Foreign Affairs Dear Fellow Boomers, Rethink Your Support for Israel What will you tell your grandchildren? Credit: NurPhoto/Getty Images The White House and Congress are scheming to send another $6.4 billion worth of armaments to the Israeli war machine. They will have to pretend it is a sale to sneak it through, hiding it in non-appropriation legislation, though American taxpayers will finance the transaction.  Note to members of our geriatric Congress: Before you vote for this package and further enable the genocide in Gaza, think about how you are going to explain your vote to your grandchildren.  All American grandparents, in fact, should reflect on the brutality that the U.S. is enabling in Gaza. Among Americans, conservative Boomers increasingly stand alone in their steadfast support for Israel—and all signs suggest their grandchildren won’t be able to forgive them for it. Don’t forget, on September 16, 2025 the United Nations Human Rights Commission concluded, after more than a two-year investigation, that Israel has committed genocide against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. You will not be able to plausibly pretend you had no way of knowing. What will you tell your grandchildren? As they grow up, they will be fully aware of the atrocities and suffering of the Gaza Holocaust. They are already aware, more so than you, perhaps. The pro-Israel propaganda machine has lost its grip on your grandchildren’s generation. And if you have young grandchildren, think of the many children their age starving and dying in Gaza. If you’re unwilling to drop your support for Israel and its genocide in Gaza, then you better prepare for future conversations with the grandkids. Here are some suggested talking points for my fellow Boomers who just can’t quit Israel: You thought Hamas was stealing all the food aid and getting fat while their fellow Palestinians were starving. As for why you thought this, well, the Israeli government said so. Israel is our greatest ally. (That story is collapsing faster than a cardboard cabin in a hurricane.) Somehow you were convinced that the Gazans—armed with small arms, rocks, and hang gliders—were a threat to U.S. national security. As for those pro-Israel Boomers in Congress, you can add the following: You needed donations and elite support to be reelected, and you received much better press and more money for being Israel First than America First. Indeed, not supporting the weapons transfer would have resulted in pro-Israel billionaires spending millions to defeat you in a primary. And you absolutely needed to hold onto power. (Warning: The grandkids might ask what the point of staying in power was—and whether you were as powerful as you thought.) You were afraid of being called names and threatened. You really liked the fancy fundraisers in Palm Beach. If all the above fails, you could fall back on a tried-and-true old chestnut of Christian Zionists: When you were very young, in Sunday school you heard about some Old Testament passages which allowed one to completely dismiss the teachings of Jesus Christ when it came to slaughtering the enemies of a certain secular government. Pro tip: Your grandchildren will probably find the power-and-money excuses more credible. Good luck! The post Dear Fellow Boomers, Rethink Your Support for Israel appeared first on The American Conservative.

Culture Cartooning Around My childhood dream, like the popularity of print newspapers, inevitably faded. There are very few times in life when a sentence written in the first person can be opened with the words “Like Flannery O’Connor,” but this is one of them: Like Flannery O’Connor, I was a cartoonist before I was a writer. Because my professional life has become crowded with other titles—film critic, book reviewer, classical-music and dance columnist, arts reporter, and, Heaven help me, ersatz political commentator—I myself sometimes forget that my original dream job was daily newspaper cartoonist.  I settled on this goal early and pursued it ardently.   I had long been bewitched by the comics pages folded into each edition of the Times-Picayune, the newspaper with which I grew up in my suburb of New Orleans. The pages stood out because of the implicit respect they accorded their seemingly inconsequential inhabitants, including Charlie Brown, Garfield, and Mr. and Mrs. Bumstead. The comics were printed large enough for an attentive reader to discern their artistry; they were also run in sufficient numbers—dozens of strips and panels spread over multiple broadsheet pages—to suggest that each had a fan base. Indeed, I can remember few events more noteworthy in the life of any newspaper I faithfully read than when a cartoon was canceled or replaced.  By the age of 8, I had become sufficiently enamored with what I knew of the cartoonist’s life to make the informed decision that I wished to make it my own. Undoubtedly, the apparent ease of this assignment made it appealing when compared to a real job—one that, for example, required leaving the house or, in fact, my desk—or even real writing. My short stories seldom filled more than a page-and-half in my ruled journal, but my cartoons would not require even that much creativity. To write and draw a daily comic strip—four, maybe five panels topped by a punchline—seemed accomplishable. Cartooning was not only an agreeable gig, I reckoned, but a secure one: I could not, in the very early 1990s, foresee a time when newspapers would cease being permanent features of American life.  