Horrible news from Boulder, Colorado, yesterday, where a man wielding a makeshift flamethrower attacked people marching in solidarity with the Israeli hostages still being held by Hamas. The FBI is investigating it as an act of terror. Politico reports:

About 1:26 p.m., police received calls that a man with a weapon near the county courthouse on 13th and Pearl streets was setting people on fire, according to Boulder Police Chief Steve Redfearn. They found multiple victims with a range of injuries from serious to minor including “injuries consistent with burns,” Redfearn said at a Sunday afternoon news conference. . . .

Eyewitness videos of the attack show a shirtless man holding what appear to be two Molotov cocktails and yelling “Free Palestine!” at a group of demonstrators seeking the release of Israeli hostages being held in Gaza. Witness interviews reported by the Boulder Daily Camera called the attack “absolutely horrific and shocking” and also described Molotov cocktails on the scene. Israeli flags were seen on the ground.

The attack comes less than two weeks after two Israeli embassy staffers were killed by another shooter at an event in Washington, D.C. Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families. Antisemitism is a terrible curse. Happy Monday.

by William Kristol

For people of a certain age, and especially those of a conservative disposition, nostalgia comes naturally.

So when you see that the New York Knicks—despite an impressively scrappy effort—have once again been eliminated from the NBA playoffs, you don’t gnash your teeth or focus on next year. Instead you think back to the last time the Knicks were NBA champions, 52 years ago (!), in 1973.

What a group of players: Willis Reed and Walt Frazier, Dave DeBusschere and Bill Bradley! Earl the Pearl! What a great coach, CCNY’s Red Holzman! And what a march through the playoffs! The upset victory over the hated Boston Celtics in the Eastern Championship Finals, handing the Celtics their first defeat ever in a seventh game at the Boston Garden. And then the 4–1 win in the finals against Wilt Chamberlain’s Lakers.

Of course, even the glories of 1973 pale by comparison to those of 1970, and that year’s championship against the Lakers, with Willis Reed famously hobbling onto the court for the Game 7. What a time for a young basketball fan from New York. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven!”

One could go on. But the point is, memories are a powerful thing. Nostalgia is a powerful thing.

In fact, one can be nostalgic for things that happened before one was alive. You read about Churchill and Britain in World War II, you listen to a few BBC reports from the time and to some of Churchill’s speeches, and you feel nostalgia for that era of greatness too, even though you only know it as hearsay and history.

You can also be nostalgic about events from the more recent past, when you were already an adult. Reagan’s 1984 speech to the boys of Pointe du Hoc. The magical McCain campaign of 2000—until it was brought down in the mud of South Carolina.

Nostalgia of this kind is a normal human phenomenon. It is—I think—a healthy phenomenon. And as a political matter, a nostalgic conservatism is a useful check on the errors of presentism and the temptations of progressivism.

But nostalgia has its downside, too. And one can’t help but see that clearly now, in the America of 2025.

For one thing, it leads one to forget the dark sides of the past in ways that can mislead one in the present. Then there is the really dangerous kind of nostalgia: a nostalgia that’s been purposefully weaponized.

Weaponized nostalgia in the hands of a demagogue and his movement goes beyond obtuseness to past evils, beyond curmudgeonly close-mindedness about the present, even beyond an unpleasant intolerance for the unfamiliar. It becomes a rabid hostility to—even a hatred for—whomever it’s easy to blame for producing this new world around us, a world that seems strange and scary. When demagogues exploit this kind of nostalgia, it can become an ugly thing indeed.

As it is in the United States today.

Any healthy polity will have a streak of conservatism. A healthy conservatism can be useful precisely in standing against a “conservative” movement that has embraced nostalgic bitterness and anger. True conservatives can appeal against that movement’s hatreds by citing the old principles of the Declaration and provisions of the Constitution.

But a healthy polity has to have a progressive element as well. It’s progressive types who can most easily explain, for example, how much we’ll damage our future well-being if we slash away at medical research or halt immigration. Dogmatic progressivism is a trap. But an appreciation of progress is not.

The normal political fights in a free country are between conservatives and progressives. At a time when there are urgent threats to what is best in both traditions, those two can come together to defend a broader set of liberal principles that transcend conservatism and progressivism.

If conservatives tend to do this with an overlay of backwards-looking nostalgia, forward-looking progressives can correct them by emphasizing a brighter future ahead.

And so, if I react to the Knicks’ loss by thinking back to the glories of the past, I also value my fellow Knicks loyalists of a more progressive bent who see defeat and enthusiastically reply: “Wait till next year!”

