Daniel Pipes will keep going until he finds a country that will greet us as liberators.
Iran is almost 4 times the size of California, is very mountainous, and has 90 million people. Even in the best possible "and then the people rose up!" fantasy, violent civil war follows (that would be fine with Pipes, probably, but that's not what he conveys here).
I think my general of theory of "American suburban brain has eroded any concept of place and distance" contributes to this. There could be a major riot half a mile from my house in Philadelphia and I likely would have no idea. If the people rise up and take Lancaster (80 miles away) it would mean nothing to me.
Staff at the nation’s largest Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility have placed bets on which detainee will be the next to die by suicide, according to new reporting from the Associated Press based on 911 calls and detainee accounts.
Owen Ramsingh, a legal permanent resident who spent several weeks at the Camp East Montana detention facility in Texas, told AP that he overheard a security guard talking about a betting pool for which detainee would next die by suicide. The guard said he had paid $500 into the pot, which would all go to the winner with the most accurate predictions on detainees harming themselves.
Without providing details, the Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told AP that Ramsingh, who was brought to the US at age 5 from the Netherlands, was lying about the suicide bets.
In January, staff at Camp East Montana called 911 to request emergency help for Geraldo Lunas Campos, a 55-year-old from Cuba. DHS described his death as an attempted suicide. A medical examiner later ruled it a homicide. That same month, staff at the detention facility called 911 to report that a 36-year-old Nicaraguan man died by suicide. The AP reports that “detainees attempted to harm themselves while expressing suicidal ideations on at least six other occasions that resulted in 911 calls.”
Once the site of an internment camp for Japanese Americans during World War II, Camp East Montana is made up of six long tents at the Fort Bliss Army base outside of El Paso. On an average day, the facility holds around 3,000 detainees who are living in harsh conditions: They lack sufficient food and often go without proper medical care, according to AP’s review of 130 calls made to 911. Those calls took place in just about five months—from when the tents were quickly constructed in mid-August to January 20.
Once the site for an internment camp for Japanese Americans during World War II……this script very much fits America. As I’ve said before, what the Miller concentration camp regime is doing is not an anomaly in America. It’s central to American racism.
With the presidential election of 2028 looming, Democrats will have a chance to decisively retake power. To do this, they are going to need a presidential candidate who can inspire the base and respect its policy preferences—and the base no longer supports unconditional support for the Israeli state as it is now constituted. If it does not align with the base, the party risks declining turnout in key states and perversely losing swing voters to a right-wing antisemitism redolent of the Lindbergh movement before the Second World War. But the war with Iran and a shifting consensus among their base will give aggressive politicians more room than ever before to change party policy.
The old, lazy mantra of a “two-state solution” seems almost delusional at this point (although, admittedly, so does a secular binational democratic state). But, at a minimum, an energetic, forward-looking policy of a Democratic administration must not reflexively co-sign on all Israeli aggression, depend on the very thin gruel of Israeli good faith, or require a Palestinian polity so enfeebled that it must accept all terms. Instead, it would insist on a pathway for Israel to become what Tony Judt once urged: a “normal state,” not a pariah, nor a new Sparta, as Netanyahu recently mused. It would apply the full weight of the U.S. government, in conjunction with the EU, G7, and regional Arab states, to compel just conditions on the parties conducive to Palestinian sovereignty and self-determination. It would recognize that Israel’s disenfranchisement and brutalization of millions of people of the same ethnicity on the West Bank is apartheid and would advocate and work to dismantle it. It would also cite the work of scholars of modern human rights and affirm that Israel—in a horrific and grim irony of postwar history—committed genocide in Gaza. It would acknowledge, or insist Israel publicly acknowledge, that it is a nuclear armed power. And it would, without fear or favor, apply U.S. law to Israel, rather than give it a winking carve-out.
Among the party’s leading politicians, who can bridge the conflict between the base and the elites, and synthesize a new position on Israel? And how much might it matter whether this politician, who would almost necessarily be the party’s presidential nominee in 2028, is Jewish? Below, we undertake a survey of some representative possibilities, noting their general qualities, but focusing on the issue of U.S. policy toward Israel and how that will influence the nomination fight. (For the purposes of this exercise, we do not believe that Kamala Harris, if she runs again for president, has much chance to win the nomination. Her opportunity to break with Joe Biden and change U.S. policy toward Israel has come and gone.)
After considering a lot of possibilities, they point to J.B. Pritzker as the most likely person to pull this off:
The person for this mission likely needs to have a foot in both worlds. There is one candidate whose particular identity, politics, and prominence put him above all the others on this issue: Illinois Governor JB Pritzker. (Note: Co-author Trip Venturella was the creator in 2022 of a tongue-in-cheek Twitter account called “Nomadic Warriors for Pritzker.”)
Pritzker is an affable pol, a plutocrat with some of the class-traitor instincts of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His Chicago accent and heavyset frame give Pritzker a kind of everyman quality. He is an outspoken progressive, having supported legislation eliminating cash bail, banning assault weapons, and prohibiting anti-union “captive audience” meetings in Illinois. He is also a scion of one of America’s most prominent Jewish families. The Pritzkers own Hyatt Hotels and sponsor the Pritzker Prize in architecture. The governor’s sister, Penny, is a former Obama Cabinet secretary who is now the head of Harvard’s Board of Overseers. Pritzker can run against the class hierarchy and privilege of the American political-economic-cultural elite—and, like FDR, he should. But it will never be said of him that he is not to that elite born and bred.
Pritzker has also demonstrated a profound commitment to the causes of Zionism and, especially, Jewish remembrance. He served on the board of AIPAC, and some of his closest advisers are AIPAC-affiliated. In multiple profiles, he has spoken of his work helping build the Illinois Holocaust Museum, an effort that he seems to regard as one of his life’s defining endeavors. Pritzker has credibility among the pro-Israel lobby. All of this would seem to make him an extremely unlikely prospect to forcefully shift party policy away from the status quo on Israel.
But in Pritzker’s case, his long-standing affiliation with the pro-Israel lobby—never a secret—doesn’t necessarily doom him. In response to the Gaza war, Pritzker seems to be revising his views about Israel, and his recent statements demonstrate, perhaps, a changing position. He has cautiously staked out a place on the party’s left flank, endorsing Sanders’s bill for arms sanctions, for instance. Unlike Newsom or Shapiro, he did not implement new state laws in Illinois cracking down on campus speech in response to the Gaza encampments of 2024. Tellingly, throughout his career, Pritzker has movingly emphasized the horror of the Holocaust—the extermination of European Jewry—rather than cheerleading for Israeli Jewish nationalism. In an extended interview with the Christian Science Monitor, during which he gave the reporter a tour of the Illinois Holocaust Museum, he noted that too little had been done to protect innocent Palestinians, a view he has now expressed in multiple statements. He was even more explicit on a recent episode of the popular I’ve Had It podcast, saying that as a Jew committed to upholding the values of social justice and people’s freedom, “I have to apply that equally to the state of Israel as I do to other countries that have committed atrocities.” From being an “unequivocal” supporter of Israel in the immediate aftermath of October 7, he has taken a much more skeptical view.
FBI data shows violent crime fell 4.5 percent in 2024, with murder plunging nearly 15 percent. Data from the Council on Criminal Justice suggests homicides dropped another 21 percent in 2025 across major cities, potentially putting the country on track for the lowest murder rate ever recorded.
Jennifer Doleac wants to change that. Doleac is the executive vice president of criminal justice at Arnold Ventures and a member of our inaugural Future Perfect 50 list. Her new book, The Science of Second Chances, makes a data-driven case that small, evidence-based interventions at key points in the criminal justice system can dramatically reduce recidivism — and that we’re leaving an astonishing number of those opportunities on the table.
