Full disclosure: I got into a little physical altercation yesterday with the Chicago police and lost my notepad in the scuffle. We'll get to that, but for now please forgive any errors in the timeline.

The first march organized by the March for the Democratic National Convention was set to take off from Chicago's Union Park at 1 p.m. Reporters were invited to get there at 7 a.m; I have no idea if any did, but at 10:30 a.m. a friend texted to say, "Union Park right now is very underwhelming." This seemed to be the consensus going in; that the anticipated 30,000 marchers would come nowhere near, and that the press would be overrepresented, which turned out to be the case—while reporting I ran into seven journalists in I know, when the average is about zero. But some of the protesters were also following the trend of pasting "PRESS" across their chests. A young woman I met on the bus around noon did the same. When I asked who she was reporting for, she looked confused; it was just a shirt. Okay, but why?

Those entering Union Park were handed a gazillion pamphlets with slogans like "NO WAR BUT CLASS WAR SMASH IMPERIALISM WITH COMMUNIST REVOLUTION," "12 ESSENTIAL FACTS FOR UNDERSTANDING THE CURRENT ISRAEL-GAZA CONFLICT," "WORKERS STRIKE BACK, WHEN WE FIGHT—WE CAN WIN," and "NEITHER PARTY REPRESENTS THE WORKING CLASS—CLASS WAR 2024,"—the all-cap emphasis conveying the commitment of the pamphlet distributors. Nearly everyone at the rally turned out to be in their 20s, dressed in today's radical chic—keffiyeh as cape, keffiyeh as neck scarf,  keffiyeh as headwrap. There were a few women in full Handmaid's Tale regalia, many young people in pro-Socialist red, and one dude wearing, refreshingly, an old Star Wars t-shirt. There was no police presence inside the park proper, but just outside there were at least 100 officers, half of them on bicycles, all of them waiting in the shade for something to happen. When I asked whether they'd be accompanying the marchers on their 1.1-mile city-approved route, I was given two short nods.

Before any marching began, there were speeches from the stage—speeches about genocide in Palestine, abortion, student debt, colonial settlers, Black Lives Matter, and cops being bastards. On and on it went, past 1 p.m.; the chanting the speakers requested was rarely very chanty. It was hot and people were thirsty and the line for the porta-potties stretched over 200 people long. 

"Can someone help me spread this out so it can be seen by the helicopter?" asked a young man, unfurling a 50-foot sheet painted with the words, "LOOK UP 'NAKBA.'"

"Would you like to carry a sign?" asked another young man, trying to offload one of the 400 or so signs strewn across the field. The sign-makers had been industrious, affixing emphatic messages like "STOP THE CRIME—FREE THEM ALL" and "GENOCIDE JOE'S LEGACY: BUTCHER OF GAZA" to wooden stakes. The problem was, there weren't nearly enough takers. How many people did the guy next to me estimate were actually here?

"Five hundred," he said, after a beat, just before someone on stage shouted into the microphone how great it was to see 15,000 people in attendance. The guy adjusted his estimate to 1,500, which I'd say was about right.

What they lacked in numbers they made up for in enthusiasm, waving Palestinian flags, communist flags, anarchist flags, "land back" flags, and a flag whose exact origin the person holding it said he did not really know. Someone mentioned they'd seen some Israeli flags earlier but I didn't see any. As for American flags, I saw exactly one, carried by a veteran named Shawn, who said he had not liked seeing American flags burned during Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's visit to Congress.

"I think that's greatly deplorable," he said, as several young men with their faces covered moved close to him. But when they noticed that several members of the press also wanted to talk with the one dude carrying an American flag, they backed off. 

"Earlier they were saying derogatory things towards me like, 'get that shit out of here. What the fuck's wrong with you?'" he said. "But at the end of the day, nobody's going to intimidate me. Nobody's going to prevent me from voicing my opinion."

If there was a similarity in the way the crowd looked and behaved, their many and multiple demands were perhaps what gave the gathering a lack of cohesion and group energy. That changed at 2:02 p.m., when it was announced that there was a special guest speaker.

However you feel about independent presidential candidate Cornel West, you would have been as energized by his 5-minute speech. He roared and he cooed, talking about "our profound love for our Palestinian brothers and sisters" and how we must extend that profound love to all our brothers and sisters. It was the adrenaline shot everyone needed to get through the next hour. With the bike police edging closer, the marchers funneled out of the park and into the streets. Messages were shouted into bullhorns, girls danced, boys drummed— they were on the move to Park 578 a mile away. The sun was still shining and the press—there must have been one for every three marchers—walked on the sidewalks. Between them and the marchers were the bike police, pushing their bikes in formation, and astride yellow-vested "safety team" members, who kept themselves between the marchers and the police. It was all very choreographed, and one would not be faulted for thinking that this whole thing would go off without a hitch.

But of course, there would be a hitch, and it came in the form of young men with their heads and faces covered. Though they may have had no affiliation with them, they marched beneath an Anarcho-brat flag and a People's Defense Units (YPG) flag, representing the Kurdish militant group in Syria. A colleague mentioned he'd seen maybe eight of the men trying to start something earlier but they had not gained purchase, the other marchers not wanting to be part of whatever mayhem they might want to commit. But now we were at the mouth of Park 578, the turnaround spot for marchers and the closest point to the United Center, where the DNC was taking place.

"That way!" one of the young men shouted, pointing toward the United Center, trying to get the group, which had grown to maybe 15 men, to make a break for the tall barrier fences. It was not going to happen—not with the cops forming a triple-line barrier of bikes and other marchers yelling for the YPG brats to stop, shouting that the march had been planned for nearly a year! It was supposed to be peaceful! Stop fucking it up! At least that's what I imagined the girl in the keffiyeh was yelling at the young men, her voice so hoarse with emotion I could not make out the words.

My colleague and I tried to interview the young men, but they had the same response to every question: "We don't talk to media." It's a catchall phrase common among young protesters, the eyes above their masks growing not bolder but shakier with each iteration. You could see them thinking it was better to stonewall than risk having one's responses scrutinized and memorialized.

But this is not always the case! As I would find ten minutes later, when some of the protesters had had enough of longingly looking at the United Center and decided to breach an exterior fence. Pop pop clang, down went the barriers, in went maybe 75 protesters. Busting shit down was an exciting change, if entirely predictable, meanwhile, a gentler strain of protesters, mostly women, were shouting from the other side, "Come back!" It was time to march back to Union Park, they said. They did not like the risks people were taking, and they were not going to do their many causes any good.

I followed the protesters over the fence.

"Come on everybody! Come on!" shouted a tall lanky guy all in black, with a garbage can lid painted with the anarchist A strapped to his back. What was he wanting everyone to do?

"I want to get all the way inside the DNC!" he said, pointing toward the United Center. "I mean what are we doing here? Isn't this what we came here to do?"

Maybe not everybody; maybe not the 70-year-old lady peace activist who I'd watch gasp as the fence came down. Maybe this kind of bravado was not for her.

"I've seen 70-year-olds do it!" he said. "We can do it if we do it together. If we can dream it, we can do it!"

He was clanging his garbage can lid when someone shouted, "Cops on all sides!" We turned toward the phalanx of blue uniforms, in the jubilation no one had seen them form a walking line, or I hadn't seen it. Shouts of "Nazi motherfuckers" and "Fuck you!" lasted maybe 30 seconds before the cops were on us. I did my best to duck into a little alcove in the fencing. Yeah, that didn't work.

"Move it! Move it!" cops shouted, as people fell down or were grabbed; when they were variously combative or trying to flee.

"You're in a restricted area!" an officer shouted at me. Another prodded me with her nightstick.

"Don't hurt her!" a protester shouted, which I thought was kind of adorable and which I caught on video, just before finding a small egress to the other side. Two men pulled me through—thanks guys—and into the waiting path of another journalist pal calmly taking in the proceedings.

"Hello Nancy," he said, adding that he thought things were about to calm down—and they did. The bulk of protesters marched back to Union Park, perhaps unaware of the side streets lined with hundreds of waiting officers, who (I'm told) were instructed to pull down their face shields, in case they needed them. On this night, they did not.

The post The Anarchist Dreams: Dispatch From the DNC appeared first on Reason.com.

Gird your loins, it's DNC time: The Democratic National Convention starts today in Chicago, and the Israel/Palestine-related tensions that have been coursing through the left since October 7 may very well come to a head this week.

Tens of thousands of protesters are expected to set up right outside of security to protest the party's support of Israel; presumptive nominee Kamala Harris' husband, Doug Emhoff, who is Jewish, is expected to speak about Judaism on stage; and, just like during the Republican National Convention, some families of hostages taken by Hamas will plead onstage for the return of their loved ones.

Some delegates who eschewed voting for Kamala Harris, calling themselves the Uncommitteds, have broken from the party pick precisely because they do not support U.S. support for Israel in the Gaza war. The Uncommitted factor is especially relevant to Michigan, a swing state with a large Middle Eastern population, and Democratic officials have been attempting to make inroads with the vocal disgruntled in recent weeks; they want a DNC that signals unity, and the likelihood that massive protests will be taking place just outside the gates undermines this.

"The key question for Democrats this week is whether the demonstrators represent a meaningful group of voters who could swing the election in November, or if they are outliers on the left who should be resisted in an appeal to the center," sums up The New York Times. 

