Sarah and I talked about this ChatGPT stuff on the Secret pod, in addition to talking about Harvard, LaMonica McIver, and Trump’s South Africa meeting.
The show is here.
Can you tell our art director saw Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning last night? (The Bulwark / Midjourney)
We talked about this New York magazine story briefly yesterday, but I want to go deep on it today. Short version: Kids in high school and college are using AI to do their homework, write their essays, and take their tests at a scale you can’t believe.
Cheating with ChatGPT in 2025 is like smoking pot in 1975. Everyone is doing it.
Is this good? Or bad? I have complicated thoughts. And what I really want from today is a conversation with you guys, in the comments.
Let’s ride.
Cards on the table: My college experience looked absolutely nothing like what is described in this piece.
The New York article talks almost exclusively with students who write papers and essays.
I wrote one paper in college. It was for a graduate-level immunobiology course and it was highly technical. I can’t be certain, but I do not believe I read a single book in college. Not a real book, anyway. Textbooks and scientific articles? Sure. I went through them by the dozen. But a book with prose in it?
Zero.
I spent all of my time in labs and working on problem sets. Math. P-chem. Orgo. Physics. We’d have problem sets to turn in every week. Tests a couple times a semester. And then finals.
ChatGPT would have been of no use to me. I could have used AI to help with problem sets, I suppose. But then I would have had to check everything by hand anyway, since these were questions with right and wrong answers. And the exams?
AI would have been utterly useless. We sat in a lecture hall for three hours, staring at exam packets filled with equations and formulas and chemical reactions and had to solve them with nothing but the Holy Spirit and a pencil.
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I understand that my experience was not the universal one. But we can start by observing that, generally speaking, there are two branches of study: Real subjects STEM and fake subjects liberal arts.
AI poses some challenges to STEM education, especially in computer science, where it can be used to write code. But in the main, kids can’t use ChatGPT to get around differential equations or fluid dynamics, because at the end of the day you have to sit in a room with a pencil and solve equations. You can either do that, or you can’t.
But liberal arts studies? That’s the nightmare. Legitimately, I cannot think of a way to stop AI from completely disrupting liberal arts education.
And yet, I’m not sure that’s a bad thing? In fact, I’m kind of on the side of the cheaters? I’m Ron Burgundy?
Let’s talk about it.
Great Job Jonathan V. Last & the Team @ The Bulwark Source link for sharing this story.
Tim Miller dives into JD Vance’s jaw-dropping interview with Ross Douthat, calling out the Vice President’s holy-sounding hypocrisy and political gaslighting. From tax cuts for the rich to pre-modern brutality and the Pope’s judgment, Tim dissects Vance’s claims line by line—and exposes the bullshit behind the performance.
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Great Job Tim Miller & the Team @ The Bulwark Source link for sharing this story.
“There’s a big difference between the old Republican Party that focused on Wall Street,” said Republican senator Jim Banks of Indiana in a video clip titled “The new GOP is the party of the working class” a couple weeks ago, “and the new Republican Party that focuses more on Main Street and working-class families.”
That party, Banks said, “has to recognize that those mechanics, factory workers like my dad and members of my family, teachers, police officers, people who go to work and make an hourly wage and a working-class living, that has to be the emphasis of the tax cuts this season.” Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri and many others have made similar statements in their attempt to portray the GOP as a “pro-worker” party and win over more working-class voters.
It’s easy to get jaded about fraud and humbuggery in politics. But the notion of the contemporary Republican Party as champion of the working class is a particularly brazen scam. There’s no better example of why than House Republicans’ gleefully approving the most devastating cuts to Medicaid in the program’s history, alongside a budget gifting the rich with enormous tax cuts.
The House voted 215-214 for the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.” (You thought that name was just Trump being Trump — actually, it’s the official title.) The legislation is big, but only a misanthropic billionaire could find it beautiful. This budget cuts Medicare spending by nearly $800 billion over the next ten years, and the Congressional Budget Office estimates that some 7.6. million people will lose coverage.
They also added draconian work requirements to the program, although most Medicaid recipients are already working, and those who are not are mostly too disabled or sick to work, are in school, or have caregiving responsibilities. They eliminated gender-affirming care, and in a tour de force of gratuitous cruelty, offered to pay states not to expand their Medicaid programs.
People will die because of these cuts, several studies have found. One National Bureau of Economic Research paper found that people who got Medicaid through the Affordable Care Act were 21 percent less likely to die, once enrolled, than those who went uncovered, and states that chose to expand Medicaid saved 27,400 lives between 2010 and 2022. Other studies have found that access to Medicaid improves people’s health and reduces deaths from diabetes and cancer. It even saves lives among the young and physically healthy by giving them access to mental health care and substance abuse treatment.
As brutal as these proposed cuts are, they don’t even provide enough savings to pay for the tax cuts, which are expected to reduce federal revenue by $3.8 trillion over the next decade. (Note that this is a lot more than the $800 billion in Medicare cuts.) But what the whole package does do is lock in a thoroughly oligarchic agenda: immiserate and kill the working class and help the rich get richer.
Sixty percent of the tax cuts will go to the top 20 percent, according to the Tax Policy Center, and more than a third will go to those making over $460,000. The budget is set to increase the wealth of the top 10 percent of Americans by 2 percent; the resources of the bottom 10 percent are expected to shrink by 4 percent, because of the cuts to health care and food assistance.
Some House Republicans warned against cutting Medicaid. Rep. David Valadao of California said less than a month ago that he wouldn’t support the bill if it included any Medicaid reductions for vulnerable populations. Rep. Nicole Malliotakis of New York attracted fawning media attention for “breaking with her party and taking a stand against Medicaid cuts.” Last month, these representatives and ten others wrote a strongly worded letter saying they wouldn’t support Medicaid cuts and warning that such cuts would lead to hospital closures, especially in rural and underserved areas.
But that was April. In the end, all the signatories sold out their working-class constituents. All but two Republican House members, Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Warren Davidson of Ohio, voted for the bill.
