Conservative Jewish-American charitable organizations are financing settlements in the West Bank, facilitating ethnic cleansing and fueling antisemitism by connecting Jewish culture in the US to the brutal Israeli state.

Like many Jewish American families, mine donated to its local chapter of the Jewish Federation for many years — no questions asked. These funds enabled us to support Jewish life and culture within our community and abroad, promoting initiatives and institutions that uphold Jewish tradition and values. However, this year, when my family received the call requesting our donation, we declined. We could no longer support an organization that diverted funds meant to support and culturally enrich our own community to subsidize Israeli settlement activity in the West Bank, undermining any remaining chance for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Acts of violence targeting Palestinians and aiding ongoing land theft in the West Bank are not things that I, and many other American Jews, want to finance with funds donated with the intent to better our communities here in the United States. Detestably, portions of those funds are being sent to illegal Israeli settlements, helping to cement Israeli settler claims to land and perpetuating a cycle of violence and oppression that will continue to prevent peace between Palestinians and Israelis.

When conflict escalates in Israel and the Palestinian territory, incidents of antisemitism and Islamophobia in the United States spike. By supporting organizations that are bankrolling illegal settlement activity in the West Bank — either knowingly or not — American Jews are playing a role in not only perpetuating the conflict abroad but also exacerbating conditions for antisemitism and hate at home.

Having seen with my own eyes the violence stoked and committed by Israeli settlers in the West Bank — cars, homes, and agriculture set aflame; grieving parents of Palestinian children shot by Israel Defense Forces soldiers following a settler attack; Palestinian homes and entire villages forcibly destroyed by settlers and the Israeli government — I believe that US tax-deductible funds should in no way be used to support their crimes.

The Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA) reports its mission to be “to build flourishing Jewish communities domestically, in Israel, and around the world.” JFNA has previously made its stance on supporting West Bank settlements, illegal under international law, clear. In 2014, JFNA, in an email to federation leaders, stated that “funds are not spent for building or maintenance in the West Bank.” It was further clarified that money could still be spent for “social services for Jews in need wherever they live in the world,” including over the Green Line (in the West Bank). This still implied that they weren’t supplying funds to establish, expand, or support projects in settlements. This hasn’t stopped local chapters of the JFNA from providing tens of thousands of dollars annually to organizations that financially support West Bank settlements.

According to IRS forms and Cece Charendoff and Uri Blau’s 2017 Haaretz investigation, local chapters of the JFNA have provided significant funds to organizations that finance settler activity. According to their 2021 IRS 990 form, the Greater Miami Jewish Federation gave a $20,000 grant to American Friends of Kehillas Simchas HaTorah Inc., which took donations in 2021 to build and support a synagogue in the Israeli settlement of Beitar Illit. This settlement was built on private Palestinian land taken from the village of Wadi Foquin, severely hampering the village’s access to key resources and further isolating it from neighboring Palestinian villages.

Similarly, the Jewish Federation of Cleveland provided $5,360 to the Hebron Fund, according to their 2023 IRS 990 form. The Hebron Fund finances Israeli settlers both inside the city of Hebron and the settlement of Kiryat Arba on the outskirts of the city. Settlers in Hebron are notorious for their violent extremism. The expansion of settlements in and around Hebron has resulted in the fragmentation of the city. Palestinians can no longer live, have businesses, or even walk in certain areas of Hebron, in what many have called proof of Israel’s apartheid system in the occupied Palestinian territory.

In addition, both these chapters, as well as the JFNA chapters of Washington, Houston, and Philadelphia gave at least $200,000 combined to the Central Fund of Israel (CFI) between 2022 and 2023. CFI has provided donations to dozens of organizations involved in settlement activity, including the Israel Land Fund, which has worked to forcibly evict Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem, particularly in the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah.

Other organizations registered as US 501(c)(3) charitable organizations are more transparent about their financial support of Israeli settlements and settlement outposts in the West Bank, although their IRS 990 forms still do not accurately reflect the scope of their financial activity. One Israel Fund, an organization with the expressed purpose of “supporting the over 500,000 residents of Judea and Samaria,” routinely finances settlement and outpost expansion projects. They have also funded the purchase of paramilitary equipment described as tools for security, including for violent settlements such as Yitzhar, which has been a hotbed for settler extremism. Settlers from Yitzhar organized and carried out the most notable settler attack in recent years in February 2023, viciously attacking the Palestinian village of Huwara, setting fire to homes, businesses, and cars, as well as firing bullets at Palestinian civilians and blocking emergency service vehicles from aiding the wounded. This attack was referred to by an Israeli military commander as a “pogrom,” and the physical devastation from the attack is still visible to this day.

Other US registered charities, often called “Friends of” organizations, directly fund specific settlements and outposts, financing housing expansions, community centers, and security infrastructure, usually on privately owned, confiscated Palestinian land. Because these organizations have been awarded 501(c)(3) status, they are tax-exempt, and donors can claim deductions on their contributions, effectively subsidizing settlement expansion with US tax dollars.

Meanwhile, a number of synagogues across North America have hosted Israel real estate fairs that feature properties in West Bank settlements. These events have sparked major protests that have been framed by critics as antisemitic simply because they take place outside synagogues. This conflation of Judaism and Jewish spaces with the settler movement puts American Jewish safety at risk.

Legislation like the “Not on Our Dime!: Ending New York Funding of Israeli Settler Violence Act,” introduced in the New York State Senate by Zohran Mamdani, the democratic primary winner for the New York City mayoral race, sought to penalize and revoke the charitable status of New York–registered charities funding West Bank settlement activity. For families like mine, this legislation echoes our moral dilemma: refusing to allow our charitable donations to contribute to a system of occupation and violence.

We must invest in our communities here in the United States at a time when community and tradition are more important than ever, and in doing so end our support for organizations like the JFNA until they enforce a policy that prohibits donation in any form over the Green Line. Support for organizations that work toward bettering and fostering our communities here at home — and not in West Bank settlements — is crucial to build safe, flourishing, and engaged Jewish communities in the United States.

As someone who has been shaped by and found identity through my local Jewish institutions, I believe we have a responsibility to ensure that our values — of justice, peace, and tikkun olam — are reflected by the organizations we chose to donate to. Giving to organizations that actively perpetuate the continuation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by supporting illegal settlement activity in the West Bank not only undermines our efforts to achieve a just and lasting peace but also compromises Jewish safety by fueling instability abroad.

In April, Palestinian activist Mohsen Mahdawi was held in detention by ICE for over two weeks despite not being charged with a crime. He speaks to Jacobin about his early life, his incarceration, and why he’s actually optimistic about the prospects for peace.

Since October 7, 2023, Mohsen Mahdawi has been central to the Columbia University protest movement against Israel’s bombardment, calling for a ceasefire, and advocating for nonviolent resistance. On April 14, he was kidnapped by ICE at an appointment to apply for US citizenship in Vermont. He was released on April 30, with Judge Geoffrey Crawford saying “the two weeks of detention so far demonstrate great harm to a person who has been charged with no crime.”

His illegal detention is part of a broader trend of ICE targeting left-wing activists, especially those active in the Palestinian solidarity movement. In this interview, he tells Jacobin about his childhood in a Palestinian refugee camp, his time in prison, and his determination to continue in his activism.

