Billionaire healthcare executive Rick Jackson won a GOP runoff for the governor’s race in Georgia, beating Georgia’s current lieutenant governor, Burt Jones. Jackson will now take on former Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms in the general election.

Jones, who famously tried to help Donald Trump overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results, earned a thank-you endorsement from Trump nearly a year ago. His loss is one of the only times during this primary cycle that the Trump-endorsed Republican didn’t win.

For his part, Jackson, despite failing to secure an endorsement, did dutifully kiss Trump’s ring in the only way that matters: He donated $1 million to Trump in December. Jackson also reportedly spent $100 million of his own money on his campaign. He claims that being self-funded means that he’s not beholden to special interests but he’s a billionaire healthcare executive, which means he’s basically a walking special interest.

The most interesting thing about this gubernatorial primary is its immediate effect on the midterm elections. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, the Georgia state legislature was one among a number of former Confederate states looking to re-gerrymander their congressional maps to give Republicans even more of an advantage. Georgia’s legislature is already dominated by Republicans, but there had been some pushback within the party against even more aggressively gerrymandering the state. Jones, as lieutenant governor (and therefore president of the Georgia state Senate), was expected to try to push through the new maps.

But now that he has lost, reports indicate that the new maps are “dead on arrival.” This is not because Jones has had a change of heart. He still wants the racist gerrymander. It’s just that, since Jones is a lame duck, other Republicans who oppose the new map no longer fear his retribution should they vote against it.

That is fascinating to me. Republicans will go for maximal racism to keep their jobs, but won’t necessarily if they’re not threatened. And we’re all used to it. Pro-racism is just kind of accepted as a necessary position for Republicans who are still running for office.

Current Issue

July/August 2026 Issue

The fact is, Republicans think racism helps them win. That’s probably the biggest difference between modern Republicans and the still-super-racist Republicans I grew up with. The Republican antipathy for equal rights has always run deep, but back in the day, active racism wasn’t the unyielding requirement for membership in the Republican party. Now, it pretty much is. And their voters love it.

I’m not looking forward to all the ways the healthcare executive will try to pick up the mantle of racist dog-whistling as he runs against a Black woman this fall. I’m sure it’ll be ugly. 

The Bad and the Ugly

• Speaking of healthcare executives—after a fashion—Luigi Mangione is planning to claim “extreme emotional disturbance” as his defense during his trial over his slaying of United HealthCare CEO Brian Thompson. This means Mangione is admitting that he killed the man (after initially pleading “not guilty”). It also means that, if this approach succeeds, he’ll receive a much-reduced prison sentence. I interpret this as Mangione going for jury nullification—which is to say that the jury will support his clearly criminal actions and refuse to convict him. He’s not arguing that his killing was justified; he’s basically saying that it was understandable. If he gets off, I want a whole book written about the jury deliberations.
• The Department of Justice has charged 15 Minnesotans with “conspiracy to impede federal officers” for resisting ICE’s invasion of Minneapolis/St. Paul. The DOJ describes the people it’s charged as “antifa,” even though it literally can’t explain what that means, or how any of the people arrested are involved with the so-called group. So we’re now at the point where the government can just charge people with being part of a conspiracy without ever defining what the conspiracy actually is. Meanwhile, the DOJ has still not charged anybody for the murders of Renée Good or Alex Pretti.
• The DOJ is also suing the city of Evanston, Illinois, for its first-in-the-nation reparations program to pay back Black people harmed by the city’s racist housing practices between 1919 and 1969. This is the same DOJ that promulgated a white-grievance reparations fund for white insurrectionists involved in January 6. If Democrats ever retake the White House, the DOJ is going to need to be stripped down to the studs and rebuilt.
• ICE agents have been given access to voter files in North Carolina and Texas. They are allegedly hunting for evidence that noncitizens are voting. Once again: Having Trump’s standing paramilitary force meddling in elections is a sign of very bad things to come in November.
• Susan Collins said she stands by her vote to confirm alleged attempted rapist Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. But she acknowledged that she was (wait for it) “disappointed” by his vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. Maine voters, I know you have a crappy choice to make in the Senate race this year. But one choice is clearly crappier than all others, and that choice is Susan Collins.

