In the year the United States celebrates the 250th anniversary of its break with the British crown, there is something almost painfully ironic about a broadcaster from the kingdom that once ruled us now being more willing to stand up to Donald Trump than much of the American establishment. But the irony isn’t really the story. The story is that the president filed a $10 billion lawsuit to punish the BBC, and in doing so, he may have handed the corporation a legal instrument to drag his children Ivanka and Donald Jr., and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, into a Miami courtroom to answer for what happened on Jan. 6.
The lawsuit was supposed to be another exercise in the familiar Trumpian playbook: File a claim, demand an astronomical sum, bury the target in legal expenses, force a humiliating settlement that gets marketed as a political win. That strategy has worked before. In 2024, ABC News agreed to pay $15 million after network anchor George Stephanopoulos inaccurately said Trump had been found liable for rape. Paramount later paid more than $24 million over CBS News’ handling of an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris that took place during the 2024 presidential race. With that track record, Trump had every reason to expect the BBC to fold in the same way.
He miscalculated badly. As a public service corporation, the BBC operates under a royal charter that explicitly bars it from entering into out-of-court financial settlements to make litigation disappear. It cannot cut a check to sweep away Trump’s claims. The corporation is legally bound to fight until a verdict is reached — or until Trump himself gives up. And its defense team, anchored by the First Amendment firm Ballard Spahr, has used that obligation to go straight at the people closest to Trump on Jan. 6.
The underlying claim concerns a 2024 documentary about Trump’s candidacy that aired on “Panorama” — the same program that aired the former Prince Andrew’s toe-curling interview with Emily Maitlis about his alleged abuse of the late Virginia Roberts Giuffre and connections to Jeffrey Epstein. Titled “Trump, A Second Chance?”, the program edited together separate portions of Trump’s Jan. 6 speech so that it sounded as though he said, in immediate sequence, “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you,” followed by “we fight, we fight like hell.” Those lines were actually spoken nearly an hour apart, and the BBC has apologized for how the edit was constructed. But the corporation has not apologized for the underlying accusation — because the documentary’s producers and the BBC’s lawyers believe it is true. The BBC has also noted the documentary never aired in the U.S., including in Florida, which creates its own problem for Trump’s attempt to establish the legal connection between the broadcast and the injury he claims to have suffered.
But the discovery fight is where this stopped being a media dispute and became a family liability. Because the entire defamation claim hinges on Trump’s intent — on what he meant by the phrase “fight like hell” — the BBC’s lawyers moved to subpoena the people who helped draft that speech and who were closest to him as the Capitol riot unfolded. On Aug. 14, the BBC asked a federal court in Miami for permission to compel testimony and records from Kushner, Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump Jr. and Kushner concerning the drafting and meaning of the speech.
According to the BBC’s own filings, Donald Jr. and Ivanka were in the room while the speech was being revised and were present when it was delivered. Kushner drafted a statement condemning the Capitol violence that the White House never issued. He also reportedly told then-chief of staff Mark Meadows the situation was “getting really ugly” as it unfolded, while Trump Jr. texted Meadows begging him to get his father to “condemn this” immediately.
These are not neutral bystanders being swept into a media spat. They are three people who watched the fire get lit and, by their own contemporaneous words, knew exactly what was burning.
These are not neutral bystanders being swept into a media spat. They are three people who watched the fire get lit and, by their own contemporaneous words, knew exactly what was burning. And if the case proceeds, they may have to say so under oath.
Trump’s own conduct made this exposure worse. The BBC also sought his financial records to test the legitimacy of the massive damages he claimed to have suffered — a maneuver that prompted him to quietly abandon his monetary claims rather than open his ledgers to public scrutiny. His lawyers had previously dismissed the request as a “fishing expedition.” But this is how discovery works: If you claim a broadcast inflicted extraordinary economic harm, the defendant gets to test that claim. Trump built the case that now threatens to expose his own children and son-in-law, and he built it because he assumed no one would ever call his bluff.
