Iran

Heat Exhaustion

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A spark of hope in a limbo that feels like hell.

By Sarah Kendzior | June 27, 2025
 

We are at war with Iran, we are not at war with Iran. Federal lands are for sale, the sale of federal lands is prohibited. The tariffs are back, the tariffs are over. Foreign students are banned, foreign students can stay. Trump rebuffs Israel, Trump will defend Israel to the death.

To the death, to our death: the threat of death is the constant. Nothing is real except awful things that don’t stop growing and don’t backtrack. Death is behind the drapes you draw down like a gunfight you already lost. The temperature hits 100 and makes you remember when the world had centuries instead of one endless day.

The heat will not relent. Why should it when nothing else will?

Politics is a jigsaw seesaw with a push and pull that cuts. Every policy is retracted and reinstated so that you can no longer remember relief. What were its ingredients — time, promises? She inhaled a sigh of relief, you think, but all you inhale is heat. You open the front door and stick out your head and breathe like Sylvia Plath.

Slam the door: you have a choice. Slam the door on that cannonball sun.

If you could have one hour, only one hour, in the cool natural air, just one hour when things were not wrong, you could make it through the week. You imagine a lemonade stand run by children selling RELIEF to adults, pouring it into paper cups, and a line of adults so long it bests the record-breaking No King’s Day rally that everyone forgot after the King announced we were at war.

The King has proclaimed we are not at war with Iran anymore because The King Won (shhhh keep telling him that.) But his backers proclaim we are at war with a nice 33-year-old man who wants to do good deeds and has assembled a massive following.

Things don’t tend to work out well for fellows like that, especially against the forces backing The King. You take some comfort that this fellow is not a carpenter.

* * *

The air feels like an oven, but New York produced a spark. New York, of all places, gave America hope with the platform of Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. We are so used to New Yorkers taking — The Trumps, The Cuomos, The Kushners, Carl Icahn, Rudy Giuliani, Steve Mnuchin, Jeffrey Epstein, Eric Adams, Bernard Kerik (RIP!), Wall Street — that it is odd when they offer something good. Affordable housing, cheap childcare, relief.

Rich New Yorkers compared the prospect of these policies to Kristallnacht.

Rich New Yorkers whined about their personal safety while powerbrokers threatened Mamdani with deportation. When they were mocked as coddled losers, they changed the narrative, claiming Mamdani, a Muslim, threatened heartland states like mine, Missouri. But the lead article on the day Mamdani won was about how much rural Missourians are enjoying the new halal menu at the Stuckey’s in Doolittle.

Zohran Mamdani has a buddy named Brad Lander who ran as a sort of co-pilot in New York’s ranked mayoral race. Lander is from St. Louis, which means he has seen affordable housing and free institutions firsthand. He can testify to New Yorkers that they are real.

Lander left St. Louis long before Wesley Bell won the most expensive race in district history with money from hard-right Zionist PACs posing under fake names like “Progressives for Missouri.” AIPAC and other lobbyists did not care about Bell or about St. Louis. Their only goal was to oust Cori Bush, who had condemned Israel’s murderous policies. The “election” was a sad spectacle. I would complain to my representative, but I don’t have representation.

There are so many terrible New Yorkers to primary, but if Lander feels homesick, we’ve got one here too.

Mamdani’s victory was a primary upset win over former governor and unrepentant sex pest Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo is part of a legal team representing Benjamin Netanyahu against ICC charges of war crimes. The team was assembled by Alan Dershowitz, a close associate of Jeffrey Epstein. Rich people who liked Epstein also like Cuomo, a fellow predator and death merchant. They need Cuomo to hold office and keep secrets.

Mamdani, unlike Cuomo, would not perform subservience to Israel, no matter how many times pundits tried. Mamdani has secrets too: like that a city can uplift its own people instead of functioning as a hub for a wealthy criminals tied to foreign states.

Rich New Yorkers are panicking because that was never a secret. It only felt like one because hardly anyone powerful said it out loud.

