Nik Cohn’s “Corner Boy: Loiterings New and Old” is alive with mystery, intrigue and revelation. An exquisite anthology of Cohn’s writing from his early days through the present, “Corner Boy” bristles with the electric, contrarian voice of a working cultural critic.
But as Cohn pointed out to me during a recent interview, the notion of being considered a critic has never felt comfortable to him. “I never thought of myself as a critic, really. And certainly not at that time. I saw myself as a pop writer.”
While his work associated with The Beatles, The Who and The Rolling Stones would see him branded as one of the premier rock critics of his day, he vastly preferred pop’s egalitarian “ethos,” admitting, “I didn’t really identify with rock very much. I liked rock ‘n’ roll, in the ’50s.”
But as rock grew and changed as a genre, it became “torturing” to Cohn’s ears, with bands competing in terms of their comparative loudness and audacity. And besides, he says, “I liked singles. I didn’t like albums.” For Cohn, pop, unlike rock, offered “a quick hit,” in contrast to album-oriented fare. When a new single comes out, says Cohn, “you’re walking down the street, you’re driving, and you hear something coming out of a window, out of a basement, and it knocks you out. And it’s over, and for three months, you can’t listen to anything else.”
Conversely, with an album, you take it home, “keep it for 20 years and contemplate its tracks,” says Cohn. “What I wanted was the physical buzz, the immediacy, and that’s a single, that’s a jukebox. It’s this kind of moment of immediacy that exists in a certain space and time. If you go to the jukebox and you play the song, while it’s the recording that we may all know and love, it’s happening to you in that very instant.”
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When Pete Townshend debuted “Tommy” for Cohn in the late ’60s, the rock opera lacked that same sense of immediacy. “Pete starts writing,” Cohn recalls, “and he comes up with his whole concept. He worked in the studio for months, and finally, he wanted to play something to me. And it was very, very serious.” Not mincing words, Cohn told him that “there’s some interesting things here, but there’s no excitement.” And that’s when the idea for “Pinball Wizard” came to the songwriter, who used to play pinball at the local arcade with Cohn and The Who’s producer Kit Lambert. “So he wrote ‘Pinball Wizard,’ which he knew I’d be a sucker for.”
Cohn is perhaps most famously known as the writer behind “Saturday Night Fever,” the film that captured the disco era for a generation. The movie was based on Cohn’s New York Magazine article on the “Tribal Rights of the New Saturday Night.” Back in those days, Cohn recalls, “New York was crumbling, was in terrible shape. And that’s when disco came out as a trickle in Black gay clubs in Harlem, and from there, it came downtown, and then spread to the boroughs.”
Smelling a story, Cohn took a taxi out to Brooklyn’s 2001 Odyssey club. “It was the dead of winter, and there was this 18-year-old, I would say, standing in the doorway, hunched over against the cold.” For Cohn, “something echoed there” in the image of the young man, who reminded him of the young, wayward Englishmen of the 1950s. The next evening, Cohn made the long slog back out to 2001 Odyssey, but the young man had disappeared. “I didn’t find him again. I didn’t find anybody there. So, what to do?” Desperate to capture the feeling he had experienced the night before, “I made it up, really. It was a work of fiction.”
As with his mother, who wrote tall tales during his Northern Irish youth, Cohn resorted to literary imagination and exaggeration to bring the story to life. “It’s just a little magazine story, and not my best work,” says Cohn. “I mean, I knew even then, it wasn’t my best story. It was something that I immediately wanted to take back and do over again.” But in short order, Cohn’s New York Magazine article was adapted into “Saturday Night Fever,” a blockbuster film and one of the bestselling albums of all time.
For Cohn, the entire experience was transfixing. “It was completely discombobulating. It seemed to be unreal for me. It was as if it was happening to somebody else. It was great to have that amount of attention. But at the same time, it wasn’t what I signed up to do when I became a writer, and I kind of lost contact with myself with disastrous consequences.” Those disastrous consequences included a drug bust in the 1980s at the hands of the FBI. Although the charges were later dropped, the whole experience forced Cohn to reconsider his place in the world. “It made me put my foot on the brakes and think, ‘What are you doing with your life here?’” He stopped using and quite literally met his future wife at the jailhouse door.
But as “Corner Boy” so presciently reminds, Cohn has never given up his contrarian voice and his yen for anti-complacency and ferreting out new experiences.
In the run-up to the November election, federal officials have sent conflicting signals about whether law enforcement agents could show up at polling places.
FBI Director Kash Patel declined to rule out deploying FBI agents to voting sites. The Department of Homeland Security has said ICE does not plan to patrol polling places, while leaving open the possibility that agents could respond to threats or serve warrants nearby. The Justice Department, meanwhile, has said it will continue sending federal personnel to polling locations as part of its election-monitoring efforts.
The mixed messages are already shaping preparations around the country: In Wisconsin, election officials are being trained on how to respond if armed federal agents appear at polling places, while in Michigan, the attorney general’s office has prepared agents, state police officials and legal filings to respond quickly to election-related incidents.
The uncertainty has left election officials preparing for scenarios they may never face and voters unsure what federal presence, if any, to expect in November.
A recent University of San Diego poll found that 40% of Americans said they think it’s likely that ICE agents will show up at the polls, and a third said their presence would reduce their trust in elections.
Federal law sharply restricts the deployment of armed federal agents at polling places, and experts say election officials have tools to respond if agents show up in violation of those restrictions.
Federal law prohibits U.S. officials from sending or keeping “troops or armed men at any place where a general or special election is held,” with only narrow exceptions for when those people are voting or if their presence is necessary “to repel armed enemies of the United States.”
Another federal law prohibits voter intimidation, with up to a yearlong prison sentence for anybody who intimidates, threatens, or coerces somebody else with the purpose of interfering with another person’s right to vote.
“It’s low likelihood, and it’s certainly impossible that any sort of federal presence could be there at every polling site in America,” said Aaron Blacksberg, federal policy counsel at the Institute for Responsive Government. “But without knowing for certain, people are concerned.”
Blacksberg said that voters especially worried about the possibility of federal law enforcement at the polls could vote by mail, drop their ballot at a drop box or or use another alternative voting option available in their jurisdiction.
The prohibition on deploying armed federal personnel to polling places is a criminal statute, said Jonathan Diaz, director of voting advocacy and partnerships for the Campaign Legal Center. “The person who orders the agents or officers to the polls also would face criminal liability for doing that,” he said.
In most jurisdictions, Diaz added, election officials are empowered to remove people from the polls if they’re causing a disruption or violating polling place rules, and they can work with local law enforcement to enforce those rules. If a voter sees federal agents at polling places in a manner that may be illegal, Diaz said, they should alert their local election officials.
Federal agents could also end up near a polling place for reasons unrelated to the election.
That happened in May, when a traffic stop led to a car being pulled over near a polling place, and ICE agents showed up to question the driver. Local law enforcement quickly showed up to tell the federal agents to leave the premises. County officials said voters weren’t questioned and polling places ran normally despite the brief ICE presence nearby.
Courts have confronted voter intimidation before
There’s little precedent for the possibility of federal agents at the polls, but courts have addressed other efforts involving law-enforcement personnel at polling places.
For example, in 1981 the Democratic National Committee took the Republican National Committee to court for allegedly seeking to revoke the registrations of minority voters in New Jersey and enlisting off-duty officers to intimidate voters by standing at the polls in heavily Black and Latino precincts. The Republican Party entered a consent decree that lasted over three decades, heavily restricting its planned election security efforts.
The decree is no longer in effect, but it could be cited in future cases “if something really grotesque were to happen in the area of voter intimidation by people looking like law enforcement” said Lorraine Minnite, a Rutgers University political science professor who served as an expert witness in the case.
She also said voters should feel confident that election officials are prepared to respond to federal interference.
Recent Votebeat reporting illustrates that around the country, top state prosecutors, secretaries of state and local election officials are preparing for scenarios like ICE showing up at the polls and preparing legal filings in advance. Some have rehearsed how to respond if federal agents seek access to polling places, ballots or voting equipment, while others are lining up attorneys and law enforcement who could act quickly.
The prospect of federal agents at polling places is already being litigated.
In September, nine groups filed a federal lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and several other agencies and officials over statements the groups say amount to threats to deploy federal agents to polling places. The groups argue such a deployment would violate federal law, including a section of the Voting Rights Act that bans voter intimidation. They are seeking an injunction blocking federal agents from being used in ways that unlawfully intimidate voters.
The Justice Department, which is named as a defendant in the lawsuit, has rejected its premise, arguing that federal officials have never said they would send law enforcement to polling locations. The Department of Homeland Security has said ICE is not planning operations targeting polling places. The case is still in its preliminary stages.
Local police have a different role at polling places.
Unlike federal law enforcement, local police routinely coordinate with election officials around polling place security.
In many cases, Diaz said, local law enforcement are at the polls at the request of election officials, who have received extensive harassment and threats since the 2020 election. Law enforcement often coordinates with election officials to keep officials and voters safe without their presence intimidating voters, he said.
“It’s far more normal for a county official or a state official from a law enforcement agency to be at or near the polls because usually they’re working with election officials, versus federal law enforcement, who have no role in the election process,” he said.
But even a lawful local police presence “can raise concerns about voter intimidation.”
In August, the Sheboygan County Sheriff’s Department in Wisconsin said they would be sending some deputies to polling locations to ensure a safe and secure election. That drew criticism from the ACLU of Wisconsin and other groups. The sheriff responded that deputies had conducted brief and routine polling place visits for years.
A few days later, legal groups sent the sheriff a letter saying that while local law enforcement can play a helpful role in elections, their presence can intimidate voters — and that intimidation may violate state and federal law.
Even when local law enforcement is working with election officials, officers are subject to the same voter intimidation restrictions as anybody else, Diaz said.
“It’s important for them to behave responsibly and transparently with election officials and with the public to reassure voters that they’ll be able to vote safely,” he said, adding that officers should carefully avoid inadvertently creating an intimidating presence for voters.
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.
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We’ve spent our entire political careers in different camps. One of us was a Democratic governor and chairman of the Democratic National Committee. The other served as a conservative Republican in Congress for over a decade, representing a deep-red district in the Indiana heartland that President Donald Trump won in each of his three presidential elections by over 30 points.
But before we got into politics, we were both physicians in internal medicine and cardiothoracic surgery, respectively. We’ve seen firsthand how crucial it is for the patient-provider relationship to guide and determine the right care. And that’s why we’re so alarmed that nearly half of Americans, according to a recent survey by KFF, the independent health organization, now report that their health insurers have delayed or denied coverage for a doctor-recommended treatment within the past two years.
Corporate insurers should not be at the forefront of patient care. Delays and denials put patients’ health at risk. And they often lead to preventable complications and higher long-term spending.
We both believe reforming the health insurance system is a moral and an economic imperative, as do many of our colleagues on both sides of the aisle. Even in a bitterly divided Congress, we have seen encouraging signs that reform is possible.
In recent months, Democrats and Republicans have worked together to hold insurers accountable — especially when it comes to “prior authorization,” the notorious and widely despised insurer practice of denying certain procedures and treatments unless doctors and patients first obtain permission. In a recent American Medical Association survey, 95% of physicians said they’ve seen prior authorization requirements delay necessary care. Nearly four in five have witnessed patients abandon treatment because of problems with the process.
Leaders in both parties already agree that improvements to the American insurance model are necessary. The bipartisan Improving Seniors’ Timely Access to Care Act would move Medicare Advantage prior authorizations to an electronic system and require quicker response times and greater transparency from insurers. Significantly, over 300 House members and 70 senators have cosponsored the legislation. This summer, it cleared two House committees unanimously.
Lawmakers are also finding common ground on transparency. In July the House Energy and Commerce Committee advanced a bipartisan bill that would require health insurers to publicly report how often they deny claims.
That scrutiny is overdue. Medicare Advantage insurers denied more than four million prior authorization requests in 2024.
When patients and their doctors appealed those denials, insurance companies reversed roughly 80% of their initial decisions. That high reversal rate suggests insurers are denying lots of medically appropriate procedures, tests and treatments — and hoping that doctors and patients will be too busy, sick and frustrated to follow through with an appeal.
That’s often a safe, albeit callous, bet. For too many Americans, fighting insurance companies can feel like a battle they cannot win. It often requires tremendous mental and emotional fortitude at a time when they are simply trying to get well. That is why Congress must take on that fight for them. Families already pay extraordinary sums for health coverage — by some measures, the monthly cost of employer-sponsored family health coverage now rivals the typical monthly mortgage payment. And still, these families face denials, delays and difficulty accessing the care and medicines they need.
As physicians, we know that time matters when someone is sick. As a Democrat and a Republican, we also recognize how rare genuine consensus is in Washington. That’s why we’re cautiously hopeful that after the midterms, Congress will seize the opportunity to make prior authorization and broader insurance marketplace reforms a priority.
The conservative media behemoth is celebrating 30 years on the air this week. I have been a loyal, daily viewer for about half that run. I remember the inaugural episodes of “The Five” and “Outnumbered.” Before Marc Lamont Hill was helping elevate the conversation on one of the country’s biggest podcasts, I watched him school Bill O’Reilly as a Fox contributor and Temple University professor. And who can forget Alan Colmes, forever assigned the role of hapless Democrat?
For years, I believed there was no particularly good reason for a serious progressive to go on Fox News. The network touts its “fair and balanced” tagline, but it is not a neutral venue and it does not deserve to be treated like one. Its business model is grievance. A Democrat on Fox is a prop. The network invites them into the studio so its audience can watch them lose. Why submit to the bad faith interruptions and the inevitable social media clip engineered to make the left look elitist or insane?
Dr. Abdul El-Sayed has made me reconsider that.
El-Sayed is not merely surviving Fox News hits. He is dominating them, and the hosts know it — and Donald Trump definitely knows it.
The Michigan Democratic Senate candidate has emerged as an anomalous fixture on the conservative network, dominating segments with a cool composure that leaves hosts alternating between hostility and reluctant infatuation. El-Sayed is not merely surviving Fox News hits. He is dominating them, and the hosts know it — and Donald Trump definitely knows it.
