The Full Context of the Tucker-Cruz

Confrontation Makes It Even Worse

By Joy-Ann Reid

Jun 19, 2025 - So many people, including myself, are sharing this very telling, quite humiliating exchange between Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Tucker Carlson, on Tucker’s podcast.

Video:  Massive Anti-Israel Protests In Tehran, Missile Strikes Intensify On Eight Day

Hundreds of Thousands March Against

US-Backed Israeli Aggression in Tehran

'Since day one of these strikes, we've seen this strong sense of anger from ordinary citizens. Now they're taking to the streets to express that.'

By Jake Johnson

Common Dreams

Jun 20, 2025 - Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of Tehran and other cities across Iran on Friday to protest Israel's illegal and escalating assault as the U.S.—Israel's top ally and arms supplier—considers entering the war, which killed or wounded more than 2,600 Iranians during its first week.

Reporting from Tehran, Al Jazeera's Tohid Asadi called Friday's demonstra-tions "unprecedentedly large."

"We have to keep in mind that a considerable proportion of Tehran's population has decided to get out of the city amid the attacks, but still we see huge numbers," said Asadi. "Since day one of these strikes, we've seen this strong sense of anger from ordinary citizens. Now they're taking to the streets to express that."

Protests also broke out in the capitals of Iraq and Lebanon as Israel and Iran traded missile strikes, and Iran's foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, arrived in Geneva for talks with European Union and United Kingdom officials.

In an interview ahead of the talks, Araghchi called the United States "a partner in this crime" and said that Iran is unwilling to engage in negotiations "until this aggression stops."

Citing an unnamed senior Iranian official, Reuters reported that Iran "was ready to discuss limitations on uranium enrichment but that any proposal for zero enrichment—not being able to enrich uranium at all—would be rejected, 'especially now under Israel's strikes.'" ...Read More

Photo: LA Protestors against ICE raids

From the Streets of LA to the National Stage:

The Left Must Win the Cultural War

Trump’s war on dissent can only be defeated by a left that challenges the values sustaining authoritarianism.

By Henry A. Giroux

Truthout

June 20, 2025 - On June 6, resistance ignited in the streets of Los Angeles to confront the Trump regime’s brutal campaign against immigrants, enforced by the brutality of ICE agents and the machinery of mass deportation. In a chilling escalation, Trump branded the protesters “insurrectionists” and threatened the use of military force — turning dissent into a crime and protest into a pretext for repression.

Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff, called Los Angeles “occupied territory,” adding, “We’ve been saying for years this is a fight to save civilization.”

This is not merely the rhetoric of strongman fantasies; it is the language of fascist ambition, a calculated pretext to invoke the Insurrection Act and erect a police state.

Beneath this chilling facade lies something far more ominous: the weaponization of the war on immigrants as a means to orchestrate ethnic cleansing, veiled under the apparatus of law and the grotesque spectacle of state power. Moreover, as Kristi Noem and Trump have blatantly outlined, their assault on immigrants extends beyond individual lives — it’s a direct attack on the U.S.’s largest cities, like Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, which stand as Democratic Party strongholds. When they claim to be liberating these urban centers from “socialists,” they are not just declaring war on ideological foes, they are also setting the stage for a fascist takeover, one rooted in division and destruction.

This is not about upholding law and order; it is the calculated weaponization of authoritarian culture to escalate state violence, instill terror, criminalize dissent, and legitimize white nationalist ideology. By framing defiance as treason, Trump attempts to cloak his own authoritarian crimes while constructing a political climate where any challenge to power is met with brutal retaliation. As Michelle Goldberg noted in The New York Times, “This is what autocracy looks like.”

The authoritarian dream is rooted in the belief that state violence should serve as the primary tool of governance.

When the guardrails of democracy are dismantled, violence shifts from being a last resort to a governing principle. This is precisely what unfolded in Los Angeles, where Trump deployed the National Guard and Marines to crush protests against his mass deportation policies, while mobilizing ICE as a modern-day Gestapo. What cannot be ignored is that the militarization of civil society is not merely an overreaction or illegal response to a fabricated insurrection; it is the very foundation upon which martial law is established, paving the way for a fully realized fascist state.

A rising to defend democracy

What unfolded in LA was not an insurrection; it was the people rising in defense of democracy. The true insurrection happened on January 6, with Trump as its chief architect. Yet once again, violence was being used not to protect democracy, but to crush it.

What we are witnessing is a spectacle of domination. The deployment of troops, the vigilante targeting of Democratic lawmakers, the planned grotesquerie of Trump’s military parade, and Trump’s order for ICE to target cities led by Democrats are not isolated events — they are scenes in the same authoritarian drama. Together, they represent a fusion of militarism and national identity, designed to normalize cruelty, fetishize strength, and recast obedience as patriotism. As Susan Sontag once warned, fascism cloaks violence in the aesthetics of spectacle — making submission not only palatable, but seductive. This is the pornography of power — where culture and repression merge in a theater of fear, scripted to extinguish political imagination and render dissent illegible.

If we are to reclaim democracy not as a slogan but as a living, breathing ethos, we must begin with culture.

In this moment of escalating violence, Trump’s use of force is more than a show of control — it is a pedagogical performance meant to normalize repression and etch it into public consciousness. This is fascist aesthetics reimagined for a media-saturated age, where power must not only be wielded but displayed as performance. Here, domination is choreographed, televised, and turned into a civic lesson.

The spectacle becomes a tutorial in submission, transforming images of state violence into instruments of mass indoctrination. Culture is not summoned to illuminate reality but to obliterate it, replacing historical memory with myth, dissent with loyalty, and resistance with silence. The convergence of Trump’s militarized crackdown in Los Angeles and his self-aggrandizing parade of force reveals a machinery of destruction no longer hidden but flaunted, a grotesque exhibition engineered to numb the senses and turn state terror into a national ritual. ...Read More

Operation Wetback 2.0: Now With Extra Hatred

By Desi Cortez

The Black Commentator

Why doesn’t Trump just cut the crap, rip off the red hat, and call it what they really call it behind closed MAGA doors?

Operation Wetback was a campaign by the U.S. government, primarily in 1954, to deport undocumented Mexican immigrants, particularly in the Southwest operation utilizing military/Gestapo-style tactics to remove Mexican immigrants - some of them American citizens - from the United States.

Yeah, that one. The phrase so racist, so dehumanizing, so soaked in Jim Crow-era bile that it makes your spine itch just hearing it. And yet - it’s the unofficial title of what’s being whispered, plotted, and now outright implemented in the darkest corners of MAGA Land.