Now this brutal excrescence of a bill goes to the Senate. Both Hawley — and more surprisingly, President Trump — are still claiming to oppose the Medicaid cuts. Trump reportedly told Republicans, “Don’t fuck with Medicaid.” (He also threatened to primary Massie for opposing the bill, so his position is confusing and erratic at best.)
Hawley wrote an op-ed in the New York Times arguing that Medicaid cuts would be “morally wrong and politically suicidal.” Hawley blamed the cuts in the bill on “corporatist Republicans” and said following their lead would “represent the end of any chance of us becoming a working-class party.” He described the stakes of the conflict this way: “Will Republicans be a majority party of the working people or a permanent minority speaking only for the C-suite?”
He’s right to worry. As Hawley pointed out in his op-ed, more than 80 percent of Americans oppose cuts to Medicaid, and over half either use the program or have a family member who does. Nearly two-thirds of Republican voters have a favorable view of Medicaid.
No one can predict the future, and sure, it’s possible that Hawley and Trump will remove some of the worst cuts in the Senate version of the bill. Maybe Trump will save Medicaid! We live in strange times. But the fact that the House passed this version should be a moment of truth for all working-class Americans: even if you hate the Democrats, most of the Republican Party elected officials hate you even more.
Great Job Liza Featherstone & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
You might think that pop music has lost the ability to generate real political controversies in its Anglo-American heartlands. The idea of a mainstream monoculture into which underground rock or rap artists can cross over has given way to a fractured landscape where even the biggest stars have to fight for people’s attention.
Instead of watching bands perform on Top of the Pops or MTV, everyone can generate their own customized playlist on Spotify or YouTube, ranging across time and space as they please. It’s hard to imagine the Sex Pistols or Public Enemy having the same impact in a digital age.
But the British political establishment has now demonstrated that you can still attract national attention by taking a stand, if that stand is against genocide in Gaza. Trumped-up charges of “supporting terrorism” against a member of Kneecap, the Irish-language rap group from Belfast, are a transparent attempt to punish Kneecap for defending the right of Palestinians to exist.
This exercise in lawfare comes just as the British government is trying to distance itself from the horrors that Israel has been inflicting upon the people of Gaza. A joint statement from the leaders of Britain, France, and Canada threatened “concrete actions” if Israel does not call off its murderous rampage in Gaza and allow humanitarian aid to enter.
The “abhorrent language” and “egregious actions” to which the statement refers have been defining characteristics of the Israeli attack on Gaza from the very start. The only people in British public life who can speak with any moral authority are the ones who have consistently opposed one of the century’s great crimes.
There was a time when pop stars could oppose horrifying campaigns of mass murder without facing an orchestrated backlash. In 1995, U2 released one of their best songs, “Miss Sarajevo,” a collaboration with Brian Eno and Luciano Pavarotti that was intended to draw people’s attention to the destruction of Bosnia by Serb nationalist forces. The lyrics began with a set of rhetorical questions:
Is there a time for keeping your distance?
A time to turn your eyes away?
Is there a time for keeping your head down?
For getting on with your day?
What might Bono have said about a globally popular musician who went to Belgrade to receive an award from Slobodan Milošević while Sarajevo was still under siege? Would that have been morally worse than “keeping your head down” or “getting on with your day”?
The U2 singer made a trip of his own to Washington in January this year so that Joe Biden could give him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in the dying days of his administration. The relationship between Biden and the Israeli forces responsible for mass killing in Palestine was, if anything, more intimate and legally actionable than the relationship between Milošević and the Republika Srpska forces responsible for mass killing in Bosnia. That did not deter Ireland’s most famous rockstar from accepting Biden’s endorsement.
In an article for the Atlantic to mark the occasion, Bono briefly referred to “an obscene leveling of civilian life” in Gaza — a strange choice of verb, more commonly associated with the destruction of buildings than the death of human beings, and without the straightforward legal implications of “killing,” let alone “murdering.” Having identified “Vladimir Putin’s guns and bombs” as the menace facing the people of Ukraine, Bono’s article refrained from mentioning the US-made guns and bombs that Israel’s military has been using to “level” Palestinians for the best part of two years. In any case, there was no talk of Gaza, however imprecise, when he received his bauble in the White House.
In 1995, the author of “Miss Sarajevo” would probably have found it hard to imagine a UK tour involving a Serbian musician who had recently performed for his countrymen taking part in the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia. The Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood did his best to deliver a contemporary equivalent by arranging a series of concerts with the Israeli singer Dudu Tassa. In December 2023, when there was no room for doubt about the deliberate mass killing of civilians in Gaza, Tassa played to Israeli soldiers to help boost their morale before they returned to Gaza for another bout of war crimes.
When British venues canceled the Greenwood–Tassa gigs under pressure from Palestine solidarity activists, the two musicians put out a statement presenting themselves as victims of “censorship and silencing,” displaying the kind of all-encompassing narcissism that might swallow a planet whole. Unsurprisingly, the Guardian reported on their complaints without bothering to mention Tassa’s service as a busker for genocide.
Unlike Bono or Greenwood, the members of Kneecap have not acquired vast personal fortunes from their time in the music industry, and the chances are they never will. The internet has transformed the economics of the business beyond recognition since the release of mega-selling albums like Achtung Baby and OK Computer. Besides, the market for an Irish-language hip-hop group with a sharp political edge is always going to be more limited than the audience for Anglophone stadium rock was during the 1980s and ’90s.
In other words, they have much more to lose if they’re prevented from touring and building on their (relatively modest) success to date. Those considerations didn’t stop the group from projecting the following message on a big screen during their set at the Coachella festival a month ago:
Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people: It is being enabled by the US government who arm and fund Israel despite their war crimes.
Fuck Israel. Free Palestine.
The response they have faced on both sides of the Atlantic, culminating in a police investigation, is an attempt to punish them for stating the facts about Israel’s conduct in Gaza with the appropriate degree of anger.
In the wake of the Coachella display, supporters of Israel combed through Kneecap’s back catalogue of performances in search of something they could use to attack the band without having to acknowledge the charge of genocide, against which there is no credible defense. London’s Metropolitan Police have now accused Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh, who goes by the name “Mo Chara” (“my friend”) when performing, of waving a Hezbollah flag during a gig last November “in such a way or in such circumstances as to arouse reasonable suspicion that he is a supporter of a proscribed organisation.”
