Iran War

A day after agreeing to a two-week ceasefire with the US, Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz again today. Tehran had allowed the first two oil tankers through earlier in the day under Iranian military escort, but halted further passage after Israel launched a wave of strikes on Lebanon.

Israeli strikes hit commercial and residential areas in central Beirut today without warning, killing at least 112 people and wounding hundreds across Lebanon, according to the AP. But Al Jazeera, citing Lebanese officials, put the toll higher — 254 dead and 1,165 wounded.

The White House demanded Iran reopen the strait immediately.

The sides disagree on what the ceasefire deal covers. Iran said the ceasefire framework includes a halt to fighting on all fronts, including Lebanon — a position shared by Pakistan. But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Lebanon is not part of the agreement. Trump told PBS News that Israel’s ongoing strikes in Lebanon are “a separate skirmish” and that Lebanon was not included in the deal.

The US and Iran also disagree on logistics around passage through the Strait of Hormuz. Trump said the US “will be helping with the traffic buildup,” but Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said yesterday the passage would occur only “via coordination with Iran’s Armed Forces.”

The fate of Iran’s nuclear program remains unresolved. Trump said the US would work with Iran to remove buried enriched uranium and that there would be “no enrichment.” Tehran has not confirmed that.

The ceasefire agreement, brokered by Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, came hours before President Trump’s deadline to destroy Iran’s power plants and bridges — a threat he escalated yesterday by warning “a whole civilization will die tonight.” It pauses US and Israeli strikes on Iran in exchange for Tehran reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Both the US and Iran have claimed military victory in the war that began with the joint US-Israeli strikes on Feb. 28.

April Elections

Democrats posted significant swings in two races yesterday, outperforming recent election results in both: a special election to fill the House seat vacated by Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene in Georgia’s 14th District, and the election for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Republican Clay Fuller, a district attorney and Air National Guard lieutenant colonel, won the Georgia runoff, defeating Democrat Shawn Harris, a retired Army brigadier general and cattle farmer, by roughly 56% to 44% — about 12 points. But that margin represents a 25-point leftward swing from Trump’s 37-point win in the district in 2024, the largest such shift in any special election since Trump returned to office.

Fuller will serve the remainder of Greene’s term. He faces another Republican primary on May 19 — against 10 other GOP candidates — and if he wins that, he will have to run again in the general election in November for a full two-year term. Once Fuller is sworn in, the House stands at 218 Republicans, 214 Democrats, 1 independent, and 2 vacancies.

In Wisconsin, Democrat-backed Judge Chris Taylor defeated Republican-backed Judge Maria Lazar, expanding the liberal majority on the seven-member state Supreme Court to 5–2.

ICE Agents Shoot Man

ICE agents shot and wounded a man during a traffic stop in Patterson, California, yesterday.

The Department of Homeland Security said the man, Carlos Ivan Mendoza Hernandez, tried to run over officers with his vehicle, prompting agents to open fire. Video footage shows the car reversing, striking another vehicle, then moving forward and veering left while a federal agent runs out of the way. The car is seen crossing into an oncoming lane. The FBI is investigating.

Hernandez was hospitalized and is in stable condition. His attorney disputes ICE’s account, and tells the AP that agents may have mistaken his client for another person.

Since Trump’s second inauguration in January 2025, ICE and CBP agents have killed or wounded dozens of people in shootings, according to a tally by The Week. At least eight have been fatally shot, including three US citizens.

Newsbreak

In The Book of Delights, award-winning poet Ross Gay has put together a collection of short essays that remind us to celebrate ordinary wonders. Written over the course of a single tumultuous year, his funny and poetic writings take pleasure in a friend’s unabashed use of air quotes, the sensation of cradling a tomato seedling aboard an airplane, and the silent nod of acknowledgment between the only two black people in a room. But Gay never dismisses the complexities, even the terrors, of living in America as a black man. It’s a powerful and necessary reminder that we can, and should, stake out a space in our lives for delight.

Iowa Appeals Court Allows Book Ban

A federal appeals court has allowed Iowa to enforce key parts of a 2023 law restricting school library books and limiting classroom discussion of gender identity and sexual orientation.

The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the state can implement the measures while legal challenges proceed. The law requires removal of books containing “descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act” from public school libraries and bars instruction on gender identity or sexual orientation in kindergarten through sixth grade.

Book publishers and authors — including Jodi Picoult, who was featured in a recent episode of The Preamble Podcast — sued over the book restriction; Lambda Legal and the ACLU of Iowa sued over the curriculum provision. Both lawsuits argue the law violates the First Amendment.

Artemis II Mission

The Artemis II crew — NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen — are on their way home after completing a lunar flyby two days ago.

NASA will host a media call with the crew at 9:45 p.m. EDT today. Splashdown is expected in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego at approximately 8:07 p.m. EDT on April 10.

Swalwell, Gonzales Face Allegations

California gubernatorial candidate and US congressman Eric Swalwell’s campaign is denying claims that multiple women plan to come forward with allegations about sexual misconduct.

Several left-leaning influencers, including Cheyenne Hunt, executive director of Gen-Z for Change, wrote on X that she is working with women who allege harassment and abuse by Swalwell.

Swalwell’s campaign called the claims a “false, outrageous rumor” spread “by flailing opponents who have sadly teamed up with MAGA conspiracy theorists.” The crowded California gubernatorial primary includes eight Democrats and two Republicans. Under California’s open primary system, two candidates with the most votes, regardless of the party, advance to the general election. The primary will take place in June.

Separately, the San Antonio Express-News reported that Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) allegedly sent lewd texts to a female campaign staffer during his first congressional run in 2020, including requests for sex and nude photos. Gonzales last month acknowledged a separate affair with a district staffer who later died by suicide. He has not responded to the latest allegations. Gonzales has dropped out of reelection bid but has refused to resign his seat.

DOJ Investigates Jan. 6 Witness

The Justice Department has assigned its civil rights division to investigate Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows during Trump’s first term, for allegedly lying to Congress.

In June 2022, Hutchinson delivered televised testimony to the House Select Committee investigating January 6 — the bipartisan panel that spent 18 months examining the Capitol attack and concluded Trump was “directly responsible” for the riot. She also testified that she heard that Trump lunged at a Secret Service agent in the presidential vehicle when told he could not join supporters at the Capitol — a claim other witnesses later contradicted. Hutchinson said she heard it from the White House deputy chief of staff Tony Ornato — with Secret Service agent Bobby Engel present and not objecting. Engel, Ornato, and the vehicle’s unnamed driver all later disputed that account through sources close to the Secret Service. Engel and Ornato said they were willing to testify under oath but neither did so publicly before the committee concluded its work.

The investigation is unusual on multiple fronts. Perjury cases involving congressional testimony would typically be handled by the US Attorney’s Office in Washington, run by Jeanine Pirro. Instead, DOJ leadership bypassed Pirro and gave the case directly to Harmeet Dhillon, who heads the Civil Rights Division — a unit that normally focuses on systemic civil rights abuses such as police misconduct and racial discrimination. The inquiry was opened after a criminal referral from Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.), who chaired a House subcommittee that reinvestigated the Capitol attack.

The New York Times reported the investigation was opened weeks ago by former Attorney General Pam Bondi before she was fired by Trump last week.

— Sharon

On Jan. 7, 2026, Karoline Leavitt was nearing the end of a routine White House briefing when she stopped mid-thought, thanked reporters, and walked off.

It was a few seconds before the 65-minute mark.

Later, online, people noticed something strange. There had been money riding on whether the briefing would last longer than 65 minutes. The betting markets gave only a 2% chance that the briefing would end under that threshold. So when Leavitt concluded a few seconds shy of the magic number, those holding the “under” contracts won. Big.

That moment might have been a coincidence. It might have been nothing at all.

But, for many, it didn’t feel like nothing because it fit a pattern.

Across a fast-growing platform called Polymarket, people aren’t just following the news. They’re betting on it. Wars. Elections. Fed rate-cut decisions. The weather. And, yes, even the length of a press briefing.

Polymarket presents itself as a prediction tool: a place where crowds, guided by financial incentives, generate better forecasts than pundits or polls. And in some cases, they do. Markets can incorporate dispersed information quickly. They can cut through noise. They can outperform surveys.

But increasingly, some traders seem to be getting bets right in ways that don’t look like luck. Maybe they had an inside source of information that the public didn’t.

And the deeper that concern seeps into politics and policy, the harder it is to ignore a more unsettling possibility: If the people betting on the future actually have a hand in shaping it, will they start to make decisions based on who will win a bet?

A Market for Reality

Polymarket is simple on its face. Users buy and sell contracts tied to real-world outcomes. Will the US enter a war with Iran? Will a specific bill pass Congress? Will a political leader leave office this year?

Each contract trades between 0 and 100 cents, reflecting the market’s estimate of the probability that an event will happen. A contract priced at 65 cents implies a 65% chance. If the event occurs, the contract pays out $1 to those who bet on it. If it doesn’t, they get nothing.

It looks like a scoreboard for the future. But it runs on money, not guesses. Its markets now attract millions of dollars in trading volume on single events, particularly during periods of geopolitical instability like the United States’ recent excursion in Iran.

Polymarket isn’t the only platform operating this way. A regulated, US-based exchange called Kalshi offers similar contracts, and CNN, CNBC, and Fox News have even made deals with it to incorporate its prediction data into their programming and streaming platforms. Kalshi has drawn scrutiny from lawmakers, who are investigating whether existing rules are sufficient for this new kind of betting. But Polymarket — which is largely offshore, is based on cryptocurrency, and allows pseudonymous trading — is harder to police. It’s where most of the high-profile, and often suspiciously well-timed, trades have surfaced.

That growth is not happening in a vacuum. Traditional sources of political forecasting have taken hits in recent years. Polling errors in multiple election cycles have eroded trust. Expert analysis often arrives hedged and late. Prediction markets, by contrast, update in real time and force participants to put money behind their beliefs.

That combination of speed, stakes, and clarity has made them feel, to many users, more honest. But they are also more hidden, which creates opportunities to exploit privileged knowledge.

When Being Right Looks Different

In late February, as tensions between the United States, Israel, and Iran escalated, Polymarket lit up.

Traders poured money into contracts tied to possible military escalation, including the likelihood of direct US involvement. At one point, markets implied a sharply rising probability of broader conflict, shifting faster than many official statements or media analyses.

Some traders did suspiciously well. One account reportedly made roughly $1 million by correctly positioning itself ahead of key developments in the Iran conflict, placing bets that aligned closely with events as they unfolded.

It was hardly an isolated instance. An analysis found $143 million in “anomalous” profits on Polymarket since 2024, returns that significantly outpaced what would be expected from chance alone.

At some point, accuracy stops looking like insight and starts looking like access.

Read more

Trump Threats

With the clock ticking on President Trump’s 8 p.m. EDT deadline for Iran to agree to a deal that includes reopening the Strait of Hormuz, today Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif requested a two-week extension to allow enough time for diplomacy to end the war. Writing on X, Sharif also asked Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz for the same period as a goodwill gesture and urged all warring parties to observe a ceasefire. Pakistan has been the primary mediator between the US and Iran.

“The President has been made aware of the proposal, and a response will come,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.

The Pakistani PM’s proposal comes after Trump reiterated his threats against Iran in a Truth Social post early this morning, where he wrote that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

The post triggered calls from across the political spectrum to remove Trump from office using the 25th Amendment. The constitutional measure allows the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet to declare a president unable to carry out the duties of the office.

Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.), once one of Trump’s most vocal allies in Congress before resigning in January, wrote on X: “25TH AMENDMENT!!! Not a single bomb has dropped on America. We cannot kill an entire civilization. This is evil and madness.” Conservative commentator Candace Owens also called for the amendment to be invoked.

Multiple House Democrats, including Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D., N.M.), made the same demand.

Conservative commentator Tucker Carlson, a Trump ally who has at times criticized the president, called the threats “vile on every level.” Sen. Ron Johnson (R., Wis.) said he did not support striking civilian infrastructure. “We are not at war with the Iranian people,” he said.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D., N.Y.) called on Congress to “immediately end this reckless war of choice.” The House is on recess until April 14.

Vice President Vance and Cabinet members have shown no willingness to invoke the amendment.

Iran War

Hours before President Trump’s deadline, the United States struck Iran’s main oil export hub of Kharg Island. A US official did not specify which targets were hit on the island but added that oil infrastructure was spared. The extent of the damage is not yet known. It was the second round of U.S. strikes on Kharg Island since the war began on Feb. 28.

Kharg Island processes about 90% of Iran’s oil exports. Since the war began, Iran has partially blocked the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly 20% of the world’s oil supply passes. Oil prices have roughly doubled since the war began.

Also today, Israeli warplanes hit bridges and railways across the country. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the Israeli strikes hit infrastructure “used by” Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

Iran fired missiles into central Israel and launched drones toward Saudi Arabia today. Saudi Arabia said it was assessing damage to an energy facility from debris of intercepted missiles. Air defense systems in the United Arab Emirates also fired back at incoming missiles and drones.

JD Vance in Hungary

Vice President JD Vance is in Budapest, Hungary today, where he held a press conference with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. “I want to help as much as I possibly can the prime minister as he faces this election season,” Vance said, where he also accused the European Union of meddling in Hungary’s affairs without providing evidence.

Orbán’s main challenger, Péter Magyar, responded on X: “No foreign country may interfere in Hungarian elections. This is our country. Hungarian history is not written in Washington, Moscow, or Brussels.”

Vance arrived in Hungary for a two-day trip that includes an Orbán campaign rally at a soccer stadium. President Trump has endorsed Orbán, his closest ally in Europe.

Orbán is seeking a fifth consecutive term as prime minister. Polls show his right-wing Fidesz party trailing Magyar’s center-right Tisza party by roughly 10 points. Magyar, 45, is a lawyer and former Fidesz insider who broke with Orbán in 2024. Prime ministers in Hungary are elected by the National Assembly to four-year terms. There are no term limits.

Rights groups and the European Union have described Orbán’s government as authoritarian, citing his consolidation of control over courts, media, and elections during his 16 years in power.

Newsbreak

The American Revolution turned the world upside down. In The American Revolution: An Intimate History, historian Geoffrey C. Ward tells us the story not from the top down but from the bottom up — and through the eyes of not only our “Founding Fathers” but also those of ordinary soldiers, women, African Americans, Native Americans, and American Loyalists. With guest essays from lauded historians and stunning visuals — prints, drawings, paintings, texts, and pamphlets from the time period, plus newly commissioned art and maps — this book reveals a nation still grappling with the questions that fueled our remarkable founding.