But the most revealing part of the BBC’s filing isn’t the subpoenas themselves — it’s the account of what happened when the network tried to serve them. Process servers attempting to deliver subpoenas to Ivanka and Kushner at their fortified Miami residence in May were physically blocked by local law enforcement, who directed them to coordinate through the Secret Service. When the BBC’s legal team did exactly that, Secret Service counsel Troy Epstein flatly declared the agency was neither authorized to accept service on the family’s behalf nor willing to help facilitate it. The BBC says it also could not serve Trump Jr. at Trump Tower. It has now asked the court for permission to use alternative methods — email or certified mail — because the ordinary machinery of American process service has been quietly closed off by a federal agency to a foreign broadcaster trying to hold the president’s family accountable.
That is the part of this story that should trouble people well beyond press freedom circles. Taxpayer-funded federal security agencies are being used as a private shield for a political dynasty, deployed to physically block the basic mechanics of a civil lawsuit that Trump himself initiated. It echoes the darker pattern already established around this family and this date — the Secret Service’s unexplained failure to preserve text messages and call logs from around Jan. 6, and allegations that agents played a role in intimidating witnesses like former Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson before her explosive congressional testimony. A protective detail meant to keep the first family safe is being repurposed to keep it unaccountable.
Trump has responded predictably, complaining that the BBC is “abusing the deposition process.” His projection is transparent. Nobody dragged his family into this. He is the plaintiff. He asked for $10 billion. He put his own reputation, his financial losses and the meaning of his own speech at the center of a case he chose to bring, and in doing so he opened the door to exactly the kind of scrutiny now aimed at Ivanka, Donald Jr. and Kushner. A defendant testing the plaintiff’s claims isn’t harassment. It’s the legal process working according to centuries of jurisprudence — just as the president intended.
None of this guarantees the subpoenas will be enforced, or that Ivanka, Donald Jr. or Kushner will ever sit for testimony. The court could still limit the subpoena’s scope, and the family’s lawyers will fight the serving of them on every available ground. But the posture itself matters.
While the BBC absorbs real financial strain from international litigation against a sitting American president, it has refused to play the domestic game of corporate capitulation that has defined how ABC, CBS and so many other news outlets have handled Trump’s legal threats. It punched back in the fight Trump started and pushed it toward the people who were actually in the room on Jan. 6 — the same people the taxpayer-funded Secret Service is now, apparently, working to keep out of reach.
If I see one more headline announcing that Gen Z has killed alcohol, I might just order another drink.
According to the internet, my generation doesn’t go to bars anymore. We don’t party. We don’t date. We’re all sitting at home sipping adaptogenic mushroom tonics, journaling our feelings and politely declining invitations to any event after 7 p.m. because we’d rather optimize our sleep scores than take a tequila shot.
There’s just one problem: I have absolutely no idea who these people are.
I was born in 2001, making me squarely Gen Z. My friends split bottles of wine over dinner. Our birthday party of choice is a bar crawl to our favorite hot spots. We can always be convinced to order another round of G&Ts with just a glance at each other. On any given Friday night, the restaurants around me are full of twenty-somethings lingering over drinks long after they’ve paid the check. Or getting in UberXLs to the night’s secondary location (i.e. the local dive bar). Even the sober Gen Zers I know still go out — they’ve just swapped negronis for mocktails.
So after reading what felt like the hundredth article declaring that my generation had abandoned alcohol, nightlife and socializing altogether, I started wondering whether I was missing something.
The statistics behind those stories are real: Younger adults are drinking less than previous generations did at the same age. But somewhere between “Gen Z drinks somewhat less” and “Gen Z is killing the bar industry,” something strange happened. A modest shift in consumer behavior hardened into a cultural stereotype. I wanted to understand what got lost in that translation.
I’m not questioning the data or trying to argue that the numbers are wrong. I’m questioning the story we’ve built around them. And if there’s one person who has spent more time thinking about that disconnect than almost anyone else, it’s Dave Infante.
The Kernel of Truth
Infante, who covers the beverage alcohol industry in his newsletter “Fingers,” has watched that distortion happen in real time. A few years ago, while reporting for VinePair, he interviewed roughly a dozen college students for a series on “the state of the modern keg party.” His findings weren’t especially dramatic.
Keg parties still existed. Students still drank. But packaged beverages — hard seltzers, canned cocktails and drinks like High Noon — were beginning to replace the giant communal keg that had become shorthand for college drinking culture.