Hamas rejects latest ceasefire proposal: On Sunday, following days of tense negotiating and Secretary of State Antony Blinken shlepping to Israel believing an agreement was imminent, Hamas rejected a proposed ceasefire deal with Israel.

"After being briefed by the mediators about what happened in the last round of talks in Doha, we once again came to the conclusion that Netanyahu is still putting obstacles in the way of reaching an agreement, and is setting new conditions and demands with the aim of undermining the mediators' efforts and prolonging the war," declared Hamas in a statement, adding that the U.S.-brokered ceasefire "aligns with" Israel's demands.

At issue is the fact that the ceasefire did not force full a Israeli withdrawal from the entirety of the Gaza Strip. Israel had proposed maintaining a large security presence on the border between Egypt and Gaza, as well as maintaining control over the Netzarim Corridor, which divides the Gaza Strip's north from its south.

Blinken has called this round of negotiations a "decisive moment" for Israel and Hamas. In the last few weeks, Iran and its proxies, including Hezbollah, have vowed to strike Israel in retaliation for its July assassinations of Hezbollah official Fuad Shukr in Beirut and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran. Thus far, wider war has been staved off, but it's unclear for how much longer that will last; the fact that negotiations were in progress may have played a contributing role. Now that may not be so.

Scenes from New York: One of the New York City hospital systems, Northwell Health, is starting a studio to make its own movie and TV shows following the success of the Netflix show Lenox Hill, which followed doctors and patients within the system. But just a few years ago, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center had to pay out a more than $2 million settlement to federal regulators for failing to protect patient privacy when a television crew was filming inside the hospital. Expect more issues, both ethical and legal, to arise.

QUICK HITS

• "The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, which account for roughly a third of all US container imports, had their third-strongest month ever in July, just shy of an all-time high reached in May 2021. Back then, a wave of inbound consumer goods caused supply bottlenecks on land and a queue of cargo ships waiting for a berth offshore was getting longer by the day," reports Bloomberg. "Demand now is driven by retailers and other importers that are stocking up ahead of US tariffs on Chinese goods and a possible strike by a large group of American dockworkers—adding to the usual frenzy of pre-holiday ordering that occurs this time of year."
• Planned Parenthood Great Rivers is offering free vasectomies and abortions for DNC attendees at a van near the convention center, which seems a little self-defeating if the idea is to grow your political party.
• Also in DNC abortion news: Some protesters have dressed up as abortion pills.
• Officials in Georgia "like the prosperity that could come with making [electric vehicles], but not the California-style mandates that prop them up. They like the jobs but agree with many of their voters who think electric vehicles are a sheet metal-clad tenet of the Democrats' woke ideology," reports Politico. 
• Donald Trump's running mate, J.D. Vance, responded this weekend to news of a Kamala Harris poll bump by saying the "media uses fake polls."

The post DNC Readies for Protesters appeared first on Reason.com.

The first domino: A bad U.S. economic outlook, reflected in Friday's jobs report, helped prompt major stock sell-offs globally over the weekend.

"Japanese stocks collapsed on Monday in their biggest single day rout since the 1987 Black Monday sell-offs," reports Reuters, with the Nikkei 225 index falling 12.4 percent and the Topix index falling 12.2 percent. The Kospi index in South Korea fell more than 10 percent. Equity markets felt the pain in Taiwan, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and China, though to a lesser degree. "At one point, the plunge in Japanese and Korean stocks tripped a 'circuit breaker' mechanism that halts trading to allow markets to digest large fluctuations," reports The New York Times. "But even after those mandatory breathers, the sell-off in stocks seemed to accelerate. Jitters spread to the debt market, prompting a halt in trading in Japanese government bonds as well."

Wall Street's "fear gauge"—the VIX—jumped to its highest level since 2020, when the pandemic prompted a wild market fluctuation. "The market response is a reflection of the deteriorating U.S. economic outlook," Jesper Koll, a director at financial services firm Monex Group, told the Times. "It was a New York sneeze that forced Japanese pneumonia."

The U.S. jobs report, released Friday, found that hiring slowed significantly in July. Unemployment continued its slow creep upward—4.3 percent, the highest since October 2021—and wage growth eased a bit. The jobs report also revised the May and June numbers downward, by a combined 29,000 jobs, indicating that the July downshift did not come out of nowhere. It also "stoked fear of a coming recession" due to something known as the "Sahm Rule," named for economic Claudia Sahm, who identified in 2019 a useful recession indicator that our July jobs report has unfortunately met (more on that from Reason's Eric Boehm).

Inflation has showed plenty of signs of cooling a bit, responding to Federal Reserve rate hikes, but the jobs report means a rate cut "could be on the table" as soon as September, according to Fed Chair Jerome Powell.

In other words, the aspirational "soft landing"—a cooling down of inflation without triggering a recession—may not in fact be materializing. And these American warning signs are leading to global ripple effects.

Bloomberg's Joe Weisenthal has, I think, the smartest and most concise take on what's going on, for those who indulge:

10 THOUGHTS ON TODAY'S BIG MARKET SELOFF

In today's 5 Things newsletter, I jotted down a bunch of random stuff about this moment in stocks, crypto, FX, and macro.

Here they are

1) It was clear instantly on Wednesday that Powell was going to be offsides this market: pic.twitter.com/iJ6ipo7Grc

— Joe Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) August 5, 2024

Scenes from New York: Will Rudy Giuliani's real estate save him?

QUICK HITS

• The U.S. government believes Iran and Hezbollah will retaliate against Israel for the recent assassinations of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran and Hezbollah leader Fuad Shukr in Beirut.
• Per tabloid reporting, which was partially confirmed by the campaign, Kamala Harris' husband, Doug Emhoff, had an affair during his first marriage (not to Harris). The woman he had an affair with allegedly became pregnant and did not keep the baby, though the campaign has not acknowledged or confirmed that part.
• "Belgium's Olympic committee announced Sunday that it would withdraw its team from the mixed relay triathlon at the Paris Olympics after one of its competitors who swam in the Seine River fell ill," reports the Associated Press. "After a spring with an abnormal amount of rainfall, tests of the river's water found that the levels of E. coli bacteria were more than 20 times higher than what World Triathlon considers acceptable," wrote Reason's Natalie Dowzicky last week. "But the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, still jumped into the Seine earlier this month in an effort to instill confidence that the waterway was just fine. But a small dip is very different from submerging yourself for hours of racing."

This is the most French possible thing that could have happened when Paris hosted the Olympics:

Running with a really stupid idea because it sounds cool, then somehow ending up fucking over the Belgians. https://t.co/K6Id4CUVV5

— Tom (@Lawmadillo) August 5, 2024

• Fun fact:

Nirvana's Nevermind was released 12,000 days ago. Its release date is closer chronologically to Fidel Castro taking control of Cuba than to today.

— Dan Szymborski (@DSzymborski) August 1, 2024

The post Markets in Panic appeared first on Reason.com.

Israeli victories: Yesterday, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said its airstrikes in mid-July killed Mohammed Deif, a key Hamas operative and one of the masterminds behind the October 7 attacks.

On Wednesday, Ismail Haniyeh, another senior Hamas official, was killed by a bomb smuggled into a guesthouse in Tehran, Iran. Israel has claimed responsibility for the attack. "The bomb had been hidden approximately two months ago in the guesthouse, according to five of the Middle Eastern officials," reports The New York Times, also noting that it was detonated remotely. "The guesthouse is run and protected by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and is part of a large compound, known as Neshat, in an upscale neighborhood of northern Tehran."

A third victory for Israel was notched this week, with the killing of Fuad Shukr, a senior Hezbollah operative, who was killed in a strike on Beirut.

Back in April, an Israeli hit on Iranian officials in Syria led to direct strikes being exchanged, though they were showy in nature, designed more to make a statement than to actually do intense damage. Now, it remains to be seen how these groups—proxies of Iran—will respond to Israel's success in taking out these targets, as well as the fact that Haniyeh was taken out in Tehran.

"Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has issued an order for Iran to strike Israel directly, in retaliation for the killing of Mr. Haniyeh in Tehran, according to three Iranian officials briefed on the order," reports the Times. "It is unclear how forcefully Iran will respond, and whether it will calibrate its attack to steer clear of escalation, as it did in April with a barrage of missiles and drones that was telegraphed well in advance."

"We are on the verge of a large, large-scale escalation," Danny Citrinowicz, who used to helm the Iran branch for Israeli military intelligence, told The Wall Street Journal. "Iran is leading the axis, and they cannot protect one of the leaders of the axis coming for [incoming President Masoud] Pezeshkian's inauguration."

Now, President Joe Biden's administration claims it is hard at work deescalating tensions in the Middle East to stave off war. But, for those who've been following domestic politics, questions remain about the degree to which Biden—the 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. workday president—is even capable of handling a pressing foreign policy issue such as this one.

Scenes from New York: "Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Lyle Frank ruled on Thursday that the Council lacked the authority to expand access to the CityFHEPS voucher program for people facing eviction or homelessness to New Yorkers who earn above what current rules allow," reports Gothamist. "Tenants who receive CityFHEPS assistance typically pay 30% of their income toward rent, and city-funded vouchers cover the rest."

