In 2015, Clay Higgins started his climb to Congress with a series of videos promising to hunt down lawbreakers. As a spokesman for the St. Landry Parish Sheriff’s Office in Louisiana, Higgins generated national attention by making Crime Stoppers public service announcements as straight-to-camera monologues. His menacing promises got him billed as the “Cajun John Wayne” in coverage by CBS News and the Washington Post.

In reality, public information officer Higgins was neither Cajun nor much of a street cop. It did not matter. In 2016, he ran for Congress as a Republican and rode his law-and-order image to Washington. As a congressman, Higgins has kept up the act: He recently made news and drew threats of congressional censure after posting a transparently racist rant about how Haitian immigrants are “thugs.”

Higgins’ carefully cultivated brand centers almost exclusively on law enforcement. His campaign logo features him in his police uniform. He has served as a reserve officer with the Louisiana Department of Justice while in Congress and is known for communicating in cryptic military jargon typical of right-wing militias. Expected to win easily in November, Higgins is believed to harbor ambitions of running for Senate in 2026. If he does, he will almost certainly continue to make his work as a cop central to his message to voters.

But a Mother Jones investigation has revealed a major problem with his pitch: Some of the former Louisiana cops Higgins has associated with have been accused by law enforcement officials of severe wrongdoing—including allegedly participating in a sex trafficking ring in one case and of committing incest in another.

One of the most troubling of these connections, which has not been previously reported, is with an old friend from the St. Landry Parish Sheriff’s Office: Leon Boudreaux. Higgins has been a member of the motorcycle group dubbed the Kindred Vets that Boudreaux founded, and the two are seemingly close. They appear together in numerous photos posted to one of Higgins’ Facebook pages, and they are also pictured together in photos posted by the Kindred Vets in 2022 and 2023.

In 2021, a year prior to Higgins posting a photo with his hand clasped with Boudreaux’s, a New Mexico jury convicted Boudreaux of incest after a teenage relative accused him of sexually assaulting her between the ages of 14 and 18.

Boudreaux confirmed to Mother Jones by phone on Thursday that he is a longtime friend of Higgins and that he rides motorcycles with him. Boudreaux said that Higgins was aware of the charges that had been brought against him. “Back when all that happened, he did call me,” Boudreaux explained. “He called to check on me. But we don’t really talk about that kind of stuff.”

Asked whether he was surprised that the incest case had not impacted their friendship, Boudreaux replied, “Not at all.” He continued, “Clay knows me. Knows I didn’t break any laws. It’s just the way it went.” Boudreaux ended the interview after saying that he did not want to be a part of an article that would “discredit” the congressman. (Higgins’ office did not respond to a detailed request for comment.)

Higgins’ willingness to appear with Boudreaux after the conviction is notable considering his public policy positions. He has repeatedly spread fears of the dangers of sex traffickers and sexual predators coming across the US-Mexico border. In a congressional resolution introduced in May, he warned about how a Haitian migrant had been arrested for the “sexual assault of a 15-year-old girl” in Massachusetts. Higgins has also said it should be illegal for women to have an abortion—including in cases of rape and incest.

Before working with Boudreaux in St. Landry Parish, Higgins served in the nearby Opelousas Police Department. He ended up there in his 40s after trading what he has described as a lucrative job managing car dealerships for a law enforcement position that paid $8 an hour.

His time included discord. In 2007, Higgins and fellow Opelousas officer John Chautin assaulted an unarmed Black man while on duty, according to an internal police investigation and reporting from the Louisiana outlet Bayou Brief. Higgins was caught lying to a police investigator and resigned rather than face discipline. Chautin, who was disciplined for his conduct, has since followed Higgins into politics: He is now the congressman’s district director. (In a 2015 email, Higgins described Chautin, who did not respond to the request for comment sent to Higgins’ congressional office, as his “best friend, work out partner and assistant Sensei.”)

Jerod Prunty is another former cop in Higgins’ orbit who caught the attention of law enforcement. In 2019, Louisiana police arrested Prunty and nine others following a 17-month investigation while he was working in Higgins’ district office as a field representative. Police alleged that Prunty was part of a sex-trafficking ring involving Chinese women who were reportedly forced to live and perform sex acts at local massage parlors. “We are shocked and saddened to learn of allegations against Jerod,” a spokesperson for Higgins said in a statement before Prunty resigned. (Prosecutors did not pursue charges against Prunty, who did not respond to a request for comment sent by email.)

Aimee Robinson, a local activist involved with the state and parish Democratic parties, said Higgins is well liked in the district, despite these controversies. “It’s like Trump, he would have to shoot somebody in the middle of the street, and even then, we’re not sure that it would matter,” she explained. (Robinson’s willingness to criticize Higgins on the record was unusual among the people Mother Jones contacted for this story, many of whom feared retribution; she said she’d recently told a friend concerned for her safety for speaking out that she has “three big dogs and a revolver” and that her address is “123 I Wish A Motherfucker Would.”)

Higgins has also courted his own share of controversies beyond the use of excessive force in Opelousas. In 1991, the first of his four wives accused him in court of holding a gun to her head, according to court records reviewed by Mother Jones. (Higgins denies the accusation made by his ex-wife, who later died.)

In the lead-up to his 2016 election, his second wife released recordings in which the two discussed the more than $100,000 in child support Higgins reportedly owed. It is unclear whether Higgins has settled that debt and, unusually for a representative, his congressional financial disclosure form lists no assets.

After leaving the Opelousas department in 2007, Higgins got a job with the Port Barre Police Department, where the bike group leader Leon Boudreaux’s identical twin brother, Deon, was the chief of police. After about three years, Higgins went to St. Landry Parish, where he worked with Leon.

Higgins was working as a night patrolman—not a particularly distinguished position for a more than 50-year-old cop—when he became the department’s public information officer. Higgins used his new role to turn himself into something of a local celebrity in viral Crime Stoppers videos. He often addressed alleged criminals in degrading language. “I can just imagine his very limited brain cells,” Higgins said in one 2015 video as a Black man appeared to rob a gas station convenience store. In another, he wondered whether Black suspects had used “even one” of their “combined eight or ten brain cells.” (In 2022, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez chastised Higgins after he referred to a Black woman testifying before them in Congress as “boo.”)

Before being pushed out of the department by Sheriff Bobby Guidroz in 2016, Higgins tried to capitalize on the notoriety generated by the St. Landry Parish videos by pitching a reality show called American Justice, starring himself, that was never produced. Episodes of his crime-hunting show were to be based around themes such as “sex crimes” and “crimes affecting children,” Higgins explained at the time. In 2015, he sent a potential list of “Regular interaction characters” for the show. The first name was Leon Boudreaux and another was that of his “close friend” Deon Boudreaux.

Four years later, police officers in Raton, New Mexico, arrested Leon Boudreaux after he had sex with a teenage relative in a local hotel room. According to a statement of probable cause obtained by Mother Jones via a public records request, the then-18-year-old victim stated she had been sexually abused by Boudreaux for the past four years.

“I gave him consent because I’m scared,” she said about what had just happened. “I’m so scared right now.” She told the officer that she had been raped by Boudreaux in the past but eventually “just started giving in.” She was afraid that Boudreaux, a short but physically imposing bodybuilding aficionado, would kill her if she said no to his advances—telling a police officer that he had a firearm with him at the time, according to the statement of probable cause. (Police found a .357 Magnum loaded with hollow point bullets and a roughly six-inch knife in his backpack.)

According to an arrest report obtained via a public records request, Boudreaux claimed in a police interview that he had fallen asleep wearing his underwear only to wake up and realize that his relative had begun having sexual intercourse with him. He added that he ejaculated against his own will before he could push her off him. Boudreaux told police that he had been taken advantage of by his teenage relative, but that he did not want to press charges.

Boudreaux said that the victim had previously accused him of rape in Port Barre. He explained that he learned of the accusation from his twin brother, the Port Barre police chief. Leon Boudreaux then got his teenage relative to recant in a conversation that he recorded, according to the police report and the Lafayette Daily Advertiser. (Deon Boudreaux did not respond to a voicemail seeking comment regarding his handling of the accusation.)

The relative then fled the state for Colorado. Leon Boudreaux tracked her down there, according to a person familiar with the case. He committed incest as they made their way back to Louisiana. (Boudreaux told New Mexico police that the victim called and asked him to pick her up in Colorado.)

Boudreaux also told the officer that a second young relative had previously accused him of wanting to have sex with her. He added that an unspecified investigation had deemed the claim unfounded. That conflicted with what the victim told New Mexico police about how Boudreaux had sexually abused both her and another relative.

Along with incest, Boudreaux was later charged with two counts of criminal sexual penetration. (A New Mexico judge prevented the latter charges from being brought to trial.) During the trial for incest, Boudreaux’s relative took the stand against Boudreaux, who did not testify, according to the prosecutor who tried the case. The judge deemed the years-long period during which Boudreaux allegedly raped his then-minor relative in Louisiana to be inadmissible. Nevertheless, in February 2021, a New Mexico jury found Boudreaux guilty on the incest charge, a felony offense.

In October 2021, he received a suspended sentence and three years of probation. The prosecutor, who requested anonymity, said the district attorney’s office had sought jail time. The prosecutor shared a victim statement that they said was read during the sentencing. In it, Boudreaux’s relative stated:

At 14, he began sexually abusing me. Although I cannot go into further detail on the events that happened prior to this case, I’d like to state that for 4 years, I suffered. For 4 years, he satisfied himself with a child. Manipulating me that because of his authority and public image, that just like my [relative] who had reported him of the same thing previously, that it would not go far and nobody would believe me.

After the arrest, a handful of Louisiana outlets reported on the case. Leon Boudreaux objected to the Advertiser’s coverage of his then-upcoming trial. “My character has been tarnished,” he complained. His twin brother, the Port Barre police chief, said that the story was an attempt to “jump on the anti-police rhetoric bandwagon for ratings.”

The year after Boudreaux’s conviction, Higgins wrote a Facebook screed with a familiar mix of righteous indignation and pretension of speaking for real Americans. Addressed to “You elitists, you woke arrogant hypocrites of both parties,” the congressman explained that “you keep poking us in the chest and eventually you’re going to get a response.” Higgins signed the post: “Respectfully, We the People.” 

In the accompanying photo, Higgins wears his Kindred Vets motorcycle gear. A thin blue line patch is clearly visible on his leather jacket. His right hand rests on Leon Boudreaux’s shoulder.

On Wednesday, during a routine operation in Gaza, Israeli soldiers reportedly killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar—seemingly stumbling into realizing a major military objective. Despite over a year’s worth of efforts, Israeli soldiers appear to have found Sinwar by accident. After killing three people during a normal operation, they apparently realized that one of the men resembled the Hamas leader. The Israeli military confirmed Sinwar’s death on Thursday.

“I think Netanyahu has zero interest in ending this war and I don’t think he’s motivated to help Biden before the elections.”

Israel and the United States have been trying to find and kill Sinwar since last October. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has cast his death as one of the main reasons for Israel’s unceasing bombardment of Gaza, saying a main war objective is “eliminating” Hamas leadership. 

With this objective met, Sinwar’s death could present a chance to end what has become a regional war. Vice President Kamala Harris said after the killing that Sinwar’s death gave “us an opportunity to finally end the war in Gaza.” But it seems unlikely that Israeli and American leaders will fully press in this moment.

A former Biden administration official said they do believe that Sinwar’s death will be viewed by the administration as “somewhat of an opportunity to secure an end to the conflict,” particularly ahead of the elections as they try to win back votes that they “certainly have lost.” The problem, the former official explained, is that “I think Netanyahu has zero interest in ending this war and I don’t think he’s motivated to help Biden before the elections.”

The next move from Israel’s government, at the moment, is unclear. On Thursday, Netanyahu stated that “the mission ahead of us has not been completed.” In an initial statement Benny Gantz, a centrist member of Netanyahu’s war cabinet, said that while Sinwar’s death is a vital goal it would not mean the end of the war in Gaza.

Sinwar was killed just over a year after he orchestrated the October 7 attack in which Hamas killed nearly 1,200 Israelis. In response, the Israeli military has leveled Gaza, killing at least 42,000 Palestinians, according to the local health ministry. (The full death toll is feared to be more than double that number, according to some public health experts.) 

Sinwar’s death comes at a time when ceasefire talks to end the war in Gaza have effectively fallen apart and the conflict has expanded throughout the region.

Israel recently launched a major invasion of Lebanon, where more than 2,000 people have now been killed. And Israel is on the verge of striking Iran in response to the ballistic missiles it launched against Israel on October 1. Iran’s decision to strike Israel came after a series of increasingly aggressive Israeli escalations in Lebanon—including extensive bombardment of residential areas in Beirut—that seemed all but guaranteed to provoke an Iranian retaliation. Hezbollah officials supported multiple ceasefire offers in early October, none of which Netanyahu accepted. (The US is not currently pushing publicly for a ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel.)

The Biden administration could use Sinwar’s death as leverage to push for an end to what is now a regional war. This would build on a letter the United States recently sent to Israel that gave Israel 30 days to allow in more humanitarian aid to Gaza, or face potential restrictions on US weapons exports to Israel. “I don’t think [the Israeli government] will be responsive to the letter,” the former Biden official said. “I don’t think they take our threat seriously. I don’t think the US government would withhold weapons. I think this is a signal that won’t be followed through on.” (Human rights groups, according to a report in Politico, voiced similar concerns that “rules don’t apply” to Israel.)

Israel has now killed the top leaders of both Hamas and Hezbollah: Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah was killed in an Israeli airstrike on September 27, and in July, Israeli is widely understood to have assassinated Hamas’ political chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran. (Haniyeh, who was Hamas’ key ceasefire negotiator, was considered to be more moderate than Sinwar.) 

Israel has reduced much of Gaza to rubble following one of the most intense aerial bombardment campaigns in modern history. The IDF has dropped at least 75,000 tons of bombs on the territory, killed at least one out of every 55 people in Gaza, and has cut off nearly all humanitarian aid. Its actions in Gaza have reportedly violated international human rights law and—along with Hamas’ actions on October 7—constitute potential war crimes in the view of the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. A case in the International Court of Justice asserting Israel is actively committing a genocide is proceeding as well.

Both Iran and Hezbollah, which is closely aligned with Iran, have signaled they would like to avoid a full-scale war with Israel that could potentially further involve the United States. The question remains whether the Biden administration is willing to use its extensive leverage as Israel’s primary weapons supplier to force an end to the conflict. 

Update, October 17: This post has been updated to reflect a new statement from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a new statement from Vice President Kamala Harris.

Last November, I asked Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University and the most renowned Palestinian American historian today, about the lack of statements from President Joe Biden expressing sympathy for Palestinians. At the time, I was writing an article outlining Biden’s long-standing and unusual unwillingness to challenge Israel.

