Andy Dufresne told his buddy Red in Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption the following:

It’s a lovely sentiment, but as Red warned Andy, “Hope is a dangerous thing.”

I don’t know if the filmmakers made the character “Red,” who was Irish in Stephen King’s novella, a Black man in the movie with a purpose in mind, or if they simply could not pass up on an actor of Morgan Freeman’s quality, but whether intentional or not, they sent a message with the casting: Hope is a privilege.

In the film, Red was a Black man convicted of murder smackdab in the Jim Crow era, sentenced to life in prison. Andy Dufresne was a “rich banker” and White. Andy knew of a world well beyond Shawshank. Red did not. Hope came naturally to Andy. Red protected himself from hope because it had burned him.

(SPOILER FOR THE BOOK AND MOVIE)

In the end, Andy’s hope freed him, but Red’s hope didn’t do the same for him. It was his apathy that freed him. Only when the system drained all hope from him, when he stopped trying to impress the parole board, did the institution that could set him free deign release Red from its grasp. Then, Andy’s hope lured Red, who finally learned to hope thanks to his White friend. In real life, Red never have gotten out.

(SPOILER ENDS HERE)

Hope can be a catalyst, but it can be an opiate or an anodyne for people who are convinced or tricked into thinking the system is working for them.

Hope can be a good thing, “maybe the best of things,” but only when supported with action and tempered with pragmatic vigilance. Hope by itself is a pipe dream. To his credit, Andy Dufresne understood that. So must we.

The Trump regime, provably and consistently corrupt, venal, power-hungry, hypocritical, cruel, and self-serving, has inflicted untold damage on our government, our economy, our people, and our reputation around the world, but the harm comes with a silver lining: A growing number of people are waking up to the fact that Trump is a symptom of a disease long ignored.

The very few acquires more and more power and wealth by controlling the very many, which the few accomplish by dividing the many into mutually exclusive groups. It’s a tale as old as time. In the U.S., this dynamic existed from the colonial era to the Gilded Age to today.

When wealthy land-grabbers during the colonial period noticed slaves, poor Black farmers, poor White farmers, and Indigenous people consorting with each other, they outlawed interracial marriage, fearing that the many might get ideas and rise up against them. They fortified anti-miscegenation laws the ideology of White supremacy. Poor White farmers could be made to feel better about themselves with a perceived superiority over other poor people.

Trump has used this to great effect in the MAGA movement. MAGA communicants are convinced they deserve more and that they would have more were it not for all of these “illegal immigrants,” while the oligarchs rob them blind.

The uber-rich exploit groupthink and team dynamics, which they’ve scaled with a global digital network and supercharged with AI, to keep the masses at each other’s throats. To speak in the parlance of our would-be technocrat overlords, fear of the other is the zero-day exploit of human software. The entry points to this exploit are near infinite.

Just look at the lurching, clubbing, insatiable behemoth that DHS, BP, and ICE have become, gorging itself on billions of funding and tens of thousands of lucrative prisoners in a vast network of concentration camps. A third of the U.S. population twisted themselves into pretzels to rationalize the extrajudicial confinement, torture, rape, and murder of people whose most common crimes were overstaying a visa and bypassing border inspection, civil violations equivalent to jaywalking.

But this administration convinced MAGA that these people were criminals, contradicting the very data that ICE made publicly available, and that they—the “rapists,” “animals,” and “vermin” from south of the border and elsewhere—were the reason why the economy was in the gutter and why they couldn’t afford their healthcare bills, rent, groceries, car payments, and on and on.

Because of this lie, they watched and cheered as a mob of masked men terrorized not just immigrants anyone who complained or dared to resist. They clapped as we as galloped toward the point of no return.

Or as William Pannapacker, masquerading as Werner Herzog, wrote:

People are pliable, especially those with hate and fear in their hearts. Technology makes it orders of magnitude easier to bewitch them. A handful of people who own all the technology and the media have their hands on the levers of power. The influence they wield is cosmic, and it’s only getting worse.

But there’s room to hope.

Elon Musk, the world’s first trillionaire, spent almost HALF A BILLION DOLLARS to back Republican candidates. It didn’t work.

Trump defied court orders, including the Supreme Court, but he lost, again and again. Only his most ardent devotees and his orbit of sycophants still support him.

A third of the population was fine with a U.S. dictator as long it as their dictator, but he couldn’t quite get there—or so we hope.

What we do with that information?

Abraham Lincoln once spoke about appealing to the “better angels of nature,” but we must also guard against the worse demons of our nature.

One person shouldn’t be able to spend hundreds of billions of dollars in order to influence elections.

A masked paramilitary shouldn’t be able to kidnap and kill people without consequences.

A president shouldn’t be able to wage war unilaterally or enrich themselves via the presidency.

Is Trump still dangerous? Yes, in some ways, he may become more desperate as a lame-duck president, but we should be more worried about the next person who comes along, wielding a similar cult of personality, having learned from Trump’s mistakes, to systematically dismantle those guardrails.

A democracy doesn’t prevent its constituents from voting in an aspiring dictator, but it should prevent that wannabe dictator from becoming one. So far, we passed, but not with flying colors. The guardrails of democracy didn’t buckle, but they budged.

It’s OK to feel hopeful today. I do. But it’s important to remember that hope isn’t going to shore up those guardrails. We are.

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Our absentee ballots were sad. When I left them with the postal worker at La Poste, I did not feel good about their chances of making it across an ocean. If U.S. democracy is counting on them, we may be in trouble.

While sitting in bed, I folded the ballot printouts for my wife Daniela and me per the instructions provided by the Westchester Board of Elections into what Daniela described mockingly as “origami.” It felt like I was making an air paper plane that I knew would nose-dive straight into the floorboards.

Because of my underdeveloped arts-and-crafts skills, the edges curled and gaps widened at the seams where the makeshift envelopes were meant to join. I was experiencing gift-wrapping PTSD. Every attempt to close the gap by refolding the envelopes warped the paper and introduced bubbled ridges that would become nuisances when I attempted to tape these Frankensteined pieces of correspondence at La Poste. I scrawled our names and addresses onto the “From” field in the unsteady handwriting of a child that my sister once said I would grow out of. A few years ago, she saw my handwriting again and said, “Oh, I guess you didn’t.”

I gave up. This would have to do.

Daniela suggested we put these pathetic excuses for envelopes into real envelopes, but she was in between work calls and didn’t have the energy to insist on the point, and I, having wrenched a revised ballot (they messed up the first one they sent me) from the board of elections at the eleventh hour, was near the end of my tether.

As I marched over to La Poste, the untaped envelopes unclenched, like overstuffed burritos unfurling. I stepped into the post office 20 minutes before they would close for their lunch break. I was on the clock.

After taping the splay paper flippers into sharp edges and paving over the gaps with tape, my democracy DIY project started to look like actual envelopes and not pieces of paper spit out unceremoniously by a refrigerator-sized machine at the local print shop.

With a flicker of confidence alight, I huddled at the self-serve kiosk to weigh the envelopes. There was just one problem: There was no postage available for mailing to the United States.

I hailed one of the postal workers and pantomimed the problem. She said something to me in French that I didn’t understand, but the nonchalant tone conveyed, “Oh why yes, of course, we do not mail to the United States.”

She bade the envelopes from me, spotting the bar code and the election seal printed on the “envelope.”

“Ah, élection,” she said.

It seemed this information was clarifying. The wheels were in motion. Then she turned the “envelopes” over and saw the evidence of my taping sutures and began to laugh. She found it so amusing that she was compelled to walk over to her colleague and show her the secure technology the U.S. uses for its elections.

“Élections aux États-Unis,” she said to her friend, among other jabs I didn’t catch.

The postal workers laughed. A customer at the help desk joined in. Customers at the front of the queue who were within earshot grinned.

The postal worker led me to the help desk on the other side of the post office. She sat in front of the computer and wrestled with a system that apparently did not want to send correspondence to the United States. Following a few minutes of frowns and huffing, she disappeared into the back room and returned with whom I assumed to be the manager.

Together, they had another round of chuckles. They postal worker went on another jolly rant, from which I could pick out only “colis,” which means “package” or “parcel.” My imagination filled in the rest:

“You’d think they would use something more secure, like a package or a security envelope.”

Eventually, they ironed out the kinks and were able to apply the proper postage. I thanked the postal worker who, despite her outsize amusement, was quite helpful.

To be fair, we could have had absentee ballots mailed to us. I’m guessing a packet snail-mailed from the county board of elections would have included official documents and real envelopes. We could have sent the ballot through the local embassy. Apparently, we could have even procured a secure pouch, whatever that is, but all of that took more planning.

We chose the email option to save time, and the digital option required the voter to print the materials and fold them into an envelope with the ballot tucked inside.

Had I more foresight, I could have asked the printers to print the “envelopes” on something sturdy, like card stock. Had I given myself more time at the post office, I could have purchased larger envelopes to stick my jury-rigged envelopes in.

But I felt the time crunch. Daniela’s ballot had been delayed. Then, I noticed the missing information on my ballot, prompting me to request an updated ballot, which took time. Weeks later, I just wanted to get the ballots out the door.

And look, we’re voting in New York, not exactly a battleground state. Our votes aren’t going to be the difference in this election. Still, I can’t help but see the sorry state of those paper absentee ballots as a metaphor for U.S. democracy: Held together by spit and gum, and in this case, flimsy paper stock and Scotch tape.

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A week ago, HSI, a division of ICE, raided Ilhan Omar’s home. On Saturday, border “czar” Tom Homan said on Fox News that the Congresswoman from Minnesota could face denaturalization and deportation.

If you’re interested in the details of the case, you can read my article that Salon published yesterday, but if you want the CliffsNotes, scroll down.

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What is Omar accused of?

Rep. Omar’s opponents accuse her of immigration fraud. She is a refugee from Somalia who became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2000. The law that facilitated her naturalization was reserved for minors. They’re claiming, without any evidence, that she is actually a year older, which would’ve made her ineligible for naturalization at the time.

Though the judicial warrant is sealed, the presence of HSI suggests the warrant pertains to immigration; and since the public charge against her is the unsubstantiated age discrepancy, it stands to reason that the warrant is related to that accusation.

Why now?

Trump and other Republican officials have been accusing Rep. Omar of immigration fraud for years, and Trump is almost halfway through his second term. Why is HSI looking into Rep. Omar weeks before the midterm elections, just as the favorability of Trump and Republicans running for office is tanking and the Republicans are poised to lose Congress? The timing is suspicious.

The Department of Justice (DoJ) has long abided by an unwritten “60-day rule,” which discourages the investigation of politicians during that window. Why? Because the DoJ could meddle with elections otherwise, which, of course, is exactly what Trump’s DoJ is doing. Even if you think Omar is the worst, you’ve abdicated your center of critical thinking if you don’t find the timing dubious.

Political assassination

Like the president, Trump’s DoJ and DHS are as corrupt as can be. This is the stuff of failed republics and sham democracies, of dictators who win 99% of the vote at gunpoint.

If this DoJ manages to rustle up a bogus charge in the drawer of a filing cabinet in the basement of a derelict building that leads to the denaturalization and deportation of a duly elected Congresswoman and refugee who became a citizen a quarter of a century ago, we will have completed the application for the renunciation our democracy, an application that is almost filled out.

This is what fascists did in the 20th century: Stripped their opponents of citizenship. This is not what serious countries do. This is not what civilized countries do.