Sam Stein

Tell me about your background. What led from your childhood in Palestine and your upbringing to you going to Columbia?

Mohsen Mahdawi

I really want to go all the way back to 1948. I am carrying the story, hopes, and struggles of my ancestors. And 1948 was a disaster year for the Palestinian people and for my family, who resided in a town called Umm Khalid (Netanya now), just a few miles away from the Mediterranean Sea. Zionist militias attacked the town and my family were exiled. They were told that it was going to be a couple of weeks before they could return. It’s seventy-six years later and we are still waiting for that return. In the aftermath of that Nakba, I was born and raised in a refugee camp in the West Bank called Al-Far’a. It’s in the north of the West Bank between Jenin and Nablus.

I am the oldest of eight siblings. Growing up in a refugee camp of about sixty-one acres with ten thousand people roughly on it, you hear your neighbors, you smell the food in the neighborhood. There is no privacy, no place for kids to play. We went to United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees schools and received basic services there. But the depth of the suffering is not necessarily only because of the conditions of being in a refugee camp, but also the continuous injustice and oppression that the Israeli army and military were imposing on my family and on my people.

I witnessed the second intifada as a child. I was ten years old when it started, and it was a very traumatic experience for me, for many other children, and for the Palestinian people. I saw my best friend killed in front of my eyes when I was a child. He was shot by an Israeli soldier in his chest and he fell dead. He was fourteen years old, I was twelve. My uncle was killed on my birthday. He was shot twice in the head and once in the shoulder. I was expecting to celebrate with him that day, my eleventh birthday, and unfortunately, instead of celebrating, I went to my uncle’s funeral. I lost two cousins. I saw neighbors being killed. I was shot when I was fifteen years old.

I witnessed the trauma of sensing that you might be killed or the trauma of sensing that somebody who you deeply love and care for might get killed, of waking up in the middle of the night to explosions that shake every atom of your body. We continued witnessing the apartheid system, where Palestinians are not treated as humans. Everyone in my family who was killed was killed without a court order and without any level of evidence, and whoever killed them never faced justice.

The freedom of travel was heavily restricted. For example, I did not see the sea until my twenties, even though the Mediterranean sea is about an hour and a half by car from Al-Far’a. Growing up during the second intifada, the whole West Bank was fractured and checkpoints were everywhere. We were not able to visit our relatives; I was not able to go and visit my mother, who was in a different area, for three years. When I finally saw her, I actually did not recognize her — my own mother.

Since October 7, four of my cousins have been killed. One of them was shot in front of his children in his chest, and his brother was killed in front of him and in front of his nephews and nieces in the refugee camp.

What fueled and motivated me to do the work that I am doing, and what brought me to Columbia, is this passion to end the war, the injustice, and the occupation — and to create a peaceful future for the children so they don’t have to go through a similar pain, a similar level of suffering that I went through.

Sam Stein

Obviously everyone has their own story and experience, but I can’t help but notice how when Palestinians tell their story, there are constants. I’ve heard so many Palestinians mention not seeing the sea and express that longing.

Mohsen Mahdawi

And it’s not just seeing the sea, right? It’s experiencing it. It’s feeling the breeze of the sea. It’s feeling the atoms of sand between your toes. It’s feeling the saltiness of the water when it touches your skin and burns your eyes. It’s experiencing the sun setting at a horizon that has no limits when you look at it. This is an experience of freedom. It’s a human experience that most Palestinian children do not experience.

Sam Stein

Were you ever able to see the sea in Palestine and Israel?

Mohsen Mahdawi

Actually, I went into Israel’s 1948 borders twice. The first time was on my twenty-third birthday. I was smuggled into Israel with a woman whom I loved at that time, and we went to my grandfather’s land. That’s when I experienced the sea for the first time.

When I went to the American consulate in 2014 to get my visa, I did not go to the beach because I did not want to risk it. This is how I was able to get to my interview at the American consulate, because the Israeli army denied me the right to go to the consulate. If I didn’t take that risk, I wouldn’t be here today.

Sam Stein

So you had a scheduled, approved appointment for your visa, but not to enter Israel.

Mohsen Mahdawi

Yes, Palestinians generally speaking need a permit, a permission — we call it Tasirh — in order to be able to go to Israel, whether it’s for a medical appointment or a visa appointment. And Palestinians are under the mercy of the Israeli system to receive that permission or not. In my case, I was denied the permit. I said, “I’m going to make it in any way possible.” I could have been shot by a sniper who was in the tower there. Or caught by the army vehicle patrolling the wall separating many areas in the West Bank.

Sam Stein

Not an easy path to get there. While you’ve been at Columbia, it seems you’ve been active organizing with American Jews and Israeli Jews that are non- or anti-Zionist who have shown support for the Palestinian cause. Before you got to Columbia, did you ever meet Israelis that weren’t soldiers running checkpoints?

Mohsen Mahdawi

I never met an Israeli as a civilian or interacted with an Israeli on a human-to-human basis, where an Israeli was not holding a gun and forcing me to act in certain ways or watching me, or stopping me at checkpoints, or killing my friend. That is the experience that I had with Israelis.

But America has provided me with the opportunity to meet Jews and Israelis for the first time in my life, to be able to have person-to-person conversations with them where we are able to talk about our experiences, about our hope, about our pain, about our trauma, and about our perception of the other. That was very thought provoking. It has shifted my whole understanding. That’s where my understanding started to shift, and I have seen it shifting also among American Jews and Israelis I have interacted with. That’s what gives me hope.

I started realizing, “Wait a minute, the issue is not necessarily that the Israelis are our enemies. The issue is that the Israelis don’t know Palestinians on a human level and in a human capacity. And there is a lot of misinformation and ignorance about the Palestinian story, the Palestinian history, and the Palestinian wants and needs.”

I did not understand much about why the Israelis are continuing to oppress us this way. It’s the chicken and the egg. But I can understand that if you don’t know somebody, you would develop a much larger fear from them, and you would develop a certain level of biases and even consider them inhuman. I came to this realization where I said, “Actually, if there is an enemy, it would be fear, it would be segregation, and it would be ignorance.”

Sam Stein

It’s so ironic that you need to travel thousands and thousands of miles to have that human interaction with the people that live in the same land as you. You said you were in the US for six years before even starting at Columbia. And you are applying for citizenship, correct?

Mohsen Mahdawi

Yes. So when I arrived in the United States, my wife was here. She’s the one who convinced me to stay here, so I got my green card.

Sam Stein

You were at an appointment for your citizenship process in Burlington, Vermont, and that was where you were kidnapped by ICE and then held for sixteen days. Was that your first appointment of this sort?

Mohsen Mahdawi

I had two appointments in Vermont, one for the green card and another later to renew it. So it wasn’t a new thing for me. What was new is the detention or abduction that took place during my citizenship interview, where I was hoping to become an American citizen and enjoy full rights and an ability to travel without worrying. The outcome was disastrous. I was denied my citizenship after my detention, and I spent sixteen days in a prison.

Sam Stein

Could you tell us what daily life was like in detention?

