How TikTok’s Most Followed U.S. Influencers Reacted to the App Going Dark: ‘I Feel Cut Off From the World’

When TikTok influencers in the United States opened their apps on the evening of Saturday, Jan. 18, many expected to have their last few hours of scrolling or posting. Instead, they were met with the following message: “Sorry, TikTok isn’t available right now. A law banning TikTok has been enacted in the U.S. Unfortunately that means you can’t use TikTok for now.”

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What followed was hours of uncertainty and discomfort for many high-profile TikTok users, as they sought to find alternative avenues to connect with their fanbases.

On Sunday afternoon, TikTok announced that it would begin restoring service to U.S. users that already have the app downloaded. The social media platform went on to thank President-elect Trump, who had spoken out on Truth Social hours before, stating that he planned to issue an executive order to save the app upon his return to the White House on Monday.

After the app went dark on Saturday night, TikTok’s biggest U.S. influencers reacted with a mixture of disappointment and resigned humor as they embarked on their first day without the platform. Some influencers rebounded by using other social media options, primarily Instagram.

TikTok star Charli D’Amelio, whose online fame has landed her a role on Broadway’s & Juliet, posted on Instagram reels on Saturday night: “Hey reels, how we doing? We’re here,” she said in the short upload. She later returned to Instagram to post a video of “the first TikTok dance she ever learned.”

Although D’Amelio’s Instagram audience is more than substantial—she currently has 42.8 million followers—her following on TikTok is staggeringly higher, as she boasts 156.8 million followers on the app.

Read More: Here’s What Happened When India Banned TikTok in 2020

Like D’Amelio, other top influencers used alternative social media platforms to post notes of gratitude to their followers and share nostalgic look-backs at their years on TikTok. Jojo Siwa, of Dance Moms and Dancing with the Stars fame, was among many influencers that reacted by posting old videos of themselves. Siwa, who has over 45 million TikTok followers, took to Instagram—where she has 11 million followers—to post a compilation of popular TikTok videos of herself, her caption reading: “Making this made me pretty emotional. Thank you for all the memories made.”

Spencer X—a musician and beatboxer who rose to fame on TikTok and eventually racked up almost 55 million followers on the app—also relocated to Instagram during the ban.

“TikTok forever changed my life. This is so crazy to see…” he wrote on his Instagram story to his 958k Instagram followers.  “You’ll forever be in our hearts. Thank you for everything.” 

YouTuber Larri Merrit, known professionally as “Larray,” posted videos on his Instagram story of him and fellow internet personality-turned-celebrity Quenlin Blackwell crying after TikTok stopped working for them. Larray, who has 27.5 million TikTok followers and around 6.5 million followers on Instagram, wrote that he hopes his followers will “continue to uplift and celebrate [their] favorite creators as they navigate this new chapter,” urging them to follow creators on other platforms.

@alixearle

I truly feel sick to my stomach & I cried myself to sleep last night. I love you all 🫶🏼

♬ it hurts, now that you’re gone – i don’t like mirrors

Meanwhile, Alix Earle— a TikTok and media personality known for her vlog-style content—posted a video of herself teary-eyed and emotional on TikTok before the app went dark on Saturday night. 

“I feel like I’m going through heartbreak,” she wrote for a caption displayed across the video. “This platform is more than an app or a job to me. I have so many memories on here. I have posted every day for the past 6 years of my life. I’ve shared my friends, family, relationships, personal struggles, secrets.”

“I cried myself to sleep last night,” she added.

Other influencers complained they felt “disconnected” and “cut off” from their communities when unable to access the app.

Internet personality James Charles, who got his start as a makeup aficionado on YouTube but now has over 40 million followers on TikTok posted to Instagram when his TikTok stopped working, complaining that it was “dystopian.”

“I don’t know what to do… I’ve already opened and closed the app probably six times already just to keep getting the same stupid warning message,” Charles told his 20 million Instagram followers. “I feel disconnected. I feel cut off from the world and my community…Now I’m rooting for Trump? Ew.”

