The FBI said Monday that it had stopped a series of attacks planned for New Year’s Eve in Southern California. The alleged plotters, say law enforcement officials, are members of a far-left, anti-capitalist, anti-government organization that had targeted companies “engaged in activities affecting interstate and foreign commerce.”

“This country protects the right to hold extreme views about its past, present, and future, but violence is an unmistakable and enforceable line,” said Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Eisenberg in a news release.

Federal and local law enforcement worked together on the case, and experts say the foiled plot underscores the success of interagency collaboration. It is also a reminder, they say, that extremism is not bound to a particular side of the political spectrum – it can arise from any social or political ideology.

Why We Wrote This

Politically-motivated violence, like the thwarted plan in the Los Angeles area, can often arise from specific beliefs instead of “pure ideology.” Experts say there are ways society can defuse potential acts and reduce the risk of terrorism.

What is this group and what was its alleged plot?

Federal authorities charged four people from the greater Los Angeles area with conspiracy and “possession of unregistered destructive device[s]” for allegedly planning to use pipe bombs on two U.S. businesses, as well as to target Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

The defendants, officials say, are members of the Turtle Island Liberation Front, which describes itself on social media as seeking “Liberation through decolonization and tribal sovereignty.” Turtle Island is a term for North America used by some Indigenous people. Instagram posts by the organization, which aligns itself with pro-Palestinian activists, call for decolonization, and one post reads “Peaceful protest will never be enough.” Law enforcement says the account is run by Audrey Carroll, one of the defendants.

Threat experts who spoke with the Monitor said their knowledge of the group is limited to the information made public by federal authorities. “It’s hard to know how significant it was and what in the end were the aims,” says Randolph Hall, director of the Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Threats and Emergencies at the University of Southern California.

Court documents describe a manifesto the group circulated titled “Operation Midnight Sun,” which lays out plans to use improvised explosive devices at five potential targets. A task force arrested the group during the planning phase, in the Mojave Desert, where the defendants were assembling bombs, according to the affidavit, which also says Ms. Carroll told a confidential informant that the plot “will be considered a terrorist act.”

What does this plot say about extremism in the U.S.?

The arrests point to a recent increase in leftist extremism, says Lorenzo Vidino, director of the Program on Extremism at The George Washington University.

While some people may remember the Weather Underground bombings of the early 1970s, leftist violence since then had not been “terrorist in nature,” says Dr. Vidino. But “in the last couple of years that dynamic has changed and we see more and more of this.”

A study from the Center for Strategic and International Studies shows spikes in left-wing attacks over the last decade, and a sharp decline in right-wing incidents in the past year.

While political violence happens all over the world, the United States, Dr. Vidino says, is experiencing more than other Western countries. “It is more polarized,” he says.

America is distinct in ways that overlap with the increased polarization: First, law enforcement is aggressive in its pursuit of violent extremists, which “allows for a pretty intense level of scrutiny of some of these dynamics,” he says. Second, access to weapons is relatively easy. Third, America’s First Amendment “allows for protection of speech that is very extreme and can therefore allow people to recruit other people to extend their message to a broader audience.” But having an outlet to express extreme ideas can also be an alternative to violence, he adds.

While some conflict may lead to violence, most does not, says Dr. Hall. “You can look at specific incidents where there’s a connection, but it hasn’t become, say, pervasive in society that people are battling with each other with guns or fists over political issues,” he says.

What does the alleged plot say about a need for vigilance?

Extremism is springing from an increasingly complex “mishmash” of beliefs, says Mike Downing, chief security officer at private security firm Prevent Advisors.

“It’s not a pure ideology on one side or pure ideology on the other side, but it’s a mixed bag of things that are used to justify certain actions, how they got radicalized, how they mobilized to violence,” says Mr. Downing, who ran counterterrorism operations in Los Angeles as a former deputy police chief for the city.

The FBI calls it “nihilistic violent extremism”: mostly people who are young and online 24/7, who pick and choose from extremist beliefs. “An extremist probably 50 years ago was reading long manuals, philosophical treatises. Today, it’s TikTok,” says Dr. Vidino. “They simplify things a lot, and they also have a fascination with ultraviolence.”

A narrow focus on whether violence comes from one end of the political spectrum over another can lead law enforcement to overlook threats, says Mr. Downing. “We just have to be careful that we don’t get lured into this false sense of security by saying, ‘Oh yeah, the evolution of these threats are only coming from one side.’”

It is possible to change a culture of violence, says Dr. Hall. “The ability to resolve disputes peacefully with the kind of institutions that favor dialogue and rule of law, trust in the legal system – these things are all important.”

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Elected and civic leaders can set the tone. “It’s important for all those in the political sphere who have the ability to influence, … to defuse the conflict that exists,” he says. “I think that’s very valuable.”

The Southern California arrests show how law enforcement agencies can successfully work together when their authority is not politicized, says Mr. Downing. Engagement like community policing and teaching people about the terrorism landscape diminishes the motivation for extremists. “And if you diminish both the motivational part of it and the capability part of that,” he says, “you reduce the risk of terrorism.”

For immigrants, naturalization ceremonies represent the culmination of their yearslong effort to earn citizenship. In front of a federal judge, permanent residents raise their right hands, repeat the Oath of Allegiance to their new country, and usually wave a small American flag with pride once the judge confirms their citizenship.

On Dec. 4, inside Boston’s Faneuil Hall – a historic site where revolutionaries like Samuel Adams fostered the idea of American freedom – one such event took a turn. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officers denied entry to several people who showed up for their naturalization ceremony, according to Project Citizenship, a nonprofit providing legal support for those seeking citizenship. Each of these individuals was from one of 19 countries the Trump administration identified as high-security risks under a Dec. 2 Department of Homeland Security memo, which mandated the immediate pausing and review of immigration applications from those countries, including Haiti, Afghanistan, and Venezuela.

What happened at the Boston ceremony is part of a tightening of the naturalization process throughout the country. In late November, New York state Attorney General Letitia James wrote a letter to USCIS questioning its decision to cancel ceremonies in several counties in her state; USCIS said the counties “did not meet the statutory requirements.” On Dec. 9 in Indianapolis, 38 out of 100 prospective citizens were turned away at their ceremony, according to local news reports. Local outlets in Atlanta reported that, on Dec. 12, three immigrants had their oath ceremonies canceled.

Why We Wrote This

In Boston and other cities, some lawful permanent residents are having their naturalization ceremonies canceled, amid a Trump administration review of applicants from 19 countries identified as posing high security risks.

The efforts to clamp down on legal immigration pathways follows the shooting of two National Guard members in Washington, one fatally, just before Thanksgiving. An Afghan national, who entered the country legally in 2021 through a program for allies who served alongside the U.S. military, has been charged with first-degree murder. Following that attack, President Donald Trump quickly announced significant immigration restrictions, including a pause on all asylum decisions. This week, the Trump administration added 20 countries to a list of nations whose citizens face full or partial bans on entering the U.S.

Those who apply for naturalization are some of the most thoroughly vetted immigrants in the country. To be eligible, an immigrant must generally have been a lawful permanent resident for at least five years, be a “person of good moral character,” and pass tests in civics and English. The process can take decades, and the oath ceremony is largely seen as a formality.

Gail Breslow, the executive director of Project Citizenship in Boston, said that 21 clients of the organization had their naturalization ceremonies canceled this month. Clients were either pulled out of line at the Dec. 4 ceremony or notified via email that their ceremonies, scheduled for Dec. 4 or Dec. 10, had been canceled.

One client who was turned away in person has lived in the U.S. for more than 20 years, Ms. Breslow says. “She’s been background checked, she’s been fingerprinted, she’s had her photo taken, she’s been tested on her knowledge of US civics. … This is someone who has already been told that they’ve been approved for citizenship.”

In Minnesota, naturalization ceremonies have also been canceled in recent weeks, says Jane Graupman, executive director of the International Institute of Minnesota, which provides legal services for immigrants. Only four of the organization’s clients have been granted citizenship this month, compared with the typical 40 to 70. In addition, the institute has documented more than 60 cases since November of immigrants who received fee waivers for their citizenship applications having officials from the USCIS’ fraud division show up at their homes to review documents such as tax records and mortgages, according to Ms. Graupman.

In a statement to the Monitor, a USCIS spokesperson said the agency has “paused all adjudications for aliens from high-risk countries” while it “works to ensure that all aliens from these countries are vetted and screened to the maximum degree possible.”

“The pause will allow for a comprehensive examination of all pending benefit requests for aliens from the designated high-risk countries,” the statement said. “The safety of the American people always comes first.”

Immigration lawyers and advocates have condemned the cancellations as unnecessary and cruel.

“By the time you actually get to the ceremony, you’ve gone through so many steps and so many processes; you already feel like you’re an American,” says Jeffrey Thielman, president and CEO of the International Institute of New England, which supports immigrants and refugees. “It’s discouraging to people, and it also creates more anxiety among the immigrant population.”

The actions from the Trump administration come at a time when national support for the president’s handling of immigration is dwindling. A recent poll by the Associated Press-NORC Center found that approval of Mr. Trump’s immigration policies has dropped from 49% in March to 38% in early December.

“Tip of the iceberg”

Over the last year, the White House has made illegal immigration a focal point in its agenda – from large scale Immigrations and Customs Enforcement operations to the mobilization of National Guard troops, the Border Patrol, and other federal agencies to assist immigration enforcement officers. Now, USCIS’s recent policies are restricting legal immigration pathways, posing roadblocks for those seeking citizenship.

Jeannie Kain, a lawyer at Kain Immigration, suggests that the cancellation of naturalization ceremonies is the “tip of the iceberg” on the possible outcomes from the USCIS memorandum.

Under Section 1447(b) of Title 8 of the U.S. Code, those pulled from the naturalization ceremonies need to be certified as a citizen within 120 days of their citizenship interview. Ms. Kain suggests that legal action is likely to be taken on behalf of those whose ceremonies have been canceled. Her greater concern is for those from the 19 high-risk countries who have pending asylum cases or are seeking green cards.

“I have [a client] who has been waiting since 2014 for a decision on their asylum case. ... And now he’s not going to get a decision.”

Ms. Kain also worries that the number of high-risk countries will increase. It’s not clear yet whether nationals who are already in the U.S. – but from the latest countries added to the Trump administration’s travel ban – will also face additional vetting for their asylum, green card, or citizenship applications.

The Trump administration might also be intensifying efforts to revoke citizenship from some who have already been naturalized. USCIS field offices have been asked to identify 100 to 200 denaturalization cases per month in the 2026 fiscal year, according to recent reporting in The New York Times.

On Dec. 10, another ceremony was held at John Joseph Moakley U.S. Courthouse in Boston, days after the Faneuil Hall ceremony where immigrants were turned away. Jane Ellis, one of many volunteers that help new citizens register to vote, said that extra volunteers were called in the event of a similar disruption.

“I just cannot imagine people going through all the steps that they have to do to get to this point. And to be turned away is just horrific,” says Ms. Ellis, who began volunteering during the first Trump administration. “I can’t even get my head around it.”

Supporters of the administration’s immigration policies see tighter restrictions as a boon. Lora Ries, director of the Border Security and Immigration Center at the Heritage Foundation, published a report this month calling for a new immigration system that “prioritizes Americans first, lawful immigrants second, and illegal aliens not at all.”

“In short, lawful applicants who are eligible for an immigration benefit should have it granted in a timely manner, and those who are not eligible should be denied expeditiously and then promptly depart the U.S.,” Ms. Ries writes.

Immigration advocates such as Ms. Breslow criticize the recent Trump administration policies for targeting people based on nationality, which she calls “xenophobic and racist.” Of the 19 high-risk countries, most are in Africa or the Middle East.

“These are people who’ve made their lives here. They’re our neighbors, they’re our co-workers, they’re people we sit next to on the bus and the subway,” she says.

Naturalization ceremonies have long been a beacon of hope to immigrants seeking the American dream.

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Mounifa Prosnitz, who is originally from Brazil, has lived in the U.S. for nine years. She walked into Moakley Courthouse last week as a permanent resident, and left as a U.S. citizen. After receiving her citizenship certificate, Ms. Prosnitz said she felt “free.”

“I don’t know how to explain it, it [feels] so good. Now I can vote, I can serve the country. I can do something to be better here.”

