We’re inching forwards through the thick smog that has cloaked Tbilisi for days. At first, I thought it was a kind of blueish, pink winter mist that makes the city feel like it’s in an ongoing sunset, until a friend who smokes told me they’d been having trouble breathing in it.

It’s Black Friday. A journey that should only take a few minutes is stretching past an hour and for the most part, Tsaro and I are sitting in silence, occasionally passing a phone between us to translate the few words we do speak. Both sides of the road are jammed. People are rushing for the deals at CarreFour, she sighs.  

This November day is also the 365th day of continuous protests in Georgia against a government Georgians believe is steering the country back into the Kremlin’s orbit after years of moving towards Europe. It’s now at 600 days and counting. Dozens of Georgians are languishing in prison, often in pre-trial detention, for participating. The protests themselves don’t make news outside the country so much anymore. Unless, that is, there is some kind of significant development, like the discovery of toxic WW1-era chemicals used by police in water cannons, the same cannons I watched the police turn on young Georgians for hours last winter.

It was while covering one of these still ongoing nightly protests that I met Tsaro Oshakmashvili, a 62-year-old widow with wayward orange curls. And it was through deciding to remain after the October 2024 election, the one international observers say was marred by serious irregularities, that I found myself reflecting upon what authoritarianism can do to how we relate to one another and the duality of Tbilisi. Georgia now has more political prisoners than Russia per capita and still regularly features as an upcoming destination amongst many UK newspapers. 

Since our meeting, Tsaro has become a public figure after her de facto adoption of Archil Museliantsi, currently in jail for allegedly damaging property during the protests. Archil is a 30-year-old-law student who was orphaned at six months old. When the pair first met on Rustaveli Avenue, at the height of Georgia’s protests, he turned to Tsaro and told her he was ready to die for his country.

Just a few days after we met, Tsaro and I were accosted by police. I’d been taking photographs outside the gates of a Tbilisi prison. With some effort, she calmed them down and we walked away with my memory card wiped. We got back into her car and sat in silence. She then turned to me and, even though my knowledge of Georgian is small, I saw the glint in her eye and knew what she was saying; “You didn’t delete them all, did you?”

Archil is serving four years for allegedly setting fire to one of the new CCTV cameras used to identify protesters through facial recognition technology. The video used to sentence him doesn’t contain any trace of his face, though. Just a man in a balaclava and a burning piece of paper. His lawyers argued it wasn’t enough to identify him, but he was found guilty anyway. After receiving his verdict, Archil was told he could request a presidential pardon. His reply: “What President? Do we have one?” 

Tsaro now spends her days campaigning around the country in Archil’s name, encourages him to make use of his sentence by pursuing his law degree, and brings him supplies in Gldani Prison. The three books and the tracksuit bottoms on the backseat of the car are for him. 

When we finally arrive, I get out of the car and notice the huge sky and the quiet. Tsaro points towards an empty field with a mesh of electric poles running through it, the city a hazy silhouette in the distance. That's Archil’s view, she says, and pauses for a moment. 

We go through security, stepping over a sleeping dog, and enter a room divided by large steel bars with an x-ray scanner running through. Archil’s things can go forward, but we cannot. As a non-blood relative, Tsaro has no visitor rights. So we watch on in silence as the items slowly travel through the scanner. It will be three more years until Tsaro and Archil can be in the same room again. It will also be the fourth time they’ve met. 

Later that night, a crowd gathers at Tbilisi State University. An explosion of flares and music signals for the protest to begin. Tsaro marches at the forefront behind a huge banner. She smiles and waves at the camera, her way of signaling to Archil that she's watching him.

I walk with the crowd, face hidden by sunglasses and a cap: enough to not be picked up by facial recognition, but hopefully not too much to violate recent laws that prohibit concealing your face.

Afterwards, I meet a group of friends who have gathered at a nearby bar. A man who is visiting from Argentina is wondering about whether to move to Tbilisi permanently, telling me what a fantastic place it seems to be. I tell him he should, then step into a sideroom, and watch on in silence as two men make use of the empty space to dance.

It’s strange to arrive in a place at such a high-stakes moment and only realise what that means as it happens. From the beginning, Georgia asked little of me and gave everything back in return, operating on such frictionlessness that meant I barely had to ask what it was that I was doing there. Perhaps the same reasons I first started to love it were the same reasons vacationing Russians had during the Soviet Union; myths of the eternal host and a perceived openness to strangers, though that ‘warm welcome’ had started to wear thin. But this wasn’t something I initially stopped to ask myself – this question of Russia’s colonial relationship with Georgia, its occupation of Georgian land, and the influx in 2022 of tens of thousands of Russians fleeing mobilisation and war with Ukraine.

Shortly after arriving, I found myself in a reality that held little regard for tomorrow; people of all nationalities – Georgian, Russian, Ukrainian, Belarussian, European, and others – turning to the present moment as a form of coping. But although I sensed that people were escaping, avoiding, I was still doing the math on who was fleeing what, exactly. It would still be many more months until I learnt the difference between what it means to confront oneself versus one’s oppressor and what we owe to the places that receive us.

But the thing that provoked me to start wondering about such things wasn’t Georgia’s existential fight against Moscow. It was a relationship with somebody who was fleeing themselves.

A friend had suggested I come to Tbilisi, proposing that Georgia could make a good follow up to a story I had recently finished about Ukrainians starting a new life in the UK. I spent the first days in the company of international correspondents focused on the upcoming election and what it would mean for the country. Drink in hand; the conversation usually concluded with how much they loved it here and when they were flying out again. I listened, sheepishly, unable to venture an opinion and not clear about what a return to an authoritarian past would look like in practice.

As the days crept forward, I couldn't have said how long I would stay, but my neighbour never asked anyway. Iskra was my age. Her dog, Riri, liked to nap on my bed. Ours was the last of a remote cluster of homes with balconies fashioned from old scraps of wood and living room furniture arranged haphazardly on the street. It was one of the highest points in the city before it gave way to rugged mountainside. The only traffic that went by here was the funicular and the tourists who gawped out of its windows. 

Without saying too much, Iskra and I were getting to know each other, sitting on our shared patio with the city, a dark twinkling pit, below. Between us, a favourite topic was emerging; Georgia, its unpredictability, and a feeling of being at odds with the places we had left behind. Iskra was born in Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic and had moved to Amderma, Russia's northern coastline, where her mother had worked as a geologist. The war had made it clear to her that she would not be returning. I was still ambivalent about what it was I carried with me from my own homeland, what that counted for in Georgia, and the idea of returning. It was Iskra who first explained to me the origins of Georgia’s resentment towards the Russians that had moved here after the war. That I was learning it from a person who had spent most of their life in Russia might have felt more ironic, had she not said it with such conviction.

After February 2022, Tbilisi was flooded with people coming over Georgia’s northern border, their arrival enabled by the ease of remote work which muddied the water between dissidents, draft dodgers, those looking for an easier life, and plain wartime tourists.

In the early days, more than 10,000 people might have arrived in a single day, a rate that wouldn't go unnoticed in Tbilisi, a city with a population of 1.3 million. Some pursued anti-war activism, others opened bars catering, at times, to an exclusively Russian clientele. As rents jumped and Russian echoed through the streets, local resentment simmered.

When Russia launched its full scale invasion, many Georgians recognised themselves as Ukraine. And now, with so many Russians in the city, could Putin use their presence to justify another special military operation and ‘liberate’ Tbilisi, too? Or, would the Georgian government align itself so closely with the Kremlin that he wouldn’t have to?

Georgian Ministers debated what to do. Should they restrict entry, like they had in the Baltic states, or allow people in, fearing that turning them away would simply deliver them back to Putin's army. Meanwhile, locals took matters into their own hands, some venues insisting you could only enter if you recognised Russia as an occupier, requesting that people sign a physical declaration. But attempts to sort so-called ‘good Russians’ from ‘bad Russians' amplified hatred, with one venue who employed such policies undergoing cyber attacks from a far-right Russian group as a result. Eventually, some gave up and went home, tired of having to prove themselves the ‘good’ kind, while Georgians endured a crushing gentrification from the very same country whose legacy they had been fighting since the Red Army invasion of 1921.

Arriving abruptly from the UK put me in an unusual position — naive enough to move between worlds without being in the firing line, and outside the divide enough that, in time, I would start to see the particularities of it clearly.

One evening, I was on my way out, looking for something to eat. Iskra was smoking on the patio.

“I’ll join you,” she said.

We descended into the city, the street lights casting a deep amber glow over its surface like dark honey, and arrived outside an Italian place. Amid the chatter, there was one man sitting alone, an untouched plate in front of him. Iskra knew him from somewhere, and the two of us slipped into the empty chairs beside him. 

After a few short words between the two, the man turned to ask me where I was from. When I told him London, his eyes widened “Oh, London? I love this culture,” proceeding to talk endlessly about the 2008 electronic music scene, naming bands I thought I had forgotten, reviving a curiosity I hadn’t felt in some time.   

“OK,” he announced, standing up as abruptly as our conversation began. “I will go to The Creek. I hope you will join me there for a drink.” And we did, entering through the double doors, passing the bar, to find him sitting in the courtyard beneath a fig tree. There we spent the remains of the evening listening to him talk about growing up in a remote Siberian town, the concentration of wealth in Russia, and the challenges of throwing parties in homes that can only fit 20 people. Iskra's eyes glazed over. Not mine.

Two nights later, I met Kostya again. From the beginning, I had questions. What was he really doing in Georgia? Did he leave Russia because he was against the war, or because he didn’t want to be sent to the front? Should he be actively helping Ukraine? What does he owe Georgia now that he is here? But I don’t ask them outright, waiting to see instead of hearing it and resonating with a person who, like me, was fueled by restlessness.

We spent the evening moving from place to place—first a wine bar, next a red-lit basement. He is unable to stay in the same spot for more than 45 minutes. Each time we take a seat somewhere new, he begins talking with the same fervour as when we first met; telling me about his childhood pets, cleaning toilets throughout his military service, a brief employment stint doing social media for a local environmental ministry, before realising “what it really was”, being cheated on by his childhood love, and cheating on all his loves since. Each of his stories is a portal into a parallel world, where words make sense, but the context they operate within do not.

It’s not until we’re sitting on the pavement outside an overspilling bar that I really start to notice him; his box shaped jaw, his eyes that stare upwards from the way he tilts his head forward when he speaks. His accent makes each syllable heavy, like a thud, when suddenly he asks if I want to go somewhere else. We do. And when I announce that I’m done for the evening, he walks me home, to the very top of the city, to a final and precarious footpath that weaves over the mountain side before landing outside mine. We hug, awkwardly. Kostya has already started to walk away when I realise how much I’ve enjoyed his company.

“Thanks for a great night,” I shout. 

“Pfff - thank me?” he replies, turning to address me and walking backwards as he does.

The following few days run like a strange clockwork. We meet most evenings, at the same time, in one of a handful of places. This, I never questioned. Instead, I relished in feeling like I had found a side door into a place I was still figuring out – meeting people of multiple nationalities in a single night, unable to tell who lived here and who was passing through; though it didn't seem to matter, and no one thought to ask.

“Let’s go to Pith,” says Kostya.

His friend, Artur, a Russian guy of Chinese descent is standing behind the bar dressed, as he usually is, in an oversized checked shirt. The place is empty aside from the three of us and it’s gone closing time. 

“I would like to go to Thailand,” says Artur, drink in hand. 

“Pfff. Thailand? Really? Come on man,” replies Kostya.

“Yes - really. I’ve had enough of this city,” says Artur, slamming his glass on the table. “We’re fucking three hours away from Russia right now. In October, this place is going down. Georgian Dream is gonna get re-elected and Putin will use the country as his playground. I don’t want to be here when that happens.” 

“So, what do you want to go to Thailand for?” asks Kostya. 

“Bro, I’m Asian. I just want to go somewhere people aren’t gonna look at me twice, where I can start a business and live in peace. Plus, I can’t be dealing with the situation between China and Taiwan. I’ve just left a war. I don’t want to be anywhere near the firing line when China invades and the US starts sending over nukes. I want to be sitting on the beach smoking a huge, fucking joint.”

A few days later, a friend learnt I was in Tbilisi and insisted I meet his friend. I go without Kostya and found myself sitting around a table in the company of Georgian women, many of whom had recently moved abroad, making idle chit-chat over a table of food. A woman to my side gives me a list of things I have to see and do, telling me how often people fall in love with her country and decide to move here permanently. I ask why she left and she goes stiff; “it’s different if you’re from here.”  

We make idle chit-chat over food. Another woman turns to me; “So, tell me where you’re staying.”

When my attempts to explain to her are unsuccessful, she pulls out a map on her phone and hands it over. I look at the screen. Half of Tbilisi is covered in red crosses.  

Don’t worry, she tells me, seeing my eyebrows furrow. “Those are just the businesses owned by Russians we avoid,” before telling me that I must get the same app myself.

I take a closer look. Half the places Kostya and I go are each marked with a red cross. I imagine myself trailing around that map, Kostya at my side, a red cross following us everywhere we go. 

After that night, the writing on the walls, that's become as staple as the buildings themselves, takes on a new immediacy. 

“Fuck Russia”

“Russia is a terrorist state”

“Russian’s go home”

“You’re not refugees”

The city starts to slow as the weather gets hotter. So hot, that even the crickets give up their ceaseless chirping and the smell of trash cooking inside their bags waiting to be collected taints the air.

Iskra and I are sitting in the patio eating watermelon until she suggests heading to a party being held at a nearby dog shelter, the intention being for dogs to leave with new owners. As we approach the fence dividing our place from the sloped wasteland, we’re hit by a smell so rancid that it stops us in our tracks. We cover our mouths, struggling to catch our breath between the chokes and sputters.

“I can't,” Iskra says, shaking her head, her voice muffled. 

Then I glance up and see it: a black cockerel, lifeless, hanging from a tree, a shoestring knotted tightly around its pale foot. Its head tilts to one side, its wings splayed open, motionless in the breezeless air.

The two of us stand there, before Iskra whispers 

“It’s a curse.”

Soon after the black cockerel appears, Iskra moves out, opting for a house on the other side of town that she shares with a Georgian family. We continue to meet. One night, we’re sharing a meal, when she announces she’s leaving. I message Kostya who is at Pith.

As I walk across town, the night is indistinguishable from any other. The city's old stone buildings and cracked pavements are dimly lit by the same amber streetlights. The same hum of nightlife whirls in the background, as people move onto their second, or third, venue for the evening. But tonight, it feels muted, like a party winding down before ever really beginning. Clusters of people stand outside bars, their mouths moving, but faces vacant. 

I can’t tell if anything has really changed, or if I’m just imagining it. Earlier that day, a piece of legislation had come into effect. The Foreign Agents Bill meant any organisation receiving more than 20% of its funding from overseas would have to register as “pursuing the interests of a foreign power.” It’s a clever, simple law, lifted from the Kremlin, giving the ruling party power to shut down media, evacuate NGOs, and silence activists. Violent protests to reverse the bill in March 2023 were successful, only for the bill to resurface. This time, the bill passed. This was not just a law. It was a signal that Georgia’s government was importing the Kremlin’s operating system.

A few days later, Kostya is staring at me from across the table, hardly blinking as he smokes. I stare back, not really seeing him, half wondering if the past few weeks are just something I made up in my head. I’m leaving tomorrow. 

“You know, I really don’t know where I am going next, or what I am going to do. Sometimes I think I also want to go to Thailand,” says Kostya out of the silence. 

“I’ve been accused so many times of being some kind of bad guy here. The amount of times I’ve been made to say Putin is a dickhead, just so that I can order a beer. I know what's happening in Russia is a lie, but still, I can’t just abandon it. I have to protect it.” 

“Why, though?” 

“Because,” he says. “I have nothing else.”

“They were cold winter days. I put on a coat, and went to the rallies, for the sake of the children” 

- Tsaro Oshakmashvili.

As Election Day, October 26, 2024, approached, Georgia’s State Security Services went on Facebook to warn of an impending Western coup, and a plot to assassinate the billionaire founder of Georgian Dream and former prime minister Bidzina Ivanshvili. A pro-Western elite was supposedly preparing to topple the government and drag Georgia into war with Russia. Outlets that spread Kremlin narratives picked up the story, adding one detail: only Russia – and Putin himself – could prevent such a coup from occurring. I had been back in the UK during the run-up to the elections, and when my flight touched down in the city of Kutaisi on the night Georgia went to the polls, I turned on my phone to find both Georgian Dream and the opposition coalition claiming victory. 

As we shuffled off the plane, a man asked where I was headed. I say Tbilisi and he asks if I want a ride with his friends: a motley crew of Georgian and Australian men, each dressed in a version of a navy puffer jacket. When it turns out there are no buses this time of night, I say yes.

I’m sat up front next to a man called Tournike. I’ve got him pegged as 45 and I’m shocked to learn he’s actually my age. I ask who he voted for. 

“Please” he says, in a low, nasally voice. “I didn’t bother.” 

“Why?” I ask. 

“It’s lose-lose either way. Politicians just want money. I’m 31. I’ve got - what? Forty, fifty, years left. I’d rather just enjoy my life.” 

I step out of their car and into the bitter wind on Rustaveli. Tbilisi is quiet. Somehow the lights feel more grey than amber. A lone car is driving up and down the broad central drag, blaring its horn, a Georgian flag billowing from its window. A group of men loiter on the empty street and cheer each time the care passes and then return to standing in silence. 

The next day, I go for a walk. Everywhere I look, I see a city void of life, of people. I message friends.  The only person who wants to meet is Dato, a sparky 24-year-old I got to know over the summer. He picks me up in his car. We tear through the city.

“This government doesn’t give a fuck,” he says, barely breathing between his words. “There is no other way but to do another Maidan. But I really hope I’m wrong.” referring to the 92-day-long pro-European protests in Kyiv’s central square which led to the fall of the then government, the annexation of Crimea just weeks later, and the death of 103 protestors. 

In just over a month's time, Dato will be arrested as he leaves a friend’s house and, later, flee the country.

We go to meet his friend, a successful restaurant owner who tells me he’s ready to pack it all in and leave Georgia for good. It’s not about fighting, it’s about making an exit.

“Will you come back?” I ask him.  

“There will be nothing to come back to.”

Kostya, who’s hosting me, returns at 4AM from a trip to Istanbul. He changes into his pajamas and gets into bed beside me. It’s now been 48 hours since the result. Evidence of voter intimidation and ballot stuffing starts to mount. Increasingly, it appears the election was stolen. A demonstration organised by opposition leaders is being held outside parliament that evening. I ask Kostya if he’s coming, but he’s going to Pith to see friends. “For my welcome home party,” he says. 

That night, the news coverage shows men holding banners stating “Georgia is not Russia.” Young women embrace amid a riot of EU and Georgian flags; people clutch their hearts as the national anthem sounds. But when the opposition finally unveil their grand plan to fight, the mood changes. 

“Our plan,” they say, “is you.”

Later that evening, I sit on Kostya’s bed while he smokes on the balcony, the cold slipping in through the open door. The harsh overhead light glares above. I tell him about the deflated protest, the sense of hopelessness settling over the city, and the stories of young Georgians planning to leave the country for good.

“I’m sorry, but these people killed my empathy,” he says, stepping in from the balcony.  

I remind him why he came here in the first place, but Kostya waves off my concerns, insisting that life here could never compare to Russia, recounting the stories of people sentenced to years in prison for holding up blank protest placards, for reposting anti-war content online, for replacing price tags at a supermarket with messages to stop the war, or throwing plastic water bottles at police. As if a protest like tonight's would even get the chance to happen in Russia, he says. They'd arrest you the moment you gathered. The police would know before you even start. “Maybe now,” he says, “they will understand what it’s like to be us.”

I spend successive evenings attending protests, interviewing people and taking photographs. I pitch news outlets. One story I have is about members of the LGBT+ community fleeing the country. Only the month before, the Family Values bill passed which prohibited all pride events and public displays of the rainbow flag, banned gender transition, adoption for same sex couples, and allowed censorship of films and books. The law is an almost direct copy of Russia’s anti-LGBT law. One man told me how he was stripped and beaten by police when they found LGBT content on his phone. Editors express only vague interest. In Tbilisi, history was accelerating. In the rest of the world, Georgia barely registered.

I go out with Dato and his friends. All anyone can talk about is the election. “If we lose this, we lose our identity,” says Dato, standing to his feet in an impromptu speech. “Where are the Russians who fled here because of the war? If they came here because of Putin, why don’t they join us in the fight?”

I put the question directly to Kostya the next day, asking him if he thinks it's his duty to join. But, really, I just want him to admit what’s really at stake; that the stories he has been told are a lie, that the same stories are used to justify wars that he can escape, that protecting those stories isn’t really escaping at all, it’s remaining trapped in the same narratives that people on the streets outside are now fighting.

But the answers I want aren’t the answers I get. 

“My country?” he asks, indignantly. “What about Europe? They are the ones making problems here.”

How would I feel, he asks, if Russia started creating bases on the UK’s borders? Exactly like what NATO is doing in Ukraine. It’s strategic, he says, the EU flags at Georgia’s airport, the funding, the way EU leaders ferry themselves in and out of the country and address crowds at opposition rallies, painting themselves as Georgia’s savior. Europe has created this situation, not Russia.

“Anyway, whatever. I just want to live my life. I’m OK with being here and them hating me.”

“But this is the crux of the hate.”

“Let them hate,” he says. “I’m tired of all the fucking hate.” 

When I return, he tells me not to speak, and that we should end it. I glance at the cigarette trembling in his hand and ask for ten minutes alone to pack my things.

The bleakest day yet comes on November 25, a month after the election and the day Georgian Dream members are sworn in. The city is cloaked in wet fog. The protesters’ plan is to block the legislators from entering parliament, but with hundreds of masked policemen forming a wall around the building there is little that can be done. Within minutes, the plastic grinning faces of parliamentarians are projected from live screens, signing their oaths of office. The crowd stands motionless in the rain, wet Georgian flags hung around their shoulders. 

Suddenly, people surge towards the iron fence erected around the building, pounding their fists against it. The desperate hammering brings relief. For a moment, it feels as though something, anything, might finally happen. But hours later, as I file photos from a cafe across the street, people are still banging on the fence, and Georgian Dream has long left the building.

On November 28, the news arrives that Georgian Dream will be suspending EU accession talks, suspending the only future that isn’t linked to Moscow. The response is immediate. Rustaveli floods with tens of thousands of people for a bitter standoff with the police who chase and beat individual protestors into the following morning. They begin to pick protesters off one by one while walking their dogs or collecting their children from school. Each evening, the crowd rejuvenates and the cycle repeats.

Somewhere in the crowd, Archil meets Tsaro for the first time. Together, they endure the cold, the tear gas, the water cannons, the indiscriminate arrests, the raids, the beatings by police. And despite having only just met, what they experience erases the distance between them. "We went through such terrible days… that, of course, there was no difference anymore,” Tsaro later told me. “This was my son. He was a son of the same Georgia.”

By the start of 2025, all major opposition leaders will be arrested; while attempts to legally ban all opposition remain underway today, effectively creating a one party rule. Obstructing the road is enforced with fines or detention, while obstructing the pavement becomes listed as a new offence. A man is charged for insulting the police online. Another is charged with throwing a water bottle at police and sentenced to two years. I think of Kostya's words, that Georgia will never be anything compared to Russia, and don’t feel so sure.

Where does Georgia go from here? Czech MEP Marketa Gregorova recently said Georgia was undeserving of its EU candidacy status and that, with Viktor Orban gone, there would be no one left to oppose targeted sanctions against officials. Meanwhile, Russia has deepened ties with South Ossetia. Part of the new agreement grants Russian citizens the right to take up official positions in the occupied region. One month after declaring the new partnership, South Ossetia’s Prime Minister stepped down. His replacement; Marat Kambolov, a Kremlin-appointed Regional Administrator. In May, Georgian Dream launched a new unit for monitoring online “hate speech” against officials, with 60 cases already being filed. 

People still stand outside parliament as 118 prisoners of conscience serve out their sentences. Some who continue to protest ask where the younger generation have gone; others say it's the sheer scale of the crackdown and the extended power police have that keeps them away. Just a few weeks ago, a friend told me he was leaving. "Society here is broken," he said. Sitting on our shared terrace, I recently asked my neighbour, in his sixties, if he attended the protests back in 2024. He just laughed. “This is nothing new for Georgia.”

The other day, I passed Kostya in the street. It was the unmistakable sound of British English from the woman he was with that made me turn his way. Two years later, the irony is that perhaps he was right; the younger generation, the ones who haven’t left, say they do have a deeper understanding of what it is like to live beneath authoritarianism – the main difference being that it didn’t cost them their empathy.

When I visit Tsaro at home, she shows me pictures of Archil on her phone, cooing how cute he is, joking that he makes her own children jealous. But I also know that she feels the full weight of this moment from the times that I have seen her cry while reading his letters.

There was something else Tsaro said that day we were intercepted by police, something that surprised me more than her small hope that I’d somehow defied the police.

“You know, not all police are bad. Some are really good people,” she said, using my phone to translate. “I felt sorry for them. They told me we have families, too. If they don’t do something, they’ll be fired and unemployed. That’s why they are afraid.” Then, smiling once again, said she was looking forward to telling Archil the story later and that he would certainly find it very funny.

Tsaro has now spent many weekends campaigning across the country with the Mothers of Conscience, a collective of mothers whose children have been imprisoned for protest-related charges since 2024. One member, Marina Terishvili, whose son is serving two years, lost her other son on the 9th April 1989, the day Georgian demands for independence from Moscow were met with shovels, tanks, and toxic gas at the hands of the Soviet authorities. Many people’s names did not make it into the official tally of the dead that day. They died months after exposure to the gas.

The Mothers often deliver newspapers written by their children from behind bars. I've joined them on these newspaper runs, and recently took a copy with me to translate back home. In it, I found a note from Archil:

“Stand by a stranger, this is what gives me strength and motivation to fight, fight when I see how people care for each other, fight when I see how they support and stand by me, a stranger to them.”

The collective responsibility people take for others, standing by strangers, is something I still see in Tbilisi, even if that community is now confined to the patches of pavement where it is still legally permitted to protest, or to the contents of a package delivered behind bars, or to the sofa in Tsaro's living room, the one that Archil is planning to sleep on when he is released. Such acts of solidarity exist in a space authoritarianism cannot so easily reach: the space between people, another homeland. 

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The post  Standing with strangers, a Tbilisi story appeared first on Coda Story.

The town of San Pedro, located in the north of Chile not far from the borders with Argentina and Bolivia, then appears like an oasis. In this hub for international tourism, small buses packed with visitors make trips from the dusty, bustling center to explore the region’s various geysers, sand dunes and volcanoes. Night sky tourism ventures offer a unique look at the southern stars. But it is the vast white salt flats, formed between 100 and 10 million years ago, that people come from around the world to see. 

As tectonic plates slowly shifted, water flowing from the Andes mountains lost access to the sea and settled into a natural drainage area known as an endorheic basin. Here, water evaporated quickly, leaving a white crust of salt on top and below, a rich mélange of minerals – lithium, potassium, magnesium, and boron — encased in brine. The Salar de Atacama is one of the biggest salt flats in the world — and one of the most important.

On March 11, Jose Antonio Kast, Chile’s new president took office. Kast, a conservative ostentatiously close to Donald Trump, has long been a critic of Chile’s national lithium strategy. One of his first actions as president was to sign an exploratory deal with the United States to extract rare earths and essential mirals. Chile, the world’s largest producer of copper and second largest of lithium, is central to the Trump administration’s plans to reduce its reliance on China as a source of the rare earths and metals that are fundamental to modern industry, from semiconductors to electric vehicles to batteries to defense technology.

Even before Kast took office, he attended Trump’s “Shield of the Americas” summit in Miami, an ostensibly security-related alliance that is also an attempt led by the U.S. to curb China’s growing influence in Latin America. Under the previous Chilean government, China had become a dominant player in the national lithium industry, as it had in Argentina. With Javier Milei, a Trump ally, in office in Buenos Aires, having another ally ensconced in Santiago has been a significant boost to U.S. plans to reclaim its role as the overwhelming regional hegemon. It was intervention from Washington, for instance, that led to Chile abandoning a $500 million Chinese telecom deal to link the two countries via undersea fiber optic cables.

