Sophie Gilbert

The Kennedy Center isn’t closing for “renovations.” It’s closing because audiences fled, artists withdrew, and its reputation collapsed under the pressures forced upon it. Cultural trust doesn’t evaporate by accident. It happens when power treats the arts as a tool, not a public good.

Yesterday, five-year-old Liam and his dad Adrian were released from Dilley detention center. I picked them up last night and escorted them back to Minnesota this morning.

Liam is now home. With his hat and his backpack.

if Musk is doing this for London crime, what do you think he is doing for content about American politics, an issue that affects him much more directly?

A line from Sophie Gilbert's review of the new Melania movie.

"Melania shows off her custom-made inauguration gown, stark white with black ribbons overlaying it, a dress that now looks unavoidably like the redacted Epstein files." www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026...

The Melania Trump Documentary Is a Disgrace The exorbitant film captures the rotten state of our entertainment industry.

On Melania www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026...

The three other journalists are annoyed

My Melania screening is canceled for a “technical issue.”

Martin Shuster sdSreptoon1hm9t97235g2u5796glgh0435l6iaf05it1l232lc20cllf4g0 · So apparently on Sunday Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, said in a press conference that "we have got children hiding in their houses, afraid to go outside ... many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank. Somebody’s gonna write that children’s story about Minnesota.” Then on Monday--one day before International Holocaust Remembrance Day--the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum tweeted in response that: "Anne Frank was targeted and murdered solely because she was Jewish. Leaders making false equivalencies to her experience for political purposes is never acceptable. Despite tensions in Minneapolis, exploiting the Holocaust is deeply offensive, especially as antisemitism surges." As someone who spent a year at the Museum as a fellow doing research, I feel embarrassed for the institution. First, it is very clear that Walz wasn't drawing an equivalence, he was drawing an analogy. So this kind of response reminds me of the atrocious positions that the ADL has started to carve out, and why it has become mostly a sycophantic joke, now seemingly mostly geared towards currying favor with MAGA.

Not unrelatedly, I am noticing that a lot of--oftentimes even well-intentioned--people are spending time trying to delineate exactly which historical referent best captures what's going on now, as if we have to pick only one. There is the now well-circulated meme that says: no, ICE isn't the Gestapo, it's actually American--it's slave catchers. But this is a kind of odd distinction: the Nazis were themselves influenced by the Americans (if you're curious read the excellent book by James Whitman, _Hitler's American Model_). Nazis came here and studied American legal systems and statutes ... and remarkably a group of "liberal" Nazis decided that they couldn't make German laws as *extreme* as American ones (and this "liberal" group in fact won the day; German laws weren't as extreme as many of ours). Equally, Nazi jurists and theorists like Carl Schmitt were deeply influenced by American notions of manifest destiny. So the Nazi and American contexts were already fused. The idea of foreign/domestic is already quite complex in this context. (And this is before we even speak of the many actual Nazis that existed here and the many people who materially supported Hitler and the regime). We can complicate this picture more by noting that Nazism itself, even apart from these American influences, wasn't something that sprouted up out of thin air: it, too, had a(n experimental) history. Many of its barbaric practices and aims were developed and tested on colonial and imperial victims (as I have written elsewhere: there is a direct line from Shark Island concentration camp [called frequently simply "Death Island" where the Germans committed genocide against the Herero and Nama people] to the entire Nazi camp system). Thinkers like Hannah Arendt and Aimé Césaire drew our attention to this already in the middle of the last century.

In noting this, let me be clear that this does not erase or make less relevant the centuries of European antisemitism that fed into the Nazi project. That's the whole point: these are all related phenomena. European antisemitism influenced the way in which European colonialism and imperialism operated against indigenous populations in the Americas. Strikingly, as innovations mounted in "administering" the Americas, antisemitic policies also evolved in Europe. Administrators (oppressors) would sometimes even move from one sphere to the other and back. They were all synergistic (a brilliant examination of some of this is María Elena Martínez's _Genealogical Fictions_). (And one could, btw, also tell an important story about the development of Islamophobia in this very same orbit, since policies stumbled on in the Americas came back to oppress both Jews and Muslims in Europe). This is all to say: Walz's analogy is not at all far fetched. The history of oppression doesn't move in any kind of neat or purely linear fashion. It is oftentimes recursive, shifting, necessarily granular. Neither is it a competitive history. It is, in the words of Michael Rothberg, a *multidirectional* history. Drawing these analogies in fact *helps* us understand all the involved phenomena better. At least this is what "Never Again" has meant and means to me: it does not mean only never again for me or other Jews. And it does not mean never again only something that looks exactly like the Nazi genocide. I think also, btw, that this is what it meant for Otto Frank, who spent time *editing* his daughter's diary so that it could be available to anyone, not only to Jews.