I’m worried Mamdani will be murdered. I’m worried he’s another faker. I’m worried he will spur a political cult, and that worry has already been vindicated: the shredding of the American monoculture has ensured every politician has a cult. Politics is the only shared pastime, which is why American life feels miserable, because the stakes are so high, and the quality of programming so low.

* * *

The heat wave hit New York. I wondered how it would affect the election. I wondered if Mamdani would win and billionaires would sue the sun. I wouldn’t rule it out.

When heat waves get this bad, the smallest effort drains you. You can feel the whole country wilting, wilting against its collective will. New Yorkers voted anyway.

I’ve said time and time again that you can’t vote out the mafia, and that’s true. But you can try not voting in the mafia. It won’t change everything. But it’s a start.

Today’s mafia is transnational but not ethnic. Its criminals have multiple passports and offshore accounts and no national allegiances. To them, countries are land masses to be stripped and sold for parts. Transnational organized crime knows no geographical bounds — but it has key hubs, and New York City is one of them.

It does not have to be. New York has been that way so long, people accept it, even take pride in it. Elite criminal impunity is New York’s currency. But what if it wasn’t? What if London and Moscow followed suit?

People fear a system crashing down because they don’t understand that it already happened and they’ve been living in wreckage sold to them as privilege. Or they understand just fine, and do not know what to do about it.

The earth is screaming. It has heat exhaustion. I do too, as I write this out, ride this out, waiting for the sun to set. Waiting for the sun to set on plutocrat thieves, waiting for the sun to set me free. Waiting for the day I greet sunrise not with dread at uncertain hours, but relief at the dawn of possibility.

* * *

Thank you for reading! I would never paywall in times of peril. But if you’d like to keep this newsletter going, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. That ensures every article remains open to everyone. This newsletter is the main source of income for my family of four, so I appreciate your support!

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Photo of a sunset I took on a nice day in 2022. What, you think I’m going out in this weather to get another?!

Trump: “It was the United States of America that saved Israel, and now it is going to be the United States of America that saves Bibi Netanyahu”

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Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

June 25, 2025

At The Hague, a city in the Netherlands, today for a summit of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Trump showed that he cannot let go of the intelligence assessment that his military strikes against Iran had set back Iran’s nuclear ambitions only by a few months. He appears determined to convince Americans that he has solved the problem of Iran’s nuclear ambitions overnight.

“It’s gone for years, years,” he said. And then, turning to the news outlets that reported the early conclusions of Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the intelligence arm of the Pentagon, that the hits delayed production of a nuclear weapon by only a few months, he said: “CNN is scum. MSDNC is scum. The New York Times is scum. They’re bad people. They’re sick. And what they’ve done is they’ve tried to make this unbelievable victory into something less.” Trump insisted that the U.S. hits caused “total obliteration.” He claimed he did not want the recognition of the effectiveness of the hits for himself, but rather for “the military.”

Trump equated the strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities with the U.S. bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters at the NATO summit that the FBI had launched a criminal investigation into who had leaked the DIA report, complaining that “CNN and others are trying to spin it to make the president look bad, when this was an overwhelming success.” Later in the morning, Trump’s social media account posted that CNN should fire Natasha Bertrand, one of the CNN journalists who broke the story that the attacks had done less damage than Trump claimed.

Marc Caputo of Axios reported this afternoon that the Trump administration will limit the classified information it shares with Congress after the leak of the DIA assessment, even though there is currently no evidence tying that leak to Congress. A senior White House official said: “We are declaring a war on leakers.”

Stephan Neukam and Andrew Solender of Axios reported that congressional Democrats, already angry that the administration delayed briefing Congress about the strikes on Iran past the legal deadline for such a briefing, see the announcement that the White House will limit the information it provides to Congress as an attempt to hide reality in order to bolster Trump’s narrative. “A senior House Democrat told the Axios reporters: “[T]his from a group of people who used Signal about actual war plans?”