Amidst the geopolitical wrangling, though, is the question of who benefits from Chile’s national resources and what impact the relentless drive to extract those resources has on the country and its people.

Sonia Ramos Chocobar sweeps kibble from the small kitchen table of her home on the outskirts of San Pedro and shoos her five dogs and three cats into the yard. Chocobar has just returned home after several days in neighboring Calama – where she was attending the first-ever Salt Flats Conference – and the house is a mess. The climate activist has made time between her afternoon grocery shopping and an evening community gathering to meet with me. 

Chocobar, in her 70s, is a bit of a local legend. In 2009, she made national news when she and another environmental activist (Amelia Mamani, since deceased) silently walked from San Pedro to Santiago, a distance of 1,534 kilometers, to raise awareness about the environmental risks of geothermal exploration near a geyser known as El Tatio — sacred to the Lickanantay indigenous community she comes from. The “march of the grandmothers” was followed by other environmental actions. Most recently, Chocobar walked to Antofagasta, the gritty port town that exports much of the copper, lithium and other resources mined out of the vast expanses of land in what’s known as Chile’s Gran Norte (“Greater North”) region. 

This time her message was different: save the Atacama salt flats.

The broader area where the borders of Chile, Argentina and Bolivia converge is often referred to as the world’s “lithium triangle.” This lost corner of South America is believed to hold 68% of the world’s lithium reserves — a key element in the production of the lithium-ion batteries that fuel not only electric vehicles, but, increasingly, data centers and other large “green” infrastructure projects. San Pedro, roughly in the middle of the triangle, is sitting on a modern gold mine — and a faultline for the future of renewable energy.  

The town of 2,500 full-time residents has long been at the center of a tug-of-war between different actors, all of whom claim sovereignty – dominion – over the salt flats surrounding it: the indigenous communities who have called this environment home for centuries, the Chilean state and the international markets salivating over the “white gold” extracted from it. Over the years, and through much negotiation on local, national and international levels, a sort of entente had been reached: the state owns the resource, private companies exploit it and some of the profits kick back to local communities. Lithium was even granted a special status under a dictatorship-era decree: a “strategic” mineral, only to be mined with the express agreement of the State. The election of Kast has already disrupted this tenuous equilibrium. The Chilean president has removed environmental protections from roughly 40 different types of natural resources — reopening the tap that has long fueled extractivism and inequality in Chile after four years of left-wing, protectionist policies. 

With counter space cleared and the tape recorder set, Chocobar begins to speak, choosing her words carefully and pausing regularly for emphasis. She sounds tired, but steely. “We are always in a constant effort to protect our water, our land,” she tells me. “We have the misfortune of the Pacific. And we have the misfortune that the Salar de Atacama is one of the greatest lithium sources in the world.”

It wasn’t always this way — in fact, the “resource curse” is relatively new, she explains. For a long time, the Atacama desert was viewed by most Chileans as a no man’s land. Growing up as a member of the Lickanantay indigenous community — also known as the Atacameño people — Chocobar learned how to coexist with the harsh environment, rather than to dominate it. How to extract groundwater, which plants to grow, when and where to shuffle crops. “If we are millenary people, it is because we have found many ways to survive here,” she says. “People think the desert is lifeless, but it’s the exact opposite.” 

Over her many years, Chocobar has seen these techniques slowly disappear: dried-up streams, dying flora and fauna, water rerouted from communities to corporations. The natural richness of the desert lands she calls home has been converted into a monocrop for export. The culprit? The world’s increasingly rapacious appetite for rare earths and metals.

Lithium demands huge amounts of water. To extract the resource through a process called brine evaporation, mineral-rich groundwater is pumped from beneath the salt flats at a rate of thousands of liters per second into vast open-air ponds. Then, the water is evaporated to reveal the lithium. 95% of this groundwater — which once belonged to the smattering of 18 indigenous communities that inhabit the region — quite literally disappears into thin air. 

For local communities, the strain is already noticeable. In San Pedro, an estimated 49% of residents don’t have access to running water, says journalist Ernesto Picco. In one town — the ironically named Santiago del Rio Grande — Picco has reported, 100% of residents have no access to water. 

It's not only humans who are being affected. The water scarcity has modified the breeding and feeding habits of alpaca populations, a local llama herder in neighboring Toconao, Hugo Flores, told me. A river used to run through San Pedro. On one of my days in town, I climbed down a ladder and walked across the dried up stream to get a better view of the distant Licancabur Volcano. The caked ground chipped under my sandals.

“We’re sitting on a watershed, and yet there is water scarcity,” Chocobar explains. “We’re being conquered, in a sense — commercially, economically. It is a natural laboratory that is being destroyed.” 

Lithium hasn’t always been so coveted.

When it comes to minerals, in Chile, copper was for a long time — and still is, to a certain extent —king. Since its discovery in the 1880s, the South American country has been one of the world’s largest exporters of copper, which is drilled out of open pit mines in the Gran Norte region. From the window of a taxi in the port city of Antofagasta the day before, I had admired the massive telescopic loading chutes that transport the mineral directly into the hull of boats, releasing brown-gold particles into the air that settles on surfaces — park benches, balconies, cars — across the city.

It wasn't until the 1960s that the Chilean government began to recognize the benefits of lithium after accidentally discovering it buried in salt brine during an exploration aimed at identifying additional water sources for copper mining. The timing couldn’t have been better. “After World War II, there was a lot of speculative value in lithium as a nuclear material,” James J. A. Blair, a professor at Cal Poly Pomona who has published several papers on lithium mining in Chile, explained over a recent video call. 

In 1979, about six years into his 17-year iron reign and following the lead of the United States, which had done the same, Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet declared lithium a “strategic resource” reserved exclusively for the state — not on account of its economic potential, which was at the time unknown, but as a national security stockpile. 

This seemingly small linguistic tweak has had long-lasting effects. 

After Pinochet’s decree, lithium extraction came under the auspices of Chile’s State Development Agency, CORFO, which started to ink contracts with private firms for further exploration. A year later, CORFO partnered with U.S.-based Foote Minerals to form the Chilean Lithium Company (SCL), in which the state held a 45% stake. 

What began as a Cold War precaution would quietly harden into one of the most unusual resource regimes in the world. By carving lithium out from the standard mining code, written in the 1930s, the Chilean state created a hybrid model. Lithium was not exactly nationalized, but neither was it fully privatized. “Lithium sits in a legal gray zone in Chile,” Blair told me. “It’s formally non-concessionable — meaning private actors can’t just stake a claim the way they would for copper — but in practice, the state has delegated extraction through long-term agreements that are incredibly favorable to a small number of firms.”

During the dictatorship’s wave of privatizations in the 1980s, control over key lithium assets was transferred to a small circle of politically connected actors. Among them: Julio Ponce Lerou, Pinochet’s son-in-law, who would go on to run SQM, now one of the world’s dominant lithium producers.

“Decisions were made in a highly centralized and opaque way,” researcher Gonzalo Gutiérrez told me over cafeteria food at the University of Chile, in Santiago. “By the time lithium became economically important, the institutional framework was already locked in.”

That framework has proven to be remarkably durable. Even as Chile transitioned back to democracy in the 1990s and expanded its role as a global mining powerhouse, lithium remained an exception — governed not through open concessions but through a handful of contracts administered by CORFO. 

In her 2025 book “Extraction,” researcher Thea Riofrancos notes that even today, two firms — SQM and Albemarle — effectively operate as a “a legally sanctioned private duopoly.” Control over lithium, she writes, is a tightrope between “the palpable potential of public control and the reality of corporate dominance.” 

For Ramón Balcázar, the founder of the San Pedro-based nonprofit, Fundacion Tantí, this legal exceptionalism has had profound consequences on the ground. “The state claims ownership, but the impacts are local,” he said. “Communities were never meaningfully included in the design of these contracts, yet they are the ones living with the depletion of water and the transformation of their ecosystems.”

Balcazar’s nonprofit sits on a side street in San Pedro, across from a trendy French bakery called La Franchuteria that sells iced lattes at European prices. 

Since its founding in 2016, Fundacion Tanti’s small team of researchers has studied the effects of lithium mining on indigenous communities in the Atacama desert. The period has coincided with nothing less than an explosion in the demand for Chilean lithium. 

The growth has mostly been tied to a dramatic rise in demand for electric vehicle batteries. Between 2015 and 2024, global lithium demand grew roughly sixfold, largely driven by EV batteries. The boom has fundamentally reshaped lithium markets: whereas EV batteries accounted for only about 15% of lithium demand in 2017, they made up roughly 85% by 2023. In Chile, arguably the world’s lithium breadbasket, raw materials are mined for export but rarely do its benefits trickle back down to communities.

“Where is the lithium going? To Elon Musk?” Daniela Rodriguez, a local journalist and activist I spoke with in San Pedro, asked. “To send rockets into space, to power electric cars that you never even see around here?” 

In 2021, Balcazar and fellow researchers came up with a neat term for this phenomenon: “green extractivism.” “What we are seeing is not an energy transition — it’s an expansion of the extractive frontier under a green label,” he told me. 

Faced with increasing demand for lithium to fuel the “green revolution,” the Chilean state has tried to thread the needle. In 2019, after a wave of mass protests against neoliberal inequality known as “el estallido social” (the social uprising), Chileans elected Gabriel Boric, a young, tattooed reformer who promised to, among other things, reassert state control over the lithium supply chain to redistribute its value. 

“Lithium is the mineral of the future,” Boric said on the campaign trail. “Chile can’t make the historic mistake of privatizing resources again.” His government promised a paradigm shift: more community involvement, more protection of wetlands, greener methods of extraction. Lithium, he seemed to say, would benefit Chileans across the whole supply chain and not just a select few at the top.

In April 2023, the government announced its National Lithium Strategy. The policy sought to expand production while increasing state control through public-private partnerships, renegotiate the contract with SQM (the same private company once headed by Pinochet’s son-in-law) and include community and indigenous participation in future lithium exploration decisions. 

In all, Boric’s government identified 68 salt flats that could be opened to mining exploration, but also 27 wetlands to be protected, Riofrancos, the author of “Extraction,” notes in her book. 

“The national lithium strategy is Boric's most successful policy,” Nicolas Grau, Boric’s former finance minister, told me over the phone. “It will allow Chile to industrialize through lithium — growing the economy while also protecting the environment.” After years of passive control, the state would finally take a more “protagonistic role” in managing the resource, Grau said, without nationalizing it.

To Riofrancos, the juggling act under Boric was typical of what happens when a state tries to pry some space in a market where extractivism has long been left unchecked. “Boric’s blueprint cited Allende as an inspiration, but his approach was more conciliatory toward extractive capital than anything Allende had proposed,” she writes. 

Local communities in San Pedro felt similarly. “The only thing politicians care about is being in power,” Chocobar said in San Pedro. “For all intents and purposes, we might as well not exist.” 

Boric’s successor, Kast has quickly rolled back environmental protections, fulfilling his campaign promises of commercializing mining and partnering with the U.S. regardless of the environmental impacts on the salt flats. 

Jorge Heine, a former Chilean diplomat and expert on international relations, argues that Kast is more constrained than it might appear. “People tend to overestimate how much a single administration can reshape lithium policy,” Heine explained. “This is a sector governed by long-term contracts, by international commitments, and by a legal framework that has proven remarkably resilient. Kast can tweak, accelerate, or slow things down, but dismantling the model entirely would come at a significant political and economic cost.”

But huge costs are already being paid, costs that communities in San Pedro have been living with for decades. Could Kast’s attempts to liberalize lithium mining and potentially exacerbate inequalities and environmental damage galvanize resistance?

For now, the signs of that resistance are still weak: graffiti scrawled on the side of the road, a grandmother walking along a highway with a cardboard sign, four panels of wood hung in a town square. But like lithium itself, transformations tend to take place very slowly at first — millennia of build-up in the brine — until suddenly they happen very fast. From Santiago to Atacama, protesters have been taking to the streets. In June, broader protests against Kast’s dismantling of social programs and services turned violent. 

At some point, austerity for the people contrasted with largesse for mining companies, technology companies and acquisitive foreign powers becomes hard for even a government elected in a landslide to defend.

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On the contrary, he told the New York Times, he’d spent $10 million secretly backing Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against the news outlet because: “I saw Gawker pioneer a unique and incredibly damaging way of getting attention by bullying people even when there was no connection with the public interest… if I didn’t think Gawker was unique, I wouldn’t have done any of this. If the entire media was more or less like this, this would be like trying to boil the ocean.” 

10 years later with the aid of an “AI tribunal,” a team of intelligence and law enforcement veterans, and a political climate vastly more hostile to press freedom, he is trying to do exactly that, bypassing the courts, short-circuiting the first amendment, and making it much, much cheaper to indulge in the quasi legal harassment of journalists.

Objection.ai is a new startup funded by Thiel, and cofounded by Aron D’Souza, who worked closely with him on the Gawker case. It promises “a fast affordable way to challenge statements in the media.” Anyone can file an objection, which will trigger an investigation by a team hired, the company says, from the CIA, FBI, and British intelligence agencies. Targeted outlets and reporters will have an opportunity to respond, and the results will be fed to an AI model, which will render a verdict. The complainant, and the target, are asked to agree to binding arbitration, with an unspecified range of potential consequences. Financial details are vague, but the company has said the process will cost around $2,000 — far less than the retainer of a crisis communications expert.

An initial slate of cases includes objections against the New York Times, for reporting on how Thiel’s fellow traveller David Sacks, former PayPal chief operating officer and Donald Trump’s former “AI and Crypto Czar,” uses his White House position to benefit Silicon Valley connections; The Wall Street Journal for its revelations about the doodle contributed by Donald Trump to Jeffrey Epstein’s birthday book (a case recently dismissed by a federal judge); and British reporter Hannah Broughton for an aggregated story in the UK tabloid the Mirror about allegations that Amazon workers were told to continue working while a colleague lay dead on the warehouse floor. A smattering of social media provocateurs (Candace Owens) and politicians (Bernie Sanders) round out the roster, but the aggregate effect is indisputable: Thiel’s animus was about journalism all along. Indeed, the Objection.ai team couldn't be clearer about that.

“Gawker was not unique,” writes D’Souza on the company’s website. “It was simply the first large media company to be tested against reality in the age of clicks, outrage, and algorithmic amplification. Since then, the same structural failure has spread everywhere.”

“Peter Thiel and I … did not just fight Gawker,” he goes on. “ — We demonstrated that facts still mattered if someone was willing to enforce them.”

This is worse than revisionism. D’Souza is banking on everyone having forgotten that the Hulk Hogan case had nothing to do with “reality.” It was undisputed that the sex tape published by Gawker was real. The original suit, which failed, was for copyright infringement and the ultimate $140 million award that bankrupted the company was for invasion of privacy and intentional infliction of emotional harm. 

This foundational lie is important, because it is a warning against the temptation to engage Objection.ai on the merits. It would be easy enough to conduct a good faith debate to take at face value D’Souza’s argument that tech platforms and algorithms amplify false claims to millions, that courts are expensive and slow, media ombuds toothless, and fact-checkers partisan. And it would not be hard to demonstrate that he is harnessing widely shared concerns about a disordered information environment to mobilize support for an AI powered justice system controlled by a hyperpartisan private company with a track record of attacking the very institutions that are holding the line on consensus reality.

It would also be a mistake. There is nothing good faith about this effort. Rather, it is classic Thiel: an attempt to hack the principles of accountability, and turn them against journalism. Leave it to his less sophisticated Silicon Valley peers to rail against the media, create in house news outlets or buy them. The PayPal co-founder is going for the heart of the system, and financing infrastructure that will enable anyone who can afford a used Honda Civic to launch a harassment campaign, cloaked in the language of legitimate investigation. James O’Keefe, but with the judicial rather than journalistic process as its governing metaphor.

It will be tempting, too, to question the likely financial sustainability of Objection. That will be the least of its founders' concerns. The for-profit structure supports a story about the company’s purpose. It may work, or not, but its goals are nonfinancial. We reached out to Thiel for comment on Objection.ai before publication and will update this article as soon as he responds.

Providing funding, alongside Thiel, is Balaji Srinivasan, the investor and author of “The Network State,” a book about social networks with “a sense of national consciousness” replacing the nation state. He once outlined an early version of the Objection.ai model in an email to the far right theorist Curtis Yarvin about dealing with critical coverage. "If things get hot,” he suggested “it may be interesting to sic the Dark Enlightenment audience on a single vulnerable hostile reporter to dox them and turn them inside out with hostile reporting sent to *their* advertisers/friends/contacts."

These men understand the limits of the Gawker verdict’s impact. It bankrupted the company, a personal victory for Thiel, but perhaps the least important outcome of the case. At a more systemic level, it struck fear into the hearts of media insurers and newsroom counsel, focusing attention on third party litigation finance as potential threat. 

If people with limitless resources could sponsor litigation against news organizations they disliked, constitutional protections would be no match for the sheer cost and complexity of defense.

Now, they’ve found an AI-assisted way to supercharge those effects. 

The Gawker case routed around the First Amendment by relying on a privacy claim. Objection.ai does so by building a hallucination of the legal process. Any journalist foolish enough to agree to binding arbitration by the company probably deserves what they get, but that will be a vanishingly small minority. For those who don’t, a phone call, or a knock on the door from a former FBI agent, or defense intelligence operative, will be chilling, and an ex-parte verdict rendered by Thiel’s custom-tuned AI will act as a cudgel on social media and via traditional PR. Journalists will be assigned a “trust score” to act as an additional goad.

In an environment of less peril for press freedom, it might be easy to laugh off Objection.ai as the confection of a thin-skinned millenarian. Right now, with the crony capture of broadcast news far advanced, swathes of the tech community openly hostile to journalism, and the White House onside, it would be wise to take it seriously. That starts with seeing it for what it is, and refusing to engage with a process which, unlike the real courts, Peter Thiel has no legal power to compel. 

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Before the elections on April 12, a scandal engulfed the Hungarian government. On leaked recordings, foreign minister Péter Szijjártó can be heard deferentially acquiescing to his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov and passing on information from EU meetings. Szijjártó appeared willing to help the Kremlin’s cause in Brussels, to remove oligarchs and their relatives from the EU blacklist, and to block efforts to aid Ukraine. Hungary’s advocacy for the Kremlin’s agenda culminated in its recent veto of fresh sanctions on Russia and over $100 billion in loans to Ukraine. On X, Polish prime minister Donald Tusk wrote that while “Hungary is and will be in the European Union, Victor Orbán and his foreign minister left Europe long ago.” And the Irish taoiseach Micheál Martin described Szijjárto’s calls with Lavrov as both “sinister” and “alarming.”

Szijjárto alleged that “foreign intelligence services, with the active involvement of Hungarian journalists, have been intercepting my phone calls.” It is a plot, the Hungarian government claims, to influence the upcoming polls. Orbán directly blames Ukraine for seeking to unseat his government. The opposition, led by Peter Magyar, has a healthy lead in the polls and describes the Hungarian government’s closeness to the Kremlin as “treason.” According to European intelligence reports, Moscow sent a three-person team to Hungary, overseen by Putin confidant Sergei Kiriyenko who ran an operation to interfere in the Moldovan election back in September. His tactics encompassed “vote-buying networks, troll farms, and on-the-ground influence campaigns.” A Kremlin-linked media consultancy, facing EU sanctions, was hired to dismiss Magyar as a Brussels stooge and portray Orbán as the only candidate strong enough to to be treated as an equal by world leaders, as evidenced by the strength of his relationship with Trump. 

Despite a war with Iran that doesn’t appear to be going entirely to plan, the U.S. president took time out to back Orbán with enthusiasm and at considerable length on Truth Social. Trump said Orbán was “a true friend, fighter, and WINNER.” JD Vance, the vice president, is scheduled to visit Hungary on April 7, just five days before the election. And secretary of state Marco Rubio went to Hungary in February. It is now part of the U.S. National Security Strategy to work towards “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.” To that end, notes the U.S. government, “the growing influence of patriotic European parties indeed gives cause for great optimism.” Orbán speaks MAGA’s language on immigration, traditional values and the Christian essence of Western societies. He is, like Putin and Trump, in MAGA’s view, an implacable opponent of secular, progressive, globalist politics as symbolised by Brussels.

Orbán, the longest serving current head of government in the EU, has become a figurehead for populist, nationalist movements across the world. The recent CPAC Hungary summit was attended by several of these leaders including France’s Marine Le Pen, Italian deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini, and the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders,who called Orbán “a lion on a continent led by sheep.” Latin American leaders close to Trump , including Javier Milei of Argentina and Jose Antonio Kast of Chile, also attended. Milei, who gave the longest speech at the summit, said Orbán was “a beacon for all… who refuse to accept that the West's destiny is one of managed decline.” This international network, with the United States and Russia included, has a vested ideological interest in seeing Orban continue to remain a thorn in the EU's side. 

But what can Brussels do? The answer, it appears, is not much. The EU is consensus driven; it needs all its parts to act in concert, giving holdouts like Orbán considerable power to hold the whole bloc hostage. But given Orbán’s prominence as an ideologue, when Hungary blocks sanctions or delays support for Ukraine, it is more than a single nation going rogue. Alice Weidler, co-chair of the far-right AfD, the largest opposition party in the German Bundestag, was among those who spoke at the CPAC Hungary conference last month. Robert Fico, prime minister of Slovakia, is an Orbán ally. On April 19, Bulgaria will have its eighth general election in just five years. Former president Rumen Radev’s new Progressive Party leads the polls and shares Orbán’s pro-Kremlin, anti-EU inclinations.

So polarized is the Hungarian election, that right wing groups are deploying their own observers from Argentina, Austria, the Czech Republic, Kenya, Poland, Germany, Italy, Spain, Serbia, Tanzania and the United States to monitor proceedings. EU observers have said the Hungarian government controls the national media and a recent documentary alleges that a desperate government is resorting to vote-buying, gerrymandering and intimidation tactics. It’s hard to see how either Orbán or Magyar will accept the election result without protest, unless the margin is crushing. But, given Trump’s disdain for NATO allies and the EU, an Orbán election defeat would be a much-needed victory for European unity. 

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

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Almost simultaneously, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission launched an investigation into Grok, X’s generative AI chatbot, for producing sexualized deepfakes which might have included personal data of Europeans, including children. Even British prime minister Keir Starmer, who has signed a sweeping “Technology Prosperity Deal” with the U.S. has, spoken about the need to “protect children’s wellbeing” from Grok. And earlier this month, French police searched the Paris offices of X as part of a process that X described as a “politicized criminal investigation.” 

With Australia having set a precedent for “age-gating” the Internet through legislation, France’s under-15 ban is now due to come into force in September. The UK already requires age verification for certain content via the Online Safety Act, and Spain, Slovenia, Denmark, Germany, and Greece are among those considering similar measures. ​​The social and political consensus is striking. A 30-country Ipsos survey found strong majorities in every country supporting bans for under-14s.

Elon Musk responded to the Spanish prime minister’s comments about social media being essentially a failed state, rife with criminality and a disregard for law, by calling him “a tyrant and traitor to the people of Spain.” The U.S. government has only been marginally more restrained. The House Judiciary Committee’s report accused Europe of mounting a decade-long campaign to “censor the global internet.” 

The involvement of the U.S. government, and its consistent defence of U.S. tech companies, means the battle is increasingly less about European regulators and Silicon Valley and more about what appears to be a profound ideological mismatch. “Though often framed as combating so-called ‘hate speech’ or ‘disinformation’,” said the Republican legislators’ report, the EU was working to “censor true information and political speech about some of the most important policy debates in recent history — including the Covid-19 pandemic, mass migration, and transgender issues.” Meanwhile, a recently published report in Europe shows how Silicon Valley companies spent 151 million euros lobbying far right European parliamentarians in 2025 to water down regulations. 

Big Tech forging links to the European far right dovetails with a Trump administration in which senior figures, including Donald Trump himself, endorse certain candidates in elections and routinely repeat far right talking points as part of an “unapologetic defense of Western civilization.” And now the U.S. State Department has openly touted the building of a “freedom.gov” portal that enables people to access restricted content, even if it contravenes local laws in sovereign countries.

But European regulations are not the only challenge to the impunity with which social media platforms seem to be able to act. As momentum builds to hold social media platforms to account in Europe, in the U.S. Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg has been defending Instagram in a Los Angeles courtroom. He was testifying in a lawsuit, one of several hundred filed in U.S. civil courts, alleging that social media platforms are addictive, harm the mental health of children and that platforms are aware of these effects but do little to safeguard teenage users from harm. 

The lawsuits have the effect of making the Australian, European, and perhaps global attempt to ban teens from setting up social media accounts appear necessary. But Paige Collings, a digital policy expert at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and board member at European Digital Rights, said that bans are politically attractive precisely because they are simple. “Complex problems require complex solutions,” she said. “It’s more expensive. It’s longer-term. It can’t just be implemented overnight. But blocking under-16s from social media — that is something you can implement overnight.” 

Collings is among a growing chorus of experts that are cautious about embracing bans as a comprehensive solution. For instance, she explains, to ban children, platforms first need to know who is a child. This relies on national digital ID systems, facial recognition, and third-party age verification. In all scenarios, Collings said, “we are trusting that these services and platforms are not storing this information, not selling the information,” often without meaningful guardrails to ensure that is the case. 

When the UK introduced age restrictions last summer, searches for VPNs surged as users of all ages tried to avoid giving away personal information. Now the government has floated expanding restrictions to VPN usage to plug enforcement gaps. The purpose of a VPN itself is to preserve the privacy of its user, however imperfectly. VPNs are essential tools for businesses to secure communications, for journalists to protect sources, and for citizens in restrictive environments to access independent information. Forcing identification to use them fundamentally undermines their purpose. And when the argument for banning them is framed around the protection of children, it reinstates the urgency of an entire infrastructure required to keep children off the internet and risks normalizing identity checks as conditions for access to online spaces. In a digital economy where personal data is highly valuable, such measures raise the question of who ultimately benefits.Beyond privacy concerns, Collings points out that age-gating can become “a fantastic tool for censorship with no accountability or remedy.” It does, in fact, do in part what the U.S. government and Silicon Valley companies say it does, which is restrict speech. At an AI summit in Delhi, French president Emmanuel Macron dismissed Silicon Valley’s invocation of censorship as a defense against European regulation. “Free speech,” he said, “is pure bullshit if nobody knows how you are guided through this… having no clue about how the algorithm is made, how it is tested and where it will guide you — the democratic biases of this could be huge.” But, forcing accountability and improving safety would perhaps be better than a blanket ban where the cutoff is 14 or 16, leaving everyone else to take cover as best they can in a “digital Wild West,” to borrow the Spanish prime minister’s phrase.

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By the time it reached my inbox, I already knew the lie was out there. What arrived was the first backlash — a venomous email that made clear how deeply the lie had seeped into the American bloodstream. At The Haitian Times, we’ve spent years reporting on Haitians as whole people: musicians, entrepreneurs, artists, families who create, build, celebrate, and endure. We’ve also covered the darker chapters — gang violence, earthquakes, cholera, and migration through unforgiving terrain. 

But this lie — this grotesque, calculated fabrication — landed like a punch to the chest. Because it wasn’t just a rumor. It was a diagnosis of how America still sees us.

People imagine exile as geography — leaving one home for another. But exile can also be internal, a quiet ache carried from room to room. Mine began not through my own displacement but by watching my parents live out theirs. Though I’m not technically an exile, I grew up in a household where exile seeped through the walls. My parents were part of the early wave of Haitian migration to New York — educated, middle-class, ambitious. In Haiti they had status. In America they had survival.

50 years on, and belonging still felt conditiona l— granted just until someone decided to snatch it away.

Springfield wasn’t an anomaly. It was a lie engineered to trigger the oldest reflex in this country: the instinct to believe the worst about Black people. Say anything about us — no matter how implausible — and a segment of America will nod along, ready to turn virulent fiction into unimpeachable fact.

In September 2024, during the U.S. presidential campaign, the lie leapt from fringe conspiracy to national talking point. J.D. Vance — then Donald Trump’s running mate — first amplified the claim, asserting that Haitian migrants in Springfield were abducting and eating pets, even after local officials told his staff the allegations were baseless.

