An "incident" at a Canadian military base has resulted in the deaths and injuries of an undisclosed number of people, officials said Saturday evening.

A man was shot dead Saturday afternoon after an argument in a crowded New York subway station, police said.

Hurricane Trudy moved closer to Mexico's Pacific coast as a Category 2 story, the National Hurricane Center said Saturday.

Carrot Top is thanking well-wishers for their support after his recent hospitalization and set his performance return date for Monday at the Luxor.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Kyiv has "evidence" proving the Starlink military systems it uses are being throttled.

Israeli settlers allegedly attacked a group of European diplomats visiting the West Bank Saturday, just a day after a photojournalist was attacked.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order waiving sanctions against Russia, specifically some that were in the Graham Act passed by Congress.

Sylvester Stallone's mob western, "Tulsa King," kicked off Season 4 on Paramount+ Friday night with the shocking deaths of two long-time characters.

Riot police have come out to face protesters in Paris and other parts of France as demonstrations have sometimes become violent Saturday.

A new book makes the most rigorous case yet for why so few working-class people hold office. But by treating the lack of workers in office as a law of electoral democracy, its authors underrate how much organized workers could change it.

A new book makes the most rigorous case yet for why so few working-class people hold office. But by treating the lack of workers in office as a law of electoral democracy, its authors underrate how much organized workers could change it.

HBO has announced Antonio Banderas will co-star with Nicolas Cage in the next installment of the anthology series, "True Detective."

China’s internet is known for a vast system of censorship and surveillance that has evolved alongside its booming digital economy. Yet the story of the Chinese internet is not simply one of authoritarian control or unrestricted growth. In her book, The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet, journalist and author Yi-Ling Liu explores how people navigate within the constantly shifting boundaries of censorship, carving out creative spaces for communities and political expression.In an interview with Jacobin, Liu talks about how the Chinese internet has evolved from a space of relative openness into an increasingly tightly controlled digital ecosystem, and how the Communist Party of China’s efforts to regulate online life intersect with its broader attempts to shape social values. She also looks at the changing relationship between Silicon Valley and Beijing, arguing that the familiar opposition between a “free” American internet and an “authoritarian” Chinese one is becoming harder to sustain.Merle GronewegYour book is called The Wall Dancers, drawing on the metaphor of “dancing in shackles” to describe how people in China navigate the shifting boundaries of censorship and political expression. Where does this metaphor come from, and why did you choose it as the title?Yi-Ling LiuI first heard the term “dancing in shackles” when interviewing hip-hop artists in China in the mid-2010s. They used it to describe creating music within the constraints of censorship. But I kept encountering the phrase and found that Chinese journalists had been using it since at least the early 2000s to describe reporting under state constraints.I was drawn to the metaphor because it captured what I experienced while living in China: this dynamic push and pull between state and society. It’s not a fixed relationship but something more fluid and unpredictable. I became interested in people who were particularly adept at navigating this terrain, and I came to call them “dancers.” Those navigating the online space became the “wall dancers.”Merle GronewegOne of those “wall dancers” is Ma Baoli, who eventually went on to found Blued, a large gay dating app. Can you tell us his story?Yi-Ling LiuMa Baoli grew up in Qinhuangdao in northeastern China and trained to become a police officer. As a teenager, he realized he was gay, although he didn’t really have the language for it. As far as he understood from his school textbooks, homosexuality was either a crime or an illness.That changed when the internet arrived in China in the late 1990s and the first internet cafés opened in Qinhuangdao. One day, he came across Beijing Story, an anonymous short story about two young men who fall in love against the backdrop of the Tiananmen demonstrations. It was revelatory for him: he realized he wasn’t alone. As he explored further, he discovered an entire queer community online that he hadn’t known existed.Inspired by this, he created a website called Danlan, meaning “light blue.” For years, he lived a double life: during the day, he was a police officer; at night, he ran Danlan. The website grew, he moved to Beijing, and he eventually quit the police force and came out publicly.By the time I met him, he was the CEO of Blued, which in 2019 was the world’s largest gay dating app. He was preparing to take the company public on the New York Stock Exchange.Merle GronewegBut ultimately, things didn’t end so well.Yi-Ling LiuWhen I started meeting him in 2019, he was at his peak. At the same time, there was already a tightening around civil society and queer organizations. Blued remained successful partly because it very consciously presented itself as a company rather than as a form of political