Mohsen Mahdawi

It was not an ICE prison. It was actually a Vermont state prison where ICE is renting a section. Most of the people who were there were not immigrants, but people who were convicted of crimes. The section where immigrants were held was a mixture of immigrants and prisoners convicted of different crimes.

The cell itself is seven feet by fourteen feet, and you share it with another inmate. The mattresses in the bunk beds that you sleep in are super thin, to the point that you start feeling pain in your back and in your body. There is a guard who comes by and flashes the light several times during the night through the glass window in the door. You have to abide by the instructions of the prison. You only have one hour to go outside. Sunlight, sleep, and food are all limited. Each meal is only twenty minutes, and if you’re five minutes late you do not get a meal. And there is the lack of medical care.

Many people who you meet there, people who committed crimes, you listen to their stories, and they are stories of trauma and stories of loss and pain. For example, one inmate I spoke to saw his mother being raped in front of his eyes when he was four years old. You speak to these people and you know that they need mental health support. And the mental health care in the prison is not really care. They are not provided with care in a way that people will be able to benefit from or in a way that provides dignity.

Then you look at the migrants, the undocumented workers who would be brought into the section. They were not provided with legal counsel or a translator.

But I felt an unbelievable level of love when I was in that prison in my cell because of all of the support, love, and care that I received from my community and from my legal team. I am really blessed. So it was not as severe on me as one might think. But it was difficult. And it’s not easy for anybody to be in prison.

And what’s the reason that it happened to me? Because of my activism, because I have been advocating and working to stop the war in Gaza, advocating for peace and justice based on my free speech. It’s outrageous.

Sam Stein

You mentioned the support that you received while you were kidnapped. Do you think that the support you received and the public outcry around your being held, especially by huge parts of the Jewish community in New York, was one of the reasons that you were released relatively quickly? And do you think that your release made it possible for Rümeysa Öztürk and Mahmoud Khalil to be released?

Mohsen Mahdawi

I was the last student activist to be detained and the first to be released. I was detained for sixteen days while everybody else spent at least double that time.

What led to my release? Some people have said I am the perfect victim. Because I believe in peace and nonviolent activism. And the Jewish community showed up big-time for me. I am very grateful for the American Jewish community and the Israeli Jewish community that saw injustice and stood up against it.

It actually affected the decision of the judge. I was accused of interfering in foreign policy and for antisemitic activism. So to see all of this support from the Jewish community was significant to the point that the judge, Judge Geoffrey Crawford, said that I was characterized as peaceful by a large number of American Jewish people. So for sure it was significant.

The system of justice, which is part of the checks and balances in the democratic system, is still functioning. Trump’s administration is trying to overload it and to flood it, but it has not succeeded yet. I’m not saying that justice is perfect, but it’s working. It’s a long path to restore justice. I just received the relief of the restrictions on my travel. I was restrained within Vermont and New York City. On July 17, Judge Crawford granted me full freedom to travel within the United States. The process for justice is a marathon.

Sam Stein

Are you still hoping to get American citizenship? And what does your future look like in terms of activism? How do you plan to keep up the struggle?

Mohsen Mahdawi

Yes, I am determined to go through the process and to get my American citizenship. I’ve been in this country for eleven years. I have roots here in Vermont, which I consider a home. I have many communities that I am connected with. This is where I experienced freedom for the first time in my life, and I felt safe until ICE kidnapped me. I’ve worked here. I’ve paid taxes. I have attended the best educational institutions and I am determined to go through the process for American citizenship.

My struggle is not only my struggle as a Palestinian refugee. It’s also tied to the American struggle for equality and for justice and for democracy. Peace is achievable, and it comes through justice. Peace will be possible when Israelis are able to see through their trauma and pain, the trauma and pain that came from antisemitism in Europe, the Holocaust, and the continuous injustice that Jewish people faced in Europe and in other parts of the world, and when Palestinians heal through their trauma that Israelis have imposed on them, on my people, for over seventy years.

So I see a path moving forward where a future of equality and freedom between the river and the sea is very achievable. And I see this path being achieved through peaceful means. I believe that it can be done through restoring and reforming international law and human rights. We have the laws that allow us to stop the injustice and to start the process for creating a future that is safe for all children, Palestinians and Israelis. I’ll continue to amplify the rights for Palestinians. I will continue to fight for Palestinians’ rights and freedom and liberation.

I don’t see this as only a Palestinian struggle. I see this as the path forward for humanity. And the work that I will continue doing is not much different than what I was already doing. It is work fueled by love, empathy, and compassion. It’s a work of imagination and vision. I believe that peace is possible. And I believe that it’s going to be achieved in a matter of a few years.

According to a leaked strategy paper, Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland sees socialist party Die Linke as a useful idiot that it can use to polarize society around culture-war issues. Die Linke shouldn’t play along.

Earlier this month, Politico leaked an internal strategy document from Germany’s anti-immigration Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). In a closed meeting, the AfD parliamentary group was shown a PowerPoint presentation titled “Introduction to the Strategy Process” that provided insight into the 3D chess the party is playing to outwit all its opponents.

The AfD wants to tear down the Brandmauer, or firewall — the mainstream parties’ informal pledge not to work with the far right — and turn the party’s leader, Alice Weidel, into Germany’s next chancellor. That’s all to be expected. What’s more interesting is that Die Linke, of all parties, is set to play a key role in this. The strategy paper envisions as a first bullet point a “cultural polarization between the AfD and Die Linke”: The AfD wants to instigate a contrived culture war with Die Linke in order to split the entire party spectrum into “bourgeois conservative vs. radical left.” Then the AfD would be left as the only possible partner for the governing Christian Democrats. The firewall would fall — and the AfD’s path to a position in the government, or even the chancellorship, would be open. That’s the plan so far.

The AfD is probably somewhat overestimating how “radical-left” the Social Democrats under their leader, Lars Klingbeil, and the Greens under Franziska Brantner really are. But there’s more to it than that. Die Linke can in any case be grateful to the AfD for making it so unmistakably clear that the culture war is a trap. Now they can more calmly hone their profile as a party focused on class-based politics, as important sections of the organization intend to do anyway.

The strategy paper not only reveals what the AfD wants from Die Linke but also implicitly makes clear what kind of left-wing politics it doesn’t find useful to its cause. It lists, for example, under the heading “Where We Are Strong” several demographics it intends to target with specialized working groups: “East Germans, rural areas, workers, Russian Germans, young voters” — demographics that a well-informed left should also focus on.

It’s obvious that the Left must rebuild its former strongholds in East Germany. Likewise, it should pay special attention to rural areas if it doesn’t want to become a party of “urban elites.” And it’s the most obvious thing in the world that a Left that claims to be a workers’ party must appeal to workers. In her successful direct-election campaign in Berlin’s Lichtenberg district, Die Linke party leader Ines Schwerdtner (a former Jacobin editor) showed that areas with a high Russian-German working-class population don’t necessarily have to be AfD territory. The fact that already in February’s federal election Die Linke could position itself as the strongest voice for young voters must also be causing some pain among AfD ranks.

If the AfD’s master plan truly depends on Die Linke jumping on command through “gender gaga” hoops (a derogatory term for identity politics around gender), then it should be easy to prevent their rise to power. The greater danger is that the far-right party might win even without a good strategy — simply because their opponents have no good strategy either.

