2026-04-24 03:00:00
Earlier this year, Yonatan Levi left his home country of Israel to observe the Hungarian election. Levi, a scholar at the center-left think tank Molad, had traveled with a group of parliamentarians and activists to study how opposition leader Péter Magyar was running a winning campaign against an authoritarian prime minister.
This was, in their view, a vital mission ahead of their own elections this year. Levi and his colleagues see, in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a kindred spirit to Hungary’s defeated autocrat. Israel “is not the Middle East’s Hungary yet,” Levi says. But, he added, “it’s getting closer and closer.”
Indeed, opposition parties are bullish on taking down Netanyahu — and defending democracy is central to their campaign.
Americans know, and generally dislike, Netanyahu based on his foreign policy: the brutality in Gaza or more recent lobbying for the ruinous Iran war. But inside Israel, Netanyahu’s opponents are most animated by domestic issues: specifically, a fear that his ultimate aim is to demolish Israel’s remaining democratic institutions and stay in power indefinitely.
This is a reasonable concern. Netanyahu’s government has put cronies in charge of Israel’s security services, demonized the Arab minority, persecuted left-wing activists, and pushed legislation that would put the judiciary under his control. He is currently on trial for corruption — with the most serious charges stemming from a scheme to trade regulatory favors for favorable news coverage from a major Israeli outlet. President Donald Trump is actively pushing Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who holds a more ceremonial position, to grant him a pardon.
Netanyahu’s tactics come directly from the playbook Viktor Orbán used to hold power in Hungary for nearly 20 years — and the two leaders know each other well. So much like in the United States, Orbán’s Hungary has become a major part of Israeli public discourse: a boogeyman for the center-left and an aspirational model for the Netanyahu-aligned right.
“I’ve never seen a foreign election being covered so closely [in the Israeli press] — except for US elections,” Levi says.
At present, Israelis expect a similar outcome. Polls consistently show that Netanyahu, who has been prime minister for all but one year since 2009, would lose his governing majority if elections were held now — and they’re required to take place no later than October. If these trends hold, then there is a real chance that he will be the next leader in the Trump-aligned far-right international to fall.
Whenever anyone talks about Israeli democracy, there are at least two giant and important asterisks attached.
The first, of course, is the Palestinians. In the West Bank, they live under Israeli military occupation, unable to vote in Israeli elections and yet still subject to the harsh rules imposed on them by IDF leadership. And the situation is even worse in Gaza.
For Israeli citizens, Jewish and Arab alike, political life is meaningfully democratic: Elections are generally free of fraud and opposition parties compete openly under relatively fair conditions. Netanyahu’s authoritarian impulses have often been limited by his small-and-rickety electoral coalitions; his Likud party has never enjoyed a margin in the Knesset (Israel’s parliament) akin to Orbán’s two-thirds majority in the Hungarian legislature.
Yet here’s our second asterisk: Despite Netanyahu’s weakness relative to someone like Orbán, the quality of Israeli democracy has degraded substantially under his watch.
While he has not yet compromised the system to the point where it can be considered a species of “competitive authoritarianism” — the political science term for Hungary under Orbán — his attacks on the judiciary and minority rights protections have damaged its foundations. Dahlia Scheindlin, a prominent Israeli political scientist and pollster, describes the country as only “very partially” democratic for its citizens — though she admits it still remains “nowhere near Hungary” in levels of authoritarian drift.
Delegations like Levi’s reflect the level of alarm among Netanyahu’s opponents: They believe that, with more time in office, Netanyahu could conceivably further entrench himself in power. While Hungary’s opposition might have just dug itself out of the competitive authoritarian hole, their Israeli peers hope to never be in it in the first place.
So what are their odds of beating Bibi?
The short answer is that their chances are reasonable, but far from guaranteed. To understand why, you need to understand the deeper divisions in Israeli politics.
Currently, Netanyahu’s governing coalition controls a majority of seats in the Knesset. The future is not bright: Polls currently show, and have shown for several years, that the five parties in its coalition are collectively likely to lose quite a few seats in the next election. Unless the numbers change substantially, Netanyahu is unlikely to be able to remain prime minister without adding new parties to his alliance.
The opposition is in better shape. As in Hungary, a broad coalition of Jewish factions ranging from the center-left to the right have come to see Netanyahu as a threat to the very survival of Israeli democracy — campaigning against him and his coalition in existential terms. Polls show these parties as, collectively, right on the cusp of winning a majority (61 seats) in the Knesset.