On the Senate floor, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said: “The administration has no right to stonewall Congress on matters of national security. Senators deserve information, and the administration has a legal obligation to inform Congress precisely about what is happening right now abroad.”

Representative Jim Himes (D-CT), the highest-ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said: “The law requires the congressional intelligence committees to be kept fully and currently informed, and I expect the Intelligence Community to comply with the law.”

Tomorrow the White House will brief senators on the strikes. Notably, it is not sending Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who testified in March that the Intelligence Community did not think Iran was developing a nuclear weapon. Instead, it is sending Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Caine. Ratcliffe, not Gabbard, will represent the Intelligence Community.

Today, Ratcliffe appeared to walk back Trump’s claims that the strikes had “totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program, saying instead they had “severely damaged” the program.

On his social media platform tonight, Trump continued his attacks on CNN and announced that tomorrow morning, Hegseth and “Military Representatives” will hold a “Major News Conference” to “fight for the Dignity of our Great American Pilots.” He claimed those “Patriots” were “very upset!” when they “started reading Fake News by CNN and The Failing New York Times. They felt terribly!… The News Conference will prove both interesting and irrefutable. Enjoy!”

There is no evidence that anyone sees the correction of Trump’s extreme claims as an attack on the pilots who flew the mission, or that the pilots see that correction in that way.

Laura Rozen of Diplomatic notes that the strikes might have convinced Iran to abandon negotiations and commit to building a nuclear weapon. Rozen quotes former top European Union Iran nuclear negotiator Enrique Mora, who wrote: “This unprecedented strike has shown, for the second time, the Islamic regime that nuclear diplomacy is reversible, fragile and vulnerable to changes in leadership in Washington. There will not be a third time.” Mora continued: “If Iran now decides to move towards a bomb, it will do so following a clear strategic logic. No one bombs the capital of a nuclear-armed country. June 21, 2025 may go down in history not as the day the Iranian nuclear program was destroyed, but as the day a nuclear Iran was irreversibly born.”

Tonight, on his social media site, Trump’s account called for Israel to abandon its trial of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for bribery, fraud, and breach of trust, calling it a “ridiculous Witch Hunt.” Trump claimed that Netanyahu was a partner in “something that nobody thought was possible, a complete elimination of potentially one of the biggest and most powerful Nuclear Weapons anywhere in the world, and it was going to happen, SOON!” Trump called for the trial to be “CANCELLED, IMMEDIATELY, or a Pardon given to a Great Hero.” He continued: “It was the United States of America that saved Israel, and now it is going to be the United States of America that saves Bibi Netanyahu.”

What I fear Trump will do with his war – Robert Reich

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Centralize even more power and curtail even more civil liberties

By Robert Reich

Friends,

One of my goals in writing this letter to you every day is to alert you to dangers to our democracy so you can alert others, who then alert others, and by this means we enlarge and strengthen our bulwark against the tide of fascism.

Wars pose particular challenges to democracy because nations at war often become more xenophobic and willing to give those in power extra leeway to protect the homeland. That’s an underlying danger in Trump’s war with Iran.

Trump has already tried to use three pretexts to usurp power — terrorism, national emergency, and war itself — to justify his mass deportations, universal tariffs, and consolidations of power. And he has tried to use these to gain legal legitimacy under laws that give presidents additional power when the nation is threatened.

Federal courts and public opinion haven’t allowed him to go as far as he wished. But if Trump’s war with Iran escalates — which it’s almost certain to do if Iran retaliates — courts may be reluctant to impede a commander-in-chief and the public may be willing to go along.

I fear that Trump’s war with Iran will enable him to use these three pretexts — terrorism, national emergency, and war — to further suppress dissent at home, narrow freedom of speech and expression, make warrantless searches and arrests of Americans, imprison opponents, and put more military onto our streets.

Terrorism

The use of terrorism has already begun. A bulletin issued just yesterday by the National Terrorism Advisory System within the Department of Homeland Security warns of a “heightened threat environment in the United States” following the U.S. military strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites.