The president raged on social media about El-Sayed’s Monday appearance on “The Story with Martha MacCallum” that Fox News spends more time covering “Democrat jihadists” than they do GOP candidates. Trump’s temper tantrums highlight a fundamental structural weakness in contemporary conservatism: Right-wing ideology is inherently hierarchical, predicated on the worship of strength and dominance. When El-Sayed goes onto Fox and refuses to shrink, when he looks a host in the eye and dismantles talking points with data and empathy, it scrambles the entire authoritarian matrix.
The psychological fallout among the network’s talking heads has been equally telling. Jesse Watters, a stalwart of the network’s macho posturing, has spent weeks gushing over El-Sayed with an almost comical bewilderment. After the Democratic candidate casually skewered his Republican opponent Mike Rogers as a “beta” on air — eliciting an involuntary chuckle from Watters — the Fox host found himself helplessly admitting that he liked the progressive Democrat despite himself.
This is a model for the left — and there is a lineage here.
Democrats on Fox News used to be cast in a narrow role: the tame liberal who could be invited on to lose politely. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., was one of the first politicians on the left who seriously engaged with the network’s audience. He appeared on Fox during his 2016 presidential run and talked directly about wages, healthcare and corporate power. Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s 2020 presidential campaign proved a Democrat can leave the network Roger Ailes built with their own viral moments. He routinely met a hostile premise with calm facts, a sharp answer and a smile that made the host’s irritation look frivolous.
El-Sayed is the next stage of that evolution. He adds something that many national Democrats still lack: an understanding that a media hit is not a policy seminar. It is about making the audience see who is in command. El-Sayed has figured out how to talk to the people who love Fox without pretending that the network is something it isn’t.
He refused to let Fox’s presenters dictate the terms of the conversation. In August, El-Sayed sat for a 25-minute one-on-one with Watters, who confronted him with the inventory of right-wing obsessions: Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Trump’s war with Iran, transgender athletes and his Muslim faith. Watters wanted to compress El-Sayed into a caricature, a radical leftist Muslim candidate who could be made alien and threatening to the people watching at home.
El-Sayed did not take the bait. When Watters pressed him about abolishing ICE, he did not surrender the moral argument or get stuck in a defensive loop. He pointed out that the U.S. enforced immigration law before ICE’s creation and that the agency’s existence has not solved the problem Watters claimed to care about.
“We were able to enforce our immigration policies without shooting people in the face and the back of the head,” El-Sayed said, while dodging several of the culture war questions and steering the interview back to healthcare and affordability. When Watters raised surgery for minors in the crudest possible terms, El-Sayed answered by asking whether the host was circumcised. Right-wing influencers howled that it was a nightmare. The clip went viral anyway.
El-Sayed’s appearance on Monday with MacCallum was masterful policy communication. The host pressed the candidate on terrorism, the Iran war, Medicare for All and campaign financing, and the two talked over each other at points because El-Sayed kept answering the question behind the question.
On terrorism, he was unequivocal that the victim is never at fault. Then, he pivoted: “Why are we fighting this war, to what end? Who benefits from it? Why did we do this? What are we paying for it?”
When MacCollum played a clip of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani defining socialism as everyone having what they need to live a dignified life, and then asked if that disturbed El-Sayed as a capitalist, he dismantled the frame in seconds. “Well, Martha, I assume you went to good public schools.”
Yes.
“And you got to drive on good roads today.”
Pretty much.
“And when you put your garbage out, somebody comes and picks it up.”
Yes.
El-Sayed embodied the most devastating move in American politics: When someone tries to explain socialism to you, explain the socialist parts of the life they already love. MacCallum pressed him on campaign finance and high-profile donors, and El-Sayed did not stutter or retreat. He pivoted to the fundamental reality that ordinary people across the political spectrum despise: the corrupting influence of corporate money in politics.
This connects directly to a deeper truth about the American electorate that corporate-backed consultants consistently fail to grasp. And there is evidence it is landing. In a recent New York Times/Siena poll, El-Sayed outperformed other swing-state Democratic Senate candidates in capturing a vital sliver of 2024 Trump voters, securing 8% compared to paltry single digits elsewhere.
This is not because those voters have suddenly embraced intersectional environmentalism or Medicare for All in its entirety; it is because working-class Americans are profoundly alienated by corporate malfeasance, stagnant wages and the hollow promises of career politicians. When a candidate like El-Sayed — just like Sanders and Buttigieg before him — speaks directly to economic class struggles without patronizing rhetoric, a significant percentage of non-ideological working-class viewers listen. And they recognize the fundamental truth in the critique.
The left does not need to pretend that Fox News has suddenly become fair. It has not. One candidate’s successful appearance does not redeem a network that has fueled racism, conspiracy theories, anti-immigrant panic and the authoritarian politics that brought Trump to power.
But refusing to appear on Fox News is no longer a tenable position if it merely concedes millions of viewers to an information ecosystem with no meaningful counterargument that can reach them.
If you stayed up late on Sunday nights to watch MTV’s “120 Minutes,” if you made sure your VCR was correctly set up to record IRS Records’ magazine show “The Cutting Edge,” if your record collection is mostly vinyl because that was the superior format of the three that were available at the time and not because “you’re really into vinyl,” you are probably aware that actor Michael Shannon and guitarist Jason Narducy have been leading a project where they tour the country playing the songs of R.E.M., the former leaders of the original alternative nation. It began with a one-off playing “Murmur,” and they recently finished touring “Lifes Rich Pageant” and came through Detroit at the end of September.
The musicians in front of you are not the humans who originated the music, and that matters because the energy is not the same . . . That might have been part of my personal resistance, that my relationship with the material was based on the people who wrote it, and I’m not big on nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake.
There is no way this story isn’t personal; no telling that can leave out my specific interest in this body of work. I saw R.E.M. for the first time the night I graduated high school in 1981, when I took myself and my fake ID to a club in Mt. Vernon, NY, to see the Gang of Four. Someone standing near me asked who was opening: “R.E.M. They’re from Georgia.” I knew who they were; I’d heard the single on WNYU, maybe for once the opening band wouldn’t suck. They didn’t. In my 20s, I ran up and down the Eastern Seaboard in order to see as many R.E.M. shows as I possibly could. I published one of the first R.E.M. fanzines, sitting at my kitchen table in my third-floor Hoboken tenement walkup with an X-Acto knife and a glue stick. I later ended up posted at a Warner Brothers office overseas where I got to work on the beginning of that era of albums.
And yet I found myself strangely apathetic and at times resistant to participating in any of the hoopla around the Shannon/Narducy ensemble. Every time someone tried to sell me on how great it was, all I thought was some version of: I saw R.E.M., I saw the actual band. Yes, I knew very well that the actual band had given their ringing endorsement to this effort. This was not about that. I wasn’t sure what the reluctance was, but then they announced a Detroit date, and I no longer had the excuse that I wasn’t going to travel to see this.
“Lifes Rich Pageant” opens with “Begin the Begin.” If I were a baseball player, I’d think about using the intro to that song as my walkup music. It’s so immediately distinctive: 0 to 60 in five seconds, instant energy, a handful of guitar notes before all of the instruments rev up. There’s gritty distortion and glorious feedback, and if you, as an audience member witnessing this performance, weren’t sure how this was all going to land in your body 40 years later, those 10 seconds will completely reassure you that you have nothing to worry about. You don’t have to think about it; your subconscious will reconnect those severed wires immediately. Or it’s less severed than simply dormant, temporarily out of use. You react the way you always reacted. It is involuntary.
There was a point in my life where I listened to the entirety of the R.E.M. catalog constantly, when there was always a tape of a live show in my Walkman, when the intro to “Underneath the Bunker” was my outgoing answering machine message. It was the era when you brought the album home and immediately recorded it onto both sides of a Maxell XL-II 90 so that when you got to the end of the album you could just flip the tape and immediately start again and not have to wait to rewind.
I did that with “Lifes Rich Pageant” and remember falling asleep as “Hyena” faded out only to bolt upright the minute I heard Michael Stipe chanting, “I’m so young/I’m so goddamn young,” and it felt like he was standing there hitting a giant gong in my tiny bedroom that had room for a bed and a small shelf for my stereo. Of course that reference is from the B-side of Patti Smith’s “Gloria” 45, the live cover of “My Generation” recorded in Cleveland in 1976, waving the standard of, “WE CREATED IT; LET’S TAKE IT OVER.” We already knew what side R.E.M. were on in the Punk Rock Wars, and we also knew that “Hyena” existed long before we arrived at “Lifes Rich Pageant” because it had been a setlist stalwart since “Reckoning.”
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See? We are still working through the first side of the record, and the memories are an avalanche at this point. But the musicians in front of you are not the humans who originated the music, and that matters because the energy is not the same. Which means you have to find your emotional connection, and that’s likely going to generate from whatever synapses are firing up in the memory bank. That might have been part of my personal resistance, that my relationship with the material was based on the people who wrote it, and I’m not big on nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake.
I never pined for a R.E.M. reunion the way I might have (for example) wished for the chance to see The Clash just one more time. I don’t understand people who don’t care if Bruce Springsteen never releases another new record as long as he keeps touring. I saw a handful of those Replacements reunion shows in 2015, but I remember towards the end of that run thinking that unless there was going to be new music, I didn’t need to see any more. But I also know that I might be a little bit of an originalist in this regard.
Shannon and Narducy have built these outings around the R.E.M. catalog, with each tour centering on an album which is performed in full, from start to finish. That’s a tricky decision to make, because the criteria for impactful album sequencing are not at all the same for a live show. (It’s easier for one-offs, but it’s much harder if you’ve committed to doing it night after night.) “Lifes Rich Pageant” is from 1986, so musicians were still thinking about sequencing their records to have two sides, and there’s a “Dinner” and a “Supper” side of this record — which Michael Shannon will make reference to later in the evening, the kind of reference I’d remember in 1986 but definitely did not recall in 2026.
When I came home and pulled the record out and realized what he was referring to, I gave myself a break for not remembering it because I have not been consulting the texts as recently as Shannon (and if you read any of the interviews he has given on this subject, it is very much that for him). That is the level of dedication to this project, which becomes obvious once the ensemble activates their full powers. Because getting up there to simply execute the songs competently would not have been sufficient for this effort, nor would it have attracted the (admittedly deserved) enthusiasm that it has.
Shannon and Narducy have built these outings around the R.E.M. catalog, with each tour centering on an album which is performed in full, from start to finish. That’s a tricky decision to make, because the criteria for impactful album sequencing are not at all the same for a live show.
“These Days” comes next in the track listing, with the beautiful lyric: We are young despite the years/ we are old despite the times. I think Jason Narducy did half a leap or at least a leg kick in the place that Peter Buck would have been kicking his impossibly lengthy daddy long legs (and credit where credit is due, every once in a while second guitarist/Rickenbacker wielder Dag Juhlin did as well). When you go see a band often enough, you know where to look and when to watch, and then the trick is to unlock the next level.
Next level for R.E.M. is trying to sing the Mike Mills harmonies, and it’s not surprising that Narducy, the man who is the definition of an alt-rock journeyman, is spot on. I don’t know what words he is singing, but the notes are correct, and the color is right, and that’s what matters here. There is a certain amount of impressionism that is going on. There’s a certain amount of willing suspension of disbelief to an extent; you can’t be going to see these shows if you are going to be a trainspotter. Or you can, but you’ll miss the point. Of particular note was his amazing imitation of Patti Smith’s vocal part in “E-bow The Letter,” later in the set. It wasn’t identical, but it was still absolutely perfect.
On “Hyena,” again, Narducy has to play guitar and sing the bass player’s vocal harmony, which isn’t a harmony so much as a counterpoint; it is meant as a third dimension, and that is much harder to execute than simple harmony. Also important on “Hyena” is how the rhythm section interacts. I have watched Jon Wurster behind the drums for many, many musical acts, and there is a reason he is in demand: he is very technically accomplished and is some kind of chameleon because he’s never imposing; that’s not often what he’s been hired for, but he isn’t some kind of bland, soulless session dude.
Which absolutely matters in the case of R.E.M. because Bill Berry was an underrated element (and a great songwriter). He was always solid and effortlessly executed these perfect yet almost imperceptibly complex rhythms while also singing harmony vocals. Wurster does not have to sing, but he has to do the rest, and he never ever missed: specifically, I watched as he intricately kept time on “Pilgrimage” later in the set, a song full of beats off the syncopation of the rest of the band, and I knew he’d pull it off, but it was a delight to witness.
The bass is covered by Wilco’s John Stirratt, and while Stirratt doesn’t have to also handle Mills’ vocals, he’s not getting off easy. The melody lines of the bass in R.E.M. songs are singularly melodic and distinctive, with a fluidity that makes them seem simple when they are not. It’s not a traditional rhythm section, but if anything were out of alignment, it would throw the entire entity out of order. You’re still having to learn a vast repertoire of another band and accommodate your style as a working professional and acclaimed musician of many years into someone else’s.
“Let’s put our heads together and start a new country up,” Michael Shannon steps out of character briefly to offer additional emphasis to that key line of “Cuyahoga,” but it’s also not exactly inaccurate — It’s a perfectly Stipean ad-lib. At some point when this project was afoot, someone was trying to sell me on it by telling me that “Michael Shannon is a very good Michael Stipe imitator” — which made me recoil in horror because that is the absolute last thing I would ever want to see, and also not at all what is happening.
What Michael Shannon is very good at is acting, and that doesn’t mean that his performance is about artifice or that it’s inauthentic; it just means this project is decidedly not trying to be a cover band; they’re not performing “Lifes Rich Pageant” like a “Rocky Horror” shadowcast. The band is staying true to the songs as they were written and performed without being exactly matchy-matchy on the things that don’t matter but being very certain to land the moments that do. And that’s what will resonate with you if you are an OG. There was a wave of excitement in the crowd when Michael Shannon picked up a bullhorn, one of Stipe’s favored devices. It’s hard to use a bullhorn in rock ‘n’ roll without looking stupid or overly dramatic, and it’s another testimony to Shannon’s presentation that you just nodded: of course there would be a bullhorn.