TikTok went dark after the Supreme Court unanimously decided on Friday that the app’s potential risk to U.S. national security warranted a ban in the United States, outweighing anger from citizens over freedom of speech concerns and its popularity in the country.

Trump, set to be sworn in on Monday, January 20, posted on his Truth Social account on Sunday that he was “asking companies not to let TikTok stay dark.”

“I will issue an executive order on Monday to extend the period of time before the law’s prohibitions take effect, so that we can make a deal to protect our national security,” he wrote. “The order will also confirm that there will be no liability for any company that helped keep TikTok from going dark before my order.”

source https://time.com/7208185/how-tiktoks-most-followed-us-influencers-reacted-to-the-app-going-dark-amid-ban/

We Are on the Precipice of a Grievance-Based Society

Economic fears have metastasized into grievance—this is the core finding of the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer. We observe a profound shift in popular sentiment, a move beyond political polarization to aggressive advocacy for self-interest. Throughout the elections of the past year, citizens have raised their voices against business, government, and the wealthy across the globe. Incumbent parties have been ousted in Western democracies, including the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, and Canada. Business has been pushed back on for its involvement in societal issues, from DEI to sustainability.

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Such grievances stem from a conviction that the system is unfair, business and government make things worse, and the rich keep getting richer. A growing sense of alienation is so profound that nearly two-thirds of respondents now fear being discriminated against, up 10 percentage points from the previous year. Even high-earners are increasingly worried about being made a victim—up 11 points to 62%. Three quarters of respondents worry about their pay not keeping up with inflation. And there is deep concern about job loss due to the impact of innovations like automation, which 58% of employees worry about, and of globalization—62% of workers worry about international trade conflicts affecting their livelihoods.

Four preconditions, which have been building for the past decade, have exacerbated these grievances. First is a pervasive lack of belief in a better future. Only one-third of respondents believe that the next generation will be better off. In every Western democracy 30% or fewer believe so. In Germany, just 14% of people believe that the next generation will be better off. And in France, just 9% believe so.

There has also been a widening divide in trust among top and bottom income brackets. Low-income respondents have profoundly less trust in institutions than the top quartile. For instance, 48% of low-income respondents trust institutions, averaged across business, government, media, and NGOs—compared to 61%, on average, among high income respondents. Business sees the greatest divergence of any institution, with a 16-point trust gap between high- and low-income groups.

Institutional leaders themselves may have also dropped the ball. Globally, two-thirds of respondents worry about journalists, government officials, and CEOs intentionally lying to them.

And there are fewer and fewer agreed-upon facts. Nearly two-thirds of respondents find it difficult to differentiate between news from a reliable source and disinformation. The decision by social media networks to move away from fact-checking will further complicate an already messy media context.

Our collective grievances are broad-based, extending from economic to electoral to societal. Most people hold a sense of grievance against elites and institutions. Sixty one percent of respondents have a moderate (41%) or high (20%) sense of grievance, defined as feeling business and government make their lives harder and serve narrow interests, and the system benefits the wealthy while regular people struggle. Such a belief is more prevalent among those on the Left than the Right (69% on the Left compared to 57% on the Right) and among older people than younger people (66% among those aged 55 and up compared to 58% among those between the ages of 18 and 34). The majority of high-grievance people adopt a zero-sum mindset: If something gives you a win politically, it comes at a cost to me.

The wealthy are seen as playing a malign role in society. Two-thirds of respondents believe the wealthy fail to pay appropriate taxes and laws that serve the wealthy come at the detriment of “people like me.” Add all of these grievances up, and many think that capitalism has failed. Over half of respondents believe that capitalism does more harm than good—53% among the general population, including 55% of 18 to 34-year-olds.

Many also feel that the prevailing political systems are broken. Only one-third of respondents believe that those with different political views “play by the rules” and fewer than half (44%) trust those with different political beliefs. Government is distrusted in 17 of the 28 countries we measured. And to many, violence may be necessary. Over half of young people approve of one or more of the following methods of hostile activism to bring about change: attacking people online, intentionally spreading disinformation, or threatening or committing violence to persons or property.

