The PointConversations and insights about the moment.
Opinion Staff Editor
Homelessness in America has risen to record levels, according to a new report released by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. It’s a worrying sign that the fragile social safety net that was erected during the pandemic has lapsed, and the country’s most vulnerable are worse off for it.
The agency’s annual count of people experiencing homelessness, taken over the course of a single night in January 2024, indicates an 18 percent increase in homelessness from the year before. Last year, 771,480 people — about 23 of every 10,000 — were experiencing homelessness, the highest number ever recorded.
A closer look at the report shows that the crisis greatly affects families with children, who had the largest increase in homelessness of any category in the report. Nearly 150,000 children were considered homeless on the night of the count.
There’s no single reason these numbers swelled so much last year. By January 2024, Covid-era eviction moratoriums and other programs, like rapid rehousing and the Emergency Rental Assistance Program, had come to an end. Backlogged evictions were resolved in court just as high inflation rates and exorbitant rents plagued rental markets. Natural disasters destroyed housing in several municipalities, leaving thousands without shelter. A growing number of asylum seekers sought temporary shelter in major cities.
The government’s report illustrates how homelessness is a crisis born of several compounded crises, a symptom of the varied ways our country is failing the most vulnerable.
Yet politicians and leaders have largely chosen to treat people without housing punitively. Last year, the Supreme Court ruled in a case called City of Grants Pass v. Johnson that outlawing sleeping outside is not “cruel and unusual punishment.” Gov. Gavin Newsom of California was among the first to make use of the ruling, swiftly “sweeping” at least 140 homeless encampments across his state. More than two dozen California cities and counties have since passed or proposed ordinances that bring harsher punishment to people who sleep outside.
Throughout the government’s most recent homelessness assessment report, its authors wrote that “comparisons to pandemic years should be made with caution.” But it’s hard not to compare: 2020 and 2021 were among the lowest counts of homelessness recorded in our country’s history. The safety nets put in place to prevent a family from being evicted if they had no place to go, to help a child on the brink of homelessness with monthly stipends, actually worked.
It isn’t just a travesty that our leaders have decided these programs aren’t a continued priority. It’s unconscionable. Rather than look upon people experiencing homelessness as outsiders, as a problem to be swept away, American leaders — and the American people — must see them for who they are: a part of us.
Opinion Staff Editor
In the late-night hours of its final legislative session, the 135th Ohio General Assembly decreed that queer kids do not deserve the same opportunity to love or live as freely as every other American. If Gov. Mike DeWine has any care for the young people he is duty-bound to protect, he will veto it.
The legislature passed H.B. 8, described as a “Parents Bill of Rights,” that ostensibly hands greater control over children’s education and mental health to parents. But in reality, this piece of legislation creates a sinister surveillance state that directly targets L.G.B.T.Q. kids for discrimination. In addition to banning mention of queerness in schools, the legislation, loosely written, could push teachers and administrators in public schools to out L.G.B.T.Q. students to their parents.
The measure is just one small piece of an ongoing reactionary culture war that preys on people’s ignorance about queer identity to divide Americans and court votes. Bills like this one are so insidiously effective because of their seemingly reasonable language. By shrouding sexual orientation under the idea of “sexuality content,” the bill’s text allows for discrimination on the frequent misunderstanding that gayness of any sort is exclusively about sex. It is not. By calling trans and nonbinary identities the product of “gender ideology,” the measure implies that a child’s gender expression is the product of some sort of external indoctrination. It is not.
The existence of this legislation implies that queer identity is nefarious or deviant, as if kids must be protected even from hearing about it. That couldn’t be farther from the truth. Exploring your queerness, especially while growing up, is a natural way of figuring out who you are and who you are likely to love. Encountering, or even experiencing, queer identity or culture doesn’t harm kids, but a discriminatory culture that forces people to hide their queerness certainly does.
Queer kids are not doing anything nefarious. They’re having their first kisses, trying on new clothes, falling in love and learning about themselves and the world. Constraining them from the experiences that are a normal part of growing up will not lead to more straight people. It will lead to a climate of fear, in which young people must hide their experiences from trusted adults and contend with society-imposed shame without support.
Should their parents be at all queerphobic, the consequences of state-mandated outing will be dangerous, if not deadly. And even if young queer people manage to covertly endure such a measure, they will be forced by their government to contend with the sort of shame that kills too, albeit more slowly.
History has proved as much. Should the governor sign the bill into law, as he has indicated he would, L.G.B.T.Q. kids in Ohio will be constrained by the same sort of legislation that stifled queer expression in Britain in the 1990s (Section 28) and in the U.S. military in the 2000s (Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell). The Ohio measure will almost certainly create the same shame as each of those failed policies, with the same deleterious health effects for the L.G.B.T.Q. people suffering under them. The only difference will be that this time, those affected will be Ohio’s young and vulnerable, who have the least power to protect themselves.
