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Depending on whom you ask, Nicolás Maduro is either the President, the former President, or the President turned dictator of Venezuela. In an indictment unsealed over the weekend, the Trump Administration calls him “the de facto but illegitimate ruler of the country.” But, in a Manhattan courtroom, on Monday, Judge Alvin Hellerstein wasn’t interested in Maduro’s title, formal or otherwise. He only asked what judges routinely ask federal defendants during their first appearances before a magistrate, right before they’re arraigned on criminal charges. “Are you, sir, Nicolás Maduro Moros?” the judge asked.

That’s when Maduro—dressed in navy, and wearing shackles and headphones, so that he could hear the court interpreter—stood up and, in his native Spanish, told the judge who he was and how he’d arrived inside a United States courtroom. “Soy el Presidente constitucional de la República Bolivariana de Venezuela,” Maduro responded, before explaining that the U.S. government had kidnapped him and his wife from their home in Caracas on January 3rd, and that he was invoking the protections of international treaties. “I consider myself a prisoner of war,” he said.

Judge Hellerstein interrupted Maduro and reminded him that he had asked a simple yes-or-no question. “I only want to know one thing: Are you Nicolás Maduro Moros?”

“I am Nicolás Maduro Moros,” the defendant confirmed. During her own allocution moments later, Maduro’s wife, Cilia Flores, likewise struck a note of defiance and introduced herself as the First Lady of Venezuela, her face appearing bruised and bandaged. (Later in the hearing, her lawyer indicated that she may have suffered a fracture or severe bruising to her ribs during her arrest.)

That was only the start of a simultaneously dramatic yet profoundly quotidian hearing in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, a venue long renowned for proceedings against corrupt politicians, Mafia figures, drug kingpins, and even former heads of state—such as Honduras’s Juan Orlando Hernández, who after his extradition, in 2022, was indicted, convicted, and imprisoned on federal drug-trafficking and weapons charges not unlike the ones Maduro faces. (On the week of Thanksgiving, President Donald Trump pardoned Hernández, just days after pardoning a turkey.) The Daniel Patrick Moynihan Courthouse, together with the neighboring Thurgood Marshall Courthouse, which houses the federal appeals court, has been the battleground for numerous Trump-era legal controversies across his two Presidencies. Steve Bannon, Michael Cohen, Stormy Daniels, E. Jean Carroll, Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and Eric Adams are among the figures in the President’s orbit who have sought, faced, or eluded justice, in one way or another, in these marbled halls.

Trump wasn’t a subject of the hearing on Monday, yet it was impossible to take in the spectacle of Maduro denouncing the charges against him, in open court, without considering that, for much of the past year, his beleaguered nation has been a fixation of the Administration, more so than any other country in Latin America. From the hundreds of Venezuelans unlawfully disappeared to El Salvador, under the Alien Enemies Act, to the elimination of Temporary Protected Status for Venezuelans, to the lawless strikes against Venezuelan boats suspected of carrying drugs, Trump has continuously made the South American country a target of his fury, his policies, and a not-so-secret desire for regime change and its vast oil reserves. Hellerstein is well aware of this relentless campaign, having ruled in May that the American President could not invoke the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime law, to summarily deport Venezuelan migrants, because there was no war, invasion, or predatory incursion by or against Venezuela that justified its use. (The judge is also familiar with Trump’s thirty-four-count indictment in New York, over hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels, which Trump tried to push to federal court—a bid that Hellerstein denied.)

Neither geopolitics nor the broader constitutional and international-law implications of Maduro’s arrest and prosecution were a focus of Monday’s proceedings, but Hellerstein did inform Maduro, during his initial protest, that he’d have an opportunity to bring up those big-picture arguments ahead of trial. His lawyer, Barry Pollack, who once represented the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, later made reference to the expected pretrial motions seeking to quash the indictment—characterizing them as “substantial”—including one related to the question of whether Maduro enjoys head-of-state immunity. This thorny and contested issue, among others, may well reach the Supreme Court, which, like Hellerstein, has already reminded Trump twice not to play fast and loose with the due process owed to Venezuelans accused of being alien enemies.

During Maduro’s first appearance, what truly mattered, for everyone involved, was informing him of the charges against him, which include narco-terrorism, cocaine-importation, and weapons-conspiracy offenses that harmed the interests of the United States. “I have it in my hands for the first time,” Maduro said, of the charging document, and he opted to waive his right to have it read into the court’s record. “I’d rather read it personally,” he added. When Hellerstein informed him of his constitutional rights to remain silent, and to legal counsel, among other protections, Maduro seemed to marvel at the idea that he had any rights at all. “I did not know these rights as you have informed them to me,” he said.

By forcibly bringing Maduro and his wife into the jurisdiction of the federal courts, the Trump Administration will now have to accept, if only tacitly, that at least two Venezuelans deserve the basic human right to be heard before the government attempts to take their life or liberty—something Judge James Boasberg, in Washington, concluded was not given to the hundred and thirty-seven Venezuelan men whom the White House sent to a brutal prison in a nation not their own. Or to the people murdered in the Caribbean under the pretense that mere suspicion of drug trafficking is enough to subject them to an act of war.

For all his unfamiliarity with U.S. criminal procedure, Maduro did seem keenly aware that his future may well hinge on his declaration at the outset of the arraignment that he remains the rightful President of Venezuela. At the crux of the hearing, when Hellerstein asked him how he pleaded, Maduro again veered off script. Rather than the usual “not guilty,” Maduro said, “Soy inocente. No soy culpable. Soy un hombre decente. Presidente constitucional de mi país,” which his interpreter rendered as: “I’m innocent. I’m not guilty. I’m a decent man,” and “still the President of my country.” Maduro’s wife, who also stands accused of drugs and weapons charges, also pleaded not guilty, and declared herself “completely innocent.”