Low-trust nations reflect aggravated levels of grievance and repairing that trust enables belief in a brighter future. In Germany, 41% of people, on average, trust institutions in society and 69% of respondents feel a moderate or higher sense of grievance. In Singapore, 65% are trusting of institutions and just 39% hold grievances. This illustrates a powerful inverse relationship: The greater trust that people have in their institutions, the less grievance a society has.

Business has emerged as the default solution on societal issues given that many people believe businesses are more competent (+48 points) and more ethical (+29 points) than their government. But businesses lack the authority to lead alone because views of business ethics plunge as people become more aggrieved. Business has the potential, and much of the publics’ permission, to address societal issues.

The other three major institutions also have the potential to address grievances in society. This is NGOs’ moment as the ethical leader, the only institution seen as a unifying force among those with a high sense of grievance and the institution with the highest trust among that group. Government needs to prove its competence again, to deliver results that benefit the individual citizen. And media outlets must successfully provide quality information that enables people to make proper decisions.

We need to move back from the precipice of a grievance-based society where violence is seen as a viable option. All four of the major institutions must play a role. Businesses will have an opportunity in the coming months to work with the new governments in major democracies on important issues such as trade, energy supply, and reskilling. 

All of this will be debated in the more chaotic, free-wheeling media, putting a premium on speed and facts. Our goal must be to give people a sense of control over their destiny, and to drive change that is positive instead of threatening to society.

source https://time.com/7208097/the-precipice-of-a-grievance-based-society/

Why Most U.S. Presidents Take the Oath of Office With a Hand on the Bible

For the second time, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump takes the oath of office on Inauguration Day Monday in Washington, D.C., by raising his right hand and putting his left hand on top of a Bible.

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Why do presidents place a hand on the Bible?

The answer is simple: tradition. That’s what the first President of the United States, George Washington, did in 1789, according to the White House Historical Association. Organizers had forgotten to bring a Bible to the ceremony, so he borrowed one from a Masonic lodge. Other presidents that were sworn in with the Bible that Washington used include Jimmy Carter, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Warren G. Harding, and George H.W. Bush.

Washington also set a precedent of kissing the Bible after taking the oath of office. Presidents followed suit, up until 1853, when Franklin Pierce placed his left hand on the Bible instead of kissing it, stopping the custom.

Some incoming presidents use Bibles that have been in their families for generations. The incumbent, President Biden, was sworn in with a Bible that has been in his family since the 19th century. 

At Trump’s first inauguration in 2017, he used two Bibles—one his mother gave him and the Bible that Lincoln was sworn in with at his first inauguration.

Some presidents did not use a Bible to take the oath of office, including Theodore Roosevelt, who did not use anything when he was sworn into office in 1901, and John Quincy Adams, who chose a legal book for his 1825 swearing-in, to signify his responsibility to uphold the U.S. constitutional law.

source https://time.com/7207967/trump-inauguration-oath-of-office-bible/

Why Biden’s Ukraine Win Was Zelensky’s Loss

When Russia invaded Ukraine nearly three years ago, President Joe Biden set three objectives for the U.S. response. Ukraine’s victory was never among them. The phrase the White House used to describe its mission at the time—supporting Ukraine “for as long as it takes”—was intentionally vague. It also raised the question: As long as it takes to do what?

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“We were deliberately not talking about the territorial parameters,” says Eric Green, who served on Biden’s National Security Council at the time, overseeing Russia policy. The U.S., in other words, made no promise to help Ukraine recover all of the land Russia had occupied, and certainly not the vast territories in eastern Ukraine and the Crimean Peninsula taken in its initial invasion in 2014. The reason was simple, Green says: in the White House’s view, doing so was beyond Ukraine’s ability, even with robust help from the West. “That was not going to be a success story ultimately. The more important objective was for Ukraine to survive as a sovereign, democratic country free to pursue integration with the West.” 

