Summary:

• President Trump told Axios in an interview Thursday that he needs to be personally involved in selecting Iran’s next leader — just as he was in Venezuela.

• Trump supports Kurds launching an offensive in Iran, tells Reuters: “I think it’s wonderful if they want to do that.”

• Little Azerbaijan talks big: President reportedly announced his country’s army is planning an assault on the regime in Iran, as a direct response to the regime’s attacks.

• Qatari fighter jets intercepted Iranian bombers that came within minutes of striking al-Udeid, the largest US military base in the Middle East: CNN

• At least 1,230 Iranians killed since Saturday in actions increasingly described as a regime-change operation, as war widens into Lebanon, Gulf targets pounded, and even Azerbaijan sees first Iranian drone strike – shuts airspace. Iran says over 3,600 civilian sites damaged. Also more missiles on Dubai. At least six US troops killed, but Pentagon has not released new casualty updates.

• US Senate last night voted 53–47 to block an effort to limit Trump’s Operation Epic Fury, allowing the campaign to continue as Washington signals deeper strikes inside Iran.

• WH hopes for ‘quick victory’ fade as it widens geopolitically/economically, with US allies weighing involvement, NATO intercepting a missile heading toward Turkey, evacuation operations underway across the region.

• European countries send naval assets to Cyprus, Italy sends ‘defensive’ equipment in wake of Iranian-made drone attacks on UK base.

• Iran’s ‘Missile Cities’ a threat, but WSJ says “US and Israeli war planes and armed drones are circling over the dozens of cavernous bases, striking missile-carrying launchers when they emerge to fire.”

• UN says 20,000 seafarers, 15,000 passengers stuck in Gulf as State Dept and others initiate evacuation plans.

• Israeli military says it knocked out 300 Iranian ballistic missile launchers, but Tel Aviv also got pummeled overnight as many projectiles made it through air defenses.

• Trump: “We have a lot of winners, but Spain is a loser, and UK has been very disappointing.”

• Price of US oil benchmark up more than 5% due to US-Israel war.

• Deposed Sha’s son Reza Pahlavi calls for Iranian officials to ‘hand over power immediately’ – also amid reports that US/Israel might purse Kurdish proxy ground op.

* * *

Update(1130): Among the ongoing flurry of war headlines, one which just broke via Axios provides the world with a better picture as to the future trajectory of the US-Israeli ‘regime change’ operation in Iran:

President Trump told Axios in an interview Thursday that he needs to be personally involved in selecting Iran’s next leader — just as he was in Venezuela.

Trump acknowledged that Mojtaba Khamenei, son of assassinated supreme leader Ali Khamenei, is the most likely successor — while making clear he finds that outcome unacceptable.

The Council of Experts have officially said they’ve postponed the announcement of the new supreme leader, but speculation abounds. Still, an announcement could be imminent.

For anyone that’s paid attention for the last 20+ years of America’s regime change wars in the Middle East and elsewhere, even if Washington leaders say “no boots on ground” all day long, they are still making “pledges” which ensures or ‘commits’ to a series of escalation steps leading to just that.

Ground invasion would be a disaster, more than likely…

You’re not putting boots on the ground in here and getting them out alive. pic.twitter.com/ICBq8NROhw

— Lucas Gage (@LucasGageX) March 5, 2026

Trump said to Axios: “They are wasting their time. Khamenei’s son is a lightweight. I have to be involved in the appointment, like with Delcy [Rodriguez] in Venezuela.” He added: “Khamenei’s son is unacceptable to me. We want someone that will bring harmony and peace to Iran.”

And very alarming for the prospect of a long quagmire which could endure for years, just like the Iraq war:

He added that he refuses to accept a new Iranian leader who would continue Khamenei’s policies, which he said would force the U.S. back to war “in five years.”

Destruction ongoing in both Tel Aviv and Tehran (below)…

Tel Aviv they don’t want you to see pic.twitter.com/GaavfEAdhP

— Abier (@abierkhatib) March 5, 2026

New videos show destruction across Iran after US and Israeli air strikes, including damage to gov’t buildings, residential neighbourhoods and Iran’s main sports stadium.

Iran’s media say dozens of strikes have hit multiple locations as fears grow of a wider regional conflict. pic.twitter.com/zuUyjCKxjN

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) March 5, 2026

* * *

The United States and Israel continue their history-shaping shock and awe style military campaign against Iran, with Israeli forces also now intensifying strikes in Lebanon. Since Saturday, at least 1,230 people have been killed in what’s clearly morphed into a regime change operation on Tehran, according to official numbers, which are expected to climb by the day. The war is expanding to nearby countries like Azerbaijan, and possibly even Turkey – in addition to the Gulf states.

Crucially, in Washington the US Senate blocked an effort to curb President Trump’s Operation Epic Fury, voting 53–47 against a procedural motion aimed at limiting the operation. Meanwhile Iran is going increasingly ‘gloves off’ in its response, with Tehran officials saying the war is expanding beyond just direct airstrikes. All the while, President Trump is still seeking ‘quick victory’ – the NY Times says Thursday. It writes, “his calculation has been that he can launch military operations with the loss of few American lives and minimal disruption to the economy. The opening days of the war in Iran are challenging that assumption.” The report continues:

Already, six Americans have been killed. Gulf allies are under attack. The stock market wobbled. Gas prices are rising. The U.S. military is spending, by some estimates, hundreds of millions of dollars per day. In Iran, an airstrike on a girls’ elementary school killed 175 people, according to local health officials and Iranian state media, and the Trump administration says it is investigating who was responsible.

Some of the most important latest developments at the Pentagon as well as CENTCOM headquarters come from fresh reporting in Politico:

Trump administration is scrambling to manage the fallout of the Iran war: The Pentagon is requesting additional intelligence officers for at least 100 days, suggesting the war could last far longer than the initially suggested four-week timeline. Officials say planning was limited. There’s talk of “through September.”

A State Department source said “too few people were read in on the war plans,” which slowed evacuation preparations and travel alerts for Americans in the region.

Critics say the response looked improvised, with one former U.S. diplomat calling it “a completely ad hoc operation… like they woke up on Saturday and decided to start a war.”

Again, if the Pentagon is requesting additional intelligence officers for at least 100 days, this strongly suggests the war could last far longer than the initially suggested four-week timeline. Hegseth has already suggested up to eight weeks, and the scope and timeline keeps sliding further.

In Iran, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi warned of “terrorist movements” along Iran’s border with Iraq and called for stronger security measures amid reports that the United States is in talks with Kurdish forces about arming them to foment an uprising against Tehran.