Now comes the hard part of waiting for a trial that is not expected to happen for a very long time; in Hernández’s case, the lapse between his indictment and trial took roughly two years. Hellerstein scheduled a follow-up hearing for March, but Pollack noted he expects that the evidence the prosecution is now required to turn over to the defense will be “voluminous and complicated”—as if to suggest that he may seek to challenge the Trump Administration’s case on a number of fronts, as soon as he learns what the U.S. government has amassed on his client. Hellerstein, who is ninety-two, and a veteran of the federal bench, said his goal is to insure that Maduro gets a fair trial: “That’s my job, and that’s my intent.” ♦

Who is more likely to uphold journalism’s ideals of uncovering inconvenient truths, holding the powerful to account, and writing the first draft of history: a handful of decaying, unwieldy legacy news organizations or a million YouTubers?

Nick Shirley, a twenty-three-year-old YouTuber whose investigation into millions of dollars of alleged day-care fraud in Minneapolis has drawn praise from Elon Musk, J. D. Vance, and Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, might look, at first glance, like the future of journalism. In a video posted on X the day after Christmas, Shirley combines two of the foundational modes of live-streaming circa 2025—the man-on-the-street interview and the thrill-seeking adventure into an unknown and ostensibly dangerous place, whether the Mongolian Steppe or a tent encampment in Philadelphia—to produce a roughly hour-long narrative. He adopts the role of a guy who simply wants to know more about a problem, going from day-care center to day-care center in Minnesota and asking the people who work there, all of whom are of Somali origin, if they’re the ones stealing taxpayer money.

In Shirley’s most viral scene, which has been clipped and shared millions of times, he walks up to a storefront with a misspelled sign reading “Quality Learing Center.” According to Shirley’s investigative partner for the video—a man whom he refers to only as David—this day care has been licensed to care for ninety-nine children and received four million dollars in taxpayer funding. In a surreal moment, Shirley and David are confronted by a woman in the parking lot who mistakes them for federal immigration agents and starts yelling to anyone who might be inside, “Don’t open up! You have ICE here,” to which Shirley responds, “How do you have ICE here, ma’am? I’m literally a YouTuber.” The rest of the video is more of the same: Shirley walks into buildings, sometimes under the guise of trying to enroll his fictional son “little Joey” into the day care, and then interviews the people he finds there, whether workers or random passersby.

If you’re among the credulous who believe there’s no political motivation behind Shirley’s reportage, there’s a thrill to watching all this unfold, especially because Shirley presents himself as just some dude on a quest for the truth. He is quite talented in this role, for what it’s worth. The best on-camera investigators often come across as Shirley does: curious, a bit slow, and pathologically stubborn about asking the same questions over and over.

After Shirley posted the video, the Minneapolis Star Tribune visited the same day-care centers and also combed through court filings and state enforcement records. They found no evidence of fraud, although a few of the centers had incurred other violations, particularly Quality Learning Center, which, the Star Tribune notes, has been “cited for multiple safety violations.” This doesn’t mean that day-care fraud has not taken place in Minneapolis—there’s a years-long history of such malfeasance, and both state and federal law enforcement have convicted dozens of offenders, as Kash Patel subsequently pointed out. But the reason that we (and, I imagine, Shirley) know that this has been going on for a while is because local news outlets have, indeed, reported on it.

Last week, the Republican speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives said that her caucus had worked with Shirley to point out day cares to visit, a claim that raises questions about whether Shirley really was just a YouTuber on an independent search for the truth or if he could have been acting on behalf of the Minnesota state G.O.P. (On X, Shirley insisted that this was “completely false,” adding, “I have no idea who this lady is.” Over the weekend, The Intercept published a piece pointing to evidence that the man called David in the video is David Hoch, whom The Intercept identified as a “political operative with connections to the Minnesota state House.”) A few days later, the Trump Administration paused federal payments to day cares around the country, a policy that will affect countless children and families. Was this a good-faith attempt by the government to root out fraud, which they learned about from Shirley? Or are Republicans simply using this moment to cut yet another federal spending program? After all, as Patel noted, the F.B.I. had been aware of fraud in Minnesota for years.

Journalism isn’t a patent office: you don’t get credit only for being first. And Shirley, for better or worse, has shone a giant spotlight on an ongoing story, which has led to the things that journalists often want out of their stories: more of the public was informed about a problem and the powers supposedly responsible were held to account. On Monday, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who has borne much of the public blame for failing to prevent fraud in the state, announced he would not be running for a third term, saying he needed to use his time “defending the people of Minnesota against the criminals who prey on our generosity and the cynics who prey on our differences.” On X, Shirley wrote, “I ENDED TIM WALZ.”

Whether Minnesota had done enough to address that fraud can and should be a point of debate. I suppose it’s also worth asking if the story had garnered enough national attention, though I’m not sure why fraud in Minnesota would be headline news across the country. But what Shirley and his cheerleaders have suggested is that he uncovered this fraud on his own because liberals in the government and the media were covering it up. Musk spent the better part of two days reposting reactions to the video, some of them falsely claiming that nearly every prominent news organization—the Times, CNN, the Washington Post—had failed to report at all, prior to Shirley’s video, on the Minnesota fraud story. The implication was that the woke media wants to protect criminal immigrants and feckless liberal politicians, most notably Walz, who supposedly let all this take place. Musk, who owns X, wants to promote the belief that the truth can be found on social media, and that the practitioners of real journalism are allegedly independent amateurs, such as Shirley, who can ask questions without being cowed by the woke agenda.