For immigrants, naturalization ceremonies represent the culmination of their yearslong effort to earn citizenship. In front of a federal judge, permanent residents raise their right hands, repeat the Oath of Allegiance to their new country, and usually wave a small American flag with pride once the judge confirms their citizenship.

On Dec. 4, inside Boston’s Faneuil Hall – a historic site where revolutionaries like Samuel Adams fostered the idea of American freedom – one such event took a turn. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officers denied entry to several people who showed up for their naturalization ceremony, according to Project Citizenship, a nonprofit providing legal support for those seeking citizenship. Each of these individuals was from one of 19 countries the Trump administration identified as high-security risks under a Dec. 2 Department of Homeland Security memo, which mandated the immediate pausing and review of immigration applications from those countries, including Haiti, Afghanistan, and Venezuela.

What happened at the Boston ceremony is part of a tightening of the naturalization process throughout the country. In late November, New York state Attorney General Letitia James wrote a letter to USCIS questioning its decision to cancel ceremonies in several counties in her state; USCIS said the counties “did not meet the statutory requirements.” On Dec. 9 in Indianapolis, 38 out of 100 prospective citizens were turned away at their ceremony, according to local news reports. Local outlets in Atlanta reported that, on Dec. 12, three immigrants had their oath ceremonies canceled.

Why We Wrote This

In Boston and other cities, some lawful permanent residents are having their naturalization ceremonies canceled, amid a Trump administration review of applicants from 19 countries identified as posing high security risks.

The efforts to clamp down on legal immigration pathways follows the shooting of two National Guard members in Washington, one fatally, just before Thanksgiving. An Afghan national, who entered the country legally in 2021 through a program for allies who served alongside the U.S. military, has been charged with first-degree murder. Following that attack, President Donald Trump quickly announced significant immigration restrictions, including a pause on all asylum decisions. This week, the Trump administration added 20 countries to a list of nations whose citizens face full or partial bans on entering the U.S.

Those who apply for naturalization are some of the most thoroughly vetted immigrants in the country. To be eligible, an immigrant must generally have been a lawful permanent resident for at least five years, be a “person of good moral character,” and pass tests in civics and English. The process can take decades, and the oath ceremony is largely seen as a formality.

Gail Breslow, the executive director of Project Citizenship in Boston, said that 21 clients of the organization had their naturalization ceremonies canceled this month. Clients were either pulled out of line at the Dec. 4 ceremony or notified via email that their ceremonies, scheduled for Dec. 4 or Dec. 10, had been canceled.

One client who was turned away in person has lived in the U.S. for more than 20 years, Ms. Breslow says. “She’s been background checked, she’s been fingerprinted, she’s had her photo taken, she’s been tested on her knowledge of US civics. … This is someone who has already been told that they’ve been approved for citizenship.”

In Minnesota, naturalization ceremonies have also been canceled in recent weeks, says Jane Graupman, executive director of the International Institute of Minnesota, which provides legal services for immigrants. Only four of the organization’s clients have been granted citizenship this month, compared with the typical 40 to 70. In addition, the institute has documented more than 60 cases since November of immigrants who received fee waivers for their citizenship applications having officials from the USCIS’ fraud division show up at their homes to review documents such as tax records and mortgages, according to Ms. Graupman.

In a statement to the Monitor, a USCIS spokesperson said the agency has “paused all adjudications for aliens from high-risk countries” while it “works to ensure that all aliens from these countries are vetted and screened to the maximum degree possible.”

“The pause will allow for a comprehensive examination of all pending benefit requests for aliens from the designated high-risk countries,” the statement said. “The safety of the American people always comes first.”

Immigration lawyers and advocates have condemned the cancellations as unnecessary and cruel.

“By the time you actually get to the ceremony, you’ve gone through so many steps and so many processes; you already feel like you’re an American,” says Jeffrey Thielman, president and CEO of the International Institute of New England, which supports immigrants and refugees. “It’s discouraging to people, and it also creates more anxiety among the immigrant population.”

The actions from the Trump administration come at a time when national support for the president’s handling of immigration is dwindling. A recent poll by the Associated Press-NORC Center found that approval of Mr. Trump’s immigration policies has dropped from 49% in March to 38% in early December.

“Tip of the iceberg”

Over the last year, the White House has made illegal immigration a focal point in its agenda – from large scale Immigrations and Customs Enforcement operations to the mobilization of National Guard troops, the Border Patrol, and other federal agencies to assist immigration enforcement officers. Now, USCIS’s recent policies are restricting legal immigration pathways, posing roadblocks for those seeking citizenship.

Jeannie Kain, a lawyer at Kain Immigration, suggests that the cancellation of naturalization ceremonies is the “tip of the iceberg” on the possible outcomes from the USCIS memorandum.

Under Section 1447(b) of Title 8 of the U.S. Code, those pulled from the naturalization ceremonies need to be certified as a citizen within 120 days of their citizenship interview. Ms. Kain suggests that legal action is likely to be taken on behalf of those whose ceremonies have been canceled. Her greater concern is for those from the 19 high-risk countries who have pending asylum cases or are seeking green cards.

“I have [a client] who has been waiting since 2014 for a decision on their asylum case. ... And now he’s not going to get a decision.”

Ms. Kain also worries that the number of high-risk countries will increase. It’s not clear yet whether nationals who are already in the U.S. – but from the latest countries added to the Trump administration’s travel ban – will also face additional vetting for their asylum, green card, or citizenship applications.

The Trump administration might also be intensifying efforts to revoke citizenship from some who have already been naturalized. USCIS field offices have been asked to identify 100 to 200 denaturalization cases per month in the 2026 fiscal year, according to recent reporting in The New York Times.

On Dec. 10, another ceremony was held at John Joseph Moakley U.S. Courthouse in Boston, days after the Faneuil Hall ceremony where immigrants were turned away. Jane Ellis, one of many volunteers that help new citizens register to vote, said that extra volunteers were called in the event of a similar disruption.

“I just cannot imagine people going through all the steps that they have to do to get to this point. And to be turned away is just horrific,” says Ms. Ellis, who began volunteering during the first Trump administration. “I can’t even get my head around it.”

Supporters of the administration’s immigration policies see tighter restrictions as a boon. Lora Ries, director of the Border Security and Immigration Center at the Heritage Foundation, published a report this month calling for a new immigration system that “prioritizes Americans first, lawful immigrants second, and illegal aliens not at all.”

“In short, lawful applicants who are eligible for an immigration benefit should have it granted in a timely manner, and those who are not eligible should be denied expeditiously and then promptly depart the U.S.,” Ms. Ries writes.

Immigration advocates such as Ms. Breslow criticize the recent Trump administration policies for targeting people based on nationality, which she calls “xenophobic and racist.” Of the 19 high-risk countries, most are in Africa or the Middle East.

“These are people who’ve made their lives here. They’re our neighbors, they’re our co-workers, they’re people we sit next to on the bus and the subway,” she says.

Naturalization ceremonies have long been a beacon of hope to immigrants seeking the American dream.

Deepen your worldview

with Monitor Highlights.

Already a subscriber? Log in to hide ads.

Mounifa Prosnitz, who is originally from Brazil, has lived in the U.S. for nine years. She walked into Moakley Courthouse last week as a permanent resident, and left as a U.S. citizen. After receiving her citizenship certificate, Ms. Prosnitz said she felt “free.”

“I don’t know how to explain it, it [feels] so good. Now I can vote, I can serve the country. I can do something to be better here.”

The United States military lost two Iowa National Guard soldiers and a civilian interpreter in Syria, and saw three more of its troops injured, in a shooting last week by an Islamic State supporter there. The violence threw a spotlight on the U.S. military’s mission in a country newly emerging from civil war.

Syrian officials had reportedly warned their American counterparts that an ISIS attack on U.S. forces could be in the offing. (Those officials said the warning went unheeded.) Though recently flagged for possible ISIS sympathies, the shooter was a member of the Syrian security forces, now a U.S. ally.

The U.S. has had soldiers on the ground in Syria for more than a decade now, with roughly 1,000 U.S. troops there today, according to the Pentagon.

Why We Wrote This

Following a recent Islamic State attack on its soldiers, the U.S. must weigh whether a return strike creates more problems for itself and a war-torn country than it solves.

Last month, Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa, who had ties to Al Qaeda and a $10 million bounty on his head 10 years ago, became the first Syrian head of state to visit the White House. The rebel forces he once led – which, though Islamist, routinely clashed with ISIS – overthrew Bashar al-Assad last December.

After their November meeting, President Donald Trump called Mr. al-Sharaa “a tough guy – I like him” and hailed a “new era” of cooperation. Since then, and in the wake of the shooting, there has been talk of expanding the U.S. mission in the country.

What are U.S. troops doing in Syria?

U.S. forces first launched operations in Syria with airstrikes in September 2014 as the Islamic State terrorist group was rapidly expanding. By the following year, U.S. special operations forces were conducting raids on the ground there against ISIS leaders.

With some fluctuations, American forces in the country generally increased until March 2019, when President Trump declared that the U.S. had liberated all ISIS-controlled territory, including “100% of the caliphate.”

But some U.S. forces stayed on, as officials explained then, to prevent the resurgence of ISIS. The 1,000 U.S. soldiers who remain are there “solely to finish the job of defeating ISIS once and for all, preventing its resurgence, and protecting the American homeland from terrorist attacks,” Tom Barrack, U.S. ambassador to Turkey and special envoy to Syria, wrote on social media this month.

The Trump administration also cut the number of U.S. bases in the country from eight to three earlier this year. The eventual goal, according to the Pentagon, is to bring that figure down to one.

That will leave what U.S. officials describe as a small but strategic U.S. outpost at Al-Tanf, in the country’s southeast near the border with Jordan and Iraq. This is designed to give the U.S. security reach that extends beyond the anti-ISIS campaign, the officials say, including the ability to monitor Iran and a jumping-off point for surveillance and rapid-reaction forces.

Will the U.S. military force posture change as a result of the fatal attack on American soldiers, and should it?

There has been no talk lately from the Trump administration of reducing U.S. forces in Syria beyond the current 1,000-troop footprint. There were, however, reports last month, around the time of Mr. al-Sharaa’s stateside visit, of an expanded U.S. presence at an airbase in Damascus to support a security agreement that the U.S. hopes to broker between Syria and Israel. Such cooperation could also help prevent an ISIS resurgence.

But some defense analysts question why the U.S. continues to put U.S. forces in harm’s way when the original foreign policy objective of the U.S. – to defeat ISIS – was declared to have been achieved six years ago. “We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump presidency,” Mr. Trump tweeted in December 2018, three months before officially declaring victory.

This is similar to the question that arose in January 2024, when three U.S. military reservists were killed by a drone launched by an Iranian-backed militia close to the Syrian border in what became known as the Tower 22 attack.

“If we didn’t have troops in Syria, there wouldn’t be any U.S. targets,” says Rosemary Kelanic, director of the Middle East Program at Defense Priorities think tank.

As it stands now, she adds, the current Syria mission lacks a clearly-defined endpoint. “Talking about preventing the resurgence of ISIS is a way of saying that ISIS doesn’t exist. How do you know that you’re done preventing the resurgence of ISIS? There’s no criteria for us to judge when this mission is complete.”

There has been some movement, if not a groundswell, among lawmakers toward withdrawing U.S. forces. “I’m heartbroken that we lost soldiers,” Rep. Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, wrote on social media after the attack. “Now is the time to ask: Why are we in Syria?”

What more can the U.S. do to help prevent terrorism, and does it involve retaliation for the recent troop attack?

As the new, relatively weak Syrian government works to get its footing, ISIS may be looking for ways to reassert itself, officials say.

For this reason, some analysts see merit in the Trump administration keeping troops on the ground, particularly since the fall of the Assad regime last year.

But others question whether it is too dangerous for troops to routinely leave their relatively secure bases, especially in violence-prone areas.

“The U.S. should do whatever it can to give Syria a fighting chance at stability,” says Adam Weinstein, deputy director of the Middle East program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft think tank. “But I don’t think they should be doing these kinds of routine joint patrols and meetings that expose U.S. troops” to harm.

Adm. Brad Cooper, head of U.S. Central Command, which runs Pentagon operations in the Middle East, has warned that one of the big risks in the country is the large population of detainees – some 9,000 former ISIS fighters – who are still in Syrian camps.