I talked to Doleac recently about what the research shows. Here are five takeaways.
1) Instead of punishing criminals more, catch them faster
For decades, the default American response to crime has been to make prison and jail sentences longer. Doleac argues we’ve been focused on the wrong end of the problem. “My team at Arnold Ventures is spending a lot of time trying to shift the policy conversation from adding sentence enhancements and passing bills that increase sentence length, to solving more crimes faster,” she told me. “That’s something that not only works better, and it’s cheaper, it also has an opportunity for bipartisan support.”
The logic is rooted in behavioral economics. Most people who commit crime are heavily focused on the present; they’re not weighing the difference between a 10-year and a 15-year sentence. What does change their behavior is the probability of getting caught right now.
Doleac’s own research offers a striking illustration: when Denmark expanded its law enforcement DNA database to include anyone charged with a felony, future criminal convictions among those added fell over 40 percent in a study that focused on men ages 18-30. Not because these people were locked up, but because a simple saliva swab changed the calculus. They knew they’d be more likely to be identified if they reoffended.
“It’s really that reduction in recidivism that most excited me as a researcher,” Doleac said. “The opportunity to use the ability to increase the probability of getting caught as a way to change behavior and put people on a better path.”
2) Give first-timers a real second chance
This may be the most counterintuitive finding in the book: dropping charges against first-time misdemeanor defendants doesn’t lead to more crime. It leads to dramatically less.
Doleac and her co-authors studied what happened when nonviolent misdemeanor cases in Suffolk County, Massachusetts, were dismissed at arraignment — essentially because the defendant got lucky with a more lenient prosecutor. The result: a 53 percent reduction in the likelihood of future criminal complaints. A separate study in Harris County, Texas, found nearly identical effects for first-time felony defendants who avoided a felony conviction via deferred adjudication or dismissal. Their reoffending rates were cut roughly in half, and their employment rates rose by nearly 50 percent over a decade.
These are major effects, and Doleac told me she was initially skeptical. “If we reduce the consequences in some way, you’re probably going to see some people commit more crime. And so the question is just, what’s the cost-benefit, right?” she said. “And then it just turned out to be this massive drop in crime, costing less money, taking less time, and leaving everybody better off.”
Why does this work? The mechanism appears to be the criminal record itself. Once you’re arraigned, that charge is visible to employers and law enforcement — even if the case is eventually dropped. “It makes it harder to get a job or keep a job, harder to get housing,” Doleac explained. For first-timers, avoiding that first record keeps them on a path where they can still find work and stability.
3) Sweat the small stuff
Some of the most effective interventions in Doleac’s book are almost absurdly simple.
In New York City, researchers found that about 40 percent of people issued a summons for low-level offenses missed their court hearings — often not because they were fleeing justice, but because the instructions were confusing and people forgot or couldn’t get there. Redesigning the paperwork cut failures to appear by 6 percentage points (a 13 percent reduction), and text reminders raised appearance rates from 62 percent to 70 percent (8 points.) That matters because a missed hearing typically triggers an arrest warrant and new charges, pulling people deeper into the system over what might have started as an open-container violation.
In Johnson County, Kansas, outreach workers simply called people leaving jail who screened positive for mental illness and offered to make them a health care appointment. That was it — a phone call and an appointment. No follow-up, no hand-holding. That “warm handoff” reduced the likelihood of another jail booking (a proxy for rearrest) by 17 percent over the following year, at a cost of $15 per person. As the book puts it, these are examples of how small shifts in information and access — what economists would call changing incentives on the margin — can divert people away from the system at a fraction of the cost of incarceration.
4) Test everything — even the popular ideas
Doleac’s commitment to evidence cuts in every direction, and some of her findings have upset people on both the left and the right.
The most prominent example is her research on “Ban the Box” — the popular policy preventing employers from asking about criminal records on job applications early in the hiring process. The goal was to help people with records get hired. The unintended result was the opposite.
“Economists look at that and they’re like, wait, you didn’t actually change any of the underlying incentives involved,” Doleac told me. “Employers are not just going to treat everyone equally now — they’re going to try to guess about the information that they wish they could see. And in the United States, criminal records are highly correlated with race.”
Her study found that Ban the Box increased racial gaps in employment, reducing job prospects for young Black men. The effect was particularly felt by those who didn’t have a record, and who could no longer signal that fact to employers. Subsequent research found the policy wasn’t even helping the people it was designed for. But by the time the evidence came out, “there was a really established Ban the Box lobby, whose jobs depended on not being convinced by the evidence, and it became very difficult to shift that.”
The broader lesson isn’t that reform is hopeless — it’s that good intentions aren’t enough. Policies need to be tested rigorously, and policymakers need to be willing to pivot when the data says something isn’t working.
5) The reform window is open — for now
Falling crime rates create a paradox. On one hand, less fear means more political space to experiment with smarter approaches. On the other, there’s a risk of complacency.
“You could imagine everyone saying, ‘Okay, good, that’s over,‘” Doleac said. “But maybe part of the lesson here is when we all try really hard to reduce crime, we can do it. And crime is still, even if it’s not a problem in your neighborhood right now, it’s a problem in a lot of neighborhoods.”
The reason Doleac is optimistic has less to do with the data and more to do with what she’s seeing on the ground. “I now spend a lot of time talking to state lawmakers,” she told me. “And that is just a very different world from the cable news political conversation.”
These lawmakers are part-time, understaffed, and trying to solve real problems in real communities.
“When I took this job, I really thought a lot of the fights would be over whether we believe the evidence or not,” she said. “What I’ve learned is it’s a much more human problem — policymakers and researchers just do not know each other.”
That bipartisan potential — on issues like improving clearance rates, testing what works in reentry, and reducing unnecessary prosecution — may be the most underappreciated good news in criminal justice today. “We might not know why there are big swings in crime,” Doleac said. “But we can point people in the right direction. It’s not just random chance, and we don’t just have to cling to our theories. We can go out and test them.”
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Every once in awhile, we get a bit of terrible code, and our submitter also shares, "this isn't called anywhere," which is good, but also bad. Ernesto sends us a function which is called in only one place:
The "one place", obviously, is within itself. This is the Google Search definition of recursion, where each recursive call is just the original call, over and over again.
This is part of a C# service, and this method shuts down the server, presumably by triggering a stack overflow. Unless C# has added tail calls, anyway.
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Born in 1906 in London, Abraham Birnbaum grew up a Jewish immigrant family from Poland which changed its name to Beame at some point. It wasn’t quite so common for fleeing Jewish families to find political and economic safety in the UK as it was in the Americas, but it definitely happened. But just a few months after the boy was born, the family moved to New York and into the tightly packed Jewish quarters of the Lower East Side, at that time the most densely populated neighborhood in the world. Beame was a good student and his parents pushed education. So he graduated from the local schools and then was onto City College in the Business and Civic Administration school, graduating in 1928.
By the late 20s, opportunities for New York Jews were a lot more than what their parents had when they came over and Beame became an exemplar of this. He already started an accounting firm in college and he kept that going while also teaching accounting at a Queens high school. He did that from 1929 until 1946, while also teaching some classes at Rutgers during World War II. So this was a guy that was doing quite well for himself but wasn’t too remarkable as he approached his 40th birthday. Just a good American success story.