QUICK HITS

• "Brazil's Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has found himself at the forefront of Venezuela's crisis after [Nicolas] Maduro declared himself the victor of an election his opponents say was fraudulent," reports Bloomberg. "The dispute and Maduro's subsequent crackdown on dissent have thrust the leader of Latin America's largest nation into an increasingly uncomfortable position. The Venezuelan president is an old ally who still has the support of many within Lula's leftist Workers' Party, which endorsed Maduro's victory this week. The opposition and the growing list of global leaders who back it, meanwhile, have appealed to Lula's efforts to paint himself as a defender of democracy, especially after he rallied international support for fair elections in his own race just two years ago."
• For this week's Just Asking Questions release, we interviewed Vivek Ramaswamy (beware, there were technical issues so the quality is suboptimal at times):

• Blake Masters defeated in Arizona:

BREAKING: Abraham Hamadeh wins Republican nomination for U.S. House in Arizona's 8th Congressional District. #APRaceCall at 5:27 p.m. MST. https://t.co/FjgpZFcJ4E

— AP Politics (@AP_Politics) August 1, 2024

• Several journalists, including The Wall Street Journal's Evan Gershkovich, were just released from Russian prison in a swap. In total, 16 people were returned to America and European allies while eight were returned to Russia.

The @WSJ's piece about the secret negotiations to free Evan Gershkovich ends with an incredible anecdote: pic.twitter.com/wM7aWu44tu

— David Gura (@davidgura) August 1, 2024

The post The IDF's Big Week appeared first on Reason.com.

On March 14, 2024, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.), a man who 13 months prior had vowed at Jerusalem's Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center that "as long as Hashem breathes air into my lungs, the United States Senate will stand behind Israel with our fullest support," peered solemnly over his glasses into the Senate's C-SPAN cameras and informed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that it was time for him to go.

"The Netanyahu coalition no longer fits the needs of Israel after October 7," Schumer declared, referring to the shock Hamas massacre and mass kidnapping event just across the militarized border separating the Palestinian Gaza Strip from the Israeli envelope around it. "Nobody expects Prime Minister Netanyahu to do the things that must be done to break the cycle of violence, preserve Israel's credibility on the world stage, and work towards a two-state solution….At this critical juncture, I believe a new election is the only way to allow for a healthy and open decision-making process about the future of Israel."

And if Netanyahu, in such an election, were to win enough votes to form another government, then continue prosecuting the war against Israel's attackers in ways Schumer doesn't approve?

"Then," the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in U.S. history warned, "the United States will have no choice but to play a more active role in shaping Israeli policy by using our leverage to change the present course."

It's an increasingly common refrain among American critics of Israeli policy, including many who are otherwise wary of Washington thumbing the scales on world affairs: The $3.8 billion that the U.S. gives each year should directly influence Israeli behavior—on war, on humanitarian assistance to Gaza, on settlements in the West Bank, even on proposed reforms to the judiciary branch—or be withdrawn.

"The Netanyahu government, or hopefully a new Israeli government, must understand that not one penny will be coming to Israel from the U.S. unless there is a fundamental change in their military and political positions," Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) said last November, reiterating a critique he and several other candidates made when seeking the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.

President Joe Biden, a stalwart supporter of Israel throughout his half-century in public office, seemed this spring to be moving closer to Sanders' point of view. Three days before Schumer's well-telegraphed speech, Politico reported, based on "four U.S. officials with knowledge of internal administration thinking," that Biden "will consider conditioning military aid to Israel if the country moves forward with a large-scale invasion of Rafah."

The Rafah offensive was indeed tabled a few days later. But then, after the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on April 1 pulverized a World Central Kitchen aid convoy in Gaza, killing seven, Biden informed Netanyahu in a tense phone call that (in the words of a White House readout) Israel needed to "announce and implement a series of specific, concrete, and measurable steps to address civilian harm, humanitarian suffering, and the safety of aid workers," or else, for the first time in a generation, the U.S. would hold up military aid.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) and three dozen other members of Congress sent a letter to the president April 5 urging him "to reconsider your recent decision to authorize the transfer of a new arms package to Israel, and to withhold this and any future offensive arms transfers until a full investigation into the airstrike is completed." NBC declared this a potential "turning point" in U.S.-Israeli relations.

But that turn lasted fewer than 10 days. On April 14, Iran fired more than 300 potentially lethal missiles and drones into Israel, marking the first time the Islamic republic had directly attacked the Jewish state, after decades of supporting proxy harassments from Hamas, Lebanon's Hezbollah, Yemen's Houthis, and various armed factions in Syria and Iraq. Largely thanks to the technological and regional military agreements that the U.S. and Israel have jointly forged, virtually all of the projectiles that did not misfire were intercepted.

"Now is not the time to abandon our friends. The House must pass urgent national-security legislation for…Israel, as well as desperately needed humanitarian aid for Palestinians in Gaza," Biden wrote in The Wall Street Journal three days later, in support of a supplemental $26.38 billion Israeli package. "I've been clear about my concerns over the safety of civilians in Gaza amid the war with Hamas, but this aid…is focused on Israel's long-term defensive needs to ensure it can maintain its military edge against Iran or any other adversary."

That same day, after months of delay, embattled House Speaker Mike Johnson (R–La.) announced that the aid bill would finally be introduced on the House floor. The only attached condition was imposed not on Israeli policy makers but on the controversial United Nations Relief and Works Agency operation in Gaza. So much for a turning point.

Yet the conversation about leverage is precisely the one America needs to be having while confronting yet another deadly and seemingly intractable standoff in the Middle East. A realistic contemplation of Washington's regional and global system of carrots and sticks, at a time when American imperial appetites are on the noticeable decline, might reveal some awkward if potentially game-changing truths. Beginning with: There are many on the pro-Israeli side who want the same policy result as Bernie Sanders, for precisely the opposite reasons.

End it, Don't Mend it

Three months before the October 7 massacre, the American Jewish publication Tablet published a provocative essay by Jacob Siegel and Liel Leibovitz bluntly headlined "End U.S. Aid to Israel."

The brief: "Israel ends up sacrificing far more value in return for the nearly $4 billion it annually receives from Washington. That's because nearly all military aid to Israel…consists of credits that go directly from the Pentagon to U.S. weapons manufacturers," they wrote. "In return, American payouts undermine Israel's domestic defense industry, weaken its economy, and compromise the country's autonomy—giving Washington veto power over everything from Israeli weapons sales to diplomatic and military strategy."

Critics of Israel, particularly in light of the subsequent war with Hamas, will surely blanch at the notion that Washington has anything like "veto power" over Tel Aviv. Yet America has nonetheless coordinated and consulted on policy far more closely with Israel, including during this conflict, than it has on, say, nearby NATO ally Turkey in its ongoing battles with Syrian Kurds. All at a time when the comparative purchasing power of America's Israeli aid has plummeted.

"The Israel of 2023," Siegel and Leibovitz observed, "is immeasurably wealthier and more powerful than the dusty socialist country of 40 years ago, where local electrical grids could be overloaded by American hair dryers." Boy howdy is it.

Israel now has a highergross domestic product (GDP) per capita than Japan and Italy, and is closing in fast on France and the United Kingdom. In 1981, as the hawkish former Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams pointed out in Commentary last year, "the United States provided Israel with $4.5 billion in economic and military aid at a time when the entire GDP of the Jewish state was only $25.4 billion." Now? GDP is north of $500 billion.

Annual U.S. aid has gone from 17.7 percent of the Israeli economy to 0.7 percent; even with the big new cash infusion, that figure goes up this fiscal year to just 5.7 percent. And as Biden himself crassly observed when selling the supplemental, the strings attached include "send[ing] military equipment from our own stockpiles, then us[ing] the money authorized by Congress to replenish those stockpiles—by buying from American suppliers….[We're] help[ing] our friends while helping ourselves." So America is sending money that Israel no longer needs to lock in long-term contracts for the military-industrial complex. (The 10-year, $38-billion Memorandum of Understanding signed by President Barack Obama in 2018 allowed for Israel to spend about a quarter of the annual total on its own domestic defense production until this year, after which the percentage is to be ratcheted steadily down to zero.)

This close military partnership, which has been the basic bilateral setup since not long after the 1967 Six Day War, has produced benefits for both Washington and Jerusalem. Israel gets some of the world's most advanced defense tech, such as the Iron Dome and David's Sling missile-interception systems; the U.S. gets premium intelligence in a volatile region and a privileged seat at the table for making commerce-lubricating peace deals.

But it's also true those contracts could be freely entered into, without a cent of U.S. taxpayer money, just as both Sanders and anti-interventionist Republicans like Sen. Mike Lee (R–Utah) would prefer. What would happen to American influence then?

"Weaning Israel off of American assistance would have the added advantage of removing the issue of conditioning such aid or using it as leverage, ideas that sometimes surface when the United States and Israel differ on important policy issues, such as the peace process," former Israeli Justice Minister Yossi Beilin and former U.S. ambassador to Israel and Egypt Daniel Kurtzer wrote four years ago in The National Interest.

In other words, say goodbye to Schumer's—and Biden's—serially insisted-upon "two-state solution," which has been a political non-starter in Israel especially since October 7. And don't be surprised if the country's regional Qualitative Military Edge, enshrined in U.S. law, would be deployed more freely in preemptively striking Iran's offensive capabilities, whether in missile production, nuclear development, or senior-level military planning.

