The recent release of Israeli American hostage Edan Alexander was the product of direct negotiations between the United States and Hamas. Presented as a confidence-building measure to establish a wider cease-fire, Israeli representatives were not party to the discussions.
This was seen as a historic departure in US-Israeli relations and precipitated serious debate over the interpersonal dynamics between Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. Avigdor Lieberman, the chair of conservative Israeli party Yisrael Beiteinu, says that the US-Israeli axis is enduring an “an unprecedented low.” Some have interpreted these dynamics as political theater, designed to provide cover for further bloody escalations. But we need to go beyond the temperament of individuals — the fixation of so much commentary today — and look to the structural trends and strategic tensions that form the backdrop to a changing world order.
The end of American unipolarity necessitates a paradigm shift in the Middle East and throws previous certainties into flux. The big picture is nothing less than a restructuring of the global state system: a world in transition, in which regional hegemons are arranging their own spheres of influence as part of the new multipolar order.
The United States, in decline relative to its erstwhile position as the single, undisputed superpower, is compelled to achieve the best possible deal from its managed retreat. The sprawling US apparatus is too costly to maintain, and critically, the wars it has fought in an effort to secure empire dominance have been abject, blundering failures. Within this shift, Israel is going to wield less strategic utility for the United States, who have no vital interests in the volatility intertwined with the Netanyahu era, such as a war with Iran.
This process will show that the Israel lobby, while influential, is not dictating US policy. This theory has been a popular one, but it has always risked underplaying the self-interest of the United States. Rather than being pulled along grudgingly, with the tail wagging the dog, the opposite is and has been the overriding dynamic: the US has invested in Israel as a garrison for securing its imperial objectives in the Middle East. As Joe Biden said in 1986: “[Supporting Israel] is the best $3 billion investment we make. Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region.”
Biden’s thinking made sense for that phase of US imperialism, but this approach is now being challenged as this asset depreciates and, indeed, becomes a liability. Simply put, the region demands stability as multipolarity takes effect, and the Gulf states want authority in this field. The United States also prefers a reconfiguration that can protect its financial and long-term strategic interests, having accepted that endless military interventions in the Middle East prove deleterious. As the US prepares for escalating competition with China, it seeks a resolution in which its objectives can be flexed commercially through Gulf collaborators against a backdrop of regional integration.
This is why they have accelerated talks with Iran, and why it is likely Iran will agree to a deal. In addition, the United States has concluded hostilities with the Houthis and, quite remarkably, without Israeli support or coordination. As mentioned above, they have also engaged in direct talks with Hamas, much to the ire of the Israeli cabinet. On his recent tour, Trump conducted high-level talks with representatives from several key states in the region, but not Israel. The USS Harry S. Truman aircraft carrier has since left the Red Sea, with three fewer fighter jets. It is little wonder that Netanyahu grasps that Israel will need to “wean ourselves off US military aid.”
As interests reposition, the United States is also coordinating with the Saudis on the nature and implementation of a lasting cease-fire in Gaza — a difficult and messy process, as disentanglement generates its own dilemmas. This is partly why one day a report will suggest the Trump administration is planning to expel a million Palestinians from Gaza to Libya, and the next, the US embassy in the country denies it. It is plausible that briefing and counterbriefing reflects schisms inside the American establishment over the question, which takes us to the future of Gaza itself, largely obliterated by Israel with the support of its NATO allies.
The proposal for a Trump-Netanyahu “Riviera” in an ethnically cleansed Gaza was never going to be accepted by the region; the AI rendering of such a grotesque spectacle posted by Trump on social media was too on the nose. But the material effect of this proposition was to hasten the Egyptian plan for Gaza, which rejected the ethnic cleansing of the strip. This plan was supported by the Arab Summit, and quietly Britain, France, Germany, and Italy also backed it. Contrary to some initial reports, the US didn’t reject it. Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff said it was a “good faith first step from the Egyptians.”
Israel has been driven into a corner: it needs regional normalization, but its negotiating position has been undermined because of its criminal and genocidal actions. With each hour it remains on its current course, its position becomes weaker. Moody’s Ratings warns of “severe implications for the government’s finances” and “a further erosion in institutional quality,” as a result of high political risks. Israel could lose some $400 billion in economic activity over the next decade, according to some estimates.
Despite this, the United States will now make deals with Arab states without raising normalization as a prerequisite. In return, Trump has secured a $600 billion Saudi investment pledge, including in one of the largest arms deals in history. This also disrupts the ironclad US commitment to Israel’s “qualitative military edge,” which is meant to guarantee it military supremacy in the Middle East. Trump also made clear in his keynote speech that Western intervention was a failed enterprise and nodded toward the uprooting of American soft power NGOs by ending US Agency for International Development (USAID) funding.=
This gives the regional players and the Gulf Cooperation Council a historic opening to discipline Israel and advance a Palestinian state. It should be said that any such objective on their part would not be altruistic, given the lack of action these regimes have taken to stop the genocide in Gaza. They are incentivized to ensure their regional sphere in the new global order is anchored in a way that is favorable to them. Saudi Arabia, in this vein, sees Israel as a security threat to its ambitions for the region because its depraved expansionist approach to the Palestinians generates cyclical violence and political unrest. The righteousness of the Palestinian cause is quite incidental (which is why it is, inexcusably, in no rush to act).
The Palestinian question is, at the same time, hardwired into regional interstate competition and serves as a platform to bring Israel to heel. The questions are: to what extent and at what pace? Another important factor is the demand for regional harmony being made by international capital – given the trade geography of the global economy – which can no longer tether itself to the US bombing new markets open.
While a narrower set of interests around arms manufacturing prefers permanent conflict, there are broader and far more differentiated flows of commerce impeded by it. This partly explains why the Financial Times has been outspoken for a cease-fire since as early as October 2023, and why other establishment publications like the Economist are slowly breaking from Israel’s Gaza policy.
Pressure is growing, and relationships are straining. Britain, France, and Canada this month released a joint statement condemning Israel’s military expansion and the lack of aid entering the strip; for the first time, the threat of targeted sanctions was broadcast. In response, Netanyahu claimed this represented a “huge prize for the genocidal attack on Israel on October 7th.” The latest statement is itself cynical, given that its signatories have been unrepentant in their provision of arms, technical support, and political cover for Israel.
However, these nations have reputational interests, global security concerns, and economic competition to consider. It is no coincidence, for instance, that Rachel Reeves has said that Britain is targeting a major Gulf trade agreement, following recent negotiations between the European Union and India. Such arrangements will be thrown into disarray should Israel be allowed to conclude the genocide and ethnically cleanse Gaza, given the consequences entailed for the region.
In Spain, last week more than three hundred officials and investors convened in Riyadh for a Spanish-Saudi Business Forum in which substantial deals were made. At the same time, Spain is calling for an arms embargo on Israel and is urging its European allies to do the same. It has also called for concrete moves toward a Palestinian state. These and other items were discussed at a high-level summit known as the “Madrid Group” on Sunday, which included representatives from European countries, including France, Britain, Germany, and Italy, along with envoys from Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Morocco, the Arab League, and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation. Israel is becoming a problem for the West to deal with, inhibiting its private sector and regional deals, rather than a rational and profitable partner.
Netanyahu, isolated and losing strategic value to the United States, has no viable path forward. It is possible he is negotiating his own “day after,” using his only remaining leverage: inflicting further misery on Palestinians and barbarically ratcheting up the stakes. His recent trip to Hungary was related to the International Criminal Court (ICC) proceedings. And while it is true the ICC is a colonial instrument, there is no guarantee that the drive to consolidate blame around one individual can be avoided; we can expect a harder Western turn against Netanyahu as states seek to distance themselves from the catastrophe they have jointly unleashed in a bid to reset relations with the Middle East, as well as the Global South.
Netanyahu also faces a domestic legal swamp involving corruption charges, which are much harder to evade. But the underlying and foundational issue is that the geopolitical recalibration attendant on the emerging multipolar world system relegates Israel’s comparative importance to US policy in the region — not just Netanyahu’s.
Netanyahu and his allies remain in control of the Israeli state — making it all the more dangerous and volatile — but their rule is fracturing and unsustainable. Netanyahu’s policy only eventuates in further curtailing Israel’s fortunes. It should also be said that this conflict is not between a handful of peaceniks and a united Israeli ruling class. Ruptures exist within the business elite, the military, security services, and among prominent political figures. We must also factor in the most fanatical and messianic elements, the settlers and so on, who are likely to become more dangerous as the situation evolves, fragmenting the state’s cohesion further. As the horrors intensify, splits will become more desperate in tone. One politician, Moshe Feiglin, recently argued on Channel 14 that “every child, every baby, is an enemy”; another, Yair Golan, has warned that “Israel is on the way to becoming a pariah state, like South Africa was . . . a sane country does not fight against civilians, does not kill babies as a hobby, and does not give itself the aim of expelling populations.”
Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert has himself taken a critical stance, telling a “People’s Peace Summit” that “Gaza is Palestinian and not Israeli. It needs to be part of a Palestinian state.” This, he argued, is the basis for achieving normalization. Former Mossad and Shin Bet heads have also coauthored a letter with a former deputy IDF chief urging Trump not to listen to Netanyahu and to end the “war.” These interventions are, of course, based on self-interest and the knowledge that Netanyahu has run out of road. The mission now is a salvage operation: an attempt to realign Israel and the United States as far as possible. It is notable that Israel’s once-confident defenders in the media are now silent. There is no single propaganda line to coalesce around; the narrative has collapsed entirely. The international Palestine solidarity movement, meanwhile, has been justified in its key demands and its assessment of the scale and objectives of the horror unleashed on Gaza.
This movement has been the vanguard of moral conscience in these past months, and it has also been politically inclusive, despite the smears directed against it. Now in the West, the “great and the good” have started to turn. Although stopping short of identifying the apartheid nature of the Israeli state, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman writes, ‘This Israeli government is behaving in ways that threaten hardcore US interests in the region. Netanyahu is not our friend.” In the Guardian, Jonathan Freedland predicts that Trump will betray his onetime ally. The former European Commission vice president Josep Borrell now says that Israel is committing genocide. Emmanuel Macron is due to cohost a summit in New York with Saudi Arabia on setting up a Palestinian state.
To reiterate, these moves are based on interests, not morality. In the case of France, Macron is vying for European and French objectives in the Middle East, for which loyalty to Israel yields diminishing returns. They, like the United States, require a new means through which to interface with the region. Others are looking to the long-term sanitization process of the Israeli state that will be required, by reducing the issue to one especially bad aberration in the form of Netanyahu.