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by Cathy Young

Sunday is likely to be remembered among the most extraordinary days in Russia’s three-plus-year war in Ukraine. It was the day Ukraine carried out a massive drone attack on military airports across Russia, destroying or severely damaging as many as 41 fighter planes—mostly Soviet-era missile-carrying bombers Russia no longer has the capacity to build. If that number is accurate, Russia has lost as much as one-third of its strategic bombing force—and a part of its nuclear triad. (While only 13 hits are confirmed by satellite imagery right now, that data is limited to one of the five bases that were hit.) The strike, apparently planned in a sophisticated intelligence operation over the course of some 18 months, has been rightly described as “stunning,” “incredible” and “fantastic.”

And it raises some questions. Is this attack, carried out on the eve of the next round of the Russia/Ukraine talks in Istanbul, a game-changer? And how does it fit into the bigger picture of the current state of Russia’s war in Ukraine?

Until Sunday, the Russia-Ukraine negotiations had been mostly dormant (and deadly). Russia made unworkable and frankly insulting proposals along the lines of “give us four regions now or we’ll take six later” and generally made it clear that it wanted nothing short of a disarmed and subjugated Ukraine. This “diplomacy” was punctuated, on a regular basis, with horrifying strikes that targeted Ukrainian civilians. Donald Trump made accusatory and vaguely threatening noises in Russia’s direction, lamenting Vladimir Putin’s bafflingly aggressive behavior but always trotting out some excuse to give Russia (and himself) a little more time before imposing new sanctions. Meanwhile, Russian and Ukrainian forces remained locked in grueling positional warfare in the battlefields of Ukraine, with Russia making very modest gains at tremendous cost to its own troops.

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The big news, before Sunday’s strike, was the apparent start of Russia’s summer offensive, which Putin evidently hopes will result in big enough gains to justify the Kremlin’s current intransigence. The anti-Ukraine contingent in the West has latched on to the narrative that Ukrainian defenses are deteriorating or even collapsing. It’s a claim that hasn’t actually died after the Ukrainian drone attack on Russian military airfields; instead that success has been spun as a sign of “weakness” by Ukraine, or desperation. But even Russia’s war-hawk “milbloggers” know better, as a roundup of their frenzied reactions shows.

What’s really happening on the ground in Ukraine? Certainly nothing close to “collapse,” as University of St. Andrew (Edinburgh) strategic studies professor Phillips O’Brien convincingly argues in his newsletter. He writes that there is an “uptick in offensive operations”—most notably, an incursion into the Sumy province, which Russia apparently intends to try to turn into a “buffer zone” and where it has recently deployed 50,000 soldiers in addition to some 75,000 who were already in the region. Yet despite this massive military presence, Russian troops have been unable to push deeper than three miles into Ukrainian territory, gaining barely over half a mile in the past week because of Ukrainian defenses. Likewise, while the Ukrainian Armed Forces are having some real problems in parts of the Donetsk region, particularly in the Liman/Pokrovsk sector of the frontlines, they have continued to counterattack, sometimes regaining lost ground.

Against this backdrop, the daring drone strike on Russian military airfields is a masterstroke: a morale booster for Ukrainians and a reminder to the Kremlin that there are no safe spaces on Russian territory anymore. Will Trump also get the message that his favorite strongman isn’t that strong and that Volodymyr Zelensky actually does have some cards? Maybe not. But between Ukraine and Trump, it certainly isn’t Ukraine that looks like a loser right now.

by Andrew Egger

Yesterday, Illinois Democratic Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi told CBS’s Face the Nation that the White House’s revocation of Chinese students’ visas would be met with “cheering” by the Chinese Communist Party.

“They want the scientists and the entrepreneurs and the engineers who can come and help their economy,” the congressman said. “And so we are probably helping them, as well as other countries, more than helping ourselves with this policy.”

When I read Krishnamoorthi’s comments, I thought about VIPKid.

VIPKid is a Chinese online tutoring company, originally founded to connect Chinese children with English tutors in the West. In the years after its founding in 2014, the company became a major success, paying tens of thousands of mostly U.S. and Canadian teachers hourly rates to hold one-on-one lessons with hundreds of thousands of mostly Chinese students.

In 2021, however, China banned VIPKid and other services connecting Chinese kids with Western English teachers. The change was billed as part of a broader effort, known as “double reduction,” to ease educational pressures on overworked Chinese students. But many argued that China—which also banned foreign textbooks and made “Xi Jinping Thought” a subject of mandatory school instruction the same year—was quietly trying to limit Western influences on their youth.

“There is another aim, which is to lock out Western culture,” writer and Chinese expat Guo Baosheng told Radio Free Asia at the time. “It’s all in the service of political stability for the regime.”

