Dickinson College President John E. Jones III was appointed as a federal judge by President George W. Bush and spent 20 years on the bench after being confirmed unanimously by the U.S. Senate in 2002. Jones spoke with The Conversation U.S. senior politics editor, Naomi Schalit, about America’s legal landscape after almost a year of Donald Trump’s presidency.

What does the case just argued at the Supreme Court about the president’s ability to fire leaders at independent agencies tell you about Donald Trump’s presidency?

We’ve seen a progression over time, with both Republican and Democratic presidents, where there’s been a stronger and stronger chief executive. But there’s been nothing like this administration, where the president has fired members of heretofore independent agencies. Having listened to oral arguments, which at times can be misleading, there’s very little question that the Supreme Court is going to overturn the “Humphreys Executor” precedent.

What it means is that this president will have the opportunity toutterly remake all of these independent agencies now. He’s going to take people out, root and branch, and put folks in who are either with the program or they’re not going to get appointed.

So this case is emblematic of Trump’s approach to presidential power?

He does not recognize and does not want among his appointees – certainly we see this in the Cabinet – any modicum of independence. You’re either with him 100% or you’re against him. Now that will extend to these independent agencies, and that means that the measured sort of regulations that have existed for a long time are going to be disrupted and maybe even eliminated.

This year has seen unusual amounts of activity in the Supreme Court’s shadow docket. What is the significance of that?

This is the court’s emergency docket. If the court takes these cases, they order a very abbreviated briefing and they decide the matter very quickly. Typically, this is a problem for lower court judges, as the cases are decided with very little explanation.

Sometimes months and months intervene before the court gets back to that case and renders a full and complete determination. One example would be the birthright citizenship case that came up to the court on the shadow docket. The court rendered an interim decision about whether U.S. District Court judges could issue orders stopping nationwide enforcement of Trump policies. They didn’t rule on the merits of the birthright citizenship case.

Since then, there have been conflicting decisions across the country. You have circuits that have ruled on the question and other circuits that haven’t ruled on it at all. So depending on where you live in the United States, you may or may not be subject to what heretofore has been the accepted interpretation of the 14th Amendment.

This administration’s clear strategy – to flood the zone by simply challenging every adverse decision against it in the lower courts – means there are an unprecedented number of cases coming up to the Supreme Court. It just means that there’s utter confusion in the lower courts, and it’s been the subject of a lot of dissatisfaction among lower court judges. It really puts the federal court system into a state of uncertainty and chaos, and obviously it’s not good for the public.

U.S. attorneys are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Congress limits how long interim U.S. attorneys can serve in these positions. But the Trump administration has circumvented those limits, keeping a number of interim U.S. attorneys on the job past the 120-day limit. These cases have been challenged in court. Why is this conflict notable?

What the president has attempted to do flies in the face of legislation that says that these interim appointments are limited to 120 days. Every court has found that the president’s appointment or attempted appointment beyond the first 120 days is unlawful and unconstitutional. It is a limitation on the president’s power.

If the president’s version were correct, you could just have endless interim appointments without any involvement by the Senate. This is a place where the courts have, in effect, upheld the integrity of the advice-and-consent system and the constitutional role of the Senate.

Trump ordered the Department of Justice to prosecute James Comey and Letitia James, among others. He has also granted massive numbers of pardons and commutations. What are your thoughts on these?

My takeaway as an American citizen and as a former judge is that at bottom, President Trump simply lacks respect for our system of justice.

I don’t think you can find otherwise when on your first day in office you issue over 1,000 pardons for people who were justifiably convicted or pled guilty to what was, by any account, an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021. He has pardoned countless people since then, including a former president of Honduras who his own administration prosecuted and for which there was abundant evidence that he was a drug trafficker. He’s blowing up boats in the Caribbean without, in my view, any rationale that’s grounded in law. The president believes the law is whatever he says it is at any given moment.

As to the Department of Justice, I think that’s one of the most worrisome things about this administration. There is a seamless interface between the White House and the Department of Justice that is problematic, and it is quite clear that the Department of Justice will do anything that the president wants.

I think we’re in a very, very difficult and dark place when the president by fiat can simply order his attorney general to prosecute a person. And I think every American should worry about a world where that takes place without any buffer.

The administration has a documented pattern of disobeying or sidestepping court orders. Your thoughts?

The way our system is supposed to work is that people can disagree with lower court decisions, but they have to obey them, unless they’re stayed by application to a higher court. The administration seems to have decided that they’re going to write U.S. district judges out of the picture and simply disregard their orders.

When I served as a U.S. District Court judge, I always understood that I had pretty awesome power to do things. That power was to be used sparingly and carefully, but when I ordered something, I expected that that order would be followed.

That is the nature of the rule of law and our system of justice that now has been turned on its head by this administration.

The second point is that I would wish that our Supreme Courtwould take a stronger stand against this kind of gamesmanship in the lower courts. Those who serve in the third branch – the nation’s courts – are all in this together. There has to be more attention given to an administration that has really gone rogue in terms of how they treat the orders of U.S. District Court judges.

I don’t think the public has ever heard more from judges or former judges or retired judges than they are hearing right now. That includes you, president of a university, former federal judge, saying things that I think the public isn’t accustomed to hearing from either current or former judges. What’s going on?

What’s happening is that judges who come from all stripes, philosophically and party affiliations, are deeply concerned and offended about the tenor of the times, and they feel the need, as I do, to become active and to rally to the support of our system of justice. Imperfect though it may be, I’ve always regarded it as the fairest and best system in the world.

John E. Jones III, President, Dickinson College

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The US-DRC agreement grants American companies priority access to the country’s vast mineral wealth. US firms get “right of first offer” on major mining projects. The DRC holds significant reserves of cobalt, copper and lithium.

This caps a remarkable six-month period. Since August, the Trump administration has signed mineral access agreements with Ukraine, Armenia and Azerbaijan, and reportedly Argentina. It has also negotiated bilateral arrangements with Saudi Arabia, Australia, Malaysia, Thailand and Japan.

The pace is striking. Traditional development programmes that secured American economic interests abroad typically took years to negotiate and implement. These deals are happening in weeks.

This isn’t simply Trump putting American economic interests forward. The scramble reveals how far the US has fallen behind China in securing access to critical minerals – and how much of that gap is the US’s own fault.

US presidents have always mixed economic interests with foreign policy. In the 1940s and early 50s, the Marshall Plan rebuilt Europe while opening markets. Cold War development aid created trading partners while dampening communist appeal. So Trump’s transactional style isn’t entirely new.

But the current mineral scramble stems from three converging problems – many of the administration’s own making.

Transactional approach

First, China restricted US access to critical minerals in retaliation for Trump’s tariff policies. Beijing imposed export controls on rare earth elements essential for the US to manufacture semiconductors, batteries and defence systems.

This created immediate supply-chain vulnerabilities. The US lacks domestic sources of these minerals. American tech and defence companies suddenly faced potential shortages with no alternative suppliers readily available.

Initially, this vulnerability may not have concerned Trump. During his first term, critical minerals weren’t a foreign policy priority. The 2017 national security strategy didn’t mention them. These materials were associated primarily with the green energy transition, a policy area Trump actively opposed.

But the rapid development of artificial intelligence changed the calculation. Training large AI models requires massive data centres. These facilities depend on advanced cooling systems, high-efficiency motors and power systems that use rare-earth elements now restricted by China.

Critical mineral access had become a strategic imperative for the US. Trump’s November 2025 national security strategy explicitly prioritises “securing access to critical supply chains and materials”. This shift coincides with the second problem: the tech sector’s growing influence over American politics. Major tech companies have secured unprecedented access to policymaking and dramatically increased their lobbying since ChatGPT first launched in late 2022.

Whether these mineral deals actually benefit the US as a whole remains unclear. The scramble treats mineral access as a zero-sum competition with China rather than a challenge that could be managed through international coordination. In addition, these rushed agreements may serve AI companies’ short-term needs without creating long term supply chain security.

The third problem for US foreign policy is the US gutted its institutional capacity for securing overseas investments. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) traditionally ran programmes that built state capacity in developing countries. These initiatives trained civil servants, developed regulatory frameworks and established procurement systems.

My research shows how programmes facilitated US investments. When countries had functioning land registries, clear property rights and professional bureaucracies, US companies could invest with confidence.

Trump froze USAID operations in January 2025. Without these institutions, the US can no longer build the governance frameworks that make American investment feasible. Instead, the administration must negotiate explicit access provisions in each bilateral deal.

The pace of recent deals reflects US’s desperate attempts to catch up with China. Whether the US can catch up will have to be evaluated, but there are several reasons to be sceptical of the benefits of the deals that have already been signed.

The DRC agreement illustrates the limitations of this approach. It promises US support for “protection of critical infrastructure” and “safeguarding territorial integrity”. But it offers little detail on how these commitments will be delivered.

Fighting between M23 rebels and DRC forces has continued even as the agreements were announced. The US lacks the institutional capacity to coordinate effective security cooperation. USAID programmes that would have built state capacity and investment safeguards no longer exist. The State Department offices that would implement security assistance have been hollowed out.

The agreement promises to establish “streamlined permitting processes” for US investors in the mining sector. But it’s unclear how investor disputes will be resolved or how American access will remain secure if political circumstances change.

Attention span

Trump’s track record further undermines these arrangements. His pattern of abandoning both promises and threats makes any commitment less credible. Investors understand this. When Trump threatened comprehensive sanctions against Russia in July 2025, Russian markets rallied rather than panicked.

Compare this to the institutional approach. USAID programmes built genuine state capacity over the years. Countries became better able to manage resources, enforce contracts and maintain stability. That created lasting conditions favourable to American investment while also supporting local development.

Without institutional backing, these mineral deals rely entirely on continued presidential attention and goodwill. My research shows that credible economic commitments require a robust diplomatic and bureaucratic apparatus. Trump has undermined this infrastructure.

If the US wants to secure critical mineral supplies effectively, reversing course would be necessary. Reinstating development agencies and rebuilding diplomatic capacity would serve American interests far better than serial bilateral bargaining.

But that would require patience and institutional investment. Trump’s approach offers neither. The US has fallen behind in the race for critical minerals. These rushed deals may provide short-term access. But they cannot create the stable, long-term supply chains American tech and defence industries actually need.

Patrick E. Shea, Senior Lecturer in International Relations and Global Governance, University of Glasgow

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The proclamation established the foundation for a new era of US dominance and “policing” of the region.

In the decades that followed, almost a third of the nearly 400 US interventions worldwide took place in Latin America. The United States toppled governments it deemed unfavourable or used force later ruled illegal by international courts.

In 2013, then-Secretary of State John Kerry announced “the era of the Monroe Doctrine is over”. It signalled a shift towards treating the region as partners rather than a sphere of influence.

Now, however, the National Security Strategy released last week by the Trump administration has formally revived that old doctrine.

It helps explain the administration’s interventionist actions in the region over the past couple months, from its deadly boat strikes in the Caribbean to its selective use of sanctions and pardons.

Why Latin America is so important

In typical hubristic fashion, the document openly announces a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, elevating the Western Hemisphere as the top US international priority. The days when the Middle East dominated American foreign policy are “thankfully over”, it says.

The document also ties US security and prosperity directly to maintaining US preeminence in Latin America. For example, it aims to deny China and other powers access to key strategic assets in the region, such as military installations, ports, critical minerals and cyber communications networks.

Crucially, it fuses the Trump administration’s harsh rhetoric on “narco-terrorists” with the US-China great power competition.

It frames a more robust US military presence and diplomatic pressure as necessary to confront Latin American drug cartels and protect sea lanes, ports and critical infrastructure from Chinese influence.

How the strategy explains Trump’s actions

For months, the Trump administration has been striking suspected drug boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, killing dozens of people.

International law experts and human rights officials say these attacks breach international law. The US Congress has not authorised any armed conflict in these waters, yet the strikes have been presented as necessary to protect the US from “narco‑terrorists”.

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has also been branded a “narco‑dictator”, though Venezuela is a minor player in the flow of drugs to the US.

On December 2, President Donald Trump told reporters that any country he believes is manufacturing or transporting drugs to the US could face a military strike. This includes not just Venezuela, but also Mexico and Colombia.

On the same day, Trump also granted a pardon to Juan Orlando Hernández, Honduras’ former president. He had been sentenced to 45 years in prison for helping move hundreds of tons of cocaine into the US.

The new National Security Strategy attempts to explain the logic behind these contradictory actions. It emphasises the need to protect US “core national interests”, and stresses:

President Trump’s foreign policy is […] not grounded in traditional, political ideology. It is motivated above all by what works for America — or, in two words, ‘America First’.

Within this logic, Hernández was pardoned because he can still serve US interests. As a former president with deep links to Honduran elites and security forces, he is exactly the kind of loyal, hard-right client Trump wants in a country that hosts US military personnel and can help police migration routes to the US.

The timing underlines this: Trump moved to free Hernández just days before Honduras’ elections, shoring up the conservative networks he once led to support Trump’s preferred candidate for president, Nasry Asfura.

In Trump’s “America First” calculus, pardoning Hernández also sends a couple clear signals. Obedient partners are rewarded. And power, not principle, determines US policy in the region.

The obsession with Venezuela

The new security strategy explains Trump’s obsession with Venezuela, in particular.

Venezuela has the world’s largest proven oil reserves and a long coastline on the Caribbean Sea, which is a vital sea lane for US goods travelling through the Panama Canal.

Under years of US sanctions, Venezuela signed several energy and mining deals with China, in addition to Iran and Russia. For Beijing, in particular, Venezuela is both an energy source and a foothold in the hemisphere.

The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy makes clear this is unacceptable to the United States. Although Venezuela is not named anywhere in the document, the strategy alludes to the fact China has made inroads with like-minded leaders in the region:

Some foreign influence will be hard to reverse, given the political alignmentsbetween certain Latin American governments and certain foreign actors.

A recent report suggests the Maduro government is now attempting a dramatic geopolitical realignment. The New York Times says Maduro’s government offered the US a dominant stake in its oil and gold resources, diverting exports from China. If true, this would represent a clear attempt to court the Trump administration and end Venezuela’s international isolation.

But many believe the Trump administration is after regime change instead.

The Venezuelan opposition leader, María Corina Machado, who won the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, is pitching a post‑Maduro future to US investors, describing a “US$1.7 trillion (A$2.5 trillion) opportunity” to privatise Venezuela’s oil, gas and infrastructure.

For US and European corporations, the message is clear: regime change could unlock vast wealth.

Latin America’s fragmented response

Regional organisations remain divided or weakened, and have yet to coordinate a response to the Trump administration. At a recent regional summit, leaders called for peace, but stopped short of condemning the US strikes off Latin America.

Governments are instead having to deal with Trump one by one. Some hope to be treated as friends; others fear being cast as “narco‑states”.

Two centuries after the Monroe Doctrine, Washington still views the hemisphere as its own backyard, in which it is “free to roam” and can meddle as it sees fit.

Juan Zahir Naranjo Cáceres, PhD Candidate, Political Science, International Relations and Constitutional Law, University of the Sunshine Coast and Shannon Brincat, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, University of the Sunshine Coast

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Premiums can rise if the costs of the medical services they cover increase. Using consumer price indices for the main components of medical care – such as services provided in clinics and hospitals as well as administrative expenses – based on federal data and data from the Kaiser Family Foundation, we found that the cost of hospital services increased the most, while the cost of physician services and prescription drugs rose more slowly.

Some of the premium increases can be attributed to an increase in hospital outpatient visits and coverage of GLP-1 drugs. But research, including our own, suggests that premiums have rapidly escalated mostly because health system consolidation – when hospitals and other health care entities merge – has led hospitals to raise prices well above their costs.

Hospital CEOs prioritize profit

Hospitals are aggressively raising their prices because hospital CEOs have incentives to do so.

One study found that for nonprofit health systems, the greatest pay increases between 2012 and 2019 went to hospital CEOs who grew the profits and size of their organizations the most. However, the financial reward of delivering above-average quality of care declined. Increased charity care – free or discounted health services nonprofit hospitals must provide some of their patients who cannot afford medical care – was not significantly tied to CEO compensation.

Board members set performance criteria that determine the base salary and bonus payments for CEOs. Over half of board members at top U.S. hospitals have professional backgrounds in finance or business. As a result, researchers and advocates have raised concerns that financial success is the dominant priority at these institutions.

One way to help ensure that nonprofit hospitals make the health of their local communities a top priority is to require their boards to disclose their executive compensation guidelines for salary and bonuses, similar to the information that for-profit health care companies disclose to their stockholders. The general public could pressure companies to put greater weight on affordability and quality of care when setting performance targets for nonprofit hospital executives.

Some economists suggest that hospital prices be regulated. This approach involves capping prices for health care services at the most expensive hospitals and restricting price growth for all hospitals. Regulators would also focus on flexible but service-specific oversight to quickly respond to unintended market disruptions.

What employers can do

Costs for health insurance coverage provided by employers are expected to surge by 9.5% in 2026.

Employers, who bear the bulk of premium increases when purchasing insurance for their workers, could include more price sensitivity when designing benefits for their employees to help keep insurance affordable for workers.

One study found that a health insurance plan that introduced three copayment levels corresponding to three hospital tiers of low, medium and high prices achieved savings of 8% per hospital stay after three years, with no evidence of a reduction in quality.

Roughly one-third of large employers are offering nontraditional health plans in 2026. For example, a variable copay plan has no or low deductibles and sets higher copayments for services at providers charging higher fees.

Holding hospitals to account

The mission statements of the largest nonprofit health care systems in the U.S. often express a desire to improve the health of the communities they serve, especially the most vulnerable.

Restraining price growth among nonprofit hospitals would introduce greater price competition to the health care market, likely forcing for-profit providers to lower their prices as well.

Vivian Ho, Professor and Chair of Health Economics, Rice University and Salpy Kanimian, Ph.D. Candidate in Economics, Rice University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Every year, editors for publications ranging from the Oxford English Dictionary to the Macquarie Dictionary of Australian English select a “word of the year.”

Sometimes these terms are thematically related, particularly in the wake of world-altering events. “Pandemic,” “lockdown” and “coronavirus,” for example, were among the words chosen in 2020. At other times, they are a potpourri of various cultural trends, as with 2022’s “goblin mode,” “permacrisis” and “gaslighting.”

This year’s slate largely centers on digital life. But rather than reflecting the unbridled optimism about the internet of the early aughts – when words like “w00t,” “blog,” “tweet” and even “face with tears of joy” emoji (😂) were chosen – this year’s selections reflect a growing unease over how the internet has become a hotbed of artifice, manipulation and fake relationships.

When seeing isn’t believing

A committee representing the Macquarie Dictionary of Australian English settled on “AI slop” for their word of the year.

