“You don’t have to wait around to change the world.”

That’s Tom Morello talking about the heroes that inspired his song “Date Night,” featured on his new solo album, “Everyone Gets Everything They Want.” “Date Night” is the story of the Oversteegen sisters, Truus and Freddie, and their friend Hannie Schaft, three young Dutch women whose act of patriotism and rebellion during WWII involved utilizing their feminine wiles to (among other things) seduce Nazis and lure them to their deaths. Unless you’re into feminist history, this is probably the first time you’re hearing those names; it’s definitely not well-known lore. So how did Morello end up writing a song about the Oversteegen sisters?

“It’s an unknown story,” Morello agreed, speaking with Salon last month. “It’s a story that deserves to be told. For years, I kept waiting for someone to make a movie about it. Nobody did. So I actually shopped a movie about it, called ‘Date Night,’ and no one was interested.” 

He continued, “And I thought, ‘Well, here’s the difference between my line of work and that line of work. In that line of work, you’ve got to get some stuffy studio executives to write a check for $50,000,000 in order to bring a story to life that someone might ruin with a poor director.” He pauses. “I’m going to write the fu*king zonk, you know what I mean? And it’s going to arrive tomorrow. And it’s going to be exactly like I want to tell it.” And zonk it is, indeed; “Date Night” is an exhilarating, high-velocity, uplifting song with a surprisingly singable chorus. It would have sounded fantastic over a movie’s closing credits. 

“It’s a story that’s just been in me for a while and deserves — especially at this particular historical juncture — a telling of how people can stand [up],” Morello said. “You know, not all heroes wear capes, and sometimes it’s an attorney who stands up for the right thing. Sometimes it’s a student who stands up in class for the right thing. And sometimes it’s three teenage girls who have had enough of the Nazis occupying their country, and they stand up for the right thing. Now, that’s a fantastic story and all, but now you need some badass riffs and a guitar solo to go with it.”

The badass riffs in this particular case are courtesy of Roman Morello, the 15-year-old son of our interviewee, who joined his dad’s band when he was 13. Morello the Younger is all over the record, but this isn’t a party trick — he’s also sharing co-writes on five songs. Morello Senior explains that Roman began playing guitar during the pandemic “and kind of got his 10,000 hours in early.”

But when your dad is famous, he’s still your dad. How do you negotiate professional boundaries with a 15-year-old? Morello laughs. “So the first crazy thing is, when you’re playing with this little kid, he’s your son in your band, and then the weirder and crazier thing is when it just becomes normal. Like, he’s just a dude in my band now, you know what I mean? I just count on him. He’s super professional. He blows the roof off the place when you give him the nod, and he’s cute as a button.”

Spoken like a dad! But this actually brings us back to “Date Night.” “Another thing about emphasizing the efficacy of youthful endeavor in changing the world is the riff of the song was written by Roman,” Morello explained. “And I sit and listen outside his door and poach his best riffs as they come out. But this was one where I was like, I’ve been looking for a home for this riff, and then that riff merged in a song that we’re both very proud of.”

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Another element of “Date Night” is that the lyrics tell the story from the point of view of the women. It’s not necessarily a perspective one expects to be accompanied by the kind of scorching guitar riffs adorning “Date Night.” Morello explained his approach: “I was trying to find my way in and how, in three short verses, do you get the picture of the art and craft of killing Nazis when you’re an occupied teenage girl in the Netherlands. I’m very familiar with the history of all three of them in the particular cases, and in the particular case we’re talking about, they needed that guy’s uniform, they needed his papers and they laid the trap.” 

He continued: “But their story is more expansive than just killing some Nazi officers in the woods. It was a lot of collaborators they went after as well. And at this historical juncture, that is something to think about. They rescued Jewish children from persecution and hid them from the Nazis. They destroyed Nazi infrastructure. And Hannie [Schaft, who was caught by the Nazis] was 14 when she started this.”

“And I’m constantly reminded — I did my senior thesis at Harvard on student movements in South Africa. And the people that changed the country were 14, 15, 16 years old. These girls [in ‘Date Night’] were 14 to 19 when they began their guerrilla warfare campaign against the fascists,” Morello said. “And I think it’s just a reminder that you don’t have to wait around to change the world. It’s been done within the immediate past by people who are no different than high school students down the block.”

Beyond this one song, there’s a lot more to think about on the rest of “Everyone Gets Everything They Want.” It is packed full of the kind of loud, vibrating guitar noise you’d expect to hear in a Tom Morello joint, and that’s not a criticism: when you have your own distinctive sound, you should absolutely make prodigious use of that particular talent. “Beth from Electronics” is a hard rock overture, an introduction that makes it clear to the listener that in case you think this is another folk-based protest album it informs you in short order (literally — it’s just 43 seconds long) that it absolutely is not. 

“Adjourn It” is a duet (more like a duel, actually) with System of A Down’s Serj Tankian, with Tankian taking the exhortative choruses while Morello’s droll baritone narrates the verses, playing the villain. The two trade off against a background of quieter rhythmic burbles (bass courtesy Roman Morello) and louder, more martial riffs, a neat slicing guitar solo and a bridge with a racing drum-and-guitar interlude that wouldn’t be out of place in a thrash metal song.

 

There are quieter songs — “quieter” being relative here — like one of two ballads on the record, “I Am Not Yours To Command.” It’s Morello half-speaking, half-singing against a gentle piano melody that emotionally underscores the song’s message of quiet defiance: “Maybe you can save me/Maybe you can’t/Maybe you can liberate me/Nah, I’ll take care of that.” The title track balances ringing classic rock chords mixed with Morello’s trademark Bomb Squad-esque riffs against a half-spoken, half-chanted narration and a white-hot guitar solo. It sticks in your head long after you finish the album.

This record is, somehow, Tom Morello’s first official rock ‘n’ roll solo outing, despite everything that’s preceded it. It’s because Morello is a musical polymath who has utilized his fame to allow himself to make whatever kind of music he wants to be making: from Rage Against the Machine to Audioslave, from the Nightwatchman to Prophets of Rage, to his now-ongoing role as third guitarist in the E Street Band to the Street Sweeper Social Club (his project with Boots Riley), to the EDM-influenced improbable collaborations released under the moniker The Atlas Underground — there’s more, but it’s enough to give you the basic gist.

Morello can do whatever he wants, and he does, up to and including the curation of his upcoming Power To The People Festival in October (“A Day of Peace, Love, Justice and Music”), along with launching a charity in honor of his late mother: The Mary Morello Memorial Project. Fans of RATM may recall Mary Morello’s now-legendary introductions of the band in its heyday (usually “The best fu*king band in the universe”), but they also just as likely know about her work as a social justice activist who also founded the anti-censorship organization Parents For Rock And Rap at the height of Tipper Gore’s PMRC hysteria. 

To continue on the subject of family, what did teenage rebellion look like in the Morello household when he was growing up? Morello chuckled. “As far as teenage rebellion, Mary Morello is the most rebellious person I’ve ever met in my life. You can’t outflank her, in any way, shape, or form. Really, the only conflict we ever really had [of] that sort of a stereotypical teenage rebellion is when I got my driver’s license. I didn’t have a curfew before my driver’s license. I did have a curfew after my driver’s license. And this, to me, felt like an injustice greater than apartheid. How have we taken rights away from this angsty teenager? But my mom and I were always very much politically aligned, and it was a real blessing to have been raised by somebody like that.”

“Everyone Gets Everything They Want” isn’t a concept record; even if all of the songs are essentially sharing the same themes, none of which are new to Morello: change and justice, injustice and fighting back, righting wrongs, the simple act of standing up and saying something isn’t right. That’s not nothing, even, and especially in 2026, when many artists prefer to remain silent. 

And sometimes defiance is a small gesture, like who you invite to sing on your record, which in peacetime is an artistic action, for fun or a simple desire to collaborate, but nowadays could also have larger meaning and impact. In addition to the collab with Serj Tankian — another musician making loud noises who is also an advocate for social justice — there’s also a collab with Belfast’s Kneecap, who rap in Gaelic and English on the blistering track “Unconquered.” It’s probably the strongest song on the record.

It’s not necessarily surprising that artists with a reputation for being politically outspoken would join forces, but it’s not like there’s a newsletter they all belong to, and while Kneecap have an international reputation, they’re not as well-known by a general public. When asked how they first came on his radar, Morello explained, “I actually became aware of them a couple summers ago. I was getting a tour of West Belfast by some veterans of the Troubles. And we ended up late night at this tiny bar . . . and there was just this huge graffitied “Kneecap” next to the bar. I didn’t even know what that word meant. Over the course of the next week or so, I learned there’s these youngsters from West Belfast who really like drugs; you know, that was the first thing I learned about them. And they were kind of a popular band.”

“All of a sudden they were able to find in their lived experience, and history of occupation and oppression, the courage as these young rappers who — the first things on their minds might have been more cocaine oriented than, you know, Middle Eastern politics-oriented. But they just absolutely stood up fearlessly in a way that reminded me of the best of Rage Against the Machine, of speaking truth to power regardless of the consequences, and unequivocally standing up for what they believe in and putting their, their music, and their lives on the line. That’s the dangerous kind of rock ‘n’ roll that I want to be involved with.” 

He continued, “We made an absolute banger, an absolute banger . . . they [asked], ‘Any direction?’ And I said, I think there were three directions. One is it’s got to be called ‘Unconquered.’ Two, it’s got to be a song that either one of us could open a show, open or close our shows with. And three, it’s got to have a hook that people, regardless of their political persuasion, are gonna have to go, that’s a fu*king banger.”

The riffs on “Unconquered” are incredibly satisfying and will probably result in the kind of response Morello’s hoping for, where he’s going to reel in folks who will then turn around and complain about what they mean, the way every one of Morello’s even slightly political social media posts has at least one response from an allegedly now-former RATM fan, somehow newly surprised at the guitarist’s mindset. Morello laughs. “I’ve been doing that for 3 decades. That’s my wheelhouse: disappointing fans when they find out what the songs are really about.”

Morello summed up this project by talking about everything that preceded it: “This is the 22nd album of my career, right? And is the first Tom Morello solo rock album. It really is. I’ve done collaborative rock albums. I’ve done band albums, I’ve done folk and Americana records, but this is the first one that is intentional — over the course of the last five or six years, I’ve been playing with my spectacular backup band, the Freedom Fighter Orchestra. Whereas in the past, my touring has been compartmentalized. This is the folk tour. This is the EDM-influenced art house tour. This is the Prophets of Rage Tour.”

He continued, “And of course, the last five, six, seven years, I’ve been embracing the totality of my career. Like, those Rage Against the Machine riffs, I love those, and I’m going to play them, and the world needs them. They’re in the DNA of rebels of all ages. Chris Cornell, I miss him every day, and I want to pay tribute to him and hear the crowd sing those beautiful melodies that he wrote, you know? I embraced the Nightwatchman stuff — that was such an incredibly richly satisfying second act for me, to be able to, in my mid-30s, become a singer-songwriter. And so I want all of those elements, but first and foremost, it’s got to be a devastatingly kick-ass, rip-oriented, guitar-solo, tearing-your-head-off, rock and roll album. That’s what we’ve made.” 

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When MS NOW heads to Arlington, Texas, on Saturday, Sept. 26, for “MS NOW Live: Together in Texas,” host Chris Hayes will be stepping into an environment he finds both familiar and necessary. For Hayes, host of “All In with Chris Hayes” and author of “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource,” gathering face-to-face with his audience isn’t just network promotion — it’s nurturing the one thing he has left in a media environment defined by change.

“I love live events,” he told me in an interview ahead of the event, describing having “a head start” on the live-events model with book tours and podcast live shows. “There’s a great energy that comes from being in a room with people. I think it’s a different energy than anything else, particularly true and truer every day in the increasingly screen-based and mediated world.”

Held at the College Park Center at the University of Texas at Arlington, MS NOW’s day-long fan event brings together 15 of the network’s top anchors — including Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O’Donnell and Jen Psaki — for in-depth conversations with thousands of Texas viewers ahead of the November midterms.  

Hayes will arrive in Texas with a deep respect for his viewers, whom he calls “sophisticated and informed” about the issues — from Democratic hopes surrounding state Rep. James Talarico’s Senate campaign to fights over data centers, development and the future of Texas communities. But he will also be bringing a theory of what’s been happening in the Lone Star State over the past several years. Describing the state as, “on its own terms,” perhaps the country’s most successful laboratory for right-wing policy, Hayes said that Texas’ long-running Republican experiment has produced a contradiction: Policies that helped make Texas affordable, fast-growing and attractive to newcomers are also changing the electorate and straining the coalition that built the model in the first place.

 

“There [are] certain parts about the Texas model that have genuinely been successful,” Hayes conceded. “Housing is pretty cheap. It’s been pretty fast-growing, and in that cheap housing and fast-growing, it’s a place that’s diversifying, and a lot of immigrants have made a life there.” 