That was one of the three objectives Biden set. He also wanted the U.S. and its allies to remain united, and he insisted on avoiding direct conflict between Russia and NATO. Looking back on his leadership during the war in Ukraine — certain to shape his legacy as a statesman — Biden has achieved those three objectives. But success on those limited terms provides little satisfaction even to some of his closest allies and advisers. “It’s unfortunately the kind of success where you don’t feel great about it,” Green says in an interview with TIME. “Because there is so much suffering for Ukraine and so much uncertainty about where it’s ultimately going to land.” 

For the Ukrainians, disappointment with Biden has been building throughout the invasion, and they have expressed it ever more openly since the U.S. presidential elections ended in Donald Trump’s victory. In a podcast that aired in early January, President Volodymyr Zelensky said the U.S. had not done enough under Biden to impose sanctions against Russia and to provide Ukraine with weapons and security guarantees. “With all due respect to the United States and the administration,” Zelensky told Lex Fridman, “I don’t want the same situation like we had with Biden. I ask for sanctions now, please, and weapons now.”

The criticism was unusually pointed, and seems all the more remarkable given how much support the U.S. has given Ukraine during Biden’s tenure—$66 billion in military assistance alone since the February 2022 Russian invasion, according to the U.S. State Department. Combine that with all of the aid Congress has approved for Ukraine’s economic, humanitarian, and other needs, and the total comes to around $183 billion as of last September, according to Ukraine Oversight, a U.S. government watchdog created in 2023 to monitor and account for all of this assistance. 

Yet Zelensky and some of his allies insist that the U.S. has been too cautious in standing up to Russia, especially when it comes to granting Ukraine a clear path to NATO membership. “It is very important that we share the same vision for Ukraine’s security future – in the E.U. and NATO,” the Ukrainian president said during his most recent visit to the White House in September.  

During that visit, Zelensky gave Biden a detailed list of requests that he described as Ukraine’s “victory plan.” Apart from calling for an invitation to join NATO, the plan urged the U.S. to strengthen Ukraine’s position in the war with a massive new influx of weapons and the permission to use them deep inside Russian territory. Biden had by then announced that he would not run for re-election, and the Ukrainians hoped that his lame-duck status would free him to make bolder decisions, in part to secure his legacy in foreign affairs. “For us his legacy is an argument,” a senior member of Zelensky’s delegation to Washington told TIME. “How will history remember you?” 

The appeals got a mixed reception. On the question of Ukraine’s NATO membership, Biden would not budge. But he did sign off on a number of moves that the White House had long rejected as too dangerous. In November, the U.S. allowed Ukraine to use American missiles to strike deep inside Russian territory. And in January, the Biden administration imposed tough sanctions against the Russian energy sector, including the “shadow fleet” of tankers Russia has used to export its oil. 

While these decisions fell short of what Zelensky wanted, they helped Biden make the case during the last foreign-policy speech of his tenure that the U.S. had met its goals in defending Ukraine. He remained careful, however, not to promise that Ukraine would regain any more of its territory, or even survive to the end of this war. Russian President Vladimir Putin “has failed thus far to subjugate Ukraine,” Biden said in his address at the State Department on Jan. 13. “Today, Ukraine is still a free, independent country, with the potential — the potential for a bright future.” 

The future that Zelensky and many of his countrymen have in mind is one in which Russia is defeated. But in rallying the world to the fight, the implication Biden embedded in his own goals was that defending Ukraine against Russia is not the same as defeating Russia. So it is not surprising if that goal remains far from Zelensky’s reach.

source https://time.com/7207661/bidens-ukraine-win-zelensky-loss/

Here’s What Happened When India Banned TikTok in 2020

When Congress passed a bill in April 2024 ordering ByteDance to either sell TikTok or face a ban, many speculated that ByteDance would opt to sell, because the American market was too valuable to relinquish freely. But TikTok actually faced an even bigger exodus of users in 2020, when India banned the app.

