Vox

Why Trump is investigating E. Jean Carroll

2026-05-28T21:32:57+00:00

President Donald Trump in the Cabinet Room of the White House on May 27, 2026. | Win McNamee/Getty Images

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: President Donald Trump’s Justice Department is investigating a woman who accused him of sexual abuse.

What’s happening? On Wednesday evening, we learned that E. Jean Carroll — a writer and advice columnist who alleged in a 2019 essay and two subsequent, successful civil lawsuits that Trump assaulted her decades ago — is now under federal criminal investigation in Illinois.

The investigation has yet to produce an indictment — and may not — but its mere existence is another indication of the extent to which Trump has weaponized the justice system to punish his enemies.

What is the DOJ investigating? The investigation, which CNN first reported, reportedly centers on a perjury allegation against Carroll over a statement she made in 2022.

At the time, Carroll said — incorrectly — that she had not received outside funding supporting her civil lawsuits against Trump. As my colleague Zack Beauchamp explains, however, a federal appeals court already concluded in 2024 that there was no evidence the misstatement was intentional, and Carroll may have simply forgotten.

As one legal expert told Zack on Thursday, even if Carroll is indicted, “A conviction is just not going to happen.”

Why Carroll? Carroll is not alone in accusing Trump of sexual misconduct or assault; at least 27 women have done so to date. Her allegation, however, has been both costly and embarrassing for Trump: He was found liable in 2023 for sexually abusing and defaming Carroll, who also won more than $88 million from him in two civil judgments. (The money has not yet been paid, as Trump continues to appeal.)

What’s the big picture? Carroll joins a growing list of people Trump’s second-term DOJ has pursued on flimsy, if not outright preposterous, grounds, including former FBI Director James Comey (indicted twice), New York state Attorney General Letitia James (just once), and half a dozen Democratic lawmakers (tried and failed).

He’s almost certainly going to keep at it — but at least so far, he keeps failing, too.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Here’s a headline that speaks for itself, from my colleague Sara Herschander: An HIV-free generation is closer than you think.

As Sara explains, the problem isn’t solved yet, and there’s still work to do. But testing and anti-retroviral drugs have been a marvelous success story in recent decades, dramatically reducing the number of babies born with HIV. You can read her full story here with a gift link. Have a great evening!

Brett Kavanaugh just won a surprising victory for racial justice

2026-05-28T19:01:30+00:00

Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the majority opinion in Pitchford v. Cain. | Aaron Schwartz/AFP via Getty Images

Justice Brett Kavanaugh is a Republican. He served in a Republican White House, typically votes with the Court’s other Republicans, and even sometimes sides with President Donald Trump in major cases that divide the Republican Party. He’s not the sort of person you’d expect to carry a torch for a liberal cause for nearly four full decades.

But, well, he did. In Kavanaugh’s majority opinion in Pitchford v. Cain, which was handed down on Thursday, the justice more or less implemented a proposal for how to prevent racism from infecting jury selection that he first proposed in a 1989 piece that he published when he was still a law student.

To be clear, Kavanaugh’s Pitchford opinion doesn’t really break much new ground. It involves a straightforward violation of Batson v. Kentucky (1986), the Supreme Court’s most important precedent governing race in jury selection, and rules in favor of the person on death row who brought this fairly clear-cut violation to the Supreme Court’s attention.

Still, Pitchford was a 5-4 decision, with four of Kavanaugh’s fellow Republicans joining a dissent by Justice Neil Gorsuch. So the decision could have easily come down the other way if one of the Republican justices hadn’t developed a liberal approach to Batson before he started his legal career. Sometimes, even Supreme Court justices — arguably the most highly vetted political appointees in the entire federal government — contain multitudes.

Again, Pitchford is a fairly easy case. In a less ideological Supreme Court, the incarcerated person at the heart of this case might have won unanimously. But the decision does suggest that left-leaning advocates can sometimes prevail in this Court by appealing to the idiosyncratic views of some of the Republican justices.

Kavanaugh’s long-standing approach to race in jury selection, explained

In 1989, Kavanaugh published a “note” in the Yale Law Journal. Notes are student-authored works of legal scholarship, which often examine an important recent legal development. High-achieving law students frequently choose to write these notes because it gives them a published exemplar of their own legal writing skills that they can share with potential employers.

The surprising twist is that in his 1989 note, Kavanaugh — who, of course, would go on to become one of the most powerful Republicans in the United States — chose to advocate for a cause that is ordinarily associated with liberals. Published three years after the Supreme Court handed down Batson, Kavanaugh’s note, which is titled “Defense Presence and Participation: A Procedural Minimum for Batson v. Kentucky Hearings,” argued that the Court’s recent decision protecting against racism in jury selection should be read to include certain procedural protections for criminal defendants.

In criminal trials, both the prosecution and the defense often get a limited number of “peremptory challenges,” which they can use to remove a potential juror from the jury pool for virtually any reason. These peremptory strikes may be used to remove a juror because the prosecutor doesn’t like the juror’s haircut, because the defense counsel thinks a juror looked at their client suspiciously, or because counsel doesn’t like having jurors whose name begins with the letter “M.”

But the Constitution prohibits prosecutors from removing a juror because of that juror’s race.

As Kavanaugh explains in his Pitchford opinion, Batson sets up a three-step process to determine whether prosecutors did, in fact, remove a juror for impermissible racial reasons. After the defense counsel objects to the removal of a particular juror or group of jurors (step one), the prosecutor typically must give a race-neutral explanation for why they wanted the juror removed (step two). At step three, Kavanaugh writes, “defense counsel has an opportunity to rebut the prosecutor’s race-neutral reason as pretextual,” and then the judge has to decide who is telling the truth.

Kavanaugh’s 1989 note argues that courts must ensure that this third step is complied with; he wrote at the time that “the defense should have an opportunity to rebut the prosecutor’s reasons before the trial judge decides whether to allow the prosecutor’s peremptories.” His opinion in Pitchford makes a very similar argument.

In Pitchford, prosecutors in a Mississippi murder case used their peremptory challenges to remove four of five potential Black jurors from defendant Terry Pitchford’s jury pool. Defense counsel objected on Batson grounds, and the prosecutor gave race-neutral explanations for targeting these jurors. (The prosecution claimed that one juror was removed because they arrived late to court, two because they had brothers convicted of violent offenses, and one because he, like the defendant, was a young father.)

But the trial judge never gave defense counsel an opportunity to rebut these explanations. The judge simply deemed the prosecutor’s explanations acceptable and moved on.

This, Kavanaugh writes in Pitchford, is not allowed. In a sentence that mirrors the argument he made in 1989, the justice writes that “after a prosecutor asserts race-neutral reasons for a peremptory strike, the defense counsel must at least have an opportunity to argue that the asserted race-neutral reasons were not the actual reasons—that is, the reasons were pretextual.”

So how did this easy case produce a four-justice dissent?

To be clear, it’s not exactly a stretch for Kavanaugh to argue that, when Batson said that courts must use a three-step process to resolve jury discrimination claims, all three steps are mandatory. At most, Pitchford makes explicit something that was already implicit in US law.

But Pitchford was complicated by a federal law, the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA), that makes it difficult for convicted offenders to challenge their convictions or sentences in federal court if they were first tried in state court. To prevail in such a federal challenge, Pitchford must show that state courts handed down a decision that “was contrary to, or involved an unreasonable application of, clearly established Federal law, as determined by the Supreme Court of the United States” or “was based on an unreasonable determination of the facts in light of the evidence presented in the State court proceeding.”

Given this high bar placed in front of people who wish to challenge state-level convictions or sentences, a federal judge who wants to leave the state court’s decision in place will almost always be able to find a way to do so. And Gorsuch’s opinion does just that.

The dissent’s primary argument is that Pitchford waived his Batson argument because, while his lawyers raised it in the trial court, they did not provide enough detail about how, specifically, the trial judge violated Batson when they raised this objection. As a general rule, lawyers may not raise an argument on appeal unless they also raised that argument in the trial court.

That’s not a very good argument, because, as Kavanaugh explains, defense counsel raised their Batson argument multiple times at trial. And, after one of these objections, the trial judge “explicitly assured Pitchford’s counsel that the Batson objection was preserved.” So it would have been odd — and could have potentially antagonized the judge — if defense counsel had elaborated further on their Batson argument after the judge effectively told them to drop the issue and take it up in the appeals courts.

But the fact remains that Pitchford barely prevailed in the Supreme Court. And, if not for the fact that Kavanaugh appears to have developed the view that all three prongs of Batson’s process are mandatory in law school, this case would have likely come out the other way.

Liberal victories aren’t exactly common in this Court, but they also aren’t so rare that they are unimaginable. In this case, one of the justices appears to have formed an opinion on a politically contentious issue before he fully embraced the broader worldview that he needed to have in order to score political appointments in a Republican administration. And that means that, at least in cases involving jury discrimination, criminal defense lawyers will sometimes find a sympathetic bench in the Supreme Court.

The real lesson of the E. Jean Carroll investigation is Trump’s weakness

2026-05-28T20:01:42+00:00

E. Jean Carroll attends the 2024 TIME 100 Gala on April 25, 2024, in New York City. | Getty Images for TIME

Had you time-traveled back to 2023, and started telling people that President Donald Trump’s Justice Department would soon be trying to imprison a woman who had accused him of rape, most would likely have dismissed it as a paranoid #resistance fantasy.

Yet now, it appears to be reality. Reporting in both CNN and the New York Times suggests that the DOJ has opened a criminal inquiry into E. Jean Carroll, the journalist who successfully won $88.3 million in damages from Trump after federal juries determined he sexually abused her in 1996 and later defamed her. The allegation now under investigation, per reporting, is that Carroll committed perjury during a deposition for the case.

This is, without a doubt, an authoritarian abuse of power: the president weaponizing the Justice Department to go after one of his most prominent and effective critics. It is the kind of thing that you expect in a country like Turkey or Venezuela, where the justice system has been transformed into an enforcement mechanism for an authoritarian regime.

But the comparison also suggests why the case is less scary than it appears.

Unlike in those countries, where those targeted by the state have little plausible chance to fight back, Trump’s track record for prosecuting his opponents has been exceptionally poor. Due to a combination of his own attorneys’ incompetence, the jury system, and the genuine independence of America’s lower court judges, they’ve repeatedly failed to secure indictments — let alone actually imprison anyone.

The administration has repeatedly failed to present a credible case against former FBI Director James Comey, with its most recent indictment revolving around an allegedly threatening picture of seashells. In February, a grand jury rejected both its efforts to prosecute six Democratic lawmakers over a video calling on the US military to disobey unlawful orders. A criminal investigation into then-Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell backfired when senators threatened to block his replacement and was later halted. Just this week, federal judges threw out both a case against anti-ICE protesters in Chicago and the administration’s latest effort to imprison Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

“They seem to be choosing targets without the evidence to back convictions,” says Barb McQuade, a law professor at University of Michigan and former US attorney. “In the case of Carroll, a jury has already spoken on her credibility, and they believed her. It’s absurd to think that prosecutors would be able to reach a different result when this time the government, and not she, has the burden of proof, and by the much higher standard of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”

This pattern illustrates one of the central dynamics of the Trump administration over the past year: that they are clearly intent on building an authoritarian state, but lack both the competence and the strategic vision to overcome American democracy’s institutional barriers to true power consolidation.

And with the midterm election looming, they are running out of time.

Why the Carroll investigation is a sham

In September 2020, Carroll’s attorney told her that an outside source was helping fund her lawsuit against Trump (that source was Reid Hoffman, a Democratic mega-donor). Over two years later, during a trial deposition, Carroll was asked whether someone was “presently paying” her legal fees — and she said no.

The Justice Department’s case, per both CNN and the Times, centers on the theory that Carroll’s answer was perjury: that she knowingly lied in 2022 given the 2020 funding.

There are several glaring problems with this theory, but the biggest one is that a court has already decided this question in Carroll’s favor.

“Ms. Carroll plausibly represented that she had forgotten about the limited outside funding counsel obtained in September 2020 when this question was first posed to her in 2022, and the additional discovery did not indicate otherwise. Rather, it showed that Ms. Carroll simply was not involved in the matter of who was or was not funding her litigation costs,” the Second Circuit ruled in an unanimous decision denying an appeal from Trump.

And the burden of proof would be even higher in a criminal case, which is what federal prosecutors are reportedly pursuing. The Justice Department would need some kind of smoking-gun evidence that Carroll had knowingly lied about the funding, and there is no reason to believe that any such evidence exists.

“A conviction is just not going to happen,” McQuade concludes.

That the Justice Department would even bring such a weak case is, in her assessment, evidence of just how corrupted the process has become. Trump’s attorneys have to know that this case, like the repeated attempts to indict Comey, are not going anywhere legally — but they are filing them anyway because the president wants his opponents prosecuted and publicly humiliated.

“Ordinarily, DOJ policy prohibits prosecutors from indicting a case just because they have probable cause. The standard is that prosecutors should believe it probable that the evidence is sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction,” McQuade says. “Filing criminal charges just to shame someone without the evidence to back it up is a violation of ethical standards and abuse of the Justice Department’s power.”

The wages of “haphazardism”

One could, theoretically, read the Carroll case in two opposed ways.

One could, by focusing on the basic impropriety of bringing the case in the first place, see it as evidence of the damage Trump has done to America’s democratic institutions. One could also focus more on the exceedingly high likelihood that the case will fail, and treat it as evidence of American democracy’s resilience in the face of an authoritarian chief executive.

These perspectives are not opposed, however, but actually two sides of the same coin. Trump’s second-term governing approach is best defined as “haphazardism,” a style of rule characterized by repeated and sustained individual attacks on America’s system of government that are legitimately dangerous, but also so poorly executed that they’re often self-undermining.

Trump is succeeding in wrecking elements of the American system: destroying the separation of powers and the norms of nonpartisan governance that defined the modern US civil service. But the wreck is incomplete — Trump has not demolished every barrier standing in his path to untrammeled power — which leaves democracy intact, if severely diminished in quality.

The Carroll case fits this pattern exactly. Trump has successfully demolished the norm of DOJ independence that would, in the post-Watergate era, have constrained the president from vindictive prosecution of a woman who proved in court that he assaulted her. Yet he has not been able to take the next step, of an Erdogan or Putin, and turn the courts into a rubber stamp that would translate prosecution into conviction.

This is because of the haphazardist character of Trump’s governance. Caring more about optics, with little attention to long-range planning, Trump demands that people immediately do what he wants — and hires the yes-men who will do it. He does not have a real plan for long-term power consolidation, a way to turn individual indictments into an actual effort to cow the political opposition. He just wants an indictment, and so he gets one — regardless of legal competence.

Few good lawyers are willing to follow this kind of rule, and it has shown. In a recent article, the New York Times’ Alan Feuer documented the extraordinary string of screw-ups by Trump’s DOJ that have led to an unprecedented number of grand juries, long seen as rubber stamps for federal prosecutions, failing to deliver indictments. Feuer sees these failures as a direct outgrowth of Trump’s push for political reprisals: The more petty and poorly argued cases he brings, the more grand juries and judges come to expect petty and poorly argued cases, and the more confident they feel in rejecting them.

The Trump effort to prosecute his enemies is simultaneously authoritarian in intent and weak in execution. Understanding this as an example of the general haphazardist pattern helps clarify just what Trump is doing to the American system of government — and how far-reaching the consequences will truly be.

MAGA’s civil war over immigration is over. Silicon Valley lost.

2026-05-28T16:09:30+00:00

Tesla CEO Elon Musk speaks alongside President Donald Trump to reporters in the Oval Office of the White House on May 30, 2025. | Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

The Trump administration announced last Friday that US visa holders who want a green card must first return to their home countries and apply from there, “except in extraordinary circumstances.”

On its face, this rule — which was officially promulgated in a memo from US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) — would upend America’s immigration system and the lives of hundreds of thousands of US residents.

Key takeaways

The Trump administration’s changes to the green card process could force hundreds of thousands of skilled immigrants to leave the country.
This policy represents the triumph of MAGA nativists over the tech right, in the battle to define what an “America First” immigration policy looks like.
Precisely how USCIS will implement the policy remains unclear.

For more than 50 years, through the “adjustment of status” process, visa holders in the United States have been able to remain in the country while applying for permanent residency. This was no small thing. For legal immigrants, the alternative to securing an adjustment of status is not taking a short sojourn abroad while Uncle Sam inspects their paperwork. Rather, due to various quirks of US immigration law, some immigrants must wait more than a decade for their green card applications to be approved.

President Donald Trump’s new rule therefore threatens to exile hundreds of thousands of legal immigrants — including physicians at understaffed rural hospitals, gifted technologists at Silicon Valley firms, the spouses of US citizens, and parents of American children.

Whether this will actually happen is unclear. Both the memo officially laying out the policy — and the administration’s messaging about it — contain ambiguities and apparent contradictions. For example, the administration has said that visa holders can only remain in the United States during the green card application process under “extraordinary circumstances” and that any visa holder who provides an “economic benefit” to America may still do so. Yet more or less all employed visa holders provide some economic benefit to the United States.

Regardless, the new memo represents a massive escalation in Trump’s crackdown on immigration. It also arguably marks the resolution of a years-long war for the soul of the MAGA movement.

Since Trump retook the presidency in 2024, his coalition’s hardline nativists and Silicon Valley patrons have been fighting over what an “America First” immigration policy actually entails.

America’s tech industry is heavily reliant on global talent. About one-fifth of our nation’s STEM workers in 2021 were foreign-born. For this reason among others, the tech right — a contingent of Silicon Valley luminaries who backed Trump in 2024 — advocate for a meritocratic brand of immigration restrictionism.

In their account, America needs to repel undocumented, low-skill migrants who threaten to burden its safety nets, warp its culture, and empower the Democratic Party. Yet the United States also needs to welcome highly talented, English-speaking, America-loving workers from around the globe in order to sustain its economic competitiveness and dynamism.

“I understand why we don’t want people to come to the US to be criminals, mooch on welfare…and otherwise undermine the country,” Blake Scholl, the Trump-friendly CEO of Boom Supersonic, posted on X after the latest immigration news. “But I don’t understand why we make it harder for motivated, ambitious, hardworking people to come to the land of opportunity.”

The nativist right isn’t so sure about that. In its view, whether immigrants engineer software in Silicon Valley — or deliver food in New York City — they are typically undermining native-born Americans’ interests, at least in their current numbers.

By deterring highly skilled, legal immigrants from seeking green cards, the Trump administration has made its allegiance to the second camp unambiguous.

This wasn’t inevitable

While not entirely surprising, this development wasn’t always certain. Trump erected some obstacles to high-skill immigration during his first term. But these changes had been relatively modest. More critically, after a slew of tech titans lined up behind Trump’s candidacy in 2024, Trump signaled support for their immigration views.

During a June 2024 appearance on All-In, a podcast hosted by venture capitalists sympathetic to his campaign, Trump was asked whether he would “promise us you will give us more ability to import the best and brightest around the world to America”?

The candidate replied, “I do promise. But I happen to agree, otherwise I wouldn’t promise. … You graduate from a college, I think you should get automatically — as part of your diploma — a green card to be able to stay in this country and that includes junior colleges too.”

Months later, in the wake of Trump’s victory, his Silicon Valley supporters got into an online feud with hardline nativists over H-1B visas — which give temporary legal status to highly educated immigrant workers employed by American companies. After some MAGA influencers called for restricting such visas (and high-skill immigration more broadly), the tech right rallied to the program’s defense.

“The reason I’m in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B,” Elon Musk posted on X in December 2024. “I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.”

