Category: News

In her new book, “Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches From the Wrong Side of History,” Nellie Bowles, a former New York Times journalist grown disillusioned with both the mainstream media and the left, writes about the year 2020, when the combustible confluence of the pandemic, the murder of George Floyd and the prospect of Donald Trump’s re-election made politics and culture go “berserk.” She describes a liberal intelligentsia “wild with rage and optimism,” brimming with “fresh ideas from academia that began to reshape every part of society.” Her name for this phenomenon, often derided as “wokeness,” is the “New Progressivism,” and her book attempts, with varying degrees of success, to skewer it.

There is much about that febrile moment worth satirizing, including the white-lady struggle sessions inspired by the risible Robin DiAngelo and the inevitable implosion of Seattle’s anarchist Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. Bowles dissects both in the book’s best sections. She seems to be inspired by the great works of 1960s and 1970s New Journalism about the absurdities of the counterculture, most famously Tom Wolfe’s “Radical Chic” and Joan Didion’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” But “Morning After the Revolution” is undermined by Bowles’s lazy mockery and insupportable generalizations.

“At various points, my fellow reporters at major news organizations told me roads and birds are racist,” she writes. “Voting is racist. Exercise is super racist.” Even allowing for 2020’s great flood of social-justice click bait, these are misleading and reductive caricatures. It’s hardly revisionist history, for example, to point out that Interstates were tools of racial segregation.

But my biggest disagreement with Bowles lies in her insistence that the movement she’s critiquing has triumphed. She describes the New Progressivism as the “operating principle of big business,” as well as the tech sector and academia. This week, speaking on the podcast of her wife, the Times Opinion writer turned heterodox media entrepreneur Bari Weiss, Bowles said, “The revolution didn’t end because it lost. It ended because it won.”

It didn’t, though. Even at the zenith of the George Floyd demonstrations, the corporate social-justice stuff was mostly window dressing; the operating principle of big business is and always was the pursuit of profit. And now, we’re in the middle of a furious reversal.

“Plenty of companies are reining in their rhetoric and in some cases action on issues such as sustainability and diversity,” said a recent Business Insider article titled “Woke No More.” Diversity, equity and inclusion departments, briefly prized, are being dismantled. “The backlash is real. And I mean, in ways that I’ve actually never seen it before,” the head of the Society for Human Resource Management told Axios. In the face of right-wing protests, Target, a company once known for its social justice trappings, has decided to stop selling Pride merchandise at some stores. And as The New York Times reported, Wall Street donors who were once hostile to Trump have made their peace with him.

On college campuses, both the Gaza protests and the resulting crackdown have shattered the illusion that radical politics can be seamlessly integrated into elite academic institutions. Long-running arguments about speech and sensitivity have been turned on their heads as leftists demand the right to chant slogans that offend their classmates, while moderates and conservatives invoke the need to keep Jewish students safe from emotional as well as physical harm.

Amid all this upheaval, the era of content warnings and policing of microaggressions may have come to an end. (Certain progressive shibboleths, like the idea that a speaker’s intent is irrelevant in deciding what speech is problematic, have been undercut by protesters insisting that calls for an intifada be interpreted in the most benign possible light.) Donors and administrators, meanwhile, have lost patience with D.E.I. programs, which they accuse of ignoring the concerns of Jews. Last week, M.I.T. became the highest- profile school to jettison mandatory diversity statements in faculty hiring. I doubt it will be the last.

There are aspects of the New Progressivism — its clunky neologisms and disdain for free speech — that I’ll be glad to see go. But however overwrought the politics of 2020 were, they also represented a rare moment when there was suddenly enormous societal energy to tackle long-festering inequalities. That energy has largely dissipated, right when we need it most, heading into another election with Trump on the ballot.

Bowles writes that her book “is for people who want to understand why Abraham Lincoln is canceled,” referring, I think, to the San Francisco Board of Education’s 2021 decision, quickly reversed, to give new names to a bunch of city schools. But that period now feels terribly distant. Four years ago, in response to the George Floyd protests, the Shenandoah County School Board in Virginia renamed schools that had honored Confederate generals. Last week, the board changed the names back.

Even if it could be sanctimonious and grating, I fear we’ll come to miss the progressive urgency that marked the Trump presidency. Bowles writes as if the uprisings of 2020 were sparked by anomie rather than real crises. She describes them with an analogy to allergy science: “When the area around a child is very well disinfected, her immune system will keep searching for a fight.”

