A freelance reporter who plays a leading role in the Wall Street Journal’s coverage of Hezbollah has repeatedly praised the terrorist group while condemning “the Israeli enemy,” a Washington Free Beacon analysis has found.
Adam Chamseddine, a Beirut-based reporter, has written or contributed to more than three dozen reports as a freelance contributor for the Journal since last year, including providing coverage of the funeral of slain Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.
Chamseddine was also the lead reporter for a story on Israel’s use of pagers to assassinate Hezbollah commanders. And he was one of the reporters for a Journal story last week that Iran is rearming its “militia allies,” like Hezbollah and Yemen’s Houthis.
While writing for the Journal, Chamseddine, a former reporter for the pro-Hezbollah newspaper As-Safir, has expressed stark anti-Israel views while hailing groups like Hezbollah and Hamas.
He has referred to “the Israeli enemy” in multiple social media posts, according to English translations of his missives, written in Arabic.
After Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, Chamseddine asserted that “female journalists are dismembered by direct Israeli targeting” and criticized what he said was “Israeli criminality” in response to the Hamas attack, while making no similar condemnation of the terrorist group.
He touted an interview “for those who want to understand the Hamas movement” with Tarek Hamoud, the head of the Palestinian Return Centre, which has reportedly been linked to Hamas.
Chamseddine’s anti-Israel views could raise questions about his work for the Journal. The paper, owned by conservative billionaire Rupert Murdoch, has faced scrutiny over the anti-Israel sympathies of other reporters covering the region.
Abeer Ayyoub, a Gaza-based freelancer for the Journal, lamented the “Jewish mafia” on social media and posted Hamas propaganda videos after Oct. 7, the Free Beacon reported.
The watchdog group HonestReporting, which uncovered Ayyoub’s posts, has criticized the Journal’s coverage of Israel and noted that the paper uses the term “militant group” to refer to Hezbollah, downplaying its terrorist activities.
Chamseddine, whose reports refer to Hezbollah as a “Lebanese militant group,” has offered sympathies to the terrorist group’s leaders.
In July 2019, he commemorated the anniversary of the death of Hezbollah commander Khaled Bazzi, who was killed by an Israeli airstrike after he orchestrated the kidnapping of two IDF soldiers on Israeli soil.
Chamseddine expressed “greetings” to Bazzi on the “anniversary of his martyrdom,” adding: “May God be pleased with you as much as your eyes blink.”
After Nasrallah’s funeral, which Chamseddine covered for the Journal in a story entitled “Hezbollah Uses Nasrallah Funeral to Show It Is Still Alive,” Chamseddine wrote on social media that the turnout at Nasrallah’s funeral “terrifies Israel” and that Nasrallah had “proved that the impossible has become possible.”
Sentiments like Chamseddine’s have increasingly infiltrated American mainstream media outlets post-Oct. 7.
CBS News producer Marwan al-Ghoul spoke at an event for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a terrorist group. And CNN freelancer Abdel Qader Sabbah once served in a Hamas-affiliated group and took photos with one of the group’s leaders.
Chamseddine has used his several other media gigs to promote anti-Israel and pro-Hezbollah views.
He hosts a news talk show on Al-Jadeed, an independent Lebanese television network, and is senior policy adviser at Badil: The Alternative Policy Institute, a Lebanese think tank that often demonizes Israel and defends Hezbollah.
Chamseddine interviewed his Badil colleague Giselle Jetti last year about a report she produced at the think tank entitled “Lebanon’s War Crimes Case Against Israel.”
Jetti’s report cited Chamseddine’s Journal article that asserted Israeli strikes killed 44 civilians in addition to a Hezbollah fighter.
In the interview, Chamseddine asked Jaffi to describe how Lebanon “can take legal action against the Israeli enemy,” according to a translation of his remarks.
Jetti published a report for Badil in May that called to “safeguard the essential services Hezbollah currently provides” in Lebanon.
She wrote that American lawmakers’ critiques of Hezbollah “implicitly dehumanize millions of Lebanese citizens who continue to support, or at least sympathize with, the party and its armed resistance.”
Chamseddine has interviewed numerous other Hezbollah apologists at Al Jadeed, including Mikhael Awad, a Lebanese analyst who has called for Lebanon to declare war on Israel, which he called a “cancerous growth.”
The Journal did not respond to a request for comment about its relationship with Chamseddine. Chamseddine did not respond to a comment request.
If Hamas leaders really cared about the suffering and pain of their people, they would have released all the hostages, disarmed and relinquished control of the Gaza Strip long ago.