At some point when this project was afoot, someone was trying to sell me on it by telling me that “Michael Shannon is a very good Michael Stipe imitator” — which made me recoil in horror because that is the absolute last thing I would ever want to see, and also not at all what is happening.
Album sequencing versus live sequencing: “Underneath the Bunker” works to close one side of an album, just like “Flowers of Guatemala” works to open side two, but those songs back to back is a little challenging energetically. Live, R.E.M. used to follow “Guatemala” with its next song, “I Believe,” and that still works a treat: “I believe in coyotes/and time as an abstract,” as the song goes, and it is a certain kind of amazing that this information still resides so robustly within my personal memory banks. Also, let’s shout out the perfect banjo intro courtesy of keyboard player Vijay Tellis-Nayak. It’s the kind of moment where everyone in the room knows what’s next and everyone is eagerly awaiting for the action to commence.
When the band finished with the album, I realized that because I had not paid attention, I had no idea what was next. I can’t guess because it’s not based on known data such as decisions the band had made about what they were and were not interested in playing this tour. This group of musicians could do whatever they wanted to and that’s exactly what they did, veering all around the catalog like a Tilt-A-Whirl. The latter-day “Lotus” went into “Chronic Town’s” “Gardening At Night.” “Harborcoat,” from the sophomore album, segued into “How the West Was Won” from a later era. Shannon made a comment about how the songs were grouped together thematically — plants and flowers and I forget the third element, which struck me as a thoroughly R.E.M. way of doing things.
“Burning Down” (which Shannon correctly attributed to the 1987 outtakes record “Dead Letter Office”) was in the mix, and I wrote “when did they ever DO this” in my notes and after checking, the truth is, not very often. I never saw the song performed live, but everyone knew about it because R.E.M. played it at a 1984 show in Seattle that was recorded for a syndicated radio show called “The Source.” If you didn’t tape a copy off of your local FM station, it wasn’t hard to find somebody that did, and it became one of the first commercial R.E.M. bootlegs.
There was a wave of excitement in the crowd when Michael Shannon picked up a bullhorn, one of Stipe’s favored devices. It’s hard to use a bullhorn in rock ‘n’ roll without looking stupid or overly dramatic, and it’s another testimony to Shannon’s presentation that you just nodded: of course there would be a bullhorn.
That’s a perspective I hadn’t considered, that they’d play songs that many people had never seen performed live. There was a palpable wave of holy sh*t, a sharp collective intake of breath, when “Fretless” began. (I told a friend, “I think I stopped breathing.”) The song was on that stellar example of movie soundtrack sequencing, Wim Wenders’ “Until the End of the World.” It remains one of R.E.M.’s strongest compositions, an entire sonic landscape that morphs instantly into a whole other world. That means it’s an ambitious choice. I did not stop to think, “This is one of my favorite songs and I’ve never heard them do it so please don’t fu*k it up.” They gave us reason to trust them almost instantly.
The one element that seemed slightly off was that Stipe’s vocals have both power and fragility, and towards the end of the set, some of the delicate touches weren’t as sharp; Shannon would apologize during bows, explaining that he was getting over an illness, and that would certainly explain it. But this is also the one critical note I could find. The one.
This outing is, clearly, an homage, but by the end I have concluded that it is simply an art project, which is a fully legitimate reason to do something. No one on the stage is hurting for work; they’re doing this for the joy of it, and probably because it’s a challenge. These are not easy songs to play, nor are R.E.M. songs any kind of simple noise to generate. I think about that aspect later in the evening during “Star 69,” which from the outside seems like a simple rock ‘n’ roll song, very loud guitar matched by breathless, insistent loud vocals. But!
The breakneck pace of the guitar chords is measured and deliberate; the drums are measured, consistent; as usual, the bassline is its own melodic counterpoint. This song was on “Monster.” This wasn’t something they just fell into. Listen to how the band signifies the second verse, how there are separate, neat, clean guitar riffs coming off of the chorus, featuring the accusation: I KNOW YOU CALLED / STAR 69 / gorgeous naked guitar solo continues riffing. And let’s not forget how, in this particular song, what’s happening is that Mills is singing the same lines as Stipe, just a beat or two slower; it’s not an echo, it’s dissonance. And Shannon and Narducy et. al. manifest all of this onstage.
If you’ve never seen R.E.M., I can’t tell you what it will feel like if you decide to go see next year’s recently-announced “Document” outing. But you do have to see the show to understand why this outing is so strongly favored. I believe it is because it is true and earnest and respectful, but it is also hella fun. R.E.M. always had a sense of humor that felt like it got forgotten or overlooked once they were playing stadiums. There is precision here, but there is also abundant joy. And joy is a thing all of us could use right now.
There are certain sensations you don’t realize belong to an era until they’re gone: the modem’s electronic shriek as it connected to the internet, the satisfying clack of a landline receiver, the little metallic weight of an arcade token in your palm. Lately, I’ve been wondering if the basket of free chips and salsa — dropped almost ceremonially onto the table before anyone has ordered a thing — might eventually join them.
At El Nopal, a regional Mexican chain my family has frequented for years, the opening minutes of dinner follow a familiar choreography. We slide into a pleather booth beneath burnt-orange walls and televisions playing Spanish-language fútbol. Half the table orders Diet Coke, the other water with lemon; someone requests a skillet of molten white queso. Then come the chips: hot, sturdy, generously salted, piled into black woven baskets alongside ramekins of fire-engine-red mild salsa and a darker, spicier version flecked with onion and jalapeño.
For our family of six, there are always two baskets, dividing the table into loose territories. Those seated in the middle are expected to choose a side; reaching from both feels vaguely lawless. Everyone has a salsa ritual. Mine is two-thirds spicy, one-third mild. My sister mixes the mild with queso until it turns a muted pink. One of my brothers splashes vinegary house hot sauce into the spicy. Soon the menus are stacked, the pebbled Coke cups are sweating rings onto the table and somebody is pointing with a chip while saying, “No, no, tell her the part about —”
The Trump administration has made that little ritual more expensive to maintain.
In July 2025, the administration withdrew from a long-standing agreement governing fresh tomatoes imported from Mexico and imposed a 17.09% antidumping duty on most of them. The Commerce Department said the move was intended to counter Mexican tomatoes being sold in the United States at unfair prices and protect domestic growers.
Then the weather got bad.
Poor conditions in Mexico and Florida further reduced supplies, and tomato prices climbed to their highest level in roughly two decades. Dante Galeazzi, president of the Texas International Produce Association, told Houston Public Media that at one point the fresh tomato market had jumped to about $80 a box. Grocery stores began backing away from tomatoes earlier in the year; restaurants, he said, held on longer.
There is only so much a restaurant can absorb.
“The challenge is for our Texas restaurants, they operate on very narrow profit margins in what I would call good economic times,” Kelsey Erickson Streufert, chief public affairs officer for the Texas Restaurant Association, told the publication.
These are not, she continued, particularly good economic times for running a restaurant. Food is more expensive, but so are labor, utilities, insurance and credit card swipe fees — virtually everything required to keep the doors open. Eventually, the arithmetic gets down to the ramekin.
“You have restaurants that are simply saying, ‘Look, I can’t afford to put salsa on the tables anymore,’” Galeazzi said. “What are consumers going to do? Where are consumers going to find this relief?”
The tragedy of a $4 basket of chips is obviously not the $4. It is the moment someone at the table inevitably says, “Eh, do we need these today?” Sometimes the answer will be yes. Some days undoubtedly call for acid, salt and crunch. On other days, maybe you skip them. You wait patiently for the entrées. The stories still get told. Someone finds a plastic straw to point with instead.
That small decision — chips or no chips — moves the diner almost imperceptibly from guest to customer. The thing that once arrived as part of the welcome now joins the same mental ledger as everything else: Drinks? An appetizer? Queso? Dessert? Do we need it? Is it worth it? Should we just save the money?
People sometimes joke online about whether you grew up in an “appetizers and drinks” family or an “entrées and water” family. It is a joke, mostly, about the invisible financial rules children learn at restaurants: what counts as normal, what counts as a treat and what you know better than to ask for.
Part of the appeal of the neighborhood Americanized Mexican restaurant has long been that it offers a particularly accessible kind of abundance. You can order an inexpensive combination plate and a soda, or water with a squeeze of lime, eat something hot and filling and deeply flavorful, and be out the door in 45 minutes without anybody making you feel strange about any of it.
And while you wait, you get the same chips as the table ordering margaritas.
Free chips briefly flatten the distinction between the appetizers-and-drinks family and the entrées-and-water family. Everybody gets to start with something.
Of course, restaurants cannot run on symbolism.
The “free” things on the table have never actually been free to them. Somebody bought the tomatoes. Somebody fried the chips. Somebody washed the ramekins and refilled the baskets. Hospitality has always had scaffolding beneath it; ideally, the guest simply doesn’t spend much time looking at it.
Lately, that scaffolding has become harder for restaurants to hide.
One of my favorite Chicago breakfast spots recently changed the way it serves Texas toast. Two slices had been the default for years. Now the waiter asks: Do you actually want two, or would one be enough? They were happy to bring two, he explained. But a lot of second slices were coming back uneaten, and they simply couldn’t afford to keep throwing them away. It is difficult to begrudge a restaurant that calculation. In fact, the question struck me as a rather thoughtful solution: Have as much toast as you want. Just tell us you want it first.
But it also made visible, for a moment, the financial scaffolding behind the plate.
That is what interests me about the chips and salsa, too. Not that restaurant owners are becoming less generous, but that the economic forces pressing on them increasingly require them to show their work.
Trade policy tends to arrive in public dressed in abstraction: percentages, agreements, investigations, duties, markets. Then someone opens an invoice. A tomato costs more. A batch of salsa costs more. The complimentary appetizer that was once cheap enough to disappear into the cost of doing business becomes expensive enough to notice. Eventually, somebody has to decide whether hospitality can continue to absorb it.
And then, one night, a server has to ask if you would like to add chips.
This is a mundane outcome of economic policy — almost comically so. No one’s dinner is destroyed. No one sits staring mournfully at the bare lacquered table. There is simply a small patch of negative space where something automatic used to happen.
But small gestures are often where hospitality lives.
The loss of free chips and salsa isn’t really about chips and salsa. It is about what happens when policy decisions force restaurants to make the scaffolding of their hospitality more visible — when a gesture designed to make guests forget about the transaction becomes part of the transaction itself. At El Nopal, when the baskets arrive, nobody asks who is paying for this round. Nobody pauses to determine whether everyone wants enough chips to justify them. Nobody calculates how hungry they are with their entrée still twenty minutes away.
Someone tells a story. Someone interrupts to improve the punchline. Someone else points across the table with a tortilla chip. And everyone reaches into the basket without asking.
Do me a favor: Picture Charles Bronson. Black moptop over a face lined like a well-traveled map, and a jacket with the collar turned up against the perennial winter of cinematic 1970s New York City. His hand’s in the coat pocket, resting on the only argument anyone he encounters will listen to. He turns to the camera and gives a rapid-fire lecture on the declining birth rates of white Americans and the need to read classical philosophers and reject post-modern thought.
Ridiculous, right? Bronson’s aggrieved architect in the classic “Death Wish” films didn’t have a guiding philosophy. All he had was a gun and the bad luck to run into nearly every petty criminal on the island of Manhattan, and he sure wasn’t trying to convince the audience of the correctness of his conservative worldview. He wasn’t a debate club member. He was a hammer meeting a nail, traveling to the run down parts of towns all over America to shore things up — to entertain rather than win over audiences. If moviegoers came away thinking that cities were hellholes full of criminals who need to be tried by 12 or carried by six, so much the better.
It’s a lesson that the team of writers, directors and producers at The Daily Wire failed to learn. The film studio arm of the conservative commentary empire created in 2015 by Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boreing, who left the company in 2025, is pushing out films that double as lectures on how America went wrong by going woke. The latest offering, a campus action film titled “Run Hide Fight: Infidels,” delivers on the hectoring and little else.
From its first original film in 2016, the studio made clear its political orientation — and intentions. “Shut In” features a protagonist, who was a recovering addict and single mother, fighting off a home invasion from a crazed pedophile, and it heavily implies that her former drug use is to blame for the current trouble. She escapes her fate by forcing her ex-boyfriend to overdose and lives happily ever after as an apple-butter-making tradwife. The Daily Wire kept the hits coming in 2020 by making director-writer Kyle Rankin’s “Run Hide Fight,” a paper-thin good-guy-with-a-gun parable that follows a 17-year-old girl whose school is under attack from a squadron of active shooters. (The title comes from a common safety protocol for everyday citizens who find themselves being shot at.) Two years later, Daily Wire commentator Matt Walsh fronted “What Is a Woman?”, a street harassment documentary centered on attacking non-traditional gender identities and transgender issues.
“Infidels,” though, sees the studio outdoing itself in centering reactionary politics. Starring disgraced Marvel star Jonathan Majors, the film takes the school-shooting premise and injects it into the campus culture wars. Under the guise of pro-Palestinian protests, terrorists take over a small liberal arts college, and a group of college students, with the help of Majors’ “protect Western civilization”-spouting veteran, fight to take back their campus.
“Infidels” spouts arguments familiar to any Daily Wire watcher at a blistering pace. College students are either misinformed about the reality of Israel’s war on Gaza, or they are completely oblivious to it.
“Infidels” spouts arguments familiar to any Daily Wire watcher at a blistering pace. College students are either misinformed about the reality of Israel’s war on Gaza, or they are completely oblivious to it. The campus protest organizer, a literal blue-haired college student in a keffiyeh, is unwittingly working for a splinter cell of murderous terrorists. In contrast to the actual police crackdown on campus protests across the country, the college’s trustees and president sit on their hands for fear of causing offense. The town’s mayor refuses to call in the SWAT team because of bad optics. Graffiti primes right-wing watchers to fume with a laundry list of leftist slogans. Land acknowledgements statements, agnosticism, the utility of college education and mixed-race families in commercials all get a moment in the over-stuffed script by Kyle Rankin.