The U.S. military lends intelligence support to thwart prison breaks, but Admiral Cooper has stressed the need to repatriate the ISIS fighters to their home countries. Humanitarian groups agree, citing alleged abuses including torture and poor conditions in the detention system, run mainly by Kurdish authorities under U.S. influence.

And there is near-universal concern about the risk of radicalization in the camps, particularly those that house the 38,000 families of ISIS fighters, roughly 60% of whom are children. Of those, nearly one-third are under age 5.

“There is no doubt that ISIS still maintains significant influence in these sites,” Admiral Cooper said. “Let us all double our work to protect the vulnerable and deny ISIS the opportunity to reemerge.”

To this end, the Pentagon in September announced that it was establishing “a special joint cell” tasked with coordinating the repatriation of ISIS fighters and their families.

As for Mr. Trump’s promised retaliation for the U.S. troop deaths, senior administration officials have said that a major U.S. bombing campaign is unlikely. Such a move could upend Mr. al-Sharaa’s tenuous political standing.

Syrian government officials have been quick to show that they are mounting an ostensibly muscular response to the recent violence, with nearly a dozen security personnel arrested and questioned about links to the attacker.

A more likely response from the U.S. could be raids against high-value targets, much like the U.S. carried out against a senior ISIS leader in July, Mr. Weinstein says.

Another possibility is drone strikes on “some targets somewhere out in the desert that are maybe loosely connected” to the attacker, Dr. Kelanic says. “They’ll call that retaliation and move on.”

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But that, too, comes with risks.

“Every time you conduct an operation like that, you risk killing innocent civilians.” And, she adds, it perpetuates the cycle that leads people to terrorism in the first place.

United States belligerence in South America is at a new high, with the launch of military strikes and the seizure of an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela, followed by President Trump’s order Tuesday for a “complete blockade” of sanctioned oil tankers going to or from that country. The moves mark a distinct shift in regional foreign policy from the anti-interventionism of recent decades.

But for one cohort in South Florida, this is just what they have been waiting for. Washington’s new activism brandishes the U.S. presence and policies that Cuban Americans here have supported since fleeing their country following the arrival of Fidel Castro and his communist plans in 1959. To many, it stems from having one of their own, Cuban-immigrant-raised Marco Rubio, at the helm of U.S. international affairs.

“That’s our boy,” says Lorena Cabrera, walking her two small dogs through the Cuban Memorial Park in Little Havana on a recent afternoon. She is referring to Mr. Rubio, who is serving as both secretary of state and interim national security adviser, and who many see as the central force behind the Trump administration’s hard line stance in Latin America this year.

Why We Wrote This

The Trump administration’s more aggressive approach to Latin America is welcomed by many in the Cuban diaspora. They see one of their own – Secretary of State Marco Rubio – as an architect of the shift that, for them, has been a long time coming.

The Cold War ended 35 years ago, and U.S. foreign policy – no longer consumed by the communist threat – shifted to a focus on terrorism and drug trafficking. However, for many on the political right in Latin America, and within the Cuban diaspora in South Florida, the danger of communism never went away. Mr. Rubio’s rise has given broader reach to the Cuban diaspora’s worldview, shaped by a historic loss of freedom, community, property, and human rights in their homeland.

“The U.S.’s new philosophy on foreign affairs reflects the perspectives of most of us inside the Cuban American community: To end the regime in Venezuela ... and of course, the one in Cuba,” says Miguel Cossio, chief operating officer of the American Museum of The Cuban Diaspora in Miami.

For Rubio, an anti-Castro dream

The click-clack and swirling sounds of dominos being mixed together on a table before a fresh round of play fills Little Havana’s Domino Park in early December. Despite posted rules that prohibit yelling and using malas palabras, or bad words, one quartet breaks both codes of conduct within moments of sitting down together, quickly dissolving into hugs and laughter.

“Faced with a life experience of pain, Cubans are a very joyous people,” says Orlando Gutiérrez-Boronat, co-founder and spokesperson for the Cuban Democratic Directorate, which promotes democracy and human rights in Cuba. “There’s sorrow in being lost and disconnected from Cuba, our land. But man, we’ll find a good time anywhere,” says Mr. Gutiérrez-Boronat, whose family fled in 1971, when he was 5 years old.

He describes the mindset of the Cuban diaspora in South Florida, with all the caveats that come with a 2 million-strong population, as patriotic, focused on family unity, prioritizing individual autonomy and freedom, thinking independently, and cherishing democracy.

In the 1950s, when the Castro brothers led a guerrilla campaign to overthrow dictator Fulgencio Batista, many in Cuba believed the struggle would return the island to democracy. But Fidel Castro and his supporters soon began carrying out indiscriminate arrests and executions, seizing private property and assets, and turning to the Soviet Union for financial aid.

Mr. Rubio’s parents left Cuba in 1956, and he was born in Miami in 1971. Like many youngsters raised in South Florida by Cuban-born parents, Mr. Rubio grew up hearing how communism had destroyed lives there, and how the United States was uniquely positioned to bring about freedom on the island. As a child, he dreamed of leading an army of Cuban exiles to overthrow the Castro regime, he wrote in “An American Son: A Memoir,” published in 2012.

Mr. Rubio rose up politically in South Florida, working for the first Cuban American woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, and eventually winning election to the Florida House in 1999.

His decision last January to put the Cuban regime back on the list of state sponsors of terrorism, and the seizure of a Cuba-bound oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela earlier this month, illustrate Mr. Rubio’s espousal of the diaspora’s worldview, locals say.

“He understands what a communist regime is and the damage it can cause,” says Mr. Cossio. “We’re witnessing a philosophical shift in foreign policy.”

An ‘iconic’ regime

The Cold War, which lasted from the late 1940s to the early 1990s, led to an ideological tug of war in Latin America between U.S.-backed anticommunism efforts and Soviet-supported leftist movements. The U.S. backed military coups in Guatemala and Chile, and supported authoritarian military dictatorships that saw leftist citizens as the enemy.

For the United States, a central threat was the prospect that communism could gain a foothold in its backyard, says William LeoGrande, a Cuba expert at American University in Washington. “Apart from Cuba itself, pretty much all of what the U.S. saw as threats in the region went away” with the end of the Cold War, he says. And so too did Washington’s focus on the region.

But in 1998, members of the Cuban diaspora watched keenly as a bombastic former paratrooper was elected president of Venezuela, promising a new economic system that would forge a path between capitalism and communism. President Hugo Chávez’s victory ushered in what was dubbed the “Pink Tide” of leftist, populist leaders across the region who promised an end to elitist politics.

The political opposition in places like Venezuela, Brazil, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Argentina saw communism in these leftist victories. Most of these democratically-elected leftists explicitly praised or had close ties with the Castro regime in Cuba.

“The regime in Cuba is iconic to the left,” says Mr. Gutiérrez-Boronat.

The U.S. mostly stayed on the sidelines.

Converging on Venezuela

Today, from Mexico to Chile, it is common for leftist political candidates to be labeled communists by their opponents. Electorally, it’s “very, very effective,” says Dr. LeoGrande.

What appears to be shifting, however, is Washington’s readiness to adopt a similar outlook. President Donald Trump stepped into the fray of Honduras’s November presidential election to call the front-runner a “borderline communist,” and he referred to New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani as a “100% Communist Lunatic” the same month. In Florida, the state government introduced a new curriculum to teach the risks and realities of communism in public schools.

Anastasios Kamoutsas, the Florida commissioner of education, expects other school districts in the country to adopt something similar. “What Mamdani is pushing is very similar to what Fidel Castro was pushing in communist Cuba. It’s important that our students understand these policies and where they can end up,” he says.

Mr. Trump’s new National Security Strategy places the U.S.’s geopolitical focus squarely on the Americas. It frames Latin America as the source of some of the United States’ most serious problems - drug trafficking, immigration, Chinese investment - and calls on the region as a whole to work toward U.S. goals.

In oil-rich Venezuela, all of these interests come together. And since September, the United States has stepped up its military pressure, blowing alleged drug-running boats out of the water and deploying the world’s largest aircraft carrier, in an effort to remove from power authoritarian leader Nicolás Maduro, Mr. Chávez’s successor. Washington says it is engaged in “armed conflict” with drug cartels, but the legality of its strikes is in question.

“Why are people asking if it’s legal? Bomb them,” says Adela Diez outside a coffee window on Little Havana’s Calle Ocho earlier this month, referring to the 25 vessels the U.S. has sunk and the more than 90 people who have been killed in the Caribbean and the Pacific. “Maduro is held up by the drug money,” she says. “Maduro is holding up Cuba. They all need to fall – Marco Rubio and Donald Trump have the right idea.”

The Cuban diaspora in Florida has grown and changed since the 1960s. The children and grandchildren of exiles are further removed from the upheaval that communism brought to the island, and new arrivals do not always see eye to eye with the old guard.

But, “one thing everyone agrees on is that communism is not good,” says Guennady Rodríguez, who fled Cuba in 2013 and now runs a political podcast called “23yFlagler.”

That collective disdain for communism can translate to: ‘“In Miami, everyone is a communist.’ It just depends on who you ask,” jokes Mr. Rodríguez. In 2023, an online news site accused him of being a prop for the Cuban regime, Mr. Rodríguez recalls, for promoting a policy of engagement with Cuba as a strategy for regime change. The loudest voices in the Cuban community here prefer an isolationist approach.

When it comes to communism, “Marco Rubio uses the word frequently. South Florida Cubans use the word frequently,” says Guillermo Grenier, a sociology professor at Florida International University. “It carries an agenda of us vs. them,” which is typical of current U.S. politics, he says.

José Jasán Nieves Cárdenas, who was a journalist in Cuba before his exile to the United States in 2019, finds that the resistance to communism is so strong that it serves as a conversation stopper. “Once you criticize certain mainstream ideas, you are a communist and you are banned from debate,” says Mr. Nieves, editor-in-chief of El Toque, an online independent news site serving audiences mostly in Cuba.

That concerns him, especially in this political moment.

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Life experience with an extreme political movement, such as the Cuban regime, tends to push people to the opposite extreme, he says. He is not surprised that the diaspora is largely conservative and sees eye to eye with Mr. Rubio. What does surprise him, though, is that Cubans fled a ‘caudillo,’ or strongman, and now seem to defend similar behavior from the Trump administration.

Debate inside the Cuban diaspora, says Mr. Nieves, is more important than ever.

Andy Omer Gokce’s unconventional idea for a new school wasn’t met with immediate enthusiasm.

The former Silicon Valley resident saw technology surging forward in profound ways, even before generative artificial-intelligence models burst into the marketplace. Could the longtime educator build a learning environment, he wondered, where students honed AI and data-science skills? A friend who worked as a software engineer turned data scientist for a large retailer scoffed at the notion.

“His response to me was, ‘We can’t even do it with undergrads. How are you going to do it in middle school?’” Mr. Gokce says.

Why We Wrote This

Teachers are grappling with how to incorporate artificial intelligence into education. A handful of schools are structuring their programs around the new technology, including a charter school in Hawaii which offers a paradigm shift around AI’s role.

Fast forward to this year: A Honolulu classroom in a school Mr. Gokce helped start is filled with iMac desktops and the occasional Rubik’s Cube. What’s not allowed? Cell phones. (Even the tech-forward school doesn’t want students “to get lost in the computers,’’ as Mr. Gokce puts it.)

Kūlia Academy is changing how students view the evolving technological world in which they are growing up. The fledgling charter school – now in its second year – represents a paradigm shift in education. Instead of shying away from AI, the school is building the academic muscles its leaders believe students will need in the cognitive computing world. It’s one of a handful of educational institutes around the country, mostly charter and private schools, that are orienting around AI as a central aspect of learning and teaching.

At the Honolulu school, educators want students to think beyond feeding prompts to AI chatbots. It’s more about understanding the technology’s underlying building blocks – the data collection, the algorithms, and the computer systems backing it all up. In fact, Mr. Gokce, the school’s executive director, says students are not allowed to use ChatGPT and other platforms to generate code. He wants them to master coding languages such as Python, JavaScript, R, and C++.

“We want them to understand the logic – how the computers work,” he says.

Seventh-grader Atlas James toggles between two displays containing data-driven projects. His latest research focuses on educational attainment in the United States. He scrolls through a spreadsheet filled with rows upon rows of data.