“I don’t really think he sees the Palestinians at all,” Khalidi replied. “He sees the Israelis as they are very carefully presented by their government and their massive information apparatus, which is being sucked at by every element of the mainstream media.”

The professional bluntness was typical of Khalidi. Throughout his decadeslong career as an academic and public intellectual, he has not shied away from lacerating fellow elites as he uproots deep assumptions about Israel and Palestine. In doing so, he has made himself a fitting successor to Said, the late Palestinian American literary critic his professorship was named after.

Khalidi’s 1997 book, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness, was called a “pathbreaking work of major importance” by Said. In the early days of the ongoing war, Khalidi’s most recent book, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, became a New York Times bestseller. He is currently working on a study of how Ireland was a laboratory for British colonial practices that were later employed in Palestine. At the end of June, he retired and became a professor emeritus.

We spoke last Wednesday—one day after Iran launched ballistic missiles at Israel following a series of Israeli escalations—to assess the one-year mark of the current war.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

A year ago, more than 1,100 people were killed in Israel in Hamas’ October 7 attack. At least 41,000 people have been killed in Gaza in response. Now, Israel has invaded Lebanon and provoked a war with Iran, which launched ballistic missiles at Israel yesterday. A year ago, was this a nightmare scenario?

It is a nightmare scenario, but we may be at the beginning of the nightmare. This is potentially a multiyear war now. By the time this is published, we will have entered its second year. But the risks in terms of a regional confrontation are much, much greater than most people would have assessed back in October 2023. This is potentially going to be a world war, a major regional war, a multifront war. In fact, in some respects, it already is.

An article in the New York Times this morning stated that “Democrats cannot afford to be accused of restraining Israel after Tuesday’s missile attack.” The US has also said it will work with Israel to impose “severe consequences” on Iran. Are you surprised that there’s been essentially no willingness by the US to use its leverage over Israel?

I have to say I’m a little surprised. Firstly, because every earlier war, with the exception of 1948, was eventually stopped by the United States, or by the international community with the involvement of the United States, much more quickly than this one. You’ve had wars that went on for a couple of months. But eventually, after backing Israel fully, the United States stopped Israel. There’s absolutely no sign of the United States doing anything but encouraging Israel and arming and protecting them diplomatically. In historical perspective, this is unique to my knowledge.

Secondly, it is a little surprising in domestic electoral terms. I don’t think Biden and [Vice President Kamala] Harris have a whole lot to worry about on their right. People who are going to vote on this issue in one way are going to vote for [former President Donald] Trump anyway. Whereas on his left, I think one of the terrible ironies of this—we will only find this out after the election—might be that Harris loses the election because she loses Michigan. Because she lost young people and Arabs and Muslims.

To the left, there’s a huge void where some people are going to hold their noses and vote for Harris. But some people will not vote for her under any circumstances. And if that tips the margin in favor of Trump, it will be one of the most colossal failures of the Democratic Party leadership in modern history to not understand that there’s lots of space to their left and there’s no space to their right. They have hewed right, right, right on this—at least publicly. Personally, I don’t understand that electoral calculation. 

I also go back to the first thing I said: I don’t understand how the United States doesn’t see that the expansion of this war is extremely harmful to any possible definition of American national interests. 

What do you think the Biden administration and its supporters fail to understand in terms of the cost to the United States of enabling this war?

The administration and the entire American elite is in another place from Americans, who reject the Biden policy, want a ceasefire, and are opposed to continuing to arm Israel. That’s the problem. You have this cork in the bottle. The bottle has changed. The cork hasn’t. 

The media elites, the university and foundation elites, the corporate elites, the donor class, the leaderships of the political parties, and the foreign policy establishment are way out in right field and are completely supportive of whatever Israel does. They back Israel to the hilt—whatever it does. And you are getting the same kind of mindless drivel in the foreign policy world about an opportunity for “remaking the Middle East” that we got before the 2003 Iraq fiasco. 

Israel killed the guy they were negotiating with in Tehran—[Ismail] Haniyeh. They don’t say anything. You want a ceasefire? Haniyeh allegedly wanted a ceasefire. Israel goes and kills the guy in Tehran. The US doesn’t say anything. Not a peep. This is a high-level provocation. 

[Harris] and the Democratic Party establishment have obviously made a decision that they can spit at young people who feel strongly about this.

You’re trying to bring about a ceasefire on the Lebanese border? The Israelis kill the person they’re negotiating with. Not a peep. The US says: He was a bad guy. He killed Americans. Good thing. 

I find it mind-boggling the degree to which the elite is blind to the damage that this is clearly doing to the United States in the world and in the Middle East—and the dangers that entails. I hear not a peep out of that elite about the potential danger of Israel leading them by the nose into an American, Israeli, Iranian, Yemeni, Palestinian, Lebanese war, which has no visible end. I mean, where does this stop? 

Harris has declined to break with Biden on Israel in her public rhetoric. If she’s elected, do you expect a significant shift in her approach to Israel and Palestine?

No, I do not. She had multiple opportunities to do a Hubert Humphrey—to disassociate herself from the president who just decided not to run again. To allow a Palestinian speaker at the [Democratic National] Convention, to meet with certain people, to modulate her virulent, pro-Israel rhetoric, she hasn’t taken those opportunities. I don’t expect that she will.

She and the Democratic Party establishment have obviously made a decision that they can spit at young people who feel strongly about this. They can ignore Arabs and Muslims, and then they can win the election anyway. That seems to have been their decision. That might change if their internal polling at the end of October shows she’s losing Michigan. But it would be a little bit late.

Humphrey’s speech was on September 30. So we’re already past that.

And it was too late for Humphrey.

The main success that Biden administration officials pointed to again and again was preventing a regional war. That has now completely fallen apart. You were in Lebanon during the 1982 Israeli invasion with your kids and your wife, Mona, who was pregnant at the time. How does your personal experience of that invasion influence how you see what is happening in Lebanon today?

It’s not deja vu for me. I actually feel it’s much, much, much worse. I’m following along with all my relatives in Beirut, as I have been following along with relatives in Palestine over the past year, as they report on what’s happening to them and around them. It’s similar, but it’s a lot worse. I think my kids are going through the same thing, especially my daughters, who were little children during the ’82 war.

And all of us are sitting in safety outside the Middle East. I’m thinking of the family that we have who are still in Beirut. They’ve been through war and misery and the collapse of Lebanon and various phases of this war in the past. I know they are resilient. But it’s really hard to experience it again and again and again. They went through it in 2006 and now they’re going through it again.

It’s horrifying that nobody seems to read history or understand that no good can come from this. Leave aside good for the Lebanese—obviously, nobody in the Western elite cares about the Lebanese or the Palestinians. There’s a degree of insensitivity, which is shocking, but we’re used to it. But nobody even cares about the Israelis. They are putting their head into a buzz saw in both Gaza and Lebanon: a tunnel without end.

What do the Americans think they are doing, pushing, allowing, arming Israel to do this vis-à-vis Iran, vis-à-vis Yemen, vis-à-vis Lebanon, vis-à-vis the Palestinians? Where does this end for Israel? They are getting themselves into a minefield out of which they will not be able to extract themselves without enormous, terrible results for them—and obviously infinitely more devastating results for Lebanon and the Palestinians. 

I don’t understand the blindness of the United States in basically encouraging Israel to commit harakiri. This cannot end well for them. It’s not going to end well for anyone else. I’m not minimizing the horror. It’s going to end worse, obviously, for Palestinians and Lebanese. But what can they possibly be thinking in Washington? Or, for that matter, in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem?

Perhaps the most horrifying result of the 1982 invasion was Sabra and Shatila, when Israeli soldiers assisted Lebanese Christian militants as they slaughtered thousands of Palestinian and Lebanese Muslims inside the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. You and your family were staying in a faculty apartment that Malcolm Kerr had found for you after American and international troops pulled out of Beirut. Could you talk about what you saw from the balcony of that apartment?

What we witnessed was the Israeli military firing illumination shells over Sabra and Shatila after they had introduced militias that they paid and armed to kill people on the basis of an agreement between [Israeli Defense Minster Ariel] Sharon and the Lebanese forces. We were a little shocked because the fighting had stopped a couple of days before. The Israelis had occupied West Beirut. There were no Palestinian military forces at all in Beirut. No fighters, no units, nothing. The camps were defenseless, and the Americans had promised the PLO that they would protect the civilian populations left behind when the PLO evacuated its forces. 

So, we were quite perplexed. What is going with these illumination shells being fired when it seemed completely quiet? We went to bed not knowing the massacre had started. When we woke up, we found out from Jon Randall and Loren Jenkins, who were working for the Washington Post, what they had just seen.

When we spoke in November, you held up your phone so that I could hear pro-Palestine demonstrations passing by you in Morningside Heights. Edward Said had the opposite experience decades before.

He said he was radicalized by being in New York during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and talked about hearing someone in Morningside Heights ask, How are we doing? It drove home that Arabs and Palestinians effectively did not exist. What do you make of the significance of that shift?

I was in New York in June 1967, and I remember people collecting money for Israel in bedsheets outside Grand Central station. The same fervor that Edward witnessed, I witnessed in ’67. There’s been an enormous shift in American public opinion. The polling numbers are unequivocally opposed to this war, opposed to Biden’s policy, opposed to continuing to arm Israel.

We’ve seen it on campus. The campus has been shut down in response to last year’s protests. We call it Fortress Columbia. You can’t get a journalist onto the campus without two days’ notice, and even then, it doesn’t work. Columbia has sealed the campus and installed checkpoints to prevent the people of the neighborhood from walking across the campus on what should be a public thoroughfare on 116th Street. 

The protest movement has been shut down by repression, but the sentiment is I’m sure still there. Most young people have an entirely different view of this war—and of Palestine and Israel—than their grandparents have. The difference is enormous and striking, and I think it may be growing. The invasion of Lebanon will do nothing to change the way people see things. I think it will just reinforce it.

I’ve seen a sea change in the past couple of decades that I was at Columbia. I arrived there in 2003, and sentiment was not favorable to Palestine overall. I still had the sense that I had when I was an undergraduate many decades ago that I was swimming against the tide of opinion among students and faculty. That’s not the case anymore. Two-thirds of the arts and sciences faculty voted no confidence in the president because of her position on the protests. I couldn’t have imagined something like that happening 25 years ago.

Do you ever fear that the shift is arriving too late? That by the time America potentially decides to hold Israel accountable, there might not be a Palestine left to save because the West Bank has been annexed and Gaza has been leveled?

Gaza has been leveled, and the West Bank has long since been annexed. It’s been incorporated into Israel in practice for decades. Israeli law operates in the West Bank for Israelis only. Palestinians are being squeezed into smaller and smaller Bantustans, and Israel is encouraging them to leave. But that doesn’t mean that Palestine is gone. You still have as many Palestinians as Israelis within the frontiers of Palestine. That’s not going to change. 

They still have a problem. How do you establish an entity involving Jewish supremacy in a country where at least half of the population are not Jews? I don’t see how they get out of that conundrum just because they’ve devastated Gaza or just because they’ve annexed the West Bank. 

They’ve created that conundrum and there’s no way out for them. They either entirely annihilate the Palestinian population or drive it out, which I don’t think is possible in the 21st century, at least I hope not, or they come to terms with it. They’re not willing to do that right now. They’re even less willing to do that after October 7. Public opinion has hardened in Israel for reasons that are perfectly understandable.

But do I see that this is too late? No. I worry that no matter how consequential the shift in public opinion is, the elite will hold on stubbornly. And that it will take even longer than it took for public opinion opposing the Iraq war or public opinion opposing the Vietnam War to force elites that were dedicated and committed to mindless, aggressive wars abroad to finally change their course. It took years and years on Vietnam, and it took years and years on Iraq.

That’s what I’m afraid of—that the anti-democratic intent of the elite, and of the party leaderships, of the foreign policy establishment, and of the donor class will prevent a shift for many more years than should be the case. If we had a really democratic system, if we had a system where public opinion had as much of an effect as money—which it doesn’t, unfortunately—then you would have seen a change already. There’s no indication that there will be a change for quite a while, regardless of who is elected in November.

A consequence of timing this interview to coincide with the one-year mark of the war is that it can obscure what came before. How should the reality of daily life in Gaza in the decades leading up to October 7 shape how we understand what has happened in the past year?

The people who have been fighting Israel in Gaza, for the most part, are people who grew up as children under this prison camp regime imposed on them by the Israelis and on the southern border by the Egyptians. Most of them have never been allowed to leave Gaza. Most of them have had all kinds of restrictions on everything they can do and buy and say for their entire lives. And they’ve lived under an authoritarian Hamas regime, which was quite unpopular in Gaza before October 7. 

The people who have been fighting the Israelis are the people who Israel’s prison camp has created. And what Israel has done in the last year is far, far worse than anything it did in the preceding 17 years of the blockade. They killed over 2,300 people in 2014. They’ve killed probably well over 50,000 in the past year, if we count those buried under the rubble. The number is 41,600 as of today. The numbers are hard to process.

The kids growing up now are going to be the successors to today’s fighters, given that nobody’s offering them a future, given that they’re going to live in misery for a decade if not longer, given that Israel will dominate their lives in even more intense ways than it had before. The people who grow up in that situation—some of them are going to turn into even more ferocious fighters resisting Israel.

The same thing is happening in South Lebanon. People grew up in South Lebanon being bombarded by Israel, and they became the fighters in the ’82 war. There’s a picture of [former Hezbollah leader Hassan] Nasrallah fighting in ’82 as a young man. That experience of constant Israeli attacks and the occupations of South Lebanon in ’78 and ’82 created Hezbollah. Even Ehud Barak admitted as much. 

I’ve seen not one mention of the fact that the United States helped Israel kill 19,000 people in Lebanon in 1982. And that might have been a factor as important as what Israel was doing in creating Hezbollah and in it turning against the United States. They considered the United States responsible for Sabra and Shatila because it had promised to protect the civilians—that no harm would come to the civilians the PLO left behind. 

I fear that the United States’ full-throated support for what Israel is doing may have the same effect in the 2020s and 2030s, unfortunately. I’m not happy about any of this. I consider all of these things disastrous. But I’m looking at them coldly. The things that I’m talking about have produced what has passed, and what we’re seeing now will produce, heaven forbid, possibly even more horrible things in the future. Those who don’t read history and don’t understand history are condemned to repeat it, but in a much worse way, I’m afraid. 

There appears to be a bullet lodged in Tim Sheehy’s right forearm. That is not in dispute. But how and when it got there has become the subject of an ongoing mystery that has dogged the campaign of the former Navy SEAL challenging Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) in one of this election cycle’s most high-stakes races.