In thinking about that period, I also tend to reach for health metaphors, but different ones. America reacted to Trump as if he were a novel pathogen and became inflamed. Now our immune system is exhausted, and the virus is returning stronger than ever.

Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia vetoed on Friday two bills that would have revoked tax exemptions for the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a century-old organization that has often been at the center of debates over the state’s Confederate past and its racial history.

In doing so, Mr. Youngkin sided with fellow Republicans in the legislature who almost unanimously opposed the bills and the efforts by the state’s Democrats to curtail the Commonwealth’s relationship with Confederate heritage organizations. The bills had nearly unanimous Democratic support in both chambers of the legislature. (One Democrat did not participate in one of the votes.)

The organization’s property tax exemptions were added to the state code in the 1950s, during segregation and when the Commonwealth maintained a closer relationship with the group. The organization’s Virginia division is also exempt from paying recordation taxes, which are levied when property sales are registered for public record.

In a statement explaining his decision, Mr. Youngkin acknowledged that the property tax exemption was “ripe for reform, delineated by inconsistencies and discrepancies.” But, he said that the bills were too narrow, specifically targeting the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and approving them would set “an inappropriate precedent.”

Lawmakers who introduced the bills said that they had wanted to modernize the tax code to reflect the state’s current values; they also stated that the government should not support organizations that promote myths romanticizing the Confederacy. Critics of the legislation said that the bills unfairly targeted the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and claimed that the group and its purposes were misunderstood.

Alex Askew, a Democratic delegate who introduced one of the bills, called the governor’s vetoes “perplexing.”

“The people of Virginia deserve to know why the governor is providing tax relief to historically pro-slavery institutions,” Mr. Askew said in a statement, adding, “Let’s work towards a fairer, more inclusive tax policy that truly reflects our commitment to equality and progress.”

If Mr. Youngkin had signed the bills, two other entities, the Stonewall Jackson Memorial Inc. and the Confederate Memorial Literary Society, would also have faced threats to their property tax exemptions.

“The governor has consistently worked in a direction that would endear him to the Republican base,” Stephen Farnsworth, a professor of political science at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, said in April, after the assembly passed the bills. He added that because of political and cultural shifts in Virginia in recent years, he expected the tax exemptions to be revoked the next time a Democrat becomes governor.

The legacy of the Confederacy is still being contested in the state that once contained its capital. In Charlottesville and Richmond, statues and monuments to Confederate figures have come down over the past decade, but earlier this month, a rural school district restored the names of Confederate officers to two schools, four years after voting to remove them.

The legislature also narrowly passed a bill to repeal special license plates featuring Robert E. Lee and the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a men’s heritage organization. Governor Youngkin also vetoed that bill on Friday.

With his veto on the tax exemption bills, Mr. Youngkin prevented the United Daughters of the Confederacy’s headquarters, a marble-clad building in Richmond, from becoming subject to property taxation. The building, which doubles as a memorial to wartime women of the Confederacy, opened in 1957 and has been listed for exemption in the tax code ever since.

The organization, which is identified as the owner of the property, would have become responsible for paying the taxes if a law had revoked the exemptions, according to Parrish Simmons, a representative with Richmond’s real estate assessor. The taxes could have totaled over $53,000 annually.

The United Daughters of the Confederacy did not immediately return a request for comment, but members were present in the gallery when the House passed the legislation in February. The women were introduced by Wren Williams, a Republican delegate who voted against both bills; Mr. Williams did not return a request for comment.

In an online public comment in opposition to one of the bills, Susan McCrobie, an officer for the organization, stated that a property tax burden would threaten the “continuation of purposes and objects for which our organization exists.”

Since its founding in 1894, the group has been open to membership for women who are descendants of Confederate soldiers. Though the stated purpose of the United Daughters of the Confederacy is to honor ancestors through memorial preservation and charity work, the organization is most often associated with Confederate statues, which it raised funds to build throughout the 20th century, and which it still defends.

Ms. McCrobie stated that if the bills were to become laws, the organization and the legislature would be “thrust into the courts for adjudication.”

Legislative efforts to revoke the tax exemptions began in 2023, when Don Scott, a Democratic delegate, introduced a bill that failed in the House, which at the time had a narrow Republican majority.