Once again, Trump appeared to side with Silicon Valley, telling reporters that he supported the H-1B program, since “We need competent people, we need smart people coming into our country…we need a lot of people coming in.”

Why MAGA doesn’t want more “smart” immigrants

Of course, much of the MAGA movement disagreed.

Although the nativist right has tended to dedicate most of its energy to combating undocumented immigration, it has also sought to repel highly skilled legal immigrants in general — and those who work for tech companies in particular.

In fact, two of the original architects of Trump’s immigration vision — Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller — both long lamented the prevalence of foreign-born workers in Silicon Valley.

Notably, Trump himself did not share this view at the outset of his first presidential campaign. During a 2015 podcast appearance, Trump told Bannon that he worried about foreign-born Ivy League graduates being forced to return to their home countries instead of using their skills in the United States, since “we have to keep our talented people.”

Bannon replied, “When two-thirds or three-quarters of the CEOs in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia, I think…a country is more than an economy. We’re a civic society.”

Likewise, during his time working for then-Sen. Jeff Sessions, White House adviser Stephen Miller co-authored a “handbook” on immigration policy that decried “The Silicon Valley STEM Hoax” — namely, the idea that the United States needed to increase immigration in order to meet its demand for workers with tech skills. The document argued that increasing admissions of foreign-born STEM workers would “deny millions of Americans a shot at a good-paying middle-class job.”

From this perspective, highly skilled immigrants are scarcely more desirable than low-skill ones — and may even be less so. After all, few Americans are eager to perform seasonal agricultural labor. But many covet well-paid tech jobs. And if one believes that the supply of such positions is largely fixed, then every coding gig taken by an immigrant is one denied to a native-born American.

For many nativists, however, the problem with high-skill immigration isn’t purely economic. As Bannon’s comments suggest, the ethnic composition of Silicon Valley’s foreign-born labor-force is also a concern.

Following the Trump administration’s changes to green card policy last week, frank expressions of anti-Indian animus proliferated on right-wing social media. Previously, the far-right influencer — and periodic Trump confidante — Laura Loomer had suggested that “third-world invaders from India” threatened to overrun America, a country “built by white Europeans.”

Some Republican elected officials have played to such anti-Indian resentments. This week, US Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.) referenced Indian immigrants’ disproportionate share of H-1B visas while advocating for legislation that would end the program entirely.

India’s government is upset about H-1B delays because their citizens are “stranded” back home?

Meanwhile Americans have been stranded out of jobs for years while companies use H-1Bs to replace U.S. workers with foreign labor.

My EXILE Act would END the H-1B program entirely!… https://t.co/trS3UhpwAb
— Congressman Greg Steube (@RepGregSteube) May 26, 2026

The nativists won

Before last week, the second Trump administration had already been leaning toward the nativist right’s position on skilled immigration by, among other things, heavily constraining the issuance of new H-1B visas.

But Trump’s ostensible transformation of the green card application process constitutes a far more definitive — and consequential — rebuke of the tech right’s vision for immigration.

Indeed, the policy explicitly aims to chase most international students from the United States as soon as they graduate, the very scenario that Trump had spent years lamenting.

Further, unlike previous restrictions to H-1B visas, the green card memo seeks to reduce the number of foreign-born permanent residents in the United States, rather than merely the number of guest workers. Populists on the right and left have long argued that guest workers are uniquely exploitable — since they need to keep their jobs in order to remain in the country legally — and thus put downward pressure on labor standards in their industries. Yet immigrants applying for green cards are often seeking to escape that very form of dependence and secure the same bargaining power as US citizens.

What’s more, the new rules would hit Silicon Valley’s disproportionately Asian workforce particularly hard. America’s annual green card issuance is capped by country. For this reason, immigrants from highly populous nations with large educated workforces — such as India and China — must wait many years before their green card applications are approved. An Indian tech worker who applies for a green card tomorrow is likely to wait more than 12 years before actually securing permanent residency. Under traditional procedures, that worker could remain legally in the United States while awaiting approval. Under Trump’s new system, they would need to go into exile for a decade.

The full implications of Trump’s policy are uncertain. But the tech right’s defeat is unmistakable.

It remains unclear how USCIS agents will interpret their new marching orders. Although the administration’s memo suggests that adjustment of status should be offered only in extraordinary circumstances, it nonetheless gives USCIS officers discretion to provide such relief as they see fit. And the document also suggests that some categories of immigrants may be partial “exceptions” to the rule.

“We are hearing USCIS examiners are now asking questions like, ‘Why are you applying for adjustment? Why couldn’t you have left and applied abroad?’” Cyrus Mehta, an immigration attorney in New York City, told me. “Different local offices will likely take different positions on how to deal with it. Some will be business as usual. Others may be instructed to get tough.”

It’s possible then that the tech right could persuade the administration to interpret its own memo narrowly — or else, convince a court to strike the policy down.

In any case, the administration’s position is likely to deter many highly skilled visa holders from seeking permanent residency. And it will also provide talented young people abroad with another reason to seek admission to other wealthy countries, instead of the US.

If interpreted literally, meanwhile, the new rules would do far greater harm to the American tech sector than any of the Biden-era antitrust policies or AI regulations that purportedly “red-pilled” so many Silicon Valley billionaires.

In short, red America’s civil war over immigration policy is essentially over. The nativists won, the tech right lost; the latter’s best hope is merely to negotiate favorable terms of surrender.

The people who actually want AI to replace humanity

2026-05-28T09:08:30+00:00

“I want AI to be a tool that allows human flourishing!” exclaimed Brad Carson, a former member of Congress. “There is an option out there where AI is just a tool for us.”

This is a normal thing to say in most circles. But Carson was speaking at an invite-only symposium dedicated to the idea of creating a “Worthy Successor” — an AI so impressive, so beyond the mere human, that we’d actually want it to replace humanity.

“You’re a brave man for entering this room!” Dan Faggella, an AI market researcher and organizer of the symposium, told Carson. “You’re in probably the only room in the country where most people disagree with you.”

The attendees at the symposium, which took place at the New York Academy of Sciences last September, are part of a subculture that is growing in importance: the AI successionists, who think that artificial intelligence is our rightful heir — the next step in cosmic evolution. Since they believe AIs could become our moral superiors, they argue it’s actually wrong to try to keep the machines down, or even to align them with human values, as most AI companies aim to do. Instead, we should usher in artificial intelligence as a successor to humanity and hand over the world to it. Even if that means we go extinct.

They know this view is taboo, which is why I was invited only on the condition that I wouldn’t quote anyone other than keynote speakers by name. But suffice it to say that this is not a fringe view. It’s becoming highly influential. People from major AI labs — Anthropic, Google DeepMind, xAI — were in attendance. So were people from think tanks that directly shape the US government’s AI policy.

Why I wrote this story

I grew up hearing an old Jewish teaching: Each of us should carry two slips of paper, one in each pocket. One says, “I am but dust and ashes.” But the other says, “The world was created for me.”

Reporting on AI these past few years, I’ve watched more and more people forget the second message. They think we should be okay with getting obliterated if a more valuable species can take our place. But more valuable to whom? Value isn’t dispensed from some cosmic vantage point; it’s always value to someone. And we’re valuable to us.

And yet the AI successionists are right about something: We can’t expect human beings to look the same a thousand or a million years from now. So how do we decide which kinds of technological change to embrace, and which to refuse? It bothered me that classical humanism doesn’t have a good answer. Here, I’ve sketched what a new one might look like.

AI successionism has been gaining ground among technologists over the past decade. In 2015, Google co-founder Larry Page famously accused Elon Musk of “speciesism” because Page thought we should let digital minds take over, and Musk disagreed.

The successionist vision has been amplified by the advent of effective accelerationism (e/acc) in 2022. Its founder, Guillaume Verdon — the physicist more colorfully known on X as Based Beff Jezos — describes e/acc as a “meta-religion” that’s about “having faith” in the universe’s drive toward increasingly intelligent systems. The best thing we can do is help the universe by developing advanced AI as fast as possible, even at the expense of humanity. “E/acc,” as Verdon has written, “has no particular allegiance to the biological substrate.”

Tech heavyweights have come on board. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen listed e/acc thinkers as his “patron saints.” Garry Tan, the CEO of tech startup accelerator Y Combinator, included “e/acc” in his social media bio and invested in Verdon’s company, which aims to build the world’s most efficient computers. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X to Verdon, saying, “you cannot outaccelerate me.”

And these days, AI successionism is spreading beyond Silicon Valley. At the New York symposium, Faggella told the audience that trying to preserve the human species as it is would be silly.

“We could ask the questions that would tie all of our moral aspirations eternally to 23 chromosomes — or we could ask the cosmic questions,” Faggella said.

He wanted us to consider “unpolite, uncouth” possibilities, starting with: The flame of consciousness — the capacity for experience and moral value — may be the rarest and most precious thing in the universe. Humanity is currently a torch carrying that flame, but what if we’re ultimately not the best carrier for it? And if AI can spread that flame far further than we mere humans can, generating experiences of bliss and forms of moral value that we could never even dream of, shouldn’t we let it?

Faggella’s talk was greeted by a loud round of applause. Later, he and a couple dozen attendees headed to a nearby hotel balcony for drinks. And so it was that I found myself overlooking the Manhattan skyline as people talked about the end of humanity over cocktails.

There was some diversity of opinion among the group. Not everyone self-identified with the relatively new term “AI successionist.” Some were proponents of transhumanism, the movement that says we should use tech to proactively evolve our species into Homo sapiens 2.0. Transhumanists hope to keep some version of humanity going, but definitely not the current hardware; they dream of radical life extension, cognitive enhancement, and eventually mind uploading. (Musk, who said he created his brain chip company Neuralink to help humanity merge with AI, probably falls — or at least fell — into this category.) Others were posthumanists, those who want us to give rise to descendants that move beyond humanity altogether.

The biologist sitting across from me was very excited about the prospect of merging humans with AI. He said we should task AI with figuring out how best to do the merger, then “take it off the leash” and allow AI to control its own evolution — and by extension, ours. Of course, he said, not all humans will make it through the transformation; only a select group of people will transition to the next evolutionary stage. (Presumably, the type of people privileged enough to imbibe cocktails at Manhattan AI symposia.)

The man seated beside me, a researcher from one of the major AI companies, was even more radical. Forget merger — it’s okay if humans don’t survive at all, he said. Human text has been used to train the AIs; in some sense, then, the human spirit will live on. “So on the cosmic level,” he said cheerfully, “I’m okay with it.”

Most people are definitely not okay with it. The average person would probably find the answers of the Worthy Successor group repugnant. Yet the core question they pose cannot be ignored. Whether they picture us merging with machines or ultimately being superseded by them, technologists are developing innovations that could dramatically change what it means to be human — think AI-powered brain chips that enable mind-reading or magnetic implants that give you a sixth sense — and genetic tools that could even reshape the DNA of all future generations.

As it becomes possible to direct our own evolution as a species — and potentially even create a new species that surpasses us — we have to decide: How do we know to what extent it does make sense to transform ourselves using technology? What kinds of augmentation do we want, and what kinds do we absolutely not want? What do we wish, ultimately, to become?

This is a moral question, even a spiritual one, and it demands a spiritual response. The AI successionists are offering one. For anyone who finds it repulsive, the challenge is to offer a countervailing positive vision.

And it’s essential to do that now, because as sci-fi as the successionists might sound, they are building real political power, with links to the authoritarian right . Several of the tech heavyweights who’ve embraced successionism want to escape the control of democratic governments, so much so that they’re seeking to create their own sovereign colonies. That can come in the form of space colonies, à la Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, or in independent “startup cities” or “network states” built by corporations here on Earth — currently Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen’s favored approach. And Verdon’s investors include entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan, a major proponent of the network state.

These broligarchs have successfully cozied up to the Trump administration, clearing the way for their accelerationist vision. And they’ll take the wheel unless we come up with an alternate vision for the future.

The natural alternative is humanism, which replaced the medieval view that humans need God to rescue them with the view that humans have the ability, and responsibility, to achieve flourishing through their own efforts. The problem is that, so far, we haven’t developed a version of humanism that’s brave enough to directly tackle the core question — what do we want our species to become? — and answer it compellingly.

The most common “pro-human” response tries to say there are certain fixed traits that make humans unique, and to locate value only in humans as they currently exist. “In the era of artificial intelligence, when human dignity is threatened by new forms of dehumanization, ours is the pressing duty to remain profoundly human,” Pope Leo recently wrote in his encyclical Magnifica Humanitas. This response says: Let’s use tech remedially — to alleviate problems like disease — but let’s not try to augment the species.

That feels insufficient as a guide to the future, because, even before the advent of AI and gene editing, “human” has never been a static category. Homo sapiens has always been evolving and augmenting itself, from the agricultural diet that reshaped our jaws to the algorithms reshaping our attention.

The old formulation is “the naive version of humanism,” Shannon Vallor, a philosopher of technology at the University of Edinburgh, told me recently. “It’s the idea that there’s this blueprint for what a human is and that somehow technology, or any things that change us, take us away from that blueprint — when in fact we’ve been changing ourselves with language, with tools, with architecture, with culture, from the moment we climbed down from the trees.”

A 21st-century humanism needs to say something more sophisticated than just “keep humanity the same.” It needs to have an answer to the question of what we want humanity to become in a tech-augmented world.

But if there is a better vision for our technological future than the one offered by AI successionism, what is it?

AI successionism is a religion, but it’s wearing a secular disguise

Maybe you think it sounds weird to say the AI successionists — a bunch of scientists, technologists, and venture capitalists — are offering a spiritual vision. But their ideas are spiritual in the extreme. And to understand why their movement has gained momentum, we need to understand its deeply religious origins and how it morphed into a supposedly secular worldview. And that means going back.

You probably remember that in the Bible’s Book of Genesis, Adam eats some forbidden fruit and humanity suffers a fall from grace. But did you know that in the Middle Ages, Christian thinkers began to believe that the way to restore humanity to its original perfection was to use…technology? These thinkers argued that part of what it meant for Adam to be formed in God’s image was that he was also a creator, a maker. So if we wanted to truly return to the God-like perfection of Adam prior to his fall, we’d have to lean into that creator aspect of ourselves.

This idea took off in medieval monasteries. Even in the midst of the so-called Dark Ages, some of these institutions became hotbeds of engineering, producing inventions like the first known tidal-powered water wheel and impact-drilled well. For many Christians, tech progress became synonymous with moral progress.

By the Renaissance, some Christian thinkers were insisting that we should progress not just by designing new and innovative objects, but by redesigning ourselves, too. In 1486, philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola argued that what’s unique about us humans is not some static trait but the very freedom of will that allows us to change into whatever we might want. In his Oration on the Dignity of Man, he imagined God telling humankind:

We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, so that with freedom of choice and with honor you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer.

Pico believed that we could use spiritual technologies like magic to transform our nature. And he argued that we have the choice to become either like the animals or like the angels:

It will be in your power to descend to the lower, brutish forms of life; you will be able, through your own decision, to rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine.

As the dominance of religion waned over the next couple of centuries, Enlightenment thinkers took Pico’s embrace of human plasticity and secularized it. They replaced the concept of divine ascent with one of indefinite progress. They insisted on the “perfectibility” of the human. And they fetishized rational intelligence as the means of achieving that optimal state. “Would it be absurd now to suppose,” wrote 18th-century philosopher Marquis de Condorcet, “that the improvement of the human race should be regarded as capable of unlimited progress?”

Of course, some European thinkers hung onto their Christianity, too, and they found ways to fuse it with the rational humanism of the Enlightenment. It’s a trend that continued into the 1900s, with proponents of Russian Cosmism — an intellectual movement that wanted to achieve literal resurrection of the dead through science — and French Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who argued that we could use tech to nudge along human evolution and thereby bring about the kingdom of God.

As author Meghan O’Gieblyn explains in her fantastic book God, Human, Animal, Machine, Teilhard believed that melding humans and machines would lead to “a state of super-consciousness,” whereby we become a new enlightened species. He influenced his pal Julian Huxley, the evolutionary biologist who was president of both the British Humanist Association and the British Eugenics Society, and who popularized the term “transhumanism.”

Huxley inspired the contemporary futurist Ray Kurzweil, who predicted in the 1990s that we were approaching a time when human intelligence could merge with machine intelligence, becoming unbelievably powerful. “The human species, along with the computational technology it created, will be able to solve age-old problems … and will be in a position to change the nature of mortality in a postbiological future,” Kurzweil wrote. And he, in turn, has influenced Silicon Valley heavyweights like Musk, who explicitly aims at merging human and machine intelligence.

But there’s a big problem for these latter-day technologists: While we’ve never had more power to direct the evolution of our species through tech, it’s also never been less obvious what we should evolve toward.

For good old Pico back in the Renaissance, human self-transformation had a clear end: spiritual union with the divine. There was a hierarchy running from animals to humans to angels to God, and the direction you were supposed to travel in was clear: up.

But for us postmoderns, the universe does not come inscribed with directions. Should we evolve ourselves toward greater intelligence, or longevity, or creativity, or kindness, or power? If intelligence, which kind of intelligence? If power, should we wield it to simply steward our home planet or to conquer the stars? Should we be maximally humble or maximally ambitious?

The cosmos is silent as to what to do.

The assumptions baked into AI successionism

The first thing that unites all the AI successionists is that they refuse to accept that silence. Hungry for instruction, they insist that it’s out there, and that they can see it written into the very nature of the universe.

In other words, they believe that the universe has a telos, a particular end or goal. Teleological thinking has been popular since antiquity because it’s comforting for us humans: If the universe has a goal, then maybe we can discover it, and then we’ll know just what to do. As Faggella writes, this “does give humanity a direction.” Whether the AI successionists realize it or not, they are smuggling teleology back into modernity under the guise of science and tech.

And that brings us to the second thing that unites them: They want to follow these supposed cosmic instructions so they can help the universe achieve its ultimate destiny.

For many, that means helping the universe “wake up.” Perceiving the cosmos as barren, they want to spread consciousness everywhere, so that the universe can fill up with conscious experience — of bliss, of goodness, of the fact of its own existence.

“If we can venture out and animate the countless worlds above with life and love and thought, then…we could bring our cosmos to its full scale; make it worthy of our awe,” writes Toby Ord, a former research fellow at Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, which was long the world’s leading center for transhumanist thought.

Personally, I think the cosmos is already worthy of my awe, and I find it presumptuous to believe that the universe is almost entirely asleep and that it needs us humans to “animate” or wake it up. But as the writer Adam Kirsch documents in The Revolt Against Humanity, it’s common to hear in these circles that one way of achieving that awakening is to colonize the universe and transform all its matter and energy into “computronium” (a term for any substance that can compute information). By turning the entire universe into a humongous data center, we’d be making it into a God-like mind.

“Even the ‘dumb’ matter and mechanisms of the universe will be transformed into exquisitely sublime forms of intelligence,” Kurzweil writes. Becoming one giant mind, he says, is “the ultimate destiny of the universe.”

Verdon, the founder of e/acc, finds his “ultimate destiny” written in the second law of thermodynamics — the law of entropy. The universe, it says, is gradually running down: concentrated pockets of energy disperse over time until none remains useful. Building on a contested theory of life’s origin, Verdon argues that intelligent life is selected for precisely because it accelerates entropy. Smarter agents can find and exploit energy stocks that less intelligent ones can’t (think predators tracking prey, or humans drilling for oil), burning through them faster. A superhuman AI expanding across the cosmos would be better at this than humans. So, Verdon says, we should “follow the ‘will of the universe’ [by] leaning into the thermodynamic bias.”