Nothing can be taken for granted in the arguments made here — not least because the Israeli cabinet is likely to become ever more vexed. At every stage, the global Palestine movement must continue to mobilize, institutionalizing and universalizing its positions as it does. It is only because of the determination of the Palestinian people that, against all the odds, they are in the end the crucial and decisive factor in the overarching regional calculation. The struggle of the Palestinian people for dignity, freedom, and human rights has shown in practice what they have always attested to: existence is resistance.
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This month, Die Linke met for its congress in Chemnitz, under the motto “Organizing Hope.” Such a slogan would have seemed out of touch the last time it held such a meet-up in October 2024. Back then, activists were surely hopeful for Die Linke’s future, despite a damaging split by the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW). Yet in many polls, the party didn’t even register, and it feared falling out of parliament altogether.
What happened to change the mood? Between the two congresses, Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government had collapsed, snap elections had been called for February 2025, and in that contest Die Linke achieved one of its best-ever results, with 8.8 percent of the vote nationally. Unlike the nail-biting federal election in 2021, when it relied on a technicality to return to the Bundestag, this year’s results night in Die Linke HQ saw a party mood.
The Chemnitz congress, then, saw a party whose fortunes had turned around almost overnight. But for the success to last, it was also decisive to agree on what had worked — and how it might be replicated in future.
According to much of the mainstream press and indeed Die Linke’s political opponents, it ought to be thanking the most unlikely of figures for its revival. We are told that it was the leader of the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) Friedrich Merz, today Germany’s chancellor, who brought Die Linke back from the brink.
According to this narrative, what made the difference was Merz’s decision, in the middle of the campaign, to push a parliamentary resolution reliant on the votes of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). Merz’s breaking of a taboo (it was the first time a Bundestag resolution was approved thanks to AfD votes, although the CDU’s overtures to the far right have a longer history) offered an opening to Die Linke’s joint lead candidate Heidi Reichinnek to shine in her speech denouncing the move, making her a popular icon among progressive voters. With her decisive intervention, she revived a party that otherwise would probably have fallen below 5 percent support.
That, at least, is the dominant account of how Die Linke turned around its fortunes. The 30 million views of Reichinnek’s speech in just one week provided a visibility such as Die Linke could otherwise only have dreamed of. But there are solid reasons to believe that Reichinnek’s speech simply accelerated and amplified an already existing trend. After all, the CDU’s vote together with the AfD came at the end of January 2025, when Die Linke had already been rising in polls throughout the month.
Absent from the mainstream narrative are the reasons why Reichinnek’s speech resonated so widely. First among these is the fact that the CDU’s joint vote with the AfD sought to impose an effective stop to asylum-seekers arriving in Germany. This also helps us understand why, when the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Greens also denounced Merz for reaching out to the AfD, their accusations rang somewhat hollow. Both these government parties had, during Scholz’s administration, presided over successive restrictions in provisions for asylum-seekers and imposed controls on some and then all German borders in September 2024. Meanwhile, in opposition Die Linke had defended the right to asylum even as it became increasingly unpopular (a poll this January indicated that 68 percent of Germans wanted to accept fewer refugees). Wagenknecht’s BSW split from it to advocate, among other things, a more restrictive immigration policy.
Second, the leader of the SPD parliamentary fraction might have accused Merz of having opened “the gates of hell” by reaching out to the AfD, with the Greens’ rhetoric only a little less harsh. But both parties remained open to forming a government with the CDU after the elections in the name of “taking responsibility.” No voter might similarly fear that Die Linke would make the deeply unpopular Merz chancellor. In short, whereas the SPD and the Greens had a credibility problem, Reichinnek’s angry speech criticizing Merz was not only well articulated but also authentic, because it built on Die Linke’s prior trajectory.
Considering the policy concessions that the SPD and Greens had made in government to both their own neoliberal-hawk government partner (the Free Democrats, FDP) and the right-wing opposition, observers could only wonder what they’d be ready to do to become the CDU’s junior partner. Joining Merz’s Christian Democrats in government this spring, the SPD has in fact accepted policies such as pushing back asylum-seekers at the German borders and replacing the eight-hour-day regulation with a weekly maximum.
Die Linke’s election effort was helped by the SPD’s and Greens’ mistakes (these parties’ previous voters were the main contributors to Die Linke’s increased vote), as leading members in the leftist party’s campaign privately acknowledge. After years of mainly worrying about attacks from the right-wing opposition, the SPD and Greens were forced to counter an agile and social-media-savvy Die Linke campaign that focused on neglected issues such as the increasing price of supermarket goods and rents, and the lack of fair taxes on the rich. Die Linke’s campaign remained laser-focused on a few key messages that activists stuck to, such as the need for a rent cap and eliminating the taxes on basic groceries. Die Linke’s creation of an app to check abusive heating and renting prices in some of the main cities was also key to positively entering the media conversation and showing that the party could practically help working-class people.
One measure of Die Linke’s recent success is that unlike at the previous congress in Halle, at this month’s edition in Chemnitz there was only scant talk of the BSW. The party founded by Wagenknecht had enjoyed around 8 percent polling support last fall, but it eventually scored 4.98 percent in February’s federal election — missing the 5 percent threshold to enter parliament by just over 9,000 votes.
The elections did not only reward Die Linke’s programmatic proposals as compared to the BSW’s, but also showed the value of its model of party organization. Whereas the highly centralized BSW has around one thousand members — each individually approved by its leadership — Die Linke entered 2025 with 58,532 members before experiencing a sudden surge to 100,000 ahead of the election (it currently has 112,000 members). Die Linke’s intensive street and door-knocking campaign contrasted with a BSW that was barely visible in the streets aside from election placards. After the campaign, one of the main challenges for Die Linke today is to integrate the wave of new sign-ups, which have made the party younger, more Western German, and more female.
The Chemnitz congress was also shaped by the perennial tension between Die Linke’s opposition course at the national level and its government participation in some federal states. February’s elections had given rival opposition parties AfD and Die Linke a combined one-third minority in parliament and, with it, the de facto power to block constitutional changes, notably to the “debt brake” which limits government deficit spending. However, after the election — but before the new parliament met — the Christian Democrats, Greens, and SPD cobbled together a two-thirds majority in the old parliament to exempt military spending from the debt brake and approve a special infrastructure fund.
In the Bundestag, Die Linke criticized the reforms because they maintain the debt brake for nonmilitary expenses while spending on the army is now theoretically unlimited. However, Die Linke members in the governments of Bremen and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern voted in favor of the package in the Bundesrat, i.e., the institution representing the federal states, where constitutional changes also need to be approved. Die Linke members in both states argued that the funds for the regional and communal governments in the approved infrastructure package were essential in times of austerity. Yet their decision clearly went against the party line and frustrated the national leadership.
The constitutional changes would have been approved even without Die Linke votes, and its recent polling remains strong in both Bremen and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Still, Die Linke can be thankful that the controversial votes took place when the BSW, which has strongly criticized remilitarization, is still recovering from the disappointment of not having entered parliament. What the representatives of Die Linke in both regional governments could not prevent was significant criticism of them at the congress in Chemnitz. Party activists lamented that they had spent the election campaign putting up placards against more military expenditure only for the Bremen and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern governments to vote for more cash for the army.
The congress also addressed the troubled question of Die Linke’s relationship with the CDU. On May 6, Merz became the first chancellor to need two voting rounds in the Bundestag before being elected. At least eighteen members of the government’s parliamentary majority did not express confidence in him. To organize a second voting attempt on the same day, Merz needed a two-thirds majority to change the procedural rules of the parliamentary session, thus requiring the help of either Die Linke or the AfD. While Merz’s CDU rules out “coalitions and other forms of content-related cooperation” with both these parties, the conservatives held conversations with Die Linke, and the leftist party decided to allow the second vote.
Whether voting together to change procedural rules qualifies as cooperation is debatable. But clearly, without Die Linke’s votes, Merz would have had to postpone his first international visits and wait at least three more days, until May 9, to be elected chancellor. There would have been mounting pressure to know whether Merz actually had a majority and which legislators had not supported him. The vote would also have collided with the first day of Die Linke’s congress.
Did it make the right decision by allowing his earlier election? A congress delegate from Frankfurt didn’t think so. She said it would have been nice “if Germany had lived three days without a king.” Die Linke’s parliamentary group was reportedly relatively divided on whether to allow the vote to proceed, but the “yes” side carried the day. Denying the early repeat vote would have reinforced Die Linke’s antiestablishment profile, a not-insignificant attribute in times of low popular support for the status quo. It is unclear, however, how it would have weathered three days being accused of bringing the country to a standstill (in fact, the situation was far less dramatic, as Scholz would have remained caretaker chancellor).
Equally important, there is no predicting what the CDU’s behavior during those three days could have been. Merz is famously impulsive and could even have prompted a move toward fresh elections, with the AfD poised to swell its ranks even further. These three days would also have opened a window of opportunity for those CDU members who had anyway preferred a minority government with, if needed, extragovernmental support from the AfD.
The conversation about the CDU’s relationship with Die Linke is expected to resurface soon, as the Bundestag needs to elect three new members for the Federal Constitutional Court and they need to be approved by a two-thirds majority. In Saxony and Thuringia, where the AfD surpassed 30 percent support in last year’s regional elections and the CDU rules without a majority, the center-right party has long been in conversations with Die Linke to approve its budgets.
The polarization between CDU and Die Linke has the positive aspect of showing that very different options are available to voters without having to opt for the AfD. Still, the new parliamentary arithmetic at both the regional and national levels will likely force CDU and Die Linke to talk more often.
“Die Linke is back” was a common line in party coleader Ines Schwerdtner’s intervention at the Chemnitz congress, as well as in Reichinnek’s comments. At least at the national level, Die Linke’s immediate strategy seeks frontal opposition to the new CDU-SPD government. In Chemnitz, for instance, Die Linke coleader Jan van Aken accused the ruling parties of being detached from ordinary people’s realities, with inflation and high grocery prices not even mentioned in their coalition agreement.
Unlike the Greens, who wanted to stay in government and will have to justify their recent record in office still for some time to come, Die Linke benefits from having long been in opposition and is currently polling 10–11 percent. Moreover, the Greens and the SPD appear to have no interest in covering their left flanks and are instead in search of centrist voters. Green politicians such as Ricarda Lang and Social Democrats such as Saskia Esken who represented the left wing of their parties have been relegated to a secondary role. Instead, the Greens appear to be taking the course of their only regional president, the centrist Winfried Kretschmann in Baden-Württemberg, whereas the SPD is firmly under the control of vice chancellor and finance minister Lars Klingbeil, a member of the party’s conservative Seeheimer Kreis faction.
Considering this and Die Linke’s internal strength, the hopes expressed at the party congress for the 2026 elections are not unfounded. Next year, it will seek to enter the Western parliaments of Rhineland-Palatinate and Baden-Württemberg for the first time and finish first in the Berlin elections, after winning most votes in the capital in February’s federal elections.
