Dear Reader,
There’s this moment in Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America” when Prior Walter’s centuries-old ancestors visit him late at night. Walter is sick, dying but not dead.
“The twentieth century. Oh dear,” one of Walter’s ancestors says. “The world is so terribly, terribly old.”
In 2025, the world is older still. Newspaper pages continue to tell stories of suffering, division, and calamity. Even without visits from angels, the forces of optimism, hope, and community feel in short supply.
As we sat in our first classes of the semester last week, a college student from Utah shot and killed far-right political commentator Charlie Kirk, marking the highest-profile political assassination of our lifetimes, and, potentially, the start of a violent cycle that would inevitably silence voices across the political spectrum. Since we left campus last spring, President Donald Trump’s openly authoritarian second term has only intensified; Trump has wielded the full power of the presidency against critics from prime ministers to protesters.
Most Wesleyan students, including ourselves, sit in positions of immense privilege. Most Wesleyan students are not immigrants, or transgender, or part of the dozens of other marginalized communities whom Trump seeks to villainize. Most Wesleyan students do not yet fear masked ICE abductions, or being shipped without due process to notorious prisons across the globe, or having their Medicaid benefits stripped by an administration seeking to fund its tax cuts for America’s ultra-wealthy.
Martin Niemöller’s “First They Came” reminds us that our civil society can only hold strong against the tide of fascism if its most comfortable are willing to speak out against it. We’re left with an imperative for those individuals: now is the time to speak out. Submit a tip about an upcoming protest to our reporting team. Write an article for our Opinion section. Make a contribution to The Argus to ensure that our reporting continues. Send us a letter; we promise to read it.
It’s our responsibility as student journalists to cover and highlight activity on campus. This semester, we must expand, not focus, our coverage. We’ll celebrate student productions and game-winning goals and our fabulous WesCelebs, while platforming budding political networks, defiant acts of protest, and administrative controversy.
Wesleyan has long been home to powerful student-run protest movements—from the 1969 takeover of Fisk Hall by civil rights activists, to the 2024 weekslong pro-Palestine encampment. While our university administration’s response to protest over the years has faced significant and rightful criticism, Trump’s crackdown presents a far more extreme, if not existential, threat to our tradition of dissent.
This year, the Trump administration’s travel ban denied visas to admitted Wesleyan international students from Sudan and Burundi. The hundreds of international students who were able to travel to campus are now legitimately limited in publishing their political views. As Trump expands his attacks on the oft-disempowered groups that make up the fabric of American society, we must not capitulate to his campaign of fear.
Kushner’s angel tells Walter to choose the path of stasis, passivity, inertia. We must instead choose the path of movement, progress, and change.
While the future remains unclear and unstable, we know that our work as student journalists becomes more crucial every day. And we can’t do it without you.
Sincerely,
Miles Pinsof-Berlowitz ’27 and Thomas Lyons ’26
Editors-in-Chief
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