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On Tuesday, June 17th, Nancy Urizar was at her job working in the fund-raising department of a Jesuit boys’ high school in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts when her phone rang. “It was just a normal day for me,” she said. “It was twelve, and I had just come back from lunch.” On the other end of the line was her father’s landlord. Some friends of her dad’s had come over, the landlord told her, and they were asking for her phone number. Since June 6th, when two significant raids on undocumented immigrants in Los Angeles marked the beginning of an escalation of operations by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, it has been a time of fear and anxiety. “She didn’t want to open the door because she was scared,” Urizar told me. But the friends turned out to be colleagues of her father, Francisco Urizar, who worked delivering Mission-brand products, including tortillas, to local grocery stores. “She was, like, I have your dad’s friends and they’re saying that they saw—I think, on the news or on social media—that there was a video, and it was my dad that got taken,” Urizar said. “I’m, like, in shock. I’m, like, stop playing this joke on me. It’s not funny.”

The video was recorded by a bystander at a Food 4 Less grocery store in the city of Pico Rivera in eastern L.A. County at nine-thirty that morning. It shows a parked yellow box truck with a homemade-looking paint job, next to which stands a group of immigration agents dressed in camouflage, helmets, and flack jackets, and holding what appear to be rifles. They wear neck buffs pulled up to hide their faces, sunglasses, and gloves, and are laden with tactical gear, as if in a combat zone and not a suburban parking lot. Francisco Urizar has been interrupted mid-delivery and, flanked by two of the agents, waits next to a dolly stacked with boxes of food. As the person recording comes closer to the scene, some bystanders shout out advice: “¡No diga nada!” (“Don’t say anything!”); “¡Hasta que tiene un lawyer presente no diga nada!” (“Until you have a lawyer present don’t say anything!”) Francisco wears a blue baseball cap and has a mustache. As the agents lead him to the back seat of a white Customs and Border Protection S.U.V., he glances back anxiously at his truck and the tortillas. “Fucked up, man,la migra,” the person recording says, as he walks closer and zooms in. Other bystanders have harsher words for the agents. “I hope you guys are fucking happy! Go home, fuck your wives,” a woman yells at them. “And you, too, fucking Captain Underpants. You think you’re fucking happy about the little uniform you got going on?” Then the video ends.

I had first seen an Instagram post about Francisco Urizar’s detention on the account of an immigrant-advocacy group called Siempre Unidos L.A., less than two hours after it was reported to have happened. Since June 6th, videos of masked federal agents detaining immigrants across Los Angeles County have been appearing on social media every day. Under state law, the Los Angeles Police Department and other local law-enforcement agencies are limited from assisting federal immigration enforcement, and many municipal governments, having declared themselves sanctuary cities, claim to be in the dark about the time and location of specific federal immigration actions. (In a response to a request for comment, the Department of Homeland Security said that it had alerted the L.A.P.D. two days before beginning theICEoperation in L.A. However, an L.A.P.D. spokesperson said that the department does not receive advance or real-time information about specific raids.) As such, the videos, often captured by bystanders and then aggregated by activist groups or local-news accounts, have become a primary record of what is going on; the federal government is not offering detailed information about where people are taken. One organization, the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, estimates that between five and six hundred people have been detained in the greater Los Angeles area since June 6th. The estimate is “not scientific,” Jorge-Mario Cabrera, the organization’s communications director, told me, adding, “Our approximation is based on the numbers of folks who get reported by the public, the media, and people who call our hotline.” TheICEagents knock on doors, but they have also been detaining people at L.A. bus stops, gas stations, car washes, food trucks, Walmarts, and Home Depots.

After Urizar told the landlord to share her phone number, her father’s colleagues called her and asked if she had a set of keys to his truck, which was still sitting in the loading zone of the grocery store. She didn’t. Unsure of what to do, she left work and called her younger sister, Francis, as she drove fourteen miles to the Food 4 Less. When Urizar arrived, Francis was already there, crying. Urizar, who is thirty years old, felt a responsibility to keep it together.

Urizar told me this the next morning over a waffle at Pancake Corner, a diner in South Gate, the city in southern L.A. County where she lives. She had been up since five in the morning, she said, and looked fatigued but calm. She told me that she had turned to her Christian faith to sustain her through the crisis. “I’m holding on to God’s word,” she said. “Whatever is God’s will, it’s going to be good, and it’s going to be his will, and that gives me peace, that gives me hope, and, honestly, that’s the thing that’s calming me down.” We waited until a server wearing a uniform poured us coffees, and then Urizar talked about her father.

Francisco Urizar, who is sixty-four years old, came to the United States from Guatemala more than thirty years ago, she told me, fleeing the civil war and looking to earn money to support four children left behind in his native country. After arriving, he met Nancy’s mother, who is from Honduras, and had two more children, Nancy first, and then Francis two years later.

“He had a drinking problem when I was younger,” Urizar said. “So he had a domestic-violence report, and we were separated.” (The case was later dismissed.) Because of her parents’ custody arrangement, from the age of eight until she was eighteen Urizar saw her father only once a week. But after her parents’ marriage ended, she said, he turned his life around. “He just solely focussed on working,” she said. “Working to clean his record, working to sustain his family in Guatemala and to sustain us—he’s just been working all his life. And now he lives by himself, has no wife, has no other kids, and he just has me and my sister here.” She had no idea if her father was targeted because her mother had once sought a restraining order or if he was racially profiled, as some of those stopped by immigration agents in recent days appear to have been. (The Department of Homeland Security told me in a written statement, “DHS enforcement operations are highly targeted, and officers do their due diligence.” It also said, “Any claims that individuals have been ‘targeted’ by law enforcement because of their skin color are disgusting and categorically FALSE.”)

“He made mistakes,” she said, “but they’re old mistakes, like twenty-plus-years-old mistakes.” And while she said that he may not have been a good husband, she considered him a devoted father. “I’ve always loved my dad,” she told me. “He’s, like, a great dad, he’s the best dad, and I’m not just saying that because he’s my dad, but he’s such a good dad. Like, everything I have is because of my dad.”

In Los Angeles in recent weeks, a popular phrase has been revived on protest signs and social-media posts: “Solo el pueblo salva al pueblo,” or, “only the people can save the people.” In L.A., although the city and county law-enforcement agencies are restricted from assistingICE, they are not working to actively impede the federal agents, either. Local groups and nonprofits have taken on the task of not only documenting the raids but also teaching people how to protect themselves. The most prominent of these is the Community Self-Defense Coalition, a network of more than sixty advocacy groups, including Black Men Build, the Harriet Tubman Center for Social Justice, and the local chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace. It was formed in February, in the early days of the second Trump Administration, after documents leaked to the L.A.Timesindicated plans for a “large scale” immigration enforcement action in the city.

At six in the morning last Saturday, Ron Gochez, a teacher at a public high school, got in the front passenger seat of an S.U.V. parked outside a laundromat in Los Angeles’s South Central neighborhood. Gochez is an organizer for Unión del Barrio, a nonpartisan political group that is part of the Community Self-Defense Coalition and advocates for the rights of Mexican Americans and other people of Latin American descent. (The driver, a volunteer in a medical mask, asked not to be identified.) “Welcome to South Central Los Angeles,” Gochez said, as we rolled out of the parking lot, passing a street sign that had been graffitied with the words “Dump Trump.” “That’s how our community feels,” Gochez said. The two were part of the Unión del Barrio community patrol, whose aim is to monitor—and warn the neighborhood about—the presence of federal agents. During the past two weeks, the patrol had been sending cars out every morning.

A few minutes earlier, a dozen volunteers, mostly women, had gathered in a circle in the parking lot; most wore black pants and green hoodies printed with the profile of a Mexica eagle warrior, the Unión del Barrio emblem. The group had distributed walkie-talkies and placed magnets on their cars which bore the Unión insignia and read “PROTECTING COMMUNITIES FROM ICE & POLICE TERROR” in English and Spanish. There were also flyers to inform residents of numbers to call if they saw vehicles characteristic of those traditionally dispatched byICE: U.S.-made models such as Ford Explorers or Chevy Tahoes with ultra-dark tinted windows, police gates separating the front seats from the back, and, at times, dealership placards or no license plates.

In the course of the next hour, we zigzagged through the blocks of South Central, a densely populated and predominantly Latino neighborhood just south of downtown L.A. We alternated between residential streets and commercial ones, with car garages, restaurants, and barber shops. With the exception of a few Mexican bakeries, most of the businesses were closed. Gochez and the driver looked for particular tells: parking in the neighborhood is scarce so the agents’ vehicles are often double-parked; their car engines are frequently running. If the community patrollers come across a suspicious vehicle, they’ll try to get the driver to crack open the window; then, if the people inside the car won’t confirm their identities, the patrol will try to see if they’re wearing any badges. They will monitor a suspicious vehicle from a distance until it leaves the area.

If the patrollers can confirm the presence ofICEagents, they will post alerts on social media, or drive through nearby streets with a megaphone telling people to stay inside and not answer the door if they are at risk. Most days they have no encounters, but Gochez takes solace in knowing that the agents must be aware that the neighborhood is watching them. That morning, there were no confirmed sightings ofICE, only a white Ford Transit van with tinted windows that had eventually left the neighborhood. The same could not be said for the rest of Los Angeles. Unión del Barrio, which has more than three hundred thousand followers on Facebook and ninety thousand on Instagram, maintains a tip line and receives hundreds of messages and calls every day. “If we had ten people taking calls it wouldn’t be enough,” Gochez said.

On June 7th, the Trump Administration deployed the California National Guard to Los Angeles, followed the next week by seven hundred U.S. marines, announcing that they would protectICE.(When asked if the military had been aidingICEin its operations, the Department of Defense referred me to a June 9th press release that described the military’s local mission as “protecting federal personnel and federal property in the greater Los Angeles area.”) The F.B.I. and federal marshals, among other agencies, have also been deputized to assist in detaining undocumented immigrants. Under these circumstances, registering the presence ofICEand C.B.P. vehicles, agents, and detentions has become something of a local sport, at times an overzealous one—I saw one TikTok of a woman in the city of El Monte painting inspirational quotes on her car, a white Dodge Durango with tinted windows, after people kept mistaking her for a Fed.

The public reaction to the presence of theICEagents is often hostile. One morning, I followed a Unión del Barrio alert to an Army Reserve center in the city of Bell, which, that morning, immigration agents were using as a staging area. A veritable hive of officials with covered faces was loading into a fleet of American-made vehicles with temporary license plates and dark windows, and rolling out into the city for their day of work. Outside, helpless to stop them, someone pulled up and simply leaned on his horn. Others tried to block the driveway with their cars, but the agents had another exit. One person shouted profanities. In the video of Nancy Urizar’s father, the anger of the strangers observing what was happening in the parking lot is also palpable. “Fuck every single one of you motherfuckers,” one person says. “Fuck every single one of you.” The protests againstICEin Los Angeles have been nearly continuous since June 6th, including outside hotels suspected of lodging agents; Pico Rivera erupted in protest the night of Francisco Urizar’s detention.

The videos of detentions posted by bystanders, which are usually time-stamped, are often similar: they tend to show men in camouflage and tactical gear, their faces obscured by neck buffs, detaining primarily Latino men. Many of the videos seemed to have been filmed in the Gateway Cities, a patchwork of small municipalities situated along L.A. County’s southeastern border, where two million people live in mostly working- and middle-class neighborhoods. The detained person is often familiar to the person recording, who might identify him as a fruit vender, or the guy who sits with his dog on a particular bench. As the person is detained, the one recording will sometimes try to get his name, before he is lost in the system.

In one video, verified by the local news siteL.A. Taco, Jason Devora, the owner of a food stand called Jason’s Tacos, in East L.A., narrates as he arrives at his business after it was raided and several people were detained. In the video, the meat for the tacosal pastorstill turns on the abandonedtrompo. “This is not a joke—they just took all my employees,” Devora can be heard saying. “It’s crazy.” (L.A. Taco, which covers local news as well as L.A.’s taco scene, has also reported on the shutdowns of some of the city’s most beloved food trucks and street stands, and of children taking over the restaurants of their parents, as workers stay home out of fear.) Another video circulating last week showed immigration agents attempting to detain a U.S. citizen named Brian Gavidia as he was walking home. (Gavidia was released.)

Some legal observers describe what is happening as “disappearances,” with days passing before detainees show up in any public government record, at which point they may already be held out of state. “With some—based on the reports that we’re getting—we can’t do much, as they have already been deported or been sent to Texas,” Cabrera, of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, told me, adding that the organization had received thousands of calls since June 6th. “Some we just don’t know where they’re at—we keep getting reports that folks are missing.”

Through theCLEANCarwash Worker Center, an advocacy organization that works with car-wash workers and other immigrant laborers, I was connected with a woman who works selling flowers with her brother. (Because of her own immigration status she requested that I not use her name.) She is forty-five years old and immigrated to the United States from Oaxaca, Mexico, in 1999; her brother followed more than a decade later. She told me that on Monday, June 9th, in the L.A. neighborhood of Inglewood, her brother went out to buy tortillas and cheese and never came home. “We had no news of him for several days and couldn’t find him,” she told me in Spanish.