Israel hit hard overnight:

⚡🚨 BREAKING NEWS | 🇮🇷 🇮🇱

IRGC: Launching the 19th wave of Operation ‘True Promise 4’. pic.twitter.com/r8eFbCVhRc

— China live (@ChinaliveX) March 5, 2026

Crazy footage of Mid air turn by an iranian Missile to dodge israeli interceptors & then hit the targetpic.twitter.com/VolJC00uy1

— Azeem Sabzvari (@Azeem_Sabzvari) March 4, 2026

Some Kurdish groups are already ‘preemptively’ getting hit, with Iran’s Intelligence Ministry announcing its forces launched operations against Kurdish groups based in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region of Iraq. The ministry said it struck positions belonging to “separatist groups” attempting to cross Iran’s western border and reported that they suffered heavy losses.

The statement, carried by state media, said Iranian forces are cooperating with “noble Kurds” to thwart what it described as an “Israeli-American” plan to attack Iranian soil. This after many Western pundits have questioned the purpose of government officials airing or ‘leaking’ supposedly covert plans for the CIA and Mossad to arm Iranian Kurdish separatists. Still, the NY Times is freshly reporting Thursday:

Pro-American, Iranian Kurdish forces based in Iraq are preparing armed units that could enter Iran, creating a potential new front in an already expanding conflict.

Meanwhile, Israel expanded its air campaign inside Iran. In a new wave of strikes around Tehran, the Israel Defense Forces said it hit the headquarters of Iran’s special forces, bases of the Basij paramilitary organization, and other government-linked sites – amid official claims the US and Israel are trying to ‘liberate’ and get the Iranian people to ‘rise up’. About 90 Israeli Air Force fighter jets participated in the operation, striking roughly 40 targets with about 200 bombs, according to the military.

Iranian authorities say civilian infrastructure has also been hit and have charged that more schools are getting obliterated. Missiles fired by the US and Israel struck two schools in the town of Parand, southwest of Tehran, Iran’s semiofficial Fars news agency is alleging. Images which were widely circulated showed debris and destruction inside what appeared to be a classroom, while several nearby residential buildings also sustained damage.

Tehran has decried European apathy as its cities get pummeled, with Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei warning that European Union countries will “pay the price, sooner or later” if they remain silent over the US-Israeli attacks. Earlier in the week a few drones were sent against EU-member Cyprus, targeting a British airbase there.

Iran’s Large Missiles Are a Challenge for Interceptors

In this image, we see once again how Iranian missiles with larger and more modern warheads pass through the interceptors without any problem whatsoever. In recent days, I have been reporting that, from what it seems to me,… pic.twitter.com/sJBQCP8r7a

— Patricia Marins (@pati_marins64) March 5, 2026

Iran has upped its retaliatory strikes against Israel in another huge assault, launching its 19th wave of missile and drone attacks targeting Israel and US assets across the Middle East. The videos coming out of Tel Aviv overnight were surreal, showing dozens of ballistic missiles soaring above – often evading Israel’s air defenses – before hitting targets and erupting in huge fireballs. Damage on the ground also confirms that many missiles continue to get through, with Israel’s military appearing to conceal the extent of destruction – and possibly even casualties. Reuters reports Thursday:

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards have tightened their grip on wartime decision making despite the loss of top commanders, senior sources say, driving a hardline strategy that is propelling Tehran’s drone and missile campaign across the region.

The IRGC said it fired ballistic missiles carrying one-ton explosive warheads at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport. One projectile landed in Bareket, east of Tel Aviv. Millions of residents across central Israel were sent into shelters overnight as missile intercepts triggered explosions that rattled buildings across the area. However, medics reported no injuries following the latest barrage. Official military assessments say that only a small number of missiles were launched and no impacts were recorded in residential neighborhoods. 

While Iran military commander Amir Heydari told state TV on Thursday the vital Strait of Hormuz isn’t closed, traders and analysts still expect it will take weeks before oil flows can resume meaningfully.

Reuters and other have asked: how deep is Iran’s missile and drone arsenal (as similar questions are being asked of Pentagon stocks): 

Iranian drone attacks could disrupt the Strait of Hormuz for months, but how long the Islamic Republic could sustain its missile barrage is less clear, according to intelligence sources and military analysts.

The Iranians are claiming to have only tapped their older stockpiles and that they’ve barely started using the shinier, high-tech and most devastating missiles. As for the ongoing Iranian attacks on US Gulf allies, Iran’s military said Thursday it carried out a drone attack on a US military site in Kuwait. Other countries have reported ongoing drone or missile activity, as well as projectiles still targeting oil and logistical sites.

Ground-level images Western networks don’t like to show, for some reason.

Hami Hamedi, RT’s bureau chief, takes a tour through the destruction of Tehran. pic.twitter.com/iMc1t1BL58

— Margarita Simonyan (@M_Simonyan) March 4, 2026

But most importantly, the conflict has come to Azerbaijan for the first time. Iranian drone strikes injured two people and damaged the terminal building of an airport near the Iran-Azerbaijan border – which marks the first such attack on Azerbaijani territory since the war began. The drones reportedly struck the exclave of Nakhchivan, which lies between Armenia and Iran, with another drone reportedly falling near a school in Shakarabad. “We strongly condemn these drone attacks launched from the territory of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Azerbaijan’s foreign ministry said.

At sea, Iran’s foreign minister condemned a US torpedo strike that sank the Iranian warship IRIS Dena off the coast of Sri Lanka on Wednesday, calling it an “atrocity” and warning that Washington will come to regret the attack. More than 80 people were killed and several remain missing after the vessel sank. The event is under international scrutiny as some Western officials and pundits have stated that according to the Geneva Convention, the US Navy was obligated to search for and rescue sinking Iranian seamen in so far as possible – but that doesn’t appear to have happened.

The fighting continues to global energy markets, particularly given cargo vessels are avoiding the Strait of Hormuz after the IRGC announced the closure of the vital shipping route, throttling oil and gas flows – though we reported overnight on an apparently China-owned bulk carrier being able to make it through.

Iran itself remains under a severe communications blackout, with Internet connectivity across the country at roughly 1% of normal levels for more than 120 hours, according NetBlocks. Iranian authorities are reportedly messaging citizens warning they better not protest at this emergency moment when the country is under attack.

The war also continues to spread in Lebanon, where Israel and Hezbollah have been in a ground war for some 24 hours, amid reports of the IDF sending tanks. Since fighting resumed earlier this week, at least 77 people have been killed and 527 wounded, according to Lebanon’s health ministry.

