Category: Politics

Donald Trump has long claimed that he — and he alone — dictates the future of the MAGA movement. And a topsy-turvey Friday will put that to the test.

A weekend wellness check on the MAGA coalition: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who on Friday announced her resignation, is spurned by its leader. And incoming New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, held up as a midterm Republican bogeyman, is now welcomed by him.

In the space of a whipsaw few hours from Friday and into Saturday morning, Trump — who has said he knows what “MAGA wants better than anybody else,” — celebrated the impending departure of “Marjorie ‘Traitor’ Brown” on Truth Social (“Marjorie went BAD,” he said) and fangirled over Mamdani (“a Great Honor meeting Zohran Mamdani”).

“A world turned upside down,” Steve Bannon, the onetime White House aide and MAGA media booster, said in a text.

MAGA’s Friday trip to The Upside Down all unfolded in a week during which Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), another frequent intraparty Trump target, effectively cracked Trump’s hold on his congressional coalition with their Epstein Files Transparency Act.

Taken together, this week is the freshest reminder that the MAGA movement has always been defined more by id than ideology, the political shaped by the personal — presenting quite the challenge for whomever must hold the coalition together after Trump.

Trump and Mamdani’s Friday meeting ended worlds away from where most expected it to go. The get-together, which Fox News previewed as a “showdown with socialism,” ended as a friendly back-and-forth between the democratic socialist and president.

“We had a meeting today that actually surprised me,” Trump told reporters during the public portion of the get together.

For some of the president’s most ardent supporters, Trump’s praise of Mamdani — a man he previously warned would lead to ruin in New York City, and who some of Trump’s closest allies (like Elise Stefanik) spent months setting up as their personal campaign trail foil — was agonizing.

“What’s the purpose of people voting in 2026 if the Democrat policies are ‘rational?’” Trump whisperer Laura Loomer said in a interview, referencing Trump’s answer to an Oval question in which he said of Mamdani, “I met with a man who’s a very rational person.”

“I’m a little confused,” she continued, “because, like, I need to know for the sake of my own edification what the administration’s stance is on Mamdani.”

The White House dismissed any handwringing about the direction of the president’s movement.

“As the architect of the MAGA movement, President Trump will always put America First. He’s secured the border; tackled Biden’s inflation crisis; lowered drug prices; ended taxes on tips, overtime, and social security; deported criminal illegal aliens; implemented important reforms to put American workers first; and more,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said.

“The fact that President Trump met with the newly elected mayor of New York City shows he is willing to talk to anyone to Make America Great Again,” she continued. “Only Politico would try to spin bipartisanship as a bad thing.”

Political horseshoe moments in Trump’s Washington rarely last. But even some of Trump’s closest allies tried to separate themselves from Friday’s meeting. Stefanik — his onetime pick for United Nations ambassador who is now running for New York governor — has repeatedly called Mamdani a “jihadist,” a label Trump explicitly rejected on Friday.

“We all want NYC to succeed. But we’ll have to agree to disagree on this one,” Stefanik posted on social media on Friday, repeatedly invoking the pejorative despite Trump’s about-face.

Still, Democrats — particularly those close to the incoming mayor — were thrilled with how Friday went down. “Trump respects strength and winners,” said Rebecca Katz, founding partner at Fight Agency, whose firm made ads for Mamdani.

And some Democratic strategists focused on 2026 celebrated Trump undermining Republicans’ attempts to paint Mamdani as the midterm bogeyman he entered the day as. Did Speaker Mike Johnson’s entire 2026 strategy just crumble?

“Pour one out for the NRCC/NRSC staffers who saw their 2026 ads go up in smoke. Sad!” said the veteran Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson.

Still, many are convinced that it is only a matter of when — not if — Trump’s embrace of the New Yorker will evaporate.

“Plenty of time for that to come if it does,” said GOP strategist Doug Heye. “Either of them coming out of that meeting on the attack would have been a mistake, especially given they’ve both tapped into voters who feel systems are broken and things cost too much.”

And some Democrats — particularly Mamdani’s intraparty critics — are convinced it all fades, and GOP messaging continues apace. Alex Hoffman, the Democratic strategist and donor adviser, said: “He will become the bogeyman as soon as he starts implementing policy and saying ‘socialist’ as the sitting mayor.”

But for Democrats, Friday’s friendly confab presented a possible path forward for handling the president.

In a year when Democrats have struggled with how to engage Trump, in which at least one of them hid behind a folder in a White House meeting and left the base wondering about her 2028 sauce, Mamdani just put on a masterclass, Katz and other Democratic strategists said.

Their theory of the case: In his meeting, he offered a template for handling Trump and Trumpism. Trump thinks Democrats are weak; Mamdani projected strength. His body language was neither embarrassed nor defensive. He did not moderate any of his positions. He didn’t grandstand, nor was he pugilistic.

“Some Democrats made the decision that they had to reject Zohran completely if they didn’t agree with all of his policies,” Katz said. “That was a mistake. Zohran doesn’t have all the answers, but he does have a way at looking at situations that is different from typical Democrats in Washington. We need a lot of wins in 2026. Let’s work together to figure out how to get them.”

Andrew Howard, Nick Reisman and Joe Anuta contributed to this report.

​Politics

When the center of protests against immigration enforcement switched recently to Charlotte, North Carolina, so did the frogs.

Back in October 2025, an agent with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency popularly known as ICE, deployed pepper spray into the air vent of a peaceful protester’s inflatable frog costume. Video of the incident in Portland, Oregon, quickly went viral. Frogs and other inflatable costumes became a fixture of protests against Trump administration actions everywhere.

As a sociologist who studies social movements and political discourse, I knew when I saw the video that we’d soon see frogs everywhere at protests.