But the state’s Republican leadership has to face reality: “If people want to move to Texas, which a lot of people do, then the state’s composition is going to change,” he said. The same in-migration fueling the Texas boom is also, in some measure, quietly padding the GOP’s own coalition. “[The state GOP] have a very ambiguous, ambivalent relationship to that.” 

This tension surfaced most recently in the backlash to social-media posts by former Tarrant County GOP Chair Bo French, a candidate for the Texas Railroad Commission, a state agency with a remit that goes beyond its name, regulating oil, gas, alternative fuels, pipeline safety, and surface mining and reclamation. French posted a photo on X after Texas’ upset win over Ohio State showing University of Texas students — many of them South Asian — in the stands, and appeared to condemn a changing, more diverse Texas. Hayes said the response from prominent Texas Republicans, including Sen. John Cornyn and former George W. Bush adviser Karl Rove, was partly about the political consequences of alienating the growing number of South Asian Texans, some of whom may already be conservative or Republican-leaning.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if the people in the photo are Republicans,” Hayes said, referring to the image French criticized. “This is Texas.”

Hayes sees Talarico as a serious test of whether that opening can be exploited into statewide electoral gains for Democrats. “Talarico, I think, is a strong candidate, and I think he’s got a real shot,” he said. Texas Democrats still need “a whole bunch of things to break the right way” to win statewide, he cautioned, calling Texas “the great white whale” of statewide Democratic politics — a state the party hasn’t won in three decades. But this cycle, Hayes argued, offers real structural openings. Ken Paxton, he said, is “a worse candidate” than even Sen. Ted Cruz; he isn’t an incumbent and lacks basic retail political skills. “He’s a real dud on the campaign trail,” Hayes noted, adding that Trump himself may be reassessing his endorsement calculus in real time. 

Against that backdrop, Hayes was direct about Republican efforts to turn Talarico’s faith and masculinity into political liabilities. “They are all but calling him a gay slur,” he said of the GOP’s campaign against him, adding that the assault on Talarico’s masculinity “reeks of desperation.” 

Hayes did not dismiss the possibility that Paxton and the GOP’s attacks on Talarico could work with some voters, particularly in a polarized environment where campaigns often seek less to persuade than to cement partisan loyalties. “You just need to snap people back to their fundamental, their partisan fundamentals,” he said. A Republican voter who may have doubts about a candidate can still be nudged toward the familiar conclusion: “I don’t really like the Democrat. Those aren’t my people.’”

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But Talarico, Hayes suggested, may be better positioned than past Democratic efforts to resist that hyper-partisan reflex. What makes Talarico’s race worth watching this cycle, in Hayes’ framing, is less about the candidate himself than about the structural gap that’s opened up on the other side. He noted that Democrats haven’t come this close in decades: Beto O’Rourke’s 2018 run against Cruz, he noted, came down to roughly “2.3 points” — the modern high-water mark for a statewide Texas Democrat. “Talarico has run a phenomenal race, and he’s a really good candidate.”

While Hayes expects the midterms to dominate the conversation in Arlington this weekend, audience members, he said, often arrive with their own closely held theories about what messages Democrats should use — and what could stop what he called “the desecration of our country” by Donald Trump. He anticipates intense interest in artificial intelligence and the infrastructure behind it, particularly data centers. The issue, Hayes said, has become more salient to his audience in recent weeks as AI tools have visibly improved and communities are increasingly confronting the land, water, power and development demands associated with data center construction.

“The data center issue really gets something deep in people,” he said. “I think Texas is an interesting place for it.”

Along with Georgia and Virginia, the Lone Star State has become central to the national conversation around data centers. It’s become a wedge issue in at least one Texas congressional race — alongside anger over the Trump administration’s attempt, which has been temporarily halted, to build a border wall in Big Bend National Park, and broader frustration with Republican Gov. Greg Abbott. (On Monday, Abbott ordered the state’s environmental regulators to stop approving permits for the construction of new data centers pending an electrical audit.) Hayes compared the reaction to a form of territorial politics. “It’s territorial in a literal physical sense — the ground, your backyard, your community, the park that you love.”

For Hayes, the Texas event is a chance to hear directly from people confronting the physical consequences of the state’s rapid development. The event also offers Hayes an opportunity to put into practice the central concern of his book, “The Sirens’ Call,” which examines how digital platforms commodify attention. MS NOW’s live event asks whether journalism can build something more durable than a click or a fleeting social-media interaction.

“I like people,” Hayes said. “I feel energized by them.” Such direct relationships, he stressed, are the core asset of modern journalism, even as tech platforms continually insert themselves between news outlets and their readers and viewers through algorithm tweaks. “As everything gets kind of disintermediated and chopped and screwed, and the platforms insert themselves between you and the audience,” he said, “what do you have? You have the people that like and respect your work . . . Nurturing that is pretty darn important.”

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The other afternoon, I was trying to take a nap.

I had worked late the night before, and dinner was still several hours away, and I had achieved that particular state of adult exhaustion in which closing your eyes for 20 minutes begins to seem less like a luxury than a medically indicated procedure. Unfortunately, the universe had other plans.

First came the whippet who lives down the hall, galloping outside my apartment and then, as he often does, failing to account for the slickness of the linoleum. There was a skid, followed by the unmistakable sound of dog meeting trash cans: bowling ball, pins. Then two neighbors began, ironically, shouting outside my window about which of them was less considerate about the amount of noise they made. Then I remembered that the ceiling fan has one speed at which it rattles faintly but insistently, so I got out of bed, yanked the chain and sent the blades spinning faster.

Finally, I lay back down. The apartment quieted. My breathing slowed. I had just begun to lilt toward sleep when my phone buzzed.

“We miss you! You deserve something sweet…”

It was an ice cream chain in a city where I no longer live.

There is something uniquely irritating about being emotionally pursued by a corporation that has also failed to notice you moved away. I lay flat on my back and began rage-unsubscribing from every company that had recently texted me in the voice of a human being. We miss you. STOP. Treat yourself. STOP. Your favorites are waiting. STOP. I continued until my phone was quiet and, eventually, so was my brain.

A few days later, rifling through my wallet, I passed a small red-and-gold card decorated with lucky cats and a rising sun. Across the top, in chunky yellow letters, it reads “Phodega.” On the back are ten little boxes. Collect ten stamps, get a free entree.

I have three.

Phodega is an Asian-American noodle and snack shop in Chicago’s West Town, a few blocks from a house where my partner and I stay when we’re house-sitting for family — a little borrowed-neighborhood life we slip into for a couple of weeks at a time, usually twice a year. Inside, a neon sign reading SEND NOODS hangs above a pyramid of Café Bustelo cans. Over the counter, another sign cheekily warns: “Don’t Try It. You Won’t Like It.” The menu includes salt-and-pepper chicken skins with sweet-and-sour sauce and something called the Viet Dip, a sandwich served with a little cup of pho jus.

The punch card is almost comically unsophisticated. It cannot send a push notification. It does not know where I live, what time I usually eat lunch or whether I have recently been searching for sandwiches. If I neglect it for six months, it will not announce that it misses me.

And yet it works.

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Every so often, while looking for a credit or business card, I flip past it and think about Phodega Fries — ribeye, cilantro, onion, jalapeños and gravy piled over seasoned fries — and decide that perhaps it is time to acquire punch number four.

During those house-sitting stretches in the neighborhood, I started feeling, embarrassingly quickly, like something of a local. The third time I walked into Phodega in about two weeks, the woman behind the counter looked up, smiled broadly and asked whether I wanted what I’d gotten last time (the Viet Dip) or wanted to try something new.

Something new, I decided. I ordered the Hainan-style chicken rice.

This is, of course, exactly the sort of interaction that restaurant apps are forever attempting to imitate. They remember what we ordered. They remind us of our favorites. They greet us by name. They offer suggestions based on what we liked last time. But there was a crucial difference in that question from behind the counter: The same thing, or something new?

She remembered me without assuming that remembering me meant she knew what I wanted.

“We know your favorites”

I like being known in restaurants. I like going to the coffee shop where the barista remembers that I take my mint tea iced and unsweetened, and I remember that she has a puppet showcase coming up. I like the brunch place where a waiter knows I want blackberry jam with my Texas toast, and I know what his nieces have been reading lately. This kind of familiarity is one of the pleasures of becoming a regular somewhere: over time, without really deciding to, two people accumulate small pieces of information about each other.

The information goes both ways.

This, increasingly, is what feels strange about the language of food apps. They borrow the vocabulary of that relationship — we remember you; we know your favorites; we missed you — while removing the reciprocal part entirely. They may know precisely what I ordered at 9:43 p.m. on a Wednesday six months ago, but there is nobody on the other side for me to know in return.

And increasingly, there is an app for almost every place we eat. The fast-food standards have them, of course, but so do regional chains and neighborhood coffee shops: download this, order ahead, skip the line, collect points, save your usual. The bargain is convenience, and often it genuinely is convenient. But increasingly, buying a sandwich or a cup of coffee also means initiating an ongoing relationship — one in which the restaurant gets a permanent little doorway into your attention long after the transaction is over.

And lately, simply remembering what we bought is beginning to look almost quaint. The next frontier is not merely knowing what we have wanted before.

It is trying to decide what we are going to want next.

A few weeks ago, I opened GoPuff, a grocery delivery app, and noticed a button I hadn’t seen before: a black square with a blue-and-white “go” glowing in the center. I tapped it.

CURATED FOR YOU.

“Pulled your late-night comfort picks,” it explained, “the usual craving fix when you order after dark.”

The screen looked almost like a cheerful kitchen-table flat-lay: products arranged over a wood-grain background, hovering around a GoPuff bag as though someone had just come home and emptied the evening’s provisions onto the table. Some were plausible: grape Uncrustables, chocolate-covered raspberries. Then came paper towels, Method cleaner, dish soap, lime sparkling water and grapefruit-scented antibacterial wipes. Apparently my 2 a.m. self is part snack-seeking raccoon, part conscientious housekeeper.

Only then did I realize this wasn’t simply a recommendation screen. GoPuff had already put every item in my cart.

The price wasn’t displayed there. I had to navigate into the cart to discover the total: $50.30.

There was an “undo auto-add” option, but it appeared in smaller, considerably less enthusiastic type. The phrase itself got me. Auto-add. The assumption was built into the feature: We have already begun shopping for you. Correct us if necessary.

I removed everything one item at a time and haven’t used the app since. I was already in the process of thinning out my reliance on delivery apps, mostly because I’ve been thinking more carefully about the cost of all that frictionless convenience — not only in money, but in how quickly every minor want can become immediately fulfillable. I haven’t sworn off delivery, nor do I particularly want to. But GoPuff made another part of the bargain newly explicit: convenience was beginning to include having my wants interpreted for me.

If a company is going to behave like a friend, eventually the friend can become presumptuous.

That is the distinction I keep returning to.

I don’t mind recommendations. Sometimes I want help deciding. But “Would you like help?” is different from “We went ahead and decided.”

Perhaps I’m protective of that difference because, of course, companies have always tried to stoke and steer desire. What feels different now is how easily they can follow us while doing it, often in the faux-friendly voice of someone who knows us — popping up on the little televisions in the backs of taxi cabs, slipping into the social media feeds in our pockets, texting us that they miss us while we’re trying to take a nap. The sales pitch has become harder to escape precisely as it has become more intimate.

Appetite, though, is not always something we know in advance.

Recently, I went to the grocery store intending, more or less, to buy ingredients for spaghetti with a weeknight Bolognese. I had already picked up a white onion, although an onion is hardly a binding commitment; so many good dinners begin that way.

Then I saw a jar of sun-dried tomatoes I’d never noticed before, packed with dark, jewel-like fruit. A pile of particularly good-looking spinach caught my eye. One decision tugged at another, and by the time I checked out, dinner had become rigatoni with chicken, spinach and sun-dried tomato sauce.

This is not an earth-shattering example of the mysterious contours of human desire. Dinner simply changed. But food is full of these tiny departures: the dish ordered on a whim that becomes the thing you return for; the ingredient you taste for the first time and immediately begin imagining in everything; the afternoon when what sounded good yesterday suddenly sounds terrible today.

That is one of the pleasures of appetite. Sometimes you enter the store with an idea and let yourself be talked out of it by a vegetable. Sometimes you only discover what you want as you go.

Food companies are increasingly interested in that interval, too. As Cris Tolomia reported this week at Quartz, Nestlé is piloting AI-powered simulations designed to model how shoppers might react to new products before they launch, while a separate AI system scans social media for shifts in what consumers want. The tools are part of a broader push into AI-assisted product development, including Nestlé’s work on foods for people taking GLP-1 drugs.

That is obviously several steps removed from GoPuff loading antibacterial wipes into my late-night cart. Nestlé is looking for signals across markets, not deciding what one particular shopper should eat at 2 a.m. But both illustrate how valuable it has become for food companies to arrive earlier — to understand appetite not merely after a preference has been expressed, but while it is still taking shape.

Which makes the moment when we still have to ask ourselves what sounds good feel increasingly precious: a little unoptimized space before something has been recommended, queued or dropped into a cart for us.

