The Bulwark

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Tim Miller: Trump Administration and Elon Are Unleashing Mayhem

Tim Miller — Sat, 08 Feb 2025 23:20:31 GMT

Tim Miller appeared on MSNBC with Alex Witt and Shelby Talcott. They discussed this weeks mayhem in the Trump administration, from Bondi, Project 2025, Elon Musks "Move fast and break things" technique and much more.

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How To Win The Culture War

Tim Miller — Sat, 08 Feb 2025 18:32:32 GMT

Ezra Klein joined Tim on the Bulwark Podcast to talk about how Democrats can actually win the culture war in the age of Trump. Watch and listen to the full thing here.

First Word on Horror - Dear Final Girls - Part One

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Documenting Horror

Sonny Bunch — Sat, 08 Feb 2025 17:00:38 GMT

On this week’s episode, I’m rejoined by writer/director Philip Gelatt and novelist Paul Tremblay (author of Horror Movie and The Cabin at the End of the World, among other scary books) to discuss the new Substack-hosted docu-horror series Etch. The concept is pretty cool: Philip has interviewed a quintet of horror authors—Tremblay, Stephen Graham Jones, Laird Barron, Elizabeth Hand, and Mariana Enriquez—and every week he’s dropping another episode that combines that interview with a reading of a short story and video illustration. (Not quite a movie, exactly, more like creepy imagery.)

I’ll say, as a longtime user/reader of Substack, it’s exciting to see folks push the boundaries of what the site can be. I think most people see Substack as a newsletter/podcast site, and most of the video I’ve seen on Substack has been, more or less, video versions of podcasts. (We have a lot of those here at The Bulwark!) But this is a great example of a creator deciding to bypass the studios and the streamers and just make something he wants to see in the world using the broadcast tools provided by and his team at Substack and doing so in a way that allows you to “own” the readers/followers, a stark contrast from YouTube, TikTok, and other user-generated video sites. (It’ll be great when they drop a streaming-style app.) If you are into horror, I highly recommend checking this out. And if you enjoyed this episode, I hope you share it with a friend!

And if you’re curious about Etch, you can watch the first episode for free here:

ETCH

Welcome to First Word on Horror, a documentary series featuring interviews with and readings from five horror writers each with a unique perspective on writing, the horror genre, and human creativity…

Listen now

7 days ago · 25 likes

Winners Make Policy, Losers Go Home (with Adam Jentleson)

Sarah Longwell — Sat, 08 Feb 2025 11:02:31 GMT

Where do Democratic voters want the party to go next? And just as importantly, how does the party need to be thinking differently? Adam Jentleson, former chief of staff to Sen. John Fetterman and aide to Sen. Harry Reid, joins Sarah to discuss the kind of thinking hampering current Democratic elected officials and staff, and they discuss some new ways to campaign and govern as the party looks toward 2026 and 2028.

New York Times Guest Essay: When Will Democrats Learn to Say No?

By Adam Jentleson:

Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy

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Trump/Musk Administration Faces First Pushback from the Courts

Jim Swift — Sat, 08 Feb 2025 01:15:46 GMT

Recently in The Bulwark:

BILL KRISTOL, MARTYN WENDELL JONES, AND BENJAMIN PARKER: A Time for Saying No
JVL: How to Win the USAID Fight
SONNY BUNCH: ‘Love Hurts’ and the Rise of the Hyphen-Comedy
ADRIAN CARRASQUILLO: Trump’s Deportation Dragnet Widens and Puerto Ricans Are Getting Caught in It

Overtime is for everyone. If you’re a subscriber: thank you. If you’re not, there’s no better time to subscribe to Bulwark+ than today. If you like today’s issue, you can share this newsletter with someone you think would value it.

KIM WEHLE: Trump/Musk Administration Faces First Pushback from the Courts

WITH ELON MUSK RUNNING THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH alongside Donald Trump and a sycophantic Republican party controlling Congress, it has sometimes seemed that there is no one left to stop the ravaging of the federal government that began minutes after Trump’s inauguration. But there is a way to slow things down: litigation.
Thursday brought news of a trio of rulings that may somewhat slow the Trump/Musk takeover of our constitutional order. They’re an important reminder that the federal courts, at least, are still functioning and capable of standing up for the Constitution and the rule of law.

HOLLY BERKLEY FLETCHER: The Future Has an African Horizon

IN MY EXPERIENCE, MOST AMERICANS—regardless of race, class, or education level—neither know nor care much about Africa. American presidential administrations have generally deemed the continent a low priority in a world full of toils and snares. Africa usually enters the conversation only when something goes terribly wrong—terrorist attacks, humanitarian calamities, disease outbreaks, wars. Even then, it’s hard for African stories to break through. The International Rescue Committee declared the Sudanese Civil War the worst humanitarian disaster ever recorded, yet most Americans probably could not find Sudan on a map, much less tell you anything about that conflict.

🎥 PODCASTS AND VIDEOS 🎧

Bulwark Podcast with Tim Miller: Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead [YouTube]
The Secret Show: Fight Club 🔐 [YouTube Preview]
Bulwark+ Live:
- JD Vance Wants To Bring Back Elon’s Racist DOGE Employee [YouTube]
- 11th Hour Lawsuit! Last Attempt To Save USAID [YouTube]
Across the Movie Aisle: 'Companion' and 'Dog Man'
Shield of the Republic: Russia's Long History of Subjugating Ukraine

Did you know? Bulwark+ members can listen to an ad-free version of these podcasts on the player of their choice.

Learn more at Bulwark+ Podcast FAQ.

📣Bulwark+ members can now listen to ad-free podcasts on Spotify! Learn more here.

Our 🎥YouTube offerings are the free-versions of shows, and they do have ads.

✍️Also: Did you know that every podcast has a transcript for B+ members? Yes! If you’re more a reader than a listener/viewer, open any podcast and the transcript button is beneath the player.

MONA CHAREN: Trump and Musk Take a Hammer to America’s Reputation

A “SPECIAL GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEE” wealthy beyond the dreams of Croesus, chose as his first target the poorest and most vulnerable people on Earth. On Sunday evening, Elon Musk and his peach-fuzz adjutants locked employees of the U.S. Agency for International Development out of their email accounts, shut down the agency website, announced that nearly everyone would be fired, and crowed that USAID had been fed into a “wood chipper.” President Onlooker muttered approvingly that the agency had it coming because it was dominated by “radical left lunatics.” Musk called them criminals.

