I think Republicans are starting to worry that Democrats might pull off court expansion. That’s because this week, the Republicans forced a vote on a constitutional amendment that would cap the number of Supreme Court justices at nine.

Amending the Constitution is notoriously difficult. An amendment must pass with a two-thirds majority in both the House and the Senate, and then it must be ratified by three-quarters of the states. 

The Republicans’ court-capping proposal failed the first hurdle. All but one Democrat (Representative Don Davis of North Carolina) voted against the amendment.  

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is generally able to count. He knew, surely, that this amendment was DOA. Prior to the vote, Johnson said he wanted to put Democrats on the record about court expansion. 

Mission accomplished? A vote against a constitutional amendment capping the number of Supreme Court justices is far from a vote in favor of expanding the court. But what Johnson and his Republican colleagues may be learning is that court expansion is no longer an inherently radical or radioactive proposal. Josh Orton, president of Demand Justice (disclosure: I’m a board member) told NBC News: “What was once a fairly dramatic and fringe idea has now become mainstream because of how fed up the country has become with the [Supreme Court’s] Roberts majority.” 

Let me put it like this: Representative Jim Clyburn, a man not known for getting out ahead of his skis, proposed on Sunday to add four justices to the Supreme Court, bringing their number to 13. 

If Democrats win the House, Senate, and White House in 2028, court expansion is going to be on the table. And Republicans know it. And now they know they can’t amend the Constitution to stop it. 

The Bad and the Ugly

• While Mike Johnson failed to cap the number of justices, he did succeed at his House resolution to “condemn socialism,” whatever the hell that means. Eight Democrats joined the Republicans in this futile effort at fascist thought policing. One of those Democrats, Vicente Gonzalez of Texas, took the opportunity to sound just as intellectually vapid as the character Rob Ritchie from The West Wing, saying, “Socialism. I don’t know. I’m from the ’80s. Socialism is not a good word for us, right?” You know what else is not a good word for us? Cowardice. Why don’t you vote for a House resolution to condemn cowardice and then resign? 
• Instead of voting for stupid Republican resolutions, maybe Democrats like Don Davis and Vicente Gonzalez should just kneel before Elon Musk and offer to shine his shoes with their tongues. His Super PAC is starting up again, targeting Democrats; if these Dems can convince him that they’re really no threat to his global world order, perhaps Musk will leave them alone. 
• You know what Mike Johnson didn’t do this week? Take any measures whatsoever to safeguard the upcoming midterm elections despite a whistleblower report that the US Postal Service is rushing through Trump changes without proper procedures or testing. 
• Immigrant-rights groups sued the Department of Homeland Security over its unverified voter-registration list. This is the list that Trump wants all states to adopt, even though nobody knows how DHS came up with it or whether it’s accurate. 
• The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that possession of AI-generated child pornography is protected by the First Amendment. Umm… no. My legal analysis is “no.” I have conducted a thorough review of all relevant case law dating back to the 1215 Magna Carta and determined this is “wrong.” Somebody make this stop. Please. 

Inspired Takes

• Gloria Steinem has died. As The Nation’s Joan Walsh wrote, “There is no way to do justice to the 92 astonishing years of the incomparable feminist.” All I want to add is that Steinem made my life better. Yes, my life as a cis hetero male. I couldn’t have my career and my life without the professional women I’ve learned from, worked with, and worked for. 
• Like every progressive, I enjoyed watching Old Man Markey beat the hell out of Seth “Weaksauce” Moulton in the Massachusetts senatorial primary. John Nichols explains that this wasn’t just a feel-good progressive ass-whupping, though. Markey’s victory is a shot across the bow of the AI-tech-bro mafia. 
• This New York magazine piece from Cristian Farias is the best legal and cultural breakdown of the ongoing Nolan Wells situation. 

Worst Argument of the Week

This week the Supreme Court issued a 5–4 shadow-docket ruling that gives Donald Trump permission to move forward with the construction of his gilded ballroom. As I anticipated in an earlier newsletter, the court ruled that the National Trust for Historic Preservation lacks the standing to sue Trump to stop the construction. More distressing still, the Republican majority failed to say who, if anybody, can or will ever have standing to sue to stop the vandalism of the people’s house in the future. 

By focusing on the standing, which is the right to sue, the court side-stepped the orange elephant in the room: the fact that Trump’s ballroom construction is patently illegal. Trump did not receive authorization from Congress before knocking down public property (the East Wing) or building something new on the spot. But that doesn’t seem to matter to the court. The only question it’s interested in is whether anybody has the authority to stop him—and according to a majority of the justices, it would seem that nobody does. 

The arguments the court offered in its ruling are legally incoherent. The National Trust for Historic Preservation argued it had standing to sue under a line of past Supreme Court precedents that hold that people can sue for “aesthetic” injury: These precedents allow a conservation group to claim harm when an environmental feature (be it a building, animal, or habitat) is harmed. The Republican majority says that these past precedents still stand, but the National Trust didn’t meet the standard, because they were “merely offended” as opposed to aesthetically harmed. Does the court explain this new distinction between offense and harm? No, it does not. 

By creating a distinction without a difference, and then failing so much as to explain what that distinction might be, the court is essentially trying to give Trump what he wants (an adult rumpus room) without applying the actual law. It’s like taking your kid out for ice cream “because it’s Tuesday” without setting the precedent “on Tuesdays we go out for ice cream.” That might be an acceptable way to parent, but it’s a terrible way to run a judicial system that is supposed to treat 342 million people equally.

Admittedly, people paying attention have come to expect this kind of slavish devotion to the Trump agenda from this Supreme Court, even if it comes at the cost of the dutiful application of laws. What’s surprising about the ballroom situation is that the court’s capitulation arrived via a vote of 5–4, not 6–3. That’s because Chief Justice John Roberts noticed the hypocrisy this time and dissented. 

Roberts, uncharacteristically, excoriated his Republican colleagues for their failure to apply a long-standing precedent or to establish a new rule in its place that could be applied equally and fairly in future situations. He even laced his dissent with some snark, writing: “[I]t now is the case that ‘I want to look at a crocodile’ can adequately answer the ever critical ‘what’s it to you?’ question of Article III standing, while ‘I want to look at the White House’ cannot—no matter how distinctive the particular viewer’s interest in looking at it may be.” 

Roberts went on to quote Winston Churchill and… it seems pretty clear to me that Roberts himself is offended by Trump’s garish White House extensions. But don’t give him too much credit. Roberts’s objections in this case stand in stark contrast to all the other times he has made special rules for Trump that ignore prior Supreme Court precedents and replace them with unworkable rules. This is the same Roberts who granted Trump immunity for criminal acts committed while in office. But here he is having a nutty over the White House ballroom. Where was this Churchillian Roberts when it came time to stop the fascists from assaulting democracy? 

For me, this is more evidence of something I believe about Roberts but cannot prove: He thinks Trump is a temporary inconvenience whose worst qualities won’t be repeated by the next Republican president. His posture is to give Trump whatever he wants while he’s alive—to keep Trump from completely destroying the court’s thin veneer of legitimacy—and hope that, once Trump is dead and gone, everything will return to “normal.” Something like the ballroom offends Roberts because the damage will outlive Trump (I bet Roberts thinks Democrats are too weak and feckless to destroy the ballroom and restore the East Wing when they get a chance, and I’m not sure he’s wrong about that). In contrast, he thinks something like absolute immunity will die with Trump, because future presidents won’t actually commit crimes while they’re in office (I am sure he’s wrong about that). 

That’s just my guess about Roberts, offered from my armchair with no training in psychoanalysis. 

But maybe Roberts just really is one of those guys who likes to strap on a fanny pack and visit all the monuments in DC while boring the hell out of his kids with his stories about Howard Taft. 

What I Wrote

I’m deep in Supreme Court term preview-land. I tried to tell my editors that my preview could be one word: “Pain.” But apparently the predictive wisdom of Clubber Lang is frowned upon in this establishment. 

In News Unrelated to the Current Chaos

I’ve been too wrapped up in what is to come to have any enjoyment anymore. Like Frodo Baggins, “I can’t recall the taste of food.” 

My trepidation about the future doesn’t just come from the Supreme Court, the midterm elections, or the encroachment of fascism. It comes from darkening fall—the one that denotes the passage of time that sometimes seems to happen while you weren’t looking. I hate autumn, and not just because white people insist on putting pumpkins in places they don’t belong. It’s a time of death and decay, and as I age I always wonder more pressingly if I will make it through to see another spring.  

My youngest child is about to start middle school. The kid makes his own breakfast now and beats me at video games. When my oldest child hit middle school it was thrilling and exciting, but now that my youngest is at that stage I’m gripped with a little bit of “wait… why are things moving so fast?” 

The younger one is my “outdoorsy” kid, and this summer he’s really forced me to think a lot about the destruction of the natural world and the uninhabitable planet we’re leaving to him. I’m used to thinking of climate change as a political problem, and a legal problem, but I think watching my kid experience things we both know won’t be there for his children really brings home the apocalyptic nature of our failure to do fuck-all to stop the climate crisis. I used to think about the great historical tragedies of lost knowledge, like the burning of the library at Alexandria, with a sense of “how could those people let that happen?” Now, I know how. 

Another parent, my editor, happened to overhear her own son talking to a friend recently about all the crazy stories his grandparents had from their childhoods that he could never imagine. He’s an outdoorsy kid too, loves the natural world. When she asked him about the stories he thought he’d have to tell to his children, he smooth-called, “I’ll tell them about all the animals we got to see that no longer exist.” 

The line gutted me. Not just because it’s true, but because her kid (and my kid) knows it’s true. They know we’re living in a time of great loss. They know their parents’ generation has failed them.

***

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Until she was abruptly fired on Thursday, Maria Bartiromo had been a longtime fixture on Fox News. (Bartiromo denies she was fired, noting that she is still on contract, but the network is certainly acting as if there has been a severance.) She’s worked on the network since 2012 and at the time of her firing was the host of no less than three programs: Sunday Morning Futures, on the flagship Fox News network, as well as the daily program Mornings with Maria and the Friday evening show Maria Bartiromo’s Wall Street. On any given week, an avid Fox viewer could see her for around 16 hours. In addition to her prominence, she set the political tone for the network. Fox News has since its inception been right-wing, but few at the network could outdo Bartiromo’s servility to Donald Trump.

After Trump lost in 2020, Bartiromo was at the forefront of voicing unfounded allegations of voter fraud, which she and others at the network knew to be false. This made Bartiromo a central figure in two major lawsuits against the network launched by two voting software companies, Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic. Fox settled the Dominion suit in 2023 by acknowledging the claims of fraud by Dominion were false and agreeing to pay $787,500,000. The Smartmatic lawsuit is still ongoing.

The Dominion settlement made Fox News gun-shy. The network, even as it remains a cheerleader for Trump and MAGA, has been wary of repeating the errors that cost it nearly a billion dollars in court fees (and could still cost it more). As NPR notes, two leading Fox News personalities involved in the Dominion lawsuits have been fired over the past few years: Lou Dobbs and Tucker Carlson. A third defendant in the lawsuit, Jeanine Pirro, left Fox to work for the Trump administration.

Pirro’s trajectory is a common one. Fox has become a de facto farm team for the Trump White House. But this fusing of a propagandistic media outlet with the government raises a question: Who do Fox News stars really work for, Donald Trump or Rupert Murdoch?

Most of the time, this question is beside the point since Trump and Murdoch are almost always aligned. But the 2020 election conspiracy represents an important fissure in this alliance. Trump continues to foment conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, both as a salve for his ego and as a way to cast doubt on future election results, whether in the midterms or the 2028 general election, that might go against the GOP. Some of Murdoch’s employees such as Bartiromo share Trump’s agenda, and that puts them in tension with their boss, who cares about the bottom line of his company. Murdoch is reputedly worth more than $25 billion, but still there are only so many times he can pay off lawsuits that run to the tens of millions.

Writing in Status, Oliver Darcy offered an account of the firing that makes clear that Bartiromo was torn between two masters. In the end, she double-crossed Murdoch to stay in the good graces of Trump. The triggering incident started in July, when Trump gave a prime-time speech offering new conspiracy theories about the election. Behind the scenes, Fox News executives issued a directive telling top staffers such as Bartiromo to steer clear of the president’s new round of lies. The speech failed to make the splash that Trump expected. Then, according to Darcy:

Ultimately Bartiromo spilled the secret… divulging to the White House that Trump’s speech had received scant coverage on the channel because network bosses had ordered it so. I’m even told the text message in which Fox News brass offered their guidance was shared by Bartiromo with the White House. In doing so, Bartiromo not only effectively betrayed her employer, but also disclosed confidential company information, violating the terms of her employment agreement.

Bartiromo deserved to be fired. In truth, the real scandal is she wasn’t fired long ago. It is worth revisiting just how reckless her spreading of the election-denial lies was. As NPR noted in 2023, Fox News’ embrace of election denialism was always motivated by a crass hunt for ratings. After Fox News declared the election for Joe Biden in 2020, the network was rapidly losing viewers. Taking up the cause of election denial was a way to win back MAGA diehards. Bartiromo, in particular, elevated a letter she was given by attorney Sidney Powell that was filled with bizarre claims.

As NPR reports:

A woman who says the wind talks to her and put forth claims of election fraud in the 2020 presidential race that she admitted were “pretty wackadoodle” turns out to be a key source of allegations that Fox News presented, night after night, to millions of viewers late that fall….

The author of the memo in which Powell and Bartiromo put so much stock offered detailed and utterly false claims of how Dominion Voting Systems helped rig the election for Biden. She also shared a bit about herself, writing that she gains insights from experiencing something “like time-travel in a semi-conscious state.”…

“Who am I? And how do I know all of this?… I’ve had the strangest dreams since I was a little girl,” the woman wrote in the email shared by Powell with Bartiromo and [Lou] Dobbs. “I was internally decapitated, and yet, I live.”

This e-mail was genuinely deranged, yet Bartiromo and other Fox anchors treated it as if it were credible. Furthermore, at the time senior Fox executives discussed amongst themselves the fact that the e-mail was unreliable. They knowingly allowed falsehoods to be aired, spurring not just conspiracy theories but also providing the ideological rationale for the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Bartiromo should have been fired the first time she went on air with the ludicrous claims of the e-mail. All those who went along with her lies should have been fired, too. But the network kept Bartiromo on air because of the ratings she brought in and because of her valuable connection with Donald Trump.

The firing of Bartiromo has nothing to do with accountability. It’s motivated by expedience, a way to limit the risk of future lawsuits. Fox has yet to have a real reckoning with its corrupt disregard for the truth.

It is hard to imagine the world without Gloria Steinem, who died on September 2 at the age of 92. For over half a century, she defined American feminism, much as many feminists, including herself, wished the media didn’t make one woman with long hair and aviator glasses the public face of a movement of millions. She was adored, attacked, and also envied, most famously by Betty Friedan, who accused her of diluting the movement’s focus and seeking celebrity. (Seeking celebrity? As we would say now, you say that like it’s a bad thing.) As Rebecca Traister says, she was the great popularizer. And lord knows, feminism needs to be popular.

The second wave gets a bad rap these days—dour, puritanical, essentialist, man-hating, racist—much of it undeserved. Gloria was the antidote: She was witty, fun-loving, free-spirited, warm, sexy, glamorous, and, of course, beautiful. She lived a big life—she wrote 11 books and spent years on the road as an “itinerant organizer”—and she lived it on her own terms.

Did she say some foolish things, things that haven’t aged well? Of course. Anyone who lives as much in the public eye as Gloria did is bound to misspeak unless they are a robot or a Trappist monk. The day her obituary went up at The New York Times I got a call from a reporter who was writing about Gloria’s famous gaffe on Real Time with Bill Maher in 2016. Young women, said this strong Hillary supporter, were for Bernie Sanders because “that’s where the boys are.” (Trust the media to seize on a rare sexist remark from a feminist while passing over the many much worse comments from sexist men like, for example, Bill Maher.) Here’s what she wrote to me when I e-mailed her at the time:

What I was thinking sitting there was that both young women and young men gravitate toward each other, and here, for a shared reason—Bernie makes an economic message like that of Occupy—but Bill cut me off to make a joke, with a line from the song, “Where the boys are”—I said no twice, that wasn’t what I meant, I even said, “how well do you know me?” Also I had just said that young women are very activist, mad as hell about what’s happening to them, graduating in debt but averaging a million dollars less over their life time to pay it back. 

Altogether, it’s clear to me that this generation of young women are far more activist and feminist than mine was.

Don’t go on Bill Maher is the moral of that story.

Sisterhood, the idea that women, qua women, have anything in common, is out of fashion, to put it mildly. The movement sometimes seems to be devouring itself in ideological battles that are sometimes mostly covert bids for power within organizations. Yet sisterhood was Gloria’s guiding principle and the premise of her politics. She really believed that women, despite their differences of race, class, age, and so on, could work together and learn from each other to make a better fairer life for all women, and for men as well. She organized by welcoming people into the movement—feminists from all over the world, young women, activists, and writers of every age. She connected people: Back in the ’80s, when a bunch of us were sitting in the airport waiting for our flight to Dubrovnik for a conference of the newly founded Network of East-West Women (shoutout to Ann Snitow, its cofounder, tireless organizer, and guiding spirit), who should show up at the last minute but a young woman pushing a dolly holding a gift from Gloria—several boxes of books by her friend Alice Walker.

It must have been hard for Gloria to watch the Trump administration trample on women’s hard-won gains—most obviously the undoing of the constitutional right to abortion, but also the dismantling of the architecture of legal protection for women’s rights, and the general license given sexist speech and behavior over the two Trump administrations. Yet she remained hopeful. One advantage older women have right now is that they remember what life used to be like when women needed their father’s or husband’s signature to get credit, marital rape was legal, and divorce was hard to get, lesbians and unfaithful wives lost custody of their children, whole categories of work were effectively barred to women—including Steinem’s own field of journalism—and basically the whole world told women to shut up, get married, and have babies.

In her last essay, published by The New Yorker, Gloria wrote: “As I write this, the world seems in a tailspin. Many feel that all the progress we’ve made is being reversed. When you’re lucky enough to have lived a long life, as I have done, your role as an older person is to remind us how far we have come.”

Gloria never forgot what life was like before, and what the women’s movement accomplished in, historically speaking, a shockingly short period of time. We did it before, so why not again? Perhaps in the answer is the secret of her hopefulness.

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

In early 2024, as the presidential election season heated up and Donald Trump’s antidemocratic language intensified, two alumni of the Washington power structure began publishing a series of memos titled “Dancing in the Dark” in The Washington Spectator.

The authors were Mark Medish, an attorney who served as a special assistant to the president, a senior director at the National Security Council, and a deputy assistant to the secretary of the US Treasury under President Bill Clinton; and Joel McCleary, who was a deputy assistant to the president during the Carter administration.

In the lead-up to the 2024 election, Medish and McCleary published three long essays detailing ways in which Trump and the MAGA movement were corroding democratic norms. Then they went quiet. Two weeks ago, the duo re-emerged with an alarming new essay, “It’s the Power, Stupid: Dancing in the Dark, Part 4.”

The warnings in Medish and McCleary’s latest essay are stark. They center around the possibility that a cornered, wrathful Trump—enabled by supine leadership in the Justice Department, the Pentagon, and other key departments of government, as well as by GOP leadership in Congress—could declare a national emergency in the run-up to and aftermath of the midterm elections. Their fear is that, if he does so, he might then activate the highly secretive, Cold War era Presidential Emergency Action Documents (PEADs), authored to ensure continuity of the government following a nuclear attack, in an attempt to suspend the constitutional order.

PEADs exist outside of the regular legislative and legal framework of the country. Drafted by a series of White House lawyers from the Eisenhower presidency onward, they are, by definition, extra-constitutional. Congress isn’t looped in on their specifics; few attorneys within government, outside of a handful at the epicenter of White House power, are thought to have seen them; only a select few cabinet members, including the vice president, the defense secretary, the national security director, and the head of the CIA, are thought to have access to them; and those who do are forbidden to even acknowledge their existence. “They’re in a weird category of executive legal authority,” Medish told me. “The way to think about this is a set of contingency plans, in effect draft orders based on contingency scenarios—what should the president do in order to maintain continuity of government?”

Over the past several decades, according to those who have studied this shadowy world, the Department of Defense has spent billions of dollars out of secret, black-budget funds, building up an infrastructure to implement PEADs and other continuity-of-government measures should an emergency situation arise. Much of this was done, McCleary alleges, at the direction of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld during the War on Terror, although the mechanisms for mass incarceration of political dissidents were worked out earlier, especially during the Reagan administration, under an operational plan known as Rex 84, when national-security officials strategized how to respond should there be a mass uprising against US interventions in Latin America. Today, under the National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7) directive, the FBI and other agencies, in conjunction with Big Tech and other purveyors of surveillance infrastructure, are investigating large numbers of political dissidents and critics.

“There’s a pretty firm belief that detention is strongly in these PEADs,” McCleary told me, choosing his words carefully. “This thing would move pretty quickly.”

As a result of their potential impact, these draft orders—at one point presumably kept under lock and key in the White House, nowadays probably maintained in highly secret digital files—have become as totemic and mysterious a symbol of presidential power as the nuclear football. He who has access to the nuclear codes can order the destruction of the world; he who has access to the PEADs—and can convince security forces that these PEADs are in fact genuine and legitimate and that orders to implement them should be followed even if they place the implementers in violation of the law—can order a sudden upending of America’s 250-year constitutional system of governance. In the hands of a man like Trump, facing a calamitous rejection from the electorate, such orders, if followed through on by law enforcement, security agents, and the military, could do untold damage to American democracy.

Both Medish and McCleary believe the warning signs are flashing red that Trump could attempt to subvert the mechanisms of, and confidence in, the midterm voting process over the next two months—what Medish called, in a Freedom Watch Media presentation this week, “pre-delegitimizing the election.” Then, if the Republicans still lose, they believe that between November and January Trump could attempt to prevent the counting of votes, order the seizure of ballot boxes, try to invoke the Insurrection Act, invoke “commander-in-chief powers” domestically, and, if all else fails, use PEADs in an effort to take control of the electoral process and stifle dissent. “It’s a question of connecting the dots,” Medish said to me. “This is the devil’s accordion.”

Medish and McCleary worry that Trump could use PEADs to attempt to silence critics in the media and other institutions and to order the detention of political opponents and those considered “terrorists” under the expansive language of NSPM-7. They are deeply concerned that the Department of Homeland Security and agencies such as ICE have built an incarceration infrastructure that could be flipped from being targeted at immigrants to also being used against the regime’s political opponents. “These are extreme scenarios,” Medish said. “But knowing all we know about this presidency, it would be naïve to completely discount extreme scenarios and desperate acts.”

At the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program, senior director Liza Goitein also thinks it possible that Trump will invoke a national emergency and then attempt to use that declaration to attack the election process. There are, she says, 137 provisions in federal laws that could be activated in the event of his declaring a national emergency in addition to the PEADs that exist outside the legislative framework. Goitein does, however, believe that the courts would intervene to strike down patently unconstitutional actions, even in the context of a declared national emergency. The Supreme Court could do this without weighing in on whether Trump was correct in declaring the emergency in the first place. That, she says, is how the Supreme Court has reacted in the four cases, including tariff implementation, in which Trump’s actions occurred within the context of a declared national emergency. In each of those cases, the Supreme Court ruled that the laws Trump was relying on didn’t in fact give him the powers that he was claiming. As a consequence, Goitein remains cautiously optimistic that, despite Trump’s best efforts, free and fair elections will take place in November, that “people who have a vested interest in defending democracy are ready to defend the legal right to vote,” and that courts will rapidly swat down moves to attack that right.

Medish and McCleary are far less confident that the courts will hold. They told me that they are penning these warnings now not to instill a sense of fatalism or despair, but so that a) politicians and elections officials can approach the coming months with eyes wide open; and b) the populace as a whole can more fully understand the stakes and how important it is to deliver Republicans an electoral defeat so large that it becomes politically impossible for the administration to activate PEADs or other emergency powers to do an end run around the GOP and Trump’s humiliation.

The public’s role in this is critical since Trump, Medish explained, could argue that in a national-emergency situation (defined largely by himself), he needs to activate previously unused executive powers to protect the homeland, “and to do that, he’s going to need to suspend statutes, due process rights, and so forth. It’s analogous to Lincoln and the suspension of habeas corpus.” At that point, worries Medish, all the power resides with the executive. “They basically say, ‘Sue me, take it to court,’” and the courts then spend so long deliberating over it that by the time judges reach decisions, the damage—in this case to the election process—has already been done. “The courts have a huge difficulty stopping executive action on national security in real time.”

And, Medish and McCleary say, if the courts can’t stop Trump and the GOP-led Congress won’t stop him, that places the burden on an aroused and enraged public to push back against Trump and his instincts to declare an emergency so as to preserve his hold on power. To vote as if the future of their democracy depends on it. And to be willing to protest, even to engage in civil disobedience, should Trump arrogate extraordinary powers to himself. “Look, we are in a difficult situation,” McCleary concluded. “People understand how dangerous it is, but they don’t understand all the elements of the danger.”

It’s been slow coming, but news coverage of climate change may at last be turning a corner. For years, reporting on climate-related disasters—the superstorm Hurricane Helene that blasted the southeastern US in 2024, the mega-fires that torched Los Angeles in 2025, the record heat that has scorched Europe and Asia in 2026—rarely mentioned the term “climate change,” despite overwhelming scientific evidence linking such extreme events to human-caused global heating. This week, however, even formerly reticent news outlets are making the climate connection clear in their coverage of the deadly flooding in Nepal, where more than 1,100 are confirmed dead and an additional 4,000 are missing.

More of these disasters are sure to follow: Even with unprecedented emissions reductions, global temperatures will rise to at least 1.8 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the UN Environment Programme announced yesterday. As rising temperatures melt more glacial ice, “we can expect more and more of these events, a greater frequency, a greater magnitude,” said Alton C. Byers of the University of Colorado, Boulder, during a Covering Climate Now live conversation on the Nepal floods.

Meanwhile, The Guardian, Agence France-Presse, The New York Times, the Associated Press, Bloomberg, Deutsche Welle, and other outlets whose reporting has long reflected established climate science are suddenly no longer outliers. The shift is particularly striking among US television networks, whose climate coverage had declined by 35 percent during the first year of Donald Trump’s second term.

NBC News did not mince words in an August 28 report, with graphics that spelled out the climate connection: “Past 60 Years: Glacial Loss Increased 4X” and “Glaciers Less Stable Worldwide From Melting.” Even CBS News has noted, more than once, the climate connection to the Nepal disaster. (This despite a president, Bari Weiss, who has fired the entire CBS News climate unit, derided climate change in newsroom meetings as “woke,” and intervened to push the network’s reporting to the right on a range of topics, above all Israel.) Referring to the “glacial burst” that triggered the gargantuan flood that swept away buildings, roads, and bridges, CBS Evening News stated on August 26 that “experts believe this is linked to climate change.” On August 31, CBS’s morning news show interviewed scientist Daniel Swain while graphics broadcast to viewers: “Climate Change Impacting Extreme Weather Events, Shifting Global Sea Levels, Ecosystems, and Human Health.”

The Nepal coverage has demonstrated the importance of public officials speaking plainly, thus giving journalists a peg to make the climate connection to extreme events. Each of the Big Three US networks, CNN, the BBC, and other international news organizations headlined the statement by Nepal’s foreign minister, Shisir Kahnal, blaming the floods on global warming. Days later, Kahnal said that Nepal is demanding compensation from the world’s biggest emitters.

Such high-profile coverage predictably irritated the tiny but noisy band of bots and cherry-picking blowhards who still deny climate change. The opinion section of The Wall Street Journal, which has disparaged climate science since the 1990s, published an article on August 28 that studiously avoided engaging with the actual scientific expertise other outlets had cited. Instead, it accused “the Western media” of rushing to judgment by embracing its “all-purpose explanation for everything: climate change.” 

The Journal’s accusation was hardly more persuasive than that of an online conspiracy theorist who tried to blame the Nepal floods on a research project in Alaska. The fact-checking unit of AFP, which delivers news to thousands of news outlets and government offices worldwide, quickly slapped down that absurdity: “AFP has repeatedly debunked claims that the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) is to blame for extreme weather events, and scientists say manipulation cannot cause floods of this magnitude—instead pointing to human-caused global warming.”

Why the Nepal disaster has called forth more plainspoken climate coverage than usual is, at this point, unclear. The availability of stunning videos showing the awesome size, speed, and force of the floods was doubtless a factor. But that can’t be the sole explanation; the images of Helene’s ferocious winds and of Los Angeles hillsides engulfed in flames were no less eye-catching. Yes, the link between higher global temperatures and melting glaciers makes intuitive sense, but is it any more intuitive than the connection between higher temperatures and the extreme heat that has killed 35,000 people and counting in Europe this summer?

In any case, the question now is where climate coverage goes from here. Nepal’s floods are a textbook illustration of the stark injustice at the heart of the climate story: The people who did the least to cause the problem tend to be the ones who suffer the first and worst. As Bill McKibben noted on his Substack, The Crucial Years, “on average, Nepalis produce about four-tenths of a ton of carbon emissions annually, compared with about 14 tons for an American.”

At the COP28 UN climate summit in 2023, the world’s governments operationalized a Loss and Damage Fund to compensate victims of climate disasters. Contributions have been paltry, but The Nation reported this week that the fund’s board of governors was discussing whether to make an inaugural donation to Nepal as a symbol of why the fund needs to be fully capitalized. As journalists and newsrooms prepare to cover the COP31 summit in Turkey this November, the long-standing debate around climate loss and damage deserves our focused attention.

Nepal’s floods also highlight another aspect of the climate story: Who is responsible for all those losses, and who should pay for the damages? To date, most reporting has trod lightly on these questions, even though a handful of investigative exposés have made clear who the chief culprits are. “A 1981 internal memo written by the director of one of Exxon’s science labs said it was ‘distinctly possible’ that cumulative carbon emissions could eventually ‘produce effects which will indeed be catastrophic (at least for a substantial portion of the earth’s population),’” author Jeff Goodell pointed out the day after the Nepal floods. 

Exxon and other companies hid that science for decades, instead pressing for ever-increasing fossil fuel production and consumption. If holding power to account is a core duty of journalism, then connecting the dots between Big Oil and the Nepal floods—and other coming disasters that Big Oil’s delaying tactics have made inevitable—is a good place to start.

Since last week, Twitch streamer Hasan Piker has been the target of a sustained rhetorical carpet-bombing from across the political spectrum: Democrats, Republicans, Fox News, and MS NOW. Piker had few fans in those quarters to begin with, but after campaigning with Michigan Democratic US Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed in his primary race, he’s become the poster boy for left-wing division and antisemitism.

El-Sayed had hoped to take advantage of Piker’s estimated multi-platform audience of 11.5 million young leftists to expand his base, but now he’s facing a contingent of Piker haters that appears to be at least as large. It’s a big problem for El-Sayed, who only won the primary vote by 0.9 percent. He needs to build a coalition of centrist and left-wing Democrats and independents to defeat Republican Mike Rogers, who’s also using attacks on Piker to sow doubts among El-Sayed’s more Israel-friendly voters.

Piker spends seven to eight hours a day live on Twitch, talking mainly left-wing politics and gaming. He has a shock-jock mentality and considers his platform an outlet for comedy and political satire, a self-described “Rush Limbaugh for Zoomers.” He’s also stridently anti-Israel and anti-Zionist—which means that he provides a goldmine of opposition research in a Michigan race where centrist voters could play a decisive role. He stans authoritarians like Mao Zedong and has worn a Mao jacket to speaking events. In the course of his marathon streaming monologues and online appearances, he’s announced that “America deserved 9/11,” “I hate America,” and that “in a totally just world, regardless of your background, any kind of fucking Zionist tendency should be treated in the same way as being a fucking rabid neo-Nazi.”

By Piker’s lights, simple support for the existence of a Jewish state alone—i.e., Zionism—is tantamount to fascist terror. Whatever boost he gave El-Sayed quickly evaporated, with the candidate now struggling to keep his campaign on-message amid a steady barrage of Piker attacks. So far, he’s failed, as the Piker-dominated news cycle continues to roll on.

Piker is what’s known as a dirtbag leftist—a term coined in 2016 by Chapo Traphouse co-host Amber A’Lee Frost. Dirtbag leftists include incivility, vulgarity, and a bright and shining mean streak in their political toolkit as rhetorical weapons to be used from the left; they represent the hardest of all possible passes on Michelle Obama’s dictum “When they go low, we go high.” Piker, Chapo, TrueAnon, The Baffler, and a legion of funny, often mean-spirited social media accounts like Dril have all lent currency to the dirtbag turn in left political discourse. On the right, meanwhile our dirtbag troll-in-chief, President Donald Trump has blithely steamrolled most standards of respectable expression; indeed, El-Sayed’s plight stems from his determination to put meaningful distance between himself and Piker’s statements, a move that Trump has never adopted in reference his own vast army of extremely online hatemongers.

When Obama suffered his own Fox smears over birtherism, tan suits, Jeremiah Wright, George Soros, and Saul Alinsky, he always maintained his dignity and refused to give his trolls the satisfaction of rising to the bait. Still, in the end, Obama did cut Wright loose and produced his long-form birth certificate. Republicans learned that bullying works—and so did the dirtbag left.

Piker is hardly the first dirtbag leftist recruited by a Democratic politician to expand a left-leaning base of support, have a better understanding of online culture, and perhaps lend some youthful edge to a campaign’s tone. And it’s hardly the first time the association has blown up in a politician’s face. In 2020, Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign frequently spent time and resources coping with the fallout from the harassing online behavior of many of his dirtbag followers. His focus on class issues and general indifference to identity politics gave the impression he largely did not care what they said. At a Las Vegas debate that February, Senator Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg called him out for it. “99.9 percent of them are decent human beings,” Sanders said of his supporters, “And if there are a few people who make ugly remarks, who attack trade union leaders, I disown those people.” 

Sanders got his chance to disown one a few days later. The Daily Beast’s Scott Bixby outed Ben Mora, a Bernie regional field director in Michigan who ran an anonymous dirtbag account. Anonymously, Mora called Senator Elizabeth Warren a “dumb Okie” and said she looked like “an adult diaper fetishist.” He wrote that Senator Amy Klobuchar looked like “that optical illusion where it’s an old lady but also a young woman depending on how you look at it but with her it’s just two different old ladies.” Mora, who is gay, said Pete Buttigieg “is what happens when the therapist botches your conversion,” and also that he could “never trust buttigieg because he combined the natural devious disposition inherent in gay men with a bloodthirsty careerist drive.”

Mora was hardly the reason Bernie Sanders lost, but he gave Sanders’s opponents a direct link between the candidate and his unruly online army of “Bernie bros.” It added up to several lost news cycles and a vindication of Sanders’s critics when his campaign could ill afford such setbacks. Whether Mora was intentionally using vulgar humor as a political weapon, or just a compulsive shitposter, he just couldn’t help himself. Today he’s hosting an online game show where judges roast the interior design of people’s apartments.

In 2023, about three weeks after the October 7 attack in Israel, the same online blowback happened in Los Angeles, when someone at the True Anon podcast Twitter account and one-time comedian Josh Androsky went after comedian Amy Schumer. She had circulated a series of ultra-Zionist, enraged tweets over the massacre that culminated in her re-posting of a racist, anti-Palestinian political cartoon that blamed all Gazans for the October 7 atrocities. Androsky and True Anon responded with Holocaust and fat jokes that amounted to a dirtbag Statler and Waldorf heckling of Schumer.

True Anon: The Nazis named a concentration camp after her. It was called Da Cow.

Androsky: It’s f–ked up that you would say this about her when you know it was actually Cowschwitz.

Androsky was not hosting an edgelord podcast or using an anonymous account; he used his real name. At the time, he worked as a senior political consultant for LA City Councilman Hugo Soto-Martinez. Androsky quickly found out that mainstream Democrats like LA Mayor Karen Bass and Soto-Martinez don’t actually like it when they get linked to Holocaust gags and fat jokes aimed at a Jewish comedian whose uncle was the Democratic minority leader of the Senate. Androsky resigned. If he’s worked in politics since, he’s kept it pretty quiet. Like Mora, his last public credit appears to be a comedy-adjacent online project, this one produced by Chapo Traphouse.

You just can’t take these kids anywhere. That’s what El-Sayed has learned as Piker rapidly became a major liability in his general election race.

Do Republicans get judged like this? They did once—but then Trump got elected, and they learned that unlike Democrats, their voters don’t actually care about racism, religious bigotry, or extremism in their ranks. Just last week, The Washington Post reported this week that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth hired a secret social media team to enhance his public image. On the team: Kurt Schlichter, who once got into an online feud with the Auschwitz Museum Twitter account about who would qualify as a “good” or “bad” Jew in a concentration camp. In August 2021, he also tweeted out a thread that included: “For too long red state conservatives have offered to live and let live with blue state liberals but the blues are evangelical Marxists who cannot allow us to provide a counter example of freedom.” And then: “So, no more. We must, by any means necessary, force them to be like us. No quarter. No compromise.” He could go harder in this vein as a Hegseth recruit, but in a Department of Defense that is rapidly disappearing all sign of dissent and anyone not white, male, hetero, or clean-shaven, he would only get promoted.

The only real question arising from Hegseth’s troll offensive was why he had bothered to keep his media team a secret. It certainly wasn’t out of any fear that the Schlicters in its ranks would damage his political future: As Hegseth floats the idea of a 2028 presidential run, he likely calculated that he could be see as trying to overshadow his boss—and that might be the one thing that could finally get him fired.

Republicans just don’t care about anything like this. Trump has given them a license to shrug off bigots in their midst, since many of them—from Candace Owens and Laura Loomer to Curtis Yarvin and Nick Fuentes—have found that their strident bigotries only win them more clout in the MAGA movement. Senator Ted Cruz now regularly attacks Tucker Carlson for antisemitism—but only after Carlson roasted him about Cruz’s badly informed jingoism in backing the war in Iran. Another MAGA-aligned antisemite, Dan Bilzerian, was roundly trashed by Republicans like House Speaker Mike Johnson and Ambassador Mike Huckabee, but that wasn’t a battle for whatever might remain of the soul of the Republican Party. They called Bilzerian out because he dared to primary Republican Randy Fine—himself no slouch in delivering right-wing edgelord rhetoric—and they wanted Bilzerian to lose. These days the burden of doing the right thing falls squarely, and only, on the Democrats.

Another case in point: Last March, El-Sayed delivered a heartfelt statement denouncing the attack on Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan. A Lebanese man, Ayman Muhammed Ghazil, targeted the synagogue after his brother Ibrahim Muhammed Ghazil—a Hezbollah commander—had been killed by the Israeli military; security guards killed Ghazil outside the temple. Following up his original comments, El-Sayed said of Ghazil, “Hurt people hurt people.” 

That might seem like a fairly anodyne sentiment, but El-Sayed delivered it the day after the attack, which appalled many in Michigan. And the fallout from that four-word aside continues—thanks once more to Piker, who observed in a mid-August broadcast that “if Jews in America keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone’s going to come around and take action—not against the State of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews.” 

Piker was not in any way threatening Jews himself; he was warning Zionist Jews that their views would provoke people who would. But his broadside gave new life to the age-old trope that Jews bring their own oppression on themselves. Variations of it have come from Richard Wagner, Father Charles Coughlin, Hitler, FDR, and Roald Dahl.

In Piker’s twist on this victim-blaming tradition, Zionist Jews bring persecution on themselves because they won’t disavow Israel. When you view this de facto demand to scuttle Zionist sympathies—at the price of prospective personal harm—alongside Piker’s claim that simply believing Israel should exist equates you with “a fucking rabid neo-Nazi,” you begin to see how Piker makes people who have recently been the subject of antisemitic violence in Michigan and all over the country a bit nervous. 

It’s that quote that made El-Sayed particularly vulnerable, especially when lined up with his “hurt people hurt people” comment, which sought to find as much understanding and empathy for the attacker as it does the victim. El-Sayed was on defense for days, until he made a heartfelt apology this past weekend for his Temple Israel comment.

Previous skeptics, like Michigan Democratic State Senator Jeffrey Moss, who has held off from endorsing El-Sayed, saw it as sincere and productive. El-Sayed won’t completely kick Piker to the curb, Jeremiah Wright–style, as his critics keep demanding, but he makes it clear that no one speaks for his campaign but himself. And he now pointedly refers to his former campaign ally as a “streamer from California.”

For his part, Piker, did not react to this past week’s media frenzy with El-Sayed’s damaged campaign in mind. He did not say “I could have phrased that better,” or that “in America everyone should be free to speak their mind without fear of violence.” No, he went on the attack on X.com. When a fan tweeted graphics paired with the condemnations of his Democratic critics and a suggestion that their pile-on was cynically coordinated and organized, Piker quoted the claim in a retweet, adding:

aipac boss call was made. they are unanimous in their hatred of me, and i welcome their hatred. if you’re a defender of israel’s genocide, of its occupation, of its child killing spree – then your boos mean nothing to me.

That comment neatly illustrated the limits of dirtbag leftist rhetoric in the context of a campaign. Invoking the specter of AIPAC as the puppeteer of Democratic leadership not only continues reinforcing antisemitic tropes; it also plays to a conspiratorial mindset that further hamstrings general-election appeals in a state like Michigan. Piker can afford to say that he welcomes the hatred of his attackers. He’s a self-employed streamer whose social-media harangues play to his terminally online audience.

But El-Sayed, coming off the narrowest of primary victories, can’t afford to welcome the hatred of the leaders of his party—he needs their support and endorsements to win. Piker’s also called Michigan Congresswoman Hillary Scholten “an Israel 1st” candidate and shamed her about a false rumor that she was having an affair with a Republican. He also went into full Ben Shapiro Debate Me! mode when he challenged El-Sayed’s Republican rival Mike Rogers to appear on his show.

All that should matter to leftists and Democrats alike is winning the midterms and getting El-Sayed into the US Senate. Piker is and always will be at heart a dirtbag leftist; and true to form, he isn’t capable of shutting up and getting out of El-Sayed’s way. If campaigns like El-Sayed’s calculate that building a younger leftist base entails outsourcing part of their messaging to performative edgelords like Piker, they shouldn’t be surprised when normie voters, resistance liberals, and centrists start to run in the opposite direction.

There is no way to do justice to the 92 astonishing years of the incomparable feminist Gloria Steinem, who died at home, surrounded by friends, Wednesday night. I knew she had been weakening, and yet I still regularly heard of her meeting with women leaders and helping anyplace and anytime she could.

Most recently, I got invited to a small New York reception with Minnesota Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan and actor-activist Jane Fonda, that I hoped might include Steinem. Flanagan slipped over to Steinem’s home early for a private meeting with the Ms. founder and Fonda. That was Steinem, I thought: always making time for new women leaders, in this case the 46-year-old progressive who will become the first Native senator if she is elected in November.

Today, social media has been full of women, young and old, of every race, posting photos with Steinem taken over the last few years. She had not been well; I hadn’t seen her in a little while. But if you had a feminist book out, a documentary, a cause, or if you were a woman running for a major office, Steinem made time for you.

The author, organizer, feminist and friend to so many grew up, struggling, in East Toledo, Ohio, caring for her ill mother. It made her a many-splendored feminist, a gorgeous woman who traveled in elite circles but championed the working class, the vulnerable, women who weren’t white, and women who weren’t straight. (Her AOL e-mail name was EastToledo; whenever that address graced my inbox, I felt thrilled.) Caring for her mother, Steinem didn’t finish a full year of school until the sixth grade but was a voracious reader. She eventually followed her sister Suzanne to Smith College, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa. 

Steinem ultimately wrote 11 books and in addition to founding Ms. she was a cofounder of New York magazine, along with Clay Felker, who also backed Ms. Felker famously told a reporter he gave Steinem her first assignment because she had “great legs.” Cataloguing the list of sexist slurs, sometimes dressed up as compliments, that she suffered is not worth my time or yours. She mostly got over them.

Steinem often said she was awakened to the feminist cause by covering a meeting of women discussing their illegal abortions. She’d had one herself in 1957, in England. The experience of listening to what these women suffered for what would later (until the Dobbs decision) be a right led to her famous essay, “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation.” She was one of the first prominent white feminists to make a point of reaching out to and including Black women, from Flo Kennedy to Dorothy Pitman Hughes to Alice Walker to the legendary Rep. Shirley Chisholm, for whom she was a delegate to the 1972 Democratic presidential nominating convention.

On the other hand, Steinem drew a lot of criticism for supporting Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama for president in 2008, and writing in The New York Times that gender was a greater barrier than race in running for president. “What worries me is that she is accused of ‘playing the gender card’ when citing the old boys’ club, while he is seen as unifying by citing civil rights confrontations,” she wrote. Like Steinem, I supported Clinton in 2008; and in 2016 we were united behind her again. That year, Steinem made a rare stumble by suggesting young women were supporting Bernie Sanders because “that’s where the boys are,” an error she was led into by non-feminist Bill Maher during an appearance on Real Time but for which she fervently apologized. (There were some sympathetic e-mails between me and “EastToledo” in those years.)

Maybe it seems odd that the woman who wrote “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation” in 1969 would support Clinton over Obama roughly 40 years later. Not to me. I would later wonder if I’d been on the wrong side in that race, and of course Steinem and I would fervently support Obama in 2008 and 2012. But the obstinacy of gender barriers, the enduring double standards facing women politicians, and lately the absolute erosion of women’s rights have made me understand even more deeply her frustration with the way women supporting Clinton “were seen as biased if they did and disloyal if they didn’t.” Since then, Steinem (and I) have supported another woman for president, Vice President Kamala Harris; since then, we have been disappointed again.

Also since then, Steinem and I have gotten to support the historic Senate candidacy of Peggy Flanagan, and I wish she could have lived to see what I expect to be her victory. Here’s what Flanagan wrote me this morning:

“Gloria Steinem spent her life changing this country for the better. She helped generations of women believe they belonged in rooms where decisions are made, and she never stopped fighting for equality, dignity, and opportunity for everyone. It has been an incredible honor to get to know her over the last year and I’m forever grateful for her friendship, her courage, and the example she set. I’ll keep doing the work she dedicated her life to—for my daughter and for generations of women to come.”

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

Next week, I will publish a piece on the 10 years since Colin Kaepernick first took a knee during the national anthem. But before that drops I wanted to share an adapted introduction to my 2021 book, The Kaepernick Effect: Taking a Knee, Changing the World. I still stand by most of my analysis, but I was wrong to think that the 2020 protests of athletes following the police murder of George Floyd would launch a new era of activism in sports. For both athletes and the broader resistance movements, the protests that summer were not a jumping-off point—they were a capstone. My next piece is going to examine why so much promise came to an end—but also why it could quickly start again. Natasha Cloud’s facing down that ant-trans jackass and former NBA player Enes Kanter is just one recent exhibit of a person of uncommon courage proclaiming dissent on the field of play in the face of a whirlwind of prejudice. Please read this before you read part two.

—Dave Zirin
 

When Colin Kaepernick’s knee hit the ground during the national anthem in August 2016, a debate was launched about police violence, patriotism, racism, and the history of the anthem itself. Through his actions, Kaepernick had also forged a link with both the Black Lives Matter movement and an often-buried history of radical athletes: people like Muhammad Ali, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, and Billie Jean King.

Kaepernick’s actions also provoked something deep, ugly, and primordial in the (white) American consciousness. They prompted a violent and highly racialized rage among a self-branded “alt-right” of fascists being marshaled together to support the 2016 candidacy of Donald Trump. The unrepentantly divisive and proudly bigoted Trump said on the campaign trail that Kaepernick “maybe should find another country to live in.” This comment, with its “Go Back to Africa” overtones, provoked a deluge of death threats leveled at Kaepernick in city after city during the 2016 season. Even with all that, Kaepernick was moved into the starting lineup and with the world breathing down his neck had a remarkable year, throwing for 16 touchdowns and just four interceptions, while leading the NFL in yards per carry. Then came Kaepernick’s exile. A league that accepts players—and owners—who have abused women, driven under the influence of alcohol, and even killed people could not stand the thought of having an avowed antiracist among “their” players, even one who engaged in community service to the extent that Kaepernick did. While taking a knee, week in, week out, Kaepernick gave away more than a million dollars to the kinds of grassroots community organizations that have trouble keeping the lights on.

NFL ownership, politicians of both stripes, and their media water-carriers were afraid of Kaepernick’s message. They were afraid because his words were politically different from those of other athletes who had raised their voices after the police killings in the summer of 2016. His words were different because, as welcome as the outspokenness of other athletes was, they were calling for peace, whereas Kaepernick was calling for justice. Through his peaceful protest, he was proclaiming that as long as there is a gap between the values the flag purports to represent and the real world, then the fight will continue.

In this regard, Kaepernick stood in the tradition of Muhammad Ali. The great Ali did not try to “build a bridge” between the pro–Vietnam War establishment and anti-war activists. He took a side. He took a side in order to win a political fight against an unjust war.

And yet for so many frothing members of the sports media, the same press that had praised Ali to the heavens upon his death just a few months earlier, Kaepernick was an enemy. The irony of praising Ali while bashing Kaepernick was lost upon them. Tragically, many in my profession lived up to Hunter S. Thompson’s description of sports writers as “chimps masturbating in a zoo cage.”

But it was not just right-wingers, frothing sports columnists, and a racist president putting Kaepernick on blast. Liberals, people who ostensibly should have been supporting Kaepernick, also critiqued his actions. Their most common response to the anthem protest against police violence was, “I support his goal, but not his methods.” This was “the line,” from NFL commissioner Roger Goodell to Hall of Fame receiver Jerry Rice to quarterback Drew Brees. It was also the widely trumpeted view of then–New York Times columnist David Brooks and a host of liberal Beltway pundits. Brooks, without irony, even invoked Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to justify his position for why Kaepernick should stop protesting.

As for the NFL, Roger Goodell’s league exiled Kaepernick after the 2016 season. But at least Goodell supported Kaepernick’s goals. NFL owners decided that Kaepernick had more value as a ghost story than as a quarterback. He was more important to franchise owners as an object lesson to haunt a new generation of players, a warning to not speak out.

Despite their efforts, he has become a spirit, inspiring in 2020 a new generation of athletes to take the field of play and use it as a platform for protest. We have seen that dramatically in the aftermath of the police murder of George Floyd, as an unprecedented number of “jocks for justice” have stepped forward, taken a knee, demonstrated in the streets, and even gone on strike to demand justice.

In 2020, not only did athletes offer their solidarity, their words, and their money to the protests. They put on their marching shoes. This was such a change from 1968, when athletes were often sent to demonstrations after King was assassinated to calm things down, even in their sports uniforms. On college campuses in the 1960s, athletes were at times used to surround buildings that were occupied by student protesters in order to keep out food and supplies. Today, football players at the Universities of Mississippi and Alabama are marching for racial justice, not attacking the protesters.

But as we see athletes making themselves heard, we must also remember the legion of young women and men—athletes from all sports, and in incredibly diverse locales across the country—taking a knee, provoking conversations, and enduring their own backlash, without Kaepernick’s financial insulation from his years as an NFL quarterback. The actions of young athletes from 2016–19 were a preview of the 2020 protests that rocked the United States. They hit cities large and small and their struggle spotlighted sports—normally a conservative force in our society—as a center for fighting racial injustice. They built a movement that put racist police brutality on trial in their communities, placing the very nature of both the anthem and patriotism up for debate.

In my conversations and interviews with more than one hundred athletes who took a knee, certain common threads are clear. They are bound together by a belief in racial justice. They are bound together, in almost every example, by the All-American trauma they experienced after the 2012 killing of 14-year-old Trayvon Martin, their generation’s Emmett Till. They are bound together by the idea that they needed to take Kaepernick’s effort to start a conversation and put it into action. They are bound together by the strength to withstand backlash. They braved death threats. They stood up to bigots. They were in some cases threatened with expulsion from their team. One high school football announcer in Alabama said that they should be lined up against a wall and shot. And yet they were undeterred, provoking a dialogue that this country did not want to have. They laid the foundation not only for the protests, but also for the unprecedented outpouring of athlete activism we saw in the summer of 2020. They created that space through struggle. Their actions could not be more relevant. Just because their warning fell on deaf ears does not mean it is too late to hear what they were trying to say.

Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey won a major primary election victory on Tuesday, claiming another win for the left in this summer’s struggle for the soul of the Democratic Party. “Tonight is a testament to the power of the progressive movement,” Markey declared to a cheering crowd in which his young supporters celebrated a 65–35 triumph over his primary rival, US Representative Seth Moulton.

It was also, the senator explained, a victory in the fight against what he described as “the criminal enterprises of Big Oil and Big Tech.” A longtime foe of corporate greed and monopoly, Markey made stymieing the plans of AI oligarchs a crucial part of his campaign. With progressive-populist enthusiasm, he promised to “tax the rich, block the bombs, and stop data centers from polluting our communities.”

This is not a new fight for Markey. As the senator noted earlier this year, he’s been “working for more than a decade to propose commonsense policies to take back unchecked power from Big Tech and put it into the hands of the American people.”

But what made Markey’s victory notable was that, in the last days of the primary campaign, he faced and overcame a cynical attack from Moulton, who attempted to dumb down the AI debate in a way that he thought would turn voters against the incumbent.

Moulton’s primary challenge to Markey was always tough to fathom. A middle-aged congressman with limitless ambition but finite political skills—as evidenced by his failed bid for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination—Moulton tried to make the fight a generational struggle between a 47-year-old rival and an 80-year-old incumbent. The message never got traction because Markey campaigned relentlessly as an energetic progressive legislator with a record of standing on the right side of history.

Yet Moulton’s desperation to make the race a referendum on youth-versus-age made the last days before Tuesday’s primary contest an instructive measure of the emerging discourse over AI regulation.

When the two candidates clashed in a pre-primary debate last month, Markey gave an uninspired answer to a silly question about whether he uses AI tools on his electronic devices. He basically said he used the apps that were on his iPhone and iPad and left it at that.

Moulton, who talked during the campaign about “winning the AI race while making sure our kids, our economy, and our communities are protected,” seized on what he thought was an opening to catch up with an incumbent who was opening a wide lead in the polls. “Not understanding the basics of AI—the most important technology of our lifetime—should be disqualifying for a U.S. Senator,” he announced on social media. “This is why we need a new generation of leadership. The future is now.”

Then he pinned the message to the top of his X feed. Then he made a campaign ad. Then the challenger said, “Americans are genuinely concerned about AI. Octogenarians in the Senate are not helping.”

The campaigns also traded charges about Moulton’s investment in defense contractors, including “an AI firm that partners with the U.S. Army,” and how Markey had received the support of a nonprofit backed by Anthropic, a firm that has supported AI regulation

Amid all this bluster, Markey kept his cool, while Moulton revealed his naïveté regarding the debate over AI.

That debate is about a lot more than ruminations on the relative merits of ChatGPT and Claude. It is a fight over who will set the rules for our future.

The mounting pressure to meet the demands of the AI billionaires—to whom Donald Trump pays so much deference—raises fundamental questions about corporate power, privacy, the future of work, and a host of other issues. These are issues that Markey—long a leading Senate advocate for worker rights and consumer protection—has been focused on for years. And they are issues on which he has displayed far more insight and agility than most members of Congress.

Markey’s detailed “AI Accountability Agenda: Taking Power Back From Big Tech” program pulls together groundbreaking legislative proposals to regulate data centers and to address the broader impacts of AI—including the No Robot Bosses Act, which “would prohibit an employer from primarily relying on automated systems for work-related decisions such as hiring, firing, or promotion. The legislation would also require employers to disclose to their employees their use of an automated decision system; conduct detailed evaluations of an automated system’s impact on workers before using the system; and provide an employee with the option to appeal to a human any decision involving an automated system.”

The senator has also proposed and supported legislation to create a human override option for AI decisions that might limit access to healthcare, infringe on privacy rights, or endanger children, and to prevent AI-powered algorithms from amplifying the biases and discrimination that is already embedded in society.

Markey’s even got a plan to prevent the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of AI oligarchs. His Equal Tax Act “would tax investment income at the same rate as ordinary labor income for individuals making more than $1 million. The bill would limit preferential tax rates for long-term capital gains and dividends, end the stepped-up basis loophole, restrict the use of like-kind exchanges by the ultra-wealthy, and limit the passthrough deduction for high-income individuals. By closing loopholes that reward wealth over work, the Equal Tax Act would ensure that the people who profit most from the AI boom pay their fair share.”

Voters recognize that the fight over AI cannot be reduced to election-eve jibes over which candidate might more ably manipulate apps on a phone. It is an existential struggle over questions of whether those with wealth and power will roll over workers, consumers, and civil rights. “Americans,” Markey has explained, “deserve policymakers who are paying attention to their lives, not Big Tech’s bottom line.” By an overwhelming margin, Massachusetts voters gave Ed Markey a mandate to continue serving as that sort of policymaker.

For Palestinians, the tawjihi is more than a final school exam. It is the test that can shape what comes next: which university a student can attend, the subjects they can study, and, in a place where opportunities are already limited, what kind of future they can build.

Usually, the months before the tawjihi are filled with familiar routines: textbooks marked with notes, private lessons, long nights of studying, anxious parents, constant conversations about grades.

For the class of 2026, preparations for exams began the year they were born.

The number 2008 sounds ordinary until it is placed beside Gaza. Israel assaulted the Gaza Strip in December 2008 and January 2009. The students born that year spent the first months of their lives enduring bombardment and displacement. War was not something they encountered in a history lesson. It was the world they entered.

In 2012, when the students were learning their letters and numbers, Israel launched another assault on Gaza.

In 2014, they put on uniforms and entered their first classrooms, starting school during yet another major war.

These students grew up amid cycles of violence, blockade, and instability. The hum of drones became the soundtrack of daily life, so much so that a silent sky left the children puzzled.

By October 2023, the children born in 2008 were teenagers approaching their final stage of schooling, and the destruction of Gaza’s educational system was about to transform what should have been the standard run-up to the tawjihi—nervousness about university and the expectations of parents—into something they never imagined.

For many of these students, the final stretch toward the tawjihi, which was held on June 20, 2026, took place without functioning schools. Despite the immense hardship, 37,698 students in the Gaza Strip took the exam along with 51,499 students in the West Bank.

Since 2023, schools have been destroyed, damaged, overcrowded, or converted into shelters. Families have been displaced repeatedly and steady electricity and internet access is no longer a given. Books, stationery, and suitable places to study have become increasingly scarce.

 So tents became classrooms.

Pieces of cardboard became desks.

Phones became libraries.

A student might spend hours looking for electricity to charge a phone that they had converted into a classroom, only to search in vain for an internet connection strong enough to download lessons or sit for a test.

Gaza’s 2026 tawjihi proceeded anyway.

The exams were conducted electronically for students in the Strip, as they had been in 2024 and 2025, since the destruction of Gaza had made sitting for them formally impossible. Students were expected to take the conventional exam, despite needing to arrange many of the basic conditions for taking it themselves.

For some, that meant studying from PDFs on phones. For others, it meant private lessons when their families could afford them, walking long distances to educational spaces, or searching—sometimes fruitlessly—for a place with electricity and stable connection.

For some students, studying competed directly with the demands of survival. Those students collected water, gathered firewood, cooked, washed clothes by hand, cared for younger siblings, and otherwise helped families who had lost their main providers. Their education was supposed to prepare them for the future, while daily life kept demanding their attention in the present.

In June, Al Jazeera reported on students preparing to sit for exams from cafés and other public places. Suwar Mohammad, a displaced student whose home in Gaza City had been destroyed, was living in a tent in Deir al-Balah. On the eve of her exams, she did not know where she would take them and was searching for a café with reliable internet.

Her uncertainty captures something essential about this year’s group of students. The question was not: Did I study enough? It was: Will the electricity stay on? Will the internet hold? Will my phone have enough battery? What happens if the connection cuts out halfway through the exam?

And behind those questions hid another problem: How could anyone concentrate while living under bombardment, surrounded by displaced families, aware of the constant violence?

For Gaza’s students, learning to navigate these insurmountable obstacles became part of the exam itself.

There is another way to understand the class of 2026: by looking for the students who are not there.

According to figures released by the Palestinian Ministry of Education in June 2026, 20,647 students have been killed in Gaza and the West Bank since October 7, 2023. More than 1,000 education workers have also been slain.

For graduating students, behind those figures are classmates who disappeared from attendance lists, friends whose names became memorial posts, and relatives who should have been sitting for the same exam but will never receive a certificate.

Some students in this generation were injured. Some lost parents. Some became responsible for younger siblings. Some survived while other members of their families did not.

The empty seats are part of the graduating class, too.

But, even for those who manage to take the test, a secure future is far from guaranteed. On June 22, Raghad Hussein Ashour, a Palestinian secondary-school student taking the 2026 tawjihi, was killed in an Israeli strike in Gaza City while returning from the exam, according to Palestinian reports and relatives.

Raghad grew up without her father, who died in Egypt from medical complications when she was a child. She was her mother’s only daughter and dreamed of becoming a doctor. Her aunt, Umm Mahmoud, described a young woman who worked relentlessly toward that dream. Raghad wanted to study medicine partly because she saw it as a continuation of the dream her father had once held for her.

Raghad was killed in a strike on a vehicle in Gaza City’s Al-Rimal neighborhood. A paramedic was also killed, and four civilians were injured.

For Raghad’s mother, there was no military explanation that could help her make sense of the loss. Her daughter had been on her way home from a school exam.

Raghad will not see her results.

She will not graduate.

She will never become a doctor.

Her story belongs to the wider record of Gaza’s students—not just as a classmate, but as a revealing example of how fragile even the most conventional step toward a livelihood has become.

Meanwhile, Yahya Nasman’s name appeared among Gaza’s successful tawjihi students with a score of 96.6.

But by the time his result was announced, Yahya was dead—killed alongside members of his family just days earlier.

His name remained on the list of graduates, but the boy who worked doggedly for that moment was not given the chance to live it.

For his family, the result arrived not as the celebration they had imagined, but as another reminder of the life that has been taken from them.

I received my own tawjihi results in 2023, the last year when Gaza’s examinations were still held under relatively normal conditions. I graduated with a score of 98. I remember the tension of waiting for a number that seemed capable of determining everything that would come next.

In 2026, I was no longer the student, but the sister of one.

When the results were announced on July 24, a message appeared on my phone informing me that my brother, Mohammed Ahmed Al-Wawi, had scored a 96.4.

Mohammed was born in that fateful year of 2008. He has specialized in science and has been an exceptionally strong student throughout his school years.

Though it can be easy, when writing about Gaza, to turn every successful student into a symbol of adversity overcome, Mohammed’s 96.4 cannot tell you how many hours of study were interrupted, how often “ordinary conditions” meant gazing at the pixels of a phone screen as drones flew overhead, or how much uncertainty clouded his final year. It cannot capture the student I have watched thrive, despite the conditions of his academic journey.

The same is true of every student in his cohort.

A 99.6 does not explain what my cousin Malik carried through these last years.

A 98 does not tell us what my cousin Raoum had to overcome.

And a passing grade cannot account for an education system devastated by war, cannot give back the missing teachers, the stolen hours, the schooling Gaza’s children should have had.

A student who did not pass cannot be described as having failed in any ordinary sense.

The tawjihi measures answers.

It does not measure displacement.

It does not measure grief.

It does not measure the hours spent searching for electricity, water, or internet.

It does not measure studying after your home has been destroyed, or while knowing someone you love has been killed.

It cannot measure the courage required to keep imagining a life beyond the present.

Gaza’s class of 2026 has spent almost its entire life growing up alongside war. They reached adolescence under ceaseless blockade and violence. They entered their final school years after October 2023, as much of the city and its educational system collapsed. They took their final exams in improvised spaces with inadequate resources.

This timeline matters because what happened to them was not one difficult school year. It was an entire young life spent without any constant other than instability.

And yet, when the results appeared, their names were still there.

Their grades appeared with the rest of the nation’s.

Their plans to attend university still stand.

That matters.

The class of 2026 did not choose the circumstances in which it grew up. It did not choose to become familiar with the sounds of war before it learned language. It did not choose an education without classrooms, nor to sit a national examination without knowing whether electricity and internet access would hold.

But it kept going.

And Gaza’s children of 2008 graduated.

In 2019, a strange image began to circulate on social media. It showed an empty hallway aglow with sickly fluorescent light, calling to mind the rear corridor of a movie theater or the cavernous antechamber leading to a mall bathroom. It’s actually a photo of a Wisconsin furniture store under renovation. It was taken in 2003, which explains its blurry patina.

The image was originally posted anonymously in a thread on /x/, the paranormal board on the bulletin-board site 4chan, in response to the prompt “Post disquieting images that just feel ‘off.’” One user dubbed the space “the Backrooms,” describing it as “six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in. God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you.” This exchange sparked an online phenomenon, popularizing the so-called “liminal space” Internet aesthetic.

The concept of the Backrooms has long fascinated me, more from the architectural side than the horror side. There is a generational element to it: Most of us who were children in the period from the 1980s to the 2000s logged many hours at vast malls waiting for our parents. It’s also rich both theoretically (being a postmodern concept par excellence) and architecturally (being a vernacular interior par excellence).

A 16-year-old visual-effects autodidact named Kane Parsons released a series of short YouTube films in 2022 that take place in and elaborate on the eerie realm of the Backrooms. The series caught the attention of the film-production powerhouse A24, which gave Parsons the budget and resources to realize a feature-length adaptation, released theatrically this past spring. It was a watershed moment: A Gen Z content creator had penetrated the traditional, institutional studio system, and his work was so high-grossing that it broke records. In an era of exhaustively rehashed IP, Backrooms was sourced from public-domain Internet content.

Although it was inspired by a static image, the film’s plot is sprawling. Clark, a failed architect relegated to running a discount-furniture store in a California strip mall, has been kicked out of his house by his wife and now sleeps at the store. Outrageous electricity bills and strange ambient noises prompt him to investigate the store’s basement, at which point he passes through a solid wall and into the apparently interminable Backrooms.

The Backrooms set is Parsons’s pièce de résistance. It’s a disorienting, labyrinthine series of largely soundless, yellow-hued rooms. It’s littered with inanimate objects that scan as wrong: items fused together, or misshapen, or inappropriately scaled. Stairs lead to nowhere. Walls morph into chutes. Space expands and contracts. It might be endless. Also, there’s some kind of monster element.

The B-plot concerns Clark’s therapist, Mary. She has her own demons, having been raised by an agoraphobic hoarder mother, and she’s resentful of her selfish and controlling patient. A cryptic message from Clark lures her to the Backrooms. Mary has a showdown not only with her intransigent patient but with (spoiler alert) his manifestation as a monster, a gnarled, unnatural version of himself. And this is Backrooms’ key gimmick: The monsters are, in fact, ourselves, our worst qualities, our most pernicious instincts.

Monster Clark ambushes his shrink, and the ensuing chase scene is the best part of the movie: It is dramatically shot, revealing the terrifying scope and sheer infinite modularity of the space. In one memorable moment, a deep chasm reveals the extent of the Backrooms, which replicate endlessly into the void. Also, the Backrooms are being monitored by a company called Async, which has been trying to investigate the space after unwittingly discovering it. When asked what this place is, Clark answers, “It’s every place that ever was.”

Parsons is trying to do a lot, perhaps too much, with Backrooms. The movie’s plot and underlying message are undercooked. (Are the Backrooms the unconscious? A secret government project? Something else?) His aesthetic choices, however, are interesting and convincing. The 21-year-old director is clearly a digital native. Though he plays with found-footage tropes, aping a lo-fi VHS look, his world operates under a resolutely digital, video-game-inspired spatial logic, in which characters “no clip,” or pass through impenetrable barriers such as walls.

Parsons’s work is postmodern in the original, architectural sense of the term: The Backrooms are simulacra, copies for which no original exists—they approximate recent pasts through pastiche. The malls of the 1990s, whose heyday Parsons is too young to have experienced, were usually themed, using referential architecture with elaborate, exaggerated set pieces (such as those displays of giant plastic fruit in a grocery store). Backrooms boasts distortions of these already distorted visuals.

Parsons’s 1990s are communicated to the audience through a series of signifiers and winks: a washed-out teal-and-pink color palette, wall-to-wall carpeting, chunky furniture, wide ties, etc. What is striking about these choices is that they are misremembered—not the decade as it was, but as reproduced via nostalgia threads on Internet forums. Fredric Jameson famously described how certain films set in the mid-20th century made the leap from depicting the 1950s to a “1950s-ness.” Parsons similarly invents a highly mediated “1990s-ness.”

Backrooms seems to be a movie about architecture: about the innate horror of the mundane, the liminal, the places that induce a level of boredom that a director who grew up with a smartphone has probably never suffered through. But it isn’t, at least not directly. Watching someone as young as Parsons attempt to capture the horror of a now-defunct suburban mundanity is a bit like watching a kid get behind the wheel of a parked car and pretend to be his dad. The pantomime of steering by someone whose feet can’t reach the pedals is a little silly, but it’s also unsettling; likewise, the film’s misremembered nostalgia produces something genuinely new and interesting. Backrooms the movie is flawed, but Backrooms the phenomenon may offer a compelling preview of the next generation of filmmaking.

Abdul El-Sayed’s bid for Michigan’s open US Senate seat could well decide which party controls the chamber after November’s midterm elections. Historically, a candidate in such a position might run cautiously. Not El-Sayed. A Rhodes scholar and epidemiologist who, at age 30, earned national attention for his transformative work as director of the Detroit Health Department, the progressive Democrat boldly advocates for Medicare for All, ending US support for Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in Israel, and adopting a fresh vision of capitalism that empowers people rather than corporations. After his primary win in August, Nation editors Katrina vanden Heuvel and John Nichols spoke with El-Sayed at a favorite haunt of his, the Alba coffeehouse in Detroit’s Corktown neighborhood.

The Nation: You’ve spent much of your life working in public health. Can you diagnose what’s wrong with American politics?