Don’t believe me? Check the headlines.

“LA Public Schools to Shield Graduation Ceremonies from ICE Raids.”

 You read that right. In the Year of Our Lord 2025, Los Angeles - one of the most diverse cities in the country - has to build a perimeter of human decency just to protect immigrant families from being snatched off school grounds while their kids walk the stage. Imagine needing a tactical defense line to graduate high school in the so-called land of the free. That’s not policy. That’s a domestic counterterrorism maneuver by your own damn government.

Who does this? Who thinks this stuff is not only acceptable but patriotic? Who likes this stuff? Who supports it? Who defends it?

Well, here’s your answer, and brace yourself - it’s not a mystery. It’s not subtle. It’s not even hidden anymore. There are two things MAGA is bankrupt of: a conscience and shame, they can’t be shamed ….that’s a trifling combination, no?

It’s the cult of Make America Great/White Again.

The same folks who think “compassion” is code for weakness. The same crowd who mourned when statues of Confederate traitors came down but cheer when brown babies get put in cages. They minimize it, rationalize it, meme it, and then spit-polish it into “border security.” And if you ask them? It’s not racism - it’s just “law and order,” baby.

Law and order. Right. The same phrase Bull Connor used before turning fire hoses on Black children. The same excuse ICE uses before they separate families at the border and throw toddlers in cages with mylar blankets. The same dog whistle-turned-foghorn that Trump has blasted from every podium he’s ever slithered behind.

And now, we’ve witnessed these ghouls construct graduation perimeters.

Let that marinate: Young people are throwing their caps into the air while ICE agents lurk in the shadows like damn wedding crashers from hell. And we’re supposed to pretend this is about protecting our borders? Please.

This is state-sponsored trauma. This is fascism cosplaying as homeland security. This is American cruelty on full display - streaming live, in HD, and proudly rebranded with a red, white, and blue bow.

Now I ask - am I lying?

Tell me I’m wrong. I dare you. I double-dog dare you. Because history says otherwise.

Let’s do a little roll call:

1. Japanese Internment Camps.

2. The Chinese Exclusion Act.

3. Operation Wetback (yes, that was its actual name - Google it, I’ll wait).

4. The Trail of Tears.

5 The Fugitive Slave Act.

6. Plantations - Cotton/tobacco,sugar you name the cash crop an industrial empire built with the enslaved blood, sweat, tears and years of people’s lives.

7 Reservations for Indigenous people

Cruelty isn’t an accident here. It’s not a glitch in the system. It is the system.

This is America’s operating system - Colonial Version 1.0, with racist updates delivered every election cycle.

But let’s not kid ourselves - it’s not just a few fringe hillbillies clutching shotguns and Confederate flags. No. The architects of this new era of terror are mainstream, buttoned-up, Bible-waving, regulation-cutting, golf-club Republicans. And before you even blink, yes, I mean White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, thank you very much.

They used to call themselves “Conservative.” Then “TEA Party.” Now it’s just “MAGA,” but it all spells the same four-letter word: FEAR. Fear of change. Fear of melanin. Fear of not being in control of every damn thing.

And that fear? It’s weaponized now. It’s the fuel for policies that punish the poor, criminalize the desperate, and terrorize the vulnerable.

Don’t get it twisted - this isn’t about national security. This is all about national purity. It’s about building a country where white grievance is government policy. And Trump, bless his dead-eyed soul, is just the mascot. He’s the bloated, gold-plated blow horn screaming what generations of White America have whispered for centuries.

And if we’re being honest - when folks show you who they are, best believe them.

This isn’t some shocking new development. This is an encore. A rerun. A sequel to the American Horror Story that never really ended.

We act surprised, like ICE just started doing this last week. But no - this is what America does. It’s what it’s always done. The only thing new is the way they’re marketing it now. They’ve updated the packaging. Added some QR codes. Tossed in a few evangelical talking points and Fox News chyron slogans. But the ingredients are the same. Racism, sexism, classim, basic xenophobia and white supremacy

And while we’re over here clapping at graduations and passing out diplomas, the stormtroopers in khakis and Ray-Bans are circling the parking lot, waiting for a family to exhale just long enough for them to strike.

So again, I ask: Who likes this … you know what?

Your neighbor. Your congressman. Your pastor. The guy two cubicles down who quotes Reagan like scripture but locks his doors when brown kids ride past on bikes.

They love it. They love every inch of it. Because it makes them feel powerful. It makes them feel safe. It reminds them that, even as the demographics shift and the truth grows louder - they can still win by breaking people.

So no, Trump doesn’t need to be subtle. He doesn’t need to dog whistle anymore. He’s got a bullhorn. And MAGA isn’t hiding this agenda - they’re selling it in 4K, with stadium rallies and PowerPoints.

Call it what it is: Operation Wetback 2.0: The Graduation Blitz.

Next, the Independence Day Raids: Yes. Unless we name it, shame it, and torch it under the blinding light of truth, we’ll keep living in a country where your child’s biggest graduation fear isn’t tripping on stage - it’s whether they’ll still have a parent to hug afterward.

Absolutely - I am pouring gasoline on that fire, I want to torch the hypocrisy in broad daylight.

Welcome to the United States of White People. Now do you believe me?

Desi Cortez also writes for BlackAthlete.com & NegusWhoRead.com. ...Read More

Photo: New York City mayoral candidate Brad Lander is placed under arrest by masked federal agents on Tuesday, June 17, 2025, in New York.

Masked Feds Arrest New York City Mayoral Candidate Brad Lander

The city's comptroller was standing up for a New Yorker after an immigration court date, and demanded to see a warrant when he was handcuffed

By Nikki McCann Ramirez

Rolling Stone

June 17, 2025 - Masked federal agents handcuffed and detained yet another Democratic lawmaker on Tuesday, this time in New York City. 

Brad Lander, a mayoral candidate and New York City’s current comptroller, was arrested by federal agents, many of them masked, while accompanying another individual out of an immigration hearing at a courtroom in Lower Manhattan. Lander was released hours later.

In a video of the arrest that has gone viral, Lander has his arms linked with the man and demands proof that the arresting agents are following the law. “I would like to see the judicial warrant,” Lander repeatedly says as a gaggle of officers — including ICE agents and other members of federal law enforcement —ushered the pair down a hallway of a federal immigration court building. An officer can be heard saying “take him in” before Lander is pushed up against the wall by a smaller huddle of men, several of whom do not appear to be wearing regular uniforms, and handcuffed. Lander has been escorting migrants to and from immigration hearings in New York for several weeks now. 