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Contributing Opinion Writer
I spent five years researching and writing my biography of Jimmy Carter. Midway through, it struck me that he was the only American president who essentially lived in three centuries: His early life on the farm in the 1920s without electricity or running water might as well have been in the 19th, he was connected (before, during and after his presidency) to many of the significant events and transformative social movements of the 20th, and the Carter Center he founded is focused on conflict resolution, global health and strengthening democracy — major challenges of the 21st.
Throughout his long life, classmates, colleagues, friends and even members of his own family found him hard to read. The enigma deepened in the presidency. From my observations and from those of the people who worked for and with him in Atlanta and Washington, a complicated picture emerges. I concluded that Carter was a driven engineer laboring to free the artist within. He once told me that he could express his true feelings only in his poetry, which he wrote after leaving the presidency. Some of it is quite good.
I enjoyed trying to peel back the layers of his complex personality. Carter was a disciplined, driven and incorruptible president equipped with a sharp, omnivorous mind; a calm and adult president, dependable in a crisis, whose religious faith helped keep him focused on saving lives; a friendless president, who in the 1976 primaries defeated or alienated a good chunk of the Democratic Party; a stubborn and acerbic president, never demeaning but sometimes an S.O.B.; a nonideological and logic-driven president who worshiped science along with God and saw governing as a series of problem sets; an austere, even spartan president out of sync with profligate American culture; a sometimes obsessive president whose diamond-cutter attention to detail brought ridicule but also historic results; a charming and formidable president in small groups and when speaking off the cuff but often underwhelming and even off-putting on television, especially when reading prepared texts; an insular, all-business president, allergic to schmoozing, with few devotees beyond his intimate circle of Georgians, in part because — like his father and Adm. Hyman Rickover, two of his greatest influences — he rarely spared time for small talk and often had trouble saying “thank you”; and an unlucky president, hamstrung in Iran by his own humanity, who was committed first to doing what he thought was right in the long term, with the politics that often imperiled him distinctly secondary to his larger aims.
For some in Carter’s orbit, his impatient and occasionally persnickety style — a few called him the grammarian in chief for correcting their memos — meant their respect would turn to reverence and love in later years. Only then did many of those who served in his administration fully understand that he accomplished much more in office than they knew and that he did so with a passion and foresight they did not fully appreciate at the time.
Now the rest of us are learning that, too.
Jonathan Alter is the author of “His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life.”
Opinion Columnist
This is a time of year when many readers are thinking about charitable donations, and have we got some suggestions for you!
For more than a century, The Times has organized a fund, now called The New York Times Communities Fund, to support those in need. The Times covers credit card fees and administrative costs, so every penny goes to organizations we’ve vetted.
The Communities Fund supports nine nonprofit groups engaged in early literacy, fighting poverty, feeding the hungry and other worthy causes. Most operate in the United States, but one helps girls attend school in sub-Saharan Africa. (Conflict alert: I’m on the board of the Communities Fund.)
You can donate to a pool that is divided among the nonprofits, or you can select one or more of the nine organizations to direct your money to. More information and a donation form are at nytcommunitiesfund.org.
That’s a Times-wide effort with a 113-year history. But we as members of the Opinion team also have our own favorites, and you can see our more personal recommendations in the Times Opinion Giving Guide 2024.
My own contribution to this collective effort is my 15-year-old holiday giving guide suggesting several extraordinary nonprofits whose work I’ve come to particularly admire. This year I recommend one volunteer opportunity — Crisis Text Line — and three nonprofits well worth a donation.
One is the Fistula Foundation, which for an average cost of $619 repairs obstetric fistulas — devastating childbirth injuries that leave women incontinent and humiliated. Another is Muso Health, which provides health care in impoverished nations in sub-Saharan Africa and has a remarkable record of saving children’s lives. The cost of bringing another person into Muso’s network is just $22 a year.
My third option, operating here in the United States, is Reach Out and Read, which distributes books to parents of very young children and coaches them on the importance of reading. It lifts children onto the magic carpet of reading.
So far this year, readers have donated more than $6 million to these three organizations in my giving guide. We estimate that this sum will help more than 130,000 people. To learn more or to donate, visit KristofImpact.org.
We don’t all agree on politics or policies, but here’s a chance for us as readers and writers to come together and make a better world.
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Opinion Columnist
Americans used to be enthusiastic about the idea of progress. If you had attended any of the World’s Fairs that were put on over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries in cities like Philadelphia, St. Louis, Chicago and New York, you would have seen great festivals celebrating the wonders of the future. If you went to Disneyworld, you could have visited Tomorrowland and the Carousel of Progress.
But gradually intellectuals and then lots of other people lost faith in progress, in the idea that growth, technology and innovation would make the future better than the past. In 2011 Virginia Postrel published a book called “The Future and Its Enemies,” arguing that the true division in politics is not left vs. right but dynamists vs. stasists. Dynamists believe in open-ended change. Stasists are in protective mode. We don’t need to rush pell-mell into the future, they say; we need to take care of our own.