On October 24, 2023, senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad threatened that his Iran-backed terror group would carry out more massacres against Israelis — time and again until Israel was annihilated.
Referring to the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 invasion of Israel that resulted in the murder of more than 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals, Hamad said:
“The Al-Aqsa Flood [the name Hamas uses to describe its October 7 slaughter] is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth…. Will we have to pay a price? Yes, and we are ready to pay it. We are called a nation of martyrs, and we are proud to sacrifice martyrs.”
Hamad, whose group continues to hold captive 50 Israeli hostages (only 20 of whom are believed to be alive), repeated Hamas’s call for the elimination of Israel:
“The existence of Israel is illogical. The existence of Israel is what causes all that pain, blood, and tears.”
Hamad made the threat from Qatar, where he and several other leaders of Hamas have been leading comfortable lives for the past few years.
Qatar and Turkey are among the few countries that continue to host and protect the leaders of the Palestinian terror group whose members have committed the worst crimes against Jews since the Holocaust.
Hamad and other Hamas leaders have no problem boasting about the October 7 massacres and threatening to launch similar attacks against Israel from their villas and hotel suites in Doha and Istanbul.
The Hamas leaders feel safe because they know they enjoy the luxurious support of governments far away from the fighting in Gaza.
On July 25, 2025, Hamad gave an interview to an Arab television station from Qatar. This time, however, he sounded different.
Asked about the suffering of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip because of the war Hamas launched nearly two years ago, Hamad said that his group’s primary goal now was to end the war with Israel.
“This is a painful and horrific war,” he remarked. “We fully understand the pain and suffering of our people in Gaza.” Hamad went on to praise the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip for their “steadfastness and patience” during the war.
The Hamas leader’s recent statements came as Palestinians in the Gaza Strip continue to complain about death, destruction and lack of food.
According to Hamas sources, more than 55,000 Palestinians have died since the beginning of the war sparked by the October 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel.
Hamad’s statements also came shortly after US President Donald J. Trump announced that Hamas does not want to release the Israeli hostages and reach a ceasefire deal.
“I think they [Hamas] want to die, and it’s very, very bad,” Trump said. “It got to be a point where you’re gonna have to finish the job.”
Hamad and the Hamas leadership are in no rush to release the hostages or reach a ceasefire agreement with Israel because they would like to see more Palestinians sacrificed as “martyrs.”
As Hamad said two years ago, “We are called a nation of martyrs.”
Hamas’s leaders do not care if another 50,000 Palestinians are “martyred” in the war they started in 2023. The more bodies pile up, the more they can blame Israel. Hamas’s leaders seem convinced that the international community is on their side.
Hamas tells the international community that Israel is killing Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. In response, many in the international community rush to condemn Israel.
Buoyed by the condemnations, Hamas then calls on Palestinians to display more “patience and steadfastness” and encourages them to continue sacrificing themselves as “martyrs.”
Hamad has the wakkaha (effrontery) to tell the Palestinians who have fallen victim to the death and destruction brought upon them by their October 7 atrocities that Hamas “understands” their pain and suffering.
It is easy for someone well-fed and sitting in a villa or hotel in Doha to talk about the suffering and pain of others in a war far away.
Hamad and the Hamas leaders sheltering in Doha and Istanbul should be apologizing to the two million Palestinians of the Gaza Strip instead of praising them for their “patience, resolve and steadfastness.”
In fact, they should be arrested and put on trial for their crimes against both Israelis and Palestinians.
If Hamas leaders really cared about the suffering and pain of their people, they would have released all the hostages, disarmed and relinquished control of the Gaza Strip long ago.
Hamas leaders, however, seem determined to turn all the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip into a “nation of martyrs.” Hamas wants more October 7-style attacks because it wants to see more Palestinians sacrificed as “martyrs” in its jihad (holy war) to destroy Israel.
Hamas leaders are selling illusions to their people that they are winning the war and that it is not impossible to exterminate Israel. They are telling the Palestinians that, thanks to their patience and steadfastness, as well as daily attacks on Israeli troops in Gaza, Israel will soon be defeated.
Hamas also has no problem lying to Trump and US envoy Steve Witkoff, as they have probably already figured out.
After months of direct and indirect negotiations with Hamas, Trump and Witkoff have finally understood that Hamas is not acting in good faith and, as Trump put it, “want to die.”
