She became a feminist at a time when saying the word out loud could make you a target. She was mocked, sexualized, dismissed, called radical, and told—over and over—that women already had everything they needed. She kept going.

That was her courage.

Steinem didn’t simply write about feminism. She put herself in the middle of the fight. She helped create Ms. Magazine. She helped build the National Women’s Political Caucus. She spoke about abortion when women were still expected to whisper about it. She challenged the idea that a woman’s body, career, sexuality, marriage, or future should be determined by someone else.

And she understood that feminism was never just about getting women into the room. It was about asking who built the room, who was allowed inside, who had power once they got there—and who was still being left outside.

She also understood that being courageous doesn’t mean being universally liked.

Gloria Steinem was criticized by conservatives who considered feminism an attack on American values. She was criticized within the feminist movement, too. She was sometimes accused of representing feminism too narrowly or receiving too much credit for a movement built by countless women, particularly Black women and women of color.

Those criticisms are part of history. But they don’t diminish the extraordinary fact that she kept showing up.

That may be what I admire most.

She didn’t wait until feminism was safe.

She didn’t wait until everyone agreed.

She didn’t wait until the political climate was comfortable.

She went anyway.

That matters enormously right now.

Because there is a temptation, especially when rights are being challenged, to become nostalgic about people like Gloria Steinem—to put their photographs on the wall, quote their best lines and congratulate ourselves for how far we’ve come.

But Gloria never treated feminism as a finished project.

She understood that rights survive because people are willing to defend them.

So remembering Gloria Steinem shouldn’t make us comfortable.

It should make us uncomfortable.

It should make us ask whether we’re willing to have even a fraction of the courage she had when the opposition is loud, when the insults are personal, when the fight is exhausting and when retreat would be easier.

She spent her life refusing to accept the boundaries other people drew around women.

That is the history worth remembering.

Not simply that Gloria Steinem was a feminist icon.

That she had the courage to become one—and then had the courage to keep fighting long after she already was.

What a woman.

What a life.

And what an example.

“I’ve done more for you than your parents, okay? Your parents are okay. I’m not gonna knock your parents, but I have been better to you than your parents.”

Read that again slowly. It isn’t a joke. It isn’t hyperbole in the way “I alone can fix it” was hyperbole. It’s a specific, deliberate rhetorical structure that shows up again and again in the historical record of men who wanted total devotion from people who weren’t inclined to give it to a stranger — so they had to dislodge something else first.

Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution ran, in part, on a piece of doctrine children were made to recite: “Father is dear, mother is dear, but Chairman Mao is dearer.” This wasn’t incidental propaganda. It was formal instruction, printed in textbooks and chanted in classrooms, designed to do one specific thing — teach a generation of children that their loyalty to the state and its leader outranked their loyalty to the people who fed them and raised them. Children were encouraged to report parents who spoke against the Party. Families were torn apart on the theory that family itself was a competing loyalty that needed to be subordinated.

North Korea built its entire founding mythology around a similar architecture. The state is the parent. The leader is the father. Actual biological parents are, at best, secondary custodians of a loyalty that ultimately belongs to Pyongyang.

Jim Jones ran the same play on a smaller scale with Peoples Temple. Robert Jay Lifton, who spent his career studying totalist movements — from Maoist China to Christian cults to political sects of every ideological stripe — identified this exact maneuver as one of the core mechanics of what he called “thought reform.” You don’t need to convince someone the leader is right about everything. You just need to convince them that their existing bonds — family, community, independent judgment — are obstacles standing between them and the leader’s love. Once that substitution happens, everything else follows on its own.

Here’s what should worry you about the Trump version: it comes pre-loaded with deniability. “I’m not gonna knock your parents.” That’s the tell, not the exception. Nobody who’s actually just complimenting himself needs to clarify that he isn’t attacking your family in the same breath. The disclaimer is doing the work of making the claim feel smaller than it is, while the claim itself — I have done more for you than the people who raised you — does the actual work of repositioning where your gratitude, your loyalty, your trust are supposed to live.

This isn’t a partisan observation dressed up as psychology. The mechanism doesn’t care about ideology. It shows up in religious cults, in political movements of every stripe, in abusive relationships between two people where one partner spends years quietly convincing the other that friends and family “don’t really understand” or “don’t really love you the way I do.” The tactic is the same because the goal is always the same: fewer competing sources of validation, more dependency on one.