Artemis II Crew Heads Home

The Artemis II crew is on its way back to Earth after completing a historic flyby of the moon yesterday, traveling farther from the planet than any humans in history.

The four astronauts broke the distance record set by Apollo 13 in 1970 at 1:56 p.m. EDT yesterday. They reached a maximum distance of 252,756 miles from Earth, more than 4,100 miles beyond Apollo 13’s mark of 248,655 miles. The Orion spacecraft came within about 4,067 miles of the moon’s surface at closest approach.

As the spacecraft passed behind the moon, mission control lost contact for about 40 minutes — a planned blackout caused by the moon blocking radio signals to NASA’s Deep Space Network.

“It is so great to hear from Earth again,” astronaut Christina Koch radioed when communication resumed, according to NASA.

The flyby ended with a roughly hour-long total solar eclipse visible only to the crew, as the moon passed between the spacecraft and the sun.

Kidnapped US Journalist Freed in Iraq

American journalist Shelly Kittleson was released today by the Iran-backed Iraqi militia Kataib Hezbollah after eight days in captivity, according to the militia and an Iraqi official with direct knowledge of the situation.

Kittleson, 49, a freelance journalist who lives in Rome, was abducted from a Baghdad street on March 31. A friend who saw her hours before the abduction told the AP she said she had no assignments in Baghdad. Kittleson published her most recent story Monday in the Italian newspaper Il Foglio. It focused on the effect of the Iran war on Iraq’s Kurdish region.

Two officials within the militia told the AP that in exchange for Kittleson’s release — which was negotiated by the outgoing Iraqi prime minister —several detained militia members would be released by Iraqi authorities.

TSA Tips ICE

US immigration authorities have arrested more than 800 people using tips from airline passenger data shared by the TSA, according to internal records reviewed by Reuters.

The data comes from TSA’s Secure Flight program, originally designed for counterterrorism screening. Officials used more than 31,000 traveler records to identify individuals’ travel plans, often allowing ICE agents to track and arrest them away from airports. Reuters said it could not determine how many arrests took place inside airports.

Toddler Sexually Abused in Federal Custody

A 3-year-old girl was sexually abused while in US government custody after being separated from her mother at the border and placed in foster care in Texas, according to a lawsuit and family accounts. The child remained in custody for five months as her father — a legal permanent resident in Chicago — struggled to secure her release. He learned of the abuse only after going to court.

The girl and her mother crossed the border near El Paso on Sept. 16 last year without legal authorization. After the toddler was separated from her mother, she was placed under the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), the federal agency that cares for nearly all “unaccompanied minors” in shelter or foster settings. Children in ORR’s care are released to parents or sponsors.

The girl reported repeated assaults by an older child in the ORR-funded foster home, and a forensic exam supported her allegations, according to the lawsuit. In one incident, a caregiver noticed that the toddler’s underwear was on backwards. Officials initially described the incident to her father as an “accident,” withholding key details until attorneys intervened.

“She was so long in there,” her father told the AP, speaking on condition of anonymity to prevent identifying his daughter. “I just think that if they would have moved faster, nothing like that would have happened.” The girl has since been reunited with her father.

Bible Passages in Texas Public Schools

Texas education officials are considering adding Bible passages to required reading lists for millions of public school students. The proposal is set for debate by the Republican-controlled state Board of Education.

The draft curriculum includes classics like The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, but also Bible passages for middle and high school students, including the story of David and Goliath from the Old Testament and a meditation on love from First Corinthians.

Oklahoma has pushed for Bible instruction in classrooms, while Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas have passed laws requiring Ten Commandments displays in schools. All have been challenged in court. Louisiana’s law has been allowed to take effect for now; the Texas and Arkansas laws are awaiting court decisions.

The Preamble examined the broader push to portray the US as a strictly Christian nation in Sharon’s recent piece, “God is Not Listening.”

We discuss:

• how presidents used to launder their insults through the press;

• which president was secretly trading enslaved people from the Oval Office (probably not the one you think!);

• why so many US politicians are older than anyone who’d ever get hired at a regular job;

• how Congress is falling down on the job of reining in the president and policing their own corruption;

• the warnings from George Washington’s farewell address that we’ve failed to heed;

… and more. Alexis also left us with some thoughts on how each of us can “just do a little something” in our own communities to start electing more officials who’ll fight for the people and not just their own interests.

Take a listen — I think you’ll come away feeling informed, and even a little encouraged.

Iran

Iran today rejected a 45-day ceasefire proposal circulated by Pakistani, Egyptian and Turkish mediators a day before President Trump’s deadline to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

“We won’t merely accept a ceasefire,” Mojtaba Ferdousi Pour, head of Iran’s diplomatic mission in Cairo, told the AP. “We only accept an end of the war with guarantees that we won’t be attacked again.” He said Iran no longer trusts the Trump administration after the US bombed the country twice during previous rounds of talks.

Israel struck the South Pars petrochemical plant at Asaluyeh in Iran, with Defense Minister Israel Katz calling it a facility responsible for about 50% of Iran’s petrochemical production. Israel also killed the head of intelligence for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, Maj. Gen. Majid Khademi, according to Iranian state media. Iran responded with missile fire on Israel.

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Meanwhile, both crew members of a US F-15E Strike Eagle plane shot down over Iran on Friday have been rescued.The pilot was recovered shortly after the crash. The weapons systems officer — a colonel — evaded capture for more than a day, hiding in a mountain crevice at 7,000 feet with a pistol, a communication device, and a tracking beacon, US officials told CBS News. He sustained a sprained ankle.

Several media outlets reported that CIA operatives spread false reports inside Iran that the airman had already been found elsewhere and being moved out. This allowed special operation forces to extract him in a nighttime rescue involving hundreds of personnel, with fighter jets striking roads to block approaching Iranian forces. Trump himself said today that Iranian forces were “looking hard, in big numbers, and getting close.”

Meanwhile, Trump today threatened to jail the journalist who first reported that US forces were searching for the missing colonel, demanding the reporter reveal their source. He did not name the journalist.

War Crimes Warning

President Trump yesterday threatened to strike Iran’s power plants and bridges if Tehran does not reopen the Strait of Hormuz by 8 p.m. tomorrow, drawing accusations of threatened war crimes from lawmakers and legal experts.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure violates the laws of armed conflict. “Never mind that blowing up bridges and power plants and killing innocent Iranians won’t reopen the Strait. It’s also a clear war crime,” he posted on X. “Even blowing up a fraction of Iran’s power plants and bridges will kill thousands of innocent people who work in those power plants and travel on the nation’s roads.” He added that Trump “isn’t even pretending to choose military targets.”

Even former Trump ally Marjorie Taylor Greene said the president “has gone insane.”

International humanitarian law prohibits targeting civilian infrastructure, but some analysts note that strikes on dual-use facilities — those serving both civilian and military purposes — are not automatically unlawful if commanders can demonstrate a specific military objective and take steps to limit civilian harm.

Asked today at a news conference whether he is concerned the threatened strikes would amount to war crimes, Trump said: “No. I hope I don’t have to do it,” adding, “The war crime is allowing Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”

Minneapolis ICE Shooting Video Contradicts Federal Account

A video newly obtained by The New York Times of a January incident where an ICE agent shot and wounded a Venezuelan immigrant in Minneapolis contradicts the federal government’s account of the incident in key ways. The government said an ICE agent fired his weapon after three people attacked him with a shovel and broom for roughly three minutes. The city’s camera footage shows a confrontation lasting about 12 seconds involving two men — not three — and no sustained attack with a shovel.

Two days after the shooting, federal prosecutors charged the two men — Venezuelan immigrants Julio Sosa-Celis and Alfredo Aljorna — with felony assault without watching the video, a Justice Department official said, instead relying on the agent’s statement. The government had access to the footage within hours. Prosecutors did not view it until nearly three weeks after filing charges, and then moved to dismiss the case, citing “newly discovered evidence.”

“Bare due diligence would have shown that the agents were lying,” said Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. ICE acting director Todd Lyons said two agents appeared to have lied under oath and placed them on leave, adding they could face criminal charges.

Newsbreak

I wrote We Are Mighty because I wanted children to know that history is not only made by the famous and powerful, but also by ordinary people who see what needs doing and choose to act. Through twelve true stories from America’s past, this book offers young readers hope, courage, and a sense of their own power — and if that is a message you would like to put into the hands of a child you love, I would be so honored for you to preorder a copy.

Artemis Moon Mission

The four Artemis II astronauts on a moon flyby mission today surpassed the farthest distance from Earth ever traveled by humans, breaking the record of 248,655 miles set by Apollo 13 in 1970, according to NASA.

The crew will reach a maximum distance of 252,760 miles during today’s flyby. The Orion capsule carrying the crew entered the lunar sphere of influence — the point at which the moon’s gravitational pull on the spacecraft becomes stronger than the earth’s — at 12:37 a.m. EDT today, according to NASA.

The mission is testing the Orion spacecraft’s life support, communications, and navigation systems with a crew for the first time. It is the first crewed lunar voyage since Apollo 17 in 1972 and paves the way for a planned lunar landing in 2028.

April 7 Elections

Voters head to the polls tomorrow in two key races: a Georgia special election to fill a House seat and a Wisconsin Supreme Court election.

In Georgia’s 14th Congressional District, Trump-backed Republican Clayton Fuller faces Democrat Shawn Harris, a retired Army brigadier general, in a special election runoff to fill the seat vacated by Marjorie Taylor Greene, who resigned in January after a falling out with Trump over the release of Epstein files. Trump carried the district by 37 points in 2024, making Fuller the heavy favorite.

In Wisconsin, a Supreme Court election pits Democrat-backed Judge Chris Taylor against Republican-backed Judge Maria Lazar. Liberals hold a 4-3 court majority; a Taylor win would expand it to 5–2. Wisconsin’s court races have become intensely partisan in recent cycles, given the court’s power over voting rules and election disputes in a presidential swing state.

SCOTUS Clears Path for Bannon Case Dismissal

The Supreme Court created a path for the Trump administration to dismiss the criminal case against Steve Bannon, the former White House adviser. Bannon was convicted in 2022 of defying a subpoena from the House January 6 committee, which investigated the attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters and concluded that Trump orchestrated a multi-part effort to overturn his 2020 election loss.

The Supreme Court vacated a lower court decision that had upheld Bannon’s conviction on two counts of contempt of Congress. Bannon’s case will return to the federal appeals court in Washington DC for further proceedings.

Bannon already served a four-month prison sentence in 2024 after losing his initial appeal.

He has argued that he was not willfully defying the subpoena, and that he was listening to the advice of his lawyer, so he should never have been convicted.

Justice Alito Hospitalized

Justice Samuel Alito was hospitalized last month after becoming ill at a Federalist Society dinner in Philadelphia. The Supreme Court confirmed last week that Alito was taken to an area hospital on March 20 “out of an abundance of caution.”

Alito was evaluated and administered fluids for dehydration. He returned to his home in Virginia that night with his security team. The court’s spokesperson said Alito was “thoroughly checked by his own physician” and returned to work the following Monday for oral argument.

Alito, 76, joined the court in 2006, and speculation has swirled about his retirement. Alito has not commented publicly on any retirement plans.

If he retires, President Trump would get the opportunity to nominate a fourth justice to the Supreme Court. His three first-term nominees — Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett — were all confirmed by the Senate.

Gaines stays calm and rejects the label: “No, because misogyny would be the hatred of women,” he explains. “I love women and actually understand them. So, since I understand them, I know what’s best for them.”

Moments earlier, the film had cut to a clip from one of Gaines’s livestream podcast episodes. Speaking about men in relationships, Gaines coaches them on how they can speak to their female partners: “B***h, we are not equal. I’m the dictator, you are the subordinate. And I dictate when I want to put d**k in you, b***h. And then you dictate when the sandwiches come by my dictation. That’s how this goes.”

If that language shocks you, if it reads like something from the furthest corners of the internet that you would never visit, then you need to know that the middle- and high-school-aged boys in your life may be hearing it every day. These messages are tucked between gym-motivation clips and dangerous prank videos in the personalized “For You” feeds that apps like TikTok serve to viewers. It’s the background noise of adolescent male life in 2026.

It’s easy to think the danger lies in a few outrageous creators, or to blame the boys who watch them and the parents who “failed” to stop it. But the real story is bigger: political leaders, tech platforms, and their recommendation algorithms have built an ecosystem that profits from radicalizing young men and then pretends what’s happening is the result of individuals’ choices.

Theroux has spent decades covering stories that make the average person extremely uncomfortable. He’s embedded with white supremacists, sat with convicted predators, and charmed his way into a cult. So when he calls the manosphere “the final boss subject in the video game of my career,” that’s worth listening to.

What is the manosphere?

The manosphere is a loose network of male-centered online communities. Debbie Ging and other researchers emphasize that these spaces include subcultures like incels (self‑described “involuntary celibates,” or young men who bond over blaming women for their lack of sexual experience), “men going their own way” (young men who have decided to withdraw from relationships with women altogether), pick‑up artists, and men’s rights activists. A shared grievance unites them: the idea that feminism has given women too much power at men’s expense.

The most visible faces of this world include Andrew Tate, a self‑described misogynist currently facing human trafficking and rape charges in Romania and the UK, and Myron Gaines, the aforementioned Fresh and Fit host who told men to be “dictators” in relationships. But the infrastructure runs deeper than just these men.

There are also meme tools like the “Female Delusion Calculator,” a website that invites women to input physical and financial preferences for a partner, and then labels them on a spectrum from “easy to please” to “aspiring cat lady.” Although the site’s About page claims it is a tool to “help women discern what is realistic from what is highly unlikely,” in practice it has become a staple of manosphere content, where male creators plug in women’s stated preferences and then broadcast the results as “proof” that they are delusional and need to lower their standards.

If the manosphere is telling boys a grand story about society’s decline, it also gives them a villain — and it’s not just women. While many influencers argue that women can be a problem, they say it’s only because shadowy forces have tricked women into abandoning their “natural” role of submission under male control.

The lens zooms out: ordinary life is recast as The Matrix, a rigged simulation designed to keep men weak and lied to. Content creators pitch their content as the red pill that lets boys “wake up” and see how things really work, much as Keanu Reeves’s character does in the movie. Once you wake up, you see that feminism, mainstream media, and basic democratic norms are just the tools of control.