activism.But by 2020, essentially every geopolitical headwind that could have tripped up Ma Baoli emerged. The pandemic shook the initial public offering, while US-China tensions made investors increasingly nervous about Chinese tech companies. Then, in 2020 and 2021, the government launched the Common Prosperity campaign and began reigning in tech entrepreneurs, starting with Jack Ma, Alibaba, and Ant Group. New regulations significantly curtailed the relatively free rein China’s tech entrepreneurs had previously enjoyed.At the same time, the tightening around queer communities became more ideological. It was no longer focused primarily on NGOs and political activism but increasingly encompassed ideas about masculinity, traditional gender roles, and China’s demographic trajectory. Feminist groups and social media accounts on Weibo, Douyin, and Xiaohongshu have also been shut down in recent years. I see all of this as part of a broader tightening.Blued was hit on both fronts. The company eventually went private after performing badly on the stock exchange, and Ma Baoli resigned as CEO. The company he had built, with around eight hundred employees, was no longer his. He ended up running a small e-commerce start-up from an office about the size of his old one in Qinhuangdao. Since the book was published in February, Blued has also been removed from app stores, so its future is very uncertain.Merle GronewegThe internet came to China during the period of “Reform and Opening Up” initiated by Deng Xiaoping. Liberal economic reforms intensified in the 1990s, while at the same time the Chinese government introduced its first rules governing the web. Geremie Barmé and Sang Ye first coined the term “Great Firewall of China” in a Wired article in 1997. What happened in those years?Yi-Ling LiuIn the mid-to-late 1990s, everyone embraced the internet, both outside and within China. The Chinese government was somewhat at odds over what to do with this new technology. They knew it could be a huge source of economic innovation, but at the same time it was inherently unstable.Deng Xiaoping is widely credited with saying: “If you open the windows, you’re inevitably going to let some flies in.” He was referring to reform and opening and allowing Western cultures and ideas into the country. But this also applied to internet technologies.The Great Firewall — or the Golden Shield Project as it was called at the time — was initiated by the Ministry of Public Security to address those “flies.” It started around 1997 and became increasingly sophisticated up until 2008. “Great Firewall” wasn’t an official term but a popular one coined by Barmé and Sang Ye. Today the Chinese equivalent, fanghuoqiang, is used quite openly even among government officials and academics.Originally the system was relatively straightforward: filtering prohibited phrases, blocking certain websites, and deploying internet police who could intervene if someone searched for politically sensitive content. Since then, the Great Firewall has grown to encompass much more.It includes top-down regulators such as the Cyberspace Administration of China and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and their censorship directives, as well as censors at social media companies who scrub content from the web. And there is another part we don’t often talk about: the internalized self-censorship people experience when deciding whether or not to speak.Merle GronewegThe so-called speech tax?Yi-Ling LiuYes, which is actually quite an old term. It was coined by Wang Xiaobo, a famous writer in the 1990s, and refers to speaking in praise of the country, government, or party as a way of gaining approval.Wang used it in reference to the Cultural Revolution, when people would sing its praises even if they privately felt differently, as a way to survive. I noticed people using the term again around 2020, particularly in relation to patriotic content.One example was the controversy around the NBA and the Hong Kong protests. After Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey expressed support for the protests on Twitter, Chinese celebrities began posting statements on Weibo such as “I stand with the Hong Kong police” or “I’m a proud Chinese.”Some of that may have been sincere. But it could also be a way of signaling allegiance and gaining government acceptance, which might help celebrities secure sponsorships or boost their visibility on platforms. That’s how I came to think of it as a speech tax: you pay a tax to the party through speech, and that in turn enables you to succeed in the marketplace.Merle GronewegIndeed, the censorship apparatus as well as the directives regarding which content to censor have evolved tremendously over the past three or four decades. Non-permissible content has expanded beyond the traditional “three Ts” — Tiananmen, Taiwan, and Tibet — to a much wider range of topics, while the government seeks to actively promote “positive energy.” How and when did you observe these changes?Yi-Ling LiuIn the early 2010s, the general understanding was that you could more or less say what you wanted as long as you avoided highly sensitive political topics, such as the three Ts. Censors intervened primarily when something or someone encouraged collective action or mobilization, but when it came to sex, societal dissatisfaction, the economy, or celebrities, there was quite a bit of leeway.A new directive from 2017 showed that this was changing. There were now clearly defined “core socialist values” that needed to be reinforced and other values considered