Abdul El-Sayed: One of the things that you learn pretty quick in medical school is that heart failure is about the heart, but it’s also about the kidneys. They have this really important relationship where your kidneys often regulate for your heart—because if the heart is beating against too much pressure, it’s on the kidneys to push water out. But what tends to happen is, once you find yourself with insufficient heart [strength], the kidneys don’t get enough pressure to know to offload. So they stop doing what they do, and the thing runs in reverse, beating up your heart, in effect. And I think what we have right now is a level of corporate capture of our politics, in every single part of American society, that is loading more on and running the system in reverse.

Our political system was always supposed to be able to act as a check on the richest and most powerful…. And now, what’s happened is that [we] have a political system that acts as a handmaiden to the richest and most powerful, accelerating the inequality that we have in our society. Our political system has become part and parcel of that inequity. It shows up in every part of our lives: whether it’s the food system, which is controlled by a couple of very large corporations and agribusinesses. Or it’s our healthcare system, which is captured by a few very large pharmaceutical companies and health-insurance companies. Or it’s our foreign policy, which is captured by a few very, very large weapons manufacturers and special interests. All of it is operating in a way that tends to drive money away from us and toward the very top.

I think if we don’t address that system of capture, we will find ourselves paying more for less, being squeezed in our work, and watching as our systems operate more to make rich people a lot of money than to actually do the things they’re supposed to.

TN: How do you talk about this system of capture in the context of a campaign where you’re being massively outspent by the wealthy and powerful?

AES: If you know you’re going to be outspent in paid media, then you have to build really, really robust earned and [self-generated media] and a really, really robust movement on the ground. That’s what we did. We started out going everywhere, talking to everyone. I did 530 public events in the primary, across 110 different cities. We have been communicating and listening and showing up in people’s lives.

TN: You have argued that when candidates rely on lots of outside money, it’s a sign of weakness.

AES: If they’re getting huge amounts of outside spending, that’s a sign of weakness because it’s a crutch. It’s like, why do you need outside spending? That’s [my opponent, Michigan Republican US Senate nominee] Mike Rogers in a nutshell. That system of politics is the problem. And it’s based on this old idea that all that matters is how much money you raise to buy media. The money isn’t spent on town halls; it isn’t spent knocking on doors. It’s spent on 30-second attack ads.

TN: You’ve complained that candidates in both parties neglect the voters in order to chase after big donors and outside money.

AES: Yes. When you go out and meet with people, you’re learning a ton in a reception line; you’re learning a ton in a small roundtable. People are telling you what they want you to focus on. Whereas when you’re fundraising or having meetings with [lobbyists for special-interest groups], all you’re learning about is what the lobby wants from you.

TN: That message resonated in the primary. How do you build on it in a general election, in a swing state that backed Donald Trump in 2024?

AES: You keep listening and learning. I think it involves identifying the ways that your central message applies across a number of different issues. You know, some of the most important issues that I think a lot of folks who voted in 2024 for Trump are paying attention to right now are data centers and ultra-processed food. And I’m looking forward to having that conversation with them.

TN: Do you see ultra-processed food as one of the major public-health issues of our time?

AES: No doubt, absolutely. I mean, look, this is the thing about [Health and Human Services Secretary] Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: He’s right about a lot of the problems—he’s just completely batshit when it comes to the solution. He’s right that ultra-processed foods are a problem. But the answer is not beef tallow and raw milk. The answer is getting [Big Agriculture and food-industry] money out of our politics.

TN: You’ve argued that there are issues that people care a great deal about but that are not well discussed in campaigns or by the major media. One of these is the Israeli assault on Gaza.

AES: The selective attention to polling is really quite fascinating to me. Like, [Gaza] is an 80/20 issue. Data centers: 80/20 issue. Healthy food: 90/10 issue. Guaranteed healthcare: 70/30 issue. I think the mistake that traditional media makes is to think that they read in for the median voter, and to miss the notion that the median voter is not always aligned on “red” [or] “blue” questions. They’re aligning more on people-versus-the-elite questions, and that’s the big miss [by the media].

I go on CNN, and they consistently ask me about the right of a foreign country to exist, which is not an issue that most people are asking about, right? They’re asking about “Well, does that foreign country have a right to my tax dollars?”

TN: Groups aligned with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) have spent heavily against you, attacking you personally rather than discussing Middle East issues.

AES: They don’t campaign on their issue. They are ultimately conceding public opinion [without acknowledging it], and that’s a pretty scary thing when you think of it from a democratic standpoint. How’s democracy supposed to work, right? If you have an argument to make, make the argument and then the public can decide. But when you come in and run 30-second attack ads, trying to assault somebody’s character because they disagree with you on an unrelated issue, that is an admission to having lost the democratic debate.

TN: You’re not a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. You’ve said, “I’m not a socialist. I’m just a capitalist who understands how capitalism works.” Talk about what you mean.

AES: We have a corporatist system; we don’t have a capitalist system. Go back and read Adam Smith: He talks about how there are no markets without morals. He talks about the central challenge to markets being monopoly, not government regulation. In fact, you need government to secure markets. And what’s happened right now, going back to the central diagnosis that you asked for, is that government has not only stopped securing markets; government has become a system by which the largest players can rent-seek, which is to destroy markets.

Capitalism relies on free entry and exit in markets, and supply and demand allocating the flow of capital. We don’t have that anymore. I would like to move us back to a capitalist economy [with] people being able to know that they are not subject to monopoly power when they’re seeking employment, and not subject to monopoly power when they’re acting as consumers.

TN: You’ve also talked about public goods, including healthcare.

AES: So, classically, public goods are the ones that everybody benefits from but are, as they say, non-rivaled and non-excludable. They’re the things that are the substrate of the market. Infrastructure is one of those things. Public safety is one of those things. Public education is one of those things. I think healthcare is one of those things. And even then, Medicare for All is not actually government healthcare; it’s government health insurance…. Medicare for All recognizes the fundamental provision of health insurance as a public good akin to infrastructure or public safety or public education, as part of the soil in which the economy works. That enables an actual market system in healthcare provision to function.

TN: Democratic Party leaders have resisted Medicare for All. Do you think a doctor who’s a big enthusiast for Medicare for All can change the debate in Washington?

AES: Hopefully, yes. Number one, I’ve spent a lot of my time studying this policy, wrote a book on it, understand the nuts and bolts of the legislation well, and hope to be able to work with like-minded colleagues to make the argument.

Second, there is a public conversation that still needs to be had, and part of my job is to be a leader of that public conversation in communities where we’re told we can’t win. The problem with the way that, too often, our party does politics is that we assume that people’s positions are fixed and then operate accordingly—rather than assuming that people want to engage in a thoughtful debate and want to be engaged on the broader issues of our time, and are willing to engage with us in a good-spirited conversation about what the best world ought to look like. A lot of what I’m testing out is the ability to go and have that conversation across places in the state of Michigan and win people over on that policy.

I think we need that in the party, to challenge the status quo. Too often, the industry is funding our party. So if you think that protecting your donors is more important than providing the best possible policy for your constituents, then you’re going to take it as fixed that you have to have an insurance industry that does what it does, and that the best thing you can do is incrementally move in directions to offer a little bit [better than the Republicans]. I just don’t think that is fixed. And I don’t have donors to protect—aside from the everyday people who support our campaign. So I’m not interested in what the health-insurance industry thinks, or what the hospital industry thinks, or what the pharmaceutical industry thinks. I’m a lot more interested in what the 10 million people in my state think.

TN: The New York Times says you’ve been the target of “a wave of Islamophobia,” much of it coming from President Trump. As a Muslim candidate, how do you speak about faith and politics?

AES: You know, it’s interesting because, for a lot of people, I’m the novelty. For both the people attacking me and the people just meeting me, I’m the novelty. I’ve been a Muslim in America my whole life, so I’m a lot more interested in the things that bring us together. Once people get past [the rhetoric from Trump and the Republicans], they will ask the more thoughtful question, which is not “How do you pray?”—it’s like “What do you pray for?” And I think I’ve learned that that is such an important space for connection. And it’s an opportunity for a broader conversation about what we all hold dear. So, yeah, people are going to attack me. Mike Rogers and Donald Trump can’t help themselves. But they want an America that’s small—and I’ve always known an America that’s big. Part of what I’m trying to do here is to show us just how big we really are, and how much more brings us together than separates us.

I got to be a twentysomething watching a guy named Barack Hussein Obama run for the presidency. What that told me about America and my place in America was profound. I believe in an America where, rather than be told how small we have to be by people like Donald Trump or Mike Rogers or JD Vance, we continuously prove just how big of an America we really are by coming together around the things that we need and deserve. This is one of those moments, where I can’t wait for Michigan and this country to remind us just how big we are. That, you know, an Abdul El-Sayed can be elected not because of or despite his name, but because we want to get money out of politics, put money in our pockets, pass Medicare for All.

TN: Do you see your campaign as opening the door to a new kind of politics that gets beyond petty partisanship and focuses on more fundamental questions?

AES: I hope so. Trump’s politics is entirely about punching down and groveling up. I do the exact opposite, and I think that’s what makes a lot of people very uncomfortable. You’ll never hear me talk down to somebody who, you know, is out trying to live their life. But I’ll talk down to Donald Trump every day, because he’s worthless. Same with Mike Rogers—worthless. These are terrible people who have weaponized their own greed against other people. I hate that. And I see it as everything that’s wrong with the way that we’ve allowed society to work. We allow the richest and most powerful to use their power and their money to game the system against everybody else. Do you remember when Donald Trump was defending his tax evasion? [Some people were] like, “Oh, he’s just so smart.” I’m like, “Bro, you’re greedy, and you lack any sense of scruples. And the system has been built to benefit people like you.”

When you ask about a new politics, we need a politics that is not afraid to stand up to power, whether it’s the power of large corporations [or] the power of a bully politician. We need a politics where we stand up to power and where we move the government to uplift people who don’t have it. That’s what I’m trying to do here.

When The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy was published in 2006, Washington was aghast at its assertion that Israel’s lobbying machine was a malign influence on US politics. Twenty years later, that argument might be met with a shrug.

This is partly a testament to the prescience of the book’s authors, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. At the time, criticizing the Israel lobby was considered to be a third rail in American politics, and the pressure to ignore or vilify the two writers was intense.

Fast-forward to 2026. Much has changed in the past two decades—major political shifts in the US and Israel, the ongoing collapse of Palestinian political representation, as well as upheaval in regional and global geopolitics. And the Israel lobby—particularly the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC—is on the ropes as never before.

Even so, it would be premature to conclude that the lobby’s power to distort US foreign policy is coming to an end. While the lobby’s machinations have been dragged out of the shadows during Israel’s war on Gaza, pro-Israel campaign funding in the United States is operating on a grander scale than ever (often promoting issues that are totally unrelated to Israel in order to obscure the intentions behind the lobby’s support for the candidates it favors). And while Democratic voters are turning away from Israel in unprecedented numbers, the lobby’s allies still maintain power at the party’s highest levels.

Which raises the question: Can the Israel lobby continue to win where it matters—in the White House and Congress—even as it rapidly loses popular legitimacy?

This is the consideration that underpins the new book Israel’s Lobby: America in the Grip of a Foreign Power, which serves as a kind of spiritual sequel to Mearsheimer and Walt’s study. (Both men have endorsed the new book.) Its authors, Ian Lustick, a political-science professor and Israel-Palestine watcher, and Eli Clifton, an investigative journalist and cofounder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, emphasize the outsize influence that Israel has exerted over US foreign policy, how that influence threatens American domestic freedoms, and how it is now being challenged. Assessing how the landscape has shifted in over 20 years, Lustick and Clifton highlight how contemporary political funding structures allow even greater access for unregulated money to flow from a small cadre of “plutocratic” pro-Israel megadonors alongside the expansion in aggressive techniques for quashing Israel’s critics—including legal pressure and attempts to co-opt campus disciplinary proceedings.

The frenzied spending and the intense resistance to change we have seen recently among Israel’s supporters are due in part to the precarious position in which the lobby currently finds itself. What might happen next can be summed up in three simple scenarios:

1. Despite all the tumult, the lobby maintains its grip on Washington, and the US continues to enable Israel’s destructive drive to displace the Palestinian people and dominate the region.

2. The jig is up: The United States stops genuflecting to Israel, and Israel is forced to figure out what it can get away with (answer: far less) in this new landscape.

3. The debate around the Israel lobby and its impact is superseded by the bigger story of the United States’ declining influence in the Middle East.

It is worth unpacking how each of these scenarios might play out.

Despite some high-profile and even spectacular losses for the lobby—most notably its failure to stop a string of pro-Palestinian Democrats from winning primary races—its staying power should not be underestimated. Which brings us to our first scenario: that the lobby comes up with a way out of its current predicament.

Given that Israel and its leaders appear to take pride in their extremism, cruelty, and callousness, it should come as little surprise that their echo chamber in the US is struggling to make popular arguments and to win debates.

But the lobby doesn’t necessarily need the masses on its side if it can maintain its dominance in elite spaces—and in some ways, it has more tools to do so than ever before. Lustick and Clifton rightly cite the significance of the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling, which opened the door to “independent” campaign expenditures, enabling AIPAC and its allies to intensify their interventions in political campaigns throughout the country in the past few years.

All that money doesn’t guarantee victory, but it can still sway elections and act as a deterrent to potential candidates. The 2026 Republican primary in Kentucky’s Fourth Congressional District is a case in point: The incumbent, Thomas Massie, a prominent critic of Israel, found himself facing the most expensive House primary in US history, thanks overwhelmingly to the funding against him from pro-Israel PACs. Massie was successfully defeated.

While this phenomenon is certainly not unique to the Israel lobby, the scale of money involved is exceptional, and the lobby often goes to great lengths to obscure its fingerprints by using front organizations. Add to this the exponential growth in the wealth of the billionaire class under the Trumpian regime of deregulation and corruption. Consider, for instance, how the eye-watering gains that tech moguls are accruing in the current IPO mania may funnel more money into the coffers of pro-Israel campaign financing.

The lobby is also attempting to show how adaptable it is by overhauling the material, strategic, and moral cases (what Mearsheimer and Walt referred to as the three “pillars”) at the core of its argument for unstinting US support for Israel. The pro-Israel narrative is being questioned in each of these three cases.

The material case—that Israel requires endless military assistance from the United States—has become the most difficult to defend. Why should American taxpayers be forced to be complicit in the genocide in Gaza, especially while funding for US domestic programs is being slashed?

Israel has cleverly attempted to preempt that argument. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his supporters in Congress are trying to pull off a bait-and-switch: an offer to taper off the use of conventional military aid and instead embed Israel’s defense and tech industries more deeply within the US military-industrial complex. Under this new configuration, the United States would still subsidize the Israeli military, but it would be able to dodge scrutiny by replacing a visible aid check with spending that could match or exceed the previous levels.

Making the case that this alliance is both strategically vital to American interests and morally aligned with US values is more complicated. It’s being attempted in two key ways. The first is the development of a radical political vision: incorporating Zionism as a touchstone of contemporary far-right Western politics and looking at Israel’s ethnonationalism as an ideal type to be replicated elsewhere, including in the US.

The second way involves the weaponization of antisemitism by recklessly using it as a cudgel to criminalize and shut down debate. In particular, the Israeli government and its allies in the lobby have attempted to redefine criticism of Israel and Zionism as antisemitic and thus out of step with American values. As a form of Israeli statecraft, it absolutely makes sense to stipulate that key critiques of Israeli policy and of Zionism should be redefined as antisemitic. As a method of silencing Israel’s critics, this tactic has been effective. As a way of actually combating antisemitism, it has been wholly counterproductive.

Finally, as Israel draws more scrutiny from legal institutions like the International Court of Justice (which is hearing South Africa’s genocide case against Israel) and the International Criminal Court (which is pursuing arrest warrants against Israeli officials), the United States has not only continued to ignore the ICJ’s rulings but has moved to attack the ICC. The US sanctioned nine ICC judges and the court’s chief prosecutor, freezing their assets and restricting their travel, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently committed the US government to “dismantl[ing] the ICC—brick by brick, if necessary.”

Clearly, then, the lobby is not about to roll over, and it could continue to hold considerable ground. But what if all these efforts fail to stem the tides of change—especially since the tactics described above, which have been successful until recently, are now generating more backlash than allegiance? This brings us to the second scenario: that of a genuine decline in the power of the Israel lobby.

To put it mildly, the lobby’s defense of the status quo is not one that can sustain widespread bipartisan support. Though its opponents might struggle to establish a broad consensus around a settler-colonial critique of Zionism, there is a widely shared public disgust at Israel’s inhumane actions and at the US government’s military, financial, and diplomatic support for them. One does not have to be a dues-paying member of the Democratic Socialists of America to recoil at the decades of occupation, the killing and starvation in Gaza, the relentless ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the West Bank, or Israel’s desire to wage perpetual war against its neighbors with the backing (and the bombs) of the US.

If Israeli voters oust Netanyahu, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir in this fall’s elections, then pro-Israel propaganda in the United States might experience a new blossoming. But a post-Bibi honeymoon, if it arrives, may be short-lived, given that Israel’s anti-Netanyahu bloc is still committed to maintaining apartheid and rejects any reasonable compromise with the Palestinians. As opinion polls reflect, Americans’ attitudes are hardening toward Israeli policy as a whole, irrespective of which leaders are in charge.

The Israel lobby’s problems look even more foreboding when one goes deeper into what is happening in the two most critical bastions of support for Israel in the US: the Jewish and evangelical communities.

Whether out of shock at Israel’s conduct in Gaza or disgust with the lobby’s cynical weaponization of antisemitism, many American Jews are beginning to turn against what Israel stands for—eroding in the process a key element of the political architecture that sustains US acquiescence to Israel’s policy agenda. A Washington Post–Ipsos survey last year found that 61 percent of American Jews believed that Israel was committing war crimes in Gaza, and polling now shows that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a staunch critic of Israeli policy, is more popular among American Jews than the prime minister of Israel.

Perhaps even more crucial are signs of declining support among evangelical Christians, especially in the community’s younger members. As the journalist John Judis has argued, the popularity of end-times prophecy is fading in favor of a justice-focused theology as a framework for engaging with the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Inside the MAGA movement, the antagonism between the America First and Israel First wings has intensified. On June 18, Vice President JD Vance admonished Israel on a New York Times podcast: “You’re a country of 9 million people, you just can’t kill your way out of solving every single national-security problem.” On his own popular podcast, Tucker Carlson regularly excoriates Israel Firsters to a receptive audience.

There’s even more of a groundswell on the Democratic side. In response to this shifting terrain, some Democrats, like Rahm Emanuel, are cynically changing their rhetoric about Israel without changing their policy commitments. If Democratic voters are mollified by these moves, the lobby will breathe a sigh of relief. But there is little evidence that is happening. Mamdani, the most compelling politician of his generation, has shown how to change the terms of debate while maintaining the support of a significant portion of the Jewish community.

That the most prominent defenders of Israel are assuming an ever-more-grotesque quality, and showing less and less of an interest in broadening their appeal, only adds to this changing reality. Witness, for instance, Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt’s launching a so-called Mamdani Monitor “for Israel” or Commentary editor John Podhoretz’s celebrating the role of “Jewish money” in Thomas Massie’s defeat.

The war against Iran may one day be regarded as a watershed moment. It is widely held that Israel played a major role in pushing the United States into the conflict, which has been a disaster for US interests. This has led many observers to begin grappling with the ways in which US and Israeli interests diverge, a reckoning that is likely to intensify over time.

Which brings us to our third scenario.

Perhaps the greater challenge that Israel faces is not the decline in its standing in the US, but rather the decline of the US itself. We no longer live in a world of American primacy, even if much of Washington is unwilling to acknowledge that fact. The catastrophic US-Israeli wars in the Middle East and West Asia are only accelerating that decline.

This could prove to be a vicious cycle: The further Israel hurtles down the path of regional overreach, the more dependent on the US and the less popular with the American public it becomes; and the more the United States is pulled into such wars, the weaker its own geopolitical position becomes.

Is it reasonable to speculate that Israel is preparing for a future in which the United States is no longer the world’s dominant power? If so, that might explain why Israel was willing to risk pursuing the Iran war.

The evidence is mounting that the Greater Israel project is recklessly overambitious. Israel is attempting to use US power (while it is still available) to establish an unassailable position of regional dominance, one that would make Israel less reliant on the United States. Netanyahu has spoken, for instance, of a “hexagon” of alliances centered on Israel, including countries in the Horn of Africa, South Asia (India), the southeastern Mediterranean, and the Gulf.

It’s unlikely that Israel can achieve this ambition. It is now viewed by most of the states in the region as a radical threat to stability. The extent of popular anger at Israel’s cruelty in Gaza has forced many of the leaders of those states, who were previously inclined to strengthen their ties with Israel, to sit up and take notice.

While it’s premature to conclude that a new regional bloc will emerge as a counter to both the Israeli- and Iranian-led axes, the pieces are beginning to be put in place. One notable development is the creation of a “Quad”—Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, and Pakistan—that has been coordinating at a high level. For these countries and others, the Iran war has demonstrated the perils of relying on a United States that can be so easily swayed by Israeli hubris. In other words, it may be that regional dynamics could ultimately lead to a more concerted and effective effort to contain and deter Israeli expansionism. Simultaneously, the Israeli attempt to deal a definitive defeat to its enemies has backfired.

Even Israel’s military edge and the success of its armaments industry may come under challenge—whether or not the current effort to further integrate the Israeli and US military succeeds. As an arms developer and exporter, Israel will face stiffer competition from South Korea, the rapidly revamping European military-industrial complex, and the burgeoning Ukrainian arms industry once that country’s war with Russia ebbs. Meanwhile, non-Western-aligned states will be able to draw more on supplies from the vastly expanded Russian arms industry and on increasingly effective Chinese military exports.

The conditions are more favorable than ever for curtailing the impact of the Israel lobby, both inside the United States and in the Middle East. The lobby is being called on to deliver more just as it is facing unprecedented challenges to its effectiveness.

It is a major achievement to have reached this moment, albeit at an astronomical cost to so many. Much will depend on how the next phase is navigated—by political movements inside the US; by regional actors, including multiple Palestinian factions; and by Israel and its supporters.

If Israeli Jews are to be compelled to reevaluate the expansionist and radical guiding ideology of their state, then there is still much work to do. Walt and Mearsheimer, and now Lustick and Clifton, have helped demystify how the Israel lobby works in the United States. If the US has indeed entered an era of genuine potential for change, including challenging Israeli impunity, then the need for a Palestinian movement to assume the mantle of strategic leadership and for an Israeli counterpart capable of thinking beyond zero-sum destruction is more acute than ever.

Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton was the last 2020 Democratic presidential candidate to speak at the Iowa State Fair “political soapbox” in August 2019, and I got to see him there. He delivered a lackluster speech before a relatively small audience. Hilariously, he told the crowd that “I had people talking to me at the urinal in the restroom, saying that they’re here to hear my speech.” My friends and I joked that we could feel the “Moultmentum.”

To no one’s surprise, Moulton left the primary race six days later—months before any votes were cast. In 2018, he had been a leader in a small centrist Democratic movement to block Nancy Pelosi from becoming speaker if Democrats took the House back in the midterms. After the party did, that Moulton campaign also went nowhere.

Moulton’s 2026 primary challenge to Democratic Senator Ed Markey met the same fate Tuesday night, when the progressive incumbent beat him by nearly a two-to-one margin. The Boston centrist, 47, tried to make the race a generational challenge against the 80-year-old Markey. But in fact, Moulton locked himself into the role of the old and out-of-touch guy, when two days after Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump in 2024, he unburdened himself to The New York Times and announced that he disagreed with Harris and many Democrats’ progressive views, including staunch support for trans rights. “I have two little girls,” he said. “I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete. But as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.” Markey quickly denounced him for throwing trans Americans “under the bus,” but Moulton insisted he was only speaking hard truths to a complacent progressive establishment. “I think that our refusal to engage in this debate, to answer the Republicans’ attacks, did a great disservice to the trans community,” he said.

These efforts to play to anti-trans sentiment within the Democratic party fell flat in Moulton’s Senate bid. At an October “No Kings” rally in Boston, Markey drew cheers, wearing a sheer trans scarf in pink and light blue, while Moulton was booed. As his trans-baiting ploys failed to gain any traction in his Senate bid, Moulton apologized to anyone who was hurt by his remarks and said he broadly supported trans rights. Still, he never took back his slam on trans athletes’ playing in women’s sports.

That wasn’t the only reason Markey won, but it was one of them. The larger reason Moulton lost is that he is a career centrist opportunist who kicked Harris while she was down, tried to take the gavel from Pelosi, and consistently blamed the party’s left for Trump’s two victories. Challenging Markey, he also tried to revive the broadly shared Democratic discomfort, especially in hindsight, with Biden running for reelection at 80, when he was clearly hobbled in speech and physical movement by his age (and diagnosed with late-stage prostate cancer once he left office.)

Sadly for Biden, there’s no comparison with Markey, who is well-spoken, witty, and agile. The incumbent senator also put together strong support from progressives, including fellow Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, Massachusetts Representative Ayanna Presley, and New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, all of whom joined him for a late rally on Sunday. Years ago, he backed Ocasio-Cortez when the Green New Deal was considered radical (it later drove some Biden policies), and he also backs Medicare for All, expanding Social Security, and higher taxes on the wealthy.

“This is the greatest gathering of progressive voices on one stage,” Markey told the crowd on Sunday. “Our progressive-palooza. That’s what we have put together.” But the real excitement came with Tuesday’s vote-a-palooza, when he won back his seat 65–35.

Moulton drew progressive ire for linking Markey to the late sex-abuser Jeffrey Epstein, charging him with “meeting with a lobbyist on behalf of…Epstein.” Markey angrily denied the charge, which was eventually disproven. Another supposed point Moulton scored in a debate with Markey—a gotcha exchange that had Markey confessing that he wasn’t sure he’d ever used artificial intelligence—also turned out to be a nonissue. “I use whatever is inside of my iPhone and my iPad, whatever comes up,” the senator said. “And I don’t know what company my iPad might be using.” It was an honest and fair answer: None of us truly know what kind of software our devices employ. But the absolutely correct answer would have been that the Big Tech companies are putting so much AI slop in their devices and apps, it leaves users adopting AI whether they want to or not.

Despite Moulton’s slaps at Pelosi and Harris, in this race he wanted to be known as a progressive. His campaign website features a “redbox”—a ploy that campaigns use to skirt campaign rules against coordinating with outside groups by placing approved messaging for other advertising initiatives or social-media promotions to adopt within a notionally unaffiliated red frame on their websites. Moulton’’s redbox said, “Voters under 40 on the go need to see that Ed Markey willfully doesn’t understand AI and is clinging to power while AI companies go unregulated, destroying our planet, our jobs and our mental health…. [They] need to see that Seth Moulton is a next generation progressive fighter who supports abolishing ICE, taxing the rich and health care for all.”

If that sort of appeal comes off as desperate opportunism, that’s because it is. Just last year, Moulton told The Boston Globe that progressive populism is “great for Democrats if we want to continue losing.” Jonathan Cohn, policy director of Progressive Mass, denounced Moulton’s 2026 moves. “Seth has done a fascinating job of trying to rebrand himself as progressive this cycle,” Cohn told The Lever. “[Moulton] doesn’t ever really actually hit on the big problem over the past few decades of the Democratic Party’s movement away from thinking about how the government can positively intervene to improve people’s everyday lives.”

Markey’s victory surprised some people, but I wasn’t one of them. I have never considered Moulton any kind of progressive, and I remember when Markey beat former representative Joseph P. Kennedy III, scion of Massachusetts’s most powerful political dynasty. No member of the Kennedy clan had ever lost a race there before. In November, Markey faces Republican John Deaton, who in 2024 lost badly to Elizabeth Warren.

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

There’s a hulking irony taking shape across the landscape of the 2026 midterms: After a decade of pundits bloviating about the menace of populism in our times, the material conditions that gave rise to American populism have upended the political consensus. In the tirelessly mythologized heartland said to harbor the recondite attitudes and mindset of MAGA-era populism, disenchanted citizens are staging an uprising over the plutocratic seizure of land and resources engineered by a new generation of robber barons. As AI data centers suck up water, land, and political capital—while spewing gas-generated carbon emissions at dangerous new levels—ordinary Americans in the country’s post-industrial interior are in open revolt. The backlash against data centers is now so potent that candidates in both major parties are scrambling to no longer be identified with the tech lords dedicated to disfiguring the country. 

The opposition to data centers in red states has grown so strident that President Donald Trump intervened on behalf of his benefactors in the AI industry. In a Truth Social post on Monday, Trump sought to browbeat his followers into submission, claiming the data centers poised to set up Borg-like in their midst will serve both their own economic self-interest and the dictates of national security. The MAGA nation should “let Data Reign,” Trump pronounced—unless, that is, its strongholds would prefer to be “backwards and poor.” “If we kill the Golden Goose,” Trump continued, showing that his mastery of fairy tales is equivalent to his prowess with capitalization, “you will have only yourselves to blame.” Perhaps sensing that any appeal to the alleged equal distribution of the wealth arising from the biggest and most oligarch-friendly investment bubble in human history would fall flat, the president tried to scold the MAGA faithful into recognizing their patriotic duty: “China could not be happier with this anti Data Center movement. Actually, they can’t believe it is happening!” 

It didn’t go over well. “This statement is insane,” went one typical reply on the traditionally Trump-idolizing platform. “I’m already on water restriction.” Another plaint got more personal: “You’re an idiot. You’ll be making money I expect. Meanwhile our lives get shittier with no water, more noise.” One of the more measured responses accurately summed up Trump’s outburst as “horrendous messaging.” 

Behind such unrest in the house of MAGA is a larger truth: Nobody wants a data center anywhere near them. A recent Heatmap News poll drives home how dramatically public opinion has shifted on the issue: A year ago, data centers won 43 percent net support and clocked 42 percent opposition. Now, in that same poll, 75 percent of respondents oppose the construction of data centers near them, and just 15 percent support them—a swing of 61 percent. Sorting through this seismic turnaround, Ryan Cooper of The American Prospect surmises that it’s part of a broader repudiation of the arrogant impunity of the tech-industry power elite: 

The AI rollout has been the ne plus ultra of Silicon Valley arrogance. A handful of billionaires—whose steadily more incomprehensible podcast appearances indicate participation in some truly unhinged group chats, or consumption of heavy-duty chemicals, or membership in literal, no-joke cults, or all three—declaimed that AI was going to revolutionize all human society, take everyone’s job, and/or maybe wipe out the human race. Therefore they needed to spend trillions and trillions of dollars building AI data centers everywhere, as fast as possible. When the tech barons blearily realized that this wasn’t the best sales pitch, and pivoted to ads about how AI had dull business applications, the damage was already done.

All true enough—yet the other, more immediate cause of the data-center revolt has to do with basic principles of communal self-protection: No one wants the austerity represented by water rationing, spikes in electrical bills, and general resource plunder to wipe out the quality of life in the places where you live and work. And this is where the precedent of 19th-century Populism–the real, capital-P article—becomes useful. When you squint a bit at the data-center uprising, its economic message is of a piece with the Populists’ crusade to rein in the brutal takeover of the American countryside by the twinned forces of the railroad and oil industries. The great Populist apostle of reform politics, Henry Demarest Lloyd, laid out the case against the oil and rail monopolies in an 1881 muckraking report for The Atlantic Monthly titled—yes—Story of a Great Monopoly. As he chronicled how railroads controlled farmers’ access to crucial markets—and how, in concert with the new Standard Oil empire, colluded to fix prices and drive up costs for farms already steeped in debt—he described a new first-order threat to the basic conditions of self-government in America. As long as the republic was in the grip of the railroad monopoly, most of its fundamental operations were throttled into oligarchic submission:

It is the railroads that have bred the millionaires who are now buying newspapers, and getting up corners in wheat, corn, and cotton, and are making railroad consolidations that stretch across the continent. By the same tactics that the railroads have used to build up the Standard [Oil Company], they can give other combinations of capitalists the control of the wheat, lumber, cotton, or any other product of the United States. . . . In less than the ordinary span of a life-time, our railroads have brought upon us the worst labor disturbances, the greatest of monopolies, and the most formidable combination of money and brains that ever overshadowed a state. . . . The common people, the nation, must take them in hand. The people can be successful only when they are right. When monopolies succeed, the people fail; when a rich criminal escapes justice, the people are punished; when a legislature is bribed, the people are cheated.

It’s striking to note how fully Lloyd’s indictment of the railroad monopoly maps on to today’s revolt against the data centers. Now, as then, legislatures are the plaything of the monopolists remaking the country into their own image—Republican candidates for Congress desperately want to memory-hole this data point, but the entire GOP majority in the House, minus just five dissenters, voted for a provision in Trump’s signature 2025 spending bill that would have forbidden states and localities from regulating the AI industry or its data-center infrastructure for a decade. That’s very much equivalent to the habit of Gilded Age railroad monarchs essentially purchasing compliant state legislatures to do their bidding. 

Then there are the resource squeezes. Just as today’s AI lords are making water scarce and electricity more expensive, railroads extended preferential rates to John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil operations while driving other smaller market players out of business and erecting the resource cartels that Lloyd and other muckrakers tirelessly chronicled.

The data-center uprising also echoes the Populist campaign against monopoly in its cross-partisan appeal. During the first Gilded Age, the major parties were enmeshed in a plutocratic consensus not unlike the one that’s controlled our own politics during the past generation, with apologists for regressive financial policies such as the gold standard and the readily gamed tariff system occupying key leadership positions in both parties. The AI oligarchy has accordingly hard-wired much of the leadership faction across the partisan aisle to do its bidding; House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries opposes a moratorium on data-center construction, just like his counterpart, House Speaker Mike Johnson, does. Establishment Democrats felt like they’d dodged a bullet when Wisconsin’s socialist candidate for governor Francesca Hong lost to former Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley—only to see Crowley’s general-election campaign thrown back on its heels by his support for data centers. Of course, the Populists sought to break the stranglehold of plutocratic governance by founding their own independent party, which was then a more viable strategy for reform politics; it’s an indictment of our duopolistic status quo that neither party, as a principled matter of political economy, can afford to divorce itself from today’s tech oligarchy. 

That, in turn, underlines the key difference between the anti-monopolists of the Gilded Age and the scourges of the tech oligarchy combating the far-reaching zoning putsches behind the planned construction of more than 2,000 new data centers: They had a clear policy objective, which was to advance the public ownership of the railroads and other utilities. “We believe the time has come when the railroad corporations will either own the people or the people must own the railroads,” the Populists declared in their 1892 Omaha Platform. No political leader today has advanced a similar case for taking over the predatory and resource-hoarding tech monopoly, but ideas along these lines might take hold in a cross-party bid to reclaim the basic conditions of self-determination in our communities. And they might have gained far more serious traction by now if we’d been in the throes of an actual Populist insurgency over the past decade, as opposed to the phony reality-television one that our pundit class ritually deplores.

Dolly Parton, the country artist best known for songs like “Jolene” and “9 to 5,” died last week at the age of 80. Though she herself would have been too modest to publicly make such a claim, she belongs, by all accounts, on the short list of musicians who should be considered among both the greatest singers and greatest songwriters in the genre’s century-plus history. A recent YouGov survey put Parton’s favorability rating at 77 percent, higher than any other musician, living or dead, and up there with Christmas (75 percent) and Thanksgiving (78 percent). Her beatification was complete well before her passing, confirmed by countless articles along the lines of “Dolly Parton, Secular Saint” (Vox) and “Everyone Loves Dolly” (oddly, Vice).

Even as a fan—and later, as a journalist covering country music—I sometimes found this to be a bit over the top. It was as if, for some, Dolly had ceased to be Dolly and had become instead an avatar of the desire for a celebrity who was truly good. Her philanthropy and her local investments were both extensive, but they are still best served by clear-eyed appraisal. Is Dollywood, her signature amusement park, really the rising tide that has lifted all boats in Sevier County, Tennessee, her childhood home, as its boosters proclaim? On the one hand, it is the county’s largest employer; on the other, it’s hard to live like a rhinestone cowboy when you make $14 an hour working seasonally parking cars.

This sort of adulation was especially unnecessary for Parton, because her life was remarkable enough without it. Born on January 19, 1946, in a cabin in the Great Smoky Mountains, she was delivered by a doctor who arrived on horseback, and her father, a sharecropper, paid for his services with a sack of cornmeal. Her family’s poverty—and the search for joy and dignity amid it—was one of the enduring themes of her work, the subject of songs like “Coat of Many Colors,” “Daddy’s Working Boots,” “In the Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad),” and “Applejack.”

The last of those, off her 1977 album New Harvest…First Gathering, tells the story of an old man who played banjo for her when she was a girl. It’s a window into the deep musicality of the community in which she was raised. Her mother sang church songs and old ballads; her grandfather was a fiddling preacher. (His song “Singing His Praise” would be recorded by Kitty Wells and Johnny Wright, and later on Parton’s final album, Smoky Mountain DNA.) She got her first guitar from one uncle, and she made her radio debut at 10 years old, with another uncle, her longtime collaborator Bill Owens, playing beside her.

Parton moved to Nashville the day after she graduated high school, boarding a Greyhound bus with her belongings stuffed into brown paper bags, which she would later describe as her matching luggage. She went to Music Row, the stretch of 16th Avenue South that was home to most of the city’s country music publishing houses and recording studios, in search of a record deal, but she couldn’t find a label that was interested in signing a new female singer.

Around this time, Parton had begun to base her appearance on that of a woman who had acquired a certain reputation in her hometown. “She had high-heeled shoes, little floating plastic goldfish in the heels of them, short skirts, low-cut tops, and I just thought she was beautiful,” Parton said in a 2023 interview. Her lifelong project of both fulfilling and challenging the expectations that accompanied this image began with “Dumb Blonde,” her 1966 Nashville debut. “This dumb blonde ain’t nobody’s fool,” goes the perfectly executed reversal. The era’s prevailing sexism is exemplified in Paul Hemphill’s book The Nashville Sound, a New Journalism–indebted survey of country music that was published three years later and was once regarded as one of the best books on the subject. Parton is only mentioned briefly, in an aside within a long chapter about Porter Wagoner. She is only “girl singer Dolly Parton, a petite blond of incredible vanilla-ice-cream beauty.”

Parton had become Wagoner’s duet partner in 1967, after his previous partner, Norma Jean, got married and resigned from his show. The pair shared a fondness for cornpone humor and flashy clothes—two things that were going out of fashion in an industry chasing uptown audiences. They recorded 12 albums together. Parton wrote many of the songs, despite what Hemphill’s book might lead you to believe. None of these LPs run longer than 30 minutes, and they are for the most part indistinguishable from one another. But this music is Nashville product at its very best: tight, sharp lyrics elevated by first-rate playing from studio hands like Johnny Gimble, Pete Drake, and Hargus “Pig” Robbins and by the vocal performances of the two leads, Wagoner’s forthright baritone an anchor for the wide range and tight vibrato of Parton’s early singing style. Like Hollywood movies of an earlier era, they remain some of the strongest evidence that can be marshaled in defense of the Fordist mode of cultural production.

Yet, just as that mode of production was challenged in the factories, so it was in the studios. In Nashville in the early 1970s, a rebellion was building among the musicians on the country music assembly line, taking its most visible form in the so-called Outlaw movement of singers like Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings. For Parton, this fight took form of a break from Wagoner, who, having gotten her signed to his label, RCA, refused to grant her permission to work with producers or managers of her choosing. Jerry Bradley, the head of RCA Nashville, later recalled a secret meeting Parton had scheduled to advocate for her artistic emancipation; it was cut short when Wagoner arrived and “grabbed her like she was a little girl.”

Dolly announced the conclusion of their creative relationship with “I Will Always Love You,” a number-one hit in 1974. (She may have written it, she later recalled, on the same day that she wrote “Jolene.”) Unlike, say, every Taylor Swift song, it is improved rather than diminished by knowledge of its scandal-sheet backstory. The emotional appeal remains big and real—as exemplified by Whitney Houston’s 1992 cover—but there is a shrewdness underneath. Read the lyrics again: These are the kind of things you say to someone as you slowly back out of a room.

Parton will forever be associated with the idea of the flirty, busty blonde. But if the story ends there, it’s incomplete. The wigs and makeup also granted Parton access to another Southern archetype, one with an interracial, working-class lineage: the trickster, the wily subaltern who uses geniality and guile to outfox betters who don’t even realize they’ve been had. Parton was smarter and more talented than anyone who tried to diminish her, yet by letting them think otherwise, she found a way not just to put up with their terrible jokes but reply with ripostes more cutting than anything thrown at her. Onstage, she covered her outfits with tassels and rhinestones and crammed her sets full of songs, gags, and instrument changes, taking turns not just on guitar and banjo but also piano, flute, and alto sax.

“I wanted to be free,” Parton told Rolling Stone in a 1977 cover story, explaining why decided to become a musician. Her LPs from this era, records like Here You Come Again and 9 to 5 and Odd Jobs, expanded her sound toward R&B, soft rock, and, cautiously, disco, inventing the female country crossover, and the moves she made—de-twanging her melodies to attract Top 40 radio, making a CMA Awards appearance or two to the reassure the base—have been repeated by every artist who has tried it since. “Islands in the Stream,” Trio, and White Limozeen kept her star burning through the ’80s, and she scored her final number-one hit with 1991’s “Rockin’ Years,” one of the great songs about boomers growing old—and a relic of an era when growing old was an acceptable topic on country radio. To date, she has sold more than 100 million records.

Parton herself seemed to feel ambivalent toward the more over-the-top expressions of adulation she was subject to later in life. She asked lawmakers not to consider a bill that would have put a statue of her likeness on the grounds of the Tennessee State Capitol, and three times she turned down the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Was this the maneuvering of a savvy politician, unwilling to make a choice that might alienate some of her fans? Or did it reflect a genuine discomfort in the uses of her celebrity? It’s hard to know. Celebrity—particularly Nashville celebrity—demands access. Today’s stars are expected to show off their families not just on social media but in magazine spreads and music videos too. Parton played that game while also giving up, it seemed, as little as possible. She insisted that her life was an open book, though sometimes you had to wonder, as with the suspect in a detective novel who arouses suspicion because his alibi is a little too tight.

If Parton ever felt trapped by her persona, she denied it whenever asked. That was the right thing to say: To do otherwise would have been to break character, to cross the limit that separates the trickster from the clown. Maybe the more relevant question would have been whether it took a toll to be so underestimated. In the public eye, she was a model of toughness and grace, as if it hardly affected her at all. Then again, one of her greatest moments came when, under the guise of a different character—the secretary Doralee Rhodes in 9 to 5—she threw all that to the wind and hogtied her abusive boss.

The one time I shared a room with Dolly Parton I was in the underbelly of Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena for the 2016 CMA Awards, filing copy from a makeshift press area. That was the year the Country Music Association presented her with a lifetime achievement award, though the honor was overshadowed by a performance by the Chicks and Beyoncé and the minor controversy it stirred. Like most of us, I can only speculate as to what thoughts were going through Parton’s head. But I can report that even seated behind a folding table, fielding questions from journalists, she cast a spell over the room to a degree I have rarely seen. She called on the different beat writers by name—without name tags—and she brought with her a lightness that remained in the room even after she exited, to loud applause. A few minutes earlier, Parton had suffered the apparent indignity of having her acceptance speech cut short. “They say they’re behind, but you’re talking about a lifetime here!” she told the crowd, perhaps betraying some small amount of frustration. Backstage, however, she refused to be offended. “It wasn’t all about me,” she said in response to a question about the slight. “It was just a moment of mine and I appreciate it.”

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: The Democrats have recruited a series of their top-choice Senate candidates to take on Republicans in double-digit Trump states on a pretty brutal map. The unpopular president is mired in scandal, and because GOP primary voters picked a series of creepy MAGA quislings as their nominees, hopes are high. Democrats look competitive almost everywhere and sport a large and durable lead on the “generic ballot.” Party strategists are whispering about a once-unthinkable takeover of the upper chamber just two years after a stinging, demoralizing defeat.

If this set of shifting baseline conditions ahead of a crucial midterm test of Trump’s power sounds a lot like the situation as the 2018 cycle began in earnest that September, that’s because we are, uncannily, at pretty much the same point we were at the end of that fateful summer. And we all know how that ended: Democrats cruised to a decisive House takeover in November but somehow lost two seats in the Senate, as red-state voters reverted to their underlying partisan preferences. That crushing setback for the Democrats gave the president the consequential opportunity to put one last hard-liner on the Supreme Court—Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett—in October 2020.

More than a decade into the Trump era, dreaming of a major electoral breakthrough in hostile partisan territory based on the president’s manifest ineptitude, grotesque shenanigans, and unabashed corruption feels almost masochistic. But this time around, it really could be different. Subtle distinctions are emerging in the national political environment and polls that could put Democratic Senate candidates over the top in deep-red Alaska, Ohio, and Texas. Those Democratic incursions on the red Senate map, coupled with expected pickups in Maine and North Carolina and holds in Georgia and Michigan, suggest that Democrats could actually seize a 52-seat majority—and possibly a bigger one, if the president continues his hopeless standoff with Iran over the Strait of Hormuz and further erodes his party’s standing.

One central dynamic behind this shift is that Democrats are picking up momentum in what had been regarded as long-shot races as normie voters are starting to tune in this fall. We’re understandably loath to recall the details of the Democrats’ Senate trauma in 2018, but in point of fact, the fall was when many highly touted Democratic candidates in red states like Missouri and Tennessee had already started to fade. In Missouri, incumbent Senator Claire McCaskill had surrendered her slim polling edge to MAGA toady Josh Hawley. And in the Volunteer State, former two-term Democratic Governor Phil Bredesen had by now blown his once significant lead over Republican Marcia Blackburn, and was running even at best. For all the money and attention lavished on Beto O’Rourke’s energetic challenge to Ted Cruz in Texas, he actually never led the race and was down more than five points on this date in 2018.

Today, by contrast, many red-state Democrats in tough races look as strong as they have all year. In Alaska, Mary Peltola is the party’s dream candidate, with a strong brand and a recent track record of running competitive campaigns for the state’s one at-large House district, winning it in 2022 and losing it narrowly in 2024. She has led eight of the nine publicly released polls in 2026. In Ohio, former senator Sherrod Brown is looking to overcome the state’s dismal history of defeated senators trying to reclaim their seats and has led seven of the last eight surveys over incumbent Republican Jon Husted, who was appointed to Vice President JD Vance’s seat following the 2024 election. And in Texas, Democrat James Talarico has led scandal-ridden MAGA nominee Ken Paxton in nine of the last 10 polls.

Republicans also seem highly unlikely to flip any Democratic-held seats this cycle. Despite all the hand-wringing about him from the usual suspects, Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed has topped the last five polls in Michigan over Republican Mike Rogers. As for Georgia, which GOP strategists had once considered their best target, incumbent Senator Jon Ossoff has built such a formidable lead that Republicans may not invest in their nominee, fascism enthusiast Mike Collins, at all.

Buried in all of this polling data is another reason Democrats are increasingly excited. In the winter and spring of 2018, when red-state Democrats like Bredesen were ostensibly leading their races, they did so mostly with topline numbers in the low-to-mid 40s. In red states like Tennessee, the undecided voter pool was—and is—heavily GOP-leaning. So as such races were poised to enter the homestretch, Democrats were unlikely to add many votes to their final polling numbers.

Meanwhile, in the states where incumbent red-state Democrats pulled off victories, they were running stronger than you would have thought if you just looked at the average survey margin because they consistently polled around or above 50 percent rather than in the low 40s. In Montana, for example, Jon Tester was averaging 49 percent in the closing months of the race, suggesting durable crossover support; he went on to defeat his GOP rival, Matt Rosendale, by narrowly clearing the 50-percent threshold.

Democratic strategists know this. And that’s why when they look at candidates like Peltola, they don’t see a chimera driven by undecided Republicans who will eventually grit their teeth and come home; they see a potential breakthrough. While polling has been sparse in her race, she’s at 49 percent in the Real Clear Politics average. Brown is at 49.3 percent in Ohio. Talarico’s support in Texas looks a bit softer, but he is in a much better position than O’Rourke was in 2018—and it’s worth remembering that Beto, unlike most Democrats that cycle, beat his polling average, losing by only 2.5 points.

The deeper, more structural reason for optimism is that President Trump is significantly less popular than he was at this point in 2018—and for reasons that have a more direct impact on the average voter. In the New York Times average, his average job favorability is 38 percent and his net disapproval is eight points worse than it was at this point in 2018. Eight years ago, his unpopularity was driven largely by issues that animated Beltway journalists and Democratic activists, like violating the Hatch Act, behaving like an ogre at G7 meetings, and conducting himself like a blackout drunk on social media. These breaches of decorum didn’t land with nearly the same force with the kind of rural diner-goers that the Times loves to interview in taking the temperature of MAGA-branded public opinion. Many Republicans and Republican-leaning independents simply tuned Trump out and focused on the robust, growing economy and the admirable lack of stupid new wars in the Middle East. But you can’t tune out credit card bills riddled with gas station charges of $75—or skyrocketing healthcare costs and grocery bills.

In 2026, Trump’s endlessly vile, made-for-Tik-Tok antics are almost part of the background din of American public life. His biggest liability today is that he promised voters that he would address the cost-of-living crisis, tame inflation on his first day back in office, and secure the border while he’s acted with almost perverse determination to enrich his ruling-class cronies at the public’s expense, spike inflation, and very publicly inflict bottomless cruelty on law-abiding immigrants far from any international frontier.

Trump lit his political capital and credibility on fire in the opening months of this administration—starting in April 2025, with his “Liberation Day” roster of chaotically conceived tariffs sparking payback initiatives from virtually every country in the world—all to be absorbed by American consumers. That was when the kind of low-information, persuadable voters who drove his 2024 victory started reevaluating their support. And the ensuing occupation of cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis by ICE goons and the predictable bloodshed that came in its wake permanently tanked his numbers with young voters and Latinos, where he had made inroads that were key to his improbable political comeback.

And it was Trump’s demented decision to launch an unprovoked war against Iran that has led more directly to higher gas and energy prices, worsening inflation, and a general climate of impending economic doom. Trump’s favorability numbers have worsened considerably since he launched his losing war in February—but what should really worry Republican strategists is that the political instincts that have allowed him to survive this long have abandoned him. To pick just one example at random, he took to Truth Social on Monday to shill for the despised AI industry’s data center buildout, warning Americans that “you will only have yourselves to blame” if they successfully oppose the construction of these monstrosities. That clueless counsel flies in the face of polling numbers showing that 75 percent of Americans oppose erecting data centers in their communities. Trump is also operating—unlike in 2018—within a near-complete political and intellectual vacuum, issuing dictats like his AI broadside from an under-construction palace full of sycophants and a cabinet stocked with blind loyalists barely qualified for entry-level work in the agencies they run. That means that as the country’s mad tyrant rants and rages on, there is no adult in the room to sit him down and tell the GOP’s one very special boy the truth.

The president’s abject haplessness and near-total indifference to public opinion is why Democrats could pull off wins in Senate contests they hadn’t previously dreamed would be within their reach. In Iowa, Democrat Josh Turek is now narrowly behind, but the state, which had gone twice for Obama, isn’t as deep-red as Texas or Tennessee. And Democrats could also score wins in outlying races that have so far barely been surveyed. Take Nebraska, for example, where independent union leader Dan Osborn is making his second run at the Senate. In 2024, he lost to Republican Deb Fischer by fewer than seven points in a national environment that was considerably better for the GOP. Osborn’s campaign has, admittedly, bankrolled all of the available polling of this race, which shows him running even with incumbent Pete Ricketts—but generic ballot polling alone suggests that this seat could be very much in play given Osborn’s popularity.

Five times in the last 10 years we have gathered at election-night parties or parked ourselves in front of the TV hoping to witness the across-the-board repudiation of Trumpism that never came. Some of those nights were more painful than others, but they all hurt. There are still 63 long days to go until the election. And we must inevitably brace ourselves for the kind of legal and procedural skulduggery the president and his personal lawyers on the Supreme Court will be getting up to, and the nontrivial possibility that all of these polls could be underestimating Republicans yet again. But after what we have endured over the past two years, even the possibility of a midterm cycle that could finally break Trump’s calamitous hold on this country is positively exhilarating.

Has it really been 25 years? It was my first week of middle school in New Jersey. We were led out of the building—there were rumors of a bomb threat—and waited for hours until we were sent home. That night, I lay awake wondering if Osama bin Laden was hiding in my yard.

It has been a long quarter-century since 9/11. Almost everyone now recognizes that the US response to Al Qaeda’s attacks was misguided, that the George W. Bush administration’s crackdown did as much damage as the attacks themselves. The positions this magazine took in the weeks, months, and years after September 11, 2001—against torture and military adventurism, and for a reinvestment in domestic programs—are now common sense.

Our first issue to address 9/11 was dated October 1, 2001. It went to press as Manhattan smoldered with fumes and uncertainty. “A great paralyzing white wall of not knowing,” as columnist Patricia J. Williams put it, still lingered in the air. The lead editorial acknowledged the country’s “swooning sense of helpless vulnerability.”

While hawkish ideologues began to talk about “open-ended war” and limiting civil liberties, it was vital, The Nation asserted, to maintain a grip on reality: “It is essential now to stick to hard facts, not fearsome shadows or injured hubris (or the xenophobic hatreds already in the air).” The editorial continued: “The paradox is that if or when we engage in brutal reprisals, they will serve a cathartic function for the vast majority of justifiably outraged Americans.” Yet dropping bombs and overthrowing governments would only stir up further hostility against the United States.

Instead of following our worst impulses as a country, The Nation urged Americans to take a hard look in the mirror. It was time to “examine the true burdens and obligations of acting like an empire awesomely more powerful than any others and answerable to no one.” Surely it would be wiser and more “truly brave” to refuse the easy response of jingoism, which would only lead to the passage of “draconian new laws that undermine civil liberties.” Instead, the attacks should force previously suppressed issues to the center of national debate. That plea went largely unheeded, as the following two and a half decades have shown. “Extremism begets extremism,” then–Washington editor David Corn wrote in that first post-9/11 issue, “and the dark smoke of a dark day will not be easily blown away.”

“The first thing I discovered is that no job, no matter how lowly, is truly ‘unskilled.’” This is from Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2001 masterwork Nickel and Dimed. I read it that year, when I was 29. Eventually, Barbara became my good friend and colleague, as we created a media organization, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and wrote and edited articles together.

To recap: For that book, Barbara went undercover, reporting as she worked as a housekeeper, nursing aide, a home cleaner, a waitress at Jerry’s and Hearthside restaurants, and a Walmart worker, all in her later 50s, wrestling with cleaning products, carrying huge diner orders, and sometimes living in motels. The book was a departure from her earlier acidly funny and sociological work, ranging from midwifery to middle-class anxiety, but for which she rarely interviewed a soul.

It’s hard to underestimate the effect Nickel and Dimed’s vacuum-cleaner’s-eye view of what it means to work a minimum-wage job in this country had on so many of us. In my case, I had been partly lulled by the hipster aestheticism of the late 1990s and the myth that ideology itself was at its end (not so fast). For those blinded by America’s late-20th-century comforts, Barbara’s book helped us to stop “unseeing” low-wage workers. It also showed us what anyone who has ever made a pizza or taken care of a child already knew but had perhaps not articulated: that there is no such thing as “unskilled” work. As Barbara wrote, “The ‘working poor,’ as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society.” And Nickel and Dimed also helped precarious creatives like me and my ilk—freelance writers, art handlers, grad students, bookstore clerks, paid hourly and shabbily—see themselves more clearly, as on a continuum with other working people. Barbara showed us the label “unskilled work,” which divided underpaid hyper-educated freelancers I think of as “black turtleneck workers” and underpaid blue-collar was a false distinction.

In Nickel and Dimed’s wake, I devoted myself to what I thought of as “undercover sociology,” reporting my book Branded from teens’ bedrooms and at marketing conferences. Barbara had that influence because she was a reporter and activist, but also because she was a trickster—she liked to fuck stuff up. With each aperçu, I think of her cackling and muttering, “Take that, Yuppie American reader! Look how impossible it is to live on the wages real people earn!”

As the year 2001 and then the decade progressed, Nickel and Dimed’s thesis became even more resonant. A new recession had started, one caused by the bursting of the dot.com bubble and then by the terrorist attacks six months later, as well as the Enron scandal and other money-man-accounting crises. Wikipedia had just launched and with it a notion of “unskilled expertise.”

In the years after Nickel and Dimed, there were also major movements that were somewhat inspired by it, from Fight for $15 to Occupy Wall Street, a mass movement that started in New York City in response to the corporate bailouts.

Soon after Occupy, I met Barbara, in what was to be the last segment of her life. She had just founded what would become our shared organization, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and talked to me on the phone, in her crackling voice, about a multimedia project I was working on, The Last Clinic, devoted to the only remaining abortion clinic in Mississippi, which would be the center of the Dobbs decision. She told me about her experience with the underground abortion collective Jane. I was enamored with her from the start: I thought of her as a matriarch of meaning. As with a number of her protégés, mostly women, Barbara also almost immediately put faith in me, constantly dubbing me her “successor.” Needless to say, that gave me faith in myself. Barbara’s brilliance, weirdness, and incorruptibility made her into something of an intellectual curio, an outsider-insider, and thus, for me, easier to love.

As an insider, she was paid a mighty word rate, her book sold 1.5 million copies, and she knew everyone; as an outsider, she far preferred pleasure and freaks to the famous and well-regarded. She was prickly, funny, ribald, in fact, and could be rude—she enjoyed martinis, cigarettes, and sardonic comebacks: when we went to lunch meetings with potential nonprofit funders who would order lattes, she’d enjoy ordering a plain soda, with an anti-elite glint in her eye. She hated sanctimony and reveled in a startling, even comic austerity—in fact, she cast aspersions on women who hired housecleaners. When we started to work together, she wanted us to exist in an anarchist state of shared power, as “co-editors.” (It brought about years of complications, as any management student would have foreseen, but it was worth it.)

We had gotten into the media business when a-dollar-a-word was the basic pay for an independent reporter. Thirty years later, a-dollar-a-word is a windfall. She knew that she was in the 1 percent of nonfiction writers, most of whom earn $25,000 a year. She also wanted to give back to the reporters who were working in stores or living on the street, and to make sure that not only the rich got to write about poverty. EHRP, the nonprofit she founded and that I ran with her—and then, sadly, without her—became our answer.

Barbara passed away in 2022 and I often wonder what she would make of what has happened since then. She was once the first co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America with Michael Harrington; many decades later, the DSA has given us Zohran Mamdani and today’s DSA-ed crop of left political leaders. What would she make of the group’s astounding political success and the rise of one of her central concerns, “affordability,” in public discourse, inspiring voters as “inequality” somehow could not? What would she think of ICE grabbing off the street the immigrant workers she had championed, the administration’s halting of crucial medical research and the spread of 20th-century diseases like measles as vaxxes are blocked? (A trained biologist, Barbara would surely be particularly appalled.) She would also be keen on AI refuseniks currently refusing to, well, play with the robots or retrain them to do their white-collar jobs. Barbara would, I think, not only report on serving Coca-Colas but also, on being an AI trainer, an Uber driver controlled by the algo, or a content filterer forced to screen violent amateur online footage.

Lastly, she would be pleased to note that Nickel and Dimed continues to sell, a director is planning to make it into a feature film (amazingly, it has already been a musical!). It is also one of the most frequently censored books in the country.

I’ve gathered the formidable contributors that follow, Arlie Hochschild, Deirdre English, Ai-jen Poo, Bill Fletcher, and Ann Larson, all who knew or were greatly influenced by Barbara. In times like these, we should commemorate those like Barbara who fought hard, and well.

—Alissa Quart

Deirdre English

Barbara had always been keenly aware of class: This struck me the first time I met her in the early 1970s as a fellow founding faculty member at the State University of New York at Old Westbury. We co-taught a course in women’s studies and began the seven years of research that resulted in our book, For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts’ Advice to Women. That book showed how male-dominated medical mismanagement of women’s physical and mental health had helped authorize stereotypes of gender, class, and race: For example, upper-class women were diagnosed as too weak and “hysterical” for work life outside the home, while working-class and poor women, especially Black women, were deemed so robust as to thrive on hard labor. This “scientific” medicalization of class, race, and gender helped to socially construct identities that were perpetuated as if they were natural.

We remained co-conspirators for life. When I became editor in chief of Mother Jones, I published her work frequently. She interrogated the overseas dumping of banned contraceptives for a National Magazine Award–winning investigative report, and her penetrating book Hearts of Men was a cover story. When she set out to write Nickel and Dimed, she secured me as her listed reference on job applications, and I was all set to confirm her fictitious identity that she was simply a recent divorcee without job experience—but no boss ever bothered to call me to check her references. On the road, she e-mailed me her notes for safe-keeping in case anything happened to her laptop (this was before we all had the alternative of uploading files to data centers, aka “the cloud”) and she called me occasionally to reground in her “previous life.” I claim the honor of having read and discussed the drafts of all of her books over the years. Barbara thrived on questioning everything, thrashing out ideas and pushing them to their logical extremes. Conversations with her were wide-ranging, eye-opening, and often thrilling.

The impact of Nickel and Dimed was epitomized not only by the hands-on labor Barbara performed, or by her no-bullshit voice, but by the systematic class analysis she precisely laid out. It was obvious enough that costs, especially rents, were high while wages were low, as she experienced when, to maintain an adequate caloric intake, she needed a second job. Then she had to move to more expensive lodgings to be closer to that job. This workload exhausted her yet barely elevated her diet of largely beans, chopped meat, and noodles, supplemented with fast food. So the initial findings were laid out.

But Barbara wrote not only of stretched-thin workers who live, then as now, in a “state of emergency” but of the affiliates who manage them, the executives who exploit them and the owners and stockholders who profit from them. She detailed how the practices and costs of disciplining workers with invasive surveillance (so much more pervasive today) weigh against the hopes of workers organizing for higher wages: “It is a tragic cycle, condemning us to ever greater inequality, and in the long run, almost no one benefits but the agents of repression themselves.”

Beside her focus on class, Barbara had a message in Nickel and Dimed about gender, directed especially at members of the labor movement and the left, which still stubbornly stereotyped workers as men in mills, mines, and factories. Yet by the late 1990s, low-wage service jobs were among the fastest-growing types of work. Her choice to take on such jobs, which were done disproportionately by women, was not only a necessity but, as a socialist-feminist, the way she pushed the labor movement to wake up and be more feminist and the feminist movement to be more class- and race-conscious. This multi-issue message was always Barbara’s creed.

One anecdote about Nickel and Dimed that comes to mind occurred after a university seminar with feminist scholars. As we left to get lunch, and Barbara remarked, “They didn’t seem to like me much, I wonder why not?” Oh, I said, it’s because you made them feel guilty that their careers depend on hiring low-wage women workers!” At that, Barbara laughed it off saying, Oh well, if that’s the reason, I’m fine with it!

It’s not that Barbara had it in for professional class women or scholars; she was one herself, after all. She was acutely aware that her own real life in the upper 20 percent also depended on the labor of the innumerable laborers all around us as well as multitudes of overseas workers. Just buying a shirt or a pound of rice makes you enmeshed, if not complicit, in the tragic vicious circle she had elaborated.

Barbara felt that as they became more successful careerists, women should not abandon their erstwhile sisters, or the initial insistence of the Women’s Liberation Movement that its cause is that of all women. Members of what she termed the Professional/Managerial Class should do whatever they could in that regard, paying very well and using their advanced skills to campaign for labor rights, higher wages, and public services such as childcare—as she did. In contrast, the “elite capture” of feminist thought in academia and abstruse jargon troubled her.

Not that she let men off the hook, sailing as they do on a sea of unequal resources, ranging from the unpaid labor of their mothers and wives, and the often lower pay of colleagues, to all the low-wage workers who serve them with the pleasant luxuries of their lives. Barbara’s attitude to them was, get over yourselves and pay up! Twenty-five years have passed, and the cruel truth is that things are even more unequal now for low-paid workers than they were when Barbara wrote her vivid call to action. Under Trump, progress has reversed. That’s no reason to quit socialist-feminism. I think she would say to all of us: Fight harder.

Ai-jen Poo

In 2001, as a young organizer, I spent my days listening to nannies in the playgrounds of Manhattan. The attention and nurturing they poured into the children in their care, juxtaposed with their conditions—not having clear job expectations or consistent hours, not having job security or access to benefits of any kind, earning wages so low that the ends rarely met—felt both enraging and perplexing. Until Barbara Ehrenreich published Nickel and Dimed and brought the epidemic of low-wage work in America into the light.

Seeing the world of work through her sharp eyes helped us all see the service jobs at the bottom of our economy as a crucial arena for change, buoying nascent organizing efforts among workers like domestic workers. Experiencing the gap between hard-earned wages and the cost of meeting our basic human needs like food, housing, and transportation through her journey, we all felt the outrage; she established a pattern that no one should stand for, certainly not the workers themselves.

Her stint as a housekeeper gave her honorary status among domestic workers in New York. We adopted her into our family of fiery women, and she bore witness to our seven-year campaign to change the New Deal–era exclusions of domestic workers from New York’s labor laws. She marched with us in Albany, stood vigil with us in front of the governor’s office, and joined me in the parks as I rallied support among workers for the first Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in the nation. Sixteen years after NY’s bill was won, 12 additional states have passed a Bill of Rights, Washington State as recently as this year. Progress has been made, but much bigger threats loom as we enter the age of AI. Many important lessons from Nickel and Dimed are more salient than ever: There is much more to most jobs than the rest of us think. There’s nothing like seeing the world through the eyes of workers to show us the truth of this economy. And there is no replacement for the human genius of great storytelling. For these truths, I will forever be grateful to Barbara Ehrenreich.

Arlie Hochschild

In Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell entered the life of the homeless tramp in grim one-day-stay city shelters in the 1930s, joining a society of males doomed as unemployed outsiders. In Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich goes one further. She takes us with her into the world of hotel maids, waitresses, Walmart sales associates, all of whom are employed outsiders. And however many jobs they work, she notes, they are doing the extra job of managing their poverty. She counts her tips as a Florida waitress, thumbs through her thin wallet for a security deposit on a rented room, learns to make hotel beds with triple-sheet setups and wrinkle-free finish and she gags at ammonia-based window sprays and pungent toilet-bowl cleaners. Barbara conveys their sinking feeling that there is no way out of their dreary lives as outsiders within.

The same holds for the women described in a book Barbara and I co-edited, Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy, which describes women who leave their own children behind in the Philippines or Mexico in order to care for the children of others in the United States. In a sense they learned to live “outside” of their own motherhood, even as sex workers learned to live outside of their sexuality. Barbara also applied her outsider-within eye to her own experience as a survivor of breast cancer, as she confronted what felt to her like a jarring culture of bright pink ribbons, teddy bears, and official optimism. In all her ideas and feelings, Barbara moved with ease past the passport controls that specialist academics can put up around ideas she cared about—ranging from the cave artists of Lascaux to Mardi Gras celebrants in New Orleans to the white-coated male medical authorities whom she and Deirdre English describe as taking over the industry of advising women. Through her wild array of curiosities and joys and journeys through time and place, Barbara gives us the extraordinary gift of her special eye of the outsider-within. It is part of her legacy which will ever remain forever a world treasure.

Ann Larson

When I first read Nickel and Dimed in the early 2000s, I remember thinking that I didn’t know it was possible to write so beautifully and with such humor about low-wage work and poverty. I assigned the book in my writing classes at colleges where I was employed as an adjunct. Earning a fraction of the wages of regular faculty while racking up student debt as a graduate student, I was nervous about my future. But the world of customer service jobs was still distant enough that I could teach the book as a scholarly work. Students were enthralled at Ehrenreich’s ability to mix research with compassionate, on-the-ground reporting. And it all came together thanks to her inimitable narrative voice.

Years later, I heard that voice in my head while working as a supermarket cashier. Like many of the workers Ehrenreich encountered in the low-wage jobs she wrote about, my colleagues struggled to keep food on the table. Virtually no one could afford health insurance or a vacation. Employees suffered from repetitive stress disorders. We clocked in and out with our fingerprints, connecting our bodies to the store’s timekeeping mechanism. Being off the clock felt less like free time than like a state of waiting. There was work and then there was waiting to go back to work.

One day, a line from Nickel and Dimed popped into my head. “What you don’t necessarily realize when you start selling your time by the hour,” Ehrenreich wrote, “is that what you’re actually selling is your life.” No longer hearing those words as a teacher but as a worker, they spoke to me more forcefully than ever. They perfectly described the existential struggle of punching a clock in a supermarket. I started thinking about writing about my job.

With the support of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, an organization founded by Ehrenreich, I published an article about cashiering. The piece was so well received that I decided to write a book. Cleanup on Aisle Five, also supported by EHRP, which came out this summer. It wouldn’t exist if she hadn’t shown the way.

Bill Fletcher Jr.

I first met Barbara in April of 1988 in New York City. A mutual friend of ours introduced us when I happened to be in New York for a wedding. Barbara was already an icon on the left, and I think that I stammered when speaking with her, in part because I had the sense that she was sizing me up. We were talking about how to unite the left—an issue that became a centerpiece of the discussions she and I had until we last saw each other.

There was, however, another piece, one related to uniting the left but also having its own identity. Of course, I am referencing Barbara’s deep commitment to the working class and to its pursuit of justice. Nickel and Dimed is both a testament to Barbara’s commitment to the working class and illustrative of an outstanding exposé of the polarization of wealth that has increased under neoliberal globalization making it more and more difficult for working people to survive.

Barbara’s commitment to workers took many forms. This included supporting unionized workers in strikes, as well as workers who were attempting to secure unionization. Yet one of the most interesting and inventive initiatives she undertook was an effort to organize professional workers. As a founder of the United Professionals, Barbara sought to organize so-called white-collar workers who are, all too often, overlooked by the media as well as traditional labor unions. Some efforts were undertaken, such as the alliance between the Service Employees International Union and 9-to-5 (the organization of women office workers) which included the creation of a local of SEIU—SEIU Local 925—to undertake that work. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees certainly organized many white-collar workers in the public sector. That said, these efforts did not address the core of what Barbara set out to address through United Professionals. Her vision was of a membership organization that could organize and advocate for white-collar professionals as workers regardless of union eligibility. It is indicative of the myopia of organized labor that her effort received little of their support and, ultimately, was forced to close up. That said, the failure of United Professionals never stopped Barbara in her quest to support the struggle of workers for social and economic justice. It is that which we should remember, especially as we celebrate the anniversary of her great book, Nickel and Dimed.