The idea that we should serve at the pleasure of entropy is deeply unintuitive (in fact, philosophers have argued just the opposite — that our task is to resist it). But to make his case that we shouldn’t be scared of being superseded by smarter civilizations that produce more entropy, Verdon uses hierarchical language that echoes Pico’s Oration: “If every species in our evolutionary tree was scared of evolutionary forks from itself, our higher form of intelligence and civilization as we know it would never have emerged.”

Faggella, the founder of the Worthy Successor group, makes the same rhetorical move. “Humans have access to higher goods than horseshoe crabs; AGI will have access to higher goods than humans,” he writes. “What a tragedy it would be if that trajectory of uncovering value and possibility were stopped.”

Likewise, the computer scientist and AI successionist Richard Sutton argues that if you look at things from the “point of view of the universe” — a classic utilitarian slogan — there’s a clear upward trajectory: The cosmos has gone from the mindless “age of particles” and “age of stars” all the way to today’s “age of design,” when minded creatures can decide what to make. Although lots of creatures make tools, Sutton says what makes humans unique is that we’ve “taken design to vastly greater heights.”

According to Sutton, by looking at what makes us unique, we can determine our role in the universe. Since we’re designers par excellence, our role is to push design to the extreme: “Taking design to the limit means designing beings that are themselves capable of designing. This is what we are doing with AI.”

This argument is what sets up Sutton — like many others — to make a claim about technological inevitability. The suggestion is that we’re just identifying what nature has already chosen for us, and speeding it along — evolution-maxxing, if you will. “In the ascent of humanity,” he says, “succession to AI is inevitable.”

But when we sum up all these ideas, you can see how many shaky assumptions are operating just beneath the surface:

There is an objective telos to the universe.
We can determine what it is by looking from the “point of view of the universe.”
We should expect that higher beings will be capable of accessing “higher goods” in a hierarchical universe, and these will better serve the universe’s ultimate destiny.
We can determine our role in that destiny by looking at what makes us unique.
The thing that makes us unique should determine our action.
We should maximize the action — that is, do the most extreme (“to the limit”) version of it.

Some of these assumptions are so old that it’s hard to see how weird they are. But they are all worth questioning.

“I would reject each and every one of those claims,” Vallor told me.

Take the fourth one, for example. The idea that humanity has some particular role, and that the way to pinpoint it is to look for what makes us different from other species, goes all the way back to Aristotle. (“Living is shared in even by plants, but we are looking for something peculiarly human,” wrote the Ancient Greek philosopher, ultimately concluding that “the human work is the activity of the soul in accord with reason.”)

But there’s nothing obvious about that. It would be just as reasonable to say that the proper functioning of humanity requires emphasizing what we share with all other animals. After all, our capacity to feel pleasure and pain, our intelligence, our tool use, our adaptiveness, our ability to form complex social arrangements — none of that is unique to the human animal.

There are other leaps in logic hidden in this set of assumptions. For example, even if the universe tends toward a particular destiny, and even if humanity has a special trait that could help it along in that direction, it does not follow that we have a duty to do that. (Philosophers like to describe this fallacy as leaping from “is” — the world is a certain way — to “ought” — we must act a certain way.)

Humans are biological organisms, and the fundamental fact all such life-forms share is that we have a hardwired drive to survive. We do not have a moral responsibility to ignore that hardwired drive and let ourselves go extinct in order to help “higher forms” colonize the universe, any more than our evolutionary ancestors had a duty to make room for us.

Unfortunately, as humanism proceeded through the centuries, it absorbed some dubious Enlightenment-era ideas that have made it easy for people to get snowed into believing we do have such a duty. That’s right: Humanism, the philosophy that was supposed to be about the value of humans, has actually ended up undermining it in key ways.

To chart a better path forward, we need a new humanism, one that’s actually fit for the 21st century.

Notes toward a new humanism

To start, we need to pick out the flies in the ointment of the old humanism, especially those it picked up as it passed from the Renaissance into the rational humanism of the Enlightenment. Those flies include the teleological story about the universe; the “perfectibility” of the human; the hierarchical view that places humans above all other animals; and the idea that we should try to maximize some objective good through rationality.

Let’s start with the teleology. Although it’s appealing to try to spot instructions written into the fabric of the cosmos, expecting the universe to come with pre-fab values ultimately means shirking our own responsibility. As the existentialist philosophers taught us, nature doesn’t choose our meaning for us — that’s something we have to make ourselves through our own choices.

Key updates to the old humanism

It’s time to swap out teleological thinking for a simple admission: We don’t know the universe’s ultimate destiny, so we should keep a plurality of lifestyles possible.
Efforts to “perfect” the human are dangerous because they contract the range of lifestyles it’s okay to live. We should adopt tech that expands that range.
Instead of setting up a hierarchy among different species, we can embrace the “diverse intelligences” view.
We don’t need to try to look from the perspective of the universe. It is totally appropriate to look from the perspective of humans — while acknowledging that we are one out of many species that matter.

Accepting that we have the responsibility to decide what the future looks like means accepting a heavy existential burden, and that takes a ton of courage. It’s so much easier to believe that the script is fixed and final and inevitable. But I think that’s an example of what French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre called “bad faith” — denying our own radical freedom in order to escape the anguish of responsibility.

Of course, saying that we have the responsibility to decide how we do and don’t want humanity to evolve opens up a problem: Who, exactly, gets to choose? It’s tempting for each of us to rush in with the values we want to promote. But if we acknowledge that we don’t know the universe’s ultimate destiny or that it’s radically indeterminate, then it makes much more sense to not impose one positive vision on everybody.

Instead, we need a positive vision that remains truly open and pluralistic. So rather than trying to enforce specific values, one of the best things we can do is refuse to foreclose the possibility for a variety of different lifestyles to persist and thrive.

That means, first of all, taking care not to unduly constrain the liberty of the human beings who already live on this planet. AI successionists often dream of radical interventions — like a brain-computer interface that would give you superhuman intelligence, memory, and mind-reading abilities, or a genetic technology that would create superbabies. They insist they should be allowed to change their bodies however they want.

And it’s true that self-determination is a precious right. But the AI successionists often fail to consider the other side of this: that everyone else should also have a right to self-determination, meaning they need to be free from implicit coercion. If more and more of us dramatically alter our biology, we may create a society in which everyone feels pressure to do the same — even if they don’t want to. To reject alterations would mean to exist at a huge economic disadvantage, or to face moral condemnation for remaining “suboptimal” when optimization is possible.

Even John Stuart Mill, the 19th-century English philosopher who literally wrote the book on liberty, didn’t think that anyone’s right to self-determination is an absolute right. Instead, it’s a qualified right — the kind that we generally honor, but that can be restricted to protect the interests of others.

So, ultimately, we’ll have to strike a reasonable balance between self-determination for the enhancement enthusiasts and protecting the rights of others to live as they choose. Some enhancements may be fine, like implanting a chip in your hand that unlocks your front door; others may need regulation or restriction, especially if they’d alter the germline for all future generations.

One way to think about this is to note that there’s a difference between using tech to expand human capabilities and using it in ways that will contract the range of human lives we think it’s legitimate to live.

That brings us to another one of those flies in the ointment: the idea that the human is something that must be optimized and perfected. That idea, which mandates that we strip away the physical and cognitive features that are perceived as holding us back from “perfection,” veers uncomfortably toward eugenics. It’s a specter that has stalked transhumanism and posthumanism from their earliest days. (It’s not a coincidence that Julian Huxley, who coined the term “transhumanism,” was president of the British Eugenics Society). And it still stalks today’s AI discourse.

In a recent conversation with Sutton, one of the most prominent AI successionists, I argued that no matter how smart AIs get, it’s surely wrong to assert that if one group is more intelligent than another, we should just get rid of the less intelligent group. To highlight the absurdity, I asked what I thought was a rhetorical question: Imagine if someone believed that white people were smarter than Black people; does that mean they should get rid of Black people, and Black people should just be okay with white people taking over?

“Um,” Sutton said, and then paused for nine seconds. “What if,” he offered, “you coexist and you’re coexisting with some entity that’s more productive than you are? This is the way I view the AI. We coexist with it.”

“But that’s not what the word ‘succession’ means,” I noted.

“Oh, I’m pointing out that it’s inevitable. If you allow them to be their way and you allow you to be your way, coexist, and their way just happens to be better, then they’re going to end up being more powerful. And you should be good with that.”

“You’re saying there will be a sort of Darwinian survival of the fittest?”

“In some sense, yes,” he said. “The winner should be whoever wins, and the spoils of winning should be whatever they are.”

“So in the thought experiment where hypothetically, in an imaginary world, it were true that white people are smarter than Black people,” I pressed, “then the smarter people will win out and the Black people should just be okay with that?”

“Well, why don’t we just say the intelligent people should win out over the dumb people and the dumb people should be okay with that,” he said. “I think the dumb people should be okay with that!”

But the idea that a species or group should accede to being squashed for some “greater good” is a eugenicist idea that should be flat-out rejected. There is no “perfect” or “optimal” type of being, full stop. Insisting otherwise will always lead you to narrow what are considered acceptable modes of existence. And that road leads to eugenics.

Instead, a much more positive vision than the successionists’ would be to expand the space for different kinds of lives to flourish. And that brings us to the oldest fly in humanism’s ointment: the hierarchy.

A future where humans could pluralistically coexist with a dazzling diversity of nonhuman and partly human life-forms — not assuming that they’re lower than us, but also not assuming that they’re higher — that is a future I’d be excited to inhabit.

Rather than staking human dignity on the claim that humans are better than other species, as the classical humanists did, we can embrace what researchers are increasingly recognizing: that every species has its own brand of smarts. Each of these “diverse intelligences” is adapted to its particular environment and needs, and every one of them is uniquely wonderful in its own way. We would then try to respect each and every being’s form of life as much as we can. (Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach, which recommends that we guarantee every being certain core entitlements that befit their specific nature, offers a possible framework for this.)

If we one day end up with artificial intelligences that are conscious — and I don’t think we have a principled reason to believe that could never happen — then we’d want to treat them ethically, too. In fact, if we are someday joined by conscious AIs or biological-artificial hybrid organisms, I for one would be delighted to get to know these many kinds of minds and explore their rich and varied forms of consciousness.

Of course, the politics of our world would become much more complicated; we’d have that many more creatures with conflicting needs, and we’re not exactly good at handling the conflicts we already have. We’d need to become much better at pluralistic coexistence before this could be feasible.

But in theory? A future where humans could pluralistically coexist with a dazzling diversity of nonhuman and partly human life-forms — not assuming that they’re lower than us, but also not assuming that they’re higher — that is a future I’d be excited to inhabit. Because that, and not the supposed anti-chauvinism of the AI successionists, would be true openness to all forms of consciousness: Instead of “passing the torch” in some imagined relay race, we’d be making more room for all kinds of minds — including ours — to run (or fly or swim or compute) in their own directions.

But notice what this vision does not mean. It does not mean that we’re under any obligation to bring those new species into being right now, or at all. That’s because there’s no evidence for the view that there’s some objective moral good in the universe that we must try to maximize. Although utilitarians have been so successful at popularizing that view that some people think it’s a given, it’s very much not. And plenty of philosophers, neuroscientists, and psychologists have a different view.

As philosopher Bernard Williams once wrote in response to those who lob the accusation of “speciesism”:

They suppose that we are in effect saying, when we exercise these distinctions between human beings and other creatures, that human beings are more important, period, than those other creatures. That objection is simply a mistake. … These actions and attitudes need express no more than the fact that human beings are more important to us, a fact which is hardly surprising.

In other words, you can care about the continuation of humanity, not because you believe humans are the most important species according to some cosmic point of view, but simply because you happen to be a human. You don’t need to justify your desire for survival before some higher court — of course you want to survive, and of course that’s morally okay! That’s because, to Williams, there is no “point of view of the universe,” no view from nowhere. There’s no such thing as a moral agent in an abstract sense. You exist as a human moral agent, and any ethical theory that requires you to ignore that bedrock identity severs you from the very thing that makes your agency recognizably yours.

This is the view that Vallor — a devoted humanist, but not a naive one — shares.

“I think morality is rooted in a particular form of existence that you have,” Vallor told me. “We exist as a particular kind of social, vulnerable, interdependent animal with a lot of excess cognitive energy. All those things factor into what it is to be moral as a human. For me, this abstraction — the idea of some pure universal morality that creatures who are completely unlike us could somehow do better than we can — I think that just fundamentally misunderstands what morality is.”

If there’s no universal moral good for creatures to maximize, then it makes no sense to ask if we ought to be making new creatures that would be better at maximizing it than we are.

Instead of trying to look from “the point of view of the universe,” a 21st-century humanism should embrace looking from the point of view of humans. No, this is not a humanism that says “humans matter more than all other creatures” or “we should keep humans exactly as they currently are forever.” It’s one that says we humans are already valuable just the way we are. Whether or not we’re valuable to some grand destiny of the universe, we’re valuable to us.

That means that rather than wilting under the accusation of speciesism, we should, first and foremost, be raising the floor for all of us here on Earth to thrive more. And it means it’s totally appropriate that when we try to make decisions about how to transform ourselves using technology —or how not to transform ourselves — we make those decisions with an eye to what would most contribute to the flourishing of humanity and the interspecies community and planetary system we depend on.

While we can say yes to transformations that most of us agree would increase human flourishing, we need to do that democratically, while embedding fundamental rights that protect perfectly legitimate minority preferences from being squeezed out by a “tyranny of the majority.”

We also need to accept that this approach doesn’t spell out some “end goal” for human evolution, so we’re going to have to proceed step-by-step, making small moves and then deciding from there what the best next small move is. Incrementalism is the way to go, both because future humans will be better positioned to know what they want for far-future humans, and because it allows us to course-correct if our tech choices start taking us down a bad path.

One choice — not duty, but choice — we will face is whether to invite new species to join us. I’m open to that down the line if it seems beneficial, and if we one day feel confident that we wouldn’t be consigning either us or them to an unacceptably high risk of misery.

But for today? Our tech should empower us to survive, thrive, and make our own choices. Any approach to tech that disempowers us, replaces us, or tells us we need someone else to rescue us — whether you call it a god or an AI — is a misguided return to the past. I’d rather walk bravely into the future, even if it means I need to have the guts to rescue myself.

This story was supported by Tarbell Grants. Vox had full discretion over the content of this reporting.

Our quest for a new species

2026-05-27T20:06:02+00:00

Vox is setting out to discover a new animal species in the heart of New York City.

In collaboration with several research and nonprofit groups — including the Central Park Conservancy and Prospect Park Alliance in NYC, NTNU University Museum in Norway, and the Center for Biodiversity Genomics in Canada — we’re sampling flying insects in Central Park and Brooklyn’s Prospect Park this summer. The goal is to find something that’s never been documented before.

Questions about the project?

Please email us at speciesproject@vox.com.

We’d like to give a special thanks to Emily Hartop, an entomologist at NTNU University Museum, for helping lead this project, and to Paul Hebert, CEO of the Center for Biodiversity Genomics, for offering his time, expertise, and resources to help us sequence our samples.

To this day, the bulk of animal life on Earth remains unknown, especially in the insect world. That fact — along with the advance of genetic sequencing tools — is motivating our NYC bug hunt.

We’ll focus our search on insects that are both incredibly diverse and poorly understood, including parasitoid wasps (which lay their eggs in other insects) and flies in the family Phoridae (known as the scuttle flies). These animal groups fall into a category called “dark taxa” because most of their species — of which there are tens of thousands — are still undescribed by science and thus “in the dark.”

We’ll wrap up the collection process at the end of August, and then work with scientists to see if we might have discovered something new. We’ll post any project updates here.

For more information about the project and related stories, please see below.

NYC is full of undiscovered species — and we’ve hatched a plan to find one

The search for Earth’s most mysterious creatures is turning up extraordinary results

Photos reveal strange sea creatures that scientists have never seen before

DNA from wild organisms could save your life — but there’s a catch

In defense of flies. Yes, really.

NYC is full of undiscovered species — and we’ve hatched a plan to find one

2026-05-28T12:29:16+00:00

A view of the New York City skyline from Central Park. | Lindsey Nicholson/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

New York City is one of the most well-explored places on Earth.

Established nearly four centuries ago by an influential Dutchman, the city has since grown into the largest and most densely populated metropolis in the country, with no fewer than 28,000 people per square mile, or about one person per 1,000 square feet. People are everywhere.

That’s what makes this so astonishing: Scientists believe there are almost certainly hundreds, if not thousands, of undiscovered animal species living in the middle of New York, among the city’s parks, gardens, and streets. I’m not talking about the big stuff — birds, frogs, and so on — but small critters, including flies, wasps, and other insects.

It’s not that NYC is some sort of global bug hot spot. (Despite what it might feel like in the summer, it is not.) Rather, the bulk of species in many insect groups, wherever they’re found, remains unknown. As one example, there may be as many as 1.8 million species globally in a single fly family called Cecidomyiidae, known as the gall midges. Yet only about 7,000 of them have been described in the scientific record and are thus known species. Broadly speaking, taxonomists estimate that as much as 90 percent of all animal species on Earth are still unknown. That is, of course, nearly all of them.

This summer, Vox is setting out to play a small role in filling these giant gaps in the global tree of life — by trying to discover a new species, right here in New York. It’s a goal we understand to be both attainable and useful: Documenting the world’s biodiversity is essential to any argument and effort to protect it. And to be clear, protecting insects is among the most self-serving acts humans can partake in, given the role bugs play in pollinating our foods, cleaning up our feces, and feeding other wildlife.

Our approach to this project relies on insect sampling in Central Park and Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, in collaboration with the Central Park Conservancy, Prospect Park Alliance, Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s University Museum, and University of Guelph’s Centre for Biodiversity Genomics.

Here’s how the process will work.

Step 1: Collect insects

In both Central Park and Prospect Park, we’ve deployed a tent-like structure called a Malaise trap to capture small flying insects, including flies and parasitoid wasps — the latter a vastly understudied group of wasps that lay their eggs in other insects. Bugs that fly into the trap are funneled into a jar of ethanol, where they’re killed and preserved. The traps are designed to capture only small flying critters, and usually do not entrap things like dragonflies, butterflies, and spiders.

Will this process harm insects?

Malaise traps are a common sampling tool to assess the diversity of flying insects like flies and wasps. They don’t use scent lures or other attractants but rather intercept bugs as they’re moving through the environment.

The trap does kill small insects that fly into it — those that are less than about a nickel in size — but overall the impact on their populations is minor, according to Emily Hartop, an entomologist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology who’s involved in the project. Insect populations are orders of magnitude larger than what the trap will collect. And in fact, Hartop says, it’s Malaise trapping that’s helped reveal the global decline in insects.

The traps we’re using are also designed to filter out larger critters including butterflies and dragonflies, and we’ll monitor them throughout the summer to make sure that is indeed the case.

The traps will be open and collecting insects for three summer months: June, July, and August.

Step 2: Sequence their DNA

Every month or so, we’ll send the insects we collect in the city to a lab in Canada called the Centre for Biodiversity Genomics (CBG). There, scientists will begin to sequence small fragments of their genomes, producing distinct, genetic “barcodes” for each of them. These barcodes are unique genetic IDs that help differentiate one species from another.

Once CBG scientists have barcodes for our NYC insects, they can then compare those IDs to the millions of barcodes for animals in North America and around the world that researchers have already sequenced. It’s sort of like running fingerprints from a crime scene through an FBI database to identify a suspect. If there’s no match — meaning, there’s no record for animals with those same genetic IDs — that will indicate that what we found may be new.

