Bluesky

During a speech in New Hampshire, governor of California and presidential hopeful Gavin Newsom warned that Donald Trump is trying to rig the midterm elections. “Trump is not screwing around,” he said. “We know what he’s doing right now. He’s doing it all across the country.” Newsom was referring, in part, to a Department of Justice lawsuit aimed at purging voter rolls in California, a baseless effort targeting 20,000 people Trump says, without evidence, are not citizens.

One might be inclined to chalk up Newsom’s talk to his own campaigning. He was speaking in New Hampshire, after all, not California, and “orange man bad” is going to be a popular applause line at Democratic rallies for the rest of my natural life.

But here are two chilling-ass sentences from a recent article by Washington Post national security expert Noah Robertson:

A small group of U.S. national security officials has been discreetly advising state governments and congressional lawmakers on how to prepare for the possibility that the Trump administration will attempt to interfere in November’s midterm elections, according to people involved in the effort.

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The group includes about 10 current and former officials with experience in the Defense Department, some of whom have previously focused on countering authoritarianism abroad.

When you’ve got experts on authoritarianism trying to advise state governments on how to counteract Trump’s efforts to mess with the election, you know you’ve got a very serious problem.

I don’t think I have to convince most people reading this that Trump’s threats to manipulate the election are very real. I’ve been saying it; most of the people you read or watch have been saying it; it’s all over social media. Indeed, almost nobody paying attention to this election thinks it will be on the up-and-up.

The question is, what are we supposed to do about it? And to that, the answers seem scarce to nonexistent. In the WaPo article, Robertson says the secret national security group is trying to “raise awareness” among lawmakers and “harden election protocols” among state boards of election. But most people are already really freaking aware of the threat. And I don’t know how you can harden a voting machine to prevent Trump’s goons from just stealing it, which they might try to do.

I guess I just can’t think of many historical examples of when an authoritarian regime has tried to steal an election and been stopped. What I can think of are situations where an authoritarian regime tried to steal an election, was successful at stealing it, and then, later, that illegitimate regime was overthrown by the people.

But even that situation is rare. Most of the time, the party that steals the election is rewarded with power, even when everybody knows the election was rigged.

Let me put it like this: What do you think the most likely reaction will be should Trump successfully steal the thing we all know he is trying to steal? Will people say, “To the streets! We are going to stop these illegitimate congresspeople from taking their seats in Washington, and we will not go home until new elections are called”? Or will people say, “Ah, well, nevertheless, we should do an autopsy of our poor midterm messaging so we can win the 2028 election”?

We know what Trump is prepared to do. But the operative question is: What is Gavin Newsom prepared to do?

The Bad and the Ugly

• Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan thinks that all the problems with our elections—at least all the problems not directly caused by Trump’s blatant attempts to steal them—have been caused by the Supreme Court. She’s right. She is 100 percent right.
• One piece of good election news is that much of the rigging the Republicans tried to do by gerrymandering their way into permanent one-party rule may be backfiring. In trying to redistrict their way to an even bigger Republican advantage, the Republicans used the results from the 2024 presidential election, among other recent high-profile races. But that might not hold up without Trump on the ballot, and it might even have weakened some previously safe Republican districts to the point where Democrats can mount a serious challenge.
• Another piece of good news: A Nebraska court rebuffed an attempt by the Republican National Committee to change Nebraska’s rules for overseas voting. When the GOP is spending time, resources, and lawsuits on Nebraska, things are going well for Democrats.
• The Supreme Court blocked Trump’s attempts to restrict gender-affirming care for trans inmates. Yes, you’re reading that right: The court stopped something bad that Trump was trying to do to trans people, and did so on the shadow docket, over the dissent of justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. I’m as shocked as anybody.
• The Supreme Court granted cert in a case challenging an 1868 federal law that prevents people from distilling spirits in their own homes for personal use. I have a complicated opinion on this. I obviously think people should be able to make bathtub whiskey (or grow cannabis or make meth, for what it’s worth, for personal use). That’s freedom, baby [editor, play the eagle screech sound now, thank you]. However, I also think the government should have the authority to regulate or prevent the production of dangerous products (like guns and ammunition, or whiskey and crystal meth, actually), even if those products are intended only for personal use. We should be able to debate whether or not the government should use that authority (no on whiskey, yes on guns), but the question in front of the Supreme Court is whether they should have it at all, and that’s where the Republican supermajority will probably get it wrong.

Inspired Takes

• I have been waiting for the big think pieces on the white suburbanites turned activists against data centers, and now The Nation has provided one with this piece from Alissa Quart. As a general rule, I don’t like NIMBY people, who become politically active only when something happens within driving distance of their suburban or rural enclave. However, NIMBY-ism is also the reason this country isn’t dotted with even more nuclear power plants and toxic waste dumps. Of course, most of the existing waste dumps are in poor communities where people have less political clout. There are some fights you can’t win without NIMBY-ism, but let’s hope the tech-bros can’t find enough space for their data centers in the few remaining enclaves where poor people can afford homes.
• Students and independent journalists are being brutalized and arrested by the police as they try to fight the state’s attempt to purge people from the voter rolls ahead of the national election. No, this isn’t the US; it’s India. Shilpi Chhotray reports for The Nation on the efforts of young Indian activists to stop their own government’s authoritarian election-scheming.
• The climate change podcast I did with the A People’s Climate podcast is available now.