Trump has said a version of this before — different words, same shape, moments where he’s positioned himself as the only one who really sees people, really fights for people, really loves people, while everyone else in their life is implicitly some lesser attachment. What’s different about this specific line is how bluntly it names the comparison. Most leaders who reach for this move dress it in euphemism. This one just said it out loud, to a stadium, and the crowd didn’t blink.

Maybe that’s the actual story here — not that he said it, but that after ten years, nobody in the room needed him to soften it anymore

The discussion about testosterone replacement therapy needs a little medical reality.

Testosterone therapy is not supposed to be prescribed simply because a man is getting older, feels tired, or wants to be more muscular. A legitimate diagnosis of hypogonadism requires symptoms consistent with testosterone deficiency plus consistently and unequivocally low testosterone levels, generally confirmed with at least two properly obtained early-morning tests. The underlying cause should also be investigated.

And age matters.

Testosterone deficiency can occur at any age, but the causes are different. A man in his 60s or 70s may experience an age-related decline, although even then treatment should be individualized. A man in his 20s or 30s who genuinely requires lifelong exogenous testosterone is more likely to have a specific medical cause: testicular damage or disease, a pituitary or hypothalamic disorder, a genetic condition, cancer treatment, trauma, or another identifiable problem.

That brings us to the military.

If a healthy 18-to-40-year-old man genuinely required exogenous testosterone injections simply to maintain normal physiological function, it is reasonable to ask whether the underlying condition would have affected his eligibility for military service in the first place.

That does not mean every young man on medically necessary testosterone is unfit for service. Some conditions develop after enlistment. Some are treatable. Some service members can absolutely remain fully capable while receiving hormone replacement therapy.

But the idea that large numbers of otherwise healthy young men require testosterone injections simply because their natural testosterone is inadequate should prompt questions—not automatic prescriptions.

Testosterone is a hormone replacement therapy for a diagnosed medical condition. It is not supposed to be a shortcut for treating normal aging, poor sleep, obesity, stress, or the cultural anxiety that some men have about getting older.

And if the Pentagon is now promoting widespread testosterone screening and possible treatment, the medical question should come first:

How many men actually have clinically diagnosed hypogonadism—and how many are simply being told that normal aging needs a prescription?

The distinction matters. So does the evidence.

But underneath the eulogies, the machinery of Washington didn’t pause for even a day. And what that machinery reveals is often more honest than what gets said at a podium.

Todd Blanche Just Lost His Best Defender

Graham chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee’s confirmation hearings with the kind of loyalty that made him one of the most reliable institutional defenders Trump’s nominees had. Whatever else can be said about that loyalty, it was consistent, and it was effective. Todd Blanche — Trump’s former personal defense lawyer, now the acting Deputy Attorney General up for confirmation as Attorney General — was set to appear before Judiciary this week, in the middle of mounting scrutiny over his handling of the Epstein files.

Graham would have been in that room. He would have run interference, managed the hostile questions, kept the hearing moving in Blanche’s favor. He’s not there now. The math didn’t just shift by one vote — it shifted by one advocate, at the exact moment Blanche needs one most, with judges already on record finding DOJ has effectively stalled and dodged. Whoever South Carolina’s governor appoints as an interim replacement inherits Graham’s vote, but nobody inherits his relationships or his willingness to spend them defending an increasingly compromised nominee.

The Ukraine Sanctions Bill Graham Never Got to Pass

Here’s the part that’s almost too on the nose: Graham spent over a year pushing a Russia sanctions bill with Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen, explicitly framed around forcing consequences for Putin’s war in Ukraine. It stalled, as most things in this Congress do, tangled up in reconciliation fights and a Senate that can barely agree on its own recess schedule.

Within hours of his death, Shaheen was already invoking it: “There can be no more fitting memorial to Lindsey, his legacy or the causes he fought for than to pass this legislation and realize his long-held dream of an independent and secure Ukraine.” That’s not cynicism on her part — it’s a genuine attempt to use a rare moment of bipartisan grief to move something Graham actually believed in. But it’s also proof that the bill needed him to die before it had a real shot at momentum. That’s a hard thing to sit with, and it should be.

What This Actually Says

None of this is really about Graham. It’s about how thin the margins are in a Senate that’s been running at 52 or 53 seats depending on the week, where the Trump administration’s most vulnerable nominee just lost his floor advocate and a stalled foreign policy priority might finally move because the man who championed it isn’t around to keep championing it slowly.