Just four years ago, “double reduction” seemed part of a familiar story: an autocratic regime shrinking suspiciously away from contact with the outside world, crimping its own people’s freedom in the process. Now, four years later, further U.S.-China educational decoupling is coming from our side. America’s policymakers have lost their confidence in our system and in openness in general. They no longer believe that growing contact between free and repressed peoples will lead to a growing desire for freedom everywhere. Today, it isn’t China indulging the impulse to limit its peoples’ and institutions’ freedom to serve an ideological agenda, it’s us.

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AMERICA IS BEING RESPECTED AGAIN: In other “America’s idiocy is China’s gain” news, Axios reports this morning on a new global-favorability poll showing America’s reputation sagging and China’s surging.

The Morning Consult poll, which surveyed residents of 13 major nations outside the United States and Canada, found a net favorability of 8.8 points for China and -1.5 points for America. Back in January 2024, the same poll found the United States with a favorability rating above 20 points abroad and China’s popularity underwater.

“Since January 2025, the overwhelming majority of countries simultaneously exhibit worsening views of the United States and improving views of China,” writes Morning Consult’s Jason McMann, per Axios. “Only in Russia have views of America meaningfully improved.”

GOING TO A DARK PLACE: If you didn’t believe things were getting out of hand, here are a few immigration-enforcement snapshots from this weekend.

• Politico reports that Homeland Security officers “briefly detained” a staffer for Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), entering his New York office to place her in handcuffs. Video of the incident shows a DHS officer saying Nadler’s staff was “harboring rioters” in their office. The staffer, heard crying on the video, was ultimately not arrested or charged with a crime. In a statement, Nadler slammed DHS and President Trump for its “aggressive and heavy-handed tactics.” “The decision to enter a congressional office and detain a staff member,” he added, “demonstrates a deeply troubling disregard for proper legal boundaries.”

• MySanAntonio reports that “at least three migrant children were taken into custody and restrained with zip ties” at the Texas city’s immigration court last week. “The children—two boys and a girl who appeared to be between the ages of 9 and 12 years old—were detained and zip-tied, along with adults who appeared to be relatives, after an immigration judge had dismissed their case, according to Carolina Rivera, an immigration attorney who serves as a federal advocate and liaison for [the Catholic Legal Immigration Network].”

• And Boston’s ABC News affiliate WCVB reports the arrest last week of Marcelo Gomes, an 18-year-old high school student who was brought to the United States illegally at the age of 5. Gomes, an honors student with no criminal history, was detained while driving to a volleyball practice. “He told me he had chains around his ankles, he had chains around his wrists,” Gomes’s girlfriend told the station. “He’s in a cell with 30 other men. He’s the only 18-year-old there, he’s the youngest there. He is not a criminal. He’s a member of this community and has never done anything wrong.”

All these stories come amid a broader administration push for federal law enforcement to dramatically accelerate immigration arrests. Back in January, the Washington Post reported that ICE had been instructed to ramp up daily arrests to at least “1,200 to 1,500.” Last week, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told Fox News that the new goal was at least 3,000 arrested migrants per day. He communicated the same number to ICE brass in a tense meeting last week, according to Axios: “Miller’s directive and tone had people leaving the meeting feeling their jobs could be in jeopardy if the new targets aren’t reached.”

Ordering law enforcement to hit arrest quotas: What could go wrong?

BIDEN CLONES: Shouldn’t somebody be monitoring Grandpa’s internet usage? In a Truth Social post yesterday, Trump shared a wild message from a supporter: “There is no #JoeBiden – executed in 2020. #Biden clones doubles & robotic engineered soulless mindless entities are what you see. >#Democrats don’t know the difference.”

Wow, you don’t say! On the one hand, this post is such howling unfiltered internet-conspiracy nonsense that it’s hard to imagine even Trump going further with it than a Truth Social repost. On the other hand, this sort of thing is breaking e-containment more and more recently. We’re in a world where the secretary of health and human services believes in chemtrails.

Whether it’s a momentary blip or something that’s going to harden into a Trump obsession, “There is no Joe Biden” is an unsettling reminder of the lunatic fever swamp in which the president routinely marinates his brain. Enjoy going about your day with the knowledge that, at any given moment, the president may be scrolling away on his phone, actively making himself more conspiratorial and paranoid.

BEFORE WE CAN ADEQUATELY RESPOND to the frontal assault Donald Trump has launched on our way of life, we need to grapple with whataboutism. It is destroying our capacity to make rational judgments. In the face of an unprecedented defiance of law, tradition, and the Constitution, too many of us find ourselves so mired in polarized thinking that we can’t see straight.

Humans have always been beguiled by black-and-white thinking. Something is either good or bad. You are either with us or against us. Greek or barbarian. Saved or damned. Sigmund Freud coined the term “Madonna/whore complex” to describe the mindset of men who relegate women into one of two categories: pure or sullied. A related error in logic is called “tu quoque” (you too), a form of the ad hominem fallacy because it attacks the person rather than disproving their argument—which should sound familiar to anyone who’s lived through the past few years of American politics.