And indeed, the costumes have visually distinguished recent events from earlier anti-Trump demonstrations, softening their public image at a time when Republican officials were calling protesters “violent” and “Antifa people.”

It’s hard to be violent in a frog suit.

Humor is subversive. When used strategically, it can help undermine the legitimacy of even the most powerful opponents.

Playful and potentially protective

Portland activist Seth Todd began protesting in an inflatable frog costume as a way of “looking ridiculous” when federal law enforcement ramped up repressive tactics against his fellow protesters at ICE facilities in October 2025.

“Nothing about this screams extremist and violent,” he told The Oregonian newspaper.

Such costumes are interactive, playful, physically unwieldy and potentially protective. They can help activists appear less threatening to police, evade facial recognition systems and even deflect the blows of police batons or rubber bullets.

Wearing inflatable costumes at demonstrations checks all the boxes for tactics that can be widely imitated: cultural relevance, symbolic power, accessibility and easy participation. My interviews with activists who used glitter bombing in past protests revealed that light-hearted tactics can expand participation by attracting newcomers who are wary of more confrontational forms of protest. This is especially true when the tactics are easy to adopt – notably, wearing inflatable costumes in the weeks leading up to Halloween.

“Protest costumes” are now a category on Amazon.

Unlike the seasoned activists who were early adopters, protesters who wore inflatable animal and character costumes – sometimes because frog costumes had sold out – at No Kings protests on Oct. 18 represented a range of experiences and affiliations, including many first-timers.

“We are middle of the road,” explained one protesting frog in Chicago, “we’re just regular folks who have had enough.”

Bears, unicorns, dinos and raccoons

Activists continue to don frog costumes in solidarity. One group calling itself the Portland Frog Brigade says its goal is “artfully exercising our First Amendment right to free speech.”

Others created Operation Inflation to collect and distribute inflatable costumes to Portland protesters.

Just days after the pepper spray incident, a video circulated showing people outside the Portland ICE facility wearing inflatable bear, unicorn, dinosaur and raccoon costumes, dancing to raucous music in front of a line of law enforcement officers clad in riot gear.

Despite the almost literal novelty value of frog costumes, there’s nothing new about any of this.

Inflatables have long played an important role in outlandish protest tactics. A large inflatable “Trump chicken” was installed outside the White House back in 2017, while a “Trump baby” blimp hovered over Parliament in London during a 2018 state visit by Trump.

During the 1960s, the Bread and Puppet Theater used towering puppets and satirical street performances to protest the Vietnam War and social inequality.

Carnivalesque tactics and clown costumes have been popular responses to police repression at anti-globalization protests.

The Raging Grannies were a mainstay at antiwar and antinuclear demonstrations in the early 2000s, easily recognizable with their colorful costumes and witty songs.

And LGBTQ+ rights advocates have thrown pies and glitter-bombed right-wing politicians, while also staging costumed flash mobs and dance parties outside the offices and homes of prominent public figures.

Absurdist performances and playful public displays are powerful tools of political dissent, especially when they stand in contrast to state violence, authoritarianism and human rights abuses.

Anya M. Galli Robertson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

When the Colorado Artificial Intelligence Act passed in May 2024, it made national headlines. The law was the first of its kind in the U.S. It was a comprehensive attempt to govern “high-risk” artificial intelligence systems across various industries before they could cause real-world harm.

Gov. Jared Polis signed it reluctantly – but now, less than a year later, the governor is supporting a federal pause on state-level AI laws. Colorado lawmakers have delayed the law’s enactment to June 2026 and are seeking to repeal and replace portions of it.

Lawmakers face pressure from the tech industry, lobbyists and the practicalities related to the cost of implementation.

What Colorado does next will shape whether its early move becomes a model for other states or a lesson in the challenges of regulating emerging technologies.

I study how AI and data science are reshaping policymaking and democratic accountability. I’m interested in what Colorado’s pioneering efforts to regulate AI can teach other state and federal legislators.

The first state to act

In 2024, Colorado legislators decided not to wait for the U.S. Congress to act on nationwide AI policy. As Congress passes fewer laws due to polarization stalling the legislative process, states have increasingly taken the lead on shaping AI governance.

The Colorado AI Act defined “high-risk” AI systems as those influencing consequential decisions in employment, housing, health care and other areas of daily life. The law’s goal was straightforward but ambitious: Create preventive protections for consumers from algorithmic discrimination while encouraging innovation.

Colorado’s leadership on this is not surprising. The state has a climate that embraces technological innovation and a rapidly growing AI sector. The state positioned itself at the frontier of AI governance, drawing from international models such as the EU AI Act and from privacy frameworks such as the 2018 California Consumer Privacy Act. With an initial effective date of Feb. 1, 2026, lawmakers gave themselves ample time to refine definitions, establish oversight mechanisms and build capacity for compliance.

When the law passed in May 2024, policy analysts and advocacy groups hailed it as a breakthrough. Other states, including Georgia and Illinois, introduced bills closely modeled after Colorado’s AI bill, though those proposals did not advance to final enactment. The law was described by the Future of Privacy Forum as the “first comprehensive and risk-based approach” to AI accountability. The forum is a nonprofit research and advocacy organization that develops guidance and policy analysis on data privacy and emerging technologies.

Legal commentators, including attorneys general across the nation, noted that Colorado created robust AI legislation that other states could emulate in the absence of federal legislation.

Politics meets process, stalling progress

Praise aside, passing a bill is one thing, but putting it into action is another.

Immediately after the bill was signed, tech companies and trade associations warned that the act could create heavy administrative burdens for startups and deter innovation. Polis, in his signing statement, cautioned that “a complex compliance regime” might slow economic growth. He urged legislators to revisit portions of the bill.