undesirable. Some of the things on the list were strange, such as endangering animals, but also striking in other ways: excessively flaunting wealth or extramarital affairs, for example. There are also campaigns against “idol worship” and excessive video gaming among minors.All of this represented a broader shift toward actively shaping what society and relationships should look like, driven by a sense that capitalism and liberalism had taken China too far and produced unhealthy values that needed to be reined in. I would put the government’s encouragement of “positive energy” in the same category.It’s no longer just: “Don’t say this, don’t say that.” It’s also: “Here are the values we want to encourage.” That includes patriotism and Chinese civilizational strength, but also more traditional ideas about marriage and social behavior.Merle GronewegDo the algorithms support this content?Yi-Ling LiuAbsolutely. It’s difficult to know how much is built into the algorithms and how much comes from human censors, but social media platforms clearly favor patriotic content, which continually rises to the top of news feeds. That makes it difficult to gauge actual public sentiment. There may be genuine grassroots nationalism, but it is also amplified by the algorithms.Merle GronewegOne of the people you spoke with for your book is a former censor. What did you learn from his experience?Yi-Ling LiuOne of the subjects of my book is Eric Liu, who worked as a “content editor” — effectively a censor — for Weibo from 2010 to 2011. At the time, Weibo was a burgeoning microblogging site seen as a harbinger of free speech.Eric was one of around 150 censors working there. He was a recent college graduate who didn’t really know what to do with his life. He found this job, and he found it incredibly boring and draining — it sucked the life out of him — but it paid a salary.Toward the end of his time there, he had a crisis of conscience, particularly after the 2011 Wenzhou train crash, in which many people died. He found himself removing posts about the accident and felt he was erasing real human suffering and preventing officials from being held accountable. He began collecting “censorship directives” sent by government authorities telling censors what content to remove and eventually leaked them to a nonprofit organization in New York. They provide an incredible window into how the censorship regime operates.I think Eric’s story is important because it puts a human face on the firewall. It’s not a precise machine that simply enforces a set of rules; maintaining it requires an enormous amount of human labor and judgment. When Eric worked at Weibo, there were around 150 censors. Today he estimates there are probably tens of thousands.Merle GronewegLooking at the decades since Mao Zedong’s death, China has gone through repeated phases of opening and tightening. Under Xi Jinping, not only were many civil society organizations shut down and other forms of civic expression curtailed, but in 2021, a crackdown on tech companies explicitly targeted the “disorderly expansion of capital.” What drives these patterns?Yi-Ling LiuChinese scholars have a vocabulary for it: fang and shou, opening and tightening. At its root is a tension between economic growth and innovation on the one hand, and political stability on the other. When the system opens and becomes too unstable, conservatives within the Communist Party assert control. When it becomes too rigid and stagnant, reformers within the government or society call for change.These phases aren’t uniform, but the broader trend over the past decade has clearly been one of closing. I would trace its roots back to 2008, with the Beijing Olympics and the global financial crisis.That was a moment when the Chinese government and intellectuals looked at the United States and the West and said, “This is where liberalization leads; this is what unfettered capitalism looks like.” In some ways, the Common Prosperity campaign was a coda to that response: we’ve seen that this doesn’t work, so instead of continuing down the path of liberalization, we’re going to clamp down.On a smaller scale, though, there has arguably been some opening around tech entrepreneurship and economic innovation in 2025 compared with 2023 — though not in civil society or politics. The pandemic had created an intense period of closure when stability was paramount. China’s growing confidence in itself amid American dysfunction may also play a role: you look at the other side and think, that actually looks pretty bad; we can afford to loosen up a little.Merle GronewegLet’s turn to the relationship with US tech companies. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Cisco provided surveillance technology that helped enable the firewall. In 2004–5, Yahoo provided Chinese authorities with email information that contributed to a journalist receiving a ten-year prison sentence. However, in 2008, Google changed course over its willingness to comply with Chinese censorship and decided to leave the country. How have US tech companies navigated China’s system over the years?Yi-Ling LiuFor a long time, the United States was invested in the idea that China would eventually become more like America: a free market and Western-style democracy. Tech companies entered China assuming they could operate within its constraints, but that liberalization would eventually follow. Bill Clinton famously compared controlling the internet to trying to nail Jell-O to the wall. The assumption was that liberty would spread through the internet.He was wrong. But