Target list

Recently: With his main challenger already in jail, why is Turkey’s president now seizing a news channel? Ezgi Başaran on Erdoğan’s fight for his political survival.

Today: A federal judge halts most of the ICE home visits in nine states, and finds “a high likelihood of error” in how it’s been selecting sites. … &c.

Feature: Why does American politics seem to have gotten so nasty? Teresa M. Bejan on the difference between good and bad civility in a democracy. (Open-access, in partnership with the Marlborough House Foundation—see our editor’s note here.)

& For members: What does “equality” actually mean? Bejan’s new book, First Among Equals: Visions of Equality Before Egalitarianism.

+ New music from Ebbb …

U.S. & North America

In uniform

Over the weekend, agents from Homeland Security Investigations, the arm of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that usually works smuggling and trafficking cases, kept knocking on doors in several states. They come in uniform, some armed, and ask whoever answers about their immigration status and whether they’ve registered or voted. In one video, an agent holds a sheet headed “Target List.” In a photo from Kansas City, four agents stand on a porch with a woman holding a child’s hand—the Justice Department has charged her, a citizen of Peru, with voting in 2024, and the case is pending. The agency’s posts on X carry a caption: “AMERICAN ELECTIONS ARE FOR AMERICANS.”

Twelve minutes a name

What’s Homeland Security looking for? Noncitizens who vote, it says, and it has “no plans to question or investigate people we believe to be U.S. citizens.” On Wednesday night, in Oakland, California, Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín ordered a stop to most of the home visits in nine states, from Friday evening until the polls close on November 3. The department’s target lists draw partly on 48.2 million records “of questionable provenance,” she found, and officers have “no more than twelve minutes to eliminate a person from the target list”—though “there is no federal database containing citizenship status of U.S. residents.” The armed visits, and the posts about them, likely broke the 1965 Voting Rights Act’s ban on intimidation, she wrote.

‘Never in question’

Here in The Signal, Adam Przeworski points out that the United States held elections even during the Civil War, and “those elections were full of violence: Professional gangs traveled from city to city trying to intimidate opponents. Democracy is full of events like that. But the principle of election itself was never in question.” Electoral integrity, Przeworski says, “has never been completely undermined in the history of the country.” … See “‘Keeping up appearances.’”

‘This area is being patrolled’

On November 3, 1981, the day New Jersey chose a governor, off-duty police in armbands, some with guns showing, stood outside polling places in black and Hispanic neighborhoods of Newark and Trenton. The Republican National Committee had recruited them for its National Ballot Security Task Force, which put up posters: “Warning. This area is being patrolled by the National Ballot Security Task Force.” It had also mailed sample ballots there and listed people whose mail came back as voters to challenge. Thomas Kean, the Republican, won by 1,797 votes. A 1982 consent decree barred the party from “ballot security” work where a district’s racial or ethnic makeup was a factor. From 1987 to 2017, a judge had to approve any such program first.

Meanwhile

The U.S. orders nonemergency staff and families out of Saudi Arabia, and a strike Saudi officials blame on Yemen’s Houthis kills two at Dammam’s airport. … Russia frees the American Stephen Hubbard, and the White House envoy, Steve Witkoff, tells President Vladimir Putin, “You are a humanitarian also, sir” (see “‘Not so much on Ukraine’”). … In the former Soviet republic of Georgia, the Constitutional Court hears a ruling-party suit to ban five opposition parties, including the three largest. … A New Mexico judge orders Meta to pay US$25 billion for misleading Facebook users on privacy. … & An archaeologist finds that carts from Phoenician to Byzantine times, not prehistoric ones, probably left most of Malta’s 2,628 mysterious stone tracks.

Thoughts? concierge@thesgnl.com.

Feature

‘A low but solid virtue’

Why does American politics seem to have gotten so nasty? Teresa M. Bejan on the difference between good and bad civility in a democracy.

At the 2016 U.S. Democratic National Convention, Michelle Obama, the wife of then-President Barack Obama, gave her party a motto: “When they go low, we go high.” This May, the Democratic Party’s official account on X replied to Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, with “shut up you ugly fuck.” Perhaps that was just a junior staffer getting carried away. It certainly caught the tone of social media.

Plenty of Americans now think their society has become less civil, and the U.S. government is among them. “Civil discourse at America’s colleges and universities has been undermined by campus takeovers, violent riots, and even a recent high-profile political assassination,” the U.S. Department of Education said, as it set aside US$60 million for programs to promote it.

The universities are acting on it, too. Harvard and Columbia now ask applicants to describe a time they disagreed with someone. More than 200,000 students have taken Perspectives, an online course from the Constructive Dialogue Institute that promises to teach them how to “find common ground.” At Yale and New York University, it’s mandatory for first-years.

But are Americans really any less civil than they used to be?

… courtesy of the Marlborough House Foundation.

From the despatch

‘Self-evident’

What does “equality” actually mean? Bejan’s new book, First Among Equals: Visions of Equality Before Egalitarianism.

A lot hinges on the meaning of “equality,” or so it seems. In late June 2023, for example, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the race-conscious admissions policies of Harvard University and the University of North Carolina violated the right to “equal protection” under the law. In 2015, the Court cited the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in ruling that same-sex couples have the right to marry. The same clause underpinned two earlier landmark civil rights cases: Loving v. Virginia (1967), which struck down state laws forbidding interracial marriage, and Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which ruled that racial segregation in public schools is unconstitutional.

There’s no shortage of politicians who claim to fight for equality. U.S. President Donald Trump, for instance, wants equality properly understood. In April 2025, he signed an executive order declaring that equal treatment under the law “guarantees equality of opportunity, not equal outcomes.” The courts, the White House, and for that matter, many among the rest of us talk as if the word had one plain meaning.

Music

‘Public’

The low-key London trio who go as Ebbb put out their debut album, Shallow Hits, on Ninja Tune this summer …