Macquarie defines the term, which was popularized in 2024 by British programmer Simon Willison and tech journalist Casey Newton, as “low-quality content created by generative AI, often containing errors, and not requested by the user.”

AI slop – which can range from a saccharine image of a young girl clinging to her little dog to career advice on LinkedIn – often goes viral, as gullible social media users share these computer-generated videos, text and graphics with others.

Images have been manipulated or altered since the dawn of photography. The technique was then improved, with an assist from AI, to create “deepfakes,” which allows existing images to be turned into video clips in surreal ways. Yes, you can now watch Hitler teaming up with Stalin to sing a 1970s hit by The Buggles.

What makes AI slop different is that images or video can be created out of whole cloth by providing a chatbot with just a prompt – no matter how bizarre the request or ensuing output.

Meet my new friend, ChatGPT

The editors of the Cambridge Dictionary chose “parasocial.” They define this as “involving or relating to a connection that someone feels between themselves and a famous person they do not know, a character in a book, film, TV series … or an artificial intelligence.”

These asymmetric relationships, according to the dictionary’s chief editor, are the result of “the public’s fascination with celebrities and their lifestyles,” and this interest “continues to reach new heights.”

As an example, Cambridge’s announcement cited the engagement of singer Taylor Swift and football player Travis Kelce, which led to a spike in online searches for the meaning of the term. Many Swifties reacted with unbridled joy, as if their best friend or sibling had just decided to tie the knot.

But the term isn’t a new one: It was coined by sociologists in 1956 to describe “the illusion” of having “a face-to-face relationship” with a performer.

However, parasocial relationships can take a bizarre or even ominous turn when the object of one’s affections is a chatbot. People are developing true feelings for these AI systems, whether they see them as a trusted friend or even a romantic partner. Young people, in particular, are now turning to generative AI for therapy.

Taking the bait

The Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year is “rage bait,” which the editors define as “online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media content.”

This is only the latest word for forms of emotional manipulation that have plagued the online world since the days of dial-up internet. Related terms include trolling, sealioning and trashposting.

Unlike a hot take – a hasty opinion on a topic that may be poorly reasoned or articulated – rage baiting is intended to be inflammatory. And it can be seen as both a cause and a result of political polarization.

People who post rage bait have been shown to lack empathy and to regard other people’s emotions as something to be exploited or even monetized. Rage baiters, in short, reflect the dark side of the attention economy.

Meaningless meaning

Perhaps the most contentious choice in 2025 was “6-7,” chosen by Dictionary.com. In this case, the controversy has to do with the actual meaning of this bit of Gen Alpha slang. The editors of the website describe it as being “meaningless, ubiquitous, and nonsensical.”

Although its definition may be slippery, the term itself can be found in the lyrics of the rapper Skrilla, who released the single “Doot Doot (6 7)” in early 2025. It was popularized by 17-year-old basketball standout Taylen Kinney. For his part, Skrilla claimed that he “never put an actual meaning on it, and I still would not want to.”

“6-7” is sometimes accompanied by a gesture, as if one were comparing the weight of objects held in both hands. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer recently performed this hand motion during a school visit. The young students were delighted. Their teacher, however, informed Starmer that her charges weren’t allowed to use it at the school, which prompted a clumsy apology from the chastened prime minister.

Throw your hands in the air?

The common element that these words share may be an attitude best described as digital nihilism.

As online misinformation, AI-generated text and images, fake news and conspiracy theories abound, it’s increasingly difficult to know whom or what to believe or trust. Digital nihilism is, in essence, an acknowledgment of a lack of meaning and certainty in our online interactions.

This year’s crop of words might best be summed up by a single emoji: the shrug (🤷). Throwing one’s hands up, in resignation or indifference, captures the anarchy that seems to characterize our digital lives.

Roger J. Kreuz, Associate Dean and Feinstone Interdisciplinary Research Professor, University of Memphis

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Along with Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, he drew an audience in the millions, amassed a personal fortune and introduced a new generation of Americans to a potent mix of religion and politics.

Swaggart was an old-time evangelist whose focus was “saving souls.” But he also preached on conservative social issues, warning followers about the evils of abortion, homosexuality and godless communism.

Swaggart also denounced what he called “false cults,” including Catholicism, Judaism and Mormonism. In fact, his denunciations of other religions, as well as his attacks on rival preachers, made him a more polarizing figure than his politicized brethren.

As a reporter, I covered Swaggart in the 1980s. Now, as a scholar of American religion, I argue that while Swaggart did not build institutions like Falwell’s Moral Majority or Robertson’s 700 Club, he helped to spread right-wing positions on social issues, such as sexual orientation and abortion, and to shape the image of televangelists in popular culture.

Swaggart’s cousins

Born into a hardscrabble life in a small Louisiana town, Swaggart grew up alongside his cousins Jerry Lee Lewis, the future rockabilly pioneer, and future country singer Mickey Gilley.

All three loved music and singing. They polished their playing on an uncle’s piano and sneaked into African American nightclubs to hear the jazz and blues forbidden by their parents.

While Gilley and Lewis turned their musical talent into recording and performing careers, Swaggart felt called to the ministry. He dropped out of high school, married at 17, began preaching at 20 and was ordained at 26.

He was licensed by the Assemblies of God, a Pentecostal denomination that believes the Holy Spirit endows believers with spiritual gifts that include speaking in tongues and faith healing.

The glory years

Pentecostals were nicknamed Holy Rollers because of their tendency to shake, quake and roll on the floor when feeling the Holy Spirit. Their preachers excelled at rousing audiences’ ardor, and Swaggart commanded the stage better than most. He paced, pounced and poured forth sweat while begging listeners to turn from sin and accept Jesus.

Starting small, he drew crowds while preaching on a flatbed trailer throughout the South. His following grew, and in 1969 he opened the Family Worship Center in Baton Rouge.

At capacity, the church held 10,000 worshippers, who represented a broad swath of America: young girls and grannies, white and Black, bankers and farmers. His sermons began calmly but built to a fever pitch. CBS newsman Dan Rather once called him the “country’s greatest speaker.”

During services, Swaggart also sang and played piano. In 1982, Newsweek magazine noted his musical chops, naming him the “King of Honky Tonk Heaven.” His music crossed gospel, country and honky-tonk – songs with a strong rhythmic beat – and he sold 17 million albums over his lifetime.

By 1975, Swaggart’s on-stage charisma powered the launch of a television ministry that would reach millions within a decade. Viewers were captivated by his soulful tunes and fire-and-brimstone sermons. At its height, Swaggart’s show was televised in 140 countries, including Peru, the Philippines and South Africa.

His ministry also became the largest mail-order business in Louisiana, selling books, tapes, T-shirts and biblical memorabilia. Thanks to the US$150 million raised annually from donations and sales, Swaggart lived in an opulent mansion, possessed a private jet previously owned by the Rockefellers, sported a yellow gold vintage Rolex and drove a Jaguar.

The downfall

Swaggart disliked competition and had a history of humiliating rival preachers. Wary of the Rev. Marvin Gorman, a Pentecostal minister whose church also was in Louisiana, Swaggart accused the man of adultery. Gorman admitted his infidelity and was defrocked.

Gorman had heard rumors about Swaggart’s own indiscretions, and he and his son decided to tail the famed evangelist. In 1988, they caught Swaggart at a motel with a prostitute, and Gorman reported the incident to Swaggart’s denomination. He also gave news outlets photos of Swaggart and the prostitute. In a tearful, televised apology, Swaggart pleaded for a second chance.

While his fans were willing, the Assemblies of God had conditions: Swaggart received the standard two-year suspension for sexual immorality. Defying the ruling, Swaggart went back to work after three months, and the denomination defrocked him.

Swaggart might have succeeded as an independent minister, but in 1991 the police stopped his car for driving on the wrong side of the road. Inside they found the preacher with a prostitute. This time, Swaggart did not ask for forgiveness. Instead, he informed his congregation, “The Lord told me it’s flat none of your business.”

Afterward, Swaggart never regained his former standing. His mail-order business dried up, donations fell, and attendance at services cratered. But up until his death, he kept on, in his own words, as an “old-fashioned, Holy Ghost-filled, shouting, weeping, soul-winning, Gospel-preaching preacher.”

Swaggart’s legacy

Swaggart, like other 1980s televangelists, brought right-wing politics into American homes. But unlike Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, Swaggart was less interested in winning elections than saving souls. In fact, when Robertson considered a presidential run in 1988, Swaggart initially tried to dissuade him – then changed his mind and supported him.

Swaggart’s calls for a return to conservative Christian norms live on – not just in Sunday sermons but also in today’s world of tradwives, abortion restrictions and calls to repeal gay marriage. His music lives on, too. The day before he died, the Southern Gospel Music Association Hall of Fame inducted him as a member.

But his legacy also survives in popular culture. In recent years, both reality television and scripted series have starred preachers shaped in the image of Swaggart and his peers. Most exaggerate his worst characteristics for shock and comedic effect.

“Preachers of L.A.,” a 2013 reality show that profiled six Los Angeles pastors, featured blinged-out ministers whose sermons mixed hip-hop with the Bible. The fictional “Greenleaf” followed the scandals of an extended family’s Memphis megachurch, while “The Righteous Gemstones,” a dark spoof of Southern preachers, turned a family ministry into a site for sex, murder and moneymaking.

But these imitations can’t match the reality. Swaggart was a larger-than-life minister whose story – from small-town wannabe to disgraced pastor, to preaching to those who would listen – had it all: sex, politics, music and religion.

For those who want a taste of the real thing, The King of Honky Tonk Heaven lives on. You can see his old services and Bible studies streaming daily on his network.

Diane Winston, Professor and Knight Center Chair in Media & Religion, USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

But if all you want for Christmas is a reprieve from stereotypical Christmas music, you’re not alone.

Despite the fact that they often rebel against conformity and commercialism, many countercultural musicians have been inspired to produce holiday tracks of their own. Because the symbols of Christmas are so widely recognizable, juxtaposing them with the sounds and values of more niche musical styles can have striking effects.

Here’s how genres like roots reggae, thrash metal and pop punk have added new layers to familiar holiday tropes:

A roots reggae Christmas revival

Certain sounds elicit certain expectations.

If you hear sleigh bells and a children’s choir, lyrics about wintry fun can’t be far. If you hear off-beat reggae guitars and Jamaican accents, you’ll probably picture pot and palm trees, not Christmas.

And yet the roots reggae sound of Jacob Miller’s “We Wish You A Irie Christmas” infuses the classic “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” with Rastafarian liberation theology.

Singers of the classic carol – which some historians trace to 16th-century England – clamor for figgy pudding, a traditional British Christmas dessert. They refuse to leave until they get their sweets: “We won’t go until we get some / So bring it out here!”

By contrast, Miller’s Christmas is “irie,” which, in Jamaican Patois, roughly translates to contentment and inner peace.

In his version, Miller points out that poverty and joy are not mutually exclusive: “We rub it and dub it to the Christmas ‘pon a broke pocket this year.” He also stresses freedom from material desire: “Don’t kill nuf oneself to buy it all.”

After all, the biblical Christmas in Bethlehem had no toys – and no snow either, just like the Caribbean.

For Rastafarians like Miller, the renewal promised by Christmas was deeply personal. In the track, a word that sounds like “Ice-mas” is actually “I’s-mas.” In Rastafarianism, the “I” is the deity contained in each person. Miller’s Christmas revelers dance to their own divinity, anticipating a return to the promised land.

In doing so, Miller turns a simple, well-worn carol into an anthem of self-worth and liberation.

Thrash metal Christmas horror

Other genres can recast an innocent carol’s lyrics into a horror story.

The 19th-century German carol “Kling, Glöckchen, Klingelingeling” was written from the perspective of the “Christkind,” a Christmas gift-bringer in parts of Europe and South America. This “little Jesus” brings gifts in countries where Santa Claus isn’t part of holiday traditions.

Each stanza is framed by a melody and words that evoke the sounds of a ringing bell, which are reflected in the title. In the carol, the Christkind implores children to let it inside so it doesn’t freeze to death. Next, the Christkind promises gifts in return for being let into the living room. Finally, the Christkind asks the children to open their hearts to it.

Who could corrupt this child-friendly pitch for piety?

Enter Thomas “Angelripper” Such, a former coal miner and the front man of the German thrash metal band Sodom.

Where earlier heavy metal could be gloomy and occult, Sodom raised the temperature even more with gory, blasphemous lyrics, buzzsaw guitars and snarled screams. Sodom’s side project, Onkel Tom Angelripper, has recorded metal versions of popular German songs, including “Kling, Glöckchen, Klingelingeling.”

Without changing the lyrics, the thrash metal sound transforms the carol’s wholesomeness into horror. A twee wind arrangement is cut off by heavy, distorted guitars and a growled “Kling.” Metal musicians often use these sounds to evoke feelings of danger.

Angelripper’s caroler sounds more like a large predator who manipulates and bribes his way into a home. In this framing, the final stanza’s line – “open your hearts to me!” – sounds less like a call for communion and more like an ominous threat of mutilation. It’s a home invasion akin to that in the classic Christmas movie “Home Alone,” but it’s all terror, no humor.

This musical corruption of ambiguous lyrics lays bare the fragility of festive innocence.

Christmas grief gets the punk treatment

There’s a whole catalog of melancholic Christmas songs, from Elvis Presley’s “Blue Christmas” to Bing Crosby’s “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.”

But few touch on painful themes of substance abuse, suicide and guilt like the raw-yet-catchy “Christmas Vacation” by pop-punk pioneers the Descendents.

For better or worse, many of the Descendents’ songs are unabashedly immature, petulant and sometimes offensive. Yet their boyish bravado puts moments of vulnerability into relief.

“Christmas Vacation” is no different.

Over jangly guitars and sparse bass, front man Milo Aukerman recalls an alcoholic friend or partner who “took a vacation into oblivion.” And while this turn of events wasn’t a surprise to the narrator, that didn’t change anything: “I knew about your plans / I really did understand / But you didn’t let me know / I wasn’t invited to go.”

The lyrics portray a process of ongoing grief. What makes “Christmas Vacation” poignant is its lyrical vacillation. The narrator wonders: Did she leave forever? Will she be back? Is she to blame? Am I?

The vocal harmony in the chorus – a pop punk staple – mirrors this ambivalence. In the track, the joining of voices starts to sound like a wail. An expected feature of pop punk is transformed into a moving expression of grief and loneliness: a common, less celebrated, holiday experience.

Rather than sneer at or mock Christmas, these three tracks give voice to the complicated emotions that can accompany the holidays. Miller evokes gratitude and hope; Angelripper provokes fear and vulnerability; the Descendents dwell on grief and longing. And all three perspectives end up complementing the focus of mainstream music on food, fancy gifts, snow and family.

Florian Walch, Assistant Professor of Music Theory, West Virginia University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

On the surface, it’s a story of male heroism. A ragtag rebel force led by a rural priest and his five sons, called the Maccabees, freed the Jews from oppressive rulers. Hanukkah, which means “rededication” in Hebrew, celebrates the Maccabees’ victory, which allowed the Jews to rededicate their temple in Jerusalem, the center of ancient Jewish worship.

But as a professor of Jewish history, I believe that seeing Hanukkah this way misses the inspiring women who were prominent in the earliest tellings of the story.

The bravery of a young widow named Judith is at the heart of an ancient book that bears her name. The heroism of a second woman, an unnamed mother of seven sons, appears in a book known as 2 Maccabees.

Saving Jerusalem

These books are not included in the Hebrew scriptures, but appear in other collections of religious texts known as the Septuagint and the Apocrypha.

According to these texts, Judith was a young Israelite widow in a town called Bethulia, strategically situated on a mountain pass into Jerusalem. To besiege Jerusalem, the Seleucid army first needed to capture Bethulia.

Facing such a formidable enemy, the townsfolk were terrified. Unless God immediately intervened, they decided, they would simply surrender. Enslavement was preferable to certain death.

But Judith scolded the local leaders for testing God, and was brave enough to take matters into her own hands. Removing her widow’s clothing, she entered the enemy camp. She beguiled the Seleucid general, Holofernes, with her beauty, and promised to give her people over to him. Hoping to seduce her, Holofernes prepared a feast. By the time his entourage left him alone with Judith, he was drunk and asleep.

Now she carried out her plan: cutting off his head and escaping back to Bethulia. The following morning, the discovery of Holofernes’ headless body left the Seleucid army trembling with fear. Soldiers fled by every available path as Bethulia’s Jews, recovering their courage, rushed in and slaughtered them. Judith’s bravery saved her town and, with it, Jerusalem.

A family’s sacrifice

The book of 2 Maccabees, Chapter 7, meanwhile, relates the story of an unnamed Jewish mother and her seven sons, who were seized by the Seleucids.

Emperor Antiochus commanded that they eat pork, which is forbidden by the Torah, to show their obedience to him. One at a time, the sons refused. An enraged Antiochus subjected them to unspeakable torture. Each son withstood the ordeal and is portrayed as a model of bravery. Resurrection awaits those who die in the service of God, they proclaimed, while for Antiochus and his followers, only death and divine punishment lay ahead.

Throughout these ordeals, their mother encouraged her sons to accept their suffering. “She reinforced her woman’s reasoning with a man’s courage,” as 2 Maccabees relates, and admonished her sons to remember their coming reward from God.

Having killed the first six brothers, Antiochus promised the youngest a fortune if only he would reject his faith. His mother told the boy, “Accept death, so that in God’s mercy I may get you back again along with your brothers.” The story in 2 Maccabees ends with the simple statement that, after her sons’ deaths, the mother also died.

Later retellings give the mother a name. Most commonly, she is called Hannah, based on a detail in the biblical book of 1 Samuel. In this section, called the “prayer of Hannah,” the prophet Samuel’s mother refers to herself as having borne seven children.

Working with God

Jewish educator and author Erica Brown has emphasized a lesson we should learn from the story of Judith, one that emerges from 2 Maccabees as well. “Just like the Hanukkah story generally, the message of these texts is that it’s not always the likely candidates who save the day,” she writes. “Sometimes salvation comes when you least expect it, from those who are least likely to deliver it.”

Three hundred years after the Maccabean revolt, Judaism’s earliest rabbis stressed a similar message. Adding a new focus to Hanukkah, they spoke of a divine miracle that occurred when the ancient Jews took back the Temple and wanted to relight the holy “eternal flame” inside. They found just one small vessel of oil, sufficient to light the flame for only one day – but it lasted eight days, giving them time to produce a new supply.

As the influential rabbi David Hartman pointed out, the Hanukkah story celebrates “our people’s strength to live without guarantees of success.” Some ordinary person, he points out, took the initiative to rekindle the eternal flame, despite how futile doing so may have seemed.