The tendency to engage in polarized thinking is hardly new, and yet, it seems that we’ve regressed in recent years. We live in an age of overflowing information and knowledge, and yet we seem more inclined now than in the recent past to succumb to whataboutism.

It’s perfectly clear why Trump and his many enablers rely on whataboutism. It’s the easiest deflection. What is the proper response to Trump’s iniquitous treatment of women? What about Bill Clinton? How can one evaluate his pardons of the January 6th insurrectionists? What about all those who rioted in protest of George Floyd’s murder and were never prosecuted? (They were.) Was Trump’s refusal to return highly classified documents a serious breach? What about Joe Biden keeping files in his garage? (Biden returned them when asked.) Is Trump corrupting the rule of law with his pardons of friends, donors, and political allies? What about Joe Biden’s pardons of Hunter and his entire family?

This game can be played endlessly, and it has been played aggressively for the past decade. It’s important to dwell on the consequences. Some people who are caught in a lie, betrayal, or other transgression admit their guilt and seek to repair the damage. That’s how mature people and societies stay civilized.

Truly depraved people don’t take that route. Trump uses whataboutism not just to change the subject or disarm the accuser (“tu quoque” was pretty much the theme of the 2016 presidential race) but also to breed cynicism. If “everybody does it” then it’s unfair to hold him accountable. And because people who constantly transgress can’t function with the knowledge that they are immoral, they must believe—and teach—that everyone is just as corrupt as they are; that the standards themselves are flawed or at least universally flouted. Does a mafia don tell his daughter that he’s a criminal, or does he explain that the world is composed of killers and losers and that you must choose one or the other?

Though Americans are sometimes perceived as idealistic, there are other strains in our character that demagogues can tap into, such as cynicism about politics. A line perhaps inaccurately attributed to Mark Twain has been a staple of after-dinner speeches for more than 150 years: “America has no native criminal class, except Congress.” Or as a more modern wag put it: “Politics comes from the Greek ‘poly’ (many) and ‘ticks’ (small, annoying bloodsuckers).”

A certain amount of skepticism about politicians is healthy. But cynicism is corrosive because it invites the very thing it scorns. Once you elect a sociopath and agree with his jaundiced view that everyone is corrupt, you’ve lost any chance of upholding basic values. If you treasure honesty, integrity, the rule of law, and decency, you must be prepared to reject whataboutism and to risk mockery by insisting that no, not everybody does it, and we don’t want to accept the kind of society in which that is assumed.

As David Frum outlined in the Atlantic:

Nothing like this has been attempted or even imagined in the history of the American presidency. Throw away the history books; discard feeble comparisons to scandals of the past. There is no analogy with any previous action by any past president. The brazenness of the self-enrichment resembles nothing seen in any earlier White House. This is American corruption on the scale of a post-Soviet republic or a postcolonial African dictatorship.

Trump’s corruption is so off the charts (a Qatari luxury jet, hundreds of millions in memecoins and tokens, bidding wars to dine with him as his club) that it defies comparison. Through the memecoin, anyone anywhere for any reason can put hundreds, or thousands, or millions of dollars directly into Trump’s pocket. Not into a campaign fund, not into a political party, but into the hands of the president. And as we witnessed on his Middle East trip, eager foreign leaders and businessmen are lining up to do so. Vietnam, hoping for relief from tariffs, is in talks to help Trump build a luxury golf course. Due almost entirely to his crypto holdings, Trump has, by one estimate, doubled his net worth in just four months.

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The Constitution could not be clearer. Article I, Section 9 reads: “No title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign state.”

Are we so cynical that we cannot summon outrage at a flagrant disregard for our founding document?

In keeping with the current grab-everything-that-isn’t-nailed-down ethos, the Trump administration announced last month that it was disbanding the Justice Department unit devoted to ferreting out crypto crime, and the Securities and Exchange Commission dropped an investigation into one of Trump’s largest donors—the one who donated top dollar (or memecoin) to have dinner with Trump at his country club outside D.C.

Yes, Biden’s pardons of his family were grubby, but they were a few pebbles compared with Trump’s avalanche of corruption. The current president is signaling with his pardons that anti-democratic violence is encouraged if undertaken on his behalf, and that no action, not even murder, is beyond redemption if you are in his camp. He has pardoned a corrupt thief who happened to be the son of a big donor, granted a “FULL AND Unconditional Pardon” to a Virginia sheriff who was convicted of selling government offices but who was redeemed by his Trump loyalty. The family of Ashli Babbitt, who violently stormed the Capitol and was shot by police, received a generous payout from the Trump-controlled government. Murderers, politicos on the take, swindlers, thieving reality TV stars, gangsters—all have been pardoned by Trump in the past few weeks. If you’re a Trump supporter, you have an honest-to-goodness get-out-of-jail-free card. The Department of Justice’s watchword is no longer “Equal Justice Under Law,” but, in the words of Ed Martin, Trump’s newly minted pardon advisor, “No MAGA left behind.”