At almost the exact same moment, another drinking trend exploded across the internet: BORGs, or “blackout rage gallons,” the customized gallon jugs of vodka, water, electrolytes and flavoring that briefly inspired a miniature moral panic in national media.
If you only followed the headlines, it was difficult to reconcile the two dominant narratives about Gen Z. Depending on the week, we were either frighteningly reckless or hopelessly boring.
Infante remembers watching that contradiction play out in real time.
“If anything,” he told me, “the story is maybe that youth were more interested in customizing the amount of alcohol they were drinking and the flavors they were drinking — or not drinking at all.”
Drinking differently is not the same thing as not drinking.
Infante has a phrase he likes to use when talking about stories like these.
“There’s usually a kernel of truth,” he said. Then that truth gets “wrenched through this…assembly line,” until what comes out on the other side barely resembles where it started.
That’s exactly what seems to have happened here. The original claim — that younger adults, on average, consume somewhat less alcohol than previous generations at the same age — is supported by plenty of evidence. But that’s not the story most people have absorbed.
Instead, we’ve somehow arrived at a version where Gen Z has collectively decided drinking isn’t fun anymore, bars are empty because nobody under 30 leaves the house and nightlife itself is quietly dying. Those are much bigger claims, and they’re far harder to prove.
Alcohol consumption statistics tell us how much alcohol people consume. They don’t tell us how often young adults see their friends. They don’t tell us whether restaurants are full, whether people are dating, whether house parties have disappeared or whether social life has migrated somewhere else entirely.
Every generation seems to inherit one cultural panic after another.
That pattern is something Corey Seemiller has spent years watching unfold.
Seemiller, a professor and one of the leading researchers of Gen Z, sees the pattern as generationally predictable. “Every generation gets blamed for everything,” she said.
When Baby Boomers were young, they were reckless. When millennials came along, they were entitled. Now Gen Z has become simultaneously too online, too anxious, too health-conscious, too antisocial and, apparently, too sober.
The labels shift depending on what’s happening in the broader culture.
Alcohol consumption statistics tell us how much alcohol people consume. They don’t tell us how often young adults see their friends. They don’t tell us whether restaurants are full, whether people are dating, whether house parties have disappeared or whether social life has migrated somewhere else entirely.
What doesn’t change is our impulse to explain complicated social and economic changes by assigning a personality to an entire generation.
Because the more Seemiller studies Gen Z, the more she finds a generation responding rationally to the world it inherited — not inventing entirely new values out of thin air.
Take socializing.
One of the most common assumptions underpinning the “Gen Z doesn’t drink” narrative is that young adults simply don’t want to go out anymore. Seemiller doesn’t buy that. Instead, she thinks we’re asking the wrong question.
Instead of asking whether Gen Z drinks less, she suggests: What does social life actually look like now?
“There are a lot of things that are going on all simultaneously,” she told me. Yes, the research consistently finds that Gen Z drinks less than previous generations. But that’s only one piece of a much bigger puzzle. “If they were to drink,” she said, “where are they drinking? Are they going to the grocery store and buying something and drinking at a gathering, or are they going to a bar?”
For decades, the bar occupied an almost uncontested position in American social life. It was where coworkers met after work, where first dates happened, where birthdays spilled into the early morning and where twenty-somethings figured out adulthood over cheap pitchers of beer. Going out and drinking were so tightly intertwined that they became almost interchangeable in the American imagination.
But Seemiller argues that’s no longer the landscape Gen Z inhabits.
Bars today aren’t simply competing with the bar down the street.
“They’re competing with boba tea houses,” she said. “They’re competing with coffee houses. They’re competing with thrift stores. They’re competing with a local park where you can just go sit down and talk to your friends.”
If you meet a friend for an overpriced matcha instead of an overpriced IPA, are you less social? If you spend three hours catching up over dinner instead of hopping between bars, are you participating less in nightlife? If you host friends at your apartment because no one wants to spend $90 before the Uber ride home, have you somehow opted out of social life altogether?
Or have the rituals simply changed?
Those questions kept resurfacing throughout my reporting, particularly when I stopped talking to experts and started talking to people my own age.
One of the first things I noticed was that almost nobody — drinkers or nondrinkers — recognized themselves in the version of Gen Z they’d been reading about.
Miranda Ferrante certainly didn’t.