Ever since, Judaism has increasingly focused on the interaction of the human and the divine. The Hanukkah story teaches listeners that they all must play a part to repair a hurting world. Not everyone needs to be a Judith or Hannah; but, like them, we humans can’t wait for God to take care of it.

In synagogues, one of the readings for the week during Hanukkah is from the prophet Zechariah, who proclaimed, “Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, says the Lord of hosts.” These words succinctly capture the meaning of Hanukkah and express what Jews might think about while lighting the Hanukkah candles: our responsibility to act in the spirit of God to create the miracles the world needs to become a place of beauty, equity and freedom.

[Get the best of The Conversation’s politics, science or religion articles each week.Sign up today.]

Alan Avery-Peck, Kraft-Hiatt Professor in Judaic Studies, College of the Holy Cross

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The region’s 500-year transformation into a Catholic stronghold seemed capped in 2013, when Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina was elected as the first Latin American pope. Once a missionary outpost, Latin America is now the heart of the Catholic Church. It is home to over 575 million adherents – over 40% of all Catholics worldwide. The next-largest regions are Europe and Africa, each home to 20% of the world’s Catholics.

Yet beneath this Catholic dominance, the region’s religious landscape is changing.

First, Protestant and Pentecostal groups have experienced dramatic growth. In 1970, only 4% of Latin Americans identified as Protestant; by 2014, the share had climbed to almost 20%.

But even as Protestant ranks swelled, another trend was quietly gaining ground: a growing share of Latin Americans abandoning institutional faith altogether. And, as my research shows, the region’s religious decline shows a surprising difference from patterns elsewhere. While fewer Latin Americans are identifying with a religion or attending services, personal faith remains strong.

Religious decline

In 2014, 8% of Latin Americans claimed no religion at all. This number is twice as high as the percentage of people who were raised without a religion, indicating that the growth is recent, coming from people who left the church as adults.

However, there had been no comprehensive study of religious change in Latin America since then. My new research, published in September 2025, draws on two decades of survey data from over 220,000 respondents in 17 Latin American countries. This data comes from the AmericasBarometer, a large, region-wide survey conducted every two years by Vanderbilt University that focuses on democracy, governance and other social issues. Because it asks the same religion questions across countries and over time, it offers an unusually clear view of changing patterns.

Overall, the number of Latin Americans reporting no religious affiliation surged from 7% in 2004 to over 18% in 2023. The share of people who say they are religiously unaffiliated grew in 15 of the 17 countries, and more than doubled in seven.

On average, 21% of people in South America say they do not have a religious affiliation, compared with 13% in Mexico and Central America. Uruguay, Chile and Argentina are the three least religious countries in the region. Guatemala, Peru and Paraguay are the most traditionally religious, with fewer than 9% who identify as unaffiliated.

Another question scholars typically use to measure religious decline is how often people go to church. From 2008 to 2023, the share of Latin Americans attending church at least once a month decreased from 67% to 60%. The percentage who never attend, meanwhile, grew from 18% to 25%.

The generational pattern is stark. Among people born in the 1940s, just over half say they attend church regularly. Each subsequent generation shows a steeper decline, dropping to just 35% for those born in the 1990s. Religious affiliation shows a similar trajectory – each generation is less affiliated than the one before.

Personal religiosity

However, in my study, I also examined a lesser-used measure of religiosity – one that tells a different story.

That measure is “religious importance”: how important people say that religion is in their daily lives. We might think of this as “personal” religiosity, as opposed to the “institutional” religiosity tied to formal congregations and denominations.

Like church attendance, overall religious importance is high in Latin America. In 2010, roughly 85% of Latin Americans in the 17 countries whose data I analyzed said religion was important in their daily lives. Sixty percent said “very,” and 25% said “somewhat.”

By 2023, the “somewhat important” group declined to 19%, while the “very important” group grew to 64%. Personal religious importance was growing, even as affiliation and church attendance were falling.

Religious importance shows the same generational pattern as affiliation and attendance: Older people tend to report higher levels than younger ones. In 2023, 68% of people born in the 1970s said religion was “very important,” compared with 60% of those born in the 1990s.

Yet when you compare people at the same age, the pattern reverses. At age 30, 55% of those born in the 1970s rated religion as very important. Compare that with 59% among Latin Americans born in the 1980s, and 62% among those born in the 1990s. If this trend continues, younger generations could eventually show greater personal religious commitment than their elders.

Affiliation vs. belief

What we are seeing in Latin America, I’d argue, is a fragmented pattern of religious decline. The authority of religious institutions is waning – fewer people claim a faith; fewer attend services. But personal belief isn’t eroding. Religious importance is holding steady, even growing.

This pattern is quite different from Europe and the United States, where institutional decline and personal belief tend to move together.

Eighty-six percent of unaffiliated people in Latin America say they believe in God or a higher power. That compares with only 30% in Europe and 69% in the United States.

Sizable proportions of unaffiliated Latin Americans also believe in angels, miracles and even that Jesus will return to Earth in their lifetime.

In other words, for many Latin Americans, leaving behind a religious label or skipping church does not mean leaving faith behind.

This distinctive pattern reflects Latin America’s unique history and culture. Since the colonial period, the region has been shaped by a mix of religious traditions. People often combine elements of Indigenous beliefs, Catholic practices and newer Protestant movements, creating personal forms of faith that don’t always fit neatly into any one church or institution.

Because priests were often scarce in rural areas, Catholicism developed in many communities with little direct oversight from the church. Home rituals, local saints’ festivals and lay leaders helped shape religious life in more independent ways.

This reality challenges how scholars typically measure religious change. Traditional frameworks for measuring religious decline, developed from Western European data, rely heavily on religious affiliation and church attendance. But this approach overlooks vibrant religiosity outside formal structures – and can lead scholars to mistaken conclusions.

In short, Latin America reminds us that faith can thrive even as institutions fade.

Matthew Blanton, PhD Candidate, Sociology and Demography, The University of Texas at Austin

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Released in 1999 and set entirely during the festive season, the film follows a doctor, Bill Harford (Tom Cruise), whose wife Alice (Nicole Kidman) admits she once considered an affair. Shaken, he becomes obsessed with pursuing his own sexual encounter and stumbles into an underground world of masked orgies and ritualised desire.

Director Stanley Kubrick chose Christmas after deciding that the original mardi gras setting from Arthur Schnitzler’s novella wouldn’t work in contemporary New York. Christmas offered the closest equivalent. After all, it’s a modern period of ritual excess, indulgence and office-party transgressions.

It’s also a season of overeating, drinking and heightened expectations, which makes it the perfect environment for exploring jealousy, deceit and desire, the film’s defining concerns.

Kubrick also uses Christmas to highlight the thin line between social and sexual ritual. Both are governed by rules, masks and secrecy, and by the privileges of those with enough power or money to ignore the rules altogether.

In this, Kubrick was curiously prophetic, pointing to the predations of the likes of Jeffrey Epstein. Meanwhile, the lavishness hints at the world of Donald Trump, who, when Kubrick made the film, was just a real estate and hotel entrepreneur.

Christmas is also the season for performing middle-class normality, a performance the film slowly unravels. The festive backdrop disguises the fact that Kubrick recreated New York on London streets and soundstages, contrasting choreographed gaiety with the darker psychological terrain of the story.

The setting also serves a crucial aesthetic purpose. The near-pervasive Christmas lights and decorations suit Kubrick’s love of practical lighting. These are visible, realistic light sources that add texture and colour, contributing to its dreamlike atmosphere. The original story he adapted was called Traumnovelle (German for “dream story”).

There may have been another reason, too. As I’ve written about extensively, Bill functions as a hidden Jewish character like the protagonist of the original book. The pervasiveness of Christmas underscores his sense of being an outsider. As Kyle Broflovski sang in the TV series South Park: “It’s hard to be a Jew on Christmas.”

Eyes Wide Shut depicts the upper-middle-class and moneyed elites of Manhattan, who use those beneath them to “service” their needs. Bill is summoned for his medical expertise when a sex worker overdoses at Victor Ziegler’s lavish party. He might just as easily be a plumber called to fix a leak.

Sex workers fare worse still. In the masked ceremony, the naked participants are staged as tableaux, basically objects, even furniture, for others’ pleasure.

Christmas consumerism also frames Bill and Alice’s marital tensions. The film repeatedly places Bill in service spaces like coffee shops, boutiques, hotels and hospitals. Even the apartment of Domino, the sex worker he meets, is presented as a workplace. On her shelf sits a copy of Introducing Sociology, reinforcing the consumerist theme.

By contrast, the Harfords’ flat, modelled on Kubrick’s own 1960s New York apartment, is warm and inviting. Kubrick lingers on domestic rituals such as brushing teeth, undressing, everyday movement. But even this comfort feels modest beside Ziegler’s townhouse or the opulent mansion where the orgy takes place.

Class anxiety runs through the film. Bill is preoccupied with his status, flashing his medical ID to access restricted spaces like the morgue and a closed costume shop. But such credentials barely get him close to the elite worlds he longs to enter.

To infiltrate them, he must use disguise. Money guides him; his wallet is always full, and his very name, Bill, seems a wry nod to economic power. Affluent by ordinary standards, he is still dwarfed by Ziegler’s wealth.

His masculinity is even more under threat. Alice cuckolds him, shattering his complacent illusion of security. She revels in puncturing his smugness.

Kubrick played cleverly with Tom Cruise’s Mission Impossible persona, simultaneously using and undermining it. Bill’s most heroic act is offering a handkerchief to a model. “That’s the kind of hero I can be,” he says.

We’re not sure whether he’s being self-deprecating. He is flirting, but all his sexual encounters other than those with Alice are unconsummated. The only real act of heroism in the movie is done for him when the mysterious woman saves him at the orgy.

Why was the film so misunderstood?

When Eyes Wide Shut was released, audiences had been waiting 12 years for a new Kubrick film. If you wait 12 years for anything, you’ll probably be disappointed.

Many expected another grand narrative about war, geopolitics or technology. Instead they found a slow, dreamlike study of marital insecurity. And because the film opened in July, most critics missed its subversive Christmas commentary entirely. They didn’t connect the dots.

Kubrick spent his career making subversive films, intellectually and technologically. Eyes Wide Shut was no exception. As his final work, it stands as the ultimate counter-Christmas film, made, fittingly, by a man who knew what it meant to be a lonely Jew at Christmas.

Nathan Abrams, Professor of Film Studies, Bangor University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

How can society police the global spread of online far-right extremism while still protecting free speech? That’s a question policymakers and watchdog organizations confronted as early as the 1980s and ’90s – and it hasn’t gone away.

Decades before artificial intelligence, Telegram and white nationalist Nick Fuentes’ livestreams, far-right extremists embraced the early days of home computing and the internet. These new technologies offered them a bastion of free speech and a global platform. They could share propaganda, spew hatred, incite violence and gain international followers like never before.

Before the digital era, far-right extremists radicalized each other primarily using print propaganda. They wrote their own newsletters and reprinted far-right tracts such as Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” and American neo-Nazi William Pierce’s “The Turner Diaries,” a dystopian work of fiction describing a race war. Then, they mailed this propaganda to supporters at home and abroad.

I’m a historian who studies neo-Nazis and far-right extremism. As my research shows, most of the neo-Nazi propaganda confiscated in Germany from the 1970s through the 1990s came from the United States. American neo-Nazis exploited their free speech under the First Amendment to bypass German censorship laws. German neo-Nazis then picked up this print propaganda and distributed it throughout the country.

This strategy wasn’t foolproof, however. Print propaganda could get lost in the mail or be confiscated, especially when crossing into Germany. Producing and shipping it was also expensive and time-consuming, and far-right organizations were chronically understaffed and strapped for cash.

Going digital

Computers, which entered the mass market in 1977, promised to help resolve these problems. In 1981, Matt Koehl, head of the National Socialist White People’s Party in the United States, solicited donations to “Help the Party Enter The Computer Age.” The American neo-Nazi Harold Covington begged for a printer, scanner and “serious PC” that could run WordPerfect word processing software. “Our multifarious enemies already possess this technology,” he noted, referring to Jews and government officials.

Soon, far-right extremists figured out how to connect their computers to one another. They did so by using online bulletin board systems, or BBSes, a precursor to the internet. A BBS was hosted on a personal computer, and other computers could dial in to the BBS using a modem and a terminal software program, allowing users to exchange messages, documents and software.

With BBSes, anyone interested in accessing far-right propaganda could simply turn on their computer and dial in to an organization’s advertised phone number. Once connected, they could read the organization’s public posts, exchange messages and upload and download files.

The first far-right bulletin board system, the Aryan Nations Liberty Net, was established in 1984 by Louis Beam, a high-ranking member of the Ku Klux Klan and Aryan Nations. Beam explained: “Imagine, if you can, a single computer to which all leaders and strategists of the patriotic movement are connected. Imagine further that any patriot in the country is able to tap into this computer at will in order to reap the benefit of all accumulative knowledge and wisdom of the leaders. ‘Someday,’ you may say? How about today?”

Then came violent neo-Nazi computer games. Neo-Nazis in the United States and elsewhere could upload and download these games via bulletin board systems, copy them onto disks and distribute them widely, especially to schoolchildren.

In the German computer game KZ Manager, players role-played as a commandant in a Nazi concentration camp that murdered Jews, Sinti and Roma, and Turkish immigrants. An early 1990s poll revealed that 39% of Austrian high schoolers knew of such games and 22% had seen them.

Arrival of the web

By the mid-1990s, with the introduction of the more user-friendly World Wide Web, bulletin boards fell out of favor. The first major racial hate website on the internet, Stormfront, was founded in 1995 by the American white supremacist Don Black. The civil rights organization Southern Poverty Law Center found that almost 100 murders were linked to Stormfront.

By 2000, the German government had discovered, and banned, over 300 German websites with right-wing content – a tenfold increase within just four years.

In response, American white supremacists again exploited their free speech rights to bypass German censorship bans. They gave international far-right extremists the opportunity to host their websites safely and anonymously on unregulated American servers – a strategy that continues today.

Up next: AI

The next frontier for far-right extremists is AI. They are using AI tools to create targeted propaganda, manipulate images, audio and videos, and evade detection. The far-right social network Gab created a Hitler chatbot that users can talk to.

AI chatbots are also adopting the far-right views of social media users. Grok, the chatbot on Elon Musk’s X, recently called itself “MechaHitler,” spewed antisemitic hate speech and denied the Holocaust.

Countering extremism

Combating online hate is a global imperative. It requires comprehensive international cooperation among governments, nongovernmental organizations, watchdog organizations, communities and tech corporations.

Far-right extremists have long pioneered innovative ways to exploit technological progress and free speech. Efforts to counter this radicalization are challenged to stay one step ahead of the far right’s technological advances.

Michelle Lynn Kahn, Associate Professor of History, University of Richmond

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Among them: whether Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth or others face criminal liability for any of the attacks. Those attacks killed people alleged to have been involved in illegal narcotics trafficking.

Congressional investigations have begun into allegations that a Sept. 2, 2025, follow-up attack on two survivors of an earlier attack was illegal and ordered by Hegseth. Some legal scholars have cited violations of international and United States criminal law that could come into play.

But as a military law scholar who spent 20 years as a lawyer and judge in the U.S. Air Force, I know that there aren’t enough facts known yet to determine who is responsible for what. There are five investigative mechanisms that could be used to determine the facts and whether there is criminal liability on the part of both senior civilian officials and military members involved in the now extensively reported second strike on the suspected drug boat that resulted in the deaths of civilians.

There are two caveats to this analysis. The first is that the Constitution says a person is to be presumed innocent before being proved guilty. The second is that the story from the White House and the Pentagon has changed over time.

Congressional committees investigate

The first investigative mechanism is the Congress itself.

The House of Representatives and the Senate each have an armed services committee and a foreign relations or foreign affairs committee. In theory, any of these committees can place people under oath and have them testify, as well as issue subpoenas to obtain information.

This concept isn’t new.

Multiple committees examined the country’s lack of preparedness preceding the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and other military installations in 1941.

Almost every month during the Vietnam War, one or more of these committees investigated military matters, including one of the most notorious war crimes in U.S. history. In 1968, Army Lt. William Laws Calley commanded a platoon of soldiers who murdered close to 500 villagers in My Lai, including children and the elderly, none of whom posed a threat and none of whom were lawful targets.

But congressional investigations can be highly political. Even during the My Lai investigation, at least one member of the House, Mendel Rivers, a South Carolina Democrat who was at that time chairman of the Committee on Armed Services, attempted to shield officers in the chain of command. There is little reason to believe that a current investigation, conducted by a dramatically polarized Congress, will be free of partisan politics.

Attorney general investigates

A second means of investigating is for the U.S. attorney general to preliminarily conclude that crimes have been committed and to convene a grand jury to investigate. A federal grand jury is a constitutional body consisting of ordinary adult citizens. Its operations are governed by the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, and its role is to investigate whether there is probable cause to determine that a person has violated the criminal laws.

A federal statute prohibits murder. As far back as 1820, if not before, federal grand juries have investigated the crime of “murder on the high seas.”

No member of the president’s administration is immune from the criminal laws of the country, with the exception of the president himself when he has acted in the capacity of president or commander in chief. The Supreme Court in 2024 determined that the president is mostly immune from prosecution under criminal law.

But I believe this type of investigation is unlikely. That’s because members of the administration have argued that their actions were legal and that the men killed in the second strike were continuing in their mission and posed a threat.

Moreover, the attorney general is supposed to act in an independent capacity from the White House. But Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, has demonstrated her loyalty to the president and his agenda in many instances.

Another consideration is that federal agency heads who rely on their attorneys in good faith are presumed to be immune from the law. This may be why Hegseth has stated that lawyers had advised the mission’s commanders.

Congress and the AG work a case

It is possible that during a congressional investigation one or more witnesses will be accused of lying under oath or accused of contempt.

Congress has the authority to hold individuals in contempt and fine and sentence them, but this is rare. Usually, Congress forwards the claim to the attorney general. Contempt of Congress is a federal misdemeanor offense, meaning a person cannot be sentenced to more than a year. Again, I believe it is unlikely that the attorney general would pursue a contempt charge in a federal court from these events.

Inspector general investigates

The Department of Defense’s inspector general can investigate allegations of wrongdoing in the department, and this includes the secretary. In the past, inspectors general have discovered criminal activity, written a publicly releasable report, and then a senior official was prosecuted.

In 2003, the Department of Defense investigated Darleen Druyun, a senior contracting official, for wrongly steering multimillion-dollar contracts to Boeing. The investigative report resulted in criminal charges from the Justice Department, and Druyun was found guilty in a criminal trial. Boeing officials also left the company, and the company was fined.