It will be in Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, however, that Die Linke’s objective of recovering working-class voters from the AfD will be most important. In these two states, which also vote in 2026, the AfD doubled the second-place parties in votes in February. The case of Saxony-Anhalt is especially concerning. The AfD collected 37 percent of ballots there and enjoys an unusual strength even in the largest cities. In 2026, the flashy headlines for Die Linke could come from Western Germany and Berlin. Yet it is in the east of the country where any votes hard won from the AfD can prevent the first far-right regional president since 1945.
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The State Department has suspended interviews with foreign citizens applying for student visas from abroad while it sets up procedures to review their social media posts. The halt comes as President Trump is trying to coerce Harvard University and other institutions to restrict what can be said on campuses, with a particular focus on anti-Israel speech. (NYT)
The administration may already be abusing the customs process to block entry to the country for conduct as innocuous as criticism of the president. But we’re sure this power won’t be one they’ll abuse. Happy Wednesday.
(Composite / Photos: GettyImages / Shutterstock)
by Andrew Egger
Elon Musk’s bright-burning but brief turn as shadow president provided a lesson for other would-be revolutionaries in the Trump administration. Move too fast, break too many things, and you risk poisoning the public against you and your work.
It’s a lesson Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appears to be taking to heart. Follow along to understand why—and why now is the moment for public pushback. You’ll be glad you did.
By now it should be clear to everyone, if it somehow wasn’t before, that the secretary of health and human services is gunning for America’s vaccines. Kennedy, who just last year proclaimed that “there’s no vaccine that is safe and effective,” who has never stopped insisting that vaccines are connected to autism, and who has actively counseled people not to vaccinate their children for years, claimed implausibly after Trump’s reelection that “we’re not going to take vaccines away from anybody.” But since his confirmation, he has been busily laying the groundwork to do exactly that.
Weeks after Kennedy took the reins at HHS, he canceled the first of three yearly meetings of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, members of which he is also reportedly preparing to fire. He’s continued to claim that vaccines haven’t been “safety tested,” and his inaugural “Make America Health Again” report last week suggested that vaccines may play a role “in the growing childhood chronic-disease crisis.” Things look no better behind the scenes: HHS’s top spokesman quit in March after just two weeks on the job, and the FDA’s top vaccine official resigned a few weeks later, citing Kennedy’s avalanche of “misinformation and lies.” That same week, Kennedy brought prominent anti-vaxxer David Geier aboard to conduct a study hunting for a link between vaccines and autism.
In the last few days, Kennedy has started to make his anti-vaccine plans a reality. On Friday, his HHS announced that the FDA would revoke authorization for COVID boosters for most healthy Americans under 65 years old. And yesterday, Kennedy announced in a video posted to social media that the COVID shot would be removed from the vaccine schedule for healthy pregnant mothers and children—a change that will likely lead insurance companies to drop the vaccine from coverage for those groups.
In announcing the change, Kennedy didn’t just say he believed the COVID vaccine to be unnecessary for those groups. He said the change would bring the nation “one step closer to realizing President Trump’s promise to Make America Healthy Again.” The implication was obvious: In Kennedy’s view, the COVID vaccine is an active threat to America’s good health.
As the New York Times’s Maggie Astor notes, this suggestion not only contradicts all available science—infants under six months old face as high a risk of hospitalization with COVID as do people who are 65 to 74 years old, and the best way to give them some protection is for their mother to get the shot while pregnant—it also contradicts the FDA and CDC’s own current guidance as of last week. When the FDA announced Thursday it would revoke the COVID shot’s authorization for most healthy people under 65, it specifically mentioned pregnant women as a group that would likely remain eligible. Even this morning, you can still visit the CDC page that describes pregnancy as a conclusive “higher-risk” condition for COVID, complete with a helpful link to the relevant meta-analysis and systematic review. The HHS website—for now—has some videos urging pregnant mothers to get the shot, too.
In many ways, the COVID vaccine is low-hanging fruit for RFK Jr. The novel coronavirus is no longer novel; many people perceive it to be yesterday’s problem. Others assess that their own current level of immunity—from former doses of the vaccine or brushes with the disease—is good enough. COVID booster uptake in particular remains low, with less than a quarter of Americans receiving the annual shot.
But anyone who thinks Kennedy will stop at the COVID shot is deluding themselves. The man was agitating against vaccines long before COVID arrived on the scene, and his spurious arguments against the COVID shot are arguments he’s deployed time and again against other vaccines as well.
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Which brings me back to Elon.
This administration may carry itself like a relentless evil empire, but they have yet to show they can weather a real punch in the jaw in the field of public opinion. When Musk grew broadly unpopular, the White House quietly put him out to pasture. When the trade war went belly-up in the polls (and in the bond market), Trump pulled back there too.
That’s the only reason why Kennedy is moving this slowly and incrementally on his pet issue. He’s waiting to see what form—if any—public backlash against his early actions might take. It’s why he constantly tries to qualify his anti-vax rhetoric by insisting he just wants more “science” and study. And it’s why every time an incremental vaccine restriction results in a public shrug, he feels emboldened to go a bit further.
So don’t let him get comfortable. If you’re among the vast sea of Americans who remain enthusiastically grateful for vaccines, the time for pushing back against Kennedy isn’t later, when he’ll likely be ratcheting up his program to “reevaluate” longstanding pediatric vaccines. It is right now.
Vaccines are a modern medical miracle. We can’t just stand by while these jokers mess them up for the rest of us.
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by William Kristol
On Monday, Donald Trump pardoned former Culpeper sheriff and fervent Trumpist Scott Jenkins, who had been convicted by a jury of his peers of fraud and bribery. Jenkins was freed as he was about to begin a ten-year prison sentence. Trump’s pardon chief at the Department of Justice [sic], Ed Martin, triumphantly posted, “No MAGA left behind.”
So, there you have it, no potential MAGA enforcers and vigilantes are to be left behind.
It turns out no MAGA donors are to be left behind, either.
In April, Trump pardoned former nursing home executive Paul Walczak who had pleaded guilty to withholding more than $10 million from the paychecks of employees under the pretext of using it for Social Security, Medicare, and income taxes. Walczak stole the money to buy a $2 million yacht and to pay for other personal luxuries. He was due to pay nearly $4.4 million in restitution, and to report to prison for 18 months. At his sentencing, the judge explained that there “is not a get-out-of-jail-free card” for the rich.
But there is. As the New York Times reported yesterday, Walczak’s mother is Elizabeth Fago, a major fundraiser for and donor to Trump. Fago attended a $1-million-per-person fundraising dinner last month at Mar-a-Lago. Less than three weeks later, Trump signed the pardon.
Trump also announced yesterday that he intends to pardon the imprisoned reality television couple Todd and Julie Chrisley, found guilty by a jury in 2022 of millions of dollars of fraud and tax evasion.
In none of these cases is there any doubt as to guilt. In none of them are there extenuating circumstances. It’s simply the case that if you’re a Trump-supporting law enforcement officer, you can get pardoned. If you’re a Trump-supporting plutocrat, you can get pardoned. If you’re a Trump-supporting wealthy celebrity, you can get pardoned.
Trump’s autocratic project needs muscle and money, cash and celebrity. The presidential pardon power turns out to be a very useful part of this project.
To my knowledge, not a single lawyer in the White House counsel’s office has resigned in protest of these pardons. Not a single Trump political appointee anywhere in the government has resigned in protest. Not a single Republican member of Congress has denounced the pardons.
And so the rule of law is disassembled in broad daylight.
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Dream Bigger, Talk More Boldly… On The Bulwark Podcast, PETE BUTTIGIEG joins TIM MILLER to explain why he thinks the Democrats need more imagination to confront our enormous challenges, plus, cracking the manosphere, what Biden could’ve done differently on COVID, and why the era of politicians sticking to their talking points is over.
Feel the Power… On Just Between Us, ANDREW EGGER joins MONA CHARENto discuss the corruption of the pardon power that Bill writes about above. They also talk about Trump’s memecoin haul and the anti-vaccine insanity.
Finally ‘Reckoning’ with AI… From Mission: Impossible to large language models, wrestling with the future, ALYSSA ROSENBERG, PETER SUDERMAN, and SONNY BUNCHon Across the Movie Aisle discuss how AI is both helping animators lip sync cartoons and also completely inventing books for summer reading lists.
Scott Pelley Says the Quiet Part Out Loud… On Bulwark+ Takes, LAUREN EGAN joins SAM STEINto look at a rare moment when a veteran journalist like Scott Pelley publicly defends the press and issues a stark warning about Trumpism.
‘A STAGGERING PUNISHMENT’: Donald Trump’s attempt to bully formerly antagonistic law firms into becoming his vassals may have cowed some firms into submission. But it also keeps running aground in the courts. On Tuesday, a D.C. federal judge struck down an executive order targeting the firm WilmerHale on constitutional grounds. WaPo reports:
In a 73-page opinion accompanying his order, Leon wrote that it was necessary to block Trump’s punishments for WilmerHale to preserve “the independent and adversarial nature of our judicial system.”
Leon wrote that the Founding Fathers had understood the necessity of an independent judiciary and independent lawyers. Trump’s orders targeting law firms, the judge said, were “a staggering punishment” challenging that very concept.
“I have concluded that this Order must be struck down in its entirety as unconstitutional,” Leon wrote. “Indeed, to rule otherwise would be unfaithful to the judgment and vision of the Founding Fathers!”
Leon is the third judge so far to punch back at Trump’s punitive orders against law firms, although we’d venture to suggest he stands alone in the panache department.
WHAT HAPPENED TO MY GOOD BUDDY VLAD? Donald Trump’s approach so far to the war in Ukraine has been guided by a pair of goofball convictions as his twin North Stars: Vladimir Putin isn’t really all that bad a guy, and he never would have invaded Ukraine if a strong president like Trump had been around. In recent weeks, Trump has seemed genuinely baffled that his mere reemergence on the world stage hasn’t convinced Putin to be a good boy and pack it in. Doesn’t he know peace through strength is back???
It’s enough that Ukraine allies on Capitol Hill have begun hoping Trump might be persuaded to move forward with additional sanctions on Moscow. Politico reports:
Pro-Ukraine allies on Capitol Hill are treading carefully as they urge the White House to consider following up on his threats to Putin by backing their effort to enact new sanctions. And allies in Europe, facing the possibility that Trump could walk away from peace talks without punishing Russia, are scrambling to figure out how they could tackle taking the lead on support for Ukraine.
“What Vladimir Putin doesn’t realize is that if it weren’t for me, lots of really bad things would have already happened to Russia, and I mean REALLY BAD,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post on Tuesday. “He’s playing with fire!”
