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America’s 250th anniversary has arrived, and, at a national level, the narrative is set: Presdient Donald Trump has made the semi-quincentennial into his personal party. 

The White House has rolled out a series of headline-grabbing events, from a UFC fight on the South Lawn to a failed concert series eventually replaced with — what else? — a full-fledged Trump rally. His transportation secretary called artists who decided not to perform “libtards.” 

The Great American State Fair is kind of a flop, too. And while Washington, DC, might see a record-setting fireworks display, no one knows exactly when, because it’s going to have to wait for Trump to finish his big speech on the Mall (at potentially 11 pm, or even later). 

But Trump’s vision of America doesn’t have to be how the whole country celebrates. After all, this has (kind of) happened before; America’s 1976 bicentennial under President Richard Nixon wasn’t smooth sailing either. 

Ultimately, according to MJ Rymsza-Pawlowska, a historian at American University and the author of History Comes Alive: Public History and Popular Culture in the 1970s, many of the bicentennial festivities ended up taking place at the local level, buoyed by grassroots support and a desire for a celebration that looked more like America. 

Rymsza-Pawlowska spoke with Today, Explained co-host Noel King in early June about how the bicentennial celebrations ended up the way they did, what Nixon’s original vision called for instead, and why even the most iconic national celebrations are often shaped less by official plans than by the people who take part in them.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation about America’s upcoming birthday, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Let’s dip back into the mists of time. It is 1976. America is a different country than it is today. What is the mood leading up to the bicentennial celebration of USA?

It is not dissimilar as the mood now, and it’s actually also not dissimilar as the mood in 1876. We never have an uncomplicated national commemoration, it turns out. 

In 1976, President Richard Nixon had just resigned under a cloud of scandal. He was a president who many people really, really disliked, who was accused of having an imperial presidency. We are coming out of a deeply unpopular war that had launched a lot of criticism and social movements, and Americans have been protesting for 10, 20 years. We live in a world where there have been very active social movements but where things have also changed a great deal in a short period of time.

Bicentennial planning started in 1966 when Lyndon Johnson was president. Lyndon Johnson formed the American Revolutionary Bicentennial Commission, which was the national body that was charged with planning the bicentennial. What Johnson really wanted to do is he wanted to have a commemoration that reflected his priorities for the domestic agenda, which was The Great Society. He envisioned a commemoration where the federal government would pump tons of infrastructure and resources into American cities. And the way that he wanted to do this is he wanted to have an international exposition. Several cities competed — Philadelphia finally won — and the idea is that [for] the bicentennial, the World’s Fair would be a kind of model city. It would be a showcase for all of Johnson’s domestic programs.

And then what happened? 

And then, Nixon came in in 1968, and he wanted to make it his own thing. Nixon also originally wanted an international exposition — a World’s Fair. But unlike Johnson, he was less interested in using it as an opportunity to build infrastructure and more interested in using it as an opportunity to celebrate America and Richard Nixon.

The first thing that I’ll say is that he took the American Revolutionary Bicentennial Commission, which, under Johnson, had been a nonpolitical commission. Nixon stocked it with people from his own cabinet and also his political allies. He put people in who shared his vision for the commemoration. But the thing that happened is that even when Nixon came in, he was a contentious, unpopular president. He had supporters, but he also had a lot of detractors. And the Vietnam War was intensifying. He immediately tries to do this kind of very celebratory World’s Fair. He gets a lot of pushback.

There’s an organization called the People’s Bicentennial Commission. They had a lot of support from civics teachers, and they had all these protests. And their idea was, basically, you should make the bicentennial a moment for reflection. Why don’t we try to plan a bicentennial that reflects the diversity of experience and the diversity of opinion across America?

One thing that I recall from being an American civilization major is that the 1970s were a time for everybody’s movement. It was the civil rights movement. It was the women’s rights movement. It was the Native American rights movement. These groups were calling on Nixon to complexify the plan, or to not make it so simple. Was it the same argument of, yes, America’s a great country, but it also has some problems and we need to acknowledge those?

Yes, absolutely. They were saying that a commemoration should be an opportunity to also reflect on the past, the present, and the future of America. For the American Indian movement, the thing that they said is: “This is a colonial history. This is not a history of freedom, of expanded rights — at least, not for us.”