So would cutting aid to Israel actually lead to more, not less war? Making predictions in the Middle East is a fool's errand. But one way to think through the scenario planning, and move faster toward a world where foreign policy commitments are more commensurate with the domestic public opinion of the countries involved, is to remember a factor that too often escapes attention: Israel is hardly the only country along the Arabian Peninsula to receive billions in American military aid.

What Leverage Bought

If the U.S. permanently cut off all aid tomorrow—and even if the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the infamous "Israel lobby," were suddenly to close up shop—the bonds of affection between the two countries would still remain strong. According to a Gallup poll, Israel has for the past quarter-century been among the leading countries toward which Americans have the most favorable opinion. Eighty-five percent of the world's Jewish population lives either in the U.S. or in Israel, in roughly equal numbers (the numerical capital of Jewry is not Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, but New York City). There are some 200,000 dual citizens living in Israel; at least 33 were killed by Hamas on or after October 7, and five more were still believed to be held hostage as of May 1. Even as Americans—particularly Democrats, and the young—have soured on Israel's prosecution of the war, there remains between the countries a shared liberal democratic (and capitalistic) culture and decades' worth of human intercourse.

Now consider Saudi Arabia.

The country that has purchased more U.S. military equipment than any other—at $140 billion and counting—has been unpopular with the American public for the entire 21st century, and not only because it was home to most of the September 11 hijackers. The House of Saud's dictatorial monarchy routinely ranks near the bottom of global freedom indices, women only recently were granted the right to drive a car, and the regime infamously assassinated Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. Saudi Arabia has been a prime mover in the brutal, decade-long Yemeni civil war, a conflict that the United Nations estimates has led to nearly 400,000 deaths, most of them civilian.

Yet in the absence of any American sympathies at all, Riyadh has still been a key strategic partner with Washington for going on eight decades. Why? Oil production is certainly part of it, though Russia and Venezuela also have tons of the stuff. The truth is that the kingdom has been deft enough diplomatically, and flush enough with spendable petrodollars, to keep insinuating itself into whatever preoccupations the American empire has at the moment: the Cold War, the Gulf War, the Iraq War, containing Iran, and doing the often messy work of behind-the-scenes negotiations on military logistics, CIA skulduggery, and peace deals.

It is in that latter category that the Saudis find themselves yet again the object of not-quite-requitable American desire, this time in the form of a tantalizing peace pact with Israel, one that could potentially dwarf in practical and symbolic significance the historic 2020 Abraham Accords between the Jewish state and Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates. The Saudi asking price thus far? Just a military security guarantee, the likes of which America has only with Japan, South Korea, and the members of NATO.

Such are the realities of American leverage in the Middle East. Washington now includes among its major non-NATO allies Qatar (circa 2022, in exchange for help with U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan), Tunisia (2015, for its role in the Arab Spring), Morocco and Kuwait (2003, for assistance in the war on terror), Bahrain (2002, ditto), and more than a dozen other countries, including Israel and Egypt.

When states are both relatively poor and militarily insecure, as Israel was in the 1970s and Egypt remains to this day, the lure of access to the world's dominant military can persuade otherwise reluctant leaders to do things they and/or their populations would rather not. Like siting U.S. military bases, or taking the American side in a regional conflict—or recognizing Israel's right to exist.

Israel since its 1948 inception has been the single largest recipient of U.S. aid, at north of $300 billion in constant 2024 dollars. Clocking in at No. 2, with more than $150 billion, is Egypt. This American money bought the modern Middle East's most foundational peace treaty. That 1979 deal, brokered by President Jimmy Carter, not only formally ended the longtime antagonists' various wars; it marked the first time an Arab country formally accepted Israel's existence. For that move against the preponderance of his country's public opinion, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat paid two years later with his life.

Such are the inherent and ongoing tensions of bribing authoritarians to make unpopular deals, particularly in countries predisposed toward resenting Israelis and/or Americans. The basing of non-Muslim U.S. troops near Saudi Arabia's holy Islamic sites of Mecca and Medina was the original radicalizing complaint of Osama bin Laden. The Jordanian population, long encouraged to treat neighboring Israel as the enemy, was ill-prepared to accept King Hussein's 1994 signing of mutual recognition, nudged in part by President Bill Clinton's promise to forgive $700 million of the country's debt. A 2022 poll of the Hashemite kingdom by the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies found opposition to diplomatic recognition at a staggering 94 percent.

That number would almost certainly be lower if the Jordanian monarchy didn't choose to stoke anti-Israeli sentiment in public while cooperating privately to such a degree that the country shot down several Iranian missiles before they could even cross into Israeli airspace. King Abdullah II called for three noisy days of national mourning last October over the deadly explosion outside of Gaza's Al-Shifa Hospital even after Israel's involvement and the initial death toll had both been convincingly debunked. Queen Rania that same month told CNN that the world "silence" in the face of Israel's war was "deafening," and that "to many in our region, it makes the Western world complicit." The kingdom tamps down criticism of the normalization deal (which it still publicly defends) and prevents protesters from ransacking the Israeli embassy but otherwise keeps the rhetoric ratcheted.

A poor country with rampant unemployment, Jordan is a top-10 recipient of U.S. aid, and it relies heavily on Israel for trade and resource cooperation. Caught literally between Iran and Israel, home to a large and restive Palestinian population, beset by months of anti-Israel protests, the monarchy is increasingly fragile and constantly triangulating. If the U.S. were to suddenly pull the rug out from underneath Jordanian aid, some 6 percent of the country's GDP would go poof.

It is easy to look upon such realities as an excuse to keep perpetuating the American foreign policy status quo. If leverage in the authoritarian Arab neighborhood has bought peace deals with Israel, the reopening of the Suez Canal, and the forging of an anti-Iran axis in the Persian Gulf, why threaten to unravel these projects by beating a hasty retreat?

That question implies a far-too-rosy picture of the status quo, and it ignores the extent to which American public opinion deviates from the conventional wisdom in Washington.

Imperial Autopilot

The American-led world order, with its emphases on international cooperation, tariff reduction, and mutual military treaties, arose out of the ashes of World War II as a bulwark against communism. That comprehensible project, while the source of semi-constant controversy in implementation, was broadly popular in the United States; it was articulated regularly by every president from Harry Truman to George H.W. Bush. With the end of the Cold War, and the failure to secure an explicit postwar settlement, came the end of domestic support for America's starring global role.

What happens when institutions wheeze on long after their rationales have collapsed? Elite corruption and populist revolt.

Corruption doesn't necessarily have to mean self-enrichment, though surely the people near the top of the American foreign policy pyramid rarely have to scrounge up their next meal. It's more about the temptations of using America's unmatched power. In the immortal 1993 words of the United States' then-ambassador to the United Nations, Madeleine Albright, spoken to the more restraint-oriented Colin Powell, "What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about if we can't use it?" Albright's interventionist point of view ended up winning the battle for Clinton's foreign policy, and then Powell became the chief salesman for President George W. Bush's disastrous war of choice in Iraq.

Afghanistan was America's longest and least popular war, yet imperial autopilot, along with the fallacy of sunken costs, meant that it took more than two decades until Biden finally (and messily) ended it. NATO, and Washington's preeminence within it, is still the dominant military paradigm on the decidedly non-American continent of Europe, even with the open skepticism about the alliance expressed serially by the former and possibly future president Donald Trump.

America has already retreated under both Trump and Biden from its legacy role in reducing global tariffs, embracing instead the kind of made-in-America mercantilism that generations of their predecessors had mostly resisted. Wherever there is some 75-year-old, Washington-forged institution and commitments thereof, there is active domestic politics railing against it.

Washington's leading role in the Middle East is somewhat younger, at around a half-century, but similarly archaic. We no longer need to counter the Soviet Union, no longer depend on foreign oil, and no longer cling to the messianic delusion that liberal democracy in the region can be spread at the point of a gun. If you could somehow wipe the slate clean and craft a new U.S. approach to the Middle East that would better align with public opinion, what would that look like?

Almost certainly, the vast majority of foreign aid to this and other regions would vanish overnight. Nos. 3 through 10 on the 2022 aid-recipient list—Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Yemen, Egypt, Jordan, Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan—would be cut off. But Nos. 1 and 2 might well remain.

The Intolerability of October 6

The Republicans who unsuccessfully opposed the $95 billion aid package to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan were onto something, as have been such presidential candidates as Pat Buchanan, 1992 Clinton, and 2000 George W. Bush. Americans are generally weary of throwing billions abroad at problems that should be solved by someone else, particularly when there are unresolved problems galore at home.

But specifically, Americans favor helping with the defense of Ukraine (No. 1 on the 2022 aid recipient list), Israel (No. 2), and Taiwan. In the absence of a coherent and comprehensible strategy, one that reflects the more modest ambitions of voters, foreign policy remains subject to the temporal emotions and legacy attachments of the public. Jordan probably wouldn't win an up-or-down referendum on U.S. support; Israel almost certainly would. Both, however, could benefit from being cut off.

The Israeli case for independence is largely about latitude, but not only: Having to spend $3.8 billion a year rather than receive it means making some responsible choices about budget priorities. Authoritarian Arab governments, too, need to take, rather than continue to shirk, responsibility.