these companies were also salesmen and profiteers. China was a huge market, and Silicon Valley companies were eager to tap into it. As late as 2016, you had Mark Zuckerberg jogging around Tiananmen Square as he tried to bring Facebook into China.That changed rapidly with the US-China tech wars, Donald Trump, and the tightening within China. Zuckerberg illustrates the shift well. By around 2018, he was arguing that the United States needed to protect its data from China and compete with Chinese companies.That’s now the dominant narrative among major US tech companies, particularly companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic. Progress is increasingly framed as a zero-sum game. We’ve moved from a “complicit dance” model that was very profit-driven to an “antagonistic race” model that is still very profit-driven. The incentive structures have simply changed.Merle GronewegThis liberal binary between a supposedly free internet and a censored one seems increasingly difficult to sustain, especially when we look at X. Do you see a convergence in how algorithms and content are controlled?Yi-Ling LiuThe idea that the American internet is free and open while the Chinese internet is closed and authoritarian is falling apart. I’m skeptical when that binary is used to justify policy agendas. In the US AI Action Plan, for example, the race to defeat “authoritarian AI” with “democratic AI” is invoked to justify building more data centers, rolling back regulations, and weakening intellectual property rights for artists and creatives.The two systems aren’t identical, of course, but the distinction is increasingly difficult to sustain. TikTok is a good example. For years, the concern was that because ByteDance had links to the Chinese government, it could shape what users saw. Now, after TikTok was sold primarily to US investors and companies, similar concerns remain because of Oracle’s role and its close links to the Trump administration. People are now asking to what extent Trump and Oracle can shape the feeds of users.So despite the shift in ownership, the underlying system of algorithmic control, tied to state and Big Tech power, remains. If anything, the two systems increasingly resemble each other rather than looking like polar opposites.Merle GronewegWhat role do social media and apps play in the lives of people in China today?Yi-Ling LiuThere are two things that are unique about the Chinese internet experience. First and foremost, it’s ultimately walled off from the rest of the world. It’s not a completely impenetrable wall, but the Chinese internet exists in what I like to call its own walled garden — a separate ecosystem, a parallel online universe where people are not on TikTok, they’re on Douyin; they’re not on Facebook, they’re on WeChat; they’re not taking Ubers, they’re taking Didis.For every kind of platform, culture, or community that exists outside the firewall, there is some equivalent within it. To step into that space means to inhabit a completely different world. And if people move in and out of the firewall, it can create a jarring bifurcation. The news you’re reading on Toutiao is going to look very different from the news you’re reading on a Western news platform.The second thing is that the internet is very deeply embedded in people’s daily lives. The rise of the mobile internet really took root and accelerated in China early on. Using your phone as a tool for everything, with mobile payments as the dominant form of payment, is very much a Chinese phenomenon. It’s therefore hard to determine where your online life begins and ends. This became particularly clear during the COVID pandemic, when your health status was indicated by whether you had a red or green QR code. Your identity is inextricably bound with your online identity.Merle GronewegFor a brief moment in January 2025, American and Chinese users exchanged glimpses into each others’ everyday lives when “TikTok refugees” from the United States opened accounts on the Chinese app Xiaohongshu (RedNote). How did you experience that exchange?Yi-Ling LiuIt was a small and transient but also beautiful moment. It reminded me of the promise of the early internet: bringing people together in unexpected ways, unmediated and unfiltered — although technically, they were still filtered through the RedNote app.What struck me was how much people cared about the same things. They wanted to know what people on the other side paid for groceries or rent, whether they found meaning in their work and what their everyday lives looked like. They were sending each other photos of their cats.It was a genuine example of grassroots exchange, and I think it felt so good precisely because that kind of interaction has become so rare. Often people approach China with preexisting ideologies, whether from the right or left political spectrum. There’s a tendency to project our desires onto the country. Among parts of the American left, that can mean glorifying China as an ideal communist state and a counter-model to imperialist America.But I think people should pay closer attention to the experiences and voices of people in China. The 996.ICU movement is a good example: tech workers at Microsoft in the United States followed what was happening to tech workers in China and engaged with them directly on GitHub, without ideological or third-party intermediaries.This article originally appeared in Jacobin, a democratic socialist magazine publishing long-form essays and analysis on politics, economics, and culture. Subscribe to the print edition for $20 a year.