You have President Nixon wanting to do the simple, patriotic Nixon-centric version, and you have all this pushback. What ends up happening?

The thing that’s really exceptional, and the biggest difference between 1976 and what we’re seeing now, is that the Nixon administration listens.

Part of the reason they listen is probably because they have a lot on their plate. This is all going on more or less simultaneously with Watergate. At the beginning of the Nixon administration, they had a lot more time and energy to micromanage the bicentennial. By the end, they are putting out lots of other fires. But the Nixon administration basically realizes that their vision for this kind of patriotic, celebratory, straightforward bicentennial is not flying. And so, they totally change course.

The mission totally changes. Nixon gives this speech in early 1974 when he’s announcing this new direction. And what he says is: “The bicentennial is not going to be invented in Washington, printed in triplicate by the government printing office, mailed to you by the US Postal Service, and filed away in your public library. Instead, we shall seek to trigger a chain reaction of tens of thousands of individual celebrations, large and small, planned in and carried out by citizens in every part of America.”

Wow. What does this tell us?

This is the bicentennial that we got. You had all of this grassroots energy of people really advocating for and planning their own commemorative activity that was more reflective of their experience. 

What they ended up doing is creating this new American Revolutionary Bicentennial Administration whose sole purpose was to disperse funding through the states to really hyperlocal groups — and even individuals who were planning bicentennial events — and then to publicize those events. The actual experience that most people had of the bicentennial was grassroots. a very ’70s take on commemoration.

This is very wholesome, what you’ve just described.

It is.

But it started out as a similar kind of politicized fury as what we’re seeing now.

Absolutely.

Do you think there is any chance that this heavily politicized celebration that President Trump has planned could morph into something perhaps a bit more hands across the water?

I think that in some ways it already is. 

As a public historian, as a fairly community-engaged person, I live in a world of the structures created for me by the bicentennial. One thing that happened when the bicentennial switched to kind of funding these small local projects is that a lot of small local projects and organizations were funded. And that capacity is still there. 

Your local museum probably got a new exhibit. Your library probably videotaped a bunch of people talking about what the commemoration means to them. That ethos is still there. And when I look at the kind of stuff that’s happening here in Washington, DC, for example, and in other cities where people that I work with in the public history community are involved, I see a lot of really great local projects. 

Here in DC, the public library is doing an exhibit about Washingtonians’ contributions to America. There’s a great organization called Made By Us that does these talk-back walls for people to write down what they wanna see for the next 250 years. There’s stuff; you just have to look for it.

️ Mercedes driver beats Leclerc and Hamilton to pole
️ Sprint race: Antonelli edges out Hamilton | Mail Philip

The top eight are on medium tyres, with Liam Lawson in ninth the only driver in the top 18 on softs.

Off we go on the formation lap.

Officers found body of 34-year-old man in luxury rental home in Pattaya area, local media says

A 21-year-old British woman has been arrested in Thailand after allegedly fatally stabbing her boyfriend, according to local media reports.

The Bangkok Post reported that on Thursday morning local time, officers found the body of a 34-year-old man, who operated a cannabis farm, in a luxury rental home in the Pattaya area, a beachside region two hours from Bangkok known for its large expat population and nightlife.

Palantir выложил в X пост, который журналисты быстро стали называть «манифестом». Формально это «The Technological Republic, in brief» — промо-выжимка из книги Алекса Карпа и Николаса Замиски The Technological Republic. Если перевести с языка подрядчика для армии, разведки и крупного бизнеса на обычный русский: не отдавайте свои данные поставщикам больших языковых моделей, не считайте внедрение ИИ по расходу токенов, держите у себя модели, следы работы системы и результаты дообучения.

Но важно, кто именно это говорит. Palantir вырос не из кружка любителей открытого ПО - компания продаёт софт для соединения данных, прав доступа, предметных моделей и действий оператора; сама она описывает свой рынок как решения «from the factory floors to the front lines». По годовому отчёту за 2025 год, 54% выручки Palantir пришло от государственных заказчиков, 46% — от коммерческих. Это не декоративный раздел "прочие красивые кейсы", а почти половина бизнеса.

Поэтому, когда такая компания заводит речь про «экономию на токенах», речь не о бережливости. Речь о новом слое контроля: где живут данные, кто управляет моделью, кто видит запросы, кто получает следы работы системы и кто потом становится обязательной частью всей этой конструкции.