Ferrante stopped drinking in July 2024 after alcohol began exacerbating her anxiety, stomach issues and sleep problems. The decision wasn’t part of some grand wellness movement. It wasn’t driven by social media. It was simply a realization that drinking no longer made her feel the way she wanted to feel.
But giving up alcohol didn’t mean giving up the rest of her life.
When I asked whether headlines about Gen Z “killing alcohol” felt accurate, she didn’t hesitate.
“No, sober does not mean ‘not fun,’” she said.
She still goes out with friends. She still celebrates birthdays at restaurants. She still orders drinks — just without alcohol. Her friends make a point of choosing places with thoughtful mocktail menus and are quick to point out alcohol-free options when they’re available.
“I think we are changing the definition of what socialization means,” she told me. “I don’t think drinking or not drinking alcohol should have any impact on the definition of socialization.”
We’ve spent years treating alcohol as a proxy for social connection. Drink less, socialize less. Order fewer beers, have fewer friends. But those equations only work if alcohol is still the primary reason people gather in the first place.
The more people I interviewed, the less convinced I became that it is.
Gabi Bradbury, who has been sober for three years, described much the same life: bars, concerts, festivals and nights out with friends, only without alcohol in her glass. “Why do we need to drink to have fun?” she asked.
Neither spoke like someone opting out of social life. If anything, both described becoming more intentional about it.
That word — intentional — came up so often during my interviews that I eventually started circling it in my notebook.
Intentional about drinking. Intentional about friendships. And then Dave Infante gave me a much more practical explanation.
Money.
The $20 Cocktail
“I think that’s a huge part of it,” Infante said when I asked how much economics has shaped the narrative around Gen Z and alcohol. “I don’t think that’s the whole piece… but I certainly think that’s a substantial piece of the puzzle.”
“We are very much squarely in the era of the $20 cocktail,” he said. “$10 beer. $18 glass of wine.”
Infante pointed me toward research by Rabobank senior beverage analyst Bourcard Nesin that complicates one of the most common assumptions about Gen Z drinking habits. Younger adults are spending roughly the same share of their income on alcohol as previous generations did — but in raw dollars, they’re spending dramatically less.
If Gen Z is earning less while simultaneously facing higher housing costs, higher grocery bills and more expensive drinks, declining alcohol purchases start looking a lot less like a cultural rejection of drinking and a lot more like basic math.
“If you boil it down like that,” Infante said, “the intuitive idea that, ‘Oh, zoomers just don’t want to drink,’ becomes very hard to defend.”
I’m hard-pressed to think of a single friend who’s ever said, “I’m not going out because I don’t believe in alcohol anymore.” I can think of dozens who’ve said, “I can’t justify spending $75 tonight.”
Those are not the same conversation, and yet we keep treating them as if they are.
“Young adults respond rationally to inflation and stagnant wages” doesn’t inspire quite the same existential panic as “Gen Z killed nightlife,” but it’s probably closer to the truth.
Infante sees that framing play out even inside the alcohol industry. As part of his reporting, he regularly listens to corporate earnings calls and began noticing a pattern: When publicly traded alcohol companies missed sales targets, executives often reached for the same explanation.
“Guess who’s to blame?” he said. “It’s those darn kids.”
Blaming a mysterious generation that simply doesn’t like alcohol is a much easier story than confronting rising prices, changing consumer behavior or whether people still feel they’re getting enough value from a night out.
“There’s this very strange frame that happens,” Infante said, “whether it was millennials with the avocado toast, or it’s zoomers who are too into weed gummies to do alcohol.”
The implication is always the same: If only young people behaved differently, the industry would be fine.
“But ultimately,” he continued, “that is not a zoomer problem. That’s a beverage alcohol firm problem.”
Consumers don’t owe industries their loyalty. If restaurants, breweries or liquor companies want people to spend money, they have to convince them the experience is worth the cost.
Some bars, Infante noted, are already experimenting with lower-priced cocktails and expanded happy hours after discovering there may simply be a ceiling to what customers will pay for a drink.
But price is only part of what has changed.
“That is not a zoomer problem. That’s a beverage alcohol firm problem.”
Longtime drinks writers Caroline Pardilla and Esther Tseng, who both started covering bars in the early 2000s, remember a pre-COVID nightlife landscape with later hours, more clubs and fewer alternatives competing for young people’s time.