Quickly, Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury made an unlikely claim on my imagination. Much of its humor—about commune-residing, marijuana-smoking permanent collegians and, later, angst-ridden, Reagan Revolution-hating yuppies—would have been completely lost on me back then. Yet, precocious kid that I was, I picked up on some of its topical humor, which I appreciated for its patina of sophistication rather than its particulars. I was surely the only second-grader in my class who, when asked to draw a picture of the cover of a recently read book, drew a near-perfect replica of the cover of a Doonesbury anthology that had a place of honor in my collection, Check Your Egos at the Door.  Although I now wince at his reflexive liberalism and lame anti-Trumpism, I cannot deny that Trudeau was legitimately my hero. Although I got my hands on each new Doonesbury anthology as it appeared at the local B. Dalton, I nonetheless took my scissors to the newspaper to clip each strip for preservation in albums intended for family photos. (I later read that John Updike, another cartoonist-turned-writer, did the same thing.) When I was perhaps 10, I remember reading about a cartoonists’ conference in New Orleans in which, apparently erroneously, Trudeau was named as one of the participants. My parents drove me to the downtown hotel where the event was taking place, and while there were lots of cartoonists happily chatting with fans, Trudeau was absent. I managed to get the attention of one cartoonist—I wish I could remember who—and he told me that, no, he didn’t think “Garry,” as he called him, was there. Strangely, I counted this encounter as a success: I had met someone in my future field who seemed to know “Garry”! That Trudeau was married to the former Today Show co-host Jane Pauley only contributed to my impression that an exciting, glamorous life could be wrung from a trade as juvenile-seeming as cartooning. I am sure I imagined a future for myself in which I scribbled away while my wife appeared on TV or maybe in the movies.  Later, my father prevailed upon a Doonesbury merchandising outfit to forward my cartoons to Trudeau in New York. Unbelievably, Trudeau wrote me an unsolicited typewritten note graciously praising my primitive, imitative but earnest work. This letter, typed on Doonesbury stationary and bearing what was, for me, its writer’s inimitable signature, arrived at my father’s office, and he called me at home to give me the news—undoubtedly interrupting one of my cartooning sessions in a spare bedroom that had been converted into a “studio,” complete with an angled drawing table and a T-square. Much to his credit, Trudeau would answer all of my subsequent fan mail. As far as I can remember, a cartoon of mine was published just once, in my school’s student magazine, but for years I continued to churn out my comics as though they had a destination and I had a deadline. When I began to be homeschooled in the third grade, I lost an automatic outlet—that student magazine was, obviously, no longer available to me—but I gained oodles of time to doodle. At age 12, I was featured on the front page of my hometown newspaper, the now-defunct Slidell Sentry-News—the unintended outcome of my having submitted my portfolio in the hope of winning a regular spot on their comics page. I had to settle for a long and flattering profile with the headline KID CARTOONIST—“settle,” because the profile was a one-time event, not a recurring presence in the funny pages.  Reading the story again today, I am not convinced that I was as busy as I had claimed—evidently, I had said that I drew five strips per week, each taking two hours—but I had worked long and hard enough for my cartoons to clearly resemble a Doonesbury knockoff. The reporter who interviewed me described my efforts in the most charitable manner possible: “Trudeau’s influence on the strips is instantly obvious. Tonguette uses many of the same techniques: disembodied icons to represent people, a dedicated stock of adult, college-educated characters, and a sharp, insightful wit.” This is much too generous, but I won’t deny that, just as Trudeau had his preferred satirical targets, such as Bush and Quayle, I had mine: Martha Stewart, whose maniacal commitment to home economics struck me as very comic strip-worthy.  Yet after the newspaper profile appeared, my interest in my vocation, chosen so confidently at eight, waned. I was probably disappointed that no syndicate called to pick up my work, and I know I was discouraged when a friend of my brother, upon looking over the article, seemed decidedly unimpressed when I explained that, no, I was not the sort of cartoonist who worked in animated cartoons. For me, it was onto other enthusiasms—the films of Orson Welles, the novels of Kurt Vonnegut, the reviews of John Simon. In many ways, I have attained the easy way of life I had hoped for. I have ended up parked at my desk in much the manner I predicted, and producing 800 words a day is not really so much more arduous than dreaming up a gag at the conclusion of a couple of panels. Plus, my career has occasionally brought me into contact with the dreams of my youth. I have reviewed exhibitions of original comics art and crossed paths with a hero or two, including Jules Feiffer, whom I interviewed for a 2020 profile in the Christian Science Monitor. Once I fully grasped Doonesbury’s politics, I ended up largely not sharing them, but I now see that Trudeau got some things right, including his opposition to the Iraq War and scorn for the president who initiated that woebegone conflict.  Things worked out, but it saddens me when I read what my father told the reporter about my seemingly indefatigable cartooning so many years ago. “He just does it all on his own,” my dad said. “We as parents don’t do anything but encourage him. . . . It isn’t something that’s a passing fancy.” Alas, it turned out to be just that—an 8-year-old’s dream of adult life that was as susceptible to fading as newsprint. My cartooning ended before its time, but don’t all things? The post Cartooning Around appeared first on The American Conservative.

