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He could have hidden the soil from view. But there it is, honest, without adornment or apology. Spilling across the bottom of the frame, unconcealed by any carpet or contrivance, soil forms the literal foundation of so many photographs by the Malian photographer Seydou Keïta. In one such picture—of two forward-leaning women in long, sumptuous dresses—the prosaic roughness of dirt seems, perhaps, firmly at odds with how splendidly ornamented the sitters are; it is an element of sheer bathos when read against their beautifully patterned garments (even in black-and-white the designs seem to vibrate), their lustrous jewelry and skin, their nonchalant elegance, so present in their postures and hands and eyes. But the soil has a way of making the poetics of Keïta’s pictures whole: just like the people who sat before his camera, the soil is ineluctably of a particular place and a climate and a land. Together with the subjects in the picture, the soil speaks of Mali’s flesh and marrow.

Born in Bamako sometime between 1921 and 1923, Keïta began taking pictures in 1935, when his uncle gifted him a Kodak Brownie flash camera. After cultivating his gaze for more than a decade—while training alongside the Bamakois photographer Mountaga Dembélé—he opened his own studio in 1948. Fifteen prolific years of studio photography ended in 1963, after Keïta was hired as Mali’s state photographer, forcing him to close the studio. (Keïta retired in 1977, and died in 2001.) But the images from his studio—their panache and sensuality, the rich density of their optical terrains—have made Keïta a lodestar of West Africa’s twentieth-century photography. At the Brooklyn Museum, a retrospective of his work, “Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens,” is currently on view.

“Untitled,” 1949-51.

Many of Keïta’s sitters were part of Mali’s middle class: civil servants and soldiers, teachers and tradespeople. Some were local to Bamako, and others travelled long distances just to get their portrait taken by the man who had emerged as the region’s authority in portraiture. All came adorned and unrepentant in their right to adornment. Keïta and his studio fostered the embellishment of style and persona, the pleasure and play of fashioning a look and of desiring to be looked at.

“Untitled,” 1956-57.

Clients were drawn to Keïta for his distinct capacity to weave together blazing technical and aesthetic precision with a soft eye for the interiority of his subjects. He was known for taking only one shot per person or group; the shutter would click, and there would be no room for waste. He almost exclusively used large-format cameras, always with a shallow depth of field, yielding a fineness of detail that magnifies the presence of his subjects.

So, too, did this orientation to detail deepen those less tangible matters simmering behind the portrait subjects’ eyes and in their aura. Take, for example, one of Keïta’s best-known photographs, which pictures a suited young man in glasses holding up a plastic flower. Coiled around the bottom of the stem, his long fingers—like those we might find in a Mannerist painting—offer an endearing combination of awkwardness and beauty. The sharpness of the image is indelible: the punching contrast between the man’s crisp white suit and a black pen tucked in his coat pocket or the blackness of his skin; the robust detail of each flower petal. But there is also a subtlety in the man himself: his gaze is murky, uncertain, at once trained toward the camera and retreating underneath the thick rim of his glasses, eyes rippling inward.

“Untitled,” 1959.

Many of Keïta’s images are imbued not only with an air of psychological ambiguity but also with a certain cultural ambiguity. The momentum of his career was swept up in the whirl of Mali’s rapidly evolving political circumstances: the country, formerly known as French Sudan, gained its independence and became Mali in 1960. Images from Keïta’s studio attest to the polymorphic consciousness of a colony hurtling toward independence, caught in a kind of fugue between tradition and novelty, between the resurgence of African taste and the appropriation of European sensibilities, between the grandeur of pan-Africanist aspirations and the specificity of the local. All these tensions—and the attendant endeavor to resolve them into a national identity—vie at the surfaces of Keïta’s pictures: they are exercises in individual style and self-fashioning which mirrored the fashioning of a nation.

“Untitled,” late nineteen-forties to mid-seventies.

Attire—particularly textiles—helped set the key of this tune. Keïta kept a vast repository of cloths and fabrics in his studio, using these as backdrops (in contrast to the painted backdrops of European and North American studio portraiture). His sitters often draped themselves in a variety of West African textiles—paying homage to the centrality of the textile in African sartorialism—as well as cloths from Europe and the Islamic world. The ensuing density of pattern pressing against pattern animates a play of geometries and rhythms that links Keïta’s visual schemas to those of European abstraction. Naturally, this latter conceit also belies the African influence that made European modernism possible.

“Untitled,” 1949-51.

We see this, for example, in an untitled portrait sometimes called “Two Ladies of Bamako.” Here, Keïta captures a pair of women—holding each other at the shoulders and the hands—dressed in traditional Malian robe-like garments called boubou. Behind them is a printed-fabric backdrop, and at their feet, a woven rug tessellated with oval patterns. Enveloped in all this optical dazzlement, and cutting across the frame with their bold, frontal gazes, the women are the very embodiment of dignity and power, mirrors of the independence roiling at the heart of the nation.

“Untitled,” late nineteen-forties to mid-seventies.

Keïta’s legacy continues to send shock waves through Mali’s creative world, and through the arena of contemporary photography. He and his younger contemporary Malick Sidibé were among those to turn Bamako into Africa’s cardinal site of image production—and one of the most important loci of photography in the world. (Since 1994, the city has been the site of the photography biennale Rencontres Africaines de la Photographie.) Keïta is lionized in the photo world, and in the art world at large, and rightfully so. But, as with many African image-makers whose work has been accepted by Western institutions, a certain hagiography has been drawn around Keïta’s name which reductively synonymizes it with “African photography.” He and his images are indeed of Mali, but they are more than a mere symbol of Mali. His photographs vibrate with the excess of their ornamentation, with an audacity of presence that exceeds the realm of the emblematic. How radiant is their defiance.

“Untitled,” 1952-55.

By the time I arrived in the Colombian border city of Cúcuta, in mid-January, most of the journalists who’d come after U.S. Special Operations Forces had captured and extracted the Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro, on January 3rd, had left. They’d descended on Cúcuta from Belgium and France and Mexico and the U.S., in the hope of entering Venezuela by crossing the Simón Bolívar International Bridge, the busiest of three bridges spanning the Táchira River. (At that time, and still, it was nearly impossible for foreign journalists to get a visa to enter the country, and, in any case, there were few flights to Caracas.) But it had soon become clear that there was little chance of their entering Venezuela safely. On January 5th, the day Delcy Rodríguez was sworn in as interim President, fourteen journalists, thirteen of them working for international media outlets and news agencies, were detained. One was deported. A couple of days later, two journalists, a Colombian and a Mexican, were stopped at Tienditas, another of Cúcuta’s border crossings, and held for hours, before being expelled.

The Simón Bolívar bridge is almost always bustling. Swarms of cars and vans come and go from both sides; idling buses advertise destinations as far-flung as Lima or Santiago or Mendoza. On the Colombian side, buzzing armies of motorcycles with uniformed drivers compete to shuttle you or your merchandise to San Antonio del Táchira, the closest city in Venezuela. It’s hot and dusty, blue-gray clouds of exhaust burping from passing trucks. You can visit one of several currency-exchange offices or bars blaring cumbia, or just sit on the curb and take in the spectacle—all the usual chaos one sees at a border that functions both as a transit hub and as an open-air market for legal and contraband goods. On either side of the bridge, there are dozens of illicit routes across the river that are controlled by binational armed groups, bypassing even the occasional cursory checks that might occur at the official border crossing. Movement in both directions is fluid and relentless, the checkpoints usually little more than a formality. A pedestrian, leaving Colombia, can stroll past the gate and cross the bridge on foot; a driver can roll by without so much as a wave at the guards. You could conceivably do the same when you get to the other side, though, these days, if you are neither Colombian nor Venezuelan, it’s not exactly advisable.

The bridge itself has a single lane of traffic in each direction, and a narrow sidewalk on either side. It isn’t long, around a thousand feet, maybe four city blocks. I was told by local friends that, as a foreigner, I could safely walk to the middle of the bridge, but no farther; unfortunately, there is no visible indication of where exactly the middle is. To make this apparently simple stroll sound even more harrowing, a friend warned me that sometimes Venezuelan National Guard agents would drag unsuspecting foreigners who had crossed this unmarked dividing line to their quarters for a shakedown or worse, especially if they were journalists. I’m not a particularly brave man, and so, with this horror story echoing in my head, I went to the bridge on my first day in Cúcuta in a state of near-panic, glancing warily behind me to spot any would-be abductors. (How would I even recognize them?) I took one anxious step, then another. Is this the middle? What about now? The whole enterprise felt utterly ridiculous.

