But the movement in itself is anomalous insofar as its mobilizing grievances are hard to deny: the French education system is chronically underfunded; teacher shortages are the norm; many schools suffer from deficient infrastructure; making 15-year-olds sit in a classroom from 8 am until 6 pm is abysmal. Bar the latter, which some, like former Prime Minister and presidential hopeful Edouard Philippe, may defend in the name of elitism, it is difficult to envisage an argument in favor of unsanitary schools. It is therefore equally anomalous, yet contextually unsurprising, that the political responses to these grievances specifically have not diverged significantly, but remedies differ.

Last summer, long before this period of unprecedented turmoil, Le Point, France’s veteran right-leaning paper, ran a front-page headline that read: “Why our kids are voting for Mélenchon, and what to do about it.” Mélenchon, the immovable radical left leader, indeed polls significantly higher than other candidates among young voters. In theory, there is nothing unusual about this trend: the left, especially its radical, revolutionary wing, has historically been the natural political home of the young. But what is uncanny about this specific case is how methodically LFI has become the face of the current movement.

There is a twisted irony in this infatuation: LFI is feeding the youth promises designed to galvanize it, without offering any actual vision. One example is instructive: Parcoursup. The platform is France’s university admissions infrastructure, created in 2018 to retire a previous system widely criticized for its opacity. Parcoursup was marketed as a transparent, individualized remedy.

It has not delivered, and the platform has been dogged by accusations of opacity, with universities free to filter applicants however they wish without being required to disclose the admissions criteria.

As a result, Parcoursup has been a centerpiece of the ongoing protests and a leading grievance among young protesters, to the point that improvement proposals when it comes to this issue are part of the five policy workstreams assigned by Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu to his cabinet.

LFI and Mélenchon were soon boastful about their longstanding opposition to Parcoursup when the protests broke out, and conversely, many protesters lauded LFI for its commitment.

In France, of the major parties, two call for its wholesale abolition. The first is Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN). The second one is Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s LFI. That the far-right and the far-left agree on remedies should already be a red flag.

In truth, Mélenchon’s stance makes perfect sense when one looks at his and his party’s ideological history. His modus operandi throughout his recent career has been premised on a simple equation: oppose everything, dismantle everything, from the Fifth Republic to Parcoursup to NATO.

But anyone who is truly interested in bettering the condition of French students should immediately have a question: what’s the alternative? After all, it is entirely legitimate and indeed healthy to oppose certain policies and systems and call for them to be abolished, but one cannot replace something with nothing — and yet, that is exactly what LFI hopes to do.

Pressed on this question, LFI’s answer amounts to replacing something with nothing: in lieu of a centralized platform, LFI wants to restore automatic admission on the sole basis of the baccalauréat. Mélenchon himself is the idea’s loudest champion; this is a 75-year-old man who went to university in the early 1970s, trying to impose the admissions system of his own youth on a student body roughly four times the size it was back then.

To defend its proposal, LFI invokes a case it hopes to build its model on: Belgium. There, too, the irony is simply otherworldly: since September 2026, parallel to the French protests, the French-speaking region of the country has been rocked by one of its most sustained waves of student unrest in years. And even Belgium’s system isn’t actually open: precisely because French students would otherwise flood into programs like medicine and dentistry, both bottlenecked back home, Belgium had to cap non-resident enrollment at 30% in those fields. The model LFI points to, in other words, only works because it stopped being an open-admission system; it exists precisely because unlimited access collapses the moment demand gets this high.

Automatic admission was only ever workable when the number of baccalauréat holders seeking a course roughly matched the seats available, but France’s higher education system has expanded dramatically since the years of Mélenchon’s studies, while the number of amphitheaters, professors and university housing is still finite. Parcoursup and its predecessor were not created for the sake of adding unnecessary bureaucracy but because the very system LFI hopes to resuscitate stopped functioning once demand began to outstrip supply. The party’s “solution” is cosmetic and would have the opposite effect of what its proponents claim it would, because it would not address the finitude that made selection necessary in the first place; the result would be administrative chaos. This, too, is characteristic of LFI: tabula rasa, and instead, chaos that it is responsible for but will blame on some other institution.

Parcoursup is but one instructive case worth zeroing in on, but it is a symptom of a broader issue: populism. LFI has mastered the art of co-opting social movements to instrumentalize them, but when it comes to a vision for governance, the bonanza dries up. In order to reinvest massively in education, the state will need a sustained public-works budget, year after year; as banal as that may sound, public spending is not free, and it hinges on the existence of a state that is fiscally responsible enough to spend reliably over time, without spooking the markets it borrows from or triggering the kind of austerity correction that tends to hit these very budgets first. Institut Montaigne, one of France’s leading independent think tanks, costed LFI’s 2022 program (whose fiscal logic is nearly identical to the one on offer for 2027) at roughly €332 billion a year in additional spending (about 13% of GDP).

LFI’s economic program would likely worsen the issues at hand. The numbers are as unambiguous as they are vertiginous: France has run a budget deficit for 52 consecutive years, and has exceeded the EU’s 3%-of-GDP ceiling continuously since the pandemic. This situation is so grave that the country has been under a formal EU “excessive deficit procedure” since mid-2024. Public debt is also climbing year after year, still nearly double the treaty limit.

Financial markets have already reacted poorly to these ideas, long before LFI acceded to government: when the left-wing coalition, including and arguably led by LFI, formed ahead of the 2024 elections, they promised to repeal the controversial 2023 pension reform and raise taxes on the wealthy. Subsequently, the risk premium on French government bonds jumped to its highest level in over four years while the gap between French and German borrowing costs widened to levels not seen since the eurozone debt crisis.

It is impossible to fund a frugal reinvestment in public services without growth, and it is impossible to have growth if the capital that finances public spending flees the country. LFI’s program has to be paid for, and the party says it will do so through steep taxation; that, too, will invite a recession. Patrick Martin, who presides over MEDEF, the largest employer federation and business lobby in France, has warned that a 2027 LFI government would send French business leaders heading for the exits. This thinly veiled threat can be criticized, but it cannot be wished away and reflects a reality: capital is mobile, and talent and firms do, in fact, relocate when a jurisdiction signals it intends to extract more from them than its neighbors. Therein lies the central contradiction sitting underneath LFI’s program, and it is precisely that contradiction that makes its program dangerous economically and, therefore, socially, because the first segment of the population that will be impacted by a crumbling economy will not be the well-off families, but the middle and working class the party claims to advocate for. There, too, the party is selling false promises to an electorate that seems increasingly seduced by its language.

Is this a new full-scale war? Yes, even the Vice-President of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) went from describing an “offensive” to a “full war” within a day. But this war is no longer just about the region itself: it is about the whole nation and its neighbours, ripping off the bandage Pretoria put on the wound.

The origins of this war lie in what ended the last one. The Pretoria Agreement was meant to be a ceasefire, a first step towards a real political settlement. But a deal is only as good as the trust behind it. Tigray was asked to disarm while the hardest questions were postponed, with nothing to guarantee Addis Ababa would ever answer them.

Worse, only two of the war’s four belligerents signed it. Eritrea and the Amhara militias who had fought alongside Addis Ababa were left out of the room, and both have since turned on Abiy Ahmed’s government, whilst Tigray’s own leaders split into rival camps. The result is the ‘Alliance for Survival’, which unites old rivals – the TPLF, Fano, and Oromo Liberation Army – under one banner.

The second problem is that Ethiopia’s internal war is now tangled up with a regional one. In late 2023, Abiy Ahmed declared that access to the Red Sea was an “existential” question for landlocked Ethiopia. His frustration is understandable: Ethiopia relies on Djibouti for over 95% of its trade, at a cost of more than a billion dollars a year. But his attention turned to Assab, an Eritrean port close to the border. Abiy insists he will not invade, but his neighbours are increasingly distrustful of his continued use of the “existential” argument.

Just four years ago, Eritrea fought alongside Addis Ababa. Since then, relations have collapsed, Eritrea has mobilised its army, and Ethiopia now accuses it of funding the rebel alliance. Eritrea denies this, but there remains a clear incentive: a weak and divided Ethiopia is in no position to pursue its claim to the coast. Simultaneously, Sudan’s warring factions are each courting a different side, raising the risk of two wars feeding into each other.

The most probable outcome is neither a swift government victory nor a rebel advance on Addis Ababa, but a long war of attrition that neither side can win outright. The federal army retains a clear advantage in the air, drones proved decisive in the last war, and the recapture of Alamata shows it can still regain ground.

Yet, it is fighting on too many fronts at once. According to ACLED, a conflict monitor, the army was already stretched by insurgencies in Amhara and Oromia before fighting resumed in Tigray. The rebels face the opposite problem. Their alliance is united by little more than a common enemy, and its members still dispute control of western Tigray.

Some will argue that such a fragile coalition cannot last. They may well be right, but a divided opposition is precisely what prolongs a war: too weak to win, but too widespread to defeat. As before, civilians will be the ones to bear the cost. Communications across Tigray have already been cut, a reminder of the war in which an estimated 600,000 people died.

To ask whether Tigray is entering a new full-scale war is to look through too narrow a lens. What is unfolding today is not just a local conflict but a multi-front, regional crisis that threatens the entire Horn of Africa. Pretoria failed because it left half the combatants outside the room. Any new deal that repeats that mistake – excluding Asmara, the Amhara, or Tigray’s rival factions – will be another bandage on the same wound. The horn has sounded; the question is whether anyone is listening.

Among the many policy proposals examined by the Greens, two stood out. The first, Amendment 3 on Jewish safety — a motion aimed at clarifying that Jewish Greens will not face discrimination or be targeted in any way for attending so-called “Zionist” synagogues. That motion was overwhelmingly defeated by a margin of nearly four hundred votes. The second: the infamous “Zionism is racism” motion. Despite Polanski choosing to miss the vote, a decision some have described as cowardly and unbecoming of a party leader, that motion passed, too, by a significant margin.

In the Jewish community, the uproar was immediate: journalists present at the conference described tearful Jewish members, with some already making plans to defect. One Jewish member “fashioned a yellow star out of her voting card in protest of the Zionism is Racism motion.” The Movement for Progressive Judaism which, as its name suggests, is the leading progressive strand within the British Jewish community, issued a statement condemning the motion as “antisemitic in its formulation and intention and sharply lambasting a party it says has “become a racist party.”

That is indeed an apt description of the situation. For many Jews, in the United Kingdom and beyond, Zionism is an integral part of Jewish identity and creed. It does not necessarily entail support for or indifference to specific policies or power structures propped up by the Israeli government; in fact, for many self-identified Zionists, vehemently opposing Israeli policies and relating to Zionism are not mutually exclusive, starting with the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who took to the streets daily to protest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right government.

The “Zionism is racism” formulation is not a 21st century novelty; it has a long history. In 1965, the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racism (ICERD) was finalized, but not before Soviet representatives requested that Zionism be appended to the final document. This effort failed, but a decade later, in 1975, at the United Nations, the Soviets finally succeeded at giving their ideology institutional backing as Resolution 3379 was approved by the General Assembly, determining that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination. Nearly two decades later, 3379 became the second UN resolution ever to be repealed, but the ideological impact of the resolution outlived its existence.

At the dawn of the 21st century, the charge resurfaced at the now-infamous 2001 Durban World Conference Against Racism, where over 3,000 NGOs called to reinstate Resolution 3379. Copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion circulated on conference grounds, and ultimately, only pressure from EU delegations led to the removal of “Zionism is racism” language from the Durban Declaration.

The United Kingdom is not unfamiliar with what happens when a political institution outlaws Zionism. In 1974, the National Union of Students (NUS) adopted a “No Platform” policy barring support or recognition for openly racist or fascist organizations. When 3379 passed the following year, student unions around the country instrumentalized this policy to argue for deregistering Jewish societies around the country on the basis that, insofar as many societies broadly identified as Zionist, they qualified as racist under NUS policy.

Take York. In 1977, the student union led by Richard Burden, later a Labour MP, ruled that the university’s small Jewish Society did not count as Zionist and could not be banned. When the Society’s members boldly decided to rewrite their constitution to declare themselves Zionist, the Union deregistered the society.

SOAS went further. Its Student Union banned its Jewish Society outright and, when students tried to reconvene one in 1979, the SU withdrew its funding. No Jewish Society existed at SOAS for decades until an explicitly and vocally anti-Zionist one was created recently.

The NUS realized the adverse consequences of its own policy and its weaponization and, by the end of 1977, it began to rescind the bans and asserted the authority to suspend any member union that attempted to impose one. But the lesson from this era is without appeal: when an institution bans Zionism, irrespective of how righteous it may regard itself, those who inevitably bear the brunt are not architects of the policies the institution claims to oppose, but indeed the ordinary Jewish members who happen to hold a belief shared by the overwhelming majority of their own community.

That belief, the way many understand it, is the antithesis of racism. Racism establishes the superiority of one group and the subjugation of others to sustain it; Zionism, in its most elementary sense, asserts nothing more than the same right to national self-determination extended to all peoples — Algerians, Vietnamese, Angolans, Syrians, Armenians, and indeed Palestinians. To describe the national liberation movement of a people who were stateless for two millennia and subjected to genocide within living memory, and before that, to relentless, incessant persecution and marginalization, is racism disguised as anti-racism; to deny that inalienable right to self-determination as a racist quest for domination is blatant racism; a principle applied to every nation except the Jewish one is a double standard that can only be explained by bigotry. It is a demand that Jews, and Jews alone, forfeit a claim every other persecuted and exiled nation has been permitted to make. That is fundamentally a racist distinction.

Today, the Green Party has decided to adjudicate, from outside, what matters of self-understanding and self-definition actually entail; a non-Jewish institution has self-deputized as the final arbiter on what Jews are permitted to believe about themselves, about their own history, about their own culture — all of which are steeped in ancestral, national and indigenous ties, manifested in every Jewish holiday, every prayer, every custom, and the broader belief system.

Crucially, and rather grimly, the Green Party has now joined a very select lineage of political organizations that have adopted an institutionally anti-Zionist stance, alongside, notably, the National Front, the British Union of Fascists, the Imperial Fascist League, the Communist Party of Great Britain, among others. The common thread running from the Comintern to the Blackshirts to the Greens is a desire to launder an antisemitic conclusion through the noble vocabulary of anti-imperialism, anti-racism or national grievance. After all, antisemitism is one of few forms of prejudice that perceives itself as virtuous; the antisemite does not regard himself as hateful or vengeful, but as a martyr of a conspiracy of disproportionate Jewish power; that conspiracy is shape-shifting, depending on what a given political movement values the most. The content changes with the century; the pith does not.

Antisemitism is exhilarating because it allows the bigot to feel like a dissident rather than a bully; a silenced poet who ventures to wield his quill rather than an insipid, banal sycophant. Antisemitism never dies because it mutates, because it gives the antisemite a purpose, a cause bolder and greater; a sense of victory, the victory of having seen through a deception that everyone else is either too naive or too compromised to name. As historian David Nirenberg concluded, each era of Western thought conceptualizes a “Judaism” that is merely the photographic negative of whatever that era prizes most. Pious societies called Jews blasphemers; secular ones called them unsophisticated zealots. Capitalist societies persecuted Jews accused of Bolshevism; communist ones accused Jews of capitalism. Nationalist movements call Jews globalists; internationalist ones call Jews tribal nationalists. And a movement that has made anti-racism and anti-colonialism its North Star, has produced a “Judaism” cast as the world’s last colonial project rooted in racism. It does not matter that the movement has been careful not to name Jews explicitly; Stalin spoke of rootless cosmopolitans, Hitler sued newspapers for “falsely” accusing him of antisemitism — and won. What matters is the function, and that does not change across centuries.

The Green Party, and in particular those more than 1,000 delegates who voted to ostracize anyone identified as linked to Zionism, have merely joined this erstwhile tradition. They have singled out Zionism, a word capacious enough to encompass most of British Jewry, specific enough to sound like legitimate political disagreement and convincing enough that many will confidently assert that it targets an ideology, not a community or ethnicity, even as it voted on a separate motion declining to say that its own Jewish members will not be targeted for attending certain synagogues, and thus opening the door to the creation of lists of synagogues deemed too “Zionist.”

It is indeed a shameful, dark day for British politics, and another watershed moment for British Jewry. To echo the words of the Movement for Progressive Judaism, “Jews do not…have to disown their communities to participate in British politics.” Some will inevitably say that the Green Party cannot be antisemitic; after all, its leader is Jewish. To which they should reflect on other examples where this line of reasoning could be applied, such as to argue that Reform cannot be racist or Islamophobic since one of its highest-ranking officials and former chairman is a Muslim man of Sri Lankan descent, or that Germany’s far-right AfD cannot be homophobic since its leader is a lesbian woman. Once again, as Progressive Judaism wrote: “Support for this motion from some Jewish members does not excuse discrimination against other Jews.”