At the time, India was TikTok’s biggest foreign market outside of China, with 200 million users. (For comparison, the U.S. currently has over 170 million TikTok users.) Following military clashes along the disputed border between India and China, the Indian government banned TikTok along with over 50 other Chinese apps, citing national security concerns.

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Despite the ban, TikTok did just fine in expanding around the world, while national and international tech companies rushed to fill the Indian void, in the process transforming their global approaches to social media. At the same time, digital rights activists tell TIME that the Indian government used the ban as precedent to crack down upon other digital platforms they deemed to be a threat. The way that users, tech giants, the government, and TikTok all adapted to the ban offer clues about what could unfold in the U.S. in the coming months.

Post-ban opportunity

Indian users flocked to TikTok as early as 2017. Video was already a dominant format in the country, buoyed by massive 4G and 5G infrastructure projects that allowed people with smartphones in remote villages to stream content. TikTok took that ecosystem even farther, allowing India’s millions of regional dialect speakers to share content and create digital communities. (At the same time, caste-based hate speech grew rapidly on the platform.) 

“A lot of the people in the rural part of the country were okay with just being themselves, and creating a 15-second clip of some song they liked,” says Murli Kanne, an entrepreneur based in Hyderabad, India, who was working in influencer marketing at the time. “People started getting followers really easily. Hindi was mostly the language used in the viral TikToks, but a lot of regional content popped up as well.” 

When the Indian government banned TikTok in June 2020, some influencers striving for global fame started using VPNs to post on TikTok. But for the millions and millions of smaller-scale users, local companies rushed to meet their demand, including MX TakaTak, Chingari, and Moj—which was launched in July 2020 by the Indian social media powerhouse ShareChat, registered over one million downloads within a week. In November 2020, at least 13 of the top 100 social apps in the Google Play Store in India were TikTok clones, with most of them newly launched, Rest of World reported. Many of these apps offered money to influencers to post on their platforms. The Indian government encouraged these efforts by issuing an Innovation Challenge to build local versions of banned apps. 

Read More: Will You Still Be Able to Use TikTok If It’s Banned? Here’s What You Need to Know

Big Tech takes over

But as these local apps fought for market share, they were about to fall behind much larger and more-resourced American competitors. “A few of these apps were not up to the mark when we compare tech,” Kanne says. “I don’t think they had a chance with the giants against them.” 

YouTube was already a hugely popular platform in India. Within months of the TikTok ban, its parent company Alphabet launched a beta version of YouTube Shorts in the country. And because audiences were already on the platform, many Indian content creators found instant success with Shorts. Comedy creator Dushyant Kukreja found that his Shorts received similar levels of views as his TikTok videos, and he soon grew his YouTube following from 40,000 to over 6 million. Creator Manjusha Martin, who had built a TikTok audience of over 770,000, created a web series on Shorts, surpassing 2 million followers on that platform. 

Buoyed by this success, YouTube soon expanded Shorts to dozens more countries. By the summer of 2022, they reported 1.5 billion viewers every month, rivaling TikTok’s viewership. 

Instagram, not to be outdone, pushed out its Reels feature in August 2020, and made India the first country to have a version of the app with Reels in a separate tab. Indians tuned into watch music and cricket, with over 1 million reels created related to the 2022 ICC T20 World Cup. In 2022, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that Reels made up more than 20% of the time people spent on Instagram, making it the company’s “fastest-growing content format by far.”

Ultimately, most of the Indian-based TikTok alternatives folded, and Indian audiences and creators got used to Shorts and Reels. The scrappy and broadly rural culture of TikTok in India winnowed down into a more top-down influencer culture on those two platforms. India is now the biggest market for both YouTube (almost 500 million monthly users) and Instagram (362 million). 

Global competition and privacy concerns

Although the Indian userbase was a significant loss for TikTok, the company simply expanded across the world. Research shows that TikTok’s userbase essentially doubled between 2020 and 2024. And the U.S. wasn’t even the main driver of this uptick: Indonesia has the most TikTok users in the world. (Brazil, Mexico, and Vietnam also have sizable audiences.) TikTok’s current dominance across continents, and its proven ability to rebound from previous massive bans, mean that ByteDance is likely in no hurry to sell the app. Rather, it will likely simply continue its expansion abroad, and hope that America’s political situation changes. 