Maybe that is why I like that little Phodega card so much. It will wait in my wallet until I decide I want another sandwich, and when I do, someone will punch another square.

It rewards the wanting after it happens. It leaves the wanting itself to me.

 

 

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“I love bacon and chicharrónes, but I could never eat pork uterus,” I confess, wincing at our 60” Insignia television screen.

“Foot soup doesn’t sound great, either,” my mother replies, squeamishly shaking her head. “But you’ve got to draw the line somewhere.”

And I have. As a finicky eater who happens to be queer, Black and disabled, I wouldn’t touch durian, duck tongues or most of the basket items on the Food Network TV show, “Chopped.” Yet my family has been watching it faithfully for nearly two decades.

The reality competition features four chefs who transform baskets of mystery items into an appetizer, entrée or a dessert. Round by round, one contestant is eliminated, or “chopped,” until a single winner emerges and is awarded $10,000. The foods are extreme and run the gamut, from silkworm pupa to a whole goat head.

In our Valley Stream, Long Island home, my youthful 80-year-old, African American mother and I — her Gen X son and facial clone — comment on each episode like armchair judges.

“Greg’s dish really looks appetizing,” Mom says, holding a bag of sea-salt Popcorner chips, “but he forgot a basket item!”

“Uh-oh,” I reply, extracting a Ritz cracker from its sleeve. “You know what that means?”

“He’s getting chopped,” we sing in unison, laughing.

My 92-year-old West Indian father, a US Army veteran with Alzheimer’s-related dementia who once did half of the cooking, now observes quietly. Though, we do pepper him with questions to keep him engaged.

“What do you think of eating nutria, Dad?”

“I…don’t know.”

“Me, either! Rat meat is gross!

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His responses, while brief, are as meaningful as the on-screen action — more so, even, because every moment he can respond to us is a precious one. The few words he pieces together help anchor us the way they did before dementia transformed our lives.

My mother, younger brother — who watches when he’s not busy bartending — and I share caregiving duties for my father, who requires round-the-clock care. Mom handles the daytime with help from an aide, while Jeff and I split the nighttime, when Dad restlessly roams the house. “Chopped” helps fill the downtime between chores, meals and other primetime events.

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I began following the series in 2009, because of a crush on Ted Allen from his days on “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.” (He seems genuine, knowledgeable, and funny: an irresistible combination for me.) And though his passion is food — and mine is scrutinizing it skeptically — I forgive him, because the show has become a minor obsession.

When I introduced it to my parents in 2010, they thought I had lost my mind.

“You, the picky eater, watching anything to do with food?” my mother asked.

“Yeah. It’s the creativity. I really enjoy seeing what they make out of the funky basket items they get. It reminds me of my art-school days. And Ted is so much fun!”

“And who is this Ted person?” my then-well father inquired.

“Ted’s the host — and the cutest dork!”

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The program has been our family ritual over the years, especially now, as we weather the havoc dementia continues to wreak on our lives. Its reality format allows for perfect projection and escapism: no coordinating specialists and home care agencies, certainly no paternal tantrums. For the hour the show airs, we leave our stresses behind and focus on enjoying each other’s company.

We also love catching the cooking tournaments, from “Alton’s Maniacal Baskets,” where quirky foods are chosen by superstar cook and presenter Alton Brown, to “Name Your Price,” where the chefs are given three products and must outbid each other for a fourth. My personal favorite is the “Military Salute” challenge, with the enlisted competitors hailing from the US Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Army. In the finale, the officers team up against the judges, illustrating the power of working together, like our family.

And they win.

Seventeen years of watching “Chopped” has left its mark on our nuclear unit: Mom and Jeff are still finding new ways to elevate hot dogs — Dad’s current culinary obsession — most recently mincing and serving them in a spaghetti bolognese. And I’m still persnickety but exposure to so many extreme foods has broadened my palate. I’ll always prefer Mom’s barbecued chicken, fried chicken and French fries, but I have branched out, trying an array of new, relatively tamer foods, ranging from albacore tuna to zucchini.

The program’s most enduring lesson for us has been one of persistence. Much like a high-stakes competition, caregiving forces us to confront the insurmountable daily. And we triumph over the chaos by staying present, flexible and focused on the tasks at hand, whatever they may be.

I still won’t eat pork uterus, though.

The post How “Chopped” keeps us together appeared first on Salon.com.

I’ve never referred to my mom’s dad as grandpa. Not grampa. And certainly not grandfather. To me, and everyone else in my family, he’s always been papa.

A lifelong Illinois farmer and lover of maintaining a stretch of land, big or small, papa must have gotten a kick out of me buying my own home in 2019, situated on a 3,615-square-foot lot in New Orleans and raised up just ever so on brick columns, holding on for dear life in the years of punishing weather it’s withstood since I became its steward.

Spending most of my formative summers attached to the heels of his boots as he puttered around in the various barns and sheds of his farm, flanked by walls of corn on two sides and soy beans and a crick (not creek) on the others, the smell of my papa is cellular to me. Good, warm, dark and healthy soil. Dutch Masters cigars. Motor oil, dispersed among the tractors, pickup truck and the red motorcycle he’d take me out on some afternoons. The smell of the breeze through the apple trees on a summer day. And Chiclets, a constant rattling in his front shirt pocket. This combination meant comfort and security to me, more so than the roof over my head, so it’s nice that, when he’s here, my own property as an adult can take on some of that sensory coziness, which makes a home feel more like a home than anything else.

I’ve always had a thing for smells. That weird Strawberry Shortcake doll that would burp its signature scent in your face when you squeezed its stomach. Scratch ‘N Sniff stickers that ran the gamut from traditional yum to secretly preferred yuck: Root beer, bubblegum, grass, wet dog. Throughout the years, my affections for my friends would be tied to their smells (Marlboro Reds, dirty jeans, sandalwood or CK One . . . um . . . fog machine). And my other closest family members, similar to my papa, all come with specific scents that map their presence in my home from room to room, front yard to back, so vividly. So significantly. I often find myself calling out the name of who the smell belongs to after they’ve passed by.

I’ll catch a whiff of my papa’s tractor-y cigar smell out back, by the tankless water heater.

“Hi, papa!”

I’ll walk from my bedroom to the kitchen, straight through a cloud of hairspray, Febreze and Barclay cigarettes.

“Hi, mom!”

A strong waft of cut cantaloupe.

“Hi, gramma!”

And, when I need it the most, a freshly washed flannel shirt comingled with the oddly pleasant aroma of uncooked meat.

“Daddy.”

Makes it easy to forget that none of these people have ever stepped a foot in my house. And never will. Because they’ve all been dead for years.

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As someone who has always been fascinated with the paranormal, as far back as I can remember, I have always kind of assumed that, at some point or another, I would come in close contact with a ghost. I’ve certainly made myself an easy target for them.

My first dabbling with the paranormal took place in the living room of the previously mentioned farm in Illinois when, one sunny summer afternoon, my cousin Amy and I made contact with who knows what from the beyond via a Ouija Board she discovered in her attic — inarguably the most terrifying of places to chance upon such a thing.

After asking it the standard sort of questions that we both suspected the other was moving the planchette to answer: “Does so and so like me back?” “Will I ever have a golden retriever like Brandon from ‘Punky Brewster?'” “Do I actually need to learn math?” I stepped up to crank the freakiness dial, establishing a burgeoning personality trait, and voiced the question: “What do you look like?”

“Mirror,” the board spelled out. And judging by my cousin’s face, she did not spell this out herself.

After staring into each other’s eyes for several very long seconds, I summoned the courage to get up from where I was seated, criss cross applesauce on the rug, to walk to the nearest mirror, which was in the hallway bathroom. Flicking on the light switch, because no way was I gonna do this in the dark, I padded apprehensively to the narrow mirror over the sink, knowing with everything in me that I was about to see the scariest thing I had ever, or would ever, encounter in my life. But it was just me in the reflection, and my mushroom hair.

I wanted more, though. I was already hooked on the concept of finding proof that there was something beyond death for all of us. That there was more to life than what could be seen, or even imagined.

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As I grew older, starting in my teens, when I had my own money to spend on spooky pastimes and adventures, I read as many books as I could get my hands on that told tales of ghost sightings and haunted locations, making a mental note of places that I hoped to one day visit myself in my continued pursuit of paranormal confirmation, and I’ve made it to quite a few since, with plans to cross more off the list. And though nary a ghost has been sighted — yet — that doesn’t mean I haven’t gotten all the proof I’ve been looking for.

In 2012, I took my girlfriend at the time to stay at the Lizzie Borden Bed & Breakfast in Fall River, Massachusetts, celebrating our first (and only) Valentine’s Day together with plans to spend a romantic evening in what’s marketed as the most haunted room in the house, the John Morse room, the very room where Abby Borden was found dead, right next to the bed where we’d be sleeping.

I say “where we’d be sleeping” here, rather than “slept,” because no sleep was had that night, and not because romance activities kept us from our slumber.

After checking in, putting our stuff in the room and joining in on the pre-purchased tour of the house, the giggles and “this is so crazy” fun of the experience transitioned into earnest fright, especially once the sun went down. I remember walking up the creaky stairs of the house to our room and feeling like I was walking somewhere with high elevation. As the night wore on, I felt dizzy, sick to my stomach and, at the worse of it, was overtaken by the out-of-nowhere feeling of rage. Sitting on the bed and looking around the room while my girlfriend dozed off for a bit, I jumped out of my skin when I heard her voice after a long stretch of silence, telling me that she’d had a brief dream that someone was dragging her under the bed.

We fled late at night to stay at the house of a friend who lived nearby, returning the next morning for the included breakfast of Johnny Cakes shaped like axes. Talking to the only other couple who managed not to chicken out like we did, I’ll never forget the looks on their faces when they learned we’d left in the midnight hour. They’d heard footsteps that they’d assumed were ours walking up and down the stairs all night long.

To redeem myself from that experience, I stayed at a few more haunted locations and actually did manage to find sleep within.

In 2016, I took my wife at the time to, regretably, spend our 2nd wedding anniversary in a cottage on the grounds of The Myrtles Plantation in St. Francisville, Louisiana, said to be one of the most haunted locations in all of America. The cottage we stayed in, specifically, was said by our tour guide to be one of the most “active” spots on the grounds, thought to be a hangout for the ghosts of children who died on the property, using it as a playhouse just as they did when they were alive.

The guide told us that previous guests had reported toys packed in their luggage for their own children would be discovered misplaced and something seemed to have found a toy of sorts in our luggage as, on our first waking morning, the freshly charged battery on a certain something or other that we’d brought with us for the anniversary trip had gone dead in the night, and it wasn’t our doing, as much as I’d like to brag that it had been.

Where many a ghost hunter has robbed themselves of a successful fact-finding mission by considering lack of a visual ghost sighting to be a bust, when seeking proof of the paranormal, I’ve been guilty of the same.

For all the eerie experiences I’ve had, I still find myself questioning if ghosts can possibly be real, even though I live alone yet, entering the house after being gone for a few hours, I’ll find it smelling exactly like the house I grew up in with my parents. Or, sitting down on my couch to watch TV at night, I’ll look over at the framed aerial photo of my gramma and papa’s farm hung on the wall, and, all of a sudden, the room will smell like their TV room, circa 1982.

I have to ask myself, how much proof is proof enough?

I’ve felt my heart stop, swearing I caught a glimpse of my long-dead cat saunter by, out of the corner of my eye. I’ve played with a handheld ghost detector at a Christmas party and been surprised by the shocked expressions on the faces of my friends, hearing it go off continuously when touched to the necklace around my neck, which belonged to my mom. And I’ve been playfully baffled to hear, time and time again, that no one else who’s taken the Graceland tour in Memphis, Tennessee thought, like I had, both times I’ve gone, that the kitchen area still smelled strongly like fried food.

The proof is there. And if this ends up being nothing more than a figment of my imagination, where’s the harm in choosing not to question it, if it gives me something I’ve been so painfully missing.

The post I smell dead people appeared first on Salon.com.

Getting older means learning that peace of mind is absolutely, 100% for sale. Or, at least for rent. When I rescued my dog, Ivy, I made a purchase, an investment. But in New York, everything seems to be temporary.

Hypervigilance is the name of the game when you have a reactive dog. It wouldn’t pose as much of a problem if she weren’t such a social being. She loves meeting new people and runs faster than any dog I’ve ever seen. To me, Ivy is a perfect dog. She cuddles next to me when I’m sick and sits on my chest when I cry. But when she sees another dog, everything changes: she snarls, barks loud enough to startle a city block, and lunges with so much force it takes all my strength to hold her back. In just one moment, she is reduced to an aggressive, rescue pit bull and nothing more.

I knew that moving to New York would be a challenge, but I didn’t think about how, with dog parks off the table, there is no off-leash space for her. And I thought, “I wonder if there’s something like Airbnb for yards.” So I googled that phrase, and Sniffspot came up. Their homepage reads, “Rent safe and private dog parks hosted by locals.” One of the locations was a 15-minute walk from my apartment, and for $15 an hour, Ivy could play and run without any risk. It wasn’t a huge space, but it was something.