In January, after control of the House flipped and Mr. Scott became Virginia’s first Black Speaker, Mr. Askew reintroduced the bill. In February, he said in an interview that the purpose of the bill was not to interfere with the United Daughters of the Confederacy’s charity work, but to make sure the state code better reflected the Commonwealth’s modern values.

Campbell Robertson contributed reporting.

A state ethics panel quietly dismissed a complaint last summer against the New York judge presiding over the criminal trial of Donald J. Trump, issuing a warning over small donations the judge had made to groups supporting Democrats, including the campaign of Joseph R. Biden.

The judge, Juan M. Merchan, donated a total of $35 to the groups in 2020, including a $15 donation earmarked for the Biden campaign, and $10 to a group called “Stop Republicans.”

Political contributions of any kind are prohibited under state judicial ethics rules.

“Justice Merchan said the complaint, from more than a year ago, was dismissed in July with a caution,” the spokesman for the court system, Al Baker, said in a statement.

A caution does not include any penalty, but it can be considered in any future cases reviewed by the state’s Commission on Judicial Conduct. A letter outlining the caution was not released because of the commission’s rules, and Justice Merchan did not make the letter available.

“The Commission on Judicial Conduct is governed by a confidentiality statute and cannot comment on nonpublic dispositions,” said Robert Tembeckjian, the commission’s administrator.

The commission’s decision was first reported by Reuters.

In its 2024 annual report, the commission said it was made aware of dozens of New York judges who had violated the rules against political contributions in recent years. Most were modest amounts, the report said, and many appeared to stem from the misperception that the rules only apply to state campaigns. In fact, judges are prohibited from contributing to any campaigns, including for federal office.

“Like so much of the misconduct the Commission encounters, making a prohibited political contribution is a self-inflicted mistake,” the commission wrote in the report.

For Justice Merchan, the stakes of such a mistake are considerably higher than most: He is the first judge in American history to preside over the criminal trial of a former president.

The donations in part fueled Mr. Trump’s efforts to have Justice Merchan removed from the case before the trial began. Mr. Trump’s lawyers also focused on Justice Merchan’s adult daughter and her work at a Democratic consulting firm.

But Justice Merchan declined to recuse himself, appeals court judges declined to step in, and the trial is now nearing its conclusion.

The case centers on a hush-money payment to a porn star, Stormy Daniels, in the last days of the 2016 presidential campaign. Ms. Daniels says she had a sexual encounter with Mr. Trump, but a $130,000 payment from Mr. Trump’s fixer bought her silence. Mr. Trump is accused of falsifying business records to cover up his reimbursement of the fixer, Michael D. Cohen, casting them as routine legal expenses.

Mr. Trump has denied the accusations against him — and has lashed out at Justice Merchan and the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, who brought the case, noting that both are Democrats.

The Academic Senate at the University of California, Los Angeles, voted against two resolutions seeking to rebuke the school’s chancellor, Gene Block, largely over his handling of an attack on a pro-Palestinian encampment two weeks ago.

The results of the votes, conducted after a three-hour meeting on Thursday, were released on Friday and showed that only 43 percent of voting members had backed a no-confidence motion. A motion to censure Dr. Block was evenly split, 88 for and 88 against, failing to achieve a simple majority of support.

“It is clear that we are not united in how we view the major events of the past weeks and the campus response to them,” Andrea M. Kasko, the Senate chair, said in a statement. “I hope that we can try to find common ground as colleagues, and have the courage to listen with open minds and open hearts even when we do not agree.”

Formal rebukes by faculty were unlikely to have practical implications for Dr. Block, 75, who is set to step down as chancellor in July, said William G. Tierney, a professor emeritus of higher education at the University of Southern California who has written about the response to campus protests across the nation.

Dr. Tierney said he doubted that Michael V. Drake, the president of the University of California system, would require Dr. Block’s resignation “before that time.”

But faculty members who backed the resolutions said they felt compelled to speak up on behalf of students and show resolve to Dr. Block’s successor.

“While we were not able to obtain a majority vote on either resolution, it is important to note that 50 percent of those who voted called for a censure of Chancellor Block’s actions,” said Carlos Santos, an associate professor of social welfare and a voting member of the Academic Senate. “I remain committed to joining my colleagues in denouncing Chancellor Block’s actions but also in calling for his resignation.”

Those who voted against rebuking the chancellor said they felt that the effort was motivated by support for the pro-Palestinian demonstrators, and not by a desire to improve future processes.