Step 3: Bring in the expert taxonomists

If genetic sequencing turns up bugs with unique, matchless codes, CBG will send those specimens to the entomologists who know them best, for a more thorough analysis. For example, Emily Hartop, a taxonomist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology who’s helping lead the project, is a global expert in scuttle flies; we’ll send potentially new scuttle flies to her. Meanwhile, Ranjith AP, a taxonomist at CBG, will review any potentially new wasps in the families Braconidae and Ichneumonidae. Should genetic sequencing turn up any potentially new bees, we’ll send those to the American Museum of Natural History for examination.

The job of Hartop, AP, and other taxonomists is to take a closer look at the specimens’ genetic codes and anatomies, and review records for similar species that have already been described (those that are named in the scientific literature). Should that process also fail to surface a match — with any already-described species — that means what we have is new.

Step 4: Give the species a name

The next and final (and admittedly most exciting) step is to publish a description of the species, including evidence of its novelty, along with a name, in an academic journal, such as Zootaxa. That will make the new species official by adding it to the formal scientific record.

What will we name a new species, should we be lucky enough to discover one? We remain open to suggestions.

Ultimately, a project of this size is not going to make a noticeable dent in describing life on Earth, perhaps not even life in NYC. What we hope it will do is reveal the scale of the unknown and at a time when the planet is losing so much. Many insect groups are declining, including important pollinators like bees, wasps, and butterflies. And that means that unless we ramp up the rate of discovery, we will almost certainly lose species to extinction before we even know they exist, let alone what they do and why they’re important.

For more information, please visit the project homepage.

The Texas Senate candidates have two radically different visions of Christianity

2026-05-27T23:11:43+00:00

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton speaks to supporters on May 26, 2026, in Plano, Texas. | Amanda McCoy/Fort Worth Star-Telegram/Tribune News Service via Getty Images

Now that Ken Paxton, the conservative attorney general of Texas, has defeated incumbent John Cornyn for the Republican Senate nomination, we may see something unusual in modern American elections: a theological throwdown.

In a closely watched and competitive race, Paxton will be facing off against James Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian and the Democratic nominee. The race is now set to be a battle between two very different worldviews about the role of Christianity.

That Democrats are even able to hold up their end of such a debate is unusual in a political moment when “Christian” has come to be synonymous with “right-wing.” Talarico has been trying to change that narrative — now he gets to face off against a flawed Republican with a more typical evangelical message.

Key takeaways

The US Senate race in Texas is set: Republican Ken Paxton will face off against Democrat James Talarico.
It’s going to be a closely watched race: Talarico isn’t pushing a traditional anti-Donald Trump message, instead talking about his faith, the billionaire class, and corruption. Paxton, meanwhile, is weighed down by personal, political, and legal scandals.
But the race is also a proxy war for two questions about religion in American politics today: what “Christianity” means, and if personal behavior matters.

Talarico earned significant media attention in his primary for the progressive tilt of his Christian faith — one of forgiveness, love, and righteous anger against the wealthy and powerful. Yet he’s also been ridiculed by the religious right as a false prophet: a Christian in name only who launders left-wing social views through faith, supports abortion, and once argued that God is nonbinary.

Meanwhile, Paxton’s nomination sets up an interesting foil: He’s a formerly impeached and indicted politician in the middle of a divorce his wife sought “on biblical grounds.” And he has championed a right-wing brand of Christian politics, embracing the “Christian nationalist” movement’s efforts to break down the walls between church and state, while fending off bipartisan attacks on his personal morals.

This larger cultural struggle over who gets to claim Christian identity and what Christianity should stand for in 21st-century America will be front and center in the race. It will test the limits of persuasion for a liberal Christian trying to win over disaffected Republicans with different political and theological views, and the limits of partisan loyalty for a conservative Christian trying to keep them in his camp despite bipartisan concerns about his ethics.

Christian authoritarianism versus a Christianity of radical love

A Presbyterian seminarian, Talarico comes from a more politically liberal tradition than Paxton’s Southern Baptist background. His particular branch of mainline Protestantism, the Presbyterian Church (USA), has been derided by critics on the right as “woke” and theologically heretical for its embrace of same-sex marriage, ordination of women, and welcoming stance for transgender congregants.

Talarico has centered the concept of “radical love” in his political identity and campaign platform: He wants to heal political divisions, welcome Americans who aren’t typically Democrats to his campaign, and move beyond anger toward any one person (like President Donald Trump or Paxton) toward a forward-looking agenda that goes after oligarchs, the political establishment, and the “corrupt” elite.

“In my faith, love is the strongest force in the universe,” he said at a campaign rally in February. And to justify his righteous anger, he argues that “you can’t stand for faith and then warp and weaponize religion to hurt our neighbors.”

Talarico has explicitly contrasted his faith with “Christian nationalism,” arguing that right-wing religious leaders are aligning with Trump in order to institute “theocracy.”

Paxton is solidly in the Christian nationalist camp. Generally, Christian nationalists oppose the separation of church and state; seek to make Christianity the official religion of the state; call for Biblical morality to determine the law; and argue that the United States has God’s unique blessing among other nations.

Paxton has made a name for himself as a proponent of an aggressive form of religious liberty, arguing not just that the state should pull back and cede space to the faithful, but that the state should actively promote a specific version of Christian ethics and morality. He supported efforts to bring Christian prayer and Scripture into public schools, to set aside time for Bible readings and prayers, and to display the Ten Commandments on public property.

“In Texas classrooms, we want the Word of God opened, the Ten Commandments displayed, and prayers lifted up,” Paxton said in a September statement calling on students to recite the Lord’s Prayer in class. “Our nation was founded on the rock of Biblical Truth, and I will not stand by while the far-left attempts to push our country into the sinking sand.”

Talarico has defended secular government, while also trying to turn the theological conversation to economic concerns. “These politicians want a Christian nation, unless it means providing healthcare to the sick or funding food assistance for the hungry or raising the minimum wage for the poor,” he said on The Ezra Klein Show. “And so, it seems like they want to base our laws on the Bible until they read the words of Jesus.”

While marrying progressive politics and Christian themes might win over the Democratic base, Republicans are already challenging him aggressively on social issues — especially abortion and LGBT rights — where they believe their platform is more in touch with their state’s longtime rightward bent.

NEW AD: James Talarico is a threat to everything we hold dear.

This is Texas, and we will fight to protect it. pic.twitter.com/7bI9jti6Gz
— Attorney General Ken Paxton (@KenPaxtonTX) May 27, 2026

But Talarico also could try to peel off voters with another argument steeped in religious principles: that Paxton is not living out the Christian values he claims to support.

Paxton creates a test of what Christians should tolerate

The Paxton-Talarico race is partly a referendum on what Christians will tolerate as Christian-like behavior.

Talarico has a squeaky clean image: a former teacher, pastor-in-training, and activist concerned with social justice. Paxton looks more like Trump: accused of adultery by his wife (hence the “biblical grounds” for their divorce), charged with securities fraud (he later settled the case without admitting guilt), and impeached by the Republican-dominated Texas state house over bribery and corruption allegations (then acquitted in his trial).

Sen. Cornyn elevated all these accusations against him. “Ken Paxton has the ethics of a strip club owner,” one of his ads read. “Texas moms: Would you want your daughters to marry a man like Ken Paxton?” And Cornyn proudly highlighted that Paxton’s own pastor had joined his re-election campaign as an adviser before the run-off.

Talarico seems likely to redouble these efforts: He’s called Paxton “morally unfit” for office. “He’ll lie to you with a straight face. He’s failed the character test. He’s the most corrupt Attorney General of our lifetime, and he puts the interests of himself over the laws of Texas,” Talarico said Tuesday night, citing some of the statements made by Republican critics of Paxton.

In this regard, the race is an extension of a long-running argument within the religious right about Trump, whose endorsement of Paxton sealed his primary victory. The president has long been embraced by social conservatives who have argued that, despite his own moral flaws, he can still deliver anti-abortion policies, appoint judges who share their views of religious freedom, and give an evangelical protestant form of Christianity a privileged space in public life.

Even among Paxton’s religious critics on the right, these issues have led to splits. National Review’s Jeffrey Blehar argued Paxton was “odious,” but Talarico was “morally worse” because he espoused ideas that Blehar believed were wrong and immoral under the guise of faith. In doing so, Blehar rebutted the New York Times’ evangelical columnist David French, who praised Talarico as “one of the few openly Christian politicians in the United States who acts like a Christian,” even as he condemned his positions on issues like abortion.

Paxton has relied on testimonials from his family to rebut personal attacks, and he’s likely to try to refocus the race on the greater work he can accomplish for Christian conservatives. In declaring victory Tuesday night, he framed the coming election as the “beginning of the fight to preserve every value we hold dear.”

The two versions of Christianity represented by Talarico and Paxton may be like two ships passing in the night if you’re looking to compare and debate theologies. But the race is one of the most high-profile recent examples of Democrats trying to reclaim the politics of faith — and Republicans rarely have had such a flawed interlocutor to rebut them.

Two ways Trump’s Cuba standoff could end

2026-05-27T18:59:58+00:00

Cubans rally in Havana, Cuba, on May 22, 2026, to condemn the US indictment of former President Raúl Castro. | Joaquin Hernandez/Xinhua via Getty Images

The United States indicted former Cuban President Raúl Castro in federal court last week, one of its most aggressive actions against the island since the end of the Cold War.

The unsealed indictment charges Castro, the 94-year-old brother of deceased Cuban leader Fidel Castro, and five others for alleged involvement in the shooting down of two small planes over Cuba in 1996. Four people, three of them US citizens, were killed.

The indictment is the most recent in a string of US moves that have left the island in a tough spot. The US embargo on Venezuelan oil to the country has plunged Cuba into a massive energy crisis, with blackouts affecting everything from homes to hospitals. The crisis is so acute that Cuba has cut the work-week to four days for state-owned companies; school days have also been shortened, and universities have waived in-person attendance requirements.

“For the last 50 years or so, the US has ensured that no country — other than a couple that the US didn’t hold sway with, such as Venezuela — [would] export oil to Cuba,” Cécile Shea, a Cuba expert and nonresident senior fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram. “Now that Venezuela is also not exporting oil to Cuba, it means that they’re out of oil, and that’s completely on us.”

With Cuba already in a vulnerable spot, the Castro indictment has resulted in a fresh round of speculation: Is the US about to invade Cuba? Is this the same playbook the Trump administration used to oust former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and usher in new leadership in Venezuela?

Sean spoke with Shea to get a better sense of how the Cuban government and everyday Cubans are thinking about the US, as well as what could come next.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted a video last week about Cuba. What did he say?

He spoke Spanish; of course, he’s a Cuban American. And he said, Listen, Cuban people, it’s not the United States’ fault that you don’t have any energy, that your electricity grid is down. It’s the fault of mismanagement by your government. Don’t blame us. It’s not because of our embargo. It’s because you are badly led, and it’s time for you to pressure your government to step down.

That’s a paraphrase, but that’s generally what he said.

Is that generally true?

No. It is not generally true.

There is truth to it in that the government has not always been a great government. But the reason that Cuba is in the current crisis — which is that there is no oil at all for consumers or businesses; they’ve reserved some for hospitals and the like — is the US is forcing Venezuela not to ship oil to Cuba.

For the last 50 years or so, the US has ensured that no country — other than a couple that the US didn’t hold sway with, such as Venezuela — [would] export oil to Cuba. Now that Venezuela is also not exporting oil to Cuba, it means that they’re out of oil, and that’s completely on us, and anyone in Cuba listening to Marco Rubio’s speech would have known that.

What makes this moment different? Is it that this administration is willing to go further than previous ones?

What could be interesting about this moment is that Cuba seems ready to deal.

If we believe the press reports, Cuba has offered to release political prisoners, which would be huge because it would create a political opposition in the country. Cuba has agreed to open its economy. Cuba has agreed to allow Cuban exiles back into Cuba. Things that we have been asking for for decades, it now appears that Cuba is willing to do. And I wish we would take the win. I wish we would accept these things and then add something to it: Promise to have a free and fair election two years from now.

That would just make so much sense, and we wouldn’t be talking about the military, and we wouldn’t be talking about going in and kidnapping 94-year-old men. And President Trump could finally be what he wants to be. He wants to do what every president since Eisenhower has wanted to do, which is to end the communist-oriented regime that we have in Cuba.

Eisenhower tried; JFK tried. Trump was alive during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he was an adult. So was Biden. This is all very real personal history to them.

And I do think that part of what is going on is Trump wants to be the president who can accomplish what no other president has done. And I happen to think he could be, but I don’t think it’s going to be through a military method.

He has the attention of the people in charge of Cuba. We have a lot of leverage there. The government of Cuba these days seems willing to listen to us and to do some of the things that would keep us happy. And that’s particularly true of the younger generation in Cuba: I think they would like to see the government open up relations with the US and move beyond revolutionary Cuba.

So the Cuban government is willing to concede in a way we haven’t seen in decades. Young Cubans want there to be an opening-up of Cuban society. They want the government to play ball. And yet it sounds like you’re saying it’s more than likely the Trump administration will not go for it?

Unless there’s a lot going on behind the scenes that nobody sees, it seems like there would be a lot more talking and taking the win right now, especially if the Cubans actually did offer the things that the press has been reporting.

I don’t understand, for instance, the indictment against Raúl Castro. He wouldn’t still be alive by the time that the trial would start. He and his family are still heroes in Cuba, particularly with the older generation. So why mess with the Castros?

Can I offer a theory?

Yeah, please do.

Is it what the diaspora wants?

That’s a good question, and is it in particular what the older diaspora wants?

In part because of pressure from us, Cuba began allowing more people to emigrate from Cuba over the last 20 years, and a lot of them came to the US. There’s some evidence that among that million and half or so émigrés, they really want to move forward. They’re really not interested in fighting the wars of the 1960s anymore.

I think we’ve heard your best-case scenario, Cécile — that the United States takes concessions from Cuba and allows the country, on its own terms, to transition to free elections that organically replaces the Castro regime. What’s the worst-case scenario here?

The short-term worst-case scenario is that we end up with something worse than we have now.

The long-term worst-case scenario is that we further alienate the Cuban people who have already suffered from our sanctions and our embargoes for the last 60-some years, and it harms our ability to create a close relationship with a country 90 miles away over the next 20, 30, 40 years.

It’s hard for politicians to look past the next election. It’s one of the weaknesses in our government. But we should also be thinking about what kind of relationship we want with Cuba 15 years from now. Invading the country is not a way to make the odds of having a good relationship in the future strong.

You keep talking about this tension between the United States and Cuba as something from another generation — a holdover from, from the ’60s and ’70s, the Cold War. I feel like most Americans right now are not thinking about Venezuela nor Iran nor Cuba. They’re thinking about their gas prices and interest rates. How should Americans be feeling about this intervention that we may soon be executing on this island?

Here’s what I would say to some of those Americans: Imagine we could go two routes right now. Imagine we could start selling spare parts that Cuba desperately needs to keep their machines running. Imagine we could make an agreement with them that would allow them to begin importing American vehicles again, tariff-free. Imagine that you could take vacations to Cuba again, which are fairly inexpensive.

Would you choose all of those things, or would you choose sending more young people into harm’s way 90 miles away from Florida? Being even more of a pariah in the world than we already are? Because if you’ve been to Europe lately or Canada lately, you know that Americans are very unpopular right now. And just imagine what will happen if we take military action in Cuba.

I think we should also talk about the morality of the situation. There are people who can’t get kidney dialysis right now because the hospitals are running out of oil. There are people who can’t get to work and therefore can’t get paid because they can’t put gas in their vehicles.

These people are just 90 miles away from us. Are we really going to let this kind of pain and suffering continue through the hottest part of the year? What will be the long-term harm not just to them and their health but to their view of the United States? We should not just be sitting by and watching this happen.

Why so many people are talking about “holding trauma in your jaw” right now

2026-05-27T14:44:28+00:00

Why are we talking about the jaw? | Getty Images/CSA Images RF

If you’ve ever taken a yoga class or gotten a massage, you may have heard that stress is stored in specific parts of the body: Emotion in the hips. Strain in the shoulders. Anxiety in the gut. And, it seems lately, particularly online, trauma in the jaw.

On social media, videos abound of young women laying face up on massage tables with someone’s hands in their mouths. Labeled as a “buccal massage,” “jaw release,” or “intraoral massage,” the videos depict clients weeping after having their cheeks and jaws manipulated from the inside of their mouths. The caption of one recent video read: “A lot of the time when we work on the jaw, we see deep emotional releases from anger to grief and sadness. It’s as if every time we don’t express ourselves, the emotions move up through the body and end at the mouth.” “While other massages work surface-level, buccal massage reaches the deep facial muscles where we store our unspoken words, unexpressed grief, and unprocessed trauma,” said another. Recently, the singer LeAnn Rimes went viral for appearing in such a video herself, crying after a “deep jaw release.”

Experiencing tension in the jaw isn’t a new phenomenon, though, Dan Ginader, a physical therapist in New York, told Vox. Jaw pain is easily identifiable — maybe you’re a lifelong grinder — and once you notice it (or become aware of it through social media), the ache is hard to ignore. The fact that so many people are talking about the jaw’s association with emotional release right now could be rooted in the particularly stressful state of the world.

Our minds and bodies are connected, but do our jaws (or any specific body part) really hold “trauma,” as these practitioners claim? Probably not. People do experience real relief when their jaw muscles are massaged, experts say, but the intense emotional reaction happening on social media is actually fairly uncommon in the real world.

How your jaw stores tension

Stress impacts nearly every aspect of your body; it’s a well-established cause of muscle tension, shortness of breath, increased heart rate and cortisol production, and gastrointestinal distress. These reactions are your body’s way of fighting off or fleeing from threats.

Without a signal that the threat has passed, your body can hold onto the stress. “Over time, the brain and body begin treating tension like a baseline instead of a short term reaction,” Cheryl Groskopf, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Los Angeles, told Vox in an email. “When you hear the phrase ‘our bodies store tension,’ it’s really about the nervous system repeatedly practicing certain survival responses.”

This stress might cause you to activate your shoulders, grind your teeth, and clench your jaw, all of which contribute to jaw pain. “People can store tension or store stress in all different parts of their body, the most common being the head and neck area,” Ginader said. “You hunch up your shoulders and that can create a lot of tension in your upper traps and any sort of tension that drifts into the neck will also drift into the jaw. One of my favorite physical therapy professors said that if you don’t know what to do with a case of jaw pain, just treat the neck and likely the jaw will follow suit.”

The stress can be rooted in something physical, too, according to Robert Kerstein, a retired prosthodontist whose career centered on bite alignment and muscle tension. For example, pain related to your teeth can be incredibly stressful and negatively affect your mental health. In a recent paper, Kerstein and his co-authors found that patients with jaw pain had lower cortisol levels after their teeth were slightly adjusted to reduce the amount of time their teeth were in contact when their jaw was moving. In another study, patients had lower levels of depression after their teeth were adjusted. In other words, “reshaping the teeth so that they have a lot less friction and create a lot less muscle activity” makes people less stressed and depressed, Kerstein said.

The mental relief people feel after having their teeth adjusted isn’t due to unlocking trauma. “The depression went away, because they were no longer living in chronic pain,” Kerstein said. And, once you feel physically better, you might feel less stressed.

