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Semafor • Feb 11, 2026

How OpenAI got comfortable with the Pentagon using ChatGPT

The tech giant announced the US military will now have access to its chatbot.

New Republic • Feb 11, 2026

America Won’t Be Easily Forgiven—Even After Trump Is Gone

In a 1975 episode of the British sitcom Fawlty Towers meant to satirize the Britons who clung to anti-German sentiment decades after World War II, hotel owner Basil Fawlty, played by John Cleese, struggles and ultimately fails to conceal his lingering resentment from a group of German tourists as his repeated Freudian slips mentioning the war reduce a young woman to tears before he makes a Hitler mustache with his fingers and goose-steps through the lobby. The scene is one of the series’s best-known; a reliable laugh-getter. More than a half-century later, President Donald Trump’s near-obsession with setting fire to alliances that have served Western interests in good stead plays like an unfunny parody of Fawlty’s comic preening.Let’s not get things twisted—even Donald Trump’s worst offenses pale in comparison to Nazi crimes, and invoking the Holocaust to make political points is never acceptable. But the Fawlty Towers episode illustrates something that’s keenly relevant today: When a nation breaks the world’s trust, forgiveness does not come quickly or easily. That’s a hard lesson that Americans, even the liberals and progressives who might absolve themselves of contributing to Trumpian misrule, will have to learn as we grapple with the damage Trump has done to our international standing only a year into his second term.Opinion polls reveal the shocking extent of the damage. In September, as Trump openly mused about making Canada the fifty-first state, an Ipsos poll found 60 percent of Canadians said they “could never trust the Americans the same way again,” while Canadian trips south of the border have cratered. European attitudes toward the United States have seen a similarly precipitous fall. A new poll by YouGov found that Western Europeans’ perceptions of the U.S. have turned sharply negative, particularly—and not surprisingly—in Denmark. On the economic front, loss of investor confidence has sunk the dollar, while Canada and the EU are forging trade deals with China, India, and the South American trade bloc Mercosur that leave the U.S. excluded. Even Queen doesn’t want to tour here.But polling data, currency exchange rates, trade deals, and rock band touring schedules don’t quite capture the deep well of anger and the sense of betrayal that many people, especially Canadians and Europeans, feel toward the U.S. now.It seems different from Bush-era anti-Americanism. When I lived in China from 2001 to 2004, any cab driver or shopkeeper who found out I was American would inevitably bring up the Iraq War. While visiting Zhengzhou, I was screamed at and physically assaulted. The anti-American stain from back then eventually faded. It will be much harder to wash out this time.A Dane in his fifties living in the U.S. for more than 20 years, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation, said Nazi Germany was not an ally that turned on its partners, whereas before Trump’s belligerent rhetoric, America had been seen as a friend, “and betraying that friendship cuts far deeper than being invaded by a known aggressor and agitator.” While Americans initially dismissed the rhetoric about Greenland as just another silly idea from a silly president, he said he had entirely different feelings and the administration’s actions signaled that Trump was not just a fool but a megalomaniac.“On a personal level, I’m trying very hard not to hate or despise everything and everyone American for allowing this to happen—but I will never again trust an American,” he wrote in a private social media message.Trump’s fixation on acquiring Greenland—without regard for what its mostly Indigenous Inuit inhabitants want—isn’t new. As early as 2019, he was trying to get the Danes to sell it. But as with his stated desire to annex Canada, and with his imposition of tariffs on trading partners, what many Americans treat as fodder for jokes or serious media analysis is, to Canadians and Europeans, a sign that their onetime ally has become a dangerous predator.Kristina Spohr, a professor of international history at the London School of Economics and Political Science, compared Trump’s bullying of Europe to Russia’s.“If one person is constantly using bullying tactics or resorting to political blackmail and only takes a step back when you are really firm, then we are dealing with something very similar to what Europeans have learned in their dealings with Russia because Russia is always testing weaknesses,” Spohr said. What is so damaging is that unlike Russia, the U.S. is supposed to be on the same side as Europe and to share the same principles and values, defending freedom and democracy. “That’s also why Europeans, both leaders and ordinary people, are just flabbergasted.”Americans’ neighbors to the north are no less flabbergasted. That’s the case with Darlene Dale, a 62-year-old Canadian Army veteran living in New Brunswick, who served alongside American forces in Afghanistan as a combat medic in 2003 and 2005. She used to travel to the U.S. frequently, including a 2016 road trip from Seattle to New York and frequent hops across the border for shopping and eating. Now, she says, she regards the U.S. as unsafe to visit and vows never to set foot on American soil again as her trust in the U.S. has been eroded “beyond repair.”“Fought side by side, and now they turn their backs on us and threaten to make us [the fifty-first state]. No going back. Too much was sacrificed for them,” Dale wrote in a message.Revelations that Trump met with Alberta separatists haven’t improved attitudes. Nor has the U.S. Embassy in Copenhagen’s removal of flags honoring the Danish soldiers killed in Afghanistan.Nina Janz, a Luxembourg-based historian, said that Trump’s policies have indeed destroyed trust in the U.S. and the perception of its reliability as a partner. But she said many relationships may survive him.