“If we were sincerely concerned about what went wrong and how we can change in the future, we wouldn’t have been so intent on rushing through this poorly thought-out resolution without gathering information or building consensus,” said Jeff Maloy, an associate professor of teaching in the molecular, cell and developmental biology department, and a voting member of the Senate.

Dr. Block, through a spokesman, declined to comment.

A group of faculty members called a special meeting of the Academic Senate last week in the aftermath of the attack on April 30, in which a group of counterprotesters, whom Dr. Block later described as “instigators,” sprayed pro-Palestinian demonstrators with pepper spray, beat them with metal and wood, and shot fireworks into their encampment.

The attack, which began not long after Dr. Block declared the encampment illegal, went on for hours without police intervention. The next day, police officers in riot gear arrested more than 200 protesters as they cleared the encampment.

Faculty members who supported rebuking Dr. Block recounted with horror how they had watched their students suffer injuries during both the attack and when the encampment was dismantled.

A few faculty members spoke against the resolutions, including some who said they were disturbed by some Jewish students’ accounts of antisemitism at the encampment.

While the Academic Senate includes all faculty members who meet certain criteria — generally, those who are tenured or are tenure-track — only a smaller group known as the Legislative Assembly, which consists of members selected to represent campus departments, is allowed to vote on resolutions.

Almost 400 faculty members attended Thursday’s virtual meeting, and several dozen speakers weighed in on the resolutions, with a majority speaking in favor of a no-confidence resolution or a censure.

Faculty members at universities around the country have taken such steps to make their positions known: On Thursday, a Columbia faculty group passed a resolution of no confidence in its president. And last week, faculty members at U.S.C., a private institution across town from U.C.L.A., voted to censure its president.

Regardless of the vote’s outcome, Dr. Tierney said that Dr. Block’s actions in recent weeks would leave “a blemish on an otherwise noteworthy career.”

In the days after April 30, Dr. Drake, the University of California president, as well as state and local leaders demanded investigations into U.C.L.A.’s response.

Dr. Block will also have to answer questions from members of Congress; he has been summoned to testify next week before a House committee that has grilled other education leaders over their responses to antisemitism.

Pro-Palestinian protesters stormed the Institute of Politics building at the University of Chicago on Friday afternoon, overturning furniture, damaging property and confronting the institute’s director, former Senator Heidi Heitkamp. She refused their demand that she leave her office, university officials said, adding that she was the only staff member in the building.

The demonstration continued into the evening outside the institute, about two blocks from where a protest encampment was removed by campus police last week.

In a statement, the protest group on Friday said that it had occupied the building to protest the University of Chicago’s ties to Israel. Bystander video showed protesters climbing through second-floor windows to leave the building as the crowd below cheered.

After demonstrators were cleared from the building by the police, other protesters remained outside and in yards nearby, chanting, yelling and pounding drums.

Jeremy Manier, a university spokesman, said in a statement that protesters had tried to block the entrance of the building, damaged property and ignored orders from law enforcement officials to leave.

“The University of Chicago is fundamentally committed to upholding the rights of protesters to express a wide range of views,” he said. “At the same time, university policies make it clear that protests cannot jeopardize public safety, disrupt the university’s operations or involve the destruction of property.”

A sign identifying the Institute of Politics building was covered with a cardboard placard that read “permanent cease-fire now,” and a set of demands were hung from the building. Among the demands was “abolish the university.”

Jeremy W. Peters contributed reporting.

“Fico was shot.” The message arrived in one of my group chats shortly after 3 p.m. on Wednesday. I checked the news and forwarded what I could find out to my friends and family. Information was limited, and headlines like “Robert Fico Was Shot After the Government Meeting in Handlova” seemed absurdly matter-of-fact.

Yes, Mr. Fico, Slovakia’s prime minister, has been a controversial figure. But could he really have been shot multiple times on a weekday afternoon in May? On Friday, he remained hospitalized in serious but stable condition after undergoing surgery.

Slovakian politics are deeply polarized in ways that have tipped into rhetorical and even physical violence. Journalist and activists, particularly women, have received online threats. In 2016 I was attacked on the way home from work. In 2022 two men were fatally shot outside a gay bar in an attack that may have been politically motivated. Last fall, two former ministers brawled at a press event.