The traditional ideal of higher education was that of the site of intellectual, and ethical and social, christening. Venerated have been the co-constitutive processes of academic enlightenment and maturation, critical thought and scholarship intertwined with discovering how to live in community. In the 21st century, the relationship between the economic function of the degree and studying at an institution have been made more explicit in the public consciousness. We have been taught to lessen an idealistic association, and instead embrace its value as an investment for our future economic position. Students are encouraged (I would say increasingly pressured into prioritizing) to accumulate credentials, networks, professional experiences, and forms of cultural capital that can be converted into advantageous positions and marketability in the competitive labor market. A diploma is a costly and corporatized, no longer public good, and commodified, not issued from an independent institution but a purchasable means to an end. Although when we apply in our senior year of high school, we may daydream images of ivy-covered walls and libraries groaning under the weight of decadent anthologies, four years later, it is the italicization of the university’s name on our CV that replace them.

Furthermore, the neoliberal university participates in the production and reproduction of class position through credentialization and differentially allocating access to professional opportunities. This reproduction operates one, through students’ subsequent insertion into the labor market, and two, within the walls of the university itself as an institution, concerned with its relationships with (current and future) wealthy alumni, donors, employers, and political and professional elites.

The university is a site of privilege in two ways: a site of class reproduction, that is likewise structured by relational power, organized by gender, race, and other axes. As such, institutional priorities are formulated based on this matrix, dictating whose interests are protected and whose futures are deemed most socially and economically valuable. Some students and staff will be worth more in its eyes. We are speaking of the prime revenue-generating bunch, such as grant-earning tenured professors or superstar athletes, whose economic success is bound up with the university’s, as well as those poised to be the future donors and framed alumni. Amongst them are often the kings of college, the golden boys branded by gilded Greek letters: fraternity brothers.

Sororities and fraternities screen and admit members through processes that evaluate a pledging student’s full package. They consider how they look, their class background, their sexuality (but not necessarily the sexual reputation of brothers… ‘slut shaming’ is to be reserved for sisters!), what they can offer in terms of DEI, and their cultural capital, all together cultivating, through specific curation, and institutionalizing a structural, norm-ordained pipeline of social and economic mobility. By controlling the campus’s social infrastructure, including party locations, alcohol distribution, entry, and social themes (such as the only two ones I’ve heard of, which degradingly and, with truly astonishing unoriginality, are entitled Golf Pros and Tennis Hoes and CEOs and Office Hoes... wow, what else can we find that rhymes with ‘hoes’?), their plebeian subjects and maidens are theirs to command and will.

It is under these institutionalized conditions that the future of seven male Chi Phi students – Matthew Ingalls, Scott Norris, Winston Lee, Gillio Lopes, Jonathan Newell, Diego Sarabia, and Scott Kretzschmar, who wanted “free pussy” – and the appearance and financial stakes of the university were calculated to be more valuable than the human dignity of a female student, a survivor of drugged, multi-partnered, multi-rounded rape, and her future.

The legal trajectory of the Cornell Seven case is as follows. Jane Doe filed a lawsuit against Cornell, the fraternity Chi Phi, the seven men, and other defendants on September 16, 2026, reopening the case from November 2024. In this lawsuit, Doe alleges that she was pressured, being also underage, to consume drugs (ketamine, marijuana, and alcohol) and was subsequently sexually assaulted by multiple men over several hours, nearly two years ago. She originally reported the incident to Cornell Police on November 8 that year. Following this year’s lawsuit, the Tompkins County District Attorney reopened said former criminal investigation September 27/28. After internal Cornell proceedings of 2024, Doe’s attorney told CBS that only two accused students were expelled. Current information provided by Cornell leads us to believe that for the rest, two were briefly suspended, one had already graduated before any sanctions could be imposed, and the final two found not responsible for any sexual misconduct. Thus the university’s internal disciplinary process produced a set of what it deemed to be some appropriate sanctions. In the lawsuit, the allegation states that students involved were offered by Cornell the opportunity to write essays to receive lesser sanctions. Meanwhile, in 2024 the criminal investigation resulted in no charges being filled. Additionally, the two systems appear to have been operating with materially different information. Cornell says it provided the DA will all necessary investigatory material (including the Snapchat group chat screenshot), while the DA said his office never received the screenshot and had not seen the transcript of Doe’s interview to campus police where she stated she was confident she was raped. Doe’s lawyer has also revealed that Doe dropped out of Cornell after the events described in the complaint.

It is also worth mentioning that Cornell has (unlike three of the Cornell Seven who went unscathed) allegedly expelled, and documentededly suspended and banned students involved in pro-Palestine protests against the ongoing genocide in Gaza, including bans from campus for three years (in comparison with the mere two-semester suspension sanctioned on two of the Cornell Seven). It also failed, a year after, to protect a student’s immigration status after his student visa was revoked due to his participation in pro-Palestine protests. As the university initially moved toward disenrolling him, he chose to leave the United States voluntarily, after ICE asked him to surrender and a judge declined to immediately block the government from deportation proceedings. We might want to raise questions about what kind of conduct the university is keenly interested in punishing.1

The subsequent paragraphs will summarize and recount Jane Doe’s 2026 civil lawsuit statement, the allegations, and purely pulls from such (i.e.: this is not the same material handled in 2024). I urge you to please, take a moment and reflect whether, in reiteration of the trigger warning, you decide to proceed with reading it. I have visually differentiated the following text to make it easier to skip.

^{On the evening of October 19, 2024, Jane Doe walked to Chi Phi to meet a friend, Male No. 1, whom she had arranged to see over text. Before arriving she had been at Tri Delta, then two bars, where she had consumed a large amount of alcohol over approximately three hours. Her sorority sisters took her to these bars despite her condition and that she was served alcohol while underage. She described herself at that point as around five out of ten intoxicated, opened a beer after arriving, and flirted with him. He proposed a threesome with him and Male No. 2. She was surprised. She agreed and they had oral and vaginal sex, which she initially described as something she was “pretty okay with,” but she asked Male No. 2 to stop when Male No. 1 became very sleepy. She wanted to make sure he was alright. While Male No. 1 slept and Male No. 2 began dry-heaving and became sick, Doe tended to them, only for Male No. 2 to resume making sexual advances on her. They briefly made out. He repeatedly reached for her vagina, and she repeatedly swatted his hand away. Male No. 3 then entered the room, pulled Doe toward him and kissed her, while Male No. 2 simultaneously groped her, after which the three had sex. When Male No. 1 awoke and proposed a foursome, Doe refused, saying “hell no” because she understood it would involve anal sex, and dove under the covers. She subsequently remembered additional men, later identified as Males No. 4 the way through 7, entering the room. Her memory became elusive and fragmented onwards. She vaguely recalled Male No. 7 making a crude and mean remark to her but not its particular articulation, apologizing, then him grabbing her face and kissing her, only for her to try to back away. Doe recalled that one of the men also slapped her hard enough to leave bruises.}

^{Shortly thereafter, Male No. 2 offered her ketamine, pouring a line, of large quantity, onto his erect penis, implying that she should snort it. She did. He then got under the covers with her and again reached for her vagina. At this point, Doe was under the covers while Male No. 2 lay beside her, Male No. 1 sat at the corner of the bed, and the other men remained in the room. The men proceeded to compliment her appearance and ask whether they could do drugs off her “perfect body”, which she agreed to, before she became dizzy, a probable mix of the ketamine and a pre-existing health condition, and was taken upstairs by Male No. 1 and Male No. 4. She also stated that she was given marijuana and liquor throughout the night.}

^{Before they took her upstairs, Male No. 3 and another man entered the room and said something to the effect of “we’re shutting down whatever the fuck this is.” She further alleges that Male No. 2 had sent a message to the “Chi Phi Actives” group chat with fifty additional members, fifty-seven fraternity brothers receiving the texts in total, advertising that there was a woman available for sex, after which additional men entered the room. Various of the fifty-seven men acknowledged the messages and some responded, which one of the men in the room re-iterated affirmatively that she was still there, prompting that they could join.}

^{Male No. 1 offered her more ketamine, after which she became extremely high and he proposed having sex again, telling her he wanted “redemption” for having passed out earlier. Doe asked, “what happened to just you and me?”, but recalled another sexual encounter happening with Males No. 1 and 4, by which point she described herself as eight out of ten intoxicated. According to Doe’s recollection, the encounter continued until approximately 5:45 a.m., when she said she was tired and needed to sleep and, as far as she remembered, both men stopped.}

^{According to the complaint, the entire episode lasted approximately seven hours and involved all seven men. It further alleges that Doe was left unconscious around 5:45 a.m. When she awoke later that morning and returned to her sorority house, she discovered bruising and other physical evidence that she associated with what had happened at Chi Phi. She subsequently began to try to reconstruct what had happened. She reported the incident to Cornell University Police on around November 8, 2024, during which she stated that she was “100% confident” that she had been raped.}

Mainstream reporting stops at presenting the Cornell Seven as a case of institutional betrayal. However, it demandingly needs to be understood, is more critically characterized as a case of institutional protection.

When sexual violence occurs, the neoliberal university views the primary threat not the moral violation nor the physical harm endured by the student, but the potential public disclosure that could damage the university’s public image, enrollment rates, or revenues. Questions of justice are re-oriented into administrative assessments organized around market logics, whose consequences amount to a response that is undeniably dismaying and disillusioning, purposeful inaction. The mediated sanctions on perpetrators, those of not just legally reprehensible crimes, but cruel, immoral and inhumane acts against fellow students, are constitutively designed to be damage control, seldom systemic accountability or survivor restoration, and fail to bring about substantive justice. Rather than investigating claims transparently, administrative procedures are designed to de-escalate or compartmentalize reports to limit the legal exposure and financial risks. Questions of respecting privacy and institutional order are often invoked, using mechanisms such as confidential settlements, NDAs, and demure resignations that carefully sweep the matter under the rug, whilst high-reward PR statements are mobilized for image protection. Furthermore, the translation of a violent act into an administrative, organizational matter can make the underlying relations of power obscured from view, rationalizing and masking instances of financially-motivated cahoots and gendered violence.

These logics are also mirrored at the student organization level within fraternities’ disciplinary systems. They utilize their own internal self-pardoning judicial councils who secure their fellow kin’s impunity, protecting the fraternity’s reputation and brotherhood. Disciplinary mechanisms and, more broadly, fraternity culture revolve around internal codes of silence like ‘don’t fuck your brother’, such that when sanctions are issued, they are perfunctory, symbolic in purpose. A self-enforcing shield of protection is erected upon the pledge class, for when everyone participates or witnesses the act, there can only be mutual blackmail.

Hazing plays a crucial role in this resocialization of brothers, elite university fraternities functioning like a bacchanalian incubator for the Epstein class. Sorority rushing isn’t absolved either from what it inflicts on its sisters. There they learn how business is dealt with in the real world. Are taught that to secure power and privilege involves no longer seeing violence as violent: the banalization of suffering. Control looks like force and hurting others, enacted in the dark basement of the fraternity chapter house (often, uncannily, columned, white mansions), and that practice a ritualized, hierarchical legacy yours to inherit once you pay your dues. These young men are being primed for the system, to take on the work of their grandfathers and fathers.

If you are outraged by the actions of the Chi Phi brothers, you should likewise be outraged by the administration’s arbiters of justice, the Civil Rights Office, especially Lauren Branchini, the Title IX Coordinator, overseeing every single step of sexual misconduct legal processes. The Civil Rights Office of bureaucrats of ‘neutral’ interest obfuscate operations in favor of the university’s interests (and let me be explicit about what those interests are: those of assets, the university’s personal long term portfolio and financial relationships to donors which depend on a sanitized public and capitulating political image, and ensuring the secure trajectory of the alumni that will belong, and already do, to this very same elite class). These processes are purposefully complex for survivors to proceed with. Branchini’s conduct of them resulted in inconsistencies when comparing the evidentiary material collected with that of civil lawsuit. It is these very processes that yielded the aforementioned unsatisfactory sanctions, with Branchini’s signature at the bottom. I mourn for Doe, thinking about how it must have felt to know it was another woman that ultimately signed off on those papers.

Importantly, Greek life serves as an institutional and campus-cultural bridging between reproduction of power relations organized around class, sexuality, gender, and race. The normalization of ‘hook-up culture’ on campuses can be understood partly as compatible with the neoliberal professional development imperative. Sexual relationships can be engaged in whilst delaying longer-term and effort- and time-consuming commitments of romantic relationships, allowing students to prioritize credential accumulation and career preparation. Hook-up culture ultimately ends up representing an expansion of women’s sexual and economic autonomy to some extent, while simultaneously reproducing gender hierarchy within the new sexual order.

Campus hook-up culture (different from casual sex per se) is illusorily emancipatory for women. Normalizing sexual behavior outside of relationships separates sexuality from the long-term reproductive and relational obligations that historically constrained women’s participation in education and employment. Yet the sexual marketplace through which this freedom to hook-up is exercised is structured by gendered, heteronormative, classed, and racial inequalities, occurring in and organized through social media, dating apps, and, within the university, the Greek system and life. The sexual autonomy ostensibly offered by hook-up culture is therefore accompanied by a pervasive sexual double standard, where fraternity brothers exercise asymmetric control and can deploy coercive sexual strategies with structural legitimacy. Another consequence of hook-up culture is the disregard, devaluation, and marginalization of women’s feelings and personhood within the hook-up scene. The transactional nature of these interactions erodes mutual concern and respect and promotes men’s affective detachment. Moreover, men can engage more frequently in casual sex without losing social status, in fact, can accrue cultural capital for it, while women risk being labeled as ‘sluts’ and socially shamed for engaging in the same exact behavior. Women can therefore technically choose whether to participate in casual sexual relations through hook-up culture, but they do so under conditions that are not equal; their choices are structured by other structural social inequalities (for example, women of color demonstrated lower participation rates, namely on dating apps, by virtue of exclusion and opting out, and report uncomfortable experiences of hyper-sexualization, racialization, stereotyping, or being ignored), concerns of reputation, safety, and the unequal distribution of power over the spaces in which boozey sexual encounters and socializing occur. And said spaces, at many universities, are almost exclusively fraternity parties.

Intense alcohol consumption is also embedded within hook-up culture, lowering resistance to sexual interactions and offering perpetrators plausible deniability, the alibi of a mutual, drunkenly-brazen encounter rather than a non-consensual violation of body and personhood. Along sobriety or lack thereof, there exists a plethora of other rape myths at disposal to divert scrutiny from the perpetrator’s acts onto the survivor’s conduct, utilized by both the student body and administration. Focusing so much time on scrutinizing the survivor’s choices, subjecting them to intrusive and humiliating questioning regarding how much they drank, what they were wearing, or whether they were flirting and presenting it as questioning in good, egalitarian faith, is perversive and a form of secondary violence. And so is that little guileful comment, spoken in a feignedly reticent tone or the guise of being a faithful legalist: “But, I mean… maybe… did she…”

My point is of especial importance in light of discourse I can already see brewing under the surface. Prickly questions about what it means that Doe perhaps intended to hook-up with the first brother and continued to socialize with multiple after that night. The proceeding behavior of survivors should not have to conform to popular expectations of what assault looks like. Likewise, I think we can all bare-minimum conceive more appropriate, more ethical ways to approach consensual (and more contestedly, intoxicated) sex. Moreover, listen to loud resonating whispers of the words ‘I completely understand her’, ‘I see what she did in what I did’, and ‘I sustained a friendship with my assaulter for a while thereafter.’ Upon trauma, the brain doesn’t know what to do. It is trying to process something it should not have to process, cannot easily make sense of. But yes, how could the brother have brutally violated Doe for she iMessaged him that they should smoke together soon, “but like leave out the extra 5 billion men and ketamine”?

A powerful ideology shielding fraternity men is the framing of male misconduct as born out of immaturity and youthful impulse rather than accountable and consciously enacted harm. Popular culture and institutional norms love to depict fraternity misconduct as normal or juvenile, as something that should not impede on the brother’s rightful access to a successful professional future. When transgressions occur, institutional and campus discourses characterize perpetrators as impressionable and horny boys who merely made a mistake, who need to be taught better. Suddenly it becomes obvious how a speciously reformatory, pedagogical-focused policy of having to write a couple of essays, offered as a means of reducing sanctions, can be applied to perpetrators of something as abhorrent as rape, or fifty complicit fraternity brothers. Who watched over the string of messages, including the following three words, sent at 1:42 a.m., that are saturated with such depravity that I lurched my laptop shut when I read them: “Shop still open?”

So fraternity brothers, look at me, at us, and at Doe. Answer us when we ask: is this brotherhood? The monopoly over the social scene, internal codes of collective self-protection and exculpation, and the simultaneous infantilization and brutalization of its members, braced by the knowledge that survivors must entrust their cases to a system whose interests structurally oppose their own? Is brotherhood what made the fifty-seven brothers of Chi Phi feel safe, feel turned on, when they did what they did together?

Is brotherly power derived from being knowing insiders within a pack? Does it mean possession of a ticket for some perverted, carnivalesque exercise of gentlemen’s-club bonding? Is it the de-individualizing suspension of morality and culpability, where the virtue of loyalty means collusion? And to have been able to achieve physical closeness without violating the homophobic boundaries of masculinity, did it demand that the brothers use her body and that voyeuristic group chat as conduits? Must Doe be the sacrificed creature through which the cult can commune?