Eulogies tell you what people want remembered. The confirmation calendar and the legislative math tell you what actually mattered functionally — whose vote counted, whose advocacy mattered, what was contingent on one person’s continued presence in a building. Sometimes the political consequences of a death say more about the actual stakes of a moment than anything said in the sincerest tribute.

Every single day of this administration, I open my laptop and read some version of the same story wearing a different mask. A federal agency gutted. A judge attacked. A statistic disputed not because it’s wrong, but because it’s inconvenient. And underneath all of it, if you trace the thread back far enough, you find the same root cause every time: a man who cannot tolerate being told he failed at something, bending entire departments of the United States government to make sure he never has to.

It doesn’t matter which department you pick. Statehood fights. Spyware deployed against Americans. The FBI reshaped into a loyalty test. The national debt ballooning while the administration picks fights it doesn’t need to pick. These aren’t separate crises. They’re the same crisis, showing up in a different building each week.

Here’s what actually keeps me up at night, though. It’s not the news cycle itself — I’ve built a career reading that cycle and I can take it. What exhausts me is knowing how many people watching this same news have no idea what they’re actually looking at. They see chaos and assume it’s strategy. They see cruelty and assume it’s policy. Almost none of it is. Most of it is one man’s refusal to sit with a single personal failure, and the rest of us paying the bill for that refusal — in time, in money, in institutions that don’t come back once they’re broken.

So today I want to walk through exactly how much of what you’re seeing traces back to that one root cause, department by department, because once you see the pattern, you can’t unsee it.

We’ve Become Numb to the Damage. Millions of Americans Haven’t Even Seen It — Because Nobody Ever Showed Them.

Here’s the part that worries me most. Those of us who follow this closely — who read the court filings, track the inspector general reports, watch the personnel purges — have developed a kind of tolerance. A new outrage lands, and instead of stopping us cold, it just gets filed next to yesterday’s outrage. We’ve been sensitized to the point that “the FBI just fired career agents for not showing sufficient loyalty” barely registers as a headline anymore. It’s Tuesday.

That numbness is dangerous on its own. But it’s not even the most dangerous thing happening right now.

The most dangerous thing is that there’s an entire population of Americans who never got numb to this — because they never saw it in the first place. Not because they don’t care. Because the damage doesn’t arrive as a single dramatic headline. It arrives as a closed rural hospital. A grant that quietly disappeared. A small town’s 250th anniversary celebration that got defunded so the money could go toward a monument in Washington instead. And for a huge share of these voters, there’s a second, harder wall in the way: their entire information diet runs through outlets built and bankrolled to protect this administration, not report on it. When the only coverage you get frames every one of these stories as “fake news,” or simply never airs them at all, you don’t have a numbness problem. You have a knowledge problem, manufactured on purpose.

That’s not an accident of the media landscape. It’s the business model. Outrage about the other side sells. Scrutiny of your own side doesn’t. So the same voters who’d be furious to learn that hundreds of FBI agents got pulled off real casework to chase a six-year-old grudge simply never hear it happened — or hear a version so distorted it reads as persecution of Trump instead of the truth. They feel the effects without ever being shown the cause, and the one place that could show them the cause has been trained, for years, not to.

That’s the gap I want to close. Not by shouting louder at the people already exhausted and paying attention, but by showing the people who aren’t yet paying attention exactly where the thread leads — so the damage stops feeling like bad luck and starts looking like what it actually is: the cost of managing one man’s ego, paid by everyone except him, and hidden on purpose from the people paying it hardest.

When the Blindness Has a Body Count: The FBI Is Investigating an Election Trump Lost Six Years Ago

Here’s a fact that should stop you cold, and I promise you most Americans have never heard it: the FBI has directed more than 200 staffers — pulled from field offices across the entire country — to investigate Georgia’s 2020 election. Not a current threat. Not an active crime. An election Joe Biden won, that has been recounted, litigated, and confirmed by Trump’s own hand-picked officials, six years ago.

And it gets worse. The investigation didn’t originate from evidence of wrongdoing. It originated from a referral by Kurt Olsen — a Trump-appointed “Director of Election Security and Integrity” who spent years pushing debunked Stop the Steal claims and was sanctioned by a federal judge for making false and misleading assertions in court. That’s who’s steering hundreds of FBI agents right now. Not a whistleblower. Not new evidence. A sanctioned conspiracy theorist with a title Trump created for him.