The weaponization of denaturalization

Perhaps even more ominous is the precedent it sets for denaturalization. How far back in our histories can DHS go, rummaging for any inconsistency in our documentation to justify our denaturalization? If there is no statute of limitations for a DHS investigation into one’s citizenship, then naturalized citizens do not enjoy the same protections as a U.S. citizen born in the U.S. to U.S. citizen parents. This effectively creates second-class citizens: Naturalized citizens.

And as anyone with a passing knowledge of fascism knows, second-class citizens and denaturalization are hallmarks of fascism.

Don’t want to be called fascist? Stop acting like one.

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Twenty-four years and a couple of weeks ago, HBO aired season 4, episode 3 of The Sopranos, titled “Christopher,” in which Silvio Dante spearheads a bid to bust up a Native American protest of the local Columbus Day Parade. Nearly a quarter century later, the same divisions remain.

The purported motivation of the show’s characters was to protect Italian heritage but given that the characters attempting to disrupt the protests were racketeering murderers, the showrunners had a darker message in mind: People will protect a legacy of violence with more violence.

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Today, almost half of the U.S. population supports Columbus Day. While support for Columbus is seasonal, that millions and millions of people maintain allegiance to a historical figure whose litany of atrocities are well-documented speaks to an abiding Eurocentric cultural protectionism underpinned by the belief that any acknowledgement of past wrongdoing would cede precious ground in The Great Culture War. Ironically, such a worldview protects the people who took that ground by force.

This worldview mocks the land-back movement and reparations as unserious notions even though hardly anyone denies the horrors committed upon Indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans, mind you. Instead, those who cling to this worldview employ made-up statutes of limitations and atrocity whataboutism to discredit movements that aim to redress past wrongs.

“Oh, that was so long ago.”

“You know Africans enslaved other Africans, right?

“American Indians were actually very violent.”

“There’s no such thing as ‘Native’ or ‘Indigenous.’ They came here through the Bering Strait.”

Citing a statute of limitation for one argument and ignoring it for another argument is flawed. Columbus landed in the Bahamas 534 years ago. The people who crossed the Bering Strait arrived at least 16,500 years ago. You can pick one argument, but you can’t have both.

Regarding Africans as slave traders and the violence of Indigenous tribes in the Americas, nothing they did comes remotely close to the scale of colonial and imperialist violence. It’s not the same ballpark. It’s not the same galaxy. And even if it were (it’s not), it’s not a particularly upstanding stance to take.

“Well, their ancestors were horrible too, so it’s OK that my ancestors were horrible.”

Also, if what European colonizers did to Africans and Indigenous peoples was “so long ago,” why continue to celebrate Christopher Columbus?

Because the real reason is that acknowledging the heinous acts committed by Christopher Columbus reveals a thread that extends to present day. One can chart the inequities of today back to the atrocities of then, and if you do that, then you arrive at an inescapable truth: Those debts, the foundation of today’s inequities, have never been paid. It’s cleaner to ignore, deny, or downplay.

The cultural significance of Christopher Columbus Day has waned over the years, owing to a growing public awareness of Columbus’s depredations and the attendant rise of Indigenous Peoples’ Day, but it remains a microcosm of an enduring cultural tension: Acknowledging the unaddressed evils of a country’s past demands a reckoning in the country’s present.

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This week marked one year since my wife and I moved to Europe. We spent nine months in France (mostly Versailles but also a six-week stint in Grasse) and the last three months in Budapest. Earlier this week, we came back to the place where we began our European adventure. Naturally, I’m feeling a bit reflective. Here are a few things I’ve learned this year:

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Takeaway #1: The glamor fades.

Vacation is a fantasy. People cook for you, make your bed, and chauffeur you around. You’re not paying bills, running errands, or cleaning your home. You can move through the world freely. When people say, “I could live here,” after a river cruise on the Seine, frankly, they don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.

Stay a little longer. Buy groceries. Navigate the postal system in a different language. Get a haircut. Miss the last train in a place you don’t speak the language. Go to the pharmacy when you’re not feeling well. Things get real, and fast.

When we first moved to Versailles, everything enchanted us—the architecture, café culture, the wine, the food, the walkable lifestyle—but eventually, real life settled in. Work. Laundry. The constant friction of not knowing the local language. The doldrums of routine.

Takeaway #2: Every place is different. Every place is the same.

When everything else is equal, humans tend to focus on differences. At first, my wife and I found France to be a sharp contrast to the U.S., but a lot of that had to do with the language. When you boil down our day-to-day and compare it to our day-to-day in the U.S., we do a lot of the same things: Get groceries, cook, wash dishes, do laundry, errands, take out the trash, work, etc. My wife’s life changed since she went back to school, the reason why we moved, but in many ways my routine stayed the same.

Over the last year, we’ve lived in Versailles, Grasse, and Budapest. They’re all quite different from New York (and each other): Versailles is a buttoned-up city adjoining Paris, Grasse’s Old Town is a cobbled, medieval village, and Budapest is both gritty and grand. They all offer different lifestyles, culture, architecture, pace, cuisine, and so on. Then again, people in all those places all have to do the same mundane things we do: Get groceries, go to work, exercise, so on and so forth. It’s a reminder that many of the differences we fixate on are cosmetic.

Takeaway #3: Humans can get used to anything.

In the last 13 months, my wife and I have moved six times: From our house in Westchester, New York to my mom’s house in New Jersey, from New Jersey to Versailles, from Versailles to Grasse, from Grasse back to Versailles, from Versailles to Budapest, and last week, from Budapest back to Versailles.

Every single time we moved, I was anxious about the move, and every time single time we moved, I was sad to leave the place I was once anxious to move to. We often resist change, but I don’t think we give ourselves enough credit for our capacity for change.

Takeaway #4: Immigrants feel more comfortable with other immigrants.

I’ve made an effort over the last to learn French. I’ve had a tutor, I’ve used several language apps, I follow French tutors on Instagram, and I watch French videos on YouTube. I’m lucky if my French is at an A2 level. When I go to the same boulangerie I’ve been going to for the last year, they still regard with the same frosty indifference. They’re warmer with native French speakers. More open. They’re not rude to me, not exactly, but their behavior with me is a constant reminder that I’m alien, that I have a gulf to cross, and that they’re not extending a bridge. I have to swim across shark-infested waters.

The only way I’ve been able to build any kind of social life here is by connecting with other people who moved to France from other places. I plugged into the anglophone writer scene in Paris, which is bustling and effervescent, but it has occurred to me: Is the anglophone community so strong in Paris because assimilating is so hard?

I won’t belabor the point here since I wrote about this phenomenon in the spring. Here’s the article if you’re interested:

Takeaway #5: The little things make you feel at home.

The barbershop in Versailles. The boulangerie. The train station. The grocery store. The bodega. (They don’t call it that, but that’s the vibe.) The barbershop in Budapest. The coffee shop with the same light fixtures as our apartment in Versailles. The grocery store by the train station. Our little square—well, more of a rectangle. Learning the routes to and from these places that perform essential functions in our daily (and weekly) lives is what made me feel grounded and part of a place. The language, especially in France, can be a barrier, but it doesn’t matter how broken my French is. These places are just as much mine as it is theirs.

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If you enjoyed this article, you might appreciate my other articles about our European escapades over the last year:

Álvaro Olmos Torrico met Vicenta Domínguez, a Quechua midwife, in the heart of the Bolivian Andes. Although he didn’t speak Quechua, he visited her regularly until, not much later, she passed away. Torrico’s experiences in this remote village high in the mountains formed the basis of The Condor Daughter, a film he wrote and directed, recently named Bolivia's submission for the Academy Awards Best Foreign Feature.

Shot in the same community in which Torrico befriended Domínguez, the film follows Clara, played by Marisol Vallejos Montaño, a teenager torn between her small indigenous community high in the mountains and the allure of a singing career in the nearby city, Cochabamba, where Torrico was born and raised.

On its face, the film is a coming-of-age story about a teenage girl bucking the expectations of tradition. It’s also a microcosm of the worldwide tension between urbanization and indigenous communities. But at its core, it’s a story about what women sacrifice to keep families and communities together.

My wife’s Quechua connection

It only took one word in the email from the publicist working on this film to pique my interest: Quechua.

My wife, who is Peruvian, has a connection to Quechua via her late maternal grandfather, or as she calls him, “papapa,” an engineer and a worldly, kindly man. Though I only met him a handful of times, his charitable, welcoming nature radiated. It was clear he liked people and adored his family. He was part Quechua.

He couldn’t speak Quechua like he could speak Spanish or English, but having grown up in a community with a large Quechua presence, he had some knowledge of the language and would pepper it into his Spanish. Though my wife’s connection to Quechua is a few generations removed, she has always expressed pride for her indigenous roots and yearns to reconnect with them. We plan to go to Peru one day soon to seek out those roots.

While the film does not take place in Peru, where my wife was born, Peru is home to the largest Quechua population, with anywhere from three to five million Quechua speakers. My understanding from cursory internet sleuthing is that the Quechua spoken in Bolivia and Peru is mutually intelligible, though, to be fair, I have no immediate way of verifying that.

Representation is more than casting

I was heartened to discover, in an interview with the director to which I’ll link at the end of the article, that many of the actors in the film were Quechua, and intrigued to learn that several actors, including the two leads, were non-professional actors. It gave the film an unvarnished quality. It felt intimate and grounded—a presence, not a performance.

But it’s not enough to tap actors from the region. I don’t think The Condor Daughter could have been executed as it was without a director with personal ties to the land and its people.

We’ve seen what happens when directors far removed from a culture try their hand at depicting indigenous people. One of the most infamous big-budget blunders in this regard was Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto. Indigenous activists and Mayan descendants in Guatemala and Mexico denounced the film for perpetuating colonial stereotypes about indigenous people.

Ignacio Ochoa, director of the Nahual Foundation that promotes Mayan culture, had the following to say back in 2006:

That Gibson hired actors and extras from Yucatec Maya, Mexico City, and Oaxaca could not save the film from his paternalistic, blinkered view.

By stark contrast, Torrico is a child of the mountains in the Ayopaya region, which brood and soar on screen. Cochabamba, depicted as the proverbial “big city” in the film, is his hometown. The love and respect he has for these Quechua communities is evident, from the casting to the cinematography to the musical score.

Non-indigenous filmmakers tend to oscillate between portraying indigenous peoples either as barbaric or as pristine and above criticism. Torrico does neither. While his reverence is apparent, he doesn’t shy away from showing some of its warts.

The burden women bear

The midwife and Clara’s adoptive mother, played by María Magdalena Sanizo, can be harsh and unempathetic, while Clara can be ungrateful and selfish. In the end, though, we, the viewers, gain a better understanding of each of their motivations. The context doesn’t absolve them, but it gives their direction meaning.

The wider Quechua community also has its faults. In one scene, a community elder pillories a young woman for infidelity. The punishment, which he administers in a community meeting, is to cut off her hair so that she may wear her shame. With the elder, knife in hand, poised to deal “justice,” the young woman, as she begins to weep, whimpers, “I didn’t do anything. I didn’t do it.” Unmoved, the elder begins to cut.

The scene plants a seed in the viewer’s mind: Why did the woman deny the charge? Was she dissimulating in an attempt to retain her dignity, was she truly unfaithful, or was she judged prematurely and harshly? Is there a disconnect between what men and women in this community consider infidelity? Do women in this community have any recourse when accused of infidelity? Do unfaithful men suffer similar public condemnation? What’s their punishment?

Later that night, Clara, weeping in their hut, asks her mother, “Why don’t you stop it? They always listen to you?”