The widening war has further stranded tens of thousands of travelers across the region. Roughly 23,000 foreign nationals remain stuck in Middle Eastern countries as commercial flights are disrupted. Several governments – including the United Kingdom, India, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Australia, and the Czech Republic – are organizing additional flights and safe border crossings to evacuate their citizens. The Trump administration came under fire initially, but has since confirmed it is organizing evacuation flights and other methods for stranded American citizens in the region.

⚡️#BREAKING CENTCOM publishes footage of US military bombing Iranian fighter jets pic.twitter.com/RosUt7EKpt

— War Monitor (@WarMonitors) March 5, 2026

At the same time Western officials say the military campaign is still escalating, with senior US officials warning that American strikes will begin targeting deeper locations inside Iran and emphasized that the operation remains in its early stages. This means ongoing heavy long-range bomber raids by the US.

France has also allowed US non-combat aircraft to use an airbase on French territory, with what a French Armed Forces spokesperson described as the “complete guarantee” that the planes “do not participate in any way in US operations in Iran” and are used only to defend regional partners. Italy announced it will send air-defense support to Gulf countries struck by Iranian retaliatory attacks, according to Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.

This question of whether US allies will jump in remains an open one. Prior precedents of American Middle East adventurism suggests it’s only a matter of time, and we are seeing the proverbial camel’s nose under the tent. Another excample: Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said he “can never categorically rule out participation” in the US-Israeli war with Iran after previously saying Canada would not take part.

Meanwhile, European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas urged diplomacy to prevent further escalation. “There has to be room for diplomacy here to really get out of this cycle of escalation, she said, adding that “it’s clear wars really end in diplomacy.” Kallas said Gulf governments are increasingly “worried about civil war inside Iran” and the consequences that could ripple across the wider region. “Nobody can tell how it will really go, but the risks are clearly there,” she said. On this front Tehran and Washington do not appear to be engaged – not even indirectly:

Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister said Iran is ready to abandon its nuclear program on the condition that the US presents a rewarding alternative offer, Sky News Arabia reported; adds no message was sent to the US to end the conflict. Focused on self defense efforts.

At the White House the war justifications have seemed to change daily. Even a key objective of full regime change appears to have been dropped from the official US list of objectives – perhaps on the realization that it would require major boots on the ground.

white house releases objectives for operation epic fury. regime change not (any longer) a specific goal pic.twitter.com/6cogYaAqgX

— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) March 3, 2026

Still, looming large over this is the potential for a WW3-style whole regional and global confrontation to erupt, in the unlikely scenario that Russia or China gets directly involved. After all, the conflict has already brushed against NATO territory. Turkish air defenses intercepted what Ankara said was a missile launched from Iran on Wednesday; however, Iranian military leaders denied firing any missile toward Turkey. The interception marked the first – and highly dangerous – time NATO forces have shot down an Iranian missile heading toward a member state during the conflict.

Authored by Thomas F. Powers via American Greatness,

It is too early to know with any precision what the long-term effects of the Trump administration’s anti-DEI efforts will be. We might take our bearings on that score by considering the fate of essays written by prominent law professors in the 1950s and 1960s touting this or that discrete step in the unfolding of the civil rights revolution—the latest Supreme Court decision, and so on—as if each were an all-or-nothing earth-shattering decision.

What we can now say with certainty is that what the Trump administration has done on the DEI front represents the beginning of a general reorientation of our politics away from wokeness. One need only survey what prominent leaders of the Left are saying about the political price the Democratic Party has paid on that score. What they are saying indicates a large political change, even if the Dems prove incapable of unmooring themselves from woke politics for the near future.

The first sign of this reorientation is a general shift in the popular mindset: the spell of woke politics has broken. This matters because it was always the way in which woke politics commanded assent in the citizens’ hearts and minds that was crucial. That assent has been questioned or denied now in a broad way, with the backing of public authority (Supreme Court decisions, executive orders, agency directives), and with widespread public support. Wokeness’s public hectoring, punitiveness, and censoriousness, and the extremism of many of its positions on the issues, is unpopular at the level of 70–30 or 80–20 opinion poll divides.

We ought to be confident, therefore, that the broken spell of wokeness augurs a permanent shift in our public life. What that means precisely, however, depends very much on how we understand wokeness and what is done going forward to ensure that woke excess does not return. Now, if, as many say, wokeness was the product of cultural Marxism (Christopher Rufo and a host of followers) or postmodernism (Jordan Peterson and another host of followers), then all that needs to be done is to combat bad ideas. On these interpretations, our universities in particular, and other cultural institutions where the influence of such ideas holds sway, need our attention. Certainly, cultural Marxism and postmodernism represent bad ideas, and the world would be a better place without their influence.

But if what wokeness represents above all is the explosive power of the civil rights revolution and the influence of an aggressive leftist interpretation of anti-discrimination politics, as another band of interpreters claims (I among them), then the task ahead is much bigger and much more difficult.

Trump’s anti-DEI measures, on this view, would represent only the first step in a broader campaign of civil rights reform. One could look long and hard without seeing much in the way of evidence for any such thing so far. Are these current efforts against DEI an illusion, a brief moment of political opportunism that will recede as public hatred of wokeness recedes—only to return in a few years when the next wave of anti-discriminatory passion rises up?

I don’t think that worry is justified. The anti-DEI campaign to date will have enduring consequences because even if it is not yet clear that what is at stake in DEI is civil rights politics, the current reorientation can only have the effect of raising our awareness of the role of anti-discrimination in our public life. This has begun on the all-important moral plane of civil rights politics. Precisely by breaking the spell of its puritanical commands, our anti-woke moment is reworking something essential to civil rights politics. Because public morality is the crucial filter of the human mind, a shift at this level will change what we see, what we think, and what we think we can say. Anti-woke sentiment, backed by changes in the law, is providing a moment of political, cultural, and mental freedom that will necessarily lead, after many decades during which this was not possible, to a general reappraisal of the moral power and the meaning of the civil rights revolution.

Morality, the Problematic Core of Anti-Discrimination Politics

The civil rights regime was always a collection of disparate, crucial elements. anti-discrimination politics began with the discrete groups who claim its protections (by now an overwhelming majority of the population), but it has been bolstered by laws and institutions and by a set of supporting “ideas” (critical race theory, postmodernist “difference” theory, critiques of “prejudice” by sociologists and anthropologists in the early twentieth century, e.g.). Its modes and orders have been advanced further in a hundred independent corollary efforts of cultural change throughout modern life (in the professions and in the domains of art, literature, and the like).