The question of how Sheehy was shot first came up last spring in a Washington Post exposé by Liz Goodwin who reported that Sheehy had said on the campaign trail he has a “bullet stuck” in his right arm from his time serving in Afghanistan. The problem was that Sheehy had told a National Park Service ranger in 2015 that the bullet wound in his right arm came from him accidentally shooting himself with a Colt .45 revolver while in Glacier National Park.

When confronted with these incompatible stories, Sheehy told the Post that his original story was a lie designed to protect former platoon-mates who may have shot him in a friendly fire incident in Afghanistan in 2012. Sheehy said that, in reality, he’d ended up in the emergency room in 2015 after falling on a hike. A park ranger, in this version of the story, was summoned to the hospital because Sheehy told the staff there that he had a bullet in his arm.

Sheey’s account should be easy to substantiate. Medical records would presumably show whether he arrived at the hospital with a fresh bullet wound or an injury sustained from a fall. The medical professionals who treated him could potentially recall what happened. A family member who was with him that day could back up his story. But Sheehy has not released records or made available any witnesses of the 2015 incident who could backup his version of events.

Sheehy, 38, is a first-time candidate who, until recently, ran a wildfire firefighting company that is struggling financially. He has been endorsed by Donald Trump and was seen as a top recruit by Senate Republicans. His background as a millennial former SEAL, Purple Heart recipient, and wealthy businessman who was largely free of MAGA baggage was seen as perfect for taking on Tester, who was first elected in 2006. Polls now show him leading Tester in a race that is crucial for determining which party controls the Senate.

In terms of medical records, the Sheehy campaign only shared an X-ray with the Post that it provided on the condition that the image not be published. Doctors who reviewed it for the paper concluded that it does not provide strong support for Sheehy’s story that a “friendly ricochet bullet” hit him in Afghanistan:

The image probably depicts a bullet, but it is not possible to tell what type of weapon it came from nor the age of the wound, said Joseph V. Sakran, a trauma surgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, who reviewed the X-ray at the request of The Post. Thomas J. Esposito, a professor at the University of Illinois College of Medicine in Peoria who has spent 30 years as a trauma surgeon, said that the X-ray looks like an injury from a low-velocity firearm, such as a handgun, and that he found it “doubtful” the bullet was the result of ricochet from an assault weapon because of the smoothness of its edges.

Sheehy’s campaign told the Post back in April that he had requested medical records from the hospital visit but had not yet been able to obtain them. Later that month, the campaign declined to comment about the status of that request and referred the paper to Sheehy’s lawyer, Daniel Watkins of Meier Watkins Phillips Pusch. The statement Watkins provided claimed that the “released reports corroborate the information we have provided, and they confirm Mr. Sheehy’s recollection of what took place.” The information provided—that is, the X-ray—does not confirm Sheehy’s account.

One piece of evidence in favor of Sheehy’s current story is that a weapons expert interviewed by the Post said it was “very unlikely” that the gun would have misfired after being dropped. The emergency room that Sheehy went to was about two hours away from where he initially said he shot himself. That, along with the fact that Sheehy appears to have been discharged from the hospital relatively quickly, could also support the claim that he did not arrive at the hospital with a fresh gunshot wound.

I reached out to Sheehy’s campaign on September 3 asking if they would be able to provide any more records to support the candidate’s account, or if they would make someone available to to defend Sheehy’s story on or off-the-record. The campaign did not respond to the email or a follow-up sent last week.

On Wednesday, I emailed Watkins, who, according to his official bio, is a “nationally ranked trial lawyer and reputation counselor specializing in high-stakes crisis and defamation cases.” Watkins confirmed that he is representing Sheehy, and asked to review the request I sent to the campaign. He did not respond after receiving it.

Another problem for Sheehy is the length he went to substantiate his original story in 2015. As the Post reported in its April follow-up, Sheehy hand wrote and signed a detailed statement that explains how he shot himself. “Upon finishing our hike at Logan’s Pass while reloading our vehicle, an improperly placed firearm kept in the vehicle for bear protection fell out and discharged into my right forearm,” he wrote. “We fully cooperated with Ranger [name redacted in document] after he called the ER and agreed to pay the $500.00 fine before leaving the hospital.” Sheehy (who was fined for discharging a firearm in a national park) went on to “request leniency with any charges related to this unfortunate accident” due to his “security clearance and involvement with national defense related contracts.”

Sheehy’s 2015 account fits with a statement of probable cause that the park ranger signed under penalty of perjury shortly after the incident. According to that statement, the ranger was already on the way to Logan Pass in response to the report of a gunshot when he learned that Sheehy was in the Kalispell hospital emergency room. That timeline is supported by a second statement from the park ranger that explained that he initially responded to the incident after a “park visitor called park dispatch” to report that a gun had been accidentally fired.

When interviewed by the Post on the condition of anonymity, the ranger, a Marine Corps veteran, said he was surprised to hear that Sheehy is now claiming to have lied to him in 2015. He recalled Sheehy showing him the weapon at the time and him seeing that it was fully loaded aside from one bullet. “I don’t in any way impugn the law enforcement officer,” Sheehy told the Post about the ranger’s written account. “Everything he says is true to the extent of his knowledge.”

As the Post noted, lying to a park ranger is a crime, although the statute of limitations has now expired. According to his current story, Sheehy lied out of a selfless desire to protect former platoon-mates from an investigation that experts say was highly unlikely to have been triggered by him saying he had been hit by friendly fire years before.

This doesn’t have to be this complicated. Sheehy just needs to release the medical records. He won’t. Which begs the question: Why not?

There appears to be a bullet lodged in Tim Sheehy’s right forearm. That is not in dispute. But how and when it got there has become the subject of an ongoing mystery that has dogged the campaign of the former Navy SEAL challenging Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) in one of this election cycle’s most high-stakes races.

The question of how Sheehy was shot first came up last spring in a Washington Post exposé by Liz Goodwin who reported that Sheehy had said on the campaign trail he has a “bullet stuck” in his right arm from his time serving in Afghanistan. The problem was that Sheehy had told a National Park Service ranger in 2015 that the bullet wound in his right arm came from him accidentally shooting himself with a Colt .45 revolver while in Glacier National Park.

When confronted with these incompatible stories, Sheehy told the Post that his original story was a lie designed to protect former platoon-mates who may have shot him in a friendly fire incident in Afghanistan in 2012. Sheehy said that, in reality, he’d ended up in the emergency room in 2015 after falling on a hike. A park ranger, in this version of the story, was summoned to the hospital because Sheehy told the staff there that he had a bullet in his arm.

Sheey’s account should be easy to substantiate. Medical records would presumably show whether he arrived at the hospital with a fresh bullet wound or an injury sustained from a fall. The medical professionals who treated him could potentially recall what happened. A family member who was with him that day could back up his story. But Sheehy has not released records or made available any witnesses of the 2015 incident who could backup his version of events.

Sheehy, 38, is a first-time candidate who, until recently, ran a wildfire firefighting company that is struggling financially. He has been endorsed by Donald Trump and was seen as a top recruit by Senate Republicans. His background as a millennial former SEAL, Purple Heart recipient, and wealthy businessman who was largely free of MAGA baggage was seen as perfect for taking on Tester, who was first elected in 2006. Polls now show him leading Tester in a race that is crucial for determining which party controls the Senate.

In terms of medical records, the Sheehy campaign only shared an X-ray with the Post that it provided on the condition that the image not be published. Doctors who reviewed it for the paper concluded that it does not provide strong support for Sheehy’s story that a “friendly ricochet bullet” hit him in Afghanistan:

The image probably depicts a bullet, but it is not possible to tell what type of weapon it came from nor the age of the wound, said Joseph V. Sakran, a trauma surgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, who reviewed the X-ray at the request of The Post. Thomas J. Esposito, a professor at the University of Illinois College of Medicine in Peoria who has spent 30 years as a trauma surgeon, said that the X-ray looks like an injury from a low-velocity firearm, such as a handgun, and that he found it “doubtful” the bullet was the result of ricochet from an assault weapon because of the smoothness of its edges.

Sheehy’s campaign told the Post back in April that he had requested medical records from the hospital visit but had not yet been able to obtain them. Later that month, the campaign declined to comment about the status of that request and referred the paper to Sheehy’s lawyer, Daniel Watkins of Meier Watkins Phillips Pusch. The statement Watkins provided claimed that the “released reports corroborate the information we have provided, and they confirm Mr. Sheehy’s recollection of what took place.” The information provided—that is, the X-ray—does not confirm Sheehy’s account.

One piece of evidence in favor of Sheehy’s current story is that a weapons expert interviewed by the Post said it was “very unlikely” that the gun would have misfired after being dropped. The emergency room that Sheehy went to was about two hours away from where he initially said he shot himself. That, along with the fact that Sheehy appears to have been discharged from the hospital relatively quickly, could also support the claim that he did not arrive at the hospital with a fresh gunshot wound.

I reached out to Sheehy’s campaign on September 3 asking if they would be able to provide any more records to support the candidate’s account, or if they would make someone available to to defend Sheehy’s story on or off-the-record. The campaign did not respond to the email or a follow-up sent last week.

On Wednesday, I emailed Watkins, who, according to his official bio, is a “nationally ranked trial lawyer and reputation counselor specializing in high-stakes crisis and defamation cases.” Watkins confirmed that he is representing Sheehy, and asked to review the request I sent to the campaign. He did not respond after receiving it.

Another problem for Sheehy is the length he went to substantiate his original story in 2015. As the Post reported in its April follow-up, Sheehy hand wrote and signed a detailed statement that explains how he shot himself. “Upon finishing our hike at Logan’s Pass while reloading our vehicle, an improperly placed firearm kept in the vehicle for bear protection fell out and discharged into my right forearm,” he wrote. “We fully cooperated with Ranger [name redacted in document] after he called the ER and agreed to pay the $500.00 fine before leaving the hospital.” Sheehy (who was fined for discharging a firearm in a national park) went on to “request leniency with any charges related to this unfortunate accident” due to his “security clearance and involvement with national defense related contracts.”

Sheehy’s 2015 account fits with a statement of probable cause that the park ranger signed under penalty of perjury shortly after the incident. According to that statement, the ranger was already on the way to Logan Pass in response to the report of a gunshot when he learned that Sheehy was in the Kalispell hospital emergency room. That timeline is supported by a second statement from the park ranger that explained that he initially responded to the incident after a “park visitor called park dispatch” to report that a gun had been accidentally fired.

When interviewed by the Post on the condition of anonymity, the ranger, a Marine Corps veteran, said he was surprised to hear that Sheehy is now claiming to have lied to him in 2015. He recalled Sheehy showing him the weapon at the time and him seeing that it was fully loaded aside from one bullet. “I don’t in any way impugn the law enforcement officer,” Sheehy told the Post about the ranger’s written account. “Everything he says is true to the extent of his knowledge.”

As the Post noted, lying to a park ranger is a crime, although the statute of limitations has now expired. According to his current story, Sheehy lied out of a selfless desire to protect former platoon-mates from an investigation that experts say was highly unlikely to have been triggered by him saying he had been hit by friendly fire years before.

This doesn’t have to be this complicated. Sheehy just needs to release the medical records. He won’t. Which begs the question: Why not?

On Wednesday afternoon, Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) posted a mocking, racist tweet about “wild” Haitians practicing “vudu” and flooding into the US from the “nastiest country in the western hemisphere.” Such rhetoric would be surprising for most members of Congress. In the case of Higgins, it serves as an excellent introduction.

Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) “put a gun to my head,” wrote an ex-wife. (A charge that Higgins denies.)

The post from Higgins, which he soon deleted, focused on the legal Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, who Republicans continue to slander for sport and potential electoral gain.

The tweet is racist. There’s not much more to say about it. There is, however, a lot more to say about Higgins, a member of Congress whose disturbing personal history has not gotten much attention.

One of Higgins’ first appearances in the public record came in a 1992 newspaper article dug up by Bayou Brief, a Louisiana publication that has investigated the congressman. Higgins, then 30, was commenting on Pat Buchanan’s run for president, which came one year after the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard and neo-Nazi David Duke was nearly elected governor of Louisiana.

“Duke won’t get the vote. Pat will. Pat represents much of the same positions,” Higgins explained to a reporter while attending a Buchanan rally—correctly sussing out Buchanan’s white nationalism. “Regardless of the fact that David’s a homeboy and all that, the boy’s a Nazi, and that’s a real problem.”

Still, Higgins admitted that he’d recently voted for David Duke for governor of Louisiana (a man who once decorated his college dorm room with a Nazi flag and picture of Adolf Hitler).

Higgins’ missteps have allegedly not been limited to rhetoric. The first of his three ex-wives wrote while seeking a protective order against him in 1991 that Higgins “put a gun to my head” during an argument. She explained that he “threatened that if I ever came near the house he would shoot me.” (Higgins denied ever being violent with her.)

In 2007, Higgins resigned from the Opelousas Police Department in Louisiana after reportedly assaulting an unarmed Black man and then lying about it. The victim stated that Higgins and another officer, John Chautin, attacked him after he did not consent to a search of his car, according to an internal investigation. “[The victim] stated while on the ground, Officer Higgins grabbed him by the hair and twisted his head and told him to go get his lawyer and called him a pussy,” the report explains. “[He] stated that he was then kicked while still on the ground but could not see who kicked him.” The report also says that Higgins “grabbed [the victim] by the neck and slammed him against his car” and “struck him in the jaw.”

Higgins went on to lie about the incident, falsely claiming that he was the one who was assaulted. Later, the now congressman called back the police investigator to admit he was not telling the truth. He claimed his decision for new honesty stemmed from confessing his sins to a counselor from Las Vegas. The report concluded something else: Higgins learned that a third officer, who was on the scene during the incident, had failed to cover for him and Chautin.

Higgins resigned rather than face disciplinary action. And he went on to hire Chautin in his congressional office.

Perhaps there are other incidents which we do not know about. As Higgins himself admits, he has skeletons.

“Not only did I do things wrong. You better start early, pack a lunch, and bring batteries for your flashlight if you intend to go back through my history and find everything I’ve done wrong,” he warned in a 2015 interview. “Bring a shovel. You might need an excavator.”

If you have information about Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.), please contact Noah Lanard at nlanard@motherjones.com.

On Wednesday afternoon, Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) posted a mocking, racist tweet about “wild” Haitians practicing “vudu” and flooding into the US from the “nastiest country in the western hemisphere.” Such rhetoric would be surprising for most members of Congress. In the case of Higgins, it serves as an excellent introduction.

Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) “put a gun to my head,” wrote an ex-wife. (A charge that Higgins denies.)

The post from Higgins, which he soon deleted, focused on the legal Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, who Republicans continue to slander for sport and potential electoral gain.