“It is now Zionist, nationalist liberals against people who believe Israel shouldn’t be a democracy, and we are the majority,” Yair Lapid, leader of the centrist Yesh Atid faction, told the Times of Israel. “The elections are going to be about this, and the next government is going to reflect this majority.”
Netanyahu has sought to position himself as an irreplaceable wartime leader who can defend the country and navigate complicated international politics, especially the relationship with Trump’s Washington. His critics have countered, often attacking him from the right, that he failed to stop the October 7 attacks and has not decisively dealt with Iran.
However, it is not clear whether this anti-Netanyahu alliance is capable of delivering meaningful change on the issues Americans tend to care about most in Israeli politics: The government’s treatment of Palestinians and its military conflicts with regional neighbors.
The country’s center of gravity is well to the right. The best-polling party is led by Naftali Bennett, a former prime minister who began his career by outflanking Netanyahu to the right on both the Palestinian conflict and judicial independence. While it seems Bennett’s commitments have shifted somewhat with the political wind, he is still the same person — and a coalition dependent on him would be profoundly shaped by his influence.
The opposition’s ideological makeup is not just a substantive problem in the event of an opposition victory, but in some way a barrier to them winning in the first place.
There is a third grouping beyond these two major Jewish party blocs: the Arab parties, who are projected to control around 11 or 12 Knesset seats. These factions are staunchly anti-Netanyahu; an alliance between the Arab party Ra’am and anti-Bibi Jewish factions briefly ousted Netanyahu in 2021 (and made Bennett prime minister).
Yet at the same time, there is resistance from the rightward flank of the opposition from forming a government with Arab support. Bennett has explicitly ruled out doing so. It’s a decision rooted in the political cost he paid for that last partnership among his right-wing base, and a sense that growing anti-Arab sentiment after October 7 would make that cost even higher in the future.
“There are many Israelis — I say this with great regret — who believe that a government should not be constrained in national security decisions by a party [primarily made up of Arabs],” said Natan Sachs, an expert on Israeli politics at the Middle East Institute.
This short-term political problem reflects, at its core, the deeper foundational problem in Israeli democracy.
Without Arab party support, the opposition might very well lack an outright majority. If that happens, and Bennett or other prospective coalition members still refuse to cut a deal with the Arabs, the most likely result is that Netanyahu stays prime minister. So there could be either a deadlock — in which Netanyahu remains in office until another election — or else a fracturing of the anti-Netanyahu bloc, in which one of the right-leaning factions defects to a prime minister they had previously described as an authoritarian menace.
This short-term political problem reflects, at its core, the deeper foundational problem in Israeli democracy.
The majority of Israeli Jews want to live in a democracy, but they also (at present) want it to see Arab Israelis marginalized and Palestinians repressed. But this is not a tenable balance. Eventually, Israeli Jews will have to seek accommodation with Palestinians or else abandon democracy entirely. The Netanyahu-aligned right has moved toward the latter solution, while his leading Jewish opponents have (for the most part) either rejected the former or refused to seriously pursue it.
The next election, then, is shaping up to be a double test of Israeli democracy: how it has weathered the immediate threat from Netanyahu’s Orbánism, and whether it is capable of confronting the structural contradiction that produced it.
As part of the shrunken pro-peace camp in Israel, Levi, the Molad scholar, is hopeful for a revival. He thought Hungary’s opposition leader Magyar won in part because he refused to let Orbán set the term of debate and pressed his own argument — in that case, the economy and corruption. With more confidence, perhaps the Israeli left could one day defeat the “little Bibi inside every Israeli politician’s head” and change the terms of the conversation themselves.
But, for now, what unites the most voters is stopping Netanyahu. A victory now only sets the stage for more fights to come.
2026-04-23 19:15:00
Friendship expert Danielle Bayard Jackson recently came to a realization about her social media engagement: Any time she posts content that centers the viewer as the wronged party of the story she is telling — like how to know if your friends are venting too much or why your friendship expectations feel mismatched — it performs extremely well with her 420,000-plus followers across Instagram and TikTok.
“We tend to really notice when we are done wrong, when others are forgetting about us,” Jackson said. “We are center to the story.”