“In the end, the network and the old political and institutional establishments still exist and will likely survive this period, despite Trump—at least this is what I hope,” she wrote in an email. “I actually think the damage done through mistrust may be even stronger within the U.S., internally.”But any Americans thinking global perceptions of their country will return to some pre-MAGA kumbaya if they simply elect Democratic congressional majorities in the 2026 midterms and a Democratic president in 2028—assuming those elections are even free and fair—are kidding themselves. What, after all, is to stop American voters from getting into another snit about egg prices or foreign conflicts and electing another Republican Congress in 2030 and another fascist demagogue as president in 2032—especially when a huge majority so vividly put feelings and vibes ahead of facts and reason in 2024?Explanations for the 2024 election results tend to focus on Democratic and Republican party strategies and the issues that animated voters. But it’s important to remember that Trump didn’t win just because 77.3 million Americans voted for him. He also won because 2.9 million voted for third-party candidates like the Green Party’s Jill Stein, while 89 million didn’t vote at all.However much the media fail to hold voters accountable and behave as if they lack agency or control over their actions when they elect bad leaders, the consequences of more than 169 million Americans reelecting Trump by commission or omission are now on horrifying display. The people around the world bearing the brunt of Trumpism aren’t likely to look on U.S. voters charitably.They have ample reason not to: More than 780,000 people in developing nations, two-thirds of them children, are estimated to have died from infectious diseases and malnutrition due to cuts to USAID, which were explicitly advocated in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025—a document that the U.S. media did not treat with the seriousness it warranted. Meanwhile, Ukrainians shiver in subzero temperatures as Russian missiles destroy their homes, even as Trump sends his Kremlin talking point–parroting real estate buddy Steve Witkoff to Moscow to negotiate Ukraine’s future despite Witkoff’s Russian financial ties.No American voter can claim they didn’t know what was coming if they reelected a man who had incited an insurrection against Congress, used the Covid-19 pandemic to divide the public as more than one million Americans died, falsely accused Haitian refugees of eating people’s pets, and even said he’d put people in camps. It’s just that they wanted or tolerated a second Trump presidency as long as whatever awfulness accompanied his second term only affected people other than themselves.That so many Americans knowingly and willingly allowed such a clearly dangerous individual back into power lays bare an American body politic awash in callous self-absorption. Who is genuinely surprised that a society that has reached such depths of moral decay that it does nothing to stop gun violence even after mass shootings of children would hand the keys to the White House to Trump and his Cabinet of horrors because its citizens just “didn’t find [Kamala] Harris compelling,” wanted to cosplay as Western saviors of the people of Gaza—who, by the way, preferred Harris—or believed Trump would lower their living costs even as he campaigned on inflationary tariffs?Whatever excuses Americans might make for letting Trump become president again are meaningless for Kenyan mothers helplessly watching their children starve to death or Greenlanders lying awake at night terrified that the U.S. will invade them.Spohr speculated that if the midterms run smoothly, and if there’s a change of administration in 2028, things might not go back internationally to how they were before Trump 2.0, but there may be a return domestically to something more ordinary in terms of how democratic governance and the judiciary function. As it stands, she said, the state is being dangerously dismantled before our eyes, while an imperial presidency has taken hold.“Trump may have warned of ‘Europe’s erasure,’ but it is rather in the U.S. where the very darkest tendencies of political culture have taken hold,” she said, adding that “still, I think it’s too early to say it’s all in the bin.”If there is to be any hope for the U.S. regaining the world’s trust, everyday Americans need to come to grips with their role in undermining it.Because of the power we have to influence events all over the world, American voters have a far greater responsibility than our counterparts in other nations to consider how our voting decisions will affect the lives of people who have no say in our elections. In 2024, 169 million Americans consciously chose to shirk that responsibility.What Americans, even those who voted for Harris, collectively face now is an obligation to demonstrate that we’re grown-ups and not a nation of selfish brats. That will likely require criminal penalties for members and enablers of the Trump regime, drastic changes to how the country is run, a full reckoning with the societal dysfunctions that contributed to Trump’s rise—e.g., the legacies of slavery and settler colonialism—and a length of time probably lasting decades.Even though my Romani heritage would likely have gotten me killed under the Nazi regime, the German citizenship I have in addition to my American citizenship means I share Germany’s collective responsibility to ensure National Socialism never takes power there again. This is not to compare the Trump administration to Nazi Germany, but it is Germany’s postwar struggle to return to the world’s good graces that serves as the object lesson for what Americans will have to do unless we want our country to be permanently isolated as a pariah nation, with former allies in good standing ignoring and stepping past us.Americans should have no illusions about the struggle that awaits us.“Something fundamental has been broken,” wrote Tricia Castle, a 55-year-old Toronto retiree who has American family members, in an email. “The trust is gone, and the damage runs too deep to pretend things will simply ‘go back to normal.’”As we embark on that struggle, much like Basil Fawlty’s German guests, we should not expect the rest of the world to let us live down our nation’s terrible choices anytime soon. We have much for which to atone.