Meta and YouTube, meanwhile, have a huge opportunity to grow, just like they did in India in 2020. And this time, they have a huge headstart, because Reels and Shorts are already a key part of American social media. 

However, many Americans have expressed the desire for new platforms—as evidenced by the flood of TikTokers to the Chinese app Red Note over the past week. “Unless you pay Meta to promote your posts, they’re not really going to show it to people,” Christina Shuler, a South Carolina-based entrepreneur who recently signed up for Red Note, tells TIME. “And Facebook is just a bunch of angry people on there. So it was refreshing to get on Red Note and know that my content was appreciated.” 

As users search for a new landing spot, digital rights activists view these TikTok bans from a more ominous perspective. Raman Jit Singh Chima, the Asia-Pacific policy director at Access Now, says that India’s TikTok ban led to an increase in the government censorship of digital content. Over the last couple months, VPN apps have been disappearing from the country’s app stores, seemingly for not complying with local rules. “The ban has built a precedent that has allowed the Indian government to continue blocking access to more web and social media content, including very often content posted by journalists or critics of the Administration,” Chima claims.

U.S.-based activists worry that the same thing could happen following the U.S. ban, especially given that the Supreme Court upheld it, giving the green light for Congress to put pressure on other social media apps they deem dangerous going forward. Other countries may follow suit and issue their own bans, as well. “

We are disappointed to see the Court sweep past the undisputed content-based justification for the law—to control what speech Americans see and share with each other—and rule only based on the shaky data privacy concerns,” David Greene, the civil liberties director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote in a statement emailed to TIME.

source https://time.com/7208112/what-happened-when-india-banned-tiktok/

How Los Angeles Can Recover from the Wildfires: Together

The wildfires that are currently devastating Los Angeles are not just a natural disaster; they are a multi-faceted crisis that will reverberate through the city’s economic, emotional, and social fabric for years to come. Even when the flames are extinguished, their impact will remain—leaving thousands displaced, jobs lost, and a sense of stability shaken.

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As we take a collective breath to assess the damage thus far, we must ask ourselves the same question Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. posed in a time of great upheaval: “Where do we go from here?”

The L.A. wildfires have revealed fractures in our city’s systems that were already under immense pressure. This isn’t just one crisis—it’s a cascading series of crises that demand creative, multi-faceted solutions.

Here’s what we must solve together

1. The consumer-economy crisis: Before the fires, approximately 70% or more of Angelenos were already living paycheck to paycheck. This fragile reality has now collapsed for many. The service industry, which employs housekeepers, drivers, landscapers, and small business owners, has come to a screeching halt. No jobs. No income. No immediate path to recovery.
2. The cost-of-living crisis: Supply and demand have skyrocketed the cost of essentials. Hotels, rental homes, and even basic groceries are now more expensive than ever, stretching already-thin budgets to a breaking point. The cost of living in Los Angeles was 50% higher than the national average before this crisis hit my birth home city. In the short term, things will only get worse, around affordability.
3. The emotional crisis of confidence: Trust has been eroded—not just in leaders, but even in basic systems and emergency services, like an assurance that your local fire hydrant will work. People feel abandoned or unprepared, amplifying the emotional toll.
4. The “Independent Parent” crisis: Many who once prided themselves on independence are now forced to move in with children or loved ones. The emotional weight of losing that independence is difficult to quantify, but its impact is profound.

What to Do If You’re in Crisis

If you find yourself navigating this overwhelming reality, the best advice is simple: Don’t go it alone. Talk to someone who has no agenda—whether it’s a financial counselor, a trusted advisor, or a local nonprofit. These individuals can help you avoid costly mistakes.

Don’t Act on Emotion: Selling a home or making significant decisions under duress can lead to regret. Pause, seek advice, and understand your options. Don’t sell and don’t settle. Never make an emotional decision. These moments demand thoughtful, informed choices—ones that you won’t regret later. There will be a lot of predators that will emerge in these times, trying to separate survivors from their wallets.