“You don’t have the authority to arrest U.S. citizens asking for a judicial warrant,” Lander said as he was cuffed. “I’m not obstructing, I’m standing right here in the hallway.” Hours later, Lander exited the courthouse in the company of New York’s Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul. 

In a statement to reporters following his release, Lander said that the charges against him had been dropped. “You guys all saw it on video, so you know exactly what happened,” Lander said. “I certainly did not assault an officer.”

“I’m going to sleep in my bed tonight, safe with my family […] I’ve got a lawyer. I don’t have to worry about my due process rights,” Lander told reporters and the crowd of supporters protesting his arrest. “At that elevator, I was separated from someone named Edgardo […] Edgardo is in ICE detention, and he’s not going to sleep in his bed tonight. So far as I know, he has no lawyer. He has been stripped of his due process rights.” 

“So I will be fine, but Edgardo is not going to be fine, and the rule of law is not fine, and our constitutional democracy is not fine,” Lander continued. 

Governor Hochul, who called the arrest “bullshit,” earlier this afternoon told gathered protesters that earlier in the day she had been “walking the streets of little Haiti” to talk to migrant New Yorkers who were “scared” about their future under the Trump administration’s immigration policies. 

The detention comes in the heat of the primary race for mayor, to be held on June 24. Zohran Mamdani, one of Lander’s opponents in the mayoral race, wrote a social media post in solidarity, insisting that Lander’s arrest “is fascism” and that “all New Yorkers must speak in one voice. Release him now.”

In a statement from the Department of Homeland Security, Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin announced that Lander had been “arrested for assaulting law enforcement and impeding a federal officer.” She added: “No one is above the law, and if you lay a hand on a law enforcement officer, you will face consequences.”

Trump’s administration has brought similar charges against Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.). The member of Congress was indicted earlier this month after the administration accused her of assaulting an ICE officer after an oversight visit at a New Jersey detention center. The tour of the facility descended into chaos after agents arrested Newark, New Jersey, mayor Ras Baraka on charges of trespassing that were later dropped. McIver denies the accusations against her. ...Read More

Photo: HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently dismissed all 17 members of the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel and named eight new people to the committee.Mark Schiefelbein/AP

Radical Opacity and RFK Jr's Health Care Firings

The new leadership at FDA unveils a program that could lead to rapid approval of new drugs without public input.

By Merrill Goozner

Gooznews

Jun 18, 2025 - HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at first promised “radical transparency” at all agencies within his department. Then he fired almost all the freedom of information staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health; cancelled meetings of FDA and CDC advisory committees that review vaccines and vaccine policies; and held meetings of his Make America Healthy Again Commission behind closed doors.

Marty Makary, the new head of FDA, boldly promised to purge all physicians and scientists on the agency’s 49 outside advisory committees with ties to private industry. The move, he said, heralded a new era where advisory committees with a diversity of opinions would offer advice free from industry influence.

Then, on Tueday, he announced a new program that will set up internal committees to rapidly approve experimental drugs within two months of receiving a company’s application. Given the short time frame, this will effectively bypass the agency’s advisory committee process.

The usual FDA review process often includes holding advisory committee meetings, especially when the clinical trial evidence on safety and efficacy for an experimental therapy is borderline. The review usually takes anywhere from ten months to a year.

As for speeding up the process, the agency already offers priority review vouchers for new drugs that meet unmet medical needs, treat rare diseases or are considered a breakthrough therapy. Those vouchers can then be used on any future drug application even if it doesn’t meet any of those criteria. It can also be sold to another company seeking rapid approval of a drug that isn’t critical.

Some products receiving priority reviews by agency scientists also benefit from the FDA’s accelerated approval process, where approvals are based an improvement in surrogate markers — biomarkers like elevated amyloid plaques in Alzheimer’s patients or tumor shrinkage in cancer patients that aren’t necessarily associated with a better outcomes when the final results of those clinical trials are in (which sometimes are never submitted because the drug companies fail to complete the trials).

The new program layers on an immediate rapid review to any company developing a new drug or device that meets one of four criteria: Does it address a health crisis; deliver an innovative cure; meet an unmet public health need; or increase the nation’s domestic drug manufacturing capacity?

The first three criteria are so vague as to be essentially meaningless. Virtually every drug and device company claims their new products are innovative and address unmet needs, even when they’re the sixth drug in a class that treats an already well-managed condition.

Giving out favors rather than regulating

As Aaron Kesselheim, a professor of medicine and member of the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School, told STAT News yesterday: “It sounds like a way of giving out political favors rather than actually meaningfully changing or enhancing the regulatory process.”

The internal process for making decisions after awarding these new priority reviews will be equally problematic. Makary, a surgical oncologist, plans to convene experts from various FDA offices for a “1-day” team review that he compared to the tumor boards hospitals use when faced with a critically ill cancer patient. “This voucher harnesses that model to deliver timely decisions for drug developers,” he said in his statement.

That ignores the fact that many new drugs to treat chronic conditions like dementia, cancer, autoimmune disorders, and rare genetic diseases are often barely effective. They often have troubling safety profiles requiring careful weighing of minimal rewards against serious risks. These are the areas where FDA reviewers are most in need of advice from outside experts through the advisory committee process.

Prior to advisory committee meetings, the FDA publishes much of the data submitted by the companies seeking a new drug approval. It posts on its website its own analysis as well as the companies’ presentations of the data, which the public can review prior to the meeting. The meeting itself — often stretching over several days — are open sessions where the advisors hear from clinicians who treat patients suffering from the disease as well as consumer and safety advocates who urge the agency to give careful consideration to the risk-reward ratio.

Will these one-day “tumor board”-like sessions be open to the public? Will internal documents be published? Will they hear from interested parties?

If the goal of the new program is to shorten the FDA’s review time, the agency needn’t come up with another work around. The simplest solution is to hire additional staff.

Large staff cuts in the works

Instead, HHS at the urging of Elon Musk’s DOGE and the Russell Voight’s Office of Management and Budget announced the FDA will be laying off 3,500 of its 19,000 staffers, exempting for the time being new product reviewers. Why not use the savings to hire more internal reviewers? That’s the surest path to shortening review times.

This new program also ignores the fact that the FDA is already heavily dependent on industry user fees to fund its review staff, which is the biggest conflict of interest at the agency. Why don’t Kennedy and Makary go to Voight and his boss in the Oval Office to demand they include more taxpayer funding for FDA reviewers instead of giving more tax breaks to the wealthy and large corporations? ...Read More

Photo: A view of debris and damage from Hurricane Milton in St. Pete Beach, Florida, October 2024

Climate Change Will Bankrupt the Country

Climate-fueled disasters cost America almost a trillion dollars over the last year, far more than economists predicted.