The horrors of October 7 revealed that the seemingly operable status quo of October 6 was in fact untenable. It was, and is, untenable for Israel to live next to neighbors, to the north and southwest, who regularly fire rockets into the country and sporadically dig tunnels to execute acts of terrorism. It's untenable for Gaza's residents to live under the dictatorial whims of a theocratic death cult that takes money from foreign governments not to build prosperity but to harass and murder Israelis. It's untenable for the region's autocrats to loudly pin the blame for their own heavy-handed misgovernance on American and Israeli scapegoats while quietly reaching out for assistance from Washington and Tel Aviv.

Qatar enjoys the status of being a major non-NATO ally with the U.S. while also financing and sheltering the leadership of Hamas. That too is untenable, and the designation should be withdrawn. Residents of the Palestinian West Bank live in a harassed and conflict-ridden uncertainty and emasculation, with second-class property rights and lousy government services. Untenable. Iran flexes its muscle to turn parts of Israel's neighbors into vassal states rather than fully fledged independent entities. None of this is tenable.

Meanwhile, the U.S. floats above the whole region, handing out aid and military contracts like a grand seigneur, hoping on Mondays to build peace, on Tuesdays to launch airstrikes, and on Wednesday try to tamp down the resulting messes from spreading into a regional war. It does deals with some of the most hideous regimes on earth while the captive populations seethe.

It is axiomatic, yet catastrophically underappreciated in Washington: Those with the most power will inevitably behave corruptly, and those without responsibility will inevitably behave irresponsibly. An Israel less tethered may feel less constrained, sure, but it may also find itself more isolated on the world stage, and therefore a tad more cautious. Arab leaders without the American security blanket may find themselves having to speak blunt truths to their populations, including about the true sources of their comparative lack of prosperity and freedom. And a United States less compromised by getting its thumbs in every pie will potentially have more, not less, moral standing in the world.

So cut off Israel. And Egypt, and Jordan, and Saudi Arabia as well. Let them bear the responsibility of their own actions, and the costs of their own security. It's time to consciously manage America's imperial drawdown, rather than careen between fading Atlanticism and resurgent populism. What's the point of having this superb military? To defend America.

The post What If the U.S. Cuts Off Aid to Israel? appeared first on Reason.com.

Bombs kill people. When someone provides bombs to a government at war, those weapons will be used to kill people. It's a simple fact but one that seems to have eluded Democrats.

After voting to send bombs to the Israeli military, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) condemned the Israeli military for killing Palestinian civilians with an American-made bomb. And after urging the Israeli military to use smaller munitions, the Biden administration found itself scrambling to deal with a mass civilian casualty event caused by one of those smaller weapons.

On Sunday, the Israeli Air Force bombed Tel al-Sultan, a neighborhood of Rafah that Israel had previously designated a safe zone for fleeing civilians. The Israeli government claimed the airstrike successfully killed two senior Hamas commanders. But a fire started by the bomb spread through the densely-packed tent city, burning to death at least 45 people, including 12 women, eight children, and three elderly. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated that the civilian deaths were a "tragic mistake."

British doctor James Smith called the fire "one of the most horrific things that I have seen or heard of in all of the weeks that I've been working in Gaza." CNN found pieces of a GBU-39/B Small Diameter Bomb, a type of 250-pound bomb that the U.S. military had rush-shipped to Israel following the Hamas attacks last October, with serial numbers from a California manufacturer.

"The Israeli bombing of a refugee camp inside a designated safe zone is horrific," Warren stated on social media. "Israel has a duty to protect innocent civilians and Palestinians seeking shelter in Rafah have nowhere safe to go. Netanyahu's assault of Rafah must stop. We need an immediate cease-fire."

Last month, Warren had voted for a $26.38 billion U.S. military aid package to Israel, as Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) pointed out. "Ma'am, you voted to send those bombs to Israel," he wrote in a response to Warren's statement.

Warren's office did not respond to a request for comment. In a statement last month, Warren noted that she voted for the aid package after the Biden administration agreed to certify that every military receiving U.S. aid "follows international law, protects civilians in war zones and allows for humanitarian aid."

On May 10, the administration ruled that there are "reasonable" accusations that Israel breaks the laws of war but that the Israeli government gave "credible and reliable" assurances about how it plans to use U.S. weapons. President Joe Biden also said that he would not be "supplying the weapons" for an Israeli invasion of Rafah that threatened the civilian population and held up a shipment of Mark 80 series bombs, which were responsible for some of the worst mass-casualty attacks in Gaza.

At a Senate hearing earlier this month, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin presented the GBU-39/B Small Diameter Bomb as a safer alternative to the Mark 80 series: "A Small Diameter Bomb, which is a precision weapon, that's very useful in a dense, built-up environment, but maybe not so much a 2,000-pound bomb that could create a lot of collateral damage."

Last October, the Israeli military used two American-made 2,000-pound bombs to assassinate a Hamas commander, killing dozens of civilians in the Jabaliya refugee camp.

Austin is right that 2,000-pound bombs, which can kill everything within 600 feet, are more likely to harm bystanders than lighter alternatives. And as the name suggests, the Small Diameter Bomb has a smaller lethal radius. However, that doesn't make the bombs any less lethal for people inside the radius—or people caught up in secondary fires caused by the weapon.

Much of the Israeli army's "precision" targeting is carried out by artificial intelligence programs. The Israeli publication +972 Magazine has reported that one AI targeting system called "Lavender" is allowed to kill a large number of civilians per Hamas fighter, and is believed to have a 10 percent error rate when identifying fighters in the first place.

Another program revealed by +972, called "Where's Daddy," targets Hamas fighters who have left the battlefield and gone home to their families.

In other words, the type of weapon matters but how the weapon is used matters more. Despite Biden's earlier threats and assurances over human rights, the Biden administration is keen to defer to Israeli claims.

"As a result of this strike on Sunday, I have no policy changes to speak to," White House spokesman John Kirby said on Tuesday. "It just happened. The Israelis are going to investigate it. We're going to be taking great interest in what they find in that investigation. And we'll see where it goes from there."

The post Democrats Surprised To Learn Bombs Are Used To Bomb People appeared first on Reason.com.

On April 13, Iran launched an unprecedented retaliatory drone and missile attack on Israel, leading the U.S. and its allies to reach once again for their favorite weapon of war—sanctions.

This knee-jerk reaction was as predictable as it was ill-founded, according to the scholarly research. In Nicholas Mulder's 2022 treatise The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War, he traces the history of sanctions from the blockades in World War I to today's morass of economic sanctions. Mulder concludes that "the historical record is relatively clear: most economic sanctions have not worked."

Mulder's treatise was followed by the book Backfire: How Sanctions Reshape the World Against U.S. Interests by Agathe Demarais. Drawing on her experience as an economic policy adviser for the diplomatic corps of the French Treasury, Demarais observes that sanctions tend to unite rather than isolate countries that are at odds with the U.S. and its allies, thereby transforming the geopolitical landscape and global economy to the detriment of U.S. influence.

The case of Iran is particularly illustrative of these points. In the recent How Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare, authors Vali Nasr, Narges Bajoghli, Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, and Ali Vaez present a detailed study on the long-term impacts of economic sanctions on Iran. Nasr is an Iranian-born distinguished professor of international affairs and Middle East studies, a veteran diplomat, and a member of the U.S. State Department's Foreign Affairs Policy Board. He and his collaborators studied the economic data and conducted long-form oral history interviews with 80 residents of Iran. The authors demonstrate that decades of Western sanctions, including the Trump administration's "maximum pressure" campaign of 2018, have neither modified Iran's international behavior in ways intended by policy makers nor precipitated any semblance of regime change.

Instead, sanctions have inflicted severe hardships on ordinary Iranians. The middle class has shrunk significantly from 45 percent in 2017 to 30 percent in 2020. If that wasn't bad enough, Nasr and his colleagues estimate that the death toll attributable to the humanitarian catastrophes triggered by sanctions—such as food shortages and the breakdown of critical medical systems—has amounted to "hundreds of thousands."

By imposing sanctions, the U.S. sought to crush Iran's economy and make life so difficult for ordinary Iranians that they would rise up and either change the regime's behavior or overthrow it altogether. However, this strategy relied on the assumption that Iranians would blame their misery on their own government and not those imposing the sanctions. Rather than blaming their government, Iranians have experienced a classic rally-'round-the-flag effect with sanctions inadvertently solidifying support for the regime. By creating animus against the U.S., sanctions have turned Iran's hurting middle class into either de facto or de jure supporters of Iran's leaders.

This is reflected in the interviews conducted by Nasr and his colleagues. Hamid, an interviewee and a disaster management specialist in Iran's civil society sector, said of sanctions: "All they've done is make the Revolutionary Guard more powerful. Those of us in civil society are suffocating."

Reza, a disillusioned university professor, echoed Hamid's concerns: "If it's not the nuclear issue, it's our ballistic missiles. If it's not our ballistic missiles, it'll be human rights. If it's not human rights, [the U.S.] will find another reason [to sanction Iran]."

Furthermore, Nasr and his co-authors contend that sanctions have driven the Iranian government to adopt more defensive and aggressive postures—the very behaviors that spurred the U.S. to impose sanctions on Iran in the first place. This pattern of behavior, where a sanctioned state becomes more militaristic and risk-taking, is well-documented and aligns with what economic theory predicts about actors with "nothing to lose." This was highlighted by William L. Silber in The Power of Nothing to Lose: The Hail Mary Effect in Politics, War, and Business, in which he elucidates how extreme pressure during times of "war" can lead nations to take bold, often reckless actions.

