FAIR

The New York Times (6/18/25) made clear that it wouldn’t mind an unprovoked attack on Iran—so long as it wasn’t done hastily.

In the wake of the US-supported Israeli attack on Iran, and days before the direct US bombing that followed, the New York Times editorial board (6/18/25) argued that “America Must Not Rush Into a War Against Iran.”

This language was as shifty as it was deliberate. Rather than oppose a policy of unprovoked aggression and mass murder, the Times editorialists suggested such a campaign was happening too hastily, and it should be preceded by more debate.

The opinion writers at the most important paper in the world were fully in favor of attacking Iran; they only worried that Trump would go about it the wrong way. In fact, the Times’ justification for war was identical to that of the Trump administration’s explanation after the fact.  It laid it out in the first paragraph:

A nuclear-armed Iran would make the world less safe. It would destabilize the already volatile Middle East. It could imperil Israel’s existence. It would encourage other nations to acquire their own nuclear weapons, with far-reaching geopolitical consequences.

The New York Times‘ echo of the standard Israeli and US propaganda line offers an opportunity to critically examine this most recent justification for aggressive war.

The Trump administration’s top intelligence official saying that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon” (Responsible Statecraft, 6/8/25) did not prevent the New York Times from asserting that Iran “has made substantial progress toward acquiring a nuclear weapon.”

The premise here was that Iran is working to build a nuclear weapon, something that forms the backbone of the Israeli propaganda campaign justifying their actions. The only problem is that there is no evidence whatsoever for this position. Not only is there no evidence that Iran is building a nuclear weapon, there is no reason to think that if they did, they would be anything other than defensive weapons.

Nowhere in the Times analysis was there any reference to the fact that neither US intelligence agencies nor international monitoring organizations have found evidence of any Iranian intention to build a nuclear weapon. As recently as March 25, 2025, Tulsi Gabbard, the Trump administration’s director of national intelligence, told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that the US intelligence community “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003.”

While the International Atomic Energy Agency has been critical of steps Iran has taken to make its nuclear power program less transparent in the context of continual threats from Israel and the US to bomb that program, IAEA director Rafael Grossi emphasized in an interview with CNN (6/17/25; cited in Al Jazeera, 6/18/25), after those threats had become reality, “We did not have any proof of a systematic effort to move into a nuclear weapon.”

“The Trump administration might well be able to achieve a stricter deal” than the one Obama negotiated in 2015, the Times advised—without mentioning that Trump’s unilateral repudiated the Obama deal (New York Times, 5/8/18).

While the Times editorial did make brief mention of the US’s Obama-era anti-nuclear treaty with Iran, it offered no analysis as to why the Trump administration unilaterally scrapped the deal, despite no violation on Iran’s part. Nor did the paper mention the Biden administration refusal to negotiate a return to the deal. There was no mention of the fact that as Israel launched its first strike against Iran, the Iranians had made it clear that they wished to make a deal with the Trump administration on its nuclear energy program, and were actively negotiating toward that end.

But the fact is that every country in the Middle East, including Iran, has been in favor of a nuclear weapons–free Middle East. Every country, that is, with the exception of Israel, whose illegal, undeclared and often unacknowledged stockpile of nuclear weapons are currently in the hands of a genocidal and messianic regime, hell-bent on attacking its neighbors and thwarting any opportunities for peace.

Despite all of the fearmongering about Iran’s alleged aggressive intent and destabilizing potential, the Times ignored ample analysis and evidence to the contrary. As eminent political scientist John Mearsheimer (PBS, 7/9/12) has argued, a nuclear armed Iran could make the region more stable, because of the deterrent power of nuclear weapons.

A 2009 US military–funded study from the RAND corporation (4/14/09) examined Iranian ”press statements, writings in military journals, and other glimpses into Iranian thinking,” and found that it was extremely unlikely that Iran would use nuclear weapons offensively against Israel. Contrary to the Times’ image of Iran as fanatical theocrats bent on Israel’s destruction at all costs, military planners in Iran are well aware of the danger of being wiped off the map by retaliatory US strikes, and plan accordingly. If the Islamic Republic was to get nuclear weapons, predicts RAND, they would be used to deter exactly the kind of unprovoked attack that the US and Israel have launched over the past several days. They would be defensive, not offensive, weapons.

The IAEA statement cited by the New York Times was the product of intense lobbying by the US (Common Dreams, 6/23/25).

The editorial board explicitly avoided the question of what Congress should do on the question of war with Iran: “The separate question of whether the United States should join the conflict is not one that we are addressing here.” But they had no problem presenting their pros list:

We know the arguments in favor of doing so—namely, that Iran’s government is a malevolent force in the world, and that it has made substantial progress toward acquiring a nuclear weapon. Last week the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is part of the United Nations, declared that Iran was violating its nonproliferation obligations and apparently hiding evidence of its efforts.

And their cons list:

Given how much weaker Iran is today than it was then, thanks partly to Israel’s humbling of Iranian proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah, the Trump administration might well be able to achieve a stricter [Iran nuclear deal] today.

While the Times correctly pointed out that the IAEA found Iran to be in “noncompliance” with the nonproliferation treaty (NPT), the Times failed to point out that this came after an intense lobbying effort from Western officials just hours before Israeli strikes. They also ignore Iran’s detailed criticism of the IAEA finding, including its allegations that the findings were based in part on forged documents—a credible allegation, given Israel’s history of fabricating and forging evidence to justify aggression. Iran also noted that some of the “nonproliferation obligations” it had allegedly violated were not codified in the NPT, but instead were part of the agreement that the US unilaterally withdrew from. Nor did the Times make reference to the IAEA chief’s explicit insistence that the agency did not have proof Iran was trying to build a nuclear weapon.

Shortly after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the bombing of Iran “was not and has not been about regime change” (BBC, 6/23/25), Trump posted, “Why wouldn’t there be a regime change???”

Instead of explaining this, the Times went straight to name-calling. One does not have to scrape the annals of the New York Times to predict that the phrase “malevolent force” has never been used to describe any of Washington’s ultra-violent allies, even the ones who have actually built and maintained an illegal stockpile of nuclear weapons. Certainly not Israel, the nation that has put an entire population under military apartheid for decades, and has slaughtered tens of thousands as part of what international rights organizations have labeled a genocide.

The US and Israel have made Iran the target of propaganda campaigns, terrorism, cyber attacks, assassinations, regime change operations and unprovoked attacks on its personnel and home soil. If the Times had included these facts, it would have inhibited the ultimate goal of the editorial: to promote the idea that war with Iran could potentially be desirable—and certainly justifiable. The Times seemed keen to act as a loyal opposition to Trump, while distancing themselves from the manner in which he might enact such a war.

Including the facts of America’s aggressive and provocative behavior against Iran would force them to conclude that the primary force destabilizing the region is not Iran, but the US and Israel. It isn’t Iran whose top papers are weighing the benefits of whether or not to launch a war of aggression against yet another nation. That honor goes to the New York Times, which said of this national discussion of mass murder policy: “Let this vital debate begin.”

After the strikes on Iran, the Trump administration and Israel have not announced full scale regime change war just yet, though there is every indication that such plans are in the works. As with Iraq in 2003, we have seen how easily false claims of weapons of mass destruction, and propaganda about a need to act, can morph into a years-long quagmire of senseless killing in the name of rebuilding a nation according to Washington’s designs. If such a war should be launched against Iran, the Times will have been one of its key supporters.

Research assistance: Emma Llano

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at [email protected] or via Bluesky: @NYTimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.

Janine Jackson interviewed Cal Poly Pomona’s Farrah Hassen about criminalizing homelessness for the June 12, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani

Janine Jackson: In 1999, then–New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani declared that “streets do not exist in civilized societies for the purpose of people sleeping there. Bedrooms are for sleeping.” He added that the right to sleep on the streets “doesn’t exist anywhere. The Founding Fathers never put that in the Constitution.”

That absurd out-of-touchness, the failure, not merely of empathy, but of knowledge? Our guest reports that still seems to undergird much of what we are told are policies and laws meant to address homelessness, including at the highest levels.

Farrah Hassen has been tracking the issue for years. She’s a writer, policy analyst and adjunct professor in the Department of Political Science at Cal Poly Pomona. She joins us now by phone from Sacramento. Welcome to CounterSpin, Farrah Hassen.

Farrah Hassen: Hi, Janine. Thanks for having me.

Other Words (6/4/25)

JJ: I want to ask you about Grants Pass v. Johnson, last year’s Supreme Court case that you wrote about recently for OtherWords, but I’d like to start, as you do, with the acknowledgement that ought to anchor every story we see: that a person who works full time and earns a minimum wage cannot afford a safe place to live almost anywhere in the United States. That’s the reality, that’s the understanding that any of our responses ought to take on board, or to be judged by, yes?

FH: That’s correct. I mean, we have to consider that backdrop if we are going to talk about the growing problem of homelessness, and the related housing crisis. And, unsurprisingly, homelessness has increased as our government has diminished social safety nets. And we have to consider that when we think about how people fall into homelessness.

JJ: So rather than respond with a commitment to housing and social services, and job and wage growth, what we’ve seen is criminalizing. I couldn’t find it, but I remember Rudy Giuliani saying that he hoped that his crackdown on unhoused people would lead to them just going away, just sort of disappearing. And that seems to be some of the thinking behind, if not the Grants Pass ruling, some of the support for it. So tell listeners a little about what Grants Pass, that decision, did, and then, what didn’t it do?