Latin America Trump Hands Milei a Lifeline The Argentine president’s program has been teetering after political reverses. The Trump administration announced Wednesday that it is extending a $20 billion currency swap line to Argentina among other measures to stem economic uncertainty and a rapidly devaluing peso. These provisions were announced after President Javier Milei’s libertarian party suffered a series of political reverses, including losing an important regional election in the province of Buenos Aires in early September. “We stand ready to do what is needed to support Argentina and the Argentine people,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent wrote in the announcement on X. The bailout is desperately needed by Milei and his allies, who have been struggling politically in recent months. After an utterly triumphant 2025, in which he was able to completely reverse Argentina’s inflationary spiral and pass important laws deregulating the Argentine economy, privatizing a number of important government-owned corporations, and cutting taxes despite having only a tiny minority in both houses of the Argentine congress, Milei’s project has begun to run into some serious snags. Milei’s movement, despite its indomitable first year, was always a fragile one. His party, La Libertad Avanza (LLA), holds just 6 of 72 seats in the Senate and 38 of 257 in the Chamber of deputies. With its coalition ally Propuesto Republicano (PRO), it could barely muster a third of the votes in either chamber. Nearly all of the administration’s governance and policymaking has taken place through executive action—both by the promulgation of presidential decrees, which give Argentine presidents the power to make, amend, and repeal all but a select number of laws, and by the liberal dispensation of the presidential veto. Both of these mechanisms are subject to legislative action; presidential decrees can be overturned by a vote of both houses, and vetoes can be overridden in a similar manner. But Milei was almost always able to cobble together just enough votes to avoid having his decrees voided and his vetoes ignored, and to pass laws where his presidential powers were not competent. The Peronist opposition—heavily fractured after the shock loss to Milei in the presidential election and oppressed by their previous president’s complete failure to control the economic situation and later Milei’s popularity and evident success in tamping inflation to manageable levels—was able to put up no effective resistance. With a combination of the liberal application of executive power and an ad hoc legislative bloc of demoralized and cooperative opposition politicians, Milei was able to embark on his program of dramatically liberalizing the Argentine economy. Much of his plan for economic recovery rested on two key initiatives: first, eliminating the budget deficit and creating a sustainable fiscal and monetary policy for the nation, and second, drawing in foreign direct investment to create economic growth and employment. This program was always going to be somewhat painful for Argentines. Putting the economy on a sustainable, non-inflationary footing meant cutting welfare and government subsidies for food, housing, utilities and other necessities—widely employed by Peronist governments—dissolving a significant number of government posts, and privatizing bloated and unproductive state-owned corporations (which result in additional job losses as companies cut costs to regain profitability). Nearly everyone suffered some kind of immediate loss in government welfare payments or employment. To offset that pain, Milei relied on a new flow of foreign direct investment into Argentina—a real possibility, since Argentina’s capital controls had made outside investment in the country almost impossible. Under the currency control regime of the preceding Peronist government of Alberto Fernandez, businesses could not easily repatriate their profits, or even easily convert them into dollars to protect them from Argentina’s rapid inflation. Why invest money into a country that does not even allow you to withdraw your earnings? That approach takes time to yield results, however—factories and offices are not built overnight. Poverty has decreased significantly, after an initial spike when benefits were cut, and economic growth has been strong, but unemployment and underemployment remain high, and the public is showing signs of impatience. The timing could not be worse for Milei and company. The Peronist opposition, after a demoralizing 2025, has finally begun to feel its way to something like an effective political message. An outstanding feud between the partisans of Cristina Kirchner, former president and a strident left-wing populist, and the more technocratically oriented Axel Kicillof, governor of the province of Buenos Aires, has largely ended after Kirchner was convicted of corruption and prohibited from running for office. That consolidation was only deepened after Kicillof’s forces managed to pull off a surprising and convincing victory in the Buenos Aires provincial elections—which was another devastating loss for Javier Milei, who had framed the election as a referendum on his government going into the midterm legislative elections in late October. The newly effective Peronists have been aided by a number of missteps and scandals on the libertarian side. Milei’s involvement in cryptocurrency came back to bite him in March, when he made a post promoting a crypto coin called $LIBRA. When Milei’s fans began pouring money into the coin—which, according to the president, would be used to