The whole experience got me thinking about rental culture and privatization. Everything we need (privacy, calm, companionship, etc.) costs extra. The rise of the gig economy is well-documented. We rent bikes, dresses and chargers. We rent side gigs. We rent other people’s time to clean our homes, walk our dogs and run our errands.

Services like rentable yards and InstaCart highlight something deeper: the way city living often turns basic needs into things we have to schedule and pay for. Open space becomes a subscription. Saving time and carving out a little peace of mind for ourselves becomes a luxury.

Take dog yoga and kitten therapy. Our love for animals runs so deep, and our need for their companionship is so strong, we’ll pay for it by the hour. These programs are especially exciting for people who can’t afford to have a pet full-time. Pat Apap, a graduate assistant at NYU, helped plan kitten therapy for grad student appreciation week. “This served as our mental health or wellness style event.” The process was fairly simple. “They were able to provide six kittens for two hours of ‘therapy’ sessions for students, and on top of that, they provided materials going over how to foster and adopt the kittens, so there was the opportunity for our community to support theirs.” Just a couple of phone calls and there they were, kittens for everyone’s enjoyment. Michelle Rifkin Mamaradlo owns The Party Pups in Staten Island. “ I do everything from baby parties to adults, to elderly homes, to employee parties.” Mamaradlo breeds cocker spaniels that live with her when they’re not “working.” Currently, she has eleven “champion trick-trained” dogs that can even ride skateboards if the party gets too dull. She says her business succeeds because of one universal truth: “ people love animals.”

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It’s easy to laugh at pet culture until you realize this market didn’t emerge out of nowhere. The loneliness epidemic, combined with late-stage capitalism, means that anything can be rented. Who said that money can’t buy happiness? The desire for connection is so strong that, in the fallout of remote pandemic work, people are willing to pay just to work next to another person.

Olivia Bannerman, 27, used WeWork twice, but it didn’t stand out to her. She couldn’t find a coffee shop that fit her needs. Poor Wi-Fi, time limits, and a lack of seating are common issues she still encounters. I asked her if she had ever worked at a public library as an alternative, and she said that she “honestly hadn’t even considered that.” The one bonus of a paid work environment? Security. “ I felt like I could get up and go pee and just leave all my stuff . . . I wasn’t worried about theft or any weirdness.” Even businesses are renting offices now. Regus offers companies space “by the hour, day, or as long as you need,” according to its website. Lana Zolzak, an associate of Regus, told Salon that its flexibility is what sets it apart. “Some people don’t want to have to get a long-term place,” she says, and signing a lease doesn’t allow any wiggle room for exigent circumstances. Plus, when companies use Regus for their office, they deal with “bills, cleaning, and everything.” While Regus’ co-workspaces are more common among young people and start-ups, Zolzak says, established businesses are opting for office rental post-COVID. As remote work ends, people need a place to go, she adds.

I’ve seen a lot of talk online about the loss of “third spaces.” These are areas separate from home and work, including parks, libraries, coffee shops, bars, etc. Bannerman lives on the Upper West Side and has noticed a lack of third spaces. Every option has a catch: cafés close early, bars are solely focused on alcohol, and restaurants are expensive. She commented that the hostility of anti-homeless architecture and police presence has even made parks less enjoyable. She said, “I  think it’s important to get out; you have new experiences, you learn new things about yourself. You develop friends, memories and connections. You get closer to your community, which can make your life fuller and richer.”

I think that renting has also soared because it’s been normalized by the unaffordability of ownership. ZipCar is more affordable than a car payment and a 12-month lease is a great option for those of us who can’t afford to buy a home. Having a pet is expensive, but an hour of dog yoga is cheaper. Renting used to be a phase. Now it’s a way of life.

David Adams, the founder of Sniffspot, spoke with me about the company’s immense growth over the last seven years. He said that their rise in popularity has been slow but steady. “It’s been a gradual process of learning that this is something people want.” As of June 2025, Sniffspot has over 30,000 hosts and almost one million guests.

The sites range from the U.S. to Australia, Canada, and even South Africa. Adams saw a gap in the market for his app because “people love making their dogs happy . . . and Sniffspot can be part of that.” He explains that dog parks are important but unpredictable. In addition to dogs like Ivy, who can be aggressive towards others, there are unknown diseases, people, and elements in a public park. When Adams lived in Seattle with his pets, he realized that all these factors disappeared with private land that he noticed was “otherwise not being used.” These days, in cities, especially, he argues, “dogs are bred to run free and that’s just not possible.”

Airbnb has simply changed the way we look at assets. Adams said that even though that company was his primary inspiration, he has also taken measures to ensure that Sniffspot doesn’t follow a similar path towards unfair practices that draw public criticism. For instance, the business model doesn’t lend itself to people buying property just to rent out. And since the sales are hourly, not nightly, hosts don’t make enough to rely on it. It’s a quieter, more sustainable kind of sharing economy, one where empty spaces serve a specific emotional need, not just economic opportunity.

Loving a dog like Ivy is a profound act of emotional labor. It requires you to be patient, calm, gentle and alert. It’s not that I haven’t tried to fix the behavior. After thousands of dollars in training, she’s able to happily interact with people in controlled spaces. But New York City is not controlled. I may have rescued her from a cramped pen in a city pound, but I brought her into a world that wasn’t designed for her. And I’m not sure it was designed for me either. Sniffspot is a great resource to have in my back pocket, but it’s not a catch-all solution. People say Ivy and I act alike and even look alike. I don’t know if that’s true, but we do have one thing in common: we’re both relying on rental culture just to get by.

The post What my reactive dog has taught me about rental culture appeared first on Salon.com.

Fifteen years ago, during President Barack Obama’s first term, we co-founded RootsAction as an online progressive group challenging not only Republicans but also the corporatism and militarism of the Democratic Party. RootsAction supported Bernie Sanders for president in 2016 and 2020. Two years before the 2024 election disaster that returned Donald Trump to the White House, the organization launched the “Don’t Run Joe” campaign, with the warning that the renomination of President Joe Biden by Democrats “would be a tragic mistake.”

Despite polls showing as early as 2022 that strong majorities of Democrats wanted a nominee other than Biden in 2024, the “Don’t Run Joe” message went unheeded — until Biden’s debate debacle in June 2024. By then, it was too late for the open primary process needed to produce a ticket that could inspire activists and defeat the fascistic faux-populism of Trump.

Like the 2024 victory of the twice-impeached, repeatedly indicted Trump, his 2016 win was avoidable. One lesson we’ve learned over the last 16 years since the 2010 midterms is that it’s a big mistake for activists to sit back and expect the Democratic Party establishment to serve up candidates who can mobilize voters and win elections. That establishment failed us in winnable presidential elections in 2000, 2004, 2016 and 2024. Tad Devine, who served as a top strategist for mainstream Democrats for decades before joining Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential bid, knows the mechanisms inside and out. The dollar-dominated process of primary campaigns, he writes in his book “How the Democrats Screwed Bernie,” is often rigged against outsider “candidates who connect with voters, who understand voter anxieties” — and these genuinely populist candidates “are more likely to succeed in general elections than those who rely primarily on insider muscle.”

RootsAction recently teamed up with Progressive Democrats of America to announce that we will jointly launch, just after the November midterm elections, a campaign urging California Rep. Ro Khanna and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to run for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination. “The voices of Khanna and/or AOC are needed in the presidential campaign to ensure that voters hear serious solutions,” the campaign’s petition says. “Without a progressive populist advocate atop the ticket, the Democratic response would be woefully underwhelming — enabling right-wing demagoguery to push voter unrest in dangerous and divisive directions.” 

The petition statement adds that the presence of Khanna and/or AOC in the presidential race “is crucial to foster debate on healthcare, jobs, AI, militarism and the U.S. relationship with Israel, along with many other issues important to a wide range of voters.”

Khanna — whose name recognition has grown recently because of his legislative battles to release the Epstein files and to end the Iran War, and his detention in the occupied West Bank by Israeli settlers — represents our country’s wealthiest district and much of Silicon Valley. Still, he wants to increase taxes on the rich. He calls himself “a progressive capitalist.”

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Ocasio-Cortez entered the House with great fanfare after a surprise 2018 Democratic primary victory over one of the party’s top leaders on Capitol Hill — Joe Crowley, who is now a corporate lobbyist — representing a working-class, Latino-majority district in New York City. Since then she has led the effort to bring the jobs-creating Green New Deal proposal to Congress, and she is helping lead the charge against the construction of artificial intelligence data centers. She identifies as “a democratic socialist.” 

While there is a difference in how these two politicians label themselves, most voters will be much more interested in whether each will address the needs of the working class and fight the greed of the billionaires. Both are direct political descendants of Sanders. AOC was active in his 2016 campaign, which inspired her to run for Congress, and she regularly joined him last year at “Fighting Oligarchy” rallies. Khanna was a surrogate and national co-chair in Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign.

RootsAction’s coalition partner in this initiative, Progressive Democrats of America, has a history of major success in candidate recruitment. In late 2013, PDA launched the “Run, Bernie, Run” movement, which drafted Sanders to seek the Democratic nomination in 2016 — a campaign that elevated the national conversation and helped spark today’s progressive upsurge.

The RunRoRunAOC.org petition argues that either Khanna or Ocasio-Cortez — or both of them — need to enter the presidential race. If both were to declare their candidacies, the organizations behind this recruitment initiative are not worried that the two will somehow “split the progressive vote.” As shown by the historic wave of insurgent victories in this year’s Democratic primaries, the party’s electoral base is largely and increasingly progressive. It’s not a small sliver of voters. And a progressive bloc of delegates at the party’s national convention in August 2028 would be all to the good, pushing for popular policies such as taxing the rich, resisting Big Tech’s AI data centers, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), green jobs initiatives, enhanced Medicare for All, cutting the military budget and stopping the weapons flow to Israel.

During last year’s New York City mayoral campaign — which, thankfully, employed ranked-choice voting — two progressive candidates actually ran as a duo in the Democratic primary: Zohran Mamdani and Brad Lander. Mamdani became mayor thanks significantly to Lander, and now Lander is heading to Congress thanks in part to Mamdani’s endorsement and support. In other races, progressives have run in tandem in crowded fields, maintaining a non-aggression strategy while bolstering each other’s positions.

Democrats should also remember that in the early months of the 2019-2020 Democratic presidential primary, before a fraught personal split between Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Sanders, the presence of the two previously friendly candidates raising similar issues of inequality and corporate greed had actually moved the whole Democratic debate in a notably more progressive direction. Khanna and Ocasio-Cortez could wield similar influence in 2028.

The ground for progressive candidates is ripe. Despite millions of dollars flooding into the campaign coffers of corporatist Democratic candidates from special interests representing AI, crypto and Israel, and despite assists to those candidates from corporate media, this year’s Democratic primaries produced an unprecedented wave of victories by underfunded progressive candidates, including Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Michigan. These insurgent successes have occurred at local and statewide levels.

After the November midterms, it will be time for progressives to focus on the national level.

Leaving the 2028 presidential nominating process to the money-drenched party elites — with their record of electoral defeats, governance failures and betrayals — would be a recipe for disaster. Ro Khanna and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez could make all the difference.

The post Democrats need a bold 2028 ticket: Ro Khanna and AOC should run appeared first on Salon.com.

The president is going after the press again.

The post When presidents ban journalists, the First Amendment is not the only constitutional right at stake appeared first on Salon.com.

One of the largest media mergers in history has been given the green light after California and 11 other states settled lawsuits Monday. For most of the year, Paramount Skydance has tried to purchase Warner Bros Discovery for a reported $110 billion, but those efforts were stalled over the summer.

Paramount and the states agreed to certain concessions to complete the deal, California’s attorney general Rob Bonta said at a news conference. Bonta led the coalition of states, plus a Hollywood writers union, that sued in July to stop the merger.

“This settlement is not a vote of support for this merger. It is not a blessing of the broader merger,” Bonta said Monday. “Broadly speaking, we believe further consolidation of markets that are central to American economic life doesn’t serve the American economy.”

The Block the Merger Coalition released a statement saying “This is a bad deal for the future of film, entertainment, independent journalism and a strong democracy in this country. We are disappointed and angry that the interests of average Americans have been trampled to benefit oligarch billionaires.”

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“A completion of the blockbuster deal would create one of the largest entertainment companies in the world,” the New York Times reported. “It would pair Paramount’s movie studio with Warner Bros., which has made films like ‘Superman,’ ‘A Minecraft Movie’ and ‘Sinners.’ The combined company would also own two major streaming services, Paramount+ and HBO Max, and control both CNN and CBS News.”

Additionally, CNN reported, it will be “financed with the help of sovereign wealth funds from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi that will indirectly own just under a 50-percent equity stake in the merged Paramount–WBD.”