These numbers are part of a larger shift that Jackson and other experts have observed when it comes to modern friendship. These relationships are increasingly seen as something to engage in when it’s convenient or beneficial — specifically when they are beneficial to you. In short, friendship today has a touch of selfishness. Everyone wants to have good friends but are less concerned with how to be a good friend.
Most people say friendship is important to them, but often act in ways that contradict that sentiment. We want friends to show up to our birthday parties but might not bat an eye at canceling on them. We yearn for connection but only want to hang out if it’s at the right time, right place, and with the right people. Otherwise, staying home is far more appealing. “The socializing opportunity has to be so overwhelmingly positive or appealing that it’ll tip the scale,” William Chopik, an associate professor of social and personality psychology at Michigan State University, told Vox. And platonic relationships are still generally considered secondary to romantic ones, mere nice-to-haves to fill the hours when your partner is busy.
The inherent self-centeredness of social media, where you are the main character, and the popularity of AI chatbots that are always available and never tire of hearing about your life, may also be skewing our idea of what it means to be a friend. One of Chopik’s students casually likened friends to NPCs — a non-playable character populating the background of a video game — as if your BFFs lack an inner life or purpose of their own. While you are certainly the main character in your own life, you’re not the center of your friends’ worlds.
Selfishness is the biggest contributor to friendship breakups, according to behavioral science research, which means that stepping outside of yourself and making an effort to be a good pal can be the difference between a lasting friendship and a failed one. Selflessness doesn’t mean people pleasing or being a doormat; it’s more about considering how you can enrich your friends’ lives to harbor goodwill. And it involves looking at what you bring to the table instead of only thinking about what your friends can offer you.
People often consider how their friends can augment or support their lives but fail to think whether they would meet those same standards. Jackson suggests getting specific with all of the qualities you look for in a friend: a good listener, supportive, doesn’t cancel plans, offers tangible support when needed, among others. “Could another person say you’re doing a great job of actively meeting those things?” Jackson said.
In reflecting on this, you may start to see areas where you could be a little more selfless. For instance, maybe every hangout with a particular friend involves getting dinner because you enjoy it, but you never stopped to ask whether that’s what they want to do, or you assumed it was fine because they’ve never pushed back. The relationship shouldn’t be solely on your terms.
Being a good friend is more than simply holding affection for another person, which can be amorphous and hard to define. Instead, think of concrete examples of what Jackson calls “inconveniences” to gauge the extent of your selflessness. A friend called in a panic about their sick child, and you helped talk them through the emotions. You attended a friend’s poetry reading on the other side of town after a particularly hectic day. The goal here is to take stock of tangible ways you’ve performed the work of friendship that solely benefit the other person.
Of course, it’s natural to focus on your own desires and preferences. But the people who are “communally motivated” — inspired to care for the welfare of others — tend to have better relationships and are happier overall. “How can we be more communally motivated?” said Bonnie Le, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Rochester. “I think about it as being attuned to what other people need.”
That might mean planning an at-home movie night for a friend who lost their job and is looking to save money or thinking of other ways to cheer them up that you know they’d really appreciate. You’re reflecting on the context and constraints of their life to craft a hangout that benefits them, even if it’s slightly inconvenient for you.
You can’t know for sure what’s going on in another person’s life until you ask, however. (This is especially true with new friends you don’t know well.) Consider the last time you inquired into how your friends were really doing or followed up on something they shared weeks ago. When you hang out, who’s doing all the talking? The ratio of sharing to listening should generally be balanced over the course of your friendship.
Relative parity is really the key. In her research, Le has found that people who are “selfless to the point of neglecting their own needs” and who are bad at asking for help don’t feel as satisfied with their lives compared to those who gave and received support. There will always be periods of give and take in long-term relationships — a friend going through a breakup will need your support, and they’ll ideally return the favor when the time comes — but, on the whole, one person shouldn’t always be in the position of emotional caretaker.
Give and take is important, but healthy relationships don’t involve keeping score, said Jaimie Arona Krems, an associate professor of psychology and the director of the UCLA Center for Friendship Research. “Yes, people are attending to how much their friends cost and how much their friends benefit them. They’re not completely blind to it,” she said. But you’re probably not going to think much about these costs until your friend is absent when you need them the most, and you realize how much you’ve supported them without ever being helped in return. While this seems contradictory, this willful ignorance is beneficial, because as soon as we admit our care and affection is conditional, the relationship becomes transactional.