It's clear that the sanctions landscape is littered with failure—not just in Iran but also in Syria, Venezuela, North Korea, Cuba, and, most recently, Russia. Despite their dismal track record, a 2021 Treasury Department report showed that the use of sanctions had surged by a stunning 900 percent since 2000. The persistence in using this tool highlights a disconnect between expected and actual outcomes in U.S. foreign policy strategy.

If the U.S. and its allies had aimed to create a more moderate Iran or change the regime with sanctions, they have failed. What is needed is a more nuanced and effective foreign policy that rests on diplomacy and does not inadvertently strengthen the very behaviors and regimes the U.S. aims to modify.

The post Sanctions Are for Losers appeared first on Reason.com.

The House of Representatives passed a $95 billion military spending package over the weekend, including $59 billion in weapons purchases in three separate bills. The aid package had been held up because some Republicans opposed more aid to Ukraine. Those concerns melted away after this month's Iranian-Israeli clashes.

The Senate already passed a similar $95 billion package two months ago, so the new House spending bills should pass the Senate and make it to President Joe Biden's desk quickly. The House package also includes a fourth "national security" bill with measures that the Senate has not voted on, including the forced sale of TikTok and new economic sanctions on Iran and Russia.

"Today, members of both parties in the House voted to advance our national security interests and send a clear message about the power of American leadership on the world stage," Biden declared in a statement after the legislation passed.

The White House advertised these bills as an aid package for Ukraine, Israel, and friendly nations in the Indo-Pacific region, such as Taiwan. But the bulk of the money will go directly into the American military-industrial complex. The package includes $29.5 billion to replenish stockpiles of American weapons given to Ukraine, Israel, and Indo-Pacific allies as well as another $29.5 billion for the development, production, and procurement of new weapons.

The wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East have burned through stockpiles of American ammunition and missiles faster than they can be replaced, and American factories will have trouble keeping up even if more money is thrown at them.

Some non-American weapons manufacturers are also poised to rake in taxpayers' money from the aid package. The U.S. government will spend $5.2 billion on Israel's Iron Dome, Iron Beam, and David's Sling defense systems, produced by an Israeli company, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems. And the Indo-Pacific bill loosens rules for spending Defense Production Act money on British and Australian companies. The United States, Britain, and Australia are working together on the AUKUS submarine project.

Supporters of the aid package have claimed that Ukraine and Israel are fighting so that American troops don't have to. But the bills themselves make it clear how much heavy lifting the U.S. military is already doing in these wars. They include $11.3 billion to support an American military buildup in Europe, and $2.4 billion for American military operations in the Middle East.

U.S. forces have bombed the Houthi movement that is threatening Israeli shipping in the Red Sea, shot down most of the Iranian missiles and drones en route to Israel, and flown surveillance drones over Gaza in order to provide intelligence to the Israeli army.

The United States is at risk of getting dragged further into these conflicts, as the Biden administration has been having trouble controlling its proxies. Israel bombed an Iranian consulate without consulting with Washington, leading to last week's Iranian-Israeli dustup. Meanwhile, Ukraine has refused U.S. calls to stop attacking inside Russian territory.

While pumping money into the wars, the package also provides aid to people that the wars have made homeless. The bills allot around $9 billion to refugee aid and other humanitarian relief, on the condition that none of the money is spent on the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, the Palestinian refugee organization that Israel has accused of supporting Hamas. (The agency, for its part, has accused Israel of torturing its employees into confessing alleged Hamas ties.)

And as usual, the spending package includes a hodgepodge of unrelated or only vaguely related items: $98 million for the Department of Energy to produce nuclear isotopes, $250 million for the World Bank's emergency response fund, $75 million for Middle Eastern border agencies fighting drug smuggling, and $390 million for the Federal Emergency Management Agency to help nonprofit organizations defend their facilities from terrorism.

The legislative package was designed to prevent either Democratic or Republican dissidents from derailing it. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R–La.) broke the aid package apart into three separate bills, then put them back together again after they passed. That way, votes against aid to Ukraine did not count against aid to Israel, and vice versa.

It was a compromise between the Biden administration, which wanted to send Ukraine and Israel aid together, and Republicans, who wanted to vote on aid to Israel separately. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and CIA Director Bill Burns have personally lobbied Johnson over the past two months, according to CNN, as Ukrainian troops have lost ground to Russia.

Johnson appealed heavily to conservative Christian feelings about Israel when trying to sell Republicans on the package. "Of course, for those of us who are believers, it's a Biblical admonition to stand with Israel," he told Newsmax on Friday.

The Ukraine-focused bill passed 311–112, with unanimous Democratic support and some Republican support. Many Democrats cheered and waved Ukrainian flags during the vote. Johnson snapped at them: "We should only wave one flag on the House floor, and I think we know which flag that is."

The Israel-focused bill passed 366–58, with the vote mixed across party lines. Although Democrats have led criticism of Israel's treatment of Palestinians and Republicans have traditionally taken a hawkish pro-Israel line, a few Republicans took a stand against spending taxpayers' money on the Israeli military.

"If Congress wants to send money to Israel, then we should defund the United Nations first," Rep. Matt Gaetz (R–Fla.) said on social media. "I have concerns about all deficit spending when sending money to any country, even if that country is a great ally or under attack."

The libertarian-leaning Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.), who is now supporting an effort to oust Johnson, told Fox News that the military spending package was Johnson's "third betrayal" of his base, after helping pass an omnibus spending bill and reauthorize mass surveillance.

"He's the uniparty speaker now," Massie said.

The post Democrats and Republicans Unite To Give Weapons Manufacturers $59 Billion appeared first on Reason.com.

Israel attacks Iran: Overnight, Israeli forces attacked near Isfahan, Iran, in retribution for Iran's barrage of drones and missiles that hit Israel roughly a week ago.

This round of fighting was started by an April 1 Israeli strike in Syria that struck an Iranian consulate complex and killed three senior commanders and four officers reportedly responsible for dictating Iran's military strategy. But Iran and Israel have been engaged in a shadow war for a long time; recent strikes just bring tensions out into the open.

Iranian air defense systems reportedly intercepted most of the drones. Some flights over Iran's airspace were diverted, while others were canceled. Damage was minimal.

Isfahan is where several of Iran's nuclear sites are located, as well as its uranium enrichment program that's necessary for developing nuclear capabilities. Some of the strikes seemed designed to hit a major military base in the area; but just as Iran's attack barely harmed Israel, the same seems to be true here.

Within Israel, opinion was split. Some engaged in saber-rattling, while others said the attack looked "weak."

"Iran must understand that when it acts against us, we have the ability to strike at any time, and we can do serious damage," said Eyal Hulata, a former national security adviser, on Galei Tzahal (Army Radio). "We have a highly capable air force, and the United States is on our side."

Iranian officials, too, have signaled mixed views. Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi had warned that "the tiniest act of aggression" on his nation's soil would provoke a massive response, and that "nothing would remain from the Zionist regime." But many noted that Iran's attack on Israel—as well as the ample warning given—seemed like it wasn't designed to do much damage. In other words: Both nations have escalated, yes, but also shown some restraint and warranted trepidation, despite posturing to the contrary.

Biden's sticky situation: "Democratic donors covered more than $1 million in legal fees racked up by attorneys representing President Joe Biden in a yearlong special counsel probe into his handling of classified documents," reports the Associated Press. "The use of party funds to cover Biden's legal bills is not without precedent and falls within the bounds of campaign finance law, but it could cloud Biden's ability to continue to hammer former President Donald Trump over his far more extensive use of donor funds to cover his legal bills."

Of course, it's unlikely that will actually happen because that would require an adversarial mainstream media that's interested in actually holding Biden accountable for his duplicitousness.

"Every single time you give to the campaign, we're going straight to talk to voters…we are not spending money on legal bills or hawking gold sneakers," said Rufus Gifford, Biden's campaign finance chair, on MSNBC earlier this month, in a soundbite he was surely proud of. It turns out that this is simply untrue!

Scenes from New York: "At New Jersey's Teterboro and Long Island's Islip airports, dozens of private jets destined for Florida take off at times such as 11:42 p.m. or 11:54 p.m. Over at JFK, a regular flight from San Juan, Puerto Rico, arrives at a seemingly purposeful time: about 15 minutes after midnight. Meanwhile, tax attorneys tell stories of clients idling in their luxury SUVs near the New Jersey entrance to the George Washington Bridge shortly before 12 a.m., waiting for the clock to turn before crossing the state line to New York."

Inside the wonderful world of rich people making sure their residence stories line up in case they're audited, courtesy of Bloomberg. Each and every one of these people? Heroes, in my book.

QUICK HITS

• The Appeal published a database of prison commissary prices. Some items available for purchase by prisoners are marked up by as much as 600 percent.
• Yesterday, 108 Columbia students were arrested after the school called in cops to attempt to empty a 50-tent encampment that had been set up, called the "Gaza Solidarity Encampment." Video footage here.
• Non-iPhone users are apparently being excluded from group chats. Don't worry, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) is coming to the rescue. Her plan? Break up Apple.
• Challenges with collecting data on religious service attendance over time, from Marginal Revolution.
• Interesting case study on the use of AI in documentaries:

If true, and looks like it is, this is a major ethical breach.