Inspired Takes

• Michael Massing spent a lot of time watching CBS News to bring us a report in The Nation about Bari Weiss’s tenure at the helm of the once-proud organization. He concludes that the problem is not with Weiss’s politics but with the boring, tedious product she’s putting on air. He writes: “I found very few traces of a conservative or pro-Trump slant.… In general, stories dealing with national politics were presented in a down-the-middle, by-the-book fashion.” While I agree with Massing on his overall point—Weiss’s main failure is that her programming is insipid and boring—I take issue with the last idea: In general, dealing with national politics “down-the-middle” is evidence of extreme political bias. Trump is a racist warmonger who regularly advances illegal or unconstitutional policies, which means that both-sides-ing his fascist policies is an attempt to sanewash the unacceptable. We’ve had a decade of both-sides nonsense and people are beyond tired of it.
• David Faris parsed the terms of the Iran deal for The Nation and concluded that it is humiliating for Trump. I’m sure it is. But the real humiliation is for us Americans who have allowed this incompetent orange asshole to terrorize the world for so many years.

Worst Argument of the Week

Earlier this spring, the Department of Justice made good on Trump’s promise to roll back gun regulations. Trump has vowed to be the most “pro–Second Amendment” president ever, and if we understand the Second Amendment to be a license for violence and death, Trump has accomplished that. The DOJ reversed 34 regulations, including various restrictions on gun ownership, gun selling, safety notices, and, of course, paperwork—because who has time to fill out forms when your testosterone level needs a boost?

This week, Perry Stein, who covers the DOJ for The Washington Post, pointed out a shocking warning the DOJ tucked into one of the new rules. This rule proposes relaxing restrictions that prevent people from owning firearms if they are unfit to manage their Social Security or veterans’ benefits.

Let that sink in: The DOJ is saying that even if the government cannot trust you to cash a check, it can still trust you to own a gun. That means veterans who are no longer mentally capable of managing their finances can still have assault rifles. And the DOJ is fully aware of how dangerous this is. The warning reads: “This risk may be minimal, or may be considerably greater (up to and including potential mass casualty events), based upon the strength of state and federal processes regarding guardianship and involuntary commitment.”

The DOJ is casually saying that its new rule could result in mass shootings. But it’s doing it anyway.

I’ve said before that this country’s epidemic of mass shootings is a choice: It’s not an accident, not an act of God, and it’s not inevitable. Instead, this country chooses to invite “mass casualty events” as a matter of course.

We can’t move forward like this. We can’t protect ourselves when our literal Justice Department shrugs at the possibility of mass shootings. We must value our children more than our guns.

What I Wrote

In a ruling on Thursday, the Supreme Court once again made it easier for people to get guns. But, in this case, it also made it easier for drug users to stay out of jail. I wrote about how the court managed to do something good and still put us all at risk. 

In News Unrelated to the Current Chaos

I am unabashedly rooting for the Iranian national team during the World Cup. It’s trying to compete under completely unreasonable circumstances.

First of all, the team is missing a couple of key players (check out the YouTuber Zealand for a breakdown on Iran’s team and all the others) who were banned from competing by their own government for being insufficiently supportive of the state. Then, our country, which is one of the host nations for this World Cup, started an illegal war against their country.

And it gets worse. After Iran qualified for the tournament, Trump suggested that the players skip it because he couldn’t guarantee their safety. He basically threatened the entire Iranian team.

FIFA, the governing body of global soccer, which has slid so far up Trump’s ass that it literally gave him a bogus “peace prize,” refused to do anything to help the Iranians. It scheduled all the team’s World Cup games in the United States, even though there are two other countries (Canada and Mexico) that are also hosting the tournament and aren’t illegally bombing their country.

And here again, the team is getting screwed. Even though Iran is being forced to play its games in the US, its players aren’t allowed to stay here. They’re being housed in Tijuana, Mexico, and have to fly to the US on game day and then immediately return to Mexico. For their first match—which they played in Los Angeles against New Zealand—key members of the Iranian staff were denied visas to enter the US.

The final ignominy for Iran came after the match. After securing a 2–2 draw against New Zealand, the team was told to leave immediately. The players thought they’d at least be allowed to stay the night and, you know, recover from a whole-ass international soccer match. But nope, they were herded onto a commercial flight and sent back to Tijuana.

The Iranian national team has been mistreated by Iran, the US, and FIFA. Its head coach, Amir Ghalenoei, said the team is the “most oppressed in the whole World Cup. Our federation isn’t here, our media isn’t here, our management isn’t here.”

He’s right. Our treatment of the team has been shameful. The very least the rest of us can do is cheer for it.

Iran next plays Belgium on Monday, in LA.

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