Friendship and goodwill is an investment — and, in a sense, that’s a little selfish. Sure, it has the potential to do a lot for another person; they feel supported, validated and, yes, entertained. But it also is good for you personally. It’s uplifting and energizing, makes you happy, gives you an opportunity to vent, and imbues your life with meaning. If you need a reason to be more selfless when it comes to the happiness and well-being of your friends, remember that the same goodwill comes back around eventually.
“It pays to help your friends even when your friends don’t know that you’re helping them, the same way that it pays to nurture an oak tree whose shade you benefit from,” Krems said. “Your nurturance of that tree benefits you through that tree’s growth — and the same way your nurturance of your friends will come back to you.”
This cycle is buoyed by trust. You trust your friends will continue to show up for you, will prioritize your preferences, and show curiosity in your life as much as you do theirs. Getting to this point takes time and repeatedly showing up even when there’s nothing to gain immediately. “When you have two selfless people, like in a marriage, who want to outdo each other,” Jackson said, “then, man, there’s such freedom in not having to do the mental labor of calculating whose turn it was, who’s been doing more than the other.” Because, contrary to what social media would have us believe, friendship is a two-way street, not a self-serving enterprise.
2026-04-23 19:00:00
This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.
As the old-timey term suggests, gerrymandering has a long history in American politics. But it has intensified in recent years — first after the Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that federal courts cannot review partisan gerrymandering claims, and again last summer, when President Donald Trump urged Republicans in Texas to redraw their maps ahead of the 2026 midterms.
Texas Republicans drew up new congressional districts last summer that are expected to net their party five more US House seats in the upcoming midterm election. Californians responded by voting for an equal and opposite redistricting plan that should swing five seats for Democrats.
On Tuesday night, Dems notched another big win when voters in Virginia approved a new map that’s expected to flip four seats their way. But the Great Redistricting Wars aren’t over. In fact, they’re still spilling over to other states. So, this morning, we’re tallying each side’s score in the electoral arms race (and concluding that the real loser might be democracy).
Democrats strike back. The Virginia referendum — and a similar initiative in California — were intended to offset Texas’s new maps. Currently, Virginia’s congressional delegation is split 6-5 in Democrats’ favor. The referendum approved on Tuesday night asked voters to rejigger the map to favor Democrats in 10 districts, netting four seats and bolstering Democrats’ chances of flipping the House of Representatives.
The proposal marked a significant shift for Democrats, who have often opposed partisan gerrymandering in the past. And the victory itself was hard won. Though Virginia has tended to vote for Democrats in presidential and gubernatorial elections since 2000, the state is swingy and had a Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, until January.
Voters also complained about confusing messaging from both sides of the campaign, and many independent voters seemed uncomfortable with the notion of a partisan power grab. The electorate leaned more Republican than it did in last year’s elections, and the race was closer than expected.
Still, urban centers like Richmond, Virginia Beach, and the Washington, DC, suburbs of northern Virginia turned out enough Democratic and independent votes to carry the measure. Combined with redrawn maps in several other states — including California, Missouri, North Carolina, Texas, Ohio, and Utah — the Virginia vote creates the possibility that Democrats will enter the midterm elections with a one-seat edge.
Florida could be next. Primaries have already begun in several states, so time is running out for any enterprising partisans who want to gerrymander further ahead of the midterms. The big wild card is Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis has wanted to redraw his state’s maps since Trump’s appeals last summer.
But the effort has been mired in GOP infighting and a lack of preparation, and it faces a state constitution that bars partisan redistricting. The state legislature is scheduled to meet for a special session to create anywhere from one to five additional Republican-leaning districts next week.
“It’s a big state, so that would give Republicans a lot of opportunity,” Barry C. Burden, an elections expert at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, told my colleague Christian Paz. But it also creates some risk for Republicans: In spreading their voters across new districts, they’re opening themselves up to the possibility of an upset — particularly if Latino voters drift back toward Democrats.
The Supreme Court has the last word. A pending Supreme Court decision could, crucially, also kick off another round of gerrymandering just ahead of the midterm elections. It’s a scenario that my colleague Ian Millhiser called “nightmare fuel for Democrats.”
