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Russia and Ukraine both launched strikes, vying for the upper hand ahead of a key NATO summit this week.

The transatlantic defense summit this week looks set to confirm the growing rift between Washington and Brussels.

Beijing insisted the test was not directed at any particular country, but the move drew rebukes from Japan, Australia and New Zealand.

“What up, Council?” said the comedian J.T. Parr, greeting the Pasadena City Council in a surfer persona. Then he got to the point: “Americans are united in our hatred of data centers. They’re big, ugly water guzzlers.”He’s right. America the Polarized has found some agreement at last. While President Trump guns it on building data centers, 71 percent of Americans oppose them, including a majority of Republicans. In Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Texas, Republicans are breaking with Trump and issuing stern warnings about the massive facilities that increasingly pock rural America. And now Humans First, a conservative group that says it supports an “America First AI policy,” is planning a nationwide data center protest on July 18. Data centers are also shaping up to be a rogue issue putting torque on the midterms. South Florida Representative Byron Donalds, now a Trump-endorsed gubernatorial candidate in his state, has quietly defied the big guy, pledging to “protect Florida’s families and communities from data centers.” In one ad, he even seems to support government control of electric utilities. (Welcome to the struggle, Comrade Donalds.) So who supports data centers? Only politicians who benefit from Big Tech’s ambition to dominate global AI. Parr, who himself ran for City Council in Burbank, California, in 2024, further said of data centers: “We’re just supposed to accept them because we might lose a race with China. Dude, where’s China?” That Homer Simpson–esque question might just nail it, and it should be taken seriously if not literally. It suggests just how vexed Americans are with Big Tech’s ongoing effort to sacrifice regular people to the global ambitions of billionaires. Thus we have a mass mobilization focused squarely on protecting American hometowns from oligarchic exploitation. According to Data Center Watch, protest groups against data centers now number an eye-popping 833 across 49 states. That’s a genuine movement. For more than a year, the protests have roused corners of America that not long ago were stuck in tribal stalemates focused on the personality of Trump. Out of these protests, a surprising, hopeful, and effective rural progressivism is emerging. Data centers, which never close, consume vast amounts of electricity. They also drain millions of gallons of local water for cooling and churn out air and noise pollution all day every day. No wonder the data center protesters have keyed into AI’s environmental impact. Contrary to popular belief that Americans are dismissive of climate concerns, 70 percent of Americans now worry about the ravages of data centers. Populists of every stripe have further grown wary of the brutally expensive ruling-class projects that jeopardize our daily lives: Silicon Valley monopolies and the war in Iran. A big faction of the anti-globalist set has further turned its attention away from the right-wing bugbear of immigration and toward causes that elsewhere are derided as “Communist”: working people and the climate.And the protests are surprisingly tactical. When it comes to affecting policy, they put the bigger No Kings demonstrations, which largely exist to express anger and ideological affiliation, in the shade. According to a watchdog group, data center opponents blocked or slowed more than 75 projects nationwide, worth $130 billion, between January and March alone. What’s more, 141 moratoria have been proposed at local, county, state, and national levels. And dozens of cities have actually implemented temporary bans, including Birmingham, Alabama; New Orleans; and Tulsa, Oklahoma.“Communities have internalized an opposition playbook,” writes Data Center Watch. “As political resistance builds and local organizing becomes more coordinated, this is now a sustained and intensifying trend.” If these communities keep at it, and keep notching wins, they might just show the way out of the defeatism and blind rage that have stymied American progress and policy for the better part of a decade.“We are anti–sacrifice zone,” said protester Megan McDonough at a Pennsylvania state Capitol demonstration last week. A sacrifice zone is a municipality that is thrown to the wolves of Big Tech. “We are anti being told that billionaire tech bros deserve more protection than the people who drink the water, breathe the air, pay the taxes, and live with the consequences.” McDonough’s speech and Parr’s where’s-China comedy spiel really point to what’s most galvanizing about the protests. The data center opponents are ordinary Americans. They embody a national everyman type we need more of in politics: the wise child, forever underestimated, who asks Socratic questions.This archetype is so American it should be featured in a pavilion for the 250th. Its vibe draws on centuries of unlikely American heroes: nonconformist Yankee Doodle, outlaw Huckleberry Finn, naïvely principled Mr. Smith, anti-authoritarian Jeff Spicoli, and, of course, skeptical realist Homer Simpson.These fellows are friends to the obvious. They don’t like abstractions. The data centers are right in front of our faces. They’re not one of the intangible threats of technology that preoccupy anti-woke and anti-tech faddists like Jonathan Haidt. (Citing Haidt’s out-of-step philosophies and opposition to DEI, dozens of students booed and walked out of his commencement address at NYU last week.) Instead, the data centers are physical outposts of AI empires—ugly water guzzlers that don’t even pretend to serve communities.At least Homer’s nuclear plant keeps him employed. A massive data facility uses automation and, once built, rarely employs more than a few dozen people. Data centers really only benefit the Big Tech emperors, to whom, according to a growing American consensus, we are no longer willing to sacrifice our towns.