My view, shared by very few, is that the Cold War was distinctly a US project that began in 1946–47 and ended in 1963. Its original impetus was to make internationalism — a euphemism for a worldwide scope of potential intervention — an unshakeable shibboleth of bipartisan foreign policy. Thus it denied the legitimacy of […]

Working-class men in the US have fallen behind women on a number of indicators of well-being. This is not due to a battle of the sexes, but because decades of growing inequality and precarity have had differential impacts on men and women.

Though you may have heard reports that men are in decline, rest assured that American men are not losing a battle of the sexes. But a majority of men are losing a class war, and losing a class war hurts. A majority of women are losing the class war too, but there are systematic gender differences in what it looks and feels like to lose. Some harms fall more heavily on women than on men, while other harms lean the other way.

Dramatically — and devastatingly — men too often lose their lives when they lose economic stability and the attendant social status. So far in the twenty-first century, fatality rates from suicide and opioid overdoses have been trending upward for the US population of all genders (aside from a very recent hopeful reversal of the opioid overdose death rate — a reversal that lamentably has not reached black Americans, whose fatality rates continue to climb). Men, however, make up roughly 80 percent of suicide deaths (though women make more suicide attempts) and 70 percent of opioid overdose deaths. We need no more convincing indicator of real pain.

Some on the Right look at the harms that men are experiencing in the United States and blame feminism or women in general. Meanwhile, some on the center and the Left want us to attend to the ways men are suffering and, to their credit, want to avoid a battle-of-the-sexes interpretation in which one side’s win must be the other side’s loss. But when analyses don’t pay enough attention to economic class, their explanations of men’s struggles also fall short.

The Illusory Battle of the Sexes

By some measures, men in the United States today are doing worse than their fathers and grandfathers and, along a few dimensions, men are doing worse than women of the same age. The data on men over time show troubling trend lines such as falling prime-age labor-force participation rates, stagnant wages (despite growing national income), and, for some subsets of the male population, stagnant or falling life expectancy (despite gains for others). In their K–12 schooling, girls on average do better than boys do; in higher education, women participate at greater rates and with greater success than men; women have more friends; and women live longer.

It certainly matters that life is in some ways getting harder for men than it used to be, and it is certainly worth noting that there are some components of putting together a good life that men are struggling more than their female peers to achieve. But when diagnosing the ills and prescribing the remedies, we lay a trap for ourselves if we put too much emphasis on gender and leave class as a secondary consideration. In fact, we prime ourselves to fall into either of two different traps: the trap of a reactionary battle-of-the-sexes framing on the one hand, or the trap of a counterproductive “cry me a river” eye roll on the other.

Take the following facts about performance in school, for instance: In high school, boys make up a majority of students in the bottom half of the GPA distribution; in the bottom tenth of the distribution, they outnumber girls two to one. Conversely, in the top half of the distribution, girls are a majority, and in the top tenth, girls have a mirror image two-to-one advantage. After high school, men are less likely than women to enroll in college, and among those who do give college a try, men are less likely to complete a degree.

There’s an obvious, misogynist battle-of-the-sexes reaction to this data, which says that if girls are doing better in school, it must be that women have somehow skewed schools to their own advantage such that they systematically discriminate against boys. My male undergraduate students told me that in their feeds, the social media algorithms regularly coughed up content from Andrew Tate and others of his ilk, conveying a targeted message to young men warning them off of college ambitions. More caring and careful observers point out that the pop-culture messaging boys get about masculinity (aggression, activity, individualism) and the behavioral demands made in school (cooperation, calm) are so at odds that schools end up failing to serve boys well.

There may be something to that, but focusing so narrowly on gender cannot explain why the female-favoring gender gap in high school graduation rates tends to be much larger in low-income school districts; some school districts, more often high-income ones, graduate boys at higher rates than girls. The fact that girls make up two-thirds of the students in the top tenth of high school GPAs can explain why Ivy League colleges have an applicant pool that is two-thirds female. But if we have already leaped to the conclusion that the education system is actively discriminating against boys (or even just inadvertently failing them), we cannot then explain why the boys in the Ivy League applicant pool are about twice as likely to be admitted so that, in the end, these most selective colleges admit and enroll a class that is roughly 50 percent male. (If anything, that looks like a heavy thumb on the scale in favor of boys.)

Insisting on a battle-of-the-sexes lens despite its explanatory failures lends support to a political project of mustering the male troops and launching an offensive campaign to take back the power that women have purportedly seized. Such a campaign might bring women down, but it can’t lift men up. What is there to “take back,” after all? Women, on average, still have lower wages than men, still experience higher poverty rates than men, and still do more unpaid domestic labor on men’s behalf than men do for women (or for themselves).

The cry-me-a-river reaction says: plenty of boys do just fine in school, so why should we trouble ourselves so much about the ones who dick around and waste the opportunities given to them? Moreover, men without college education earn more than women without college education. And when they do get their acts together to go to college, men maintain their wage gap advantage over their college-educated female counterparts. Sorting the gender wage gap data into groups based on the competitiveness and prestige of the post-high-school training and education pursued reveals more or less the same gap in every bin: when we compare like to like, women earn roughly 25 percent less than men, whether we are looking at those who have earned vocational certificates, associate’s degrees, bachelor’s degrees at not-so-selective colleges, or bachelor’s degrees at highly selective colleges.

Women are not outperforming men academically because they are “winning.” Women have on average committed themselves to academics because they are losing in the labor market. Women must aim higher than men in school if they want merely to match men’s earnings. This is even truer for women who may want to have children. The pay gap between mothers and fathers is markedly wider than the overall average pay gap between women and men.

So, our eye-roller says, if men want to maintain their economic advantage over women, all they have to do is quit bellyaching and do their homework. But that interpretation is a trap too. No one wins a comparative victimhood contest, and “suck it up, bucko” isn’t a political agenda that can win widespread support or improve life for anyone.

The All-Too-Real Class War

Something has been taken from many men, but it clearly wasn’t women who took it. (Unless the “something” in question is broad social permission for men to kick women around, in which case, yes, every wave of the women’s movement has aimed at taking that permission away.) Who is responsible for the dire situation of many men today, then? The answer to that is also clear: the rich.

The evidence is plentiful. Exhibit A: the labor share of national income has fallen. From the end of World War II to near the end of the twentieth century, labor captured somewhere in the neighborhood of 63 percent of the value added in production each year. There was a slight downward drift in the years approaching and immediately after 2000, and then the Great Recession hit. The labor share plummeted to somewhere around 57 percent and hasn’t bounced back. This amounts to thousands of dollars per person per year lost by the vast majority of the population who don’t live on asset income alone.

Relatedly, exhibit B: what isn’t getting paid to workers is piling up around the superrich. In just fifteen years, from March 2008 to March 2023, the highest 0.01 percent of disposable personal incomes swelled 43.4 percent. We’re talking about 25,100 people — they wouldn’t even fill Fenway Park — who now bring in an average of $25.7 million per year after taxes. The rest of the top 1 percent, those whose incomes are only in seven digits, not eight, have trailed 5 or 10 percentage points behind in their rates of disposable income growth. That 43.4 percent income surge at the tip-top is more than twice the total income growth rate and more than three times the growth rate in income for people in the middle of the distribution.