The members of the band have vowed to contest the charge in court: “We deny this ‘offense’ and will vehemently defend ourselves.” As such, they need to choose their words carefully and deal with the law as it is and not as they would like it to be. Others can speak more bluntly and point out that the entire premise of the case is a travesty. The British state has no moral standing to put anyone on trial for “supporting terrorism.”
It shouldn’t matter if Ó hAnnaidh had expressed clear, enthusiastic support for Hezbollah, speaking at length in a way that left no room for misunderstanding. There should be no legal consequences whatsoever for speech of that kind, let alone for waving a flag. In the lexicon of British politics, “terrorist” is a playground insult with no objective meaning. It certainly has nothing to do with violence against noncombatants, since British governments have been happy to entertain Israeli politicians who are responsible for the mass killing of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians.
The people of West Belfast, the community that produced Kneecap, repeatedly elected Gerry Adams as their MP at a time when the British establishment considered him to be the physical embodiment of terrorism. During the same period, Britain’s state security forces were systematically collaborating with loyalist paramilitaries responsible for hundreds of sectarian killings.
Government ministers like the current Northern Ireland secretary Hilary Benn are still fighting to prevent the truth about state collusion from coming out, long after the Irish Republican Army ended its campaign and Adams became a regular guest at Downing Street and the White House. When British politicians and media commentators engage in strident moralizing about the evils of terrorism, the response of most people in West Belfast is to roll their eyes in contempt.
The week before the Metropolitan Police charged Ó hAnnaidh, London’s British Museum hosted a private party to celebrate the seventy-seventh anniversary of Israel’s foundation. The guests included Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, Nigel Farage of Reform UK, and the Labour politician Maria Eagle, who was there to represent Keir Starmer’s government.
Eagle boasted that the Royal Air Force has been running surveillance flights over Gaza to assist the Israeli military. She claimed that this was “in support of hostage rescue efforts,” knowing perfectly well that Benjamin Netanyahu’s government couldn’t care less about the hostages in Gaza.
The keynote speech at the event came from Netanyahu’s ambassador Tzipi Hotovely. Hotovely is a boorish racist with no diplomatic skills whatsoever who has always denied the right of Palestine to exist. She once told an interviewer that Israel would have to destroy “every school, every mosque, every second house” in Gaza. If a normal country had appointed her as its representative, it would have been a public relations catastrophe.
But this is Israel we are talking about, so the British political class has continued to fawn over her, no matter how many times she lashes out abusively at its own members. Her most recent gaffe was to accuse the London mayor Sadiq Khan of “spouting Hamas propaganda” when he noted that more than fifty thousand Palestinians have now been killed in Gaza. Khan did not even point the finger directly at the guilty parties, but his reference to “the appalling suffering and killing that continues in Sudan and Palestine” was too much for Hotovely to bear.
This would have been the clumsiest intervention of the month from Israel’s local auxiliaries were it not for the comments of Jonathan Turner, chief executive of UK Lawyers for Israel, who claimed that starving the people of Gaza might be an act of kindness that leads to reduced obesity levels. Turner, whose group took legal action against the Starmer government when it imposed partial limitations on the supply of weapons to Israel, will certainly not be investigated by the Metropolitan Police for “supporting terrorism.”
Meanwhile, a coalition of human rights organizations has brought a case before the High Court in London to challenge the ongoing transfer of British-made components for F-35 warplanes that Israel is using to drop bombs on Gaza. Government lawyers claimed to have seen no evidence that Israeli forces were deliberately targeting civilians.
The court has heard testimony from Mark Perlmutter, a US doctor who volunteered in Gaza. Perlmutter reported having seen many dead or injured children whose wounds indicated that Israeli soldiers had carefully picked them out as targets:
For example, I evaluated two children that were snipered twice each. Both received central chest wounds and side of the head wounds which meant the child was shot a second time after they died and probably were already on the ground. These two children were shot so perfectly in the chest that I couldn’t have put my stethoscope over their hearts more accurately.
This is the “war” that the British state has been supporting with every tool in its kit, including the criminalization of domestic dissenters.
The legal move against Kneecap came just days after the BBC shunted Gary Lineker out of his job as a TV presenter because he was too outspoken about the slaughter in Gaza. Lineker’s experience speaks volumes about the state of British public discourse when it comes to Israel, for two main reasons.
First of all, Lineker is the most congenial front man you could possibly imagine for a pro-Palestinian viewpoint. Those unfamiliar with his role in British culture might care to picture a cross between Tom Hanks and Michael Jordan. He famously went through his entire career as one of England’s greatest soccer players without acquiring a single booking for disciplinary infractions. After retirement, he became the jovial face of BBC sports coverage for the best part of thirty years.
Before Lineker started talking about Palestine, the most controversial incident in his whole career was probably the time when he honored a pledge to present Match of the Day in his underwear after Leicester City’s unlikely Premier League victory in 2016. None of this sufficed to protect him from sustained vilification as he made the abrupt shift from national treasure to hate figure of the right-wing press.
Secondly, Lineker is a useful case study because he is a liberal who does not make his living from the world of politics. Of course, Britain is full of people like that, but most of them do not have a national profile that brings their perspective to the attention of millions. Politicians, newspaper columnists, and the like tend to prefer the argument of power to the power of argument, so they are extremely reluctant to apply basic liberal principles to Israel’s track record for fear that it would lead them to the same conclusions as Lineker.
The pretext that BBC managers used for finally ousting Lineker would not even qualify as a fig leaf in a more serious public sphere. On his Instagram account, he shared a post that featured a short video of Canadian-Palestinian lawyer Diana Buttu explaining what the Zionist state-building project has entailed for Palestinians. There was nothing remotely objectionable in what Buttu said. The account that reposted the video had placed a small emoji of a rodent outside the frame — it was easy to miss, even if the intention behind it was to conjure up old antisemitic imagery depicting Jews as rats, which was far from clear.