To be more accurate, it is not Hamas’s leaders who want to die. Instead, they want ordinary Palestinians to die so that the leaders can stay in power forever and remain wealthy — some are, or were, billionaires.
Those who actually know Hamas have always been aware that the terror group never acted in good faith. Hamas’s leaders have never hesitated to murder anyone who stands in their way, whether Israelis or Palestinians.
Since its establishment in the late 1980s, Hamas has been consistent and clear about its goals: the elimination of Israel through jihad. That is the real reason Hamas has never accepted any peace process with Israel.
That is also the real reason Hamas views as traitors those Palestinians who recognize Israel’s right to exist and are willing to make peace with Israel.
The only reason Hamas’s leaders might want a ceasefire is to allow their members to rearm and regroup. The leaders want to ensure that after the war with Israel, they will continue to hold onto power in the Gaza Strip.
Meanwhile, Hamas’s leaders evidently do not mind if dozens of Palestinians are killed and wounded every day, because the international pressure is directed against Israel.
The soldier claimed looters coordinated their movements to evade drone surveillance and often returned with reinforcements.
By Vered Weiss, World Israel News
An Israel Defense Forces soldier, identified only as “Y” for security reasons, has provided a detailed account of a violent incident at a Gaza humanitarian corridor, challenging media reports that Israeli troops fired on starving civilians.
Speaking with The Media Line, “Y” described scenes of chaos, violence and calculated provocation as he guarded one of three designated aid delivery zones in southern Gaza.
“This wasn’t combat with terrorists—it was worse,” he said. “We saw people trampling each other, stealing food and fighting. We’re trained for war, not riot control.”
According to “Y,” the distribution site was overrun multiple times by organized crowds. They showed up on foot, motorcycles, horses—some with sacks, some with knives.
It was a stampede, not a line,” he said. He claimed looters coordinated their movements to evade drone surveillance and often returned with reinforcements.
Most disturbing to him was the July 20 incident, which gained international attention. He said the disturbance began the night before, when trucks arrived early.
Though the area was closed, men gathered to loot. The following morning, a mass of adult men—no women or children—charged the IDF position near the food trucks.
“We fired warning shots, used megaphones, even flash grenades. Nothing worked,” he recalled.
“Gunfire came from behind the crowd. They weren’t there for aid—they were sent to create a scene.”
“Y” claimed Hamas deliberately engineered the confrontation to produce dramatic media footage. “They used the crowd as cover, and cameras were already rolling when the violence started,” he said.
He insisted the soldiers only opened fire as a last resort to defend themselves and the site. Names later released confirmed that the dead were all adult males.
He rejected accusations of famine in Gaza as misinformation. “There is food,” he said. “But Hamas blocks access to manipulate world opinion. They want pictures of starving children. That’s their weapon.”
COGAT, Israel’s military coordination unit, also disputes the famine claims. “Aid is not being restricted by us,” said Col. Abdullah Halabi. “We’ve allowed in more than 23,000 trucks.”
“Y” remains skeptical of proposals to return distribution control to UNRWA, calling the agency “indistinguishable from Hamas.”
His conclusion: “A ceasefire can’t mean withdrawal. There must be a buffer. We can’t afford another October 7. And no matter what the headlines say—we’ll keep doing the job.”
For Amrusi, any serious attempt to free the hostages must be based on force, not hope.
By Vered Weiss, World Israel News
As diplomatic efforts to secure the release of Israeli hostages held by Hamas reach a standstill, former senior Shin Bet official Yossi Amrusi is calling for a dramatic overhaul of Israel’s approach.
In a recent interview with Maariv, Amrusi sharply criticized the government’s current strategy and laid out a two-pronged plan he believes is the only viable path to bringing the hostages home.
“Israel must stop signaling that it’s willing to keep playing this same game,” said Amrusi, warning that continued negotiation under the current terms only serves Hamas’s interests.
“Dragging out the talks works for them. They know that every passing day brings more international pressure on Israel—whether it’s the false narrative of starvation, political shifts abroad, or growing domestic discontent.”
Amrusi also questioned the influence and effectiveness of the Qatari mediators, suggesting they may lack real access to Hamas’s decision-makers.
“It’s unclear whether anyone in Gaza truly controls the hostage situation,” he said. “Some of the hostages may not even be in the hands of Hamas anymore.”
For Amrusi, any serious attempt to free the hostages must be based on force, not hope.
“Hamas will only release the hostages if they are compelled to. But we’re not applying the necessary pressure. Our military options are limited, and we’re propping Hamas up by continuing to allow humanitarian aid—fuel, supplies, even money—into Gaza.”
