January 27, 2026 ❧ INTERVIEW: How to handle the fear, EPA to stop animal testing, Palestinians go on general strike, and your cat thinks you’re a klutz. 

Plus: Ye apologizes for his Nazism again, TikTok claims apparent censorship was caused by a power outage, and the government repeals workplace protections because they protect trans people.

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HERE & ABROAD

❧ DEEP DIVE: How to handle the fear — Q&A with Rachel Cohen ❧

“We just stumbled upon Greg Bovino for a pre-Hague photo shoot,” Rachel Cohen says in a January 13 Instagram reel. She’s standing in a parking lot in Minneapolis wearing a denimjean jacket. Greg Bovino, the Border Patrol commander at large, is dressed in military greens and flanked by his typical entourage of armed agents. “So Greg, you’re standing right there in front of me, but to everyone following along at home, I hope you fucking eat shit. I hope this keeps you up at night for the rest of your life. And no one fucking wants you here.” The reel got over 872,000 likes.

Cohen first rose to prominence in March of last year when she publicly resigned from Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, where she worked as a finance attorney. Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, another big corporate law firm, had just cut a deal with the Trump administration, agreeing to millions of dollars of pro-bono work for conservatives and to give up on diversity in exchange for keeping their government security clearances. Cohen was dismayed to see that her own workplace was not putting up a fight, so she quit. Her resignation letter made national news, and she has parlayed that momentum into a social media presence with hundreds of thousands of followers. Under the handle @cohen.489, she posts about the news, providing a moral and legal lens on the Trump administration’s actions, as well as about her experiences protesting on the streets of Chicago, where she lives, doing nothing to sugarcoat just how brutally far ICE is going. Crucially, she also posts about fear: the fear many of us feel right now, how the administration can use that fear to quell dissent among the privileged, and how to reframe fear so that people understand just how much power they have to act right now. As you’ll read, she can be blunt on this point, but perhaps now is not the time for niceties. 

I wanted to talk to Cohen because I felt myself becoming afraid. Writing this News Briefing week after week, I started to despair, and to hesitate in a way I hadn’t before, thinking twice about public actions like protesting. It may seem like Cohen is fearless, but she is not. She has to talk herself through the same anxieties anyone may feel about Trump’s fascism, about doing something like attending a protest where ICE will likely use pepper spray (or worse).

Below, we talk through worry and apprehension, plus what we can do to fight back once we are on the other side of it. 

Peep (and share) a short video of our conversation on Instagram and Youtube.

Rachel Cohen: There are so many people with privilege that are hiding behind this subjective fear of a hypothetical reality that might come for them that looks very similar to the actual reality that many people are living in this moment. Particularly when I was in big law, there are so many people that are worried about career implications and finances. There are so many people in this country who are afraid to leave their houses, even to go to work right now, because they might just be disappeared off the streets.

White people are worried about safety if they show up to a protest, when there are five-year-olds that are getting taken off the streets because they are Latino. And so it’s kind of this hypothetical fear that’s really, really crucial to ideas of empire and to pressur[ing] privileged people to accept a kind of twofold humanity, right? The idea that state violence is normal for some people and is both abnormal—extremely abnormal—and an okay reason to be so afraid as to opt out for other groups of people. And those things can’t coexist. Like it can’t both be so abnormal when a police officer murders a white woman that it is in the consciousness of over 80 percent of the electorate—that can’t be true, and also that it’s not safe for white people to be out in the streets. Those things simply don’t coexist. They are inherently in conflict with each other.

It is crucial that people with more privilege show up in this moment, because the risks to them are so much lower. And even kind of the lower-risk harm that can happen, like being handcuffed or being pepper-sprayed or similar—and the comparatively very rare extreme harm that we’ve seen twice now, where white people are murdered by the state—those things drive so much attention and outrage, whereas 32 people died in ICE detention last year, at least five have died in ICE detention already this year, and it does not generate the same kind of attention and outrage. And so all of that to say, and maybe this is the lede, and I buried it: People who the system is supposed to work for are the ones who need to be out protesting the way that the system is working. Because they are more protected and because they are amplified.

EC: One of the things I heard you say [is that] sometimes it can feel existential for people with privilege to be handcuffed. It can feel like an existential threat to be pepper-sprayed, and that’s a misunderstanding of the situation. It is not existential. There’s a much greater existential harm to other people.

RC: Yeah, I think a lot of white people need to grow the fuck up. Like, frankly, I think that we need to be serious. If we’re honest with ourselves, we’d say, “You know what, I’m not willing to bear the risk that I get pepper-sprayed as my neighbors are being disappeared to work camps.” Then say that. But don’t say [that] this is now comparatively unsafe for me. Don’t hide behind the tragic but incredibly infrequent instances where the state murders white people, when they murder non-white people constantly and that’s just accepted as normal.