Days later, during his first and only debate with Kamala Harris, Trump repeated the claim on national television, declaring that in Springfield, Haitian immigrants were “eating the dogs” and “eating the cats.” On air, the moderator cited the city manager’s office, which said there were no credible reports of pets being harmed by immigrants.

Fact-checkers, including Reuters, also found no evidence. But by then, the damage was done.

Springfield had been on our radar for years. Haitians there had been followed, attacked, and robbed as they carried cash to send home. We’d reported on those incidents, and on how a small Midwestern city struggled to absorb a new Haitian community.

We knew Haitians were no longer settling exclusively in New York or Florida. We were migrating to the Midwest, the Southwest, and the Deep South — regions less accustomed to us and often less welcoming.

At The Haitian Times, we pushed back forcefully against the pet-eating hoax — publishing extensive reporting that debunked it, amplifying local officials’ denials, and demanding accountability. For that, we paid a price. Over the following months, our inboxes and message boards filled with blistering attacks — emails drenched in racism and vitriol, accusing us of lying, covering for “savages,” or participating in imagined conspiracies. The more we insisted on truth, the more determined some were to punish us for it.

We planned two town halls in Springfield — one with local officials, another with the Haitian community. Both were canceled amid bomb threats, rising hostility, and word that white supremacist groups intended to march through the city. Local leaders told us plainly: they could not guarantee our safety.

Then came a phone call I will never forget.

Macollvie Jean-François Neel, our special projects editor, called me early on the Monday after she returned from Springfield. Her voice was taut but steady. She had been doxxed and swatted — targeted by a form of harassment in which someone makes a false emergency report to provoke an armed police response. An anonymous email to Catholic Charities in Rochester, New York, claimed a brutal murder had occurred at her Brooklyn home.

Seven NYPD officers surrounded her house. Guns holstered but ready. 

A “wellness check,” they called it.

Every Black family in America knows how quickly such encounters can turn deadly. Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency technician in Louisville, Kentucky, was killed in her apartment during a botched late-night police raid. Officers fired more than 30 rounds. She never stood a chance. Atatiana Jefferson, a 28-year-old Black woman in Fort Worth, Texas, was shot through her bedroom window while playing video games with her nephew. Police had arrived for a “welfare check” after a neighbor noticed her door ajar. They never announced themselves. She was killed within seconds.

For many white Europeans, these stories sound unimaginable. For Black Americans, they form a grim, familiar pattern. The dangerous imagination of others is often deadlier than any reality.

After Macollvie finished recounting the incident, I closed my laptop and went on my daily walk, my stride propelled by fury. For nearly an hour I marched through my neighborhood’s nature trail, furious at the fragility of our lives, of the threats to our safety in this country we call our own. Back home, still simmering, I wrote two posts — one on LinkedIn, one on Twitter. They were raw, unfiltered. Within hours, both went viral. Messages poured in. Television bookers reached out. Reporters sought analysis. Allies offered solidarity. Everyone wanted me to turn this wound into words.

And then it clicked: Exile isn’t about a country you leave. It’s about the distance between who you are and who the world insists you must be.

The dual exile

My mother worked in a SoHo garment factory long before the neighborhood became a destination, taken over by galleries and loft apartments. She came home with fingers pricked from sewing needles, the smell of machine oil clinging to her clothes. “School is your salvation,” she’d tell me. “Don’t end up like me.” My stepfather worked as a mechanic at the United Postal Service. My uncles drove taxis, worked factory shifts, held multiple jobs that drained their dignity by the hour. Their friends slid down the American class ladder: teachers became janitors, accountants cleaned office buildings, nurses tended to the elderly in strangers’ homes. Edwidge Danticat once said her Barnard classmates remarked on the irony of our lives in the U.S.: “In Haiti we had maids; here we were the maids.”

On weekends my parents and their friends gathered in cramped salons across Brooklyn and Queens — passing around rum, grief, gossip. They spoke of a bright, sun-washed Haiti they carried on their person like a pressed flower. They dreamed of returning once the regime fell.

They would turn the music up as loud as the room would allow and sing along to “Haiti”, the iconic ballad by Skah-Shah, then the darling of the Haitian community. I watched their faces as they belted out the lyrics — laughter and grief sharing the same space in their eyes, their voices cracking and rising together.

This morning I woke up with tears in both eyes.
I miss my country. Haiti chérie.

Oh God, give me strength.
My family back home criticizes me when I don’t write letters.
They don’t know my heart is broken.
Life in New York is hard.

As the band slipped into a long, melodic instrumental passage, something shifted. Hips and heads began to sway. Conversation faded. A small living room in Brooklyn filled with movement, with a kind of quiet, shared trance — half celebration, half mourning. This was not simply music; it was a ritual, a way of keeping Haiti alive when distance and circumstance conspired to erase it.

What filled that room was nostalgia — not sentimental, not indulgent, but heavy and necessary. A longing for a homeland that remained painfully present and impossibly distant at the same time. Haiti was close enough to sing to, to dance with, to invoke by name. And yet it was far enough away to break hearts nightly, right there on American couches, under American ceilings.

That was exile, long before I had a word for it.

But the Duvaliers never fell, the regime never changed.

François “Papa Doc” Duvalier ruled through terror. His Tonton Macoutes disappeared intellectuals, tortured dissidents, murdered without hesitation. When he handed power to his nineteen-year-old son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc,” in 1971, the repression modernized but did not cease.

By the early 1980s — two decades after they had left — my parents acknowledged a truth that crushed them: they would never return home. Haiti had changed. They had changed. Their exile had hardened.

I came of age as part of a bridge generation linking Haiti and America, carrying our parents’ grief in one hand and our futures in the other.

And yet, there were moments of joy — brief flickers where we felt we belonged in America. In elementary school, making the basketball team thrilled me. In high school, soccer became a sanctuary. Team sports offered respite from isolation, a glimpse of camaraderie, a doorway into American culture. For a while, I thought that was what belonging meant, what it felt like — this rush, this folding into something larger. 

The closest I ever came to that sensation of belonging was in college, at Florida A&M University in Tallahassee. The historically Black university sits atop one of the city’s seven hills, and when I arrived it felt less like a campus than a citadel — an elevated space of Black thought, ambition, and self-possession. Almost immediately, I felt the intellectual electricity that coursed through the student body. Most students came from Florida, but many arrived from the Midwest and the Northeast, carrying with them different accents, histories, and shades of Blackness.

I sought out FAMU deliberately. Growing up in Elizabeth, New Jersey, tensions between Haitians and African Americans simmered constantly. There was suspicion on both sides. We didn’t understand one another. We didn’t speak the same way. We didn’t trust one another. I remember telling my mother, shortly after arriving in New York, that I was surprised by how many Haitians there were. She laughed and said there weren’t — that I was mistaking Black Americans for Haitians. That confusion captured something essential: in America, Blackness is often flattened, stripped of its histories and distinctions.

FAMU took what was flattened and gave it shape. It was a place where learning how to navigate white power in America was not incidental but central to the institution’s mission. Late at night, between studying and watching Black Entertainment Television, we debated politics, culture, and survival — how we would confront the world waiting beyond campus. That search for connection carried me to West Africa as a Peace Corps volunteer in Benin and Togo, where I deepened my Pan-African quest to understand the relationship between continental Africans and the diaspora.

Still, even in that Black oasis, belonging proved brittle. The mother of a woman I was dating despised me. One day, she looked me in the eyes and said, flatly, that Haitians ate cats. It was a chilling reminder that even among our own, exile stuck to us, a second skin. 

It was with this inheritance — the contradictions, aspirations, flashes of connection — that I founded The Haitian Times in 1999. Not just as a newspaper, but as a repository for our stories, where they could be kept without distortion. It was a ledger of our collective presence. A home for a scattered people. Over 25 years, the paper has chronicled immigration battles, homeownership milestones, the rise of Haitian nurses in American healthcare, the emergence of entrepreneurs, artists, and scholars reshaping Haitian American identity. We became a mirror — and often a megaphone — reflecting a community still discovering how to belong.

But journalism, too, would show me my place.

When I joined The New York Times, I was welcomed but not fully claimed. Editors called one of my beats “immigration.” I called it covering immigrants — the lifeblood of New York’s buses, subways, corner stores, and neighborhoods. I wrote about cab drivers navigating midnight streets, nannies raising other people’s children, shopkeepers who kept entire blocks alive. Immigrants animated the city; I simply made them visible.

Yet I always operated with one hand on the door. The profession embraced me, but not always my perspective. The city was my subject, but rarely my home.

Running The Haitian Times deepened this duality. By day, I covered life in America; by night, I remained tethered to Haiti’s turmoil and beauty.

Two places claimed me. Neither fully let me in. That was the essence of my dual exile: belonging everywhere and nowhere at once.

The rotating outsider

After 50 years in America, I’ve learned that each generation selects its “other”: Italians; Jews; Irish; Chinese; Indians. Each group, at different moments, was caricatured and feared. Over time — through numbers, proximity, and the strange elasticity of whiteness — they moved inside the circle.

I’ve seen this happen among South Asians. Some came with little money, scraping by as taxi drivers, convenience store owners, warehouse workers. Their stories echo the struggles of the countless immigrants navigating America’s lower rungs. But others arrived with advanced degrees, English fluency, caste and class privilege, and global networks. Many entered the American middle and upper-middle class swiftly, achieving what sociologists call adjacency — not whiteness, but a comfortable (and falsely comforting) proximity to power. 

When Zohran Mamdani, an Indian-Ugandan-American of considerable social and cultural privilege, became the city’s first Muslim and first South Asian mayor, his victory — powered by a multiracial, multi-class coalition — showed how adjacency can become influence, and how an immigrant-led movement can capture the helm of America’s largest city.

But Haitians do not enjoy adjacency.

We arrived at the intersection of Blackness and foreignness — the two most enduring definitions of “other” in American life. We did not come through elite work visas or tech pipelines. We fled dictatorships, poverty, violence. We arrived with determination but often without capital, language, or protection. And in America, race does not rotate like ethnicity does.

A white ethnic group can become white-er.

A Black immigrant group can only become Black-er.

This is why the Springfield lie metastasized so quickly and so easily. Why strangers felt entitled to weaponize their fear against my colleague. And yet the irony is astonishing. Haitians are cast as permanent outsiders in a country we helped shape from its earliest days. It was a Haitian, Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, who founded the city of Chicago. Haitian refugees fleeing the revolution ignited cultural, political, and demographic transformation in New Orleans. In 1779, more than 500 free Black soldiers from Saint-Domingue, the Chasseurs-Volontaires, fought alongside American revolutionaries in the Battle of Savannah. They bled for a nation that today treats their descendants as intruders.

The outsider label is not simply a misunderstanding. It is deliberate erasure.

Always on the outside

Bob Dylan — my favorite poet of contradiction — wrote a line that has lived with me for decades:

“Always on the outside of whatever side there was.”

The moment I heard it, I recognized myself. It linked me to a lineage of Black artists and intellectuals for whom exile became a survival strategy: Richard Wright. James Baldwin. Chester Himes. Nina Simone. They left because America made it too hard to breathe, too hard to think, too hard to exist with dignity.

Baldwin said leaving America saved his life. In Paris he found the distance he needed to see his country clearly — and to write about it with a heat that still sears.

Sometimes I wonder what might have happened had I chosen their path.

But I stayed, remaining in the place that wounded me even as I strove to be the change that I wanted to see in America. Journalism allowed me to confront exile directly, to define myself before others misdefined me or my community. It gave me a language for the fracture I had always felt both within and without.

There is a line often attributed to Baldwin — not literal, but true to his philosophy: The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.

So, I made something. A newsroom. A community institution. A bridge for the bridge generation.

But creation did not erase exile. It only gave it form — Springfield, Macollvie’s swatting, my parents’ sacrifices, the precariousness shadowing every Black immigrant life. These moments showed me that America will welcome our labor, our tragedies, our “resilience” — but still choose not to welcome us. I am not on the outside because I failed to belong. I am on the outside because America’s borders of belonging were never drawn with people like me in mind.

Claiming belonging

After Springfield, after Macollvie’s ordeal, after months of racist email invective and those two viral posts, I realized something else: Belonging in America is not given, is not granted. It is claimed. It is not secured by citizenship, longevity, or contribution. It is forged through community, through institutions, through memory.

But even those who would claim belonging, now face the anger and aggression of those who would deny it to them. In recent years, The United States has witnessed:

• ICE raids tearing families, schools and cities apart
• Asylum seekers detained in maximum security prisons
• The Muslim ban, the casual abuse directed at those from “shithole” countries
• Family separations at the southern border
• The normalization of open xenophobia
• The resurgence of white supremacist violence

Under the Trump presidency, these are not expressions of our worst selves. They are public policy. They reveal a nation increasingly comfortable with cruelty, increasingly hostile to outsiders, increasingly eager to weaponize belonging. And now the question is: What will post-Trump America look like?

Even when the man exits the stage, the movement he unleashed will outlive him. Suspicion once fringe is now mainstream. Scapegoating once coded is now explicit. Viewing neighbors as threats is common currency.

These currents are not confined to the United States. Across Europe — from France to the U.K., Italy to Hungary — immigration has become a proxy for deeper anxieties about culture, identity, and power. Borders harden. Parties shift rightward. The definition of “belonging” becomes forbiddingly narrow.

For immigrants — especially Black immigrants — this means we must build parallel structures of safety, connection, and truth. We cannot rely on our nations to protect us. We must protect ourselves.

In recent months, I’ve found myself returning to what happened in Springfield in August and September 2024, and to the question that kept rising in the quiet afterwards: How did we find the will to continue to report, to insist on telling our truth even when fear crept inside our own newsroom, to insist that we had a right to be here, to be seen and to be heard? 

For me, the answer arrived slowly, like a figure emerging through fog. There are forces in this country — loud, coordinated, and intentional — that want people like us to feel like exiles. They want us to retreat into silence, to internalize the idea that we are perpetual outsiders whose presence can be erased with a rumor, a smear, a threat.

My parents and their peers had lived under Duvalier’s dictatorship, where fear was a currency and silence a survival tactic. They fled a regime that demanded their obedience through terror. But in these United States, I refused to reenact their posture of cowering and running. 

America likes to imagine itself as a shining city on a hill — a beacon, a north star. But Springfield revealed an America where the light feels less like a guiding glow and more like a rotating lighthouse beam: illuminating some, ignoring others, blinding many. 

After 50 years, I have learned this: Exile describes where others place you. Belonging is what you build with your own hands.

So I stand my ground. Not because I believe in the myth of the hill, but because I believe — fiercely — in our right to stand upon it.

Even if America insists on keeping me just outside the circle, I will stand outside it and keep writing. From this vantage, I can see my country clearly enough to tell the truth about it. And I can see Haiti clearly enough to honor it. I can see my parents clearly enough to understand their sacrifices. And I can see the next generation: those Haitian American children who will read our stories and recognize themselves within them.

That — more than safety, more than acceptance, more than any passport — is belonging. 

This essay is an adaptation from his upcoming memoir “Always on the Outside.”

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Albertans queuing to sign a petition, even one to secede from Canada, could never compete for attention with the tragic, disorienting developments that filled the first long month of 2026: the ICE shooting in Minneapolis, Donald Trump's bombastic threats to annex Greenland, and Canadian prime minister Mark Carney's tense warnings from Davos about middle powers ending up "on the menu." 

But for those who've tracked how sovereignty collapses, these winter queues had an eerie resonance.

Almost as soon as he took office for his second term, Trump began calling Canada "the 51st state," declaring that the country "only works" if it becomes part of the United States. He'd refuse to use proper titles, referring to Canadian prime ministers as "Governor Trudeau" and later "Governor Carney." He posted altered maps showing Canada as U.S. territory. It played as crude humor, vintage Trump bluster designed to dominate the news cycle and unsettle an ally he viewed as weak. But by January 2026, as Trump’s threats to annex Greenland dominated headlines, his drip-drip taunting of Canada had calcified into something concrete on the ground in Alberta, had given shape and momentum to a once low-key secessionist sentiment.

The Alberta Prosperity Project needs 177,732 signatures by May to trigger a referendum on secession from Canada. Their representatives claim they've made "repeated visits" to Washington to meet with senior Trump administration officials, meetings they say took place inside the kind of secure facility reserved for discussing classified intelligence. 

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent publicly declared that Alberta should "come down into the U.S." as a "natural partner." Republican Congressman Andy Ogles told the BBC that Albertans "would prefer not to be part of Canada and be part of the United States because we are winning day in and day out." According to the separatists' own materials, their vision includes a "common market" with the U.S., zero tariffs, adoption of the U.S. dollar and construction of two oil pipelines through American territory. Spokesperson Jeffrey Rath has claimed the U.S. would potentially provide a $500 billion line of credit to the newly independent Alberta.

Widening the Overton window

A referendum on Albertan secession, should it happen, appears almost certain to fail. Polls show only 24% of Albertans support joining the U.S., with 65% strongly opposed. Most media outside Canada has treated this as a fringe story. But the language being used by the Trump administration in support of secession is becoming a textbook example of how the Overton window shifts: say the outrageous thing, let it be dismissed as mischievous troublemaking, and then watch as domestic actors race to occupy the newly opened political space. Repeat until the "absurd" becomes debatable, and the debatable becomes negotiable. When a U.S. Treasury Secretary publicly advocates for a Canadian province to secede and join America, he's not predicting the future — he's manufacturing a present in which such conversations become possible. There’s no master plan; the chaos itself creates opportunity.

The timing matters. Mark Carney has emerged as the strongest voice pushing back against Trump's increasingly aggressive rhetoric, most notably in his Davos speech warning that middle powers risk ending up "on the menu." Daniel Béland, a political scientist at McGill University who studies Canadian federalism, sees Alberta separatism as potentially serving a strategic purpose for the Trump administration: "Mark Carney is standing up to Trump. We saw what happened in Davos, right? So maybe they see that what's happening in Alberta is weakening both Canada and Carney."

The reason this story matters has less to do with the petition itself than with the narrative infrastructure being built around it. Recently, the exiled Russian news agency Meduza obtained a manual that the Kremlin had distributed to state-owned and pro-government media outlets instructing them how to cover Trump's Greenland standoff. The directives were explicit: emphasize that territorial expansion is what "strong countries" do, that Trump is "aiming for Vladimir Putin's success," that conflicts with European countries "will be forgotten, but the territories will remain." Journalists were told to frame NATO as "collapsing" and Putin as "forcing America to engage in equal dialogue" while European leaders "halfheartedly protest on social media."

For Russian and Chinese state outlets, coverage of Albertan separatism is in keeping with the broad narrative that Western alliances are fracturing and sovereignty is negotiable for resource-rich regions. Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, meanwhile, has spent the past year articulating what he calls a doctrine of "hemispheric defense," framing Canada not as an ally but as territory that needs to be controlled. A "rapidly changing" Canada, he has said, in which 25% of the population is "foreign-born" means "these people are hostile to the United States of America." Canada, Bannon claims, “is the next Ukraine."

While Bannon has spoken extensively about hemispheric defence and Canada’s strategic value as a U.S. protectorate, there's been no official movement towards such a goal — no Pentagon study, no Congressional authorization hearings, no legal pathway to annexation. Trump can troll, Bannon can theorize, Bessent can advocate, but no one appears to be seriously suggesting executing a plan. The damage isn't in the doing, it’s in the destabilization, it’s in normalizing the conversation.

A parallel playbook doesn't mean identical outcomes. There will be no little green men, no masked special forces in Calgary. But in 2014, when Russia entered Crimea, it wasn't military occupation alone, it began with the systematic deployment of narratives that made annexation appear inevitable, even locally driven, before troops ever arrived. And now the Kremlin argues hypocrisy when the United Nations Secretary General says the principle of the “self-determination of peoples has a number of requisites.” 

Déjà vu

My view is shaped by what I've witnessed: Russian-backed separatists taking over my grandparents' house in Abkhazia in the 1990s, years of reporting from South Ossetia before Russia seized it in 2008, and standing outside a Ukrainian military base in Perevalnoe in 2014, watching Russian soldiers in unmarked uniforms take control while Moscow denied they were even there.

The annexation of Crimea showed how the ground for seizing sovereignty is laid through manufactured political theater. A politician whose party won 4% of the vote in 2010 was installed at gunpoint and held a referendum under occupation that reported 96.7% of people supported joining Russia. He's still in charge.

Provinces and regions challenge sovereignty regularly. In Scotland's 2014 referendum on whether it should be independent of the United Kingdom, nearly 45% voted ‘yes.’ Catalonia's 2017 referendum saw 48% back independence from Spain before Madrid blocked it through force, both physical and legal. Quebec came within 1% of secession in 1995, a margin so narrow it prompted federal legislation defining how provinces could leave.

What distinguishes Alberta isn't the referendum mechanism, it's the involvement of a foreign power. In every previous case, challenges to sovereignty remained internal disputes. Spain's government opposed Catalonia, but secessionists didn’t visit France to seek €500 billion in credit from the French government. Canada addressed Quebec's grievances, but the U.S. Treasury Secretary at the time didn't suggest that Quebec should "come down into the U.S."

The overt encouragement of Albertan secession is without precedent among Western democracies. Canada faces provocation by a superpower neighbor whose cabinet officials actively encourage provincial secession, whose political figures meet separatist leaders in secure intelligence facilities, and whose state apparatus treats a G7 ally's territorial integrity as negotiable. "This is something that, at least to my knowledge, is unprecedented," says Béland, referring to US State Department meetings with Alberta separatists. 

The architecture of erosion

The conditions in Alberta and Crimea are, of course, fundamentally different: no troops, no armed separatists, and Alberta is a democracy in which roughly 76% oppose joining the U.S., if not necessarily Albertan independence. What's comparable though is the vocabulary being used in the U.S.: the systematic framing of sovereignty as conditional, resources as rightfully belonging to a more powerful neighbor, and local grievances as requiring external "solutions." 

The rhetorical architecture that made Crimea possible is now being constructed around Alberta. That architecture requires foundation stones, and Alberta has them. When the province joined Canada in 1905, Ottawa retained control of Alberta’s natural resources though Ontario and Quebec got to keep theirs. This inequity was corrected in 1930, but the resentment lingered. In 1980, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau imposed a 25% federal tax on Alberta's oil and seized control of pricing. The backlash was fierce: unemployment soared, projects collapsed, and "let the eastern bastards freeze in the dark" became a rallying cry. Separatist movements have flared and faded for decades, always returning to the same core grievance: Alberta produces 90% of Canada's oil, Canada sells 95% of it to the United States, yet Alberta feels like a resource colony for Eastern Canada's benefit.

Russia exploited similar dynamics in Crimea: real economic marginalization, language politics, the feeling of being a colony for Kyiv's benefit. External powers don't create these grievances, but they weaponize them. And just as in Crimea, it's indigenous populations raising the alarm first. The Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation filed a lawsuit arguing that Alberta cannot hold a referendum without indigenous consent, and explicitly warning that a referendum "will enable foreign interference from the most powerful neighbor to the south." In Crimea, the indigenous Tatar population boycotted the 2014 referendum and suffered systematic repression afterward.

Alberta's premier, Danielle Smith, has walked a careful line, speaking about her desire to stay a part of Canada while defending the need to hold a referendum. She met Trump at Mar-a-Lago days before his inauguration last year, speaking of the "need to preserve our independence while we grow this critical partnership." But when the referendum petition was approved, she framed it as a democratic duty: "You need to have a pressure-release valve on issues that people care about." According to the Globe and Mail, Canadian defense officials have recently modeled a U.S. invasion scenario for the first time in over a century: a theoretical planning exercise, not an operational war plan. The modeling assumed American forces would overcome Canadian positions in as little as 2 days, prompting examination of asymmetric responses: sabotage, drones, dispersed resistance. Officials stressed an invasion remains highly unlikely. But allies don't conduct theoretical exercises in fratricide unless something fundamental has shifted.

The shifting burden

Stories matter. The current collapse of Europe's post-Cold War security arrangement began with narratives that made that collapse imaginable.

From the mid-2000s, Russian state television started hosting marginal voices questioning Ukraine's right to exist. In 2008, the Russian daily Kommersant reported that in a private meeting, Putin told George W. Bush that Ukraine was "not even a state" and that the Kremlin would be encouraging secession in both Crimea and eastern Ukraine. Six years of this rhetoric made Ukrainian sovereignty negotiable before a single soldier crossed the border.

Trump has spent over a year declaring Canada "only works" as part of the United States while his Treasury Secretary publicly advocates for Alberta's secession and Bannon, whose finger is frequently firmly on MAGA’s pulse, calls the country "hostile" and "the next Ukraine." Béland warns that the damage from this process extends beyond the referendum's outcome: "Even if the ‘no’ wins, the remain side wins, and even if it's an easy victory... having a referendum campaign is highly divisive in and of itself, and it opens the door to potential U.S. interference."

Sovereignty doesn't collapse with a single referendum. It erodes in the accumulation of moments when defending it appears unreasonable, when maintaining it requires constant justification, when the burden of proof shifts from those who would divide to those who would preserve.

With additional reporting from Masho Lomashvili

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But does it mean the regime is at its last gasp? Or will these events be added to a long list of inconclusive revolts that started well before the "Green Revolution" that followed the 2009 election, through to the "Woman, Life, Freedom" movement in 2022?

The latest signs are that the protests may be waning. But there are at least three new elements that make this latest uprising different and which may rise again later even if the regime survives. 

The protests were kicked off by the Bazaar in Tehran, the conservative mercantile class, normally the last to want to rock the boat. Like a bushfire, it spread with lightning speed to towns and cities across the country, fuelled by grievances that had surfaced in previous protests. So, the initial impulse came from the country's disastrous economic situation. With the national currency, the Rial, losing 84% of its value over the past year alone, inflation had brought crushing hardship to many despite the regime's efforts to apply bandaids to the gaping wounds. The involvement of the Bazaar gave the protests a new depth. The second novel element was the sudden emergence, around ten days into the uprising, of Reza Pahlavi, son of the ousted Shah, as a figurehead for the protests. "Javid Shah, Long live the Shah!" became one of the main battle cries of the protesters. The dissident movement lacked unity, leadership and a shared platform. The hope was that Reza Pahlavi could act as a unifying figure who might oversee a transition to a democratic future. 

Adopting him may have been a sign of desperation, but it was also a red rag to the regime, a provocation impossible to ignore. A third new feature was the unprecedented level of outside interference, whose direction and intentions were far from clear at the outset. Fresh from abducting Nicolás Maduro and vowing to "run" Venezuela, Donald Trump seemed in the mood for further adventures, urging Iranian "patriots" to keep protesting, and telling them that help was on the way. Much would clearly depend on what form that "help" would take. But by tying it so clearly to Iran's internal situation rather than the nuclear or missile issues that underlay the 12-day Israeli-U.S. war on Iran in June last year, Trump's intervention was giving the uprising a dimension it lacked before.

All this amounted to what the regime clearly saw as a potentially mortal threat, and it reacted with unprecedented ferocity. Though the full picture has yet to emerge because of the communications blackout, there are horror stories of overflowing morgues, many gunshot wounds to eyes and genitals, machine guns mowing down crowds, and many other brutalities that seemed to succeed in tamping down the flames. Opposition human rights groups believe the death toll is closer to 12,000 than the 2,000 initially announced by the regime, which was already a good deal higher than for previous uprisings.

Left in a purely Iranian context without the U.S. wild card, the regime, although rattled, seems to have survived another round of challenge, though with consequences that may surface later. As Israeli military analysts had pointed out, the Iranian authorities had many repressive tools they had not yet deployed. There was no sign of a crack in the loyalty of the security forces or of serious splits within the government. Bear in mind that the Revolutionary Guards (the IRGC), in addition to their powerful military machine and auxiliaries (the Basij), also wield huge economic clout on which hundreds of thousands of families depend.

If this round has been crushed internally, there will surely be another round later unless there is a radical change. The decision by activists to adopt Reza Pahlavi did not reflect a widespread longing for the monarchy; it was rather a signal that the opposition had given up hope of changing the regime from within, and that overthrow was the only way forward, with Pahlavi as the only visible symbol of defiance to rally around. But even Donald Trump cast doubt on the level of support inside Iran for the aspiring "Crown Prince."