This condemnatory assessment of Greek life under the neoliberal, gendered university matters not only because it participates in the production of acts of abuse, violence, and discrimination broadly on campus, but because it significantly perpetrates the conditions needed under which campus sexual violence, like the Cornell Seven case, is dealt with. Dealt with in the appalling, seemingly anomalous, but in fact systemic way that it did. Every sort of power structure that functions such that harming other people acquires you more power will breed and nourish rape culture. I urge you to look closer at my words: it is a warning, an indictment of an interminable, waltz of reformism. Just two days after Tompkins County District Attorney said they would reopen the criminal investigation, the Trump administration rescinded Title IX Biden administration rewrites, making it harder to report sexual assault on campuses.

Discourse cannot frame sexual violence insularly as a private misunderstanding between two equally-situated individuals and most certainly not entertain ideas around rape being a consequence of the survivor’s imprudence. Nor can it stop at the recognition that these institutions have errantly failed to administer justice. It must, we must, whilst foremost centering concern and empathy for survivors as they encounter it and our critical efforts, interrogate the social genealogy of perpetration and critically examine rape culture, now and in our daily lives.

In suit, we must also invest equal energy in community-building outside of the institutions that fail us. We need more everyday acts of resistance, such as refusing to partake in and permit the continuation of the culture and traditions safeguarding perpetration and complicity. A greater task is to identify strategic entry points for contravening and rewriting them.

Because when someone makes a rape joke, it is that deep. So are the scoring systems ranking girls and their sexual performance, the spread of rumors and intimate images, or the charged themes of parties. Putting on pussy-cat ears can sometimes be playful, but what happens when that fantasy is no longer about you, the person, but about you the animal, put down on all fours, eye-level with his hips? Living in the chapter house can bring about life-long friendships, laughing with your neighboring brother about how loudly his bed creaked last night, but what happens when he pulls out his phone to show you the non-consensual recording he took of her and him?

For however long the duration for which the physical assault lasts, assault does not end there. Assault lasts a lifetime, is also the narratives and rumors that follow you. The stares from classmates, your heart-sinking when you find out that everyone has an opinion on your university’s anonymous campus social media app before you made the choice to share anything yet, to whom, or ever. Not to mention the other complex ways trauma lives in the body and mind.

The Cornell Seven are a media spectacle, which have and will elicit many differing reactions. There will be denial, rejection, anger, hurt… I’d like to raise attention to two.

One, the feeling of guilt from brothers. Guilt of complicity, perhaps knowing about instances similar in varying degrees alike to Does. In that same vein, I have heard some men say they are mad, I believe secondarily to reckon with that guilt. They say they want to beat up brothers like the Cornell Seven. To this I say, the violence you want to inflict on them is the other side of the coin of the violence towards women. It is a re-iteration of physical domination meaning power. What is a true demonstration of strength and courage is refusing complicity and having the conversations needed to halt instances of sexual violence from occurring. Conversation you may need to have with friends, and certainly, your brothers.

Secondly, and most importantly, the feeling of distress from the sisters of Jane Doe. Survivors. The media spectacle that has come of the Cornell Seven, is in some ways, many women’s story becoming sensationalized. I know I am participating in the circulation. That is why I want to end my essay by saying this. Jane Doe does not need our superficial outrage. She does not need instagram stories of catchy, vacuous 5-word slogans.2 Instead of reposts, what Doe deserves is the support and freedom to process the reporting however she needs to. However all survivors need to as they navigate reading the media coverage themselves. This is the most difficult form of solidarity to show. We are not good because we hate bad men. We are good because we make ourselves useful to those that have been harmed, as well as accountable. Vocal against the harm. Productive, awareness-arming, support, centering the dignity, care, and triumph of one another as survivors, supporters, friends, and family – as brothers and sisters – is of utmost value. Otherwise, these insidious, evasive verdicts will be all that is left, consolatory essay writing deemed appropriate for raping a girl for hours or smirking at the phone screen as it happens a couple floors up.

AfD has been soaring across all German states, but nowhere has its agenda and worldview landed as well as it has in states that were once part of the Soviet-occupied German Democratic Republic (GDR). In those regions, AfD has craftily and cogently navigated singular political dynamics punctuated by a sense of abandonment, contempt, neglect and dereliction of duty from Berlin. Today, one may print a map of Germany before 1989, and an electoral map from 2026, and would discern that the areas once part of the GDR almost flawlessly map onto AfD’s strongholds. Saxony-Anhalt, which just delivered AfD a landslide triumph and the prospect of a first far right regional government since 1945, exemplifies this.

There is not one single, universal explanation for this phenomenon; rather, it is a combination of social, economic, cultural and political reasons spanning decades. But one reason for the German east’s increased proclivity to trust the far right, as opposed to a more reticent west, traces back to the policies that the Soviet Union pursued and implemented in the aftermath of World War II, and what those policies effectuated.

When the Allies occupied most of Western Europe in 1945, denazification became a priority. Nazi officials were prosecuted, jailed, executed, hunted down. School curricula, infested with Nazism, were tossed and rewritten from scratch; the Allies understood that, in the same way authoritarian regimes cement their rule by weaponizing education to condition the next generations for totalitarianism, education could also be leveraged to reverse this conditioning and substitute it with a different form of conditioning — one that made totalitarianism, Nazism, antisemitism, persecution, imperialism unacceptable. While the Allies botched that work and quickly moved away from it, that work still had its perks.

Across the Iron Curtain, denazification was also enacted, sometimes more thoroughly than in the West. But Soviet denazification was more hollow: it was predicated on the notion that Nazism was a predominantly West German phenomenon. Instead of proper, comprehensive denazification, the GDR opted for state-mandated “antifascism” as a political identity. GDR leaders portrayed themselves as victims of Nazism rather than successors to part of the Third Reich with attendant obligations. They explicitly rejected any acknowledgment of guilt, instead projecting it onto other actors in the West. Antifascism morphed into a founding myth and central component of the East German folklore, invoked to legitimize the new regime and re-indoctrinate the population.

Instead of grappling with the specificities of Nazi persecution, the goal was to depict all Soviets as victims of Nazism. In so doing, the Soviets concocted a narrative that the masses could relate to, one that did not center the Jewish victims many of them still detested and distrusted. In parallel, the State made laudatory propaganda omnipresent: another founding myth, that of the Great Patriotic War, of the heroic sacrifice of Communist fighters. Naturally, the reality of complicity, collaboration, widespread antisemitism was never even considered. The GDR was not to accept any responsibility for Nazi atrocities because it was an entirely new socialist entity that had already defeated fascism.

This propensity to universalize the Holocaust is well-documented. In 1958, the GDR unveiled its flagship site of Nazi-era commemorations in Buchenwald with the “Nationale Mahn-und Gedenkstätte Buchenwald.” In that exhibition, the area where thousands of Jewish deportees had been herded and massacred was excluded. Instead, the dominant narrative superimposed at the site relied on two notions: one, that antifascist resistance prevailed; two, that Western capitalist greed was at the source of all suffering. No real, meaningful mention of the Holocaust, of Jewish or Romani victims. Only of uniform, all-encompassing Soviet victimhood and redemption through heroic resistance and socialism.

That ideology is not confined to remembrance sites; it extended to reparations too. While West Germany began paying reparations soon after the end of the war, with up to 3.45 billion marks paid to Israel and the Jewish Claims Conference, the GDR paid no equivalent Holocaust-specific compensation, opting for pensions to “victims of fascism.”

Soviet denazification was also heavily conceptualized to fit the propaganda of the regime; as such, Nazi persecution was reframed as a matter of class, not race. In the meantime, the GDR clamped down on those in its ranks swimming against the tide: in the 1950s, the regime carried out “anticosmopolitan” purges — a euphemism tapping into Stalin’s derogatory characterization of Jews as “rootless cosmopolitans.” These purges saw scholars, like Paul Merker, who advocated reparations to Holocaust survivors, be expelled from the party. The small Jewish community that had remained in East Germany after World War II fled.

Meanwhile, Holocaust memory was occasionally brandished by the GDR for political purposes: the Eichmann Trial was extensively covered by local press, used to cast West Germany as the true heir to Nazism. Simultaneously, the GDR, under Soviet influence, enacted increasingly oppressive and tyrannical laws against Soviet Jews. On the Western side, denazification was flawed: some former Nazis were integrated into government and authorities often dragged their foot when it came to prosecutions, but ultimately, a national framework of collective shame and reparations arose.

Inevitably, insofar as the GDR did not undertake any substantive work to stamp out Nazi and antisemitic ideology in East Germany, that very ideology did not just vanish at the sight of the GDR’s antifascist grandiloquent gestures. As political scientist Manès Weisskircher documented, East Germany retained strong, organized far right youth networks, especially in the 1980s. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification, these networks were empowered by the arrival of prominent Western far-right activists who relocated east to prop up the far right there; by the early 1990s, arson attacks on migrants and refugees surged and hate groups began to pop up and spread in major eastern cities like Dresden. A far right political scene that had not been dismantled before reunification consolidated after it in favorable ground.

When AfD emerged in the 2010s, it was not long before it found an interested base in the east, one that it has spent the last decade cultivating, expanding and consolidating; the breakthrough in Saxony is part of this strategy, one that the party fully owns as it claims to speak for the forgotten people of the former GDR. A study from 2022 indicated that many eastern Germans, despite harboring negative views of the GDR as such, do not associate Russia or the former Soviet Union with the Republic’s oppressive machinery; it showed that the narrative that the Soviet apparatus pushed in the decades after the war instead of pursuing cultural denazification, continues to influence how eastern Germans view the Soviets as liberators from Nazism rather than occupier or, in modern geopolitics, adversary. It is not a coincidence that the AfD’s electoral map tracks the old east-west partition with near-flawless precision.

Naturally, several caveats are to be taken into account. The first is that denazification in West Germany was not perfect either; it was far better, more efficient and lasting in the sense that Nazi atrocities were acknowledged as such and subject to continuous reckoning; they were not buried under layers of ideology or sugarcoated to woo the local population. But it was messy, sometimes cynical: by 1951, amnesty laws were being enacted as the Allies grew bored with prosecutions, and many former Nazi officials were reinstated, with some fully rehabilitated and allowed to re-enter the political apparatus. It is therefore bewildering that the man who co-authored the legal commentary of the Nuremberg Race Laws could serve as Chief of Staff to the Chancellor through 1963. But even that imperfectness did not go unaddressed: the Ulm Einsatzgruppen trial of 1958, the Eichmann trial and the Auschwitz trial in 1963 ignited widespread cultural reckoning.

Therein lies the fundamental difference: West Germany’s denazification was incomplete but contested, an open wound that generations kept reopening; East Germany’s was incomplete and closed due to ideology. For the GDR to be legitimate, it needed to assert the Nazi issue as a story of the past, a solved problem, structurally eliminated along with capitalism.

The second is twofold: one, AfD has also been rising substantially in the territories of the former West Germany; two, that there are other reasons factoring into increased eastern support for AfD. Both of these are valid. But the former is smaller in scale and later in onset than the eastern surge. The Western numbers still trail the eastern ones by a wide margin. The second point is serious but does not disqualify the argument of this piece: there are other factors, but denazification — and lack thereof — is one worth examining as a standalone factor. This variable is one of many, a supplementary cultural factor that shows how under the red veil that covered East Germany for half a century, there was still the blackness and rot of Nazi ideology permeating every level of society, especially the pervasive and genocidal antisemitic ideology that was not only never rooted out or addressed, but instead recycled and revived to serve the new regime’s worldview.

It is therefore unsurprising that the AfD’s anti-Holocaust remembrance crusade resonates particularly with East Germans; since reunification, and after decades of hearing about the atrocities their country committed through a specific ideological lens — fascism as an outgrowth of monopoly capitalism, the perpetrators as capitalist elites, no meaningful education on the specificity of the Nazis’ genocidal machinery —, East German children have been taught profusively about the history of the Holocaust, of Nazi crimes, of genocide. After decades of what the regime deemed a settled issue, this saturation has alienated many easterners who feel that a curriculum taught in a language of guilt and deep soul-searching — which they were entirely unfamiliar with prior to 1989 — has been imposed on them by a different political culture.

The answer is not to reconsider how Germany envisages its Holocaust education. It is to double down on Holocaust education, on teaching about the atrocities of the Nazi regime. In so doing, Germany is not guilt-tripping generations that have no direct relation to these atrocities; rather, it is compelling the German youth to grapple with the kind of political community it aspires to be part of by fostering civic responsibility.

Note: This piece is part of our new Essay Column, dedicated to longer, more in-depth discussions.

I went to a screening of an experimental documentary about a late cultural theorist and philosopher at Paris’s hottest self-described “lieu culturel pluridiscipliane” (one of those metamodern third spaces hosting club nights, magazine launches, food events, concerts, exhibitions, and more). A panel of academics was to speak after. It’s funny, only after moving here did I discover that one of the metro stations in the 10e is actually an interdimensional portal to Hackney Wick! No Eurostar needed.

The film coupled contemporary documentary work with a fictional dystopian subplot, and had a cyber-anarchist aesthetic. I got the impression its creators see it less as a documentary and more a political and philosophical project, taking up the work of its subject and inviting us to continue his tentative ambition: a promise and (re)provocation of post-capitalist desire into the 21st century.

As I sat there, with my friend, waiting for the screening to start, I felt a bit self-conscious. Holding my posture upright, I kept messing with my bangs. The people who had come were quite attractive. And, I presumed, smart. Stylized, many sporting effectively curated evidence of certain artistic and political sensibilities, I am confident in saying this was, almost ubiquitously, a crowd self-identifying as leftist. Moreover, you don’t hear about an event that is this particular, at this selected venue, entirely by chance. For your visual: baggy denim. Mops of dark hair. All French cheekbones and strong expressive brows. Lots of modish tattoos, from micro to neo-traditional. Pierced earlobes and eyebrows. Combat boots. Needless to say, I avoided eye contact with everyone and yearned for the film to start on time before I sneezed too loudly by accident or something (it did not start on time; it was 30 minutes late, which my friend called ever so French).

15 minutes before the film started, another man went to join the one sitting to my left. I politely smiled and looked up thinking he would say excuse me as he inserted himself into the tight spot (as my friend had done to the woman sitting to our right, making sure she could still see), but he did not.

Upon his self-installation, he displayed immediate signs of no regard for personal space. Over the course of the next 5 minutes, his legs moved from a permissible, albeit uncomfortable for me, leg on the knee stance, to a massive man-spread. Within 30 minutes, I could smell his hot beer breath. His heavy respiration was audible the entire film duration. He also kept talking to his friend. While they were, in spite of disheartened glances from their disrupted neighbor (my glances), almost continuously rowdy among themselves, they interestingly became noticeably listless during the film’s interview with a female academic (a political theorist, beholder of a professorship, and writer of over a dozen books); there was even a scoff released.

It is in moments like these that I gain consciousness. The acrid, forcibly lucid kind.

This was an event for theoretically curious youth. The participants of the Gen Z left, or those who have an interest in the post-2008 left, given the film’s subject matter. The counter-culture. The hope. The campaigners and protesters (this is Paris after all). Who advocate for change, humanism, and the survival of arts and independent media. Those who are continuing the project against domination.

I wanted to take off the makeup and accessories I had picked out trying to doll myself up this morning, and cover myself in mud and shit. Harbor a Pig-Pen cloud of must, and invade my man-spreading neighbor’s space in return.

I wanted to tell him something along the lines of this.

I am angry. You make me angry.

Why, you ask?

It would not be enough for you to close your legs. You did not for the rest of the film anyway. I don’t think you were trying to intimidate me or express disrespect. I don’t think you sat down and thought, I am going to make this woman uncomfortable, make her have to squeeze her bladder so that I can nurse my beer in between my thighs. You simply occupied the space, already yours to occupy.

Underneath the irritation about your legs and breath was something much uglier, something much more sure unearthing within me.

Perhaps this positioning wasn’t even coming from arrogance on your part. Without either of us having consciously chosen the arrangement, one of us is thought to be owed expansiveness, is given entitlement, is to penetrate and define space. And the other subject is expected to yield. Smell his wet, yeasty exhalations.

Here is the problem with many leftist men and misogyny on the left: your acknowledgement of my intelligence, of my comradeship, does not actually alter the structure of our relationship. For many of you, ‘intelligent’ has simply been added to the list of qualities you find desirable in me. A literati, this toy comes packaged with a removable political philosophy book by her side. You not only assess me as hot, but smart, and therefore, even hotter. That is, you admire me precisely as an exceptional woman: attractive and intellectual, against the category of ‘woman’ against which I am being evaluated, within which intellectual depth would never be presumed. A woman may be educated and agreeably articulate; but I am exceptional, in the seriousness, depth, and intensity you are struck to discover I possess.