fund small businesses in Argentina—the coin’s creators pulled the rug, sold their stakes, and walked away with millions. The entire thing had been a scam, and Milei and members of his close circle, especially his sister Karina, were suspected of having profited from the affair. But the $LIBRA scandal is small potatoes compared to the most recent eruption. In late August, journalists published an audio recording of the head of Argentina’s disability agency that detailed a corruption scandal where a government contractor for pharmaceutical supplies would charge a markup for its products and kick back a portion of the proceeds to members of the Milei administration, including Karina Milei. There are a number of questions about the provenance of the recordings, and no material evidence of the bribery operation alleged in the recordings has yet been discovered, but the publication of the allegations released a wave of anger leading into the Buenos Aires provincial elections and midterm elections. Milei also alienated a number of important allies and collaborators in the provinces who had supported him in 2024 by refusing to release funds from the national government for local infrastructure projects. He argued that the funds could not be released as part of his program to maintain the budget surplus and pay down the national debt, but frustrated governors stopped instructing their allies in Congress to vote for Milei’s proposals. The combined effect of a revitalized opposition, political scandals, and alienated former allies has been a complete route of Milei’s political program in the national legislature. In 2024, Milei won 119 out of 179 votes in the Chamber of Deputies. In 2025, he has won only 29 out of 81 votes—and most of those victories were early in the year. Between June and September, in both houses of Congress, Milei and LLA have lost a devastating 83 percent of legislative votes—overturning presidential decrees, overriding presidential vetoes, and passing laws that directly impinge on Milei’s project of maintaining a balanced budget. This political weakness threatened a financial rout, as investors became nervous over the continued viability of Milei’s economic reforms. A looming run on the peso threatened to become a self-fulfilling prophecy: Nervous investors pulling out of the country just before the midterm elections could create a rapid economic crash and thus defeat for Milei and his allies at the ballot box. The United States’ intervention hands the country, and Milei, a vital lifeline by shoring up the currency and debt markets with the full faith and credit of the mighty American economy, enough to prevent any rapid unravelling of the country before October. But Javier Milei is still a relatively popular president, and his party remains the favorite for the midterms next month. Even an underperformance will lead to a much greater presence for LLA in the Argentine Congress, a badly needed backstop for Milei’s political program and Argentina’s economic recovery. The post Trump Hands Milei a Lifeline appeared first on The American Conservative.

A pioneer. The post Who was the first woman to have a song banned by the BBC? first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

Don't you know you've really got to jerk it out? The post ‘Paper Tigers’: the forgotten indie album Steve Jones adored first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

A grand opening. The post The Arctic Monkeys song Matt Helders said “felt like a sense of achievement” first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

The road not taken. The post The would-be Wham! shows they regretted not playing: “A final tour to say goodbye to our fans” first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

On September 18, the first wide-ranging interview of Pope Leo IV was published in a book titled Leo XIV: Citizen of the World, Missionary of the XXI Century. The book, which was published in Spanish, has been described as a “collaboration” with the pope, given that His Holiness was given the opportunity to review it and suggest any changes he deemed necessary. As such, it offers an especially revealing look at who the pope believes himself to be amidst the lingering questions in the secular and religious press on who this new pope truly is. “Families need to be supported,” he said…. “They call it the traditional family. The family is father and mother and children.” The New York Times’ interest in the book was to examine the Catholic response to it more than its actual content. That response being, in the Times’ estimation, that Catholics with a variety of political and ideological leanings are continuing to claim, even after the publication of this long-form interview, that the pope fits into their camp. “Liberal? Conservative? Cubs Fan? Catholics Project Many Images Onto Pope,” reads the headline. I would submit, however, that more interesting is what the pope actually says in the book about himself to Elise Ann Allen, Crux’s senior correspondent in Rome and a fellow American. Allen, who has affectionate regard for the pope and describes his good character and kindness, began by asking him head-on “Who is Robert Francis Prevost? Who Is Pope Leo XIV?” The pope’s immediate response was to point to his conviction that every human being is touched by God’s gifts of dignity, goodness, and grace. He described himself as, “Someone who has a deep appreciation for humanity … a deep faith that, in some way, the mystery of Jesus Christ, God incarnate, reaches all of us. I believe that I have the ability to sit with other people and recognize the goodness