The military can investigate its civilian members but cannot prosecute them. The Uniform Code of Military Justice does not apply to civilians. That includes the president and secretary of defense, even though they are at the pinnacle of the chain of command.

International courts investigate

Finally, an investigation could be mounted through international law as enforced by courts outside of the United States.

Superpowers such as the United States and Russia often get a free pass from international law enforcement. In 1986, the International Court of Justice – a body partly created by the United States – ruled that the United States under the Reagan administration violated Nicaragua’s sovereignty during its civil war.

The Reagan administration’s response was that because other nations had disregarded the court, so too would the United States. No American official was ever held to account for the mining of Nicaragua’s main port or for the arming of rebels that led to the deaths of Nicaraguans.

It’s not clear which, if any, of these mechanisms will be used to hold accountable those who ordered and carried out the September 2025 operation in the Caribbean that killed two survivors of an earlier attack. What is clear is that the methods exist to find the facts – and make judgments based on them.

Joshua Kastenberg, Professor of Law, University of New Mexico

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

But one thing the men agreed on was the power of a new, representative legislative branch. Article I – the first one, after all – details the awesome responsibilities of the House of Representatives and the Senate: power to levy taxes, fund the government, declare war, impeach justices and presidents, and approve treaties, among many, many others.

In comparison, Article II, detailing the responsibilities of the president, and Article III, detailing the Supreme Court, are rather brief – further deferring to the preferred branch, Congress, for actual policymaking.

At the helm of this new legislative centerpiece, there was only one leadership requirement: The House of Representatives must select a speaker of the House.

The position, modeled after parliamentary leaders in the British House of Commons, was meant to act as a nonpartisan moderator and referee. The framers famously disliked political parties, and they knew the importance of building coalitions to solve the young nation’s vast policy problems.

But this idealistic vision for leadership quickly dissolved.

The current speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana, holds a position that has strayed dramatically from this nonpartisan vision. Today, the leadership role is far more than legislative manager – it is a powerful, party-centric position that controls nearly every aspect of House activity.

And while most speakers have used their tenure to strengthen the position and the power of Congress as a whole, Johnson’s choice to lead by following President Donald Trump drifts the position even further from the framers’ vision of congressional primacy.

Centralizing power

By the early 1800s, Speaker of the House Henry Clay, first elected speaker in 1810 as a member of the Whig Party, used the position to pursue personal policy goals, most notably entry into the War of 1812 against Great Britain.

Speaker Thomas Reed continued this trend by enacting powerful procedures in 1890 that allowed his Republican majority party to steamroll opposition in the legislative process.

In 1899, Speaker David Henderson created a Republican “cabinet” of new chamber positions that directly answered to – and owed their newly elevated positions to – him.

In the 20th century, in an attempt to further control the legislation Congress considered, reformers solidified the speaker’s power over procedure and party. Speaker Joseph Cannon, a Republican who ascended to the position in 1903, commandeered the powerful Rules Committee, which allowed speakers to control not only which legislation received a vote but even the amending and voting process.

At the other end of the 20th century was an effort to retool the position into a fully partisan role. After being elected speaker in 1995, Republican Newt Gingrich expanded the responsibilities of the office beyond handling legislation by centralizing resources in the office of the speaker. Gingrich grew the size of leadership staff – and prevented policy caucuses from hiring their own. He controlled the flow of information from committee chairs to rank-and-file members, and even directed access to congressional activity by C-SPAN, the public service broadcaster that provides coverage of Congress.

As a result, the modern speaker of the House now plays a powerful role in the development and passage of legislation – a dynamic that scholars refer to as the “centralization” of Congress.

Part of this is out of necessity: The House in particular, with 435 members, requires someone to, well, lead. And as America has grown in population, economic power and the size of government, the policy problems Congress tackles have become more complex, making this job all the more important.

But the position that began as coalition-building has evolved into controlling the floor schedule and flow of information and coordinating and commandeering committee work. My work on Congress has also documented how leaders invoke their power to dictate constituent communication for members of their party and use campaign finance donations to bolster party loyalty.

This centralization has cemented the responsibilities of the speaker within the chamber. More importantly, it has elevated the speaker to a national party figure.

Major legislation passed

Some successful leaders have been able to translate these advantages to pass major party priorities: Speaker Sam Rayburn, a Democrat from Texas, began his tenure in 1940 and was the longest-serving speaker of the House, ultimately working with eight different presidents.

Under Rayburn’s leadership, Congress passed incredible projects, including the Marshall Plan to fund recovery and reconstruction in postwar Western Europe, and legislation to develop and construct the Interstate Highway System.

In the modern era, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat and the first and only female speaker, began her tenure in 2007 and held together a diverse Democratic coalition to pass the Affordable Care Act into law.

But as the role of speaker has become one of proactive party leader, rather than passive chamber manager, not all speakers have been able to keep their party happy.

Protecting Congress’ power

John Boehner, a Republican who became speaker in 2011, was known for his procedural expertise and diplomatic skills. But he ultimately resigned after he relied on a bipartisan coalition to end a government shutdown in 2014 and avert financial crises, causing his support among his party to plummet.

Speaker Kevin McCarthy was ousted in 2023 from the position by his own Republican Party after working with Democratic members to fund the government and maintain Congress’ power of the purse.

Although these decisions angered the party, they symbolized the enduring nature of the position’s intention: the protector of Article I powers. Speakers have used their growing array of policy acumen, procedural advantages and congressional resources to navigate the chamber through immense policy challenges, reinforcing Article I responsibilities – from levying taxes to reforming major programs that affect every American – that other branches simply could not ignore.

In short, a strengthened party leader has often strengthened Congress as a whole.

Although Johnson, the current speaker, inherited one of the most well-resourced speaker offices in U.S. history, he faces a dilemma in his position: solving enormous national policy challenges while managing an unruly party bound by loyalty to a leader outside of the chamber.

Johnson’s recent decision to keep Congress out of session for eight weeks during the entirety of the government shutdown indicates a balance of deference tilted toward party over the responsibilities of a powerful Congress.

This eight-week absence severely weakened the chamber. Not being in session meant no committee meetings, and thus, no oversight; no appropriations bills passed, and thus, more deference to executive-branch funding decisions; and no policy debates or formal declarations of war, and thus, domestic and foreign policy alike being determined by unelected bureaucrats and appointed judges.

Unfortunately for frustrated House members and their constituents, beyond new leadership, there is little recourse.

While the gradual, powerful concentration of authority has made the speaker’s office more responsive to party and national demands alike, it has also left the chamber dependent on the speaker to safeguard the power of the People’s House.

SoRelle Wyckoff Gaynor, Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Politics, University of Virginia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Governments and central banks hold dollars to manage the value of their own currencies and as a form of insurance against economic shocks. Key commodities such as oil are also priced in dollars.

This dominant position, which has given the US enormous privileges including the capacity to borrow money cheaply and the ability to use the global financial system as a tool of statecraft, is often explained through the size and stability of US markets and the strength of its institutions. But beneath these economic fundamentals lies something more intangible: trust.

Countries and private financial institutions hold dollars, trade in dollars and borrow in dollars because they trust the US to maintain an open, rules-based international order. They also trust the US to honour contracts, protect property rights and manage the world’s financial plumbing responsibly by acting as an international lender of last resort during periods of crisis.

The dollar system has long had its critics. In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, which occurred between 2007 and 2009, emerging economies faced severe spillovers from US monetary policy and growing exposure to dollar-denominated debt. They also witnessed the increasing use of financial sanctions as a tool of US foreign policy.

China, Russia, India and other countries outside the west began constructing alternative financial infrastructures – new payment systems, currency swap lines and efforts to internationalise their own currencies. What began as a gradual search for some form of protection from US financial power quietly created cracks at the margins of the dollar-based system.

However, nothing has been as disorienting to the global role of the dollar as the second Trump administration’s overt attacks on the liberal international economic order. The imposition of sweeping trade tariffs, as well as efforts to undermine international and domestic institutions, represent a fundamental break with the promise of responsible American financial leadership.

Previous predictions of the dollar’s decline have proved premature. But as we argue in a recently published paper, the erosion of trust in the US as the steward of the liberal international order should be taken seriously. What we are seeing is not the immediate collapse of US financial power, but the beginning of a slow transition towards a fragmented, multipolar – and less predictable – global monetary system.

Rupture of trust

Three developments stand out. First, Washington’s commitment to the liberal economic order under the leadership of Donald Trump is being widely questioned. Rather than acting as the guarantor of open markets, Trump has reframed global trade as a transactional system where countries must “buy down” US tariffs. This means other countries must essentially now buy American Treasuries and other securities in exchange for access to the US market.

Second, surging US debt is increasing doubts about US fiscal stability. The Trump administration’s major tax cuts and spending plans are projected to create persistent deficits of around 6% of GDP, and US government debt has ballooned to record levels. This has prompted foreign central banks to reduce their dollar holdings.

Third, the Trump administration is openly attacking and undermining US government agencies and the country’s central bank, the Federal Reserve. Trump has repeatedly threatened to replace the current Fed chair, Jerome Powell, and dismiss other central bank officials since returning to the White House in January.

Central bank independence is considered a hallmark of credible monetary governance and undermining it raises doubts about whether the US remains a reliable anchor for the global financial system. According to Reuters, European officials are now openly questioning whether the Fed will continue to supply dollars to overseas central banks at times of financial strife.

Taken together, these actions are striking at the core foundation of dollar dominance: the assumption that the US will behave predictably, responsibly and with institutional restraint.

Despite the turbulence, no single currency is ready to replace the dollar. China’s renminbi still lacks open capital markets and strong legal protections, while the euro lacks a unified fiscal authority. New digital currency platforms remain experimental or speculative.

Still, the world is moving towards a more fragmented monetary landscape. Countries are diversifying their reserves into gold and other non-dollar assets. At the same time, regional payment systems are proliferating and dollar-denominated lending to emerging economies is declining.

Commodities are also priced increasingly in currencies other than the dollar. And no longer are only countries like China retreating from the dollar system, even US allies in Europe are encouraging banks to reduce their reliance on dollar funding.

The global economy is entering a financial interregnum – a period in which the old order is fading but the new one is not yet born. The dollar’s dominance will not vanish overnight as too many institutions and networks still rely on it. But its uncontested supremacy is coming to an end.

A fragmented financial system will reduce US leverage, while also making the global economy more complex and, possibly, more crisis-prone. The dollar is not dead. But the world is slowly preparing for life beyond dollar hegemony, and the second Trump administration may be the catalyst that turns long-running dissatisfaction into systemic change.

Fabian Pape, Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow in the School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh; Johannes Petry, CSGR Research Fellow, University of Warwick, and Tobias Pforr, Visiting Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In January 2025, President Donald Trump issued an executive order removing the recognition of citizenship for the U.S.-born children of both immigrants here illegally and visitors here only temporarily. The new rule is not retroactive. This change in long-standing U.S. policy sparked a wave of litigation culminating in Trump v. Washington, an appeal by Trump to remove the injunction put in place by federal courts.

When the justices weigh the arguments, they will focus on the meaning of the first sentence of the 14th Amendment, known as the citizenship clause: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

Both sides agree that to be granted birthright citizenship under the Constitution, a child must be born inside U.S. borders and the parents must be “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States. However, each side will give a very different interpretation of what the second requirement means. Who falls under “the jurisdiction” of the United States in this context?

As a close observer of the court, I anticipate a divided outcome grounded in strong arguments from each side.

Arguments for automatic citizenship

Simply put, the argument against the Trump administration is that the 14th Amendment’s expansion of citizenship after the eradication of slavery was meant to be broad rather than narrow, encompassing not only formerly enslaved Black people but all persons who arrived on U.S. soil under the protection of the Constitution.

The Civil War amendments – the 13th, 14th and 15th – established inherent equality as a constitutional value, which embraced all persons born in the nation without reference to race, ethnicity or origin.

One of the strongest arguments that automatic citizenship is the meaning of the Constitution is long-standing practice. Citizenship by birth regardless of parental status – with few exceptions – has been the effective rule since the time of America’s founding.

Advocates also point to precedent: the landmark case of United States v. Wong Kim Ark in 1898. When an American-born descendant of resident noncitizens sued after being refused re-entry to San Francisco under the Chinese Exclusion Act, the court recognized his natural-born citizenship.

If we read the Constitution in a living fashion – emphasizing the evolution of American beliefs and values over time – the constitutional commitment to broad citizenship grounded in equality, regardless of ethnicity or economic status, seems even more clear.

However, advocates must try to convince the court’s originalists – Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett – who read the Constitution based on its meaning when it was adopted.

The originalist argument in favor of birthright citizenship is that the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction” was meant to invoke only a small set of exceptions found in traditional British common law. In the Wong Kim Ark ruling, the court relied on this “customary law of England, brought to America by the colonists.”

One exception to birthright citizenship covered by this line of rulings is the child of a foreign diplomat, whose parents represent the interests of another country. Another exception is the children of invading foreign armies. A third exception discussed explicitly by the framers of the 14th Amendment was Native Americans, who at the time were understood to be under the jurisdiction of their tribal government as a separate sovereign. That category of exclusion faded away after Congress recognized the citizenship of Native Americans in 1924.

The advocates of automatic birthright citizenship conclude that whether the 14th Amendment is interpreted in a living or in an original way, its small set of exceptions do not override its broad message of citizenship grounded in human equality.

Opposition to birthright citizenship

The opposing argument begins with a simple intuition: In a society defined by self-government, as America is, there is no such thing as citizenship without consent. In the same way that an American citizen cannot declare himself a French citizen and vote in French elections without consent from the French government, a foreign national cannot declare himself a U.S. citizen without consent.

This argument emphasizes that citizenship in a democracy means holding equal political power over our collective decisions. That is something only existing citizens hold the right to offer to others, something which must be decided through elections and the lawmaking process.

The court’s ruling in Elk v. Wilkins in 1884 – just 16 years after the ratification of the 14th Amendment – endorses “the principle that no one can become a citizen of a nation without its consent.” By making entry into the United States without approval a federal offense, Congress has effectively denied that consent.

Scholars who support this view argue that the 14th Amendment does not provide this consent. Instead it sets a limitation. To the authors of the 14th Amendment, “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” conveyed a limit to natural citizenship grounded in mutual allegiance. That means if people are free to deny their old national allegiance, and an independent nation is free to decide its own membership, the recognition of a new national identity must be mutual.

Immigrants living in the United States illegally have not accepted the sovereignty of the nation’s laws. On the other side of the coin, the government has not officially accepted them as residents under its protection.

If mutual recognition of allegiance is the meaning of the 14th Amendment, the Trump administration has not violated it.

The opponents of birthright citizenship argue that the Wong Kim Ark ruling has been misrepresented. In that case, the court only considered permanent legal residents like Wong Kim Ark’s parents, but not residents here illegally or temporarily. The focus on British common law in that ruling is simply misguided because the findings of Calvin’s Case or any other precedents dealing with British subjects were voided by the American Revolution.

In this view, the Declaration of Independence replaced subjects with citizens. The power to determine national membership was taken away from kings and placed in the hands of democratic majorities.

For opponents of birthright citizenship, the 14th Amendment does not take that power away from citizens but instead codifies the rule that mutual consent is the touchstone of admission. The requirement to be “subject to the jurisdiction” provides the mechanism of that consent.

Congress can determine who is accepted as a member of the national community under its jurisdiction. In this view, Congress – and the American people – have spoken: Current federal laws make entry into U.S. borders without permission a crime rather than a forced acceptance of political membership.

What might happen

The court will likely announce a ruling in summer 2026 before early July, just in time for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The court will ultimately decide whether the Constitution endorses the declaration’s invocation of essential equality or its creation of a sovereign people empowered to determine the boundaries of national membership.

The court’s three Democratic-appointed justices – Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor – will surely side against the Trump administration. The six Republican-appointed justices seem likely to divide, a symptom of disagreements within the originalist camp.

The liberal justices need at least two of the conservatives to join them to form a majority of five to uphold universal birthright citizenship. This will likely be some combination of Chief Justice John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

The Trump administration will prevail only if five out of the six conservatives reject the British common law foundations of the Wong Kim Ark ruling in favor of citizenship by consent alone.

America should know by July Fourth.

Morgan Marietta, Professor of American Civics, University of Tennessee

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

One example of that radicalization was the attack on the US Capitol on January 6 2021 in an attempt to overturn the result. Exacerbating that radicalisation is the movement’s hostility towards much of the mainstream media. This is something that has been amplified by the US president himself, who has famously referred to the media as “the enemy of the American people”.

But how has this radical movement movement emerged from the socially conservative Republican Party? The rise of MAGA has marked an important political shift in America that has many liberal-minded people scratching their heads. Psychology studies can offer insights that can help explain the MAGA movement’s motivations.

1. Fused identity

Identity is central to understanding the way MAGA holds together as a group and can also explain many of its motives. Trump has been able to mobilise his base effectively by communicating that shared identity. And it’s this sense of common identity and purpose that has been so important in the development of MAGA as a powerful political movement.

The almost absolute faith in Trump’s leadership has a lot to do with negative resentment of other groups that he singles out for criticism, particularly migrants, liberals and feminists. But it is actually a positive identification with white nationalism that is a stronger indicator of the sort of person who might identify with MAGA.

MAGA supporters unite around a shared perception of threat to their status, often related to issues of race and immigration. But it is also seen to be motivated by the desire to cultivate belonging and group pride as a way to regain lost esteem.

Some researchers also believe that even the act of wearing a MAGA hat is a sign of what is known as “identity fusion” – when boundaries between the self and the group blur. When this occurs, wearing a MAGA hat may be a symbol of who I am rather than just who I voted for.

This is significant since identity fusion is associated with reported willingness to undertake more extreme actions such as hurting people and damaging property to uphold the Trump community and to achieve his aims.

2. Moral self-righteousness

MAGA members also tend to adhere to the idea that one’s own ethnic group is more morally pure than others. MAGA ideology tends to divide America into “good” and “evil” groups, with themselves as good and out-groups, such as the ones mentioned above, cast as evil. This positions “true Americans”, the people who built the nation, patriots who have “had enough”, as part of the former.

Since it frames politics as a struggle over “right values and lifestyles”, such rhetoric heightens the risk of malignant moral superiority. When communicated by a leader, it creates in followers the sense that they have an obligation to act against these “evil” forces which threaten their group.

When this sense of superiority is threatened, it can lead to aggression, such as the assault on the US Capitol .

3. The right to dominate other groups

Aggressiveness in political groups such as MAGA is also connected to what is known as “social dominance orientation”. This relates to belief in a hierarchy – the idea that one social group has the right to dominate other groups.