He accused the Israeli government of failing to act decisively, citing political hesitation and fear of international backlash.
“We’re not establishing humanitarian zones; we’re not opening immigration channels for Gazans who want out. We don’t know how to win.”
Amrusi outlined a dual strategy: Israel must first end its current negotiating posture and instead exert both military and psychological pressure on Hamas.
“Only a parallel effort—tightening the noose on the battlefield while showing we’re prepared to walk away from the table—has any chance of success,” he concluded. “This is the only way the hostages will come home.”
Novelist of global political thrillers Frederick Forsyth died recently. He was best known for TheDay of the Jackal and The Odessa File, which became popular films in the 1970s. (The Day of the Jackal is also a current television series more loosely based on the book.) As a boy, I read his novels voraciously. They were set in the Cold War, in the aftermath of World War II, a genre that has not to my knowledge been replicated in the post-Cold War world. Why not?
Forsyth was himself a swashbuckling international reporter who lived dramatically just as he wrote about dramatic events. He was a 1950s Royal Air Force pilot drawn to journalism in the 1960s, covering assassination attempts on Charles de Gaulle and the Nigerian civil war.
His most popular book, and my favorite, is The Day of the Jackal of 1971 about an assassination attempt on de Gaulle by exiled French Algerians, through their Secret Army Organization (OAS), angry over the French president’s betrayal of their cause. It’s based on an actual 1962 attempt, which is the 1973 film’s opening scene, with gunmen firing directly into De Gaulle’s car on a Paris street. The bullets barely missed the president and his wife, who were largely unflustered and continued with their country weekend.
The OAS then resolves to hire an untraceable non-Frenchman for the next try on de Gaulle, while French intelligence brutally unravels the OAS. Forsyth’s novel, drawing upon his journalistic experiences, forensically tracks the search for the mysterious and cold blooded if charming English assassin known as The Jackal. The hero is a shrewd but unassuming French police investigator who thoroughly follows the fragmentary clues, with help from various international intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
When the police inspector has finally identified The Jackal, wider French law enforcement takes the investigation away from him, confident of their manhunt skills. Of course, they fail and must again seek his help. De Gaulle himself is aloof from the investigation, deeming its details beneath his dignity. And he refuses to amend his schedule.
The Jackal, realizing he is hunted, seduces a married French countess, spending the night in her chateau, leaving her dead. Later, when in Paris, he seduces a homosexual man for access to his apartment, also murdering him. French police now realize that The Jackal is targeting de Gaulle on Paris Liberation Day, when he will be vulnerable during multiple public ceremonies. Crafty as ever, The Jackal disguises himself as a crippled and bemedaled French Resistance veteran, tricking his way into a woman’s apartment, killing her, and aiming his gun at the French president. The police inspector finds and kills him only after he has already fired several shots from his silencer. The final scene is gripping and wonderful. But in the end, it turns out that The Jackal’s identity is unknown. The mystery continues. But the stability of France, a key Cold War Western ally, if a difficult one, was preserved against terrorist plots. De Gaulle, of course, was a key figure of both WWII and the Cold War.
Forsyth’s The Odessa File of 1973, which became a film in 1974, like The Day of the Jackal, is set in the early 1960s. It portrays a young German reporter who in 1963 finds the diary of a Holocaust survivor who has committed suicide. The diary recalls the horrors of a senior SS sadist, loosely based on the real-life Butcher of Riga, who has since become, under a pseudonym, a munitions factory director, protected by the secretive Organization of Former Members of the SS (ODESSA). The factory is covertly providing missile guidance systems to Gamal Nasser’s Egypt. The reporter, with help from Israel’s Mossad, infiltrates ODESSA and tracks down the Butcher, who he knows, from the diary, murdered his father, a German army officer. The movie diverges from the film, with the reporter killing the Butcher in self-defense during their confrontation. In the book, the Butcher escapes to Argentina, as did the real Butcher. The film focused public attention on the real Butcher, forcing his escape from Argentina to Paraguay, where he died in 1977. The book and film portray a post-war Germany still uneasily in denial about its Nazi crimes, with many law enforcement officers as ODESSA members.