The clear winner in the deal is David Ellison, Paramount’s CEO and son of billionaire Larry Ellison, co-founder of the tech company Oracle. Both Ellisons are allies of President Donald Trump, whose Federal Communications Commission on Thursday approved Paramount’s petition to allow 49.5% of its equity to be held by foreign entities. There is normally a 25-percent cap on foreign broadcast ownership.

The post Paramount takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery fueled by foreign cash: report appeared first on Salon.com.

Perhaps it’s just hope springing eternal, but it seems that in the last week alone, there has been a significant step toward people finally understanding and accepting the incalculable toll of Israel’s war crimes and mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

The progress has been twofold, courtesy of a one-two punch from the music and film industries: Robert Kraft Streisand-effected himself and Ed Sheeran in the wake of Macklemore’s support of Palestine. In the days that followed, Sheeran’s other opening acts dropped out of his tour, leaving his remaining dates in limbo and egg all over his face. Musicians and public figures followed, incentivized to stick their necks out for Palestine as a simultaneous middle finger to the average American businessman. Then, Israel threatened to strip “NAZA” co-directors Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham of their citizenship — or worse — if they return to the country, implying that the contents of the documentary making waves in the film festival circuit are really as damning as early critics say. 

Some might call that fate, others coincidence. Really, it’s the result of the tireless efforts by activists, journalists, aid workers and artists globally who have been desperately trying to direct the world’s attention to the human rights crises in Gaza for nearly three years. But no matter what you call it, it’s working.

“Damning” is an understatement for the magnitude of the atrocities Szor and Abraham lay bare — ceaseless, calculated, and escalating crimes committed by the Israeli state. Throughout the film, which screens at this year’s New York Film Festival, Abraham interviews 24 different members of Israeli military intelligence about their day-to-day operations, learning the extent of the inhumanity running the show. Given Israel’s pattern of retaliation against dissenting voices, the interviews are filmed on the condition of anonymity, with voices digitally altered and conversations taking place under the cover of night on the rooftops in Tel Aviv. 

Naturally, this makes the film’s contents easier to refute for those who choose to deny the obvious. But the horrible and useful thing about the world today is that everyone has a camera. Palestinian suffering has been well and faithfully documented — including by Szor and Abraham, two of the four co-directors of the Oscar-winning 2024 documentary, “No Other Land.” But the most frequent and at-risk chroniclers of this critical point in history have been Palestinians displaced from Gaza and the West Bank, hoping to preserve the memory of their homes, lives and families, and hold the world’s attention without breaking its gaze. Now that their horrific plight coincides with Abraham and Szor’s second documentary, that goal stands to become a reality. But nothing will change if the world doesn’t listen up, harden their stomachs and stop pretending that the mass murders happening in Gaza, as “NAZA” so plainly puts it, are anything less than systematic.

Most pointedly, “NAZA” is titled for an Israeli military acronym referring to how many civilians will be killed in an airstrike. Throughout the film, officers rattle off numbers with all the nonchalance of times tables: 10, 15, 20, 25 NAZA, all expandable in Israel’s post-October 7 military escalation. While the state rattles off arguments about Hamas terrorists using human shields to avoid being killed, or going to great lengths to hide themselves, the officers interviewed report that the 75,000-plus Palestinians who have been killed in less than three years were considered disposable. The NAZA were no mere accidents, no casualties of war. They were tens of thousands of innocent people deemed complicit in the actions of a few, and therefore, their lives were of no value to Israeli military officials.

Even more frightening are the claims made about how this information is gathered. According to the interviewed personnel, the number of NAZA is determined by advanced, invasive surveillance — a combination of Gaza building codes that provide all the information needed about a structure’s inhabitants, and subcontracted AI programs that sort through data. The AI analyzes known Hamas agents’ phones for patterns in their cellular signals and compares them to hundreds of thousands of others in Gaza. If someone happens to live near a Hamas operative, or spends enough time in their general vicinity, the cell signal could very well lead the AI to determine that this person is also working for Hamas. The likelihood of that being true is slim, but that doesn’t matter when the mission is to kill anyone who might even tangentially, unknowingly associate with the organization. 

In an evocatively titled section of the film, “Daddy’s Home,” Israeli military officers describe hacking into young girls’ phones and listening, waiting for them to exclaim with happiness that their father — a person the Israeli military believes is tied to Hamas — has returned. That moment, amid the pure and innocent joy of a child reunited with their parent after a long day, is when the airstrike happens. To make sure they’ve accomplished their mission, Israeli officials keep listening, hearing the agonizing screams of mothers trying to save their daughters, and families begging for help and salvation. “It was like a video game,” one official tells Abraham.

This is merely the tip of the “NAZA” iceberg, and at times, it feels alarmingly and disappointingly difficult to compartmentalize it all at once. Not only do we learn swaths of dreadful, unforgettable information — much of which, the film notes, was previously published in the Guardian, Local Call and +972 magazine to little global reaction — but we come to understand AI warfare is not a threat, but a reality. It’s, admittedly, a lot to take in. 

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But that is also the film’s crucial challenge. “NAZA” asks its audience not only to withstand 77 straight minutes of horrifying information about the senseless deaths of Palestinian men, women and children, but to feel their spirit in every last syllable, and hold onto it when we go. We’re tasked with gauging our relative comfort with how much the world has changed in the three years since October 7, and how much bleaker things have become. Ignorance hasn’t done jack sh*t, and hasn’t made anybody’s lives any better. To continue to turn the other cheek now isn’t convenience; it’s cowardice, just as it always has been. That it’s taken this long to reach what could be a watershed moment speaks volumes about how every passing day furthers humanity’s desensitization. 

In the film, Abraham asks one of the Israeli military officers if he thinks that these systematic murders — carried out knowingly alongside efforts to turn Gaza to rubble and deprive Palestinians of shelter, food, water, housing and basic safety — constitute a genocide. “Yes, absolutely,” they reply. In the background, residents of Tel Aviv go about their daily lives mere miles from the catastrophic anguish in Gaza. Here, Szor and Abraham quietly demonstrate the lengths and risks of their allyship, pitting their relatively comfortable upbringing in Israel against their fervent quest to unlearn a propagandistic way of living. Their lens finds people walking on their treadmills, talking on the phone, laughing with one another. Families gather; special moments are cherished. But these sights are drained of their warmth, depicted with a cold, eerie hum that, when it bleeds into the roar of suffering miles away, becomes a deafening cacophony.

 

But one doesn’t have to be near the desert to hear the dissonance. The sound is here, too. It’s right next to you, wherever you are, if you only listen for it. Those who have tried to tune out the blaring pandemonium — to ignore the cruel, senseless violence enacted upon a Palestine that deserves peace — won’t be able to stave it off much longer. It seems that much of the Western world is waking up, roused by that sonorous noise that they just can’t seem to shake. And with a newly announced, calculated theatrical rollout to “bring ‘NAZA’ to audiences as quickly as possible,” there is, at long last, a real chance that this wave is still rising, and won’t reach its crest. To quote some very succinct words from Macklemore, something I never believed I’d do but am very fortunate to be able to: “When the news cycle moves on, which it will, don’t move with it.”

“NAZA” screens from September 26 at the New York Film Festival, with a limited release in New York September 30, Los Angeles October 9, and a nationwide rollout to follow.

The post “NAZA” could be the tipping point in the public perception of Gaza appeared first on Salon.com.

Last week, Fox News seemed to be trying to give Donald Trump what he wanted. Network personalities went on air and recited, with all the enthusiasm of a sixth grader reading a book report he skimmed on the bus, the rosiest possible version of Trump’s economy. Will Cain stood in front of a big board and tried to force-feed viewers praise for an economy that much of the public sees as failing them and their families. Greg Gutfeld, in the familiar performance of a man discovering empathy only when the numbers flatter his side, acted surprised to care about falling poverty statistics. It all had the feel of a network reading from the same set of talking points, dispatched from somewhere on the C-suite level, hurrying to convince viewers that Trump’s economy is thriving.

But that synchronized propaganda blitz flopped. 

Whatever the assignment was supposed to accomplish, it did not appease the man it was designed to flatter. By the end of the week, the president who had just been handed hours of favorable spin by the most watched cable network in the nation let out a tantrum so large it swallowed three unrelated newsrooms. Facing a failing presidency, crashing poll numbers, the prospect of a Democratic wave in November’s midterms and zero sense of a second-term agenda, Trump just up and banned CNN, Politico and MS NOW from the White House for seemingly no reason. On Monday, they announced they were suing to reinstate their access.

“On Friday the press shop was blindsided,” Politico reported, as the directive happened while chief of staff Susie Wiles was out of town. Still, the latest retaliatory purge was as pathetic as it was predictable. Trump did not identify a specific false report or allege a security breach to justify his radical action. Instead, his stated offense was simply that these outlets had produced too many negative stories over too much time. By Saturday morning, reporters from all three outlets were turned away at the White House gates. 

Fox News barely let out a peep. And the rest of the White House press corps — the reporters who share vans and pool feeds and holiday parties with the people just banished — did what they have done for a decade now. Mostly nothing.

That appears to have changed Monday morning. Late Sunday night, the administration announced it was banning CNN from serving in its previously scheduled slot as the television pool representative for the White House press corps — a marked escalation of the situation. In response, major networks including ABC, CBS, NBC and, notably, Fox News — agreed to suspend their pool coverage of Trump in solidarity with CNN. In a joint statement, the four networks, along with CNN, said, “The public has a vital interest in receiving accurate, independent information about its government. No administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting.”

New York Times reporter Peter Baker pointed out the historic nature of this event: “For the first time in my 30 years of covering the White House, the president will not have a network TV camera covering his everyday official actions and travels.”

At least until this point, Trump knew the press corps’ dirty little secret: It was far too late for symbolic outrage to substitute for collective action. The press has spent years teaching Trump that it is possible to divide journalists from one another. He recognized that much of the Washington press corps will deplore his conduct in a statement, and then show up for the next photo-op, fight for the next pool slot and keep treating access to an increasingly authoritarian White House as a professional prize. He believed, with good reason, that outlets like Fox News will even frame the exclusion of their peers as a partisan squabble in an effort to appear balanced. 

But Fox News has been here before.

In 2009, when Barack Obama’s White House tried to marginalize Fox News by excluding the network from an interview with Treasury official Kenneth Feinberg, the other television networks pushed back. The attempt was temporary — exclusion from one specific interview, not an announced and potentially expanding ban on multiple major outlets from White House grounds because their reporting offended the president. But the other four major television networks — ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN — refused to participate if Fox was excluded.

The Washington bureau chiefs delivered a clear ultimatum that either Fox News is allowed in the room, or nobody goes in. Jake Tapper, then at ABC, confronted White House press secretary Robert Gibbs in the briefing room and asked him directly why it was appropriate for the government to declare a news organization illegitimate. (Fox lawyers later argued in court that hosts like Tucker Carlson cannot reasonably be considered legitimate sources of news.) Facing a unified front from a press corps that put constitutional principles ahead of commercial rivalries, the Obama administration backed down immediately. 

That moment demonstrated the power of absolute press solidarity. The networks did not defend Fox News because they agreed with its right-wing bias, but because they understood the precedent that would be set if a president were permitted to ban a critic from the room. Once the government establishes press facilities and admits credentialed journalists to gather news, it cannot hand access out according to ideological loyalty. 

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But that solidarity fractured in the years that followed. With Trump’s rise and his infamously leaky first term, White House reporters have seemingly surrendered to access journalism. When he descended his golden escalator at Trump Tower in 2015, major television networks traded journalistic rigor for spectacle. They broadcast his rallies uninterrupted, handing him billions of dollars in free airtime to normalize his attacks on democratic norms. In 2018, the administration pulled CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta’s press credentials after he refused to hand back a microphone during a heated exchange. CNN sued, other outlets filed friend of the court briefs, and the administration eventually folded and restored his pass. Although imperfect, this response demonstrated that the old model still worked.

In 2025, Trump tried it again, this time against the Associated Press, after the wire service declined to rename the Gulf of Mexico on his say so. The AP sued. Fox News, NBC, the New York Times and the Washington Post all filed amicus briefs on the AP’s behalf, and a Trump appointed district court judge, Trevor McFadden, ordered the ban lifted from the broader White House grounds, even as an appeals court let Trump keep the AP out of the Oval Office, Air Force One and Mar-a-Lago while the case proceeds. All the while, the president held press avails in which he continued to attack the press. 

Trump understands how to exploit every weakness the media has cultivated, like its addiction to spectacle. He insults a reporter, and the clip runs all day. He threatens a network, and the network gets a bump in attention. He calls the press “the enemy of the people,” then calls individual reporters when he wants to plant a story or manipulate a news cycle. He denounces the New York Times as “fake news,” then sits for lengthy interviews with its reporters when they are writing books he hopes will immortalize his preferred version of events. At this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Trump turned CNN’s Kaitlan Collins into a target of misogynistic ridicule while the assembled press corps remained seated. 