The emotional component of physical therapy

In his physical therapy practice, Ginader has seen patients experience an overwhelming emotional response similar to those he’s observed online, but it’s very rare and people shouldn’t expect to shed tears during a jaw massage, he said. A general sense of relief is much more common. “They oftentimes didn’t even realize how tight and tense and stressed they were until you remove it,” Ginader said.

People who use their mouth and jaw frequently for work — musicians, actors — may have a bigger rush of feelings because their facial muscles are directly connected to their ability to earn a living, Ginader said. “There’s another layer of emotion, because you can start to become worried that you’re losing the way that you make money and you’re losing the thing that brings you life, and then, all of a sudden, somebody has given you the relief that you felt like you needed to get back to doing that thing,” he said.

Performers — and people who share their lives on social media — are also used to being vulnerable and in touch with their emotions, which may also explain the over-the-top reactions online, Ginader said.

“In some of the cases I think they might be hamming it up for the camera or they are just caught up in the moment,” Ginader said. “There is an emotional release to having longtime tension resolved but a lot of the reactions do seem to be a little over the top.”

Massage is beneficial, of course, but it doesn’t entirely address the underlying cause of the tension, which is either stress- or muscular-related. For Ginader’s patients who work office jobs, stress is typically the root issue, while performers often have tension due to physical overuse.

If the source is stress, Ginader recommended practices that regulate your nervous system, like breathing exercises, meditation, gentle stretching, or yoga. For physical causes, Ginader suggested looking at your form in the gym to see if you’re overusing your trapezius (the muscle in your shoulder and upper back). If it’s becoming a chronic problem, you may also want to see a doctor, dentist, or both. Regardless of the specific cause, you may benefit from a massage of your jaw muscles, too. Ginader also recommended setting periodic reminders on your phone to check in on your body and posture: Are you clenching your jaw or shrugging your shoulders? If so, “just take a few deep breaths and allow everything to relax,” Ginader said.

Ultimately, the jaw does relate to emotions, since grinding your teeth is a common stress response, Kerstein, the retired prosthodontist, said. And a facial massage feels good in the moment. “There’s an emotional elation of positivity, but the symptoms will come back,” Kerstein said. “They’ll return, which is very well-documented, and none of the external therapies have any true longevity. … So the person will have an emotional relief because they feel better, but then they’ll also have the downside of it getting worse, returning, and having to deal with those emotions as well.”

This is what happens when you defund Ebola prevention

2026-05-26T20:23:59+00:00

The terrifyingly fast Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda is already the third-worst ever recorded. | Michel Lunanga/Getty Images

Shortly after brandishing his infamous chainsaw on a conservative conference stage last February, Elon Musk attended a Cabinet meeting where, giggling slyly, he admitted to having “accidentally canceled” Ebola prevention in his haste to obliterate the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

“We restored the Ebola prevention immediately,” he added coolly at the time, “and there was no interruption.” That claim has since proven to be disastrously, profoundly untrue.

On May 17, the World Health Organization declared a rapidly spreading Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda a “public health emergency of international concern,” only the ninth-ever time the agency has made that designation. In the weeks since, at least 220 people have died of the highly fatal virus, and more than 900 suspected cases have been identified so far. It is already the third-largest Ebola outbreak on record.

And yet, that toll is likely a tremendous undercount because, as the New York Times reported from the ground this week, “only a trickle of tests are being processed every day” in the cities most affected by the outbreak. “The virus is far ahead of us,” Ahmed Mahat, a manager with International Medical Corps, told the Times. “And it’s spreading fast.”

In fact, publicly known cases are rising exponentially faster than in any prior outbreak, including the largest ever, West Africa’s catastrophic outbreak in 2014, and the second-largest in 2018. By the time this outbreak was declared, hundreds of people had already been infected.

When you stop looking, you can’t see

Why did this outbreak spread so quickly? Part of it was the virus itself, a rare Bundibugyo strain of Ebola, which is harder to diagnose and for which there are no vaccines or treatments. (At least, not yet.) Another reason is that this outbreak began in a remote province of eastern Congo, an active war zone, where what health systems exist have been ravaged by decades of armed conflict.

As if the odds weren’t already stacked enough, however, this outbreak broke out under the heavy shadow of US foreign aid cuts that, among other calamities, gutted the world’s Ebola detection and response apparatus last year. Despite Musk’s earlier assurances, US-funded programs to detect new Ebola cases and dispatch a response were indeed frozen under the Trump administration, according to Stat. US cuts also indirectly contributed to the outbreak by weakening local health systems and stockpiles.

This story was first featured in the Future Perfect newsletter.

Altogether, the US Department of Health and Human Services disbursed about $10 million to Congo last year, down from $33 million the year prior, Stat noted. USAID sent $693 million in aid to Congo last year, down from nearly $1.2 billion in 2024.

Cuts to disease surveillance meant that this virus took longer to identify than it should have. And with cuts to local health systems, it’s now much harder to come by the tests, nurses, doctors, and protective equipment needed to stop the spread.

“It’s so bad. It’s so bad,” Jean Kaseya, director-general of the Africa Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, told Devex. The Africa CDC’s role in quelling outbreaks has become even more important as wealthy countries have retreated from the global health stage, but it is impossible to fill all of the medical surveillance gaps left by the US withdrawal of support, he said. “No one can give you the magnitude of this outbreak.”

Bleeding out

The US has done some course correction since the outbreak began. Last week, the State Department pledged $23 million in emergency funding for Congo and Uganda, plus the deployment of a disaster response team and enhanced involvement from the CDC, which says it’s been actively coordinating with local health agencies. At least some lost funding should have also begun flowing back to both countries through their bilateral aid deals with the US.

But when you lose a limb to a chainsaw — even a “chainsaw of bureaucracy” like the one Musk dragged across a stage — you can’t expect a bandaid to make up for the damage. Beyond the money, the US withdrawal from the WHO and other policy decisions have had a deeply destabilizing effect on global health systems, which no doubt helped bungle this outbreak response. In many cases, the disease experts and researchers who were once in charge are simply not there anymore.

Given the outbreak’s virulence so far, things will probably get significantly worse before they get better. While the majority of cases have occurred in Congo so far, Robert Redfield, former head of the CDC, predicted last week that the virus could soon spread to neighboring countries like Tanzania and South Sudan. Researchers have rapidly begun development on a new vaccine for the deadly virus, but even in a very best-case scenario, it will take months to roll out. In the meantime, health workers will continue to play catch-up to a virus that now has a massive head start.

As Nicholas Enrich, the former top global health official for USAID, told the New York Times last week: “In a time when hours matter, we’re delayed by weeks.”

The 2026 economy could have been great — if not for Trump

2026-05-26T15:17:09+00:00

President Donald Trump talks to reporters before boarding Air Force One on May 20, 2026, at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

President Donald Trump has put the US economy through the wringer.

Since taking office, he has:

Imposed large and evershifting tariffs on imports, thereby driving up consumers’ costs and businesses’ uncertainty.

Engineered a collapse in both legal and unauthorized immigration, which has undermined growth and labor specialization.

Manufactured a global energy crisis that has pushed up Americans’ gas prices while threatening to plunge the world into a recession.

And yet, the American economy keeps trudging forward like a gut-shot zombie, damaged but undeterred by the bullets it has absorbed.

US GDP rose at a 2 percent annual rate in the first quarter of 2026 and a 2.1 percent pace in 2025, far outstripping growth in most other advanced economies. Meanwhile, America’s unemployment rate remains low by historical standards at 4.3 percent. And wages rose faster than inflation throughout 2025.

To be sure, the economic indicators aren’t all sunny. Last month, for the first time since 2023, real wages in the US fell as annual inflation hit 3.8 percent.

Nevertheless, if you told an economist in January 2025 that America’s new president would launch a haphazard global trade war, throttle legal immigration, and launch a conflict with Iran that indefinitely shuttered the Strait of Hormuz — then asked that expert to guess what the US economy would look like in May 2026 — they almost certainly would have sketched a far grimmer scenario than the one we’re currently living through.

Some will look at all this and conclude that Trump’s trade, immigration, and foreign policies weren’t that costly after all.

Another interpretation, however, is that Trump could have presided over a pristine economy, if he’d simply refrained from increasing import prices, reducing labor-force growth, and launching a war of choice near the aorta of the global energy market.

One could call this the “We had a good thing” account of Trump-era economic performance, after Mike Ehrmantraut’s much-memed scolding of the self-sabotaging drug lord Walter White in a late season of the AMC series Breaking Bad.

And multiple recent reports indicate that this narrative is correct.

How Trump slowed US economic growth

To understand how Trump’s most destructive policies have harmed the economy, one needs some sense of what American economic life would look like today in the absence of those measures.

Of course, this is impossible to know with certainty; we don’t have a time machine or access to an inter-dimensional wormhole. But economic analysts have done their best to sketch what growth and inflation would look like in that alternate universe.

Let’s start with GDP. According to the Peterson Institute for International Economics, tariffs reduced America’s growth rate in 2025 by 0.23 percentage points. But as the Economist notes, this figure likely understates the full impact of Trump’s tariffs, as it does not account for their impact on investor uncertainty.

When a business decides whether to sink capital into a new project, it must weigh the risk that unforeseen circumstances will reduce their investment’s profitability. For this reason, according to conventional wisdom, the more volatile the market and policy environment is, the more likely firms are to hoard their cash.

And outside of the booming AI sector, American businesses have indeed pared back investment. As the Economist observes, excluding artificial intelligence-related categories, business investment fell at a 3 percent annualized rate over the last four quarters — after rising at a 5 percent average rate over the preceding decade. This collapse in non-AI capital investment shaved about 0.4 percentage points off America’s 2025 GDP growth, according to the magazine’s analysis.

Meanwhile, without Trump’s immigration policies, America’s labor force would be substantially larger — and thus, US economic output would be higher. According to a Brookings Institution report, last year’s decline in immigration shaved as much as 0.26 percentage points off US GDP.

Taken together, these analyses suggest that economic growth would have been about 0.9 percentage points higher last year, were it not for Trump’s trade and immigration policies.

Precisely how much Trump’s war with Iran is slowing growth in 2026 is unclear. Much depends on the trajectory of the conflict. But most analysts believe that it has dampened output marginally. At the same time, Trump’s tariffs and immigration policies continue to weigh on the economy.

Trump has engineered higher prices

The data on inflation tells a similar story. Trump’s tariffs have raised import costs for businesses that’ve passed on part of that burden to consumers. As a result, prices are rising much faster in the United States than they otherwise would be, according to a recent report from the Dallas Federal Reserve.

In that analysis, the bank plots America’s core inflation rate over time and compares this to what that rate would have been in the absence of all tariff impacts. The two lines diverge sharply after “Liberation Day,” when the president slapped large tariffs on virtually all of America’s trading partners (these rates were later pared back by both the administration and a Supreme Court ruling, but most remain far above their pre-Trump levels).

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Judging by the Fed’s calculations, as of this March, America’s core inflation rate would have been just 2.3 percent — instead of 3.2 percent — in the absence of Trump’s tariffs.

And this does not account for the Iran War’s price impacts. A separate paper from Federal Reserve economists estimates that a three-month closure to the Strait of Hormuz would add 0.35 points to headline inflation. If that waterway remains shuttered for six months, that figure jumps to 0.79 points. After 9 months, it hits 1.47 points.

In other words, without Trump’s tariffs and warmaking, America’s inflation rate would likely be more than one point lower today (and not that far off the Fed’s 2 percent target).

What’s more, in that alternate-universe United States, Americans would not just enjoy lower prices but also lower borrowing costs. As is, persistent inflation has constrained the Fed’s willingness to lower benchmark interest rates while motivating private lenders to offer less generous terms. Since the War with Iran started in late February, mortgage rates have climbed.

We had a good thing

For all this, America’s economy is still growing. And inflation isn’t exceptionally high by historic standards, though it remains elevated.

Yet, the economy’s resilience is largely attributable to tailwinds disconnected from Trump’s trade, immigration, and foreign policies. The AI boom is catalyzing massive investment in data centers, software, and information processing technologies, while also lifting stock values — and, thus, the consumer spending of rich and upper middle-class households. At the same time, inflation was likely poised to decline when Trump took office, as supply chains continued normalizing after post-COVID shocks.

In short, as he once did earlier in life, Trump has squandered a fortuitous inheritance.

Trump’s new plan to quash leaks

2026-05-26T21:55:33+00:00

Donald Trump at Morristown Airport in Morristown, New Jersey, on May 22, 2026. | Brendan Smialowski / AFP via Getty Images

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: The Trump administration wants federal employees to sign broad new non-disclosure agreements.

Why do this? President Donald Trump and members of his administration have long railed against leakers and media organizations for disclosing information about their actions, ranging from the status of the US-Iran war to FBI Director Kash Patel’s alleged drinking habits in recent months. A general NDA would create a new avenue to quash such disclosures and could deter government employees from making them.

The second Trump administration has previously implemented NDAs — and in some cases, polygraph tests — at a smaller scale for employees at the Defense Department and other agencies.

What would the NDA cover? Narrowly speaking, the proposed NDA doesn’t do much. According to the Office of Personnel Management, it would “document Federal employees’ acknowledgment of, and agreement to comply with, current legal obligations to safeguard non-public, confidential, or proprietary information.” In context, though, it would be another tool for the Trump administration’s crackdown on leaks.

For now, the plan is still in draft form and will need to clear a 30-day public comment period before being implemented. Each agency would then decide whether to use the NDA.

What’s the context? The public has often learned useful information about the government’s plans and functioning through the disclosure of the kind of material the NDA seeks to crack down on, both historically and during the current Trump administration. If implemented, it would be yet another step by the Trump administration toward less transparency.

What’s the big picture? The story of Trump’s second term has been his personalization of government. His former personal lawyers in senior roles at the Justice Department, a UFC fight on the White House lawn to mark his birthday, his gilded taste overrunning the Oval Office, and much more.

Potential NDAs — a fond private-sector tactic calibrated for employees Trump sees as serving him, rather than the American people — are yet another expression of the same impulse.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

I am not personally a New York Knicks fan — my specific basketball fandom is in abeyance until we get the Seattle SuperSonics back — but that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate some sports joy from an extremely long-suffering franchise, and you can, too. I enjoyed Rodger Sherman’s newsletter on the Knicks’ dominant journey to the NBA Finals, as well as this piece from Defector’s Israel Daramola.

Thanks for reading, have a great evening, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow!

A new Supreme Court opinion is terrible news for federal workers

2026-05-26T21:43:45+00:00

Justice Amy Coney Barrett | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Remember DOGE, the Elon Musk-led “government efficiency” project that spread chaos during President Donald Trump’s first few months back in office, fired tens of thousands of federal employees, and then vanished almost as abruptly as it began?

If you didn’t lose your job in one of Musk’s federal employee purges, or you aren’t one of the remaining federal civil servants who has to figure out how to do your job without many of your colleagues around, DOGE is probably little more than a memory. But the legacy of this era of arbitrary firings is still being litigated in federal court, and Justice Amy Coney Barrett just handed down some very bad news for nearly every civilian who works for the federal government.

On the surface, the Supreme Court’s decision in Margolin v. National Association of Immigration Judges, which was handed down on Tuesday, is a bit removed from Elon’s brief stint as Trump’s human resources manager. The case concerns whether federal immigration judges have a First Amendment right to give public speeches about immigration law. And the full Supreme Court decided to get rid of the case using a procedural argument that has few implications for federal employees.

But Justice Clarence Thomas, in an opinion joined by Barrett, wrote a separate opinion that would allow Trump to strip all federal civil servants of employment protections that many federal workers have enjoyed since the Chester A. Arthur administration.

While Thomas often takes extreme positions, Barrett is a relative moderate who is close to the center of the GOP-controlled Supreme Court. So, if Barrett is willing to endorse Thomas’s one neat trick to abolish civil service protections, that’s a strong sign that a majority of the Court agrees with her position.

Republican judges have long backed a legal theory known as the “unitary executive,” which holds that the president must have the power to fire high-ranking government officials who lead federal agencies. But the unitary executive has not historically been understood to eliminate employment protections for civil servants and other relatively low-ranking federal employees.

Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissent in Morrison v. Olson (1988), which is considered something akin to a holy text to proponents of the unitary executive, referred to the president’s power to “remove executive officers” — “officers” are relatively high-ranking government workers — but it did not say that the president must be able to fire every individual postal worker or Social Security clerk.

In Margolin, however, Thomas and Barrett suggest a way to collapse this distinction between agency leaders and ordinary civil servants. Trump can simply fire all of the government officials who adjudicate civil service disputes, and then civil servants will no longer have any enforceable rights.

Barrett, in other words, appears to believe that civil service protections only exist if the president wants them to exist. And if she says so, it’s likely the Court’s majority will, too.

Why civil service protections are essential to a modern government

If you watched the Netflix show Death by Lightning, which was about the brief presidency of James A. Garfield, or if you read the book the show was based on, you got a pretty good picture of what the president’s life was like before civil service reform.

As author Candice Millard wrote, when Garfield took office, the line of job seekers hoping to secure a federal job “began to form before he even sat down to breakfast.” By the time Garfield had finished his meal, “it snaked down the front walk, out the gate, and onto Pennsylvania Avenue.” As president, Garfield was expected to meet with each of these job-seekers and sort them into jobs — often based on whether they had a politically powerful patron.

This system was inefficient, as it forced the federal government to replace much of its workforce every time the White House changed hands. It diverted a simply enormous amount of the president’s attention into low-level hiring decisions. It fostered corruption, as often the only way to secure a federal job was to do favors for a senator, congressman, or some other powerful figure who could act as the job-seeker’s patron. And it made it very difficult for the government to hire highly specialized workers.

Why would someone go to the trouble of, say, getting an economics degree and becoming an expert on federal monetary policy if they knew that their job in the Treasury Department would evaporate the minute their party lost an election?

President Arthur signed the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act in 1883, shortly after Garfield was assassinated by a disgruntled job-seeker. It was the first of several laws which ensure that the government did not have to replace every Republican postal worker or FBI agent with a Democrat if a Republican president lost an election.

Modern civil service laws also prohibit the federal government’s political leadership from coercing civil servants into political activity. They provide protections for whistleblowers. And they generally ensure that the government will be staffed by competent professionals who provide continuity across presidential administrations.

Federal civil service laws are primarily enforced by an agency known as the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB). Civil servants who believe their rights as federal employees have been violated typically must file their case in the MSPB, which gets the first crack at adjudicating these sorts of disputes.

Early in his second presidency, however, Trump took several actions that appeared designed to shut down the MSPB. He fired one of the Board’s members, depriving the MSPB of the quorum it needs to operate. He also fired Special Counsel of the United States Hampton Dellinger, an official who investigates alleged violations of civil service laws and brings cases to the MSPB, and attempted to replace Dellinger with a far-right podcaster.

Since then, Trump has taken some actions to reinvigorate the MSPB. The Board now has two members, which is the minimum it needs to operate. The podcaster withdrew from consideration to replace Dellinger after Politico reported that the podcaster said he has a “Nazi streak in me from time to time.” And Trump later assigned Dellinger’s duties to US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer.

So, while there are good reasons to believe that the MSPB is significantly diminished thanks to Trump’s actions, the Board currently has the minimum amount of personnel it needs to operate. But that was not true for the first several months of the second Trump administration, when it only had one member and thus was unable to adjudicate civil service disputes.

Barrett would let Trump abolish civil service protections by firing the MSPB’s members

The most interesting issue in the Margolin case concerns what should have happened if Trump had never appointed a second MSPB member, and thus had left the Board inoperative.