Who is actually in control? Well, this is where antisemitic talking points about shadowy Jewish elites seep in, and talk of The Matrix blurs into talk of satanic or globalist cabals secretly running everything. In Theroux’s film, when he asks streamer Ed Matthews who he thinks controls the world, Matthews answers plainly and in earnest: “The Jews.” HSTikkyTokky, one of the main subjects of the documentary, loudly starts a chant in public: “F**k the Jews! F**k the Jews!” He then tells Theroux, “You’re a puppet, you can’t say what you want to say… I’m real. I’m raw. I’m not a puppet; no one is controlling what I say. No one’s my daddy… The Jews are your daddy.”

For boys watching, influencers’ conspiratorial and transgressive commentary models a way of feeling powerful, by imagining yourself as the only one brave enough to say what’s “really” going on. Real men are the ones who have taken the red pill. That worldview doesn’t stop at the edge of the internet.

Cozying up to power

The manosphere has walked into the White House.

In March 2026, Donald Trump appointed Nick Adams, an Australian-born self-described “wildly successful alpha male” influencer with a history of Islamophobic commentary and fabricated social media vignettes (like a viral tale in which two “attractive Latinas” spot him at the gym, praise Trump’s border policies, and cheer him on while he hits a personal-record bench press) as special presidential envoy for tourism, exceptionalism and American values.

Adams built his brand by posting lines like “I go to Hooters. I eat rare steaks. I lift extremely heavy weights. I read the Bible every night. I am pursued by copious amounts of women.” Trump wrote the foreword to his book Alpha Kings, which promises to show young American men “what it means to be a true alpha male in today’s hyper-feminized world.”

Adams is not an outlier in Trump’s orbit. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has repeatedly argued that women do not belong in combat roles and has portrayed efforts to make the military more inclusive of women as a kind of social experiment that undermines effectiveness, signaling to young men that equality itself is a national security threat.

Trump acolyte and former leader of the Department of Government Efficiency Elon Musk has been sued for engaging in sexual harassment at his company SpaceX (though he has denied the allegations), and currently presides over X (formerly Twitter), where independent researchers have reported increases in misogynistic, extremist, and conspiratorial content since he took the helm of the company. Trump’s appointments of men like these are a signal that the president himself has aligned himself with the manosphere — in fact, he might be considered one of its biggest influencers.

In the 2016 “Access Hollywood” tape, Trump boasted about his approach to women: “I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the p***y.” It sounds like a Fresh and Fit livestream.

Over the course of his public life, he’s faced 26 sexual misconduct allegations, was found liable for sexual abuse in a civil trial, and still won two presidential elections. If the manosphere teaches boys that powerful men face no consequences for how they treat women, Trump is living proof. And growing young male allegiance to him has shown up in electoral politics: according to PBS NewsHour, young men shifted roughly 15 points to the right between 2020 and 2024.

Researchers noted that within hours of Trump’s 2024 electoral victory being called, social media was flooded with celebratory misogynistic posts, with figures like white nationalist Nick Fuentes posting, “Your body, my choice. Forever.” Signs reading “Women Are Property” appeared on a Texas university campus. A widely circulated TikTok reported that schoolboys were repeating Fuentes’s slogan directly to female classmates. The pipeline from manosphere content to electoral politics to classroom harassment ran in a single unbroken line. We’ve seen this pattern before. When leaders wink at or reward this kind of aggression, it hardens into a movement with real‑world enforcers.

An army of disaffected young men

Fascist movements have always known what to do with disoriented young men. Historians of Mussolini’s Blackshirts and the Nazi’s Brownshirts note that these paramilitary formations drew heavily on war veterans, unemployed youth, and men who felt humiliated by economic collapse and political instability. In Italy, the regime drilled boys in a cult of virility — lauding those who were “young, strong, obedient, sacrificial, and heroic” — and turned Blackshirt violence against socialists, trade unionists, and other designated enemies into public spectacle.

The squads thought of themselves as cleaners-up of degeneracy, street enforcers of moral order, defenders of women and children against lurking predators and corrupt elites. At the core of these movements was a deep‑rooted misogyny: historic fascist parties in Italy and Germany insisted that women’s “proper” role was to stay home, have children, and produce future soldiers for the nation. In far‑right rhetoric since, left-leaning policies and movements are often mocked as a “nanny state” that pampers citizens instead of letting “real men” stand on their own.

Those movements also had men in suits who found them useful. Mainstream conservative parties in Germany and Italy tried to harness fascist energy to break trade unions and smash socialist and communist parties to restore a more authoritarian order without having to dirty their own hands. They backed Mussolini and Hitler, believing they could “frame” and control them, using Blackshirts and Brownshirts as a disposable muscle to discipline the left and intimidate voters, then swapping the dictators out once the job was done.

The Brownshirts and Blackshirts consumed them instead, helping to dismantle parliaments, outlaw opposition parties, and sideline or even imprison some of the very elites who had first opened the door. The people who recognized the danger earliest were the ones the movement was already targeting: women, Jewish communities, labor organizers, and minorities. We are watching the same dynamic in the US, and the manosphere’s most important recruiter is the one sitting in the Oval Office.

Who’s actually sounding the alarm

Research shows that if a 16-year-old opens TikTok and searches for gym tips before school, within his first 23 minutes of scrolling, he’s been served toxic content: clips pushing rigid, dominance‑focused masculinity, degrading or dehumanizing women, promoting far‑right or anti‑LGBTQ views, or amplifying conspiracies about things like globalism or a plot to silence Andrew Tate. Within 26 minutes, manosphere content will show up.

In high schools, 76% of teachers are already extremely concerned about how this content is shaping the young men in their classes. And this isn’t just an American problem. Studies and educators from the UK to Australia describe the manosphere as a global, algorithm‑driven ecosystem. One British schoolteacher reported hearing a student say it was “ok to hurt women because Andrew Tate does it.”

According to security strategist Cecilia Polizzi, writing for the Global Network on Extremism and Technology, algorithms reward engagement over nuance and amplify outrage, fear, and treat polarizing content as a structural feature. Platforms are designed to profit from this pipeline. The moral panic about individual “bad boys” and broken homes, the idea that this is just a problem of a few damaged kids or inattentive parents, is a distraction they don’t mind at all. It keeps attention on supposedly defective families instead of on the platforms, business models, and political actors that are deliberately engineering this ecosystem for profit and power.

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This can’t be solved with a list of conversation starters for concerned parents. Structural problems require structural solutions. In Europe, the Digital Services Act now forces the biggest platforms to assess how their algorithms fuel systemic risks like gender‑based violence and extremism, and to open up their recommender systems to outside scrutiny.

In the US, California’s Age‑Appropriate Design Code pushes companies to prioritize children’s safety over engagement metrics in any service likely to be used by under‑18s, including by limiting data‑driven features that amplify harmful content. Outside of government, organizations like the Global Network on Extremism and Technology are mapping how manosphere content reaches boys in minutes and calling for targeted de‑amplification of extremist networks, data access for researchers, and real penalties when platforms ignore these risks.

Manosphere radicalization is a youth-focused, male-centered, fascist recruitment pipeline, and it’s running right now on your kids’ phones. Combating it will require monitoring, research funding, and platform accountability. The question Inside the Manosphere leaves open is this: If we already know what this looks like, and we can see it scaling in real time, at what point do we start calling it what it is and treating it as such?

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She was the one who first taught me about my emotions. Before her, I didn’t have language for what was happening inside me. I just knew something was wrong. She helped me see that I wasn’t broken. I was anxious. I was depressed. Naming it felt like the first real relief I’d had in years. So when she suggested I was using my emotions as an excuse, it felt like a betrayal.

Looking back at this now, I completely understand her point. I was in college and had refused to go home for Thanksgiving break because I thought I needed to process how depressed I felt. But in reality I was just isolating myself further. What I couldn’t see yet was that my therapist wasn’t asking me to stop feeling. She was pointing out that I’d given my feelings authority they were never meant to have.

That was over a decade ago. But if I posted that story on Instagram today — skipping Thanksgiving because I needed to honor my mental health, and getting pushback from my therapist for it — the comments would be full of people telling me the therapist was wrong. “Protect your energy.” “You don’t owe anyone your presence.” “If it doesn’t feel aligned, don’t force it.”

Mental health counseling has become less stigmatized, which is genuinely a good thing. More people than ever are going to therapy, talking openly about their inner lives, teaching their kids emotional vocabulary most of us never had. But somewhere along the way, “Your feelings are valid” became “Your feelings are always right.”

A bad day can no longer be just a bad day. It needs a diagnosis, a root cause, and a treatment plan. If you push yourself to do something you don’t feel like doing, you’re supposedly abandoning yourself. The logic is hard to argue with because it borrows the language of healing. But there’s a difference between a feeling that’s telling you something important and one that just means you don’t want to be inconvenienced.

The problem isn’t that we feel things. It’s that we’ve started building identities around them. “I’m an anxious person” doesn’t describe a passing experience — it is a permanent forecast, suggesting you should cancel, retreat, and reorganize your life around feeling bad. Todd Kashdan’s research on emotional flexibility finds exactly this: people who treat feelings as passing states move through them. People who treat them as fixed identities get stuck.

To be clear, I’m not arguing we should go back to suppressing our emotions. Emotions carry important information about what you value, what hurts, what needs attention. But information isn’t instruction. The clinical psychologist Harriet Lerner says it best: “Feelings are like children. You don’t want them driving the car, but you shouldn’t stuff them in the trunk either.” They belong in the passenger seat. You hear them out; maybe they even change your route. But your values are driving. What do you want your life to look like in five years? What kind of person are you trying to be? Those questions should steer, not whether you woke up feeling motivated.

When feelings take the wheel, most of us veer in one of two directions. Some of us react — we feel angry and fire off a text we can’t take back, or feel excited and commit to something we haven’t thought through. Others retreat. We feel anxious and cancel our plans. We feel overwhelmed and give up on our goals.

There’s also a sneakier version of retreat that doesn’t look like avoidance at all. It looks like researching the decision for three more weeks. Talking it through with every person you know. Compulsively checking your email or your ex’s social media or the news, convinced you’re being responsible when really you’re just trying to outrun the discomfort. You feel like you’re doing something, but you’re spinning in place.

The solution is to notice which one you do and practice the opposite. (In therapy we call this “opposite action.”) If you tend to react, practice pausing before you commit. If you tend to retreat, practice showing up even when it feels uncomfortable or wrong. Letting our feelings run our lives feels good in the moment, but it hurts us in the long run.

Most days I don’t feel like doing the hard things. I don’t feel like having the difficult conversation, being patient with my daughter, or showing up when I’m running on empty. But if I waited until my feelings gave me permission to move, I’d spend a lot of my life on the couch eating ice cream. The life I actually want requires me to show up on days when everything in me says to stay home.

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Iran

US and Israeli officials announced today that a US fighter jet was shot down over Iran. One of its two crew members has been rescued, and the status of the second crew member is unknown as search and rescue operations continue.

The downed aircraft was an F-15E Strike Eagle — a dual-role strike fighter that carries a two-person crew: a pilot and a weapons systems officer. This incident is the first time a US war plane has been shot down by Iran in the five-week-long war. Iran’s state media circulated images of the wreckage, and Iranian officials announced a “precious prize” for information on the “enemy pilot.” The potential capture of the second crew member could pose military and intelligence risks for the US.

Separately, a second US combat plane — an A-10 Warthog attack aircraft — crashed near the Strait of Hormuz around the same time the F-15E was shot down, though its pilot was safely rescued, according to two US officials.

Elsewhere in the conflict, Israeli Defense Forces struck Iran and Lebanon’s capitals today while Iran launched drones and missiles across the Middle East, setting Kuwait’s Mina al-Ahmadi oil refinery ablaze and damaging a desalination plant in a neighboring Gulf state. The strike at the refinery caused significant fires but there were no reports of civilian casualties.

Desalination plants are critical civilian infrastructure across the region. While Iran gets only a small fraction of its water from desalination, nearby countries including Qatar and Bahrain produce more than half of their drinking water using the technology, which converts seawater into potable water by removing salt.

Acting AG on Epstein Files

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said yesterday the Justice Department has released all records tied to Jeffrey Epstein.

“The Department of Justice has now released all the files with respect to the Epstein saga,” Blanche said on Fox News. “To the extent the Epstein files [were] a part of the past year of this Justice Department, it should not be a part of anything going forward.”

Lawmakers from both parties pushed back. “This is a lie. About 50 percent of the files have been released and per our subpoena it’s illegal to withhold them,” wrote Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) on X. “Blanche may think it’s over, but we are just getting started.”

“Congratulations AG Blanche,” posted Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.). “Now you have 30 days to release the rest of the files before becoming criminally liable for failure to comply with the Epstein Files Transparency Act.”

The files include millions of pages of investigative material — witness accounts, financial records, and law enforcement evidence — covered by the Epstein Files Transparency Act, the law enacted last year mandating broad public release.

DOJ says it has released about 3.5 million pages, but an earlier internal memo identified more than 6 million.

Jobs Report

The US added 178,000 non-farm payroll jobs in March, while unemployment edged down to 4.3% from 4.4% in February, according to the Labor Department’s jobs report released today. Non-farm payrolls exclude farm workers, private household employees, and nonprofit workers, making them the most consistent gauge of labor market health.

The numbers are often revised as more accurate data becomes available. February’s payrolls were revised further downward — from an initially reported loss of 92,000 jobs to a loss of 133,000 — while January was revised up from 126,000 jobs added to 160,000.

Newsbreak

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Presidential Records

The Justice Department has concluded that key provisions of the 1978 Presidential Records Act are unconstitutional. When a president leaves office, the PRA requires the White House to send all official records to the National Archives and Records Administration, the federal agency tasked with preserving presidential records. Those records include letters, memos, schedules, briefing papers, emails, digital images, social media content, and audio and video recordings, among other materials.

In a 52-page opinion released yesterday, the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel wrote that the Act “exceeds Congress’s enumerated and implied powers” and “unconstitutionally intrudes on the independence and autonomy of the President.” As a result, the opinion states, the president does not have to turn over records to the National Archives.

After leaving office in 2021, Trump retained many official documents — including classified materials — and ignored the National Archives’ requests to return them. He was subsequently indicted on 40 felony counts under the Espionage Act. Trump cited the PRA in his defense, arguing it allowed him to designate the files as personal. A federal judge in Florida ultimately dismissed the case, ruling that the special counsel who brought the charges had been appointed unlawfully.

The PRA was signed into law by President Jimmy Carter in 1978, after President Richard Nixon attempted to retain control of White House recordings and documents following his resignation over the Watergate scandal. Congress enacted the law to ensure presidential records would be preserved as public property.

$1.5 Trillion Defense Budget

With the war in Iran ongoing, the Trump administration is proposing $1.5 trillion for defense spending in fiscal year 2027 — which begins on Oct. 1 of this year — a roughly 44% increase over 2026 levels.