Understand heterosexual sexuality as a relation of power. Living in a gendered, patriarchal society is to live in a world structured by relations of domination and subjectivation, gender being one of their principal organizing axes. Male desire defines the value and meaning of the feminized body, the object of its desire. That desire then defines how she, which she accordingly internalizes, should and is expected to act. You may recognize me as intelligent enough to be interesting to you, worthy of sexually pursuing or maybe even dating, but you will not, likely unconsciously, in that same act, recognize me as capable of intellectual authority in my own right. My intelligence does not dissolve the gendered relation in which I, the woman, am placed as the object for you to ultimately evaluate, which for most of you anyway, only ever amounts to increasing her desirability.

I am an intellectual in a skirt, and, the cherry on top, a feminist. As you confuse your capacity to desire a feminist with being a feminist yourself, my politics become a turn-on rather than the structure you continue to be complicit in.

Lust must be proof of your own feminist enlightenment. Arousal is mistaken for an unearned claim to an understanding of the world as gendered and oppressive towards women. None of the hard work to educate yourself; all of that can just osmotically be transferred by dating a feminist. And your alibi: your lust is mediated through recognition of my politics. The internal calculation goes: I find her attractive because she’s intelligent and politically interested and engaged; therefore, I’m not crudely objectifying her like all those other men do. Not like the right does. God, I’m such a feminist.

Maybe it is my anger that is sexy to you. Because I am difficult to catch, a challenge for you to approach, and a challenger of the world around me. Just like you, my dear radical.

You, seemingly forbidden to me, are let into the Amazonian kingdom. My transgression is erotic and filthy. You are the one I choose to sin with. The one I deemed moral and conscious enough of the feminist plight. Or maybe the one I defected from my politics for.

And to my delight, you think: she’s not like those bimbo, pick-me, MAGA barbies who vote away their rights. The handmaidens, idiot tradwives, ugly Mar-a-Lago lip-filled bitches, or braindead Silicon Valley waifish escorts orbiting tech feudal lords. You have no difficulty recognizing women as lesser than you, striping them of their agency, and touting misogynistic insults the second they disagree with you. If your opinions on other forms of domination, such as class struggle, ebbed away, could I tell the difference between your reeking rhetoric and that of the oppressors you speak of?

And what would happen if I were to question you? Would intellectualized vitriol be sent my way? Would you paternalize and dismiss my claims, reduce them to cooing distractions, insisting I don’t know what’s best for me? Oh yes, thank you for liberating me from the tiresome business of speaking and thinking for myself!

Into the bargain, I can also become especially desirable to you as a cultural object, like another one of the industrial rings worn on your fingers. Decorated in silver bangles and eyeliner, I have also put in work to aestheticize myself. What’s more, to others, you are seen as a feminist’s man. You will be seen as adjacent, have more authority in progressive spaces, and I, another signifier of your status; you will be imbued with my symbolic and aesthetic capital, absolved of misogynistic grievances aimed at you because you are seeing a feminist, or held on a pedestal for putting up with my annoying temperament. You are hot shit.

Whatever of the following I am, it is all up for you to decide. It is whatever you prefer, à la carte. After all, I’m your girl. An obsequious feminist. I am yours to wear, access, and penetrate, yours to lust for and capture.

That is why I fantasize about covering myself in shit. If I am rolling in that dirty, frightening, pitiful, sublime substance, I cannot be yours. There, I am safe. I am undesirable to you. You will not get to turn my politics into just another aspect of my desirability.

Maybe you, a man like the man-spreader, who goes to these types of events and identifies as part of the left, are reading this and feeling yourself slowly, almost intuitively, get angry with me. Let me halt you before your mind attempts the mental shortcut of calling me an anti-male, radical misandrist.

I am not saying you always consciously think this way. You do not mentally talk yourself through as such: women are objects, therefore I will now proceed to objectify women. Well, I hope not.

One cannot reasonably hold an individual responsible for having been socialized into patriarchy in quite the same way that one holds them responsible for a deliberately chosen act of theirs. You did not fully choose the socio-psychological desires, dispositions, or assumptions you inherited (I am cautious to say desires are entirely private preferences we have no control over, exonerated from examination). You, yourself, did not individually create the patriarchal social order. You were born into it too. And like under capitalism according to Marxists, to benefit from a structure of domination is not necessarily to be liberated by it. The interest of the bourgeoisie is that of capital, which is of no human, of not anyone. With patriarchy, men do receive material benefits, but ultimately, they often suffer from it as well (as evidenced by the infamous, monopolized by the manosphere, statistic of male suicide-rates) and are constrained by its norms.

Let me also be clear: this is not a simplistic indictment of intelligence, values, or political beliefs adding to someone’s attractiveness in someone else’s eyes. What I am pointing at is that we must try to never forget that just because we find ourselves in spaces (metaphorical or physical) that empower, sustain, and are committed to growing political consciousness, it does not mean that we, together in that space and individually, have somehow entirely escaped all the structures concerned. We remain in reality. Nor can we assume that just because of our commitment to the political fight, we stand outside, are immune and do not participate in any configuration or strand of the structures of domination the fight seeks to overcome. The identities, practices, and desires developed and cultivated within such spaces can still be incorporated into existing oppressive structures of desire, consumption, and social distinction, becoming compatible with, and even contributing to, the reproduction of said relations and structures of domination. Those who believe themselves to be conscious, and hopefully are indeed to some extent conscious, may nonetheless participate in reproducing the relations they believe they have learned to recognize. As you know, these structures are ever-mutable, responsive to changes in pop culture, geopolitics, technogenesis, and the myriad of other forces that have an impact and interact with our social reality. Whilst we, on the other hand, are fallible, overly confident in our acuity, and sometimes weak. But our strength lies in our hopefulness, in our belief in the need for change. This needs to be radically accessed and kept in mind.

And yes, I am saying you are quite responsible for what you do with your desire. If you assume you simply have access to me, sexualize me when I do not want to be, exercise sexual aggression, patronize me, or reach for misogynoir and transmisogyny (these two final items being absolutely some of the most popular problems within the left) behind your public shield of progressivism, you are to be held responsible for that. You inviolably, imperatively hold the responsibility of recognizing committing these incongruent, hypocritical, and harmful acts if you have the progressive values you indeed claim to have. Especially if you are a leftist and believe in radical equality. Once you identify yourself with an emancipatory political project, that identification, and the normative commitments that accompany it, bare obligations concerning how you conduct yourself, or, concerning unconscious contradiction, to correct and continuously seek to better yourself.

At its core, this is the same fundamental, formative principle we teach snotty children in kindergarten to set them on their path to growing up into good people in society. You may not have meant to hurt Mary when you knocked over her Lego tower. But now that Ms. Kudela has brought it to your attention, you can move forward and correct what you did wrong. Say sorry to Mary. Do not continue playing with your Legos in the same way and then tell me that you are a good kid. Intent matters, and disposition and environment will have an inherent influence on our actions, but they do not, and we must refuse to allow them to exhaust responsibility. If we accept the fact that our reality is one organized, understood, and effectively naturalized as structured by domination, this acceptance is certainly not a permission for resignation.

I am tired of letting gender as an axis of oppression remain a blind spot of today’s left.

Moreover, in regards to the criticisms leveled at the ‘bourgeois individualist left’ and its moralist, essentializing, identity politics crusade – often associated with this image of an over-sensitive, over-censoring queer, POC, or feminist academic or university student (belovedly used by the right) studying something like ‘lesbian dance theory’ – whilst I do truly agree with less vilifying and blame-game-y articulations of this critique, I find another observation to be of interest. I, personally, have found that many dogmatic, orthodox Marxists men, who are also moralists, frequently possess an unmistakably sexist attitude. These de rigueur men have a conviction that the left has been emasculated, deeply unmilitant, and in desperate need of a revival in virility. Some return to a fraternal conception of its political identity, centered on a masculinist, soldiering ideal (and yet many, I can’t help but giggle and suspect, would easily be taken down in a fight by the average pub prole). This however, goes mostly unnoticed, aside from by women in leftist spaces. But instead, somehow, the face of dogmatism in media remains the blue-haired, pierced woman (our tragic heroine).

I have seen this type live at panels, on social media, and even at house parties. Sometimes, they don’t even happen to be heterosexual. Perhaps this has something to do with feminist concerns being denounced as indubitably subordinate to class struggle (I myself do not subscribe to a view that gendered domination is exhaustively derivative of class relations) or as aforementioned, reduced to the same individual essentialism the orthodox claim to oppose. There’s a nagging irony in militantly condemning identity essentialism whilst championing an idealized, gendered political subject of one’s own: an unalloyedly class-conscious worker, whose universal interests come to mean the interests of a less universal and more masculine subject. But anyhow, maybe this attitude I speak of is simply produced by the oldest explanation available: plain ol’ women-hating.

Lastly, when our feminist politics are used as symbolic capital for men, their urgency and personal stakes are subsequently lost. It becomes a way for them to be gestural, get ironic proximity without obliging change in their behavior. Let us not settle for, at worst, a wry performance of solidarity and, at best, recognition and accountability alone: leftist men must enter the fight and join us in rupturing the structures themselves, where we all have skin in the game. Too often, the Gen Z left as a whole seem caught in a cycle: we enter the fight up in arms, freshly motivated by the political science modules that tore away the veil (a veil that, in fairness, cost several thousand pounds a semester to have torn…), expend ourselves, likely find ourselves amidst toxic discourse with guilt-mongering from our own and insult from elders and those who do not think alike, retreat to our trenches in existential dread, and eventually return to confront the very same structures still intact. We move, but in circles, the structures we oppose absorbing the inertia of protest. Without actual materializing efforts of rupture, mobilization amounts to motion within the system and recuperation.

This is, most definitely, informed by my own explicitly heartening conception of the left. A left accessing, yes, its critical faculties, but also a capacity to imagine the possible, inspired heavily by Haud Guéguen, who writes about restoring hope and actualizing a desirable future. This, as opposed to resting sat, fuming and melancholic in the archaic hot tub of sexist thoughts repackaged as dogma, is what I hope from my left. My conception of the proletariat would consequently, overtly, be spacious: a plural political subject concerned with fighting feminist, racial, queer, economic, and necessarily all other (mutual, often codependent) strands of oppression. Nor must we require the oppressed to be exemplary representatives of their political emancipation. In fact, it is likely that the subject most in need of liberation, the bearer of today’s most profound oppression, will not be the perfect moral or intellectual subject or be the most able to intellectually, articulate and advocate for their case for need. The Afghan teenager banned from secondary education may, herself, express homophobic or patriarchal beliefs if asked. She has, presumably, not cracked open Karl Marx, Simone de Beauvoir or Sara Ahmed and can readily wield their lenses, ideas, and paradigms against the world around her. And she almost certainly does not display the aesthetic editions of her personal philosophical and literary anthology, purchased from Judd Books, Politics and Prose, and Waterstones, on her art deco nightstand (self-dig). But you, my well-read, intellectual leftist men… I know you have a nightstand like mine, or perhaps worse, a coffee table displaying philosophy and art monographs. What is your excuse for your selective curriculum? Try your hand at a woman writer1.

But yes, wouldn’t it be much more convenient if you could just avoid chewing on any of the thoughts I’ve articulated above? Wouldn’t it be easier to just be seen out in public with a feminist woman a couple times, have sex with her, and then ghost her?

That itsy-bitsy word, ‘casual,’ deceives in its liberatory clothes. How politely brought up us young women have been in the emotional discipline of the postfeminist subject, the neoliberal individual subject, and heterosexual womanhood! Nor would you remain unscathed, likewise confronted with alienation and a culture rewarding your detachment. As interrogated in sociologist Eva Illouz’s work on contemporary heterosexuality and author Erin Williams’s continued reflection, our casual arrangement, (what I am referring to as ‘casual arrangements,’ I am problematizing as a participatory instance within a modern culture or institution, the problem not being, strictly speaking, ‘casual sex’ per se) organized around market logics and, par for the course, have gendered consequences. It would follow that I would tolerate “interpretive effort,” as Williams puts it, as part of my alienated, emotional labour: feeling insecurity and self-blame for your lack of attention and the lack of stability, perceiving my feelings as personal psychological faults. The minimization of my own wants would become evidence of my autonomy; my willingness to tolerate deprivation, evidence of my self-sufficiency. An occultation of sensation. To be smaller, to always make myself smaller, into infinite, lithe exiguity.

I would act lax publicly, say it’s an easygoing (get ready for the dreaded word…) ‘situationship’ to friends when asked. Oh! Nothing’s the matter with me (said whilst unlocking and locking my phone, flashing an empty screen). This era of transactionality, where commitment is seen as optional and the abundance of hinge matches responding to prompts about top 4 on letterboxd choices makes everyone interchangeable with the flick. of. a. finger. Aren’t relationships just so bourgeois? A normative path we won’t take. We call this independence, freedom, and being liberated enough to enjoy what is perfunctorily offered.

We are no longer in the age of the patriarch or cultural variations of the New Man, but of a policed (heterosexual) masculinity: you, the self-fashioned progressive, sensitive boy. He who, before he touches her, paints his nails to hide the inveterate dirt underneath them. You have committed to memory certain vocabulary: consent, boundaries, her pleasure. You become the altruistic misogynistic subject, dosing emotional vulnerability and access. There can often be a reciprocity in bed, even bona fide reciprocity, worn like a credential. But in spite of the egalitarian affect, there is a unilateral determination of when closeness is granted or withheld. At the end of the day, the relational leash will proverbially be put in your hand to grip.

So, like I said, you could opt to just like one of my old Instagram posts, eventually slide up on my story, and text me. Text me inconsistently, a fluctuating string of heavy bursts and silences, always keeping me on my toes, keeping me addicted, imprudent, as I try to tell myself that all of this was never anything more than my head overanalyzing. As we both try to convince ourselves that all of this is normal and totally aboveboard on either end. The discontinuous reinforcement, asynchronous intimacy, and my perennial obsession fed by our constant digital availability, always just one click of the send button away. We could eventually (not necessarily too early, according the butchered, unintelligible timeline of contemporary talking-stages) end up spending a night together when you text me late to come over. And then you could slip away, go radio silent. Return to your full-time job of arguing on ‘brocialist’ threads on X, wearing your t-shirt that has ‘real feminists eat box’ written on it.

Enjoy me, discard me, and call it nothing more than the messy, fucked business of being a twenty-first-century man. You’re too busy anyway, getting ready to fight a revolution.

That is what I am angry about.

In May, the Labour government confirmed that HS2 will run at 320 km/h rather than the 360 km/h originally specified. When the cut was first reported in March, the Daily Mail’s verdict was that Britain’s flagship railway might now be “potentially... slower than in developing countries like India, Morocco and Indonesia.” Underneath the negative reactions was an assumption that is wrong twice over: that HS2 has been turned into an embarrassing, budget version of Britain’s high-speed ambitions, and that the same is true of the proposed HS2 Lite further north.

It helps to start with the original 360 km/h specification. The 2013 business case for HS2 promised the “best and fastest railway in the world”.

Not the most useful. Not the best value. The fastest.

And that is before considering that HS2’s main purpose was capacity relief in the first place. Speed mattered. But it was supposed to serve the railway’s wider purpose — capacity, connectivity and economic growth — rather than become an end in itself.

James Stewart’s 2025 review, commissioned by the government to investigate HS2’s cost overruns, traced part of the problem to “gold-plating”: building to unnecessarily demanding standards rather than asking what the railway actually needed to do. Lovegrove’s subsequent review of the Civil Service’s role in HS2 lists gold-plating among the programme’s “original sins”.

And gold-plating was hardly HS2’s only problem. The programme suffered from changing objectives, inefficient contracting, poor cost estimates, weak risk management and a failure to understand how much work was being handed to contractors before designs were sufficiently developed. Costs were repeatedly underestimated, while the programme became increasingly complex and difficult to manage.

The obsession with speed was not cost-free. HS2 was designed with exceptionally generous curve radii for unrestricted high-speed running, alongside demanding specifications for track, power, junctions and other infrastructure. Oakervee found that the trains themselves were not the main problem: manufacturers told the review that speeds would need to fall to around 250 km/h before rolling-stock costs became meaningfully cheaper. The bigger costs came from the infrastructure associated with a speed that was exceptionally ambitious, but offered limited practical value.

And yet Oakervee found little evidence that the programme had regularly stopped to ask whether these standards were actually worth what they cost. Britain fixed the ambition first and spent the next decade trying to justify it.

So what happens when you remove the obsession with speed?

HS2 runs at 320 km/h.

That is not slow.

320 km/h is the top operating speed of France’s TGV and Japan’s fastest Shinkansen services. HS1, which already carries Eurostar trains out of London on HS1, tops out at 300 km/h. China and Indonesia have services capable of 350 km/h, but 320 km/h is hardly some embarrassing second tier of high-speed rail. Nobody calls the TGV “TGV Lite”.

More importantly, the government has not suddenly rebuilt HS2 as a cheaper railway. The alignment remains the same, and the infrastructure has largely been designed around the costly higher speed anyway. The government's initial assessment says the principal savings come from avoiding the risks and costs of certifying the railway for a speed not currently operated anywhere in the world, alongside reduced testing and commissioning requirements.

The government estimates the change could save between £1 billion and £2.5 billion, while adding about three minutes to the London–Birmingham journey.

Three minutes.

