2026-11-13 06:46:00
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Last week, Democrats dominated elections as Donald Trump, a lame-duck Republican, waged an unpopular war in Iran that he started and that a majority of Americans want to end. Notice the parallels to 20 years ago: In 2006, Democrats dominated the midterms as George W. Bush, a lame-duck Republican, waged an unpopular war in Iraq that he chose to start and that a majority of Americans wanted to end.
Back then, with Democrats in control of both chambers of Congress for the first time in 12 years, The Atlantic asked 44 foreign-policy specialists about withdrawal from Iraq. Most people surveyed for this 2007 article predicted that policy would move in the direction that voters wanted: an end to the war. Around that time, 130,000 to 150,000 U.S. troops were in Iraq. Seventy-three percent of respondents said that America would not have a significant military presence in Iraq (defined as 50,000 troops or more) five years in the future. And they were correct––although that oversimplifies what came next. Revisiting what happened with regard to Iraq is a helpful reminder that winning elections by campaigning against a war is far easier than actually ending the conflict.
In January 2007, days after the Democratic-majority Congress was sworn in, Bush gave the anti-war coalition the opposite of what it wanted: He told the public that he had already begun “the surge,” which would increase U.S. troop levels in Iraq to roughly 170,000. Democrats in the House passed a nonbinding resolution disapproving of the policy. Nearly two months later, they passed a $124 billion emergency spending bill for Iraq and Afghanistan, which also mandated that within months the United States would start pulling troops out of Iraq. But Bush vetoed the bill, arguing that “setting a deadline for withdrawal is setting a date for failure,” and that the U.S. should not tell enemies its plans. That December, under pressure to support the troops, Congress approved $70 billion in additional funding for Iraq and Afghanistan.
The following year, as conditions in Iraq improved, Bush began reducing America’s military presence and handing security matters over to the Iraqis. Barack Obama, who had campaigned on ending the “dumb war,” won the White House and continued winding down military activity. By 2012, nearly all U.S. forces were gone—but that didn’t last. Obama ended up redeploying troops to Iraq in 2014 to respond to the rise of the Islamic State. President Trump, who also criticized the war in his 2016 campaign, kept soldiers there to continue fighting ISIS. Not until his second term, earlier this year, did the final withdrawal of U.S. forces occur. All told, America’s military stayed in Iraq for years under multiple Congresses and presidents who won elections by appealing to voters who wanted the war to be over.
The Atlantic asked the foreign-policy experts one other question back in 2007: How should the United States withdraw from Iraq? The most popular answer (46 percent) urged a phased withdrawal to minimize chaos; the least popular answer (5 percent) favored an “immediate, full-scale withdrawal.” Today, most Americans want the war in Iran to end, but how it should end is less certain. Here the Iraq withdrawal ceases to be a close parallel: America seems less able to dictate events in Iran, because that war is being waged against an intact regime, rather than against insurgents after a military victory, and Iran’s ability to challenge American interests––by closing the Strait of Hormuz, attacking American military bases, and striking U.S. allies in the region––could complicate plans.
Plus, America’s enemies in Iraq did not have the capacity to develop a nuclear weapon in 2006. Iran’s ability to go nuclear is contested, and if it obtained “a nuclear weapon during my term,” Trump told 60 Minutes over the weekend, “I would be excoriated far worse than what’s happened.” He may be right. As much as Americans want the war to conclude, they also overwhelmingly agree that Iran should not possess such a weapon. But Trump’s statement elides confident claims he made last year about bygone missile strikes destroying Iran’s nuclear capabilities, undermining his own public rationale for war.
Come January, America will once again have a Republican president who maintains that he made the right call by going to war and a congressional majority under pressure to end the war. If Trump presses ahead, knowing he’ll never face voters again, Congress could stop him if it is willing to cut off military funding for Iran operations. But do Democrats have the votes to do so and the willingness to live with the results? As in 2006, lawmakers tend to hesitate when foreseeing potential political risks—in this case, being blamed for an American loss or a nuclear Iran.
Instead, they may be tempted to take measures short of actually forcing Trump’s hand. Already in June, the Republican-controlled Congress passed a bipartisan resolution telling Trump to get congressional approval to continue the war or to withdraw the military from Iran. When he ignored the legislation, lawmakers let him keep fighting anyway without consequence.
Trump has since acknowledged that the war helped Democrats win the House and the Senate, and said that he expects the conflict to end soon. But today, in announcing that Vance, an Iran-war skeptic, will no longer take part in negotiations, Trump seemed to abandon the idea of a diplomatic resolution. “We don’t need a deal with Iran,” he wrote on Truth Social. “We’ve got their money, Hundreds of Billions of Dollars, and we’ve got their Strait!”
It seems possible that Americans will be clashing over Iran policy for years to come. The history of the Iraq War suggests that, even when voters want peace, finishing conflicts that a president favors is far harder than starting them.
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Evening Read
The Last Trumpist Standing
By Adam Kirsch
Does Donald Trump mean anything? The question could be asked about the president’s promises, which he usually fails to keep, and his podium remarks, which are devoted to free association. But for conservative politicians, policy makers, and intellectuals, the question has a wider bearing. Since 2016, the right has been trying to figure out what Trump means as a political phenomenon. Presidents are transformative when they stand for an idea: Ronald Reagan was personally popular, but what made him historic was the reorientation of American politics toward Reaganism, an assertive brand of small-government, big-stick conservatism. Trump has certainly been transformative, so it stands to reason that there is such a thing as Trumpism …
Events can’t be explained until they’re over, when they turn into history. So it’s only now, as Trumpism seems to be fading as a political force, that its true meaning can be seen clearly. The winner in the fight to define it is the last Trumpist standing: Stephen Miller, the new White House chief of staff.