By Ryan Cooper

The American Prospect

June 20, 2025 - Back in 2018, Yale economist William Nordhaus won the Nobel Prize for his work on his Dynamic Integrated Climate-Economy (DICE) model. The idea was to set up a picture of the global economy, add on some estimates of the economic costs of warming with a “damage function,” plus estimates of what climate policy would cost, and all adjusted with a discount term to account for how people value current production more than future production (according to economists, at least). That way you can calculate an “optimal” climate policy in the form of a carbon tax that would precisely compensate for warming damages without burdening the economy too much.

At the time, I wrote an extensive critique of the model, focused mainly on its damage function. For this, Nordhaus used a smooth quadratic equation, meaning it ruled out the possibility of any sharp upward breaks from tipping-point effects, like the Arctic Ocean becoming permanently ice-free or Siberian permafrost melting and releasing massive amounts of methane. Following Nordhaus’s advice to let warming drift up to 3.5 degrees Celsius, I argued, would be taking a hideous risk.

Fast-forward seven years, and it turns out that I was wrong: The economic damage of climate change is already much, much worse than DICE predicted, and the economic cost of policy to fix climate change is actually negative. I would like to apologize for the error.

On the first point, Bloomberg Intelligence has the details in a new report estimating that climate disasters cost America $955 billion in the 12-month period ending May 1 this year, or about 3 percent of GDP. This mainly comes from skyrocketing home insurance premiums, which have doubled since 2017, as well as expensive weather disasters, like the one-two punch of Hurricanes Helene and Milton ($113 billion) and the Los Angeles fires ($65 billion).

Now, some caveats are in order. This is just one year in one country, and damages are surely not uniform across the globe. Additionally, much of the disaster response shows up as more spending that is included in GDP. But undoubtedly most of it must be counted as damage, as it involves spending to replace structures or infrastructure that otherwise would have gone to productive business, particularly in the context of a low-unemployment, high-interest-rate economy. As the Bloomberg analysis argues, disaster spending is “crowding out consumer discretionary spending elsewhere in the economy and putting pressure on local governments to prioritize disaster repair over other infrastructure projects.”

Ultimately, the Bloomberg analysis is very straightforward and plausible. Home insurance is obviously in crisis because of weather disasters that are obviously caused by climate change. And however you slice it, 3 percent of GDP is wildly outside the range of the 2018 DICE model, which predicts a hit of just 0.5 percent of GDP from 1.47 degrees Celsius of warming (the global average of 2024). If we’re off by a factor of six in the world’s second-largest economy, then something is seriously amiss.

On the second point about the costs of climate action, we have a natural experiment in the form of Donald Trump attempting to tear up President Biden’s climate policy. A recent analysis from Yale’s REPEAT Project estimates that should this effort succeed, by 2035 it will raise American household and business energy costs by more than $50 billion per year, or $270 to $415 per household; reduce capital investment in electricity generation and clean fuels production by $1 trillion; threaten $522 billion in existing investment in clean energy and manufacturing; end the battery manufacturing boom; and seriously hinder new electricity generation projects, thus increasing average electricity bills by about 9 percent by 2030, or up to 17 percent in some states, including Pennsylvania and Texas. An analysis by Energy Innovation estimated that by 2030, Trump would destroy 1.7 million jobs and reduce U.S. GDP by $320 billion per year.

Renewables are the cheapest

The reason is obvious: Renewable energy is now the cheapest kind of energy, and it’s getting cheaper every year. Just since 2018, the price of lithium batteries has fallen by 47 percent; the price of solar panels has fallen by 35 percent. New green technology using that ever-cheaper power to produce carbon-free concrete, steel, and so on will clearly drive global economic growth for the rest of this century at least. Trump’s plan to force Americans to keep paying for uneconomical coal plants is not unlike the Soviet obsession with filth-spewing heavy industry that was already outdated by the 1950s. Trump’s administration will cede the industries of the future to China and Europe for the foreseeable future.

To Nordhaus’s credit, he published an updated version of DICE in 2023 taking critiques like mine into account, particularly raising much more caution about high levels of warming. “Note that the damage function has been calibrated for damage estimates with temperature increases up to 4 °C and is not well-suited for temperature increases above that range,” he writes in the instruction manual. Still, even this model only estimates a 1.6 percent hit to GDP for three degrees of warming—far too small.

I don’t think that Trump is much concerned with economic estimates of anything, least of all climate change. He isn’t ripping up the Inflation Reduction Act because of the DICE model. Like all fascisms, MAGA is a movement of irrational cultural grievance bent on evil for its own sake. Wind turbines, solar panels, and EVs are liberal-coded, and therefore must be destroyed, regardless of the heavy collateral damage to conservative regions like, again, Texas.

But it is still worth pointing out how gravely mistaken Nordhaus’s approach was. Economists commonly assume that any policy has trade-offs (“There is no such thing as a free lunch”), and that environmental regulation burdens the economy by definition. In the case of climate, neither assumption was correct. If we had pursued vigorous climate policy back in the 1980s when Carl Sagan and James Hansen were testifying before Congress in favor of it, we’d be richer, safer, and healthier.

Ryan Cooper is the Prospect’s managing editor, and author of ‘How Are You Going to Pay for That?: Smart Answers to the Dumbest Question in Politics.’ He was previously a national correspondent for The Week. ...Read More

Nuclear Options and Iran: Boasts of

Regime Change Have the Opposite Effect

By Tariq Ali

NLR Sidecar

17 June 2025 - The expansion of the war from Palestine to Iran, which began on 13 June, signals an Israeli obsession persisting for four decades. As the Trump administration was negotiating in bad faith with Iran over its nuclear programme, the Israeli regime took advantage of an interval to bomb Tehran, assassinating leading scientists, a senior general and other officials, some of them engaged in the talks.

After a few unconvincing denials, Trump admitted that the US had been informed of the attack ahead of time. Now the West is backing Israel’s latest onslaught, despite what Tulsi Gabbard, the Trump-appointed Director of National Intelligence, said as recently as 25 March: ‘The Intelligence Community continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons programme he suspended in 2003.’  