Between the Israeli genocide in Gaza and the calamitous stalemate of Donald Trump’s war in Iran, the American foreign policy consensus has been coming apart. Popular support for the United States’ violent foreign policy has reached an unprecedented nadir, as Americans increasingly recognize the downsides of maintaining a global empire.In particular, US military largesse has come at the cost of spending on domestic needs, and voters are increasingly unhappy about this trade-off. According to polling by ReThink Media and the Costs of War Project at Brown University, 59 percent of respondents found the Trump administration’s proposed 2027 Pentagon budget of $1.5 trillion to be excessive.This new epoch has ruptured elite unanimity over how the United States should proceed with its Atlas-like standing in the world. On the Right, Trump’s Iran war has curdled support from key MAGA acolytes like Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Meanwhile, socialists like Zohran Mamdani have helped mobilize the intense unpopularity of Israel’s decimation of Gaza into a movement that threatens to undo the Democratic Party’s long-standing fidelity to Tel Aviv.Yet centrist Democrats, despite waning influence, maintain a garrote around foreign policy and fiercely resist the dialing back of US imperial ambitions. As the 2028 presidential primary approaches, this faction may yet exert strong influence over whatever Democratic administration might assume office.What makes the center’s foreign policy so stifling is a commitment to an outdated vision of American supremacy. Prominent figures who represent this ideology include Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin, Joe Biden’s national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, and former Obama chief of staff and disgraced Chicago mayor — and potential presidential candidate — Rahm Emanuel. They are all wedded to the idea that technocratic efficiency in the service of US imperial power, not any kind of democratic accountability, should continue to dominate American foreign policy. Their play is to rebrand the politics of empire as a pugilistic, muscular force for liberal internationalism that will, under the banner of great-power competition, reignite the moderate wing of the Democratic Party. Socialists must be prepared to confront the embattled center’s noxious, reheated Cold War narratives — especially because centrists will no doubt weaponize them against the insurgent Left.The Center Holds?These anachronistic Cold Warriors view politics as eternal struggle characterized by a conflict between “free-market” democrats and rigid authoritarians. The reason for the center’s fixation on these outdated schemas isn’t difficult to grasp: US victory in the Cold War was the pinnacle of the liberal international project. The end of the Soviet Union was supposed to illustrate once and for all that Western-style capitalism was superior to any alternative. But even as the foundations of American preeminence have deteriorated, the establishment is not ready to relinquish the idea that we should perpetually remain the “indispensable nation.”This obsession appears periodically in their rhetoric: “As a Cold War kid, I’m thankful it was [Ronald] Reagan and not Trump in office in the 1980s. Trump would have lost us the Cold War,” Slotkin said in her response to the president’s March 2025 address to Congress. “Donald Trump’s actions suggest that, in his heart, he doesn’t believe we are an exceptional nation. He clearly doesn’t think we should lead the world.”The collapsing of complexity is key to the center’s perspective. See, for example, Sullivan’s projection of the Russian invasion of Ukraine through a similar lens: “As a child of the eighties and ‘Rocky’ and ‘Red Dawn,’ I believe in freedom fighters, and I believe in righteous causes, and I believe the Ukrainians have one,” Sullivan told the New Yorker in 2023. “There are very few conflicts that I have seen — maybe none — in the post–Cold War era . . . where there’s such a clear good guy and bad guy.” This reductive framework turns the horrific war into a made-in-Hollywood Manichaean struggle rather than a crisis that might be addressed through actual diplomacy.Emanuel took such thinking a step further in a 2025 Wall Street Journal op-ed with the subhead “Can Americans stop fighting each other long enough to appreciate the threat from China?” As Trump’s second term battered American confidence in the country’s intrinsic goodness, Emanuel argued that the United States could move forward if we set aside our petty grievances and focus on the existential threat emerging from the East.In this understanding of geopolitical brinksmanship, America becomes the shining city on the hill when it’s engaged in a metaphysical battle. A refrain sung by liberals during the Cold War was that our rivalry with the Soviet Union was not only a moral struggle, but that the fight against communism was a spur to domestic progress. After World War II, issues such as civil rights were embraced by the original Cold Warriors like President Harry Truman in large part because racial inequality was often highlighted in Soviet propaganda. Anti-black racism had to be resolved not simply because it was flagrantly unjust, but also because it was useful to the enemy. When Truman became the first president in history to address the NAACP, he asserted that the United States must “put our own house in order” if it was to overcome the supposed Soviet threat.We can see a modern-day analog of this thinking in how the center approaches China. But unlike with the Soviet Union, in which the rivalry was seen as a catalyst for progressive social change, centrists view our competition with China as an opportunity to usher in a new era of prosperity for the middle class — while eschewing the ambitious redistributive measures being advocated by socialists like Mamdani and fellow travelers like Abdul El-Sayed.Take Emanuel’s proposal to tax online betting and prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi and use the billions procured to reverse cuts to the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, all under the auspices of better competing with China. “I want to bet on America, not bet against America, and that’s what we’re doing right now,” he said in a recent appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher. “And plow all the money into doubling up on research, so we don’t lose this race on fusion, nuclear energy, quantum computing, life sciences, to the Chinese, which