More From The Atlantic
Culture Break
Think. As literary scams proliferate, authors don’t know whether their readers are real anymore—and vice versa, Rachel Kadish writes.
Explore. Young math enthusiasts have watched as AI learns to do the tasks they were once distinctly good at—but at a drunk-math party in San Francisco, Lila Shroff found a reason for hope when it comes to the uniquely human love of numbers.
Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
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2026-11-13 05:35:14
Jensen Huang’s abrupt departure from Nvidia, following revelations of an affair with a woman, Alice Huang, whom U.S. intelligence officials believe to be a Chinese-intelligence asset, should force a fundamental rethinking of America’s AI strategy.
Jensen Huang was not just the CEO of the world’s most important semiconductor company. He was also one of Donald Trump’s closest and most influential advisers on AI. Huang persuaded Trump to abandon his initial embrace of export controls, arguing that U.S. technology firms should compete in China. He persistently argued that AI is more akin to electricity than a weapon and that warnings about AI safety were wildly overblown—a view that Trump fully internalized.
In the coming months, Congress will scrutinize every aspect of the scandal. Among these are the Commerce Department’s suspension of its investigation into Megaspeed, the Singaporean company that Alice Huang was a director of; the failure to crack down on China’s extensive chip-smuggling operation in Southeast Asia; Nvidia’s financial contributions to Trump’s pet projects, such as the White House ballroom; and China’s possible illicit influence over other business leaders in America.
[Read: A $5.7 trillion face-plant]
The scandal comes at a moment of deep national dissatisfaction and anxiety about AI, and it is likely to reinforce public concerns that the companies developing this technology are given too much influence over how it is governed. In the recent midterm elections, candidates promising restrictions on data-center construction made significant gains. Dario Amodei and Sam Altman, the heads of Anthropic and OpenAI, respectively, have warned that new models could come with tremendous risk and suggested that the companies should “pace the frontier.” Hardly a week passes without news of unprecedented cyberattacks, some of which are powered by AI. In July, for example, autonomous agents undergoing safety testing at OpenAI escaped their sandbox and hacked into the systems of Hugging Face, another AI company.
America’s conundrum is this: The United States must stay ahead of China, but it also has to take safety seriously. The answer is not to accelerate development or to seek a grand bargain with Beijing, but to strengthen export controls. Stronger controls will help preserve America’s lead, creating the room to slow down development and ensure that new models are rigorously tested before they are released.
Winning the race with China has become a one-size-fits-all excuse for business executives to advance their company’s interests and reject calls for regulation of any kind. Politicians have also fallen into this trap. In September, Senator Ted Cruz told Politico, “If they’re going to be killer robots, I’d rather they be American killer robots and not Chinese killer robots.”
Geopolitics are a poor excuse for doing something irrational. But to say, as Huang did, that who wins the race doesn’t really matter is equally wrong. In April, Anthropic announced that it had developed a model called Mythos, which gave users extremely advanced cyberattack capabilities. Rather than releasing Mythos to the public, Anthropic worked with the Trump administration to set up Project Glasswing, which gave the top U.S. companies access to the model for cyberdefense, so that they could plug their gaps as quickly as possible. If China or any other state had developed Mythos-like capabilities first, it would not likely have shared the model with U.S. companies, which would have been left exposed.
Several senators have proposed a tempting solution: The United States should negotiate a comprehensive arms control with China to pause or slow down AI development. Altman has said that such a deal would be easy for Trump and Xi Jinping to agree to. But this is a fantasy. Verification would be extremely difficult. China would likely see the pursuit of such an agreement as a U.S. attempt to lock in a lead. In a recent statement, the head of the Ministry for State Security, China’s intelligence services, made clear that China sees AI competition with the United States in adversarial terms. That doesn’t rule out talks and coordinated actions to address specific safety risks, but it does mean that a grand bargain is extremely unlikely.
Taking safety seriously is impossible if the AI developers continue at full throttle. The models are close to being able to improve themselves, a capacity that could dramatically accelerate technological progress beyond the ability of humans to evaluate and control it.
That’s why the United States needs to strengthen its export controls and double down on safety in the lead time that gives it over China. Although China is working hard to develop its indigenous chip-manufacturing capability, it is still struggling. In June 2025, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick testified to Congress that China produces only about 200,000 advanced chips annually, a tiny number compared with what it needs. Chips are the one advantage that the United States has over China, and Washington needs to capitalize on this.
Much of China’s progress appears to have depended on access to American AI models. Chinese companies have used distillation, a technique whereby a less capable model is trained by a more powerful one, allowing it to duplicate some of those capabilities quickly. In February, Anthropic revealed that DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax had generated more than 16 million exchanges with Claude through approximately 24,000 fraudulent accounts to extract its capabilities. The company later uncovered an even larger operation by Alibaba, involving more than 150 million exchanges designed to improve its Qwen models. In September, the FBI and the NSA warned that Chinese laboratories were using large-scale distillation to acquire American AI capabilities at a fraction of the cost of developing them independently.