The regime's only hope of treating the dire economic crisis swiftly and undercutting protest would be to bring about a lifting of ever-tightening sanctions, which means coming to terms with the Americans. And that raises the question of U.S. (or Trump's) intentions. In the 12-day war last June, Israel clearly wanted to continue a campaign of detailed bombing that could have led to regime collapse, while Trump was content with one spectacular strike. His instinct is not to get embroiled in lengthy open-ended hostilities. 

Regime change in Iran would very likely produce chaos, and perhaps fragmentation of the country as a unitary state. It is very hard to imagine a smooth transition to democracy, and very easy to see Kurdish, Arab, Azeri Turkish, Sunni Baluchi, and other minorities splintering away as vying factions struggle for power in Tehran. That may suit Israel's playbook for regional disintegration, but the transactional Trump likes to do deals with unified states; witness Syria, where Israel favours a weak, decentralized state, but the U.S. wants a unified, cooperative one under al-Sharaa; and Venezuela, where Trump has left the regime in place and spurned the opposition despite removing Maduro. 

If it remains committed to some form of action against Iran, the U.S, would have to calibrate its moves with great care. Striking nuclear or missile facilities again would likely have little effect on the regime, but would provoke a reaction against U.S. bases in the Gulf that might not be as cosmetic and choreographed as it was last June. American strikes against political, military or security targets would have to be sustained and detailed or would end up being ineffective or counter-productive, and if effective, could produce collapse and chaos. Might Trump dream of doing a Maduro on the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamene'i, leaving the IRGC and others to do a deal? Anything is possible. But in Iran, nothing is simple. 

While Israel was standing by watchfully and hoping for a tough U.S. response, there were countervailing pressures from America's Gulf Arab allies, deeply unsettled by the crisis. They don't want to be hit by an angry Iranian neighbor, while the possibility of regime collapse and fragmentation opens up all kinds of prospects of regional instability and danger. The signs are that these representations have hit home with Trump.

But Iran remains a mess with no easy resolution. And it's not going to go away.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

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By 2013, he moved to eastern Germany to live in what he thought was an eco-commune project. The commune, though, was made up of a group of German ethnonationalist settlers determined to resurrect the German “Volksgut,” a reference to shared heritage and communal living off the land. The shared heritage was code for white and heterosexual and the plan was to buy up enough land so each family could cultivate and live self-sufficiently on their own plot. What might at first glance have appeared an idealized, bucolic homestead had unmistakable echoes of the Nazi concept of “blood and soil.”

The ethnonationalist identitarian movement, which emerged in Europe around 2012, propagates the Great Replacement conspiracy theory about the deliberate supplanting of white populations across the West with immigrants. Remigration, a core tenet of the movement, its answer to the so-called Great Replacement, has now become a political buzzword in both Europe and the United States. In October 2025, the Department of Homeland Security, either oblivious to or uncaring about the connotations, posted “remigration” and a link to its self-deporting app on X. And earlier in 2025, the Donald Trump administration proposed the setting up of an “Office of Remigration” as part of a revamped U.S. State Department.

Back in 2013, though, Felix was an early participant in what was still a nascent, if growing movement across Germany — the revival of an insular rural fantasy life as the answer to the disorienting, alienating, global megapolis. Already by 2015, identitarian activists were holding demonstrations in Berlin, unfurling a banner from the top of the Brandenburg Gate that called for “secure borders” as necessary for a secure future.

It was the year former German chancellor Angela Merkel would famously say “Wir schaffen das” (we can do this), adopting a compassionate, welcoming approach to migrants crossing into Germany. Between 2015 and 2016, an estimated one million refugees were allowed into Germany from Syria alone. 

Ten years later, her party’s tone, as it seeks to deport many of those Syrian refugees, is markedly different. 

Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, BfV classified the Identitarian Movement and groups associated with it as “extreme” in 2019. “These verbal firestarters,” said BfV president Thomas Haldenwang, who left office in 2024 and has yet to be replaced, “question people's equality and dignity, they speak of foreign infiltration, boost their own identity to denigrate others and stoke hostile feelings towards perceived enemies."

For years, far right extremists have been buying up land in rural parts of Germany, like the village of Wienrode in the Harz mountains. Here, they hoped to build their “traditional” off-grid communes and to recruit villagers for their cause. Felix was now a member, a part of the attempt to take over Wienrode. Their group, called “Weda Elysia” was led by Maik Schulz and, as they moved into Wienrode, they handed out flyers promising to “bring back the soul” of the rundown local bar that they’d bought. An undercover reporter recorded Schulz claiming that his intent in buying the bar and land in Wienrode was to turn it into a center “for German customs” and German families.” It was, Schulz allegedly said, “the last chance to save the race.” Wienrode, in effect, turned into a place of chosen exile where those dissatisfied with what Germany had become could create their own version of the ideal German nation. 

Despite the BfV’s classification of Weda Elysia as right-wing extremists in 2024, the group continues to base itself in Wienrode. When I visited in 2025, some of the group’s remaining members had rented the house of Steffen Hupka, a notorious neo-Nazi who had moved to the area decades ago to turn a local castle into a training center for right wing parties. Hupka failed, but Weda Elysia has had more success. They’ve made inroads in local politics, with Schulz’s wife Aruna and another member winning seats on the local council (there was hardly any competition; they had previously bullied the town’s mayor into resigning.) Aruna even appeared on an Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) campaign poster in Wienrode. 

AfD, which has also been classified as a right-wing extremist group by German intelligence, is currently the country’s main opposition party. The AfD’s newly formed youth wing is led by a 28-year-old who has long been associated with identitarian figures and who has rejected the official labelling of the movement as extremist. 

Since its 1871 founding as a state, Germany has been a country of migration and seen several waves of widespread migration. At the same time, an ethnonationalist idea of citizenship was institutionalized by Germany’s 1913 citizenship law, which was drafted in a time where racism against Eastern European migrants was rampant. Here, unlike in other Western European countries like France and the UK, German citizenship was granted according to the “principle of descent by blood” and not by birth on German soil. This law was not reformed until 1999. 

In the 1990s, fringe far-right parties got voted into some state parliaments, amidst post-reunification economic uncertainty and conservative chancellor Helmut Kohl’s anti-immigration policies. Today, polls show that the ethnonationalist AfD is on course to get 40% of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt's state elections. There are several well-known neo-Nazis representing the AfD in local government in the Harz region. 

Despite the attempt in 2019 to emphasize the threat represented by the identitarian movement, the rise of AfD has made those concerns politically mainstream. In some polls, AfD is now the most widely supported political party in the country. It has forced more moderate politicians to amp up their rhetoric. In October, Germany’s current chancellor, Friedrich Merz — who has been a longtime challenger of Merkel for the leadership of the center-right Christian Democratic Union — talked about “large scale deportations” of migrants and the “fear” Europeans feel in public spaces because of migrants who “do not abide by our rules.”

Of the Syrian refugees welcomed into the country by Merkel in 2015, Merz has said: "The civil war in Syria is over. There is no longer any reason for asylum in Germany, and, therefore, we can begin repatriations." Merz’s language was vague enough to make it sound like he was effectively threatening forced deportations of tens of thousands of people, which would be a legal and logistical impossibility. But his words were not merely what pundits have described as a far right dog-whistle. Deportations between January and October 2025 were up 18% from the corresponding period in 2024 and up 45% from 2023. The German government is also trying to set up “voluntary” schemes that critics have described as a pressure tactic. 

Of course, the return of ethnonationalist identitarianism, or at least identitarian talking points, is not just a German phenomenon. Identarianism, a label first coined in the 1960s in France, reemerged in France with the formation of the Bloc Identitaire in 2003. The youth wing, Génération Identitaire, was banned in France in 2021 for inciting hatred and violence. But as in Germany, in France too once fringe identitarian views are part of the political mainstream. With the French government narrowly surviving a recent no-confidence vote, polling suggests the far-right National Front candidate would easily win a presidential election, despite its leader Marine Le Pen being banned from standing.

In Britain too, Identitarian bugbears — particularly its anti-Islam and anti-migration stances — have been made mainstream by the likes of far-right activist Tommy Robinson. Incidentally, earlier this month Robinson said his legal bills as he fought off a terrorism charge in the British courts were paid by Elon Musk. More than an echo of European identitarianism can also be found in the recent emergence in the U.S. of a whites-only settlement in Arkansas called “Return to the Land.”

Back in July, 2020, the US-based non-profit Global Project Against Hate and Extremism released a report that white supremacist groups such as Generation Identity (GI) ran practically unchecked on social media, “despite their proliferation of propaganda such as the Great Replacement, which similarly inspires terrorism and argues that white people are being genocided in their home countries. ”The report found at least 67 Twitter accounts for GI chapters in 14 countries with over 140,000 followers. 

In an example of once fringe identatrian conspiracy theories becoming mainstream, Donald Trump last year alleged that white South Africans were victims of “genocide,” and allowed Afrikaner farmers to claim asylum in the United States. And in September 2024, even before Trump began his second term, Stephen Miller, the current deputy chief of staff and homeland security adviser, posted that “remigration” was the “Trump plan to end the invasion of small town America.”

When I first spoke to Felix Krauss, he told me he’d left Weda Elysia in 2018 because of in-fighting. But, judging from his self-published memoir, he’d internalized the group’s extreme right views. His ideas, like those of many who were part of Schulz’s Weda Elysium group, can be traced not just to identitarianism or European ethnonationalism, but more directly to Anastasianism — a movement created by the fans of a 1990s fantasy book series. 

In the chaos of the post-Soviet ‘90s in Russia, a former riverboat tour guide called Vladimir Megre published a fantasy series called “The Ringing Cedars,” which he promoted as autobiographical, the product of an epiphany. He, a businessman, had been lost in a forest where he met a scantily-clad woman, the survivor of an ancient fictional culture put to sleep centuries ago by “the priests,” whom the series describes in grossly antisemitic terms. The woman bore his child and they lived on a magical self-sustaining farm. But he felt called to return to society to tell readers that they too could reclaim their lost connection to the natural world if they lived self-sufficiently on one hectare of land in a (heterosexual) family unit.

The first Ringing Cedars book was published in Russia in 1996. The books captured the zeitgeist. “Russian bookstores in the ‘90s were filled with illustrated fairy tales and myths about the history of Russia,” says Kaarina Aitamurto, a senior researcher at the University of Helsinki’s Aleksanteri Institute with expertise in contemporary paganism in Russia. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and a wave of devastating accounts about Soviet crimes, “alternative” history books were popular. Megre’s books sold 11 million copies worldwide. Since then, fans in various countries have tried to build the “ancestral estate” he described. 

By September 2020, a Ringing Cedars settlement registration page in Russia claimed 389 settlements had been built, inhabited by about 6,000 people. Anthropologist Veronica Davidov, who came across a Ringing Cedars settlement in 2011, called the movement “reactionary eco-nationalist.” Disillusioned with the post-Soviet deregulated state, she wrote, Megre’s pseudohistory offered readers an alternative “heroic” narrative where they could live apart from the state and its services.

Megre, the author of the Ringing Cedars books, is now 75 years old. He runs an international online distribution service that sells bags of cedar nuts, cedar oil, and the Anastasian books, which have been translated into 20 languages. Environmentalist Nara Petrovic, who translated the Ringing Cedars books from Russian to Slovenian, told me she had run into Megre at several conferences for aspiring translators and publishers of the series. They met in Prague in 2002, Egypt in 2006, and Turkey in 2008. 

“I’ve seen people from other cultures interpret [the books] to suit their own traditions,” he told me. In Slovenia, Petrovic said, he heard a theory that Megre’s fictional ancient civilization is based on the Vinča culture of southeast Europe which dates back to 5400 BCE. “I’m not 100% buying it,” Petrovic says, “because it’s so hard to go back that far and know how they lived, but as an idea it's very emotional and touches people strongly.”

Anastasian settlements spread from Russia through much of eastern and central Europe. In Ukraine, the book series enjoyed a boom in the 2000s. At festivals, fans invented rituals to cosplay Megre’s fictional ancient civilization. Some tried to live as the books commanded, without electricity and growing their own food. People I spoke to said their priority was for straight couples to have babies in nature. 

But then Russia invaded Ukraine, in 2014 and again in 2022. In one Anastasian village outside Kyiv, Kristina, whose parents’ settlement was caught in a crossfire between the invading Russian army and Ukrainian soldiers in 2022, told me that she and her neighbors do not talk about Megre’s books anymore. Some, she said, still cling to the idea of being part of a movement from Russia that will bring harmonious ecovillages to the entire planet. But “it’s an angry joke,” Kristina told me. 

In other parts of Europe, the Ringing Cedars books’ romanticized back-to-the land narratives still have an enduring appeal. In Germany, by 2022, there were at least 17 such settlements, the biggest of which spanned over 200 acres. In Telegram groups, settlers (or wannabe settlers) posted conspiracy theories and videos about “Germanic culture”, including references to a myth, associated with the Roman historian Tacitus, and adopted by German ethnonationalists and Nazis that Germanic tribes were literally “born of the soil. And they also posted pictures of recipes and their gardens. 

For a while, mostly before the media started covering Anastasianism’s German far right links, the books resonated at health and wellness events and in alternative agriculture circles. One German eco-villager told me that in the late 2010s, he would often meet people in his network looking for alternative communities and ways to connect with nature, who were convinced that the books offered solutions for “peace, for living away from materialism and an environmentally-friendly future” — People who wanted to opt out of the globalized, growth-dependent economic system sending us towards climate catastrophe. One of the people he spoke to was Felix Krauss. 

In a 2021 essay for the Journal of Populism Studies, Heidi Hart wrote about the “tensions that emerge in neo-pagan media and practices, when they appeal not only to far-right enthusiasts but also to those with a left-leaning, environmentalist bent.” Ultimately, she concludes, “any group that follows a purity mentality, seeking deep, unadulterated roots in nature, risks nativist thinking.” I tried to get back in touch with Felix to discuss when his environmentalism shaded into nativism and how Anastasianism bridged the two. But he told me he didn’t want to speak to me anymore.

When Weda Elysia first moved into Wienrode around 2018, the village pastor told constituents not to go to their coffee and cake events, unless they wanted to wake up one day to police everywhere because “100 neo-Nazis next door are celebrating Hitler’s birthday.” Seven years later, on the surface it looked like little had changed. Hardly any villagers have officially joined Weda Elysia. And while the group may own the village inn, they don’t have self-sufficient homesteads and don’t farm their own food. 

Still, the pastor and other critics of Weda Elysia are quieter now. Some anonymously, say they received threats, suffered damage to their property and were accused of “dividing” the local community. Weda Elysia may be the objects of state surveillance, but they are still in Wienrode as an entrenched part of the German far-right ecosystem, with AfD politicians and known neo-Nazis often spotted at their headquarters. At the 2025 edition of their annual winter market, I watched as straight-looking couples waltzed to the Nutcracker soundtrack and held candles aloft. One attendee openly described it to me as an "ethnonationalist Weihnachtsmarkt," referring to a seasonal street market common across Germany in the month leading up to Christmas.

Ruth Fiedler, a representative of the Die Linke party (The Left) in the district, told me that the participation of Weda Elysia members in village and district councils was one example of how power dynamics in the region were shifting. “It is getting harder for people to distance themselves from right-wing extremism,” she said. “When it is their neighbors, people they work with.” In a recent town hall meeting, Aruna, the wife of Weda Elysia leader Maik Schulz, told Fiedler that it is the extremist right-wing group that “are the real democrats.” 

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Argentina’s president Javier Milei greeted news of Kast’s victory with a map of South America, divided neatly into red (left wing) and blue (right wing) halves. Lined up on the blue side were Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador, with Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela prominent in red. “The left recedes,” posted Milei, “freedom advances.” Not surprisingly, president-elect Kast’s first trip after the election was to Buenos Aires this week where he embraced Milei and posed with a chainsaw, a reference to their shared promise to slash budgets and the size of their governments. Kast also found time in Buenos Aires to support Trump’s desire to force regime change in Venezuela. “It solves,” Kast said, “a gigantic problem for us.” 

This year has been terrible for incumbent left wing governments in South and Central America. In Ecuador and Bolivia, right-wing candidates were recently elected to office. Last month, Hondurans voted between three candidates; left-wing candidate Rixi Moncada trailed a center-right and a Trump-backed far-right candidate locked in a virtual tie as the country sent soldiers into the streets to calm tensions. Next year, both Colombia and Brazil will head to the polls in highly-anticipated elections. Kast, who lost in two previous attempts to become president, is arguably the most right wing politician to be elected president in Chile since the end of Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship in 1990. Kast’s brother was a central banker during Pinochet’s rule and his father was a member of the Nazi party. “In a way,” Chilean academic Victor Muñoz Tamayo told me, “this is an election of our political moment.”

On Wednesday, Donald Trump posted that “Venezuela is completely surrounded” and will be “until such time as they return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us.” Alongside oil, the U.S. government prizes access to critical minerals. In the vast desert region known as Norte Grande lies an expanse of salt flats on the borderlands between Chile, Bolivia and Argentina. It is known as the “lithium triangle.” Here, roughly one-third of the world’s supply of lithium sits beneath the surface of the earth. Extracting this rare element, a key component of electric vehicle batteries, requires large quantities of water: roughly 500,000 gallons per ton of lithium carbonate. While the incumbent Chilean government sought to regulate the extraction of lithium and nationalize its production, Kast has said he favors a market approach. “They don't believe in climate change. They don't believe in protecting the rights of nature. They don't recognize ancestral communities,” says Daniela Rodriguez, a local “journalist and activist” in the town of San Pedro de Atacama. 

The choice of location – the upscale Santiago neighborhood of Las Condes – for Kast’s victory speech was no accident. In front of a crowd of thousands in this area of sleek high rises and banks nestled just below the nearby mountains, Kast said “Chile won. And the hope of living without fear won.” 

In the first round of voting in November, Jeannette Jara, who ran on a coalition platform that spanned from Communists to Christian Democrats, came out on top – garnering around 27 percent of votes. She beat out Kast, populist Franco Parisi, far-right libertarian Johannes Kaiser and center-right Evelyn Matthei. Originally from Conchalí, a poor commuter suburb of Santiago, Jara highlighted her working-class roots and accomplishments as labor minister under president Gabriel Boric. In this role, Jara passed laws to raise the minimum wage, gradually reduce the work week and partially reform the country’s private pension system – a legacy of the 17-year Pinochet dictatorship. In Chile, Boric was elected on a wave of popular discontent that coalesced in the nationwide 2019 social movement known as the estallido social (social outburst), but once in office, he struggled to impose his transformative vision, including a rewrite of the 1980 constitution. Jara’s party affiliation and her connection to Boric (whose approval rating sits around 30 percent) hampered  her candidacy. 

In campaign spots, Kast frequently red-baited Jara, playing on long-held fears of the Communist party that still persist in Chile. “Vote 5 [Kast’s ballot number], without communism, without communism,” went the lyrics of one popular campaign jingle. Kast has also minimized his previous support for Pinochet, whose regime arrested, tortured and disappeared thousands of opposition members and leftists. As a candidate in 2017, Kast said he would have voted for the dictator and has said Pinochet “saved” the country from communism. Though he was once known for his extreme policy positions, Kast successfully moderated his tone when campaigning. “In the past,” Muñoz Tamayo explained, “he talked about things like eliminating the Ministry of Women. Now, he focuses on public order, crime, and uncontrolled migration. They’re right-wing, radical issues, but also very popular.” There are an estimated 336,000 undocumented refugees in Chile, many of them from Venezuela. 

It’s an issue that has made some voters ignore Kast’s praise for Pinochet. I traveled to Los Vilos, a couple of hours north of Santiago by bus, where I met former student activist Joaquín Vidal at the seaside bed-and-breakfast he runs. Vidal showed me tokens he kept in a box from his eight-month spell in prison for participating in a protest against Pinochet’s rule. He went into exile in 1982. One of the items he’d kept in the box was a leather belt signed by his fellow inmates. “Normally, I’d give these items to the Museum of Memory and Human Rights,” he told me. “But I’m worried the far-right might shut it down.” 

In parliamentary elections on November 15, right-wing parties gained a majority in the Chamber of Deputies, giving Kast an unprecedented mandate. While campaigning, Kast was able to reassure a country paralyzed by fear that he was focused on the issues that mattered to them. But executing on his promises, which include forcibly removing hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants and implementing austerity measures will be difficult. Over seafood in a Santiago restaurant, Jorge Heine, Chile's former ambassador to China, South Africa and India, told me that Kast “does not have a proper team of experienced public policy specialists and professionals to run the country.” This, he added, “does not bode well.” 

Despite the tenor of the election, Heine told me, “the truth is Kast will be handed a country that is in pretty good shape and by no means ‘in crisis,’ as he likes to say.” The question is, “will he act like [Italian prime minister Giorgia] Meloni or Trump?” Chile’s election of a Trump-supporting right wing president comes at a time that the White House has revealed its extensive plans for the region. 

“American sweat, ingenuity and toil created the oil industry in Venezuela,” posted Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff. “Its tyrannical expropriation was the largest recorded theft of American wealth and property.” It's an attitude that informs current White House policy in Latin America, even though the United Nations enshrined the principle of “permanent sovereignty over natural wealth and resources” in 1962. Miller is effectively saying that countries like Venezuela should not be sovereign, but instead vassal-states. The ‘Trump Corollary,’ the U.S. government’s updating of the 19th century Monroe Doctrine, claims “as a condition of our security and prosperity” the right to “assert ourselves confidently where and when we need to in the region.” Its actions in Venezuela are a demonstration of this intent. 

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter.Sign up here.

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Halfway around the world, an exiled Uyghur linguist opens his laptop, connecting to students scattered across three continents for a language lesson that could have gotten him killed back home in Xinjiang. Abduweli Ayup spent 15 months in a Chinese prison for the crime of teaching children their mother tongue. Now he continues to teach, but the surveillance systems that drove him from his home have learned to follow him in exile.

Meanwhile, in rural Europe, a teenager felt so alienated by environmental catastrophe and urban modernity that he joined an off-grid settlement promising a return to "natural" living. His new community, with its disturbing historical “blood and soil” echoes, operates with the same transnational infrastructure as those fleeing persecution: Telegram networks, international gatherings, dispersed organizing.

And across the United States—once the ultimate destination for those fleeing authoritarianism—journalists, activists, and dissidents increasingly ask themselves a question that would have seemed absurd a decade ago: Where do we go when this place falls?

Each of these stories reveals a different piece of the puzzle: how displacement operates in our time, what sanctuary means, and what it costs to stay connected while trying to escape. Together, they map a fundamental transformation in how power operates in our era. 

Understanding displacement in the 21st century has become central to understanding power itself: how it is exercised across borders, how resistance operates, and how communities reorganize around new forms of belonging. This is why we are launching “The Age of Exile”—a special series investigating displacement in the modern world. For our journalists, exile is not just a humanitarian crisis or a theme. It's a lens through which to see how the world is changing.

The changing nature of exile

Whenever I think of exile, I think of my childhood. I was 10 years old in Tbilisi, then in the midst of civil war, and life had become a long series of goodbyes. We watched our world empty out, family by family, week by week. There was no gas, no electricity, no food—just violence, darkness and bread lines stretching for hours. Every week, another family would come to say goodbye: aunts, uncles, school friends, the family from the fourth floor. They were leaving for anywhere that wasn't falling apart.

Those gatherings, in rooms thick with cigarette smoke and the smell of bubbling Turkish coffee, were layered with contradictions: their grief at leaving mixed with envy that we would remain rooted, our envy that they had found a way to escape, and underneath it all, our collective mourning for all that was being lost—not just families and individual relationships but the fabric of an entire world being torn apart.

Back then, leaving was akin to severing. Letters arrived less frequently. Phone calls were expensive, the crackling line a manifestation of the distance. Communities dispersed, connections frayed, memories faded. The families who left became stories we told about people who used to live here, whose apartments now housed strangers, whose children we'd never meet again. 

That was exile then: an irreversible absence. 

But that’s not exile now. Today’s exiles carry entire worlds in their pockets. They organize resistance across time zones, preserve languages through apps, watch homelands collapse in real time through livestreams they cannot look away from. They maintain influence and identity across continents in ways that would have seemed impossible just a generation ago. 

But the same technologies enabling connection also enable persecution. Authoritarian regimes don't need to keep people imprisoned within borders—they can subject even those in self-exile to a form of remote control, of borderless authority. Surveillance systems follow activists across continents. Transnational repression turns safety into illusion and digital lifelines become tracking devices.

As democracy retreats globally, the space for sanctuary is shrinking. There are fewer and fewer places left to go. Belarusian activists now flee to Georgia only to watch the same "foreign agents" laws that they left behind become the law in Tbilisi, Nicaraguan dissidents who seek sanctuary in Costa Rica find that the Ortega regime's reach extends across the border. Burmese refugees in Thailand face detention, extortion, and the constant threat of deportation. 

Technology has transformed exile, as it transforms everything. In host societies that feel overwhelmed by newcomers, in origin countries emptied of their young, in the digital networks connecting them, people feel increasingly displaced from the world around them, displaced from belonging itself. Some flee this alienation by seeking communities that operate transnationally, constructing new forms of identity and power that reshape host societies. Others discover sanctuary internally—what Soviet dissidents called "inner exile," the psychological condition of being present in your body but exiled from your world. When your homeland no longer feels like home even if you never leave it. When you exist geographically inside a country but spiritually, politically, ideologically outside it. This may be the most common form of exile our age creates: not fleeing across borders, but fleeing inward.

Most exile journalism tells essential stories—refugees fleeing war, journalists escaping persecution, dissidents seeking sanctuary. These stories matter. But they're symptoms of something deeper. We're investigating the root cause: how displacement itself has become the infrastructure through which power operates in the 21st century. Our Age of Exile series examines exile not as just a humanitarian crisis but as the perspective through which to understand much about how our world is changing. We’ll bring you stories from frontiers others miss: on how identity is constructed and across borders, on how communities can cohere even when scattered, and how the same technologies that enable resistance also enable surveillance. 

Read these stories and please get in touch with me to share your own. I am on antelava@codastory.com

Where and how have you encountered exile: in your own displacement, in communities around you, in the feeling of being foreign in your own country? What stories do you want to see told? What questions demand answers? Your experiences and insights will shape this series, because mapping displacement in the 21st century means listening to voices from everywhere. Help us understand what it means to construct belonging when connection across borders enables both community and control.

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The post Welcome to the age of exile appeared first on Coda Story.

Tuggar’s mention of Sudan was a reminder of what religious war and genocide looks like and how little the international community has done to stop it. He cited Nigeria’s “constitutional commitment to religious freedom” and its status as Africa’s largest democracy as reasons why it was “impossible” that the government would look away from the kind of violence Trump described. Trump did not cite any statistics when he told reporters on Air Force One that “record numbers of Christians” are being killed in Nigeria. A multifaith country, Nigeria has the sixth largest Christian population in the world. Numbers from the Pew Center show that about 93 million Christians live in Nigeria, compared to 120 million Muslims. 

The U.S. president seems to be taking his lead from Texas senator Ted Cruz. The latter posted on X last month that “officials in Nigeria are ignoring and even facilitating the mass murder of Christians by Islamist jihadists.” In his ‘Nigeria Religious Freedom Accountability Act,’ Cruz said 52,000 Christians have been killed in the country since 2009 and over 20,000 churches and religious institutions have been destroyed. These numbers have been described by the Nigerian government as “absolutely absurd” and “not supported by any facts whatsoever.” Cruz called for sanctions on Nigerians officials. In his bill Cruz also called for Nigeria to be designated a “Country of Particular Concern,” a designation reserved for states that tolerate “egregious religious freedom violations.” And on Monday the Trump administration did exactly that, arguing that the designation was necessary because Nigerians were being prevented from freely expressing their beliefs. 

But speak to people in Nigeria and you will get a different analysis depending on whom you ask. The violence, perpetrated by Islamist groups like Boko Haram, Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), and others is indiscriminate, claiming the lives of both Christians and Muslims. Tens of thousands of people have died and millions have been displaced as a result of the security situation in Nigeria. Many of these are residents in northern Nigeria, especially in the northeast and northwest, where the population is primarily Muslim.