we are now losing.”Slotkin has sounded a similar note. In a 2025 speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, she insisted that failing to invest in future technologies would make American families vulnerable not only to financial hardship but also to cyberterror attacks engineered by Xi Jinping. “We need economic security to be a national security priority. We need to get our ass in gear on the tech arms race, particularly on AI, and we need to protect Americans at home from these [Chinese] threats.”Sullivan, to his credit, once acknowledged that explicitly endorsing the concept of a second Cold War is unappealing to the contemporary middle class. In a Carnegie Endowment paper he coauthored right before Biden’s 2020 victory, Sullivan and his fellow wonks say that winning the middle-class vote means doing away with notions of “cosmic struggle” with China. Nevertheless, the paper advocates for a foreign policy that would maintain American dominance through reaping the benefits of “business dynamism and trade openness . . . while massively increasing public investment to enhance U.S. competitiveness, resilience, and equitable economic growth.”Still, the Carnegie paper expresses a kind of neo–Cold War logic: while acknowledging that Americans are concerned about imperial overreach, the report nonetheless claims they want a strong national defense, in part due to its invigorating effects on the economy. (Despite the fact that military spending is an ineffective means of creating jobs compared to public investments in health care or education.) So, Sullivan and company argue, a dramatic reduction in Pentagon spending would be unwise. “Instead of slashing the defense budget, a more prudent course would be to reduce defense spending gradually and predictably over the longer term, while shifting some resources toward a broader conception of national defense,” the report asserts.Here the long tail of the Cold War becomes even more pronounced. The center left draws substantial portions of its capital, both literal and political, from the defense industry. Although 56 percent of US voters want to reduce defense spending, the technocratic center refuses to pivot. That is not only because they are still convinced of our empire’s value to the world but also because, largely due to the Cold War, the political economy of the United States remains intimately intertwined with defense spending. Adopting less militaristic stances would not only be detrimental to their reelection campaigns — defense lobbyists are some of the most generous campaign contributors — but would undermine their push for a new military-tech spending spree.The Intraparty FightThis is why attempts by progressives like Rep. Ro Khanna to push the Democratic Party toward an explicit rejection of interventionism were met with dismissal by senior Democrats. When Politico interviewed lawmakers during the 2025 North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit, New Hampshire Sen. Jeanne Shaheen forcefully rejected Khanna’s suggestion. “I think Ro Khanna is wrong. The fact is, foreign policy isn’t that easy. You can’t just say I’m against all conflicts because they’re all going to be against America’s interest or against global interest,” Shaheen, who has taken substantial campaign donations from the defense industry, said.Yet the influence of legalized corruption is only part of the explanation of the center’s intransigence here. The resurgence of the Cold Warrior archetype increasingly looks like a prelude to a larger impending fracture within the Democratic Party. Moderates are hoping to invoke the refined art of anti-communism to discipline the rising socialists in the party like Mamdani, Melat Kiros, and Claire Valdez.After the triumphs by Kiros, Valdez, and other left-wing candidates in this past summer’s Democratic primaries, perennial neoconservative scrivener David Brooks penned a column in The Atlantic encouraging establishment Democrats to retake the party — much like they did following the end of World War II. In Brooks’s telling of events, President Truman and his allies’ purge of every shade of red from the Democratic Party and its allied trade unions paved the way for modern liberalism’s golden era. (Though historian Manning Marable has persuasively argued that this purge dramatically set back progress on civil rights.) This intraparty clash “taught [Democratic centrists] how to organize, how to push back against a foe that did not believe in democratic niceties. It made them tougher.”According to Brooks, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) — which he claims is in league with the governments of Cuba and Venezuela as well as Hamas — are analogous to the Communists who were once critical to the New Deal coalition. (In a similar vein, British Trotskyist turned born-again centrist Paul Mason recently called on elected socialists to condemn the DSA “Leninists” in their midst.) If Brooks’s perspective is indicative, the center views the struggle over foreign policy as not simply a matter of electoral strategy but as an existential fight for hegemony within the party.But there’s a paradox in the resurgence of the Cold Warrior: the original Cold War was inherently ideological, and the current geopolitical vacuum its ending has created is deeply postmodern. For now, there are no grand disputes over the direction of history, and the attempt to make an enemy out of China is unjustified, dangerous, and counterproductive when it comes to addressing global challenges like climate change.The socialist left needs to offer an alternative narrative about, and vision of, foreign policy. That might include an account of what demilitarization will look like; an argument as to why and how we should divest from egregious human rights violators like Israel and Saudi Arabia; a plan for cooperating with other global powers to rebuild a world ravaged by austerity and ecological collapse; and a case for aid to hemispheric allies in Latin America that are reckoning with the rise of new reactionary governments. That sort of vision offers a way beyond the fruitless Cold War fantasies indulged by centrists like Emanuel and Slotkin.This article originally appeared in Jacobin, a democratic socialist magazine publishing long-form essays and analysis on politics, economics, and culture. Subscribe to the print edition for $20 a year.

Released in theaters and on-demand Friday, the fact-based film "Clean Hands" was directed by Jake Allyn and stars Zach Braff and Esther McGregor.