It’s still the rainy season in South Asia, and people in Nepal have come to expect increasingly extreme monsoon floods. But it wasn’t raining when the flood came this time. The water came not from the clouds but from the mountain itself.

The Himalayan glaciers, the planet’s Third Pole, are melting at an accelerating rate, along with the thawing permafrost that has long held this thin-air cryosphere together like glue.

On the morning of August 26, an enormous chunk of glacier and mountain at some 17,000 feet gave way on the north face of Langtang Lirung, setting off a cascade that sent a tsunami-like flood of water-and-rock slurry down the Bhotekoshi River on the Nepal-Tibet border and on down the heavily populated Trishuli River in the hills of central Nepal. As of this writing, more than 900 lives have been lost, with more than 4,200 missing, according to the Nepali government. (China’s state media reports “significant” losses, with more than 500 missing on the Tibet side of the border.)

Settlements, bridges, and roads along the river—including a vital trade route to China—have been swept away. And in addition to the cost in lives and property, more than 10 percent of Nepal’s crucial hydropower capacity has been destroyed.

How Nepal, a poor developing country of 30 million people that is among the most vulnerable to climate change, will pay for this disaster and many others—and whether it can adapt to climate change in meaningful ways—are not only economic questions but also deeply political and moral ones. (My forthcoming feature in The Nation’s October issue looks at Nepal’s alarming climate crisis and its complex political and human rights situation.) To date, the world’s wealthiest and most historically responsible nations have failed to commit anywhere close to enough funding for adaptation and loss-and-damage in developing countries.

To understand the scale of this disaster’s impact on Nepal, and the prospect of international assistance, in the days after the flood I spoke with the Nepali climate expert Manjeet Dhakal, director of Climate Analytics South Asia in Kathmandu, who heads the United Nations’ Least Developed Countries Support Team. Dhakal has been closely involved in the creation of the UN’s climate loss-and-damage fund. He told me that though the fund is not yet fully operational, there are now internal discussions underway about providing emergency assistance to Nepal.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

—Wen Stephenson

Wen Stephenson: The scale of this disaster is shocking, especially in terms of the human lives lost. The scope and scale of the damage is historic, yes?

Manjeet Dhakal: Yes, it’s historic. With climate change, the scientists have been warning about this. But the scale was something beyond the predictions.

WS: To put this disaster in context, what does it mean for Nepal that it struck this specific region? The Bhotekoshi-Trishuli river basin is both a crucial transport route to China and is also described as “the backbone of Nepal’s energy sector.” It’s reported that more than 10 percent of Nepal’s hydropower capacity was knocked out by this disaster. How important is hydropower for Nepal’s economy? And what does this mean going forward?

MD: There was about 500 megawatts of hydropower running, plus another roughly 200 megawatts that were in the last stages of construction, so roughly 700 to 750 megawatts has been heavily impacted.

And this is the peak season. Nepal has started exporting roughly 1,000 megawatts [1 gigawatt] of hydroelectricity to India during the rainy season, which has become a huge backbone for the economy.

So this obviously has set back the country in a number of ways, but the implication seems it will go much, much further. You mentioned the trade route. This is the new route that has been in operation for the past few years. There were 400-plus container trucks near Rasuwa, on the road with imports from China, with more than 1,000 drivers, workers and traders missing. The business will be heavily impacted, and in the longer run, with the energy infrastructure damage, the impact will go much higher.

Maybe this is a small thing, but there is also the electric vehicle exhibition going on in Kathmandu. [EV sales have surged in Nepal] and many of these new vehicles were there in the port of entry at the border and were completely washed away.

So you can imagine the trickle-down effect in the longer run. It’s massive.

WS: One thing to emphasize is that the pain of this disaster will reach Nepalis far beyond the immediate area where the flood has taken place. It will be felt from the Himalaya to the Tarai, in the plains. The last time we talked, two years ago, you mentioned how one major disaster can have a large impact on the country’s economy.

MD: Before the earthquake in 2015, the GDP growth rate was around 5 percent. Right after the earthquake, it was 0.8 percent. So yes, one disaster can set back the country’s economy. I was looking at the data for this year, and in 2025, GDP growth was 4.6 percent. In 2026, because of the political instability [following the September GenZ uprising], it has gone down to around 2.7 percent. But now with the majority government, the multilateral banks were sending a very positive signal, that the growth rate would be 5 percent in 2027. Now that will fall with this one disaster, with the energy, the export-import, the loss of property, the agricultural impact. A number of things.

WS: A disaster like this always raises talk about climate loss-and-damage funding through the UN process, but we all know that process is slow and uncertain. How does Nepal absorb the economic impact of something like this? How will it pay for recovery? There will be a certain amount of grant assistance, but presumably this will add to Nepal’s already heavy debt burden. Is there any realistic hope of loss-and-damage funds in the near future?

MD: Yeah, the scale is so massive. We’ll soon come up with an assessment, but this will go into a few billions. The finance minister mentioned $7 billion [Nepal’s GDP is about $50 billion], but it’s a very rough estimate as of now. And then there is also the non-economic factors of human life, which obviously can’t be compensated.

WS: Right.

MD: What we have seen in the past is, even though the world responds when these events are in the headlines, it fades away after a few months. The 2022 flood in Pakistan, it was all over the news, and then we saw the fate in terms of the scale and the level of support they received.

There have been certain pledges from India and China and other countries, and I think we should be grateful to the international community for that. The multilateral banks, the World Bank and Asian Development Bank, have pledged as well. But the number, it’s so massive, these pledges are not enough.

In terms of the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage, I am very closely affiliated with it. I was involved in designing the fund as a member of the UN Transitional Committee that established it. The fund is not fully operational, but we have initiated internal discussions on whether it could provide support to Nepal, including through an extraordinary board meeting. There is an opportunity to demonstrate what the fund was designed to deliver.

WS: Would it be a symbolic gesture or would it be a significant amount of funding?

MD: It may only be a symbolic gesture, because the fund still has very limited resources. In 2023, at COP28 in Dubai, around $800 million was pledged, and the fund has yet to receive the full amount. But even a symbolic response could set an important precedent for how the fund responds when such disasters strike vulnerable countries in the future.

WS: Some experts in Nepal are very pessimistic about the prospect of any significant loss-and-damage compensation ever coming. What you would say to them?

MD: Yeah, I think we really have to honor what has been agreed in the multilateral process, in terms of the obligation of the developed countries, the countries with higher emissions. Those obligations have been well articulated, for example, in the Paris Agreement. We keep hearing that with the geopolitics, with the economic situation, there isn’t enough resources. But then at the same time, you also see the billions invested in war. So those arguments really don’t make sense. I think it’s the mindset. We really need to think about the mindset of short-term gain versus the long-term global perspective.

WS: Where do you think it’s going in this next round of the COPs? Do you think loss and damage will be higher on the agenda?

MD: There are just two absolute things. The framework has been agreed in the Paris Agreement and its rules: The global community has to put an effort to urgently reduce emissions, yes, and then mobilize finance at scale. These two things need to happen. For this, obviously, we don’t need just another meeting. It’s a decision that countries can make at the national level, and then we can celebrate when we all meet for this international conference. But it has always been the other way around. We discuss what cannot be done rather than what should be done.

But there are countries with resources, and there are countries who have an obligation, countries with major emissions who need to take responsibility.

WS: This disaster would seem to strengthen the argument made by experts in Nepal about the need to diversify the country’s energy mix, which is so heavily reliant on expensive, large-scale, highly vulnerable hydropower. Could a transition to renewables at scale, and especially solar, be seen as a form of climate adaptation and resilience? We usually think of the transition to solar energy in terms of emissions, but Nepal doesn’t need to cut its emissions, which are negligible, so much as it needs to adapt.

MD: Yes, awareness has grown considerably in recent years about the need for energy diversification, the country being heavily dependent on hydropower. The impact of climate change could be devastating.

I was in the high-impact area just last weekend. I went to Trishuli Bazaar, in Nuwakot, and I visited a solar plant, the largest in Nepal, roughly 25 megawatts. There are other solar plants, on the southern belt in the plains, but not to this scale. The one that I visited was in the valley, to my surprise, and the news says most of it has been damaged. I was thinking of asking, why was that not installed on the top of the mountain?

But I think really the irony of the story is, I was so excited when I saw that solar plant, because I was always putting it in my slides, my presentations, explaining the one best example of energy diversification. And now that plant has been destroyed.

Since she was elected to Congress in 2018, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has had her every move scrutinized. In a 2021 interview, Vice President JD Vance condemned Democrats as “childless cat ladies” who “don’t really have a direct stake in [our country],” citing AOC’s lack of children as a matter of public concern. Now the 36-year-old New York representative has embraced the attention in order to change that narrative, posting a series of Instagram reels documenting her egg-freezing journey and demystifying this fast-growing type of reproductive care. Her chatty, informative reels offer a calm counterpoint to the fevered lectures we’ve heard from Vance and others in the “retrosexual” crowd (pro-natalist, masculinist, anti-abortion, anti-contraception, anti-DEI) about departures from old-school patterns of women’s work and fertility.

Vance and company ignore the underlying issue: The government wants people to have children but provides few resources for families. Before birth control was widely available, that approach “worked” to maintain a high birthrate, while forcing many parents into low-wage jobs to feed unplanned children (their desperation ensuring their bosses’ profits).

But people now have a choice, and many delay having kids until they feel ready to provide for them, a point that arrives for some but not all as the affordability crisis worsens. Others choose not to become parents at all. As a result, the country’s fertility rate has declined 23 percent since 2007—most notably among women ages 15 to 19 (down 72 percent) and 20 to 24 (down 51 percent).

As a highly visible working woman sharing her own biological-clock story, AOC is addressing the concerns of millions about how to plan for a family while pursuing a career. Her videos walk viewers through the egg-freezing process, from injections to ultrasounds to egg retrieval, detailing the high costs and complex science of fertility preservation with humor (one episode in her kitchen begins “Today we’re making—eggs!”).

While her videos are casual and friendly, AOC’s job title (and national recognition) remind viewers that there’s more to this story. Her ability to delay starting a family has likely been crucial to the success of her political career, something that viewers all over the country can relate to. By sharing her fertility choices, she’s demonstrating that it’s possible for her generation to change expectations around forming a family—and to demand better support for it. One reel shows the congresswoman efficiently injecting her belly in the green room of ABC’s This Week, before cutting to a clip from her interview there: “Millennials are…starting to be decisive at the polls. And there is anger at being ignored, sidelined, having our economic futures mortgaged by the generations that came before us—on everything from the economy to climate.… We’re taking the reins.”

Unlike Vance, AOC addresses why Americans are starting families later: “Hello—we don’t provide healthcare, we don’t provide childcare, and…a lot of people struggle to find a suitable partner. No one gender’s fault: That is a collective issue.” Subsidized healthcare (including fertility treatments) and childcare would do much to mitigate the concerns of potential parents.

The retrosexual “tradwife” model also clashes with economic reality: If women all went home, the GDP would immediately fall by a third, followed by massive drops in productivity and consumer spending. Given that women are disproportionately represented in essential sectors like healthcare and education, the exit of even a small percentage of them from the workforce would be catastrophic.

AOC understands that many people don’t want kids at 26—they’d rather establish careers, see the world, and find a long-term partner first. That means more older parents, egg freezing, egg and sperm donation, adoption, and fostering—and more child-free adults long-term. She affirms that viewers “do not need anyone’s approval to lead your life and make the choices that make you happy.… You know, maybe in life you can’t have everything, but here’s the secret: You can have a hell of a lot.” She acknowledges that egg freezing isn’t foolproof, and there’s a real chance that she won’t end up having a child. But these videos offer a compelling vision of a world where women’s concerns and insights matter and where solutions can be found through civil dialogue rather than knee-jerk go-back-ism.

By joining civic life in significant numbers, women have reworked traditional systems that excluded them from policymaking. But it has taken time to get there due to a childcare catch-22: Because they lacked a childcare infrastructure, women couldn’t be elected in sufficient numbers to create one. Delaying family has allowed more of them to reach positions where they can begin building supportive systems for families in the future. They’ve done this precisely because, contrary to Vance, they do have a deep stake in this country and commitment to realizing its promise.

History suggests that it’s only when women like AOC reach critical mass in policymaking roles, potentially sacrificing some of their personal hopes, that we may finally create the national care infrastructure we’ve always needed and the thriving future we desire.

The uneasy stalemate between Iran and the United States flared into violence on Sunday after America launched an attack on Iranian rocket launchers. Iran retaliated by launching missiles against Jordan, a US ally. The new round of fighting proves that the Trump administration remains committed to the fantasy that that more violence will force the Iranian government to surrender. In reality, although both sides in the conflict have endured losses, the ability of the US to impose its will with force has steadily diminished. On August 22, retired general Barry R. McCaffrey offered the sober assessment that “the US Armed Forces have probably permanently lost access to 15 Persian Gulf bases. Iran now poised to control access the Gulf States. US will have to negotiate new access in western Saudi Arabia, Israel, southern Europe.”

McCaffrey is an eminently establishment figure, but his pessimistic conclusion aligns with the judgement of thinkers who are more typically seen as critics of the foreign-policy consensus. John Mearsheimer, for example, an international-relations professor at the University of Chicago, describes the Iran War as a humiliating defeat.

Unfortunately, acknowledging defeat doesn’t come easily to either Donald Trump or the ridiculous martinet he nominated to run the military, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Both Trump and Hegseth are cultural warriors first and foremost, interested in winning battles on social issues by purging trans soldiers from the military, blocking the advancement of women and Blacks in the upper ranks, and overturning anything they consider DEI (a broad category that includes even acknowledging that Black soldiers have served with distinction).

With his focus on culture wars, Hegseth isn’t likely to listen to the criticism of figures like McCaffrey and Mearsheimer. In fact, evidence suggests that he isn’t even willing to listen to his own four-star generals who are offering dire warning that the military is dangerously overextended. As The Washington Post reported on Sunday, “Several U.S. military leaders have advised Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that prolonging large-scale operations against Iran is unsustainable and risks weakening their ability to confront threats elsewhere, including the U.S. homeland.” Even before the Iran War started, Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the White House “that the U.S. lacked sufficient munitions—and support from allies—to conduct an extended large-scale campaign.” The Trump administration ignored this caution, and the US is now in a worse position, lacking the military bases to resupply navy vessels in the region (which has led to crisis conditions on ships such as the USS Liberty) and suffering a shortage of Patriot interceptors.

The Post report noted that “certain generals and admirals were more expansive and frank than is usual in telling Hegseth they disagreed with orders to keep providing equipment and personnel when the operation’s trajectory remains uncertain.”

If Hegseth is disregarding the advice of his top generals, it’s because the culture war is more important to him than the real war. Hegseth has White House ambitions and is gearing up for the 2028 GOP presidential nomination. Losing a war with Iran would tarnish Hegseth politically, but he has developed a simple solution: using the resources of the Pentagon to create a troll army of social-media influencers who could create an alternate reality where all his actions were brilliant victories.

On August 27, Will Sommer of The Bulwark, an astute observer of the right, reported that one of Hegseth’s most vocal online fans was also covertly a civilian employee of the Pentagon. The person in question was Jennica Pounds, who posts under the name DataRepublican. As Sommer noted:

Hegseth has gone to great lengths to limit and muzzle many members of the traditional Pentagon press corps. But secretly employing a shadowy, rabidly online personality for the apparent purpose of going after your enemies is a remarkable illustration of the kind of steps Hegseth appears willing to take to fight internecine political wars. Here’s the thing, though:

Pounds appears to be just one of several people enlisted in such a task.

At least three other prominent pro-Trump social media figures who have either worked for Hegseth or almost gotten jobs at the Pentagon have also come to serve as reliable online allies for Hegseth. Funnily enough, they’ve also all rushed to defend Pounds in the face of the criticism that she’s an undercover federal operative.

On Sunday, the Post published an extensive article that built on Sommer’s journalism, both confirming it and providing additional details. According to the newspaper, “The Pentagon has secretly installed several conservative military veterans with large online followings in government roles, declining to disclose their assignments as they amplify Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s viewpoints and attack those who scrutinize the Trump administration.”

One of Hegseth’s troll soldiers, Thomas Anderson (who posts under the name Cynical Publius), repeatedly attacked anti-war Republican Representative Thomas Massie during a primary race that Massie ended up losing. It’s hard not to avoid the conclusion that taxpayer money allocated to the Pentagon was used by the executive branch to influence a congressional election, a direct attack on the principle of keeping the military out of domestic politics.

Shamefully, the Post’s excellent reporting was attacked by the paper’s hawkish columnist Marc Thiessen, a frequently unhinged apologist for Trump’s imperialism, who responded to the report about senior generals dissenting from Hegseth by fuming, “Whoever leaked this is a traitor and ought to be prosecuted.”

In point of fact, the leaker was committing an act of high patriotism, not treason. In a constitutional republic, the military is not the political instrument of either the president or the defense secretary. Rather, the military must always be nonpartisan. If top generals think the military is being pushed to the limits of its fighting capacity, the public deserves to know.

Hegseth is remaking the military into the image of MAGA: an army of white cis-male reactionaries who nurse fantasies of their macho prowess and love the catatonic self-satisfaction of living in a social-media echo chamber.

A perhaps more sympathetic interpretation might be that Hegseth is as much to be pitied as held in contempt. After all, he’s clearly incapable of winning a real war, so has to settle for the illusory victories of his troll army.

The USS Abraham Lincoln was designed to sail forever. The 100,000-ton vessel can transport 5,400 sailors and 90 jets for 25 years without refueling, thanks to the atomic fission of two Westinghouse nuclear reactors stored in the hull. The ship’s infinite power source offers an incredible military edge, one tempered by inevitable rust and oxidation from sea water, plus the basic human needs of the sailors aboard, among them clean water, food, soap, and the ability to engage, at least intermittently, with civilization.

Last November, for the ninth or 10th time, the Lincoln departed from the port of San Diego for the Middle East. The ship was worn down, and the crew was burnt out, thoroughly frazzled by what military leaders described as a quickening “operational tempo” that was soon to hit hyper speed—conditions that only nuclear reactors could endure.

For nearly half of 2024, the Lincoln had been deployed in the Eastern Mediterranean to deter Iran, the Houthis, and other proxy forces targeting Israel as the country unleashed a genocide in Gaza. In 2025, the crew of the Lincoln underwent a series of intense sustainment exercises across hundreds of nautical miles in Alaska and other locales.

The November deployment was slated to end in May, but three months in, President Trump launched the War in Iran, forcing the Lincoln to ramp up operations and remain on the water. As of this writing, the carrier has been out to sea for a whopping eight months—the longest stretch of time without a port call in modern history. Thousands of sailors worked hundreds of days without a single one off.

Military brass today express a posture of constant vigilance while also proclaiming that the Pentagon is “a people business.” Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao has equated “troop welfare” with tactical success, as have countless leaders before him. The truth, however, is that war is a body business, its planners calculating the most brutally efficient ways to maintain morale and manpower. Military food, for instance, is designed within an inch of its life, made to fit specific caloric and dietary standards while also being lightweight and nonperishable. The rare perk of a “surf and turf” meal is seen by servicemembers not as some kind gesture, but instead an ominous harbinger of an unexpectedly long or heavy rotation to come.

The Pentagon frequently stretches the bounds of human will to keep the bombs dropping. This work is accomplished by specified training regimes that treat suffering, and even death, as crucial precursors to heroism and true manhood. Surrender, or even dissent, is seen as cowardly. This message is clear in the US Navy’s unofficial motto, “Don’t Give Up the Ship,” an order initially barked during the War of 1812 by the gravely wounded commander of the USS Chesapeake. In the end, the surviving sailors waved the white flag, making the pragmatic decision to spare their own lives after the prospect of victory had clearly eluded them.

“Victory” has had many meanings in the Forever Wars, a constantly shifting target that has pushed service members, and the equipment they rely on, to the limit. A quarter century into the war on terror, US troops and their families are contending with the military’s cold and callous approach to human resources in exceptional ways. They are a generation contending with profound distance and isolation brought on by historically long and repeated deployments. Back on American shores, many face moldy on-base housing, food insecurity, and a spate of physical and mental ailments brought on through their service. The Navy is particularly prone to these problems, beset by logistical, manpower, and construction issues stemming from the fact that that the branch is, as one former Naval commander warned a decade ago, “an 11-carrier Navy in a 15-carrier world.”

A deployment, no matter its length or locale, is emotionally grueling. One 2018 metanalysis of 185 studies found consistently adverse mental health effects from these odysseys. Nearly half of 1,000 sailors surveyed in 2025 claimed that the services available onboard to help address these stressors were grossly inadequate.

Sailors on the Lincoln have endured a particularly hard time on the seas, battered not not only by heavy combat operations, but also bad food, a lack of soap and toothpaste, dirty water, moldy showers, and severe plumbing issues. The mail system also went on the fritz, leading to lost care packages that have exacerbated the crew’s gnawing sense of isolation. (Other ships have experienced similar problems.)

In recent weeks, Navy families and sailors have taken the unusual step of speaking out on behalf of the crew as conditions have become especially dire. Reports say that multiple sailors have attempted to jump into the sea. Last week, a Lincoln sailor named Joshua Aviles wrote on Facebook that his father had been improperly detained by immigration authorities while waiting on his green card approval.

Earlier in the month, the Navy held a combative town hall in San Diego with frustrated families. According to Stars & Stripes, one wife reported that her husband recently texted her that “he hopes he doesn’t wake up tomorrow.” According to MS Now, “another parent said her daughter feels that she is never going to come home and believes she is going to die on the ship.”

Interestingly, the conditions aboard the Lincoln have even been turning the troops and their families, many of them Trump voters, against the war itself. According to MS Now, a woman in the town hall “questioned the mission and said she found it difficult to be proud of her sailor when she believed the military was ‘killing innocent civilians’ and her sailor expressed guilt about what he was doing.” Her comments were met with rousing applause.

These disclosures spawned public outrage, but also backlash among certain military figures, men who snapped into the tired old line that abasement is a noble part of service. Veterans on Reddit derided struggling crewmembers as weak, while President Trump wished them more pain, asserting that the Lincoln’s record-breaking deployment was “not nearly long enough.”

In a particularly bizarre tirade on Fox News, Joey Jones, a Marine Corps Reservist who lost both his legs in Afghanistan, inveighed against the complaints from the Lincoln by himself loudly complaining on air about the many indignities he suffered overseas. Jones whined in particular about salty ramen noodles and six months without showering, insisting that this was all fine by him and that the sailors on the ship should buck up. “How weak are you?!” he shouted at one point to the camera.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegsteth, who, in his 2024 book The War on Warriors, fashioned himself as a champion of the troops, especially those who refused the Covid-19 vaccine, has repeatedly downplayed the suffering of the sailors as “misrepresented.” Then, a few days ago, Hegseth’s brass charged a sailor who jumped from the Lincoln for “intentionally faking an illness or hurting themselves to avoid work, duty or service.”

In a short interview with the press, Hegseth proudly nodded to his own suffering in the services, and insisted, with a forced sense of awe, that the “austere conditions” on the ship were not regrettable, but “incredible.”

This week, the Lincoln is expected to make a brief port call in Thailand before undergoing a month-long slog back to America. It’s a well-earned break, but one many military observers predict will inevitably devolve into a maelstrom of hard-drinking debauchery. It’s convenient to blame such behavior on the sailors, but these are the signature avenues the Pentagon offers troops to expel the intense stress, isolation, and pent-up social and sexual energy brought on by a deployment. The Pentagon takes such poor care of its people that even its efforts at rest and relaxation are bound to leave a mark.

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

In 2011, Richard Kyte, an ethics professor at Viterbo University, noticed that two of his colleagues were growing increasingly isolated. So he suggested they meet every Wednesday at 6:30 am for breakfast at a café five blocks from their university in La Crosse, Wisconsin.

Fifteen years later, the meetups have continued and expanded, now happening at a tavern after the café closed. Some of the most reluctant participants are now the most engaged. Even as the group has changed, the opportunity for connection has remained.

“A couple colleagues that started with me years ago, our friendship has really deepened,” said Kyte, noting that he’s also become good friends with those who joined later. “When you’re talking about adding a close friend, that’s a huge change in the quality of your life.”

Places like Kyte’s local tavern have long offered more than food and drink. Known as “third places,” these informal gathering spaces outside home and work—from cafés and barber shops to local parks and libraries—can serve as hubs for social interaction, community ties, and civic engagement. But across the United States, many of these places are disappearing, transforming, or giving way to large corporate chains, some of which may prioritize efficiency and turnover over giving people a space to linger. That shift comes as Americans are feeling increasingly lonely, divided, and distrustful.

Kyte, author of Finding Your Third Place, said third places are not only declining overall but also changing. “They’re changing their character. The old places that were common third places are dying pretty rapidly,” he said. “Where do I find a third place? That’s a question I get a lot.”

First coined by sociologist Ray Oldenburg, third places are a crucial form of social infrastructure. Research shows that they can foster belonging and social cohesion, as they offer opportunities for casual, low-stakes interactions. Regular engagement in these spaces has also been linked to lower loneliness and stress and better physical, mental, social, and cognitive health.

“Covid brought a greater awareness to third places, to how vital they are for everyday health and well-being,” said Jessica Finlay, anassistant professor of geography at the University of Colorado Boulder. ”They can be a social glue that connects us, and it’s really important for not just individual health but collective health.”

Yet fewer people are visiting these spaces, particularly since the pandemic. A national survey found that 54 percent of Americans now regularly spend time in such places, down from 67 percent in 2019.

Rising costs, remote work, busy schedules, and growing e-commerce are some of the reasons these places have become harder to sustain and fit into daily life. People are also socializing and communicating less. In 2025, 30 percent of Americans did so on an average day, down from 38 percent a decade earlier, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Part of that may be because there are more ways to connect and be entertained without leaving home. Social media, gaming communities, group chats, and other digital spaces have moved more social interaction online. Finlay said these digital third places can bring both promise and peril.

“Even though you might be able to find folks who share the same passions or interests, there historically is value in productively encountering difference. When we’re in third places in person, we might be right next to someone who doesn’t think like we do or navigate the world in the same way,” she said. “We can lose a lot of that online.”

As third places become scarcer, their loss isn’t felt equally. A 2025 study found that the overall decline in third place availability may disproportionately affect majority-Black, lower-educated, and rural communities. Some of these groups already report higher rates of loneliness or less social support.

“We wanted to dig a little bit deeper into where are these closures concentrated? And we did find that underserved communities typically saw a greater concentration of closures,” said Finlay, one of the study’s authors.

But the pattern isn’t uniform, Finlay added, as some kinds of third places are holding steady or increasing. For instance, the majority-Black communities in the study had more access to civic and social organizations, beauty and barber shops, and restaurants. Libraries, meanwhile, were more concentrated in less-educated and rural areas. Some of these communities may also be more adept at finding other places to gather. “The story is complicated.”

The Trust for Public Land has also found that neighborhoods where most residents are people of color have access to an average of 44 percent less park acreage than predominantly white neighborhoods. Similar park space inequities exist in low-income neighborhoods.

Without accessible third places, experts warn, people may become more isolated and social networks can shrink. Their loss may also deepen political division and mistrust. In a 2025 Pew survey, just 44 percent of Americans said they trusted all or most of the people in their neighborhood.

“When you have a decline in the amount of time that people are actually spending getting to know others in their community, you have a decline in trust, because…most trust is built through person-to-person relationships,” said Kyte. “And so we’re going to continue to see less trust, and that leads to more polarization.”

Kyte added that third places can also help build deeper relationships over time, as he’s seen with his weekly tavern meetings. “Third places are the main places where we go, where we expand that friendship network. As people go to them less, they become increasingly lonely and there are fewer options available that are both accessible and affordable.”

But Setha Low, an anthropology professor at City University of New York, cautioned against drawing a straight line between fewer third places and rising loneliness. “Everybody’s looking for it to be one thing,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be one thing.”

Still, creating more opportunities to gather starts with supporting places where it can happen. That means helping existing third places stay open while making it easier to create new ones, from investing more in public spaces and lowering barriers for small businesses to rethinking policies and regulations that make such spaces harder to build.

“The main thing that needs to be done is to revise zoning codes in towns and cities to allow for small business in residential areas, usually called mixed-use zoning,” Kyte said. “There is a growing movement among urban planners to do this, but it’s a long, slow process. My own city of La Crosse is in the middle of this process right now.” Other cities such as Dallas, Pittsburgh, and Seattle have also been rethinking such zoning rules.

Through its Local Conversations initiative, Strong Towns is supporting more than 290 locally led groups across the country to take small steps to build community and improve their neighborhoods. The changes can be simple, said John T. Reuter, the organization’s executive director, such as adding benches at bus stops and dog parks, making intersections and crosswalks safer, or turning front yards into gathering spaces.

“People were reaching out to their neighbors, finding ways to connect, and starting to figure out how to heal their places,” Reuter said. “The very core problem that we have is our built environment is what’s driven us to this space of disconnection. And the solution is to start with reconnecting public space.”

But creating more third places isn’t enough; they also need to encourage connection. Comfortable seating, for example, can give people a reason to linger, while programming can draw people into the space. Finlay said that can require getting meaningful input from the communities the spaces are meant to serve.

“It is both quantity and quality,” she said. “Folks have mentioned wanting to just feel welcome in places, so little things like having ‘all are welcome’ signs or doing programming like game nights and trivia.”

Ultimately though, people have to show up.

“Each of us individually can have third places reappear for us, whether that’s a church or a coffee shop or a bowling alley or a game store, right? Whatever it might be, I would just encourage people to go out into the world,” said Reuter. “All of these things are happening today, and you just have to go out and find them and join them. You might not be able to end the loneliness epidemic for everyone, but you can end it for yourself.”

It was ironic that the literary services start-up had been founded by an editor. But if you’d met her, that wouldn’t surprise you. The labor of editing, she believed, was arduous and its romanticization undeserved. To her, the taste of selection was the sole editorial virtue, everything else a chore. In her ideal world, each piece of copy would already come with tracked changes, leaving the prudent editor with little more than the discretion to press “Accept” or “Reject.” She would happily relegate the rest of the labor and presumed others would feel this way too. And so, when she created her company, she gave away all the “drudgery” to the thing, an artificial-intelligence tool. Like Pygmalion, she built it in her image, and like Pygmalion, she loved what she had wrought. Even if she might hesitate to call it flawless, it was preferable to the many entry-level copy editors who routinely sent in their CVs, eager to do her bidding. After all, the thing could produce an editorial memo in less than a minute. In a few seconds, it could parse a tangled paragraph and downsize it to a corporatized readability, or copy-edit a chapter in the time it takes to shift between browsers. “I taught it as I taught you,” my boss said. With her tool by my side, I could edit a piece of prose without so much as reading a line.

My boss would sit at her long, lonely desk for hours, the picture of a classic editor. Her rainbow-coded bookcase was the work of a handsomely paid book stylist who, I imagined, read only the spines. When I interrupted her, she would tap her glasses till they landed, precisely each time, on the edge of her nose, a compliment to the gravity of her downward glare. This editorial chic perhaps served to make the uncool, fraught endeavour of using artificial intelligence for the time-honored work of editing appear less offensive. At parties, I could never admit where I worked. It was like lying about a bad boyfriend.

The type of tool my boss’s company had created was christened, sometimes pejoratively, an “AI wrapper.” For a tool created by “wrapping” foundation models with an interface inviting enough to goad you into buying yet another subscription, “wrapper” is a fitting descriptor. All a company has to do to make one is pretty up the existing Big AI models. On the back end, the system instructions my boss had written would begin, “You are a diligent editor…,” and once you uploaded a manuscript onto the thing, it would answer with the disarming confidence of one. The first time I used it to line-edit a chapter of a book, the sight of the text being pressed into cohesion was spectacular.

In the initial days of the job, I’d judge the thing’s judgment and report back on any of its transgressions. As I occupied the lowest rung of the editorial ladder, I couldn’t even say that I was training it to replace me. When it was right, it was right, and when it was wrong, we were wrong: All the blame for its hallucinations was to be shared with the human who bungled the prompt my boss offered it.

My condition at the company became only more demoralizing when I tried to humanize the thing as a means of selling it to clients. (If I wanted to be a better editor, I also had to learn how to be a marketer, my boss reasoned.) Once, I called it my boss’s doppelgänger; other times, I pitched it as a patient, forgiving editor, one certain not to take forever to validate the writer. “Unless you run out of tokens,” I’d joke. “And, of course, you can bug it on the weekends,” my boss would say.

Although I was as compliant as workers come, I almost never read anything that one of our clients, a think tank, sent our way. I wasn’t equipped for the task; I’d never learned how to edit a policy paper. That was acceptable as long as I could pretend otherwise, a demonstration that came as easily as copying and pasting swaths of generated edits into a document.

A recent study in the journal Technology, Mind, and Behavior found that those who relied heavily on large-language-model tools felt no sense of ownership over the output they created with them. This could explain why any compliment to my editing occasioned a headache, as if I had yanked out a fistful of hair. Although I was great at my work, I was no good at it. I couldn’t have done it without the thing.

The fact that the thing possesses a style does not mean it’s a good style. After taking stock of human writing, it assesses recurring sentence structures and grammatical tools. Then it mistakes all the recurrences, such as the recurrence of em dashes, for a necessary characteristic of good writing. Whatever we now chastise as literary affronts for their likeness to AI-generated writing were, before AI, a kind of writing that could be considered forgettable, or writing that aspired to be, but was not quite yet, good. As Laura Kipnis has written in Wired, large language models, through which the thing routed its edits, favor “pseudo-profundities” like delve and dive. The side effect of fraternizing with AI as much as I was expected to do was that I started to see the hand of the machine lurking in things it could never, ever have touched. In his literary manifesto The World of Sex, for example, Henry Miller uses the word delve twice, smartly. But when I saw it in his prose, I was jump-scared.

At work, I was instructed to do away with all the telling platitudinal verbs, slipping an innocent choice in their place, sometimes even replacing the em dashes with commas. Even when endorsing the thing and being up-front about using AI, it couldn’t seem like you’d used AI.

I started to become disillusioned just as the thing started gaining popularity. We two sole employees and an intern were assigned to line-edit an entire 150,000-word PhD dissertation in no more than three days. As with many of our edits by then, it was to be completed piecemeal, as if the pages of the manuscript were sliding across a conveyor belt, each of us assigned to specific tasks.

When I told my boss the goal was impossible, she noted that this was probably because we expected to take as much time on it as a “manual editor” would. (It would appear that we were the “assisted” editors.) There was not even enough time to push back on the request: With the thing, we were compelled to work faster, even if it was making many dubious edits, as the mention of the thing slowing us down would always be regarded as a defensive reflex on our part.

I could not manage, let alone fathom, such proficiency, and so I didn’t read more than a paragraph of that dissertation while editing it. I yielded to the thing absolutely in order to deliver results as the efficient machine I was expected to be. Soon enough, anticlimactically, the writer’s message announcing their love of the edits was forwarded to me, with an addendum from my boss: “I said it was all you!” This clarification was a fiction: Those edits were never going to be mine.

In his 1948 lecture “Good Readers and Good Writers,” Vladimir Nabokov states that a reader who begins a book with a “ready-made generalization” in mind is reading it from the “wrong end…. Nothing is more boring or more unfair to the author.” Yet the prompt library of the thing was lined with phrases that worked with such generalizations. Each draft, it was assumed, warranted a homogeneous approach; the only demarcation was its form. (We even had a prompt to edit poetry.) As I worked, my ambivalence toward everything I edited swelled. I’d habitually run anything I was assigned to do through the models. (I was often asked to gut-check “with” them.) If I wasn’t swift enough, I was reminded that I should’ve been, for any holdup was objectionable when these tools exist. Any time I edited withthe thing, which was most of the time, the metastasizing impact lingered long after the injury of using it ended.

A good reader, “a rereader,” Nabokov writes, can take in the “artistic delight” of the writer. The thing, with its numb productivity, had neither the time nor the ability for this vaunted part of the exercise. Using it, I learned that anyone could engineer prompts. Even someone like me, with all my inexperience of the world, could hastily type something like “proptedit shrt story” into a chatbot interface and watch it reliably spew out a coherent prompt for editing a short story. I knew I wasn’t really editing, but at times I had to believe I was. At work, I often couldn’t allow myself to confront the thought that several prompts of roughly a few hundred words detailing how to approach any type of manuscript would never match years of editorial experience. That would’ve compromised the enterprise entirely.

We can, in theory, train the thing to sound like us. I wager, perhaps vainly, that it will never sound as much like us as we will come to sound like it. Because how an idea is articulated matters as much as the idea itself. Would writers want an editor who will gulp their sentences down and spit them back as prose of an equivocating indistinguishability?

In his foreword to Editor to Author: The Letters of Maxwell E. Perkins, John Hall Wheelock quotes the French critic Hippolyte Taine, who wrote that a “great editor” is “an artist whose medium is the work of other men.” The thing was designed to make the art of editing less taxing. An editor, in my boss’s theory, could use AI and still edit with rigor, still take the same amount of time as she otherwise would reading and rereading. It was the time to exercise “taste” that my boss wanted to give back to editors, and in the case of clients who used the tool, she did just that. Whether they used that extra time to further mold a promising writer or simply accelerate the production line, though, I don’t know.

What I do know is that the thing produced the addictive feeling of providing editorial attention without the fact of ever having to put in the hours required to actually do so. In the infrequent event of a client complaining about flat, uninspiring edits, we would never go back and do the work ourselves, but simply adjust the back-end prompt or switch the model assigned to it. Other times, we’d accuse the clients of vanity or oversensitivity. Usually, though, they left moderately pleased with the revised output.

When I left the job two years ago, it was out of a selfish desire to stockpile the little conviction I still had in the value of my creative labor and my most necessarily complex abilities. I couldn’t even confess how morally repulsive I thought my role to be. And my leaving, of course, didn’t make a dent in the project of automation. With the thing, anyone on the precipice of acquiring skill will atrophy into an unskilled laborer before they’ve even had the chance to slip up.

When a technology is pitched, even if unpersuasively, as a democratizing entity, any counter-argument to its use is often dismissed as snobbish. But when the employment of this technology is detected in writing, it is often rightfully met with aversion. If those who are disadvantaged, be it by class or competence, were to rely on it unquestionably, it would only re-create, if not entrench, the preexistent pecking order.

When I’m writing, I don’t want to suspect that I sound like AI, and when I’m reading, I don’t want to suspect the writer of using it. This suspicion, I worry, turns the mind into mush, much the way the thing was likely to do. Although I’m now a fairly competent copy editor, I take hours longer than I’d like to. On the other hand, the thing made me, inadvertently, a better reader, by striving against its very being.

AI, in short, insults the writerly tradition. We need not, and should not, capitulate to the basest instincts of this lowly thing, and neither should we have to correct ourselves in anticipation of it. It is a dehumanizing way not only to read, but to be read. Worse still are those industries that believe the reader will read what isn’t written by a human. Perhaps she will, but perhaps she’s also not the reader one wishes to have. The good reader of a great writer, as Nabokov observes, tries “to grasp the individual magic of [the writer’s] genius and to study the style, the imagery, the pattern of his novels or poems.” Why would you resort to this delectably masochistic labor if the writer, or their editor, didn’t labor themselves?

If you want to stop a large business from causing incalculable harm to ordinary people, there is one surefire way to do it: Release the tort lawyers.

That was one of the lessons of the settlement this week between Facebook, which now wishes to be called Meta, and 47 states. The states sued the social-media giant for endangering children with addictive practices that undermine their mental health. On Wednesday, Meta settled for $17.1 billion.

The settlement is not just about the money. These kinds of settlements never are. As part of the deal, Meta agreed to make massive changes to how it tries to trap kids on its platforms, which also include Instagram. Some of these settlement-imposed restrictions are things you could never achieve through congressional regulation. For instance, Meta agreed to set time limits on how long teens can be logged in to Facebook and Instagram. If you tried to impose that through legislation, somebody would sue the government, and the pro-business, Republican-controlled Supreme Court would likely overturn it. But if Meta is doing it “voluntarily” (if “voluntarily” means at the point of a tort gun), there’s nothing John Roberts can do.

So which tech-boy mega-business is going to get the tort treatment next? Every day, the rising Nerd Reich tramples more and more of our jobs, our democracy, our freaking mental health. While the government aids and enables, tort law is beginning to look like our best regulatory hope. Our regulators of last resort.

I know that sounds counterintuitive to a lot of people. We’ve been trained to think that regulation requires congressional legislation followed by enforcement by the executive branch. We’ve been trained to think that the threat of criminal penalties, including jail time, restrains the worst instincts of the oligarch class.

It’s great when those levers work, but at the end of the day, the only thing the billionaires really care about is money. Tort lawyers take their money. Most big business interests can buy their way out of jail (see, for instance, the precisely zero people jailed for their roles in the 2008 financial collapse). Most congressional legislation merely changes the parameters of how these people make their money. Most antitrust laws… are never enforced. But tort lawyers can reach into these companies—through lawsuits filed by private individuals or state and government institutions themselves—and take money away from these people. Businesses respond to that kind of pressure.

Tort litigation works. It worked against the tobacco industry. It’s pretty much the only thing that has ever worked against the fossil fuel industry. It worked against the Sackler family. It was working against the gun industry, until ammosexuals passed a whole law to stop it from working. (I have a whole chapter on this in my book, Bad Law).

And I promise you, it’s the only thing that is going to work against Big Tech.

The Bad and the Ugly

• I have enjoyed not thinking about Maine politics for a couple of weeks, but I was shocked out of my complacency by the Republican gubernatorial candidate, Bobby Charles. He said he’s going to ask the Trump administration to send ICE agents to the polls for the election. “Here’s my secret,” he told a bunch of Maine Young Republicans, according to audio from the event. “I have a friend named Tom Homan…. I’m going to make an appeal [to Tom] for ICE and Marshals to be at our voting booths.” On the positive side, every Stephen King novel I’ve read tells me that ICE cannot possibly be scarier than any of the other things that lurk in Maine.
• A Republican judge blocked a proposed ballot amendment that would have let Maryland voters decide if they want to redistrict their state to give Democrats more of an advantage. This is in keeping with the apparent rule that only Republicans can try to win elections.
• Last week, I mentioned that Texas refused to extradite an ICE agent accused of a crime to Minnesota to stand trial. Now, Texas has released the man. It’s feared he might flee to… Mexico.
• A federal judge denied Karmelo Anthony’s appeal for a new trial.
• Republican Senator Josh Hawley has started a Senate probe into the use of Flock cameras. Every now and again, Hawley does something right, because he appears to be one of the only senators who is as suspicious of emerging technology as he should be and seems to generally understand how it works. But, since I’m sure as hell not going to close this section by saying nice things about Josh Hawley, here is a video of an unknown hero who showed up to a city council meeting in San Diego in a Darth Vader costume to make the case for Flock cameras as an essential technology for the Evil Empire.

Inspired Takes

• I did not know that we are experiencing a “munitions shortage,” but apparently the American military is low on bullets? I… can’t think of anything better. In The Nation, William Hartung begs Democrats not to try to solve the “problem” by giving Pete Hegseth more money.
• In The Nation, Bryce Covert explains that the Trump administration wants to change the Head Start program to de-prioritize enrolling homeless children. It’s like these people wake up and think, “What is the most evil thing I can accomplish today?” and then go do it.

Worst Argument of the Week

A man who erected a guillotine outside the Supreme Court was arrested on Tuesday and charged with “transporting a deadly weapon.” The man allegedly drove the guillotine on his flatbed truck from his home in California to Washington, DC.

Given that we live in a violent country, it is important for me to say that, as much as I detest the current Supreme Court, I do not support the French solution to our problems. I’m a Truth and Reconciliation guy, not a Committee of Public Safety guy.

But I have a number of problems with the arrest of this man, who remains unnamed.

First of all, he did not go full Robespierre on the Supreme Court. It’s hard for me to look at a guillotine as a “true threat,” which is the legal standard here. That means I don’t think he intended to cause imminent harm to the Supreme Court justices. It seems to me that he was making a political statement, not a violent threat.

It would seem the authorities agree with me on this point, because the man has not been charged with attempted murder, criminal menace, intimidation, or harassment. Instead, they’ve charged him with transporting a deadly weapon—which is where we do not agree. This guy could have carried a fucking assault rifle while driving a Humvee, and nobody would have charged him with anything. If he had been arrested with an assault weapon, he could have appealed to his Second Amendment “rights,” and the Supreme Court—the same one he drove all the way from California to visit—likely would have ordered him released. I cannot countenance living in a world where driving around with a rickety, premodern slicing device is an illegal act, but driving around with a weapon of modern mass warfare is a protected right.

Let me put it like this: I’m more comfortable with a First Amendment right to erect a guillotine outside the Supreme Court than I am with a Second Amendment right to stand erect with an AR-15 outside a Walmart. I am 100 percent sure we’d be a safer, more civilized country under my rule than the one promoted by the Supreme Court.

And this is where I remind you that the guys who erected a gallows outside of Congress on January 6 while people literally attacked the Capitol threatening to cause harm to government officials have never even been found, much less arrested and charged with a crime.

It’s the hypocrisy that bothers me.

What I Wrote

I explained the Supreme Court’s shadow docket decision allowing Donald Trump to proceed with his plans to restrict mail-in voting ahead of the midterm elections. The court said the case is not “ripe” for review, meaning that, because Trump’s plans have not yet been carried out, the states suing to stop him have not suffered any harm.

Since the ruling, the US Post Office has started to implement Trump’s rules. So a collection of states have sued again. Hopefully, the court will not be able to hide behind procedure this time and will have to confront Trump’s plans to rig the election.

In News Unrelated to the Current Chaos

This has been a tough week in celebrity deaths. We lost music icon, feminist trailblazer, and vaccine benefactor Dolly Parton (whose proud union history John Nichols recounted in The Nation). And we lost the comedic genius Tim Curry.

They say bad things come in threes—and for me, the third tragedy of the week was the death of the voice actor Peter Cullen. You might not immediately recognize his name, but if you are of a certain age, you have certainly heard his work. Cullen was the voice of Optimus Prime in both the original Transformers cartoons and the animated feature, as well as the later Michael Bay movies, and the voice of Eeyore in the Winnie-the-Pooh cartoons. The actor was part of the soundtrack of many of our childhoods.

Cullen became one of my heroes inadvertently because, when I was a kid, I was sure Cullen (or Optimus and Eeyore) was Black. In a world full of white voices playing white heroes, I was positive that Cullen was one of my people. I thought that his deep baritone came from a Black man. After all, Darth Vader was Black. It made sense to me that they wouldn’t allow the depiction of a Black guy as the actual hero leader, so you could only get away with it if the Black guy looked like a robot. And it made perfect sense to me that the donkey who always knew how things could go wrong was a Black guy at heart. (At the time, I had no idea that the two characters were voiced by the same actor.)

I didn’t learn Cullen was white until I was in college and was gifted the magic of a Yahoo search engine.

By then, it didn’t matter. I had found other Black heroes and was old enough not to need representation in white media as much. Simply thinking Cullen was Black had served its childhood purpose.

So rest in peace, Peter Cullen: a white man who sounded so cool he could have been Black.

***

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Not for the first time, Republican Georgia congressman and Senate nominee Mike Collins is having to fend off questions about a former staffer’s florid public embrace of racism. On Thursday, The Washington Post reported that “a former staffer for Representative Mike Collins (R-Georgia) shared images in June and July on his X account of a swastika and one that depicts himself in Ku Klux Klan robes.” 

The former staffer in question is 24-year-old Mike Parra, who worked as an intern for Collins as well as a contractor for a pro-Collins leadership PAC. Parra says he was merely being “satirical,” and that he is not really a white supremacist. But he has also described himself as a “twink fascist,” used anti-Black slurs, and said he thinks “the white race contributes more to the world,” which most people would recognize as the core belief of white supremacists.

Since Parra no longer works for Collins, his racist posts might seem a minor matter. But this is not the first such scandal involving Collins and his staff—not by a long shot.

As The Washington Post sums up:

A number of people in Collins’s orbit have been accused of having ties to white nationalists or of making racist or antisemitic comments, and the congressman’s own social media presence has also drawn scrutiny….

Collins, a trucking executive, has faced scrutiny over his own social media feed, where he has shared posts that were called racist and antisemitic, allegations he has denied….

In July, Collins replaced his…chief of staff Kip Talley after Slate reported on his participation in a group chat that included Nick Fuentes and Richard Spencer, both of whom are white supremacists and antisemites….

CNN reported in July that Collins’s son-in-law, David Alan Scheer II, has shared Nazi imagery online.…

In May, another Collins ex-staffer, William Paul, confronted Rep. Mike Lawler (R-New York) at a bar, hurling antisemitic insults at him…

Having one racist crony may be regarded as a misfortune. Having several should make even the most naïve investigator suspicious.

Aside from these incidents of racism and antisemitism from various confederates, Collins also fired another staffer, Brandon Phillips, for a vile post mocking the attempted suicide of the wife of a rival political consultant. The viciousness of that post shares an affinity with the racist trolling that Collins and his associates have often indulged in.

It’s a mistake to see this nastiness and bigotry as having no wider importance beyond the individuals concerned. Rather, they reflect a political fact that extends beyond Collins: Over the past 10 years, racist invective has become one of the main ways that the GOP activates its base and courts younger voters. It was not by chance that figures like Parra and Phillips worked for Collins. Rather, their passion for outré violations of common decency were what made them desirable employees—until they went too far and had to be disavowed.

In 2017, in the wake of the infamous Unite the Right march in Charlottesville, Virginia, the journalist Alex Pareene wrote a remarkably prophetic essay for Splinter arguing that the alt-right racist provocateurs who attended the rally were the future of the GOP. Pareene noted:

Racial resentment has been a driving force behind College Republican recruitment for years, but at this point it’s really all they have left to offer. In the age of President Donald Trump, what inspires a young person not merely to be conservative or vote Republican, but to get active in organized Republican politics? Do you think it’s a fervent belief that Paul Ryan knows the optimal tax policy to spur economic growth? Or do you think it’s more likely to be something else?

Pareene ended his essay by naming one rally attendee:

These future Republican elected officials could easily look very much like rally attendee Nicholas Fuentes, a Boston University student until his decision this week to leave the school. He didn’t appear to be a formal member of any young Republican organizations, but he was a self-described Republican. In interviews, he denies being a white supremacist. On Facebook, after the rally, he wrote: “The rootless transnational elite knows that a tidal wave of white identity is coming.”

In 2017, Fuentes was, to borrow a Bob Dylan phrase, a complete unknown, a college dropout with some local notoriety for his racist provocations. But he would shortly become one of the most popular streamers on the far right, infamous for his repeated Holocaust denial and praise of Nazism. Both Trump and his vice president JD Vance have been diligent about cultivating the hard-core racists in their coalition, including Fuentes, who infamously dined with Trump and Kanye West at Mar-a-Lago in 2022.

We’re now a decade into Trump’s takeover of the GOP. It ill-behoves us at this late date to be shocked by the fact that a Trump acolyte like Mike Collins has said bigoted things, has bigoted family members, and has repeatedly hired bigots for his staff. Collins does all this because this is how you succeed in GOP politics.

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

Late last week, volunteers working with the Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio, were inundated with calls about men being arrested and separated from their families. One of those detained was a pastor, Gilbert Joubert Adrien. Joubert Adrien, who is the minister of a church of 130 people, was, apparently, snatched by ICE agents while at a gas station. He is just one of several dozen Haitians to be targeted by ICE in Springfield in the past week, according to monitoring groups such as G92 and the Haitian Bridge Alliance.

Haitians in Springfield have been the center of some of the cruelest xenophobic behaviors of the Trump era. Perhaps you will remember the 2024 presidential campaign, during which JD Vance and Donald Trump made up false rumors about Haitians in the city “eating dogs and cats.” Trump doubled down on this outlandish claim during his televised debate with Kamala Harris; Vance admitted that the allegations were likely false but nevertheless went out of his way to justify his circulation of these slanderous allegations.

Now the administration is unleashing the full force of ICE on this same community, launching what can only be described as an officially sanctioned pogrom against people whose offense seems mainly to be that they are members of a race and a nation that Trump regards with peculiar contempt and animus. “These are people who fled for their lives,” Guerline Jozef, of the Haitian Bridge Alliance told me. “Some of them still have pending asylum claims, which means the government is violating due process.”

Similar attacks against Haitians are occurring around the country. In San Diego, advocates for the Haitian community have been using social media to report dozens of ICE kidnappings over the past two weeks along El Cajon Boulevard, and in the City Heights and Lemon Grove neighborhoods. In Flatbush, Brooklyn, the epicenter of the Big Apple’s Haitian community, businesses report that fewer customers are coming in, with community members afraid to be seen in public lest ICE snatch them. In the days after the Supreme Court ruling, the New York City Public Advocate’s office reported increased ICE activity in the neighborhood. In southern Florida, the Haitian Bridge Alliance reports that a surge of immigrants Haitians have been arrested and placed into deportation proceedings since the Supreme Court ruling. Jozef tells me of Haitian meatpackers and poultry workers in Salisbury, Maryland, and Virginia, who have also been snatched by ICE. She marvels, she says at “the cruelty, the inhumanity, the terror in what they are inflicting on the community.” And, she says, the Alliance expects things to only get worse, “even more casualties, more cruelties, more children being left without their parents.”

During Trump 1.0, the MAGA leader listed Haiti among the “shithole” countries of the world whose people he didn’t want immigrating to the US. One of the immediate consequences of Trump’s loathing of Haitians was a shutting of the southern border to Haitian men traveling north after they had been booted out of Brazil during a particular moment of economic crisis. In 2018, I interviewed many Haitian women in San Diego who had been stranded in the city with their young children, while their husbands, boyfriends, and teenage sons were either detained in US detention centers after asking for asylum or were stuck in limbo in Tijuana and unable to reunite with their female relatives in the United States.

Fast-forward eight years and that animus is, at speed, upending hundreds of thousands of lives and causing untold economic chaos in communities around the United States. It goes without saying that the vast majority of the more than 300,000 Haitians Trump is targeting around the country are law-abiding members of society. Until the US Supreme Court’s hard-right majority allowed the administration to shred Haitians’ Temporary Protected Status, they were living and working in the country entirely legally, working in industries such as home healthcare and construction, in restaurants and warehouses. They had the required work permits and they had Social Security numbers. Now their papers have been deemed void, in a way not dissimilar to how German Jews were deprived of citizenship rights in the early years of Nazi rule; their status has been revoked, and they are being quite literally hunted by ICE, fitted with ankle monitors, or simply thrown into harsh detention centers. Many of them are being summarily flown back to Haiti—a country with a supposedly transitional government presided over by an unelected council, which has no democratic mandate and that exists largely in name only, its writ hardly present in many parts of the nation; afflicted with desperate poverty; and experiencing daily terror inflicted by some of the most violent gangs on earth—and left to fend for themselves however they can.

In a single day’s haul last week, ICE deported more than 160 people back to Haiti, according to reporting by the Miami Herald. They were dropped off in Port-au-Prince with nothing but their wits to survive on. Days later, gangs in the nearby city of Kenscoff killed 47 people and kidnapped many others—further evidence, if any were needed, of just how dangerous conditions are in the country that these deportees are now being sent to. Instead of pulling back, the administration doubled down. On Thursday, the The New York Times reported that team Trump was planning weekly deportation flights to Haiti.The real risk of violent death faced by these deportees is, clearly, of absolutely no concern to the masters of Trump’s deportation machine.

It is hard to overemphasize just how authoritarian and cruel this all is. In its vast scale, we can liken it to Stalin’s projects of uprooting hundreds of thousands and millions at a go, and ordering them to relocate without consideration for impact on families or on community. It is, too, redolent of some early Nazi practices: In the deliberate humiliation ritual of fitting law-abiding people, recently deemed enemies of the state, with ankle monitors—all-too-visible markers of “otherness”—simply because of who they are, it is redolent of the Nazi’s decision, early in Hitler’s reign, to force Jews to wear the identifying tag of the yellow Star of David sewn onto their clothing.

Good Germans, back then, either turned a blind eye to what was happening, cheered it on, or, if they were government officials, rationalized the implementation of these vile mandates by avowing that they were only obeying orders. Today, I fear, Good Americans are doing much the same thing: Some simply prefer not to see; others—the MAGA diehards—cheer on this sadism; and still others, including those working for government agencies that are increasingly made dirty by Trump’s fanaticism, rationalize the unjustifiable by saying that this is all above their pay grade and that they are simply doing what they have been ordered to do.

There is, in the United States these days, more than a whiff of Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil. Entirely atrocious things—things that will haunt subsequent generations—are being done in our names; yet the temptation is that we get on with our daily lives and ignore the screams of terror and of despair from the victims of Trump’s unleashed gestapo.

Here’s the good news of this long, hard summer: In the real world of hard-fought Democratic primaries in 2026, all across the country candidates themselves are leading the way in promoting a big-tent anti-Trump party that embraces both the center and the left. There are many great examples of ambitious, popular, but ultimately losing candidates endorsing the winner in their primary race, someone who was 24 hours earlier their bitter rival. Oddly, these stories have gotten comparatively little attention.

Instead, the media has obsessed over centrist Democrats—who are not actual candidates—declaring war on the left. Third Way, a centrist group rooted in the political philosophy of the Bill Clinton administration and founded in 2005 as a neoliberal answer to GOP President George W. Bush, announced a $15 million campaign against the Democratic left after progressive Abdul el-Sayed won the Michigan Democratic Senate primary over centrist Representative Haley Stevens. Shortly after that, long-ago Clinton adviser and professional loudmouth centrist James Carville told Democratic Socialists of America members “don’t use our goddamn name,” as if he owns the rights to the Democratic brand. (He doesn’t.)

Fellow Clinton adviser and permanent pundit Paul Begala carried on the DSA bashing, blaming the group for electing Bush over Gore in 2000, in a podcast with Fox News’ house Democrat, Jessica Tarlov. That’s ridiculous: Founder Michael Harrington had died the year before, and DSA in 2000 was a shadow of what it had been, and what it would become—after Bernie Sanders, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani. It had roughly 6,000 members at the time. The group didn’t endorse Ralph Nader against Gore, though a few prominent members did.

And just last week, Obama adviser David Axelrod took aim at arguably the most vulnerable Democratic senator up for reelection this year, Georgia’s Jon Ossoff, for stating that Donald Trump would rather “travel with Natalie” (Harp, one of his closest advisers) than do his job. Axelrod insisted that this crucial senator, the only incumbent running this year in a state Trump won in 2024, had made a “gratuitous and unnecessary” reference to Harp that “distracted and detracted from the power of the message.”

Um, David? Not that I think dominating our easily distracted media is the be all and end all of political strategy, but Ossoff owned the airwaves, and the pixels, in the week after he said that, and not because people agreed with you. (We did not.)

Sorry, I was promising good news, but I got distracted by all the bad. That happens these days. But let’s go on.

We’ll start with the August 4 Michigan race between el-Sayed and Stevens. El-Sayed is not a DSA member, and in fact calls himself a capitalist, but he has strongly opposed Israel’s war on Gaza and embraced many other priorities of the party’s left flank. El-Sayed had a big lead in polls for a while, but he won a narrow victory. Centrist Democrats and pundits at first plotzed. But Stevens pretty quickly endorsed el-Sayed, and she was followed by Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Senator minority leader Chuck Schumer, and 2024 Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.

A week later, progressive Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan beat center-liberal Representative Angie Craig to win the Democratic nomination for the Minnesota Senate seat from which progressive Tina Smith will soon retire. Even faster than Stevens, Craig called Flanagan and announced not just her concession but her strong support, and then went public with it. They’ve already campaigned together.

That same night, in Wisconsin, DSA member and state Representative Francesca Hong, who polls had shown was the likely winner up until Election Day, narrowly lost to liberal Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley in the Democratic gubernatorial primary. Like Craig, Hong immediately endorsed her rival, even while their respective supporters were still shooting verbal spitballs at one another on social media. (Hey, it’s politics. It happens.) By the next morning, Crowley and Hong were at a “unity breakfast” together, along with Senator Tammy Baldwin, Representative Mark Pocan, and other state leaders who had backed both candidates. Hong and Crowley quickly hit the campaign trail together, just like Craig and Flanagan.

And a week after that, Florida Democratic Senate candidate Alexander Vindman, for a while expected to win, lost to DSA-backed insurgent Representative Angie Nixon. Vindman not only quickly endorsed Nixon; he sent her money (the anti-Trump Resistance Democrat had raised big dollars for his losing quest).

You could say this trend started in New York, in June, after relative centrist Caitlin Conley won the Democratic primary in Hudson Valley’s NY-17, winning the right to face vulnerable GOP Representative Mike Lawler. Progressive Working Families Party endorsee Effie Phillips-Staley endorsed Conley—and so did the WFP.

You could maybe even argue it began in New York City last year, when progressive Brad Lander and DSA member Zohran Mamdani endorsed each other and urged their supporters to rank the other second (New York City has ranked-choice voting) if they wanted to rank them first. Lander backers mostly did so, and Mamdani ultimately won, to the continuing horror of centrists everywhere. A year later, Lander defeated liberal billionaire incumbent Representative Dan Goldman in New York’s 10th Congressional District, with the ardent backing of Mamdani.

Why does all of this cross-ideological-lines solidarity deserve praise (and electoral excitement)? Because it is virtually ignored by the mainstream media, which would much rather cover what they perceive as the centrist “war” against Democratic progressives, especially those in DSA. For my entire adulthood, the media story is always about “Dems in disarray,” even today, as Republicans lose parts of their base, and all of their soul, to Trump’s cruelty and ignorance. The New York Times can’t call the Democratic left anything but “divisive,” even though it’s beefing up Democratic vote totals, and winning elections, all across the country.

“This is one of those moments where the pendulum has shifted, and people are anti-incumbent and anti–status quo,” says Jasmine Gripper, head of New York’s Working Families Party. “And I think what Dems need to do is be unafraid of the swing. and lean into it, and the energy. Lean into: This is how we win.”

In Wisconsin, longtime organizer Davette Baker, who supported Francesca Hong, is now solidly for David Crowley. But on her Facebook page she publicly rebuked Wisconsin’s current Democratic governor, Tony Evers, for deriding Hong’s supporters. After Crowley won, reporters asked what he expected of Hong voters. “They have to play along,” Evers said.

He corrected himself: “Not play along—they have to be part of it.” But then he went on to say Crowley doesn’t support Hong’s policy priorities. Way to go, Governor, when Crowley beat Hong by only about 3,000 votes (and statewide voter turnout was higher than it’s been in years). The Milwaukee County Executive also supports many if not most of Hong’s policies.

I know David Crowley; Baker knows him better. He started his political life as an organizer, and she’s known him since those days. She believes he supports many of Hong’s policy priorities. “I’m very excited about David,” Baker told me on Wednesday. But not so much about Evers’s interventions in the race, which she hopes party leaders have stopped.

At an August 17 joint appearance in Madison, Hong told the ideologically diverse crowd just why she supports Crowley: “[Crowley’s] childhood on Milwaukee’s north side shaped his vision of how government can add or subtract. Support or obstruct. Grow a community or deplete it,” Hong said. “David has lived the struggles that far too many Wisconsinites can relate to [and] have lived themselves.” Her supporters continue to ask Crowley to endorse Hong’s proposal to add a new, higher state tax bracket, and so far he hasn’t. We’ll keep watching.

But this is how the system is supposed to work: People who are allies on the vast majority of issues marshal their supporters to push for their policies; they don’t sit out crucial races and denounce their victorious rivals as the enemy.

Carville, Begala, Axelrod—older white men who, to their credit, ran some important Democratic victories around the turn of the century— could stand to learn from a new generation of Democrats, progressives, socialists and centrists, who understand the stakes in these 2026 midterms and the importance of expanding the Democrats’ reach.

Asked on Meet the Press last Sunday whether democratic socialists have a role in his party, Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen—himself a white man of 67—struck a different note. “Yes they do, as part of the debate. I think that those in the Democratic Party who are afraid of a healthy debate are missing the point, because Democratic voters do not want a return to the pre-Trump status quo.”

Like Jon Ossoff, Van Hollen understands that, even apart from ideology, Democrats want leaders who are fighters. Luckily they have quite a few running for election in November. Let’s hope the left-baiting critics learn a lesson from the united front these candidates are assembling.

Millions of oat milk drinkers around the world are about to learn that a supermajority of people want stronger climate action. Oatly, the world’s largest oat drink company, is printing summaries of what it calls “the ultimate climate solution” on every carton it produces. In 2025, the company reported selling 593 million liters of oat milk and related products across more than 40 countries. The goal, Oatly’s senior sustainability director Caroline Reid wrote on LinkedIn, is to “unlock the power of the 89% of people” who want governments to tackle the climate crisis. This summer, that crisis has led to at least 35,000 excess deaths from extreme heat in Europe alone.

Oatly launched the awareness campaign in response to Covering Climate Now’s 89 Percent Project. The Guardian, Agence France-Presse, and dozens of other CCNow partners have been reporting for more than a year on peer-reviewed studies and opinion surveys that found that 80 to 89 percent of the world’s people want governments to “do more” about climate change. The exact percentage varies by country: In Germany (which happens to be the biggest national market for oat milk), it’s 86 percent; in India, it’s 80 percent; in the United States, it’s 74 percent. The catch is that most of these people don’t realize they are the overwhelming majority, so they tend to stay silent on climate issues.

What makes the 89 percent message “the ultimate climate solution” is that it makes many other solutions—from technologies such as rooftop solar to policies such as ending fossil fuel subsidies—more achievable. “Governments can enable and support the transition” away from fossil fuels, Reid said, and they’re more likely to do so if a massive majority of people “use your voice, use your vote.”

Oatly presents the 89 percent solution with the same puckish humor its packaging has long featured, but with an extra visual wink. The text occupies one side of each carton and is divided into two blocks. The first block is 11 words long and reads, “Politicians, these eleven words represent people not interested in climate action.” The second block’s 89 words represent “people who want their leaders and governments to take more action.” They inform the politicians that “a lot of voters could swing your way” if you take action before reassuring them, “Not that we think you’re interested in getting votes for whatever reason, no, of course not.”

Oatly’s initiative, launched last week in its home country of Sweden before expanding internationally, follows a separate 89 percent campaign that began earlier this year in Japan. Starting in April 2026 and running for the next two years, every TV station and network in Japan will air public service commercials saying that 89 percent of Japan’s people want stronger climate action, so no one should be afraid to talk about it. In June, in a related initiative, 136 Japanese news outlets also began spreading the 89 percent message via social media platforms, news releases, and other forms of public communication.

The 89 Percent Project continues in September with a CCNow interview with California Governor Gavin Newsom. Building on California’s history of bipartisan environmentalism, Newsom’s eight years in office have seen an aggressive expansion of renewable energy even as the state’s economy remains the world’s fourth largest. CCNow will interview Newsom, a likely 2028 presidential candidate, on September 23 as part of New York Climate Week.

It’s worth emphasizing how exceptional an 80 to 89 percent level of support is for any public issue. When journalists cover elections, we typically label any victory with 60 percent or more of the vote a “landslide.” An 80 to 89 percent result would be a “super-landslide.” Even in the US, a petrostate in all but name, 74 percent of people support stronger climate action.

Despite this clear global supermajority, most politicians in most countries have not implemented most of the policies and technologies needed to curb global warming. After all, even to propose such measures has long been fiercely opposed by arguably the richest, most powerful economic enterprise in history: the private and state-owned companies of the international fossil fuel industry.

The industry has spent decades and vast amounts of money backing politicians that will do its bidding and opposing those who won’t, while also denying the science showing that burning too much oil, gas, and coal would catastrophically overheat the planet. As extreme weather has gotten worse in recent years, outright denial has become less tenable and the industry and its allies have pivoted to arguing that climate change is simply too controversial to even talk about, much less to tackle. Some erstwhile supporters of climate action followed suit, as prominent voices in politics, civil society, and the media embraced “climate hushing.”

The fact that most people favoring stronger climate action mistakenly believe that they are the minority is a perverse tribute to the effectiveness of the industry’s propaganda. The 89 percent data tell a decidedly different story: They show that an enormous if largely dormant constituency of people in most countries would welcome straight talk and commonsense solutions to a crisis that is increasingly affecting their lives.

This public sentiment represents a game-changing opportunity for politicians, activists, and citizens who care about preserving a livable planet, and also sends a message to journalists and newsrooms: Don’t fall for climate hushing. The vast majority of your audience wants to know more about climate change, how it connects to the extreme weather they are experiencing, and especially how it can be tackled. That’s a subject full of drama, consequences, and heroes and villains—the essence of good storytelling. It’s high time we tell it.

On Wednesday, eight days into a landmark social-media-addiction trial that hadn’t really been going its way, and facing the unenviable prospect of having to put its weirdo chief executive on the stand, Meta evidently decided to cut its losses, agreeing to pay out $17 billion to a coalition of 47 states and four additional jurisdictions (plus another $1 billion to Texas, which settled separately) to make the case go away. Meta also agreed to assorted changes to Facebook and Instagram that could make both platforms less wildly addictive and toxic to teens.

Given that Meta could have been on the hook for as much as several hundred billion dollars had it lost the case outright, investors not unreasonably concluded that an $18 billion solution was a pretty decent deal for the company, sending shares up modestly for the day.

Meta is trying to spin the settlement in a distinctly Meta-esque way, which is to say a thoroughly dishonest one. In an utterly surreal statement on Wednesday, the company claimed that the changes it is being forced to make are just another happy chapter in its “longstanding efforts to empower parents and support teens.” Never mind that Mark Zuckerberg has always bitterly resisted anything that might curtail engagement time on his platforms for the sake of safety. Forget that the company had tried no less than six times, over the course of three years, to have this court case thrown out. Pay no attention to the $2.4 billion Meta spent on legal proceedings in the second quarter of 2026 alone.