WMD sham revisited

The IAEA inspectors know full well that there are no nuclear weapons. They have simply been acting as willing spies for the US and Israel, providing pen-portraits of the senior scientists who have now been killed. Iran has belatedly realised that it was pointless letting them into the country and a parliamentary bill has been drafted to throw them out. The country’s leadership had nothing to gain from sacrificing this part of their sovereignty, yet they clung to the lame half-hope, half-belief that if they did as the Americans wanted, they might get the sanctions lifted and a US-guaranteed peace.  

Their own historical experience should have taught them otherwise. Iran’s elected government was overthrown with covert Anglo-American aid in 1953 and its secular opposition destroyed. After a quarter of a century of Western-backed dictatorship, the Pahlavi dynasty was finally overthrown.

But a year after the 1979 Revolution, the West – as well as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait – funded Iraq to start a war against Iran and topple the new regime. It lasted eight years and left half a million people dead, mostly on the Iranian side. Hundreds of Iraqi missiles hit Iranian cities and economic targets, especially the oil industry. In the war’s final stages, the US destroyed nearly half the Iranian navy in the Gulf and, for good measure, shot down a civilian passenger plane. Britain loyally helped in the cover-up.  

Since then, the Islamic Republic’s foreign policy has always put the regime’s survival at its centre. During the Iran–Iraq war, the clerics had no hesitation in buying arms from their avowed enemies, Israel included. Their solidarity with oppositional forces has been fragmentary and opportunist, devoid of any consistent anti-imperialist strategy, except in their lonely but crucial capacity as a defender of Palestinian rights, in a region where every single Arab government has capitulated to the hegemon. On 15 June, soon after the Israeli attack, there was a remarkable procession of over fifty donkeys in Gaza, the animals garlanded and covered with silk and satin robes; as they were led down the street, children stroked them with genuine affection. Why? ‘Because’, explained the organiser, ‘they have been more help to us than all the Arab states put together’.  

Following the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Iranians no doubt hoped that collaborating with Washington – clearing the path for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and Mullah Omar – would win them some respite. In many respects, the ‘War on Terror’ was not a bad time for the Islamic Republic. Its standing in the region soared together with oil prices, its enemies in Baghdad and Kabul were brutally removed, and the Shia groups it had been backing since 1979 were brought to power in neighbouring Iraq. It’s difficult to imagine that neither the Bush politburo (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice) nor its unofficial US-based Arab advisers (Kanaan Makiya, Fouad Ajmi) could have foreseen this outcome, but that appears to have been the case. The first non-Western foreigner to visit the Green Zone as an honoured guest was President Ahmedinejad. 

Both Sunni and Shia nationalists came together to oppose the occupying forces, firing rockets and mortar at the US embassy. It was Iranian state intervention that split this opposition, ensuring that a united Iraqi resistance movement descended into a futile and destructive civil war. Muqtada al-Sadr, a key Shia leader in Iraq, had been shocked by the atrocities in Fallujah and led a series of popular uprisings against the US coalition. At the height of the conflict, he was invited to visit Iran and ended up staying – or being kept there? – for the next four years. The subsequent entry of ISIS onto the battlefield strengthened this tactical US–Iran alliance, with the Pentagon providing air support to aid the assaults being carried out by the 60,000 strong Shia militants on the ground.

Beware of enemy flattery

Most of these forces were under the indirect command of Qassem Soleimani, who was in regular communication with General David Petraeus. Soleimani was a gifted strategist, yet susceptible to flattery, especially from the Great Satan. He was the main thinker behind the expansionist tactics deployed by Tehran after 9/11, but his tendency to boast to his US counterparts alienated some of them, especially when he explained accurately how the Iranians had foreseen and exploited most US mistakes in the region. Spencer Ackerman’s description rings true: 

He was pragmatic enough to cooperate with Washington when it suited Iranian interests, as destroying the Caliphate did, and was prepared to clash with Washington when it suited Iranian interests, as with Soleimani’s backstopping of Syria’s Bashar el Assad or earlier with IED modifications that killed hundreds of US troops and maimed more. Soleimani’s impunity infuriated the Security State and the Right. His success stung.  

Yet even as Iran’s regional power increased, social tensions at home were rising. The revolution had excited hopes at first, but the ensuing war with Iraq was debilitating. Partly for this reason, Iran took a tougher stance on the nuclear question, asserting its sovereign right to enrich uranium. Domestically, this was seen as a means of reuniting the population. Externally, it has a perfectly logical defensive purpose: the country was in a vulnerable position, encircled by atomic states (India, Pakistan, China, Russia, Israel) as well as a string of American bases with potential or actual nuclear stockpiles in Qatar, Iraq, Turkey, Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. Nuclear-armed US aircraft carriers and submarines patrolled the waters off its southern coast.  

Totally forgotten in the West is the fact that the nuclear programme was an initiative first taken by the Shah in the 1970s with US support. One of the companies involved was a fiefdom of Dick Cheney, Bush’s sleazy Vice President. Khomeini halted the project when he came to power, considering it un-Islamic. But he later relented and operations restarted. As the programme ramped up in the mid-2000s, Iran and its supreme leader found that their attempts to placate Washington had come to nothing. They were still in the West’s crosshairs. The Bush White House gave the impression that either a direct US strike against Iran, or an attack via its tried-and-tested regional relay, Israel, might soon be on the cards. The Israelis, for their part, were virulently opposed to anyone challenging their nuclear monopoly in the Middle East. Iran’s leader was described by the Israeli government and its loyal media networks as a ‘psychopath’ and a ‘new Hitler’. It was a hurriedly manufactured crisis, of the sort in which the West has become a specialist. The hypocrisy was breathtaking. The US had nuclear weapons, as did the UK, France and Israel; yet Iran’s search for the technology required for the lowest grade of nuclear self-defence provoked moral panic.  

In the scramble by European powers to enhance their standing with Washington following the invasion of Iraq, France, Germany and Britain were keen to prove their mettle by forcing Tehran to accept stringent limits on its nuclear activity. The Khatami regime immediately capitulated, imagining it was really being invited in from the cold. In December 2003, they signed the ‘Additional Protocol’ demanded by the EU3, agreeing to a ‘voluntary suspension’ of the right to enrichment guaranteed under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Again, it made no difference. Within months, the IAEA condemned them for having failed to ratify it and Israel was boasting of its intention to ‘destroy Natanz’. In the summer of 2004, a large bipartisan majority in the US Congress passed a resolution for ‘all appropriate measures’ to prevent an Iranian weapons programme and there was speculation about an ‘October surprise’ in the run-up to that year’s election.  

