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WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Join The New Yorker’s writers and editors for reporting, insight, and analysis of the most pressing political issues of our time. On Mondays, David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, presents conversations and feature stories about current events. On Wednesdays, the senior editor Tyler Foggatt goes deep on a consequential political story via far-reaching interviews with staff writers and outside experts. And, on Fridays, the staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss the latest developments in Washington and beyond, offering an encompassing understanding of this moment in American politics.

The Political Scene | The New Yorker

Immigration has been the cornerstone of Donald Trump’s political career, and in his second successful Presidential campaign he promised to execute the largest deportation in history. Stephen Miller, Trump’s key advisor on hard-line immigration policy, said that the incoming Administration would “unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,” possibly involving the use of the military. “I do think they’re going to strain the outer limits of the law on that,” the staff writer Jonathan Blitzer tells David Remnick. “We’re entering unprecedented territory.” Blitzer unpacks some of the anti-immigrant rhetoric, and explains measures that the new Administration is likely to take. “I.C.E. has a policy that discourages arrests at schools, hospitals, places of worship, courts,” he says. That policy can change and, he believes, will. “You’re going to see arrest operations in very scary and upsetting places.” The aim, he thinks, will be “to create a sense of terror. That is going to be the modus operandi of the Administration.” Blitzer is the author of “Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here,” a definitive account of the immigration crisis. 

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Inside Donald Trump’s Mass-Deportation Plans

After a five-day manhunt, Luigi Mangione, a twenty-six-year-old Ivy League graduate, was arrested and charged on Monday with the widely publicized assassination of the UnitedHealthcare C.E.O. Brian Thompson. The case seized public imagination, and there has been a torrent of commentary celebrating Mangione and denigrating Thompson, including fan edits of the alleged shooter to posts sharing personal anecdotes of denied health-insurance claims. “Mangione is going to be seen as a folk hero across the aisle,” the New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino tells Tyler Foggatt. What does the lionization of a suspected murderer say about the health of our society? 

This week’s reading:

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How Daniel Penny Was Found Not Guilty in a Subway Killing That Divided New York • ,” by Adam Iscoe

 • “
A Man Was Murdered in Cold Blood and You’re Laughing? • ,” by Jia Tolentino

 • “
What Will Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy Accomplish with Doge? • ,” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells“

 • 
The Fall of Assad’s Syria • ,” by Rania Abouzeid

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

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Why Luigi Mangione Is Being Treated as a Folk Hero

1. Power dynamics in the Middle East shifted dramatically this year. In Lebanon, Israel dealt a severe blow toHezbollah, and another crucial ally of Iran—Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria—was toppled by insurgents. But the historian Rashid Khalidi is skeptical that these changes will set back the Palestinian cause, as it relates to Israel. “This idea that the Palestinians are bereft of allies assumes that they had people who were doing things for their interest,” Khalidi tells David Remnick, “which I don’t think was true.” The limited responses to the war in Gaza by Iran and Hezbollah, Khalidi believes, clearly demonstrate that Iran’s so-called Axis of Resistance “was designed by Iran to protect the Iranian regime. . . . It wasn’t designed to protect Palestine.” Khalidi, a professor emeritus at Columbia University, is the author of a number of books on Palestinian history; among them, “The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine” has been particularly influential. The book helped bring the term “settler colonialism” into common parlance, at least on the left, to describe Israel’s relationship to historic Palestine. Sometimes invoked as a term of opprobrium, “settler colonialism” is strongly disputed by supporters of Israel. Khalidi asserts that the description is historically specific and accurate. The early Zionists, he says, understood their effort as colonization. “That’s not some antisemitic slur,” he says. “That’s the description they gave themselves.”

 2. The concept of settler colonialism has been applied, on the political left, to describe Israel’s founding, and to its settlement of the Palestinian-occupied territories. This usage has been disputed by supporters of Israel and by thinkers including Adam Kirsch, an editor at the Wall Street Journal, who has also written about philosophy for The New Yorker. “Settler colonialism is . . . a zero-sum way of looking at the conflict,” Kirsch tells David Remnick. “In the classic examples, it involves the destruction of one people by another and their replacement over a large territory, really a continent-wide territory. That’s not at all the history of Israel and Palestine.” Kirsch made his case in a recent book, “On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice.”