This conflict is now roiling the Republican Party. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are dynamists. They want to welcome talented immigrants to the American economy for the same reason the New York Mets are spending over $700 million to sign Juan Soto. You could field a team with all native-born players, but you couldn’t hope to compete with the best in the world.
This has elicited howls of outrage from those who want to restrict immigration, including supporters of canceling the H-1B visa program for skilled immigrants. We should be employing Americans in these jobs, those on MAGA’s rightward edge respond. The vaunted technological progress the dynamists worship has ripped American communities to shreds.
This is not a discrete one-off dispute. This is the kind of core tension you get in your party when you do as Trump has done: taken a dynamic, free-market capitalist party and infused it with protective, backward-looking, reactionary philosophy. We’re going to see this kind of dispute also when it comes to economic regulation, trade, technology policy, labor policy, housing policy and so on.
It’s normal for people like me to have contempt for the reactionaries. We’re in an epic race with China over the future, over who will master A.I. and other technologies. Of course we need to attract the world’s best talent.
But the reactionaries have a point. One of my favorite sayings from psychology is that all of life is a series of daring explorations from a secure base. The reactionaries are right to point out that the past few decades of go-go change have eviscerated many people’s secure bases — stable families, vibrant hometowns, plausible career paths for those who didn’t want to go to college, the stable values that hold communities together.
I don’t know if Trumpism will ever evolve into a serious governing force, but if it does, then resolving the tension between its dynamists and its stasists will be its chief mission — that is, giving regular people a sense that they are being taken care of and seen, so that they feel secure enough to welcome all the bounty that skilled immigrants and technological change bring to our lives.
In its own cranky way, MAGA is now having an interesting internal debate.
Editorial Board Member
Did you hear the one about the real estate dealer who got elected president and started fantasizing about buying Greenland? Spoiler: If you elect him again, don’t be surprised when he actually goes for it.
In fact, President-elect Donald Trump did not wait to be sworn in before reviving his bid for Greenland, which he has upgraded to an “absolute necessity.” So it’s worth checking out what he finds so tempting in this big chunk of ice.
The idea was floated early in his first term by a good friend of his, the cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder, but Trump typically adopted it as his own and ordered his minions to get on it. “I’m a real estate developer,” he explained to reporters interviewing him for a book. “I look at a corner, I say, ‘I’ve got to get that store for the building that I’m building,’ etc. It’s not that different.” Greenland, he conceded, was more than a corner store: “I love maps. And I always said, ‘Look at the size of this. It’s massive.’ That should be part of the United States.”
Greenland, to be precise, is not a country. It’s a self-governing part of Denmark. But such technicalities are not a problem to a Manhattan real estate developer. Nor is the fact that the governments of Denmark and Greenland have reiterated that the island is not for sale. In Trump’s business, that’s an opening bid.
And Greenland, apart from looming bigly on a Mercator projection of the world, is a very desirable chunk of real estate, with huge potential for development. Trump is not the first American president to eye it; Andrew Johnson floated the idea in the 1860s, and Harry Truman offered Denmark $100 million for it in 1946.
Greenland has abundant riches, including rare-earth elements, and lies strategically over the eastern gateway to the fast-melting Northwest Passage. The United States maintains the Pituffik Space Base there for missile defense and space surveillance. China has shown keen interest in putting its money into Greenland, though its efforts to build three airports there have been resisted by the United States.
Trump may have personal motives, too. When he raised the idea in his first term, the Danish prime minister called it “absurd.” Trump promptly canceled a scheduled visit to Denmark. He doesn’t forget slights.
Can the U.S. really afford this gigantic ice cube? The Washington Post has estimated a price of about $1.7 trillion. But might Greenland’s 56,000 residents, who have the right to declare full independence from Denmark anytime they want, be tempted by a lower offer? Would the 57,000 residents of, say, Hoboken refuse a million dollars each to secede from New Jersey and join New York? Manhattan, after all, went for $24 in beads and trinkets, the Louisiana Purchase for $15 million and Alaska for $7.2 million.
OK, so the “Buy Greenland” joke isn’t so funny anymore. But, hey, did you hear the ones going around about annexing Canada and buying the Panama Canal? This guy cracks me up.
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Until this week, Donald Trump had seemed to lack one of the hallmarks of a strongman: territorial expansion.
Sure, he mentioned in his first term that he’d like to buy Greenland, but it seemed like a laughable real estate bid that Denmark quickly rejected. Then, over the holiday, Trump revived the idea as something beyond a big-box Christmas present or trophy he deserves for winning the election.
In a similar vein, his insulting reference to the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, as “governor” and his (unsuccessful) efforts to lure the hockey great Wayne Gretzky into politics, were not just winter fun and games. Same for his threats to seize the Panama Canal, a crucial artery of global trade.