Officers found body of 34-year-old man in luxury rental home in Pattaya area, local media says

A 21-year-old British woman has been arrested in Thailand after allegedly fatally stabbing her boyfriend, according to local media reports.

The Bangkok Post reported that on Thursday morning local time, officers found the body of a 34-year-old man, who operated a cannabis farm, in a luxury rental home in the Pattaya area, a beachside region two hours from Bangkok known for its large expat population and nightlife.

Prime minister holds no ‘personal animosity’ toward likely successor and stresses he has a platform to build on

Keir Starmer has said Labour “should go on to win the next election” under his likely successor, Andy Burnham, based on what the prime minister had already achieved.

In his first interview since he announced he would stand down, Starmer also said he held no “personal animosity” toward Burnham, who is expected to succeed him.

As workers around the world worry about being replaced by artificial intelligence, two recent studies have shown how humanity's competition and collaboration with bots in the office are evolving.

Savings plans for children born between January 2025 and December 2028 launched as president seeks electoral boost

Trump accounts, a savings vehicle named after the US president and authorized by congressional Republicans, are set to go live on Saturday, offering American parents a new way to save money for their children by investing in funds managed by major Wall Street firms.

All accounts established for children born between January 2025 through December 2028 – nearly the entirety of Donald Trump’s second term – will receive $1,000 from the government. Parents, friends and employers will be able to deposit as much as $5,000 a year into the accounts.

Exclusive: Anger at union’s decision to put 200 of its 600 staff in England at risk of redundancy

The British Medical Association is threatening to axe up to a third of its entire workforce to help it tackle a significant cash crisis.

The doctors’ union has placed 200 of its 600 staff in England at risk of redundancy. That has triggered anxiety and fury among staff, who have accused the BMA of appalling behaviour and “hypocrisy”.

Prime minister holds no ‘personal animosity’ toward likely successor and stresses he has a platform to build on

Keir Starmer has said Labour “should go on to win the next election” under his likely successor, Andy Burnham, based on what the prime minister had already achieved.

In his first interview since he announced he would stand down, Starmer also said he held no “personal animosity” toward Burnham, who is expected to succeed him.

Как сделать Shorts или сгенерировать видео Reels без долгих часов съемок и монтажа? Разбираем топовые ИИ для создания коротких видео из фото и текста с музыкой, выбираем нейросеть для генерации на русском языке. Актуальные лимиты, фишки и гайд на 2026 год.

В конце 90-х французская Alcatel выпустила One Touch Pocket — компактный телефон, рассчитанный на деловых пользователей. Помимо звонков, аппарат позволял работать с контактами, органайзером и модемом — в эпоху зарождавшегося мобильного интернета это выглядело современно.

Сегодня One Touch Pocket уже воспринимается как любопытный артефакт своего времени. Тем интереснее заглянуть внутрь и посмотреть, какие инженерные решения использовали разработчики почти тридцать лет назад и чем этот телефон выделялся на фоне современников.

The Indian photographer dunked his iPhone underwater to get this shot of his pet

Rashid Sheriff’s fascination with photography and drawing originated in his school days, though “due to various limitations and circumstances, I couldn’t pursue those interests”, he says.

For the past 18 years, Sheriff, who is from Kerala, in south-west India, has been working in Qatar as an auto electrician. Smartphones, however, have allowed him to return to his passions once again.

Scholars will someday wonder how the richest country in history chose to throw it all away. But the crisis has been there since the beginning

The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence has arrived at a moment of some embarrassment for the Republic. The United States of America, established to overthrow a mad king, has elected, 250 years later, a mad king of its very own. America is setting itself on fire at its birthday party. It always had a dramatic streak.

In 30 or 40 years, scholars of history, if they exist, will want to know how the richest country in history, with the world’s most powerful alliance network, and a scientific and research capacity fuelled by the talent of the world, chose to throw it all away.

Jonathan met Sadie when she was dating his wife. Now the two women share him – but he insists that they are the ones in control

• How do you do it? Share the story of your sex life, anonymously

When he suggested we stop seeing each other because he developed feelings for me, I told him: ‘This is too special to give up’

America’s 250th birthday celebration feels like a child’s birthday party ruined by fighting between two soon-to-be-divorced parents. What should be a benign celebration of shared, if slightly boring, values has become a fully partisan affair. 