FH: A year ago, on June 28, in the City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, the Supreme Court ruled that local governments can criminalize people for sleeping outside, even if there is no available shelter. The Supreme Court overturned the 2018 Martin v. Boise precedent that had been decided by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which had said that the Eighth Amendment’s “cruel and unusual punishment” clause prohibits cities from penalizing unhoused people for sitting, sleeping or lying outside on public property unless they have access to adequate temporary shelter.

And so, for some context, in Grants Pass, like other cities across the United States, the number of people living unhoused easily exceeds the number of available shelter on any given night. Debra Blake was among those Grants Pass residents who were forced to live outside—in her case, for eight years—after losing her job and housing. Moreover, her disability disqualified her from staying in the town’s only shelter. And the city had these anti-camping ordinances that prohibited people like Debra Blake from sleeping or camping in the public, and they interpreted “camping” to even include the use of bedding, like a blanket, to stay warm in the cold.

Anyone who violated these ordinances in the city could be ticketed, could face fines, even subject to criminal prosecution. And the Grants Pass City Council themselves revealed that the underlying goal of these ordinances was to “make it uncomfortable enough for unhoused people in our city so they will want to move down the road.”

Cal Matters (2/27/25)

And so in Debra Blake’s case, after being banished from every park, accruing thousands in fines, she sued the city of Grants Pass as part of this class action suit, for violating unhoused residents’ constitutional rights. And the Oregon District Court agreed in 2020 that the city’s actions constituted cruel and unusual punishment.

But, sadly, Blake never got to see the results. And the city of Grants Pass ended up appealing this decision all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in the city’s favor.

And which brings us back to today. And I should also note, going back to the Supreme Court’s decision, that, importantly, it did not say, “Therefore, state and local governments must now criminalize homelessness.” But because the high court found Grants Pass’s anti-camping ordinances constitutional, many jurisdictions, unfortunately, including in California where I live, have used the court’s decision as a green light to crack down on people living unhoused, including by passing these “anti-camping ordinances,” similar to Grants Pass, which broadly criminalized the act of sleeping or pitching tents or other structures on publicly owned property.

JJ: It’s clear that the issues of homelessness involve many societal factors other than housing. And, at the same time, there’s an Occam’s razor at work here. There’s a reason that “housing first” lands as a call, isn’t there? For people who think, “Well, it’s very complicated. It’s about mental health, it’s about family structure” or whatever, housing first makes a lot of sense, if folks would just think of it that way, yeah?

Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative (6/23)

FH: That’s absolutely correct. There is a misconception that homelessness is primarily caused by addiction and mental illness—which is not to say, to be clear, that there are not people suffering from mental illness and addiction among our nation’s unhoused population.

But there was this landmark study in June 2023 by the University of California San Francisco that focused on California, and it found that poverty and high housing costs are, in fact, the driving forces of homelessness. And that’s just more confirmation that housing unaffordability is the primary cause of homelessness, as other research and experts have long noted.

And that’s why, therefore, using the findings of this evidence, punitive fines, arrests, sweeps of encampments do not address the root of the problem, which is, again, the absence of permanent, affordable and, I might add, adequate housing. And so there are more things our country can do instead of criminalizing homelessness, which only traps people into these cycles, these endless cycles of poverty and homelessness, not to mention criminal penalties being inhumane to begin with.

And so housing first, as you mentioned, is one proven, evidence-backed solution here. It prioritizes providing permanent housing as soon as possible to individuals and families experiencing homelessness, without preconditions. It’s in contrast to what some people want, which is treatment first, or treatment only. Housing first also is coupled with voluntary supportive services to help improve housing stability and well-being, especially for those people who may need additional support, additional treatment.

And housing first has had strong bipartisan support for decades. It’s been supported by the Department of Housing and Urban Development and other agencies. And there’s so much evidence that shows that housing first actually works, including in places like Houston, Texas, which notably reduced homelessness by nearly two thirds over a decade. So that’s just yet another example of why, instead of kicking people while they’re down, housing support, combined with other voluntary services, really helped to lift people back up.

JJ: I’ll just only ask you, finally, Farrah Hassen, if you see a particular role for news media here, either for good or for ill, in terms of consideration of this question, which I want to ground folks in the statement that you have in the piece, “Homelessness is solvable in our lifetime.” It’s not bending laws of nature, it’s just informed effort. And I wonder what role you think news media might play there.

Farrah Hassen: “We have to look at this as a government failure, instead of constantly pointing back at people living unhoused, and blaming them for their plight.”

FH: Oh, thank you. I really do appreciate that question, because underlying that question is, I believe, a larger narrative of how we talk about housing in this country. And you would never know that it’s actually a well-defined and internationally protected fundamental human right that all people—not people who have to be means-tested, or meet certain qualifications—all people are entitled to. Why? Because we all know innately, looking at our own lives, that housing is essential to life, to health, to well-being, but in the United States, it has primarily treated housing as a commodity, and it’s failing to protect this right for large numbers of people.

Homelessness itself, the sheer fact that over 770,000 people last year experienced homelessness, a record high, directly violates this right to adequate housing. So we have to look at this as a government failure, instead of constantly pointing back at people living unhoused, and blaming them for their plight, as if there are not larger structural factors at play that contribute to housing remaining perpetually unaffordable for more and more people living in this country.

And so obviously the US doesn’t recognize housing as a human right, but I believe we should talk about it more, like we do about the need for Medicare for All, which is rooted in healthcare for all. We need these economic, social and cultural rights, along with civil and political rights, to really be able to live our lives to the fullest. And, fundamentally, that means transforming our nation’s approach to housing policies, and to remember that people shouldn’t be punished as well, as we look back on homelessness, for living in public spaces. People should not be punished for existing.

JJ: I’m going to end on that note. We’ve been speaking with writer, policy analyst and adjunct professor at Cal Poly Pomona Farrah Hassen. Thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

FH: Thanks so much, Janine.

After citing Trump administration charges that Kilmar Abrego Garcia was a member of MS-13, Al Jazeera (6/6/25) included a response from his advocates: “His lawyers have denied that he was a gang member and said he had not been convicted of any crime.”

Kilmar Abrego Garcia was returned to the United States on June 6, after being wrongly deported to El Salvador almost three months earlier. Abrego Garcia had been detained in El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center since March 15, along with more than 250 other immigrants accused of belonging to the Latin American gangs Tren de Aragua and MS-13.

Abrego Garcia’s case drew particular media attention, due to the admission by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that his deportation and subsequent imprisonment were a result of an “administrative error.” For weeks, however, both the Trump administration and the Salvadoran government insisted they were powerless to return Abrego Garcia to the United States.

After months of protests from Abrego Garcia’s Maryland community and legal challenges from his lawyers, the father of three was finally returned to the US. But there was a caveat: He would face criminal charges related to an immigrant-smuggling operation that the Department of Justice alleges Abrego Garcia took part in as a member of MS-13.

Though there are plenty of reasons to cast doubt on the charges made against Abrego Garcia, in the seven articles published in the wake of his return, the New York Times (6/6/25, 6/6/25, 6/6/25, 6/8/25) and Wall Street Journal (6/6/25, 6/7/25, 6/8/25) present them mostly at face value. Given that the publications are the top two largest newspapers in America, their deficient coverage of one of the most important immigration cases of the second Trump administration is noteworthy.

The main New York Times story (6/6/25) on Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s return from El Salvador consists largely of Trump administration officials accusing him of crimes—with no quotes from Abrego Garcia’s lawyers contesting those charges. 

Only two of the articles (New York Times, 6/6/25; Wall Street Journal, 6/7/25) mentioned that the charges against Abrego Garcia stem from recent information supplied by jailhouse informants.  The articles failed to note that such testimony is notoriously unreliable, as documented by research, and frequently results in wrongful convictions.

Though there are six unnamed co-conspirators listed in the indictment, it appears as though the majority of the charges rely on the testimony of one or two of these individuals. Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, one of Abrego Garcia’s attorneys, told CNN’s Erin Burnett (6/6/25), “The very first question I’m going to be asking is, what were those two people offered to make up these really fantastic, hyperbolic allegations against Mr. Abrego Garcia?”

The DoJ’s stonewalling of Abrego Garcia’s lawyers in his civil case should raise further suspicion about why these jailhouse informants decided to come forward now, despite the DoJ’s allegation that Abrego Garcia has been involved with immigrant smuggling since 2016. None of the articles mention that Abrego Garcia had been attending yearly check-ins with ICE since 2019, and that these allegations had not come up during the six years that ICE had been monitoring him, nor were they mentioned during the trial that resulted in a judge granting him withholding of removal.

In their New York Times piece (6/6/25), reporters Devlin Barrett, Alan Feuer and Glenn Thrush dedicated two paragraphs to a 2022 traffic stop involving Abrego Garcia that the indictment cites as evidence of a smuggling operation, while curiously omitting the fact that he was not charged with a crime at the time of the incident.

None of the articles mentioned that Abrego Garcia had been in ICE detention for seven months in 2019, at the same time that the DoJ alleges he was leading an immigrant smuggling operation. Also missing in the Times and Journal’s coverage was the fact that the police officer who authored the 2019 report was later terminated for sharing “sensitive and confidential information about an ongoing police investigation with a commercial sex worker” (USA Today, 4/17/25).

The Wall Street Journal (6/6/25) published several paragraphs alleging crimes by Abrego Garcia with no rebuttal.