Donald Trump has a new favorite word. He’s been calling Democrats “Communists” ever since a few democratic socialists won some House primaries. “These are hardcore, godless Communists,” he told the Faith & Freedom Coalition conference last month. “This is the most serious threat to our country since its existence.” GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson, the ever-loyal shih tzu on his emperor’s lap, has picked it up, as well. The midterms, he said recently, will pit “common sense versus communism.”Well. The first question here is whether Americans even know what communism is (or was) anymore. There are five countries in the world that still call themselves Communist, but one of those is China, which at least in economic terms barely counts (the others are Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, and Laos). More than that, it’s getting to be close to 40 years now since the Eastern bloc collapsed. A person would have to be at least 45 years old to have any memory of all that. Right now, 57.5 percent of Americans are under that age.As you’d expect, young people who weren’t alive to see how cruel, corrupt, and lethargic the Soviet Union was either don’t know much about communism or don’t see it as such a bad thing. A poll released last week by the libertarian Cato Institute had some interesting numbers. Among all Americans, capitalism was viewed favorably by just 52 percent (that’s the number that would be worrying me if I were a Friedmanesque free marketeer; it’s insanely low!). Socialism was viewed favorably by 37 percent. And communism got a thumbs-up from 21 percent. That’s overall. Among respondents under 30 years old, 38 percent said they had a favorable view of communism. But in the Queens of Donald Trump’s youth, calling someone a Commie packed a real wallop, so he clearly thinks it still can. The word doesn’t actually apply to any of these people he’s trying to condemn, of course. As I noted last week, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Zohran Mamdani, and even Bernie Sanders himself aren’t really socialists, in the proper historical sense of the word. I don’t hear any of them calling for the state to seize the means of production, which is the basic historical position of socialism. They’re social democrats. The only one among the crop who has apparently said a few nice things about actual communism is Darializa Avila Chevalier, the 32-year-old who won the Democratic primary in an upper Manhattan district. Her leftism appears to be much more of the campus-radical variety than Mamdani’s sewer socialism; we’ll see in two years whether the voters of her district are good with that, or whether she has indeed “grown considerably” since she wrote those social media posts.Meanwhile, on the Fourth of July, a bunch of white supremacists from something called the Patriot Front felt at home enough in Trump’s Washington to march in front of the Capitol wearing masks, sunglasses, and ballcaps with the group’s logo boldly displayed and carrying an array of flags, including the Confederate flag. (These ghouls undoubtedly went unmasked during the pandemic to protest supposedly totalitarian public health policies, and now they’re dressing like totalitarians in an attempt to terrorize regular people.)  And that night, of course, America, or that portion of it that was interested, listened to another windy address from a president who once invited avowed white supremacist Nick Fuentes to dine with him at his house and told the extremist Proud Boys to stand by. That same president participated back in May in Rededicate 250, a Christian nationalist prayer gathering that, whatever its organizers said, was clearly intended to pound home the idea that the United States is supposed to be a Christian nation, which of course it is not. Democratic Representative Jared Huffman of California accurately told PBS that the event “would have the Founders rolling in their graves.” This doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of right-wing radicalism in this country, most of which Trump tacitly or sometimes explicitly endorses with rhetoric that’s clearly fascist. And beyond Trump himself, many rank-and-file Republicans are shocking extremists; remember Nazis mingling openly at the 2024 CPAC conference, or those leaked text messages by young Republicans last fall (“I love Hitler”)?It’s crystal clear in a factual sense which party is more radical today. The Democrats could elect two dozen socialists and they still wouldn’t be anywhere near as far left as the GOP has gone far right. Oh, and by the way: For all the media attention socialist candidates get when they win, it’s still a fact that on balance, mainstream and even centrist Democrats are winning more primaries this year. The Cook Political Report revealed over the weekend that in the 22 GOP-controlled congressional districts where Democrats have held primaries so far, 14 have been won by candidates with mainstream and centrist backing. Only four have been won by candidates backed by the Progressive Caucus. So in swing districts, Democratic voters are still mainly