in them.” He then shifted to discussing the traits that shape his approach to dialogue. This is notable given the strong emphasis that the pope has placed on listening to a variety of voices in these first four months of his papacy — an emphasis that has brought about considerable goodwill from many sides amidst division, and perhaps caused, as the New York Times put it, “followers to project their hopes and expectations onto a pope who has so far resisted identifying clearly with any particular camp.” The pope said, “In conversation, in dialogue, in respect, I am able to see the good, whether the other person is someone of faith or not, and to share some of the happiness and hope of what it means to be alive, the gift of life.” According to the pope, we should not fear that his end goal is dialogue, and that we will continue forever in a pontificate in which no major decisions are ever made. Answering Allen’s question of what makes him such a respected leader, Pope Leo pointed to two factors: his ability to listen and his ability to be decisive: I know how to listen, I believe, quite well. When I am with people, I respect everyone’s point of view, but then I also reach a point with them, when it is possible, to say, “We have to make a decision here, friends. Somehow, let’s try to unite everyone’s ideas.” It’s not only about compromise. It’s not only about finding the lowest common denominator. It’s about looking ahead and bringing the people with you as you do it. I’m not a lone ranger, I never have been. It’s the way to build this sense of “We’re in this together,” and, again, respect for every member of the group, of the Church, of the community…. [This is present] in my own formation, certainly based on the sense of the Church of Vatican II, trying to be part of building this kind of Church that truly invites the participation of all of its members. The pope went on to describe other personal traits that inform his leadership, noting in particular, “I’m adventurous. Some people would use the word brave, others ‘crazy,’ but I’m willing to move forward.” This makes sense given his childhood dream of becoming a missionary in Africa that he revealed at another point in his interview and his many years persisting despite facing grave dangers as a missionary in Peru. He then, quite assuredly, spoke of his own decisiveness: I am capable of being decisive when it is necessary to be decisive, which is another aspect of leadership that sometimes people lack. You can’t just go around in circles thinking, “Let’s think about this and talk about this forever.” You have to make decisions in order to move forward. I’m capable of doing that, and I’m not afraid to do that. You don’t always make the right decision, sometimes you make mistakes, but I guess the people have the sense that they feel invited, they feel listened to, and they know that there will be progress on something. This sense of decisiveness comes amidst his very “synodal” papacy, synodality being to him “an attitude, an openness, a willingness to understand.” Synodality is an “important dimension,” he said, of “how we live our life as the Church.” He said it “consists in each of its members having a voice and a role to play through prayer, reflection.” One means through which we can see how the pontiff puts this method of listening and decisiveness into action is through how he approaches in his interview the, as he put it, “hot-button” issue of homosexuality. While much of the pope’s interview with Allen is only available in Spanish translation in the book, the portion in which he discusses the LGBTQ issue was published by Crux in video form in the original English. The pontiff explained that in the “back of [his] mind” on this issue is a comment from a cardinal from the eastern part of the world, who said that the Western world is “fixated, obsessed with sexuality.” It’s at the back of his mind, Pope Leo said, “because of what I’ve already tried to demonstrate and live out in terms of my understanding of being whole at this time in history. I’m trying to not continue to polarize, promote polarization in the church.” The pope gestured toward welcoming and inviting everyone, regardless of sexual identity: “And I am trying to say, this is what Pope Francis said very clearly when he would say ‘Todos, Todos, Todos,’ everyone’s invited in. But I don’t invite a person in because they are or are not of any specific identity. I invite the person in because he’s a son or daughter of God.” Then the pope made the comments that have drawn attention. He said, “I mean obviously at some point people want Church doctrine to change and they want attitudes to change. I think we have to change attitudes before we ever change doctrine. I find it highly unlikely, certainly in the immediate future, that the Church’s doctrine, in terms of what the church teaches about sexuality, what the Church teaches about marriage [will change].” The phrase “I think we have to change attitudes before we ever change doctrine” could be interpreted as motioning toward the idea that a change in doctrine on this matter would be good but that changing attitudes first would be necessary. But Jonathan Liedl wrote this week in the National Catholic Register that he found “compelling” the explanation that the pope chose these words because he decided they were “the best way to lower expectations for change without necessarily pushing away those who have come to expect it as a possibility.” The “non-reaction of the Church” to these words, Liedl explains, comes in the context of a papacy in which the “interpretive key” is the pope’s effort to