The administration has planned large increases for shipbuilding, the Golden Dome missile interceptor defense system, and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program.

At a private Easter luncheon at the White House earlier this week, Trump said it is “not possible” for the federal government to fund Medicare, Medicaid, and child care, arguing those programs should be left to the states while the federal government focuses on military spending. He said he told budget director Russell Vought: “Don’t send any money for day care, because the United States can’t take care of day care…We’re fighting wars.”

Artemis II Moon Mission

Four astronauts aboard Artemis II are en route to circle the Moon following a successful launch two days ago.

The crew — NASA commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen — will spend about 10 days in space before returning to Earth. Glover is set to become the first Black astronaut to travel to deep space.

“Humanity has once again shown what we are capable of, and it’s your hopes for the future that carry us now on this journey around the moon,” Hansen said on behalf of the mission after the spacecraft fired its engines to set course for the Moon.

By midday today, the spacecraft had traveled more than 96,000 miles from Earth, with roughly 161,000 miles remaining to the Moon, according to NASA’s mission tracker.

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The mission is designed to test the spacecraft’s life support, communications, and navigation systems with a crew aboard for the first time. It is the first crewed lunar mission since Apollo 17 in December 1972, and paves the way for a planned lunar landing mission in 2028.

100% Drug Tariffs

President Trump signed an executive order yesterday that could impose up to 100% tariffs on patented drugs from companies that do not reach pricing deals with his administration.

Under the plan, companies that agree to charge the US the lowest price they offer any country — known as “most favored nation” pricing — and move manufacturing to the US would face 0% tariffs. Companies building US factories but without such pricing deals would face 20% tariffs, rising to 100% within four years.

An administration official told reporters that companies still have time to negotiate — 120 days for larger companies and 180 days for others.

Industry groups objected. Stephen Ubl, CEO of the pharmaceutical trade group PhRMA, said tariffs “on cutting-edge medicines will increase costs and could jeopardize billions in U.S. investments.”

Trump said the move was needed to address national security risks tied to reliance on foreign drug supply chains. The new tariffs were announced on the first anniversary of Trump’s “Liberation Day,” when he unveiled sweeping import taxes on nearly every country in 2025. Those tariffs were among the duties the Supreme Court struck down in February.

Four days later, from St. Peter’s Square in Rome, the first American-born pope answered him. In a pointed rebuke, Pope Leo said, “Jesus is the King of Peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war.”

Invoking the prophet Isaiah, Pope Leo quoted, “Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen. Your hands are full of blood.”

The White House responded the next day. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt opened her briefing by addressing reporters: “Good afternoon everyone. Could you hear our ‘Amen’ in there? We just said a little loud prayer as a team.”

During the briefing, Leavitt was asked directly about the pope’s remarks. Her answer: “Our nation was a nation founded 250 years ago, almost, on Judeo-Christian values.”

“America was founded as a Christian nation,” Hegseth has repeated for years. His pastor, Doug Wilson, whom Hegseth has invited to pray at the Pentagon, believes America should be a theocracy.

The claim that America was founded as a religious project is not a new one, nor are Leavitt and Hegseth alone in propagating that belief. Men like David Barton, a longtime Texas GOP leader, are doing much of the heavy lifting. In April 2025, Barton sat before the Texas House education committee and showed them a worn Bible. He claimed that it was “actually printed by the official printer of Congress.” Then he produced a colonial-era reading primer and testified that first graders had once been drilled on 43 questions about the Ten Commandments, suggesting that American public schools should return to the practice. The founders intended America to be governed by Christian principles, he told the committee. He maintains that the separation of church and state is a myth.

Barton has been telling this story for almost 40 years, and he tells it with the confidence of a man who believes he has never been wrong about anything. He is the founder of WallBuilders, an organization that promotes what it calls “America’s forgotten history and heroes” through books, podcasts, a museum, and a lobbying network that reaches state legislators in all 50 states. Time magazine named him one of the 25 most influential evangelicals in America. He says he gives more than 400 speeches a year.

There is one problem with David Barton’s version of American history: significant portions of it are made up.

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Pam Bondi Fired

President Trump today fired Attorney General Pam Bondi, ending her 14-month tenure as the nation’s top law enforcement officer. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche will serve as Acting Attorney General.

On social media, Trump praised Bondi as “a Great American Patriot” and said she would be “transitioning to a much needed and important new job in the private sector.”

Bondi is the second cabinet member removed during Trump’s second term, following the firing of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem last month.

Reports said Trump had grown frustrated with Bondi on two fronts: her handling of the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files, which created a backlash among his supporters, and what he viewed as insufficient action against his political opponents. The DOJ had filed cases against former FBI director James Comey (charged with making a false statement to Congress and obstruction) and New York AG Letitia James (mortgage fraud). Both cases were dismissed by a federal judge, who said the US attorney who oversaw the case was appointed illegally.

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Top General Asked to Step Down

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth today asked Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George to step down and take immediate retirement, a Pentagon official confirmed to CBS.

George, a West Point graduate and career infantry officer, was nominated by President Biden and confirmed by the Senate in 2023 for a four-year term that was expected to run through 2027. An unnamed Defense Department official told CBS: “We are grateful for his service, but it was time for a leadership change in the Army.” CBS, citing an unnamed source, said that Hegseth wanted someone who will implement President Trump’s vision in the Army.

Gen. Christopher LaNeve, the current vice chief of staff and a former military aide to Hegseth, will serve as acting Army chief. A Pentagon spokesman described LaNeve as “a battle-tested leader with decades of operational experience and is completely trusted by Secretary Hegseth to carry out the vision of this administration without fault.”

Gen. George is among the dozen senior military officers who have been removed by Hegseth, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. CQ Brown and Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti.

Iran

In an address to the nation last night, President Trump said that US military objectives in Iran are “nearing completion” and vowed to hit Iran “extremely hard” over the next two to three weeks.

“We’re going to bring them back to the Stone Ages, where they belong,” Trump said. He did not offer a concrete timeline for ending the war, now in its fifth week.

Before the speech, oil prices had dipped below $100 a barrel — afterward, West Texas Intermediate crude increased 10% to $110.22 a barrel, and Brent crude climbed more than 6% to $107.35 per barrel.

Earlier yesterday, Trump posted on social media that Iran’s president wanted a ceasefire. Iran’s Foreign Ministry called the claim “false and baseless.”

Meanwhile, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said today it struck an Amazon’s Web Services cloud computing facility in Bahrain. The Financial Times, which first reported the strike yesterday, said the Bahraini officials extinguished fire caused by the attack but the extent of the damage is not known. The IRGC has warned it would target American companies operating in the Gulf region, naming 18 firms including Apple, Google, and Meta as potential targets.

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DHS Shutdown Continues

President Trump said today he will sign an executive order to pay all Department of Homeland Security employees who have gone without paychecks during the 48-day partial shutdown — the longest government shutdown in US history.

The order expands a similar directive he signed last week covering only TSA workers. Administration officials told CNBC that the money came from last year’s Republican tax and spending package. Thousands of other DHS staffers, including FEMA workers, civilian Coast Guard employees, and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency staff have gone unpaid since the shutdown began in mid-February. The White House did not say where the funding would come from. Axios noted the move could run afoul of the Antideficiency Act, which bars federal spending without congressional approval.

Trump’s announcement came after yet another deadlock in Congress. Today, the Senate passed a bipartisan bill to fund most of DHS through Sept. 30, excluding ICE and parts of Customs and Border Protection, but the House adjourned its own session without acting on the bill. A prior joint announcement by Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune had indicated the House would pass it. The next House session begins Monday.

Trump has endorsed a two-track approach: pass the Senate bill to reopen most of DHS, then fund ICE and Border Patrol separately through reconciliation — a budget process that would bypass a potential Democratic filibuster. Trump has set a June 1 deadline for the reconciliation bill. Although Speaker Johnson is now on board, some of his Republican colleagues are opposed to any bill that excludes funding for ICE.

Florida Voting Law

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis yesterday signed a law requiring voters to prove their US citizenship when registering to vote and in order to get a REAL ID that demonstrates their citizenship, making Florida the first state to enact its own version of the federal SAVE Act, which has stalled in the US Senate.

DeSantis cited “election integrity” as justification for the law.

The law requires a valid US passport, original birth certificate, or Real ID-compliant Florida driver’s license — a new version that will indicate US citizenship — to register. The law takes effect Jan. 1, 2027 — after this year’s midterm elections but before the 2028 presidential race.

Several groups have already filed suit, arguing the law places an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote and violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause.

Noem-Lewandowski Probe

The Department of Homeland Security inspector general is investigating how contracts were handled under former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, including the role of her advisor Corey Lewandowski.

Under scrutiny is a $220 million advertising contract awarded to Republican-connected firms without using a competitive bidding process. One of the beneficiaries, per ProPublica, is the consulting firm Strategy Group, which had worked for Noem when she was governor of South Dakota. The firm’s CEO is the husband of former DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin. Lewandowski also worked with the firm, ProPublica reported but did not say in what capacity.

The New York Times reported yesterday that the Trump administration has received complaints about Lewandowski’s involvement in the contracting process. Among those raising concerns is Palantir, the data analytics firm that has developed technology for DHS to track individuals for deportation. The Times did not specify the nature of the company’s complaint.

NBC News reported that several companies told the White House they were asked to pay Lewandowski himself or consultants tied to him as a condition of winning — or keeping — government work. Lewandowski, who had taken an unpaid “special government employee” role at DHS, has denied any impropriety.

Meanwhile, reports have surfaced that the former DHS Secretary’s husband Bryon Noem has alleged that Kristi had an affair with Lewandowski.

White House Ballroom

The National Capital Planning Commission — the federal government’s planning agency for construction on federal land — approved President Trump’s $400 million White House ballroom project today, despite the overwhelming majority of more than 35,000 comments that the public sent to the commission opposing the plan.

The approval comes days after a federal judge ordered construction halted until Congress authorizes it. The judge has stayed his order for two weeks to allow the administration to appeal.

The commission is chaired by Will Scharf, a Trump appointee and former personal lawyer to the president. He also serves as White House staff secretary. The two other Trump-appointed White House officials — OMB associate director Stuart Leven and White House deputy chief of staff James Blair — also sit on the commission. DC Council Chairman Phil Mendelson voted no, saying the 90,000-square-foot structure was “just too large” and criticizing what he called a “rushed process.” Two other commissioners voted “present.”

Ahead of the vote, the commission removed language from its official documents saying projects on federal land “require” its approval, instead describing its review as routine, after a request from a White House official, The Washington Post reported.

Trump had the East Wing demolished last year to make way for the ballroom. Trump has said Congressional approval for construction on White House property is not required. It was not clear how the administration will proceed in light of the judge’s order.

There’s no shortage of headlines out there shouting about how the clock is ticking on Social Security, with language warning that the program’s funding might “run out,” “run dry,” or be “depleted” by the early to mid 2030s. But what do these claims that Social Security will become “insolvent” or “go broke” actually mean for Americans? And is there anything we can do about it?

The short answers to these questions are “It’s complicated” and “Yes.” But here at The Preamble we prefer a bit more nuance. So here we go!

Wait, what is Social Security?

Social Security is one of the longest-running programs of the federal government. Established in 1935 under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, it’s a social insurance program intended to protect Americans from at least some of the “hazards and vicissitudes of life,” as FDR explained. Social Security is designed to support people who are too old to work or who cannot work due to disability, as well as the families of those people.

Throughout their lives, Americans will commonly interact with Social Security by paying into the program, or eventually by receiving benefits. If you’ve ever received a paycheck in the United States, you’ve likely noticed that 6.2% of your earnings are withheld for Social Security. This amount is withheld for all wages up to $184,500 per year. If you earn more than that in a year, your remaining income is not subject to Social Security withholding. About 93% of the US workforce, or nearly 183 million workers, contribute to Social Security in this way.

More than 75 million people, or about 22% of Americans, currently receive benefits from Social Security. Most (78%) of these beneficiaries are Americans who are 65 years of age or older; some (15%) are Americans under the age of 65 who are unable to work for a range of reasons, from illness to injury to longer term or permanent disabilities. The remaining beneficiaries (7%) include other groups, like early retirees or spouses and/or children of deceased, retired, or disabled workers, who receive survivor benefits.

What does it mean to receive benefits from Social Security? Basically, it means you get a modest payment from a shared pool of money on a regular basis. The mean Social Security retirement payment, for example, is around $2,000 per month ($24,000 annually), while the mean disability payment is around $1,600 per month ($19,200 annually). For context, the federal poverty level in 2026 is an annual income of $15,960 or lower for an individual, meaning that Social Security payments alone can keep someone above the poverty line.

The amount paid per month also varies across different people since it’s calculated through a formula that takes into account your age when you stopped working, how much you earned, and how long you worked, among other factors. In general, the more money you earn during your working years, the more money you receive as benefits from Social Security, subject to some situational differences, like whether you’re still working and under full retirement age while collecting benefits.

Today, almost all older adults receive at least some Social Security benefits, with many lower-income adults relying on Social Security as nearly all of their income in retirement. Other common sources of income people rely on in retirement include 401(k)s, other retirement accounts like IRAs, personal savings and investments, and pensions (guaranteed retirement income from your employer). However, pensions have become far less common since the 1980s. Researchers also estimate that Social Security is particularly important for Black, Latino, and Asian retirees, who are more likely to live below the poverty line than their white counterparts. It’s also particularly valuable for women, who on balance earn less than men, are more likely to take time away from work during their careers, and have smaller pensions or retirement savings due to lower earnings.

Social Security is also a powerful economic force for children and dependents of beneficiaries, both disabled and retired. For example, a 2022 estimate found that Social Security lifted 1.4 million children above the poverty line, either through their parents’ or caretakers’ receiving benefits, or through receiving benefits directly.

How is Social Security funded?

More than 90% of Social Security is funded through payroll taxes. The 6.2% of your earnings that goes to Social Security each paycheck is only part of the picture. Employers pay another 6.2% when they issue your paycheck, making it a total 12.4% payroll tax that funds Social Security. If you are self-employed, you pay the entire 12.4%.

About 5% of Social Security funding comes from taxes on Social Security benefits themselves, as many people who receive payments then pay taxes on those payments, kind of like income taxes but on benefits. The final 5% of Social Security income comes from interest earned from Treasury bonds.

Another thing to know is that when we’re talking about “Social Security” as a whole, we’re really talking about two major funds: the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund (OASI) and the Disability Insurance Trust Fund (DI). While they are often treated as a unit (OASDI), they technically operate as separate funds and face different budgetary constraints and projections, which we’ll see shortly.

