There is, after all, a pervasive worry, among the political class, that college students, ensconced in their own bubbles, could use a bit of shock therapy from a man unconcerned with preferred pronouns, trigger warnings, and the humanity of Palestinians. But it also shows how the political class’s obsession with universities blinds it to everything else. And the everything-else of Kirk’s politics amounted to little more than a loathing of those whose mere existence provoked his ire.

Faced with the prospect of a Kamala Harris presidency, Kirk told his audience that the threat had to be averted because Harris wanted to “kidnap your child via the trans agenda.” Garden-variety transphobia is sadly unremarkable. But Kirk was a master of folding seemingly discordant bigotries into each other, as when he defined “the American way of life” as marriage, home ownership, and child-rearing free of “the lesbian, gay, transgender garbage in their school,” adding that he did not want kids to “have to hear the Muslim call to prayer five times a day.” The American way of life was “Christendom,” Kirk claimed, and Islam—“the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America”—was antithetical to that.

Kirk habitually railed against “Black crime,” claiming that “prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people.” He repeated the rape accusations against Yusef Salaam, a member of the exonerated Central Park Five who is now a New York City councilman, calling him a “disgusting pig” who had gotten away with “gang rape.” Whatever distaste Kirk held for Blacks was multiplied when he turned to those from Haiti. Haiti was, by Kirk’s lights, a country “infested with demonic voodoo,” whose migrants were “raping your women and hunting you down at night.” These Haitians, as well as undocumented immigrants from other countries, were “having a field day,” per Kirk, and “coming for your daughter next.”

There was an “anti-white agenda,” Kirk howled. One that sought to “make the country more like the Third World.” The southern border was “the dumping ground of the planet,” he claimed, and a magnet for “the rapists, the thugs, the murderers, fighting-age males.” “They’re coming from across the world, from China, from Russia, from Middle Eastern countries,” he said, “and they’re coming in and they’re coming in and they’re coming in and they’re coming in…”

Kirk’s bigotry was not personal, but extended to the institution he founded, Turning Point USA. Crystal Clanton, the group’s former national field director, once texted a fellow Turning Point employee, “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE. Like fuck them all … I hate blacks. End of story.” One of the group’s advisers, Rip McIntosh, once published a newsletter featuring an essay from a pseudonymous writer that said Blacks had “become socially incompatible with other races” and that Black culture was an “un-fixable and crime-ridden mess.” In 2022, after three Black football players were killed at another college, Meg Miller, president of Turning Point’s chapter at the University of Missouri, joked (“joked”) in a social media message, “If they would have killed 4 more n-ggers we would have had the whole week off.”

The tragedy is personal—Kirk was robbed of his life, and his children and family will forever live with the knowledge that a visual record of that robbery is just an internet search away. And the tragedy is national. Political violence ends conversation and invites war; its rejection is paramount to a functioning democracy and a free society. “Political violence is a virus,” Klein noted. This assertion is true. It is also at odds with Kirk’s own words. It’s not that Kirk merely, as Klein put it, “defended the Second Amendment”—it’s that Kirk endorsed hurting people to advance his preferred policy outcomes.

What are we to make of a man who called for the execution of the American president, and then was executed himself? What are we to make of an NFL that, on one hand, encourages us to “End Racism,” and, on the other, urges us to commemorate an unreconstructed white supremacist? And what of the writers, the thinkers, and the pundits who cannot separate the great crime of Kirk’s death from the malignancy of his public life? Can they truly be so ignorant to the words of a man they have so rushed to memorialize? I don’t know. But the most telling detail in Klein’s column was that, for all his praise, there was not a single word in the piece from Kirk himself.

More than a century and a half ago, this country ignored the explicit words of men who sought to raise an empire of slavery. It subsequently transformed those men into gallant knights who sought only to preserve their beloved Camelot. There was a fatigue, in certain quarters, with Reconstruction—which is to say, multiracial democracy—and a desire for reunion, to make America great again. Thus, in the late 19th century and much of the 20th, this country’s most storied intellectuals transfigured hate-mongers into heroes and ignored their words—just as, right now, some are ignoring Kirk’s.