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Rashid Khalidi on the Palestinian Cause in a Volatile Middle East, and the Meaning of Settler Colonialism

From the conflict in Gaza and the war in Ukraine to political chaos across Europe and the reëlection of Donald Trump, 2024 has been among the most tumultuous years in recent memory. Isaac Chotiner, the primary contributor to The New Yorker’s Q. & A. segment, has been following it all. He joins the show to reflect on his favorite interviews of the year, and to discuss 2024’s two biggest stories: the violence in Gaza and the reëlection of Donald Trump. Chotiner also talks about Joe Biden’s legacy, and his view on how Biden’s Presidency will be regarded by history.

This week’s reading:

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The Year in Brain Rot • ,” by Jessica Winter

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Luigi Mangione and the Making of a Modern Antihero • ,” by Jessica Winter

 • “
Syria After Assad • ,” by Robin Wright

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In South Korea, a Blueprint for Resisting Autocracy? • ,” by E. Tammy Kim

Tune in to The Political Scene wherever you get your podcasts.

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We Have Some Questions for Isaac Chotiner About 2024

We’re in the midst of another election season, and yet again American democracy hangs in the balance, with a leading Presidential candidate who has threatened to suspend parts of the Constitution. How did the foundations of our political system become so shaky? Jelani Cobb, the dean of the journalism school at Columbia University; Evan Osnos, a Washington correspondent for The New Yorker; and the best-selling author and historian Jill Lepore joined The New Yorker’s Michael Luo for a discussion of that very existential question during the most recent New Yorker Festival. From Cobb’s perspective, “it’s not that complicated,” he notes, “If we went all the way back to the fundamental dichotomy of the people who founded this country and the way they subsidized their mission of liberty with the lives of slaves. So we’ve always been engaged in that dialectic.” Lepore argues that people on both sides of the political divide choose to embrace an account of the past that accords with their politics, something she considers “incredibly dangerous.” Osnos, who witnessed the upheaval of January 6th firsthand, thinks the deeper problem is disengagement from the country and the political system. “I was struck by how many of [the rioters] told me it was their first trip to Washington,” Osnos says. “They came to Washington to sack the Capitol.”

CORRECTION: Jelani Cobb notes that Queens was at one time the second-whitest borough of New York City, and is the most diverse county in the United States. Measures of diversity vary; in some recent data, Queens ranks third among counties

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How Did Our Democracy Get so Fragile?

Donald Trump may be the first former President to be indicted for a crime, but he is not the first to lead an insurrection and then attempt to dodge the consequences. More than a hundred and fifty years ago, the U.S. government set out to try Jefferson Davis, the former President of the Confederacy, for treason. Those efforts failed. In this week’s New Yorker, Jill Lepore, a staff writer at the magazine and a historian at Harvard, writes an essay about the lasting consequences of that failure. There are many parallels between our current moment and the post-Civil War reunification era: the thorniness of prosecuting politicians, the fear of inciting more political violence, and questions about how best to move a bitterly divided country forward. Lepore joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the historical lessons of Jefferson Davis and the legal efforts to kick Trump off the ballot using the disqualification clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

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The Post-Civil War Precedent for the Trump Trials

The Washington Roundtable: Former Speaker Kevin McCarthy announced his resignation from Congress this week, not long after a coup by several of his Republican colleagues cost him the leadership. The lawmaker who had temporarily filled the Speaker position—Representative Patrick McHenry of North Carolina—also announced his departure from the lower chamber. But it’s not just former House Speakers who are leaving their positions. Dozens of members of the 118th Congress are not running for reëlection. Some are leaving to run for higher office, others are retiring, yet others have simply had enough—and one, Representative George Santos, was expelled. Former Representative Jim Cooper, Democrat of Tennessee, joins the New Yorker staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos on this week’s episode to analyze this phenomenon. “It’s really become a clown show, and elections are like clown swapping,” he tells them. “I don’t think there is a Republican Party anymore, and, if there is one, it’s ungovernable because they eat their own.” Cooper and the hosts discuss what it is like to be in Congress, the state of the Republican Party, and the forces driving the recent exodus of members. 