What does Social Security’s financial situation look like?

To understand some of the challenges facing Social Security, it’s helpful to consider its financial health over time. The chart below depicts three key variables:

1. The total asset reserves in the two trust funds (OASI and DI);

2. The annual total income into Social Security (the payroll taxes, program benefit taxes, and interest described above);

3. The annual total costs of running Social Security, which include the amount paid out to beneficiaries (99.1% of costs) as well as administrative costs (0.5%) and transfers to the railroad retirement program (0.4%).

While Social Security in its OASI form has been around since 1935, the DI component was officially merged with it in 1957, so the graph below depicts the trends for these three variables since 1957.

Social Security’s costs have been outpacing its income since 2021

Total income, total costs, and total asset reserves at the end of each year for the OAS and DI trust funds since 1957, in billions of US dollars

Two things stand out. First, a big reason you’re hearing about Social Security these days is that in 2021 the total costs of the program exceeded its income for the first time since a deficit stretch in 1975–1981. There were a few other periods (1959, 1961–62, 1965) when costs briefly and slightly exceeded benefits before that, but they were so brief they’re barely visible on the chart. The current stretch and the period during the late Seventies — which was largely the result of a flawed adjustment to the formula in 1972 followed by an unexpectedly low-performing national economy — are the two major sustained periods of Social Security deficit.

Second, also in 2021, you’ll notice the total asset reserves held in the two trusts at the end of each year started decreasing. Again, we saw a small decrease of asset reserves between 1977 and 1981, but overall it was much smaller than the current decrease.

Thus, the concern is that if trends continue this way and we do nothing about it, we will eventually fully deplete all the money in the asset reserves. Some of the biggest debates around Social Security’s financial future, thus, effectively boil down to four questions: how likely is that “if,” what can we do about it, how soon is this “eventually,” and what happens if the funds are fully depleted. We’ll tackle these questions in reverse order.

What happens if the assets run out?

While it sounds scary to think about funds being completely gone, it’s important to remember that even with no assets in the reserves, there will still be income for Social Security through our three avenues of payroll taxes, taxes on benefits, and Treasury bond interest.

If we think of Social Security as a kind of national savings account, depleting the assets would be like running through our savings but still having a job. It’s not ideal to live paycheck to paycheck (though it would be very American of us to end up that way), but the broader Social Security program can technically live on without assets in reserve.

Of course, if we burned through our savings as individuals, the next move would usually be to adjust either our income or our spending so that we can start to build our savings account back up. This is how experts are thinking about Social Security potentially running dry: if all the assets are depleted, the payment amounts distributed to beneficiaries (i.e., our spending) will need to decrease.

Specifically, estimates suggest that if the reserves are depleted, the program will be able to pay out only 83% of its current benefits for a few years, and then if nothing still changes, that number will decrease to 73%. Of course, less money is worse for all recipients, but it’s also anticipated that many older adults — particularly members of marginalized populations and people with disabilities — may fall below the poverty line. So, the payouts won’t hit zero instantly, but the consequences will be real, right away, for many people.

When will assets run out?

Estimates vary, but most anticipate the reserves running dry sometime between 2032 and 2035. On balance, the estimates have crept earlier over the last few years, but the general consensus is that we have less than a decade remaining before the reserves zero out if we don’t do anything differently (there’s that “if” again).

The chart below depicts the most recently published projection from the Social Security Administration itself. It separates out the two funds, which means we can see that the fates of OASI and DI actually look quite different. The way to interpret the lines below is that they represent the ratio of trust reserves as a percentage of the annual cost for each of the two arms of Social Security, old age and survivors, as well as disability insurance. A ratio of one (or even approaching one within five years) means that the benefits can continue to be paid in full.

If trends continue as they are, the OASI will no longer be able to pay benefits in full by 2034

Trust reserves as a percentage of annual cost for OASI and DI funds. A ratio of 1 or more (100%) indicates that if costs exceed income, there is still enough in reserves and tax revenue to pay full benefits

The ratio of the OASI fund is projected to drop below one in 2029 and then reach zero by 2034 in this particular projection. The DI fund, on the other hand, actually is projected to have an increasing ratio of reserves to cost. The explanation for why these two projections are different is a big part of why Social Security is considered to be in trouble in the first place.

How likely are these projections?

Here is where things get stickier. The projections around Social Security’s financial future are built on a series of demographic, economic, and disability assumptions that experts make about America’s future.

The reason it’s difficult to pin down exactly when Social Security’s reserves are going to run out is that the answer depends on what assumptions you include in your model, as well as how variables actually unfold, which is why even under the same assumptions, predictions from this year might be different from last year’s.

To be more concrete: The amount of money in Social Security’s reserves will depend on how much is going into the funds and how much is coming out. How much is going in will depend on how many people are working (demographic and disability assumptions) and how much money they’re making (economic assumptions). How much is going out will depend on how many people are retiring (demographic assumptions) or have to stop working due to illness, injury, or another condition (disability assumptions) and how expensive things are (economic assumptions).

In general, the primary demographic challenge facing the OASI fund in particular is that the age distribution of the US population is shifting toward having more older than younger people. This means the number of people receiving benefits from Social Security will increase, while the number of people paying into it will decrease. Underlying variables around fertility rates, immigration rates, and mortality rates all affect this balance, which is why exact numbers are difficult to pin down. At the same time, the number of people receiving disability benefits is not increasing, or expected to increase, which is the primary reason the DI fund is not expected to become insolvent. While one solution for OASI’s pending insolvency might be to distribute funds from DI or combine the funds, alas, this is prohibited by law. The overall DI fund is also much smaller, and even combining them would only increase OAS and DI solvency by perhaps a year or so.

Can we do anything about this?

There are two answers to what we can do about this. One is shorter term, and the other is longer term. On the shorter term side, there is a lot of room for negotiation and strategizing about how to make Social Security more sustainable. As with any budget challenge, again, the two levers are to increase the amount going in or decrease the amount coming out. On the income side, this could look like increasing the percentage of each paycheck that goes to Social Security from 6.2% to something slightly higher. Another option would be to raise the cap above which our incomes are not subject to Social Security withholding to something higher than $184,500.

On the reducing-spending side, we could of course decrease the percentage of benefits paid out to all recipients, but we could also be more judicious about whose percentages are reduced by how much. For example, while there is a maximum benefit payout (about $5,000 per month), there is currently no cap on the amount of money you can earn while still receiving up to the maximum. How much net worth or income you have is also not currently part of the calculations, meaning even billionaires can receive Social Security benefits today.

This has prompted some policy thinking around whether to cap or reduce benefits for wealthier or higher-income individuals or families. One policy proposal, for example, recommends capping Social Security payments at $100,000 per year for couples.

Another policy lever is increasing the age after which you can receive benefits. But because many people have planned their lives around receiving benefits at a certain time, even pushing back the age limit by one year could have massive repercussions for their financial well-being.

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As you can imagine, these are all politically charged topics — who is more or less deserving of benefits can be tricky to figure out, as it’s both a mathematical and ethical question.

On the longer-term side, Social Security’s challenges reflect a lot of much deeper changes afoot in the US (and many parts of the world). Policies that affect complex issues like family planning, immigration, and overall worker productivity all eventually affect Social Security. Heated debates about reproductive rights and childcare affordability are also part of the puzzle, as are the divisive debates around what the “right” immigration rate is for this country. Plus, underlying technological shifts, such as through the advancement of AI, may seriously disrupt the way people earn incomes.

Wherever you personally land on any of these contentious issues, they all affect our immediate lives (our access to care, whether ICE is in our neighborhood and what they can do, whether we get laid off), but they also affect our collective futures — our ability to keep the social safety net that FDR hoped would protect us from exactly these sorts of vicissitudes. As he said in 1935, “we can never insure one hundred percent of the population against one hundred percent of the hazards,” but we can all participate in conversations, communicate with our representatives, and advocate for policy positions we think have the best chance of doing so.

Birthright Citizenship

A majority of Supreme Court justices today appeared skeptical of President Trump’s effort to end birthright citizenship.

The case, Trump v. Barbara, centers on the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” The Trump administration argues the second part of the phrase applies only to those with “political allegiance” to the US, which he says would exclude the children of undocumented parents or those in the country with temporary status. The government’s lawyer, Solicitor General John Sauer, argued that for more than a century, the 14th Amendment has been misinterpreted, and was never meant to cover children born on US soil whose parents were not citizens.

But a majority of the justices — including those appointed by Trump himself — did not appear to be buying the government’s arguments.

Chief Justice Roberts told Sauer that his entire argument rested on a handful of strange exceptions, like children born to foreign diplomats or to enemies during a military invasion, and he asked how Sauer could stretch those tiny examples to cover millions of people. Justice Gorsuch told Sauer bluntly that he might want to stop relying on Wong Kim Ark, an 1898 Supreme Court case that found the child of Chinese nationals was indeed a citizen, because the case supported the idea of birthright citizenship.

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Sauer urged the Court to consider the present-day reality of birthright citizenship: “We’re in a new world now…where 8 billion people are one plane ride away from having a child who’s a US citizen.”

Chief Justice John Roberts replied: “Well, it’s a new world. It’s the same Constitution.”

Justice Kagan told Sauer he was engaging in a revisionist version of history, and Kavanaugh essentially said that how other countries handle citizenship — something Sauer repeatedly brought up — is of little consequence, since we are dealing with the American Constitution. Justice Jackson drove the point home, asking if the government was planning on bringing pregnant women in for depositions to determine their immigration status.

Justice Gorsuch also point-blank asked Sauer if Native Americans were natural-born citizens and Sauer hesitated repeatedly, before saying he thought so, but he would need to consider it further. By the end of the hearing, it appeared that only two justices — Thomas and Alito — were sympathetic to the government’s arguments.

Trump attended the hearing — a first for a sitting president — and left halfway through. He later posted on social media that the US was “the only Country in the World STUPID enough to allow ‘Birthright’ Citizenship.” More than 30 countries grant automatic birthright citizenship.

The Court is expected to rule in June or July.

Iran

A day after the Associated Press reported that Gulf states allied with the US are urging continued action in Iran, President Trump told Reuters that the US would be “out of Iran pretty quickly” and return only for “spot hits,” though he gave no timeline for ending current operations and did not explain what would trigger a return.

Although the Trump administration has at times suggested that a major objective of the war is to eliminate Iran’s prospects of developing a nuclear weapon, when asked about Iran’s underground enriched uranium stockpiles, Trump said: “That’s so far underground, I don’t care about that.” Trump had previously stated that Iran could not keep enriched uranium. But early this week, Trump administration officials told The Wall Street Journal that the president was considering ordering US troops into Iran to extract nearly 1,000 pounds of stored enriched uranium.

Trump also threatened to withdraw from NATO, the treaty alliance the US joined in 1949. “They haven’t been friends when we needed them,” he said. “We’ve never asked them for much… it’s a one-way street.” Trump has asked European allies for help reopening the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has blockaded since the war began. They have refused.

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Election Executive Order

President Trump yesterday signed an executive order directing administration officials to compile lists of eligible voters in each state for federal elections, while imposing new restrictions on mail-in voting.

The order, “protecting the integrity of federal elections,” instructs agencies including the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration to build state-by-state lists of voting-age American citizens and share them with state election officials. The order directs the DOJ to investigate and prosecute state and local election officials who give out ballots to anyone who is not eligible, and it also seeks to limit mail ballots to voters on approved lists and requires tracking through mail barcodes.

Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows told the AP the order was “laughably unconstitutional” and said her state would not comply. Most states allow some form of mail-in voting; eight states and Washington DC conduct elections entirely by mail, automatically sending ballots to all registered voters in California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont and Washington.

DHS Shutdown Deal

Senate Majority Leader John Thune and House Speaker Mike Johnson announced today that Republicans have reached an agreement to end the 47-day partial DHS shutdown, with a vote possible as early as tomorrow morning.

The deal, which Speaker Johnson refused to let the House vote on last week, would fund DHS through Sept. 30. ICE and Border Patrol would continue operating on funds Congress approved last year rather than new appropriations, sidestepping Democratic demands for restrictions on immigration enforcement. Democrats had sought to require judicial warrants for arrests, visible identification for agents, and a stop to enforcement near schools and churches.

Trump said today he would sign the proposed funding bill, a position a senior White House official confirmed.

The shutdown has strained airport security nationwide, with TSA officers working without pay for weeks, leading to widespread callouts and resignations. The officers started getting back pay this week.

Kid Rock Flyby

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said yesterday that US Army pilots who flew Apache helicopters near the Nashville home of musician Kid Rock will not face punishment, reversing an earlier suspension and investigation.

The helicopters, part of a training mission, made low passes over both anti-Trump “No Kings” protests and Kid Rock’s property last week, prompting scrutiny over possible violations of flight rules and concerns about the military appearing politicized. The Army had initially grounded the crew pending review.

Hegseth, however, halted the inquiry, posting on social media: “No punishment. No investigation.”

According to NPR, Kid Rock — a supporter of President Trump — had no problem with the helicopters’ flight path. “If it makes their day a little brighter for their service to our country, protecting us, I think that’s a great thing,” he said.

Artemis II Moon Mission

Four astronauts lifted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida today at 6.35 p.m. ET, beginning a 10-day journey around the moon and back aboard NASA’s Orion spacecraft — ahead of a planned lunar landing mission in 2028.

The mission — Artemis II — is designed to test the spacecraft’s life support, communications and navigation systems with a crew aboard for the first time. It is the first crewed lunar mission since Apollo 17 in December 1972.

—Sharon

Sama, a 31-year-old engineer in Tehran, was screaming with joy when she heard Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was dead.

That was week one of the war.

By week two, she couldn’t sleep. “Now I see some are terrified,” she said. “I wake up either to the sound of explosions, or because of nightmares about them.”

That emotional whiplash — hope giving way to dread — captures something essential about this moment inside Iran. One month into the US-Israeli military campaign, Khamenei is gone, the country is under bombardment, and yet the Islamic Republic remains intact. For many Iranians, the possibility of change feels closer than it has in years — and at the same time more uncertain and more frightening.

This is the part of the story that has largely been missing from American coverage. The focus has been on strikes, negotiations, and decisions in Washington. But what is unfolding inside Iran — the limits of protest, the resilience of the regime, and the absence of a clear alternative — may ultimately matter just as much in determining what comes next.

Arash Azizi, historian, Yale lecturer, Atlantic columnist, and author of What Iranians Want, has spent years studying Iran’s political evolution and remains in close contact with people inside the country, including members of his family. His assessment of the current moment is clear-eyed and notably unsentimental.