As it happens, the international bridge and its ambiguous border are, together, a fairly apt metaphor for understanding Cúcuta. The metropolitan area has a total population of around 1.2 million people, about a quarter of whom are Venezuelan. Throughout the city and the region, the familial, cultural, and economic ties to Venezuela run deep. Virtually everyone I spoke with, during my time there, either had family on the other side or had themselves lived there. Many had dual citizenship, a remnant of the time, not so long ago, when Venezuela was the prosperous and stable oil-rich country next door, while Colombia was in the grips of an intractable and deteriorating crisis. In the eighties and nineties, the forward-thinking parents of babies born in Cúcuta would cross into Venezuela and register them there, too, just in case. It was simply the practical thing to do for the future of your child.

For decades, the flow of migrants went in one direction—Colombians moving to Venezuela for jobs and opportunities that couldn’t be found at home. In the nineteen-nineties, Colombians were Venezuela’s largest immigrant group, though hardly the only one: such was the strength of the Venezuelan economy that it had drawn workers and professionals from all over Latin America, and Europe and Asia. Colombians who grew up in Cúcuta in the nineties have fond memories of day trips across the border, marvelling at the pristine, newly paved roads, eating at McDonald’s, or visiting the malls in San Cristóbal, the capital city of the Venezuelan state of Táchira. They recall watching Venezuelan television in awe, at a time when Colombia had only a few channels, whose broadcasts went dark from before midnight until the following morning. One Cucuteño told me that he grew up a fan of the iconic cartoon “ThunderCats,” broadcast from across the border; his cousins in the Colombian capital, Bogotá, hadn’t even heard of it. In short, Venezuela was the future, while Colombia, mired in chaos and violence, lagged behind.

The journalist Sinar Alvarado, a Colombian who grew up in Venezuela in the eighties, once told me how confusing it was to try to place himself within a class structure that shifted depending on where he happened to be: his immediate family was working class in Venezuela, but, when he visited Colombia, he was magically transformed into the rich cousin. In Cúcuta, the local economy depended on Venezuelans who crossed the border to spend their powerful currency on shoes and clothes, flaunting their wealth, often buying in bulk. The contrast between then and now couldn’t be more stark: Venezuelans these days are, for the most part, no longer in town to buy sneakers. They’re buying groceries. Today, you can purchase stacks of worthless bolívares in Cúcuta’s central plaza, nostalgic souvenirs of a prosperity that may never return.

After Hugo Chávez’s election in 1998, net emigration from Venezuela began to increase. It was a relative trickle at first. The people leaving were, broadly speaking, the well-off, the business class, those who wanted to protect their investments and properties. Next, as the economic outlook worsened, came the middle class, looking for better opportunities, and many of those who went to Colombia could be more accurately described as returnees: the children and grandchildren of Colombians who’d emigrated a generation or two earlier, now claiming their citizenship in order to start over. Both of these groups included dissidents, victims of the ever-tightening repression. Each disappointing election lost by the opposition (or, more recently, stolen by Maduro) prompted many who no longer believed that change was possible to leave.

Still, no one was really prepared for 2017, when Venezuela’s hyperinflation made daily life unsustainable. That year, the official inflation rate rose to eight hundred and sixty-three per cent; the following year, it went even higher, to an astonishing annual rate of more than a hundred and thirty thousand per cent. Faced with this untenable situation, ordinary people from across the country simply picked up their belongings and began walking, eventually crossing the Simón Bolívar bridge into Cúcuta, and then heading farther, into Colombia, and beyond. What was initially a local concern for Cúcuta—which woke to find its streets and byways lined with refugees—soon became a national, and then regional, crisis. It was unprecedented, and if you talk to Cucuteños today, many still shudder as they recall those scenes. Mention los caminantes, the walkers, and everyone here knows what you’re talking about.

Keila Vilchez, a Venezuelan journalist writing for Cúcuta’s main paper, La Opinión, told me that those people weren’t migrating so much as fleeing. “That’s all you can call it,” she said. “Because anyone who decides to walk for twenty days, thirty days, forty days to leave their country is doing it because there is no hope.” The walkers whom Vilchez met in those days while reporting from Cúcuta, and along the roads of the Colombian state of Norte de Santander, were mostly headed to Bogotá, or to the coast, or to the coffee-growing region of Colombia, having heard rumors that there might be work there. They carried their entire lives with them, rolling their bulging suitcases along the sides of roads, children in their arms. They wore sandals or were barefoot. They were desperate: no papers, no money, perhaps a phone number of a relative or an address somewhere in Bogotá. Unprepared for the altitude or for the elements, many died along the way. In 2018 alone, more than 1.3 million Venezuelans left the country. “As a Venezuelan, I couldn’t help but think how lucky I’d been,” Vilchez said.

All told, more than seven million Venezuelans—around twenty per cent of the population—have left since 2015. It’s no exaggeration to say that this unprecedented exodus has affected every country in the region: straining diplomatic relations, testing social safety nets, sparking xenophobic backlash, polarizing public opinion, and transforming politics. The humanitarian emergency arguably transformed the political debate on immigration in the U.S., as well. How many Americans had heard of Tren de Aragua before it became a shorthand for the kinds of immigrants Trump was promising to deport en masse? I was living in New York when Republican governors began sending busloads of migrants to blue-state cities like mine. In the winter of 2022 to 2023, I volunteered to meet new arrivals at the Port Authority, most of whom were Venezuelans. They were young men and women, families; I remember them as dazed and bewildered and excited, scarcely able to believe that they were in midtown Manhattan. They needed winter coats and hats and underwear and shoelaces. And more—a place to rest, a job, a school for their kids. Many had crossed the Simón Bolívar bridge, and all one could do was offer a welcome, and stand in awe of how far they’d come, every journey a kind of miracle.

One morning in Cúcuta, I went to Las Delicias, a neighborhood of roughly four hundred families on the outskirts of town, where dirt roads snake up and down green hills, turning to mud in the rains, and more than half the residents are Venezuelan. There had been gunfire the previous afternoon, the victims a pair of young men on a motorcycle, one of whom had been shot in the back and died. The other remained hospitalized. Neither garnered much sympathy from the residents I spoke to; they were thieves, or so it was said, and life was too difficult to spend much time feeling sorry for criminals. Las Delicias officially became part of Cúcuta in 2015, a bureaucratic change that many hoped would bring much needed services and infrastructure improvements to the neighborhood, but not much has materialized yet.

The Venezuelan families I spoke to had all arrived in the time of the walkers, and all told versions of the same story: the economic catastrophe, the yearning for something better, if not for themselves then for their children. A fifty-eight-year-old named Ramón remembered the exact date he’d decided to leave: September 23, 2015. “I couldn’t take it anymore,” he said. “If you wanted to buy flour, or bread, or anything, you had to wait in line for two or three hours.” He’d repaired electronic equipment back home, and had found work in Cúcuta doing the same. He’d come with his wife and two daughters; his youngest, a boy, was born in Colombia.

Everyone I spoke to had family back in Venezuela—parents, cousins, brothers, sisters. When I asked what they were hearing about the situation there, how things had changed since Maduro’s ouster, I was met with blank looks. “Nothing,” one woman in her early thirties told me with a shrug. “What I know, I know from the news. We can’t say anything. We talk about breakfast.” In other words, people were still scared, and nothing had really changed. “Regime tweak,” the Guardian called it. It’s no wonder that people were afraid to speak. In addition to economic freefall and the consequent humanitarian emergency, Maduro’s nearly thirteen years in power were marked by repeating cycles of repression: the pro-democracy opposition movement would gather strength in anticipation of an election, or in the angry aftermath of one, and each wave of street protests—in 2014, 2017, 2019, and 2024—would be met with indiscriminate state violence and mass arrests. At this writing, five weeks after President Trump announced that the U.S. was running Venezuela, more than six hundred political prisoners, including close allies of the opposition leader María Corina Machado, are still languishing in Venezuelan jails.