I say this as someone in favor of using effects, including AI, in documentaries.

Many documentary elements, like in all film, operate at a subconscious level for the viewer. These elements should generate an… https://t.co/DdsNlu6u19

— Zach Weissmueller (@TheAbridgedZach) April 19, 2024

The post Israel's Retaliation appeared first on Reason.com.

No sit-ins on company dime: Yesterday, Google fired 28 of its workers after employees held sit-ins to protest the company's contracts with the Israeli government. The employees were part of a group called "No Tech for Apartheid," which protests the provision of cloud computing—called Project Nimbus—to the Israeli government.

"Physically impeding other employees' work and preventing them from accessing our facilities is a clear violation of our policies, and completely unacceptable behavior," said a company spokesman in a statement.

It's interesting watching tech companies decide they have no tolerance for this type of employee heckler's veto. Anti-Israel activism—which has for years involved protesting Project Nimbus, to the point that Israel even wrote a provision about employee activism into the contract it has with Google—has long been an undercurrent at the tech company. But just a few years ago, when companies wanted to be at the vanguard of wokeness, they treated such activism differently than they're treating it today.

Back in 2018, thousands of Google employees protested Project Maven, a contract with the Pentagon that would have used the company's AI technology to assess drone surveillance footage. Google higher-ups acquiesced to the activists' demands, saying they would not renew the contract and developing a set of AI guiding principles that landed squarely in the middle of the road. "While we are not developing AI for use in weapons," CEO Sundar Pichai wrote at the time, "we will continue our work with governments and the military in many other areas." After all, "these collaborations are important and we'll actively look for more ways to augment the critical work of these organizations and keep service members and civilians safe."

Give an inch, take a mile: Now, employees are understandably emboldened. "I refuse to build technology that empowers genocide," one Googler shouted last month during a tech conference keynote speech given by Barak Regev, head of Google Israel. The employee was promptly fired for "interfering with an official company-sponsored event."

Employees who apply to work for Google should probably be aware that the company has a long history of military contracts, both American and foreign. "The Federal Procurement Data System shows the Coast Guard bought licenses to Google Earth in 2005; the Army did the same in 2007," reported Wired. Not to mention: "The Pentagon had a sympathetic ear at the top. In 2016, Eric Schmidt, formerly Google's CEO and then Alphabet's executive chair, became chair of the department's Defense Innovation Advisory Board, which promoted tech industry collaboration with the agency."

"This is a huge escalation and a change in how Google has responded to worker criticisms," said one employee who protested yesterday. But the actual types of contracts Google goes after has not changed; it's merely that the company pivoted from soft on activism to much tougher, as it seemingly realized inmates cannot—and should not—run the asylum. Or, in this case, occupy the offices of Google Cloud's CEO during the workday.

Seating the jury: In Manhattan, former President Donald Trump's trial is proceeding more quickly and smoothly than expected, with seven out of 12 total jurors already picked.

The case against Trump concerns the falsifying of business records related to hush money payments he doled out following a sexual tryst with porn star Stormy Daniels. He's being brought up on 34 felony counts and could face a total of four years in prison if convicted. Given what a polarizing figure Trump is, there were concerns about how jury selection would go, but it appears to be proceeding rather smoothly.

The jurors so far include "a man originally from Ireland who will serve as foreman, an oncology nurse, a grandfather originally from Puerto Rico, a middle-school teacher from Harlem, two lawyers and a software engineer for Disney," reported The New York Times. Picking a truly fair and impartial jury, that's representative of New York as a whole, is a near-impossible task; it remains to be seen whether anyone will pull the wool over the eyes of those selecting them or become improperly enchanted by the media spotlight. (More detail on those who were not picked, and more on the questions jurors have been asked.)

Scenes from New York: New excuse just dropped for why state legislators can't put together a budget on time.

QUICK HITS

• NPR's new CEO appears to hate tech and the people who make it, arguing in support of the idea that "the rise of tech empires threatens society," wrote Pirate Wires' Sanjana Friedman. (Not to mention, she was apparently very triggered by Hereticon, the best social event of the year.)
• What comes next for Israel?
• Everything you ever wanted to know about the forgotten moral panic over beepers.
• As the International Space Station gets retired, are we entering the era of the private space station?
• Europoor discourse is raging on Twitter:

There's a European upper middle-class cope which basically says "yes, America might look richer, but there's no work-life balance, culture, or accessible healthcare." What I've learnt moving here is that, no, for genuinely comparable professionals, America is just much richer.

— Ryan Bourne (@MrRBourne) April 17, 2024

• "When the government of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela and his country's opposition signed an agreement in October to work toward free and fair elections this year, it was seen as a glimmer of hope after years of authoritarian rule and economic free fall," reported The New York Times. The U.S. lifted oil sanctions, hoping for the best. Now, merely six months later, "the Maduro government has made several moves that have dimmed the chances of legitimate elections, and a frustrated Biden administration on Wednesday announced that it was letting the sanctions relief expire."
• A better debate format is possible:

I would enjoy a debate between him and Trump where the moderators just teed them up, shame-free, to tell the most fanciful bullshit stories about themselves and their families. https://t.co/9QO20RsKBk

— Matt Welch (@MattWelch) April 17, 2024

• The libertarian take on Cruel Intentions we didn't know we needed.

The post Google Fires 28 appeared first on Reason.com.

President Joe Biden announced Friday that the U.S. military will work with Jordan to begin airdropping aid to starving Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Ever since it was proposed, this idea has attracted criticisms from experienced humanitarian workers, who say the airdrops are an expensive, wasteful gimmick to avoid addressing the political problems causing the starvation.

The charity Oxfam America, for example, issued a statement Thursday arguing that airdrops "would mostly serve to relieve the guilty consciences of senior U.S. officials whose policies are contributing to the ongoing atrocities and risk of famine in Gaza." Instead, it said, Biden should "cut the flow" of American weapons to Israel.

Jeremy Konyndyk, the president of Refugees International and a former disaster relief official in the Obama and Biden administrations, outlined the problems with airdrops in a PBS interview a day before Biden's announcement.

"We only used them when we had absolutely no other option, because they're the worst way to get aid in. They cost a lot of money, they're difficult to mount logistically, and they get very little volume," Konyndyk said. "We're only resorting to airdrops because of the blockages by the Israeli government."

Airdropping food costs about $16,000 per ton, as opposed to $180 per ton on average to move food aid by truck, according to a U.S. Air Force study from 2016.

Under pressure from the Biden administration, the Israeli government has opened a land crossing into the Gaza Strip—but Israeli nationalist protesters have physically blocked the crossing several times. Meanwhile, goods entering Gaza from Egypt must still go through the arduous Israeli border inspection process.

Sen. Chris van Hollen (D–Md.), who visited the Egyptian side of the Rafah crossing in January, told The New Yorker that some shipments were being held at the border for 20 days, and that he saw entire shipments turned back because they contained just one banned item, such as a tent with a metal pole.

The U.S. government itself has admitted that the starvation is a political problem, although it blames Hamas rather than Israel.

"It is not a question of aid going in," U.S. State Department spokesman Matt Miller told reporters on Thursday. "There is a distribution problem inside Gaza right now because there are police officers—some of whom are members of Hamas—who have been providing the security for that distribution inside Gaza. And what Israel says is that they have a legitimate right to go after Hamas. We would obviously prefer to see members of a security force inside Gaza who are not Hamas members."

Inside the Gaza Strip, distribution has been chaotic. Riots have broken out around aid convoys, and Hamas-affiliated police shot a teenager in a December incident. Israeli forces have also bombed the police officers guarding aid convoys. U.S. official David Satterfield said last month that the attacks on police in Gaza have made it "virtually impossible" to protect aid from "criminal gangs."

The deadliest aid-related incident of the war, known as "flour massacre," took place Wednesday, when Israeli forces opened fire on a crowd of Palestinians seeking aid. According to the Palestinian health ministry, 112 people were killed. The Israeli military claims that its troops opened fire when Palestinians approached them in an unsafe way, that their gunfire caused only 10 casualties, and that most of the deaths were produced by a stampede.

That day, the war's Palestinian death toll reportedly crossed 30,000 deaths. Half a million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, a quarter of the population, are facing imminent starvation, according to U.N. officials.

In addition to announcing the airdrops, Biden said that he was seeking an "immediate" six-week ceasefire and a "surge" of aid on the ground. He has so far resisted calling for a permanent end to the war. When the war resumes, the aid that cost Americans so much to fly in may soon be bombed by American weapons.

The post Airdropping Aid to Gaza Is an Expensive Gimmick appeared first on Reason.com.

Reporter and podcaster Eli Lake and author Jeremy Hammond debated the resolution, "The root cause of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the Palestinians' rejection of Israel's right to exist."

Taking the affirmative is Lake, the former senior national security correspondent for The Daily Beast and Newsweek. He is currently a reporter at The Free Press and host of The Re-Education podcast. He has also contributed to CNN, Fox News, C-SPAN, Charlie Rose, the I Am Rapaport: Stereo Podcast, and Bloggingheads.tv.