New Republic • Feb 11, 2026

The Anti-Homelessness Plot Against the First Amendment

Alabama and 19 other Republican-led states are asking the Supreme Court to blow up more than a century of First Amendment precedents. In their place, they are urging the high court’s conservative majority to replace them with an originalist history-and-tradition test that would wipe away many of the free speech protections that American currently enjoy.Taylor v. Singleton is ostensibly about whether Alabama can criminally punish a man for holding a sign asking for help under the First Amendment. Beneath the surface, however, the GOP attorneys general are hoping to pull off a counterrevolution against America’s rich, enduring tradition of free speech and expression.The case began with a homeless man in Montgomery, Alabama. Jonathan Singleton, who is indigent and unhoused, often holds up signs along the state’s highways and sidewalks to call attention to his plight. As a result, according to his lawyers, he has been cited six times for violating the state’s pedestrian solicitation statute.The most recent sign barely counted as solicitation or begging: It simply read, “HOMELESS. Today it is me, tomorrow it could be you.” Singleton was holding up the sign on the grassy side of a highway exit when last cited. In 2020, he filed a federal lawsuit to challenge the Alabama solicitation ban, as well as a counterpart law that banned loitering “in a public place for the purpose of begging.”Efforts to criminalize homelessness have been met with a mixed reception at the Supreme Court. In June 2024, the justices held in Grants Pass v. Johnson that an Oregon city’s ordinance against sleeping and camping in public spaces did not violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, even if the defendants had nowhere else to go. The high court’s decision overturned a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision to the contrary and gave Western states broad latitude to criminalize homelessness.On the other hand, the Supreme Court has also struck down multiple state and local statutes that seek to criminalize public solicitation. In the 1980 case Village of Schaumburg v. Citizens for a Better Environment, for example, the court rejected a Chicago suburb’s ordinance that sought to restrict public solicitation unless a group in question met certain budgetary and licensing conditions.Such requirements, the court ruled, were too sweeping and poorly tailored to survive First Amendment scrutiny. Justice Byron White noted in his majority opinion that while the court had sometimes allowed states to ban commercial solicitation, it had generally resisted restrictions on charitable solicitations, even in residential neighborhoods, because doing so could infringe upon the solicitors’ free speech and free exercise rights.Alabama’s ordinances covered a wide range of expressive signs and actions. The Alabama Law Enforcement Agency, or ALEA, one of the defendants in the Singleton case, “has made arrests under the begging statute for holding a sign that said ‘homeless anything will help’; for holding ‘a plastic jar’ for ‘Birmingham Restoration Ministries’; and for approaching vehicles with a hat in hand ‘in an effort to beg,’” Singleton’s lawyers told the high court. For that reason, it is unsurprising that the city of Montgomery and its police department reached settlements with Singleton at an early stage of the litigation.But the state of Alabama, which represented ALEA, did not settle. It first took a defeat in the district court to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, which sided with Singleton. A three-judge panel concluded last April that begging was constitutionally protected speech under the circuit’s prior precedents, in line with the Supreme Court’s solicitation rulings, and that it was bound by that precedent until the Supreme Court says otherwise.Now Alabama has asked the Supreme Court to intervene and hopes to establish that begging is not a constitutionally protected right. “Governments need ‘the full panoply of tools in the policy toolbox’ to address the homelessness crisis plaguing their streets,” the state claimed in one of its briefs, quoting from the Supreme Court’s ruling in Grants Pass. “Regulating begging is one such tool, prophylactically turning off one spigot to downstream harms like public intoxication, drug abuse, and encampments before they happen.”This formulation does not inspire confidence that Alabama actually understands how homelessness works or how to address its root causes. Nor does the friend-of-the-court brief from 19 other GOP-led states, which tried to caveat their argument by explaining that the states “are not seeking to criminalize poverty but rather, to discourage destructive responses to poverty and the impacts those responses have on society.” What is truly disturbing about this petition is how Alabama wants to win. Federal courts have developed a wide range of doctrines to assess when and how government officials violate the First Amendment, what kinds of speech are protected, and whether the violation is justified under the court’s balancing tests. Alabama argued that that entire framework should be scrapped and replaced with a flat “history and tradition” test to rule in its favor.“Courts across the country have reduced the freedom of speech to a ‘mechanical jurisprudence’ of ‘oversimplified formulas’ that ‘treat … society as though it consisted of bloodless categories,’” the state claimed in its petition. “The Court should grant certiorari to restore the role of history and tradition in an area of First Amendment jurisprudence where it is badly needed.”In this particular case, Alabama argued that its anti-begging law is constitutional because states in the founding era had a wide range of laws to punish people for “vagrancy” and similar offenses. “At the founding, States commonly prohibited idleness, wandering about with no course of business or fixed residence, begging in the streets, and the like,” the state claimed. “The basic theory, inherited from the English, was to distinguish those who could work (but refused) from those [who] could not. The law demanded ‘honest labor’ from the former and charity to the latter.”Singleton took a much different view of this history, which he described as “shaky originalism right out of the gate.” He noted that vagrancy laws fell out of favor because post–Civil War constitutional amendments destroyed the basis for their existence. “The Thirteenth Amendment forecloses the theory of involuntary servitude that undergirded many of the founding-era vagrancy laws,” Singleton explained to the justices, quoting from recent precedent, “and the Fourteenth Amendment forecloses the use of vagrancy laws to ‘maintain … racial hierarchy,’ as attempted by southern states in the wake of the Civil War.”The Supreme Court recently experimented with history-and-tradition tests for other constitutional rights. It hasn’t gone well. In 2022, the court’s conservative majority ruled in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen that gun regulations presumptively violate the Second Amendment’s individual right to bear arms unless they could be connected to some analogous law from the eighteenth or nineteenth century.That “history and tradition” test led to chaos in the lower courts as federal judges acting in good faith reached starkly different conclusions about which laws passed historical muster. Eventually, the justices were forced to scale it back in United States v. Rahimi in 2024 by widening the scope of what counted as a historical analogue. Justice Clarence Thomas, the author of Bruen, found himself as the sole dissenter that time around.The Rahimi setback has not stopped Thomas from trying to introduce similar jurisprudential time bombs into First Amendment law, most recently in the 2024 trademark case Vidal v. Elster. At issue was whether the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office could refuse to register trademarks that disparaged living people—in this case, the phrase “Trump too small.” The court upheld the agency’s refusal in part because federal trademark law had consistently rejected such applications.“Our courts have long recognized that trademarks containing names may be restricted,” Thomas wrote for the court. “And, these name restrictions served established principles. This history and tradition is sufficient to conclude that the names clause—a content-based, but viewpoint-neutral, trademark restriction—is compatible with the First Amendment. We need look no further in this case.”Beneath the surface, however, he received pushback from an unlikely source: Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who took issue with his ham-fisted usage of history and tradition to resolve a case that could’ve been dealt with under existing First Amendment doctrines. “Relying exclusively on history and tradition may seem like a way of avoiding judge-made tests,” she explained in her partially concurring opinion. “But a rule rendering tradition dispositive is itself a judge-made test. And I do not see a good reason to resolve this case using that approach rather than by adopting a generally applicable principle.”Barrett had good reason to resist Thomas’s approach. Reducing the First Amendment to a mere history-and-tradition test, as Alabama proposes, would amount to the most severe reduction in Americans’ free speech rights since the republic’s founding. Founding-era state legislatures imposed restrictions on a much wider range of speech and expression than any Americans have experienced in living memory.Multiple postrevolutionary states had anti-blasphemy laws, and they were infrequently enforced throughout the nineteenth century, as well. Some early American states had much lower thresholds for libel; a history-and-tradition test would likely make it much easier for wealthy Americans to punish speech that criticizes them. The federal government might even be able to enact laws that make it illegal to criticize the president or other government officials, pointing to the Alien and Sedition Acts as a historical analogue.Alabama does not really deny that diminishing Americans’ free speech is its goal. “While the Court may be unlikely to walk back the First Amendment’s application to profanity or blasphemy,” the state coyly claimed in response to Singleton’s brief, quoting from concurring opinions by Thomas, “‘these changes appear to have reflected changing policy judgments, not a sense that [the founding-era laws] violated the original meaning of the First or Fourteenth Amendment.’”It is unclear whether there will be four votes to take up the case, let alone five votes to rule in Alabama’s favor. Barrett’s challenge in Vidal signals that at least some of the court’s conservative justices wouldn’t be on board with it. But it is deeply disturbing that this many Republican-led states would be behind such a concerted attack on free speech. And it is deeply ironic that they might bring back blasphemy laws by enforcing an ordinance that is itself a blasphemy against the New Testament.