That is not Britain abandoning high-speed rail. It is Britain finally asking whether 360 km/h was worth paying for.

Now apply the same question before the concrete is poured rather than after, and you get the proposal commonly labelled “HS2 Lite”.

After Rishi Sunak cancelled HS2 north of Birmingham in 2023, Andy Burnham, then Mayor of Greater Manchester, joined the West Midlands in commissioning a study, chaired by former Network Rail chief Sir David Higgins and led by Arup into a cheaper Birmingham–Manchester connection. Burnham is now Prime Minister, and his government has set a long-term objective to build a "lite" line between the two cities.

Except: Lite compared with what?

The Birmingham–Manchester leg of HS2 does not exist. There is no railway being downgraded, no 360 km/h service being replaced and no half-built line being stripped back. The Higgins–Arup proposal is therefore not a scaled-back version of a railway Britain had already committed to build. It is a proposal for a railway Britain has yet to decide how to build.

And it is deliberately less extravagant. The proposal envisages trains running at around 300 km/h and looks for savings through simpler infrastructure and greater use of land and assets already acquired for HS2. Its proponents estimate that it could cost up to 40 per cent less than the original Birmingham–Manchester leg.

The obvious response is that this must mean the north is getting less, but a cancelled railway is a strange benchmark for judging what Britain should build next. HS2 Lite is better understood not as a downgrade, but as a proposal that tries to learn from HS2’s mistakes.

That is why the language matters. Calling it “Lite” makes the original scheme the default and everything cheaper a compromise. But the original scheme is not the thing being delivered.

Iain Docherty and Jon Shaw have made a similar point about British infrastructure more broadly: things treated as fairly ordinary infrastructure elsewhere are often presented in Britain as “world class”, with the label becoming an excuse for greater complexity and cost. Look at high-speed rail elsewhere in Europe. Italy built the Bologna–Florence high-speed line through the Apennines, with around 94 per cent of the route in tunnels. They built difficult railways because they wanted railways.

Britain somehow ended up wanting the fastest railway in the world as well.

There is an obvious political incentive here. “We are building the fastest railway in the world” is a good headline. “We have specified this railway to the level actually required” is not.

One sounds ambitious, the other sounds competent.

That helps explain how 360 km/h survived for so long, and why 320 km/h is now being presented by some critics as a national embarrassment. It also explains why “HS2 Lite” sounds like a consolation prize when there is no original northern railway to be consoled for losing.

The problem with HS2 was never that Britain tried to build high-speed rail. It was that it repeatedly confused the most extravagant possible specification with the best possible railway.

320 km/h is not a failed 360 km/h railway.

A £1–2.5 billion saving is not evidence that Britain has given up.

And a Birmingham–Manchester railway designed at 300 km/h for substantially less than the cancelled scheme is not “HS2 Lite” simply because the number on its specification sheet is smaller.

The only embarrassment of the whole ordeal is that it took Britain thirteen years, multiple reviews and one cancelled phase to discover that “fastest” and “best” are not the same thing.

This case is a paradigmatic example of social media frenzies: a dark, obscure true crime story with a body count high enough to guarantee outrage and a diagnosis intricate enough, it is the perfect recipe for an online inferno. With striking headlines and attention-grabbing fifteen-second clips, a court of public opinion has decreed, with unwavering confidence, that they know better than the forensic psychiatrists testifying under oath. Postpartum psychosis, in their view, is a loophole for baby-killers. Anyone who so much as considers her illness is defending child murder.

Evidently, that conclusion is not based on any sort of thorough or professional review of evidence; rather, it comes from the fact that a paralyzed woman who killed her children makes a better villain than a complicated one; that a mother who failed at the one job society insists is hers alone is an electrifying story.

Lindsay Clancy, then, has become two opposing things at once: to some, a barefaced murderer who deserves to be locked up; to others, a martyr failed by the healthcare system. In both interpretations, the actual issue is missed: in the specific hours she killed her children, had Ms. Clancy’s mind lost its grip on reality badly enough that the law’s standard for culpability doesn’t apply to her the way it would to someone who carried out a murder with full use of their faculties? And therein lies the uncomfortable truth: none of us can answer that. But regardless, a parallel trial has been run on social media with no expertise, no burden of proof, no rules of evidence and no real stake in the outcome beyond pining for darkness and mystery.

What if Lindsay Clancy were a man? Fathers kill their children too, sometimes during psychiatric breaks. There’s outrage, but it doesn’t calcify into the same lasting cultural symbol. A father who kills is a broken man, a tragedy. A mother who kills becomes something closer to myth: the Medea who corrupted and perverted the one role she wasn’t allowed to fail at. Motherhood is construed as an identity with one acceptable version and any deviation, illness included, is filed as proof the woman underneath was never what she seemed. In this vision, postpartum psychosis doesn’t explain the killings; it just unmasks a monster that was there all along. There is no room for a woman who was, by all available accounts including those of her parents in law (her mother-in-law testified that she was “begging for help”) and the children’s nanny, loving and present, and who was failed by the people meant to take care of her, including when she was turned away by a Women and Infants Program dedicated to these cases because “she was overly medicated.”

Another fundamental misconception pertains to the verdict. Clancy’s defense has argued for weeks that she should be found not guilty by reason of insanity (NGRI). Online, this has been treated as some sick, twisted bid for freedom, some legal trick to let a murderer walk. That is abysmally wrong. In the jurisdiction trying her, an NGRI verdict triggers automatic commitment: indefinite confinement to a secure psychiatric facility, for however long the court decides. Thus, the defense is not asking to wheel her home where she can enjoy freedom; it is asking to decide which locked institution she spends the rest of her life in.

Calling that a lighter outcome grossly misunderstands what confinement actually is. In 2001, Andrea Yates drowned her five children in a bathtub in Houston and was found not guilty by reason of insanity; two decades later, she remains hospitalized. Ed Gein was found not guilty by reason of insanity too and spent the rest of his life in psychiatric institutions. His crimes look nothing like Clancy’s, but the verdict did the same thing in both cases, and no one argued he was “getting away” with his crimes — because he was not.

What this case tells us is that mental health is still, despite major progress over the last decades, a taboo. One study published in 2020 and comparing public attitudes toward physical and psychiatric conditions found that people with mental illness experience more social stigmatization and receive less concern for their welfare than people with physical illness do. Part of that comes from a visibility issue: the impairment behind a mental illness is typically invisible and abstract in a way a broken spine or a dislocated shoulder isn’t. That taboo is at the crux of the Clancy case: while nobody would ask a woman recovering from a car crash to prove, beyond her doctors’ word, that her spine was actually broken, she is however being asked to prove that her mind was actually gone, and her doctors’ own say-so is insufficient to some. Our culture has not yet come to terms with the fact that the mind can falter the same way the organ can.

That misconception explains in great part the public’s anger. Reading NGRI as “getting away with murder” assumes the legal and medical process is a con and that mercy is fraud; that there is a villain who is conning the system to walk free. Naturally, that story is exactly that: a story. It is not truthful, valid or accurate. If people actually understood that Clancy faces potential lifelong confinement with no sentence to count down, the outrage would have almost nothing left to stand on. A villain story is more tantalizing.

None of this means treating Clancy as an innocent martyr or defending the killing of children. But it requires acknowledging a basic, unflattering truth: that we don’t know, that we’re not equipped, trained, meant to know. As of this article, the jury itself doesn’t seem to know either; they have told the judge three times that they are deadlocked. Twelve people who actually sat through eighty-plus witnesses and months of testimony cannot settle this confidently, and that should tell us something about those online so eager to settle it in fifteen seconds.

This is not an isolated case in which social media seizes upon a tragedy and distorts it in every possible way, rejecting all expert opinion and disregarding the rules that govern the judicial process, in order to bring to light a story that is darker, more sensational, and more shocking — and it is certainly not the last. But one should hope that more people will exercise more restraint, more humility and more moderation in future cases; true crime conspiracies and pre-baked verdicts not only risk undermining judicial processes, they are also an insult to the victims of these crimes and to their loved ones.

“Pacifism is to the West and the missiles are to the East—and that is an unequal relationship.” — François Mitterrand, former President of France, during the Euromissile crisis, 1984.

In June 2024, five coffins draped in French tricolours appeared near the Eiffel Tower, each bearing the inscription “French soldiers of Ukraine.” French intelligence attributed the operation to Russia as part of a broader campaign to fuel political instability and erode public support for Ukraine. The incident was a stark reminder that the war in Ukraine is neither geographically contained nor temporally isolated, but part of a Russian hybrid war already being waged against the West.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 constituted the most significant challenge to Europe’s security since 1945. Yet the strategic failures that enabled it predate it by a decade. Since Russia’s illegal occupation of Crimea in 2014, the West has been governed by a singular imperative: the avoidance of direct confrontation. This priority, while superficially prudent, has created a paradox where the very measures intended to thwart wider conflict have enabled its expansion.

This pattern reflects what might be called suicidal reluctance — fear of escalation as the organising principle of policy at the expense of deterrence.

Consider the evidence. In the days after the invasion, Western leaders agonised over banning Russian banks from SWIFT, describing it as a “nuclear option.” When they relented, World War 3 did not ensue. When HIMARS rocket systems were delivered to Ukraine, Armageddon did not follow. When F-16s arrived, nothing happened. The pattern is consistent: the West hesitates, Russia escalates, the West eventually acts, and the catastrophe that was promised does not materialize.

In the meantime, the escalation ladder has been climbed by Russia. Mass mobilisation. Shahed drone strikes on Kyiv. North Korean troops on European soil.

The fundamental misconception at the heart of Western policy holds that restraint deters aggression and that regimes like Russia respect multilateral peace. They do not. Aggression feeds on hesitation. Authoritarian regimes with expansionist ambitions do not answer to diplomacy conducted from weakness. They answer to the same force they use to subdue their neighbours. Tyrannies are not restrained by caution; they are restrained by resistance. Fire is not put out by pleading with it.

Comprehensive support for Ukraine does not risk engulfing us in war. It has the potential to end it by cornering Russia, overwhelming its capabilities and demonstrating that territorial conquest in Europe will not pass.

The consequences extend far beyond Ukraine. In 1994, Ukraine surrendered its nuclear arsenal in exchange for security guarantees under the Budapest Memorandum. Those guarantees have been all but shattered. The message to other regimes is devastating: agreements with the West can be voided by force. The cost of “avoiding escalation” here may, ultimately, be paid elsewhere.

Since January 2025, the return of Donald Trump and American isolationism has undermined alliances and commitments. But if the defence of the European order depends entirely on Washington, that order is inherently fragile. While the U.S. turns its back on decades of foreign policy on Russia, Europe must chart its own path and policy.

Attempts to force a ceasefire onto Ukraine do not seek to end the conflict. They aim to freeze it in time. In the words of Oleksandra Matviichuk, Ukrainian lawyer and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, “peace does not come when the country which was invaded stops fighting. That’s not peace. That’s occupation, and occupation doesn’t decrease the human suffering, it just makes [it] invisible.” Every frozen conflict in the post-Soviet space, from Transnistria to South Ossetia, has functioned as a tool of permanent destabilisation.

Opponents will note that the nuclear threat is real. But the architecture of nuclear deterrence exists precisely to prevent nuclear war. If Russia resorts to nuclear force, it faces nuclear retaliation — mutually assured destruction. To allow the invocation of nuclear threats to paralyse policy is to gift Russia a veto over the sovereignty of every non-nuclear state on its border.

The Cold War provides clear evidence that deterrence restrains aggression. In the Euromissile crisis, NATO deployed Pershing II and cruise missiles in Western Europe in response to Soviet SS-20 missiles. Moscow bemoaned the move as escalatory, yet the result was the opposite: the pressure created by NATO’s resolve led the Soviets to back down and to the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.

There is a persistent misconception that Putin is a madman driven by irrationality. This narrative is comforting because it absolves us of the responsibility to act, but it is erroneous. Putin is ruthless, calculating and opportunistic. He understands that Russia would not survive a war with NATO, let alone a nuclear standoff. His threats are instruments of coercion, calibrated to exploit Western fear. The measures critics warn would provoke wider war are precisely those that would coax Russia into retreat because the alternative is annihilation, and Putin’s security apparatus in Russia are well aware of this, hence their campaign to dampen Western public support for Ukraine.

What is required is not a continuation of the status quo, but a decisive shift to active deterrence: a no-fly zone over Ukraine; long-range missiles capable of striking military installations; the designation of Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism. European leaders have floated deploying troops to secure a future peace deal. This is suicidal reluctance — offering to act once the crisis is resolved rather than acting to resolve it. If troops can be deployed after a ceasefire, they can be deployed now. Deterrence deferred is deterrence denied.

Suicidal reluctance is the gradual erosion of everything the postwar order was built to protect. The way to end this war is not to force Ukraine to sign away its sovereignty for “peace for our time” as was once heralded by Neville Chamberlain. It is to make the war unwinnable for the aggressor, because the alternative is a world in which borders are redrawn by force, agreements are worthless, and the strong devour the weak.

This article was originally published in UCL’s International Public Policy Review and finalized in April 2026. Given the pace of developments in Eastern Europe, some facts, figures, or projections referenced in this article may have since been superseded.

This is the second heatwave of 2026. The first, between May 23rd and 30th, was the earliest ever observed in France, a spring 2026 that is now officially the hottest on record, with a mean temperature 1.69°C above normal. And that’s before we even reach July and August.

The entire timeline is so familiar it is almost redundant: the weather maps turn ruby red, authorities issue orange and red vigilance alerts, ministers issue statements urging people to close their blinds and drink water, experts appear on television, civilians suffocate. Then it ends, the news cycle moves on, until another blistering heatwave emerges, a little hotter, a little longer, a little deadlier.

This heatwave should not be interpreted as an anomaly. It is a trajectory. The heatwave of August 2003 killed 15,000 people in 24 days, a death rate of 638 per day, peaking at 3,540 excess deaths on August 12th alone, a figure that exceeded the daily mortality rate of Covid-19. A Senate report called it “a veritable sanitary earthquake” for which the country was “manifestly unprepared.” Nearly 23 years have elapsed. That diagnosis is still applicable.

Take hospitals. At the Robert-Ballanger hospital in Seine-Saint-Denis, temperatures in south-facing rooms have been touching 45°C, with patients requesting early discharge. The improvised response, including survival blankets taped over windows, damp sheets in front of desk fans, blocks of ice standing in for cooling systems, is the standard. Only 7% of French schools are equipped with functional air conditioning, with an estimated 1,300 temporary closures already attributed to extreme heat. There is no legal requirement to close a school when interior temperatures become dangerous, despite the WHO considering temperatures above 30°C a genuine health hazard. France’s newest hospital, built at a cost of €1.3 billion, will have cooling only in intensive care and operating theaters — in other words, is obsolete before it even opens.

The political response has been predictably inadequate. Rival parties race to propose air conditioning, with the righ tabling mandatory cooling units in schools and care homes and the far-right promising €20 billion in zero-rate loans for refrigeration equipment while the far-left pretends to be Earth’s guardian angel while promising to end nuclear energy on their first day in office, which would, whether they admit or not, precipitate the return of fossil fuels, as we saw in Germany in the 2010s.

But mass mechanical cooling in hospitals already under severe budget pressure would worsen their finances and, by expelling heat externally, worsen the very urban heat islands that make heatwaves deadly.

One may wonder, then, if not air conditioning, what is the solution? One country provides part of the answer: Singapore.

The small Asian country is not an obvious reference point for a French summer: it sits one degree north of the equator, in permanent tropical heat, with humidity that makes Paris in June feel mild. But it is precisely because of these very conditions that it is the right comparison: Singapore has spent fifty years engineering urban livability in conditions far more extreme than anything France currently faces and has done so not with air conditioning as a first resort.

Its Green Plan 2030 commits to an additional 1,000 hectares of green space, with every resident within a ten-minute walk of a park. Its Skyrise Greenery program, enacted in 2009, has introduced over 300 hectares of vegetation into new urban developments through rooftop gardens and vertical green facades. While many find this architecture visually pleasing, it is, most crucially, effective: greening building facades reduces energy cooling loads by 10 to 31%. Cool paint coatings, tested in public housing estates, reduce ambient temperatures around buildings by up to 2°C. The city has also launched Cooling Singapore 2.0, a research programme specifically designed to map urban heat sources at the neighborhood level and feed the findings directly into planning decisions.

The contrast with France and, indeed, other European countries, is due to political apathy. France’s cities are built of stone and concrete that absorbs heat during the day and releases it at night, which is why Parisian nights in June no longer cool and Parisians — like myself — are suffocating. Its streets are overwhelmingly impermeable, preventing the evaporation that makes a forest floor ten degrees cooler. Most lowest-income private renters live in properties rated F or G on the energy performance scale, describing buildings that trap cold in winter and trap heat in summer with equally devastating efficiency. Countless people, especially students, live in “chambres de bonne,” small rooms under the zinc-rich roof that are rented out and particularly exposed to the heat.

Lastly, its urban planning framework contains no binding requirement for green coverage, cool surface materials, shading standards or the kind of systematic heat mapping that Singapore has made fundamental.