Ever the stoic, Ana says, “That’s the way it is around here. It’s the custom. You have to have patience…You have to respect it and get used to it.”

The most telling part of this exchange is “get used to it,” which is the closest Ana comes to a concession. It suggests that once she too had to “get used to it,” which further suggests that she also once found the practice distasteful. Maybe she still does.

When Ana tells an expectant mother that she will have a girl, the mother replies, “I’d have preferred a boy. As a woman, she’s fated to suffer.”

Later, when the crops are failing and the animals are dying, members of the community blame Clara’s sudden disappearance for their woes.

Women dealt a more difficult hand is hardly unique, but it’s a reminder that this is no Edenic community. It’s earthbound, no matter how high up they live, and flawed.

The Condor Daughter is a paean to women as the keepers of tradition and the givers of life, but it’s also a dirge for all that women must sacrifice to those ends.

Women drive the plot.

Clara represents the tension between ambition and duty, between community and the lure of the outside world. Ana is an agent of Pachamama, Mother Earth, and a bulwark against the encroaching city. Clara’s friend, Flora, played by Alisson Jimenez, embodies restlessness and is the bridge between the Quechua community and Cochabamba. Beatriz, a friend and former member of the community, played by Nely Huayta, helps Ana locate Clara in the city. Beatriz is a warning.

The Condor Daughter subverts the longstanding notion in European folklore, mythology, religion, and literary canon that women are seductresses, from the Sirens to Jezebel to the femme fatale. Here, men are the seducers. It’s a young man, Franz, played by Alberto Loza Franco, who tempts Flora and, by association, Clara to the city. In the city, a music agent tempts Clara into a life of glitz as a folklore singer.

Regardless of who does the tempting, the asymmetry of seduction is true here as it is elsewhere: Women are left to deal with the consequences. When a blight afflicts the crops and a disease riddles the livestock, I couldn’t help but wonder if pollutants from the city might be the culprit. The city is male. The Earth is female.

Even if they stay put, the outside world draws nearer. Shortly after a stillbirth, a doctor from the city arrives.

“We respect the Quechua culture and customs,” the doctor says. “But now, the government wants there to be more rural hospitals so people in rural areas have access to dignified healthcare.”

The interpreter, who is also from the country, empathizes with Ana before reading between the lines for her:

“…these orders are from higher up. They’ll take care of everything, and they won’t let you work anymore. From now you’ll be held accountable.”

The implication is that Ana is responsible for the stillbirth, even though only about one-fifth of stillbirths are preventable with allopathic medicine. In other words, Ana is likely not to blame.

Regardless, urbanization marches forward, the traditions of indigenous communities imperiled. Cities draw the young, while rural areas founder and disappear. We gain something from the cities, but we also lose something. Technology offers conveniences, but it spreads us thin, weakening the bonds of community and family. Simple lives may be hard, but they keep us closer to the Earth, which offers bounty without asking anything in return.

When Vicenta Domínguez, the last Quechua midwife in the Cochabamba region, died from a tragic accident, Torrico worried that her knowledge would die with her—a worry that served as the catalyst for this film. Torrico managed to salvage some traditional Quechua childbirth songs, some of which Domínguez herself might have sung while administering her sacred duties, but those songs, immortalized in this film, Torrico laments, are no longer sung today.

The film opened in New York City on September 11 and in Los Angeles on September 18 and will be playing throughout Hispanic Heritage Month (September 15-October 15).

The following is a Q&A by with writer-director Torrico. If you enjoyed this article and are interested in the film, this interview is well worth a read:

The Cinema Mystique

The Condor Daughter + Interview with Director and Writer Alvaro Olmos Torrico

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a month ago · 8 likes · 2 comments · The Cinema Mystique by Tyia

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In 2019, Hasan Piker, the oft-reviled progressive commentator, said that the “U.S. deserved 9/11.”

The comment recently resurfaced as Democratic socialists, for whom Piker typically stumps, continued to make headway in the latest political cycle. Legacy media has confronted these candidates, charging them to disavow Piker for his comments.

Among conservatives and PAC-owned Democrats, Piker is persona non grata, a hammer-and-sickle-shaped leftist boogeyman. Call him whatever you like. He was right about 9/11.

Wait!

Before you unsubscribe lest you be infected with my anti-U.S. propaganda, let me explain:

Piker’s detractors cast him as a hater of the U.S. who derived malicious satisfaction from the 9/11 attack, but it was a lie. His words were taken in isolation, stripped of their intent.

What he said, meant, and later expanded on was that U.S. policy and military actions in West Asia inspired bitter anti-U.S. sentiment in the region that ultimately manifested in the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil. You’re free to disagree with his assessment, but that is what he actually meant.

Piker later apologized for his poor choice of words, conceding that the “the U.S. didn’t deserve 9/11.” The people who died on 9/11 didn’t deserve what they got. Of course not. It’s wildly irresponsible and misleading to suggest, as his critics have, that Piker justified the deaths of innocent civilians. That’s completely false.

He was talking about the blowback from the U.S. government’s actions in the region. And even though his words were sloppy at best and recklessly callous at worst, Piker touched on an uncomfortable truth:

Terrorists aren’t born. They’re made.

The people who died on 911 were innocent, but the U.S. government was not.

To be clear, no U.S. foreign policy justifies the slaughter of innocent civilians. What the 9/11 attackers did was unspeakable, but it’s a grave mistake to assume that people arrive at such a drastic measure unprompted. People don’t simply wake up one day and decide to fly a commercial airliner into a skyscraper. Terrorism is a response to stimuli—a hateful, irrational response but a response nonetheless. It’s a symptom of a deep-seated grievance.

The grievance doesn’t justify the crime, but understanding the grievance is critical to understanding and addressing the threat of terror. Dispatching terrorists doesn’t solve the underlying problem. It only treats the symptom.

Unfortunately, the U.S. has learned precious few lessons from 9/11. We’re still mucking around in the affairs of sovereign nations, plundering, assassinating, and deposing foreign leaders under the guise of “justice,” “security,” and “democracy,” an unmitigated farce that is putting us in danger once again.

The actions the U.S. has taken since 9/11 has sacrificed “our better angels” without getting anything meaningful in return. The measures we took post-9/11, such as the passing of the Patriot Act and the creation of DHS and ICE, paved the way for the xenophobic, paramilitary, surveillance state we find ourselves in today.

Not even New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is exempt from such xenophobia. In fact, he is a perennial target of xenophobia and islamophobia, which, fittingly, has ratcheted up in the run-up to the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Rudy Guiliani, mayor during 9/11, recently said in a conspiracy-theory-laden, anti-Muslim rant that Mamdani should skip the ceremony.

“It offends me that he’s coming,” he said.

Not to be outdone, Vickie Paladino, a New York City councilwoman, in a tirade that made Guiliani’s rant sound erudite by comparison, said:

The people who fulminate against Mamdani and Piker are the same people who invoke “never forget” as a performative refrain without actually doing anything for the families of the 9/11 victims and the first responders. John Stewart, not an elected official but a comedian, has had to take up that mantle instead.

For years, New York City residents and families of the 9/11 victims demanded the release of documents related to air quality near Ground Zero. For years, officials withheld the information...until this week, when the Mamdani administration released 170,000 documents that revealed officials, including Mayor Guiliani, knew that the air near Ground Zero was dangerous to breathe.

So, please forgive my socket-breaking eye roll at the pearl-clutching directed at the errant comment of a Twitch streamer. I’m more concerned about the people who used 9/11 as an excuse to weaponize xenophobia, scale surveillance, and militarize the police, while concealing the hazardous particulates in and around Ground Zero.

Should Piker have said what he said? No. Does that mean he didn’t have a point? Also, no. But the people who vilify Piker do so because it’s easier to point fingers than to look in the mirror—something the U.S. government hasn’t done for a long time, if ever.

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(NOTE: The story below is based on a conversation I had with one of the readers of this newsletter. For reasons that will soon become obvious, she will remain anonymous. I refer to her in this article as “Diana.”)

A few years ago, Diana’s father received treatment at a hospital in the small town in Massachusetts where Diana grew up. Diana’s parents immigrated to Massachusetts from Portugal when she was four years old. The plan had been to get their footing and then move to Sacramento, which, they’d been told, had a similar climate to the small island town they were from.

They were farmers, and it was their understanding that Sacramento could support most of the crops they were used to raising, but immigrant plans have a habit of changing. They never made it to Sacramento. Decades later, Diana’s father sat in a hospital bed in the snow-laden Northeastern town that was meant to be a layover.

The floor nurse, also Portuguese, asked Diana’s father where in Portugal he was from. It wasn’t Lisbon or Porto or any other major city in Portugal, where people recede into the statistics. It was a small island where people knew each other by name. When he told her, the nurse rushed out of the room. When she returned, flustered, she spoke with Diana.

“Your uncle tortured my grandfather,” she said.

Diana’s uncle had been chief of police in their village under António de Oliveira Salazar, the notorious Portuguese dictator who ruled from 1932 to 1968. Diana’s uncle policed this little corner of Salazar’s regime much as Salazar ruled the country. As such, he earned a reputation for brutality. Every villager would’ve known his name. Between the last name and the name of the village, the nurse knew exactly who Diana’s uncle was.

Diana’s uncle was recruited into the police following military service, which served as a pipeline for Salazar’s police. He rose through the ranks quickly, eventually becoming chief of police in their hometown. The police tried to recruit her father, but he failed the test on purpose. Twice. He knew what they did, and he wanted no part of it. His other brother also evaded enlistment, which made Diana wonder if Salazar’s police saw something in her uncle.

Though Diana did not spend much time with her uncle growing up, since she left Portugal as a little girl, she remembers him as stern and egotistical. He enjoyed lording his success over others, for which, as chief of police, there was ample opportunity. Most people in the village, like her parents, eked out a subsistence as farmers, their immediate fates tied to the caprices of nature. Would it rain enough? Would there be enough wheat? As an unabashed sexist, he frowned on Diana’s education. Women were meant for housework and child-rearing.

In spite of these unsavory traits, Diana found it difficult to reconcile the man she knew with the stories she heard. He was known to torture villagers, beating them and sometimes locking them in an outhouse for days. One young man on a neighboring islet, a young man who routinely spoke out against Salazar, pilfered an orange from an orchard. Word got round to Diana’s uncle, who hopped on a boat to mete out justice. The owner of the orchard insisted he didn’t want any harm to come to the boy, but it was too late. Diana’s uncle had all the pretext he needed to teach a loudmouth boy a lesson he would not soon forget.

Why was Diana’s uncle able to get away with thuggish tactics? Why wouldn’t the villagers rise up against him? Sure, he formed an enforcement arm of Salazar’s regime, but this wasn’t in the heart of the regime in Lisbon. This was a small island in the Azores and Madeira, a pair of volcanic archipelagos 500 miles southwest of mainland Portugal.

Part of the answer lies in the Sisyphean reality of subsistence farming. The villagers worked tirelessly just to be able to have enough to live and eat. Little energy and time would’ve been left over to freelance as a revolutionary. Diana quoted Aristotle to underscore the point:

“It is also in the interests of a tyrant to keep his people poor, so that they may not be able to afford the cost of protecting themselves by arms and be so occupied with their daily tasks that they have no time for rebellion.”

Another part of the answer lies in isolation. The villagers weren’t just cut off from the rest of the country. They were cut off from the world, let alone the rest of the country. They had no point of reference. The radio was the only window into the outside world, but the programming was made up of Catholic services and an hour of “the news” at night, which was nothing more than Salazar’s propaganda machine.