The tweet is racist. There’s not much more to say about it. There is, however, a lot more to say about Higgins, a member of Congress whose disturbing personal history has not gotten much attention.

One of Higgins’ first appearances in the public record came in a 1992 newspaper article dug up by Bayou Brief, a Louisiana publication that has investigated the congressman. Higgins, then 30, was commenting on Pat Buchanan’s run for president, which came one year after the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard and neo-Nazi David Duke was nearly elected governor of Louisiana.

“Duke won’t get the vote. Pat will. Pat represents much of the same positions,” Higgins explained to a reporter while attending a Buchanan rally—correctly sussing out Buchanan’s white nationalism. “Regardless of the fact that David’s a homeboy and all that, the boy’s a Nazi, and that’s a real problem.”

Still, Higgins admitted that he’d recently voted for David Duke for governor of Louisiana (a man who once decorated his college dorm room with a Nazi flag and picture of Adolf Hitler).

Higgins’ missteps have allegedly not been limited to rhetoric. The first of his three ex-wives wrote while seeking a protective order against him in 1991 that Higgins “put a gun to my head” during an argument. She explained that he “threatened that if I ever came near the house he would shoot me.” (Higgins denied ever being violent with her.)

In 2007, Higgins resigned from the Opelousas Police Department in Louisiana after reportedly assaulting an unarmed Black man and then lying about it. The victim stated that Higgins and another officer, John Chautin, attacked him after he did not consent to a search of his car, according to an internal investigation. “[The victim] stated while on the ground, Officer Higgins grabbed him by the hair and twisted his head and told him to go get his lawyer and called him a pussy,” the report explains. “[He] stated that he was then kicked while still on the ground but could not see who kicked him.” The report also says that Higgins “grabbed [the victim] by the neck and slammed him against his car” and “struck him in the jaw.”

Higgins went on to lie about the incident, falsely claiming that he was the one who was assaulted. Later, the now congressman called back the police investigator to admit he was not telling the truth. He claimed his decision for new honesty stemmed from confessing his sins to a counselor from Las Vegas. The report concluded something else: Higgins learned that a third officer, who was on the scene during the incident, had failed to cover for him and Chautin.

Higgins resigned rather than face disciplinary action. And he went on to hire Chautin in his congressional office.

Perhaps there are other incidents which we do not know about. As Higgins himself admits, he has skeletons.

“Not only did I do things wrong. You better start early, pack a lunch, and bring batteries for your flashlight if you intend to go back through my history and find everything I’ve done wrong,” he warned in a 2015 interview. “Bring a shovel. You might need an excavator.”

If you have information about Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.), please contact Noah Lanard at nlanard@motherjones.com.

When President Joe Biden first joined the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1975, it was taken as a sign that the 32-year-old legislator was “ticketed for a bright future.” The assumption proved correct. Although it took decades, Biden did ascend the ladder of American power—rising to chair of that committee to vice president and, finally, to the presidency. As Biden climbed, he was not shy about selling himself as a master statesman and an expert on foreign policy. While running for president in 2007, he made that experience central to his case for why Democrats should back him over Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

In theory, the speech that Biden gave on Tuesday morning to the United Nations General Assembly—the last of his career before the body—was the end of this triumphant arc. An American president opining, at the end of his reign, on his record within a favored policy arena.

Instead, the timing of the UN speech highlighted one of the central failures of his presidency: Biden’s inability to restore even a semblance of calm between Israel and its neighbors in the wake of the October 7 attack by Hamas. As if to rub it in, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu posted a video on social media during the speech in which he vowed to continue the bombing in Lebanon that Biden tried in vain to prevent.

Since October 7, the Biden administration’s overarching diplomatic priority in the Middle East has been to prevent a broader regional war. The president sent top level envoys and military officials to the region countless times in service of that goal. He dispatched carrier strike groups to signal to Iran and its proxies that the United States was prepared to defend Israel. He agreed to almost all of Israel’s requests for weapons and diplomatic cover—partly out of a misguided belief that doing so would give the administration the ability to shape Israel’s actions.

While it has been clear for most of the past year that his approach has failed in Gaza—where more than 41,000 people have been killed and nearly 100,000 people have been injured—the Biden administration has clung, as ceasefire talks fell apart, to the victory of Israel not starting a massive regional conflict. Now, even that tiny glimmer of a win has faded.

In the past week, Biden’s efforts in Lebanon have fallen apart. The signs that Israel was headed toward war began in earnest last week when it made a central goal of its military campaign to return residents that had evacuated out of the north to their homes. One day later, it began detonating thousands of pagers sent to members of Hezbollah in what even centrist American officials like former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta have called an act of terrorism. On Friday, it launched an airstrike in Beirut targeting senior Hezbollah commanders that killed at least 50 people.

Despite this, during the speech, Biden reiterated his longstanding position that it is “not in anyone’s interest” for there to be a full-scale war in the region. “Even as the situation has escalated, a diplomatic solution is still possible,” he continued. “In fact, it remains the only path to lasting security…That’s what we’re working tirelessly to achieve.”

Israel clearly disagrees. Monday was the deadliest day in Lebanon since at least 1990. Israeli airstrikes throughout the country killed more than 550 people—including at least 144 women and children—and injured more than 1,800, according to the Lebanese health ministry. (By population, this is equivalent to the United States suffering roughly 150,000 casualties in a single day; there were less than half as many US casualties during the entirety of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.) 

Israel’s assault shows no sign of letting up. In his Tuesday post, Netanyahu pledged to continue the bombing and said “anybody who has a missile in their living room will not have a home.” Hezbollah has responded by launching rockets into Israel.

Another US goal of the Biden administration has been a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel, which has also fallen apart. In private, even Biden’s own officials now say that is unlikely to happen during his presidency. Netanyahu seems to have no interest in a ceasefire partly because it would cost him the support of the far-right Jewish supremacists in his cabinet and potentially bring down his governing coalition.

Biden detailed the horrors of Hamas’ October 7 attack on Tuesday before making clear that the families of Israeli hostages he has met with are “going through hell.” He added that “innocent civilians in Gaza are also going through hell” as evidenced by the “thousands and thousands” of people who have been killed. “Now is the time” for Israel and Hamas to agree to a ceasefire that ends the war,” Biden said.

But his administration has proven to be almost completely unwilling to use the United States’ substantial leverage to push Israel to change course. As a result, Biden has been repeatedly and publicly humiliated by Netanyahu, an ostensible ally who is believed to want Donald Trump to beat Biden’s Vice President Kamala Harris in November.

Throughout the speech, Biden made a point of defending the UN Charter and his efforts to uphold it. “The Security Council, like the UN itself, needs to go back to the job of making peace—of brokering deals to end wars and suffering,” the president argued. It is a noble goal but it almost surely rang hollow to the diplomats and heads of state in attendance. 

Over the past year, Biden’s UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield has consistently vetoed Security Council resolutions designed to hold Israel accountable and end the war. In April, the United States was the only Security Council member to veto a resolution that recommended that Palestine be admitted as a member of the UN. In December, it was one of 10 out of 186 nations to oppose a ceasefire resolution. No other major powers joined it in doing so. (On Tuesday, ProPublica reported that Secretary of State Antony Blinken, a longtime Biden aide, rejected US government reports that found that Israel deliberately blocked humanitarian aid to Gaza—a conclusion that could have forced the United States to cut off military aid.)

The United States is not the only nation to use its Security Council position to run interference for violent and illiberal actions. China and Russia do the same. The difference is that Biden wanted to be seen as a champion of a “rules-based” order that respected international law and prioritized humanitarian concerns. His actions in relation to Israel and Palestine do not fit with such a goal. If Biden is aware of the tension, he did not mention it on Tuesday. 

When President Joe Biden first joined the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1975, it was taken as a sign that the 32-year-old legislator was “ticketed for a bright future.” The assumption proved correct. Although it took decades, Biden did ascend the ladder of American power—rising to chair of that committee to vice president and, finally, to the presidency. As Biden climbed, he was not shy about selling himself as a master statesman and an expert on foreign policy. While running for president in 2007, he made that experience central to his case for why Democrats should back him over Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

In theory, the speech that Biden gave on Tuesday morning to the United Nations General Assembly—the last of his career before the body—was the end of this triumphant arc. An American president opining, at the end of his reign, on his record within a favored policy arena.

Instead, the timing of the UN speech highlighted one of the central failures of his presidency: Biden’s inability to restore even a semblance of calm between Israel and its neighbors in the wake of the October 7 attack by Hamas. As if to rub it in, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu posted a video on social media during the speech in which he vowed to continue the bombing in Lebanon that Biden tried in vain to prevent.

Since October 7, the Biden administration’s overarching diplomatic priority in the Middle East has been to prevent a broader regional war. The president sent top level envoys and military officials to the region countless times in service of that goal. He dispatched carrier strike groups to signal to Iran and its proxies that the United States was prepared to defend Israel. He agreed to almost all of Israel’s requests for weapons and diplomatic cover—partly out of a misguided belief that doing so would give the administration the ability to shape Israel’s actions.

While it has been clear for most of the past year that his approach has failed in Gaza—where more than 41,000 people have been killed and nearly 100,000 people have been injured—the Biden administration has clung, as ceasefire talks fell apart, to the victory of Israel not starting a massive regional conflict. Now, even that tiny glimmer of a win has faded.

In the past week, Biden’s efforts in Lebanon have fallen apart. The signs that Israel was headed toward war began in earnest last week when it made a central goal of its military campaign to return residents that had evacuated out of the north to their homes. One day later, it began detonating thousands of pagers sent to members of Hezbollah in what even centrist American officials like former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta have called an act of terrorism. On Friday, it launched an airstrike in Beirut targeting senior Hezbollah commanders that killed at least 50 people.

Despite this, during the speech, Biden reiterated his longstanding position that it is “not in anyone’s interest” for there to be a full-scale war in the region. “Even as the situation has escalated, a diplomatic solution is still possible,” he continued. “In fact, it remains the only path to lasting security…That’s what we’re working tirelessly to achieve.”

Israel clearly disagrees. Monday was the deadliest day in Lebanon since at least 1990. Israeli airstrikes throughout the country killed more than 550 people—including at least 144 women and children—and injured more than 1,800, according to the Lebanese health ministry. (By population, this is equivalent to the United States suffering roughly 150,000 casualties in a single day; there were less than half as many US casualties during the entirety of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.) 

Israel’s assault shows no sign of letting up. In his Tuesday post, Netanyahu pledged to continue the bombing and said “anybody who has a missile in their living room will not have a home.” Hezbollah has responded by launching rockets into Israel.

Another US goal of the Biden administration has been a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel, which has also fallen apart. In private, even Biden’s own officials now say that is unlikely to happen during his presidency. Netanyahu seems to have no interest in a ceasefire partly because it would cost him the support of the far-right Jewish supremacists in his cabinet and potentially bring down his governing coalition.

Biden detailed the horrors of Hamas’ October 7 attack on Tuesday before making clear that the families of Israeli hostages he has met with are “going through hell.” He added that “innocent civilians in Gaza are also going through hell” as evidenced by the “thousands and thousands” of people who have been killed. “Now is the time” for Israel and Hamas to agree to a ceasefire that ends the war,” Biden said.

But his administration has proven to be almost completely unwilling to use the United States’ substantial leverage to push Israel to change course. As a result, Biden has been repeatedly and publicly humiliated by Netanyahu, an ostensible ally who is believed to want Donald Trump to beat Biden’s Vice President Kamala Harris in November.

Throughout the speech, Biden made a point of defending the UN Charter and his efforts to uphold it. “The Security Council, like the UN itself, needs to go back to the job of making peace—of brokering deals to end wars and suffering,” the president argued. It is a noble goal but it almost surely rang hollow to the diplomats and heads of state in attendance. 

Over the past year, Biden’s UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield has consistently vetoed Security Council resolutions designed to hold Israel accountable and end the war. In April, the United States was the only Security Council member to veto a resolution that recommended that Palestine be admitted as a member of the UN. In December, it was one of 10 out of 186 nations to oppose a ceasefire resolution. No other major powers joined it in doing so. (On Tuesday, ProPublica reported that Secretary of State Antony Blinken, a longtime Biden aide, rejected US government reports that found that Israel deliberately blocked humanitarian aid to Gaza—a conclusion that could have forced the United States to cut off military aid.)

The United States is not the only nation to use its Security Council position to run interference for violent and illiberal actions. China and Russia do the same. The difference is that Biden wanted to be seen as a champion of a “rules-based” order that respected international law and prioritized humanitarian concerns. His actions in relation to Israel and Palestine do not fit with such a goal. If Biden is aware of the tension, he did not mention it on Tuesday. 

This February, President Joe Biden was eating an ice cream cone with Late Night host Seth Meyers in Manhattan when a reporter asked about the chances of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. “Well,” Biden replied, prompting breaking news posts, “I hope, by the end of the weekend.” The president then assured the public: “We’re close.”

Nearly seven months later, no ceasefire is in sight. On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported that multiple US officials told the paper that there is little chance of a ceasefire.

The report continued a horrific week for Biden’s foreign policy record in the Middle East. Each of the past five days has brought its own grim news about the vanishing chances of peace in the region:

Monday: Israel formally expanded its war aims to include the return of residents evacuated out of the north. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said the “possibility for an agreement is running out” with Hezbollah. Gallant explained, “Therefore, the only way left to ensure the return of Israel’s northern communities to their homes will be via military action.” It suggested a much heightened potential for a wider war between Lebanon and Israel.

Tuesday: Israel began detonating explosive-rigged pagers and walkie-talkies in an attack that targeted members of Hezbollah, the Iran-backed political and militant group. Axios reported that US officials were not warned of the operation. The indiscriminate approach killed dozens—including at least two children—and injured thousands. In doing so, Israel greatly increased the odds of a regional war (that the United States does not want to be dragged into).

Wednesday: Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said that his kingdom will not normalize relations with Israel without the “establishment of a Palestinian state.” The announcement appeared to kill off any chance of success for a years-long (and widely criticized) effort by the Biden administration to normalize relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, while largely sidestepping the concerns of Palestinians. That effort had begun under the Trump administration in the much touted Abraham Accords that the former president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, had helped broker.

Thursday: A Wall Street Journal story headlined “US Officials Concede Gaza Cease-Fire Out of Reach for Biden,” cited senior US officials who have concluded that a ceasefire deal is unlikely during Biden’s presidency. “No deal is imminent,” one said. “I’m not sure it ever gets done.”

Friday: Israel killed at least 12 people in an airstrike in Beirut targeting senior Hezbollah commanders. As Gallant made clear earlier in the week in reference to Lebanon, “we are at the start of a new phase in the war” and the “center of gravity is moving north.”