But in large part, the hateful rhetoric — of which there is lots — is confined to the internet, and it has become normalized. Lawmakers, activists and journalists take it to be the price of participating in civic life. We reassure ourselves that those who write threatening messages online are not usually the ones who carry them out.

That’s not to say the atmosphere hasn’t had an impact on politics. Zuzana Caputova, the progressive departing president and a civil rights lawyer, has been open about the fact that death threats against her and her family helped her decide not to run again.

But someone has now shot the prime minister. In retrospect, it seems that the hateful rhetoric was gradually, inevitably building to violence, and we are waiting in this dangerous moment to see what comes next. Either the attack will trigger harsh action from the government and make everything worse. Or cooler heads will prevail, and we will pause, pick up the pieces of our fractured country and try to put them back together.

It’s hard to overstate the magnitude of the presence of Mr. Fico in Slovakian politics. A former Communist Party member and a founding member of the Smer party, which, in its early incarnation, was a party of the center-left, he has been prime minister four times since 2006. His relationship with the mainstream media started frosty and deteriorated from there. There have been frequent allegations of corruption. Anti-corruption protesters in 2016 demanded, unsuccessfully, that he and his deputy resign.

But it was the murder of the journalist Jan Kuciak and his fiancée, who were shot dead in their apartment in 2018 when Mr. Kuciak was in the middle of an investigation into political corruption, that really seemed to split Slovakian politics. Large-scale demonstrations — some with mock gallows and coffins — again demanded his departure. That time they succeeded.

Afterward, the public remained roughly divided in two camps: Those for Mr. Fico, and those against. People who were pro-Fico skewed working class and nationalist; those against were mostly members of liberal, wealthier elites.

When Mr. Fico attempted a comeback last fall, he embraced right-wing views, although his party still positions itself as social democrats, and he won handily.

The political atmosphere of the last few months has been particularly febrile. Since Mr. Fico’s return to office his coalition has embarked on a controversial bid to replace the public broadcaster, and he has dismantled an anti-corruption watchdog, despite warnings from the European Union and more protests. In April we had the presidential election — which Ms. Caputova did not run in — and Peter Pellegrini, an ally of Mr. Fico’s, won. From there we went almost directly into campaign season for the European Union elections in June.

The division seemed to harden with each election, each political rally, each campaign remark that became less and less about issues and policy and more like a Marvel-esque battle between good and evil. It came from both sides. Last year, Mr. Fico’s opponents suggested that he would turn the country over to the “mafia.” And Ms. Caputova sued Mr. Fico after he suggested she was a U.S. puppet and a supporter of George Soros.

But, until this week, most of us still thought that this was just how we do politics now.

A few hours after the shooting, video footage emerged and the online activities and opinions of the man suspected in the attack were quickly scrutinized. Everyone assumed it was political. “He must have been a progressive liberal” was one theory that circulated. The actual motives are still unclear. The interior minister described the attack as “politically motivated” but said the suspect did not belong to a “radicalized group.” He was identified only as Juraj C.

After the shooting, some lawmakers lost their tempers and continued in the usual way. “This is your fault,” the vice chairman of Smer yelled at opposition lawmakers. Another lawmaker accused journalists of being responsible, and declared the beginning of a political war. Thankfully, many other voices appealed for unity and for people to stop fueling the atmosphere of hate. Mr. Pellegrini, who won the recent presidential election, and others urged a pause in the campaigning for the European Union elections.

We know now that as we talk relentlessly about a fight between good and evil, someone, somewhere, might be taking us at our word.

Alena Krempaska is the program director at the Human Rights Institute, an advocacy organization based in Bratislava, Slovakia.

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Tony Pigg, a silky-voiced disc jockey who rode high during FM radio’s golden era — first supplying extended jams to the psychedelic underground on the seminal San Francisco radio station KSAN in the 1960s and later at the powerhouse rock station WPLJ in New York — died on April 26 at his home in Manhattan. He was 85.

His death was announced by his wife, Lucinda Scala Quinn.

Howard Stern recently said on his SiriusXM satellite radio show that he was enamored with Mr. Pigg’s work when he was growing up on Long Island.

“He was one of those guys I was really jealous of,” Mr. Stern said. “When I was growing up I was like, ‘I want to be on the radio, but I don’t have a voice like Tony Pigg.’”