Polis convened a special legislative session to reconsider portions of the law. Multiple bills were introduced to amend or delay its implementation. Industry advocates pressed for narrower definitions and longer timelines. All the while, consumer groups fought to preserve the act’s protections.

Meanwhile, other states watched closely and changed course on sweeping AI policy. Gov. Gavin Newsom slowed California’s own ambitious AI bill after facing similar concerns. Meanwhile Connecticut failed to pass its AI legislation amid a veto threat from Gov. Ned Lamont.

Colorado’s early lead turned precarious. The same boldness that made it first also made the law vulnerable – particularly because, as seen in other states, governors can veto, delay or narrow AI legislation as political dynamics shift.

From big swing to small ball

In my opinion, Colorado can remain a leader in AI policy by pivoting toward “small ball,” or incremental, policymaking, characterized by gradual improvements, monitoring and iteration.

This means focusing not just on lofty goals but on the practical architecture of implementation. That would include defining what counts as high-risk applications and clarifying compliance duties. It could also include launching pilot programs to test regulatory mechanisms before full enforcement and building impact assessments to measure the effects on innovation and equity. And finally, it could engage developers and community stakeholders in shaping norms and standards.

This incrementalism is not a retreat from the initial goal but rather realism. Most durable policy emerges from gradual refinement, not sweeping reform. For example, the EU’s AI Act is actually being implemented in stages rather than all at once, according to legal scholar Nita Farahany.

Effective governance of complex technologies requires iteration and adjustment. The same was true for data privacy, environmental regulation and social media oversight.

In the early 2010s, social media platforms grew unchecked, generating public benefits but also new harms. Only after extensive research and public pressure did governments begin regulating content and data practices.

Colorado’s AI law may represent the start of a similar trajectory: an early, imperfect step that prompts learning, revision and eventual standardization across states.

The core challenge is striking a workable balance. Regulations need to protect people from unfair or unclear AI decisions without creating such heavy burdens that businesses hesitate to build or deploy new tools. With its thriving tech sector and pragmatic policy culture, Colorado is well positioned to model that balance by embracing incremental, accountable policymaking. In doing so, the state can turn a stalled start into a blueprint for how states nationwide might govern AI responsibly.

Stefani Langehennig receives funding from the American Political Science Association’s (APSA) Centennial Center Research Center.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman – among the eight Democrats who voted to end the federal government shutdown – has always been a unique character and a sly self-promoter.

His political brand is that of an anti-politician. It’s reflected in his ultracasual wardrobe, his willingness – and even eagerness – to vote and express opinions across party lines, and his stated inability to socialize or glad-hand.

Even his new book, “Unfettered,” is not your typical political memoir, and thus is entirely on-brand for Fetterman. Most political memoirs are written to advance the politician’s career. Fetterman’s, however, discusses his dissatisfaction with Congress and spends far more time on his battles with depression than his role as a senator.

As a politics professor who studies Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, I find that one of the most unique things about Fetterman is his political rise from mayor of Braddock, Pennsylvania – a small borough outside Pittsburgh with fewer than 2,000 residents – to the U.S. Senate.

And yet, while this sort of political leap is highly unusual, it also reflects a recent trend in American politics. Over the past five years, more mayors of small and midsized cities have developed national political profiles in a way they hadn’t before.

It’s a phenomenon that has roots in suburbanization and 1990s-era political trends, and it’s one we will likely see again in 2028, at least among Democrats.

From small town to Senate chambers

Boroughs are the smallest form of municipality in Pennsylvania, and there are more than 950 of them in the state. The office of borough mayor is so insignificant that in Braddock, it came with a small stipend instead of a salary.

Yet after holding that obscure position for a decade, Fetterman mounted a credible campaign to be the Democratic candidate for a U.S. Senate seat in 2016. He fell short but captured nearly 20% of the primary vote against three other candidates.

In 2018, Fetterman was elected Pennsylvania lieutenant governor, and then in 2022, he ran again for the Senate. He beat Conor Lamb by a landslide in the Democratic primary and then squeaked out a victory against Republican candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz.

It may seem incredible that someone could jump from being a borough mayor to lieutenant governor and then U.S. senator. But other politicians over the past decade have used their positions as mayors of small-to-midsized cities to run for national office, including the U.S. presidency.

Cory Booker, for instance, was elected mayor of Newark, New Jersey, in 2006; U.S. senator in 2013; and briefly ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020.

Booker was joined in the early race to be the Democratic presidential nominee by Pete Buttigieg, who was elected mayor of South Bend, Indiana, in 2011; and Wayne Messam, who was elected mayor of Miramar, Florida, in 2015.

The 2020 presidential primaries also included some big-city mayors like then-New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio and his immediate predecessor, Mike Bloomberg. Eric Garcetti, mayor of Los Angeles at the time, was apparently also considering a presidential run in 2020.

By contrast, before 2020, a grand total of 13 people who had ever served as a mayor later ran for president. Only Grover Cleveland and Calvin Coolidge were successful.

Of course, Fetterman has never run for president, but then, few mayors ever run for U.S. Senate either. As Booker noted in his 2017 memoir, “United,” he was, in 2013, the 1,949th person to ever be sworn in as a U.S. senator, but “only the 21st person since 1789 to ascend directly from mayor to Senator.”

Free trade and fractured bonds

How did this trend start? I trace it back to the eight years of the Clinton presidency, from 1993 to 2001, and more specifically, the North American Free Trade Agreement that went into effect in 1994 and the Clinton administration’s focus on community and civil society.

NAFTA was a treaty signed by the U.S., Mexico and Canada agreeing to lift tariffs and other barriers to trade. It had bipartisan support, but it was also politically divisive, especially with labor unions, historically a key pillar of the Democratic Party, which did not want to see manufacturers move their operations to Mexico to take advantage of lower labor costs.