Shirley’s video gained a lot of traction because it was promoted by some of the most powerful and followed accounts on social media—but it went mega-viral because of its form. It’s true that local and national news reported on fraud in Minnesota, but there’s nothing quite like watching a secret get revealed on video, especially if you believe that everyone is trying to suppress it. The reality is that traditional investigative journalism is a frequently boring and frustrating endeavor that takes a lot of time, money, and patience. A lot of effort is expended tracking down paperwork from public-records requests, or looking through LinkedIn profiles to find people who might have worked together, or knocking on the doors of potential sources. When the work is done and enters the world, there’s a decent chance that the reporting garners relatively little attention. Print-media outlets—at least the types of places that can still afford investigative desks—are often sclerotic, quasi-puritanical institutions that discourage their practitioners from too much self-promotion or marketing.

Television news has always had a different approach to investigative work, attempting to engineer dramatic confrontations between the person or institution under scrutiny and the intrepid reporter. Local news has dined out for decades on the spectacle of the journalist marching into the shady business and demanding why the frozen meat has been stored in a mop bucket or whatever. National networks, for their part, have produced news-magazine shows that specialize in filming similarly dramatic face-to-face encounters. (During three years as a television-news correspondent, I quickly learned that the point of everything I did was to make the person sitting across from me as uncomfortable as possible.)

In the past few years, this approach has made its way to YouTube, Twitch, and the other live-streaming sites. The vast majority of political content online is still commentary—running the full gamut from the socialist Hasan Piker to the white nationalist Nick Fuentes—but a handful of creators, like Shirley, have turned the tropes of the TV-news investigation into millions of streaming views. The style, credibility, and sanity of these programs vary wildly. Candace Owens, for example, has “investigated” everything from the assassination of Charlie Kirk to whether Emmanuel Macron’s wife is actually a man. Owens mostly does her talking from behind a desk. Shirley, though, uses techniques that resemble the popular and notorious reality show “To Catch a Predator,” from the mid-two-thousands, on which the host, Chris Hansen, would confront potential sexual predators. And he has aped the look and feel of Michael Moore’s intimate low-budget documentary “Roger & Me,” from 1989. Moore’s documentary, like Shirley’s viral video, mostly features a casually dressed man talking to people in a Midwestern city during winter. The seeming authenticity of that formula perfectly serves the social-media narrative that the truth can come only from streamers and YouTubers.

This insurrectionary narrative about the media is not restricted to the right. In the world of sports, Pablo Torre, who spent more than a decade at ESPN, has captivated fans with his own version of the video investigation. Coffeezilla, a YouTuber with more than four million subscribers, regularly “uncovers scams,” as he puts it. An important, demystifying truth has been revealed through all this: investigative journalism is mostly about persistence, and it can, in fact, be done by amateurs—sometimes carefully and well, and sometimes not. Just as the streaming and TikTok booms flooded the streets of New York City with hundreds of aspiring influencers who asked passersby what they did for a living or who rated passersby on a scale of one to ten, Shirley and his fellow independent journalists will likely inspire others to turn themselves into one-man local documentary news units.

In the week following Shirley’s viral video, a host of copycats went out to day-care facilities around the country and posted their own videos. They tended to be even less thorough than Shirley, who at least had David around to show some paperwork. Everything from blacked-out windows—which, as anyone with children in a major city knows, are common for day cares—to empty facilities on New Year’s Eve were presented as supposed proof of fraud and corruption. I imagine these gonzo investigations will propagate and that by summer we will see thousands of Nick Shirleys asking questions about small-business loans, public-school funding, and the moon landing. Some will be scrupulous; others will broker in conspiracy and flagrant lies. But most will probably look something like Shirley’s synthesis of TikTok, TV news, and Michael Moore. There is something inherently arresting about watching a poorly dressed, insistent person barging into places where they’re not invited, particularly if you think they’re uncovering something that will dovetail exactly with your political beliefs.

What’s more, the people in charge of actual institutions of power—the Vice President, the F.B.I. director, the Attorney General—seem hellbent on having Nick Shirley, or someone like him, replace the legacy media. This past weekend, Shirley and a host of other right-wing independent-media accounts shared images that allegedly showed Venezuelans in the streets celebrating the capture of President Nicolás Maduro by American armed forces. Many of these images were either A.I.-generated or taken from some other event entirely. Shirley posted a video of a handful of happy people in Miami and wrote, “World Cup style celebrations are ERUPTING all across Venezuela atm, congratulations to the people of Venezuela!”

Before we hail the glory of independent media and toss those crotchety investigative reporters and editors to the unemployment lines, I would ask again the question that began this column, slightly rephrased this time: Do a million YouTube investigators actually constitute a freer media, or are they more likely to bend with the political winds blown by the most powerful people in this country, who seem eager to prop up an endless, self-generating supply of content creators as the next fount of truth? In this media environment, the government doesn’t even have to produce its own propaganda; it simply needs to direct the public to someone who is already doing the job for them. ♦

Achilles (Alan) Akrivos was born in a working-class neighborhood of Athens, to a family of left-wing activists. His relatives had fought the Nazis during the Second World War. One of his uncles had been part of the resistance to the right-wing military dictatorship that controlled Greece between 1967 and 1974. In 1982, when Akrivos was in his early twenties, he decided to move to the United States, settling in Astoria, a mostly Greek enclave in northwestern Queens. It wasn’t really a hotbed. People would yell at him, he said, when he tried to hand out flyers advocating for an increase to the minimum wage. Around 2015, that started to change. Akrivos was a volunteer for Bernie Sanders’s Presidential campaign, and he would often talk to voters under the elevated train station at Thirty-first Street, sitting at a long table with placards and socialist literature. “For the first time, we were not getting shouted at,” he told me recently. His neighbors actually seemed curious. They were unhappy about the state of the world, the cost of things, and sometimes even with capitalism itself. “People were, like, ‘Yeah, I cannot live like this. We need to change something.’ ”

In 2023, Astoria became notable for having a democratic socialist at every level of elected government. The neighborhood elected Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Congress in 2018, and Zohran Mamdani to the State Assembly in 2020. (Back when he was still a longshot, Mamdani used to plan his mayoral run in the Astoria branch of Qahwah House, a Yemeni coffee shop.) In 2021, it elected Tiffany Cabán, an attorney endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America, to the City Council, and in 2022, it elected Kristen Gonzalez, another D.S.A. endorsee, to the State Senate. Observers of this political confluence have dubbed it the People’s Republic of Astoria, or a part of the Commie Corridor, a wider term that also includes nearby Greenpoint and Long Island City. A running joke is that candidates endorsed by D.S.A. regularly “do Assad numbers”—a reference to Bashar al-Assad, the former Syrian dictator—as if it were no contest.