Jim Kerr, another mainstay of the once-dominant WPLJ, said in a statement: “The warmth and wit of Tony Pigg entertained an entire generation of New York radio listeners. His talent was a major reason why in the 1970s, WPLJ became the most-listened-to FM station in America and is so fondly remembered today.”

Mr. Pigg’s deep, sonorous voice was also a staple of television. For three decades he was the announcer for the long-running New York-based live morning show originally co-hosted by Regis Philbin, which has evolved into “Live With Kelly and Mark,” now starring Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos.

Tony Pigg was born Richard Joseph Quinn on April 11, 1939, in Sacramento to Philomena (Cantisano) Quinn, a court stenographer, and Joseph Quinn, a corrections officer and milkman. He studied art under the painter Wayne Thiebaud at California State University, Sacramento, and served a stint in the Army before deciding to pursue a career in radio.

He dropped out of college to get his radio license and, after honing his craft at stations in Winslow, Ariz., and his hometown, landed at KSAN, a soundtrack of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury scene. It was there that his original “nom de disc,” as he called it — Tony (after a favorite uncle) Bigg (because he was 6-foot-4) — morphed into “Tony Pigg” after a colleague garbled “Bigg” during a meeting.

“It was funny, so I kept it,” he said in a 1983 interview with The Daily Item of Port Chester N.Y. “Even though it was funny for about a week.”

The station was not a place where people got hung up on particulars. “We were a bunch of hippies — longhaired freaks,” he told The Daily News of New York in 1989.

Eschewing Top 40 playlists and breathless D.J. banter for deep album cuts and anti-establishment satire, KSAN served as a cradle for local bands like Jefferson Airplane, Santana and the Grateful Dead.

Mr. Pigg was particularly close to the Dead, whom he knew through his friend Owsley Stanley, who helped finance the band as well as warp their perceptions, thanks to the fabled LSD he produced.

In 1970, Mr. Pigg moved to New York to join WABC-FM, which soon became WPLJ. A staple of the metropolitan airwaves, it helped pioneer the album-oriented rock format, which focused on popular tracks from heavyweights like the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones and David Bowie — basically classic rock before it was “classic.”

He spent more than a decade at the station, which now has a Christian contemporary format. He later manned the microphones at the New York stations WXRK (known as K-Rock) and WNEW-FM.

In addition to his wife, he is survived by two children from a previous marriage, Mark and Lisa Quinn; three other sons, Calder, Miles and Luca Quinn; and a granddaughter.

Listeners over the years hailed Mr. Pigg for his unflappable on-air persona, a manner both warm and cool. In the words of The Daily News, he could “convincingly juggle ‘Mr. Wild, Crazy and Irreverent’ with ‘Mr. Committed Citizen.’”

He had plenty to say, but he measured out his on-air commentary in carefully calibrated doses.

“My own personal theory is just shut up and play the music,” he told The Daily Item. “If I can enhance the music by succinct phrases or inflections, that is really the ultimate craft in jockdom.”

It is a tale as old as Adam and Eve: A husband, faced with accusations of misconduct, blames the wife.

It is also a time-honored, bipartisan political strategy. This week, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey pointed ringed fingers at their wives for episodes that have landed each man in political or legal trouble.

“It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito,” Justice Alito, one of the Supreme Court’s most conservative members, told The New York Times in explaining an upside-down American flag — a “Stop the Steal” symbol of protest by Donald J. Trump’s supporters — flying on a pole in the family’s front lawn in the days before President Biden’s 2021 inauguration. The justice’s wife, Martha-Ann Alito, was in a feud with neighbors at the time over an anti-Trump sign, The Times reported.

In the case of Mr. Menendez, a Democrat, it was his lawyer who did the finger pointing. On Wednesday, in a federal courtroom in Manhattan, the lawyer, Avi Weitzman, blamed the senator’s wife and her financial troubles for what prosecutors have described as a bribery scheme involving foreign governments and hundreds of thousands of dollars in gifts.

“She tried to get cash and assets any which way she could,” Mr. Weitzman told the jury. “She kept him in the dark on what she was asking others to give her.” (Ms. Menendez also faces charges in the case but will be tried separately, after a breast cancer diagnosis. She has pleaded not guilty, and a lawyer representing her declined to comment.)

Casting blame on a spouse for perceived misdeeds may help relieve the immediate pressure on a public official, but it does so, necessarily, by exposing the most intimate of partnerships to scrutiny and scorn.