Lineker faced a barrage of criticism from detractors who accused him of circulating Nazi-style propaganda. He deleted the post and recorded a video apologizing for it, explaining that he had not seen the offending emoji, which was far more than he needed to do under the circumstances. As we have seen in so many similar cases, from Ilhan Omar to Jeremy Corbyn, Lineker’s critics merely banked the apology as a confession of guilt to the most extravagant charges while continuing to attack him.
There was a palpable sense of relief among senior BBC officials that they could now speed up Lineker’s departure while generating headlines that contained the term “antisemitism.” Articles discussing the end of Lineker’s BBC career studiously avoided mentioning the actual reason for it, which was understood by all. A sleazy, mendacious hit job from the BBC’s own media editor inadvertently stumbled upon the truth as it sought to present Lineker as the author of his own downfall: “He could not keep quiet. In the end, it brought him down.”
While pontificating about the urgent need for “impartiality,” even on the part of sports presenters as they speak in a personal capacity, the people who run the BBC have inflicted lasting damage on its reputation for producing serious journalism. Managers have given a single, egregiously partisan editor license to micromanage stories about Palestine for the world’s most popular news website.
Of course, the real issue here is not the bias of one person — it is the organizational structure that has allowed them to become so influential. At time of writing, the BBC is still refusing to broadcast a film it commissioned about the experience of medical workers in Gaza. Other British broadcasters have followed in the BBC’s footsteps, taking their line from a political class that has provided material support for genocide.
After Starmer issued his joint statement with Emmanuel Macron and Mark Carney earlier this week, Netanyahu responded with a typically petulant and deceitful whine: “When mass murderers, rapists, baby killers and kidnappers thank you, you’re on the wrong side of justice.” It was a telling point, though not in the way that Netanyahu intended.
Since October 2023, he has unleashed a gang of sadistic killers on the people of Gaza, inciting them to commit horrific crimes. The main “concrete action” Western leaders should be discussing at this point in time is how to bring the Israeli leader to justice and ensure that he spends the rest of his life in a prison cell.
When a man like Netanyahu has good reason to thank you, you’re on the wrong side of justice and the wrong side of history. Starmer and his allies will never be able to wash away the stain of complicity after what they have done.
Great Job Daniel Finn & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
We’re joining forces with Crooked Media’s Jon Lovett on June 6 for a live show in D.C. to raise funds for Andry Hernandez Romero. We’ll be joined on stage by special guests to celebrate Pride, vent, pre-game, commiserate, laugh, vent some more, and raise money for the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, which represents Andry and others being held in El Salvador without so much as a hearing. Because if this administration can kidnap Andry and ship him off to a foreign gulag—if they get away with that and the media just moves on—they can do it to anyone.
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Can’t make the show? You can support efforts to free Andry and other wrongly imprisoned immigrants at FreeAndry.org.
Want to get more involved? Join Vote Save America, the Human Rights Campaign and the Immigrant Defenders Law Center for a protest in support of Andry José Hernández Romero. This is an opportunity for WorldPride attendees, DMV area residents, and the entire LGBTQ+ community to rally around Andry as we demand his return!
Action for Andry
Great Job Sarah Longwell & the Team @ The Bulwark Source link for sharing this story.
Illustration by Imogene Chayes, costume design by Ann Foley
I’m joined by Ann Foley this week to discuss her work as costume designer on the hit HBO show The Last of Us. From sourcing vintage clothes to weaving the infected’s fungal-explosions in with the clothes they were wearing when they died to her graduate school on the sets of Agents of SHIELD, Ann’s insights into translating the world of the game to the world of the screen are pretty fascinating. At the end of the episode, Ann mentions Ellie’s Converse sneakers; you can see what Bella Ramsey scribbled on them here. And if you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend!
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Great Job Sonny Bunch & the Team @ The Bulwark Source link for sharing this story.
Friedrich Merz is Germany’s new chancellor — head of government in Europe’s largest economy, but likely also setting the direction for the EU as a whole. Leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Merz’s campaign for the federal election this February 23 was marked by sharp conservative rhetoric and promises of market‑driven reforms. Yet, falling well short of a majority, he immediately turned toward the familiar terrain of negotiating a “grand coalition” with the center‑left Social Democratic Party (SPD).
Merz thus sought the very alliance that he has always denounced. But who is he, and what can be expected from a chancellor who campaigned as a hard-liner but now faces the same compromises that defined Angela Merkel’s rein? To answer this, it helps to look back three years.
Back then, in a quiet dining room of a Berlin hotel, a group of leading German conservatives gathered for what was publicly described as a farewell dinner for Volker Bouffier, then prime minister of the state of Hesse. Sitting at the table were familiar faces from the CDU. As journalist Sara Sievert recounts in her biography of Merz, Der Unvermeidbare (“The Inevitable”), the real purpose of the evening was more strategic than sentimental. With Merkel’s long chancellorship nearing its end — and her chosen successors, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer and Armin Laschet, failing to secure public confidence — the CDU elite were searching for a new direction.
When Merz, then-new party leader, stood up to speak that night, everyone knew what was coming: the long-anticipated break with the Merkel era. But instead of denouncing his predecessor outright, Merz invoked another CDU heavyweight — Roland Koch, himself former prime minister of Hesse — praising his controversial 1999 campaign against the reform of Germany’s citizenship laws. Back then, Koch’s hard-line stance against granting birthright citizenship to immigrants’ children had mobilized xenophobic sentiments. People queued in front of the CDU’s stalls, asking where to sign against foreigners. Under Merkel, this was regarded as a low point of CDU history. For Merz, it was to be a model for the party’s new direction.
Thus, fears of a sharp rightward shift under Merz have long simmered in Germany’s political discourse. Critics warn that his chancellorship could signal the CDU’s gradual openness to collaboration with the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), or at the very least, a reversal of the centrist policies that defined the Merkel years. Under Merkel, the CDU had accommodated progressive reforms: introducing a minimum wage, legalizing same-sex marriage, phasing out nuclear energy, and accepting over a million refugees in 2015.
