reviving

Minutes before he met with Chinese Premier Xi Jinping in Busan, South Korea on Wednesday, U.S. President Donald Trump issued a statement on social media saying he “instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis. That process will begin immediately.” The reason, Trump explained, was because of “other countries [SIC] testing programs.”

Other countries, he said, “seem to all be nuclear testing” but when it comes to the U.S., “We have more nuclear weapons than anybody. We don’t do testing. I see them testing and I say, well, if they’re going to test, I guess we have to test.”

Asked where the tests would occur, the president said, “It’ll be announced. We have test sites.”

At this point, it’s unclear if the president is talking about testing out nuclear weapons delivery systems, something that happens on a regular basis, or actual warheads via a detonation, which the U.S. hasn’t done in more than three decades. The fact that this has not been officially clarified is highly problematic. We reached out to the White House for more details, and they referred us back to Trump’s social media post. We also reached out to several experts for their insights, which you can read more about later in this story.

Testing that results in setting off a chain reaction, known as “critical testing,” last took place nearly a decade ago by North Korea on Sept. 3, 2017. The last U.S. critical nuclear weapons test took place on Sept. 23, 1992, according to the Arms Control Association (ACA). While Russian President Vladimir Putin recently announced the testing of a nuclear-powered cruise missile and a nuclear-powered, nuclear-tipped torpedo, which could have spurred Trump’s tweet if he really meant testing delivery systems, Moscow last conducted a critical nuclear device test on Oct. 24, 1990, according to the ACA. Meanwhile, China’s last test was on July 29, 1996.

In the interim, however, several nations, including the U.S., have conducted what is known as sub-critical testing, which does not result in setting off a chain reaction. It’s possible that expanding those efforts could be at least part of what Trump is referring to, as well. 

Clearly, restarting live nuclear weapons testing would be a massive departure for the U.S. and a very costly one at that. It would likely prompt other nuclear powers to return to live testing, as well. That is if this is what Trump was truly referring to. Assuming that’s the case, we contacted some of the smartest people we know who work on these issues for a living to give us an understanding of what such a revival would actually entail and how long it would take. Their answers have been lightly edited for clarity.

Our participating experts are:

Hans
Kristensen — Director, Nuclear Information Project, Federation of American Scientists. Writes the bi-monthly Nuclear Notebook and the world nuclear forces overview in the SIPRI Yearbook.

Jon B. Wolfsthal, Director of Global Risk, American Federation of Scientists.

Daryl G. Kimball has been Executive Director of the Arms Control Association (ACA) and publisher and contributor for the organization’s monthly journal, Arms Control Today, since September 2001.

Q: Can you tell me the process by which this could happen? What is the chain of command, and who has to be involved?

Hans Kristensen

A: The process for this would require the White House to direct the Department of Energy (DOE) to order the nuclear laboratories to start preparing for a nuclear test. And since the United States doesn’t currently have a nuclear weapons test explosion program, Congress would have to appropriate the money first. 

Jon B. Wolfsthal

A: Not sure what “this” is at this point. To conduct operational flight tests of US delivery systems, those are already underway for existing systems and systems in development. For nuclear testing, the US would need to fund the conduct of a nuclear explosive test. It would be conducted by the US Department of Energy/National Nuclear Security Administration.

Daryl G. Kimball

A: The President has the legal authority to do this, but he needs authorization and appropriations for this purpose by Congress, and Congress can block or modify what he can do or under what conditions, etc. It’s the National Nuclear Security Administration, which is a semi-autonomous agency within the Department of Energy that is responsible for maintaining the existing warheads in the U.S. arsenal. They’ve been doing this since the mid-90s, since the U.S. halted nuclear testing in September 1992 through a very well-funded, sophisticated stockpile stewardship program, which uses non-nuclear, or I should say, non-testing methods, to maintain the seven warhead types in US arsenal.

Q: What specifically would be tested?

Hans Kristensen

A: It is hard to understand what Trump is referring to. It might have been triggered by Russia’s two new missile tests over the last week. But the United States already tests its nuclear weapons in similar ways by conducting test launches and laboratory experiments. If by testing he means nuclear explosive testing, that would be reckless, probably not possible for 18 months, would cost money that Congress would have to approve, and it would most certainly [result in] Russian and Chinese, and likely also India and Pakistan nuclear tests. Unlike the United States, all these countries would have much to gain by restarting nuclear testing. Besides, although there have been occasional rumors that Russia and China may have conducted very small-yield tests, I’m not aware of any reports that they have conducted significant nuclear test explosions.