This breakdown of solidarity among the press corps has allowed Republicans to build a false narrative around media access. After Trump announced his ban on CNN, Politico and MS NOW, the conservative political machine rallied to defend the blatantly unconstitutional act with a familiar bait and switch. Trump allies like Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., absurdly claimed no president has been more open to the press than Trump and mocked the idea that press access requires actual access. Scalise repeatedly parroted the debunked claim that Joe Biden revoked the credentials of 400 reporters, a distortion fact-checked by ABC’s Jonathan Karl, who noted that only one reporter was ever denied a credential under Biden. The rest simply hadn’t reapplied and were let in anyway. United Nations Ambassador Mike Waltz told CNN’s own Dana Bash that he backs banning her network. Fox News contributor Joey Jones, whose colleague Jacqui Heinrich is the current White House Correspondents’ Association president, casually remarked that he would not “shed a tear” over the banned journalists. Heinrich, Fox’s White House correspondent, rightly condemned the ban as an unequivocal violation of the First Amendment.

Fox’s opinion side has spent a decade building an audience that treats CNN’s misfortune as content. In that time, Fox News paid $787.5 million to settle Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit after internal communications revealed how Trump’s false election claims were knowingly aired and promoted.

But Monday morning’s news that at least some of the past solidarity has returned is heartening — and it stands as a rebuke to an out-of-control president and administration that thinks they can bulldoze the media into submission. Still, the damage has been done. While a legal victory for CNN, Politico and MS NOW is probable, it will in all likelihood come months from now, after the outlets have been shut out of covering the president during the most consequential midterm season in a generation. That is not the same as winning. 

Executive power cannot be checked by the courts alone; it must be checked by real-time resistance from reporters. Monday’s collective action is a meaningful first step. Now there should be another: while the lawyers argue the case in federal court, the rest of the White House press corps should make sure the chairs in the briefing room are empty.

UPDATE: This story has been updated to reflect Monday morning’s news that ABC, CBS, Fox News and NBC are suspending pool coverage in solidarity with CNN, and that CNN, Politico and MS NOW are filing suit to regain access to the White House.

The post Trump didn’t break the press. They did that to themselves appeared first on Salon.com.

All politics are identity politics. Republicans have long mocked this notion, treating the very concept of “identity politics” as a left-wing fixation. In reality, the GOP’s success is entirely due to the cheapest form of identity politics: For decades, but especially now, they have worked to distract voters from the party’s ruinous policies with appeals to their identity as white, provincial and, most importantly, Christian. This campaign has been enormously successful. White evangelicals have been the backbone of the GOP for decades not because they love tax cuts for the rich and environmental degradation, but because they have been told, repeatedly, that Democrats are demonic and there is no such thing as a liberal Christian. 

This is why there’s a growing panic in the Republican ranks over the campaign of James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate in Texas, and it’s not just fear that he could beat Ken Paxton, the state’s Republican attorney general. Win or lose, Talarico — a seminary student-turned-politician — embodies an existential threat to the right’s long-standing myth that to be Christian must necessarily mean voting Republican. 

“As a young evangelical we were taught repeatedly and clearly: It is not possible to be a Christian and a Democrat,” Brad Onishi, a research associate at the University of California, Berkeley and co-host of the “Straight White American Jesus” podcast, told me. “But candidates like Talarico are changing that. His theological acumen and keen ability to use the language of the New Testament to disarm bad-faith religious attacks is showing a new way forward.”

Most white evangelicals believe “you cannot ever vote for a Democrat because they hate you,” explained April Ajoy, a former Christian nationalist turned liberal Christian, on her YouTube channel Wednesday. Part of her deconstruction journey, she said, meant rejecting the belief that “Christians cannot vote Democrat.”

As Ajoy pointed out, if one looks past the tribalist loyalties, Democrats should be a better fit for people who claim allegiance to Jesus Christ, who called on followers to feed the hungry and welcome the stranger. But tribalist identity politics are what really matters. White evangelical leaders keep their flocks voting for Republicans by implying that they are somehow abandoning the identity of “Christian” if they choose to vote for Democrats. The fact that many Democratic politicians are also Christian doesn’t register because they usually don’t foreground their religious identity in the same way as Republicans, who wave Bibles and pray loudly. 

Talarico, though, has centered his Christian identity in his campaign. It’s not just that he regularly quotes scripture or speaks openly of his faith. His biography reads far more like that of a right-wing evangelical than the liberal Democrat he is. He studied theology at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary and is the grandson of a Baptist preacher. He gives off Boy Scout vibes with his earnest tones and short haircut. He even grew up in Round Rock, a suburb of Austin that has shifted left in recent years, but that used to be infamous for its right-wing politics. For white evangelicals experiencing doubts about MAGA politics, Talarico is a role model for how to be a liberal without giving up their faith, or even a conservative aesthetic.

Many Christian right leaders understand that, even if Talarico can’t pull off a miracle win in Texas, his campaign and fame is a long-term threat to their cause. The reaction from white evangelical influencers to him isn’t just about disagreeing with him politically. They are actively trying to discredit his identity as a Christian. 

“They are people who are walking into churches and walking into the lives of Christians with the demonic specific intent to deceive Christians and advance evil and destroy their faith,” said Josh Howerton, a popular podcaster who serves as senior pastor of the Dallas-based Lakepointe Church. He went on to mock Talarico’s “reverend vibe,” calling him a “false teacher.”

In April, Trump-loving evangelical podcaster Eric Metaxas insisted that Talarico’s faith is a left-wing hoax. “They don’t they don’t openly say we worship Satan and we hate your savior,” he said. “No, they pretend to be more Christian.”

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“[Talarico] is not a Christian man,” his guest Megan Basham, a self-declared “unabashed church lady,” agreed. She noted that “Satan” can say Christian-sounding things, but that “doesn’t make him Christian.”

But the headline of an episode of evangelical podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey’s show was perhaps the most inflammatory: “James Talarico is More Demonic Than You Think.” Stuckey, who has attacked empathy as “toxic,” warned viewers and listeners that “Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. Satan looks good. He sounds good.” Talarico, she said, is “evil disguised as goodness.”

If this were just about the outcome of a single Senate race — one in which Talarico is still an underdog, despite strong poll numbers — there would be no need for this extreme rhetoric equating him to Satan, calling him demonic and denying that he’s a real Christian. The GOP’s panicked reaction is about much more than one election. As Howerton declared, there are only “two types” of Christians, “Christian conservatives and conservative Christians.” They do not want their followers peeking behind door number three.

The religious right has good reason to worry that some of their followers could be tempted by Talarico’s message that liberal Christians are a real thing. Already, churches are losing power because their fidelity to the GOP over Christ’s message of love and compassion. A recent study from the Billy Graham Center Research Institute at the evangelical Wheaton College shows that nearly half of Gen Z respondents agreed with the statement “Christians’ support of Trump has made me less likely to go to church.” 

Many people have left religion altogether rather than try to deal with the dissonance between Trump’s hateful message and the Christian call to love. Others have struggled, not wanting to abandon their faith or community over political disagreements. As Ajoy and Onishi explained, they instead squelch their doubts and fall in line. This is why Talarico is such a potent threat, far beyond November. Even if he loses his election, he’s made it much harder for the right to convince their followers that being a Christian means voting Republican. 

The post James Talarico’s campaign could do lasting damage to the GOP appeared first on Salon.com.

This story was originally reported by Grace Panetta of The 19th. Meet Grace and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.

As Republicans gathered in Dallas, Texas for their pre-midterm convention last week, Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico focused on survivors of Jeffrey Epstein. 

Talarico got a tour of the Reading Room, a traveling exhibit of the nearly 3 million files that the Department of Justice released from its investigation into the late disgraced financier and convicted sex offender — the result of a hard-fought battle by survivors of Epstein’s abuse who are still seeking justice and transparency from a government they say repeatedly failed them. 

Speaking alongside Epstein survivors Annie Farmer and Sharlene Rochard, Talarico praised them for their courage in coming forward and attacked his Republican opponent, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, for not meeting with the survivors and what he said was “a history of covering up abuse.” Talarico called on Paxton to use his authority to sue the Justice Department over its handling of the release of the files connected to Epstein, who died in prison in 2019 while awaiting trial for federal sex trafficking charges.  

“When did pedophilia become a partisan issue? When did holding sexual abusers accountable become controversial? When did Ken Paxton decide it was OK to ignore these survivors?” Talarico said. 

“I am tired of seeing powerful people cover up abuse. I think we’re all tired of it — Democrats, Republicans and independents alike,” he added. 

Republicans currently enjoy an advantage as the party voters trust more on crime — 45 percent of voters said they trusted the GOP the most on the issue in a 2025 Pew Research Center survey, up from 40 percent in 2023. It’s typically been GOP candidates who have run attack ads hitting their opponents as being “soft” on crime. But the dynamics around crime messaging have shifted with the national spotlight on the Epstein files and the bipartisan push for more accountability for Epstein’s crimes — an issue that Democratic strategists and pollsters say has rare, high levels of crossover support. 

And Democrats in races from Arizona to North Carolina are attacking their Republican opponents for their votes not just on the Epstein files, but on their ties to other sex offenders and their records on cases of sexual abuse. 

In Texas’ Senate race, Talarico has also slammed Paxton for his office offering what he called an “Epstein-style” plea deal to a defendant, Waco attorney Adam Hoffman, who was charged with sexually abusing a minor. After Hoffman’s trial ended in a hung jury, the prosecution offered a deal that would have allowed him to serve just one day in jail, which sparked public outrage and was rejected by the judge in the case. Hoffman eventually pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges and was sentenced to 60 days in jail but was not required to register as a sex offender. 

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In a letter to a Republican state lawmaker earlier this year, the career prosecutors who tried the case said the outcome was in the best interest of the child victim, who did not wish to voluntarily testify in a second trial. 

The day after the GOP convention last week, Talarico’s campaign debuted a new television ad attacking Paxton over the plea deal. 

“Ken Paxton’s corruption endangers our kids,” the ad says. “We don’t need any more pedophile protectors in Washington.” 

Paxton’s campaign responded by highlighting a pro-Talarico super PAC taking $11.5 million in donations from Reid Hoffman, a venture capitalist, tech founder and Democratic megadonor who crossed paths with Epstein through his work with the MIT Media Lab in the 2010s, after Epstein became a convicted sex offender. Hoffman apologized in 2019 for associating with Epstein.

“James Talarico continues to lie to Texans about his radical record with the help of Epstein money. It’s disgusting that the man claiming to run a campaign against billionaires is bought and paid for by Epstein’s billionaire buddy,” Paxton campaign spokesperson Madison Cercy said in a statement to The 19th.

President Donald Trump, who spoke both nights at the Dallas convention and has backed Paxton, also had ties to Epstein, but he says they stopped associating well before Epstein became a convicted sex offender. Trump himself in 2024 was found guilty of falsifying business records, and in 2023 was found liable for sexual abuse in a case over accusations from the 1990s.

Also last week, the North Carolina Democratic Party aired digital ads on conservative media platforms hitting the state’s Republican U.S. Senate nominee, Michael Whatley, for his ties to Harvey West Jr., a GOP donor and convicted sex offender whom Whatley repeatedly elevated to top posts within the state Republican Party.   

Whatley, an ex-Republican National Committee chair endorsed by Trump, is running against former Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper for the seat opened up by retiring Republican Sen. Thom Tillis. 

Democrats and Republicans alike have scrutinized Whatley for his ties to West, a former police officer who was charged with the statutory rape of three minor girls. West pleaded guilty to lesser charges of taking indecent liberties with minors in 2000, serving six years in prison and registering as a sex offender. Earlier this summer, a national Democratic super PAC unveiled $2.3 million in digital ads attacking Whatley over the matter.

“If this is who Whatley hires for a job, why would we ever hire Whatley for the Senate?” said the ad from the WinSenate PAC.  

Whatley’s campaign has dismissed the criticisms over his elevation of West as a “distraction” and a “smear.” Whatley has also made attacking Cooper on crime and public safety central to his campaign message, including by criticizing the early release of some incarcerated people during the COVID-19 pandemic. Cooper has called the attacks misleading.  

“Michael Whatley spent his career appointing a convicted child sex predator who served six years in prison and spent over a decade as a registered sex offender to a top role within the North Carolina Republican Party – North Carolinians deserve better,” a Cooper campaign spokesperson said in a statement to The 19th. 

And another convicted sex offender who served time in prison for crimes against children recently delivered the opening prayer at a rally in support of Whatley’s campaign, the Associated Press reported Friday. Whatley’s campaign told the outlet it did not organize the rally or choose any of the speakers. 

In Arizona, both Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs and Republicans have criticized the GOP gubernatorial nominee, U.S. Rep. Andy Biggs, for his handling of legislation aimed at addressing law enforcement corruption in enabling the abuse of women and children within the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. The polygamist religious cult led by Warren Jeffs, who is currently serving a life sentence for child sex assault, had a stronghold in the small Arizona town of Colorado City, including over local law enforcement.  