The rewriting and the ignoring were done not just by Confederates, but also by putative allies for whom the reduction of Black people to serfdom was the unfortunate price of white unity. The import of this history has never been clearer than in this moment when the hard question must be asked: If you would look away from the words of Charlie Kirk, from what else would you look away?

We are being ravaged by diseases of despair. We don’t eat well. Our sedentary lifestyles are bad for physical and mental health. But we don’t talk nearly enough about the successes of public health and the advancements of science, which have largely been pushed by agencies, doctors, and research Kennedy and the Trump administration are now attacking. Our food, though more processed, is less contaminated thanks to FDA regulation. Infant mortality has plummeted. Cancer deaths have dropped 34% since 1991. Death rates from childhood leukemia are down six-fold since 1950. Vaccines for measles, polio, hepatitis B, and HPV have saved millions of lives. Smallpox was eliminated. Measles cases are down 99% (despite some recent outbreaks). U.S. life expectancy rose in the 20th century by over 30 years. Cardiovascular disease mortality has fallen about 75% from the 1950s. Even the maternal mortality rates in the U.S. may have been overstated, and new studies show our numbers are much more in line with other developed nations. HIV and AIDS deaths are down 54% since 2010 alone. Overdose deaths fell in 2024 by a whopping 27%. The list goes on and on and on. In short: We’re doing a lot of things right, and doing them in large part because of these agencies, scientific research, new drugs, new vaccines, and new treatment protocols. Quite obviously, these achievements are not enough to warrant burning the entire system down.

Mass shootings have an impact on the psyche of our society writ large that a lot of other gun violence does not. They are, in simple terms, effective acts of terrorism. They terrorize. When you report on these shootings, something quickly becomes very obvious: They don't just irreparably damage the lives of the victims, their families, and their friends; they also traumatize witnesses, responding law enforcement officers, doctors, nurses treating the injured, and the community as a whole. And that trauma spreads outward like a wave.

conservative columnist Noam Blum, who said pointedly and concisely something I believe with all my heart: “Nothing is monocausal. There are just parts of our society that are unfathomably broken and they occasionally intersect in unspeakably awful and evil ways.”

Now, I hate the expression “conspiracy theory” and have been advocating against its casual use for a couple years now. I especially object to how commonly people use the term to slander popular beliefs that contradict institutional statements but are highly credible; we’ve learned that many “conspiracy theories” have ended up being true. But today, I’m going to use the expression to refer to things I’d define like this: a belief or set of beliefs which connect unrelated observations together based on a set of fundamentally false assumptions.

As the internet has proliferated unsubstantiated assumptions, conspiracies have become more abundant. The internet has also incentivized politicians, political influencers, media outlets, and pundits to constantly battle for attention. Attention means influence, which translates to votes, fundraising clicks, subscriptions and money, depending on what you are looking for. And easy ways to get attention include: stoking conspiracies, evoking fear, and providing shock value.

Republican conspiracy theories are at the center of conservative discourse and messaging. Conspiracy theorists on the left, in contrast, are usually marginalized

Rural Americans may be more susceptible to MAGA than most people, but I doubt it. College graduates are supposedly inoculated, but it is an arbitrary assumption. I know lots of PhD holders who are born MAGAs and many others who would don the red hat tomorrow morning in response to some perceived slight. There are people who have repudiated their own principles in order to become “Honorary Patriots”; there are lifelong Democrats who have enthusiastically entered Trump’s orbit. MAGA has nothing inherently to do with geography, education, or even stated political beliefs. It appeals to a certain type of mind.

It is also, to an immense extent, the disease of a generation—the generation that grew up online, that learned to mistake engagement for truth, that confused being heard with being right. This is as true of suburban millennials as it is of rural boomers. It is the disease of the algorithmically poisoned.

The Contrarian Intellectual His Substack has 10,000 subscribers and a name like “Uncomfortable Truths” or “Against the Grain.” He has an advanced degree and a career in academia or journalism. He positions himself as a truth-teller willing to say what others won’t.

He’s built his brand on being the reasonable liberal who’s willing to criticize his own side. But his criticism only flows in one direction. He’s endlessly concerned about cancel culture but never mentions voter suppression. He worries about campus speech codes but not about book bans. He’s created a career out of giving conservatives permission to feel intellectual about their prejudices.