Research shows people who believe in hierarchy are more likely to disregard basic democratic principles. They see society as a “competitive jungle” where groups struggle for power and dominance.

As a result, they view groups that differ from them as inferior. This justifies any actions that maintain their in-group status.

This holds true even if – as in the case of MAGA-followers – it means a belief in violence in response to unwelcome social and cultural changes. Polling has found that MAGA supporters are also far more likely to believe that there will be a civil war in the US and that violence in order to advance the movement’s political objectives would be justified.

4. Aggressive followership

There’s a scientific debate about what draws people to authoritarian leaders. Some scholars emphasise the tendency to want to submit to authority, high levels of aggression when sanctioned and adherence to conventional values such as traditional views on religion and sexuality. Others focus more on a preference for conformity over personal autonomy.

But they agree on one point: authoritarian followers submit to leaders who stress the superiority of their social group and who they consider to be capable of handling the threats they see as coming from other groups.

Research on the MAGA movement from 2016 shows that Trump supporters were more likely than other supporters of other Republican party candidates to score high on one facet of authoritarianism: the willingness to resort to aggression towards people seen to go against social norms if encouraged by someone they’ve accepted as an authority figure. But they don’t appear to score as highly on two other facets: submission to established authorities and an adherence to conventional values.

This suggests that authoritarianism among the MAGA movement has evolved into a more distinct profile, characterized primarily by a prejudiced aggressiveness towards other social groups.

History tells us that radical political movements tend to pop up when the societal context is perceived as threatening. In this process, some people have personal dispositions that make them more prone to follow authoritarian leaders. So it’s important to take both personality and context into account when trying to understand movements such as MAGA.

Magnus Linden, Associate Professor of Psychology, Lund University; Claire Campbell, Lecturer in Social Psychology, Ulster University, and Fredrik Björklund, Professor of psychology, Lund University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

It set off a chorus of warnings about the tax flight of the city’s wealthiest residents.

Hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman claimed that both the city’s businesses and wealthy residents “have already started making arrangements for the exits.”

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul echoed the concern, opposing the proposal “because we cannot have them leave the state.” Before the election, Mamdani’s opponent, former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, joked that if Mamdani won, “even I will move to Florida.”

I research whether high earners actually move when their taxes go up. My colleagues and I have analyzed millionaire taxes in New Jersey and California, the migration of Forbes billionaires globally and decades of IRS data tracing where Americans with million-dollar incomes live.

Top earners are often thought of as “mobile millionaires” who are ever searching for lower-tax places to live. In reality, they’re often reluctant to leave the places where they built their careers and raised their families.

At the same time, there are grains of truth in the tax migration arguments, so it’s important to carefully parse the evidence.

A small fraction of a small fraction

The first fact is simple: Millionaires have low migration rates.

Mobility in America is highest among people who are still searching for their economic place in life. Workers who earn the lowest wages move across state lines at relatively high rates, about 4.5% per year, often in search of more affordable housing. People making $1 million-plus a year move only half as often: Just 2.4% of them pack up each year.

When millionaires do move, it rarely appears to be for tax reasons. For example, Florida is the top destination for New York movers in general. But among the richest 1% of New Yorkers, the top destination is Connecticut, followed by New Jersey and California, all three of which levy a millionaire tax.

Some millionaires certainly do favor lower-tax destinations. But many moves to low-tax states are offset by moves in the opposite direction to higher-tax states, and many other moves take place between states that have the same tax rate.

Overall, only about 15% of millionaires who move end up with a lower tax bill. That shows the rich are willing and able to move for tax reasons. But because only about 2.4% of millionaires move each year – and only a fraction of those moves reduce their taxes – overall tax migration ends up being a small fraction of a small fraction. Not never, but not often.

Some benefits don’t have a dollar sign

Migration is mostly a young person’s game.

The most mobile Americans are recent college graduates who are brimming with potential, searching for work and unburdened by major responsibilities. Their rate of migration from one state to another is over 12%, more than four times the rate of millionaires.

The typical adult mover is about 30 years old, while the highest income earners are typically about 50. People choose where to build their careers and families decades before they reach their peak earnings phase.

By the time someone earns enough to be taxed in the highest brackets, they’re usually late into their careers. They are almost always married, often have children at home, own their homes and, in many cases, own a business. Their social lives and their economic success are linked to local networks of colleagues, clients and connections built up over a long career. Moving away from those networks means giving up a great deal of social capital and starting over somewhere new.

Top earners know that some states have lower taxes, but for most, tax flight is simply a bad deal. The social and economic costs of uprooting are bigger than the tax savings.

When your social world collapses

Two recent events showed why the rich generally stay where they are – and what it takes to move them.

The first was the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which President Donald Trump signed into law in late 2017. The tax reform package capped the federal deduction for state and local taxes and raised taxes on high earners in states like New York, New Jersey and California. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “So Long, California. Sayonara, New York,” economists Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore predicted that 800,000 people a year would flee those states.

They didn’t. A colleague and I studied every millionaire tax return in the country for two years before and after the reform. Nothing happened. There was no increase in migration out of the states where tax burdens rose. The predicted exodus simply did not occur.

We were about to wrap up the study and call it case closed. Then something unexpected did happen: In early 2020, millionaires began leaving high-tax states in large numbers. Low-tax states saw no comparable outflows. The pattern matched those tax-flight predictions from just a few years earlier.

It was the COVID-19 pandemic, and it brought a profound shock to the social lives of city residents.

Offices emptied out, with entry swipes in major cities dropping by nearly 90%. Time spent at work fell sharply, local amenities were shuttered, and time spent alone grew as in-person contact became a health risk. K–12 schools closed, disrupting children’s relationships with teachers and classmates.

For many households, this was also a strange form of freedom, and a chance to rethink the geography of work and life, especially for top earners who could work remotely from anywhere. Disconnected from the bonds of place, top earners moved and clearly favored low-tax destinations.

The lesson is that social lives and economic policies are deeply intertwined. The 2017 tax reform had no effect on migration because the social cost of moving is high – especially for people at the peak of their careers who are enjoying the many social benefits of economic success. As long as those connections to others are strong, they outweigh the appeal of moving to lower-tax states.

When the pandemic broke apart so much of social life, the ledger shifted. If your office, school, friendships and daily routines no longer anchor you in place, what is keeping you in a high-tax place?

But by early 2023, as social and economic life returned to normal, we found that millionaire migration patterns mostly reverted to their prepandemic baselines.

In other words, the surge in tax flight was temporary.

If you want the rich, appeal to the young

There is a big lesson here for state and city policies.

Every place wants to attract high-income earners and the spending power and tax dollars that accompany their salaries. Many policymakers think that tax cuts will lure them in, but this is mostly a fool’s errand. In normal times, the rich are deeply rooted and not movable.

The real opportunity lies in attracting and retaining the next generation of top earners – young people who are unattached to place and looking for opportunities to build their careers and their lives. Places that draw young professionals build the pipeline of future top earners.

Those early-career folks are mobile, but they are not thinking about the top tax rate. Their salaries are low. They are trying to find good jobs, pay the rent, form relationships and start families. They hope to be successful enough to one day be paying Mamdani’s millionaire tax. For the time being, though, they need the basic costs of living to be manageable. Soon they will need affordable child care and good public schools for their kids.

If the city helps them that far along, many of them would gladly pay a millionaire tax when and if the time comes. In this light, the Mamdani plan is simply practical: Higher taxes at the top support the services and quality of life that keep the next generation in the city.

Cristobal Young, Associate Professor of Sociology, Cornell University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Combined with the fact that 95 per cent of AI pilot projects fail, traders treated his remark as a broader warning. Although Altman was referring specifically to private startups rather than publicly traded giants, some appear to have interpreted it as an industry-wide assessment.

Tech billionaire Peter Thiel sold his Nvidia holdings, for instance, while American investor Michael Burry (of The Big Short fame) has made million-dollar bets that companies like Palantir and Nvidia will drop in value.

What Altman’s comment really exposes is not only the fragility of specific firms but the deeper tendency Prussian philosopher Karl Marx predicted: the problem of surplus capital that can no longer find profitable outlets in production.

Marx’s theory of crisis

The future of AI is not in question. Like the internet after the dot-com crash, the technology will endure. What is in question is where capital will flow once AI equities stop delivering the speculative returns they have promised over the past few years.

That question takes us directly back to Marx’s analysis of crises driven by over-accumulation. Marx argued that an economy becomes unstable when the mass of accumulated capital can no longer be profitably reinvested.

An overproduction of capital, he explained, occurs whenever additional investment fails to generate new surplus value. When surplus capital cannot profitably be absorbed through the production of goods, it is displaced into speculative outlets.

Tech investments mask economic weakness

Years of low interest rates and pandemic-era liquidity have swollen corporate balance sheets. Much of that liquidity has entered the technology sector, concentrating in the so-called “Magnificent Seven” — Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla. Without these firms, market performance would be negative.

This does not signal technological dynamism; it reflects capital concentrated in a narrow cluster of overvalued assets, functioning as “money thrown into circulation without a material basis in production” that circulates without any grounding in real economic activity.

The consequence of this is that less investment reaches the “real economy”, which fuels economic stagnation and the cost-of-living crisis, both of which remain obscured by the formal metric of GDP.

How AI became the latest fix

Economic geographer David Harvey extends Marx’s insight through the idea of the “spatio-temporal fix,” which refers to the way capital temporarily resolves stagnation by either pushing investment into the future or expanding into new territories.

Over-accumulation generates surpluses of labour, productive capacity and money capital, which cannot be absorbed without loss. These surpluses are then redirected into long-term projects that defer crises into new spaces that open fresh possibilities for extraction.

The AI boom functions as both a temporal and a spatial fix. As a temporal fix, it offers investors claims on future profitability that may never arrive — what Marx called “fictitious capital.” This is wealth that shows up on balance sheets despite having little basis in the real economy rooted in the production of goods.

Spatially, the expansion of data centres, chip manufacturing sites and mineral extraction zones requires enormous physical investment. These projects absorb capital while depending on new territories, new labour markets and new resource frontiers.

Yet as Altman’s admission suggests, and as U.S. President Donald Trump’s protectionist measures complicate global trade, these outlets are reaching their limits.

The costs of speculative capital

The consequences of over-accumulation extend far beyond firms and investors. They are experienced socially, not abstractly. Marx explained that an overproduction of capital corresponds to an overproduction of the means of production and necessities of life that cannot be used at existing rates of exploitation.

In other words, stagnant purchasing power prevents capital from being valorized at the pace it is being produced. As profitability declines, the economy resolves the imbalance by destroying the livelihoods of workers and households whose pensions are tied to equities.

History offers stark examples. The dot-com crash wiped out small investors and concentrated power in surviving firms. The 2008 financial crisis displaced millions from their homes while financial institutions were rescued.

Today, large asset managers are already hedging against potential turbulence. Vanguard, for instance, has shifted significantly toward fixed income.

Speculation drives growth

The AI bubble is primarily a symptom of structural pressures rather than purely a technological event. In the early 20th century, Marxist economist Rosa Luxemburg questioned where the continually increasing demand required for expanded reproduction would come from.

Her answer echoes Marx and Harvey: when productive outlets shrink, capital moves either outward or into speculation. The U.S. increasingly chooses the latter.

Corporate spending on AI infrastructure now contributes more to GDP growth than household consumption, an unprecedented inversion that shows how much growth is being driven by speculative investment rather than productive expansion.

This dynamic pulls down the rate of profit, and when the speculative flow reverses, contraction will follow.

Tariffs tighten the squeeze on capital

Financial inflation has intensified as the traditional pressure valves that once allowed capital to move into new physical or geographic markets have narrowed.

Tariffs, export controls on semiconductors and retaliatory trade measures have narrowed the global space available for relocation. Since capital cannot readily escape the structural pressures of the domestic economy, it increasingly turns to financial tools that postpone losses by rolling debt forward or inflating asset prices; mechanisms that ultimately heighten fragility when the reckoning comes.

U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell’s openness to interest rate cuts signals a renewed turn toward cheap credit. Lower borrowing costs let capital paper over losses and pump up fresh speculative cycles.

Marx captured this logic in his analysis of interest-bearing capital, where finance generates claims on future production “above and beyond what can be realized in the form of commodities.”

The result is that households are pushed to take on more debt than they can manage, effectively swapping a crisis of stagnation for a crisis of consumer credit.

Bubbles and social risk

If the AI bubble bursts when governments have limited room to shift investment internationally and the economy is propped up by increasingly fragile credit, the consequences could be serious.

Capital will not disappear, but will instead concentrate in bond markets and credit instruments inflated by a U.S. central bank eager to cut interest rates. This does not avert crisis; it merely transfers the costs downward.

Bubbles are not accidents, but recurring mechanisms for absorbing surplus capital. If Trump’s protectionism ensures that spatial outlets continue to close and temporal fixes rely on ever riskier leverage, the system moves toward a cycle of asset inflation, collapse and renewed state intervention.

AI will survive, but the speculative bubble surrounding it is a sign of a deeper structural problem — the cost of which, when finally realized, will fall most heavily on the working class.

Elliot Goodell Ugalde, PhD Candidate, Political Economy, Queen's University, Ontario

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

“We’ve had some great interviews with Tucker Carlson, but you can’t tell him who to interview,” President Donald Trump said on Nov. 17, 2025. “Ultimately, people have to decide.”

Fuentes is a 27-year-old livestreamer with openly antisemitic views. He has called Adolf Hitler both “awesome” and “right.” But he has become impossible for the Republican Party to banish, despite repeated attempts by some party leaders.

This dynamic reveals how fringe ideologies operate differently today compared to the mid-20th century, when institutional gatekeepers – political parties, law enforcement, the media – could more effectively contain extremist movements.

And through their 21st-century methods of communication and operation, Nick Fuentes and his followers – the “Groypers” – have managed to get what their 20th-century predecessors could not: widespread awareness and political influence.

Atlanta, 1940: Brazen but brief fascist group

As a historian of the American far right, I have spent years examining how fascist movements adapted to the conditions of postwar America. The trajectory from the 1940s until today shows a fundamental shift: from defined organizational structures that could be dismantled to diffuse cultural movements that spread through social media.

Let me offer an example.

In 1946, barely a year after Hitler’s defeat, young men in khaki shirts marched through Atlanta, Georgia, performing Nazi salutes and promising racial vengeance.

Led by Homer Loomis Jr. – a Princeton dropout who called Hitler’s manifesto “Mein Kampf” his “bible” – this group, known as the Columbians, offered Atlanta a glimpse of explicit fascism. They conducted armed patrols, held uniformed drills and even drew up blueprints for blowing up City Hall.

Their brazenness, however, was matched by their brevity. Ten months after forming, Atlanta authorities revoked their charter and jailed the ringleaders.

The swift suppression seemed to prove that explicit fascism had no future in postwar America. And for decades that held true. Open Nazi sympathizers remained marginal, their organizations small and easily ostracized.

In the 1970s, when a group of American Nazis planned to march in Skokie, Illinois, a predominantly Jewish suburb of Chicago, the event was most notable for the counterprotests it triggered.

Mainstreaming fascism

But the Columbians’ failure, it turned out, was organizational, not ideological. The government could revoke a charter and convict leaders. They could not repress a mood.

In the digital age, Fuentes represents that mood as a diffuse sensibility rather than a structured organization. Where the Columbians wore uniforms that advertised their fascist allegiance, Fuentes wears suits and frames his worldview in the rhetoric of “America First.”

The difference is strategic. In a 2019 livestream, Fuentes explained his approach openly: “Bit by bit we start to break down these walls … and then one day, we become the mainstream.”

This packaging marks a deliberate shift. Fuentes treats plausible deniability – of fascism, of antisemitism – not as a weakness but as a central feature. The content of his message remains extreme, but the ironic wrapping enables something the Columbians never achieved – cultural saturation.

Fuentes’s followers, Groypers, have in turn mastered this diffusion strategy.

For many conservatives under 40, exposure to Groyper-style content isn’t in meetings. They absorb it through social media feeds, Discord servers and group chats. A tone of grievance and ironic provocation becomes prominent background noise, moving the marginal toward the mainstream. A generation raised on anti-woke content, 4chan and transgressive memes now shapes the neofascist movement’s tone.

At the same time, institutional authority has in many ways effectively collapsed. The Columbians faced united opposition from media, prosecutors and politicians. Those gatekeepers no longer control conservatism or the white nationalists who are adjacent to it.

Achieving what predecessors could not

The Carlson-Fuentes interview has instead exposed a rift within MAGA circles.

Several board members of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank with deep ties to the Trump administration, have resigned over the controversy, including one this week.

They were angered that Kevin Roberts, the foundation’s president, released a video defending the interview. Roberts has apologized for some of its contents but not retracted it.

Republicans aren’t all in agreement about whether Groypers represent a threat or an important constituency. Members of Congress have given speeches at Fuentes’ conferences; Trump dined with him at Mar-a-Lago in 2022.

Last year, JD Vance, now the vice president, called Fuentes a “total loser.” Fuentes attempted, without success, to mobilize Groypers against Trump in 2024 and called the president a “scam artist” earlier this year for failing to release the files in the Jeffrey Epstein case.

Yet the broader Groyperfication of conservative youth culture proceeds apace. Trump reversed his stance on the Epstein files. In defending Carlson’s interview with Fuentes, Trump said, “I don’t know much about him.”

Trump said roughly the same thing when he sat down to dinner with Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago in November 2022. Still, that event showed that the Groypers, now six years into their existence, have achieved what their predecessors could not: genuine cultural penetration and political influence.

The old remedies no longer function. Authorities cannot ban an atmosphere or revoke the charter of a meme. Social media platforms designed to maximize engagement often maximize anger. Fuentes and imitators exploit this frustration.

They remain controversial, and the Groypers’ lack of formal institutions could mean they will at some point fade like other far-right youth movements. Trump’s eventual exit from politics may also deprive them of a central reference point.

But they might represent something new: a post-organizational extremism uniquely adapted to digital life.

The Columbians once promised to control Atlanta in six months and America in 10 years. They lasted 10 months. The Groypers have already long outlasted them. That endurance signals a new, far more successful approach.

Alex McPhee-Browne, PhD student studying the American and global far right, University of Cambridge

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

But U.S. District Judge Cameron McGowan Currie qualified her dismissals, saying she did so “without prejudice.”

What does that legal term mean?

Unaddressed charges

In her ruling, Currie concluded that the appointment of interim U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan, who filed the cases against Comey and James, was unlawful. Currie wrote:

“Because Ms. Halligan had no lawful authority to present the indictment, I will grant Mr. Comey’s motion and dismiss the indictment without prejudice.”

She wrote the same about the case against James.