We must disenthrall ourselves from the whataboutism mindset. There are honorable politicians. There are honest businessmen. There are police and soldiers and teachers and programmers and athletes and judges of integrity. Millions of Americans are appalled and deeply embarrassed by the kakistocracy we’ve elevated. Hold on to that outrage. It’s the road back from this disaster.

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Welcome back to World Brief, where we’re looking at negotiations for an Israel-Hamas cease-fire, China’s low-level attendance at the Shangri-La Dialogue, and Ukraine accusing Russia of stalling peace talks.

Truce Proposal

Hamas said on Friday that it was still reviewing a U.S. proposal for a 60-day cease-fire with Israel—which Israel agreed to the day before—and added that it is consulting with other Palestinian factions.

Welcome back to World Brief, where we’re looking at negotiations for an Israel-Hamas cease-fire, China’s low-level attendance at the Shangri-La Dialogue, and Ukraine accusing Russia of stalling peace talks.

Truce Proposal

Hamas said on Friday that it was still reviewing a U.S. proposal for a 60-day cease-fire with Israel—which Israel agreed to the day before—and added that it is consulting with other Palestinian factions.

Hamas initially said on Thursday that the proposal “fails to meet any of the just and legitimate demands of our people” and shows that Israel “fundamentally seeks to entrench the occupation and perpetuate policies of killing and starvation, even during what is supposed to be a period of temporary de-escalation.” However, the group did not outright reject the deal at that time and said its officials were “undertaking a thorough and responsible review” of it.

Although the details of the plan, put forward by U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff with help from Egypt and Qatar, have not been made public, reports indicate that the cease-fire would last 60 days; Hamas would release 28 Israeli hostages (10 living and 18 deceased) during the first week in exchange for 1,236 Palestinian prisoners and the remains of 180 Palestinians. There are 58 hostages remaining in Gaza, 20 of whom are believed to be alive.

As soon as the truce went into effect, Israel would cease all military operations in Gaza and begin to allow more humanitarian aid into the territory. This assistance would be delivered via the United Nations, the Red Crescent, and other agreed-upon channels.

If further negotiations to secure a permanent cease-fire did not conclude within the 60 days, then the deal could be extended. Once a permanent truce is agreed on, Hamas would then be required to release the remaining 30 hostages.

However, according to Hamas, the U.S. proposal does not guarantee aid deliveries into Gaza, does not commit to the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the territory, and does not include language about what would happen after the initial 60 days expires. This is “far from what Hamas agreed to with the American mediator,” Hamas spokesperson Sami Abu Zuhri told Houthi-owned Yemeni media outlet al-Masirah.

Recent cease-fire efforts have stalled as both sides refuse to concede major sticking points in the war. Namely, these include Israel demanding that Hamas disarm completely, be dismantled as a governing force, and return all 58 hostages before the war ends. Meanwhile, Hamas refuses to give up its weapons and has argued that Israel must first pull its troops from Gaza and commit to ending the conflict.

At the same time, Gaza’s humanitarian situation continues to deteriorate. On Friday, Israeli airstrikes killed 27 people, according to hospital officials. The United Nations’ humanitarian affairs agency also accused Israel of blocking all but a trickle of aid from entering Gaza, creating “the hungriest place on Earth” at a time when a controversial new aid distribution system—also backed by Washington—has wreaked havoc on southern Gaza.

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What We’re Following

Shangri-La attendance. The Shangri-La Dialogue kicked off in Singapore on Friday with one notable absence: Chinese Defense Minister Dong Jun. Although Beijing has previously sent its top defense diplomat to the security conference, Dong sent a lower-level delegation in his place this year to discuss the country’s growing influence in the Indo-Pacific.

This comes in stark contrast to the United States, which sent Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to give what experts expect will be the Pentagon’s most comprehensive public outline of U.S. defense priorities in the region since President Donald Trump began his second term in January.

But while many defense officials at Shangri-La are prioritizing tackling U.S.-China tensions and rising Indo-Pacific threats, European leaders warned the international community not to lose sight on efforts to end the Russia-Ukraine war.

“If you consider that Russia could be allowed to take a part of the territory of Ukraine without any restriction, without any constraint, without any reaction of the global order, how would you phrase what would happen in Taiwan?” French President Emmanuel Macron asked, adding, “What would you do the day something happened in” the Philippines?