Trump also told reporters on Sunday that he was “absolutely” considering additional economic sanctions on Russia and described Putin as having “gone absolutely CRAZY” in a social media post.
The president has issued similar, yet sporadic, threats since his first days in office. But at no point has he followed through and ratcheted up pressure on Moscow—despite Putin repeatedly telling Trump he supports peace while intensifying his bombing campaign in Ukraine.
Unfortunately, this last point is likely the key one. Putin’s insistence on continuing to bomb Ukraine into oblivion may draw a lot of confused bluster from the president. But we’ve yet to see evidence it will cause him to reevaluate his baseline, shirts-and-skins reflex to prefer Putin’s company to Volodymyr Zelensky’s.
SETTLING SCORES: First Daughter-in-Law Lara Trump appeared yesterday on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show to try to squeeze just a bit more blood from Jake Tapper’s and Alex Thompson’s Original Sin. She recounted to Ingraham how Tapper called her to apologize for a contentious 2020 exchange in which he accused her of mocking Biden’s stutter and angrily cut her off when she asserted that Biden was “very clearly [in] cognitive decline.” It should be noted that Tapper has said she was right and he was wrong in some of his book tour interviews.
Yet Lara Trump remains unmollified. She scoffed that “it feels a little bit too late” and suggested that Tapper was trying to “discount his own role” in the cover-up. Meanwhile, Ingraham zinged Tapper on X for “smearing” Lara Trump in 2020.
But who’s really being “smeared”? In early 2024, Tapper was extremely tough on Democrats who tried to spin away special counsel Robert Hur’s report characterizing Biden as “an elderly man with a poor memory.” He also raised the age issue in an interview with Biden in 2022. The 2020 rebuke of Lara Trump was from a time when (as Original Sin details) Biden’s mental decline was far from “clear”—a time when he did well in debates against both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, even parrying Trump’s interruptions with the memorable, “Will you shut up, man?” (Are the MAGA media telling us their idol got smacked down by a rival with dementia?) Lara Trump’s diagnoses were almost certainly less about astute judgment than about throwing mud at the wall only to have it stick five years later. Tapper owed her no apology.
—Cathy Young
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Reporting Highlights
A “Valid” Threat: Schools must use threat assessments to determine if a threat of mass violence is “valid,” but they often carry them out inconsistently.
No State Transparency: Tennessee is supposed to track how effective schools’ threat assessments are, but the state does not release that information to the public.
Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Experts say it’s dangerous for schools to expel students without plans to follow up or address behavioral concerns.
These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.
The day after a teenager opened fire in a Nashville high school cafeteria early this year, officials in the district scrambled to investigate potential threats across their schools. Rumors flew that the shooter, who killed a student before turning the gun on himself, had accomplices at large.
At DuPont Tyler Middle School, the assistant principal’s most urgent concern was a 12-year-old boy. James, a seventh grader with a small voice and mop of brown hair, had posted a concerning screenshot on Instagram that morning, Jan. 23. He was arrested at school hours later and charged with making a threat of mass violence.
The assistant principal had to complete a detailed investigation called a threat assessment, as required by Tennessee law. First, she and other school employees had to figure out whether James’ threat was valid. Then, they had to determine what actions to take to help a potentially troubled child and protect other students.
Threat assessments are not public, but the district gave ProPublica a copy of James’ with his father’s permission. School officials did not carry out the threat assessment properly, according to experts who reviewed it at ProPublica’s request. Instead, the school expelled James without investigating further and skipped crucial steps that would help him or protect others. (We are using the child’s middle name to protect his privacy.)
The way school officials handled James’ case also exposes glaring contradictions in two recent Tennessee laws that aim to criminalize school threats and require schools to expel students who make them — with minimal recourse, transparency or accountability.
One obvious issue in the threat assessment, according to the experts, appeared on Page 20. That page features a checklist of options for how the school could address its concerns about James, including advising his parents to secure guns in their home and ensuring he has access to counseling.
Schools should take steps like these even when a student is expelled, according to John Van Dreal, a former school administrator who has spent decades helping schools improve their violence prevention strategies. Officials at James’ school opted for none of the options they could have taken. Instead, the assistant principal wrote under the list in blue pen, “student was expelled.”
“That’s actually about the most dangerous thing you can do for the student,” Van Dreal said, “and honestly for the community.”
Van Dreal’s name appears in tiny print at the bottom of each page of James’ threat assessment, because he helped the school district set up its current process. After ProPublica shared details about James’ case, Van Dreal said, “What I’m hearing is probably more training and more examples are needed.”
One page of the threat assessment form, created by John Van Dreal, used in James’ case
Credit:
Obtained by ProPublica. Highlighted by ProPublica.
Nashville’s school district does not collect data on how many threat assessments it does or how many result in expulsions, according to spokesperson Sean Braisted. “The goal is always to ensure the safety and well-being of all students while addressing incidents appropriately,” Braisted wrote. He later declined to answer questions ProPublica asked about James’ case, although James’ father signed a privacy waiver allowing the school to do so.
Tennessee schools must submit data to the state on how effective their threat assessments are — but the state does not release that information to the public. School districts are required to get training on threat assessments, but lawyers and parents say they often carry them out inconsistently and use varying definitions for what makes a threat valid.
Two recent contradictory Tennessee laws make it even harder to handle student threats. One mandates a felony charge for anyone who makes a “threat of mass violence” at school, without requiring police to investigate intent or credibility. The other requires schools to determine that a threat of mass violence is “valid” before expelling a student for at least a year.
James’ alleged threat was a screenshot of a text exchange. One person said they would “shoot up” a Nashville school and asked if the other would attack a different school. “Yea,” the other person replied. “I got some other people for other schools.” The FBI flagged the post for school officials and police. James told school officials that he reposted the screenshot from the Instagram page of a Spanish-language news site.
The Tennessean published a story in April detailing James’ arrest and overnight stay in juvenile detention. The story, and the ones ProPublica and WPLN published last year on other arrests, shows how quickly police move to take youth into custody.
Schools in Tennessee are supposed to follow a higher standard than police when it comes to investigating threats of mass violence: They’re supposed to determine whether a threat is valid. For instance, in Hamilton County, a few hours southeast of Nashville, school officials chose not to expel two students even after police arrested them for threats of mass violence, ProPublica and WPLN previously reported.
Yet when James’ father appealed his son’s expulsion at a March school district hearing, the assistant principal said repeatedly that James had to be expelled simply because he’d been arrested. “We did not investigate further,” she said. James’ father shared an audio recording of the hearing with ProPublica.
James, who turned 13 in February, is small for his age, still awaiting the teenage growth spurt of his three older brothers. At the hearing, his voice was soft but assured as he explained what happened. He said he understands why he shouldn’t have posted the screenshot. But he said he wanted to warn others and feel “heroic.”
Melissa Nelson, a national school safety consultant based in Pennsylvania who trains school employees on managing threats, reviewed James’ threat assessment at ProPublica’s request and concluded that “this is gross mismanagement of a case.”
“This tool has not been used as intended,” she said. “They didn’t do a behavior threat assessment. They filled out some paperwork.”
After the police took James away, assistant principal Angela Post convened a team of school employees to decide whether to expel him. They used a threat assessment form that Van Dreal had developed, one of the most commonly used across the country, to guide them on how to respond.
According to Van Dreal, Metro Nashville Public Schools is in an early phase of using the form, and its staff have flown to Oregon at least once to learn from his consulting group.
Van Dreal tells school officials to use the threat assessment to collect information about a student in trouble and address behavior that could signal future violence. If school officials worried that James was planning an act of violence, they should have pursued some of the many options outlined in the threat assessment to get him help and protect the school from harm.
Instead, they chose none of those options.
Experts said that is one of the biggest mistakes school officials make. “Even if a child is expelled, what I always train is: Out of sight, out of mind doesn’t help,” Nelson said. “Expelling a child doesn’t deescalate the situation or move them off the pathway of violence. A lot of times, it makes it worse.”
School officials also failed to seek out more information that could have helped them figure out whether the threat was valid. Post checked a box acknowledging that she hadn’t notified James’ parents of the threat assessment. She wrote beside it, as an explanation, “student was arrested and expelled.” On a line asking whether James had access to weapons, Post wrote that the threat assessment team did not know.
Interviewing parents is a crucial part of the process, said Rob Moore, a Tennessee psychologist who has helped schools conduct threat assessments for more than two decades. “When you sit in that room with those parents and you collect data from them, you really get a sense of things that teachers would never know, that the administrators would never know.”
Although school officials did not opt to investigate further or to monitor James, the threat assessment indicated they had concerns he may pose a threat. In response to a question about whether James’ caregivers, peers or staff were concerned about his potential for acting out aggressively, Post checked yes and wrote, “He has little to no supervision in discipline structures at home but might think he could get away with it.”
And although James told school administrators he was not a participant in the text thread he shared on Instagram, Post wrote that he had indicated a plan and intention to harm others. “See attached image. Shows location, intent to harm, targets and date,” she wrote, referencing a screenshot of James’ Instagram post. She also wrote that he had a motive: “The post indicated that he was being made fun of. See attached image.”
The threat assessment included questionnaires from James’ teachers; three out of four said they did not have concerns about potential aggression. One teacher, who taught James social studies, cited his disciplinary history: using racial slurs, fighting another student and “researching racially motivated things” on the school computer. “Dad seemed disengaged in conference & somewhat unaware of the child’s school or social or personal issues,” she wrote.
James’ dad and stepmom did not know that the threat assessment accused them of lax supervision at home. That’s because they didn’t even know the threat assessment existed until ProPublica told them about it, more than a week after it took place.
Upon reading the document, their first emotion, after shock, was anger. They said they hadn’t known about the incident with the racial slur, and it was not directly referenced in a copy of James’ disciplinary history. But they felt upset at the insinuation that they had not been involved in James’ life. “We’ve been asking for help, for grades, tutoring,” his dad, Kyle Caldwell, said. “And we really didn’t get any.”
James relaxes at home with his dad, Kyle Caldwell, and the family dog. James was put on court supervision following his arrest.
Credit:
Andrea Morales for ProPublica
James said that in early September, his social studies teacher taught the class about World War II. He said the teacher didn’t answer enough of his questions, so he started searching online. The school flagged that he had looked up swastikas. “I didn’t know much about it,” he said. “That’s why I searched it.”
As part of his discipline, the school prohibited him from using its computers. His stepmother, Breanne Metz, shared emails she sent to James’ teachers explaining she and Caldwell were worried about his grades and wanted to help him catch up.