Merz has often been viewed as Merkel’s ideological antithesis. A sharp-tongued critic of her centrism, he was sidelined from party leadership as early as 2002, when Merkel ousted him from his post as parliamentary leader. For years, he remained in the political wilderness as an arch-conservative waiting for the pendulum to swing back. Now that he’s returned, however, he appears less intent on reviving his old neoliberal convictions than on emulating Merkel’s pragmatism — ironically adopting the very approach he once derided.
Much of Merz’s public reputation, particularly on the broad liberal and left-wing space, stems from this time out of the political spotlight. In particular, his role as chairman of the German division of BlackRock, the American asset management behemoth, is seen with a critical eye by most Germans. His close personal ties to BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, as reported in a recent biography by Volker Resing, only add to the perception that Merz represents the financial elite more than the electorate.
Still, his advocates seek to reframe this association not as a liability but as a strength. His corporate entanglements are portrayed as proof of worldly competence, a business-minded sensibility absent from the typical career politician. “Through his many board positions,” write Jutta Falke-Ischinger and Daniel Goffart in their biography of Merz, “he gained a deep and novel insight into the economy.” Between 2007 and 2018, Merz served on at least nineteen corporate boards, from Commerzbank to BASF and the recycling giant Interseroh. Just as he was plotting his political comeback, his connections earned him millions and embedded him within Europe’s financial elite.
This fusion of economic power and political ambition has drawn intense scrutiny. Merz continued to serve in Germany’s parliament until 2009 despite having effectively exited politics two years earlier. He collected his full salary while delivering no parliamentary speeches in his final term. More controversial still were the board seats and advisory roles he received from industrial leaders with whom he shared personal histories.
One case involved Werner Müller, the former minister of economic affairs under Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who awarded Merz a lucrative consulting role at Ruhrkohle AG. Müller later also helped secure him a board seat at Stadler Rail, a Swiss company that went public in 2019. This reportedly made Merz a multimillionaire. Resing, another Merz biographer, quotes one of Merz’s confidants describing this as “his real entry into the circle of the financial and business elite.” This entry came just a year after Merz announced his return to frontline politics.
His proponents have tried to downplay the potential for conflicts of interest. Resing cites a corporate attorney familiar with Merz’s legal work who insists that “the substantive work was always done by others.” Merz, the implication goes, was more of a figurehead than an operative.
When BlackRock executive Merz returned to the political spotlight in 2018, his image as Merkel’s adversary and a neoliberal hard-liner was already firmly established. But what has largely disappeared from the public eye is that Merkel herself was not always perceived as a non-ideological chancellor devoid of political dogmas. On the contrary: when she competed with Merz early in her career for the most important posts within the CDU power apparatus, she too was seen as a neoliberal “radical reformer.” The weekly Der Spiegel wrote at the time about Merkel: “She doesn’t just want to discard cornerstones of 16 years of CDU policy under Helmut Kohl. Merkel wants to overhaul the welfare systems so thoroughly that all concepts dating back to Chancellor Bismarck gradually disappear from the party’s program.”
This stance was especially evident at the CDU party congress in Leipzig in December 2003. At the time, the CDU was, according to Merkel and Merz biographer Resing, “almost radically hungry for renewal.” The policy resolution called for a flat tax, a comprehensive pension system reform, and a massive reduction in social spending. Merz was also present at the congress: “Today marks the beginning of the end of the Social Democratization of the Union,” he thrilled back then.
Yet when Merkel entered the 2005 election campaign, it became clear that this course did not convince a majority. Her economically neoliberal agenda did not resonate — and in fact the CDU lost voters. With 35.2 percent of the vote, she achieved exactly the same result as seven years earlier — the very result that had enabled Gerhard Schröder and the SPD to take power. This outcome would become pivotal for Merkel’s subsequent political strategy. As Resing, who published his first Merkel biography in 2009, writes, the lesson was clear for Merkel: “You can’t win elections with a hardline, economically liberal reform agenda.” Thus, Merkel became the pragmatist the world remembers her for today.
Could the same thing happen to Merz? In 2005, he understood that the Christian Democrats’ electoral victory actually exposed the weakness of Merkel and her program. In a newspaper column at the time, he pointed out that 2.6 million voters had given their first, local vote to the CDU but not their second, more decisive one. The piece bore the title: “Voters apparently don’t want Merkel.”
Back then, sixteen years of Helmut Kohl were followed by a brief SPD-led interlude, to which Merkel responded in 2005 with a radical reform agenda that fared modestly with voters but still brought her to the chancellorship — thanks to a coalition with the SPD.
Now, sixteen years of Merkel have been followed by an even shorter SPD-led interlude, and Merz has responded with a radical reform program that has fared even worse with voters — but will still make him chancellor, again thanks to a SPD willing to cooperate for a little bit of power within ministries.
In their coalition agreement, the two parties prioritize stricter immigration controls and corporate tax relief, while officially preserving key social democratic achievements such as the independent Minimum Wage Commission. Notably, the SPD has managed to prevent major rollbacks of welfare policies, even as the CDU secures business-friendly reforms like accelerated depreciation and a lower corporate tax rate. It’s a playbook known from Merkel’s time. In a more surprising shift, both parties also committed to easing the so-called “debt brake,” a constitutional constraint that has long hampered public investment since its enactment by Merkel’s government in 2009.
So, the parallels have limits. Today’s SPD is weaker than ever, and the CDU is also diminished — the resulting coalition is hardly comparable to Merkel’s power-saturated grand coalitions. These altered dynamics will also have their effect on Merz.
There is no doubt that Merz has presented himself as a radical candidate for the chancellorship. In previous years, he primarily attracted media attention when he overstepped rhetorical boundaries, for example, when he accused Ukrainian refugees of “welfare tourism,” referred to migrant children as “little pashas,” or falsely claimed that asylum seekers were getting free dental work in German clinics.
In 2020, when asked whether he could imagine a gay chancellor for Germany, he replied: “Let me put it this way: the question of sexual orientation is none of the public’s business. As long as it remains within the bounds of the law and doesn’t involve children — and at that point I draw an absolute line — it’s not a matter for public debate.” That this statement placed him “on the borderline of homophobia,” as Sievert writes in her book, is perhaps the most charitable interpretation.