ALGIS VALIUNAS: The Poetry of Bombs and Trenches and Mustard Gas

THE AWFUL DESTRUCTIVENESS of the First World War, which ripped its way through the best of a generation like a flail at harvest time, has long been exhaustively documented and mourned and reviled. But in Muse of Fire, Michael Korda, an intellectually sprightly nonagenarian with a distinguished military background and two dozen books to his credit, has written an insightful study of several of the major English (and one American) war poets whose experience became emblematic of the general course of the war and significantly shaped the public mind, from the innocent irrational enthusiasm of the early going to the disgust and despair as the slaughter proceeded with no good end in sight. No other war, Korda writes, has been so completely subject to official censorship. The authorities saw to it that the newspapers and soldiers’ letters home told as little as possible of the insane bloodletting and the routine excruciation of life in the trenches. As no one else could, soldier poets laid bare the pointless suffering as it occurred. And thus, for a brief time, English poetry became a matter of civic importance, as never before and never since.

🚨OVERTIME🚨

Happy Friday! A quick programming note: Bill and Sarah will go live on Sunday at noon ET on the Substack App to chat with you about the week in news. An alert will go out at noon via email letting you know where to watch. We'll post the replay on the site. too.

If you haven’t downloaded the app and want to watch live, you’ll have to have it for this. (The replay, you won’t.) Just be sure to be careful about your settings if you prefer emails when installing.

Vice President Poaster JD Vance is back…. Arguing with Democratic congressmen and erstwhile supporters on Twitter.

MAGA’s Sickening Hypocrisy… From ‘Save The Children’ To ‘Defund The Org That Actually Saves Children’ (Mike Masnick, Tech Dirt).

DOGE Emails Went Out… to Federal Judges by Mistake (Newsweek).

“The White House just issued an executive order… on South Africa that includes admitting Afrikaner South Africans as refugees to the United States” (Ben Jacobs). That is just so incredibly convenient! How could that have happened? Where are we at on eggs?

“This is not what we stand for, and it will never be what we stand for.” Cincinnati Mayor Aftab Pureval on the neo-Nazi demonstration in Evendale.

Return of the Big Mac… The Daniel Beard Bridge (locally known as the Big Mac) is reopening ahead of schedule after a bizarre playground arson.

Eagle Ed Martin’s Love Letters… To Elon Musk are super cringe, formatted improperly, and legally dubious in a kind of frightening way: this man is the District Attorney for the District of Columbia. Oh, and communicated exclusively through X, like a good DA should. (After they’re printed, signed, and scanned, which is totally normal!)

Guess who is in charge of The Kennedy Center now? Trump, who appointed himself chairman of the board (The Hill).

U.S. foreign aid freeze disrupts… Houston-based HIV program’s lifesaving work in Africa (Houston Chronicle🎁 )

Tech support questions? Email members@thebulwark.com. Questions for me? Respond to this message.

—30—

Editorial photos provided by Getty Images. For full credits, please consult the article.

Dems Fight for Dept of Education as DOGE Locks the Doors

Sam Stein — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 23:30:53 GMT

Sam Stein is joined by Congressman Maxwell Frost to discuss Democrats’ denied entry to the Department of Education as DOGE targets their next department takeover.

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Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead

Tim Miller — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 20:35:04 GMT

Partly because of the courts and partly because the White House keeps stepping on rakes or trying to break everything, the Dems who were too chill about Trump pre- and post-election have fully moved into 'threat to the Republic' mode. Meanwhile, angry bureaucrats, particularly at the FBI, are digging in. But don't be sanguine because the administration is still trying to take a wrecking ball to the civil service— anything that goes wrong that involves the government though (like that measles outbreak in Texas) they're going to own from here on out. Plus, Trump's dirty energy policy, the challenge of getting his tax cuts through Congress, and Kanye goes all in on Hitler.

Ezra Klein joins Tim on the weekend pod.

show notes

show notes

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JD Vance Wants To Bring Back Elon’s Racist DOGE Employee

Sam Stein — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 19:34:14 GMT

Sarah Longwell and Sam Stein go off on JD Vance and Elon Musk after they defend the racist DOGE employee who was removed.

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Russia's Long History of Subjugating Ukraine

Fri, 07 Feb 2025 17:49:14 GMT

With Eliot traveling Eric welcomes Eugene Finkel, the Kenneth H. Keller Professor of International Affairs at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) to discuss his recent book Intent to Destroy: Russia's Two-Hundred Year Quest to Dominate Ukraine (New York: Basic Books, 2024). They discuss the long-term Russian effort to dominate, subordinate and eliminate Ukrainian nationality, culture and language. They touch on the pillars of Russian national identify and how Russians came to see Ukraine and Ukrainians as inferior members of a hierarchy of Russian-ness and how the emergence of Ukrainian nationalism in Poland and later the Austro-Hungarian empire came to represent an existential threat to Russian ethnic domination of St. Petersburg's multinational empire in the run up to world war one. They discuss the collapse of the Russian Empire and the emergence of an independent Ukraine, the reasons for its failure and Stalin's efforts to destroy Ukrainian nationalism, his drive for collectivization of agriculture and the ensuing Holodomor -- a man-made famine that cost perhaps as many as 5 million lives. They also discuss Ukraine during World War Two, caught between the Wehrmacht and Red Army. The collaboration of some Ukrainian nationalists with the Nazis and the guerrilla war to prevent Soviet re-occupation of Ukraine which lasted into the early 1950s, cost perhaps 100 thousand lives and gave birth to the Russian notion that Ukrainian nationalism was inherently fascist. They consider Ukraine's independence in 1992, the negotiation of the Budapest Memorandum and the myth that Ukraine "gave up nuclear weapons, as well as the cultural shift that will have to take place in Russia if there is to be lasting peace that ends the current war.

Intent to Destroy: Russia’s Two-Hundred-Year Quest to Dominate Ukraine:

https://a.co/d/5fsdy8L

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Shield of the Republic is a Bulwark podcast cosponsored by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.

How to Win the USAID Fight

Jonathan V. Last — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 17:09:21 GMT

First up: Sarah and I argued about everything on the Secret pod today. The show is here.

Second: An update on yesterday’s story about the confusion surrounding Trump’s (maybe?) firing the head of the National Archives. There had been conflicting reports about Trump having quietly fired the archivist of the United States and replaced her with Marco Rubio. When I talked to sources at NARA, they said that Archivist Colleen Shogan was still in her office. Later in the day, ABC News, which first broke the story, walked it back, confirming that Shogan was still in the job—but that replacing her has been the subject of “extensive discussions at the White House.”

(John Moore/Getty Images)

1. Dear Democrats

Don’t ever do this again:

Chuck Schumer should not be the face of your party. Leading chants is imbecilic. Showing up outside a building is nonsensical. People don’t care about buildings. They care about stories.

Further: You are not winning and have no chance to win anything for 21 months. Your message is absurd on its face.

Your job as Democrats is to lead the opposition to Trump, which means making Trump unpopular. Right now there are only two engine governors on Trumpism: The courts and his popularity. You can’t influence the courts, but you do have input on public opinion. Stop wasting it.

First rule of fight club: Pick your opponent. Ultimately you need to drag Trump’s numbers down, but right now he’s riding high. Elon Musk is a softer target.