Pardilla remembers bar hopping as a routine weekend activity.
“It was just what our idea of fun was,” she said. “You’re just being social and it made you feel good and you kind of loosened up and everything.”
Tseng remembers going to coffee shops at 10 p.m. and blogging into the early hours of the morning.
“What coffee shop do you know is open that long anymore?” she asked.
It’s a small question that points toward a much larger shift. People talk about Gen Z as though young adults collectively decided to stop going out, when the physical infrastructure of going out has changed around them.
“There were a lot of clubs,” Tseng said. “Stuff used to be open a lot later. People drank a lot more back then, and especially leading up to the pandemic, the hours just kept getting cut shorter.”
Restaurants changed. Hospitality changed. Consumers changed. Even years later, many cities still haven’t fully returned to the schedules they kept before 2020.
If last call happens earlier, if restaurants close sooner and if people got used to gathering in smaller groups during lockdown, of course the texture of nightlife is going to look different than it did in 2018.
That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s disappearing. It may simply be evolving into something else.
The Gen Z Era
When people describe Gen Z as uninterested in going out, I wonder what exactly they’re looking at. Because I don’t see empty nightlife.
I see neighborhood wine bars packed over one bottle, sold-out tastings and cocktail bars where people wait an hour for a seat. The drink still matters, but increasingly it’s part of something larger: the room, the menu, the DJ, the conversation.
If previous generations often went to bars because that’s simply where people went, Gen Z seems more likely to ask a different question first.
Is this worth leaving the house for?
Infante sees that selectiveness reflected in the marketplace.
“The motive is a little different,” he told me. “Zoomer’s interest is less driven by conspicuous consumption than seeking out specific experiences.”
When older generations describe Gen Z as drinking less, they often seem to hear less interested. But those aren’t synonymous. If anything, many of the Gen Z drinkers I interviewed sounded intensely interested in food, wine, cocktails and hospitality. They just weren’t interested in drinking indiscriminately.
Part of the reason that distinction gets lost may be simple nostalgia.
Corey Seemiller told me every generation tends to romanticize the version of young adulthood it experienced while quietly forgetting the parts that weren’t so glamorous.
If you survived the reckless decisions, cheap beer and late nights and emerged with nothing worse than embarrassing stories, those stories become legends. The hangovers and genuinely bad decisions tend not to make the highlight reel.
Martin confirmed that alcohol really was more central to American social life.
“In terms of sociability, in terms of work cultures, it has been really central to sociability, particularly for men, and increasingly in the 20th century, I think, for women as well,” he said.
Drinking also functioned as a rite of passage, particularly as young adults reached legal drinking age.
But the social world surrounding that drinking was different, too.
“Our society has become much more of a surveillance society,” Martin said. Young people know that if photos or videos of a drunken night end up online, a future employer — or several million strangers — may eventually see them.
It’s one thing to wake up with a hangover. It’s another to wake up viral.
Add pandemic adolescence, expensive housing and stagnant wages, and different choices begin to look less mysterious than inevitable.
Martin described Gen Z as one of the first generations in recent memory to come of age facing markedly tighter economic circumstances.
“They’re just not going to do as well as their parents,” he said. Entry-level jobs pay relatively little, job security is tenuous and the math of going out matters. “If you’re going out and ordering those five drinks, some other bill is not getting paid, and that’s not sustainable.”
We often compare Gen Z’s present to older generations’ memories instead of their reality. That’s an impossible standard to meet.
“For younger people, they’re no longer living in the same kind of possibility that the older generations had,” Martin said. “I think they probably feel that the older generations just simply do not understand that, and perhaps they’re right, perhaps they don’t.”
In many ways, Seemiller told me, it’s more useful to think about the “Gen Z era” than Gen Z itself.
“Gen Z” implies something intrinsic about the people. “The Gen Z era” shifts the focus to the world surrounding them.
This is a generation that entered adulthood during a global pandemic after spending formative years online. We’re navigating historically expensive housing, student debt, inflation, stagnant entry-level wages and a social landscape with more entertainment options than previous generations had.
Spend ten minutes on TikTok and you’ll find creators dissecting natural wines, comparing probiotic sodas, reviewing coffee shops, ranking matcha cafés, explaining amaro, making elaborate cocktails and debating whether dirty martinis have finally replaced Aperol spritzes as the drink of the summer.