Jon B. Wolfsthal

A: Again, it depends. This is not well explained by the President at this point.

Daryl G. Kimball

A: Well, this is a great question that the president’s people need to answer. Nuclear testing has historically been used to proof-test new warhead designs. Does the device explode? Does it detonate to the desired explosive yield? Does it have the characteristics that you want? That is the main reason why the United States conducted most of its 1,030 nuclear tests. What exactly they will be trying to figure out from a technical standpoint, I do not know, and frankly, there is no reason why the United States needs nuclear test explosions to maintain existing warheads in our arsenal.

So, looking at Trump’s statements, it’s pretty clear that whatever kind of nuclear testing he’s thinking about, it’s for political purposes. It is a juvenile kind of tit-for-tat reaction to what he perceives other countries are doing. And I would note that he claims that this is from an overnight quote on Air Force One, one you know, all other countries seem to be doing this. Well, those of us who follow these issues extremely carefully do not see any other country conducting nuclear explosive tests. So the president and his scientific advisors need to explain what he’s talking about. I would say that he appears to be confused and misinformed about this issue.

Q: How long would it take from the time of this social media posting until the tests take place?

Hans Kristensen

A: It would be expensive because the timeline for doing a simple explosion is six to 10 months, a fully instrumented test in 24 to 36 months, and a test to develop a new nuclear warhead is about 60 months.

Jon B. Wolfsthal

A: It would require anywhere from a few months to conduct a rapid explosive test and 18 months to conduct a fully instrumented test that would yield scientific results.

Daryl G. Kimball

A: I think it would take many months. I would put it at around 36 months to be able to conduct a nuclear explosive test underground that is contained. There are generally two kinds of tests. One is a demonstration test that simply says, ‘We have nuclear weapons and they explode.’ Then there is a test that is designed to derive some data about the weapon’s design to help understand how it’s working. A scientific test requires much more preparation and time than a simple demonstration test. In theory, the United States could fire a Minuteman III missile from the ground. Within an hour, it could detonate a nuclear device high in the atmosphere, and we would see that one of our nuclear warheads works. But that’s not what I think Donald Trump was talking about.

Q: Where could these tests take place?

Hans Kristensen

A: It can practically only be done in Nevada.

Jon B. Wolfsthal

A: The most likely spot is the Nevada National Security Site, which is the former US nuclear weapons test site about 45 minutes north of Las Vegas. No other location is currently capable or legally structured for the conduct of nuclear explosive tests.

Daryl G. Kimball

A: The Nevada National Security Site, which is nearly the size of Rhode Island, is where the United States conducted the majority of its nuclear test explosions, including 100 in the atmosphere, beginning in 1951. That is the site where, if there’s a military scientific need to resume testing, that’s where the United States has been planning for.

With so many questions about Trump’s nuclear testing statements still outstanding, we are waiting for further clarification from the White House. We will update this story with any pertinent details provided.

Contact the author: [email protected]

Dozens of dilapidated stone buildings are all that remain of the once-thriving border village of Martoli, in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand. Nestled in the Johar Valley and surrounded by Himalayan peaks, the most notable being Nanda Devi, once considered the tallest mountain in the world, this village had traded sugar, lentils, spices, and cloth for salt and wool with Tibetans across the border.

The nomadic inhabitants of several villages spent the winter months in the plains gathering goods to be traded with Tibetans in the summer. However, the border was sealed following an armed conflict between India and China in 1962, disrupting life in the high villages and leaving people with little incentive to return.

Kishan Singh, 77, was 14 when he left with his family to settle in the lower village of Thal. He still returns to Martoli every summer to till the land and cultivate buckwheat, strawberries, and black cumin.

His ancestral home has no roof, so he sleeps in a neighbour’s abandoned house during the six months he spends in this village.

“I enjoy being in the mountains and the land here is very fertile,” he says.

In late autumn, he hires mules to transport his harvest to his home in the plains, where he sells it at a modest profit.