If hearing the arguments of Shapiro, who acts as a producer, in the mouths of supposed twentysomethings doesn’t give the game away, the baffling characterizations in the film do. The students’ tastes veer almost embarrassingly close to those of suburban middle-aged men. They drink (unaged) whiskey that one student distills in his dorm room while listening to ‘90s butt-rockers Seven Mary Three. One character is introduced swinging a sword in his pajamas while chomping a cigar and quoting Rudyard Kipling. If you have been unfortunate to see a Daily Wire hang session, then you will know that Shapiro and Company aren’t setting up a spate of undergraduate methanol blindness. They genuinely think these kids are cool.
Focusing on the cast of college kids uncovers the core problem of the film. You’re meant to root against villains who, outside of their devotion to a radical strain of Islam, believe everything The Daily Wire’s average opinionator believes. For the logic of this siege thriller to make any sense, you have to want those college kids, who spend the first hour taking over quads and discussing polyamory, to get away unscathed. Rankin clearly doesn’t; he luxuriates in the deaths of the blue-haired activist and her gay right-hand man. The former has her throat slit in a startlingly graphic manner, and the latter is thrown from a roof in a literal interpretation of a common counterargument against LGBTQ+ supporters of Palestine. The shot of the student falling from a roof to his death is drawn out and examined from several gleeful angles.
On the opposite side, the audience is meant to root for Majors’ character, who warns that Islam is coming for “the wombs of our women” and that the U.S. will be undermined by a strict devotion to the rights of citizens. That sword-swinging cigar chomper calls a dying Egyptian dorm neighbor a common ethnic epithet before rushing off to save the day, which in turn serves to highlight a larger issue that The Daily Wire runs into each time they sit down to hammer out a script. When they try to sneak their liberal bogeymen into a film, their debate team muscles kick in. Soon, the film is more “well, actually” than action.
In a vacuum, Bronson’s “Death Wish” vigilante was just as unlikeable. For four films, the actor played a grief-crazed man looking for trouble and shooting anyone who looked at him crossways. But Bronson wasn’t one for speechifying; he never turned to the camera and explained how the big-city carnage was all Jimmy Carter’s fault. He certainly never decided that his late wife, who had been killed by gang members, deserved her fate because of his household’s liberal views at the series’ outset. In the hands of The Daily Wire’s would-be auteurs, the criminals would have spent the opening hour of “Death Wish” hopping subway turnstiles and taking free classes at City University of New York.
The problem of unlikeable heroes is also evident in the leaked script of the studio’s upcoming pro-ICE thriller. With a working title of “Pawn Shop,” the film is set to follow a pair of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents facing down a mob of supposed antifa counterprotestors and members of the gang MS-13 as they attempt to take a suspect into custody. There is even a showdown with a Renee Good stand-in, who is shot by one of the film’s hero agents. From a draft script shared by The Bulwark:
The first shot takes the [sic] Melanie in the neck, below her covid mask. The second in the head, above her covid mask.
The inclusion of the mask might make The Daily Wire’s supposedly small-government audience feel less sympathy for an unarmed woman who was killed. But asking audiences who haven’t already bought into Shapiro’s schtick to root for her killer across the next few hours of action and culture war arguments is a heavy load no Daily Wire film has shown they can lift.
UPDATE: This column has been updated to clarify the departure of Daily Wire co-founder Jeremy Boreing from the company in 2025.
Pete Hegseth is odd. This isn’t just a personal opinion, though there’s no doubt that he gets widely mocked for his carefully cultivated public persona, which is a mix of megachurch preacher, gym rat and Robert Duvall’s napalm-huffing character in “Apocalypse Now.” The fact that the defense secretary is different is simply a statistical reality.
It’s not just that he’s a white evangelical Christian, a group that, according to PRRI, makes up only 13% of the population. Hegseth’s church, the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, is extreme even for the right, with a leader who argues against women’s suffrage and teaches that slavery was the height of “mutual intimacy and harmony” between the races. Even within MAGA, those remain fringe positions, despite great efforts by some Christian nationalists to reignite “debate” on such long-resolved issues.
All this means it’s hard not to laugh when Hegseth pontificates about his hatred of “weirdos.” Although he has a war to fight in Iran, somehow he finds time to focus his attention on what he clearly sees as the greater battle: remaking the military according to the demands of his very white, very male, very right-wing vision.
“No fatties, no t******s, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals,” Hegseth said during a Sept. 30 speech at the U.S. Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia. He didn’t explicitly say “no women,” but his kicker — “with testosterone testing on top” — made the implication plain. The “no beardos” demand may seem strange, but as Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times explained, it’s coded racism. Hegseth ended medical exemptions that allowed beards for people, mostly Black men, with certain skin conditions. This may explain why he has no problem when white men have beards, as seen on his church leader, Doug Wilson, or the many celebrities the defense secretary likes to take photos with. (Hegseth himself sported a beard in 2018.)
“Wimps,” “radicals” and “weirdos” are more ambiguous pejoratives, but Hegseth’s recent actions suggest his definitions are expansive enough to cover the vast majority of Americans. He’s been on a firing spree, demanding a 20% cut of the Pentagon’s top brass in an apparent effort to expunge those he deems “woke.” The move comes after nearly two years of blocking promotions for and pushing out Black and female military leaders. Hegseth also rewrote the list of religions recognized by the Pentagon, narrowing from over 200 faith categorizations to a mere 31 — 22 of which are Christian. He claims this is to simplify the bureaucracy, but his motives are likely more disturbing: to stigmatize non-Christians and restrict the definition of “Christian.” The Air Force is already forcing service members to register their religious beliefs under the truncated list, drawing criticism from atheists and others whose belief systems are not included as options.
Last week, Hegseth upped the ante by announcing the formation of the Office of Religious Affairs “to strengthen the moral, ethical and spiritual readiness of our warfighters.” Despite boilerplate claims that this action will not “compel religious participation” or “diminish the free exercise rights” of service members, both the policies and pomp surrounding the announcement made it clear that the goal is to promote Hegseth’s version of Christianity — and shame anyone who does not adhere to it. The office will be run by the defense secretary himself and, in ominous language, promises to fund “research, technology, and analytical tools to support and assess spiritual fitness,” which sounds like a data-gathering operation to ensure troops meet Hegseth’s esoteric views on proper religious practice.
“Our department is, you might say, putting on the full armor of God,” Hegseth said in his announcement, using language from the Book of Ephesians that will be sure to resonate with Christian evangelicals.
Taken together, this purge helps clarify what Hegseth means when he’s talking about “weirdos” and “wimps,” as well as other slurs like “t******s.” He’s hostile to women, the LGBTQ+ community, people of color and anyone who doesn’t adhere to his vision of conservative Christianity — although it’s worth noting that with his message of peace and love, Jesus Christ himself would not be accepted by Hegseth as a Christian.
The secretary may have gone to Princeton University, but he hasn’t yet grasped the concept of irony. The people he deems “weirdos” far outnumber those in his narrow category, presumably of non-weirdos, many times over.
Hegseth has tried to justify his position and rhetoric by arguing that a proper military should only contain “the real 1%” of supposedly superior people. But as Eliot Cohen of The Atlantic notes, this claim is ignorant of history. You need large numbers to win wars, which inherently means that armies can’t be elitist institutions.
Hegseth has a real math problem on his hands. His “real 1%” of alleged non-weirdos is just not enough people to staff a modern military, especially in times of war. His solution appears to be to hit the road, trying to recruit more mini-Hegseths to enlist. On Sept. 19 he embarked on the Send Me Tour in an effort to reach out to people in white evangelical-heavy parts of the country with a Bible-heavy pitch about how Jesus wants them to fight for their country. Both the tour’s name and the secretary’s stump speech rely heavily on Isaiah 6:8; Hegseth equates God’s call to the prophet to be faithful with his own plea for evangelicals to join the military.
In a response video, Sen. Raphael Warnock, the Democrat from Georgia who is also an ordained minister with multiple theology degrees, didn’t mince his words. “Pete Hegseth is busy twisting the scriptures yet again . . . When Isaiah answers that call, it is not a call to go into battle.” Instead, Warnock said, “Isaiah challenges corruption” and “those who would crush the poor.”
Those objectives, of course, are not remotely Hegseth’s. His creation of a hierarchy that places white, straight men at the top and relegates everyone else into an underclass of “weirdos” and “wimps” ignores the Bible’s historical context — and actual meaning. Anyone who doubts that can simply examine his behavior in office and his monomaniacal focus on sorting America’s service members into a worthy-unworthy dichotomy, based solely on how much they adhere to his own self-serving ideals of what a soldier should look like.
Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.
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Sometimes it seems like the 2020 presidential election never ends.
Trying to prove that he actually won that race has been an animating feature of President Donald Trump’s second term, even though audits, investigations, and court cases have all found that he lost to former President Joe Biden.
Trump’s obsession has famously become a litmus test within the Republican Party. But a new analysis shared first with Votebeat suggests that, six years later, the issue may be losing some of its animating power for candidates.
States United Action, a nonpartisan nonprofit that supports state officials in protecting elections, examined the number of people running for statewide office or Congress who backed President Donald Trump’s false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, refused to certify the legitimate results of that election, or attempted to overturn those results. The group categorizes those candidates as “election deniers.”
The group found that the number of such candidates fell by about 30% between 2022 and 2026, dropping from 285 to 197.
The candidates this year on the States United Action list includes contestants for governor in key swing states, attorneys general, U.S. senators, members of the House of Representatives, and, perhaps most importantly, secretaries of state. If they win, it would give them expanded control over the levers of electoral power for what is expected to be a contentious 2028 presidential election.
Right now, according to States United Action, 27 current statewide officeholders on their list have some oversight of elections. This November, 33 candidates for statewide office are on the ballot across the country.
If history is any guide, most of them are likely to lose. Since 2021, according to the group’s analysis, fewer than one in four of such candidates have won a statewide office.
“We know that election denial is a losing campaign strategy and that Americans are tired of hearing the same old lies,” said Joanna Lydgate, CEO of States United Action. But, she added, “the threat they pose to our elections and the rule of law is very real: The candidates who win in 2026 will run our elections in 2028 and serve as a check on Trump’s power in the meantime.”
Such candidates are on the ballot in almost all of the swing states expected to be pivotal to the 2028 presidential race, including Arizona, Nevada, and Wisconsin.
One of the most closely watched races is the one for Arizona secretary of state, where incumbent Democrat Adrian Fontes faces Alexander Kolodin, an attorney who helped bring unsuccessful lawsuits challenging Arizona’s 2020 election results and was later disciplined by the State Bar over election-related litigation.
Kolodin, who did not respond to a request for comment, rejects the “election denier” label. On the campaign trail, he has sought to highlight his work in the Arizona Legislature, noting that several of his election reform bills have passed with bipartisan support, though those largely came out of negotiations around must-pass pieces of legislation.
Meanwhile, Kolodin would not say at a recent debate whether Arizona’s elections were safe and secure.
The persistent attacks on America’s electoral system are starting to take a toll on voter confidence. Recent polls have shown shrinking confidence in the country’s elections. For example, a recent University of California, San Diego survey found that less than half Americans — just 49% — thought the November election would be free and fair.
Thad Kousser, a UC-San Diego political science professor, said that electing election skeptics to office doesn’t necessarily mean that they will throw a wrench into the process.
“The real question is not what people have said about past elections but whether the elections that they run are going to be rooted in reality, informed by the experts in their teams,” he said. “If people come into office and take an open and honest look, that’s going to be very different than if they came in with their mind made up, ignored the evidence and pushed for policies that are not rooted in reality.”
One recent case of that arose in South Dakota, where outgoing Secretary of State Monae Johnson entered office as a skeptic of the electoral office and is leaving as a defender of its integrity. Johnson, a Republican, is endorsing a Democrat to replace her in the fall election after feuding with her party over the issue.
Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.
Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.
At a Monday night rally in Nebraska, President Donald Trump spoke about the Iran war and record-high oil prices, both of which are outraging voters and promise to be deciding factors in the November midterm elections. First the president downplayed the high costs, saying they are “artificial” and “a little bit high.” Then Trump said that by attacking Iran, he was promoting peace.
“It’s a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe,” Trump said to applause. “They can take out a city. Let them take let it let them take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego. That’s this is a very small price to pay and it’s going to be over with very soon. It’s essentially almost over with and they might keep going a little long. You know, they always say they have a big threshold for pain. They need it. Let me tell you.”
The New York Times reported “It was not immediately clear what Mr. Trump meant,” but to others, the message was clearly about inciting violence on an American city. Politicians, especially in California, erupted in outrage, at least on social media. San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria posted on X that “San Diego is not collateral damage … Keep our city out of your reckless war talk.” Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass described Trump’s comments as “dangerous,” posting on X that “In the face of irresponsible threats, as Angelenos, we know how to stand together and protect our city.”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom echoed Bass, posting on X that Trump’s comments could be “treasonous” and claimed he is “directing the State Threat Assessment Center to actively monitor the situation in the event that foreign actors interpret the President’s remarks as an invitation to target California.” All three are Democrats but at least one Republican shared the sentiment that Trump’s speech wasn’t harmless.
“As a Navy veteran, I served to protect Americans, not write off American cities as an acceptable price of war,” Jim Desmond, a Republican congressional nominee in a San Diego metro district, posted on X. “Our job is to keep Americans safe, stand up to our enemies, and make sure a threat like that never becomes reality. No American city is expendable, and no American family should ever be treated as collateral damage.”
But on Tuesday, the White House said this was all just a big misunderstanding and the president actually wants to prevent Tehran from taking out a city. White House Communications Director Steven Cheung posted on X that “The media freakout over President Trump’s comments is not rooted in reality. He was clearly stating U.S. cities would have been threatened if a nuclear Iran hadn’t been stopped. America is safer because of the President. Iran has no nuclear, no navy, no air force, and no money.”
Also on Tuesday, it was reported that most families of the six soldiers killed in the deadliest attack of the Iran war would not be attending a major White House event for Gold Star families hosted by Trump.
“Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story” takes a lot of liberties with the truth. But the most egregious one comes in the last fifteen minutes of the eighth and final episode of this portrait of an axe murderer.