Unknown peace terms. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha accused Russia on Friday of purposefully stalling peace negotiations by failing to share a promised memorandum outlining Moscow’s terms.

Both sides agreed to provide that information following a round of direct talks in Istanbul earlier this month, and Kyiv claims to have already submitted its terms to both Russia and the United States. But Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said on Friday that Moscow’s memorandum could not “be made public” and would instead be submitted during the next round of dialogue in Istanbul, scheduled for Monday. Both sides have agreed to attend the meeting in theory, but Sybiha has warned that Kyiv may only show up if Russia’s terms are provided beforehand.

“We are interested in seeing these meetings continue because we want the war to end this year,” Sybiha said, adding that Moscow “must accept an unconditional cease-fire” to allow broader negotiations to take place. Russia, however, appears to remain largely uninterested in an immediate truce, instead focusing on the so-called “root causes” of the war, such as Kyiv’s NATO ambitions.

New mediation body. Representatives from more than 30 countries convened in Hong Kong on Friday to establish a global mediation-based dispute resolution group. Called the Convention on the Establishment of the International Organization for Mediation, the body aims to provide “Chinese wisdom” to resolve conflicts between nations and “move beyond the zero-sum mindset of ‘you lose, and I win,’” Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said.

Beijing maintains that this is the first intergovernmental legal organization to focus on mediation and that it will be vital to help safeguard the principles of the U.N. Charter. But some experts worry that it could also further China’s global south ambitions. Beijing has long aimed to be a leader among developing nations, and with Trump’s trade war isolating Washington from the rest of the world, China is hoping to bolster its arbitration credentials and establish a reputation on par with the International Court of Justice.

Odds and Ends

Archaeologists in Guatemala have newly discovered a vast complex of pyramids, sanctuaries, and even a canal system belonging to the ancient Mayan people, Guatemala’s Culture Ministry announced on Thursday. Stretching across three areas near the sacred Mayan site of Uaxactún, the ruins are believed to be nearly 3,000 years old. “These sites form a previously unknown urban triangle whose existence we were unaware of until now,” the ministry said. “These new archeological discoveries constitute a testament of Mayan culture’s greatness, which today we are making known to the whole world.”

DEMOCRATIC STRATEGISTS IN RECENT MONTHS approached officials at the party’s main Senate super PAC to discuss a bank-shot idea for flipping control of the Senate: quietly backing independent candidates in traditionally Republican states.

The strategy is highly sensitive. Any public acknowledgement that the Democratic political infrastructure is, in fact, backing non-Democrats risks angering the party’s base and ruining the aura of independence of the candidates the party is surreptitiously trying to help. Any involvement, should it come, would likely be done late in the cycle and with minimum disclosure.

Still, operatives have pinpointed states where they think the approach might work, according to two people familiar with the conversations. The list includes Nebraska, Iowa, and Alaska, all of which are hosting Senate contests this year in what could end up being Democrats’ best chance at denying Republicans another majority.

The discussions happening between Senate Majority PAC and other party leaders underscore just how difficult the Senate map is for Democrats this cycle. And it is another indication that top officials recognize their brand is badly damaged among a wide swath of the country.

However, some of these Democratic officials thinking about next year’s midterms have reached another, more dire conclusion.

Sam Stein and Jonathan Cohn discuss the truth behind GOP Medicaid messaging, the real impact of the proposed cuts, and why this isn’t about fraud but about gutting coverage.

Check out Jonathan’s piece here

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Tim Miller and Sam Stein break down a jaw-dropping series of statements from Senator Joni Ernst — including one from a cemetery, where she basically tells Iowans worried about Medicaid cuts to embrace death… and Jesus.

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IMAGINE BEING HANDED the ultimate weapon to win a future war and throwing that weapon away.

That’s a fair description of what Robert F. Kennedy Jr. did last week when he canceled a $766 million government contract to develop a new bird flu vaccine.

The contract was with Moderna, the Massachusetts-based biotech company that developed and continues to produce one of the original COVID-19 shots. The Biden administration awarded the contract last year, through a special government program designed to fund preparation for future public health threats.

Moderna was trying to use its know-how from COVID to invent a vaccine platform it could deploy rapidly against several types of influenza, including the H5N1 bird flu—a version of which, if you haven’t heard, has spread to the United States and is ravaging poultry farms. But it’s not the price of eggs keeping infectious-disease doctors up at night. It’s the possibility that a strain mutates, jumps species, and ends up in humans, who then start transmitting it to each other.

It’s happened before, in mostly isolated outbreaks, with mortality rates that reached 50 percent. That dwarfs the comparable figure for COVID-19, which in most countries was in the low single digits and yet still killed more than 7 million people around the world, including more than a million in the United States.