How did this happen? Recently, I spoke to a half-dozen activists, campaigners, and longtime Astoria residents. “The short answer is extreme demographic change,” Akrivos told me. Astoria doesn’t have a particularly extensive history of socialism. Katya Nicolaou, another resident and left-wing organizer, said that there had been an influx of radical Greek students, like her and Akrivos, in the seventies and eighties. And Akrivos told me that in the late nineteenth century, pockets of socialist German immigrants settled in the area. (Also in the nineteenth century, a company town set up around the Steinway piano factory had elements of utopian-socialism.) But generally, in recent decades, the residents were conservative Democrats. Astoria is the fictional home of Archie Bunker, the bigoted, blue-collar guy from the nineteen-seventies sitcom “All in the Family,” who perpetually bickered with his more progressive relatives. (Bunker’s son-in-law, Mike, was a bit more woke, but probably not D.S.A.-level.) It used to be represented in Congress by Joe Crowley, an establishment Democrat, and at the State Assembly level for ten years by Aravella Simotas, a progressive but not socialist Greek American. Simotas narrowly lost a primary in 2020 to Mamdani, by around four hundred votes. Simotas told me recently that she had noticed the electorate had started to change more than fifteen years ago, even before Ocasio-Cortez’s initial victory.

What changed? Astoria, which was relatively affordable at that point, started to attract people who cared about the cost of living. Young families moved in. New immigrants continued to come, too, increasingly from the Middle East and South Asia. Stylianos Karolidis, a thirty-one-year-old D.S.A. member who grew up in Astoria, told me that new arrivals tend to be more open to D.S.A. candidates because they didn’t have a preëxisting loyalty to New York’s Democratic machine. “That makes people more open to change,” he explained. Georgia Lignou, who moved to the neighborhood in 1987, ventured that Astoria’s immigrant mix is also a bit less scared of the word “socialist.” “We come from parts of the world where socialism isn’t a curse,” she told me. Karolidis agreed. Even some of the newer Greek migrants, who are still coming to Astoria, he said, are pretty radical, thanks to the eurozone crisis.

It’s not just who arrived. Around the same time, Astoria’s conservative Democrats—the Archie Bunkers—started leaving the Party and becoming Republicans. Michael Lange, a New York elections analyst who is often credited with coining the term “Commie Corridor,” described it to me as a “perfect storm.” Astoria isn’t actually the most left-leaning neighborhood in New York. (That would be parts of Williamsburg and Bushwick, in Brooklyn, and parts of Ridgewood, in Queens.) In the general mayoral election, Lange pointed out, some parts of Astoria voted more than forty per cent for Andrew Cuomo. But those voters aren’t dominant in Astoria’s Democratic primaries anymore.

On Election Night, as the results rolled in, one graphic showed the returns for Mamdani in blue, against those for Cuomo in orange. A lot of New York was blue. Ridgewood was deep, deep navy; the Upper West Side was pale cerulean. Lange tweeted, “You can see the Commie Corridor from space.” Astoria was in the center, but it wasn’t the bluest. The Bronx, parts of which Ocasio-Cortez also represents, was about the same shade. It can be hard to disentangle Astoria from the citywide and nationwide trends of the D.S.A. But if you look at a significant part of Mamdani’s winning coalition that night—young people, renters, South Asians, and Muslims—it looked a lot like Astoria.

Last month, I took a walk around northern Astoria with Karolidis, the D.S.A. member who grew up there. As a young man, Karolidis had been a conservative Republican. “I was really on one about gentrification and affordability,” he said. “My nemesis when I was a teen was the hipster.” He saw the neighborhood change from his front door: people started calling delis “bodegas,” and diners became smoothie shops. When he was ten years old, he remembers seeing his neighbors, two women in their twenties, order FreshDirect. “I was, like, What the hell is that?” he told me. “That was a harbinger.”

Karolidis moved away from Astoria, but he found himself drawn in by the Ocasio-Cortez campaign. “I don’t think I understood what it meant to be a socialist—I just knew, these were the people doing something in my neighborhood,” he told me. He moved back, and got involved with a D.S.A. campaign to gain public control over the energy system. Within three years, he had started a socialist podcast. “I just learned an incredible amount about the economy, how the world works, and what socialism is and what Marxism is,” he said. “What is the petite bourgeoisie? It’s been a wild ride.”

Earlier in the day, I’d also met with Shawna Morlock, who had been one of the very first volunteers on Ocasio-Cortez’s primary campaign. Morlock, who was a hair stylist, had moved to Astoria a few years earlier with her husband, a restaurant manager, because it was “a place you could afford on two blue-collar salaries.” She had never worked on a political campaign. On her first-ever canvassing shift, near Astoria Park, she met Ocasio-Cortez, who, in a role-play, pretended to be a voter, and had Morlock practice pitching her. (“I was so awkward and terrible, but she was so kind,” Morlock said.) Morlock joined the D.S.A. and eventually became a full-time staffer to Gonzalez, the state senator.