“Data is a really big part of the life we live today,” he says. “Nowadays, everybody’s on a phone, a computer, a tablet, and it’s important to understand both how our data is collected and used, and how to use data that we find in our everyday scenarios to better understand the world.”

In addition to the ban on cell phones for students, there is no homework. The school day is longer, with summer school required, along with more time for math and English language arts every day. Those aspects appear to be paying academic dividends. Kūlia Academy students posted the state’s top scores on Hawaii’s most recent standardized tests.

The education experiment comes amid a stock market juiced by AI enthusiasm and parallel worries about job extinction. Large-scale layoffs this year at companies such as Amazon and UPS have raised concerns about workforce automation, though experts have cautioned that AI innovations might be playing a more indirect role at this point. Still, the hazy outlook has triggered more discussion about the skills today’s students need to compete in tomorrow’s workforce.

“The people who might have a job in the future should have the AI skills,” Mr. Gokce says. “There is no escape. It’s coming.”

Wading into AI learning

When ChatGPT debuted three years ago, it marked the beginning of a cognitive technology era, in which computers simulated human reasoning to an unprecedented degree. Most people had never interacted with digital platforms designed to mimic human thinking. Questions arose almost immediately, especially in the realm of education.

Would students ever write another essay on their own? Conversely, could machine learning models actually enhance student learning through tutoring or other tools?

Today, 33 states and Puerto Rico have adopted AI guidance or policies for K-12 schools, according to AI for Education, an organization pushing for teacher training and responsible adoption of generative AI in classrooms. Those frameworks vary widely, addressing issues such as data privacy, ethical use, professional learning, and classroom strategies.

“We need strong thinking skills in our young people, which includes a deep understanding of the digital world,” says Rebecca Winthrop, who leads Brookings Institution’s Global Task Force on AI in Education. “And it’s not necessarily a tools-first approach to AI literacy, but a conceptual and ethical grounding.”

But few schools have waded as deeply into AI learning as Kūlia Academy, which bills itself as the “first school in the United States to offer a comprehensive 7-year Artificial Intelligence and Data Science program.” This specialty charter school, now serving roughly 150 sixth and seventh graders from across Oahu, expects to scale up through 12th grade over the next six years.

Mr. Gokce, a former charter school leader in California, received approval from Hawaii’s State Public Charter School Commission to launch Kūlia Academy. He and other school founders built the AI and data science-focused program using curricula from Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California, Los Angeles, and AI4ALL.

In some classrooms, that means students are learning to code or analyze data. But visitors will also find children practicing hula dances, playing string instruments, and conducting hands-on science experiments. Plus, for four hours each day, they are immersed in math and English language arts – two hours for each subject. All told, the regular school day runs from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.

The approach lured Patricia Tobin out of retirement to teach English language arts. She says the school practices intentional cross-class collaboration. Students’ research projects in their AI data-science class, for instance, turn into English assignments when they are ready to report their conclusions.

The result, Ms. Tobin says, might be a TED Talk-style speech, a comic book, or a more traditional report.

“With two back-to-back hours, we can really take deep dives and incorporate that data science into the literacy development,” says Ms. Tobin, who originally moved to Hawaii with a job through a Johns Hopkins University program training teachers in literacy reforms. “They’re going to get so much more out of what they research if they’re at or above their reading level and understanding of math.”

And it’s not just students analyzing data. Teachers are, too. A wall in the staff lounge features photos of every student with colored tape indicating their progress in math and English language arts. The tuition-free charter school, which uses a lottery-based admissions process based on demand, pulls from a range of socioeconomic groups. School leaders say 52% of students qualified for free or reduced-price lunch this academic year.

The vast majority appear to be excelling. Kūlia Academy’s inaugural class of sixth graders logged the highest proficiency rates – 75% in math and 80% in English language arts – among all Hawaii middle and high schools on the state benchmarking tests, according to the school.

“The culture is that it’s cool to be smart here,” says Chris Teijeiro, whose son Hendrix is in seventh grade at Kūlia Academy.

Student input

Do the consumers – the school’s sixth and seventh graders – agree?

The middle schoolers who spoke with the Monitor didn’t hold back. On the cool list: their blue uniforms, advanced classes, and fun electives. Not so cool, at least according to some students: summer school and the no-cell-phone policy.

“I really like that,” says Sana Cook, referring to the dress code,” because it makes everyone look neat and organized.”

On the academic side, Sana says she and her peers are doing math “way above our grade level” and diving into the complexities of AI data science and coding. “It’s really advanced,” says the seventh grader, “but it’s fun to do.”

That positive sentiment toward AI isn’t necessarily shared by other students, parents, and teachers nationwide. A RAND survey conducted earlier this year found that even as AI use is increasing among students and teachers, widespread skepticism remains. Forty-eight percent of middle school students, 55% of high schoolers, and 61% of parents expressed concern about AI use harming critical-thinking skills.

The caveat is that the survey question asked about AI use rather than AI learning – the latter of which Kūlia Academy is striving to do. Still, it’s a glimpse into the fraught public attitude toward the rapidly accelerating technology. More than half of the students surveyed also worry about being falsely accused of cheating with AI.

“The larger point is that we need to figure out what are the right ways of using AI that build skills instead of replace skills,” says Christopher Doss, a senior economist at RAND, a research organization.

That’s exactly what spurred Edwyna Brooks to move her sixth-grader son from a private school to Kūlia Academy.

“It’s easy to pigeonhole [AI] as something that’s bad when you haven’t touched it, right?” she says. “... Broadening their perspective now will make it easier for them to adapt and use it as a tool instead of something negative.”

Ms. Brooks was among roughly a dozen parents who voluntarily showed up, some during their work hours, to chat about their children’s experiences. School leaders say this type of parent engagement isn’t uncommon. Two recent turkey potluck dinners – one for each grade – brought so many families to the school, cars filled the parking lot and lined neighboring streets.

Enrolling their children at Kūlia Academy, particularly when it opened last year, represented a leap of faith. It was an untested concept. But the parents shared similar motivations for taking that risk. They say their children were bored or not challenged enough in their previous schools. Others couldn’t shake the feeling that the education system wasn’t changing fast enough to keep up with the digital age.

Eileen James had been searching for a new academic home for her son, Atlas, whom she described as the “odd man out” at his former school. He was bullied and frustrated, she says, which led to behavior problems in the classroom. Now, Ms. James says her son has “found his people,” and, as a mother, she appreciates the innovative learning model.

“Who knows what education is going to look like in the future? None of us do,” she says. “It’s not going to look the way it does now.”

How far will this model go?

Before long, Kūlia Academy could need more classrooms. It’s occupying a building in a working-class neighborhood that formerly housed a parochial school, but Mr. Gokce has already started scouting expansion locations. He has reason to be optimistic. Inquiries have increased in the nearly year and a half since the educators welcomed their first group of learners.

“We had twice as many applications last year,” he says. “And this year we’re expecting way more.”

Mr. Gokce envisions Kūlia Academy graduates leaving with a firm understanding of how AI and data science work. He hopes that at least half of the school’s students attend college and major in AI data science or similar fields. But the school’s founder also predicts that some will land jobs immediately after high school, recruited by tech leaders who value skillsets over degrees.

And if students pursue seemingly unrelated careers? That’s beneficial, too, he says, because they will be armed with knowledge to solve problems.

AI experts don’t foresee Kūlia Academy replicas popping up in every community, though.

Charles Fadel, chairman and founder of the Center for Curriculum Redesign, explains why using a car analogy. Most adults will learn to drive a car. But if you’re simply a driver – not a car designer or auto technician – do you really need to know how electrodes in a car battery work?

“Not every kid needs that,” Mr. Fadel says, referring to a deep understanding of AI and data science. “However, every kid needs to know how to be extremely good at AI literacy.”

It’s an education debate that likely won’t conclude anytime soon.

Approaching AI with a youth mindset

Kelvin Frazier splits his time between teaching chemistry to college students at Chaminade University of Honolulu and math to middle schoolers at Kūlia Academy. A generational difference has stood out to him.

His sixth and seventh graders approach AI with curiosity, he says. They want to know the applications and inner workings of the technology.

“The college students? They’re more ... ‘How can I find my easy way out of things?’” says Dr. Frazier, who holds a doctorate in physical chemistry from MIT.

Technological innovation and practical use are one aspect of responsible AI use. But as Kūlia Academy students point out, it’s also a matter of stewardship. That’s something they talk about frequently in their classes.

“You have to think about the bad things that AI can lead to, right?” says Bill Nguyen, a seventh grader. “The entire reason that AI can sometimes be bad is because of you. Yeah, that’s right – you,” he says, with a point of emphasis. “It uses data. AI only knows what it knows because of data.”

As the saying goes, a week is a lifetime in politics. For recent evidence, look to Texas.

The state didn’t have a confirmed congressional district map at the start of last week. Politicians on both sides of the aisle weren’t sure whether they should retire, or if – and where – they should run again. Uncertainty around the fate of President Donald Trump’s push for state lawmakers to create five additional Republican seats in Congress hung thick in the air.

Now, the state has a congressional map approved by the U.S. Supreme Court. But one of the more compelling races in the country – for a seat in the U.S. Senate – has also taken shape as candidates have solidified their running plans. The five-person race in 2026 could not only make or break the GOP’s three-seat Senate majority for the following two years, but it could also help define the identity of the two major parties going forward.

Why We Wrote This

It’s been a big month for politics in Texas, after the Supreme Court approved redistricted congressional maps and top candidates solidified running plans. The Senate race emerged as a marquee race with distinct choices in both the Democratic and GOP primaries.

Texas is a deeply conservative state; it’s been three decades since a Democrat last won a statewide race here. What is popular with this state’s voters will not reflect the entirety of the country. Yet questions over the candidates’ style and substance here mirror national debates over what types of politicians resonate most with voters in this political moment.

Who will those voters choose among the diverse array of candidates? The experienced and conservative incumbent, Sen. John Cornyn? Or his arguably more conservative – but more scandal-marked – primary opponent, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton? U.S. Rep. Wesley Hunt is also running on the Republican side, and has fared reasonably well in early polling.

For Democrats, will they choose the youthful, faith-guided progressive in state Rep. James Talarico? Or the firebrand, and social media superstar, Rep. Jasmine Crockett?

In a way, this election is a combination of all the questions that have dominated Texas politics for the past three decades. How conservative will the Republican nominee be? What will it take for a Democrat to end the party’s statewide losing streak? With the primaries in four months, and the general election in 11, the answers are far away. But the race is shaping up to be one of the defining contests of this election cycle.

“We’re even more polarized now” than in recent elections, says Brandon Rottinghaus, a political scientist at the University of Houston.

Voters will face a choice, he adds: “Who’s the better fit for their ideological vision, and who can win?”

The red half

Since first joining the Senate in 2002, Mr. Cornyn is facing perhaps the toughest reelection fight of his career. Over the decades, he has navigated his party’s gradual rightward shift. Now, however, the GOP is more ideologically conservative than ever, and it’s beholden to the singular influence of Mr. Trump.

Senator Cornyn “has been able to adapt as needed,” says Mark Jones, a political scientist at Rice University in Houston. But “it was harder for him to adapt in the Trump era.”

Mr. Cornyn, Dr. Jones adds, faces the prospect of his primary opponents “remind[ing] Texas Republican voters of every center-right or compromise position [he] has taken over the past decade.”

This includes helping to shepherd a gun-safety bill through Congress following a mass shooting in 2022 at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. It also includes his skepticism of Mr. Trump over the years.

Mr. Paxton, meanwhile, brought a lawsuit seeking to overturn the 2020 election results in four states because of alleged fraud. (The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately ruled against him, stating that he did not have standing to sue and that there was no evidence of widespread fraud.)

Unfortunately for Mr. Paxton, his conservative bona fides are clashing with a long history of personal and political controversy. For a decade, he faced charges of securities fraud. (He settled the case last year.) In 2023, the Republican-controlled Texas legislature impeached him on charges of bribery and abuse of office. (The state Senate acquitted him in votes along party lines.) Most recently, his wife, Angela – a state senator and a devout Christian – announced that she was filing for divorce “on biblical grounds.” In court filings, she alleged adultery.

Recent polls have shown Mr. Cornyn and Mr. Paxton in a virtual dead heat, but that baggage should be enough to render Mr. Paxton an unviable candidate in a general election, some Republicans argue.