But Beame was also interested in Democratic Party politics and was a guy in the local machine. So were lots of guys so this isn’t that revelatory either. Despite teaching in Queens, he lived in Brooklyn and was part of that Democratic machine of that borough. But he was super capable. He had his firm, he had a good patronage network of his own just from teaching for so long, and so the machine started hiring him to do bigger tasks. In 1946, he was named the city’s assistant director of the budget, which was a huge job. He got promoted to the actual director in 1952 and held that position until 1961. Then he became city comptroller from 1962-65 and again from 1970-73.
Of course these were tough times for New York. The city was changing rapidly. Industry was fleeing. The nation’s housing policy strongly urged ethnic whites to flee the city for the suburbs and provided very real incentives to do so, such as home loans that were available at much lower costs in all-white areas through the redlining policies of the Federal Housing Administration, not to mention the freeway building mania after the Highway Act of 1956 provided speedy roads to get them back into the city to work. This all meant that the city’s tax base was dropping while larger parts of the city were turning into ghettos. Crime was on the rise and city finances were sketchy. So yeah, no easy task for Beame to manage this stuff! Beame had one good way to handle matters–work with the unions. For years, Mike Quill would rant and rave about bringing his transit workers out of strike but it never happened because he and Beame understood each other quite well. They would cut a deal and it would be good for the workers. Same with the garbage workers and other municipal workers.
Beame was such an effective player in the New York Democratic machine that people started talking about him as a mayoral possibility. He got the nomination in 1965. But that year, the city’s voters chose the elite rich liberal Republican John Lindsay instead. Lindsay was a good man in a lot of ways. But he was totally and completely out of touch with the working class. The strike that Quill had ranted about for years finally happened when Lindsay. who like any Republican did not like unions, tried to crack down on Quill’s TUWA and the subway workers brought the city to its knees. The garbage workers did the same thing. When Lindsay backed student protestors, the Hard Hat Riots led by revanchist building trades leader Peter Brennan not only beat up hippies, but rioted on City Hall for the flag being at half staff over the killing of the kids at Kent State. Basically, Lindsay was massively in over his head.
So in 1973, Democrats were in good shape to win the mayor again. It was a highly contested primary, as New York politics often are, and Beame won 34% of the vote, which was enough for him to win the nomination. He then won the general, making him the first Jewish mayor in the city’s history. But the conditions that New York had faced for decades were culminating in the 1975 fiscal crisis, when Gerald Ford refused to bail out the city. Beame did what he could. He knew things had to change. He cut the budget and laid off workers, attempting to balance the budget and make Washington happy. But it was just too much for him to deal with. Probably the city’s finances were too much for anyone to deal with in 1975. Then in 1977 came the legendary blackout, which shut down the city’s power structure for a full day in the middle of the summer. This was also the Bronx in Burning era, where slumlords were burning buildings for the insurance.
Beame later was seen as a bad mayor by many, but I think that’s a bit unfair because the conditions were so, so rough for anyone. He did balance the budget though. Whether that’s really that laudable, I don’t know. But who was going to handle this any better?
Now, not really being an expert on Beame, I decided to consult the archives of a true expert, our friend, the late great Steven Attewell. One of the last things he wrote for us was his ranking of recent NYC mayors. Here’s what he said about Beame:
Abe Beame (1974-1977):
The first (observant) Jewish mayor of NYC, Beame was a man tortured by the contradictions between his desire to maintain NYC’s social democratic traditions and the awful economic situation he inherited. Beame became mayor during the 1973-1975 recession, which was at the time the worst since the Great Depression, and pretty much immediately had to deal with the NYC Fiscal Crisis, and was also mayor during the 1977 Blackout because clearly the Fates just fucking hated this guy.
If Lindsay was hated by white people for being too friendly with black people, Beame brought white people and black people together in their hatred of him for his public sector layoffs, his wage freezes, and his cuts to public spending. And while it’s true that Beame absolutely adopted the logic of austerity and should be criticized for that, it should also be remembered that he was dealing with a well-organized and highly politicized capital strike that was backed up at the Federal level by the Ford Administration.
Verdict: kind of an asshole, but largely because he got mugged by Wall Street and the White House.
Seems about right to me.
Beame lived forever and basically spent his later life as a lobbyist and doing investment banking. He died in 2001, at the age of 94.
Abe Beame is buried in New Montefiore Cemetery, West Babylon, New York.
If you would like this series to visit other American mayors, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Carl Stokes is in Cleveland and Samuel “Golden Rule” Jones is in Toledo, Ohio, Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.
It often feels like people fall into one of two categories: those who throw things away easily, and those who hold onto everything. For those of us who fall into the latter category, tasks like spring cleaning and downsizing can be a challenge, especially when you take into account the amount of stuff we as Americans tend to accumulate.
In fact, 71 percent of Americans say they buy things they already have because they can’t find the original in all of their clutter. And as baby boomers age, they and their children are trying to get a handle on all the things that have accumulated between them.
So what’s the difference between someone who might have a few too many things and someone who could be considered having a hoarding problem?
Mary Dozier is a clinical psychologist and professor at Mississippi State University. She studies hoarding disorder and specializes in intervention to help older adults with hoarding problems, and she says that at the end of the day, it’s subjective.
“The level of clutter that one person finds to be completely functional, another person might find that they can’t use their home the way they want to anymore,” she told Vox. “That’s how I always think about it: is the level of clutter keeping you from using the home how you would like to use it?”
How can we learn to get rid of the clutter in our lives? And when should we hold onto things? Dozier answers these questions and more on the latest episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast.
Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.
You work with people who hold on to too much stuff in a way that really limits them and impacts their lives in a negative way. But I think a lot of us struggle to manage our things. Why do we hold on? What’s going on with us?
I think of the items we have as an external manifestation of ourselves. We tend to hold onto things from either our past or family members’ past because it gives us this sense of where we’ve come from. But we also often hold onto things because of the promise of who we could be.
The silly example I have from my life is a pasta maker. It’s embarrassing, but a whole decade ago, I took a pasta-making class with my husband, and in the class, it was really easy, and so we were like, “We’re definitely going to go home and make pasta.” We tried it once. It was not easy. And I think some of those dreams are easier to let go of than others.
How often is throwing everything out the answer? Like, should we just throw that pasta maker in the garbage?
I felt my heart rate go up when you said that. Truthfully, one of the things we know is that when people have really, really severe hoarding problems, it’s not safe for them to be in their home.
Sometimes what has to happen is this massive cleanout, but it’s an incredibly traumatic thing that it’s the same kind of a PTSD response as if you lost your home in a tornado, because in essence, you did. A tornado swept through your home and took everything away.
I know that there’s a broad spectrum of minimalism to maximalism, but I think I’m a fan of keeping the things around us that help us feel like who we are. It’s that external way that we present the world, whether it’s through our clothing or our accessories or the clutter that we have in our handbags. The things that we choose to keep on ourselves or to keep in our home signal to the world of who we think that we are.
I’m curious if things like the Marie Kondo method or any of those other kinds of minimalist decluttering hacks work for the people that you help. Is it that simple or is there a little more there?
I think there’s more to it, and especially to the idea of sparking joy. If you put a puppy in front of me, I’m going to say this puppy is sparking some joy right now. There’s a difference between happiness and fulfillment.
I always encourage people to go through your clutter and think about what you want to keep and what you want to let go of. Starting before you even do that, ask yourself what are your values? What do you care about in the world? What’s important for you in a broader sense? And then as you’re going through these items, thinking through if that item is consistent with those values.
You don’t have to hold onto something out of guilt. If somebody gives you a present and you don’t want it, that’s okay. It doesn’t say anything about you or your friendship with that person to not keep that item. That guilt shouldn’t be part of why you’re holding onto things.
In your opinion, what are some of the good reasons not to get rid of stuff?