Whether it is France or any democracy in the West, there is an impossibility of preventing the inevitable. It is thus tragically unsurprising that, despite knowing that heatwave episodes alone are projected to cost a staggering €206 billion cumulatively between 2026 and 2030, politicians are deferring.

What Singapore demonstrates is that dense, hot cities can be made liveable through planning discipline applied consistently over time: green infrastructure, urban cooling treated as a public utility, heat resilience designed into the core of new developments. None of this requires a tropical climate or an authoritarian government, it merely requires decision-making, which European democracies seem increasingly incapable of doing.

While this heatwave is unprecedented, it is clear that its disorienting records will be broken, once more, in the near future, and again incessantly over the next century. While there are still ways to limit the the total temperature increase above pre-industrial levels, there is no longer any serious scientific debate about whether the damage already done can be undone because it cannot. The heat baked into the atmosphere by a century of emissions is not reversible. We will face more summers like this one. The question is whether, by the next heatwave, we will have decided to act to adapt. Every year of delay means more dead, more billions spent patching a crisis that planning could have absorbed and more records broken that will feel increasingly inevitable.

The conventional wisdom was not unreasonable: modern politics increasingly reward noise, and Israel is no exception to this trend. It rewards grievance, spectacle and the self-mythology that Netanyahu has mastered over three decades and that Bennett has worked hard to emulate. Eisenkot has none of that: he does not perform, he does not lash out, he does not pivot. When he speaks, he sounds less like a politician than like a senior officer briefing a parliamentary committee: measured, specific, slightly dry. He is no politician in the modern sense.

And perhaps that is the allure. The failed Iran war, and what it revealed about Netanyahu’s broader Iran strategy since 2015, appears to have reshuffled the deck in ways that few fully predicted. Netanyahu, who had staked his political identity on being Israel’s life-depending security man, finds himself unable to credibly claim victory: the MoU was negotiated over his head, Washington cut the deal and a plurality of Israelis describe the outcome as a failure. Bennett, who had surged on a platform of muscular hawkishness and executive competence, watched his numbers crater in the weeks after the deal. The security crisis that was supposed to be his lane turned out to suit Eisenkot better.

After years of maximalist rhetoric from the governing coalition, about total victory, about reshaping the Middle East, about divine mandates over biblical territory, there is a constituency, apparently larger than anyone anticipated, that is simply exhausted; tired of being lied to about what victory looks like. Eisenkot, who lost a son in Gaza, who resigned from Netanyahu’s war cabinet in June 2024 and spent months methodically documenting the government’s strategic failures, carries a credibility that no amount of campaign spending can manufacture.

Interestingly, after Peter Magyar’s landslide victory in Hungary, many pundits in Israel, especially those affiliated with Bennett, emphasized that Israel, too, needed a Peter Magyar: an insider-turned-reformer with enough credibility on the right to peel off Likud voters. They were right about the need but seemingly wrong about the man. Bennett, whatever his virtues, broke with Netanyahu in 2021 and has spent years auditioning for the role of opposition savior; the rupture is old, the grievance familiar, the positioning too predictable. Eisenkot is the more newer proposition. He sat in Netanyahu’s war cabinet; he watched the October 7 failures from the inside; he resigned in June 2024 with the methodical precision of a general who had finished his reconnaissance. If Magyar’s power derived from the fact that he knew exactly where Orbán’s system was rotten, then Eisenkot carries a version of that same knowledge, more recent and more specific than anything Bennett can claim. The dull knife, then, is sharper than we thought.

In 1981, François Mitterrand coined the phrase “la force tranquille” (quiet force) to describe his brand in the French presidential campaign. He used it to describe a man who had lost two presidential elections, who had waited his turn, who had accumulated credibility through patience rather than performance and who ultimately defeated an incumbent President not by out-shouting him but by making him look erratic by comparison. While Mitterand was far more ideological than Eisenkot is, the political logic is identical.

Gadi Eisenkot is leveraging this moment in Israeli politics with remarkable precision: his social media operation, lean, pointed and frequently praised across the Israeli political press, has managed to be scathing without being shrill. Where Netanyahu blusters and Bennett scrambles, Eisenkot releases carefully sourced videos and moves on.

And the coalition he has assembled around Yashar tells its own story. His party’s members read like a curated cross-section of Israeli institutional life: Shir Siegel, daughter of former Gaza hostages Aviva and Keith Siegel; Shaul Meridor, former head of the Finance Ministry’s Budget Division; Matan Kahana, a former Bennett ally who defected; Nir Zohar, President of Wix; and, strikingly, Yoram Cohen, former head of the Shin Bet (Israel’s internal intelligence agency). They are generals, economists, technologists and survivors; people whose credibility was earned somewhere other than a Knesset committee room. While Likud convulses through primary infighting, its members reliably providing Israeli political television with its weekly dose of parliamentary theater, Eisenkot has assembled a coalition of institutional gravitas. The implicit message is deliberate: governance is a craft that he is mastering.

Eisenkot’s sharpest weapon is the one Netanyahu built his entire career on: security. For three decades, Netanyahu has owned the terrain of Israeli defense, labeling himself as “Mr. Security,” the hawk’s hawk, the man who could be trusted to keep Iran at bay, to talk tough in Washington, to name the threat when others looked away. That ownership is now being systematically dismantled, first on October 7, then with the Iran debacle. When the US-Iran memorandum of understanding was announced, Eisenkot did not reach for the vocabulary of outrage that Bennett and the far-right reflexively deployed; he reached for precision. He noted that Israelis were once again learning about a major agreement affecting their security not from their own government, but from foreign leaders. He described the outcome as “the dismal result of a failed government.”

This is what makes Eisenkot uniquely dangerous to Netanyahu on his own terrain. Bennett can criticize Netanyahu on security, and he has, but he was out of power when it happened and many Israelis bleakly remember his short term as Prime Minister where Netanyahu leveraged a wave of terrorism to paint him as weak. Eisenkot sat in the war cabinet; he watched the strategies he had helped build get discarded for political convenience. He is someone who can reveal, for instance, a joint Mossad-IDF programme launched in 2015 to develop capabilities for a decisive strike on Iran, a plan that “cost billions of shekels” and was ultimately abandoned. He knows where the bodies are buried because he was in the room when the decisions were made, first as Chief of Staff, then as war cabinet member.

It is therefore no wonder that Likud has now pivoted away from Bennett and begun attacking Eisenkot in a slew of ads, some of which have been labeled as racist for their characterization of both Israeli-Arabs, attempting, as Likud has done for decades, to weaponize the specter of Arab political influence against whoever threatens them most. But the attacks have not landed cleanly, and for a reason that cuts to the heart of Israeli political sociology: Eisenkot is a Mizrahi Jew. The son of Moroccan Jewish immigrants, he was born into precisely the demographic that Likud has relied upon for fifty years as its most loyal electoral base — the Mizrahi working and middle class, historically marginalized by the overwhelmingly Ashkenazi left and wooed by Netanyahu’s coalition. That courtship is now visibly fraying: earlier this year, Netanyahu’s own spokesman Ziv Agmon was caught on tape calling Mizrahi Likud lawmakers a “baboon” and a “r*tarded Moroccan,” prompting a scandal that forced his eventual departure.

And when Netanyahu’s camp, specifically his aide Jonatan Urich, himself facing criminal indictment for leaking classified information and cavorting with Qatar, posted a video mocking Eisenkot’s accented English, the response was a masterclass: Eisenkot called it racist. He described the ignominious mockery of a Moroccan Jewish immigrant’s son for not speaking the language of Philadelphia. Then Eisenkot twisted the knife: “Where was Netanyahu’s excellent English on October 7? Did it help us with anything?”

Between the security brand and this, the game Eisenkot is playing is clear. The Mizrahi constituency is not monolithic and he is not naive enough to believe identity alone will carry it. But he is betting that a Mizrahi former IDF chief, one who lost a son in Gaza, who sat inside Netanyahu’s war cabinet, who speaks the language of security professionally, can peel off enough of Likud’s traditional base to make the coalition arithmetic work in October. Bennett, for all his tactical intelligence, is an Ashkenazi national-religious politician trying to appeal to voters who have always seen his type as the enemy. Eisenkot is breaking through because he is boring, and perhaps, the answer to relentless authoritarian populism is this brand of “force tranquille.”

Disclosure Day is a disappointment in the most frustrating way: the movie had everything and did nothing with it.

The plot is, in essence, the evergreen template in UFO fiction. A cybersecurity expert turned whistleblower uncovers proof that the government has been concealing alien life for decades, running covert experiments from classified facilities while the rest of humanity is stonewalled. He is hunted, finds an unlikely ally and the truth, we are told, belongs to everyone. If this sounds familiar, it is no accident — it should. It is the foundational mythology of every UFO conspiracy thriller from The X-Files onward and Spielberg does not interrogate it, subvert it, revisit it or deepen it. He simply executes it, competently, expensively and without surprise. The only difference is the plotline.

The movie’s most damning scene arrives near the end, when the two central characters are brought face to face with an alien and engage in direct communication with it. Intended to be the emotional and narrative climax, it is deflating in that it lacks restraint, which Spielberg once masterfully deployed. In Spielberg’s greatest alien works, the unknown was palpable, glimpsed, suggested. Here, the alien is a prop, the mystery dissolved in a single scene of dialogue.

The supernatural elements throughout suffer from the same problem. Blunt’s character develops an inexplicable ability to communicate in any language and intuit private details about strangers — and the movie does, to its credit, attempt an explanation. In a flashback sequence, a young Margaret Fairchild (played by Blunt) is followed into her room by animals, who lead her to a strange fairy-tale cottage in the woods. Inside, she and a young Daniel Kellner (played by Josh O’Connor) are subjected to some form of procedure that, we are to understand, is what grants them their abilities.

The Hansel and Gretel imagery could have worked as deliberate uncanny strangeness, the kind of dream-logic that lives between horror and wonder. But the film cannot decide what register it is operating in. It is too earnest to be surreal, too random to be meaningful. The result is odd. Worse still is a moment in which the adult Daniel Kellner, watching the scene from the side, attempts to intervene, screaming helplessly at the young Margaret Fairchild, unable to change what has already happened. The echo of the bookshelf scene in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar is unavoidable. But where Nolan’s version devastates, because the film has spent two hours building the weight of that father-daughter relationship, here the anguish is asserted without foundation. The emotion has not been earned, and the borrowing only sharpens the sense of how far short the movie falls.

Colin Firth’s villain compounds the issue. He is a corporate antagonist drawn in the broadest strokes: sinister, powerful, power-hungry. There is nothing behind the performance that Firth is given to work with and the result is a character who functions as an obstacle rather than an argument. He lacks a meaningful internal logic.

There is one moment Disclosure Day that gestures at genuine depth. Elizabeth Marvel’s Sister Maura, a Catholic nun who provides sanctuary to the two protagonists, is given a brief but memorable scene in which she addresses what confirmed alien existence would mean for religious faith. Her central claim is that humans are God’s creation on earth; that the existence of life beyond it does not discard that teaching but rather expands it. God, she suggests, is larger than humanity’s conception of him. It is a compelling proposition and Marvel delivers it with quiet authority. For a few minutes, Disclosure Day becomes the film it could have been: one that wrestles seriously with the civilization-altering implications of its own premise. It deserved a full arc. Instead it is raised and sidelined within minutes. That Spielberg identified this question, gave it to one of his strongest supporting players and then chose not to pursue it is incredibly telling.

What saves this movie from being a write-off is Emily Blunt. She is, simply put, outstanding. In a role that could easily have been passive, she brings an emotional precision that elevates every scene she is in. The confusion, the fear, the resolve: Blunt portrays each register with a specificity the script does not earn. She is doing the movie’s work for it, and largely succeeding.

The harder question is what Spielberg was trying to say and whether he knew. He has now made several movies about alien life and across all of them there is a consistent belief that we are not alone and that encounter with the unknown is, ultimately, a transcendent rather than a threatening experience. Disclosure Day nominally operates within that worldview. But where Close Encounters earned its wonder through two hours of obsession, dread and longing, and E.T. grounded it in a child’s grief, Disclosure Day asserts it. The emotional journey is prescribed rather than felt. We are told the truth belongs to everyone. We are not made to feel why it matters.

In the end, this is the movie’s indictment: not that it is bad, but that it is insufficient. Spielberg assembled the best available cast, score and collaborators; inherited a premise that the current political moment had primed audiences to receive; and produced something that would have felt dated thirty years ago. Disclosure Day does not fail because it is clumsy. It fails because it is comfortable; comfort, in a movie about humanity’s most destabilizing possible truth, is unforgiving.

There is something almost cynical about the movie’s relationship to its own material: rather than grappling seriously with what alien disclosure would mean, Disclosure Day flatters the conspiratorial imagination: the covert facilities, the government cover-up spanning decades, the lone truth-teller against the machine. It is a movie built to validate those who already believe, not to challenge or illuminate anyone.

The overwhelming feeling, walking out, is not anger but impatience. This movie needed more time, more courage, more conviction. Disclosure Day feels exactly like what it is: botched, cheesy and hasty.

Prominent actress and beauty blogger Victoria Bonya, famous for starring in the early seasons of Russian reality TV show Dom-2 (2004–present), went viral after her ‘scathing’ appeal to President Putin.

During her 18-minute video, Bonya drew on pressing issues in the country, including the disastrous floods in Dagestan, livestock culls in Siberia, intensifying financial hardships for SMEs, and strict internet freedom limitations. The TV star presented herself as the defendant of the grievances of ordinary Russians.

However, the blogger trotted carefully, outlining issues that avoided perturbing authorities and challenging Putin’s authoritarian rule over the country. In the most daring part of the video, Victoria alleged that the Russian people—including regional governors—feared the President, and were too afraid to relay the gravity of the situation.

The scale of this response quickly attracted attention both inside and outside Russia, after the video garnered over 27 million views. Western media outlets took up the uproar to portray Bonya as an influential figure opposing the Russian authorities, with a publication from The Guardian citing her ‘scathing remarks’ and ‘fierce critique’ of the Kremlin.

In addition, a series of interview requests from Russian opposition outlets such as Silver Rain and Meduza followed. Bonya hit back vehemently, claiming that she “loved [her] country” and “loved [her] President,” shutting down suspicions of her membership in Russian opposition. Insisting that the media was misrepresenting her messaging, the TV star urged journalists to refrain from considering herself their ideological ally.

“I am not with you,” she remarked after facing considerable backlash from pro-Russian public figures, notably state-channel media figure Vladimir Solovyev. “Please do not associate me with [your] opposition.”

Abbas Gallyamov—a Russian exile and former speechwriter for President Vladimir Putin—analyses the effect of Bonya’s address on drawing in a ‘new audience’ into the realm of political dialogue. The unlikely participation of otherwise apolitical citizens poses the wider question about a more covertly dissenting form of civic dialogue in Russia, dissimilar to conventional state-society dialogue in Western democracies.

The success of Bonya’s video raises broader questions about who is capable of articulating public grievances in contemporary Russia, and through what channels such grievances are expressed.

On the basis of the social grievances that Bonya raised, the resonance that the public found with the blogger triggered an explosion of support, the strength of which surpassed the dwindling opposition outlets, many of which operate in exile. This is particularly striking given Bonya’s lack of political credentials and her repeated rejection of an oppositional identity.

Rather than emerging through familiar opposition structures, this resonance suggests that expressions of public grievance may increasingly be articulated through less conventional or institutional actors, particularly in times of heightened repression.

While more conspicuous forms of civic engagement, including direct manifestations of dissent, may be more readily understood by a Western political framework, the ordinary Russian may voice political concerns differently. What, then, is the Russian understanding of personal freedoms? Of justice? And of participation in dissenting rhetoric?

Bonya’s fierce appeal yet loyal position undermines long-standing Western assumptions about Russian dissent and the figures typically associated with it. Movements and campaigns by figures such as Navalny and Nemtsov have long been tokenised as representatives of Russia’s liberal opposition. While their appeal undeniably piqued support from certain groups in Russia in the past, the present domestic situation may point towards a more complicated reality.

Notably, the popularity of the blogger’s video is difficult to compare with the recent acclaim received by conventional pillars of the Russian opposition, such as Yulia Navalnaya’s continuation of Navalny’s project FBK (Anti-Corruption Foundation).

Viewed through this lens, the acclaim received by Bonya’s video is particularly revealing of political participation in Russia, especially the public’s aversion to explicit political agendas and reluctance to disrupt the status quo.

With the war’s further penetration into daily life, the lifestyle blogger found resonance through a form of civil society activity that does not fundamentally undermine the ruling party and carefully circumvents outright rejection of the governing system. Bonya’s conscious avoidance of blaming public grievances directly on the President is not only a strategic move familiar within the Kremlin’s political playbook, but simultaneously a key factor behind her broader appeal.

By refusing to align herself with any explicit ideology, or to place herself in stark opposition to the President, Bonya’s video enabled ordinary Russians to feel vindicated in their grievances without identifying themselves with overt political dissent or committing to a long-term political agenda. Her appeal did not fundamentally challenge the stability of the existing political order, nor did it implicate viewers in the risks that often accompany direct criticism of the authorities. Instead, it removed many of the social and political costs typically associated with participation in oppositional discourse.