Desperate for information, she and her nineteen-year-old daughter distributed letters to houses nearby that had home-security cameras, asking if anyone had footage of him. Someone soon responded. In the security video she received, which is time-stamped shortly after ten in the morning, the camera records a driveway, empty sidewalks, and the lawns of single-family homes. Two agents—both unmasked and dressed in plainclothes, one with a vest labelled “police”—hold the arms of a third man, presumably the brother, whose hands are cuffed in front of him. The agents sit the man down on the sidewalk until, within seconds, an unmarked white van with darkened windows arrives. The driver and two agents put the man into the back seat and then drive away.

On Thursday, June 12th, she finally had contact with her brother. She learned that he was at the AdelantoICEProcessing Center., in Adelanto, California—a two-hour drive from Los Angeles—where many people detained in the recent raids are being held. Her brother had been the primary breadwinner for her and her three children. “He practically put his whole life to one side to be with me and my children,” she said, crying. “Now I feel impotent that I can’t help him, because when I needed him he was with me.”

Christopher Ortiz, another family member of a detained person, told me that, on Friday, June 6th, when federal agents raided Ambiance Apparel, a clothes wholesaler in L.A.’s fashion district where his father, José, worked, José had called Ortiz’s sister to tell her that a raid was under way. After a call to her father went to voice mail, she had rushed there in time to see him and other employees being taken away. It was not until the following Monday that they had any contact with their father, a three-minute phone call during which he told Ortiz’s sister that he was being held at Adelanto and asked after his cats. When they finally managed to meet with him at Adelanto, it was by ignoring guidance that proved incorrect about when they would be able to visit.

José, who immigrated to the United States from Guanajuato, Mexico, has lived here for thirty years. I asked Ortiz how he felt about the protests that had erupted in downtown L.A. following the raid on Ambiance Apparel. “I would say I was just very, just really focussed on trying to get my father back or at least get in contact with him,” he said. “But I would say I think I would have felt crazy if this happened and everyone and everything just kept going like it’s nothing.”

When Nancy Urizar arrived at the parking lot of the Food 4 Less, she told me, she had been showered with assistance by strangers. Bystanders had already loaded the boxes of food back inside her father’s truck. It turned out the keys had been handed over to a grocery-store security guard, who gave them to Francis. Francisco’s colleagues met Urizar at the grocery store. One of them told her that he would take over the route until they had more information, so that Francisco would not lose his clients, and volunteered to return the truck to the lot where it was stored.

“That was a blessing, and, after that, just a lot of people started coming up to me, hugging me, praying for me, just telling me kind words,” Urizar told me. “They drove by, or they had seen the videos, and I’m crying and they’re telling me all these things. I just felt so much support from the Latino community, you know? It was so beautiful.” She spoke with one young woman, the daughter of a truck driver who delivered tortillas for another brand. The woman told Urizar and Francis that she had taken over her father’s business since theICEraids had escalated, so that he could be safe at home. “She’s probably twenty-five—she seemed really young,” Urizar said. “And she was, like, I’m the one driving the truck, I’m the one unloading tortillas and, like, stocking everything in the market. Like, because my dad’s an immigrant, you know, and she’s tiny, tiny, skinny, and she’s, like, I’m so sorry, and she’s crying with us, she’s hugging us.”

Francisco owned the truck he was driving on the day authorities took him in. When he was given a phone call from detention later that day, his first fear was about the truck, his livelihood, and so he called a colleague to ask him to go retrieve it. Before they were cut off, the colleague was able to reassure him it had all been taken care of, and also that his daughters knew he had been taken in. Francisco did not know where he was, only that it had taken a long time to get there. That, as of the time of our meeting, had been the only moment of contact. Urizar said that she had no idea where her father was being detained, although she suspected Adelanto. After our breakfast, Urizar told me that she was going to start calling lawyers. People had been sending her many referrals. “Right now, I’m just asking God for wisdom and direction,” she said.

On June 15th, Donald Trump declared that the raids that have been happening in Los Angeles will soon be happening in New York and Chicago—what he called, in a post on Truth Social, “the core of the Democrat Power Center.” Republicans have also shown a willingness to go after immigrant-advocacy organizations. Unión del Barrio and the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights have both received cease-and-desist letters from the Missouri senator Josh Hawley, who is the chair of the Senate Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, suggesting that the organizations had “provided logistical support and financial resources” to protesters engaged in “disruptive actions” and demanding that they preserve relevant records, including internal communications, financial documents, and “media or public relations strategies.” (Both organizations have denied involvement in illegal activity.) Chris Newman, the legal director and general counsel of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, which is assisting dozens of day laborers who have been targeted by immigration authorities in the city in recent days, described the current moment as a turning point. He told me that after therecent fires in Los Angeles, when immigrant laborers were on the front lines of the cleanup effort, an appreciation for their work has grown. “Going forward, we are going to see the city really unifying around the most vulnerable people,” he said. He thought that politicians nationally should pay attention to what is going on in Los Angeles: “My hope is that Washington is now following a lead set by California, mostly by people on the streets.”

In Francisco’s three decades of living in the United States, Urizar said, he often tried to get residency. She told me that his work permit had only recently expired and that he paid taxes. He had spent many years, and many thousands of dollars in attorney fees, trying to secure permanent status, but without success. As he entered his mid-sixties, he had begun thinking about going back to Guatemala. “He just kind of felt like giving up and just going back on his own—you know, that reason, of, like, ‘I’ll just go back, and I guess I can’t come back.’ ” Nancy had recently got married and was more independent; Francisco was still helping out Francis, and working to finish paying off his car. Urizar said that he had discussed saving money for retirement, since immigrants who aren’t lawful permanent residents or under other select designations are restricted from collecting Social Security benefits in the U.S., even if they have paid into the system. He had not seen his mother, who is now in her nineties, for more than thirty years, or his children living in Guatemala. Urizar prayed that he would be released and allowed to leave the country on his own terms. “I don’t want to think about it, but I think the smartest and the wisest thing to do is to prepare for what can be next, like, what’s gonna happen with his bills, or what’s gonna happen with his business,” she said. “That’s all gonna fall on me.” Nancy Urizar had never gone to Guatemala, she said, “because he told me the first time he wanted me to experience it was with him.” ♦

In the days after theHamas attacksof October 7, 2023, Israel’s Prime Minister,Benjamin Netanyahu, evaded any public admission of responsibility for the colossal security failure. He mostly avoided attending memorial services for the dead. He rarely met with the families of Israeli hostages languishing in the tunnels of Gaza.

The LedeReporting and commentary on what you need to know today.

Under previous Israeli Prime Ministers, flagrant lapses of intelligence and military strategy were followed fairly quickly by hearings and dramatic results. In October, 1973, Egyptian and Syrian forces took Israel by surprise in the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights, and, for a few days, put the state in profound peril. Within weeks of the conclusion of the assault, which became known as the Yom Kippur War, a state commission of inquiry, led by the then chief justice of Israel’s Supreme Court, Shimon Agranat, questioned witnesses about the miscalculations and oversights that led to the crisis. Its findings helped lead to the eventual resignations of Prime Minister Golda Meir and Defense Minister Moshe Dayan.

In contrast, even though leading members of Netanyahu’s military and defense establishment have resigned or apologized for their roles in the tragedy of October 7th, he has so far dodged any real accounting, rebuffed any inquiry. As a result, for the first year after the attacks, his poll numbers were dreadful. Political observers in Israel across the ideological spectrum talked about when, not if, Netanyahu would finally fall from power and be replaced by, among others, General Benny Gantz, the former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, or the ex-finance minister Avigdor Lieberman. And yet, as Nahum Barnea, a veteran political columnist, told me in Israel at the time, “I go to funerals of politicians to make sure they are buried. But comebacks are possible.”

And now, on the day afterDonald Trumpjoined Israel in bombing the Islamic Republic of Iran’snuclear installations, Netanyahu and his circle are counting on his political resurrection. Never mind thecatastrophe of Gaza, with tens of thousands dead and worldwide condemnation. Never mind Netanyahu’s political assaults on democratic norms and institutions. Never mind his legal travails.

Amit Segal, a journalist for Channel 12, is deeply sourced in the Prime Minister’s office and considered by some a kind of messenger for his thinking. I called Segal on Sunday, less than a day after American B-2 bombers dropped their payloads on nuclear sites at Fordow, Isfahan, and Natanz in what has been dubbed Operation Midnight Hammer.

“In the first twelve months after October 7th, it looked like this was Netanyahu’s Gallipoli, a catastrophe which almost destroyed Churchill’s career,” Segal said. In 1916, as First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill led the Entente powers of the First World War in acrushing defeaton Turkey’s Gallipoli Peninsula at the hands of the Ottoman Empire.

“This was the single most horrific moment in the history of Israel, and it was under the administration of ‘Mr. Security,’ ” Segal went on. “It wasn’t just another scandal. It was his raison d’être. Today, followingthe fallof Hezbollah, in Lebanon, and the fall of Assad in Syria, and the fate of Hamas, and now theattack on the nuclear programin Iran, October 7th looks more like Pearl Harbor—a devastating failure that ends some time later with total victory. History, in fifty years, I believe, will see October 7th in the context of the Israel-Iran war. But the question is, more immediately, will the Israeli public see it that way? I am not sure. But it is significant. It has re-created him as Mr. Security. But it is not over. Nonetheless, people here see the Israeli attack and getting the green light from the U.S. and Trump as the most dramatic diplomatic achievement for Israel since the United Nations voted on its existence in 1947.”

Segal’s spin has the ring of authenticity only insofar as it seems to accurately echo the obsessions, the vanities, the thinking, and even the inner life of Netanyahu. In his memoir, Netanyahu makes constant references to Churchill. When I interviewed him during his first term, Netanyahu smoked enormous cigars and kept a portrait of Churchill in his office. When it comes to Tehran, Netanyahu has been talking about gathering storms for many years. In 2006, he said, “It is 1938 and Iran is Germany.” In 2011, he told the British interviewer Piers Morgan, “I admire Winston Churchill because I think he saw the danger to western civilization and acted in time to staunch the hemorrhage.”

Segal told me that, in planning the military assault on Iran, the security establishment estimated that retaliatory strikes would cause somewhere between eight hundred and four thousand deaths in Israel. So far, the reality has been much lower than those expectations. Some of Iran’s ballistic missiles have slipped through Israel’s air defenses and, according to theTimes,at least twenty-nine people have been killed and nine hundred injured. Segal also allowed that, when Netanyahu justified the strikes to the public by talking about the imminence of Iran’s nuclear-weapons program, it was, “to be honest, more of a literary description than a mathematical one”—meaning that, though Israeli intelligence, according to Segal, had evidence that Iran had enriched uranium to percentages only appropriate for a weapon, the actual weaponization process was hidden from view. The conclusion, Segal said, wasn’t that “they could do it tomorrow.” The crucial factor was that Iran was in a weakened state, with much of its air defenses eliminated. As a result, Segal said, “They took what they knew and portrayed it as more dramatic than it was. But Netanyahu was right on intentions.”

When I relayed Segal’s remarks about Churchill to Amos Harel, a defense analyst forHaaretz, Harel chuckled. “Well, this is the Bibi narrative. As the son of a historian”—the father, Benzion Netanyahu, was a right-wing historian of the Spanish Inquisition—“he thinks this way. What he is trying to do right now, without admitting the blame for October 7th and having gotten rid of everyone else who was involved, he is retelling the story as if it was all planned. He is now saying that, on October 9th, he already knew it would be a turning point in the history of the Middle East.”

Israel analysts told me it is not yet clear how or when Netanyahu might try to capitalize on the Iran issue for political gain. Some say he will eventually call for new elections and might even find a way to jettison the most reactionary members of his current coalition,Itamar Ben-Gvirand Bezalel Smotrich. Netanyahu could reach out to his critics for the sake of national unity, or he might use his seeming success against Iran to fuel his way on the road to greater autocracy. Others even speculate that, having attacked Iran and cajoled the United States to join the war, he will, after being the longest-serving Prime Minister in Israeli history, call it quits. One of his biographers and a writer forThe Economist, Anshel Pfeffer, however, doubts that scenario, saying, “Netanyahu has no life at all without that office.”

Nadav Eyal, a prominent columnist for the Israeli newspaperYedioth Ahronoth,told me that, though Netanyahu’s poll numbers did not improve significantly after the defeat of Hezbollah, “this is a whole new ballgame for him.”

“Netanyahu was responsible for the biggest failure in Israeli history, but now he can say he delivered,” Eyal said. He believes that Netanyahu will continue on. “After October 7th, he kept himself isolated. He didn’t visit the kibbutzim that had been attacked. Now he is everywhere. He went to Bat Yam after it was hit, he went to the Soroka hospital after it was hit.”

There is no overestimating the triumphalism in the Prime Minister’s circle. “The right and Bibi’s gang are experiencing a particularly dramatic form of orgasm,” one liberal Israeli journalist, who asked not to be quoted by name, told me. “Bibi is now the king of Israel in terms of his resurrection.” The journalist noted the similarities between Netanyahu and Trump in the manner in which the Israeli Prime Minister has “done everything in his power to dismantle Israeli society and Israeli democracy and its institutions. So you don’t know how, and on what basis, any future election will be decided.”