Each of these Trumpian effusions should be seen as more than sources of titillation around the holiday table. They are evidence of the president-elect’s expansionist impulses. He cannot annex or squash these countries, which (like the other 193 nations in the world) don’t appreciate being bullied by the United States.
But he may well use his leverage — backed by the overwhelming military superiority of the U.S. — for more than extracting rare earth metals (Greenland), enhancing border security (Canada) and lowering fees on American shipping (Panama). Trump seems hungry for a new global disorder in which he exports political chaos, praising his fellow strongmen while leaving our democratic allies to scramble and — he hopes — submit.
This suggests there’s a disturbing method to what seems to be Trump’s holiday madness. Strongmen have long used what they define as threats to national security as pretexts for adventures abroad that stoke nationalism and thus solidify their power. One of Trump’s only successes in his first term was that he didn’t get us into a war. But that could change, with expanding Chinese influence as the official excuse.
The German leader whom Trump may most resemble is not Hitler but Kaiser Wilhelm II, the strutting nationalist whose saber-rattling presaged Europe’s stumble into World War I. John Bolton, who served as Trump’s national security adviser, says a major international crisis is “much more likely” in the second term.
Greenland and Canada will not become battlefields, but Panama might. Trump last week accused Jimmy Carter of “foolishly” turning over the canal to Panama by signing treaties that were narrowly ratified by the Senate in 1978 with bipartisan support. At the time, the Joint Chiefs of Staff warned that if the Senate rejected the treaties, Panama would almost certainly erupt into violence and that terrorist threats to the canal could require an open-ended commitment of 100,000 U.S. troops — a festering Vietnam on our doorstep.
In 1976, Ronald Reagan almost won the Republican nomination over the incumbent president, Gerald Ford, with the line, “We bought it, we paid for it, it’s ours.” Given the toxicity of the Panama Canal issue, Carter was advised to put off the treaties until a second term. But he persevered, and several Democratic senators lost their seats because of their votes for ratification.
Years later, I asked a senior Reagan administration official why Reagan did not abrogate the treaties once in office. The answer was that Reagan understood that he had been wrong and that the treaties were a success. Now Trump is threatening to do what Reagan did not. And he may not be joking.
Opinion Senior Editor
If TikTok’s various legal appeals are unable to stop a law that could ban it in the United States by Jan. 19, this will be the last college early-decision season documented on the app. Over the past month, as has become the custom, students trained cameras on themselves — and often their family and friends — as they waited for the news about their admissions to load on college web portals. “Latch,” by Disclosure, with vocals by Sam Smith, remained the soundtrack of choice this year. At least for those who received good news.
TikTok is not the only video app. Reels, which is owned by Instagram, is another platform for short videos. But in the nine years since TikTok was released in the United States, its users have built a world they now inhabit. The expectant students who sit in front of their computers in hopes of admission to their college of choice probably got the first hint of what awaited them on the app.
As I watched the decisions this year, it struck me that I was looking at some of the realest family portraits our sanitized digital culture is likely to produce: students focusing their cameras on themselves as they stare at a screen and wait to learn their fate. Parents bracing themselves for the worst or doing the mental math if their kids are lucky enough to get in. Siblings trying to figure out what is happening and where to look.
Higher education has become gamified beyond recognition. Achievement culture encompasses so many aspects of life. Early decision has been widely criticized.
But for a moment, watching the mighty procession of singular dreams fulfilled, I found it hard to be cynical about the power of this storytelling form.
If TikTok goes dark, the thrills it documents — births, engagements, even deaths — will no doubt migrate to another platform.
But for now, there is a mother who needed to see the acceptance letter for herself, a silent father whose only recognition of his son’s good fortune is a closed fist brought to his own waist, a grandmother confused by all the hullabaloo. And for about 10 seconds, their triumph is ours, too.
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Editorial Board Member
Even amid a national crisis of faith in institutions, the wanton abuse of power at the New York Police Department is shocking and demands accountability.
On Friday, the chief of the department, Jeffrey Maddrey, New York City’s highest ranking uniformed police official, resigned after a female subordinate accused him of pressuring her to give him sexual favors in exchange for overtime pay.
What’s worse, Mayor Eric Adams knew Maddrey had been the subject of serious complaints before.
In 2015, Maddrey had an inappropriate relationship with a subordinate, then lied to the department’s internal affairs investigators about it, according to a report from The City, a nonprofit news organization that has aggressively covered the department’s abuses. Adams promoted him anyway.
In 2021, Maddrey dismissed charges against a retired police officer who had chased three young boys with a gun. In that incident, the Civilian Complaint Review Board, a police oversight body, recommended that Maddrey be disciplined. But when Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell, the first woman to hold the job, tried to impose that discipline, Adams asked her not to.
