President Donald Trump has thrown the nation’s health systems into chaos. In just the first month of his presidency, the administration has made drastic cuts to medical research and epidemic surveillance, and mounted serious threats to Medicaid, Medicare, and essential childhood vaccination. With last week’s confirmation of Robert F. Kennedy Jr (RFK Jr), it has now also delivered the nation’s health systems into the hands of conspiracy theorists. Dangerous quacks promoting “health care freedom” like RFK Jr have risen in prominence by manipulating widespread anger […]

Mayfreed Durán-Arape. (Photo provided by Doris Arape. Background: GettyImages / Shutterstock) SO MUCH OF THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S mass deportation policy hinges on the word “criminals.” Most Americans agree that real criminals in the country illegally are bad and should be deported. Where the administration has outrun the public is in the matter of who is considered a criminal. When Trump’s term began, they said the focus was on “public safety threats and national security threats”—the most serious risks. But a week later, White House Press […]

In the 1960s, leftist filmmakers from France to Japan revolutionized the documentary. Anti-fascism was not just the heritage of past generations but a message carried forward by the avant-garde on-screen. French director Agnès Varda. (Jacques Prayer / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images) Leftist filmmakers of the 1960s revolutionized the art of documentary. Often inspired by the radical art of the Soviet 1920s, filmmakers in countries like France and Japan dared to make film into a powerful weapon in the fight against fascism, weaving fiction into nonfiction […]

In August of last year, I wrote a piece for the New York Times in which I argued that the Starbucks unionization campaign illustrates the inherent limitations of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in facilitating mass unionization in America. The piece analyzes how much NLRB effort was required to produce 11,000 new union members at Starbucks and then concludes that the NLRB does not have even a tiny fraction of the budget that would be required to certify millions of new union members in a short […]

Over the years, we’ve piled up some indelible images of gutless Republican surrender to Trump. Ted Cruz’s face of pure pain as he phone-banked for Trump in 2016. Mitt Romney’s rueful smile at dinner with Trump after that election. And now, a dead-eyed Marco Rubio cheerleading Trump’s abandonment of Ukraine from behind a negotiating table in Riyadh. Rubio may have built his entire career around righteous opposition to autocrats abroad. Now, however, he’s discovered that what’s really best is for America to “take advantage of […]

Sam Stein discusses the long-lasting damages of DOGE’s cut on science and innovation, as academic whistleblowers ring the alarms on the impacts that could last generations. Read More from Sam Stein, “The DOGE Brain Drain Has Begun” Leave a comment As always: Watch, listen, and leave a comment. Bulwark+ Takes is home to short videos, livestreams and event archives exclusively for Bulwark+ members. Don’t care for video? Use the controls on the left-hand side of the player to toggle to audio. Great Job Sam Stein […]

Police overreach and restrictions on civil liberties have been a hallmark of Emmanuel Macron’s presidency. Even compared to previous French leaders, his administration has brought a surge in police violence against protest movements and residents of the banlieues. The authoritarian thrust was also visible in a lockdown regime considerably harsher than many other Western European countries, and official bans on government-critical civil-society groups, such as the environmental movement Earth Uprising and the anti-Islamophobia group Collective Against Islamophobia in France (CCIF), which provided legal support to […]

Elon Musk speaks with President Donald J. Trump and reporters in the Oval Office at the White House on February 11, 2025. (Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images) THREE DAYS AFTER the National Institutes of Health abruptly announced it would place a strict, low cap on the money it sends to universities and research institutions for the administrative costs of scientific research, the University of Iowa made an abrupt announcement of its own. The school’s Office of the Vice President for Research […]

Tim Miller and Sam Stein talk Sean Hannity’s soft ball interview with Elon Musk and Donald Trump. Leave a comment As always: Watch, listen, and leave a comment. Bulwark+ Takes is home to short videos, livestreams and event archives exclusively for Bulwark+ members. Don’t care for video? Use the controls on the left-hand side of the player to toggle to audio. Great Job Sam Stein & the Team @ The Bulwark Source link for sharing this story.