“Religious conservatives in the party are not happy with Paxton,” says Gary Polland, editor in chief of the Texas Conservative Review, an online newsletter.

The GOP’s majority in the U.S. Senate also complicates the fundraising math should the embattled attorney general win the nomination. It could also complicate a Trump endorsement, says Mr. Polland.

“I don’t anticipate Trump endorsing Paxton,” he adds. “Trump wants to win [the Senate] in November. ... If Paxton is the nominee, it’s going to require spending significant resources [in Texas] that would be better spent in other races.”

The Paxton campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

The blue half

Indeed, the prospect of a Paxton nomination has given Democrats hope that the Senate seat could be winnable.

Democrats “desperately want to run against Ken Paxton,” says Matt Mackowiak, a GOP consultant and a senior adviser for the Cornyn campaign.

“He would be the top of the ticket,” he adds. “And we don’t have to look back far to see the effects of having a weak top-of-ballot candidate.”

In 2018, Sen. Ted Cruz ran for reelection and beat Democratic Rep. Beto O’Rourke by just 2.6 points – the closest Senate race in the state since 1978. Senator Cruz’s unpopularity in the state, combined with Mr. Trump’s unpopularity among Democrats, helped fuel a strong showing from Democratic voters. The party is hoping for a similar formula next November.

Yet, Democrats have a biennial problem they will still need to overcome: Do they win by convincing Republican voters to split their ticket and vote for a Democrat – likely only feasible by nominating a more moderate candidate? Or do they win by getting as many Democrats and non-voters to the polls as possible through fiery rhetoric?

Mr. Talarico appears to have chosen the former.

His profile grew first as a face of the Democratic resistance to the GOP’s redistricting push, an effort that drew the praise of former President Barack Obama. In July, he made a head-turning appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, earning Mr. Rogan’s recommendation that he run for president. An orthodox campaign “is [not] going to cut it in Texas,” Mr. Talarico said during a September interview. He would like to do a town hall with a Republican Party group “so we can have a real dialogue,” he added.

Ms. Crockett appears to have chosen the latter.

Having earned nationwide recognition for viral clashes with Republican colleagues in Congress, she declared at a campaign launch event that Mr. Trump “better get to work because I’m coming for you.”

Republicans have since claimed that they nudged Ms. Crockett toward running because they believe she would be too polarizing in a general election to win. While recent polls show her leading Mr. Talarico, they also show her with lower favorability ratings than every candidate other than Mr. Paxton and Mr. Cornyn among Texas voters.

In truth, both Democrats would be polarizing in November, experts say.

“Both candidates are progressive,” says Professor Rottinghaus.

Mr. Talarico “doesn’t demonize Republicans as frequently or vociferously as Jasmine Crockett,” he adds. “That’s going to make him look moderate. But it’s moderation in tactics and tone, not moderation in policy.”

On sex and gender issues, for example, Mr. Talarico has said that “God is non-binary.” In another speech, he noted that “there are many more than two biological sexes. In fact, there are six.”

Neither the Crockett nor the Talarico campaigns responded to requests for comment.

“Even more polarized”

At bottom, the midterm elections next year will feature one of the most high-stakes and competitive elections in Texas for decades. Both parties will hold tough primaries featuring politically vulnerable candidates – primaries that could well lead to run-off elections in May.

Texas voters will be asked again and again who they want to represent them, and they will have to answer age-old political questions around experience or novelty, compromise or ideological purity. The nation will be watching.

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While statewide elections in Texas have developed a familiar rhythm in the years of Republican dominance, because of “the size of the office, and the stakes for Texas and the nation,” says Professor Rottinghaus, the contest next year is going to be entirely new.

“It’s a movie we’ve seen before, but it’s one that is now approaching blockbuster status,” he adds.

As the saying goes, a week is a lifetime in politics. For recent evidence, look to Texas.

The state didn’t have a confirmed congressional district map at the start of last week. Politicians on both sides of the aisle weren’t sure whether they should retire, or if – and where – they should run again. Uncertainty around the fate of President Donald Trump’s push for state lawmakers to create five additional Republican seats in Congress hung thick in the air.

Now, the state has a congressional map approved by the U.S. Supreme Court. But one of the more compelling races in the country – for a seat in the U.S. Senate – has also taken shape as candidates have solidified their running plans. The five-person race in 2026 could not only make or break the GOP’s three-seat Senate majority for the following two years, but it could also help define the identity of the two major parties going forward.

Why We Wrote This

It’s been a big month for politics in Texas, after the Supreme Court approved redistricted congressional maps and top candidates solidified running plans. The Senate race emerged as a marquee race with distinct choices in both the Democratic and GOP primaries.

Texas is a deeply conservative state; it’s been three decades since a Democrat last won a statewide race here. What is popular with this state’s voters will not reflect the entirety of the country. Yet questions over the candidates’ style and substance here mirror national debates over what types of politicians resonate most with voters in this political moment.

Who will those voters choose among the diverse array of candidates? The experienced and conservative incumbent, Sen. John Cornyn? Or his arguably more conservative – but more scandal-marked – primary opponent, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton? U.S. Rep. Wesley Hunt is also running on the Republican side, and has fared reasonably well in early polling.

For Democrats, will they choose the youthful, faith-guided progressive in state Rep. James Talarico? Or the firebrand, and social media superstar, Rep. Jasmine Crockett?

In a way, this election is a combination of all the questions that have dominated Texas politics for the past three decades. How conservative will the Republican nominee be? What will it take for a Democrat to end the party’s statewide losing streak? With the primaries in four months, and the general election in 11, the answers are far away. But the race is shaping up to be one of the defining contests of this election cycle.

“We’re even more polarized now” than in recent elections, says Brandon Rottinghaus, a political scientist at the University of Houston.

Voters will face a choice, he adds: “Who’s the better fit for their ideological vision, and who can win?”

The red half

Since first joining the Senate in 2002, Mr. Cornyn is facing perhaps the toughest reelection fight of his career. Over the decades, he has navigated his party’s gradual rightward shift. Now, however, the GOP is more ideologically conservative than ever, and it’s beholden to the singular influence of Mr. Trump.

Senator Cornyn “has been able to adapt as needed,” says Mark Jones, a political scientist at Rice University in Houston. But “it was harder for him to adapt in the Trump era.”

Mr. Cornyn, Dr. Jones adds, faces the prospect of his primary opponents “remind[ing] Texas Republican voters of every center-right or compromise position [he] has taken over the past decade.”

This includes helping to shepherd a gun-safety bill through Congress following a mass shooting in 2022 at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. It also includes his skepticism of Mr. Trump over the years.

Mr. Paxton, meanwhile, brought a lawsuit seeking to overturn the 2020 election results in four states because of alleged fraud. (The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately ruled against him, stating that he did not have standing to sue and that there was no evidence of widespread fraud.)

Unfortunately for Mr. Paxton, his conservative bona fides are clashing with a long history of personal and political controversy. For a decade, he faced charges of securities fraud. (He settled the case last year.) In 2023, the Republican-controlled Texas legislature impeached him on charges of bribery and abuse of office. (The state Senate acquitted him in votes along party lines.) Most recently, his wife, Angela – a state senator and a devout Christian – announced that she was filing for divorce “on biblical grounds.” In court filings, she alleged adultery.

Recent polls have shown Mr. Cornyn and Mr. Paxton in a virtual dead heat, but that baggage should be enough to render Mr. Paxton an unviable candidate in a general election, some Republicans argue.

“Religious conservatives in the party are not happy with Paxton,” says Gary Polland, editor in chief of the Texas Conservative Review, an online newsletter.

The GOP’s majority in the U.S. Senate also complicates the fundraising math should the embattled attorney general win the nomination. It could also complicate a Trump endorsement, says Mr. Polland.

“I don’t anticipate Trump endorsing Paxton,” he adds. “Trump wants to win [the Senate] in November. ... If Paxton is the nominee, it’s going to require spending significant resources [in Texas] that would be better spent in other races.”

The Paxton campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

The blue half

Indeed, the prospect of a Paxton nomination has given Democrats hope that the Senate seat could be winnable.

Democrats “desperately want to run against Ken Paxton,” says Matt Mackowiak, a GOP consultant and a senior adviser for the Cornyn campaign.

“He would be the top of the ticket,” he adds. “And we don’t have to look back far to see the effects of having a weak top-of-ballot candidate.”

In 2018, Sen. Ted Cruz ran for reelection and beat Democratic Rep. Beto O’Rourke by just 2.6 points – the closest Senate race in the state since 1978. Senator Cruz’s unpopularity in the state, combined with Mr. Trump’s unpopularity among Democrats, helped fuel a strong showing from Democratic voters. The party is hoping for a similar formula next November.

Yet, Democrats have a biennial problem they will still need to overcome: Do they win by convincing Republican voters to split their ticket and vote for a Democrat – likely only feasible by nominating a more moderate candidate? Or do they win by getting as many Democrats and non-voters to the polls as possible through fiery rhetoric?

Mr. Talarico appears to have chosen the former.

His profile grew first as a face of the Democratic resistance to the GOP’s redistricting push, an effort that drew the praise of former President Barack Obama. In July, he made a head-turning appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, earning Mr. Rogan’s recommendation that he run for president. An orthodox campaign “is [not] going to cut it in Texas,” Mr. Talarico said during a September interview. He would like to do a town hall with a Republican Party group “so we can have a real dialogue,” he added.

Ms. Crockett appears to have chosen the latter.

Having earned nationwide recognition for viral clashes with Republican colleagues in Congress, she declared at a campaign launch event that Mr. Trump “better get to work because I’m coming for you.”

Republicans have since claimed that they nudged Ms. Crockett toward running because they believe she would be too polarizing in a general election to win. While recent polls show her leading Mr. Talarico, they also show her with lower favorability ratings than every candidate other than Mr. Paxton and Mr. Cornyn among Texas voters.

In truth, both Democrats would be polarizing in November, experts say.

“Both candidates are progressive,” says Professor Rottinghaus.

Mr. Talarico “doesn’t demonize Republicans as frequently or vociferously as Jasmine Crockett,” he adds. “That’s going to make him look moderate. But it’s moderation in tactics and tone, not moderation in policy.”

On sex and gender issues, for example, Mr. Talarico has said that “God is non-binary.” In another speech, he noted that “there are many more than two biological sexes. In fact, there are six.”

Neither the Crockett nor the Talarico campaigns responded to requests for comment.

“Even more polarized”

At bottom, the midterm elections next year will feature one of the most high-stakes and competitive elections in Texas for decades. Both parties will hold tough primaries featuring politically vulnerable candidates – primaries that could well lead to run-off elections in May.

Texas voters will be asked again and again who they want to represent them, and they will have to answer age-old political questions around experience or novelty, compromise or ideological purity. The nation will be watching.

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While statewide elections in Texas have developed a familiar rhythm in the years of Republican dominance, because of “the size of the office, and the stakes for Texas and the nation,” says Professor Rottinghaus, the contest next year is going to be entirely new.

“It’s a movie we’ve seen before, but it’s one that is now approaching blockbuster status,” he adds.

In the middle of a blistering August day, Tremaine Collins is standing on the platform of the Oku train station in Tokyo, punching a code into an app on his phone to pay for his ticket. 

It’s a busy central hub in the Kita district, where passengers connect to an array of places in one of the most sprawling metropolises in the world. 

Mr. Collins is getting the hang of navigating his new city. Today, he’s dressed in blue jeans, comfortable yet stylish silver low tops, and a multi-hued, brown plaid shirt mixed with maroon. His buttons are open, exposing a white tank top and a gold necklace and pendant.

Why We Wrote This

Study abroad benefits can be life-changing, in terms of retention, economic capital, and upward mobility. So why do so few Black men get that opportunity? One person described it as the $20 million question. Our reporter always regretted not taking advantage of study abroad himself, so he searched for Black male college students to document their overseas experiences.

He’s one of only two Black men on the busy platform at the moment – and one of relatively few in Japan. “I’m not here because I’m here on vacation,” he says. “I’m here because this is a goal that I always wanted to get here.”

Mr. Collins has just begun his first year at Temple University Japan, where about half of its 3,000 students are from the United States and roughly a quarter are from Japan. He is not simply doing a semester abroad program. He’s enrolled as a full-time student in a four-year undergraduate program.