Diana shared an anecdote to illustrate how cut-off the island was:

One day, a damaged submarine emerged in the waters surrounding the island, from which a handful of sailors issued, swimming to their shores. Turned out that was no ordinary submarine. It was a U-boat. The sailors were German. It was through these sailors that the villagers found out World War II was underway.

The last piece that kept the villagers docile was their lack of education. The highest level of education that could be achieved was fourth grade. The only way to advance beyond that was to leave the island. And there was only one sanctioned way to leave the island: Become a priest. One of Diana’s cousins became a priest expressly to leave and get an education. Once the regime fell, he renounced priesthood and eventually became a Supreme Court justice in Lisbon. Women had no such recourse.

Diana’s uncle softened over the years, especially when he became a grandfather. Diana was surprised to see her uncle pick up her son, which, in his youth, he would not have deigned to do, as he considered anything to do with children the exclusive domain of women.

That side of the family had three boys and a whopping ten girls, three of whom had no children, and in their old age lived in nursing homes. Diana’s uncle made sure his sisters wanted for nothing, paying for any provisions and conveniences they needed. As a younger man, Diana’s uncle was tightfisted. His generosity came much later.

In his last few years of life, Diana’s uncle was wracked with guilt and, as a devout Catholic, consumed with the idea that he was going to hell. He called his brother, Diana’s father, several times a day toward the end, begging for advice. How could he atone? Was he going to go to hell for what he did? Diana’s father pitied his brother, but he had no answers for him. That was his brother’s cross to bear.

Diana’s uncle lived to be 92 years old. Those last years were torturous. His family had issues. His sons got in trouble with the law. One of them committed a hit-and-run. When he was chief of police, he could resolve any trouble his sons got into, but when the regime ended, things changed.

It seems those last few years were a hell of his own construction. Is that enough to atone? I don’t know. I think it’s academic. The people he hurt don’t benefit from his pain. Would that nurse who cared for Diana’s father feel better because the man who tortured her grandfather lived in fear of perdition for the last couple of years of his life? Would she feel better if she knew that his meanness poisoned some of his children? I doubt it. Additional pain never wipes previous pain off the ledger. It only adds to it.

Diana’s father also lived to be 92 years old, but his were a very different 92 years. He raised his daughter, Diana, in a vibrant immigrant community in Massachusetts, which, at the time, included a sizeable Portuguese contingent. He and his wife encouraged their daughter’s education at a time when it wasn’t common. Most of Diana’s Portuguese friends didn’t go to college, but Diana proved to be an excellent student. They didn’t always understand U.S. culture.

One day, Diana saw a friend twirl a baton, so she wanted one.

“You want to twirl a metal stick?” her father asked.

They might not have always understood, but they supported her all the same. Diana went on to become a majorette. Not only did she go on to college, but she also collected advanced science degrees. She conducted research that would have major impact in medicine and technology. I can’t mention her contributions because they’re significant enough to identify her. She’s had a rich, wonderful life, thanks in no small part to her parents and their willingness to support that which they did not always understand.

Following the grisly revelation, the nurse composed herself. She didn’t take their family history out on her father. She was good to him, Diana said. I wasn’t there, but I suspect the nurse could intuit that, for reasons that escape even Diana, he was not like his brother. Or maybe the nurse was just a good person who didn’t believe in paying hate forward.

was one of the first people I met in France. Ahead of the move, I posted a forlorn Substack note in a bid to make friends abroad. Phineas was one of the beneficent few who obliged. A month later, he and I were in a café in Paris, sharing a coffee and a hot chocolate, talking about life in France and the political situation back in the U.S.

Before meeting him, I knew Phineas from his Substack, , which at the time was called Becoming French, a newsletter that “shed[s] a light on the challenges faced by immigrants, exiles, expats, foreigners and others who have found a home in France.” The newsletter, mercifully, in English, became my go-to resource for goings-on in Paris and France. Bonus: Phineas posts some awesome pictures.

When I started this Q&A series about why people leave their countries of origin, Phineas was one of the first people I thought of. Below are his thoughts about taking the plunge.

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1. When did you leave the U.S. and why?

I left the U.S., most recently, in August 2018 to attend a grad school program at Sciences Po, but that was just the most recent of a number of expatriations / migrations / whatever you want to call it. Before that, I spent a year in Toulouse, from 2015 to 2016, teaching English. The first time I ever left the U.S., I was three years old. My mom taught study abroad for a college in New York and she managed to swing a trip to Paris. After that, we spent almost all of my childhood summers here. I guess because of this, I never felt fully American but never felt fully French either. I left when I realized that the rhythm of things and the priorities over here made more sense for me.

2. Where do you live? What made you choose this place?

Paris. It’s the city where I feel the most at ease in the world. Whenever my train —even delayed like the one I’m on now — pulls into the station, I feel a sense of relief.

3. What was the hardest part about moving? In hindsight, would you do anything differently?

I still feel like my closest friends — a group of college friends who ended up living in New York at the same time as me for a few years in our early 20s — are in the U.S. It was sad to leave them and it’s sad to only see them once or twice a year. That said, I regret the other opportunities I could have lived abroad — in very different places — but didn’t, more than moving away.

4. What did you gain by moving? What do you appreciate most about where you live now?

Perspective. Both on the world and on the U.S. The U.S. is a world of its own and as such, sometimes people living there tend to view it as a universe distinct from and unattached to the rest of the planet. When you go abroad, the world feels bigger, but so too does the U.S. Each time I go back, I feel like I’m discovering it for the first time.

Like I said earlier, I most appreciate the pace over here. It’s more laid-back, even sleepier, but no less interesting or inspiring.

5. Is there anything you miss about the U.S.?

The open road. Last summer, my friend and I drove from Minneapolis, Minnesota to Laredo, Texas, routing ourselves through all of the cities on the way called Paris (not a joke, our favorite was Paris, Arkansas). The U.S. is vast in a way that Europeans simply can’t comprehend. This is good and bad.

6. What advice would you give someone thinking about leaving the U.S.?

Moving abroad is rewarding and exciting and fun, but also at times infuriatingly complicated (unless you have a lot of money, I imagine). You’ll have to navigate the Bermuda Triangle of phone plan, bank account and healthcare card. You’ll have to be ready to make a fool of yourself for the first bit. And you’ll have to accept that people — wherever you go — don’t operate like Americans. As my French father-in-law, a big outdoorsman and trail hiker, says: “Fuck the plan.”

Phineas’s Substack:

(Re)voir

Citizenship and belonging amidst the rise of the far-right

By Phineas Rueckert

Here are some previous Q&As with people who left their country of origin:

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The article below was originally published on June 16th on prismreports.org ahead of the June 30th Supreme Court decision that struck down Trump’s executive order and upheld birthright citizenship.

Hell-bent on ending birthright citizenship, Trump signed two more executive orders last Thursday, August 6, in an effort to weaken the 14th Amendment Citizenship Clause.

While the following article lacks the context of the Supreme Court decision and the latest pair of executive orders, the thrust of the piece is just as relevant as it was almost two months ago. The article exposes the Trump administration’s true motives for ending birthright citizenship and provides context for their refusal to admit defeat. To concede birthright citizenship is to concede the larger strategy. Trump, Miller et al can’t allow that.

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Trump’s push to end birthright citizenship is part of broader nativist strategy

The Supreme Court will make a decision this month on President Donald Trump’s executive order attempting to end birthright citizenship. Though it appears that the highest court in the country is poised to rule against Trump, the executive order represents a broader strategy: to control the ethnic and racial makeup of the U.S.

During oral arguments, the federal government hinged its case on the “jurisdiction thereof” language of the 14th Amendment, insisting that “illegal aliens” and temporary residents are not subject to the jurisdiction of the U.S. Even the Supreme Court’s conservative justices appeared skeptical of the government’s arguments. When the government’s attorney contended that modern developments such as “birth tourism” justified a restriction of birthright citizenship, saying, “We’re in a new world now,” Chief Justice John Roberts offered a terse rebuttal: “It’s a new world. It’s the same Constitution.”

As part of the public relations campaign to further bolster its case, the Trump administration has argued two additional points: one, that birthright citizenship codified so-called anchor babies, or U.S. citizen children born to undocumented parents, thereby facilitating chain migration. And two, that few countries in the world maintain birthright citizenship.

These claims do not survive scrutiny.

While many countries do not maintain birthright citizenship akin to the U.S., it’s an exaggeration to claim that the U.S. is unique. Most countries in the Americas have unrestricted birthright citizenship. Though automatic birthright citizenship no longer exists in Europe, conditional versions of jus soli, or “right of the soil,” do exist. For example, France first introduced jus soli in the mid-1800s. The formation of the European Union (EU) also obviated the utility of birthright citizenship, since EU citizens can move across the continent freely.

It’s also easy to poke holes in the claim that undocumented immigrants use birthright citizenship to gain a residential foothold in the U.S. A child who gains citizenship via birthright must wait 21 years to petition for their parents’ residency and eventual citizenship. For nearly a quarter-century, those undocumented immigrants would need to live on the fringes of society in order to evade detection by the authorities. Even a minor infraction could upend their lives, and result in their detention and deportation. It’s a preposterously inefficient and risky means of achieving citizenship.

With arguments against birthright citizenship wilting under the heat of logic, we should turn to the timing of Trump’s executive order to glean insights into his administration’s true motivations.

Trump signed Executive Order 14160 on Jan. 20, 2025, the first day of his second term. He is the first president to attempt to roll back birthright citizenship since Congress established jus soli by ratifying the 14th Amendment in 1868. It begs the question: Why now?

Answering this question requires a bird’s-eye view of the Trump administration’s approach to immigration, residency, and citizenship. When viewed together, his nativist governing comes into sharp focus.

The most egregious example of Trump 2.0 nativism lies in its draconian immigration enforcement, believed by many to be the brainchild of the administration’s immigration czar, Stephen Miller, also the architect of the family separation policy. Trump’s first year in office was the deadliest year for immigrants detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) since 2004. ICE detention deaths are on a similar trajectory this year.

The administration sidesteps these grim figures by claiming it’s rounding up “criminals.” Analysis by , a data scientist and researcher who uses data provided by ICE, consistently showed over the last year that as the population of detained immigrants has grown, the proportion of detained immigrants with criminal convictions has shrunk.

This statistic should come as no surprise, since ICE has made a habit of detaining people—noncitizens and citizens alike—without cause or due process. One of the most high-profile examples is Kilmar Armando Ábrego García, a Salvadoran man whom the administration detained and deported to CECOT, a maximum security facility in El Salvador notorious for its human rights violations. This was done against the orders of the Maryland Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court.

One arguing in bad faith might attempt to make the case that ICE isn’t targeting ethnic and racial groups but rather, the scaling up of immigration enforcement created a nation-sized dragnet that inadvertently caught innocent people. But it’s not easy to maintain this position for long, after the Supreme Court’s decision last year in Noem v. Vasquez-Perdomo that allows for racial profiling on a “massive scale,” according to the American Civil Liberties Union.

More broadly, the administration exhibits blatant double standards in its immigration policies, initiatives, and tactics. For example, last year after stripping 675,000 asylum-seekers from Afghanistan, Burma, Cameroon, Haiti, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, South Sudan, Syria, and Venezuela of Temporary Protected Status (TPS), this year Trump limited the refugee program to a record low of 7,500 people—6,665 of whom were white South Africans.