As we now know from the Nvidia scandal, espionage also likely plays a role. Huang knew more than any other individual about who was getting advanced chips. Access to that information could have proved invaluable to a foreign actor. The AI labs are also very vulnerable to spying. Last month, federal prosecutors charged a Saudi national employed at OpenAI with installing a covert recording device. The labs’ crown jewels are model weights—the mathematical parameters that encode what the models have learned. If a foreign intelligence service steals those weights, it could acquire capabilities that the labs spent years developing. The U.S. government needs to significantly increase counterintelligence cooperation with the labs and other companies doing work that pertains to U.S. national security.
[Read: The scandal is bigger than Jensen Huang]
Ensuring adequate safety of new AI models depends on slowing the race, not just between the U.S. and China, but also among the American labs. AI engineers and experts have been discussing how to do this. One of the leading ideas is to require the labs to reallocate their computing power, devoting far less of it to research and development and far more to customer service and safety. This would slow the pace of development—and it could be done within parameters that allow the United States to stay ahead of China, and the AI companies to maintain their profitability.
President Trump has spent much of the past two years bullying some of America’s closest and oldest allies, and his posture has hardly generated confidence in Washington’s stewardship of AI. America’s Five Eyes allies (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom) had to wait months before gaining access to Mythos to improve their private-sector cyberdefenses. These and other traditional allies will surely worry that an American president may use powerful AI against them. Trump is unlikely to assuage these fears, but the new Congress can begin to lay the foundation for a new AI alliance that lays down criteria for access to chips, computing infrastructure, and frontier models, and proposes restraints and assurances for how the United States will use powerful AI.
One lesson of the Jensen Huang scandal is that policy makers gave extraordinary influence to technology executives whose commercial interests did not always align with American interests. His departure offers a rare opportunity to rethink the assumptions that have underpinned AI strategy for the past two years, address mounting concerns about the technology, and establish a new approach that protects both American AI leadership and public safety.
2026-11-13 05:23:34
Sign up for Video Village, a new weekly newsletter in which David Sims unearths cinematic gems and brings readers into his movie obsession.
This week marks the limited-theater release of Paper Tiger, a muted, tragic crime thriller that’s the latest film in the director James Gray’s heady oeuvre. The story, set in Brooklyn and Queens in the 1980s, manages to be both tightly focused and operatic in scale: Two brothers (played by Adam Driver and Miles Teller) get in over their heads on a business scheme, and must watch as their dream of climbing the social ladder is brutally ripped away—partly thanks to their own mistakes. This tale of relatably flawed people is, in my opinion, one of the year’s must-see films, which is true basically anytime Gray makes a movie. And yet, so many cinemagoers still seem to have never heard of him.
That lack of awareness could be partly because only a couple of his films could reasonably be called hits—the 2007 cop thriller We Own the Night was a solid performer, and his sci-fi epic, Ad Astra, did reasonable (if unspectacular) business in 2019. Big-name actors like working with Gray, including Joaquin Phoenix, Brad Pitt, Mark Wahlberg, and Scarlett Johansson, who co-stars in Paper Tiger; their eager participation helps him secure $15 million budgets. But his films are usually dark affairs that don’t leave the audience with easy answers or tidy lessons learned. Most of them take place in outer-borough New York; many are period pieces. In short: hardly mainstream.
Yet Gray often finds a way to tell these stories on the margins through seemingly glitzy trappings. In Paper Tiger, the characters’ entire story arcs might amount to a two-minute conversation you hear in the background of a much grander mob movie: Driver plays Gary Pearl, a former cop who has become a showboat of a private-security consultant, while Teller is his industrious brother, Irwin, an engineer who’s married to Hester (Johansson) with two teenage kids. Gary talks Irwin into going into business with him helping to clean up an industrial lot in Brooklyn’s polluted Gowanus Canal, promising big money in return; quickly, it becomes clear that they are working with the Russian mob, and Irwin’s attention to detail is perceived by the gangsters as untoward snooping. From there, Gary and Irwin’s illusions of professional safety quickly vanish.
The dreadful violence and recrimination that follow feels both completely avoidable and utterly inevitable. That tension is what defines so many of Gray’s films—some Shakespearean drama happening on a prosaic, human level. The violence is always shocking and narratively earned, while still feeling intensely cinematic (there’s a shoot-out sequence near the end of Paper Tiger that is one of the coolest action sequences I’ve seen in a movie all year). We Own the Night has an incredible car chase that echoes classics of the genre, such as The French Connection; Ad Astra features a thrilling set piece involving moon-buggy warfare unlike anything I’d ever seen staged in a sci-fi movie. Yet both of those films are also about the kind of interpersonal drama a friend might tell you about over a long night of drinking at a bar.
No matter what the setting, Gray homes in on the most understandable sorts of failure. The excellent Two Lovers is a tragicomic romance, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Gwyneth Paltrow, that transposes the tale of a Dostoyevsky character (inspired by the story “White Nights”) to modern-day Brighton Beach, in Brooklyn. Another tale of the sort is The Lost City of Z, an adaptation of David Grann’s fantastic nonfiction work about the explorer Percy Fawcett, who vanished deep in the Amazon while looking for evidence of ancient civilization. These are fatally flawed protagonists, heroes as likely to be felled by family trauma as by grandiose ambition.
