“The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of the parent.”

–Carl Jung

Shadow Within Jung May 18, 2026 Talk to Yourself This Way and Your Life Will Heal | Carl Jung Your body has never been your enemy. It has been trying to speak to you for years. Carl Jung believed that emotional pain, repression, and unresolved trauma often express themselves through the body. In this video, you will discover how the way you speak to yourself can influence healing, self-awareness, and inner transformation. ????

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller addresses the audience at the Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism at the State Department on July 16, 2026 in Washington, DC. 

(Photo by Finn Gomez/Getty Images)

“If you’re not alarmed you’re not paying attention.”

Brad Reed

Jul 16, 2026 (CommonDreams.org)

Trump administration officials on Thursday hyped up plans to carry out mass political arrests and prosecutions of people whom it deemed far-left terrorists.

In a speech given at the US State Department, Stephen Miller, President Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff, described left-wing political violence as a “fatal cancer to civilization,” and boasted of plans to use state power to suppress people whom he called “political terrorists.”

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Miller said that the administration would be carrying out this operation under the guidance of National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7), a directive signed by Trump in September that demanded a “national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts.”

Miller bragged that “for the first time in American history,” NSPM-7 would direct “all of our law enforcement and intelligence agencies to work together to disrupt, identify, defund, de-bank, arrest, prosecute these political terrorists that are operating within our country.”

Santa Monica Goebbels is doing his weird and creepy gyrations while delivering a speech smearing Democrats as violent radicals pic.twitter.com/PaeDcD55jw

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 16, 2026

Miller said that the mass arrest of left-wing radicals was necessary to prevent them from carrying out mass arrests of their own.

“Inevitably, left to its course, it always becomes a gulag,” said Miller. “It always becomes the mass imprisonment of political enemies, the stripping of their rights and freedoms, inflicting immense pain, humiliation, suffering, in order to establish complete and total control, control through psychological and physical and actual terror.”

The social media account of independent progressive publication The Tennessee Holler expressed alarm at Miller’s speech.

“Fascism is here,” The Tennessee Holler wrote. “If you’re not alarmed you’re not paying attention. ‘Left-wing political terrorism’ will mean those who oppose the regime—while actual right-wing extremism is allowed to grow and thrive. We are very far off the cliff, folks.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who also spoke of the event, noted last year that his department “designated four violent far-left extremist groups as foreign terrorist organizations, and there will be more designations soon.”

Secretary of State Rubio says there will be more terrorist designations of left-wing groups "soon." pic.twitter.com/RmZjBgQXas

— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) July 16, 2026

The administration’s declaration of war against left-wing political violence comes despite decades of research showing that political violence is more commonly carried out by right-wing groups.

A report published last year by the Center for Strategic and International Studies found that, while left-wing political violence has grown since Trump’s first election in 2016, it “remains much lower than historical levels of violence carried out by right-wing and jihadist attackers.”

The report also noted that violence carried out by left-wing individuals or groups was “remarkably less lethal” than violence carried out by right-wing or jihadist individuals or groups.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

Brad Reed

Brad Reed is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

Full Bio >

Opinion

Readers respond to a guest essay about the labels used to describe those in the L.G.B.T.Q. community.

July 18, 2026 (NYTimes.com)

To the Editor:

Re “I’m Gay, Not Queer. It Matters,” by Matthew Vines (Opinion guest essay, July 2):

In 1990, the year Queer Nation published the manifesto that Mr. Vines quotes in his essay, I was one of that group’s members. I was 19. That same year, the Boy Scouts of America expelled me for being gay, and two years later, I sued.

The case took eight years to reach the Supreme Court, which in 2000 ruled in favor of the Boy Scouts. My Lambda Legal attorney at the time, Evan Wolfson, went on to become a leader in the marriage equality movement that Mr. Vines credits with changing his life.

In his essay, Mr. Vines presents queer confrontation and mainstream acceptance as opposing forces. My life tells a different story. The welcome I found among queer radicals gave me the courage to fight for a place in the most wholesome institution in America. The people in the streets and the people in the courtrooms were the same movement. Often the same people.

I am 55. I survived the AIDS crisis and buried many friends. I have been queer all my life, in the streets and in the courtroom, and I never found those two fights as far apart as Mr. Vines suggests.

James Dale
New York

To the Editor:

Matthew Vines’s guest essay left me with one overriding thought: He’s looking in the wrong direction.

I’ve lived through the fight for marriage equality. The L.G.B.T.Q. community did not win those rights by being polished, restrained or always in agreement. People marched, protested, challenged unjust laws, came out publicly and refused to hide. Some were criticized for being too loud or too radical. History has a way of changing those judgments.

The danger, to me, is a political movement that opposed our equality long before most Americans had ever heard the word “queer.” It is also a movement that keeps finding new groups to target: immigrants, religious minorities, transgender people, people of color and anyone else who does not fit its vision of America.

That is why I struggle with Mr. Vines’s conclusion. Dividing our community into the acceptable and the unacceptable will not change the minds of people who have spent decades trying to roll back our rights. Those coming for us would do so regardless of how polished and restrained our community tried to be.

Garrick Spears
Canaan, N.Y.

To the Editor:

I grew up just south of Matthew Vines in a small town in Oklahoma. I intimately understand the comfort he found in the marriage equality messaging of the 2010s. As an associate legal director at the Human Rights Campaign, I wrote some of it.

