Hours after Tehran had agreed to the unprecedented concession of eliminating its nuclear stockpile, Donald Trump announced the launch of a “massive and ongoing” US and Israeli air war to topple the Islamic Republic. Trump claimed that he had launched Operation Epic Fury because Iran had refused to negotiate and “just wanted to practice evil.” The Israeli Defense Forces announced their commencement of hostilities in a tweet that “Israel has a right to defend itself.”

At 9:45 a.m. local time in Tehran, Israel and the United States used high-altitude bombers, jets, and cruise missiles to strike military and civilian targets across the vast country. Both Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and President Masoud Pezeshkian were targeted in the attacks. Israeli media is filled with reports that Khamenei, who has ruled Iran for nearly thirty years, is dead, a claim rejected by Iranian media. (Sources inside Iran have reported that Khamenei’s son and daughter-in-law have been killed.) Strikes also targeted Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps general Mohammad Pakpour as well as Iran’s minister of defense and its chief of intelligence. A girls’ school in Minab in southern Iran was also struck. The death toll now stands at fifty, with a similar number wounded. According to domestic media, the victims are as young as seven. The houses of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president from 2005 to 2013, and former prime minister Mir Hossein Moussavi, who has been under house arrest for seventeen years, were also targeted, indicating the United States and Israel wish, at best, to remove any pretenders to power outside of their control or, at worst, to create a power vacuum at the top that could precipitate a civil war.

Tehran has responded by launching a first wave of ballistic missiles against Israel and targeting US military assets in the region. Iran is surrounded by US air and naval bases housing some forty thousand troops. Strikes have been reported in the vicinity of the US Ali Al-Salem Air Base in Kuwait; the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain; the Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar; and the US Al Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates. Explosions have also been reported in and around Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, home to significant US military assets. Iran has closed the Strait of Hormuz, the choke point for a fifth of global oil supplies.

While the growing favorability of socialism among young people can be taken as a sign of progress, the same generation that turned out in droves for Mamdani also propels tradwives, anti-vax wellness influencers, and MAHA content creators to virality.

In this issue, we investigate how young people navigate conditions in work, school, housing, culture, and family life that say a lot about where modern capitalism is and where politics is going, and we examine how socialist politics can appeal to a generation that often feels the future holds little to be hopeful about.

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In this episode of Confronting Capitalism, Vivek Chibber and Melissa Naschek discuss the history of automation, the effects of technology on employment and wages, and why socialists should want to harness AI to create human flourishing.

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