The triumphalism in the White House is also unmistakable. On Sunday, Trump wentonlineto say, “It’s not politically correct to use the term, ‘Regime Change,’ but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!”

Yet, for both men, much still rests upon the Iranian response. As Harel, ofHaaretz, put it to me, “Things can change in a day. You can admire the precision of this operation, but, if suddenly an Iranian ballistic missile hits an apartment building and kills twenty kids or one of our F-35s is shot down over Iran and is taken prisoner, the complexion of things could change in an instant.”

Moreover, as Aluf Benn, the editor ofHaaretz, said, there are members of the Israeli public who will never come around to Netanyahu. “There are people who would be against Bibi even if he brokered world peace and brought about the end of disease and hunger,” Benn said. “Then there are those who fear regional war.” The question is what Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, will do next, Benn added. “Will he swallow his pride and resume negotiations to preserve the regime and end the sanctions and give up his nuclear program? There is a way out. Or is there jihadi declaration of war? I just don’t know. No one does.”

One matter of historical fact was pointed out by almost everyone with whom I spoke, including those who dismissed the vanity of Netanyahu’s self-conception as a Churchillian figure.

When Churchill, just after the conclusion of the Second World War, faced election, he lost to the Labour Party leader, Clement Attlee. On the morning after his defeat, Churchill’s wife, Clementine, tried to console him and called the result “a blessing in disguise.” To which Churchill replied, “At the moment it seems quite effectively disguised.” ♦

The thirty-three-year-old democratic socialist has created a movement. Can it overcome Andrew Cuomo’s power?

Zohran Mamdani, the young democratic-socialist state assemblyman who has waged a surprisingly strong campaign for mayor of New York City, hasn’t just frustrated his opponents. He’s made them jealous. “I regret not running for mayor in 2021,” State Senator Jessica Ramos said this month, during a televised Democratic primary debate, when asked if she had any regrets in her political career. “I thought I needed more experience,” she explained. “But turns out you just need to make good videos.” Someone in the audience broke out in applause. It was obvious to everyone that this was a jab at Mamdani. Standing a few feet away from Ramos, Mamdani took in the dig with—what else?—a winning, dimpled smile.

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In 2025, the idea of dismissing a political candidate for “just” being good at social media is almost a joke in itself. We have known for many years now that a candidate who can tell their story creatively on the internet is at an electoral advantage, in New York City and pretty much anywhere in the world. Social media is where many voters decide if a politician is what the Tammany Hall bosses a hundred years ago used to call “regular”—whether they can be counted on. It’s an authenticity test. A mayoral campaign today that doesn’t have a plan for “good videos”—ones in which the candidate can make their case and an implicit compact with their audience—is likely doomed. It’s not difficult to understand Mamdani’s opponents’ frustration. Most have spent years carefully plotting their mayoral runs, building their résumés, political connections, and fund-raising networks. Now the kid with the nice eyebrows is running circles around them.

When I had coffee with Mamdani a few months ago, he proudly told me that his thousands of campaign volunteers—the people he’d converted to his side, partly with “good videos”—would, before primary day, knock on a million doors on his behalf. I was skeptical. Which million, I asked. Mamdani flashed me another one of those damned smiles. At the time, I had been thinking of recent debates over the effectiveness of political canvassing and other ground-game techniques. I was reminded particularly of the former congressmanBeto O’Rourke, who excited his supporters around the country with a pledge to knock on more than a million doors in Texas in his run for Senate, in 2018, only to come up short against Ted Cruz. Texas is big—two hundred and sixty-nine thousand square miles—and has resisted canvassing efforts for decades. But New York City’s four hundred and sixty-nine square miles might present an even harder challenge to door knocking: Who in this town answers the door to a stranger with an open mind? Who even opens the door?

What I hadn’t considered is that, even if knocking on a million doors isn’t the most efficient use of campaign resources in New York City, it makes for great content. The story of Mamdani’s door-knocking campaign and other old-fashioned efforts reached millions of people online, gave the campaign shape, and helped it become a movement.Ding-dongand TikTok. In politics today, one can feed off the other.

Mamdani has a movement behind him, but he has spent the closing days of the primary race struggling to build a coalition. Even in the polls that look best for him, Mamdani comes up short to Andrew Cuomo, the disgraced former governor who has led every ranked-choice poll since he entered the race. In one poll, conducted on behalf of a superPACthat supports Mamdani (in 2025, even socialists have superPACs), he comes out just two points behind Cuomo in the final round of ranked-choice voting. The cross tabs of that poll showed why. Among Black voters, Mamdani lost by more than forty points. Among Hispanic voters, he lost by nearly ten. Mamdani’s voters trended younger than Cuomo’s—no big surprise there—but also whiter, better educated, and more male. That he has aspired to speak for the city’s downtrodden but has done best drawing out the work-from-home creative class is a contradiction that he wasn’t able to resolve before primary day.

That same poll showed Mamdani leading among Asian voters. There are 1.5 million residents of Asian descent in the city, but that’s still less than twenty per cent of the city’s population. Mamdani, the son of Mahmood Mamdani, a Ugandan Indian political scientist, and Mira Nair, an Indian American filmmaker, has also made a representation pitch to the city’s more than seven hundred thousand Muslims. But forming a coalition requires reaching voters beyond what might be considered a politician’s natural base, stitching together unlikely factions, communities, and blocs. In the race’s closing days, Mamdani’s campaign became fixated on “momentum,” reaching for the figurative in lieu of the numerical. (E-mail subject line, June 17th: “AS MOMENTUM REACHES A FEVER PITCH, BERNIE SANDERS ENDORSES ZOHRAN MAMDANI FOR MAYOR.”) When the votes get counted, though, coalitions trump momentum every time.

Mamdani has been stymied for several reasons that were apparent before primary day. For one thing, he is undeniably young, and he never found a way to reassure voters that he was truly up for the job of managing the city’s agencies, its hundred-billion-dollar budget, and its three-hundred-thousand-person workforce. In trying to become the youngest mayor since John Purroy Mitchel—the idealistic “Boy Mayor” who was elected at thirty-four, in 1914, and got crushed by Tammany’s man John Francis (Red Mike) Hylan three years later—Mamdani never explained how he might avoid Mitchel’s fate. The new program of public spending he has proposed is predicated on increasing taxes on the wealthy and corporations, taxes that would have to be approved in Albany. If the big shots in Albany—never a good bet for anything, politically—refuse him, what would become of Mayor Mamdani? No one can say.

Some voters are turned off by the socialist label, though most of Mamdani’s policies are hardly revolutionary. He’s calling for free buses (they have some free bus lines in Boston) and freezing the rent on rent-regulated apartments (which Bill de Blasio did three times in his eight years as mayor—and rents still kept rising in the city over all). Mamdani has backed off some of the language that he’d espoused during his activist days in college and the years after—“I will not defund the police,” he said, at the final Democratic primary debate—but he has not fully explained what changed his mind, besides the fact that he is running for mayor.

Mamdani’s critics and opponents have cornered him for his views on Israel—a line of questioning that his supporters say is unfair. They’re right that outlets like the New YorkPostand theFree Presshave tried to make him a bogeyman, and that attack ads funded by Cuomo and his allies have relied on Islamophobic tropes and racism. (“Less Safe. Too Radical,” read one mailer that arrived in my mailbox, next to what must be one of the only unflattering photographs of Mamdani in existence.) But part of the reason that reporters have kept asking Mamdani about Israel is because his answer isn’t very convincing. “I believe Israel has the right to exist as a state with equal rights,” he says. For a guy who exudes authenticity, that sounds suspiciously like a line he arrived at not personally but after a series of increasingly frustrating meetings. There are nearly a million Jews living in New York City, many of them ardently Zionist, and the next mayor is going to have to speak on this issue. (Think of the protests at Columbia, and of the ongoing federal response to them.) This was a challenge for Mamdani, and not one he has yet met.

In the primary campaign’s closing days, Mamdani has shown signs of casting about for ways to win—he’s shown signs, in other words, of being a normal politician. He’s reached for the strains of liberalism and radicalism that have expressed themselves in the city in recent years, sometimes reaching for more than one at once. “Government must deliver an agenda of abundance that puts the ninety-nine per cent over the one per cent,” he told a huge rally crowd at the Manhattan music venue Terminal 5, serving up Occupy-tinged red meat with a side of centrist-slogan salad. He made a surprising overture to the city’s Orthodox Jewish communities, which were stung a few years ago by aTimesinvestigation that revealed neglect and academic underperformance in Hasidic yeshivas. “The issue of your education is something I will listen to your leaders [about],” Mamdani told a Hasidic newspaper a few weeks ago. Were these the shrewd moves of a wunderkind on the doorstep of a historic election upset? Or were they compromises made by a precocious political talent seeing the numbers close in around him?

No one has ever accused Andrew Cuomo of being “regular.” For more than a decade, he has loomed over New York politics like the Prince of Darkness. The son of a legendary former New York governor, Mario Cuomo, he is the closest thing in living memory that the state has to political royalty. Cuomo, who legalized same-sex marriage in New York and spearheaded major infrastructure projects such as the bridge across the Hudson River named for his father, is among the handful of paternalistic local leaders in history—like Peter Stuyvesant, who told the residents of New Amsterdam that he would rule over them “like a father,” Nelson Rockefeller, and Michael Bloomberg—whose legacies, good and bad, will endure for centuries.

The question is: what is he doing running for mayor? Four years out from a sexual-harassment and abuse-of-power scandal that forced him from office as governor, Cuomo is clearly running to redeem himself, if only in his own eyes. He has plodded through the race, parking his Dodge Chargerwhereverhe pleases and apologizing for nothing and no one, making no promises to avoid the bullying, recalcitrance, handsiness, and tolerance of corruption that he was known for in the governor’s office. In fact, he’s avoided promises of any kind about what he’d do as mayor. Instead of focussing on policy pledges, Cuomo has made the campaign a demonstration of political might, garnering endorsements from elected officials—including many who called for him to resign four years ago—from labor union leaders (though DC 37, which represents most city workers, backed Mamdani over him), and from religious leaders in Black and Jewish communities. The power plays have at times been breathtaking. In June, a group of Orthodox leaders in South Brooklyn announced their support for Adrienne Adams, the speaker of the City Council. A few days later, they announced that they had changed their minds and had decided to back Cuomo instead.

Cuomo doesn’t make good videos, but he knows that he doesn’t need to. Say what you will about the cynical old operator, he has spent the campaign stitching together a coalition. In 2013, Bill de Blasio won the mayoral election with a potent mix of Black votes plus liberals of various creeds and colors. In 2021,Eric Adamssucceeded de Blasio with a potent mix of Black votes plus moderates of various creeds and colors. Cuomo is now attempting to re-create Adams’s formula. Sunday after Sunday, he has sat in the pews at Black churches. He has called the rise in antisemitism the “most important” issue in the election, and, though this is transparent pandering (most voters say affordability and public safety are top of mind for them), it has not blunted its political effectiveness. When Mamdani has wobbled on provocative slogans like “Globalize the intifada,” he has played right into Cuomo’s hands. The former governor’s chances of being a disaster as mayor are at least as high as Mamdani’s, but many rich and powerful New Yorkers appear willing to ignore that risk. (Bloomberg contributed more than eight million dollars to a superPACbacking Cuomo.) He simply might have the votes.

Since Mamdani gained on Cuomo in the last weeks of the spring, the Democratic primary has mostly looked like a two-man contest. But there was a moment last week when everyone was talking about Brad Lander, the city’s comptroller, who has spent much of the race polling at a distant third place. Within a matter of days, Lander was sort of endorsed by theTimesand got himselfdetainedby Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers while trying to escort a man out of immigration court. “I’m going to be just fine,” Lander told reporters after his release. “I lost a button.” The real issue, he said, was what happened to the man he was trying to help, who was now trapped somewhere in the country’s immigration-detention gulag. It was a good performance from a veteran of local government who hopes to lead a city of immigrants through a period of anti-immigrant terror. And, though the sight of masked plainclothes officers manhandling the city’s second-highest-ranking elected official was a terrifying omen for Trump’s encroachment on New York, it also made, not incidentally, for good videos.

Lander is a candidate who might have once hoped for an endorsement from theTimes’ editorial board, and who was dismayed last year when the paper announced it would stop endorsing in local races. Everyone remembers the primary in 2021, when aTimesendorsement helped propel Kathryn Garcia, the camera-shy former sanitation commissioner, within a few thousand votes of the front-runner, Eric Adams. This month, the paper’s opinion section relented in its determination to stay out of the mayoral race, sort of, and released asurveyof fifteen notable New Yorkers, seven of whom picked Lander as their first-choice candidate. (No other candidates received the support of more than two respondents.)