When I spoke with Vilchez, she had just gone to Venezuela, not as a reporter but to pick up her daughter in Maracaibo. She’d left her cellphone in Colombia, as a precaution in case she was stopped, but nothing had happened. She’d seen a young man get bullied out of a gold ring by the National Guard, but this was an indignity so quotidian it was hardly worth noting. Everything was normal, she told me. Tense, but normal. The same could be said of Cúcuta, where a veritable parade of international media had arrived in search of a story only to find none. “There were more journalists than there was news,” she told me, laughing.

Still, if everything in Cúcuta is normal, it should also be noted that normal itself is pretty alarming. The city is among the most dangerous in Colombia—in 2025, there were more than seven times as many homicides per capita here than there were in New York City—and conversations with locals are laced with chilling anecdotes recounted offhand: a man shot during a church service; a couple who sold coffee on the street murdered one morning. A young Cucuteño named Juan Sebastián toured me around his neighborhood, Colombia Uno, pointing out the sites of the executions that had marked his childhood and adolescence. One night, on my way back to my hotel, I was forced into a detour; the roads around the government buildings were closed to protect against potential drone attacks by the E.L.N.—the Spanish acronym for the National Liberation Army, a guerrilla group traditionally allied with Caracas, which remains active in the area. Whatever was happening or not happening in Venezuela, this was simply Cúcuta on an ordinary day. And although things appeared quiet for the moment, many locals I spoke to were afraid that they might not stay that way. Fresh unrest in Venezuela could spark another wave of refugees, and now, after the collapse of U.S.A.I.D., most of the structures that had been in place to deal with the humanitarian emergency no longer existed.

I went back to the bridge a few nights after I arrived, to attend a vigil being held by a couple dozen family members of political prisoners in Venezuela. If Maduro’s ouster had sparked any hope, these people might have been the ones to feel it most acutely, to believe that it was now possible that they might finally see their loved ones again. There were dozens of photos of unfortunate men and women, including Colombians who had crossed the border one day—to see family, to go sightseeing, to teach a workshop—only to fall victim to the arbitrary brutality of the Maduro regime, to be accused of terrorism or conspiring against the state and imprisoned. The people at the vigil were sombre, as the Lord’s Prayer played on repeat from a speaker. One woman, Miriam, told me that she hadn’t seen her son in a decade, so long that she’d given him up for dead until, a few months ago, a Colombian who’d been released had come home with the news that he’d been in the same prison as her son. It had to be him, she said, because his first name, Guzmán, was very unusual. If he is, in fact, alive, he’d be thirty-eight now.

As the vigil wound down, I walked across the bridge and onto the Venezuelan side, bolder this time because I was with friends. It was all but deserted, with only the occasional car or motorcycle drifting past, a few pedestrians, and, along the railing, faded signs from ACNUR, the Spanish acronym for the U.N. Refugee Agency, denouncing human trafficking. We walked right up to the gate and a checkpoint, unmanned at that hour. A sign spanning the width of the bridge wished us “Bienvenidos, República Bolivariana de Venezuela,” and as we approached there was a smiling portrait of Nicolás Maduro in a white collarless shirt. Beside his face was the caption “In this world, no one respects cowards.” ♦

On January 28th, four days after Customs and Border Protection agents shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, a new song by Bruce Springsteen called “Streets of Minneapolis” appeared online. In it, Springsteen croaks his solidarity with a city under “an occupier’s boots,” as agents for the D.H.S. and for ICE break into homes, intimidate peaceful observers, detain U.S. citizens, and, with the shootings of Pretti and Renee Nicole Good, kill people in the street. “Streets of Minneapolis” is a rapid-response protest song, and it shows. Springsteen’s voice sounds shredded, and the words often fall awkwardly within the cadence of the Dylanesque melody. He sings the names of the dead haltingly, as though he is reading them off a screen—which, judging from the recording-studio footage in the song’s lyric video, he probably is. The song is about the news, but it is also, perhaps unintentionally, about the moment of lag when we absorb the names and images, when we try to assimilate atrocity into narrative.

Springsteen wasn’t the only artist to rush into this gap. The British singer-songwriter Billy Bragg released “City of Heroes,” a spirited work of turbo-folk agitprop that invokes Martin Niemöller’s “First They Came.” The punk bands NOFX and Dropkick Murphys updated old songs with new anti-ICE lyrics. (A sample line from “Citizen I.C.E.,” by the latter: “Too scared to join the military / Too dumb to be a cop.”) Earlier in January, the roots-rock doyenne Lucinda Williams put out “The World’s Gone Wrong,” a record that tries to capture the texture of everyday life amid smoldering crisis—the toll of long working hours, the distant thrum of war, the small consolations of art. Williams’s brand of dissent is off the cuff and laconic: “The President of the United States can kiss my ass,” she told the crowd at a recent show in New York.

The protest song is threatening a comeback, as it tends to do during episodes of national turmoil. The “return of the protest song” has been hailed—to take a quick sampling from this millennium—in 2004 (with the releases of Green Day’s album “American Idiot,” the compilations “Rock Against Bush” and “War (If It Feels Good, Do It!)”), in 2015 (the year Kendrick Lamar dropped his anthemic, if ambivalent, “Alright”), in 2017 (the projected year of anti-Donald Trump music that never coalesced into a movement), and in 2020 (the year of George Floyd’s murder and the protests that followed it, extensively chronicled in song). Even the topical songs of the sixties folk movement constituted a revival, a reinvention of the Popular Front-style political art of the thirties and forties, for the waning years of McCarthyism. At its best, protest music could channel and focus public feelings, and clarify the stakes of the moment—“Which Side Are You On?” asked a 1931 song by Florence Reece, written for the United Mine Workers on strike in Harlan County, Kentucky.

What do we want from a protest song today? For a form that takes aim at the issues of the present, the protest song in 2026 is curiously backward-looking. Sometimes these songs situate current events in a longer arc—Bragg’s “City of Heroes” speaks of learning “the lessons of history,” and Williams’s well-intentioned but clumsily executed “Black Tears” declares that “four hundred years” of anti-Black violence in the Americas is “long enough.” Often, they are concerned with entering today’s horrors into the record. When Springsteen sings about “the winter of ’26,” he is singing as if it is already over, giving an archival gravitas to events that many of us experience mainly through flashes of short-form video. Slashing electric guitars and gospel-choir harmonies once served to wrench the old folk idiom into the violent present, as they did when Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young recorded the lacerating “Ohio” in response to the killings at Kent State, in 1970. And yet, in today’s topical songs by legacy rock artists, such elements don’t heighten the immediacy of the day’s horrors but, rather, run them through a sepia-toned filter. The protest song longs for history.

Or else it longs for a break from it. One curious thing about the periodic announcement of protest music’s return is that it never really went away. The past decade in particular has seen a flourishing of conservative protest songs, in particular. In 2023, Jason Aldean, a vocal Trump supporter, released “Try That in a Small Town,” a sombre pop-country song that many took to be a general celebration of vigilante violence, or a fantasy of white revenge against the 2020 George Floyd protests. (It also quotes a guitar riff from Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.”) The music video interposes clips of a nation on fire—thieves and looters running rampant, protesters spitting in cops’ faces—with footage of Aldean and his band playing in front of a courthouse in Columbia, Tennessee, vowing to deliver justice. When it was discovered that this courthouse had been the site of a lynching and a race riot, this promise took on a particularly sinister character. Amid the controversy, Aldean both denied knowing this history and presented himself as a speaker of truth to power. “It’s very uncommon for someone to say something, for fear of losing a job or losing some money,” he told one interviewer. “It just kind of reaches a breaking point to where you’re, like, ‘Somebody needs to say something, and if nobody’s gonna do it then I’ll be the guy.’ ”

The lone guy speaking up from the wilderness is the central figure in today’s conservative protest music. “Am I the only one here tonight shakin’ my head and thinkin’ somethin’ ain’t right?” Aaron Lewis, the pro-MAGA frontman of the hard-rock band Staind, sings in a 2021 solo release. In the song’s video, a now familiar montage of protests and lockdown notices is intercut with shots of Mount Rushmore and soldiers waving flags. Lewis stands alone with his guitar, enveloped in a green-screened thunderstorm. He is “standin’ on the edge of the end of time,” athwart history, begging it to stop.