Such a form of civic engagement is compatible with the wider public’s aversion to overt manifestations of dissent, which are frequently associated with instability, social upheaval and the disruptive nature of protest movements. By insisting on greater freedoms without the obligations or consequences of opposition membership, Bonya’s address helped lower the barriers that often discourage political participation among ordinary Russians.

Political science research delineates a similar narrative. Influential works on civil society in Russia insist that, rather than rendering the concept obsolete in the current political context, Russia’s state-society contention has long pursued a more nuanced form of dissent. As scholars argue, civil society in Russia should not be understood solely through the Western prism of binaries, such as the presence or absence of liberal democratic institutions or outward manifestations of opposition, but through the diverse ways citizens negotiate, challenge and engage with state power outside conventional frameworks of political participation.

Far from demonstrating total political apathy, the popularity of Bonya’s address suggests that civic engagement in contemporary Russia may be most effective when it allows citizens to express discontent without assuming the social and political risks associated with organised opposition, and when grievances are voiced in a manner that is not fundamentally disruptive to the familiar status quo.

While Russian understandings of liberal freedoms may appear contrarian and differ significantly from those of the West, episodic flare-ups such as the appeal of Bonya’s video serve as a reminder that political disengagement should not be confused with political indifference. The resonance of her message suggests that many Russians remain acutely aware of the social and economic pressures shaping their daily lives. What is often absent is not dissatisfaction itself, but a compelling vehicle through which that dissatisfaction can be expressed. In turn, Bonya’s address may reveal the blueprint for the conditions under which Russian civic consciousness is willing to make itself heard.

In April 2024, Malawi’s government, led by President Lazarus Chakwera, made a telling decision that revealed its true economic priorities. With elections approaching, the Reserve Bank of Malawi (RBM) reversed an IMF-mandated devaluation and fixed the official exchange rate. The logic was straightforward: devaluation was pushing up import prices, import prices were fuelling inflation, and inflation was losing votes.

Fix the rate, shield consumers, win the election.

Chakwera lost anyway. In September 2025, voters chose his predecessor Peter Mutharika by a landslide — 56.76% vs. 33.01% of the vote — with the economy as the dominant issue. The exchange rate fix had failed even on its own political terms, and left behind a structural wreckage that Mutharika now inherits.

This is not primarily a story about one government’s cynical monetary policy, but rather a story about what happens when a state tries to use an exchange rate anchor it cannot actually sustain.

The mechanics are worth understanding. When Malawi re-fixed its rate, it created an immediate gap between the official rate and the parallel market, which was running roughly 100 per cent above official for essential goods at its peak. This is not an abstract distortion. It meant that ordinary import-dependent households — the vast majority of the population — were being pushed onto a black market to access basic goods, while the formal rate offered them nothing.

Meanwhile the tobacco sector, which benefits from periodic step-devaluations and conducts dollar-denominated transactions, remained largely insulated from the kwacha (Malawi’s currency) depreciation eroding household purchasing power. Yet even here, the desperation of the FX position is visible: the RBM imposed a 30 per cent export surrender requirement to claw back foreign exchange from its primary beneficiaries, imposing distortions even on the sector the arrangement was designed to protect. The fix looked like consumer protection. It functioned as a subsidy to export capital at the expense of import-dependent labour.

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Credible exchange rate commitments require transparency, enforceability, and sufficient political cost of abandonment. Malawi’s arrangement failed all three. The Reserve Bank published no intervention data, giving private actors no basis for confidence in the rate. The government's willingness to re-fix the exchange rate after already agreeing to float under IMF Extended Credit Facility conditions demonstrated that the commitment could be abandoned on demand. And the ECF terminated without completing a single review, removing the one institutional constraint that gave the arrangement any external credibility. With gross reserves at just 0.7 months of imports — far below any recognised adequacy threshold — the Reserve Bank was not defending a rate so much as declaring one.

The consequences were predictable. Inflation peaked at 35 per cent in early 2024 and has since fallen to around 24 per cent as of early 2026 — a sign of some stabilisation — but still deeply damaging for a country where nearly three-quarters of the population lives below $2.15 a day as of 2025. The parallel market spread deterred foreign direct investment not only because of Malawi’s underlying economic weaknesses, but because investors could not reliably assess effective returns when profit repatriation might occur at either the official or the parallel rate. The currency distortion was generating uncertainty on top of genuine economic weakness, compounding both.

The IMF’s prescription — a unified market-clearing rate — is technically correct. The problem is that it is insufficient on its own. Malawi arrived at this crisis through a combination of fiscal dominance, reserve depletion, and absence of genuine central bank independence. A rate unification that is not preceded by fiscal consolidation, reserve rebuilding, and meaningful RBM autonomy will simply face the same political pressures that have hampered every previous stabilisation attempt. The structure that produced the April 2024 decision has not changed. Only the government has.

Mutharika inherited an economy where public debt has returned roughly to the levels that preceded Malawi’s major debt relief in 2006, in which the ECF remains terminated, and in which the distributional coalitions that benefit from exchange rate distortion are still politically powerful. The tobacco sector’s interests have not changed. The political incentives to prioritise short-term price stability over long-term monetary credibility have not changed. The question is whether a new government, without an electoral horizon for another four years, has the window to do what its predecessor could not.

There is a narrow case for cautious optimism. Chakwera’s loss demonstrated that economic mismanagement carries electoral consequences; the electorate delivered the punishment the IMF’s terminated programme could not. Mutharika has both the political capital of a landslide and the institutional memory of having governed before, providing a rare political window for change. The interest rate cut from 26 to 24 per cent in March 2026 is modest but suggests a willingness to begin normalisation. Yet these advantages are opportunities rather than achievements. The underlying constraints — weak reserves, high debt, and powerful interests that benefit from distortion — remain largely unchanged.

Optimism has to be conditional on the sequencing being right. Rate unification without fiscal consolidation is not reform; it is exposure. Malawi’s monetary problem is downstream of its fiscal and institutional problems, and treating the exchange rate in isolation will not resolve it.

The IMF knows this.

The question is whether the new government does too, and whether it has the political appetite to act on that knowledge before the next electoral cycle begins to foreclose options once again.

At an event hosted by the Institute for Government over 10 years ago, Economist Sharon White described Britain as one of the most centralised states in the developed world. Successive governments have promised to fix it and, so far, every single one has failed.

The consequences are visible not merely in constitutional arrangements but in economic outcomes. Consider what the 2026 Cities Outlook Report tells us about what actually works. In a decade of national economic stagnation — disposable incomes up just 2.4 per cent since 2013, barely worth measuring — a handful of places managed to do genuinely better: living standards rising more than twice as fast, residents thousands of pounds better off in real terms. Barnsley. Doncaster. Wakefield. Not glamorous cities. Not tech clusters or university boom towns. Northern towns that turned local economic growth into actual income gains for residents. Meanwhile, plenty of places with booming GVA figures — Cambridge, notably — saw real disposable incomes fall.

The standard diagnosis — levelling up, rebalancing, the Northern Powerhouse, whatever the current rebrand is — treats the problem as one of resources: if only we could redirect enough investment northward, the geography would fix itself. It won't. Manchester shows why.

Manchester’s advocates point to a city-region economy exceeding £100 billion, with a consistent 3.1% annual growth rate (double the UK average), a serious institutional architecture in the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, and the Bee Network as tangible proof that meaningful devolution produces results. All of that is true, though the critics are also right that living standards in Greater Manchester’s most deprived communities are still lagging. The growth is real; whether it reaches everyone is still a work in progress. That’s an argument for doing devolution better and more completely, not for retreating from it.

And let’s be clear about what devolution actually means. This is not inherently an argument for less government, nor a case for Whitehall to step back and let markets sort out the North. Economic growth is fundamentally local. A civil servant in a Whitehall office does not know that a particular bus route is why a firm can’t recruit from a particular neighbourhood. The local mayor does. The OECD has long emphasised that agglomeration effects only materialise when cities can coordinate transport, housing, skills and infrastructure at a regional level. Active government is essential; the question is which level of government should be acting, and on what.

The Bee Network is the clearest example. Using devolved transport powers, Greater Manchester is building the first fully integrated public transport system outside London: buses, trams, cycling, and eventually local rail under a single network, with coordinated fares and coherent branding. Disconnected transport is one of the most reliable mechanisms for locking low-income workers out of opportunity. London has had integrated transport governance for decades. The idea that Manchester having it too is somehow radical or experimental is a kind of institutional provincialism that stands in the way of economic growth.

But cities cannot build everything alone. Rail connectivity between Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield and Liverpool is not a local question but a national one, and here the central state’s record is disappointing. HS2’s northern leg was cancelled. The government promised the saved money would go into alternative rail upgrades; most of it didn’t. Labour’s January 2026 Northern Powerhouse Rail announcement is better than nothing — a new Liverpool-Manchester line, upgrades at Leeds and elsewhere — but with no formal cost estimate and completion dates sliding into the 2030s, it is a commitment whose ambition is inversely proportional to its urgency. The North has been promised better railways for thirty years.

The devolution argument and the national infrastructure argument are not in competition. They are making the same point. Cities can govern themselves. They cannot build north-south rail lines. Westminster’s job is not to micromanage local planning decisions in Leeds; it is to deliver the strategic connective tissue that allows Northern cities to function as an integrated economic unit. The tragedy of British governance is that it does neither well: too controlling about the things cities should run, too irresolute about the things only the state can deliver.

Germany doesn't agonise over this. Munich governs Munich. Hamburg governs Hamburg. The federal government takes primary responsibility for strategic national infrastructure, while the Länder and municipalities exercise far greater autonomy over local affairs. The result is a national economy whose strength doesn't depend on one city and one postcode.

The truth is that Central government likes controlling the money. Whitehall officials like being the people who decide. Ministers like having patronage to dispense. Devolution requires those institutions to surrender power, something they are not incentivised to do voluntarily.

The much-needed Trailblazer Devolution Deals — expanded powers for Greater Manchester and the West Midlands — suggest that Westminster does occasionally grasp the logic. But Britain’s devolution settlement is still a patchwork of ad hoc deals extracted from a reluctant centre by politicians with enough clout to negotiate. The country outside of London deserves a system, not a series of exceptions.

A government that truly sought to boost economic growth would look at the Cities Outlook data — the towns translating growth into living standards, the cities with booming GVA but nothing in workers’ pockets, the stark variation in outcomes between regions — and conclude that locally-tailored policy, delivered by leaders with skin in the game and democratic accountability to local voters, beats uniform national prescription almost every time. It would then build a system that reflected this.

Britain keeps designing systems that don’t.

Let Manchester govern Manchester. Let Leeds govern Leeds. Let Liverpool, Sheffield and Newcastle shape their own economic futures. Build the railways and energy networks that bind those cities into a functioning national economy. Stop treating city autonomy as a reward for good behaviour, and stop treating national infrastructure as an aspiration for some future decade.

The data exists. The model exists. The only thing missing is a central government willing to admit that competence isn’t something it has a monopoly on.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Armenia’s alignment with Russia seemed inevitable: like many post-Soviet states, the landlocked country found itself structurally dependent on Moscow for energy, security and the troops garrisoned on its own soil. In 1992, Armenia became of the founding members of the CSTO, Russia’s answer to NATO. This dependence on Russia looked like partnership for decades until September 2023, when Russian peacekeepers stood by and watched Azerbaijan end Armenian presence in Nagorno-Karabakh and pulled out altogether in the aftermath. With an Armenian population revolted about Karabakh, Pashinyan, who has liberalized and democratized the country since his advent in 2018, got the domestic mandate to pivot away from Russia and towards the West and, in particular, the European Union.

In 2024, Pashinyan suspended Armenia’s participation in the CSTO and called for the withdrawal of Russian troops. He secured an EU integration framework and, most dramatically, greenlighted the TRIPP corridor, a US-brokered route across southern Armenia that would connect Europe to Central Asia while bypassing both Russia and Iran, undermining one of the Kremlin’s most valuable logistical strangleholds in the region. The reaction from the Kremlin has been as swift as it has been predictable: threats of interference, warnings that EU integration is incompatible with Armenia’s membership of the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union, restrictions on imports of Armenian products and threats to withdraw access to discounted natural gas. Its latest response has been somewhat novel: to use the roughly two million Armenians living and working in Russia as both a pressure point and an electoral weapon to tamper with the country’s elections.

Old habits die hard: the playbook being deployed in Armenia was already operationalized before. In 2014 and 2025, Russia massively interfered in Moldova’s national elections through mass disinformation campaigns, a Kremlin-backed oligarch funding the opposition, the bussing in of Transnistrian voters and the bribing of voters in the occupied region. In Georgia, sustained pressure, a captured judiciary and a pro-Russian ruling party delivered Moscow a friendlier government, through thinly veiled fraud, without the need for overt interference. The Armenian operation follows the same logic: a billionaire candidate in Samvel Karapetyan, Armenian-Russian and currently on trial for calling for the overthrow of the government; a newly established Kremlin directorate specifically tasked with running influence operations in Armenia; and a disinformation campaign that, according to the Berlin-based ZOiS research centre, ranks as one of the largest state-backed operations in modern European history. The voter airlift, confirmed or not, is the newest element of a campaign that is otherwise eerily familiar.

The Kremlin is likely to be disappointed. Pashinyan is polling at around 60%, with Karapetyan’s Strong Armenia party struggling to crack the 20% ceiling. Even if Moscow succeeded in transporting 100,000 voters, the arithmetic does not work in a proportional system with a gap that wide. Eurasianet, one of the more sober analysts of the Caucasus, called any such effort “a waste of time and money.” The Kremlin appears to know this: the voter airlift was a plan discussed, priced and assigned regional quotas, according to Reuters. What remains is the disinformation campaign, the economic coercion and the hope that a fifth of undecided Armenian voters break heavily against Pashinyan, but all of this is a rearguard action, not a strategy, which seems to be a recurring issue in Russia’s foreign endeavors.

The significance of June 7 is not limited to Armenia; a Pashinyan win would cement Armenia’s westward break; Russian troops would likely be withdrawn, TRIPP greenlit, EU integration underway. For Moscow, this would be a structural setback. Armenia has served as a garrison state, an economic dependent and a blueprint of the kind of captivity Russia has relied upon to maintain its post-Soviet architecture. Losing it, in the middle of a war that has already exposed the limits of Russian hard power is a different order of defeat. The frantic interference and spending from the Kremlin supports this theory of panic.

June 7 seems to be Pashinyan’s to lose. But a won election is not an end in and of itself; Russia does not need to win on polling day to retain influence in Armenia: it needs only to keep the country economically dependent, politically polarized and strategically hesitant. The disinformation campaign will not stop on June 8, nor will the gas threats. The two million Armenians in Russia remain a pressure point. The West, slow to grasp the significance of the Caucasus, cannot afford to treat a Pashinyan victory as a non-event. EU integration needs resources behind it, not just frameworks and statements. The Kremlin is on the verge of losing a fundamental stronghold in a region that is crucial to its security framework; the question is whether the West is serious enough to make that loss permanent and to leverage it.

On May 20, Ben Gvir posted a video of himself at Ashdod Port taunting detained flotilla activists, dozens of whom were forced to kneel on the ground, hands bound behind their backs, as he waved an Israeli flag and declared: “Welcome to Israel, we are the landlords.” The international reaction was swift and damning: Italy, France, Spain, Canada and the Netherlands summoned Israeli envoys. The European Council president called it “completely unacceptable.” Even Netanyahu publicly rebuked him, a rare rebuke that, as we shall see, came with no consequences whatsoever.

In Israel, the hardest condemnations came from the opposition. Yair Lapid, the leader of the opposition, called it a “terrorist attack on Israel’s international standing,” blaming “the Prime Minister, who brought a convicted criminal into the government.” Gadi Eisenkot, the former IDF Chief of Staff-turned-politician, similarly berated Netanyahu, underscoring that “a prime minister who truly prioritizes Israel's interests should have fired him long ago.”

He is a repeat offender: inflammatory, depraved videos, statements and policies are his MO. It is how he galvanizes his electorate of fanatics who want the whole land conquered and the Palestinian multitude expelled, or subdued.

But Ben Gvir did not self-appoint to the government. He did not self-sustain his presence. It is reassuring that the rest of the Israeli government, starting with Netanyahu, recognized that this latest outburst was beyond the pale, but the ensuing statements are hypocritical beyond belief.

Traditionally, when a head of government determines that one of his ministers “does not represent the values” of the country, that minister is dismissed. After all, why would someone who does not represent the values of the country remain in charge of its national security?

There are no signs of Ben Gvir being fired. Not now, nor at any point during his tenure — not after he publicly called to starve Gazans, not after he boasted of torturing prisoners, not after he delivered a speech at a Kahane-founded yeshiva with a banner glorifying Kahane and Baruch Goldstein — who killed 29 Palestinian worshippers in the 1994 Hebron massacre — as “martyrs,” not after he repeatedly defied the status quo on the Temple Mount, not after he claimed that spitting on Christians is an “old Jewish tradition.”