Then, a few days later, the paper published an unsignededitorialthat admonished New Yorkers not to vote for Mamdani; described Lander as competent but uninspiring; and reluctantly supported Cuomo, despite “serious objections to his ethics and conduct.” The piece was bizarre. It glossed de Blasio’s eight years as mayor as the source of the city’s current decline, while making almost no mention of the pandemic’s devastation, the shoddy scandals of the Adams administration, or the hostility that the current President displays for the politics and people of his home town. But in its weird, jumpy antagonism, the editorial captured a mix of sentiments that a certain swath of New Yorkers, particularly the wealthy and the powerful, do feel: that the city is less nice and less safe than it was not so long ago, that they’d rather go with a disgraced establishment politician like Cuomo than risk it with more progressive alternatives, and that the thirty-three-year-old socialist upstart with the good videos is a joke. The punch line is he’s still making them nervous. ♦

Just hours after the U.S. bombed three nuclear sites in Iran on Sunday, President Masoud Pezeshkian joined thousands of anti-American protesters in Tehran’s Enghelab Square. Enghelab means “revolution” in Farsi. The angry crowd waved placards vowing that they were “ready for the big battle” and calling for “revenge, revenge.” One poster depicted President Donald Trump as a snarling vampire. The Iranian regime has long been able to mobilize its base for propaganda purposes and social-media imagery. But, after ten days of barrages by the American and Israeli militaries, the more telling banners made plaintive and prideful statements. “Iran is our homeland,” one declared. “Its soil is our honor. And its flag is our shroud.”

Late on Monday, President Trump said on Truth Social that Iran and Israel had “fully agreed” to a “Complete and Total CEASEFIRE.” But the outcome of this war may be shaped more by Iran’s culture and politics than by the military prowess of its opponents. Iran’s controversial nuclear program is only part of a larger conundrum. Can the U.S. and Israel coexist with the Islamic Republic at all after forty-six years of fraught enmity? And will the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the Islamic theocracy survive politically after the military onslaughts?

Trump had already called for an end to hostilities, and renewed negotiations with Tehran, following the unprecedented deployment ofU.S. stealth aircraft and bunker-busting bombsover the weekend. “Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace,” he said, in a televised address. In a subsequent briefing at the Pentagon, his Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, told reporters that Operation Midnight Hammer, which lasted a mere twenty-five minutes, “has not been about regime change.” But, by Sunday afternoon, Trump posted, on Truth Social, “It’s not politically correct to use the term, ‘Regime Change,’ but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!”

Israel has been even more explicit. Its Defense Minister, Israel Katz, said that Khamenei is a “modern Hitler” and “cannot continue to exist.” On Monday, Israel struck two of the biggest symbols of Iranian repression: the entryway of the infamous Evin Prison, where thousands of dissidents have been held, and the headquarters of the Basij, the paramilitary wing of the Revolutionary Guard, which is used to crack down on opposition. It also hit other internal security sites. In a statement, the Israeli Defense Forces said that the facilities have been responsible “for homeland defense, suppressing threats, and maintaining regime stability.”

Trump’s ceasefire announcement followed Iran’s anticipated response to the U.S. strikes: short- and medium-range missile barrages on Al Udeid Air Base, in Qatar, the largest American military installation in the region. The Supreme National Security Council, the chief decision-making body in Tehran, which includes political and military leaders, said in a statement that it had fired the same number of missiles that the U.S. used over the weekend. The response mirrored Iran’s retaliation, in 2020, after the U.S. killed General Qassem Suleimani, the leader of the Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Force. It fired missiles on U.S. forces at the Ain al-Asad base in Iraq. Hostilities de-escalated after that. This time, Tehran reportedly sent warning of its strike in advance. Several American warplanes and ships had already been moved last week.

I suspect that millions of Iranians would not miss Khamenei, an accidental leader who stepped into top jobs only after others died unexpectedly. He was a mid-level cleric when he became President, in 1981; a terror attack had killed his predecessor. Six years later, I had breakfast with him, in an ornate room at the Waldorf-Astoria, in New York. It was during his only trip to the West, when he spoke at the opening session of the U.N. General Assembly. In our meeting, he lacked charisma, worldliness, and intellectual depth. He mumbled his way through inflammatory rhetoric as a member of his Revolutionary Guard team bent over to cut up his breakfast meat. (He lost the use of his right arm in 1981, after a bomb hidden in a tape recorder went off as he spoke at a mosque in Tehran. His hand dangles at his side.) In 1989, he stepped in after the revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, died suddenly, with no heir apparent. Khamenei had a limited independent political base, so he tapped into the Iranian military. They have empowered each other ever since.

The fate of the Islamic Republic is not necessarily dependent on the fate of its ruling Ayatollah. “Khamenei as a leader may not survive this war—either because he is literally taken out of the scene through an assassination or because the war ends with such a disastrous outcome for the country that he will be forced to step down,” Ellie Geranmayeh, a senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, told me. Khamenei now faces only bad options. He will, however, avoid unconditional surrender at all costs. He would “likely prefer being taken down as a martyr rather than going down in history as the Iranian leader who capitulated with a gun to his head,” Geranmayeh said.

The majority of Iranians are Shiite. The sect emerged in the seventh century, after the Prophet Muhammad died, during a political dispute over leadership with mainstream Sunnis. Shiism preaches that it is better to die fighting for justice than to live with injustice. Imam Hussein, an early Shiite leader, fought Sunnis in the Umayyad dynasty, even though he had only a few dozen fighters and knew they were grossly outnumbered and bound to die. Martyrdom remains central to devout Shia. I’ve travelled in Iran for decades, and I think it is among the most secular countries in the Middle East. Yet the history of the faith and its traditions still define the culture and the mind-sets of many. Iranians are also religious and ethnic minorities in the wider world, and that has bred existential fears of foreign conquest.

“Shiism is a culture of resistance,” Fatemeh Haghighatjoo, a former member of Iran’s parliament, told me. Elected in 2000 at the age of thirty-two, she was the youngest female lawmaker in the revolution’s history. She was barred from running a second time, in 2004, after accusing the regime of torturing political prisoners and manipulating elections. She left Tehran a year later and now lives in Massachusetts. Iranians “are basically against authoritarianism, and they don’t like what’s going on in the country,” she told me. But Haghighatjoo doesn’t see the regime abruptly collapsing. Khamenei could easily be replaced, she said. Article 111 of Iran’s constitution, which is modelled on French and Belgian law, calls for a troika—made up of the President, the judiciary chief, and a cleric from the Guardian Council—to assume the duties of the leader if he is incapacitated or dismissed. An eighty-eight-man Assembly of Experts, which is democratically elected every eight years, would then select a new one.

After almost half a century, the Islamic Republic has deeply entrenched institutions—and intense rivalries among its executive, legislative, judicial, military, and intelligence branches. But they all crave survival despite their bickering, John Limbert, one of fifty-two diplomats held hostage after the U.S. Embassy was seized, in 1979, told me. “They love power. They’ve kept it. They’ve kept other people out of it,” he said. “For better or worse, they’ve built a system that is resilient. There’s a cadre, a men’s club” that includes the first generation of revolutionaries or their acolytes. For most of the past twenty-five hundred years, Limbert noted, Iran has been led by dictators—“some bad, some terrible. Some with crowns, some with turbans, some with military uniforms.” And, if regime change does happen, he cautioned, “Why should we assume it’s for the better? People assumed that in 1979. ‘Let’s get rid of the shah and everything will be better.’ ”

Since the Revolution, the Islamic Republic has managed to endure punishing blows by enemies, both foreign and domestic. In 1981, the young regime survived two massive bombings by the Mujahideen-e Khalq, or Warriors of the People, which killed a President, a Prime Minister, a judiciary chief, twenty-seven members of parliament, and dozens of other officials. After Iraq’s then President, Saddam Hussein, invaded in 1980, Iran held out for eight years, even as the Reagan Administration fed Baghdad intelligence that it used to kill tens of thousands of Iranian troops with chemical weapons. Iran reluctantly agreed to a U.N. ceasefire, in 1988, but the regime got its revenge by supporting and arming Shiite opposition groups that are now major players in post-Saddam Iraq. Iran has survived, albeit with growing difficulty, more than fifteen hundred U.S. sanctions, which have reportedly cost hundreds of billions of dollars in lost revenue. And it has managed to suppress sporadic nationwide protests—the student uprising in 1999, the Green Movement after the Presidential election in 2009, economic protests over price hikes since 2017, and the“woman, life, freedom” movementin 2022. “Death to the dictator” has been a common chant in all of them.

In the past, Iran’s upheavals have been presaged by visible indicators, Shaul Bakhash, a Harvard-educated former editor in Iran, and the author of“The Reign of the Ayatollahs: Iran and the Islamic Revolution,” told me. They have included huge ongoing street protests. Bazaars have closed down “not because of disorder but as a protest,” Bakhash said. Critical sectors, notably the oil industry and the civil service, have gone on strike. “We don’t see any of these elements right now,” he said. And even in the current dire circumstances, Bakhash added, “The individuals who might lead an opposition have not spoken up.”

And yet, long term, the status quo may not be acceptable, either, Geranmayeh said. If the regime emerges from the war with a diplomatic off-ramp, it will have to overhaul the social contract, which for two decades after the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan has provided Iranians with security, in exchange for restricted political, social, and economic rights. The stunning scope of the U.S. and Israeli airstrikes over the past ten days proves that the theocracy can no longer deliver the protection it promises.

Utopian, religious, and ideological revolutions have only so much staying power if they fail to meet their absolutist goals and their publics’ lofty expectations. The Soviet Union could not sustain Communist rule in a world rapidly becoming politically and economically globalized. South Africa could not endure the isolation or the costs of apartheid, which required separate and segregated housing, schooling, health care, and infrastructure for three different races.

All aspects of life in Iran are now growing worse, Mohammad Taghi Karroubi, a lawyer and the son of the former speaker of parliament Mehdi Karroubi, told me. In 2009, his father, a cleric, ran for the Presidency, as did the former Prime Minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi, to defeat the hard-line incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The two opposition candidates lost in a vote widely viewed as fraudulent. Wearing green sashes, the two men led the Green Movement, when millions protested for some six months. Both men were placed under house arrest for almost fifteen years. “People will go to the streets again in the future,” Karroubi said, during a WhatsApp conversation from London. For now, though, they “prefer to be silent” because of the U.S. and Israeli aggression. “The day after the aggression,” he said, “they will start to talk. They will start to criticize the system.” ♦

This article has been updated to include news developments.

Progress against H.I.V. marks one of the greatest accomplishments of biomedical research in history. Four decades ago, an H.I.V. infection meant an early, painful death. Scientists went on to develop powerful antiretroviral treatments that staved offAIDSand curbed H.I.V.’s spread. Yet, in 2023, 1.3 million people around the world became infected—more than thirty-five hundred per day, nearly a hundred and fifty every hour. Treatments only work if you take them, and many people do not know that they have H.I.V. Even for those who are aware of their status and can access the drugs, the virus integrates with human chromosomes and never clears, meaning that people living with H.I.V. must take medication for the rest of their lives. In 2023, almost forty million people were living with H.I.V., and six hundred and thirty thousand died fromAIDS.

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Then, in June, 2024, Moupali Das, the head of H.I.V. prevention for the pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences, received an e-mail about lenacapavir, a drug being tested by the company to prevent the spread of H.I.V. The message authorized Das to see the results from an ongoing clinical trial in South Africa and Uganda. When she reviewed the data, at her company’s sprawling campus in Foster City, California, she had to move closer to her computer’s screen to confirm that she was reading the numbers correctly. She was dumbstruck: What she thought was a zero reallywasa zero. More than two thousand teen girls and young women had been injected with the drug, which stays in the body for an astonishing six months. In the first year of the trial, each received two shots, and none of them became infected with H.I.V. “It was phenomenal,” Das told me. “We thought it was going to work, but none of us thought it was going to be one hundred per cent.” Three months later, the drug demonstrated ninety-six-per-cent efficacy in a similar trial that had enrolled more than three thousand men, transgender men and women, and nonbinary people who have sex with men.

For nearly twelve years, Gilead had been selling a pill named Truvada as a preventive treatment called pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP. The drug worked remarkably well in clinical trials, but many healthy people had difficulty taking a daily pill, and others faced stigma and discrimination from sexual partners. Another company, ViiV Healthcare, brought a PrEP injection to market in 2021, but it only lasts two months, and remains little used. If two shots a year offered the same protection, Das knew, it could revolutionize H.I.V. prevention. On June 18th, the F.D.A. approved lenacapavir for PrEP. A stunning new era is upon us. But, as world leaders dismantle global health programs and cut back foreign aid, will this extraordinary new technology be able to change the world?

When scientists first started talking about using drugs to prevent the spread of H.I.V., few expected that Gilead would be the company to develop them. In the early nineteen-nineties, the top anti-H.I.V. drugs on the market had at most a modest impact: they were reserved for people with severely damaged immune systems and, at best, only extended life by a few years. Side effects included diarrhea, nausea, headaches, and anemia. As the death toll approached a million per year, big pharmaceutical companies competed to create better treatments. Gilead, a small corporation that had a few hundred employees, was an underdog in the race. But it licensed a promising compound, tenofovir, from academics in Europe.

During that bleak era, Che-Chung Tsai, a researcher at the University of Washington, contacted several companies, seeking experimental drugs for use in an animal study. Gilead sent him an early form of tenofovir, which produced remarkable results. When a group of monkeys were given the compound before being exposed to H.I.V.’s simian cousin, S.I.V., not a single one was infected. What’s more, the drug had no significant adverse effects.