Two articles omitted comments from Abrego Garcia’s legal team altogether (New York Times 6/6/25; Wall Street Journal, 6/7/25). While the other articles do quote Abrego Garcia’s lawyers, they cited them only about his initial deportation and his return, but not about the criminal charges. Three articles (New York Times, 6/6/25, 6/6/25; Wall Street Journal, 6/6/25) include the same sole quote from Andrew Rossman, another one of Abrego Garcia’s lawyers:

Today’s action proves what we’ve known all along—that the administration had the ability to bring him back and just refused to do so…. It’s now up to our judicial system to see that Mr. Abrego Garcia receives the due process that the Constitution guarantees to all persons.

When given the chance to comment on the criminal allegations, Abrego Garcia’s lawyers have been clear that these charges are “preposterous.” Sandoval-Moshenberg told CBS affiliate WUSA9 (6/6/25), “What happened today is the exact opposite of due process, because due process means the opportunity to defend yourself before you’re punished, not afterwards.”

Another one of his lawyers, Chris Newman, who is also the legal director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, told WUSA9 (6/6/25) in the same conference:

This administration has shown amazing disregard for the Constitution, for due process and for basic decency. It is engaged in an unprecedented campaign of disinformation, defamation and cruelty directed at Kilmar’s family.

Another member of Abrego Garcia’s legal team, Brian Murray, told MSNBC’s Alex Witt (6/7/25), “Anyone who’s been looking at this case and has been watching this play out would agree this is a political and vindictive prosecution.”

In the days since Abrego Garcia’s release, his legal team has frequently made themselves available to media to speak about the criminal charges and ongoing constitutional issues surrounding his case. At a time when immigrants’ rights to free speech are under attack, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal chose to sideline the voices of their advocates.

Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

CEPR (3/3/25)

This week on CounterSpin: We’ve always heard that racists hate quotas, yet Stephen Miller’s “3000 a day however which way” mandate is terrorizing immigrant communities—brown immigrant communities—around the country. The response from people of conscience can look many ways: linking arms around people in danger, absolutely; vigorously disputing misinformation about immigrants, whether hateful or patronizing, also. But another piece is gaining a deeper, broader understanding of migration. News media could help answer one implied question—“Why is anyone trying to come to the US anyway?”—by grappling with the role of conditions the US has largely created in the places people are driven from. We’ll talk about that largely missing piece from elite media’s immigration coverage with Michael Galant, senior research and outreach associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Inequality.org (5/29/25)

Also on the show: Anyone who pays attention and cares can see that the Trump budget bill is a brazen transfer of resources from those that are trying to meet basic needs to those that can’t remember how many houses they own. But corporate reporting rarely breaks out economic policy in terms of how it affects different people—especially how it affects communities for whom they show no consistent concern. Economic policy is itself racialized, gendered, regionalized, targeted. Humanistic journalism would help us see that.

LaToya Parker is a senior researcher at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, and co-author, with Joint Center president Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, of the recent piece “This Federal Budget Will Be a Disaster for Black Workers.”

New York comptroller Brad Lander being arrested by DHS secret police for asking to see their warrant (AP, 6/17/25).

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained New York City’s comptroller, Brad Lander, as he and other activists escorted immigrants in the halls of Manhattan’s federal immigration court house (AP, 6/17/25; New York Times, 6/17/25; Democracy Now!, 6/18/25).

Lander is a progressive Democrat running for mayor, although he is trailing in the polls. He is only the latest of many Democrats who have been detained by federal agents in a widespread campaign of intimidation of President Donald Trump’s critics, such as California Sen. Alex Padilla and Newark Mayor Ras Baraka. New Jersey Rep. LaMonica McIver was also indicted  on “charges alleging she assaulted and interfered with immigration officers outside a New Jersey detention center” (AP, 6/10/25), the same case Baraka was involved in.

Feds also briefly detained an aide to New York Rep. Jerrold Nadler. The arrest and hospitalization of California Service Employees International Union leader David Huerta helped kick off the uprising against ICE in Los Angeles (Guardian, 6/9/25). Two House committees are investigating Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell to “determine if the mayor obstructed immigration operations” (WZTV, 6/18/25).

The witch hunt has focused on judges, too. Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan faces a possible prison sentence on allegations she helped an immigrant evade authorities in her courtroom. Attorney General Pam Bondi took to Fox News (4/25/25) to warn other judges who run afoul with the executive branch: “We are prosecuting you.”

During an emergency rally outside the federal building, elected officials and activists charged that Lander’s high-profile arrest was meant as the Trump administration’s warning against any citizen who advocates for immigrant families. The outrage was palpable. Said Justin Brannan, a city council member running for Lander’s job this year: “I’m from Brooklyn. You know what we call this? Complete and total bullshit.”

The New York Post (6/17/25) calls lawmakers standing up for immigrants as “pretty pathetic, and pointless,” because “even many Democrats support Trump’s deportations of criminal illegal immigrants.” (“Many” here means 9%, according to Pew—6/17/25.)

The Murdoch press, however, is celebrating the latest use weaponization of government power.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board (6/17/25):

“Do you have a judicial warrant?” Mr. Lander asks, as he’s pulled along in a scrum toward an elevator. “Do you have a judicial warrant? Can I see the judicial warrant? Can I see the warrant? I will let go when you show me the judicial warrant. Where is it? Where is the warrant?” It isn’t his job to demand a warrant or for agents to produce one to him.

First of all, Lander is the comptroller, the city’s second-highest elected officer and its chief fiduciary. Comptrollers commonly advocate for clean government, transparency and criminal justice reform. Further, he was acting mostly in his capacity as an activist doing “court watch” to protect families against deportations and family separations. Is it his job as comptroller to ensure cops aren’t abusing their power? Arguably. Is it his duty as a citizen in a democratic society? Absolutely.

The New York Post editorial board (6/17/25):

Lander repeatedly demanded to see a warrant for a guy ICE was detaining outside federal immigration court, holding his hand on the arrestee’s shoulder in an obvious bid to obstruct the agents enough to provoke an arrest.

Unsurprisingly, the charges got dropped after a few hours; Homeland Security has far more important things to do than play the heavy in Dems’ various morality plays.

Clearly, the editorial was written so hastily the writers didn’t notice a glaring contradiction: Given how many federal agents came after Lander and how long they detained him, the feds clearly did prioritize his detention. Some activists outside the courthouse even speculated that the rally calling for his release only encouraged federal agents to keep holding him.

Fox News (6/17/25) suggested that Lander’s arrest was “staged” because he was released “after being held for only a few hours.”  (The Fox video blurred out the faces of the DHS officers who weren’t masked.)

Joe Concha of the Washington Examiner told Fox & Friends First (6/18/25) Lander’s arrest was “cheesy performance art.” His paper (Washington Examiner, 6/18/25) recalled that Concha “predicted these efforts will only increase.” And Fox News (6/17/25) interviewed Joe Borelli, a Republican city council member:

“Election day is a week from today, and early voting has begun. Make no mistake, the purpose was to get the headlines that he’s getting,” said Borelli. “It’s instant name recognition and establishing even stronger liberal bona fides.”

Speaking with Fox News Digital, Borelli likened Lander’s arrest to the recent arrest of Newark Democrat Mayor Ras Baraka and the detaining of Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., who were both detained for allegedly disrupting different federal events.

“This is the playbook for lefty politicians who want to make a get-a-headline. They try to get arrested, they get arrested and then fake outrage over getting arrested,” he said.

This is a common smear that right-wing media use against progressive activists: that they are engaging in publicity stunts (New York Post, 7/20/22; Jerusalem Post, 6/8/25). Put aside the fact DHS is led by Kristi Noem, famous for her cosplay photo ops: None of these people asked, or tried, to be arrested. Lander and other activists have been doing this type of work in order to publicize the injustice of these mass immigrant round-ups and the eradication of due process.

If anything, the federal agents making these arrests are the ones giving these actions more play in the news, and creating more outrage in general. In other words, right-wing media are mad that these arrests are helping to unify the outrage against mass deportations.

In fact, a headline at the right-wing Washington Times (6/17/25) warned: “Democrats’ Defiance of ICE Grows After New York Mayoral Candidate Arrested.”

It isn’t terribly unusual that these right-wing outlets are pooh-poohing Democrats and immigrants. The issue here isn’t their devotion to right-wing policies, but to a Mafia-like government that is using an unaccountable police force to arrest politicians of a rival political party. The Murdoch press isn’t just running propaganda for the White House, these outlets are fanning the flames of authoritarianism.

“Have the canines acquired strange mutations living near the power plant?” Popular Mechanics (6/8/25) asks. Spoiler alert: No.

I like to read science stories, even (maybe especially) when they’re not politically earthshaking. But sometimes what’s on the label is not what’s in the tin.

Take a Popular Mechanics story, “The Dogs of Chernobyl Are Experiencing Rapid Evolution, Study Suggests” (6/8/25). The subhead asks the question, “Have the canines acquired strange mutations living near the power plant?”

To answer that, PM reports on a paper from 2023: “The study uncovered that the feral dogs living near the Chernobyl Power Plant showed distinct genetic differences from dogs living only some 10 miles away in nearby Chernobyl City.” That is literally all we learn about the findings of the study that the headline is based on.

It does go on to say that a newer study finds that the answer to the subhead’s question is “no”:

A study published nearly two years later confidently asserts that we can cross radiation off the list of explanations for the current state of the Chernobyl canine population…. This new genetic analysis looked at the chromosomal level, the genome level and even the nucleotides of the Chernobyl dogs, and found no abnormalities indicative of radiation-induced mutation.

Oh. Never mind!