But central to the whole has always been the moral claim of the fight against discrimination. That moral claim has always been essential to civil rights politics and explains its great power in modern life.

Morality is crucial to anti-discrimination for a very simple reason: our perception of “discrimination” is a perception of an injustice. Indeed, what we mean politically by “discrimination” is always “unjust discrimination.” All human beings discriminate among classes of things, conceiving of better and worse, all the time; whenever we say “that’s discrimination” in a political sense, however, what we always have in mind is some kind of unfair or unmerited discrimination or negative judgment.

At the very beginning of anti-discrimination, we of course confront a form of unfair or unjust discrimination against blacks in America that any fair-minded person can very easily see was outrageous. Any decent person will say that an individual ought to be judged by the content of his character, not by the color of his skin. Anti-black discrimination in America was also extremely harsh and harmful, entailing a wide array of harms, ranging from minor indignities all the way up to violence and homicide. Americans were powerfully reminded of the profound injustice of American racism at the moment of their great moral triumph over Hitler and Nazism, which revealed the full scale of the horror of the Holocaust.

The moral power of civil rights politics played a decisive role in the 1950s and 1960s when the anti-discrimination regime was launched. It is true that the American liberal democratic tradition had long expressed a certain wariness of moral crusades (like Prohibition or, before that, religious puritanism). Only a moral force of immense power, of the sort the civil rights revolution was, could overcome our hesitations along those lines. The only real parallel to the civil rights effort was the attempt a century earlier to deal with American race discrimination’s father, or grandfather, slavery, in the Civil War, the bloodiest war in American history.

Victims of discrimination now carried a moral claim that could be used to demand attention from others. This moral starting point was supercharged and made hyper-spirited because, not entirely by conscious design, anti-discrimination enforcement came to institutionalize a hybrid of the civil law and criminal law. Policing harassment and discrimination borrows from the spirit of the criminal law at crucial points (naming offenders and victims, enlisting government prosecutors, paying close attention to intent and “motive”) but with the legal instrumentalities of tort law (looser procedures with lower standards of protection for the accused).

One consequence of this hybrid quasi-public, quasi-private legal structure was that enforcement of the machine could be handed over to employers, educational establishments, and other large (private or public) institutional entities acting in their capacity as “employers.” Enforcement was then implemented by our fellow citizens, acting under a sanction that was rooted in the law but not evidently or obviously “official” or governmental. The overall result was that anti-discrimination enforcement became a way of policing in an effective and relatively intimate way a significant portion of our social interactions, interpersonal behavior, and private speech—and policing how people treat one another is very much a matter of basic morality.

It was into this social domain that civil rights law, invited in by all-too-willing fellow citizens (bosses, deans, HR managers), imported the punitive and blame-casting spirit of the criminal law. At least as important, these individuals wielded the crucial coercive “corrective measure” of this privatized enforcement regime, above all, the firing of individuals. Punishment thus completes the picture for anything in the ballpark of “harassment”—and also for actions like demonstrating recalcitrance to the demands of the new order.

A New Morality?

As important as the victim/perpetrator injustice claims have been to the moral hold of civil rights politics, the morality of the anti-discrimination revolution is more complicated than that; moreover, its various claims are stated in much more precise terms. Indeed, a whole new system of public morality emerged out of the civil rights revolution.

To elaborate on this in detail would take more space than I have here, but in brief, a new terminology has emerged to clarify the harm of discrimination and to articulate the steps that must be taken to eradicate it. “Identity” is a vitally important term today because it names with some precision what it is in the individual that is threatened by group-on-group discrimination. “Respect” must replace mere “toleration” as a standard of interpersonal treatment because toleration is consistent with some kinds of discrimination (especially discrimination in the private sector). Claims from both identity and respect show that civil rights politics is thus necessarily a politics of “recognition.” New schemes of representation come into view as necessary as well—new, more “inclusive” schemes that reflect the “voices” of those previously excluded by discrimination. And, last but certainly not least, a host of new equality claims—systemic, structural, societal—call into question noticeable inequalities affecting the groups protected under anti-discrimination law. Such claims are now advanced under the heading of “equity.”

A whole new civic morality has thus emerged out of the political upheaval of the civil rights revolution; shamefully, our political scientists have nothing to say about this massive and astonishing fact of our public life.

It is the morality of civil rights as interpreted by the Left that supplies the key “ideas” that are at the core of the woke outlook—and not, I would insist, cultural Marxism or postmodernism or cultural relativism, and so on. To be sure, “ideas” there are here aplenty—identity, inclusion, recognition, respect, equity, etc.—but they are all ideas with a very simple and clear political origin. The lesson for us here ought to be this: political history as the cause of ideas, not intellectual history as the cause of politics.

One additional step remains: it is above all the moral logic of civil rights politics that must be “taught,” as a semi-official catechism, by way of the public and private enforcers of the regime, through things like diversity training, Title IX training, anti-bullying training, and the like—and with punitive sanctions for those who do not want to go along.

The moral power of the anti-discrimination revolution helps to explain how it could grow and grow, more or less unchecked, to the point where it became the monstrous woke regime against which the people have finally rebelled. This explains, too, why the American Left thought for so long that the Democratic Party could ride an anti-discrimination coalition to enduring political victory. Because of its moral content, the anti-discrimination regime—its groups, its laws, its ideas, its institutions, public and private—all seemed unquestionable, simply above criticism.

Our Doubts About the New Morality

What is crucial about the current moment is that anti-DEI sentiment extends to a new wariness concerning precisely the moralism of wokeness. Americans are heirs of the Enlightenment and heirs of liberal democratic constitutional government, and they have not entirely forgotten the suspicion of any politics that claims too much in the name of high and lofty ideals, religious or secular.

It’s true that almost no one is saying publicly that anti-wokeness is really at bottom opposition to civil rights moralism. But one need only consider in rough outline what it is that public anti-woke ire expresses in order to see why that is the case.

We don’t see this, however, and that is because the great moral power of civil rights still does its work to halt us from facing the enormous consequences of the social-political revolution that has taken place in its name. This is something that we see today, even in the Trump administration’s very effective anti-DEI measures. This is a huge effort of civil rights reform, in fact, unprecedented in its sweep. But does anyone call it by that name?

What is needed is a fuller and franker facing of the hold the civil rights revolution has on us. The greatest obstacle to that is its moral hold. How, then, to start to challenge—or at least to begin to think clearly about—something as important to American life as the morality of anti-discrimination without going off the deep end into a world that would welcome back discrimination of the kind American blacks endured before the 1960s. That is a price we cannot pay.