The Voting Rights Act, a landmark 1965 law, prohibits election practices that discriminate based on race and has historically been used to justify the creation of congressional districts where racial minorities make up a majority of the population. Should the Court strike down that provision during this term, a number of Southern states would likely redraw their electoral maps. Several still have time to do so before the midterm contests.
What would that mean in political terms? Nothing good for Democrats. Last fall, a New York Times analysis predicted the party could lose roughly a dozen districts, wiping out whatever gains it made in the California and Virginia referendums.
Partisan gerrymandering isn’t great for democracy, either. While research suggests it doesn’t significantly increase polarization — a claim some critics have made — widespread gerrymandering could dilute the power of voters in affected districts and dampen political competition. But few in power seem to care about that much anymore, as long as it’s the other side facing limits.
“We’re not engaged in political gerrymandering,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) told the Times this week. “We are engaged in responding to the Republican effort to rig the midterm elections.”
2026-04-23 18:12:00
This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get access to member-exclusive stories every month, become a Vox Member today.
On any given Saturday, you might find Morgan Quinn Ross, an assistant professor of emerging media and technology at Oregon State University, deep in the mountainous woods, sans phone, on a solo run. “People generally know that I do it, so if I die, I would like to think that they would find me eventually,” Ross tells Vox. “But I find that really restorative. I find that it’s really helpful just to check back in with myself after the week and really appreciate nature.” After conducting multiple studies on solitude, he’s come to consider this form of alone time — one completely removed from human contact — a way of being “attuned to the self.”
During the week, Ross trains with a run club, but Saturdays are for him; they’re his opportunity to reflect. Though a solitary jog through the woods hardly seems social at all, the ritual is an essential component of Ross’s social routine, as alone time is necessary for any well-balanced social life.
Jeffrey A. Hall, a communication studies professor at the University of Kansas, sees this ratio of alone and social time as integral to a healthy “social biome,” which is also the title of the book he co-authored with Andy J. Merolla, a communications professor at UC Santa Barbara. Each person’s unique social biome encompasses all of their regular interactions with friends and family, co-workers, and strangers, and it thrives when there is a mix of connectedness and alone time. Because social interaction is inherently energy-intensive, everyone needs solitude to replenish. “It allows us to regroup, understand our sense of self, recharge our batteries, but then also be capable of entering into conversation and discourse with curiosity and compassion and interest,” Hall tells Vox.
Despite — or perhaps because of — solitude’s restorative abilities, we’ve collectively gone a little overboard on alone time. Between 2003 and 2019, Americans spent an increasing amount of their day alone: 43.5 percent in 2003 versus 48.7 percent in 2019, according to an analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. (It went up even more in 2020.) Meanwhile, the amount of time Americans spent with people they don’t live with dropped.
These shifts are reflected in cultural messages like the push to “protect one’s peace” from exhausting friends and the glorification of canceling plans. Ironically, a lot of attention has been paid to the loneliness epidemic, and the physical and emotional harms that chronic loneliness can cause. But someone who spends frequent time in solitude isn’t necessarily lonely, just as people who are physically alone might not be getting restorative solitude. Are you really by yourself if you’re accessible by text and email?
While the ideal amount of solitude is unique to each individual, there are ways to ensure alone time is truly beneficial and doesn’t become your default state.
In a 2024 study, Ross outlined the ways in which solitude can end up being fairly social; he and his co-author referred to it as being “shaded” by technology. On one end of the spectrum is total isolation, where you’re physically alone, inaccessible to others, and not engaging in any virtual communication or social media consumption. On the other end are instances in which you’re not exactly socializing, but there’s potential for social interaction; think of being in a coffee shop with strangers, available on Slack, looking at Instagram. Everything else falls somewhere in the middle. For example, reading a book or scrolling TikTok is what Ross considers a solitary social experience due to the ability to engage with another’s thoughts.
In this study, all forms of solitude were restorative, but participants considered the more social versions, like reading in a coffee shop, more effective at fostering connection while, at the same time, recharging their batteries. These semi-social solitary pursuits might also be more accessible for those who can’t steal away for hours at a time. “There’s different possible experiences with these different types of solitude,” Ross says. “It comes down to aligning what you’re able to carve out in your day-to-day life, as well as some of the specific things that you’re trying to get out of solitude. Being in the woods might be better for some things, but the moment on the commute and the shower, those moments might be more helpful for other things.”