The bulletin notes that U.S. law enforcement “has disrupted multiple potentially lethal Iranian-backed plots in the United States since 2020,” and goes on to warn of Iranian retaliation for Sunday morning’s attack.

Surely Iran is planning retaliation. During a Sunday phone call with French President Emmanuel Macron, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian insisted that the U.S. “receive a response to their aggression,” according to Iran’s official news agency, IRNA, as reported by The Times of Israel.

Any retaliation by Iran will be used by Trump to justify an intensifying crackdown on “terrorism.”

Even before Trump’s attack on Iran, he appropriated the term “terrorist” to describe various groups he deemed threats to the United States — including drug cartels and migrants.

Trump framed the rendition of Venezuelans to El Salvador as necessary to protect the U.S. from the scourge of “terrorism.” And he described fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction.

Now that we are at war with Iran, expect Trump to use the rhetoric of terrorism far more often, and the Department of Homeland Security to lead the charge against such threats.

National emergency

In his first hundred days in office this term, Trump declared eight “national emergencies” — far more than any other modern president in that same period of time. By comparison, Biden declared 11 national emergencies over his whole four-year term. Obama declared 12 in his eight years. George W. Bush declared 14 in his two terms.

The declaration of a national emergency automatically allows a president to use “emergency” powers in laws intended by Congress to be utilized rarely, when the nation is seriously imperiled.

Trump has been using such so-called “emergencies” to achieve domestic priorities more quickly than he’d be able to if he tried to pass laws through Congress.

The pattern began in his first term when he declared a “national emergency” to help fund the southern border wall after Congress didn’t approve the full amount. His declaration of an invasion on the southern border paved the way for intensified deportations.

Trump’s declaration of an “economic emergency” in April, based on the nation’s trade deficit (which has existed for decades), enabled him to impose unprecedented global tariffs.

An “energy emergency” made it easier for him to ease environmental regulations. His pronouncement that fentanyl entering from Canada was an emergency provided legal justification for sanctions, as did a similar finding on the International Criminal Court’s approach to Israel.

Trump invoked a “national emergency” to justify sending the National Guard to Los Angeles at a time when state and local officials said they had the protests there under control. Had he not federalized the National Guard, Trump said, “Los Angeles would have been completely obliterated.”

Trump’s stream of emergency declarations has also contributed to a sense that America is facing perpetual crises, under threat from foreign nations and domestic enemies. Trump thrives in this atmosphere, adopting the role of fighter and savior.

His war with Iran will fuel even more “national emergencies” and the legal authority that accompanies them.

War

Trump has tried to use the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to justify his mass deportations without due process, but unsuccessfully in the courts because the Act allows a president to detain and remove nationals of an enemy nation only during a “declared war,” “invasion,” or “predatory incursion” against the United States.

The law was invoked only three times before Trump, each during a war declared by Congress: the War of 1812 (with the United Kingdom), World War I and World War II. Each gave the U.S. government heightened powers to remove from the U.S. nationals of the party it was fighting. It was used during World War II to justify the internment of Japanese Americans and has since become synonymous with some of the nation’s most shameful civil liberties violations.

Trump’s attempt to use this centuries-old statute to conduct mass removals—outside of immigration law, with no hearings or judicial review—has been another authoritarian power grab posing grave threats to civil liberties and the rule of law.

On April 7, the Supreme Court reaffirmed that people targeted by Trump under the Alien Enemies Act must be given notice and an opportunity to challenge their removal, including arguments over the law’s constitutionality and application.

Yet a war with Iran may be enough to seemingly legitimize his use of the Act.

In addition, Trump has not ruled out invoking the Insurrection Act, which allows the deployment of active-duty U.S. military personnel within the United States in cases of unrest or rebellion — a prospect also made more likely when the nation is at war.

Trump wants to be a war president. Everything he has done to date has been aimed at concentrating power in his hands and undermining democratic institutions, which are far easier to do as a war president.