One answer is to begin to look at, to see, the civil rights revolution in its many conflicts with another morality that has great power in America—namely, the morality of the liberal democratic constitutional tradition. And when one begins to look on that level, there are indeed many, many conflicts between the logic of anti-discrimination and that older moral-political outlook.

Looking at anti-discrimination (as a whole) from the perspective of liberalism (as a whole), we will perhaps be able to begin, finally, to see the anti-discrimination regime as a distinct entity. We will, at the same time, be unable not to notice the many lines of tension between these twin poles of our moral-political order. That ought to free us up to start thinking more clearly about the relationship between them. Questioning one’s civic morality is not something to be embraced lightly, but fortunately for us in this situation, questioning one set of our moral categories may be done with a view to another, healthier, set.

* * *

Thomas F. Powers is Visiting Lecturer at The Center for Civics, Culture, and Society at Cleveland State University and author of American Multiculturalism and the Anti-Discrimination Regime (St. Augustine’s Press).

Israel is striking Iran’s internal security apparatus in an effort to weaken the regime’s ability to suppress dissent and potentially open the door to a popular uprising, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Israeli airstrikes on Wednesday targeted figures and facilities tied to domestic repression, including members of the Basij paramilitary and senior intelligence officials, the Israeli military said. Israel and the U.S. have also hit internal-security institutions such as the Tehran headquarters of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which plays a central role in protecting the regime.

The IRGC and Basij led the violent crackdown on antigovernment protests in January, when security forces fired on demonstrators and killed thousands. Police and intelligence agencies also detained large numbers of protesters.

Israeli officials say the goal is to weaken Iran’s coercive apparatus from the air so citizens can challenge the government on the ground. Analysts caution that airpower alone may not bring down the regime.

“If the bet is that airstrikes will finish the job from above while Iranians complete it from below, it’s a bet that rests on no clear historical model,” said Ali Vaez of the International Crisis Group. “It also ignores the resilience of entrenched authoritarian systems like the Islamic Republic.”

The Wall Street Journal writes that recent strikes targeted dozens of internal security facilities, including the IRGC’s Tharallah headquarters, which coordinates intelligence, policing and Basij units during unrest. Israeli jets also hit the police special-units command, Faraja, responsible for riot control. Iran later confirmed the death of Faraja intelligence chief Golamreza Rezaian.

“These bodies were responsible for, among other things, suppressing protests against the regime through violent measures and civilian arrests,” the Israeli military said.

Joint U.S.-Israeli operations have also focused on western Iran’s Kurdish regions, long known as opposition strongholds. Rights groups reported strikes on police and detention sites in the Kurdish city of Sanandaj.

The conflict comes amid growing unrest inside Iran driven by economic hardship, political grievances and anger over the January killings. More than 7,000 people have died in the unrest, according to Human Rights Activists in Iran.

Still, the government retains a near monopoly on weapons across most of the country, and Basij patrols continue. Civilian casualties from the conflict—over 1,000 so far, including 180 children—could also strengthen hardline support for the regime.

Former President Donald Trump has urged Iranian security forces to defect. “I urge the IRGC, Iranian military, police to lay down your arms and receive full immunity or face certain death,” he said Sunday. “It will be certain death.”

U.S. equity futures jumped around 4:00 a.m. ET after Bloomberg News reported that Iran had previously signaled a willingness to surrender its highly enriched uranium stockpiles in high-stakes negotiations, just before the U.S. launched Operation Epic Fury.

Although the Bloomberg story relates to last week’s U.S.-Iran developments, the market is extremely sensitive to headlines – even old ones – and that was enough to send S&P 500 E-mini futures surging, erasing earlier losses and now flat. Nasdaq futures are also little changed.

Main U.S. equity futures indexes

Here’s what Bloomberg reported:

Iran told the U.S. in recent nuclear negotiations that its stockpile of highly enriched uranium “is the result of our practical achievements and that we are ready to get rid of it, provided we get something good in return,” the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency cited Deputy Foreign Minister Majid Takht-Ravanchi as saying.

Bear in mind this news is ‘old’ (we reported on Friday), but for it to repeated no in public is very different from saying it in private a week ago…

Absolutely huge late Friday developing news, if it’s confirmed and assuming it sticks, via CBS: “Iran has agreed to give up its stockpile of enriched material – zero accumulation – and allow for full verification by the IAEA of its nuclear program according to US-Iran talks mediator, Oman’s foreign minister Badr al Busaidi.”

The Iranian side also seems to be confirming its willingness to make this significant concession, also to stave off a massive US attack, given the immense build-up of Pentagon assets in the region. According to more breaking details via CBS:

Negotiators from the U.S. and Iran have made “substantial progress” toward a deal to curb Iran’s nuclear program, Omani Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi told CBS News on Friday, as President Trump considers strikes on Iran.

Albusaidi — who has mediated several rounds of U.S.-Iran talks over the last month — told “Face the Nation” moderator Margaret Brennan that a “peace deal is within our reach.”

He said Iran has agreed that it will “never, ever have … nuclear material that will create a bomb,” which he called a “big achievement.” The country’s existing stockpiles of enriched uranium would be “blended to the lowest level possible” and “converted into fuel, and that fuel will be irreversible,” according to Albusaidi.

Why this old news is being recirculated remains unclear.

Last week:

On Wednesday, CNN reported that Iranian intel officials had sent word to Washington about potential talks to end the conflict, yet no U.S. official has publicly confirmed that any negotiations are underway.

Interestingly while stocks jumped on the ‘hope’, Polymarket odds a ceasefire by month-end slipped to just 1 in 4…

Iran potentially surrendering its uranium stockpiles may become the new “trade war” headlines for the stock market casino. We all remember those headlines from one year ago and in Trump’s first term. 

Things over at Anthropic are getting wild.

On Friday, the Trump administration ‘fired’ the woke serial copyright infringer, industry disruptor and software-engineer-extinctor after a bruising dispute with the Pentagon came to a head over ethical concerns surrounding Claude’s military use – specifically, domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. The Pentagon demanded to use ClaudeAI for “any lawful purpose” with no guardrails – or having to ask permission from a bunch of blue-haired Karens in a life-or-death scenario. The chatbot’s supposedly idealistic leader (whose sister and Anthropic co-founder, Daniella Amodei, is married to Holden Karnofsky, the founder of Effective Altruism himself) had to signal virtuemaxx to his employees, and said no. OpenAi’s Sam Altman, who is a different kinds of opportunistic sociopath with zero moral qualms, pretended to side with Amodei at first only to immediately swoop in and poach Anthropic’s Pentagon contract. Meanwhile, Amodei’s investors, who had just dumped all their cocaine cash for the next 20 years into his company at a $380 billion valuation, and realized they would never see their money again if the government blacklisted and banned the company from all government supply chains, were terribly vexxed. 