James had been struggling with his parents’ contentious divorce; after his mom lost custody of him, he hadn’t been able to see her in months. Worried, his dad and stepmom arranged for him to see a school counselor. James said the counselor tried to connect with him through their mutual love of video games over about five sessions, which was nice, though “it didn’t really help.” Post wrote in the threat assessment that James had “disclosed confidential information to the school counselor that would support a feeling of being overwhelmed or distraught.”
Then James lost his best friend: Lieutenant Dan, a three-legged pitbull-lab mix named after a character from the movie “Forrest Gump.” Dan joined the family when he and James were both 1, and he died of cancer last November. As James describes it, he was at capacity with the emotions he was dealing with, and his dog’s death was the tipping point. “When someone you love or something you love for your whole life passes away, you can’t hold it,” he said. He sat in class feeling sad and exhausted.
Records show school staff talked with James’ parents about his attendance at school and he was disciplined for not complying with an unspecified request. Then in mid-December, he began a fight with another student, who had been “horseplaying” with him “off and on” and went too far, according to the school report. The following month, he was arrested and expelled.
In the days after the arrest, Caldwell considered hiring a lawyer. Reading the threat assessment “added the urgency” for him to finally make the call. “The puzzle pieces weren’t coming together in their story,” he said. “It really looked like they were going to try to be sweeping their stuff under the rug.”
In mid-March, James sat at the oval table in the district conference room next to his father and across from assistant principal Post. He wore a gray vest over his T-shirt in preparation for an appeal hearing that would determine whether he would be allowed back in school. It had been nearly two months since he had set foot on district property.
Caldwell brought his private lawyer, a rare resource for a school hearing. He showed up that morning nervous but eager to make his case directly to school administrators. The public rarely gets insight into what happens at a school appeal hearing, but Caldwell shared an audio recording with ProPublica.
Post started by reading aloud the social media post that landed James in trouble, stumbling over the shorthand and unfamiliar internet slang. Then, it was James’ turn to speak for himself.
Lisa Currie, the school district’s director of discipline, asked him to explain why he had reposted the screenshot of the texts. “You do understand that once you reposted them from somewhere else, it gave the appearance that this was a conversation that you were having?” she said.
“I just wanted to let people know, feel heroic,” James said. “I didn’t want more people to get hurt.”
James enjoys building and painting the model F-15E fighter jet his dad bought him.
Credit:
Andrea Morales for ProPublica
Over the next 40 minutes, Caldwell’s lawyer questioned Post about the process the school used to determine whether James should be expelled. When he pressed her for direct responses, Post repeatedly said that law enforcement and not the school held the primary responsibility for investigating the threat. Although the law requires schools to use a threat assessment to determine if the threat is “valid,” Post and her team based the expulsion entirely on the police’s arrest.
Once local police take over a case, she said, “then it’s not really our investigation anymore.”
“Was it your assessment at the time that he wrote this statement, like physically typed it out on a computer and posted it?” the lawyer asked.
“We did not make that determination,” Post said.
She said school staff did not look deeply through James’ disciplinary history as part of the threat assessment. “That’s not necessarily the purpose of the threat assessment,” she told the lawyer. Because James had been expelled and arrested, “there would not be a reason to be concerned about the return of a student.”
Currie indicated that Post’s approach was supported by district leaders. “The purpose of the threat assessment is to determine appropriate supports and interventions around the students while they’re in the building,” she said. Post and Currie did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment or to written questions.
Post told the lawyer she couldn’t remember whether school staff investigated the origin of the original threat.
“So if there was an actual threat made and somebody else authored this threat, then we don’t know who that is. Would that be a fair statement?” the lawyer asked.
“That is possible,” Post responded. She said James didn’t initially say that he had shared the post to warn others and it wasn’t her place to decide whether he intended to make a threat. “I don’t want to think, ‘Oh, he’s not going to do that.’ And then something just like the previous day happened,” she said, referring to the Antioch High School shooting. Once James was arrested, “it’s in MNPD’s hands,” Post said, referring to the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department.
The lawyer asked Post to explain whether the threat assessment could ever have changed school officials’ decision to expel James: What if school officials found out that the threat was not valid? “Had y’all come on information that he had not written these texts,” he asked, “would it have changed the punishment?”
“We would have had to let our [school resource officer] know and they would have had to go through the MNPD channels,” she said.
“You did not at that time know whether he wrote those text messages or not?” the lawyer asked again.
“Correct,” Post said.
Then, it was Caldwell’s turn to speak. He criticized the school’s decision to leave him out of the initial disciplinary process. He would have explained to James why he should go through “appropriate channels” to report a threat instead of posting it on Instagram. “As a dad,” he said, “there was a teachable parent moment that I didn’t get to have.”
As the hearing came to a close, Currie told Caldwell to expect a decision soon.
The arrest and expulsion cleaved James’ life in two. He now begins many sentences with the phrase “before everything happened.” Before everything happened, he would ride his bike with his brothers and friends to explore the forested land and abandoned houses in the surrounding neighborhoods. They found all sorts of strange garbage: a fire engine’s license plate, wooden pictures of “demonic rituals,” a dentist chair adorned with rusty handcuffs.
James looks for four-leaf clovers in his backyard.
Credit:
Andrea Morales for ProPublica
He was able to come home from his night in detention in exchange for agreeing to pretrial diversion with six months of court supervision, a common outcome for students charged with threats of mass violence. While under supervision, he wasn’t allowed to use the computer or phone unsupervised by an adult and was mostly restricted to the streets around his house. “It’s a big neighborhood, but once you get used to it, it’s small,” he said.
The court recently lifted his supervision, earlier than expected. Because he had completed the terms of pretrial diversion, his case was dismissed.
His parents declined Metro Nashville Public Schools’ offer to enroll him in the local alternative school, which primarily serves kids with disciplinary issues who were suspended or expelled from their original schools. Instead, they enrolled him at an online public charter school; he starts in the fall.
As James waited to hear the result of the expulsion hearing, he followed the schedule his dad and stepmom created for him — less a rigorous academic curriculum than a routine to keep him occupied while his stepmom takes calls in her home office. He gets most excited about the hands-on activities, like building and painting the model F-15E fighter jet his dad bought him online.
One night in early April, tornadoes touched down just outside Nashville. James, his five siblings, and two dogs huddled with Caldwell and Metz in the windowless laundry room; the kids wore helmets in case of falling debris. When they got up the next morning, groggy but unharmed, Caldwell checked the mailbox: A letter from the school district was inside.
District officials had reviewed the information from the hearing and determined that “there was not a due process violation of MNPS’ expulsion process.” James was still expelled. Caldwell had prepared his son for this outcome so that he wouldn’t be devastated. James would later joke that the storm had delivered the bad news.
The letter gave the family the option to escalate the appeal through the district process. But the odds of winning and the costs of retaining the lawyer made the effort feel futile. The more the family fought back, the more anxious the 13-year-old felt about his future. Would he feel even worse if they lost again? Would people start to think of him as a bad kid?
That afternoon, talking with his dad about the letter, James quietly considered these questions. Then he went outside to watch the storm clouds.
For Sheena Scarbrough, being a mother to two daughters was her greatest pride.
She envisioned watching them grow into adulthood — side by side, thriving, and supported. But those dreams were shattered in April 2024, when her 19-year-old daughter, Sade Robinson, went on a first date with an older man and never came home.
“This is the worst type of pain and hurt. I just miss her being present. I miss her — her life, her spirit, her calls. Just her. Her laughter, her character, her loving nature. She was just so loved,” Scarbrough told Capital B. “I just miss her being there with us every day.”
The grieving mother decided against publicly celebrating Robinson’s second heavenly birthday on Mother’s Day weekend this year. She would have been 21.
Last year, Scarbrough organized a balloon release in her honor at a park near their home. But this year, her oldest daughter’s birthday came just weeks before her accused killer’s trial. Maxwell Anderson, 34, is charged with first-degree intentional homicide, mutilating a corpse, and arson of property other than a building. He has been held in jail on $5 million cash bail. If convicted, he faces life in prison. Jury selection begins May 27.
Capital B has reached out to Anderson’s attorneys Anthony Cotton and Jason Findling for comment. Beyond Anderson’s not-guilty plea to the criminal charges, they declined to comment via email.
Robinson’s death underscores the dangers for Black women living in Wisconsin, where, a 2024 Columbia University report found, they’re 20 times more likely to be murdered than their white peers. The state’s Justice Department says there are 175 missing people from the state, but advocates say those numbers aren’t complete, especially as violence against Black women is on the rise.
In the weeks leading up to the trial, Scarbrough referred to Anderson as a “demonic entity, an entity or the demon” throughout her interview with Capital B.
“That demonic entity,” she said with conviction. “A normal person would not move in that…level of behavior.”
A mother waits for answers
Sade Robinson was 19 years old at the time of her death. (Courtesy of Sheena Scarbrough)
Robinson’s case also highlights disparities in police investigations in Wisconsin and across the country when it comes to missing Black people. When Robinson did not show up for work at Pizza Shuttle on April 2, 2024, she was reported missing by co-workers, but Scarbrough wasn’t notified for two days of her disappearance. This is an example of the disconnect law enforcement has with Black families when investigating missing loved ones, said state Rep. Shelia Stubbs, who — along with other lawmakers, including Republican state Rep. Jesse James — has been advocating for an investigative task force to address these disparities.
Once contacted, Scarbrough was able to assist detectives in their investigation by providing Robinson’s last known phone location — the mother and daughter had been tracking each other’s phones for safety.
“I never imagined this would be my, where I would be placed in life,” Scarbrough said, adding, “This is something I never expected to walk through — being a crime victim.
“My daughter [was] taken from me in the most brutal way.”
“I just miss her being present. I miss her — her life, her spirit, her calls. Just her.”
Sheena Scarbrough, mother of Sade Robinson
According to multiple news outlets, Anderson has prior convictions for domestic violence, disorderly conduct, and drunk driving. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel also reported that court records highlight concerns about his mental health and substance abuse.
“I will be at court every day. This is, you know, a long wait,” Scarbrough said. “Definitely, I will be at court every day to get justice for my daughter, most definitely.”
Scarbrough said there are “a lot of different layers” in connection to her daughter’s death that she cannot get into publicly but that will come out at the criminal trial or through civil litigation she has pending in Milwaukee County Circuit Court.
“We have definitely stopped this demonic entity in their tracks,” she said.
She filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Anderson in June 2024, and this April she filed another suit against two bars, accusing them of contributing to her daughter’s death by allegedly over-serving alcohol to Robinson, who was underage, while she was on a date with Anderson. There’s video surveillance of Robinson’s last moments alive in those bars, according to television station WISN.
Anderson’s attorneys argued in court earlier this year that there’s a potential alibi through Anderson’s phone records. He may have allegedly been in his home using the internet at the time when someone was driving Robinson’s car.