A third novel by Forsyth, but not turned into a film, more directly involved the Cold War, The Devil’s Alternative, published in 1979 and set in 1982. The Soviet Union has suffered a serious famine, and Kremlin hawks want to invade Western Europe as the solution, which the Communist Party chairman, an aging Leonid Brezhnev-like figure, opposes as far too dangerous. The plan is leaked to a British intelligence officer by his former Russian lover. Ukrainian nationalists have hijacked a giant oil tanker in the North Sea, threatening ecological catastrophe if their brethren, imprisoned in West Germany for having hijacked an airliner (and also secretly having assassinated the KGB chief), are not released. The Soviets threaten to end negotiations for concessions in return for famine relief, which means pro-war hardliners will prevail. Through terrifying events, the Ukrainian nationalists and the Kremlin hawks both self-destruct, with a “moderate” anointed as the new Soviet party chairman. And it turns out that the British spy’s lover was in fact working for the aging outgoing party chairman, who wanted the West to counter the Kremlin hawks. The status quo returns. Characters in The Devil’s Alternative are loosely based, besides Brezhnev, on Margaret Thatcher, Jimmy Carter, National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance.
Sadly, The Devil’s Alternative never became a film. Oddly, during the Cold War, films rarely directly addressed the Soviet Union, preferring safer villains, typically Nazis, or the fantasy monsters of James Bond films. It’s notable that The Devil’s Alternative’s “happy” ending entails the death of Ukrainian nationalists and the victory of Kremlin “doves” over hawks as the best possible scenario. Few in 1979 could imagine a plausible happier scenario. The Cold War and the Soviet Union, nearly everybody assumed, were permanent.
Forsyth wrote more novels after the Cold War ended addressing post-Soviet Russia, Afghan-originated terrorism, and international narcotics trafficking. To my mind these and other post-Cold War international thrillers lacked the cosmic drama of Cold War stories, when the world was still under the shadow of WWII, having defeated Nazi totalitarianism, and struggling to avert WWIII while constraining Soviet totalitarianism. The stakes were higher; the villains and heroes were clearer; the personalities were larger. The competing spiritualities were more distinctly Christian-related versus demonic/godless. The current television version of The Day of the Jackal maybe evinces nostalgia for the old paradigm.
In Cold War literature, Forsyth was a sort of Homer of popular but sophisticated thrillers that demonstrated what made and sustained the West as it struggled against its enemies and dealt with the demons of its past. May there be future Forsyths who can demonstrate the West’s even more complex struggles for survival and identity today.
Dutch PM Dick Schoof claimed he warned Israel over Gaza aid — but Israeli President Isaac Herzog says that’s not true.
By World Israel News Staff
Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof said he told Israeli President Isaac Herzog that the Netherlands plans to take action against Israel if it does not increase humanitarian aid to Gaza — triggering a sharp response from Herzog, who accused the Dutch leader of lying about their conversation.
In a post on X published Monday evening, Schoof claimed he had discussed the “catastrophic situation” in Gaza with Herzog, adding that he warned the Israeli leader the Netherlands would take action if Gazans are not granted “immediate, unfettered, safe access to humanitarian aid.”
Schoof wrote that during the conversation, he had threatened to support efforts to suspend Israel’s participation in a European Union research program, and floated the idea of ending trade ties with the Jewish state.
Herzog, a figurehead known for his diplomacy and calm demeanor, responded with uncharacteristic candor to Schoof’s tweet.
“Sorry Prime Minister, with all due respect — this tweet does not reflect the spirit and details of the call,” Herzog replied on his X account.
“Nor does it reflect my crystal clear position that it will be a HUGE mistake if EU takes such steps especially in light of Israel’s ongoing and upgraded humanitarian efforts,” he added.
“I am especially saddened that the plight of our hostages and the demand for their immediate release are not even mentioned!”
A source told the Jerusalem Post that Schoof’s characterization of tough talk during the phone call was false.
In reality, Schoof told Herzog that “he is a true friend of Israel” but is under immense public pressure to take a stand on the Gaza aid issue, the source told the Post.
According to the source, Schoof said “he has no choice [but to]… support the suspension of a small part of the EU-Israel Association Agreement” in order to appease his voters.
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.
Mohsen Mahdawi speaks at a protest on the Columbia University campus, on November 9, 2023 in New York City. (Mukta Joshi / Getty Images)
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.
The coleader of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, Alice Weidel, gives a speech during a general debate on the budget of the Chancellery at the Bundestag in Berlin, on July 9, 2025. (Odd Andersen / AFP via Getty Images)
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.
“By some measures, men in the US today are doing worse than their fathers and grandfathers and, along a few dimensions, worse than women of the same age.” (Nicolas Armer / Picture Alliance via Getty Images)
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.