In 2013, a bill that would have given the state the ability to take over the Colorado City marshals overwhelmingly passed in the state House. But Biggs, then a state senator and president of the upper chamber, didn’t bring it to a vote in the Senate, drawing ire from lawmakers in both parties. Hobbs’ campaign and its allies have hit Biggs over the issue with a website and a documentary-style video.     

Biggs has defended his handling of the matter, pointing to his background as a prosecutor and his past votes to decertify the Colorado City Police Department. 

“Whatever she wants to say, it’s bogus, it’s crap and it’s a lie,” Biggs said in a recent interview on local radio station KTAR News. 

“First of all, that particular bill was so poorly crafted that the Fraternal Order of Police and the Arizona Association of Police opposed it,” he added. “Second of all, I have a record of protecting women and children that’s unparalleled.” 

Two Democrats running to flip competitive House seats, Christina Hines in Michigan and Shannon Taylor in Virginia, are running on their records prosecuting crimes against women and children and holding the powerful to account. 

Taylor, a local prosecutor running against U.S. Rep. Rob Wittman in Virginia’s 1st District, has made her record on public safety and fighting corruption central to her campaign. 

Last week, she released a television ad highlighting her willingness to go after members of her own party. The ad points to the prosecution of former Democratic state lawmaker Joe Morrissey, who entered an Alford plea to a misdemeanor charge of contributing to the delinquency of a minor in 2014 after being charged with multiple felonies stemming from a sexual relationship with his then-teenage receptionist. He denied wrongdoing and was pardoned in 2022.   

“As Henrico’s top prosecutor, I didn’t care that he was a Democrat, or the pressure I got to make it go away, so I called for a special prosecutor,” she said, referring to her post as the commonwealth attorney for Henrico County. “I’m Shannon Taylor, and I approve this message because doing what’s right matters more than politics.”  

Hines, who has a background as a sex crimes prosecutor, is running against Mike Bouchard Jr.  for an open seat in Michigan’s 10th District in the Detroit suburbs. 

“In my stump speech, I always talk about how Congress actually needs a sexual assault prosecutor right now more than ever,” Hines told The 19th in an interview in July before going out to knock on doors. 

Not a week of her campaign goes by, she said, without someone sharing their own story of abuse with her. 

“This is a rampant issue in our society, and I end up talking to people all over the place that that is a top issue for them in their life,” Hines added. “And they might not tell everybody else, but it matters to them that I have that background.” 

The post The Epstein reckoning hits the campaign trail appeared first on Salon.com.

President Donald Trump has found a new purpose for the massive triumphal arch he wants to build near Arlington National Cemetery: national security.

“At the strong request of the United States Military, and for National Security purposes, I have agreed to convert the magnificent Triumphal Arch, planned since the Civil War Era many years ago, at the Receptive Circle adjoining the Arlington Memorial Bridge, into a top grade Military Complex/Triumphal Arch,” Trump wrote Sunday on Truth Social.

Trump said the proposed 250-foot structure would house and rapidly deploy “large numbers of drones,” position snipers on its roof and plaza and store “large quantities of sniper ammunition.” He also claimed Washington is the only one of the world’s “59 top cities and Capitals” without a triumphal arch.

But the post raises questions about both the history of the project and its newly announced military purpose.

The Pentagon has not publicly identified which part of the military requested the conversion or what security threat the facility would address. A military official said the Defense Department had nothing to add beyond Trump’s post. Retired Marine Col. Mark Cancian also questioned the need for such a facility when the active Army installation Fort Myer sits roughly a mile away.

Trump’s claim that the arch has been “planned since the Civil War Era” also oversimplifies a complicated history. Plans for a Potomac crossing date to before the Civil War, and various monumental arches were proposed in Washington during the late 19th century. But the plan Congress approved in 1925 for Arlington Memorial Bridge called for two 166-foot columns near what is now Memorial Circle, not Trump’s triumphal arch. Those columns were never built.

The claim involving “59 top cities and Capitals” is similarly unclear. Trump did not identify the 59 cities or the source of the comparison. GlobalSecurity.org examined a similar claim Trump made earlier this year and found that, among the world’s 65 largest metropolitan areas, only eight had what it classified as significant triumphal or memorial arches. Fifty-seven, including Tokyo, Beijing, Moscow and Los Angeles, did not.

The military conversion could also add questions to an already complicated approval process. The project still lacks final approval from the National Capital Planning Commission and faces a federal lawsuit challenging Trump’s authority to build it without congressional authorization. The Washington Post reported Sunday that a military complex had not previously been raised during required historic-preservation consultations.

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Then there are the drones.

The Federal Aviation Administration cleared the 250-foot structure Friday, finding it would not pose a substantial hazard to aircraft using nearby Reagan National Airport. Two days later, Trump announced plans to rapidly deploy “large numbers of drones” from the site. There is no indication the FAA’s determination evaluated drone operations from the proposed complex.

It is not the first time Trump has added a national-security purpose to one of his disputed construction projects.

The White House ballroom was initially promoted as a venue for state dinners and other large events. As the project faced legal challenges, Trump increasingly described it as a “Military Complex/Ballroom” and emphasized underground security infrastructure as part of its purpose.

Now the arch, initially promoted as a monument commemorating America’s 250th anniversary, has undergone a similar transformation. Whether the military requested that transformation — and why it needs a drone and sniper facility at Memorial Circle — remains unexplained.

The post Trump’s arch now comes with snipers appeared first on Salon.com.

President Donald Trump is going all-in on artificial intelligence, dismissing growing concerns over AI and data centers as politically motivated “hoaxes” while promising that his administration will not “hinder or stifle” the rapidly expanding industry.

Trump announced Saturday that he is forming an “AI Force,” which he compared to the Space Force created during his first term, and will soon appoint an AI “czar.”

“We will cherish it, help it, and watch over it, as it grows!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

The president provided few details about what the new force would actually do, including where it would sit within the federal government, what authority it would have or how it would differ from existing federal AI initiatives. Trump instead argued that harmful uses of AI could be addressed through the existing criminal and civil justice systems.

His embrace of the technology comes as some Republicans are confronting growing opposition to the data centers needed to power it ahead of November’s midterm elections.

Trump’s longtime pollster Tony Fabrizio warned Republican candidates in a memo this week that “unqualified support for building more AI data centers is a losing position.” Fabrizio advised candidates to address concerns about electricity prices, pressure on power grids and water consumption rather than offer blanket support for new construction.

Trump took the opposite tone Saturday, claiming opposition to data centers had “largely failed” because communities discovered they brought “Higher Salaries, Lower Taxes, and Safer Streets.”

Some Republican candidates have gone further than Fabrizio’s messaging advice. Michigan Republican Senate nominee Mike Rogers has backed a one-year moratorium on new data centers in his state and called for slowing AI development while the government develops additional safeguards.

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Trump, meanwhile, framed rapid AI development as both an economic imperative and a competition with China, claiming the technology could eventually account for as much as 25% of U.S. gross domestic product.

His enthusiasm extends even to the technology’s name.

Hours before announcing the AI Force, Trump asked his Truth Social followers to vote on replacing “Artificial Intelligence” with “Superior Intelligence,” “Extreme Intelligence” or “Supreme Intelligence.”

The post Trump thinks AI needs its own “Force” now appeared first on Salon.com.

It should come as no surprise that wars break armies. The chaotic, destructive nature of battle tends to wound even the most highly trained armed forces. Today, however, the U.S. military is being impaired not by some determined overseas enemy but rather by its own leadership in a fratricidal war against imagined cultural bogeymen. The harm has become so discernible that Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., called this week for an impeachment vote on Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

Massie’s push for removal, while unexpected, is not without merit. In his crusade to decontaminate the ranks from the supposed virus of “DEI” — diversity, equity and inclusion — Hegseth is waging a malicious campaign against his own troops with little, if any, precedent in American history.

True, there have been moments in the nation’s martial past when social progress and military resistance sat in uneasy tension. The Truman administration’s desegregation of the armed forces or President Bill Clinton’s desire to allow gay and lesbian service members to serve openly exemplified clashes when the very meaning of American democracy seemed to be negotiated among those in uniform.

Previous American wars equally have highlighted both the fraught nature of serving in higher-level leadership roles and in lower ranks where war’s injurious effects are most grievously felt.

During the Second World War, for instance, the U.S. Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall gained a harsh reputation for firing senior officers who didn’t pass muster in the crucible of combat. Yet the future secretary of state — and architect of the Marshall Plan — was most concerned with competence and candor leading to military effectiveness. As one account suggests, Marshall “was not looking for conformists. He believed in the respectful, confidential expression of dissent.” In a time of war, personal ideologies mattered little to national security. 

If young Americans serving in uniform during World War II were unaware of how Marshall approached general officer accountability, they certainly felt war’s ravages up close and personal. Marine Eugene B. Sledge, a Pacific theater veteran, marveled at “the incredible cruelty that decent men could commit when reduced to a brutish existence in their fight for survival amid the violent death, terror, tension, fatigue, and filth that was the infantryman’s war.”

The Cold War experience would prove just as injurious, and on more than just the personal level. While veterans of the American war in Vietnam, like Lieutenant Philip Caputo, remembered his men being in a “permanent state of exhaustion,” more senior officers worried about the conflict’s impact on the very health of the U.S. military. Future Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore, who commanded a cavalry unit at the late 1965 Ia Drang battle, fretted how the war was “devastating to the morale and effectiveness of every American unit in combat.” Might the armed forces not survive the ordeal of Vietnam? 

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Such existential questions endured throughout the post-9/11 global war on terrorism. While pundits and correspondents alike compared the war in Iraq to Vietnam, soldiers and Marines on the front lines struggled to find meaning in their combat tours. As journalist C.J. Chivers, who interviewed scores of fellow veterans, wondered: “Had it been worth it? Have they helped? Why had they been ordered to fight the way they fought?” In such convoluted wars, easy answers were hard to come by.

As in Vietnam, larger questions about the impact of war on military readiness accompanied veterans’ soul-searching. Some wrote anxiously about the “strain . . . being felt throughout the services, in terms of wear and tear on the troops, their families, and their equipment.” Others opined that American strategy lay “dead,” the victim of a hyper-focused counterinsurgency approach that favored tactics over the more important challenge of matching national resources to policy aims. 

If the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had “broken” some American servicemembers serving overseas, making for a difficult reintegration back home, they apparently also had fractured the very organizations to which those in uniform belonged. 

Hegseth’s cultural war, however, is far different — and, potentially, far more damaging. While the ongoing war in Iran consumes strategic military reserves for ostensibly little strategic gain, the defense secretary persists in targeting the very men and women tasked with carrying out the president’s foreign policy objectives. The fratricide is nearly all-encompassing.

Unlike any defense secretary before him, Hegseth has inserted himself into promotion board decisions, especially when it comes to selection of officers for promotion to major general. By one account, he has blocked the advancement of more than 80 generals and admirals. His flurry of cashiering officers appears based on little more than targeting those who are not ideologically aligned with the secretary’s worldview. 

On another front, his anti-diversity and inclusion crusade continues unimpeded. In a fiery speech to the West Point graduating class in May, Hegseth railed against “woke” and “anti-American ideologies” while castigating those who “embraced the DEI craze.” The message was clear: Only “warriors” need apply to the newly reconstituted profession of arms. Perhaps not coincidentally, adverse promotion decisions have fallen most heavily on Black and female officers.

The secretary’s constant refrain on what we might call “tactical masculinity” oversimplifies the true nature of modern warfare, which is far more complex and multifaceted than his vision of tough and fit infantrymen engaging in hand-to-hand combat. The increasing use of military drones is but one example. But Hegseth’s scorched-earth policies also run the long-term risk of weakening the nation’s armed forces by narrowing recruiting possibilities for an all-volunteer force. An all-white, all-male military is hardly representative of American democracy.

All wars damage the armies that fight them. And, without question, some wars see armies turn against themselves, most infamously in Vietnam, when some 900 “fragging” incidents — attempts on the lives of fellow soldiers — resulted in the deaths of 99 American uniformed personnel. 

Yet the current fratricidal war against the U.S. armed forces, championed by its own defense secretary himself, is a phenomenon unlike any other in the nation’s history.

Evaluating the present without the benefit of perspective from the past can be a risky business. At very least, though, Americans today should insist that their civilian leaders don’t wage war against those citizens who have pledged their service for no other cause but the nation’s defense.

The post Pete Hegseth declares war — on his own troops appeared first on Salon.com.

My grandmother’s baked spaghetti came in slabs, which was part of its charm. Hot from the oven, they sagged dramatically over the edge of a spatula, held together mainly by a web of browned mozzarella; cold from the refrigerator the next day, they cut much more cleanly and were arguably better. Underneath the cheese were snapped spaghetti, ground chuck and a generous pour of Ragu, and as the casserole disappeared over the course of a weekend, red sauce and rendered beef fat collected in iridescent pools at the exposed corners of the dish.