The largest of the Johar Valley villages had about 1,500 people at its peak in the early 1960s. Martoli had about 500 residents then, while some of the dozen or so other villages had 10 to 15 homes each.

Now, only three or four people return to Martoli each summer.

A few villagers are returning in summer to the nearby villages of Laspa, Ghanghar, and Rilkot, as they can now travel by vehicle to within a few kilometres (miles) of their villages on a recently built unpaved road.

Among the scattered remnants of earlier stone houses in Martoli, a new guesthouse has appeared to cater for a few trekkers who pass through the village en route to the Nanda Devi Base Camp.

During a trip to the Middle East marking the end of Israel’s war on Gaza, United States President Donald Trump turned to another source of strife in the region: the tensions between Tehran and Washington.

In remarks to the Israeli Knesset on Monday, Trump, who took the unprecedented step of bombing Iranian nuclear facilities earlier this year amid a 12-day war between Israel and Iran, offered a “hand of friendship”.

“We are ready when you are, and it will be the best decision that Iran has ever made, and it’s going to happen,” Trump said of a possible agreement with Tehran.

“The hand of friendship and cooperation is open. I’m telling you, they [Iran] want to make a deal. It would be great if we could make a deal.”

But despite the dovish rhetoric, the Trump administration has continued to take a hard line against Iran, and analysts say that a path towards better relations between the two countries remains filled with obstacles.

Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a US-based think tank, said that the Israeli and US attacks in June, which came as nuclear negotiations between Washington and Tehran were ongoing, undermined advocacy for diplomacy in Iran.

“There’s a perception that the US is using diplomacy to lull Iran into a false sense of security,” Parsi said.

‘Iran is open to a deal’

Iran itself has not closed the door to diplomacy, but its leaders have not rushed to renew talks with the US, either.

“If we receive a reasonable, balanced, and fair proposal from the Americans for negotiations, we will certainly consider it,” Iranian Minister of Foreign Affairs Abbas Araghchi said during a television interview on Saturday.

Iran had rejected an Egyptian invitation to attend a summit on the war in Gaza in Sharm el-Sheikh on Monday, citing US attacks and sanctions.

Talks over Iran’s nuclear programme have not resumed since the Trump administration’s bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities. Israel started the war in June, days before the US and Iranian officials were set for another round of talks.

The US, which during Trump’s first term in 2018 withdrew from a previous deal limiting Iran’s nuclear programme, has also insisted that any new agreement include a total ban on Iranian uranium enrichment.

That demand goes beyond the original deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which only curbed Iran’s uranium enrichment programme under a strict international inspection system.

Iran has depicted that new demand as a denial of its rights as a sovereign country, noting that the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) does not prohibit uranium enrichment.

The impasse over enrichment has become a sticking point in negotiations.

“Iran is open to a deal,” Parsi told Al Jazeera. “But regardless of Trump’s positive tone and kind words, what he is looking for is for Iran to capitulate. As long as he insists on zero enrichment, I don’t think he will get a deal.”

Israel’s war with Iran, which included Israel’s assassination of high-level military figures and civilian nuclear scientists, as well as air strikes that killed hundreds of people, has also increased scepticism about the prospects of a lasting deal with the US.

In a speech to the Knesset on Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lauded the US decision to bomb Iran during the war as a “biblical miracle”.

Since the beginning of the war in Gaza, Israel has struck a series of blows against Iran and allied groups, such as Hezbollah, across the Middle East, leaving it significantly weakened and giving the US little incentive to make concessions on uranium enrichment and other issues.

Trump often reiterates that Iran’s nuclear programme has been “obliterated” by the US strikes on key facilities, but the extent of the damage remains unclear.

The Pentagon said earlier this year that the Iranian nuclear programme had been set back by one to two years. But Rafael Grossi, the head of the United Nations nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), has said that Iran could be enriching uranium again within months.

Trump can ‘let Iran sweat’

Iran insists that it is not seeking a nuclear weapon, while Israel is widely believed to possess an undeclared nuclear arsenal.

Gregory Brew, an Iran analyst at the US-based Eurasia Group, argued that time is on Trump’s side in the confrontation with Iran.

“Trump can sound optimistic about diplomacy, but he can also afford to wait and let Iran sweat,” Brew told Al Jazeera via email.