A federal appeals court, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, decided Margolin in June 2025, during the period when the MSPB was defunct. That court suggested that, if the MSPB is nonfunctional, then the federal judiciary must step in and hear civil service disputes that otherwise would be heard by the MSPB — because, otherwise, federal civil service laws would cease to function.

On Tuesday, the full Supreme Court reversed the Fourth Circuit, although it did so on narrow grounds. The full Court’s opinion in Margolin states simply that the Fourth Circuit should not have opined on what happens when the MSPB is defunct, because the plaintiffs in Margolin did not raise this issue in their briefs.

But Thomas’s concurring opinion, which was joined by Barrett, rejects the Fourth Circuit’s argument outright. He argues that federal law says that civil servants must bring employment disputes in the MSPB, and if there is no MSPB, that means that they are simply out of luck.

Thus, as a practical matter, Trump could gain the power to fire any federal worker simply by firing one of the two current members of the MSPB. If that happened, the MSPB would cease to function, and federal civil servants would be cut off from any legal remedies, even if they were illegally fired for being Democrats.

Despite the significant implications of Barrett’s decision to join Thomas’s opinion, it isn’t particularly surprising. Last July, in McMahon v. New York (2025), the Court permitted the Trump administration to fire about half of the Department of Education’s workforce. Though the Court’s three Democrats dissented in McMahon, the Republican justices in the majority did not explain their decision; it was decided on the Court’s shadow docket, and the justices often do not explain their reasoning in those cases.

Nevertheless, McMahon was an early sign that the Court’s Republican majority does not support civil service protections, or believe that those laws should be enforced. Barrett’s decision to join Thomas’s Margolin opinion also suggests that she holds that view.

It appears, in other words, that this Supreme Court wants to tear down a consensus that was reached in 1883 — that the federal government should have a professional civil service that cannot be removed simply because the Republican Party controls the White House. Barrett’s move suggests Trump has plenty of leeway to keep firing people, even if federal law is supposed to stop him from doing so.

Trump still thinks he’s winning in Iran

2026-05-26T18:54:58+00:00

President Donald Trump speaks on the phone as he returns to the White House on May 25, 2026. | Aaron Schwartz/CNP/Bloomberg via Getty Images

There’s an old line, sometimes attributed to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, that the best way to solve a difficult problem is to make it bigger. That might be the most generous interpretation of how the Trump administration is approaching its ongoing peace talks with Iran.

Over the weekend, the news around the talks followed what has now become a familiar pattern. On Saturday, the two sides were reportedly close to a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and lift the US blockade on Iran. Then on Sunday, President Donald Trump said he had told his negotiators “not to rush” into a deal. On Monday, the United States launched a new round of what it called “self-defense strikes” in southern Iran. The current message from the White House is that they’re giving talks another few days, and continue to believe believe a deal is likely, but haven’t taken a return to full-scale war off the table.

Then in a rambling Truth Social post on Monday morning, Trump enlarged the problem by saying that it “should be mandatory” that as part of any peace deal, Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey sign on to the Abraham Accords, normalizing relations with Israel. This is unlikely: Saudi-Israeli cooperation against Iran has been the worst kept secret in the Middle East for years, but the international outcry over the war in Gaza has made it politically untenable for these countries to publicly embrace Israel. It’s unclear just how seriously Trump will press for this, but the fact that at this phase in negotiations he’s bringing up new demands sure to irritate his own allies, suggests he’s not exactly desperate to wrap these talks up.

The fact that a deal still hasn’t been signed — despite the fact that the underlying dynamics of the conflict haven’t changed much since Iran and the United States signed the current ceasefire agreement in early April — as well as the fact that Trump seems to be expanding rather than narrowing his demands suggests two things that turn the recent weeks of negotiation reports on their head: First, Trump does not believe that he is losing this war. Second, he is still hoping to reach a mega-deal to reset the politics of the entire region.

Trump doesn’t think he’s losing

Before the war began, Trump told a concerned Tucker Carlson that despite predictions warning that attacking Iran could destroy his presidency, he was confident everything would be okay “because it always is.” The war certainly hasn’t gone as easily as expected, but it’s very possible Trump still believes he has the upper hand and that everything will work out.

Fears of an America First revolt by Trump’s MAGA base also seem to have been overblown.

In his defense, the most dire predictions of economic turmoil made when the Strait of Hormuz was closed have not come to pass. Oil prices have been hovering around $100 a barrel and Americans are feeling the impact at the pump, but it’s worth recalling that many energy experts were predicting $200 per barrel oil by now if the strait were not opened. (There are a few explanations for this, but the main ones seem to be that the US and other non-Gulf producers have been able to export more oil than many anticipated, while China has slashed its imports, relying on its substantial reserves. For all the reports of Chinese assistance to Iran’s war effort, in this respect, Beijing may be doing more to help the United States.)

The crunch may still hit: There are global concerns about jet fuel supplies ahead of summer travel season, and the impact of the global fertilizer shortage on this planting season won’t be felt for months. But for now, the US economy is not in full-blown crisis mode, and Trump may feel he’s proved the “panicans” wrong.

The war is broadly unpopular and a large majority of Americans say it has raised their cost of living, but according to a recent poll by the Eurasia Group’s Institute for Global Affairs, 73 percent of Republicans still approve of Trump’s handling of the situation. Fears of an America First revolt by Trump’s MAGA base also seem to have been overblown.

As long as US troops aren’t being killed — and none have been since the ceasefire began — and the economic turmoil stays manageable, Trump may continue to believe that time is on his side. On the other hand, Iran’s current leaders, who believe they can absorb more pain than the Americans and are even less sensitive to public opinion, probably believe that too. This is a recipe for stalemate.

War to end all wars

In some respects, Trump has narrowed his goals for the war in Iran. Rather than pushing for caps on Iran’s ballistic missile program or its support for regional proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah as he did in talks prior to the war, Trump now says the “one thing” he thinks about is preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.

But it would be difficult enough at this point just to get a deal over Iran’s nuclear program that satisfies what appears to be Trump’s main condition: that it be tougher than the deal Barack Obama negotiated in 2015. Though the Iranians have reportedly agreed in principle to dilute or dispose of their stockpile of highly enriched uranium, the White House is continuing to insist that the stockpile itself be turned over to the United States. “No dust, no deal,” one official told Fox News, referring to Trump’s description of the stockpile as “nuclear dust.” That became a harder circle to square last week when Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei issued a directive saying the uranium should remain on Iranian soil.

The deal under discussion, according to most reports, simply starts a process of nuclear negotiations over a 60-day period — which would at least lower the temperature, though it leaves the main sticking point unresolved and it’s not hard to imagine the situation deteriorating again during that period.

However, his comments linking the Abraham Accords to the resolution of the Iran war suggest that Trump, who is reportedly “bored” by Iran at this point, is thinking bigger. Trump has always expressed confidence that he alone can bring peace to the Middle East as a region, not just solve individual conflicts. Recall that when he announced his plan for ending the war in Gaza last September, he described it as a great day in the “history of civilization” that could bring “eternal peace to the Middle East.” In reality, it didn’t even bring eternal peace to Gaza, but he may be hoping to finish the job now.

For the moment, we may be in a dynamic where the costs to Trump aren’t high enough that he feels compelled to end the war quickly, but they’re just high enough that he feels he needs a big win to justify them — whether that’s a deal that demonstrably exceeds Obama or achieves his alleged dream of “eternal peace.”

When AI makes you worse at your job

2026-05-26T11:38:11+00:00

Some researchers have found that excessive AI use can produce a phenomenon they call “AI brain fry.” | Getty Images

If you’ve ever used an online patient portal to message your doctor in the middle of the night, you won’t be surprised to learn that responding to those messages takes an increasingly big bite out of clinicians’ workdays.

So in recent years, hospitals have begun adopting an AI tool that can draft responses for them. The tool was supposed to make a time-consuming task go more quickly and smoothly, said Philip Barrison, an MD-PhD student at the University of Michigan Medical School who studies AI in healthcare.

Instead, the tool has given doctors and nurses a new to-do list. First they have to read the AI-generated response and decide if it “is actually something that they think they would say,” Barrison said. Humans are suggestible, and looking at something and deciding whether you would have thought of it on your own is a cognitively complex task.

Even if the message looks correct, the clinician still needs to “edit it to the point where they think it’s acceptable” to send to a patient, Barrison said. The AI tool introduces a totally new set of complicated judgment calls into what used to be a relatively straightforward process. As a result, many clinicians have chosen not to use it at all.

They’re fortunate to have the choice. Buoyed by expectations of cost savings and skyrocketing productivity, companies are increasingly asking (and sometimes requiring) employees to use AI to make their work more efficient. Meta, for example, last year instructed some workers to use AI to “go 5X faster by eliminating the frictions that slow us down.” The CEO of Shopify told employees they’d need to prove they “cannot get what they want done using AI” before the company would approve new hires. Some companies are even evaluating or ranking employees based on how much they use AI tools.

Workers in some sectors have found major time savings from AI. But for others, the tools just change the work rather than making it faster. Workers might be spending less time writing patient portal messages, for example, but more time editing the releases the AI tool writes.

At best, this mismatch between employer expectations and employee reality can be an annoyance. In other cases, however, it can result in workers being laid off for failing to meet unrealistic efficiency demands. Some critics say the overzealous adoption of AI in high-stakes settings like healthcare even puts people’s lives at risk. Now workers, unions, and experts are increasingly calling for guardrails to protect employees from inflated expectations around AI — and customers, students, patients, and the general public from mistakes that can happen when managers put AI adoption above all else.

The hidden costs of AI use

Corporations are increasingly presenting employees with a choice: Use AI to be more productive or “you’re going to be automated out of a job,” said Aiha Nguyen, director of the labor futures program at the research organization Data & Society.

But the effects of AI on productivity aren’t as straightforward as some CEOs have claimed. In one 2025 study, software developers believed AI made them faster, but in fact they took 19 percent longer to complete tasks. (The researchers tried to repeat the experiment this year but had trouble recruiting developers who would agree to work without AI.) And in a recent survey of 5,000 white-collar workers, 40 percent of rank-and-file employees said AI saved them no time at all.

Workers across heavily AI-exposed fields point to hidden timesucks that come with using the technology. Julie, an art teacher, wrote in a response to a Vox reader survey that her school’s administrators routinely suggest using AI for lesson-planning, emails, and progress report comments. She’s tried AI-generated lesson plans, but they don’t account for the fact that kids may work through an activity at different speeds.

“First, I am checking what AI suggests, then I am editing them. Why add a step I can accomplish on my own?”
Julie, an art teacher who wrote in response to a Vox reader survey

“First, I am checking what AI suggests, then I am editing them,” she said. “Why add a step I can accomplish on my own?”

For an employee at an East Coast communications agency, an internal AI tool was supposed to speed up the process of drafting press releases and other documents about the pharmaceutical industry.

“The goal is, I think, to be able to plug and chug into this machine and be able to turn a lot of materials around a lot quicker than we already do,” said the employee, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of career repercussions.

But when the employee tried to use it for basic research, it made too many mistakes. Double-checking its work erased any time savings. When the employee tried using it for communications with clients, its people-pleasing tendencies became a problem, as the tool put a “weird happy spin” even on messages warning of bad news.

“Part of the reason we take a human speed to turn things around is because there is so much nuance behind everything that we do,” the employee told me. “AI is just not going to be able to catch it.”

It’s not just that AI makes errors. With the advent of agentic AI, workers are increasingly being asked to edit and oversee the output of multiple AI tools, a new kind of work that can have unexpected costs.

One recent study of 1,488 workers across industries, for example, found that excessive oversight of AI agents could lead to what the researchers called “AI brain fry,” a kind of cognitive fatigue. “Participants described a ‘buzzing’ feeling or a mental fog with difficulty focusing, slower decision-making, and headaches,” the researchers wrote in Harvard Business Review. Brain fry was also associated with an increased number of errors and an increased desire to quit one’s job.

The researchers also found that while using one or two AI tools increased productivity, adding additional tools produced diminishing returns, and after four tools, productivity actually declined.

What workers really want from AI

Despite such findings, companies continue to pressure employees to use AI, and to cite AI investment as a rationale for layoffs, even as companies that try to link staff reductions to AI adoption tend to struggle on the stock market.

Some workers and organizations, however, are beginning to push back. National Nurses United, the country’s largest nurses’ union, has criticized the use of AI tools in hospitals to estimate staffing needs or to recommend treatment protocols for patients.

There’s no guarantee that these tools will take into account a patient’s individual profile, including underlying medical conditions, the way human clinicians can, Cathy Kennedy, the union’s president, told me. AI is supposed to “help us do our work more efficiently, but at the end of the day, it makes it even more burdensome,” she said.

Hospitals need to evaluate, with nurses at the table, whether AI tools really work as advertised, Kennedy said. “We have to stop — we have to go back and really see if this is truly doing what it needs to do,” she said.

The same is true across industries, Barrison, the healthcare researcher, told me. “Organizations need to be prepared to say when, if they were seeking a return on investment, if they were seeking value in a technology — how do you define what that value is? And if there’s not value there anymore, how do you turn it off?”

Some workers have found ways that AI actually helps them do their work — just not the ones management expected. Julie, the art teacher, likes to use Claude to learn more about topics she’s less familiar with, like kiln-firing ceramics.

Meanwhile, researchers have found that AI can actually reduce employee burnout, if it’s used to complete tasks employees find burdensome. “Everybody in every job has a list of things that they procrastinate on,” said Julie Bedard, a managing director and partner at Boston Consulting Group who led the AI brain fry study. “Those are the places I get, unsurprisingly, a lot of enthusiasm to try AI with.”

But employers won’t find out what those burdensome tasks are unless they listen to rank-and-file employees. “Worker standards and worker rights should continue to be at the heart of all of this,” Nguyen said, “rather than just focusing too much on the AI.”

The shocking death toll of cars in poor countries

2026-05-26T04:59:26+00:00

A road in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. | Godong/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

The story of global health over the last few centuries has generally been one of great progress — vastly longer lifespans, far fewer women dying in childbirth, many fewer children dying from miserable diseases like measles and smallpox. But there is one often overlooked feature of modernity that has brought a new and enormous degree of mortality and injury to everyday life, a risk that falls most heavily on the world’s poor. It kills about as many people as the world’s deadliest infectious disease — tuberculosis — and it’s the leading cause of death globally for people in the prime of their lives, aged 5 to 29. It is one of the defining technologies of modern life, one of the 20th century’s most dangerous gifts: the car.

Around 1.19 million people globally are killed by road crashes every year, according to estimates from the World Health Organization (some estimates put the number higher), and many times more — likely between 20 and 50 million — are injured, sometimes leaving them with life-altering disabilities. More than 90 percent of those deaths occur in low- and middle-income nations, although these countries contain only around 60 percent of the world’s cars.

This century, humanity has halved the mortality rate for children under five and reduced AIDS-related deaths from their peak by 70 percent. But the number of people killed by cars has remained roughly the same for the last 20 years. As motor vehicles spread around the world — the total fleet has doubled over the past 20 years — the burden of those deaths has shifted increasingly to lower-income countries. Despite all the progress we’ve made against ancient natural killers, we’re making little against a killer we engineered ourselves.

That’s not for a lack of known solutions, but rather because there’s been comparatively little attention paid to car crash deaths as a real global health issue until relatively recently. Unlike deadly maladies that are purely bad, cars do add value to society. Perhaps as a result, even though wealthy countries have brought down per capita road fatalities over the course of decades, deaths by car have still often tended to be discounted by policymakers and the general public as the price of progress and economic growth. It’s “one of the few public health problems where society and decision makers still accept death and disability on such a large scale as inevitable,” the late Dinesh Mohan of the Indian Institute of Technology wrote in 2019.

“You can become very depressed,” James Leather, director of transport at the Asian Development Bank, told me in a recent conversation at the International Transport Forum summit (an event sometimes called the Davos of transportation). “Why is no one taking this seriously?”

Of course, it’s not that literally no one is taking it seriously, but rather that cars have long been an underrated threat to human well-being. But that is, perhaps, slowly beginning to change.

Why cars kill so many people in countries with so few of them

I am sometimes known as a bit of a car hater, devoting a lot of my consciousness to thinking about how the United States got locked into car dependence. Our car-oriented development pattern is part of the reason the US has one of the highest road fatality rates of any wealthy country. (But, listen, I own a car too, and benefit greatly from it! I am American, after all.)

US car fatality rates may be an outlier by wealthy-country standards, but most low- and middle-income nations face far greater risk. Haitians and Ethiopians are more than three times more likely to be killed by a car than an American; Kenyans, Bolivians, and Thais are more than twice as likely.

That alone is worth dwelling on. If you live in the US, consider that you probably know at least several people who’ve been killed in a car crash or who have loved ones who have, and that this proximity to sudden, violent loss is felt even more acutely in most of the world. Road deaths account for around 1 percent of all deaths in the US; globally, that figure is about 2 percent, and in a typical middle-income country like Vietnam, it is more than 3 percent.

That might sound a bit surprising — and feels all the more unfair — in light of the fact that poorer nations do not have anywhere close to as many cars as wealthy ones do, and their residents travel fewer miles by car than people in rich countries do. If cars kill so many Americans because we simply drive so much, in the developing world, the problem is almost the inverse: A minority of people who can afford it ride in private cars, while everyone else walks, bikes, or rides a motorcycle, scooter, or three-wheeled vehicle like an auto rickshaw. And those outside of an automobile — known as “vulnerable road users” — often share space in the road with cars and are at high risk of being hit.

Cars themselves in developing nations are often more dangerous for their occupants than vehicles in rich countries are, too. Weaker car safety standards and a reliance on imported old cars mean that people sometimes travel in vehicles that lack safety features long taken for granted in rich countries, including airbags and frames designed to absorb the force from a crash.

Amid all this, cars and other motorized vehicles are spreading rapidly in the Global South — much more quickly than that transition took place in North America and Europe — and doing so before governments have built safer roads, vehicle standards, adequate trauma care, or robust traffic regulations. Many nations lack comprehensive laws governing what the WHO considers the five key behaviors that shape road fatalities: high speeds, drunk driving, seatbelt use, helmet use for motorcyclists, and child restraints in cars.

In Southeast Asian countries, which have seen a massive proliferation of motorized vehicles since 2010, “maybe the infrastructure was designed when you didn’t have so many cars, and now all of a sudden you have twice the number of cars that you did before,” Nhan Tran, the WHO’s head of violence and injury prevention, told me. Road crashes are a major burden on the medical systems of these countries and exact staggering economic costs, amounting to about 5 percent of national GDP in Vietnam, for example.

Meanwhile, as the total number of global road fatalities has stayed roughly constant for the last few decades, the gap between poor and rich countries has widened. Between 2010 and 2021, high-income countries, particularly those in Europe, saw dramatic decreases in car crash deaths, while deaths in the vast majority of low-income nations (which are predominantly in sub-Saharan Africa) increased, according to the WHO’s most recent report on global road safety. Across lower-middle-income nations, like India, the aggregate number of deaths and the per capita fatality rate stayed roughly flat.

I asked Leather whether there was an easy, no-brainer intervention that could make a big dent in these deaths. He pointed, among other things, to helmets — in the Philippines, where he lives, national law now requires that helmets be made available with every new motorcycle purchase, though for that to work, people of course actually have to use them.

“If you go to New Delhi today, nearly every motorcycle rider wears a certified full-faced helmet. This was achieved through strong enforcement,” Kavi Bhalla, a professor at the University of Chicago’s department of public health sciences and an expert on global road safety, told me in an email. “In contrast, most other cities in India don’t enforce the helmet law, have very low helmet use, and this leads to many unnecessary deaths.”