This makes Mr. Collins stand out in other ways. Very few U.S. Black men attending a college or university take advantage of opportunities to study abroad. In the 2023-2024 school year, there were almost 300,000 Americans studying in other countries. About two-thirds of these students were white, according to the Institute for International Education, and 6% were Black. While men made up one-third of Americans studying abroad, Black men were only 2% of that total, experts say.

“I mean, this is the $20 million question, literally. It’s been a topic of conferences since forever,” says Tonija Hope, who leads the study abroad program at Howard University in Washington, D.C., a historically Black college. She and others want to know why Black males don’t study abroad and what can be done to get them to participate. 

The benefits can be life-changing. Research indicates that studying abroad strengthens retention and completion rates. It makes job applicants more attractive to hiring managers, and it increases social and economic capital to further upward mobility.

Mr. Collins says he always wanted to do different things when he was growing up in Lorain, Ohio, a steel town on the shore of Lake Erie. He loved Pokémon and anime – Japanese animation – which his peers often mocked. Later, he wasn’t very interested in sports or hip-hop music.

Tremaine Collins talks about reaching beyond Black culture

He gets choked up remembering that time. “My dad wasn’t really in my life like that. It was really just my mom and my grandma.” He says feelings of neglect and loneliness always made him look in the mirror and speak words of affirmations to himself: I’m a good person, I have a good heart. 

“I wanted to learn just how to be a better man and to be someone who’s brave, who’s courageous. Someone who’s intelligent and really in tune with themselves,” Mr. Collins says.

One thing he did wish to do was travel. No one in his immediate family had ever traveled outside the United States – not him, his older brother, or his two sisters. He made a radical decision: After he graduated from high school, to his family’s disbelief, he enlisted in the Air Force and was stationed in Montana.

“I didn’t really have nobody to believe in me until I did certain things that were outside the box,” he says, holding back tears.

After three years of military service, the GI Bill helped fund his college plans. The two schools he applied to were both overseas: a university in Rome and the American University of Paris, where he was accepted and attended for a year.

But a chance encounter with French police made him decide to leave. Officers stopped him and aggressively frisked him. The incident replays in his mind like a scene from a movie.

“They pull you over because you’re Black and maybe they think you fit a profile. It feels uncomfortable. You’re nervous and scared,” he recalls.

Between his semesters in France, he traveled. He visited several countries in Europe and then went to Asia, stopping in Tokyo. Before heading back to his Paris dorm, he had one more stop in Austria, but he says he kicked himself for not spending more time in Japan.

That’s when he decided to apply to Temple University Japan. 

“I think if you have the opportunity to do something where you can explore outside of yourself, and if you want to not do it and blame it on fear, I think you’re doing yourself an injustice,” he says, wishing more people from where he grew up felt the same. 

Overcoming the “4 Fs”

Decades ago, Margery Ganz, a professor at Spelman College in Atlanta, wrote a paper, “The 4 F’s: Overcoming Barriers to Study Abroad,” an examination of the reasons Black students do not take advantage of overseas programs. The 4 F’s she identified are family, finances, fear, and faculty. 

Studying abroad is a new experience for families, especially for first-generation or low-income students. But families can also limit opportunities simply because of their lack of familiarity with international travel and the value of such studies. Finances, too, might often be a problem for Black students, who, as a whole, don’t always have the resources of their white counterparts.

Fear of racism abroad is a major concern for Black students and their families. Living in foreign countries can heighten experiences of microaggressions and discrimination. There is also the fear of isolation and being the only Black student within a given program. Then there is simply the fear of the unknown. 

In 2014, then-first lady Michelle Obama spoke about studying abroad during a trip to China, where she told students at Peking University in Beijing that she was afraid – and unaware of the full opportunities available to her when she was an undergraduate at Princeton University in New Jersey.

“The benefits of studying abroad are almost endless,” Mrs. Obama said. She spoke about the practice making Americans more appealing on the job market, more compassionate, and how it forces students out of their comfort zones.

Dr. Ganz’s final F – faculty – refers to the structural issues in study abroad programs, including insufficient outreach to Black students. 

But there are other reasons for lower participation rates, says Dr. Hope at Howard. “There is a lot of speculation, but one to start with is the low enrollment rate in higher ed across the board,” Dr. Hope says. “When you already have low numbers, then how do you convince those that are in higher ed to go?” she asks.

But she also mentions a fifth F. “I would add, in the case of, like Howard and many HBCUs and probably universities generally: FOMO. 

“At Howard, in the fall, you don’t want to miss homecoming,” Dr. Hope says. “If you’re pledging a fraternity or sorority, you don’t want to miss rush. And then, in the spring, you don’t want to miss other things. Elections for student government, you miss that. So there’s always something that is going to be missed.”

This year, too, all study abroad programs took a hit. In August, the State Department scrapped $100 million in cultural exchange programs, calling them “low priority.” President Donald Trump has also made it more difficult for foreign students to study in the U.S., which has advocates concerned about opportunities for American students seeking to go overseas.

“It is dire now,” says James Ham, director of international affairs at North Carolina Central University, of these cuts. But he believes funding will eventually return, and that schools have to be ready. “We have to find ways to continue to prepare our students going forward,” he says.

Dr. Hope says that, a decade ago, Howard students voted to be charged a $100 globalization fee for study abroad initiatives. She wants more to follow through and go. Last year, more than 200 Howard students studied abroad – but that’s still far from the 10% of students she would like to see. 

“The goal for me is the longer term. You need to unpack a suitcase, you need to learn a bus route to get you somewhere, and you have to figure out how to do that on your own,” Dr. Hope says. 

“If you saw what I saw”

Ruby Maddox devoted much of her career to getting more men to travel abroad. 

In 2016, she helped found Leaders of the Free World, a nonprofit that works to empower Black men. She facilitated leadership training and international travel for her clients.

Ms. Maddox said studying abroad helped expand her own worldview in a profound way after she decided to visit Ghana in 2010. “I went over there to study urban agriculture for a summer,” she told the Monitor, reflecting on how she used a $5,000 student-aid refund to fund the trip, which she researched and planned herself.

Initially, her plan was, “I’m gonna go over there. I’m going to study urban agriculture and focus on the work that I’m doing.”

“And then it hit me,” she said during a Zoom interview this year, “there was the whole aspect of how I’m traveling abroad for the first time, in a country where everybody around looked like me.” 

She saw Black professionals, professors, and government officials. Ms. Maddox says the experience of not being the “other” or being the only Black student in a room helped her make a shift in her life when she returned to Springfield, Massachusetts.

“To this day, I have no words. It’s like you see that the work is bigger,” Ms. Maddox recalled. “I felt like I wanted more young people to have this experience. I settled on a lot of the young men in my family and the young men in my community who had this potential that was off the charts, and I would say to myself, ‘If you saw what I saw, you would be unstoppable.’” Weeks after her interview with the Monitor, Ms. Maddox died unexpectedly.

The leadership nonprofit began, in fact, when she and co-founder Lavar Thomas took a group of men on a two-week trip to Ghana. After the first trip was a success, she continued to take groups of 15 or so Black college students from across the country. She partnered with schools including the University of Delaware, Prairie View A&M University in Texas, and New Jersey City University. 

Dr. Ham at North Carolina Central is on the board of Leaders of the Free World, and he travels with the group to Ghana. For years, he worked with the Peace Corps, working his way up to country director in Uganda, Cameroon, and South Africa. He then served as deputy country director for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Zambia, Guinea, and Ivory Coast. 

When he started at the Peace Corps in 1996, he was the only Black man in his group, which also included one Black woman from Alabama.

“I want to inspire African Americans to really pursue these kinds of career opportunities, especially for our young, because when it comes to participation in international affairs and study abroad opportunities, we are the least to participate – and more so African American men are least exposed to that,” Dr. Ham says. “This has been my mission.”

The groups that Leaders of the Free World brings to Africa are hosted by faculty, students, and leaders at the University of Ghana in Accra. The exchange students focus on leadership and service, including political leadership. They do projects, such as building a kitchen for a school whose roof collapsed. They meet new people, try new food, and learn traditional African dance.

This was the vision of the late Ms. Maddox. “That really was the seed that I wanted to plant – that seed of seeing yourself being unstoppable, of seeing yourself beyond what they told you you were, even if for those two weeks you could step outside of those perceived boundaries that you had physically and mentally,” she told the Monitor.

“Not all butterflies and rainbows”

When he was a junior at Georgia State University, Timothy Mason studied abroad in Lisbon, Portugal, from August to December in 2024.

He loved it, but it didn’t come without obstacles. His family was afraid, but his worried mother eventually relented and let him go. She even flew with him to Portugal to help him settle in. 

Though there were students from all over the U.S., Mr. Mason and a friend from Spelman College were the only two Black students. There was only one other person of color in their group of 20.

An environmental science major, Mr. Mason says he’s not uncomfortable in such white spaces, but being isolated in Lisbon highlighted differences. 

“Our lived experiences are different, and it’s hard not to have somebody to relate to, because the white experience is very different from the Black experience when I’m trying to make friends with people,” he says.

In Portugal during the 2024 presidential election, for which he filed an absentee ballot, he discussed the results between former Vice President Kamala Harris, a Black and Asian woman, and President Trump. Some members of his group asserted that racism and sexism were not issues in the race. 

“I feel like that’s something so present for me and I’m not even a woman, but just being Black and knowing that everything is not all butterflies and rainbows and that racism actually happens to people,” he recalls. “It was one of those things where I had to have patience.” 

Nihongo nomi (Japanese only)

Days before classes start, Mr. Collins is participating in opening week activities. Today is a day to tour campus buildings, potentially meet faculty, and decide whether they want to join a student group, which ranges from everything from jiujitsu to the chess club. The day will conclude with a party and live music.

His tour guide, a senior named Kenya Douglas, walks a group of 20 students to the welcome center. Mr. Collins asks questions about navigating the city. 

“If you see a sign that says Nihongo nomi (Japanese only) or Gaikokujin okotowari (No foreigners), don’t go in there,” Mr. Douglas warns. “Some places are not foreigner friendly.”

Mr. Collins is eager for the first day of classes. All courses at Temple University Japan are taught in English, but the art major wants to learn Japanese.

His first class, in fact, is Japanese Elements I. On the first day, his instructor, Takeda Sota, is going over hiragana and katakana, the writing shapes and characters for the Japanese language.

The first day went really well, Mr. Collins says, and he’s confident that he will be happy studying in Tokyo for the next few years. In fact, he can partially see the future, he says, when it comes to his time studying in Japan. “I think my older self is going to be proud of my younger self.” 

“Sometimes, I feel you’ve got to step away from the culture to try to find out what you actually like,” Mr. Collins says. “That’s what we know, but if you don’t step outside of America and you’re African American … and that’s all you know is hip-hop culture? You don’t look outside to find out who you are.”

This story was produced with support from the Education Writers Association Reporting Fellowship program.

On April 8, during a dip in the stock market after President Donald Trump had announced sweeping tariffs the previous week, Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene bought thousands of dollars’ worth of stocks. Many of those stocks soared in value after the president paused most tariffs the following day.

Rep. Greene was one of the earliest members to file a mandatory disclosure report about her trades. After the time requirement for disclosure lapsed, Newsweek reported that at least 25 members from both parties made trades between Trump’s tariff announcement and the subsequent pause.

The public disclosure of the transaction highlighted an issue that’s long been a source of public cynicism about Congress: whether members use confidential information about significant political events, or perhaps pending legislation or agency regulation, to make money in the stock market. Unlike the general public, lawmakers often have access to privileged information and decision-making that can impact the profitability of industries and specific companies, which can significantly raise or lower their their stock prices.

Why We Wrote This

Members of Congress have access to information they could use to make money in the stock market. There’s a new push to ban members from buying and selling stocks, with the goal of countering possible insider trading.

To date, no direct evidence has emerged that Ms. Greene or other members of Congress benefited from insider trading in this case. But the attention on stock trading comes as Mr. Trump faces scrutiny over whether he and his family are making money off the presidency. Watchdog groups point to loosening oversight on possible conflicts of interest, even as many private-sector financial institutions, for example, have limited the trading of individual stocks by employees.

In Congress, the highest-profile effort to curtail insider trading is a measure that would ban House members and senators from owning individual stocks altogether. Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida filed a discharge petition last week that would force the House to vote on the ban if she can get enough signatures. A few high-profile members are among the 16 who have signed on so far, well short of the 218 it would need to bring the measure to a vote.