Come back to that sense of what this item is doing for you. Is it that this is the one thing that seeing it gives you that connection to your grandfather? I think sometimes people get lost in, “I’m going to hold onto everything that reminds me of my grandfather. I’m going to hold onto everything that’s about this dream I could be.” Try to think through why you keep things and how many of those things you need to keep.
Are there ways that we can reframe clutter to better serve us?
I think it can be helpful to take that step back and think, “If there wasn’t anything in this home, what would I want to be in here?” Everything that you keep, you’re making a decision to keep, and sometimes people default to that decision because it’s hard to think through.
But you’re still making that choice. That inaction in itself is still an action, which I think is probably one of those broader truths about life. Are you staying in a relationship because you’re choosing to be in that relationship every day, or are you staying in the relationship just because it’s what you’ve been doing? You can kind of think about our relationships with our items.
I think as boomers age and younger generations start to get more of their stuff it can be like, “What do you do with it?” Do you have any advice for that?
There’s something called Swedish Death Cleaning. I don’t know if you’ve come across it, but it’s basically putting the responsibility on the baby boomers: They’re the ones that should be going through their things before we’re inheriting it. It’s this idea of cleaning out your things before you die.
It’s something that I deal with a lot of my patients that I’ve treated. These older adults who will say things like, “I could get rid of these things, but I want to make sure it goes somewhere where it’s going to be appreciated. I want my daughter to inherit my wedding china but I know that right now she doesn’t want it.” And so they’re holding onto it as this responsibility for it. Our responsibility is to people, but not necessarily to things.
Is it possible to be a happy maximalist?
Absolutely. It comes back to if it’s dysfunctional or not. If your home is filled to the brim, but you’re living a healthy, happy life in that environment, that’s absolutely okay.
It’s all about the subjectivity of it. Just because there might be a current cultural norm for minimalism or — I know cottagecore was in for a while — these trends come and go, but think about what’s your truth of how you like your space to be.
Are you someone who likes a completely blank wall, or do you want it to be gallery style? I think whatever somebody’s truth may be is good if you’re healthy, if you’re happy, if it’s not hurting anyone.
A sign warning hikers of bears along the Fujiyoshida Trail on Mount Fuji. | Yiming Chen/Getty Images
It’s a scene from a nightmare: You’re shopping at the supermarket on a normal fall evening, and suddenly a hungry bear walks in and starts smashing things.
This scene has become a reality in parts of Japan. Last year, in a city north of Tokyo, an adult bear entered an open grocery store, “rampaged” through the sushi section, and, according to a store employee, knocked over and smashed a pile of avocados. The animal became agitated and injured two people, local officials said.
Other stories of recent bear encounters in Japan come to a more harrowing end. In October, local police in Iwate Prefecture, a region in northeastern Japan, reported that a man was out foraging mushrooms in the forest when he was killed by a bear. A few months earlier in a different region, a bear killed a hiker — and data from his smartwatch later revealed frightening details surrounding his death.
These examples point to one fact: Japan has a bear problem, at least in the north.
In 2025, bears killed more than a dozen people in the country and injured more than 200 others. That’s way up from the previous record, set in 2023, of six deaths. The threat grew so severe last fall — when bears are out looking for more food in preparation for hibernation — that the government called in the military, deploying troops to help trap bears in the northern prefecture of Akita, the epicenter of the attacks. In November, meanwhile, the US embassy in Tokyo issued a rare “wildlife alert” warning US citizens to watch out for bears.
Most of the recent incidents involved Asiatic black bears, which are not normally aggressive, according to Hengjun Xiao, an environmental researcher at Japan’s Keio University. That makes what he describes as the recent “bear crisis” all the more extraordinary.
So what’s going on?
Share your feedback
Do you have a story tip or feedback on our reporting? Reach out to benji.jones@vox.com.
That’s a question that Xiao, a doctoral researcher, and his colleagues tried to answer in a new paper, published earlier this month. It offers a compelling answer — and a clear warning, revealing an unexpected consequence of our changing climate.
The strange connection between clouds and bear attacks
Scientists and spectators previously proposed a range of explanations for the uptick in fatal bear attacks. Some have suggested that as Japan’s population ages, fewer and fewer people are living and farming in the countryside around cities. That has allowed natural vegetation — i.e., bear habitat — to grow back, meaning bears are inhabiting land closer to human settlements.
Other people have pointed out that the number of hunters in Japan is shrinking, too: There are around half as many licensed hunters in Japan today as there were in 1970. So bears are losing a predator of their own.
These reasons are useful but incomplete — they don’t explain why black bears are attacking people, or why the number of incidents exploded so much last year.
Xiao’s study helps fill in the gaps. By analyzing climate and satellite data, Xiao found that a weather anomaly tied to climate change may explain the deadly surge.
The details are complex, but the new paper — as well as a much lengthier, unpublished study that’s currently under peer review — suggests that climate change is weakening winds, known as the westerlies, that bring dry air into Japan and prevent moist air from the Pacific from flooding in. That’s making northern Japan cloudier.
With more clouds, less light reaches the forest. And this is key: Without light, forests fail to produce young shoots, nuts, and other foods that bears rely on, the study argues. That leaves bears hungry and likely to venture into human settlements in search of sustenance. Last year, Akita, the epicenter of bear attacks, “endured one of its darkest springs in recent memory,” the authors write, and beech trees in northern Japan produced almost no nuts.
Remarkably, this research essentially suggests that an abundance of clouds — a drop in sunlight — fueled the recent bear attacks in Japan. What’s more is that Japan should expect more of this forest-dimming phenomenon in the years to come, Xiao said, as the planet warms.
“We are now at a critical point,” Xiao told Vox. “The bear attacks last year are just a warning. There will be more and more of this sort of thing in the future because of the increasing of clouds.”
A warning of what’s to come
Rising global temperatures impact the planet in a number of well-known ways, from fueling extreme wildfires and hurricanes to raising sea levels. But some of the consequences of climate change are more hidden — and they include a spike in human-wildlife conflict.
Japan’s bear crisis is just one example of many, said Briana Abrahms, a researcher at the University of Washington who studies human-wildlife interactions. “This case in Japan is really indicative of a broader global pattern,” said Abrahms, who was not involved in the new research.
A few years ago Abrahms published a paper showing how climate change is amplifying human-wildlife conflict around the world — by altering where animals live, when they’re active, and how they behave. During droughts, for example, elephants have entered villages searching for water. Forest fires, meanwhile, have pushed tigers closer to human settlements. And marine heat waves can alter whale migrations, heightening the risk of ship collisions.
Similarly, rising temperatures can affect human behavior in ways that make us more likely to encounter wildlife, Abrahms says. When crops fail during an extreme drought, for example, farmers might instead forage for food in nearby natural forests, where they’re more likely to encounter dangerous animals like bears.
“It’s really important for people all around the world — whether they live in the US or Japan or elsewhere — to be aware of these connections between climate events and changes in human-wildlife interactions,” Abrahms said. “Knowing that connection with climate can help us anticipate where and when conflicts are more likely to arise.”
Born in San Antonio in May 1940, Meyers rose to prominence in the 1960s as a founding member of the Sir Douglas Quintet alongside longtime friend Doug Sahm. The band gained national attention during the British Invasion era, when many listeners mistakenly believed the Texas group was from England.
“Everybody thought they were from Britain,” recalled Henry Pena. “When they got there, they saw a bunch of kids from Texas and said, ‘What’s going on here?’ Well, we’re here already, you might as well let us play.”
Meyers became widely recognized for his signature use of the Vox Continental organ and his ability to blend rock, conjunto and Tex-Mex influences into a sound that became uniquely tied to South Texas.