“I don’t think I joined D.S.A. thinking, I am a socialist,” Morlock told me. “I joined it because they believe the same thing I believe in.” The year after Ocasio-Cortez won, Morlock campaigned for Cabán, who was running for Queens District Attorney. (Cabán lost the Democratic nomination by just fifty-five votes, and was later elected to the City Council.) One day, Morlock recalled, “I was picking up my literature to knock doors, and one volunteer was, like, ‘Thank you, comrade.’ ” I was, like, ‘O.K.? Comrade . . . I guess.’ ” As Morlock puts it, it took a few campaigns to “dis-McCarthyize” her mind. “After organizing for a couple of years, I’m, like, I’m socialist.”

Astoria can feel a bit like an island. It’s nice, a little isolated, and has good seafood. Is there something about it as a place that has made it more amenable to socialist politics? “Astoria is very accessible,” Nicolaou, the Greek left-wing organizer, told me. “People are accessible to each other.” “It’s walkable, it’s beautiful, it’s a good place to run political campaigns,” Lange told me. There is an argument that Astoria is the perfect place for one of the D.S.A.’s signature New York tactics—the canvass. “I’ve knocked all of Astoria, basically,” Morlock told me. When she rings a doorbell, people actually come to talk to her. “I’m coming back to the same people, over and over, cycle to cycle, who remember me,” she said.

In 1932, Morris Hillquit, a founder of the Socialist Party of America, coined the term “sewer socialism” to describe a kind of socialism that focusses on everyday municipal problems. Nicolaou said that a lot of the neighborhood’s older residents were impressed by young D.S.A. members who went grocery shopping for vulnerable people at the start of the pandemic. Karolidis told me a story about Mamdani, when he was a state assemblyman, supporting seniors at an affordable-housing complex near Ditmars. “Now there are dozens of older Greek seniors in this complex who love Zohran because he helped them out,” he said. The City Council office of Cabán, he added, has a reputation for being very responsive. “It’s the little things over and over,” Morlock said. Some people are “probably not familiar with D.S.A. and what it means to be a socialist,” Karolidis said, “but they see our candidates and are, like, ‘Oh, yes, I had a good experience—I like these people.’ ”

Astoria’s local outpost of the D.S.A., the Queens branch, is also known for being results-focussed and cohesive, multiple people told me. (“There’s nobody who is, like, ‘Oh, man, this candidate doesn’t know this Marxist theory,’ ” Lange said.) Years of winning elections have reinforced that approach, and helped members bond outside politics. The New York City chapter of D.S.A. has a run club and a thriving parents’ group called Comrades with Kids. (Diana Moreno, who was recently endorsed by Mamdani to take over his State Assembly seat, is a loyal member of the parents’ group chat.) In Astoria, normie Democrats wind up getting converted. Morlock told me about a friend of hers from the neighborhood. “When we first met, I remember her being, like, ‘Oh, I love Kamala Harris or Cory Booker,’ ” she said. Now that friend sends Morlock communist memes. “Really, really hard-core anti-capitalist things,” Morlock said. Why did that happen? “This mom—she is struggling to afford the things that used to be easy,” Morlock said. “Our kids are seen as an afterthought. Our elected leaders don’t give a shit. Everybody’s fucking pissed!” Lignou, one of the longtime Astoria residents, told me, “Astoria attracted many people because it was very humane. You can save and raise a family. Then everything became very expensive. It was a very good example of what capitalism does.”

On a recent evening, I pushed open the door of the Syllogos Kreton Minos, a community club for the Cretan diaspora in northern Astoria, to attend a Greek music night, run by Nicolaou. I was looking forward to quizzing long-term Astoria residents about the recent leftward turn. “The Greek left loves this kind of music,” Nicolaou had told me, referring to a genre called rebetiko, which she described as a Greek version of the blues. Inside, there were a few Christmas decorations, and some older Cretan men played endless rounds of cards in the corner. I was early, so I started eating a large plate of pork kleftiko, a dish of meat and red and green peppers, braised with oregano and olive oil. Slowly, the musicians set up and the tables around me started filling. Akrivos, the Athenian from a political family, was picking at a plate of fried whiting, and I was handed a shot glass of grappa mixed with honey by Barbara Lambrakis, a seventy-five-year-old woman who has lived in Astoria since she was thirteen. Lambrakis was very excited to tell me that she owned an apartment building near where Mamdani lived. “Even though I do own rent-stabilized apartments, I support him, believe it or not,” she said.

I was sitting next to Maria Lymberopoulos, a seventy-five-year-old woman who has lived in Astoria for fifty years. Lymberopoulos told me she thinks of herself more as a liberal, but since 2019 she had consistently voted for D.S.A. candidates. She’s not interested in the “socialist” label. (Mamdani, she said, reminded her of a young Barack Obama.) “I believe in the social issues we have—everything is expensive. They’re concerned about the things the average person needs.” There wasn’t much difference between her idea of liberalism and Astoria’s idea of socialism, she said. “Maybe, when you get older, your mind opens up more,” she told me. “And you’re ready to accept what your grandson or the young neighbor is doing.”

In the meantime, Nicolaou and a friend had started dancing. Akrivos was noodling on a bouzouki. Over the music, Lymberopoulos made sure to tell me that most Greek people in Astoria weren’t this leftist. Earlier, I’d also spoken to a man in his late sixties, named Dimitris, whom someone had described to me as an “old-school Greek communist.”(Dimitris declined to give his last name. “They have memories of McCarthy,” Nicolaou said.) Dimitris told me proudly that, in the early nineties, the former general secretary of the Greek Communist Party had visited Astoria, and he’d met him; his friend showed me a photo on his phone. Dimitris was grateful for the socialist wave, but he wasn’t fully impressed. “I wouldn’t call them socialists,” he said of Astoria’s younger residents. “As Marx put it, all the crucial sectors of the economy—they are supposed to belong to the people. I didn’t hear any of those candidates proposing something like that.” Of Ocasio-Cortez, he told me, “She’s not a Marxist. Anybody can say ‘I’m a socialist.’ It’s become fashionable to.”