He is also sitting in front of a screen. “Am I the only one willin’ to bleed / Or take a bullet for bein’ free / Screamin’ ‘What the fuck?’ at my TV?” Lewis bellows. This oscillation between rage at one’s own powerlessness and fantasies of violence is the song’s motive force. It could be said that conservative protest music is more likely than its progressive counterpart to call for something like armed revolt—perhaps most overtly in Forgiato Blow and JJ Lawhorn’s minorly viral 2025 song “Good vs Evil,” which takes “Try That in a Small Town” to its logical end point. “We need a big tall tree and a short piece of rope / Hang ’em up high at sundown,” Lawhorn sings over a beat suspiciously reminiscent of Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road.” But these songs are also honest, sometimes despite themselves, about the feelings of impotence associated with watching history play out on a screen.

Then again, the protest song is right there in the fray with history, flashing across our screens, vying for our attention. Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond,” from 2023, a song about “livin’ in the new world / with an old soul” that gets sidetracked on a rant about welfare and snack cakes, became a surprise viral hit partially on the strength of its video, which finds Anthony playing the song live in the woods. It also owed some of its popularity to the efforts of right-wing commentators, including Matt Walsh and the former F.B.I. deputy director Dan Bongino, to brand the song as a MAGA anthem. It hardly mattered that Anthony described his own politics as “dead center,” or that the song’s inventory of complaints—the cost of living, human trafficking—could align with any number of political programs. The song was subsumed into online discourse, and it became something at once more banal and more pervasive than spectacle: it became content, another piece of digital flotsam eddying across the feed.

For progressives, the undisputed master of the viral protest song is the thirty-three-year-old folksinger Jesse Welles, who makes videos of himself standing in a field, singing clever miniature tunes about the hypocrisies of the health-care industry, tech billionaires, ICE. Welles, who was nominated for four Grammys in 2025, is a gifted lyricist, and his finest verses use cascades of slant rhymes to move subtly from specific finger-pointing to broader implication. One recent song takes aim at “outright white supremacists, or America First / I think they both sell merch / The whole place seems a little bit cursed / It’s like somebody might have been living here first.”

If Welles’s hyper-specific lyrics are his gift, they can also make his songs feel ephemeral. In “The Ballad of Big Balls,” from August, 2025, he sings, “Some days I forget that Cracker Barrels exist / But there ain’t no one forgetting about that list.” The assault of a former DOGE staffer, the fracas over the Cracker Barrel logo, the demands to release Jeffrey Epstein’s “client list”—this is hardly the stuff of “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” let alone “Rich Men North of Richmond.” It is more like the “Today’s News” sidebar on X set to music, re-creating the vertiginous churn of posts—and then neutralizing the feeling in a mist of icy smugness. In this sense, Welles’s songs are far better suited to social media than to the stage, to say nothing of the ramparts. At one of his concerts last year, a member of the audience yelled during a song, “Why didn’t you film this one in the woods?”

Caught between nostalgia and numbing immersion in the feed, the protest song today seems to have lost some of its power to confront and mobilize. Even when it takes a bold stand—see “Hind’s Hall,” Macklemore’s admirably adversarial song in support of the Palestinian-solidarity movement on college campuses—it has a tendency to feel simply like more news, more commentary, more posts. “We see the lies in them / Claiming it’s antisemitic to be anti-Zionist,” Macklemore raps, the lyrics less an incitement than a summary.

Perhaps the protest song has changed because our listening has changed, too. More than a decade into the streaming era, music has been radically devalued, with artists taking home less revenue than ever from their recordings and listeners ceasing to think of music as a product of skilled labor, something worth paying for directly. Along with this economic devaluation, as the journalist Liz Pelly has written, there’s been a diminishment of music’s social function, “the relegation of music to something passable, just filling the air to drown out the office worker’s inner thoughts.” When the dominant mode of listening to recorded music is more or less unconscious, the protest song can hardly go to work shaping one’s political consciousness.

Still, some songs can disrupt our dazed habit of barely listening and give us something to participate in. Protesters in San Juan blasted “Afilando los Cuchillos,” a furious indictment of the Puerto Rican government, by Bad Bunny, Residente, and iLe, during demonstrations in 2019 that eventually led to the resignation of then governor Ricardo Roselló. Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright,” a song that became synonymous with Black Lives Matter, is less granular in its critiques, but it is exactly this quality of expansiveness—with its nimble pivots from the personal to the topical to the metaphysical—that has allowed it to endure as an all-purpose protest anthem. (Most recently, it has been heard at demonstrations against ICE.) Even “Not Like Us,” his Drake diss track from 2024, with its sheer exuberance, its surfeit of hooks, and its invocation of a shared “us,” delivered a frisson of the collective will.

Today, the most stirring music coming out of the protests against ICE is not being made by marquee artists but by groups of everyday people, such as a large crowd that gathered outside the Minneapolis Marriott City Center to sing a song called “It’s Okay to Change Your Mind” to the ICE agents staying in the hotel. Springsteen’s “Streets of Minneapolis” is at its most galvanizing when a chant of “ICE out now!” erupts during the final verse, a crowd of voices intruding and exceeding the song. A skeptic might say that the recording merely pantomimes this collective participation—though, when Springsteen played it in Minneapolis, the crowd joined in and all but drowned him out. It is maybe fairer to say that the song knows on some level that it is not on the leading edge of oppositional politics but, rather, just a step behind it. There are far worse places to be. ♦

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The Washington Roundtable discusses Donald Trump’s threats to “nationalize” elections in fifteen states, the recent F.B.I. raid to seize 2020 voting records at an election facility in Fulton County, Georgia, and the ways in which the Administration might meddle with a free and fair vote in 2026. Their guest, Richard Hasen, is the director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at U.C.L.A.’s School of Law. “I actually think that now is the time to be preparing for this,” Hasen says. “I think states and localities should think about getting injunctions from federal courts against Donald Trump to prevent him from interfering with the tabulation of ballots.”

This week’s reading:

“Donald Trump Already Knows the 2026 Election Is ‘Rigged,’ ” by Susan B. Glasser

“Dan Bongino’s Podcast Homecoming,” by Jon Allsop

“Why the D.H.S. Disaster in Minneapolis Was Predictable,” by Jonathan Blitzer

“Is ICE Leading Us Into a Constitutional Crisis?,” by Isaac Chotiner

“How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post,” by Ruth Marcus

“ ‘Melania’ Is a Forty-Million-Dollar Journey Into the Void,” by Lauren Collins

“How Trump Is Debasing the Dollar and Eroding U.S. Economic Dominance,” by John Cassidy

“Russia Is Swarming Europe with Young Agents,” by Ian Crouch

Tune in wherever you get your podcasts.

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Ben Shapiro is a conservative provocateur. Ever since he was a teen-ager at U.C.L.A. writing op-eds for the Daily Bruin, he has shown a penchant for the rhetorical grenade. Women who have abortions are “baby killers.” Western civilization is “superior” to other civilizations. “Israelis like to build,” he tweeted in 2010. “Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage. This is not a difficult issue. #settlementsrock.” Shapiro is now forty-two, and his rhetoric has mellowed only somewhat. On college campuses and on his podcast, “The Ben Shapiro Show,” he has been an advocate for the Trump Presidency, even though he refused to vote for him in 2016 and allows that the President is—as we discuss here—financially corrupt and morally wanting.

Earlier this week, I spoke with Shapiro for The New Yorker Radio Hour, mainly about the battles within the MAGA movement in which he is currently engaged. Recently, Shapiro has gone into attack mode against some of his fellow MAGA media stars, including Tucker Carlson, for their indulgence, if not outright support, of antisemites like Nick Fuentes. It is a drama that has implications not only for the Trump era but for what might follow. J. D. Vance, for one, has refused to join Shapiro in rebuking Carlson. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

You worked at Breitbart, which was an ur-publication of the MAGA movement. You were acquainted with Steve Bannon and all kinds of people. When you look back on your Breitbart days, what do you think was positive about that time, and what do you look back on with some regret?

I had worked at Talk Radio Network, which was the syndicator for Michael Savage and Laura Ingraham, and then I ended up being hired by Andrew. I’d known Andrew since I was at U.C.L.A.—

Andrew Breitbart, the founder of the publication. Who died in his forties.