The latest allegations against Maddrey became public after Lt. Quathisha Epps filed a formal complaint accusing him of coercing her into sexual acts in his office inside Police Headquarters in exchange for overtime pay. Epps said that after she rejected his advances, Maddrey retaliated by bringing her under scrutiny for excessive overtime. In the complaint, Epps says that she is a survivor of domestic abuse, something Maddrey exploited.
Hours after Maddrey stepped down, so did Miguel Iglesias, the chief of internal affairs, which is supposed to investigate this kind of misconduct.
Making this kind of corruption and abuse of power possible is Mayor Adams, a former cop who promised to keep the city safe while reforming America’s largest police department. Instead of fixing it, he added to the culture of corruption and impunity by promoting his friends and shielding powerful police officials from scrutiny.
The latest allegations give the public a disturbing glimpse into an organization dominated by a small group of men in which women have rarely served in the most senior roles. They also offer an insight into the way overtime pay is used by the N.Y.P.D.’s leaders to punish and reward. It’s clear that the annual budget review the department gives to the City Council is insufficient. The city deserves a much more detailed and independent accounting of exactly how and why that overtime money was spent.
Several police officials have come under scrutiny related to overtime recently, an encouraging sign that the department’s new commissioner, Jessica Tisch — the city’s fourth under Adams — is prepared to rein in abusive practices. Those efforts will go only so far as Mayor Adams allows them to.
The allegations against Maddrey top off a year in which New Yorkers learned the N.Y.P.D. was at the center of a corruption investigation in which the brother of a former police commissioner, Edward Caban, is accused of shaking down the owner of a Brooklyn bar.
Adams is up for re-election next year, and that vote will finally give New Yorkers who want an end to the corruption, abuse and sexual harassment at the N.Y.P.D. a chance to be heard.
Deputy Editor, the Editorial Board
There is so much repellently sleazy behavior documented in the House Ethics Committee report about Matt Gaetz that a reader has to stop every few pages to look away and focus on what still seems astounding: This is the man that Donald Trump wanted to be the attorney general of the United States, the highest-ranking law enforcement official in the land, the leader of the Department of Justice.
Trump wanted to give that position to a man who paid at least half a dozen women for sex, according to the report, which was made public on Monday. And the violation of Florida’s prostitution law isn’t even the real depravity; the committee took pains to detail the underlying implication of his actions: “Representative Gaetz took advantage of the economic vulnerability of young women to lure them into sexual activity for which they received an average of a few hundred dollars after each encounter.”
Trump wanted to give the Justice Department to a man the committee says committed the statutory rape of a 17-year-old girl. A man who is accused of setting up a phony email account at his office in the House to buy illegal drugs and who then used the drugs to facilitate sexual misconduct. A man who accepted impermissible gifts and plane trips, according to the report, and who used the power of his office to help a woman with whom he was having sex. A man whose conduct, according to his own colleagues of both parties, “reflects discreditably upon the House.”
And of course, on Trump himself.
Nonetheless, when you read through the details, you can see the commonality between the two men, and the reasons Trump held Gaetz in high esteem. It’s not just the contempt for women as disposable commodities for hire or plunder; it’s the contempt for the law.
Gaetz fought the committee’s investigation at every turn, and the report’s appendices are full of letters from him dripping with disdain at the process, completely indignant that he should even be asked to account for his actions. He blames his enemies in Washington for his plight, he blames the press, he says Democrats have done much worse, and he just lies and lies, denying allegations that are fully documented elsewhere in the text.
The report says Gaetz refused to supply the committee with the exculpatory evidence that he claimed he had and refused to respond to subpoenas. His assertions “were nothing more than attempts to delay the committee’s investigation,” the report said. And then there were his attempts to bully witnesses against him. “The committee had serious concerns that Representative Gaetz might retaliate against individuals who cooperated with the committee,” the report said.
Does that sound familiar? It’s a summary of the conduct we’ve seen from the president-elect for years, whenever the law tries to make him responsible for his conduct. In many ways, these two men think the same way about authority, and in that sense, Gaetz would have been an ideal attorney general for the next administration.
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Donald Trump’s private lawsuits against ABC News, CBS News and most recently The Des Moines Register are only the first phase of his promised battle to “straighten out the press.” Once he gets back in office next month, a far more troubling phase will begin: his promised effort to use government power to force reporters to reveal their sources for national security articles he doesn’t like.
Trump hasn’t been the least bit reticent about his plans. He has repeatedly said that reporters whose work relies on confidential government sources should simply be tossed in jail until they reveal the names of their contacts. The threat of prison rape, he says, will end journalistic stubbornness once and for all. The crudeness of that particular fantasy says a lot about Trump’s cast of mind, and it also shows how little he understands about the importance that reporters place on confidentiality. But the fights he is promising are real, and the financial costs could be ruinous for small or nonprofit news organizations.