“Many Iranians have a magical thinking,” he told me. “They think of 1979, where overnight the Shah was overthrown and something else came. So now this can happen again — in the opposite direction.”

It is an appealing idea, he said, particularly in moments of upheaval. But it is also misleading.

A system built to prevent its own collapse

The Islamic Republic that exists today is, in many ways, a system designed in response to the lessons of 1979.

When the Shah fell, it was not simply because of mass protest. It was because the state had lost its ability to enforce power. The military fractured. Soldiers refused to fire on civilians. Political authority dissolved once coercive force became unreliable.

The Islamic Republic has spent decades ensuring that that scenario cannot be repeated. It built parallel security structures that operate alongside the regular military but are more tightly bound to the survival of the regime — most notably the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the most powerful part of Iran’s military, and the Basij militia, a volunteer force used to police dissent and enforce ideological control. Iran has expanded intelligence networks and surveillance capabilities, embedding them not only in major cities but in smaller towns and rural areas that historically had little direct state presence.

At the same time, the regime worked systematically to eliminate alternative centers of power.

Opposition figures inside Iran have been imprisoned, intimidated, or killed. Abroad, dissidents have been targeted in hundreds of assassinations over four decades. Civil society — from independent media to labor unions — has been weakened or dismantled. Political competition has been tightly controlled through the vetting of candidates to ensure loyalty to the system.

That absence of leadership and viable alternatives is the product of sustained policy — and the central reason protest movements have struggled to translate dissent into change.

“The state was very aware of how the Shah fell,” said Roya Boroumand, co-founder of the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran. “They have made sure that, if they have a legitimacy problem, there is no one to fill that vacuum.”

Protest without power

Over the past two decades, Iran has experienced repeated waves of protest, each one broader and more politically explicit than the last — and each one met with escalating repression.

The 2009 Green Movement brought millions into the streets before being violently suppressed. The 2019 fuel protests left at least 1,500 people dead. The 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom movement became a global symbol of resistance to state repression and demands for basic rights and dignity before being crushed through arrests, executions, and widespread intimidation.

In December 2025 and January 2026, protests reached a new level. Demonstrations spread across all 31 provinces, cutting across class and generational lines. For a brief moment, it appeared that the scale of unrest might overwhelm the system.

Instead, the regime responded with overwhelming force. Estimates of those killed in the first days of the crackdown alone range from roughly 7,000 to as high as 30,000, depending on the source. Thousands more were detained. Communication networks were restricted. Surveillance intensified. Families were pressured into silence.

The pattern has become familiar: mobilization followed by containment, dissent followed by repression. What has been missing is not courage among the people, but a pathway to power.

The unintended consequences of war

In the months leading up to the war, the Iranian regime was arguably at one of its weakest points in years — battered by the January protests, constrained by a struggling economy, and occupying a diminished regional posture after setbacks to its proxy networks. The expectation in some quarters was that external pressure might push it over the edge.

So far, the evidence points in a different direction.

The war has reinforced the regime’s internal position. External attack has made it easier for the leadership to frame dissent as disloyalty and to rally political and security elites who might otherwise be divided.

Data from ACLED, which monitors violent conflict and protests around the world, underscores that dynamic. Since the war began, the overwhelming majority of demonstrations have been pro-government, while anti-regime protest has been rare and quickly suppressed.

“The regime has not fragmented and there are no defections,” said ACLED president Clionadh Raleigh.

This does not mean the regime has regained legitimacy with the Iranian public. It has not. But it does suggest that external military pressure is not producing the kind of internal fracture that would lead to collapse. Instead, it is narrowing political space and strengthening the regime’s control at home.

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The limits of external support

For many Iranians, the gap between the rhetoric outside their country and the reality inside it has been stark.

During the January protests, Donald Trump urged Iranians to “TAKE OVER” regime institutions and warned that if the government killed protesters, the United States would respond forcefully.

Some believed him. Accounts from inside Iran describe people watching the skies, expecting intervention that never came. The protests were crushed. No response followed.

Azizi sees that outcome as predictable.

“It’s pitiful in a way because this was an entirely predictable course of events,” he said. “What in Donald Trump shows — what has he ever done — that would suggest he’s a friend of democracy?”

An opposition without a center

The question of what comes next if the regime weakens significantly remains unresolved.

The Iranian opposition is diverse but deeply fragmented. Some Iranians aligned with Reza Pahlavi — the son of the deposed Shah — see him as a transitional figure, a bridge to democratic elections rather than a return to monarchy. For some Iranians, particularly in the diaspora, that framing resonates, fed by nostalgia for the pre-revolutionary era as a time of stability and prosperity.

Inside Iran, Pahlavi’s actual support is harder to measure — and his lack of any organization or network raises serious questions about whether he would be capable of driving change. Other factions compete for influence: the Mojahedin-e Khalq — a controversial opposition movement that broke violently with the Islamic Republic after the 1979 revolution and was designated a US terrorist organization until 2012 — remains deeply unpopular inside Iran, particularly because of its alliance with Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War. Kurdish political organizations have regional influence but are at risk of fragmentation. Efforts to build broader coalitions continue, but with limited cohesion.

“Revolutions never win by people getting guns,” Azizi says. “The way it works is that they cause a crack in the security forces — so that they defect to the people.” No sign of that crack has appeared. “Because who do they defect to?”

A revolution deferred

Taken together, these dynamics point to a more complicated reality than either the imminent collapse of Iran or its decisive transformation.

What is unfolding inside Iran is not a revolution in the traditional sense. It may be the beginning of a prolonged period of strain, adaptation, and uncertainty. The regime remains deeply unpopular but resilient. The population remains dissatisfied but politically constrained. The system is under pressure but not yet breaking.

For many Iranians, that is the hardest reality to accept. The desire for a decisive rupture — a moment like 1979 — remains powerful. But the conditions that made that moment possible do not exist today.

What exists instead is a government that has learned from its past, a society that continues to push against it, and a geopolitical environment that complicates both.

For now, the revolution is stuck — not because the forces for change are absent, but because the structures that contain them remain intact.

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Conversion Therapy at the Supreme Court

The US Supreme Court struck down Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy for LGBTQ+ youth, finding that the ban violated the free speech rights of a conservative Christian therapist.

Writing for the majority in the 8-1 decision, Justice Neil Gorsuch agreed with the plaintiff that the Colorado law violates her First Amendment rights to free speech, because it censors what she is allowed to say as part of talk therapy. The Court says that in this instance, speech in a therapy context is not conduct, which makes it different from other healthcare regulations that don’t implicate the First Amendment.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the lone dissenter, and warned that the majority’s decision was “ushering in an era of unprofessional and unsafe medical care” by leaving some kinds of care unregulated for the sake of free speech.

More than 20 states in the US have laws banning conversion therapy, which are likely to be impacted by the decision.

Iran

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps today accused American companies operating in the Gulf region of helping the US and Israel wage war against them. “From now on the main institutions involved in such operations will be considered legitimate targets,” the IRGC said in a statement that named 18 companies, including Apple, Google, and Meta.

Meanwhile, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine said today that US B-52 bombers have been flying over Iran for the first time in the war, suggesting they had degraded military capacity. But Defense Secretary Hegseth said that Iran can still launch missiles at US targets.

US and Israeli forces struck military sites in Isfahan today, Iran’s state news agency Fars reported. Isfahan houses Iran’s main nuclear research complex and has been a repeated target since the war began. Overnight, Iran struck a Kuwaiti oil tanker off Dubai — an attack on Gulf commercial shipping — and officials said the fire was extinguished today.

According to the Associated Press, Gulf states including Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait and Bahrain have privately told the Trump administration they want military operations against Iran to continue until there are significant changes in Iranian leadership or substantial degradation of its military capacity. The White House declined to comment on the story.

NATO Alliance

President Trump said today that the UK and France have not supported the US in its war against Iran. Trump has asked European allies for assistance in reopening the Strait of Hormuz, which has been blocked by Iran since the war began. So far, they have refused.

France has also refused to allow planes involved in the war use of its airspace. “France wouldn’t let planes headed to Israel, loaded up with military supplies, fly over French territory. France has been VERY UNHELPFUL,” Trump wrote on social media. In another post, he told the UK that the US will not be there to help it anymore, “just like you weren’t there for us,” and told it to “go get your own oil!” France’s refusal to grant overflight rights, a French official said, is consistent with their position of not taking part in the war. Without them, US military cargo flights must take longer routes, consuming more fuel and time.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth later declined to reaffirm the US commitment to NATO’s collective defense, saying the decision was President Trump’s to make. “You don’t have much of an alliance if you have countries that are not willing to stand with you when you need them,” he said.

Article 5 of NATO’s founding treaty establishes that an armed attack on one member is treated as an attack on all — a provision invoked once, after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.

Texas School Shooting

A 15-year-old student shot a teacher at a Texas high school and then fatally shot himself yesterday, according to the Comal County Sheriff’s Office. Neither has been publicly identified.

The shooting occurred at Hill Country College Preparatory High School in Bulverde, a small city near San Antonio. No other injuries were reported. A student told KSAT TV the shooter fired three or four rounds.

The Comal County Sheriff’s Office said that the student used a .357 revolver that he brought from home. Authorities said they believe the student may have experienced “academic challenges,” though the motive remains under investigation. The teacher who was shot remains hospitalized.

Newsbreak

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Birthright Citizenship

The US Supreme Court will hear oral arguments tomorrow in Trump v. Barbara. The case will decide whether President Trump’s January 2025 executive order ending birthright citizenship for children born in the US to undocumented immigrants or temporarily present parents is constitutional.

The 14th Amendment states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” The Trump administration argues that “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” refers to political allegiance rather than physical presence — meaning children of undocumented or temporary-status parents do not qualify. The plaintiffs argue the amendment guarantees citizenship to all born on US soil, with narrow historical exceptions such as the children of foreign diplomats, and that a president cannot alter the Constitution by executive order.

Three federal district courts ruled the order unconstitutional and issued nationwide injunctions against the executive order. The plaintiffs are a class-action group led by a Honduran asylum applicant referred to as “Barbara,” with the ACLU leading the legal challenge.

Gas Prices

Gas prices nationwide surged past $4 a gallon for the first time since 2022 today, driven by the ongoing Iran war’s disruption to global fuel supply.

The national average for a gallon of regular gasoline reached $4.02, according to the American Automobile Association — up more than a dollar since last month. Drivers in California are paying nearly $6 a gallon; those in Colorado, New Mexico and the Northeast are averaging around $3.80.

Experts say affordability will be a key issue in the midterm elections in November this year and high gas prices could hurt Republicans’ prospects since they’re currently in power.

According to a Time magazine analysis, in the last three midterms when the price of oil hovered around or above $100 a barrel (adjusted for inflation) at this point in the election cycle — as it does now — the party in the White House lost 29 House seats on average.

DHS Shutdown

Airport security lines that have stretched four hours or more during the DHS shutdown are easing as TSA officers begin receiving back pay.

Wait time at the Atlanta airport had dropped to under 15 minutes today, according to posted TSA figures.

President Trump last week signed an executive order directing DHS to redirect funds to pay TSA workers. But it does not guarantee continued pay if the shutdown persists, and Congress is now in a planned two-week recess.

The shutdown, now in its 46th day, began when DHS funding lapsed in mid-February.

NPR, PBS Funding

A federal judge today ruled that Donald Trump’s executive order last year barring federal funds to NPR and PBS was unconstitutional, finding it violated the First Amendment.

The court said the government cannot deny funding based on disagreement with a news outlet’s editorial content. The ruling blocks enforcement of the order, though it does not restore funding already lost.

The decision is unlikely to have an immediate effect on public media funding. Two months after the executive order last year, Republicans in Congress voted to claw back roughly $1.1 billion in funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which distributes federal support to NPR and PBS. Trump and Republican allies have argued that public media coverage is biased against them.

Following the funding cut, the CPB shut down.

White House Ballroom

A federal judge in Washington DC today ordered a temporary halt to construction of a $400 million White House ballroom initiated by President Trump, ruling the project cannot proceed without congressional approval. Trump had the East Wing demolished last year to make way for the ballroom.

The judge sided with the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which said Trump had no authority to construct the ballroom, saying the historic preservation group was likely to prevail on the merits of the case. The judge said that no statute gives the president the authority he claims and that only Congress can authorize such construction.

“The President of the United States is the steward of the White House for future generations of First Families. He is not, however, the owner!” wrote Judge Richard Leon. The order will not take effect for 14 days, giving the Trump administration time to appeal.

Another DOGE staffer, Edward Coristine, whose “age and lack of experience came to symbolize DOGE for many of its critics,” according to NBC News, was only a teenager when he was hired at DOGE, despite the fact that his resume — which must have been brief — included being let go from an internship after it was discovered he had leaked cybersecurity secrets. This band of young techies was to preside over reducing the country’s $2 trillion federal deficit. They were sent out to various government agencies and given unchecked power to lay off federal employees and cut spending.

Now, DOGE is facing a lawsuit over its role in slashing grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in April of last year — grants that amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars, covering everything from cultural preservation projects to basic maintenance at museums. As a part of that lawsuit, video-recorded depositions took place in January of this year, and remarks from Cavanaugh and Fox went viral after being released earlier this month.

In one clip, Cavanaugh is asked, “You don’t regret that people [who relied on those grants] might have lost important incomes?” Cavanaugh responds, “No.” He explains, “I think it was more important to reduce the federal deficit from $2 trillion to close to zero.” The interviewer then asks, “Did you reduce the federal deficit?” Cavanaugh replies, “No, we didn’t.” (Despite cutting 9% of the federal workforce, DOGE did not reduce spending.)

Fox was asked to define diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) because the NEH grants had been terminated in response to executive orders requiring an end to federal funding for DEI-related projects. He refused to define DEI, claiming that it is “exactly what was written in the EO [executive order].”

Cavanaugh and Fox, both members of DOGE’s Small Agencies Team, were the key decision-makers in the grant terminations despite their lack of any background in the humanities, and there is shock value in their viral clips. But those comments hardly scratch the surface. The rest of the lawsuit’s discovery material was just released to the public, and there is much to be learned from it.

Understanding the lawsuit and the NEH

The lawsuit over the grant cuts is against both DOGE and the NEH. One of the largest funders of humanities research in the country, the NEH is a historically nonpartisan, independent federal organization. In March 2025, DOGE was brought in to hasten steps toward eliminating DEI and ensuring compliance with the Trump administration’s executive orders. On April 1, about 1,400 NEH grants — totaling over $100 million — were canceled after a deliberation period of just a few weeks. The NEH had never before terminated any grants in this manner, at this scale, or for these reasons. In their depositions, leaders at the NEH could recall no more than a few grant cancellations; one longtime staffer said that in his 22 years at the organization, there had been “under half a dozen.”