NAFTA is often blamed for, among other things, the “hollowing out” of U.S. communities in the Rust Belt that stretches from the Northeast to the Upper Midwest states that surround the Great Lakes. In this vast area, there are thousands of small and midsized towns and cities, many of which depended on single industries like paper milling or auto parts manufacturing. Once those businesses relocated, residents found themselves unemployed, underemployed and stranded in increasingly poorer towns.

At the same time, President Bill Clinton convened a series of seminars on American democracy and community at Camp David and the White House. He invited some of the country’s most prominent “communitarian” intellectuals to glean policy and speech ideas from them. He also established the AmeriCorps program, which expanded and provided support for various civic-oriented volunteer opportunities.

Of the mayors who developed national political profiles in the 2010s, arguably the most successful were Booker, Buttigieg and Fetterman. All three came from Rust Belt communities that had suffered severely from the deindustrialization that many residents and analysts of various stripes blamed on NAFTA, and all three spoke effectively about their personal experience with it in their communities.

Each mayor was also able to tell stories about personal interactions and interventions in their cities that spoke to the sense of a lost community that came to define the turn of the 21st century. The hardest evidence for this lost community came from the book “Bowling Alone” by American political scientist Robert Putnam, who participated in the White House seminars on community and American democracy.

It’s also notable that, prior to running for mayor of Braddock, Fetterman worked at an AmeriCorps program in a poor Pittsburgh neighborhood.

Suburbanization and polarization

Immediately after World War II, federal mortgage guarantees and massive investment in highways fueled suburban housing construction, for which the returning GIs and the baby boom created huge demand.

Along with suburbanization has come political polarization. Urban areas are increasingly composed of people with liberal ideologies, while rural areas are increasingly more conservative. Suburban areas fall somewhere in between – often serving as key battlegrounds in statewide elections.

Midsized cities like South Bend or Miramar are often suburban in nature and design. They typically don’t carry the Democratic ideological baggage of large cities, but they are often also dealing with so-called urban problems such as poverty and crime. This is especially true of Braddock, a suburb with uniquely high levels of poverty and unemployment.

A mayor like Fetterman can therefore show how he’s able to address fundamental and widespread problems while at the same time being relatively nonpartisan about it. Among his better-known accomplishments as Braddock mayor were building a new community center, rehabbing properties, establishing an urban farm and running a youth program.

No doubt, Fetterman is a unique politician. But he is also the product of a specific moment in American political development and culture when mayors became viable actors on the national stage. My guess is that this trend will continue in what will most likely be a crowded Democratic presidential primary race in 2028.

Read more of our stories about Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, or sign up for our Philadelphia newsletter on Substack.

Richardson Dilworth does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

As the Trump administration carries out what many observers say are illegal military strikes against vessels in the Caribbean allegedly smuggling drugs, six Democratic members of Congress issued a video on Nov. 18, 2025, telling the military “You can refuse illegal orders” and “You must refuse illegal orders.”

The lawmakers have all served either in the military or the intelligence community. Their message sparked a furious response on social media from President Donald Trump, who called the legislators’ action “seditious behavior, punishable by death.”

One of the lawmakers, Sen. Elissa Slotkin, told The New York Times that she had heard from troops currently serving that they were worried about their own liability in actions such as the ones in the Caribbean.

This is not the first time Trump has put members of the military in situations whose legality has been questioned. But a large percentage of service members understand their duty to follow the law in such a difficult moment.

We are scholars of international relations and international law. We conducted survey research at the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Human Security Lab and discovered that many service members do understand the distinction between legal and illegal orders, the duty to disobey certain orders, and when they should do so.

The ethical dilemma

With his Aug. 11, 2025, announcement that he was sending the National Guard – along with federal law enforcement – into Washington, D.C. to fight crime, Trump edged U.S. troops closer to the kind of military-civilian confrontations that can cross ethical and legal lines.

Indeed, since Trump returned to office, many of his actions have alarmed international human rights observers. His administration has deported immigrants without due process, held detainees in inhumane conditions, threatened the forcible removal of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and deployed both the National Guard and federal military troops to Los Angeles, Portland, Oregon, Chicago and other cities to quell largely peaceful protests or enforce immigration laws.

When a sitting commander in chief authorizes acts like these, which many assert are clear violations of the law, men and women in uniform face an ethical dilemma: How should they respond to an order they believe is illegal?

The question may already be affecting troop morale. “The moral injuries of this operation, I think, will be enduring,” a National Guard member who had been deployed to quell public unrest over immigration arrests in Los Angeles told The New York Times. “This is not what the military of our country was designed to do, at all.”

Troops who are ordered to do something illegal are put in a bind – so much so that some argue that troops themselves are harmed when given such orders. They are not trained in legal nuances, and they are conditioned to obey. Yet if they obey “manifestly unlawful” orders, they can be prosecuted. Some analysts fear that U.S. troops are ill-equipped to recognize this threshold.

Compelled to disobey

U.S. service members take an oath to uphold the Constitution. In addition, under Article 92 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the U.S. Manual for Courts-Martial, service members must obey lawful orders and disobey unlawful orders. Unlawful orders are those that clearly violate the U.S. Constitution, international human rights standards or the Geneva Conventions.

Service members who follow an illegal order can be held liable and court-martialed or subject to prosecution by international tribunals. Following orders from a superior is no defense.

Our poll, fielded between June 13 and June 30, 2025, shows that service members understand these rules. Of the 818 active-duty troops we surveyed, just 9% stated that they would “obey any order.” Only 9% “didn’t know,” and only 2% had “no comment.”