The curiosity is still there. It’s simply spread across a much wider landscape than alcohol alone.
When Pardilla was younger, drinking was simply folded into what being social looked like.
“Drinking was a sign of maturity, right?” she said. “That’s why a lot of college kids got wasted because you’re like, I’m able to drink now and you kind of go overboard.”
She thinks that idea has changed.
“I think [Gen Z] can be more selective and they have that opportunity to be more selective,” she said. “They’re more aware of the non-alcoholic options, so it’s not so much the getting wasted, but it’s more just having fun, not necessarily boozy fun. They’re just doing it for themselves.”
There have always been people who drank sparingly or didn’t drink at all. What’s changed, Pardilla said, is how visible and socially acceptable those choices have become.
Bars have responded. Many now treat their nonalcoholic menus not as an afterthought but as another place to show creativity.
“A lot of bars I’ve spoken to, they’re thinking very thoughtfully about how to create non-alcoholic cocktails that have a backbone,” Tseng said. “That have complex flavor profiles, that are not just juice and a splash of soda or a lime or something.”
“A lot of bars I’ve spoken to, they’re thinking very thoughtfully about how to create non-alcoholic cocktails that have a backbone. That have complex flavor profiles, that are not just juice and a splash of soda or a lime or something.”
I went down an Instagram rabbit hole looking at the work of Austin Hennelly at Kato, a Michelin-starred restaurant whose nonalcoholic drinks include things like a green strawberry daiquiri built with floral aperitif, wildflower honey, whey, oro blanco and lime.
Looking at it, I understood immediately why someone might happily pay cocktail prices for a drink without alcohol.
On the other hand, if your $16 “mocktail” is lemonade with soda and some mint leaves, we need to have a conversation.
Inside the beverage industry, Infante says one of the biggest misconceptions surrounding the explosion of nonalcoholic drinks is that they’re replacing alcohol altogether.
“The biggest buyer of non-alcoholic beverages,” he said, “are people who are drinkers.”
In other words, the people ordering N/A beer, spirit-free cocktails and alcohol-free sparkling wine are often the exact same people ordering IPAs, martinis and Champagne on different occasions.
They’re not abandoning one category. They’re moving fluidly between them.
Infante likes using a word coined by journalist H.L. Mencken nearly a century ago: omnibibulousness.
It essentially means someone who will drink anything: beer, wine, cocktails, coffee, sparkling water, nonalcoholic beer. Whatever fits the moment.
The modern beverage landscape has never offered more options, and consumers are responding accordingly. That isn’t evidence of alcohol’s demise. It’s evidence of abundance.
Gen Z isn’t refusing to socialize. We’re choosing among more ways to do it than previous generations had available.
Sometimes we’re drinking less because cocktails cost $22. Sometimes we’re alternating between alcoholic and nonalcoholic drinks, prioritizing food over booze, training for a marathon or simply staying home because rent is due next week.
The data tells us what changed. The reporting tells us why.
Those aren’t the decisions of a joyless generation. They’re the decisions of people living in 2026.
Every summer, conservative television hosts and influencers suddenly discover women’s professional basketball, which they insist they don’t care about, and then they spend weeks explaining why it’s one of society’s greatest ills. This year, just like last, their attempts to turn the WNBA into a proxy war for cultural grievances is failing because it’s not really about the league.
It is a content farm built using Caitlin Clark, her Indiana Fever teammate Sophie Cunningham and a nonexistent transgender player controversy to conceal old grievances about race and gender. But despite the attempts to sully the WNBA brand, the league is thriving — and the whole spectacle is now backfiring in ways even the people profiting from it can no longer hide.
The right has attacked the WNBA since at least Brittney Griner’s 2022 imprisonment in Russia. In 2025, the Onion ran a spoof headline imagining the State Department designating the league a terrorist organization. It was funny because it wasn’t that far off from how conservative media actually treats the WNBA until football arrives to distract them.
Fox built out what it called a “hard contact timeline” for Clark, who is white in a league where 70% of the players are Black. This helped lay the groundwork for MAGA media’s narrative: that the WNBA is being handed a gift by a white star, and it is responding with ingratitude.