But despite his reliance on provocative topics, Merz may no longer be genuinely interested in escalating them. In the biography by Falke-Ischinger and Goffart, Merz is quoted as saying: “I’m not the conservative fossil my opponents like to make me out to be.” The authors describe how he has become more cautious. He had come to realize that his brash demeanor and outdated rhetoric from pre-1989 West Germany had repeatedly tripped him up. He has since accepted, they write, “that the world can’t simply be rolled back to where it was 16 years before Merkel.”
Even though he is celebrated in the more conservative factions of his party for his aggressive stance, it has become evident that this approach cannot replicate past electoral successes. Public sensitivity has increased, as clearly demonstrated by the wave of outrage over the taboo-breaking joint vote with the AfD on a Bundestag motion this January.
Merz long saw himself as the antithesis of Merkel, but he may end up becoming her political reincarnation. The fact that — just like Merkel before him — he is now entering a grand coalition is further evidence that he intends to govern not as a radical reformer, but as a pragmatic administrator of what he would like to be a hyper-stable Republic.
But it is questionable whether even this opportunistic governing style will work under present conditions. The political and economic prerequisites have fundamentally changed since Merkel’s era. Her chancellorship benefited from a phase of global economic growth that especially favored Germany as an export nation. That model no longer functions. Merz, on the other hand, is unlikely to be compelled — given the absence of pressure from the Left — to sustainably boost domestic demand. There will likely be investments in bridges sturdy enough for tanks. But wage increases that might allow a young generation to afford a new car again? Hardly. Merkel’s stability-focused course had an expiry date — and that date has long since passed.
To be Merkel’s true successor, Merz would have to tackle the many unresolved issues she left behind, notably crippling infrastructure deficits and the failing model of an export-led economy that relied on cheap energy and low labor costs and now faces immense challenges in the context of global supply chain disruptions. But he lacks not only the political finesse, but also the power base to do so.
When Merkel first governed with the SPD, she had a comfortable majority of seats in the Bundestag. The grand coalition Merz now leads is the weakest in history with merely 52 percent of seats. Moreover, the political pressures on the CDU have shifted fundamentally. While Merkel governed during a global upsurge of left-liberalism, with majorities in Germany in favor of legalizing gay marriages, the transition to clean energy and, initially, even the opening of borders, Merz faces a reversed dynamic. Today, the pressure is coming from the Right, articulated by the AfD with a vehemence that no party had the basis to match during Merkel’s time.
Under these conditions, it will be difficult for Merz to stabilize and capitalize on the “center” that Merkel cultivated. He has already distanced himself from his economic radicalism in the hope of reassembling Merkel’s broad voter base. But it is likely that the consensus model she cultivated will not survive his chancellorship.
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THE HOUSE REPUBLICANS’ “One Big Beautiful Bill” is big, at over a thousand pages. But is it beautiful? Not in the eyes of this beholder.
All I can see when I look at it is “denihilism,” a word my former boss at USA Today, Bill Sternberg, used this week in an article about climate change, the coming hurricane season, and the many ways the Trump administration has weakened and destabilized federal weather forecasting and disaster response agencies.
These actions, Bill wrote,
appear driven by a combination of scientific denial (if you pretend a problem like climate change doesn’t exist, then you don’t have to do anything about it, particularly anything that would offend fossil fuel interests) and ideological nihilism (taking a perverse pleasure in inflicting trauma on federal employees and watching the world burn). Call it denihilism.
The gigantic House budget bill that passed by one vote is denihilism to the max. On climate alone, it would roll back Biden-era clean energy incentives and programs, resulting in over 800,000 lost jobs, increased climate-warming pollution, and rising electricity prices—a triple threat to workers, public health, and the cost of living. Not to mention setbacks to U.S. progress in clean-energy manufacturing.
The 215–214 vote came hours after a stock selloff sparked by analyses showing the bill’s tax component—extending, expanding, and reviving provisions of the 2017 tax law—would increase U.S. debt by $3 trillion to $5 trillion over ten years, with interest costs approaching one-third of all federal revenues, amid downgrades of U.S. creditworthiness.
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While most of the tax benefits go to upper-income households, most of the savings proposed to offset about a third of the tax-revenue losses would penalize lower-income Americans by cutting roughly $1.1 trillion in health coverage and food benefits. And they would be cut in a deceptive way—by increasing red tape and paperwork to the point where stressed, needy, busy people just give up.
The GOP plan, public policy professors Pamela Herd and Donald Moynihan wrote this week, relies on “opaque cuts, which will shed millions of eligible beneficiaries by overwhelming them with pointless paperwork and other needlessly complicated administrative requirements.” They are less obvious than outright cuts, but they’ll have the same effect—making it “impossible for eligible clients to access the safety net.”
Republicans aren’t stopping at adding work requirements and administrative burdens to Medicaid, the health insurance program (no cash handouts) that’s a lifeline to hospitals and over 70 million low-income people, almost all of whom are kids, parents, disabled, or already working. They’re also reversing years of reforms to ease enrollment and renewals—“simplifying applications, eliminating confusing paperwork and automating processes,” Herd and Moynihan note.
THE GOP BILL TAKES THE SAME APPROACH to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), known as food stamps, that 40 million children, seniors, and disabled adults count on. Republicans are counting on the burden of work requirements to pare participation and costs, and on states to find money to pay an increased share of the joint federal-state program.
The knock-on effects of all of this can hardly be overstated. There’s solid evidence that these kinds of complexity can stunt and wreck lives, a concept I wrote about in connection with the fiftieth anniversary of the War on Poverty in 2014:
In Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, economist Sendhil Mullainathan of Harvard and psychologist Eldar Shafir of Princeton show that simply feeling poor makes it very hard to think clearly. Their studies found the same dramatic results whether the subjects were Indian sugarcane farmers or shoppers at a New Jersey mall. Feeling rich (the farmers who were studied after their harvests, for instance) resulted in good performance on intelligence tests. Feeling poor produced much worse results.
Worries about not having enough money, it turns out, can subtract 13 IQ points from your mental capacity or “bandwidth,” as the authors call it. That’s a more profound effect than losing a full night’s sleep.
