Americans are an odd lot. An increasingly accurate manifestation of the askew priorities, misplaced passions, and political impotence of the general public, particularly what constitutes something called, the “progressive left,” is the tantrum-like expressions of outrage that have come to dominate social discourse. Setting aside important concerns about the algorithmic power of villainous companies, such as Meta, X, and Tik Tok, to manipulate the attention of its millions of users, social media does provide some indication of what consumes people; what compels them to post, like, share, and comment as opposed to what elicits the sound of cyber crickets.

First of all, they came to take the gypsies
and I was happy because they pilfered.
Then they came to take the Jews and I said nothing,
because they were unpleasant to me.
Then they came to take homosexuals,
and I was relieved, because they were annoying me.
Then they came to take the Communists,
and I said nothing because I was not a Communist.
One day they came to take me,
and there was nobody left to protest.

–Bertold Brecht

“No pasarán!” – they shall not pass. It’s the rallying cry that strikes at the core of my identity. The same anti-fascist slogan heard by my Spanish grandmother, who endured the horrors of that country’s civil war, echoed in London where my Jewish paternal grandparents lived. Ninety years ago, it was this cry that united tens of thousands of East Enders, who stood tall against Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts at the battle of Cable Street.

America’s century is over. History has not ended. This has become the new conventional wisdom even among the keepers of convention.

The challenge is how America finds real security in this new era. This month, we witnessed two strikingly different answers: one from the self-proclaimed most powerful man in the world, Donald Trump, and one from the champion of the rising populist movement on the left, Senator Bernie Sanders.

Florida lawyer Jalal Shehadeh is convinced that the warrantless seizure of his cell phone by federal agents at the Newark International Airport after he returned from Palestine this September was not random.

Shehadeh, a Miami-based attorney and Palestinian rights advocate, was held for several hours for a secondary inspection and had his phone seized by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) after he refused to allow federal agents to search it.