For ultimately the Nazi genocide--any genocide--is a highly mediated phenomenon: it consists of many diffuse events, marshals an immense amount of people and institutions, relies on sometimes conflicting or contradictory cross-sections of society, and, indeed, emerges out of a process that does not neatly, especially as its happening, have a clear beginning, middle, and end, but rather arranges for itself a kind of constellation that harnesses a range of actors, perspectives, and also histories (this is one way to understand how German colonial projects or anti-communism or ableism were no less crucial to Nazism than European antisemitism). The genocidal outcomes emerge from the structural forms society adopts. And all of this without in any way eliding the special role that Jews played in the apocalyptic Nazi worldview.

Please read this extremely thoughtful & careful post on Tim Walz, Anne Frank, & the US Holocaust Memorial Museum from Martin Shuster, philosopher, Isaac Swift Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies, former Holocaust Memorial Museum Fellow, & scholar of genocide, the Holocaust, & authoritarianism:

"I do think that a lot of the power of the powerless comes from the creation of a consensus — and, bluntly speaking, a moral consensus. A moral consensus that what is happening is wicked, what is happening is wrong, what is happening is, in a fundamental sense, evil. To the extent that what the Trump administration is doing gets on the wrong side of that, either internationally or domestically, it does create a way for people to start pushing back."

From an Ezra Klein show recorded on Friday, before the killing of Alex Pretti and all that has happened since. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/27/o...

This is what letting RFK jr go wild on health looks like

Scheduling issues and they’re not doing screeners

A gardening account I follow posted this morning: "Let me be really clear. I HATE this administration. I HATE every evil, hypocritical, lying, gaslighting, self-serving fucker in it to a person."

Printing this out so I can salute it.

Family of man killed by off-duty ICE agent in LA demands charges: ‘The ache will never go away’ After Renee Good’s killing in Minneapolis, calls grow for accountability in the shooting of Keith Porter Jr on New Year’s Eve

Justice for Keith Porter www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

All of these tickets have been bought by journalists being paid to see the movie so it’s a full circle

The bar for "worst British disaster in America" is very high but Will Lewis is practicing his vault.

Federal agent secured gun from Minn. man before fatal shooting, videos show A Washington Post analysis of videos sheds light on the encounter that left 37-year-old Alex Pretti dead.

My @washingtonpost.com colleagues worked round the clock this weekend to expose the truth of what's happening in Minneapolis and bring urgent weather news to millions facing dangerous cold and snow.

If you value this work, tell Jeff Bezos to #SaveThePost
www.washingtonpost.com/investigatio...

This is one of the things that I find is most shocking to people outside Minnesota who don’t realize it yet—the scale at which everyone who isn’t white has been forced into a spectrum of hiding.

Very good article drawing out the Tahrir Square comparison.

Welcome to the American Winter In the frozen streets of Minneapolis, something profound is happening.

This is a really incredible piece. Share it widely 🎁https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/01/minneapolis-uprising/685755/?gift=C-rzmQ8PsUHt15odxTKJDn7xrpPNxSpotkNz_P27oI0

ICE is now responsible for 66% of the homicides in Minneapolis this year.

The Problem With Greg Bovino’s Overcoat Isn’t What You Think The head of Border Patrol isn’t referencing the Nazis — but he is sending a message.

This can have consequences for how agents see themselves. If they put on clothes designed for war, they are more likely to see cities as hostile terrain and citizens as enemy combatants, which can increase the chance of violence. Link to the story here:

www.politico.com/news/magazin...

Um

This is so stupid and crazy it wouldn’t have passed muster in the Veep writer’s room. Also demonstrates that they’d be insane to share any real intel with Patel.

Never change, WSJ www.wsj.com/real-estate/...

Violent crime rates haven't been this low since the '60s. They've dropped in cities ranging from Baltimore to Seattle—with many police departments short on staffing. Why? It might be the result of Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

Musk’s Chatbot Flooded X With Millions of Sexualized Images in Days, New Estimates Show

We set out to determine how many images of women and girls Grok created during its nudifying spree. What we found was “industrial-scale abuse,” experts said. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/t...

Heated Rivalry and the Art of Anti-Dystopia Joy in the present makes joy in the future seem plausible.

This was very good on that front jenka.substack.com/p/heated-riv...

I've been thinking about this a lot with regard to romance onscreen. People love it! They're starved for it! Give them more!

Barron Trump may have saved woman’s life with police call, London court hears Youngest son of US president raised alarm after woman was allegedly attacked during video call last January

I have a lot of questions! www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...