Proposed bills, executive orders, and memos during Trump’s second term have also shown that his double standard applies to U.S. citizens. Last December, Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, introduced the Exclusive Citizenship Act of 2025, legislation that would force Americans with dual citizenship to choose between the two countries granting them legal status. Though Moreno’s bill is unlikely to pass because of 14th Amendment protections, it’s a reminder that this administration and its acolytes perceive citizenship not as an unassailable right, but rather as a tiered system that should favor white people. Last June, a memo from the U.S. Department of Justice revealed that it would prioritize denaturalization, a process that allows the government to strip someone of their American citizenship. Historically, denaturalization was largely reserved for Nazi war criminals.

It’s no secret which groups of people will become targets of denaturalization efforts. In 1970, the Latino population in the U.S. numbered 9.6 million, or about 5% of the population. In 2024, that number reached 68 million, or 19.9% of the overall population. The breakneck growth of the Latino population fuels white supremacists’ paranoia of “the Great Replacement,” a racist conspiracy theory positing that hospitable immigration policies are part of a larger plot to “replace” white political power and culture in Western countries.

When viewed in isolation, the revocation of birthright citizenship in the U.S. is intellectual fodder for constitutional wonks. It may even make sense to moderates: “Maybe the child of undocumented immigrants shouldn’t automatically get citizenship?” But the Supreme Court case can only be seen as part of the Trump administration’s larger litany of racist and xenophobic efforts.

Trump’s campaign promises amount to a sinister agenda: to bar immigrants from entering the U.S. and drastically restrict the naturalization of Black and brown people.

Editorial Team:
Tina Vasquez, Lead Editor
Lara Witt, Top Editor
Rashmee Kumar, Copy Editor

Prism is an independent and nonprofit newsroom led by journalists of color. We report from the ground up and at the intersections of injustice. (www.prismreports.org).

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Last Monday, my wife and I flew to Madrid amid the first national emergency declared for a wildfire in Spain’s history. The day before our flight, we saw the apocalyptic headlines:

Two wildfires ignited and merged 30 miles west of Madrid. I thought about my mom’s cousins who live in the suburbs. I called my mom, who called her cousins. They were on vacation, safe and sound hundreds of miles to the northwest, ensconced in the cocoon of moisture that is Galicia.

Our attention turned to our upcoming flight. Was it safe? Was it wise? Was it selfish? What about the insalubrious air quality or inadvertent siphoning of resources away from the country’s multi-front war against wildfires? Could the conflagration breach the city’s limits?

Tío Benito assured us that they were making a big fuss out of nothing. The host of the apartment in which we were staying echoed those sentiments.

“Aquí en el centro hacemos vida normal.”
(“Here in the [city] center, we live a normal life.”)

She even sent us a picture of the blue skies in the city center as evidence.

One French foreign minister called the fires a “tragedy” while in the same breath urging tourists not to cancel their trips. Those words rang callous given the loss of vegetation, wildlife, human life, homes, and livelihood, but tourism in the Mediterranean during the summer does the briskest of business. The stakes are high.

Expecting 100 million tourists this year, Spain in particular is in demand. Its summer arrivals forecast is up six percent.

But my wife and I couldn’t ignore the news reports. The wildfires were not in control. They still aren’t.

We decided to cancel our trip.

Our host had some flexibility but not within the timeframe of rescheduling that the airline tolerated. In the end, we couldn’t cancel without throwing away more than a grand, so we flew to Madrid.

Upon our approach to the capital, the view from the plane was hazy, but I couldn’t tell if that was from the wildfires or if it was just a regular hazy day. In the city center, everything appeared normal, as advertised, except for one thing: The vanishing smell of potato chip bags burning in a campfire.

My family comes from Spain. Both my parents were born in Spain, as was my sister. A few years back, my sister hired a genealogist to see how far back our roots in Spain go: the 1700s, as far as we can tell.

Twenty years ago, I sought out the birthplaces of my mom and my dad: Belvis de la Jara, a little village south of Toledo, and Cañada de la Cruz, an even smaller, remote village in the foothills of the Revolcadores massif in Murcia. On this trip, I found my sister’s birthplace in the well-heeled Salamanca neighborhood in Madrid.

(My victorious picture below for reference, but please overlook the weird thing I’m doing with my arms, which appear to be operated remotely by a forklift operator.)

I had been to Madrid before, but my visit was so brief that it hardly counts. My ex and I, in our twenties then, checked into a hostel only to be promptly collected by my family upon hearing of our sorry state. Tía Pili negotiated an immediate refund with the hostel manager and ferried us back to her home in the suburbs. We saw a lot of Spain but little of Madrid.

Before this trip, I had only vague inklings of what Madrid was. The train station with a jungle inside. Late-night al fresco dining in a plaza overrun with restaurants and cafes. This time, I got a deeper sense of the city.

We stayed in las Letras, the literary quarter where titans of literature, such as Miguel de Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and Francisco de Quevedo, once lived, now celebrated throughout the district in stores, cafes, street signs, and novelty items.

We also had the good fortune of staying on the same block as the oldest flamenco tablao in the world. The flamenco performers mesmerized us: the adhan-like wailing of the singers, reminding me of the grainy records of La Niña de La Puebla my father used to play; the jazzy riffing of the musicians; and the triumphant, truculent stamping of the dancers. I’d never seen a deeper connection between singers, musicians, and dancers.

It was easy to fall in love with Madrid. The people were friendly, the food was invariably good, from classic Spanish fare to a comfy soup spot to the best sushi we’ve had in years, and the architecture rivaled that of Paris and Prague. The city was fun, friendly, clean, safe, beautiful, and easy to explore.

My only grievance was the heat, the third uninvited member of our travel party, which was extreme, surpassing 100 degrees on more than one occasion, and ubiquitous, since we walked almost everywhere. Many eateries, stores, and coffee shops offered little to no respite, either lacking air conditioning or keeping the doors wide open so as to render the AC meaningless. The heat was a constant reminder of what was happening outside the city limits.

I couldn’t help but feel a bit like the passengers in “Triangle of Sadness,” drinking champagne while the superyacht sloshed and bucked against the waves of a cataclysmic storm. As the Spanish countryside burned, my wife and I scarfed down croquetas and quaffed Cava.

More than 300,000 people have evacuated their homes in Spain, France, and Portugal. Now, Greece is on fire. Across Europe, more than a million acres have burned. For context, Luxembourg is 638,000 acres.

The current wildfires are the predictable consequence of arid climates and soaring temperatures. European countries broke records for extreme heat in July. This July was Spain’s hottest on record. On our return to Budapest, the same heat greeted us. While we were in Spain, Hungary broke a 105-year daily heat record for July 31st, rising to 39.4°C (nearly 103 degrees Fahrenheit) in the Újpest district.

Every year, heat records are broken. The global trend is implacable and politically agnostic. Earth is getting hotter. Climate change is happening, and it doesn’t give a shit if people believe it or not. The effects are knocking on our doors and moving into our basements. Larger wildfires. Bigger storms. Ecosystems askew. There used to be a season for wildfires. Now, they take place year-round.

In 2023, a couple of years before the start of our European adventures, I smelled a wildfire for the first time in my life. The smoke from Canadian wildfires drifted down hundreds of miles. The sky in New York turned a Martian orange-grey. The smell of smoke tickled my lungs.

I experienced a lesser version of that on our trip to Madrid. If we had been in New York a few weeks ago, we would’ve experienced the same or worse: It looked like someone had applied a “Dune” filter to New York City. Again, smoke from Canada’s wildfires wafted south.

When New Yorkers expressed alarm in 2023, Californians scoffed. “We deal with this every year,” they mocked. Sure, and New Yorkers deal with snow every year, but can we agree that if a blizzard hits San Diego, something is wrong?

We stopped calling the phenomenon global warming because generally people are not good at divorcing their personal experiences from a larger natural phenomenon. For the unlettered, every winter storm served as evidence refuting “global warming.”

The term climate change is less catchy but more accurate. The planet is warming, yes, but the effects of warming are the real cause for concern: Destabilized environments and more severe weather events, including hurricanes, droughts, and, yes, wildfires.

Meanwhile, we’re flying more than ever. July 23, 2026 was the busiest 24-hour period of commercial flights ever, with more than 153,000 commercials flights tracked.

But whether we’re traveling more by necessity or for pleasure, the truth is immoveable: We can’t run from this problem. In fact, running only makes it worse.

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Two months ago, my wife and I came to Budapest to do some recon for a potential move. We arrived three days after Péter Magyar took his oath of office as prime minister of Hungary, ending the 16-year rule of Viktor Orbán.

Now, three weeks into a three-month stay in Budapest, I learned that the Hungarian parliament voted to remove President Tamás Sulyok, who is widely considered to be an Orbán toady.

Prime Minister Péter Magyar's Tisza party flexed its two-thirds majority to invoke the 17th amendment to the constitution to get rid of Sulyok, Péter Polt, the head of the Constitutional Court, Constitutional Court judges older than 70, and deputies who have served three terms (barred from running again). The move decimates Orbán’s Fidesz party.

Beware when fighting the monster…

In his second term, which stretched unnaturally for 16 years thanks to some political fuckery, Orbán leaned into the quid-pro-quo style of governance characteristic of every corrupt government.

A lawyer by trade, Orbán used his knowledge to systematically dismantle the guardrails of democracy: He consolidated domestic media into a foundation run by his allies (KESMA), weakened the Constitutional Court, cued up EU contracts for his oligarch buddies, and installed his cronies across the government, effectively creating a mafia state.

Orbán was a dictator.

And yet, some fear that the current prime minister has gone too far in his quest to root out Orbán loyalists. There’s a thin line between the removal of corrupt officials and political recriminations, between repairing the pillars of democracy and rushing a nearsighted solution.

Benjamin Ward, deputy Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch, had the following to say:

How this critical transition in Hungary shakes out remains to be seen, but the U.S. needn’t wait for that eventuality to glean insights for its own struggles with a weakening democracy.

Lesson #1: The dictatorship doesn’t end with the dictator

When North Korea’s “Supreme Leader” Kim Jong Il died, his son, Kim Jong Un, picked up right where his dad left off. Dictators are able to consolidate power by promising power and riches to those who pledge loyalty to them above all else. Such a corrupt, self-serving network doesn’t spring up overnight, and it can’t be uprooted overnight either.

Magyar and the Tisza party understood that Orbán’s rule didn’t end with him. His acolytes were still out there. Lopping off the head of the snake was not enough. When Trump’s presidency ends, the Republican party’s fascist turn is not undone. Project 2025 doesn’t disappear. Dark money in politics remains. The plutocrats, technofascists, and puppeteers behind Trump will keep conspiring. Ridding ourselves of Trump is but one component of a treatment plan to which the U.S. has never adhered.

Lesson #2: The difference between reform, revenge, and justice

The concern about Magyar overstepping is understandable. Hungary doesn’t want to jump out of the frying pan only to end up in the fire. The focus should be on restoring checks and balances and reinforcing public institutions.

One of the biggest lessons of the Trump presidency, particularly the second term, is how much of what limited presidents historically has been political decorum. Sure, we have checks and balances, but if a president is willing to flout court orders, race through executive orders that challenge the Constitution, and empower federal agencies to do one’s bidding at the expense of due process and rule of law, then we have to reexamine the interweaving dynamics of the systems that adjudicate and enforce the laws of the land, including U.S. Marshals, immigration courts, the Supreme Court, presidential appointees, executive orders, and on and on and on.