This was one of two dinners I could reliably expect when we visited her in West Virginia. My grandmother, the daughter of a coal miner and a master of the frugal feast, made either baked spaghetti or steak and gravy with mashed potatoes, green beans and biscuits with blackberry jam; stay long enough and you got leftovers of both. She passed the spaghetti recipe to my mother early in my parents’ marriage, and Mom changed almost nothing. The noodles were still snapped. The beef was still beef. The mozzarella still went on with a heavy hand.

What changed, slowly enough that nobody announced it, was the jar.

First there was Ragu. Then Bertolli. And then there was Rao’s.

I remember the first time my mother took me to The Fresh Market. It was fall, and the entryway smelled aggressively of cinnamon brooms. Just inside was a coffee station — “Complimentary,” an employee in a green apron told us — where I, a preteen with no particular business drinking coffee, poured myself something hazelnut-flavored and carried it solemnly through the aisles. Classical music played overhead. My mother remarked, approvingly, that the lighting didn’t give her a migraine.

Looking back, I suspect my father had recently begun making a little more money, because that afternoon we bought two things I distinctly remember never having had before: Kerrygold butter and a jar of Rao’s.

That night, Mom used the Rao’s in my grandmother’s baked spaghetti. On the side were little wheat rolls from The Fresh Market bakery, spread with pats of Kerrygold — a small but perceptible upgrade from the Bunny Bread and Country Crock of a few years earlier. Nothing about the occasion had changed. It was still spaghetti night. But I remember that dinner in my bones for how special it felt.

By the time I was in college, Rao’s had undergone another transformation. It started appearing in my parents’ pantry in Costco two-packs, usually beside gigantic cases of bottled water, enough paper towels to absorb a malfunctioning sprinkler system and gallon-sized jugs of olive oil. At $12.99 for two jars, it had stopped being the sauce from the fancy grocery store and become simply the sauce my mother bought. She has never gone back.

This past January, deep in winter pasta mode, I realized the supermarket had followed her. There were suddenly what looked like two additional feet of shelf space devoted to sauces with labels I would happily frame and ingredient lists apparently designed to seduce me personally: no added sugar, good olive oil, whole tomatoes, actual garlic. The average supermarket now has top-shelf pasta sauce in both senses of the phrase.

I should disclose that I am helpless in the face of good food packaging. Give me an embossed jar with a hand-drawn garlic bulb, a wobbly little restaurant façade and typography that looks like it was commissioned by someone who owns several linen aprons, and I go full Tex Avery wolf: eyes out, tongue unspooled, all higher reasoning suspended.

Some of them, annoyingly, are also very good.

My first step beyond Rao’s was Carbone’s vodka sauce, which asks for a splash of fresh cream — a sentence that has probably already caused several restaurant acolytes to sit bolt upright and announce that IT IS NOT THE SAME AS CARBONE. Fine. Nobody said it was. But the jar that really got me was Sauz’s lemon-pepper pesto. I tossed it with store-bought ravioli and shredded rotisserie chicken warmed in olive oil, put peas on the side, and waited for the part where I needed to fix something. It never came.

Nothing.

Yet it was surprisingly complex: bright with lemon juice and fresh peel, nutty with almonds and Parmigiano Reggiano, savory with garlic and olive oil. It was the sort of flavor I could reproduce if sufficiently motivated. On a Tuesday, I was not.

And now we have arrived at Alison Roman selling “A Very Good Sauce,” including a jar inspired by the caramelized-shallot-and-anchovy pasta that once briefly seemed to occupy half the internet. A generous three-pack runs $30, or $10 a jar. 

I made that pasta when everyone else did, and kept making it after everyone stopped posting about it. For years I’ve had deli containers of the gorgeous, sticky umami tangle rotating in and out of my refrigerator. So the ability to simply buy a jar descended from it feels like an almost comically specific luxury: somebody else has already done the sticky part.

For a dedicated home cook, this is part of the appeal. Eventually you discover that certain chefs and recipe developers simply share your tastes: their pantry looks like your pantry, their idea of enough acid is your idea of enough acid. Their recipes acquire a little micro-mythology in your kitchen. By the time they put something in a jar, you aren’t exactly starting from scratch. The product arrives pre-endorsed by your own past dinners.

Chef Scott Conant is playing in the same sandbox: his Martone Street sauces run about $10 a jar, or just under $40 for a four-pack, which is less “generic red sauce” than “Scott Conant would like to handle this part of dinner for you.”

There are, meanwhile, levels to this.

Bio Orto makes an organic butternut-squash cream sauce that I bought at Eataly for $18.49 and desperately wanted to find merely fine. It was not merely fine. Eataly itself sells a $25.99 Alfredo that, unlike so many jarred Alfredo sauces, does not taste as though someone dissolved Parmesan into wallpaper paste. There is also a $29.99 mushroom pasta sauce with white truffle flavoring.

Twenty-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents. For sauce.

I can hear the objections from here.

The problem is that these, too, are very good.

Of course, there is another possible ending for a beloved sauce: it gets very, very big. Campbell’s acquired Rao’s, and there are armies of people online who remain convinced that something must have changed, despite Rao’s FAQ explicitly assuring worried customers that the company won’t “touch the sauce.” I haven’t eaten enough Rao’s lately to join the prosecution. What interests me is the anxiety itself. Once people love a jar rather than merely use it, corporate ownership can start to feel less like a business transaction than someone acquiring custody of a family recipe.

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Then again, sometimes an expensive jar is simply an expensive jar. The $18.49 Bio Orto remains, emphatically, an $18.49 jar of pasta sauce. I am not here to argue that this constitutes thrift.

But lately the comparison I make in my head is less often fancy sauce versus Ragu than grocery-store splurge versus going out. Dinner for two at a neighborhood trattoria recently ran us $86 with appetizers, one cocktail and no dessert. Delivery can wander toward $60 before tip with insulting ease. Against that backdrop, an $18 sauce, seven dollars’ worth of Italian sausage, a two-dollar pound of pasta, a Caesar salad kit and some good bakery focaccia occupy a strange but useful category: not a cheap dinner, exactly, but a comparatively inexpensive special one.

Sometimes what I’m buying is 20 minutes of my own attention.

If the sauce needs nothing from me, I can spend that energy making dessert, mixing a cocktail for guests, warming bread — or simply deciding which sparkling water sounds good. I can also happily spend another night softening onions in butter and doctoring $2.62 Ragu Kettle Cooked Tomato Basil (one of the best of the budget sauces) with garlic powder, onion powder, red-pepper flakes and whatever umami booster is closest: anchovy, miso, soy.

Sometimes I want to futz. It is simply nice not to have to.

Which is why I have trouble getting particularly worked up about the expensive-sauce aisle. Sure, sometimes the beautiful jar is bought by someone who simply enjoys beautiful jars. But it might also be dinner for an exhausted parent who wants twenty minutes back and misses what the inside of a restaurant tastes like. Or it might be the thing that gets a couple through a no-takeout month while they save for their wedding without making every Wednesday night feel like financial punishment.

Convenience food has always existed to solve problems. We’ve simply gotten more specific about which problems we would like it to solve.

As for that $18.49 squash sauce, I browned some Italian sausage, boiled pasta, warmed the sauce and put a Caesar salad and good focaccia on the table. I had not roasted a squash. I had not grated cheese into a saucepan. I had not dirtied anything requiring an overnight soak. Dinner tasted rich and savory and faintly sweet, the sort of thing I would have been delighted to order at a neighborhood restaurant.

By the end, I was dragging pieces of focaccia through the last orange streaks left in the pan.

It was, after all that, just dinner at home.

Which was kind of the luxury.

The post How jarred pasta sauce became a luxury pantry essential appeared first on Salon.com.

There are always power centers in any White House. Certain people have their own little fiefdoms or specific knowledge of how government bureaucracy works, which gives them a leg up in internecine battles. Some offices or Cabinet posts are just imbued with more power than others. The Treasury secretary, for example, is always going to have more juice than the secretary of agriculture, just by virtue of their respective portfolios. But there is no job that has traditionally been more powerful than White House chief of staff.

The role of the position is multi-faceted, managing the flow of information to the Oval Office and keeping them from becoming distracted by people pushing their own agendas and distorting the president’s understanding of the facts. The chief of staff has hiring and firing power over the West Wing, basically running the day-to-day operation of the presidency. Mediating disputes among the executive branch’s advisers and officials before they reach the president is also an important part of the job. But most importantly, the chief of staff should be the president’s most trusted adviser, willing to provide an honest assessment and opinion on all the important issues that reach the Resolute Desk. 

No president has a more checkered past with chiefs of staff than Donald Trump. In 2017, as a complete political novice, he brought in a GOP party hack, Reince Priebus, who quickly proved himself to be completely unprepared to deal with an egomaniac like Trump. Priebus was fairly swiftly given the heave-ho in favor of retired Gen. John Kelly, who was serving as secretary of homeland security. He was expected to whip the White House and the chaotic president into shape. While Kelly tried his best, he proved to be no match for the force that was Javanka — Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, the president’s son-in-law and daughter — and others who had forged a personal relationship with Trump and wielded influence, no matter how hard Kelly tried to discipline the operation. After the four-star general couldn’t tame the Trump White House, they ended up with a bucket of lukewarm chamomile tea by the name of Mark Meadows, who is probably best remembered as the man who sat on his couch scrolling through his phone while insurrectionists stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, simply saying the president wanted to be alone. 

“It used to be a fairly stiff competition for the worst chief of staff in history,” according to Chris Whipple, author of “The Gatekeepers,” the definitive book on the subject, “but Meadows absolutely owns it.” Still, there were others. Until Meadows, most people would have considered H.R. Haldeman, Richard Nixon’s very loyal chief of staff, to be the lowest rating. After all, Haldeman actually did time for his crimes in service of Nixon’s infamous abuses of power. George H.W. Bush’s right-hand man, John Sununu, was known to be a terrible manager and a terrible boss, while Don Regan, who served in the Reagan administration, handled the disastrous Iran-Contra scandal badly and alienated the very powerful Nancy Reagan, which in the end proved to be fatal to his employment in the West Wing. 

According to Whipple, the consensus is that Howard Baker, Reagan’s final chief of staff, and Dick Cheney, who served Gerald Ford, were considered competent, but the “gold standard” is James Baker, Reagan’s first chief, and Leon Panetta, who brought much-needed organization and discipline to the chaotic early days of Bill Clinton’s presidency. 

Susie Wiles, Trump’s current chief of staff, won’t be included in that pantheon, even though the president’s second term is a very different operation than the first. Following his loss to Joe Biden in 2020, Trump and his inner circle spent their four years in the wilderness figuring out what they wanted to do if they got back into power and devised a strategy to get it done. According to New York Times journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, authors of the book “Regime Change,” the massive leaks that characterized the first term have given way to a tightly controlled administration run by a group of devoted loyalists. Their fealty appears to be voluntary, and Wiles will no doubt be credited with maintaining discipline among the staff far better than those who served in the first Trump White House. But the job is about more than discipline, and on that scale, Wiles is little better than Meadows. 

As the first female chief of staff in history, she does deserve credit for running, along with Chris LaCivita, Trump’s successful 2024 campaign, an operation that, at least for him, was relatively professional and buttoned up. After his win against Vice President Kamala Harris, Wiles was the logical choice to follow him into the White House. She seems to have found the key to managing Trump, which is to not manage him at all. (One imagines his mother reached the same conclusion around the time he reportedly gave his second-grade music teacher a black eye because “he didn’t know anything about music.”) 

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Whipple interviewed Wiles eleven times for a major feature in Vanity Fair, and she was incredibly frank, letting it be known that she didn’t think much of Vice President JD Vance, characterizing him as an opportunist and a “conspiracy theorist.” She also called Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget — and the author of much of Project 2025 — a “right-wing absolute zealot.” But Wiles also revealed that she doesn’t see her job as one in which she tries to help the president sort through all the options and do the hard job of offering her unvarnished advice, even when it’s something Trump doesn’t want to hear.

Wiles denies that she is an enabler, but it’s clear that Vance was right when he told Whipple that she sees her job as a “facilitator,” which simply means that she makes sure the president’s disordered trains of thought run on time. She even more or less admitted it herself when she said that she only has difficult conversations with the boss over “little things.” Wiles revealed that she doesn’t have “these seminal moments where you have to go in and tell the president what he wants to do is unconstitutional or will cost lives. I don’t have that.” 

That pretty much says it all. And one has to question whether Wiles challenges him on the little things either. After all, in addition to a list of cronies and sycophants, Trump appointed her to the board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. If she had any clout, you would think she could have talked him out of his petty obsession of adding his name to a living memorial to a revered, slain president — a disgusting act of desecration. But with Trump, there’s nothing too small on which to fixate and, in any case, this crusade to remake Washington, D.C., in his own image overwhelms all other concerns, including economic crises and war. 

In other words, Susie Wiles has no influence over Trump at all. Just like Mark Meadows, she’s essentially sitting on a couch and scrolling on her phone while the world burns.

The post Susie Wiles is Trump’s chief enabler appeared first on Salon.com.