New Republic • Feb 11, 2026

Meet the Candidate Challenging Iowa’s Most Sacred Cow: Ethanol

A retired water scientist named Chris Jones is running in the Democratic primary for secretary of agriculture in Iowa. That may not sound like a blockbuster race. But Jones is an unusual candidate: It’s rare for anyone on the ballot in Iowa to be so critical of the state’s total commitment to the ethanol industry. If Jones receives even slightly more support than expected in the primary, it may show that the chokehold that a powerful ethanol bloc has had on farm politics for more than 20 years is finally loosening.Iowa’s water is heavily polluted, and agriculture is responsible. Excess quantities of nitrogen fertilizers and astonishing quantities of manure are sprayed on crops. When they wash out of the soil and into rivers and streams, nitrate—the fertilizing nutrient that plants are meant to take up—seeps into the water supply, along with traces of agrochemicals ubiquitiously coated on seeds and doused on plants. This is a toxic combination; nitrates and pesticides in drinking water are each implicated in Iowa’s climbing cancer rates. Add in E. coli and other bacteria from manure, which combine with excess fertilizer to generate algal blooms in the state’s rivers and lakes, and it’s no surprise that water quality is a constant struggle. All summer, state beaches are regularly closed to swimming. The state’s major water utility maintains a costly emergency nitrate removal system, which has even been running this winter after a historic peak this summer.Chris Jones doesn’t pull punches. The causes of this crisis, he says, are a lapse in federal laws that required water-conscious farming, irresponsible disposal of the state’s overwhelming superabundance of manure produced by factory farms, a better-safe-than-sorry culture of overuse of synthetic fertilizer, and a general commitment to growing corn on every square inch of land that will support it.As a research engineer funded by the state legislature, it was Jones’s job to turn data from a statewide water-quality sensor network into scientific insights. He published research but also felt a responsibility to explain to the public what the data showed, and why nothing was getting better. While his humble blog on the university website became influential, politicians defunded the system of sensors he drew from. Jones told press that he’d heard the blog was being used as a threat against the rest of the program’s existence, and retired. This was 2023. He now blogs on Substack to a subscriber base of over 5,000—modest in the grand scheme of things but impressive for chart-heavy pieces focused on ag reform. His 2023 book The Swine Republic: Struggles With the Truth About Agriculture and Water Quality also exceeded expectations, garnering coverage in the Des Moines Register for its surprising three printings under a month after its release.One of Jones’s most controversial arguments is that ethanol, a notorious third-rail topic in farm country, has to be phased out in order for water quality to be restored. Ethanol is shorthand for a usually corn-derived biofuel. The industry was marginal until 2005, when the Bush administration’s Environmental Protection Agency mandated oil refineries blend a minimum ratio of ethanol into U.S. gasoline. Production grew meteorically. About half of Iowa’s corn now gets made into ethanol. This means that half of the production of the most productive corn state, on untold acres of some of the highest-yielding farmland in the world, is burned in cars—an oddity that is only possible because of federal policy. In our food system, there’s abundance, there’s waste, and there’s ethanol, which is the perfect encapsulation of the horror of both.Jones wants Iowans to rethink the state’s reliance on ethanol. The biofuel’s environmental benefit, he notes, is questionable at best. In terms of jobs and growth, the refineries don’t pay sufficient dividends. And because the ethanol market props up the price of corn, it holds together a system that incentivizes all-out production—meaning copious applications of fertilizer and pesticide, farming right up to the banks of local creeks and rivers—at the direct expense of water quality.But Iowa corn growers don’t stake their livelihood on what happens to the commodity after it leaves the grain elevator—they care about the price. And ethanol, a law-ordained industry that burns corn far more efficiently than anyone can eat it, absorbs a huge portion of supply. Without this outlet, we would be left with the unmistakable reality that there’s too much goddamn corn, and there has been for a long time. The specter of millions of bushels of grain with insufficient demand is the scariest ghost in Iowa, and it haunts lobbyists and senators relentlessly.On the other hand, if you can topple the ethanol narrative, then you’ve got a good start on remaking the system completely. With a thoughtful transition, eventually you could start growing food again, and introduce incentives that make for soil- and water-friendly farming. This is the basic proposal that Jones presented in a Facebook reel posted by the campaign. The comments—245 of them and counting, on an unremarkable campaign post for a primary race for minor state office—are notable for their volume alone. Their tone is mixed to negative. The typical knee-jerk is present (“Why is he anti Ethanol? He is Lying, we need Ethanol!”), along with other alarmist rebuttals that the corn market would tank if ethanol were to disappear overnight. (Jones is campaigning for a “strategic retreat,” not an immediate ban.) The assent, not all of which is enthusiastic, comes from many corners, forming no coherent voice—which might be to Jones’s advantage, if an ethanol-critical platform winds up uniting people of varying backgrounds and political allegiances. More than anything, Iowans seem to want to talk about ethanol, for or against it—and Jones’s is the only campaign that is willing to make the conversation interesting.As long-shot campaigns go, this one has the makings of an overachiever. Jones has already built himself a high profile as a dissident. His tour stops around the state in the coldest period of a frigid winter—I’ve seen such stops in presidential primary season produce single-digit attendances—seem to be drawing a respectable number of supporters. The small but mighty progressive media voices in Iowa love him, and the grassroots are going to give everything they have. The other advantage his campaign wields is that he’s a genuinely new voice. His focus on clean water doesn’t put farmers front and center or cater to them directly. He’s running on environmental outcomes first, with a message of shared prosperity instead of promising to build farm wealth and hope that it trickles down. In Iowa politics, this approach is unprecedented.At its most practical, the campaign advocates proposals that Jones has argued for all along—that farmers should be required to make basic, specific adjustments to their practices to prevent the ruination of the state’s water supply. Simply making the case that farmers should be regulated is spicy stuff in Iowa.Jones isn’t running, however, for an office that can actually enact these policies. The Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship, or IDALS, cannot make state law. It funds modest, piecemeal water and soil conservation projects. Weather and crop information, along with food and animal safety, are the large part of its duties. Real change lies in the state legislature, which has sweeping power to transform the industry, particularly through the state Department of Natural Resources, which can punish polluters, regulate farming practices, and limit industrial agricultural development. Only federal power can undo the ethanol mandate. Jones says he’s “realistic” about the possibilities of winning the race and is clear-eyed about the limits of the position, but affirms that until the substantive discussion changes, nothing will.Should Jones win the primary, his Republican opponent will be the former Monsanto lobbyist and incumbent two-term Secretary Mike Naig, who has already commented on Jones’s candidacy, “I think you could say he hates ag, he hates farmers, and he intends to increase regulation and cost.” Meanwhile Jones’s Democratic primary opponent, Wade Dooley, sounds like the many moderates that come before him, running on a bingo card of buzzwords with few specifics, let alone plans for accountability. Dooley offers a “practical, results-focused approach,” pledging to “measure what works” while “working across differences.” Jones, by contrast, says: “Corporations public and private have stripped the wealth from Iowa and continue to do so, and they leave us with pollution and cancer. Iowa’s political leaders have helped them do it. So have the liberal elite.”If Jones breaks out in this campaign, it will likely follow a pattern similar to Zohran Mamdani’s in New York City. Both cases are characterized by a dual-party establishment that has locked itself into positions characterized by vacuous shibboleths that sound credible to a general public until one day they don’t. The establishment parties have gotten used to silencing alternative viewpoints with fear and hatemongering, while for many on the ground, the status quo has become increasingly contradictory and oppressive. At some point, the shibboleths start to sound delusional and the once-taboo arguments seem like the voice of reason. The right voice enters at the right time, and the dam breaks.It’s hard to say whether Chris Jones will be the right voice at the right time. It’s easy to predict that he won’t be the state’s next agriculture secretary. But for a long time Iowa voters have had no other choices. Eventually, something as contradictory and damaging as ethanol has to be overcome by a new common sense.