In part, this is due to the president’s determination to make it all about himself. But the agita surrounding America 250 is not just about President Donald Trump’s garish White House UFC fight or poorly attended “Great American State Fair.” It is a reflection of a deeper division: a sense that Democratic and Republican partisans seem to have two wholly different visions of what the country is and should be. With partisan division enabling a president who aspires to kingly power, attempting to celebrate the republic’s extraordinary past can feel like willfully ignoring its parlous future.

Yet amid this gloom, I found hope for the country in an unlikely source: a death. Or, more precisely, the reaction to it.

Gordon Wood was, for most of the year, the greatest living historian of the American Revolution — remaining remarkably sharp at age 92, over a decade after his retirement from Brown University. After Wood was fatally struck by a car on June 7, his death prompted an extraordinary wave of encomia from prominent figures across the political spectrum. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis mourned him, as did Wood’s former student Rep. Seth Magaziner (D-RI). The Federalist Society, The Atlantic, and the New Republic all published tributes. Libertarian magazine Reason sung his praises, as did the World Socialist Web Site.

How could a single historian, writing a topic as familiar (and ideologically contested) as the American revolution, have such wide appeal? After reading Wood’s 1991 masterwork The Radicalism of the American Revolution, I can confidently say the book is brilliant: meticulously researched and compellingly argued. It also performs a fascinating bit of ideological work: a prescient pre-bunking of recently fashionable ideas, on both the radical left and right, that paint America as an ethno-nationalist project.

Wood’s America is a country defined not by blood, but by ideas: a revolutionary commitment to equality that began hypocritically but gave rise to the first truly democratic society in the world’s history.

That so many on both right and left still find something to admire in this vision suggests that Wood’s vision is not some kind of anachronism of the pre-Trump consensus, but a potential wellspring of unity in the 250 years to come. And it’s a reminder that the ideas of the Revolution — the ones Wood showed to be so powerfully influential — still define more of the country today than we often appreciate.

The Revolution, according to Gordon Wood

The Radicalism of the American Revolution is, at heart, an attempt to understand the revolution as a truly transformative event. 

When Wood was writing, many historians argued that the Revolution — despite its name — wasn’t all that revolutionary. There was a short war; afterward, a similar set of men ran the same set of colonies, like a company after an employee buyout. No kings lost their heads; no “Year Zero” was declared. “We have,” Wood writes, “generally described the Revolution as an unusually conservative affair.” 

Wood’s book is dedicated to proving this view wrong: to show that what was declared in 1776 was not conservative small-ball, but rather “one of the greatest revolutions the world has known, a momentous upheaval that not only fundamentally altered the character of American society but decisively affected the course of subsequent history.”

One might think such a book is hagiography for the founding generation. But unlike the dime-a-dozen pop history biographies of America’s early leaders, The Radicalism of the American Revolution is keenly interested in the gaps, weaknesses, and limits of the founders’ perspective. In fact, Wood argues that democracy as we know it was an unintended consequence of their revolutionary actions — almost a more polite and productive version of the French Revolution eating its own.

Prior to the Revolution, Wood argues, the social structure of the American colonies was in many ways a “brittle” facsimile of the British motherland’s. Political power was exercised primarily by an aristocratic class, a landed gentry who made their living by controlling land rather than actual labor. These “gentlemen” had distinctive manners, modes of dress, and activities; their social inferiors literally showed them deference, through the use of titles and respectful bows, in everyday interactions.

“We will never comprehend the distinctiveness of that premodern world until we appreciate the extent to which many ordinary people still accepted their own lowliness,” Wood writes.

Most of the leading American Revolutionaries — like Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin — were either gentlemen by birth or else managed the rare feat of ascending to that rank. But they were gentlemen of particular sorts: Enlightenment rationalists, who believed that society could be effectively remolded through the application of reason, and political republicans influenced heavily by their study of classical Greece and Rome.

Wood spends quite some time defining this republican ideology, treating it as the missing link between the aristocratic past and democratic present. 