With the Sir Douglas Quintet, Meyers helped produce several enduring hits, including “Mendocino,” “Velma from Selma,” “Nuevo Laredo” and the iconic, “(Hey Baby) Qué Pasó.”
“San Antonio is missing him now,” Pena said. “We’ve got to pay homage to him because he was a hero for all of us here in the music industry – a big contributor.”
In the 1990s, Meyers co-founded the Grammy-winning supergroup Texas Tornados with Tex-Mex stars Flaco Jiménez and Freddy Fender, further cementing his legacy in the genre.
Accordionist Santiago Jiménez Jr., brother of Flaco Jiménez, remembered Meyers as both a gifted musician and a generous friend.
“We lost a friend, a musician, an icon,” Jiménez said.
Friends and colleagues also described Meyers as humble despite his fame. Treviño said the musician was frequently recognized in public but never turned away fans.
In addition to his two great bands, he was also a signature instrumentalist on Dylan’s two greatest post-1980 albums. R.I.P.
Вместо эпиграфа: "Миф есть описание действительного события в восприятии дурака и в обработке поэта". Так вот, вашему вниманию предлагается вторая часть: восприятие дурака.
Напомню, что в начале ноября 2025 года традиционно состоялся очередной Зиланткон. Если кому интересно, уже 34/35: 35 по счету, 34 - по нумерации, потому что вместо юбилейного № 30 в 2020 году состоялся №29 3/4, и 21, на котором я побывала (какой кошмар...). Я тоже уже традиционно (и удивительно: и в этом году меня оттуда не выгнали. Интересно, удастся ли продержаться и следующий год?) была при газете/новостном сайте Зиланткона - "Летящем Зиланте" (интересно, сколько лет я при нем состою? Кажется, с 2013 года официально. Правда, в 2014 мы официально были при Фантлабе. Ну и, наверное, до 2013 мы с Романом туда просто писали тексты - иначе с чего бы мы стали работниками "Летящего Зиланта"?). Жаль, что "Летящий Зилант" уже несколько лет существует только в виде группы ВКонтакте ( https://vk.com/let_zilant ). Бумажная газета мне нравилась больше. Хотя, конечно, с нею гораздо больше мороки (верстать, печатать...). От состояния работником при "Летящем Зиланте" много пользы: я для него пишу отчеты о посещенных мероприятиях, а потом (исходя из того, что не все мои френды читают "Летящий Зилант") утаскиваю эти же отчеты в блоги. (Кстати, мне тут ЖЖ присылает напоминалки, "О чем вы писали в этот день", прислал он и напоминания о старых постах про Зилантконы. Раньше отчеты о мероприятиях у меня выходили лучше.)
Проходил Зиланткон в ДК имени Ленина, он же Культурно-досуговый комплекс имени В.И. Ленина, он же Ленин-Сарай. Я еще успела застать времена, когда Зиланткон занимал своей официальной программой три здания (ДК имени Ленина, ДК - или как там его, в общем, Гайдар-Сарай - имени Гайдара и Казанский авиационный техникум), а уж что творилось на неофициальной программе в "местах массовых поселений" - школах (2 шт., бюджетное поселение на пенках), КАПО, оно же профилакторий (удобств больше) и гостиницах (удобств совсем много) - я и не представляю; немного видела, что происходит после официальной программы в ДК - где к тому же еще и жили в разных закутках и не только. Но ныне все мероприятия происходят только в КДК имени Ленина, а поселение самостоятельное (хотя для избранных работников - "на месте работы", в КДК; приятно было узнать, что меня помнят/любят/ценят настолько, что предложили поселиться в КДК - это было бы очень удобно и экономило бы много сил, времени и денег, но увы: я уже не способна спать на пенках, т.е. спать-то способна, а вот встать с пола - нет, да и моя манера вставать в 1.30 ночи/утра и начинать шебуршать вряд ли порадовала бы окружающих; так что уже второй год я по вашим советам снимаю квартиру через "Островок"; в прошлом году вы мне посоветовали очень хорошую и недорогую квартиру, я ее и в этом году хотела снять, но опоздала и она была занята, самостоятельно нашла другую, еще ближе к КДК, и все бы в ней было хорошо, кроме тараканов - я их очень боюсь - и практического отсутствия Интернета: только по "белому списку", это когда поискать что-то в Интернете можно, а посмотреть, что именно нашел, - уже сильно не всегда; вот что получается, когда тупая жаба действует самостоятельно - уверена, если бы я попросила вас о совете и помощи, вы бы мне подобрали недалеко расположенную квартиру _без_ тараканов и проблем, в том числе с Интернетом; правда, с другой стороны, если учесть ее расположение - может, и смириться с тараканами и отсутствием Интернета? Уж очень хорошо расположена была.).
Минута занимательной статистики: было заявлено 309 мероприятий (не считая тех, которые состоялись спонтанно в ходе Зиланткона), я хотела посетить 84, посетила же в результате 21. Жалкий результат... (Площадок же было 16 и "Ярмарка", из них посещено 5. И "Ярмарка". И то с натяжкой, потому что "Хоббичья Норка" была посещаема исключительно пробегом.)
После "Последнего испытания" должно было быть обсуждение спектакля, и меня даже туда звали, но... Я не могла пропустить традиционный концерт Олега Медведева. Много у Зиланткона традиций, и концерт Олега Медведева - одна из них. (А ходить на этот концерт и начинать рассказ о концерте этой фразой - уже моя традиция.)
In the immediate years after the talkie era began, Mervyn LeRoy was about as big as it got as a director. He was just pushing out content through the early 30s, multiple films a year. Since they were usually only about an hour long and this was normal in the silent era, this isn’t that surprising, even if it was to change soon. The films are a bit mixed, though the best (Gold Diggers of 1933) are pretty great. He was willing to push the envelope at times as well, not so much with sex, but with realistic portrayals of life when the subject matter met the film. One of the better examples is 1932’s Three on a Match. This isn’t a perfect film. It’s supposed to be about three classmates in a late 1910s-early 1920s New York public school, one rich, one smart but poor, one a sex-crazed disaster.
They grow up. They meet again in 1931 after years apart. Bette Davis plays the smart but poor one. She is just working a regular job. The weakness of the film is casting Davis but giving her nothing at all to do, so it’s disappointing on that front. Joan Blondell is the sex-crazed disaster who has found her way being a showgirl and has gotten her shit together after time in reform school. Ann Dvorak is the rich girl, who is now an unhappy rich wife. It’s really the Dvorak show and somewhat the Blondell show. For Dvorak, rich and married but unhappy, throws her life away for some loser and becomes what is clearly but not actually stated a heroin addict who loses her son. The husband, played by a very boring Warren William makes me want to leave him too.
What makes this film work is Dvorak’s descent portrayed so well (she is good at playing rich and maybe isn’t quite so well playing dope fiend, but is good enough) and then Blondell, who is awesome in every role she played in the 30s. Seriously, I think Joan Blondell is one of the great all-time Hollywood figures. She made every film she was in better. She could wise crack with the best of them, she could play poor and clawing your way up great, she had the looks, the voice, the whole thing. Just a very good actor. Also, the film has a very young Humphrey Bogart in a small role as a gangster enforcer and of course he could do that very well.
Unfortunately, Dvorak’s character’s kid plays a key role here and like every child actor from the 30s, I largely wish he had been murdered early in the film. These kids were directed to this saccharine and annoying cuteness. Yeah, I’m an asshole, I don’t care. Somehow child acting has improved so much since the 60s. Thank God for that. This film could really use Macaulay Culkin or someone like that.
So the film is uneven, but really quite solid, even if Davis’ role was way smaller than it could have been. Absolutely worth your time.