And, of course, there’s the reputational and interpersonal fallout from throwing your wife under the bus.

“Given how the public generally women holds to a higher ethical standard than men and expect them to take raps for behavior men routinely get away with, I could see how men might think blaming their wife for a misdeed could shield them from criticism,” said Jennifer Palmieri, a political strategist who knows about spousal controversy from working on the presidential campaigns of John Edwards and Hillary Clinton. “But not when it involves your wife. You just look like a coward.”

Sidestepping political controversy and pushing your wife directly into it is a move bound to prompt accusations of sexism, as it often plays on negative stereotypes of manipulative, ambitious or status-obsessed political wives with uncontrollable emotions and an outsize sense of entitlement.

Justice Alito’s claim about Mrs. Alito would seem to put her into a different category: A wife whose strongly held, unwisely advertised opinions become a professional liability for her husband. (Neither has been charged with a crime or formally accused of wrongdoing.)

Political spouse scandals often arise from the inevitable marital disruption created when one member of a couple rises to a high-visibility job that, at least in theory, is bound by particular laws and codes of ethics. Not only does it force the spouses into new public roles, it also means they can be natural scapegoats when something goes awry, whether they embrace it or not.

“​​This is not normal behavior; this is not normal marital strife,” said former Representative Brian Baird, a Democrat from Washington State, who was a practicing psychologist for two decades before spending a dozen years in Congress. “Lots of us go through marital strife, but that strife does not include acting in ways that are extraordinarily questionable or self-enriching or undermining the political system itself and then making excuses for that.”

One of the most important public corruption cases in recent decades centered on the marriage of Bob McDonnell, a Republican former governor of Virginia.

Mr. McDonnell and his wife, Maureen, both faced federal charges stemming from more than $165,000 in loans and gifts given to the family by a nutritional-supplements executive. At their trial, in 2014, Mr. McDonnell’s lawyers said the couple had been too estranged to engage in a conspiracy, seizing on a witness’s description of her as a “nutbag” and saying she had become fixated on luxury goods.

(In the case of charged crimes, blaming the wife can make for excellent legal strategy, since spouses cannot be compelled to testify against each other.)

Mr. McDonnell took the stand in his own defense, telling the jury that his wife had been disappointed in their financial circumstances and “overwhelmed” by the stress of her role in public office. Both were convicted, but the convictions were later overturned through a unanimous 2016 Supreme Court ruling that loosened federal bribery statutes. He filed for divorce three years later.

As with Ms. Menendez and Ms. McDonnell, politicians’ wives have faced legal consequences beyond public opprobrium.

In 2018, charged with stealing campaign money to support a lavish lifestyle, former Representative Duncan D. Hunter, a Republican from California, said his wife was responsible for the couple’s finances. Both later pleaded guilty to corruption.

There are also political couples whose professional ambitions and private transgressions are so closely intertwined that public condemnation flows freely between them, even when neither partner directly blames the other.

While Mrs. Clinton was first lady, her husband’s foes on the political right painted her as a dangerous and manipulative figure. Later, her own political aspirations often collided, at times extremely uncomfortably, with her husband’s infidelity and his postpresidential work.

Sometimes, spouses’ political roles or outside employment complicate their partners’ official business.

Another Supreme Court justice, Clarence Thomas, has faced calls for his recusal or resignation after correspondence showed that his wife, Virginia Thomas, a longtime right-wing activist, sought to overthrow the results of the 2020 election.

And former Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died in 2020, faced criticism for not recusing herself from cases to which her husband, Martin Ginsburg, a tax lawyer, had direct or indirect ties.

Of course, Washington men behaving badly are sometimes called out by their wives. Just this week, Representative Rich McCormick, a Georgia Republican, filed for divorce and then watched as his wife, Debra Miller, publicly suggested that he had had an affair with a fellow member of Congress.

Women in public office have also gotten in trouble because of their romantic partners. In 2020, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, a Democrat, blamed her husband’s “poor attempt at humor” after reports that he had tried to cajole a marina owner into putting his boat in the water before the Memorial Day rush, which also violated the state’s Covid lockdown policies.

Before Carol Moseley Braun was sworn in as a Democratic senator from Illinois in 1993, she came under fire because of accusations that her boyfriend, who was also her campaign manager, had sexually harassed women on the campaign staff.

Ms. Moseley Braun said in an interview on Friday that political advisers at the time urged her to cast blame on her boyfriend and distance herself from him.