When asked to describe unlawful orders in their own words, about 25% of respondents wrote about their duty to disobey orders that were “obviously wrong,” “obviously criminal” or “obviously unconstitutional.”

Another 8% spoke of immoral orders. One respondent wrote that “orders that clearly break international law, such as targeting non-combatants, are not just illegal — they’re immoral. As military personnel, we have a duty to uphold the law and refuse commands that betray that duty.”

Just over 40% of respondents listed specific examples of orders they would feel compelled to disobey.

The most common unprompted response, cited by 26% of those surveyed, was “harming civilians,” while another 15% of respondents gave a variety of other examples of violations of duty and law, such as “torturing prisoners” and “harming U.S. troops.”

One wrote that “an order would be obviously unlawful if it involved harming civilians, using torture, targeting people based on identity, or punishing others without legal process.”

Soldiers, not lawyers

But the open-ended answers pointed to another struggle troops face: Some no longer trust U.S. law as useful guidance.

Writing in their own words about how they would know an illegal order when they saw it, more troops emphasized international law as a standard of illegality than emphasized U.S. law.

Others implied that acts that are illegal under international law might become legal in the U.S.

“Trump will issue illegal orders,” wrote one respondent. “The new laws will allow it,” wrote another. A third wrote, “We are not required to obey such laws.”

Several emphasized the U.S. political situation directly in their remarks, stating they’d disobey “oppression or harming U.S. civilians that clearly goes against the Constitution” or an order for “use of the military to carry out deportations.”

Still, the percentage of respondents who said they would disobey specific orders – such as torture – is lower than the percentage of respondents who recognized the responsibility to disobey in general.

This is not surprising: Troops are trained to obey and face numerous social, psychological and institutional pressures to do so. By contrast, most troops receive relatively little training in the laws of war or human rights law.

Political scientists have found, however, that having information on international law affects attitudes about the use of force among the general public. It can also affect decision-making by military personnel.

This finding was also borne out in our survey.

When we explicitly reminded troops that shooting civilians was a violation of international law, their willingness to disobey increased 8 percentage points.

Drawing the line

As my research with another scholar showed in 2020, even thinking about law and morality can make a difference in opposition to certain war crimes.

The preliminary results from our survey led to a similar conclusion. Troops who answered questions on “manifestly unlawful orders” before they were asked questions on specific scenarios were much more likely to say they would refuse those specific illegal orders.

When asked if they would follow an order to drop a nuclear bomb on a civilian city, for example, 69% of troops who received that question first said they would obey the order.

But when the respondents were asked to think about and comment on the duty to disobey unlawful orders before being asked if they would follow the order to bomb, the percentage who would obey the order dropped 13 points to 56%.

While many troops said they might obey questionable orders, the large number who would not is remarkable.

Military culture makes disobedience difficult: Soldiers can be court-martialed for obeying an unlawful order, or for disobeying a lawful one.

Yet between one-third to half of the U.S. troops we surveyed would be willing to disobey if ordered to shoot or starve civilians, torture prisoners or drop a nuclear bomb on a city.

The service members described the methods they would use. Some would confront their superiors directly. Others imagined indirect methods: asking questions, creating diversions, going AWOL, “becoming violently ill.”

Criminologist Eva Whitehead researched actual cases of troop disobedience of illegal orders and found that when some troops disobey – even indirectly – others can more easily find the courage to do the same.

Whitehead’s research showed that those who refuse to follow illegal or immoral orders are most effective when they stand up for their actions openly.

The initial results of our survey – coupled with a recent spike in calls to the GI Rights Hotline – suggest American men and women in uniform don’t want to obey unlawful orders.

Some are standing up loudly. Many are thinking ahead to what they might do if confronted with unlawful orders. And those we surveyed are looking for guidance from the Constitution and international law to determine where they may have to draw that line.

This story, initially published on Aug. 13, 2025, has been updated to include a reference to a video issued by Democratic members of Congress.

Zahra Marashi, an undergraduate research assistant at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, contributed to the research for this article.

Charli Carpenter directs Human Security Lab which has received funding from University of Massachusetts College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, the National Science Foundation, and the Lex International Fund of the Swiss Philanthropy Foundation.

Geraldine Santoso does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

House Democrats are jumping into an upcoming special election in Tennessee, dumping $1 million on an increasingly nationalized battle for a deep-red congressional seat as President Donald Trump gets involved in the race.

House Majority PAC, the super PAC aligned with the lower chamber’s Democratic leadership, announced plans on Friday to spend $1 million on TV and digital ads to boost state Rep. Aftyn Behn. The Tennessee Democrat faces Republican Matt Van Epps next month in a district Trump won by 22 points in 2024.

The spending represents a dramatic escalation for national Democrats, who have so far not spent significant cash on the long-shot race. Republicans have pumped far more — over $1.7 million — into it, including through the Trump-allied super PAC and the Club for Growth.

This week, Trump and Kamala Harris waded into the contest, with the president hosting a telephone rally for Van Epps, while Harris appeared at a canvass launch for Behn on Tuesday.

Privately, Democrats acknowledge it’s at best a narrow path to victory, but are voicing newfound optimism about their ability to win — or at least narrow past margins — on Republican turf after their consistent overperformance at the ballot box since Trump’s 2024 rout.

The Tennessee race marks the House Democrats’ super PAC’s first special election involvement this cycle.

Ahead of April special elections in Florida for two congressional seats in districts that Trump won by more than 30 points, Democratic candidates raised millions, mostly from online donors, but HMP and other Democratic super PACs steered clear. Republican-aligned super PACs spent more than $1 million on each race, and both Democratic candidates overperformed expectations, while still losing by roughly 15 points each.

Democratic enthusiasm is also showing up in the Tennessee candidates’ fundraising totals.