choosing the nominees they calculate have a better shot at winning such a district.But we’re going to be hearing all about Communists for the next four months. Trump is obviously trying to make the midterms a referendum on the Democratic Party and not on him. History tells us this rarely works. It didn’t work for him in 2018, when he was around 40 percent in the polls and tried to make the dreaded caravan headed toward the Rio Grande from Central America the central issue. And the economy was comparatively good then, unlike now, when a soaring stock market is benefiting the rich while most Americans continue to struggle with Trump-juiced inflation.So Democrats, who tend to freak out about things, should not freak out about this. Sure, communism is a scary word, at least to people of a certain age and ideological bent. But I’d imagine very few people who aren’t dyed-in-the-wool MAGA believe the Democratic Party is a bunch of Communists. I hope that instead of lamely denying it and moving on to gas prices, they have the guts to fight fire with fire and point out to voters who the real extremists in this country are.

American higher education is in crisis. Changes to student loan financing, a decline in the number of international students, and a weaponized federal research apparatus are creating historic challenges for everyone. Every day, new pitfalls emerge out of Washington and state capitals across the country. Right now, for instance, the Department of Education is finalizing a rule that would limit financial aid for graduate students if the program they are enrolled in does not produce enough graduates who make enough money, threatening a large number of graduate arts programs. At stake are the jobs of thousands of people who are employed by schools across the country. Now we’re beginning to see the toll this is taking. Layoffs have hit multiple universities. Boston University laid off more than 100 of its staff last spring, the New School laid off nearly 90 faculty and staff, the University of Maryland laid off 84 employees, and Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Science is looking at laying off 25 percent of its staff (thanks to a plan put together by McKinsey and Company). Most dramatically, Hampshire College announced the closure of its doors this past spring. It will unfortunately not be the last institution to fold. Where faculty have jobs, they increasingly do not feel free to do their work. In Texas, the A&M and Tech systems have implemented prohibitions on teaching of race, sex, and gender—leading to the cancellation or modification of courses. At the University of Texas at Austin, departments have been merged, likely because of pressure caused by “anti DEI” bills, which also saw the closure of student services offices across the state of Texas. But it’s not just public universities in Republican states that face these pressures. At Harvard, the heads of the Center for Middle East Studies and the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights were dismissed from their roles for running programming related to Palestine. Facing distrust from the public, hostile lawmakers, and corporate decision-making practices, what are the students, staff, and faculty of the ivory tower to do? The solution lies in what graduate students across the country have been doing for the past few years; what workers in the U.S. have done for over a hundred years—organize a union.Both inside and outside of higher education, there has been talk for years about what ails the system and why it has seemingly become out of touch and distrusted. A core tenet of the oft-repeated arguments is that universities have become bastions of activism, rather than places where scholarship is cultivated. The lone scholar who spends years studying Plato and Aristotle is run off campus and replaced by a purple-haired student with a sticker-laden megaphone; or so we are told. At the same time, universities are critiqued for not being engaged enough with communities, for setting kids up with degrees that will not serve them in the “real world”—the bubble of scholarly pursuit is simultaneously romanticized as a lost bygone era and source of present-day weakness.The solution to this put forward by higher education leaders is to invest millions in viewpoint diversity or civic engagement centers, like those at Tufts University and the University of North Carolina, with the goal of bringing more conservative voices to campus. At the behest of donors and lawmakers, universities have become a battleground for the culture war. When you dig in to the polling numbers about why universities are distrusted, it is true that a vast majority of Americans believe colleges and universities are headed in the wrong direction. Within those numbers, about 45 percent of people believe that universities do not do enough to expose students to a wide range of opinions. Meanwhile, 80 percent believe that universities are doing a poor job of keeping tuition costs affordable.  