Initially, one of the few bright spots of Biden’s approach was that no regional war had broken out. The recent Israeli assaults in Lebanon, along with Gallant’s comments about a “new phase” of the war, suggest that may soon change. For Netanyahu, who is widely believed to favor a second Donald Trump presidency, a new phase of conflict that makes a Biden-Harris administration look ineffectual just as some Americans begin voting may carry additional rewards.

This string of havoc was all, sadly, predictable. In response to the brutal Hamas attack on October 7, Biden embraced what was labeled a “bear hug” approach to his relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In keeping with a decades-old personal approach for managing relations with Israel, he made sure there was “no daylight” between him and the Israeli Prime Minister in public. Biden thought it would allow him to shape the direction of the war in private.

Without US weapons, Israeli military experts have made clear that the country would not be able to carry on fighting at such scale.

Biden’s faith in a no daylight approach had been repeatedly disproven prior to October 7 but he stuck with it anyway. That decision reflected an effectively limitless commitment to supporting Israel. As I reported in December on the roots of Biden’s flawed response to the war, his Israel record was unusual:

Biden has long gone further than many of his fellow Democrats in defense of Israel. As a senator, he backed moving the American embassy to Jerusalem decades before Donald Trump made that a reality, boasted about attending more fundraisers for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) than any other senator, and savaged an effort by George H.W. Bush to push Israel toward negotiating with Palestinians. As vice president, he undercut Barack Obama’s efforts to push Israel toward peace. As president prior to October 7, he continued policies implemented by Trump that sidelined Palestinians.

The death toll in Gaza stood at around 20,000 when that story came out. It is now double that, and the full death toll may prove far higher. Nearly 100,000 people have been injured. Israeli hostages remain in captivity in large part due to Netanyahu’s repeated efforts to derail ceasefire negotiations.

What has not changed is Biden’s almost complete unwillingness to use the United States’ extensive leverage over Israel. Aside from some 2,000-pound bombs, his administration has ensured that arms keep flowing. That decision has been made despite substantial evidence that doing so violates US laws that prevent weapons from being sent to foreign units implicated in major human rights violations. Without US weapons, Israeli military experts have made clear that the country would not be able to carry on fighting at such scale.

This February, President Joe Biden was eating an ice cream cone with Late Night host Seth Meyers in Manhattan when a reporter asked about the chances of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. “Well,” Biden replied, prompting breaking news posts, “I hope, by the end of the weekend.” The president then assured the public: “We’re close.”

Nearly seven months later, no ceasefire is in sight. On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported that multiple US officials told the paper that there is little chance of a ceasefire.

The report continued a horrific week for Biden’s foreign policy record in the Middle East. Each of the past five days has brought its own grim news about the vanishing chances of peace in the region:

Monday: Israel formally expanded its war aims to include the return of residents evacuated out of the north. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said the “possibility for an agreement is running out” with Hezbollah. Gallant explained, “Therefore, the only way left to ensure the return of Israel’s northern communities to their homes will be via military action.” It suggested a much heightened potential for a wider war between Lebanon and Israel.

Tuesday: Israel began detonating explosive-rigged pagers and walkie-talkies in an attack that targeted members of Hezbollah, the Iran-backed political and militant group. Axios reported that US officials were not warned of the operation. The indiscriminate approach killed dozens—including at least two children—and injured thousands. In doing so, Israel greatly increased the odds of a regional war (that the United States does not want to be dragged into).

Wednesday: Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said that his kingdom will not normalize relations with Israel without the “establishment of a Palestinian state.” The announcement appeared to kill off any chance of success for a years-long (and widely criticized) effort by the Biden administration to normalize relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, while largely sidestepping the concerns of Palestinians. That effort had begun under the Trump administration in the much touted Abraham Accords that the former president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, had helped broker.

Thursday: A Wall Street Journal story headlined “US Officials Concede Gaza Cease-Fire Out of Reach for Biden,” cited senior US officials who have concluded that a ceasefire deal is unlikely during Biden’s presidency. “No deal is imminent,” one said. “I’m not sure it ever gets done.”

Friday: Israel killed at least 12 people in an airstrike in Beirut targeting senior Hezbollah commanders. As Gallant made clear earlier in the week in reference to Lebanon, “we are at the start of a new phase in the war” and the “center of gravity is moving north.”

Initially, one of the few bright spots of Biden’s approach was that no regional war had broken out. The recent Israeli assaults in Lebanon, along with Gallant’s comments about a “new phase” of the war, suggest that may soon change. For Netanyahu, who is widely believed to favor a second Donald Trump presidency, a new phase of conflict that makes a Biden-Harris administration look ineffectual just as some Americans begin voting may carry additional rewards.

This string of havoc was all, sadly, predictable. In response to the brutal Hamas attack on October 7, Biden embraced what was labeled a “bear hug” approach to his relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In keeping with a decades-old personal approach for managing relations with Israel, he made sure there was “no daylight” between him and the Israeli Prime Minister in public. Biden thought it would allow him to shape the direction of the war in private.

Without US weapons, Israeli military experts have made clear that the country would not be able to carry on fighting at such scale.

Biden’s faith in a no daylight approach had been repeatedly disproven prior to October 7 but he stuck with it anyway. That decision reflected an effectively limitless commitment to supporting Israel. As I reported in December on the roots of Biden’s flawed response to the war, his Israel record was unusual:

Biden has long gone further than many of his fellow Democrats in defense of Israel. As a senator, he backed moving the American embassy to Jerusalem decades before Donald Trump made that a reality, boasted about attending more fundraisers for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) than any other senator, and savaged an effort by George H.W. Bush to push Israel toward negotiating with Palestinians. As vice president, he undercut Barack Obama’s efforts to push Israel toward peace. As president prior to October 7, he continued policies implemented by Trump that sidelined Palestinians.

The death toll in Gaza stood at around 20,000 when that story came out. It is now double that, and the full death toll may prove far higher. Nearly 100,000 people have been injured. Israeli hostages remain in captivity in large part due to Netanyahu’s repeated efforts to derail ceasefire negotiations.

What has not changed is Biden’s almost complete unwillingness to use the United States’ extensive leverage over Israel. Aside from some 2,000-pound bombs, his administration has ensured that arms keep flowing. That decision has been made despite substantial evidence that doing so violates US laws that prevent weapons from being sent to foreign units implicated in major human rights violations. Without US weapons, Israeli military experts have made clear that the country would not be able to carry on fighting at such scale.

The Uncommitted movement announced on Thursday that it will not be endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris. The decision comes in response to Harris declining to break with the Biden administration over its response to the war in Israel and Palestine and after a tumultuous Democratic National Convention in which Palestinian voices were largely shut out from speaking about the horrors happening in Gaza.

The group, which represents the hundreds of thousands of Democrats who voted “uncommitted” during the primaries in protest of Biden’s Gaza policy, said in a statement released Thursday that “Vice President Harris’s unwillingness to shift on unconditional weapons policy or to even make a clear campaign statement in support of upholding existing US and international human rights law has made it impossible for us to endorse her.”

At the same time, the movement’s leaders stressed that they oppose Donald Trump and are not recommending that supporters vote for a third-party candidate because doing so could help elect Trump.

“I told VP Harris through the tears that Michigan voters want to vote for her, but we need a policy change that is going to save lives.”

“We must block Donald Trump, which is why we urge Uncommitted voters to vote against him and avoid third-party candidates that could inadvertently boost his chances, as Trump openly boasts that third parties will help his candidacy,” the group said in a statement released on Thursday. “We urge Uncommitted voters to register anti-Trump votes and vote up and down the ballot.”

Uncommitted leaders, throughout the past months, have been eager to endorse Harris and organize on her behalf if she were willing to move more aggressively towards ending the war. In early August, when organizer Layla Elabed briefly met the vice president, she told her as much. “I told VP Harris through the tears that Michigan voters want to vote for her,” Elabed said at the time, “but we need a policy change that is going to save lives.” Elabed stressed that “pro-war forces like AIPAC may want to drive us out of the Democratic Party, but we’re here to stay.”

Uncommitted had asked Vice President Harris to respond by September 15 to a request to meet with Palestinian Americans in Michigan whose family members have been killed during the war. That meeting has not happened and the Harris campaign has not committed to making it happen.

“The Vice President is committed to work to earn every vote, unite our country, and to be a President for all Americans,” the Harris campaign said in a statement. “She will continue working to bring the war in Gaza to an end in a way where Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination.”

The latest announcement from Uncommitted comes one month after the group made news with a sit-in at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Uncommitted made two main policy asks at the convention: an immediate ceasefire and a US arms embargo on Israel to help bring one about. But Uncommitted delegates also made much smaller demands in the lead up to and during the convention.

Most notably, they asked that an American doctor who has volunteered in Gaza, or a Palestinian American, be given a brief speaking slot from the convention’s main stage. After convention organizers rejected Tanya Haj-Hassan, a pediatric intensive care doctor, the group eventually began pushing for a speaking slot for Georgia state Rep. Ruwa Romman, a Palestinian American Democrat.

Lexis Zeidan, an organizer with the Uncommitted national movement, said that in their refusal to allow even one Palestinian American speaker, “the DNC and the vice president’s campaign fumbled even a small gesture.”

“Now, the vice president’s team is courting people like Dick Cheney, while sidelining these incredibly important anti-war voices,” she said. Some leaders within Uncommitted are voting for Harris—and others will not be voting at the top of the ticket at all. Zeidan, who is Palestinian American, said that on a personal level, she “simply cannot go to the ballot box and cast a vote for a candidate that is not hearing the demands of her people.” Her fellow organizer, Abbas Alawieh, will be voting for Harris, a choice he describes as a “chess move” against Donald Trump.

“If you’re willing to get some satisfaction out of feeling like you punished Harris, and that’ll help you sleep at night, I can respect that,” Alawieh said. But, he added, “In order for me to try and start sleeping at night, I need to know that I’m blocking Donald Trump because his plans are very clearly to enable Netanyahu to do more murdering.”

Mother Jones reported during the convention that Romman, who was not an Uncommitted delegate, planned to explicitly endorse Harris from the main stage. Nevertheless, national Democrats denied her and any other Palestinian American Democrat a speaking slot without asking to see their remarks. Uncommitted had made clear that any speech would be vetted and pre-approved by convention planners. As we reported:

By denying someone of Palestinian descent the chance to speak, the Harris campaign missed an easy opportunity to create distance between itself and President Biden’s failing and highly unpopular response to the war. A June poll by CBS News and YouGov found that 77 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of independents believe that the United States should not send weapons and supplies to Israel, despite the Biden administration’s support for continuing to do so. Only 23 percent of Democrats, compared with 76 percent of Republicans, told Gallup in June that they support Israel’s military actions in Gaza. 

More than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed and nearly 100,000 have been injured in Gaza, according to the local health ministry. Public health experts fear that the full death toll may be far higher. Nearly a year into the war, the chances for a ceasefire in the near future still appear low.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears committed to prolonging the war—even if it means the death of more hostages—to appease far-right cabinet members and remain in power. President Biden has largely refused to use the United States’ extensive leverage to push Netanyahu toward a ceasefire.

In last week’s debate, Harris reiterated her support for Israel and once again called for the US to have the “most lethal fighting force in the world.” 

“Our organizing around the presidential election was never about endorsing a specific candidate,” Alawieh, the Uncommitted cofounder, made clear on Thursday. “It has always been about building a movement that saves lives.”

Update, September 19: This post has been updated with a statement from the campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris.

At the center of the two biggest controversies of JD Vance’s short political career have been cats. The first came from his attacks against the “childless cat ladies” on the left. More recently, the Republican vice presidential candidate has been spreading lies about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating pets.

One possible conclusion to draw from these missives is that he is an angry man who spends too much time on the internet. Another is that he is a liar. But there is much more to what Vance is doing than mere trolling. 

Vance’s cat rhetoric is a purposeful attempt to simplify Great Replacement hysteria—hoping to convince voters that their fears of a migrant invasion and childless women are an existential threat. The controversies derive from two fixations: the number of children American women are having and the rate at which foreigners are coming to the United States. Vance wants a United States where the birth rate is high and the immigration rate is low.

In championing low immigration, mass deportation, and an increase in fertility, Vance is aligning himself with white nationalists who were once shunned by the Republican establishment. These days, he is spending less time openly espousing his ideas than he used to on podcasts. Instead, Vance—as he has explained is part of his project—is finding uncomplicated ways to get his points across (whether they are factual or not). “I do think that political rhetoric is fundamentally [about] dealing with people at their particular level,” he said earlier this year. “I think you get too deep into the theory, you actually miss a lot of the truth.” On Sunday, he went further, telling CNN’s Dana Bash during an exchange about Springfield, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

Lying about Haitian immigrants eating cats and attacking childless cat ladies is a perfect example of this plan. Vance thinks he can sell what critics have called “blood and soil nationalism”—invoking the Nazi slogan—with dumb memes.

Vance has not hidden his influences for this theory of change. “I read this book when I was maybe 15 years old, called the Death of the West by Patrick Buchanan,” Vance said during a 2021 podcast appearance. “And that was a really influential book for me.” Buchanan, a former speechwriter for Richard Nixon and Republican presidential candidate, was not subtle about his white nationalism in the Death of the West. When it came to immigration, he accused Mexican Americans of waging a “reconquista” of land they’d lost to the United States. He spoke of declining birth rates in extreme terms—claiming that “Western women” were committing an “autogenocide for peoples of European ancestry” by having too many abortions.

It is not hard to trace the line between Buchanan’s fears and Vance’s anxieties about “childless cat ladies.” The subtitle of Buchanan’s book cuts to the heart of Vance’s current preoccupations: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization.

Buchanan’s worldview was rooted in a paleoconservatism that rejected the view that America is an idea and instead saw America as a people. In doing so, he embraced a framework that justified exclusion and a permanent white majority. 

Vance has been emphasizing the claim that Americans are a “people” for much of this year. During a speech to the hard-right group American Moment earlier this year, Vance made a point of bringing up “this thing that increasingly bothers me, which is the concept that American is an idea.” Vance made the same point about Americans as a people in July at the National Conservatism Conference in which he railed about the influx of Haitian migrants in Springfield. But the clearest explanation of this obsession, as my colleague Isabela Dias wrote, came during the Republican National Convention: 

America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.

Now, it is part of that tradition, of course, that we welcome newcomers. But when we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms.

Vance went on to talk about the cemetery plot in Kentucky that he hopes that he; his wife, Usha, the child of Indian immigrants; and, eventually, their kids will be buried in. (Her family came on “our terms” in this formulation.)

“There will be seven generations just in that small mountain cemetery plot in eastern Kentucky,” Vance said. “Seven generations of people who have fought for this country. Who have built this country. Who have made things in this country. And who would fight and die to protect this country if they were asked to.”