Currie’s “without prejudice” reference means the dismissal did not address what legal scholars like me call the merits or substance of the underlying criminal charges.

A “without prejudice” dismissal is legalese for “you can try again if you can fix the problems with your case.” Had the judge ruled that the dismissals were “with prejudice,” that would have meant the government could not have brought the cases again.

Here’s what prosecutors would need to fix to be able to bring cases against Comey and James again.

Federal law provides that whenever a U.S. attorney’s position is vacant, the attorney general may appoint an interim U.S. attorney for a period of 120 days. At the end of that period, it’s up to the federal judges of the district where that position is vacant to appoint someone to continue in that role unless and until the president nominates, and the Senate confirms, a U.S. attorney through the normal appointments process.

The Trump administration appointed Halligan’s predecessor, U.S. Attorney Erik Siebert, in that interim role in January 2025. And when the 120 days from his appointment lapsed, the district judges of the Eastern District of Virginia selected him to continue on in his interim role.

Currie found that when Siebert resigned after his reappointment, that did not empower the Trump administration to appoint a new interim prosecutor. The power still resided with the District Court judges. Because of that, Halligan’s appointment and her efforts to secure the Comey and James indictments were void.

The end of the beginning

The Department of Justice can certainly appeal these rulings and could get them reversed on appeal, or it could refile them after a new U.S. attorney is named in accordance with law.

It may be too late for the case against Comey, however, because the statute of limitations on those charges has already run out. As Currie noted in her Comey ruling, while the statute of limitations is generally suspended when a valid indictment has been filed, an invalid indictment, like the one against Comey, would not have the same effect on the statute of limitations.

That means the time has likely run out on the claims against the former FBI director.

If Currie’s rulings stand, the Justice Department can’t just file the cases again, with Halligan still in this role, unless the Trump administration follows the procedures set forth in the law for her proper appointment.

While this is not the beginning of the end for these prosecutions, it is, at least, the end of the beginning.

Ray Brescia, Associate Dean for Research and Intellectual Life, Albany Law School

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

And that’s exactly what he did. Over the next four days, Trump met with FIFA President Gianni Infantino in the Oval Office to announce expedited visas for fans at next year’s World Cup (though, pointedly, not for all).

He hosted Saudi Arabia Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman with an effusive news conference, where he attacked a journalist for asking a “horrible, insubordinate” question about the killing and dismemberment of a journalist at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018. The crown prince was then feted at a White House state dinner with tech giants from Apple to Nvidia.

Trump also lashed out at his political opponents with dangerous, vengeful rhetoric that was shocking, even by his standards.

On Thursday, the president posted on Truth Social to trash a video produced by six Democratic members of Congress, who had all served in the military or intelligence services. They accused the Trump administration of attempting to pit the military and intelligence services against the American people. In a direct address to military and intelligence leaders, they said:

Our laws are clear: You can refuse illegal orders; you must refuse illegal orders. No one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our Constitution.

Trump went ballistic. He called the message “seditious behaviour at the highest level” and said the Democratic lawmakers should be punished “by death”.

By the end of the week, the Epstein affair had faded to the background – by design.

Dire poll numbers

So, what’s going on behind the scenes that’s driving this vitriol? Put simply, Trump is under pressure like at no other time in his second term.

For one, his poll numbers – and those of the Republicans – have hit rock bottom.

A Fox News poll last week had Trump’s favourable rating at just 40% – even worse than Joe Biden’s rating at the same point in his presidency. And three quarters of respondents viewed the economy negatively.

Moreover, the Democrats’ sweep in elections in Virginia and New Jersey on November 5 has given them a major boost ahead of next November’s midterm elections that could determine the control of Congress.

Another poll has the Democrats up 14% over Republicans when respondents were asked who they would vote for if the election was held today. This is the largest gap since 2017, which presaged the Democrats taking back control of the House of Representatives in 2018.

The driver in all this is a growing lack of confidence in Trump’s ability to resolve the affordability crisis in food, rent, insurance, health care and other basic items. Trump’s message that the US economy is the “hottest” on the planet is not resonating with voters.

As was obvious during the US government shutdown, Trump has no interest in meeting with Democrats, much less negotiating with them. He wants to destroy them. And, at a time of heightened political violence, he’s publicly saying he wants some of them executed.

In Trump’s mind, there are almost no limits to his exercise of power. He has deployed the National Guard to patrol US cities, which a judge last week said was illegal, and he has ordered the killings of people in small boats in the Caribbean. He does not tolerate dissent to his exercise of power as commander in chief.

That is precisely the fear the Democrats expressed in their message last week – that the military could potentially be used against American citizens, particularly if Trump feels his power is starting to weaken.

Cracks emerging in Trump’s loyalist base

The other thing that has Trump worried is his stranglehold over the Republican Party. There are signs this may be starting to crack. And given his second term has been boosted by loyalists – both in the party and in his appointments – this could be a cause of significant concern for the president.

Marjorie Taylor Greene is a case in point. For a decade, the Georgia congresswoman has been one of the most vocal Trump and MAGA cheerleaders. But this year, she has increasingly spoken out against Trump for reneging on his commitment to put “America first” with all his foreign policy focus and travel overseas.

Her break with Trump over the Epstein files was the last straw. In recent days, he called her “Marjorie Traitor Greene” and threatened to back a candidate to challenge her in a Republican primary next year.

On Friday, Greene announced she would resign from Congress. She said what she stood for “should not result in me being called a traitor and threatened by the president of the United States.”

Trump has made clear his intention to destroy more of his enemies and others who stand in his way. This is what Trump feels he must do to survive.

But how long Trump manages to ward off other Republican challenges remains to be seen, especially if Republicans up for election next year become really worried about their chances. They could start creating distance between their priorities and how Trump is preforming as president.

With all this pressure mounting on Trump – not to mention a looming showdown with some Republicans over his Ukraine peace plan – he may be heading for a winter of discontent.

Bruce Wolpe, Non-resident Senior Fellow, United States Study Centre, University of Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

But Trump’s second term may be different.

A new round of administration policies now cuts deeper into farmers’ livelihoods – not just squeezing profits but reshaping how farms survive – through renewed tariffs on agricultural products, visa restrictions on farm workers, reduced farm subsidies and open favoritism toward South American agricultural competitors.

In the past, farmers’ loyalty to Trump has overridden economics. In our study of the 2018–19 trade war between the U.S. and China, we found that farmers in Trump-voting counties kept planting soybeans even though the trade war’s effects were clear: Their costs would rise and their profits would fall. Farmers in Democratic-leaning counties, by contrast, shifted acreage toward alternatives such as corn or wheat that were likely to be more profitable. For many pro-Trump farmers, political belief outweighed market logic – at least in the short term.

Today, the economic effects of policies affecting farmers are broader and deeper – and the resolve that carried farmers’ support for Trump through the first trade war may no longer be enough.

Tariffs: The familiar pain returns

The revived U.S.-China trade conflict has again placed soybeans at its center. In March 2025, Beijing suspended import licenses for several major U.S. soybean exporters following new U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods. Trump countered with a new round of reciprocal tariffs, broadening the list of Chinese imports hit and raising rates on already targeted goods.

An October 2025 deal promised China would buy 25 million metric tons of U.S. soybeans a year, but relief has proved mostly symbolic.

Before the 2018-19 trade war, China regularly imported 30 million to 36 million metric tons of U.S. soybeans annually — more than one-third of all American soybean exports. Now, Beijing has signed long-term contracts with Brazil and Argentina, leaving U.S. producers with shrinking overseas demand for their crops.

Prices remain roughly 40% to 50% below pre-2018 levels, and farmers are storing record volumes of unsold soybeans.

In 2019, the federal government cushioned those losses with over $23 billion in bailout payments to farmers. This time, Republican leaders show little appetite for another bailout. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s funds for farm relief are running low, leaving farmers with lower prices and less support.

Labor: Fewer hands, higher costs

Farms are also short of workers. Roughly 42% of U.S. crop workers lack legal status, according to the National Agricultural Workers Survey. Tougher immigration enforcement and slower visa processing have thinned the labor pool just as production costs are surging. Hired-labor expenses rose 14.4% from 2021 to 2022 and another 15.2% the following year, and costs such as fertilizer, equipment and parts climbed sharply.

Many growers are turning to the H-2A guest worker program – a legal pipeline for seasonal foreign labor that has quadrupled in size over the past decade. But it is expensive: Farms must pay the adverse effect wage rate, a federally set pay rate that is more than twice the regular federal minimum wage. And farms must provide every H-2A worker with free housing and free transportation to and from the U.S., as well as from their housing to the worksite. Large agribusinesses can absorb those costs; small family farms often cannot.

As exports collapsed in late September 2025, the head of the American Soybean Association wrote a public letter to the White House begging for help, saying, “We’ve had your back. We need you to have ours now.” The hard-line immigration policy approach that rallies rural voters is also pushing smaller farms to the brink – forcing them to ask what their loyalty still buys.

Subsidies and symbolism: The Argentina shock

The question of the value of farmers’ loyalty sharpened in the fall of 2025 when the U.S. Treasury approved a $20 billion currency-swap deal with Argentina – supporting the country’s president, Javier Milei, a political ally of Trump, while the country remains a direct agricultural competitor.

U.S. farmers, already frustrated by low prices and visa delays, took it as an insult. Argentina is among the world’s largest soybean exporters, and U.S. farm groups asked why the federal government would underwrite a competitor while trimming support for American producers at home.

The tension deepened when Trump floated the idea of buying Argentinian beef for U.S. markets – a remark one Kansas rancher called “an absolute betrayal.” The plan may be economically minor, but symbolically it pierced the “America First” narrative that had helped hold the farm vote together.

Clean energy: The new rural subsidy under threat

For decades, the farm vote relied on federally funded support programs – crop insurance, price guarantees and disaster assistance – which account for a significant share of net farm income. Over the past five years, a quieter lifeline has emerged: renewable energy.

Wind and solar projects have brought jobs, tax revenue and steady lease payments to rural counties that have been losing both population and farm income for decades. Iowa now gets about 63% of its electricity from wind, while Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas have seen significant growth.

That momentum has stalled. In August 2025, a U.S. Treasury Department policy change froze billions in rural investment in renewable energy projects. Industry trackers report that prolonged uncertainty has pushed many Midwestern renewable projects into limbo.

For farmers, this isn’t an abstract climate debate — it’s a lost income stream. Leasing land for turbines or solar panels brought in tens of thousands of dollars a year and kept many family farms afloat.

The freeze wipes out one of the few growth engines in rural America and highlights an irony at the heart of Trump’s message: The administration that promises to protect the heartland is dismantling the clean energy investments that were finally helping it diversify.

Politics: How deep does loyalty run?

As our research found, during the first trade war, Trump-voting counties absorbed heavy financial losses without changing course. That loyalty was propped up by subsidies – and by hope. This time, neither cushion is secure.

Many farmers still share Trump’s skepticism of Washington and global elites. But shrinking federal backing, tighter labor and a competitor’s bailout cut close to home. The question now is whether cultural identity can keep outweighing material loss – or whether the second trade war will signal a deeper political shift.

No sudden collapse of rural support for Trump is likely; cultural loyalty doesn’t fade overnight. But strain is visible. Farm groups are quietly pressing for pragmatic trade policy and visa reform, and several Republican governors now lobby for labor flexibility rather than tougher enforcement.

If the first Trump trade war tested farmers’ wallets, this one tests their faith – and faith, once shaken, is far harder to restore.

Kee Hyun Park, Assistant Professor of International Political Economy, Nanyang Technological University; Institute for Humane Studies and Shannon P. Carcelli, Assistant Professor of Government and Politics, University of Maryland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

You are an expert on MAGA. How do you learn what you know about MAGA?

I’m a cultural anthropologist, and what we do is field work. We go where the people we’re studying live, act, talk. We observe and sort of hang out and see what happens. We listen and then we unpack themes. We try and understand the meaning systems that undergird whatever group we’re studying. And then, of course, there’s interviewing.

It appears that MAGA, Trump’s core supporters, are very concerned about various aspects of the Epstein story, including the release of documents that are in the possession of the U.S. government. Are they, in fact, concerned about this?

The answer is yes, but there’s also a sort of “no” implicit, too. We need to back up and think, first of all, what is MAGA.

I think of it as what we call in anthropology a nativist movement, a foregrounding of the people in the land. And this is where you get America First discourse. It’s also xenophobic, meaning that there’s a fear of outsiders, invaders coming in. It’s populist, so it’s something that’s sort of for the people.

Tucker Carlson interviewed Marjorie Taylor Greene, and he said, “I’m going to go over the five pillars of MAGA.” Those were America First, this is absolutely central. Borders was the second. You’ve got to secure the borders. The third was globalist antipathy, or a recognition that globalization has failed. Another one was free speech, and another one he mentioned was no more foreign wars. And I would add into that an emphasis on “we the people” versus elites.

Each of those is interwoven with a key dynamic to MAGA, which is conspiracy theory. And those conspiracy theories are usually anti-elite, going back to we the people.

If you look at Epstein, he’s where many of the conspiracy theories converge: Stop the Steal, The Big Lie, lawfare, deep state, replacement theory. Epstein kind of hits all of these, that there’s this elite cabal that’s orchestrating things that ultimately are against the interests of we the people, with a sort of antisemitic strain to this. And in particular, if we go back to Pizzagate in 2016, this conspiracy theory that there were these Democratic elitists who were, you know, demonic forces who were sex trafficking, and lo and behold, here’s Epstein doing precisely that.

There’s kind of a bucket of these things, and Epstein is more in it than not in it?

He’s all over it. He’s been there, you know, from the beginning, because he’s elite and they believe he’s doing sex trafficking. And then there’s a suspicion of the deep state, of the government, and this means cover-ups. What was MAGA promised? Trump said, we’re going to give you the goods, right? Kash Patel, Pam Bondi, everyone said we’re going to tell you this stuff. And it sure smacks of a cover-up, if you just look at it.

But the bottom line is there’s a realization among many people in MAGA that you’ve got to stay with Trump. It’s too much to say there is no MAGA without Trump. There’s certainly no Trumpism without Trump, but MAGA without Trump would be like the tea party. It’ll just sort of fade away without Trump.

People in MAGA are supporting Trump more than more mainstream Republicans on this. So I don’t think there’s going to be a break over this, but it certainly adds strain. And you can see in the current moment that Trump is under some strain.

The break that we are seeing is Trump breaking with one of his leading MAGA supporters, Marjorie Taylor Greene, not the MAGA supporter breaking with Trump.

With Greene, sometimes it’s like a yo-yo in a relationship with Trump. You fall apart, you have tension, and then you sort of get back. Elon Musk was a little bit like that. You have this breakup, and now she’s sort of backtracking like Elon Musk did. I don’t think what is happening is indicative of a larger fracturing that’s going to take place with MAGA.

It seems that Trump did his about-face on releasing the documents so that MAGA doesn’t have to break with him.

It’s absolutely true. He’s incredible at taking any story and turning it in his direction. He’s sort of like a chess player, unless he blurts something out. He’s a couple of moves ahead of wherever, whatever’s running, and so in a way we’re always behind, and he knows where we are. It’s incredible that he’s able to do this.

There’s one other thing about MAGA. I think of it as “don’t cross the boss.” It’s this sort of overzealous love of Trump that has to be expressed, and literally no one ever crosses the boss in these contexts. You toe the line, and if you go against the line, you know what happened to Marjorie Taylor Greene, there’s the threat Trump is going to disown you. You’re going to get primaried.

Trump has probably made a brilliant strategic move, which is suddenly to say, “I’m all for releasing it. It’s actually the Democrats who are these evil elites, and now we’re going to investigate Bill Clinton and all these other Democrats.” He takes over the narrative, he knows how to do it, and it’s intentional. Whoever says Trump is not charismatic, he doesn’t make sense – Trump is highly charismatic. He can move a crowd. He knows what he’s doing. Never underestimate him.

Does MAGA care about girls who were sexually abused?

There is concern, you know, especially among the devout Christians in MAGA, for whom sex trafficking is a huge issue.

I think if you look at sort of notions of Christian morality, it also goes to notions of sort of innocence, being afflicted by demonic forces. And it’s an attack on we the people by those elites; it’s a violation of rights. I mean, who isn’t horrified by the idea of sex trafficking? But again, especially in the Christian circles, this is a huge issue.

Alex Hinton, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology; Director, Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights, Rutgers University - Newark

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Her arrest put a spotlight on Fusarium graminearum, a harmful pathogen. But while its risk to grains such as wheat, corn and rice can be alarming, Fusarium isn’t new to American farmers. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates it costs wheat and barley farmers more than $1 billion a year.

Tom Allen, an extension and research professor of plant pathology at Mississippi State University, explains what Fusarium graminearum is and isn’t.

What is Fusarium graminearum?

Fusarium graminearum is a common fungal plant pathogen that creates problems for farmers across the U.S.

It causes a disease in barley and wheat called Fusarium head blight, or scab. It can also damage rice and rot corn ears and stalks. In severe cases, scab could cut a farm’s yield by 45%.

Scab has been responsible for some of the greatest annual crop losses in the U.S. In 2024, estimates from extension and research plant pathologists suggested scab reduced the U.S. wheat crop by approximately 31 million bushels or roughly 2%.

When compared with other wheat diseases that harm the head and kernels, scab is by far the most concerning because it occurs across wide areas and affects the crop at advanced growth stages.

Why is Fusarium graminearum a concern?

As a plant pathogen, the fungus responsible for scab produces a mycotoxin in grain that can harm humans and livestock. In addition, when wheat grain used for seed is infested with the fungus, the seeds are less likely to germinate and produce new plants in the next growing season.

The mycotoxin is widely categorized as a vomitoxin. It can induce vomiting if ingested in high enough concentrations, but prolonged exposure can also cause gastronintestinal damage, harm the immune system and inflame the central nervous system.

In animals, repeated exposure to the mycotoxin in food can decrease their growth and weight, and livestock can develop an immune response to the toxin that can harm their ability to reproduce.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has issued advisory levels, basically limits for the amount of mycotoxin considered a health hazard in grain products.

Since barley and wheat are important as food for humans and livestock, harvested grain is routinely tested when farmers bring their crops to grain elevators for sale. Entire loads of grain may be rejected if they’re found to have mycotoxin concentrations above the FDA limits.

Wheat can be treated to remove scabby kernels. If mycotoxin levels aren’t too high, it could also be used for livestock feed. The advisory threshold for the mycotoxin is higher for adult cattle and chickens, at 10 parts per million, than it is for humans, at 1 ppm.

What does the law say about importing and moving plant pathogens?

These risks are why importing and even moving plant pathogens within the U.S. is regulated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, or USDA-APHIS, through the Plant Protection Act of 2000.