Behn raised just over $1 million since the start of October, according to a report her campaign filed with the Federal Election Commission on Thursday. More than half the total was from donors giving less than $200. Van Epps raised $590,000 over the same period, with nearly half his funds coming from other political committees.

​Politics

As the United States faces increasing incidents of book banning and threats of governmental intervention – as seen in the temporary suspension of TV host Jimmy Kimmel – the common reflex for many who want to safeguard free expression is to turn to the First Amendment and its free speech protections.

Yet, the First Amendment has not always been potent enough to protect the right to speak. The Cold War presented one such moment in American history, when the freedom of political expression collided with paranoia over communist infiltration.

In 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committee subpoenaed 10 screenwriters and directors to testify about their union membership and alleged communist associations. Labeled the Hollywood Ten, the defiant witnesses – Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Adrian Scott and Dalton Trumbo – refused to answer questions on First Amendment grounds. During his dramatic testimony, Lawson proclaimed his intent “to fight for the Bill of Rights,” which he argued the committee “was trying to destroy.”

They were all cited for contempt of Congress. Eight were sentenced to a year in federal prison, and two received six-month terms. Upon their release, they faced blacklisting in the industry. Some, like writer Dalton Trumbo, temporarily left the country.

As a researcher focused on the cultural cold war, I have examined the role the First Amendment played in the anti-communist hearings during the 1940s and ’50s.

The conviction and incarceration of the Hollywood Ten left a chilling effect on subsequent witnesses called to appear before congressional committees. It also established a period of repression historians now refer to as the Second Red Scare.

Although the freedom of speech is enshrined in the Constitution and prized by Americans, the story of the Second Red Scare shows that this freedom is even more fragile than it may now seem.

The Fifth Amendment communists

After the 1947 hearings, the term “unfriendly” became a label applied by the House Un-American Activities Committee and the press to the Hollywood Ten and any witnesses who refused to cooperate with the committee. These witnesses, who wanted to avoid the fate of the Hollywood Ten, began to shift away from the First Amendment as a legal strategy.

They chose instead to plead the Fifth Amendment, which grants people the right to protect themselves from self-incrimination. Many prominent artists during the 1950s, including playwright Lillian Hellman and singer and activist Paul Robeson, opted to invoke the Fifth when called before the committee and asked about their political affiliations.

The Fifth Amendment shielded hundreds of “unfriendly” witnesses from imprisonment, including artists, teachers and federal workers. However, it did not save them from job loss and blacklisting.

While they could avoid contempt citations by pleading the Fifth, they could not erase the stain of perceived guilt. This legal approach became so widespread that U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the country’s leading anti-communist crusader, disparaged these witnesses as “Fifth Amendment Communists” and boasted of purging their ranks from the federal government.

From Fifth back to First

In 1953, the physicist Albert Einstein became instrumental in revitalizing the force of the First Amendment as a rhetorical and legal tactic in the congressional hearings. Having fled Germany after the Nazis came to power, Einstein took a position at Princeton in 1933 and became an important voice in American politics.

Einstein’s philosophical battle against McCarthyism began with a letter to a Brooklyn high school teacher named William Frauenglass.

In April of that year, Frauenglass was subpoenaed to appear before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, “the Senate counterpart” of the House Un-American Activities Committee, to testify about his involvement in an intercultural education seminar. After the hearing, in which Frauenglass declined to speak about his political affiliations, he risked potential termination from his position and wrote to Einstein seeking support.

In his response, Einstein urged Frauenglass and all intellectuals to enact a “revolutionary” form of complete “noncooperation” with the committee.

While Einstein advised noncompliance, he also acknowledged the potential risk: “Every intellectual who is called before one of the committees ought to refuse to testify, i.e., he must be prepared for jail and economic ruin, in short, for the sacrifice of his personal welfare in the interest of the cultural welfare of his country.”

Frauenglass shared his story with the press, and Einstein’s letter was published in full in The New York Times on June 12, 1953. It was also quoted in local papers around the country.

One week later, Frauenglass was fired from his job.

After learning about Einstein’s public position, McCarthy labeled the Nobel laureate “an enemy of America.” That didn’t stop Einstein’s campaign for freedom of expression. He continued to encourage witnesses to rely on the First Amendment.

When the engineer Albert Shadowitz received a subpoena in 1953 to appear before McCarthy’s Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, to answer questions about alleged ties to the Communist Party, he traveled to Einstein’s home to seek out the physicist’s advice. After consulting with Einstein, Shadowitz opted for the First Amendment over the Fifth Amendment.

On Dec. 16, 1953, Shadowitz informed the committee that he had received counsel from Einstein. He then voiced his opposition to the hearing on the grounds of the First Amendment: “I will refuse to answer any question which invades my rights to think as I please or which violates my guarantees of free speech and association.”

He was cited for contempt in August 1954 and indicted that November, facing a potential year in prison and US$1,000 fine. As an indicator of McCarthy’s diminishing power, the charge was thrown out in July 1955 by a federal judge.

The triumph of dissent

Well-known public figures also began to turn away from the Fifth Amendment as a legal tactic and to draw on the First Amendment.

In August 1955, when the folk musician Pete Seeger testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee, he voiced his rejection of the Fifth Amendment defense during the hearing. Seeger asserted that he wanted to use his testimony to call into question the nature of the inquiry altogether.

Pleading the protection of the First Amendment, Seeger refused “to answer any questions” related to his “political beliefs” and instead interrogated the committee’s right to ask such questions “under such compulsion as this.”

When the playwright Arthur Miller was subpoenaed by the committee in 1956, he also refused to invoke the Fifth. Both were cited for contempt. Seeger was sentenced to a year in prison. Miller was given the option to pay a $500 dollar fine or spend 30 days in jail.