Andy Ogles, whose name and character were both rejected by Armando Iannucci for being too obvious, is always around to show the id of MAGA:
Rep. Andy Ogles said on Monday that Muslims have no place in America, an Islamophobic attack from a sitting member of Congress.
“Muslims don’t belong in American society. Pluralism is a lie,” the Tennessee Republican posted Monday morning on X.
It is not the first bigoted social media post Ogles has made.
He has also said that “America and Islam are incompatible,” and has introduced legislation to halt immigration from Muslim-majority nations.
A spokesperson for Ogles referred POLITICO to an interview the member of Congress did with Fox News following a shooting in Austin, Texas, in which he said that “mass Islamic immigration, legal or illegal, has transformed America and brought destructive consequences.”
Ogles’ post comes as Republicans gather in Florida for their annual retreat and could serve as a distraction as the party seeks to hash out its agenda ahead of the midterms.
Spokespeople for the offices of the top three House Republicans — Speaker Mike Johnson, Majority Leader Steve Scalise and Majority Whip Tom Emmer — did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said in a post that Ogles is “a malignant clown and pathological liar who has fabricated his whole life story.”
“Disgusting Islamophobes like you do not belong in Congress or in civilized society,” Jeffries added.
Ogles’ legislation, the Halt Immigration from Countries with Inadequate Verification Capabilities Act, would amend the Immigration and Nationality Act by refusing admission to immigrants from some majority-Muslim countries like Iran, Libya and Syria. North Korea, Venezuela and Yemen are also named in the bill, which does make exceptions for U.S. citizens.
“E pluribus unum” is so un-American! I can’t wait for John Roberts to hold that there is absolutely no evidence of racial animus behind the Halt Immigration from Countries with Inadequate Verification Capabilities Act.
-- Это уже такой знакомый маршрут, что на каждом его ответвлении я вспоминаю, что ты мне рассказывала, когда мы здесь шли в какой-нибудь поза-препрошлый раз.
И я совершенно таю, это слушая: вот, мои истории находят свой извилистый путь к сердцу художницы и человека. А Ленка продолжает:
-- Например, сейчас я вспоминаю, как ты мне рассказывала, как у тебя был учитель, который был недоволен тем, что ему приходится учить евреев. Он не любил евреев. Но все-таки с тобой он обошелся по-доброму.
Не без труда обнаружилось, что Ленка вспоминает историю про великого математика И. Р. Шафаревича. Под впечатлением бесед со своим великим учеником Ю. И. Маниным ему случилось написать книгу "Русофобия" (в русле французских идей о малом народе внутри большого). Эта книга (особенно ее название) приобрела такую славу, что И. Р. прослыл физиологическим антисемитом, несмотря на список своих учеников. Ну я и рассказывала Ленке про свою одноклассницу, которая, уже в бытность свою студенткой мехмата, ужасно хотела прийти на его семинар, но опасалась, имея характерный еврейский вид: вдруг держатель семинара увидит ее и скажет: а ну, мол, чемодан, вокзал, Израиль! Опоздала и вошла в темноте. Ничего не случилось, да и Шафаревича, как ей показалось, там не было, никто не председательствовал. Если она чего-нибудь не понимала, спрашивала милого и крайне интеллигентного дядечку, который тоже опоздал немного и сел с ней рядом. Он слушал ее вопросы внимательно и шепотом отвечал, внятно, доброжелательно и чрезвычайно вежливо. Разумеется, потом ее спросили, что же это Шафаревич все нашептывал ей на ушко?
-- Но меня, -- говорю, -- он никогда ничему не учил.
-- Как? -- говорит Ленка. -- Вообще? Не может быть!
-- Нет, -- говорю. -- Только его сын.
-- Ну вот видишь! Значит, я все правильно запомнила, -- с удовлетворением заключает Ленка.
Возразить тут нечего. Мы дошли до качелей, на которых нас всегда бомбят, и была сирена, и Гоша пел, а шакалов не было. Ленка меня газлайтила -- ты, мол, уверена, что в прошлый раз были шакалы? -- пока я не начала сомневаться во всем, даже в русофобии малого народа. Звезды были огромные, а ракеты даже больше звезд, и не все они распадались на маленькие. Еще был странный продолговатый объект, не желтый, а красный, и летел он иначе: как будто и падал, но очень медленно, как спутник в книжке "Занимательная физика" (он там падал на Землю, но Земля из-под него уворачивалась). Ленка пристрастилась к этим картинам, я всерьез опасаюсь, что, если мы переживем эту войну, она будем по ним тосковать. На самом деле это красиво (особенно не в городе, а в холмах), но ничего из ряда вон выходящего, во всяком случае, если хор шакалов в отпуску.
A youth walks on the precipice of a wall past the Kurdish flag in Erbil, the capital of Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region on March 9, 2026. | Ozan Kose/AFP via Getty Images
Last week, President Donald Trump spoke with Iraqi and Iranian Kurdish leaders, reportedly offering “extensive US aircover” and logistical support for armed groups to cross the border from Iraq into Iran to push out regime forces. As one of these leaders put it, his message was that “Kurds must choose a side in this battle — either with America and Israel or with Iran.”
Turning to Kurdish ethnic minorities, who are spread across multiple countries in the region, to be America’s frontline fighters is a formula that’s worked before, most recently in the fight against the Islamic State. But the plan seemed to fizzle out this time, and over the weekend, Trump changed his tune, telling reporters, “We don’t want to make the war any more complex than it already is. I have ruled that out, I don’t want the Kurds going in.”
The Kurds are not yet in a position to launch an attack, according to Abdullah Mohtadi, an Iranian Kurdish leader in an undisclosed location outside the country, who I spoke with over the weekend. Mohtadi, secretary general of the Komala Party of Iranian Kurdistan, said there were “several thousand” fighters or peshmergas under their command in Iraq, and “tens of thousands” of young people in Iranian Kurdistan who would be willing to take up arms if they were given protection. But the Iranian regime was still too strong, even with US support, to take on.
“For us to make any move, we need to have the Revolutionary Guards and repressive forces of the Iranian regime sufficiently weakened — weakened enough for the people in the cities to rise and the Peshmerga forces to come in,” he said. “Before that, we will avoid it.”
Despite some contradictory reporting last week, Mohtadi said that Kurdish fighters had not yet crossed the border into Iran, but were maintaining a “defensive position” in their camps in Iraq where they are under constant fire from Iranian drones and missiles.
The back and forth between Trump and the Kurds speaks to one of the underlying tensions of the war. The US and Israeli aerial bombardment has had stunning success at killing senior Iranian leaders and destroying key infrastructure, but air campaigns are historically not well-suited to actually dislodging regimes or forcing them to surrender. For that you need troops on the ground — and in Iran, the domestic opposition is not well armed.
This left Washington considering backing armed Kurdish groups, as it has numerous times in the past. Often called the world’s largest ethnic group without a state of its own, there are an estimated 25 million to 30 million Kurds, living mainly in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey.
They have been historically marginalized and discriminated against — often worse —in all those countries, including Iran, home to around 10 million to 15 million Kurds who live mainly in the country’s northwest, bordering Iraq and Turkey. In 2022, when an Iranian Kurdish woman named Mahsa Amini died under suspicious circumstances in custody after her arrest by Iran’s morality police, it sparked nationwide protests and the Kurdish slogan “woman, life, freedom” was adopted by the wider Iranian opposition.
Across the border in Iraq, the Kurdish region in the country’s north has enjoyed a much greater degree of autonomy since the US imposed a no-fly zone after the first Gulf War in 1991. This part of Iraq is also host to a number of exiled Iranian Kurdish groups, who recently formed an alliance to take on the regime if the opportunity presents itself.