H.I.V. is made up of single-stranded RNA rather than double-stranded DNA. To infect its host, it enters white blood cells, uses a viral enzyme called reverse transcriptase to convert its RNA into DNA, and hijacks the cell’s machinery to make more copies of itself. Tenofovir works by crippling this enzyme. In a person with H.I.V., tenofovir prevents the virus from making new copies of itself.

Yet tenofovir also showed promise for people who did not have H.I.V. The monkey study found that, when a healthy animal received tenofovir, the virus was like a bullet that fell to the ground before striking its target: the RNA virus couldn’t convert itself into DNA, so it couldn’t splice itself into the DNA of the host.

Despite the drug’s potential as PrEP, Gilead made little effort to support the research: preventive drugs had unique risks. In uninfected people, it’s harder to prove that the benefits of a drug will outweigh potential risks, raising liability concerns. Some feared that widespread use of PrEP might breed resistant strains of the virus itself. And although millions of H.I.V.-positive people were desperate for effective drugs, it wasn’t clear that people at the highest risk of infection—gay men, sex workers, people who injected drugs, sexually active heterosexuals in sub-Saharan African countries—would want PrEP or be able to access it. And so Gilead focussed instead on the lucrative and stable market of H.I.V. treatments. In 2001, tenofovir won F.D.A. approval for treating H.I.V. infections. The next year, the drug accounted for about half of the company’s sales.

Gilead’s disinterest in PrEP deeply frustrated academic researchers. In 2003, to confirm that tenofovir would work as well in humans as it had in monkeys, researchers announced plans to recruit sex workers for a clinical trial in Cambodia. Gilead kept itself at a distance from the study; the National Institutes of Health (N.I.H.) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation offered to fund the research. But someAIDSactivists were enraged by the trial’s design. They argued that researchers were introducing risk of infection to people in a country with limited treatment resources. In July, 2004, at an internationalAIDSconference in Bangkok, a group descended on a Gilead Sciences booth and plastered it with posters: “Sex Workers Infected by Gilead,” “Tenofovir Makes Me Vomit,” and “Gilead Prefers us HIV+.” As news cameras from around the world gathered around the scene, the activists covered signs in fake blood. Soon after, the trials in Cambodia were abandoned. Though Gilead provided academic researchers use of the compound for PrEP studies, they declined to pursue further preventive testing on their own.

A month after the Bangkok conference, the F.D.A. approved a new H.I.V. treatment, produced by Gilead, called Truvada, which combined tenofovir with a second drug. At the time, regimens typically required three drugs, several times a day. The new compound, a pill taken once a day, could be combined with just one other drug, simplifying treatment. By 2006, Truvada was the best-selling anti-H.I.V. drug on the market.

Flush with cash, Gilead launched an ambitious project to create a new drug targeting an H.I.V. protein called capsid. Many scientists saw Gilead’s project as folly: viral proteins have no obvious weaknesses, making them far less druggable than viral enzymes. Researchers had long thought that capsid proteins—which link together to form a protective shell, known as a cone, around the RNA—simply fell apart after infecting a cell. But a series of stunning discoveries found that the capsid cone not only survives infection but plays a far more complex role in the production of new viruses. With this insight, Gilead tested thousands of compounds, leading to the discovery, in 2012, of what would become lenacapavir.

That same year, Gilead finally sought F.D.A. approval for Truvada as PrEP. It was approved in July. A drug for prevention was a major turning point, yet it was met with ambivalence by some of the communities most affected by the virus. Even the primary market for the drug, gay men in the United States, had strong reservations about taking the pills to protect themselves. Critics feared it created incentives for uninfected men to abandon condoms and increase their number of sexual partners, undermining years of hard-won progress in prevention. Worries ran so high that some gay men for a time slagged people who used PrEP as “Truvada whores.”

Truvada PrEP steadily gained popularity, and as it grew cheaper it became more widespread in poorer countries. In March, 2019, Gilead reported that lenacapavir had performed well in early human studies. Gilead’s risky investment was showing signs of paying off—and this time, the company was eager to get ahead of its critics.

In December, 2019, Das flew to Kigali, Rwanda, to meet with community advocates and public-health leaders from across the continent. Lenacapavir was going to be tested as a prevention tool; the company wanted input on the design of the trials. How could the company’s researchers avoid the community opposition that had dogged the Cambodia trial? Should they include pregnant people? What about adolescents as young as sixteen? Earlier research had been roundly criticized for excluding both groups, as well as for cutting out trans people and anyone taking hormones. Yvette Raphael, a human-rights activist who chairs the African Women Prevention Community Accountability Board, left the meeting reluctantly impressed. “It was tough because, obviously, they are a pharmaceutical company, and we are advocates,” Raphael said recently. “We’d like to see more transparency from them—but they really have tried.”

The company has also made efforts to increase access to preventive lenacapavir. After a drug is approved, years often pass before generic manufacturers are allowed to sell it at a discount. But in October, 2024, Gilead—still months away from even seeking F.D.A. approval—announced that it had cut a deal with six generic manufacturers to provide low-cost versions of lenacapavir PrEP to a hundred and twenty poorer countries. While those producers are getting up and running, a process that may take an estimated two years, Gilead will sell lenacapavir to the same countries at cost. “They learned from their mistakes,” Mitchell Warren, the executive director ofAVAC, an advocacy group for PrEP and other H.I.V.-prevention interventions, told me. “At least conceptually, this is one of the most transformational moments in H.I.V. prevention ever.”

Two months later, near the end of the Biden Administration, a major partnership set out to make injectable preventive lenacapavir available to at least two million people during its first three years on the market. It would bring together the President’s Emergency Plan forAIDSRelief, orPEPFAR; the deep-pocketed Global Fund to FightAIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria; the Gates Foundation; and the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation.

Then came another seismic shift in the H.I.V./AIDSworld. On the day President Donald Trump took office, his Administration began dismantlingPEPFAR, which has spent more than a hundred and twenty billion dollars in more than fifty countries over the past two decades—not only to support the treatment of twenty million people but also to purchase and deliver more than ninety per cent of PrEP drugs used globally. A State Department memo in February stated that, during this pause of U.S. Foreign Assistance or until further notice,PEPFARcould only support PrEP for pregnant and breast-feeding women.

The fate of the rollout of lenacapavir PrEP remains murky. Although neither the Gates Foundation nor the Global Fund has committed to honoring their original pledge, both have indicated that they still plan to support “equitable access” to lenacapavir PrEP. (What this means, in practice, is difficult to say.) The White House, earlier this month, released its Congressional Budget Justification for fiscal year 2026 that calls for continued support forPEPFAR, with a budget cut of thirty per cent and a desire to speed its elimination; it specifically mentions funding for “high cost-efficiency biomedical tools, such as a twice-a-year HIV prevention injection.”

Injectable lenacapavir, despite its clear benefits, faces several other financial, political, and cultural challenges that have dogged PrEP from the outset. Will insurance companies reimburse for it in full? How aggressively will health officials promote its use? Will communities embrace it? “We have not seen evidence of the bigger resources being devoted and the political will to do what needs to be done to get any of these PrEP options into the populations that need it the most,” says Raphael Landovitz, an H.I.V./AIDSresearcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has helped run other PrEP studies. “Everything we have seen is incremental. And so I fear that this is going to be yet another incremental improvement.”

Then again, Landovitz speaks for many when he describes the results from the two lenacapavir clinical trials as “stunning.” And he notes that a near-hundred-per-cent protection from infection “is better than I think we could ever have hoped for from a prophylactic vaccine.”

Eleven years ago, the Joint United Nations Programme on H.I.V./AIDSannounced a “fast-track” strategy to “end the AIDS epidemic.” Thanks to testing, treatment, and prevention tools like PrEP, infection rates were dropping year after year.UNAIDScontended that if the number of new infections were to drop as low as two hundred thousand a year by 2030, theAIDSpandemic would, effectively, end.

The world, of course, is way off target.

In March, at a large H.I.V./AIDSconference held in San Francisco, Gilead scientists reported new data from a small human study suggesting that higher doses of lenacapavir allow the drug to protect the body for more than a year. At the same meeting, however, researchers were reeling; the Trump Administration had just laid off thousands of scientists at the N.I.H. and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and cut funding to their universities, their research grants, and clinical-trial networks that test new medicines.

It was another blow: the cutbacks to research joined slashes to global health programs, threatening to slow down decades of progress.

Scientists and researchers continue to warn that such disturbances will hobble future innovations. More immediately, lenacapavir PrEP may be able to reach only a small percentage of the people who stand to benefit. Even if Gilead and its supporters are able to insure equitable access, the U.S government’s retreat from the fight against H.I.V. andAIDSwill present new challenges and new infections. Will this powerful new medicine counteract the damage? Or will lenacapavir PrEP, which could change the world, only maintain the status quo?

In wealthy countries where insurance companies or governments cover most of the price of drugs, the new medicine will likely build a market. But most people who are at high risk of H.I.V. infection live in countries that have long relied on governments such as the U.S. to prop up their limited investments in health care. Even with discounted pricing and market competition driving costs down further in time, testing for infection and delivering drugs is expensive, too. It’s hard to see how lenacapavir PrEP will live up to its promise without new infusions of financial assistance.

Some H.I.V./AIDSadvocates have criticized Gilead for not yet cutting a deal to offer discounted lenacapavir to middle-income countries. Then, there’s South Africa, which has more people living with H.I.V. than any other nation and funds the bulk of its own response to its epidemic. The country pays a mere forty-one dollars to provide a person with an annual supply of PrEP pills; will they pay more for two long-acting injections?

Injectable lenacapavir cannot, on its own, end the H.I.V./AIDSepidemic. The world still needs a cure for the tens of millions now living with H.I.V. and a prophylactic vaccine that can outlast a year. Other prevention tools exist, and more are being developed. But, even in the wake of dramatic setbacks, companies such as Gilead, in concert with nonprofits, clinicians, advocates, philanthropists, and foreign governments, could collectively insure that this remarkable drug is accessible to all. Then its success will depend on the medicine itself—and on the interest of those who have the option to use it. ♦

Being a liberal justice on a Supreme Court with a six-Justice conservative super-majority can be a miserable job. The opportunities for victory are scant; frustration is the baseline. There are two different models for dealing with this reality, approaches that can broadly be described as strategic and rhetorical. A strategic Justice can try to lure a conservative vote here and there, to cobble together an elusive majority and at least limit the damage. A rhetorical Justice can call out the conservatives for the sake of educating the current public and planting a flag for history. Or she—and the three liberals are all women—can tailor her response to the specific case.

Elena Kagan exemplifies this last, hybrid model. She is more than willing to let the majority have it when that is warranted; she also forges compromises with individual conservatives when it is possible to pick up their votes. The newest member of the Court, Ketanji Brown Jackson, is the epitome of the rhetorical Justice. Last week, as the Court prepared to finish its work for the year, Jackson issued a pair of dissents that signalled her despair over the Court’s trajectory, her refusal to sugarcoat its behavior, and her willingness to break with her liberal colleagues, Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor.

New Justices tend to hang back; Jackson, now in her third term, spoke up from the start. In her first eight oral arguments, she spoke eleven thousand words, twice as many as the next most loquacious Justice, Sotomayor. That tendency has persisted—TheHillfound that Jackson spoke seventy-five thousand words this term, fifty per cent more than Sotomayor—and it isn’t the only measure of Jackson’s assertiveness. As theTimesSupreme Court correspondent Adam Liptak noted at the conclusion of Jackson’s first term on the Court, Chief Justice John Roberts “did not write his first solo dissent in an argued case until 16 years into his tenure. Justice Jackson issued three such dissents in her first term.” Jackson’s conduct this term—in her work on the Court and her comments outside it—is not different so much as it ismore so: more alarmed at the direction the Court and the country are heading, and more willing than ever to go it alone in expressing that distress.

Jackson’s independence from her liberal colleagues was on display in April, when the majority ruled that a challenge to President Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to remove Venezuelan migrants to a Salvadoran prison had been brought in the wrong court. Sotomayor’s dissent, joined by Kagan, Jackson, and, in part, by the conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett, was unsparing. She described the Trump Administration’s effort to “hustle” the Venezuelans out of the country before they could obtain due process as “an extraordinary threat to the rule of law.” The Court’s seeming indulgence of that behavior, she added, was “indefensible.” Jackson went further, in her own dissent. She assailed the majority’s “fly-by-night approach” of deciding cases on an emergency basis, without full briefing or oral argument—and compared the opinion withKorematsu v. United States, the discredited 1944 ruling upholding the internment of Japanese Americans. “At least when the Court went off base in the past, it left a record so posterity could see how it went wrong,” Jackson wrote. “With more and more of our most significant rulings taking place in the shadows of our emergency docket, today’s Court leaves less and less of a trace. But make no mistake: We are just as wrong now as we have been in the past, with similarly devastating consequences. It just seems we are now less willing to face it.”