At this point the story has jumped to the 1910s, roughly two decades after Lizzie (Ella Beatty) brutally and famously killed her father, Andrew Borden (Charlie Hunnam), and stepmother, Abby (Rebecca Hall). An older, haunted Lizzie, who was acquitted of the crimes in 1893, prays for forgiveness for committing them, something she never publicly admitted to in real life. She subsequently tells Maggie (Vicky Krieps) — her lover/former housekeeper/accomplice to the murders, at least according to “Monster’s” version of events — that she wants to make her notoriety “mean something.” Then the show immediately cuts to a group of suffragettes who have gathered in Borden’s parlor to sing “The March of the Women,” an anthem among the female pioneers who sought to win the right to vote, and got it in 1920.
That’s right, “Monster” wants us to believe that Lizzie Borden ultimately redeemed herself by becoming an active member of the suffragist movement. If you’re currently scratching your head and going, “Huh, I don’t remember that from the musical ‘Suffs,’” that’s because it’s not in there and it isn’t true. But making it seem like Borden played a small role in the successful pursuit of the 19th Amendment — she even announces the news of its passage to a roomful of elated women — brings closure to the narrative thread that this fourth season of “Monster” commits very hard to pulling: that Borden was a feminist hero unfairly ostracized for unleashing her justifiable anger toward her abusive parents and rebelling against the expectations of an inherently misogynistic society.
(Netflix) Ella Beatty as Lizzie Borden and Vicky Krieps as Maggie Sullivan in “Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story”
Making it seem like Borden played a small role in the successful pursuit of the 19th Amendment brings closure to the narrative thread that this fourth season of “Monster” commits very hard to pulling: that Borden was a feminist hero.
Throughout its four seasons, “Monster” has routinely played pretty fast and loose with facts. Co-created by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, the latter of whom wrote this entire current season, the series sometimes embellishes details to help its audience empathize with the real-life killers it depicts in fictionalized form. (Jeffrey Dahmer, the Menendez brothers and Ed Gein have been previous subjects.) But there’s something especially absurd about trying to assert the relevance of Lizzie Borden, a woman best known for slicing up her parents, by suggesting that her name belongs in the same sentence as Susan B. Anthony and Ida B. Wells. When the U.S. is approaching a midterm election in which voting rights are being threatened on multiple levels and reproductive rights will very much be on the ballot, it feels especially galling to be so glib.
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On a logical, storytelling level, this development doesn’t even make sense. A few scenes prior to Lizzie’s entry into feminist politics, she realizes the degree to which she has become a public laughing stock and a shameful figure with whom no one wants to be associated. At one point, she actually slaps a young trick-or-treater in the face when she realizes the girl is dressed up as Lizzie Borden for Halloween. The idea that a bunch of women who want to be taken seriously as astute citizens would happily gather in the home of the country’s most famous female murderer, or march for suffrage alongside her, simply does not compute.
This is just one of the ways that “Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story” attempts to underscore Borden’s significance and influence. As the Ed Gein season did, this one also connects its protagonist to a future murderer inspired by her: Aileen Wuornos, portrayed here with borderline campy intensity by Murphy muse, Sarah Paulson. Wuornos pops up in multiple episodes, including one in which she and her girlfriend Shelby stay at the Lizzie Borden house in the ’80s, when it’s operating as a macabre bed and breakfast. (This never actually happened.) After having sex on the same fainting couch where Lizzie stabbed her father to death (!), Wuornos has a conversation with the ghost of Borden and tells her, “You’re, like, a woman who didn’t take any sh*t.” In an absolutely ridiculous fantasy sequence near the end of this episode, Aileen, Shelby, Lizzie and Maggie dramatically dance together to Bronski Beat’s “Smalltown Boy” in the dovecote where Lizzie tended to her beloved birds.
(Netflix) Sarah Paulson as Aileen Wuornos in “Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story”
There’s something especially absurd about trying to assert the relevance of Lizzie Borden, a woman best known for slicing up her parents, by suggesting that her name belongs in the same sentence as Susan B. Anthony and Ida B. Wells.
The idea unsubtly conveyed here is that these women are connected by shared, traumatic experiences and resilience in the face of them. Wuornos murdered multiple men after they turned violent while she was working as a prostitute in Florida. During her trial — yes, we get to see some of that in the season finale, because why not? — she insists that she acted in self-defense after being assaulted and raped. Wuornos also was abused throughout her childhood, and so was Borden. In its early episodes, “Monster” depicts the cruelty routinely directed at Lizzie by her heavy-drinking, negligent father and her vile stepmother, who tells her stepdaughter, repeatedly, how useless she is. When Lizzie finally violently chops them up, something that “Monster,” ever infatuated with gore, shows us multiple times, it comes across as an act of self-defense. She’s ultimately acquitted by an all-male jury not because they buy a self-defense plea, but because they don’t believe a woman could be capable of such butchery. Even after unleashing her fury in the most gruesome way possible, Lizzie is somehow still underestimated. In a way, the central argument of “Monster” is nothing more than: “Women: We can kill just as good as men!”
In truth, the experiences of both Borden and Wuornos reflect a reality that existed for women in the 1800s and the 1980s, and still does in 2026: that when women are attacked, society tends to turn a blind eye, which, in some cases, forces those women to resort to extreme measures. If you need a current example of turning a blind eye, look no further than the recently reopened case of alleged gang rape at Cornell University.
In a culture that seems more misogynistic with every passing day, the latent rage that burns within so many women — women, by the way, who haven’t resorted to axe-murdering — is a legitimate, real thing, which is why it’s so frustrating to watch “Monster” explore that truth by resorting to telling lies. Those themes come across extremely loudly and very clearly without needing to suggest that when the ladies go to the polls in November, we should whisper a thank you to Lizzie Borden for making it all possible.
“The Lizzie Borden Story” wants us to see Lizzie as the ultimate nasty woman, someone who would have defiantly donned a pink pussy hat had she lived to see Donald Trump get elected. This is not just a stretch; it’s an insult to women who have stood up to their oppressors, and continue to do so, without resorting to violence.
The most honest, self-owning moment in “Monster” is a scene in the final episode where Lizzie visits a bookstore and asks the proprietress to stop selling recently published tomes about her life because “they are full of lies.”
“Miss Borden,” the shop owner says, “I can’t control what’s written about you. And I certainly can’t control the appetite there is to read about you.”
“You’re certainly happy to profit off of it,” Lizzie responds.
“Very much so,” the seller responds. Then she looks into the eyes of her fellow woman and adds: “And you sell well, Miss Borden.”
Based on “Monster’s” popularity on Netflix — it’s been one of the most watched shows on the platform since it debuted in mid-September — Miss Borden still sells well. And the makers of this program are more than happy to reap the benefits of that, even if their story is also full of lies.
Donald Trump has spent his political life treating the press as a prop. Friendly outlets are the audience he performs for, while hostile ones are the villains he performs against. But the president has never had to confront a prop that has stopped cooperating. It’s why he has spent several days raging at nearly every corner of the media, including the one network he has long treated as his own. Increasingly obsessed with controlling the image of his political decline rather than reckoning with reality, Trump has set out on a campaign of intimidation as his usual spectacle starts to finally fizzle out following more than a decade of domination. But browbeating Fox News and continuing to sideline CNN and POLITICO cannot conceal what is there in plain sight: shrinking crowds and falling poll numbers.
Over a whirlwind weekend of rallies across Alabama, Ohio, Oklahoma and Texas, the cracks in the MAGA facade became impossible to ignore. Trump has always treated crowd size at his rallies as a proxy for legitimacy and domination. In his eyes, the image of an overflowing arena functions as proof that the country loves him, that the media lies about him and that his political project remains invincible. This is why the sight of empty seats in high school gymnasiums and muted cable coverage that tell a less flattering story cuts so deeply.
“In actuality, my Events for very good Republican Politicians are probably more crowded than ever. There are no empty seats, there haven’t been for years, and there never will be. The Rallies are ‘HOTTER’ than ever,” he wrote on Truth Social Monday, demanding that “The New York Times, and many other Artificial Media Outlets, should be arrested for their dishonesty.” The president was referencing a Times report that during an event on Friday, Trump’s venue on the campus of the University of South Alabama was not full and that Trump’s midterm campaign swing feels “more like a farewell tour.”
But the day before, Trump had turned his fire on a less obvious target.
“Sad to see that Fox & Friends (Sunday) is not covering our packed house and incredibly enthusiastic (beyond!) Rally that took place in Ohio last night, or the ones in Alabama, Texas, or Oklahoma over the past two days,” he posted on Truth Social Sunday morning. The rallies were “absolutely phenomenal, better than ever,” he insisted. “Our people want to see our Rallies, and reports on our Rallies, on FoxNews, or they will very quickly stop watching (like I am doing right now!).”
It was the second time in five days Trump had attacked the conservative media powerhouse by name, and this time he brought a hit list. He accused Fox of forcing Democrats down MAGA’s throats and demanded to know who fired “the great Maria Bartiromo,” the ex-host who reportedly shared internal network communications with the administration. “Who makes these decisions at FoxNews?” Trump asked, before demanding the network cover his “happenings” or soon have the ratings of “FAKE NEWS CNN or MSNOW,” because “Fox tried this act once before, and almost went out of business (and always right before an election!). That can happen again!”
But Fox had already covered the Ohio rally before Trump posted his tirade. A Snapstream search found that “Fox and Friends Weekend” aired a segment on his event supporting Senate hopeful Jon Husted and gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy in Vandalia shortly before Trump’s post, focusing on his data center comments. Significantly, though, the network’s pattern across the four-state swing shows that hosts tease the president’s speeches, throw to a live correspondent report, but rarely air the rally live. While Fox didn’t air Trump’s Ohio speech live, it ran a report at the top of the hour and showed Ramaswamy warming up the crowd. The network did the same in Alabama on Friday, and in North Carolina last month.
There are exceptions. Sean Hannity cut into his show on Thursday and aired 36 uninterrupted minutes from Oklahoma. But the usual approach is no secret — and it didn’t start this weekend. Tellingly, after Trump’s attacks, Fox opened “The Five” and “The Will Cain Show” on Monday with rally clips.
The president has been escalating his rhetoric against the network for months. In April, he told Fox executives to “take Jessica Tarlov off the air.” He has also gone after hosts Bret Baier and Shannon Bream, complaining that the latter failed to challenge a Democratic congressman on her Sunday program. As CNN’s Brian Stelter noted, Fox has calculated that Trump’s rallies — which are long, repetitive and rarely produce news — are “not a ratings magnet right now.” The Republican National Committee’s midterm convention in Texas apparently was not either, meriting just one segment on “The Five” per day; most speakers were never shown on the network. Ironically, the unprecedented spectacle resulted in a rare reverse bounce that left Trump’s net approval declining and the Democrats’ advantage on the generic ballot increasing.
Trump’s media strategy depends on collapsing every unfavorable fact into the same category: enemy propaganda.
When CNN’s Kristen Holmes asked Trump about the NBC News/Telemundo poll that found his approval with Latino voters at just 27% on Monday, he cut her off, “You’re fake news! You’re CNN. You’re fake news. My poll numbers are great, and all you have to do is look at the crowds we’re drawing.” Days before, he delivered a characteristically crude address that singled out CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins in front of a hostile crowd, eliciting angry boos and vicious chants. Trump’s media strategy depends on collapsing every unfavorable fact into the same category: enemy propaganda.
The administration’s treatment of CNN, MS NOW and POLITICO made that purpose impossible for even the White House press corps to ignore. On Monday, the White House barred POLITICO from traveling aboard Air Force One, preventing the outlet from fulfilling its role in the presidential press pool, having been scheduled to serve as the print representative. Trump has already kicked CNN out of the television pool on the plane, replacing it with friendly outlets including LindellTV and Real America’s Voice.
The legal fight over that control comes to a head Thursday, when Trump-appointed federal Judge Timothy J. Kelly is scheduled to hear arguments on whether to extend the block on the president’s ban of CNN, MS NOW and POLITICO from the White House. Last month, Kelly issued a temporary restraining order requiring the administration to restore the outlets’ credentials, rejecting, at least at that stage, the administration’s national security rationale for yanking access.
The Justice Department nevertheless asked the court late Friday to permit the ban’s reinstatement, suggesting in the government’s filing that “bona fide journalists would identify sources instead of relying on anonymous sources.” This reasoning is especially rich, coming from a White House that routinely briefs reporters on background, requiring them to grant anonymity under its own ground rules. One “reporting incident” cited against POLITICO was a June story quoting a “senior administration official” — exactly the arrangement the White House demanded.
From the courtroom to Truth Social, Trump’s increasingly unhinged media attacks expose a serious weakness in his political model. He is a president with nothing to sell. But he needs constant confirmation that his movement is growing. When even Fox News declines to provide uninterrupted validation, the illusion becomes harder to sustain.
The American public is increasingly seeing through MAGA’s smoke and mirrors. Ultimately, no amount of bullying, executive bans or early morning social media rants can paper over the fact that one month before the midterm elections, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee added six more candidates to its “Red to Blue” list this week, districts Trump won by an average of 16 points or more in 2024.
The Supreme Court convened on Monday for another exciting round of “how far will they go?” and, as luck would have it, the putative leader of the conservative majority, Justice Samuel Alito, is out on a book tour talking about the philosophy that will guide their decisions.
“So Ordered: An Originalist’s View of the Constitution, the Court, and Our Country” is a collection of essays adapted from speeches he has given since 2007, many with straightforward titles, including “Let Judges Be Judges.” While an associate justice, Alito’s power on the Court shouldn’t be undersold. While all the other conservatives justices — aside from Clarence Thomas — don’t openly identify as originalists, they have shown themselves happy to follow Alito’s lead when it suits their ends. In fact, the so-called Roberts Court, named by tradition after the chief justice, is a misnomer. It’s really the Alito Court, which should send a chill down your spine if you have any concerns about where America is heading.
Alito gave a long interview to CBS News legal correspondent Jan Crawford, addressing a wide range of issues. One wouldn’t call him a charming personality, but he is compelling in his absolute confidence in himself and his ideas. At 76, he seems to be just getting started. He admitted to Crawford that he thinks about retiring, as anyone his age would, but he doesn’t have any intention of doing so at the moment, a fact that must come as a disappointment to both President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans who are struggling to hold on to their majority.