Vance was born in Ohio. It was his grandparents who came to the state in search of economic opportunity in the 1940s. His kids would likely be buried in the family plot in Kentucky sometime around 2100—roughly 160 years after any of their paternal ancestors lived there. But for Vance, it doesn’t seem to matter. He believes his blood is connected to that soil. That is what it means for him for America to be a people.

Behind the silly memes of Donald Trump running with cats is a much darker story. Vance sees a rapid demographic shift that is being forced upon the American “people” through immigration and childless women. Vance is determined to stop it. If he has to talk about cats along the way, he will. 

At the center of the two biggest controversies of JD Vance’s short political career have been cats. The first came from his attacks against the “childless cat ladies” on the left. More recently, the Republican vice presidential candidate has been spreading lies about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating pets.

One possible conclusion to draw from these missives is that he is an angry man who spends too much time on the internet. Another is that he is a liar. But there is much more to what Vance is doing than mere trolling. 

Vance’s cat rhetoric is a purposeful attempt to simplify Great Replacement hysteria—hoping to convince voters that their fears of a migrant invasion and childless women are an existential threat. The controversies derive from two fixations: the number of children American women are having and the rate at which foreigners are coming to the United States. Vance wants a United States where the birth rate is high and the immigration rate is low.

In championing low immigration, mass deportation, and an increase in fertility, Vance is aligning himself with white nationalists who were once shunned by the Republican establishment. These days, he is spending less time openly espousing his ideas than he used to on podcasts. Instead, Vance—as he has explained is part of his project—is finding uncomplicated ways to get his points across (whether they are factual or not). “I do think that political rhetoric is fundamentally [about] dealing with people at their particular level,” he said earlier this year. “I think you get too deep into the theory, you actually miss a lot of the truth.” On Sunday, he went further, telling CNN’s Dana Bash during an exchange about Springfield, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

Lying about Haitian immigrants eating cats and attacking childless cat ladies is a perfect example of this plan. Vance thinks he can sell what critics have called “blood and soil nationalism”—invoking the Nazi slogan—with dumb memes.

Vance has not hidden his influences for this theory of change. “I read this book when I was maybe 15 years old, called the Death of the West by Patrick Buchanan,” Vance said during a 2021 podcast appearance. “And that was a really influential book for me.” Buchanan, a former speechwriter for Richard Nixon and Republican presidential candidate, was not subtle about his white nationalism in the Death of the West. When it came to immigration, he accused Mexican Americans of waging a “reconquista” of land they’d lost to the United States. He spoke of declining birth rates in extreme terms—claiming that “Western women” were committing an “autogenocide for peoples of European ancestry” by having too many abortions.

It is not hard to trace the line between Buchanan’s fears and Vance’s anxieties about “childless cat ladies.” The subtitle of Buchanan’s book cuts to the heart of Vance’s current preoccupations: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization.

Buchanan’s worldview was rooted in a paleoconservatism that rejected the view that America is an idea and instead saw America as a people. In doing so, he embraced a framework that justified exclusion and a permanent white majority. 

Vance has been emphasizing the claim that Americans are a “people” for much of this year. During a speech to the hard-right group American Moment earlier this year, Vance made a point of bringing up “this thing that increasingly bothers me, which is the concept that American is an idea.” Vance made the same point about Americans as a people in July at the National Conservatism Conference in which he railed about the influx of Haitian migrants in Springfield. But the clearest explanation of this obsession, as my colleague Isabela Dias wrote, came during the Republican National Convention: 

America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.

Now, it is part of that tradition, of course, that we welcome newcomers. But when we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms.

Vance went on to talk about the cemetery plot in Kentucky that he hopes that he; his wife, Usha, the child of Indian immigrants; and, eventually, their kids will be buried in. (Her family came on “our terms” in this formulation.)

“There will be seven generations just in that small mountain cemetery plot in eastern Kentucky,” Vance said. “Seven generations of people who have fought for this country. Who have built this country. Who have made things in this country. And who would fight and die to protect this country if they were asked to.”

Vance was born in Ohio. It was his grandparents who came to the state in search of economic opportunity in the 1940s. His kids would likely be buried in the family plot in Kentucky sometime around 2100—roughly 160 years after any of their paternal ancestors lived there. But for Vance, it doesn’t seem to matter. He believes his blood is connected to that soil. That is what it means for him for America to be a people.

Behind the silly memes of Donald Trump running with cats is a much darker story. Vance sees a rapid demographic shift that is being forced upon the American “people” through immigration and childless women. Vance is determined to stop it. If he has to talk about cats along the way, he will. 

On Monday,  JD Vance wrote a more than 1,200 word post on X in response to a second apparent assassination attempt targeting Donald. In it, Vance said the “threat of violence is disgraceful,” called on people to “reject political violence,” and said he admired President Joe Biden for “calling for peace and calm.”

Vance’s rejection of political violence would be more persuasive had he not recently endorsed a book that celebrates right-wing political violence and dictators who committed some of the most notorious atrocities of the 20th century. Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them) by Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec and coauthor Joshua Lisec, a professional ghostwriter, was published in July with a forward by Steve Bannon. As my colleague David Corn reported in July, Vance wrote a blurb used to promote the book: 

In the past, communists marched in the streets waving red flags. Today, they march through HR, college campuses, and courtrooms to wage lawfare against good, honest people. In Unhumans, Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec reveal their plans and show us what to do to fight back.

Even by today’s standards, Unhumans is extreme, transparently authoritarian, and evocative of Nazi propaganda in its insistence on the complete dehumanization of political opponents. The thesis of the book is that the right is up against “unhumans” intent on destroying civilization. It defines unhumans broadly—saying that the label applies to communists, socialists, leftists, and so-called progressives. In summarizing their argument, they write: 

This is a book about unhumans, and this is what they do: With power, unhumans undo civilization itself. They undo order. They undo the basic bonds of society that make communities and nations possible. They destroy the human rights of life, liberty and property—and undo their own humanity in the process by fully embracing nihilism, cynicism, and envy.

Vance and Posobiec appear to be close. During a speech in March to the hard-right group American Moment, the Ohio senator began began by shouting out “good friends” in the audience like fellow Peter Thiel acolyte Blake Masters and “Jack P,” an apparent reference to Posobiec, who was in the audience that night. Vance’s blurb appeared a few months later. 

But it is really in their account of 20th century politics that the full extent of their revisionism comes into view. A section dealing with the Spanish Civil war comes with the subhead: “Fransciso Franco, a Great Man of History.” 

“Ironically, for being remembered in the West as a fascist dictator,” the authors claim, “the eventual [sic] victorious general Franco—the self-proclaimed caudillo, or leader, of postwar new Spain—didn’t actually do a lot of fascism or dictating.” This will come as news to the Spaniards whose ancestors’ remains are still being identified in mass graves that Franco was responsible for. 

As I read their paeon to Franco, who took power as a result of a military coup, I remembered Mother Jones co-founder Adam Hochschild’s book on Americans who fought against Franco, Spain in Our Hearts. In it, Hochschild describes how Franco’s troops boasted about having Moorish soldiers rape Spanish women who opposed them. Franco’s Nationalist troops, he writes, celebrated raping perceived enemies by scrawling on walls: “Your women will give birth to Fascists.” Hochschild continues: 

Beyond the rapes, in town after town, women whose only crime was to be supporters of Popular Front parties had their heads shaved. In a practice borrowed from Italian Fascists, they were then forcefed castor oil (a powerful laxative) and paraded through the streets, sometimes naked or half naked, to be jeered as they soiled themselves.

Posobiec and Lisec take a different view of Franco. They suggest that the Spanish civil war is rarely described as what it is: “a righteous, justified war for the sake of the cross—that is, for the honor and glory of Jesus Christ.” 

Elsewhere in the book, Posobiec and Lisec celebrate Augusto Pinochet, who came to power in a CIA-backed coup that deposed Chile’s democratically elected president Salvador Allende. One of the defining atrocities of Pinochet’s dictatorship were the “death flights” in which political dissidents were killed and forcibly disappeared after being dropped from the air into the ocean or mountains. Posobiec and Lisec write that the “story of tossing communists out of helicopters hails from Pinochet’s elimination of communism.” They continue approvingly, “Wherever Pinochet was, there was no communism.”

Other subjects of the author’s adulation include Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Joseph McCarthy. In closing, they argue that “Great Men of Means,” which they effectively define as dictators, are one of the best ways to crush their subhuman opponents. Supporting such a strongman is depicted as all but the opportunity of a lifetime. “You’ll know them when you see them,” the authors explain, “as they attract all the literal and metaphorical firepower of the enemy.”

Vance may abhor some political violence. But his endorsement of Unhumans raises questions about how he feels about the kind directed at his political enemies.

On Monday morning, a friend texted Vilès Dorsainvil to ask if he’d seen the claims circulating on social media. Dorsainvil, the leader of Springfield, Ohio’s Haitian Community Help and Support Center, had not. He quickly saw that Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) had posted that “reports now show” that Springfield residents were having their “pets abducted and eaten” by “Haitian illegal immigrants.”

“It was so painful,” Dorsainvil explained. “I had to leave my job because I was so perturbed that I could not concentrate.” He took the week off from working as a bilingual specialist who processes applications for government assistance to support his community and focus on his mental health. 

City officials quickly made clear there is no evidence to support the lies Vance and many other top Republicans, including Donald Trump, are spreading. Vance didn’t care. As he wrote on Tuesday, “Keep the cat memes flowing.” (Vance’s Senate office did not respond to a request for comment that asked for any evidence that would support his recent claims.)

These aren’t harmless memes. The prototypical example looks like what would happen if someone typed “Black people in a third world country chasing Donald Trump holding a cat” into an AI-powered image generator.

Just gonna leave this here … @ericswalwell pic.twitter.com/nDTqN0IZ6Y

— Nancy Mace (@NancyMace) September 10, 2024

In recent months, Vance has been the key figure in making Springfield a national target for the far right. “I blame JD Vance for it. Our city leaders reached out to JD Vance, our senator, asking for help,” Carl Ruby, the senior pastor at Central Christian in Springfield, said about a request for federal assistance Vance drew attention to this summer. “Instead, he brought it up at a Senate hearing and referenced it as a crisis and began amplifying these lies.” In doing so, Vance has put his own constituents at risk. Bomb threats have now led to multiple Springfield schools being evacuated.

The initial gut reaction many people are having to this racist smear campaign is the correct one: It’s vile. Nor is it new. The first ad of his political career in 2022 (titled “Are you a racist?”) opened with Vance asking “Do you hate Mexicans?” He went to to attack the media for calling “us” racist for wanting to build the wall and to invoke the Great Replacement theory—claiming in the ad that “Democrat voters” were “pouring into this country” from across the southern border.

Are you a racist? pic.twitter.com/Fdknxld39i

— JD Vance (@JDVance) April 5, 2022

Vance’s lies about Springfield are the latest iteration of what could be mistaken for only cynical race-baiting. The reality is that they reflect much deeper-seated biases about who the country belongs to. As Vance stressed in his Republican National Convention speech, “America is not just an idea” but a “people with a shared history and a common future.” He went on, “When we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms.” His rhetoric about Springfield should leave little doubt about who he means by we.

Springfield is about an hour northeast of where Vance grew up in Middletown, and shares many similarities to the economically depressed hometown Vance described in Hillbilly Elegy. If anything, the decline in Springfield was more severe. Middletown’s population has remained relatively steady since 1970, while in Springfield it dropped from more than 80,000 in 1970 to fewer than 60,000 in 2020. 

That has changed in recent years as a result of an influx of what local officials and community leaders estimate to be about 15,000 Haitian immigrants. Ruby explained that the large majority of Haitians in Springfield have some form of legal authorization to live in the United States such as Temporary Protected Status. Many work for Topre America, a Japanese auto parts manufacturer. Others have found jobs at a Dole food processing plant and countless local businesses. Their success in finding jobs and opening businesses of their own has led other Haitian immigrants to come to Springfield through word of mouth.

Ruby has lived in Springfield for about 40 years. “Our county is projected to lose about 25,000 people between now and 2050,” Ruby told me on Tuesday. “Having an influx of immigrants, from my perspective, is a wonderful thing.”

In another world, Vance might view Haitian migrants seeking opportunity sympathetically. Hillbilly Elegy is, in many ways, a memoir of domestic migration. It chronicles how the so-called hillbilly highway brought his grandparents out of Appalachia in the 1940s. Vance is intimately acquainted with both the promise and perils that can flow from a family’s decision to leave home. 

One difference is that Haitians in Springfield appear to be doing much better than the relatives and community members Vance put in the pillory in Hillbilly Elegy. Local employers, Ruby said, view them as hard workers who, unlike some other residents, can be counted on to pass drug tests. Ruby added that many Haitians in Springfield were professionals back home and are now significantly underemployed. Contrary to what Vance’s fearmongering suggests, there has been no increase in property or violent crime in Springfield, according to local data.

Vance’s demonization of the Haitian community comes despite the fact that he spent much of his brief career as a venture capitalist whose stated mission was to create jobs in places like Springfield. Politico reported during his Senate run that his venture firm was “part of a group of at least 46 investors who together invested in three companies that created a total of about 750 jobs in the state of Ohio between 2019 and 2022.” The economic growth happening today in Springfield is more impressive.

The difference is that it is being propelled to a large degree by immigrants. Vance appears to oppose it for the same reasons he obsesses over native-born American womens’ declining fertility, while also calling for mass deportations. “You would never be able to get him to answer why it is that he simultaneously thinks ‘our people’ need to have more babies to reverse the decline in fertility and also we need to remove so-called illegal aliens…to increase American workers’ labor market power,” the University of Chicago historian Gabriel Winant argued on a recent podcast. “Those two positions are only reconcilable through racism.”

Vance has spoken about his affinity for a 2002 screed by Patrick Buchanan that decries the “autogenocide for peoples of European ancestry” caused by “Western women” having too many abortions. As Vance explained in a 2021 podcast appearance, “I read this book, when I was maybe 15 years old, called the Death of the West [How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization] by Patrick Buchanan. And that was a really influential book for me.”

It is also true that roughly 15,000 Haitians quickly arriving in a city of less than 60,000 has caused challenges. Ruby said the Rocking Horse Community Health Center has been “absolutely overwhelmed” and needs more resources to help deal with the influx. Rent prices have increased—partly due to landlords taking affordable housing units and converting them to market rate ones. The New York Times has reported that school officials are worried about whether they’ll have enough funding to support students in the coming years.

Mayor Rob Rue and other political leaders in the city have pleaded for extra federal assistance. Last month, Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio), who represents Springfield, said he was working to secure more federal funding to help the city. “This obviously has not risen to a crisis level but it is probably a burdensome level where we have to make sure that this community receives the support they need so they’re not isolated,” Turner explained at the time.