Paper Tiger is one of Gray’s best movies, and it’s attracting rave reviews. Yet I worry it’s going to go the same route as most of his filmography—highly praised, with underwhelming ticket sales and little awards attention. The film played at the Cannes Film Festival, where Gray’s work has been in competition six times without ever winning an award (even he seems sick of going there). He’s received zero Oscar nominations over the course of a storied career. It’s hard to put a finger on why; perhaps his work is too minor-key for voting bodies. Obviously, the biggest win for any director is getting to make more movies, and I think Gray will continue to do that without much issue—great actors always seem to want to collaborate with him. But a film like Paper Tiger deserves to be seen widely; go if you can, and you’ll soon want to delve into the rest of Gray’s fascinating, knotty filmography.
An Essay I Enjoyed
The Unbearable Mediocrity of Microdramas
By Elise Hannum
For one weekend in October, the AMC theater off of New York City’s Union Square wasn’t playing any recognizable new releases. Instead, it was closed to the general public, with the sidewalk outside taken over by a small red carpet covered by a white tent, where the occasional group of attractive actor types in suits and gowns got their photo taken. Inside, the bar offered a promotional cocktail; a merch stand downstairs sold exclusive baseball caps and tote bags. The attendees were there to watch screenings, but not of traditional wide-screen features: These films took up only a sliver of the screen, with a five-foot black space on either side.
Coming Attractions
Until this week, James Gunn and Peter Safran, the co-heads of DC Studios, seemed to have no reason to fear for their jobs. Clayface, the latest installment in the comic-book movie franchise, was a mild success at the box office; they seemed to have made it through the huge post–Warner Bros.–Paramount merger unscathed. Well, no more: Skydance, as that new company is called, announced on Monday that Gunn and Safran were exiting the company, just four years after taking the roles.
On the one hand, I’m sad to see them go, as their creative perspective came across as quite exciting and not so ruthlessly corporate. Releasing an adaptation of Clayface before introducing the franchise’s take on Batman is wacky, yet the end result was a pretty fun bit of gory horror that did decent business. On the other hand, as I noted in a previous edition of the newsletter, that movie did next to nothing to advance any wider stories—ostensibly the goal for an interconnected series that tends to receive two or three big new installments a year. And while Gunn and Safran also had a couple of other projects in the pipeline (including the Gunn-directed Superman sequel Man of Tomorrow, in theaters next summer), their rollout of the new DC universe had been arguably plodding.
My guess is that the Skydance CEO David Ellison wants to win over the broadest audience possible, more in line with what Marvel has achieved over the past two decades. He’s even brought in a former Marvel employee as Gunn and Safran’s replacement: Jeremy Latcham, an ex–senior vice president. His creative bona fides seem more limited than Gunn and Safran’s; he’s never been involved with big storytelling decisions. But Latcham will likely be tasked with moving along new movies starring more familiar characters as quickly as possible, as DC fights for attention in a crowded comic-book-cinema landscape.
Do people want that kind of saturation, though? The Marvel Cinematic Universe has massively slowed down in recent years, as ticket sales fell. The upcoming Avengers: Doomsday basically promises a full reset, likely simplifying the franchise’s sprawling “multiverse.” A statement from Gunn on his departure even suggested mild relief that those sorts of creative choices will no longer be his problem: “The past four years [of] my time at DC Studios has been trying, to say the least,” he wrote on social media. “I dislike the at-times corporate nature of the job.” Now he’ll just be tasked with putting on a brave face as a sequel he directed is released by different bosses. At least he will no longer have to answer endless fan questions about the meaning of every casting decision.
What Else I’m Watching
I plan on writing about Lee Chang-dong’s wonderful new drama Possible Love soon, now that it’s streaming on Netflix. In anticipation, I’ve completed my journey through his filmography; 2010’s Poetry is really worth a watch (it’s also streaming on Netflix, as well as the Criterion Channel). It’s a spare portrait of a suburban woman dealing with an Alzheimer’s diagnosis and a horrifying scandal involving her grandson. But it’s also about her growing interest in writing poetry, and the brief moments of transcendence that come through art. Lee, who directed 2018’s excellent Burning as well, is so good at marrying the unsettling and the sublime.
I also rewatched Bad Day at Black Rock, a neo-Western classic from the ’50s that I picked because it was the shortest movie on my friend’s Letterboxd watch list (sue me, I was tired). It’s 81 minutes long, but that’s not the only reason to recommend it: It’s a wonderfully tense little mystery, in which a stoic Spencer Tracy arrives at a desolate hamlet somewhere out West in search of a missing Japanese person and meets stiff resistance. While the events all build into a nasty showdown, the themes dig a lot deeper than simple vengeance—it’s one of the best, earliest films to wrestle with America’s World War II–era racism toward the Japanese.
2026-11-13 05:13:00
An assault on free speech is unfolding in France. On Tuesday, a judge placed Michel Houellebecq, one of the country’s most significant living writers, under investigation for his alleged “complicity in incitement to discrimination, hatred or violence,” an accusation that stems from comments he made about Muslims several years ago. Houellebecq’s remarks were controversial and insensitive, but defending his freedom to speak does not require finding his words unobjectionable. Even the most offensive generalizations about minority groups should have to meet an exceptionally high threshold to warrant such a legal intervention. Houellebecq’s do not. The fact that he now faces the possibility of criminal charges should concern anyone who professes to care about the free exchange of ideas.