Britain’s latest prime minister, Andy Burnham, raised hackles on his first trip to the North of Ireland when he declared a referendum on Irish unity to be “off the table.” Burnham may simply have intended to say that it wasn’t on the short-term agenda, since there is no sign as yet that a majority of people in the North would vote for a united Ireland. But his choice of words implied that it was for the British government to decide whether a referendum should happen, which angered nationalists.Burnham’s secretary of state for Northern Ireland, Chris Bryant, made another clumsy intervention when the unionist Orange Order tried to march down the nationalist Garvaghy Road in Portadown. The Parades Commission, which regulates all public parades in the North, had denied permission for the march every year since the late 1990s. This time, however, a court found that the commission hadn’t followed the right procedures before rejecting the Orange Order’s application once again.When the Orange Order filed another application to march down the Garvaghy Road on Sunday, September 29, the commission gave its approval, to the astonishment of nationalists. The Irish taoiseach, Micheál Martin, described the decision as “incomprehensible and wrong.” After not one but two court hearings on September 28, the march was due to go ahead, but residents of the Garvaghy Road assembled overnight to block the road.They were joined by Michelle O’Neill and Mary Lou McDonald, Sinn Féin’s leadership team from North and South, along with politicians from the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) and People Before Profit. The size of the counterdemonstration and the involvement of high-profile figures like O’Neill ensured that the march could not go ahead.Unionist politicians accused O’Neill and the other demonstrators of breaking the law, and Chris Bryant added his voice to the chorus: “Nobody should be attending an unlawful protest.” Bryant waited for two weeks before using his ministerial powers to overturn the Parade Commission’s decision and prevent the Orange Order from marching.Bryant delivered his first speech to the recent Labour Party conference in the shadow of events in Portadown. While he alluded to the latest crisis, Bryant’s main priority was to make the case for the Northern Ireland Troubles Bill that his government has introduced. The bill has already become a political flash point as part of a long-running dispute over the record of the state security forces during the Troubles.State CollusionOn February 12, 1989, Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane, who was known for challenging the British government in human rights cases, sat down to dinner with his wife and three children. During the meal, three gunmen entered the family home and shot Finucane fourteen times. His wife, Geraldine, was wounded in the attack. Finucane was thirty-nine when he was killed by a pro-British loyalist paramilitary group.The killing might have been another entry in the grim catalog of Troubles murders were it not for what happened afterward. One of his killers, Ken Barrett, was eventually convicted. Successive investigations uncovered extensive evidence of collusion between loyalist paramilitaries responsible for killings like this and British state agents.In 2012, then–Prime Minister David Cameron apologized to the Finucane family for what he described as “shocking levels of state collusion.” A review by Sir Desmond de Silva concluded that there had been a “wilful and abject failure” by successive governments to establish a proper legal framework for the handling of state agents.In 2019, the UK Supreme Court ruled that previous investigations into Finucane’s murder had failed to meet the state’s obligations under Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The family had spent decades asking for an independent inquiry into the circumstances of his death. This year, they finally got one. The Patrick Finucane Inquiry held its preliminary hearing in Belfast on June 10.In Westminster, this has opened up an argument over what should happen to the remaining open cases from the Troubles. The Northern Ireland Troubles Bill is supposed to replace the Conservative government’s deeply controversial 2023 Legacy Act.The latter bill attempted to draw a line under the past by ending new inquests and civil actions. Many saw this as a way of giving immunity to British soldiers for crimes they committed during the conflict. The immunity provisions were condemned by victims’ organizations and Northern Ireland’s political parties, both nationalist and unionist.The Labour government that took office in 2024 eventually scrapped the Legacy Act and introduced the new Troubles bill in its place. While it does contain some improvements, it is still seriously flawed.Last month, the Westminster Joint Committee on Human Rights stated that the bill needs further changes if it is to secure public confidence and address the legacy of the conflict properly. It raised concerns about the independence of the proposed Legacy Commission, the handling of sensitive information, the role of families, and the legal framework surrounding investigations.“Our Brave Armed Forces”Over 3,500 people were killed during the Troubles. While British political discourse usually presents the conflict as a sectarian one with the British army stuck in the middle, this distorts the historical record and erases the culpability of the state for its own abuses.Chris Bryant’s Labour colleague Al Carns was armed forces minister until his resignation in June this year. Carns, who served as an officer in Britain’s Royal Marines, claimed that the Troubles Act would promote unfair harassment of former soldiers: “The [Irish Republican Army] failed to achieve its political ends through the use of terrorist tactics. We must be exceptionally careful that we do not help them achieve those ends through other means.”Bryant appeared to be very anxious to reassure Carns and his political allies in his party conference speech. He began by expressing his gratitude to every British soldier who had served during the Troubles — “Thank you for your service” — and