Dorsainvil, who has lived in Springfield for four years, says he and fellow Haitians initially received a largely positive response from the community. He traced the beginning of a more intense backlash from some Springfield residents to an August 2023 accident in which a Haitian driver without a valid license collided with a school bus. The crash killed Aiden Clark, an 11-year-old boy, and injured at least 20 children.

The tragedy led some residents to rail against Haitian immigrants at community meetings. Clark’s parents have been adamantly opposed their son’s death being used to demonize people. “We do not want our son’s name to be associated with the hate that’s being spewed at these meetings,” Nathan and Danielle Clark wrote in a statement read at a community meeting last October. “Please do not mix up the values of our family with the uninformed majority that vocalize their hate. Aiden embraced different cultures and would insist you do the same.”

It was only after Vance started talking about Springfield that the city attracted significant national attention, according to Dorsainvil and Ruby. In July, Vance brought up Springfield’s Haitian community during a hearing with Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. “In my conversations with folks in Springfield, it’s not just housing,” Vance said. “It’s also hospital services, it’s school services. There are a whole host of ways in which this immigration problem, I think, is having very real human consequences.” One day later, Vance brought up Springfield in a speech at the National Conservatism Conference.

Vance’s remarks appear to have gotten the attention of producers at Fox News. Within days, Springfield Mayor Rob Rue and City Manager Bryan Heck appeared on the channel for what proved to be a typically sensationalistic segment. Rue and Heck’s main ask was similar to one that has been made by mayors across the country: They wanted federal aid to support a rapid increase in the city’s immigrant population. “I feel like they were kind of blindsided,” said Ruby. “It made them look anti-immigrant, when, in fact, I think they’ve worked really hard to try to manage the situation.” (Rue told the New York Times this week that, “It’s frustrating when national politicians, on the national stage, mischaracterize what is actually going on and misrepresent our community.”)

Springfield also began to attract more attention from the extreme right. On August 10, a dozen neo-Nazis affiliated with the group Blood Tribe marched through Springfield carrying Swastika flags. On August 27, one of those Nazis, Drake Berentz, spoke at a Springfield community meeting before being ejected for threatening rhetoric. (Berentz falsely identified himself as Nathaniel Higgers, a fake name meant to evoke the racist slur it resembles.)

Still, nothing compared to what has happened in the past week. Last Friday, the right-wing X account End Wokeness, which has 2.9 million followers, shared a post in which someone claimed that the friend of his neighbor’s daughter had said that Haitian residents of Springfield had killed her cat and hung it from a tree branch. The rumor quickly went viral. 

Still, the claim mostly lived on social media before Vance took it up.

When I spoke to Ruby on Tuesday, he told me his big fear was that Springfield would come up in the presidential debate that night. “Springfield is a powder keg right now,” Ruby added. He feared what might happen if there were another tragedy like the one that killed Aiden Clark. 

Just before the debate, Nathan Clark spoke at a Springfield City Commission meeting. “Using Aidan as a political tool is, to say the least, reprehensible for any political purpose,” Clark said. “And speaking of morally bankrupt, politicians—Bernie Moreno, Chip Roy, JD Vance, and Donald Trump—they have spoken my son’s name and used his death for political gain. This needs to stop now.”

Nathan Clark — the father of 11-year-old Aiden Clark, who was killed in a car accident in Springfield, Ohio — tells JD Vance and Donald Trump to stop using his son’s name and the city of Springfield to demonize Haitian immigrants. “This needs to stop now!” pic.twitter.com/3J8FtZ82Ts

— Keith Boykin (@keithboykin) September 11, 2024

That did not stop Trump from bringing up Springfield and the claims about pets being eaten during the debate. Vance defended Trump’s decision to do so afterwards. The result is that some Haitian families in Springfield are reportedly now keeping their kids home from school out of fear for their safety. On Thursday morning, Springfield city hall was evacuated following a bomb threat, as was a local elementary school. 

On Friday morning, Springfield received new bomb threats targeting city commissioners and multiple schools. A middle school was closed and three schools were evacuated.

Two hours later, Vance posted about Springfield again. Americans, he wrote, should be talking about Springfield “every single day.”

On Monday morning, a friend texted Vilès Dorsainvil to ask if he’d seen the claims circulating on social media. Dorsainvil, the leader of Springfield, Ohio’s Haitian Community Help and Support Center, had not. He quickly saw that Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) had posted that “reports now show” that Springfield residents were having their “pets abducted and eaten” by “Haitian illegal immigrants.”

“It was so painful,” Dorsainvil explained. “I had to leave my job because I was so perturbed that I could not concentrate.” He took the week off from working as a bilingual specialist who processes applications for government assistance to support his community and focus on his mental health. 

City officials quickly made clear there is no evidence to support the lies Vance and many other top Republicans, including Donald Trump, are spreading. Vance didn’t care. As he wrote on Tuesday, “Keep the cat memes flowing.” (Vance’s Senate office did not respond to a request for comment that asked for any evidence that would support his recent claims.)

These aren’t harmless memes. The prototypical example looks like what would happen if someone typed “Black people in a third world country chasing Donald Trump holding a cat” into an AI-powered image generator.

Just gonna leave this here … @ericswalwell pic.twitter.com/nDTqN0IZ6Y

— Nancy Mace (@NancyMace) September 10, 2024

In recent months, Vance has been the key figure in making Springfield a national target for the far right. “I blame JD Vance for it. Our city leaders reached out to JD Vance, our senator, asking for help,” Carl Ruby, the senior pastor at Central Christian in Springfield, said about a request for federal assistance Vance drew attention to this summer. “Instead, he brought it up at a Senate hearing and referenced it as a crisis and began amplifying these lies.” In doing so, Vance has put his own constituents at risk. Bomb threats have now led to multiple Springfield schools being evacuated.

The initial gut reaction many people are having to this racist smear campaign is the correct one: It’s vile. Nor is it new. The first ad of his political career in 2022 (titled “Are you a racist?”) opened with Vance asking “Do you hate Mexicans?” He went to to attack the media for calling “us” racist for wanting to build the wall and to invoke the Great Replacement theory—claiming in the ad that “Democrat voters” were “pouring into this country” from across the southern border.

Are you a racist? pic.twitter.com/Fdknxld39i

— JD Vance (@JDVance) April 5, 2022

Vance’s lies about Springfield are the latest iteration of what could be mistaken for only cynical race-baiting. The reality is that they reflect much deeper-seated biases about who the country belongs to. As Vance stressed in his Republican National Convention speech, “America is not just an idea” but a “people with a shared history and a common future.” He went on, “When we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms.” His rhetoric about Springfield should leave little doubt about who he means by we.

Springfield is about an hour northeast of where Vance grew up in Middletown, and shares many similarities to the economically depressed hometown Vance described in Hillbilly Elegy. If anything, the decline in Springfield was more severe. Middletown’s population has remained relatively steady since 1970, while in Springfield it dropped from more than 80,000 in 1970 to fewer than 60,000 in 2020. 

That has changed in recent years as a result of an influx of what local officials and community leaders estimate to be about 15,000 Haitian immigrants. Ruby explained that the large majority of Haitians in Springfield have some form of legal authorization to live in the United States such as Temporary Protected Status. Many work for Topre America, a Japanese auto parts manufacturer. Others have found jobs at a Dole food processing plant and countless local businesses. Their success in finding jobs and opening businesses of their own has led other Haitian immigrants to come to Springfield through word of mouth.

Ruby has lived in Springfield for about 40 years. “Our county is projected to lose about 25,000 people between now and 2050,” Ruby told me on Tuesday. “Having an influx of immigrants, from my perspective, is a wonderful thing.”

In another world, Vance might view Haitian migrants seeking opportunity sympathetically. Hillbilly Elegy is, in many ways, a memoir of domestic migration. It chronicles how the so-called hillbilly highway brought his grandparents out of Appalachia in the 1940s. Vance is intimately acquainted with both the promise and perils that can flow from a family’s decision to leave home. 

One difference is that Haitians in Springfield appear to be doing much better than the relatives and community members Vance put in the pillory in Hillbilly Elegy. Local employers, Ruby said, view them as hard workers who, unlike some other residents, can be counted on to pass drug tests. Ruby added that many Haitians in Springfield were professionals back home and are now significantly underemployed. Contrary to what Vance’s fearmongering suggests, there has been no increase in property or violent crime in Springfield, according to local data.

Vance’s demonization of the Haitian community comes despite the fact that he spent much of his brief career as a venture capitalist whose stated mission was to create jobs in places like Springfield. Politico reported during his Senate run that his venture firm was “part of a group of at least 46 investors who together invested in three companies that created a total of about 750 jobs in the state of Ohio between 2019 and 2022.” The economic growth happening today in Springfield is more impressive.

The difference is that it is being propelled to a large degree by immigrants. Vance appears to oppose it for the same reasons he obsesses over native-born American womens’ declining fertility, while also calling for mass deportations. “You would never be able to get him to answer why it is that he simultaneously thinks ‘our people’ need to have more babies to reverse the decline in fertility and also we need to remove so-called illegal aliens…to increase American workers’ labor market power,” the University of Chicago historian Gabriel Winant argued on a recent podcast. “Those two positions are only reconcilable through racism.”

Vance has spoken about his affinity for a 2002 screed by Patrick Buchanan that decries the “autogenocide for peoples of European ancestry” caused by “Western women” having too many abortions. As Vance explained in a 2021 podcast appearance, “I read this book, when I was maybe 15 years old, called the Death of the West [How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization] by Patrick Buchanan. And that was a really influential book for me.”

It is also true that roughly 15,000 Haitians quickly arriving in a city of less than 60,000 has caused challenges. Ruby said the Rocking Horse Community Health Center has been “absolutely overwhelmed” and needs more resources to help deal with the influx. Rent prices have increased—partly due to landlords taking affordable housing units and converting them to market rate ones. The New York Times has reported that school officials are worried about whether they’ll have enough funding to support students in the coming years.

Mayor Rob Rue and other political leaders in the city have pleaded for extra federal assistance. Last month, Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio), who represents Springfield, said he was working to secure more federal funding to help the city. “This obviously has not risen to a crisis level but it is probably a burdensome level where we have to make sure that this community receives the support they need so they’re not isolated,” Turner explained at the time.

Dorsainvil, who has lived in Springfield for four years, says he and fellow Haitians initially received a largely positive response from the community. He traced the beginning of a more intense backlash from some Springfield residents to an August 2023 accident in which a Haitian driver without a valid license collided with a school bus. The crash killed Aiden Clark, an 11-year-old boy, and injured at least 20 children.

The tragedy led some residents to rail against Haitian immigrants at community meetings. Clark’s parents have been adamantly opposed their son’s death being used to demonize people. “We do not want our son’s name to be associated with the hate that’s being spewed at these meetings,” Nathan and Danielle Clark wrote in a statement read at a community meeting last October. “Please do not mix up the values of our family with the uninformed majority that vocalize their hate. Aiden embraced different cultures and would insist you do the same.”

It was only after Vance started talking about Springfield that the city attracted significant national attention, according to Dorsainvil and Ruby. In July, Vance brought up Springfield’s Haitian community during a hearing with Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. “In my conversations with folks in Springfield, it’s not just housing,” Vance said. “It’s also hospital services, it’s school services. There are a whole host of ways in which this immigration problem, I think, is having very real human consequences.” One day later, Vance brought up Springfield in a speech at the National Conservatism Conference.

Vance’s remarks appear to have gotten the attention of producers at Fox News. Within days, Springfield Mayor Rob Rue and City Manager Bryan Heck appeared on the channel for what proved to be a typically sensationalistic segment. Rue and Heck’s main ask was similar to one that has been made by mayors across the country: They wanted federal aid to support a rapid increase in the city’s immigrant population. “I feel like they were kind of blindsided,” said Ruby. “It made them look anti-immigrant, when, in fact, I think they’ve worked really hard to try to manage the situation.” (Rue told the New York Times this week that, “It’s frustrating when national politicians, on the national stage, mischaracterize what is actually going on and misrepresent our community.”)

Springfield also began to attract more attention from the extreme right. On August 10, a dozen neo-Nazis affiliated with the group Blood Tribe marched through Springfield carrying Swastika flags. On August 27, one of those Nazis, Drake Berentz, spoke at a Springfield community meeting before being ejected for threatening rhetoric. (Berentz falsely identified himself as Nathaniel Higgers, a fake name meant to evoke the racist slur it resembles.)

Still, nothing compared to what has happened in the past week. Last Friday, the right-wing X account End Wokeness, which has 2.9 million followers, shared a post in which someone claimed that the friend of his neighbor’s daughter had said that Haitian residents of Springfield had killed her cat and hung it from a tree branch. The rumor quickly went viral. 

Still, the claim mostly lived on social media before Vance took it up.

When I spoke to Ruby on Tuesday, he told me his big fear was that Springfield would come up in the presidential debate that night. “Springfield is a powder keg right now,” Ruby added. He feared what might happen if there were another tragedy like the one that killed Aiden Clark. 

Just before the debate, Nathan Clark spoke at a Springfield City Commission meeting. “Using Aidan as a political tool is, to say the least, reprehensible for any political purpose,” Clark said. “And speaking of morally bankrupt, politicians—Bernie Moreno, Chip Roy, JD Vance, and Donald Trump—they have spoken my son’s name and used his death for political gain. This needs to stop now.”

Nathan Clark — the father of 11-year-old Aiden Clark, who was killed in a car accident in Springfield, Ohio — tells JD Vance and Donald Trump to stop using his son’s name and the city of Springfield to demonize Haitian immigrants. “This needs to stop now!” pic.twitter.com/3J8FtZ82Ts

— Keith Boykin (@keithboykin) September 11, 2024

That did not stop Trump from bringing up Springfield and the claims about pets being eaten during the debate. Vance defended Trump’s decision to do so afterwards. The result is that some Haitian families in Springfield are reportedly now keeping their kids home from school out of fear for their safety. On Thursday morning, Springfield city hall was evacuated following a bomb threat, as was a local elementary school. 

On Friday morning, Springfield received new bomb threats targeting city commissioners and multiple schools. A middle school was closed and three schools were evacuated.

Two hours later, Vance posted about Springfield again. Americans, he wrote, should be talking about Springfield “every single day.”

A young racist man who spends too much time online should have heard a lot to like from Donald Trump during Tuesday’s debate. But from what I saw from the usual suspects on the right, his performance didn’t earn their praise. Winning is most important in their hierarchy of power and they knew they were watching a loser.

Trump’s open embrace of far-right disinformation started from the very beginning of the debate, when he alluded to Springfield, Ohio. In case listeners didn’t catch the blatantly racist reference to a fake story that’s been circulating about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Ohio, he made it explicit later in the debate. 