Yeah, he was very young. I’d known Andrew for about ten years. He came to me and said, “Will you come on board and join Breitbart?” It was the middle of the 2012 election cycle, and he died three, four weeks after I’d signed on. Suddenly the leadership structure was completely upended, because Andrew had been sort of a one-man band. He was the person from whom all thoughts sort of sprang, in terms of the direction of the site. The leadership structure changed pretty dramatically. Steve Bannon—who’d been kind of hanging around on the fringes of the Breitbart universe; he’d been making a documentary about Andrew—was brought in by Larry Solov, who was Andrew’s [business] partner, to essentially be president of Breitbart.

Did you have problems with Steve Bannon and the like, and their treatment of rhetoric and truth or non-truth and conspiracy theory, when you first encountered it?

It was never, sort of, a bed of roses with Steve Bannon. There are a lot of people in the Breitbart infrastructure who are not fond of Steve, or the way that he was running things, making editorial decisions and the like. I think that there were some wonderful things—

But how did you assess what Steve Bannon wanted in this world? He wasn’t just a conservative. He was and remains a kind of MAGA warrior who’s willing to say and do what is necessary to push that battle forward. And I’m being gentle about this.

Yeah, I mean, if you look at Breitbart’s coverage circa, say, 2012 or 2013, those were fairly mainstream conservative talking points. It was certainly a mainstream conservative website at that time. I think by the time we hit 2015, 2016, things had started to evolve, especially because of the rise of President Trump. I was not a supporter of President Trump in the 2015-2016 election cycle. I was much more supportive of Ted Cruz in the primaries, and then, in the general election, I actually didn’t vote, because I was unhappy with both candidates.

Obviously, after that, President Trump did many things that, as a conservative, I like. He’s certainly a non-ideological figure, which is why so many people try to sort of claim that MAGA is a part of their movement. You have Reagan conservatives who will say that MAGA is Reagan conservatism. You’ll have national populists who say that it’s national populist. Trump is none of those things. Trump is Trump, and he has instincts—

Which means what to you, Ben? “Trump is Trump” means what?

His instincts are sort of naturally those of a 1975 conservative. That means that he likes a strong America on the world stage, but tempered by a sort of hard-nosed realism about non-interventionism. When it comes to domestic policy, he has a weird mix of not liking the government to be involved in everything, but also wanting to use the government in ways that I don’t particularly approve of. He seems to be more about: What is the solution at hand? Will I try it? And then, if it doesn’t work, then he pulls out of it. People have termed that “TACO”—“Trump Always Chickens Out.” I don’t think that’s right. I think that President Trump is a person who is willing to try different things and then will shift on a dime if he thinks those things aren’t working.

Do you think Trump is honest?

In some ways yes and in some ways no.

There was an article in the Wall Street Journal just a couple of days ago describing the fishy investments from Abu Dhabi into the Trump family. Our reporter, David Kirkpatrick, who’s extremely conservative in his calculations, has said that the Trump family has enriched itself to the tune of four billion dollars since taking office again in 2024. Does this concern you at all?

Of course. I’ve been calling this out since, I think, before pretty much anybody else. I mean, early on in the Trump Administration, when World Liberty Financial was pretty clearly making a fair bit of money over in the Middle East, I raised red flags on my show, consistently, about how I thought this was wrong. If the name were Biden instead of Trump, people would be screaming bloody murder. And this was not beneficial to President Trump’s agenda, either. So, sure, that concerns me.

Not beneficial to his agenda, or corrupt?

I mean—both, obviously. I do think that if you are taking what I perceive to be digital assets that are not particularly worthwhile, and then you have people who are politically interested in investing massive amounts of money into those things, that is not a good thing.

You voted for him the second time?

I voted for him in 2020, and then I campaigned for him in 2024.

Why?

Because it was now a binary choice between Trump and Kamala Harris, and I liked a lot of what he did during his first Administration. I felt the guardrails would largely hold, which I believe they have, with regard to President Trump. I know many on the left believe they’ve not, but what I would say is that—

You believe the guardrails have held this time?

Yes. I’m hard-pressed to see—

Help me on that, Ben.

The Trump Administration has not bucked the judiciary by saying that if an appellate court or the Supreme Court rules in a particular way, it will still go ahead and do whatever it is it wants to do. The President does cite legal authority for the things that he’s doing—

So, you’re confident that the Justice Department will pursue corruption charges against the Trump family?

No, I’m confident that the President will likely pardon himself and his children in the same way that Joe Biden did on his way out. [Laughs.]

You’re laughing, but that’s radically corrupt, is it not?

I think that it was radically corrupt when the D.O.J. did not pursue, with alacrity, a lot of the issues surrounding the Biden family, too. So the answer is yes, and it applies to all parties. What I hear from the left is a constant drumbeat of accusations about President Trump, to which I acquiesce, in part, but I find them utterly unconcerned with the same sorts of issues arising on their side of the aisle. They see President Trump as the person who’s constantly violating the standard, the person who’s constantly setting the new standard, the person who is responsible for the death of American politics, or the decay of American politics.

And, as I’ve said publicly before, I think President Trump stumbled on the prone body of American politics and said, “This is a dead body.” I see him much more as a coroner than as the murderer. Now, that doesn’t mean that there’s not some of both, meaning that I think things can get worse under President Trump than they were heretofore, and I’m not going to deny that he’s done things that I think are bad and wrong. I was very critical of his rhetoric, for example, between the election of 2020 and January 6th. But I do think that—

But do you not see any of these things as disqualifying, in a moral-political sense? January 6th, for example.

I don’t know what disqualifying means, in the sense that I did not support him in the primaries—

That he would lose your faith and vote and support forever.

Well, I mean, the only way to lose my faith and support and vote forever would be for there to be an alternative that I find superior to him. This is the problem when you’re making voting decisions. Would I want Donald Trump marrying into my family? Probably not. The problem is that once you say that the candidate is “disqualified,” then you either have to sit out the election—which I did in 2016. And then whatever damage President Trump had, I thought, done by being elected in 2016, he did a bunch of things I liked between 2016 and 2020, and then I did not like what he did with regard to the election of 2020, and the falsehoods that he told about winning that election. And then I didn’t support him in the primaries, and then he ended up winning the nomination. He was running against Kamala Harris. So I can either sit out the election again, which doesn’t really achieve the—

So what you’re saying is that the potential of Kamala Harris, in your view, politically, outweighs the support for what, in essence, was an insurrection on Capitol Hill? That’s hard for me, to say the least.

I think that that’s a pretty poor way of putting it. That’s not the way that we assess candidates in the real world. The way that we assess candidates in the real world is: Who is more likely to perform the agenda that I see as important versus who is more likely to inhibit that agenda. And so I can fully disapprove of what happened on January 6th and think it was quite terrible, and still acknowledge that Donald Trump as President, from 2017 to 2021, did a better job than Joe Biden did.

There are many people in the Republican Party who consider themselves Never Trumpers. Not a decisive number, certainly, but there are a number of people who see his moral transgressions as so serious that they make a very different calculation than you do, electorally.

I mean, sure. And they’re entitled to that calculation. The question to me is always one of iteration. Voting is one decision, but just because you vote for someone doesn’t mean that you support everything that they do.

Ben, what initially attracted you to conservatism?

I grew up in a household with two Reagan Republicans—my parents are pretty conservative. The basic idea that lies behind a good conservatism, I think, is personal responsibility, duty, a requirement that you do the right thing, a basic moral stance about how individuals should act in a free country. And I think that’s still largely what drives my conservatism today.

A kind of personal rectitude.

Yes.

Do you find that that’s antithetical to liberalism?

It doesn’t have to be, but I think that liberalism very often is a way of shielding people from the consequences of their own decisions, or an attempt to shift individual responsibility onto systems in a way that is frequently unjustified.

The difference between right and left—in my definition of it—is that the right acknowledges that when people fail, because human nature is fallible, very often that is your own responsibility. And the best way to actually treat that problem is to self-correct. And the left, because they have, I think, a rosier view of what human nature is, tends to attribute to systems that which I think more properly lies in responsibility with the individual.

How much did religion influence your becoming a conservative? You were raised an Orthodox Jew—I think you’re still a practicing Orthodox Jew, am I correct?