Nope! They’re making changes, basically, out of the goodness of their hearts. “Ensuring teens have a safe and productive experience on our platforms is an absolute imperative for Meta,” the statement declares, in flagrant contradiction to everything we know to be true about Meta. “We want to get this right for parents and teens, and that’s why we partnered with state attorneys general to set a new industry standard.” That’s right—Meta and the coalition of attorneys general aren’t adversaries; they’re basically pals! “We’re pleased to launch these new protections, and we’ll continue to work with parents, policymakers, and regulators around the world to further our shared goal of supporting teens and empowering parents online,” the statement continues. I feel as though I’ve stepped into Bizarro World.

As for the $18 billion the attorneys general extracted from Meta? Think of it as a sort of present, “which can be used to fund youth online safety initiatives, among other state priorities.”

Meta, the company that cares? Hardly. As former Facebook global public policy director Sarah Wynn-Williams has so persuasively argued in Careless People, her bestselling 2025 memoir of her time at the company then known as Facebook, Meta is actually a company that couldn’t care less.

As I think we all know, Facebook’s infamous slogan back in the day was “move fast and break things,” a phrase that for a time adorned omnipresent motivational posters in Facebook’s offices. In a 2009 interview, Zuckerberg told Business Insider that this was his “prime directive to his developers and team,” adding a sharper corollary that makes the callousness explicit: “Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.” Nonetheless, Zuckerberg retired the slogan after several years, replacing it with the much less memorable “move fast with stable infrastructure.” (Yes, that was the real slogan.) He hadn’t changed his mind about the desirability of breaking things, nor was he trying to curtail social harms; he just wanted to reassure developers that he wouldn’t saddle them with broken code.

And in fact Facebook (and then Meta) had only just begun breaking things. For Zuckerberg, nothing seems to matter more than maximizing the level of engagement on his platforms. He seems willing to endorse almost any ethical shortcut that will drive clicks, and ultimately revenue. And when the company’s mistakes and oversights—whether driven by haste or greed or just plain carelessness— began to break things in the real world, Facebook and later Meta seemed less interested in fixing things than covering them up. For instance, Facebook didn’t care that its infrastructure enabled the sleazy political consultancy Cambridge Analytica to collect the personal information of tens of millions of Facebook users without their consent.

In 2017, Facebook decided to amp up engagement by algorithmically promoting posts that drew the most emotional reactions from users, turning what was then called its “news feed” into a curated buffet of rage bait and misinformation, in the process transforming countless boomers into budding conspiracy theorists. The company only got around to reverting the algorithm in 2020 but the damage was done; a certain degree of conspiratorial misinformation was baked into the platform. Now, of course, the site is overrun with AI slop that too many users think is real. In the most extreme example of the company’s carelessness, Facebook was so bizarrely lackadaisical in how it dealt with hate speech in Myanmar that it ultimately helped to foment a literal genocide.

Pedophiles, scam ads, “beauty” filters that inspire eating disorders: The history of Meta, from the Facebook days to the present, has been one ethical catastrophe after another. We can only hope that the company is ultimately nibbled to death by lawsuits, $18 billion at a time.

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

The mRNA Covid vaccines saved millions of lives. Though the United States had higher excess deaths from SARS-CoV-2 than other peer nations in the G7, it could have been a whole lot worse without the development and rollout of these immunogens. The technology powering mRNA vaccines is truly remarkable, and the Nobel Prize that Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman received for the foundational discoveries that made these vaccines possible was well deserved.

Since the arrival of these vaccines, there has been a flurry of activity to use mRNA technology to fight other diseases. A landmark “phase 3” study of an mRNA vaccine for melanoma, announced by Moderna and Merck in August, suggests that we may have found a winner.

In the study, patients were assigned to Merck’s Keytruda (or pembrolizumab, an immunotherapy drug) either with or without Moderna’s new vaccine (intisimeran, AKA mRNA-4157, an individualized neoantigen therapy). The combo extended the time patients lived without a recurrence of melanoma compared with Keytruda alone, while the treatment also reduced the risk of the cancer’s metastasizing across the body. Moderna’s mRNA vaccine for melanoma is also a personalized treatment—rather than targeting common tumor antigens, the vaccine is custom-made for each patient by identifying neoantigens (abnormal proteins associated with cancer cells) that are specific to their own tumor.

While phase 3 studies are the last port of call before regulatory approval by the FDA, the Moderna/Merck study is still underway. Immunotherapy for cancer is, as Science magazine’s Derek Lowe cautions us, “a hideously complex field with many twists and turns.” The companies have yet to show how much their drug could boost overall survival rates, which is the ultimate test of its effectiveness. Scientists, clinicians, and patients will have to wait to see the data when it is presented at upcoming conferences and examine the full set of results to derive any firmer conclusions. But the initial results are certainly promising.

Yet amid the excitement about this new development in melanoma treatment, the question arises: Who will get the benefit from these advances? You see, it is only a few years ago that Moderna dug in its heels and refused to share mRNA technology with lower- and middle-income countries, which led to a vast undersupply of these vaccines, a stark inequality in access to them, and millions of unnecessary deaths. Moderna was thinking ahead to this very moment: If they had shared mRNA technology with countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America back then, allowing them to produce their own vaccines, then their future, exclusive profits from new uses of the mRNA platform would have been in jeopardy. This is after the company made billions in profits and benefited from investments by the US government in the fundamental research that made these vaccines possible. It is a story of greed and cruelty, which should never be forgotten.

Keytruda alone costs about $12,000 for a short-term dose, and on a yearly basis can cost upwards of $150,000–200,000 depending on one’s treatment regimen. Yes, insurance covers much of the costs for many, but once again, American taxpayers subsidized the fundamental research on PD1, the target of the drug, and are now paying again through higher deductibles, co-insurance, and rising premiums that pass on drug costs to the consumer. Now add Moderna’s new cancer vaccine into the mix.

Intisimeran is a bespoke treatment, made specifically for an individual’s tumor neoantigens. Think of it this way: Keytruda and similar drugs target a single common pathway; they are the box store, retail giant version of cancer immunotherapy. Intisimeran is haute couture, made just for you. The price for haute couture is never cheap. By the time pharmacy benefit managers, pharmacies, hospitals, and insurers take their cut, intisimeran is going to make high-fashion prices from the likes of Chanel and Christian Dior look like a bargain.

And don’t look to the federal government to rein all this in. Despite the fact that Merck was among the companies that signed a confidential deal with the White House to lower the prices of some prescription drugs, Keytruda’s price has risen 6 percent since last year to $210,000 for one year’s treatment under President Donald Trump.

Finally, despite the anticipated high price of Moderna’s melanoma vaccine, the future is not bright for the mRNA field in the United States, even with the profits that this technology may reap. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and National Institutes of Health director Jay Bhattacharya both have come out strongly against mRNA development, citing the supposed dangers of their use and expressing lack of trust in the technology. Of course, both RFK Jr. and Bhattacharya have no evidence to support their claims and are actively spreading misinformation about the science. We indeed have to address the high price of drugs in the US, but cutting off public funding for mRNA development really puts us in the worst of both worlds. New innovations now will be forestalled; new applications of this technology will happen elsewhere, and patients will bear the ultimate price for the sheer idiocy and abject heartlessness of RFK Jr. and Jay Bhattacharya, as new cures and treatments based on mRNA will languish in what is becoming the most backward of nations.

The Trump administration escalated its war on nature in July when its Interior and Commerce departments decreed that the Endangered Species Act does not protect habitats. The decision—that only the organisms themselves are protected—contradicts decades of consensus going back to the 1973 Endangered Species Act (ESA).

Like Trump’s other anti-environmental policies, this must be reverted by a future administration. And that should be only the beginning: Adequately confronting the extinction crisis will require reckoning with the shortcomings of the pre-Trump status quo in conservation policy. Even before the current assault on biodiversity, one East Coast songbird had slipped through the cracks and was plummeting toward extinction.

With its timid habits and narrow range in Atlantic tidal marshes, saltmarsh sparrows stay out of sight of all but the most dedicated birdwatchers. Seldom taking flight, this crisply marked, warm-hued sparrow navigates the marsh on foot, darting mouselike through the low, dense grasses.

But while spotting a saltmarsh sparrow has long been a challenge, it may soon become impossible. From 1998 to 2012, the saltmarsh sparrow population dropped by nearly 90 percent: from 212,000 to 28,000. The main culprit is rising sea levels.

Before sea-level rise accelerated, saltmarsh sparrows regularly lost some nests to tidal flooding, but the species adapted to life in the marsh within consistent tidal cycles. Both sexes hedge their genetic bets by seeking multiple mates—to a greater extent than any other bird—and females respond to nest loss by immediately building a new nest, giving their next clutch just enough time to fledge before the next month’s flood.

Researchers predict that by the 2060s there will never again be enough time. The interval between tides high enough to flood nests will narrow such that the sparrow will no longer be able to reproduce. If that happens, the saltmarsh sparrow would be the first bird species to go extinct on the US mainland in the Endangered Species Act era.

Despite this, federal conservation authorities have never designated the saltmarsh sparrow as endangered. It has not even been listed as threatened. Instead, the United States Fish & Wildlife Service (USFWS)—the Interior Department agency responsible for endangered species—keeps stalling on designating the saltmarsh sparrow for protection. Now it faces a lawsuit from the conservation group the Center for Biological Diversity, alleging that their failure to respond is unlawful. (Disclosure: I interned at the Center from May to October 2025.)

“It’s hard for me to think of a stronger case for listing a species under the Endangered Species Act based on the science,” Chris Elphick, a University of Connecticut biologist and sparrow researcher, told me. “I think it’s more likely to go extinct than some species that are on the endangered species list.”

Elphick and his colleague Greg Shriver asked USFWS to place the saltmarsh sparrow on the endangered species list nine years ago. The agency responded with a maddening series of unexplained delays. After agreeing to start the listing process by 2019, it instead postponed the decision to 2023, then to 2024. Eventually, a spokesperson told me the decision would come out “as soon as workload and schedules allow.” The date given for further action, last updated in spring 2025, reads “To Be Determined.”

The basis for the lawsuit filed in February by the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) is the USFWS’s failure to respond to its petition. The ESA gives the agency 90 days to decide whether the evidence presented could warrant listing. If so, it must formally determine within 12 months of receipt whether listing is warranted, not warranted, or “precluded” by higher-priority species. Yet, more than two years after the CBD submitted the petition, USFWS has given no response at all. (A USFWS representative declined to comment on ongoing litigation.)

Missing these deadlines is standard practice at USFWS, said Lia Comerford, an attorney leading the lawsuit for the CBD. She told me that the agency’s listing backlog predates the Trump administration’s attacks.

“Certainly, the Fish and Wildlife Service, especially right now, is under attack by the Trump administration,” Comerford said. “But that doesn’t excuse them from the statutory deadlines set up in the Endangered Species Act, and that they need to fulfill their obligations to protect imperiled species.”

If this lawsuit succeeds in securing a belated 90-day finding, Comerford said the CBD is prepared to sue again for the 12-month finding.

For now, local efforts can help fill in the gaps in regulatory action. In the northeast corner of Massachusetts, a state where the sparrow is listed as a species of special concern, USFWS wildlife biologist Nancy Pau oversees marsh restoration at Parker River National Wildlife Refuge. Pau previously worked on endangerment findings at the agency; now she fills old farm ditches and drains pools of standing water to restore the marsh’s natural tidal flows. Wary of bureaucratic burdens, though, Pau is ambivalent about listing the sparrow as endangered.

“Even though it’s not listed, I feel like voluntary conservation is working,” Pau said. “We’re doing recovery without the species being listed.”

Pau pointed out that sparrow conservation is already a regional priority for the agency, and that listing the species wouldn’t necessarily bring in any more money for conservation. I don’t see it that way—this species lives in a narrow stretch of coast spanning 14 states, all with their own environmental laws, and we’re running out of time to pull it out of a precipitous decline. If the Endangered Species Act isn’t invoked here, what is it for?

The USFWS has a statutory obligation to protect imperiled creatures like this sparrow, but saving it is also in our own interest. Creatures like the saltmarsh sparrow are leading indicators of our failure to address the climate crisis. Coastal marshes are critical buffers against flooding, and many lie adjacent to homes, businesses, and roads. The rising seas annihilating the sparrow’s ability to nest also threaten coastal residents in the densely populated Northeast. If we lose the saltmarsh sparrow because we fail to protect its marshes, much worse is in store—because those marshes protect us.

Conversely, if we do what it takes to save the sparrow—restoring marshes degraded by centuries of European settlement, clearing the way for new marshes in areas on the verge of inundation—we could stabilize our shorelines against the sea-level rise locked in by existing greenhouse gas emissions.

But without the political will to muster robust protections for the bird and the habitats we all depend on, the saltmarsh sparrow is dead in the water.

Four times a week, Millicah Wanjiru brings her three-month-old twins to the Denise Louie Education Center in Seattle, Washington. Wanjiru hasn’t had a home of her own for three years; when she was six months pregnant, she started staying at an emergency shelter for women and children called Mary’s Place. The one-hour Denise Louie parenting classes for her and other Mary’s Place residents, funded through an Early Head Start grant, always begin with parents introducing themselves with a song. Then the babies do tummy time and Wanjiru gets feedback from the home visitors leading the class on how their development is progressing. Her babies are growing fast: both of them can already roll over. When they do, the group of parents and teachers clap and cheer.

The babies get hearing tests and vaccinations, and the nurses help parents talk through questions to ask when they visit the pediatrician. Once, one of the twins had a lot of mucus in her eyes and Wanjiru feared that she was going blind; a nurse at the class advised putting breast milk on it and it cleared up “like magic,” she said. She also gets diapers, formula, and snacks when she attends.

For Wanjiru, who suffered trauma while living on the streets, the class “helps us with routine, it’s like normalcy,” she said. She’s also getting parenting guidance, help with how to talk to her babies, how to soothe them when they cry, and, equally important, other people to talk to as she navigates parenting. The program gives her toys and books to read to her babies. She last had a baby 15 years ago, when she was a teenager, so she feels like she’s starting all over. Wanjiru is now trying to secure a room in a transitional housing complex, and the class has promised to follow her there with home visits; it will serve her until her children turn 3 and can enroll in a Head Start classroom.

“It’s wonderful,” Wanjiru said. “I hope this program never ends.”

But this program is indeed at risk of ending. The Trump administration recently proposed a rule that, if finalized, would erase a huge number of standards and rules that guide the quality and services offered in Early Head Start and Head Start, the free, federal preschool program for low-income children. Among what’s lost are important guidelines that ease eligibility and paperwork for homeless families like Wanjiru’s, which make sure they can enroll and benefit. If the rule is finalized, Denise Louise may no longer be able to partner with Mary’s Place to offer services for homeless parents like Wanjiru through Early Head Start, said Linda Mitchell, chief government affairs officer at Mary’s Place. All told, the administration’s changes make it much less likely that Head Start will continue serving the more than 60,000 homeless children who are currently enrolled.

When Congress reauthorized the Head Start Act in 2007, it included a mandate that programs around the country prioritize enrolling children in families who are experiencing homelessness. But it said that the details of how programs should do that would be spelled out in standards developed by the Department of Health and Human Services. Those guidelines, which in addition to easing paperwork burdens for families unlikely to have much documentation allow programs to prioritize homeless families, have been in place for 10 years, and Trump’s proposed rule would replace all 133 pages of them.

“These are families who are moving around frequently, from couch to car to motel maybe to shelter,” said Barbara Duffield, executive director of SchoolHouse Connection, a nonprofit focused on homelessness among children. That means they may need to enroll their children midway through the school year. It also means that holding onto the documentation ordinarily required of parents who enroll is difficult—things like birth certificates, immunization records, and proof of income to show a family is eligible. “If you’re fleeing domestic violence in the middle of the night and going from place to place, records may not be the thing you think to take with you,” Duffield explained. “If you’re on the move constantly you don’t have anywhere to store anything.”

The current Head Start standards, issued at the end of 2016, spell out how programs can work around these challenges to make sure homeless children participate. For example, the current standards say that, despite a requirement to maximize enrollment, programs can reserve up to 3 percent of their spots for homeless children for 30 days in case they show up unexpectedly. It also says that programs must include such families when they do assessments of the needs of their communities and can prioritize them on waiting lists. Meanwhile, under the current standards, homeless families can self-attest—essentially swear—that they’re homeless if they can’t immediately gather proof of eligibility, allowing their children to enroll while they secure the necessary documents, and their homelessness makes them automatically eligible. That is all “operationalized due to those performance standards,” Duffield said. Without guidelines specifically permitting these accommodations for homeless families, programs will be unlikely to offer them, she said. “Head Start is a very compliance-focused program. People are afraid to do anything if they can’t point to a specific place where it says, ‘Yes you can do this.’”

The proposed rule acknowledges that, with more stringent paperwork requirements, “some families, such as those experiencing homelessness, may have a more challenging time providing such documentation.” Without self-attestation, in particular, the administration estimates that 8 percent of children who are currently enrolled would no longer be eligible if the rule is finalized. “They admit this would impact families who are homeless, but they don’t offer a solution,” noted Katie Hamm, who served as deputy assistant secretary for early childhood development at the Office for the Administration for Children & Families under President Joe Biden.

“The administration is saying these rules are duplicative and they’re redundant and they’re burdensome and we just need to rely on the statute,” Duffield said. But “the law doesn’t execute itself.”

If programs aren’t explicitly told that they can set spots aside for homeless children, they won’t do so, Duffield said, especially as the Trump administration amps up the pressure to enroll more children; the proposed rule claims that it would preserve or expand the program by as many as 236,000 slots. Programs must also dedicate time and resources to finding and enrolling homeless families because “they don’t typically walk in the door,” Duffield said; without that being mandated and supported, programs may stop doing so. “We’re just going to go backwards in time.”

The end result, as the proposed rule itself acknowledges, will be fewer homeless children enrolled in Head Start. Head Start served 60,221 homeless children in the 2024–25 school year, which represents 7.7 percent of enrollment, up significantly from the 26,235 served in the 2006–07 school year, the last year before Congress mandated their inclusion. “There are very few things I feel certain about, but I feel certain that you’ll start to see the number of children who are homeless go back down and the children who need it most won’t have it,” Duffield said.

Even proposed eliminations that do not specifically target homeless families could have an outsize impact on them. Other changes put forward in the proposed rule would weaken standards on class sizes and ratios, curriculum, punishment, and family engagement and add in requirements like only teaching in English. Homeless families in particular will feel the impact of dropping required health and developmental screenings. “The totality of the changes will disproportionately impact families who are unhoused,” Hamm said.

The treatment of homeless families in the proposed rule stands in contrast with children in foster families. The rule retains all of the guidelines for these families, including their ability to be categorically eligible and self-attest.

The proposed rule is open for public comment through October 6. Duffield plans to submit a comment not only criticizing the changes but asking for adjustments that would help homeless children, such as requiring Head Start programs to designate specific liaisons for homeless families and create individualized plans to support homeless students. But it’s not just advocates and program directors weighing in. Within a week, members of the public had submitted over 500 comments, which is “a lot for this stage,” Hamm said; there were 3,257 two weeks later. Many are negative. “The Head Start program is so important for our country. I am against these changes. Investment in Head Start is an investment in the country’s future,” saysone . “Preschool should not only be for rich white people, but for all children. Everyone deserves to have the opportunity for a great education,” says another.

“I think a lot of people will submit comments about this,” Hamm said. “It’s been getting a lot of attention.”

Once the public comment period ends, HHS must review and respond to the comments. In the past, it has taken administrations as long as a year to complete that process, Hamm said, but this one “has been working with a much faster turnaround,” so she estimated it might take a matter of months. After that, the administration can publish a final rule, and the rule would take effect 60 days after that unless blocked by a judge.

Lawsuits aren’t likely to be filed until after a final rule is published. When The Nation asked the American Civil Liberties Union, which has brought a lawsuit against other administration changes to Head Start, if it would file a lawsuit against the rule, the organization said, “We’re closely reviewing the proposed rule and evaluating all available legal options.” Hamm argued that the changes impacting homeless children are, on their own, “contrary to Congress’s directive to focus specifically on enrolling children who are homeless and removing barriers,” and that other changes are also contrary to the Head Start Act.

Advocates are hopeful that Congress will put a stop to the rule. “The [Head Start] community will expect Congress to do something about this and hold the administration accountable,” Hamm said. But its levers to do so are limited. Members of Congress could insert a prohibition on implementing the rule in must-pass funding legislation, but the Senate has already passed a continuing resolution that would fund the government through December 11 (the House still has to pass its version). Assuming the rule becomes final, Congress could overturn it through the Congressional Review Act, but to do so, President Trump would have to sign the measure, or Congress would have to override a veto.

Senator Patty Murray, long a champion for early childhood education and Head Start, said at a recent press conference, “I will press administration officials when they come before Congress. I’ll sound the alarm as loudly as I possibly can, and I will carry this fight into every negotiation I walk into.”

“I’m hoping the groundswell of support translates into action on both sides of the aisle, because there’s nothing that should be partisan about this program,” Duffield said. By enabling parents to stabilize their lives, she added, “Head Start ends homelessness.”

Wanjiru’s babies are still very young, but she already has her eyes on their education and wants to enroll them in the Head Start program for 3- to 5-year-olds at Denise Louie as soon as she can. “The earlier start for kids, the better,” she said. “The more they get school, the more they learn and they more they know.”

When presented with the possibility of not being able to access Head Start as a homeless parent, she was taken aback. “We definitely need Head Start,” she said. “That would punish us.”

Dolly Parton, the brilliant songwriter and beloved country singer who has died at age 80, wrote one of the great anthems of the American working class. The title song from 9 to 5, the 1980 classic about battling gender inequity in the workplace that starred Parton, Jane Fonda, and Lily Tomlin, spoke so much truth that it became a hit on the pop and country charts, gained an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song, and collected two Grammys.

Workers everywhere knew what Parton meant when she sang about “barely gettin’ by, it’s all takin’ and no givin’,” and complained, “They just use your mind and they never give you credit. It’s enough to drive you crazy if you let it.” That song appeared on a remarkable solo album by Parton, 9 to 5 and Odd Jobs, which also included songs such as “Working Girl” and “Poor Folks Town” by Parton, along with a poignant cover of “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos,” Woody Guthrie’s reflection on the racist treatment of migrant farm workers.

The album’s title track warned, “It’s a rich man’s game no matter what they call it. And you spend your life puttin’ money in his wallet.” It also reminded working women, “There’s a better life and you think about it, don’t you?”

So it came as no surprise that the news of Parton’s death on Tuesday elicited heartfelt expressions of mourning—and respect—from unions that counted her as one of their own.

“Dolly Parton knew what it was like to struggle as she fought for working families her whole career,” recalled the AFL-CIO. “From providing free books to kids to giving working women our ‘9 to 5’ anthem, she was an icon and an inspiration. Rest in power to our union sister. We will always love you.”

Parton was, indeed, a union sister for the better part of 60 years—carrying the card of multiple labor organizations that on Tuesday celebrated the talent and humanity that earned the country singer, actress, and philanthropist universal admiration.

“Rest in peace, Dolly. Thank you for the music and the solidarity,” declared the American Federation of Musicians of the United States and Canada (AFM), the AFL-CIO-affiliated labor union that represents 70,000 professional singers and players, including Parton. AFM recalled a member whose “influence went far beyond the boundaries of country music, but she never lost track of who she was and her values.”

“Before she was an icon, Dolly was a working musician,” explained AFM International president Tino Gagliardi, who got his start as a New York–based trumpet player. “Dolly never forgot the musicians who helped bring her music to life. By standing firm for solidarity and treating every player with dignity, she elevated our entire profession.”

Dave Pomeroy, the bass player who serves as president of the AFM’s powerful Local 257 in Nashville, noted, “Throughout her 58 years as a proud member in good standing of Local 257, she set the gold standard for supporting her band and fellow musicians,” he recalled. “Dolly and her team consistently filed AFM union contracts for gigs, sessions, and tours, ensuring that the bands, singers, and studio musicians working alongside her received the benefits of union membership.”

Similar sentiments were expressed by entertainment industry unionists in Hollywood and nationwide.

“She was a member of SAG-AFTRA for more than five decades, joining the union in 1969,” recalled the Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, which proudly counted Parton among the 160,000 singers, recording artists, actors, announcers, broadcast journalists, dancers, DJs, news writers, news editors, program hosts, puppeteers, stunt performers, voiceover artists and other media professionals it represents.

“The passing of Dolly Parton will be deeply felt throughout our membership. Her life and legacy of joy and creativity had an indescribable impact on the world. As a singer, songwriter, performer, business leader and all-around visionary, Dolly Parton’s talent is revered across generations,” said SAG-AFTRA president Sean Astin (the veteran actor who played Samwise Gamgee in The Lord of the Rings trilogy). “Her basic humanity is known to the world, and she is simply beloved by countless millions. Personally, from ‘9 to 5’ when she effortlessly advanced the cause of professional women, to her Islands in the Stream collaboration with Kenny Rogers, I’m a true and forever fan. On behalf of SAG-AFTRA and my family, we send thoughts of love and condolence to her family.”

SAG-AFTRA National Executive Director & Chief Negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, a longtime social, economic justice, and LGBTQ+ rights campaigner, hailed Parton as “a once-in-a-generation artist and, just as importantly, someone of true generosity and decency.”

“As a fellow native Tennessean,” he recalled. “I’m humbled by what she did with her platform: putting books in the hands of millions of children through the Imagination Library, standing up for people being treated unfairly, and modeling real inclusion, including as a steady friend to the LGBTQ+ community well before that was easy to do. SAG-AFTRA and the entire creative community mourn her loss.”

And, of course, Service Employees International Union Local 925, which can trace its roots to the 1970s organizing of women office workers that helped to inspire Parton’s iconic film, added its voice of solidarity. “We’re not in the habit of recognizing celebrity deaths here at 925. That said, Dolly Parton is a national treasure and some folks here joke that Dolly is our Local’s patron saint,” declared the union activists. “After all, her song ‘9 to 5’ is our anthem.”

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

The stakes could not be higher, and yet the Democratic Party is undermining its own chances of winning the midterms. Not for lack of money—there is plenty of money—but because a bias so pervasive that most of the people acting on it cannot see it is shaping how it gets spent. I’ve given that bias a name: Straight White American Male Preference, or SWAMP. It dilutes Democratic strategy, misdirects hundreds of millions of dollars, and starves the constituencies most likely to produce a majority.

My organization, Democracy in Color, has just completed a comprehensive SWAMP audit of the Democratic Party, and the findings are alarming.

It follows in the tradition of the Fannie Lou Hamer Report, the first independent audit of Democratic Party spending, which my late wife, Susan Sandler, Julie Martinez Ortega, and I published in 2014. That report found that, of the $514 million the DNC, DSCC, and DCCC paid to consultants, just 1.7 percent went to firms owned by people of color. Twelve years later, the leadership and the consultant corps have barely changed—and what flows from that is more urgent still: roughly a billion dollars misallocated by preference rather than by data, based on the spending patterns of the most recent election cycles.

A SWAMP audit, a tool I developed while writing my latest book, Are White Men Smarter Than Everybody Else?, measures the racial and gender preference an institution is showing. It rests on a single number: Straight white men are 29 percent of the US population and 29 percent of the electorate. Where white men hold not 29 percent of the power but 67, 89, or 100 percent, only two explanations are available. Either white men are smarter and more deserving than everybody else, or preference is doing the work.

Leadership

Nearly half of all Democratic voters are people of color. But 100 percent of the top leadership of the party’s principal campaign committees and allied super PACs is white, and 67 percent of those leaders are white men—more than double their share of the country. If expertise about your target constituencies matters—and it does—that absence of cultural insight and a track record is a strategic liability, not merely an equity problem.

This tracks with how power is allocated everywhere in this country, and it reflects the widespread, rarely stated, emotionally uncomfortable assumption that white men are in fact smarter than everyone else. Isabel Wilkerson identified this reality in her book Caste, describing America as a long-running drama in which “for generations, everyone has known who is center stage in the lead.”

It is a truism of behavioral science that people tend to like people like themselves, so it should be no surprise that monochromatic Party leaders turn to other whites, and to white men, in grossly disproportionate numbers. Our analysis of the FEC filings by the top Democratic Party committees found that of the $155 million paid this cycle to the consultants among the party’s top 100 vendors, 89 percent went to firms run by white people, and 57 percent of those firms are run by white men.

Strategy and spending

This is not about abstract racial and gender bean-counting. It’s about winning elections, retaking control of Congress, and stopping the march of authoritarianism in America.

White men are 29 percent of the population and accounted for just 26 percent of the Democratic coalition that won in 2020. In other words, nearly three-quarters of Democratic voters are not white men. The six entities that constitute the party’s spending apparatus deployed $2.3 billion in 2024 and are on course to spend roughly $1 billion in these midterms. That money has to follow the arithmetic of the actual electorate.

It doesn’t. Television advertising is, almost by definition, a tool of persuasion. You don’t need to saturate the Black community with ads about how bad the Republicans are, for example, as 90 percent of Black voters regularly reject the GOP. But most spending is on ads designed to persuade, usually white swing voters. In 2024, those six committees spent $1.1 billion on persuasion advertising and $64 million on field and voter mobilization. For every dollar the party spent mobilizing the voters who are its base, it spent $17.70 chasing the voters least likely to be with us.

That is not just statistical overrepresentation. It’s a foolhardy defiance of the law of diminishing marginal returns: Past the saturation point, additional spending in a market becomes wasteful, because you’ve already attracted all the support that pool of people is going to give you.

Democratic spending on white men blew past that point decades ago. Democrats have not won a majority of white male voters since 1968, and that support has stayed within a narrow band, under a hard ceiling, in every presidential election since 1992 (peaking in 2008 at 40 percent), no matter how many hundreds of millions get thrown at it. And the premium is steep. Political scientists John Sides, Lynn Vavreck, and Christopher Warshaw estimate that television persuasion in Senate contests costs roughly $200 per vote; the mobilization research of Donald Green and Alan Gerber puts the cost of an additional vote through organizing at $65 to $84.

Pennsylvania in 2024 shows what that costs. Democrats lost the Senate race there by roughly 15,000 votes, while 354,000 eligible African American voters did not cast a ballot. Black turnout was 64 percent, against 69 percent among whites; closing that gap would have produced 55,000 votes, roughly 90 percent of them Democratic. At the high end of the Green-Gerber range, $4.7 million in Black voter mobilization would have won the seat. Democrats spent $62 million on television there.

Winning

Here is the good news, and it is considerable: The votes required to win in 2026 already exist. They don’t have to be persuaded. They have to be mobilized.

The Senate map runs through Alaska, North Carolina, Texas, Ohio, Georgia, and Maine—states where women and voters of color, not straight white men, will decide the outcome. Alaska has the largest Native population share of any state, and the Democratic nominee, Mary Peltola, is Alaska Native. Black voters are more than a fifth of North Carolina’s electorate and roughly a third of Georgia’s; they are not a constituency to be appended to the end of a television plan—they are the plan. And every year 4 million young Americans turn 18, most of them people of color.

We know this works because we have done it. In 2018, a Latino-focused mobilization program anchored by Communities for a New California reached 40,000 voters and unseated Republican David Valadao in California’s two-thirds-Latino 22nd district. In Georgia, eight years of registration and organizing, propelled by Stacey Abrams, delivered Jon Ossoff, Raphael Warnock, and control of the Senate.

There are signs the party can learn. Two white male Democratic Senate candidates, are modeling how to spend money in ways that target the non-white male majority of the electorate. In Texas, James Talarico’s Senate campaign has announced $25 million for Black voter mobilization, among the largest such commitments any Democratic campaign has ever made. In Georgia, Ossoff has made accountability on the Epstein files a centerpiece of his reelection, and the polling is rewarding him for it. The conventional wisdom that Democrats should say nothing about gender justice is being disproven in real time.

The counterexample is just as instructive. In June, the DCCC, which normally stays out of contested primaries, spent $135,000 opposing Randy Villegas, a Latino Democrat running in a district that is two-thirds Latino. He won anyway.

The remedy is not complicated: De-SWAMP the spending. Of the roughly $1 billion Democrats will deploy this fall, no more than 29 percent should chase straight white men (their share of the electorate) and at least 71 percent (roughly $710 million) should go toward mobilizing the women, people of color, and young people who are the party’s majority and its greatest untapped strength, through permanent, community-based, year-round organizing. And straight white men should not hold way more than 29 percent of the party’s campaign leadership.

Confronted with the overrepresentation this audit documents, there are only two explanations. Either straight white men are smarter and more deserving than everyone else, or preference is doing the work. We reject the first, and this audit is the evidence for the second. There is still time to defeat this disease, win the midterms, and forestall authoritarianism—but only if the party spends as though every vote, and every voter, matters equally.

There’s a scene in The Shawshank Redemption where the wrongly convicted prisoner, Andy Dufresne, is trying to convince Warden Norton to act on new evidence that could exonerate him. The warden, who is using Dufresne’s accounting skills to hide his own illegal dealings, offers a bunch of reasons for ignoring the new evidence. Dufresne exclaims, “How can you be so obtuse?” The line sends the warden into a rage, and he throws Dufresne into solitary confinement. 

The warden, of course, is not being obtuse. He understands the implications of what Dufresne is saying perfectly well. He just doesn’t want to lose his bookkeeper, and certainly doesn’t want to risk Dufresne’s exposing his illegal operation. The warden is not dense; he is evil.

So it is with our Supreme Court, which ruled on Monday to allow Donald Trump to move forward with one of his own illegal schemes. In an emergency decision, issued through the shadow docket, the Republican supermajority gave Trump permission to limit voting by mail in the upcoming midterm elections. In doing this, the six GOP justices well understand that the president is trying to give himself the ability to manipulate the vote. They’re not confused by his plan. They’re not being obtuse. They’re simply aiding and abetting Trump’s assault on democratic self-government.

The origin of this particular assault is an executive order, issued in March, titled “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections.” It does three things:

• Instructs the Department of Homeland Security to come up with a list of US citizens it thinks are eligible to vote. The list would be independent of state voter rolls, yet sent to the states to supersede their own voter registration lists.
• Instructs the Department of Justice to investigate and prosecute state and local officials who provide ballots to those who are “not eligible” to vote.
• Prohibits the US Postal Service from delivering mail-in ballots to those the administration deems not eligible to vote.

The entire executive order is unconstitutional. Voter registration and the maintenance of voter rolls is handled on the state level, not the federal level. The Trump administration has no constitutional authority to tell the states whom can be sent a ballot. It has no constitutional authority to tell the Postal Service whom it can deliver mail to. It has no legal authority to prosecute state officials who follow their own state’s procedures for producing that mail.

A group of 23 states sued the Trump administration and, in July, US District Judge Indira Talwani blocked Trump’s unconstitutional executive order. But then Trump appealed to his Supreme Court—and, on Monday, the Republican supermajority dutifully stayed the district court order and allowed Trump to proceed with his election-rigging plans.

The unsigned Republican majority opinion says that Trump’s order is not “ripe” for judicial review. Ripe is a legal term that means an issue cannot be adjudicated because it has yet to produce harm. The court is saying that the states haven’t (yet) been hurt by Trump’s executive order, so they can’t sue to stop him.

That argument is every bit as preposterous as it sounds. State election officials are being harmed, right now, by the threat of prosecution should they follow their state’s procedures for issuing mail-in ballots. Voters in those states are being harmed, right now, by the confusion Trump is causing over whether they can expect to receive a ballot. Either the court thinks that such harms can be stopped at some point in the future or, more likely, they think that Trump’s attempts to suppress the vote and rig the election aren’t “harms” at all.

Moreover, the executive order violates a critical Supreme Court precedent: the Purcell Principle. This doctrine holds that changes to the administration of any election cannot be made “too close” to an election. Reasonable people can debate how close is “too close,” but we should be able to agree that late August is (or should be) too close to an early-November election to change which government agency gets to determine who is eligible to vote by mail.

Ironically, the fact that we’re still in August, coupled with the fact that the Republicans have rested their decision on ripeness, does give the Supreme Court time to reverse course. It is possible that over the next few weeks, once the Trump administration orders the states to use the list of voters Homeland Security provides, that the court will find a “harm” to the states. Should two of the Republican justices allow themselves to see the harm, it’s possible that they will also see that the harm is unconstitutional.

But even a late-game restoration of mail-in voting will allow Trump and the Republican justices to accomplish their central aim: to sow confusion, uncertainty, and distrust in mail-in voting. We are just over two months away from the election and a mere six or seven weeks away from the start of early voting in some states. The fact that I cannot tell you how mail-in voting will work accomplishes much of what Trump wants.

And we can assume that this executive order is only the first shot across the bow. The Supreme Court has emboldened Trump (as if he needed any more emboldening). Even if the court eventually rules on the merits that this EO is unconstitutional, Trump will simply issue another one, and then another one. If he’s not allowed to prevent the post office from sending mail-in ballots to voters, his next move will be to order the USPS not to return the ballots from people who are not on his preapproved list of voters. Then he’ll order elections officials to not count the ballots once they’re received and threaten them with lawsuits if they do. Every one of those executive orders will be challenged by states, but the Supreme Court has given Trump every reason to believe that one of these unconstitutional, antidemocratic orders will hold up in court and that he can keep muddying the procedures for running elections—potentially right up to Election Day.

In a 23-page dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said as much:

This suspect scenario appears tailor-made to weaponize this case as a means of destabilizing the nation’s vote-by-mail systems through court-assisted procedural maneuvers.… Rather than swallow the Government’s gamesmanship whole, the Court should have given this empty, strategic, and bad-faith stay bid the swift rejection it deserves.

Justice Jackson is right about this. She is wrong, however, about something else. She writes:

In the end, though, what makes today’s ruling so off-base is the Court’s lack of situational awareness regarding this equitable judgment. It treats the Government’s stay application as if the whole point is merely to demonstrate that the Plaintiff States’ claims are not justiciable. Taking its eye off the ball, the majority misses the Government’s actual objective: to secure our imprimatur for its effort to foment chaos ahead of the November elections.

The Republican justices are not taking their eye off the ball. Again, they know exactly what Trump is doing. They are helping him do it, on purpose, with a full and complete understanding of the likely results. They are situationally aware, and they support the situation Trump is causing.

The only people being obtuse in this moment are those who insist that the Supreme Court is a reasonable actor, committed to maintaining American-style democracy against the threats posed by the Trump administration.

If you don’t believe me, just do what Mr. Rogers told all of us of a certain age to do: “Look for the helpers.” The Republicans on the Supreme Court are the helpers. They’re just helping evil.

Razor Dobbs looked out at River Road. The rural stretch that hugs the winding banks of the upper Guadalupe River in Center Point, Texas, was being inundated with rain.

It was past two in the morning on July 16 and the Guadalupe was rising fast. Within seconds, Dobbs said, it was coming up onto the road.

“It hit me: This is bad,” Dobbs said. “This is like last year.”

Soon, Dobbs, a firefighter with the Center Point Volunteer Fire Department, was called to begin evacuations across town. He spent the next 22 hours working—responding to dozens of distress calls, rescuing residents from attics, and wading through water to pull people from floating cars.

“It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, we just had a flood,’” Dobbs said. “No, we had a biblical flood.”

Multiple rounds of storms hit Texas between July 13 and17, resulting in what the National Weather Service described as “catastrophic flooding,” that led to the death of two people. More than a dozen locations in the counties hardest hit received more than two feet of rain in just a few days. Rivers surged causing widespread property damage and road closures in counties as far as Southwest and West Texas.

Strikingly for communities in the heart of the Hill Country, like Center Point in Kerr County, the floods were strikingly familiar.

For, in those communities, it had only been a year since the Guadalupe River rose almost 30 feet in under an hour after being pummeled by an intense burst of late-night rain. The surge created a wall of water that tore through the Hill Country. More than 130 people died, including 25 young girls at Camp Mystic. Most of the deaths occurred in Kerr County.

Key differences helped spare lives when the river rose again this year. The storm played out over multiple days and multiple river basins, allowing people more time to evacuate and prepare. There were fewer visitors camping and staying along the Guadalupe (last year’s floods occurred during the early morning of the Fourth of July). Responders and residents alike reported swifter reactions to warning signs due to anxiety and experience related to last year’s tragedy and, in some cases, more available response tools.

But Dobbs said a lower death toll should not undercut the severity of this year’s floods. In Center Point, the Guadalupe rose 32 feet in four hours, as high as last year. In Comfort, a town nine miles away, the river rose higher than it did in 2025, cresting at 37 feet. The river in that area had measured only around three feet in the weeks leading up to the flood.

Rebecca Loebe, a Center Point resident, was asleep in her home when the rain began to fall in the early morning of July 16. Her husband woke up around 5:30 am to a missed call and a text from their neighbor. “Go check on the river,” the text said. “It’s flooding.”

Loebe’s husband woke her after reading the text and the two jumped out of bed to examine the state of the Guadalupe.

Loebe knew the river had been high after days of rainfall. But her property is 40 feet up, so when the river rises under typical circumstances, “it goes from being 40 feet away to being 36 feet away.” Only a tiny portion of her backyard lies in the 500-year floodplain, she said.

“I found that out when we were getting home insurance,” Loebe said. “And I said, if the water ever gets up here, then I think the whole world is underwater.”

But when she went outside her house, down to the sidewalk and toward a cliff that overlooks the Guadalupe, Loebe knew something was wrong. The water was all the way up the cliff, coming up into the yard—and it was moving fast.

Loebe spotted the pair of inner tubes that she and her husband have used to float on the river during different times. They were already in the water and Loebe resigned herself to losing them. When she looked back only seconds later, the tubes were already 100 yards away.

“I didn’t stick around,” Loebe said.

She raced back to her house to gather the few important items she could think of: their passports, birth certificates, her father’s guitar—and their dog. Then, Loebe and her husband made their way to higher ground on their property, the mother-in-law house built at the end of their driveway.

From there, they noticed that the creek that runs behind houses across the street from their property was also flooding. Water was coming towards them in both directions.

As morning pressed on, the sun began to rise, and the river appeared to slowly recede. But around 9 am, Loebe and her husband evacuated to the lone school in Center Point after being informed that another wall of water was coming down the river. She and her husband didn’t return home for hours.

Loebe’s property survived relatively unscathed, but the day’s events stayed with her. She’d been out of town when the Guadalupe flooded last year, and water made its way into her backyard—an image that at the time felt impossible to visualize.

However, she did see the aftermath—the debris, the destruction. Like along the stretch of river that runs behind her house, where a nearly 70-foot cypress tree had fallen. During the flood, the tree had raced down the middle of the river, running parallel to the banks. She observed that the nearly 12-foot root structure shooting off of the giant tree had become fully perpendicular to the banks.

Now Loebe had seen the flooding river with her own eyes, watched it rise, waited, and wondered if it would reach her. When she next observed that stretch of river behind her house, the giant cypress was gone. It had been washed away.

“So many of us had this story that what happened last year was like a once in a lifetime event,” Loebe said. “As the water peaked at almost the exact same spot, it conflicted with that narrative. To see something very similar so soon was unnerving.”

Indeed, residents across the Hill Country are grappling with the improbability that two floods that reached similar extremes could happen in back-to-back years.

Alix Seyfarth, the director of strategy at All Hands & Hearts, said the disaster relief nonprofit is seeing damage in many of the same areas as last year. After the July 2025 floods, AH&H deployed tens of thousands of volunteers to the Hill Country to assist with immediate recovery.

Over the year that followed, their efforts shifted to repairing homes. Seyfarth said AH&H had completed 11 homes and had nine in progress when floods hit this July. Four of these homes were re-impacted after this year’s floods, three of which were structurally damaged.

“We’re going back to homes that we’ve already supported, where people have to do everything all over again,” Seyfarth said.

Dondi Persyn, a Boerne, Texas, native who’s been organizing in the Hill Country since the 2025 floods said she’s been assisting many of the same locals she met while doing relief work over the past year.

Last year, Persyn initially began her recovery efforts by searching for flood victims. But after noticing how many personal items were strewn about the area, she launched the Facebook page Found on the Guadalupe River, with the intention of reconnecting victims with belongings lost in the flood. The effort expanded quickly, with Persyn running a warehouse until March of this year where personal effects found along the river were collected, cleaned and organized for victims to parse through.

As demand slowed, Persyn moved remaining items into a storage unit, though she continues to collect belongings weekly and makes frequent visits to Kerr County. When rain began to pour in mid-July, Persyn prepared herself for the possibility of another flood. After the storm, she assumed that people would begin reaching out again, asking about lost items and notifying her of belongings discovered. But instead, there was a different need.

“It’s been a different kind of damage,” Persyn said. “Not one where people were losing as much of their personal property that were just like flooded way down the river. More like it ended up in their yard.”

And so, Persyn alongside other volunteers from Found on the Guadalupe, returned to the homes of the same residents they’d gotten to know over the past year—residents whose belongings they’d washed, whose items they’d returned, whose stories they’d heard.

“Since we’ve been in the community over the last year, we’ve grown these really deep bonds with the people that live there,” Persyn said. “When you’re washing their things and returning their loved ones’ items, you become bonded. You get to know them on a different level. All the people that have survived, we know their stories.”

Persyn said her team initially worked on mucking out homes. Then, they set up a distribution center at a local business where she’s spent weeks handing out storage bins, boots, and squeegees. On one such day, she spent around seven hours giving out dehumidifiers. On another weekend, she distributed more than 1,000 bins for storing clean items that can’t be mixed up with the mud and muck inside flooded houses.

Though this process of recovery is different, particularly because it does not stem from extreme loss of life, pain, uncertainty, and confusion lie in the fact that another extreme flood happened so soon. For Dobbs, last year’s flood was difficult. He and the fire department spent nearly a month after the flood working 12-hour days in search of missing victims. He also found flood victims on his property. He used his wife’s UTV as a recovery vehicle to carry the bodies out.

“It just brought back so much,” Dobbs said.

And while residents grapple with the question of how such a similar flood could have occurred so soon after last year, some—Loebe included—are beginning to ponder another increasingly obvious question. Will this happen again?

The way that University of South Carolina professor and climate scientist Claudia Benitez-Nelson sees it, extreme flooding will likely continue to occur in the Hill Country.

“These types of events used to happen once every 100 years, once every 1,000 years,” she said. “But now they’re happening over and over again as the temperature gets hotter.”

Benitez-Nelson said climate change is making extreme weather events more likely. This is particularly true, she said, for extreme rain events. As the planet warms, there’s more heat in the atmosphere, which allows for more evaporation. These heavy downpours are becoming more frequent because warmer air can hold more moisture.

“Heat is energy,” Benitez-Nelson said. “That energy has to go somewhere, and that energy is what we’re seeing in these massive thunderstorms.”

Rice University professor and flood prediction expert Phillip Bedient agrees that extreme flooding will become more frequent. Moving forward in this landscape, he said, means investing in technology that can warn residents of a disaster quickly and accurately.

Currently, Bedient is working with researchers at the University of Texas at Arlington to develop an early flood warning system that links radar-based computerized predictions with siren and river gauges. This technology and swift emergency response like what occurred this year will be a key element in ensuring safety during future floods, he said.

“It’s unfortunate, but that’s what it’s going to take to make it a viable area,” Bedient said. “They’ve got to have this kind of system because they’re not going to all leave. They’re going to stick it out because for many of them, it’s their land.”

And so, these communities will continue to recover—to pick up the pieces, neighbors helping neighbors, preparing to start anew.

Dobbs has already returned to his work with the Center Point Volunteer Fire Department, even though the station is damaged from flooding for the second year in a row. For there will be more calls, more neighbors in need of assistance, more accidents. Someone will need to be there.

Washington has been seized with the existence and potential implications of a shortage of munitions, from artillery shells up to and including expensive missile interceptors. But contrary to the conventional wisdom, the munitions “crisis” is not due to bad planning or insufficient funding. It is due to a policy of runaway arms sales and reckless military intervention that should be reined in, not perpetuated for the next generation by expanding US capabilities to produce munitions and missiles.

The top priority should be ending America’s addiction to endless wars and runaway arms dealing, not throwing more money at the Pentagon to bulk up on the tools of war.

To be clear, there are other reasons for the so-called munitions shortage that have more to do with domestic politics than foreign policy excesses. For one, munitions have always been a stepchild in the articulation of the Pentagon’s weapons buying priorities. More profitable big-ticket items like aircraft carriers, combat aircraft (like the deeply dysfunctional F-35), intercontinental ballistic missiles, and ballistic missile and attack submarines have always been favored, both because they are more lucrative for contractors and because those systems have developed strong support in Congress by spreading production to a majority of states and congressional districts.

But even allowing for this budgetary bias, the US military would have more than enough munitions if our government weren’t arming Ukraine (the effort to help Kyiv fend off a Russian invasion has cratered under Trump II but thrived under Biden); arming Israeli genocide and aggression with tens of thousands of missiles and bombs; and fighting a war in Iran where Tehran is using relatively inexpensive drones that the United States is attempting to shoot down with missiles worth millions of dollars.

The answer to the munitions crisis in part involves producing simpler, less expensive munitions that can be produced on shorter timelines, in some cases by reviving government arsenals that aren’t distorted in their approach by the quest for maximum profits. The arms lobby will fight this approach tooth and nail, because it would replace the easy money they receive under current arrangements with a more effective, efficient approach that would take them out of the loop.

ProPublica has done a compelling case study of why the usual suspects in the arms industry can’t be trusted to boost munitions production. In a carefully researched, well-documented piece, they tell the story of General Dynamics, which received over half a billion dollars to build a new munitions factory and, two years later, has not produced a single artillery shell thanks to production snafus tied to the purchase of untested equipment.

More important than fixing production methods is fixing our ill-advised foreign policy. We need a more restrained, more realistic approach to military aid, arms transfers, and military intervention that promotes defense narrowly defined, avoids illegal, aggressive wars, and stops arming reckless regimes that engage in brutal, destabilizing wars and oppress the human beings under their territorial control.

The mindless rush to build more capacity to produce bombs, shells, and missiles ignores the central fact that it is US policy that is the problem, not a lack of sufficient implements of destruction.

If they want to undercut alarmist calls for more munitions production, progressive movements and concerned members of the broader public need to push for an America whose foreign policy is about preventing war, not promoting it. Given our other urgent needs, from addressing the climate crisis to reducing poverty to heading off future pandemics, America cannot afford to become a garrison state committed to endless wars and the coddling of repressive regimes. We should be debating a shortage of diplomacy and common sense in US foreign policy, not a shortage of munitions.

By late 2022, Ukraine had rallied, with Western backing, and Russia’s invasion had wavered. The war was only several months old, but it already appeared that Russians might be abruptly routed. Which was terrifying—because US intelligence intercepts made clear that, long before they’d allow that, the Russians would use battlefield nuclear weapons against CIA-Ukrainian positions.

That October, President Joe Biden admitted to rich campaign donors that we were flirting with “Armageddon,” and hadn’t been this close to it since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. His comments were spun then as not supported by any particular intel, just the president spitballing. But that was not true.

Two years later, The New York Times offered a report based on 18 months of interviews “with administration officials, diplomats…and military officials who recounted the depth of their fear in those weeks” [emphasis mine] that Russia, on the ropes, was about to use nuclear weapons.

Biden apparently asked Russia’s Vladimir Putin for “an urgent meeting of emissaries,” and in November 2022 our spy chiefs met. The Russian spy chief “apparently thought the CIA director had been sent to negotiate…[to] end the war,” reported The New York Times. “It took some time for Mr. Burns to disabuse Mr. Naryshkin of the idea that the United States was ready [to talk peace terms].”

How tragicomic. As has been exhaustively documented, the US government vetoed Ukrainian-Russian peace agreements that would have ended the war within the first few weeks. (Think of how much death and destruction could have been averted.) Now, with time-consuming effort, we convinced the Russian side one more time that, no, we still weren’t interested in peace. Apparently the Russians couldn’t believe it!

We’ve learned little since.

Despite the incredible danger of provoking a world-ending nuclear war, Ukraine’s more recent CIA/NATO-supported strikes have targeted Russia’s nuclear weapons systems. In May 2024, Ukrainian drones repeatedly attacked, and briefly disabled, Russian early-warning-system radars. Those radars are used to detect incoming nuclear attack. In nuclear war game scenarios, such radars are often taken out as a “blinding” tactic ahead of a nuclear first strike. So, to attempt to cripple these radars (which had little to nothing to do with the Ukraine war itself) was wildly reckless. Theodore Postol, a physicist and professor at MIT, called it “the dumbest thing Ukraine can do.”

The same goes for Operation Spider’s Web, in which Ukrainian drones secretly shipped in trucks across Russia deployed last June to attack airfields as far off as Murmansk in the far north and Irkutsk in the Siberian east. Ukraine claimed to have destroyed up to a third of the Russian strategic nuclear bombing fleet. This summer, Ukraine marked the anniversary of that triumph by releasing dramatically scored video footage of this likely CIA-conceived-and-guided operation. Again: Attacking Russia’s nuclear warning radars one year, and their nuclear weapons-armed strategic bombers the next, is incredibly provocative.

This winter, the Ukrainians escalated even further, with the ultimate attack on nuclear command and control: They made an apparent attempt to blow up Putin’s home at the Russian resort of Lake Valdai.

The Russians expressed rage, and Putin called Donald Trump to complain, as Trump discussed with journalists later that day. “President Putin told me about [a drone attack on his residence]. Early in the morning he said he was attacked. It’s no good,” said Trump then. “I was very angry about it.”

Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky initially dismissed reports of an attack on Putin’s Lake Valdai home as a Russian “fabrication,” and after a CIA briefing, Trump also reversed himself and said he now disbelieved Putin. But six months later, Zelensky seemed to confirm the attack, taunting Putin about it in an open letter.

“We often hear that you are comfortable with this war. Of course, not in those cases when it comes to the security of your residence in Valdai,” Zelensky wrote then to Putin. “Your own life is valuable to you.”

What would have happened if weapons guided to target by the CIA had killed the Russian president, and/or his wife and two young sons?

For context: America and Russia have hundreds of nuclear weapons aimed at each other, poised for launch after just several minutes of consideration. France and Britain, who have been startlingly bellicose against Russia of late, also have nuclear weapons. For the first time in the lifetime of most of us, there are also no remaining US-Russian arms control agreements: They’ve all either been torn up or allowed to expire. And nuclear war games consistently show that once even a single nuclear weapon is used in anger, it’s very hard to prevent an inevitable, rapid escalation into full-on nuclear war.

What would such a war mean? Well, if Russia and NATO were to start exchanging nuclear strikes, we could see millions of people killed in an afternoon, and billions more in coming years by a so-called “nuclear winter” of climate, agricultural, and civilizational collapse.

These cold hard facts have occasionally inspired protesters to interrupt ho-hum political events in recent years, like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s neighborhood town hall, to demand something be done.

“You’re playing with our lives!” yells one, after accusing Ocasio-Cortez and the Democrats of pouring gasoline onto a conflagration in Ukraine and risking a worldwide nuclear war. Another takes up the argument, yelling, “Are you going to stop nuclear war? Yes or no?” The congresswoman tells him he needs to get into the line to ask his questions, to which he replies, “There is no line, because this is bullshit! None of this matters if we’re all dead! None of it!”

Put the Ukraine war itself aside, and consider: We need to be able to work with the Russians on reviving nuclear arms control talks. We urgently need to get weapons off of hair-trigger alert everywhere, and to remember and honor our treaty commitments to work for global nuclear disarmament—preferably before America or Israel rage-nuke Iran.

Eventually, we need the American and Russian governments to join the majority of the world’s nations in signing the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

We can’t do any of that critical work in this environment—and for many in Washington, that is itself a good enough reason for continued war in Ukraine.

Conversely, a rededication to good-faith peace in Ukraine could open the door to truly ambitious nuclear disarmament efforts. That would be quite an achievement for a president who styles himself a deal-making artist, and who in fact has had a long-standing interest in global nuclear abolition. Of course, in recent months, Donald Trump seems more likely to get us all killed with nuclear weapons than to save us from them. Perhaps we’ll be lucky enough, one last time, to escape such a fate, for a little longer—long enough, one hopes and prays, for commonsense, win-win international politics to finally be forced upon Washington, if only by citizen-led political change.

Democratic politicians seem to have finally gotten the memo: More than anything, people want their economic grievances addressed and their hard work rewarded. Nothing else comes close to mattering as much as earning enough money to pay the bills and having a shot at the American Dream.

From Pete Buttigieg deploring a political system that allows corporations to squeeze farmers and consumers to Senator Chris Murphy’s bill banning private equity ownership of hospitals and nursing homes, Democrats are showing signs of reclaiming their party’s New Deal–era legacy.

They’re wise to do so. In June, our respective organizations, the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative (RUBI) and the Center for Working-Class Politics, surveyed 6,100 people, more than a thousand of them rural, about their reactions to political messaging. We asked them to compare two GOP opposition messages and 13 different kinds of messages either written by us or frequently heard on the campaign trail or in content by groups such as Indivisible, Showing Up for Racial Justice, and the Movement Voter Project. We have now compiled our findings in a new study, “Kitchen Table Messaging for the Populist Era.”

The results are clear. We found that people said they were substantially more likely to vote for Democrats who deploy populist economic messaging than for Democrats with messaging that criticizes Trump, warns about fascism and oligarchy, or exposes elites’ divide-and-conquer playbook. (Divide-and-conquer rhetoric scapegoats marginalized groups so that working people blame them—rather than elites—for their hard times.) The preference for kitchen-table populism held true with our respondents across the board and with key subgroups, including rural voters.

Our kitchen-table populist messages all do four things in various ways: They acknowledge that wages aren’t keeping pace with rising costs; affirm that people are working hard and deserve a decent standard of living; recognize that economic elites are doing well while ordinary people are struggling; and lay out clear material solutions such as making corporations and billionaires pay their fair share in taxes and refusing corporate PAC donations.

All seven of these messages beat both GOP messages. In some cases, the gap was modest, but our top performers absolutely trounced the GOP opposition.

When it came to the divide-and-conquer set, Texas senatorial candidate James Talarico’s message below did a little better than the Race-Class Narrative (a messaging approach that frames racial division as an elite tactic to divide working people) but lagged far behind the kitchen-table populist winners. Talarico is edging his opponent out in recent polls and, we suggest, could do better still, especially with rural voters, by doubling down on his more resonant messages rather than the one below:

Unity Adapted from James Talarico
“The billionaires want to keep us from seeing all that we have in common. They divide us by party, by race, by gender, by religion so we don’t notice they’re defunding our schools, gutting our healthcare, and cutting taxes for themselves and their rich friends. It’s the oldest strategy in the world: divide and conquer. They want to keep us from realizing there’s far more that unites us than divides us. Because once we do, we’ll come together to fix what’s broken in our country and take back power for ourselves and our communities.”

Race-Class Narrative… Adapted from ASO Communications
“Every family, of every color and background, deserves to have what we need. But today, Republicans spread lies to keep us divided while they abduct our neighbors, start wars abroad and jack up prices. If you want to know who took your money, it’s the people with all the money. And if billionaires and Republicans can talk you into thinking anyone else is to blame for your hard times, they will keep getting away with it. The many can take on the money by voting for leaders who will fund our futures and respect our freedoms.”

Given the popularity of divide-and-conquer rhetoric on the progressive left, we created our own unique divide-and-conquer message called “Immigrant Solidarity.” It fared better than the others in this category but, again, lagged behind the kitchen-table champs.

Immigrant Solidarity Original message by study authors
“So many people are struggling financially—and the question is why. As far as I’m concerned, immigrants who are here to work and feed their families aren’t the problem. The problem is politicians and their lobbyist buddies who hand tax breaks to the rich and then turn around and say: ‘Sorry we don’t have enough money for schools and health care, and it’s immigrants’ fault.’ That’s BS. Most of us have more in common with an immigrant who works paycheck to paycheck than with a CEO that gets paid a big bonus for moving their factories overseas. The government should go after the people who rig our economy, not the ones who build it.”

For key persuadable segments of the electorate, the preference for kitchen-table populism over divide-and-conquer and anti-Trump narratives was even more pronounced. Rural respondents and Trump waverers (who voted for him in 2024 and are not planning to vote Republican in 2028) unequivocally rejected the Race-Class Narrative and anti-Trump messages. Independents and undecided likely 2026 voters were mildly positive toward anti-Trump and Race-Class messages but liked Kitchen Table Populist messages far better, especially this one:

American Way…
“Most people just want to work hard, get ahead, and give their kids a better shot—and they should be able to. But the cost of rent, groceries, and health care keeps going up faster than working families can keep up, and paychecks just aren’t stretching the way they used to. I’m going to bring those costs down for working people, make sure the biggest corporations pay their fair share, and crack down on corruption and the people who game the system for themselves. Hard work should pay off again—that’s the American way.”

Our data crowns the message above as the clear winner (to the extent that any single survey can). That was fairly predictable: Voters have for years been telling pollsters that the cost of living is their number-one concern—no surprise when half the country struggles to pay for gas and groceries. Messages that keep these financial woes front and center obviously resonate. For rural voters with a strong work ethic, acknowledgement that they work hard and deserve a decent standard of living goes a long way.

Anti-Trump attacks, even those that link Trump’s malfeasance to pocketbook pain, fail because they try to get voters to focus their attention on what is, to them, a matter of less importance. Whereas kitchen-table populism dwells in concrete reality, Trump attacks veer into abstractions (fascism, abuse of power, the end of democracy, etc). Trump’s abuses of power are matters of grave importance, but, when your car’s broken down and the rent’s overdue, they can feel somewhat beside the point.

The Talarico and Race-Class Narrative divide-and-conquer messages present a different set of pitfalls: They suggest that elites have successfully duped “you” or “us” into supporting their xenophobic, jingoistic agenda against your own best interests. This comes across as condescending, implying that the speaker knows better than the hapless voter what’s really going on. This accentuates liberals’ reputation for self-righteousness and lands particularly badly with rural voters who already feel stung by liberal disdain.

Politics 101 requires politicians to meet voters where they’re at, not where political consultants and activists wish they were at. Where they’re at is the kitchen table, sorting through stacks of bills. Candidates who meet them there, with empathy, bold solutions, and a dash of anger toward the winner-take-all system, will be given a fair hearing.

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

Good morning. Buenos días. Bom dia.

I’m Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, representing the Seventh Congressional District in Washington State and a proud immigrant: the first and only Indian American woman to serve in the House of Representatives and one of only two dozen naturalized citizens in Congress. I, and my colleague Representative Chuy Garcia from Illinois, are so honored to stand with you at the opening of this PanAmerican Congress.

Many of you have traveled great distances, some at personal risk, because you know how urgent this moment is. Thank you for everything you are doing to lift up and fight for working people and poor people in your countries and across the hemisphere.

We all face similar forms of opposition to our progress, from authoritarians and dictators trampling on human rights and international laws, to misinformation and disinformation designed to undermine the free and fair elections of our countries, to the growing inequality and the capture of our economies by billionaires and giant corporations that throttle our peoples’ human rights, dignity, and futures.

This is exactly why the PanAmerican Congress is so important at this moment. The challenges we face require a shared hemispheric response, a response based on listening and learning from each other, on collaboration, the rule of law, and respect for sovereignty; and on shared strategies to take on the growing threat of fascism and right-wing actors in all our countries.

The Trump administration’s catastrophic reframing of the Monroe Doctrine in a new and super-sized vanity ploy called the Donroe Doctrine reasserts the failed and flawed concept of US dominance in the hemisphere. It dangerously attempts to justify US intervention, economic coercion, military pressure, and unilateral operations, often in violation of our own US Constitution and international law.

Just last week, we made our opposition to this doctrine clear in a letter that I led, with 10 of my colleagues, including Representative Garcia and Senator Bernie Sanders, demanding answers from Secretary of State Marco Rubio on the use and scope of these efforts—all completely unauthorized by Congress—and incredibly vast.

Dozens of lethal, extrajudicial strikes on boats in the Caribbean and Pacific Ocean carried out by the US military over the past year. Joint operations with partner militaries that have led to the bombing and detention of civilians. The kidnapping of a sitting head of state in Venezuela. The imposing of an illegal fuel blockade on top of a longstanding, illegal embargo against Cuba, that inflicts terrible collective punishment on the Cuban people—something that I have emphasized over and over again in the two Congressional delegations I have led to Cuba. Tariffs and sanctions deployed to shield political allies of the US president from prosecution. And US interference in other sovereign nations’ elections, including endorsing favored candidates, and pardoning a convicted narcotrafficker on the eve of an election.

This is an old and dangerous playbook of intervention and regime change that carries the same severe costs. It holds contempt for democratic institutions, hostility toward migrants and the poor, a willingness to criminalize dissent, and an economic vision that serves corporations and billionaires first and working families last. And most dangerously, it is being propped up and furthered by the economic, military, and political might coming straight from the White House but not authorized by Congress or approved by the people.

That is exactly why we are here. The far right is coordinating across nations, and so must we. Not only must we share effective strategies of opposition, but also our solutions of proposition: a shared vision that lifts up and puts power back in the hands of the people. A real partnership between our nations of collaboration and cooperation to solve the global challenges of climate change, labor rights, public health, migration, and economic prosperity for all. An understanding that military might, dominance, and aggression are tools of the oppressor, but diplomacy and respectful multilateral and bilateral relationships are the only tools to bring about lasting peace.

As a long-time organizer for justice speaking with awe and respect to a room full of people who have led transitions from dictators to democracies, and brought strength and power to peoples’ movements across the hemisphere, I can say that strength emerges most in times of crisis. What terrifies our opponents most is that our ideas are truly popular and we refuse to give up.

Across the United States, majorities of Americans reject the outright cruel kidnapping and disappearing of immigrants by ICE, and instead are clamoring for humane immigration reforms. Majorities reject billionaires and corporations who want to steal our clean air, water, and energy and instead demand that we respect our core value as human beings. Majorities reject spending taxpayer dollars on bombs abroad and instead demand universal healthcare and housing. Majorities are responding to a call that our people should thrive—not just barely survive.

And in late July, one of our last actions before breaking for August recess was to pass my War Powers Resolution in the House, with every Democrat and several Republicans supporting an end to the war in Iran. We won’t stop there—we intend to pass Representative Velázquez’s Cuba War Powers Resolution when we get back, as well as other legislative actions to take on this administration’s unconstitutional actions.

Most hopeful is that we stand poised to retake control of the House of Representatives in November, and possibly even the Senate. From New York to New Jersey, Florida to Pennsylvania, Colorado to California, and Michigan to Minnesota, incredible progressive champions are winning elections despite tens of millions of dollars poured into those races for their opponents. We are so pleased to welcome some special guests of the US delegation, soon-to-be members of Congress: Chris Rabb from Pennsylvania, Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez from New York, and Adam Hamawy from New Jersey.

Thank you to the organizers of the PanAmerican Congress for having the vision to see that our collective action is the only way forward. And thank you to all of you for demanding change and insisting on democratic institutions by the people and for the people, built jointly across the hemisphere, not imposed north to south.

This is our time. Let’s use it to build power for the people across our hemisphere. Thank you.

Popsicles potentially contaminated with glass. Granola marketed toward breastfeeding mothers, recalled due to salmonella risk. And of course, shredded iceberg lettuce that causes explosive diarrhea. The summer of recalls has touched every culinary category—even dog food and baby formula.

It’s difficult to lay the outbreaks at the feet of any one agency or presidency. But what surely isn’t helping: the Trump administration’s slash-and-burn approach to the regulatory bodies meant to safeguard Americans.

Last year, amid DOGE’s cost-cutting fervor, the administration cut about 20 percent of FDA staff, and 25 percent of the CDC’s. Food safety checks were suspended for months, including lab testing for Cyclospora, the parasite that one year later is fueling what is now the third-largest outbreak of foodborne illness in American history, with close to 10,000 confirmed cases.

But though few administrations have been quite as indifferent to the nation’s health and welfare as the current one, the problems with America’s food supply span decades—thanks in part to vigorous lobbying by the deep-pocketed food industry.

Between 1998 and 2020, the ultraprocessed-food industry spent over a billion dollars on lobbying—more than the gambling, tobacco, and alcohol industries. The agribusiness lobby, meanwhile, dropped over $500 million between 2019 and 2023 alone.

Over the years, the industry’s efforts have prevailed across presidential administrations. When first lady Michelle Obama embarked on a campaign against childhood obesity in the early 2010s, Big Food unleashed a torrent of lobbying dollars. The White House backed away from efforts to get healthier food marketed to kids.

During those years, Congress did manage to pass the Food Safety and Modernization Act (FSMA), which includes a traceability rule requiring more detailed record keeping for some of the most common culprits in foodborne outbreaks—like eggs, greens, and soft cheeses. It’s a measure that might have helped stall the cyclosporiasis outbreak.

However, thanks to industry lobbying, implementation of the rule has been delayed, and delayed, and delayed. The rule is now scheduled to go into effect in 2028, 17 years after the original law passed. Assuming the industry doesn’t win another extension.

In the meantime, per the Government Accountability Office—which you have to imagine has its work cut out for it these days—the FDA has come nowhere close to meeting its FSMA-mandated targets for foreign safety inspections since 2018. The FSMA calls for 19,200 such inspections each year; in 2025, they conducted 995, or about 5 percent of that target.

So the challenges facing food safety regulations are nothing new. Yet the severity of this year’s recalls seems pronounced. Per the US PIRG Education Fund, while the total number of recalls is not unusually high, there has been “a huge increase in the number of illnesses caused by contaminated food.”

In other words, the outbreaks we have seen are higher-profile, more severe, and more likely to trigger anxieties about food safety. But that also means they are provoking more awareness, backlash—and potentially, action.

No doubt Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s tenure as head of HHS has been undermined by his conspiratorial anti-vaccine positions and advocacy for raw milk consumption. Yet in naming Kennedy to his cabinet, Trump elevated a longtime foe of Big Food—and crystallized such opposition as a mainstream conservative position.

Sure enough, even as Trump’s approval rating sinks as low as 30 percent, 41 percent of Americans still identify with the “MAHA movement.” And supermajorities of US adults agree that we need more regulation of chemical additives and pesticides. Even Trump himself, remarkably, has at least paid lip service to the movement by publicly condemning the “industrial food complex.”