Houellebecq’s supposed crime occurred in November 2022 during an interview with the magazine Front Populaire. “When entire territories come under Islamist control, I think acts of resistance will take place,” Houellebecq said. “There will be attacks and shootings in mosques, in cafés frequented by Muslims, in short, Bataclans in reverse.” He was referring to a 2015 attack on Paris’s Bataclan concert hall, one of several acts of jihadist terrorism in the 2010s that collectively killed hundreds in France.
“I believe that the wish of the population with French roots, as the phrase goes, is not for Muslims to assimilate,” Houellebecq continued, “but for them to stop stealing from and assaulting them, in short, for the violence to decrease, for them to respect the law and people. Or, another good solution, for them to leave.”
[Thomas Chatterton Williams: The violence sweeping France was never really about schools]
Elsewhere in the interview, Houellebecq spoke about the “Great Replacement.” This idea, coined by the French writer Renaud Camus, casts demographic change through immigration as the replacement of native European populations, particularly by Muslims. “I was very shocked that it was called a theory. It’s not a theory, it’s a fact,” Houellebecq said. Camus “observed a great replacement or—to be more precise—the changing ethnic and religious composition of the European population. It is statistically evident.”
Houellebecq’s lawyers have disputed that his remarks amount to incitement, correctly noting that predicting violence is not the same as provoking it. “The incriminated remarks have no dimension of incitement, not even implicitly, and therefore fall within the bounds of freedom of opinion and expression,” they said in a statement to the French media. “A prophet of doom does not wish for disaster, quite the contrary. His place is not in a courtroom.”
After the interview came out, Muslim and anti-racist groups filed complaints against Houellebecq. In 2023, he published a memoir that described his comments as clumsy, an obvious and somewhat lame attempt at self-preservation. If the book was a ploy to eliminate his legal exposure, it didn’t work. Multiple groups declined to withdraw their complaints, which ultimately led to the investigation announced this week.
The debate over Houellebecq’s comments acquired renewed urgency following a mass shooting last month. On October 23, a 39-year-old gunman drove through the communes of Trappes and La Verrière, outside Paris, and fired a submachine gun at passersby whom he believed to be African or Muslim, according to prosecutors. He killed a 26-year-old man of African descent and injured seven others, including an 11-year-old girl. Investigators found a copy of Mein Kampf in his home. Yesterday, the Union of Mosques of France, one of the groups that had filed a complaint against Houellebecq, issued a statement invoking the attack as an illustration of the danger of his rhetoric. But no matter how deplorable the attack was, it doesn’t erase the crucial distinction between foreseeing violence and inciting it; a plain reading of Houellebecq’s words shows that he was engaged in the former.
France does not guarantee the same speech protections that Americans take for granted under the First Amendment. In the United States, the legal standard for incitement holds that speech must be aimed at producing imminent unlawful action, and is likely to produce it. In France, the standard is lower: Incitement may be punishable even if it’s merely implicit, its intended effect isn’t imminent, and it’s unlikely to have any effect whatsoever. All manner of verbal transgressions have resulted in convictions, fines, and even time in jail. In 2011, for example, a Paris court convicted the designer John Galliano of making racist and anti-Semitic insults in public.
In Houellebecq’s case, the language used by the judge is telling. The allegation concerns the incitement of “discrimination, hatred, or violence,” three terms with radically different meanings. Punishing speech that is intended and likely to provoke imminent violence is one thing. But criminalizing the encouragement of something so nebulous as “hatred” of a group is far too broad a power to grant the state. And the allegation comes years after the fact. How far back can a causal chain reach?
This isn’t the first time that Houellebecq has faced legal trouble for comments he made about Muslims. In 2002, he was prosecuted after referring to Islam in an interview as “the stupidest religion.” He was later acquitted, but the investigation was itself a penalty. The prospect of being subjected to such cumbersome proceedings, which can last years, preemptively chills speech. Right-wing American politicians such as J. D. Vance have scolded Europeans for taking such an authoritarian approach to wrongthink. They are hypocrites, given their own administration’s offenses. But they are nonetheless correct.
[Read: Europe’s free-speech problem]
The point is not whether Houellebecq said anything objectionable, but that we all ought to retain the right to express objectionable views. Immigration, demographic change, and the reality of Islamist violence are issues that France cannot wish away. Indeed, they are pressing political concerns and must remain subjects open to candid disagreement. That includes arguments that may be exaggerated, offensive, or wrong. To require a speaker to prove that his words are innocuous is too large a concession to censors. It must be the state’s burden to justify any punishment, not the speaker’s to show that his views deserve protection to begin with.
Right now, France is creating conditions in which only outright extremists will dare say what many privately believe to be true. This is no victory for minorities. People who are comfortable granting the state such an extraordinary power to referee the boundaries of intellectual and political debate should keep in mind that tomorrow it might be used by a far-right government in ways they do not support. The right to speak and offend is the safeguard of a free and liberal society, for the simple fact that the authority to punish unwelcome speech is a weapon anyone can pick up and use.
2026-11-12 23:57:00
Early in 2024, Donald Trump took the stage at the Black Conservative Federation gala in South Carolina. “We love you!” one audience member yelled. “We love you,” Trump responded, adding, “We’ve energized the Republican Party, and we’ve expanded the Republican Party.” At the time, he was right: The share of Black voters supporting Trump had ticked up in 2020 and seemed to be growing. “And they’re going, Wait a minute—there must be a mistake here; they’re saying, Black people must really like Trump. It must be a mistake,” he said. As he looked around at the organization’s leaders onstage with him, he smiled and said, “These guys know it’s no mistake.”