The Wellness Influencer Her Instagram is a masterpiece of soft-focus selfies and inspirational quotes. She sells courses on “authentic living” and posts about the importance of “doing your own research.” She’s got 50K followers who hang on her every word about manifestation, healing crystals, and toxic relationships. She already went MAGA during the pandemic, though she’d never admit it. It started with “questioning the narrative” about vaccines and evolved into sharing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. content and ranting about “globalist elites.” She doesn’t post Trump content directly—that would hurt her brand—but she’s constantly sharing adjacent conspiracy theories about child trafficking, fluoride in water, and the “plandemic.”

The Venture Capitalist His Twitter is a constant stream of complaints about “woke employees” destroying productivity and liberal professors poisoning young minds. He’s worth $500 million because of a few home run investments that he lucked into thanks to his Stanford network, but talks like he’s the victim of a vast conspiracy. His feed alternates between humble-brags about his latest investment and rants about how universities are churning out unemployable graduates who expect “participation trophies.” He’s already MAGA, though he’d never admit it publicly—bad for fundraising. He privately complains that diversity hiring is destroying meritocracy while his portfolio companies are run entirely by Stanford MBAs who look exactly like him. He thinks workers asking for fair wages are “entitled” and students protesting genocide are “indoctrinated.”

The Legacy Media Reporter His bio says “Covering politics for [Major News Outlet]” and he takes pride in his “objectivity.” He writes careful both-sides pieces about every issue and treats Trump’s fascist rhetoric as just another political strategy worth analyzing. He’s not quite MAGA yet, but he’s already doing their work for them. He frames voter suppression as “election integrity measures” and describes anti-trans legislation as “parental rights bills.” He gives equal weight to climate scientists and oil industry propagandists because “balance” is more important than truth

The Business Owner She runs a small business—maybe a restaurant, maybe a retail store. She posts about “entrepreneurship” and “the American dream.” She works seventy hours a week and takes pride in “building something from nothing.” She’s prime MAGA material because she’s been trained to see her success as purely individual and her struggles as evidence of government overreach. When COVID restrictions hurt her business, she blamed “bureaucrats” rather than the virus. When she can’t find workers, she blames unemployment benefits rather than wages. Her MAGA turn will be complete when she decides that her business problems are caused by taxes, regulations, and lazy workers rather than market forces and systemic issues. She’ll vote for anyone who promises to “get government out of the way” and let “job creators” like her prosper.

The Normie He doesn’t post about politics much. His feed is mostly sports, vacation photos, and memes. He seems reasonable, moderate, unengaged with the culture wars. He’s the kind of person who says “I don’t really follow politics” and means it. But he’s susceptible to MAGA because he’s politically lazy. He gets his information from headlines and assumes that “both sides” are equally bad. He’s annoyed by political discussions and just wants everyone to “get along.” His MAGA evolution will happen gradually, through exposure to right-wing content disguised as non-political entertainment. He’ll start sharing “funny” memes that happen to have political undertones. He’ll begin to believe that liberals are “too sensitive” and conservatives are “more reasonable.”

The Ones Who Won’t Take the small-town Republican from Ohio who should be MAGA by every demographic marker—pickup truck, church every Sunday, straight GOP for twenty years. But her childhood best friend came out as trans, and suddenly the culture war had a face she loved. Now she’s at city council meetings defending the very people she once thoughtlessly condemned.

They don’t need enemies to blame for their problems. They don’t need simple answers to complicated questions. They’re the teacher who posts about her students’ achievements without making it about herself. They’re the small business owner who pays his workers well because he knows it’s right and actually better for business, not because he has to. They’re the veteran who talks about service without wrapping it in nationalism. They’re the parent who worries about their kids without blaming teachers for everything.

MAGA appeals to people who need to feel special, who need enemies to blame, who need simple answers to complex problems. It attracts those who mistake confidence for competence, who confuse being loud with being right, who think that admitting uncertainty is weakness. It’s not about education or geography or even politics. It’s about character. It’s about whether you can tolerate complexity, whether you can admit mistakes, whether you can see other people as fully human. The scary thing about MAGA isn’t that it’s obviously evil—it’s that it’s appealing to people who think they’re good. It offers them a way to feel righteous about their resentments, patriotic about their prejudices, and principled about their selfishness.