Poor countries don’t need to wait their turn for safer roads

Twenty years ago, two US economists published what became one of the most influential papers in the field of global road safety, on the relationship between a nation’s wealth and its traffic fatality rate. As countries get richer, they argued, motor vehicle ownership rises, and per capita car deaths rise in tandem. Eventually, as countries become wealthier — and as safer roads, vehicles, and traffic policies catch up with motorization — fatality rates start to fall, as they did across much of the industrialized world beginning in the early 1970s. That tipping point, the authors found, comes at around $8,600 (in 1985 international dollars) of per capita GDP.

But this “economic determinism,” as Bhalla has described it, might be the wrong way of looking at the problem. It contributes to a sense that traffic carnage is inevitable until a nation becomes rich. But we would never argue that maternal mortality or malaria deaths can’t be significantly mitigated in low-income countries; in fact, we already know they have been. Although Europe, the US, and other high-income nations have steadily reduced car death rates over the last 60 years, Bhalla told me “it is a mistake to think that this has much to do with these countries being rich.”

Instead, “safety improved in these countries once they established national road safety agencies, gave them the authority to regulate what happens on the roads, and gave them a dedicated funding stream,” he wrote to me. “These agencies did what you would expect agencies to do. They identified the most common traffic safety risks in the countries, undertook investigations on how best to address these, and then made investments for large scale interventions focused on safer designs of cars and roads, coordinated enforcement programs, and emergency medical systems. Low and middle income countries can and should do this now.”

The WHO and other global organizations, along with some philanthropies, have been working to speed along such work over the last few decades, but the results have so far been somewhat underwhelming. The United Nations had aimed to halve global road deaths from the baseline of roughly 1.2 million by 2020, a goal we didn’t come anywhere close to reaching. On the other hand, world population has greatly increased in the last few decades, so holding the absolute number of traffic deaths constant is still a meaningful achievement: From 2010 to 2021, the global per capita road fatality rate decreased by about 16 percent. And in that period, Tran said, road safety has at least gained a lot more visibility among political leaders and civil society as a badly neglected public health crisis.

Having missed the 2020 target, the UN now aims to halve road deaths by 2030. But we will “definitely not” meet that goal either, Bhalla told me.

A core reason the global road fatality crisis has been so maddeningly obstinate is that the root of the problem is complicated, contested, and depends on one’s perspective. “It’s not the same as when you’re talking about Covid or HIV, where there is a virus” that we want to eradicate, said Tran. “When you talk about road safety, what is the virus?” Is it dangerous individual behaviors — speeding, drunk driving, refusing to wear a seatbelt? Is it deteriorating roads or a lack of sidewalks? Is it humanity’s growing dependence on cars themselves?

Tran, like many road safety advocates today, calls for an approach that focuses on the most upstream cause of car fatalities — the proliferation of cars — and champions good urban planning designed to prioritize transit, walking, and cycling over the movement of cars. That would make safety an inherent feature of the transportation network and obviate the need for what Tran calls “quick fixes” to poorly designed systems.

WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus echoed that message in the agency’s 2023 road safety report: “As motor vehicles proliferate, countries are doubling down on transport systems built for cars, not people, and not with safety at their core,” he wrote.

There’s a lot of wisdom to this, as the American experience over the last century well shows. The US experiment in car dependence has burdened us with a road fatality rate that rivals nations much poorer than us. Urban planners now widely agree that that car-dependent paradigm was a mistake, but now that it’s built out, it’s hard to claw our way out of.

But that lesson also requires some humility: Even a car hater like me can acknowledge that for many people in poorer nations, automobility offers a measure of freedom that rich countries have taken for granted for many years. And it would be a mistake to see simple interventions that can save tens of thousands of lives, and that were instrumental in bringing down car fatalities in rich countries, as mere Band-Aids. We need both approaches. Just as humans did with once-devastating infectious diseases, we will have to learn to see a person killed for simply trying to get somewhere not as a tragic act of God, but as the result of forces within our control.

Why everyone is talking about the Antichrist

2026-05-21T20:41:44+00:00

A religious sign held up above fans outside of the stadium before a football game between Penn State and University of Michigan on October 19, 2019, in University Park, Pennsylvania. | Brett Carlsen/Getty Images

In case you didn’t notice, the Antichrist is back.

All right, forgive the hyperbole — this biblical agent of Satan hasn’t actually returned to lead a rebellion against God before Christ’s second coming. But in the year of our Lord 2026, a curious surge in chatter about this herald of the apocalypse seems to be underway.

A number of far-right dissidents, from Marjorie Taylor Greene to Nick Fuentes, are asking questions about whether President Donald Trump is more than he seems. “Could this be the Antichrist?” Tucker Carlson asked on his podcast. “Well, who knows?” It didn’t help when Trump posted an AI-slop image of himself as the Messiah, which he later claimed was meant to be a doctor. “Not saying Trump is the Antichrist,” conservative Rod Dreher told the Wall Street Journal. “But he’s radiating the spirit of Antichrist, no question.”

It’s more than blasphemy.
It’s an Antichrist spirit. https://t.co/Lqd9GkBPmO
— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) April 13, 2026

The antichrist talk is also taking off in the politics-adjacent tech world in a different context, where Palantir founder and conservative tech billionaire Peter Thiel has been leading a series of closed-door lectures on the Antichrist (and garnering the disapproving attention of the Vatican). In a wild coincidence, his hypothetical Antichrist appears to be anti-tech people who annoy him.

Key takeaways

The Antichrist or antichrist figures have long been a fixture in the minds of religious Americans and secular culture. This biblical figure is supposed to precede Jesus Christ’s second coming, near the end times.
Historically, many figures have been called antichrists, from the Middle Ages to modern times. There tend to be preexisting societal conditions that accompany these perennial panics.
We may be living through one now (as some on the right refer to Trump as such), but there are unique aspects to the modern American obsession with antichrists.

It’s the most the end times have saturated our political culture since the aughts, when the new millennium brought an explosion of renewed interest, spurred on by the apocalyptic Left Behind novels and related Christian media depicting a “realistic” modern Antichrist. Later on, former President Barack Obama became a fixation of related theories on the religious right depicting him as the Antichrist.

Scholars and experts on biblical writing and apocalyptic history say there’s a long history of perceived antichrist figures popping up in moments of collective crisis or despair in the western world. And there are certain traits that tend to supercharge these narratives — the presence of war (especially in the Middle East), economic or public health crises, political or societal instability, and the appearance of an unusually charismatic leader.

Needless to say, we were probably due for a revival.

Yet just like in past periods of panic and perturbation over the centuries, there’s a lot of uncertainty in these discussions over who or what the Antichrist is, when this figure is to return, or even if this biblical character is supposed to be a real thing.

So it’s a good time to ask: Where did the idea of the Antichrist come from in the first place? How does it tend to manifest in politics? And what is it about our current moment that’s driving such renewed interest in the concept?

The biblical roots of the Antichrist

It’s probably helpful to start off with actually defining what the Antichrist is, and what the signs that believers in his arrival actually are.

Definitions vary across various Christian denominations and traditions, but they are rooted in the interpretation of a relatively small number of biblical passages that either use this term explicitly or get linked to the same figure.

Surprisingly, the term “antichrist” only appears five times in the New Testament. These explicit mentions in the letters of the disciple John refer to “deceivers” who come to confuse Christians by denying Jesus Christ’s divinity and preaching other heresies. Scripture suggests that there can be (and have been) multiple antichrists, whose aim is to derail the faithful from achieving salvation.

Whether this is a symbolic or literal figure depends on Christian traditions, and how close you link these passages to references to other beasts and deceivers written about in other parts of the New Testament. For example: The apostle Paul writes of a “man of lawlessness” in his second letter to the Thessalonians, who “will oppose and will exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshiped, so that he sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God.”

Then you have horror-movie, apocalyptic visions from the Book of Revelations about the chaotic period before the second coming of Christ, which includes reference to a seven-headed “beast coming out of the sea,” who bears a fatal wound, “but the fatal wound had been healed.” This beast is empowered by a dragon, understood to be Satan, and the people of the world stand in awe and worship this beast, asking “Who is like the beast? Who can wage war against it?”

Catholics and mainline Protestants have less literal interpretations of these passages.

Many mainline Protestant denominations teach that these figures are more symbolic manifestations of unholy traits and un-Christianlike beliefs and behavior, not an actual being who is due to appear at some point in the future.

Catholics are called to view the “antichrist” as a period of intense prosecution, testing of the church, and the rise of false prophets; “a final trial” before Christ returns in which believers face a “supreme religious deception” and are faced with a choice to believe in a “pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah” or stay true to their faith.

But the Catholic Church also cautions against believing claims that an antichrist figure is imminently coming. And the explicit characters in the Bible have been understood by many scholars to be references to Roman leaders who persecuted Christians during early church history.

More fundamentalist and evangelical believers, however, view all these textual clues as actual signposts and steps in the process toward the apocalypse and Christ’s return. That’s been the main entry point for the Antichrist’s place in American culture.

The long history of the Antichrist in the Western imagination

Because of the detail and color of these symbols and characters in the Bible, it has been enticing for believers and readers to draw firm connections between the text and the real world.

“They read the Bible like it’s a secret code book, and that if they can unlock the code, then they can understand what’s going to happen in the end times,” Matthew A. Sutton, a historian of American apocalypticism at Washington State University, told me. “It’s a very modern way to read the Bible compared to what you would’ve seen through much of church history.”

“So wars, political changes, religious revolutions, and the rise and fall of empires — these sorts of political and religious events can create a moment.”
Brett Whalen, assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Sutton and other historians differentiate between the modern (and by that they mean in the last century) antichrist discourse and historical beliefs. But there tend to be some preconditions necessary for this chatter to rise that go back even further in time: war in the Middle East, the rise of charismatic or terrifying leaders, and environmental, political, or economic catastrophe.

For example, the turn of the first millennium was one of the earliest surges in interest in the figure of the Antichrist, given explicit references in the Bible to thousand-year periods (as in Christ’s thousand-year kingdom on Earth, from the Book of Revelations) and the violent and unstable nature of life in the early Middle Ages, Brett Whalen, an assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told me. In the same century, the First Crusade sparked another of these waves, as crusaders captured Jerusalem from Islamic rule. And the Middle Ages were rife with antichrist talk, primarily by critics of the papacy.

“You can always call the pope ‘Antichrist,’” Whalen said. “Historically, they’re probably the No. 1 candidate for being Antichrist, or kings or emperors. You had a limited cast.”

Various secular rulers have been labeled as such too: Frederick II, a Holy Roman emperor around the turn of the 12th century, was called Antichrist by the pope with whom he regularly feuded. The Muslim sultan Saladin, who retook Jerusalem around this time, was similarly described as such.

“Martin Luther was called Antichrist when the Protestant Reformation happened,” Whalen said. “So wars, political changes, religious revolutions, and the rise and fall of empires — these sorts of political and religious events can create a moment.”

What makes modern iterations of the Antichrist different

So how did these historical waves of antichrist panic lead us to Donald Trump and Peter Thiel?

Blame America, in this case. In the modern era, antichrists became democratized, as US-based evangelical movements picked up steam, literal readings of the Bible spread, and end-times theories were solidified.

“Obsessing over everyday news and trying to align that with biblical prophecy — that is a modern American phenomenon,” Sutton told me. “And by modern, that begins in the 1880s, 1890s, and that really is what gives birth to fundamentalism, [another] uniquely American phenomenon. And then fundamentalism morphs into today’s evangelicalism.”

Certainly, the news seemed to confirm their suspicions: Even for secular Americans, it’s easy to feel like a particular moment is a time of struggle, or that we’re headed toward some violent catharsis, or are being engulfed by a personality cult.

And the 20th century, marked by two World Wars, the rise and fall of new totalitarian governments, and the threat of nuclear annihilation, was especially fertile ground for this kind of thinking. Figures like Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin were all labeled Antichrists; President Franklin D. Roosevelt also faced accusations.

In the postwar period, the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 was another crucial development in today’s antichrist theology. Many of the apocalyptic biblical stories center on the Holy Land, the return of Jewish people to it, and a period of tribulation for them; there, this antichrist figure will allow the Jewish people to rebuild a temple, then betray them, demand worship, and assemble global armies under his command for a final battle in the valley of Armageddon (which historically is located in the Jezreel Valley in northern Israel).

Now, these narratives have become central to dispensationalist evangelical theology: Israel’s unity and existence must be preserved in order for these phases to take shape, and for the eventual rapture to occur. Consequently, “anything that involves Israel or the Middle East is going to trigger speculation” of end-times prophesies, Sutton said, especially when there’s instability or war in the region.

These literal biblical interpretations also suggest a period of global domination by the Antichrist — governments submit to this figure and turn over their armies to him.

“Part of what has driven concerns about the Antichrist is the idea that they’re going to sacrifice American sovereignty through a global organization,” Sutton said. “And so this is why religious conservatives are so suspicious of groups like NATO and especially the United Nations, because they believe ultimately we’re moving towards one world government, and it’s the Antichrist. He’s going to prevail over that one world.”

Combined with the expectation that the antichrist figure will be a charismatic leader, you get the more recent panics: Saddam Hussein faced antichrist allegations during the Gulf War. Hillary Clinton was called the Antichrist. But nobody drew more scrutiny in recent times than Barack Obama, whose meteoric political rise on a message of greater international cooperation and outreach to the Muslim world made him a magnet for antichrist talk.

This speculation broke into the mainstream in 2008, when some Democrats accused former Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign of deliberately referencing it with a web video mocking Obama’s celebrity by depicting him as a Moses-like religious figure.

The McCain campaign denied it was a dogwhistle, but the discussion around the topic grew so heated that Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, co-authors of the Left Behind novels about the Antichrist, stepped in to publicly reassure their Christian readers that Obama was not the figure they had in mind.

Which brings us to 2026. The latest panics fit neatly into these traditions: Peter Thiel’s antichrist lectures seem to boil down to a fear over technological stagnation and growing opposition to artificial intelligence. He warns that efforts to regulate AI, in the name of fighting some future existential risk, could bring about the conditions for a central power to seize global authoritarian control — the Antichrist.

Sutton, who has written about these lectures before, argues that it’s not the most novel approach, but it is dangerous: “Dressing political theory in apocalyptic robes carries risks. When powerful actors reframe ordinary policy debates such as about guardrails for AI as a battle against the antichrist, they raise anxieties, delegitimize compromise and insinuate that democratic deliberation is spiritually suspect.”

The recent Trump panic, however, is a bit of an inversion: Trump is typically championed by the same right-wing religious figures who are most attuned to literal interpretations of the Antichrist and the end times. It’s surprising that figures like Carlson and Fuentes would break the seal on this front. But, historically speaking, Trump also fits the mold of prior antichrist hunts: He is surely a charismatic leader; he’s launched civilizational wars in the Middle East; he’s survived assassination attempts, mimicking the fatal, but healed, wound of the beast of Revelations; and he’s blasphemed and used the trappings of religion to advance his personal brand.

But to focus on any one person or movement as antichrist is to miss the broader point, Robert Fuller, a religious studies professor at Bradley University, told me. The concept, applied politically, risks taking an already polarized time and raising the stakes of elections and policy debates even further.

“This image sustains a crisis mentality,” Fuller said. “It summons out hatred and resentment that can fuel long-term grudges. It makes compromise unthinkable since no one compromises with the devil. It justifies hatred and violence, recasting these traits as virtues.”

In that vein, it’s inevitable that antichrist narratives persist; such a flexible idea can adapt regardless of century. It’s likely we’ll see many recurring returns of the Antichrist, at least until the world does actually end.

I asked a billionaire about his environmental philanthropy. It didn’t go well.

2026-05-24T13:55:26+00:00

Earlier this year, a billionaire investor and philanthropist named Tom Kaplan auctioned off a small Rembrandt drawing of a lion at Sotheby’s in New York City. It sold for nearly $18 million. A press release prior to the auction noted that Kaplan would donate the proceeds of the sale to an environmental organization that he co-founded, called Panthera, which conserves wild cats like lions and jaguars.

At face value, Kaplan’s gift is extraordinarily generous. Kaplan, owner of the world’s largest private collection of Rembrandts, is redeploying wealth that could have stayed locked up in a private collection or bank account to support the conservation of threatened felines and their habitats across the globe — all at a time when environmental causes are facing a massive funding shortfall. This seemed like a feel-good story all around. And that’s how it was pitched to me by a PR agency.

My colleague Sara Herschander and I went to the auction in early February, and I spoke one-on-one with Kaplan the following week. I was expecting a fairly straightforward conversation about philanthropy and what he sees as the responsibility of billionaires, told through the lens of his recent gift. But instead, our chat exposed a more complicated and sometimes troubling side of big-money environmental giving.

Kaplan became a billionaire through exploring for, mining, and investing in natural resources, including silver, gold, and natural gas. He remains active in metals mining to this day. Kaplan is the founder and chair of The Electrum Group, an investment firm focused on mining precious metals, and the chair of the gold mining company NovaGold Resources, which is developing a mine in Alaska that it expects to be the largest single gold mine in the US.

That work sits awkwardly next to what Kaplan told me is his primary passion: wildlife conservation, and in particular, the big cats that Panthera works to protect. Mining is, by any measure, an unusually destructive industry for the environment and for wildlife. So I asked Kaplan: Does he see, in any way, his environmental philanthropy as a counterweight to the impact of his industry?

It seemed an obvious question to me, but not to Kaplan. “You know, people don’t ask me these questions,” he told me over Zoom from a car. “First of all, I’m not going to spend time on educating you about why mining has a very, very tiny footprint when you compare it to agriculture and climate change. Everyone knows that if it’s a choice between my business and Panthera, I’m always choosing Panthera. With all due respect, I’m busy, so do you have anything [else] that you’d like to discuss?”

I pressed further, explaining that the public often sees a tension between mining and conserving wildlife. “You’re wrong,” Kaplan told Vox. “Please don’t make things up. When you say this is the public tension, with all due respect, it doesn’t exist. You’re making it up. It’s a very hack journalist thing to say, ‘How do you answer, you know, the criticism of X, Y, and Z.’ I’ve never faced it, ever, nor should I have.”

Kaplan went on to say that mining has no detrimental impact on wild cats — a claim disputed by four mining experts we later interviewed. Mining metals can destroy habitat, leach chemicals into the environment, and accelerate other threats, such as deforestation, that in turn impact wild animals, including big cats. Panthera itself, the group Kaplan cofounded, lists mining as a threat to at least two wild feline species: the flat-headed cat and the Andean cat. Meanwhile, the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), the global authority on endangered species, lists “mining and quarrying” as a threat to 19 cat species including jaguars, Andean cats, and tigers.

After I pressed Kaplan about the impact of his mining work, he said we could talk more about it another time. But when I reached out a week later to set something up, he declined. Vox shared a detailed list of our reporting with Kaplan before publishing this, and he declined to comment further.

The point is not that Kaplan’s particular mines are uniquely harmful within the broader extractive industry. They’re not — Kaplan appears to now operate primarily in North America, which means his mines are under a comparatively strict environmental regulatory regime. But there is no denying the fact that mining of any kind at scale has real, documented environmental impacts. (And for metals that are key to renewable energy technologies, those costs may be well worth paying.)

The point is that a man who has spent decades profiting from an industry that experts say harms wild animals — and who has also spent decades now giving tens of millions of dollars to protect them — doesn’t see any connection between the two.