When ballots were cast later that year, roughly 15 percent of Black voters chose Trump over Kamala Harris in the general election, up from 6 percent in 2016 and 8 percent in 2020, according to the Pew Research Center. The gains were mainly among Black men, about 21 percent of whom took a flier on Trump, according to exit polling. Theories for the shift abounded: The culprit was misogyny, or frustration with President Biden and the Democratic Party in general, or the lure of rhetoric about strong families and self-reliance, or the appeal of Trump’s bravado to otherwise-disempowered young men. No one argument could capture the full picture, but the bottom line was clear: Black voters seemed to be moving, however tentatively, toward Trump and the GOP.
Two years later, the picture looks different. According to the Associated Press, about 90 percent of Black voters supported Democrats last Tuesday, up from the roughly eight in 10 who went for Harris in 2024. Strong turnout throughout the country—and especially in majority-minority counties in the South—helped secure historic wins for Democrats. In Georgia, where Keisha Lance Bottoms became the first Black woman to be elected governor of any U.S. state, the share of Black midterm voters who went to the polls last week reached 54 percent, up from 45.5 percent in 2022 and 39 percent in 2010. In Texas, where a blue wave swept the entire slate of Democrats into statewide office for the first time in decades, the early and absentee Black vote rose 53 percent from 2022. And in Mississippi, where Scott Colom displaced the Republican incumbent to become the state’s first Black senator since Reconstruction, Black voters made up 33 percent of the electorate, up from 30 percent in 2024. Only about one in 10 Black men voted for the Republican on the ballot—except in Florida, where about a quarter of Black men and 10 percent of Black women backed the GOP candidate, Byron Donalds, making him the state’s first Black governor.
The question now is whether last Tuesday’s vote proves that 2024 was an anomaly and that Black voters have come back to the Democratic Party to stay, or whether they will be up for grabs in 2028 and beyond. Christopher Towler, a political scientist at California State University at Sacramento who studies Black voting behavior, argues that the shift toward Trump in 2024 was never as significant as it appeared, and that much of it could be explained by diminished overall turnout among Black voters that year. “Turnout influences how we interpret these partisan supports,” Towler told me. He said the share of Black voters who choose Republicans has stayed relatively stable for six decades (except for 1996 and 2008, when nearly all Black voters backed the Democrat for president), but it accounts for a larger percentage of the Black vote in low-turnout elections. Towler never bought the idea that the 2024 election marked the start of a racial realignment in politics. “All the evidence has suggested that is absolutely not the case,” he said. Instead, that spike in Black support for Trump more likely reflected who showed up and who stayed home.
But for Democratic operatives, the 2024 numbers should still ring some alarm bells. Charles Coleman Jr., a civil-rights lawyer and political analyst, told me fluctuations in turnout reflect a paradigm shift in how Black Americans participate in politics. Black voters have always been pragmatic: They vote for the party that they believe will “do us less harm,” he said. But this has been changing. “There are more and more members of the Black electorate who are tired of a ‘less harm’ orientation,” he said. They “want proactive policy that is going to benefit them.” If they don’t get it, they may just stay home.
[Madeleine Carlisle and Russell Berman: Republicans redistricted themselves out of Congress]
In practice, this means that Democrats can no longer assume that being the least-bad party will energize Black voters. The confluence of events that catalyzed a surge in Black turnout this year cannot be counted on to boost voter rolls in the next election or the one after that. Any party seeking to either keep Black voters in the fold or woo them to their camp will have to offer more than promises.
Black voters have grown accustomed to an insulting routine: When election season rolls around, candidates go to Black churches and barbershops to make their pitch and show voters that they care. This can make Black people feel like props, glad-handed just in time for their votes.
Garlin Gilchrist, a Democrat and Michigan’s first Black lieutenant governor, who was just elected Michigan’s secretary of state, told me that he traveled to every one of Michigan’s 83 counties at least three times. “I try to model consistency. I’m here with you, talking to you, listening to you, understanding what’s going on,” he said. But he noticed in his tours that many Black voters had grown jaded. “What I see are people who are just like, I’m sick of running in place, I’m sick of these people lying, I’m sick of these prices going up, and I’m sick of people acting like I only matter sometimes,” he said last week, not long after he cast his ballot.
Ever since President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat, signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned racial segregation in public places and outlawed employment discrimination, Black voters have been the Democratic Party’s most reliable bloc. The “southern strategy” embraced by the Republican Party in the 1960s, which saw politicians play to the prejudices of white voters across the region, transformed the southern political landscape and alienated Black voters. For decades, the political calculus for Black voters had been clear: The Democrats are the “less harm” party. But a choice between empty promises and outright bigotry is hardly a choice at all.
Yet that calculus may be changing. While campaigning amid the coronavirus pandemic and the racial reckoning of 2020, Biden made a number of commitments to appeal to Black people. As he had promised, he tapped a Black woman for vice president and appointed the first Black woman to the Supreme Court. He also made Juneteenth a federal holiday and fought racial discrimination in the housing market. But Black voters began souring on him after his first year in office, disappointed by the failure of Democrats to pass key voting-rights legislation, and later by rising prices. By May 2024, pundits warned that Black voters were starting to splinter off from the Democratic coalition.