Musk is a deeply unappealing human. He is inextricably linked to Trump. And his popularity is already moving downhill. Best of all, Musk doesn’t have Trump’s intuitive grasp of demagoguery. Trump knows how to bob and weave. When Musk gets punched in the mouth, all he does is bleed.

Second rule of fight club: Find good ground. USAID does not look like good ground. It’s a massive program. It’s mostly about foreign aid. It’s a process story. Musk thinks it’s a great place to make a stand.

But you can turn it into a trap for Musk if you’re smart. Ignore the process aspects. Don’t talk about moral obligations. Arguments about creating strategic advantages for China aren’t going to get you anywhere.

What you can do is personalize it.

Third rule of fight club: Personalize everything.1 Are you a Democratic officeholder? Great. Buy a plane ticket to Nairobi.

When you get there, go to the Mathare settlement and talk to people who are going to die because Musk shut off their HIV medication when he closed down USAID. Get out your phone and take video of these conversations. Post them on YouTube, TikTok, Insta—everywhere.

Tell the real stories of actual people who are going to die because of Elon Musk. It won’t be hard to find them. This isn’t an actuarial game where programmatic cuts will, at some future date, result in an increased death rate for nameless, faceless people. You can find the actual human beings who are going to die. You can talk to them. You can share their stories and ask your fellow Americans, “Is this what you voted for?”

When you’re done in Nairobi, hop a flight to South Africa and go to Vulindlela—east of Lesotho. Go find Asanda Zondi and interview her. The New York Times was able to do it; surely you can too?

Asanda Zondi received a startling phone call last Thursday, with orders to make her way to a health clinic in Vulindlela, South Africa, where she was participating in a research study that was testing a new device to prevent pregnancy and H.IV. infection.
The trial was shutting down, a nurse told her. . . .
When Ms. Zondi, 22, arrived at the clinic, she learned why: The U.S. Agency for International Development, which funded the study, had withdrawn financial support and had issued a stop-work order to all organizations around the globe that receive its money.

There are many other people—real people—you can interview. The Times has helpfully given you a starting point:

The Times identified more than 30 frozen studies that had volunteers already in the care of researchers, including trials of:
malaria treatment in children under age 5 in Mozambique
treatment for cholera in Bangladesh
a screen-and-treat method for cervical cancer in Malawi
tuberculosis treatment for children and teenagers in Peru and South Africa
nutritional support for children in Ethiopia
early-childhood-development interventions in Cambodia
ways to support pregnant and breastfeeding women to reduce malnutrition in Jordan
an mRNA vaccine technology for H.I.V. in South Africa . . .
In England, about 100 people have been inoculated with an experimental malaria vaccine in two clinical trials. Now, they no longer have access to the clinical trial staff if that vaccine were to cause an adverse reaction in their bodies.

Go find these people. Especially the children. Interview them, on camera. Share their stories with America.

Donald Trump and JD Vance aren’t going to respond by saying, “These Untermenschen deserve to die.”

But you know who just might say that out loud? The ketamine-addled billionaire and his menagerie of 20-year-old incels.

If you’re a Democrat, that’s a contrast you embrace. Keep telling these stories and connecting them to Musk until he defends himself by saying something absolutely ghoulish. Make him radioactive, and let him dangle around Trump’s neck.

Because at some point, Musk’s negatives will start to contaminate Trump’s public standing. And then Trump will either have to live with it or cut Musk loose. Which would create a new set of problems for the president.

There are other fissures to exploit. Franklin Graham runs a charity called Samaritan’s Purse, which gets $90 million from USAID. Graham says that he has gotten an exemption from the Trump administration for his ministry to keep getting its USAID money.

But Catholic Relief Services was not so lucky. They’ve already started laying off employees and shutting down relief programs. Go interview current and former Catholic Relief Services employees and ask them to describe the programs they’ve had to shut down and share the stories of the desperate people the are now leaving behind.

Present this side by side with Samaritan’s Purse and ask why Musk spared Trump’s Protestant minister buddy, but not the Papists?

Go on offense. Start telling stories. Stop holding press conferences in Washington. And for the love of all that’s holy, put Chuck Schumer in a closet.

But wait—there’s actually one more opportunity for Democrats. And it’s scheduled to arrive in a couple of weeks . . .

2. Power Nexus

This week Josh Marshall pointed out that House Democrats will have one (1) moment of real leverage over Trump: the budget / debt ceiling vote.

Trump cannot pass either without Democratic help.

So Democrats have this one chance to extract something meaningful from him.2 And Marshall knows exactly what it should be:

The standard should be no help on the budget or the debt ceiling until the lawbreaking stops. Period. End of story. No wilding gangs marauding through the federal government. End the criminal conduct. Period.
That’s it. No nuance.
There are many terrible things Trump and his supporters can do by passing new laws. They can shut down USAID, the Department of Education, FEMA. Whatever. They can do a ton of other horrible things. They can try to take away everyone’s health care to fund tax cuts for his billionaire friends, as they are in fact intending to do. All of that is terrible but legal if they can put together the votes. They are in the majority. Joe Biden passed big legislation with tighter margins. What they are doing now, on the contrary, is not only brazenly illegal but an overt and undeniable violation of the federal constitution. When that stops then Democrats will consider helping on the budget and the debt ceiling. And they can negotiate on particulars. But nothing until the lawbreaking stops.

This. 👆

How do you operationalize such a deal? That’s where Dems would need to be creative. You can’t just . . . take Trump’s word for it, can you? But that’s how elected Democrats earn their pay: Figuring out binding legislative solutions to situations where two parties have divergent interests.

However they do it, ending lawless government should be the Democrats’ only acceptable compromise.

Tuesday night, Sarah and I have a live to chat with our founding members about what’s next for The Bulwark and we’ll answer questions too. Leave us your thoughts and questions here.

If you want to attend this first Founders Town Hall of 2025, upgrade your membership today. We’ll send out location link on Tuesday.

3. Da Bears

Virginia McCaskey died yesterday:

Virginia Halas McCaskey, the longtime owner of the Chicago Bears and the daughter of George Halas Sr., who created the team and was one of the founding fathers of the N.F.L., died on Thursday. She was 102 and had spent her entire life around the team going back to the 1920s.
The Bears, who announced her death on their website, did not list a cause or specify where she died.
Mrs. McCaskey attended nearly every Bears game for decades. She witnessed eight of the Bears’ nine league titles (their first championship was in 1921, before she was born and when the team was named the Staleys), as well as its only Super Bowl championship, in January 1986. . . .
Mrs. McCaskey never took her front row seat to N.F.L. history for granted.
“All the opportunities I’ve had, all the privileges I’ve had, all the miracles I’ve watched — I’m just very grateful,” she said in “A Lifetime of Sundays,” a 2019 documentary celebrating the N.F.L.’s 100th anniversary. “I can’t think of a better life.” . . .
Virginia Marion Halas McCaskey was born on Jan. 5, 1923, in Chicago, the eldest child of Mr. Halas and Minnie Bushing Halas, who died in 1966. By then, Mr. Halas had already made his name as a football player and coach and had even played briefly for the New York Yankees, in 1919. The following year, he was hired by the A.E. Staley food starch manufacturer in Decatur, Ill., to run the Staleys, the company’s football team.