High-octane bullying

At the time, I argued in the Guardian that ‘to face up to the enemies ranged against Iran requires an intelligent and far-sighted strategy – not the current rag-bag of opportunism and manoeuvre, determined by the immediate interests of the clerics’. A number of liberal and socialist Iranian intellectuals wrote back from Tehran to express strong agreement, especially with my conclusion:  

Clearing the way for the overthrow of the Iraqi Ba’ath and Afghan Taliban regimes and backing the US occupations has bought no respite. The US undersecretary of state has spoken of ‘ratcheting up the pressure’. Israeli defence minister Shaul Mofaz has said that ‘Israel will not be able to accept an Iranian nuclear capability, and it must have the capability to defend itself with all that this implies, and we are preparing.’ Hillary Clinton accused the Bush administration of ‘downplaying the Iranian threat’ and called for pressure on Russia and China to impose sanctions on Tehran. Chirac has spoken of using French nuclear weapons against such a ‘rogue state’. Perhaps it is simply high-octane rocket-rattling, the aim being to frighten Tehran into submission. Bullying is unlikely to succeed. Will the West then embark on a new war?  

US foreign policy was aptly summarised by Bush’s laconic avowal in 2003, ‘if you’re not with us, you’re against us’. Britain, Canada, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Australia needed no convincing. To this day, Iraq has not returned to the social and economic stability that it had before ‘regime-change’. A million plus casualties and five million orphans was the price it was forced to pay after its government was mendaciously accused of harbouring WMDs. Western companies now siphon off the bulk of Iraqi oil.  

Many who waged the Iraq war have since regretted it, but that has not stopped imperial strategists from carrying on in similar fashion elsewhere. In Gaza, the horror continues. Bombs, deaths, starvation and a callousness that evokes how the Wehrmacht treated the Slav Untermensch. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz has published an editorial, tougher than anything that has appeared in liberal dailies in the Euro-Atlantic zone, which attacks European leaders’ pathetic decision to sanction only the two outright fascists in Netanyahu’s government and instead demands total sanctions against Israel itself. This is what real friends of Israel should be demanding, rather than encouraging its kamikaze politics and genocidal campaigns.  

After Israel’s near-complete success in levelling the Strip and exterminating tens of thousands of its people, the Netanyahu government clearly felt it was time to expand the war to other targets. First there was the IDF’s campaign against Hezbollah, which killed much of its leadership and left the organisation greatly weakened, bringing Lebanon to heel. (It is no surprise that young Lebanese have since climbed onto their roof terraces to cheer on the Iranian drones.) Then came Syria, where Israel launched multiple attacks without even pretending it was self-defence. In collaboration with NATO-member Turkey and remnants of the Ba’athist apparatus, Israel helped to install a puppet government under a well-trained US stooge, the former al-Qaida operative Jolani.  

The stage was now set for the assault on Iran. As always, Western double-standards are at work when Israel is involved. Israel has not joined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, has not signed the Biological Weapons Convention and the Ottawa Convention, has not ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention and has disregarded international law and UN resolutions for decades, with ICJ arrest warrants now issued against Netanyahu and Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity, plus an ongoing genocide investigation . . . This is what a rogue state looks like.  

The two countries are currently communicating via drones, F35s and missiles. Both Tehran and Tel Aviv have suffered hits. The declared Israeli aim of destroying the nuclear reactors has not been accomplished and Netanyahu’s boast that he will bring about regime change has produced the opposite effect. Hijabless women have been demonstrating in the streets, chanting ‘Get an atom bomb’. One of them told a reporter: ‘In parliament, they’re discussing closing down the Hormuz Straits. No need to discuss. Just close them down.’ Trump is insisting that the war can only end once Tehran surrenders completely. Many Iranians now believe that the recent nuclear negotiations were always a feint. In 2020, Trump used similar tactics to carry out the assassination of Soleimani, persuading the Iraqi Prime Minister to act as a mediator in US–Iran talks so as to lure the General to Baghdad. So far, the Iranians have withstood the assault. The country that urgently needs regime change is Israel.  ...Read More

On the Road Again with Team Bernie

By Bernie Sanders

https://berniesanders.com/

The Fighting Oligarchy tour is on the road again. So far, we’ve held 198 events in 12 states - speaking to over 260,000 people. Now, we’re adding 3 more states to that list.

Tomorrow, I will be in Texas for the first of three events. We will also be doing events over the weekend in Louisiana and Oklahoma - including some very rural areas.

So. Why are we doing rallies in three very red states? The answer is obvious. We’ve got to educate, organize and mobilize working people in EVERY state in the country to fight oligarchy, authoritarianism, kleptocracy and the massive cuts to Medicaid, nutrition and education that Trump is proposing.

The truth is that the ruling class agenda is NOT popular. Very few Americans believe that it’s appropriate for one person to own more wealth than the bottom 52% of households; that we provide massive tax breaks to billionaires; and that we maintain a corrupt campaign finance system that allows the very rich to buy elections.

Most Americans understand, no matter where they live, that the current economic and political systems are rigged and broken in favor of the rich and that we need fundamental changes. They want a government and economic policies that benefit all, not just the wealthy few.

Sadly, the Democratic Establishment is incapable and uninterested in mounting grassroots working-class movements. Also, their economic agenda, to the degree that they have one, is very weak. Opposing Trump’s disastrous policies are enormously important. But it’s not enough. We need to provide a bold working class alternative agenda - based on economic, social, racial and environmental justice. And that’s what the Fighting Oligarchy tour is all about.

I also want you to know that we are not just doing rallies, as important as they are.

We are building organization

We have hired organizers in a number of states with Republican members of Congress who are now bringing people together to oppose Trump‘s “Big Beautiful Bill” and to lay the groundwork for a successful 2026 election.

We have mobilized thousands of volunteers in over a dozen states to do the same. We are also helping many hundreds of new candidates learn how to run for office for school board, city council, state representative and other local and statewide positions.

And we have recently been endorsing, and providing assistance, to a number of strong progressive candidates around the country - including Abdul El-Sayed for U.S. Senate in Michigan, Adelita Grijalva for Congress in Arizona, Robert Peters for Congress in Illinois, Troy Jackson for Governor of Maine, Donovon McKinney for Congress in Michigan, Rebecca Cooke for Congress in Wisconsin, Zohran Mamdani for Mayor of New York City and Justin Brannan for New York City Comptroller.

More endorsements will be coming in the near future.

In this pivotal moment in American and world history, when the stakes are so high for our country and the entire planet, we should not underestimate the difficult challenges that we face. But that should not make us pessimistic. If we stand together, we have the power to create a government and an economy that works for all of us, not just a handful of billionaires.

