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Bob Dylan warned us about guys like Stephen Miller
Is Stephen Miller a closeted Bob Dylan fan?
The question arose the other day when Miller, defending talk of a possible U.S. takeover of Greenland, said, “We live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
While not an exact quotation, some Dylanologists hear echoes of an obscure 1983 Dylan song in the White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy’s remarks. In “Union Sundown,” from Dylan’s album, Infidels, the Nobel Prize-winning song-poet sang:
Democracy don’t rule the world
You’d better get that in your head
This world is ruled by violence
But I guess that’s better left unsaid.
Miller’s statement shares something of a worldview with Dylan’s, albeit in a twisted way that misrepresents Dylan’s remarks. Re-listening to “Union Sundown” and the rest of the songs on Infidels over 40 years after their initial release, one is struck by how Dylan’s lyrics are drenched with irony and sarcasm. You can hear it in “Man of Peace,” wherein Dylan sings:
Look out your window, baby, there’s a scene you’d like to catch
The band is playing “Dixie,” a man got his hand outstretched
Could be the Führer
Could be the local priest
You know sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace.
And the sarcasm verily drips off every line of the song “Neighborhood Bully,” a thinly veiled recounting of the entirety of Jewish history in an attempt to explain and justify Zionism, without ever using the words “Jews” or “Israel.” Dylan sings:
The neighborhood bully just lives to survive
He’s criticized and condemned for being alive
He’s not supposed to fight back, he’s supposed to have thick skin
He’s supposed to lay down and die when his door is kicked in.
The album Infidels includes a photograph of Dylan crouching down on a hillside overlooking the walled city of Jerusalem on its inner sleeve.
If Miller missed the irony in Dylan’s lyrics, he is not the first to do so. The right-wing ideologue is in good company with the erstwhile Village Voice. In its review of Infidels, the left-wing weekly called Dylan “the William F. Buckley of rock and roll,” presumably based on Dylan’s pro-Israel stance, but more significantly based on a wholesale misreading of “Union Sundown,” in which Dylan sings:
Well, it’s sundown on the union
And what’s made in the U.S.A.
Sure was a good idea
’Til greed got in the way.
The Voice and others at the time heard this as a condemnation of labor unions, when in fact the song takes to task the corporations that moved factories and jobs overseas in order to bypass the growing power of unionized workers in America. The “greed [that] got in the way” refers to the companies that exported American manufacturing abroad, as Dylan makes clear in this verse:
You know, capitalism is above the law
It say, “It don’t count ’less it sells”
When it costs too much to build it at home
You just build it cheaper someplace else.
Taking a fresh listen to the entirety of Infidels, one is struck by how many phrases and lyrics resonate strongly today, suggesting that Dylan was in full prophetic mode when he wrote and recorded these songs. The opening track, “Jokerman,” portrays an evil leader:
You’re a man of the mountains, you can walk on the clouds
Manipulator of crowds, you’re a dream twister
You’re going to Sodom and Gomorrah
But what do you care?
The song also indicts “False-hearted judges dying in the webs that they spin,” a line redolent of today’s politicization of the federal judiciary and the Supreme Court. Some have interpreted the next line — “Only a matter of time ’til night comes steppin’ in” — as a reference to Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir, Night — in other words, as a foreboding prediction of the resurfacing of fascism and Nazism.
Even in “Sweetheart Like You,” ostensibly a love song, Dylan sings:
They say that patriotism is the last refuge
To which a scoundrel clings
Steal a little and they throw you in jail
Steal a lot and they make you king.
Today, in an era when the U.S. president is a convicted felon who openly fantasizes about overthrowing democracy and crowning himself king, that verse reads more like fortune-telling rather than a work of imagination.
Likewise, in the song “License to Kill,” Dylan predicts the ascension of the ultimate petulant narcissist:
Now he worships at an altar of a stagnant pool
And when he sees his reflection, he’s fulfilled
Oh, man is opposed to fair play
He wants it all and he wants it his way.
Stephen Miller was not even born yet when Infidels was first released. That would happen two years later, when Miller was born in Santa Monica, California – just 20 minutes down the Pacific Coast Highway from Bob Dylan’s home in Malibu.
But it’s certainly possible that Miller heard Dylan’s album at some point in his life. It’s also possible that he so totally missed the irony and sarcasm running through the album that he found inspiration in Infidels for Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for the current presidential administration. If so, Miller ought to take another look at the album, beginning with a long meditation on its title.
But I guess that’s better left unsaid….
The post Bob Dylan warned us about guys like Stephen Miller appeared first on The Forward.
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UCLA student government condemns campus Hillel for hosting former hostage
A campus event featuring freed Israeli hostage Omer Shem Tov drew the condemnation of UCLA’s student government on Tuesday. In an open letter, the UCLA Students Associated Council said that bringing Tov to speak to students “served to legitimize and normalize” atrocities in Gaza and Lebanon.
Shem Tov, 23, was kidnapped from the Nova music festival in Southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and held hostage in Gaza until his release in a prisoner exchange in February 2025. UCLA hosted him on April 14 for a Yom HaShoah event.
“While we affirm the humanity of all people impacted by violence, we reject the selective platforming of narratives that obscure the broader reality of ongoing state violence,” the student government letter wrote in the letter, which was addressed to the UCLA administration and UCLA Hillel among others. “Israel is currently continuing to carry out what has been widely identified by human rights advocates as a genocide in Gaza, while also expanding its illegal military campaign into Lebanon.