That death toll would have been even higher if not for speedy development of COVID vaccines, including Moderna’s, whose secret sauce is mRNA technology that generally allows for much quicker production. That’s why two of the scientists most responsible for the breakthrough won the Nobel Prize in Medicine. And it’s why that bird flu contract went to Moderna, whose early tests on the bird flu vaccine have already produced promising results.

But the contract was through the Department of Health and Human Services, which thanks to Donald Trump is under the leadership of Kennedy, the longtime vaccination critic whose egregious lies about the COVID shot include grossly exaggerating the prevalence of side effects and claiming it offers no protection against severe disease.

Kennedy didn’t trot out any of these lines when canceling the Moderna contract. In fact, he didn’t say anything at all. But an HHS spokesperson told reporters like me that the Moderna decision was “about safety, integrity, and trust” and described mRNA technology as “under-tested”—even though the mRNA COVID shots went through extensive, randomized clinical trials before approval, and have been closely monitored for adverse effects ever since.

That last part is no small thing. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, told me in a phone interview he estimates as many as 1 billion people have gotten at least one dose of an mRNA vaccine, with only rare reports of serious side effects.

“I would argue that this has been extraordinarily well studied,” Jha said, “and turns out to be one of the safest vaccine platforms we have.”

Jha, who served as the government’s COVID-19 coordinator during the Biden administration, went on to call the under-testing argument “absurd.” That’s pretty much the consensus among mainstream scientists, as I heard when I put the question to several more of them.

Adam Lauring, chief of infectious diseases at the University of Michigan and a leading researcher into the biology and evolution of viruses, said “these vaccines have probably been studied more intensively over the last five years than pretty much any other vaccines.” Adam Ratner, a nationally recognized pediatric infectious diseases physician in New York City, told me via email that the “mRNA COVID vaccines have been extensively tested and have an excellent safety record.”

Ratner, who is the author of the book Booster Shots, said he could not fathom why Kennedy would be cutting off development of a treatment that might offer the surest, quickest way to prevent a potentially catastrophic spread of bird flu—let alone slow progress on a treatment that holds out the promise of fighting a lot more than infectious disease.

“This decision,” Ratner said, “represents an unforced error of potentially epic proportions.”

CANCELLATION OF THE MODERNA CONTRACT was not the only vaccine-related news that Kennedy made last week. He also announced a major shift in the official recommendation about who should get COVID booster shots and when.

Unlike the Moderna announcement, however, that decision may have been as remarkable for the way it was made and publicized as for what it actually dictated.

The announcement came on Tuesday morning, when Kennedy said in a 60-second social media video that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) would stop recommending boosters for healthy children and healthy non-elderly adults, including pregnant women.

The decision had been rumored for weeks, and even many of those who would prefer to keep the old recommendation for kids concede the risk-versus-reward calculation is open to debate. But the case for pregnant women getting boosters is a lot more clear-cut, as my Bulwark colleague Andrew Egger noted last week.

Studies have linked COVID during pregnancy to pre-term births, preeclampsia, and other complications, as well as long-term damage to the mother’s kidneys, heart, and other systems. Vaccinating pregnant mothers is the surest way to protect newborns and infants, who are highly vulnerable to infection and its most serious effects—and who, for the first few months of life, rely on whatever antibodies they got in utero because they cannot get the shots.

Kennedy’s announcement prompted a blistering statement from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, plus lots of questions about exactly who made the decision and why—especially because two top FDA officials had indicated in a much-ballyhooed article a week earlier that their agency still thought pregnancy was a valid reason for boosters.

“If you look at the data and the science, it does show that COVID vaccination is important for pregnant women—we should be doing everything that we can to not only prevent COVID, but mitigating the severity of disease for people who still get it,” Krutika Kuppalli, a U.S.-based infectious-disease physician and researcher who worked on COVID response for the World Health Organization, told me in a phone interview. “I’m not really understanding how this decision came about.”

Normally, CDC issues vaccine guidelines by following a clear, methodical process that starts with government scientists at CDC and other agencies collecting and analyzing data, which then goes to an advisory committee of outside scientists who meet and discuss the evidence in public. The CDC director presides over those meetings and makes a recommendation, which in turn requires a (usually perfunctory) signoff from the HHS secretary.

That clearly didn’t happen here, because the advisory committee hasn’t met yet. Even if it had, there would have been no permanent or acting CDC director to preside or follow up with a recommendation. As best as anybody can tell—and, yes, it’s totally bonkers that this is even an open question—the person currently performing the CDC director’s duties is the chief of staff, who among other things is not a scientist. He’s a lawyer with a background in aviation.