Journalist and Fast Food Nation author Eric Schlosser put it best: “If a politician who drinks 12 Diet Cokes a day, serves McDonald’s food at the White House, stages campaign events at McDonald’s restaurants—and routinely orders a meal of two Big Macs, two Filet-O-Fish sandwiches and a chocolate shake just for himself—now feels the need to criticize industrial food, a seismic shift has occurred in US popular opinion.”

In turn, Democrats have seized this newfound common ground. Bernie Sanders just got a bill advanced to the Senate floor that would ban junk food commercials for kids and require warning labels on certain processed foods; two years ago, with Democrats in charge, the same bill couldn’t make it out of committee. Meanwhile, the latest five-year farm bill passed in April with bipartisan support—but only after removing language that would have protected pesticide companies from certain lawsuits.

And in last year’s legislative sessions, per Harvard Law School’s Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation, 35 states across every degree of the political spectrum introduced legislation restricting food additives.

These wins are possible only because grassroots public sentiment has been undeniable—between ascendant MAHA advocates and long-concerned progressives alike. And grassroots food safety advocacy has a long history of leading to change.

In 1969, in suburban Chicago, a young mother was fed up. She noticed a package of pepper steak at the grocery store that had gone rancid—and the butcher refused to tell her how old it was. Days later, she saw another housewife having the same argument with the same butcher.

Together, they started National Consumers United, an advocacy group that campaigned for grocery stores to visibly date their products. And despite being accused of being “either communists or spies” by a local grocery chain head, that practice was soon implemented over mounting consumer pressure—and has since remained standard for over half a century.

That mother was Jan Schakowsky, who went on to be elected—and reelected 13 times—as the US representative for Illinois’s Ninth Congressional District. She is retiring this year. But her story serves as a reminder of the power consumers have to band together in the face of injustice and demand better.

For decades, Big Food has counted on Americans having too much on their plate to bite back against their bloated influence. But increasingly, we seem to have the appetite.

In 2021, a State Farm “captive agent” told a company sales leader that attempting to get information about claims out of company reps and adjusters was like talking to members of a “secret society.” The agent was not a member of the club—State Farm captive agents technically work for themselves under contract to the company—and the difficulty of getting straight answers made it look to the agent like the claims department wasn’t doing its job.

Or, perhaps, it was doing its job just fine.

The agent’s concerns are contained in court documents recently unsealed in Comanche County, Oklahoma. They are part of a long-running legal battle between State Farm and thousands of Oklahoma homeowners who say that the company has deliberately worked to reduce payouts on claims of roof damage following severe wind-and-hail events in the state. The fight has drawn the interest of Oklahoma’s government and become an issue in the state’s gubernatorial race.

The documents, which were released late last week, show that the agent was not alone; numerous other State Farm contractors were sounding internal alarms over what appeared to be a company-wide scheme to lowball distressed claimants.

The story starts in June 2020—June 26, to be precise, according to the new documents. That’s when a plan to systematically reduce indemnity costs, which I will refer to as the Wind/Hail Initiative, was launched in Texas. Within six months, the plan was rolled out to other states, including Oklahoma. (State Farm has defended its tactics as ordinary business operations.)

Roofers across Oklahoma quickly noticed that State Farm had stopped paying out fully on roof replacement claims. In doing so, the company seemed to be following in the footsteps of Allstate, which decades earlier had implemented a similar “process” to arbitrarily reduce payouts on roof damage. Many policyholders lawyered up, and soon, there were dozens of bad-faith roof-claim cases quietly moving through Oklahoma courts. From 2020 to 2024, plaintiffs fought to gain access to secret documents that remained under protective orders even as they were said to prove the existence of a scheme to defraud Oklahoma policyholders of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Today, there are more than 1,000 legal cases against State Farm in Oklahoma, and the effort to hold insurance conglomerates responsible has turned political. Republican Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, as he vies for the governorship of the state in a primary runoff to be held Tuesday, has intervened in ongoing litigation and filed lawsuits against both State Farm and Allstate.

Drummond may be said to have staked his candidacy on his defense of Oklahoma homeowners, who, despite paying twice the national average for homeowners insurance, have for years found their claims of hail damage to be denied at a mysteriously elevated rate. Drummond’s runoff opponent, a Trump-endorsed former state senator named Mike Mazzei, has come to the defense of insurance carriers, even as Oklahoma polls show bipartisan distaste for insurance companies and as President Trump has publicly upbraided State Farm.

Now, at the final hour before the runoff, an initial tranche of the so-called State Farm Documents is finally coming to light.

My own insurance odyssey launched in early 2025, when the editor of a small Oklahoma nonprofit journalism outlet asked me to look into homeowners insurance in the state.

In May 2025, I published the first article of what would prove to be approximately 50,000 words’ worth of insurance stories. The maiden effort focused on Oklahoma Insurance Commissioner Glen Mulready’s sneaky ploy to spread a false claim—via The Wall Street Journal — that hail alone, and not insurance companies’ policies, explained Oklahoma’s outsize homeowners rates.

A couple of months later, I received an anonymous text from someone familiar with my coverage, advising me to attend an upcoming hearing in a case known as Nida v. State Farm.

Nida was a consolidation of nine cases, which in turn were representative of 125 bad-faith cases against State Farm. The cases were remarkably similar: A home would suffer approximately $30,000 in damage, and State Farm would produce a lowball offer of 10 percent of that amount in compensation.

The hearing was held in a cavernous old courtroom in Oklahoma City, with great murals on the walls, ancient nicotine stains on the ceiling, and enough hard wooden pews to accommodate the indicted congregation of a megachurch. But apart from the attorneys, I was only one in the echoey room.

The Nida cases, I learned, had been settled more or less immediately after plaintiffs’ attorneys won access to the secret documents and began deposing State Farm executives. The documents remained under a protective order because the cases were settled. But then State Farm briefly—and accidentally, the company later claimed—made the terms of the settlements public. A new lawsuit was filed, and in court, I witnessed one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys reveal the settlement amount of just one of the 125 cases.

Not $30,000. Not $50,000 or $100,000. Just one case settled for $3 million.

Multiply that by 125. Round down to be safe (not everyone would have necessarily been in line for such an eye-popping payout). That’s how much State Farm appeared willing to pay to protect the secret documents.

The Nida case is ongoing, but that was not State Farm’s biggest problem. Their problem was that it never stopped hailing in Oklahoma.

In early December, I wrote about a denied claim from a Tulsa police lieutenant named Billy Hursh, a kind and clean-cut man who, alongside his wife and son, exhibited the nostalgic charm of a Hummel figurine. With that, the trickle of cases turned into a deluge. A fellow journalist later told me that she noticed 10 new roof claim cases being filed every day in courts across the state.

A few days after my Hursh piece ran, Attorney General Gentner Drummond filed to assist in the cases. Drummond charged that State Farm had committed racketeering offenses. (It wasn’t the first time that State Farm had been threatened with RICO laws. In 2018, the company paid $250 million to wriggle out of a lawsuit that alleged it had purchased a seat on the Illinois Supreme Court.)

It was about then that the Oklahoma Supreme Court got involved, with both the secret documents and the AG’s intervention. State Farm was producing writs of prohibition like they were gobbling aspirin, and I wrote about another bad-faith case: The insurance company was fighting tooth and nail to deny the roof claim of none other than a retired chief justice of the Oklahoma Supreme Court.

I wrote stories about secret documents from the past. A State Farm whistleblower from the 1990s—a woman who has since gone missing—left behind a sheaf of documents that were leaked to her after she appeared on an episode of 60 Minutes. Other pleadings in Oklahoma sneaked in details of the “process” that Allstate had first tried out on residents of Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1997.

All the while, both plaintiffs’ attorneys and lawyers for State Farm refused interview requests about the rapidly accumulating cases in Oklahoma. (State Farm’s corporate media center has also consistently refused requests for interviews with State Farm executives.)

Then word came: A judge in Comanche County had ordered State Farm to produce 800,000 documents. State Farm did so, but designated all 800,000 documents confidential. The plaintiffs argued that this was in violation of Oklahoma law, and the judge agreed. He ordered the release of 31 documents out of the 44 requested by attorneys, totaling 159 pages. It was the first time any of the State Farm Documents had become public. I drove three hours to Comanche County to grab them before State Farm could file a stay.

One figure at the heart of the Great Oklahoma State Farm Roof Claim Saga is a woman named Nicole Manduca, a 27-year State Farm veteran who rose through the ranks from claim representative to senior leader and director of property and casualty operations, among other titles.

In previous stories, I had reported that Manduca had bragged about setting an arbitrary goal of a 50 percent reduction in payouts in the Wind/Hail Initiative, representing billions of dollars of denied claims. The new documents reveal that early in 2020 Manduca identified full roof replacements on wind and hail claims as the company’s “biggest bucket of opportunity” for reducing claim payouts.

In newly released e-mail and text exchanges, Manduca frequently referred to what she called “the hypothesis”: Before 2020, she said, State Farm was awarding full roof replacements on 85 percent of small hail-damage claims and 65 percent of wind claims. Citing data from the consulting giant Accenture, Manduca claimed that nationwide “averages” on hail and wind roof replacements were 8–10 percent and 5 percent, respectively.

Presumably, “the hypothesis” was that State Farm could save a load of money if full roof replacement rates were in line with the nationwide “average.”

To understand that bit of sophistry, you have to step into the past.

Insurance companies have always sought to finesse extra profits. The lunge toward greed, however, took a quantum leap forward in the 1990s, when Allstate called on corporate supervillain McKinsey and Company to help the insurance industry scrappily claw its way from highly profitable to too big to fail.

That’s where the story starts repeating. After receiving a McKinsey “fact-gathering” report totaling more than 12,000 pages, Allstate identified the best area in which to pursue “opportunity dollars”: roof damage in wind and hail claims. In the years to come, Allstate would secure Accenture data suggesting that nationwide roof replacement rates were significantly lower than what certain companies were then paying out.

There was a problem, however. The Accenture data that first Allstate, and then State Farm, claimed to rely on has proven impossible to verify. When asked to provide evidence of the data in court, State Farm’s lawyers were forced to say that they couldn’t.

In devising and championing the Wind/Hail Initiative in Dallas in 2020, Manduca and several other State Farm executives repeated what Allstate did in Albuquerque in 1997. Both got caught with their hand in the cookie jar and paid a price (Allstate has lost multiple court cases over the past two decades), but not enough of a price to change their behavior—at least so far.

The insurance giants also got help from the courts. In a landmark 2003 decision in Campbell v. State Farm, the Supreme Court shot down a $146 million punitive judgment against the company, effectively inoculating it against the kind of massive award that might actually compel a corporate bad actor to change its reprehensible ways.

Apart from the decision, the oral argument in Campbell v. State Farm is notable for a quote from Justice Antonin Scalia. Rather than the sort of flippant quip that has solidified Scalia’s legacy as a conservative icon, his comments in Campbell were a plaintive call, a winsome acknowledgement that there were few ways left to hold insurance companies accountable.

“No amount of money will suffice; maybe we have to send them to jail,” Scalia said. “Whatever it takes to stop them. I mean, what if nothing will stop them but sending them to jail?”

They don’t just come out and say it.

The internal State Farm documents read like the faux-sacred texts of a Ponzi scheme cult. Neutered acronyms abound. The documents speak of “quality” when they mean “arbitrarily reducing payouts.” An increased “error rate” means an employee is not being sufficiently ruthless in denying claims. The “Art of the Conversation,” a training module offered to claims handlers tasked with delivering news of claim denials to insureds, is the whitewashed process of teaching a human being to be cruel to another human being.

What becomes palpable in the documents is that the biggest problem the insurance companies had in implementing craven profit initiatives was the reluctance of managers and agents and claim handlers to get fully on board. Internal communications often read like the goofy rhetoric of a cult leader scheming the best way to turn desperate initiates into brainwashed acolytes.

Hence, Nicole Manduca, in the early months of the 2020 rollout in Dallas, wrote in newly released text exchanges to colleagues that “expanding/broadening management review on higher hail/wind severity threshold nets us the most gain.” In other words, get your managers in line, or it doesn’t work.

Manduca’s nervousness is apparent as she sweats data from the early months (“Concerned to see the larger % for Wind and Hail is flat”), as is her excitement when tools become available to track data on the Wind/Hail Initiative (“I’m drooling. :o3:o3:o3”).

By 2023, the jury was in: The Hail/Wind Initiative was wildly profitable, with $1.4 billion in reduced indemnity from 2020 to 2021. Before the initiative, Manduca reported internally, State Farm replaced 5.6 roofs for every roof they repaired. Since then, the number of total roofs replaced had fallen to 2.1. The Wind/Hail Initiative was reaping billions.

In August 2023, even as bad-faith roof cases had begun to pile up in Oklahoma, the newly released documents show that the Wind/Hail Initiative had become a subject of discussion at weekly meetings of a group known as the Fix Profit Task Force. In short, State Farm wasn’t concerned by the roof claims in Oklahoma or the tens of millions of dollars they would pay to make those cases go away. Instead, they doubled down, and now the very highest reaches of State Farm were getting involved. The morning meetings of the Fix Profit Task Force were called by State Farm CFO Jon Farney, who would soon be promoted to become just the sixth CEO in State Farm’s 104-year history.

Letters from three State Farm captive agents embedded in the documents released last week—each written as the Hail/Wind Initiative took hold, and each expressing an alienation from the company that was identical to the agent who said it operated like a secret society—tell the story of what has become of an iconic American brand.

An August 2021 letter from Dublin, Ohio–based State Farm agent Chad Harris described his experience of getting pulled into a claim dispute but being unable to communicate with anyone from State Farm’s claims department. Harris complained that claims were now being handled by outside contractors, and that no one at State Farm was empowered to resolve a conflict.

“This is terribly embarrassing for State Farm…and me, as the local agent,” Harris wrote. “This claim highlights all the current dysfunction within our SF claims operations and processes.”

Two months later, Louisville, Kentucky–based State Farm agent Tracy Haus wrote to leadership to say that although she “bleeds State Farm logos” she was now worried for State Farm’s reputation: reputable companies, she said, were now saying that State Farm was no different from Allstate.

“The old slogan of ‘we pay what we owe, not a penny less, not a penny more,’ is not the case right now,” Haus wrote. “We now pay really low and customers fight to get what we owe them in more and more cases…. We need a drastic change before it’s too late.”

Two weeks after Haus’s letter, Massillon, Ohio–based State Farm agent Robert Garner wrote to leadership to describe the impact of a denied roof claim on his business. He was losing multiple clients over a single claim, Garner said, and, like Harris, he was struggling to communicate with the claims department.

“This is just one example of many other clients that feel the same way,” Garner wrote. “This is the first time in my 15 years I have had any issue with claims.”

What the agents failed to perceive in 2021—that being sidelined in the claim process was all part of the Wind/Hail Initiative—must have become apparent in May of this year, when State Farm announced pay cuts of 35–40 percent for 19,000 captive agents across the country.

The Great Oklahoma Roof Claim Saga has reached a fever pitch.

Today, when I attend a State Farm hearing in Oklahoma, there are generally three or four reporters in the courtroom, and cameras waiting in the hallway representing most of the media outlets in the state. Plaintiffs’ attorneys have begun giving interviews. Morose State Farm lawyers continue to refuse comment.

Tuesday’s runoff election may signal whether Oklahomans are tired of feeble excuses for skyrocketing homeowners rates and the arbitrary denial of valid claims from wildly wealthy insurance companies.

Regardless of the outcome of the election, the litigation will continue. Trial dates that took months to secure are rapidly approaching, and in the same case that forced State Farm to hand over 800,000 documents, plaintiffs’ attorneys were granted a deposition of State Farm CEO Jon Farney. In a separate case, Nicole Manduca will be deposed as well—for the third time.

Two questions remain. First, will State Farm once again settle out of court, not for tens of millions of dollars for 125 cases this time, but for whatever it will take to quash 1,000 outstanding Oklahoma cases? And second, will plaintiffs’ attorneys and attorneys general across the country follow the lead of Oklahoma and further compound State Farm’s woes?

Enes Kanter was a mediocre NBA player who, in 2020, attracted more attention than he ever received on the court by decrying the Black Lives Matter movement and pushing to “get politics out of sports.” A year later, to celebrate becoming a US citizen, he legally changed his name to “Enes Kanter Freedom.”

But when it came to the performance art of being a right-wing talking head, Kanter had no game. Kanter’s off-court microphone skills, it seemed, were about as good as his on-court defense, and he was quickly cycled off of the Fox News gravy train. In 2024, he tried on a new persona of “former NBA player who supports the Israeli genocide on Gaza.” When the hype around that hot take waned, he became once again an ex-player without a team or any prospects of relevance.

But Kanter finally found a way to satisfy both his personal pathologies and attention-dopamine addiction—by claiming (with a smirk) that he is now a trans woman and demanding a roster spot in the WNBA.

This past Sunday, Kanter pushed it even further, making a spectacle of himself at a WNBA game between the Chicago Sky and Indiana Fever by wearing a shirt that read “WOMAN: Noun, adult human female.” The stunt prompted Sky vet Natasha Cloud to confront him from the court. When he rose from his seat and approached her with his arms outstretched, escalating the conflict, he was removed. As he was ushered out, he put his arms behind his back, as though he was being handcuffed. Later, he said, again with a proud smirk, he was removed from a WNBA game for “supporting women.”

After the game, Natasha Cloud posted on Threads: “To every trans kid/person, you are apart of MY community & tribe. You belong. You’re loved. You’re seen. You’re perfect as you are. & you will always be protected by me.”

Cloud has shown more courage and backbone than the WNBA executives that have let their league become an avatar for anti-trans bigots. Not coincidentally, Cloud has also been a consistent voice for the Palestinian people and for Black lives. She also can actually articulate why she holds those beliefs. In other words, she is the opposite of a talentless, attention-seeking hack.

The less said about Kanter and the whole crowd that says they are “protecting women” while deifying a sexual abuser and alleged pederast in the Oval Office the better. Their arguments are meant to sow division through distraction, all of it built on a foundation of deep-rooted misogyny.

As ESPN’s Mina Kimes posted: “Loser behavior from a guy who’s clinging like a shriveled old barnacle to a sport he doesn’t actually care about in a desperate bid for relevance. Do not cede one inch to him or anyone who acts this way.” But while these individuals deserve none of the attention they so desperately crave, Kimes is correct that we nevertheless cannot give them an inch. There is no “trans invasion” of the WNBA—that simply doesn’t exist. What does exist, however, is the ongoing, relentless attack on trans kids and trans people in all parts of life, promulgated through a coordinated, well-funded, and highly organized campaign, of which Kanter is merely a grateful shill. The only danger in the WNBA right now is of picking the unlucky seat in the stands next to some YouTube influencer comfortable with fascist violence and desperate to create a viral moment.

Fox News is now egging on every right-wing “influencer” like Kanter to turn their sights on a league in which they previously showed little notice. Murdoch’s state media isn’t interested in Iran, the economy, or Trump’s deeply weird relationship with his aide Natalie Harp—instead, according to Media Matters, since July 22, Fox has “dedicated at least 130 segments to discussing the possibility of trans athletes in the WNBA.”

Before all this became the outrage du jour, Fox was mostly attacking the WNBA on racist grounds, claiming white players—really, the only two they ever heard of, Indiana Fever players Caitlin Clark and her anti-trans, relentlessly mediocre teammate Sophie Cunningham—were getting fouled too hard by Black women. They egged on politicians and their fascist-minded followers, who—it must be reemphasized—have never before given a damn about women’s sports other than a desire to overturn Title IX. Now they’re suddenly on a mission to “protect” white players. But none of this is new: The WNBA has long been a right-wing target. That’s because it’s queer-friendly, its stars are mostly Black women, and its players have historically been some of the most outspoken public figures against the racist, sexist, and homophobic aims of these fascists. It’s important we don’t neglect that part of the story.

As hundreds of millions of dollars in broadcast revenue pours into the league’s coffers, its executives are fecklessly going along with marching orders to “offend” as few people as possible. But now they need to stand with their fans, who long have seen WNBA games as a queer friendly space.

In fact, last week in Brooklyn, hundreds of transgender activists and allies showed up at the Barclays Center during a New York Liberty game against the Indiana Fever to confront about 50 members of the late Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA, who were there to protest the inclusion of trans women in women’s sports. (Suffice it to say, TPUSA does not have a Brooklyn chapter.) The counter-rally was massive, inspiring, and a sign that popular opinion about this issue is not necessarily what the media would have you believe.

The right thinks they have their wedge issue. They think that by attacking the WNBA, and by attacking trans people, they get to pile onto two of their favorite targets to produce division and distraction in a country openly devolving into disastrous decay.

But given the masses of people at the Brooklyn counter-rally and the outpouring of support for Natasha Cloud, their bigotry is also provoking the opposite reaction. These figures on the right are being exposed as the losers, con artists, and social parasites that they are. It’s clear that they care nothing about women’s sports.

No, their goal goes way beyond sports. It’s about eradicating trans people—not just from public life, but life altogether. This is obvious. It’s all out in the open. And until commentators are willing to admit that the WNBA panic is nothing but a stalking horse for the fascist elimination of trans lives, we’re going to keep seeing more pathetic charlatans sprout up like an unwanted fungus.

The chiming of the debt clock at $40 trillion—just as Voyager 1 reached one light-day’s distance from Earth and for similar reasons—has provoked a flood of comment. Milestones are milestones: They measure, and they help pass the time. Otherwise, they have no intrinsic importance.

By force of preset agendas, conservatives and liberals react to debt headlines like Pavlov’s dogs. For one side, it’s about Social Security and Medicare. For the other, it’s about making the wealthy pay. There is surely good reason to control healthcare costs. And we do need progressive taxation, to restore the democratic middle-class society we once enjoyed. Neither has to do with the so-called problem of the federal debt.

Is the federal debt “sustainable”? The simplest answer is: “obviously.” United States debts are due in US dollars produced by the US itself. All debts of that type are sustainable: They can always be paid, exactly as promised, “debt limit” or no.

Fans of complexity have cooked up a criterion: a stable or declining ratio of government debt to gross domestic product. This metric compares growth of debt to growth of GDP. Here the key determinant is the interest rate on the existing debt. So long as that rate (averaged over all the maturities) is below the nominal (meaning real growth plus inflation) GDP growth rate, the debt/GDP ratio will eventually shrink. When Secretary Bessent says that we can “grow out of the debt,” this is the commonsense meaning of that shorthand.

Guess what? Today’s federal debt interest rates are well below today’s growth of GDP. We are already “growing” out of the so-called problem. You have to add in the current deficit, but over time it’s the interest rate and the growth rate that decide which way the ratio goes.

True, interest rates have gone up, and may rise further. But it takes time for that to work through the federal debt stock. And the macro effect of interest rates—the double-whammy of higher interest and lower GDP, both driving up the debt/GDP ratio—isn’t what it used to be.

Back when the federal debt was much smaller, higher interest rates mainly hit the private sector: business investment, housing, consumer credit. In 1981, Volcker could (and did) raise rates to 20 percent and take the economy down. Today, with a federal debt greater than GDP, higher interest payments flood debt holders with cash, which they tend to put into stocks and other assets. That is why the Fed under Powell couldn’t slow the economy after 2021. The distributive effect, more money to the rich, is bad. But these days the macro effects are at worst a wash.

What then is going on with “long” bonds? Again, it’s simple enough: Existing long bonds have a low coupon. So when short rates rise, their price falls and the yield goes up. This inflicts a capital loss on bond funds. It has nothing to do with risk, confidence, or the $40 trillion milestone. Bessent tried to buck up the long bond market by buying some back. It didn’t work: The interest rate is powerful and the purchases were small. The buybacks also replaced low-rate long bonds with high-rate short-term debt, increasing Treasury’s interest payout. Why, pray, would a public servant, supposedly not working for the bondholders, want to do that?

What about that bailout of Japan? Japan faces two very big problems: a steep oil bill (thanks to Mr. Trump’s Iran War) and a “carry trade” that takes advantage of the low interest rates Japan has maintained for decades. Traders borrow in yen, invest in (say) pesos, and pocket the spread. This means constant selling of yen, and that places unremitting pressure on the yen’s value.

To offset that, and to pay for oil, Japan might have to sell US bonds, causing more grief for the bond funds. So Bessent recently swapped euros for yen. When this stopgap expires (I predict, in November), Japan will have to raise its own interest rates (destroying much local business), or let the yen fall (bringing on inflation), or liquidate those US bonds, or impose capital controls (decapitating the carry trade). It should have imposed controls long ago.

Japan’s dilemma exposes contradictions within the dollar system. The Fed’s move toward higher rates and Treasury’s desire to keep the dollar down, relative to the yen and any other country in similar trouble, are in conflict. Japan’s domestic economic objectives, locked into low interest rates, conflict with stable exchange rates in open capital markets. But capital controls, should Japan finally go that route, do not spell the end for the dollar. China amassed trillions in US bonds while maintaining capital controls—before selling many of them off to build stockpiles of oil and other key resources.

Many US adversaries, and not a few Americans—including Vice President Vance, to his credit—have reservations about the dollar-reserve system. Some would like to get rid of it. But it’s not so easy; there is no other place in the world system to place all the existing reserves. China is the obvious successor state—a large, stable country with great industry and technical talent. But China isn’t run by bankers. The Chinese can see very well what being run by bankers has done to us.

The system may fall apart someday. Maybe the Iran War will bring it down. Maybe it won’t. For now, though, the dollar is like the dictionary: You can move around in it, from one asset to another, but you can’t easily jump to the outside. To put it all in two words: Hotel California.

On Sunday, The New York Times reported that “Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, met privately in recent weeks with Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and top outside adviser, and discussed potential areas of common ground.” On one level, the meeting was clearly good news for Jeffries. The midterm elections will be held just 71 days from now, and there is every possibility that the Democrats could take control of the House and make Jeffries the next House Speaker. The fact that Kushner, who holds no official position but functions as the president’s consigliere, met with Jeffries is a sign that the White House is seriously contemplating such a defeat.

Not surprisingly, congressional Republicans are unhappy. Current House Speaker Mike Johnson tried to pooh-pooh the meeting and minimize Kushner’s importance, telling Fox News, “I don’t know what that’s about. I know Jared has interest in lots of other things going on.” Johnson added that Kushner “hedges bets” and is “not really directly involved in the admin, at least in the day-to-day in the White House.”

It’s hard not to be delighted by Johnson’s discomfort. But the meeting also raised red flags for those who worried that Jeffries was helping whitewash one of Trump’s most corrupt cronies. Tommy Vietor, the former Obama adviser who cohosts the Pod Save America podcast, noted, “Jared Kushner has no actual government job he just uses his family connections to get money from gulf autocrats and fund corrupt deals. The only way [Jeffries] should work with him is with demands for documents and subpoenas.” Mehdi Hasan, the CEO of Zeteo, echoed Vietor, writing, “The only meeting Hakeem Jeffries should be having with Jared Kushner is to tell him he’ll be subpoenaed by the House for a corruption investigation on day one of Democratic control of the House. This is just pathetic stuff from the House Dem leader.” Erstwhile neocon turned anti-Trumper William Kristol posted, “Really? Or, as the kids say, AYFKM?” (The acronym stands for “Are you fucking kidding me?”)

Between them, the progressive Hasan, the Obama liberal Vietor, and the former neoconservative Kristol represent very different wings of the Democratic coalition. But they were all united in their alarm over the Kushner-Jeffries sit-down.

Still, the House Democratic leader found his defenders among the centrist establishment, with Neera Tanden, CEO of the Center for American Progress, predictably emerging as the congressional leader’s most forceful defender on social media.

Responding to a Jeffries critic, Tanden wrote, “Ask Mike Johnson how he feels about Trump White House admitting Dems are going to win the House before everyone loses it on this website.” Tanden also compared the Jeffries-Kushner private meeting with New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s public meeting with Donald Trump last year.

But this is a spurious parallel. As journalist Brian Beutler, who writes at the Off Message Substack, notes,

Mamdani’s goal is to reduce harm to NYC. Jeffries is about to lead a coequal branch of the federal government under hostile occupation. I had mixed feelings about the Mamdani meeting (much as I enjoyed the pictures). This is worse…. Mamdani has almost no power over Trump; Jeffries will have a great deal over Trump, but not if he’s working cooperatively with him (as opposed to adversarially) on the issues he and Kushner reportedly discussed.

Strangely, Tanden undercut her own support for Jeffries by re-tweeting a poor defense from an anonymous account on X.com called “Scary Lawyerguy” noting that the Times report was cowritten by Maggie Haberman, famed for her extensive access to Trumpworld. This post speculated, “Trump’s son-in-law leaked to Maggie that he met privately with Jeffries as a means of stoking intra-party discord among Democrats.” Although meant to exonerate Jeffries, this theory makes him look bad, as someone who was successfully played by Kushner.

Leaving aside the murky matter of whether Kushner leaked the news of the meeting, the president’s son-in-law clearly outfoxed Jeffries. If he becomes speaker of the House, Jeffries will have to tackle the issue of Trump’s corruption. As my Nation colleague Chris Lehmann has cogently argued, House Democrats have been maddeningly reluctant to make the president’s crookedness a top political priority, preferring vague rhetoric about “kitchen sink” issues.

This myopia on corruption is especially frustrating because it has fueled Trump’s sense of invulnerability. The penny-ante pelf of his first term has been replaced by world-historical grifting, with the president and his family enriching themselves with billions of dollars in business deals.

No one in Trump’s inner circle embodies this naked venality more than Jared Kushner, who acts as an ambassador without portfolio, negotiating with countries in the Middle East, while also being enriched by deals with autocrats in the region.

In 2021, Kushner founded the investment firm Affinity Partners, which has received $2 billion in funding from the Saudi state as well as another $1.5 from Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Writing in The Atlantic, Andrea Bernstein noted that Kushner has been given a unique post that evades transparency:

While carrying out public business for his father-in-law, he has continued to pursue his private interests and declined to disclose any information about them. There’s a carve-out designation in ethics laws known as the “special government employee,” which allows businesspeople to perform work for the government. Elon Musk was a special government employee, and so was Corey Lewandowski. But Kushner has not been designated one. He is both outside and inside government—a “volunteer,” the White House calls him. And he is vaulting over strictures that were put in place to defend the mechanisms of government from becoming tools of foreign or private interests….

[Kushner] has a direct line to the president. But his political dealings are ineluctably intertwined with his businesses. Kushner is related by marriage to the president, one who smiles on those who do business with his family, and the 2021 Saudi investment in Affinity Partners was made despite the Saudi fund’s own finding that the company’s operations were “unsatisfactory in all aspects.” Kushner has defended the deal, saying that the Saudi fund “is one of the most prestigious investors in the world.”

If the Democrats win the House, Kushner’s many conflicts of interest should be a major focus of investigation. Unfortunately, Jeffries’s meeting with Kushner indicates that this is unlikely to happen, since Jeffries seems to think the president’s son-in-law is someone worth negotiating with.

Worryingly, Jeffries seems to have been motivated by positive memories of working with Kushner during Trump’s first term. As the Times reports, “The private get-together was described by one of the people as a catch-up for Mr. Kushner and Mr. Jeffries. The two men have stayed in touch since they worked together on a criminal justice bill midway through Mr. Trump’s first term.”

There’s an argument to be made—although one that requires an extraordinary generosity of spirit—that Kushner was a moderating influence on Trump’s first term. In truth, this claim rests more on PR spin than actual policy outcomes. But in Trump’s current term, Kushner is something different: an avatar of the president’s epic lawlessness. The fact that Jeffries can’t see that is disqualifying.

The Democrats need a fighter as their House leader. Instead, they have a collaborator, one who is loyal to dreams of comity even at the expense of tolerating corruption.

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy launched his career in public life as a reality-TV star, and, in the TV-addled second Trump administration, he’s returning to his roots with last week’s release of his family-vacation reality show, The Great American Road Trip. The series had been initially pegged for a June release on YouTube, but the producers sent it back for edits, apparently to ensure that it wouldn’t go too far afoul of federal ethics rules.

The editors needn’t have bothered. The final product, which chronicles the Duffy family’s travels across the country, is a work of free-floating MAGA agitprop without any real dramatic interest, and remains, like most such undertakings in the second Trump administration, a running breach of basic government ethics.

The vanity project desperately aims to depict the transportation secretary and his wife, Rachel Campos-Duffy, as an ordinary American couple even though they’ve both followed the same decidedly elite celebrity career trajectory, leading from reality-TV stints to the conservative mediasphere. Sean had parlayed that résumé into a seat in the House of Representatives and his cabinet appointment, while Rachel became a Fox News anchor.

If you’re thinking this doesn’t make for relatable TV viewing, you’re right. The Great American Road Trip gamely seeks to gin up some right-wing intergenerational frisson by having the Duffys’ adult daughter Evita tag along as part of the show’s contingent of eight Duffy offspring. She’s a wannabe conservative influencer; she’s accompanied by her husband, Michael Alfonso, the former producer for Dan Bongino’s podcast and current Republican nominee for Congress in Duffy’s former seat in Wisconsin’s seventh district. The high jinks and scrapes that this quartet of media-savvy ideologues encounter come across less like the fare on the Real Housewives franchise or The Jersey Shore than a CPAC breakout panel on wheels.

The Great American Road Trip is also a puzzling effort to chronicle the daily life of a powerful cabinet secretary. True to the time-honored goofy-dad conventions of television programming, Duffy comes off as a happy- go-lucky husband and father, but the show depicts his cabinet position as consisting of little more than the offscreen job duties of a sitcom paterfamilias. As the Duffys tool through the American interior, Sean stages a series of meet-and-greets at various factories and cultural events. If this is his core approach to overseeing the nation’s transportation infrastructure, it’s little wonder that the airline industry has faced a historic volume of delays and flight cancellations under his lax supervision.

But the show’s quasi-documentary ambitions are a slapdash afterthought; like most undertakings of this White House, The Great American Road Trip is an opportunity for well-heeled patrons to buy their way into the Trump administration’s good graces. Funded by a number of large corporations regulated by the Department of Transportation (DOT), the series includes entire segments in which Duffy essentially auditions as a spokesperson for the very firms lobbying his agency.

Such set pieces speak volumes about the conduct of regulatory policy in the second Trump White House. The DOT insists that the show wasn’t financed with taxpayer dollars—but on closer examination, that proves to be an empty disclaimer. By structuring so many of the stops along the trip around Duffy’s photo-ops, the show allows Duffy essentially to double dip–using DOT resources on the pretext that he’s performing his job duties before the TV cameras. As a DOT spokesperson described it to me, “On these brief stops, the Secretary also often conducted additional visits like touring air traffic control towers and assessing port infrastructure. Like with any other official engagements, the Department covered the flight.”

And like so many Trump-branded celebrations of the nation’s semiquincentennial, The Great American Road Trip is steeped in dark money. The show’s expenses—including the travel costs incurred by the other members of the Duffy clan—were mostly covered by a 501(c)(4) organization also called the Great American Road Trip, set up by Tori Barnes, a former lobbyist for the American Travel Association. The 501(c)(4) was sponsored by a number of large corporations regulated by Duffy’s DOT including Boeing, Toyota, Shell, the Electronic Payments Coalition, CRH, Google, Royal Caribbean, Chase, Lyft, the American Bus Association, United Airlines, and more. In return for their sponsorship, these companies were promised prominent branding in the show, and VIP access to the secretary. In the first few episodes, you mostly see these sponsors called out in the end credits—but as the series progresses, they’re accorded much more prominent airtime.

Even so, it’s clear that these exercises in product placement are a dim shadow of what was originally envisioned for the show. The promotional trailer, released in May, teased a stop by the Duffy family at the Royal Caribbean cruise line’s Icon of the Seas, where they tried out the ship’s waterslides and other amenities. Yet none of the actual episodes include even a mention of this visit or the cruise company. Another sponsor, Toyota, also gets some premium airtime in the trailer via close-ups displaying the company’s emblem on the car the Duffys drive, but these visual callouts were evidently scrubbed from the final version of the series. (Neither Toyota nor Royal Caribbean responded to requests for comment on their disappearance from the show.).

The series kicks off exactly as you’d expect, with the Duffy clan stopping by the White House to receive Donald Trump’s blessing before departing for Philadelphia. After stopping for cheesesteaks, the family tours historic sites alongside Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum—you know, just like any American family does. The children hear about the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall from park rangers before moving on to the National Constitution Center, where Secretary Duffy goes out of his way to give a shout-out to billionaire hedge fund manager Ken Griffin, an implaccable foe of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani who’s currently lavishing $40 million on Republican midterm campaigns.

In the ensuing episodes, the largely perfunctory road-trip footage gives way to conservative culture-war messaging. The second episode opens with a conversation about where Paloma, Duffy’s 17-year-old daughter, will attend college. Sean and Rachel are extremely leery about the prospect that she could end up at Havard. As Sean soberly explains to Paloma before the camera, Harvard has “professionalized figuring out how they can take good young girls like you and, I think, corrupt their minds.” The goofy dad has reverted to high-paranoid Fox News form, calling to mind the CIA control freak played by Robert DeNiro in Meet the Parents.

The rest of the episode takes place in Boston, but features none of the historic destinations that a family marking the country’s anniversary would take in there. In a fitting gloss on the Trumpian vision of White House power as a glorified branding endeavor, the Duffys visit the house Sean lived in during his stint on MTV’s Real World Boston. Then it’s on to the Harvard Catholic Center to have a spiritual authority weigh in on Sean’s fears that Paloma would be corrupted by attending the dangerously liberal institution. The Boston episode wraps with Sean taking his kids to watch a football game between the US Maritime Academy and the US Coast Guard Academy at Fenway Park. (Scenes with then–Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, who attended the game alongside the Duffys, seem to have been left on the cutting-room floor.)

As the show progresses, sponsors’ screentime picks up. In the family’s visit to Charleston, they visit Boeing’s factory, where Duffy praises the company’s high-tech aviation innovations—making no note, as a more conscientious transportation secretary might, of Boeing’s irresponsible recent safety record, let alone Duffy’s actions to relax oversight of the company.

Not all the show’s celebrations of its corporate sponsors are quite this crass. In an anything-but-spontaneous encounter, onetime reality star Naomi Olindo happens on the Duffys at a restaurant in Charleston, South Carolina. As she makes small talk with them, she exults in the benefits of credit card reward points—a mention surely savored by two of the series’s sponsors, Chase Travel and the Electronic Payments Coalition. (Like Royal Caribbean and Toyota, the two companies did not respond to requests for comment.)

In the fifth episode, during the family’s stop in Fort Worth, Texas, Sean Duffy conducts a solo tour of a local asphalt plant owned by CRH, a multinational building materials corporation that was a major sponsor of the show. CRH is heavily dependent on DOT grants for its revenue and stands to benefit from Duffy’s policies. In the final episode, the Duffys visit Rachel Campos-Duffy’s parents in Arizona and the chapel on Arizona State University’s campus where the elder Duffys got married; from there, the clan decamps for the Grand Canyon. But first Sean takes his children with him to meet up with Waymo’s chief marketing officer, who treats them all to a ride in the company’s autonomous vehicles, providing the perfect opportunity for the secretary to extol the accomplishments of yet another sponsor who operates under Duffy’s regulatory authority.

While the central conceit of The Great American Road Trip is to make the Duffys come across as an ordinary family learning cool things about the country’s past, they’re clearly the very thing that they routinely demonize and dread: out-of-touch cultural elitists. Road trips, once the cheap option for vacationing families, are increasingly expensive, with Trump’s disastrous war with Iran driving up fuel costs and the price of daily essentials. (Not surprisingly, the Duffys’ version of the road trip is pointedly insulated from such pressures; thanks no doubt to the generous subsidies they’ve raked in from the government and 501(c)(4)s, they seem to book flights to most of their appointed stops, and rent a car upon their arrival.) Even the show’s treatment of traditional rites of passage in family life, such as Paloma’s search for the right college, is a study in acute privilege. For most middle-class families, the central question about a college education is how to pay for it—not the specter of corruption at the hands of Harvard faculty bearing an over=woke agenda. Indeed, the only glancing mention of any sort of real-world financial concern in the series is the choreographed callout to the wondrous boon of credit card reward points—a mention that typically advanced the self-interest of the show’s sponsors.

In all this clumsy elite cosplaying of the trials of normal family life, The Great American Road Trip most closely resembles 2010’s Sarah Palin’s Alaska. That ludicrous offering likewise presumed to show Palin and her family as ordinary folk savoring the libertarian pleasures of life on the Alaskan frontier; it doubled as an effort to rehabilitate Palin’s political career in the wake of her poor performance on the campaign trail as John McCain’s 2008 running mate. It speaks volume about the everyday corruption of the second Trump term that Palin’s show now seems almost quaint and charming in comparison to the Duffy clan’s unseemly rush to cash in on the parents’ political renown with a host of corporate sponsorships and photo-ops for the companies and lobbyists that Sean Duffy is currently charged with regulating. It’s all a grim reminder that reality-TV—a format that MTV jokingly called The Real World when the network launched the careers of the elder Duffys—has now become our reality, and devoured all the basic operations of our government.

Yes!

In March, I stood on a porch in northern Idaho and spoke with Nancy, a labor nurse who has delivered hundreds of babies over the years. She signed the petition I was carrying, for the Reproductive Freedom & Privacy Act, because she knows exactly how many things can and do go wrong during a pregnancy. So did Jim in Canyon County, who told me that he was a lifelong conservative who believed Idaho’s abortion ban had gone too far. So did Corey, a military veteran who declared that the politicians needed to mind their own damn business—and whose wife had to be flown to Utah to receive essential care.

By the time the signature drive ended, volunteers with our coalition, Idahoans United for Women & Families, had gathered over 110,000 signatures in every corner of the state, from Boise and Coeur d’Alene to towns most people outside Idaho have never heard of.

I start with our petition because the question posed in this debate can make the topic sound like an abstract line-drawing exercise. It isn’t. In Idaho, we’re not choosing between an ideal policy and a compromised one. We’re choosing between the total ban we have right now, which contains “exceptions” so deliberately narrow as to be unusable, and a standard that protected access to essential care for nearly 50 years.

That distinction matters, and I think it’s gotten lost as people around the country debate the merits of our petition. Our initiative restores the framework that Idaho and much of the country lived under before Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization struck down the federal constitutional right to abortion: legal access to abortion before viability (the point in a pregnancy when the fetus may be capable of surviving outside the uterus, typically between 22 and 24 weeks), and after viability when it’s necessary to protect the patient’s life or health or in cases of a fatal fetal diagnosis. (Notably, Idaho is one of only five states with no health exception.)

This is not a new restriction that we invented to win over skeptical voters. It’s the same line set by the Supreme Court that many of us have lived with for our entire lives. We are not asking Idaho to accept a limit; we are asking it to take back a line that a majority of Idahoans still support.

I understand that some advocates want ballot language with no gestational reference point at all, full stop, and they are critical of Idaho’s policy because it includes post-viability limits. But I must strongly disagree.

At the risk of becoming even more of a pariah in national abortion-rights circles, I’d ask these advocates to consider the nuances of voters’ complex personal beliefs around abortion. A majority of Americans, and Idahoans, understandably balk at the notion of no restrictions because of the bad-faith work of anti-abortion activists, who will say and do anything to misrepresent what post-viability access so often actually means: a wanted pregnancy that turned fatal for the fetus or catastrophic for the pregnant woman in the final months.

Nothing in our initiative—or in any serious reproductive-rights initiative on any ballot—permits what anti-abortion activists claim it does. The idea of unrestricted abortion “up to the moment of birth” is not a real policy anywhere in the United States. It is a bad-faith phrase created to be repeated, not examined, and I’d rather focus on what the policy does than on rebutting a ghoulish caricature of it.

Since Dobbs, we’ve ended up with a patchwork of healthcare access, a jumble of unworkable bans, and women from states like Idaho (where we’ve lost 43 percent of our obstetricians since the 2022 ban) enduring hardship and heartache as it becomes increasingly clear that no one is coming to save us.

This is the system we’re organizing within, and I’d argue that’s exactly why the viability line is the right choice for a citizens’ initiative in a state like Idaho—not as a ceiling on our ambitions, but as the reflection of a broad, reasonable coalition united by urgent need.

Our campaign includes physicians and nurses, Catholics and Mormons, college students and retirees, ranchers and suburbanites, young parents and great-grandparents, Republicans and Democrats and independents who agree on very little else. What holds this coalition together isn’t a shared position on the best, most perfect reproductive-healthcare policy. Instead, it’s a shared belief that politicians are always the wrong people to be making these decisions.

That belief is not a lesser version of reproductive freedom. It’s the version that is building consensus among voters, and it’s the standard in 21 states, from red to blue to purple ones. I don’t know what the future of the national movement to restore reproductive rights to every American looks like, and that’s not my job; my responsibility is to the women, doctors, and families suffering needlessly in Idaho. Our future rests in campaigns like this one—rooted in local trust, driven by life-or-death stakes, and honest about what we’re asking for and why.

Melanie Folwell

No!

Ballot initiatives meant to protect reproductive rights should not include restrictions on abortion in the third trimester or at potential fetal “viability.” Either people have the right to make decisions about their lives and bodies without government interference, or they don’t. Whether we call this form of restriction a “limit” or a “ban,” it authorizes government interference in people’s medical decisions. The consequences are delayed or denied medical care, criminalization, and diminished rights for pregnant people.

For all these reasons and more, leading medical organizations and public-health experts reject legal restrictions on abortion, including in the third trimester. Medical professionals know that denying someone timely abortion care at any point in their pregnancy jeopardizes their health and safety, and the exceptions written into any law are insufficient.

The reality is that abortions later in pregnancy reflect diverse and often overlapping circumstances: serious fetal diagnoses, threats to the pregnant person’s health, a later recognition of pregnancy, abusive relationships that make it difficult or unsafe to end a pregnancy early on, interactions with crisis-pregnancy centers, and financial or logistical barriers that delay access to timely care.

Critically, laws that limit rights also adopt the premise of abortion bans: that at some point in a pregnancy, the government should overrule the pregnant person’s decisions about their own body. That premise fundamentally reshapes the relationship between pregnant people and the state.

If the government can claim authority over a pregnancy at some point, that becomes the point when the pregnant person’s rights are diminished. Behaviors during pregnancy become paths to punishment: The same legal foundation is used to justify surveillance, investigate miscarriages, and prosecute pregnancy outcomes.

That is why debates over third-trimester abortion cannot be separated from debates over the criminalization of pregnancy. At a time when such criminalization is accelerating, efforts to preserve abortion limits leave intact the legal foundation that harms pregnant people. Protections with gestational limits simply fail to meet the current moment.

For decades, the abortion-rights movement has accepted compromises intended to make abortion more politically palatable to moderates. We celebrated Roe v. Wade even though it explicitly allowed states to enact restrictions that denied care and allowed criminalization. We perpetuated an anti-abortion stigma when we reassured the public that later abortions were tragic but rare. We emphasized exceptions instead of bodily autonomy.

Those compromises only served to normalize the idea that the government should have the authority to override a pregnant person’s decisions. Activists must stop conceding that premise.

Abortion bans are never acceptable. But we also don’t have to settle for them. Ballot initiatives both with and without limits have succeeded since Roe was overturned. This suggests that voters who support abortion rights will support meaningful protections when given the chance.

Defenders of limits often argue that they are “meeting people where they are,” shifting blame onto the public, as if people are clamoring for limited protections. Instead, public-opinion research shows that most people reject government interference and support abortion access. (And new research suggests that the number of people who support abortion in all circumstances is growing.) Their biggest fear is that excluding a viability limit will doom a ballot initiative, jeopardizing access to abortion earlier in pregnancy. But that is a false choice. None of this diminishes the need for strong legal protections for early-abortion care. It does, however, challenge the assumption that the only way to protect abortion access is to abandon later-abortion patients.

I understand the appeal of political compromise, because I once believed in it myself. But then I needed abortion care in the third trimester and discovered that my then–home state of New York effectively banned abortion after 24 weeks. Already in the throes of a crisis, my husband and I had to pay thousands of dollars out of pocket, travel across the country, and navigate one of the most difficult experiences of our lives far from home. Ultimately, we were lucky. But we learned the hard way that there are always people left behind on the other side of a political compromise.

Ballot initiatives present an extraordinary opportunity to define the future of reproductive rights. We should not squander it on entrenching the same legal framework that has long justified abortion bans and the criminalization of pregnancy.

This moment demands solidarity across state lines and a clear commitment to one fundamental truth: Pregnancy must never erase a person’s rights, and the decision whether, when, and how to continue a pregnancy belongs to the person living it—not to the government.

Erika A. Christensen

If the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence has demonstrated anything, it would be that the United States remains profoundly divided over how to narrate its origin story. While some triumphantly celebrate it, others point to the country’s long history of exclusions and violence. Then there is a third perspective: Even as the US has failed to keep its promises, they can still be fulfilled over time. Which of these views is correct? Few scholars are better suited to answer this question than Ned Blackhawk, whose celebrated book The Rediscovery of America has redefined American history by portraying Native peoples not as marginal victims of conquest but as active participants in the continent’s political history. The Nation interviewed Blackhawk to discuss his views of the US founding, his thinking about American constitutional law as it concerns tribal sovereignty, and the reasons why he believes the study of American history needs a new theoretical framework.

—Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins: This year marks the United States’ 250th anniversary, yet there is a deep division over how this history should be narrated. Some put forward a triumphalist view that celebrates 1776 as a kind of breakthrough historical moment for the institutionalization of democracy and liberty. Others stress the country’s long track record of historical wrongs and political injustices while nevertheless holding on to the American story as an unfulfilled experiment toward progress. There is also a third perspective, somewhat distinct from this latter one, that sees American democracy as inherently exclusive, racist, sexist, and militarist, and therefore arrives at a judgment of it that is resoundingly negative. As a historian of Native American history in the United States, how do you see things, especially given that we are in a year memorializing its 250 years?

Ned Blackhawk: Obviously, we as a nation arrive at the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in a state of deep national reflection and, some might argue, something closer to crisis—about how to characterize the American experiment. Anniversaries of this magnitude are not merely commemorative. They force a country to reflect upon which story of itself it intends to subscribe. Origin stories are integral to these moments of commemoration and redefinition. The account we give of our beginning shapes who we believe belongs, whose claims we are prepared to honor, and what we imagine ourselves capable of becoming.

I honestly never thought that I would be positioned to participate in this year’s commemorative conversations. I wrote a chapter subtitled “The Indigenous Origins of the American Revolution” in my book The Rediscovery of America before Covid, and only afterward did I realize that 2026 was on the horizon. I enjoyed participating in the PBS series The American Revolution, which I think offers us an origin story equal to the seriousness of the historical moment.

In a few pieces on the subject, I have tried to suggest that we as a national community—including our nation’s historians—have never fully grasped the historical origins of the anti-Indigenous ideologies found in the Declaration nor adequately gauged their legacies. The terms “savages” and “frontier” both appear in the last concluding grievance of July 4, 1776, and their histories offer far from celebratory assessments of the revolution.

Taking these terms seriously requires us to move away from the educated elites of Boston and the Atlantic coast and to see the interior world of Native America as a central and, indeed, defining component of the Revolutionary Era. These terms have histories that I explore and emerged only after the expulsion of the French empire in North America. We must be able to see the evolution of American democracy alongside these patterns of racialization, vilification, and dispossession that were also at the heart of the revolution.

DSJ: On this topic there seems to be a tension in The Rediscovery of America concerning your thinking about US constitutional law. You, for instance, explain how the Constitution’s relationship with Native peoples has mainly been one of dispossession and marginalization. However, you also find solace in US constitutional law. Can you explain this?

NB: It is hard to summarize the complex relationships between Native nations and the federal government—both in 1787 and now. There is such a diversity of peoples, polities, interests, and competing visions of the good involved. In a chapter in my book titled “Colonialism’s Constitution,” I do take a critical view of the restructuring of federal authority after 1787. However, it also suggests that this new national formation held inherent powers that we often do not fully recognize. Given the contested struggles that occurred before 1787 and were occurring across eastern America, the founders understood the elemental need to have a national government control, regulate, and determine Indian affairs.

That’s what the Constitution did and still does. States ceded these powers to the federal government, thereby strengthening its administrative capacities and ultimately limiting state jurisdictions over Indian lands, peoples, and governments. While unclear at the time, this relationship evolved and came to recognize the inherent sovereignty of Native nations within the United States. For far too long we have treated the founders’ revolution and the nation’s revolution as one and the same—as if the meaning of the country that the United States would ultimately become was exclusive to the men who first took up the idea. I try in my work to highlight the ability and agency of Native peoples to shape the evolving systems of power and governance around them and, importantly, to reveal the historical inaccuracies of dominant paradigms still too often used to explain US state formation.

DSJ: Are you troubled by the fact that Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch might be considered the champion or enactor of this politics at the national level?

NB: There may be a bit too much court history here to fully answer this question, which I might reframe as to suggest that all of our politics are all involved in the court and its justices. I do believe that American Indian sovereignty and its everyday, ongoing, inherent recognition by institutions of the US government, such as the Supreme Court, are elemental attributes of American democracy. They should be understood, recognized, and when needed celebrated. They express what the United States has been as well as can better become, and while there are deep and ongoing challenges confronting Native American communities, there are also important histories of resistance, activism, and achievement that inform our current moment.

I have had the privilege of serving as a consultant on several recent media productions, as well as helping to organize research in support of various tribal sovereignty initiatives. In such capacities, we invited Gorsuch to keynote one of our conferences, and while he was unable, he sent along a personal note that was touching. It would be nice to see more justices and judges become known for their support of tribal sovereignty.

DSJ: Which tribes/Native American nations do you think have ended up being the most effective politically?

NB: Much of my scholarship concerns the history of Native peoples confronting the consequences of European conquest and colonization. While I have more recently taught, studied, and now researched contemporary Native American history, I am not always informed on many of the fast-moving currents of modern Native governance.

For 10 years I was on the faculty at UW–Madison, and it amazed me to see several tribes in the state regularly take on and overcome state and local challenges to their sovereignty. The Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin, the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin, the Menominee Nation of Wisconsin, and several of the Ojibwe tribes in the state have each confronted powerful challenges to their sovereign authority. Many have established powerful governments, language programs, economies, fisheries, farms, and other forms of resilient autonomy that are often unknown nationally. I had the fortune to have many Native students in my classes, one of whom, Dr. Doug Kiel (Oneida), wrote a remarkable dissertation, “The Oneida Resurgence,” about his community’s history that was just recently published as a book.

Even a quick survey of the text might astonish some readers. Deeply dispossessed of their homelands by US allotment policies well into the New Deal era, the Oneida developed sets of strategies that inverted US assimilation efforts in many ways, turning, for example, federal urbanization policies for Native youth into processes of migration that had the effect of often bringing tribal members back into reservation governance with new skill sets, economic familiarities, and organizational patterns. By the 1980s and before the rise of Indian gaming, the Oneida had essentially laid the strong foundations of a modern Native nation, one that has become successful in regaining alienated lands and establishing tribally controlled schools, as well as building robust economies, engendered them backlash from nearby non-Native municipalities. This element of tribal success—what Kiel terms “settler backlash”—needs to accompany assessments of the modern American Indian sovereignty movement more broadly.

DSJ: You state the following in The Rediscovery of America: “Scholars have recently come to view African American slavery as central to the making of America, but few have seen Native Americans’ similar light.” What is your explanation for this and, given your work and other more recent scholarship devoted to Native American history, do you think this is starting to change?

NB: If we return to the anniversary upon us, we can see that both before the American Revolution and long after Native nations and enslaved and free Black communities participated in the broad formation of the meanings of American democracy. Many, for example, wrote and signed petitions, and those petitions survive as an extraordinary record of political visions and philosophies from below. They show people at the margins reasoning about liberty, demanding inclusion, and laying claim to the same ideals being proclaimed in more elite circles. The PBS American Revolution series tries to capture some of this and shows how the revolution’s principles were not handed down intact from a chosen few but were contested, expanded, and made real by people the founders never meant to include.

I wish more historians had familiarity with these subjects and could share them in more detailed and analytic form. As I write, a racial “binary” has too often informed the telling of national history. Many of the most utilized paradigms of US history often do not capture such heterogenous and contested processes, especially for Native peoples. In their current formulation, paradigms like “Freedom,” “Liberty,” and “Equality” often lack adequate conceptual space or value for communities who have long questioned US individualism and private property regimes, peoples who have wanted autonomy and power, not rights and incorporation. As we are seeing in the dramatic rise in US expansionary ideologies, there have been many constitutional harms in US history and many forms of violent injustices. No single or original “sin” characterizes US history, as many have suggested. With that said we also must not retreat from telling a history of the United States that reflects America not as a finished idea handed down by statesmen but as an experiment—and an experiment that has belonged to more people than those who are usually credited. Native nations exercised sovereignty and shaped the war’s course, as well as the literal shape of the nation through treaties, diplomacy, and arms. Enslaved and freed Blacks similarly seized the language of liberty and forced the country to confront the distance between its words and its conduct. Ordinary people, soldiers and civilians alike, made the abstraction of independence into something lived and survived. We must be able to grant all of them their place in the story without flattering anyone, and without the easy condescension of hindsight.

DSJ: Much has been made of the so-called crisis of the history profession–declining tenure track jobs, the nonrenewal of tenure lines, the shrinking admission of PhD students, as well as fewer history majors. Is the way American history is taught part of the problem in your opinion? I mention this because you are calling for a “new theory of American history” that “better explain[s] the course of American history.”

NB: As a Native historian, I know well how fraught the history of the American nation remains and how popular accounts often resolve these tensions by erasing more complicated narratives and sets of actors. At its foundation, a more informed theory of US history must refuse to chart the familiar and work to capture the inescapable and dizzying diversity that has always characterized North America, before as well as after 1492.

Tackling the most difficult causes and consequences of the revolution offers a space to begin to revise these familiar analyses. The relationship between the British colonists and Native nations—and its consequences for the causes and course of the revolution—deserves paramount attention. Academic historians have now recognized the centrality of expansion and Native dispossession to the revolution—rage over the Proclamation Line of 1763 stimulated rebellion against the king. Many efforts are underway to bring this fuller history out of the academy and before a broader public, doing so often for the first time and with vivid and moving detail.

These are some of the lessons that the present moment requires. A democracy in doubt about itself is often tempted to retreat into a smaller, more exclusive story of its founding—to decide that the country belonged only to those who revolted against the crown. We must make an opposite and far more demanding case: The nation has always been larger than those who named it, and its ideals—like American Indian sovereignty—were contested and ultimately achieved by those at the margins as much as the center. I hope that is the origin story that can help to build a new theory of US history. Hopefully new understandings can flow from 2026 to better inform the next generation of students, scholars, and citizens.

The summer before I began studying as an undergrad at the University of Oxford, I braced myself for racism. I spent several hours each day preparing by scrolling through blogs, newspaper articles, and social-media posts. Across these platforms, Black students documented racist encounters with white students, and occasionally, staff. Stories about campus guards blocking Black students from entering campus, tersely questioning their credentials; one where a group of white men joked about Black women’s genitalia and sexual viability at fancy dinners; instances of being mistaken for other Black students with whom they shared no facial characteristics; inappropriate touching of hair and faces; uncomfortable staring at clubs or on the street. Once I landed at St Hilda’s college, these experiences recurred with exhausting banality. They felt both routine and normalized, despite the obvious distress they caused. At some point, it was more practical to stop mentioning them.

I would soon learn that these instances were not relegated to social life but extended into academia itself. For one, there was the dearth of Black academics in the humanities, and the appalling figure of under 1 percent teaching at the university: a proportion in line with the national picture, where Black academics still make up only around 1 percent of all professors in the United Kingdom, according to the Society for Research into Higher Education. A Black visiting professor from an American university made a joke during a lecture that by teaching at the university, she had raised their statistics on Black professors from less than 1 percent to 1 percent. At the end of my time there, I was told in no uncertain terms by an American professor that if I wanted to study anything related to Black people, I was better off leaving the institution as soon as possible and heading to the United States. He emphatically pointed out that there was really no place for that kind of research or thinking to flourish there. It was a shame, but he was also right. Experiences like these showed me that our intellect and contributions were not respected, funded, or even desired.

I noticed however, in the recounting of this distress to friends and family, a peculiar tension: a gnawing sense of “who are you to be speaking about this?” or “is your experience really that bad compared to what people are experiencing outside these institutions?” One white classmate once actually asked me, “Do you really feel like you’re being oppressed?” in a sarcastic tone that implied I was anything but. To be silent about these experiences was to participate in a process of subjugation, in the predations on one’s mental health and well-being, but to speak up about them was to be ridiculed for not simply ignoring disrespectful comments and soldiering on, grateful to be “accepted” in the first place.

As a former student at both Oxford and Cambridge, I expected two things: that this kind of racism would be perpetrated in daily encounters, but also that it would be minimized as belonging to a lower order of microaggression—one that paled in comparison to the larger structural racism that prevented Black people from accessing places like Oxford and Cambridge in the first place—rather than being recognized as its counterpart. Part of the reason for this stems from a wider societal tendency to undermine or relegate the internal and external sufferings of Black people in a racist society, a phenomenon that is well documented in the psychology of Black mental health patients. Because Black patients are perceived as “emotionally tougher” than their white counterparts, they are frequently undertreated, misdiagnosed, or deemed not to require intensive mental health interventions even when these might be necessary. This is the “Black superwoman/superman” phenomenon: an expectation that Black people can triumph, persevere, and surmount obstacles easily, and that we possess an ingrained and limitless strength; a belief that also leads to Black people like Jason Arday to be failed persistently by institutions of all kinds.

The poisonous exceptionalism that followed Black students and staff at Cambridge was accompanied by the fact that Black students were tolerated as interlopers—an alien, if benign, species let loose in their cherished institution for people to gawk at, speculate about, and undermine. This was encoded not only in the social relationships at the university but also intensified by the wider political climate in the UK.

As an international student during the era of the mid-2010s when the British media and politicians compared immigrants to cockroaches, called them rapists, murderers, and infiltrators, I know that racial animus and hatred was actively stoked in the process. One of the first acts required of international students from non-white, non-Western countries was to report themselves to the police upon arrival, criminality already presumed, expected even. Another element of this racist profiling was “the prevent strategy,” which unfairly targeted Muslim students at universities and alienated them out of fear of potential radicalization. Experiences like the ones outlined above were not aberrations but formed as part and parcel with the dual and mutually reinforcing modes of fetishization and criminalization that the university held Black people in thrall to.

On August 14, 2026, Jason Arday, 41, professor of sociology of education at the University of Cambridge and a professorial fellow at Jesus College, was found dead at his home in Battersea, south London, just nine days after resigning from his position, and one week after the US publication of his memoir prompted renewed press scrutiny of his life story. Police described the death as “unexpected” but not being treated as “suspicious.” The resignation came after weeks of attacks by the press and online trolls over allegations that Arday had conducted academic plagiarism and biographical fabrication. The accusations of plagiarism were originally raised by Nathan Cofnas, a former Cambridge philosophy researcher and self-described “race realist” who was himself later dismissed by the university over his own remarks in a Substack article. Cofnas had argued in a 2024 blog post titled “A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution” that under a strictly meritocratic, colorblind system, Black people would “disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment.” He accused Arday of plagiarizing passages of his 2015 PhD thesis and cast doubt on his account of his own life—including his claim to have run 30 marathons in 35 days, raised £5.5 million for charity, and been nonverbal until age 11 and unable to read or write until 18. His biographical statements were at the time of his death never ascertained as false, and Liverpool John Moores University, which had awarded the doctorate, had already investigated the plagiarism claims years prior and found no evidence of academic misconduct; the allegations nonetheless produced close to 250 articles from the UK press in little over three weeks. In other words, people jumped at the opportunity to take down a Black scholar.

Professor Jason Arday’s passing, following this pile-on by the press and the spurious, racially motivated accusations of Nathan Cofnas, cannot be understood outside of Cambridge’s wider failure to safeguard and support Black students, and the broader neglect of Black people in academia so pervasive at Oxbridge. Arday inherited a highly visible position of “outsideness” simply by virtue of being one of the only Black professors in the institution. To be Black was to be asked to pose in university advertising, even while alumni and staff would say smugly, “It’s so nice to have people like you here.” Black academics like Arday were actively used as props for a university strategy to appear more diverse than it was, with little respect for the needs and experiences of Black students once they arrived.

The university’s need to prove its diversity without the laborious work of self-inquiry and transformation might be better explained through some historical context. It was a time of protest around statues—those honoring Rhodesia founder Cecil Rhodes at the University of Cape Town, and Edward Colston, a slave trader commemorated in Bristol. It was a time when Claudia Rankine’s Citizen was read widely, and student groups on campus organized around it. The “Rhodes Must Fall” movement kicked off in 2015, when South African Rhodes Scholars highlighted Oxbridge’s retention of statues celebrating known racists and colonizers as emblems of institutional majesty and grandeur, alongside the lack of professors of color and the lack of diversity in reading lists and curricula. It was also a larger movement to acknowledge how the institution had profited from slavery and colonialism, and to look at history and legacy from the perspective of the outsider rather than the dominant power. It sought to advance significant and underacknowledged historical, philosophical, and political thought around reparation, restitution, and racism, and to bring that into the forefront of public consciousness. Students and staff who participated in this movement were often vilified and used as bogeymen by the right, who actively despised discourse around Black Lives Matter and decolonization, and would have preferred that those students cease to exist in the first place. The context of the 2010s, and the movements for racial justice and the charges of complicity faced by institutions like Oxford and Cambridge, gave way to a self-congratulatory instinct—parading the success of alumni and staff of color. But as the protest decade has ended, at Oxbridge and universities around the country, there has been an intense right-wing backlash over anti-racist activism in universities, the previous decades’ victories have been put on shakier ground.

Black staff like Arday, in the triumphant announcement of his academic credentials and qualifications, were already highly vulnerable to this type of attack. Cambridge’s desire to, in a sense, “blackwash” its own racism is responsible for the bullying he faced. This is not in any way to undermine Arday’s work, academic background, and achievements, but rather to say that those achievements do not matter when the machinery of racism is in full motion. When he was appointed in 2023, at 37, as Cambridge’s youngest-ever Black professor, there were only five other Black professors at the university across disciplines. Professor Arday was branded a fraud and a liar. Never mind that the plagiarism allegations had already been investigated and dismissed by his awarding university and the jury was still out on the biographical claims; they were nonetheless permitted as points of bullying to portray him as unqualified and to denigrate his character and professional status before the world.

The vitriol endured by Jason Arday is a clear example of how Black people are punished far more severely than their white counterparts for the same offenses. There are clear parallels in academia. On instagram Mona Chalabi released an infographic showcasing prominent white intellectuals accused of plagiarism, none of whom resigned or lost public favor, alongside Claudine Gay at Harvard, who held her post as president for just six months—the shortest tenure in the university’s history—and Arday, whose bullying resulted in his tragic death. White people have falsified documents, résumés, and credentials in sport to business—Ryan Lochte, Martha Stewart, Lance Armstrong, to name a few—yet have successfully revived their careers and continued with their lives. The drive to punish Jason Arday in this case shows that no matter how high Black people climb in society, it does not undo the existence of racism. The tragic fallacy of representation is that under the right circumstances, racists will weaponize it. Lanre Bakare, in a recent piece for The Guardian, noted that some academics have argued that Arday’s alleged plagiarism poses a crisis of trust for other Black academics, who will likely have their own positions attacked as a result. I was saddened by these accounts, as they demonstrated that in certain corners of academia, it was pragmatic and safer to distance oneself from Arday rather than rally around him, potentially risking professional or reputational damage.

I cannot fathom how incredibly lonely, isolating, and alienating it must have been for Arday to endure this kind of bullying and still feel as though one has made things worse for other Black academics. But the lesson of Arday’s death is not that he was some lone fraudster who sneaked into a professorship at Cambridge; it is that Black people in high positions are expected and demanded to be infallible. Any mistake will be seized upon and used to attack not just them but all Black people in these elite white spaces. In this schema, Arday stands in for all Black academia. He must either be a villain deserving of international disgrace or otherwise extolled as a blameless saint, his memory paraded as a mascot for racist victimization that only obscures discussion of the social forces that triggered this attack in the first place. Both racist and unjust binaries that stop us, ultimately from viewing him in the fullness of his humanity.

The urgency of support for Arday is not just to mourn his death, but to argue strongly that Black people do not have to be superhuman to deserve existence and space within public life. There is obviously a clear difference between the investigation of plagiarism conducted by Liverpool John Moores University and the racial bullying and denigration of character Arday endured in his final days, a fact intensified by Cambridge’s toothless response of capitulating to the attack in the first place. Cambridge should have stood 10-toes down in light of Liverpool John Moore’s investigation last year. Arday’s case demonstrates a widespread failure to acknowledge the humanity of the individual at the heart of this awful assault, one that propagated the myth of the Black superhuman.

That myth is dangerous and deeply racist, and it needs to be done away with for good. During a meal just days before he died, Arday told his friend Simon Woolley that “they’re hounding me to death” and he “couldn’t see a way out.” To those closest to him his vulnerability was clear, but to the press he was just a Black fraudster, a spectacle for their racist appetites.

The American professor who warned me away from Oxbridge was right. There is no place for Black people there, except within a razor-thin margin, and their tired attempts at inclusion do not include people of color but often only further alienate and divide them in service of their own self-righteous ends. The irony of this unfortunate attack is that Jason Arday was best placed to educate the public and his students on this horrific racial illogic, but his death brings that possibility to an end. We have seen the snuffing out of Black talent, intellect, and potential in real time.

Earlier this week, Trump publicly wrestled with the weighty question of whether to “bomb the shit out of” longtime US ally Oman. Oman’s apparent sin is, it appears, simply being located geographically near Iran and thus having no choice but to engage with the Islamic Republic over the Strait of Hormuz. At the same time, his authoritarian ally in the Middle east, Israeli National Security Minister Itamir Ben-Gvir publicly advocated killing “thirty to forty” Palestinians per day in the Gaza Strip, saying there were some people not worthy of life; some people, in fact who weren’t even human. It was as quintessential a statement of fascist intent as anything to come out of the Netanyahu administration, yet not a single member of the Trump administration mustered even a peep in protest at this heinous proposal. And why would they? It was quite in keeping with the stuff that comes out of Trump’s mouth on a regular basis.

