64 h. ago The US government is effectively kidnapping people for opposing genocide | Moira Donegan

Rumeysa Ozturk, a visa holder, was snatched off the streets by Ice agents and sent to a detention center 1,000 miles away for opposing war crimes in GazaThe abductors wore masks because they do not want their identities known. On Tuesday evening, Rumeysa Ozturk exited her apartment building and walked on to the street in Somerville, Massachusetts – a city outside Boston – into the fading daylight. Ozturk, a Turkish-born PhD student at Tufts University who studies children’s media and childhood development, was on her way to an iftar dinner with friends, planning to break her Ramadan fast.In a video taken from a surveillance camera, she wears a pink hijab and a long white puffer coat against the New England cold. The first man, not uniformed but wearing plain clothes, as all the agents are, approaches her as if asking for directions. But he quickly closes in and grabs her by the wrists she has raised defensively toward her face. Continue reading...

Politics

4 d. ago What the accidentally leaked war group chat reveals about the Trump administration | Moira Donegan

Thanks to the Signal leaks, we can see how the administration acts when they think they are in private. It’s not a pretty sightPerhaps one of the greatest lessons of the Donald Trump era, for me, has been in learning the difference between being shocked and being surprised. And indeed it was a bit shocking to learn, via an essay published by the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, that a high-profile journalist had been included on a chat on the commercial messaging app in which a military strike on the Houthi rebels in Yemen was coordinated – including discussions of the timing of the attack, debates about political messaging, personnel coordination and weapons to be used – seemingly without anyone noticing that he was there.It was shocking that their incompetence was so fortuitous – that the person they included, seemingly accidentally, in their unsecured group chat about war plans was someone so uniquely equipped to broadcast their idiocy to a large audience. But it was ...

Politics

9 d. ago Politics have changed but the Democrats haven’t – they are old and out of touch | Moira Donegan

Leading Democrats vainly hope for a return to the politics of the past – they must engage with the realities of the presentIs this the way the Democratic party ends – not with a bang, but with a whimper? Last week, the party’s Senate caucus seemed poised to do something that they had never done before: block the Trump administration’s proposed continuing resolution, and shut down the government. It would have been a largely symbolic move, one that signaled opposition to the Trump administration’s usurpation of Congress’s spending authority and a willingness to play procedural hardball in order to slow Elon Musk’s radical anti-government agenda. It would have signaled, too, a party willing to take itself seriously as the opposition to a president with authoritarian ambitions.Government shutdowns are unpopular, but so, right now, is the Democratic party: several senators from swing states seemed ready to stick their necks out, ready to bet that it would be better to be seen doing some...

Politics

3 w. ago Andrew Tate is back in the US – and a model of Trump’s worldview | Moira Donegan

As the anti-woman influencer sees it, domination is its own end. Is it any surprise he’s a supporter of the president?Andrew Tate is now a free man.The rightwing anti-woman influencer landed in Florida last week after being held detained for over two years in Romania on rape, sex trafficking and money laundering charges. The Romanian courts abruptly reversed their previous refusal to allow Tate to leave the country after several high-level Trump administration officials took an interest in his case – including Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr, who called Tate’s arrest in Romania “absolute insanity”. The Romanian foreign minister, Emil Hurezeanu, was reportedly approached by a Trump envoy about Tate’s case at a security conference in Munich in February; Tate arrived in the US within weeks. When asked if Trump had played a role in Tate and his brother’s release, the Tates’lawyer Joseph McBride said: “Do the math. These guys are on the plane.” Continue reading...

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3 w. ago Democrats are acting sedate and silent during Trump’s worst excesses | Moira Donegan

Trump is getting comfortable in power. And Democrats are nowhere to be seenWhat was the point of Donald Trump’s address to Congress on Tuesday night? The annual speech – called the “State of the Union” address in every year except the one just after the president’s ascent to office – has long been a somewhat outdated bit of political theater, an event light on policy specifics and heavy on messaging in an era in which political messaging’s most effective venues have long since moved online.It’s perhaps even less clear what a speech to Congress is supposed to mean for this president, who has proven himself so indifferent to constitutional limits on his power – or for this Congress, which has shown itself so willing to abdicate its own constitutional responsibilities. It seems, like so many of the formalities of American politics do now, a bit like a phantom limb: something that Americans keep feeling for long after it has been excised. How long will it be, one wonders, until everyone...

Politics

4 w. ago Trump’s style of petty domination was in full display with Zelenskyy | Moira Donegan

Trump and Vance, I think, never really intended to have a conversation with Zelenskky. Instead, they wanted to look tough on TVThe last time Donald Trump did this, it was in secret, and he got impeached over it. In 2019, Donald Trump, on a phone call with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, demanded that the Ukrainian president produce – or fabricate – evidence of wrongdoing by Hunter Biden, the son of Trump’s eventual opponent in the 2020 election, in exchange for continued US military aide.At the time, Russia had already seized control of the Ukrainian region of Crimea, and was funding violent insurgent groups in the country’s east; it was increasingly clear that a full-scale Russian invasion was coming, as it finally did in 2022. Since the end of second world war, it has been America that checks Russian expansionist ambitions in Europe – America that provided the backstop to the Nato alliance, America that secured the independence of eastern Europe. Trump wanted to condition that longstanding r...

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