Scarbrough couldn’t quite put into words what justice would look like at the end of the criminal trial. She still has a 17-year-old daughter, Adriana, who she says is grieving the loss of her big sister.
“Not having my baby present, like nothing’s going to replace that. There will never be justice. I want my daughter back,” she said. “But definitely making sure those types of demonic entities are not on the streets to harm or hurt anyone else.”
Nonetheless, she said: “The truth will be told. My daughter’s voice will be heard.”
Great Job Christina Carrega & the Team @ Capital B News Source link for sharing this story.
Feminist language is being twisted into a weapon against feminism itself.
People gather to protest Project 2025 in front of the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., on March 16, 2025. Project 2025 is a nearly 900-page policy document to reform the federal government crafted by the conservative Heritage Foundation. (Bonnie Cash / AFP via Getty Images)
This post was originally published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette, with the headline “‘War Is Peace. Freedom Is Slavery. Ignorance Is Strength.’ — 1984 in 2025.”
As someone who has taught and fought for women’s rights for close to four decades, I find it intensely frustrating how the Trump administration is weaponizing feminist rhetoric and law to attack women’s rights. Claiming to defend gender equality, they are eliminating hard-fought gains for women and twisting laws meant to protect women’s rights into tools to destroy them. We are plunging into a world eerily similar to George Orwell’s novel 1984.
This gaslighting strategy has been used for years by the antiabortion movement, which claims that abortion restrictions protect women’s health, when in fact they harm women’s health. Antiabortion crisis pregnancy centers call themselves “Choices” or “All Options” as they work to eliminate both women’s choices and options. These centers claim to care about women but use disinformation and scare tactics to coerce them into carrying unwanted pregnancies to term.
Antiabortion advocates have coopted the language of anti-racism to attack Black women for having abortions. These largely white activists have held “freedom rides” across the South and coopted the Black Lives Matter movement by proclaiming “Baby Lives Matter.” Their feigned concern for Black children is belied by their attempts to cut social programs that support these children once they are born.
Extending their manipulation beyond language and into history, the antiabortion movement coopts feminist and anti-racist heroes to attack the rights of women and Black people. One of the leading antiabortion organizations is called Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. Ironically, abortion opponents introduced legislation in Congress to restrict abortion, titled the Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act.
Using a different tactic, they push to eliminate programs that help mothers by arguing that these programs are discriminatory because they help some but not all women. The Trump administration is considering doing away with federal tax credits for daycare—claiming that it’s “discriminatory” towards “stay-at-home parents.” Don’t be fooled by their gender-neutral language—they are talking about mothers.
In higher education, the Trump administration justifies its attacks on gender and ethnic studies by arguing that these fields are discriminatory because they study discrimination. Despite his Nazi affiliations, Trump uses claims of anti-Semitism to destroy higher education. Trump deletes history from government websites and bans words, such as women, gender and sexuality. Meanwhile, they are eliminating Title IX protections against sexual harassment and assault in schools—all while insisting they are the ones who are fighting discrimination.
Conservatives then invoke women’s rights to attack other historically marginalized communities. Last summer, the conservative Independent Women’s Forum operated a cross-country bus campaign called, “Save Our Sports: Take Back Title IX.” IWF has never done anything to promote women’s sports or enforce Title IX, but they urged Trump to weaponize the law to block a handful of trans women across the country from participating in women’s sports. Schools have been violating Title IX’s prohibition of sex discrimination in education for years, yet never has the federal government withdrawn federal funding from a school until now—not for discriminating against women, but for allowing trans women to participate in women’s sports. Trump doesn’t care that the lost funding is likely to hurt women’s sports because, of course, it was never about supporting female athletes.
Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s policy agenda that Trump has closely followed, is full of this kind of hypocrisy. They claim to support freedom, equality and the “inalienable right of self-direction,” yet recommend policies that roll back women’s right to control their bodies by banning abortion, restricting contraception and eliminating funding for domestic violence shelters and rape crisis centers.
For generations, feminist philosophers have analyzed how patriarchy inverts the truth to serve its interests. Mary Daly, in her book Beyond God the Father, called this phenomenon “reversal,” illustrated by the patriarchal myth of Adam giving birth to Eve. Daly explained: “It’s ridiculous. Who could believe that? It’s contrary to all biology. But with that myth in mind, people can justify somehow the idea that God is male. And therefore that male is God.”
George Orwell called it “Doublethink” in 1984’s totalitarian society where, “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” In the novel, The Ministry of Truth made up the lies, and the Ministry of Love tortured people. In an essay on political language, Orwell argued that tyrants use propaganda “to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
Republicans today are using the 1984 reversal playbook, flooding people with lies to confuse them and corrupting our thought with their language. Many have fallen for Trump’s lies—or don’t care about the truth. They hope to acclimatize us, like a frog in warming water, to the atrocities of Trump’s authoritarian regime. If we continue down our current trajectory, I fear we are destined to become the controlled and manipulated society of Orwell’s 1984.
But Orwell had advice: “To think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration.”
To think clearly, we must challenge their lies and relentlessly, loudly and clearly speak the truth. And we must invest in science, higher education, open debate and critical thinking without fear of penalty.
The job of a journalist is to go to where the silence is — especially when those in power seek to silence voices that question or challenge power. That is what we do at Democracy Now! day in and day out, and we’re able to do it because of financial support from people like you — people who trust and depend on our independent reporting. If you believe that freedom of speech and freedom of the press are essential to the functioning of a democratic society, please donate today. Every dollar makes a difference. Thank you so much.
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One morning in January, Byju Raveendran sat in the back seat of his shiny black Cadillac as it sped through Dubai. Just three years prior, the schoolteachers’ son had appeared on the Forbes list of richest Indians as founder and CEO of Byju’s, then one of the world’s most valuable education technology companies. He was dressed casually in a T-shirt and jeans, while his driver, Hashim, was more formally attired in a collared shirt. Raveendran, square-jawed and muscular at 45, told me he typically rides beside Hashim in the passenger seat, seeming intent on underscoring his down-to-earthness. “I always sit there, no, Hashim?” he asked, with a boyish laugh. Hashim nodded.
Former Byju’s employees had told me about Raveendran’s love for staying at the world’s finest hotels, and the upscale properties and luxury cars his family owned when he was based in Bengaluru. I’d heard his wife and co-founder, Divya Gokulnath, described as a jet-setter who networked with Silicon Valley elites.
But beyond the Cadillac, Raveendran didn’t seem keen for me to get a glimpse of his wealth. He was facing accusations of defrauding U.S. lenders for hundreds of millions of dollars, while tens of thousands of his employees had been laid off. I’d hoped to be invited to his home — one source told me it was a mansion in a gated community of Dubai. Instead, he showed up at my hotel on short notice to take me to a South Indian restaurant for a simple breakfast of idli, vada, and sambar — his staple meal during a modest upbringing in a village in Kerala.
Raveendran wanted to show he hadn’t let success get to his head, and wouldn’t let his company’s staggering problems, either. He was defiant that his entrepreneurial journey wasn’t over yet. “Why I am confident of a comeback is that the most valuable thing I had is still with me,” he said, referring to himself.
Byju Raveendran, 2023. Getty Images/Rest of World
Byju’s, launched in 2011, developed into a learning app that quickly became one of the best known brands across India. It made Raveendran a pioneer in the rapidly expanding sector of educational technology, in a country with a massive appetite for education solutions. By 2017, marquee investors like the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative had vaulted Byju’s into the upper echelons of global edtech companies, sparking a worldwide acquisitions spree. In 2022, the company was valued at about $22 billion, with roughly 60,000 employees and millions of paying users.
But things unraveled — slowly at first, and then all of a sudden. In September 2023, the Board of Control for Cricket in India took Byju’s to court for defaulting on a $19 million sponsorship payment. BCCI’s complaint came just months after news that Byju’s had allegedly defaulted on a $1.2 billion loan from U.S. lenders. They sued Byju’s parent company, Think and Learn, in a bankruptcy court in Delaware. The details included in that suit were shocking: The plaintiffs alleged that $533 million of the loan had been siphoned to a sham hedge fund once registered at the address of an International House of Pancakes restaurant in Miami. The fund was run by a 23-year-old with seemingly no relevant educational or professional experience, who’d purportedly spent part of the funds on a Ferrari, a Lamborghini, and a Rolls-Royce.
Three of Byju’s biggest investors, including the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, had subsequently resigned from the company’s board. At a press briefing in October 2024, Raveendran lamented that the legal troubles and investor exits had all but destroyed the company. “It’s worth zero,” he declared.
The Delaware case was nearing conclusion when I visited Raveendran in Dubai, where he’d moved, he has said, for his father’s medical treatment. Even though Think and Learn and various educational companies in the Byju’s empire were still operating, Raveendran no longer had control over them, pending the U.S. and Indian court proceedings. As we raced toward the restaurant, he insisted the allegations of theft were baseless — echoing a statement he’d made when I’d first called him. His company’s troubles, he said, had simply resulted from “trying to grow too soon, too fast.”
Through nearly five hours of interviews over two days, he refused to take responsibility for the company’s legal and financial woes, painting himself as a victim of a conspiracy by U.S. lenders. And while all the court documents I’d read seemed starkly damning, listening to Raveendran argue his case in person made me occasionally wonder if he had indeed been wronged. He is persuasive because his earnestness doesn’t feel like a put-on.
Sitting across from me at a table for two, he sketched a diagram of little arrows on a paper napkin to provide an alternative explanation for the missing funds. I didn’t fully understand the accounting he was relaying, but the presentation evoked his past as a tutor who’d once filled stadiums by simplifying difficult math problems with slides of diagrams and equations. I could just as easily imagine his talent at pitching to investors, where a self-confidence that seemed to edge on delusion might come off as visionary.
As the waiter cleared our plates, Raveendran told me he expected to regain control of his company. “Worst-case scenario, if we don’t get control back, we’ll launch everything through a new platform.”
Raveendran grew up in Azhikode, a small villagein Kerala. He watched his grandfather toil on the family farm to grow paddy even at the age of 90, he told me when we sat down to talk inside a plush conference room in a Dubai high-rise where he rents a coworking space. Kerala has the highest literacy rate among Indian states, and Raveendran’s parents, both college-educated, were teachers at the school he attended: His father taught physics and his mother taught math.
As a kid, Raveendran told me, he loved math — and his seventh-grade math teacher once even asked him to lead the class while she was away. “Otherwise I was an introvert,” Raveendran said. “But the moment I started teaching math, I saw the value that I was giving.”
Raveendran often skipped class to play sports, which meant he had to catch up on schoolwork on his own at home. This, he said, showed him the power of self-education — the basis for his app years later. “Learning on your own is so much more efficient” than being taught in school, he said.