Republicanism, in his telling, rejected the essential monarchical principle that power should follow blood. It was instead a philosophy of virtue, perhaps even meritocracy: the belief that society should be organized to allow its best educated, most selfless and disinterested members to rule for the benefit of the whole. No (white male) person was intrinsically better in moral terms, but some people were better suited for political power by dint of character and training.

This is how the American Revolution’s elite could at once reject the basic monarchical principles of social hierarchy — to pen the radical words of the Declaration of Independence — while simultaneously restricting the franchise in early America to white men with substantial property holdings. Only such men, in the republican imagination, were capable of making the kinds of disinterested and virtuous choices necessary for a free society to be properly governed.

Yet this “aristocracy of virtue and talent,” as Jefferson called it, would swiftly prove unstable. Early America, marked by massive immigration and westward migration, became too large to be controlled by a small group of widely trusted elites. Economic affairs became dominated not by a handful of landowners trained to be virtuous republicans, but the growing ranks of merchants, bankers, and other such early-stage capitalists. Individual Americans, taking the idea of government by the people seriously, demanded a real role in determining their leaders.

Within 50 years of the Declaration, the republican dreams of the revolutionaries had been shattered.

Politics was not the province of an enlightened elite attempting to govern based on an ethos of disinterested neutrality, but rather a mass pastime in which different parties and factions competed to advance their own interests. The ideal of the landowning gentleman was now seen as archaic, an embarrassment in a country where working with one’s hands and building one’s own fortune were seen as the true marks of virtue. Traditional Christianity, viewed by many Founders as a form of passe superstition, was experiencing another Great Awakening. Even women and slaves had begun demanding equality. (Wood believes that it was not an accident that the first American abolitionist society was founded in 1775, on the Revolution’s eve.)

In effect, America had become something recognizably (if not fully) democratic: a society which abolished traditional aristocratic ideals of rank, and replaced them with the notion of equal citizens who rule themselves. This idea of America, that “all men are created equal,” was so powerful that even its creators could not contain it.

Indeed, Wood shows that many leading founders had, by the end of their lives, become downright pessimistic about the country they created.

“This American world was not meant for me,” Alexander Hamilton wrote his fellow founder Gouverneur Morris in 1802.

The bipartisanship of Wood’s America

The Radicalism of the American Revolution turned Wood into a superstar — one whose influence was felt in politics and popular culture.

In 1995, Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich handed out copies to his Republican colleagues. In 1997, the title character in Good Will Hunting uses his knowledge of Wood’s oeuvre to mock an obnoxious Harvard graduate student. In 2011, President Barack Obama awarded Wood the National Humanities Medal for “scholarship that provides insight into the founding of the nation.”

It’s easy to see why Wood’s vision of the American founding had such mass appeal. It is an unusually persuasive vindication of America’s national mythology: treating the Revolution as not just a petty squabble between colonists and the crown, but the single most important event in creating democracy as we know it. The book’s narrative is patriotic and capitalist in ways that appealed to the Republican right; its vision of the founding containing the seeds of social liberation for oppressed groups appealed to a left that believed in MLK Jr.’s arc of history.

Nowadays, it may seem that ascendant radicals on both the right and left have moved past Wood.

On the right, there is a growing view that Wood’s “creedal” vision of American identity — the notion that American identity is about adherence to the country’s core ideas and values — is too weak, too permissive, too woke. This view treats Americanness as a kind of ethnicity: a status gained by the historical linkages between one’s family and the land. Vice President JD Vance is the most vigorous advocate for this blood-and-soil vision of American identity, which he sees as a decisive case for the administration’s attempts to lower migration numbers.

“America is not just an idea. We’re a particular place, with a particular people, and a particular set of beliefs and way of life,” Vance said in a 2025 speech at the far-right Claremont Institute. “You cannot swap 10 million people from anywhere else in the world and expect America to remain unchanged.”

On the left, there is an idea that the United States is an essentially reactionary nation — that its original sin of slavery gives the lie to the pretty words of the founders, and in fact speaks to the nation’s truest essence. Commonly (though largely unfairly) associated with the New York Times’ 1619 Project, this view is most typically found among radical social justice activists, leftist professors, and Third Worldist socialists — people like soon-to-be Representative Darializa Avila Chevalier (D-NY), who bragged about wiping her hands on an American flag, and popular podcaster Hasan Piker.