What a life. Read the whole thing.

By now you’ve probably guessed that I’m just restating Saul Alinsky: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”

Unless Democrats are willing to refuse to give any help and let Trump and Republicans own the chaos. I’m not advocating that, but I’m not not advocating it, either. I’m open to all ideas here.

Fight Club

Jonathan V. Last — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 16:24:09 GMT

Sarah and JVL fight about fear, bleakness, USAID, Democrats, Hadestown, and Dogman.

'Companion' and 'Dog Man'

Sonny Bunch — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 15:41:00 GMT

Something for the kids and something for the adults!

Trump’s Deportation Dragnet Widens and Puerto Ricans Are Getting Caught in It

Adrian Carrasquillo — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 15:30:03 GMT

John Vergara's ‘79th’ mural in Chicago, Illinois. (Photo By Raymond Boyd/Getty Images)

WHEN THE NEW ADMINISTRATION set up shop, White House border czar Tom Homan acknowledged that collateral arrests would be part of the coming immigration raids. Yes, the administration was going to focus on those with criminal histories, he stressed, but if undocumented immigrants without criminal records got detained, so be it. After all, they too were here illegally.

What was never part of the deal was U.S. citizens being swept up in ICE raids. But less than three weeks into the Trump administration, that’s exactly what’s happening. And the Puerto Rican population on the mainland is bearing the brunt of it.

Already, there have been a handful of documented examples of raids and confrontations at Puerto Rican businesses, despite Puerto Ricans having automatic U.S. citizenship.

The raids have startled Puerto Ricans, who are rushing to get passports out of fear that they could be targeted just for speaking Spanish or having brown skin.

In Newark on January 23, a dozen agents raided Ocean Seafood Depot during which they targeted, among others, the Puerto Rican warehouse manager, a U.S. military veteran who Newark Mayor Ras Baraka said “suffered the indignity of having the legitimacy of his military documentation questioned.”

The warehouse manager has declined media interviews given the crush of attention. But his treatment appalled those who know him.

“He’s been a worker here for a few years,” a coworker told The Bulwark, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of being targeted. “We were shocked this happened because he’s a U.S. citizen.”

In late January, ICE agents barged into Puerto Rican restaurant Boricua Restaurant 2 in Philadelphia, looking to take away one of the two owners. The two Puerto Rican men are well regarded in the community. One of them, Hector Serrano, had created a salsa dance troupe. His business partner, Robert Acevedo, who was harassed by ICE, is a retired Philadelphia police officer. The video they took after the incident went viral on TikTok and Instagram.

“They came in here and they thought we were undocumented because this is a Puerto Rican restaurant. We of course knew how to defend ourselves and had to check them, that not every Latino is undocumented,” Serrano said in the video posted on January 30, which had 1.1 million views on Instagram.

In an interview, Serrano told The Bulwark that after the video went viral, he heard from the owners of Dominican restaurants and bodegas who appreciated their defense of their culture and community. He noted that on their restaurant menus they include facts about Puerto Rico; the first one being that they’re U.S. citizens.

“As a Christian-owned business, we know we’re not perfect, but as Cristianos we said ‘God has reasons for what he does, so let’s just do this video in one take,’” he said. “People have responded, but we say we’re not heroes, please don’t even use that word, those are the police officers, the firefighters that risk their lives. But the reaction was some people felt hurt, others that we were a voice, and the one thing we saw was the majority were proud that we weren’t ghetto. We professionally defended ourselves and our business.”

A third incident involving ICE targeting Puerto Ricans in raids was recently documented by Telemundo Puerto Rico. The network featured an anonymous Puerto Rican man on January 27, who said his sister in Milwaukee was grabbed by ICE after speaking Spanish, along with her mother-in-law and a child. They were driven to a facility but were not ultimately taken inside. Instead, they were released when she showed documentation and said they were from Puerto Rico. The agents, according to the report, responded simply with “Sorry.”

The family has not been publicly identified. And in the days since the incident, ICE has seized on the lack of confirmation to deny they ever were detained. But the brother made clear that the family wished to remain anonymous because it has been a difficult process for the family to be targeted despite being U.S. citizens.

Roberto Cruz, the supervising attorney for the southeast region with civil rights organization LatinoJustice PRLDEF, said he was limited in how much he could share about the case because his organization is working on a possible lawsuit.

“We are still investigating the facts, but because we are involved in potential litigation, we cannot make comment,” he said, when asked about the matter by The Bulwark during a webinar he cohosted to help Puerto Ricans to know their rights.

THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION HAS NEVER exhibited much concern about collateral arrests as it enacts the president’s harsh new immigration enforcement policies. But the targeting of Puerto Ricans has left its critics feeling vindicated.

“This is masked racial profiling,” said Frankie Miranda, president and CEO of the Hispanic Federation, a nonprofit membership organization active in 42 states and additional territories, including an office in Puerto Rico. Miranda argued that the incidents involving Puerto Ricans belie the administration’s talking point that these efforts were about getting dangerous criminals off the streets.

“We hear about only some of these cases, we know there are more of them,” he added. “Puerto Ricans are the best example of how these immigration policies are not really working, this is about quotas and racial profiling.”

Rep. Nydia Velázquez (D-N.Y.), a leading Democrat on immigration issues in Congress, said she too believed Puerto Ricans were being targeted for how they looked and for speaking Spanish. She pointed the finger at White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller.

“It shows that what they’re doing has no real enforcement priorities, when you have this guy Miller pushing for quotas, it encourages ICE to round up as many people as possible without regard for due process,” she told The Bulwark.

Rep. Nydia Velázquez (D-N.Y.) speaks during a press conference held in the U.S. Capitol on January 23, 2025 by the members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus to discuss the immigration executive orders enacted by the Trump administration. (Photo by Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images)

Velázquez said her Puerto Rican constituents are among those concerned about being stopped and asked for documents. She cited an El Vocero report that showed an “incredible increase” in passport and passport-card requests from Puerto Ricans due to fears they could be caught up in enforcement actions.

“Let’s be clear—Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens and they should not be forced to live in fear on the mainland or on their own island of Puerto Rico,” Velázquez said.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt forwarded The Bulwark’s request for comment to Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin, who said “DHS enforcement agents conduct targeted enforcement actions.”

“We do our due diligence,” McLaughlin wrote. “We know who we are targeting ahead of time. If and when we do encounter individuals subject to arrest, the men and women of ICE are trained to ask a series of well-determined questions to determine alienage and removability.”