For three seasons, Clark has been the perfect vessel for this project. The former Iowa superstar entered the WNBA as the all-time leading scorer in women’s Division I basketball, and she arrived in Indianapolis with a massive audience already attached to her. That made her an irresistible figure for a right-wing media ecosystem constantly searching for a new culture war protagonist. Fox built out what it called a “hard contact timeline” for Clark, who is white in a league where 70% of the players are Black. This helped lay the groundwork for MAGA media’s narrative: that the WNBA is being handed a gift by a white star, and it is responding with ingratitude.
This year they have taken that myth further than ever, and Media Matters for America put a number on exactly how far. Since June 25, when Phoenix Mercury forward Alyssa Thomas, who is Black, picked up a flagrant foul on Clark, Fox News has aired at least 206 segments and devoted more than 13 and a half hours of programming to the WNBA, sprawled across “The Five,” “The Ingraham Angle,” “Hannity” and “Gutfeld!” More than eight of those hours, according to the analysis, have gone specifically to relitigating the issue of trans athletes in a league that has none.
This inconvenient reality has turned the right-wing media circus into an absurd performance art piece. Pundits have resorted to inventing entirely fictional scenarios to keep their audiences angry. Outkick founder Clay Travis offered to bankroll a completely fake expansion team in Nashville just to stock it with a 100% transgender roster. Cunningham’s comments in an interview with ESPN opposing trans inclusion in women’s sports gave this machinery another opening. Fox’s coverage pivoted from hard fouls to trans panic, Clark got dragged into a fight she has spent three years trying to avoid and Cunningham’s follower count exploded. Former NBA players like Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White are now engaged in publicity stunts declaring themselves eligible for future drafts under the cynical guise of identifying as women.
The wall-to-wall outrage manufactured by Fox News and its allies has even appeared to tire the network’s host Jesse Watters, who is no stranger to being aggrieved by so-called wokeness. “This is week three of ‘The Five’ covering the WNBA,” he recently complained, “and I have to say, I’m done.”
The on-the-ground consequences have not been abstract. When the Fever traveled to play Seattle Storm, two teenage fans wore shirts referencing XX and XY chromosomes and carried a sign thanking Cunningham for “speaking up for girls.” Storm co-owner Celeste Keaton confronted them, allegedly cursing at the girls and calling them “insane,” conduct serious enough that the league fined and suspended her for five home games, an extraordinarily rare disciplinary step against a team owner. The Storm apologized. Cunningham called Keaton’s behavior “truly embarrassing” while also attempting to distance herself from her previous anti-trans comments, stressing that trans women, trans men and everyone else are welcome “at her table.” Fox News Digital and Outkick turned the two teenagers into viral martyrs, while British novelist and anti-trans activist J.K. Rowling pronounced them “heroines” to her tens of millions of social media followers. Independent activist Jennifer Sey, whose XX-XY Athletics brand produced the shirts, and Riley Gaines, the former collegiate swimmer who has built a podcast career on her anti-LGBTQ+ advocacy and a fifth-place tie in a college championship, both showed up courtside for the Fever’s next game against the Minnesota Lynx.
Beneath the surface of the fabricated trans panic lies an even uglier dynamic driven by racial resentment and the commodification of Clark and Cunningham. Right-wing media outlets have tried desperately to cast Clark as a conservative culture war martyr, claiming she is the helpless victim of a mass conspiracy and anti-white racism orchestrated by her peers. President Donald Trump weighed in on Thomas’ foul on Clark, saying the Fever guard was “treated rather rough.” Newsmax host Greg Kelly said the league should have “the cops” show up and start making arrests over the common basketball foul. Eleven House Republicans led by Texas Rep. August Pfluger wrote to Commissioner Cathy Engelbert speculating that rough play against Clark “may be racially motivated” and threatening federal investigation. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, presiding over a state with no WNBA franchise, threatened to prosecute players for assault. On Fox News, the Federalist’s Brianna Lyman argued that “the bigger problem in the WNBA right now is anti-white racism,” while a recent Washington Examiner op-ed argued that “The WNBA has a black entitlement problem.”