I guess an accurate headline—”Study Finds No Sign Chernobyl’s Dogs Are Radioactive Mutants”—wouldn’t have gotten as many clicks.

“Dinosaurs didn’t rule the Earth,” Big Think (6/10/26) argues, because someone found a fossil of “a badger-like mammal…biting a small horned dinosaur.”

Another piece appeared in Big Think (6/10/26) under the headline “A Mesozoic Myth: Dinosaurs Didn’t Rule the Earth Like We Think.” Intriguing! Tell us more?

It turns that the argument is basically that even though none of them were “larger than the size of a house cat,” during the age of dinosaurs “there were ancient mammal equivalents of squirrels, shrews, otters, aardvarks, flying squirrels and more.” I put it to you, though, that none of these are the kind of creatures that we think of today as “ruling the Earth.”

Imagine for a moment that Country A launched an illegal and unprovoked attack on Country B. In any sort of objective world, you might expect media coverage of the episode to go something along the lines of: “Country A Launches Illegal and Unprovoked Attack on Country B.”

Not so in the case of Israel, whose special relationship with the United States means it gets special coverage in the US corporate media. When Israel attacked Iran early last Friday, killing numerous civilians along with military officials and scientists, the press was standing by to present the assault as fundamentally justified—no surprise coming from the outlets that have for more than 20 months refused to describe Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip as genocide.

AP‘s headline (6/18/25) highlights that Israel struck “Iran’s nuclear sites and kills top generals”; the article doesn’t note that Iran says the “overwhelming majority” of the 78 people killed at that point by Israel were civilians (Times of Israel, 6/14/25).

From the get-go, the corporate media narrative was that Israel had targeted Iranian military and nuclear facilities in a “preemptive strike” (ABC, 6/13/25), with civilian casualties presented either as an afterthought or not at all (e.g., AP, 6/18/25). (As the Israeli attack on Iran has continued unabated for the past week in tandem with retaliatory Iranian strikes on Israel, the Iranian civilian death toll has become harder to ignore—as, for example, in the Washington Post’s recent profile of 23-year-old poet Parnia Abbasi, killed along with her family as they slept in their Tehran apartment building.)

On Monday, June 16, the fourth day of the assault, the Associated Press reported that Israeli strikes had “killed at least 224 people since Friday.” This figure appeared in the eighth paragraph of the 34-paragraph article; the first reference to Iranian civilians appeared in paragraph 33, which informed readers that “rights groups” had suggested that the number was a “significant undercount,” and that 197 civilians were thus far among the upwards of 400 dead.

Back in paragraph 8, meanwhile, came the typical implicit validation of Israeli actions:

Israel says its sweeping assault on Iran’s top military leaders, uranium enrichment sites and nuclear scientists, is necessary to prevent its longtime adversary from getting any closer to building an atomic weapon.

That Israel’s “preventive” efforts happened to occur smack in the middle of a US push for a diplomatic resolution to the Iranian nuclear issue has not proved to be a detail that is overly of interest to the US media; nor have corporate outlets found it necessary to dwell too deeply on the matter of the personal convenience of war on Iran for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu—both as a distraction from the genocide in Gaza, and from his domestic embroilment in assorted corruption charges.

In its own coverage, NBC News (6/14/25) highlighted that Netanyahu had “said the operation targeted Iran’s nuclear program and ‘will continue for as many days as it takes to remove this threat.’” Somehow, it is never deemed worth mentioning in such reports that it is not in fact up to Israel—the only state in the region with an (undeclared) nuclear arsenal, and a non-signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty—to be policing any perceived nuclear “threat.” Instead, Israeli officials are given ample space, time and again, to present their supposed cause as entirely legitimate, while getting away with murder—not to mention genocide.

A Washington Post article (6/16/25) manages to blame the Iranian officials for not keeping their people safe from Israeli missiles.

Its profile of the young poet Abbasi notwithstanding, the Washington Post has been particularly aggressive in toeing the Israeli line. Following Netanyahu’s English-language appeal to Iranians to “stand up” against the “common enemy: the murderous regime that both oppresses you and impoverishes you”—a pretty rich accusation, coming from the man currently presiding over mass murder and all manner of other oppression—Post reporter Yeganeh Torbati (6/14/25) undertook to detail how some Iranians “see potential salvation in Israel’s attack despite risk of a wider war.”

In her dispatch, Torbati explained that in spite of reports of civilian deaths, “ordinary Iranians” had “expressed satisfaction” at Israel’s attacks on Iran’s “oppressive government.” As usual, there was no room for any potentially relevant historical details regarding “oppressive” governance in Iran—like, say, the 1953 CIA-orchestrated coup d’état against the democratically elected Mohammad Mossadegh, which paved the way for the extended rule-by-terror of the torture-happy Iranian shah, whose oppression was aided by manic acquisition of US weaponry.

On Monday, Torbati was back with another report on how, amid Israel’s attacks on Iran, the Iranian population had “lamented the lack of adequate safety instructions and evacuation orders” from its government, “turning to social media for answers.” The article quotes a Tehran resident named Alireza as complaining that “we have nothing, not even a government that would bother giving safety suggestions to people”—although it’s anyone’s guess as to what sort of suggestions the government is supposed to offer given the circumstances. Try not to be sleeping in your apartment when Israel decides to bomb it?

We thus end up with an entire article in a top US newspaper suggesting that the issue at hand is not that Israel is conducting illegal and unprovoked attacks on Iran, but rather that the Iranian government has not publicized proper safety recommendations for dealing with said attacks. At one point, Torbati concedes that “the government did provide some broad safety instructions,” and that “a government spokeswoman, Fatemeh Mohajerani, recommended that Iranians take shelter in metros, mosques and schools.”

Refusing to leave it at that, Torbati goes on to object that “it was unclear why mosques and schools would be safer than other buildings, given that Israel had already targeted residential and other civilian structures”—which again magically transforms the issue into a critique of the Iranian government for lack of clarity, as opposed to a critique of Israel for, you know, committing war crimes.

To the New York Times (6/15/25), mass assassination of Iranian leaders is a “playbook” and “following the script.”

Which brings us to the New York Times, never one to miss a chance to cheerlead on behalf of Israeli atrocities—like that time in 2009 that the paper’s resident foreign affairs columnist literally advocated for targeting civilians in Gaza (FAIR.org, 1/30/25), invoking Israel’s targeting of civilians in Lebanon in 2006 as a positive precedent. Now, a Times article (6/15/25) headlined “Israel’s Attack in Iran Echoes Its Strategy Against Hezbollah” wonders if another Lebanese precedent might prove successful: “Israel decimated the group’s leadership last fall and degraded its military capabilities. Can the same strategy work against a far more powerful foe?”

After reminiscing about “repeated Israeli attacks on apartment buildings, bunkers and speeding vehicles” in Lebanon in 2024—which produced “more than 15 senior Hezbollah military commanders eliminated in total”—the piece speculates that Israel’s ongoing attacks on Iran and assassinations of top Iranian officers seem “to be following the script from last fall” in Lebanon. Swift confirmation comes from Randa Slim at the Middle East Institute in Washington: “It’s all targeted, the assassination of their senior officials in their homes.”

Never mind that Israel’s activity in Lebanon last fall amounted to straight-up terrorism—or that somehow these “targeted assassinations” managed to kill some 4,000 people in Lebanon between October 2023 and November 2024 alone. In unceasingly providing a platform to justify Israeli aggression and mass civilian slaughter throughout the region, the US corporate media at least appears to be following its own script to a T.

Pro-Israel zealots commonly attempt to discredit criticism of the Israeli government by equating such criticism with antisemitism, because Israel is the world’s only state with a Jewish majority.

One way of lifting up this accusation is to say that pro-Palestine leftists hold Israel to a different standard by focusing on Israel and ignoring human rights concerns in other countries. The World Jewish Congress (5/4/22) gives supposed examples of this, such as “accusing Israel of human right violations while refusing to criticize regimes with far worse human right abuses, such as Iran, North Korea, Iraq and Pakistan,” or “rebuking Israel for allegedly violating women’s rights, while ignoring significantly worse abuses carried out by governments and terrorist organizations.”

To the New York Times (6/14/25), saying that people are opposed to Israel and not to Jews is “making excuses.”

The New York Times (6/14/25) recently invoked this in an editorial headlined “Antisemitism Is an Urgent Problem. Too Many People Are Making Excuses.” To the board’s credit, the editorial talks about how antisemitism plays a big role in the Trump administration’s racist and demagogic rule—although it could have gone further into analyzing how antisemitism is at the center of fascism’s other conspiratorial bigotries: that Jewish masterminds are behind mass immigration (FAIR.org, 10/30/18) and Black Lives Matter (Fox Business, 12/15/17).

But the editorialists aim at least as much criticism at the left for its vocal opposition against the ongoing genocide and starvation in Gaza. Yes, the editors admit that “criticism of the Israeli government is not the same thing as antisemitism,” and insist that they themselves “have abhorred the mass killing of civilians and the destruction of Gaza.” They also said that pro-Israel activists “hurt their own cause when they equate all such arguments with antisemitism.”

There’s a “but” coming. “But some Americans have gone too far in the other direction,” the board said, pointing to the “3D test” of “delegitimization, demonization and double standards” that it says is a key test for determining “when criticism of Israel crosses into antisemitism.” “Progressive rhetoric has regularly failed that test in recent years,” they write:

Consider the double standard that leads to a fixation on Israel’s human rights record and little campus activism about the records of China, Russia, Sudan, Venezuela or almost any other country. Consider how often left-leaning groups suggest that the world’s one Jewish state should not exist and express admiration for Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis—Iran-backed terrorist groups that brag about murdering Jews. Consider how often people use “Zionist” as a slur—an echo of Soviet propaganda from the Cold War—and call for the exclusion of Zionists from public spaces. The definition of a Zionist is somebody who supports the existence of Israel.