“In this context, elevating a single narrative, absent of critical political and humanitarian framing, serves to legitimize and normalize these ongoing atrocities.”
Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, UCLA Hillel’s director emeritus, called the statement “completely ridiculous.”
“You can’t present the narrative of your experience without it being called ‘one sided,’” Seidler-Feller said. “There has to be a counter-story to persecution. Is there a counter-story to killing people?”
UCLA Hillel executive director Daniel Gold dismissed the criticism in Tuesday’s letter as antisemitic.
“Hillel at UCLA and Students Supporting Israel UCLA would like to apologize…for absolutely nothing,” he wrote in a statement. “Members of UCLA student government have once again shown they are anti-dialogue, anti-learning, anti-truth, anti-student and antisemitic.”
The USAC did not respond to a request for comment.
As college campuses across the country became a hotspot for pro-Palestinian activism following the Oct. 7 attack, UCLA, with an activist history and a large Jewish population, stood out as a major flashpoint. Its student encampment was the site of a riot in April 2024 and eventually cleared by police in riot gear.
The USAC has sided with pro-Palestinian protesters throughout. In a Feb. 2025 letter titled “We Are All SJP,” the USAC, which is democratically elected by the roughly 30,000-member UCLA student body, condemned Chancellor Julio Frenk’s suspension of Students for Justice in Palestine. The letter referred to Israel only as “the Zionist state” or put the country’s name inside quotation marks.
The University of California has since been sued by the Department of Justice, which said that UCLA created a hostile work environment against Jewish and Israeli faculty in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
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Trump extends ceasefire with Iran, even after Iran balks at new round of negotiations
(JTA) — President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that he would unilaterally extend the U.S.-Israeli ceasefire with Iran, even though Iran had not agreed to his conditions or even to return to the negotiating table.
Trump announced the decision on Truth Social just hours before the two-week-old deal was set to expire. Citing Iran’s “fractured” leadership, Trump wrote that he had been asked by Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to “hold our Attack on the Country of Iran until such time as their leaders and representatives can come up with a unified proposal.”
Vice President JD Vance’s planned trip to Islamabad, where talks were set to take place, was postponed indefinitely after Iran failed to confirm its participation in negotiations.
Trump added that the United States would maintain its naval blockade of Iranian ports in the Strait of Hormuz, despite Iran’s repeated calls for the restrictions to be lifted.
The announcement marked a sharp departure from the president’s statements earlier in the day, telling CNBC that, if a deal was not made before the deadline, “I expect to be bombing.”
In a statement Tuesday, Sharif thanked Trump for his “gracious acceptance” of Pakistan’s request to extend the ceasefire, adding that the country would “continue its earnest efforts for a negotiated settlement of the conflict.”
The announcement adds to uncertain about the war’s future, including for Israelis who lived through six weeks of Iranian bombing, and renews questions about Trump’s commitment to achieving his war goals, which have varied and included blunting Iran’s nuclear ambitions, achieving regime change, and destroying Iran’s stockpile of ballistic missiles. He said earlier this week that he was asking Iran to limit its nuclear program for 20 years, five years longer than was required by the deal struck by Barack Obama in 2015. Trump exited that deal in 2018.
Last week, Trump announced a different ceasefire, between Israel and Lebanon, on Truth Social, contradicting Israel’s claim that the Iran ceasefire would not apply to its fighting with Hezbollah, an Iran-backed proxy in Lebanon.
Trump’s announcement of the ceasefire extension came during the night in Israel, after Israelis began their celebration of Independence Day. It drew criticism from one of his staunchest pro-Israel supporters, the Zionist Organization of America, whose national president Morton Klein said in a statement that “interminable delay is the standard Islamic Iranian regime negotiating tactic” and that acceding to it represented a victory for Iran. The statement did not mention Trump.
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Alan Dershowitz quits Democratic Party, calling it ‘most anti-Israel party in U.S. history’
(JTA) — Alan Dershowitz, the prominent pro-Israel attorney whose clients have included Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, announced on Monday that he was leaving the Democratic party and registering as a Republican.
Describing himself as a “lifelong Democrat,” Dershowitz wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that he had decided to “bite the bullet and register as a Republican,” citing Democratic support for an arms embargo on Israel last week and the Michigan Senate candidate Abdul el-Sayed’s anti-Israel rhetoric.
“There is no denying that the hard left, anti-Israel wing of the Democratic Party has moved from the fringe to the mainstream,” Dershowitz wrote, adding that “Republicans have their own antisemitic fringe, but for now it remains a fringe.”
The announcement formalized a political evolution for Dershowitz, who defended Trump during his first impeachment and has increasingly broken with Democrats over Israel in recent years.
In 2021, Dershowitz nominated Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, and Avi Berkowitz, Trump’s top Middle Eastern envoy during his first administration, for the Nobel Peace Prize over their hand in shaping the Abraham Accords.
Dershowitz — who has recently faced scrutiny over his ties to Epstein, and previously denied allegations of sexual misconduct made by one of Epstein’s accusers — panned the Democratic Party as the “most anti-Israel party in U.S. history” in the op-ed.
“I believe that the Democratic Party’s hostility to Israel represents a deeper and more dangerous shift away from the center and toward a radical approach that is bad for America and the free world,” Dershowitz wrote, adding that he intended to “work hard to prevent the Democrats from gaining control of the House and Senate.”
Dershowitz’s comments are in line with Trump’s statements about Jews and the Democratic Party. He has repeatedly expressed amazement at how any Jews could vote for the Democrats considering his own record when it comes to Israel.
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