It’s also important to differentiate between political vendettas and prosecuting crimes. The opposition will always cry foul, just as Magyar and his party are seeing, but under any regime, crimes are committed. They must be prosecuted lest other bad actors feel emboldened to do the same in a future administration. For example, ICE cannot get away with killing innocent people. If they do, we collectively accept state-sanctioned murders. Agents and those that empowered them must be prosecuted.

Orbán didn’t start out as a dictator. The other day, my wife made conversation with a taxi driver, who confirmed as much, saying that in the beginning, things weren’t OK. Were there perceptible signs of what he would become in the beginning? I don’t know, but by the time people got up to speed, it was too late, at least until this past May.

Trump’s consolidation of power is not as advanced as Orbán’s was, but what if his jokes about a third term ended up being not so jokey? He’s older, though. The specter of the further unification of executive power in the U.S. lies not with an old, visibly tired man. It lies with someone we may not even know yet.

Trump’s second term was more destructive than the first, and if we fail to heed the lessons of our fall into authoritarianism, Trump’s spiritual successor will be far more dangerous than Trump ever was.

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Dear ICE,

You murdered Lorenzo Salgado Araujo yesterday. You will pay for it.

Migrant Insider

ICE Killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo on a Houston Street Today. It's Using the Same Script It Always Uses.

WASHINGTON — Lorenzo Salgado Araujo bled out on Canal Street in Houston’s East End before 7 a.m. Tuesday, shot by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer during what the agency is calling a routine “targeted enforcement operation.” His family has not yet had the chance to call it anything at all…

Read more

4 months ago · 119 likes · 27 comments · Pablo Manríquez

I know you know it’s murder. Why else would your agents flee when they kill someone, as they did in Minnesota? Because they know they’re guilty. YOU know they’re guilty.

Why do you have boilerplate statements for deadly scenarios? Because the details don’t matter to you. Only the party line does. It’s a hell of a coincidence that ICE agents are invariable victims of people who “weaponize their vehicles,” for which the only credible method of self-defense, apparently, is discharging one’s firearm with the discretion of Yosemite Sam.

You goose-step into cities and pull up your masks and bandanas as if you were a band of outlaws suiting up for a train heist.

You cruise through neighborhoods in unmarked vehicles, snatching up people’s neighbors, and demand that citizens and noncitizens alike produce identification without returning the favor.

You drag people out of their homes, schools, and workplaces without cause or warrant, spurning due process, shitting on the rule of law, and wiping your asses with the Constitution—you know, the other bible you swear by but don’t live by.

You grab, grope, drag, beat, rape, and kill people in broad daylight. We know. There are videos.

You got away with it, so far, and that’s why you keep doing it. You do it because you can. The President of the United States is your autopen underwriter. You’ve got carte blanche. That must make you feel pretty powerful, damn near untouchable, am I right?

But all parties come to an end, and someone has to clean up the mess eventually.

I know what you’re thinking. You’ve been getting away with this shit for decades. Hell, has proven this over and over and over again. Why would this time be any different?

That’s true, of course, but I think you know deep down in your heart of hearts that you crossed the line further than you ever have. The bodies pile up. The evidence of your—ahem—indiscretions mount.

There are other skeletons, worse skeletons that we’re not even yet onto, in your closet, aren’t there? What happened at those concentration camps? Alligator Alcatraz. CECOT. What happened to migrants that disappeared? We’ll find out. When this regime crumbles, those skeletons will come tumbling out.

But that’s not why a reckoning is coming, and as sure as you put on your jodhpurs one leg at a time, a reckoning is coming. It’s coming because you bet on the wrong horse—a man who would feed his children to wolves to save himself.

I think what you may have overlooked, or at the very least underestimated, is Trump’s unblemished record of fucking people over. Everyone who has ever carried water for him ended up getting screwed: former lawyers, business partners, vendors, staff, his cabinet, confidantes, and political allies. People who ended up in jail, disbarred, disgraced, and more.

After the changing of the guard, you will be added to that list. No more masks. No more anonymity. The rest of us, those of us who see you for what you truly are, the foot soldiers of a fascist regime piloting a eugenics program, a not-so-secret police force doing a wannabe tyrant’s bidding, and murderers of innocent people, we won’t forget.

State and federal prosecutors are gathering evidence, biding their time until the day that your mob boss no longer runs a protection racket for you. “I was following orders” didn’t work before, and it won’t work later.

Enjoy your unqualified impunity while you still can. It won’t last forever.

Special thanks to for putting me onto the story about Lorenzo Salgado Araujo.

Some other articles about ICE:

• “Murder in Minneapolis”

• “ICE Emerges as Trump's Gestapo”

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Yesterday, the Supreme Court struck down an executive order that would have ended birthright citizenship, a bedrock legal principle ensuring anyone born in the United States is a citizen.

But the story shouldn’t be that SCOTUS saved birthright citizenship. It should be that Trump tried to get rid of it in the first place.

He is the first president to attack birthright citizenship since the 14th Amendment established it in the U.S. in 1868.

Birthright citizenship around the world

Trump has said that “no other country has birthright citizenship.” This claim, like most of what he says, is a wanton fabrication. For starters, most of the countries in the Americas have birthright citizenship—32 others, to be exact.

Other countries around the world have different forms of conditional birthright citizenship. It’s important to remember that countries and continents are organized differently and, therefore, cannot be compared directly.

For example, the formation of the European Union changed migration patterns and border laws in Europe. Most European citizens can travel freely across the continent, able to live and work with little to no restriction in any of the 27 EU member states.

Germany may not grant automatic German citizenship to a child born in Germany to Bulgarian parents, but it doesn’t much matter since they’re all EU citizens anyway. Apples and oranges.

A losing Constitutional case

Trump’s unfounded claim was likely a deflection of his side’s anemic Constitutional argument, reflected by the decision that went against him in spite of having a 6 to 3 ideological advantage in the highest court in the land.

But let’s say for the sake of argument that the U.S. was the only country in the world to grant birthright citizenship (it’s not even close to true). What happened to the “American exceptionalism” conservatives are always banging on about? Suddenly, being the only one to do something is not worthy of aspiration? Now it’s something to avoid? How convenient.

The birth of birthright citizenship

Alright, then, let’s consider birthright citizenship on merit.

The initial intent of birthright citizenship was to ensure that Black people, former slaves, enjoyed the same protections endowed by citizenship. Subsequent Supreme Court cases upheld the right, most notably in the 1898 case, the United States versus Wong Kim Ark.

Wong was born in San Francisco to Chinese parents. Upon leaving and returning to the country, the U.S. denied him reentry on the basis that he was not a U.S. citizen. The Supreme Court thought otherwise.

Chief Justice John Roberts, a conservative appointed by George W. Bush, wrote the following about Wong Kim Ark in his written opinion:

It was never about the Constitution

But this was never about the law. It was always about controlling who can come and who can stay. This administration has been hard at work stratifying citizenship—a trademark of fascist states.

Senator Bernie Moreno proposed a bill that would end dual citizenship; the DHS issued a memo prioritizing denaturalization, which led to an unprecedented denaturalization effort; and though SCOTUS scuttled Trump’s plans for birthright citizenship, the overall message is clear:

Not all citizens are equal.

If you naturalize, your citizenship is provisional, hence the specter of denaturalization. If you have more than one citizenship, you must renounce your other citizenship or lose your U.S. citizenship, if Senator Moreno had his druthers. And if your parents did not have permanent legal authorization when you were born, your citizenship is stained, at least according to opponents of birthright citizenship, most of whom started opposing it 18 months ago.

Birthright citizenship is the great equalizer: If you’re born in the U.S., you belong. No ifs, ands, or buts. That scares some people.

It’s the promise of a U.S. that never really was. The idea is nice, though. Clean slate. Equal footing. Lush opportunity.

The idea lives on, for now, though its signal grows ever fainter.

More from me on birthright citizenship:

Prism: “Trump’s push to end birthright citizenship is part of nativist strategy”

Salon: “My citizenship, up for debate”

¿401 Que?: “My Life Without Birthright Citizenship”

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Since moving to France, I’ve met a good number of emigrants from the United States, and because I write about immigration and the move my wife and I made to another country, I’ve also connected with U.S. emigrants on Substack, including this installment’s interviewee, .

I started this “Why People Leave” Q&A series because I wanted to learn why people leave one country for another. Even in the best of circumstances, it’s not easy. When people do something that isn’t easy, there’s a powerful motivation behind it. I wanted to understand those motivations better.

Below is my interview with , an author and survivor of Christian nationalism, about why she and her husband decided to leave the U.S.

(If you’ve moved from one country to another and want to be included in the series, please send me a message below. Note: the first few interviewees have been U.S. emigrants, but I welcome anyone who has moved to another country.)

When did you leave the U.S. and why?

I officially left the US for good on 5 November 2024, the last US Presidential election, but the decision was more than a decade in the making.

Before I met my husband, he had lived overseas in three different countries. In his thirties, he knew he wanted to leave the US when he retired, or before if he could get a fulfilling job. He didn’t plan to fall in love with a sheltered former White Christian Nationalist woman from the South who’d barely left the country.

We traveled the world for more than a decade before I decided to test my level of comfort with leaving the US permanently. In 2015, I applied for a writing residency in northern Wales and spent part of 2016 living in the UK.

I was hooked. I subsequently secured extended residencies in Switzerland, Ireland, Portugal, and Iceland. Residencies weren’t merely about creating; I observed the governments, took note of cultural values, and compared the pace of life with the US. Over time, I extended my stays because I lost creative time to detoxing from the US. I never understood how traumatic and abusive the United States is until I was able to spend extended periods beyond it.

Whatever party or tribe, the US values extractive capitalism. We left because it is inhumane to live in a place that tortures and divides people, steals our lives and creations for profit, and forces its citizens—We the People—to be a welfare state for billionaires and their enablers.

What made you choose the place you moved to?

Because of my work, I am the target of near-constant trolling and abuse. I don’t talk publicly about where we landed, other than to joke that I’ll be learning and butchering a new language for the rest of my life.

We chose to live in a strong democracy with progressive values. People are treated like human beings, not cog-serfs in the billionaire welfare state machine. We also value its quiet, boring nature, access to universal healthcare, and warm, welcoming culture.

What was the hardest part about moving? In hindsight, would you do anything differently?

The hardest part about moving is the uncertainty. Bureaucracy is real. It’s expensive. No matter how carefully one plans, she must always be prepared for detours, added cost, and delays.

If I could do anything differently, I would’ve left the US sooner. I was ready to leave by 2018, but my husband wanted to finish out his career in public service. We find ourselves unsettled at an unsettling time globally. I wish I’d listened to my gut and fought to leave earlier.

What did you gain by moving? What do you appreciate most about where you live now?

We take up space in a secular place. I appreciate that most churches are empty; most religious holidays are rebranded with secular names; and nobody talks about their faith. I’m not saying people don’t have faith. Instead, they understand its place in a welcoming, inclusive society. Having been indoctrinated in White Christian Nationalism as a child and teenager and doing decades of work to reject that sect, I don’t want to spend the rest of my life governed by White Christian Nationalist men who are billionaire puppets. I know what their control looks and feels like, and I don’t want anything to do with it.

Is there anything you miss about the U.S.?

I miss certain people. But my friends live all over the world. We keep in touch because we work at it collectively.

And as a lifelong Southerner, I miss certain foods and customs:

• A sun-warmed, silky South Carolina peach

• Buying shrimp at the dock on the creek or from a roadside stand cooler

• Scott’s Barbecue in Hemingway, SC

• The rotten scent of pluff mud

• The way Spanish moss filters sunlight

• Kopps Frozen Custard—the only non-Southern thing on this list. Ha.