But some Democrats say the current practices are not good enough.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, and Rep Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), ranking member of the Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement, wrote a letter to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and ICE Acting Director Caleb Vitello on February 4. In it, they requested more information on “troubling” reports that U.S. citizens have been detained during enforcement operations, citing the Milwaukee report and an NBC News article highlighting multiple incidents of American citizens being wrongfully detained.

On the webinar, Cruz said his group, LatinoJustice PRLDEF, has seen both alarming trends of Puerto Ricans subjected to discriminatory treatment at airports and government checkpoints, as well as instances of agents telling them their Puerto Rican ID or driver’s licenses are not sufficient to prove their citizenship.

The Zoom call, organized by Power4PuertoRico, a Puerto Rican diaspora advocacy coalition, was a clear illustration of the chaos that has surrounded Trump’s enforcement efforts. Cruz, giving “Know Your Rights” training to Puerto Ricans, warned that ICE agents often claim to be police officers. He advised those doing the training to ask for IDs, and if detained, not to sign any documents. He also advised recording any ICE agents who force their way into a home.

The administration is also putting itself in legal peril if it’s haphazardly storming businesses and worksites and rounding up brown people who speak Spanish or look Latino. As The Bulwark previously reported, this approach by the first Trump administration during a 2018 raid in Tennessee led to a class-action lawsuit on behalf of seven workers who were racially profiled and experienced excessive force. They won a $1.175 million settlement in 2022 that required the U.S. government to pay the plaintiffs $475,000.

Ray Collazo, the executive director of the UnidosUS Action Fund, the political arm of one of the oldest Hispanic civil rights organizations in the nation, is very active in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. He said Puerto Ricans there are so concerned that they have begun asking him if they should carry their passport.

He said he knows the owner of the Boricua Restaurant 2 in Philadelphia very well, and noted that Latino areas and small businesses he is in contact with are seeing less foot traffic because of the raids.

“You can’t say you’re going to target criminals, but the brand is ‘mass deportation’—it doesn’t equate,” Collazo said. “We knew it was going to be heavily focused on racial profiling. It’s not targeted, like they say; it’s going to be random. If you really wanted to do it that way, you wouldn’t be targeting and harassing urban and Latino small businesses to cause fear and terror.”

Carlos Calderon, one of the best known influencers in Puerto Rico, with close to 1.7 million followers across TikTok and Instagram, said Puerto Ricans don’t see themselves as special because of their citizenship. Calderon works with top brands and travels a lot to the mainland. Recently his mother has begun worrying about his travels, he told The Bulwark.

“Now my mom is saying, ‘Take your passport book and get a passport card,’” he said. “I say, ‘Mami, you’re taking it to a whole other level.’ I’m trying to maintain the sanity of the world we live in, but we don’t live in that world anymore, and it hasn’t even been a month.”

One Last Thing

The Department of Justice is suing Chicago and Illinois over their sanctuary city/state practices. The lawsuit alleges that those cities are engaged in an “intentional effort to obstruct the Federal Government’s enforcement of federal immigration law and to impede consultation and communication between federal, state, and local law enforcement officials.”

You might remember Chicago as the site of recent raids, and Homan’s frustration over Chicago residents being too prepared and fending off ICE with what they learned in “Know Your Rights” training.

The Future Has an African Horizon

Holly Berkley Fletcher — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 15:29:22 GMT

An aerial view of people in the Goz al-Haj Camp where civilians fleeing the civil conflict in Sudan complain of mistreatment by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) who they say displaced them as they struggle to survive the cold and food crisis in Shendi city, north of the capital Khartoum, Sudan on December 25, 2024. (Photo by Osman Bakir/Anadolu via Getty Images)

IN MY EXPERIENCE, MOST AMERICANS—regardless of race, class, or education level—neither know nor care much about Africa. American presidential administrations have generally deemed the continent a low priority in a world full of toils and snares. Africa usually enters the conversation only when something goes terribly wrong—terrorist attacks, humanitarian calamities, disease outbreaks, wars. Even then, it’s hard for African stories to break through. The International Rescue Committee declared the Sudanese Civil War the worst humanitarian disaster ever recorded, yet most Americans probably could not find Sudan on a map, much less tell you anything about that conflict.

To the extent Americans do hear or think about Africa, it’s probably because of stories of famine and tragedy and violence. You’ve seen images of suffering children, refugees, and drought. But if you look a bit closer, if you care just a little bit more, you will hear stories of resilience, courage, and cooperation. Of Dr. Dennis Mukwege, a Nobel laureate, who has dedicated his life to healing the physical and invisible wounds of Congolese rape survivors in one of the most conflict-ridden regions of the world. Or Sudan’s Resistance Committees, networks of ordinary neighbors, often led by women, who brought down a dictator and now fight to care for each other as two military forces ravage the country, competing to succeed him. I would recall for you how, amidst some of the worst hyperinflation in history, I saw Zimbabweans working for little if any pay to collect trash and repair roads and keep their society afloat as the economy collapsed around them. Or how women in Sierra Leone came together to help end one of the continent’s bloodiest wars.

To argue that Africa has direct bearing on American interests, I could offer a list of bullet points and charts, as I have done for skeptical policymakers for decades. I could focus on the negative—how weak governance, economic instability, and the disproportionate impact of climate change fuel terrorism, illicit finance, smuggling, piracy, disease, conflict, and migration. I could tell you that our adversaries—Russia and China, and to a lesser extent Iran and North Korea—are aggressively exploiting the continent’s poverty, insecurity, natural resources, and economic potential to gain a geopolitical edge. China is practically buying up whole countries with exploitative loans, and Russia is undermining democracies with armies-for-hire and disinformation while plundering gold and diamonds. Incidentally, the dismantling of USAID is not only a humanitarian disaster for Africa, it is a gift to our adversaries.

Or I could focus on the positive, like the tremendous economic potential of Africa’s abundant natural resources, innovative spirit, and astounding demographic growth—the continent will have 2.6 billion people by 2050. I could tell you about the hundreds of millions of Africans who are already consumers, and the 250 million more who will join them by 2030, unlocking $3 trillion in consumer spending. I could emphasize that while the developed world stands on the edge of a demographic cliff, Africa will have an abundant supply of workers, an increasing percentage of whom are well educated, speak English, and live in relatively stable countries.

I could also mention that sub-Saharan African migration to the United States has been growing rapidly for decades, and that immigrants from this region are better educated, more likely to work, and more likely to speak English at home compared to other immigrants.

I’m not arguing that Americans should spend the better part of their lives studying, watching, living, rejoicing in, absorbing Africa as I have. I’m just saying that it’s worth a little more of our attention. I could give you the data and the logical arguments, which are compelling and essential for influencing policy in a crowded field of competing interests and finite resources. But for me, facts and figures seem wholly inadequate to convey the importance of Africa. The continent has mattered to me as much as my own heart since my missionary parents moved me there at age 8. Data cannot capture the unending gift of it.