"I’ve seen people on television!": Trump’s open embrace of far-right disinformation started from the very beginning of the debate when he alluded to Springfield, Ohio. pic.twitter.com/tmnnmaCGvQ

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) September 11, 2024

“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in,” Trump said. “They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in this country and it’s a shame.”

This was not the first time that Trump has referenced Springfield in recent days. JD Vance has done the same, as has a who’s who of right-wing influencers. It has all felt like a mob with pitchforks in hand.

Trump, of course, was not done. In a word salad of MAGA paranoia, Trump claimed that Harris “wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison.” As others quickly pointed out, it was not far off from a chyron from Succession meant to parody right-wing media.

pic.twitter.com/7jcBUtUCVW

— no context succession (@nocontextroyco) September 11, 2024

When it came to foreign policy, Trump went out of his way to praise Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orban. This might have been welcome news to New Right figures who’ve spent years posting about Orban and the authoritarian crackdowns he has used to shore-up his self-proclaimed “illiberal democracy.” But Trump couldn’t even make his odious points coherently. As he put it:

I’m just quoting [Orban]. China was afraid of [Trump]. North Korea was afraid of him. Look at what’s going on with North Korea by the way. He said Russia was afraid of him. I ended the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and Biden put it back on day one. But he ended the XL pipeline. The XL pipeline in our country. He ended that but he let the Russians build the pipeline going all over Europe and heading into Germany. The biggest pipeline in the world. Look, Viktor Orban said it. He said the most respected, most feared person is Donald Trump.

Rod Dreher, a right-wing blogger who moved from the United States to Hungary largely due to his affinity for Orban and the direction he is taking the country, accepted that Trump had lost.

Hate to say it, but Kamala won this by looking and sounding normal. Trump blustered and failed to keep focus. Yeah, moderators on her side, but that can’t excuse Trump’s missing so many chances to go after her. Trump barely laid a glove on her all night. Depressing.

— Rod Dreher (@roddreher) September 11, 2024

As Trump flailed during his Orban tangent, Harris looked on with a mix of amusement and seemingly genuine confusion. Across the stage was an angry and unhinged old man walking into every trap she laid for him when he was not stepping into ones of his own making.

Denying this was pointless for his fans. So, they turned to a tactic that losers have likely embraced for as long as debating has existed: From Catturd on down they blamed the moderators. 

The entire night. https://t.co/ZQq5fPKzJO

— Catturd (@catturd2) September 11, 2024

Near midnight last week, Democratic delegates with the Uncommitted movement sat in protest outside Chicago’s United Center. Elected by hundreds of thousands of primary voters who oppose President Joe Biden’s response to the war in Gaza, the delegates were sent to the DNC “uncommitted”—not pledged to support any candidate at the convention. Earlier in the week, the group did what they were elected to do by calling for a permanent ceasefire and immediate arms embargo. They also continued a simpler request they’d started making before the convention: a spot for a speaker on the main stage to talk about Palestine.

On Wednesday evening, the DNC and Harris campaign finally told them that no Palestinian American would be allowed to speak from the main stage of the convention. Here was their last ditch effort. They hoped a sit-in—and the Civil Rights history it evoked—would push party leaders to change their minds.

As the delegates waited, I watched a middle-aged man walk past. He shouted at the protesters: “Free the hostages!”

“We agree,” a chorus of Uncommitted supporters replied.

He shouted again: “Free the hostages!”

“We agree,” a woman wearing a hijab repeated. The man, seemingly confused, wandered away. 

That image, over the past week after the DNC, has stuck in my mind. Despite being a group of staunch Democrats working to affect change from within the party, the Harris campaign—and many Democrats—mostly treated Uncommitted and their allies as outsiders ruining a party at the DNC. And, often, it seemed without even understanding what they were saying or where agreement could be had. The result was a four-day convention that managed to find space for seemingly everyone on the main stage except those willing to speak personally about what is happening in Palestine.

Donald Trump’s former communications director Stephanie Grisham, who stayed through family separations but called it quits after January 6? Yes. An American doctor who saved the lives of children in Gaza? No. A former Republican Lieutenant Gov. of Georgia who Democrats said in March was on the “frontlines of banning abortion, restricting the right to vote, and cutting taxes for the rich and powerful?” Yes. Rep. Ruwa Romman, a Georgia Democrat currently fighting against that agenda in the state legislature? No.

By denying someone of Palestinian descent the chance to speak, the Harris campaign missed an easy opportunity to create distance between itself and President Biden’s failing and highly unpopular response to the war. A June poll by CBS News and YouGov found that 77 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of independents believe that the United States should not send weapons and supplies to Israel, despite the Biden administration’s support for continuing to do so. Only 23 percent of Democrats, compared with 76 percent of Republicans, told Gallup in June that they support Israel’s military actions in Gaza. 

Nevertheless, Biden has pursued a policy of effectively unconditional support for Israel that is more in line with the preferences of Republican voters than independents and members of his own party. A Palestinian American speaker would have given Uncommitted delegates something to bring back to the voters who elected them to show that Harris understands this reality. 

“If we go to [uncommitted voters] right now and say, Hey, trust us there’s been a change at the top and we feel like maybe Vice President Harris feels a little bit differently in her heart,” Uncommitted co-founder Abbas Alawieh explained at the group’s first press conference of the convention, “that’s not going to win back voters. We need a plan. We need to know how the killing is going to be stopped.” 

The Uncommitted delegates made clear throughout the week that they want to defeat Trump. But they want Harris to take positions that will help them to convince their voters to support her. It is a remarkably pragmatic message for a movement that believes Harris has served as vice president in an administration enabling a genocide. Uncommitted delegates were not the communists I saw carrying a hammer and sickle–adorned banner at a protest outside the convention’s security perimeter. They were Democrats sent to Chicago by Democratic voters to pursue the inside track.

It was always going to be hard to sustain US media attention on Gaza as the presidential election came to dominate the minds of journalists and their bosses. Uncommitted, in a stroke of depressingly clear-eyed organizing tact, launched a movement that asked Democrats to vote uncommitted instead of backing Biden. And in doing so, Waleed Shahid, a Democratic strategist who previously served as the spokesperson for the Squad-adjacent Justice Democrats, along with Alawieh and fellow co-founder Layla Elabed, turned the effort to end the war into the kind of campaign story journalists could cover. 

Alawieh, a large and gentle man who previously worked as Rep. Cori Bush’s (D-Mo.) chief of staff, served as an emotional spokesperson throughout the DNC. As a teenager, he survived Israeli bombs that fell on south Lebanon. “I remember what those bombs feel like when they drop,” Alawieh explained. “I remember how your bones shake within your body.” 

The overarching message of his speeches was that the more than 16,000 children who have died in Gaza are just as human as the boy he once was. The need to make that point again and again was its own form of dehumanization. But Alawieh hoped that repeating the message would get Democrats to accept his help and change their course on Gaza.

As he staged the sit-in, Alawieh struggled to accept that there would be no speaker at the DNC: “We did everything right, you know?” Again and again, Alawieh told reporters he was waiting for party leaders to call and tell him they’d changed their mind. 

Often, during the DNC, I was struck by the restraint of the Uncommitted movement. So much, it seemed, was set up for Democrats to accept. And all of this was despite what they had seen—and their families had experienced. 

What often got lost in commentary about the Uncommitted movement during the DNC were the atrocities that forced this moment. Israelis and Palestinians are now almost one year into the war that began with the brutal October 7 Hamas-led attack that took the lives of nearly 1,200 people in Israel. Since then, Israel has killed more than 40,000 people in Gaza and injured nearly 100,000—most of whom have been civilians, according to the local health ministry. (Relative to Gaza’s population, this is the equivalent to the United States suffering 20 million casualties in less than a year.) 

Thousands of bodies are believed to be buried under the rubble and potentially tens of thousands of others may die due to malnutrition, disease, and the destruction of medical infrastructure caused by the Israeli siege. This suffering is happening in a small strip of land that was considered by many experts to be an “open-air prison” long before October 7 as a result of a devastating Israeli blockade. Beyond the damage to human life, Gaza has been reduced to rubble by one of the most intense aerial bombing campaigns in human history. Top Israeli officials have spoken openly about wanting to destroy Gaza. Thanks in part to a steady stream of American armaments, they have now succeeded to an extent that is still not fully understood. 

When I spoke in March with Omer Bartov, an Israeli military veteran who is now the Samuel Pisar Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University, he believed Israel’s actions in Gaza were on the verge of genocide. Since then, Bartov has concluded that the line has been crossed. (He is far from alone in that conclusion among genocide scholars and human rights experts.) 

At the DNC, most of this went largely unheard. The focus was understandably on the joy and unity inspired by Harris replacing Biden atop the ticket. For the first time in more than a decade, Democrats seemed to have the swagger of the Obama era. They didn’t want to jinx it but they knew a Trump-ending victory was tantalizingly close. They mocked the former president as a morally—and perhaps anatomically—small man.

But, for others, it was impossible to fully take part in that celebration with Gaza in mind. A Tuesday Uncommitted press conference made that clear. Featuring American doctors who have volunteered in Gaza, their testimony was at times punctuated by the sobbing of those listening. Mark Perlmutter, a Jewish American orthopedic surgeon in North Carolina, said in a statement read by fellow surgeon Feroze Sidhwa: 

Never before have I seen a small child shot in the head and then in the chest, and I could never have imagined that I would see two such cases in less than two weeks. Never before have I seen a dozen small children screaming in pain and terror—crowded into a trauma bay smaller than my living room, their burning flesh filling the space so aggressively that my eyes started to burn…

And, worst of all, I could never have imagined that my government would be supplying the weapons and funding that keeps this horrifying slaughter going. Not for one week. Not for one month. But for nearly an entire year now. To this day, I wear my late father’s mezuzah around my neck. Since returning from Gaza, I have also draped a keffiyeh over my shoulders. And there is no contradiction.  

These horrors are not abstractions for many Uncommitted voters and their allies. At the Monday panel on Palestinian human rights attended by hundreds of people, Hala Hijazi introduced herself as a moderate Democrat and civil servant from San Francisco. Hijazi said that more than 100 of her family members had been killed in Gaza—including two the previous week.

“I’m here because they can no longer speak,” she said. “I’m here because it’s the least that I can do as an American, as a person of faith, and as a Democrat.”

Like other convention speeches, the Uncommitted movement knew that the speaker and remarks would have been edited and vetted beforehand. Initially, Uncommitted organizers put forward Tanya Haj-Hassan, a pediatric intensive care doctor who spoke at Uncommitted press conferences.

Wrenching moment as Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, a pediatric intensive care doctor who did heroic work volunteering in Gaza, describes people trying to discredit her by claiming and assuming she is Palestinian. As she makes clear, it shouldn’t matter. But she is not Palestinian. pic.twitter.com/fYovf67zCU

— Noah Lanard (@nlanard) August 22, 2024

After Dr. Haj-Hassan was rejected for unspecified reasons, organizers sent over the names of people who have lost relatives in Gaza, as well as Palestinian American elected officials. Uncommitted organizers had heard that it was a good sign that their speaking request was still in limbo.

One of their top choices was Romman, the Georgia state representative. Romman’s message would have complemented the one delivered by Jon Polin and Rachel Goldberg, who gave a moving speech about how their son Hersh Goldberg-Polin was taken hostage on October 7. Romman saw letting an elected Democrat like herself give a carefully worded speech as the “bare minimum” party leaders could do. But they never contacted her to see what she wanted to say. 

As a result, the Harris campaign likely did not see the speech Romman hoped to give until Mother Jones published it during the convention. Once it was out, even more moderate writers like Jonathan Chait wondered what all the fuss was about. Why go through so much trouble and sow so much disunity to prevent an elected Democrat from giving a speech that included lines like:

Let’s commit to each other, to electing Vice President Harris and defeating Donald Trump who uses my identity as a Palestinian as a slur. Let’s fight for the policies long overdue—from restoring access to abortions to ensuring a living wage, to demanding an end to reckless war and a ceasefire in Gaza.

It was the refusal to let a Palestinian American say even that that led to the sit-in on Wednesday night. Instead, on the final night of the convention, Rep. Romman ended up reading the speech she’d hoped to give to the many members of the media assembled before her outside the United Center. Later that night, the delegates locked arms and made their way back into the United Center. As they made their way in, it was increasingly possible to imagine a Democratic Party that one day saw them not as disruptors but champions of the values the party purports to hold. But by the time that moment arrives, there may be far fewer Palestines left to save.

As Romman has made clear, there is a long tradition of this kind of activism at the DNC. In 1988, the Reverend Jesse Jackson famously invoked how liberals have lauded history they might have said was too controversial at the time of its happening. After mentioning apartheid in South Africa, Jackson spoke of the need for the party to not shy away from controversy if it meant keeping a conscience. “Fannie Lou Hamer didn’t have the most votes in Atlantic City, but her principles have outlasted the life of every delegate who voted to lock her out,” Jackson argued. “If we are principled first, our politics will fall in place.” Romman invoked their legacy, adding that “I hope we listen now instead of in the future.”

Back inside the arena, delegates—committed and uncommitted—heard Harris accept the nomination. 

“What has happened in Gaza over the past 10 months is devastating,” the vice president said during the section of her speech that addressed the war. “So many innocent lives lost. Desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, over and over again. The scale of suffering is heartbreaking.”

This was, if anything, a step backward from March, when Biden said in his State of the Union:

This war has taken a greater toll on innocent civilians than all previous wars in Gaza combined. More than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed.  Most of whom are not Hamas. Thousands and thousands are innocent women and children. Girls and boys also orphaned. Nearly 2 million more Palestinians under bombardment or displaced.  Homes destroyed, neighborhoods in rubble, cities in ruin. Families without food, water, medicine. It’s heartbreaking.

Either way, focusing on rhetoric is a distraction from the policy decisions that matter. As Uncommitted delegates said too many times to count at the convention: “Palestinians can’t eat words.”

In announcing the sit-in, Alawieh referenced how the parents of Hersh Goldberg-Polin had talked in their DNC speech about the idea in the Jewish tradition “every person is an entire universe.” He connected it to a Muslim idea that harming one person harms all of humanity. “As I was seated inside as a delegate, and hearing about the 109 hostages still in Gaza,” he explained. “I sat with them. Every one of those 109 people are universes.”

“And I was also thinking of the 16,000 children,” Alawieh continued. “I could have been one of those children.”

Why did no Palestinian go on that stage? Perhaps because it is easier for those enabling Israel’s war in Gaza not to hear these pleas of shared humanity. It would require them to maybe reckon with how easy it is to forget about who is at the end of the bombs we send to Israel. “We are talking about children,” Alawieh said outside the arena. “President Biden, Vice President Harris, what are we talking about here? We’re talking about children.”