I write this not to worry or depress you. My purpose is to encourage you to be extra vigilant in guarding against Trump’s further use of these three pretexts to erode democracy and attack our freedoms.

Wars almost always challenge civil liberties. Given Trump’s record, that challenge could be enormous.

Be safe. Be strong.

Source: What I fear Trump will do with his war – Robert Reich

I Spent No Kings Day in a Cave

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Walking over the underground before it walks over you.

By Sarah Kendzior | June 29, 2025
 

There is a salamander so rare, you can find it only in the Ozarks. It is born wide-eyed and willing, eager to explore its surroundings: blue streams, green forests.

One day, the salamander wanders into a crack in the earth. This is the most fateful decision it will make. The world darkens, but the salamander keeps going: down, down, down, until no light remains. Over time, its skin begins to mutate. A film grows over its eyelids and fuses them shut.

The salamander is now blind. But it does not know. It will live, and die, in the eternal darkness of a subterranean cave.

I spent No Kings Day in a cave because I wanted to see the salamander. But I also wanted to ensure no film comes to cover my own eyes. A cave 250 feet underground has no cell service and no surveillance. It has no AI or GPS. Lone light shines from lanterns held by humans. They reveal a labyrinthine land of stone, not dead but slow growing. I go to caves to reset my senses. They show me the peace I am missing.

On the drive to the Ozarks, I saw a photo on social media. A protester held a handmade sign with a warning I wrote years ago: “THIS IS A TRANSNATIONAL CRIME SYNDICATE MASQUERADING AS A GOVERNMENT.”

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I’ve seen these words on signs for nearly a decade. In Trump’s first term, they were plastered around St. Louis by activists from the local Indivisible group. Now they’ve been revived. I’m glad people read my words, but I wish they didn’t still resonate. I want my books housed under “History” instead of “Current Events.” I want my warnings to be heeded and an alternate America to emerge: the America we deserve.

That outcome looks less likely each year. Time is the autocrat’s weapon: that’s why DOJ lackeys crowing “Be patient” were integral to mafia state rule. Officials knew what Trump was before they let him in, in part because he wouldn’t stop telling everyone. The remedy lay not only in exposing Trump but stopping the forces behind him. No one in power wanted to do that, for it would reveal institutional complicity.

As I wrote in January, “The most important thing about the election is not that Trump was proclaimed the winner, but that he was allowed to run.”

Despite my own ominous message, I was heartened to see the sign. I am grateful for the protesters: their refusal to abide tyranny and genocide, their insistence that immigrants and migrants be protected, their creativity and defiance. Protesting is honorable. Protests show the magnitude of dissent and shape new alliances.

Protests matter in their own right. But in the 21st century, protests have not brought policy change. Americans have never protested so much yet gained so little leverage. This is not the fault of protesters but of the multifaceted mafia state.

“No Kings” is a misnomer. Trump is not in charge. A birthday with a military parade gives the trappings of a king. But Trump is only the frontman for transnational organized crime. That’s all he ever was or will be.

Trump did not rise to this position alone. US officials have grown a second skin, one that seals their eyes and their deals and their documents. They entered the darkness of the mafia state and did so knowingly. Had they not, Trump could have never run in 2016 or in 2024. Party allegiance indicates whether a US official acts as an abuser (GOP) or an enabler (Democrat). But when they speak, it is often with one voice.

Now that voice is calling for war. This is another reason I descend beneath the earth.

US officials want war with Iran. They want it because Israel wants it and they do what Israel says. Israel has been planning to strike Iran since 2024: a timeline which makes Kamala Harris’s rehabilitation of Iraq warmongers look less like a campaign and more like an audition, and November resemble less an election than a selection.

Trump showed his willingness to abet an Iran War in his first term. The only question for Iran warmongers was whether they would rather have an ambitious bureaucrat like Harris or put up, again, with Trump’s mercurial grift.

The notion of not having an Iran War is dismissed. Israel is the main instigator but not the only one. The military-industrial complex wants war, apocalypse fiends want war, and alphabet agencies have had an Iran grudge since before I was born.