The intelligence community got dragged into this same grudge. When the FBI searched the Fulton County election hub in January, then-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard herself showed up at the search — despite the fact that the DNI’s job is legally limited to foreign intelligence, not domestic law enforcement — and arranged a congratulatory call so Trump could personally thank the agents for indulging him. Gabbard has since resigned. Her replacement, Bill Pulte, has no intelligence background at all; his actual job is running the Federal Housing Finance Agency. He’s kept the role anyway, spending it, by his own record, compiling material on Trump’s perceived political enemies rather than tracking foreign threats. The nation’s top intelligence post has functionally become another tool for managing the president’s grievances.

This is the blindness I’m talking about. Hundreds of FBI agents are not investigating cartels, or foreign espionage, or domestic terror threats, or child exploitation rings. They’re investigating whether Donald Trump’s ego was right in 2020. Meanwhile, over at DOJ, Jeanine Pirro — a former Fox host with no prosecutorial infrastructure to show for it — is running the U.S. Attorney’s office for the nation’s capital at a trial win rate roughly half the national average, because loyalty got her the job, not competence.

None of this comes free. Every analyst reassigned to Fulton County is an analyst not working a real case. Every hour Pirro’s office spends chasing headlines instead of convictions is an hour a violent case sits unprosecuted. This is what it actually costs to keep one man from ever having to say the words “I lost.”

And this is exactly the part the average voter never sees, twice over — once because the damage is structural instead of cinematic, and again because the outlets they trust most have every incentive to make sure they never connect the dots. That’s the whole scheme, working exactly as designed. Not loud enough for the sensitized to notice. Hidden well enough that the unaware never will — unless somebody hands them the thread.

He called it the Managerial Age. The greatest evil, he wrote, is not conceived in dens of crime. It is conceived in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices.

File the date: March 13, 2026. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth held a press conference. CNN had just reported that the Pentagon significantly underestimated Iran’s willingness to close the Strait of Hormuz. Hegseth did not dispute the reporting. He said: “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.”

No one raised a voice.

Note which detail matters here. Hegseth did not threaten CNN. He did not need to. He announced, calmly, at a podium, that the preferred outcome was already in motion. David Ellison — son of Larry Ellison, billionaire donor and vocal Trump supporter — had already taken control of CBS News. Transcripts show CBS coverage of Trump became measurably less critical after that transfer. Bari Weiss, installed as editorial overseer, is now reported to be extending her authority to CNN.

This is not a media story. It is a structural story.

The consolidation itself is the mechanism. Six corporations controlled ninety percent of American media in 2011. The mergers since have not expanded independence. They have reshuffled ownership while concentrating it. The FCC, designed as a nonpartisan body, has functioned under this administration as a lever of political approval for transactions that require it.

The Paramount Skydance merger — the vehicle through which Ellison controls CBS — has admitted in FCC filings that nearly half the combined company would be foreign-owned. The backing comes from sovereign wealth funds controlled by Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, and Qatar.

Clean offices. Signed documents. Regulatory filings. No raised voices.

Lewis understood that the most durable evil does not announce itself. It is moved, seconded, carried, and minuted. It does not require villains in the melodramatic sense. It requires administrators — people doing their jobs, approving transactions, managing optics, filing paperwork — who have decided, quietly, that editorial independence is a cost center and political alignment is a survival strategy.

Most readers will process this as a business story. A merger. A personnel decision. A regulatory approval. That is precisely how it is designed to be processed.

Note what Lewis identified as the precondition: not force, not spectacle, not the raised voice. The precondition is the assumption, spreading quietly through institutions, that the men in the offices know better than the public what the public should be permitted to know.

The Managerial Age does not announce its arrival. It sends a press release.

She was born on May 15, 1937, in Prague, Czechoslovakia — a country that would cease to exist under Nazi occupation two years later. Her family fled. They came back after the war. They fled again after the Soviets. She was eleven years old when they arrived in the United States as refugees. She would grow up to become the most powerful diplomat in the world.

That is the American story at its best. Not the myth of it. The actual thing.

Albright became the 64th Secretary of State in January 1997, confirmed unanimously by the United States Senate. She was the first woman to hold the office, and at that moment, the highest-ranking woman in the history of the U.S. government. She didn’t get there by inheritance or loyalty to a patron. She got there through five decades of serious, grinding work — a Ph.D. from Columbia, years on the National Security Council staff, the chairmanship of the Center for National Policy, a professorship at Georgetown, and four years as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, where she earned a reputation as the toughest voice in the room.