The lawsuit was filed by a group of organizations seeking to have the terminations reversed and the funding reinstated. They claim that the defunding violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fifth Amendment by specifically targeting grants related to minority groups. They say that because the NEH cut out any congressional role, the grants were “cancelled without statutory authority.” And they allege that NEH and DOGE employees violated the Federal Records Act — which requires federal officials to maintain a record of their decisions for the sake of accountability — by communicating about government business on the app Signal and setting it to delete their messages automatically.

But even without preserving a full record, they left a trail of evidence. As Inside Higher Ed reports, “the trove of [discovery] documents — including depositions with top NEH administrators and DOGE staff, as well as emails, spreadsheets and text messages — suggest rushed, chaotic funding termination decisions and reveal the extent of DOGE’s influence in terminating 97 percent of the agency’s grants.”

DOGE’s takeover of the NEH

The discovery documents paint a picture that centers on Cavanaugh and Fox, along with Michael McDonald, the Trump-appointed acting chair of the NEH at the time. Email records show Cavanaugh and Fox telling McDonald that they were getting pressure directly from the White House to make the cuts.

In his deposition, Cavanaugh admitted that this was a fabrication and called it “a pressure tactic.” But it helped DOGE get the upper hand. McDonald deferred his authority to Cavanaugh and Fox, saying, “As you’ve made clear, it’s your decision on whether to discontinue funding on any of the [grants].”

The DOGE team and experienced NEH employees diverged on certain grants, and when they did, it was DOGE that had the final say. For example, when asked why funding was cut for a documentary about Jewish women forced into slave labor during the Holocaust, Fox said the documentary was “inherently related to DEI” because it focused on marginalized voices and Jewish women specifically. (Despite his reluctance to define what DEI is during the deposition, he was happy to identify DEI-related programs.) McDonald did not agree. The project’s grant was terminated.

In his deposition, McDonald explained why he allowed the DOGE employees to do as they saw fit. “I believe that I had a responsibility [as acting director of the NEH], which, in my view, is part of the executive branch of government. We were given instructions by the President to cooperate with DOGE in its work.” McDonald understood just how unprecedented the cuts were, but he said he supported DOGE in its goal of aligning the NEH with the president’s executive order.

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While McDonald yielded to DOGE, the depositions make clear that he wasn’t aware of the measures it was resorting to to get the job done. The executive orders themselves were vague and hardly described DEI; one simply refers to “diversity” and “equity” efforts as illegal, without defining those terms. DOGE staffers were left to fill in the uncertainty with their own understanding.

So they consulted ChatGPT. “Does the following relate at all to DEI? Respond factually in less than 120 characters,” Fox told the chatbot. “Begin with ‘Yes.’ or ‘No.’ followed by a brief explanation.” He plugged in grant descriptions that were just a few sentences and allowed an AI model to make decisions that had consequences in the hundreds of thousands of dollars each.

Unsurprisingly, the ChatGPT decisions were crude and imprecise. The records show that it wasn’t even told what constitutes DEI. It made elementary errors that weren’t caught, and things that were in no way related to DEI were mistakenly flagged. For example, grants to replace a museum’s HVAC system, digitize a local newspaper, and train individuals who preserve historic documents and archives were all deemed DEI — flagged because they would increase “inclusion” or “access” to the humanities.

But while those mistakes reveal carelessness, what is more concerning are the cuts that were not made in error. The standard seems to have been that any cultural preservation project related to people who are nonwhite, LGBTQ, or women could not be funded.

What DOGE says, goes

The DOGE staff used a very broad brush in identifying what they considered DEI. Grants on preserving the history of the Civil War, the works of W. E. B. Du Bois, and Native American languages were canceled. Grants related to Alfred North Whitehead, Martin Van Buren, and Ernest Hemingway — white men — were in the clear.

With no relevant experience, DOGE flagged anything with terms such as “BIPOC,” “tribal,” and “LGBTQ” as DEI rather than individually analyzing the grants. A plaintiff motion for summary judgment reads, “Fox’s initial search was a facially race-, ethnicity-, and sexuality-based screen — grants touching on the experiences of racial minorities, Indigenous peoples, or LGBTQ communities were flagged.” (The motion is still pending.)

ChatGPT marked a biography of Oscar Adams Jr. as DEI because it “explores the life and accomplishments of… a Black lawyer and jurist.” A project translating works from the Holocaust into English was deemed DEI because “this anthology explores Jewish writers’ engagement with the Holocaust.”

Sarah Weickse, executive director of the American Historical Association, one of the plaintiffs in the case, remarked, “Terminating the grants of scholars and institutions” due to “the race or [social identity] of the historical figures they intended to study… threatens the study of history and the humanities more broadly.”

In his deposition, McDonald admitted that he disagreed with multiple grant terminations. He said he believed they were not in violation of the executive order and should not have been flagged as DEI and canceled. He had sent an email to DOGE employees saying as much, writing that NEH staff made a careful review of all grants and assessed their relation to DEI, “rat[ing] them high, medium or low in terms of promoting DEI.” But when DOGE came in with their list, McDonald expressed concern that they planned to cut “products that seemed to have no applicability to promoting DEI.”

The DOGE employees were less cautious. In his deposition, Cavanaugh said that identifying DEI, and therefore knowing what grants to cut, is simple and intuitive — and when it wasn’t, he explained, “we [would] lean on the side of cutting it because DOGE’s mission was to reduce federal spending. We erred on the side of the cut versus keep, generally.”

The DOGE employees say they deliberately put the NEH under intense time pressure to provide recommendations on funding decisions. In practice, this meant cutting corners. After the NEH agreed to bend the knee and scrap their carefully considered first set of recommendations, McDonald, in an email to Fox, wrote, “In the interest of time, because we know you want to move quickly, we didn’t give these applications the individualized consideration that we did [the first time around].” This time, they gave careful treatment to just a select few grants. “We only explicitly initialed a few important projects — such as the papers of George Washington — whose cancellation would not reflect well on any of us,” the email read.

DOGE’s hypocrisy

The obvious irony is that DOGE was slashing DEI programs for their alleged injustice and unfairness, and yet the means through which they did so were neither just nor fair.

Critics of DEI often say that it wrongly treats people differently based on racial categories. Yet this is exactly what DOGE did in its funding decisions: objective academic value was not assessed, and grants were cut only because they happened to relate to minority groups.

DEI critics express concern that DEI affords opportunities to people who aren’t qualified, yet the DOGE staffers were primary examples of just that. “Neither Fox nor Cavanaugh had any relevant background in the humanities, public or private grant administration, peer review, or government service of any kind prior to joining the Administration,” reads the plaintiffs’ motion for summary judgment.

DEI critics insist on the importance of merit-based decisions, yet some DOGE staffers came into their positions through personal connections and without relevant experience.

And in the end it was mostly for nothing. The NEH was gutted. Careers were ended or hindered, and valuable research will not be done. Meanwhile, the budget deficit continues to trend upward. Cavanaugh said in his deposition that he saw his job as slashing “useless agencies.” Perhaps he should have begun with DOGE’s Small Agencies Team.

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Iran

President Trump today threatened to destroy Iran’s electricity plants, oil wells, and sea water desalination facilities if Iran does not agree to a deal to end the war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz “shortly.” Iran’s UN representative responded that deliberately targeting “civilian industrial infrastructure” to exert economic pressure or impose collective punishment could constitute “serious violations of international humanitarian law, including war crimes.”

Trump also threatened to strike Kharg Island, which exports an estimated 1.5 to 2 million barrels per day — roughly 90% of Iran’s crude oil exports.

Around 20% of the world’s crude oil passes through the Strait. Iran has been blocking it since the war began more than a month ago.

Last week, Iran fired ballistic missiles and drones at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, injuring at least 15 US troops, with five being seriously hurt. The strike also destroyed an E-3 Sentry aircraft — a radar and command-and-control jet whose loss could affect the US military’s ability to monitor threats in the region.

Trump administration officials told The Wall Street Journal on Sunday that the president is considering ordering US troops into Iran to extract nearly 1,000 pounds of stored enriched uranium. Trump has said eliminating the country’s nuclear weapons capability is a key objective of his military campaign against Iran. He has not made a final decision on the troop order.

Iran’s parliament speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, warned that Iranian forces were “waiting for the arrival of American troops on the ground to set them on fire and punish their regional partners forever,” according to state-run IRNA.

Bank of America Epstein Settlement

Bank of America has agreed to pay $72.5 million to hundreds of survivors of Jeffrey Epstein to settle a lawsuit filed last year alleging the bank provided financial services to Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation. The bank did not admit wrongdoing in connection with the settlement. A US district judge will hold a hearing next month to decide whether to approve the settlement.

Epstein, a convicted sex offender and financier, pleaded guilty in 2008 to Florida state charges of procuring a minor for prostitution. He was also federally indicted on sex trafficking charges in July 2019 and pleaded not guilty. He was found dead in a Manhattan federal detention facility in August 2019 while awaiting trial.

This is the third bank settlement tied to Epstein. JPMorgan Chase previously agreed to pay $290 million and Deutsche Bank agreed to pay $75 million to victims.

The lawsuits allege the banks processed millions of dollars in transactions that had hallmarks of sex trafficking — including large, structured cash withdrawals — and that bank employees raised internal concerns that went unaddressed. The suits don’t accuse the banks of directly participating in the trafficking, but rather that they knowingly or negligently enabled it by continuing to service Epstein’s accounts.

DHS Shutdown

The Transportation Security Administration said today it is sending the first paychecks to its officers in over a month, and long lines at airports have begun to ease. Some airports had seen security screening wait times of four to six hours after large numbers of TSA agents quit or called out from work.

After Congress failed to reach a deal to end the Department of Homeland Security shutdown, President Trump last week signed an executive order requiring DHS to redirect funds appropriated for other purposes to pay TSA workers.

No agreement on DHS funding has been reached, and Congress is now in recess.

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I just finished recording the audiobook for We Are Mighty, and I’m so excited for these stories to reach readers in a whole new way. The book tells the true stories of twelve ordinary Americans from our past who saw what needed doing and did it — and getting to read those stories aloud was such an honor.

If there is a child in your life who loves listening, learning, and hearing true stories of courage, hope, and everyday bravery, I’d be so honored for you to share We Are Mighty with them.

Cuba Oil

A Russian oil tanker carrying an estimated 730,000 barrels of crude oil arrived in Cuba on Monday, completing its passage unimpeded by the US Coast Guard despite the American fuel blockade on the island. In January, after the US removed Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro from power, President Trump signed an executive order restricting the flow of oil into the country. Cuba depends on oil for electricity, and relied on Venezuelan oil to keep its power grid functional.

The blockade has contributed to Cuba’s humanitarian and economic crisis. With oil imports sharply curtailed, the government has imposed rolling blackouts and limited public transportation. Hospitals, water systems and food distribution networks have also been disrupted as diesel supplies run low.

When asked about allowing the Russian ship to send oil to Cuba, President Trump told reporters he had “no problem” with any country sending oil, though it was not immediately clear whether his administration has formally reversed the blockade.

Deaths in ICE Custody

At least 13 immigrant detainees have died in ICE custody in the first three months of 2026, bringing the total since President Trump’s reelection to 46.

Emmanuel Damas, 56, had lived in Boston after emigrating from Haiti. Arrested in September 2025 on allegations of assaulting his 12-year-old son, Damas was subsequently transferred to an immigration detention center in Arizona. He died at a hospital in Scottsdale on March 2 while still in ICE custody, making him the thirteenth detainee to die in custody this year. Damas had complained of a toothache before being taken to the hospital.

The Department of Homeland Security called Damas a “criminal illegal alien,” but his brother said Damas arrived in the United States legally under a humanitarian parole program and had a pending petition for Temporary Protected Status, which allows immigrants to live and work in the country temporarily.

“They let him rot in there and die like he had no family,” said Presly Nelson, one of Damas’s brothers.

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As of early February, approximately 70,000 detainees were held in ICE custody, according to TRAC Immigration at Syracuse University. According to the American Immigration Council, an immigrants’ rights organization, the high numbers have produced “horrible overcrowding” and “worsening and substandard medical care.” ICE has said it provides comprehensive medical screening and care and investigates all in-custody deaths.

The 33 deaths in ICE custody recorded in 2025 were the most in a single year since the Department of Homeland Security was established in 2003. By comparison, annual deaths averaged about seven under Biden and eight under President Obama.

The vast majority of deaths this year occurred in ICE’s network of nearly 200 detention facilities; five occurred outside a detention center.

“No Kings” Nationwide

An estimated 8 million people joined more than 3,000 No Kings protests across the country on Saturday, with a marquee event in St. Paul, Minnesota, where Bruce Springsteen performed “Streets of Minneapolis,” a new song he released in January. The song protests the killings of two Minneapolis residents, Renée Good and Alex Pretti, during federal immigration raids.

Protesters told CNN reporters they turned out to call for an end to strict federal immigration enforcement, the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda, the war with Iran, and the rising cost of living. Most demonstrations were peaceful, though arrests and clashes between police and rally-goers were reported in some cities, including Los Angeles — where police said they arrested a total of 75 for mainly disobeying orders to disperse — and Denver, where the police arrested nine, mainly for not moving when asked to do so.

The March 28 events marked the third and largest nationwide “No Kings” mobilization since 2025. The protests were organized by a broad progressive coalition including Indivisible, the 50501 movement, labor unions and civil rights organizations. Demonstrations also took place in Europe, Mexico and Canada.

NASA Moon Mission

NASA is preparing to send astronauts to the moon for the first time in more than 50 years. Weather permitting, the agency said it is targeting liftoff as soon as Wednesday. There will be no landing on the moon.

According to NASA, the mission is to test the safety of the new spacecraft, Orion, which is designed to carry the crew during the 10-day trip around the moon and back. The mission — known as Artemis II — aims to take four astronauts around the moon and back to earth, and will also test life support, communications and navigation with the astronauts on board.

The last crewed moon landing was Apollo 17 in December 1972.

White House App

The White House has launched a smartphone app it says will deliver President Trump and his administration “directly” to the American people. Available in smartphone app stores, the app will have “major announcements, executive actions, and other key priorities;” “live streams of

briefings, speeches…as they happen;” and allow people to “stay connected on the latest policy breakthroughs.”