These views are picking up on real things: the very long record of America betraying its egalitarian ideals, and the perennial discomfort many native-born Americans feel about cultural change inherent to a nation that has always been defined by immigration. Yet both depend on exaggerations and factual distortions to arrive at their dour vision of America — a point that Wood spent quite a bit of effort trying to prove in recent years.

He bitterly contested a claim in the 1619 Project’s opening essay that the Revolution was motivated in large part by a desire to protect slavery (a passage the Times ultimately toned down). One of his final published works, a December 2025 Wall Street Journal op-ed, was an extended attack on Vance’s view of American identity.

“The United States isn’t a nation like other nations, and it never has been. There is no American ethnicity to back up the state, and there was no such distinctive ethnicity even in 1776,” Wood writes. “As Lincoln grasped better than anyone ever has, the Revolution and the Declaration offered us a set of beliefs that through the generations has supplied a bond that holds together the most diverse nation history has ever known.”

One might see Wood as a relic: a believer in an antiquated patriotic vision that millennials like Vance and Chevalier have moved beyond. Data, however, tells a different story: that the overwhelming majority of Americans see their country in Wood’s creedal terms.

A recent Pell Center survey asked Americans whether they believed their country was “built on the character of the Anglo-Saxon people” or “the idea that everyone is born with rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The latter view prevailed by a massive 85–15 margin. (The ideological group most likely to pick Anglo-Saxon were, ironically enough, progressives.)

Another recent poll, from PRRI, asked respondents to rank which qualities were important to being an American. Creedal ideas, like tolerance of diversity and believing in individual freedom or the Constitution, were ranked as important by roughly 90 percent of respondents. By contrast, “being of Western Heritage” received the lowest levels of support of any listed quality (with the highest agreement this time around among Republicans).

I cannot stress enough how rare it is to get 90 percent of Americans to agree on anything political nowadays. For so many to agree on a concept that’s quite divisive among the political elite suggests that there’s something powerful about the American idea as Wood understood it— something that transcends even the bitter divisions of our moment, and speaks to the deepest essence of who most Americans believe themselves to be.

Ordinary Americans seem, in principle, committed to the core values of the founding documents: freedom, equality, and popular sovereignty. The trouble comes in how to apply them. Does freedom require a larger state or a smaller one? Does equality require race-consciousness or race-blindness? And who, exactly, is threatening democracy and how? 

These are the sorts of disagreements that fuel increasingly bitter polarization. But any effort to reconstruct a sense of national purpose, of a polity engaged in a cooperative enterprise rather than partisan warfare, will require the creedal patriotism behind the disagreements as a building block. Gordon Wood helped reveal what those founding ideals really were and why they mattered; it is up to the generations following him to make them agents of American unity once again.

Up to 30 million people expected to attend delayed events for Ali Khamenei, killed at start of war with US and Israel

Huge crowds have gathered at the funeral of the former Iranian supreme leader after the gates of the sprawling Grand Mosalla mosque in central Tehran let in thousands of mourners who had been waiting through the night to enter the grounds.

Iran is staging mass funeral processions for Ali Khamenei – whose ⁠37-year reign was brought ⁠to an ​end in February by the first airstrike of the war launched by the US and Israel. By 5.30am, the Tehran streets surrounding the mosque were already filling up as Iranians, some travelling for hours and many carrying flags or posters of Khamenei, made their way to an event designed to emphasise the country’s sense of loss at the killing of the supreme leader and desire for revenge. Emotions filled the air as the crowds chanted Death to America and Israel.

Up to 30 million people expected to attend delayed events for Ali Khamenei, killed at start of war with US and Israel

Huge crowds have gathered at the funeral of the former Iranian supreme leader after the gates of the sprawling Grand Mosalla mosque in central Tehran let in thousands of mourners who had been waiting through the night to enter the grounds.

Iran is staging mass funeral processions for Ali Khamenei – whose ⁠37-year reign was brought ⁠to an ​end in February by the first airstrike of the war launched by the US and Israel. By 5.30am, the Tehran streets surrounding the mosque were already filling up as Iranians, some travelling for hours and many carrying flags or posters of Khamenei, made their way to an event designed to emphasise the country’s sense of loss at the killing of the supreme leader and desire for revenge. Emotions filled the air as the crowds chanted Death to America and Israel.