She knew what she was fighting for because she had lived what happens when no one fights.

During her tenure she led NATO’s intervention in Kosovo, stopping ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. She expanded NATO eastward, bringing Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic — her homeland — into the alliance, extending the security umbrella over nations that had known Soviet occupation within living memory. She negotiated, pressured, and maneuvered through some of the most volatile years of the post-Cold War order. She wore her brooches like a second language — a snake when she wanted to send a message to Saddam Hussein, a crab when Russian diplomats called her “a parrot.” She understood that symbolism and substance were not opposites.

When she learned in adulthood that her family had been Jewish, that three of her grandparents had died in Nazi concentration camps — information her parents had kept from her in an effort to protect her — she did not retreat from the revelation. She integrated it. It deepened her understanding of what was at stake when the world looked away.

She wrote. She taught. She warned. Her 2018 book, Fascism: A Warning, read like a dispatch from someone who had seen the early signs before and was watching them reappear. It was not a partisan document. It was a reckoning.

She died on March 23, 2022. She was 84 years old.

The current Secretary of State is Marco Rubio.

This is not a comparison designed to be unfair to Rubio. The facts do that work on their own.

Rubio is not without ability. He is a capable political operator who spent fourteen years in the Senate, served on the Foreign Relations Committee, and demonstrated — at least during parts of his career — a genuine understanding of democratic values and the threat posed by authoritarianism abroad. He called Trump a “con man” and a “dangerous” candidate during the 2016 primary. He was not entirely wrong.

Then he wasn’t.

Rubio is now the 72nd Secretary of State, serving simultaneously as acting National Security Advisor — a dual role last held by Henry Kissinger. He is the first Latino to hold either position, which is a fact worth acknowledging and a barrier worth noting. It does not change the assessment of what he has done with the office.

Under his tenure, the State Department has gutted the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor — firing 80% of its staff. It has shut down the office that tracked foreign disinformation. It has slashed the foreign aid infrastructure that, whatever its imperfections, represented America’s investment in stability across the developing world. USAID — which Rubio briefly administered — was effectively dismantled.

The man who once said America must stand for democracy abroad now runs a State Department that has made authoritarian accommodation its operating logic. Ukraine is “not our war.” Refugees are a burden. Alliances are transactions. Human rights are leverage — when they’re mentioned at all.

When NBC News asked Rubio in Beijing this week whether he still felt the same way about China’s human rights record that he did as a Senator — when China sanctioned him for what he said — he explained that his job now is different. He executes the president’s foreign policy.

That is, in one sentence, the distance between these two Secretaries of State.

Albright carried her convictions into the office. She shaped policy from a bedrock of lived understanding. She knew what tyranny looked like from the inside of a family that had run from it twice. She brought that knowledge into every negotiation, every press conference, every NATO council meeting.

Rubio brought his convictions to the Senate floor and left them there when the job changed.

There is a line Albright returned to again and again, a phrase she used to describe the role of the United States in the world: the indispensable nation.

She meant it as a responsibility. A weight. A moral obligation that came with power, not a license to wield it without accountability.

The current administration has inverted that idea entirely. America First, in practice, has meant America Alone — pulling back from the structures we built, the commitments we made, the reputation we spent decades earning. The indispensable nation has become the unreliable one.

Madeleine Albright spent her life building the thing they are dismantling.

She understood — because she had lived its absence — what the world looks like when America decides it doesn’t need to show up.

Today would have been her 89th birthday.

She was born in a country that no longer existed by the time she was two years old.

She spent the rest of her life making sure other people’s countries didn’t disappear.

That is the office. That is what it was for. That is what we gave away.

Look at it.

A cartoon egg character with a Trump combover reading a book labeled MAGA. Posted by a federal agency that is actively being dismantled. During a week meant to honor the people who show up every single day to educate other people’s children — underpaid, undersupplied, and increasingly under legal threat for teaching accurate history.

This is what they think of teachers. This is what they think of your kids.

I don’t have children. But if I did and I walked into a classroom and saw this on the wall, I would pull them out that day. Not because I’m opposed to education. Because this isn’t education. This is indoctrination wearing a party hat.