Speaking last month at a judicial conference, Jackson seized the opportunity to call out “the elephant in the room, which is the relentless attacks and disregard and disparagement that judges around the country, and perhaps many of you, are now facing on a daily basis.” Two of her colleagues had already taken oblique aim at President Trump. In March, after Trump called for the impeachment of the district-court judge who handled the Alien Enemies Act case, the Chief Justice departed from his usual Olympian silence to note that “impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.” Later that month, Sotomayor went a bit further. “One of the things that is troubling so many right now is many of the standards being changed right now were norms that governed officials into what was right and wrong,” Sotomayor cautioned in an appearance at Georgetown University Law Center. “Once norms are broken, then you are shaking some of the foundation of the rule of law.” Jackson, for her part, let it rip. “Across the nation, judges are facing increased threats of not only physical violence but also professional retaliation, just for doing our jobs,” she warned. “And the attacks are not random; they seem designed to intimidate those of us who serve in this critical capacity. The attacks are also not isolated incidents; that is, they impact more than just the individual judges who are being targeted. Rather, the threats and the harassment are attacks on our democracy—on our system of government. And they ultimately risk undermining our Constitution and the rule of law.”

The ferocity of Jackson’s dissents last week was remarkable in part because the opinions came in two relatively low-profile cases, not the kind of hot-button disputes that tend to bring out the adjectives. It was even more remarkable because, in both cases, one of her liberal colleagues was on the opposing side: Kagan, who tends to be more moderate than Jackson and Sotomayor, joined the majority. One case involved the important but technical question of whether the federal disability-rights law covers discrimination against retired workers in the benefits they receive. The majority opinion and the dissent each accused the other side of being driven by the desire to reach the outcome they wanted rather than by an interest in interpreting the law correctly—a charge that is about as nasty as things get at the high court. Gorsuch, writing for the majority, asserted that Jackson had resorted to examining the purpose and legislative history of the disability law because she found the method of “pure textualism”—looking only at the precise language of a statute—“insufficiently pliable to secure the result” she wanted. Jackson returned fire. “Too often, this Court closes its eyes to context, enactment history, and the legislature’s goals when assessing statutory meaning,” she wrote. “I cannot abide that narrow-minded approach. If a statute’s text does not provide a clear answer to a question, it is not our role to keep twisting and turning those words until self-confirmatory observations solidify our ‘first blush’ assumptions.”

Sotomayor joined that part of Jackson’s dissent, but she pointedly did not sign on to a lengthy footnote in which Jackson accused the majority of “an unfortunate misunderstanding of the judicial role,” arguing that the insistence on “pure textualism”—its refusal to consider Congress’s goals in enacting a statute—turns the interpretive task into a potent weapon for advancing judicial policy preferences.” Far from “being ‘insufficiently pliable,’ ” Jackson added, “pure textualism is incessantly malleable—that’s its primary problem—and, indeed, it is certainly somehow always flexible enough to secure the majority’s desired outcome.”

If that exchange wasn’t heated enough, in the second case—which concerned whether gasoline companies, not just automakers, have standing to challenge California’s auto-emissions standards—Jackson all but accused the majority of being in the pocket of big business. The Justices allowed the case to proceed even though the Trump Administration had signalled that it will repeal the waiver letting California set its own emissions standards. The Court “does not explain why it is so eager to resolve this highly factbound, soon-to-be-moot dispute,” Jackson wrote. “For some, this silence will only harden their sense that the Court softens its certiorari standards”—how it decides whether to hear a case—“when evaluating petitions from moneyed interests.” She added, “This Court’s simultaneous aversion to hearing cases involving the potential vindication of the rights of less powerful litigants—workers, criminal defendants, and the condemned, among others—will further fortify that impression.” Jackson made a similar point about the Court’s finding: that gasoline companies had the right to sue. The majority’s “demonstrated concern for ensuring that the fuel industry’s ability to sue is recognized on these facts highlights a potential gap in the manner in which the Court treats the claims of plaintiffs pursuing profits versus those seeking to advance other objectives,” she wrote. Sotomayor, notably, dissented separately.

The end of a Supreme Court term is inevitably a moment for frayed tempers and jangled nerves. And Jackson is not the first Justice to sound such a bitter note. “The current Court is textualist only when being so suits it,” Kagan wrote three years ago, when the Court essentially invented a new rule to limit regulatory agencies. “When that method would frustrate broader goals, special canons like the ‘major questions doctrine’ magically appear as get-out-of-text-free cards.” Dissenting in the Presidential-immunity case last year, Sotomayor lamented that the majority “invents an atextual, ahistorical, and unjustifiable immunity that puts the President above the law,” concluding, “With fear for our democracy, I dissent.” (Jackson took some of the oomph out of Sotomayor’s opinion, which she and Kagan joined, by penning one of her own.)

Even so, the Jackson dissents—and there could be more to come before the summer recess—offer an unnerving window into a Court where Justices’ patience with one another is wearing thin. They are splintered, often angrily, along familiar ideological lines, and at the same time the diminished liberal wing, rather than being unified in opposition, often finds itself fractured. The institution that the country needs most right now is not a happy place, and the junior Justice may be the unhappiest of all. ♦

Earlier this year, it seemed as though the final chapter of Leonard Peltier’s story had been written. The eighty-year-old is serving two consecutive life sentences for the 1975 killing of two F.B.I. agents, Ronald Williams and Jack Coler, which he says he didn’t commit. Having exhausted legal channels for appeal, and been denied parole, it appeared that he would die in prison. But, during the final moments of Joe Biden’s Presidential Administration, Biden commuted Peltier’s sentence to home confinement. Peltier is now home, at the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation, in North Dakota.

When I called him after he got there, one of the first things he said to me was, “We were at war.” That war had already begun when Peltier was a child. In 1953, when Peltier was nine, Congress passed a bill to terminate his tribe, the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. The government’s actions were part of an attempt to end the trust status of tribal lands and the protections that came with it. The Red Power Movement, which advocated American Indian political and cultural autonomy, arose to reverse this agenda, and activists such as Peltier came to see themselves as engaged in a twentieth-century battle akin to the one their ancestors staged in the nineteenth century against the tide of western expansion.

In 1972, Peltier joined the American Indian Movement, among the more confrontational Red Power groups, which had been founded, a few years before, by Dennis Banks, Clyde Bellecourt, and others. That fall,AIMhelped organize a cross-country caravan called the Trail of Broken Treaties, which ended in the takeover of the Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarters, in Washington, D.C., demanding the repeal of termination legislation and renewing federal treaty relations with tribes.AIMbrought together fellow-travellers from different tribes who shared similar life stories and who resolved to turn back the existential threats facing tribal life. Many had been taught to feel shame in Native culture and language at Indian boarding schools; others had been hardened by prison stints or by the harsh realities of urban poverty. All were trying to create meaning out of a life that seemed robbed from them. That meant survival by any means, and, as it had for their ancestors, that sometimes meant picking up a gun.

After the Trail of Broken Treaties, the F.B.I. also adopted tactics of war in its increased efforts againstAIM. In 1973, the federal government conducted a seventy-one-day siege against hundreds ofAIMmembers and dissident Oglalas who had holed up at Wounded Knee, the infamous massacre site on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, to protest a despotic tribal government led by a man named Dick Wilson. The government sent hundreds of F.B.I. agents, U.S. marshals, and others to the Wounded Knee trenches, armed with military equipment including armored personnel carriers and tear gas. Their opponents were armed mostly with hunting rifles. Federal forces killed two men during the siege, the first of manyAIMdeaths to come. Peltier, meanwhile, was sitting in a Milwaukee jail, facing a charge of attempted murder that stemmed from a different protest. He was later acquitted.

Violence only increased on the reservation in the wake of the occupation. Dick Wilson set his “GOONsquad”—a private militia that he dubbed the Guardians of the Oglala Nation—to exact revenge onAIMand its supporters, andAIMretaliated. There were beatings and murders during what was dubbed the Reign of Terror. The increased presence of the F.B.I. in Pine Ridge didn’t help matters. By the spring of 1975, Peltier had set up camp on the reservation at Oglala, offering protection to elders. A confidential F.B.I. memo described the Bureau’s new function as a “paramilitary law enforcement operation in Indian Country.” The atmosphere in Pine Ridge was explosive.

On June 26, 1975, Agents Williams and Coler were at the reservation to serve warrants for robbery and assault, according to the F.B.I., when a shoot-out ensued. Peltier was arrested in Canada. His co-defendants, Bob Robideau and Dino Butler, were arrested in the U.S., tried first, and acquitted on the grounds of self-defense after their attorneys presented evidence of the volatile conditions on the reservation and the aggressive actions of the F.B.I. When Peltier was tried separately, several months later, a judge barred his defense from presenting similar evidence to a less sympathetic venue. An all-white jury convicted him of two counts of murder.

A few months after the shoot-out, another prominent member ofAIM, Anna Mae Aquash, disappeared, and was later found dead. For years, rumors circulated that she had been murdered by other members of the group who suspected that she was an informant. Peltier was publicly linked to her killing, but he has denied any involvement and has never been charged. Others suspected an F.B.I. coverup. A confidential report detailed the Bureau’s likely knowledge of the murder months before the discovery of Aquash’s body.

Peltier spent the next five decades in federal prison, where he claims that jailhouse informants and would-be assassins presented new dangers. On the outside, his supporters raised his profile as a political prisoner, and the F.B.I. pushed back. In 2000, hundreds of agents marched in front of the White House, demanding that President Bill Clinton not grant Peltier clemency. In the two-thousands, two formerAIMmembers were convicted of Anna Mae Aquash’s murder, although an alleged conspirator, Theda Nelson Clarke, was not indicted, and the trials seemed to produce more questions than answers.

Nonetheless, there continued to be overwhelming support for Peltier’s freedom in Indian Country, especially in the Pine Ridge reservation, where memories of the violence over a half century ago still feel fresh. The Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline, in 2016, catalyzed a new era of Native activism, and, in recent years, young Native activists took up Peltier’s campaign. His freedom was seen as part of a broader effort to address destructive federal policies, including the Indian boarding-school system, which Peltier was subjected to. When he crossed the reservation line this February, it was as though a prisoner of the country’s longest war had finally returned home.

We spoke, via Zoom, for several hours in the spring. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Can you start by introducing yourself?

My father was a French Chippewa Cree from Turtle Mountain. And my mother was Lakota and Chippewa from Spirit Lake. I was raised basically here on Turtle Mountain and what was called Fort Totten, in the past, but the real name, today, is Spirit Lake. I was raised in both Nations. And we’re Nations, we’re not reservations any longer. We have opened the doors to freedom as much as we can, but we still have a ways to go.

You’ve spent five decades behind bars. Did you expect President Biden to release you?

No. I honestly believed that they were just delaying, and I was going to die in prison. Some people told him, if he didn’t do something, it would be political suicide for the Democratic Party, because the Natives are going to move away from him. But that’s not the real reason he let me go—they were looking for a way to let me go. So I told Holly [Cook Macarro, a lobbyist and activist], “Ask him for clemency and ask him for home confinement.” That’s how we got home confinement.

Now I’m in my house. They bought me a house—the people. I want to cry every time I think about it, I’m so happy that my people have shown me love. For the first month, I thought I was dreaming. I thought I was going to wake up one morning and there I was in that prison cell again. But I’m still here. I got my own office and I’m sitting here drinking coffee, talking to you. I’m starting to believe that I’m really out.

A 1953 bill called for the termination of your tribe, the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, at “the earliest possible time.” What was the situation like then, and how did it influence your becoming an activist?

It was 1953 when I was sent to the Wahpeton boarding school. My grandfather had died about six months before that. My grandmother was trying to get some assistance to feed me, my sister, and my cousin. She was living in the same house that we were raised in. They came, got us three kids, and put us in boarding school. I got out in 1956.

I came back here to Turtle Mountain to live with my dad and stepmother, and they were all organizing. I listened to some of the meetings they had, and they were talking about termination—that we were going to be the next reservation to be terminated, because we heard what was going on with the Menominees. They told my dad and his generation that they had to sign up for relocation, and that we were being terminated in Turtle Mountain, because it was too small of a reservation.

But my dad and his generation stood up to it, and told them, “No, you ain’t even paid us for the land you took already.” They took land from the Minnesota border all the way to Montana—they called it the Ten-Cent Treaty. They said our land was only worth ten cents an acre. It was filled with minerals, and it was probably one of the biggest ripoffs in the history of Native people.

The protest against termination was one of my first demonstrations. I was about thirteen. They took over the B.I.A. [Bureau of Indian Affairs] building. In the basement was the jail. They took over the jail and they occupied it all day. Celia Dakota, my stepmother’s sister, was doing most of the talking, and she was very angry. The superintendent was Mr. Rice. I’m standing in the back listening to all this, and the phone rang, and he answered the phone. When he hung up, he said, “I have to go now, you guys got to clear out. It’s my wife, and she said my dinner’s getting cold.” Ms. Celia got pissed off. She said, “You son of a bitch, my children are up home starving. You’re worrying about your goddam meal getting cold?” She started calling to hang him—literally, I’m not exaggerating. She said, “Somebody get a rope.” Nobody had a rope, thank God.

But he said, “I’ll make a phone call, let me call Bismarck.” [Bismarck was where the B.I.A. had its regional office.] And he called Bismarck. “These people are going to kill me, man,” he said. “They’re mad, they’re angry, they’re starving over here.” They said, “Tell them we’ll be there in the morning.” Next morning, two of them came down from Bismarck. They gave everybody a fifty-dollar voucher and said they stopped the termination of Turtle Mountain. That’s when I really started becoming an activist. But we didn’t call it activists. We called ourselves warriors for the people.