Considering the sad example of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, both Alito and Thomas would have done conservatives and Trump a big favor if they had retired during these first two years of Trump domination. Had they done so, they would have been seen as heroes to their fellow right-wing activists.
Trump may think his legacy is in the hideous monuments he’s building to himself, but the Court’s conservative majority will be the lasting mark of his reign. He has already appointed three — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — of the six conservative justices, and if he were able to appoint two more in the vein of Alito and Thomas, but 30 years younger, he would likely seal the nation’s future and benefit his wealthy cronies for generations to come.
Even if the pair had merely hinted they might resign, it would have given the Republicans something to run on in the midterms. Should the Democrats win a majority in the Senate, as they are now increasingly expected to, come January any hopes of appointing a far-right conservative in Alito’s image are dead for at least the next two years. If a vacancy were to happen, presumably the Democrats would invoke the McConnell precedent and keep the seat open until a new president is elected.
“I think I can still make a contribution,” Alito told Crawford. “And it’s hard to give up the opportunity to do something that I think will be good for the Constitution and good for the country as long as I’m able to do it.”
But right now Alito and Thomas are at the height of their power and influence — and they aren’t going anywhere. “I think I can still make a contribution,” Alito told Crawford. “And it’s hard to give up the opportunity to do something that I think will be good for the Constitution and good for the country as long as I’m able to do it.” As Kevin McMahon, a political science professor at Connecticut’s Trinity College, told Reuters, “They have been waiting for a long time to be in the position. So why leave?”
Why leave indeed? Crawford’s analysis of Alito’s power on the Court is that he is now the fulcrum on which its decisions are made. “Alito is especially skilled in bringing together five justices for a majority on some of the Court’s most difficult and contentious issues,” she observes. “The justice often publicly portrayed as unyielding and inflexible is, behind the scenes, the conservative who is uniquely adept at finding common ground on the most divisive issues.”
Alito is certainly having some success with his signature issue, the unitary executive, having been a champion of the right-wing theory since the 1980s, when he worked for Ronald Reagan’s hyper-partisan Attorney General Ed Meese in the Justice Department. As Alito defined it back in 2000, before he was elevated to the high court, the “president has not just some executive powers, but the executive power — the whole thing.” He believes the president has the sole authority over federal agencies and sees presidential power as dominant — well, unless the Supreme Court disagrees and says otherwise.
All this may seem to be in conflict with Alito’s guiding philosophy of originalism, but he explains that away by calling himself a “practical originalist” who believes that the Constitution is a sort of sacred text that must be taken literally as it was understood at the time of its adoption — unless it just doesn’t seem right. Last week, he wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed headlined “Even Originalists Make Mistakes,” in which he listed legal scholars and practitioners who, in his estimation, aren’t following the one true creed. But Alito admitted that he, too, must sometimes deviate from the path and make a “reasonable judgment call” that may require him to overturn precedents and that “conditions” may “militate against scholarly purity.”
The justice goes to great lengths to deny that he has any partisan interest, but it’s clear throughout the interview and from his other comments over the last few years that he’s highly partisan and influenced by the right-wing hysteria over the “woke” left. Alito expressed grave concern about presidents criticizing the Court for its decisions, saying that Joe Biden was particularly harsh. But when pushed a bit, he admitted that Trump has been harsh too. That false equivalence is so fatuous it’s embarrassing that a Supreme Court justice would have the gall to utter it.
Biden condemned the Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade by calling it a “tragic error” and “an extreme and dangerous path the court is now taking us on.” The 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson decision did, after all, overturn a constitutional right that had been in effect for 50 years, one that numerous conservative justices had told the Senate and country they considered to be settled law. Trump, on the other hand, has said that members of the Court, especially those he appointed, are “very unpatriotic and disloyal to the Constitution,” when they vote against his wishes. But he hasn’t stopped there. They are also, he said, “an embarrassment to their families, if you want to know the truth” and a “disgrace to our nation.” But then Trump loves Alito and says he “wants to make America great again,” so perhaps the justice agrees with him about his brethren. And why not? They are aligned on virtually every issue.
As the Court’s new term begins, Alito is clearly feeling his oats. He wants to have the influence and power to decide the radical cases that are coming before the court as a result of Trump’s unprecedented power grab under the unitary executive theory. The project is his life’s work. So he’s staying.
But that doesn’t mean that Democrats didn’t dodge a bullet when he refused to retire so Trump could name a young replacement. These days it may be hard to imagine anyone worse than Samuel Alito, but just think about who could have been next. How does Justice Todd Blanche or Justice Aileen Cannon sound?
The 2026 U.S. midterm campaigns are the first in which AI-generated political ads are regularly appearing on people’s televisions and social media feeds.
What we found has surprised us: AI use spans from hyperrealistic deepfakes to subtle enhancements; Republican sponsors – both candidates and interest groups – are much more likely to use AI than are Democratic sponsors; and, thanks to a patchwork of state legislation, many of these ads do not disclose the use of AI at all.
From deepfakes to subtle edits
An assortment of politicians and watchdog groups have expressed concern about campaigns using generative AI to produce deepfakes – synthetic videos showing people doing things they did not do – that might deceive voters.
We’ve noticed several ads containing hyperrealistic deepfakes of famous politicians, including Donald Trump, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, Kamala Harris and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Ocasio-Cortez, in particular, is a favorite among Republican advertisers, appearing in at least five ads.
We’ve seen deepfakes in which a Republican Senate candidate from Louisiana drives a school bus full of undocumented immigrants, a Republican candidate for governor from South Carolina walks arm in arm with drag queens, and an ad in which Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney and Mike Pence are seen carrying pitchforks on the White House lawn.
People who are not politicians made appearances, too, including a fake Dr. Anthony Fauci, seen running around a state fair with a huge syringe, presumably eager to vaccinate everyone. We’ve also noticed several ads in which AI was used to generate crowds or constituents.
In several cases, AI was used to enhance visuals rather than generate something new. One ad from Chip Keating, a Republican candidate for governor in Oklahoma, includes an AI disclaimer, but it doesn’t specify exactly how AI was used. Ads that use AI to enhance visuals don’t necessarily look different from ads that were created in the pre-AI era, which makes it difficult for viewers to discern whether they depict something false.
A partisan gap
Republicans – both candidates and groups such as super PACs and 501(c) organizations – are much more likely to use AI in their ads than are Democrats, according to our research.
In fact, Republican candidates or pro-Republican groups were behind 80% of the ads we tracked and 83% of the spending.
We can only speculate as to why Republicans dominate the use of AI in political advertising in 2026. In general, Democrats tend to take on a regulatory mindset when it comes to political campaigns, favoring limits on campaign spending and required disclosures. In 2022, for instance, only Senate Democrats and two independents voted to advance the DISCLOSE Act that would have required additional campaign finance disclosures for super PACs, labor unions and corporations. Republicans, by contrast, tend to be more in favor of a free market approach.
These more general philosophies may be reflected in the parties’ use of generative AI for political advertising, something about which voters are worried. Polling shows broad support for more regulation, with 78% of registered voters favoring a ban on AI content that makes deceptive claims about candidates.
AI-modified videos of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries posted by President Donald Trump were displayed at the White House in October 2025. Alex Wong/Getty Images News via Getty Images
Disclaimers all over the map
Because regulation of AI in advertising depends on a patchwork of state legislation, many of these ads are not required to disclose the use of AI. This lack of disclaimers makes tracking AI use in ads challenging. Our team has relied on media coverage and trained student coders to flag ads that are potentially AI-generated.
Across 35 states, only 31% of the ads we tracked – representing 22% of the spending – disclosed the use of AI tools. The wording of these disclaimers was all over the map. For example, one Georgia ad included the disclaimer, “This video has been manipulated or generated with artificial intelligence,” while an Oklahoma ad said, “Political satire. AI-generated images do not depict actual events.” A North Carolina state Senate ad said, “You guessed it! AI was definitely used to generate these silly video clips.”
Laws don’t drive disclosure
Some advertisers voluntarily disclose the use of AI even when they are not required to do so. Sometimes, the opposite occurs – advertisers don’t include disclaimers even when state law requires them to. In fact, we’ve found that a state law that requires disclaimers on ads that use AI has very little relationship with the actual use of disclaimers.
In states without laws governing the use of AI in political ads, 32% of ads contained a disclaimer; by contrast, in states with laws governing the use of AI, 29% contained a disclaimer. This comparison, however, is not perfect, as some of the ads in our database aren’t covered by their state’s law. Some states, such as Colorado, have laws that apply only to candidate deepfakes and thus exclude other uses of AI. In other instances, such as in Louisiana, an AI law was enacted after the ad aired.
Minnesota law generally bans deepfakes in political ads, but an ad featuring synthetic video of Democratic Senate candidate Peggy Flanagan aired in May 2026 anyway. Whether it violated state law is uncertain, as the law requires that the media be “so realistic that a reasonable person would believe it depicts speech or conduct of an individual who did not in fact engage in such speech or conduct.”
Moving forward, the real policy challenge will revolve around transparency, the enforceability of existing laws and simply figuring out what type of disclosure would be helpful to voters.
American health officials are on high alert following reports of a death in Russia that may be linked to pneumonic plague. The cause of death for the individual has yet to be officially confirmed by lab testing, but Daria Shipilova, a 28-year-old lab technician, worked at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East, an institute that, as the name implies, is dedicated to studying plague. The illness is highly fatal, with average fatality rates approaching 100%.
Pneumonic plague is also highly contagious and can spread from person to person via air droplets. That gives the disease a high potential for an epidemic spread or even a global pandemic, but health officials have cautioned we have a long way to go to get to that point. The plague is treatable with antibiotics, but must be caught early enough. Due to the potential severity here, approximately 200 people have also been placed under medical observation in Irkutsk, a region in eastern Siberia, and some hospitals have been placed under quarantine.
U.S. officials are paying close attention. The State Department, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response, and other agencies are all trying to learn more. Axios reported this info as a “scoop,” but it’s relatively routine to surveil any pathogen that could cause severe damage to national security. However, Russia does not seem to be fully cooperating, with reports that Russian officials’ are being hesitant to share info while Russian intelligence officers are reportedly getting involved.
“We don’t have a lot of intel,” one U.S. health official told the Washington Post. “It’s in Siberia. Unless someone gets on a plane and gets to the U.S., it is low risk. We should be alert but not panicked.” Based on the available information, the World Health Organization said “the public health risk to the general population appears to be low.”
Even President Donald Trump weighed in, telling reporters Monday that “We’re looking at it very strongly. He said he hasn’t yet talked with Russian President Vladimir Putin about it, but offered U.S. help with the issue. “It’s a rough disease. You know, that’s a disease we used to be able to control, but somehow those microbes have gotten stronger and smarter,” Trump said. “Anybody that has that kind of a problem we’ll always [be] willing to help. We’ll help you.”
John Stewart was always going to claim his ring. That much was a given on “Lanterns” from the moment HBO debuted the first images of Aaron Pierre’s John and Kyle Chandler’s Hal Jordan – there’s that, and DC Comics’ established lore. The question was always how.
The answer, in the end, was by breaking his lifelong conditioning, contradicting one of the main qualifications of heroic worthiness established by a council of powerful beings most people aren’t even aware exists. John was taught that Green Lanterns must be fearless beings capable of focusing and wielding their will. In 2016, John did exactly that when he finally took the ring from Hal and killed an adversary he’d grown to care about.
Maneuvering Hal to a place of vulnerability required focus. Summoning the will to surrender that power he’d trained all his life to inherit, to the Guardians of the Universe ordering him to betray his friend, is a Herculean act.
But the ultimate reveal of the “Lanterns” finale, besides resolving the mystery established in the series premiere, is that the supposedly infallible Guardians are wrong to view fearlessness as the ultimate virtue. “Fear and love make people scared,” John says to his friend Kerry (Kelly Macdonald), a small-town sheriff, “and scared people can do anything.”
What a long, strange hero’s journey it’s been. In its eight episodes, “Lanterns” wrestled with an array of concepts some viewers loved and others … well, you know, fanboys and the internet.
Along with being an origin story and an alien hunt unfurling in a 2016-set timeline, “Lanterns” grounds itself in a murder mystery that defines its 2026 plot running in parallel. Only in 2026, John isn’t a Lantern, and Hal, his one-time mentor, turns up dead.
Throughout the season, “Lanterns” played upon established canon to thread a host of themes. Among them are white male entitlement versus the crushing demands of Black exceptionalism; the complicated bond linking fathers to sons; and the agonizing bravery required of mothers raising boys the world is conditioned to ostracize.
That last one is how John solves the season’s overarching mystery, settling one of the story’s defining and tormented relationships into a peaceful place. On the surface, John’s trajectory is that of a son forced to correct his father’s failure. But it’s John’s mother, Bernadette (Jasmine Cephas Jones), who always keeps him on task — even as it pains her to do it.
Only after John declines the call to be Earth’s Lantern and gets to know Kerry and her family, including her son Noah (Shea Pritchard), does he realize the purpose in breaking his programming.
(John Johnson/HBO Max)
Noah has his own to overcome. He’s a star high school jock, the pride of Rushville and the grandson of Zoe (Poorna Jagannathan), who seduced John in 2016 and turned out to be the rogue extraterrestrial he and Hal were looking for: a Manhunter, synthetic beings created by the Guardians before the Lantern Corps replaced them. Zoe nearly destroys Rushville to save herself, while John almost violates his principles to seize the ring from Hal, per the Guardians’ orders, and take out Zoe.
If you watched that pivotal fifth episode and wondered why she smiled right before John put a bullet in her brain, maybe it’s because she knew she wasn’t the last of her kind. Noah is extraordinary because he’s also a Manhunter, created by the alien technology Zoe used to impregnate Kerry.
And as one exceptional son recognizes in another, the difference between how we’re born and what we become is who nurtures us.
Kerry is the reason that Noah grew up a kind, considerate young man. But he can’t help feeling the tug of his genetic programming to infiltrate the highest rungs of politics and manipulate the levers of power, he admits.
It’s only after he confesses to murdering Hal, looking visibly afraid all the while, that John realizes the only person more fearful of Noah being discovered is his mother, Kerry — the person who actually shot Hal Jordan in the face.