A few days earlier, on my walk with Karolidis, we’d gone to look at his old family home. He had told me it was a very obvious metaphor for Astoria. We walked down Ditmars Boulevard, past Karolidis’s old elementary school, and onto Sound Street, a strangely cut-off street that hits the highway. Karolidis had grown up in a low-slung duplex. His family lived on the left side; his father ran a food truck and stored it in the garage. When Karolidis was sixteen, his father died. His mother had to sell the house, and the family moved to Jamaica, Queens. A few years later, their half was redeveloped. The new owner added another story, and then subdivided it into apartments. Standing on the street, we gossiped about how funny it looked. The right side, which hadn’t been renovated, had a classic triangular roof that ended suddenly as it hit the new story of apartments, which shot straight up. “It used to be one—it looked normal,” Karolidis said. “You can see what I mean,” he said.

I asked Karolidis how he thought his sixteen-year-old self, the conservative Republican, would have reacted if he’d told him that, one day, people would be calling his neighborhood the People’s Republic of Astoria. He warned me that the term was very “Twitter-born.” He could imagine his teen self getting angry over it. Now he appreciated it. Since he’d been forced to move out of Astoria all those years ago, he’d grown up, met someone—a transplant from the Midwest—moved back, joined the D.S.A., campaigned for public power over electricity, and quit his old job. Astoria had changed a lot but also stayed the same. Socialists, he pointed out, had been elected in Astoria for almost ten years, and the place was still quite nice. “I feel very positive about that term now,” he said. “The People’s Republic, or the Commie Corridor—the people own it.” ♦

Hello, parents! We here at Davenport Brewery pride ourselves on being family-friendly, despite selling a product that children are legally barred from consuming, which we always kind of assumed meant that we would attract an exclusively adult clientele. But I guess we were wrong about that, and we are thrilled that so many of you are deciding to bring your young children with you on your weekend-afternoon trips to our taproom. Seriously, just thrilled about it—all of us! Even that one bartender who you swore kept giving you dirty looks after your toddler dumped three bowls of our complimentary mini-pretzels on the floor and started stomping them into pretzel dust, inspiring all of the other toddlers at the brewery to do likewise. In fact, especially that one bartender!

That said, we’ve decided to institute the following rules regarding the conduct of children to help make us even more thrilled that you keep deciding to bring them with you in quantities that cause us to question whether all of those statistics about declining birth rates are actually true. Please insure that your offspring follow these guidelines on your next visit:

• Children must be supervised at all times.

• Supervised by you, just to be clear. Not by the waitress—currently carrying a tray of very full pint glasses and curly fries over to the bachelor party at table nineteen—who you think looks trustworthy enough.

• We know that many of our beers have extremely child-friendly labels featuring unicorns, kittens, and rainbows, but we cannot stress enough that this does not mean that your children are allowed to drink them. We’re honestly not sure why we’re allowed to put these types of images on our beers, either, but here we are.

• Families are free to sit wherever space is available but are strongly encouraged to set up shop in our new Family-Friendly Fun Zone, conveniently located at the Sandcastle Playground, seventeen blocks away.

• The rocks at our brewery are meant to be just rocks. They should not be thrown, jumped off, eaten, screamed at, or otherwise befouled.

• We’re as impressed by your children’s creativity as you are, but the cornhole and giant Jenga we set up in the courtyard are meant to be used for playing cornhole and giant Jenga, not a new game your children invented that seems to mainly involve hiding the beanbags and bricks under cars and yelling at each other about who is doing it best.

• Parents are under no obligation to explain the rules of this beanbag-and-brick-hiding game to us. In fact, they are strongly discouraged from doing so.

• Our chairs are for sitting on, not for constructing elaborate forts. And, if you happen to have an architecturally gifted child who makes a chair fort that genuinely looks pretty cool, he should at least let our manager crawl in and check it out instead of telling her that no adults are allowed.

• The brewery’s ball pit is meant to be an incisive commentary on our generation’s tendency to enjoy the trappings of adulthood—such as consuming alcohol—without fully committing to the responsibilities that are supposed to come with them, such as parenthood. Please explain this to your children if they get confused and think that the ball pit is something they should be able to play in.

Thank you in advance for following these rules. If you break them, we regret to inform you that we will have to ask you to leave just as soon as one of us can figure out how to get a young child to do anything we say.

Oh, and if anyone ever tells you that this place stays open past 4 P.M., just ignore them. They’re lying. ♦

The New Yorker staff writer Jon Lee Anderson joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the U.S. military operation that captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and brought him to the United States to face narco-terrorism charges. They talk about the unprecedented nature of the raid, the shaky intelligence and legal rationale behind it, and what the operation reveals about the Trump Administration’s increasingly coercive approach to the region. They also examine what “running” Venezuela could look like in practice—from leaving Maduro associates in power to exploiting the country’s oil reserves—and how the intervention may reverberate across Latin America.

This week’s reading:

“Regime Change in America’s Back Yard,” by Jon Lee Anderson

“Who’s Running Venezuela After the Fall of Maduro?,” by Jonathan Blitzer

“The Folly of Trump’s Oil Imperialism,” by John Cassidy

“The Brazen Illegality of Trump’s Venezuela Operation,” by Isaac Chotiner

“Can the U.S. Really ‘Run’ Venezuela?” by Caroline Mimbs Nyce

Tune in to The Political Scene wherever you get your podcasts.

Donald Trump has promised to “run” Venezuela after ordering, with scant legal basis, a military operation that killed at least eighty people, some of them civilians, and involved the seizure of Venezuela’s President, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores. On Monday, in New York City, Maduro and Flores pleaded not guilty to drug trafficking and other criminal charges. Trump has repeatedly said that he intends to exert control over Venezuela to allow American oil companies to profit. The Venezuelan opposition is led by María Corina Machado, who won the Nobel Peace Prize last year, but Trump has seemingly lost interest in her—he recently claimed that she “doesn’t have the support” in Venezuela—and instead favors Maduro’s Vice-President, Delcy Rodríguez, who has been elevated to replace him. In Caracas, on Monday, the National Assembly met and unveiled a portrait of Maduro and Flores, suggesting a degree of continuity. (The Financial Times reported that, last year, Rodríguez and her brother had held secret talks with the United States about a “post-Maduro future.”)