Let’s be precise about what this administration has done to public education while posting cartoon eggs for Teacher Appreciation Week. They’ve cut $6.8 billion from the Department of Education budget. They’ve pushed Bible instruction and mandatory prayer back into public school curricula. They’ve ended the universal free school lunch program. They’ve flooded school board meetings with Turning Point USA organizing kits. They’ve banned books in federal guidance. They’ve threatened Title I funding for districts that won’t comply with ideological curriculum mandates. They’ve packed classrooms by cutting teaching positions while demanding higher test scores.

And then they posted this.

A MAGA reading program mascot. For Teacher Appreciation Week. From the agency they are trying to abolish.

The teachers I know are buying their own supplies. They are staying until six o’clock. They are calling parents back after dinner. They are writing grants on weekends to keep art programs alive. They are sitting with kids who don’t have enough to eat at home. They are doing the most important underpaid work in this country, and the federal government just told them — with a cartoon egg holding a MAGA book — exactly how much they are appreciated.

This isn’t a tone-deaf mistake. This is a message.

The message is: your children belong to our agenda now.

That should be a dealbreaker for every parent in America regardless of party. Salt on open wounds doesn’t begin to cover it. This is contempt dressed up in primary colors and posted on a Tuesday.

Trump ran to the cameras. Talked about the stock market. Said he gets targeted more than Biden because he’s more consequential.

Same building. Different species.

Trump ran to the cameras. Talked about the stock market. Said he gets targeted more than Biden because he’s more consequential.

Same building. Different species.

Denmark: -84. The country Trump tried to buy. Sweden: -79. Finland: -80. Germany: -72. Austria: -78. These are not adversaries. These are the nations whose soldiers bled next to ours on every battlefield of the last century. They built NATO with us. They rebuilt Europe with us. They buried their dead alongside ours.

And the only countries on this map where Donald Trump registers positive approval are Hungary — run by Viktor Orbán, whom Trump calls his favorite European leader — and Serbia. That is the company we now keep on the world stage.

This did not happen because of a bad news cycle. It happened because the world watched. They watched us threaten Denmark. They watched us abandon Ukraine. They watched us start a war, deplete our missile stockpiles, and send envoys to beg Pakistan to pass notes to Iran. They watched us fire the inspectors general, gut the foreign service, and replace diplomats with loyalists.

America’s reputation is not wounded. It has been systematically dismantled — not by our enemies, but by the man 77 million Americans chose to lead us.

Generations of diplomatic capital. Gone. And the damage compounds daily.

The map is not an opinion. It is a receipt.

File the date. April 24, 2026. The United States Department of Justice announced that it is formally adopting the firing squad, electrocution, and gas asphyxiation as authorized methods of federal execution.

Note the framing. The document does not describe these as expansions of state power over the body. It describes them as a restoration of “solemn duty.”

This is worth pausing over.

The history of authoritarian consolidation is not primarily a history of dramatic moments. It is a history of paperwork. New protocols. Amended procedures. Expanded methods. Streamlined timelines. Each action taken is legal, in the sense that the state declares it legal. Each action is framed as the correction of a prior wrong — the prior administration’s weakness, sentimentality, failure of nerve.

Note which administration’s language is being used here. The announcement condemns the Biden Justice Department for “untold harm to the public.” The harm identified is: declining to kill people.

Consider what the word “streamline” is doing in this context. The Justice Department announced it is streamlining internal processes to expedite death penalty cases — reducing by years the period between conviction and execution. In ordinary governance, speed in bureaucratic process is neutral or good. In the administration of death, speed forecloses review. Speed is not efficiency. Speed is finality before error can be corrected.

The United States has executed innocent people. This is documented. It is not contested by serious scholars of the criminal justice system. The Death Penalty Information Center has tracked 190 exonerations of death row inmates since 1973. The argument for slower processes was always this: the state, once it kills, cannot unkill.

The DOJ also moved to publish a proposed rule prohibiting capital inmates from submitting clemency petitions until court decisions in the inmate’s direct appeal and first collateral attack are final. Read that sentence again slowly. The government is proposing to formally restrict the pathway by which a condemned person might demonstrate their innocence before the state ends their life.

Note the geography of this announcement. Approximately 141 countries have abolished the death penalty, including all but one European nation — Belarus. Belarus. File that comparison. Not because the United States is Belarus. Because the direction of movement matters. Democratic consolidation moves toward restraint of state violence. The opposite movement has a pattern, and the pattern has a name.

The federal government has not previously included the firing squad as a method of execution in its protocols, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. This is new ground. It is being broken quietly, on a Friday, in the language of restoration.