Trump is trying something blatantly unconstitutional that I’m confident the Supreme Court will not allow, though it is allowing this administration to use a little court gamesmanship to fight the fights they can win. Basically, the administration is not asking whether they overstepped the line but whether the courts are using the right tools to pull them back. I understand why this is happening, but it doesn’t make it any less frustrating (or alarming) that it's working.

The majority found a reasonable answer, which seems to limit universal injunctions without stopping them altogether. In the immediate term, the majority opinion left open the possibility that federal judges can issue universal injunctions when their absence would create what Justice Brett Kavanaugh called “an unworkable or intolerable patchwork” across states (such as, conveniently, with birthright citizenship)

The court further clarified that it still sees other kinds of challenges, like class-action lawsuits, as appropriate ways to trigger universal injunctions in the future. These lawsuits have more procedural hurdles to clear, but they’re still quite common, and until the 21st century were the most common way to trigger the kind of universal injunction we are discussing now.

Kavanaugh said that the Supreme Court could pick up some of the authority it limited to district courts by hearing more direct appeals for universal injunctions itself. Specifically, Kavanaugh said that when the Supreme Court is asked to intervene, it “should not and cannot hide in the tall grass,” but must “grant or deny” relief as a form of nationwide guidance until the issue is resolved

The Supreme Court did not say federal courts can’t issue these injunctions, it said “universal injunctions likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has given to federal courts.” In other words, courts likely don't have this power, which is granted by Congress.

The court has narrowed, but not stripped, the power of U.S. district courts to issue universal injunctions. It has not unleashed presidential lawlessness, and in the future, its decision will benefit a lot of the people who are screaming from the rooftops now about unchecked executive power.

Of all the words I just wrote to describe Mamdani, the most important one is this: authentic. I have spilled a lot of ink criticizing progressives for their bad ideas, purity politics, intolerance, and groupthink. Mamdani is unabashedly progressive, but he somehow avoids seeming preachy — he is not insufferably condescending, he doesn’t lecture about language use, and he doesn’t practice purity politics. He focused entirely on persuasion — pitching people outside the progressive base that he’s right about kitchen-table issues, and the old Democratic guard is wrong. In short: He’s a great politician.

He’s already abandoned one of his more controversial positions, promising to “work with the police” to reduce their burden by hiring more cops as well as more social workers rather than “defunding the police.”

"The world is deceived by the situation in the Gaza Strip," says Moumen al-Natour, a Gaza lawyer and former organiser of the 2019 anti-Hamas "We Want to Live" movement. Al-Natour spoke to us from the shattered remains of his city, the flimsy canvas side of the tent which now forms part of his house billowing behind him. "The world thinks that Gaza is Hamas and Hamas is Gaza," he said. "We didn't choose Hamas and now Hamas is determined to rule Gaza and tie our fate to its own. Hamas must retreat. "

With little to lose and hopes of an end to the war dashed once more, some Gazans direct their fury equally at Israel and Hamas. Asked which side he blamed most for Gaza's catastrophe, Amin Abed said it was "a choice between cholera and the plague".

Former and current staffers paint a picture of an erratic senator who has become almost impossible to work for and whose mental-health situation is more serious and complicated than previously reported. No one is saying every controversial position (for example, his respectful relationship with Trump) stems from his mental health — but it’s become harder for them to tell which ones do. When I spoke with Fetterman in April and shared those concerns, he denied anything was amiss. He told me that he felt like the “best version” of himself and later texted that the staff turnover at his office was typical of Washington. “Why is this a story?” he asked.

Those first days in the hospital were rough. Fetterman was experiencing delusions. He thought that if he took a bed at the hospital, he would be arrested. He told doctors that he believed members of his family were wearing wires to secretly record him. In one chaotic moment, Fetterman grew convinced that a political rally was being held in the hospital’s lobby and that he needed to break out of his room to attend. David Williamson, Fetterman’s doctor, told me that the main causes of the delusions were the lingering effects of the stroke, dehydration, and depression and that the original medication for the depression could also have been a factor. According to paperwork from Walter Reed, doctors then stopped all antidepressants and put him on other drugs. (Williamson declined to comment on the specifics of the medication plan.)