Yes, that’s right. We became Orthodox when I was eleven. So I remember eating at Kentucky Fried Chicken. But I was fairly young when we became Orthodox. My mom and dad started going to a synagogue down in Venice Beach, actually, and they were very taken with the rabbi, and I think that they got more and more interested in that. They decided that they wanted to send me to a Jewish day school. And so I’d go to the Jewish day school—it was an Orthodox school—and I’d come home and say, “Mom and Dad, I don’t understand why we’re doing X, Y, and Z, when at school they’re teaching me that this is what we’re supposed to be doing.” And my parents were, I think, smart enough to see the inherent conflict, and, instead of saying, “Your school is doing it wrong,” or “You’re doing it wrong,” or “They’re teaching the wrong thing,” they said “Well, we’re probably doing it wrong,” and so probably we need to actually rectify that breach.

Let’s talk about the debate that you’re having inside MAGA. You’re at the center of a fight—a feud—that’s developing in the conservative movement, and it has to do with antisemitism and conspiracy theories related to antisemitism. Not long after Charlie Kirk died, you spoke at the Turning Point USA Conference, America Fest, and you called out Candace Owens and attendees like Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson—these are very influential figures now on the right, and the media, of the MAGA movement. Talk to me a little bit about this divide, how it’s developed, and what it’s done to your relationships inside the MAGA movement.

First of all, as people may suspect, I’m not particularly interested in my personal relationships with others in the political sphere. I have a family that’s very tight-knit. I have four children, going on five. I have a dog. I have plenty of things going on in my social calendar, and I don’t see it as particularly important to hang out with people who are in sort of the same career milieu.

There were two speeches that I gave back to back. One was a speech that I gave at the Heritage Foundation the night before, and one was the T.P.U.S.A. speech that I gave that night. The Heritage Foundation speech was specifically directed at Tucker Carlson, because I believe that Tucker Carlson is not a conservative in any real marked way that I can identify, and I was pointing that out at the Heritage Foundation.

How would you describe his politics?

Conspiratorial populism would probably be a fair descriptor of his politics.

Our colleague Jason Zengerle knew him as a young wise-guy reporter who leaned, maybe, center right. What happened to Tucker Carlson?

I try not to speculate about people’s motivations because I don’t have a window into their head. All I can say is that the stuff that he has been promoting for the past several years is very much in line with the philosophies of people like Alexander Dugin.

The Russian nationalist philosopher, said to be close to the thinking of Vladimir Putin.

Yes. Carlson’s view of America in the world is a view that is actually closer to Howard Zinn than to that of traditional conservatives. This idea that America is a nefarious and terrible force in the world that has committed myriad sins and must withdraw from the world, both for its own good and for the good of the world. His belief that a conspiratorial coterie of people is manipulating American policy. Those people very often happen to have crossover with Jews, according to his guests whom he routinely launders onto the air.

So, when it came to T.P.U.S.A., in the aftermath of Charlie [Kirk]’s death, Candace Owens, in particular, had started speculating, openly, that people at T.P.U.S.A.—up to and including, in my interpretation, Erika Kirk, Charlie’s wife—had been complicit in his murder or at least complicit in a coverup of his murder. Her bizarre conspiratorial rantings had been treated as legitimate and worthwhile by people ranging from Tucker Carlson to Megyn Kelly. And so I felt that it was necessary to make a speech about the gap that has emerged on the right between a conspiratorial view of politics—that sort of conspiratorialism has taken over large parts of the Republican Party and the conservative movement.

Candace Owens is, I believe, somebody that you worked with at the Daily Wire?

Yeah, we hired her in 2021—

What did you see in her then?

—and then we fired her in 2023. In 2021, what we saw was a fairly mainstream conservative who said inflammatory things, and who had been telling us that she—

Inflammatory things that you liked?

Most of them I liked, some of them not as much. And so, as people who hired her, we thought that she was going to develop in intellectual directions. She had said that she was learning with Shelby Steele, for example, and reading the works of Thomas Sowell, and this kind of thing. But, by 2022, it was apparent that she was moving in another direction, and then it took until 2023 for that direction to come to full fruition—

And what was the direction in 2023?

By 2023, she was spouting antisemitic conspiracy theories, among other conspiracy theories, including the idea that Emmanuel Macron’s wife is actually a man, and this sort of stuff.

So that was your limit with her?

Well, to be fair, I am not an officer of my company. The people who made that decision were Jeremy Boreing and Caleb Robinson, the co-C.E.O.s of the company.

You specifically criticized Tucker Carlson for a really soft interview he did with a guy named Nick Fuentes, who is, I think it’s fair to say, a Nazi apologist. You said, “If you have that person on your show and you proceed to glaze him, you ought to own it.” You point out how outrageous he is. But isn’t that exactly what Carlson wants in his guest? Attention?

I mean, I think that the attention doesn’t hurt, but, at the same time, I think there is probably some ideological overlap between some of the things that he believes about America and some of the stuff that Nick Fuentes believes. Tucker has a habit of bringing on guests who spout the most conspiratorial form of a theory, and then he sort of buys it back about five per cent. And then he allows those views to be predominant in the public discourse while talking about what wonderful people these folks are.

I get that, and I can’t help but agree with that. But then you have Donald Trump, who had dinner with Nick Fuentes. How does that affect your feeling about Donald Trump?

I mean, I condemned that at the time. When it comes to his dinner with Fuentes, and I believe it was Kanye West—

A good combination.

Yeah, pretty awful combination. People say that I grade on a curve, but I think I grade realistically here: I’m not surprised by what President Trump does. He likes being with famous people. He very often does not know who they are. He will say bad things about them five minutes later. He is as inconstant as the changing wind when it comes to his feelings about people. He will like Steve Bannon until he calls him “Sloppy Steven” and fires him, whereupon he will welcome him back into his orbit and like him again. And so these sort of—

But you’re taking this too casually. He’s having dinner with a Nazi apologist.

I didn’t take that casually.

And then doesn’t go off and blast him. He just kind of says, “Oh, I kind of didn’t know who it was, and Kanye brought him along.” First of all, that’s bad staff work, to say the least—

Terrible staff work.

And it’s bad behavior on the part of the President of the United States, no?

I agree that it’s bad behavior on the part of the President of the United States. I’m not sure what else to say about that.

At America Fest, Vice-President Vance said this: “President Trump didn’t build the greatest coalition in politics by running his supporters through endless self-defeating purity tests. I didn’t bring a list of conservatives to denounce or de-platform, and I don’t really care if some people out there, I’m sure, will have the fake-news media denounce me after this speech.” He was attacking you, wasn’t he?

I mean, I assume that he was disagreeing with the thing that I had said, sure. And I will point out that I don’t think the Vice-President is being very accurate about his own approach to various conservatives and other people online. He’s quite fond of attacking people online from time to time.

I remember when a bunch of young Republican leaders had their Signal chat exposed and they were making all kinds of antisemitic remarks. The Vice-President didn’t denounce that either. In fact, he just thought it was, you know, kids being kids.

And again, I highly disagree with this as both a matter of morality and as a matter of tactics. I think tactically it’s foolish. I think it’s immoral.

Then what’s going on? This is so prevalent and excused at the top end of—at least part of—the conservative media sphere and the White House.

I mean, I think it’s a mirror image of what’s going on on the left. I think to pretend that antisemitism is not rising on both the right and the left is to be whistling past the graveyard. And one of the things—

Fair enough. But stick to the right, and anatomize that.

But the reason that I’m pointing this out—

Because they’re in office—

I understand, but Democrats would like to be in office. And so to go back to the original point with regard to President Trump and voting for him and not voting for him—if the question is binary choice, then you’re going to have to make a decision between one of these parties. These are the two major parties. And so that’s why I think it’s important to bring into perspective what’s happening in both parties.

But Ben, do you see antisemitism in the mouths of leading Democratic contenders for the Presidency?

I see antisemitism in the Democratic Party apparatus’s willingness to not only humor but to promote everybody ranging from New York mayor Zohran Mamdani to Rashida Tlaib, the congresswoman from Michigan, to Ilhan Omar, the congresswoman from Minnesota, to the bizarre attempt to mirror all of the excesses of the anti-Israel movement. And I don’t just mean anti-Netanyahu—I mean anti-Israel.