foster unity. Notably, Crux, as well as the Spanish translation in Allen’s book, have transcribed this pertinent phrase from the pope differently than I heard it, and I rolled the tape four times. Allen’s version of the quote says, “[W]e have to change attitudes before we even think about changing what the Church says about any given question.” This softens and generalizes the pope’s comments. Perhaps the pope, who reviewed the book, wanted to clarify his comments. Regardless, the pope, while gesturing openness toward those concerned with getting the Church to accept homosexuality, softly said that he finds it “highly unlikely” that the Church’s doctrine on the matter will change in the “immediate future.” Later, he said more firmly, “But I think that the Church’s teaching will continue as it is, and that’s what I have to say about that for right now.” The pope also used the opportunity to discuss the centrality to society of marriage, specifically meaning a man and a woman united together. “Families need to be supported,” he said. “They call it the traditional family. The family is father and mother and children. I think that the role of the family in society, which has at times suffered in recent decades, I think that that once again has to be recognized, strengthened.” Interestingly, Pope Leo discussed the possibility that divisions in society today might emerge from the fact that many have been deprived of the opportunity to grow up in a traditional family. “And I just wonder,” he said, “about if the question about polarization and how people treat one another doesn’t also come from situations where people did not grow up in the context of a family where we learn, that’s the first place you learn how to love one another, how to live with one another, how to talk with one another, and how to form the bonds of communion. That’s the family. If you take away that basic building block, it becomes very difficult to learn that in other ways.” The pope also, in the context of this discussion, made perhaps the first decisive action on a matter of import and controversy. He stated that the published rituals of blessing “people who love one another” in Germany go “specifically against the document that Pope Francis approved, Fiducia Supplicans.” The late pontiff’s document allows for “non-liturgical” blessings of couples in “irregular relationships,” including same-sex relationships, but calls for “spontaneous blessings.” A later press release clarified that these blessings should not take place in a prominent place, suggested that a “catechesis” explaining “that these types of blessings are not an endorsement of the life led by those who request them” might be necessary alongside the blessing, and said that such blessings should be “neither liturgical nor ritualised.” Here we have the pope listening to those from various sides on an issue of import, offering a posture of unity, giving a (mostly) conclusive answer: “I think that the Church’s teaching will continue as it is,” and stating decisively opposition to the manner in which certain German bishops have conducted themselves in regard to blessings for same-sex couples. Whether he will go beyond simply stating his opposition to such blessings remains unclear for the time being. On Friday, the pope also put on display the decisiveness he advertised when he made his first major appointment. He filled his previous, powerful spot as prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops. Archbishop Filippo Iannone, who is currently prefect of the Dicastery for Legislative Texts, and is known for being a level-headed veteran bureaucrat and canonist, will take on the role of helping the pope to select bishops. Iannone notably had a hand in efforts to curtail the rebellious German church’s “Synodal Way,” which, among other things, called for the creation of a “synodal committee” consisting of bishops and laypeople who would make major decisions. Pope Leo, before he was named pope, was one of the top Vatican officials working to resolve the German issue, and it is known that he is seeking to learn German, potentially to help deal with the crisis created by the German Church. One Vatican source close to the Jesuit America magazine said that the pope’s selection of Iannone was “an enigma” and “difficult to decipher.” An alternative interpretation is that Archbishop Iannone will bring a steady hand and a dedication to thoroughness and procedure. As the pope continues to shift from his period of listening to one of decisiveness, it’s worth noting what Leo said is the most “fundamental role” of the successor Peter: confirming others in the faith. “Being pope, successor to Peter, asked to confirm others in their faith, which is the most important part, is also something that can happen only by the grace of God,” he said. ***** The pope made one more thing clear in his interview: He feels a strong connection to his American identity. While I’m sure the pope loves Peru, and he has said so, the reality is that he obtained Peruvian citizenship because it was a requirement for being a bishop there. This is a man who is obsessed with Peeps, loves Midwestern roadtrips, and whose father served in the Navy in World War II. And so, when the pope was asked if he identifies more as a Peruvian or as an American, he said, “I’m obviously an American, and I very much feel that I’m an American.” Peru, he added, “is a part of who I am.” READ MORE from Ellie Gardey Holmes: ‘Sexual Life of Colonialism’ Professor Denied Tenure at Harvard The SPLC and the Radicalization of Charlie Kirk’s Killer Harvard Kennedy School Peddles Ecomysticism