Over the past decade, the share of Black Americans who identify as Democrats has fallen, from 65 percent in 2013 to 49 percent in 2025, whereas the shares of those who identify as independent, Republican, or “other” have all risen. The share of “other” Black voters grew the most, from 7 percent in 2013 to 18 percent last year. Terrance Woodbury, a pollster, has done focus groups with Black voters who have gone back and forth with their vote—those who supported Barack Obama and then Trump, or Bernie Sanders and then Trump. “These voters feel like they have not been getting a fair deal. Their lives have simply not been getting better, despite giving Democrats 90 percent of their votes,” he told me. This, he said, made many of these voters “Trump-curious” in 2024: “They just wanted to give him a shot and see what he would do.”
These voters have now seen what Trump would do, and they didn’t like it, especially the war in Iran and rising fuel prices. The hardships that began under Biden have hardly let up under Trump: From 2022 to 2025, there was a 25 percent drop in median Black-household wealth, according to a recent report from the Federal Reserve. The Black unemployment rate climbed to 7 percent in September—almost double the rate of white workers.
But economic problems only partly explain why Black voters turned out in force last Tuesday. According to exit polls, voters were eager to not only repudiate Trump, but also push back against Republican-led efforts to redraw district maps to weaken Black congressional representation. In 1886, the Supreme Court called voting a fundamental right because it was a “preservative of all rights.” This year, that same Court gutted key parts of the Voting Rights Act, the 1965 legislation that protected Black suffrage by prohibiting voter suppression in southern states. Although the decision in Louisiana v. Callais purports to ban racial discrimination in voting, it allows lawmakers to carve up political districts for partisan reasons rather than racist ones when the two are so closely linked—especially in the South, where partisanship remains a solid proxy for race.
[Adam Serwer: Voters can be disenfranchised now]
Over the past two years, Black voters have watched as one Republican-run state after another tried to gerrymander them out of a voice. They responded by foiling those plans on Election Day. Representative Shomari Figures of Alabama, a Black Democrat representing the Second Congressional District, held on to his seat, despite the efforts of state lawmakers to redraw the map to favor his Republican rival. Especially high turnout in majority-Black counties helped explain why. In Georgia, the margins of victory for Democrats, including Bottoms, apparently squelched Republican plans to redraw the state’s congressional map. The outgoing Republican governor, Brian Kemp, announced last week that he would not call a special session for a gerrymander. “The voters of our state have spoken,” he said.
In a poll of 700 Black women ahead of last Tuesday’s election, 95 percent said that they were concerned about the impact of changes to voting rights. “We have to protect the right to vote jealously; we have to guard it,” Janai Nelson, the president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, told me. Without it, she said, the American idea of representative democracy falls apart. But, she added, the landscape for voting rights remains “quite bleak.” The new district maps may have failed to pay off this year, but the Supreme Court has ensured that lawmakers can still try to silence Black voters in the future—not that that will necessarily pay off for them. Republicans appear to have squandered the party’s nascent gains in the Black vote by trying to marginalize it. As LaTosha Brown, a co-founder of the advocacy group Black Voters Matter Fund, put it to my colleagues: “I call it the great Blacklash.”
Democrats shouldn’t necessarily count on Black voters to stay energized. The electoral stakes won’t always feel so high; the president won’t always be so unpopular; the Democrats could once again fall short of their promises. The voters who chose their couch over the voting booth in 2024 could do so again. If voters don’t feel like lawmakers are working with them to make their lives better—beyond a few church visits in the months before an election—they may question whether it’s worth heading to the polls at all.
“I get asked all the time from Democratic candidates and campaigns, What do we need to say to Black voters?” Woodbury told me. He explained that promising to make Black lives better can be a winning message. But it works for politicians only if they actually do it.
2026-11-12 23:14:27
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One fall afternoon in Liberty, Mississippi, in 1961, a white Democratic former congressman and state legislator named E. H. Hurst shot Herbert Lee in the head. Hurst was angry that Lee, who was Black, had been trying to register other Black Mississippians to vote. An all-white jury accepted Hurst’s claim that he had acted in self-defense because Lee came at him with a tire iron. Donald Trump, now the sitting president of the United States, was 15 years old.
This was how “negro law” worked in Jim Crow Mississippi, which was essentially a police state. Although many laws were race-neutral in their language, “in a society in which race mattered above all else, ‘negro law’ determined who was punished for what,” the historian Neil McMillen wrote in Dark Journey, his 1989 history of Mississippi. In the 1940s, the NAACP was “virtually forced to operate underground,” because in 1920, the state legislature had made it illegal to “possess or distribute” material that would “disturb relations between the races.” As late as 1961, a white man could shoot a Black man in broad daylight and get away with it. When the Black reporter Simeon Booker arrived in 1955 to cover the lynching of Emmett Till for Jet magazine, he wrote that he witnessed “not only raw hatred, but state condoned terror.”
This apparatus of state-condoned terror was still active into the 1960s. As Thomas Ricks writes in Waging a Good War, his history of the civil-rights movement as a nonviolent military campaign, when the legendary civil-rights organizer Bob Moses went down to Mississippi he was “assaulted and jailed repeatedly, sometimes simply for speaking to white people as equals.” In 1963, Moses and other organizers survived a drive-by shooting. He later wrote to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee that Mississippi was extremely dangerous—“we were just like sitting ducks” and “people were just going to be wiped out.”