Overtime is for everyone. If you’re a subscriber: thank you. If you’re not, there’s no better time to subscribe to Bulwark+ than today. If you like today’s issue, you can share this newsletter with someone you think would value it. Marco Rubio on February 16, 2025 during his first Middle East tour since becoming secretary of state. (Photo by Evelyn Hockstein/Pool/AFP via Getty Images) I’M AN ETERNAL OPTIMIST. But my gut, informed by a career spent studying and implementing American foreign policy, tells me this […]

JVL and Mona talk about the post-Pax Americana world, Napoleon, and taking to the streets. Just Between Us is a podcast exclusively for members of Bulwark+ featuring Mona Charen and her Bulwark colleagues unburdening themselves each Tuesday evening. To listen to this episode become a Bulwark+ member today. Join now To add this Bulwark+ podcast to your player of choice, click here. Read more Great Job Jonathan V. Last & the Team @ The Bulwark Source link for sharing this story.

Tim Miller and Jonathan V. Last discuss Donald Trump and his administration’s new alliances with previous adversaries, and the flipping on allies. Read JVL’s The Triad, “Meet Kevin Hassett: Conservatism’s Invincible Ignoramus” Morning Shots, “Staying Patriotic in Trump’s America” Leave a comment Read more Great Job Jonathan V. Last & the Team @ The Bulwark Source link for sharing this story.

The Pillar’s Ed Condon joins JVL to talk about the Trump administration’s confrontation(s) with the Catholics. Leave a comment Follow on Substack. WTF 2.0 is a pop-up show on Substack during the first 100 days of second Trump administration. Join JVL at 1pm on Tuesday, February 25 for a live conversation with of The Message Box and Pod Save America fame. Great Job Jonathan V. Last & the Team @ The Bulwark Source link for sharing this story.

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Members of Congress are not quite sure who exactly is in charge of American foreign policy right now. It’s not about who is actually making the decisions. That, they know. Instead, we might put the core issue in the form of a question: “What gave these people the gall to do exactly what they promised they’d do if they were given the power to do it?” There is overwhelming consensus on Capitol Hill that Russian President Vladimir Putin is a […]

The Gorge is a wildly silly action-sci-fi-horror-romance, released on Apple TV+ on Valentine’s Day to alert you to the way it stresses the “unusual love story” angle. Maintaining a conventionally brooding atmosphere through gloomy CGI, The Gorge is about two top snipers stationed in towers on opposite sides of a sinister chasm in a remote forested location. Both are assigned to keep whatever’s in there from getting out. Since one sniper is played by beautiful Anya Taylor-Joy (Furiosa, The Witch) and the other is played […]

Trump is A-OK with all the murder and mayhem Russia has unleashed on Ukraine, and he’s making a mockery of all his enablers who claimed he’d do a Reagan-esque kind of deal. Instead, Ukraine wasn’t even invited to the “peace” talks, while Trump tries to impose an extortion deal on the Ukrainian people for daring to fight back against the Russian invasion. Plus, the danger to our constitutional system if the main guy in the Oval Office defies a court order, the real live threat […]

Andrew Egger and Joe Perticone discuss Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s defiant strikes at Trump Border Czar Tom Homan as he repeatedly goes after her for supporting education of laws and constitutional rights. Leave a comment As always: Watch, listen, and leave a comment. Bulwark+ Takes is home to short videos, livestreams and event archives exclusively for Bulwark+ members. Don’t care for video? Use the controls on the left-hand side of the player to toggle to audio. Great Job Andrew Egger & the Team @ The Bulwark Source […]

As the smoke settles on the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria and its replacement by Islamist leadership under Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), it is clear that Turkey’s far-right governing bloc has emerged from the tumult strong and emboldened. What is less clear is whether this will mean that Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will be able to project influence across the region without constraint. To many observers and government propagandists, HTS’s victory in Syria was a product of Erdoğan’s strategic genius. But while the fall […]

Tim Miller appeared on MSNBC’s The 11th Hour with Stephanie Ruhle to discuss Democratic donors who are afraid of Trump seeking retribution against them. Leave a comment As always: Watch, listen, and leave a comment. Bulwark+ Takes is home to short videos, livestreams and event archives exclusively for Bulwark+ members. Don’t care for video? Use the controls on the left-hand side of the player to toggle to audio. Great Job Tim Miller & the Team @ The Bulwark Source link for sharing this story.