Art from Current Affairs Magazine Vol. 3, Issue 3

❧ In Other News ❧

❧ YE APOLOGIZES FOR NAZISM IN FULL PAGE WSJ AD. It is entirely possible to stop being a Nazi, even if you once were one. Just ask Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, who purchased a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal to apologize for his full-throated embrace of Nazi symbols and rhetoric. In the past, Ye has used a Super Bowl ad to sell swastika merch, denied the Holocaust, praised Hitler, and sampled Hitler in a track called, you guessed it, “Heil Hitler.” This isn’t Ye’s first apology—he apologized in 2023 after Jonah Hill’s performance in 21 Jump Street made him think Jews were OK after all, before reneging. This time around, Ye blamed his prejudice on a frontal lobe injury that he says caused his bipolar disorder. Only time will tell if he’s serious about regretting his actions, but we can absolutely buy the idea that a little bit of brain damage makes it a lot easier to be a Nazi. And that, as Ye claims in his letter, medication can help. 

Art by Chris Matthews from Current Affairs Magazine Vol. 3, Issue 3

❧ EPA TO STOP ANIMAL TESTING BY 2035. Within a decade, mammals will no longer be used in labs to test the toxicity of chemicals at the Environmental Protection Agency, reports the New York Times. While this may be a win for animal rights, it could also reflect loosening standards at the EPA, which has rolled back regulations on PFAS in water, a type of “forever chemical” that can harm human health, and shut down its research department.

CURRENT-EST AFFAIRS

What’s new in the magazine this week?

The Line Between Politics and Pro Wrestling Has Disappeared

Donald Trump has been a member of the WWE Hall of Fame since 2013. Does that surprise you? Maybe it shouldn’t. “Once cast as the pinnacle of trash TV in the late ’90s and early 2000s, pro wrestling has not only survived the cultural sneer; it might now be the template for contemporary American politics. The aesthetics of kayfabe, of egotistical villains and manufactured feuds, now structure our public life,” writes Jason Myles in his piece “The Line Between Politics and Pro Wrestling Has Disappeared.” Watching overly beefed-up people step through choreographed action can teach us about this moment, where politics can feel like a ticketed event at the Roman coliseum. Myles lays it all out here.

❧ In More News ❧

❧ TIKTOK CLAIMS APPARENT CENSORSHIP IS A “SERVICE OUTAGE.” The long-awaited sale of the U.S. TikTok app finally went through last week, putting majority ownership of the powerful social media app in a group of investors that includes Oracle, owned by Trump ally David Ellison, who bought Paramount and then hired Bari Weiss to run CBS News. Soon after the sale, political content started getting substantially fewer views on TikTok, and users reported difficulties uploading videos. (There have also been reports that users can’t write the word “Epstein” in their DMs, which is inconvenient for anyone actually named that.) TikTok claims the issue was a data center power outage. The new ownership has said, separately, that it does plan to change the app’s algorithm. 

Art by Mike Freiheit from Current Affairs Magazine Vol. 3 Issue 3

❧ FEDERAL GOVERNMENT RESCINDS ANTI-HARASSMENT GUIDELINES THAT PROTECT TRANS PEOPLE. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has rescinded workplace harassment guidelines that helped employers comply with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Originally written during the #MeToo Movement, the guidance allowed trans people to use their preferred bathroom. The Republican-controlled entity said they made the change to align with Trump’s decree that there are only two sexes.

Art from Current Affairs Magazine Vol. 3, Issue 3

❧ PALESTINIANS TOWNS WITHIN ISRAEL GO ON GENERAL STRIKE. The strikers, who are all citizens of Israel, are protesting “rising violence and crime rates, accusing the Israeli police of failing to protect their communities,” as well as “alleged Israeli complicity in organised crime,” according to Middle East Eye. 252 Palestinians were killed “in criminal incidents” last year, and 19 have already been killed this year. The strike began in Sakhnin, a city in northern Israel, then spread to other majority Palestinian towns, making it the largest demonstrations in years; and protest leaders are calling for more Palestinians in Israel to join them.

❧ The Rest of Our Conversation with Rachel Cohen ❧

EC: Actually, your safety rating as a white person is almost 100%. One of the things you talked about in your video was opting into fear. And I thought that was a really interesting phrase. I’m curious, do you ever get scared?

RC: Oh, yeah, but my fear is subjective. It’s rooted in this kind of nebulous fear of, “Oh my gosh, I am out in a place where harm could befall me.” I get scared when I fly sometimes too, right? That doesn’t mean it’s reasonable.

EC: What do you do, when you do feel afraid? Is it just, you tell yourself that it’s unreasonable, or is there something else, like, is there like a tactic that you have in the moment to help calm yourself down?

RC: I tend to get frightened beforehand, much more than I get frightened when I’m in it. And I suspect that is true for most people. I think that the fear is much greater when we are deciding whether or not to show up then it is once we actually get there. And so in the before, when I feel myself getting afraid, the tactic that I use is to remove myself from the reality of the situation, to treat it as a hypothetical, and say, if I was presented with this as a hypothetical, given how I think about myself, given who I think I am, and the kind of person that I think I am, how would I predict that I would respond? When I was in school learning about the Civil Rights Movement, what did I think of myself? Where did I think that I would be as someone with privilege? And if I think about myself that way, what do I have to do in order to be honest with myself, right? Like, what do I have to do for my self conception to be correct? 