There have been media reports that Iraqi Kurdish leaders are reluctant to get involved in the current fight between the US and Iran. “They have hosted us for a long time, but they’re weary of the Iranian threats,” Mohtadi said, noting that the Kurdish Regional Government’s capital, Erbil, which hosts a US military base, has been under near constant Iranian missile bombardment since the war began.
Iranian Kurdish forces, even with full American support, are not in a position to march on Tehran and overthrow the Islamic Republic regime. The objective in any military offensive, rather, would be to restore safety and security in their own region. Mohtadi denied, however, that the goal was to establish an independent state.
“We see some reports that portray us as separatists, “ he said. “That’s not true. We are for a democratic, secular, unified Iran where the rights of Kurds and other ethnic minorities are respected. What we want is a democratic Iran that is unified, but at the same time decentralized in the form of a federal system.”
Mohtadi also pushed back against the notion that backing armed militias within Iran could lead to civil war or regional destabilization, arguing that it was the regime itself that is causing chaos at home and abroad.
“Who shoots missiles to neighboring countries? Who massacres their own people? It’s not us, it’s not the Iranian opposition, it’s not the Iranian civil society, it’s the Revolutionary Guards,” he said.
There’s an old saying that Kurds, with a long history of guerilla warfare in multiple countries, have “no friends but the mountains.” Often, the United States has had a warm relationship with the Kurds, but that friendship has limits. In the 1970s, the United States, working with the then-US-aligned Iranian government, backed Kurdish groups fighting the Soviet-backed Iraqi government, then later withdrew that support, leading to a massacre. “Covert action should not be confused with missionary work,” Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said, reflecting on what many saw as a betrayal. A similar dynamic played out when the United States encouraged Iraqi Kurds to rise up during the first Gulf War.
More recently in Syria, Kurdish rebels worked closely with the US military to fight ISIS, establishing a semi-independent enclave in the country’s northeast in the process. In January, Syrian government forces, now under the US-aligned President Ahmed al-Sharaa, overtook much of the region. Rather than coming to their aid, the US urged their Kurdish allies to merge with Syrian security forces. This effectively brought an end to the short-lived Syrian Kurdish statelet known as Rojava. In a Sunday Reuters article, Syrian Kurds are quoted warning their Iranian brethren against aligning with the United States, only to be abandoned when the geopolitical winds shift.
Mohtadi interpreted this history differently, pointing out that it was US air support that allowed the establishment of the Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq (after the massacre of thousands by Saddam Hussein’s Hussein’s airforce) and that protected Kurdish regions from ISIS’s genocidal offensive in 2014.
“I personally have witnessed many instances since 1991 that the United States helped Kurds and saved them,” he said.
Though formed as a left-wing militant group prior to the Iranian revolution, Mohtadi’s Komala Party has become far more moderate and pro-American in its decades in exile. Mohtadi expressed gratitude to the Trump administration, saying, “they kept their promises and came to help the Iranian people by striking the Iranian regime and defeating them on the battlefield.”
It remains unclear exactly what prompted Trump’s shift on aligning with the Kurds. It may have been doubts about their military capabilities, concerns about chaos within Iran, or reactions from regional allies. (Turkey is perennially concerned about upsurges of Kurdish nationalism and its president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, is an influential Trump ally.)
Mohtadi, who at 76 has been witness to multiple eras of Kurdish politics in multiple countries, argues that this moment of weakness for the Iranian regime is a “unique opportunity…not only for Kurds but for the whole Iranian people, and to change the face of the entire Middle East.”
How Trump will approach this moment in the days and weeks to come remains a mystery, as is what it will mean for Iranians of all ethnicities. For now, those plans don’t appear to include any extravagant promises of support to the Kurds. That leaves them in a familiar place: in a regional war they didn’t start, looking for the best way to navigate the dangers.
Bo Gritz is dead. One of the largely forgotten figures of the late 20th century, Gritz played a critical role in the development of the paranoid, conspiracy theory driven reality of today’s world. He is not worth remembering outside of this, as he was a self-promoting clown show of lies and propaganda, but he had an outsized role on late twentieth century American culture as it turned toward creating myths about why the nation lost in Vietnam and seeing big government and liberals as conspiracies to attack our liberties, all of which helped lead to figures such as Donald Trump rising in the Republican Party and to the presidency.
Born in 1939 in Enid, Oklahoma, Gritz was a tough kid with a tough childhood. His father was killed in World War II and his maternal grandparents raised him. He was a troubled kid and got expelled from school. The family did have some money though and he was sent to Fork Union Military Academy in Virginia to straighten him out with some military discipline.
Immediately upon graduating from high school, in 1957, Gritz enlisted in the Army. Although he was an enlisted man, people saw possibility in him and he attended Officer Candidate School. By 1963, he was a captain and was promoted to major in 1967. This put him in line to go to Vietnam. He was involved in some intense fighting in the Vietnam War. He commanded a detachment made up of a mix of American, South Vietnamese, and Cambodian soldiers that were basically mercenaries for whatever America needed. This meant special missions that included investigating shot down airplanes and recovering their black boxes if possible.
For all of this, Gritz was promoted to lieutenant colonel and became an important Army insider. He commanded special forces in Latin America from 1975 to 1977, became Chief of Congressional Relations for the Defense Security Agency, and worked in the office of the Secretary of Defense. But in 1979, he retired from the military. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t still involved. It means he was doing covert work that was easier to do outside the military structure, such as going to Afghanistan to train the mujahedeen.
As this went on, he became obsessed with the idea that the Vietnamese communists were holding any number of American prisoners of war. In fact, this is a good moment to consider the POW/MIA craze of the 1980s. It was so difficult for a lot of Americans to understand why we had lost the war in Vietnam. They were not prepared to say that the entire operation was badly considered from the beginning, that being a wannabe colonialist power attempting to intervene in a post-colonial civil war had a lot of potential to go very badly. So it had to be someone else who had cost the U.S. the war. It was the government unwilling to do what it took to win the war. Or maybe it was the anti-war hippies and their protests. Or maybe it was the unpatriotic media. But whatever it was, it was someone else’s fault, someone who had sacrificed a generation of young American men. Of course, the government had indeed sacrificed a generation of young American men, but saying the war was just a bad idea and all these people died for a stupid cause wasn’t something people were willing to say.
These ideas began manifesting themselves in some fascinating cultural ways. First, there was the idea that soldiers were spat upon as they returned home. This is both absurd and, today, is conventional wisdom. When I ask my students about this—students who often know very little about American history before they get to my class—they have almost all heard it. The problem is that there is zero evidence that it ever happened. None. Not a single documented case, as the scholar Jerry Lembcke explored in detail. And let’s be clear, despite the narrative that the media cost the nation the war, in fact, the media was extremely anti-protestor, especially early in the war. Had this happened, the media would have been all over it. But they weren’t. It doesn’t even get mentioned in any American media publication or other cultural product until the early 1980s. Then this became a core idea of Rambo and the narrative got set in stone. Moreover, this is nonsense because the antiwar movement was inherently pro-soldier. The vast majority of antiwar protestors didn’t care about Vietnam or communism one way or the other. They just didn’t want to go fight the war and they wanted to bring the soldiers home.