I’D RATHER TELL YOU WHAT A SUNSET looks like over the vast expanse of the Great Rift Valley, where some of our earliest ancestors made their home. Or describe the bracing cold of the Kenyan highlands when the equatorial sun gives way to clouds of stars. I would try to find words for the blurry grace of the Earth’s fastest land mammal hitting her stride. I’d describe the awe of being surrounded by the gentle, terrifying flow of an elephant herd, knowing any one of its number could flip your car like a coin. Or I’d tell you what it feels like to float on the sunrise over the savannah in a hot air balloon.

I wonder if you know that one of the oldest Christian traditions in the world still thrives in Ethiopia, where ancient churches are carved like secret chambers into granite. I’d urge you to go to Great Zimbabwe to see the well-preserved ruins of a sophisticated kingdom that thrived almost a thousand years ago. Or the tens of thousands of cave etchings tens of thousands of years old that dot southern Africa.

Or I might tell you about James, who worked for our family as a young man and went on to be a successful comedian. I would introduce you to Philemon, a civil servant in western Kenya who ministers to the physical and spiritual needs of a marginalized community a few hours north with his own time and money. I would definitely want you to meet Nancy, a single mother in rural Tanzania who got up in the middle of the night to take me and my seriously injured friend to the hospital and stayed with us throughout what turned into a 24-hour ordeal. I’d mention my dear friend Moses, a safari operator who never meets a stranger, human or animal, and can get his Land Cruiser through the most intractable mud hole. Or how Sammy, who has been climbing 17,000-foot Mt. Kenya for forty years, soothed the anxiety of a sobbing middle-aged American lady so she could fulfill a dream of summiting the mountain in whose shadow she had grown up.

Sammy and the author at the top of Mt. Kenya. Photo courtesy of the author.

I would describe the Kikuyu women who walk down the road chatting and knitting, with loads of wood tied to their backs and babies attached to their chests. And the waist-high boys who simultaneously herd goats and play soccer with balls fashioned from plastic bags and rags. I’d try to capture the improbable joy of South Sudanese people bathing in the Nile as the sun sets on a young nation that just can’t catch a break. I’d want you to hear of the communities who have tied their livelihoods to the wildlife with whom they once competed, caring for them as their own children so that our children’s children can experience their majesty. Or the rangers who risk their lives battling poachers to protect some of the last members of disappearing species.

I could tell you about the astounding art, by artists of world renown and of roadside stands. Or the vibrant colors and flavors of fabric and food and fruit. Or the infectious rhythms of Grammy-nominated Afrobeats stars and humble choirs in mud-walled churches. Or the prophetic work of writers like Chinua Achebe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and the lyrical narratives of NoViolet Bulawayo and Imbolo Mbue.

You might be surprised to hear that Kenyan tech entrepreneurs pioneered mobile money and crowd sourcing during emergencies and elections. Or that Kenya is a climate leader, with 90 percent of its power derived from renewables. If you haven’t tasted Kenyan tea or Ethiopian coffee or South African wine or some of the fiercely competitive varieties of West African jollof rice, you will want to remedy that immediately. And I must teach you a few of my favorite Swahili words, like “shaghalabaghala,” the meaning of which is close to its sound, something equivalent to “clusterf***.” Trust me, you need that word in your vocabulary. Especially these days.

I could go on, but it still would not scratch the surface of all Africa contains, to teach us and show us and change us, if we would allow it. Africa is sunny skies and fragrant rains and parched earth and cruel floods. It is wide smiles and withering heartbreak. It is rutted roads paved with perseverance, the ferocity of family, the embrace of community, and the welcoming of strangers. It is the prison of poverty and the shamelessness of dictators and far too many stillborn dreams.

But it’s also a freedom Americans have forgotten—freedom from the illusion of control, the relentlessness of choice, the scarcity of time, the loneliness of privilege, and the insatiability of success.

I’M OFTEN ASKED WHY AFRICA MATTERS. It’s an understandable question in a world of real responsibilities, real demands, and realpolitik. And an easy one, as it holds fewer uncomfortable implications and demands for us. It puts the burden on Africa to prove itself worthy.

A better, harder, question might be: Why doesn’t Africa matter to us? What fuels our ignorance and apathy? Maybe we don’t ask that question because it shifts the onus onto us—our motives, our prejudices, our lack of empathy, curiosity, and imagination. It conjures up histories and disparities and realities we’d rather not consider.

Things that matter, including continents and their people, don’t have to explain why they matter. They just do. Whether we appreciate them—for our own good—is up to us.

A Time for Saying No

William Kristol — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 13:38:16 GMT

A friend pointed out to us that Bill’s facetious conversation between Trump and Bannon in yesterday’s issue couldn’t possibly have been intercepted by the NSA under FISA Section 702. We appreciate the attention to detail and acknowledge that it’s a fair point: The NSA only targets foreigners, regardless of what legal authority they use.

It would be completely illegal for the NSA to intercept the communications of the president with any American. The only way Trump could make himself subject to that kind of collection would be if, when he was a private citizen, he had regular contact with shady foreigners.

Happy Friday.

People protest against US President Donald Trump and Elon Musk's plan to shutdown USAID outside the US Capitol on February 5, 2025. (Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)

The Value of a Negative Vision

by William Kristol

Saying “No” is underrated.

This is probably true about life in general, IMHO. But I’ll let others deal with life in general. That’s too deep a topic for us mere Morning Shots types. We just do politics. And in politics, a kind of negative capability is underrated.

What do I mean? Well, in politics, in my experience, you’re often told this: You really need to have a positive vision for the future. You can’t just be against things. You’ve got to be upbeat, aspirational, inspiring.

To which I’m inclined to say: Bah humbug.

I’m not denying the power of positive thinking. I remember as a kid hearing Robert Kennedy (Sr.) paraphrasing George Bernard Shaw: “Some men see things as they are, and ask why. I dream of things that never were, and ask why not.” Even to a cold-hearted young conservative like me, this was stirring, even inspiring.

And young conservatives circa 1970 also had their dreams. Bill Buckley chose to call a book of essays by conservative thinkers that he edited, Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?—taking the title of a popular 1930s song.

But I’ve got to say, after all these years, I’ve found it’s pretty unusual to see a dream walking.

And I’ll also admit this: We conservatives wanted to believe that we were energized by a dream. We wanted to think that we’d been convinced of the case for conservativism by studying Burke or reading Hayek. But what really moved us, our truest and strongest motivation, was a loathing for the Communist regimes we saw abroad, accompanied by a distrust of the American left here at home.

Which was fine! Communist tyranny was terrible. The American left was often foolish.

It was perfectly reasonable to take one’s bearings from despising what was repulsive and fighting what was wrong or dangerous.