Most important, the threats that federal agents will dig through phone records and use surveillance and brutality to find leakers will make it far more difficult for whistle-blowers to tell the truth about government abuses. Trump has already made it clear that fear will be one of the principal tools he uses to reshape Washington in his image. In particular, the fear of prosecution and investigation will be explicitly used to prevent exposure of corruption, incompetence or improper use of power.
That’s why the Senate should have passed the Press Act, a bill that would protect reporters from being forced by a court to reveal their sources of information. The measure had already unanimously passed the House, but on Nov. 20, Trump issued a social media edict demanding that “Republicans must kill this bill!”
When the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, tried to pass it by unanimous consent on Dec. 10, Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, blocked it. Senate Democrats say that because of Trump’s demand, they could not get the Republican votes needed to attach the bill to the spending bill that has to be passed by Friday to avert a government shutdown.
For extreme partisans like Cotton, pursuing confidential sources is a right-wing priority, since in his mind all reporters are leftists with a grudge against Republicans. “The Press Act would undermine our national security and turn liberal reporters into a protected class,” he wrote on social media last week. In fact, the bill would protect all news organizations, regardless of whether they have a political ideology. Both Fox News and The New York Times were among 108 news organizations that signed a letter urging passage of the act that was written by the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press. And the bill would allow aggressive reporting on the federal government no matter which party is in power.
If Republican senators were more concerned about the First Amendment than Trump’s dictates, they could still help Democrats pass the bill this year. But if not, and if reporters start going to jail next year, Congress will have more opportunities to stand up for the principles of the nation’s founders and prevent that abuse.
Opinion Writer
Sometimes it feels like white Christians are the only religious voting bloc with true sway in America. Conservative evangelicals in particular have a great deal of power in the Republican Party, thanks to their tight embrace of Donald Trump. I often hear people talk about how Democrats can win back some white Christian support, as if that should be the party’s priority in the coming years.
But with Democrats searching for their future, they’d be foolish to ignore a large and growing religious group that is already in their corner: the Nones.
Now nearly 30 percent of the population, the Nones include atheists, agnostics and people who say they’re no faith in particular. According to new data from the Public Religion Research Institute, a nonpartisan polling organization, 72 percent of the religiously unaffiliated voted for Kamala Harris. Melissa Deckman, the chief executive of P.R.R.I., shared a more granular breakdown of unaffiliated voters with me over email: 82 percent of atheists, 80 percent of agnostics and 64 percent of those who said they had no particular faith voted for Harris.
“When placed into context with our other findings from the 2024 post-election survey,” Deckman wrote, “we can see how distinct the unaffiliated are. They are almost three times as likely to report voting for Harris than Trump, and only Black Protestants reported voting for Harris at higher rates.”
Atheists and agnostics are not just Harris voters, they are also highly politically engaged. Last year, Ryan Burge, a political scientist and the author of the Graphs About Religion newsletter, put it plainly in a post called “Nobody Participates in Politics More Than Atheists”:
Here’s what I believe to be the emerging narrative of the next several decades: the rise of atheism and their unbelievably high level of political engagement in recent electoral politics. Let me put it plainly: Atheists are the most politically active group in American politics today and the Democrats (and some Republicans) ignore them at their own peril.
I think it would be pretty easy to galvanize these voters without alienating Democrats of faith: The party should focus on religious freedom as a bedrock of American society, and highlight the unpopular ways in which conservative Christians are trying to push their faith on everybody else, like bringing the Bible into public schools. Younger Americans are markedly less religious than older ones and it would be shortsighted for Democrats to dismiss that.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTEditorial Board Member
It may be that Chrystia Freeland could have resigned even more dramatically from Justin Trudeau’s government in Canada, though it would have taken something akin to kneeing him in public. But after the humiliation the prime minister visited on one of his most loyal and talented cabinet ministers, he should have seen it coming.
The bare bones are these: Freeland (whose husband is a reporter on the culture desk at The Times) was the deputy prime minister and finance minister in Canada. She was working on two critical projects: the fall economic statement to Parliament, which is a sort of midyear mini-budget, and the transition to a new president down south, who is threatening 25 percent tariffs on Canada, enough to throw her country into a recession.
Trudeau, meanwhile, was struggling to survive. After nine years in office, his popularity ratings were so low that one poll had him below Donald Trump, which in Canada says a lot. In an apparent effort to boost his ratings, he proposed a holiday from sales taxes and modest checks to lower-income taxpayers, measures that ran directly contrary to Freeland’s pledge to keep the deficit down. Then he made things worse by calling her on Friday and asking her to step down as finance minister to make room for a buddy of his — but only after she presented the economic statement. And he wanted her to continue working on the Trump transition.
Freeland was a brilliant journalist and author when Trudeau recruited her for the Liberal Party in 2013, and she served under him as minister of foreign affairs and of international trade before taking on finance. Throughout her stint in government, she remained staunchly loyal to Trudeau, even as his halo dimmed and controversies struck one after another. Until that call on Friday. Then it all came out.
