The first time I killed a deer, my uncle field-dressed it for me. He showed me how to press the tip of the knife into the animal’s soft belly hard enough to push through the skin and fascia but not so hard that it pierced an organ and made a mess. He sliced from the pelvis to the base of the rib cage. He reached in past his elbows to pull out the viscera. They lay bluish and steaming on the soil. Next time, he said, it was up to me.

The year was 2006. I was in Jacobson, Minnesota. My friends had all read Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. I got the gist: Most of the food in the grocery store is made from corn. “Free-range chicken” is a lie. We are alienated from what we eat but don’t have to be.

I was 23. If I was going to eat meat, I thought, I should know what it felt like to kill an animal. I decided to join the rural side of my family for the annual deer hunt. My grandpa gave me one of his rifles and taught me to shoot. He gave me a knife to gut with. I thought I would do this annually: stock my freezer with venison.

I haven’t shot a deer in 20 years. My grandpa’s gun is moldering in the crawl space beneath my house. I lost the knife.

It might be closer to the truth to say I hunted deer for a woman. Jaclyne was a wilderness guide with a big laugh who wore Carhartt and stood several inches taller than me. In northern Minnesota, we taught kids to identify trees and read tracks in the snow. She pulsed with esprit de corps. On weekends, she organized cross-country-skiing expeditions for the staff of the outdoor education center we worked for. We would sit midday in some distant silent wood and start a fire and drink whiskey and eat sandwiches. Once, we skied into the wilderness and built a quinzee (a snow hut) on a frozen lake and slept in it—or tried to. If we don’t die from hypothermia, I thought, it will cave in and we’ll be asphyxiated. I was in love.

In October, while the tamaracks blazed gold, we carried shotguns and stepped quietly through the woods, alert for grouse. We waded into bogs and foraged cranberries. With gifted wild rice from nearby lakes; we had dinner. But a grouse isn’t much for two hungry people. So I thought: I should kill a deer.

Come summer, I followed Jaclyne’s lead and became a wilderness guide. Each May, wealthy kids streamed in from the country’s outdoorsy colleges like Bowdoin and St. John’s, the University of Montana, and the University of Puget Sound to lead trips for Twin Cities youth. An essay by the scholar William Cronon, “The Trouble With Wilderness,” which argues that “wilderness” is man-made by regulations and fantasies and the expulsion of Indigenous peoples, circulated in the camp like samizdat, photocopied and stapled and passed from hand to hand.

“The Trouble With Wilderness” was published in the inaugural issue of Environmental History in January 1996 and has since been cited by scholars more than 7,500 times. In it, Cronon says that “we see the reflection of our own unexamined longings and desires” when we look at the wilderness: the sublime and the frontier. The sublime is the divine other, the sense of God, however secularized, that makes us feel small. The frontier is the edge of civilization where we test our grit, are rejuvenated through a healthful primitivism, and feel big. However intoxicating the wilderness is—and Cronon does not deny its power—it is “insidious,” he writes, and represents a “flight from history.” Wilderness serves the soothing pretensions of wealthy urbanites. The environmental movement must instead recognize the porousness of the wild in every human cranny, in our cities and our backyards.

We read this, then paddled into the wilderness. As for me, each time a group I led arrived at a campsite, I tried to teach them, young teens, the trees—ash, birch, cedar, fir, maple, pine, or spruce. I pointed out the remnants of ramps in the water from the logging era; noted the Ojibwe who lived here then and before. I said this was our home, if only for a night. We were in history! They just wanted to know if we would see a moose.

After the summer, Jaclyne and I bought one-way tickets to Buenos Aires: We wanted to hike new trails, see the Southern Cross. We bused to Tierra del Fuego, then worked our way up the Patagonian Andes. When we ran out of money, we moved to Mendoza and taught English. I was so bad at it that I was fired. When we heard about a farm that took volunteers in exchange for room and board, Jaclyne suggested we go.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

***

If you enjoyed this installment of Elie v. U.S., click here to receive the newsletter in your inbox each Friday.

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.

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).

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.

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.)

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.”

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.”

***

If you enjoyed this installment of Elie v. U.S., click here to receive the newsletter in your inbox each Friday.

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.”