I don’t like comparing US officials to an Ozark blind salamander, because it is insulting to the salamander. But US officials have been obeying and abetting so long that they don’t remember what it’s like to see the world for what it is — or realize that we can see them for what they are, too.

* * *

The cave opening was a third of a mile into the woods. We gathered at the trailhead as the guide detailed our journey. It was rare for Cathedral Cave to be open. So rare that I, a cave connoisseur, had never been inside.

There were about twelve of us: my husband and kids, a few couples, and some folks from India who had never seen a cave. Everyone was excited that their first time would be in Missouri. A man in a Cardinals T-shirt asked me where I lived. When I said “St Louis”, he gave me the eye reserved for city folk.

“I’m from Kimmswick,” he said. A town of 134 people.

“Home of the levee-high pie!” I exclaimed. “I ate that pie, that big huge apple pie. And you have the apple butter festival! And the strawberry festival. We tried to go once, but it was too crowded.”

“The strawberry festival.” The man shuddered. “Don’t get me started. We get out of town for that. Stay and it’s 45 minutes to drive half a mile.”

“You had some hard years with the floods, right? 2019, 2022.” Canceled events, sandbags on riverbeds.

“Yes,” he said quietly. “We need that festival. The apple butter one too.”

“Once,” I said, “We went to Kimmswick without even knowing it was Deer Widow’s Weekend. My husband spent the whole time wandering around like, ‘Why am I the only man in town?!”

Everyone laughed. Later in the cave, the man in the Cards shirt helped a one-armed man make his way down the slippery paths, ensuring he was safe.

“Did everyone get bug spray?” asked our guide, a peppy parks ranger. “The ticks are bad this year. And there’s that new tick, the really bad one. The one that makes you allergic to meat.”

Everyone gasped. Here was a Missouri tragedy.

“Is that real?” asked my son. “All meat? Even hot dogs?!”

“It’s real,” the guide confirmed. “Allergic to all meat. Except fish and chicken, but those don’t count. I know someone who got bit. She’s a vegan now.”

We gasped again. Someone grabbed the spray and began frantically reapplying.

“Now there’s a shame,” said the Cardinals man.

“Poor thing,” a woman murmured.

“OK!” said the guide after a moment of silence for the tragic vegan. “We’re going to hike to the cave. Does everyone have their lanterns?”

We held up our “lanterns,” which were flashlights, but we liked the delusion. Cathedral Cave used to be a show cave when it was owned by Lester Dill, who also owned its neighbor, Onondaga Cave. I wrote about Dill in my book The Last American Road Trip, for he was a quintessential American: the inventor of the bumper sticker and tacky PR stunts, and an environmentalist who spent his final years saving Missouri’s caves and rivers from destruction. Dill led a life of wild contradictions: like his state, like his country.

In the 1930s, Cathedral Cave was a show cave with electricity. When the electricity broke in the 1970s, and thieves stole the copper wire, Dill decided not to fix it, but instead make Cathedral a “wild cave” lit by lantern. Missourians excel at transforming laziness and destruction into entertainment.

At the end of the trail stood a moss-covered concrete cube with a padlocked door. Here our guide showed us photos of the blind salamander, talking him up like a long-lost friend. She noted he had been hard to spot, but we should give a holler if he appeared. She gave the requisite warnings about not touching cave formations and urged us to protect bats vulnerable to white nose syndrome. I have heard these warnings for decades, but I never tire of them, because they mean someone cares.

She unlocked the door. A blast of cool air initiated our descent. We climbed into Cathedral Cave, navigating puddles and switchbacks. The railing was gritty from age but the formations dazzled, indifferent to time. Stalactites glistened with pearls of water: the ceiling lived. The guide noted that caves are impervious to earthquakes and other natural disasters. Stromatolites outlast everything: they are older, she said, than the rings of Saturn. It would take a deliberate act of man to destroy the underworld.

 

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