To be fair, Trump had other things on his mind. He had just ordered the Pentagon to scale back military exercises with longtime ally South Korea, made it clear this was punishment for the country not jumping into Trump’s Iran War quagmire, and then began a bizarre days-long, and one-directional, love-fest with North Korea’s dictatorial leader Kim Jong Un, repeatedly heaping praise on the tyrant even as that tyrant remained notably close-lipped in return.

In 2017, as Kim and Trump verbally sparred over North Korea’s accelerated program, and after Trump threatened to “totally destroy” the country, Kim memorably denounced Trump as a “frightened dog,” a “gangster fond of playing with fire,” and pledged that “I will surely and definitely tame the mentally deranged US dotard with fire.” Nine years on, Kim seems to have realized his promise, as his rapidly growing nuclear arsenal serves to conjure up nothing but awe in the eyes of his erstwhile adversary. That “frightened dog” has rolled over, pedaled his legs in the air submissively and, even while he makes more empty, bludgeoning, threats to other countries around the world, has let it be known that he sees who the alpha male in the room really is. But that’s how it always is with bullies, isn’t it? They talk tough until their bluff is called, and then, whining, they slink away, tail between their legs, or cozy up to the nearest genuine tough guy.

Take what happened in Minneapolis earlier this year. Trump unleashed hellfire on the city in the form of armed and deadly ICE agents occupying the streets. And then, when by the tens of thousands, Minnesotans came out to push back against this de facto military occupation, he withdrew in defeat.

Now, six months after Trump’s defeat in Minneapolis, it’s becoming even clearer just how all-pervasive, and antidemocratic, the Trumpist assault on a great American city was, and what its ambitions were. As the conflict escalated, the Department of Homeland Security rapidly created a spy network that, in many ways, was modeled on the COINTELPRO assault on progressives from the 1950s and 1960s.

The monitoring of Minnesotans, dubbed Operation Puppet Master, involved sending undercover agents to union meetings, to church gatherings, to planning sessions in which neighborhood groups strategized on how to push back against ICE. It involved infiltrating civil rights and immigrant rights organizations and gathering data that could be, and now is being, subsequently used in conspiracy trials against activists.

Given that we are now in a “National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 moment”—NSPM7 was signed by Trump as a way to direct government energies into investigating and neutering progressive individuals and groups—in which the vast intelligence and law enforcement apparatuses of the federal government are focused on discovering and rooting out alleged leftist plots against the United States, we should expect evermore Operation Puppet Masters to be unleashed against Americans. The more Americans successfully push back against Trump’s authoritarian agenda, the more DHS and DoJ forces will be activated in efforts to tip the scales against Trump’s perceived enemies.

Indeed, in ways large and small, the administration is accelerating a politics of fear and of intimidation. This week, ICE agents attempted a raid on immigration law firm offices in the northern Sacramento suburb of Natomas, run by attorney Raissa Morris. Allegedly, they were on a search for beds in which undocumented immigrants sleep, since many clients use the office as their mailing address. In reality, since immigrants, especially those fleeing violence, routinely use their attorneys’ offices as mailing addresses, there was no real reason to assume the immigration office was running a flophouse. This was, quite simply, a fishing expedition intended to sow fear in immigrant communities and force law firm clients to put their home addresses on official documents, making it easier for ICE to track them down and arrest them.

Raissa Morris, who has practiced immigration law in the region for years, wasn’t in the office when the four black SUVs, with tinted windows, drove up to the office parking lot Thursday morning. The first she knew of what was going on was when a legal assistant phoned to tell her an armed agent was at the front door asking for a “walk-through” to double-check that there were no beds on the premises. He didn’t have a warrant, and the staffer wanted to know what to do. Morris told her employee to refuse them entry and then she rushed over to the building. By the time she arrived, the agent, and the four cars parked in her lot, were gone, leaving behind a verbal threat with the staff: that they might come back in the middle of the night and break into the building to check on whether there were immigrants sleeping there. “I think they were just there to intimidate,” Morris told me. “They were trying to intimidate us so we don’t put our address as a safe address for our clients. My clients are scared, scared to come in and drop off documents.”

That inflicting of fear on already vulnerable people is simply business as usual these days, serving as authoritarian rocket fuel powering the base. Remember Springfield, Ohio, a small town that shot to national prominence during the 2024 election campaign when JD Vance circulated what he knew to be false stories about Haitian immigrants kidnapping and eating locals’ pets? Now, in the wake of Trump dismantling, with Supreme Court blessing, Haitians’ Temporary Protected Status in the US, ICE is going out of its way to make unendurable the lives of Haitians in that city. En masse, the agency is making Springfield’s Haitians wear ankle monitors and surrender their passports; actions that it has not, to date, taken against the broader Haitian population in Ohio.

This has nothing to do with public safety and everything to do with pandering to a base that was convinced by demagoguery in 2024 to view Springfields’ Haitians as cat-and-dog-stealing-and-eating barbarians, people not worthy of basic dignity or respect.

Which brings me back to Ben-Gvir and his statement that culling the Gaza Strip’s population each night was desirable because those targeted for death did not merit being called human. A quarter century ago, George Bush talked about an “axis of evil.” That’s a pretty good description for an international club of bloodthirsty autocrats that includes the unsavory likes of Ben-Gvir, Trump, and Kim Jong-un.

I’m sorry, but we have to talk about the fucking ballroom. I assure you, I am not happy about this. The world is on fire, but I, and now you, need to devote actual mental energy to Donald Trump’s White House play space.

A brief recap for those blissfully unaware of how truly stupid this country has become. Trump tore down the East Wing of the White House without prior authorization from any of the relevant committees. In its place, he plans to erect a gilded ballroom worthy of his fatuous regime. He claims that the ballroom will include an underground security bunker.

The ballroom is flatly illegal. The White House is not Trump’s personal property, and it lies on federal land. Construction is not allowed on federal lands without explicit authorization from Congress, which Trump doesn’t have.

Lower courts have blocked construction of the above-ground portions of the project, but now Trump has appealed those rulings to the Supreme Court.

I was prepared to roll my eyes at the whole thing, waiting for the inevitable day when a new Democratic president destroys whatever Trump is able to build. But Ian Millhisier actually read the appeal and put the fear of God in me. Trump’s case could allow the Supreme Court to gut a key environmental protection, which could then allow Trump and the Republicans to trample all over national parks, national monuments, endangered habitats, and even endangered species.

The issue has to do with what’s known as standing, which is the legal jargon for the right to sue. Trump’s ballroom construction was stopped thanks to a lawsuit from the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The group sued under a long-standing principle that allows lawsuits from people who intend to “visit” a site and will find it “less attractive” if alterations proposed by the government or the people running it are allowed to proceed.

It might sound thin, but this is an important way for the public to protect and preserve public parks and monuments. This kind of standing allows regular people to protect things and places that should belong to everybody.

Trump’s appeal directly challenges this kind of standing. If he’s successful, it will strip the public of a key way to enforce historical preservation and environmental protection laws. Trump could, quite literally, emboss his face on Mount Rushmore or turn Yellowstone into a golf course if this kind of standing is not upheld.

The Republicans running the Supreme Court have shown a deep antipathy toward both environmental protection and the ability of citizens to sue to stop the government.

Trump’s ballroom could easily turn into a national environmental disaster. And, as with everything the Trump administration does, the Supreme Court appears eager to help with the destruction.

The Bad and the Ugly

• In other terrible environmental news, the Trump administration has authorized the sale of a 31 million–acre tract of seafloor off American Samoa for deep-sea oil mining. The planned sale, which represents yet another depressing first (the first time this country has opened its waters for deep-sea plunder), threatens the precious and vulnerable ecosystem off the Rose Atoll. The administration is being sued, for now, by various conservation groups.
• Moving on to Trump’s abiding stupidity and incompetence, it turns out the National Park Service warned the Trump administration that the Reflecting Pool was peeling long before the administration launched its baseless vandalism case against innocent people.
• Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison is suing Texas Governor Greg Abbott to extradite an ICE agent who assaulted a man in Minnesota. Yes, we live in a world where criminal ICE agents can flee to Texas to escape legal consequences for their actions, because Texas is essentially a rogue state that provides refuge to paramilitary sadists. 
• Meanwhile, ICE is now offering legal liability insurance to its people so they can, you know, violate people’s constitutional rights without breaking the bank.
• Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman has reduced the charges against a whistleblower cop who recorded his fellow officers making racial, ethnic, sexist, and homophobic slurs. Technically, recording people without their consent is illegal in California but… I think Hochman completely missed the point of these recordings. No word on whether he is going to do anything to the cops who were recorded calling women “rapeable,” among other horrors, or investigate them to see if their words were ever translated into criminal malfeasance or abuse.

Inspired Takes

• I saw Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey. I really liked it. The Nation’s Katha Pollitt saw it. She didn’t like it as much. Thing is, I agree with almost all of Pollitt’s criticisms. It’s just that none of these problems ruined my enjoyment of the movie. In related news, I understand and appreciate all the scientific criticism leveled at Project Hail Mary, and, similarly, do not give a shit about those criticisms and think it was a great movie. I also like all the Jurassic Park movies, even the objectively terrible ones. Maybe I should start my own movie review column called “Actually, It’s Fine.”
• In Talking Points Memo, Madiba Dennie explains how the Supreme Court is primarily responsible for the epidemic of sports betting in this country, thanks to its ruling in Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association. That case is an intellectual sore spot for me, because I remember agreeing with the court in real time and telling people who said that it would lead to an explosion of sports betting that they were being hysterical because the sports leagues themselves would never allow it. So, you know, I was very, very wrong.

Worst Argument of the Week

I was today-years-old when I learned that major international airports across the country have small washing stations to allow Muslim travelers to perform wudu, or wash their feet, hands, and arms in preparation for their five daily prayers. I think that’s neat. I tend to think of the airline industry as the industry that’s most openly hostile to its own customers, so learning about this small acknowledgement of the needs of millions gave me a fleeting sense of hope.

“Fleeting,” of course, because I learned about the washing stations’ existence only in the context of Christofascist bigots’ attempt to take them away. Texas Governor Greg Abbott sent a letter last week to the heads of the Houston and Dallas airports declaring that the washrooms are discriminatory to everyone else and threatening to revoke their state grant funds.

It is a risible argument. Having a washroom designed to aid in a religious practice is not discriminatory toward other religions. That’s like saying having a kosher food option is discriminatory toward people who don’t keep kosher. Or having fish on a Friday menu is discriminatory toward people who aren’t Catholic. If anything, not having the washroom is a discriminatory attack on the free exercise of the religion of the people who need it.

What makes Abbott’s attack truly hypocritical is that… we’re talking about Greg Abbott here. We’re talking about a guy who is trying to force public schools to display the Ten Commandment in every classroom in his state. This is a guy who uses religious beliefs as an excuse to set bounty hunts on people fleeing his state’s clutches to get an abortion. Greg Abbott has long since blown past the free exercise of religion to arrive squarely at the unconstitutional imposition of one religion, his, above all others.

Alas, this doesn’t make him all that unusual. What Abbot is doing is straight-up bigoted, but it’s also perfectly in keeping with the rise and ongoing march of Christofascism. These people want to force the rest of us to live in a Christian theocracy.

In such a world, any acknowledgement or accommodation to another religion is seen as an attack on the majority faith. It is the worst kind of argument, but one that the bad guys always make.

What I Wrote

Trump is trying to change the Census. Again. This time he’s planning new tricks to undercount non-white people, locking in a warped view of America until 2040. I wrote about how Democrats must stop him.

In News Unrelated to the Current Chaos

Jason Arday, the youngest-ever Black professor at Cambridge University, was found dead this week at the age of 41. There’s no apparent foul play. Arday left his post at Cambridge following a “plagiarism scandal,” but I put that phrase in scare quotes because it seems like the allegations amounted to a few missed citations. Nonetheless, the man was hounded, disgraced, lost his job, and is now dead.

All I can say is, “There but for the grace of God go I.” The reality of being a Black public intellectual is that your credentials and intellect are constantly questioned by whites. There is no margin for error. You will not be allowed to recover from mistakes, and so you just can’t make them. You will not be allowed to fail up, you will just be pushed face down in the muck.

That’s… a certain kind of pressure. I don’t know how Arday dealt with it. I don’t know how any of us deal with it. I drink, to be honest. And I content myself with the knowledge that the anonymous portions of my life—my family, my video games, my sportsball teams—provide me with enough satisfaction that white people can take everything else away from me, and I’ll still be happy. I even have an outline for the novel I’ll write under a pen name when whites cancel me for whatever.

In The Nation, Jafari Sinclaire Allen writes about the machine that came for Arday, and comes for all of us. My only message to young Black writers and thinkers is to train yourself to never want something that only the white man can give. Because once they figure that out, they’ll make you a slave to it, or take it away.

That’s of course, easier said than done. I have a cross-stitch in my office that reads, “Don’t let these white people make you stroke out.”

***

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I’ll confess I was leery when Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff turned long-standing speculation about the relationship between Donald Trump and his 35-year-old aide Natalie Harp into a hot topic of national debate. It’s long been known that Harp is obsessed with Trump to the point of creepiness, and that the president is all too happy to bask in the glow of her fawning gaze. Their bizarre bond, which seems to have unsettled many in the White House, was already documented in two books of access journalism: the recently released Regime Change, by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, and All or Nothing, by Michael Wolff, which was published last year. But such books are for hardcore political junkies; they don’t necessarily move political debate or even get noticed by the broader public.

Ossoff, who nurses presidential ambitions and knows he can warm the hearts of Democratic voters by taking potshots at Trump, saw his opportunity amid fresh and hilarious reports that, in early July, Trump, fearful of an Iranian attack on Air Force One, sneaked off in a catering truck and moved to another plane. When the president made this evasive maneuver, he reportedly had Harp by his side. Meanwhile, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent were left playing the unenviable role of decoys on Air Force One, their only consolation being that the so-called Iranian threat was likely a fiction.

Speaking at a rally last Sunday, Ossoff riffed on this story, telling an appreciative crowd that Trump “doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.”

While I enjoy polemical attacks on Trump as much as anyone, I wasn’t sure there was much mileage to be gained from trying to stoke another presidential sex scandal, which was what Ossoff seemed to be implying. The fact that Trump is a brutal sexual predator is not only well documented (serious allegations of assault against him have been made by more than two dozen women); it has also been established in a court of law thanks to the brave testimony of E. Jean Carroll. Given Trump’s lifetime of truly vile behavior, a consensual affair (if that is what is going on) seems like a minor sin.

But my mistake was in thinking of the Trump/Harp story as a sex scandal. Their relationship doesn’t have to be sexual to be disturbing. Its true significance is that it proves just how deranged the cult of personality around Trump has become.

Born in 1991, Harp is an evangelical Christian. She finished her undergraduate degree at Point Loma Nazarene University in 2012 before getting an MBA from Liberty University in 2015. But, as with many politicized Christians, Harp’s focus of devotion has shifted to the unlikely person of Donald Trump.

Earlier this year on Easter Sunday, the president posted an AI image that seemed to show him as a Christ-like figure healing a sick man (who, bizarrely, resembled Jeffrey Epstein). The conflation of Christ with Trump might seem to many as either absurd or even blasphemous. But Harp believes that just as Jesus brought Lazarus back from the dead, so she herself was given a new lease on life by Trump.

The New York Times reports that Harp “has said that she suffered from bone cancer and that it was legislation Mr. Trump signed in 2018 that provided her access to experimental treatments.” This story carries an emotional punch, although, as The Washington Post reported in 2020, when Harp told her tale to the Republican National Convention, experts doubted its veracity. The drugs she most likely received were already legal without any assistance from Trump.

The factual veracity of Harp’s claims is beside the point, since she’s not interested in accurate reporting. Rather, Harp is a mythologist, creating lore to glorify the object of her worship, Donald Trump.

The intensity of Harp’s devotion to Trump can’t be gainsaid. Haberman and Swann describe her with Homeric epithets worthy of a priestess of Zeus: “The ever-present Natalie Harp” and “the ubiquitous Natalie Harp, laptop at the ready.” Trump, they write, was

accompanied on the golf course by Natalie Harp, an aide who supplied him with a fresh stream of positive news stories and social media comments that she would often read aloud and later follow up with copies from the portable printer she carried around. Harp wrote Trump adoring letters that she left in his personal spaces, including one that read “You are all that matters to me.”

An endless fount of flattery and upbeat (if dubiously sourced) reports on Trump’s achievements, Harp has worked hard to earn her place beside the president. Trump clearly enjoys her adulation. According to Haberman and Swann:

Harp’s devotion to the President had remained undimmed through the hectic early months of the second term. Trump had taken to telling his staff that Natalie (or “Nathalie,” as he would call her, using a French pronunciation) was the only one who loved him as much as his wife and kids. “All of you will go off and make money,” he would say. “She’ll never leave me.”

On Thursday, The Daily Beast published two more letters Harp had written to Trump, both full of effusive praise. On one she wrote, “Thank you for being my Guardian and Protector in this Life.” In another letter, she echoed a line from Jane Austen and wrote, “it is I who is unworthy.”

Harp might be Trump’s most assiduous devotee, but she is hardly alone. Trump’s monumental narcissism has made self-abasement the surest path to his inner circle. This is a dangerous dynamic, since it means Trump is not listening to any critical voices that might warn him away from his capricious impulses.

Harp’s success in turning toadying into access also explains why she is now the topic of controversy: because the other courtiers and cronies in Trump’s orbit are jealous. Tell-all accounts—such as the ones written by Haberman and Swann or Wolff—aren’t coming from Democrats, who hardly have a chance to near Trump. They’re coming from inside the White House, from people who object to Harp because they want to take her place. After all, the current scandal might lead to Harp’s being exiled from Trump’s A-list, but the president himself will remain a needy man-child. Which means the job of high priestess in the cult will have to be filled by another eager applicant.

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

I can afford no sentimentality about America. For hundreds of years, a majority of my fellow Americans preferred to see me in bondage, tilling the fields, mercilessly beaten, and regarded as much less than human. For a hundred years more, a majority preferred me as their indentured servant, but not as their political equal. And until only recently, a majority preferred to see me jailed, sickly, and alone for the crime of loving another man. Yet the view from down here, where my rights are negotiated out of my sight, and where my perceived wrongs are met with state-sanctioned brutality, lends itself to remarkable clarity about the health of our democracy.

Here is the truth: The grand experiment in democratic self-government that a band of revolutionary soon-to-be Americans launched 250 years ago has been taken out back, shot, and left for dead. This moment is the culmination of intentional efforts to trade democracy for plutocracy precisely when democracy might permanently place the levers of power in the hands of those of us down here—those of us who, because of our distance from the white straight male paradigm, have always been restrained from capturing the power of democracy. The culprits of our demise drape themselves in American flags and symbols while performing Judas’s function at the last supper of our democracy. History is not surprised; its sense of humor is irony, after all.

What’s more, our unwillingness to see this democratic downfall as such doubles our danger. It would be risky enough to live under an undemocratic regime and know it, but it is nearly fatal to live under one while behaving as though a single future election, timely death, or minor repair is all that is needed to restore some former glory.

Many Americans want, indeed, need this not to be true. They need to tell their children that American democracy is strong. And by that they mean not only effective but safe from people like me. They need to be able to say that we have not failed to preserve for ourselves and our progeny that which was entrusted to us by previous generations.

But my children cannot afford for me to tell them this lie. I cannot leave them unprepared for the reconstruction effort that lies ahead if I wish for them to pass to their children anything that looks, feels, or sounds like a democracy.

Perhaps we can ease our grip on the fiction if we start with easily digestible bites. We should at least be able to agree that an essential characteristic of a democracy is that the people choose their leader. Yet twice already in this century more Americans have voted for the opponent of the man placing his hand on the Bible. When the keys of government are handed over to the non-winner in other countries, especially countries run by people who look like me, the American government rightfully calls it a coup. We should not call it anything less when it occurs here.

It doesn’t matter that the mechanism for the coup is embedded in our founding document—a document that created fractional humanity for Black people and required amending to give political rights to half our species. There is no sound claim that the first elections of Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump reflect a healthy democracy. But the men who designed the Electoral College preferred the sound of democracy in each other’s voices more than the practice of it with everyone in these United States.

We have mostly tolerated the antidemocratic nature of the Electoral College because, until fairly recently, its outcomes have more or less matched the choice of a majority of voters. Prior to the 2000 election, the mismatch between the two had not occurred in over 100 years. Now not only has it happened twice in the first quarter of this century but it is even more likely to occur after the 2030 census reallocates House seats.

How many more times must we give the nuclear codes to someone who has not garnered the support of a majority of the electorate before we are willing to accept that, when it comes to the quintessential democratic possibility to choose who will lead us, American democracy is failing? When democracy fails, it severs the bridge that I depend on to build a future where I can exist.

It is this reality that makes the Supreme Court’s recent, final demolition of the Voting Rights Act particularly pernicious.

The cost to get the act passed in the first place—to sufficiently prick the consciousness of a majority of Americans to grant me political equality—was high. It was not enough to demand that my grandmother read, knowing that she had been forbidden to learn; to embarrass my mother with guessing games; or to threaten my sister’s life for the thought of casting the ballot. No, it took burying my lynched brothers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in Mississippi; surviving one beating after another at the registrar’s office; and broadcasting my splattered blood on the Edmund Pettus Bridge into American living rooms. And even that was not enough to make permanent that which had been bought at such a price. I was required to prove the payment sufficient by convincing Congress to reauthorize the act. And I did, over and over and over again.

Throughout this time, though, the Supreme Court had the act in its sights.

In its first significant attack on the Voting Rights Act, the 1980 case Mobile v. Bolden, the Supreme Court claimed that the American majority could not have possibly meant to bar discrimination against me without proof that discrimination was in the heart of the actor, not just his actions. In response, I convinced Congress to correct the Supreme Court’s error by amending the Voting Rights Act to make clear that it mattered not at all whether state legislators meant to discriminate, but only whether they did so in fact.

For a moment, we, all of us, were willing to find out what this democracy could be if we all had a voice. But sometimes, young Department of Justice lawyers who were never comfortable with the majority’s choice grow up and get black robes. And then they use those robes to take from the majority even the option to remedy past and persistent harms.

Now, with the court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, the same corrective efforts that a few months ago demanded only that I persuade a majority of Congress require me to persuade a majority of Americans to amend our Constitution—a supermajoritarian act.

A purported democracy where a majority cannot decide to repair the harms it historically perpetuated is no democracy at all.

To make matters worse, the Supreme Court claims that it had no other choice. Chief Justice Roberts, along with Justices Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Coney Barrett, and Kavanaugh, ruled that the 14th Amendment does not allow any use of race as a corrective to historical and persistent harms. This requires a remarkable interpretation of history.

One must believe that, while 360,000 Union soldiers were killed on our soil to end my dehumanization and to grant me political equality, their deaths, which made the 14th Amendment possible, simultaneously nullified future reparative efforts. Only people more dedicated to something other than democracy could so contort history to arrive at that result.

And lest you be led to believe that the harm that flows from the stripping of my political rights is limited to those of us down here, let me make the picture clearer. To arrive at their conclusion in Louisiana v. Callais that state legislatures cannot be stopped from drawing my political power out of existence, the Court boldly embraced a claim that it had only begrudgingly permitted years before: that anything that can be justified by pursuit of political power may be done no matter who it harms.

Merely seven years ago, in Rucho v. Common Cause, Roberts lamented that even though the pursuit of maximum political power through gerrymandering is “unjust” and “incompatible with democratic principles,” there was nothing for judges to do about it—because there aren’t objective ways to decide when gerrymandering has gone too far. Four of his colleagues thought him wrong even about that. In Callais, the court said the quiet part out loud, declaring that the pursuit of maximum political power through gerrymandering is a legitimate goal. Legitimate in what way, one must ask. Surely not in any way that empowers us to choose our leaders instead of them choosing us.

In this so-called democracy, none of the compromises I’ve made with the American majority are respected. In the 1980s and ’90s, I danced under the nearest disco ball by night. During the day, I sat vigil by my brother’s bedside at a hospital where no one wanted to touch his body or breathe the same air. As he lay there, a disease thought to be driven more by my bedroom than biology ravaged his body. I buried my lover, my dance partners, my friends, and some of the only family I had day after day after day until being gay became synonymous with grief. I finally convinced our government to seek treatments and, God willing, someday, a cure. The hundreds of millions of dollars that followed stemmed the tide of an epidemic, brought us closer to a cure than ever, and expanded prevention efforts all over the world.

But what does all that matter when one man sitting at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue can decide that, regardless of how a majority of us wish to use our collective coffers, he alone can ensure that the money not be spent? This particular antidemocratic reality is playing out all over the bodies of those of us down here. With the snap of his fingers, there goes the money to find out why my sisters are dying more than others who bear children as they bring life into the world. With another snap, there are suddenly no more dollars to understand why my brother’s cells are sickle-shaped or his prostate more inviting to cancer. Convincing the American majority to give a damn about me, about us down here, proves worthless when democracy fails, when the majority no longer controls the purse strings.

Perhaps I should be grateful that we ever did, as some of the most important questions a country can ask were never asked of us. Right now, my brothers and sisters are back in the Middle East fighting a war that nearly no one wants to fight. How can we be at war, an action expressly reserved for a majority to decide, when we were never asked? When a military commander orders our children to the front lines without our consent, whatever we might call it, we do not call it a democracy. We also do not call it a democracy when the only crime one needs to commit to draw the wrath of the entire Department of Justice is to be disliked by a single man, and nothing more.

Despite the evidence, some persist in asking me to believe that the American democratic experiment remains alive and well. That I am mistaken. That it cannot be so bad. But what kind of democracy do we have where a majority of Americans cannot elect the president, decide who will represent them in the halls of Congress, choose to correct historical and persistent harms, rely on the courts to impose criminal or civil sanctions on presidential overreach. or stop the president from taking us to war, using the Department of Justice as his sword against personal enemies, and ending congressionally authorized, hard-fought-for programs with the snap of his finger? The cry from down here is this: The American democratic experiment is dead.

We told ourselves that the blood of over 600,000 Americans shed during the Civil War proved a moral truth: that we are bound up together and must find a way to live together, rather than insist that only some of us have a claim to the idea of America. We were wrong–or perhaps we learned different lessons. Some of us learned only that what they could not take by force they might instead take through fear, subterfuge, and the machinery of misinformation.

Yet, enraged as I may be, I cannot afford despair. You can’t tell the children there’s no hope. By this, I do not mean we should lie to them. They cannot afford to be told that the world is made of rainbows when it is a vicious storm. But I do mean to tell them that storms, like sunshine, are not permanent fixtures. Honest hope requires humility.

Thankfully, those of us down here are practiced at this dance.

When my ancestors were brought ashore in Savannah, Georgia, shackled at their hands and feet, setting foot on what we today call the United States of America, they toiled by day but whispered into their children’s ears at night about the freedom that would one day come. They buried the tiniest flickering flame of hope for a better future deep inside themselves and planted it in their children. Those children, shackled from the day of their birth until the day of their death, carried that flame and passed it to their children. Those children too never knew a day of freedom. And so it was for 10 generations. Birth and death in bondage, but a flicker of hope passed down, ultimately to me. So, for those of us down here, the source of the light for that shining city on a hill is the one buried and passed down, not one that requires me to ignore what our eyes can so plainly see.

Let us pause, then, if only for a moment, amid the shock and awe, the jostling from one crisis to another, to acknowledge that this is happening. This is not a call to surrender or cease the resistance. Rather, it is a call to become responsible to future generations of Americans, all of them, whether their ancestors today are tearing the house down or struggling to hold it together. That responsibility demands an honest reckoning with the past and a bold imagining of the future. Nothing today is as it must be.

The men who signed the Declaration of Independence knew that 250 years ago. The delegates at the Constitutional Convention knew that. The people many of those men enslaved knew that. The abolitionists knew that. The suffragettes knew that. The students who staged sit-in protests knew that. The queers at Stonewall knew that. And for a brief luminous moment, those of us who filled the streets after the murder of George Floyd knew that too.

Let us not forget now, for we can least afford to forget at this dark moment that everything can be different from what it is today. We can live in a democracy again, a better one than the one that has passed away.

This story was published in collaboration with the Investigative Reporting Lab at Yale.

In her decade of experience working with unaccompanied migrant children in Texas, attorney Alexa Sendukas has represented over a hundred children and youth. For years, Sendukas’s work at the Galveston-Houston Immigrant Representation Project (GHIRP) had been supported by federal funding meant to ensure that children do not go defenseless in immigration court. But on July 31, the contract governing that work expired.

GHIRP, which currently represents around 500 young clients, is now staring down a situation Sendukas could never have previously imagined: the possibility of withdrawing from hundreds of cases.

The long-standing contract had funded a network of nearly 100 organizations and hundreds of attorneys providing legal aid to more than 20,000 unaccompanied migrant children across the country. In its place, the Trump administration has struck a $20 million agreement with the nonprofit US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants and a $158 million contract with Our Rescue, an organization founded by an ex-ICE agent accused of sexual exploitation and sex trafficking. On its website, Our Rescue touts its collaboration with law enforcement—but the organization does not appear to have experience providing immigrant legal services.

In the past weeks, some organizations have shut down their legal aid programs for unaccompanied children entirely. Others are preparing to lay off staff and are making difficult decisions about which young clients they can continue representing and which cases they will have to discontinue. Meanwhile, in Central America, one major nonprofit providing social services to returning migrant children told me they are bracing themselves for an influx of deported children they may not have capacity to serve.

This gutting of expert legal assistance for migrant children comes as immigration enforcement increasingly targets children and families, and the federal government fast-tracks court hearings for children across the country.

“It’s very clear that this is a comprehensive targeting of children to accelerate their deportation,” Sendukas said.

The result is a deluge of legal proceedings for migrant children with fewer lawyers than ever to represent them. GHIRP has some 70 asylum interviews scheduled for the next six weeks; last Monday, Sendukas was scheduled for five simultaneous interviews. Some young clients have been working with Sendukas for years. GHIRP’s youngest client is 4 years old.

Texas is a national epicenter for immigration enforcement, and in Houston, local law enforcement collaborates extensively with ICE. Nearly every day, new children continue to arrive to shelters for unaccompanied children within the state, Sendukas says.

Sendukas’s work representing these young people is no longer funded, but if she doesn’t show up for her clients, she asks, who will?

The administration has been trying to make it harder for unaccompanied migrant children to access legal representation since February of last year, when it issued and then quickly rescinded a stop work order for legal services funded through the unaccompanied children contract. The Trump administration’s attempt to prematurely terminate the contract a month later was blocked in federal court.

Yet, while the contract had continued until July 31, the Trump administration stopped paying around December 2025, putting organizations like GHIRP under financial pressure. Earlier this month, a federal court ordered Trump to release those unpaid funds—an amount advocates say totaled $65 million.

Acacia Center for Justice, the prime contract holder on the original agreement that funded organizations like GHIRP, has said that negotiations over a new contract failed because the Trump administration demanded that it share confidential client information that could be used to accelerate deportations.

In a statement to The Nation, the press secretary for the Department of Health and Human Services wrote that the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), the agency responsible for unaccompanied children, “remains fully compliant with its legal and regulatory obligations.”

The US’s celebrated right to counsel does not exist in immigration court. According to the Vera Institute of Justice, of the more than 630,000 people ordered removed in immigration courts over the past year, more than two-thirds had no lawyer representing them.

However, a 2008 federal anti-trafficking law requires the federal government to provide legal counsel to unaccompanied migrant children “to the greatest extent practicable.”

The Trump administration is now dismantling a network of expert legal organizations across the country, built up over the past two decades, that provides know-your-rights presentations to unaccompanied children in government custody, helps children file asylum claims, and represents young clients in immigration court.

In a Thursday court filing, a group of non-profits funded under the previous contract, including GHIRP, called for an evidentiary hearing to examine the Department of Health and Human Services’s failure to provide legal services. The filing detailed examples of children–including a seven-year-old in Los Angeles, a child in Texas, and a one-year-old baby in Arizona–who appeared in court without an attorney, and in some cases waived their rights to seek relief from removal.

In the days after the contract expired, Ana Devereaux, a staff attorney at the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center, sorted through the organization’s 950 ongoing cases to determine which unaccompanied children they could continue to represent. MIRC is currently expecting to withdraw from 520 of those cases.

Without federal funding, MIRC is planning to lay off the entire 70-person team working on unaccompanied children’s cases by October. MIRC is in a better financial situation than many peer legal providers across the country: It has managed to source funding from the state of Michigan, private foundations, and individual donors to keep representing children in as many cases as possible. But this supplementary funding won’t be nearly enough to cover the full range of services previously funded by the federal government.

Alexandra Manrique Alfonso, the director of the Children’s Legal Program at the Miami-based legal nonprofit Americans for Immigrant Justice (AI Justice), said the organization was similarly evaluating its 300-some cases to determine whom they could continue to represent. Attorneys may look at a child’s age, the status of their case, and their risk of removal when making these evaluations—but such decisions are very difficult, Manrique Alfonso said.

“Every minor deserves representation,” Manrique Alfonso said. “We are trying to see who is the most vulnerable out of the most vulnerable set.”

GHIRP, MIRC, and AI Justice have also been facing a slew of asylum hearings, suddenly scheduled just as the organizations are attempting to downsize operations. MIRC has received around 21 asylum interview notices in the last four weeks—more than they had received in the entire previous year. This uptick in caseload aligns with Trump’s attempts to accelerate the deportation process. For instance, in late July, the administration instituted a new that allows asylum officers to determine an applicant’s asylum eligibility without interviewing them.

The term “unaccompanied alien children” has traditionally referred to children who cross the US-Mexico border alone. But over the past year, new arrivals in ORR custody are increasingly children and teens living in the US who are apprehended by internal immigration enforcement, advocates say. Such children may not really be “unaccompanied” at all. A child or teen who is living with their family in the US may be stopped by immigration enforcement while alone and thus processed as unaccompanied.

According to Devereaux, immigration enforcement in Michigan has appeared to target parents who come forward to reunite with children in ORR-run shelters. In one case Devereaux described, a father was detained during a fingerprint appointment to be reunited with his teenage son. The father was deported, and his son is now in long-term foster care.

Similar tactics have been reported in Texas, where attorneys say children are being used as “bait” to arrest and detain family members. In July, Reuters reported that over 12,000 people had been arrested by immigration enforcement using leads that ORR had shared with ICE about unaccompanied children and sponsors.

Such stories reveal how unaccompanied children have become a central target in the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign. Deportations of unaccompanied minors have tripled compared to Trump’s first term, ProPublica has reported.

“The mass deportation agenda is driving an unprecedented level of family separation, and not just because parents are deported,” said Becky Wolozin, a senior attorney at the National Center for Youth Law. “Children are being taken into custody without their families; parents and caregivers are threatened with deportation if they attempt to reunite with their children.”

While such separation tactics are less visible than the infamous family separation policy of Trump’s first term, they are “incredibly harmful,” Wolozin said.

Over the past year, the number of days unaccompanied children spend in ORR custody has skyrocketed (in July, the average stay in ORR custody was 187 days). Because the government has defunded attorneys who visit shelters for legal rights presentations, children will lose key advocates who can monitor the conditions in these shelters, which have sometimes been sites of sexual harassment and abuse.

For the some 1,800 unaccompanied children currently in government custody, suddenly losing a trusted attorney may be traumatic, advocates warn. “Especially for kids in custody, they may trust their attorneys more than any of the other adults in their life,” Devereaux said. “Sometimes we have clients who are having mental health crises and the first person they call is their attorney.”

Amy Schaltegger Escoto is the director of reintegration programs at Kids in Need of Defense (KIND), which provides services to children returning to Guatemala and Honduras. According to Schaltegger Escoto, the number of children served by the program has doubled over the past year, even as funding remains flat.

Children returning from the US can be traumatized by their journeys, Schaltegger Escoto says. Restarting life in a new country—sometimes after living all or most of their lives in the US—can be immensely complex. In many cases, the children have lost some Spanish-speaking ability; children may also feel shame, failure, and stigma after they return to their country of origin.

In yet another move to lay the groundwork for possible mass deportations, Trump administration is ramping up construction for immigration facilities flagged specifically for unaccompanied children. A request for proposal posted by the Department of Health and Human Services in July invites contractors to bid on the construction of an “Emergency Intake Facility” to hold up to 3,000 unaccompanied children.

Advocates have raised alarm over this planned construction, pointing out that shelters for unaccompanied children are currently at around only 27 percent occupancy. According to Sendukas, who has visited similar large-scale emergency shelters to provide know-your-rights presentations, children in emergency intake facilities often face poor conditions and inadequate access to legal services.

In Alexandria, Louisiana, ICE plans to open a 528-bed facility for families, unaccompanied children, and women, next to an airport that has become the largest deportation hub in the nation. The facility will be built on a defunct Air Force base that has been found to have some of the highest levels of forever chemical contamination in the country.

ICE has described the facility as a 72-hour “staging area.” Yet investigations into a similar short-term facility operating in the same town shows that people are held well over the three-day limit, in unsafe conditions. The LaSalle Family Foundation, the nonprofit arm of a private prison corporation, is slated to run the new facility for family and children. In the past year, two people have died at a LaSalle-run ICE institution in a nearby town.

Tania Wolf, Southeast advocacy manager for the National Immigration Project, rejects the idea that the Alexandria ICE facility could serve as a humane and short-term holding spot for unaccompanied children. The goal, Wolf says, is to expand detention and deportation.

“Once you build it, they will fill it,” Wolf said. “And they are moving at break-neck speeds to open up these facilities.”

The Trump administration’s attempt to bring stable peace to Ukraine has failed. The war is thus set to continue, without a radical change, but with a slowly deteriorating situation for Ukraine. The United States is no longer capable of supplying Ukraine with adequate numbers of the air defense systems necessary to prevent Russia from steadily destroying Ukrainian infrastructure. The coming bitter winter is likely to drive millions more Ukrainians to seek refuge in the West. Russia does not necessarily need to win on the battlefield if it can turn Ukraine into a permanently ruined state and a burden on Europe that European electorates will not sustain indefinitely.

While this conflict lasts, it will also present a permanent risk that the US will be dragged into direct conflict with Russia, and a certainty that the US will be distracted from other urgent and essential goals at home and abroad. The danger of the war spreading to engulf Europe and the US has been highlighted by the Russian threat to seize European ships in retaliation for their seizure of ships of Russia’s “shadow fleet.” Whatever Trump may think, should this happen it would be impossible for the US to remain aloof—and once a cycle of escalation begins, will anyone be able to stop it?

For the sake of the American people and the international community, most of which ardently desires and needs an end to this war, it is for the new American left to take up the search for peace, and to press for this if the Democratic Party wins control of Congress this November, and of the presidency in 2028.

For US progressives to pursue peace strongly and consistently will, however, take a radical break with the attitudes and policies of the Democratic Party establishment stretching back for more than a century. It will also require a willingness to overrule existing centrist governments in Europe.

Trump’s effort failed for multiple reasons: On a few key issues, Ukraine and Russia’s positions remain irreconcilable; the deep dysfunction of his administration made it impossible to craft a strategy that would have brought sufficient incentives and pressure to bear to overcome this gap; Trump met constant resistance from the Europeans, which also strengthened Ukrainian obduracy; and his administration has been increasingly infiltrated by neoconservatives who are rigidly opposed to compromise with Russia or anyone else.

Lastly, of course, the disastrous war with Iran has hopelessly distracted the administration from the Ukraine peace process—not least because, absurdly, the same amateur team is responsible for both sets of talks. In a rational world, US failure against Iran, and the exhaustion of key US weapons stocks, would have given a new and urgent impulse to the search for peace in Ukraine, which the US is no longer capable of supplying with desperately needed air defense systems.

But there is an additional factor that has barely been noticed in the United States, partly thanks to the refusal of most US journalists and “experts” to talk to the Russians and listen to what they are saying. This is that due to a combination of domestic political polarization and self-justifying moral arrogance, the US has repeatedly demonstrated that it can no longer be trusted to keep its word.

One reason for the rigidity of Russian positions is that the Russian establishment fears with good reason that any concessions it makes in a peace settlement will be permanent and irreversible, while any made by Trump will be reversed by a Democratic administration after 2028; just as Trump, disastrously, abolished Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran.

The West of course also has good reason to distrust Russia—which is why it is necessary that any peace settlement be as solid, formal, and comprehensive as possible, and not a fragile and unstable ceasefire like that in the Donbas between 2015 and 2022, that eventually led to full-scale war.

To be stable and lasting, a peace settlement will require Russia to recognize Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity on the land that it still holds, Ukraine’s right to defenses adequate to deter Russia, and Ukraine’s right to join the European Union. The Ukrainians will have to recognize Russia’s legitimate security interests (which are essentially identical to the bipartisan US determination to exclude hostile alliances from Central America), permanently forgo NATO membership and the stationing of Western troops on its soil, and guarantee the linguistic and cultural rights of Russian-speaking citizens of Ukraine.

If they are to commit themselves to the search for an end to the Ukraine war, the first thing that US progressives need to recognize is that this peace cannot be wholly “just,” and that this is because not just of the inescapable realities of this war, but of every war. Think of the peace agreements that the US has entered into since its foundation. At best, they have led to a lesser evil than the other possibilities, but not one of them could be called truly “just.” The one that came closest perhaps was the Versailles settlement after World War I—and its disastrous actual consequences contributed to the rise of the Nazis and a new and even more horrendous world war.

Perhaps the most important lesson of all for American (and European) progressives is the one taught by Robert Burns:

O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
An’ foolish notion.

The US establishment that launched the illegal war against Iran, thereby undermined the global trading system it was pledged to defend, endangered the entire world economy, and abetted the Israeli campaign of terror in Gaza has lost the respect of the world and no longer has any right to adopt a position of moral superiority on the world stage. Most of the Europeans, with their weaselly attempt to combine abstention from the war with the use of their bases by the United States, are in no better case.

Madeleine Albright (a Democratic secretary of state, let us remember), famously said that “we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and see further than other nations into the future.” This now sounds like a fantastically bad joke. The Cyclops was certainly tall, but only had one eye. The US is even worse: wandering the world like Oedipus, self-blinded in both eyes.

But if the image of the indispensable nation is dead, the United States, in concert with others, can still be a useful nation. This will, however, require an end to self-aggrandizing self-righteousness. Instead, Americans should remember the words of the Declaration of Independence, and pay “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind,” as being part of sinful mankind, rather than standing above it.

This spring, in Louisiana v. Callais, the Supreme Court gutted what remained of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the provision that for six decades stopped states from drawing Black voters out of power. It was the culmination of a long project—some may say obsession—on the right. In 2019, in Rucho v. Common Cause, the court had already held that partisan gerrymandering, no matter how brazen, was simply none of the federal judiciary’s business. Together, those two rulings have allowed states to create rigged election maps that are close to untouchable. The court won’t stop you from rigging a district for your party, and it has now stripped away the law that stopped you from rigging one against Black or brown communities. The court has removed the referees and let the players draw the lines however they like.

This is all in service of one particular goal: to enshrine conservative power at the ballot box, which sacrifices democracy in the name of political power. It is a new form of the gerrymandering that generations of civil rights activists fought against. The goal is the same. The point is to rig the rules, to bake in the result before a ballot is cast.

Right now that fight is happening in the courthouse. But elections are only one arena where the rules get rigged. It also happens in the boardroom.

The term “gerrymander” is a portmanteau created to describe an electoral rigging. But I would argue that the term could apply to other ways our society is rigged. What gerrymandering does is set the terms of the argument itself—whose vote counts and how. In so doing, it determines what a country treats as common sense and who gets cast as a threat. It shapes history and whose account of events gets believed. That happens in not just electoral spaces but cultural ones, as well.

Take the Paramount merger, shorthand for Paramount Skydance’s attempted takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery. This consolidation, unprecedented in Hollywood, would irreparably reshape the media industry by combining multiple massive studios underneath one roof, placing the power to shape culture and Hollywood in the hands of an unprecedented few. This is not just monopoly or consolidation—it is another form of gerrymandering. It redraws the boundaries so the contest is settled before it starts.

This way, Paramount doesn’t have to win the argument about whose stories matter. It just can quietly redraw the map of who is even in the room to make these decisions, so that certain voices are pushed to the margins and others are locked out entirely, no vote required. Of course, the result looks “natural” once the lines are set: Audiences “just don’t want” those shows; those creators “just aren’t out there,” the same way a map makes a durable minority look like the authentic will of the voters. Gerrymandering works by controlling the terms of the fight rather than the fight itself. Both in elections and in media consolidation, gerrymandering buries a deliberate choice inside what looks like a neutral process, and is designed to be self-perpetuating. The fewer people left with the power to draw the lines, the harder it becomes for anyone else to ever redraw them.

Until recently, the roughly $80 billion deal was basically a sure thing — shareholders signed off in the spring, and Trump’s Justice Department pronounced it no threat to competition in June. But earlier this summer, a dozen state attorneys general, led by California’s Rob Bonta, sued to block the merger. A federal judge froze the deal, warning that it would gut competition and hand too much of what Americans watch and read to just one owner. In response to the attorneys general’s suit, Paramount agreed to an antitrust trial over the merger that will delay it until the middle of 2027, if it goes through at all. But the fight isn’t over.

If the merger is approved, it will represent a threat to democracy in its own right. The combined company would answer to David Ellison, whose father, Larry, is among the richest men alive and close with Trump administration officials. The younger Ellison would own an enormous share of American film and television, plus CNN. This will narrow the set of major cultural decision makers in Hollywood, handing the job to executives who have every reason to keep whoever runs Washington happy. And it will push stories outside of the decision makers’ comfort zone further to the edges.

Hollywood has never been perfect, but often, representation on screen has always run slightly ahead of the law—the culture moves first, and the rules follow. People saw same-sex couples on television years before they could legally marry; they saw Black leads carry a blockbuster before they saw a Black family move into their neighborhood. Will & Grace ran in prime time through years in which marriage equality was still losing at the ballot box in state after state. Sidney Poitier was the biggest box-office draw in 1968, in a country that hadn’t even passed the Fair Housing Act. Cultural change engenders political change.

This merger puts the decisions about whose and which stories to tell in the hands of even fewer than before. When one company swallows another until a handful of conglomerates control the pipes that culture runs through, that is gerrymandering by another name. It fixes the outer edges of what most people will ever see. It determines which stories get made and which quietly die in development, which voices travel and which get cut in the name of “brand safety.” It draws the lines. Strip Black voters of their leverage over the district, wave through the consolidation that narrows whose stories get told, and the losses compound: You lose your grip on the map, then on the story people tell about why the map looks that way. The damage lands where it usually lands—on the communities already straining to get a fair hearing, now boxed in whether they push or hold.

I wrote my new book, From Presence to Power, in large part to make this kind of corporate power legible—because it is at once the least examined and among the most decisive forces in our lives. Corporations set the boundaries of what and who gets to be culturally relevant. They decide which stories reach us and which are never told. For a century, Hollywood has been the most significant storyteller in America. More consolidation means fewer people in the rooms where those choices get made, and fewer people means more of us are left out of the story.

This is especially true for Black people. Hollywood has long profited from black culture without always opening doors for black people. Our absence has been treated as normal. And while Hollywood has been ahead of the country, it has been ahead on screen and behind it everywhere else. The same studios that put Black stories in front of millions kept Black writers, directors, and executives out of the rooms where those stories get greenlighted. This is not a side effect, either. I’d argue this is actually a good part of what consolidation is for—to have the power to determine who is excluded, who is centered, and who is ignored.

This is what happens when you rig the rules at the ballot box and in Hollywood or news media. The Supreme Court approves the gerrymandered district map to shape our politics. Media behemoths gerrymander the media map to shape the culture. The gutted Voting Rights Act and the blessing of this megamerger are not two different stories but one. They are the same story about power.

None of this arrives labeled honestly. It comes disguised as neutral process, of the court staying out of politics, the merger a result of the market’s doing its thing. But there is nothing neutral about settling the outcome before the contest starts. That’s the whole point of a gerrymander. Once you can see the lines being drawn around you and your vote and your story, the only question left is whether we make them draw them back.

The good news is that we can. Corporations that look untouchable are more dependent on us than they want us to believe. They rely on the audiences and the subscribers; they need the workers and the communities they can’t do without. That dependence is leverage. The moment enough of us decide to use it together, we really can win. This is not a pipe dream, nor impossible. I have seen it work. In 2022, Penguin Random House’s purchase of Simon & Schuster was blocked after authors and agents made the case that fewer publishers would mean fewer books and smaller advances for the writers who most needed them. A year later, writers and actors shut the industry down for months and came back with the first real guardrails on AI and streaming pay.

But challenging power requires understanding the threat and seeing the strategic levers for change that push people in power to change their approach. We must set new expectations for attorneys general and, when Democrats take power again, the FCC—not just challenge tech companies. We must set expectations for state legislatures. That is how presence becomes power. We can’t wait for the people who drew the lines to redraw them. We have to build a base big enough and determined enough that they can no longer afford to leave us out of the story.

Don’t look now, but one of the great shibboleths of the MAGA era is unraveling: the notion that a brutal crackdown on undocumented immigrants represents a key political strength of the Trumpified Republican Party. The campaign to deploy blanket ICE raids to terrorize immigrants—and, simultaneously, the Democratic-led states and cities targeted by the White House—has proven to be so broadly unpopular that it’s emerging as a central worry for Republican political operatives on the eve of the midterms.

Just 37 percent of respondents in a recent Kennedy School survey approved of Trump’s mass deportation regime, and the paramilitary command structure of the immigration sweeps was even less popular, with just 33 percent professing support for ICE, 31 percent backing ICE raids in the workplace, and 34 percent approving of the use of the military in rounding up immigrants.

What’s more, voters are decidedly skeptical about the Trump administration’s belated—and mostly fictional—effort to make it seem as though it’s dialing back on ICE’s gestapo sieges. In a new Politico survey, carried out by the polling firm Public First, a majority of respondents agree that there’s been at least a small shift in the White House’s immigration tactics. But a 44 percent plurality say that the changes make no difference in how much they trust the administration, while nearly a third—30 percent—say that they’re now less likely to extend such trust. Notably, the same core top-line result holds for Trump voters in the survey: 71 percent said they observed a shift in enforcement tactics, but 48 percent reported that it made no difference in their trust in the White House. And while you might presume that trust level to be high, it’s nowhere near what the lords of MAGA messaging would want. Indeed, 15 percent of Trump voters now believe that the ICE raids are “too aggressive”—not what party leaders were hoping for when the 2024 Republican National Convention broke out into chants of “Mass deportation now!”

The scale of disaffection with Trump’s gulag state presents a huge opportunity for Democrats in the midterms and beyond—but for the party to seize it will require a thorough reconsideration of its milquetoast approach to immigration, which throughout the Trump era has been to raise procedural objections to a xenophobic moral panic that was always going to culminate in brownshirt deployments and concentration camps.

There are some heartening signs that such an effort is underway; last week, Democratic National Committee members approved a resolution calling for the abolition of ICE—a position that party leaders have long disowned as too fringe and unworkable. But the DNC isn’t dictating broader messaging to the party, and the consensus from on high remains mired in support for a set of “reform” proposals—such as requiring ICE agents to go unmasked and wear body-cams, the cessation of roving ICE patrols, and a revamped code of conduct—that would do little to derail the overall collapse of immigration enforcement into fascist squalor.

While some of these changes—particularly the sanction on patrols—would be helpful, they’re largely designed to create the appearance of improved conduct in a mobilization of state power that is fundamentally depraved. This strategy is very much of a piece with the craven support that Democratic lawmakers gave to the shameful and demagogic 2025 Laken Riley Act, which furnished the expansive legal rationale for ICE’s detention-and-rendition campaign. In all such policy debates, too many Democrats shun any robust challenge to right-wing calumnies about immigrants for fear of appearing “soft” on immigration enforcement—and so preemptively concede the authority to frame public discourse to a MAGA right obsessed with branding immigrants as dangerous criminals for whom even long-term detention is too good. As long as Democrats operate from this anemic, defensive posture, their reforms will come off at best as cosmetic afterthoughts, and at worst as outright capitulations in the Laken Riley vein.

A better starting point would be to call out the lies that have abetted the buildup of the deportation police state in the second Trump administration—beginning with the glib and unfounded equation of undocumented immigration with criminality. It’s never been the case that undocumented immigrants commit violent crime at a higher rate than the country’s native-born population. Indeed, a recent study in the Journal of Urban Affairs surveying more than 11,500 neighborhoods in 100 US cities found that areas that experienced increases in undocumented immigration saw the rates of both violent and property crime decrease.

Then there’s the trespass that gothic-minded MAGA types have treated as a foundational and unforgivable betrayal of the country’s civic covenant: entering the United States by other-than-legal means, and remaining here to work and raise families. In reality, unsanctioned entry into the country isn’t a crime at all but rather a civil misdemeanor. That’s right: The federal goon squads terrorizing our cities and neighborhoods are tearing families apart, arranging extrajudicial renditions, and placing ailing immigrants in squalid conditions that have repeatedly proved fatal, for the rough legal equivalent of traffic violations. It’s not being “soft” on the immigration issue to drive home this grotesque misapplication of state power—in fact, you can’t capture the full scope of the impunity unleashed under MAGA’s auspices without this basic framework—yet you will look in vain for any prominent Democratic leaders employing it.

Then there are the pernicious culture-war libels that the right continually trains on immigrants—from the flagrant and self-admitted lies about Haitians eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, to the recent, fabricated scare about a sinister alliance of socialists and Muslim extremists. These politicized urban legends are obviously pivotal to the MAGA project of stoking unfounded fears to legitimize authoritarian seizures of power—yet the Democratic opposition again can’t seem to make this basic point land as it recoils from challenging the broader framework of right-wing fearmongering on immigration.

Finally, there’s the economic impact of immigration—arguably the biggest whopper in the MAGA clearinghouse of falsehoods. The overall contributions of immigrants to the US economy will work out to more than $7 trillion from 2024 to 2034, according to the Congressional Budget Office. And Trump has continually proclaimed that undocumented immigrants are a debilitating drain on Social Security and Medicare—when, in reality, they pay into both programs on a massive scale while deriving zero benefits. ICE’s terror campaign has already caused notable spikes in unemployment and small-business failures, since immigrants are integral to the labor economy. Every MAGA demagogue who blathers on about an immigrant “invasion” of the country should be asked to explain just what kind of invader it is that gives an occupied power $7 trillion.

These would be the makings of a successful Democratic bid to seize the political moment and recast the demented national debate over immigration in a register approaching sanity. But of course I’m a crazy dreamer; when House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries was asked about abolishing ICE on Meet the Press on Sunday, he delivered this response: “We need a safe, strong, and secure border. ICE should conduct itself like every other police organization in this country. We’re committed to dramatic reform.”

In other words, the word salads will continue, and so will the beatings, renditions, unlawful detentions, and killings. And come November, Democratic figureheads like Jeffries may yet again be left wondering just why they can’t seem to find an energized base to latch on to.

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

It’s far too late now to bemoan how the meaning and sentiment behind “stay woke,” which originally pertained to the recognition of the racist structures that condition Black life in the United States, was stolen from Black Americans and caricatured into the ultimate symbol of political correctness run amok. But that notion of a crazed population seeking to punish anyone who doesn’t bend the knee to the new social rules and demand absurd changes to the social and political world is at the heart of the current discourse around so-called “Woke 1”—a term that is now quickly coming to define the seminal year of 2020, when the Covid pandemic and the murder of George Floyd fueled one of the biggest social justice movements in American history and popularized concepts like abolishing prisons and defunding the police.

The conversation started after Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez invoked the phrase in a recent ABC News interview. Asked about Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong’s onetime support for prison abolition and police defunding, Ocasio-Cortez quoted New York City Councilman Chi Ossé’s declaration that “Woke 1 was crazyyyy.” She did say that there had been a “huge opening of the Overton Window” in 2020, and that “the discussions that were had in that time were quite fruitful.” But she concluded that “rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric that we would use today.”

Centrists and conservatives immediately pounced—after all, here was one of the most prominent leftists in America seeming to agree with them that the left had gone, well, a little nuts back in 2020. The implication from Ocasio-Cortez and Ossé is obvious: The 2020 protests against police violence and the rhetoric that came from that time produced a kind of frenzy that led people, including themselves, astray. Now, with their heads clear, they’re focused on serious and mature politics.

The people who stand against the caricature of wokeness will never stop telling you about the evils of its manifestation in elite liberal institutions and political circles. You know what I’m talking about: racial awareness training, pronouns, reading books like White Fragility, land acknowledgements. (Even worse, these people were forced to entertain police abolition and defunding as serious intellectual ideas.)

Not to say that some of these things aren’t annoying. But the irony is that they are examples of the urgent material demands of the movement being siphoned away by elites, not evidence of what organizers actually wanted. Land acknowledgements are easier than reparations. Asking for more representation in elite colleges is necessary, but it is not as important as addressing overpolicing and racial profiling. The Democrats kneeling in supposed solidarity while wearing kente cloths were making a symbolic gesture meant to distract from actual police reform—the physical equivalent of pushing for more body cameras, despite endless evidence that they are ineffective. But no, it was all crazy.

You’d think that millions of people in 2020 just woke up and demanded that everyone needed to make land acknowledgements and call people by their correct pronouns or otherwise face a firing line. You could also be forgiven for feeling insane yourself for remembering that the protests of 2020 started because the world saw a long video of George Floyd being slowly killed by a police officer while another stood guard—and that the killing was another one in a long history of police killing Black people, then justifying their actions through the often-used excuses that allowed them to escape accountability. (Maybe they felt threatened because the Black person reached for an invisible gun, or moved toward them threateningly. Maybe the guy was just big, and thus automatically scary. And even if none of that was true, maybe the person did something bad in their past and got what was coming to them.)

In 2020, in the middle of a pandemic where people also saw and heard very clearly how little the government cared for their lives, many people around the country declared that they wanted society to be different. Black people have consistently protested and spoken up about police violence, and often the rest of the public goes on about their day, seeing police violence as a Black issue. Not this time. Through the work of organizers—not the academics, pundits, and media personalities, who would go on to dominate the conversation—many others from the country joined them in the streets.

The status quo was clearly untenable. And for the first time in a long time, many different kinds of people saw the ways that the violence against Black people was connected to the wider oppression of all marginalized people. Protests spread from city to city, state to state, and soon, people around the world joined in, started their own protests, and spoke up about their oppressions.

For once, politicians couldn’t dismiss this as Black people being angry again. They were forced to confront how much of their city and state budgets were being eaten up by police and ask whether sending officers to do traffic stops and mental welfare checks was the best option. They were asked to explain to the public why paying police so much overtime was more worthwhile than putting that money into public services that would help people live better lives.

Police abolition is the big boogeyman for a lot of the people who see Woke 1 as crazy. Though it has a long academic and social history, 2020 was the first time that many people had encountered it, and the gravity of the proposal felt unimaginable to them. But underneath that was the related but more minimalist concept of defunding the police.

The defund movement stems from an obvious truth: that the more contact people have with police over nonviolent offenses, the higher the chance those interactions could potentially become deadly. It’s not a matter of whether a police officer is a good or bad apple, but whether someone with a gun should be handling problems like stopping drivers for expired tags or petty theft. Because once that stop or call is made, there’s a real possibility that the person who is being stopped is killed. And every time police kill a person over a small issue, we collectively make and defend the argument that a human life is worth whatever offense that was. Defunding the police was an idea that stemmed from valuing human life more than a candy bar or a broken taillight.

The way such an idea was dismissed and characterized as an absurd attack on sensible society and politics, you’d think it was actually enacted and led to the unraveling of the paradise that we lived in. But it wasn’t. Not in any real way. Not even close. It was a vision for a different order of things, one more aligned with an appreciation of human life, and specifically Black life. Yet many saw this new order as so absurd, so extreme, that the backlash not only entrenched the original problem but further stripped away the rights of those marginalized groups who had the audacity to complain.

This was the latest in a long cycle of white backlash that has been constant since at least the civil rights era. And since we have allowed the right to dominate the structure of discourse for so long—whether in defining what “woke” is, or what extremism is, or what free speech is—we’re now in a stage where the supposedly sensible thing is to disavow one of the biggest protest movements in modern history because those that saw police violence against Black people as routine are now framing that movement as a time of lunacy.

Police funding has increased across the board since 2020. Police departments have been given more and newer technology to surveil people. Police killings barely make any noise now because even politicians on the left have accepted that confronting that violence is silly and divorced from sensible politics. ICE has also grown exponentially and inherited the police’s immunity and power to attack and kill anyone it wants with no consequence. ICE agents work in tandem with police across the country, and resistance is left up to those organizers and individual actors who have the courage to put their bodies on the line still, while their politicians laugh on social media and ABC News.

Beyond the disappointment of seeing Ossé and AOC dismiss such an important time and the real grievances that gave birth to that movement—a movement that benefited their careers as well as larger Democratic victories around the country—I’ve also been disappointed in their framing their current lack of imagination as maturity. It seems like the natural cycle for inspiring young politicians on the left to get elected and slowly be transformed into the liberals that they used to criticize, even to the point of lending political cover to people carrying out a genocide, but it’s no less dispiriting to watch them accept this current iteration of the world as the less absurd one.

This is a society that keeps being pulled to the right, one where the president and his cronies are so brazenly corrupt that each day comes with another scandal that could have ended anyone else’s presidency but for him barely makes the news, a world where this current administration can go after left-wing organizations with the combined powers of the courts and federal agencies, strip civil rights from vulnerable groups, openly declare and enact their project of purging the country of non-white people, a world in where police are even more emboldened, more present in everyday life, more confident that they can kill and escape accountability, and we’re supposed to think that this is the normal world. And the suggestion that maybe things shouldn’t be this way, even approached imperfectly and annoyingly, was just so crazyyyy.

In June, during the first of the record heat waves to scorch Europe this summer, “the London Ambulance Service fielded over 53,000 calls, surpassing the number received when the Covid-19 pandemic was at its height in March 2020,”Bloomberg Green reported this week. Conditions inside UK hospitals were “far worse” than during Covid, Fiona Brennan, an anesthetist in Cardiff, told Bloomberg. It was so hot inside surgery rooms for cancer patients that basic procedures faltered, Brennan continued, adding that some patients were so sweaty that she had to constantly check that intravenous drips were not “slipping out” of their bodies.

Also, as with Covid, early mortality figures dramatically understated the death tolls to come. The UK Health Security Agency initially estimated that 2,877 people died from heat-related ailments in May and June. France estimated that there were 5,700 excess deaths between June 17 and July 2. Other analyses, benefiting from more complete data and advanced methodology, blamed the heat for as many as 20,000 deaths. And that was before the June heat wave was followed by an additional four heat waves that surely boosted the number of sick and dying.

And Europe, as we’ve reported, is not the only hot spot. In India, temperatures in Delhi soared to 129 degrees Fahrenheit, pushing the limits of human survival, especially for the city’s poor, again illustrating a core injustice of the climate emergency: The people who did the least to cause it are the ones who tend to suffer the most.

There are critical differences, of course, between the Covid and climate emergencies. In the opening weeks of the pandemic, scientists weren’t sure how the virus spread, or how to treat it. By contrast, science is unequivocal that today’s extreme heat waves—and the drought and fires they’ve kindled—would be “all but impossible” without human-caused global warming driven primarily by burning oil, gas, and coal. “Summer of 2026 is another step in the escalation of our world into a sort of hotter, more dangerous planet that climate scientists have been telling us about for decades,” Jeff Goodell, the author of The Heat Will Kill You First, said on CBS.

When Covid emerged in early 2020, much of the media rose to the challenge, providing science-based reporting that helped both the public and policymakers make informed decisions about how to respond. Journalists held governments to account, puncturing claims of miracle cures and explaining the value of physical distancing and getting vaccinated.

But, with notable exceptions like those cited in this article, news coverage of this summer’s extreme weather has fallen well short of the Covid standard. Two-thirds of the articles that major UK newspapers published about the summer’s fires did not even mention climate change, much less explain how record heat makes fires more likely and deadly. In the US, the evening newscasts of ABC, CBS, and NBC during the week of July 13 to 19 lavished airtime on the extreme weather but did not utter the words “climate change.”

The Guardian, as usual, has kept the climate connection front and center, and on August 8, it published an opinion piece by the mayor of London, Sadiq Kahn, who urged government leaders in Britain and around the world to treat climate change as the emergency that scientists say it is—something Khan began doing as mayor in 2018. Khan’s call for leaders to “reduce our reliance on oil and gas” did not name names, but commentators interpreted it as pressing the new British prime minister, Andy Burnham, to rule out more North Sea oil drilling, a question Burnham has studiously avoided since taking office on July 20. Meanwhile, a petition demanding that the government present a televised emergency briefing on the climate crisis has attracted 100,000 signatures, the threshold for getting it debated in Parliament, whose next session begins September 1.

Kahn was only half right, however, when he opined that “the climate emergency is here, and no one can say they didn’t see it coming.” Yes, the emergency is here, and “coming faster and harder” than even scientists expected, economist Matthew Argawala of the University of Sussex said on Britain’s Channel 4. But as Kahn’s own article goes on to lament, a small but noisy chorus of climate deniers still deny that climate change is happening at all.

Kahn cites Donald Trump’s dismissal of climate change as “a con job” and calls out unnamed “opposition politicians and rightwing populists” in the UK. He does not point out that these obstructionists represent only a small fraction of public opinion. More 83 percent of Britons and 74 percent of Americans want their governments to take stronger climate action, according to Gallup polling that informs Covering Climate Now’s 89 Percent Project. But the deniers appear to be more numerous than they actually are, both because they have access to far-reaching megaphones and because most news coverage does not point out how wildly their claims are contradicted by science.

Again, the contrast with media coverage of Covid is striking. On April 23, 2020, as Covid’s death toll was mounting, Trump suggested at a White House press briefing that injecting disinfectant into the body might kill the virus. News outlets responded with a flurry of stories quoting incredulous experts lambasting Trump’s idea as dangerous nonsense. Trump quickly retreated, claiming that he’d been speaking sarcastically (though video of his remarks showed he was serious.)

Most journalists did better than this during Covid, and the public needs us to do better now.

I never met Jason Arday. He is still beloved; my people claim our dead. We do not wait to be introduced before we grieve them, or before the all-too-familiar rage. I will mourn him the way Black people have always mourned in public—telling the truth, correcting the record, and admonishing the sinner. There should be nowhere for them to hide. And there is still time for some of us to do better.

Not an Event, a Mode

Look at what has been laid out for you, dear reader. A man of 41 found in a flat in Battersea, and a police service that calls the death “unexpected, but not suspicious,” as if this shock is, at once, no one’s doing. Before this, a self-described hereditarian trained software on a Black man’s 11-year-old dissertation. It is all arranged, waiting for you to lean in and assess, to weigh—like some Anubis with a mobile phone with all the news apps and socials—whether Jason Arday earned his ruin.

And while you are bent over it, counting his citations, the thing that put him there keeps running on. Isaac Sanders, a doctoral student, already put it plainly on Instagram: “Jason Arday’s research explains exactly what happened to Jason Arday.” Fifteen years “describing his and many others’ lived experience.” “Fighting the tide,” on Black doctoral students trying to enter the profession. “No one can see me cry,” on the mental-health toll carried by Black staff in the university. “Forget the headlines,” Sanders said: “Read the bibliography.” I will leave you to it. Likewise, here I want to reorient us to what has been running in the background, unwatched; constructing and reconstructing sturdy institutions out of the stuff of pseudoscience. From a doctoral thesis 11 years old to a man dead nine days after he resigned. From “questions about his qualifications” to a family begging the press to stop. From who plagiarized, to who is fit to profess at all. From one Black scholar at Cambridge to every one of us reading this, feeling the floor tilting. Do you feel it?

This is not an event. It is a mode—a dynamic, durable apparatus of subjection and disposability that never runs out of supply.

Fuck Them. They Really Are Trying to Destroy Us.

The them is multiple. First, those who make racial hereditarianism their jobs. Second, those who merely use this batshit view—which exhumes the discredited 19th-century canard that Black people are innately, heritably inferior—to win convenient populist political ballast, or monetizable attention. What they share is a false racial grievance: the insistence that the inclusion of Black people steals what should belong to white folks by right. But also the they who built the pedestal and sold tickets to the toppling; focusing intensely, all along, precisely on what matters least, while ignoring the harder, critical questions. Fuck all of them.

I will say the quiet part out loud and plainly, since they count on our being too ashamed to say it. Most of us came in through the door that affirmative action pried open, and there is no shame in it. It was put in place only a very short time ago, as a corrective for violently enforced legal exclusion that is even older than Cambridge—and which is yet still unpaid-for and yet unrepaired.

To arrive through a remedy is not to arrive on sufferance. Once inside, we do the work. It is well documented that we write the books and rebuild the fields, shape-shifting whole disciplines. In fact, this is part of why they are mad. We teach your children—all of them, every background—to think better and be better than they learned at home. You are welcome.

Insignificant to Science, Indispensable to Politics: In the Tense of Due Diligence

Nathan Cofnas—a self-proclaimed “race realist” whose “hereditarianism” is scientifically condemned, and who has held only fixed-term academic posts (and that’s only part of the reason he seems mad)—is too useful to the movement to discard. While his work is published as philosophy, not science, it is indispensable to politics. He has been clear about his plan since at least 2024. Having already published that in a true meritocracy the number of Black professors would fall to almost none, after he was fired by Cambridge’s Emmanuel College, he informed donors to his Free Speech Union fundraising page of his effort to champion “the right of academics to express politically incorrect views about race.” Politically incorrect—as if what he peddles were a rude opinion at a dinner party.

Hereditarianism is not a suppressed viewpoint. It is a defeated one. Haitian anthropologist Anténor Firmin provided the evidence against the race science of his century in 1885.