“With its nuclear programme in ruins, and with new Israeli strikes likely if Iran takes steps to rebuild the programme, [Supreme Leader Ali] Khamenei and the rest of the leadership don’t have many good options.”

Iran is also facing renewed sanctions from the UN after France, Germany and the United Kingdom triggered a so-called snapback of sanctions in August, arguing that Iran had violated the terms of the JCPOA.

Tehran countered that the US unilaterally withdrew from the agreement in 2018, and called another deal allowing inspections of its nuclear facilities by the IAEA “no longer relevant” after the US and Israeli strikes.

Iran was incensed at the IAEA for failing to condemn strikes against its nuclear facilities, which Tehran argues are protected under international law.

“There’s no upside for Trump in resuming talks without Iranian concessions, and there’s currently little downside in letting pressure build, as Iran has been weakened to the point that its ability to threaten Israel or US interests in the region is fairly limited,” said Brew.

“Trump may be willing to let the matter rest for a few months to see if increased economic pain forces Iran back to the negotiating table on favourable terms.”

‘Edible means it won’t kill you – it doesn’t mean it tastes good. This, however, does taste good,” says chef Carla Lamont as she snips off a piece of orpine, a native sedum, in her herb garden. It’s crisp and juicy like a granny smith but tastes more like cucumber. “It’s said to ward off strange people and lightning strikes; but I like strange people.”

We’re on a three-hectare (seven-acre) coastal croft on the Hebridean island of Mull. Armed with scissors, Carla is giving me a kitchen garden tour and culinary masterclass – she was a quarter-finalist in Masterchef: The Professionals a few years back. Sweet cicely can be swapped for star anise, she tells me. Lemon verbena she uses in scallop ceviche.

She points out a barberry bush whose small, sour berries, a Middle Eastern staple, she adds to jewelled rice, and a myrtle bush which, I learn, is different from the bog myrtle growing wild on the croft that, when the leaves are crushed, smells gloriously aromatic with hints of eucalyptus. Bog myrtle also protects your woollens from moths, wards off midges – and is a key ingredient in one of her cocktails.

“I had never grown anything before I came here. I was in a kitchen in the city and herbs came dried in a tub. Now, if I haven’t heard of something, I give it a go or thrust it at Jonny and say ‘Greenhouse.’”

Carla and Jonny, her husband, are part of a new wave of crofter chefs or field-to-fork farmers spreading across Scotland. Crofting is, essentially, small-scale subsistence farming, the crofter traditionally rearing a few animals and growing vegetables on the smallholding, and maintaining a job or two on the side.

Now, just as the architect-designed, off-grid bothy is a world away from the bare-bones huts that once gave shepherds shelter, the croft has been reinvented. Our back-to-the-land yearnings, fuelled by programmes such as This Farming Life and Ben Fogle: New Lives in the Wild, have turned crofting into a modern rural fantasy.

The new generation of crofters still juggle jobs, but today, that usually involves tourism rather than working for the local laird. For Jonny and Carla, it’s a restaurant called Ninth Wave and a cute cabin, the Sea Shanty (sleeps two from £800 a week).

They met 30 years ago when Carla, from Canada, answered an ad for a chef on the neighbouring island of Iona. Jonny’s nickname, Carla smiles, is “the lobster man”. Every day, he hikes two miles cross-country to his small boat, the Sonsie, returning with the catch that Carla cooks in the restaurant. They also cure, smoke and brine seafood and meat on Bruach Mhor croft. When Jonny’s not fishing, he’s working the land.

They grow about 80% of the fruit and vegetables for the restaurant in their kitchen garden, everything from cardoons to wasabi, and forage for wild herbs on the croft. They’ve counted more than 150 seasonal greens, herbs and edible flowers growing wild here. Bumping up the dirt track for lunch, the hedgerow is billowing with fluffy meadowsweet. “I’ll be harvesting it later for panna cotta,” Carla tells me.

“People don’t realise you can eat so many flowers.” The pots of blowsy blooms by the door, it turns out, are also on the menu. “Marigolds are edible and so are dahlias. You can eat the flowers and the tubers. The Mexicans used them as their main starch crop hundreds of years ago. They’re wonderful roasted; like a cross between a potato and a jerusalem artichoke.”