Federal law restricts the movement of plant pathogens, including bacteria, fungi and viruses, even for research purposes, as well as their release into the environment. A scientist who wants to move a plant pathogen, either within the U.S. or from outside the U.S., must go through a permitting process with USDA-APHIS that can take up to six months to complete.

The goal of these rules is to reduce the risk of introducing something new that could be even more destructive for crops.

Even with Fusarium graminearum, which has appeared on every continent but Antarctica, there is potential for introducing new genetic material into the environment that may exist in other countries but not the U.S. and could have harmful consequences for crops.

How do you manage Fusarium graminearum infections?

Fusarium graminearum infections generally occur during the plant’s flowering, rainfall and periods of high humidity during early stages of grain production.

Wheat in the southern U.S. is conducive to infection during the spring. As the season progresses, the risk from scab progresses north through the U.S. and into Canada as the grain crops mature across the region, with continued periods of conducive weather throughout the summer.

Between seasons, Fusarium graminearum survives on barley, wheat and corn plant residues that remain in the field after harvest. It reproduces by producing microscopic spores that can then travel long distances on wind currents, spreading the fungus across large geographic areas each season.

In wheat and barley, farmers can suppress the damage by spraying a fungicide onto developing wheat heads when they’re most susceptible to infection. Applying fungicide can reduce scab and its severity, improve grain weight and reduce mycotoxin contamination.

However, integrated approaches to manage plant diseases are generally ideal, including planting barley or wheat varieties that are resistant to scab and also using a carefully timed fungicide application, rotating crops, and tilling the soil after harvest to reduce residue where Fusarium graminearum can survive the winter.

Even though fungicide applications may be beneficial, fungicides offer only some protection and can’t cure scab. If the environmental conditions are extremely conducive for scab, with ample moisture and humidity during flowering, the disease will still occur albeit at reduced levels.

Plant pathologists are making progress on early warning systems for farmers. A team from Kansas State University, Ohio State University and Pennsylvania State University has been developing a computer model to predict the risk of scab. Their wheat disease predictive model uses historic and current environmental data from weather stations throughout the U.S., along with current conditions, to develop a forecast.

In those areas that are most at risk, plant pathologists and commodity specialists encourage wheat growers to apply a fungicide during periods when the fungus is likely to grow to reduce the chances of damage to crops and the spread of mycotoxin.

Tom W. Allen, Associate Research Professor of Plant Pathology, Mississippi State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Trump’s demands that Obama release his birth certificate had, in part, made Trump a front-runner among Republican hopefuls for their party’s nomination in the following year’s presidential election.

Obama referred to Trump’s presidential ambitions by joking that, if elected, Trump would bring some changes to the White House.

Obama then called attention to a satirical photo the guests could see of a remodeled White House with the words “Trump” and “The White House” in large purple letters followed by the words “hotel,” “casino” and “golf course.”

Obama’s ridicule of Trump that evening has been credited with inspiring Trump to run for president in 2016.

My book, “The Art of the Political Putdown,” includes Obama’s chiding of Trump at the correspondents’ dinner to demonstrate how politicians use humor to establish superiority over a rival.

Obama’s ridicule humiliated Trump, who temporarily dropped the birther conspiracy before reviving it. But Trump may have gotten the last laugh by using the humiliation of that night, as some think, as motivation in his run for the president in 2016.

There is a further twist to Obama joking about Trump’s renovations to the White House if Trump became president. Trump has fulfilled Obama’s prediction, kind of.

The Trump administration has razed the East Wing, which sits adjacent to the White House, and will replace it with a 90,000-square-foot, gold-encrusted ballroom that appears to reflect the ostentatious tastes of the president.

The US$300 million ballroom will be twice the size of the White House.

It’s expected to be big enough to accommodate nearly a thousand people. Design renderings suggest that the ballroom will resemble the ballroom at Mar-a-Lago, the president’s private estate in Palm Beach, Florida.

“I don’t have any plan to call it after myself,” Trump said recently. “That was fake news. Probably going to call it the presidential ballroom or something like that. We haven’t really thought about a name yet.”

But senior administration officials told ABC News that they were already referring to the structure as “The President Donald J. Trump Ballroom.”

The renovation will have neither a hotel, casino nor golf course, as Obama mentioned in his light-hearted speech at the 2011 correspondents’ dinner.

Obama pokes fun at Trump

In the months before the 2011 correspondents’ dinner, Trump had repeatedly claimed that Obama had not been born in Hawaii but had instead been born outside the United States, perhaps in his father’s home country of Kenya.

The baseless conspiracy theory became such a distraction that Obama released his long-form birth certificate in April 2011.

Three days later, Obama delivered his speech at the correspondents’ dinner with Trump in the audience, where he said that Trump, having put the birther conspiracy behind him, could move to other conspiracy theories like claims the moon landing was staged, aliens landed in Roswell, New Mexico, or the unsolved murders of rappers Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur.

“Did we fake the moon landing?” Obama said. “What really happened at Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?”

Obama then poked fun at Trump’s reality show, “The Apprentice,” and referred to how Trump, who owned hotels, casinos and golf courses, might renovate the White House.

When Obama was finished, Seth Meyers, the host of the dinner, made additional jokes at Trump’s expense.

“Donald Trump has been saying that he will run for president as a Republican – which is surprising, since I just assumed that he was running as a joke,” Meyers said.

Trump gets the last laugh

The New Yorker magazine writer Adam Gopnik remembered watching Trump as the jokes kept coming at his expense.

“Trump’s humiliation was as absolute, and as visible, as any I have ever seen: his head set in place, like a man on a pillory, he barely moved or altered his expression as wave after wave of laughter struck him,” Gopnik wrote. “There was not a trace of feigning good humor about him.”

Roger Stone, one of Trump’s top advisers, said Trump decided to run for president after he felt he had been publicly humiliated.

“I think that is the night he resolves to run for president,” Stone said in an interview with the PBS program “Frontline.” “I think that he is kind of motivated by it. ‘Maybe I’ll just run. Maybe I’ll show them all.‘”

Trump, if Stone and other political observers are correct, sought the presidency to avenge that humiliation.

“I thought, ‘Oh, Barack Obama is starting something that I don’t know if he’ll be able to finish,’” said Omarosa Manigault, a former “Apprentice” contestant who became Trump’s director of African American outreach during his first term.

“Every critic, every detractor, will have to bow down to President Trump,” she said. “It is everyone who’s ever doubted Donald, whoever disagreed, whoever challenged him – it is the ultimate revenge to become the most powerful man in the universe.”

The notoriously thin-skinned Trump did not attend the White House correspondents’ dinner during his first presidency. He also did not attend the dinner during the first year of his second presidency.

Although Trump has never publicly acknowledged the importance of that event in 2011, a number of people have noted how pivotal it was, demonstrating how the putdown can be a powerful weapon in politics – even, perhaps, extending to tearing down the White House’s East Wing.

Chris Lamb, Professor of Journalism, Indiana University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The chemtrails theory has circulated since 1996, when conspiracy theorists misinterpreted a U.S. Air Force research paper about weather modification, a valid topic of research. Social media and conservative news outlets have since magnified the conspiracy theory. One recent study notes that X, formerly Twitter, is a particularly active node of this “broad online community of conspiracy.”

I’m a communications researcher who studies conspiracy theories. The thoroughly debunked chemtrails theory provides a textbook example of how conspiracy theories work.

Boosted into the stratosphere

Conservative pundit Tucker Carlson, whose podcast averages over a million viewers per episode, recently interviewed Dane Wigington, a longtime opponent of what he calls “geoengineering.” While the interview has been extensively discredited and mocked in other media coverage, it is only one example of the spike in chemtrail belief.

Although chemtrail belief spans the political spectrum, it is particularly evident in Republican circles. U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has professed his support for the theory. U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia has written legislation to ban chemical weather control, and many state legislatures have done the same.

Online influencers with millions of followers have promoted what was once a fringe theory to a large audience. It finds a ready audience among climate change deniers and anti-deep state agitators who fear government mind control.

Heads I win, tails you lose

Although research on weather modification is real, the overwhelming majority of qualified experts deny that the chemtrail theory has any solid basis in fact. For example, geoengineering researcher David Keith’s lab posted a blunt statement on its website. A wealth of other resources exist online, and many of their conclusions are posted at contrailscience.com.

But even without a deep dive into the science, the chemtrail theory has glaring logical problems. Two of them are falsifiability and parsimony.

The philosopher Karl Popper explains that unless your conjecture can be proved false, it lies outside the realm of science.

According to psychologist Rob Brotherton, conspiracy theories have a classic “heads I win, tails you lose” structure. Conspiracy theorists say that chemtrails are part of a nefarious government plot, but its existence has been covered up by the same villains. If there was any evidence that weather modification was actually happening, that would support the theory, but any evidence denying chemtrails also supports the theory – specifically, the part that alleges a cover-up.

People who subscribe to the conspiracy theory consider anyone who confirms it to be a brave whistleblower and anyone who denies it to be foolish, evil or paid off. Therefore, no amount of information could even hypothetically disprove it for true believers. This denial makes the theory nonfalsifiable, meaning it’s impossible to disprove. By contrast, good theories are not false, but they must also be constructed in such a way that if they were false, evidence could show that.

Nonfalsifiable theories are inherently suspect because they exist in a closed loop of self-confirmation. In practice, theories are not usually declared “false” based on a single test but are taken more or less seriously based on the preponderance of good evidence and scientific consensus. This approach is important because conspiracy theories and disinformation often claim to falsify mainstream theories, or at least exploit a poor understanding of what certainty means in scientific methods.

Like most conspiracy theories, the chemtrail story tends not to meet the criteria of parsimony, also known as Occam’s razor, which suggests that the more suppositions a theory requires to be true, the less likely it actually is. While not perfect, this concept can be an important way to think about probability when it comes to conspiracy theories. Is it more likely that the government is covering up a massive weather program, mind-control program or both that involve thousands or millions of silent, complicit agents, from the local weather reporter to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or that we’re seeing ice crystals from plane engines?

Of course, calling something a “conspiracy theory” does not automatically invalidate it. After all, real conspiracies do exist. But it’s important to remember scientist and science communicator Carl Sagan’s adage that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” In the case of chemtrails, the evidence just isn’t there.

Psychology of conspiracy theory belief

If the evidence against it is so powerful and the logic is so weak, why do people believe the chemtrail conspiracy theory? As I have argued in my new book, “Post-Weird: Fragmentation, Community, and the Decline of the Mainstream,” conspiracy theorists create bonds with each other through shared practices of interpreting the world, seeing every detail and scrap of evidence as unshakable signs of a larger, hidden meaning.

Uncertainty, ambiguity and chaos can be overwhelming. Conspiracy theories are symptoms, ad hoc attempts to deal with the anxiety caused by feelings of powerlessness in a chaotic and complicated world where awful things like tornadoes, hurricanes and wildfires can happen seemingly at random for reasons that even well-informed people struggle to understand. When people feel overwhelmed and helpless, they create fantasies that give an illusion of mastery and control.

Although there are liberal chemtrail believers, aversion to uncertainty might explain why the theory has become so popular with Carlson’s audience: Researchers have long argued that authoritarian, right-wing beliefs have a similar underlying structure.

On some level, chemtrail theorists would rather be targets of an evil conspiracy than face the limits of their knowledge and power, even though conspiracy beliefs are not completely satisfying. Sigmund Freud described a fort-da (“gone-here”) game played by his grandson where he threw away a toy and dragged it back on a string, something Freud interpreted as a simulation of control when the child had none. Conspiracy theories may serve a similar purpose, allowing their believers to feel that the world isn’t really random and that they, the ones who see through the charade, really have some control over it. The grander the conspiracy, the more brilliant and heroic the conspiracy theorists must be.

Conspiracies are dramatic and exciting, with clear lines of good and evil, whereas real life is boring and sometimes scary. The chemtrail theory is ultimately prideful. It’s a way for theorists to feel powerful and smart when they face things beyond their comprehension and control. Conspiracy theories come and go, but responding to them in the long term means finding better ways to embrace uncertainty, ambiguity and our own limits alongside a new embrace of the tools we do have: logic, evidence and even humility.

Calum Lister Matheson, Associate Professor of Communication, University of Pittsburgh

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The focus of the fightback by Trump’s supporters is in Miami, where a Trump-appointed US attorney, Jason A. Reding Quiñones, has begun to issue subpoenas to a wide range of former officials.

This has included former CIA director John Brennan, former FBI counterintelligence official Peter Strzok, former FBI attorney Lisa Page and former director of national intelligence James Clapper, all of whom were involved in the federal investigation into alleged links between Russian intelligence and Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

The way the so-called conspiracy is unfolding will feel familiar to anyone who has watched US politics closely in the past decade. There’s been a constant stream of allegations and counter-allegations. But the narrative from the Trump camp is that the powerful “deep state” forces have been arrayed against the president. The “two-tier” justice system that has persecuted Trump can only be rebalanced by pursuing those who investigated him in 2017 and 2021.

The Grand Conspiracy contains similarities with other prominent conspiracy theories and how they spread. The QAnon movement, whose most famous claim is of a global paedophile ring run out of a Washington pizza parlour involving senior Democrats, is one where disparate claims are sporadically and partially evidenced. The political potency of these claims does not sit in the individual pieces of evidence but in the overarching story.

The story is that hidden government and proxy networks manipulate the truth and judicial outcomes and that only through pressure from “truthers” (what many people in the US who believe conspiracy theories call themselves) will wrongdoers be brought to account. Once these ideas are popularised, they take on a momentum and a direction that is difficult to control.

Campaign of ‘lawfare’

Soon after his inauguration, Trump set up a “weaponization working group” within the Department of Justice. Its director, Ed Martin, said in May that he would expose and discredit people he believes to be guilty, even if the evidence wasn’t sufficient to charge them: “If they can be charged, we’ll charge them. But if they can’t be charged, we will name them. And we will name them, and in a culture that respects shame, they should be people that are ashamed.”

In the US the norm has been to “charge crimes, not people”, so this modification fundamentally changes the focus of prosecutors.

Former FBI director James Comey responds to his indictment by grand jury in September.

The recent subpoenas in Florida show this principle at work, effectively making legal process into the punishment. Even without full court hearings on specific charges, being forced to provide testimony or documents creates suspicion around those who are targeted. Criticism from legal officials that this is a “indict first, investigate second” method suggests that this is a break from historical norms.

Lawfare, defined as “legal action undertaken as part of a hostile campaign”, doesn’t require a successful prosecution. It merely requires enough investigative activity to solidify a narrative of suspected guilt and enough costs and pressure to seriously inconvenience those affected by it. In the new era of digital media, it’s enough to degrade the standing of a political opponent.

In that way, political retaliation has become a prosecuting objective. This is clear from what the US president has indicated in his frequent posts on his social media platforms for his enemies, such as former FBI director James Comey, who investigated his alleged links to Russia, or Adam Schiff, the senator who led his impeachment in 2019.

Hardball politics or authoritarianism?

Political scientists argue that authoritarianism is something that happens little by little. Some of these steps involve using state power to target political opponents, degrading checks and balances and making loyalty a legal requirement.

There are reasons to believe that the US seems to be tracking this trajectory currently, certainly when it comes to using the Justice Department to harass the president’s political enemies and pushing back against court judgments while attacking the judges that have issued them.

Further slides towards authoritarianism are possible because of the political potency of contemporary conspiracy movements. The right-wing QAnon movement, for example, has been exceptionally agile. It has offered its followers identity, community spaces and a logic that encourages active participation, exhorting believers to “do your own research”, for example.

In the wake of the near daily addition of material from the investigations into the allegations that the late financier, Jeffrey Epstein, ran a sex trafficking ring, involving some influential US citizens, many American citizens have concluded as a general truth that their elites do hide things. This makes it far simpler for broader conspiracies to gain traction and more difficult for politicians and journalists to work out what is conspiracy and what is evidence. This is creating a problematic feedback loop – hints of wrongdoing fuel public suspicion, and public suspicion fuels the idea of a further need for investigation.

But to suggest that anyone has control over this would be wrong. These movements can just as easily consume those seen as supporters as they do those seen as enemies. Marjorie Taylor-Greene’s determination to release the full and unredacted Epstein files could well produce negative outcomes for some Maga supporters, including prominent ones.

So, the transformation of legal process into public spectacle in America is suggestive of a drift towards authoritarianism. America’s famous “constitutional guardrails” of separation of powers, independent courts, juries and counsels will be pivotal in preventing this. They will need to stand firm.

The grand conspiracy theory might be more about seeking to isolate, and financially and emotionally exhaust opponents, while at the same time destroying America’s system of checks and balances. It might work.

Robert Dover, Professor of Intelligence and National Security & Dean of Faculty, University of Hull

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

According to the United States government’s official report of the 16-day search, Earhart and Noonan ran out of fuel and crashed into the Pacific Ocean, short of their objective of Howland Island, on July 2 1937.

The disappearance, which is often labelled as “mysterious”, continues to captivate the world. With no confirmed wreckage found, millions of dollars have been spent on repeated, fruitless searches. And sensational claims of a possible discovery make splashy headlines with alarming regularity.

Interest in Earhart’s case has also been bolstered by United States President Donald Trump who, in September, said he would order his administration to declassify secret government records related to the disappearance.

A cycle of discovery and disappointment

Many expeditions for Earhart have followed a predictable four-step pattern: a dramatic announcement of a new, startling find; “we found Amelia” stories in the press; the evidence is quietly debunked, or the expedition is postponed; the coverage fades from the media cycle until the next “startling find”. And repeat.

In recent months, we have seen extensive media coverage of yet another such planned expedition. The destination is the so-called “Taraia object”, photographed off Nikumaroro Island, Kiribati – some 644km south-west of Earhart’s destination of Howland Island.

The expedition team includes experts from Purdue University, and the Archaeological Legacy Institute (ALI), headed by ALI’s Executive Director Richard Pettigrew.

It is based on a hypothesis by The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) that Nikumaroro Island was the final destination of Earhart and Noonan. However, the US government’s initial search (which included Nikumaroro) turned up no evidence of Earhart, Noonan or the aircraft.

Still, the joint ALI and Purdue team seem hopeful. As Pettigrew told Newsweek:

Everything that we see indicates it’s very possible, perhaps even likely, that this is what remains of Amelia Earhart’s aircraft.

The Conversation reached out to TIGHAR founder Ric Gillespie, who said he does not think the Taraia object is the wreck of Earhart’s Lockheed Model 10E Electra aircraft.

Originally scheduled to launch on November 4, the joint ALI and Purdue expedition was postponed last month due to issues with getting permits from the Kiribati government.