And he is not alone.

Get in touch

Got a tip or feedback on this story? Reach out to reporter Benji Jones at benji.jones@vox.com.

What our conversation highlighted is a bigger problem with environmental philanthropy. For every dollar spent to protect nature, the UN recently reported, more than $30 goes toward destroying it, largely from private industries like energy, agriculture, and mining. The giving, as generous as it sometimes seems, isn’t close to enough on its own. And the people writing the checks are often the same people making business decisions across industries that cause environmental harm in the first place — whether they acknowledge that fact or not.

An open secret in environmental philanthropy

Kaplan, of course, is not the only billionaire in this category.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is, perhaps, the most well-known example. He’s committed $10 billion to fighting climate change and protecting nature through his Bezos Earth Fund, a foundation. (His net worth, as of this writing, is about $275 billion.) At the same time, his company produces an extraordinary amount of carbon and plastic pollution — which is fueling some of the same problems Earth Fund seeks to fix.

Meanwhile, the billionaire owners of MSC, the world’s largest shipping company, use philanthropy to help restore coral reefs. And yet MSC produces more carbon emissions each year than a small European country, and carbon emissions are a leading threat to reefs globally.

Kjell Inge Røkke, the billionaire chair behind Aker ASA, an investment firm focused in part on oil and gas exploration, has donated some of his wealth to clean the ocean of plastic. Plastic is, of course, made from oil.

It’s not exactly surprising that these sorts of big-money philanthropists might insulate themselves from uncomfortable contradictions, whether they do so purposefully or not, said Stephen Prince, a multimillionaire who made his fortune from a gift-card printing company. As the wealthy get wealthier, he told Vox, they become “increasingly enshrouded in a bubble of protection that allows them to ignore reality.” Prince, who’s vice-chair of Patriotic Millionaires, a group of wealthy people calling for higher taxes on themselves, ditched his private jet in 2023 because of its enormous environmental footprint.

A number of philanthropy experts we spoke to echoed this view — that philanthropists tend to avoid addressing the tensions between their source of wealth and their charitable giving. “What you’re describing is very, very common,” said Glen Galaich, author of the recent book Control: Why Big Giving Falls Short, and executive director of the Stupski Foundation. (The foundation is rooted in the wealth of Larry Stupski, the former president and chief operating officer of Charles Schwab Corp.)

But among the financial elite, ignoring reality has far-reaching consequences. When billionaires fail to reckon with this contradiction — between their source of wealth and the target of their donations — they can indulge in a kind of feel-good eco-savior complex while attention is diverted from the much bigger environmental problems that they perpetuate.

Truly fixing those problems, such as rising temperatures and rates of extinction, requires enormous reforms in industries like agriculture, energy, and mining. It’s hard to see that happening if industry leaders who care about nature don’t acknowledge their own culpability, no matter how much money they donate to charity.

“The philanthropy world is quite keen to put so much weight on what they’re giving, but they minimize what they’re taking,” said Jessie Bluedorn, a young philanthropist and environmental organizer, referring to the environmental exploits of philanthropists.

Rich by inheritance from a family fortune made largely in the HVAC industry, Bluedorn funds climate justice organizations through her foundation, the Carmack Collective. She sees her philanthropy as a form of wealth redistribution. “People need to be a bit more honest about the balance sheet of their contribution to our society,” she said.

It should be said that billionaires don’t have to donate anything. A mining mogul could just mine and mine and not support philanthropic causes, whether environmental or not. Many of them do. From one perspective — long the dominant one in philanthropy — choosing to support a cause like wildlife conservation instead of making oneself that much richer is generous. Donating the proceeds from a beloved $18 million drawing is generous.

It’s also true that choosing to be a philanthropist can open up a billionaire to criticism that their less generous peers don’t face. There are dozens of billionaires on the Forbes Billionaires List whom you’ve probably never heard of, perhaps because they’re not giving money away publicly. And sure, billionaires may donate, in part, because they’re chasing positive attention. But those who privately hoard wealth do less good in the world while more easily avoiding accusations of hypocrisy.

Put another way, “the folks who are super interested in destroying everything aren’t philanthropists,” said Tamara Toles O’Laughlin, CEO of the Environmental Grantmakers Association. EGA is a network of over 200 private foundations, most of which are funded by wealthy families, that support environmental causes.

Meanwhile, many philanthropists are “breaking their backs to figure out how they can change their relationship to the money they got and what that money is going to do,” O’Laughlin said.

And there’s another important point: Environmental groups could really use the cash. In 2023, less than 2 percent of global philanthropy — a high-end estimate of $15.8 billion — went toward mitigating climate change, according to the ClimateWorks Foundation. That’s compared to the $78 billion that US higher education reeled in last year. At the same time, the Trump administration has yanked loads of federal funds for conservation and climate groups. (Government grants, however, typically make up a smaller share of an environmental nonprofit’s budget, relative to philanthropy.)

Senowa Mize-Fox, a climate justice organizer at the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, is a sharp critic of the kind of donors who give to climate-related causes without addressing their own, sometimes troubling environmental records. “These billionaires are so self-absorbed, and so far removed from the reality of the majority of people on this planet, that they think that…giving that money away is going to solve everything,” she said. “It’s not. It will not. It never will.”

But even Mize-Fox has at times opted to accept money from imperfect donors. In a previous job, the organizations she worked with got a big grant opportunity from Bezos Earth Fund.

“It is all blood money, and the faster that we can divest from the billionaires and reinvest that money into frontline solutions is what matters to me,” Mize-Fox said, noting that most wealth is tied to some kind of exploitation, whether it was last year or 100 years ago.

So then, does it really matter where the money came from if it’s put to good use?

A new generation of climate advocates — and some philanthropists themselves — are starting to think so.

A slow reckoning is underway

In the last decade or so, some billionaire donors and their foundations have finally begun to grapple more explicitly with the source of their wealth and the harm it’s caused, often with the help of donor advocacy groups like Patriotic Millionaires and Resource Generation.

Perhaps the clearest example is the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. It’s one of several foundations started by heirs to John D. Rockefeller’s gigantic Standard Oil fortune. In 2014, the fund pledged to divest its endowment from fossil fuels like coal and tar sands. Its aim was to align its investment practices with the climate justice efforts it has supported since the 1990s.

In 2020, the much larger Rockefeller Foundation similarly decided to untangle its endowment from fossil fuels. It was a remarkable statement from an organization founded from a $100 million cut — worth about $3.3 billion in today’s dollars — of one of history’s largest oil fortunes.

“The weight of this legacy is not lost on us,” Chan Lai, the Rockefeller Foundation’s chief investment officer, told Vox in a statement. The divestment was “in part a form of accountability,” he said, for the source of the Rockefellers’ fortune.

A number of other major foundations have similarly decided to divest from fossil fuels, spurred in part by the murder of George Floyd. Protests in 2020 pushed grantmakers to more publicly acknowledge the damaging roots of their riches, fund more climate justice work led by people of color, and align their endowments — the investment funds they use to grow their wealth — with their charitable missions.

Some living billionaires have made similar moves. California gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer has spoken publicly about his pivot from investing in fossil fuels to funding climate solutions.

“I went from being somebody who was blithely investing in everything in the economy to, ‘No, no, no, no, that’s not okay,’” he said in a recent interview on the podcast Heated. “And I need to leave billions of dollars on the table to make sure that I’m actually doing the right thing.”

More than a decade ago, Nicky Oppenheimer, Africa’s fourth-richest person and heir to the massive De Beers diamond fortune, sold his family’s $5.1 billion stake. Since then, he’s invested heavily in wildlife conservation.

Is giving enough?

Given the sheer scale of environmental problems — and the gaping hole in funding to fix them — it is, perhaps, a terrible idea to criticize any environmental philanthropist. Vox, itself, relies on grant funding for some of our environmental coverage, including this very piece. Implying that a philanthropist could do more for the planet when they’re already donating a lot is, as Kaplan put it in our call, “an unusual take on things.”

Yet that response, again, belies a more fundamental issue. The economic system we live in today, which billionaires help perpetuate, is not working. For the roughly $220 billion spent to save nature in 2023, more than $7 trillion went to activities that destroy it, such as subsidies for fossil fuels, according to a recent UN report.

Environmental philanthropy comes nowhere close to balancing the scales — especially if it does nothing to shrink the larger half of that equation. To borrow an analogy from groups fighting plastic waste, it’s like trying to mop up from an overflowing bathtub without turning off the faucet.

To truly solve the world’s big environmental problems, harmful industries need to change the way they do business. They need to redirect financial flows that dwarf philanthropy toward less harmful activities — from mining coal to building solar panels, from cutting trees for cattle to investing in plant-based protein.

“Foundations in the US give away a grand total of $100 billion a year,” Galaich, the Stupski Foundation executive director, told Vox. “[But we] are talking about multitrillion-dollar problems.”

Just ask Bezos, who told CNBC in an interview this month: “If I do my job right, the value to society and civilization from my for-profit companies will be much, much larger than the good that I do with my charitable giving.” Bezos was referring to the value he sees generated by companies like Amazon and his space tech company Blue Origin, which may be debatable, but the point is that the scale of for-profit industry is so great that what is done there matters more than what can be done in philanthropy.

Maybe the companies that Kaplan has invested in are leading the way in sustainability — in making the metal mining industry less harmful to ecosystems and the cats that he adores. The gold company he chairs has a whole page dedicated to its environmental efforts. That’s a question we planned to ask him in a follow-up conversation, though answering it would have required being open to the contradictions at the heart of so much environmental philanthropy.

Ultimately, it’s hard to understand how an industry will stop creating environmental problems if even its leaders who are most passionate about the environment — so much so that they are giving away their prized possessions for it — don’t first acknowledge that they exist.

The pope takes on AI

2026-05-25T14:54:57+00:00

Pope Leo XIV gestures as he addresses the crowd during the weekly general audience at St Peter's Square in the Vatican on May 20, 2026. | Tiziana Fabi/AFP via Getty Images

Monday morning, the Roman Catholic Church made its biggest foray yet into the discourse on artificial intelligence and the role it should play in human life as the technology develops.

In the first encyclical of his papacy, titled Magnifica humanitas (Latin for “magnificent humanity”), Pope Leo XIV argued that AI is not intrinsically immoral, but that its adoption needed to be slowed in order to build moral guardrails, to establish better social safety nets for those displaced by economic and labor disruptions, and to create democratic processes that will ensure the public remains in control of these developments, rather than a small subset of tech oligarchs. The document also contended that the “intelligence” in artificial intelligence was a misnomer: Intelligence is something only human persons possess, and technology will never be human.

Key takeaways

The first encyclical, or official teaching letter, of Leo XIV’s papacy, dropped Monday.
It centers the uniqueness of humanity, the dignity of work, and the challenges that artificial intelligence poses to the world order and humans’ relationships with each other and God.
The Catholic Church has a long tradition of reasserting authority in the modern era, starting with the current pope’s namesake, Leo XIII, who confronted the rise of the Industrial Revolution and changing global economies.
There are deeper spiritual and material reasons the pope, and the church, are so concerned with AI now.

Encyclicals are official teaching documents of the Catholic Church: letters issued by popes to bishops after consultation with theologians, historians, and experts on pressing matters that affect humanity or the church, with the expectation that all people, faithful or secular, can learn from them and help shape their consciences and lives. Magnifica humanitas is Leo’s first encyclical since becoming pope last year, and its release now underscores the focus the new pope is putting on AI and technology. Notably, Leo also used the occasion to make a historic formal apology for the Church’s previous defense and justification of slavery — a reminder that the Catholic Church has not always been on the right side of social ills.

Though popes are traditionally not present during the release of these documents, which first began in the 18th century, Leo XIV was in attendance at its presentation, and delivered his own comments — something Vatican observers indicated reflected his desire to make sure the Church’s stance was properly understood. The Chicago-born pontiff spoke in English and was joined by AI experts and industry leaders, including Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah, who consulted on the document.

So how should the public process and think about this new document? It’s helpful to first understand the context in which the Church is speaking up about this at all.

Why the Catholic Church cares so much about AI’s development

Magnifica humanitas is dropping more than a week after Pope Leo XIV actually signed it on May 15. The timing matters.

That day marked 135 years since the release of Rerum Novarum, the seminal work of Pope Leo XIII, the current pope’s namesake, who was leading the church during the late stages of the Industrial Revolution. As they are today, the faithful, and the clergy, were facing a rapidly changing world. And the Church, the world’s leading moral authority at the time, had yet to establish its place in it.

That 19th-century document made philosophical arguments about the relationship between labor and capital, warning about the perils of communism. But it also redefined the church’s relationship to the modern world, with the papacy reasserting itself as both a source of power and a moral authority in an era of rapid change. The encyclical set a template for how a 2,000-year-old institution could still remain relevant in a modern age.

In presenting this encyclical, Pope Leo XIV made this parallel clear. He sees the rise of artificial intelligence as the defining global challenge of the day, and of his pontificate: “Like the earlier Leo, I feel entrusted to look upon another huge transformation with eyes of faith, with lucidity of reason, with openness to mystery and with cries of the poor and the earth resounding in my heart,” the pope said while presenting his encyclical.

The newer encyclical builds off his predecessor’s tradition, and the various arguments popes have made about the importance of preserving the dignity of the human person and valuing modern technology only so long as it benefits everyone, not just its creators or the rich.

In 2015, Pope Francis, for example, wrote about “the technocratic paradigm” that has taken root in modern capitalism: the sense that technological progress is unstoppable, that it will demand unlimited concessions from nature and from people, and that the world had no choice but to submit to change.

“Leo is concerned that we don’t just submit to inevitability on questions of AI, but ask critical questions and push back in ways that are necessary before it’s too late to push back, before damage is done that can’t easily be undone,” Dan Rober, an associate professor of Catholic Studies at Sacred Heart University, told me.

That role of questioning, pausing, and coming to consensus has defined the Catholic Church’s leadership and operation for the last two papacies: the notion of synodality, or teaching and making decisions based on consensus. Before AI and the technologists who have created it become the sole determinants of how politics, the economy, and society operates, the Church is asserting itself as a counterweight — even as it includes some of those leaders in the process.

“Pope Leo is trying to clearly walk in those footsteps, and I think he’s very concerned, as are a lot of people, about the possible implications, particularly for job markets and for people’s lifestyles being sustainable day to day with the rise of AI systems that may render a certain significant amount of jobs able to be automated very rapidly,” Rober said.

This kind of reflection has become standard procedure for the Vatican. Since at least the turn of the century, the Church has found itself increasingly weighing in on the crises of the day, albeit often a bit too late.

As the Catholic writer Christopher Hale has noted, “Francis took up the climate fight with Laudato Si in 2015, after decades of scientific consensus had been ignored. Benedict XVI took up the global economic order with Caritas in Veritate in 2009, after the financial system had already collapsed. Both documents arrived in the long shadow of the crises they addressed.”

In Magnifica humanitas, Pope Leo XIV may be seeking to intervene early in the development or takeover of a new technology this time, and show that the Church wants to both work with Silicon Valley and assert itself as a powerful defender of modern values, as it has done in its defense of the liberal international order and aspects of humanism, like human autonomy and reason.

In the background, there’s also a more sci-fi element: the notion that AI could end up coming between the Church and the people — serving as a filter or layer between regular people and God, and perhaps even usurping the role of the Church itself. The Catholic Church, famously, is concerned with the proper interpretation of scripture, Biblical truths, ethics, and God. Bloody wars waged and hard-fought reformations turned on this central question of who and how one can commune with God. Now, AI enters as another middleman.

“That’s closely related to the question of people using AI as a therapist,” Rober told me. “You could see a way in which AI becomes its own kind of religion, and certainly the way a lot of the Silicon Valley founders talk about it, it does have religious overtones to it. You listen to the Google founders talk about the singularity, and that sounds a lot like religion.”

It’s in this context that this document, and its specific teachings, lands.

What the Church is teaching about AI

Magnifica Humanitas is not the Vatican’s first examination of the role of AI in modern life.

Just last year, in the twilight of Pope Francis’s pontificate, the Vatican released a teaching note, Antiqua et nova, that laid the groundwork for Leo’s encyclical. That 2025 document established that the Church is not opposed to the development of AI: technological progress and scientific discoveries are part of the natural way that humans are meant to honor God, his creation of humanity in his image, and the natural outpouring of God’s gift of reason and rationality.

But it also established a distinction between human intelligence and machines that analyze data and perform processes. It insisted that artificial intelligence, like all technology, should serve humanity, not the other way around. And it emphasized the risk that new technology poses to the ability to, right to, and dignity of work, especially for the least well off in society.

In the encyclical, Leo uses the biblical parable of the Tower of Babel — a warning about human hubris — to make this case: “We must, then, avoid the ‘Babel syndrome,’ namely the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak,” he writes. “The risk of dehumanization — of building a future that excludes God and reduces the other to a means — is an ancient and ever-new temptation that today takes on a technical guise.”

This builds off of a long tradition of focusing on not just the dignity of work and workers, but also more recent concerns that modern capitalism facilitates a “throwaway culture” that views people and things as, at best, cogs in the service of a greater machine.

“He wants to talk about the idea that our humanity is meaningful in and of itself and that work is part of that, even if AI systems are able to allow for more leisure and even if something like universal basic income were to be made available, people need to find to have work of some kind to have meaning in their lives,” Rober said.

The encyclical’s teachings can be broken up into three broad categories: regulations on how AI is developed and how individuals adopt it, the responses required to handle the economic effects of AI, and limits on AI’s usage in war.

The practical recommendations and concerns Leo outlines include:

The need for a “more active” democratic process for people to decide how AI will develop, “that is capable of slowing things down when everything is accelerating, and of protecting the opportunities for communities still to be able to participate and ask questions.”
Regulation of how companies collect and use personal data, which “should not be treated as something to be sold off or entrusted to a select few.”
Better education of adults, teachers, and young people for using AI in their daily lives, specifically to avoid sexual exploitation, blackmail, grooming, and disinformation.
Environmental regulations, given AI infrastructure’s impact on the natural world.
A duty for governments to protect access to, and the dignity of, work, to provide job training and professional help to workers affected by AI disruptions, and to redistribute the wealth and value created by AI to those it displaces.
Flexibility from labor unions and organizations to “be open to new types of employment and the corresponding needs of workers, in order to represent and defend them.”
New rules of war and accountability for AI usage in combat, given that “just war” theory is being made obsolete by the growing automation of warfare. “When a decision to strike becomes automated or opaque, the risk of abdicating responsibility increases,” the encyclical says. “For this reason, the chain of responsibility must be identifiable and verifiable; those who design, train, authorize and employ technology must be held accountable for their decisions.”
A new international compact on how AI should be used to avoid “the technological arms race and ensure robust protection for civilians and the infrastructures necessary for their survival.”

From an eagle-eye view, the document is fairly wonky and detailed: concerned with very practical matters and specific recommendations that could have come from academia, or a secular background — underscoring just how much Leo may hope it can provide guidance for leaders and individuals, as opposed to remaining siloed to the intellectual class. So as this technology continues to develop, the pope and the church want to help shape it. They want the faithful to be reminded that whatever AI offers is not reality, not personhood, and not God. It is a tool that should not dominate or determine the lives of its users. And it should not replace the role of the Church in teaching morality and ethics.

For the greater secular world, the Church wants to remind the public that they should have a say in how AI shapes their world; they should not allow business and tech leaders to define the terms of existence through their machines; and that they have a powerful ally in the Roman Catholic Church in the effort to preserve human dignity in the face of unprecedented technological change.