Security researchers and privacy advocates have raised concerns about the app’s data collection practices. A Mashable report described it as a potential “privacy nightmare,” citing unclear data policies and broad permission requests. According to the report, which cited a post on X, the app requests access to users’ precise location, network connections, fingerprint and biometric data, and the ability to modify or delete contents of shared storage.

A separate user found the app was transmitting exact location data every 4.5 minutes to a third-party server run by OneSignal, a push notification company.

On Christmas Day, 1916, nearly a thousand people filed into Statuary Hall in the United States Capitol to mourn a thirty-year-old woman named Inez Milholland. She had been a suffragist, a lawyer, and one of the most electrifying public speakers of her generation. A month earlier, she had collapsed at a podium in Los Angeles while delivering a speech on behalf of women’s suffrage. Her last public words were a question directed at President Woodrow Wilson: “Mr. President, how long must women wait for liberty?” She died on November 25, 1916.

At her memorial, the suffragist Maud Younger delivered a eulogy that contained a line I have not been able to stop thinking about. “No work for liberty can be lost,” she said. “It lives on in the hearts of the people, in their hopes, their aspirations, their activities. It becomes part of the life of the nation.”

I think about that line because I hear, constantly, from people who believe the opposite. They write to me in my DMs by the thousands. They say it at school board meetings. They whisper it to their spouses after the kids go to bed: I don’t think any of this matters anymore. The system is broken. Nothing I do will make a difference. I understand the impulse. I feel the weight of it myself.

We are living through a period of extraordinary political exhaustion. Trust in virtually every major American institution has fallen to historic lows. We struggle to talk to our own family members about the issues that matter most. Social media has trained us to experience every political development as either a catastrophe or a victory, with nothing in between. Many Americans have responded in the most human way possible: they have decided to stop caring.

I am here to argue that this is precisely the wrong response — and that hope, far from being naive, is the most rational and historically grounded stance available to us.

Let me be clear: I do not mean optimism. Optimism is the vague belief that things will probably work out. Hope is something more rigorous than that. Hope is the recognition that the future has not yet been finalized — and that we get a say in how the story ends. It is a claim about what is still possible, and it is a claim that American history validates again and again.

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The abolitionists of the 1830s spoke against slavery when the institution was expanding and most white Americans considered it permanent. The labor organizers of the early twentieth century fought for the eight-hour workday when factory owners held enormous political power. The civil rights activists of the 1950s sat at lunch counters in a country where much of the population actively opposed their cause. In every one of these moments, the story looked like it was already written. It was not. None of these people acted because they were confident they would win. They acted because they understood that the ending was not yet decided — and they refused to let someone else write it for them.

And here is the part we too often forget: it worked. Not perfectly. Not completely. Not without terrible cost. But the arcs of those movements bent toward the outcomes their participants fought for. The Thirteenth Amendment passed. The Fair Labor Standards Act became law. The Civil Rights Act was signed at a time when most Americans thought the government was pushing integration too fast. The lesson of American history is not that progress is inevitable. It is that progress is possible — but only when enough people decide to act as though it is.

So what does it look like to choose hope in 2026?

It looks like paying attention to the right things. Most of the decisions that directly affect your life — your children’s schools, your roads, your water, your local courts — are made by state legislators and school board officials whose names most Americans cannot recite. Your local government is where your voice actually carries weight. Learn who represents you. Show up to a meeting. It is less dramatic than posting online, and a hundred times more effective.

It looks like talking to people. Research consistently shows that the most powerful antidote to polarization is genuine conversation across lines of difference — not debate, but the simple act of asking someone you disagree with why they believe what they believe, and then actually listening.

And it looks like staying in the game. Vote in every election, including the ones nobody talks about. Support local journalism. Volunteer for something that has nothing to do with a political party. The most meaningful civic work in America has always been done by people who were not famous, not powerful, and not certain they would succeed.

Inez Milholland never had the chance to vote. She died four years before the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified. But Maud Younger was right about her. No work for liberty can be lost. The words Milholland spoke, the crowds she moved — all of it lived on in the women who picked up her banner and carried it forward, who picketed the White House with her final question on their signs: How long must women wait for liberty?

The answer turned out to be four more years of sacrifice, struggle, and hope that must have felt, at times, completely irrational.

That is what hope is. It is not a feeling. It is a practice. It is the decision to do work that makes sense regardless of how it turns out, because no work for liberty — no act of citizenship, no conversation held in good faith, no vote cast in an off-year election — is ever truly lost. The Americans who came before us made that choice again and again, in times far darker than our own. We are not too broken, too divided, or too tired to do the same.

*****

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I don’t remember what I had posted about, but the words are still seared into my brain. I told myself I wasn’t going to let it get to me. I’m a therapist with a public account. I share my ideas with strangers, and some of them aren’t going to like what I have to say. I know this is part of the deal. But that logic never helps.

Within an hour I’d refreshed the comments three times. I was searching for who else might agree and what their points were. By that evening I was scrolling back through my own content, re-reading captions, checking myself. How can I do better? Could I have said it differently? It felt like I was just trying to learn and grow (and sometimes I genuinely was), but mostly I was trying to figure out how to make sure nobody ever called me harmful again, which is not possible on the internet.

For most of my life, people have told me I need thicker skin. I’m too sensitive. I care too much about what other people think of me. I’ve read probably every book on the topic, hoping I could overcome this defect if I just tried hard enough. Spoiler alert, it didn’t help.

Because it’s not just in your head. It’s in your body. Before you can even begin to reason with yourself, your heart rate spikes, your stomach drops, cortisol floods your bloodstream. By the time you’re thinking, “This shouldn’t bother me,” your nervous system has already decided that it does. You can’t think your way out of a reaction your body had before your brain caught up.

For most of human history, other people’s opinions of you determined whether you survived. Social rejection wasn’t embarrassing, it was dangerous. If your tribe cast you out, you were alone against predators, starvation, and everything else that could kill you. The people who cared deeply about what others thought of them were the ones who survived. We are literally the descendants of people who cared.

And yet we treat caring like a character flaw. We hold up people who seem unbothered on pedestals, praise them for being mentally tough, and make fun of people who are “try-hards.” The message is clear: if you’re affected by what people think of you, something went wrong in your wiring.

The real problem isn’t that you care. It’s what you do with that caring. Most of us have been taught to do the worst possible thing with it: suppress it. Stop caring. Don’t take it personally. Tune everyone out. This advice sounds empowering, but it’s asking your brain to shut off a threat detection system that has kept humans alive for thousands of years.

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Psychologist Daniel Wegner studied what happens when people try to suppress a thought: the brain actually monitors for it more closely, which means you end up thinking about it more than if you’d never tried to stop. Try it for yourself. Don’t think about a white bear for the next thirty seconds.

How did it go? My guess is you failed because your brain had to think about the white bear to check whether you were thinking about it. Now replace “white bear” with “what people think of me” and you have the exact cycle most of us are trapped in — scanning every room for evidence of disapproval, replaying conversations, refreshing comments at midnight.

There’s a middle path between suppressing the thought and spiraling into it: notice the reaction without obeying it. Of course certain comments will hurt you. Your body is allowed to respond to that. But what you do next is the difference between, on one hand, spiraling, and, on the other, honoring your feelings and moving on. Not every opinion deserves the same response. There’s a big difference between listening to your partner’s concern and listening to some faceless stranger on the internet with “Live Laugh Love” in their bio. So before you go looking for proof that you should feel worse, close the app. Put the phone in another room. Walk away. Every time you go looking, you’re training your brain to need more reassurance next time.

I don’t think my skin has gotten any thicker over the past few years. I just stopped being mad at myself about it. My sensitivity isn’t broken. It’s my nervous system doing its job. The sting still comes. But now when it does, I pause. I breathe. I let the reaction pass instead of chasing it down a rabbit hole. And then I ask myself: Is this person someone whose opinion I would seek out? Would I even take advice from them? Usually, the answer is no. And that’s enough.

This community is for paid subscribers, and we’d love to have you join us! The goal is to create a safe and welcoming environment for everyone, which means speaking to and treating each other with respect in the comments.

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— The Preamble Editorial Team

Iran

Iran’s state media reported Friday that two of the country’s nuclear facilities, one in the city of Arak and the other in Yazd Province, had been struck. Israel claimed responsibility for the attacks, and Iran quickly threatened to retaliate.

The strikes come as the Pentagon plans to deploy up to 10,000 additional ground troops to the Middle East, a development reported by The Wall Street Journal yesterday. The troops would join roughly 4,500 Marines and about 3,000 paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division already ordered to deploy

Iran continued its own attacks. Several Gulf countries intercepted a barrage of drones and missiles from Iran. Two Kuwaiti ports were struck, and one missile landed in Jordan.

The Strait of Hormuz remains largely closed to shipping traffic. Two Chinese container vessels were turned back today.

TSA Pay

After Congress failed to reach a deal to end the partial government shutdown, President Trump signed an executive order today directing federal officials to pay TSA agents.

During the middle of the night, the Senate passed a bill that would fund DHS, excluding ICE and CBP. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson then refused to bring that bill to the floor for a vote, leaving funding in limbo for two weeks as Congress heads out on its spring break.

President Trump then issued an order saying that funds already appropriated for other things should be redirected for TSA pay, and that when TSA was finally funded, the other pool of money should be repaid. The order did not mention other DHS employees, like the Coast Guard, who are also affected by the six-week partial government shut down.

FBI Hack

Hackers linked to Iran breached FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal email, a Justice Department official said Thursday.

The hacking group, which calls itself Handala Hack Team, posted a sample of the material online, and the Justice Department official said the material appeared authentic. The documents include a mix of personal and work correspondence dating from 2010 to 2019, according to an analysis by Reuters.

Handala describes itself as a pro-Palestinian vigilante hacking group. The Justice Department says it is a “faketivist” persona operated directly by Iran’s ministry of intelligence and security.

Earlier this month, Handala claimed responsibility for a destructive malware attack against Stryker, a Michigan-based medical technology company.

Anthropic Wins

A federal judge on Thursday temporarily blocked the Pentagon from labeling AI company Anthropic a “supply chain risk,” ruling that the designation appeared arbitrary and could “cripple” the California-based company.

“Nothing in the governing statute supports the Orwellian notion that an American company may be branded a potential adversary and saboteur of the U.S. for expressing disagreement with the government,” US District Judge Rita Lin wrote in her ruling.

The Pentagon designated Anthropic a supply chain risk after the company refused to allow its AI model, Claude, to be used to help operate autonomous weapons systems or conduct mass surveillance. After Anthropic went public with its concerns on Feb. 27, President Trump ordered all federal agencies to stop using Anthropic’s products.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth soon followed, directing the department to designate Anthropic a supply chain risk and barring any defense contractor from doing business with the company. Anthropic sued the Pentagon in response.

Judge Lin blocked all three actions — Trump’s order, Hegseth’s order, and the formal supply chain designation — because they were retaliatory.

Anthropic is the first American company to receive the supply chain risk designation, which has typically been applied to foreign firms.

Judge Lin’s order takes effect in one week. It does not require the Pentagon to use Anthropic’s products.

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A Flower Traveled in My Blood tells the story of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, the Argentine grandmothers who fought to find the babies stolen by the military dictatorship during the country’s brutal “Dirty War.” After pregnant women were kidnapped, forced to give birth in captivity, and then disappeared, their children were secretly placed with other families, often tied to the regime itself. Through courage, persistence, and groundbreaking genetic research, the grandmothers challenged a terrorized nation and built one of the most extraordinary human rights movements in modern history.

Trump Signature

The Treasury Department announced yesterday that President Trump’s signature will appear on all new US paper money. The department described the move as part of the commemoration of the country’s 250th anniversary.

It would be the first time a sitting president’s signature has appeared on US currency. Since paper currency was first printed in 1861, bills have carried the signatures of the Treasury secretary and the US treasurer — not the president. Under the new arrangement, Trump’s signature will appear alongside that of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. The signature of US Treasurer Brandon Beach will not appear on the new bills.

Medical Schools Under Probe

The Justice Department has opened investigations into the admissions policies of three medical schools over possible unlawful consideration of race in admissions. Such consideration would run contrary to the US Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which sharply limited the use of race in college admissions.

Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon sent letters to Stanford University, the University of California San Diego, and Ohio State University outlining the investigations. Dhillon confirmed the investigations in a post on X on Wednesday, publishing a photo of herself signing the letters.

The schools have been ordered to provide “extensive lists of data” by April 24 or “risk interruptions to essential federal funding.”

Trump has also threatened to withhold federal funding from universities over other issues, including diversity initiatives, climate programs, transgender policies, and pro-Palestinian protests against Israel’s military campaign in Gaza after Hamas attacked Israel in October 2023.

Florida Democrat

The House Ethics Committee on Friday found Democratic Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick of Florida in violation of several campaign finance laws and regulations. The committee announced the finding after a public hearing on Thursday — a departure from the panel’s standard practice of meeting behind closed doors.

Cherfilus-McCormick, a three-term congresswoman, was indicted in November on federal charges of allegedly stealing $5 million in FEMA disaster relief funds for her campaign. She has pleaded not guilty.

The ethics panel said it would wait until after Congress’s April recess to recommend disciplinary action, which could include expulsion from the House. At least one Democrat publicly called on her to resign.

“You can’t crime your way into legitimate power,” Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-WA) posted on X. “She should resign or be removed.”

There is precedent for expelling a member before a criminal conviction. In 2023, the House voted to expel Rep. George Santos (R-NY) before the conclusion of his federal criminal case.

Insider Trading

California Gov. Gavin Newsom said Thursday he would sign an executive order banning appointed state officials with access to non-public information from trading on prediction markets — online platforms where users can bet money on almost any outcome, such as whether a sports team will win a game, whether a legislature will pass a law, or whether a war will break out somewhere by a given date.

The order follows concerns over suspiciously well-timed trades of stocks and oil contracts ahead of several of President Trump’s major announcements.

Lawmakers from both parties have called for greater regulatory scrutiny of prediction markets. On Monday, a bipartisan pair of senators — Adam Schiff, a Democrat from California, and John Curtis, a Republican from Utah — introduced the Prediction Markets Are Gambling Act. It would make prediction markets subject to gambling laws rather than treating them as a form of financial trading.

Two major prediction market platforms announced new restrictions earlier this week.

Kalshi said it would ban political candidates from trading on their own campaigns and block anyone involved in college or professional sports from trading contracts related to their sport.

Polymarket said users cannot trade on contracts if they might possess confidential information or could influence the outcome — a restriction that could apply to athletes, company officials, and policymakers.