I recently spoke by phone with Javier Corrales, an expert on Venezuelan politics who is a professor of political science at Amherst College. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how Maduro ruled Venezuela, how the opposition to his regime was viewed inside the country, and what Trump really wants to see happen.

How would you describe the Maduro regime as it existed a couple of days ago? And how would you say that regime changed over the course of his nearly thirteen years in power?

Maduro made it to the Presidency because of a decision by Hugo Chávez, a very popular and populist President who became semi-dictatorial. But, the moment Maduro came in, he started to lose popularity, which prompted him to become even more autocratic than Chávez. During the first six or seven years of his administration, his regime became a paradigmatic example of what we call autocratization. You start out with some democratic liberties—not a lot—and then you gradually tighten the regime in order to acquire more power and become more repressive. The way that he has maintained support within his inner circle relies on traditional autocratic practices—the usual propaganda, terror, espionage, torture, control of the media—and also on Maduro granting the military special business contracts and lucrative opportunities, and allowing many of his collaborators to engage in illicit economic activities.

How do you describe Chávez’s government and how it changed over time? And do you view Maduro’s quick loss of popularity as being a result of Chávez having made mistakes that manifested themselves in the Maduro era, or a result of Maduro going in a different direction than Chávez—not just more authoritarian, but in ways that lost him popular support?

What Chávez did was a little bit original, but since his time we have seen the model repeated elsewhere. He was a classic left-wing populist with a military background, which for Latin America is not that unusual. He had an anti-democratic background, too—he staged a coup that failed—but, later, he decided to run for office and he was seen as this populist savior. And he used that popularity to basically overhaul the most important institutions of governance. Using his popularity, his referenda, his ability to win elections, he started to change the constitution to give himself more power and to take power away from other groups. He started to expand the use of decrees. He turned his ruling party into a rubber stamp.

He began to apply a lot of intimidation against members who had initially supported him, then turned against him. Once he consolidated full control of his movement, he began to treat the opposition exactly the same way. But, in the very beginning, he lucked out, because as he was acquiring more powers and becoming more dictatorial and more oppressive toward internal critics and outside opponents, he experienced an oil boom from 2003 till about 2008 or 2009. The price of oil skyrocketed right around the Iraq War. And this gave the government so much money that he was able to co-opt almost every sector of society, all the way from business élites and military leaders to the middle classes and the poor. And so we see a combination of a President engaging in a huge consumption boom while simultaneously becoming autocratic.

That was Chávez, who was President from 1999 until his death, in 2013. Maduro comes in and the economic boom is over—the price of oil drops. The state is incredibly inefficient, it has too many liabilities. And so, in many ways, Maduro doesn’t enjoy the economic instruments that Chávez had at his disposal to co-opt people. That’s one reason he loses popularity. The second reason is he makes a number of important mistakes. He intensifies price controls. He takes nationalizations even further at a time when most Venezuelans were, like, “Enough with these policies.” And so he experienced a very serious decline and he panics and then starts to become more authoritarian.

As you think about how the Maduro regime developed during his time in power, in addition to becoming more autocratic, I’m wondering how much it centered on him. We can think of autocratic governments that are more cults of personality and others that are not. One example of the former was Argentina after the Peróns, which was led by a junta. I’m thinking specifically about what this will mean if Maduro’s loyalists continue running the country.

I think you’re making an important distinction. Chávez was so popular that he didn’t need to trade as many favors. Since Maduro didn’t have that type of popular appeal, he relied on forms of coöperation. He would say to his inner circle, “You have to be very loyal to me and I am in command. I am in command the way a C.E.O. is in command of a corporation, but I will, in return, give you all autonomies to run whatever unit of this system you’re going to be in charge of. So if you are doing military affairs, you get plenty of autonomy. If you are running the oil sector, you get plenty of autonomy. If you are a governor, you get plenty of autonomy.” This is how he did it. What occurs is that they’re all loyal to the main guy because the main guy is giving all these groups significant institutional autonomies. It’s almost like a king and an aristocracy in which the nobles have enough leeway to run things as they see fit.

So it’s not exactly a vertical system, like when Fidel Castro was in office, or when Stalin was in office. It’s a confederacy, in the sense that there is a central government, but the different federations have enormous leeway. That is why the regime doesn’t collapse when the top leader gets removed from it, because what you have is a leader with ancillary institutions and fiefdoms operating on their own.

This suggests that if what the Trump Administration wants is to have a more pliant government that gives oil concessions to the U.S., but can keep the country relatively stable in the short or medium term, then that’s a real possibility because the government will continue as it was before, to some degree.

That is correct. It depends on what concessions Trump is going to demand. One of the most important ones is that he wants to give more access to major American oil companies and bring them into the Venezuelan oil business. You don’t need regime change in Venezuela to get that. This is something that Maduro was already willing to grant, and I think the current leaders of Venezuela are all ready to provide it because this does not require regime change. And they had already made the decision that it had been kind of crazy for the regime to move away from the U.S. market. So they were already pretty ready to do this. If the only thing that Trump demands is more access to oil assets in Venezuela, that is something that Delcy Rodríguez and the rest of the regime will easily provide.

Do you see Rodríguez as an important figure going forward? What was her role under Maduro?

She was a very close and trusted political ally of Maduro and, as such, she had plenty of autonomy. She was running a number of affairs. She was Vice-President. She was running the oil business. She was in charge of relations with the private sector. Her brother was in charge of the legislature. They were perfect examples of what I was describing. They were very loyal, but they had quite a bit of autonomy. And, in many ways, she introduced important things that one would not have seen—policies, for example, that Maduro perhaps would have never implemented himself.