It’s true that the case for liberal democracy is complicated. But the case against fascism and communism is simple. You didn’t have to work out all the issues and challenges of liberalism to be a strong anti-fascist in the 1930s and an anti-Communist in the 1960s. It was the right thing to do.

Which brings us to 2025.

It’s right to be disgusted when you see Donald Trump demonizing law-abiding immigrants and Elon Musk praising the Alternative für Deutschland. It’s right to be repulsed by the stupidity and the cruelty of their policies. It’s right to be appalled by their admiration for dictators. It’s right to be repelled by the racists who flock to them, like the new acting under secretary of state for public diplomacy, Darren Beattie (who once said that “competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work”), and key DOGE staffer (until yesterday) Marko Elez (who boasted, “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool”).

It’s right to say “no” to all that. It’s reasonable to make saying no to all that the first principle of our politics. It would be nice to be able to see a dream walking. But that’s for tomorrow. For today, it’s urgent to say no to our looming nightmare.

Programming note: Bill and Sarah will go live on Sunday at noon ET to chat with you about the week in news. An alert will go out at noon via email and the Substack app letting you know where to watch. We’ll post the replay on the site, too.

Save the Data

by Martyn Wendell Jones

When Jefferson and Juliana McMillan-Wilhoit received an alert last Friday morning that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s webpage dedicated to the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS) had been taken offline, they knew they had to move quickly.

The McMillan-Wilhoits are the founders of Flourish and Thrive Labs, a consulting firm that works with state and local public health departments on technology implementation and strategic planning. They were aware that they were likely seeing the beginning of the CDC’s attempt to meet the imminent deadline of President Donald Trump’s executive orders requiring government agencies to scour any trace of DEI or “gender ideology.” Jefferson and a colleague started searching out and downloading as many of the agency’s datasets as they could.

“At that point, the CDC website was still up and working, so we were able to download a lot of data before the outage,” he told The Bulwark. A file transfer protocol site where most of the data was stored remained up after the agency’s public-facing webpages went down, Juliana added, which extended the window for them to save the data.

“People didn’t know that FTP site exists, because if you’re not in the research world, you have no reason to know it exists,” Jefferson said. But it wasn’t long before even that site was taken down. The McMillan-Wilhoits believe around 1,000 CDC-related pages ended up going dark in the wake of Trump’s orders. The New York Times estimates around 3,000 pages disappeared.

Flourish and Thrive Labs was ultimately able to preserve about ten datasets, some of which contain decades’ worth of raw data. The recovered material includes vital statistics, immunization information, the YRBSS, the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), the National Health Interview Survey, and other sources, many of which still turn up “404” page-not-found error messages on the agency’s website.

“All of this data, beyond being publicly available for reasons of transparency, is essential for public health programming,” Jefferson said. Health departments across the country rely on it to do community health improvement planning, and without access to the agency’s studies and surveys, making those plans becomes virtually impossible.

Normally, Jefferson said, the CDC enables public health professionals to keep track of the progress of seasonal diseases like the flu and RSV almost in real time, with information being updated daily or weekly. That service helps them respond quickly to changes in the environment.

“We may have to pivot how we’re vaccinating, or pivot our prevention efforts,” he said. When those tools disappear, “we can’t do that with enough time to make any difference.”

“The impact for public health and healthcare providers is huge,” Juliana said. “This is really impacting local public health systems.”

Having copies of the raw datasets has also made it possible for the McMillan-Wilhoits’ firm to begin assessing the scope of changes that have been made to the curated data files being restored to the CDC website since the blackout. The primary change they’ve been able to detect so far in these restored files—which represent the aggregations of raw data that make higher-level trends across populations visible—is that variable labels for “gender” have been switched to “sex,” reflecting the demands set out in Trump’s executive order targeting “gender identity.” But the fact that these variable labels were changed in the curated data files means those files were “touched” during the blackout—which is to say, it creates the possibility that there could be underlying data-level modifications, as well.

“I would only trust the raw data, because during the outage, I can’t guarantee that any of the data wasn’t changed” in files where variable labels were switched, Jefferson said.

Given the importance of the data Flourish and Thrive Labs recovered, the firm has been making it available to state and local health departments, many of which are in the middle of their health improvement planning cycles. There is no charge for access, but the McMillan-Wilhoits have refrained from making the data public or widely accessible. They were spooked by others who approached them for access seemingly with an intent to monetize it.

“This is vital data, and we want to make it available” to those who need it most, Juliana later wrote in an email. The couple plan on setting up a protected website where “anyone in state and local health” can access the recovered information, but in the meantime, they are inviting anyone who urgently needs it and works in public health to contact them at cdcdatarequest [at] fandtlabs.com.

Quick Hits

CUTTING OFF OUR NOSE: As the Trump/Musk administration dismantles USAID, there’s been a lot of attention—rightly—on the good America does for the world through the aid agency. The New York Times today reports on some of the good the aid recipients do for us, including by volunteering to test new medical therapies and devices.

Now, some of the people mid-way through experimental treatments are left in the lurch—with experimental treatments literally in them.

The U.S. Agency for International Development, which funded the study, had withdrawn financial support and had issued a stop-work order to all organizations around the globe that receive its money. The abrupt move followed an executive order by President Trump freezing all foreign aid for at least 90 days. Since then, the Trump administration has taken steps to dismantle the agency entirely. . . .
In interviews, scientists—who are forbidden by the terms of the stop-work order to speak with the news media—described agonizing choices: violate the stop-work orders and continue to care for trial volunteers, or leave them alone to face potential side effects and harm. . . .
The Times identified more than 30 frozen studies that had volunteers already in the care of researchers, including trials of:
malaria treatment in children under age 5 in Mozambique
treatment for cholera in Bangladesh
a screen-and-treat method for cervical cancer in Malawi
tuberculosis treatment for children and teenagers in Peru and South Africa
nutritional support for children in Ethiopia
early-childhood-development interventions in Cambodia
ways to support pregnant and breastfeeding women to reduce malnutrition in Jordan
an mRNA vaccine technology for H.I.V. in South Africa

Read the whole thing.

THE KING OF DEBT: Remember when conservatives really cared about fiscal responsibility and the national debt? Seems like forever ago. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget ran the numbers on Trump’s tax proposals and, yowza, that’s a lot of red ink:

In a closed-door meeting with House Leadership today President Trump reportedly outlined his tax priorities. According to press reports, they included extending the expiring pieces of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA); expanding the State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction; enacting tax breaks for goods made in America; cutting taxes on income from tips, overtime pay, and Social Security benefits; and eliminating tax breaks for carried interest and stadium owners.
Depending on the details of these proposals, our rough estimate is that a package of this nature would:
Reduce revenue by $5.0 trillion to $11.2 trillion over ten years.
Lower revenue by 1.3 to 3.0 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
Boost debt to between 132 and 149 percent of GDP by 2035, if not offset, compared to nearly 100 percent today and 118 percent under current law.
Such a package could also lead to significant income shifting and tax avoidance, weaken the Medicare and possibly Social Security trust funds, dramatically boost interest costs, and increase the risk of a debt spiral.

