On the Wednesday of the last week of July, a former Florida State University employee approached a man wearing an Israeli Defense Force (IDF) shirt on campus and began berating him for his support of a state she believed was committing genocide. By the next day, she was arrested, on the basis of the person wearing the IDF t-shirt alleging (with video support) that she gave him “maybe just a push” on the shoulder and also alleging (without any support) that she “definitely just hate-crimed” him. The attorney general of the United States, Pam Bondi, who directs the Department of Justice, had...

Empires, unlike revolutions, don’t have heralds; they work off quiet aggrandizements of power, not bold declarations of freedom. But America’s imperial class appears to have a member who’s missed that memo: the Zionist hedge fund manager William Ackman, a self-selected Patrick Henry of an elite that cannot want one. For the last few years, as his allies have quietly worked to curtail popular politics, Ackman has become a reliable articulator at any given moment of just what game they are actually playing. In 2023 and 2024, as his allies subtly tried to float alternatives to conservative...

In the past decade of political upheaval, less than a handful of successful candidates have laid down direct challenges to America’s military-industrial complex. Thomas Massie, the U.S. Congressman from Kentucky’s 4th District, is first and foremost among them. In June, President Donald Trump announced an open season on Massie, for the perceived crimes of having voted against the deficit-busting “Big Beautiful Bill” and opposing Trump’s strikes on Iran because they occurred without authorization from Congress. “Open season” in this case meant the formation of a MAGA Pac run by Trump’s former...

“War,” Randolph Bourne wrote, is “the health of the state.” But war is also, it has recently and quietly become clear, the cheapest and quickest antidote when the state gets sick. This antidote, in fact, represents the most significant part of President Donald Trump’s agenda since he assumed office on January 20, after running what many supporters believed was an antiwar campaign. Instead he has presided over an infusion of war spending to stabilize America with trickle-down job creation at home and resource extraction abroad. This strategy represents the ratcheting up of what American...