After six weeks in the hospital, the doctors determined his mental-health issues were in remission. Williamson said, “He expressed a firm commitment to treatment over the long term.” Doctors provided Fetterman with a multi-faceted treatment approach. He needed to stay on his medication and to get his blood checked regularly. It was also important that he stay hydrated, so staff made sure his office fridge remained stocked with Gatorade. He needed to eat healthy and get regular exercise (this was both for his mental health and for the underlying heart problems that had led to his stroke). It was also strongly suggested that he stay off social media, which exacerbated his mental-health challenges. “I’ve never noticed anyone to believe that their mental health has been supported by spending any kind of time on social media,” he said in 2023.

it wasn’t until October 7 that it became clear Fetterman was the most outspoken Israel hawk in his party, offering constant and unconditional support for the military action in Gaza. Early on in the conflict, 16 of his former campaign staffers wrote a letter — anonymously — saying they found his full-throated support for Israel to be a “gutting betrayal.” Jentleson had taken to defending Fetterman on X from such criticisms, posting, “The thing about being a staffer is that no one elected you to represent them.”

In early November, just weeks after the attack, Gisele arrived at her husband’s Senate office and, according to a staffer present, they got into a heated argument. “They are bombing refugee camps. How can you support this?” the staffer recalled her saying with tears in her eyes. “That’s all propaganda,” Fetterman replied. Later, a still visibly upset Gisele pulled the staffer aside. She asked him if members of Fetterman’s team were pushing him to take these stances for political reasons. The staffer told her that the opposite was true: Many of them were as upset as she was. “If you’re pushing back on this, there’s no hope,” the staffer recalled her saying. “This is horrible news.”

Gisele might have disliked what her husband was up to, but his father loved it. Karl Fetterman, an insurance executive, was way more conservative than his son. He used to have a magnet on his refrigerator that warned that his dog bites Democrats, and he watched Fox News constantly. When Fox would air segments about Fetterman’s strong stances on Israel or invite him on as a guest, the senator’s father would, according to former staff, almost always call to say how proud he was.

Gisele then texted that she had told her husband that his staff and doctor were worried about him but that he told her “that’s not true and I guess I am not talking to you today” before hanging up. The doctor had also “said that he was fighting to get access of the Twitter account,” she went on. “Please promise me that he’ll never have access.” The staffer said that Fetterman was asking for the passwords but that he would not give them up. “I told him I don’t want to talk to him until his blood is tested,” Gisele wrote.

There was also the possibility that Fetterman’s illness had drawn out or intensified his existing predilections. In some ways, Fetterman was being the guy voters sent to Congress. He keeps to himself? He cancels fundraising events last minute? He thinks a lot of his colleagues are morons? Make him president already! He was never a particularly easy person to work with — he’d had that reputation throughout his entire political career. So sometimes the staff would debate whether a fundamental change had occurred or they were just imagining things, particularly since there were stretches of time when he was lucid and together. “It got hard to know which way was up,” Jentleson told me. “Was he acting crazy, or were we overreacting? I asked myself that a lot.”

Years after the stroke, Fetterman continues to struggle with auditory processing. To chat with me, he had put an iPhone on the table that transcribed my questions to him in real time. Sometimes Fetterman wouldn’t finish reading a question before answering, and other times his sentences could come out a bit garbled. After a podcast taping earlier this year with The Bulwark, the interviewer Tim Miller came away feeling like Fetterman might not be all there. “He’s struggling,” Miller said in a separate podcast taping. “He’s, like, really struggling. And I just think coming off of the Biden thing, we should not be hiding the ball on this sort of stuff.”

But in my conversation with Fetterman, I didn’t find any indication that the stroke had left him cognitively impaired. Our interview lasted just over an hour, during the first half of which he seemed excited to discuss just about anything I threw at him. He had problems with the way Democrats had estranged themselves from the public, he said, but still had no intention of leaving the party to become a Republican or even an independent: “Same chance I’m going to end up with a beautiful head of hair.”