“I thought that would be cowardly of me to do,” she said. “I said, ‘This guy has not done anything wrong.’”

The typical posture from powerful men in Washington, she said, is the opposite.

“They just find somebody else to blame but me,” she said. “And the person closest to me is this woman over here, and you can kick her around as much as you want.”

Benjamin Weiser and Catie Edmondson contributed reporting.

Workers at two Mercedes-Benz factories near Tuscaloosa, Ala., voted on Friday against joining the United Automobile Workers, a stunning blow to the union’s campaign to gain ground in the South, where it has traditionally been weak.

The defeat, based on an unofficial union tally, came after Kay Ivey, Alabama’s governor, and other Republican leaders argued that a pro-union vote would choke off the investment that has transformed the state into a major auto producer. Hyundai and Honda also have large factories in Alabama that the U.A.W. is trying to organize.

The vote took on national significance as a test of whether the U.A.W. could build on a string of recent victories and gain ground in a state whose elected officials have been hostile to organized labor. The union has said it wants to organize every automobile factory in the United States, expanding its membership to include the employees of companies like Toyota and Tesla.

But the loss at the Mercedes plants will almost surely slow down the union’s campaign and probably force it to do more spadework to secure the support of workers before seeking to hold elections at other auto plants. Union leaders will want to spend time figuring out how best to counter the messages and tactics of local lawmakers and company executives.

“It hurts to lose, no doubt,” Elizabeth Shuler, president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., said on Friday. “But we see it not as a loss, but a temporary setback. Workers will persevere no matter what it takes.”

Auto executives and conservative lawmakers are also likely to closely study the vote at Mercedes to figure out the best approaches to fend off the U.A.W. and other unions in future contests and to deter union campaigns from the get-go.

The South has become an important battleground. States like Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee are attracting much of the billions of dollars that automakers and suppliers are investing in electric vehicle and battery factories. The U.A.W. wants to represent workers at those factories.

Mercedes produces sport utility vehicles at a factory in Vance, Ala., and battery packs for electric vehicles at a plant in nearby Woodstock. Polling had been underway all week at the two factories under the supervision of the National Labor Relations Board.

In a campaign conducted largely by word of mouth, union activists argued that in addition to better pay and benefits, the U.A.W. would protect Mercedes’ 5,200 workers from abrupt changes in their schedules and long shifts, including on weekends.

“If it wasn’t for us building those cars, you wouldn’t be putting the money that you’re putting in your pockets,” said Kay Finklea, who works in quality control at Mercedes and campaigned for the union. “So treat us with dignity, treat us with respect and pay us.”

But activists acknowledged that many workers who were unhappy with working conditions at Mercedes were also reluctant to join the union, swayed by warnings from company executives and politicians that membership would lead to onerous dues and loss of control over their jobs.

Mercedes tried hard to block the union. Last month, in an apparent attempt to address employee complaints, the company shook up local management, appointing Federico Kochlowski as chief executive of the German company’s U.S. unit.

Mr. Kochlowski, who has worked at Mercedes for about 20 years in various manufacturing positions in China, Mexico and the United States, acknowledged that there were problems at the Alabama plants and promised to make improvements. “I understand that many things are not OK,” he said in a video posted by Mercedes online. “Give me a shot.”

Union activists noted that Mr. Kochlowski had already been a member of top management and interpreted his appointment as a last-minute attempt to fend off the U.A.W.

The U.A.W. has filed six charges of unfair labor practices against Mercedes with the labor relations board, saying the company disciplined employees for discussing unionization at work, prevented organizers from distributing union materials, conducted surveillance of workers and fired workers who supported the union.

Mercedes denies the claims.

Previous attempts by the U.A.W. to represent workers at Mercedes and other auto manufacturers in the South have failed. But the U.A.W. is stronger than it has been in years after winning a unionization vote at a Volkswagen plant in Tennessee last month after losing two previous elections at that plant. The union also won hefty pay raises last year for workers at Ford Motor, General Motors and Stellantis, the parent company of Chrysler, Jeep and Ram.

Mercedes workers who support joining the U.A.W. said they would keep fighting.

“Mercedes is going to be unionized,” Robert Lett, who works in the Woodstock battery factory and campaigned for the union, said ahead of the vote. “It doesn’t matter if it’s Friday or in the future. There’s too much frustration there for us to not eventually unionize.”