In north-central Nigeria however, it is true that Christian communities have been targeted. Their demands for government action to stop the killings have fallen on deaf ears. I live for some of the year in Kwara State, a state in north-central Nigeria. In October, a distant relative was kidnapped with his entire family. My friends, family members and I have had to move house on short notice due to vicious attacks and kidnappings near where we live. But it’s hard to argue that Christians are being singled out when so many Nigerians of every background are dying. 

“The irony is rich enough to choke on,” writes Elnathan John, a Nigerian novelist. “Trump’s America, where school boards ban books and churches preach ethnic purity, has appointed itself the saviour of our pluralism… One imagines a global exchange programme: our clerics and their preachers meeting to compare notes on how to weaponise God most efficiently.” Nigerians, broadly, acknowledge the insecurity in the country, and frequently debate the role of religion in the widespread violence. But everyone agrees that Trump’s motives are suspect. Before this recent outburst, Trump’s reputation in Nigeria, while mixed, consisted of support from a strong Christian base. The threat of military action over an internal issue has sparked widespread indignation and accusations of neocolonial overreach.

Trump’s Africa strategy is a decisive pivot away from traditional development aid and democratic institution-building toward hard-nosed commercial diplomacy, centered on U.S. access to critical minerals and African compliance on accepting deportees in exchange for financial incentives or favorable trade terms. Nigeria, notably, is one of the countries that has refused to take in deportees and was recently hit with 15% “reciprocal” tariffs. Ghana, which was also hit with 15% tariffs, just accepted 14 West African deportees. 

Trump’s other approach to Africa has been to interfere in highly charged internal politics based on narratives that appeal to his base. This summer, Trump accused the South African government of enabling a “genocide” of white farmers, a highly politicized and disputed claim rooted in white nationalist rhetoric. While Trump said he would give special dispensation for white Afrikaner refugees from South Africa (tellingly, very few have actually taken advantage of his offer), he did not threaten violence on a sovereign country for its internal troubles as he has against Nigeria. 

While Vladimir Putin has stayed quiet over the issue, Andrey Maslov, head of the Center for African Studies at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics said Trump is deliberately leading the U.S.  down a path of isolation and focusing on the country’s internal problems. “He works for his core electorate and the future electorate of [Vice President] J.D. Vance, specifically its religious segment,” Maslov told Russia’s state-controlled media RT.

Does Trump’s foreign policy continue to help China position itself as the more reliable global partner? Expressing support for the Nigerian government, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson said Beijing “opposes any country using religion or human rights as a pretext to interfere in other countries' internal affairs.” China has invested billions in Nigerian infrastructure and minerals in recent years, and the value of its trade with Nigeria now outstrips that of the U.S. Has the global pattern been set – China now offers the carrot, while the U.S. wields the stick?

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

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I was at a park near where Florida A&M University and Florida State University campuses overlapped in Tallahassee some forty years ago, enjoying the warm air and easy company of friends, when I overheard a white student waxing nostalgic about the Civil War.

“The South should have won,” he said wistfully, as though mourning a missed opportunity rather than a moral catastrophe.

My friends and I exchanged glances. As the outspoken one in the group, I called back, “We beat you last time, and we’ll do it again.”

At the time, I was a sophomore at FAMU, an Historically Black College and University, immersed in African and U.S. history, surrounded by a vibrant, intellectual, Pan-African community that shaped my view of the world.

It was an oasis—an environment where I could think deeply and freely about the past and its implications for the present.

That encounter seemed trivial then, but in hindsight, it revealed something festering beneath the surface of American life: a refusal, especially among some white Americans, to reckon with the legacy of the Civil War.

A family that defied the script

Years later, I would revisit that moment when I went to pick up my daughter at school. She bears the richness of two heritages—mine rooted in Haiti’s resistance, her mother’s Midwestern sensibilities.

Upon seeing me in the courtyard, one of her friends called out that her nanny was here to pick her up. Irritated, she shouted, “That’s my daddy, not my nanny.”

I smiled at her spunkiness. But I also knew that moment crystallized what I had always sensed: our very existence as a family disrupted someone’s idea of what America should look like.

In 1996, I wrote about our marriage for Essence Magazine. The stares. The quiet bewilderment. The feeling that our presence broke an unspoken rule. “Our very existence,” I wrote then, “disrupted someone’s idea of what America should look like.”

It still does.

A fire long smoldering

Four decades after that afternoon in Tallahassee, I’ve come to believe we’re in the midst of the Civil War’s final battle—not a clash of soldiers on a field, but a sociopolitical and cultural war threatening to tear the nation apart.

A fire is roaring through America’s foundations. It didn’t start yesterday. It wasn’t sparked by Black Lives Matter or the 2020 election or any single migrant crossing a border. No—this fire has been smoldering for generations, lit by the unfinished business of the Civil War.

“This is not a war between North and South or red and blue. It’s a war within whiteness itself.”

It’s a reckoning between two factions of white America:
– One trying to build a country where power is shared and history confronted.
– The other desperate to preserve a fantasy where they remain the sole heirs to the republic.

People of color are the excuse, not the cause. The rest of us are just trying not to get burned.

The arsonists and the alarm sounders

January 6 wasn’t just a riot—it was a flare from a deeper blaze.

When white Americans stormed the Capitol waving Confederate flags, Jesus banners, and Trump signs, they weren’t attacking a building. They were rejecting a future that no longer centers them.

They were not fringe. They were family—teachers, cops, veterans, neighbors—willing to overturn democracy to preserve supremacy.

On the other side are white Americans lighting different kinds of fires: truth-telling ones. They’re teaching real history, confronting privilege, tearing down monuments to lies.

But they’re outgunned by grievance—weaponized, monetized, and televised grievance. And nothing in America spreads faster than white grievance wrapped in the flag.

A fire fueled by fear

What drives this isn’t just racism—it’s fear.
Fear of losing centrality.
Fear of becoming “just another demographic.”
Fear that the stories they were told about greatness might be myths.

Equality feels like oppression when you’ve never experienced either.

This fear is tangled with economic despair and a longing for a past that never truly existed. As the promise of American prosperity falters, anger searches for a scapegoat. Immigrants. Black people. Queer youth. Anyone but the systems that failed them.

The refrain becomes familiar: “America is changing too fast.” But the truth is, America is finally starting to look like itself.

Witness from the margins

I write this not only as a journalist who has covered American democracy for decades, but as a Haitian immigrant who has lived its contradictions.

I arrived as a Black boy with a French accent, navigating the strange hierarchies of race in America. Later, I married a white woman from the Midwest. We raised biracial children in Brooklyn—a borough that celebrates difference in a country that often doesn’t.

For those of us not born here, the message is double-edged: assimilate into a crumbling house, or help rebuild it from the foundation up.

The Currency of Whiteness

For generations, whiteness has been an invisible currency—buying safety, authority, dominance. Now, that currency is losing value. The country is changing its exchange rate.

Some white Americans are hoarding what they can while they can. But people of color aren’t seeking revenge; we’re seeking balance. We don’t want to become what whiteness once was—we want to build something better.

But we can’t rebuild while one faction is holding a flamethrower.

The front lines

Go to any school board meeting, and you’ll see it. Parents shouting about “indoctrination,” demanding books be banned, LGBTQ kids erased.
Go to any legislature, and you’ll see laws crafted to silence, restrict, and erase.
Go online, and you’ll find young white men radicalized by digital preachers of hate.

This fire is not spontaneous—it is fed, stoked, and monetized.

Redefining whiteness

“What does it mean to be white in America without being supreme?”

That’s the question white Americans must face.
Without supremacy, whiteness becomes a blank page. Some see emptiness. Others see possibility.

The hope lies with those writing a new script: one rooted in solidarity, not superiority. But this new identity won’t be born in classrooms—it’ll be forged in discomfort, in truth-telling, in choosing democracy over delusion.

America’s burning house

America today is a house on fire. The flames were set long ago—some rooms built on slavery, others on exclusion, others on stolen land.

Some white Americans are the arsonists, some the alarm sounders, and the rest of us are tenants wondering whether the fire will reach our floor before the builders arrive.

This is the metaphor of our time: a burning house still under construction. We can let it collapse—or rebuild it stronger and fairer.

The Final Battle

The final battle of the Civil War is here.
Not with bayonets but ballots.
Not with cavalry but algorithms.
Not in Gettysburg but in Georgia, Michigan, Texas—and in living rooms across the country.

And now, with the reins of power once again in his hands, Donald Trump is no longer shouting from the sidelines.
He’s using the full weight of his office to bend democracy to his will—purging dissenters, weaponizing institutions, rewarding loyalty over law.

He has become less a president than an arsonist-in-chief, pouring accelerant on the nation’s divisions and daring America to burn.
Each provocation—each threat, each insult, each abuse of power—is another match flicked at the dry timber of grievance that’s been piling up for generations.

The question now: Will America finally douse the flames—or stand mesmerized as the house collapses around us?

The memory returns

Sometimes, I think back to that afternoon in Tallahassee, when a college kid wistfully claimed the South should’ve won.
I wonder where he is now—did he grow out of that fantasy or dig deeper into it?
Is he among those cheering today as Trump fans the flames from inside the house?

I’ll never know. But I do know this: the war he romanticized never ended—it just changed its weapons and its uniforms.
And now, as the smoke thickens and the fire climbs higher, we are all living in the house they built.

Whether it stands or burns will depend on who chooses to rebuild—and who keeps feeding the fire

A version of this article was first published on Garry's Substack and Coda's Sunday Read newsletter. Sign up here.

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Vox’s anti-migrant messaging connects it to the values of a broad swathe of right wing groups across the world. In context, Las Marifachas views represent and reflect a trend that has been growing across Europe, from France to Germany to the U.K., for a decade now – the alliance between some gay men and far-right parties, brought together by their shared hostility towards immigration, particularly Muslim immigration.  

Gay conservatism is not new, of course. Its roots go back to the 1950s and the leadership purge at the once progressive, Communist-inspired Mattachine Society. In 2024, JD Vance felt confident enough to predict that he and Donald Trump would win the “normal gay guy vote.” He was wrong. An unprecedented proportion of LGBTQ voters voted Democrat, even as more voters than ever identified as LGBTQ. In Europe, though, immigration has been a more pressing concern for some LGBTQ voters, driven by misinformation and polarizing online content about homophobic immigrants. It is a widespread fear. 

That’s why in May, Las Marifachas traveled to the Romanian capital Bucharest, livestreaming election reports from the headquarters of the populist Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR). The election was being rerun after far-right candidate Călin Georgescu’s victory last November was annulled due to allegations of Russian interference. The controversy meant the Romanian election had become a right wing cause célèbre. Even ‘Make America Great Again’ representatives had traveled to Bucharest to throw Donald Trump hats into crowds of cheering supporters.

Part of this global right, Las Marifachas had to be in Bucharest, crowdfunding their first “international mission” and ignoring the perplexed glances from local, flag-waving AUR supporters whose party has said it opposes “homosexual marriage” and “publicly-funded trans-sexual surgery and other Freudo-Marxism-inspired 'innovations' meant to fluidize, relativize, and eventually abolish the traditional moral paradigm.”

Still, whatever AUR’s professed anti-LGBTQ beliefs, Madame in Spain insists Muslims pose a greater threat. “I can’t understand how the LGBTQ community, feminists and this damn woke movement can support Islam,” Madame says. “Because they don’t come to integrate, they come to destroy us.”

Back in Spain, Las Marifachas have been promoting their new song, ‘Bocadillo de jamón’ (literally, ham sandwich), a dig at Muslims who don’t eat pork. “In every Spanish home,” reads the title of one of the Marifachas’ YouTube videos, “there must be a leg of ham.” It’s the kind of sentiment that increasingly resonates with Spanish voters.

After a surprisingly mediocre showing in the 2023 Spanish general election, recent polling shows that Vox is regaining momentum. It is currently the most popular party in the country among men and among younger demographics, with 27.9% of 18-24 year olds and 26% of 25-34 year olds saying they will vote for Vox in the next general election, according to a poll in Spanish newspaper El Pais. Though it is not until 2027, Elon Musk has already declared on X that “Vox will win the next election.”

Musk’s support echoes that of Donald Trump, with Vox leader Santiago Abascal securing a spot alongside Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Argentina’s Javier Milei as MAGA’s most prominent overseas supporters. While Vox currently holds just 33 seats out of 350 in the Spanish parliament, its influence on the national agenda far exceeds its political presence.

In September, at ‘Viva Europa’, a Vox conference, attended virtually by Meloni, Orbán and Milei, Abascal wore a white ‘Freedom’ t-shirt in tribute to Charlie Kirk, the prominent MAGA activist, who had been assassinated just days earlier while speaking at Utah Valley University. Delegates embraced Kirk as a martyr for free speech. “Some point and others shoot,” Abascal said. “Since censorship isn’t enough for them, they resort to murder.” He was also quoted as saying, the left “do not kill us for being fascists – they call us fascists in order to kill us”.

Eorope's homonationalist wave

In contrast with much of the rest of Europe, the Spanish government has been welcoming of immigration, acknowledging its economic advantages and the need for immigrants in an ageing country with one of the lowest birth rates in the world. But this year Spain overtook Germany as the top EU asylum destination, and anti-immigration sentiment has been growing.

 It reached boiling point this summer. On July 9, a 68-year old man in the southern Spanish town of Torre-Pacheco — where about a third of its 40,000 inhabitants are migrants — was brutally beaten up by three young men. Far-right groups were quick to use the beating as an opportunity to spread fake videos and misinformation on a Telegram group called “Deport them Now Spain”. Among the racist, anti-migrant invective were calls to “hunt” down North Africans and “reunite them with Allah”. 

The violent clashes between protestors and police echoed riots in other European cities in recent summers, including last year in the United Kingdom after the killing of three children in a mass stabbing was falsely blamed on Muslims and asylum seekers. Using a new tool called FARO, developed to detect hate speech, the Spanish government found that the Torre-Pacheco incident fueled a wave of 33,000 messages containing hate speech towards immigrants posted in a single day.

When I asked Carlitos, of Las Marifachas, about the role of social media in driving real-life violence against immigrants in Torre-Pacheco, he said that it was not the Telegram group that was the problem. People on the streets, he argued, now feel empowered to act. “I do generalize,” he said, “that the Islamic religion is homophobic.”

It is a belief many LGBTQ+ voters across Europe have shared. In France, Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Rally party (RN) received strong support from gay voters during her runs for president. In 2017, polling showed that Le Pen was, remarkably, more popular among LGBTQ voters, which make up 6.5% of the French electorate, than she was with straight voters. This, despite her party’s traditional opposition to LGBTQ+ rights.

A 2024 study from the London School of Economics showed that in the U.K., a growing number of people profess progressive views on homosexuality alongside anti-immigrant sentiment, a combination that became prominent during the Brexit debates back in 2016. And much more recently, in the run-up to the German elections in February this year, a survey by the LGBTQ dating app Romeo showed that the majority of the 10,000 people polled favored the far-right Alternative for Germany, led by the openly gay Alice Weidel. 

In the Netherlands, the late-1990s rise of Pim Fortuyn, a gay academic turned hardline anti-immigrant, was an early example of the coming together of progressive views on homosexuality with conservative views on immigration. Dutch scholars have tracked how Fortuyn’s framing of Muslim migration as a threat to Western openness and liberalism changed populist politics.

The above are all examples of “homonationalism”, a term coined two decades ago by Jasbir Puar, a professor of women’s and gender studies at Rutgers University. Her work describes how far-right actors instrumentalize LGBTQ rights to spread anti-immigrant messages by creating a binary narrative in which Islam is pitted against homosexuality. Originally focused on post-9/11 America, European scholars have since used Puar’s framework to document similar patterns in multiple countries.

"Across Europe, it has proven effective for promoting anti-immigrant policies and gaining gay voters," says Guillermo Fernández Vázquez, a political scientist at Madrid's Complutense University. "While the LGBTQ community has always been told that the far-right is a threat to their rights," he told me, "actors like Las Marifachas argue that 'no, it's actually the immigrants, so the far right is not your enemy, it's your main defender.'" The far-right becomes, paradoxically, the main ally of European gays because, he adds, "they claim to be the only ones tough and determined enough to kick out the supposed aggressors."

The algorithm advantage

Social media platforms play a crucial role in amplifying this messaging and making once obscure political positions mainstream, especially since companies like Meta eliminated their fact-checking operations. Far-right content is inherently more compatible with social media algorithms that prioritize confrontational and populist material, explains Petter Törnberg, a University of Amsterdam professor studying social media polarization.

Las Marifachas are part of Spain's "Fachatubers" — a portmanteau of "facha" (fascist) and YouTuber. These creators have mastered how to use coded language to evade detection while conveying extremist messages.

Much of Las Marifachas' content discusses violent crimes in Spain, emphasizing assaults on LGBTQ individuals and the nationalities of the alleged perpetrators. “This discourse criminalizes all immigration and has nothing to do with LGTBIQ+ rights or wellbeing,” says Francesc Álvarez, head of  the Barcelona-based advocacy group Ram de l'Aigua. "Right-wing groups exploit the false premise that all migrants are homophobic and no LGBTQ immigrants exist, when Spain actually serves as a destination for those fleeing persecution over sexual orientation.”

Las Marifachas distance themselves from the LGBTQ movement, which they claim is “woke” ideology separate from homosexuality. Both Madame and Carlitos describe themselves as deeply religious, promoting Christian and traditional family values. They oppose homosexual adoption and don't object to Vox's anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ policy proposals.

"We've contributed our grain of sand,” says Madame, “by uncloseting a lot of homosexuals who didn't dare say that they support the right." According to Guillermo Fernández Vázquez, "the primary function of this type of group, apart from surprising and entertaining, is to break things apart — to disperse, to fragment." In the medium and long term, he adds, "it's a strategy to ensure that there won't be a LGBTQ community that's united against the far-right."

Historically, he said, “the far-right has not exactly been supportive of LGBTQ rights, but when it turns out that it can benefit from LGBTQ support in pursuing anti-liberal, anti-Muslim, anti-migration aims, it is happy to adopt those values."

On 23 September, Donald Trump delivered an incendiary speech at the United Nations general assembly hall in New York, castigating European countries for failing to “stop people that you’ve never seen before, that you have nothing in common with.” It’s an anti-immigration message that should, arguably, resonate with Las Marifachas, a message that Vox appears intent on delivering to the Spanish electorate.
On October 11, Las Marifachas plan to be in Miami. It is the next stop, after Romania, on their “international mission” to get people to see things their way, to persuade people to drink from their fizzy cocktail of anti-immigration rhetoric, support for the pro-MAGA Vox party, and current-day homonationalism. Their goal in Miami, as they talk about censorship in Spain, will be to persuade their audience that the future is best served through an alliance with the far-right, in lying with the devil you know. Is fear proving stronger than traditional solidarity among marginalized groups.

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Thirteen years ago, a group of American do-gooders tried to do something about this. 

The NGO Invisible Children published a 30-minute YouTube video with high hopes. With their film ‘Kony 2012’, they sought to stop the Lord’s Resistance Army, which had kidnapped, killed and brought misery to families across several Central African nations since the late 1980s. The video opens with our blue orb home spinning in outer space as the director reminds us of our place in time. “Right now, there are more people on Facebook than there were on the planet 200 years ago,” he says. “Humanity's greatest desire is to belong and connect, and now, we see each other. We hear each other. We share what we love. And this connection is changing the way the world works.” In other words,  the technology of connection will solve this problem.

Despite the uber virality of the film,100 million plus views nearly overnight, Kony remains a free man, though much more infamous, and his victims didn’t get all the help they needed. The campaign seemed to embody slacktivism at its most poisonous: the high hope that you can change the world from your sofa.

“Hope,” Gloria Steinem once wrote, “is a very unruly emotion.” Steinem was writing about US politics in the Nixon era but the observation holds. Hope is at the core of how many of us think about the future. Do we have hope? That’s good. It’s bad if we have the opposite – despair, or even cynicism. 

Former CNN international correspondent, Arwa Damon knows this unruly quality of hope firsthand. For years she worked as a journalist in conflict zones. Now she helps kids injured by war through her charity called INARA. She discussed this work last month at ZEG Fest, Coda’s annual storytelling festival in Tbilisi. In war, Damon has seen how combatants toy with hope, holding out the possibility of more aid, less fighting only to undermine these visions of a better tomorrow. This way, she says they snuff out resistance. This way they win. 

In seeing this, and in surviving her own close calls, Damon told the Zeg attendees, she realized she didn’t need hope to motivate her. “Fuck hope,” she said to surprised laughter. 

So what motivates her to keep going? “Moral obligation,” she said. After everything she has seen, she simply cannot live with herself if she doesn’t help.  She doesn’t need to hope for an end to wars to help those injured by them now. In fact, such a hope might make her job harder because she’d have to deal with the despair when this hope gets dashed, as it will again and again. She can’t stop wars, but she can, and does, help the kids on the front lines. 

Most of us haven’t crawled through sewers to reach besieged Syrian cities or sat with children in Iraq recovering from vicious attacks. And most of us don’t spend our days marshalling aid convoys into war zones. But we see those scenes on our phones, in near real time. And many of us feel unsure what to do with that knowledge because most of us would like to do something about these horrors. How do we deal with this complex emotional reality? Especially since, even if we are not in a physical war zone, the information environment is packed with people fighting to control the narratives. In this moment of information overload and gargantuan problems, could clinging onto hope be doing us more harm than good? 

Emotion researchers like Dr. Marc Brackett will tell you that instead of thinking of emotions as good or bad, we can think of them as signals about ourselves and the world around us. And we could also think about them as behaviors in the real world. Dr. Brackett, who founded and runs the Center for Emotional Intelligence at Yale, said hope involves problem solving and planning. Think about exercising, which you might do because you hope to improve your body. In those cases hope could prove a useful motivator. “The people who only have hope but not a plan only really have despair,” Dr. Brackett explained “because hope doesn't result in an outcome.”  

Developing a workout plan seems doable. Developing a plan to capture a warlord or stop kids from suffering in wars is a good deal more complex. The 2010s internet gave us slacktivism and Kony 2012, which seems quaint compared to the 2020s internet with its doom scrolling, wars in Ukraine and Gaza and much more misery broadcast in real time. What should we do with this information? With this knowledge? 

Small wonder people tune out, or in our journalism jargon, practice news avoidance. But opting out of news doesn’t even provide a respite. Unless you’ve meticulously pruned your social media ecosystem, the wails of children, the worries about climate change, the looming threats of economic disruption or killer machines, those all can quickly crowd out whatever dopamine you got from that video of puppy taking its first wobbly steps. But paradoxically, the pursuit of feeling good, might actually be part of the problem of hope. 

I took these questions about hope to Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, an acclaimed psychologist and neuroscientist. She too talked less about our brains and more about our behaviors. The author of, among other things, How Emotions are Made, Dr. Barrett noted that we might experience hope in the moment as pleasant or energizing and it helps with creating an emotional regulation narrative. Meaning: we can endure difficulty in the present because we believe tomorrow we will feel better, it will get better. However, Barrett said hope alone as a motivator “might not be as resistant to the slings and arrows of life.” If you assume things will get better, and then they don’t, how do you keep going? 

“I think people misunderstand what's happening under the hood when you're feeling miserable,” she added. “Lots of times feel unpleasant not because they're wrong but because they're hard.”

I told Dr. Barrett about Damon’s belief that she keeps going because of moral obligation and she again looked at the emotional through the behavioral. “There is one way to think about moral responsibility as something different than hope,” she said, “but if hope is a discipline and you're doing something to make the parts of the world different you could call it the discipline of hope.” This could be a more durable motivation, she suggested, than one merely chasing a pleasant sensation that tomorrow will be better.  “My point is that, if your motivation is to feel good, whatever it is you are doing, your motivation will wane.”

After ‘Kony 2012’ shot to astonishing success, in terms of views, the creators raised tens of millions of dollars but achieved little on the ground – an early lesson in the limits of clicktivism. Once upon a time American do-gooders hoped they’d help Ugandan children simply by making a warlord infamous, now the viralness of  Kony 2012 feels like a window into a cringey past, a graveyard of hopes dashed. But maybe we just grew up. Maybe our present time and this information environment full of noise and warring parties asks more of us. Maybe hope has a place but among a whole emotional palate of motivations instead of a central pillar keeping us moving forward. Because let’s be honest: we may never get there.  Hope, as the experts told me, doesn’t work without a plan. And, raising hopes, especially grand ones like changing global events from your smartphone, only to have them dashed can actually prompt people to disengage, to despair maybe, or even to embrace cynicism so they don’t have to go through the difficult discipline of hope and potential disappointment.  

One day, during the start of the pandemic, when my home doubled as my office, I got a piece of professional advice I’ve held tight. A therapist who works with ER doctors shared with a group of us journalists that when we work on tasks that seem never ending, burnout is more likely. To prevent it, he advised that we right-size the problem. Put down the work from time to time, celebrate our achievements (especially in tough times), develop rituals and build out perspective to nourish us as we keep doing the work.

The pandemic ended but we bear the scars and warily look out at a horizon full of looming troubles, most of them way outside the control of any one of us. Both Dr. Marc Brackett and Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett reminded me: emotions are complex and humans aren’t motivated by just one thing. But no matter what mountain we want to climb we would all do well to adopt this conception of hope as a discipline rather than just a feeling. Because in this environment, there’s always someone on the other side betting we’ll give up in despair.

A version of this story was published in last week’s Sunday Read newsletter. Sign up here.

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The post The danger of hope appeared first on Coda Story.

It was in this world that I found myself, the latest addition to the city's English-speaking press corps. I had landed as the BBC's correspondent, but unlike most of my on-air colleagues at the time, I had an accent no one could quite place and a backstory most of my fellow foreign correspondents would have struggled to map. Except for Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, the other accented foreigner in Beirut's lively foreign correspondents group.

In Beirut, like all foreign correspondents Ghaith and I were outsiders to the country we were reporting on, but we were also outsiders trying to break into an industry that was reluctant to accept us. I remember at one particularly loud Beirut media party, a middle-aged man shouted into my ear that the new BBC correspondent's accent was a disgrace, an act of disrespect to British listeners. He didn't realize he was speaking to that very correspondent. 

Ghaith meanwhile had made his way from an architecture school in Baghdad (evident in the skill he brings to his sketches) onto the pages of The Guardian, somehow transforming the drawbridge of the British media establishment into an open door.  But it wasn’t our struggle that we bonded over – it was bananas. Or, more precisely, the scarcity thereof.

In Saddam’s Iraq, I learned from Ghaith, much like in the Soviet Georgia of my childhood, the lack of bananas turned them into more than a fruit. They were a symbol of luxury, a crescent-shaped promise that somewhere life was sweet and abundant. Most kids like us, who grew up dreaming of bananas, set out to chase abundance in Europe or America as adults. For whatever reasons, Ghaith and I chose the reverse commute, drawn to the abundance of stories in places that others wanted to flee. 

Ghaith and I decided to turn our community of two into a secret club we called “Journalists Without Proper Passports”: JPP, or was it JwPP. We couldn’t quite agree on the acronym, but it became a running joke about the strange calculus of turning what you lack into what you offer. Our passports, while pretty useless for weekend trips to Europe or getting U.S. visas, worked miracles for getting into places like Libya, Yemen, Uzbekistan, Burma, and Iran.

On a trip to Afghanistan, Ghaith left his Beirut apartment keys with a fresh face who had just arrived in the city: Josh Hersh. Josh, I only recently learned, had been agonizing over whether he should move from New York to Beirut, coming up with excuse after excuse not to make the leap. "In April, I'm gonna be in Afghanistan," Ghaith had told him when they met. "You can stay in my apartment, no problem." Just like that, Josh had no more excuses. And so, while Ghaith was in  Afghanistan, Josh was settling into Beirut's rhythm, discovering what the rest of us already knew: that the city had a way of making you feel like you belonged, even when you clearly didn't.

Josh had a keen reporter’s eye for things the rest of us missed. I remember one night at Barometre – a sweaty, crowded Palestinian bar where men spun in circles to music that seemed to defy gravity – Josh and I slipped outside for air. He pointed at my beer and said, "You aren't really drinking that, are you?" Just like that, he'd guessed my secret: I was pregnant. That was Josh's gift – listening and watching harder than anyone else, catching the detail that unlocks the rest of the story.