In a resignation letter also posted on X, Freeland fumed that this was not the time for “costly political gimmicks,” when Canada needed all its reserves for a possible tariff war. Canadians, she declared, “know when we are working for them, and they equally know when we are focused on ourselves.” The current government, she said, would come to an end, but it would be defined for a generation by how it deals with what she called the “aggressive economic nationalism” looming in the United States, which she clearly wanted to counter more forcefully than Trudeau did.
It’s hard to see how Trudeau can weather this storm. Freeland’s accusations were just what the opposition Conservatives, currently way ahead of Trudeau’s Liberals in national polls, have been saying: that the prime minister is focused only on political survival. Liberals know they cannot win with Trudeau. The New Democratic Party, on whose support the Liberals rely for a majority in Parliament, is not saying whether it will support Trudeau in a no-confidence vote.
Trudeau, however, has insisted that he will stay on and lead his party in elections that must be held no later than October. As he later told a group of supporters, “It has not been an easy day.”
Editorial Board Member
A friend of mine told me recently that her teenage daughter had been carried home from a party by friends after she slumped over abruptly. One minute, she was talking. The next minute, she’d passed out.
My friend had no doubt about what had happened: Someone had slipped a “roofie” in her daughter’s drink.
As the mother of a young girl, the story terrified me. You can teach your child right from wrong, but how do you protect her from a predator who is willing to poison her?
Druggings are far from new — remember Bill Cosby’s routine about Spanish fly? — but they seem to be more common now than ever, so much so that California enacted a law this summer that requires bars to offer test strips to make sure that drinks haven’t been spiked.
That’s why the allegations against Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of defense, are so disturbing. It’s not just that he paid a woman he met at a California Federation of Republican Women’s convention in Monterey in 2017 an undisclosed sum for a nondisclosure agreement after she filed a police report alleging that he sexually assaulted her. It’s that she said she doesn’t remember much about it and told the police that she thinks she was drugged.
Hegseth insists the encounter was consensual and claims he paid her to keep her from going public with false accusations. But she reportedly traveled to the convention with her husband and two young kids, hardly the ideal circumstances for a voluntary tryst.
That’s the terrifying thing about these drugs. Rohypnol leaves the body within 36 to 72 hours. GHB is gone within 10 to 12 hours. If she had indeed been drugged with a substance like that, how could she prove it?
Hegseth told Senator Lindsey Graham last week that he would release his accuser from a confidential settlement agreement and allow her to testify, and I hope she has the courage to do so. She would have to undergo a battery of unfriendly questions from Hegseth’s partisans in the Senate, and it doesn’t help that Hegseth’s attorney is threatening to sue her if he is not confirmed.
But on behalf of all the parents who fear this happening to their daughters, the Senate cannot confirm Hegseth without getting to the bottom of what happened that night.
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Opinion Columnist
After more than a year of twisting in the wind, it is official: Adeel Mangi, President Biden’s nominee to the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, will not become the nation’s first Muslim federal appellate judge. This was perhaps inevitable. Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, cut a deal with Republicans last month to abandon four appeals court nominees who didn’t have the votes to win in exchange for not obstructing the confirmation of about a dozen circuit court justices.
It was not surprising that Mangi, a Pakistani American corporate litigator with a strong record of community service, was the subject of anti-Muslim smears by Republicans. What really doomed his candidacy, however, was opposition from frontline Senate Democrats.
They claimed that their opposition was motivated not by anti-Muslim prejudice but by a second line of attack Republicans tried after numerous Jewish groups rushed to his defense, citing his extensive pro bono work on religious freedom cases. Mangi, Republicans claimed, with zero credible evidence, supported releasing prisoners convicted of killing police officers.
These attacks were without merit, and it is shameful that two Democratic senators, Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen, both of Nevada, gave them any credence. The failure to confirm Mangi before Democrats lose their majority is yet another preview of the way capitulation, not courage, in the face of Trumpist forces will be the order of the day for some time to come.
Failed nominees to such offices often shuffle off pretty quietly. Mangi made a different and more courageous choice: He sent a blistering letter to Biden, thanking him for the nomination and support but decrying the process as a farce and excoriating the Democrats who abandoned his nomination:
I will not assume the worst possible motivation for their embrace of this attack. But to me that leaves two possibilities: that these Senators lack the wisdom to discern the truth, which exposes a catastrophic lack of judgment; or they used my nomination to court conservative voters in an election year, which exposes a catastrophic lack of principle.
The letter continues:
Our country faces an incoming tsunami of bigotry, hatred and discrimination. It targets Muslims, Arabs, Jews, Black people, the LGBTQ+ community and many others. And it always pretends to be something other than what it is. These forces are fueled not only by their proponents, but equally by the collaboration and silence of the spineless.
Reading this passionate letter made me think that Mangi would have made an excellent appellate judge, one much needed in this cruel new era. It is a shame he won’t get the chance.