We earned legal protections by arguing unthreatening sameness. It would be easy to attribute falling levels of public support to the abandonment of a streamlined gay narrative. But the language we use to describe our community is not the problem. We have hit the limits of legal equality while navigating fraying democratic institutions. The MAGA agenda has made L.G.B.T.Q. lives the villain in an old, predictable, antidemocratic story.

A healthy democracy depends on protecting individuality and expression. It does not prescribe a single vision for living, but rather a set of tools to live differently while thriving together. L.G.B.T.Q. people are beautifully and inescapably different. Queer lives are good for democracy. Our stubborn existence and demand for equal dignity are daily forms of democratic resistance.

Robin Maril
Portland, Ore.
The writer is an assistant professor at Willamette University College of Law and the author of “A Queer Guide to Saving American Democracy.”

To the Editor:

I recognize the shame behind Matthew Vines’s essay. It is devastating to be gay (or lesbian or queer) in a homophobic religious community. Yet Mr. Vines misses the profound connection between queer politics and robust Christianity.

Queer politics is, indeed, anti-normative. But the point is not rebellion for its own sake. Decades of queer scholarship and activism have understood the critique of social norms as a way of exposing systems (like gender and the tax code) that make some lives more livable than others. Questioning those norms allows us to be advocates for the people they harm.

Queer politics, like Christ’s teaching, reminds us that our responsibility is not to those with power, but to those who lack it — all those whom the community rejects. Both call us to support those who have less than we do — those facing violence, homelessness, the withholding of medical care or death. Queer politics asks this; gay identity does not.

Queer politics asks more of us than acceptance for ourselves. It asks us to stand with those who remain excluded. That is not a departure from Christian ethics but a reminder of them.

Shannon Brennan
Milwaukee
The writer is an associate professor of English at Carthage College and an associate editor at Edith Wharton Review.

To the Editor:

I am heterosexual, which seems to mean that Matthew Vines is worried I don’t like him. He avoids calling himself queer as a gay man because he finds the term too “adversarial” toward straight people. Indeed, in Mr. Vines’s eyes, offending heterosexual people — or simply confusing them — appears to be the worst mistake available to a gay person who likes having rights.

I was struck by how limiting Mr. Vines’s ideas are. He certainly did not choose to be gay, but in fretting that gay people will make straight homophobes too mad to stop being homophobic, he has certainly chosen to be fearful. If there is a solution to homophobia, it is not to enforce “clarity and moderation” in the ways that human beings are allowed to identify; it is to enlist straight allies to defend the human right to be fluid and radical.

Griffin Larson-Erf
Skokie, Ill.

To the Editor:

I owe a debt of gratitude for Matthew Vines articulating not only the differences between being gay and being queer, but also for reminding us, especially those who might have forgotten the fact, that being gay “is every bit as dignified and human as being straight.”

Like Mr. Vines, I consider myself to be gay and not queer. What’s more, I often bristle when I’m lumped into what often seems like an amorphous mass of nonheteronormative identities.

Admittedly — and now somewhat ashamedly — never having had a desire to be married, I selfishly considered the issues surrounding same-sex marriage as no concern of mine. With the far right’s onslaught against all manner of human rights, the urgency to fight for L.G.B.T.Q. rights is palpable. I’m left thinking that perhaps it’s time to be a lot more vociferously queer than I’d have ever considered before.

(Rev.) Shaun S. Brown
San Diego

Corrected on

July 18, 2026: 

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of the letter by Robin Maril misstated her affiliation. She is a former associate legal director at the Human Rights Campaign, not at the United Nations Human Rights Council.

We acknowledge mistakes in our reporting with corrections. If you spot an error, please let us know at corrections@nytimes.com.Learn more.

A version of this article appears in print on July 19, 2026, Section SR, Page 11 of the New York edition with the headline: Parsing ‘Gay’ and ‘Queer’

(Contributed by Michael Kelly, H.W.)

Zohar: The Book of Enlightenment

Anonymous, Daniel C. Matt (Translator), Moses ben Shem Tov …more

“Paulist Press deserves credit for adding this new dimension to interfaith dialogue.” The Jewish Spectator The Book of Enlightenment edited and translated, with an introduction by Daniel Chanan Matt, preface by Arthur Green So this story of Torah is the garment of Torah. Whoever thinks that the garment is the real Torah and not something else―may his spirit deflate! Zohar (c. 1280-1286) Zohar―”the book of Splendor, Radiance, Enlightenment”―has fascinated readers from its first appearance in thirteenth-century Spain until today. It is the major text of Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition. To assure the acceptance of his work within the Jewish community, a Spanish scholar named Moses de Leon claimed that Zohar was an ancient work of the school of the famous Rabbi Shim’on son of Yohai. It was not until our own century that critical scholarship demonstrated that the book’s author was Moses de Leon himself. His mosaic of Scripture, Midrash, medieval homily, fiction, and fantasy presents what Professor Daniel Matt describes as “a challenge to the normal workings of consciousness [that] dares one to examine one’s assumptions about tradition, God, and self.”

About the author

Anonymous

Books can be attributed to “Anonymous” for several reasons:

* They are officially published under that name
* They are traditional stories not attributed to a specific author
* They are religious texts not generally attributed to a specific author

Books whose authorship is merely uncertain should be attributed to Unknown.

See also: Anonymous

(Goodreads.com)

Time and the Old Women by Francisco de Goya (thehistoryofart.org)

Bandits’ Roost, 59 1/2 Mulberry Street, [New York City] 1888

Photo: Jacob Riis / Wikimedia