Outraged by the civilian casualties from the war on Iran, protester Guido Reichstadter scaled the 168-foot Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge in Washington, D.C., earlier this month. He remained on the bridge for over five days. Upon descending, he was arrested and charged by law enforcement for trespassing. Reichstadter says he undertook his protest as a form of nonviolent opposition against both the Trump administration’s war on Iran and the unchecked acceleration of artificial intelligence systems — some of which have been used by the United States military to select targets for deadly missile strikes. “We the people, in whose name these murders are being committed, we’ve got the power and the responsibility to nonviolently withdraw our support, our cooperation, from the system, from the regime,” he explains. Reichstadter is a former U.S. Marine who left the service after refusing to deploy to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. He is now an outspoken social justice activist and the founder of the grassroots coalition Stop AI.
This year’s local election results from the United Kingdom are in. The far-right, anti-immigrant Reform UK party made substantial gains, while the ruling Labour Party suffered heavy losses, signaling what London-based journalist Daniel Trilling calls a “wider fragmenting of politics” and a generational shift away from the two-party political system. We get an overview of major developments to the U.K. political scene from Trilling, including how Donald Trump’s transformation of the U.S. right-wing movement has inspired Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party, and how the Labour Party’s crackdown on pro-Palestine activism led to rising support for the left-wing Green Party. Trilling also discusses how populist sentiment continues to influence other countries in Europe after Hungary’s extremist leader Viktor Orbán suffered a major election defeat last month.