As Seeger and Miller fought their appeals in court, McCarthy’s popularity continued to wane, and public sentiment began to shift.

Prompted by Einstein, the noncompliant witnesses in the 1950s reshaped the public discussion, refocusing the conversation on the importance of freedom of expression rather than the fears of imagined communist infiltration.

Although the First Amendment failed to keep the Hollywood Ten out of prison, it ultimately prevailed. Unlike the Hollywood Ten, both Miller and Seeger won their appeals. Miller spent no time in prison and Seeger only one day in jail. Miller’s conviction was reversed in 1958, Seeger’s in 1962. The Second Red Scare was over.

As the Second Red Scare shows, when free speech is under attack, strategic compliance may be useful for individuals. However, bold and courageous acts of dissent are critical for protecting First Amendment rights for everyone.

I met Pete Seeger personally while directing a documentary film about his environmental legacy.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Congress on Nov. 18, 2025, passed legislation that calls on the Justice Department to release records related to Jeffrey Epstein, the late convicted sex offender. Those records on the federal investigation of Epstein and his accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, have brought renewed attention to sex trafficking. Alfonso Serrano, a politics editor at The Conversation, spoke with Kate Price, an associate research scientist at the Wellesley Centers for Women at Wellesley College, where she studies child sexual exploitation and child sex trafficking policy.

What is child sex trafficking and how does it differ from other kinds of trafficking?

It is a child being traded for sex via force, fraud or coercion. These are children who are under the age of 18. Often what happens, in terms of victim blaming, if a child is, say, 15, 16, 17, there’s this level of blame from perpetrators, the media, relatives, law enforcement, jurors: “She knew what she was doing.” I recently heard this with the Epstein files back in the news: “He wasn’t into like 8-year-olds. … There’s a difference between a 15-year-old and a 5-year-old.” That’s not true. Children cannot make decisions that adults can. Neuroscience shows that children’s brains are not developed until their mid 20s. Children do not have the same decision-making capacity. That very vulnerability is what is preyed upon by perpetrators.

Why do we not use terms like “child prostitution” anymore, and why does language matter?

In the late 1990s and early aughts, at the beginning of the anti-human trafficking movement, people did use the term child prostitution. In fact, I used it in a white paper that I did, and I’m a survivor. But once we really adopted and embraced the terminology of force, fraud and coercion of human trafficking, that gave us a new frame to think of the power dynamics that are involved in the commercial sexual exploitation of children. This phrasing captures the true essence of what is happening within child sex trafficking.

This is not a child somehow deciding that they’re going to go out and trade sex for money, heat, food, anything of value. This is a case of perpetrators, whether they are family members or nonfamily traffickers, who are preying on the vulnerability of children who have often been sexually abused prior to their commercial sexual exploitation. This prior abuse adds another layer of vulnerability.

How do Epstein’s actions fit into the paradigm of trafficking – is he a classic case or an unusual one?

Jeffrey Epstein is not unique. This is absolutely a classic case, for four primary reasons. Child sex trafficking perpetrators are primarily white men, with wealth and power. Epstein was, granted, among the uber rich and really powerful men. But power is relative to whatever context in which a child is being exploited. The most powerful person in a small town may not be a billionaire like Epstein, but they have disposable income and high socioeconomic status for the area, or they may hold a prominent position in government, church or a civic organization.

The Epstein case is also not unique in that victims are often dehumanized, by perpetrators and in the media. They are blamed, even though they are children who are developmentally incapable of making adult choices. There are transcripts of Maxwell calling the girls “trash.” These are seen as disposable children, not worthy of protections. And they have already been dehumanized within our culture prior to exploitation, whether it be through poverty, lack of educational or employment opportunities, or prior sexual violence. That makes them even more vulnerable to perpetrators such as Epstein and Maxwell, who are looking to prey upon those vulnerabilities.

Third, traffickers often insulate themselves from detection and trafficking charges by having others, such as women or girls, recruiting victims for them, which is exactly what Epstein did. Lastly, traffickers and buyers often plea down their trafficking charges. That results in low trafficking prosecution rates. They plea down from a charge like trafficking of a minor to assault, so this does not count toward trafficking prosecution rates. Epstein did exactly this in 2008 when he accepted prosecutor Alex Acosta’s nonprosecution agreement to plead guilty to two lesser Florida state-level prostitution charges rather than facing the multiple federal child sex trafficking charges for which Epstein was being investigated. This ability to use their wealth and power hides the truth of what is happening.

What systems allow sex trafficking to happen, and how can we change those systems?

Law enforcement often looks the other way. In the Epstein case, one of the victims had reached out to the FBI decades ago and nothing happened. It’s really been the persistence of the survivors, saying people really need to look at this.

Child sex trafficking is not a political issue. It’s one of the few bipartisan issues in our country that is so culturally divided. Yet Americans need to acknowledge that perpetrators comes from all political affiliations, they come from all races, socioeconomic status. As a culture, we really need to not blame victims and survivors. These are children who are being manipulated and violated. So recognizing the truth of power differences between perpetrators and victims is something that we as a culture very much need to do. By supporting victims, we can use our power – as relatives, jurors, constituents, elected officials – to hold traffickers and buyers to account. Victim-blaming creates a diversion that cements perpetrators’ ability to exploit and abuse children without fear of detection.

In terms of legislation, most states in the country still retain the right to criminalize sexually exploited minors, either through arrests or prosecution. These are laws that all states have considered since 2007, when New York was the first state to introduce a Safe Harbor law.

In Massachusetts, where I live, law enforcement retains the right to arrest or prosecute a minor for prostitution. That often doesn’t happen. But the reason law enforcement says it needs to have these laws is because it encourages children to get services. It’s a leverage point.