The gift was on full display when, almost two decades after they met, Ghaith and Josh sat down in Tbilisi at ZEG, our annual storytelling festival. Josh was interviewing Ghaith at ZEG for Kicker, his podcast for Columbia Journalism Review.

The conversation happened at a moment when the Middle East was literally on the brink of a wider war. The old fault lines – sectarian, geopolitical, generational – were shifting beneath our feet. And Ghaith's words felt both urgent and timeless, a reminder that beneath every headline about good guys and bad guys are people making desperate choices about survival. Unlike many of us, who eventually scattered to desk jobs at a comfortable distance from the action, Ghaith is still the one regularly slipping into Damascus and Sana’a, telling stories that – as Josh put it “refuse to moralize”, to categorize people as heroes or traitors, insisting instead on the messy, human reality of survival. 

At ZEG, he talked about Mustafa, a young man in Damascus who became a "reluctant collaborator" with the Syrian regime – not out of ideology, but out of a desperate calculus for survival. "My rule number one: I will never be beaten up ever again," Ghaith recounted Mustafa saying. "And of course, he gets beaten up again and again and again." It's a line that lands with particular force now, as the region cycles through yet another round of violence, and the world tries once more to flatten its tragedies into headlines.

Ghaith also spoke about the legacy of violence that shapes the region's present – and its future: "That's the legacy, the trauma of violence, that is the biggest problem in this region, I think. It is an organic reason why these cycles perpetuate themselves."

And then there was his insight into how the West – and the world – misunderstands the Middle East: "At one point, I realized there is no one conflict crossing the region from Tehran to Sana'a via Baghdad and Damascus. But a constellation of smaller conflicts utilized for a bigger one… It's so much easier to understand the conflict in the Middle East as Iran versus the Sunnis or the Jihadis versus Israel. But if we see it as a local conflict, I think it's much more difficult, but it's much more interesting."

"My anger with Americans is not only destroying Iraq, not only committing massacres and whatnot, and not a single person went to jail for the things they did in Iraq. Not George Bush. Not Nouri al-Maliki. No one has ever stood and said, well, I'm sorry for the things we've done. We will never have a proper reconciliation because the same trauma of violence and sectarianism will be repackaged and will travel to Syria, to Yemen and come back to haunt this region. And that's my problem. And this is why I'm angry."

Josh, with his characteristic gentleness, pressed Ghaith on these patterns and the craft of reporting on them. And Ghaith, ever the reluctant protagonist, brushed aside the idea of bravery: "I'm scared all the time. Not sometimes, but all the time. But also, I think it's not about me. I want to tell the story of Mustafa, of the other people on the ground. I don't want to be distracted by my own story, reading “War and Peace” in a Taliban detention cell."

When the session ended, people didn't leave with answers – they left with better questions. There was that electric feeling you get when a conversation has broken something open, when the neat categories we use to understand the world have been gently but firmly dismantled. In that room, for an hour, we weren't talking about "the Middle East" as an abstraction, but about the weight of history on individual lives.

In a moment when the region is once again at the center of the world's anxieties, when the language of "good guys" and "bad guys" is being weaponized by everyone from politicians to algorithms, we need conversations that refuse to let us off the hook. We need the kind of journalism that Ghaith practices, journalism that insists on the messy, contradictory reality of people's lives, that sees the individual inside the collective tragedy.

A version of this story was published in last week’s Sunday Read newsletter. Sign up here.

Listen to the full conversation on The Kicker. If you're curious about the stories that shaped it, pick up Ghaith's book, and join us at the next ZEG, where the best conversations are always the ones you didn't expect to have.

The post What we miss when we talk about the “Middle East” appeared first on Coda Story.

On May 18, Romanians will vote in the second and final round of elections to pick their president, with Simion, a decisive first round winner, the favourite, albeit current polling shows he is running neck-and-neck with his opponent Nicusor Dan, the relatively liberal current mayor of Bucharest. Also on that day, the first round of Poland’s presidential elections will take place. Nawrocki, analysts suggest, is likely to lose to the more liberal Warsaw mayor Rafał Trzaskowski. 

But Simion’s appearance in Warsaw did cause anger, with one Polish member of the European parliament describing both candidates as representatives of “Putin’s international”. Simion denies being pro-Kremlin, but wants to stop military aid to Ukraine. An ultranationalist, he promotes the rebuilding of a greater Romania, raising the prospect of potential territorial disputes with Ukraine, Moldova, and Bulgaria. Indeed, he is already banned from entering both Moldova and Ukraine. 

Rather than Russia, the association Simion prefers to acknowledge is with Donald Trump and MAGA. As he said of his visit to Poland and support for Nawrocki, “Together, we could become two pro-MAGA presidents committed to reviving our partnership with the United States and strengthening stability along NATO’s eastern flank.”

Certainly, Simion’s MAGA love was on show during the first round of Romania’s election on May 4, and MAGA reciprocated that love. 

At the party’s Bucharest headquarters, on a warm, triumphant election night, with Simion having won over 40% of the votes, a MAGA hat-wearing American took to the podium. He asked the cheering crowd if they wanted their own "Trump hat", and threw one (and only one) towards a section chanting "MAGA, MAGA, MAGA." Brian Brown, a prominent conservative activist, was in his element, expressing solidarity with jubilant Simion supporters. 

"You, my friends," he said, "are in the eye of the storm. What happens in this country will define what happens all over Europe. And Americans know it and more and more are waking up to the truth that we must stand together. We must never be silenced." Meanwhile, a protester screaming “fascists” was quickly removed. 

Brown, who leads the anti-LGBTQ group International Organization for the Family and has been described by human rights organizations as an "infamous exporter of hate and vocal Putin supporter," was celebrating a seismic political shift. In response to Simion’s large first round victory, Romania's prime minister resigned. His own party's establishment candidate didn’t even make it to the May 18 second round. 

Simion, a 38-year-old Eurosceptic and self-described "Trumpist," had founded his far-right nationalist party, Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR) just over a decade ago. At the AUR offices on election night – with Simion himself only appearing by video – Brown drew explicit parallels between Romania's situation and that of America, extolling the "friendship of true Romanians and true Americans, people that stand together against a lie." Right wing leaders in other countries echoed the sentiment. Italy's deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini, for instance, declared on social media that Romanians had "finally voted, freely, with their heads and hearts." 

Romania's election became a right wing cause célèbre after the Constitutional Court annulled the presidential polls in December last year, ruling that it had been vitiated by a Russian influence operation. U.S. vice president JD Vance accused Romania of canceling the election based on “flimsy suspicions” and Elon Musk described the head of the Constitutional Court as a “tyrant”. This is why MAGA supporters took a keen interest in the May 4 do-over. It was, according to  Brown, a litmus test for freedom, for the voters’ right to choose their president, no matter how unpalatable he might be to the establishment. 

In November, 2024, far-right candidate Călin Georgescu won the first round of Romania’s presidential elections. The polls were scuppered though after intelligence revealed irregularities in campaign funding and that Russia had been involved in the setting up of almost 800 TikTok accounts backing Georgescu’s candidacy. He was also barred from participating in the rerun.

Distrust and disapproval of Romania’s political system have been growing ever since. When I got to Bucharest, my taxi driver, the first person I met, told me he wouldn’t even bother voting in the rerun. The ban on Georgescu was portrayed in right wing circles as anti-democratic. And the support he received from leading Trump administration figures such as Vance was in keeping with their support for far-right parties across Europe. 

Before Friedrich Merz won a contentious parliamentary vote to become German Chancellor, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Germany was a “tyranny in disguise” because its intelligence services classified the anti-immigration AfD, now Germany’s main opposition party, as “confirmed right wing extremist[s].” Vance said the “bureaucrats” were trying to destroy “the most popular party in Germany.” It proved, he added, that decades after the West brought down the Berlin Wall, the German establishment had “rebuilt” it. The outspoken nature of this intervention in the internal politics of an ally shows that the Trump administration would rather maintain ideological ties with far-right parties in Europe than follow traditional diplomatic protocols. 

Simion, for his part, has said that he’s a natural ally of the U.S. Republican Party, and that AUR is “almost perfectly aligned ideologically with the MAGA movement.” Just two weeks before the Romanian elections, Brian Brown met with Simion and his wife in Washington, D.C., with both men propagating their affinity to “the free world” and “Judeo-Christian legacy” in an Instagram video. Simion is also currently being scrutinized over attempts to hire a lobbying firm in the U.S. for $1.5 million to secure meetings with key American political figures and media appearances with U.S. journalists. 

In Romania, the president has a semi-executive role that comes with considerable powers over foreign policy, national security, defence spending and judicial appointments. The Romanian president also represents the country on the international stage and can veto important EU votes – a level of influence that might be considered handy on the other side of the Atlantic too.

The fact that both U.S. and other European far-right leaders came in person to offer their support to Simion after the first round of the election, or paid obeisance online, shows how it’s becoming increasingly important for the far-right to to be seen as a coherent, global force. As Brown put it in Bucharest: “We need MAGA and MEGA. Make America great again. Make Europe great again.” 

With Canada and Australia swinging to the center-left in their recent elections – in what many have called “the Trump slump” – the Romanian election offers Trump and MAGA hope that it can continue to remake the world in its own image. The irony is that MAGA, with its global offshoots, is arguably the most effective contemporary international solidarity movement, despite railing against globalism and being so apparently parochial in its outlook. 

A version of this story was published in last week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

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The post Bucharest Calling: MAGA goes on tour appeared first on Coda Story.

On Friday afternoon in Delhi, I was at my daughter's school, waiting to pick her up and straining to eavesdrop on knots of parents and -- this being Delhi -- separate knots of household staff. Every tightly bunched group was absorbed by conversation on the only subject anyone in Delhi, and no doubt the rest of India, was talking about: are we going to war with Pakistan?

By Saturday afternoon, my assumption that India and Pakistan would find a way to step back from the brink because they had no other serious choice, seemed wildly optimistic. On the jingoistic, cacophonous, largely unwatchable Indian news channels, there were still reports of drones being shot down and air bases and military infrastructure being attacked. War seemed imminent. So imminent that India’s largest-selling weekly newsmagazine went with “War!” and a battalion of fighter jets on its cover. 

But by five pm on Saturday, Donald Trump announced a complete ceasefire. Before anyone from the Indian or Pakistani government had said anything. Entire nations were caught off guard. The screeching newsreaders, still foaming at the mouth, were outraged – “who moved my war?” 

And then the media swiveled on a dime (rather, a one-rupee coin). Spinning furiously, crazed hamsters on their wheels, the analysts and anchors insisted India had won. In Pakistan, their counterparts were doing much the same. The truth is, both countries had lost 

India and Pakistan had been locked in a clumsy, deadly two-step while the rest of the world looked away. It began on April 22, with a terrorist attack in Pahalgam, Kashmir, in which 26 men, almost all of them Hindu, and singled out for their religious affiliation, were killed. United States Vice President JD Vance, was in India on a “private trip” at the time, with his Indian-American wife and children.

The attack was a provocation that the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Hindu nationalist government could not tolerate. Their supporters bayed for vengeance. And Modi, whose personal brand as the protector of the Hindu nation – boasting in campaign speeches about his 56-inch chest – is predicated on him being the leader of a newly vigorous, aggressive India, an emerging superpower, had to respond with overwhelming force.

It took two weeks -- during which India did not provide proof of the Pakistani state's involvement in the April 22 attack beyond an established history of Pakistan’s financing of terror. The country featured on the Financial Action Task Force's grey list between 2018 and 2022, though it insists it has since largely cleaned up its act. Indian retribution came in the form of the bombing of what India described as terrorist camps. This was, Indian officials said, a restrained, responsible response to Pakistan-sponsored terrorism. No military sites, for example, were hit.

Pakistan said civilians were killed and that mosques were bombed. They then retaliated to India's retaliation. And India retaliated to Pakistan’s retaliation against India’s retaliation. Inevitably, there was a retaliation to the retaliation to the retaliation against the retaliation. And so on, until Trump announced the ceasefire. As the bombings intensified, both India and Pakistan insisted they didn't want war and were taking responsible actions to de-escalate. In the warped logic of this fighting, the bombs being dropped actually signaled both countries' understanding that they could go so far and no further.

Initially, the United States, which has played a part in brokering peace in previous clashes between India and Pakistan, seemed content to let both countries duke it out. It’s “none of our business,” said Vance. While Donald Trump seemed to think the dispute over Kashmir was the latest episode of a show that dated back "1,000 years, probably longer." Later, he modified this assessment to mere centuries.

The truth is, this conflict is a product of British colonial rule, of the hastily conceived and disastrously executed partition of India in 1947. The Cliffs notes, with considerable nuance lost through inadequate summary, are as follows: Kashmir, a Muslim-majority state with a Hindu king, wanted to be independent of both India and Pakistan. But when Pakistani forces invaded Kashmir in October, 1947, the king asked India for help and signed an agreement binding Kashmir to the Indian union. 

It led to the first war between Pakistan and India, nations that were born just weeks earlier as the British departed. Under the terms of a United Nations-negotiated ceasefire, India gained control of about two-thirds of Kashmir. But this was temporary until a plebiscite to determine the future of Kashmir was held. This plebiscite never happened. As a result, both countries believe they have an inalienable right to the entirety of Kashmir: India because of the king's decision to sign the instrument of accession; Pakistan because Kashmir is a Muslim-majority state and Pakistan was created as a homeland for the subcontinent's Muslims. In 1965, both countries fought another inconclusive war. 

But as long as India continues to pretend there is a viable military solution to its disputes with Pakistan, the prospect of conflict, if not outright war, remains an ever-present Damoclean threat.

But since 1989, as the Soviet Union collapsed and there was a proliferation of US-funded mujahideen in the region, separatist sentiments in Kashmir spiraled into violent insurgency. India says these militants are a proxy, a tool of the Pakistani deep state. So Kashmir became a theater of both postcolonial and post-Cold War conflict.

Between 1999 and 2019, the U.S. reliably talked both countries off the ledge and leading international diplomatic efforts to get India and Pakistan to back off when overly aggressive gestures and posturing threatened to become kinetic. The U.S. has Cold War-era strategic and security ties with Pakistan but only recently has India become a close partner with an active role to play in containing China’s emerging dominance. India, Australia, Japan and the U.S. are part of the Quad, a loose grouping intended to counter China’s designs on the Indo-Pacific.

Modi and Trump have made several displays of personal friendship, each supporting the other’s election campaigns. But the Trump administration had declined to intervene in current tensions. It was a position of apathy, as if it had no stake in preventing war. For Modi, it must sting that carefully choreographed hugs with Western leaders had not resulted in more diplomatic support for his military action against Pakistan. 

Modi also received little support from institutions. For instance,  India had lobbied for the IMF to withhold funds from Pakistan. But the IMF chose to release $1 billion in loans to Islamabad, even as Pakistan was engaged in artillery exchanges with India. With the U.S. seemingly taking a back seat, Saudi Arabia and Iran had offered to mediate, as had Russia. Even China, which provides over 80% of the Pakistani army's weaponry and also administers part of Kashmir, said it would help broker peace. 

But it was the U.S. that swooped in over the weekend. Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio both posted about the negotiations, with Trump even saying he had used trade as leverage to prevent a nuclear war. “Millions of people,” he said, “could have been killed.”

While Pakistan were happy to acknowledge the U.S. role in forcing a truce, Indian diplomats and politicians were either tight-lipped or disapproving. India has long resisted external interference in the Kashmir dispute, insisting that negotiations have to be strictly bilateral. Ultimately, neither India nor Pakistan can afford full-scale war. This is not asymmetrical combat. India may be much larger than Pakistan and conventionally more powerful. It may have a growing economy, while Pakistan is struggling to finance its debts. But, as one British analyst said, if this is a Goliath-David struggle, David has a nuclear weapon in his sling. 

The Trump-brokered ceasefire may only be temporary respite – so temporary, indeed, that barely hours after the agreement was announced, the chief minister of Indian-administered Kashmir posted on X that he had heard explosions in the state capital Srinagar. “What the hell,” he wrote, “just happened to the ceasefire?” But as long as India continues to pretend there is a viable military solution to its disputes with Pakistan, the prospect of conflict, if not outright war, remains an ever-present Damoclean threat.

As an Indian citizen and a parent, I find both governments' confidence that they can toe an invisible line more than a little disconcerting. But, judging by the political and media response to the prospect of war, only a few shared my scepticism. In India, since April 22, there have been very few calls for peace, very few questions about the need for a military response to a terrorist attack, even though bombing Pakistan has not deterred subsequent terrorism.

One of those calls for peace, though, came from Himanshi Narwal, whose husband of six days, an Indian navy officer, was shot in front of her. Narwal, who was photographed kneeling beside her husband's prone body, became a symbol of India's grief and outrage. 

That was before she spoke. Narwal told reporters that she only held the men who had murdered her husband responsible and not all Muslims or all Kashmiris. "We want peace," she said, "and only peace."

This sentiment made her a target of Hindu nationalist scorn on social media. Narwal was excoriated as a "woke secular" – a particularly Indian insult, mixing American right wing culture war tropes with the Indian use of the word "secular" to mock Indian liberals who supposedly kowtow to minorities, particularly Muslims.  

India's initial retaliation was given the code name "Operation Sindoor", a reference to the deep red powder some married Hindu women dab on the parting of their hair or on their foreheads. India's military action, in other words, was being taken on behalf of the women who had lost their husbands on April 22. Women like Himanshi Narwal. Though what she, and others like her, might think is apparently besides the point or even worthy of contempt. 

The contrast between Narwal's dignity and the absurd propaganda peddled by the mainstream Indian media would have been comical if it were not simultaneously so depressing. On Friday evening, a friend, an editor at a national magazine, sent me a collection of screen grabs of headlines in India, mostly from television news. Each claim was remarkable -- Pakistani planes being shot out of the sky, rebels from Balochistan capturing the city of Quetta, the Indian navy bombing Karachi, even reports of a coup -- and each claim was either knowingly false or entirely unverified. On Indian TV screens every night, since Wednesday night when India first bombed its targets in Pakistan, we've been exposed to a tale told by idiots.

 Was it too much to hope for some restraint? But the tone taken by the mainstream media, a mimicking of the abrasive arrogance of Hindu nationalist trolls on social media, was matched by the Indian government. I watched a spokesperson from the BJP, India's governing party, tell a British news channel about Modi's "3E policy -- evaporate, eradicate, eliminate... shameless Pakistan needs to be taught a lesson." Oy vey! 

And now, does the ceasefire mean that the so-called 3E policy has been abandoned? Would the Modi government – which had blocked the few critical, independent voices – have the courage to reimagine its response to Pakistan, to reevaluate the belligerence of its rhetoric, and to instead embrace the inherent strength in India’s secular, constitutional values and enter into constructive dialogue?

The signs are not encouraging. In a late bid to wrest the narrative momentum from Donald Trump, Indian politicians, journalists and commentators spread word of the country’s new approach to terrorism. Modi, having been silent through much of the fighting, elaborated on the “new normal,” in an address to the nation on Monday night. India, he said, would no longer distinguish “between the government sponsoring terrorism and the masterminds of terrorism.” The words were belligerent, the policies no kind of solution. 

Perhaps, India’s wounds are still too raw for self-reflection. But the question remains: Is India going to be held hostage to its own anger? Or will it acknowledge that talks, and people to people contact, must resume.

A version of this story was published in last week’s Sunday Read newsletter. Sign up here.

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The post The Truth Social truce appeared first on Coda Story.

The people I spoke to, many of whom had voted Republican all their lives, found themselves caught between two worlds and ostracized, not only by the conservative community, who broadly rejected their right to exist, but also by the LGBTQ community, who could not comprehend how they could have voted for a president who actively sought to roll back their rights. They were kicked out of transgender support groups, rejected by their friends and families, and turned to Facebook to find community and support. Yet they stood firm for Trump, with one woman telling me: “I don’t push for trans rights, I push for my personal rights.”

Seven years after I spoke with those women, Trump has been reelected and his administration has ramped up its war on transgender rights, suing the state of Maine for allowing transgender athletes in girls’ sports, and building on a series of executive orders aimed specifically at rolling back transgender rights.

When he took office, President Trump signed executive orders declaring that sexes are “not changeable”, and shutting down gender-affirming care for people under the age of 19. Orders have also ended funding for LGBTQ education, and have been designed to push teachers to withdraw support for trans students and try to intimidate them into not using students’ chosen names or gender identities. 

As we approach the 100th day of Trump’s second term, I caught up with one of the trans women I spoke to seven years ago: Danielle Marie, 47, living in Dallas, Texas, who transitioned in October 2016, shortly before Trump first took office. 

This article was reported by Isobel Cockerell. The following account is told in Danielle’s own words.

Danielle’s Story

I remember I had my first thoughts of wanting to be a girl when I was in kindergarten. It was not some really deep thing that was crushing me. It was just how I felt. It was something I always wished I could do, but I would just push it down, shake my head and say to myself, “Well, that’s not happening. That’s ridiculous. Man up and move on.”

But it was always there.

I had a lot of shame, but I hid it well. I grew up, and got pretty successful, career-wise:  I was an account manager in the security industry, so I was making good money and managing a group of people. I got married, and my wife wanted a big family — in a way, I saw having lots of kids as a sign of masculinity. I was a virile, baby-making father and career man. We had five kids together. 

But by 2016, my career was stalled and my marriage felt like it was headed towards divorce. Everything was falling apart. And I started to think about transitioning. There really was not much for me to risk at that point. Maybe this was my chance to finally be happy. 

As Donald Trump’s campaign ramped up, I I thought — "What harm could it do? He’s an outsider. He’s not an inside-the-Beltway politician. He’s a successful businessman, let’s give him a shot." I figured, worst-case scenario, things would stay about the same, and best-case scenario, we’d have a more robust economy, and a strong job market.

I didn’t think too much about the social aspects. And sure, I knew there were people on the left saying that socially he was a really bad guy, and I was like, "Yeah, I don’t think he really stands for that stuff. I just think he’ll be a normal president."

So  I started my transition during the Trump campaign. I came out to my family in October 2016, and I voted for Trump in November. In a way, I didn’t consider my sexuality or gender identity to be much of a thing defining my vote. I kind of detached the two. I was like, “Yeah, I’m trans and I’m pansexual, but whatever — that has nothing to do with what I’ve believed my whole life.”

As the Trump administration got underway, I got every surgery I wanted — glottoplasty, facial work, breast implants, body defining liposuction, vaginoplasty — paying for it with my savings. 

After my transition, my parents stopped talking to me, I went through a divorce, and my kids stopped talking to me too. It tanked my career, there's definitely a certain level of disrespect that comes with being trans. 

I fell in with a group of conservative folks in the LGBTQ community for a while, just to get by. They were the only support group I had. 

If I could travel back in time, I would set the old me down and say, “Look, these people are not your friends. They lack empathy. They’re almost reptilian in the way that they cannot empathize with the plight of others. Start thinking for yourself. Look around. Stop associating with this mess.”

As it was, I was exposed close-up to a level of vitriol and rabid hatred. The people I was hanging out with were very angry, bigoted, hateful people. 

Their hatred started to help me shift my ideas and nudge me in a different direction. So, towards the end of Trump’s first term I started to pull away from them, too, and then things got really hard.

The left didn’t like me because I had voted for Trump. And the conservative LGBTQ community didn’t like me. But ultimately, it wasn’t until I distanced myself from that group that I was really able to grow and change in what I think is a more positive direction.

The evidence against Trump was piling up, and I began to wonder if he was really bad news. 

I started listening to more centrist podcasts, and gravitating more and more left in the content I was exposed to. By the end of Trump’s first term, I was pretty far along moving towards the left. Then January 6 happened. That day was a bellwether for me. It was like — okay, not only are these people bad, but they fashion themselves as patriots. A patriot doesn’t do what they did on January 6. That was the last nail in the coffin for any hope of me ever being conservative again. Conservatism is a total lack of empathy — I know from having been one. 

In the run-up to the November 2024 election, the prospect of Trump’s return to power chilled my blood. As a former conservative, I at least understand where they’re coming from — but the revamped MAGA movement and Project 2025 really began to scare me and make me believe we were screwed.

There was everything in there: anti-trans, anti-gay, anti-marriage equality, removing gender markers from legal documents. That’s going to affect me. 

On election night I was home alone. I watched it on TV for a while. It looked pretty solid that he was going to win, and I went to bed. I didn’t get hysterical. Drained would be the right word. I was in disbelief. It was just like — well, we’re fucked. It was a mix of despair, anger, and a kind of remorse for my country. 

After the guy who had his people storm the Capitol and threaten the vice president, after that guy won again — I felt like, “My country is gone. Everything I had ever hoped this country was and could be is gone.”

I have an “F” on my driver’s license — but I won’t soon. I had to go through counseling, get a letter, go to the DMV. But they stopped issuing it almost a year ago. 

Now they want to go after people who already had it changed. A law has been proposed in Texas that, if you present a government document that shows a different sex than the one assigned at birth, you are committing what they want to call “gender identity fraud”. It’s punishable by up to two years in prison and a $10,000 fine. Even if this law doesn’t go through, they’ll come up with something just as bad.

It feels like they’re kicking me while I’m down. I’m just trying to be myself and live my life — and that is somehow way too much to ask. It’s heartbreaking. They already hated us. We dealt with that. But now they’re in power, they want us poor, unemployable, unusable — or to detransition. That’s what they want.

I’d like to move — at least to a blue state, if not out of the country. Oregon or Washington would be ideal, but they’re expensive. I’ve thought about Colorado. But ultimately, I think my best bet is to try to seek refugee status in Canada. That’s what I wish for the most.

I’ve even toyed with the idea of detransitioning. I never thought about it before he won. I’m not planning to do it, but I’m preparing myself mentally for that possibility — that I might have to, just to survive. I’m so far along now, I don’t even know if it’s feasible. If I started presenting as male, people would probably think I was a trans man. So I don’t think it would save me.

There’s a lot of rhetoric. They’re taking away our rights but they haven’t rounded us up yet. And then you see what they’re doing to immigrants. They’re deporting people to camps in Central America, places they’re not even from. I’m afraid they’ll do the same to us. They’ll hide it behind the language of “help” or “care,” and then send us to conversion camps. I’m pretty convinced of that.

That’s why I think I need to get the hell out, at least out of Texas. But I’m just in no position right now. I’m paycheck to paycheck, like most Americans.

I still consider myself a patriot. I think there are a lot of wonderful things this country can be, and in many cases has been. It destroys me to have to walk away and turn my back on my country because the people that are ruining it have won.

This article was put together based on an interview Danielle did with Coda reporter Isobel Cockerell. Her words have been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

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In the hours after Pope Francis died on Easter Monday, I went, like thousands of others in Rome, straight to St Peter's Square to witness the city in mourning as the basilica's somber bell tolled. 

Just three days before, on Good Friday, worshippers in the eternal city proceeded, by candlelight, through the ruins of the Colosseum, as some of the Pope's final meditations were read to them. "When technology tempts us to feel all powerful, remind us," the leader of the service called out. "We are clay in your hands," the crowd responded in unison.

As our world becomes ever more governed by tech, the Pope's meditations are a reminder of our flawed, common humanity. We have built, he warned, "a world of calculation and algorithms, of cold logic and implacable interests." These turned out to be his last public words on technology. Right until the end, he called on his followers to think hard about how we're being captured by the technology around us. "How I would like for us to look less at screens and look each other in the eyes more!" 

Faith vs. the new religion 

Unlike politicians who often struggle to grasp AI's technical complexity, the Vatican has leveraged its centuries of experience with faith, symbols, and power to recognize AI for what it increasingly represents: not just a tool, but a competing belief system with its own prophets, promises of salvation, and demands for devotion.

In February 2020, the Vatican's Pontifical Academy for Life published the Rome Call for AI ethics, arguing that "AI systems must be conceived, designed and implemented to serve and protect human beings and the environment in which they live." And in January of this year, the Vatican released a document called Antiqua et Nova – one of its most comprehensive statements to date on AI – that warned we're in danger of worshipping AI as a God, or as an idol.

Our investigation into Silicon Valley's cult-like movement 

I first became interested in the Vatican's perspective on AI while working on our Audible podcast series "Captured" with Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie. In our year-long investigation, we discovered how Silicon Valley's AI pioneers have adopted quasi-religious language to describe their products and ambitions — with some tech leaders explicitly positioning themselves as prophets creating a new god.