The fact that “Lanterns” is a conversation with and about fear — its avoidance and the lengths we go to to negate it — explains the audience’s divided response to the show. Some people will always want their superhero TV shows to feature battles and explosions every week. “Lanterns” delivered that primarily in its fifth episode, then fueled the rest with dramatic chemistry and punchy dialogue.
Its scripts also hold plenty of wisdom, including what exiled fugitive Lantern Sinestro (Ulrich Thomsen) shares after John finds him on a dead world, along with a lantern Sinestro forged for Noah that uses fear as part of its power source. The fallen Sinestro calls fear an evolutionary intelligence: “Show me a species that’s fearless, I’ll show you something on the extinction list,” he says.
“If harnessed correctly,” Sinestro adds, “fear can be the most powerful force in the universe.” To charge Hal’s nearly dead ring, then, means changing the terms of engagement with its might. It also means erasing the construct of Hal’s consciousness that has guided John since his mentor died.
Throughout its run, some viewers have been bewildered as to why some of the same people who loved “Peacemaker” and “The Boys,” two other superhero shows that indicted white supremacy, deemed “Lanterns” to be performatively progressive.
Basic hypocrisy is the simplest answer; it comes as easily to some of us as breathing. But what “Lanterns” does with John Stewart delineates the divide between sympathetic and empathetic storytelling. “Peacemaker” creator James Gunn and “The Boys” creator and showrunner Eric Kripke are paragons of a white guy conveying their understanding of nonwhite experiences from their perspective. Both shows’ white heroes understand that racism, and specifically Nazism, is bad.
(John Johnson/HBO Max)
“Lanterns” is also co-created by three white guys — showrunner Chris Mundy, Damon Lindelof and Tom King — who tapped Vanessa Baden Kelly, a Black woman, to tell John Stewart’s story from a place of firsthand experience. By placing us inside John’s life, Baden Kelly vicariously produced, in some, a feeling of familiarity and, in others, discomfort. She wrote John’s story from a place of empathy; Gunn and Kripke, along with the “Lanterns” creators, can only be sympathetic.
Sympathy is, by its nature, separate from another’s discomfort, thoughts and prayers offered from a distance. Empathy can make us feel things we may not like, including reactions like fear. Hence the Christian nationalist push to brand empathy as toxic.
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Intentionally or not, then, John’s ultimate choice to let Noah live and keep Kerry’s culpability in Hal’s death a secret is a demonstration of empathy’s bravery. With Kerry’s nurturing to keep Noah in check — perhaps — John can embrace his destiny on his terms, as he tells arrogant Guy Gardner (Nathan Fillion), the Guardians’ official doofus, when John calls for him.
“Think of me as an independent contractor. No Guardians. No Corps,” he says. “You take the stars, have fun. I’ll take the dirt. I’m completely confident we won’t get in each other’s way.”
One of the last things Hal Jordan’s hologram tells John before he blinks out, possibly forever, will define Pierre’s hero moving forward, along with this series, should it earn a second season. “Don’t be afraid to be afraid,” he says.
Then, as John charges his ring, he composes a new oath: “In brightest day, in the darkest night / I’ll embrace my fear. I’ll do what’s right / I choose this ring, I choose this fight / In service to this lantern’s light.”
Earth has Guy Gardner’s sympathy, but the world needs John Stewart — a hero who knows fear and was raised to understand what to do with it.
All episodes of “Lanterns” are streaming on HBO Max.
There comes a point in the life of many soups when they get a little sleepy.
This happens especially often with soups that are creamy, starchy or — blessedly — both. Everything is humming along just fine. The onions are soft. The garlic is fragrant. The spices have bloomed. You taste a spoonful and think, Hmm. So you add another pinch of seasoning. You taste again. Still: Hmm.
At this point, most of us instinctively reach for the salt.
But I’d like to gently intercept your hand on the way there and redirect it toward wherever you keep your vinegar. Some swear by the pantry, others insist upon the refrigerator; we will not allow ourselves to be distracted from our soup scholarship by these sectarian squabbles (at least not this week).
Because sometimes your soup doesn’t need more salt. It needs acid.
A small splash of vinegar at the end of cooking can give a tired pot an almost startling jolt. Vegetables taste brighter. Herbs seem greener. Starchy soups feel less pasty on the tongue. Spices that had faded into the background suddenly become legible again. Depending on how much you add, you might even get a delectable little Oh, what is that? pucker at the end of each bite.
I love lemon in soup, too. Sometimes I want the lemon flavor to be the whole point: a lemony avgolemono, for instance, or a chicken stew that tastes unabashedly citrusy. But lemon can announce itself loudly. Same with lime.
Vinegar can be more like a gentle wake-up than a glass of water to the face.
I first really understood this while making Alison Roman’s dill-packed potato-leek soup, published originally a little over five years ago, which finishes with white wine vinegar. Roman writes that the vinegar makes the soup taste “almost like a pickle.” I went into the recipe expecting exactly that, was delighted to find it delivered and started experimenting with the same trick in soups of my own.
The key here is finishing with vinegar. There are, of course, soups where acidity is built in earlier: Chinese hot-and-sour soups, borscht and various Eastern European sour soups all have their own traditions and techniques. But that’s a different lesson.
For our purposes, cook your soup until it’s essentially done. Then, before making the final salt adjustment, add about 1/2 teaspoon to 1 teaspoon of vinegar. Stir it in thoroughly and give it a moment. I actually like to step away from the stove at this point. Get some water. Wash a spoon. Pop my head out the kitchen window like a dog on a road trip. Then come back and taste again.
Vinegar is firmly in the category of ingredients that are easier to add than subtract. You’re not necessarily trying to make the soup taste vinegary. You’re waiting for everything else in the pot to suddenly taste more like itself.
Different vinegars naturally play better with different soups. Red wine vinegar is wonderful with hearty lentil, bean and farro soups, and I love it in beef stew. It can also rescue a tomato soup that’s drifted too far toward sweetness.
White wine vinegar — or even plain distilled white vinegar — is excellent with potatoes, creamy chicken soups and corn chowders. Think of the logic of salt-and-vinegar potato chips: starch loves that sharp little counterpoint.
For sweeter, earthier soups made with squash or root vegetables, I tend toward vinegars with a little fruitiness of their own, like apple cider vinegar or my current favorite, white balsamic.
There are exceptions. I probably wouldn’t start splashing vinegar into a delicate seafood bisque. And broccoli-cheddar soup, for me, remains a no-fly zone. Not every pot requires intervention.
But many do.
I learned to cook thinking that “finishing” a dish meant adding enough salt and pepper. Then fresh herbs were a revelation. Acid was another one: a reminder that a finished dish doesn’t necessarily need more flavor so much as it sometimes needs contrast.
That’s especially true of this week’s soup: a hot honey carrot and sweet potato number built with garlic, onion, coriander, paprika, cumin, red pepper flakes and miso, then rounded out with savory stock and coconut milk.
Before the vinegar, it tasted good — but a little too sweet and a little too earthy. The white balsamic changed the geometry of the whole bowl. The sweetness of the vegetables became more nuanced instead of landing like a sledgehammer. The spices emerged. The stock tasted more savory. And instead of registering immediately, the hot honey left a gentle warmth at the back of each bite.
So that’s your homework for week two of Soup School: When your next pot tastes fine but somehow unfinished, don’t automatically add another shower of salt.
Add a little vinegar.
Let it sink in.
Then taste again.
Hot Honey Carrot and Sweet Potato Soup
Building on last week’s lesson, this soup starts in the oven, where carrots, sweet potatoes, scallions, miso, hot honey and a deliberately assertive amount of spice get deeply caramelized before ever meeting the stockpot. Coconut milk softens the edges.
Then, incorporating this week’s lesson, white balsamic or apple cider vinegar keeps the root vegetables’ sweetness from becoming cloying.
A note on the spices: There are a lot of them. That’s intentional. Sweet potatoes and carrots can take it, and the coconut milk mellows everything considerably. If you’re particularly sensitive to heat, though, feel free to scale back the red pepper flakes and hot honey.
Yields
4 servings
Prep Time
10 minutes
Cook Time
50 minutes
Ingredients
2 medium carrots, roughly chopped
1 cup diced sweet potato, fresh or frozen
2 tablespoons sliced scallion greens, plus more for serving
1 tablespoon olive oil
3 teaspoons garlic powder
3 teaspoons onion powder
3 teaspoons ground coriander
3 teaspoons smoked paprika
3 teaspoons ground cumin
3 teaspoons red pepper flakes, or less to taste
1 tablespoon white miso paste
3 teaspoons hot honey, plus more to taste if desired
1 cup chicken or vegetable stock, divided
1 cup full-fat canned coconut milk
White balsamic vinegar or apple cider vinegar, as needed
Kosher salt, to taste
Coconut cream, for serving
Crusty bread, for serving
Directions
Heat the oven to 425 F.
Add the carrots, sweet potato and scallions to a Dutch oven. Drizzle with the olive oil, then add the garlic powder, onion powder, coriander, smoked paprika, cumin, red pepper flakes and miso. Drizzle the hot honey over everything and toss thoroughly to coat.
Transfer the uncovered Dutch oven to the oven and roast for about 25 minutes, until the vegetables are tender and beginning to caramelize around the edges.
Remove the pot from the oven. Transfer about half of the vegetable mixture to a blender and blend until smooth, then return it to the Dutch oven. Alternatively, use an immersion blender directly in the pot, stopping while plenty of texture remains.
Set the Dutch oven over medium heat and add 1/2 cup of the chicken or vegetable stock. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the mixture becomes thick and deeply aromatic. Add the remaining 1/2 cup stock and the coconut milk.
Bring to a gentle simmer and cook for about 20 minutes, allowing the flavors to meld and the soup to thicken slightly.
Remove the soup from the heat. Add 1 teaspoon of white balsamic or apple cider vinegar and stir well. Give it a moment, then taste. Continue adding vinegar, 1 teaspoon at a time, until the soup tastes bright and the sweetness, spice and savoriness feel balanced.
Only then, add salt to taste.
Ladle into bowls and finish simply with fresh scallions and a small swirl of coconut cream. Serve with crusty bread.
This story originally appeared in “The Bite,” my weekly food newsletter for Salon. If you enjoyed it and would like more essays, recipes, technique explainers and interviews sent straight to your inbox, subscribe here.
To film Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s new movie “Digger,” a satirical black comedy about an aging oil tycoon facing a potentially apocalyptic crisis he fathered, Tom Cruise needed extensive prosthetics — six hours of prosthetics, to be exact. Upholding his reputation as the most intense person in any room, Cruise has proudly touted that, by encouraging the makeup artists (and running drills with them using a stopwatch), they worked the entire process down from six hours to less than one. As this is basically unheard of, the anecdote plays great on a press tour. But Cruise’s story is also an ironic reflection of “Digger”: an undeniably ambitious project whose assuredness conveys a stubborn disregard for everyone but itself.
Typically, that kind of thing isn’t so bad in a movie. More filmmakers would do well to be so confident in their vision that they successfully tune out intrusive thoughts about what anyone else will think, refusing to dull their boldest ideas and temper their biggest swings. But “Digger” complicates this certitude, weaving its audience into the fabric of its story so tightly that they’re bound to their seat, forced to sit with their eyes peeled open as Iñárritu points his finger back at them. His thematic concepts and narrative red herrings rely on the viewer’s presence. Without us, there is no one to hoist blame upon when the film reveals its layers, no one to compare to the film’s wide-eyed spectators of global collapse.
(Warner Bros. Pictures) Tom Cruise in “Digger”
Iñárritu reduces our connection to art to a distraction. While that notion may be true for some, it’s not universal, and Iñárritu’s haughty assumption only reflects how disconnected “Digger” is from the very reality it presumes to understand well enough to satirize.
“Digger” can’t be a great film on its own; its success relies on generating strained discourse, on the cowardly option to chalk up its seismic errors in judgment and smug self-satisfaction to a difference in intellect. “This film is supposed to be annoying,” it argues time and again. “It’s supposed to move at a slug’s pace, and be lit with the putrid pallid color of a corpse’s husk. If you don’t get that, you must not be able to understand that this movie is already our reality.” To make a movie about the end of the world that asserts the viewer needs to understand their own complicity assumes an uncharitable worldview that keeps a vertical mile’s distance between the art and its spectators. With “Digger,” Iñárritu commands — to quote “Real Housewives of New York” alum Kelly Bensimon — “You come up to me; I don’t go down to you.”
But I’ll play ball. Americans did, of course, elect Donald Trump a second time. It’s fair to assume many of us require a stern talking-to, like dogs who need their pills hidden inside the cheese that is Cruise’s Mr. Movies persona. But the problem with Iñárritu’s approach is that he’s fashioned “Digger” as a satire for a post-satire world, a state of living where every day is almost comically bleak. The more glaring issue, though, is that he seems to think this is a novel concept, one he can mine with a twist that strips “Digger” of its parts to examine the relationship between the audience and the artistic outlets (like this very movie) they use for a blip of respite between the horrors.
Once Iñárritu peels the skin off, he resumes taking cheap shots at the exposed wound, reducing our connection to art to a distraction. He assumes that, these days, the public goes to see movies or plays, watches television, or reads books either to avoid this dismal reality or absolve themselves from it. While that notion may be true for some, it’s not universal, and Iñárritu’s haughty assumption only reflects how disconnected “Digger” is from the very reality it presumes to understand well enough to satirize.
Saying all of this broadly without context would be an argument as compelling as Iñárritu’s — which is to say, not very. That does, however, mean that a key spoiler for the film, which occurs about 40 minutes into its runtime, is just ahead. If you would prefer not to know more, pause here. (But bookmark this page to return to, won’t you?)
Iñárritu spends the film’s first quarter setting the scene and characters — strangely quite literally, raising what looks like a stage curtain but is revealed to be a window shade. Cruise’s Digger Rockwell rises from bed and tries to feed his bizarrely acting cat before learning of an explosion on his oil rig in Greenland. Lively scientist Dr. Nirav Ganesh (Riz Ahmed) warns Digger that the explosion has sent a massive ice shelf toward Norway, which will flood the coasts and hundreds of thousands of people. But it’s only the beginning. The explosion has triggered more movement, with another glacier headed toward Alaska. To avoid panic and stay ahead of the narrative, Digger meets with the president (John Goodman) and the military to discuss next steps.
