June 22: War, and What Else Really Happened Last week

A second news roundup collab; Khalil is free; public lands are not for sale

Hello friends.

Welcome to my weekly paywalled news roundup, where I give you a measured amount of the news so you can stay informed without going insane, plus action steps.

Brooklyn, June 2025

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This week I’m again turning over the mic to a Substack friend, Elizabeth Doerr of the wonderful, tender and practical

Cramming for the Apocalypse

. You might also check out her writers’ community, Scribente Maternum.

Hello everyone! I’m Elizabeth Doerr–a climate justice and resilience writer with my own Substack at crammingfortheapocalypse.substack.com. I’m excited that Anya invited me to participate in What Really Happened This Week because I admire her work, her journalism, and her humanity so much. As a writer and mother trying to navigate raising a kid in an increasingly uncertain world, connecting with likeminded people and writers is huge to me.

With that, I’m coming to you today to bring you the news of the week…

1.Trump enters war with Iran

2.Mahmoud Khalil is free

3.Senate Republicans propose public lands sell-off

4.Court backs Trump’s use of National Guard

5. Good news/wild card

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1. Trump enters war with Iran

On Saturday American warplanes dropped bombs on three nuclear sites in Iran.

Since Israel attacked Iran on June 12th. the question that has loomed over everything is “will the U.S. get involved?”

U.S. assistance to Israel in this conflict lays bare a dispute within the MAGA movement: the war hawks and the isolationist, America First crowd. Andreas Kluth from Bloomberg wrote, “The MAGA Coalition won’t survive a ‘bunker-buster’.”

Now that it’s happened, I guess we’ll see whether they rally around the flag.

What is clear right now is that we are going to war without legally required Congressional authorization, with a secretary of defense who is widely reported to be an alcoholic and who has had a series of serious communications security breaches since being named to the post, and at a time of Netanyahu’s choosing.

Iranian civilians are vulnerable and abandoned. Hundreds of civilians have been killed in Iran and at least dozens of people killed in Israel so far in this war. Meanwhile, Israeli soldiers continue to kill Gazans turning up at aid sites.

2. Mahmoud Khalil is free

104 days ago, Columbia University student and pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, was detained by DHS officers, one of the first political arrests of protestors. He missed his son’s birth and his graduation while incarcerated in a detention facility in Louisiana. Friday, though, he was released and finally reunited with his wife and infant son.