The spat resulted in three things; first, in addition to getting ‘fired,’ Anthropic was deemed a “supply-chain risk” (making them radioactive to the defense industry) – and federal agencies were given six months to ditch Anthropic products. Second, OpenAI’s Sam Altman slid into Hegseth’s DMs (through proper channels, we’re sure) and landed Anthropic’s contract – which they revised to beef up and clarify safety protocols, and third, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei threw a ripper of a tantrum in a leaked memo sent to over 2,000 employees attacking the Trump administration and OpenAI. 

For Silicon Valley investors and allies, it immediately sank in how absolutely fucked they are if this stands. Now in a PR crisis, Amodei is scrambling to salvage his company’s relationship with the Pentagon (read: the goodwill of his investors) – and has begun last-ditch talks with senior officials in hopes of striking a new deal, FT reports, adding that he’s now personally negotiating with Emil Michael, the Pentagon’s undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, who on Thursday called Amodei as a “liar” with a “God complex after talks with the Pentagon collapsed. 

It’s a shame that @DarioAmodei is a liar and has a God-complex. He wants nothing more than to try to personally control the US Military and is ok putting our nation’s safety at risk.

The @DeptofWar will ALWAYS adhere to the law but not bend to whims of any one for-profit tech… https://t.co/ZfwXG36Wvl

— Under Secretary of War Emil Michael (@USWREMichael) February 27, 2026

Pentagon Showdown

Anthropic drew several red lines against allowing its technology to power fully autonomous lethal weapons or mass domestic surveillance, arguing that the level of protections the Pentagon wanted would be ineffective, and that the Defense Department’s language was suspicious.

“Near the end of the negotiation the department offered to accept our current terms if we deleted a specific phrase about ‘analysis of bulk acquired data,’” Amodei wrote in a memo to employees. “That was the single line in the contract that exactly matched the scenario we were most worried about. We found that very suspicious.”

Pentagon officials, meanwhile, claim that Anthropic was demanding they ask permission in life-or-death nuclear scenarios, which Anthropic denied.

A defense official said the Pentagon’s technology chief whittled the debate down to a life-and-death nuclear scenario at a meeting last month: If an intercontinental ballistic missile was launched at the United States, could the military use Anthropic’s Claude AI system to help shoot it down?

It’s the kind of situation where technological might and speed could be critical to detection and counterstrike, with the time to make a decision measured in minutes and seconds. Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei’s answer rankled the Pentagon, according to the official, who characterized the CEO’s reply as: You could call us and we’d work it out.

An Anthropic spokesperson denied Amodei gave that response, calling the account “patently false,” and saying the company has agreed to allow Claude to be used for missile defense. But officials have cited this and another incident involving Claude’s use in the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro as flashpoints in a spiraling standoff between the company and the Pentagon in recent days. The meeting was previously reported by Semafor. –Washington Post

Does the last-ditch effort to save things mean that Anthropic is going to budge on their red lines – perhaps matching whatever OpenAI has stipulated or agreed to?

Memo Meltdown

After OpenAI snaked their contract, Amodei dismissed the rival’s safeguards as little more than “20% real and 80% safety theater,” – claiming that OpenAI’s Pentagon deal appears to rely on “safety layers” and monitoring systems intended to block prohibited uses – safeguards he says are easily bypassed.

“Refusals aren’t reliable and jailbreaks are common,” he wrote, adding that AI models cannot reliably determine whether they are being used for surveillance or autonomous weapons because they lack visibility into the real-world context of how their outputs are used.

Amodei also blasted the idea that contractors such as Palantir could enforce restrictions through software filters.

“Our sense was that it was almost entirely safety theater,” he wrote, claiming such tools were designed mainly to placate concerned employees rather than actually prevent abuses.

‘We Haven’t Given Dictator-Style Praise To Trump’

Amodei argued that the real reason the Trump administration is targeting Anthropic has nothing to do with technology or national security.

“The real reasons the DoW and the Trump admin do not like us is that we haven’t donated to Trump… we haven’t given dictator-style praise to Trump… and we have supported AI regulation,” he wrote.

Amodei claimed OpenAI leadership – including president Greg Brockman – had donated heavily to pro-Trump political groups while Anthropic refused to play the same game.

He also accused the Pentagon of coordinating messaging with OpenAI to portray Anthropic as unreasonable in contract negotiations.

“Sam is trying to make it more possible for the admin to punish us by undercutting our public support,” Amodei wrote.

Which, again, begs the question of whether or not Anthropic is now willing to budge on their red lines.

Investors Alarmed

Needless to say, Anthropic’s investors and partners are freaked out – with backers including Amazon, Nvidia, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Iconiq Capital scrambling to hold urgent talks with the company in recent days as they attempt to defuse the conflict with Washington.

A major technology industry group representing many of these companies sent a letter to the Hegseth Wednesday warning against the Pentagon labeling any AI provider a supply-chain risk amid a procurement dispute.

But what really matters are Anthropic’s investors – both current but especially future (after all someone has to fund those billions in perpetual losses)  – many of whom blame Amodei’s confrontational approach for escalating the situation.

“It’s an ego and diplomacy problem,” one person familiar with the talks told Reuters.

Some investors have reportedly reached out to contacts inside the Trump administration in hopes of calming tensions.

Following Trump and Hegseth’s Friday announcement, several agencies began shifting away from the company. The State Department has reportedly moved to OpenAI following an order from the White House to phase out Anthropic systems within six months.

Meanwhile, Anthropic has raised tens of billions of dollars and is widely expected to pursue a public offering. Enterprise customers account for roughly 80% of the company’s revenue, and its projected annual run rate has reportedly surged from about $14 billion to $19 billion in recent weeks (and do we believe this?).

Less than one week into Operation Epic Fury, Beijing has ordered its top refiners to halt gasoline and diesel exports as the Strait of Hormuz remained paralyzed on Thursday morning. The move exposes how China is one of the biggest losers in a prolonged Hormuz shutdown, with Beijing appearing to brace for an oil shock.