Signs you might need some alone time (and how to get it).
In research led by Thuy-vy Nguyen, principal investigator of the Solitude Lab and an associate professor at Durham University, participants mentioned partaking in quiet, enjoyable activities like reading, listening to music, gardening, and, yes, taking a walk in nature. “The activities that you do also shape your solitude experience,” Nguyen tells Vox. “If you can find things that you enjoy doing and you want a space where you can be free to do that activity, that’s also good.”
Regardless of your preferred vehicle for solitude, the intended result is “a state of calm and relaxation,” says Nguyen. Truly restorative alone time allows us to mellow out after highly stimulating events, whether they were fun and exciting or frustrating and anger-inducing. “A lot of times people also find it’s a space to cope with mental fatigue,” she says.
But the pressures and distractions of the modern world can undermine solitary peace. While Ross’s study found that being technologically plugged in wasn’t detrimental to restorative solitude, there may be a point where being too available can backfire. “If you’re really trying to engage in self-reflection and be more internally focused, I think that’s where the possibility of a phone call or engaging with media might conflict with that,” he says.
Hall, the communication professor, agrees that the gray area of solitude — being physically alone but checking emails, answering texts and phone calls — compromises the restorative aspects of alone time. Those demands and obligations directly interfere with your ability to recharge, he says. It’s particularly difficult to decompress if the inputs are stressful, like breaking news alerts. To fully reap the benefits of solitude, Hall says, “you should be comfortable with the idea that work can’t reach you right now, or the stressors of the world need to [be] put at bay, or you need to retreat into a room to have some peace and quiet because you have a two-year-old at home.”
In her studies, Nguyen has found that even participants who have access to their phones report feeling calm. But consuming a constant stream of stimulating content on the phone can prevent you from sitting with your thoughts and reflecting.
There’s a case, then, to be made for preserving the sanctity of both social and and alone time, to fully embrace both ends of the spectrum. To get the most out of solitude, you might need to ditch your phone, which, in turn, may allow you to be fully present when spending time with friends later.
“Our current communication landscape offers all of these different things in between, where you’re kind of socializing, but you’re also kind of alone,” Ross says. “But I think, by and large, there’s value in having these experiences of really being in these social interactions and really being in these solitude moments.”
While solitude is a good thing, and spending more time alone does not necessarily make a person lonely, it’s possible to grow too accustomed to isolation, Hall says. With plenty of opportunities approximating social connection — parasocial relationships to podcast hosts, exchanging DMs on Instagram with friends — you might experience social inertia and start to forgo actual human interaction.
Nguyen’s current research explores the idea of being “stuck” in solitude, and the issue isn’t isolation, she says, but the emotions associated with being alone. She says people might feel like they don’t connect with those in their social network when they hang out with them, so they stop making plans, or they could get really hooked on one solitary hobby, like interacting with an AI chatbot. If you feel that ChatGPT is meeting your social needs, you might not be motivated to venture out to talk to a real person.
Rather than utilizing solitude as a means of avoiding others, experts say, consider it a necessary component as your social biome. In terms of the proportion of the day, a lot of people spend the majority of their time not socializing: you’re sleeping, commuting, or engaged in deep work. Maximizing social time, then, has the greatest payoff to well-being, Hall says. (Of course, there are highly social professions, like nurses, teachers, and servers, where one might need to prioritize solitude instead.) Send a text, make a plan with a friend this week, say hi to a neighbor. “Our current social discourse is, ‘People are exhausting, don’t do any of it,’” Hall says. “I think that the evidence is actually much stronger saying do a little of it frequently and make it into a routine.”
2026-04-23 06:10:00
This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.
Welcome to The Logoff: The Trump administration is reportedly hoping to send Afghan refugees to Congo — or back to the country they fled from.
What’s happening? According to a New York Times scoop, more than 1,100 Afghan refugees who are currently in Qatar at a former US military base and who were promised a chance to come to the US may soon be offered a choice between relocation to the Democratic Republic of the Congo and returning to Afghanistan.
Neither option is desirable: Congo is currently facing a serious refugee crisis and ongoing fighting with a rebel paramilitary group, and the refugees have no ties to the country. But in Afghanistan, their lives would be in immediate danger from the country’s Taliban government.