Historians recognize the language of restoration. It is among the most reliable signals in the literature of democratic backsliding. The strongman does not say: I am expanding state power over life and death. He says: I am returning us to what we were. He says: the weakness before me was the aberration. He says: I am restoring solemn duty.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche stated that “the prior administration failed in its duty to protect the American people by refusing to pursue and carry out the ultimate punishment.” The argument is constructed so that mercy is failure. Restraint is dereliction. This is the logic that precedes things historians spend careers explaining.

Note which three people currently sit on federal death row. Dylann Roof, who carried out the 2015 racist slayings of nine Black members of Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina; Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the 2013 Boston Marathon bomber; and Robert Bowers, who carried out fatal shootings at a Pittsburgh synagogue. The state has genuine monsters to point to. It always does. The question worth asking is not whether the state can identify people who committed atrocities. The question is what kind of state we are choosing to become in response to them.

The Trump administration has so far authorized seeking death sentences against 44 defendants. The machinery being built is not calibrated for three people.

The firing squad. The gas chamber. The electric chair. These are not innovations. They are retrievals. Things that were set aside are being brought back. Bureaucracies do not retrieve methods of killing casually. They retrieve them because they anticipate needing them.

You may draw your own conclusions about what they are anticipating.

A former staffer told the San Francisco Chronicle — and then CNN — that Eric Swalwell had sex with her while she was blacked out. Twice. Once in 2019. Once in 2024.

“I was pushing him off of me, saying no,” she told CNN. “He didn’t stop.”

She didn’t come forward sooner because he was the foundation of her career. Because she had no one to vouch for her skills outside of him and his office. Because she knew, if she spoke, it would define her.

She was right about that last part.

Three more women followed. Unsolicited nude photos. Unwanted touching. A pattern.

The Manhattan DA opened a criminal investigation Saturday.

Within 24 hours of the Chronicle story, Swalwell lost every single one of his 21 congressional endorsements. Pelosi called him. Jeffries called on him to drop out. Schiff withdrew. Khanna said what he did was “sick and disgusting.” His campaign co-chair quit. His staff quit. The California Teachers Association quit. Labor quit.

The frontrunner for governor of California went from the top of the polls to radioactive in a single news cycle.

And Eric Swalwell is still running.

Here’s what he said Friday night.

“They are absolutely false. They did not happen.”

Then: “I do not suggest to you in any way that I’m perfect or that I’m a saint. I have certainly made mistakes in judgment in my past, but those mistakes are between my wife and me.”

That’s two things he said in the same video.

They did not happen.

And: I apologize to my wife.

File that.

Here’s something else.

For nearly 20 years, Swalwell has described himself as a prosecutor who went to court on behalf of victims. Specifically on behalf of sexual assault victims.

That’s the credential he runs on. That’s the moral authority he claims.

A woman says she told him no. She says she was pushing him off. She says he didn’t stop.

And he is using that credential — right now — to stay in this race.

The Democratic Party moved fast here. That matters. It should be said.

It is also not enough.

Because Eric Swalwell is still in this race.

Because he has decided that his political future is worth more than the testimony of the women who trusted him.

Because somewhere in his calculation, the math still works.

It shouldn’t.

There’s a word for what the woman described.

Swalwell knows it.

He prosecuted cases that used it.

He just doesn’t want it applied to him.

After the courts blocked the original tariff scheme, the administration did not pause to reconsider whether the policy itself was lawful or wise. Instead, it did something more revealing: it searched for another legal hook—another statute that could be stretched to reach the same predetermined outcome. The goal did not change. Only the justification did.

This is not adaptation. It is evasion.

In a functioning constitutional system, law defines the limits of power. Here, law is being treated as a menu of options—pick a statute, reinterpret it aggressively, and proceed until a judge intervenes. When that intervention comes, the response is not reflection but iteration: try again, differently, and hope this version survives longer.

The statute now being used was never meant to support sweeping, indefinite tariffs tied to political narratives about trade. It was designed for narrow, time-bound economic circumstances. To deploy it in this way is not creative interpretation; it is a deliberate effort to detach power from its legal foundation.

And that is the point.

This pattern reveals a governing philosophy that does not accept limits as legitimate. If Congress has not clearly granted the authority, the answer is not to seek legislation—it is to act anyway and force the courts to react. Power is asserted first; legality is sorted out later.

That reverses the constitutional order.