Programming note: Today on WTF 2.0 I’m going to be joined by ’s Ed Condon to talk about Catholic Church inside baseball: What’s happening with Catholic Charities and USAID and the Trump administration and JD Vance? I’ll go live on Substack and the site around 1:00 p.m. We’ll send out an alert when we get started and post the replay on the site too. Kevin Hassett, a very serious man. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images) Over the weekend the director of the president’s National Economic Council went […]

Over the weekend, the Trump administration appeared to begin the process of rolling back enforcement of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the “Magna Carta” of federal environmental law. In a filing submitted February 16, administration officials announced an interim rule titled “Removal of National Environmental Policy Act Implementing Regulations.” NEPA requires all federal agencies to consider the environmental impact of their work, including by submitting new contracts and permits to rigorous environmental assessments and public comment. Signed into law by President Richard Nixon in 1970 amid […]

The second Trump administration has the federal workforce in its crosshairs. Spearheading the effort is Elon Musk (the richest man in the world) and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (not actually a government department). Donald Trump and Musk have taken a shotgun-blast approach: instituting a hiring freeze, shutting down whole agencies, telling workers to stop coming in, offering buyouts to two million workers, ordering remote workers back to the office in violation of union contracts, and mass-firing workers still in their probationary periods. In […]

This morning’s “peace” talks between the Trump team and Russia appear to be off to an awesome start, as Fox News’s Jacqui Heinrich reports: The US and Russia are proposing a three-stage peace plan, according to multiple foreign diplomatic sources close to the talks in Saudi Arabia. The plan includes a ceasefire, elections in Ukraine, then signing of a final agreement. Multiple foreign diplomatic sources tell FOX the US and Russia consider holding new elections in Ukraine to be a key condition for the success […]

It was meant to shock. And shock it did. The European functionaries, heads of state, defense ministers, and NATO bigwigs assembled at Munich’s Bayerische Hof last Friday expected the US vice president to enlighten them on the peace plan for Ukraine just launched by President Donald Trump. Instead, they were treated to a nineteen-minute diatribe on the betrayal of democratic values by European elites. Vance accused them of resorting to “Soviet-style words” to censure opinions that did not fit their groupthink, using extra-democratic means to […]

Once upon a time, Donald Trump became the GOP standard bearer by indicating he would be a different kind of Republican. He broke with the GOP’s obsession with shrinking government and cutting entitlements, rejected party orthodoxy on trade deals, and generally ran against and defeated the Republican establishment and their “donors and special interests” who, he said, hated him because he rejected their money, and whom he later blamed for sabotaging his presidency. Yet ironically, the man Trump has tasked with running the essential machinery […]

In the inaugural episode of FYPod, Tim Miller and Cameron Klasky react to idolization of weirdos like Andrew Tate amongst Gen Z males, while Cam explains why Democrats can’t be cool and crash the Daytona 500 like Donald Trump just did. Then, digital activist and artist Dylan Geick joins Tim and Cam to discuss the pivot among the young male demographic towards Trumpism and authoritarians, when “radicalization” really occurs for politically engaged new adults, and why the Democrats need good looking male advocates to win […]

Wondering what the hell this podcast is? Tim Miller and Cameron Kasky are here to give you the inside scoop on why they created this Gen Z politics show. Take a listen top learn more about the topics they’ll explore and the guests they’ll have on in future episodes. Leave a comment Watch, listen and leave a comment. Don’t care for video? Use the controls on the left side of the player to toggle to the audio edition. FYPod is available wherever you get your […]

Marco Rubio on February 16, 2025 during his first Middle East tour since becoming secretary of state. (Photo by Evelyn Hockstein/Pool/AFP via Getty Images) I’M AN ETERNAL OPTIMIST. But my gut, informed by a career spent studying and implementing American foreign policy, tells me this week will not go well. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is set to meet Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Rubio’s diplomatic experience is limited to his time in the Senate, during which he served on the […]