The upside of the research is that the scarcity-perpetuating-scarcity problem can be fixed. “Starting from the premise that programs for people in need should use as little mental bandwidth as possible, the potential for policy remedies is clear,” I wrote. For instance, for people eligible for multiple programs, a one-stop shop open for long hours would relieve stress by reducing time spent on public transportation, in waiting rooms, and away from jobs.
Unfortunately for us, we now have a Republican party determined to make policy remedies as complicated as possible, knowing and perhaps even intending that the result will be more scarcity. How can that possibly help the country?
The GOP safety-net plans, not surprisingly, are wildly unpopular. Data for Progress, a progressive polling firm, found overwhelming opposition to SNAP cuts in every single congressional district in the country. Less than 15 percent of likely voters in each district support the cuts, the firm said Thursday.
It’s true that some parts of the GOP megabill enjoy broad support. Eliminating federal income taxes on tips and overtime, in line with Donald Trump’s campaign promises, is in the bill, at least for now. The exemption only lasts through 2028, and it could disrupt the labor market, and safety-net cuts could cancel out any advantage to families, but it’s one of the only appealing talking points available to Republicans. If they end up keeping it.
As for Democrats, those safety-net cuts are a political layup. Senate Republicans might prevent the worst, but 215 House Republicans are already on record as voting for it. And, as the fictional detective Harry Bosch’s mantra goes, “Everybody counts or nobody counts.”
He’s talking about bringing justice in equal measure in all his cases. We should be making sure all Americans have the opportunity to live their best lives, instead of making sure we shower the most generous tax cuts on people who need them least.
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The week before President Donald Trump unveiled bruising new tariffs that sent the stock market plummeting, a key official in the agency that shapes his administration’s trade policy sold off as much as $30,000 of stock.
Two days before that so-called “Liberation Day” announcement on April 2, a State Department official sold as much as $50,000 in stock, then bought a similar investment as prices fell.
And just before Trump made another significant tariff announcement, a White House lawyer sold shares in nine companies, records show.
More than a dozen high-ranking executive branch officials and congressional aides have made well-timed trades since Trump took office in January, most of them selling stock before the market plunged amid fears that Trump’s tariffs would set off a global trade war, according to a ProPublica review of disclosures across the government.
All of the trades came shortly before a significant government announcement or development that could influence stock prices. Some who sold individual stocks or broader market funds used their earnings to buy investments that are generally less risky, such as bonds or treasuries. Others appear to have kept their money in cash. In one case unrelated to tariffs, records show that a congressional aide bought stock in two mining companies shortly before a key Senate committee approved a bill written by his boss that would help the firms.
Using nonpublic information learned at work to trade securities could violate the law. But even if such actions aren’t influenced by insider knowledge, ethics experts warn that trading stock while the federal government’s actions move markets can create the appearance of impropriety. The recent trades by government officials, they said, underscore that there should be tighter rules on how, or if, federal employees can trade securities.
“The executive branch is routinely engaged in activities that will move the market,” said Tyler Gellasch, who, as a congressional aide, helped write the law on insider trading by government officials and now runs a nonprofit focused on transparency and ethics in capital markets. “I don’t think members of Congress and executive branch officials should be trading securities. To the extent they have investment holdings, it should be managed by someone else outside their purview. The temptation to put their own personal self-interest ahead of their duties to the country is just too high.”
There is no evidence that the trades by government officials identified by ProPublica were informed by nonpublic information. Still, when government officials trade stock at opportune times, Gellasch said, even if it was based on luck and not inside information, it undermines trust in government and the markets
“It then becomes a thing where our markets look rigged,” he said.
In response to questions from ProPublica, the officials who made the trades either said they had no insider information that would help them time their decisions or did not respond to questions about the transactions.
Questions about trades based on nonpublic information have swirled around Congress for years and began anew after Trump’s tariffs announcements led to wild swings in the market. Lawmakers’ trades are automatically posted online and, after multiple congressional stock-trading scandals, are widely scrutinized as soon as they become public.
But less attention is paid to the trades of executive branch employees and congressional aides whose work could give them access to confidential information likely to influence markets once made public.
Last week, ProPublica reported that Attorney General Pam Bondi sold between $1 million and $5 million worth of shares of Trump Media, the president’s social media company, on April 2. After the market closed that day, Trump unveiled his “Liberation Day” tariffs, sending the market reeling. Bondi’s ethics agreement required her to sell by early May, but why she sold on that date is unclear. She has yet to answer questions about the trades, and the Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment.
Earlier this week, ProPublica reported that Sean Duffy, Trump’s transportation secretary, sold shares in almost three dozen companies on Feb. 11, two days before Trump announced plans to institute wide-ranging “reciprocal” tariffs. A Transportation Department spokesperson said Duffy’s account manager made the trades and that Duffy had no input on the timing.
Using insider government information to buy or sell securities could violate the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge, or STOCK, Act. But no cases have ever been brought under the law, and some legal experts have doubts it would hold up to scrutiny from the courts, which in recent years have generally narrowed what constitutes illegal insider trading.
Thousands of government employees are required to file disclosure forms if they sell or buy securities worth more than $1,000. In many cases, the records are available only in person in Washington, D.C., or through a records request. The documents do not include exact amounts bought or sold but instead provide a broad range for the totals of each transaction.
ProPublica examined hundreds of records for trades shortly before major tariff announcements or other key government decisions. Trump, of course, repeatedly said on the campaign trail that he intended to institute dramatic tariffs on foreign imports. But during the first weeks of his term, investors were not panic selling, seeming to assume that his campaign promises were bluster. Several tariff announcements by Trump early on shook the markets, but it wasn’t until he detailed his new tariffs on April 2 that stocks dived.
Among those who sold securities before one of Trump’s main tariff announcements was Tobias Dorsey. Dorsey, a lawyer in the executive branch since the Obama administration, was named acting general counsel for the White House’s Office of Administration in January, when Trump was inaugurated. The division provides a range of services, including research and legal counseling across the president’s staff, including the Office of the United States Trade Representative, which helps craft trade policy. In his LinkedIn bio, Dorsey describes his duties since 2022 as giving “expert advice on a wide range of legal and policy matters to help White House officials achieve their policy goals.”