New Republic • Feb 11, 2026

Yes, It’s Fascism, but That Doesn’t Mean We’re Cooked

In the days when antifascist meant what it actually means and hadn’t been turned into a scare word by the fascists whom antifascists exist to oppose, there was Benedetto Croce.Born in 1866, Croce was an Italian philosopher, famous for his 1938 work History as the Story of Liberty. His case against fascism was straightforward. Fascism, he wrote, is “the debasing of men until they are either a flock to be led to pasture, or captured, trained animals in a cage.” He served in the Italian government, as an antifascist liberal, from 1910 to 1952.Croce the philosopher considered himself an idealist. His passion was for the human imagination. But as fascism under Mussolini aimed to stifle imagination in the 1920s and 1930s, Croce began making a vigorous, even relentless, case for its opposite—liberal democracy, which he considered the best guarantor of free minds. In 1937, while a senator in what was then the Kingdom of Italy, Croce made this case in the pages of The New Republic. His article was assigned by Bruce Bliven, who edited this magazine from 1930 to 1946 and moved its editorial stance leftward, from neutrality and bothsidesism to strong support for FDR and the policies of the New Deal. “The Future of Democracy” ran as a symposium on April 7, 1937, and Croce wrote the lead article. Above all, Croce was impatient with those who pitted fascism against antifascism as if they were soccer teams: “The choice between liberty and suppression of liberty is not on the same plane as a choice between things of different values, one of which may reasonably be preferred to the other.” Liberty, he wrote, means human dignity. The suppression of liberty degrades and demeans us. To New Republic readers in the United States at the time, this case for freedom must have seemed self-evident. Americans regularly pledged allegiance to a nation of liberty and justice for all; an ideal of liberal democracy should have been mother’s milk. What kind of barbaric European tyrant would ever sic masked thugs on the people, stifle speech and journalism, and hedge the people’s fundamental rights? Not here.But European antifascists at the time sorely needed Croce. They clambered for an imported copy of the April 7 issue of The New Republic, which was hard to come by. Tuning early radios to staticky reports from France or England, both of which Mussolini derided as “democracies,” was as good as it got. All of Europe was on tenterhooks. The vibrating fear that something was about to happen—authoritarianism, tyranny, war, the apocalypse—made it hard to see what was already happening. The leaders of the Fascist and the Nazi parties held dictatorial power in Italy and Germany. And still Italians and Germans were asking, in effect, “Has fascism happened here?”  So when young Italian antifascists managed to score a copy of Croce’s article they shared it around with other antifascists, like a 1980s zine. In her 1937 diary of wartime Italy, Iris Origo describes “a small but ardent group of university students determined to find out what is being thought, felt, and taught in other countries.” One of them “had smuggled in one of Croce’s articles (from The New Republic) and … he and his friends sat up at night copying it, to hand on to other people.”  In his article, Croce first called on readers to stop wondering “Is this fascism?” To him, the question was a passive desire for a weather forecast or stock market speculation. He wrote, “We need solely to make up our own minds and to act, each one according to his understanding and his capacity … to work unremittingly under whatever conditions prevail, with every means at hand, and continuously, to work for the preservation and strengthening of the liberal spirit.”He considered it “mental decadence” when people gave up and blamed the uneducated masses for the fascist slide, just the way people today sigh and blame the MAGA rank and file. Croce’s respect for the public is something we should emulate in the United States right now. In a democracy, he wrote in a stern reminder, the people are not an economic class. They’re a citizenry “capable of governing.” The problem is not the people, he went on. It’s the governing class. “If evil there be, [it] is in ourselves”—elites like Croce himself—“and in ourselves alone is the remedy.” Antifascists everywhere took Croce’s article as a shot of adrenaline. In Italy, young antifascists were helplessly watching their peers lose their minds, don black shirts, regurgitate fascist doctrine, and worship Mussolini like a god. Finally, in Croce, they had a philosopher and legislator empowering them to resist. If The New Republic is not yet samizdat here, that’s only because our own Il Duce, Donald Trump, doesn’t read. He shakes down visual media instead, while letting collaborationist billionaires strangle newspapers, including, most recently, The Washington Post. The takeover of CBS News by Trump’s ally David Ellison now means the network is best understood as captured. On TikTok, under the new control of Trump’s closer ally and David’s father, Larry Ellison, new pro-Trump censorship meets never-ending ads, optimization, surveillance, and data gouging. Signs of originality, imagination, and resistance get pushed into corners or extinguished. Croce, who believed laissez-faire capitalism hampered freedom while pretending to promote it, would have been horrified.Right-wingers have managed to conflate liberal democracy with elitist posing. Some leftists see liberal democracy as Mussolini did: nothing but rapacious capitalism. But liberalism at baseline really is the best guarantor of liberty. It’s time, evidently, for Americans to go back to the old gym, where the case for liberal democracy must be stripped down to basics. Right now, in our own illiberal society, Americans who hold political office—or have any capacity, platform, or resources at all—must stop yielding to idle anxiety, and fight with everything they have to get our civil liberties and our free minds back.  