The reality is that universities have come to be operated more as businesses than as not-for-profit entities of higher education, and this has led to their having the trust that businesses are afforded. Presidents of private colleges, in particular, are paid in the millions (at public universities, so are the football coaches). Universities have amassed huge amounts of property, corporate consultants are brought in for all sorts of reasons, and tuition costs continue to skyrocket. This trend is slated to get worse as universities seek to disentangle themselves from public dollars to make them less fickle to changes in political winds. Despite being operated like businesses, universities encourage their workers to view their pursuit of knowledge and/or labor in support of it as separate from work that would require a union: It is a privilege to be able to do scholarship or work in higher education, and therefore you don’t require a union like a coal miner or an autoworker. It is this separation of profession that encourages isolation from other working people. When graduate students across the country unionized with the United Auto Workers, they showed up on the picket line when autoworkers went on strike in 2023. Dues paid by academic workers support other industries when they are on strike, and vice versa.I’ve seen this dynamic firsthand as a member of a graduate labor union. When workers of the local grocery store chain went on strike, in 2019, the union coordinated people to join up at the picket line. A few of us joined one rainy morning and were approached by a white guy in an NRA hat, holding a strike sign. He thanked us for being there; regardless of what he may have heard about universities, or what differences may have otherwise existed politically, here was an example of workers coming together in a material struggle. Unions contribute to community cohesion and trust. In Rust Belt Union Blues, Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol write about how unions in Pennsylvania integrated themselves into every facet of daily life. The union hall was a place where weddings and community functions occurred; the union itself was a source of connection—where people felt united based on their shared identity as workers. As unions dwindled due to deindustrialization, so too did this broader union infrastructure, leaving people to find social identity in other group settings, some of them more reactionary. Higher-ed unions are not going to magically solve community isolation and atomization, but considering the acute need to boost community understanding and trust for this sector, in particular, academic workers can and should be part of the solution. Organizing a union requires having hard conversations. It requires you to talk to many different people across life and work experience, political allegiances, and other divisions. They may or may not agree with the purpose of a union. Still, this dialogue exposes you to alternative viewpoints in a more visceral way than the proposed “viewpoint diversity” centers will allow. Whether or not everyone agrees from the outset, they will ultimately be a part of your union if you succeed. And to get there, you have to do the necessary work of convincing a majority of the potential beneficiaries of labor organizing that it’s a worthwhile effort—that at the end of the day, they’ll all come out ahead. There are many tangible material benefits that unionization can provide; it creates leverage on university governance, where faculty, staff, and students may otherwise feel they have none. But unions are not a panacea—in light of broader industry-related shifts, layoffs do happen (Harvard staff who are facing cuts are unionized). It happened to the auto industry, and it can happen to higher ed. Nevertheless, organizing makes any cuts to workers much more costly to do, and it gives workers far more benefits when parting. For people in higher education, the last year has been spent on edge watching decisions come down the pipeline that have impacted their industry and their livelihoods, with no ability to control what happens. It is a feeling of utter and complete helplessness. Universities and professional organizations have been mostly siloed in this effort, relying on conversations with members of Congress and direct negotiations with the government, or otherwise taking legal action. As the public has been galvanized by issues of war, immigration, and the economy, the destruction of America’s research and academic institutions is not a top priority for people’s attention.This siloing also occurs on campus. Currently, the American Association of University Professors is trying to organize faculty across different fields of study. For years, it was thought that humanities faculty were the ones primarily under threat, so they currently make up more of the AAUP’s base. Now it is science faculty who are facing the chopping block and are doing so unorganized and unprepared. While humanities faculty may be aware and sympathetic, it ultimately takes members of the scientific community to provide insight on how certain policies put forward by federal agencies may impact them. You cannot be a bystander to the saving of your field; no one else will have these conversations for you. As nonsensical and counterproductive as these cuts are to the national interest, they are no different from what a factory worker experienced during the signing of the free trade agreements of the 1980s and 1990s. Watching the government take an ax to your industry and countless communities, with little recourse available, is depressing. Organizing can help allay the bad feelings and put those who are under the boot back on the front foot. Universities may not be able to mobilize the public or build effective coalitions as institutions, but members of the university community can—and should.  