Hammond, an independent journalist and author, takes the negative. He is the author of several books, including Obstacle to Peace: The US Role in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.

• Video and Audio Editing: John Osterhoudt

The post What's the Root Cause of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict? appeared first on Reason.com.

As I watched the gigantic, awesome, triumphant, overwhelming, punishingly large and loud Dune: Part Two in IMAX earlier this week, I couldn't help but think of an old meme. 

Sometime before the 2021 release of Dune: Part One, a clever anonymous poster mocked up a "know your candidates" page featuring Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. Only the "issue" they were discussing wasn't health care or foreign policy. It was, "What is Dune about?" 

In the meme, Sanders' answer was typically long-winded and discursive: "Well, it's hard to say Dune is about any one thing, because Dune is rich with themes. The first book, for example, is about ecology, and the hero's journey, and as a criticism of the Foundation series' take on declining empires, among other things. The second book subverts the hero's journey told in the first book, and the later books follow in…" and then the fake Sanders answer trails off the page. 

The meme version of Biden simply responds: "Dune is about worms." 

The magic of director Denis Villeneuve's two-part adaptation of Frank Herbert's 1965 sci-fi novel is that it captures both of the fake candidate answers from the meme. It's an intricate desert epic about ecological balance, the harshness of nature, the economics of resource extraction, imperialism, tribal politics, corporate intrigue, groovy psychedelic drugs, culture clash, and Golden Age science fiction missing the point, among other things. 

But it's also about, you know, worms. 

Specifically: very, very big worms. 

Even more than the first film, which covered a little more than half of Herbert's novel, Dune: Part Two is a showcase for cinematic grandiosity, for movies as conveyors of sheer, terrifying enormity. The movie is the tale of young Paul Atreides, a young duke whose family was killed by their rivals the Harkonnens after a distant emperor granted the Atreides charge of the planet Arrakis. 

Arrakis isn't just any planet: It's the home to spice, a psychedelic drug that also happens to power interstellar travel, which is made by the planet's native giant sandworms. Imagine if oil was also LSD, and it was produced by roving, murderous whales who lived deep in the desert sands. 

The first installment was the story of Atreides' journey to Dune and the defeat of his family. The second is the story of his triumphant revenge, as he unites the local people, the Fremen, in defiance of the Harkonnen overlords.

Herbert's novel is replete with descriptions of corporate structures and what amount to company strategy discussions about economic fundamentals and resource extraction metrics, all mixed with complex political machinations and semi-inscrutable hallucinogenic dream logic featuring religious prophecies and drug-addled visions, plus a lot of asides about the elegant sustainable eco-technology of life on a barren sand planet. At times, reading Dune resembles reading minutes from a corporate board meeting while tripping balls with green-tech climate activists in the desert. 

Anyway, you can probably see what meme-Bernie was talking about. 

The movie, however, captures all of this clunky complexity quite well, capturing desert life among the Fremen and gesturing at their political structures and religious beliefs without subjecting viewers to drawn-out exposition. Villeneuve and co-screenwriter Jon Spaihts understand that a thoughtfully imagined fictional world doesn't need to constantly stop to explain itself; it can just go about its business. 

But then, in the midst of all this, there are the worms. In contrast to Dune: Part One, which closed with a hint of the possibility, this time Paul Atreides gets to ride them. And it is awesome. 

In Dune: Part Two, Villeneuve delivers a handful of truly gargantuan set pieces featuring Arrakis' skyscraper-sized sandworms as they plow through the desert of the film's alien planet. Along with his work on the first-contact film Arrival, they mark Villeneuve as Hollywood's most successful purveyor of colossal mystery.

As with that movie's obelisk and its tentacled alien inhabitants, there's something truly alien about the sandworms of Arrakis, and also a sense of scale and vastness that few other filmmakers convey. Watching a sandworm plunge through desert valleys, blasting tidal waves of sand in its wake, on an oversized IMAX screen in kneecap-rattling surround sound is the sort of audiovisual experience that big-budget, big-screen movies were made for. Dune: Part Two is a glorious, overwhelming sensory smorgasbord. 

In recent years, far too many blockbusters have served up weightless, ugly, computer-generated, mediocre-at-best set pieces. Villeneuve's Dune films are reminders of what real cinematic spectacle looks like. They are movies about worms—really big worms. Hell yeah, they are.  

The post <i>Dune: Part Two</i> Is a Glorious Sci-Fi Spectacle appeared first on Reason.com.

U.S. works to negotiate ceasefire: The United States, via a U.N. Security Council resolution, is urging a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas "as soon as practicable"—using ceasefire language for the first time—as well as rebuking Israel for plans to possibly invade Rafah.

"Until now, the United States alone has publicly and consistently rejected demands for an outright cease-fire in U.N. resolutions on the war in Gaza, siding with Israel in its war against Hamas," reports The New York Times.

The changed language "reflect[s] President [Joe] Biden's shift toward criticism of Israel's prosecution of the war and of its planned offensive into the southern Gaza city of Rafah," per the Times.

About half of Gaza's civilians are sheltering in Rafah, and an offensive there "would have serious implications for regional peace and security," per the language of the draft resolution.

Julian Assange returns to court: The WikiLeaks founder who has been held in London's Belmarsh prison since 2019, and whose lawyers have been fighting possible extradition to the U.S., will have his case return to court this week.

The two-day hearing will determine whether Assange has reached the end of his ability to appeal his case in the U.K. and whether he will be extradited to the U.S., where he faces a possible 175 years in prison if convicted of espionage charges.

Back in 2010 and 2011, WikiLeaks published thousands of documents leaked by whistleblower Chelsea Manning, who was at the time an Army intelligence analyst serving in Iraq. The documents brought information to light about civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan for which the U.S. military had been responsible.

In 2019, the U.S. Department of Justice charged Assange with 18 counts of violating the Espionage Act—a case with huge implications for press freedom, if Assange does in fact stand trial and receive a conviction.

For more on Assange's case, check out this conversation Zach Weissmueller and I had with Julian's wife, Stella:

Scenes from New York: The Roman Catholic Diocese of New York was duped into allowing a funeral mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral for a vocally atheist transgender activist.

"The cathedral only knew that family and friends were requesting a funeral Mass for a Catholic and had no idea our welcome and prayer would be degraded in such a sacrilegious and deceptive way," wrote Fr. Enrique Salvo—who is one of my priests (he splits his time between St. Patrick's Cathedral and the Basilica of St. Patrick's Old Cathedral, where I am a parishioner)—in a statement.

"The pews were packed with mourners, many of them transgender, who wore daring high-fashion outfits and cheered as eulogists led them in praying for transgender rights and access to gender-affirming health care," reported The New York Times. A video circulated of mourners approvingly calling the deceased "mother of all whores" inside the cathedral.

"Several mainstream media outlets had framed the event as a breakthrough occasion and a sign of the Catholic Church shifting its teaching—or at least its tone—on sexuality and human anthropology," reported Catholic News Agency. But many Catholics, contra mainstream reporting, feel as though the funeral made a mockery of our faith.

Both St. Patrick's in Midtown and Old St. Patrick's in Nolita are frequent targets for activist stunts due to the Catholic Church's positions on trans issues and abortion.

QUICK HITS

• "As of late September, I thought that (i) it had become too late for a full-fledged primary challenge to Biden, and (ii) Biden voluntarily announcing that he wouldn't run for a second term was a close call but probably failed a cost-benefit test for Democrats," writes Nate Silver. "Since then, Biden's situation has become considerably worse…to borrow the poker term, Biden no longer has as many 'outs'—meaning, contingencies that could improve his situation."
• Germany will decriminalize recreational weed this week, allowing adults to grow up to three plants and possess up to 25 grams of cannabis.
• "Flying got safer last year almost everywhere except Russia," reports Bloomberg. Someone tell Tucker Carlson, who is possibly still wandering around a Russian grocery store, eyes wide with delight.
• "What is the 'migrant crisis' in New York and Chicago?" asks Jerusalem Demsas at The Atlantic. "It includes visible signs of disorder like migrants sleeping outside as hotel rooms fill up, anger among native-born Americans that limited resources are being spent on migrants, and an expensive bureaucratic scramble to arrange health screenings, translation services, housing programs, legal services, school placements, school buses, and other needs for newcomers." But some of the problem, Demsas says, stems from the red-state governors busing migrants to these big cities in particular: "When immigrants make their way to a city in an organic fashion, they usually are drawn to a place where they have family ties, job leads, or other connections and resources available. When they're resettled through an official government program, as the displaced Ukrainians were, the federal government coordinates with local governments to ensure a smooth transition."
• A look inside the deep tech scene in El Segundo:

Along with YCs call for more deep tech applications, this is just the beginning of a broader transition of venture capital towards businesses with defensible moats in atoms-first industries, where AI and ML are in the stack but not the main show. pic.twitter.com/BnGQxfIJnz

— Andrew Côté (@Andercot) February 19, 2024

• A look at all Donald Trump's incredible props over the years.
• lol:

Obama's daughter trying to sneak past Nepo baby discourse by not using her last name. Bro you are Obama's Duaghter pic.twitter.com/Z8PtkAYsSh

— McRib (@McR1B69) February 19, 2024

The post U.S. Begins To Talk Ceasefire appeared first on Reason.com.