New Republic • Feb 11, 2026

Denis Johnson’s Desperate, Poetic Horrors

Denis Johnson wrote about some of the most unlikable characters in American fiction, and yet he always managed to make readers care what happened to them. This talent may have had something to do with many unlikable qualities in Johnson himself that, through the force of his dedicated and uncompromising talent, carried him through three marriages, nearly two dozen books of poetry and fiction, several plays and screenplays, and numerous darkly recurring periods of addiction. It would be fair to say that, throughout his adult life, he was either suffering from addictive disorders or engaged in 12-step programs to keep them at bay.Johnson’s major and minor characters were doped-out criminals, doped-out derelict parents, doped-out journalists, and a frenetic range of doped-out CIA agents, drug smugglers, motorcycle gangs, hit men, and American Special Forces ops. In his best-known and most successful book—the small but powerful series of character-linked short stories Jesus’s Son—they were simply doped-out dopers, often stealing the money they needed to buy drugs, living in communal packs in order to save money to buy drugs, and taking ugly late-night jobs—such as cleaning blood off a hospital floor in the most memorable of these stories, “Emergency”—in order to, you know. As one recovering narrator recalls in The Largesse of the Sea Maiden: Stories, Johnson’s excellent last book of fiction:Just to sketch out the last four years—broke, lost, detox, homeless in Texas, shot in the ribs by a thirty-eight, mooching off the charity of Dad in Ukiah, detox again, run over (I think, I’m pretty sure, I can’t remember) then shot again, and detox right now one more time again.As the same character finally concludes, his gravestone will almost certainly read: “I Should Be Dead.” Which might actually be reassuring, since death is the only form of detox that Johnson’s most troubled characters aren’t doomed to repeat.As Ted Geltner recounts in his enjoyable, narratively brisk, and compassionate new biography, Denis Johnson wrote about difficult (and sometimes even awful) people from the inside out. Born in Munich in 1949, and gifted with supportive, intelligent parents (his father was a career diplomat who worked with the FBI, CIA, and the U.S. Information Agency), Johnson spent his early years in the Philippines, Japan, and Washington D.C., during which time he developed many of the attributes of a creative personality: He learned to prefer reading books to taking classes about them, and he often got into trouble. Early in adolescence he was suspended for “disruptive behavior,” and later, at 14, he developed a predilection for rum. As he grew older, he developed a lot more predilections.Geltner offers an honest vision of a complicated, and often quite selfish, man while still bringing out what was most moving, generous, and poetic about him.Geltner does for Johnson what Johnson did in his best fictions, offering us a deep, honest vision of a complicated, and often quite selfish, man while still bringing out what was most moving, generous, and poetic about him. In many ways, Geltner’s previous biography—of the wild, self-taught punk-country genius who wrote some of Southern gothic’s raunchiest novels, Harry Crews—was the perfect preparation for this one. In other ways, Johnson’s privileged childhood, his clean-cut and deceptive good looks, and his successful path from one prestigious literary grant or award to another, makes him Crews’s opposite. And yet both wrote books that were unlike the books of anybody else in their generation; and both lived hard-fought lives that left as many marks on Johnson’s soul as they did on Crews’s face and body.What saved Johnson (and so many writers) from a life of pointless crime and sadness was his love for books. Determining as a teenager to write poetry, he went to the University of Iowa creative writing program when he was 18. Within months of enrolling, he was the writer to whom all the other students chose to compare themselves. He made fast friends with Raymond Carver and Robert Stone (two other notoriously addictive personalities) and visiting writers such as Charles Bukowski, who lived full-time on the darkest roads of poverty and alcoholism that Johnson managed to visit only for brief periods in between recoveries. And he quickly developed a knack for winning writing awards and grants—everything from small university summer grants to the Guggenheim, the Frost Place poet-in-residence, and the Lannan Fellowship.Like Zola, he treated the world around him as his own personal laboratory experiment, and from a young age always seemed to be scrounging through the lives of his friends and acquaintances for material with which to fashion his stories and poems. “He cultivated friendships with the oddballs and intriguing characters who populated the bars, bookstores, and other gathering spots from one end of town to the other and beyond,” Geltner writes. “He would sit down and start conversations with people who he considered characters,” his first wife, Nancy Jo Lister, recalled. “He was always trying to harvest words or emotions or outlooks that he could then file away in his head. It was part of who he was when I first met him. Iowa City had its share of oddballs, and Denis knew them all.”Eventually, the most dismal characters and raunchiest private adventures of Denis’s youthful indiscretions would come together in his cult novel/story cycle, Jesus’s Son; but his earliest success as a fiction writer began with a short story based on a conversation he overheard between a young woman and her daughter on a Greyhound bus late at night. “Move your foot,” the woman had said. “I’m tired now. Move your foot or I’m going to have the bus driver stop the bus and we’re going to put you off the bus in the dark and we’re going to drive away.” As the story develops, she gets drunk with a fellow passenger named Bill Houston, and the finished story, “There Comes After Here,” charts their intertwining errant paths into the Midwestern darkness. Eventually, after a few years’ hiatus, Johnson