The restaurant was once the barn or bothy, with a dirt floor and tin roof, attached to their one-bedroom cottage. And while the produce for the menu might mainly be locally grown, reared or caught, the inspiration for Carla’s dishes comes from her travels. At the end of each season, the couple head off on food adventures, grazing their way through Latin America, Asia and the Middle East.

For lunch I’m tucking into a Mexican-inspired dish: Jonny’s lobster teetering on garden-grown roasted corn salsa, a creamy Yucatan avocado and hoja santo soup, laced with lemon verbena and Vietnamese coriander. “It’s not fine dining,” she shrugs, “it’s street food presented nicely.”

At the other end of the island, another restaurant on a croft is also making waves as much for its architectural wow factor as its pasture-to-plate menus. Jeanette Cutlack moved to Mull from Brighton in 2008 and ran a pop-up restaurant for 10 years in her home. Her dream, however, was to restore the abandoned croft and ruined barn down the lane.

With the help of an old university friend, Edward Farleigh-Dastmalchi, who founded London-based architects Fardaa, she began work. Croft 3 is now a destination restaurant, the old steading converted into a pared-back, cathedral-style dining space, open to the rafters with bare plaster walls and vast windows framing sea views; the project won a prestigious Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland award. Diners eat the simple, field-to-fork menus at long communal tables cut from a single Douglas fir. Starters such as crab arancini and lemon mayonnaise are served alongside spicy haggis, cornbread and salsa verde. Haggis is Jeanette’s speciality and she also runs haggis-making workshops.

Now that the land has been cleared, the 20-hectare croft is starting to bear fruit. Jeanette has planted a nectarine tree and kiwi vine. In a polytunnel, she and her family grow salad and herbs while a small flock of Hebridean sheep grazes the hill that is part of the land. Last September, hogget was on the menu for the first time. What they don’t grow or rear themselves, they source from neighbouring crofts and fishers.

Mull once lagged behind the Hebrides’ culinary powerhouse, Skye, but it’s starting to emerge from its shadow. A food and drink trail around the island highlights a growing number of artisan producers as well as gourmet pit stops such as pop-up turned permanent fixture Ar Bòrd (our table). Iain and Joyce Hetherington have converted their front room into a restaurant showcasing the local produce – from creel-caught shellfish landed at Croig on the island’s north coast, to organic vegetables grown by Carol Guidicelli on her croft at Langamull, near Croig, along with their in-house smoked venison. On the tiny community-owned island of Ulva, meanwhile, a short boat ride away, the Boathouse, recently revamped by Banjo Beale, winner of a TV interior design show, has become one of the hottest lunch spots, with diners crammed around picnic tables devouring plates of briny langoustine and crab claws on the water’s edge.

And then there is the well established but ever-evolving award-winning Sgriob-ruadh farm, where they produce Isle of Mull cheese, just a few minutes’ drive from Tobermory’s pastel-painted waterfront. The Reade family arrived on the island with five cows in the 1980s and rebuilt a rundown dairy operation, starting cheese production a few years later. The farm’s Glass Barn cafe is a fabulous, foliage-festooned space where you can sample signature cheese and charcuterie platters or a bowl of homemade soup and a cheese scone before taking the far from run-of-the-mill tour.

Our small tour group meets the US cheese-maker Troy by the pig pen. After hearing a potted family history, we move on to the milking parlour where he weaves in science and Willy Wonka-style invention. The milk, he explains, is pumped to the cheese-making shed next door via an underground tank. The warm milk, fresh from the cows’ udders, heats the water used by the cafe. Walking us through the cheese-making process, we head underground to the vast cheese cellar, meet newborn calves and piglets and learn about innovative sustainable farming initiatives.

The leftover whey from the cheesemaking was once used to feed the pigs – until they found a better use for it. In the farmyard a smart new micro-distillery uses the whey to make gin and “whey-ski” – possibly a pun too far, a barrel-aged spirit. The tour ends with a tasting. The gin has a surprisingly distinctive creaminess, the whey-ski is pure fire water.

“It’s not sweet like a bourbon,” Troy says as he pours another dram. “It’s more like an Irish whiskey.” I knock it back, thinking that’s the thing about Mull: for outside-the-box thinking and wild culinary innovation, it’s leading the way.