Beijing is scrambling after panicking at the start of the week and calling for an immediate ceasefire in the U.S.-Iran conflict. Since then, Iraq has begun cutting crude oil output, and Wednesday brought another major energy shock: Qatar’s massive LNG export operation declared force majeure, effectively removing about 20% of global LNG supply from the market, with roughly 80% of those volumes normally headed to Asia.

Bloomberg sources say that officials from the National Development and Reform Commission, China’s top economic planner, called for an immediate temporary suspension of refined crude product exports on Thursday. 

Chinese officials told top domestic refiners to halt any new export deals and cancel existing shipments, though jet and bunker fuel in bonded storage, along with supplies to Hong Kong and Macau, are exempt. 

NDRC’s decision is merely viewed as a way for Beijing protect domestic fuel supply and energy security. We’ve made it very well known to readers that China is heavily exposed to Gulf energy. 

We’ve briefed readers (read here) that China is heavily exposed to cheap Iranian crude exports. About 80% of Iran’s oil exports – about 1.6 million barrels per day – go to China.

… and so is the rest of Asia.

We asked a very important question on Wednesday evening: “Will Trump Seize Or Destroy Iran’s Oil Export Island?”

Crude oil futures for April on the Shanghai International Exchange (priced in dollars) are near $100/bbl.

However, there is some good news overnight:

• China-Linked Bulk Carrier Exits Strait Of Hormuz Without Incident

Any sustained closure of the critical waterway could trigger an energy shock in China, hitting first through higher prices and, if the disruption persists, through tighter physical supply. As the world’s largest crude importer, with roughly half of its oil imports linked to Gulf shipments, Beijing faces the risk of chokepoint disruptions. 

All of this comes just weeks before President Trump’s upcoming trip to Beijing, and with the U.S. military likely to provide tanker escorts through the narrow waterway, the leverage Washington appears to have gained ahead of any Trump-Xi meeting looks increasingly well calculated. 

Authored by Christina Comben via cointelegraph,

Leopold Aschenbrenner has built a US stock portfolio heavily concentrated in companies that supply the power and infrastructure behind the artificial intelligence boom.

The former OpenAI researcher, who left the lab’s superalignment team to launch San Francisco-based hedge fund Situational Awareness LP, has expanded it from $383 million in assets in early 2025 to a reported $5.52 billion in equity positions in its latest 13F filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

The fund’s 13F filing for Q4 2025 shows a highly concentrated portfolio built around betting that the real winners of the AI boom won’t be chatbots, but the power plants and data centers that feed them. Situational Awareness reported $5.52 billion in US equity positions across 29 holdings, with a large share of that value clustered in a handful of AI infrastructure names.

Those include graphics processing unit (GPU) cloud provider CoreWeave, fuel cell and power specialist Bloom Energy, Intel, optics maker Lumentum and Bitcoin miner-turned-AI infrastructure play Core Scientific. 

Aschenbrenner first drew attention as a precocious AI thinker after publishing a widely read “Situational Awareness” manifesto on the race to advanced AI, then quickly parlayed that profile into capital. His San Francisco-based AI hedge fund now manages more than $1.5 billion, backed by prominent tech founders, family offices and institutions.

Aschenbrenner has been a substantial net buyer quarter-on-quarter, with Situational Awareness’ 13-F reported US equity and options portfolio increasing from about $254 million in Q4 2024 to more than $5.5 billion by Q4 2025. Over that period, the fund built sizable positions in Bitcoin miners and related energy infrastructure firms including IREN, Cipher Mining, Riot Platforms, Bitdeer and Applied Digital.

Bitcoin miners pivot from hashrate to horsepower

The bet aligns with a broader shift already reshaping Bitcoin mining. After the latest halving squeezed block rewards, large miners have started repurposing their high-density, power-rich sites as AI hosting hubs, treating megawatts and data center space as scarce assets in the new compute economy rather than just hashrate.

Core Scientific, for example, has signed a series of 12-year high-performance computing hosting contracts with AI cloud firm CoreWeave, while MARA acquired a 64% stake in French computing infrastructure operator Exaion, expanding into AI and cloud services.

Situational Awareness disclosed a 9.4% stake in Core Scientific via an amended Schedule 13D, representing 28,756,478 shares with shared voting and disposition power, effectively giving the fund a levered bet on CoreWeave’s expansion and the miner’s pivot from pure Bitcoin to AI and high-performance computing.

At the same time, the fund has taken aim at the other side of the AI transition with a short position in Indian IT giant Infosys, a wager that large language models and AI coding tools will pressure the traditional outsourced software services model.

Goldman analysts, led by Eric Sheridan, updated clients this week on the latest developments in the North American autonomous vehicle rideshare market. They point out that the AV rideshare market continues to expand as Uber, Lyft, Waymo, and Zoox roll out AV operations nationwide.

Readers will notice that the commercial AV deployments this year, including Uber, Lyft, Waymo, and Zoox (Tesla in Texas), are full steam ahead.

Key AV deployment announcements for Uber, Lyft, and Waymo in 4Q25

Key AV deployment announcements for Uber, Lyft, and Waymo YTD 2026

One of the most fascinating charts Sheridan produced for clients shows the miles between accidents for Waymo and Tesla.

Here’s more on the safety data:

Based on available crash data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) from July 2025 through mid-January 2026, and disclosures from Waymo (for all US cities it’s operating in commercially) and Tesla (for Austin) around trips/miles driven by their respective robotaxi services, we estimate that Tesla has an accident (regardless of fault) every 45K-60K miles, while Waymo has an accident (regardless of fault) every 60K-110K miles. We note that these datapoints reflect driverless miles (including those with a safety observer/monitor for Tesla) and do not include manually operated vehicles and accidents in cities without public rides being offered. We show estimated monthly miles between accidents for both companies in Exhibit 1. Note that Tesla’s miles between accidents were ~1.5K miles in July and Tesla did not have any reported accidents in August. Further, note that January data only captures known/reported accidents through January 15th and further accidents are typically reported in the following month’s data (i.e., February data).

Note that because Tesla’s fleet in Austin is a mix of vehicles, both with and without a safety monitor, and because there are differences in where the rides are occurring (with Waymo operating commercially in more cities), the data may not be directly comparable. In addition, reports are filed with NHTSA even for minor issues that would be unlikely to be reported by a human (e.g. driving over a curb), and not all accidents are the fault of the AV.

Goldman has told clients that the AV rideshare buildout is still in its early stages and is set to accelerate from here.