Through the union, every street becomes the classroom; coalitions are built, picket lines are formed, and people come to understand each other across lines of division. This may seem overly idealistic and hopelessly naïve. There’s no doubt that the battle will be a hard one. All the same, it is a path forward with tangible steps and real benefit—if only because you’ll be fighting the fight together. Form the union today, protect your job tomorrow, build a better community next week.

Every nation sustains itself with mythmaking. This is why Augustus commissioned Virgil to write The Aeneid at the moment the emperor was transforming the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire, why the British monarch is crowned atop the Stone of Destiny, why Marianne looks over Paris from both the Place de la Nation and the Place de la République, and why the Mexican president emerges every September 15 around 11 p.m. onto the balcony of the National Palace in Mexico City to issue el Grito—the cry that sparked the Mexican war of independence—anew.But perhaps no nation has been more dependent upon its stories than the United States, a country formed in the relatively recent past without the benefits of shared ethnicity, language, or custom. In the absence of the usual ties that typically hold a nation together, it is values, we are told, that make an American an American and that make this country the special place that it is. Ironically, while Americans have always bitterly disagreed about the practical implications of those values, they have largely been consistent in the story they tell about those values and thus themselves. That story goes a little something like this: The United States was founded by good men, rebelling against tyranny and dedicated to the cause of liberty. Throughout its history, the United States has sought to pursue the path of freedom and justice, although some people—often, but not always progressives—are willing to concede that it has sometimes fallen short of this ideal. What these people will not concede, however—what they almost never concede—is the fundamental assumption that the United States of America is collectively a nation striving for the good.In any other time, this persistent bit of American Exceptionalism might be excusable, even charming. But in a moment in which it seems not only increasingly impossible, but irresponsible, to ignore the deep flaws at the heart of the American project, this is exactly the choice that has been made by a certain brand of liberal public intellectual cum influencer in the Trump era. This cohort includes figures such as Jill Lepore, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Joanne B. Freeman, and Kevin M. Kruse. Heather Cox Richardson and Timothy Snyder are arguably the two most prominent examples of a new iteration of an old trend, the historian as explainer, and perhaps more jarringly as political strategist. Credentialed historians and critics of the current regime, they promise key insight into the present via their knowledge of the past, and they have become a prominent feature of the opposition to Donald Trump.The narrative of history and, more importantly, of the present that they offer has gone viral, offering comfort to its audience and a substantial economic benefit to its creators in the form of newsletter subscriptions and book deals. While it seems cruel to challenge anyone’s source of comfort in this very disquieting age and is certainly unkind to question academics pursuing alternate income streams, it is time we start to question the narrative of history that has been so widely adopted by many Americans and ask whether this particular fantasy of the past is providing any benefit in our increasingly dystopian present. In particular, there is an insistence among these figures that the past is something to be mined for lessons about how to survive the rising tide of authoritarianism and fascism. It’s a compelling premise. But a decade into what future historians may very well term the “Trump Era,” it’s still not precisely clear what use the past is to understanding—let alone escaping—the current predicament.The Resist! Historians, as you might call them, would not be possible if not for the American center-left’s increasingly romantic view of expertise. It (and the Democratic Party) have over the past 30 years come to be dominated by the most well-educated: Roughly 60 percent of people with graduate degrees lean blue. The nation’s best