[Adam Serwer: Even where MAGA won, MAGA lost]
The point of all this terror was to prevent what happened yesterday, when the Democrat Scott Colom defeated Cindy Hyde-Smith to become the first Black U.S. senator from Mississippi since Reconstruction. Hyde-Smith attended a segregation academy as a child—private schools set up in the South to circumvent the Brown v. Board of Education ruling to integrate public schools. She had previously blocked Colom’s appointment to the federal bench. On Election Night, Hyde-Smith declared victory, saying, “I blocked Scott Colom from being a federal judge, and you blocked him from being a U.S. Senator.” That was a little premature.
“In Mississippi, our prayers often change the course of history,” Colom said in his victory speech last night. “It’s not something that I did, y’all. It’s something that we did. All I did was have the courage to imagine a night like this.”
The last Black man to have served as a U.S. senator from Mississippi, Blanche Bruce—back then senators were appointed by the state legislature—was born enslaved in 1841. His mother was enslaved, and his father was her master in the eyes of the law. One of Bruce’s votes was against the Republican-supported Chinese Exclusion Act, which he explained as a vote of conscience and solidarity, “representing as I do a people who are considered essentially disqualified from the privileges and immunities of American citizenship.”
Before the turn of the 20th century, Mississippi was majority-Black. State-tolerated (or state-encouraged) terror led many Black Mississippians to flee north during the Great Migration. Today, Mississippi still has the highest proportion of Black residents of any state. Before the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, law and violence kept Black Mississippians disenfranchised; after, racially polarized voting would place a hard ceiling on the aspirations of every Black candidate in this red state. The last Democrat to represent Mississippi in the Senate was John Stennis, an avowed segregationist who, as a prosecutor in the 1930s, led the prosecution of three Black men who had been tortured into confessions, a case that led the Supreme Court to rule in 1936 that such confessions are inadmissible under the Fourteenth Amendment.
This is all to say, as one famous Mississippian put it, that “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Mississippi today is not the Mississippi of Dark Journey, but we are living in a world inextricably shaped by it. Multiracial democracy in America is young; it emerged only in the lifetimes of the people who are still currently governing the country. It is younger than the president. It is younger than most of the justices on the Supreme Court. And it has been under assault. The past decade has seen a relentless attack on its foundations from people who remember the time before multiracial democracy as a golden age. It was not a golden age in Mississippi, not for people like Herbert Lee, or Bob Moses, or Fannie Lou Hamer.
Conservatives have undone or undermined many of the laws and constitutional amendments passed to ensure that Black Americans could exercise their rights as full citizens. The Supreme Court has slowly chipped away at the Voting Rights Act, most recently ruling in Louisiana v. Callais that racist voting restrictions are constitutional if they are passed with partisan, rather than racist, intent. This standard would permit many Jim Crow–era laws that were superficially race-neutral but racist in intent. As McMillen observed, in pre-1965 Mississippi, “Much of the exclusionary process was necessarily left to the discriminatory application of otherwise racially neutral law.” (If lawmakers want to disenfranchise Democratic voters, and those voters just happen to be Black—by coincidence, of course!—that’s fine.)
Many Republican-controlled states in the South responded to the ruling by gerrymandering Black-majority districts out of existence. At the time, the former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale gleefully speculated that “if states are aggressive, we could see a healthy majority in the House perpetually.” Republicans might never have to worry about courting Black voters again.
Black Americans responded to this assault on the foundations of their freedom with terrific fervor in the midterms. Black-voter turnout in the South appears to have surged last week to a hair below levels usually seen when a president is on the ballot. That, along with increased white support for Democrats, helped put previously deep-red states like Mississippi into contention.
[Adam Serwer: Texas Republicans get washed]
The next Congress will have seven Black U.S. senators—Colom, Raphael Warnock of Georgia, Tim Scott of South Carolina, Juliana Stratton of Illinois, Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware, Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland, and Cory Booker of New Jersey—the most ever in history. There will be five contemporaneous Black governors in the United States in 2027, with Wes Moore in Maryland, Keisha Lance Bottoms in Georgia, Byron Donalds in Florida, David Crowley in Wisconsin, and Aaron Ford in Nevada. Before this election, there had been only three such elected governors: Moore, Douglas Wilder from Virginia, and Deval Patrick of Massachusetts. The first Black governor of any state, P. B. S. Pinchback of Louisiana, who inherited the office in 1872 after his running mate was impeached, required the intervention of the Grant administration to prevent a white-supremacist uprising in Louisiana. He was in office for 39 days. There would not be another Black governor in America for more than a century.
The fact that Black voters defeated efforts to limit their political power does not make such efforts morally acceptable or justifiable, of course. As Jamelle Bouie wrote in The New York Times this week, “That Americans of all stripes can overcome obstacles to voting does not mean that they should have to. And high Black turnout does not obviate the need for legislation to secure the right to vote.”
Bruce would be proud of Colom, I think, albeit initially confused as to why he was running as a Democrat. It took a century from Reconstruction to the civil-rights movement to restore the rights of Black voters, and far less time before politicians and justices began to curtail them again. Yet the project of snuffing out Black aspirations to equal citizenship will always fail. It failed in 1875. It failed in 1965. And it failed in 2026, with Callais. It will always fail, even if it takes a hundred years. Or a hundred and fifty.