Let’s take these one at a time. It is depressingly telling that the first line echoes a year-old editorial in the right-wing City Journal (4/14/24) that condemned students for not aiming their protests at Syria, Russia or China. The most obvious answer to these “gotcha” scenarios is that the US and US universities are not funding human rights violations or wars initiated by any of these countries. The protests against Israel’s actions in Gaza are growing in the US precisely because of US support for Israel. Students often want to see their universities divest from Israeli entities as a way to put pressure on Israel, the same way activists mobilized against South African apartheid.

The US and its allies have imposed sanctions on Russia (Reuters, 2/27/22; Politico, 2/28/22; Al Jazeera, 4/24/24), and the US is currently in a trade war with China (CNN, 6/11/25); the State Department has declared it will “aggressively” revoke the visas of Chinese students (Reuters, 5/29/25). The Trump administration’s new travel restrictions ban people from Sudan and highly restrict entry for Venezuelans (NPR, 6/9/25). The Council on Foreign Relations (3/11/25) estimates that the US has given Ukraine $128 billion to defend against the Russian invasion, and the House of Representatives has an entire committee devoted to investigating China’s ruling Communist Party.

The Times next asks us to “consider how often left-leaning groups suggest that the world’s one Jewish state should not exist.” Left-leaning groups generally oppose ethnostates, and tend not to make an exception for Israel, whose ethnic policies have been condemned as “apartheid” by the world’s leading human rights groups. As for expressing admiration for Hamas et al.: You’ll rarely hear US progressives praising Hamas, but you will hear them blaming Hamas’s violence on the thousands of Palestinians killed by Israel prior to October 7, 2023.

The Times goes on to complain that the word “Zionist,” which it defines as “somebody who supports the existence of Israel,” is used as a slur. But Zionism hasn’t become a thorny word because of antisemitism. Zionists are defending a political system where rights and freedom depend on one’s religion and ethnicity, a concept the small-d democrats of a liberal paper like the Times would otherwise abhor. The word “Dixiecrat” is remembered today only as a bad word, not because these people were from the American Southeast, but because they advocated for segregation.

The Times, as usual, wrongly equates Zionism with Jewishness. There are many Jewish non-Zionists and anti-Zionists, including sects that view Zionism as a sort of false messianism. There are also many Christian Zionists—who far outnumber Jewish Zionists—who see Israel as a necessary means to the biblically foretold End Times.

The editorial admits that the Trump administration “has also used [antisemitism] as a pretext for his broader campaign against the independence of higher education.” The paper notes: “The combination risks turning antisemitism into yet another partisan issue, encouraging opponents to dismiss it as one of his invented realities.”

The Times is absolutely right that the Trump administration’s vociferous attacks on antisemitism are ineffective, precisely because they are patently just a stick with which to beat his enemies in academia. But that is the exact same problem that the Times editorial has: If you use charges of antisemitism as a pretense to smear critics of a genocidal government, you are doing nothing to protect Jews.

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at [email protected] or via Bluesky: @NYTimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.

Trigger warning: discussion of suicide and its depictions.

The New York Times Magazine (6/1/25) ignored ethical guidelines designed to keep reporting from encouraging suicide.

The New York Times Magazine recently published a cover story (6/1/25) that gave in-depth representation to the challenges faced by a chronically sick, disabled woman named Paula Ritchie, age 52. Ritchie dealt with underdiagnosed illnesses and pain, as well as challenges in supporting herself and managing her mental health.

The Times then told the story of Ritchie ending her own life out of despair over her situation. The journalist, Katie Engelhart, observed and documented her suicide, up until the last breath left her body. “I was with Ritchie until the very end,” she posted on X (6/1/25). Engelhart gave lengthy justifications for Ritchie’s choice to end her life, and described several people who supported her in that decision.

Articles like this aren’t common in the media. Suicide prevention is typically regarded as both a social good and an ethical responsibility. In the US and Canada (where the article takes place), suicidal people are involuntarily detained to prevent their deaths. It has long been illegal in Canada (and many US states) to assist or even “counsel” a person to commit suicide.

There are also ethical standards that guide media outlets in reporting on suicide, in order to minimize the risk of glamorizing or idealizing it. These guidelines are based on research showing that the media has an outsized influence when it comes to suicide. Graphic, detailed and sensationalized coverage has been shown to increase the “risk of contagion,” according to one guide. AP News specifically tries to avoid detailing the “methods used” in stories that reference suicide, based on this research.

The Times violated almost all of the published guidelines by personalizing, detailing, dramatizing, justifying and sentimentalizing Ritchie’s suicide, as well as by making it a cover story. The story featured close-up images of the method of Ritchie’s death and what appears to be her post-mortem body.

The World Health Organization urges journalists covering suicide not to “explicitly describe the method used” or “use photographs, video footage or social media links that relate to the circumstances of the suicide,” among other guidelines.

So why wasn’t there generalized outrage or pushback from other media? The only significant outcry came from thousands of disabled people on social media.

The simplest answer is that Ritchie’s suicide was administered by a doctor, and legal in Canada. Media tend to be more accepting of the unacceptable when it is government-sanctioned. In 2021, the country expanded its Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) law to permit physician-assisted suicide for disabled people who aren’t suffering terminal illnesses. The law and its implementation have been extremely controversial, as the article noted. Similar laws have been passed or introduced across Europe.

The Times article reinforced a popular belief that disability is a fate worse than death. The disabled author Imani Barbarin sums it up in the title of her forthcoming book: If I Were You, I’d Kill Myself. It’s a refrain disabled people are accustomed to hearing, the frightful implication of which is that accommodations aren’t worth the bother, and death is for their own good.

The media has a tendency to reinforce this idea in stories about disability. As I previously wrote about for FAIR (1/20/21), the New York Times (4/10/20, 12/24/20) published stories early in the Covid-19 pandemic suggesting that disability should be considered in determining who had a right to Covid ventilators, based on unproven myths of “quality of life.” The articles cited literal eugenicists as experts, and didn’t invite disabled people to the conversation.

In Engelhart’s Times article, she appeared to offer a sensitive and balanced view on the debates around MAiD expansion. Yet the article was laden with ableist rhetoric, medical misinformation and subtle propaganda from the well-funded “right to die” movement. It also left out prominent critical facts about MAiD.

Engelhart omitted that the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (3/11/25) issued a report in March that condemned Canada’s MAiD, and recommended that the country “repeal” the expanded law and halt plans for future expansion. The report outlined how benefits and healthcare for disabled people are inadequate in Canada, resulting in coercion around MAiD, especially for women and marginalized groups. People have been sharing stories of coercive MAiD practices since it was expanded (e.g., Independent, 6/23/23; New York Post, 11/8/22; X, 6/4/25).

It’s significant that the most powerful international body issued such a strong condemnation of MAiD; it’s something that anyone following the issue should know about, and Engelhart has published a book on MAiD and speaks about it constantly, yet she left it out of her article.

Dying With Dignity Canada’s goals include, according to the Walrus (1/12/24) “making MAiD available to people whose sole condition is a mental disorder” and “expanding MAID to ‘mature minors’ age twelve and older.”

Engelhart did discuss some of the issues exposed by the UN, but she cited “disability rights advocates,” “critics” and “opponents,” not the UN. She also didn’t name or quote these opponents, aside from a few uneasy doctors. None of the many disability rights, human rights and religious organizations that have condemned MAiD expansion were named, and only some of their arguments were discussed. Missing, for instance, was the fact that a promised expansion of disability benefits was tabled just after MAiD expansion was approved, suggesting the government saw the suicide program as another solution, of sorts, to the disability problem.

Also missing from the article was the role of a powerful lobbying group known as Dying with Dignity Canada (DwD), which has raised millions of dollars from corporate and wealthy donors (Walrus, 1/12/24). DwD has had an enormous influence on the Canadian government and media conversations on MAiD. The organization isn’t named in the Times Magazine piece, but its propaganda is subtly woven throughout.

Engelhart has been more explicit about her pro-MAiD leanings in other writings and statements (e.g., Neiman Storyboard, 3/3/21; NPR, 3/9/21), as well as in online responses to comments on her Times Magazine piece.

As evidence of her bias, look at the way Engelhart introduced the terminology in the Times article: “Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) program—what critics call physician-assisted suicide.” It’s a curious attribution. Is there a more direct, factual way to describe what happened to Ritchie than suicide? It’s a subtle nod to DwD, which seeks to remove the “suicide” from assisted suicide. From the organization’s website:

We do not use the terms assisted suicide or euthanasia because they stigmatize people who are suffering intolerably and want to access their right to a peaceful death. Suicide is a desperate act of self-harm, while medical assistance in dying is a legal, federally regulated end-of-life choice, driven by hope and autonomy.

The Merriam-Webster definition of suicide is “the act or an instance of ending one’s own life voluntarily and intentionally.” DwD seems to be attempting to redefine the word to soften what happens with MAiD.

On Twitter, Engelhart has argued that “assisted death” is a less “politically loaded” term than “assisted suicide.” She has also taken issue with the AP for referring to MAiD recipients as “killed.” It’s not propaganda to state that when someone dies, they are “killed” by the cause of death. People are killed by cancer, accidents and self-inflicted wounds as much as by murder.