Deputy Editor, the Editorial Board
New York City’s campaign finance system is one of the best of its kind in the nation at reducing the influence of big money in local politics, and the best way to ensure it stays that way is to keep Mayor Eric Adams and other shady politicians as far from it as possible. The Campaign Finance Board did just that on Monday when it barred Adams from receiving any public matching funds for his re-election campaign, after he was accused of blatantly abusing the system in a federal indictment in September.
But Adams never should have received matching funds for his initial campaign in 2021, and the city still has a few steps to take to prevent that kind of mistake from happening again.
The board’s action on Monday — which it attributed to “conduct detrimental to the matching funds program” by Adams — deprives the Adams campaign of as much as $4.3 million in matching funds, which could be a crippling blow in a race in which competitors are already lining up to challenge the mayor. In 2021, he received $10 million in public funds, and the federal indictment said some portion of that was improper, because Adams solicited illegal foreign campaign donations that were falsely attributed to local straw donors to get the city’s match.
If the finance board had agreed to Adams’s request for a match this year, it would have sent a pretty clear message to other politicians that there are no consequences for straw-donor fraud and that the city’s treasury is open for looting. “Access to public dollars is not an automatic privilege,” said Joanna Zdanys, who works on campaign finance issues at the Brennan Center for Justice, in a statement. “It must be earned through compliance with strict standards of accountability and transparency.”
But the board needs to improve its own accountability. In 2021, it spotted some questionable donations to the Adams campaign and asked the campaign for documentation. Adams ignored the request but got the matching funds anyway. City Councilman Lincoln Restler has proposed a new law that would cut off matching funds for politicians who ignore requests and would require the board to look more closely at money raised through intermediaries. The Council should make that a priority, even if it has to override a veto by Adams.
The mayor, meanwhile, is more occupied with bending the knee before Donald Trump than he is with leading the city, seemingly in the hopes that Trump will pardon him. On Monday, perhaps sensing a kinship with someone with a similar contempt for good governance, Trump said he would consider such a pardon. That may leave Adams free to run again without legal encumbrances, but at least the taxpayers won’t have to foot the bill for it.
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Opinion Columnist
One of the more moving stories in The Times this week is an account of the life of Brian Thompson, the United Healthcare chief executive who was gunned down on Dec. 4 outside a Midtown Manhattan hotel.
Thompson “grew up in a working-class family in Jewell, Iowa,” a tiny farming community north of Des Moines, Amy Julia Harris and Ernesto Londoño report. “His mother was a beautician, according to family friends, and his father worked at a facility to store grain.” Thompson’s childhood was spent “going row by row through the fields to kill weeds with a knife, or working manual labor at turkey and hog farms.”
Those details are worth bearing in mind as some people seek to cast his killing as a tale of justified, or at least understandable, fury against faceless corporate greed. One ex-Times reporter, Taylor Lorenz, said she felt “joy” at the killing. Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator, offered that “violence is never the answer” but “people can only be pushed so far.” Pictures of Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old charged with the murder of Thompson, have also elicited a fair amount of oohing and ahhing on social media over his toned physique and bright smile.
But if Mangione’s personal story (at least what we know of it so far) is supposed to serve as some sort of parable, it isn’t one that progressives should take comfort in. He is the scion of a wealthy and prominent Maryland family, was educated at an elite private school and the University of Pennsylvania and worked remotely from a nice apartment in Hawaii. And while Mangione, like millions of people, apparently suffered from debilitating back pain, excellent health care is not generally an issue for Americans of great wealth.
All this suggests that Mangione may prove to be a figure out of a Dostoyevsky novel — Raskolnikov with a silver spoon. It’s a familiar type. Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal, was a lawyer’s son whose mother moved him to London before he went on to become an international terrorist. Osama bin Laden came from immense wealth. Angry rich kids jacked up on radical, nihilistic philosophies can cause a lot of harm, not least to the working-class folks whose interests they pretend to champion.
As for the suggestion that Thompson’s murder should be an occasion to discuss America’s supposed rage at private health insurers, it’s worth pointing out that a 2023 survey from the nonpartisan health policy research institute KFF found that 81 percent of insured adults gave their health insurance plans a rating of “excellent” or “good.” Even a majority of those who said their health was “fair” or “poor” still broadly liked their health insurance. No industry is perfect — nor is any health care model — and insurance companies make terrible calls all the time in the interest of cost savings. But the idea that those companies represent a unique evil in American life is divorced from the experience of most of their customers.
Thompson’s life might have been cut brutally short, but it will remain a model for how a talented and determined man from humble roots can still rise to the top of corporate life without the benefit of rich parents and an Ivy League degree. As for the killer, John Fetterman had the choicest words: He’s “going to die in prison,” the peerless Pennsylvania senator told HuffPost. “Congratulations if you want to celebrate that.”