The consequences are not abstract. When policy is made this way, it becomes inherently unstable. Businesses are subject to rules that may vanish in a courtroom. International partners are forced to negotiate with a government whose commitments may not survive judicial review. Citizens are left with a version of governance that feels arbitrary, because it is.

But the deeper damage is institutional.

Each time the executive branch stretches a law beyond recognition, it tests whether anyone will stop it. Courts may do so, for now. But over time, the repetition itself matters. It normalizes the idea that the boundaries of power are not fixed, only provisional—something to be discovered through trial and error.

This is how democratic erosion actually happens. Not through a single dramatic break, but through a steady process of redefining what counts as acceptable. A statute used once in an extreme way becomes a precedent for using it again. What was once unthinkable becomes routine.

And so the cycle continues: assert, litigate, adjust, repeat.

It would be a mistake to see this as merely a fight over tariffs. It is a test of whether law still functions as a constraint, or whether it has been reduced to a temporary obstacle—something to be maneuvered around until the next attempt.

The courts may again block this effort. If they do, the administration will likely search for yet another pathway.

At some point, the question is no longer whether a particular policy survives. The question is whether the habit of governing within the law survives.

Right now, that habit is under sustained attack—not in rhetoric, but in practice.

https://www.ms.now/news/president-trump-tried-a-new-tariff-strategy-but-it-still-landed-in-court

Trump started a war without telling his allies. No consultation. No warning. No coalition. He and Israel launched strikes on Iran and then turned around and demanded that NATO — a defensive alliance built on collective security, not collective obedience — clean up the mess.

They said no.

And he called them cowards.

Italy closed its base. Spain closed its airspace. The German defense minister said out loud what every ally is thinking: This is not our war. We did not start it. That is not selfishness. That is sovereignty. That is exactly what we would say if France unilaterally bombed a country and then demanded we send our ships into a war zone to fix it.

NATO has invoked Article 5 exactly once in 76 years. After September 11. When the world showed up for us — including France, including Germany, including the countries Trump is now threatening and insulting — without being asked twice.

He didn’t give them the same courtesy of being asked once.

Now he’s signaling he may end this war with Iran still controlling the Strait of Hormuz. Twenty percent of the world’s oil supply. Blocked. And his answer is to tell allies to go take it themselves — in a strait his own Navy considers too dangerous to enter.

This is not a foreign policy. This is a man who broke the window, handed his neighbors the bill, and threatened to burn down the neighborhood association when they pushed back.

The article is right. This is bullying. But it’s worse than that. It is the deliberate dismantling of the architecture that kept a third world war from happening for three quarters of a century — not out of strategy, not out of necessity, but out of spite.

We built that alliance. Americans bled for it. And he is burning it down because our allies had the nerve to say we didn’t agree to this war.

Neither did we.

Donald Trump is the world’s worst friend

File the date: March 28, 2026. Eight million people. Every state. The largest protest in American history.

Note what happened the next morning: nothing changed.

This is not a criticism. It is a pattern.

In Hungary, millions marched. Viktor Orbán controls every institution. In Serbia, the protests are now in their fourth year. The government remains. In Georgia, students filled the streets for months. The foreign agents law passed anyway.

Note which countries broke their authoritarian governments through protest: North Macedonia. Montenegro. Poland. Note what they had in common. The protests did not replace elections. They fed them. They became coalitions. They became votes. The streets became a parliament.

Implicit in a highly-curated street protest is an orderly return to business as usual by the end of the day. Thus, it serves more as a barometer of anti-Trump sentiment than as a model of resistance.

A barometer is not a lever.

Note also what is happening simultaneously: in 2025, at least 16 states enacted 29 restrictive voting laws. Seven states enacted election interference laws giving partisan actors unprecedented authority over voting and election processes. The SAVE Act is still pending in the Senate. The mechanism by which 8 million protesters become 8 million votes is being dismantled in real time.

Poland succeeded by putting together a broad coalition to defend the independence of the Polish judiciary — and that became a coalition to elect parliamentarians in 2023, and that succeeded in changing the government.

The march is not the work. The march is the beginning of the work.

History does not reward the most passionate movement. It rewards the movement that converts passion into institutional power before the institutions are gone.

The question is not whether 8 million Americans were in the streets yesterday.

The question is whether they will be in the polling places in November — and whether those polling places will still be accessible when they arrive.

File that date too.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

https://www.ms.now/opinion/no-kings-protest-trump-size-future