He said that no one in his staff would know about his personal health situation and that anyone who told me otherwise was simply misinformed. “There’s not really anything to respond when that’s just not accurate,” he said. “What they say,” I pressed on, “is that they’ve witnessed ups and downs that could be associated with kind of a relapse. And they also worry that the medication that you’re on is not just for depression, but more serious drugs that if you’re not on them would be a problem. Is there truth to that?” “I don’t have any comment on that,” he said. “I’m going to go off record. Go off record. Go off record.” I cannot report what Fetterman said over the course of the next four minutes, but I can say that after he was done talking, I found myself in the hallway outside his office making awkward small talk with one of his press aides. Five minutes later, the door opened and I was ushered back in. The office felt different now. Quiet and tense. Fetterman was still in the same chair but slumped into himself, like a deflated parade float. His shoes were now on, and he avoided looking at me. Finally, I broke the silence. “Anything to say about that?” I asked, hoping to pick up our conversation where we had left off.

The proper objective for a nation, as Adam Smith put it, is to arrange things so we get as large a volume of imports as possible for as small a volume of exports as possible.” By this logic, anything that slows the flow of imports, or raises their cost, would indeed be a self-inflicted wound. If the Chinese Communist Party wants to block the sale of U.S. electric vehicles in China, let it. We should still want as many cheap Chinese EVs as possible flooding into our market.

Even Friedman’s claim that “the proper objective for a nation, as Adam Smith put it, is to arrange things so we get as large a volume of imports as possible for as small a volume of exports as possible,” runs directly counter to what Smith actually wrote, which was: “If a foreign country can supply us with a commodity cheaper than we ourselves can make it, better buy it of them with some part of the produce of our own industry.”

With some part of the produce of our own country. A vital assumption of the classical model was that trade would be balanced—something made here for something made there

self-improvement can turn into hyper-individualism very quickly, which is also another incredibly American attitude in general

right-wing commentary is like a warm blanket that you can surround yourself with that says: “You’re right to be angry and you should be angry at vulnerable populations. You should be angry at people who have no power over you. And then if you dominate them a little bit, then that gives you a little bit of power, right?”

there’s definitely a lot of interest amongst the American working class to to change things. Some people have associated that change with Donald Trump. I find that kind of change to be worse because I think Donald Trump is further breaking the system that was broken previously prior to this.

That’s the attitude that many Americans have. They’re just like, “Yeah, everything is messed up. At least this guy wants to break the system. And I don’t really like the system anyway. I don’t like the institutions anyway. They, what have they done for me? So let’s test this out.”

A UN commission investigating crimes against humanity in Yugoslavia defined ethnic cleansing as “rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area.” That’s an accurate description of what Trump wants to do in Gaza. What else would we call it? And where are they going to go? Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and even the West Bank all reject this plan. One of Gaza’s defining characteristics is that over 80% of its inhabitants are descendants of people displaced following the 1948 war; that history is part of what makes Gazans so committed to staying in place — but Trump wants to run it back.

the route of peacemaking he’s pursuing is making one of two sides just go away. That’s not peacemaking; it’s domination. And it’s a means of diplomacy that tends to create the preconditions for future conflicts.

The same president who criticized nation-building in Afghanistan and wanted to avoid conflict in Ukraine now wants to “take over” Gazan reconstruction.

Trump tends to push interpretations of his statements towards the poles of either optimistically brushing him off or paranoia, depending on the person or the topic. For me, on this topic, it creates paranoia. What exactly does Trump mean by “we’re going to take it over?”

Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt says Trump wants to remove Gazans from the strip temporarily, but Trump also literally said he wants to permanently relocate them and then rebuild Gaza “for the world’s people”

Trump consistently phrased his descriptions of Gaza to avoid apportioning any amount of responsibility to Israel. Gaza is a “demolition site,” but demolished by whom? “Gaza is a guarantee that they’re going to end up dying,” meaning the location itself is hostile to Palestinians? Gazans have suffered “bad luck,” meaning that bad things have just happened to occur to them?