Who are the refugees? Many of the 1,100 Afghans now stuck in limbo in Qatar aided the US over nearly two decades of war as interpreters working with US troops or served as members of the Afghan special forces. Some, the Times reports, are family members of American soldiers, and more than 400 are children.
Most have also already been screened and approved to move to the US, according to NBC.
What’s the context? The US took in nearly 200,000 Afghan refugees during and after its chaotic withdrawal from the country in August 2021, but the Trump administration ended visa processing for all Afghans last year after two National Guard members in Washington, DC, were shot by an Afghan national who was admitted to the US in 2021.
What comes next? This is not yet a done deal, only under discussion by the Trump administration and Congolese officials. But it would match a well-worn pattern of the Trump administration trying to send refugees and other immigrants anywhere they can, regardless of safety or other ethical concerns. Earlier this month, Congo agreed to receive immigrants from third countries deported by the US, and at least 15 people were sent there last week.
Hi readers, happy Earth Day! If you’re looking for some actionable ways to help the planet today, my colleagues over at Future Perfect pulled together some charity recommendations here.
If you’re just ready to log off, I hope you’re able to do it by getting outside and enjoying nature a little bit this evening. Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow!
2026-04-23 05:35:00
The facts underlying Hencely v. Fluor Corporation, a case the Supreme Court handed down on Wednesday, are horrible and tragic.
During a 2016 Veterans Day celebration on Bagram Airfield, a US military base in Afghanistan, a suicide bomber named Ahmad Nayeb detonated an explosion that killed five people and wounded 17 more. One of the wounded was Army Specialist Winston Hencely, who confronted the bomber and attempted to question him — causing Nayeb to set off his suicide vest shortly after Hencely approached him.
The Army believes that Hencely’s actions “likely prevent[ed] a far greater tragedy,” because the soldier stopped Nayeb from triggering the explosion in a location where it could have killed more people. Hencely is now permanently disabled from skull and brain injuries suffered during the bombing.
The legal issue in Hencely involves “preemption,” a constitutional principle dictating that, when federal law and state law are at odds with each other, the federal law prevails and will often displace the state law entirely. After the bombing, Hencely sued Fluor Corporation, a military contractor that employed Nayeb, claiming that Fluor violated South Carolina law by failing to adequately supervise Nayeb. Fluor has two subsidiaries in South Carolina.
In Hencely, six justices concluded that the wounded soldier’s lawsuit is not preempted, and thus does not need to be dismissed before any court determines if Fluor should be liable. While all three of the Court’s Democrats sided with Hencely, the case cleaved the Republican justices straight down the middle (and not in the way that the Republican justices ordinarily split when they split down the middle). Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the majority opinion, which was also joined by Republican Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett. Justice Samuel Alito wrote the dissent, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
The question of when a particular state law is preempted by federal law does not always divide the justices along familiar political lines. An expansive approach to preemption sometimes yields results that liberals will celebrate, and other times, benefits right-leaning policymakers. In Wyeth v. Levine (2009), for example, Thomas also took a narrow view of when federal laws should be read to preempt a state law, and thus ruled against a pharmaceutical company whose drug caused a woman to lose her arm. But advocates for immigrants also frequently argue that state laws targeting their clients are preempted by federal law.
So the Hencely case is significant because it reveals how each of the current justices tends to view preemption cases. Thomas has long questioned many of the Court’s previous cases, taking a broad view of preemption, and it now appears that Gorsuch and Barrett share some of his skepticism. The other three Republicans, by contrast, appear much more sympathetic to arguments that the federal government should have exclusive control over some areas of US policy.
The Constitution provides that federal law “shall be the supreme Law of the Land,” and state law must yield to it. But determining whether a specific state law is preempted by a federal law is not always a simple task.
The easiest cases involve “express” presumption, when Congress enacts a law that explicitly invalidates particular kinds of state laws. Imagine, for example, that South Carolina had a law requiring all T-shirts to be made with 100% yellow fabric. If Congress passed a law saying that “no state may regulate the color of T-shirts,” that federal law would expressly preempt South Carolina’s yellow shirt law.
Other relatively easy cases involve “impossibility” preemption, which occurs when it is impossible for someone to simultaneously comply with a state law and a different federal law. If Congress passed a law requiring all T-shirts to be made with 100% red fabric, for example, the hypothetical yellow shirt law would also be preempted because a shirt cannot be entirely red and entirely yellow at the same time.