That might explain why, as the Washington Post reported, CDC staff learned about the decision the same way the public did: by watching that Tuesday video, in which Kennedy was, bizarrely, flanked by directors of two other health agencies but nobody from the CDC.

WHAT CAME NEXT was even weirder.

Two days went by with no more official communication, except for a “directive” with Kennedy’s signature that circulated internally and eventually landed in the inboxes of reporters like me. It was just one page without HHS letterhead or other trappings of official documentation, and it contained what looked to me like a typo that seemed to contradict Kennedy’s central message.

CDC finally updated its online vaccine information on Thursday night, though the new material didn’t line up with what Kennedy had outlined in the video. Under the new guidelines, CDC has completely withdrawn the recommendation of COVID vaccine boosters for pregnant women, but it has given some support for boosters among healthy kids, albeit with a caveat suggesting parents consult their doctors through “shared decision-making.” CDC has done so even though the case for giving boosters to healthy kids is weaker than it is for giving boosters to pregnant women.

And just to make things even more confusing, the HHS media office has responded to media queries (again, including mine) by saying “the old COVID-19 vaccine recommendations for healthy children under 18 and for pregnant women have been removed from the CDC vaccine schedule.” That makes it sound like CDC is treating the two groups the same way, when the online guidance for them is plainly different.

The ambiguous, conflicting messages and shambolic, unprofessional presentations will not surprise you if you have been watching the Trump administration closely these past few months—or if you read last week’s exposé by two NOTUS reporters showing Kennedy’s highly touted “Make America Healthy Again” report contained bogus and sometimes misleading citations.

But the saga around the boosters provides something new: the clearest evidence yet that Kennedy was lying when he promised congressional overseers—and the American people—that his goals were to increase transparency and scientific accountability rather than impose his own agenda. “I don’t think people should be taking medical advice from me,” he told a House committee in May.

“What you have here is the secretary—not even the CDC director, because there is no CDC director—the secretary jumping in and saying the way he interprets the science is X, and so he’s going to make a decision unilaterally to preempt any decision or recommendation that [the advisory committee] would make,” University of Michigan law professor Sam Bagenstos—who served as HHS general counsel during the Biden administration—told me. “That’s a completely irregular process.”

The full effect of the revised COVID booster guidance is impossible to know at this point—in part because its meaning still isn’t totally clear. But there’s a real possibility that it will affect people’s access to the vaccines, making it difficult for people who want or need them to get them.

The “shared decision” recommendation for kids would be enough to keep boosters on the list of vaccines insurers must cover, under the Affordable Care Act’s preventative care requirement, experts told me. But it could at the very least complicate the process for people who would get shots at pharmacies, where consultations aren’t always easy.

As for the lack of guidance on pregnant women, that could give insurers more freedom to drop full coverage. On the other hand, other CDC webpages continued to recommend the shot for pregnant women as late as Friday night. And some insurers might opt to keep covering the boosters regardless of the recommendation—especially for pregnant women, given the high cost of treating serious COVID complications should they occur.

But CDC recommendations have implications that go beyond legal requirements for insurers. They influence public attitudes. CDC recommendations also serve as guidance for physicians all over the country, many of whom don’t have time—or specific technical background—to spend days weighing research evidence on their own.

“If you’re a primary-care physician and you’re trying to decide what to recommend to your patient, it gets to the point where you can’t necessarily trust the recommendations that are being made by HHS and CDC anymore,” Bagenstos said.

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And even for experts following the research more closely, Jha said, “the usual process has a few advantages, because it’s super transparent. Everybody has seen the data. You can disagree with the decisions, but at least you’ve seen the data on which it is based, and the CDC scientists have had a chance to share that data in a public function.”

In short, Kennedy is introducing more uncertainty into everyday medicine while undercutting CDC’s institutional credibility. And he’s doing so in a way that could render this particular decision vulnerable to a court challenge, Bagenstos noted, because administrative law prohibits federal agencies like CDC from arbitrary or capricious action. That’s one reason officials deliberate so methodically and so publicly—or did in non-Trumpian times, at any rate.

But litigation takes time. And even if Kennedy’s guidance on COVID boosters eventually falls in court, he’s sent a message about how unreliable federal support for vaccines has become and will be. The companies that manufacture vaccines are sure to notice.

They have other ways to make money, after all, and other places to do it too. That includes China, whose government has been investing heavily in biotech at precisely the time when—thanks again to Trump and Kennedy—the U.S. government is cutting back support for medical research. Put it all together, and it’s easy to see how vaccine development and production could slow or move overseas, or maybe both.

With any of those scenarios, Americans could find themselves waiting longer for help in a future pandemic. And if it’s bird flu or a new COVID strain or some other yet-to-be-seen pathogen, waiting longer for a vaccine could mean not surviving the outbreak at all.

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