How We Can Help Each Other

Recovery isn’t something we can achieve in isolation. This is a moment for neighbors, communities, and institutions to come together.

Help your neighbors. Consider opening your home through platforms like Airbnb—offering displaced families a safe and temporary place to stay. A simple act of generosity can be a lifeline.

Read More: How to Help Victims of the Los Angeles Wildfires

Volunteer your expertise: Organizations like Operation HOPE, in partnership with FEMA and DHS, are providing essential services through programs like HOPE Inside Disaster and tools like the Emergency Financial First Aid Kit (EFFAK). The EFFAK helps families organize critical financial documents and resources in preparation for or recovery from a disaster. We can connect skilled volunteer professionals with survivors, offering free financial counseling to navigate the complex road ahead.

We need bold, collaborative leadership to address the immediate needs and long-term systemic failures that have made this crisis so devastating.

Here’s what that looks like

1. Strengthening preparedness: All cities and communities must invest in better disaster readiness, from improving early warning systems to ensuring emergency shelters and support networks are accessible to all. All Americans should invest time in “Individual Preparedness” for potential future events including things like (1) creating a financial plan, (2) having an emergency go bag, (3) developing emergency evacuation routes and family communication plans, and (4) starting or growing an emergency savings plan (unlike the 60% of Americans who don’t have $500 for an emergency), as just a few critical steps.
2. Economic support for vulnerable workers: Targeted programs must be developed to help service industry workers and small businesses rebuild their livelihoods. This could include emergency grants, zero-interest loans, or job training for displaced workers.
3. Affordable housing initiatives: The fires exacerbated an already dire housing crisis. We must push for affordable housing reforms to ensure displaced families aren’t permanently locked out of the housing market.
4. Community-led solutions: Grassroots efforts, combined with public-private partnerships, are key to rebuilding trust and creating equitable recovery plans.

The crisis in Los Angeles is profound, but it is not insurmountable. This city has always been a beacon of resilience and re-invention and we have the tools to rise again.

But recovery will not come from waiting. Whether through generosity, expertise, or advocacy, every Angeleno has a role to play in rebuilding our city. Rebuilding won’t take days, weeks, or months but rather years and therefore we must keep our attention focused not only on the immediate but also on the medium-term and long-term needs of those impacted by the fires so that lives, businesses, and communities can come back and be even stronger and more resilient than before.

The time for action is now. And the solutions—creative, bold, and compassionate—are in our hands.

source https://time.com/7207939/la-wildfires-recovery-community/

No One Won the War in Gaza

After 15 months of agony, the potential Gaza ceasefire comes as a colossal relief not just for Palestinians and Israelis, but for the wider Middle East. True, the deal is narrow in size and scope. It covers a physical space scarcely bigger than Martha’s Vineyard. The actual terms of the first phase of the ceasefire agreement extend no farther than a pause in fighting, an exchange of some hostages and a partial Israeli withdrawal. Given recent precedent, the fragility of Israel’s ruling coalition and the yawning gap between the belligerents, this deal is just as likely to collapse, or simply to lapse, as to foster a longer-term peace. Still, even a temporary lowering of the regional heart rate allows for useful reflection.

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The modern Middle East is prone to shifting alliances and balances of power, but each turn of the kaleidoscope tends to tumble only one piece of the multicolored pattern at a go. This time, the rearrangement looks far more radical than the puny size of Gaza might have suggested. Perhaps not since the Arab-Israeli war of 1967 has the regional puzzle been so swiftly and wholly transformed. In those six days Israel conquered East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza, Syria’s Golan Heights and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, upending a two-decade-long status quo, shattering Arab dreams, expanding America’s role, and making the Jewish State an occupying power and turning millions of Palestinians into a subject people.