students are now collected in one political corner utterly unwilling to question the teacher’s competence. She is, after all, the teacher.This shift has also been catalyzed by the American right’s increasingly dangerous anti-intellectualism, which in part drove their political opponents to a sometimes exaggerated deference to credentialed authority—a deference that often ignores the fact that experts frequently disagree with each other. Take, for example, the progressive rallying cry to “Believe science.” This certainly seems to be a good idea, especially on clearly settled topics such as the efficiency of vaccines and the reality of climate change. But what about those issues where the science—and more importantly the scientists—deeply disagree? Who exactly are we trusting then? After all, there are good faith, legitimate debates occurring around issues ranging from the effects and efficiency of long-term psychiatric drug use in children to support options for autistic people to the ethics of AI. None of this is settled, and experts—credentialed experts—disagree.This deification of expertise in and of itself has also made it somewhat portable, a fact that is on clear display among the historian influencers. Take, for example, Heather Cox Richardson—arguably the most prominent of the cohort. Richardson’s Substack Letters From an American boasts over three million subscribers and is one of the most widely read newsletters in the world. The Harvard-educated Boston College professor has nearly six million followers on social media and was a Time 100 Creator in 2025. Letters From an American began as a synopsis of the events around Trump’s first impeachment and continues as a daily commentary on current events, much of which includes Richardson’s advice on topics ranging from how to identify fascism to how resistance to the MAGA movement ought to be organized. Her blog has also built a New York Times bestselling book, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America.When her work is shared, and it often is, the credibility of her positions is upheld by the assurance that Richardson is an expert—which is most certainly true: She wrote her dissertation on the Republican Party’s economic policies during the Civil War. Before Richardson entered the realm of public intellectualism as the co-host of the NPR-affiliate podcast Freak Out and Carry On in 2017, all of her books were focused on nineteenth-century America, including works on Reconstruction, the Battle of Wounded Knee, and the history of the Republican Party. Although fascism does have nineteenth-century roots, albeit in Europe, much of her newsletter is devoted to what is best described as punditry: analysis of the president’s mental state, upcoming Senate elections, and the weaponization of government agencies.Timothy Snyder, the other bright star of this constellation, has a better claim to being an expert on fascism. Snyder, who decamped from Yale to the University of Toronto last year, is a historian of Central and Eastern Europe, with a specialization in the Holocaust and the Soviet Union. But his academic work is not directly linked to his advice on what to do in twenty-first-century America. That work, for example, includes a biography of Wilhelm von Habsburg, the poet and soldier who was placed in charge of Ukrainians against the Bolsheviks in the aftermath of World War I. Moreover, perhaps even more than Richardson, Snyder has leaned into the dubious idea that the historian is really a political strategist in disguise. His 2017 book, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century, topped The New York Times bestseller list and became something like scripture among some left-leaning Americans during the first Trump administration.The entire subdiscipline of historiography exists because historians themselves are conscious that the way history is written and interpreted does itself have a history, one that is infused by ideological and sociological (and not infrequently psychological) influence. When we try to learn lessons from history, we must first choose a version to teach us—which narratives to highlight or omit, which assumptions to accept, which voices to elevate or ignore. That is why the past is often a comforter as much as if not more than it is a teacher. This is certainly true in the case of the Resist! Historians.The popular success of figures like Richardson and Snyder rests on the fact they are presenting a narrative that rarely challenges their audience—which is largely white, middle-class, well-educated, and progressive. It is an audience made up of people for whom, up until now, the American project has worked out very well. What many of these people want to hear is that the rise of Trump and the MAGA movement is an aberration, a fixable malfunction. The audience for Richardson and Snyder, whether on podcasts, Substack, or Threads, want to believe that the current president and his supporters are not heirs to their American legacy but have instead twisted the truth about this nation’s history for their own malign ends. In this context, not only are their