This was the kind of thing that led people like Gritz into resentment and crazy conspiracy theories. Part of this, also mainstreamed by Rambo and other early Vietnam reflections in the movies, is that the government abandoned unknown but large numbers of prisoners of war in Vietnam. In fact, Gritz may have been the inspiration for the Rambo character. Again, these myths about POWs was just flat out untrue. The Vietnamese government had a whole lot bigger fish to fry than to still hold American prisoners of war after the war was won. It had to build a society, overthrow the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and fight a war with China, all before 1980. But Gritz became a huge promoter of this idea. This became a mantra of late twentieth century American conservatism. Even today, you see POW/MIA flags up in all sorts of public places—even though there have not been any but a few American POWs in a half-century, despite our wars in the Middle East. But good luck saying we should take those silly conspiracy theory flags down! They are now part of American identity. This is, at least in part, Bo Gritz’s contribution to American life. Great.
Specifically, Gritz fundraised to take trips to southeast Asia to get the boys home. He got other right-wing loons such as Ross Perot and Clint Eastwood to fund these trips. At first, the Defense Department was at least slightly interested in making sure no one was over there, but the government soon realized Gritz was an unhinged lunatic. In fact, the only thing that came of it was that, while in Laos, one of his anti-communist Laotian guerillas he worked with was killed and one of the Americans in his search party, was kidnapped for ransom! If anything, Gritz created prisoners of war!
Moreover, Gritz was breaking all sorts of laws. He had to turn himself in to the police in Thailand for his operations out of that country into Laos for smuggling military equipment. Moreover, one of his comrades was later convicted for smuggling explosives around these operations; though Gritz was not prosecuted, there is no way he didn’t know about this and encouraged it. But although he faced up to 30 years in prison in Thailand and although the Vietnamese definitely wanted him imprisoned, Grtiz never served a day.
Now, Gritz was a massive self-promoter along the way. He was an extremely highly decorated officer. He just loved his own personal history of covert operations and he saw the world as needing more men like him. So he kept it up. He went to Burma in 1986 because he still believed there were POWs and also believed the huge Burmese opium baron Khun Sa knew where they were. So even though Sa was an international criminal, Gritz went over and interviewed him. He got Sa to get on video and make claims that leading Americans, including Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, were involved in his opium smuggling operations.
This all led Gritz into ever more wild conspiracy theories. He was smart enough to realize that while he was a right-winger, there were potential advocates for his ideas on the far left too and so he tried to bring conspiracy theorists of different political stripes together at various conferences, to some success. After all, when you are a conspiracy theorist, your actual politics on the issues really make no difference because they aren’t what are driving your engagement and your life.
By the early 90s, Gritz was all-in on the far-right ideas around the “one world government” under the auspices of the United Nations and represented in the U.S. by George Bush’s “New World Order” speech.Gritz became a total conspiracy theorist in domestic life too, the kind of that the Southern Poverty Law Center has followed for years.[1] He went into the deepest area of American horrors, the idea that there was a gigantic conspiracy that attacked the true Americans—the straight, conservative, war-loving, white man. In 1998, he wrote, “Do you see the sign, the scent, stain and mark of the beast on America today? … Are you willing to submit and join this seedline of Satan? … Look to those who are openly antichrist… . [W]ho in the world is promoting abortion, pornography, pedophilia, Godless laws, adultery, New Age international banking, entertainment industry and world publishing? Wherever you find perversion of God’s laws you will find the worshippers of Baal with their roots still in Babylonian mysticism.” Whew, OK then.
Naturally enough, all this led weirdo right-wing parties to nominate Gritz for their national campaigns. In 1988, something called the Populist Party nominated him for VP, but he dropped out when he discovered David Duke was the presidential candidate. He thought it was going to be the corrupt congressman from Ohio, Jim Traficant, who I guess was respectable enough compared to Duke! But this debacle didn’t stop him from becoming the party’s presidential candidate in 1992, and it was all very stupid with rants against the Federal Reserve and the New World Order. Naturally, he only got 0.1% of the vote nationally, but he cleared 2 percent in Idaho and almost 4 percent in Utah, demonstrating the power of extremism in the Rocky Mountains. Some of this is also explained by Gritz’s 1984 conversion to the Mormon faith, which has provided some of the most virulent right-wing extremism in American politics, including more recently, the Bundy family takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in 2016, one of the events that presaged the rise of Trump.
As he aged, Gritz moved deeper into anti-Semitism. He became a follower of Christian Identity theology, common among highly radicalized Mormons, which argues that the Israelites of the Bible are actually whites and not Jews and thus whites are the “chosen people.” That this is complete nonsense makes no difference, as it never does for racists and/or conspiracy theorists. In 2000, Gritz claimed, “Jews, feminists, sodomites and other liberal activists may install Gore over an apathetic moral majority. … Runaway abortion, anti-Christ/God and globalism are certain.”
In 1996, Gritz and his son Jim kidnapped two children in Connecticut. One of their other lunatic followers claimed her husband had engaged in “Satanic sexual abuse.” The Gritz decided to go save the boys. Of course all they did was get themselves arrested for it and there was zero evidence of this woman’s charges. Gritz later called the whole thing “the biggest mistake of my life.” Yeah, well, I can think of a few more you might want to consider!
None of this looney tunes conspiracy theories helped Gritz’s personal life. In 1998, his wife left him. He dressed up in all his military regala, took his truck from his community to the town of Kamiah and shot himself in the chest. He failed to kill himself. People noted the irony of a man who had bragged for decades on his excellent marksmanship had failed to shoot correct with the gun pressed against his own chest. Others thought it might well be a fraud, yet another publicity stunt or a way to get his wife back.
Didn’t make any difference in how he saw the world anyway. Gritz later created what he called a “constitutional covenant community” near Orofino, Idaho. This was hardly his first highly armed right-wing community. He first tried this near Kamiah, Idaho, bordering the Nez Perce reservation, in 1994, but he left it after the suicide attempt. Then he moved to Nevada to create something called the Fellowship of Eternal Warriors, merging his brand of right-wing off-Christian theology with anti-Semitism and homophobia, which had really risen in the right-wing crazy world by the early 90s, with attempts in Oregon and Colorado to create state law against gay people.
Despite all of this, Gritz was the guy people called when other crazy right-wingers were in trouble. He spent a week in the forests of North Carolina trying to get the abortion clinic and Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph to surrender. But his most prominent moment was when he became the intermediary between the government and his fellow right-wing extremist Randy Weaver when the FBI descended upon the latter’s compound at Ruby Ridge, in Idaho. This whole thing was a disaster for the government. Weaver shot and killed a federal marshal, the FBI killed his wife and son. To his credit, I guess, Gritz got Weaver to surrender to end the blood bath. And in fact, Weaver only ended up serving 18 months in prison and that for the original charge that brought the FBI to his compound, not for killing the officer. I guess in this country, you can get away with killing the cops if you are a white right-winger. Other Gritz attempts to intervene in favor of far-right causes went less well. He tried to intervene in the next big standoff between the government and a right-wing extremist group, the so-called Freedmen, on their Jordan, Montana compound. Amazingly, Gritz thought the Freemen were too crazy for him and he bailed. And to be clear, this was a man who tried to invade the Florida hospital where doctors finally pulled the plug on Terry Schiavo in 2005.
But there was one thing that really mattered more than anything else—The Big Grift. He would sell anything to his fellow extremists. He had a deal called SPIKE — Specially Prepared Individuals for Key Events. This was a 12 part video series that was supposed to prep you for the war to come. But the war to come, I mean who wouldn’t make money on that? He charged people an arm and a leg for these videos. And that really says it all, doesn’t it. Right wing revolution for profit!
Well, that’s Bo Gritz for you. This very bad, no good, terrible man is dead and so, in a sense, is an era of American history we have not really dealt with. Once we pull down the pointless POW/MIA flags, we will have moved beyond Gritz’s insanity. Until then? Bo Gritz remains with us in spirit.
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