Raveendran studied mechanical engineering at a nearby college, then spent a few years servicing mechanical systems on ships. During a visit to Bengaluru in 2003, some friends who were there working IT jobs asked if he’d coach them for an entrance test for the elite Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), whose MBAs are highly prized in the international job market. Eventually, the lessons moved to a classroom at a local college, Raveendran said. “Once I started doing that — and it was free, this is not business, I was doing it for fun — they started bringing their friends.”
Raveendran built a reputation as an extraordinary teacher, breaking down complicated material into simple, digestible morsels. In addition to drilling on fundamentals, he provided novel shortcuts for solving problems and techniques for smarter test-taking. He would teach students how to identify patterns so they could solve problems faster. “He made me visualize the whole problem and taught me tips and hacks to find answers quickly by reverse engineering,” a former student, Ankit Uttam, wrote on LinkedIn in 2023. “It was a novel way of learning for me.”
When I looked up some of Raveendran’s lectures on YouTube, I could see what he meant. In one video, he shows how to compute the area of two regions marked on a diagram of a square nested within a circle nested within another square. The typical way to solve the problem requires several computation steps, including the use of pi. But Raveendran simplifies it by reorienting the inner square so the area to be computed suddenly becomes a triangle.
Byju demonstrates a math concept in an early video for Think and Learn. Think and Learn
Eventually, Raveendran told me, he rented an auditorium with a seating capacity of 1,200 and began charging 1,000 rupees per ticket — around $20 at the time — to cover rentals. When the auditorium started to fill to capacity, it generated more than 10 times the rent. “Which is huge, right?” he remarked, smiling.
As word spread — both of Raveendran’s instructional prowess, and the success of some of his pupils — demand rose. The competition to enroll in engineering and medical colleges in India is fierce: Vast numbers of students in the country view becoming an engineer or a doctor as a guarantee of a comfortable life. The competition to secure a slot in an MBA program is just as tough. A group of students in Chennai wanted Raveendran in their city, so he began flying there weekly. By 2006, he told me, he was traveling to nine cities across India per week, rushing from airports to college auditoriums where hundreds of eager students waited, pencils at the ready.
When the auditoriums proved too small, Raveendran rented sports stadiums that could seat up to 25,000 students. His slides were projected on big screens surrounding the stage. Nobody had seen anything like this, one former student told me. “People would be glued to the screens [while he taught],” this person said. Raveendran referred to them as “math shows.”
The former student eventually joined the company, was close to Raveendran’s inner circle, and became one of the company’s most senior executives before leaving in 2024. He recalled being awestruck by Raveendran when he first saw him teach. (Like several other former employees I spoke to, this individual would speak about Raveendran and Byju’s only on condition of anonymity. He agreed to be identified by one of his initials, S.) Raveendran was very confident, S told me. “It was easy to get wowed by his persona. … When you’re sitting in his class, the guy is teaching you math in a way that it has never been brought to you. You’ll be amazed. You’ll be floored.”
Aside from the logistical challenge of accommodating so many students in a single class, Raveendran told me teaching dozens or hundreds of students at once was straightforward. “There is no difference the moment you have more than 50 students in a class,” he said. “See, if class is happening through group discussions and case study, that’s different. … But if there are 1,000 students, they wouldn’t even see me properly.” The communication had to be one-way. His instruction had to anticipate every possible question students might think to ask — a skill that would later help him shape his learning app. The other advantage he took from these stadium-sized classes was building a larger-than-life image for himself as a pioneer in education.
In 2009, distance learning was taking off around the world, powered by the rise of broadband internet and the advent of smartphones. Raveendran began recording his lectures on video and broadcasting them on screens at some 40 learning centers across India. He told me students were willing to pay the same fee to attend video lectures as they were for in-person instruction.
A few of his former best students had joined him by now to become part of the company. They began to expand the business, adding a new market of high-school students looking to improve their math skills for all manner of competitive college entrance tests. This also meant raising the bar for the video content: Simple recordings of his lectures, Raveendran realized, wouldn’t be enough to keep younger students engaged. “We needed to create movie-like videos and game-like interactions,” he told me. In 2011, he founded Think and Learn, whose goal was to create instructional content that would appeal to students from kindergarten to high school.
The Byju’s app, 2019. Getty Images/Rest of World
S, the former student-turned-executive, told me Raveendran’s presence in the classroom transferred easily into the entrepreneurial context. “If you met him for half an hour, you would feel that you could conquer the world, that there was nothing that was impossible,” he said. Like the 50 or so employees Raveendran had gathered around himself in the early years of the company, S became a believer in the mission Raveendran said he was pursuing: revolutionizing education.
In 2013, Aarin Capital, led by Indian business tycoons Ranjan Pai and Mohandas Pai, was the first investor in Byju’s, with about $8 million. “Once we got access to capital, we were able to accelerate product development and content development,” Raveendran told me. That was followed by $25 million from the Indian arm of the U.S. venture capital giant Sequoia Capital. In August 2015, Think and Learn launched the Byju’s learning app, offering recorded lectures integrated with virtual demonstrations, animations, and games. Subscribers could access the content with plans that cost 2,500–50,000 rupees, or about $40–$780 back then. Within months, millions of Indians had downloaded the app. Within a year, Byju’s had acquired some 300,000 paying subscribers. More funding poured in: $75 million from Sequoia and Sofina, followed by another $50 million in a funding round that included the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
The money helped Byju’s expand its sales teams and establish studios that churned out ever more sophisticated content, created by a growing team of instructors. “They had a very, very aggressive sales model that was incentives-based,” Ranjan Goyal, an education technology consultant in Mumbai, told me. The sales team would be paid a commission for every new subscriber they brought in. “They had feet on the street who would go to people’s homes and convince them. … Many parents chose Byju’s, and Byju’s started growing rapidly.”
Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan stands on stage before an audience of awestruck moms and dads in an ad that first aired in November 2017. “When people fall in love,” he tells them in Hindi, holding a heart-shaped balloon, “you can hear violins playing in the background.” But he isn’t the hero of this love story, he says, before segueing into a dance sequence that features the Pythagorean theorem. “Let our children fall in love — with learning,” he exhorts, to cheering applause. “Download Byju’s — the learning app.”
Byju’s was becoming one of the most visible startups in India. “They are masters at brand-building,” a top executive who left the company in 2023 told me. He noted how effectively the company used digital marketing methods, including search engine optimization. “Even today, you look up random stuff [in education], Byju’s will come up as your first result.”
As investors lined up, Raveendran began to dream bigger. He wanted Byju’s to be a global edtech giant, and “it was like, ‘I’m on top of the world. You tell me what you want. I’ll get that done,’” S told me. Raveendran would say to his executives, S recalled, “This is how we create content. If you see someone else doing it better, we’ll buy them.”
Think and Learn staff in Bengaluru, 2017. Getty Images/Rest of World
Investors from around the world scrambled to get an audience with Raveendran, a former marketing executive said, remembering him traveling frequently to meet venture capitalists and fund managers from Hong Kong to London. Starting in Julyof 2017, the company began a string of acquisitions with TutorVista, an online company used mainly by students in the United States. By the end of 2018, Think and Learn was valued at over $1 billion. The big purchases continued: a digital game-based learning company, a digital reading platform for kids, a provider of online professional and higher education courses to learners in at least 170 countries.
Byju’s put significant investment into producing quality content, Apurva Mathur, a consultant for the company from 2020 until 2024, told me. Mathur helped develop videos on physics. “If we could think it, they would finance it,” he said. Five months into his job, he wanted to demonstrate that a steel bearing and a feather would take the same amount of time to fall to the ground in a perfect vacuum. “I casually said I wish I had a simulation of vacuum,” he recalled. “I said the word, and the simulation of vacuum was done and the video is there on the web.”
A teacher for a Byju’s company conducts an online coding class. Getty Images/Rest of World
But the phenomenal expansion of the Byju’s corporate empire — which Mathur described as “an acquisition overdrive on steroids” — masked some troubling realities. Starting in 2018, under intense pressure to acquire new subscribers, the company’s sales teams were reportedly pressuring low-income families such as autorickshaw drivers, vegetable sellers, and construction workers. This was essential for continuing to increase the company’s subscriber base, and promoting the narrative of its ceaseless growth.
Former Byju’s employees revealed to Rest of World in 2021 that sales associates were instructed to ask children deliberately tricky questions during sales visits, to make them appear academically weak in front of their parents and pressure families into purchasing the company’s products. At the time, Byju’s told Rest of World it had “a stringent zero-tolerance policy towards any form of unprofessional dialogue or abuse” and that “in cases where such behavior comes to light, we immediately evaluate the situation and take corrective action.”
Jeevan Jena, the father of a teenage girl in Delhi, told me recently about such an experience. The sales staff had given him verbal assurances of all the support that Byju’s would provide to his daughter once she subscribed. “I asked them to give me everything in writing,” he told me. What they gave him in writing, however, didn’t include any of the verbal commitments. When he backed out of buying a subscription, he said, Byju’s staff in Bengaluru called him and threatened to take legal action. Jena wasn’t intimidated.
Even many of the low-income households who did want to sign up, meanwhile, couldn’t afford the fee required for a three-year subscription. So Byju’s came up with a workaround: The company helped aspiring subscribers secure loans from banks and other financial institutions, with Byju’s as the guarantor. The company offered refunds to those who weren’t satisfied with the progress their child was making during a 15-day trial period of the product.
“Of the 100 users who came in [a month], as many as 20 would ask for a refund,” S, the former senior executive, who had direct experience with sales, told me. In addition, he said, another 30% of subscribers would eventually stop paying the bank, which meant they were no longer bringing in revenue. But the refund process and the systems keeping track of subscribers’ monthly installments weren’t interlinked, S said, so it was hard to know how many paid subscribers there actually were. (Raveendran didn’t respond to questions about the company’s sales tactics or history of retaining and tracking subscriptions.)
A Byju’s advertisement in New Delhi, 2023. Getty Images/Rest of World
Some of these problems were overshadowed by the sudden demand for online education when the Covid-19 pandemic began in March 2020, kicking off a period of forced lockdowns and social distancing. A surge in cheap capital and rapid adoption of digital services fueled a tech investment bubble, with startups receiving high valuations despite unproven business models. Edtech was one of the sectors that reaped the biggest rewards, as demand for online education soared. Byju’s made its educational content accessible for free in the early weeks of the pandemic, which led to a huge volume of people downloading the app.