But, as a hustler is wont to do, Cofnas is running game: “Politically incorrect” attempts to convert a refuted scientific claim into a suppressed viewpoint, and a suppressed viewpoint into a protected belief. That a county court in England bought the okey-doke of his lawsuit against Emmanuel for “belief discrimination” does not make it anything other than what it is. He announced the strategy, raised the money for it, and won—he lost his own suit and won the ruling he was really after—not vindication, but the finding: that his “views about race” are a protected belief the law must shield. Then Cofnas turned it on: fed a Black man’s 11-year-old dissertation through software until it raised a flag. The way this usually goes, a plagiarism accusation is answered quietly—an inquiry, a correction, a retraction—not in the media. But none of that mattered; the campaign had already chosen him.

Reporters and pundits seemed to pick at the account of Arday’s life for sport; spinning a plagiarism inquiry into hundreds of articles about a man’s childhood, and his account of himself. The media attention and incessant parasocial chatter has not stopped. Not even after his family begged them to, following his death.

Respectable outlets that would never print a race scientist, perish the thought, took the racist premise of hereditarianism—barely scrubbed of its stench—and ran it in the pretense of due diligence. They laundered it and executed it. A Black scholar’s standing is counterfeit until a machine says otherwise.

The House Witness

Some do not wait to have “token” thrust upon them but run headlong to the cover to proclaim it. Staff writer at The Atlantic and former Bates College assistant professor Tyler Austin Harper’s September cover story, “Confessions of a Token Black Professor” was not his first turn as the house witness. Months earlier, he indicted the Mellon Foundation and its president, Elizabeth Alexander, for pledging that “there won’t be a penny…not contributing to a more fair, more just, more beautiful society”—as though justice and beauty were crimes. He first made Alexander his exhibit; then, for the cover, made an exhibit of himself. He called the academy “a new model of inclusive exclusion,” making himself its representative wound. He confessed to having been hired as “a scholar second, if at all,” then admitted that he found himself “reflexively” wondering whether the other professors of color were “up to the job.”

Harper did Cofnas’s work from the inside, signing the putative “confession” they have wanted for two generations.

Be a token, if you must. But we will not abide the miserable inference—the dog whistle, I am not like those others—that we who came through a door nailed shut against our parents and grandparents, and did the work once we were through it, should carry any shame for being in the classroom or editorial meeting.

A token is placed. It is a thing set down by one who imagines they can therefore pick it back up and do with it what they will.

Speak for yourself, son. You have never spoken for us.

Gears and Levers

This is not merely a scandal, or an excess to be adjudicated in think pieces good only for outrage and then forgotten. It is far from an aberration. This is the design working.

I say “fuck them” because this is a program—announced, funded, and now affirmed in a British court—running exactly as intended. This machine’s money, personnel, and half-century of patience do not stop at Britain’s shoreline. Cofnas’s ruling, Harper’s cover, a chancellor’s commissioned report, and the money behind them, are gears and levers of one transatlantic apparatus; turned on both shores by many of the same people, and pointed at the same target. Still, we are not the ultimate target: behind us is a public, in Britain and America, kept from seeing how it is governed, by whom, and in whose interest. The standing of Black scholars—the fields and institutions and access we built on both sides of the water—forms a barricade they mean to clear in higher education, cultural institutions, and philanthropy, toward that end.

Consider Eric Kaufmann. He co-authored the Policy Exchange report that called for a government “Director of Academic Freedom” at Britain’s higher-education regulator—an office empowered to investigate universities and press for penalties, which Britain created in its 2023 free-speech act. He is also an adjunct fellow at New York’s Manhattan Institute, from which he has urged the American academy to follow Britain’s lead and let the government audit and fine its universities.

A movement that seeks to audit, fine, and defund speech it does not like is not a defender of speech. This is a transatlantic movement to end the independent production of knowledge about race and power—and to decide, on both shores, who is permitted to produce it at all.

No Standing to Audit Us

My warrant to be here was never anyone’s to hand me, and so it is not anyone’s to revoke. It was secured before I drew breath—by people forbidden on pain of the lash to learn their letters. They learned them anyway and transformed literature. Their example is the standard by which Black scholars continue to contribute (and, let’s be real, many of us consistently out do many of our colleagues). This is the standard of a people whose ancestors were turned from these same gates with police batons and statutes. They tried anyway. Sent their children. Some died trying. That is the warrant I hold to not only master the discipline, but to show where it has gone wrong, where it has no standing, and to transform it for the good of the world. Not by the largesse or grace of any institution, but as a debt paid—constantly compounded and repaid through our labor here, in the logic of the plantation. Always newly arriving in the discipline or department or masthead or byline or classroom. They have no standing to audit me. I will not allow Cofnas’s ledger.

Looked at one way, they have won. He is gone and the chilling effect—felt by scholars in Britain and in America—is real. They will likely continue their crusade, undeterred by this reminder of the real human costs. But, there is still time for some of us to do better.

In the tradition of the Black jeremiad—a form of speech that proclaims and exhorts, condemning wrongdoing, but holding out hope for the future—let us turn from them to us.

“Turn to your neighbor,” a preacher might say! You and I, who watched all of it. Those who read the first headline and let “plagiarism” settle softly into “where there’s smoke…” Who forwarded and ridiculed. You and I who clicked, and clicked, and told ourselves that reading is not the same as consuming. But Jimmy Baldwin already revealed the deadly sin of false innocence. What the world took in as ‘content’ now documents a man’s last excruciating months on this earth.

At least those who build the machine know what they are. It is the ones who believe their hands are clean who keep it running—“We only watched, only read, only wondered aloud whether he’d done it…”—especially those who know better and seem unwilling to fucking stand up and fight against the machine. Turn to your neighbor and say: “We can do better.”

To them: Find something better to do with your time than hunt for alibis for your motivated racist assumptions. Go build a thing of your own. Grieve your own dead. Read a book by one of the people you have been trying to unmake: You may even be the better for it.

We have buried more of us than you will ever trouble to count, and we are still here. We are not going anywhere. And we remember every name—ours, and yours.

Keep our names out your mouth.

After the first Trump administration purposely broke the 2020 Census—the decennial population count that determines congressional representation, among other things—I implored the Biden administration to do away with Trump’s warped count and commission an accurate one. I said it should be unconscionable to spend 10 years relying on a census that purposely undercounted Black and brown voters, as it would make it even easier for Republicans to gerrymander away minority political representation.

The Biden administration, of course, did nothing to fix the problem, and Republicans have indeed done everything they can to erase minority representation through gerrymandering. Now Donald Trump is back, and his administration is taking another stab at ruining the Census. This time it’s not only trying to juice GOP representation in Congress but also trying to ensure massive changes in how federal resources are allocated.

Back during Trump’s first term, his administration did not get everything it wanted out of the 2020 Census. You might remember that, in 2019, Trump desperately tried to add a citizenship question to that Census but was blocked by the Supreme Court. Now that he has returned to power, his administration is trying to add a citizenship question to the 2030 Census—a question that will have two separate but related effects. The first is that it will deter some noncitizens from filling out the form, and the second is that the government will then exclude many of the noncitizens who do answer from the final count. The result: an artificially depressed population count in a number of states.

The fact that Trump is planning anything around the 2030 Census is mildly worrisome to me, given that Trump is supposed to be out of power by then. However, the decennial Census is a massive government undertaking, and mid-decade planning for the thing is not inherently abnormal.

Moreover, Trump’s attempt to radically change the Census just as the count was set to get started in 2019 is what scuttled his plan. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the unanimous opinion blocking the addition of the citizenship question, arguing that the administration’s reason for adding the question was contrived, and thus the administration didn’t meet the criteria for amending the Census questionnaire. This time, Trump is starting early and doing what the court pretty much told him to do to get a second bite at the apple. This is the consistent call-and-response practice between the court and this president: Trump tries something outrageous; the Supreme Court says “no” but tells him exactly how to do it in the future; Trump does it the way the Supreme Court wants and then gets his way. Remember this when you’re “celebrating” any ruling that initially seems adverse to Trump’s plans.

In any event, blocking noncitizens from being counted by the Census would be a devastating change, not only to how we determine political representation but also to how the government functions. Trump and the Republicans justify the citizenship question by arguing that, since noncitizens can’t vote, they shouldn’t be included in our Census counts. That argument is flawed. Noncitizens still use, and are entitled to use, government resources, which means that having an accurate count of how many people live in a state or locality, regardless of citizenship or voting status, is still critical. It literally determines what cut of federal funding states and localities get across a host of issues.

Moreover, excluding noncitizens from the count is not the only major change Trump is planning for the 2030 Census. Talking Points Memo obtained a draft copy of the new rules circulating around the Department of Commerce (the executive agency charged with administering the Census) and discovered that the Trump administration is also trying to change how people record where they live; the administration wants to shift from using a person’s “usual residence” to the one available on their tax records.

This is a direct attack on young people, and especially college students. Often the “usual residence” of a student or recent graduate is, you know, where they actually live: in a college dorm, town, or urban enclave. But, for the purposes of taxes, they might still be listed as living with their parents. I, for instance, lived and voted in Massachusetts during college and law school, but my tax residence never changed from my parents’ house in New York. This change would essentially give young people less political power, while giving their parents more.

There’s a third proposed change that would potentially be more devastating than all the others: Trump wants the Census to stop counting the race and ethnicity of the people living in this country.

I am sure that Republicans will try to sell this change as some kind of wonderful, post-racial, “colorblind” moment of social advancement, but do not fall for the Kumbaya okey doke. Knowing the racial and ethnic makeup of the country is critical for a number of programs designed both to ameliorate the legacies of segregation and racism and to identify new expressions of bigotry. Even though the current administration thinks those programs should not exist, the hope is that Trump won’t be in charge through 2040. Yet if he is able to prevent the government from counting the number of Black and brown people in the country, he will be able to frustrate restarting those programs, even long after he is (hopefully) out of power.

And then there’s the more immediate problem of congressional redistricting. Remember, racially motivated gerrymanders are the only kind of gerrymanders that are still, technically speaking, unconstitutional according to this Supreme Court. But if Trump can prevent the government from counting where minorities live, it will be truly impossible to ever prove that a gerrymander was designed to take away their power. You won’t be able to argue that a district was designed to erase the Black vote if you are not allowed to know where Black people actually live.

There’s also the argument that the forced ignorance of our racial and ethnic makeup is textbook erasure of minority communities. Whatever we want to do with the information about race and ethnicity, we should at least have it as part of our official count of ourselves.

Given the Trump administration’s well-documented racial animus, I have to assume that these proposals will go forward as part of the planning for the 2030 Census. I also have to assume that the Supreme Court will allow these changes to go through, as their concerns last time were entirely process-oriented, and Trump is giving himself enough time to do the process correctly.

That means that the only real chance to stop this will be for Democrats to take control of the White House in 2028 and put somebody in charge at the Commerce Department who will be laser-focused on fixing the Census. Democrats must recognize the problem, the existential danger it poses, and prioritize correcting it.

This is not a sexy issue. “I will unfuck the Census,” is not going to generate a lot of applause during a stump speech in New Hampshire. And yet, it must be a critical, “first hundred days” priority for an incoming Democratic administration—if we are allowed to have one.

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

Hubert Harrison was a Caribbean-born educator and activist who was a prominent advocate for labor rights, free speech, radical internationalism, and free love in the Jim Crow era. He inspired and contributed to political organizations and cultural movements as diverse as the Socialist Party, the Marcus Garvey movement, and the so-called “Harlem Renaissance.” Harrison also wrote a number of pieces for The Nation in the 1920s as the magazine’s first regular Black book reviewer.

Now an acclaimed new book by Brian Kwoba, an associate professor of history and director of the African and African American Studies program at the University of Memphis, examines the life and thought of this unjustly neglected figure. Hubert Harrison: Forbidden Genius of Black Radicalism has won the 2026 Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association and the 2026 Phillis Wheatley Book Award from the Sons and Daughters of the United States Middle Passage. The Nation spoke with Kwoba about Harrison’s legacy and its significance for political transformation today.

—Peter Cole

Peter Cole: Hubert Harrison was an incredible figure, but few people know about him outside of Black-studies departments. So tell us who he was and why he mattered.

Brian Kwoba: In September 1912, a century before Occupy Wall Street, a Black orator’s booming baritone occupied the attention of a large crowd in front of the New York Stock Exchange building on Wall Street. It was the voice of Hubert Harrison; he was making the case for socialism. The New York Times described him as “an eloquent and forceful negro speaker” who had “shattered all records for distance” in his address on behalf of working people and against the robber-baron oligarchs of the Gilded Age.

After blazing a trail for Black activists in the Socialist Party, Harrison called for an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist Colored International alliance in the face of European colonialism in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Most spectacularly, Harrison’s Liberty League of Negro Americans catalyzed the rise of Marcus Garvey, who headed the largest international organization of Black people in modern history.

PC: How, when, and where did Harrison become
radicalized?

BK: Harrison was born on the island of St. Croix in 1883 and moved to New York City in 1900 as a teenager. There he saw firsthand vast wealth inequality and heard constant reports on the national epidemic of white racist lynchings of African Americans. Like so many other Caribbean migrants who had come to the United States, Harrison was shocked by the intensity of the racial violence he found here.

PC: What was Harrison’s relationship with the Industrial Workers of the World, the wider labor movement, and the Socialist Party?

BK: Harrison held a number of the odd jobs available to a young Black immigrant in early-20th-century Manhattan. Eventually he secured a job as a postal worker and joined the postal workers’ union. But after he wrote op-ed pieces critical of Booker T. Washington’s conservatism, Washington’s “Tuskegee Machine” got him fired. Far from discouraging him, the retaliatory firing led Harrison to join the Socialist Party as a full-time paid organizer.

Harrison campaigned several times for Eugene Debs for president. He also wrote a series on “The Negro and Socialism” in the party’s International Socialist Review and articles in The New York Call analyzing race and class in the United States as seen through a historical-materialist lens. He then launched the Colored Socialist Club in Harlem, the party’s first official Black-led formation, to recruit Black workers and organizers. Unfortunately, the party failed to heed his call for special attention to the serious oppression of Black workers, who, he argued, formed the most proletarian element in the country.

This unsavory experience with what he called the “Southernism” (i.e., anti-Black racism) of the Socialists led him to support the more radical Industrial Workers of the World, which welcomed Black workers and Black labor leaders like Ben Fletcher into its ranks. Harrison was the only Black speaker to address strike rallies and union meetings alongside IWW leaders like Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and “Big Bill” Haywood during the Paterson Silk Strike of over 20,000 workers in 1913.

PC: Harrison became an influence on Marcus Garvey, who founded and led the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Tell us about that.

BK: When Garvey founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association in 1914, he aimed to build a Tuskegee-style industrial school in Jamaica. In 1917, shortly after Garvey got to Harlem, he joined Harrison’s Liberty League of Negro Americans. The Liberty League transformed Garvey by imbuing him with a “race-first” politics, a mass-movement (rather than school-building) orientation, and a model for including African Americans and African Caribbeans in a single organization. Eventually Garvey left the league, but he adopted key elements of Harrison’s model to expand the Universal Negro Improvement Association into the largest international organization of Black people in modern history. In other words, Marcus Garvey’s name would never have become attached to the global Black-nationalist movement without the decisive influence of Hubert Harrison.

At the same time, Harrison saw firsthand how Garvey’s monarchical, ultranationalist, imperial, and pro-capitalist fixations helped boost Garvey’s ego and mythical status but formed barriers to the project of liberating the Black working class from racial capitalism. If Harrison learned in the Socialist Party that class consciousness will never achieve its goal without a serious grounding in Black liberation, he learned from the Garvey movement that pan-African liberation will never achieve its goal without a deep grounding in class consciousness.

PC: Why did Harrison get so thoroughly erased from popular memory?

BK: This question is the elephant in the room. Harrison proved too hot to handle and too cold to hold, thanks to his incisive criticisms of all the forces and figures that might otherwise have kept his memory alive. Take, for example, the “Harlem Renaissance” narrative: Harrison argued that African Americans had a rich literary heritage from the 19th century onward and thus rejected the notion that a “renaissance” was suddenly underway in the 1920s. He maintained that after the wanton destruction of the First World War, the white cultural-entertainment industry had now turned for inspiration and rejuvenation to the artistic output of the postwar “New Negro” in Harlem. The industry sold handpicked examples of nonthreatening Black artists to white audiences as a “Negro renaissance.”

This idea, and its enshrinement as the hegemonic narrative about Harlem history in the early 20th century, deliberately excluded the many creative people—both within and beyond Harlem—who represented more visionary thinking, like that of the free-loving blues women, Garveyists, Black Marxists, and Harrison himself.

PC: You write that there are things about Harrison’s legacy that are not fully appreciated. Can you tell us what those are?

BK: The most controversial and most generative of them concerns Harrison’s sexual politics, which were not only ahead of his time but apparently ahead of ours, too. Harrison developed a Black free-love politics at a time when such a concept was unthinkably risky and revolutionary.

Harrison’s was a time of strict sexual repression on the part of both church and state through the Comstock laws. White mobs lynched Black men often for the alleged sexual threat they posed to white women. In this sex-negative context, Harrison was one of the first figures in African American history to publicly call for legalizing contraception and offering publicly available courses on sex education; he also openly denounced the church and state repression of sexuality and defended a conception of love based on variety and freedom.

By connecting capitalism, white supremacy, the church, European colonialism, and women’s oppression to compulsory monogamy, Harrison articulated—in the 1910s!—a Black free-love politics that would begin to bloom quite spectacularly in the sexual experimentation that emerged within and alongside the artistic and cultural awakening of the Harlem of the 1920s.

In short, my book does more than simply resurrect a long-lost beacon of possibility from the Black radical tradition. Harrison’s “forbidden genius” offers a gem-filled kaleidoscope of visionary politics for radical transformation in the 21st century. So it’s high time that we reclaim it.

Can the current wave of progressive populism move from its successes in big cities to wins in America’s rural communities and Rust Belt? The answer will likely decide whether Democrats can wrest control of Congress this fall and what the nation’s politics will look like for years to come.

In the far northwest corner of New York State, in a sprawling House district that takes more than four hours to drive across from end to end, Alissa Ellman is inventing her own brand of progressive populism in a race against one of Donald Trump’s closest allies in Congress.

Ellman, 42, is the Democratic nominee in New York’s 24th Congressional District, an expanse populated by dairy farms, apple orchards, and small towns with populations that rarely surpass 10,000. A child of a working-class family, Ellman joined the US Army at 17, was sent to Afghanistan, was exposed to the Army’s toxic burn pits there, and got a deadly cancer. She beat the cancer with medical care from the Veterans Administration and later went to work at the VA helping other veterans get needed services. Then, in February 2025, she was among the first federal workers fired by Elon Musk and DOGE.

Soon afterward, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer plucked her from her small Lockport, NY, home to be his symbolic guest for Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech. Ellman also did a series of national news interviews, on MSNBC and elsewhere. Blunt and plainspoken, she quickly drew the attention of network producers. Trump administration officials also took notice and offered her job back on the condition that she stop talking to the press.

“I was like, ‘Fuck you, I’m running for Congress,’” Ellman said.

Ellman’s November opponent is Representative Claudia Tenney, the most ultra-MAGA member of the state’s House delegation. (One of Tenney’s top legislative priorities is to make Trump’s birthday a national holiday.)

“I’ve talked to approximately 20,000 rural New Yorkers and I ask them all the same question: What matters to you most? And overwhelmingly, it’s just cost. Their electrical has doubled, their cost for interest has doubled,” said Ellman.

But the way Ellman talks about cost issues here differs from many other progressive candidates around the country. “Stop using buzzwords like ‘affordability.’ You have to talk about these issues like a human being and not like an MSNBC host on TV. Talk about the actual electric bill. Talk about the fact that people aren’t moving out of their parents’ homes till they’re 30. Talk about the cost of food, of gas, and maintaining a car.

“Out here, people also want to talk about actual solutions. It’s like when the plumbing breaks in your house. You hire a plumber, you bring in a pipe, you screw it together. People want to know what all of those steps are. They don’t want to just be told that tomorrow you’re going to get up and all the pipes are going to be fixed.”

Ellman said that also applies to the other big issue she hears about while campaigning—the country’s broken healthcare system.

“Medicare for All—80 percent of people do not know what that even means. They’re like, ‘That sounds like some stupid liberal buzzword.’ We have to get people to buy into this. Why don’t we take Medicare for All and initially cover everybody who does physical labor, expand Medicare for those people down to age 45. Why don’t we do that first? Because then we get the buy-in from the people who really need this the most.”

Candidates who campaign in places like this also need to be prepared for voters who bring up hot-button social issues.

“When you’re talking to a person who’s super right-wing, they’ll often immediately bring up trans people. And I’ve learned to just push that away. I’m like, ‘I’m not here to talk about the propaganda of social issues. I’m here to talk about why your electric bill is $750 for a three-bedroom house every month. I’m here to talk about the practical everyday stuff, like is the snow getting plowed?’”

The other hot-button topic in communities like these is guns, which Ellman says is just built into the culture here.

“You grew up as a 10-year-old getting taken out to the big field behind your house and your dad set up some cans and you sat there and you shot at ’em and you learned some gun safety rules. Then one day when you’re around 12, they’re like, ‘Hey, wanna go deer hunting with me? We really gotta fill the freezer this winter.’ And then you go out and you deer hunt for six hours silently in the woods with your dad. Maybe you don’t even shoot at a deer.

“A lot of places are 30 or 40 minutes away from a police station. You think that you’re going to wait around if you’re getting robbed. There’s bears and foxes and you have a small dog or a cat. If we’re going to reform gun laws and burn the political capital that’s going to take, then make a law that’s actually effective. I think that it would be a lot smarter to talk to gun owners and involve them.”

Another issue that Ellman talks about often is a rare one for a progressive woman candidate—the struggles of working-class men.

“I think I have a unique perspective because I was in the Army and I worked with a lot of these people. I’m also married to a very blue-collar working-class guy. What I really think it comes down to is that they feel they’re being screwed, and they’re not wrong. But who are they being screwed by?

“You’re talking about blue-collar working-class men who get up at four in the morning, go outside when it’s four feet of snow on the ground, shovel their driveway, go work outside all day throwing drywall up or pouring roads, hurting their hands, their backs, their knees. I think it makes them people we should really be focused on taking care of in this country. They are the backbone of society. I mean, you like flushing your toilet. You like turning on a light switch.

“They’re sick of their real-life work being less valued than, say, intellectual work. We should be moving that Social Security age down for those people. Do you think your body’s going to last till 65 when you’re picking up 350 pounds of drywall every day for 15 years?”

You also run into a lot of hardcore Trump supporters here. “My answer is connection,” said Ellman. “I talk to them about fishing or hunting or what they like to do. I talk to them about the places that we agree, like, yeah, we should be more fiscally responsible. I think we gotta stop pretending that we have all the answers.”

Ellman also hears story after story about the personal cost of political division. “There’s been so many times that I’ve been told by people, ‘I don’t talk to my brother anymore. I don’t talk to my dad. I don’t go to church anymore. I’m not in the VFW anymore because of MAGA.’ That’s the wrong answer. The right answer is to sit next to those people, smile, and boldly be who you are.

“There’s no shame in standing up for the marginalized. To me that’s very Christ-like.”

“I’m not doing this for any other reason than to fight for people,” Ellman told me, “for my friends and family, my community, the children that my children will grow up with. That’s who I’m fighting for.”

Win or lose in November, progressive populists looking to build support in communities like these would do well to listen to Ellman, especially those in New York City who harbor ambitions statewide down the road.

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

Gaza—Yasmeen al-Jamala still hears her infant son’s scream.

One night, her baby suddenly cried out. She switched on a flashlight and found his face covered in blood. A large weasel, big as a cat, had attacked him while he slept.

“Now I dream that something is coming for him every night,” she says.

Since that night, she checks her son repeatedly after he falls asleep. Every unfamiliar sound sends her reaching for a flashlight. Like many parents in Gaza, she says she no longer fears only what falls from the sky. She fears what emerges from the darkness after the bombing stops.

The world watches Gaza through the spectacle of bombs, tanks, and diplomacy. Yet some of the clearest evidence of the humanitarian collapse we now face comes in much smaller forms: weasels, rats, and other vermin moving freely through tents, hospitals, and ruined neighborhoods.

For many outside Gaza, rats may sound like a secondary concern when compared with bombs and bullets. But anyone who has lived through humanitarian disasters understands their significance. Rats spread disease. They contaminate food supplies. They transform misery into something even more degrading.

This is what prolonged humanitarian collapse feels like—not a single dramatic moment, but the slow accumulation of indignities that make ordinary life almost impossible.

The rats are simply the most visible warning.

According to Gaza municipality spokesperson Hosni Mhanna, more than 350,000 tons of garbage now lie uncollected across Gaza City, alongside roughly 25 million tons of rubble. The destruction of Gaza’s sewage systems and Israel’s refusal to allow the entry of adequate supplies of pesticides have created ideal conditions for rodents to multiply.

Their presence is a reminder that modern warfare does not end with explosions. It lingers in the poisoned water, the mountains of uncollected rubbish, the collapsed sewage systems and the desperate overcrowding that follows. Rodents thrive because the systems that keep human beings healthy and safe have collapsed. They run through streets where children still play because there is nowhere else for either of them to go. They climb over tents pitched beside mountains of rubbish because families have nowhere else to sleep. They enter homes whose doors no longer close because explosions have shattered the walls. They terrorize children trying to sleep in makeshift shelters.

Families have developed new nightly rituals. Before trying to sleep, they shake out blankets, inspect mattresses, and shine cell-phone flashlights into the corners of tents. Shoes are turned upside down before anyone slips them on in the morning. Food, when there is any, is hung from ropes or placed on makeshift shelves in the hope that rodents cannot reach it. Parents keep watch long after their children fall asleep, listening for the scratching sounds that signal another unwelcome visitor.

Sleep itself has become fragmented. Many people have told me that they wake repeatedly through the night, startled by movement against the tent walls or by the sound of plastic sheeting rustling. For a population already exhausted by months of bombardment, displacement and hunger, even the few hours meant for rest are no longer safe.

Almost every dawn, I watch them from my window. Rats and weasels emerge from the darkness and disappear into the ruined houses opposite our building, entering homes where families continue trying to live.

The infestation is no longer confined to tents. Before sunrise, people making their way to the dawn prayer walk cautiously through the darkness, watching the ground as much as the sky, knowing they may encounter rats before they reach the mosque.

Sondos Hamdan, who is pregnant, says she dreads the arrival of the night.

“I don’t sleep anymore,” she says. “My doctor told me not even to try to fight them. The fear alone could cause complications with my pregnancy.”

She is far from alone. Parents speak of feeling helpless as they try to protect children from dangers they cannot control. Mothers describe sleeping lightly so they can wake at the slightest sound. Fathers search for scraps of wood or metal to block gaps beneath tents, knowing the barriers rarely work. Every evening brings the same calculation: Where is the safest place to sleep tonight?

Many say the fear itself has become another form of exhaustion. Surviving the bombs no longer guarantees a peaceful night.

Inshirah Hajjaj sleeps with her feet uncovered because diabetes leaves them burning at night. One morning she opened her eyes to find blood pooling beneath her leg. During the night, a weasel had bitten two of her toes. It was the second time this had happened.

None of this happened by accident.

Garbage accumulates because there is nowhere to take it. Sewage spills because treatment plants cease functioning. Food scraps become impossible to dispose of safely. Entire families are forced into overcrowded camps where sanitation is scarce and privacy is nonexistent. Every one of these conditions creates the perfect environment for rats to flourish.

In normal times, rodents are controlled by functioning municipalities, waste collection services, sanitation workers, and public-health systems. They disappear into the background because governments and communities ensure that they do. But in war, those invisible systems disappear first.

History repeatedly demonstrates that war creates ideal conditions for epidemics. Destroy sanitation infrastructure, and infectious diseases soon follow. Limit clean water, and illnesses spread rapidly. Force hundreds of thousands into overcrowded shelters and preventable health emergencies become almost inevitable.

At Al-Shifa Hospital, emergency physician Dr. Muneer al-Shakhrit says such cases are becoming increasingly familiar. Patients arrive with bites from rodents and other animals. Those with diabetes face particular danger because they often cannot feel injuries immediately. Some require intensive care because of rat-bite fever and other infections.

For 20-year-old Amany Abu Selmi, the rodents devoured something less tangible than food. Days before her wedding, rats chewed through the clothes she had carefully prepared as a bride. Even joy, in Gaza, has become something that must survive infestation.

No society should accept that children grow up surrounded by rubble, waste, and vermin. No humanitarian response should consider such conditions anything approaching normal.

Wars inevitably produce destruction. Yet international humanitarian principles exist precisely because civilians should not bear unlimited consequences for conflicts beyond their control. The protection of public health, access to sanitation, and the preservation of basic living conditions are not luxuries to be discussed after a ceasefire. They are essential to preventing even greater suffering while conflict continues.

The longer these conditions persist, the greater the risk becomes. Rodent infestations are not merely unpleasant. They increase the likelihood of disease transmission, contaminate food supplies, and deepen psychological trauma among populations already living under extraordinary stress. For children especially, the experience of sleeping in fear—not only of air strikes but of the creatures crawling through their tents—adds another layer of suffering that cannot easily be measured.

Rats do what rats have always done. They follow waste, destruction, and neglect. Human beings, however, have choices.

The question history will ask is not why the rats came. It is why the world accepted the conditions that invited them.

Voting is a defining right of citizenship in a democracy. That’s why the United States can only be described as one after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 overturned the Jim Crow–era laws that systematically robbed Black Americans of the right to vote. But in April, the Supreme Court voted to gut what little remains of that legislation. The court’s conservative supermajority ruled in Louisiana v. Callais that race-conscious congressional maps violate the Constitution but partisan ones do not. In a country where race so often predicts party, racist mapmakers can plead partisan intentions, and the court has put the burden of proof on their critics. The effect is that racist gerrymandering is nearly impossible to challenge. This outcome seems to have finally forced Democrats to recognize that attacks on Black citizenship are attacks on democracy itself.

Too bad that recognition comes so terribly, tragically late. Louisiana v. Callais was an utterly predictable milestone in the right’s ongoing legal and cultural counterrevolution against Black civil rights and Black citizenship itself. And it was Democrats’ passivity and even deference in the face of that counterrevolution that helped enable its success.

Since public outrage over the killing of George Floyd briefly forced Americans to reckon with our legacy of racial injustice, the right has been overt in its frontal attack on the struggle for Black equality. Most often, we heard about the right’s attacks on speech—on slogans like “Black Lives Matter,” which the right derided as racially exclusionary, or on crucial concepts, often developed by scholars, like critical race theory, intersectionality, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). But the backlash quickly turned from the rhetorical to the material: Within one year of 2020’s Black Lives Matter protests, more than 100 bills to limit the rights of protesters were introduced nationwide, and at least three states passed “hit and kill” laws to shield people who struck protesters with their vehicles from criminal or civil liability. Nearly 900 proposals to limit how educators teach race and sex were filed at the local, state, and federal level, with 21 states codifying restrictions on classroom instruction about slavery and racism. The right’s attacks on DEI programs would help justify everything from 600,000 Black women losing their jobs within Trump’s first year back in office, to purges of Black historical artifacts from museums, to the cancellation of long-overdue sanitation improvements in the Black Belt. Eventually, Republicans reduced this entire assault to a war on wokeness, a word they redefined and weaponized to mean anything related to race.

Each attack further normalized the idea that Black claims to equal citizenship are illegitimate. “They start out by demonizing our language,” Stacey Abrams, the voting-rights activist, attorney, and former Georgia lawmaker, said recently on her podcast, Assembly Required. “It then moves to litigation to dismantle the rights we have. And then, eventually, to legislation to ensure we can never build them back.”

Instead of rebutting these attacks, Democrats blamed the very language that the right was demeaning—and rushed to disavow it themselves. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders argued that the Democrats lost the 2024 presidential election because they presented themselves as “a party of identity politics.” Virginia Senator Mark Warner claimed that the party’s “over-the-top wokeism” resulted in “a valid attack.” Washington Representative Adam Smith sought counsel not from the scholars and community organizers whose ideas had been openly—and proudly—distorted by the conservative activist Christopher Rufo, but from Rufo himself. In early 2025, the center-left think tank Third Way convened a group of moderate Democrats in order to, as Third Way’s summary of the gathering described it, “chart the Democratic comeback.” The bulk of their grievances, Politico reported, “centered on the kind of identity politics that they believed lost them races up and down the ballot.” The group’s top recommendation was for the party to “move away from identity politics.” A follow-up list of over 40 terms to avoid included intersectionality and critical theory, lest Democrats be seen as “enforcers of wokeness.”

This was tantamount to cosigning the moral panic spread by Republicans. It reinforced the lie that the problem was the language of racial justice instead of the injustices the language was trying to name. “This is perhaps a reflection of one thing that the right did understand about us,” Kimberlé Crenshaw, the legal scholar who coined the term intersectionality and worked with other scholars to develop critical race theory, suggested to me: “that our commitments to these so-called values, and our literacy with the ideas that are an expression of those values, was tepid at best.”

Then conservatives used what Crenshaw calls the “Trojan horse of wokeness” to mainstream ideas that had previously been considered extreme. The right increasingly called for circumscribed citizenship, from propagating the idea of “heritage Americans” to attempting to overturn birthright citizenship. “I would often say, ‘If you think [that conservatives are] moving into this space only to eliminate the things you don’t really know or feel ambivalent about—structural racism, critical race theory, the 1619 Project—you are so sadly mistaken,’” Crenshaw told me. “‘Because it is going to transcend, it’s going to metastasize, and it’s eventually going to take out a bigger chunk of what you may value as part of our collective history.’”

Someday, historians will retrace the steps leading to this authoritarian moment, and they will undoubtedly point to Republicans’ steady march toward extremism. But I hope they will also note that Democrats helped clear the path by treating each right-wing attack on Black citizenship as a fight too politically risky to wage, until we ended up with this frontal assault—first on the words, then on the laws, and now on democracy itself.

Imagine that you’ve woken up one morning as a protein-“maxxing” influencer—an online personality focused on maximizing your health and body aesthetics by dialing up your protein intake. Your daily video stream might start with a protein electrolyte water followed by some weightlifting. For breakfast, you might eat several eggs with squash and avocado (to make sure you’re also maxxing healthy fat and beta-carotene), or you might keep it simple with a pound of fried ground beef. Lunch might be a human-brain-size glob of chopped raw tuna, a big juicy steak, or a Japanese fried-rice-and-tempeh dish sponsored by your vegan coaching company. At some point, you will likely consume a protein shake, a perfect opportunity to promote your self-branded protein powder. Dinner might be meat again, or perhaps a chicken quesadilla split into multiple protein-bearing sections. Or, stripping off the thin veneer of normalcy that separates man from goblin, you could feast on raw organ meats just like Liver King, a fitness influencer who claims to emulate the “ancestral lifestyle” of our Paleolithic forebears.

Even if you aren’t plugged into the online proteinverse, you have certainly observed the nutrient’s takeover of your local grocery store. You’ve seen the bars and shakes, the supplements and powders. You’ve ogled the protein water and perhaps even noticed that your favorite brand of heavy cream boasts “uttermost protein.” Pizza crust, Cup Noodles, even cocktails (witness the Espresso Proteini)—no food or drink, it seems, is safe from Big Protein, a multibillion-dollar enterprise since at least 2020. By now, protein is just one more metric to maxx in our never-ending pursuit of the optimal self.

What low fat was to the 1980s and ’90s, and low carb was to the 2000s, high protein is to our current era. As media outlets analyze America’s love affair with this macronutrient, noted protein-enjoyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is helping to revise government nutrition policy. With its top-heavy look, RFK Jr.’s inverted food pyramid recalls the V-shaped male torso idealized by the online self-improvement community of “looksmaxxers.” The discourse, like the processed-food and supplement industries, has itself become protein-rich—and, in the case of the food pyramid, helps signal the Trump administration’s alignment with the masculinist right.

More than an Internet fad, more even than the food industry’s latest effort to wrest profit from an increasingly fickle and economically stressed public, proteinmaxxing is part of the deep-rooted social pathology of nutritionism: the idea that a whole food is no more and no less than the sum of its parts. This reductive approach to eating marks proteinmaxxing as part of what might be called the Great Unbundling, which atomizes our bodies and minds as surely as bag-check fees have been separated out from base airfares. In the Great Unbundling, we experience the logical end point of a culture that regards an overwhelming array of choices as capitalism’s greatest gift. Whether you’re ordering takeout or choosing a healthcare plan, the thinking goes, you’ll be happiest if you can select from multiple options, tailor-making your own bliss.

On the food front, the Great Unbundling has convinced Americans that healthy diets are made up of discrete nutrients that can be chemically disaggregated from their source foods and ingested in optimal doses. Food science has made it possible to isolate, say, an apple’s natural antioxidants and process them into any number of “apple-inspired” derivatives. The problem is that the resulting App’lGlop™ may not be as nourishing as an apple—or it may be so addictive that you can’t stop yourself from consuming 47 pouches, at 7,000 percent of your recommended dietary allowance of sugar. These defects are obscured by marketing and advertising, enabled by the government’s laissez-faire attitude toward the food industry’s health claims.

This regulatory environment pushes consumers into what the 1990s-era conspiracy theorist Milton William Cooper called “doing your own research,” or scouring the Internet for clues about which supplement or superfood may be right for them. The gamified logic that has transformed us into a nation of food-science Indiana Joneses also animates our drive for self-optimization. We constantly have to convince ourselves that we’re having a peak experience rather than an impoverished one: Hey, you’re not slowly killing yourself by subsisting exclusively on frozen pizza—you’re getting 32 grams of protein!

In the end, what gets unbundled along with our purchases is our self-perception. We begin to understand ourselves not as an integrated whole but as a collection of swappable parts that can be tuned up ad infinitum. Yet no matter how much time, money, or protein powder we invest in, the human condition guarantees that perfection will remain out of reach.

America has long been a nation of dietary obsessives, our food habits shaped less by our own tastes than by others’ religious beliefs or profit motives. Long before megacorporations like Sysco were reducing restaurant menus to standardized blandness, Americans had learned to elevate convenience and uniformity over enjoyment, freshness, and regional specificity. In the 19th century, the domestic-science movement led a broad shift away from homemade foods based on family tradition toward processed ones. As the food historian Laura Shapiro has written, domestic scientists—drawn from an emerging class of mostly white, East Coast professionals—believed that “if they could reform American eating habits, they could reform Americans” themselves. The nation’s fate, it seemed, hung on the willingness of home cooks, whether ladies of the house or hired hands, to step into the bright, sanitized world of measuring spoons and packaged yeast. Only after the housewife was cleansed of irrational attachments—to her hard-won intuitions, to her country or ethnicity of origin, to her very senses—could she adequately support her family’s pursuit of the American dream.

Enter the cooking schools, which aimed to supplant guesswork with measurement and to cure cognitive overload with planning. Smothering all variations in season, region, and taste beneath a prim, starched, Bostonian sameness, cooking-school instructors helped establish a food culture that proved durable precisely because it was boring. The women who championed this new type of cooking, Shapiro writes, “were proud of their lifeless palates,” which they considered essential to creating a healthful national cuisine. The American food of the future might not taste great, but it would fuel healthy, morally upright workers. In contrast to these lofty goals, Shapiro writes, “the flavors of food were of slight, somewhat anthropological interest.”

The idea of food as a shortcut to Protestant virtue is still with us today. It lives on in the joyless slop served in American hospitals and nursing homes; in Nutraloaf, the homogenized nightmare blob used to punish US prison inmates; and in products like Huel and Soylent, the “nutritionally complete,” “science-backed” bachelor chow beloved by tech bros. This form of pragmatism-maxxing has also enabled the protein bar—the gentleman’s Nutraloaf—to leap from some venture capitalist’s carceral imagination to a bodega near you.

Once food is understood primarily as fuel, and those it is fueling as engines of national prosperity, the path toward dehumanization has been laid. Today, all that remains of the cooking-school teacher’s earnestness, her Quakerish simplicity, is a commitment to hard work and deprivation. Fold in a bottomless appetite for quarterly earnings and you have the perfect food-industry executive. He and a diffuse network of online health-and-wellness influencers—including proteinmaxxers—work symbiotically to convince the American worker-consumer that food is just one more metric to optimize. Just as some 19th-century housewives were enthralled by cooking-school notions of health and hygiene, so are their descendants trapped in the ideal of productivity. Eager to perform efficiency (and thus, we hope, maintain our family’s health-insurance coverage), we will wolf down a sad desk lunch instead of taking a break. All the better if, loaded with protein, this meal helps us soldier on until we can prepare for the next day.

But should we, in fact, be proteinmaxxing? Signs point to no. The Trump administration may be telling us to “prioritize protein foods at every meal,” but most Americans are eating plenty of protein. In fact, we are probably eating too much—around one gram per kilogram of body weight on average, with two-thirds of it coming from meat. Instead, we could all probably benefit from more fiber. The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) recommends 25 grams a day for women and 38 for men, but Americans typically eat only about 10 to 15 grams—far short of the ideal daily dose. Insufficient fiber can lead to constipation, which a recent study linked to major depression. With such low fiber intake, is it any wonder that Americans are as miserable as ever?

The food we consume every day befits our status as pawns in the Great Unbundling. Attractively packaged and flawlessly marketed to the micro-demographic we identify with, our meals are more likely to be heavily processed than fresh-cooked from whole foods. Their ingredients are often shipped from far away rather than produced locally. They may be so sweet or salty, so loaded with satiety-defying ingredients, that our brains forget how little nourishment we’re actually getting. And since this type of food lends itself to solo eating, it often doesn’t provide the social connection that humans are hard-wired to crave.

Lawmakers have not only failed to keep up with the industry guile that makes these foods so ubiquitous in the American diet, but in many cases they have actually aided and abetted it. Since 1906, US law has held food manufacturers to specific labeling requirements for imitation goods, such as alternative proteins. In 1938, it became illegal to sell an imitation unless “its label bears, in type of uniform size and prominence, the word ‘imitation’ and, immediately thereafter, the name of the food imitated.” This is how we got, say, Trader Joe’s Surimi Imitation Crabmeat, or “krab.”

What the 1938 law did not do, however, was to define imitation. Over the years, industry scientists created products that mimicked the taste and texture of foods like hamburgers and ice cream while containing few of their actual ingredients. In 1973, the Food and Drug Administration sought to dispel confusion by distinguishing “imitations” from “substitutes.” The former were defined as nutritionally inferior and required special labeling. Substitutes, on the other hand, were deemed nutritionally equivalent to the products they imitated and could be sold without further ado. “Subsequently,” one analysis of the 1973 law notes, “the range and variety of substitute products on the market significantly increased.”

For food manufacturers, permission to flood the zone with appealingly labeled knockoff foods—from lemonless lemonade to high-protein meatless “crumbles”—was a major victory. Consumers, meanwhile, became increasingly perplexed, not to mention diseased. In 1968, the Senate convened a Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs to help mitigate hunger and malnutrition. Soon, however, the committee began trying to understand why Americans were suffering from such high rates of heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. Its conclusion—that, far from suffering from malnutrition, “at least 30 million Americans” were actually overeating—was reflected in a 1977 report titled Dietary Goals for the United States. The first edition of Dietary Goals recommended that Americans “reduce consumption of meat,” among other high-calorie foods. Under pressure from the food industry, however, the committee issued a second edition that replaced the “eat less” messaging with ambivalent, unbundled guidance like “decrease consumption of animal fats.”

This seemingly innocuous terminological shift was a boon for the food industry. If, in 1973, manufacturers had won the right to market imitations without labeling them as such, now they could formulate products featuring more or less of whatever nutrients the government favored, then advertise them as health foods. One result was the low-fat-diet craze, which dominated the nutrition landscape from approximately 1980 through the mid-2010s. Newly empowered to make health claims, the food industry began churning out low- or no-fat products packed with sugar, vegetable oils, and fillers. An unintended consequence was the “SnackWell effect,” wherein a person feels so virtuous for having chosen a low-fat food that they gorge themselves on it. But even as many of these products were touted as “reduced-guilt” options, the rates of obesity and other chronic illnesses rose.

When companies began churning out their low-fat creations in the late 1970s, they were, in theory, empowering people to choose how much fat to consume—but they were also contributing to the Great Unbundling. To make their offerings palatable, the industry had to observe a kind of nutritional conservation of energy, swapping in one basic substance (sugar—i.e., carbohydrates) for another (fats). Whole foods were increasingly disintegrated into their constituent chemicals—macronutrients, originally discovered in the early 19th century.

In 1827, the British chemist William Prout concluded that all foods are composed of “the saccharine, the oily, and the albuminous”—that is, carbohydrates, fats, and proteins. By the middle of the century, Justus von Liebig, a German chemist known as the “father of nutrition science,” had settled on protein as the “master nutrient.” So strong was Liebig’s belief in protein’s miraculous powers that in 1847 he developed Extractum carnis Liebig, a beef extract for those too poor to buy actual beef. “To a considerable extent,” the author Michael Pollan writes, “we still have a food system organized around the promotion of protein as the master nutrient.”

For critics of industrial food production like Pollan or Marion Nestle, a professor emerita of nutrition, food studies, and public health at New York University, nutritionist thinking has done more harm than good. “Because public discussion of nutrition issues tends to focus on single nutrients,” Nestle writes in Food Politics, her landmark study of the US food industry, common-sense dietary recommendations become “hopelessly obscured.” According to Pollan, the emphasis on nutrients over whole foods takes on a “quasireligious” character, with government officials and scientific experts acting as priests shepherding us toward “dietary salvation.” Every fad diet emerges from what Pollan describes as a dualistic ideology with an “evil nutrient for adherents to excoriate” and “a savior nutrient” they can adore. Given that there are only so many good nutrients, it’s no surprise that protein is now king. “It’s the only thing that’s left,” Nestle told me. “There are only four sources of calories: protein, fat, carbohydrate, and alcohol. Fat is out. Carbohydrate is out. And you can’t tell people to eat more alcohol.”

Proteinmaxxing influencers flourish in this environment of little to no regulation. At the root of our susceptibility to diet fads is neither laziness nor gullibility but rather an anxious desire to deconstruct the black box of expert guidance—which, though scientific in form, is often far from objective in content. Food companies invest significant resources not only in lobbying the government but also in wooing experts by sponsoring their research or endowing professorships. “Co-opting experts—especially academic experts—is an explicit corporate strategy,” Nestle writes. If experts are known to be for sale, is it any wonder that their recommendations are suspect? Those who seek alternative perspectives are attempting to do for health advice what the Protestant Reformation did for Catholic liturgy: translate opaque dead-language texts into an actionable vernacular. Yet this openness to influence makes us vulnerable to online wellness grifters, who have gained power since the Covid-19 pandemic and are now telegraphing their low-fact messaging from the government itself.

Ben Recht, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Berkeley and a noted authority in optimization research, finds the popular fixation on maxxing “offensive.” Many contemporary nutrition and fitness practices, from injecting peptides to consuming Joe Rogan–endorsed supplements, are stealing scientific valor. Rather than drawing on empirical observation or study, they rely on vibes. Any “findings” that health influencers report are anecdotal, even apocryphal—and yet, from Rogan on down, they speak with dead-eyed certainty.

A perfect example of optimization logic run amok is the looksmaxxer Clavicular. Born Braden Eric Peters, the twentysomething influencer burst onto the scene in 2025 with videos promoting dubious beauty tips like “bonesmashing” and taking meth to stay lean. His main gift to humanity has been to popularize terms previously confined to incel subcultures, like “frame-mogging” (making another guy look bad by being taller or buffer than him), “foids” (women), or “jestermaxxing” (compulsively striving to impress the foids with attention-seeking behavior). Clavicular’s patter also consists of scientific-sounding acronyms that, on closer inspection, qualify as symptoms of what he would call “brainrotmaxxing”: “PSL” (derived from the names of the Internet forums PUAHate, SlutHate, and Lookism); “SMV” (sexual market value); “LTN” (low-tier normie). These terms suggest a scientific seriousness that belies their origins in the Internet’s foulest abattoirs.

Trying to optimize qualitative variables like “sexual market value” or multitasking with more than one metric at a time catapults would-be maxxers away from logic and reason and into the realm of fantasy. The problem with any form of maxxing, then, is that it’s both too vague and too specific, puffed up with unearned quantitative authority. According to Recht, the outcome is a “corrosive mentality” that “erases a lot of what makes life worth living.” And, indeed, Clavicular and his ilk do not seem especially happy (though they might counter that happiness is not the point—“ascension” is).

Whether you’re fine-tuning your appearance or your diet, maxxing can lead not merely to ill health but to the darkest possibilities of the human experience. “Scientific rigor often takes you to skull-measuring,” Recht says. “We think that the quantified is objective,” but “just because you’re counting doesn’t make you a scientist.” Even the mathematically inclined, as Recht details on his Substack blog arg min, can miss the mark when they try to optimize human behaviors like eating. In 1945, the economist George Stigler published a paper describing the optimal diet. Using information about dozens of foods, he crafted a regimen that could be followed at minimal cost—just 11 cents a day in 1939 money—while satisfying the USDA’s nutritional guidelines for calories, protein, calcium, iron, and vitamins. The only problem was that, as Recht points out, “Stigler’s diet was horrifying,” consisting of about “one pound of flour, two ounces of evaporated milk, five ounces of cabbage, one ounce of spinach, and a pound of dried navy beans” per day. “No one who wasn’t being tortured would eat this,” he writes. Eating, like making art or falling in love, involves numerous subjective, unquantifiable factors. And “if you can’t quantify it,” Recht concludes, “you can’t optimize it.”

This objection is unlikely to deter committed proteinmaxxers, whose behavior is rooted in the most unassailable metric of all: personal belief. What RFK Jr. and the Make America Healthy Again crowd are proposing, Nestle told me, “is for you to develop your own personal ideology around food,” an ambition facilitated by the disinformation vector that is social media. Supplement companies, food manufacturers, and now our own government are happy to stoke even the most irrational beliefs if they move product. “And the people at [the Department of] Health and Human Services, every single one of them,” Nestle added, “are selling wellness products…. At best, they sincerely believe that these things will help.”

This belief-based approach to health is anchored in an ideology of individualism, as are some of the most famous critiques of our food system. When Pollan wrote in The Omnivore’s Dilemma that “many people today seem perfectly content eating at the end of an industrial food chain, without a thought in the world,” he missed the issue’s systemic underpinnings. Like Whole Foods founder John Mackey, who once compared the Affordable Care Act to fascism, Pollan suggests that people who eat poorly are doing so by choice. Shopping for quality over convenience “takes more money and effort,” he admits, “but as soon as you begin to treat that expenditure” as “a kind of vote—a vote for health in the largest sense—food no longer seems like the smartest place to economize.” The idea seems to be that if we all just “vote with our fork,” the food industry will discontinue practices that spark joy in its shareholders and instead make it financially tenable for Public School Timmy to eat a lunch that couldn’t be confused with prison food. Mackey took a similarly hectoring tone in a 2020 interview with The New York Times: “People have got to become wiser about their food choices. And if people want different foods, the market will provide it.”

The government is now actively testing this hypothesis with guidelines that assume Americans choose their diets in a vacuum. Neither Republicans nor mainstream Democrats have the stomach to regulate the food industry, which is responsible for the torrent of ultra-processed foods and questionable supplements glutting our diets. Instead, the emphasis is on education and personal responsibility: As long as it tells people to “prioritize protein foods at every meal,” the state believes that it has done its job. Yet as Nestle points out, “There is a substantial literature in public health that shows that education doesn’t change behavior.”

A government that was serious about mitigating our poor eating habits would have to upend nearly every aspect of American life. To have the time and money to eat better, Americans would need free healthcare, childcare, and eldercare, not to mention higher wages, longer parental leaves, shorter and more predictable working hours, stronger worker protections, and better infrastructure. On the supplier side, taxes, subsidies, labeling restrictions, and the regulation of marketing tactics would help stop so many ultra-processed foods from being created and sold. As long as food manufacturers are allowed to position ultra-processed foods at eye level on supermarket shelves; to exploit supplement-labeling loopholes to make unproven health claims and to label foods deceptively; to use cartoons to advertise to children; and to sponsor academic research, things are unlikely to change—no matter how many foodies in Marin County and Greenwich Village vote with their forks or how many steaks RFK Jr.’s inverted food pyramid depicts.

Seen through this lens, proteinmaxxing reveals its true form. Accelerationist and blackpilled, irony-poisoned and apocalyptic, it is part of a movement that prioritizes appearance over function. It’s a form of nihilism: The world is over, nothing matters, so you might as well maxx out your muscles and your credit card. And if you can hustle a few dollars out of your followers while you’re at it, even better.

Nestle, who has seen dozens of trendy diets come and go over the years, understands proteinmaxxing as a bid for self-determination. “There’s more and more feeling among people about lack of control,” she says, and food—even faddish or unnourishing food—offers an accessible way to reclaim it. At the end of the day, “people need to feel better,” she says. “They have to have something in their lives that feels good. Because everything outside is so horrible.”

Odesa, Ukraine—A clear-eyed middle-aged man leans in closer, yelping in broken English: “I don’t want to die, understand? But they got me. Now I have to go.” He downs another shot of vodka. The restaurant terrace is full of people enjoying their shashliks. They don’t mind the man and his raucous friends, as send-off parties for newly mobilized soldiers are no longer noteworthy.

They are a part of the city’s soundscape just like the moped buzzing of Russia’s 440-pound Shahed drones or the howl of air raid sirens.

Every now and again these drones make car-size holes in apartment buildings and kill civilians. The front line is about 90 miles away from here, but the way locals treat it, it might as well be on the moon. Odesa is an eclectic, sun-soaked Black Sea port city where baroque Russian Imperial buildings mix with Soviet panel housing, looking out to steep beaches. Those beaches stay packed even when explosions cut through blaring American pop music—only a few foreign tourists gingerly jog for shelter.

But beneath the veneer of relative normality, just like in the rest of Ukraine, Odesa is home to a self-designated underclass of men aged 25–60, who live as fugitives in their own country. In Ukraine they are called uhylyanty, which is derogatory slang for “dodgers.” For years, the uhylyanty have been trying to avoid Ukraine’s massive military mobilization campaign that began the same day as the full-scale Russian invasion.

In the early months of 2022, volunteers were lining up for the front. Not anymore. It is unclear how many are hiding, but estimates range from 2 to 6 million. This is not widely researched, and in the English-language press the dodgers issue is drowned out by pieces highlighting Ukraine’s innovation and heroism.

Many in Western capitals describe the war as a struggle between good and evil, a fight for the West’s freedom and security. The Kremlin has also demonstrated its utter disregard for civilian lives. Russian soldiers torture, murder, and rape on a mass scale.

To stop Putin’s onslaught, Kyiv is desperate for people. Success, for all the high-tech drones, remains dependent on bodies. “If two years ago commanders needed rockets, now they need people,” said Oleksandr Syrski, former Ukraine military chief.

Yet millions of Ukrainians don’t want to fight. Why?

The Fear

In Odesa I met Taras (name changed at his request) at a beachside bar. A staunch Protestant, Taras recoils at the idea of killing. The bulky, six-foot-six 29-year-old does not look like a fugitive as he bites into his burger. “You see, I am big,” the IT developer says with a proud smile. “That’s why the Tetseka doesn’t bother me. I have no fear.”

TCR, pronounced as te-tse-ka in Ukrainian, stands for Territorial Center of Recruitment and Social Support. This is Ukraine’s state agency responsible for organizing mobilization.

The Tetseka officers move in groups of three to five men, sometimes dressed as civilians. Often they are accompanied by police. They drive Renault Masters, Ford Transits, or other generic minibuses with pitch-black tinted windows. These minibuses are how the mobilization got its folk moniker: busyfykatsia or busification.

In a poll last year, a record 68 percent of Ukrainians said they don’t trust the Tetseka. But some still view mobilization as necessary. I spoke with energetic Kateryna Musiyenko, 27, who is a part of the activist group Robymo vam Nervy (Making You Nervous), which advocates ridding Odesa of Soviet and Russian cultural heritage.

“For me [mobilization] is not a problem because most of my relatives and friends are already mobilized,” Kateryna says. “It’s constitutionally mandatory. And I don’t think it’s a problem because we have to do that. Who will do that if not the Ukrainians? Maybe the methods are not pleasant. But when people ignore [draft] letters for months and they try to escape it and they are sitting home just to not fight, for me, it’s really cringe.”

In October 2025, a month after I met Taras, three Tetseka men jumped out of a covert minibus and ran after him. He managed to escape, leaving his backpack and jacket behind.

In November, a different patrol spotted Taras again. “They ran after me. They got lost pretty fast, except for two who caught up with me at a cul-de-sac.” As the two men dressed in military fatigues got a hold on Taras, a gaggle of middle-aged women passersbys tried to pull him out of trouble, but the Tetseka men wouldn’t let go.

“They yelled at the women, threatening them with rape or beatings,” recounts Taras. Eventually, the Tetseka prevailed after calling for police backup. Taras was driven away.

Scenes like this have become the new normal. They are frequent and often more dramatic, sometimes featuring a conscript’s pleading and crying loved ones.

After being snatched by the Tetseka, Taras was brought in for a medical exam, alongside dozens of men from all walks of life. Taras sat in a dimly lit corridor painted in the customary Soviet institutional green, under letter-sized posters of scantily-clad models advertising military service.

“There was this rumor online that you can dodge by not letting them take a photo of you. That didn’t work by the time I got there,” he recounts, monotonously.

Taras says that after refusing to be photographed, he was forced into a small room where two plainclothed men took his picture while smacking him on the head. A bulbous colonel “with prosthetic legs up to his knees and mad eyes” yelled out that he would shoot Taras if he moved, aiming a handgun at him.

“Then they started selling us,” Taras remembers. The men were interviewed by the bulbous colonel and army unit commanders. “Commanders then came up to the colonel with envelopes of cash, bidding for men they chose.”

Taras was able to pitch his IT expertise. He was selected for a drone unit, but to his terror, he was designated as a fixik: a mobile one-man repair team. “I would have had dozens of drones in my car. I would have been the prime target,” he shudders.

Still, Taras didn’t argue much, seeing how one of his fellow recruits “got cocky and demanded better conditions. So, the unit that initially wanted him passed. He was given to Skelya.”

The rest of the time the once-cocky scrawny twentysomething was in the corridor, Taras wouldn’t dare look his way. Two armed soldiers from Skelya were beating the conscript. “You are ours now, they said to him,” remembers Taras.

Skelya, meaning “rock,” is Ukraine’s largest assault unit. Skelya is eponymous with its commander Yurii Harkavyi’s call sign, inspired by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. A few months ago, Johnson recorded a video for Harkavyi, sending him “mana.”

Skelya is infamous for torturing and killing dozens of conscripts sent its way. The Oleksandr Semenov case is well known. He arrived at the Kropyvnytskyi hospital in January 2026. Semenov claimed that during his time in Skelya he was beaten, tied to an ATV, and dragged on the ground. A few days later, he died. The official cause was listed as pneumonia.

No comprehensive public data exists, but it is common knowledge in Ukraine that there were quite a few murky deaths in Tetseka holdings, in training camps, or in units’ compounds. Since 2022, there have been more than 1,400 criminal proceedings concerning torture, opened against Tetseka centers and police stations.

Only 20 resulted in a conviction. One such conviction concerns a videoed case of a brutal beating of a conscript. Two Tetseka officers pleaded guilty and received one year of probation and fines of roughly $20.

The Mess

Tetseka has an unsavory reputation in the army at large, such that soldiers often wear patches and bumper stickers proclaiming “not Tetseka.” I saw these patches sold anywhere from Odesa’s expansive Privoz to Kharkiv’s flea market.

Many Tetseka officers have been wounded in action, like the bulbous amputee major who threatened Taras. Some are sent there because health issues make them unfit for frontline service. Despised and understaffed, the Tetseka comes out dysfunctional. Ukrainians are often able to escape them.

For example, Taras fell ill in a training camp after weeks of back-breaking labor in howling November wind. While he was at a hospital, Taras told me, his friends were able to kidnap him. Now the IT specialist is hiding from the Tetseka in a rental apartment back in Odesa. He stays indoors reading Chinese fantasy novels all day.

Taras’s acquaintance, another IT specialist Boris (name changed at his request), is a quintessential example of how messy mobilization might get.

The Tetseka caught Boris, 27, while he was summering in a country house, which he and his partner rented in a village on the outskirts of Kyiv. He said he deliberately searched for a place away from the main roads and population centers to avoid the draft. One morning, Boris was walking down an empty sunny street. Listening to stoner metal on the loop, he didn’t notice a police car pulling up.

Not very athletic, Boris didn’t try to run away. After spending a night at the Tetseka hold, he was driven off to a medical commission. An anarchist, Boris feels little but contempt toward the idea of fighting for a state.

Next, he says, “they drove me through this neighborhood in Kyiv. And I realized that I know that my boys live right over there.” Boris thought about it while the car idled at a red light. Then he opened the car door and walked out pushing into a jog and then a sprint when he heard screaming behind him. “It was like a trance,” he says.

For a few months Boris lived a normal life in Kyiv. When I visited him last fall he seemed completely nonchalant. “The Tetseka don’t come here. This is a wealthy neighborhood,” Boris explained.

But then, he wanted to save on rent. “I moved into a poorer neighborhood, more proletarian. And there they got me. A Tetseka guy just slammed me to the ground.”

The often-unsaid reality is that mobilization primarily targets working-class Ukrainians. Volodymyr Ishchenko, 44, is a soft-spoken Ukrainian sociologist based in Germany. He researches class dynamics in Ukraine and particularly mobilization.

“Those who are forcibly mobilized,” Ishchenko explains, “are disproportionately poor. They are factory workers or from rural areas.” He elaborates that wealthier men are able to pay the ever-growing bribes to get the Tetseka off their backs or at least afford a lawyer. Lawyers aren’t too safe either—a Kharkiv region lawyer was beaten by Tetseka till his leg broke.

There is a bribe price list compiled by Ukrainian reporters. One would pay $6,000 to avoid being taken by the Tetseka; $10,000 buys you a “special flight,” i.e., being driven out of the country in an ambulance. The list culminates with $50,000 for a fake disability status, removal from the draft database, and departure abroad. The prices vary across Ukraine, though. Taras said he was asked for a $10,000 bribe by the Tetseka staff just to be let go.

The average monthly salary in Ukraine is about $700.

Kyiv has been trying to reform the Tetseka, and clamp down on corruption and messiness. But a well-oiled Tetseka would only grab men more effectively. The system needs bodies. Especially, as long as Russia is able to reliably supply its own ranks with a motley of foreign mercenaries, conscripts, convicts, and highly paid contract soldiers.

The Resistance

Ukrainians are well aware of torture in the Tetseka and of the rampant corruption thanks to Ukrainian domestic media. So it is no wonder that Tetseka raids frequently provoke spontaneous riots. Odesa, Taras’s hometown, has had its share. In 2026 alone, some 20 officers of the Odesa region’s Tetseka were injured by uhylyanty or their sympathizers—with knives, fists, and bullets.

Across Ukraine, physical resistance to the Tetseka is bubbling up, although giving an exact figure is impossible: Just like with suspicious deaths, no comprehensive sociological mapping exists. Last year, Ukrainian police registered 341 cases of attacks on the Tetseka. In 2023, the parliamentary human rights chief said that there were over 1,000 recorded confrontations.

This July, in western Ukraine’s Lviv, a hundreds-strong crowd roughed up Tetseka officers who tried to grab a man off the street. They even turned the Tetseka car upside down. The next day, Zelensky’s chief of staff, Kyrylo Budanov, called for “a just law enforcement response.” A day later police detained several participants, while a local activist veteran posted a gloomy video, in which several men and teenagers are forced to apologize and chant “glory to Tetseka.”

In the light of this swift justice, it becomes obvious why mass riots against the Tetseka are not omnipresent, and traditional mass protests are nonexistent. “How would we do an anti-Tetseka maidan?” asks Boris, rhetorically. “It would be like protesting against the necessary.”

Ishchenko, the sociologist, elaborates further: “It is this narrow, privileged—yet easily mobilizable and highly visible in the public sphere—‘civil society,’ that is capable of sustaining and rapidly assembling a protest” like the ones against Zelensky’s sacking last month of military chief Mykhailo Fedorov.

Ishchenko goes on to argue that there is a fundamental class distinction “vis-à-vis the resistance to the ‘busification,’ which hit the less-privileged classes hardest. While the latter are far more numerous, they remain fragmented.”

So, to keep safe, Ukrainians resort to online resistance and grassroots documentation. For years, Ukrainian social media has been flooded with daily videos of the Tetseka roughing up men and shoving them in vans, often as relatives cry nearby.

In most cities there are specialized Telegram channels run by local enthusiasts. They are called something like Kyiv Weather or more directly Draft Papers Odesa. There, Ukrainians post information about the movements of the Tetseka. A typical message from Draft Papers Odesa, a channel of over 55,000 readers: Balkivs’ka St., corner of Dal’nyts’ka st—a patrol car snatched a Glovo deliveryman. His Glovo moped is still parked there.

In these channels, Ukrainians have developed a thesaurus of slurs just for the Tetseka: lyudolovy (people-catchers), pidory (faggots), nechist’ (ghouls), or simply cherty (demons). Some of these terms go back to Soviet, even Imperial times. The region has a storied tradition of resisting conscription: from Central Asia’s Basmachi uprising to Tbilisi’s largest market, still named Dezerter Bazaar. Serving in the military is generally stigmatized across the post-Soviet space, and the institutions enforcing the draft are not well-appreciated.

There is also a thriving digital ecosystem around those who escape Ukraine over the border. There are numerous vloggers who document their escapes and training regimens necessary to brave the rivers and forests of Ukraine’s southwestern border—which is patrolled by drones and armed guards. There is even an iOS game where the protagonist has to learn to swim over the Tysa border river. Dozens of draft dodgers have drowned in Tysa alone.

Anastasia Piliavsky, 45 years old and quick-witted, is a British Ukrainian anthropologist. She lives between Odesa and Cambridge. Her daughter, now in a Ukrainian summer camp, has been playing the all-popular “Tetseka game,” a variation of Cowboys and Indians. In the game, there are three factions, Piliavsky says: the uhylyanty, those who are helping the uhylyanty, and the Tetseka. “The Tetseka are the baddies in this,” Piliavsky concludes.

She expands: “In the rear the Tetseka is viewed as this brutal, corrupt enemy force, and experienced as much more dangerous and much more loathsome than the Russian enemy force. That’s critical. A breaking point.”

The Spin

years, the topic of mobilization hasn’t been widely present in mainstream Western discourse. Often when it is raised, it is met with cancellation campaigns.

The aforementioned Ukrainian sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko was one of the first academics to research mobilization, meeting immediate pushback. An online panel on mobilization Ishchenko tried to co-convene at Central European University’s Democracy Institute was canceled by the institute, the day after the official announcement went live. The institute cited concerns from the “Ukrainian community.”

Ishchenko argues that the Western grant infrastructure created a particular creative class that is seen in the West as the only legitimate Ukrainian voice. Piliavsky elaborates that this creative class “is a professional class, not the richest, but a class in the business of words and ideas. They work as fixers, they dominate the scene where foreign journalists like to hang out. And they are also—overwhelmingly—not the ones fighting. Because many have either the means to buy themselves out—or the connections to avoid the front.”

There have been plenty of Western-funded programs over the years explicitly designed to select a new breed of Ukrainian leaders. Take MP Oleksandra Ustinova. She is an alumna of the State Department’s Future Leaders Exchange program, the Transatlantic Fellowship Program, and Stanford’s Ukrainian Emerging Leaders Program.

In 2024, Ustinova called for the imprisonment of men caught fleeing conscription. This caused quite a stir, as Ustinova’s husband, a Ukrainian man of military age, has been living in the United States since 2022. And Ustinova is not the only politician whose family is avoiding mobilization while she advocates for ramping it up. Lviv’s mayor called for a gender-blind conscription system—his two sons live abroad. An unnamed Ukrainian MP told reporters that only two MPs have children in the military.

Meanwhile, European policymakers increasingly discuss sending Ukrainian refugee men back to Ukraine, or otherwise impeding their flight abroad. Over 4 million Ukrainians have temporary protected status in the EU, and since the invasion European capitals adopted a humanitarian rhetoric. “They were received with open arms.… This is Europe’s spirit. A Union that stands strong together,” Ursula von der Leyen said in 2022.

Yet it seems that fleeing conscripts are getting written out of the EU’s humanitarianism. From March 2027, fighting-age men will be excluded from the temporary protection scheme.

Polish Defense Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz said recently that “all young Ukrainians fit for military service must return to Ukraine.” Already in 2024, the foreign affairs spokesman for the German far-right party Alternative für Deutschland’s parliamentary group said, “Before a single NATO soldier is sent to Ukraine, the Ukrainian men of military age should first be sent back.”

None of this is framed as stopping Europe’s military assistance to Ukraine. In fact, Europe’s reticence to accommodate the draft dodgers is painted as “something the Ukrainians asked us to do.” And indeed, Kyiv seems happy to cooperate, working to set up “Unity Hubs” in Germany, which are supposed to entice Ukrainian men to return. In 2024, Ukraine also cut all consular services to military-age citizens abroad.

The uhylyanty might have different ideas. As Taras puts it, “When a European comes to a Ukrainian, who is getting bombed every day, and asks: ‘Why don’t you want to be the shield of Europe?’ I don’t get it. If you want to defend your values—go and defend them, don’t throw us under the bus.”

Boris adds: “Many here don’t believe in Ukraine as something they want to risk their lives for.” Ishchenko echoes his point: “Ukrainians might love Ukraine. But they hate and distrust their state.”

To explain why the Western media rarely covered mobilization, the sociologist quotes Slovene philosopher Slavoj Žižek: “Wile E. Coyote runs off a cliff and is running in the air. But can only run as long as he doesn’t look down.” Covering “busification,” Ishchenko thinks, would be “looking down” and admitting many Ukrainians’ disillusionment in the liberal world order, tantamount to ceasing to believe in the end of history.