In our reporting, we documented tech leaders like Bryan Johnson speaking literally about "creating God in the form of superintelligence," billionaire investors discussing how to "live forever" through AI, and founders talking about building all-knowing, all-powerful machines that will free us from suffering and propel us into utopia. One founder told us their goal was to install "all human knowledge into every human" through brain-computer interfaces — in other words, make us all omniscient.

Nobel laureate Maria Ressa, whom I spoke with recently, told me she had warned Pope Francis about the dangers of algorithms designed to promote lies and disinformation. "Francis understood the impact of lies," she said. She explained to the Pope how Facebook had destroyed the political landscape in the Philippines, where the platform’s engagement algorithms allowed disinformation to spread like wildfire. "I said — 'this is literally an incentive structure that is rewarding lies.'"

According to Ressa, AI evangelists in Silicon Valley are acquiring "the power of gods without the wisdom of God." It is power, she said, "that is in the hands of men whose arrogance prevents them from seeing the impact of rolling out technology that's not safe for their kids."

The battle for humanity's future 

The Vatican has always understood how to use technology, engineering and spectacle to harness devotion and wield power — you only have to walk into St Peter’s Basilica to understand that. I spoke to a Vatican priest, on his way to Rome to pay his respects to the Pope. He told me why the Vatican understands the growing power of artificial intelligence so well. "We know perfectly well," he said, "that certain structures can become divinities. In the end, technology should be a tool for living — it should not be the end of man."

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

The post Pope Francis’s final warning appeared first on Coda Story.

These seemingly eccentric obsessions with exotic animals reveal a fundamental truth about how power itself works. The zebra collection isn't merely decorative – it's emblematic of a system where the arbitrary whims of the powerful become reality, where resources that could serve many are instead directed toward personal indulgence. Orbán admires Ivanishvili's Georgian Dream party, which has steered the country away from EU integration. Trump openly praises Orbán. These men create a web of mutual admiration, exchanging not just tactics but symbols and sometimes even PR consultants – as we learned when Israeli media revealed that Benjamin Netanyahu’s advisers had orchestrated a covert campaign to counter negative discourse around Qatar. Those same advisers were also tasked with cleaning up Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić's public image.

Years ago as a BBC correspondent in Central Asia, I remember staring with bemusement at a massive golden statue in Turkmenistan of the former president, Saparmurat Niyazov, the self-styled ‘Turkmenbashi’, the ‘father of all Turkmen’. The statue rotated to always face the sun. We journalists used to dismiss it as the eccentricity of a dictator in a little-known corner of the world. These weren't mere quirks, though, but  early warning signs of an authoritarian pattern that would spread globally.

Last weekend, we gathered voices who have witnessed authoritarianism's rise across continents for our event "The Playbook." Their unanimous observation: the patterns emerging in America mirror what they've already witnessed elsewhere.

Nobel laureate Maria Ressa, who has faced multiple criminal charges and arrest warrants in the Philippines for her journalism, described her own sense of déjà vu watching events unfold in the United States. Democracy dies not in one blow but through "death by a thousand cuts"—media capture, then academic institutions, then NGOs, until the entire society bleeds out, Ressa warned.

Bill Browder, the architect of the Magnitsky Act that holds Russian leaders to account for human rights violations – which he lobbied for after his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky was murdered in Russian custody – mapped how Vladimir Putin perfected symbolic terrorization through selective targeting. He saw this pattern being repeated in the U.S.: "This attack on law firms, as an example, going after Covington & Burling, Perkins Coie, and Paul Weiss... what's the message to every law firm in America? Don't go after the government." He pointed to judges facing impeachment threats and green card holders being threatened with deportation as classic examples of the Putin playbook unfolding in America – striking fear into entire sectors through selective prosecution.

Many audience questions focused on resistance strategies, with particular frustration directed at the Democratic Party's seeming inability to mount an effective opposition. "Why are they so quiet about this?" Armando Iannucci asked, voicing a common concern about the lack of a coordinated response.

Yet Browder managed to see a bright side in America's chaotic, decentralized resistance: "The Putin model is to find the leader of the opposition and then destroy them," he noted. "But if you don't have a leader and resistance comes from everywhere, there's no way to stop it." He pointed to student-led protests in Serbia and Georgia, where grassroots movements without central leadership proved remarkably resilient.

Few know more about resistance than anti-apartheid era South African activist Kumi Naidoo, who served as head of both Greenpeace and Amnesty International. While he offered practical resistance strategies, Naidoo also emphasized something crucial: "We have demonized people who do not agree with us," he cautioned. "We cannot move forward in this moment where we find ourselves unless we consciously build bridges to the people that are not with us." This doesn't mean compromising on principles, but rather understanding the genuine concerns that drive people to support authoritarian figures.

"The worst disease in the world that we face,” Naidoo said, “is not HIV/AIDS or cancer or influenza—it's a disease we can call affluenza." This pathological obsession with wealth accumulation creates the perfect environment for would-be dictators, as ordinary people mistakenly see oligarchs not as threats to democracy but as aspirational figures. The zebra-collecting billionaire becomes someone to admire rather than fear.

Every speaker at our event expressed a haunting familiarity with America's unfolding crisis – they've all seen this movie before, even though no one, right now, can possibly predict how it ends. Iannucci, creator of “The Death of Stalin” and “Veep – so, someone who has, literally, written the script – said the current reality might put him out of the job. How do you parody something already so absurd? 

“Trump,” he said, “is a self-basting satirist in that he is his own entertainment." Still, Iannucci underscored why humor remains vital in dark times: "Dictators and autocrats hate jokes because laughter is spontaneous, and they hate the idea of a spontaneous reaction that they have no control over."

Far from mere entertainment, Iannucci argued that storytelling itself becomes essential resistance. He challenged us to move beyond speaking only to those who already agree with us: "We must tell authentic stories which are rooted in reality. And understand that to stand a chance to get through this moment we're in, we have to invest equally on the objective side as well as the subjective side."

As authoritarians build their global networks of mutual admiration, from private zoos to public policy, the countering networks of resistance become all the more crucial.

Maria Ressa's powerful assertion that "when it is a battle for facts, journalism becomes activism" particularly resonated with me. As a journalist, I've been trained in objectivity and balance. Yet we now face a moment where the foundations of free thought that my profession relies on are themselves under direct assault. This isn't about choosing political sides – it's about recognizing when factual reality itself is being deliberately undermined as a strategy of control.

I also found myself enthusiastically agreeing with Kumi Naidoo who emphasized that we must genuinely listen to those who support authoritarian figures, not to validate harmful policies but to understand the legitimate grievances that fuel support for them. From Manila to Moscow to Washington, the pattern is clear but not inevitable. The script is familiar, but we still have time to write a different ending – one where free thought and factual discourse prevail over manipulation and fear.

If you would like to become part of conversations like this one, we have news: we have just launched a brand new membership program connecting journalists, artists, thinkers and changemakers across borders. Join today to receive the recording of this event and access to future gatherings where we'll continue connecting dots others miss.

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For nearly a decade, our team has documented how anti-LGBT legislation and rhetoric has migrated from Russia to Central Asia to Turkey to Georgia, Brazil, and now the United States. 

Trump's speech was instantly recognizable to those who have followed this trail. He took us on a tour of its classic landmarks: presenting anti-transgender policies as "protecting women," framing gender-affirming care as "mutilation," and positioning this politicized language as a return to common sense rather than an attack on civil rights. 

But to understand how we got here, we need to look back more than a decade to when the Kremlin first deployed anti-LGBT rhetoric not as a moral stance, but as a tactical weapon.

A Russian export

In 2012, facing mounting protests over corruption, Vladimir Putin's government desperately needed to change the agenda and refocus national anger elsewhere. As our contributing editor Peter Pomerantsev later wrote: "Putin faced a mounting wave of protests focusing on bad governance and corruption among the elites. He desperately needed to change the agenda and refocus national anger elsewhere."

The opportunity came when self-declared feminist provocateurs Pussy Riot performed their "punk prayer" in Moscow's central cathedral. Putin seized the moment. Suddenly Russian state TV shifted their attention from corruption scandals to tabloid rants about witches, God, Satan, and anal sex. Europe, previously a symbol of the rule of law and transparency, was rebranded as "Gayropa."

This wasn't about deeply held religious beliefs. As Pomerantsev noted, "Putin was probably telling the truth when he told a TV interviewer he had no problem with homosexuals. His administration is said to contain several, and some key members of the media elite are themselves discreetly gay." Russia's social culture is, Pomerantsev wrote, "hedonistic and, if anything, somewhat libertine; rates for abortion, divorce and children born out of wedlock are high. Church attendance is low. The US Bible belt it certainly isn't." 

But if Putin had no personal problem with homosexuality, he saw the potential of playing to prejudice. Russia's 2013 "gay propaganda" law banning the "promotion of non-traditional sexual relations" to minors became the template. Soon, nearly identical laws appeared in former Soviet countries—first in Lithuania, then Latvia, then across Central Asia. The language was often copied verbatim, with the same vague prohibitions against "propaganda" that left room to criminalize everything from pride parades to sex education to simply mentioning that LGBT people exist.

The creation of a global axis

What began as a deliberate distraction from Putin’s failure to rein in corruption evolved into a transnational movement. Russian "family values" defenders organized international conferences, bringing together American evangelicals, European far-right politicians, and anti-LGBT activists from Africa.

Those meetings bore fruit. The most powerful connections happened through the World Congress of Families, where links between Russian Orthodox activists and American evangelical groups were forged. These meetings created pathways for rhetoric and policies to travel, often through multiple countries in other continents, before reaching the mainstream in Western democracies.

"Homosexual propaganda is the disease of a modern anti-Christian society."

When Trump spoke about banning "gender ideology," he echoed language first deployed by the Kremlin. When he announced that he had "signed an executive order to ban men from playing in women's sports," he was repeating almost word-for-word the justifications used for Russia's bans on transgender athletes.

From Russia to Brazil to America

By 2020, this Christian-inflected, homophobic, family values playbook had made it to Brazil, where President Jair Bolsonaro deployed its tactics to appeal to a wide swathe of religious conservatives. In May 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Bolsonaro attempted to divert attention from his mishandling of the crisis by posting on Facebook that the World Health Organization was encouraging masturbation in children as young as four.

The post was bizarre, quickly deleted, and made little sense—but it wasn't the product of some Bolsonaro fever dream. Anyone who had watched Russian state television was already familiar with the crazy conspiracy theory about WHO encouraging childhood masturbation.

It first appeared on Russian state TV channels around 2014, when Putin's traditional values crusade had really picked up momentum. The whole theory was based on a WHO document on sex education that mentioned early childhood masturbation as a normal psychosexual phenomenon that teachers should be prepared to discuss—an obscure, academic point distorted by Russian media into evidence that European children were being forced to masturbate from the age of four.

Bizarre as it was, the story had legs, repeated so often that it migrated from Russian television to the Brazilian president’s social media to Christian conservative talking points in the U.S. and Britain. 

Watching the Edges

What happens on the periphery—both geographical and narrative—eventually moves to the center. Eight years ago, we were documenting anti-LGBT legislation in Kyrgyzstan that seemed fringe, distant, and surely far removed from established democracies. Today, similar laws are being implemented in countries like Hungary, Georgia, and even the United States.

"People [who] call themselves traditionalists rise up. If you are gay, lesbian, especially transgender, you will be not only beaten, you will be killed."

Georgia, my own country, is a fascinating case study in how such rhetoric takes root. Once the most promising democracy among the former Soviet republics, Georgia has regressed. With the Kremlin-friendly Georgian Dream in power, and despite determined and vocal opposition, the ruling party pushed through a "foreign agents" law modeled directly on its Russian counterpart and “family values” legislation that targets LGBT rights, including banning Pride parades and public displays of the rainbow flag.

The pattern is unmistakable and what makes it particularly dangerous is how these policies are laundered through increasingly respectable channels. Phrases that began on Russian state TV like "gender ideology" and protecting children from "propaganda" have become mainstream Republican talking points.

Russia's Blueprint: Unleashing Violence

The consequences of this exported blueprint are devastating. It gives license to religious conservatives everywhere to act on  their prejudices and then point to them as universal. In Indonesia, for instance, which has been mulling changes to its broadcast law that single out investigative journalism and LGBT content, two young men in conservative Aceh were publicly flogged under Shariah law for gay sex. Vigilantes burst into a flat to find the men allegedly mid-embrace.   

In Russia, the gay propaganda law unleashed unprecedented violence against LGBTQ people. As Lyosha Gorshkov, a gay Russian professor who fled to the United States, told us in 2016:  "people [who] call themselves traditionalists rise up. If you are gay, lesbian, especially transgender, you will be not only beaten, but you will be killed. Government keeps targeting LGBT population because it's easiest target.”

Before fleeing Russia, Gorshkov was targeted by the Federal Security Service (the modern version of the KGB). An agent at his university called him into his office and demanded he identify communists and homosexuals. "He would follow me every single week, calling me, looking for me at the university," Gorshkov explained. When a bogus article circulated claiming Gorshkov was "promoting sodomy," he knew he had to leave.

In St. Petersburg, which became the epicenter for Russian homophobia, LGBT people faced increasing danger. Nearly nine years ago, journalist Dmitry Tsilikin was murdered in what police believed was a homophobic attack. Local politicians like Vitaly Milonov, who masterminded the city's gay propaganda law that later went national, routinely used dehumanizing language that inspired vigilante violence.

"We have to face moral dangers,” Milonov told our reporter Amy Mackinnon. Homosexual propaganda, he said, is “the disease of a modern anti-Christian society," Milonov told our reporter Amy MacKinnon.

Coming Full Circle

President Trump's speech this week represents a concerning milestone in this journey of authoritarian rhetoric. When he promised to bring "common sense" back by recognizing only two genders, he was echoing Putin from a decade earlier, though no one acknowledged the source.

Particularly troubling is how within the United States such rhetoric is becoming law. Iowa's legislature recently passed a bill to strip the state's civil rights code of protections based on gender identity—the first state to explicitly revoke such protections. Georgia's state legislature, meanwhile, passed a bill to cut off funding for gender-affirming care for minors and people held in state prisons. Georgia had already passed a bill banning transgender athletes from school sports.

These are the legislative fruits from rhetorical roots planted over a decade ago. I'll never forget the May afternoon in 2016 when I sat in Tbilisi's main concert hall, watching Josiah Trenham, an Eastern Orthodox priest from California, take the stage at the World Congress of Families conference. The hall was packed with hundreds of guests, many of them Americans who had traveled to the Georgian capital to discuss ways to "save the world from homosexuality." What still haunts me is how warmly the audience applauded Trenham’s words.

"I have witnessed my nation disgrace itself before God and men," he thundered. "My counsel to beloved Georgians is this: stand firm in your faith against the LGBT revolution. Do not give in or your cities will become like San Francisco, where there are 80,000 more dogs in the city than there are children. Tell the LGBT tolerance tyrants, this lavender mafia, these homofascists, these rainbow radicals, that they are not welcome to promote their anti-religious anti-civilizational propaganda in your nations."

Later, when I confronted Trenham, he insisted he hadn't encouraged violence, claiming instead that the people "who are for provocation and violence are the LGBTs themselves." Outside, hundreds of Georgian Orthodox activists were gathered with religious icons and signs that quoted Biblical scripture. They were free to express their hate. But when my phone rang, it was an LGBT activist calling in panic because ten of his friends had been arrested for writing "Love is equal" on a sidewalk only a few blocks away.

Cynical Kremlin propaganda coupled with genuine religious fervor had created this monster, and more monsters were being bred everywhere. The success of the Russian playbook lies in its incremental nature. First, you frame the issue as one about protecting children. Then you expand to education. Then to adults. At each step, those opposing the restrictions can be painted as ideologues who don't care about protecting the vulnerable.

Setting Trump's speech alongside those made by others, from political leaders to religious preachers, reveals that the U.S. is just the latest domino to fall. Solid family values as a contrast to the licentiousness of the decadent West  was a campaign that began in the Kremlin's halls of power as a distraction. It has now become a cornerstone of authoritarian governance worldwide.

In Tbilisi, at the World Congress of Families conference, a Polish anti-abortion activist explained: "You have to understand that in the west politicians are thinking in four-year terms... but in Russia they think more like emperors." The Kremlin’s long game has paid off.

For years, we've documented how authoritarianism travels across borders, now that story is becoming America’s story.

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But if things were getting uncomfortable for him in Buenos Aires, bounding onto the stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland with a chainsaw, he seemed right at home. The chainsaw was a gift for Elon Musk, an unabashed admirer of Milei’s economic policies, his belief that government needs to essentially just get out of the way.  

In Argentina, Milei frequently cites his international clout as evidence of the appeal of his libertarian ideology. He says that Trump brought Musk into his government to replicate the role of Federico Sturzenegger, Argentina’s Minister of Deregulation and State Transformation. Whether Musk is a committed libertarian in the Milei and Sturzenegger mold is unknown. And unlike them, Musk has no electoral remit to enact his reforms. Back in September 2024, though, when DOGE had not yet taken shape, Musk posted on X that the “example” Milei was “setting with Argentina will be a helpful model for the rest of the world.”

And With DOGE fully up and running, Musk described Sturzenegger’s “Chainsaw 2.0” or “deep chainsaw” plans as “awesome.” In this plan, the national government of Argentina would, for instance, not build public housing because it’s something the private sector can do. The “lesson for other countries,” Sturzenegger says, “is that we should revisit the limits of what can be done.”

Just over a year into his government, Milei cut public spending by 30%, shut down half of the country's ministries, eliminated hundreds of laws and decrees, slashed nearly 40,000 public sector jobs, and reduced public works budgets to a bare minimum—all without major civil unrest, in the face of an opposition that remains largely paralyzed.

The shock Americans feel as they try to comprehend exactly how much power DOGE has been given, is how Argentinians felt as they watched Milei’s government—largely composed of individuals with no political experience, some without even a formal appointment—dismantle the state. 

While Milei has dramatically reduced inflation to 2.2%—no small feat in a country where inflation had crossed 200%—his cuts, alongside soaring costs, have also pushed some into poverty and his once high approval ratings are falling. 

That’s why his trip to the U.S. was important. At CPAC it’s Milei’s conservatism – last month in Davos, he railed against the “promoters of the sinister agenda of wokeism” – that counts, not the facts of his governance. Milei takes pride in his high standing within the global right wing. He is a part of what Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, in her own CPAC speech, called a global conservative collaboration. “When Bill Clinton and Tony Blair created a global, leftist liberal network in the 90s,” she said, “they were called ‘statesmen.’ Today when Trump, Meloni, Milei and, maybe, Modi talk, they are called a ‘threat to democracy.’ This is the left’s double standard.” It is this global prominence, Milei hopes, that will continue to propel his agenda forward in Argentina and shield him from the fallout of the crypto scandal. 

As for Milei’s effect on the U.S. – both Trump and Musk appear to be looking at him as the canary in the coalmine of radical deregulation. Just how far can governments go down the path of libertarianism? How far can they go to redefine the role of government in society?  Both approaches reflect a foundational shift in governance philosophy - from institutional processes to disruption by outsiders who view existing systems as obstacles rather than safeguards.

Milei’s first year in government offers a preview of what's unfolding in America. Musk is now taking Milei's playbook further by adding technology - developing AI tools to automate the government downsizing that Milei executed manually with his 40,000 job cuts. Both men use their credentials as disruptors to justify radical changes while dismissing criticism as establishment resistance. And both have created a mutual amplification system - Milei points to Musk's support as validation while Musk points to Argentina as proof that his approach works, despite emerging evidence to the contrary in both cases. A U.S. district judge has, at least temporarily, stopped DOGE from accessing treasury data on the grounds that such data might be “improperly disclosed.” As questions mount about DOGE’s intentions, including from its own employees, Americans should watch Argentina’s libertarian experiment closely. It could serve not as a blueprint but as a warning about what happens when bureaucratic guardrails are dismantled with chainsaws, real or metaphorical.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

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Trump had said that by his deadline Israel should demand the return of all 76 of the remaining Israeli hostages (including the remains of the 35 or so believed to be dead), or "let hell break out". Hamas had earlier threatened to call off the scheduled release of another three hostages unless the Israelis lifted the curbs it said they had imposed on the flow of aid into the battered enclave, especially shelter items. 

Egyptian and Qatari mediators ironed out the problem, as they had done with previous hitches. But, in the meanwhile, Benjamin Netanyahu's far right government took up the baton Trump had handed to it. In preparation to unleash hell, if "our hostages" were not freed by the deadline, Israel massed troops in and around Gaza. It was left unclear whether Israel was demanding the release of all 76 hostages, or just the 17 due to be freed over the current 42-day first phase of the Gaza agreement, or just the three originally meant to be freed on that Saturday in line with the accord.

In the event, the sixth hostage handover of Phase 1 went ahead smoothly, with three Israeli men, looking as fit and healthy as could be expected given their ordeal, handed over to the International Red Cross and thence back to Israel in exchange for the release of 369 Palestinian prisoners, 36 of them serving long-term sentences and the rest Gazans picked up at random with no charges. 

Netanyahu hates the Palestinian Authority at least as much as he does Hamas, because the PA wants a two-state solution. "There will be no Hamas and no PA in Gaza after the war," he said.

As before, and against the wishes of the Red Cross, Hamas turned the handover into a spectacle aimed at conveying the message that it is still strong and in control, with hundreds of heavily-armed, smartly-uniformed fighters, some toting advanced Israeli combat weapons probably seized in the October 7 2023 attack, cordoning off a large square and displaying the hostages on a stage festooned with Hamas banners and slogans. 

With the closing stages of the first phase set to continue (14 more days, 14 more hostages) did this mean that some daylight was opening up between Netanyahu and Trump, who had railed against the release of hostages in "dribs and drabs"? Not really. Trump is clearly in tune with the more vocally extreme elements in the Israeli cabinet, Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, but Netanyahu could not simply junk the elaborately-negotiated and signed agreement, especially as the highly-emotive issue of hostage lives was at stake. At the security cabinet meeting where the exchange was approved, he is reported to have told his ministers not to give interviews or mention the Trump plan, to avoid appearing to act counter to the volatile US president.

So the focus shifted to the second phase of the accord, which was supposed to see the release of all Israeli hostages and many more Palestinian prisoners, and the complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip. It would mean the end of the war, with preparations for a third phase devoted to reconstruction. 

Negotiations on Phase 2 were meant to start on February 4, but two weeks went by before movement started in that direction, and the process was clearly going to be fraught. The issue of who would control and govern Gaza had been left open. As the TV screens glaringly showed, Hamas was still very much there and in charge. All attempts had failed to encourage an alternative local leadership, or to posit a takeover by the discredited Palestinian Authority from the West Bank. 

Netanyahu hates the PA at least as much as he does Hamas, because the PA wants a two-state solution. "There will be no Hamas and no PA in Gaza after the war," he said on February 17. "I am committed to U.S. President Trump's plan for the realization of a different Gaza."

"Any plan that leaves Hamas in charge of Gaza will be unacceptable to Israel," said Trump's Secretary of State Marco Rubio. After talks with Netanyahu, he added : "Hamas cannot continue as a military or government force. It must be eliminated or eradicated."

"The next phase of the hostage deal remains under great threat," concluded Amir Tibon in Haaretz. "It is clear that Netanyahu wants the deal to collapse and the war to resume, and that he is doing everything in his power to make that happen." The collapse of the deal with Hamas would be the only way to enable Trump's "plan" for the US to "take over, own and cherish" a Gaza flattened beyond redemption and devoid of its Palestinian inhabitants, who would be rehoused happily and permanently in "beautiful communities" elsewhere while their Gaza was reborn as an incredible Riviera for others. 

It's a real estate hustler's fantasy that collides head-on with every sanctity and imperative in Arab history and politics. Egypt and Jordan immediately rejected Trump's suggestion that they take in Palestinians from Gaza. Trump was presumably assuming that the several billion dollars both receive in US military and economic aid would leverage obedience. But there are some issues that are beyond pressure and bribery. It would be an existential threat for King Abdullah's Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in particular. He knows that if the Gazans are displaced, the much closer and more numerous inhabitants of the West Bank, where things are already hotting up dangerously, would not be far behind. 

No Arab leader can go down in history as collaborating in a second Nakba, the first being the displacement of Palestinians by the creation of Israel in 1948. The Saudis, who Trump is counting on to join Israel in an expanded Abraham Accord despite Gaza, know this as well as any, and have long made it unequivocally clear that there is no way normalisation will happen without a clear pathway to a Palestinian state. They were further irked by Netanyahu's facetious suggestion that if they were so keen on that, why not establish it in the Kingdom? 

Riyadh set about rallying the Arabs behind a plan to counter the Trump scheme, with Egypt and others working on the details of a formula for reconstructing the Strip without displacing its inhabitants. The key issue is whether Hamas could be induced to stand aside, and who would take political and security control. Whatever the arrangement, Hamas would still be the power behind the camouflage. Would Israel accept such a cosmetic ploy, or, with Trump's backing, go all out to complete its stated war aim of destroying Hamas? 

That would complete the conversion of Gaza into a totally unlivable hell on earth, to which it is already pretty close. If that were to happen and the doors were opened, the bulk of the population might have no option but to stream out for the sake of simple survival. "Give them a choice. Not forcible eviction. Not ethnic cleansing," as Netanyahu said.

If the Gaza issue might produce some Arab pushback against Trump's wilder notions, Israel's ambition to deal with Iran is less contentious, though further conflict is unlikely to be welcomed by the Gulf countries. The Saudis, UAE and others roundly condemned Israel's large-scale attack on Iran on October 26 last year – their relations with Tehran have improved considerably since Trump's first term. 

But Iran is certainly in the crosshairs. After meeting with Secretary of State Rubio on February 16, Netanyahu said that with President Trump's support, "I have no doubt we can and will finish the job." While Rubio said that Israel and the U.S. "stand shoulder to shoulder" against Iran, it remains to be seen whether Trump, who supposedly prefers making deals to making war, would prefer to squeeze Iran into quasi-submission rather than encouraging or engaging in conflict. 

The effect of Israel's devastating blows to Iran's regional allies is being felt strongly in Lebanon, where the new government formed by PM Nawaf Salam onFebruary 8 clearly reflected a new balance of power, with Hezbollah losing its ability to veto decisions it doesn't like. 

The day after the new Lebanese cabinet held its first meeting, Israeli warplanes broke the sound barrier over Beirut, rattling windows and nerves throughout the city. It was a clear message aimed at Beirut airport, which the Israelis (through the US) threatened to bombard if it allowed flights from Tehran to land, on the accusation that such planes were bringing in cash and possibly weapons for Hezbollah. The airport cancelled the incoming flights, prompting protest demonstrations by Hezbollah followers around the airport in which vehicles of UN peacekeepers were attacked and burned. The Salam government then went further, and cancelled all flights to and from Iran until further notice.

Under the November 27 ceasefire agreement last year between Israel and Hezbollah, Israeli forces were supposed to leave Lebanon by January 27, but the deadline was pushed back to February 18. Though the accord's co-sponsor France insisted the Israelis should then pull out fully, the U.S. did not oppose Israel's decision to retain five strategic hilltop positions in southern Lebanon. Israel also continued to carry out strikes on what it deemed Hezbollah targets in the Beqaa Valley, and on February 17 assassinated a Hamas officer with a drone strike on his car in the Lebanese city of Sidon. The concept of "ceasefire" seemed to be somewhat relative.

Netanyahu hailed Trump as the best friend Israel has ever had in the White House. The question now is whether the American president can treat the Arab side of the equation as amounting to nothing.

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PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel must have thought the bet he made on Vance in the 2022 Ohio Senate race had paid off in Paris. Thiel, alongside fellow venture capitalists David Sacks and Elon Musk, is the money behind the rise of JD Vance to the vice presidency of the United States. And in the French capital, Vance gave his investors the returns they've been banking on, making the argument that even the tamest regulation would stifle the AI industry and kill innovation.