From a technical policymaking standpoint, we know how to change this. And for about a year, from spring 2020 to spring 2021, we did. Pandemic-era policies such as more generous child tax credits, unemployment insurance benefits, and other forms of social welfare spending provided direct support to many, improved the bargaining position of workers, and held the top 0.01 percent in check. That one year, disposable incomes grew faster in the bottom 50 percent than in the rest of the distribution. Then we let the concentration of income resume with a vengeance.

As income gaps have expanded to Gilded Age proportions, gaps in outcomes when we compare people across differences of income have also expanded. These now dwarf any gaps we can find across differences of gender.

Consider life expectancy. For the cohort born in 1920 or 1930, rich men outlived poor men by about five years, rich women outlived poor women by about four, and when we look at men and women within groups with similar incomes, women outlived men by somewhere between three and six years. For those born just a little later in the century, the gender gap stayed about the same, but the class gap in life expectancy roughly doubled. A rich man born in 1940 is likely still alive today and can expect to hang on for three more years yet — a rich woman for five. On average, the women born in 1940 who lived at the opposite end of the income scale have been dead for five years, and the poor men have been gone for almost a decade. May their memory be a blessing.

Class disparities in years on Earth only widened for the baby boomers. For the cohort born in 1960, men and women at the top are thriving now that they are sixty-five and are projected to live longer than any cohort before them. Meanwhile, men at the bottom are not expected to have gained anything, and women at the bottom are expected to die younger than women born poor a little earlier.

If you line up Americans by income, then, you are also lining us up by probable age at death. The difference between top and bottom life expectancies is reached by a steady gradient across the whole domain of incomes — but the gradient is steeper for men than for women.

Being a man is not on its own a source of hardship. In the absence of money, however, it does seem that maleness functions as an accelerant for some of the injuries of class. Women have not been spared from the effects of class war from above, and poor women are of course harmed by poverty too. However, for now at least, they survive it a little longer than their brothers.

Maybe what allows women to cope better in some respects is that there is no historical precedent that led women to expect better for themselves in the labor market, whereas within living memory, men could more easily get jobs that were considered appropriately masculine and get a bigger slice of the national economic pie than they get now. Instead of considering their class injuries to be an insult to their manhood, men would do well to consider class injuries an insult to all who bear them. Whatever the reasons, on average, women endure the injuries of class a little longer than men. To do more than endure and directly combat class oppression, men and women will have to work together.

Who’s the Boss’s Bitch?

The oppressive, exploitative treatment of women in the workplace has repeatedly served as a pilot project for how capital will later treat men. At the beginning of the nineteenth century Industrial Revolution in the United States, the first wage-labor force in the textile factories was almost entirely female. Later, intrusive factory discipline was imposed on men. Later still, when capital wanted to wriggle out of the commitments to labor that the twentieth-century union movement had pressed them into, they experimented with putting women into “flexible” labor arrangements through temp agencies such as Kelly Girl. (That is, flexible for the employer, not so flexible for the worker.)

Having figured out how to avoid long-term commitments to women workers while keeping them always available, capital then weaseled out of commitments men thought they had won. And here we are.

When working-class men express a feeling of being “feminized,” or when manosphere influencers tell men they are being emasculated, there is a kernel of economic truth. The dominant model of mid-twentieth-century male adulthood was the breadwinning head of a household, and a decent fraction of the jobs available to men made that role achievable. Some men were excluded, especially most black men whose gains from the civil rights movement arrived right around the same time that income distribution trends turned back toward increased income inequality. But for many men whose prime working years fell in the few decades after World War II, it was not necessary to start with a lot of assets or education to get a respectable slice of the economic pie.

With the shift of economic rewards steeply upward, the precarious, dead-end structure of work that was for a while mostly reserved for women and non-whites is now imposed on a bigger share of the male workforce too — including white men, especially if they do not have college degrees.

Women have always had to go above and beyond baseline requirements to prove that they are qualified for employment; the phenomenon of credential creep means that employers now often demand effortful and personally costly demonstrations of worthiness and commitment from men too. Get a degree, a certificate, a license to get your first job. Then if you want to advance, don’t expect an on-the-job career ladder. Go get more formal training at your own expense. Breadwinning is harder, so anyone who holds onto that as the measure of manhood is set up to feel like a failure.

No one wants to be overworked, underpaid, disrespected, and treated as expendable. In that sense, men are increasingly being treated similarly to how women have traditionally been treated. And being treated like a woman, in that sense, is bad for anyone. In short, no one wants to be the boss’s bitch. The problem isn’t that men are misgendered by degrading and insecure employment; the problem is that, with few exceptions and even fewer lifetime immunities, workers are degraded and insecure.

Meanwhile, even as the economy-wide share of “bad jobs” grows and an expanding share of the workforce is consigned to work them, women and non-white racial groups are no longer categorically barred from the dwindling share of “good jobs,” the high-pay, high-status work that used to be explicitly reserved for white men. But as a classic 1981 article about women in the professions by Michael Carter and Susan Boslego Carter put it, “Women get a ticket to ride after the gravy train has left the station.” As good jobs get scarcer, the demands they put on workers get more onerous — more entry requirements, more always-on availability — meaning that just when women and non-white workers get their first toehold in the “good jobs” section of the labor market, the good jobs that remain are worse than they used to be. The accelerating concentration of wealth and incomes at the very top of the distribution leaves most men and most women milling around on the platform together, the rumble of the gravy train receding in the distance.

What’s the Agenda?

Even for those stuck in a mistaken lost-battle-of-the-sexes diagnosis of men’s ills, the follow-up demand isn’t usually to combat exclusion so that men can have access to the kinds of lives that women are leading. There isn’t really any structural exclusion to combat; just, perhaps, some cultural squeamishness about shifting gender norms. (For example, employment is growing in the caring professions like education and health care. Many men may be refusing to enter, but the relevant schools and employers aren’t barring the doors against them.)

Demands to knock women down don’t deserve consideration. So what is an agenda that could win some dignity and economic security and pare back the class gaps in school achievement and life expectancy? Just about anything that reduces income inequality will help. Improve housing affordability in areas with strong labor markets and strong union movements so that workers can move to take advantage of economic opportunity. Raise labor’s share of pretax income by strengthening workers’ bargaining position with a strong social safety net, a robust public jobs program, and protections for unions’ collective action. Reduce the yawning gulfs in posttax income with more steeply progressive taxes. (There was a time when the top marginal tax rate was 91 percent!)

These eminently doable options for making men’s lives better — affordable housing, wage growth at the bottom, progressive taxation, and so on — would of course make women’s lives better too. Sharing gains across lines of gender makes the gains bigger, even for men; past experience shows us that leaving women out only keeps alive a degraded status that threatens to swallow men again too.

If asked to give a sketch of the ideal Victorian politician, most of us would describe someone like Rory Stewart. A former high-ranking Middle East diplomat turned public intellectual and non-profit executive, fond of soaring grandiloquent rhetoric, classical allusions, and the scion of a family with a long tradition of public service. This uniquely antiquated personage very nearly made Stewart Prime Minister, but ultimately British conservatives chose to elevate Boris Johnson, who later brutally ended Stewart’s time in the Conservative Party.