What advice would you give someone thinking about leaving the U.S.?

Leaving the US is a personal decision. Many people believe the only way to fight what’s happening is to stay in the US. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve been condemned for leaving.

But we can fight for the world we want wherever we are.

If someone is in a vulnerable population—which in the US includes all Peoples of Color, immigrants, LGBTQIA+ and transgender people, all women, all who have ever voted against the ruling party, all who reject White Christian Nationalism, and all who oppose billionaire psychopaths—it isn’t disloyal or wrong to leave. You must live in your body; you have every right to protect your body and soul, your sanity and spirit. Maybe your gut is screaming at you to protect those precious things about your precious self.

Perhaps it’s time to listen.

Where you can find Andra:

Readers can find Andra at her best-selling Substack For Such a Time As This (formerly How Project 2025 Will Ruin YOUR Life.)

For Such a Time as This

A guide to decode the country America has chosen to be.

By Andra Watkins

Before she started writing about White Christian Nationalism’s fusion with government, Andra published several books, including her NYT best-selling memoir Not Without My Father: One Woman’s 444-Mile Walk of the Natchez Trace. Readers can find her books on her website (andrawatkins.com). (Her memoir is the most successful, but To Live Forever is her favorite.)

She’s also sporadically active on BlueSky (@andrawatkins.bsky.social)

Her work has also been featured in Newsweek, Salon, Lincoln Square, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, The Beautiful Mess by , Big Tent USA, Secular Arizona, and more.

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Previous installments of “Why People Leave” series:

If Idiocracy and Team America: World Police had a baby that went on to manage a strip club in Reno that is eventually torched by the mob for an insurance payout, we would get the current incarnation of the United States: Stupid, selfish, tacky, star-spangled-bannered, and mean.

What better way to exemplify these qualities than by constructing a cage on the South Lawn for grown men to bludgeon, lacerate, strangle, and break one another? Have Kid Rock perform. Just make sure to do a sound check. The bloodthirsty masses will love it, just as they did almost 2,000 years ago.

Do as the Romans

Following Emperor Nero’s depredations and excesses, the Romans built the Colosseum at least in part to pacify its citizenry and restore faith in the stewardship of Rome’s rulers. The gambit worked. It turned out that common folk loved seeing lions eat Christians alive and swords deposit the steaming bowels of gladiators onto the Colosseum sand. If religion is the opiate of the masses, violence is the alcohol.

Wag the Dog

Tried-and-true methods of mollifying the masses include finding a group to scapegoat, starting wars, and offering violence on a platter. Trump is either a student of history (nope), or he’s a natural tyrant (yep) because he’s ticked those boxes many times over.

Approval ratings are tanking? Start a war. Those pesky Epstein Files refuse to go away? Start a war. Start several. Deny they’re wars, and when it becomes clear you’re unable to accomplish your objectives, claim you ended those wars. People frustrated and angry about the runaway freight train that is inflation? Blame it on Biden. Or Obama. Or Hillary’s emails. Or ’s laptop. And when those old chestnuts are no longer shiny enough to distract the hoi polloi, give them human cockfighting.

A UFC Fan who is embarrassed by the UFC White House event

To be clear, I’m not particularly offended by the White House event, although I am skeptical of Dana White’s claims that it will not cost the taxpayers anything. The UFC is covering the cost of the production, but will it bear the brunt of the scaled-up security that will most certainly be needed? I doubt it very much.

I also have concerns about security vulnerabilities of a large-scale sporting event on the White House lawn. That’s a lot of moving parts. All that said, I like the UFC, to the certain surprise of whatever bleary-eyed MAGA trolls stumble onto this article. Contrary to popular conservative belief, some of us “soy boy” liberals actually enjoy a spot of sanctioned violence.

My 35th birthday party took place at a bar that played UFC 194, where I watched an ascending Conor McGregor starch the long-standing champion, Jose Aldo, in 13 seconds. My bachelor party was going to take place at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn for UFC 249, a lightweight championship bout between herky-jerky journeyman and perennial weirdo, Tony Ferguson, and Khabib Nurmagomedov, probably the greatest lightweight of all time. It would’ve been an awesome fight to watch, but it was April of 2020, and Covid had other plans.

In other words, I’m a fan, but there’s a time and a place. I wouldn’t watch a UFC fight in the library or in a church. I like video games, but I wouldn’t whip out a Nintendo Switch in a client meeting to get in a quick Breath of the Wild sesh while we talk deliverables.

It doesn’t have to be illegal to be trashy

There’s nothing illegal about it. There’s nothing wrong about it, beyond how people may feel about violence, even regulated, consensual violence, or the hyper-sexualization of the “ring girls,” scantily clad women who sashay across the bloodstained canvas holding an outsize posterboard with a number on it, in case anyone has trouble keeping count up to three (or five for championship bouts).

It may not be illegal. It may not be unethical (depending on who you ask). But it’s still trashy as hell. It’s an all-you-can-eat buffet at a rest stop. It’s a gas station burrito. A port a potty at a music festival. Hitchhiking on the Jersey Turnpike. Room-temperature Natty Lights. None of these things are immoral, but they’re not something to be proud of either.

Low-class event for a low-class president

No one should be surprised that a vain man would organize such an event for his birthday—a man with the most elaborate combover since Christian Bale in American Hustle; a man who paints his skin orange, bleaches his teeth the color of whiteout, and dyes his hair platinum blond; a man who tricked out the White House to look like Saddam Hussein’s palace. No, it’s for Flag Day, really! The only thing that surprises me is that it wasn’t called UFC Trump.

Buying UFC stocks leading up to the White House event

But why a UFC event? Why not a teen pageant? We know he loves those. Well, for starters, Trump is buddy-buddy with UFC President Dana White, a vocal supporter who has stumped for Trump on the campaign trail. Trump has also dabbled in fight promotion in his Atlantic City heyday.

There’s another reason, however, a more corrupt reason. With Trump, there always is. He bought stock in the UFC’s parent company in the run-up to the event as he was promoting it. The grift never ends. Why should it? There has been no venture in Trump’s lifetime that has been anywhere near as lucrative for him as the Oval Office, tripling his net worth since winning the presidency the second time.

Thank you, manosphere

This event is for Trump, but it’s also a tip of the hat to the people who got him elected: Men. Not just any men. Manly men.

Men who lift weights and hunt deer and drag race and hold crypto and build shit and close (ABC, motherfucker).

Men too strong for therapy. Men who drink like Hemingway. Men who lay down the law, who only lay their hands on women when it’s necessary, like when they don’t shut the fuck up, you know, like Sean Connery said. Men who shoot first and ask questions later. Don’t tread on me, brother.

Men who go after what they want. Who don’t take no for an answer. Who pull themselves up by their bootstraps, a physics paradox only they can reconcile.

Men who came here to drink beer and kick ass. Better not let that beer run out.

Guys, this Bud’s for you, unless, of course, it’s rainbow-colored.

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I met Kristin at a reading in Paris shortly after moving to France— well, “met” is a strong word. I listened as she read from a series that began as “Airbnb reviews poems,” which are hilarious and vulnerable, a few of which you can find here. In April, she published a wonderful essay titled, “Exactly 20 Years Ago I Was Going to Be the Wife of a Doctor,” in which she finds joy and beauty in the messy and nonlinear. When I decided to start this series, “Why People Leave,” Kristin was one of the first people I thought of, largely on the strength of this piece, which I highly recommend, dear readers.

Kristin D. Sanders is a writer, editor, and educator. She is the author of Cuntry, a finalist for the 2015 National Poetry Series. Her work has appeared in such places as Lit Hub, Longreads, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Bitch Magazine, Hobart, Columbia Journal, The Guardian, and elsewhere.

Below is my Q&A with Kristin about why decided to move to France. You can find links to her work following the Q&A.

(If you’ve moved from one country to another and want to be included in the series, please send me a message below.)

When did you leave the U.S. and why?

I was a digital nomad for a few years before the pandemic, and I came to Paris a few times (as well as Marseille, Avignon, Aix) for extended 3-month long visits. I made amazing friends and fell into the anglophone literary expat community. In 2021, a friend wanted to sublet her apartment, and I took the opportunity to get a visitor visa and officially move. It’s rare for such an incredible opportunity to fall into your lap, but also, I had done the work to create a life where I could seize that opportunity. I arrived in Paris on January 2, 2022.

What was the hardest part about moving? In hindsight, would you do anything differently?

I really, really regret not switching my driver’s license from Virginia to France within the one-year window after moving here. That was a huge mistake. If I ever want to drive here, I need to take the test—in French!—and it’s notoriously difficult.

The hardest part is leaving behind friendships and my family in the US and slowly watching some of those friendships fade. I think it’s a natural progression, but still sad. I talk to my family very regularly though, even though two are on the west coast (it helps that I’m a night owl!).

What did you gain by moving? What do you appreciate most about where you live now?

As a single woman in her 40s, I feel like this move was an investment in taking care of myself and my future. I now have the carte vitale (which was quite the journey!), a work visa, a freelance business in France: I see these as ways that I am taking care of myself as a single woman, while also contributing to the kind of society I want to live in, one where education, healthcare, childcare, and social services are accessible and prioritized. I see France as truly a “pro-life” society: they take care of mothers, of children, of educating their population, in stark contrast to the “pro-life” posturing of the Republican US government. I also feel much safer here. An acquaintance was killed in the 2015 Lafayette, LA movie theater shooting, an incredible musician and entrepreneur my age, Jillian Johnson. That really drove home for me how it can happen anywhere, to anyone. I think Americans harbor a lot of unspoken, even unacknowledged fear and anxiety about gun violence.

Is there anything you miss about the U.S.?

I miss wet bean and cheese burritos in a Mexican diner. I miss In-N-Out burgers. I miss my friends and their American optimism, positivity, and hustle. Sometimes I miss driving and talking to strangers in line.

What advice would you give someone thinking about leaving the U.S.?

Do it. It will be harder than you imagined, but it’s worth it. But also, explore different countries, visas, even just traveling and working remotely before picking a place. (I think France is overwhelmed with Americans at the moment??)

Here are some places you can find Kristin and her writing:

Part Poet, Part Guide

On being an expat in Paris, dating men around the world, being a freelance writer, and living the digital nomad life — written with a touch of poetry.

By Kristin D. Sanders

IG: @KristinDianeSanders

Website: kristindianesanders.com

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Previous installment of the “Why People Leave” series:

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Record numbers of U.S. citizens have left the States in the last year and a half, my wife and I among them. Because of the timing of our emigration, people assumed we left because of Trump. In truth, we left for my wife’s graduate program.

I’ve met plenty of U.S. emigrants in France. Some, like me, have been here less than a year. Others have been here more than 20 years. In writing this Substack, I’ve connected with people from around the world who left the U.S. I started to wonder why people choose to leave, so I decided to ask some of those people why.

Below is my interview with , author of The Conscientious Emigrant and founder of Conscientious Emigration™, about why she and her husband chose to leave.

(This is the first installment of what will be an ongoing series about why people leave. If you’ve moved from one country to another and want to be included in the series, please send me a message below.)

When did you leave the U.S. and why?

We left the US in September of 2022, due to racialized hostility toward my husband and I (as an interracial couple), rampant environmental destruction right near our home, and the suffocating cost of living. January 6 — the day that traitors attacked the US Capitol — coincided with the day we got our marriage license, and our first anniversary was stained by racialized hostility; these two incidents flipped a switch for me from “it would be nice to leave the US someday” to “we need to figure out how to get out of here.”