Ninth Wave: four-course lunch £80 (not open for dinner). Croft 3: two-course menu £42, three courses £50. The Boathouse: half lobster £25, langoustines £18 (a la carte). Ar Bòrd: three-course set menu £55pp. Isle of Mull Cheese tour: £20

Omagh Town were founded in 1962, but their heyday came in the 1990s when they were challenging in cups, in the top half of the league and playing in the Intertoto Cup in Europe.

“We had the good days, the glory days back then,” said former striker Andy Crawford.

“St Julian’s was a fortress when we were going really well. We were a thriving team back then.”

While Gaelic football was the dominant sport in Tyrone, with St Julian’s Road a stone’s throw away from the imperious Healy Park ground that the county’s four-time All-Ireland winners call home, Omagh Town played a key role in the community.

Manchester United’s treble winners, as well as Liverpool and Chelsea, all came to play the club in charity matches in the aftermath of the Omagh bomb in August 1998, in which 29 people were killed and hundreds more injured in one of the worst atrocities of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

The games were a show of the club helping the town to come together, but their financial issues continued into the start of the new millennium and Crawford, who joined Linfield a year before the club’s eventual collapse, said “the cracks were starting to show” by the time of his departure.

Relegation in the 2004-05 season, along with the closure of their social club, were pinned as the reasons for Omagh Town’s demise as more than 60 years of history were gone in an instant.

St Julian’s Road lay derelict for years, and in 2020 it was turned into a public park where there still sits a small memorial to mark the visits of the Premier League teams in the aftermath of the bomb.

Here we go again.

A bunch of successful, conservative professional women are telling young women they don’t need careers to have fulfilling lives. All they need to do is avoid college (or better yet, just use it to find a husband), get married, have babies, stay home and live happily ever after.

Perhaps you’ve noticed the proliferation of “tradwife” (i.e. traditional wife) influencers on various forms of social media, or the coverage of conferences like the woefully misnamed Young Women’s Leadership Summit that recently took place in Dallas. A project of Charlie Kirk’s conservative student organization, Turning Point USA, the summit promised to focus on “foundational aspects of womanhood” such as “faith, femininity and well-being.”

The conference drew 3,000 women who, according to reports, were mostly college students or young professionals. They sported pins that read “My favorite season is the fall of feminism” and “Dump your socialist boyfriend,” and they were told by Kirk, “We should bring back the celebration of the Mrs. degree.”

“The left wants women to feel angry and like victims, and like your rights are being taken away,” a 31-year-old influencer named Arynne Wexler told a reporter for New York magazine. Not to put too fine a point on it, but in fact her rights are being taken away. Perhaps she has forgotten that the Supreme Court overturned the right to abortion in 2022?

Anyway, there is absolutely nothing new here. A certain subset of women — straight, white, conservative, religious — has always fought against gender equality for their own reasons, but mostly I’d say because it threatens their own privileged status and proximity to male power.

Nearly half a century before Wexler bemoaned “the left,” Phyllis Schlafly, lawyer, author and anti-feminist crusader, said basically the same thing: “The feminist movement taught women to see themselves as victims of an oppressive patriarchy. Self-imposed victimhood is not a recipe for happiness.”

Hmmm. I’m pretty sure it was oppressive patriarchy that prevented women from owning property, having their own credit cards and bank accounts, from earning equal pay, accessing legal birth control and abortion, serving on juries and holding public office. Until second wave feminism came along in the 1960s and 1970s, I’m pretty sure, too, that oppressive patriarchy allowed employers to fire women once they married or got pregnant, and that domestic violence, marital rape and sexual harassment were not treated as crimes. Oh, and it was feminists who pushed for Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, which addressed gender inequality in education, including, crucially, in sports.

Attacking feminism because you‘ve never experienced a time when women were not, for the most part, legally equal to men springs from the same ignorant well as believing measles vaccines are unnecessary because you’ve never experienced the (largely vaccine-eliminated) disease for yourself.

Indeed, reciting the accomplishments of feminism reminds me of that classic scene in the 1979 black comedy “Monty Python’s Life of Brian.” You may recall it: What have the Romans ever given us? (Just sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system and public health.)

A consistent thread in the argument against gender equality is that feminism makes women feel bad for staying home with their kids and not pursuing careers.