In January, Elon Musk told BlackRock CEO Larry Fink at Davos that Tesla expects to operate a “widespread” robotaxi network by the end of this year.

It is only a matter of time before taxi drivers and human Uber drivers begin to revolt against AVs gaining deeper penetration in the rideshare market. That shift should become increasingly visible over the next several years, with the impact likely to be far more noticeable by 2028 and beyond.

The full Goldman note can be viewed (here) and is available to pro subs.

Goldman analysts, led by Eric Sheridan, updated clients this week on the latest developments in the North American autonomous vehicle rideshare market. They point out that the AV rideshare market continues to expand as Uber, Lyft, Waymo, and Zoox roll out AV operations nationwide.

Readers will notice that the commercial AV deployments this year, including Uber, Lyft, Waymo, and Zoox (Tesla in Texas), are full steam ahead.

Key AV deployment announcements for Uber, Lyft, and Waymo in 4Q25

Key AV deployment announcements for Uber, Lyft, and Waymo YTD 2026

One of the most fascinating charts Sheridan produced for clients shows the miles between accidents for Waymo and Tesla.

Here’s more on the safety data:

Based on available crash data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) from July 2025 through mid-January 2026, and disclosures from Waymo (for all US cities it’s operating in commercially) and Tesla (for Austin) around trips/miles driven by their respective robotaxi services, we estimate that Tesla has an accident (regardless of fault) every 45K-60K miles, while Waymo has an accident (regardless of fault) every 60K-110K miles. We note that these datapoints reflect driverless miles (including those with a safety observer/monitor for Tesla) and do not include manually operated vehicles and accidents in cities without public rides being offered. We show estimated monthly miles between accidents for both companies in Exhibit 1. Note that Tesla’s miles between accidents were ~1.5K miles in July and Tesla did not have any reported accidents in August. Further, note that January data only captures known/reported accidents through January 15th and further accidents are typically reported in the following month’s data (i.e., February data).

Note that because Tesla’s fleet in Austin is a mix of vehicles, both with and without a safety monitor, and because there are differences in where the rides are occurring (with Waymo operating commercially in more cities), the data may not be directly comparable. In addition, reports are filed with NHTSA even for minor issues that would be unlikely to be reported by a human (e.g. driving over a curb), and not all accidents are the fault of the AV.

Goldman has told clients that the AV rideshare buildout is still in its early stages and is set to accelerate from here.

In January, Elon Musk told BlackRock CEO Larry Fink at Davos that Tesla expects to operate a “widespread” robotaxi network by the end of this year.

It is only a matter of time before taxi drivers and human Uber drivers begin to revolt against AVs gaining deeper penetration in the rideshare market. That shift should become increasingly visible over the next several years, with the impact likely to be far more noticeable by 2028 and beyond.

The full Goldman note can be viewed (here) and is available to pro subs.

Via REMIX News,

The wave of police searches and prosecutions in Germany may be facing a new hurdle after Germany’s top court, the Constitutional Court, issued two landmark rulings strengthening freedom of expression. However, Fatina Keilani, editor in Welt’s freedom of expression department, said that these two decisions have gone largely unnoticed by the public, an oversight that she finds remarkable.

Writing in Welt, Keilani reports that the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe handed down two resolutions in December that push back against what she describes as hasty convictions for insults. The rulings stem from two separate cases in which individuals used sharp, even offensive language against public officials and medical staff — and were criminally sentenced for it.

As Remix News has extensively reported, there have been hundreds, if not thousands, of such cases in recent years. Some of these cases have even attracted international attention and led to questions about freedom of speech and growing repression in Germany.

Just late last month, German prosecutors launched investigations into dozens of comments under just one post criticizing Chancellor Friedrich Merz, with one user calling him “Pinocchio.” A number of constitutional lawyers were quick to slam the investigations, with one labeling it “hysterical madness.”

Now, Germany’s top court is strengthening freedom of expression at a worrying time.

The first case involved a retired police officer whose son attended a high school during the Covid pandemic. Angered by the school’s testing requirements, the father sent the headmaster a series of emails accusing him of serving a “fascist system and its henchmen” and of “fascist cadre obedience.” The Göppingen District Court sentenced him to a fine of 70 daily rates of €80 each for insult. He lost every appeal before taking his case to Karlsruhe — where he finally prevailed.

The Constitutional Court found that his right to freedom of expression had been violated, ruling that the lower courts had not examined the meaning of his statements carefully enough, nor struck an adequate balance between free expression and the protection of personality.

Keilani quotes the court directly: “Part of this freedom is that citizens can attack officials they consider responsible in an accusatory and personalized way for their way of exercising power, without having to fear that the personal elements of such statements are removed from this context and form the basis for drastic judicial sanctions.”

The second case involved a man who had been placed in a psychiatric hospital on multiple occasions and subjected to coercive measures. In a letter to his lawyer in 2023, he described hospital staff as a “psychiatric mob.” When he applied to have the letter formally served, a senior bailiff refused on the grounds that its content was punishable. The Stuttgart Higher Regional Court upheld that refusal — but Karlsruhe disagreed.

The Constitutional Court was pointed in its criticism, noting that the Higher Regional Court’s entire reasoning had been reduced to just two sentences, and that it had made no real weighing of the fundamental right to free expression at all. The case has been sent back for reconsideration.

For Keilani, both rulings carry a significance that extends beyond the individual cases. She situates them within a broader climate of concern, noting that “numerous decisions against freedom of expression have recently raised doubts in Germany about the rule of law and about the stability of the courts with regard to this crucial fundamental right.”

In particular, the wave of politicians weaponizing comments on the internet to launch police raids and drag social media users to court. Against that backdrop, she finds the Karlsruhe decisions reassuring — while also reading them as a firm instruction to lower courts about the standard they must meet when judging speech.

These rulings do not necessarily mean, however, that internet users are now able to freely insult politicians without consequence. For one, prosecutors and politicians still have incentive to pursue such cases, both in order to stifle dissent and to intimidate the populace. Social media users may be able to defend themselves in court, but it will likely take years and cost them substantial amounts of money. Furthermore, outright insults without context are still likely to be prosecutable offenses under current German law. For example, insulting a politician’s physical appearance or simply calling them a slur could land social media users in hot water.

Regardless, the country’s top court has drawn a line in the sand, according to Keilani.

She also cited the “urgent decision of the Cologne Administrative Court regarding the classification of the AfD” as also a welcome sign that rule of law still stands in Germany. In that ruling, the Cologne court found that the designation of the AfD as a “confirmed” case of right-wing extremism was not constitutionally sound.