Netanyahu appointed him with full knowledge of his record: the infamous 1995 interview in which he held up an ornament ripped from Rabin’s car and said “We’ll get to Rabin too,” weeks before Rabin was assassinated; the 1995 Goldstein Purim costume; his ban from IDF service because he was deemed too extreme; his 2007 conviction for racial incitement; the 2021 incident in which he drew a handgun on two unarmed Arab garage attendants in Tel Aviv, shouting “Arab dogs.”

This is only a snapshot. Ben Gvir is a pyromaniac who has no place in public office, let alone government, and he never did. This latest outburst did not reveal that; it only confirmed it.

If Netanyahu and his allies were serious about reining in Ben Gvir and advancing “the true values of Israel,” they would uproot the rot he and his party bring. The absurdity is glaring: they say Ben Gvir does not represent Israel’s values, yet they keep him in government. That contradiction resolves itself only one way: they are not claiming to represent those values either. Which would, at least, be an honest position.

The real reason is straightforward: coalition survival, as always. But there is a darker logic underneath it. Ben Gvir is not merely tolerated; he is useful. He functions as a pressure release valve and a negotiating tool, allowing Netanyahu to govern to the hard right while maintaining deniability. Every time Ben Gvir does something unconscionable, Netanyahu gets to play the moderate, as seen in the flotilla incident. The outrage is not a side effect of the arrangement, it is integral to it. Put bluntly, Ben Gvir is Netanyahu’s designated arsonist.

There is, however, one scenario worth watching. Once the Knesset session ends, Netanyahu may fire Ben Gvir; not out of principle, but to campaign on it. He would claim he finally stood up to the insanity, a claim as absurd as it is cynical, made safely after the Knesset has dissolved and before anyone can hold him to account. He would then quietly negotiate Ben Gvir’s return should the next election allow it.

TLDR: the government’s sudden damage control is as farcical as it is performative; a front erected to placate Israel’s allies and maintain the fiction that Ben Gvir has gone rogue. But Netanyahu has full powers to remove a minister at any time, for any reason. Former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who was fired in November 2024 for the cardinal sin of disagreeing with Netanyahu, can testify to that. And yet Ben Gvir remains, with no dismissal in sight. Ben Gvir is not rogue: the government is, and always has been. His continued presence is the proof. He is a feature, not a bug, of this government, one that Netanyahu assembled, sustains and will reassemble the moment the votes allow it.

Labour’s demise is the consequence of two years of purposeless leadership. Dealt a historic mandate in the summer of 2024, Starmer has failed to use it meaningfully. The parliamentary majority he was handed, the largest in a generation, demanded boldness; what Britain got instead was managerialism. He became a paragon of caution without conviction, triangulating endlessly. Voters who lent Labour their votes expecting change watched instead as Starmer picked fights with his own party, retreating from almost every commitment that might have defined his premiership. There is no Starmerism; there is no project; there is no vision. There is only the management of decline, a form of damage control, conducted by a man who seems more comfortable as a technocrat than a leader.

The numbers were a bleak harbinger for Labour. Starmer’s net favourability stood at -45 in April, making him the most unpopular leader in Britain — by far. A majority of the public believe he should resign, compared with just 23% who think he should remain. Most devastating of all: among 2024 Labour voters, opinion is split, with a staggering 37% believing he should step down. His ratings sit in similar territory to Theresa May’s just before her resignation. This is no difficult patch; it is the picture of failure, felt even within his party.

Internally, the party is in shambles. Union chiefs have turned on Starmer; on the backbenches, Labour MPs have indicated that if the party performs poorly across the board, Starmer will face renewed pressure to quit or set out a timetable for his departure; one Labour MP, Jon Trickett, has already publicly called for his resignation. The problem, it seems, is personal. And, thankfully for Labour, Starmer is not inevitable; several credible alternatives have emerged. Andy Burnham, the Greater Manchester Mayor, is the public’s preferred choice with 36% of voters preferring as Prime Minister against 29% for Starmer; 62% of Labour members would back him in a head-to-head. Other potential candidates include Health Secretary Wes Streeting, Angela Rayner and Shabana Mahmood. None of them are perfect. All of them are better than the status quo.

What Labour needs is not merely a different face but a different approach. Whoever succeeds Starmer must offer three things he has failed to provide: a distinct political identity, a willingness to govern boldly, an honest relationship with the public. The EU is the clearest test of all three. Streeting has hinted at a customs union and Burnham has said he hopes Britain will rejoin in his lifetime.

The public supports rapprochement: a majority of voters support rejoining the EU, with that figure reaching 83% among Labour voters. And yet, inexplicably, Labour has spent two years carefully avoiding saying so, getting outflanked on Europe by the Greens and the Liberal Democrats, who, conversely, are willing to say plainly what Labour cannot: that Brexit was a mistake that left Britain’s economy an estimated 4% smaller than it would otherwise have been, weakened Britain diplomatically and worsened the immigration crisis. A new Labour leader who speaks honestly about that damage would also force Farage to defend the disaster he spent decades engineering.

The local elections are an indictment not of Labour’s policies, but of their absence. It is an indictment of purposeless, directionless, lethargic leadership. Parties recover from bad governments; they rarely recover from leaders who have lost the fundamental trust of the people they govern. Starmer has lost that trust and the longer he stays in office, the more damage Labour will suffer. Reform is not waiting. Nor are the Greens. Every day Starmer remains in Downing Street is a day Farage spends consolidating gains that will be very hard to reverse. Labour was elected to govern Britain, and it must fulfill that promise before it is too late.

For thirty years, Collins has cultivated the image of the pragmatic Republican: too principled for partisanship, too Mainer for Washington. Her record reflects that complexity: she voted against repealing the Affordable Care Act, condemned the Muslim travel ban and was one of seven Republicans to vote to convict Trump after January 6. Last week, she was one of only two Republicans to support a preemptive War Powers Resolution that would have required Trump to seek congressional approval before launching military action against Cuba. The resolution failed 51-47. Trump has repeatedly lambasted her: in January, The Hill reported that he “dialed Collins with profanity-laced rant” over her vote on Venezuela war powers. He has also called for a Republican to mount a primary challenge to unseat her.

But in practice, Collins has voted with Trump 95% of the time since he returned to the White House in January 2025. She confirmed Kavanaugh and Barrett to the Supreme Court after assuring Maine voters they wouldn’t touch Roe v. Wade; they did. More recently, she endorsed the SAVE Act, a sweeping voter suppression bill backed by Trump. And that discrepancy has become starkly clear in Trump’s second term and explains her growing unpopularity.

Last summer, Graham Platner, a Marine veteran, oyster farmer and first-time candidate, launched his bid for the U.S. Senate with a video that racked up 2.5 million views in its first 24 hours. Platner introduced himself as a weathered working man from Sullivan, staring down the oligarchy and the politicians who serve it. The campaign raised a million dollars in its first nine days and had amassed over 6,000 volunteers by September. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren switfly endorsed him. The Democratic establishment, spooked, recruited two-term Governor Janet Mills to run against him and clear the field. On April 30, Mills ended her bid, led by as much as 30 points by Platner. The insurgent won a major battle in the internal ideological war that has brewed in the Democratic Party since November 2024. But the establishment had reasons to seek an alternative to Platner.

On October 21, 2025, Platner posted a video of himself dancing shirtless at his brother’s wedding, hoping the video would humanize him and boost his popularity. Instead, it revealed a chest tattoo bore a striking resemblance to the Totenkopf, the skull insignia of the Nazi SS. Platner reasoned that he had gotten it drunk in Croatia, confusing it for a generic skull and crossbones, and that he had since had it covered. But an anonymous former acquaintance told CNN and Jewish Insider that Platner had been fully aware of its meaning and had previously referred to it as “my Totenkopf.”

Within days, reporters surfaced a trail of Reddit posts that painted a broader and more troubling picture: in 2013, he posted a thread about anti-rape underwear where he suggested that people worried about sexual assault should “take some responsibility for themselves and not get so fucked up they wind up having sex with someone they don't mean to.” And in 2014, he described a Hamas raid in which terrorists killed Israeli soldiers as “a damn fine looking and successful raid against a superior opponent,” adding that he would “give credit where credit is due, no matter who they are fighting for.”

This led his campaign’s political director to resign and call him “unelectable.” His campaign manager and finance director followed suit.

Come November, Maine Democrats face a choice between two kinds of disaster. The first is the one Genevieve McDonald saw coming when she resigned: Collins floods the airwaves with the tattoo, the Hamas comments, the rape thread and Platner loses a race that was one of the Senate Democrats’ most reliable pickups. Collins has defied the polls and the pundits before: in 2020, she was written off by virtually every analyst and won anyway. Handing her opposition research this rich is a gift. But the second scenario may be the more quietly troubling one: Platner pulls it off and heads to DC. And then what? The moderating has already begun. He has said he is “currently not for an assault weapons ban, certainly in the form that they have been put forward,” positioning himself to the right of the Democratic mainstream on the issue before he has cast a single Senate vote.

There is a prior for what happens when Democrats elect their rough-edged, anti-establishment savior and send him to Washington. John Fetterman was endorsed by Sanders, ran as a populist outsider and won Pennsylvania in 2022 on the back of enormous grassroots enthusiasm. Within two years, he called for mass deportations, opposed every War Powers resolutions, unironically spoke of “Trump Derangement Syndrome” and called for Trump’s ballroom to be authorized. Platner has already shown the instinct, if not yet the full trajectory: in addition to his opposition to an assault weapons ban, he has said many of his friends voted for Trump and has faced allegations that he himself previously voted for him. None of this disqualifies him. But it is a concerning harbinger.

So here is where Maine’s Democrats find themselves in the spring of 2026: slated to nominate a tattoo-covered, Hamas-praising, sexual-assault-minimising oyster farmer to take on a five-term incumbent who has survived everything the party has thrown at her for three decades. Perhaps they are right. Perhaps Platner is exactly what Maine needs: unpolished, unvetted and unafraid, a human wrecking ball aimed at a woman who has made a career out of being too reasonable to dislodge. But the Democratic Party has a habit of telling itself that this time is different and driving into a wall. And this time, they seem inclined to sacrifice their very values to defend what they would never defend if Mr. Platner was a Republican.

I arrived in Budapest the weekend after the election that ended Viktor Orbán’s sixteen-year grip on Hungary. On the streets of District VII, the Jewish Quarter, the posters were still up. Some had been ripped down. Some had been defaced. A few lay flat on the pavement, face-up, staring at the sky. Nobody had bothered to remove them.

That seemed about right.

I had not let myself believe it would happen. For months, the polling had shown Tisza ahead by margins that seemed too good to be true. I had watched the 2022 cycle, when United for Hungary went into election night with momentum and came out crushed. I knew what Hungarian electoral geography looked like, what Fidesz’s grip on rural constituencies meant, what a gerrymandered map could do to a popular vote. So I watched the supermajority projections with skepticism, and I waited for the catch.

There was no catch.

141 seats on 53.2% of the vote. Fidesz halved to 52. A turnout of 79.6% — the highest since the last Communist-era election of 1985. No contestation. Orbán conceded on the night. It was clean, decisive, and stunning.

Which made what I found on the ground all the more surprising.

Relief, not real joy. That was how a middle-aged woman put it, her children beside her, when I asked how she felt about the election. We were standing in HAB — Hungarian Art and Business, a contemporary art centre on Andrássy út. She said it simply, almost flatly, the way you say something that has been true for a while and doesn’t need explaining. Then she turned back to the exhibition.

I wasn’t sure what I was expecting, but it wasn’t that.

I flew into Budapest through Ferenc Liszt International Airport, the subject of an ongoing EU anti-fraud investigation — itself a lesson in what sixteen years of Orbán looks like. The structures Orbán built did not announce themselves. They were just there, quietly.

On the drive through Erzsébettelep, there was a billboard. On it: Dóra Dúró, a politician from Mi Hazánk (Our Homeland Movement) infamous for shredding a children’s book she deemed to be "homosexual propaganda" at a press conference. Her face was still there. Still up. The week after the election that was supposed to end all of this.

That felt like the right introduction to Hungary.

Budapest

The Jewish Quarter — the old ruin bar district, now colonised almost entirely by tourists — made it genuinely difficult to find Hungarians. The centre has become a theme park: beautiful but unkempt, full of stag parties and backpackers unaware an election just happened. Infrastructure that should have been upgraded wears its neglect visibly. Corruption, everyone agreed, had exploded under Fidesz. The money went somewhere. It did not go here.

One thing I had not expected: the visibility of LGBTQ people. Same-sex couples, visibly queer individuals, people presenting in ways that would have felt conspicuous elsewhere in Central Europe. Budapest has always been Hungary's liberal exception; this may simply be what it looks like when you pay attention. Whether people simply felt freer knowing Fidesz was out, I cannot say.

What I can say is that the legal picture has not changed and is unlikely to. Magyar's Tisza ran on a pro-European, anti-corruption platform — not a socially liberal one. LGBT adoption rights and same-sex marriage, constitutionally banned under Orbán, are not on his agenda. The law has not moved.

I met more Hungarians in Zugló and around Angyalföld. What I found was not jubilation. It was something quieter and more complicated: relief, caution, and often a frank admission that Tisza had not been anyone’s first choice so much as their only one. Several people described voting for Magyar the way many Americans described voting for Biden in 2020, not out of enthusiasm, but out of a desperate need for the alternative to lose.

Some younger Hungarians in District V were more vocal: openly contemptuous of Orbán, happy to say so to a foreign stranger. But even they were hesitant about Magyar. The celebrations, one told me, felt premature.

“We don’t really know what he is yet.”

The Vote Beneath the Vote

The headline obscures something. The only other party to cross the parliamentary threshold was Our Homeland Movement — the ultranationalist far-right. The liberal Democratic Coalition and the satirical MKKP won no seats. That the only genuine options facing Hungarian voters were centre-right, right, and far-right says something about where the country sits.

The voters who backed Tisza did not all back the same thing. An older couple I met from Balatonföldvár wanted more EU, yes, but also conservative values, Hungarian identity, nothing radical. They saw the result as a win-win. Others in Budapest voted purely to stop Fidesz. These are not the same electorate, and Magyar will have to govern both.

Analysts had noted before the election that Magyar leaned into some core continuities with Fidesz — nationalist rhetoric, scepticism about Ukraine’s EU accession, rejection of the EU migration pact. He is not Orbán. But he is not a liberal either.

The Same People

The most clarifying thing anyone said to me in Budapest came from a young Nigerian couple — medical students, five years in Hungary, who spoke with the authority of people who have watched the country from the outside in. When I mentioned the election result, one of them shrugged.

“These are the same people who kept him in for sixteen years.”

It landed like a correct answer to a question nobody had asked. Four elections which produced landslide mandates for Fidesz cannot simply be waved away with accusations of electoral bias or unfair press coverage.

Orbán was genuinely popular in Hungary, and perhaps his loss reflects what Hungarians stood to lose by reelecting him — economically, internationally, institutionally — rather than a fundamental rejection of the values he represented.

What the couple described of their own experience as a Black couple living in Hungary confirmed what you would expect. The election result was real but the country had not become a different place overnight.

The police, separately, made their own impression. We encountered a young woman one evening who was clearly in serious distress — disoriented, potentially drugged, unaware of where she was. The officers who responded treated her as an inconvenience. Slow to act, dismissive, apparently uninterested. Hotel workers nearby were unsurprised.

“The government doesn’t care about women, and neither does the police” one told us, unprompted.

Ultimately a social and political transformation in Hungarian is far from guaranteed — if possible at all.

What One Election Can and Cannot Do

Magyar’s two-thirds majority gives him the power to amend Hungary’s Basic Law, the same constitution Orbán rewrote to entrench his own power. That is significant. The tools exist, on paper, for genuine structural reform.

But Fidesz spent sixteen years building something more durable than a parliamentary majority. It built a media landscape, a judicial culture, a network of loyalists in institutions, a geography of patronage that runs deep into rural Hungary. Fidesz recorded its best results in the eastern Szabolcs–Szatmár–Bereg County and won 84.2% of the diaspora vote.

The Fidesz base has not gone anywhere.

Then there is the media, with Fidesz directly or indirectly controlling roughly 80% of Hungary’s media resources. KESMA — Orbán’s media conglomerate — now owns over 470 outlets, all producing content indistinguishable from government campaign material. KESMA does not dissolve because Fidesz lost. Simply replacing its board with Tisza-friendly appointees would replicate the problem with different beneficiaries. Magyar will have to decide what to do with an apparatus built specifically to destroy pluralism — whatever he decides, he will be accused of hypocrisy either way.

The Fidesz posters on the pavement in Budapest were not a metaphor I was looking for, but was one nonetheless. They were still there. Nobody had cleaned them up. And the people who put them there — who voted for what they represented, four elections in a row — were still there too.

Hungary did something remarkable on 12 April. Whether it did something meaningful is a different question. The honest answer, standing in Zugló a week later, listening to people speak carefully about a future they wanted to believe in but had not yet earned the right to assume, was: not yet.

Perhaps.

Ask again later.