Proponents say the ban would restore accountability and bolster public trust in Congress. House Speaker Mike Johnson told Punchbowl News it would be a disincentive for people to run for Congress.

What laws exist regarding members of Congress trading stocks?

In 1978, Congress passed the Ethics in Government Act, designed to promote government transparency and prevent conflicts of interest in the wake of the Watergate scandal. The act required senior officials in the three branches of government – including all members of Congress – to make annual disclosures of their sources of income, liabilities, gifts, and stock sales and purchases.

In 2012, President Barack Obama signed the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act, or STOCK Act. The measure, which passed overwhelmingly in Congress, reinforced the Ethics in Government Act by placing additional restrictions on congressional members’ financial transactions.

Under the STOCK Act, which made it clear that government officials are subject to the same federal insider trading laws as regular citizens, members must disclose any stock sales or purchases over $1,000 within 30 to 45 days, not just once a year. The act imposed new penalties for failing to disclose transactions on time – generally a $200 fee for a first-time offense.

However, many members of Congress, as well as 73% of voters, according to a 2024 YouGov poll, don’t think these laws go far enough.

What issues have been raised recently regarding stock trading among congressional lawmakers?

Since the STOCK Act’s passage, no members of Congress have been prosecuted for violating it. But there’s been plenty of public scrutiny over trades from members of both parties that seem auspiciously timed.

For example, the buying and selling of stocks by members of Congress soared to more than 700, according to the Wall Street Journal, in the seven days between President Trump’s tariff announcement on April 2 and his subsequent pause on most of them. Recently, NBC News uncovered that Republican Rep. Rob Bresnahan of Pennsylvania had offloaded hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of stock in companies that manage Medicaid enrollees, a week before voting for a bill that slashed Medicaid funding.

Insider trading is notoriously difficult to enforce, says Donald Langevoort, a law professor at Georgetown University. One reason is that it’s tricky to prove.

To do so, under current insider-trading law, there must be evidence that the member of Congress knew something the public didn’t, and that knowledge was important enough to alter their financial decisions.

But there are plenty of loopholes.

“Most of what Congress learns is speculative,” says Mr. Langevoort. And if a public news report or a social media post speculates about the same information, it’s no longer “non-public.”

Jeffrey Miron, a senior lecturer at Harvard University and vice president for research at the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute, says even a law banning members and their immediate families from owning individual stocks would leave wide loopholes. For example, he posits, members could still trade stocks in a friend’s or relative’s portfolio.

“Anyone who wants to circumvent these rules will find legal and probably illegal ways to do so,” he says.

Mr. Miron says it’s better to have disclosure rules so voters know what’s happening rather than to try to stop insider trading altogether.

“I think it’s all just for show, to pretend that people are not influenced by the desire to earn money on information they may receive,” he says of a proposed ban. “But, of course, they are … and voters have to recognize that it might be happening.”

What is the path forward in Congress?

Already, in the 119th Congress, more than 25 bills or resolutions have been introduced that would impose further restrictions on members’ financial transactions.

Rep. Luna’s discharge petition would force a vote on the Restore Trust in Congress Act. This bipartisan bill, which has more than 100 co-sponsors, would ban members of Congress, their spouses, and their dependent children from owning or trading individual stocks.

House Speaker Mike Johnson has signaled openness to stricter measures to prevent insider trading – though he has walked back his earlier support for a full ban on members owning stocks.

President Trump said in a Time Magazine interview this year that he would sign a ban on congressional stock trading if it came to his desk. He referred to former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whose activity in the stock market has also come under scrutiny.

“Well, I watched Nancy Pelosi get rich through insider information, and I would be okay with it,” he said. “If they send that to me, I would do it.”

How would this ban compare with rules already in place for the executive and judicial branches? All three branches are subject to laws that prohibit certain types of insider trading, as well as the 1978 Ethics in Government Act.

Deepen your worldview

with Monitor Highlights.

Already a subscriber? Log in to hide ads.

Other disclosure laws apply to specific branches. Judges, for example, must recuse themselves from participating in legal cases that could be tied to their personal stock holdings. Under a 2022 law, they must also promptly disclose any new stock purchases and sales in a publicly accessible database.

Executive branch officials must recuse themselves from any duties in which their stock ownership might create a conflict of interest. Under current law, most can still own and trade stocks, though legislation has been floated in recent years to ban this exception as well.

On April 8, during a dip in the stock market after President Donald Trump had announced sweeping tariffs the previous week, Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene bought thousands of dollars’ worth of stocks. Many of those stocks soared in value after the president paused most tariffs the following day.

Rep. Greene was one of the earliest members to file a mandatory disclosure report about her trades. After the time requirement for disclosure lapsed, Newsweek reported that at least 25 members from both parties made trades between Trump’s tariff announcement and the subsequent pause.

The public disclosure of the transaction highlighted an issue that’s long been a source of public cynicism about Congress: whether members use confidential information about significant political events, or perhaps pending legislation or agency regulation, to make money in the stock market. Unlike the general public, lawmakers often have access to privileged information and decision-making that can impact the profitability of industries and specific companies, which can significantly raise or lower their their stock prices.

Why We Wrote This

Members of Congress have access to information they could use to make money in the stock market. There’s a new push to ban members from buying and selling stocks, with the goal of countering possible insider trading.

To date, no direct evidence has emerged that Ms. Greene or other members of Congress benefited from insider trading in this case. But the attention on stock trading comes as Mr. Trump faces scrutiny over whether he and his family are making money off the presidency. Watchdog groups point to loosening oversight on possible conflicts of interest, even as many private-sector financial institutions, for example, have limited the trading of individual stocks by employees.

In Congress, the highest-profile effort to curtail insider trading is a measure that would ban House members and senators from owning individual stocks altogether. Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida filed a discharge petition last week that would force the House to vote on the ban if she can get enough signatures. A few high-profile members are among the 16 who have signed on so far, well short of the 218 it would need to bring the measure to a vote.

Proponents say the ban would restore accountability and bolster public trust in Congress. House Speaker Mike Johnson told Punchbowl News it would be a disincentive for people to run for Congress.

What laws exist regarding members of Congress trading stocks?

In 1978, Congress passed the Ethics in Government Act, designed to promote government transparency and prevent conflicts of interest in the wake of the Watergate scandal. The act required senior officials in the three branches of government – including all members of Congress – to make annual disclosures of their sources of income, liabilities, gifts, and stock sales and purchases.

In 2012, President Barack Obama signed the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act, or STOCK Act. The measure, which passed overwhelmingly in Congress, reinforced the Ethics in Government Act by placing additional restrictions on congressional members’ financial transactions.

Under the STOCK Act, which made it clear that government officials are subject to the same federal insider trading laws as regular citizens, members must disclose any stock sales or purchases over $1,000 within 30 to 45 days, not just once a year. The act imposed new penalties for failing to disclose transactions on time – generally a $200 fee for a first-time offense.

However, many members of Congress, as well as 73% of voters, according to a 2024 YouGov poll, don’t think these laws go far enough.

What issues have been raised recently regarding stock trading among congressional lawmakers?

Since the STOCK Act’s passage, no members of Congress have been prosecuted for violating it. But there’s been plenty of public scrutiny over trades from members of both parties that seem auspiciously timed.

For example, the buying and selling of stocks by members of Congress soared to more than 700, according to the Wall Street Journal, in the seven days between President Trump’s tariff announcement on April 2 and his subsequent pause on most of them. Recently, NBC News uncovered that Republican Rep. Rob Bresnahan of Pennsylvania had offloaded hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of stock in companies that manage Medicaid enrollees, a week before voting for a bill that slashed Medicaid funding.

Insider trading is notoriously difficult to enforce, says Donald Langevoort, a law professor at Georgetown University. One reason is that it’s tricky to prove.

To do so, under current insider-trading law, there must be evidence that the member of Congress knew something the public didn’t, and that knowledge was important enough to alter their financial decisions.

But there are plenty of loopholes.

“Most of what Congress learns is speculative,” says Mr. Langevoort. And if a public news report or a social media post speculates about the same information, it’s no longer “non-public.”

Jeffrey Miron, a senior lecturer at Harvard University and vice president for research at the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute, says even a law banning members and their immediate families from owning individual stocks would leave wide loopholes. For example, he posits, members could still trade stocks in a friend’s or relative’s portfolio.

“Anyone who wants to circumvent these rules will find legal and probably illegal ways to do so,” he says.

Mr. Miron says it’s better to have disclosure rules so voters know what’s happening rather than to try to stop insider trading altogether.

“I think it’s all just for show, to pretend that people are not influenced by the desire to earn money on information they may receive,” he says of a proposed ban. “But, of course, they are … and voters have to recognize that it might be happening.”

What is the path forward in Congress?

Already, in the 119th Congress, more than 25 bills or resolutions have been introduced that would impose further restrictions on members’ financial transactions.

Rep. Luna’s discharge petition would force a vote on the Restore Trust in Congress Act. This bipartisan bill, which has more than 100 co-sponsors, would ban members of Congress, their spouses, and their dependent children from owning or trading individual stocks.

House Speaker Mike Johnson has signaled openness to stricter measures to prevent insider trading – though he has walked back his earlier support for a full ban on members owning stocks.

President Trump said in a Time Magazine interview this year that he would sign a ban on congressional stock trading if it came to his desk. He referred to former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whose activity in the stock market has also come under scrutiny.

“Well, I watched Nancy Pelosi get rich through insider information, and I would be okay with it,” he said. “If they send that to me, I would do it.”

How would this ban compare with rules already in place for the executive and judicial branches? All three branches are subject to laws that prohibit certain types of insider trading, as well as the 1978 Ethics in Government Act.

Deepen your worldview

with Monitor Highlights.

Already a subscriber? Log in to hide ads.

Other disclosure laws apply to specific branches. Judges, for example, must recuse themselves from participating in legal cases that could be tied to their personal stock holdings. Under a 2022 law, they must also promptly disclose any new stock purchases and sales in a publicly accessible database.

Executive branch officials must recuse themselves from any duties in which their stock ownership might create a conflict of interest. Under current law, most can still own and trade stocks, though legislation has been floated in recent years to ban this exception as well.

In a respite from years with nation-wrenching mass killing incidents, the United States is on track to record the lowest level of such deadly events in two decades, according to one group of researchers tracking the data.

There have been 17 mass killings, 14 of which involved guns, recorded this year, according to a database maintained by Northeastern University, in partnership with the Associated Press and USA Today. While that number could increase in December, it is the lowest since the database was established in 2006. And it represents a significant drop from recent years – including 2023, which saw more than three dozen such incidents.

Northeastern’s database tracks incidents in which four or more people were killed intentionally, excluding the assailant, in a 24-hour period. Most mass violence is gun-related, which the chart accompanying this article focuses on. But the database also tracks other incidents of mass killing, such as stabbings or the use of vehicles to attack pedestrians.

Why We Wrote This

While the annual number of mass violence events spikes and dips, even a slight reprieve from bloodshed in a nation that sees thousands of homicides each year highlights shifts in policies.

The database offers an important perspective – but only one – on the nation’s struggles with violence, which does not always end in fatalities. Another organization, for example, the Gun Violence Archive, has counted 381 mass shootings this year, compared with 503 for all of 2024. This group defines a mass shooting as an event in which four or more people are shot, though not necessarily killed.

Some experts credit recent crime policies on both local and national levels for some of the progress – as well as stepped-up school safety measures. In part, the shift might also represent what statisticians refer to as a “reversion to the mean,” suggesting a return to more average crime levels after a spike in preceding years.

Associated Press/USA TODAY/Northeastern University Mass Killings Database, U.S. Centers for Disease Control

While the long-term trend in mass killings is characterized by spikes and dips – not a clear rising or falling direction – the recent data shows a decline.

“The overall violent crime picture seems to be getting a little better in the United States,” says Adam Lankford, author of “The Myth of Martyrdom,” which identifies motivations for violent rampages.

A reprieve, but an ongoing challenge

For public officials and citizens alike, any evidence of a drop in mass violence is welcome news – a reprieve from bloodshed in a nation that sees tens of thousands of gun-involved deaths each year.

Determining what factors cause such violence to rise and fall is a challenging task, especially when attempting to draw scientific conclusions. Criminologists are still debating why homicides dropped precipitously during the 1990s.