Engelhart’s efforts to soften the language of assisted suicide calls to mind crime reporters using “police-involved shooting” to say that police have shot someone. The common norms for speaking about suicide and shootings can apply without harm or distortion of the facts.

The Times Magazine article reflected some of the contradictions inherent to DwD ideology that appear throughout Engelhart’s work. For instance, she often compares assisted suicide rights to abortion rights, a DwD talking point. But she also compares it to the merciful “euthanizing” of “beloved pets.” Unlike people who elect abortions, animals do not get to choose their fates, or even express their wishes. Humans project our assumptions onto pets, including that their suffering must be a fate worse than death.

Despite Engelhart’s seeming alignment with the “dying with dignity” movement, to her credit, she did expose that there wasn’t absolute “dignity” in Ritchie’s death. The article ends with a gruesome description of Ritchie’s last moments, including her expression of “horrible” discomfort.

Dr. Matt Wonnacott, the doctor who approved euthanasia for Paula Ritchie: “If you tell me that you’re suffering, who am I to question that?” he told Engelhart.

Engelhart provided a lot of detail about Ritchie’s medical conditions, but relied on outdated, vaguely sourced and ableist ways of describing chronic illness. Here and elsewhere, her work is mostly sourced to doctors, especially MAiD providers, and patients who want to die, but not the many people who live with and manage complex chronic disease.

As a disabled journalist, I see Ritchie’s story through a different lens than Engelhart. I have many of her conditions, deal with ongoing suffering, sometimes severe, and was suicidal at one point.

Engelhart described Ritchie as if she were too difficult to diagnose sufficiently beyond a collection of symptoms, including head injury, migraine, fatigue, dizziness, long-standing depression and PTSD from childhood trauma. Yet I know that it can take ten or more years for a person to get properly diagnosed with most chronic illnesses, if they are lucky. I also know that chronic illness patients deal with doctors who gaslight, misdiagnose and psychologize symptoms.

The doctor who authorized Ritchie’s suicide, Matt Wonnacott, appears to be one of those. He was a primary source in the story. Engelhart did leave it open for readers to feel uncomfortable with Wonnacott’s approach. Although he acknowledged that Ritchie still had treatment options, he admitted to making decisions to approve assisted suicide based on “gestalt” and “patient choice” more than medicine. On the other hand, Engelhart seemed to take the doctor’s medical assessments at face value, not interrogating his knowledge or biases.

At one point, Engelhart referred to a category of MAiD patients with “functional disorders…that are poorly understood within medicine, and disputed within medicine, and that some clinicians believe have a significant psychological component.” Who are these clinicians? She did not say, but then listed a series of conditions that are not considered, by official diagnostic criteria, to be psychological: “fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, irritable-bowel syndrome, some kinds of chronic headaches.”  “Functional” has a history, like “hysteria” before it, of being used as a catch-all for misunderstood women’s illnesses.

As for “chronic fatigue,” it is more properly known as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, or ME. There is an epidemic of it lately, as it is commonly caused by Covid-19. As such, there are countless recent studies proving its physiological causes. At one point, Engelhart discussed how Ritchie’s muscles work one minute, then “suddenly buckle” the next, writing: “This suggested that the buckling was due to psychological causes or a lack of effort.” Yet Ritchie seemed to be demonstrating a hallmark symptom of ME known as “post-exertional malaise.”

Engelhart included a lot of detail about Ritchie’s care and medications, with the effect of seeming like every option was exhausted. Yet I am surprised by what is missing. There is no mention of dysautonomia or its treatments, even though Ritchie has difficulty bathing herself and getting out of the bath, both common in that illness. There is no mention of cutting-edge treatments for ME, like antivirals for reactivated viruses, or naltrexone. And there is no mention of the new class of CGRP migraine drugs, which have rescued millions of people from horrible constant pain.

In place of medical investigation, Engelhart uses rhetoric and sentiment to portray Ritchie as a lost cause. She supports this portrait with classist and ableist imagery, like mentioning Ritchie’s “old TV and a window that looked out on a row of garbage bins,” her “stained” floors, her trouble bathing and long history of depression. She quotes people in Ritchie’s life who liked her, but also found her difficult, “vicious,” and “loud and excessive.”

I have a different perspective on Ritchie. She comes across to me as resourceful in pursuing help, a strong person who has survived tremendous suffering, and compassionate to others. She is surrounded by friends when she dies. She has common illnesses that have been under-researched due to medical misogyny. And she has been denied cutting-edge treatments due to the profound gulf between research and practice, as well as long-established bigotry in medical care. In my perception, if she had been properly diagnosed and treated, she may or may not have felt differently about ending her life.

The Economist‘s cover story (11/21/24) seemed to encourage not just legalizing suicide, but suicide itself.

Engelhart did a skillful job of portraying her own role in Ritchie’s suicide as if she were a passive observer. In a separate interview she gave with the Times about writing the piece, she said she “was trying to be as small a presence as possible in the room.” Yet she also admitted that Ritchie reached for her hand just before she died, so she couldn’t have been that small. Engelhart didn’t reflect, in the interview, on the role she may have played in Ritchie’s fate, or the ethics of her project.

The article emphasized that Ritchie knew she was being interviewed by a writer for the New York Times Magazine. She knew that her story would be amplified worldwide, but especially if she continued to end her life. Engelhart’s body of work on MAiD is mostly about people who elect and complete the act of suicide. That validation, alone, could have been a form of encouragement, especially for someone who felt isolated and unheard.

Best practices in suicide prevention are based on studies showing that suicidal people are uniquely and extremely vulnerable to suggestion, and that suicidality is usually temporary. According to a journalism guide from the Trevor Project, which aims to prevent suicide in LGBTQ youth, “More than 50 research studies worldwide have found that certain types of news coverage can increase the likelihood of suicide in vulnerable individuals.”

With the Times’ story, the worst-case scenario almost happened. One reader, a patient with Long Covid, responded on social media that the article caused him to consider that maybe assisted suicide would be a good option for him. After reading the responses of disabled people, he had more context and changed his mind. (I am protecting his identity.)

There is growing support for the expansion of assisted suicide across the world and in the media (e.g., Economist, 11/13/21, 11/21/24). The pandemic has eased people’s discomfort with preventable death, especially of elderly and disabled people. Engelhart’s book got a lot of attention around the height of Covid-19’s Omicron wave. Meanwhile, the current US administration is suggesting that worthiness for healthcare should be tied to social value.

It’s a key time for news organizations to recall their ethical obligations around reporting on suicide. At the very least, the news shouldn’t stop calling it “suicide” just because those who die have been approved for MAiD due to disability.

Stories of chronically sick people who resist MAiD and/or survive suicide attempts are rarely given as much in-depth treatment or column inches in the media. But those stories might give readers more context in considering how to feel about these policies. The New York Times even gave a flattering interview (11/16/24) to a doctor who has elsewhere been condemned for her unethical and too-eager MAiD practices and has been restricted from practicing everywhere (London Times, 7/19/24; Globe and Mail, 3/9/16).

News outlets should also consider hiring disabled journalists and editors to work on stories like this, or at least journalists who are curious enough to investigate medicine critically. Mainstream writing about health and disability has long ignored the insights of chronic illness patients, unless to use individual cases to speak over collective concerns. We need stories about disability and illness that don’t rely mostly on the medical establishment for expertise, especially given its long history of aligning with eugenics.

The protests emerged as resistance to militarized law enforcement (Al Jazeera, 6/7/25), a dynamic that was often obscured by coverage that focused on the “clash” between protesters and government. 

In the early morning of Friday, June 6, several federal agencies carried out militarized immigration raids across Los Angeles (Al Jazeera, 6/7/25). Armed and masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, along with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), FBI and DEA, tore through these neighborhoods in unmarked vehicles, carrying out a new method of targeted raids in workplaces like Home Depot, Ambiance Apparel and car washes (Washington Post, 6/8/25, 6/12/25, LA Times, 6/10/25).

Later that morning, demonstrations formed in front of the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building and Metropolitan Detention Center, where detainees were believed to be held (Al Jazeera, 6/11/25). Protests grew exponentially over the weekend, spreading not only across California, but also to major cities around the country (Time, 6/9/25).

In response, without state authorization, President Donald Trump federalized and deployed 2,000 California National Guard troops to LA to “solve the problem” (CNN, 6/9/25). California Gov. Gavin Newsom, LA Mayor Karen Bass and other government officials have called this an unprecedented show of force and an abuse of executive power, intended to intimidate and terrorize local communities (Atlantic, 6/10/25; CNN, 6/9/25).

While major media sources described these protests as “mostly peaceful,” they nevertheless tended to dwell on what was depicted as rioting and protester violence. In its morning newsletter, the New York Times (6/9/25) set the scene:

Hundreds of National Guard troops arrived in the city, and crowds of people demonstrated against President Trump’s immigration raids. They clashed with federal agents, leaving burned cars, broken barricades and graffiti scrawled across government buildings downtown.

Is it possible that Trump administration efforts to expel nearly a million Los Angeles residents are “driving chaos at LA immigration protests” (LA Times, 6/10/25)?

The LA Times (6/10/25), citing LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell, blamed “‘anarchists’ who, he said, were bent on exploiting the state of unrest to vandalize property and attack police.” (Law enforcement agencies reported only a handful of minor injuries to officers—KCRA, 6/12/25.) These critiques were interwoven with descriptions of “scenes of lawlessness [that] disgusted” McDonnell, such as setting “Waymo taxis on fire,” “defacing city buildings with anti-police graffiti” and looting businesses. And, an ironic, laughable account of the underlying power dynamics at play:

Several young men crept through the crowd, hunched over and hiding something in their hands. They reached the front line and hurled eggs at the officers, who fired into the fleeing crowd with riot guns.