But oftentimes children do not trust law enforcement. And often for good reason. Some law enforcement are perpretrators. Other times, law enforcement tells sex-trafficked minors, “We’re doing this for your protection, we’re going to lock you up.” Both instances are deeply traumatizing and lead to mistrust of the police. That being said, so many extraordinary law enforcement agents are committed to supporting child sex trafficking victims and holding perpetrators to account.

Much of this retraumatization happens because local and state governments do not have the money for social services, trauma-informed, child sex trafficking-specific services, and housing opportunities for children to be able to heal. What we have is a robust criminal legal system. So, until we have a robust system that can support children who have been trafficked, sex trafficking is going to continue, in my experience.

Any last thoughts?

We need to acknowledge low prosecution rates of child sexual abuse cases, that 14% of all reported – just reported – child sexual abuse perpetrators are convicted or plead guilty. Similarly, in terms of adult rape charges, 1% of cases end in a conviction or guilty plea. So much of this lack of perpetrator accountability comes through this employment of plea deals and dehumanizing and retraumatizing victims during legal proceedings.

So we need to acknowledge when our criminal-legal system is not doing justice to victims whatsoever, and they’re allowing perpetrators to walk free. In the Epstein case, we’re focused on a few people, while hundreds of perpetrators continue to walk free. By employing these tactics, predators will continue to use the societal silence and misperceptions to their advantage. If it takes a village to raise a child, it also takes a village to sexually exploit a child.

Kate Price does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Larry Summers once drove Cornel West out of Harvard in a very public fight. Now, Summers is back in the spotlight, and West can’t help but point out the irony.

“There’s a certain level of, not just hypocrisy, but a certain kind of chickens coming home to roost here,” West said in an interview Wednesday. “It’s just sad that [Summers] has been preoccupied with the 11th commandment, ‘Thou shalt not get caught,’ rather than the other 10.”

Last week, a tranche of newly released emails revealed that Summers had, over the course of a decade, corresponded with the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, including soliciting romantic advice as he pursued an extramarital affair. This week, Summers announced a retreat from public life, including stepping away from his teaching duties at Harvard.

Two decades ago, Summers chastised West for engaging in behavior that could be deemed “embarrassing” to the university or could interfere with his teaching, such as engaging in politics and recording a rap CD. The feud led to West’s resignation from Harvard.

Since leaving Harvard in 2002, West, a public intellectual and activist, has taken faculty positions at Princeton and Union Theological Seminary; he published eight books and recorded a pair of hip-hop albums; he ran for president in 2024.

West, reached by telephone, seemed unsurprised by the revelations that Epstein considered himself Summers’ “wing man.” (At the time of correspondence, Epstein had already been sent to prison on state charges of soliciting prostitution from someone under the age of 18.)

“He’s a neoliberal gangster, the way Trump’s a neofascist gangster,” West said of Summers. “There’s not a lot of integrity, honesty and decency. There is a lot of cold-heartedness and mean-spiritedness in both of them, even though they come from different ideological camps.”

West, a devout Christian, quickly qualified his statement. “I don’t say that in order to trash them,” he said. “I think that they both could be better human beings, but they don’t seem to be interested in it too much.”

West’s much-publicized feud with Summers began shortly after Summers’ arrival to Cambridge in 2001. Per West’s account, chronicled in his 2004 book “Democracy Matters,” Summers, the newly installed Harvard president, summoned West — then a university professor in African American studies — to his office and chastised him for his political engagement, for recording a hip-hop CD, for contributing to grade inflation and for not producing philosophically rigorous academic work. He said West needed to “learn to be a good citizen at Harvard and focus on the academic needs of students, not the wages of workers,” per West’s account.

Summers “questioned my academic accomplishments and my political affiliations,” West later wrote, “without bothering either to read any of my work or to develop an understanding of how it has been regarded by the wider academic community.”

West claimed Summers apologized to him “more than once,” but Summers went on to tell The New York Times he had not apologized. “I then knew just what an unprincipled power player I was dealing with,” West wrote, calling him “a bull in a china shop, a bully in a difficult and delicate situation, an arrogant man, and an ineffective leader.”

Does that characterization still stand, two decades later? West thinks so. “The sad thing is that he, like Trump, has been able to get away with it for so long,” West said Wednesday. “Anytime you have that kind of gangsta behavior with impunity, no accountability, there’s no answerability. He doesn’t take responsibility up until now.”

That responsibility came by way of a terse statement, released Monday, in which Summers acknowledged he is “deeply ashamed” of his actions and decided he would “be stepping back from public commitments as one part of my broader effort to rebuild trust and repair relationships with the people closest to me.” On Wednesday, he announced he would resign from OpenAI’s board.

When West spoke to POLITICO Wednesday evening, Summer’s resignation from his teaching duties at Harvard were not yet public, even though the university was facing increasing pressure — including from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a former Harvard Law professor — to dump him.

West wasn’t so convinced that Summers should have been ousted from Harvard.

“I think people should be able to teach at Harvard who have a variety of different degrees of moral character,” West said. “I don’t think you have to be St. Francis of Assisi or have the spirit of Fannie Lou Hamer to teach at Harvard. … I always give Brother Summers, and anybody else, a chance to just choose to be a better person. He’s still alive. He can bounce back.”

It’s a “sad thing,” West continued, “when you have professors who are willing to hang out with gangsters like Epstein, and therefore, all of the criticism that’s moral and spiritual he deserves. I don’t know that the inference means that he can just no longer teach at Harvard or any other place. I’m a little reluctant to move in that direction. I tend to come out of the Black freedom struggle, which says, lift every voice, which makes me a very strong libertarian.”

​Politics