As Nelson Mandela, one of the great liberation leaders in modern history reminded us: “It always seems impossible until it is done.”

Let’s do it.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick on Rachel Maddow

talking Trump Immigration Policy ...5.0min

From Upton

Sinclair's 'Goose Step' to the Neoliberal University

Essays on the Ongoing Transformation of Higher Education

By Daniel Morris

and Harry Targ

Paperback USD 17.00

This is a unique collection of 15 essays by two Purdue University professors who use their institution as a case-in-point study of the changing nature of the American 'multiversity.' They take a book from an earlier time, Upton Sinclair's 'The Goose-Step A Study of American Education' from 1923, which exposed the capitalist corruption of the ivory tower back then and brought it up to date with more far-reaching changes today. time. They also include, as an appendix, a 1967 essay by SDS leader Carl Davidson, who broke some of the original ground on the subject.

Click HERE to Purchase

New Studies on the Left, May 2025

Paperback $14.95

...is a journal of socialist theory and practice. It is the successor to ‘Dialogue and Initiative, published as an annual journal of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism in book form from 2012 to 2022. It will continue the CCDS policy of left unity, including articles with a variety of left perspectives, including debates.

This issue contains a dozen articles grouped under the headings of Analysis and Global Reach, Electoral campaigns, and Book Reviews. Some are reprinted from other sources, but many appear here for the first time.

Among the authors are C.J. Atkins, Carl Davidson, Steve Early, Bill Fletcher, Jr., Suzanne Gordon, Jerry Harris, Jay Jurie, Paul Krehbiel, Matthew Scott, Rod Such, Harry Targ, and Janet Tucker and Steve Willett.

Table of Contents



Click HERE to purchase



HOLIDAY SALE ON EVERY TITLE BEGINS TODAY!

Hard Ball & Little Heroes Press is sharing the holiday spirit by offering a 25% discount on ALL TITLES from November 15-December 25. Enter SOLIDARITY in the discount box when you order a book, 25% will be automatically taken off your cost.

Happy holidays! Tim Sheard, editor

For the children...



Good Guy Jake...An inspiring Children’s Christmas story for Labor!

Imagine young children reading a book about a union that wins back the job of a sanitation worker unfairly fired for taking toys out of the trash. That’s what they will discover in Good Guy Jake. 

For years Jake has repaired and painted broken toys he pulled from the trash on his rounds and given them to the children in the local shelter at Christmas. But when an angry motorist reports Jake to the sanitation company, Jake is fired for breaking city regulations. 

His union takes the case to arbitration. There, the union brings in a crowd of children, who show the judge the toys Jake gave them and tell her that he taught them the true meaning of Christmas.

History Lesson of the Week: The Dying Tecumseh and the Birth of a Legend

A sculpture in the Smithsonian collection reveals much about how the Indians of the West were viewed in the early ages of the United States

By Bill Gilbert

The Smithsonian

At the end of a long gallery in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American Art there is a ton of marble that, after nearly 20 years of intermittent work, was completed in 1856 by Frederick Pettrich, a German-born, Italian-trained sculptor. The subject is a reclining, heroically proportioned man whose dignified and noble demeanor is unaffected by a bullet hole in the right temple. If the wound and a tomahawk held in the right hand are overlooked, the figure could be that of one of the champions of classical legend — an expiring Hector or Siegfried — who so engaged romantic artists of 19th-century Europe.

In fact, the gleaming white sculpture is entitled The Dying Tecumseh, but any resemblance to the mortal Shawnee leader of that name is entirely coincidental. He died in battle and was disfigured by enemy soldiers 25 years before Pettrich began this work. While alive he posed for no known portrait. Nevertheless it is singularly appropriate that this is an imaginary figure, for no one else of Tecumseh's race and few of any other have had such a powerful and abiding impact on the collective American imagination.

The real Tecumseh was born circa 1768 in southern Ohio at the beginning of a sporadic but ferociously fought war that did not end until — and largely because — he was killed in 1813. In this conflict his Shawnee, the Miami, the Potawatomi and other nations of the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley region sought to defend themselves against the white settlers pioneering westward across the Appalachians.

Tecumseh was a warrior at 15; later he became a renowned field commander and a charismatic orator. By the early 1800s he had conceived of a Pan-Indian federation. In this union he hoped old tribal rivalries would be set aside so that the indigenous people of the Great Lakes and Mississippi Valley could act as one in resisting the advancing whites. From a base on the Tippecanoe River in northern Indiana, he traveled from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico promoting this federation. His ambition was probably an impossible one; the Indian population of this territory was then less than 100,000 and that of the United States nearly seven million. Still, rumors of what he was up to greatly alarmed many frontier whites, including William Henry Harrison, the federal governor of the Indiana Territory. Formerly a Regular Army officer, Harrison negotiated with Tecumseh face-to-face on two occasions and assessed him as "one of those uncommon geniuses who spring up occasionally to produce revolutions and overturn the established order of things." ...Read More

Adelante #4 is out! A special on immigration for the closing days of the election. Use it everywhere!

Get it here: http://ouleft.org/Adelante-4.pdf

By Bill Gallegos, excerpted from our new fall issue of “¡Adelante!”

U.S. GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump demonized Mexicans and immigrants as a central part of his 2016 presidential campaign. In 2024, he has doubled down. If elected, he promises to unleash an ethnic cleansing campaign to deport the 12 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. This is horrible enough as a complete violation of human rights. But this pogrom is only one piece of the larger anti-democratic ‘Project 2025’ of the Heritage Foundation. They are coming for all of us. While singling out Mexican immigrants, Trump aims at all immigrant communities, including growing communities in the South, Midwest, and East.

Thankfully the political energy has shifted since President Biden dropped out of the presidential race. Vice-President Kamala Harris is now the Democratic Party candidate, and the polls show a significant shift in her direction. More than a million new volunteers have signed up for Harris, and hundreds of millions of new dollars have been contributed to her campaign.

The Biden-Harris Administration has been mixed on immigration: on one hand, it continues to support the legalization of Dreamers (DACA) and pushes for a path to legalization for the spouses of immigrants with legal residency. On the other hand, it has denied asylum protections for refugees crossing the southern border and supported legislation for increased militarization as well as new administrative hurdles. While our most important fight is against the MAGA right, the fight for full rights and protections for immigrants is a long-term struggle beyond the November elections.

The Biden dropout also creates significant opportunities for the left and progressives to advance the fight against the fascist threat, to advance a progressive platform, and to put new pressure on both Biden and the Harris campaign to demand a ceasefire in Gaza. It enables us to push back strongly against Trump’s racist threats against immigrants while advancing a positive program for immigrant rights.