Where do you live? What made you choose this place?

We live on the island of Cozumel, on the Caribbean side of Mexico. I began vacationing here almost 15 years ago, and learned to SCUBA dive with a local-run dive shop here. As an ocean conservationist, being able to snorkel and dive was always a priority for me, and my husband quickly fell in love with it upon visiting in July 2022. That was when the window opened — we had an opportunity to move into a home here at the same time that our rent was rising in Florida. This was the “window.” I feverishly researched our visa eligibility while we were on vacation; when we got back home, we mobilized immediately and moved seven weeks later, residency visas in hand.

What was the hardest part about moving? In hindsight, would you do anything differently?

The physical toll of moving was most difficult; in particular, the drive. We decided to load all of our earthly possessions and our two dogs into our two-door Honda Civic and drive the whole way. It was extremely stressful. I wouldn’t say I would do it differently, however; in our case our dogs are simply too nervous to be in the hold of an airplane. I would make the sacrifice to our comfort again in order for the pups to feel safe.

What did you gain by moving? What do you appreciate most about where you live now?

Oh, we gained everything. I don’t actually feel any loss. Frankly, we hated living in Florida, and in the US more generally. The culture, the cost, the pace, the energy—all of it is better here. Cozumel, specifically, has a laid-back, “live and let live” culture which I really adore. When my husband and I are out together, locals treat us kindly and with indifference to our “race-mixing” which is a huge relief. The climate, of course, and the abundance of marine and terrestrial wildlife also make living here hugely calming, beautiful, and delightful.

Is there anything you miss about the U.S.?

No, I don’t miss anything about the US, aside from some of the people we have left behind. Not one thing. We have been back once, in 2023, and I couldn’t wait to leave. This mirrors the experience of many of my clients, who have told me they find returning to the US to be jarring, overstimulating, stressful, and devoid of the connection they have found abroad.

What advice would you give someone thinking about leaving the U.S.?

If you want to emigrate (as opposed to being a digital nomad or perpetual “visitor”), really assess what is available to you based on visa eligibility requirements in various countries; remember that immigration laws exist at the national level, so in order to manifest your desire to live in a specific popular city, for example, will be determined by the country’s immigration restrictions. Once you’ve narrowed those options down, map out your priorities: which places will be tolerant/accepting of your identitie(s)? Which places can meet your medical needs? Which places have cultural alignment with your values? Which places can you afford? There are almost endless variables to consider, but you need to identify what’s most important to you first.

No place will be perfect, so you have to decide what you’re willing to accept in exchange for improvements in other areas of life. This is why custom consultations are so important: no person’s assessment or path to emigration will be exactly the same. You may end up deciding not to leave at all. In fact, I hosted a great live chat with fellow migrant Dr. , co-author of the Stay or Go Workbook, designed to help folks navigate this threshold question. Emigration isn’t the right move for everyone. But first, you need to know what your options, needs, and priorities are in order to even assess the question intelligently.

If you’re thinking about moving to another country, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better resource than Elizabeth.

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Elizabeth’s emigration consultancy:
Conscientious Emigration™

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This week, my wife and I visited Budapest, three days after Péter Magyar, Hungary’s new prime minister, took his oath of office, ending Viktor Orbán’s 16-year rule.

I was curious to see what Budapest would be like after Orbán, widely considered to be an autocrat who systematically dismantled the guardrails of democracy while installing his cronies across the government, effectively creating a mafia state.

Hungary was at a crossroads: It could spiral further into full-blown dictatorship, or it could save itself at the precipice. The people of Hungary responded with a full-throated repudiation of autocracy, earning Magyar’s Tisza party a two-thirds parliamentary majority.

Would we see parades in the streets? Flash mobs? Street parties?

None of the above.

On our first day in Budapest, the city was empty, but as the weekend approached and the temperatures rose, tourists from across Europe appeared.

Spanish speakers seemed to be everywhere in District VII, Erzsébetváros, which is known as the Jewish quarter and as a nightlife nexus. The streets thronged with tourists at night. Restaurants teemed.

On our last night, we managed to slip into one of the two last tables at Gettó Gulyás, a cozy eatery serving up traditional Hungarian fare to locals and tourists alike. A quiet German couple sat next to us. Two tables over, a group of young Italian women caused a kerfuffle. In front of us, a long table of Hungarians, clearly longtime friends, hugged and ordered shots.

In other words, nothing was amiss. Budapest was a thriving, cosmopolitan city enjoying the bloom of spring. Was the label of dictatorship a scurrilous accusation? A canard? Propaganda? Was there no dictatorship after all?

Some say that Orbán losing to Magyar is proof that he wasn’t really a dictator because dictators don’t lose. This claim, however, gets a couple of things wrong about autocrats:

1. Autocracy is not binary.

   There is a range of power consolidation, maturing or degrading over time.

2. The end of a dictator isn’t necessarily the end of a dictatorship.

   The work isn’t over just because the figurehead is gone. Many of the loyalists who enabled Orbán are still in place.

To be fair, we were there only for three days, not nearly enough time to assess the state of the city or the country. Also, we have no point of reference, as we weren’t in Hungary when Orbán was in power.

I can judge by what I’ve read about Orbán and his regime, but I don’t need to be in Hungary for that. Any additional context I might get in person can be gleaned, as far as I can tell, in one of two ways:

1. Living there before or after Orbán’s rule and during Orbán’s rule.

   I wasn’t in Hungary for any of that, save three days last week, which disqualifies me in this regard. That leaves me only with the option below.

2. Speaking to people who lived in Hungary before, during and now, after Orbán’s rule. Which gives me two sources of insight: A taxi driver and a property manager.

The taxi driver

Our taxi driver from Budapest Ferenc Liszt Airport was friendly and polite.

He insisted on carrying our bags. He rhapsodized about his country. He even asked permission to use his cell phone to call his girlfriend. But when the conversation turned to immigrants, his mood darkened.

He complained about the EU’s open-borders approach to immigration. He proudly pointed to Orbán’s close relationship with Trump, citing Trump and Putin’s supposed support of Hungary reclaiming land from Ukraine.

It’s just one person, hardly a “statistically significant” sample, but it’s a reminder that autocrats, in spite of their dogged efforts to silence the voice of the people, still get their support sometimes.

The property manager

My wife and I went to Budapest on vacation, yes, but we were also conducting reconnaissance, since we may spend a little more time there. We found a property manager who specializes in short-term rentals. He showed us a couple of apartments and gave us a quick tour of the central District VI neighborhood.

As we were wrapping things up, his background came up. He had moved to Hungary from Belgium in 2010. The year jumped out at me.

“Wait, 2010? You moved here when Orbán assumed office the second time?” I asked.

“I came in with him and I saw him out.”

He smiled.

“How do people feel?” I asked.

“Relieved. It’s been hard.”

I didn’t press him, but he brought out his phone and pulled up a video that displayed what I thought we might see following the transfer of power: Thousands of people dancing and singing in front of parliament.

Was this what the end of a dictatorship feels like? I don’t know. I don’t even know if I could tell what the beginning of one would feel like, though I have my suspicions.

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The birth of a 40-year nickname

On the days my mom and I would take the bus, she’d treat me to a chocolate milk before school. There was a little take-out coffee shop across the street from our bus stop. She ordered, and I watched the man pump liquid chocolate into a paper cup with milk. The coffee shop was only a couple of blocks away from my school, but I always finished it before we got there. I have never tasted a better chocolate milk in my life. I don’t think I ever will.

I went to Holy Rosary Academy, a Roman Catholic elementary school in Union City, New Jersey. My mom worked there as a teacher’s assistant. The first year I attended, I wasn’t a student. The nuns just let me tag along since my mom couldn’t leave me with anyone. I was a quiet kid, so it worked out. I kept close to my mom and did the schoolwork.

At the end of the year, Sister Gertrude, the school principal, asked me if I wanted to go to the first grade since I’d done all the work. With no hesitation, I declined because I knew it would mean being in a classroom without my mom, so I did kindergarten twice. I was a mama’s boy. Still am.

My mom got the nickname “Miss Millie” at Holy Rosary. Her actual name is “Milagros,” which translates to “Miracles,” but none of the sisters who ran the school spoke Spanish, so they called her Millie for short. The name stuck. More than 40 years later, kids still call her Miss Millie.

The beginning of a 30-year business

In 1996, my mom and my sister started a daycare center. My dad could no longer be trusted to provide, though he never really could. My mom’s wages at Holy Rosary weren’t enough to cover all of our expenses, which forced her to juggle multiple jobs, including working the register at the local Dunkin’ Donuts. I got into the habit of doing my homework at Dunkin’ Donuts to keep her company.

She would close at midnight and then prepare the donuts, which took another two or three hours, only to get up three hours later to take me to school. One night, just before closing, a man came in and asked my mom if he could borrow some change. He was eyeing the plastic tip cup, which would fetch my mom a few measly bucks.

“You know what?” he said. “I’ll just take this.”

He snatched the money and left.

My sister knew something had to give. In addition to Dunkin’ Donuts and Holy Rosary, my mom worked at a daycare center after school and used her station wagon as unofficial taxi we affectionately called “The Ride” to drive other kids to and from school.

Since my mom already worked at a daycare center, talks of starting a business together naturally gravitated toward a daycare. My mom didn’t have money saved up; she was barely able to tread water. My sister, however, had managed to save $20,000 (today, it’s more than double that) working at a law firm in the city that she affectionately called “Jimmy’s,” which was the name of the principal, a kooky but good-hearted older guy. My sister used that money to open the daycare with my mom.

Now it was my sister’s turn to work multiple jobs. She would open the day care at 7:00 a.m., head into the city to work at Jimmy’s, go to the daycare after hours to do office work (financials, administrative, etc.) and, finally, clean the daycare for the next day. What was her reward? Grueling work with little return.

The daycare wasn’t a financial bonanza. The margins were too small. It wasn’t an easy business, either. Besides the nonstop work of taking care of small children, there were a lot of hoops to jump through, such as navigating government programs and state inspections, for example.

The daycare endured many trials, including Covid (childcare can’t be done remotely) and a betrayal by a former employee that crippled and almost shuttered the daycare, but it, like they, persevered.

The daycare might not have been a financial windfall, but it was turning point for the family. Without having to depend on my dad, my mom helmed the finances in our house. As a result, things started to go better for us.

My sister hasn’t worked at the daycare in a long time but without her, the daycare wouldn’t have happened. Though my sister’s path forward from the daycare was less straightforward, she ultimately found her way to her dream of becoming a novelist. If you have found any of this post interesting, consider checking out her website, since much of her writing incorporates elements from our upbringing and family dynamics.

A legacy of caring

This August, the daycare will have been in business for 30 years. During that time, my mother has taken care of upwards of 1,000 children, all of whom have all called her Miss Millie. She has taken care of generations of children, including one of my best childhood friends, Juan, whom she taught in kindergarten. Decades later, he sent his boys to my mom’s daycare. Hell, my mom even let one of my best friends and college roommate, Wythe, stay at her house, twice, one time without me. They started calling him Replacement Pablo!

She’s a fixture in her corner of New Jersey because she essentially raised it. That’s one hell of a legacy. There’s nothing greater than the love of a mother, and she shared that with an entire community. Knowing firsthand what kind of mother she is, I’m happy for them. They couldn’t have done any better.

More stories about family:

Latino Enough. Never American Enough.