By contrast the Gaza crisis has lasted far longer than any previous Arab-Israeli clash. Its cost in lives has been immensely higher, too. An epidemiological study published this month in The Lancet, Britain’s top medical journal, suggests that 70,000 Gazans may have been killed so far, a grisly tally that is more than three times greater than the total number of Israelis, military and civilian, killed in all the wars and terror attacks Israel has faced since its founding in 1948. Even so, Hamas’s easy breach of Israeli defenses on Oct. 7, and Israel’s loss of 1,200 lives in a single day were an unprecedented shock to the Jewish State. But as in 1967 the reverberations of the war have reached beyond the immediate parties to Israel’s other neighbors and even more distant countries across the region, often in unexpected ways.

How so? At a dinner party in Cairo, the Egyptian capital, a guest speaks with dark sarcasm of the singular achievements of Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas mastermind behind the horrendous Oct. 7, 2023, attack that sparked the current conflagration (an Israeli drone killed Sinwar a year later). “Isn’t it amazing how one man achieved in one year what millions of people couldn’t do in decades?” she asks rhetorically, ticking off the effects. “Because of him Israel destroyed Hezbollah in Lebanon, and because of that the Assad regime fell in Syria, and because of that Iran’s ‘Axis of Resistance’ collapsed.” She pauses for effect, then adds that it is to Sinwar’s “genius” that we owe the prolonging of Benjamin Netanyahu’s political life as Israel’s prime minister, as well as the rescue of the Egyptian leader, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, from mounting debts and other troubles.

The sarcasm is merited. Each of these “successes” represents an own-goal for Hamas. The Palestinian Islamist group was allied to and funded by the now strategically diminished Islamic Republic of Iran. The Assad family in Syria were no special friends to Hamas, but Israel took advantage of their fall to obliterate Syria’s entire arsenal of heavy weapons, putting one more potential regional adversary out of military action for perhaps a generation. Netanyahu is far more popular in Israel now than before the war and the Egyptian leader, who has viciously persecuted its parent organization, the global Muslim Brotherhood, has been reprieved by Western creditors in reward for maintaining a stony silence over Gaza.

To be fair, Sinwar at immense cost to both Israelis and Palestinians did achieve some of his real aims. He put the plight of Palestinians back in the global spotlight. He undermined efforts to widen Israel’s web of treaties with Arab states, most notably Saudi Arabia. He shamed Israel, first by exposing its military incompetence and then by provoking a response so violent that it has severely damaged the country’s moral standing. But the people of Gaza are not the only ones in the region to ask, now, whether Sinwar’s gamble was worth it.

The Hamas leader’s reckless play has left Israel, as it was briefly after the 1967 war, an almost undisputed mini-hegemon in the region. Its Arab neighbours are military dwarves by comparison, and in most cases too absorbed in internal affairs to care much for the fate of the Palestinians. Iran has burned its fingers, and all that even nuclear weapons would bring is a new level of stand-off with Israel–which is in any case a rather far-off country that many ordinary Iranians do not regard as an enemy. The timely arrival in Washington of a new, even more gung-ho Israel-first administration than Joe Biden’s, which bankrolled Netanyahu’s Gaza offensive to the tune of $17.9 billion, simply underlines Israel’s military dominance.

But as in 1967, Israel’s triumph comes loaded with unwanted responsibilities. Back then, wise Israelis counseled that to remain an occupying power over an understandably angry people was not only morally repugnant, but could erode Israel’s own society. That advice was ultimately ignored in favor of an undeclared policy of creeping annexation and colonization. The result is that today Israel rules over populations of Palestinians and of Jewish Israelis that are almost equal in number but disturbingly skewed in terms of rights and wealth and outlook. This is hardly a recipe for peaceful coexistence.

Yet because of unquestioning support from America and other Western backers, because of perpetual Arab disarray and because of its own rightward political drift, Israel has persisted in this direction. The temptation to dig the hole deeper is even stronger just now, with Gaza a smoldering ruin and all potential regional challengers cowed. Can Israel now rise to the wisdom of being magnanimous in victory? Alas, the signs are not good.

source https://time.com/7207787/no-one-won-the-war-in-gaza/