While other violence databases also suggest a general decline in mass violence, Professor Lankford notes that the kind of premeditated public mass killings that tend to change the behavior of Americans did not decline in the new findings, with most of the shift attributed to a decline in mass killings in or near people’s homes.

What’s more, he says, a rise in targeted political killings might well deflate any sense of relief from a slowdown of mass killings.

The type of violent acts that inspire fear and motivate responses are “school shootings, shootings at malls, movie theaters,” says Professor Lankford, who is also a criminologist at the University of Alabama. That means “that the type of mass killing that has decreased most significantly is not the type of mass killing that Americans appear to be most afraid of.”

Still, one of those categories has seen a big recent drop.

In years past, some of the nation’s most tragic mass shootings have occurred at schools – including Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut; Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas; and Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

So far this year, no act rising to the mass killing definition has taken place on a school campus.

Part of that shift might be the result of changes in school policy and practice.

Twenty-two states, for example, now mandate the establishment of school threat-assessment teams, and the 2022 Safer Communities Act included millions of federal dollars to support gun violence prevention programs.

“You can make the case that we’re seeing more threats but not as many attacks as schools have implemented threat assessment programs,” says Eric Madfis, director of the Violence Prevention and Transformation Research Collaborative at the University of Washington in Tacoma.

“When I talk to people who have averted a school shooting, a big part of it is breaking through a code of silence of students reporting things,” he adds.

As part of that, “we have gone from zero tolerance policies where we punish a kid who accidentally brings a knife to school to looking at the substance and content of threats,” he continues. “Do they have the ability to carry it out, access to weapons, plans of who they are going to kill, when, and where? We’ve seen amazing outcomes” from that shift.

A return to normalcy after the COVID-19 pandemic’s whiplash might also be a contributing factor, alongside an overall decline in violent crime rates since 2022.

Renewed focus by police on tackling gun proliferation in high crime areas and making arrests in more murder cases might also be having a positive impact.

Experts say improved emergency care is also leading to fewer deaths when mass shootings do occur.

A shooting in Minnesota earlier this year, for example, didn’t reach Northeastern’s definition of a mass killing, even though about 20 people were injured. Why? Despite the enormous tragedy of the event, in which two children died, experts say the quick actions of Minneapolis responders likely saved many lives.

A matter of care

Social scientists suggest that one significant causal factor of violent crimes throughout American history has been levels of societal well-being, including political agency and expression.

Following the American Revolution, the expansion of the voting franchise, a vibrant economy based on business ownership, and a shared sense of patriotism contributed to the New England region achieving the lowest homicide rates in the Western world in the late 1700s.

Conversely, from deadly 1960s riots in several U.S. cities to instances of violence accompanying some protests after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, the prevalence of protest-related violence has been among the historical predictors of high homicide rates in the modern age.

Yet, this year, the U.S. has seen numerous protests, including large “No Kings” demonstrations, without a homicide spike. The protests have been defined not by violence but by social commentary (posters, costumes, and speeches) aimed at politicians, most notably President Donald Trump.

Partisan echo chambers might also be concealing shifts in feelings among Americans about their own prospects and those of the communities where they reside, as partisanship intensifies.

“The key to low homicide rates is successful nation-building,” writes Randolph Roth, author of “American Homicide,” in a 2024 research paper on why homicide rates rise and fall.

At the same time, stubbornly high numbers of gun deaths overall – including suicides, which are far more numerous than homicides – challenge the notion that general well-being is pushing down mass violence, at least at this moment.

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Just because a society might be getting better at preventing mass shootings doesn’t mean the threat is diminishing, says Professor Lankford. He cites targeted political violence and a 2023 report from the U.S. surgeon general on an epidemic of loneliness and isolation as matters of concern.

“If anybody is interpreting this [dip in mass killings] as, ‘Congratulations, we’ve stopped school shootings or workplace shootings,’ then they’re just wrong about what the data show,” he says.

Lawmakers gathered in closed-door briefings on Thursday to watch a video of a U.S. missile strike on a boat that the Trump administration claims was bringing drugs to America.

The footage showed a second attack ordered by Adm. Frank M. Bradley, then in charge of the U.S. military’s secretive Joint Special Operations Command. There is bipartisan agreement that the strike killed two shirtless survivors holding fast to an overturned hull.

The debate on Capitol Hill and beyond, which began with a published report about the orders governing that Sept. 2 boat strike, now centers on whether the strikes were legal and on whether the order for a second strike on survivors violated military law.

Why We Wrote This

With military leaders in the spotlight over drug boat attacks, how do troops know when to follow orders and when to push back?

On those points, lawmakers watching the same video came away with strong views that fell along party lines.

The top-ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, said he saw “two individuals in clear distress, without any means of locomotion, with a destroyed vessel, who were killed by the United States.”

Sen. Tom Cotton, the Arkansas Republican who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, saw “two survivors trying to flip a boat – loaded with drugs bound for the United States – back over so they could stay in the fight.”

That September attack was the first in what has become a broader U.S. boat strike operation in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, in which more than 80 people have been killed.

The Sept. 2 strike, and the debate surrounding it, is a case study in the sorts of wrenching decisions U.S. military leaders are charged with making, and for which they are required to study ethics, moral reasoning, and military law. More broadly, the Trump administration’s entire campaign against what it calls “narco-terrorists,” treating them for the first time as enemy combatants, has been criticized by some military experts as illegal.

The result is tension faced by U.S. troops empowered to kill for national security or political ends as they carry out missions: They could face harsh criminal sanctions for obeying an unlawful order – or disobeying a lawful one.

“That is the burden every military person bears,” says retired Maj. Gen. Steven Lepper, who served as an Air Force lawyer and instructed troops on the laws of war. “It is why they are trained continuously on their legal obligations.”

What kind of training about legal orders do service members get?

All new service members are instructed in the laws of warfare, including basics such as the Geneva Conventions, rules of engagement, and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Officers who lead troops, particularly those enrolled at American military academies, get more nuanced training – including required courses in ethics and moral reasoning, among other subjects.

A tenured professor at the U.S. Military Academy until he resigned earlier this year, Graham Parsons found that there was “no debate” when it came to classroom discussions about following illegal orders: Cadets agreed they would never do it. “That’s just bedrock.”

But the tougher case studies he presented to Army cadets forced them to grapple with questions such as how much risk commanders should take to minimize civilian casualties at the expense of their own troops’ safety. The law often isn’t clear on such points, Professor Parsons says. But among military leaders, “there is an obligation to manage that line.”

To learn how to do that, West Point cadets debate giving and receiving orders that are “not clearly illegal, but maybe clearly wrong,” he says.

One of his students’ favorite case studies involves a film called “Lone Survivor,” which has characters portraying Navy SEALs debating whether to kill a couple of Afghan goat herders who stumble upon – and could give it away should they inform the Taliban.

“Of course, they do the right thing [and let the herders go unharmed], but it comes back to bite them.” The goat herders do tell the Taliban, and Taliban fighters ambush the SEALs.

Lively classroom debate ensued. “My sense was that many were sympathetic, or more open, to the idea that they should’ve killed these guys,” Professor Parsons says.

Eventually, though, most concluded that killing the goat herders was not morally justifiable and that killing them ultimately proved to be unwise strategically as well. For those who thought the herders should have been killed, “We would always say, even if you disagree, you should know that the law says if you kill these people, you could be prosecuted” for war crimes.

Further up the ranks, U.S. military generals are required by congressional mandate to take a five-week workshop when they receive their first star to brush up on topics such as civil-military relations and the law.

How strong is the pressure to obey an order, regardless of its perceived legality?

Military law is clear: An order from a superior should be presumed lawful and is disobeyed at the peril of the subordinate.

That includes orders that troops might suspect are illegal, but are not. These are referred to by Peter Feaver, a professor at Duke University and an instructor in the course for new generals, as “awful but lawful” orders.

Members of the top brass sometimes have the impression that they can refuse orders that force them to do immoral or unethical things, Richard Kohn, a professor emeritus specializing in military history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told the Monitor in an interview earlier this year.

He teaches the workshop alongside Professor Feaver. “We tell them, ‘There’s nothing in the Uniform Code of Military [Justice] or military law that says you can refuse an order just because you think it’s immoral or improper,’” Professor Kohn said.

But they also receive pointers on how to artfully, tactfully, and at times forcefully push back when offering their best military advice to their civilian bosses.

Military leaders generally hold that encouraging young soldiers to second-guess a superior’s orders can undermine discipline and the smooth operation of life-endangering missions.

The law endeavors to make it easier for the rank and file to follow orders by stating that an unlawful order is one so obviously criminal that a person “of ordinary sense and understanding” would clearly recognize it as, or already know it to be, illegal.

And when they have deep doubts about orders, they are taught to request clarification from their leaders, raise issues up the chain of command, or even, in some cases, to “slow roll” them.

Still, the pressure to follow unlawful orders can be significant.

When he was invited to speak to sophomores taking an Ethics and Moral Reasoning for Navy Leaders class in 2003 at the U.S. Naval Academy, Hugh Thompson warned midshipmen about this.

An Army helicopter pilot, Mr. Thompson found himself in the Vietnamese village of My Lai in 1968 as a massacre was taking place.

U.S. troops were bayoneting and shooting unarmed people, many of them women and children. Of the more than 500 killed, more than 150 were under the age of 12.

Mr. Thompson landed his helicopter in the line of fire “to prevent their murder,” reads the Soldier’s Medal citation he was awarded nearly 30 years later. He confronted the American commander who had ordered the killings and told him that he was prepared to open fire on U.S. troops should they harm any more civilians.

Mr. Thompson was “no peacenik,” he told the midshipmen. “I wasn’t that kind of guy. You know, I call a lieutenant ‘sir.’”

He attributed the massacre to low-level leadership, racism, and “negative peer pressure” that many soldiers there appeared to face in obeying orders. Of the 190 or so U.S. troops at My Lai, roughly 13 to 18 took active part in the killings, Mr. Thompson said. The rest stood aside.

Treated by many Americans as a traitor who had mutinied, Mr. Thompson was threatened with prosecution by lawmakers before being recognized decades later as a hero.

How likely is it that Admiral Bradley or others will be charged with taking illegal actions?

Based on reports from Admiral Bradley’s closed-door hearing, the Trump administration is continuing to build its case that the United States is in armed conflict with cartels and that the boat crews, which it alleges are carrying drugs, are “combatants,” many legal analysts say.

The drugs, Trump officials further argue, should be regarded as lethal weapons coming to American shores.

Critics of this argument say speedboats are not warships – and in some cases might not even be capable of reaching America. They also argue that while the 11-person crew killed on Sept. 2 might have been running drugs, they would be deemed criminals, not enemy fighters.

“Having drugs on [a] boat is not the same as having an armed force being arrayed against your military,” says Mr. Lepper, a founder of a new consortium of retired U.S. military lawyers called the Former JAGs Working Group. “We have argued that unless there’s more to it than that, what we’re seeing is not lawful.”

Beyond this, some military law scholars consider the second strike on the two survivors as an attack on shipwrecked persons. This is cited explicitly in the Defense Department’s Law of War Manual as an unlawful act. “I personally have used that example when conducting law-of-war training,” Mr. Lepper says.

Military officials, including Admiral Bradley, have reportedly told lawmakers that the hull still contained cocaine and that another boat could come along and retrieve it. The survivors, they further argued, could communicate their whereabouts to facilitate that move.

If this is an accurate rendering of the admiral’s response, then he makes a plausible case for the legality of a second strike, says retired Maj. Gen. Charles Dunlap, a former deputy judge advocate general for the Air Force and now executive director of the Center on Law, Ethics, and National Security at Duke University’s school of law.

Professor Dunlap notes that immunity from attack for shipwrecked belligerents “is conditional on refraining from any hostile act or attempt to escape,” according to the International Committee of the Red Cross. The ICRC specifically includes “attempting to communicate with one’s own party” as an example of a hostile act.

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Whether Admiral Bradley and troops will be charged with any crimes hinges in part on the investigation that lawmakers have promised to undertake, analysts say, and ultimately also on whether they support the ways in which Trump officials are endeavoring to redefine enemy combatants and the nature of armed conflict.

For now, the admiral’s experience spotlights the responsibility senior officers bear, as the administration announced on Thursday that the U.S. military attacked another boat – the 22nd such strike since Sept. 2 – killing four more people.