Listen, I asked Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, about this. I was on Gavin’s podcast, and he acknowledged that this sort of stuff has become quite prevalent in Democratic circles. So the reason that I’m pointing this out is, No. 1, because I think it’s important, just as a matter of description, to be realistic about the rise of antisemitism in the United States, period. And then I’m happy to discuss the problems on my own side of the political aisle—which I have, repeatedly.

Did the degree of antisemitism on the right take you by surprise?

Yes. The rise of it over the course of the last couple of years has certainly taken me by surprise. The willingness to aid and abet and promote antisemitic conspiracy theories has been shocking.

To understand what’s happening, I think we first have to understand what antisemitism actually is, because when people mischaracterize the definition, that allows their particular side to escape. So people tend to define antisemitism in a way that excuses their side, and that throws all of the blame on the other side. What they will say is “Well, I’m just anti-Israel, I’m not antisemitic,” or “I’m not personally antisemitic, I’m just against Jewish control of the media.”

The definition of antisemitism—antisemitism at its root—is a conspiracy theory about the power of Jews as a group in the world. And that can be channelled into an anti-Zionism that says that Israel is controlling American foreign policy, and that Israel has befuddled the world, and it’s all about the Benjamins—which is the kind of thing that Ilhan Omar says—or it can be channelled into: Jews in America are too powerful in the media and they’re cliquish and they are controlling the circumstances of my life.

And yet, Ben, as somebody who’s written from Israel and Palestine for years and years—the reaction to some of the things I write is that I’m an antisemite, which is, I’ve got to say, news to me. And so I worry that that term, which is highly potent, is slung around in a very dangerous way sometimes.

So this is why I’m trying to be more precise about the definition. Being critical of Israeli policy is not the same thing as saying, for example, that Israel’s government designed and implemented a genocide, which is a lie, and that is a lie that can be chalked up to a nefarious view of what Jews are doing in the world, because it is also part and parcel of a broader lie, which is that the Jews have then sold the idea that they’re capable of doing whatever they want under the guise of America’s banner, and they’ve done so because of their inordinate power. It’s part of a broader conspiracy theory.

This is why I’m trying to be particularistic in my definition about what antisemitism is. I think the broad definition of antisemitism as sort of a subset of racism is wrong. I think that that definition is both overbroad and under-inclusive. What you end up with is the emptying out of antisemitism as a worthwhile category that actually bears weight in American life. Much the same way that the right said, for a long time, “You keep calling everybody racist, therefore nobody’s a racist,” which is untrue, right? There are actual racists out there.

There are.

But the idea is that if you over-apply a category, then it starts losing its power and its effectiveness, and that actually opens the door to the thing. I think the same thing has happened with antisemitism. And so what I’ve said before is: instead of talking in categories of antisemitism, or Jew hatred, or the rest of it, why don’t we talk about what’s true and what’s false and what’s moral and what’s not moral, because that’s easier for people to get their head around.

Let me ask you about another extremely potent issue, not just in the Republican Party, and that’s the Epstein files. What do you think they prove or don’t prove, other than the absolute hideous nature of the subject himself?

Let’s put it this way: The virality of the narrative around the Epstein files says something different from what the evidence shows. What the evidence shows in the Epstein files is that you have a number of very high-profile people who were in close contact with Jeffrey Epstein, who was a convicted sex offender with minors. The indictments against Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell suggest that the trafficking of minors was about Jeffrey Epstein. There’s no one else who’s been indicted in terms of trafficking of minors except for Jeffrey Epstein. And, according to the F.B.I. under President Trump, there is no one who’s going to be, because they do not have sufficient evidence that he was trafficking young girls to other people.

The narrative that has been drawn from the Epstein story—because, presumably, people don’t know where his money comes from, although there was a deep dive, I believe, in the New York Times Magazine, looking into where his money came from—the narrative is a broader one that goes back to the conspiracy theorizing that has taken over large swaths of both parties, but it is very, very potent on the right. And that is that there is a cadre of people who are preying upon children, who manipulate everything in your life, who may be doing so because they have been honey-potted or because they’re being manipulated by a foreign intelligence service. On the far right, this is treated as Mossad, even though there is zero evidence that that is the case. Ehud Barak’s name is brought up in this context. As you might imagine, I’m not a fan of Ehud Barak, but there is no evidence that, on behalf of Mossad, he was running Jeffrey Epstein as a sex-trafficking agent. By the way, it’d be pretty terrible statecraft, considering that Epstein was already a convicted sex offender.

But I think that the broader theory here, which goes well beyond the evidence and the virality of that theory, speaks to people’s belief that they’re not in control of their own lives. I think this gets back to some of my original politics, that individual responsibility is the lodestar of a successful society. And when you have conspiratorialism take over, as Karl Popper suggested, it’s a massive problem.

Are Donald Trump and the MAGA movement healthy for this country? Do you see promise in the people that have been put forward as successors to Donald Trump, J. D. Vance among them?

I have differential opinions on a wide variety of these people. If the Vice-President were in a primary with Marco Rubio, I would be likely to support Marco Rubio in that primary over J. D. Vance. Are there options that I like better than others? Sure. Are there things about the Trump movement that I think have been good and salutatory? Sure. Is he my ideal? If I could construct in my head the ideal Republican candidate or President, would it look exactly like Donald Trump? No, but I’m not sure that he’s claiming to be that, nor do I have that magical power, try as I might, to manifest that in real life.

What do you think Donald Trump cares about?

I try not to get into motivations because I’m not a psychiatrist, but here’s the nice thing about President Trump. When you asked if he was honest—whatever is in his head is going to come out of his mouth in the next two-point-seven seconds. There is no brain-mouth barrier for President Trump.

That’s not so much honesty as impulsivity, no?

Well, I mean, it’s honesty in the sense that you are getting his honest take on what he thinks in that moment. It may be an impulsive approach to honesty, but there is a definition of honesty by which it serves.

It’s revealing, I’ll give you that.

It is revealing. It is authentic—if you want to call it authentic, it’s authentic. But as far as “What is the core of his political belief?” Again, I think he has an instinct that he wants America to be great and powerful in the world. He likes the symbolism of America being great and powerful in the world. America is strong, America is virile. These are things that clearly he does believe. And so the way that manifests, in policy, may be grabbing Nicolás Maduro and taking him back to New York for trial, or it may be an industrial policy that is more reminiscent of a 1937 F.D.R. policy than it is of a traditional sort of Reagan Republican policy.

Or finding more to be sympathetic about with Vladimir Putin than with Volodymyr Zelensky. It’s a pretty slippery slope.

Yeah. So when it comes to Putin and Zelensky, again, that one I cannot explain from a sort of America-great perspective. I think that the President—

Can’t you explain it? I mean, can’t you explain it in terms of: he is impressed by, taken with, the kind of authoritarian impulses and behavior of Putin? Same with Xi Jinping.

I think that he is attracted by powerful people, for sure. But he has sort of varied, fairly widely, actually, over the course of the last year and a half in terms of the things that he’s been saying on Russia-Ukraine. I’ve been very consistent that I think that we ought to be supporting Ukraine sufficiently enough to deter the Russian threat, and to force Putin to the table.

I want to ask you about Minneapolis. From a free-speech point of view, from a First Amendment point of view, should somebody like Don Lemon be prosecuted?

I mean, if what he was doing was performing an act of journalism, then the answer is no. The question is going to be whether they can prove in court that he was actually a conspirator in violation of the FACE Act.

Are you worried about Donald Trump’s regard for journalists? He’s obviously infatuated with them—he loves to talk to them. But he refers to them as enemies of the people. And, you know, as a student of history, that’s a phrase that comes from Robespierre, it comes from Stalin, and it has consequences.

I mean, he’s been doing that for ten years, and you seem to have a robust audience and the ability to speak freely every day. I don’t think that you’re sitting in your studio right now waiting for the F.B.I. to break down your door.

You think he’s just kidding around? The F.B.I. had no problem breaking down the door of a Washington Post reporter and taking all her devices recently.

And, if you go back to the Obama Administration, James Rosen was treated quite similarly when he was working for Fox News. And then the Associated Press, I think, had some situations with the Obama Administration, as well. This is why I go back to: Is Trump breaking new ground here or is he using tools that were left over from other Administrations in ways that people don’t like? I don’t like it, either. I mean, him suing various outlets, I think, is wrong and bad. Do I think that we are now facing a grave threat that the First Amendment has ended in the United States because Don Lemon was picked up by the D.O.J.? I don’t.