The hardest preemption cases, meanwhile, involve state laws that may undercut a federal policy or undermine the goals of a federal law, but that do not present such a clear conflict with a federal law that it is impossible to comply with both laws. In Hines v. Davidowitz (1941), for example, the Supreme Court struck down a Pennsylvania law requiring noncitizens to register with the state, even though no federal law explicitly prohibited Pennsylvania from enacting such a registration regime.
The Court reasoned that Congress had passed “a broad and comprehensive plan describing the terms and conditions upon which aliens may enter this country, how they may acquire citizenship, and the manner in which they may be deported,” and that this plan fully established the rights and obligations of noncitizens within the United States. If Pennsylvania were allowed to supplement this federal plan with additional regulation, that would stand “as an obstacle to the accomplishment and execution of the full purposes and objectives of Congress.”
Hencely involved a dispute that more closely resembles Hines than it does the more clear cut hypotheticals involving yellow T-shirts. On the one hand, Nayeb had a job at Bagram because of a US military program called “Afghan First,” which, as Thomas explains in his opinion, “sought to stimulate the local economy and stabilize the Afghan Government by requiring contractors to hire Afghans ‘to the maximum extent possible.’”
Thus, as Alito wrote in dissent, the military had apparently decided that these “long-term foreign policy and defense objectives” justified the risk that an Afghan national might find work on a US military facility, and then use their limited access to that facility in order to commit a terrorist attack.
In other words, much as the Pennsylvania immigrant registration law undercut the federal government’s broader goals of providing a certain level of civil liberties to noncitizens, Alito argued that allowing Hencely to sue a military contractor who complied with the federal government’s policy of giving jobs to Afghan nationals would undermine that policy.
Thomas, meanwhile, concluded that, while Fluor may have hired Nayeb in order to comply with a federal directive, it allegedly did not comply with all of its obligations to the federal government. Though Nayeb was allowed on the base, he was a “red-badge holder” and thus was supposed to be closely monitored and often escorted through the base by Fluor.
An Army report, Thomas writes, concluded that “Fluor’s lax supervision … allowed Nayeb to check out tools that he did not need for his job and that he used to make the bomb inside Bagram.” It also found that Fluor failed to escort Nayeb off the base at the end of his shift.
Ultimately, Thomas disagrees with Alito that a state law can be preempted merely because it undercuts the military’s Afghan First policy in some oblique way. In Thomas’s view, preemption is only justified when “the government has directed a contractor to do the very thing” that is forbidden by state law. Hencely did not sue Fluor for hiring Nayeb; he sued Fluor for failing to adequately supervise Nayeb, and the federal government did, indeed, direct Fluor to monitor and escort red-badge-holding Afghan nationals.
Thomas’s opinion in Hencely won’t surprise anyone familiar with his opinion concurring in the judgment in Wyeth, the case ruling in favor of the woman who lost her arm due to a drug’s side effect. In that case, Thomas wrote that “I have become increasingly skeptical of this Court’s ‘purposes and objectives’ pre-emption jurisprudence,” which allows courts to invalidate “state laws based on perceived conflicts with broad federal policy objectives … that are not embodied within the text of federal law.”
Justice Thomas, in other words, appears to reject cases like Hines, which hold that federal law can sometimes displace state laws even when there isn’t an unavoidable conflict between the two laws. The fact that Gorsuch and Barrett joined his opinion in Hencely suggests that these two relatively new justices, who weren’t on the Court when Wyeth was decided, may share Thomas’s views.
As a practical matter, that’s good news for consumers and for consumer rights lawyers. Cases like Wyeth, where the manufacturer of a potentially dangerous product claims that state lawsuits arising out of that product are preempted by federal law, are fairly common. Hencely suggests that at least three of the Court’s Republicans will not support these preemption claims, at least when federal law does not clearly conflict with a state law.
At the same time, immigrants and immigration advocates will likely look upon Hencely with trepidation, as it suggests that this three-justice bloc may also seek to overrule Hines, a seminal precedent establishing that states typically may not impose restrictions on immigrants that cannot be found in federal law.
Preemption is not an issue that always favors the left or the right. Sometimes a state law benefits traditionally liberal causes, and sometimes it tries to advance a more right-wing goal. But Hencely suggests that the current Court will be more cautious about preemption claims generally, regardless of who benefits from that decision.