I was arrested for civil disobedience back in August, and it was such a low-stakes, low-risk activity, again, because I am white and very, very insulated, very privileged. And the night before, I was so nervous about doing it, and that was how I calmed myself down. I ran through it and said, “Okay, if I present myself with this hypothetical, I have the chance to draw a lot of attention to a place where people are being detained without access to food and beds and hygiene products, and so many people in Chicago don’t even know that it’s happening, not because activists are not trying to tell them, but because white people with big megaphones are not putting themselves on the line, right?” Like of course, I would say to myself that I would do that. So I have to do it, even if I feel nervous about it now, or scared, or whatever else like that. Fear isn’t like an escape hatch to let you maintain your self-conception as a good person. Because we don’t think of ourselves as [saying] “I would do the right thing, so long as it wasn’t scary at all,” right?

Art from Current Affairs Magazine Vol. 3, Issue 3

EC: And it sounds like what you’re doing is running through, like a personal trolley problem … and then appealing to who you are.

RC: Yeah, I think a lot about accurate self conception. I think that we let ourselves off the hook. One of my least popular takes, I think, is that a lot of particularly white people, a lot of people with privilege, wealthy people, I think we could stand to be quite a bit harder on ourselves, to expect a lot more from ourselves. And I think that is a very unpopular take in this moment. There’s all of this “we need to be gentle with ourselves.” We do need to be gentle with ourselves and with other people. But that’s not the same thing as letting yourself off the hook. 

EC: The Greg Bovino video was probably psychically satisfying for a lot of people to see. Something I think about, and not only is this dissent in the streets, but this is a content war. ICE has a mandate to record videos. Ryan Broderick wrote about how he was in Minneapolis and he saw an ICE agent holding a gun and a phone at the same time. And your Greg Bovino yelling thing did go viral. And I’m curious, what does dissent look like online, when this is a content war, and also the algorithms are owned by these oligarchs? It’s a lot to parse through.

RC: It is, and it’s a great question. It’s where I think a lot of us should be focusing. I think, to be totally honest, one of the things that makes the content war so difficult—It’s not just the algorithmic constraints. It’s that we are rapidly approaching, and perhaps even in already, a moment where the most effective kind of nonviolent activism is being branded as illegal, up to and including being called domestic terrorism or criminal conspiracy by the government. And so there are a lot of people that are not going to feel comfortable going online and saying, slow down ICE operations in whatever nonviolent way you can, right? 

I think that the Bovino video is a good example, because it’s such a pressure release for people. And I don’t think that there’s anything inherently wrong about posting pressure releases and making very clear for white people, especially after ICE murdering two white people, that we should recognize that we still are cloaked in very deep protection at all times. But where that becomes an issue is when the kinds of pressure releases that many content creators make are viewed as activism because they are not. And so figuring out where to straddle the line, especially as legitimate activism gets ever closer to being criminalized by the government.

Art by Mike Freiheit from Current Affairs Magazine Vol. 3 Issue 3

EC: One of the big debates that I’ve seen is what is and isn’t settled fact in this country, in terms of what Trump is able to do, how powerful he actually is, and how much space we actually have to push back. I’m curious about your take on that, because you are talking about this increased criminalization. What, how how far do you think we’ve gone, and how much room do you think we have to navigate and push back and change the facts of this country still? 

RC: I think we are in a very bad place. I think it has happened much less rapidly than a lot of people care to admit, because there’s so much tribalism in the country that the people who see how bad things are much more likely to be Democratic voters, and Democratic voters are much less likely to admit that the policies of Democratic presidents have directly contributed to where we are, as well as to the build out of the immigration system to and the carceral nature of it, the extreme funding of ICE, the build out of surveillance and focus on “law and order” that’s always been weaponized against, particularly Black people in this country.

[...] but I do think that there is still tons of room for dislodging us from that path. The general strike that we’re seeing in Minneapolis today is an example of the kinds of tactics that we have not really seen so far, but that are particularly effective. General strikes are so effective in resistance to a deeply unpopular government policy or system. They almost never happen in the United States. And so I think there’s so much more room for economic pressure. The people that are calling the shots are overwhelmingly these tech billionaires, who, if they start to actually lose money, will back off. There’s all of these economic levers that can be pulled, but I think that getting people to pull them will require an honest understanding of where we are and what we’re seeing, and I don’t think that we’re there yet. Especially in the talking head spaces, so I think that can make people feel more demoralized, because all the people that they see commenting on their various news channels are just denying reality at every turn.

ANIMAL FACT OF THE WEEK

Your cat thinks you’re a klutz!

Whereas dogs understand the fact that humans are not dogs, cats haven’t really caught on yet, cat researcher John Bradshaw told National Geographic. They think we are big cats and treat us like we are one of them. They love us, Bradshaw says, but “They do think we’re clumsy: Not many cats trip over people, but we trip over cats.”

Photo via Горбунова М.С., CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Writing and research by Emily Carmichael. Editing and additional material by Emily Topping and Nathan J. Robinson. Header graphic by Cali Traina Blume. This news briefing is a product of Current Affairs Magazine. Subscribe to our gorgeous and informative print edition here, and our delightful podcast here.

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