would return to the story, which became the opening chapter of his first novel, Angels (1983). Also early in his time at Iowa, he married Lister, who was as young and unprepared for parenting as he was. And when she went into labor (at only 18 years old), Johnson was so drunk the nurse wouldn’t allow him into the delivery room. The couple named the child Morgan, after a popular 1960s British film comedy about a London artist who runs around London acting like a gorilla. It was an image with which Johnson and his wife seemed to connect. Johnson was either unprepared for fatherhood or simply not very interested in the idea. He spent his free time getting drunk with friends, and made money by selling “nickel bags of marijuana in College Green Park.” He and his friends lived in a farmhouse where they began to accumulate guns, drugs, and booze; and tensions (as you might expect) grew to the point where one of them was shot. (Johnson managed to avoid being the victim of the many violent and sometimes deadly accidents that regularly occurred all around him—car crashes, guns going off, police raids, etc.) His early fiction and poems treat children as little distractions who are easily forgotten—as in the opening chapters of Angels, when the boozy young mom, Jamie, wanders through city streets with a strange man and seems to completely forget the baby and small child accompanying them. The poem “Talking Richard Wilson Blues, by Richard Clay Wilson” (published in his collection The Veil in 1987) depicts a toddler as the product of an intimate theft, in which a woman takes “that warmth between you” andIt changes into a baby. “Here’s to the little shitter,The little linoleum lizard.” Once he peed on meWhen I was changing him—that one got a laugh …Before his son was 2 years old, Johnson had checked himself into his first psychiatric clinic for addiction; shortly afterward he divorced Lister, and was soon living with another woman and a whole new set of predilections.After three books of poetry published between the late ’60s and the early 1980s, Johnson wanted to try his hand at a book of fiction. In 1980, in order to research a novel, he began teaching a yearlong workshop at Arizona’s Florence State Prison, where he left few human stones unturned. At his first workshop, he singled out one young man as the best writer in the group—he turned out to be the multiple murderer Robert Benjamin Smith, who, at the age of 18, had entered a Mesa Arizona beauty parlor and shot four women and a 4-year old child in the head, execution-style. (Smith had spent the previous months “researching” the crimes of Charles Whitman, who had killed 15 and wounded 31 on the University of Texas, Austin campus.) Sentenced to death, Smith spent several years on death row, where he gathered up much of the firsthand experience that Johnson would later use in Angels, his story of crime and punishment in middle America, stretching from the Chicago rape of one character to an Arizona robbery and murder committed by another. The concluding chapter, in particular, draws from Smith’s material, when Bill Houston awaits his last meal, his walk to the gas chamber and, in Death Row parlance, that moment when he would be released from the misfortunes of his life by “going up the pipe.” Johnson’s acceptance of poorly directed human passions and manias was never better expressed than in this first novel, with its sense of lost souls in a world that doesn’t understand them and doesn’t care to. During his murder trial, Bill Houston sees this alien world assemble around him, as he watcheshis trial from behind a wall of magic, considering with amazement how pulling the trigger had been hardly different—only a jot of strength, a quarter second’s exertion—from not pulling the trigger. And yet it had unharnessed all of this, these men in their beautiful suits, their gold watches smoldering on their tan wrists, speaking with great seriousness sometimes, joking with one another sometimes, gently cradling their sheafs of paper covered with all the reasons for what was going on here. Johnson’s criminal losers aren’t evil so much as they fail to see reasons to be good.The novel earned many strong reviews, some prestigious foreign rights sales and film money, and landed Johnson on GQ’s list of “tomorrow’s literary lions.” With this small solid success at his back, he embarked on a series of “fiction finding” missions. On assignment for Esquire, he visited Costa Rica and Nicaragua; he journeyed to Mindanao in the Philippines to interview Muslim secessionists and to west Africa to cover the First Liberian Civil War. Closer to home, he mined his trips to Key West for his second novel, Fiskadoro (1985), set in a postnuclear seafront village named Twicetown (commemorating not one but two nuclear strikes), populated by a cultural motley of fishermen and leaderless military personnel staffing the bombed-out local bases. Johnson’s plots (especially this one) are sometimes less satisfying or even comprehensible than those of writers like Robert Stone, who influenced him, but he brings many passages to life even when it’s hard to distinguish why those passages are narratively significant.More successful was his third novel, The Stars at Noon (1986), which traces the escape pattern of a drug-addicted part-time sex worker trying to find her way from Nicaragua back to the States without getting killed—all related in the desperate, poetically intense voice that recognizes the world’s horrors and beauties, even while she has trouble finding a way through it. And Johnson eventually put his African journeys to use in his last, Conradian novel, The Laughing Monsters (2014), about a former U.S. intelligence operative in West Africa who returns 10 years later in order to buy and sell whatever he can get his hands on—from government documents to uranium 235. Like Graham Greene or Robert Stone, Johnson never seemed to go on holidays or take “trips.” He roamed the world accumulating material.Even as he established himself professionally, Johnson’s personal life remained tumultuous. In the early ’80s, when he moved with his second wife, the artist Lucinda Johnson, to the small Cape Cod seafront town of Wellfleet, Massachusetts, he was soon charging ahead with his increasingly common practice of committing serial infidelities, which were interspersed with intense periods of apology, reavowal, and unfulfilled promises to get himself back to AA. “I remember getting really tired of it,” Lucinda recalled. “You [confess], and you’re pardoned, it’s like, okay, are you just going to keep doing the same thing over and over? How many times can you say you’re sorry?”  