"The AI future is not going to be won by hand-wringing about safety," Vance lectured assembled global leaders. "It will be won by building." Perhaps inevitably, given the tone being taken, the United States (alongside the United Kingdom) refused to sign an innocuous pledge at the end of the conference to "reduce digital divides" and "ensure AI is open, inclusive, transparent, ethical, safe, secure, and trustworthy." Nearly sixty other countries did sign.

Trump, it seems, doesn’t do multilateral, global treaties, having already pulled the U.S. out of a panoply of international agreements on health, climate change, justice, trade and taxation. And as the U.S. refused to play ball, China declared its intent to collaborate freely with other countries, to play its part in creating "a community with a shared future for mankind".

Vance’s first speech abroad as vice president showed how the Trump administration is looking to force everyone - allies and adversaries alike - to react while the U.S. sets the tune. Clearly, by countering American abrasiveness, China senses an opportunity to strengthen its soft power.

Not long after Vance’s visit to Paris, it was Hegseth’s turn to lecture the U.S.’s European allies. “Make no mistake,” he said in Brussels, “President Trump will not allow anyone to turn Uncle Sam into Uncle Sucker.”

Hegseth told reporters that the “peace dividend has to end.” Europe needs to spend more on its own defense because there are “autocrats with ambitions around the globe from Russia to the communist Chinese.” Either the West, he added, “awakens to that reality… or we will abdicate that responsibility to somebody else with all the wrong values.” 

The Trump administration is looking to force allies and adversaries alike to march to the beat of America's drum. By countering American abrasiveness, China senses an opportunity to strengthen its soft power.

Meanwhile in Washington, DC, Donald Trump was demonstrating the extent to which the United States seemed to be marginalizing NATO, by claiming to have already agreed with Vladimir Putin to begin negotiating a peace deal over Ukraine. No European leader had been clued in; neither had the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky. If Europe was getting the stick, it very much seemed as if Putin was getting the carrot. “I know him very well,” Trump said about Putin. “I think he wants peace. I think he would tell me if he didn’t.” Trump also expressed his hope that Russia could rejoin the G7 (formerly G8) bloc of the world’s wealthiest nations.

“Europe must be part of any negotiations,” a group of European foreign ministers said in Paris, insisting plaintively on a seat at the table even as Trump seems intent on pulling that seat out from underneath them. A meeting between Putin and Trump has been mooted to discuss Ukraine – it will be held in Saudi Arabia and, as of now, nobody else has been invited. Though, as Vance prepares to meet with Zelensky at a security conference in Munich at the weekend, at least the U.S. acknowledges that Ukraine will need to be a part of the process. But an indication of the terms on which a peace deal with Russia might be agreed was provided by U.S. defence secretary Pete Hegseth who said that neither NATO membership nor reclaiming all its land occupied by Russia were “realistic” goals for Ukraine. 

China, reportedly, has also offered to host Trump and Putin for a summit to discuss a peace deal. Speaking in London, Wang Yi, the Chinese foreign minister, said “China is willing to work together with all parties, including the European side, to continue to play a constructive role in this regard.” The “rationality” of China’s position, he maintained, has been borne out by recent developments. Last year, China and Brazil said it could broker a peace deal, an offer Zelensky dismissed, questioning both countries’ motivations. “You will not boost your power,” he said, “at Ukraine’s expense.”

Since Trump returned to the White House, China’s approach has been to remind the world that it is a responsible global power. As the U.S. puts the world on the defensive, "China will increasingly be seen as a reliable global partner," noted one state magazine. The article was a reaction to the USAID freeze and argued that Beijing could now persuade other countries that its model "provides a more predictable and lasting choice for cooperation." 

Russian commentators, even as they welcomed Trump’s return, have been more cautious about any strategic benefits Russia might accrue. "The liberal agenda of previous administrations was something we learned to counter effectively," wrote an RT columnist. "But this conservative agenda, focused on patriotism, traditional family structures, and individual success, could prove more difficult to combat." Moscow must now compete with a Trump administration that can’t be attacked for being “woke,” that addresses the world from a vantage point that Russia thought was theirs, through conservative rather than progressive values and through Big Tech and trade tariffs rather than aid.

But with Trump intent on posturing as the lone gunslinger in town, Russia might take comfort in its alliance with China. What of Europe, though, and Western consensus?

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

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The encounter was jarring not just for its surreal nature - a discussion of political theory amid artillery fire - but for what it revealed about Russian propaganda's evolving sophistication. When I researched the Overton Window after our conversation, I discovered that Russian state media had long been obsessed with the concept, transforming this Western analytical framework into something more potent: both an explanation for social change and supposed proof of Western cultural warfare. Russian commentators didn't just cite the theory -  they wielded it as both explanation and evidence of Western attempts to undermine Russian society.

Over the next decade, I watched this once-academic term slide from Russian state TV screens and the trenches of eastern Ukraine into mainstream Western discourse - embraced by commentators on both the far left and far right of the political spectrum. What began as a framework for understanding social change became a blueprint for engineering it.

Now we're watching this process play out in real time.  For instance, Elon Musk's handpicked team running DOGE - the new Department of Government Efficiency - are inexperienced young men between the ages of 19 and 24 with unfettered access to federal systems. A decade ago, putting Silicon Valley twenty-somethings in charge of critical government functions would have sparked outrage. Today, it's celebrated as innovation.

What began as a framework for understanding social change became a blueprint for engineering it.

The transformation extends far beyond Washington. When America's president proposes to "take over" Gaza and turn it into "the Riviera of the Middle East," when Musk tells Germans to "move beyond" Nazi guilt, they're deliberately expanding what's politically possible. From Joe Rogan to Tucker Carlson, from African opinion writers praising Trump's aid cuts as "liberation" to conservative thinkers reimagining solutions for Gaza - each pushes the boundaries of acceptable discourse a little further.

The shift manifests across every domain of power. Inside federal agencies, tech executives now make decisions once reserved for career civil servants, normalizing private control of public functions. On the global stage, raw deal-making has replaced diplomatic principles, with decades-old alliances discarded in favor of transactional relationships. El Salvador's president offers his prisons to house American inmates. Ukraine, fighting for survival against Russia, signals its willingness to trade military support for mineral rights. Even humanitarian aid, long seen as a moral imperative, is being recast as a form of dependency that needs to be eliminated.

BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, has already adapted to this new reality. Their latest analysis simply divides nations into "winners and losers" based on their ability to navigate this new transactional diplomacy and stay on Trump’s good side. No moral judgments, no democratic values - just raw negotiating power.

The Overton Window - or "Окно Овертона блядь" as the Russian commander put it in 2014, mechanically adding the profanity at the end of each phrase like a full stop - offers a powerful framework for understanding how societies transform - not through sudden upheaval but through the gradual shifting of what people consider acceptable.  Whether through the brutal recalibrations of war or the calculated provocations of political theater, the Overton Window is always in motion, reshaped by those willing to push its boundaries.

This systematic normalization of the extreme is a core tenet of the authoritarian playbook - a calculated strategy of gradually expanding what society will tolerate, inch by inch, controversy by controversy. The goal is not just to push boundaries, but to exhaust resistance, to make the previously unimaginable seem not just possible, but inevitable.

The same mechanism operates in political discourse, where deliberate provocation becomes a strategic tool for reshaping collective perception. Donald Trump is the master of this approach. 

Whether through the brutal recalibrations of war or the calculated provocations of political theater, the Overton Window is always in motion, reshaped by those willing to push its boundaries. This systematic normalization of the extreme is a core tenet of the authoritarian playbook.

His political methodology isn't about achieving specific outcomes, but about continuously expanding the boundaries of acceptable discourse. Each provocative statement serves as a strategic instrument, deliberately designed to recalibrate social and political norms. When he suggests purchasing Greenland or proposing radical reimaginings of geopolitical landscapes like in Gaza, the actual feasibility becomes secondary to the act of introducing previously unthinkable concepts into mainstream conversation.

The genius of this approach lies in its relentlessness. By consistently proposing ideas that initially seem outrageous, extreme positions gradually become reference points for future discussions. Each controversial statement doesn't just distract from previous controversies; it fundamentally reshapes the political imagination. The goal is not immediate implementation but permanent transformation - moving the entire conceptual framework of what society considers possible.

Russian propagandists were early to grasp its significance, weaponizing the Overton Window theory itself as supposed evidence of Western cultural imperialism. That commander in Donetsk was just echoing what Russian state media had been claiming for years: that the West was deliberately expanding society's boundaries to impose its values on Russia.

A decade later, we're watching this process unfold in reverse. As transactional relationships replace values-based alliances, as oligarchic control displaces democratic institutions, as the unthinkable becomes routine - the transformation of our societies isn't happening by accident. 

Through the years of Brexit, Trump's first win, Orbán's rise, and the growing global polarization, that conversation in the ruins of Donetsk has stayed with me. There was something chilling about a commander discussing political theory between artillery fire - not because it felt academic, but because he embodied how thoroughly manufactured narratives could drive real-world violence. He was willing to fight and die for a worldview constructed by Russian state media about "traditional values" under attack. 

In the end, we are all unwitting participants in this grand narrative shift, our perceptions subtly recalibrated by the very forces that seek to reshape our understanding of what is possible, acceptable, and true. And whether we are shocked by those in power or find ourselves applauding them, we are simultaneously the observers and the changed.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

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And that’s without counting the cost of Trump’s decision to withdraw from the World Health Organization which has particularly serious implications for Africa. Eventually, Marco Rubio, the new U.S. secretary of state, walked back some of the order, saying exceptions would be made for “life-saving aid” including HIV treatments.

Despite Rubio’s clarification that essential aid would be granted a “humanitarian waiver,” many aid workers said they hadn’t yet been told whether they could resume operations, having already been told to cease operations last week. In Uganda alone, an estimated 1.2 million people would have been affected by the withdrawal of funds from AIDS relief. The Ugandan-born executive director of UNAIDS, Winnie Byanyima said that the United States’  “unwavering commitment to addressing HIV stands as a global gold standard of leadership.” If Trump continued to back AIDS relief, she added, the U.S. could effectively “end AIDS by 2030.” 

But few Ugandan politicians expressed any anger or even disappointment in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s blanket order to freeze funding. On X, human rights activist, Hillary Innocent Taylor Seguya asked “where is the outrage?” Months before, he had told me how the autocratic Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni’s government monitored social media posts and sometimes used online criticism as grounds to arrest activists.  

By contrast, in August, 2023, when the World Bank decided to suspend new public financing to Uganda, Museveni himself took to social media. The World Bank made its decision in the wake of Uganda’s “Anti-Homosexuality Act, 2023” which sought to “prohibit any form of sexual relations between persons of the same sex” and to “prohibit the promotion or recognition of sexual relations between persons of the same sex.” 

The range of punishments included life imprisonment and even the death penalty. For LGBT activist Hans Senfuma, the passage of the act into Ugandan law turned his nightmare into reality “It essentially gives the go-ahead to attack those who are assumed to be LGBTQ+,” he said, explaining that he himself now lived a life of secrecy, rarely leaving his apartment for fear even of his own neighbors.

It is, posted Museveni, “unfortunate that the World Bank and other actors dare to want to coerce us into abandoning our faith, culture, principles and sovereignty, using money.” Uganda, he added, “does not need pressure from anybody to know how to solve problems in our society. They are our problems.” Later that year, Joe Biden suspended Uganda from a group of African countries granted special duty free access to the US for specified products.

With the election of Trump, Uganda sees an opportunity to return to the fold. “We are going to start engaging with the new administration as soon as possible,” said Vincent Waiswa Bagiire, a senior foreign ministry official. “The tone which His Excellency Trump has set is favorable.” Over a five-year period, it was estimated that Uganda’s anti-LGBTQ law would cost it over $8 billion. But with Trump having signed his own anti-LGBTQ executive orders, the Ugandan government sees him as a likely ally, as someone who shares their values. 

Trump has used his executive power to restore U.S. participation in global anti-abortion pacts to deny millions of women around the world access to contraception and safe abortions. It’s a stance that puts the United States in league with Hungary, Russia and extreme theocracies.

Indeed, as The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported, Valerie Huber, a former adviser to the Trump administration, has been traveling across Africa soliciting government investment in her sex education programs. Huber, TBIJ noted, is the “driving force behind the Geneva Consensus Declaration, a statement signed by 34 countries saying that there is ‘no international right to abortion.’” 

Trump’s executive order commits the United States to recognizing “two sexes, male and female” which are apparently “not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.” This has emboldened anti-LGBT activists across the continent. In Ghana, for instance, a bill has been proposed to imprison people for “identifying” as LGBT or funding LGBT groups. While the new Ghanaian president John Mahama, who like Trump was inaugurated in January, says the bill is “effectively dead on procedural grounds,” activists have been pushing for its passage into law. “With Donald Trump’s return,” said one activist, “Ghana is on the right side of history.”

In a paper commissioned by the Swedish Association for Sexuality Education in September, the researcher Malayah Harper assessed the global ramifications of the implementation of Project 2025 proposals. Project 2025, she argued, “calls for an end to using U.S. diplomatic soft power in Africa to protect the rights of LGBTQ+ communities, and refers to this diplomacy as ‘imposing pro-LGBT initiatives.” Connected to this, is the conservative desire for Trump to pull the plug on U.S. funds for foreign organizations that promote or provide abortions. 

And Trump has done exactly that, using his executive power to restore U.S. participation in global anti-abortion pacts to deny millions of women around the world, including in Africa, access to contraception and safe abortions. Significantly, while speaking of the government’s “humanitarian waiver,” Rubio made sure to say exemptions did not apply to abortion, family planning, transgender surgeries, and diversity, equity and inclusion programs. It’s a stance that puts the United States in league with Hungary, Russia and extreme theocracies.

It is a key trope of Russian propaganda that homosexuality is a decadent Western concept. Russia, the Kremlin insists, is the last bastion of traditional family values, a pitch which has resonated with conservative communities everywhere. Now that the U.S. is following along the same path, the effect on women’s health could be catastrophic. 

Also, as Trump retreats from public health initiatives in Africa and elsewhere, it leaves the door open for others, particularly China to step in and reshape global alliances to its benefit. Anna Reismann, the Country Director for Uganda and South Sudan at Konrad-Adenaur-Stiftung, a foundation associated with the Christian Democratic Union of Germany, a major center-right political party, told me that dropping aid funding only fueled anti-Western narratives. “It plays to sentiments against colonialism and paternalistic behaviors of Western powers," she said. In other words, the vacuum left by the U.S. would be filled by China, Russia and other non-Western powers that do not impose human rights conditions on funding. 

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

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PB: Haiti, which is just 700 miles from the coast of Florida, is the United States’ ultimate other. Americans know very little about it. When I tell people that I lived in Haiti for a while, a few would say, “Oh, I've always wanted to go to Polynesia!” And I'd say, no, not Tahiti, Haiti. This is the same Haiti that is a four hour flight from JFK. I think that geographical proximity stands in sharp contrast to the wild American ignorance about Haiti, and I don't think that ignorance is unintentional. We'd rather not think about it as Americans. We would rather not know the manner in which the United States, our country, has subverted Haiti from the very get go.

Haiti is the only successful slave rebellion in history and what they managed to do was kick out Napoleon's own army. They were the first republic in the entire world to abolish slavery. And this was at a time when Thomas Jefferson was president in the United States, and the US had 60 more years until its Emancipation Proclamation. Haiti was way ahead of the United States on these issues, and it posed a terrible threat to these white imperial powers. These imperial powers built enormous wealth on ideologies of white supremacy — you saw this with England and India, France and Haiti and the United States with plenty of its own enslaved people. In that moment, the moment of its birth, Haiti was a pariah to the white imperial powers.

A lot of times there's a kind of obsession with the things that threaten us. I'm no psychologist, but the neuroses and the racism of the United States says a lot more about the United States than it does about Haiti; about the ways in which we remain threatened more than 200 years after the founding of the first black Republic. We remain threatened by the idea of black people governing themselves. You can see this in the ways that over the past 35 years, and even over the past 15 years, the United States has really done quite a lot of meddling with Haiti’s democracy, to put it mildly, which is what has led to its current state of violence and insecurity, and the complete dismantling of the state.

NJ: We see the same stereotypes and rhetoric each time this happens — foreigners and immigrants eat strange foods, they want your jobs, they are violent. Yet the American economy needs immigrant workers. When those workers express their cultural identity, or need health care, then immigration becomes an easy target for resentment. It’s like saying: come here, work in our factories, but don't be visible or have needs. Is that a correct characterization?

 PB: There's this wonderful Haitian saying: If you want to kill a dog, say it has rabies. That's what JD Vance is doing. What he's really doing is trying to foment fear among Americans, right? Foment fear of change, of black people, of the other and galvanize that fear. And so a great way to do it is to say that Haitians, they're diseased or they eat pets. These tropes have a very long history, of the third world being a place of diseases, or the savages.

NJ: “Savages” who are devoid of compassion for animals unlike civilized people, and only know how to hunt and kill. 
PB: Exactly! And this idea of eating pets is also interesting coming from the Republicans, who pride themselves on eating meat. Like Vance who received some flak for adapting to his wife's vegetarian diet. I think for a lot of Haitians have felt, like, what the fuck do I need to say? Should Haiti’s Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and all the Haitian pet lovers need to now come out and say, actually, we don't eat cats and dogs?

I know what you mean about the critical mass, it’s like saying — go ahead, you can be different in America as long as you act the same. But I have a feeling that a lot of the anti immigrant sentiment does not come from the people in towns like Springfield. It seems like the farther you are from actually knowing immigrants, the easier it is to scare you. These terrible lies are a great disservice to Haitians and immigrants, of course, but also to the people in towns like Springfield, even to those who might have voted Republican. Many people do try really hard to welcome immigrants, to make room, make resources available, and try to do the right thing.

I’m thinking of the incredible grace of the family of the boy who was killed in a vehicular accident in Ohio last year, by a person from Haiti. His death was a terrible and tragic accident, and even now, his family is showing up to city council meetings and asking for his death not to be used as a political tool.

The post Why is Trump obsessed with Haiti? He’s not the only one appeared first on Coda Story.

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Behind it all is the self-proclaimed “anarcho-capitalist” economist, television pundit and lambchop sideburn-laden populist President Javier Milei, who took office at the end of 2023. Milei’s rapid rise was fueled in part by his relative outsider status in a moment of economic crisis caused by what Milei calls the failed political “caste.” Argentina is grappling with inflation rates of more than 200%, a 40% poverty rate, plummeting foreign currency reserves and massive sovereign debt.

Milei, who defeated his institutional political opponents in a run-off, cited the Hanukkah story of the Maccabees in his inauguration speech in December, describing the Jewish warriors’ successful revolt against the ruling class in the 2nd century B.C. as a “symbol of the victory of the weak over the powerful.” This was no coincidence. Alongside his transgressive public presence and radical policy decrees, Milei emphatically embraces Judaism.

Born and raised Catholic, like the majority of Argentines, Milei has in recent years studied the Torah with great intrigue. He claims that he is seriously considering converting to Orthodox Judaism, but says he would do this only after his term in office, given the strict lifestyle requirements of orthodoxy. And he has voiced full-throated support for Israel’s ongoing bombardment of Gaza.

At his inauguration, Milei hosted conservative populist Viktor Orbán. The Hungarian prime minister, who is a close ally of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has drawn harsh critiques for his attempts to downplay the Hungarian role in the persecution of Jewish people during World War II and for his demonization of American-Hungarian philanthropist George Soros, who is Jewish. Also at the inauguration and invited to light the Hanukkah menorah was Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whose dependence on Western powers to defend Ukraine against Russia’s invasion has made him a symbol of liberal internationalism — one that the isolationist populist right has grown to loathe. After the ceremony, Zelenskyy, who is Jewish, was seen confronting Orbán over the Hungarian prime minister’s obstruction of efforts to get European Union aid to Ukraine.

Shortly before his inauguration, Milei received blessings from the famed Kabbalistic rabbi David Hanania Pinto. After his inauguration, Milei flew to New York to visit the tomb of “the Rebbe,” as the influential Hasidic spiritual leader Menachem Mendel Schneerson who died in 1994, is known; his burial place was also famously visited before Election Day 2016 by Ivanka Trump, herself a convert. After the gravesite visit, Milei dined with former U.S. President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, and Gerardo Werthein, a close personal friend of Clinton’s, who will soon become Argentina’s ambassador to the U.S. Werthein too is Jewish.

On the outside at least, Milei holds many contradictions. His embrace of a nationalist populist like Orbán suggests one set of priorities, while his kinship with Zelenskyy, a Jewish leader raising money globally for the war with Russia, suggests another. The same could be said of his visit to a religiously conservative spiritual site followed by lunch with a neoliberal Democrat who famously scandalized the White House by having an affair with an intern. Politically, religiously and stylistically, Milei is difficult to categorize.

Like other populists, his perceived authenticity is his biggest political asset. But who is the authentic Milei? Venezuelan journalist Moises Naim wrote in El País that there are two Mileis: One is the bespectacled libertarian economist who may actually break an economic gridlock for Argentina. The other is the tantric sex expert with an Austin Powers hairdo who famously hired a medium to speak with his deceased dog and dead people who told him he would win the presidency.

In a similar vein, there seem to be two Mileis with Judaism: One who has a sincere calling to the faith and all its intricate pluralisms, and one who dialogues with a global right that has used Israel as a symbol of conservative ethnonationalism while also engaging in antisemitic rhetorical tropes that have galvanized and won the support of disaffected, largely white Christian voters in both the U.S. and Europe.

Argentina itself is a place of contradictions in recent Jewish history. It has given safety to Jews fleeing persecution throughout the 20th century — they now compose about 0.5% of the population and represent Latin America’s largest Jewish community. But it also gave refuge to Nazis escaping war crimes tribunals after the Holocaust. A Spanish judiciary commission found that during Argentina’s military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983, Jews were disproportionately targeted for torture and disappearance. 

Milei has downplayed the “dirty war” carried out by that anti-communist military regime, which investigators later estimated to have ordered the extrajudicial killings of more than 20,000 people. His vice president, Victoria Villarruel, has pushed what the Buenos Aires Times called a “denialist discourse” about the history of the dictatorship. Families of victims have expressed fear that whitewashing Argentina’s darkest chapter of the 20th century could pave the way for history to repeat itself. 

In more recent decades, Argentina has become the site of proxy attacks on Israeli and Jewish institutions carried out by Iranian-aligned extremist groups. A 1992 suicide bombing on the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires killed 29 people and a similar attack on a Jewish community center two years later killed 85. Decades later, investigations into the bombings were marred by allegations that sitting government officials, including the left-wing president at the time, Cristina de Kirchner, had orchestrated a cover-up and committed. Alberto Nisman, the federal prosecutor investigating these allegations, was found dead in his apartment in 2015, shortly before he was scheduled to present his findings.

And despite Milei’s embrace of Judaism, his own administration is not immune to antisemitic allegiances. His attorney general, Rodolfo Barra, was once forced to resign from a government job when it was discovered he had been part of neo-Nazi group Tacuara.

The Israel-Hamas war has of course ratcheted up tensions around these cases, and in Jewish and Arab communities across the country.

“For most people, his Judaism is another eccentricity,” says writer Tamara Tenenbaum, whose father was killed in the 1994 Jewish community center bombing. Tenenbaum was part of a diverse group of Argentine Jewish intellectuals and leaders who signed a letter, “Milei does not represent us,” noting how Milei had been embraced by right-wing political projects around the world that champion Israel while simultaneously leaning into antisemitic tropes — through the vilification of concepts like “globalism” or “cultural marxism”— and supporting other forms of racism and discrimination. All this comes against a backdrop of a rising evangelical population in Argentina that supports both Milei and Israel, but may resist more progressive visions held by some segments of the Jewish community. 

“I got a lot of antisemitic hate online from supporters of Milei,” Tenenbaum told me. “Your surname speaks for you,” one person wrote her. Another message read: “Of course you are a leftist whore with that name.”

Since taking office, Milei has announced pro-Israel policies, like declaring Hamas a terrorist organization, installing his personal rabbi, Axel Wahnish, as ambassador to Israel, and declaring intentions to move Argentina’s Israel embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

The moves have inspired what Buenos Aires-based rabbi Fabián Skolnik calls “two opposing sentiments” among Argentine Jews who support Milei. On the one hand, “the community feels pride and happiness to have a pro-Jewish, pro-Israel president. He participates in community activities, in Hanukkah, in Jewish life.” Yet on the other hand, having a president visibly associated with Judaism inspires worry. “If things don’t go well and issues start to emerge, a lot of folks in the Jewish community are afraid that will awaken antisemitism.”

Not simply in style or words, Milei has networked himself with a posse of populist right-wing politicians worldwide, many members of which have embraced Israel, sometimes in spite of their own antisemitic leanings, in a fight against Islamic extremism or the fabled brand of communism they say is threatening to traditional family values. Right-wing populist leaders who celebrated Milei’s victory have in recent years also specifically embraced Netanyahu, Israel and “Judeo-Christian” conservative values — be they former U.S. President Donald Trump or former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who also proposed moving the Brazilian embassy to Jerusalem after the U.S. did as much in 2018.

Milei appears to be interested in aligning himself with other figures who may support his vision for austerity. “He happens to be in the same box as nationalist populist figures,” said Juan Soto, who has organized right-wing leaders including Milei in his work with the Disenso Foundation, a think-tank arm of Spain’s far right Vox Party. To wit, Milei signed onto the 2020 Carta de Madrid, a brief manifesto penned by the Disenso Foundation that denounced the supposedly encroaching specter of communism in Spain, Latin America and the United States.

But, Soto told me, “economic protectionism is where the New Right can be divided.” He described Milei as an outlier, in that he is “a free marketeer, a classical liberal, who needs international help.” In this sense too, Milei embodies contradictions. He is a libertarian who wants to dollarize the Argentine economy, who will also deeply rely on the International Monetary Fund — which Argentina owes $32 billion — to course correct his country’s economy. This is a far cry from other populist parties who embrace economic nationalism or alternative transnational cooperation with some of the U.S.’s rivals, such as BRICS — which Milei has refused to join — whose founding members are Brazil, Russia, India and China. 

Milei may align with Vox’s Carta de Madrid, but he doesn’t align with Old World conservatism that sometimes veers into Putin fetishism, as in the case of Hungary’s Orbán. In this sense, we have to understand Milei’s as a distinctly New World brand. He welcomes Yankee internationalism and displays a unique mash-up of embracing libertine social preferences mixed with conservative religious guidance. He has supporters with antisemitic leanings, but he himself loves Judaism. Milei may be more like Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador with Palestinian ancestry, who staunchly supports Israel, decries Hamas and has taken extreme measures to enact change in El Salvador — much akin to Milei’s campaign spirit of waving a chainsaw as a symbol of drastic change coming. In a battle to eradicate the country’s drug cartels, Bukele has taken a “state of exception” to extremes, overseeing the arrests of nearly 60,000 people alongside enforced disappearances, torture of detainees and an overall dissolution of due process. These measures have drastically reduced El Salvador’s once record-high homicide rate, but at a tremendous cost to its democracy and to the tens of thousands affected by Bukele’s scorched-earth approach.

Perhaps part of Milei’s interest in aligning with traditionalist or religious factions of the global right on issues like abortion, which he firmly opposes, is to distinguish himself from “social-marxist” opponents and civil rights detractors. “If you have an important figure in the global right like Milei who is so strongly interested in Judaism, it is an important building block in the ‘Judeo-Christian’ coalition,” says Rabbi Slomo Koves, a leader of the Hungarian Chabad, a highly networked sect of Judaism known for encouraging more religious observance among Jews. The global right’s embrace of the “Judeo” within the “Judeo-Christian” coalition could mitigate antisemitism within some rank-and-file. Or it could just help to cover it up. 

While holding all of these contradictions on the global stage and at home, Milei is already bringing shock therapy to Argentina’s bedraggled economy. At the World Economic Forum in Davos this year – the nationalist’s symbol of greedy globalists –  Milei addressed business leaders saying they were “social benefactors” and that free markets, not socialism, would save Argentina. He is a populist stradling the “globalist” and the “nationalist” divide. He is a potential Jewish convert navigating support for two different Jewish leaders, supporting two very different wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. At home, he is alternately donning his economist glasses and his chainsaw. How will all this impact Argentina’s economy, Jewish population and national fabric? We’ll soon find out.

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