When I went to Washington State, I got involved in fishing and hunting demonstrations. My business partner, Howard Miller, was from Michigan. He was an older guy, and he and his wife, Mary Jane, were like a dad and a mother to me. We started a garage together and we got on the front page of the SeattleTimes, and that brought in a lot of business—two Indian guys starting a garage in a big city. We came home about six every night, usually watching news while Mary Jane was cooking supper. I’m watching the news; there was the demonstration about fishing and hunting, and cops are beating up this girl. I don’t know how old she was, but her little boy was probably five years old. They tore her blouse. That’s one of the things they always did to the women is tear their blouses to embarrass them. And they’re beating the shit out of her. Her little kid come running up, “Don’t hit my mama no more.” So they started hitting him. I told Howie, “You can have all this. I’m going to go fight with these people.” I couldn’t get out of my mind what I’d just seen.

You gave up your garage. How did you join the American Indian Movement?

I went to Denver and met Vernon Bellecourt. He started telling me about the American Indian Movement. I said, “Can anybody join?” I gave him a little history of my activism. He said, “We’re looking for new recruits all the time. We’re going down to a convention at Leech Lake, and I would like to have you guys travel with me.” I went to Leech Lake, and I heard Dennis Banks talk. I said, “Man, this guy can speak. This is the kind of leadership we need.”

[In April, 1974, three white teen-agers killed three Navajo men near Farmington, New Mexico. The incident, known as the Chokecherry Massacre, spurred major protests; the following year,AIMheld its convention in Farmington. A few months before the convention, a close confidant of Dennis Banks’s was outed as working for the F.B.I., which fuelled growing paranoia within the group.] Suspicions also swirled around your friend Anna Mae Aquash. It was quite shocking that the Aquash murder trials went forward because there was no physical evidence; it was all hearsay. But, during the trials, you were named as someone who interrogated Aquash for being an informant.

I didn’t carry power to order somebody killed. Anna Mae was my friend. She came with us to Farmington. We pulled into where they told us to set up our camp. Ka-Mook [another member ofAIM, also known as Darlene Nichols] came out and said, “Leonard, they’re having a meeting in there about Anna Mae.” I said, “About what?” She said, “Well, they think she’s a rat.” I said, “That’s bullshit. She’s been with us all this time, and I would’ve found out by now she was a rat.” She said, “Well, that’s what they’re saying in there. I just thought I’d come out and tell you this.”

I went in there and I asked them, “What’s this about Anna Mae, man?” They said, “Well, we got evidence.” I said, “I don’t believe that for a minute. She’s been with us for the last six months. I would’ve found out by now. Don’t anybody touch her because if you do, I’m turning against you, I’m coming after you. She is not a rat, don’t be putting that shit on people, that’s not true.” In fact, I told them, I’m going to go and interrogate her again. I never interrogated her before. I told her, “Let’s go sit behind a tree over here for a while.” So we did. Then I came back and I said, “No, I believe now fully, she’s not a rat.”

Anna Mae split from there because she was scared. A lot of people were looking at her weird.

It’s interesting that Ka-Mook was in this meeting and then came out and told you this. She was a key witness in the Aquash homicide trials. [Ka-Mook, who was in a common-law marriage with Banks, subsequently worked with the F.B.I., secretly taping conversations with Banks and others.]

She hated Anna Mae. She tried to say Anna Mae was her best friend. Anna Mae was sleeping with Dennis, and she hated it. [Ka-Mook told theTimesthat she and Aquash got along fine.]

I took Anna Mae behind the tree line and we had sat down and talked. I told her, “Make off like I really got rough with you—cry to the other women. We got to make this believable.” What did we do? We smoked a joint, sat back, laid in the sun, laughed. That’s all we did to cover her trail so nobody would try to take a pot shot at her. We created that story. She took off right after that. I don’t know who she left with. We knew she was O.K., but we left before the convention was over.

Ka-Mook said that Anna Mae told people that you put a gun to her head during the interrogation. Are you saying this was a cover story that you and Anna Mae made up?

Yeah, a cover story. It’s an old tactic in any movement to clear somebody up that’s being falsely accused of something like this.

Were there any threats to the camp before the shoot-out? Did you get any indication that something was about to pop off?

Yes. We’d seen helicopters flying over that land, all around there. We found out that those helicopters were taking surveillance surveys. And somebody that was familiar with it said they’re doing a survey of this whole area—they were possibly going to prepare an attack there. Later, during the shoot-out, we’d seen these same helicopters flying over us. They weren’t just surveyors like they told everybody, because some of the people went and complained, “Hey, why is this helicopter flying over our property with big old machines hanging out underneath it?”

These kids would be walking around down the road and the F.B.I. would pick them up and take them down to the jail to be interrogated, then tell them to walk home. That was illegal. Agents were walking to the Oglala housing, they were just walking indoors and looking, supposedly, for Jimmy Eagle, who supposedly stole a pair of used cowboy boots.

We knew what they were doing. They had everybody in the community housing very pissed off. People were saying, “They wouldn’t do that to a white man coming in, just walk in their house.” That terrified a lot of the elders. Those were terror attacks, acting like a bunch of Storm Troopers. That’s the language people started using during the Reign of Terror. This was the F.B.I. doing this. They deny it, but that’s true. That’s why people got scared and paranoid, and a lot of them believed that something was going to happen, especially with those helicopters flying around. What we heard from people that were in intelligence is that they used to scope out for a lot of tunnels and stuff like this back in Vietnam—same machines, they were claiming. People started getting paranoid.

Were a lot of those people in Oglala present when the shooting started, on June 26th?

I can’t say that for sure, so I’m not going to say anything about it. I’m not going to say who did what or who killed who. Were they participating and fighting? I would say, yes, they did. They believed they were protecting their home, because, by the time this was going on, they were surrounded by the F.B.I.SWATteams. How did they get there so soon? That’s the thing we’ve always asked.

There were families living in these homes caught in a crossfire.

Yeah. And everybody’s home. We were prepared for that because Dennis was living there with his kids and so were the other people. They were taught to be prepared for any attack, which trail to take. That’s why they all got away even with being surrounded. There was a family living in one of them small houses; I ran up there and got those people out of there immediately. One guy was running across the field, they started concentrating on him. And, well, I got the family and I got them out of there, too. They knew what to do anyway—that’s why a lot of them were not in the middle of the firefight. Not saying I’m a hero, but I’m proud of being able to do that.

You’re saying you did what you came to do. How did you get your group out?

We saw that we were surrounded completely, so we were trying to figure out how in the hell are we going to get out of there. We stopped and said a prayer. We prayed to the Great Spirit to help us. As we were moving, I saw this big bird fly out of the trees and it flew a certain way. I said, “Looks like this eagle, maybe he’s taking us out of here.” Now, this ain’t no bullshit, this ain’t no fantasy, this really happened. It led us to a culvert, and that’s how we got out of there. As we were getting close, the police cars left. They didn’t see us, so they left, moved on to something else.

And what was your thinking at that time? Was there a plan or were you just trying to—

We were trying to get away, there were no plans. But then, once we got to the hillside, Oglala people came to our rescue and led us out of there. Two young Oglala people came on horses and led us out. They risked their lives and their safety for what was going on. That wasn’t bullshit, that’s the only way we could’ve got out of there, because they had us surrounded.

Once you got out of there, you and Dennis later caught up with each other, but what happened in between?

Ka-Mook went to her family’s home in the Oglala community and Dennis happened to just go by himself, with the security, to the trial. [Banks faced trial in South Dakota for his role in a 1973 riot at the Custer County courthouse.] I ran in with Dennis later, and we sat around and talked about it. He said, “I don’t want to go to prison, I might never get out of there.” I said, “I don’t think it’ll come from any Natives in there, we might have a couple, two, three that are jealous, but the majority of them in there are going to protect you, so we don’t need to worry about that, we need to worry about the staff and the rednecks in there.” We made a decision: he wasn’t going to surrender to the conviction. We had more and more people coming to us, and the F.B.I. was going crazy—they were wearing uniforms like military and coming into homes acting like Gestapos.

It wasn’t just in the Oglala community; it was happening all over the reservation. We needed protection, we needed arms. So we went to Los Angeles and got some help. We raised some money. Another friend bought a bunch of weapons. The people were terrified at what the F.B.I. was doing in those military uniforms and fatigues, and we were going back to help them, we’d fight for them, that’s what we were going to do.

Your goal was to go back to Pine Ridge?

We were in Seattle. We realized that this person’s home that was protecting us was being surveilled, and so we said, Let’s move. He was a pretty big activist himself. We left and travelled across Oregon. I’m not sure now where the hell we were heading—I think it was back to South Dakota, really. And we got stopped in Oregon. [While in Oregon, Peltier was pulled over by police officers. He fled and was shot.]

At that point, Anna Mae had reconnected with you as well.

While we were there, she hooked up with us again. So if I had treated her the way everybody claims—if I put a gun to her head—she would’ve never showed up. That was a lie. I already interrogated her about being a pig informer. And the real truth was all we did was sit around and laugh about it, that was my interrogation. Because I knew she wasn’t, I just knew it. Some of the things that we were involved in, the cops would’ve known, and they never did know. They never brought it up, so they didn’t know about it.

We made a lot of shit up to throw them off. People on phones that we knew were being tapped, they would say, “Dennis and Leonard are coming in tonight, be ready.” And then hang up the phone, and we were probably fifteen hundred miles away from there. A lot of people did that, both Natives and non-Natives.

After getting stopped in Oregon, you left for Canada.

I left way later. We sat around with all the elders, and we couldn’t figure out who were the informants. One of the things that we talked about was perhaps we should go to Canada and ask for asylum.

When I got shot in the back by the cops, on the shoulder, I had to try to get the bullet out. And so I went to these people, they put me in their attic. A doctor came and he tried to dig out that bullet, but he couldn’t get at it. They gave me a shot for pain and got to digging, but he couldn’t find it. “You got to get an X-ray.” I said, “To hell with it, just leave it in there.” It’s still there, fifty years later.

Any place I went, we had those type of people supporting us. If we were mad-dog killers like they tried to say we were, those people ain’t going to support us. Our people don’t support mad-dog killers. There was an actual war going on—they were going to wipe us all out if they could. So they did us a favor by pulling us over in Oregon and starting shooting. The cop was shooting around like he was a goddam—I don’t know, he must have thought he was a hero or something.

I had to get away to distract him because Ka-Mook was pregnant, Anna Mae and them were there, and we had two small kids. What if I had a gun? I wouldn’t have shot back anyway because I knew where the kids were, and they were all crying. So I get shot, but I still got away.

I went to Canada. I figured that we’d get more information about who were the informants that were turning against the Oglala Nation. And I went over, got arrested, and, early in the morning, they flew me into British Columbia. They brought me to one of the most conservative judges. I had two lawyers. The Native people there and the Native people from America, they came to my support and my rescue.

We found out that they had this woman [Myrtle Poor Bear] who I’d never met in my life. She was an Oglala, she came from the Poor Bear family, which is a big family. But she claimed that she was my girlfriend and she was an eyewitness to the killings. That’s totally untrue, which was proven beyond a shadow of doubt—it was all fabricated.

They promised us that they would give me a fair trial. But with the Myrtle Poor Bear stuff, I knew that was a lie. They had taken me from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where I was supposed to go to trial, but mysteriously they gave me a change of venue, to Fargo, North Dakota, a hotbed of extreme racism against Native people. In the middle of the trial, we find out that one of the jurors was a racist. She had made derogatory statements about Native people. My lawyer agreed to keep her on, but that juror should be immediately dismissed. That didn’t happen, and, of course, they all came back with a guilty verdict.

The next issue was we uncovered evidence that cast doubt on whether the murder weapon was the murder weapon. Years later, we found evidence they had done firing-pin tests on this weapon that came out negative, so this was not the murder weapon. [The government claimed that the October, 1975 F.B.I. Laboratory teletype cited by Peltier was an interim report that did not include results from later ballistic tests, and therefore did not undermine its case against him.]

You talked about this being at war with the United States government and the tactics they were using—and this extended beyond Pine Ridge, and went into the prison. There’s the case of Robert (Standing Deer) Wilson, who approached you and basically confessed to being paid to put a hit on you. Can you talk about that interaction with him, and what led to your attempts to liberate yourself from prison?

Well, Standing Deer, to be honest about it, was a little bit smarter than the rest of the informants. He had a charge for robbing a bank when he injured a cop, right? And they don’t make deals with people like that—very rarely. So, when he made a deal with them, he made them sign the papers that he would be totally exonerated from that charge, and that’s what made me believe that he was telling the truth—because he showed me the papers where they discharged that shooting of the cop.

When he showed me the paperwork, I confronted him directly, and I said, “So what are you going to do about it? Come on, let’s get it over with.” And he said, “No. I’ve been reading about your case, I’ve been reading about the Native people, I don’t want to come back to white people.” He said, “I want to fight for our people—I don’t want to be here, that’s why I’m telling you this.” That’s how he revealed himself and we accepted him. He crossed over from their side to ours.

He, as far as I know, didn’t really connect with his Indigenous identity. And judging from Peter Matthiessen’s book about your case, “In the Spirit of Crazy Horse,” it sounds like you helped him reconnect. Was that a common thing for you, to connect Indigenous brothers on the inside with the spirituality, and really push that?