Trump wants to cut taxes, clearly. But he also wants to keep spending like Louis XIV, who supposedly dismissed his profligacy with the phrase, “Après moi, le déluge.” Honestly, we’d be lucky to get to the “après” part at this point.

WHAT’S THE HARM IN HUMORING HIM?: Trump’s ridiculous plan to depopulate Gaza and turn it into some kind of real-estate development was met with immediate rejection from the rulers of Saudi Arabia and Jordan, Trump’s “favorite dictator,” Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt, and even, more subtly, Trump’s own administration and staff.

But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, desperate to hold on to power to avoid corruption charges, mired in a war for which he has no apparent theory of victory, and dependent on his government’s right-wing factions for political survival, has endorsed Trump’s plan—kind of. CNN reports:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has backed US President Donald Trump’s proposal to “take over” Gaza, as Israel’s army was ordered to prepare plans for large numbers of Palestinians to leave the territory.
Trump’s plan triggered an enormous backlash, with leaders from the Middle East and beyond rejecting it as unworkable and illegal.
But Netanyahu insisted the plan—which Trump said would involve sending Gaza’s residents to neighboring countries and taking “long-term ownership” of the enclave—was a “remarkable idea.”
“The actual idea of allowing first Gazans who want to leave to leave, I mean, what is wrong with that?” he told Fox News Wednesday, adding that those who leave the strip “can come back.”

That idea—allowing voluntary emigration from Gaza and giving the United States responsibility for the long-term government of the territory—has obvious appeal to the Israeli leader, even if it’s slightly different from what Trump seems to have in mind.

Still, it’s odd that an Israeli would back such a scheme. Trump’s plan sounds an awful lot like the British Mandate for Palestine, against which Israel’s founders fought in a violent insurgency.

‘Love Hurts’ and the Rise of the Hyphen-Comedy

Sonny Bunch — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 13:03:52 GMT

‘Love Hurts’ (MovieStillsDB)

Tim Miller talked to Ben Stiller on his podcast this week,1 and one thing they discussed was the paucity of comedies in filmmaking these days.

There are all sorts of reasons for this. Partly it’s because audiences have stopped showing up for comedies in theaters; as Stiller notes in the interview, studios made a bunch of great comedies for adults in the 2000s because those movies made tons of money. Between Judd Apatow’s incredible run from The 40-Year-Old Virgin through Funny People and the so-called Frat Pack, funny business was big business. Audiences don’t show up for that kind of thing anymore, so that kind of thing doesn’t really get made.

But that’s just pushing the question off a level. Why aren’t audiences showing up? Is it because comedies have migrated to Netflix, where Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison empire continues to do solid business? Maybe; a lot of comedy has certainly migrated to streaming, where the economics make a little more sense. (The cost in advertising to open a film on 3,000 screens often dwarfs a comedy’s production budget; such costs don’t really exist on streaming, particularly on Netflix, the homepage of which is the most valuable real estate in the business.) Are studio comedies too tame, too worried about hewing to modern sensibilities to really be funny? Perhaps; I do think fear of giving offense has put a damper on some comedic impulses. (As former Amazon Pictures exec Roy Price noted last year, “In unfettered environments such as standup and on YouTube and TikTok, comedy continues to thrive.”)

There’s another explanation, though, and it’s that comedy has woven itself into nearly every other genre. Call it the rise of the hyphen-comedy. This was the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s secret weapon: they were almost all pretty funny. Romcoms have grown rarer, but they’re still more common than straightforward romances or comedies. There are very few pure action movies anymore; most are really action-comedies. The Fall Guy, Bullet Train, Wolfs, etc., etc.: all movies that blend action, often quite well-executed action, with solid comedy beats. (Some also wrap the comedy and the action into a third subgenre, like Violent Night or Red One did with Christmas movies or Abigail and Renfield did with horror.)

Love Hurts is a prototypical action-comedy: Ke Huy Quan plays Marvin Gable, a mob enforcer who rejected his brother, Knuckles (Daniel Wu) and their life of crime following the supposed death of Rose (Ariana DeBose). When Rose turns up alive and ready to reveal all sorts of nasty financial shenanigans within Knuckles’s criminal empire, Marvin and Rose both are hunted by a series of oddly named (and shaped) assassins.

I don’t want to sugarcoat this: Love Hurts is, fundamentally, a very silly film, though intentionally so. For instance, one of Marvin’s nemeses is called the Raven (Mustafa Shakir), a hulking brute with a fondness for blades and bad poetry; the Raven’s burgeoning relationship with Marvin’s depressed assistant, Ashley (Lio Tipton), is played for plenty of offbeat chuckles.

King (Marshawn Lynch) and Otis (André Eriksen) are a deadly ebony-and-ivory duo, though when the massive pair are not trying to kill Marvin, King is coaching Otis through a breakup. No, screenwriters Matthew Murray, Josh Stoddard, and Luke Passmore aren’t reinventing the wheel here or anything, but the patter is funny and Lynch is a gifted comic actor, willing and able to wield his bulk and aggressive demeanor for giggles.

I keep highlighting sizes here, because director Jonathan Eusebio and stunt coordinator Can Aydin expertly mine the size differential between Quan and his antagonists for laughs. The smaller man is often getting tossed around like a ragdoll, but he deftly combines the physicality of his fighting with the mannerisms of a put-upon stiff just trying to get through the day. Lynch looks like an inverted pyramid to Quan’s beanpole; there’s a Laurel-and-Hardy quality to their fisticuffs that can’t help but amuse.

Love Hurts is an 87North production, and one thing they have mastered over the last few years in films like Bullet Train, Violent Night, and Nobody is melding comedy and violence, often by using the constraints of space and putting the action in an unusual place. The tight corridors of a high-speed rail car or a bus, the snowy wastes of a family set up for Christmas, that sort of thing. Love Hurts puts most of the action in a realtor’s office and a house on the market, using the very implements of open-house staging as part of the battleground.

And Quan’s inherently upbeat demeanor contrasts nicely with the predicament he finds himself in here; he’s not asked to do as much emotional heavy lifting here as he was in Everything Everywhere All at Once, for which he won an Oscar, but his innate decency and charm still shine through even while he’s taking (and dispensing) a beating. His messy joy bounces nicely off both the sultry DeBose (another Oscar winner) and the Goth-minded pair played by Shakir and Tipton.

Love Hurts isn’t doing anything revolutionary, but it successfully combines action and humor into silly, raucous fun, and does so in under 90 minutes. There are worse ways to spend a February evening.

On this week’s bonus episode of Across the Movie Aisle, we did a couple of a quick reviews: Companion and Dog Man. Something for the adults, something for the kids. Fun for everyone! Hope you enjoy.