Have thoughts on The Political Scene? Send us an email at themail@newyorker.com, including “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

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Why Are House Republicans Leaving Congress?

Liz Cheney has been Republican royalty, and a conservative stalwart in Washington—a daughter of former Vice-President Dick Cheney and culture warrior Lynne Cheney. But after protesting Donald Trump’s election lies, and voting for his impeachment after January 6th, she found herself in exile from the G.O.P. Cheney is contemplating a Presidential campaign on a third-party line. As she promotes her new book, “Oath and Honor,” she is raising the alarm that Americans across the political spectrum have become “numb” to Trump’s overtly dictatorial aspirations. “People really understood that what he had done [on January 6th] was unacceptable, not to mention unconstitutional and illegal,” she tells David Remnick. “That recognition quickly dwindled.” She finds herself frustrated with former allies on the right who have become shameless enablers of Trump; she does not trust Speaker Mike Johnson, a former friend, to perform his constitutional duties during the electoral process. She is also concerned that the left is squandering an opportunity to defeat Donald Trump in 2024 by alienating some of the voters whose support they need on issues such as crime and immigration. Trump “has figured out a way, as dictators have in the past, to make those people think he speaks for them,” she says. Still, Cheney’s faith in the country’s institutions and judiciary has not been totally shaken. Asked if Trump should go to jail if convicted—on any of his ninety-one federal charges—she says yes without hesitation; but we must not presume that “someone else is going to save us from him.”

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Liz Cheney: Donald Trump Should Go to Jail if Convicted

Last week, the U.S. Congress passed a nonbinding resolution that deemed any expression of anti-Zionism to be a form of antisemitism. This move closely follows the model set by the German government, which has created strict measures to combat antisemitism and a bureaucracy to enforce those measures. Sometimes, Jewish people are found to be in violation. In both Germany and the United States, many politicians championing similar protections are members of the right wing, some of whom are also known white supremacists. Masha Gessen, a New Yorker staff writer, recently wrote an essay about the politics of memory in Europe and the widespread insistence that the Holocaust is a singular event unlike any other. Gessen joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss how the stories we tell about history can prevent us from understanding the conditions that give rise to atrocities. “The thing is, if something is unimaginable, then anything that happens in the present, which is by definition imaginable, is not like it,” Gessen says. “And I think that’s the crazy mental trick that we’ve played on ourselves.” 

Masha Gessen was due to receive the Hannah Arendt Prize on December 15th, but, after the publication of this essay, the Heinrich Böll Foundation chose not to participate in the granting of the award.

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Masha Gessen on the Holocaust, Israel, and the Politics of Memory

The Washington Roundtable: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s requests for more aid from the United States got a frosty reception from many Republicans on the Hill this week. It’s the most recent expression of the American far right’s affinity for Vladimir Putin’s project in Russia, and, more recently, for Viktor Orbán’s consolidation of power in Hungary. The New Yorker staff writer Andrew Marantz joins the Washington Roundtable to discuss his reporting on CPAC Hungary, where far-right political figures gathered in Budapest last year, and on why American conservatives are gravitating toward figures like Putin and Orbán. “You don’t have to be a red-string-on-a-corkboard conspiracy theorist to see the connections,” Marantz says. “In Florida, for example, Ron DeSantis’s administration has admitted when they wrote the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill, they were modelling it on a previous Hungarian law, which was itself modelled on a previous Russian law. So, no one’s really entirely hiding the ball here.” Marantz joins the staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos on this week’s episode.

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How the American Right Came to Love Putin

One of the most read New Yorker stories of 2023 was Ronan Farrow’s investigation into Elon Musk—how the U.S. government came to rely on him, and why it’s now struggling to rein him in. With Tesla, SpaceX, and Twitter (now known as X), Musk is deciding the future of the auto industry, the space race, and free speech. The reason for this, Farrow explains, is not Musk’s outrageous personality; it’s the structures of neoliberal capitalism that allowed a person like Musk to ascend. Read more by Ronan Farrow on Harvey Weinstein’s sexual misconduct, Britney Spears’s conservatorship, and the Israeli surveillance agency Black Cube.

This episode was originally published in August, 2023.

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Ronan Farrow on the “Shadow Rule” of Elon Musk

Ronan Farrow on the “Shadow Rule” of Elon Musk

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