Since January, Israel has repeatedly violated the terms of the ceasefire; it refused to withdraw its soldiers, it continued military operations (150 Palestinians were reportedly killed in Gaza during the “ceasefire”), and it blocked electricity and humanitarian aid from entering Gaza — a violation of international humanitarian law.

this week, he became the first Israeli leader to ever fire the head of Shin Bet, an intelligence agency in Israel that recently put blame on the Israeli government (and Netanyahu) for failing to act on warnings about the October 7 attack. With Netanyahu’s governing position secured and critical voices banished, the bombing started again in earnest.

while Hamas may be responsible for the horror it unleashed on Gaza with its October 7 attacks, I find it hard to dispute that — within the scope of the last two months — the primary fault for this deal collapsing lies with Israel.

The talking point from Netanyahu and Trump is simple: Hamas didn’t release the remaining hostages. But it’s also incomplete. Hamas did the most important thing it had committed to in phase one: It released all 33 hostages, as the deal called for, and came to the table to negotiate phase two.   Israel violated the agreement’s terms first by not meeting on the ceasefire’s 16th day to discuss the plans for phase two. Phase two was always going to be the sticking point, because it required an actual end to the war and Israel leaving Gaza.

Trump then began insisting on an extension of phase one, which was not in the text of the agreement. Then Israel broke the commitment to withdraw from the Philadelphi corridor. Then Israel broke its promise to continue aid while second stage talks were ongoing. Then Israel broke the promise to actually cease firing. Israel did all of this before Hamas balked on additional hostage releases.

Netanyahu has abandoned the hostages to extend his political life. From the early days of the war, this has been the story; it’s why he refused to end the war earlier, and it’s how he has survived this year and a half despite his political obituary being written on October 8. Once again, it is politically advantageous for him for the war to continue. Netanyahu needs approval for a budget before March 31, which he can’t get without support from the far-right wing of his party, which wants him to do exactly what he’s doing now.

Gazans have no ability to restrain or resist Hamas, a group that cares more about killing Israelis or pretending it may have a way to win this war than it does about protecting its own people. Israelis are at the whims of a leader who consistently ignores their pleas for a ceasefire, caring only about his own political survival.

we have the leaders of Hamas holding on to all they have, which are literal human bargaining chips, and the Israeli prime minister openly defying the desires of the hostages’ families. Meanwhile, the U.S. president openly muses about permanently vacating Palestinians from Gaza

The key to his tactics is part delivery, part content. He relays his messages in stunty, shareable packages, but the substance of that message draws on an older tactic from the Bernie Sanders playbook: Pick a handful of straightforward economic proposals that would impact the daily lives of regular people and repeat, repeat, repeat.

It includes copious doorknocking but also two highly-produced videos a month, supplemented by shorter, deadpan, often direct-to-camera bits. In almost all of them, policy is colored with a secondary secret weapon: “Humor is a very effective method of communication,” he says. Hence the bouncy pitch for a city-owned grocery store in each borough as a “public option for produce” and the viral video from the ice-cold waves of Coney Island. Some of the snappy Trump voter interviews even have an affable sense of humor about them.

That mission is resonating early in the NYC mayoral contest, with Mamdani climbing the polls despite his youth and lack of managerial experience. “Zohran is one of the few serious communicators the socialist and progressive left has now in America,” said Ross Barkan, a political writer and former political candidate who once employed Mamdani as his campaign manager. “I think a lot of the left lost the plot,” Barkan said, in terms of “emphasizing cultural issues at the expense of economic issues. I think Zohran has been very smart to run a cost of living campaign.”

As upbeat music swirls, Mamdani fast-talks about his universal childcare, rent freeze and grocery store ideas. In a burst of outer borough realism, the spot ends with the elders devolving into argument again about early morning construction noise, as Mamdani slips quietly away from the table.

That’s the kind of modern face-time exposure that digitally-literate lawmakers like California Rep. Sara Jacobs, with her “get ready with me” videos, are eager to pursue. And it makes them stand out in a Democratic Party that’s still mostly more comfortable debating white papers or talking to legacy media. “If you go to consultants, what they will prescribe you is that which may have worked 10 or 20 years ago,” Mamdani says. “So much of what is driving our campaign is a desire to go beyond simply the political context of New York City into the cultural context, the civic context, the city itself.”