In Dallas last month, young conference-goers told the New York Times “that it was feminism and career ambition making them unhappy, not the broader stress of puzzle-piecing together the responsibilities of modern life.”

In 1994, then-First Lady Barbara Bush said she had experienced a period of depression and partly attributed it to “the women’s movement,” which, as she told NPR, “sort of made women who stayed home feel inadequate.” I get that. But in response, I would paraphrase Eleanor Roosevelt: No one can make you feel inadequate without your consent. If you are lucky enough to be able to stay home with your children and do not feel compelled to carve out a career, more power to you.

Alex Clark, a popular podcaster and influencer who headlined the Young Women’s Leadership Conference, offered the crowd her Make America Healthy Again formula: “Less Prozac and more protein. Less burnout, more babies, less feminism, more femininity.”

But having lots of babies is stressful — having one baby is stressful — and can certainly lead to its own kind of burnout.

One of the most popular tradwives in the country, Hannah Neeleman, is a Mormon mother of eight young children. She is married to a rancher who is the son of the founder of Jet Blue, has more than 9 million social media followers and, as a former professional ballerina, posts under the handle Ballerina Farm.

Last summer, in a profile published by the Times of London, she was dubbed the “queen of tradwives.” We learned that she does all the food shopping, makes all the meals and has no help with childcare. I would submit that she is a career woman as well, since she runs popular social media accounts that generate millions of dollars a year in income. In a stunning admission, her husband told the London Times reporter that his wife “sometimes gets so ill from exhaustion that she can’t get out of bed for a week.”

I could not help but think of Mormon housewives in the state of Utah, which has led the nation in antidepressant prescriptions for decades. “Most men here would just as soon their wives take pills than bother to delve into the problems, and maybe find out they might have something to do with the problems,” a Mormon mom told the Los Angeles Times in 2002, the year the prescription study was released.

Dana Loesch, a conservative commentator, radio host and author who once shilled for the National Rifle Assn., was one of the speakers in Dallas whose reality contradicts her rhetoric.

“I’ll tell you this, ladies,” she told the crowd. “You cannot have it all, at the same time. Something will suffer.”

Oh please. Loesch has it all — a career, marriage and kids.

So why can’t they?

@rabcarian.bsky.social
@rabcarian.

WASHINGTON — President Trump on Friday called for the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the 2020 election won by Democrat Joe Biden, repeating his baseless claim that the contest was marred by widespread fraud.

“Biden was grossly incompetent, and the 2020 election was a total FRAUD!” Trump said in a social media post in which he also sought to favorably contrast his immigration enforcement approach with that of the former president. “The evidence is MASSIVE and OVERWHELMING. A Special Prosecutor must be appointed. This cannot be allowed to happen again in the United States of America! Let the work begin!”

Trump’s post, made as his Republican White House is consumed by a hugely substantial foreign policy decision on whether to get directly involved in the Israel-Iran war, is part of an amped-up effort by him to undermine the legitimacy of Biden’s presidency. Earlier this month, Trump directed his administration to investigate Biden’s actions as president, alleging aides masked his predecessor’s “cognitive decline.” Biden has dismissed the investigation as “a mere distraction.”

The post also revives a long-running grievance by Trump that the election was stolen even though courts around the country and a Trump attorney general from his first term found no evidence of fraud that could have affected the outcome. The Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity arm pronounced the election “the most secure in American history.”

It was unclear what Trump had in mind when he called for a special prosecutor, but in the event Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi heeds his call, she may face pressure to appoint someone who has already been confirmed by the Senate. A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment Friday.

The Justice Department in recent years has appointed a succession of special counsels — sometimes, though not always, plucked from outside the agency — to lead investigations into politically sensitive matters, including into conduct by Biden and by Trump.

Last year, Trump’s personal lawyers launched an aggressive, and successful, challenge to the appointment of Jack Smith, the special counsel assigned to investigate his efforts to undo the 2020 presidential election and his retention of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla. A Trump-appointed judge agreed, ruling that then-Atty. Gen. Merrick Garland had exceeded his bounds by appointing a prosecutor without Senate approval and confirmation, and dismissed the case.

That legal team included Todd Blanche, who is now deputy attorney general, as well as Emil Bove, who is Blanche’s top deputy but was recently nominated to serve as a judge on a federal appeals court.

Tucker writes for the Associated Press.