But Ben, sooner or later, he’s not going to like what you say, and your turn is going to come and you’re going to be deposed, and you’re going to be sued. Will that change your view of this?

Not particularly. Again, I think that it’s wrong for him to do the suing of these outlets. So I’m not sure what would change about my opinion, given that I’ve said already that I think that it’s wrong. It might hurt more, if he did it to me.

Let me get a little insight about—

You’ve noticed that I’m not excusing any of the things that I think he’s doing that are wrong.

I do.

And this is why, one of the things that I think that if people on the opposite side of the aisle actually wanted to be shooting for a better future here, which is, I think, what we would all like, it is not enough to simply rail against Trump and say this is not normal. It is why I think the people on the left should do some of the same with their own side. Much of what we’ve talked about here is me criticizing my own side. I’d say ninety per cent of what we’ve talked about is me criticizing my own side. But I find an extraordinary dearth of that, unfortunately, on the left. And I think people do react by supporting the right. And this is one of the things that I think is a huge mistake on the part of the media, is to sort of play this game where Trump does a thing, therefore it is a bad thing. People on the left do the same thing; they are opposing Trump, therefore it’s a good thing. And that seems to me completely problematic. I’m perfectly willing to, on each of these specific problems, say: if the evidence shows that Donald Trump is targeting Don Lemon—

Ben, there is no question that every President, and I’ll just say it unequivocally, every President, sooner or later, lies. Every President, sooner or later, misbehaves. We’re talking, though, about a radical difference in degree, are we not?

I mean, I really do not think so.

That’s where we disagree. A lot.

We definitely disagree on this. I think that the left routinely underestimates what’s done by the left, whereas I think I’m being pretty accurate in that I think both sides are routinely violating the rules and that’s why we are in sort of a political death spiral.

When you look at immigration policy, I think we can agree that there was no immigration policy—certainly no effective immigration policy when it came to the southern border—for far too long. And we can argue about the reasons for that, and what bill didn’t get passed, and so on. How do you feel about the way it’s being done, as dramatized by ICE in Minneapolis and elsewhere, and mass deportations, and people being shipped off to El Salvador, and the rest?

So these are two separate questions. Trump’s border policy is incredibly popular because the border was sealed on Day One, and it turns out that you didn’t need a piece of legislation to do that. Joe Biden could always have done that. In fact, even in the last couple of months while he was President, he sort of started to do that.

As far as internal policing of illegal immigration, I think that the approach taken by Tom Homan, the border czar, has been significantly better than the approach taken by the D.H.S. secretary or Stephen Miller, the President’s top adviser on these issues, which is: home in on the criminal illegal immigrants, many of whom are in the system. I think that Democrats are actually making a major mistake by not having local law enforcement coöperate with ICE in taking people who are in jail and deporting those people, or reporting them to ICE for deportation. I think that’s a huge mistake by Democrats politically, and just in terms of policy—

Well, as we’re constantly reminded, Obama deported many, many people, rightly or wrongly. It’s not as if this is some unique thing.

That’s true. I mean, you’re right, that’s been a consistent policy in the United States for a while, to deport criminal illegal immigrants. Ramping that up, I think, is both smart policy and good policy. I think that the Trump Administration’s reaction, which has been to set up quotas, or radically ramp up going after noncriminal illegal immigrants—by which I mean people who have not committed an additional crime other than crossing the border illegally—is a political mistake, and has been redounding not to the benefit of the Trump Administration. There are better ways to do it. But I think that Democrats are playing with fire in a lot of the stuff that they’ve been doing in places like Minneapolis. I think the idea that ICE agents are state-sponsored terrorism—I confronted the California governor about that, and he backed off of that.

Rhetorically.

Yes. When people suggest that ICE is Gestapo, when people are likening this to the Holocaust, I think it’s a massive . . . not only mistake, but—

Separate out the rhetoric from the behavior. What do you think of the behavior of ICE in Minneapolis? When people in the highest levels of government refer to people like Alex Pretti as a “terrorist”—you’ve heard this.

Yes. I literally came out that day and I said that that was a complete misapprehension of the situation, so far as I could tell on the tape. And I said the same thing about the characterization of Renee Good as somebody who was trying to mow down immigration officers by the bushel. I mean, it was stated by Gregory Bovino, I believe, that Alex Pretti wanted to kill as many ICE agents as possible, or border patrol as possible. And I said that that’s not true and I think that that’s wrong, which is why I’m very happy that Tom Homan, who seems to be more of an adult, has been put in charge of implementation of border policy in Minnesota.

Ben, there are a million things we could talk about and probably disagree about, but I do want to focus on one thing. You said—and I think quite rightly—earlier that the left and the right keep digging their trenches deeper and deeper and deeper. Who do you see in the conservative world who’s a potential leader who would not have these tremendous moral failings that you’ve described, who would do without the kind of rhetorical ugliness that you have denounced? Who would cast out the kind of characters that Tucker Carlson and company are encouraging?

I think there are a number of them. Glenn Youngkin, the former governor of Virginia; Brian Kemp, the former governor of Georgia. I think Governor [Ron] DeSantis in Florida has done an excellent job. I think that Senator Ted Cruz has spoken out very clearly against people like, for example, Tucker Carlson and his predations. I think Secretary of State Rubio would be really good. I’d like to see Vice-President Vance change tack on a lot of this; I hope that he will.

This is a systemic problem on both the left and the right: the primary system is very, very difficult for people who are not deliberately inflammatory to navigate. Because primary voters tend to be the most passionate voters, and that means that the people who tend to elevate are the people who are sometimes the most provocative.

The American system is built for gridlock. It’s meant to force us to generate large-scale approval in order to get major things done. You shouldn’t be able to do things with fifty-one per cent—you should have to have seventy per cent to do it. That’s why the system was built the way it is with all of the gridlock between the branches, and between the states and the federal government. And I think that the way that both the political parties—as vehicles for political victory—and also the commentariat in search of clicks and giggles have mobilized is in opposition to that. So people are getting more and more frustrated—

My concern is with the sustenance of democracy and democratic institutions. And I wonder if we share, or we don’t share, a concern that the period that we’re in now potentially lays waste to those institutions.

I’m worried about it, for sure, but I think that we may be worried about it from different angles. One of the things that I notice about democracies that sort of fall into crisis is, No. 1, lack of institutional trust. But if you believe that if the other side wins, it’s literally the end of the democracy—that is incredibly dangerous. That really is a problem. Because that suggests that if the other side wins, you’re never going to get to vote again, tyranny is upon you, and perhaps the only solution is a solution that breaks the system.

But Ben, when the President of the United States tries to threaten officials in Georgia to give him some votes, or he starts to talk about “nationalizing” the elections, all these things, whether it’s January 6th—aren’t these legitimate concerns? Is the worrier the problem, or the actual situation the problem?

Well, I mean, no. I think in some situations the worrier is the problem. It depends on the conclusion you’re drawing. I think the worry about January 6th was justified, because I think that the behavior of the President between the election and January 6th was morally wrong and also legally wrong. But I also think that the guardrails held. And the notion that Democrats are sitting around worrying that there will never be another clean election—that’s not true. And when Republicans say the same thing, Democrats are right to pounce on that. President Trump will say: if we don’t win this election, it was stolen. But then I’ll hear Democrats turn around and say very much the same thing about Republicans. And once both sides believe that if the other side wins, the election was stolen, then how are we supposed to ever share a polity together? That is a massive problem.

Now, I think that the founders built an incredible system. I think that the guardrails are incredibly strong. The reality is that our system is very much still functional. And, last I checked, Democrats are slated to win the House and possibly the Senate, so they don’t feel like this is the end of the road. ♦

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Jenin Younes rose to prominence on the right by defending medical professionals like Jay Bhattacharya who claimed that they were being censored over opposition to vaccination and masking mandates. Younes worked for the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a group described as libertarian, and appeared at events with the Federalist Society. As the political winds have shifted, she says that the Trump Administration’s attacks on free speech are worse than anything that she saw during the Biden Administration. Younes is currently the national legal director for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. David Remnick speaks with her about her unlikely trajectory and about how her commitment to free speech—regardless of which side of the aisle the issue arises from—has left her in a uniquely lonely political position.

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