Yes. Without being a brag or trying to say I was anybody special, when I got to prison, I’d already been very popular among Indian people in the streets, and so was the American Indian Movement. And so a lot of people immediately came to my rescue, let’s say. Different groups of people came to me and told me, “We’re behind you, anybody tries any bullshit, we’re behind you.” And some of these guys were big gang members, people who had a reputation of being, well, warriors. So that was a lot easier for me to be accepted by Native people.

And a lot of Native people came to me and said, “We want to be part of you guys, we want to fight for our people.” So I got a lot of protection in that way. Although I don’t know anybody that was really up to kill me—the F.B.I., I know they tried to make it sound like I needed protection. That was not true.

And now, after nearly fifty years, you’re sitting at home. What do you want the world to know about your case?

The world should know what America has done. I was no more guilty than my co-defendants, and they were found not guilty by reason of self-defense, because the jury heard what was going on, and they said that should not be done to any American. Native people have just as much right to defend themselves as any other race in the United States or around the world. I did not get a fair trial—all you got to do is read the court’s records.

This has been happening to us for hundreds of years, facing these types of trials. I’ve had a great-great uncle that was hung as one of the Dakota Thirty-eight. [In 1862, multiple Dakota groups took up arms against white settlers and members of the U.S. military. The government later executed thirty-eight men who were involved.] They hung thirty-eight of us at one time on bullshit evidence, five-minute trials with no appeals. This is what happened to us, this is just one incident of so many.

Who was that great-great uncle?

His name was White Dog. He was a brother to my great-great grandmother named Tatewikuwa, the Wind Chases the Sun—that’s my family name. But they hung him. And the reason they hung him was even more outrageous. He was walking around on the reservation and he seen this white woman looking for something to eat, wild vegetables. They looked at each other and at first she panicked and thought, Oh, my God, this guy’s going to kill me, rape me, and kill me. That’s what they were saying about Native people, that Native men see a white woman and they want to rape her and kill her. Well, that was not true, it never has been true. If anything, it was the total opposite. Her kids were hungry at home. He wasn’t doing anything that showed her that her life was in danger. They started talking. She told him, “My husband got killed and my kids are at home hungry because they ain’t got no food.” So he started helping her. He felt sorry for her. She kept telling the story that she wasn’t the only one. He asked her, “Do you have a gun?” She said, “Yes, but I only have one bullet.” He said, “Let me use it, I’ll get you a deer.” So he brought back a deer. The next day they were all happy and he came by to see if they were O.K.

He started teaching them how to hunt. And in those days, they had what were called wood buffalos. So he killed one of them, dressed it, and brought it back to the community. He was one of the guys arrested with all the Dakota men, young boys. A soldier pulled White Dog out of line. He was going to put him in the group that was going to be hung. She started begging for his life, and that only infuriated the captain, and they hung poor White Dog, too. He was innocent and he got hung. That’s part of the history of the family that was happening to us.

How do you want your story to end?

I want the people to read and know the history of what happened to Native people, the true history, the genocide, the mass murders, the killing of people—little girls, our great-great grandmothers—and enslaving our children. And I want the world to know what they did, how they did it. Not once have they ever apologized for all that brutality. They’re doing it again. Look what’s happening in Palestine. They’re murdering women, children, babies. I want that story told with my story, that’s what I’m about. I want to tell people what they did to me in the courtroom. If I would’ve been allowed to give my defense, I would’ve never gone to prison. I want the world to know what they did. I want the world to know that they’re still doing it in America.

Then, I could probably die happy—the main thing is to tell the story of what they did to us. To hell with Leonard Peltier! I want you to know what we were fighting for, and that was the truth. That’s why so many Indian people support me; they know what happened. They know what was going to happen to us, and they support me for that. I would like to hear and read this story from our point of view, a Native point of view. ♦

For this week’s Fault Lines column, Jon Allsop is filling in for Jay Caspian Kang.

Earlier this year, Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, launched a podcast that promised direct conversations with people he disagrees with. In reality, it featured him sucking up to figures from theMAGAExtended Universe. Inthe début episode,the guest was Charlie Kirk, an influential young right-wing activist and commentator; Newsom suggested that his thirteen-year-old son was so excited to meet Kirk that he wanted to skip school to attend the taping. (Newsom didn’t let him. “C’mon,” Kirk objected. “You cancelled school for like two years!” Newsom seemed to find this funny.) The following week, Steve Bannon came on the show and said that the 2020 election was stolen; Newsom let this slide. Recently, in the wake of the protests against immigration raids in Los Angeles, Kirk and Bannon have returned Newsom’s hospitality by, respectively, calling him “the fakest person I’ve ever met” and comparing him to John C. Calhoun. Newsom, for his part, has pushed back strongly against the Trump Administration’s militarized response to the protests, challenging Tom Homan, President Trump’s border czar, to arrest him (“Come and get me, tough guy”) and tweaking Trump himself in TikTok memes inspired by “Hamilton” andTaylor Swift. With enemies like these, who needs friends?

Jay Caspian Kang pointed outin this column, in March, that Newsom’s podcast always seemed doomed to fail—not to mention “embarrassing”—because his conciliatory approach was out of step with polling that indicated liberals want to see Democrats fight Trump’s Republican Party, not get along with it. Ina different column, Kang similarly took issue with a school of thought, advanced most explicitly by the veteran strategist James Carville, holding that Democrats should “roll over and play dead,” allowing Trump to burn himself out. As Kang put it, this strategy never seemed viable, either, and several recent developments signal that playing dead is, well, dead. Newsom’s newfound combativeness is one example. Another came last week, also in relation to the L.A. protests, when Alex Padilla, the normally mild-mannered California senator, confronted Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security Secretary, at a press conference, and was forced to the floor and handcuffed by federal agents. This week, there were similar scenes in New York City, where agents arrested Brad Lander, the comptroller and a candidate for mayor, while he was accompanying a migrant in immigration court. In between, millions of anti-Trump demonstrators protested across the country under the banner “No Kings.”

It’s possible to see all this as the dormant resistance to Trump finally awakening. But that isn’t really correct. AsI wrote in the first days of the new Administration, Trump’s opponents may not have marshalled anything like the enormous Women’s March of January, 2017, but civil-society groups had started to organize their supporters, and many of Trump’s early moves were quickly challenged in court. Since then, therehavebeen a lot of protests—even more, by one count, than in the equivalent stretch of Trump’s first term—though the media, as Kang noted, hasn’t always covered them to the same extent. Newsom may only just have found his voice, but other leading Democrats—the Illinois governor,J. B. Pritzker, for example—never lost theirs. Earlier this year, I felt sure that this sort of activity would spread and intensify, as it now has, if only because Trump’s political project ultimatelyrequiresresistance—which generates conflict—in order to thrive, and he will keep pushing until inevitably provoking his opponents. Newsom is a case in point. His grovelling may have been of some use to the likes of Kirk and Bannon, but he’s much more useful as a foil, an avatar of a woke élite that’s imperilling America. Being a foil may be useful to Newsom, too. One ally told NBC that if Newsomwereto be arrested for supposedly obstructing Trump’s immigration raids, it would be his “Nelson Mandela moment”—a comparison that has surely not been made before, and hopefully won’t be again.

We are, unfortunately, at the point in this column where I must capitalize the word “Resistance,” and maybe add a hashtag for good measure. As I’ve previouslynoted, with these accoutrements, the word comes to signify something more than merely fighting back, becoming freighted with the cultural signifiers of the liberal opposition to Trump’s first term. (Think “Notorious R.B.G.” tote bags, Jimmy Kimmel proposing that Trump become a ceremonial king in exchange for going away as President, the cast of “Hamilton” confronting then Vice-President Mike Pence.) As Trump returned to office, this #Resistancedidappear to be dead. Now Newsom is posting “Hamilton” memes, and Jimmy Kimmel has shown up at a “No Kings” protest. I do still think we’re in a different moment. (The old Twitter is gone, for starters.) But the basic animating spirit of the #Resistance has clearly survived.

Still, it remains an open question what a new Resistance might look like, how it might cohere or be channelled. In February, Kang posed precisely that question in this column. He toyed with historical precedents—Goldwater Republicanism, the Tea Party—but found them imprecise and largely unhelpful. He described the contours of a “nü-Resistance”—which he characterized as “angry, oppositional, and ideologically chaotic,” and severed from various pillars of the Democratic establishment—but wasn’t yet sure where that energy might go.

Nearly half a year later, we have some new data points. The framework of a Democratic Tea Party remains unhelpful—butsomethingis going on inside (and, now, outside) the Democratic National Committee, which has recently been riven by threats to primary complacent incumbents (and, now, Democrats who support going to war with Iran). These tensions have been whipped up, most notably, by David Hogg, the Parkland shooting survivor turned activist turned short-serving D.N.C. vice-chair. (After other D.N.C. leaders clashed with Hogg, his election was invalidated on procedural grounds, and he ultimately declined to run again for the post.) And Newsom, Padilla, and the “No Kings” protests appear to have harnessed some of the loose energy recently.

But other reported efforts to counter Trump’s appeal—throwing money at influencers in the hope of finding the “next Joe Rogan,” a project to study “the syntax, language and content” that appeal to young men—demonstrate the limits of top-down attempts to cultivate political energy, as well as the persistent staleness of the institutional Democratic brand. At this stage, it seems to me that “young men,” never as homogeneous a voting bloc as imagined by post-election pundits, are vastly more likely to get bored ofMAGAthan to be seduced by the political equivalent of Steve Buscemi with a skateboard asking them, “How do you vote, fellow-kids?” More substantively, the ideological contours of the new Resistance still feel unsettled. Uncompromising opposition to Trump’s most brazen maneuversdoesincreasingly look like a unifying approach. But, even there, consensus is not yet total. Some Democrats have fretted that Trump’s L.A. crackdown is bait to distract them from kitchen-table issues. Gretchen Whitmer—the governor of Michigan and, like Newsom, a leading candidate to be the Democrats’ next standard-bearer—has pursued a strategy of working with the Administration. If Newsom’s podcast supplied the most humiliating audio of the new Trump era, the most humiliating image was surelya photo of Whitmerphysically hiding in the Oval Office as Trump signed orders to investigate a pair of first-term officials who went on to criticize him. This hasn’t seemed to hurt her standing—at least in Michigan—and she has been able to tout some policy victories, most notably obtaining new fighter jets for a local base.

As with Newsom, I suspect that Trump will at some point drive Whitmer past breaking point. (Already, he has suggested that he might pardon the men convicted of trying to kidnap her, in 2020; what happens if he attempts to send the Marines to Detroit?) Then again, the notion that Newsom started his podcast with the pure intention of reaching out toMAGA, only to be met with actions that he couldn’t possibly accept, may underplay his political cunning. It’s not hard to imagine Newsom embarking on the podcast—which, as Kang noted, immediately went down horribly with the Democratic base—knowing full well that he would soon be back in Resistance-leader mode, but seeing it, in the interim, as a useful way to distance himself from progressive totems that he perceives as toxic (for instance, trans athletes competing in girls’ sports, which he disavowed to Kirk), or something to point to and say, “Look, I really did try reasoning with these people!”

And this is assuming that Newsom actuallyhaspivoted away from the podcast-conciliation strategy, which isn’t clear, even if he certainly has movedtowardResistance leadership. As recently as June 4th, he posted another cloyingly folksy conversation, this time with Dr. Phil, who described himself as “the least political person I know” before extolling family values and weighing in on “pro-Hamas” protests on college campuses; two days later, the L.A. raids began. (Dr. Phil was on the scene, having been granted special access, for some reason, to document immigration-enforcement actions.) Last week,Newsomwas interviewed on “The Daily,” the New YorkTimes’ flagship podcast, and without any prompting stressed that he has “no problem meeting with people and talking to people I disagree with,” as “some of your viewers and listeners may know.” Asked about his podcast, he indicated that he still sees it as “incredibly important” to show “a little humility” toward his adversaries, and to listen.

Back in February, Kang concluded that, when it came to the emerging opposition to Trump, “what we are seeing is not a shift in policy preferences but, rather, the dissolution of traditional political logic in this country.” I’m not sure I’d go quite this far. It’s perfectly logical, in light of how Trump is behaving, that the opposition is intensifying; it is also not surprising—or necessarily concerning—that Democrats haven’t yet articulated a coherent new policy platform less than a year on from a priors-shattering defeat. But Newsom and many of his fellow-Democrats do seem to be trying to have it both ways—to prove that you can joke around with Steve Bannonandpost “Hamilton” memes about Trump without disappearing down the gaping chasm between those acts. WhenI last wrote about Trump resistance in this column, it was to argue that it will have to coalesce, if it does at all, within a fragmented media ecosystem; Newsom, perhaps, is trying to game the choose-your-own-adventure quality of this ecosystem by putting out different content that might seep into, and resonate within, very different filter bubbles. I think this is doomed to fail because it (and he) is palpably inauthentic, and authenticity—or, rather, the perception thereof—is king in this media environment. But someone else might manage to do it. If the new Resistance remains hard to define, that’s partly because it’s still early. There’s no inevitability of neat coherence down the line. One thing is for sure: the mass protests will continue. ♦