In his recently published memoirs, Politics on the Edge, Rory Stewart tells the saga of this political rise and fall. Amid the swirl of history and amusing political anecdotes, there is a curious reflection on the various ailments plaguing British politics. In the course of recounting his many fascinating experiences, Stewart gives readers an idea of how moral purpose can be restored to a political world defined by selfish technocracy and dangerous populism.

Though not a household name in the United States, Rory Stewart is undoubtedly a leading figure in Britain. The son of a high-ranking intelligence official, he served for many years as a diplomat and nonprofit leader in the Middle East before entering politics as a member of the Conservative Party.

Very soon after entering the arena, Stewart began to fear that his conception of conservatism fundamentally clashed with the predominant view of those in power. In meetings with local officials, he often encountered a narrow parochialism. In conversations with politicians, he discovered that few concerned themselves with the glories of the British political tradition but instead with polling data and performance metrics. Both of these attributes—that of reactionary parochialism and professionalized, technocratic politics—flew in the face of Stewart’s most deeply held beliefs: “limited government and individual rights; prudence at home and strength abroad; respect for tradition” and love of country.

As Stewart goes on to battle a broken prison system, inefficient bureaucracies, and international terrorism, it becomes clear that the professional political class stood in the way of any hope of institutional reform. The complete incompetence Stewart encounters in the upper reaches of the British government is truly astounding: A Prime Minister who believes the push for Brexit is a manageable burst of economic discontent; a foreign minister more concerned with giving bold Periclean speeches than understanding the nuances of foreign policy; an environment minister who seems only to understand sound bites. The unifying theme across these many failures is that almost every public official Stewart mentions is entirely sure of their own rightness. Both David Cameron and Boris Johnson believe they have correct answers to most questions. Even when found to be bewilderingly, earth-shatteringly wrong, most politicians refuse to admit failure of any kind. This is actually an attribute voters are initially inclined to respect but inevitably find frustrating as the failures of such leaders began to pile up.

Stewart spends a great deal of time on the human tragedy that such hubristic characters reveal. However, latent within his descriptions of such individuals and their political struggles is a larger battle between the forces of tribalistic populism and corporatized neoliberalism. The neoliberals—best captured by Prime Minister David Cameron and his key supporters—are sleek, professional, and meticulous. They are also entirely removed from the lives of everyday voters. Cameron neither seemed to know nor care about what goes on in the lives of the average British citizens, unless those views could be expressed through a polling spreadsheet. By the end of the book, this detachment from the public catches up to the neoliberals. Brexit completely destroyed their grip on the Conservative Party and (until the recent election of Sir Kier Starmer) banished their carefully sanitized liberalism to the rump of British politics. Though Stewart’s story focuses on the case of the United Kingdom, this exact series of events has played out in Western democracies across the world. 

The populists are, as the name implies, not as distant from the minds of the people as their neoliberal opponents. Despite this, they prove themselves throughout the course of the book to be every bit as vapid and self-interested. Though Stewart certainly meets principled advocates of Brexit and supporters of Boris Johnson, many more seem to be grifters—mining the anger and resentments of their fellow citizens for personal benefit. Stewart rightly wagered both as a candidate for the leadership of his party and later as a citizen on the sidelines that this vapidness would catch up to the Johnson government.

In contrast to the political divides of the 20^th century, what was once a battle between conservatism and liberalism is now essentially a battle between neoliberals and populists. In theory, this need not be a tragedy; political divisions reset with each new age and the parties eventually catch up to such changes. However, neither neoliberalism nor populism represents viable political solutions. After all, who in a moment of crisis wishes to turn to a hollowed-out liberal ethos or a politics of resentment?

This, then, is the crisis of our age. In a time of social and technological upheaval, there is no viable political alternative to solve the manifold crises we confront. Yet at the heart of Stewart’s depressing narrative lay the broad contours of a political disposition that could save us from ourselves. Nowhere is Stewart’s approach better exemplified than in a speech he delivered to officially launch his campaign for leader of the Conservative Party. In his exordium, Stewart declared that: “We have to make a choice between two different paths for our country. A choice between fairy stories and the politics of reality.”

At first blush, this may sound like the sort of trite nonsense neoliberals say to discredit their opponents. Yet, as the speech continued, it becomes clear that Stewart is offering a bold alternative to all of modern politics. He talked about “love, and loving the reality of place,” and how we need institutions that permit greater input from the people themselves. His speech ends on a poetic note, quoting a line from T.S. Eliot: “the only wisdom we can hope to acquire is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.”

Realism, love, localism, democracy, and humility—these may not seem like the typical foundations for a political movement. Yet that is precisely their strength. Over the course of his memoirs, Rory Stewart lays bare the fatal weaknesses of the political establishment, but he closes by granting hope to the reader. For in his dynamic and unusual approach to politics, one can start to detect the sort of moderate politics that could one day replace neoliberalism and stand on its own against nationalism—a politics grounded in place, conviction, and the honest humility that government can never provide all the answers to all of humanity’s problems.

Victims accuse military of ‘cover-up’ after it closed investigation without checking archives or interviewing suspect

How much longer will we watch Israel starve children to death and massacre civilians seeking food before American political leaders put a stop to this madness?

More than twenty months into the genocide, Israel has rendered Gaza a hellscape on earth. This hellscape is not an act of God, or a natural disaster, or some force majeure — it’s human-made, orchestrated by Israel, funded and armed by the United States, and cheered on by Western political elites.

For five hellish months, Israel has imposed a total blockade on Gaza, blocking all food deliveries to the starving population of two million Palestinians, almost half of them children, and condemning hundreds to a slow and agonizing death. Unsatisfied with forced mass starvation, Israeli forces carried out the equivalent of their previous flour massacre in Gaza almost daily, slaughtering over one thousand Palestinians seeking food. On Wednesday, more than one hundred international aid and rights groups appealed to governments to take immediate action in Gaza, where over one hundred thousand children are facing imminent mass death if this barbarity continues.

The humanitarian calamity is so horrific that top UN officials have abandoned their customarily restrained tone for outraged and emotionally charged condemnations. UN secretary-general António Guterres has berated the international community for ignoring the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, which he said presents a “moral crisis that challenges the global conscience.”

“I cannot explain the level of indifference and inaction we see by too many in the international community — the lack of compassion, the lack of truth, the lack of humanity,” Guterres told participants at the global assembly of the rights group Amnesty International.

Meanwhile, genocidal rhetoric continues to pour out of the upper echelons of Israeli leadership, with one minister pledging that Israel is “racing to wipe out Gaza.” The genocidal mania also includes an Israeli version of Donald Trump’s Gaza video, featuring a dystopian AI-generated scenario of an ethnically cleansed Gaza, with Trump Tower glimmering over the depopulated landscape.

US president Trump has once again cheered for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. In a recent interview, Trump openly called on Israel to cleanse Gaza, while virtually blaming Palestinians for their own death. He told Israel to “finish the job” in Gaza.