Memories of his years of university, drugs, rehab, and more drugs again would prove his most enduring source of inspiration. After a journalistic adventure to the Philippines put him in hospital with malaria in 1988, he felt too broken to focus on a long project, and so he pulled some disjointed autobiographical pieces out of a drawer that had embarrassed him so much that he had never considered publishing them. They were episodic, offbeat, and often ended with ironic asides or afterthoughts that neither commented on the main events of the story nor resolved them. They were more like Zen-ish parables that took off from the story in the same ways that Johnson had taken off from so many urgent events in his life, and as he worked the stories into shape, he decided he didn’t have to be ashamed about his past anymore. “I think after going through the common humiliations of a human life,” he later said, “I realized it just doesn’t matter.… There’s nobody who can disguise himself.” The stories not only helped him break into the front ranks of publishing at The New Yorker (at that time far from the sort of venue one would expect to feature stories about strung-out junkies, let alone ones in which the central character was referred to only as “Fuckhead”), but the finished book would become a surprise bestseller and a just-as-surprising small-budget dramedy-film starring Billy Crudup, as well as establish itself (in Geltner’s estimation) as one of those generational works of fiction, like Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 or Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, which most serious readers of the time would either read or feel that they should.Drugs, car crashes, felonious assaults, and murders most foul—Johnson managed to bring poetry to the worst places in which he had ever gotten himself lost, like an urban-alleyway version of a high fantasy trilogy. Jesus’s Son (1992), for all its extremities of comedy, violence, and gothic gruesomeness, spoke from the heart of a believable life, or from a believable nightmare of one. In one story, a man enters an emergency room with a knife buried in one eyeball and says: “I can see. But I can’t make a fist out of my left hand because this knife is doing something to my brain.” In another, the narrator is more afraid of his family than he is of running away from them: “I didn’t want to go home. My wife was different than she used to be, and we had a six-month-old baby I was afraid of, a little son.”As Geltner describes, these stories that Johnson “had first scribbled into his notebook in Iowa City in the ’60s appeared on the shelves of bookstores twenty years later, a new generation was grabbing for the steering wheel of American culture, one with anew sensibility. The old rebellion had been against the army, the government, and the flag. The new rebellion focused on corporations, greed, and the singular pursuit of money and status.… The kids who gobbled up Denis’s stories in the ’90s were an alienated, nihilistic species who wanted to separate themselves from the entire structure itself.” Johnson connected with kids who wanted to drop out of the culture as Johnson himself had. Drugs, car crashes, felonious assaults, and murders most foul—Johnson managed to bring poetry to the worst places in which he had ever gotten himself lost, like an urban-alleyway version of a high fantasy trilogy. Jesus’s Son, in its dark weird way, was escapist.As a poet and novelist, Johnson rarely placed a foot wrong; he reserved his most egregious missteps for real life. After Jesus’s Son, he continued steadily producing well-regarded books and stopped running away from those closest to him. He softly converted to Christianity, and homeschooled two daughters from his third marriage, which lasted until he died. He produced the sort of big, ambitious mid-career books that often ruin American writers, receiving the National Book Award for Tree of Smoke (2007)—a decades-spanning depiction of rogue CIA ops in Vietnam and the Philippines, for which he resurrected the dissolute brothers James and Bill Houston from Angels. Even his smallish follow-ups to that big serious-looking book, such as Train Dreams (2011), a Cormac McCarthy–esque story of ghosts, railroads, and wolves set in northern Idaho, proved uniquely memorable. His finest and most entertaining short novel—Nobody Move (2009), published as a monthly serial in Playboy—is the fastest funniest novel Elmore Leonard never wrote, with all of Johnson’s most brilliant narrative skills on full display. He should have lived to write more books like this one. He didn’t. Diagnosed within liver cancer in 2015—quite likely the result of living with hepatitis C contracted during his years of drug use—Johnson moved back to northern California with his third wife and daughters, where he continued writing. He made some small efforts at reconciling with Morgan, and even had time to correct the proofs for his final book, a beautiful collection of short stories titled The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, which contained his most memorable assessment of a writer’s life—or, perhaps, simply his writer’s life:I’ve gone from rags to riches and back again, and more than once. Whatever happens to you, you put it on a page, work it into shape, cast it in a light. It’s not much different, really, from filming a parade of clouds across the sky and calling it a movie—although it has to be admitted that the clouds can descend, take you up, carry you to all kinds of places, some of them terrible, and you don’t get back where you came from for years and years.