detractors the real inheritors of the nation’s Founders, but there is a clear path to escaping this fraught moment: accepting the truth about the nation and following where it leads us.When Richardson, for instance, wrote about Rededicate 250, a bizarre event held on the National Mall on May 17 that was part political rally and part evangelical revival, she wrote with confidence, “...the United States of America was not founded as a Christian nation. The Founders were quite clear about that…,” and she went on to quote the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli, which famously declared that “the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion” and “has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility [of Muslims].” It’s a bold, appealing proclamation, one that seeks to co-opt, if not to obliterate, a key trope on the right, where the Founders’ status as (almost exclusively) white Protestants and their invocations of the Almighty trump the constitutionally protected rights they enshrined, most notably in the First Amendment.And it’s true, the Treaty of Tripoli does say exactly that. But this is not the whole story. Many states maintained a religious test for office, and an established church, well into the nineteenth century. In fact, Massachusetts, where Richardson was educated and continues to work, did not fully disestablish its state church until 1833. Moreover, institutional histories are not the only histories that count. Rededicate 250 can only be seen as an anomaly if you ignore the long history connecting evangelical revivals and American politics dating back to Colonial times—traditions that have continually reasserted themselves in figures like Billy Graham and the continued prominence of megachurches. In the lived history of the Republic, not only the Christian character, but the evangelical nature of the country, are hard to deny. It can certainly be complicated and contextualized via documents like the Treaty of Tripoli. But that is different than asserting that their existence trumps other relevant details and events in U.S. history.Of course, the truth of some of its assertions does not mean that the contemporary brand of MAGA evangelical has the right to govern the United States unchallenged, but it is also incorrect that there is no precedent for the rise of MAGA. As in a version of the twentieth century that exists to provide “lessons” to anti-fascists in the present, the idea that there is a pure, uncontested American history available for use by those disgusted by the current regime is comforting, even inspiring. It simplifies history, creating binaries between the authentic and the opportunistic and, in many cases, between good and evil. Rather than unspooling the complexities and ambiguities of American history, it instead treats the past as raw material for punditry. The Treaty of Tripoli is not an early example of diplomacy and statecraft from a new nation struggling for legitimacy, but a tool to be used against Christian conservatives who wield history and Scripture selectively.History is neither a teacher who rewards the best students nor a sweeping morality play. It is inconsistent, morally ambiguous, and often not especially helpful.But history is neither a teacher who rewards the best students nor a sweeping morality play. It is inconsistent, morally ambiguous, and often not especially helpful. It is one of many forms of expertise that can provide resonant analogies and occasional lessons—but its lessons are not inherently of more use than those offered by social science or even political activism.It is, of course, hardly unique for subject experts, particularly academics, to stray outside their areas, particularly while providing mainstream political commentary. Economics, in particular, has turned out a steady stream of pundits, from the respectable (former New York Times columnist and, yes, current Substacker Paul Krugman, for example) to the baldly ideological (such as the nationally syndicated, baldly libertarian John Stossel). But there is nothing about academic training, no matter the discipline, that translates automatically to expertise in political strategy, just as there is nothing in history that provides a clear playbook for escaping the overlapping crises brought about by the second Trump administration.That is not to say that Richardson, Snyder, and the other historian influencers need to quit the public square, but more that their visions and approaches to historical punditry need to be challenged. There is room for more diverse and sometimes dissenting voices, who are more willing to voice facts about the United States that disquiet and disturb. There is room to question expertise, particularly when it is deployed as cover for political analysis or punditry. And there is room for more stories to be told about America, even when they are stories we may not like.

The post These Immigrant Kids Were Once Protected. Under Trump, Their Deportations Have Tripled. appeared first on ProPublica.

The president slammed communism as a “cancer” during his remarks on the National Mall on Saturday.