US complicity in the Gaza genocide goes beyond funding and arming Israel to the hilt with bipartisan blessing. Recent media reports have revealed that Israel and the Trump administration are coordinating a scheme to drive Palestinians out of Gaza, which could include countries like Ethiopia, Indonesia, and Libya — a revived Zionist dream as old as Israel itself, hatched originally by Zionist leaders like Moshe Dayan and Levi Eshkol, to transfer Palestinian refugees in Gaza to countries in North Africa (the Libyan Operation), or even to Latin America by air (the Moshe Dayan plan). “All of Gaza will be Jewish,” as one Israeli minister recently vowed.

Europe is faring hardly better. For over twenty months, the Western political class has refused to rein in Israel’s genocidal spree in Gaza. France’s recent recognition of a Palestinian state, while refusing to take immediate and concrete actions to stop the genocide and the forced starvation of Palestinians in Gaza, is a largely empty gesture, especially in the face of what the UN’s former aid chief describes as “the worst crime of the century.”

UK leaders seem to believe that Israel can always act with impunity and without consequences against Palestinians, while Germany has no qualms about making Palestinians pay for its past crimes against the Jews, with a horrifying repeat of past atrocities. Or as Hans Frank, a Nazi governor in occupied Poland, put it in his diary: “That we sentence 1.2 million Jews to die of hunger should be noted only marginally.”

For decades, Western leaders have winked at Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people, refusing to take a stand against the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the siege of Gaza, and the apartheid in the West Bank, marked by the constant dispossession and erasure of Palestinian existence, daily dehumanization and forced displacement, unhinged settler violence, systematic torture, and other unspeakable injustices, which together have culminated in the Gaza genocide.

According to international law, siege starvation is a war crime, a crime against humanity, and an act of genocide. The global consensus has been that sieges are “barbaric and medieval” and belong to a darker period in human history. And yet, for nearly two decades, Israel has imposed its devastating and suffocating blockade of Gaza without consequences.

This brutal and inhumane blockade, the longest in modern history, has been sustained and naturalized with Western support and blessing, whose leaders have become accustomed to seeing Palestinians ghettoed in concentration camps swollen by refugees, caged in a tiny enclave like sheep penned for slaughter, under constant bombardment and invasions, displaced time and again. If Gaza was already unlivable before the genocide, it’s now “worse than hell on earth,” to cite the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The Gaza genocide is the most documented genocide in human history. Future historians contemplating it will scratch their heads over how this unimaginable horror was allowed to happen in this enlightened century — how the civilized world watched it unfold in real time, broadcast by the victims themselves, and did nothing to stop it. As UNICEF spokesperson James Elder put it: “Gaza has shattered humanity’s records for its darkest chapters. Humanity must now urgently write a different chapter.”

For the horror of the Gaza genocide is not merely the fact that it was allowed to happen, but that it was allowed to happen for this long and for far longer than most genocides in recent memory — with the persistent backing of Western powers. The Srebrenica genocide, which marks thirty years this month, unfolded in a few horrific days in July 1995, prompting swift Western intervention. While Israel’s genocide in Gaza has reaped so far at least ten times as many victims as the Srebrenica genocide in Bosnia, no other genocide has garnered the same level of complicity and apathy from Western elites. Not to mention Arab complicity, whose leaders largely see Palestinian resistance and struggle for freedom as an existential threat.

In Slaughterhouse-Five, American writer Kurt Vonnegut describes the bombing of Dresden, which unfolded eighty years ago and lasted for two nights, as the “greatest massacre in European history.” One wonders what he would say about Israel’s unending slaughter of Gaza, which has been unfolding before our eyes for nearly two years, with no end in sight. Gone are the days when a Palestinian prisoner’s hunger strike would cause a global outrage. The new threshold, established in Gaza by Israel and its Western allies, is that a pariah state can starve to death an entire people and still be a member of the United Nations.

For twenty-one months, Western powers, led by the United States, have allowed Israel to plumb new depths of barbarity in Gaza almost daily without offering Palestinians even the dignity of humanitarian sympathy. They continue to do so even when the Western-backed destruction of Palestinians has brought the whole global order and postwar moral legacy to the brink of collapse. And they remain unfazed by Israel’s absolute contempt for the basic tenets of international justice, thus rendering Gaza, in the words of a prominent Palestinian human rights lawyer, “the graveyard of international law.”

This holocaust must stop now. Humanity itself is at stake. As Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), has put it: “Make ‘never again’ a reality. If we fail the Palestinians in Gaza, others are likely to be failed too in the future.”

Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill funnels tens of billions of additional dollars to Immigration and Customs Enforcement — meaning the agency will have three times as much to spend next year as it did this year.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deported 545,252 people from the US between 2021 and 2024, according to its data, including 271,484 last year.

The Trump administration wants to deport one million people per year. To that end, there’s $75 billion for ICE in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which was signed into law earlier this month. This includes:

• $45 billion to expand the agency’s “detention capacity,” including building new ICE prisons (see Section 90003 of the bill).
• $30 billion for bonus pay for ICE personnel; recruiting, hiring, and training new personnel; additional facilities, vehicles, and funding for “enforcement and removal operations” (see Section 100052).

The actual total is likely higher than $75 billion. While that’s the amount specifically designated for ICE in the legislative text, there are sections of the reconciliation bill that allow the Trump administration to direct billions more to the agency if it wants to. These sections effectively form a slush fund for Department of Homeland Security (DHS) leadership. Here are two examples that immediately come to mind:

• Section 100051 provides $2.1 billion to DHS, the cabinet department that houses ICE. While this section doesn’t explicitly say any of the funding is for ICE, of its twelve listed purposes, four involve removals, which ICE manages.
• Section 90007 provides $10 billion to DHS for “undertaking activities in support of the Department of Homeland Security’s mission to safeguard the border of the United States.”

That second one basically says nothing and is the extent of the details — and guardrails — for the $10 billion provision. I’m not kidding; here’s the entire section:

With this $75 billion in extra funding, the Trump administration expects ICE to swell its ranks by 50 percent, expand its detention capacity by 100 percent, and increase removals by 268 percent by 2029.

The New ICE Budget, in Context

The aforementioned funding in the reconciliation bill adds to — not replaces — the amount ICE receives through the regularly scheduled federal budget process. Congress approved $10.4 billion for the agency through this process in 2025, and Trump requested $11.3 billion for 2026.

The Big Beautiful Bill allows ICE to use this extra $75 billion anytime between now and the end of September 2029 (i.e., during fiscal years 2025–29). Technically, all $75 billion counts toward 2025’s total — for budget enforcement and scorekeeping purposes, funding made available over multiple years generally counts toward the first year agencies can start using those funds, which in this case is 2025.

I chose not to construct the chart below that way because it’s too far removed from how the money will realistically be spent. Donald Trump signed his bill with less than three months left in fiscal year 2025, and White House budget documents show it would only begin using the extra funding next (fiscal) year. Those documents also indicate that DHS will obligate 25 percent of the homeland security funds in the reconciliation bill next year. To estimate the 2026 ICE budget, I assumed the 25 percent share would apply equally on a pro rata basis across all DHS agencies, including ICE. That $18.7 billion was added to the $11.3 billion requested in Trump’s 2026 funding request.