promised that they would not be “dragged through the courts unnecessarily . . . there is no equivalence between the lawful actions of our brave armed forces and the deliberate acts of terrorists.”The argument that veterans are being unfairly targeted has a long history but little evidence to back it up. In 2017, the Democratic Unionist Party claimed that 90 percent of cases investigated by the Historical Enquiries Team (HET) involved killings by the British army; the real figure was approximately 30 percent. The HET had completed investigations into 1,615 cases by that point: 1,038 of the cases involved killings attributed to republicans, 536 were attributed to loyalists, and just thirty-two were attributed to the army.Prosecutions of former soldiers have been rare. According to Bryant’s predecessor as Northern Ireland secretary, Hilary Benn, the authorities considered sixty-eight Troubles-related cases for prosecution between 2012 and 2024 and decided to bring prosecutions in twenty-five of those cases. Only six involved the military, and only one of the six resulted in a conviction (and a suspended sentence).The Standards ExpectedOne of the most notorious cases is that of Soldier F, the name given for legal reasons to a former paratrooper who went on trial over the Bloody Sunday killings in January 1972, when the British army’s Parachute Regiment shot dead thirteen unarmed civil rights protesters in Derry. In October 2025, Soldier F was acquitted of murdering James Wray and William McKinney and of attempting to murder five others.The judge said the evidence against Soldier F was not strong enough to convict him, with the passage of more than half a century since Bloody Sunday making it harder to test witness statements. The British government spent £4.3 million on his defense, a figure that angered victims’ families and politicians, including Foyle MP Colum Eastwood of the SDLP, who called the spending “sick.”The British state has an obvious interest in bringing the Troubles to an end politically. As time passes since the conflict wound down, more and more people are becoming aware of the sinister role played by the British security forces, including allegations of extrajudicial killings and widespread collusion with loyalist paramilitary groups. The British government has acknowledged that collusion was rife.The current legacy machinery itself hardly inspires public confidence. The existing Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery has been operating under the framework created by the Conservative government’s Legacy Act. In May, a government-commissioned review by Peter May, a former permanent secretary with the Northern Ireland Civil Service, pointed to serious problems in the organization. This prompted Bryant to say that some of the issues the review identified were “unacceptable” and “below the standards expected.”The government subsequently established an oversight committee and action plan. The Troubles bill proposes transforming that organization into a reformed Legacy Commission. The government’s 2026–27 work plan anticipates substantially increased demand once the new legislation comes into force. It also states that the commission is awaiting further detail from the government about cases that will be referred to it.On October 13, the British government brought forward more than one hundred amendments to the Troubles bill. One of the most significant changes was a move to give the British attorney general exclusive responsibility for deciding whether prosecutions over Troubles-related offenses should go ahead. Another amendment “makes clear that the Bill does not allow the lawful actions of soldiers in the course of duty to be treated as equivalent to the actions of terrorists.”Michelle O’Neill branded the amended bill as a “veterans’ charter” and a “wasted opportunity”: “The British Attorney General, who is appointed by the British Government, is going to adjudicate as to whether or not British state forces broke the law here.” Even with the amendments, bodies representing British veterans still complained that it did not offer their members total immunity from any threat of prosecution.Waiting Too LongNearly three decades after the Good Friday Agreement, the institution intended to deal with the past is still waiting for the legislation that is supposed to tell it how to do its job. Meanwhile, the people with direct memories of the Troubles are growing older, from civilians to soldiers and paramilitaries. For many families, this agonizing wait for truth and justice has already consumed most of their lives.There are also gaps in the bill that have received considerably less attention than the controversy over the status of veterans. This year, the Northern Ireland Assembly backed a motion calling for Troubles-related sexual violence, including rape and child sexual abuse, to be explicitly included within the legacy framework.The British government’s task should be considerably simpler than the political debate suggests. The process for dealing with the conflict’s legacy needs to be a truly independent one that would investigate and prosecute serious crimes regardless of who the perpetrator was. The danger is that Labour will end up creating another compromise that is designed primarily to make the politics manageable and let British soldiers off the hook.When the state is accused of wrongdoing, it cannot be allowed to decide for itself when the questions have been answered. Pat Finucane’s wife Geraldine finally saw the first hearing of the inquiry into her husband’s murder in June this year, after waiting thirty-seven years. Further hearings are now beginning as the inquiry works through the evidence surrounding the killing and the role of the state. For the Finucane family and so many others still awaiting answers from the state, the very least the British government can do is to allow such inquiries to finish.This article originally appeared in Jacobin, a democratic socialist magazine publishing long-form essays and analysis on politics, economics, and culture. Subscribe to the print edition for $20 a year.

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