The article ran under the headline “Protesters or Agitators: Who Is Driving Chaos at LA Immigration Protests?”—never offering readers the possibility that the answer is, in fact, law enforcement. The framing came directly from McDonnell’s attempt, cited in the article, to draw a “distinction” between protesters and anarchists. Yet further down, the piece described what can only be understood as federal troops instigating chaos and violence:

A phalanx of National Guard troops charged into the crowd, yelling “push” as they rammed people with riot shields. The troops and federal officers used pepper balls, tear gas canisters as well as flash-bang and smoke grenades to break up the crowd.

No one in the crowd had been violent toward the federal deployment up to that point. The purpose of the surge appeared to be to clear space for a convoy of approaching federal vehicles.

CNN (6/10/25) framed police munitions as the way cops “responded with force” after protests “devolved into violence.” 

One CNN article (6/10/25) offered “A Look at the ‘Less Lethal’ Weapons Authorities Used to Crack Down on Los Angeles Protests.” Reporter Dakin Andone wrote:

Police have used a standard variety of tools to disperse crowds and quell protests that had devolved into violence, with protesters lighting self-driving cars on fire and two motorcyclists driving into a skirmish line of officers, injuring two. A Molotov cocktail was also thrown at officers, LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell alleged, condemning the “disgusting” violence.

Authorities have responded with force. So far, CNN has documented the deployment of flash-bangs, tear gas, pepper balls, rubber bullets and bean bag rounds, as well as more traditional gear such as batons.

To CNN, protesters devolve into “violence,” while heavily armed agents of the state respond with “force.”

The article noted that these weapons are not “harmless,” as they have been found to “disable, disfigure and even kill.” Projectiles are meant to cause “‘blunt-force trauma to the skin,’” chemical irritants cause “difficulty swallowing, chest tightness, coughing, shortness of breath and a feeling of choking,” and flash-bangs “obscure a target’s vision and hearing.”

Yet the article’s description of the effects of those weapons used in LA remained almost entirely theoretical. The only example it gave of a civilian targeted by one of these “less lethal” weapons was that of Australian 9News correspondent Lauren Tomasi, shot at close range by a rubber bullet while reporting on live TV. (Video footage shows that there was no one close to the line of officers, nor were any protesters closing in.) “The bullet left her sore, but she was otherwise unharmed,” CNN blithely noted.

While it’s good to see media standing up for those who were injured while exercising the freedom of the press (Guardian, 6/11/25), they might have shown similar concern for those hurt while engaging in freedom of assembly.

Meanwhile, Reporters Without Borders (6/11/25) has documented an astounding 35 violent attacks on journalists, almost entirely by law enforcement, including numerous reporters hit by police projectiles. The Guardian (6/11/25) reported that British photographer Nick Stern needed surgery when police shot him in the leg with a “less-lethal projectile”; Toby Canham, a photographer working for the New York Post,  was “hit in the head by a less-lethal round” by a California highway patrol officer and “treated for whiplash and neck pain,” the Guardian said. (Protesters were injured by police munitions as well, as repeatedly attested by social media, but reporters showed less interest in those injuries.)

The headlines that reported the assault on Tomasi frequently left out the perpetrator: “Australian Reporter Covering Los Angeles Immigration Protests Hit by Rubber Bullet on Live TV,” was how CBS (6/10/25) put it; CNN (6/8/25) had “Australian Reporter Covering LA Protests Hit by Rubber Bullet.” The Sydney Morning Herald (6/9/25) described Tomasi as “caught in the crossfire as the LAPD fired rubber bullets at protesters”—which doesn’t sound like a “crossfire” at all.

Many reports denied the potential for these weapons to cause death by labeling them “non-lethal” (Guardian, 6/8/25, 6/11/25; AP, 6/9/25; LA Times, 6/10/25; USA Today, 6/10/25; Newsweek, 6/10/25) or “less-than-lethal” (New York Times, 6/6/25; NBC, 6/8/25). These descriptors are entirely inaccurate, as studies and reports have documented dozens of deaths caused by “less-lethal” projectiles, as well as hundreds of permanent injuries (BMJ Open, 12/5/17; Amnesty International, 3/14/23; Arizona Republic, 5/13/25).

Reuters (6/11/25) reported on attacks by such weapons under the headline “Journalists Among the Injured in LA as ICE Protests Grow Violent”—a framing that treated the protests as the source of the violence being inflicted on journalists by police.

As an example of leftists who “encouraged peaceful protests to turn violent,” NBC News (6/12/25) included those who condemned police violence “using expletives and slights.” (Note that the skateboard-wielding protester is the same individual the LA Times—6/10/25—used to suggest “agitators” were “driving chaos.”)

A remarkable NBC News article (6/12/25) blamed protesters for fomenting violence by pointing out police violence. “Some Far-Left Groups Have Encouraged Peaceful Protests to Turn Violent, Experts Say,” was the headline; one of the few examples, under the heading “Assassination culture,” was:

One anti-police group, the People’s City Council Los Angeles, has taken to calling out the actions of officers at the protests, using expletives and slights.

Just before 1 a.m. Tuesday, it posted on X the name and picture of a police officer it said was firing rubber bullets at protesters.

He is “fucking unhinged and unloading on protesters at point blank range,” the post read. “FUCK THIS PIG!!”

Perhaps it was the cop firing rubber bullets at protesters at point blank range who “encouraged peaceful protests to turn violent”—and not the “expletives and slights” of the witnesses?

Sarah J. Jackson (Atlantic, 6/3/20): “When news stories employ sensational images of property damage, using terms such as riot and the even more sensational mayhem and chaos, researchers have noted a rise in public support for law-and-order crackdowns on protest.”

The New York Times editorial board (6/8/25), while critical of Trump’s National Guard deployment, opined that “protesters will do nothing to further their cause if they resort to violence.” The LA Times (6/10/25) expressed that “violence and widespread property damage at protests…have diverted public attention away from the focus of the demonstrations.” What has historically turned the tide against protests, however, is inflammatory reporting that blames protesters for their response to government’s aggressive efforts to suppress freedom of assembly (Penn State University, 6/1/01; Real Change, 3/18/09; Atlantic, 6/3/20).

By framing the problem as unruly demonstrators, the media lend legitimacy to the Trump administration’s attempt to set a precedent for military suppression of dissent. (“If there’s any protester that wants to come out, they will be met with very big force,” Trump said of the military parade he arranged to run through DC on June 14, his 79th birthday. “This is people that hate our country, but they will be met with very heavy force.”) Journalists should be focusing not on the broken windows, but on Trump’s very real efforts to break our democracy.

Sure, you may like the idea of a “socialist New York,” but New York magazine (5/20/25) is here with a bunch of anonymous sources to tell you it’s “more complicated.”

There’s an art to writing a profile of a political candidate that sows doubt about their fitness for office without attacking them directly. Done smoothly, it can be more damaging than an overt hit piece.

“Zohran Mamdani Crashes the Party,” a recent New York magazine profile (5/20/25) of the New York State Assembly member and New York City mayoral candidate, is a prime example. The headline and subhead (“He’s selling the dream of a socialist New York. The picture inside the Democratic party is more complicated.”) manage to convey knowing sympathy (party-crashing is cool!) and parental concern (a socialist New York is but a “dream,” and party insiders know the reality is “more complicated”).

The story’s author, E. Alex Jung, is not a Free Press columnist but a National Magazine Award–nominated features writer who comes across as sympathetic to but skeptical of Mamdani. Mamdani, he writes,

has given hope to people who are in despair about the state of the country…showing up at protests for trans rights and shouting at Tom Homan while State Police officers hold him back—and then posting it all on Instagram.

Jung added that Mamdani

became the first to max out the city’s campaign matching funds and had more individual donors than the rest of the field combined…. His campaign has built the largest field program ever for a mayoral race: Around 22,000 volunteers have knocked on 450,000 doors and made 140,000 phone calls…. The rally at Brooklyn Steel was a demonstration to the city’s progressive power brokers that the time to consolidate behind their candidate was yesterday—that he was the only one who could slay the big bad, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Though the odds of that happening are not good.

Part of subtly and effectively undermining someone is appearing to give them their due. As ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo said of his rival Mamdani during a recent NYC mayoral debate:

Mr. Mamdani is very good on Twitter and with videos, but he actually produces nothing…. He has no experience with Washington, no experience with New York City.

Like Cuomo, New York acknowledges upfront that Mamdani is an exceptionally strong communicator. It then puts forth a string of criticisms, most from unnamed colleagues and critics of Mamdani, with their own agendas and reasons to resent his rise. An “anti-Cuomo Democratic strategist” dismisses Mamdani supporters as “online kids.” Critics claim he is “drawn to attention-grabbing stunts rather than the grind of whipping votes.” Because Jung allows anonymous sources to criticize Mamdani at length—he quotes or paraphrases “those with knowledge of the conversations,” “some New York Democratic Party members,” “a Democratic political operative,” “another operative,” “critics,” “detractors” and so on—the reader has no way of independently assessing their motives.

The New York Editorial Board (2/2/25), “a group of veteran journalists interviewing candidates for Mayor of New York City,” got specifics on the questions New York said were “unclear.”