“The narrative was, ‘Okay, this is the company that is supporting people during this pandemic. They have a great digital product,’” a senior executive in the Byju’s ecosystem told me. There wasn’t enough scrutiny, he added, when Raveendran put out numbers about the business or its valuation. While the growth in subscribers and revenue in the first couple of years of the company’s existence had been real, he said, expecting that growth to continue at the same pace wasn’t realistic: “You cannot multiply everything in India by 1.4 billion [India’s population] and expect it to work.”
By the time Byju’s submitted its earnings report for the fiscal year ending 2021 to India’s Ministry of Corporate Affairs — more than a year late — it was evident the business had not been profitable for some time. The company had lost a staggering amount of roughly $550 million in that time period — at least 15 times as much as it had lost the previous fiscal year. The company said at the time that the dip was due to deferring its revenue to subsequent years.
It’s unclear if investors didn’t receive timely information about these losses or if they didn’t care much since new investors were eager to jump on board. The senior executive in the Byju’s ecosystem saw the frenzy from up close. “I think investors really were hearing what they wanted to hear, because at that point, the valuation was going up every quarter,” he told me. “I literally saw that in board meetings. The new investor would come and ask a bunch of difficult questions. By the next quarter, there would be another investor at a higher valuation, and it was their problem now because [the earlier investors] had already marked up [their] investment 20%.”
In the absence of real growth in profits, the juggernaut became dependent on new rounds of fundraising, enabled by massive spending on brand-building. In 2019, Byju’s had purchased the rights to sponsor the jersey of the Indian cricket team, a contract that was extended until 2023. Then, in March 2022, Byju’s became an official sponsor of the FIFA World Cup in Qatar — a move aimed at getting global recognition for the brand. That same month, Byju’s announced it had raised a total of $800 million via a personal contribution from Raveendran and new funding from three investment companies, bringing the company to a reported valuation of $22 billion. One of them was an obscure entity named Sumeru Ventures.
There initially seemed nothing remarkable about Byju’s raising yet more capital.But three months after Sumeru’s investment, The Morning Context, a financial news website published from India, received an anonymous tip. Pradip Saha, a 40-year-old journalist at the publication who had been covering the company, told me the tip was vague — but suggested there was something fishy about Byju’s recent funding round.
Saha, who is short and stocky with a soothingly calm demeanor, began digging into Sumeru. The company’s website claimed it was a global technology fund, Saha recounted, but he could find only a handful of investments by the firm on the business information site Crunchbase, all into Indian startups. He looked through dozens of documents filed with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, which showed none of those companies had actually received money from the fund. Sumeru appeared to Saha to be a phantom: a name with no money attached, creating the impression of an investment that never came. Saha broke the story in The Morning Context in July 2022. He kept at the investigation for the next several months, eventually publishing the results in his 2023 book, The Learning Trap. (Sumeru Ventures could not be reached for comment.)
When I met Saha at a coffee shop in Delhi in January, he was still animated by the saga. “Byju’s had said the money from the fundraise had come, and the markets believed it,” he said. Riding in part on this supposed investment, “the company raised the next round of funding on a higher valuation.” The promised money from Sumeru never arrived. In his book, Saha recounts Raveendran defending himself by saying he’d heard from his investors that Sumeru would be a good backer. “I was like, I can’t believe you are [painting yourself as] the victim,” Saha told me. “If I can find out with a Google search that this company [Sumeru] has no history of investment, how can you not find it?” (Raveendran didn’t respond to a request for comment about Sumeru or his interactions with Saha.)
But it was the alleged fraud that led to the lawsuit in Delaware that would eventually draw the most scrutiny to Byju’s. In November 2021, the company had raised $1.2 billion in a “term loan B” from lenders in the United States. Such loans allow companies to focus on growth instead of making debt repayments until the end of the loan term, when a large repayment becomes due.
Byju’s defaulted on the loan. In March 2023, the lenders removed the leader of the company’s U.S. subsidiary, Alpha Inc, and appointed a new director. In February 2024, Alpha filed for bankruptcy in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware. The U.S. lenders made a shocking allegation that Byju’s had transferred about $533 million to a hedge fund called Camshaft Capital Fund. When the lenders investigated Camshaft’s background, they found it was run by William Morton, a man in his mid-20s with very little financial investment experience. Camshaft’s business address had once been listed as being inside an IHOP in Miami. (Camshaft’s lawyers told the Financial Times last year that the company “vigorously denies” the allegations against it. A lawyer for Camshaft did not respond to requests to comment for this story.)
Things were starting to unravel at home as well. On July 16, 2024, insolvency proceedings were initiated against Byju’s in India after the country’s National Company Law Tribunal admitted a lawsuit by the BCCI over unpaid dues from its sponsorship of the Indian cricket team. An attempted settlement of the suit between the two parties was quashed by India’s Supreme Court in October. The Byju’s empire was already in a tailspin at this point: Even though the companies under the Byju’s umbrella were still functioning, tens of thousands of employees were let go in successive rounds of layoffs. According to media reports, the company’s workforce went down from about 60,000 employees in 2022 to about 14,000 by early 2024.
Think And Learn staff in Bengaluru, 2017. Getty Images/Rest of World
In February, a month after my meetings with Raveendran, the judge in the Delaware court issued an opinion. It validated the allegation that Alpha Inc had fraudulently transferred funds from the $1.2 billion loan to Camshaft, essentially engaging in theft. “[The plaintiffs’] investigator concluded that the hedge fund was a sham, and I agree,” Judge John T. Dorsey observed in the opinion. The defendants have appealed, and the case is ongoing.
Then, in April, a lawsuit filed on behalf of the lenders in the same Delaware court accused Raveendran, Gokulnath, and another key executive at Byju’s of stealing and hiding the missing $533 million.
Raveendran didn’t reply to a request for comment about the April lawsuit and Judge Dorsey’s opinion.
The unraveling of the Byju’s empire has come as a shock to many employees. One former employee who led a team for several years until 2024 told me he was proud of the work he and his colleagues had been doing. “I’ve never seen a team that was more dedicated to making sure that teaching was done right,” he said. He’d been surprised, he added, when he first heard the company needed to downsize because some expected investments hadn’t materialized. “Why do we need new investors for us to keep our businesses running?” he remembered wondering. “Have we just been burning investor money to keep up?”
S, meanwhile, lamented that he’d used the best years of his life to help build Byju’s, only to see it come apart. “A lot of us couldn’t believe it was happening,” he told me. “Like, okay, this can’t happen. It can’t be this bad. Till the end.”
In a podcast interview last year, Arjun Mohan, who was CEO for the company’s international and India divisions between July 2023 and April 2024, reflected on what he saw as its biggest flaw. “There was absolutely no control on cost,” he said. “Investments were done without any understanding of what could be the potential revenue, what could be the potential cash flow. A lot of things were always done in optimism and exuberance rather than deep business insights and research.”
Some investors, however, have managed to win big in the Byju’s saga. Several of the company’s early backers divested or sold off a significant part of their stake when the company was still riding high — such as Sequoia India (now Peak XV Partners), the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and Aarin Capital. Others, like Prosus, which ended up writing off its stake in Byju’s at a $493 million loss, were left holding the bag.
Anand Lunia, a founding partner in the VC firm India Quotient, told me the Byju’s debacle follows a familiar storyline in the tech industry: A startup gathers too much momentum too quickly — all on the promise of future growth, regardless of the fundamentals of the business — only to eventually come crashing down. “This is an indictment of the Silicon Valley money-pumping system,” Lunia said, likening the collapse of Byju’s to that of FTX, the cryptocurrency exchange and hedge fund co-founded by Sam Bankman-Fried, who is now in prison. “You are in a rush to deploy money, and you deploy money without any firsthand diligence. Somebody praises Byju’s, and so you think, oh, yeah, we should invest in Byju’s.” In Lunia’s view, investors can’t be absolved of the blame.
Raveendran himself, though, has remained defiant. When we spoke in Dubai in January, the Delaware decision still hadn’t landed. He seemed to think the case would resolve in his favor. He attempted multiple times to convince me the accusation by the U.S. lenders — that he had, in effect, siphoned $533 million from the $1.2 billion loan — was baseless. The money, he claimed, was routed through Camshaft to a U.K.-based intermediary so it could eventually finance new acquisition and expansion plans that Byju’s was in the process of implementing.
When I asked why Camshaft — which had no experience managing funds — had been chosen for this task, Raveendran said he’d merely gone along with a recommendation made by his bankers. “I didn’t know Camshaft,” he said, adding that he’d only learned who William Morton was after reading press reports.
This echoed how Pradip Saha of The Morning Contexthad recalled Raveendran defending himself about the investment from Sumeru Ventures. Raveendran promised to send me documents to support his argument, but he never did.
Sitting in the Dubai restaurant, Raveendran didn’t show any signs of impatience about my repeated questions about the alleged fraud, but I could tell he was dismayed at not being able to persuade me to accept his narrative. We sipped our coffee in silence for a couple of minutes as he gathered his thoughts.
Then he turned his attention to the future. Given the Delaware court proceedings and other ongoing cases, the possibility that Raveendran would regain control of Byju’s seemed remote. He projected optimism, nonetheless. And if he couldn’t recapture Byju’s, he vowed, he would simply build a new empire. He hinted again that he might launch an entirely new online platform, reiterating what he’d told me in an earlier conversation: “The moment I start teaching, I’m sure I will fill stadiums again.” Only this time, they would be virtual stadiums, infinitely large. “We have done trials,” he claimed. “What was [once] attended by 25,000 — a million students will attend.”
Since my time with him in Dubai, Raveendran has continued telling audiences his version of his company’s demise. In May, during a podcast interview about the fate of Byju’s, he used the word “narrative” 20 times — and vowed that his would prevail. He pushed back against the Delaware court opinion and allegations of theft, saying he’d been subject to “a very dirty game” by U.S. investors. He said he felt for his former employees and apologized to paying students whose service was disrupted. His main mistakes, though, had only been “growing a little too soon too fast” — and taking the U.S. loan, which he said the company hadn’t really needed anyway. His mansion in Dubai was rented, he claimed, adding that he’d put his own funds into paying salaries and trying to save the company. “I never started this for money,” he said, insisting he has no regrets. “What were the odds of me doing even a fraction of what I did?”
#math #tutor #missing #million
Thanks to the Team @ Rest of World – Source link & Great Job Yudhijit Bhattacharjee
Sam Stein and Will Sommer react to Elon Musk dissing the GOP’s big spending bill.
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Andrew Egger and Mona discuss the corruption of the pardon power and the DOJ, Trump’s memecoin haul, and the vaccine insanity.
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Just Between Us is a podcast exclusively for members of Bulwark+ featuring Mona Charen and her Bulwark colleagues unburdening themselves each Tuesday evening. To listen to this episode become a Bulwark+ member today.
Great Job Mona Charen & the Team @ The Bulwark Source link for sharing this story.