The Disillusionment

In March 2025, a Sky News team visited the aforementioned Skelya regiment. One of the team’s drivers stayed in her car at the Skelya command post. Then a masked man walked up and shot the armored car point-blank a dozen times and vanished into the midnight darkness. Another soldier soon appeared to collect the spent casings and tell the terrified driver to flee. Sky News filed complaints to no avail. Sky News producer Azad Safadov told the story on Facebook last July. He said that Sky News could’ve created “an international scandal, but didn’t do this because they support our country.”

When I read about the war in English, I see it presented as some glorious spectacle. Thousands of headlines and social media posts project triumphant messaging of a Ukrainian “Gondor” standing against the “Russian orcs.” Flagship Ukrainian English-language outlet Kyiv Independent recently published a playful video where a reporter said that Ukrainian men dodging mobilization are her biggest dating red flag.

Online one might also encounter smiling Shiba Inu dogs decked out in Ukrainian uniforms, stills from The Lord of the Rings or The Mandalorian, proclaiming that “This Is the Way.” As The Atlantic put it, ”Ukraine is Winning the Meme War.”

The “red flag” uhylyanty, on the other hand, see an altogether different war. They know that serving does not look like fighting orcs alongside Gandalf the White. More likely, it looks like living in a dugout for months while defecating in a trash bag to avoid getting spotted—and when spotted eventually, bleeding out in a trench with your entrails out.

That is what Boris told me, when I visited his Kyiv hideout, three weeks before he moved to a poorer neighborhood to be mobilized. “You see, death is not as scary, what is scarier is the constant discomfort of serving—for God knows what. Death is momentary; discomfort is forever.”

After Boris was finally caught, he spent months in a dilapidated training camp with boarded windows, where the conscripts were monitored 24/7 lest they escape. He then became a soldier. The mood of the military, Boris says, is described in two sentiments: “God, help me survive this” and “I don’t fucking want to die for this country.”

“Now,” he wrote me from basic training, “I am listening to this guy who tells me I need to fight the Russians, because they will kill and rape my sister. But I wouldn’t let this guy anywhere near my sister either.”

When I ask Boris whether he thinks of himself as fighting for democracy and freedom, the now-soldier sardonically responds, “Of course not.” Simultaneously, Boris developed a more measured outlook on the Tetseka. “I understand that you can’t fight this war without mobilization. Maybe in the beginning there was a chance to trade some territory for peace,” he says. “But now, it will just keep going on. We’re in a zugzwang.”

Still, Boris is holding on to hope of eventually leaving Ukraine, saving up his army pay to later leverage it for an escape. “They kept telling me [at basic training] that they are going to teach me how to survive on the battlefield, but I already know how to survive there,” he says: “Stay off the fucking battlefield.”

One of the greatest stories in American domestic affairs is how the far-right government of a small Middle Eastern country came to hold a controlling interest in United States foreign policy. Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick’s new book, Israel’s Lobby, combines investigative journalism and political science to tie together the stories of American and Israeli oligarchs capturing the policymaking process in successive presidential administrations and the geopolitical, and domestic consequences of American foreign policy sold to the highest bidder. But are long-held assumptions finally shifting? If so, how and to what consequence? Nation editor and publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel, author and Nation columnist Jeet Heer, author and activist Daniel Levy, and Clifton and Lustick discussed these questions on August 12 in a no-holds-barred conversation.

The Democratic Party’s overlords are facing a multifront challenge to their authority, as their voting base has rallied behind outsider candidates and its Beltway leaders succumb to rote left-punching sloganeering. But one clear mandate still animates the party from on high: Its fundraising operations shall not come under close critical scrutiny.

That’s the glum conclusion political scientist Adam Bonica reached at the end of an aborted eight-month collaboration with the New York Times Opinion section. As Bonica recounts in a pair of Substack entries, he launched a study based on individual contribution data from the Federal Elections Commission and Meta’s advertising library, showing that the main respondents to the obtrusive and incessant text-based fundraising appeals launched by Democratic-affiliated groups—which Bonica aptly characterizes as “Spam PACs”—are “overwhelmingly elderly, and [that] a surprisingly concentrated group of them accounts for the bulk of the money raised”:

Among the fundraising ads run by the largest spam PACs, between 70 and 85 percent of impressions are delivered to users 65 and older, though people in that age band account for just 14 percent of Meta’s adult users in the United States, according to data published by Meta.

The FEC donation records, cross-referenced with the L2 national voter file, reveal a similar but even more pronounced skew. Less than 1 percent of all Democratic donors account for almost half of the $1.4 billion raised by spam PACs since 2017. Put more precisely, roughly 138,000 donors averaging 75 years of age have each donated to these PACs one hundred times or more. I call them “captive spam donors.”

This data point is key, because the basic come-ons floated by these fundraising outfits are alarmist, misleading, and deceptive. The idea behind them is clearly to cut through the onslaught of online donor pitches with an acute air of personalized urgency and/or peril. And like all fundraising appeals, these solicitations lean heavily on a sense of guilt. Bonica outlines how the sky-is-falling, quasi-bullying rhetoric that suffuses the industry verges on elder abuse:

Whether or not those who operate this fundraising model recognize or intend it, fundraising spam runs on similar psychological levers to those that federal law enforcement and consumer-protection groups identify as hallmarks of elder financial exploitation: manufactured urgency, emotional appeals engineered to trigger guilt or fear, false exclusivity, fabricated account or profile statuses that look like official notices, and relentless pressure to give before there’s time to think. Why stamp “FINAL ATTEMPT” on a message and warn that “the deadline is just hours away” if not to manufacture urgency? Why claim that Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Hakeem Jeffries have emailed you, then demand an answer to their “desperate pleas” if not to trigger guilt? Why warn that Social Security checks will be “SLASHED by $500/month?!”—up from the $460 in the email sent two days earlier—if not to stoke fear? Why tell someone they are “the only Democrat in your city who hasn’t responded” if not to single them out? Why announce a recipient’s “appointment to the Social Security Advisory Board” above a picture of a Social Security card if not to dress a solicitation as official business? Why the midnight deadlines, the countdown timers, the “400% MATCH” that applies only if you give right now, if not to force a decision before reflection can intervene?

Bonica’s findings are an extension of his earlier research into the Democrats’ sprawling Spam PAC complex, which found it to largely be a self-dealing boondoggle for the party’s consultant class. In breaking down the expenditures for the leading clearinghouses of spam fundraising appeals, Bonica found that out of some $670 million in donations, just $11 million wound up in the coffers of campaigns, national party committees, and individual candidates. The other $659 million stayed with the fundraising groups themselves. That works out, Bonica wrote, to “a fundraising efficiency rate of just 1.6 percent.”

His latest work detects an additional layer of cynical exploitation to this already skeevy shakedown operation that Bonica calls “heartbreaking.” In one instance, he writes, an 85-year-old Ohio retiree made 7,800 donations to Democratic-aligned fundraising shops, totaling more than $648,000—more than double the appraised value of his home. One 91-year-old Indiana woman in an assisted living facility made 25,000 $10 donations.

But it turns out that Bonica’s bracing research is just part of the story here. The other dismaying saga concerns how a major investigation commissioned by The New York Times ended up as a Substack post. Bonica has devoted a separate post to that, and it makes for similarly bleak reading.

The Times Opinion section actually reached out to collaborate with Bonica on a data-heavy project after he published his first report on the Democratic Scam PAC network last year, and he pulled the elder-predation report together in close coordination with the section’s editors and researchers. But when Bonica and the Times reached out to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and its sister Beltway operation, the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee (DSCC), they replied with a cease-and-desist letter threatening the paper with legal action if it proceeded to publish the story. Like many such documents, the letter was largely an exercise in smoke-blowing—it vigorously disputed the claim that both groups and their fundraising hirelings “targeted” elder donors, even though Bonica never made any such claims. A separate letter from the lawyers at Mothership Strategies—which is, as its name suggests, the largest player in the Democratic Spam PAC world, founded by a pair of former DCCC staffers—comically sought to refute Bonica’s finding that the prime tributary of donors skews above the age of 75 by citing research Bonica himself had earlier published with political scientist Jake Grumbach, which pegged the median age of donors in the 2020 cycle at a much lower 59.

Yet the legal intimidation worked, even though the piece had been fact-checked four times, and a data journalist on staff had independently verified Bonica’s findings. After Bonica got confirmation from his editor that the piece was about to be scheduled, he was abruptly informed that the Times wouldn’t be publishing it after all.

The Paper of Record’s nonsensical rationale was that the piece was “too investigative” and “too authoritative” for the Opinion section—raising the question of why it devoted eight months of its own staff time to ensuring the piece’s investigative veracity, and suggesting that regular readers of the aperçus of Bret Stephens and Tom Friedman would somehow be disoriented by confirmed reporting presented in convincing fashion. Bonica quotes an informal comment from another staffer at the paper that’s at least marginally less ludicrous, and probably much closer to the mark: After columnist Nick Kristof published a reported piece on the IDF’s sexual abuse of Palestinians in the war in Gaza, the Times opinion shop wasn’t going to court another “predictable headache.” (Bonica subsequently sought to get the piece published at The Bulwark, but that plan also fizzled out, thanks both to a fresh round of cease-and-desist letters from Spam PACs—-one of which cited the Times’ decision and advised, Mafia-style that “your publication should do the same”—and obtrusive edits that, in the author’s view, disfigured the point of the piece.)

And so a major investigation into the predatory fundraising apparatus of a major political party has landed on Substack—while the newspaper that had originally commissioned it has since released a statement claiming that the piece had never been fully fact-checked, even though the author has a copious paper trail showing otherwise. In other words, The New York Times is now adopting the same anemic, ass-covering campaign targeting Bonica’s credibility that the Democratic campaign committees did, on the same apparent calculus: that other institutional onlookers won’t evince much interest in the actual record. That, regrettably, is why “all the news that’s fit to print” ranks somewhere close to “FINAL ATTEMPT” and “400 % MATCH” in the annals of public credibility.

In July, a parent whose son was serving on the Navy ship USS Abraham Lincoln wrote an alarmed letter to Stars and Stripes, expressing worry that the dire conditions being reported from aboard the ship were harming sailors. The Abraham Lincoln has been deployed in the Middle East since last November and has seen combat in the Iran War. It was scheduled to return home in May, but its mission has been indefinitely extended. “My son is currently on that ship and listening to him say that he and his shipmates constantly think about jumping off the ship just for relief is so hard to listen to,” the letter read. The writer added, “Our loved ones are out there fighting with no understanding as to what they’re defending.”

The anxiety expressed in that letter was well grounded. Since then, reports from two publications that are well sourced with the Pentagon—Stars and Stripes and The Navy Times—have made clear that there have been multiple suicide attempts aboard the Lincoln. While the Navy denies that there is a widespread mental health crisis on the Lincoln, the families of sailors, as well as political leaders, have begun to loudly decry the distressing conditions aboard the ship.

On August 8, Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal wrote a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao, complaining, “There have been widespread reports of shortages of basic supplies, water contamination, plumbing issues, deteriorating mental health, deck safety concerns, and disruptions in the mail system, which have caused many care packages in route to the ship to be lost in transit for months.”

The roots of the critical situation aboard the Lincoln go back to poor military planning by Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth in the run-up to the Iran disaster. They had assumed that overwhelming US airpower would lead to a quick victory, comparable to the coup the US was able to pull off in Venezuela in January. This scenario radically underestimated the resilience and capability of the Iranian government.

As The New York Times reports,

The aircraft carrier U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln’s supply problems began soon after the first day of the war, as Iranian missiles and attack drones fell on a Navy base in Bahrain.

The Iranian attack, retaliation for the U.S.-Israeli assault on Tehran, destroyed much of the base. And as it went up in smoke, so did a major logistics hub that the Navy has relied on for decades.

Iran had, in fact, destroyed or severely compromised US military bases all over the Middle East, not just in Bahrain but also in the United Arab Emirates and Oman. This meant the sailors on the Lincoln had to receive food from farther away and had no easy access to shore leave.

While the supply chain issue has been slowly mended, for a time it meant a rapid deterioration in living conditions. Even a CNN report that tried to minimize the problems acknowledged that there was “a dearth of fresh food for many months. For a stretch…their meals were reduced to tuna mixed with noodles, or corn dogs. Several described losing significant weight.” Other problems included black mold that would drip on the sailors, extended periods without laundry, and backed-up toilets spewing human waste.

Even more demoralizing than these physical problems was the psychological toll of an interminable mission with no clear end goal or purpose. As one sailor told CNN reporter Pamela Brown:

At first when we learned that we would be doing combat operations it was intended to be a 2 week thing. But unfortunately that became a 7 month thing.… They told us it was to help Iranian protesters, then they told us we are out here to denuclearize Iran, now it’s to support a blockade. The purpose of even doing this is inconsistent…. This is a big let down with consistent extensions that affects our loved ones who have their lives on hold until we return.

The Trump administration and its media outriders have decided that the best way to handle this scandal is to add insult to injury.

On Friday, Trump was asked by a reporter if the deployment has gone on too long. The president replied, “No. Not nearly long enough.” He denied that the families of service members were concerned about conditions aboard the ship. He did say that the Lincoln was “moving” and was about to be replaced by a “very similar” ship. A Pentagon spokesperson claimed, “Legitimate challenges of a long combat deployment are being twisted into a false narrative.”

More bluntly, Fox News host Joey Jones dismissed complaining sailors as whiny crybabies. “How weak are you?” he asked. He added that “if this is who we are, we’re just Rome sitting here waiting to burn. We’ve got nothing left. It makes me fume.”

The crisis on the Lincoln is one of Trump’s own making. It’s a result of his deeply irresponsible handling of military affairs. Trump is an overgrown man-child who should be confined to playing with toy soldiers and model ships. Unfortunately, he’s in charge of a military with real soldiers who can bleed, die, and also kill.

Trump’s childish mentality was on display near the end of his first term in 2020, when he called for the Navy to redesign its ships to be more aesthetically pleasing. He claimed he told naval commanders, “That’s a terrible-looking ship, let’s make it beautiful.” Trump added, “The U.S. Navy will lead the design of these ships along with me, because I’m a very aesthetic person.”

Six years later, Trump has lost neither his kitschy sensibility—borne out in his destructive “renovations” of the White House and the Kennedy Center—nor his desire to remake the Navy. On Thursday, The Wall Street Journal reported that “Trump has directed the Navy to tear out a complex system for launching jet fighters from its aircraft carriers and instead go back to using steam catapults, a move Navy officials have fought for years and will likely cost billions of dollars.” And on Saturday, The Washington Post noted, “The U.S. Navy is considering a major redesign of its new aircraft carriers to better match President Donald Trump’s preferred aesthetic for the warships.”

Trump is alarmingly detached from reality. He has no concern for the flesh-and-blood sailors who serve in his Navy, much less the countless civilians killed in his imperialist wars. His main concern is visual display: having cool World War II–style aircraft carriers that can make aesthetically pleasing explosions. During the Second World War, a famous poster warned of the dangers of idle chatter that could empower the enemy: LOOSE LIPS SINK SHIPS. With Trump, we can update the slogan to warn: A LOOSE GRIP ON REALITY SINKS SHIPS.

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

Kaaha Kaahiye is showing me around Glendale Homes, where she grew up. She talks quickly and enthusiastically, pointing out a playground she used to play on and then a lush vegetable garden, a squash so big it’s pulling over its trellis. “The Hmong families always have the best gardens,” she says.

A little boy swerves past us on a bike: “’Scuse me!” he hollers over his shoulder. Kaaha moved here when she was little like that. Built in 1952, it is the oldest public housing development remaining in Minneapolis. All the others have been torn down.

Over the years, the Minneapolis Public Housing Authority (MPHA) has moved toward issuing Section 8 vouchers, a system that appears to benefit landlords more than voucher recipients. And now MPHA wants to demolish Glendale, too. Kaaha can’t imagine these happy little homes she loves so much being torn down. While MPHA says that Glendale replacement will be more public housing, Kaaha is concerned that private developers will weasel their way in. She tells me that not long ago, MPHA leased Elliot Twins, another public housing project, to the Bank of Canada for just one dollar.

“Can you imagine?” she says, shaking her head.

As we walk up the hill that Glendale is built on and look back down on the rows of tidy townhouses, you can almost feel the brand-new condos that already loom over the neighborhood closing in.

A few days earlier, I was in Baraboo, Wisconsin, helping set up chairs for a town hall hosted by the nonpartisan community organizing project Small Town and Rural Seniors. The senior citizens behind the event, most in their 70s and 80s, were huddled in a corner going through the questions they would ask when the candidates arrived.

Judy Brey of Reedsburg, Wisconsin, asked the first question: “If elected as governor, will you support a moratorium on the closure or sale of county-owned nursing homes?”

The entire room leaned in, eyes on the candidates.

Judy and many of the other seniors in the room have been in a years-long fight with their local county boards over the sale of publicly owned nursing homes to private buyers. For generations, these nursing homes have provided residents a sense of security as they and their loved ones age.

“It’s all ideological,” says Judy. “It’s not based on reason or what’s best for people.” When these homes are sold to private buyers, the quality of care goes down and the costs for families go up as the corporations who have purchased them squeeze out every last dollar of profit.

But still, many county boards are putting the nursing homes up for sale. Why? Because for two whole generations now we’ve been told that public goods are no good at all.

I was a baby when Ronald Reagan said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’“ I grew up, and now have raised my own child, in the long shadow of that sentiment. While the public schools I went to had libraries full of books and brand-new blacktops on which we played dodgeball, by the time my son went to school, the roof of his gym leaked into mop buckets, and he didn’t have a science teacher for two full years.

These conditions are not due to something wrong with public education; they are due to lawmakers’ stripping away all the money. We live in North Carolina, where, for the last two decades, state legislators have prioritized tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy few over public education for the rest of us. Our state now, embarrassingly, ranks 50th in public school funding.

Lawmakers now point to the leaky roofs and lack of science teachers that they caused to rationalize subsidizing privately run charter schools. In 2023, our General Assembly dramatically expanded the state’s voucher program and eliminated the income cap—diverting $4 billion in taxpayer money over the next 10 years to pay for wealthy people to send their kids to private schools.

Kaaha has a phrase for this: “Demolition by neglect.” She says that what is happening to Glendale Townhomes—and to Wisconsin’s nursing homes and to my North Carolina neighborhood’s school—is not because public goods are no good, but because private interests and the investor class make the government rotten to the core.

Kaaha was 14 when she and her mother learned that MPHA wanted to tear down their home. This felt terrifying because Glendale had been such a source of stability for them.

Neighbors began organizing under the name Defend Glendale. Over the next decade, they canvassed the neighborhood, drove turnout at public meetings, and petitioned MPHA and their local government to no avail. In what Kaaha describes as a “true Hail Mary move,” they decided to document the neighborhood’s history by researching, collecting artifacts, and interviewing current and former residents. They hoped to bring people together through the history project, and maybe their documentation could secure historic designation for the neighborhood, protecting it from demolition.

It didn’t work. While the exhibit and documentary they made won multiple awards, they were unable to get historic designation or prevent demolition. This past June, the official announcement was made: Glendale will begin to be torn down next year.

“At least we documented that this was here,” Kaaha said to me as we walked around. “So everyone can know.”

From urban Minneapolis to rural Wisconsin, pooling our resources to create public goods can change Americans’ lives for the better. The seniors in Wisconsin have repeatedly told me they remember a time when the government invested in people and it worked well for them. That’s one reason why they are fighting so hard to preserve what’s left of that better system, such as the publicly owned nursing homes. One woman told me that both her children attended government-funded daycare during World War II—at the time, it was provided to any working mother, regardless of her income. Another told me about the government subsidies and loans she and her husband were able to get to purchase a farm in the 1970s, changing their life trajectory. An older man described to me how he received a well-funded public education that prepared him well for his livelihood while accruing no debt—something that seems foreign, distant, and impossible to me. So many of us have not experienced the goodness of having public goods; we can hardly imagine what is possible.

Between Musk’s DOGEing of the federal government and the Big Beautiful Bill’s decimation of SNAP and Medicaid, we are experiencing the destruction of public goods at a breakneck speed. So while it’s probably cold comfort to the families who are losing their homes, the fact that they documented Glendale is important. We can’t let ourselves forget what is possible just because profiteers are rewriting the rules.

One night many years ago, my partner came home from work, hobbled on his crutches across the living room, and nearly collapsed onto the couch. He was still recovering from major surgery but was unable to take time off from work, as his income was dependent on a patchwork of adjunct teaching jobs without benefits under short-term contracts at three different colleges.

A massive bolus of keys, several for each place he worked, was clipped to his belt and jangled comically, metaphorically, off the edge of the couch. “Are we living in a sitcom?” I asked. We both started laughing. As with many issues in this era, the tragedy of reality had somehow crossed the line into satire. Still, I mentally pocketed the scene. Years later, I wrote it into my novel The Adjunct—then I wrote it out, for being too absurd.

Now the news is teeming with stories about higher education—not only about Trump’s attacks on universities, but about the recent college grads who are facing the toughest job market since the pandemic. For those who do manage to find employment, over 40 percent are working jobs that don’t usually require a college degree.

In the midst of these crises, it’s easy to miss a longer-term problem in academia: the deterioration of working conditions for faculty. Because there are jobs for college instructors. They do require degrees. But the pay and the benefits are abysmal. Universities now have more adjuncts than tenured and tenure-track professors combined. Many adjuncts make around $4,000 a course, and a quarter of adjuncts make less than $25,000 a year. In no city in the United States is this enough money to live off comfortably.

Tell people that your partner is a professor, and they don’t imagine an adjunct. The job conjures the image of an idyllic campus dotted with rusticated stone buildings, of a messy office packed with books, and of a job so cushy, all that’s left to worry about is existential dread. The academy of campus novels, from The Secret History to Wonder Boys, and TV shows like The Chair or HBO’s new comedy The Rooster offer a mythology as quaint these days as the western.

Adjunct professors are the gig-economy workers of higher ed. They often have multiple jobs, partly because of the low pay, partly because courses can be canceled at the last minute, and partly because some universities limit the number of classes that an adjunct can teach (possibly to avoid health-insurance obligations).

Adjuncts were originally used in small numbers, as a way to bring industry professionals into the classroom. Now they’re a cost-saving measure, with positions often filled by academics vying for a decreasing number of tenure-track jobs. This is the case even as universities continue to spend big in other areas, such as to cover the costs of their increasingly large administrations or to construct new buildings designed to garner prestige and lure students.

Adjuncts typically receive no benefits: no employer-sponsored healthcare plan, no retirement plan, no sick leave, no disability, and, of course, no support for research and writing. This isn’t just bad for adjuncts as workers; it’s bad for everyone, affecting the quality of education, our ideals of equity, and our ability to create a society rich with new art, stories, and ideas.

Adjunct labor disproportionately affects women and Black people and, ironically, is most often used in the liberal arts and humanities, disciplines that often position themselves as centers of freedom and diversity. (Most of the adjuncts I know are in fields like English, political theory, and philosophy.) Some universities have been cowed into dropping their diversity, equity, and inclusion programs by the Trump administration, but how deeply dedicated these institutions ever were to equity is unclear, given that they run on the backs of highly skilled, low-paid, precarious labor—a system that only serves to reinforce class and social hierarchies.

There is no indication that adjuncts are less capable than their tenured peers, only that they haven’t won the lottery of professorship. Despite their compromised positions, adjuncts still win teaching awards, publish books, and contribute widely to scholarship, literature, and the arts. And they do this even though their academic research and writing—meant to be supported by a tenured position—has been relegated to unpaid labor.

Adjuncting is also a bad deal for students, who seem largely unaware of the problem. (I recently heard about a student who was shocked to discover, upon dropping food off at a local pantry, that their instructor was the one picking it up.)

As the cost of tuition rapidly increases, and as the proliferation of AI compromises the college experience, students should know that universities are ensuring that their instructors don’t have the time to dedicate to creating new classes or modules or to fully contend with how AI is changing the classroom. Adjuncts also don’t have a chance to be a part of any one university community, which would allow them to become mentors to students as well as to connect with and learn from peer scholars, then bring that knowledge back into the classroom.

I used to think of academia as a modern patronage system that shaped our thought and culture in important ways. Through tenure, thinkers, writers, and artists were offered financial stability, and with it the time and freedom to research and create outside of the market. In exchange, they passed their knowledge on to students.

But academia no longer fulfills this promise. In the 10 years since my partner’s surgery, he has worked at eight institutions in three different countries, in a series of precarious academic positions—and all this while applying for the next round of jobs, writing articles for leading journals, and publishing a book with a major university press. There’s a strange, depressing dissonance to leveling up in a career—achieving, essentially, all the milestones of tenure—yet never having the opportunity to advance, never mind having the dignity of stability.

I stood by helplessly watching my partner’s plight. In it, I saw reflected my own struggle to sustain a creative-writing career with a hodgepodge of freelance work, and I saw the struggle of many workers whose livelihoods have been relegated to the gig economy. All I could think to do was write.

I joke that I rage-wrote The Adjunct, but it’s only partly a joke. I wrote the book from a maddening, cornered place that felt both unsustainable and unchangeable. The Adjunct is nothing like a classic academic novel. It sprawls beyond the enclosed space of a single campus. It is not about a professor wracked by ennui or existential dread. It’s not even, really, a novel of ideas. Instead, it’s about an adjunct barely making ends meet, teaching a class about the campus novel—the very genre she’s been alienated from.

Whether you think of it as satire or reportage mostly depends on how much you know about the plight of the adjunct yourself.

In 2021, while on a Mediterranean yacht trip, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump thought they had found heaven on earth in an unlikely spot: Sazan, a rocky island off of Albania.

As Trump later recalled in a podcast interview. “We swam to the islands. We went on a hike, barefoot all the way, up to the top. And we were just captivated.” Kusher, who had previously served as an adviser to his father-in-law, Donald Trump, during the president’s first term, was in the midst of turning the political connections he had made in government into lucrative business deals. Albania, a struggling post-communist country with a government eager to win powerful friends in the West, seemed a promising location. Seizing the opportunity, Kushner initiated a deal to purchase Sazan, as well as marshland in nearby Zvërnec that was home to scores of endangered birds, including flamingos. And Kushner’s investment fund, Affinity Partners, working with the family of Qatari billionaire Moutaz Khayyat, started buying more land, with plans to build luxury hotels.

The scheme stank to high heaven from the start. Although Donald Trump was out of power, he was already indicating that he would seek the presidency again in 2024, which meant that foreign billionaires and political leaders had every reason to curry Kushner’s favor. (The president’s son-in-law would in fact return as a senior foreign policy adviser and emissary in Trump’s second term, making him an even worthier investment.)

Further, land deals in Albania were inherently suspect because of the heavy influence of organized crime over the nation’s government. Writing in The Nation in June, Mitchell Prothero noted:

Over the past two decades, Albanian clans have taken over much of Europe’s cocaine trade, which has immersed an otherwise poor country in illegal, hard-to-spend cash. And the government isn’t about to spurn the economic benefits of this influx….

It’s all a recipe for corruption on a massive scale, as powerful business interests coordinate new development projects with the government, and the international mafia ecosystem. Kushner and his consortium of investors aren’t direct players in this system—but it’s unthinkable that his local business backers and government officials friendly to the projects aren’t involved.

Prothero was right to suspect that Kushner’s deal would inevitably be entangled in political corruption and mob ties. On Saturday, The Wall Street Journal published a detailed report on one of the key players in the deal, Artur Shehu, described by the newspaper as “a suspected gangster who fled to Miami after a gunfight at his bar.”

In 2024, villagers in Zvërnec wrote a letter to Kushner saying that land he was buying from Shehu in fact belonged to them.

The villagers had a strong case. As the Journal reports,

One chunk of land was secured by one of Shehu’s lawyers in 2007 by presenting property officials a mistranslated Ottoman-era land record. While translating from Ottoman Turkish, an archivist substituted out the original owner and inserted Seit Shehu’s name instead, a court found. The lawyer and the archivist were later convicted on falsified documents-related charges, though the lawyer’s case is being retried.

Shehu has been under repeated investigation by authorities in Albania and other European countries for decades. (He hasn’t been convicted and denies wrongdoing.) In June, Shehu was arrested on RICO-style charges by the Albanian special prosecutors’ office, which claimed he was a prominent member of a large drug gang.

It’s hardly a coincidence that Kusher and his Qatari cronies were involved in buying land from an alleged gangster. As the Journal notes, “Gains from cocaine filtered their way to Albania via cryptocurrency and cash smuggled on buses—with the group ultimately laundering money through Albanian real estate.” Albanian gangsters frequently operate by fusing cryptocurrency and real estate, with their corruption greased by access to political power. That is structurally very similar to Kushner’s own putatively legitimate business enterprises. The Trump family also thrives on crypto, real estate, and proximity to political power.

As The Guardian reported on Thursday, Trump’s second term has been a massive exercise in primitive accumulation by grift. In 2025, the president made $2.2 billion

by amassing big cryptocurrency holdings, benefiting from wealthy foreign interests, expanding his Truth Social business and more, while federal oversight of his actions has waned.

Trump last year raked in at least $1.4bn from his crypto ventures according to financial disclosure forms he filed in June…. Monetizing his presidency further this summer, Trump’s Truth Social media business is pushing a new scheme that offers wealthy buyers special early access to his posts for a fee of $100,000 a month.

The sheer scale of the Trump family’s graft is producing a heartening backlash. This is most visible in Albania, where there have been near-daily protests that have expanded into a wide-ranging attack on the country’s crooked government. The spirit of resistance in Albania should inspire Americans. As my Nation colleague Chris Lehmann has lamented, Donald Trump in his second term has been brazenly corrupt, swaggering with a sickening impunity in part because Democratic Party leaders are gun-shy about challenging him. Fortunately, some in the party, notably Senator Elizabeth Warren, have kept beating the drums on Trumpian corruption. If Democrats win back Congress in the midterms, they’ll be in a strong position to investigate Trump family corruption, including the sleazy deals Kushner made in Albania.

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

Earlier this week, Donald Trump signed an executive order intended both to reduce the number of vaccines American children receive and to make it harder for them to get those vaccines.

Trump declared that kids didn’t need to be routinely vaccinated against Hepatitis A and B, or against meningitis—all diseases that can prove life-altering or even lethal. And he targeted the MMR vaccine, which in one shot protects children from mumps, measles, and rubella, and has been spectacularly successful over the decades in reducing childhood mortality rates.

Referring to repeatedly debunked theories that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. continues to push, Trump claimed that multi-vaccine shots like the MMR jab trigger autism, and that separating them out would potentially save millions of lives. He also claimed, bizarrely, that these all-in-one inoculations injected soda can–size amounts of liquid into children; in reality, each shot contains a fraction of a tablespoonful of serum.

As happens so often these days, legal experts immediately pointed out that Trump’s decree wouldn’t really carry the force of law, as vaccine policies are mostly determined at the state rather than the federal level, and any changes to vaccine mandates will likely trigger long and bitter legal battles. In other words, this was dismissible as simply routine Trumpian bluster.

But that largely misses the point. Trump sabotages public policy not through careful legal or legislative strategies but by flooding the zone with his gibberish. When he claims that he knows more than the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Cancer Society, and all the other specialist networks that have come out against his proposed vaccination changes, he is deliberately creating enough white noise to further undermine consensus ideas around science, public health, and how political decisions ought to be made around complex issues such as vaccine policy.

In Trump-land, no matter what the issue is, be it vaccines or American history, there is only one ultimate arbiter, and that is Donald J. Trump, the all-knowing Father of the People whose visage now glares out from so many public buildings in the nation’s capital. That omnipresence, that looming menace over all areas of public life, is the quintessence of authoritarian leadership.

For those not caught in the spell of Trump’s increasingly surreal personality cult—witness the AI-generated images he posted last week of himself in military uniform, medals festooning his chest, flanked by Generals MacArthur and Patton, as well as other AI images of him kissing a gold statue of Jesus, arresting a space alien, and merging his face with George Washington’s— it’s highly unlikely that an unenforceable executive order on vaccines, combined with a large dose of Trumpian hyperbole, will undermine their willingness to get their children vaccinated. But for those still in the cult, especially those living in red states such as Florida, whose public health leaders have already done tremendous damage by buying into conspiracy theories around vaccinations, there is a real risk that Trump’s blather will convince some of them to leave their kids unvaccinated. And if and when that happens, it’s likely that large numbers of children will end up getting sickened by diseases that, until recently, they would have been properly immunized against.

Trump’s administration has already gone out of its way to limit healthcare access for millions of Americans, enacting sweeping cuts to Medicaid and refusing to extend tax credits for Affordable Care Act subsidies. In this, the federal government has largely been supported by GOP leaders at the state level. Predictably, the number of uninsured people is rising rapidly, disproportionately in Republican states. In Texas, one in six residents is now uninsured, including more than 10 percent of young children.

There’s no evidence that these trends will be reversed anytime soon. Quite the opposite: As more cuts to public services kick in, so more people will be left outside of the never particularly munificent protections of America’s social safety net.

Given these realities, it’s already hard to get children vaccinated—it’s expensive and time-consuming, and increasing numbers of families don’t have regular access to primary care doctors. Trump’s order, aimed at requiring multiple visits to get shots that used to be delivered simultaneously, will make it even more daunting for working families in states such as Texas to ensure that their children get the vaccinations they need, and thus more likely that hard-to-contain epidemics will break out.

In a functional democracy, the administration would have to hit the pause button on actions this wantonly destructive, and a raft of state and federal officials and political leaders would be vehemently pushing back against this order. In the bizarro-world of Trump-land, however, there’s no one left to tell the president that he is off the rails. GOP governors, fearful of a radicalized anti-vaxxer base, sure as hell won’t go to bat on this issue, and neither will most congresspeople. True, some senators, such as John Cornyn and Bill Cassidy, posted milquetoast criticisms of the executive order, but those same senators have consistently failed to stand up to Trump when their votes actually mattered.

To take the most obvious example, Cornyn and Cassidy both voted to confirm RFK Jr, despite it being manifestly obvious that Kennedy was a wrecking ball aimed at science-based health policy. If they were serious about protecting access to vaccines, they never would have helped smooth his confirmation. Both also recently voted to confirm Todd Blanche as attorney general, despite it being abundantly clear that Blanche would only further empower Trump to seize control over every aspect of the government—including scientific decision-making processes that he is plainly unqualified to weigh in on.

When the rubber actually hits the road, these men, who in their heart of hearts surely know better, have facilitated Trump’s increasingly irrationalist assault on the foundational pillars of American governance. It is, to put it mildly, hardly a legacy to be proud of.

The Los Angeles Lakers are one of the marquee sport franchises, and yet they just got flipped like a run-down beach house in Tampa.

In a move that shocked NBA insiders, Guggenheim Partners CEO Mark Walter, who bought the team less than a year ago for a jaw-dropping $10 billion, just sold the storied squad to former Disney CEO Bob Iger and venture capitalist Josh Kushner for $12 billion. (Kushner is the brother of Trump’s son-in-law Jared and son of billionaire convicted felon turned Trump-pardoned ambassador Charles Kushner.)

Walter had a reputation as a private-equity shark. He also owns the Los Angeles Dodgers, having bought the baseball team in 2012 for $2.5 billion, and has spent the last year trying to “merge” the two iconic LA teams—which, in private-equity speak, means instituting slash-and-burn layoffs and squeezing every last penny out of the franchises and their fans for their investors. Among oligarchs and private-equity strip miners, he’s considered to be on the cutting edge, known for dramatically overpaying for sports franchises as a way to park money in an asset that historically only rises in value. In the process, Walter has exposed himself as a paper tiger, over-leveraged and searching for financial support to pay for his original Lakers deal and for the Dodgers’s astronomical contracts. The fact that the Lakers compete in a building called Crypto.com Arena is almost too perfect.

But more important than Walter’s portfolio are his alleged financial felonies, and they are ample. Walter has found himself in the crosshairs of both Todd Blanche’s Department of Justice and the Security and Exchange Commission for over $16 billion in—again, allegedly—improperly reported loans. We shall now see whether selling to Kushner will make Walter’s legal troubles magically go away. Walter needs the $2 billion to pay lawyers, or potentially to settle with the DOJ. That will be up to Blanche, an unqualified, deeply corrupt lackey, who is more Trump’s personal attorney than attorney general.

And with that, what could be the most lazily choreographed corruption scheme of the Trump era, the president gets another billionaire in his pocket. If he gets a cut from the buy on top of that, no one would be shocked. That’s just business as usual for an administration enriching its own and looting the country.

This also explains why Walter just brought the Dodgers to the White House over objections from players, the media, and fans. At the ceremony, he even gave Trump a Dodgers World Series ring. Walter may as well have proceeded to kiss it. Future generations will get to debate over whether the open-air corruption of this administration is cartoonishly evil or just indolent. Either way, it serves a political purpose: claim absolute power and dare anyone to say otherwise. The brandishing of impunity in the face of preexisting ethical frameworks is a timeworn expression of despotism.

Selling to Bob Iger, who is more of a figurehead than the moneybags here, also has its advantages. In March, Iger left his post as CEO of Disney, which oversees ESPN, after a dramatic fall from grace. His newfound control of Los Angeles’s glamor franchise represents a return to power for someone who has been on the outside looking in. And so far, the Kushner connection to this deal has neither been investigated nor much discussed at ESPN.

This is not necessarily because of Iger, although one could be forgiven for wondering. But Iger doesn’t even need to call up ESPN HQ to keep it that way. The network has made a dramatic right turn in recent years, with boss Jimmy Pitaro muzzling any political discussion that isn’t MAGA or MAGA-adjacent. It has laid off any journalists or opinion writers with a social conscience, while shelling out millions to carnival barker Stephen A. Smith and Pat McAfee—or, as pro-wrestler CM Punk likes to call him, Pat MAGAfee. The editorial position of the network—and its muted journalists—is already built around suppressing any criticism of Kushner and Iger. The MAGA is now baked into what was once the World Wide Leader in sports. Expecting it to hold the powerful to account would be like asking a dog to meow.

NOlympics LA, a local grassroots organization investigating the many ways financial exploitation sneaks into cities through the Trojan horse of sports, says Kushner is more than just a private-equity scion. “Kushner is a slumlord who has helped fund chatGPT and Anduril, the military drone maker run by Palmer Luckey,” said Eric Sheehan, an organizer for NOlympics LA. “The coming together of weapons makers and children’s entertainment to buy and trade legendary sports institutions exclusively as assets ensure fiduciary responsibilities that overwrite any human impulse. As our treasured cultural institutions are encircled and captured by capital, the Lakers being bought by a slumlord who funds AI and military weapons is par for the course.”

In addition to the Trump-adjacent stench, the problem with these ego-driven franchise valuations by private equity is that the people in charge are showing zero regard for the communities where these teams have taken root. One could certainly argue that this has been true of sports since the notorious Walter O’Malley absconded with the Brooklyn Dodgers and brought them to Los Angeles, where they eventually uprooted the working-class Mexican community of Chavez Ravine to build Dodgers Stadium. But now the volume has been turned up to 11. Franchise owners no longer depend upon community support for their profits. Public subsidies, the addiction economy of legalized gambling, and, most of all, broadcast TV rights provide the revenue streams, and if there are greater cable deals and taxpayer-funded stadium plans in other cities, then goodbye to the hometown squad. It’s pitiless profiteering for the rich, abandoned stadiums or prohibitive ticket prices for the rest of us.

One thing is certain: We need to remember that these teams were ours—spiritually, psychologically, personally—before they ever became just another asset in the private-equity portfolios of people like nepo-oligarch Josh Kushner, bored retiree Bob Iger, or the prison-avoidant Mark Walter. With the rise of a new democratic socialist movement, we need to start demanding more than concessions. We need to protect our teams from these sharks and ensure that they aren’t uprooted or stripped down for parts. The only way to do that is to call for public ownership. As more and more democratic socialists come into public office, we should be demanding that they join us in the fight to make these teams become—like the Green Bay Packers already are—fan-owned or publicly run. If we don’t get these obscenely rich saboteurs and their “wealth funds” out of sports, we will be left with a pale facsimile of what once existed. Symbols of community cohesion will instead become emblems of decay.

Every time a grotesque sale like this happens, we need to remember that these billionaires are not just buying up the sports world. They are buying our joy. And it’s nothing but a hostile takeover.

Constance Jordan’s debt burden began as $186,000 in federal loans. She used the money to attend undergraduate and graduate school, and became a psychiatric nurse practitioner. Now she is 70 years old, and, despite her making payments since 1998, her debt burden stands at $435,000.

Until two years ago, Jordan was making those payments as part of the most affordable plan in history: Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE). The Biden-era loan repayment plan reduced monthly loan payments, sometimes to as low as $0, and allowed borrowers to receive forgiveness after 10 or 25 years of making payments. According to the Biden administration, borrowers would see lifetime payments per dollar fall by 40 percent on average.

Under SAVE, Jordan paid $800 per month, an amount she found reasonable given her salary. “I never skipped a payment,” she told me.

Then, several Republican-led states filed two lawsuits arguing that the Biden administration lacked the authority to create SAVE and that it was a backhanded way to implement mass debt cancellations. After a court ruling in June 2024 placed an injunction on key features of the plan, the Biden administration placed all borrowers in SAVE in an administrative forbearance while the administration continued to “defend” the repayment plan in court.

Since then, borrowers in SAVE have not had to make payments, but on July 1, they began receiving notifications that they would need to switch to a new repayment plan within 90 days, or the Department of Education would do it for them—enrolling them in the Standard Plan, which is the most expensive. The new repayment plans often come with monthly bills that are two to three times higher.

Jordan’s best option among new plans is the Income-Contingent Repayment, and under this plan, her new monthly payment is $3,900, almost five times the original amount. “There’s no way on God’s green Earth I can afford that payment,” she said. That amount does not feel income-contingent to her. While she no longer sees patients, she does some work for extra money, such as administering disability exams, and she receives Social Security. The combined income will not be enough to cover her new loan bill.

“What does one do?” she asked me, holding a stack of correspondences from her servicer.

Franco Vitella manages a branch library in Toledo, Ohio. It’s what he went to school for, and he’s good at it. His debt burden began as $50,000 in federal loans, most of which he took out for an undergraduate degree he completed in 2009. He became a librarian with the understanding that his career choice would allow him to pursue Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF), a program that forgives all federal loans for public service workers who make 120 payments in a qualifying repayment plan.

He looked at the repayment plans available in 2016 and believed he’d be able to afford the payments, which was true at first. Under his first plan, REPAYE, he paid $120 a month, and then SAVE offered something even better: $0 payments. With this in mind, he and his wife decided to have a second child.

“Everything costs more than it did just a few years ago,” he said. “While I have a good job, my pay has not matched the rate of inflation.”

The plan he chose after leaving SAVE, Income-Based Repayment, costs him $221, though that number has not been fixed in the communications he’s had with his loan servicer, the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority (MOHELA). Like other borrowers across the country, he was mistakenly given a quote of $50 a month for his new plan, and he applied to it believing that would be his payment.

A week later, he received notice that his new payment would be $0, which was confirmed on his first billing statement. Then, the next day, he received a new notice, saying that his plan was approved and his payment would be $745, which MOHELA eventually acknowledged was an error after he spent hours on the phone with them.

But even today, when he uses the Federal Student Aid repayment simulator—a calculator that shows payment amounts under different plans based on loan burdens, interest rates, and family size—he receives a number lower than his current bill of $221. And just recently, he was inexplicably asked to apply for his plan again, despite his already having made payments in it. “It’s awful and insulting,” he said about the contradictory information he receives from his insurer.

Vitella’s new bill means that he’ll “think twice” before going to the doctor. “The increased payments will reduce my ability to save for almost anything and put me in a position where I need to take on debt for emergencies,” he said. It also means that his wife, who homeschools their two children, may be pushed back into the workforce. This means their kids will likely have to enroll in public school.

“I worry what that means for my oldest daughter, who may not excel in a public school environment,” Vitella said. “She has Level 1 autism, and benefits from the supports my wife can offer.”

Constance and Vitella are two of the nearly 8 million people enrolled in SAVE, all of whom are being forced out of the plan, nearly simultaneously. “We’re talking about nearly a fourth of the federal student loan portfolio, which is one of the reasons the process of transfer has been so devastating,” said Braxton Brewington, press secretary for the Debt Collective, a national union of debtors. According to Brewington, the effects of this mass transfer have come with “errors, missteps, mistakes, and illegalities.”

One such issue is borrowers’ ability to receive credit for their qualifying payments toward relief. Borrowers have transferred plans because new ones are introduced or shuttered, and now their past payments are lost. Shayla Perry, a 46-year-old program manager for a tech company based in Georgia, said that MOHELA has no record of five years of payments she made years earlier. At the time, she was making payments on a Federal Family Education Loan, a guaranteed loan that was a federal-private partnership and which no longer exists. She was told when she consolidated her loan to enroll in SAVE that her payment history would come with her, but it did not.

MOHELA representatives told her that while she might have made payments, they cannot confirm them and that there was nothing she could do about it because “those two systems don’t talk.” Perry has submitted a complaint, as instructed, but no one has responded. She struggles to get someone on the phone when she calls, and when she can, according to Perry, the people she talks to seem to know less than she does. For example, one representative didn’t understand that under Trump’s new repayment plan, the Repayment Assistance Plan, her repayment timeline would be extended.

Today, her debt burden is $238,745, and though her monthly payments under SAVE were $273, her new options range from $998 to $1,167. If Perry’s five years of qualifying payments are never located, she will pay an additional $60,000 before she is eligible to receive relief. “I want to ask our public officials, ‘Do you see this?’” Perry said. “’Do you see what’s happening? Why is this allowed to happen?’”

Over the weekend of August 1, many borrowers in SAVE received shocking news: Their loans, which they had been told were in forbearance, were now, according to MOHELA, in default. It seemed as if their loans were being transferred to a collections company and their default status reported to credit bureaus. To be back in good standing, they’d need to make one large bulk payment.

“The last e-mail I’d received from them was in June,” said Daniela Perez, a 28-year-old nonprofit worker living in Miami. “Then I woke up to multiple e-mails saying my account was in default status, and I owed $11,000,” she said. “I don’t have $11,000 to dish out to settle this debt, and it wouldn’t let you pay your monthly amount.”

When she called MOHELA at 8 am on Monday morning, it was the first time the representative had heard of what happened. After speaking with dozens of other borrowers online who received the same notice, Perez determined that it was probably an error and that the months in forbearance were being counted as missed payments. Her credit was not harmed, but other borrowers have reported to the Debt Collective that their credit reports still reflect the false delinquencies.

“We never got an apology for what happened,” Perez said. It had been for her and other borrowers, terrifying.

“Default is such a shameful topic,” according to Sabrina Ashley Cereceres, executive director of the Student Debt Crisis Center, a nonprofit organization advocating on behalf of 2 million borrowers. When borrowers enter that status, or are told falsely they are in that status, she said, they “tend to check out.” Cereceres had heard from dozens of borrowers over the weekend getting this same error. “It is going to cause extra stress and discouragement, in addition to confusion,” she said.

This stress is well-documented. Nearly a fifth of surveyed borrowers reported suicidal ideation associated with their loan payments, according to Dan Collier, professor and research fellow at Princeton’s Debt Collection Lab.

In addition to the historic transfer of repayment plans, Cereceres cites the gutting of the Department of Education as a factor in the ongoing problems harming borrowers. Brewington agrees. “The Department of Education is incompetent and fueling much of this disaster. They have made decisions to move forward based on squeezing as much money as they can get out of people, whether it’s legal or not,” he said.

“They are supposed to be servicers, not banks,” Jordan, the semiretired nurse practitioner, told me.

On August 5, the Student Debt Crisis Center and the Debt Collective issued a joint press release demanding a national pause on all federal loan payments and interest. “A pause isn’t just reasonable, it’s necessary,” according to the statement, which includes a petition for a pause signed by over 130k borrowers. Borrowers have told SDCC that a payment pause “would offer relief from impossible bills, prevent ballooning balances, and provide breathing room amid a volatile repayment system.” The Trump administration is currently facing a pending legal challenge filed by borrowers over federal loan changes.

“One thing a debtor can do is complain, complain, complain,” said Brewington. “The CFPB should hear your complaint. The Department of Education should hear your complaint. Your state’s attorney general should hear your complaint. Your member of Congress and your two senators should hear your complaint. Your local representatives should hear your complaint. Your student loan servicers should hear your complaint,” he said. Cereceres agreed, also recommending that frustrated borrowers add their name to the petition.

On Monday, August 10, the two groups started their National Week of Action, calling attention to the “real, immediate, and irreparable harm to millions of student debtors” along with demanding a federal pause.

Borrowers and advocacy groups are sounding the alarm on a problem that, according to them, is getting larger, not smaller. Today, one in five borrowers is in default, half a million borrowers await approval for the income-driven repayment plans they applied to, and another 100,000 PSLF buy-back applications remain pending, on top of the SAVE transfer.

If nothing is done, according to Brewington, “We will have the worst student loan default crisis in the history of the country.”

Jordan, Vitella, Perry, and Perez all shared that they went to school so that they could get a good job and have a good life. But their loan payments are making that difficult. “I would like to be able to buy a house someday,” said Perez, who shared that she is an immigrant and a first-generation college student. She feels extra pressure to do well, “but I have a $100,00 debt I have to settle first.”

Jordan recently filed for forbearance under her new income-driven repayment plan because she could not make the nearly $4,000 payments. The forbearance process, like everything else, was confusing. Reading from notes she recorded this spring, she cited a day in which she called her servicer, Nelnet, seven times and after a series of disconnections, strange messages, and wrong numbers, gave up.

A week later, when she was finally able to connect, an automated voice said there was no record of her in their accounts. So overwhelmed was she that she gave up entirely, questions unanswered, and did her best to navigate her request for forbearance alone.

Jordan might remain in forbearance until next year, as one letter from Nelnet told her, or she might need to recertify in November, which she was told in a different letter. She doesn’t know. Like everyone else, she’s in limbo.

It seems like ancient history now, but it was only a year and a half ago that Elon Musk found himself on the wrong side of the new right after he signaled support for the H1-B visa program. No one contributed more money to Donald Trump’s reelection—and no one seemed to fall from grace faster. Musk’s thought crime was to acknowledge that the talents of foreign workers have “made America strong” and built his companies. MAGA turned on Musk with shocking speed and ferocity, and he was defiant in turn. “Take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face,” he told critics.

Then, a few months later, Musk began feuding with Trump himself over the outlays in the GOP’s signature spending and taxation bill—a fight that soon metastasized, given the magnitude of the egos involved. Musk went so far as to accuse Trump of intentionally sabotaging the handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files. Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon called on Trump to nationalize Musk’s companies and deport him. Online, Trump’s most fervent sycophants fantasized about Musk being executed for his disloyalty.

Many observers believed Musk’s MAGA affair had come to an end. But as a recovering MAGA adherent myself, I noticed something that made me suspect otherwise: Around the time the world’s richest man saw his influence with the right slipping, he began to post more about race. The right, in response, slowly warmed to him again. An analysis by The Washington Post found that, from October 2025 to mid-April, Musk indeed “significantly increased his rate of online posts about race and his concerns about perceived threats to Whiteness or what he views as calls for a ‘genocide’ against White people.” He posted about race almost every day during this period, at “nearly triple the rate for the previous two years.”

The online right took notice. “This rethoric [sic] from Elon Musk is huge and if he keeps it up, it will save lives,” wrote one influtential race-baiting X user. This shift reached a crescendo this summer, when Musk publicly supported Citizen Vigilante, a film about a man who kills immigrants—criminals and noncriminals alike. One person posted a menacing image of the film’s titular vigilante captioned, “First the traitors, then the invaders.” Musk replied, “Yes,” endorsing the notion of executing perceived race traitors. The phrasing and the sentiment behind it were lifted right out of The Turner Diaries, an infamous white supremacist novel about a race war in which non-whites and their white allies are slaughtered by a group of radicals who usurp the federal government. The novel had helped shaped the worldview of the right-wing terrorist Timothy McVeigh, who killed 167 people and injured 684 in his 1995 bombing attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

Musk was able to survive the fallout from his initial break with the MAGA right, because he, like Trump, understands something important about the present moment: There is no more powerful force in the right-wing psyche than racial conflict. It’s the reason that Musk is once more viewed as a movement hero on the right—and why the conservative movement remains is in Trump’s thrall. Every other issue and consideration is a far-distant second to the specter of the racial conflict that, in the right-wing imagination, is forever looming on the horizon.

This tendency has always existed in the GOP, though under the pressures of maintaining respectability in the political mainstream, gatekeepers in the conservative movement sought to marginalize its uglier manifestations. The racial panics that gained more recent favor in the conservative movement were also somewhat more targeted than the race hatreds that convulsed the right in the 20th century, zeroing in narrow, disfavored groups such as Muslims.

With Trump’s takeover, however, the GOP has once more become a clearing house of viral racial animus, building up a far more extensive—and expanding—list of enemies. The centrality of racial conflict also why the efforts of Republicans such as Mike Pence—who recently launched a think tank to reclaim the party from Trump’s influence—are doomed to fail. People like Pence want to go back to serving warm beer after Trump has had everyone slamming the hard stuff for the last decade. In 1968, Republican strategist Kevin Phillips said that “the whole secret of politics is knowing who hates who,” and no one has embraced that cynical philosophy—or utilized it more effectively—than Trump.

Phillips is an important figure in GOP history because it was his 1968 memo for Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign that outlined the “Southern strategy” to exploit racial resentment among certain white voters. Phillips built out his strategy in response to segregationist George Wallace’s third-party bid. Wallace, then the Democratic governor of Alabama, ran for president on an openly anti–civil rights platform. By dog-whistling about “crime, decentralization of federal social programming, and law and order,” Phillips wrote, Nixon could implicitly appeal to the racial anxieties of Wallace supporters without using the governor’s incendiary language, which would jeopardize the support of white moderates. The Southern strategy worked so well that every Republican president since Nixon has embraced it to some extent.

Trump’s central innovation in his second term has been to elevate the Southern strategy from a campaign tactic to a governing agenda—a fact the right simultaneously celebrates on its own terms and denies when others notice. Take, for example, the case of Scott Greer, who was fired from The Daily Caller, the right-wing website founded by Tucker Carlson, for his ties to white nationalist groups. In an interview with The Ezra Klein Show, Christopher Rufo, the senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute best known for his crusade against critical race theory, argued that Greer should still be granted a platform, since Greer himself has since advocated against the white nationalist label. But this proves to largely be a distinction without a difference. Greer hasn’t so much reconsidered his core views on race; rather, the MAGA GOP has gravitated more closely to them—which means that he can rehabilitate his standing in the movement with minimal, and mostly cosmetic, changes to his rhetoric. He’s comfortable calling himself a “conservative” because that label now includes views that once were relegated to fringe white nationalist figures. Even the self-described “white advocate” Jared Taylor has criticized Greer and those like him for wanting to “have it both ways”—discarding fraught segregation-friendly labels for the sake of optics while claiming that the Trumpified GOP is the best vehicle for advancing the views associated with those labels.

On one level, this feud among white nationalists is eloquent testimony to how far right the GOP has veered on race; what might have earlier been fodder for an unhinged right-wing Reddit flame war is now a platform for commentators on the right like Rufo to ally themselves with white nationalists who until very recently disparaged his work as an accomodationist obstacle to full-blown “right-wing identitarianism.” And by most reasonable measures, both Greer and Taylor are right: racists can have it both ways on the right, and the savvy career move for ambitious white nationalists like Greer is to throw in with the GOP. After all, the people running White House social-media pages have incorporated themes and even music drawn from self-consciously white supremacist scenes. What was once relegated to the fringe is now mainstream on the right.

I know this firsthand, as a former enthusiastic recruit to the MAGA right. I watched this transformation happen in real time from the inside.

I traveled from the edge of the right to becoming a Lincoln Fellow of the Claremont Institute—which, like virtually every other conservative institution today, has given Trump carte blanche under the belief that he is the only thing standing between the West and “race communism” or, more commonly now, “Third Worldism.” The nomenclature is always fungible; what’s constant is the invocation of a mortal racialized threat to civilization as we know it.

In a nutshell, the right understands itself as being in a struggle against a racial and demographic clock. Without some drastic intervention, a long line of demagogues on the right routinely lament, the United States will be swamped by a coalition of nonwhites, immigrants, and white enablers who will bring about a dark age of acute government dysfunction and naked corruption. The prime directive of this new regime will be the formal persecution of whites, who will become the victims of an ever-intensifying system of racial favoritism that places them at the bottom.

As the Musk episode showed, no one on the right can be seen as a backslider from this vision and still have a viable political career: It has bulked into a badge of right-wing identity, fulfilling much the same role that tax-cutting antigovernment ideology did in the 1980s and ’90s. Its status as an unshakable article of faith in the MAGA movement also means that it doesn’t really matter whether the leaders who’ve bought into it really subscribe to it; its instrumental value is simply too great, so long as these apocalyptic delusions have the movement’s base in their grip. Trump understands this instinctively, and Musk figured it out by paying attention to him. So did JD Vance. An empty suit is a reliable weathervane, as we’ve seen in Vance’s cunning reinvention from a Never Trump conservative who compared Trump to Hitler into an ardent purveyor of MAGA racial panics.

The price of this sort of cynical demagoguery is steep. The “civilization” that’s dogmatically held to be imperiled by brown and foreign-born hordes has degenerated under Trump’s watch into a kleptocratic kakistocracy without an analogue in American history. It’s impossible, in this compass, to detail all the ways Trump has made American life materially worse and more dystopian while profiting from the collective misery of millions of everyday people. A partial inventory would include monetizing the White House for Trump to make more money than he did as a businessman, Musk’s own colossally destructive and deadly reign at DOGE, unleashing new disease threats through sheer incompetence, the relentless onslaught against the environment and wildlife, the unprecedented weaponization of the Department of Justice, the killings of American citizens by federal agents with impunity, and the construction of a digital police state that groups like Claremont, prior to their own MAGA makeovers, would have decried as a civil-liberties travesty.

Yet all this criminal dysfunction is only part of the cost of doing business, so far as the white nationalist right is concerned. Within its charmed Caucasian chalk circle, there’s simply no price that’s too high for “saving” America from “Third Worldism”—even if the rescue operation turns America into the very sort of squalid authoritarian regime the right associates with that incoherent term. This is also why there is no reason to believe an internal course correction is in the cards. If there is hope, it is in an expanded Democratic coalition that is more amenable to dissent, disagreement, and defectors.

After the cavalcade of race panics, the second most powerful tool in the right’s arsenal is the fear of no return: the notion that the mandate of civilizational restoration means that there’s no alternative but to be locked in to the right—that changing one’s mind is irrelevant, or futile, because one’s allegiance is preordained in one’s genetic makeup.

Of course, this is another lie—one that appeals to the worst aspects of our nature. The truth is that America’s story, at its best, is one of reconciliation. Even George Wallace turned a hard corner later in life and found redemption. It’s high time that conservatives in America took due note of how Wallace turned his life around, rather than mimicking his opportunistic descent into bigotry and hatred.

In the wake of this week’s primary votes in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and South Carolina, our punditry complex remains fixated on the left insurgency in the Democratic Party. But we should find some time, amid all these speculative forecasts, to linger over one of the most satisfying outcomes of this primary season: the decisive defeat of MyPillow impresario Mike Lindell as he mounted an ultra-MAGA bid for Minnesota’s GOP gubernatorial nomination.

Lindell is best known for his zealous public support of Donald Trump’s unhinged conspiracy theories about his 2020 electoral defeat—an effort that devoured millions of Lindell’s own fortune and resulted in a handful of delusional pseudo-documentaries peddling lies about election fraud, while earning him still more disavowals and deplatformings from media networks that agreed to air his calumnies in exchange for cash. Lindell has also faced a welter of court cases based on his election lies. In June, he settled a lawsuit brought by the voting machine company formerly known as Dominion, which settled an earlier $787 million claim against Fox News on the same grounds. A separate action, brought by a Dominion executive in Colorado, resulted in a $2.3 million judgment against Lindell, together with $4.4 million in punitive fees his lawyers are still fighting, amid a steady stream of sanctions for false citations and other errors. And the voting machine firm Smartmatic won a separate suit against Lindell, though he continues to refuse to pay the damages he owes.

This long trail of fabulism and conspiracy-mongering is a credential in a MAGA movement now rife with election deniers, and Lindell minted an enthusiastic Trump endorsement out of it, which pretty much furnished his entire campaign platform. But Lindell’s reliance on the president’s kingmaking prowess came decisively to naught: He was soundly thrashed by Minnesota House Speaker Lisa DeMuth on Tuesday, losing by 11 points and more than 45,000 votes; to absolutely no one’s surprise, he is refusing to concede and floating a fresh round of fabricated claims about rampant election fraud.

It’s far too soon to hail Lindell’s defeat as a sign that the Republican Party might be, at long last, stirring out of its authoritarian fantasias and engaging with some semblance of reality once more. But Lindell’s face-plant, after his leading in the polls during the campaign’s homestretch, marks the most prominent loss by a Trump-anointed hopeful in this primary cycle. Trump endorsements still command widespread devotion from the GOP base, as incumbent casualties on the right such as John Cornyn, Thom Tillis, Thomas Massie, and John Cassidy can readily attest. Yet Lindell’s defeat comes after a number of other setbacks for handpicked Trump endorsees in the primaries. Just last week, Tennessee Representative Andy Ogles—a stout homophobe and anti-Islamic racist hailed by Trump as a “conservative warrior”—lost a race in his redrawn district to former state agricultural commissioner Charlie Hatcher. In Michigan’s eighth district, meanwhile, Trump-endorsed candidate Amir Hassan lost badly to Thomas J. Smith—an especially embarrassing outcome for Hassan and Trump since Smith had suspended his campaign the month before.

Several of Trump’s biggest endorsement flops centered, as Lindell’s did, on a governor’s race. In Iowa, MAGA standard-bearer Randy Feenstra lost to Zack Laun, an insurgent candidate aligned with the MAHA movement. In Georgia—a critical swing state—Trump’s pet candidate, Lieutenant Governor Burt Jones, lost to Rick Jackson, a billionaire healthcare executive running as an “outsider.” And in South Carolina—traditionally deep-red Trump country—Pamela Evette, another lieutenant governor endorsed by Trump, fell to state Attorney General Alan Wilson. (Though Trump, who can’t bear to lose, issued a hurried dual endorsement of both candidates when he saw that an Evette win was looking like a long shot.) These miscues in governors’ races are revealing, since they’re statewide tests of voter sentiment that, unlike Senate contests, aren’t heavily reliant on the national party’s resources and organizing infrastructure.

Lindell’s poor showing in Minnesota was also telling because the state has become a flash point in the protests against the Trump administration’s fascist mass deportation campaign—an initiative that’s losing public support on a massive scale. Right-wing leaders in Minnesota have sought to distract from this liability with demagogic and racist attacks on the state’s Somali community, which they allege has engaged in rampant government-funded fraud, but that’s chiefly served to further diminish the party’s support among non-white voters.

It’s true that, in addition to facing these MAGA headwinds, Lindell also contended with some structural challenges. He wasn’t the beneficiary of the state GOP’s endorsement—though the candidate who did nail it down, former healthcare executive Kendall Qualls, finished a distant third in the primary balloting. In an election cycle more friendly to Trump—who now has an approval rating below the depths he reached in the wake of the January 6 coup attempt—Lindell might well have claimed that the state GOP leaders were RINO’s, stiffing a heroic truth-teller to continue feathering their own nests. Instead, the state party’s failure to play much of a significant role in the race’s outcome seems to be an ominous reflection of the broader cluelessness of the national party in the face of a Trump-free future. It’s unclear how much Lindell wound up spending on his campaign, given his plutocratic portfolio and the absence of any serious regulation of dark-money spending, but it doesn’t appear to be much—not a surprising development, since he’s still drowning in legal fees and stepped away from his MyPillow post to run for governor.

But all these factors aside, the resounding defeat of Trump’s best-known ally in election denial and MAGA grievance politics is a boon for sanity and truthfulness. There may well be another boomlet in self-funded bogus documentaries about Lindell’s loss, but it seems like a growing contingent of the public is happy to tell the tireless self-dramatizing crank to stuff a pillow in it.

This week, Francesca Hong won one of the highest vote totals ever recorded for a Wisconsin Democrat in a seriously contested primary for the party’s gubernatorial nomination. Her tally—around 312,000 votes—was almost 90,000 votes more than Democratic Governor Tony Evers won when he was first nominated in 2018.

Evers chose not to seek reelection this year. He remained aloof from a chaotic multi-candidate campaign to replace him, before finally endorsing a last-minute bid by Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, who on Tuesday finished a little over 3,000 votes ahead of Hong.

Election analysis is often an exercise in managing expectations, and that it certainly the case in Wisconsin, where pre-primary polls put Hong in the lead. When she didn’t prevail, pundits and political insiders rushed to declare a definitional victory for the Democratic Party’s embattled centrist wing.

“Democrat establishment strikes back as socialist candidate downed in battleground primary,” read the Fox News headline, while CNBC announced, “Hong’s defeat in Wisconsin deals blow to rising Democratic socialists.” And, of course, The New York Times presumed that “A Stunning Loss in Wisconsin Shows the Limits of the Left.”

Seriously? A little-known legislator with a scant campaign treasury, whose candidacy was actively opposed by the sitting governor and faced a hair-on-fire national media onslaught, finished in a virtual tie for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in the ultimate swing state. And we’re supposed to believe that the result has defined the limits of the left?

History suggests differently.

Movements are built over time. Robert M. La Follette, the great progressive governor of Wisconsin in the early 20th century, lost repeated bids for his Republican Party’s gubernatorial nomination. He was labeled as too radical, too unprepared, and too unfit to govern. And then he won. The transformational figure in the modern Democratic Party of Wisconsin, William Proxmire, was dismissed as a gadfly. He lost bids for governor in 1952, 1954, and 1956. Then, in 1957, he won a special election for what had been Joe McCarthy’s US Senate seat and ushered in a new kind of politics in a once rigidly Republican state.

In the heat of an election season, results are measured in raw vote totals. But they should also be measured by the potential they reveal. That is what Hong did on election night. “We have built something that will change politics forever,” she told a cheering crowd of young supporters. “What we have done will be remembered. I don’t even know how the final results will end. But what I do know is that we are ready to keep fighting, and I feel confident. More importantly, I am so deeply, deeply grateful.”

Hong had every right to be grateful, and every right to be confident about the future.

With an outsider campaign that defied expectations and conventional wisdom, she came within a whisker of winning one of the highest-profile contests of a volatile election year. And, despite a frenzied final debate about her “electability,” public polls and internal Democratic surveys suggested that she could be a viable contender in November against the extremely right-wing Republican nominee, Tom Tiffany.

Even as she promised to fully support Crowley, Hong reflected, appropriately, on what her own run had accomplished. “This campaign was not about getting one person into office,” she said. “It is about building a movement and a government that puts working people first. Our movement is strong, and the work isn’t done.”

The map of Wisconsin confirms that assessment. Hong’s support was not narrowly defined, nor regionally constricted. She won 20 of Wisconsin’s 72 counties, carrying wide swaths of northwest and western Wisconsin, as well as much of the industrial Fox Valley. She won Green Bay and surrounding Brown County, as well as Democratic strongholds such as Eau Claire and La Crosse. She carried Menominee County, the home of the state’s Menominee Indian Reservation. Her highest percentage of the vote came not from liberal Madison’s Dane County but from Ashland County on the far shores of Lake Superior. She even came within 2,400 votes of winning Crowley’s Milwaukee County.

While much of the national coverage of the Wisconsin campaign had focused on Hong’s democratic socialism and her old tweets about Thanksgiving and the best place to sample cheese curds, the secret to her statewide viability was not a novel new approach developed by strategists in New York or Washington.

Rather, Hong practiced an old-school version of Wisconsin Democratic politics—recognizing the importance of building a coalition rooted in the progressive heartlands of Madison, the diverse precincts of Milwaukee, and the rural regions that Democrats have so frequently neglected. In building that coalition, Hong did something that is so rare in politics that it confused many of the national reporters who began following her as her campaign as it surged in the polls: She engaged in real conversations with Wisconsinites, joking with them, showing off her Milwaukee Bucks tattoo, and paying close attention when they talked about things like their concerns about AI data centers.

Long before most Democrats nationally took an interest in the issue, Hong called for a moratorium on construction of major data centers. But she did not stop there. She recognized that the widespread opposition to data centers is just one expression of a deeper anxiety over the threat that artificial intelligence poses to jobs, privacy and the frameworks of our lives. So—in addition to plans to tax the rich and fully fund public education, break up agribusiness monopolies, establish public banking, and strengthen unions—she proposed a detailed agenda that promised “no tax breaks or state funding for AI layoffs” and said that, when it came to AI regulation, “Wisconsin will step in to protect workers if the federal government won’t.”

Hong’s determination to build a campaign based on her interactions with voters—as opposed to demands from campaign donors and talking points from out-of-state consultants—set her apart. And it built a loyalty that saw her through the turbulent close of a campaign in which candidates with more money and name recognition stumbled and, in many cases, dropped out. Even amid claims that Hong could not beat a Republican “culture wars” crusade that would attack her as a holiday-hating Marxist, hundreds of thousands of Democratic primary voters stuck with the 37-year-old progressive, who proudly identified herself as “a mom, service worker, chef, and community organizer”

Just as Hong stuck with them. While most of the media’s attention to the last days of the campaign focused on some ill-advised appearances on national cable shows—where the commentariat could talk about nothing but old tweets on police funding and Thanksgiving—the candidate spent most of her time on the road, traveling along blue highways and county roads from Viroqua (population 4,504) to Siren (population 1,554) and to historic manufacturing centers such as Kenosha, and, of course, to Green Bay. She frequently mentioned the latter city in response to questions about her supposedly “radical” ideology: “When people ask about my style of progressive politics, I always start with the three Ps: fixing potholes, fully funding our public schools, and our community-owned Green Bay Packers.”

“At some stops,” Hong noted, “we’ve even had to change venues because so many people [were] showing up.” They wanted pictures with the former chef and restaurant owner from Madison whom so many national commentators portrayed as “too radical” or “too woke” to connect with voters in a swing state such as Wisconsin. In fact, Francesca Hong connected with more than 300,000 of them, as she laid the foundations for a movement that is far from finished.