The profile opens with a shower of trivializing compliments. Mamdani and his “congregation of true believers” are “jubilant and young.” Supporters like Kamala Harris’s stepdaughter Ella Emhoff and semi-canceled chef Alison Roman represent “power and cool and changing winds.” Mamdani is “a Democratic Socialists of America–backed candidate” (as a DSA member, I can confirm) with a “short work history and a long history of pro-Palestinian advocacy”—qualities, Jung writes, that were “seen as nonstarters within the small electorate that ultimately decides the race.”

Yet in the last six months, he has “transformed the race with memorable policy proposals and a winning social-media presence. If you’re online, he seems to be the only candidate with Wi-Fi.” His campaign videos are “in the language of the internet.”

So far, a reader will have learned that Mamdani is young, cool and online. His campaign pitch—Freeze the rent! Make buses fast and free! Universal childcare!—is catchy, as is his plan to tax the rich and big corporations, provide free buses and municipal grocery stores, and establish a department of community safety. But how New Yorkers feel about these proposals and “how he would actually do all of this” is “unclear”—whether because Jung neglected to ask, or was unsatisfied with the answer, we’ll never know.

Profiles like this are popular because they are more about personality and style than sober, eat-your-vegetables political analysis. Thus, we learn that Mamdani is “energetic, enthusiastic, quick with a joke, and good-looking in a ‘Who’s your brother’s friend?’ kind of way.” It’s a vivid description, and it’s reminiscent of ex-Sen. Claire McCaskill’s blistering dismissal of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: She was, McCaskill said, a “bright, shiny new object” whose rhetoric was “cheap” (Business Insider, 12/26/18).

New York scorned the “ideological purity” that made Mamdani insist that marginalized workers ought to have gotten the support they needed (New York Times, 10/19/21).

Jung contends without evidence that Mamdani supporters have had “a smothering effect on discourse, making any public criticism or dissent verboten within parts of the left.” He goes on to quote state Sen. Jabari Brisport, who was elected alongside Mamdani in 2020. Unlike most of Jung’s sources, Brisport is a Mamdani supporter and willing to speak on the record. “People were looking for drastic changes in society,” Brisport says of the period in which they were elected.

But according to Jung, the “reality of the chamber was different.” Recounting a fight between moderate and progressive Democrats over whether to tax the rich and expand a fund for undocumented workers who had been denied federal pandemic relief, he implies that Mamdani was outmaneuvered. Legislators eventually agreed to set aside $2.1 billion for the excluded-workers fund—far short of the $3.5 billion that progressives wanted and, it’s important to note, excluded workers needed.

Mamdani and some colleagues indicated to New York State Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie that they would protest the shortfall by voting against the budget, which would have passed regardless. Heastie “warned that the fund would get watered down even more if they didn’t fall in line.” (Heastie denies this.) Mamdani, Jung writes, was “in a panic, unsure of what to do. Accept less than what you believe or risk losing even more?”

Unwilling to risk it, Mamdani ended up voting for a budget he had initially opposed as insufficient. Yet somehow the villain of this story is not Heastie, who apparently threatened to withhold even more money from people in need, but Mamdani, who is implied to have shown poor judgment and “earned a reputation for ideological purity.”

The evidence? He pushed hard for single-payer healthcare, fought side-by-side with city taxi drivers to win hundreds of millions of dollars in debt relief from the city, joined a protest encampment by cab drivers outside City Hall, and convinced Chuck Schumer to film a video calling attention to the cabbies’ plight via the story of one whose brother, a fellow driver, killed himself under enormous financial pressure. Where outlets like New York see an obsession with “ideological purity,” others see a willingness to fight.

Politico (4/30/25) blamed Mamdani for the end of a free bus pilot program because he didn’t understand that “you’re either a team player or you’re not.”

Mamdani also got Senate Deputy Leader Mike Gianaris to co-sponsor an eight-bill legislative package known as Fix the MTA, which would have frozen fares, instituted six-minute service on subways, and phased in free buses over four years. He spent $22,000 of his own campaign money to promote it.

It didn’t have the unqualified backing of Gov. Hochul or the MTA, so Mamdani texted Mayor Eric Adams, who had mentioned that he found the dictator Idi Amin fascinating, and arranged a dinner with the mayor and Mamdani’s father, whom Amin had expelled from Uganda. Mamdani then convinced Adams to take a photo with a poster touting free buses, and film a quick video to support the program—all of which led to earned media, and resulted in a fare-free-bus pilot being included in the 2023 budget. “It was a success,” Jung writes.

Some might conclude that Mamdani is resourceful and effective. But Jung cautions us to curb our enthusiasm. “For Mamdani,” Jung writes, “this was an example of his ability to work with someone…whom he was critical of and yet recognized as a potential ally.” But wait: Unnamed legislators told Jung that Mamdani could have extended the bus program during the 2024 budget negotiations, but he “took issue” with a part of the budget that would make it easier for landlords to claim they were doing needed repairs while raising rents on rent-stabilized units—a major loophole in New York’s tenant protections.

According to Politico (4/30/25), when Mamdani told Heastie he planned to vote against the budget because of this, Heastie threatened to kill the expansion of the free-bus pilot. Mamdani refused to back down this time, so Heastie pulled the plug on free buses. (Heastie and Mamdani say this didn’t happen.) “That is literally a material good being delivered to the working class…. And [Mamdani] threw it away for a performance,” an unnamed legislator told Jung.

Despite the allegation that Heastie killed free buses because Mamdani wouldn’t support a budget he believed would harm his constituents, Jung again portrays Mamdani as incompetent: “He appeared to realize he’d made a mistake,” and tried and failed during this year’s budget negotiations “to get free buses back on the agenda, this time by attempting to leverage his district’s capital funds.” (The campaign, again, denies this.)

“That to me demonstrates how he operates—you can talk about doing things, but that alone is not going to achieve those things,” yet another unnamed colleague of Mamdani’s tells Jung. What “some New York Democratic Party members”—again, unnamed—see as Mamdani’s legislative missteps “have given them pause about his ability to govern…. They see him as a show pony, not a workhorse,” Jung writes.

It’s a trope often invoked to discredit social media-savvy progressives. As Caroline Fredrickson, president emerita of the American Constitution Society, said of Rep. Ocasio-Cortez in 2019 (Guardian, 12/24/19): “A lot of people expected a show pony. But it turns out she’s a workhorse.”

“Mamdani’s moral clarity has the aura of privilege,” New York snarked, implicitly contrasting him with—Andrew Cuomo (NY1, 6/12/25)?

In addition to casting doubt on Mamdani’s ability to govern, Jung implies that the everyday New Yorkers who admire him are shallow and naive. “Literally this morning I posted you on my Instagram story!” one young woman tells Mamdani, adding, “I’m so emotional seeing you. Like, you’re real.” As a number of public forums and events have made clear, many Mamdani supporters know and care a great deal about policy, while also using Instagram. But you wouldn’t know that from this profile.

Perhaps the most insidious aspect of profiles like these is the suggestion that it’s hypocritical to fight for poor and working-class people when you are not poor or working-class. (Mamdani’s father, Mahmood Mamdani, is a Columbia professor, and his mother, Mira Nair, is a prominent filmmaker.)

The candidate’s “moral clarity,” which many appreciate, has “the aura of privilege,” Jung writes. He asks about “the combination of the relative privilege in [Mamdani’s] own life and the working-class people at the center of his politics.” But to admirers of, say, Franklin Delano Roosevelt or Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, there is nothing suspect or contradictory about rich and upper-middle-class people standing in solidarity with their poor and working-class counterparts.

Jung acknowledges that Mamdani has “given hope to people who are in despair…and looking for someone with real fight.” Yet, ultimately, he sees the “appeal of [Mamdani’s] message” as its “simplicity and memeability”—not specific policies or his willingness to battle for them. The final quote is the most telling: “The thing about being a legislator and making compromises is that poor people make compromises every single day,” an unnamed colleague of Mamdani’s tells Jung. “Poor people know what is important, and sometimes they have to choose between two important things.”

It could be that poor people are born knowing how to prioritize and negotiate. Or it could be that politicians force them to choose between, for example, reliable transit and affordable housing. This profile creates the impression that Mamdani is unwilling to compromise and unfit to govern. But it’s just as plausible that his rejection of such false dichotomies has made some colleagues eager to keep him out of the mayor’s office.

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(Creative Commons photo: Diane Krauthamer)

This week on CounterSpin: Media are focused on public protests in LA, but seem less interested in what’s making people angry. That’s in part about the federal government’s stated bid to capture and eject anyone they determine “opposes US foreign policy.” Protesters and witnesses and journalists in LA aren’t being shot at and thrown around and sent to the hospital because they disagree with US policy, we’re told, but because they’re interfering with the federal agents carrying out that policy. See how that works? If you don’t, and it worries you, you’re far from alone.

We hear from Chip Gibbons, policy director at Defending Rights and Dissent, about the critical case of Columbia University student activist Mahmoud Khalil, held without warrant in a detention facility in Louisiana since March, for voicing support for Palestinian lives. There’s an important legal development, but how meaningfully Khalil’s case ultimately translates—just like with ICE sweeps around the country—will have to do with us.

Other Words (6/4/25)

Also on the show: If the problem were to “get rid of” unhoused people, the answer would be to house them. It’s cheaper than jailing people for being homeless, so if it’s those “taxpayer dollars” you care about, this would be plan A. Why isn’t it? We hear from Farrah Hassen, policy analyst, writer and adjunct professor in the Department of Political Science at Cal Poly Pomona.

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