She has inherited a lot of power. Now, my only caveat with what I am saying is, every time you remove the strong man from any system, even this confederacy that I have described, you will inevitably have a discussion within the inner circles about who should really go next, who is more qualified, who has the better idea. I’m not sure if she’s going to survive an internal power struggle, if it emerges.

How would you describe the Venezuelan opposition, which is led by María Corina Machado? She won the Nobel Peace Prize, and it seems like the Trump Administration may have lost interest in her. There’s some reporting, from the Washington Post, about how her winning of the Peace Prize, which Trump thought was his, may have caused some resentment.

The Venezuelan opposition has been expanding significantly in Maduro’s time, but here is the problem. The government increased the number of obstacles to undermine the competitiveness of elections, the ability to run an organized campaign, and this has included not just terrible regulations, but arrests and prohibitions. Most members of the opposition started to basically give up on running because they were, like, “The cards are so stacked against us.” What Machado did in 2024, which is really extraordinary, is she changed her mind, and the United States helped. She was convinced that it made sense to compete even if the rules were stacked against them. And she was able to mobilize the most effective electoral campaign against an authoritarian regime that we have seen in a very, very long time. And she not only wins but she wins massively.

Just to be clear, she was barred from running herself.

Yes, her first choice for candidate was also barred from running, which gave her very little time to pick somebody else, and then she selected Edmundo González. Everybody in Venezuela who voted in that election for González was voting for her, though. Even the government said this.

So do you view that as her having some independent power base, or is it more that she was just the alternative to an unpopular government? Is there a unified opposition that you view as having a real power base and ideological component that one can grab onto?

Machado became a folk hero of the Venezuelan opposition between late 2023 and 2024. She has always been around, and she has a past that many people have criticized.

How so?

There were moments when she was very extremist in not wanting to make agreements with other members of the opposition. She was very hard-line, very intransigent. She was, like, “With this regime, we just are never going to negotiate anything.” And many folks thought that that was a type of dogmatism and inflexibility that was not productive. She also has very market-oriented economic policies. She wants widespread privatizations that not a lot of people want.

But she changed approaching the 2024 elections and she built a spectacular coalition. She was able to, for the first time, really gather a massive movement. Contrary to what President Trump said, the respect that Machado enjoys both in Venezuela and abroad is unrivalled in the history of the opposition to Chavismo.

Left-wing figures in Latin America have often used anti-Americanism politically, in many cases for good reasons since America has been supporting coups and attempting coups right up to the present day. How much of the politics of Chávez and Maduro was based on anti-Americanism? And is it a problem for Machado that, if she is ever going to take power, it seems like she’s going to have to kiss up to Trump and be seen by the White House as someone that they can control, and therefore, because of the association with the U.S. and what the U.S. has done in Venezuela, will become more toxic?

In America, and in the world, anti-U.S., anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist sentiment is always very strong, but this is a very important thing to keep in mind: it is also a tool that autocrats use to justify their worst excesses. There’s a very strong correlation with the rise of autocracy and human-rights abuses and bad governance and the increase in anti-American discourse. We see it everywhere. This is not coincidental. Most Venezuelans who are smart recognize that this is a rhetorical device. It works with a small group of ideologues. But it’s not the main reason for the appeal. It’s very important that we understand that this is what they tell themselves to rationalize their autocratic practices.

In terms of Machado being too aligned with Trump, I think this is a fair criticism. I understand why she did it. She felt very isolated internationally, and she felt that nobody was really helping. And, from the very beginning, Trump promised that he was really, really, really, really going to help. If you feel that your country has been hijacked, you have a tendency to choose the person who promises to carry out bold actions. But it is true that Trump is very unpopular and that Machado probably made a mistake and she has paid a price for it. And now she has been betrayed by Trump. It is one thing to be anti-American, but it’s another thing to become too close to a President who is so incredibly polemical. But, in terms of her standing in Venezuela, I don’t think it has affected her that much.

In terms of Trump, though, it’s not that he’s polemical. He just bombed the country and says he will run it and take the oil. No country wants to hear that or experience that from a foreign nation, whether they are leftist and anti-capitalist or not.

No, absolutely not. Most of the justifications that Trump has given are incredibly unpopular, even among the opposition. Of course, the opposition is very grateful that Maduro is gone. But as a defense of what was done, one has to say that Trump’s was one of the worst possible speeches. The justifications that were given are things that most members of the opposition would be embarrassed to be hearing. These were not things that are part of what the opposition ever wanted: to talk about “We’re going to be there and we’re going to be running things and we’re going to be taking all the oil and we’re going to be keeping the rest of the Chavista regime in place.” Any sensible speechwriter would have seen that—if it was part of any script—and said, “These are going to be statements that are going to fray the coalition that we’re trying to build.”

Right, but even talking about sensible speechwriters feels like it’s in a different universe. Trump doesn’t care about any coalition, and doesn’t care about anyone in Venezuela. My concern would be that people on the ground in Venezuela—and if they feel like celebrating Maduro’s fall, I certainly would never judge that—don’t realize the degree to which literally none of these considerations matter at all to Trump.

A very fair point. I think there are many members of the Venezuelan opposition who are not used to a President who really doesn’t care about the same values that they care about. There has always been the belief that the U.S. President defended many different objectives in foreign policy, but that the promotion of democracy, good governance, and rule of law were there. It may not be a priority, but it’s always there. And I think what happened on January 3rd, and especially the statements made by Trump where he has been so transparent about what he really cares about, came as a shock to many people who have always refused to believe what for many of us has been very obvious for many years now—that he really is a President who only cares about acquisition, acquisition, acquisition for himself, dressed up as patriotism. ♦