As Digger and the president peer out a window, a light flickers. A tree in the distance falls, and a giant hand emerges from the ground to put it back in place. Iñárritu reveals that all of this is rehearsal for a new production of the cult-classic play “Fossil Fools,” about a real-life climate disaster and its players who changed the world forever. Digger and all the characters we’ve met so far are actors. This explains their blowhard nature. Their constant screaming and yelling is a feature of the play’s meta-satire. Unfortunately for us, the film’s audience, it doesn’t make watching the rest of the rehearsal any more enjoyable.
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If anything, the “twist” — in quotes because I tend to see anything that occurs less than an hour into a two-plus-hour film as a plot point rather than a twist — blunders the viewer’s goodwill. The jokes are less funny because they don’t occur within the film’s natural rhythm. The overacting is exhausting because it’s not only Iñárritu’s creative choice, but rather the methods employed by the play-within-a-movie’s director. Every single frame of “Digger” is thrust through an extra two meta layers. This is an interesting exercise for the filmmaker, surely, but the rest of us are stuck waiting for Iñárritu’s larger message to come into play. Placing the narrative left turn so early into the film almost feels like a tactic to curb theatrical walkouts.
Those who resist the urge to use their precious time doing anything else will be rewarded not with payoff, but indictment. You there, yes you, the one sitting in seat 11E; you’re no better than the doomed dunces coming to see this production of “Fossil Fools.” Like them, you want the satire to make you feel smart, to make you feel like you’re one of the good guys? Too bad. By simply continuing to exist and endure this life you didn’t choose, you are no better than Digger Rockwell.
(Warner Bros. Pictures) John Goodman in “Digger”
Iñárritu portrays the average person as a seal, ready to bark and clap at anything that so much as alludes to reality. His film has ill will spewing from every pore, a complete loathing for humanity. Yes, we all have some level of complicity in the world’s eventual end. Tell us something we don’t know.
The film, of course, doesn’t say this in so many words. But it doesn’t have to, either. Cruise’s character is an intentional parallel to his own cinema-championing schtick, an actor who believes every scene he’s in should carry some semblance of the truth. But when he argues veracity’s importance, the play’s producer, Kenny (Jesse Plemons), reminds him truth doesn’t matter to the audience. The people are coming for catharsis. They want to cheer on Digger’s demise. This momentary cleanse won’t save them, but it will keep them going.
There is no shortage of ideas to dredge from this truth, about how we use art to cope, sometimes to our own detriment. When “Digger” briefly strikes this resonant note, its warring aspects begin to coalesce, before Iñárritu strikes them with a shovel and breaks everything up again. Just after the opening night’s audience gets their emotional release, a tone fills the theater, with a voice cautioning of a “Level 4 warning.” (What convenient timing, this happening after the play has finished!) Without surprise, the audience dons their luxury PPE — branded “LUNGZ,” complete with a cutesy “Z” at the end, because all these sheep adapted to their new normal so willingly — and makes their way into war-torn streets patrolled by drones and robot cops. Roll credits, roll eyes.
As if this whole affair weren’t self-satisfied enough, Iñárritu jabs his finger at the audience one last time. After about 90 seconds, the film’s end-credits song is interrupted by the same “Level 4” warning, this time aimed at the viewer trudging out of the theater (or, in the near future, asleep on their couch).
In a film full of contrived indignities, this is the most maddening, suggesting that anyone watching the film is no more clever than the “Fossil Fools” audience members. Iñárritu portrays the average person as a seal, ready to bark and clap at anything that so much as alludes to reality. His film has ill will spewing from every pore, a complete loathing for humanity. Yes, we all have some level of complicity in the world’s eventual end. Tell us something we don’t know.
Riffing on the human need for emotional engagement through the arts with such venom is not just a slap in the face; it’s evidence of Iñárritu’s gnawing insecurities. By lampooning the desire to see our experiences in art without crafting any emotional resonance of its own, Iñárritu comes off as unjustly malicious, upset that his films are too sprawling and cluttered to pull off that connection consistently. How brutally ironic that “Digger” is Warner Bros.’ last film before being swallowed by Paramount–Skydance. It may have ambition, and it may have exactly the kind of role Cruise needs to pursue. But the film merely gestures to its own unfortunate place in history, without ever cementing it as a tragedy. Dig into one’s ideas too much, and eventually they’ll become hollow.
For more than a year, journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan had been trying — and largely failing — to raise awareness about the very strange story of Donald Trump and his aide Natalie Harp. Shortly after the 2024 election, the New York Times journalists published a profile of the lithe blonde in her early 30s, complete with photos of her gazing at Trump adoringly, explaining how she left him love letters with language like, “You are all that matters to me.” On Aug. 16, Haberman was still trying to raise the issue during an appearance on MS NOW, describing Harp as Trump’s “human binky.”
But in the end, it was Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., who woke up much of the public to this disturbing relationship by mentioning Harp on the campaign trail. “He doesn’t want to do the job,” the senator said of Trump, the sleeves of his blue shirt rolled up. “He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar.”
The defensive reaction from the White House was so over-the-top that it backfired, drawing more attention to the relationship.
But a mystery remained. Haberman, Swan and many others had been talking about Harp, but it wasn’t until Ossoff said something that the White House truly lost their minds.
The reaction likely had little to do with Ossoff’s comments, as elegantly as they were constructed. No, this recoil was more about the messenger than the message. At 39, Ossoff isn’t just young. He is strikingly handsome. The boyish good looks of his early career have matured into something closer to the old-fashioned allure of a 1960s-era movie star, such as Gregory Peck or Warren Beatty. Broad-chested, with great hair and a winning smile, Ossoff has a cool demeanor, good sense of humor and moral seriousness in a proportion that’s rare in politics — and that hasn’t really been seen since Barack Obama. Ossoff, in other words, can get it.
I’m talking about votes.
Put another way, Ossoff is everything the 80-year-old president wishes he were, but isn’t. Harp’s presence is a touchy, daily reminder to both Trump and his staff of the president’s thick catalog failings as a human being. Having a young, handsome, talented man mock Trump for his emotional support aide had to have stung with a special precision. No one needs to tell the president or his staff that Ossoff feels just fine about himself — and doesn’t need a full-time emotional support aide to follow him around, praising his every move.
Considering how much the White House communications staff is extremely online, they are also likely to know that Ossoff has become quite the thirst trap, even among young women and gay men who otherwise aren’t especially political on social media. As Grace Panetta of The 19th recently explained, the senator is a reliable, if unwitting, model for light-hearted crush content, much like what creators generate in tribute to movie stars like Timothée Chalamet or Tom Holland.
“Take a scroll through Instagram and TikTok, and you’ll see fan edit-style videos of Ossoff at campaign rallies and in Senate hearings,” Panetta wrote. Women jokingly call out Ossoff’s “slutty Atticus Finch cosplay” or predict that Ossoff will be “a hot president in my lifetime.” It’s reached the point where a reporter from TMZ asked Ossoff if he has “BDE,” which is not short for Big Dictionary Energy, despite the senator very much seeming like he’d be a fan of Oxford’s quintessential publication.
Ossoff’s sex appeal doesn’t just offer a striking contrast with Trump’s oversized suits and comical combover. He’s also very different than men in the Republican ranks who are closer to his own age and, like himself, are widely seen as potential 2028 presidential candidates. At 42, Vice President JD Vance is also the subject a lot of online content. But most of it portrays him in a comically unflattering manner, with tiny dead eyes, oversized cheeks and a maniacal grin. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, 55, isn’t mocked for his looks, but he is often portrayed as a sad sack, a man too slow-witted and spineless to be much use beyond his role as Trump’s patsy. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, 46, is blessed with good looks that even three breakfast gin-and-tonics can’t take away. But with the help of Colin Jost on “Saturday Night Live,” he is mostly viewed like an overgrown frat boy crushing beer cans on his forehead. None come even close to the dreamboat treatment Ossoff receives.
This disparate treatment is especially amusing because the MAGA movement has insisted for years that they are bringing back a more virile masculinity — supposedly to cure all the allegedly poisonous feminism inflicted upon America by those WNBA-loving Democrats. No doubt there are some people impressed by all the workout videos posted by MAGA leaders, though that audience probably doesn’t have much crossover with people who get second dates. But what all the chest-thumping and push-up contests of the right really communicates is overcompensation rather than reclaiming some “lost” masculinity.
Beneath the right’s meltdown over Ossoff’s relatively tame comment about Harp was a molten layer of male insecurity. Steven Cheung, the volatile White House communications director, tweeted, “Jon Jackoff has to be the biggest cuck loser in politics.” White House spokesman David Ingle called the senator a “cringeworthy, feminine theatre kid.” Both unwisely lobbed these insults from X accounts featuring photos of themselves. The handy comparison left the observer to contemplate how, with MAGA, it’s typically true that every accusation is itself a confession. Similarly, Trump compared Ossoff to Pee-wee Herman, a reference to a film that is older than the senator and only served to underscore how old and out of touch the president is.
MAGA’s belief that masculinity is on the decline is more a reflection of their personal fears and resentments than an accurate picture of the world. Men who can just act normal continue to do fine, or as much as one can in this economy. As with many of the thirst-trap Democrats that are rising stars, including New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Michigan Senate hopeful Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a large part of Ossoff’s charm is that he possesses an easy masculinity, one comfortable with women’s equality. MAGA influencers may deny it, but men who actually like and respect women tend to be more attractive to women and gay men.
Being chill with women’s power projects confidence. Insecure men are the ones who demand that women are forced into subservient roles, just so men can feel bigger. It speaks to an internal belief that they can’t win without cheating. That’s loser energy, not the Big Dictionary Energy being given off by Ossoff and this new crop of young, vigorous Democratic men.
As Americans prepared to celebrate the nation’s 250th birthday on the morning of July 4, sobering images flashed across their phones and TV screens. Hundreds of masked men marched the streets of Washington carrying flags and chanting “Reclaim America!” It soon became clear from the logos on their identical baseball caps that the marchers were members of Patriot Front, a white nationalist group.
The march ended without incident. Still, it joined the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol – both of which culminated in deadly violence – as recent mass demonstrations with participants who openly embrace white nationalism. Members of a loosely organized movement that usually operates out of public view, white nationalists hold that shifting demographics pose an existential threat to the white race, which they view as culturally superior and deserving of power over other groups in the U.S.
Combined with the spread of white nationalist ideology from obscure corners of the internet into mainstream politics, these events have led many Americans to wonder: How extensive is white nationalism’s appeal among the broader public, and who is drawn to this extremist ideology?
We are political scientists who study political behavior, identity and social media. In recently published research in the scientific journal Nature, we offer some answers to these questions using national surveys we conducted with nearly 8,000 non-Hispanic white Americans from 2021 to 2025.
Asking Americans about white nationalism
We expected many Americans would be unfamiliar with the term “white nationalism,” so we defined it for survey respondents with a brief statement covering the movement’s major tenets: the purported need to maintain a white majority in the U.S., claims about the superiority of white culture, and calls for white people to hold more political and economic power than other groups. We measured endorsement of the movement’s ideology, not participation in the movement itself or approval of its tactics.
We randomly varied whether respondents saw the description before or after we asked whether they supported the white nationalist movement. Overall, nearly 5% of white adults – about 1 in 20 – said they did.
Those asked the question before seeing the description were less likely to express support at first, but their reported support rose after they read it. Along with several tests for possible response bias, this suggests that 5% is a reasonable lower-bound estimate of the true level of support.
Whether 1 in 20 white adults is a high or low number is a matter of interpretation. For context, it’s roughly the same as the share of American adults who identify as vegetarian or vegan.
Young white men
A number that jumped out to us was the share of white men under age 30 who support white nationalism: just over 13%, or about 1 in 7. This was more than twice the level of support for white nationalism among women in this age group: 6%. Endorsement of white nationalism among men significantly declined by age: Only 2% of white men age 65 and over registered support.
Our discovery that white men born before the passage of the Civil Rights Act were more likely to reject white nationalism than those coming of age today may come as a surprise, as younger white Americans typically hold more tolerant views on racial matters than their elders. But young men have long been overrepresented in extremist groups, and white nationalism’s grievance narrative may resonate for young white men today as they fall behind previous generations of men on key indicators like finishing college, starting careers and forming families, as well as on their overall health.
Online life
Another key predictor of support: online social life that crowds out offline relationships. We asked respondents to call to mind their three best friends and then to tell us whether each friend was known only offline, only online or both.
We found that the more best friends known only online, the stronger one’s support for white nationalism. The internet and particularly social media are channels through which people may be exposed to white nationalist content. They are also places where alienated people may turn for the human connections they lack offline.
Interestingly, we did not find a general relationship between more social media use and more support for white nationalism. So while online life appears to be related to support for white nationalism, what matters in our findings is not how much people use social media, but whether their closest friends are known only online.
Individual and social strain
Strain, whether defined as undergoing personal difficulties or being exposed to wider social distress, is also a strong predictor of support for white nationalism. We asked respondents whether they had suffered from specific hardships over the past year, including the death of a loved one, losing a job, being the victim of a crime or getting divorced. Respondents experiencing more of these adversities were more likely to endorse white nationalism.
Social strain in the counties where respondents live – such as poverty, unemployment and population loss – emerged as another strong predictor of support for white nationalism, as did countywide rates of “deaths of despair,” which include suicide and deaths associated with drug and alcohol use. In other words, support for white nationalism was higher among people living in more distressed or economically depressed places.
We found in our research that white Democrats and liberals are significantly less likely to endorse white nationalism than white Republicans and conservatives. However, we also found high levels of support among those who were unsure of their ideology or partisanship, suggesting a potential untapped reservoir of political support for white nationalist ideas.
In our view, those who seek to understand and address this critical development in American public life must reckon with the broad structural shifts that have reshaped Americans’ identities, social relations and sense of economic security and that undergird white nationalism’s appeal to the broader public.
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