ALI continues to publicly fundraise for it, hoping to reach a target of US$900,000 for “Phase 1” (a site visit). Estimated costs for the proposed Phase 2 (the archaeological excavation) and Phase 3 (the “recovery of the aircraft remains”) are yet to be released.

Before ALI, there was TIGHAR

TIGHAR was founded by as a private non-profit in 1985 by Ric Gillespie, and has been searching for aircraft wrecks, including Earhart’s, since 1989. It has mounted at least five expeditions to Nikumaroro since 2010.

Last year, Gillespie said he was “absolutely certain” Earhart crash-landed and lived as a castaway on Nikumaroro Island. But no definitive evidence has been presented.

The organisation has never recovered a complete aircraft of any type, nor a single verified piece of an historic aircraft. For each search project, it raises funds from members, the public, and other interested parties.

Although Gillespie told The Conversation TIGHAR is currently “not fundraising for Earhart research or expeditions”, the organisation’s website contradicts this.

Dorothy Cochrane, a now-retired curator of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, and a long time sceptic of TIGHAR’s work, said in 2016:

He’s (Ric Gillespie) used the same quote unquote evidence over and over again. […] He does this on a routine basis whenever he wants to mount another expedition … It’s his business. It’s his livelihood.

TIGHAR generates income through multiple channels, including various tiers of membership fees, the sale of publications, and general donations. But its website provides little information regarding how funds are allocated to or used within projects.

In response to questions about transparency around how donations are used, Gillespie told The Conversation:

TIGHAR is a recognised educational non-profit foundation. Like any non-profit organisation, we raise money to cover the cost doing our work. All US non-profits are prohibited from “making” money. All money raised is put into the organisation.

Professional heritage and preservation organisations have also raised concerns regarding private bodies searching for, and salvaging, historic wrecks – especially when such organisations only speak of finding and recovery, and not of subsequent preservation or research.

The competing hypotheses

There are several competing views on what happened to Earhart. Some searchers follow the official report’s finding that she crashed and sank close to Howland Island.

In January 2024, much media hype was generated by a sonar image – taken by exploration company Deep Sea Vision – of what some claimed was Earhart’s aircraft. But in November, it was revealed to be a natural rock formation, with far less publicity. Many people will have seen the “discovery”, but not the correction.

The Nauticos Corporation has also been searching for Amelia since 2001, mounting searches in 2002, 2006 and 2017. Each one has come back empty-handed.

Some searchers have also put forward outlandish theories that have all been debunked. These include the claims that Earhart was a spy for then US president Franklin D. Roosevelt, that she crashed in Papua New Guinea, that she was taken prisoner by the Japanese, and that she survived the flight and returned to live anonymously in the US.

Cultural fascination and media myth-making

The global media loves a sensational story: if it bleeds, it leads. But while there’s no fresh blood in the Earhart story, the legacy and modern media have contributed to the proliferation of reports from dubious organisations.

This kind of sensationalism can overshadow critical inquiry, and lead to unsupported claims being remembered long after quiet retractions and scientific rebuttals are published.

At the time of her death, Earhart was among the most famous women in the world. She was a record-breaking pilot, best-selling author, feminist hero and friend of the first lady Eleanor Roosevelt. She disappeared at the peak of her career, and towards the end of the golden age of aerial exploration.

Even people with no interest in historical aviation or aviation archaeology have heard of her, and want to read about the next expedition to find her. But at what cost?

Each high-tech expedition costs millions of dollars. As yet, not one has produced irrefutable evidence of the wreckage. As searches continue, we must ensure they are supported by ethical funding and evidenced-based reporting.

The story of Earhart’s disappearance persists not just because of what we don’t know, but because of how we choose to keep the myth alive. Perhaps one day we can let her rest in peace.

Natasha Heap, Program Director for the Bachelor of Aviation, University of Southern Queensland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The full story of what has happened at the BBC may take months (or years) to emerge. But it’s become evident that a combination of poor editorial judgement and political meddling by longstanding BBC critics contributed to Tim Davie and Deborah Turness’s departures.

That there were editorial mistakes is not in question. The BBC Panorama documentary on Trump spliced together two different parts of Trump’s notorious January 6 2021 speech on Capitol Hill, without making the edit clear.

The programme itself, which was broadcast a few days before the 2024 US presidential election, was arguably carefully balanced, containing an equal number of Trump supporters and detractors. Notably, it did not receive a single complaint at the time of transmission.

It was broadcast a week before the 2024 US presidential election – nearly four years after the speech itself. It wasn’t a programme that was likely to sway anyone’s views of the president, who was impeached for “incitement of insurrection” after January 6. He was later acquitted.

Nevertheless, it was wrong to edit the speech in this way. That error was one of many allegations of institutional bias included in a dossier by Michael Prescott. Until June, Prescott – a former political editor for Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times and longtime PR professional – was an external adviser to the BBC’s editorial guidelines and standards committee.

The report was leaked to the Telegraph, which splashed with selected excerpts alleging that the programme had been “doctored”, and listing other editorial problems that he claimed the BBC had failed to put right.

Political influence

The Telegraph, like much of the British press, has for decades waged an editorial war against the BBC. As a publicly funded, free-to-air broadcaster, which is by some distance the most trusted news provider in the UK, the BBC is a serious challenge to news publishers’ commercial interests. It also offends the political sensibilities of those opposed to public funding interventions more generally.

It was therefore only a matter of time before the Telegraph “exclusive” on BBC bias and the Panorama programme escalated, especially once noticed by the White House. As the crisis gathered steam, one of the many burning questions was: why on earth is the BBC not responding?

It has now been reported – including by the BBC’s media editor Katie Razzall and BBC presenter Nick Robinson – that an apology was drafted by the BBC news team and was ready to be signed off a week ago.

Unfortunately, the BBC board reportedly prevented Turness from putting out the apology, instead opting for a letter to MPs on the media select committee. What followed was a damaging vacuum, with the BBC unable to defend itself or acknowledge its error. As internal arguments raged, it simply issued a bland statement that it would respond in writing to the select committee.

Key to this institutional paralysis and the fallout that followed were the political appointees to the BBC board. When the BBC charter was renewed in 2016, the then Conservative government introduced a new governance structure. The BBC would be governed by a unitary board of 14, including a chair, and four part-time members, each representing one of the UK’s nations. These five were all government appointees.

That boardroom dissent was, it now appears, led by those political appointees, in particular Sir Robbie Gibb. Following time as a BBC executive in charge of political programmes, Gibb was Conservative prime minister Theresa May’s director of communications. He was subsequently involved in the founding of GB News, an avowedly right-wing news channel.

In the words of Prospect magazine and former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, Gibb “does not pretend to be impartial on issues related to British politics or Israel”.

Gibb was appointed to the BBC board by Boris Johnson, reappointed by Rishi Sunak, and his term runs until 2028. It is therefore unsurprising that Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey has called for Gibb’s immediate removal from the board and for an end to the practice of political appointments.

The Conversation has reached out to Gibb for comment.

In his letter to the chair of the media select committee on Monday, BBC chairman Samir Shah acknowledged the Panorama mistake and apologised for the news team’s “error of judgement”. He made it clear, however, that Prescott’s report “does not present a full picture of the discussions, decisions and actions that were taken”.

Changes for the future

This peculiar arrangement of political appointments appears to have effectively given partisan appointees a veto over a crucial senior management decision, resulting in the forced departure of the BBC’s two most senior news executives.

While Davey is right that this anomaly needs to be rectified, the whole BBC governance structure is in need of an overhaul. At a time of increasing polarisation and social media misinformation, it is more important than ever that the BBC is protected from political interference.

The next BBC charter, starting from January 2028, offers a perfect opportunity to provide the kind of protective structure that the BBC requires. As part of a campaign to support public service broadcasting in the UK, the British Broadcasting Challenge – a group of academics and media professionals that includes myself and The Conversation’s CEO Chris Waiting – published a report last month calling for a “genuinely independent public appointments process for the chair and trustees, insulated from covert and overt government influence”.

This could be done through a dedicated body set up under the same terms as the wholly independent Press Recognition Panel, with no links to any political party or partisan campaigning group. Such a body could be responsible not just for non-executive BBC appointments (including its chair) but also for the chair of regulator Ofcom and the chair of Channel 4 – both currently in the gift of government.

The Labour government is about to kickstart a debate on the next BBC charter. Lisa Nandy, as the responsible secretary of state, has it in her hands to rectify some of the egregious damage inflicted on the BBC’s reputation by the political meddling of the last few days. Let’s hope that she rises to the challenge.

Steven Barnett, Professor of Communications, University of Westminster

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

These concern the effectiveness and integrity of the BBC’s internal editorial procedures for investigating complaints, and the pressure being brought to bear on the BBC by conservative political and media forces in the United Kingdom.

The Trump controversy originated from the editing of a BBC Panorama documentary called “Trump: A Second Chance?” It went to air a week before the 2024 US presidential election, and contained replays of sections of the speech Trump had made to his supporters just before the insurrection in Washington on 6 January 2021.

In the speech, Trump said at one point: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer our brave senators and congressmen and women.” Fifty minutes later, in the same speech, he said: “I’ll be with you. And we fight. Fight like hell.”

According to the BBC’s own account, these two quotes were spliced together to read: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol […] and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell.”

The effect was to give the impression Trump was egging on his supporters to violence.

At that time, a journalist called Michael Prescott was working as an independent external adviser to the BBC’s editorial standards committee. According to The Guardian, Prescott’s appointment to this role had been pushed by a BBC board member, Robbie Gibb, who had been communications chief for the former Conservative prime minister Theresa May and had also helped set up the right-wing broadcaster GB News.

Prescott left the BBC in June 2025, but during his time there he wrote a letter to the BBC board drawing their attention to what he saw as problems of “serious and systemic” editorial bias within the broadcaster. The dishonest editing of the Trump speech was one example he gave to support his case.

He wrote that when these lapses had been brought to the attention of editorial managers, they “refused to accept there had been a breach of standards”.

That letter came into the possession of London’s Daily Telegraph, a conservative newspaper. On November 3 it published a story based on it, under the headline: “Exclusive: BBC doctored Trump speech, internal report reveals”. The sub-heading read: “Corporation edited footage in Panorama programme to make it seem president was encouraging Capitol riot, according to whistleblower dossier”.

It is not known who the whistleblower was.

The Trump White House was on to this immediately, a press secretary describing the BBC as “100% fake news” and a “propaganda machine”. Trump himself posted on his Truth Social platform that “very dishonest people” had “tried to step on the scales of a Presidential Election”, adding: “On top of everything else, they are from a Foreign Country, one that many consider our Number One Ally. What a terrible thing for democracy!”

News Corporation’s British streaming service TalkTV predicted Trump will sue the BBC. As yet there have been no developments of that kind.

The Prescott revelations come only three weeks after the BBC reported that the British broadcasting regulator Ofcom had found another BBC documentary, this time about the war in Gaza, had committed a “serious breach” of broadcasting rules by failing to tell its audience that the documentary’s narrator was the son of the Hamas minister for agriculture.

Ofcom concluded that the program, called “Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone” was materially misleading by failing to disclose that family link.

These are egregious errors, and the journalists who made them should be called to account. But the resignation of the director-general and the CEO of news is so disproportional a response that it raises questions about what pressures were brought to bear on them and by whom.

The Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail ran hard for a week on the Trump story, and this generated pressure from the House of Commons culture committee to extract explanations from the BBC.

Politically, the timing was certainly inconvenient. The BBC is about to begin negotiations with the government over its future funding, and perhaps a calculation was made that these might proceed more fruitfully with a new director-general and head of news after a procession of controversies over the past couple of years.

On top of that was the Trump factor. Were there diplomatic pressures on the British government from the White House to see that some trophy scalps were taken?

Davie and Turness have each said that mistakes had been made, that the buck stopped with them, and that they were resigning on principle. Perhaps so, but the sources of pressure – the White House, the House of Commons, the conservative media – are such as to invite a closer scrutiny of the reasons for their departure.

They also seemed unable to respond effectively to the week-long onslaught from The Telegraph and Mail, either by defending their journalists or admitting mistakes had been made and that they had taken remedial steps.

It is also a reminder to public broadcasters like Australia’s ABC, that in the current political climate they are high-priority targets for right-wing media and politicians. The ABC has had its crisis with the Antoinette Lattouf case, which cost it more than $2.5 million for its management’s failure to stand up for its journalists against external pressure.

Fortunately it coincided with the planned departures of the chair and managing director, giving it the opportunity of a fresh start. The BBC is about to get a similar opportunity. Clearly it needs to more effectively enforce its editorial standards but it also needs to stand up for its people when they are unfairly targeted.

Denis Muller, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Advancing Journalism, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

It was another example of how Trump’s shifting policy positions, racially inflammatory statements and threats frequently fuel a flurry of headlines, reflecting what some psychologists are calling “media saturation overload” or “Trump stress disorder.”

This barrage of information may seem like overcommunication from a hyperactive administration. But it is much more than that.

Scholars have found that the constant, often conflicting and at times false information coming out of the White House and shared via social media posts and the conventional news media causes members of the public to see truth and fact as relative and makes them more likely to dismiss those who disagree with them as untruthful. This leaves doubt about what’s real and what isn’t.

This citizen paralysis creates what philosopher Hannah Arendt described in “The Origins of Totalitarianism” as a general public “for whom the distinction between fact and fiction … no longer exist.” When lies are truth and truth is derided as lies, Arendt wrote, ordinary people lose their bearings and can be manipulated for totalitarian objectives.

Meanwhile, many journalists have openly acknowledged fatigue with the pace and nature of the Trump administrations’ news cycles, amid frequent newsroom layoffs, mergers and closures.

I am a longtime journalist and now scholar of journalism and race, trained to see the methods and aims behind political leaders’ press operations. And as I show in my forthcoming book, the Trump administration’s rhetorical strategies echo the playbooks of authoritarian and white supremacist organizations such as the Third Reich and some factions of the modern alt-right movement. They are intended to narrow the scope of who belongs as an American.

Headlines at ‘muzzle velocity’

The Trump administration’s rhetorical strategies include claiming victim status while often laying blame on immigrants or other scapegoats in ways that I believe betray racist intent. At the same time it has overwhelmed journalists and the public with breaking news.

This strategy was laid out by Steve Bannon, an influential Trump supporter and strategist in his first administration, during a 2019 PBS “Frontline” interview, when he described the media as “the opposition party.”

“They’re dumb and they’re lazy, they can only focus on one thing at a time,” he said. “All we have to do is flood the zone. … Bang, bang, bang. These guys will never – will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity.”

Bannon has long been associated with the alt-right, a movement known for rhetorical tactics that minimize and obfuscate its true aims.

A strategy forged in Trump’s first term

As I detail in my book, “American Otherness in Journalism: News Media Representations of Identity and Belonging,” Trump and his key advisers have been developing, refining and ramping up their news media manipulation for a long time.

An early example of this is the way the administration used these tactics through Trump’s public responses to the fatal violence at the August 2017 Unite the Right protest in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The two-day rally was organized by a white nationalist blogger and attended by members of neo-Nazi, white supremacist and far-right militias protesting the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee from a Charlottesville park. They marched with tiki torches, flew Confederate and Nazi flags and chanted antisemitic and racist slogans.

Amid violent clashes with counterprotesters on the second day, a neo-Nazi sympathizer drove into a crowd, killing a 32-year-old woman and injuring many others.

My study of television news coverage of Unite the Right found that the majority of news reports focused on the contradictory and inflammatory statements that Trump made about the antisemitic and racist protesters. Trump’s Aug. 15, 2017, press conference remark about blame on both sides after what happened garnered the most news media attention: “I think there is blame on both sides,” he said. “You had some very bad people in that group. You also had some very fine people on both sides.”

Exploiting chaos

The uncertainty surrounding what he meant created a cycle of news stories implying and denying that he sympathizes with white supremacists.

This is-he-or-isn’t-he intrigue spurred a surge of what fits the description of Bannon’s “muzzle-velocity” news headlines: “Trump declares ‘racism is evil’ amid pressure over Charlottesville” followed closely by “Trump defends White-nationalist protesters” and “Why Trump can’t get his story straight on Charlottesville.”

With the focus on Trump’s comments and what he might have really meant, the news media ultimately missed covering at the time the long-term threat posed by these white supremacist and other extremist groups.

Echoing a playbook from the past

Scholars have identified the fascist roots of these “post-truth” strategies: strongmen leaders uninterested in establishing leadership through honesty and transparency.

A recent scholarly analysis of Trump’s leadership concludes that the second-term president is overwhelming the public into “organized despair” by pitting races against each other while targeting minority groups as scapegoats, a tactic that hearkens back to 1930s Germany.

A 2019 analysis of Trump’s narrative style describes how he presents himself as a “strongman” fighting invisible forces of censorship and suppression. It also points out that this was part of the appeal of fascist leaders such as Mussolini and Hitler.

Researchers of Nazi propaganda identified key tactics in the German press such as name-calling and lumping together groups seen as opposition – communists, liberals and Jews – until public understanding of those groups blur into phrases like “enemies of Germany.” The messaging was constant and immersive, carried in local and national newspapers, radio, film and posters.

A key part of Trump’s rhetorical strategy is using race without directly referring to it. For example, Trump has described cities with large nonwhite populations such as Washington, D.C., and Chicago as “out of control” or “dirty,” contrary to actual crime statistics. He’s also questioned Kamala Harris’ racial identity, suggesting she “happened to turn Black.” And referring to Black football players who had been protesting systemic racism by kneeling during the national anthem, Trump said, “Get that son of a bitch off the field right now,” which many observers interpreted as racist because he was insulting people of color for the act of protesting racism.

This racial coding has been used by white supremacist groups to mask their true intent. They also use less overt labels such as “alt-right” or “pro-white” as a “rhetorical bridge” to the mainstream public.

In the case of the NFL protesters, the plausible deniability became an actual denial. Trump perfected this move when, during a 2020 debate with Joe Biden, he said, “Proud Boys – stand back and stand by,” referencing another group accused of thinly veiled racism.

Drowning in headlines

I believe that the endgame for this strategy is authoritarian power that greatly narrows the scope of who truly belongs and has rights in this country as an American.

This media saturation – drowning the public with a thousand Trump-generated headlines – allows his administration to keep dominating and controlling national attention.

But the media-consuming public can use the tools they have to encourage news outlets to better inform the public by identifying the media saturation strategy and reporting on why leaders are using it.

Otherwise, if news consumers let the headline overload do what it’s intended to do, and become overwhelmed and paralyzed, they become pawns in what I consider a ploy to make America less egalitarian and less democratic.

Angie Chuang, Associate Professor of Journalism, University of Colorado Boulder

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.