This week's topic:

THE DANGER OF WAR WITH IRAN TODAY: WE MUST SAY 'NO'

Click the picture to access the blog.

Tunes of the Week: Down To The River To Pray - Alison Krauss ...4:1 min

Book Review: The Conservative Intellectual Who Laid the Groundwork for Trump

William F. Buckley Jr. was the erudite heart of American conservatism. But the political vision that he helped forge was—and remains today—focused less on adhering to principles and more on ferreting out enemies.

The January 2025 issue of National Review magazine featured, on its cover, a cartoon image of Donald Trump driving a campaign bus-cum-garbage truck into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, a handful of Harris-Walz campaign posters tumbling out of its tailgate. “After the Sweep,” read the triumphant headline. Over the course of eight-odd years, the publication that had once dedicated an entire issue to anathematizing Trump had moved from cool accommodation to warm, if not entirely reservationless, embrace. The February issue offered a study in dissonant juxtaposition: Gazing out beatifically from the cover was the magazine’s late founder, William F. Buckley Jr., rendered in schmaltzy watercolor to mark the centenary of his birth.

Sam Tanenhaus’s marvelous, decades-in-the-making biography, Buckley: The Life and Revolution That Changed America, begins with an epigraph from John Keats’s letters: “Man’s life of any worth is a continual allegory.” For many in the Trump era, looking back wistfully on an imagined past of comity and consensus, the Buckleyite allegory has been one of declension: from the sesquipedalian verbalist who gamely sparred with liberals on TV to the monosyllabic vulgarian occupying the White House. From Bach’s bouncy Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, with which Buckley’s Firing Line television show opened for more than 30 years, to the schlocky Trump-rally ballads of Lee Greenwood. From a movement helmed by a “responsible” leader who made conservatism respectable by (as the story goes) cleansing it of its kooks and antisemites to one led by a man who enthusiastically welcomed them back in.

Tanenhaus’s biography complicates this narrative. It offers a deeply affectionate portrait of Buckley’s personal life: of his munificence, his sense of humor, his extraordinary loyalty and capacity for friendship—what the ex-Communist intellectual (and early National Review staffer) Whittaker Chambers, the subject of Tanenhaus’s first biography, called Buckley’s “special grace.” Yet Tanenhaus also methodically surfaces the darker strains of the movement that flourished even, and sometimes especially, in its most rarefied precincts. The political vision that Buckley helped forge was, as it is now, concerned not primarily with advancing a particular set of principles but with defining and rooting out perceived enemies. When Donald Trump rails against the “Radical Left Lunatics, Communists, Fascists, Marxists, Democrats, & RINOS” who comprise the “enemy within,” he inherits Buckley’s legacy far more than he blasphemes it. ...Read More

TV Review: The Second Season of 'Andor' Stands Tall

By Brian Tallerico

Rogerebert.com

April 21, 2025 - “Andor” opens its second season with a micro version of what it does so well: a scene of sharp intellect about becoming who you are when you stand up for what you believe in, before pivoting to a larger-than-life “Star Wars Action Sequence” that comes out of nowhere and unfolds unexpectedly.

It’s a great ten-minute season overture: Messaging that feels timelier than ever blended into grandiose sci-fi action storytelling that’s riveting within its own universe. This 12-episode arc, which really unfolds more like four interconnected feature films, is the best season of television so far this year, and one of the best of the current decade. It is what “Star Wars” (and all sci-fi TV) can be at its peak, and I hope it’s a roadmap to the future of this entire franchise. Let Andor lead the way.

The very structure of “Andor” this season is artful. Disney+ is dropping three episodes for four consecutive weeks, unfolding like a “quadrilogy” of feature films. Each night has a different writer. And, as most people know, the season takes place over four years. So, the first night debuts three episodes written by creator Tony Gilroy himself, set in BBY 4. The next week launches three episodes written by first-season Emmy nominee Beau Willimon set in BBY 3. Like a great film series, these chapters stand on their own while also folding their thematic concerns into each other. And the writers don’t completely dismiss the episodic structure either, with some chapters, especially 8 and 10, both masterful, standing on their own. It’s like a nesting doll of creative storytelling.

Director Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn) in Lucasfilm’s ANDOR Season 2, exclusively on Disney+. ©2025 Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM. All Rights Reserved

And creative it is. “Andor” avoids the common prequel problems by twisting and turning Diego Luna’s Cassian Andor from the first season to the one we know in “Rogue One” in unpredictable ways. It’s a show about the development of a rebel leader, but how Gilroy and company get from the first season premiere to the character’s introduction in “Rogue One” cosnsistently fascinates. Some complained that Luna was a bit too subdued in season one, but rewatching season one as a prelude to this review reveals how subtle his work is through the 24 episodes, as Andor goes from hesitant believer to a passionate leader of a Resistance.

What a Resistance it is. A lot will be written about the timeliness of “Andor” in an age when unchecked power and political resistance are in the headlines, but this is no mere “good vs. evil” piece of storytelling. It is about the complexity of resistance. It is about how what we do defines who we are, particularly in times of great conflict. The characters who suffer in this season of “Andor” are the ones who try to have it both ways, who give lip service to action but thrive off corruption. There are so many lines that I scribbled down in my notes, but one that stuck out was “It’s not up to us what we save and what we lose” when we choose to fight back. It’s a show about sacrifice and trauma, and how narratives are crafted, told more effectively than any political drama in years. As someone says, “one person’s rebel is another person’s terrorist.” It is so thematically rich that it can almost be overwhelming, and there are even more scenes of political machinations than the first year, but be patient with the slow burn of every plot thread. They all eventually ignite.

Bix Caleen (Adria Arjona) in Lucasfilm’s ANDOR Season 2, exclusively on Disney+. ©2025 Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM. All Rights Reserved.

What really elevates “Andor” is the blend of theme and plot. The speeches about fascism and resistance turn words into action and convey the difficulty of doing so. We’re in a time of great amplification of rhetoric, but this show understands the power of both the message and the fist, the pace of both resistance and fascism. How do you use rebellions to further fascism? How does human frailty impact both? What about emotional connections? Are you willing to give up less when you have so much to lose?

It’s not all speechifying. Within these deeper themes, the writers of “Andor” take the time to unpack and examine how human beings respond to things like trauma and instability. The former comes through in Adria Arjona‘s phenomenal work as Bix, who was tortured last season and carries the weight of that into this one. She’s a major part of the sophomore outing and does the best work of her growing career. ...Read More

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