The graph below shows that ICE’s budget is projected to triple next year to $30 billion, which is more than Poland spent on its military last year. Compared to the world’s largest military budgets, ICE’s 2026 budget would rank in the top fifteen.

The $30 billion estimate for 2026 is the most responsible one I could make given the available evidence. I also think it could end up being too low, possibly by a lot. There are likely billions more for ICE in the reconciliation bill than the $75 billion officially designated as such in the bill text, due to the nebulous DHS slush fund I mentioned earlier.

Additionally, the White House budget documents I referred to indicated that “at least” a quarter of the extra funding would be spent in 2026. I suspect the Trump administration will front-load the $75 billion rather than evenly distribute it each year from 2026 to 2029, thereby driving next year’s ICE budget above $30 billion. What I’m getting at is that despite my estimate being methodologically sound, this chart could age like it drank from the wrong grail. The projected $30 billion for 2026 visualized below should be considered a minimum estimate.

Who ICE Will Target, and Who It Won’t

The Trump administration wants to increase yearly deportations by 268 percent, and ICE’s forthcoming $30 billion budget is the first major expenditure in pursuit of that quota.

To meet that aggressive (and arbitrary) goal, recent history shows that ICE will likely seek to inflate its removal numbers by targeting noncitizens with no criminal history, including those who are legally in the country or are in the process of legalizing their status.

Annual deportations surged 360 percent under the Biden administration. From 2021 to 2024, the number of people deported who had been convicted of a crime increased by 74 percent. By comparison, deportations of people with neither a criminal record nor pending charges jumped nearly 1,200 percent. More than two out of every three people ICE deported last year fit the latter description. All this is according to ICE’s own data.

ICE has already made this approach clear by systematically arresting people applying for citizenship at their immigration appointments, regardless of their legal status. Predictably, Palestinian activists have been targeted.

It’s already clear who ICE won’t target.

ICE has a “Human Rights Violators and War Crimes” page, where it claims to be “at the forefront of the U.S. government’s efforts to prevent the United States from becoming a safe haven for individuals who commit war crimes, genocide, torture and other forms of serious human rights abuses around the globe.” ICE’s stated goals are to “prevent the admission of known or suspected war criminals . . . into the United States,” “prosecute individuals in the United States who have been involved in and/or responsible for . . . human rights violations across the globe,” and “remove offenders” from the country.

Israeli prime minister and International Criminal Court fugitive Benjamin Netanyahu visited the United States earlier this month. Where was ICE when Netanyahu was galavanting around Capitol Hill?

Not content to torment the Ivy League, Republicans are seeking authoritarian control over working-class public universities like the City University of New York. The latest salvo: allegedly firing four adjuncts for their support of Palestine.

Republicans’ ideological attack on higher education seemed limited to elite Ivy League institutions at first, briefly dressing up an authoritarian crackdown on left-wing ideas like Palestinian solidarity and racial equality in the drag of anti-elitism. That’s changing. Now they’re coming for public universities all over the country.

On Wednesday, the US Department of Education announced “civil rights” investigations into the University of Nebraska Omaha, the University of Michigan, and others. They’ve also been investigating George Mason University and, last month, forced the University of Virginia’s president to resign. Faculty, students, higher-education unions, and the communities that depend on such institutions should be ready to fight the tsunami of repression that’s coming.

The City University of New York (CUNY), one of the greatest working-class higher-education institutions in America, is one of the latest institutions to be targeted, recently facing the harassment of a congressional hearing on “antisemitism” (a term that has become a depraved kind of code for the defense of Palestinians, a people currently enduring slow starvation with their children as part of a broader campaign of genocide). CUNY leadership is coping with the attack in the worst possible way: by repressing and punishing pro-Palestinian activism.

On paper, CUNY protects academic freedom in its bylaws, which specify that the university should be a “forum for the advocacy of all ideas protected by the First Amendment,” and emphasizes a commitment to the “principles of academic freedom.” Similar language appears in CUNY’s contract with its faculty and staff union, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC). But there have been times in CUNY’s history when this value has been breached. In the 1950s, a rabidly anti-Communist Brooklyn College president shut down the school newspaper and encouraged state and federal investigations of left-leaning faculty.

That McCarthyite atmosphere has returned to CUNY. Last month, CUNY fired Corinna Mullin and three other faculty members who haven’t chosen to be publicly identified. According to the union, all have advocated for Palestinian rights.

The firings followed a script that is becoming predictable: of universities capitulating easily to pressure from far-right politicians and braying mobs when it comes to speech about Gaza.

Hiring and firing adjunct professors is, at CUNY, up to the department chairs, and all the fired adjuncts had been rehired by their departments. As James Davis, the president of the PSC, pointed out in a letter to CUNY, in no case was the professor’s job performance judged unsatisfactory, nor were there any complaints of misconduct against any of the four.

Geert Dhondt, the chair of economics at John Jay College — one of several departments in which Mullin taught — said her teaching evaluations were “among the highest in the college.” Dhondt called CUNY’s decision to override the departments “highly unusual, it only happens when there is strong outside pressure.”

And indeed, there has been outside pressure. Mullin’s firing was stoked by local far-right politicians. Republican City Councilwoman Inna Vernikov and her Democratic colleague Kalman Yeger have been calling for Mullin’s dismissal since last year, alleging that she was involved in a violent April protest on campus. Mullin, through her lawyer, has called it a peaceful protest and insisted that she did not break any laws.

Vernikov herself is one to talk about violent campus protest; she was arrested for bringing a gun to a Brooklyn College Palestine protest in October 2023 yet has somehow managed to keep her job.

CUNY leadership has essentially admitted that this was a political purge. At a congressional hearing this month on campus “antisemitism,” Florida Republican Randy Fine asked about Mullin by name, quoting her chanting, “Down with Zionist scum.” CUNY chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez assured the far-right congressman that she was “no longer employed by the university.”

It’s also significant that all the fired faculty are adjuncts, part-time faculty who lack tenure or other job protections that some full-time professors enjoy. In an interview with Jacobin this week, Mullin suggested that the firings were just the beginning of a larger crackdown on anti-imperialist educators. The purge, she said, makes “one thing brutally clear: academic freedom does not meaningfully exist for contingent faculty. But we are not the exception — we are the warning.”

The PSC is holding a protest demanding the reinstatement of the fired professors at Brooklyn College on July 31.

It’s clear that the idea of academic freedom — the idea of universities as institutions independent of the government, which can nurture inquiry and debate free of interference — is more endangered than it has been in the United States at any time since the McCarthy era, thanks to the authoritarian Trump administration and a bipartisan desperation to quash any discussion of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

None of CUNY’s compliance with this project will do the university system any good. The entire academic project suffers when administrators refuse to honor the principle of academic freedom. But such compliance also doesn’t appease the fascists — it just shows weakness.

During the hearings, unmoved by the sacrifice of a few adjunct professors, Rep. Elise Stefanik, a far-right maniac who represents New York State’s North Country region, called for Chancellor Rodríguez to be fired. That he was, in the PSC’s telling, willing to indulge the McCarthyism of the Stefaniks of the world by firing these adjuncts may not even be enough to save his own job.