Worst Argument of the Week

Vivek Ramaswamy might be the worst human being running for public office this cycle. I don’t say that lightly (I’m well aware that Ken Paxton exists), but Ramaswamy’s latest attack ad is honestly the most despicable thing I’ve seen done during a campaign since Trump mocked a reporter for his disability in 2015.

Ramaswamy is running for governor of Ohio against Democrat Amy Acton. Acton has talked about her rough start in life: She grew up poor, was abused by her mother, sexually assaulted by her mother’s husband, and eventually removed from her mother’s custody after that same mother’s husband was charged and indicted for rape. She was 12 at the time.

Ramaswamy’s campaign decided to find the estranged, abusive mom and put her in an ad in which she called Acton a “liar.” Neither Ramaswamy nor Acton’s mother provided any evidence to dispute Acton’s story, much of which is backed up by court records. But Ramaswamy, who is apparently bound by no standard of accuracy or decency, decided to hand the woman a mic anyway.

Acton’s brother, Philip Stearns, corroborated Acton’s story and slammed Ramaswamy in a statement: “It’s not surprising that Vivek Ramaswamy has stooped to such a despicable low as to attempt to turn the sexual abuse Amy endured at twelve years old from our birth mother’s husband into a political talking point.… After he was arrested and Amy and I were removed from their custody, our birth mother stayed married to Amy’s rapist until he died. This desperate, disgusting attack reveals exactly who Vivek Ramaswamy is at his core—a pathetic excuse for a man who is willing to hurt anyone as long as it gets him what he wants.”

Ramaswamy has doubled down on the ad, vowing to keep it running. He said that Acton “has no vision other than to complain about what someone did to her.” In this moment, Ramaswamy has gone from denying that his opponent was raped to mocking her for being raped when she was 12 and talking about it.

I honestly have no words for what Ramaswamy is doing—and I’m supposed to come up with words for a living. It’s disgusting, and it’s disgusting to a degree that I think people who vote for him after this are disgusting too. This is beyond a political question, or a policy question. If you can vote for a person who uses their opponents’ abuser against them, you are a bad person, full stop. There’s no coming back from that. There’s no “Actually I was economically aggrieved.” If an ad like this “works” on you, you are just as terrible as the guy who thought it would work. Either you have a core sense of decency or you don’t.

Vivek Ramaswamy has no decency.

What I Wrote

The Supreme Court granted cert in another case this week, this one aimed at affirmative action—or whatever is left of it. Having largely succeeded at taking opportunities away from college students, the GOP justices have moved on to… fifth graders. I wrote about this latest legal attack.

In News Unrelated to the Current Chaos

Microsoft Copilot released a new ad to try to get people to use its AI “assistant,” and, hoo boy, it’s a doozy. The amazing thing about the ad is that the people who made it were actually honest about what AI is all about and how white folks are likely to use it.

The ad features a white guy named “Kyle” who works in a generic corporate office. It opens with him looking enviously at a Black coworker, “Daniel,” who is being praised by his colleagues for his forecast model, which the ad calls “honestly beautiful.” Distressed by all the props Daniel is getting, Kyle starts typing into Copilot; in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it scroll, we see Kyle typing in “analyze Daniel’s forecast model,” which I suppose is the white, chatbot euphemism for “plagiarize Daniel’s forecast model.” Kyle also asks Copilot to make his model “beautiful.” Smash cut to the next day: All the coworkers are gathered around Kyle—including the only female employee in the frame, who is using a lint roller on Kyle’s suit. Daniel looks on in defeat while the voice-over says, “Kyle is not competitive. It’s not even a contest.”

Suffice it to say that I hate every fucking second of this ad. Like, the kind of hate that makes you reflexively grit your teeth and ball your hand into a fist as if you’re about to get into a fight with your computer screen. The ad has so many levels of gross. There’s the implicit white grievance against the high-performing Black coworker, without which the rest of the ad doesn’t even make sense. There’s the implicit acknowledgement of white male mediocrity; again, the ad doesn’t even make sense unless we all assume that Kyle is not able to produce work on the level that Daniel does. There’s the willingness to do anything to come out on top, even to the point of plagiarizing. And there’s the deep sexism of reducing a woman colleague to a lint cleaner, literally grooming the white male who cheated his way to victory. It’s all so amazingly awful.

It’s also… the most honest thing these people have ever said about AI. The point of AI is not to enhance your own work like the tech-bro mafia keeps insisting. The point of AI is to steal somebody else’s work, potentially everybody else’s work, and pass it off as your own. What the other guy (who happens to be Black) did with talent and hard work, you can do in a day with AI and no skill but metastasizing jealousy. The ad is promoting the fact that AI allows you to be the worst version of yourself.

The mind reels when you think about how many people at Microsoft must have seen and approved this ad before it went live. Then again, sometimes the most dangerous thing a corporation can do is tell the truth.

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