On Feb. 25 and 26, disclosure records show, Dorsey unloaded shares of an index fund and nine companies, including cleaning products manufacturer Clorox and engineering firm Emerson Electric. The total dollar figure for the sales was between $12,000 and $180,000. (He purchased one stock, defense contractor Palantir, which was selling for a bargain after recently plummeting on news of Pentagon budget cuts.)
At the time of Dorsey’s trades, investors were still largely in denial that Trump was going to go through with the massive tariffs he had promised during the campaign. But the next morning, Trump posted on social media that significant tariffs on Mexico and Canada “will, indeed, go into effect, as scheduled” in several days, and that “China will likewise be charged an additional 10% Tariff on that date.”
The S&P 500, a stock index that tracks a wide swath of the market, fell almost 2% that day alone and ultimately dropped nearly 18% in six weeks.
In an interview, Dorsey said the sale was made by his wife from an account belonging to her. He said she decided to sell around $20,000 worth of shares so they could make tuition payments and that he had no nonpublic information on the impending tariff announcements. The kind of work he does as a career employee, he said, focuses not on public policy, but on how the White House operates, including personnel, workplace technology, contracts and records issues.
“I’m not advising Stephen Miller or Peter Navarro,” he said, referring to top policy advisers to the president. “I’m advising the people running the campus. … I don’t have access to any sensitive political information.”
Another well-timed set of transactions was made by Marshall Stallings, the director of intergovernmental affairs and public engagement for Trump’s Trade Representative. The office helps shape the White House’s trade policy and negotiates trade deals with foreign governments.
On March 25 and 27, Stallings sold between $2,000 and $30,000 of stock in retail giant Target and mining company Freeport-McMoRan. The sales appear to have been an abrupt U-turn. He had purchased the shares less than a week earlier. Days after Stallings’ sales, Trump unveiled his most dramatic tariffs. Target stock fell 17%. Freeport-McMoRan fell 25%.
Stallings and the Trade Representative’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
A longtime State Department official, Stephanie Syptak-Ramnath, who until April was ambassador to Peru, also appeared to make a bet against the stock market. On March 24 and 25, she sold between $255,000 and $650,000 in stocks, and bought between $265,000 and $650,000 in bond and treasury funds (along with $50,000 to $100,000 in stocks). Then, on March 31, two days before Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement, she sold between $15,000 and $50,000 of a broad-based stock fund. When the market started to plummet, she bought back the same dollar range in another stock fund. Syptak-Ramnath said she did not have any information about the administration’s decisions beyond what was publicly available. The trades, she said, were “undertaken as a result of family obligations” and in “response to a changing economy.”
A second longtime State Department official, Gautam Rana, who is now ambassador to Slovakia, sold between $830,000 and $1.7 million worth of stock on March 19, a week before Trump declared new tariffs on cars and two weeks before his “Liberation Day” announcement. The shares he sold were largely broad-based index funds. Rana declined to comment for this story.
Virginia Canter, a former government ethics lawyer, said executive branch employees who don’t have nonpublic information and want to trade stock should consult with ethics officials before doing so, thereby allowing an independent third party to assess their actions.
“If you trade and you don’t seek advice in advance, you kind of do it at your own risk, and if you’re asked about it, you have to hope there aren’t factors that make someone question your motivations,” Canter said. “If you seek ethics official advice, you have some cover.”
Executive branch employees are barred from taking government actions that would narrowly benefit them personally, and some are required to sell stock in companies and industries they have purview over in their jobs. But like members of Congress, they are allowed to trade securities.
Since Trump’s tariff announcements and walkbacks began causing fluctuations in the market, questions have been raised about whether anyone has profited off advance notice of the moves. After Trump unexpectedly rolled back some of his tariffs in early April, causing stocks to surge, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez warned on social media that “any member of Congress who purchased stocks in the last 48 hours should probably disclose that now.”
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene bought between $21,000 and $315,000 of stock the day before and the day of the announcement. In a statement, Greene said a financial adviser controls her investments: “Since my portfolio manager makes my trades for me, I usually find out about them when the media asks.”
ProPublica’s review of disclosures also found trades by congressional aides that took place before the market tumbled.
Michael Platt, a veteran Republican staffer who served in the Commerce Department during Trump’s first term and now works for the House committee that handles administrative matters for the chamber, restructured his portfolio in March. An account under his wife’s name sold off between $96,000 and $390,000 in mostly American companies, and purchased at least $45,000 in foreign stocks and at least $15,000 in an American and Canadian energy index fund. Some stock forecasters considered international markets a relatively safe haven if Trump went through with his tariffs. Platt did not respond to requests for comment.
Stephanie Trifone, a Senate Judiciary Committee aide, sold stock in mid-March and bought at least $50,000 in treasuries. A spokesperson for the committee’s Democratic minority said Trifone had no nonpublic information about the tariffs and her trades were conducted by a financial adviser without her input. Kevin Wheeler, a staffer for the Senate Appropriations Committee, made a similar move. In late February, he and his spouse offloaded between $18,000 and $270,000 in funds composed almost entirely of stocks and bought between $50,000 and $225,000 in bonds. A spokesperson for the Appropriation Committee’s Republican majority said Wheeler had no nonpublic information about Trump’s tariff plans and that a financial planner made the trades after advising Wheeler to take a more conservative approach with his portfolio.
Precious metals can be a safe haven during a bear market turn, but those stocks, like the rest of the market, declined after Trump’s tariff announcements.
Two days after White’s last purchase in April of the mining companies’ shares, however, the firms got some good news. A bill White’s boss introduced to make it easier for mining companies like Hecla and Coeur to operate on public lands was approved by a Senate committee, an important step in passing a bill. (White added to his Hecla shares earlier this month and sold his stake in Coeur.)
White told ProPublica that “all required reporting and ethics rules were followed.” Any suggestion that the committee passing the bill played a role in his stock purchases “is a stretch and patently false,” he said, adding that the legislation “has not become law and even if it does, would take decades to have any appreciable impact.”
Update, May 22, 2025: This story has been updated to include a statement from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
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