Clark herself has repeatedly said she doesn’t want to be used this way, that harassment of any kind isn’t acceptable and that she stands with her Black colleagues in the league. It hasn’t mattered. Conservative commentators have attacked her from the other direction for refusing to take their side on trans athletes. The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh called her “the biggest coward in the history of sports.”
This is a classic MAGA media pattern: Elevate a woman as a brave truth-teller only until she exercises independent judgment. Fox News even tried to flip the whole thing on the left, writing in its Outkick vertical, “Now, they all want [Clark] to shut up and dribble.” The aggressive pushback against Black stars like Angel Reese and DiJonai Carrington, meanwhile, demonstrates that the conservative media apparatus views the surging popularity of women’s basketball primarily through a racialized lens.
And yet the plan is not working — at least not in the way its architects intended. Rather than capitulating to the relentless pressure from right-wing pundits and political actors, the broader WNBA community has mounted a fierce and inspiring defense of its players and values. The league issued strong statements making it abundantly clear that its players will not be used as political pawns for reactionary internet trolls. Fans have shown up waving Trans Pride flags. Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve wore a shirt reading “Trans kids belong” on an ESPN broadcast and told reporters plainly that “there is a faction of people in our country that are making this a massive issue.” Fans of the opposing Golden State Valkyries cheered Carrington’s return to Chase Center after the outrage over her Aug. 8 flagrant foul against Cunningham.
Meanwhile, the business the right claims to be so worried about keeps expanding, regardless of how loudly Fox tries to poison it. The league signed an 11-year media rights agreement — worth roughly $2 billion — with Disney, Amazon and NBC that took effect in 2025. Viewership was up 23% that season and ticket sales increased by 26%, and the new collective bargaining agreement ratified this spring raised the team salary cap from roughly $1.5 to $7 million, the largest single jump in the history of American professional sports labor, with players now guaranteed a real share of league revenue for the first time.
None of this happened because Fox News decided to help. It happened because millions of people, including plenty who have never watched a minute of Fox in their lives, decided the games were worth watching on their own terms.
Francesca Hong’s narrow loss in Tuesday’s Wisconsin Democratic primary for governor has been billed as a setback for progressives following a string of high-profile wins. A “stunning loss,” the New York Times proclaimed on Wednesday. POLITICO declared the democratic socialist’s defeat by David Crowley, a mainstream Democrat and the Milwaukee County executive, “is undercutting the narrative of an emerging insurgency.” Both publications agreed the result exposed “the limits of the left” and its power.
In fact, what the race revealed were the weaknesses and limitations of an ineffective candidate who would have almost certainly flamed out in the general election. Democrats across the political spectrum, and especially progressives, should all be breathing a sigh of relief at her defeat.
Hong had a compelling story. The child of South Korean immigrants, she has confronted the high cost of college — she was once forced to drop out to find work — and has experienced financial hardship. As a single mother and service-industry worker, Hong carries relatable and valuable lived experience that is often missing from the halls of state and federal government.
The problem was that the 37-year-old assemblywoman couldn’t quite manage to assemble a compelling narrative from all those memorable, resonant elements. At nearly every turn, she allowed herself to be defined: as a well intentioned candidate with some wacky views (“Abolish the Senate,” anyone?); as a provocateur who, to quote one Wisconsin voter, was “sort of inviting some controversies”; as being, in the words of the Wisconsin Elections Commission’s Democratic chair, “willing to sell out the Jews of Wisconsin for a few bucks”; as the contender most likely to prevail in a primary that sometimes seemed like a Marx Brothers comedy, with candidates dropping out of (and, in the case of Crowley, reentering) the race according to shifting fortunes.
Hong was never fully in control of her own narrative. By the end, and by her own hand, she was reduced to being a joyless hater of holidays and an avowed enemy of All Things Fun.
Her interviews didn’t help. While Hong described herself as a “hustler” in a July interview with MS NOW’s Antonia Hylton, the energy she gave off was anything but. She appeared out of her element, far too hesitant even in the friendly environment afforded by the liberal-oriented network, and her performance set the stage for a test she was bound to fail when it came three weeks later. In an appearance on Fox News, Hong withered under host Dana Perino’s questioning about how much her views aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America platform and her provocative social media history, which included calls to “[d]efund then abolish” the police.
Worse were Hong’s attempts to confront her apparent antipathy toward holidays including Thanksgiving, Valentine’s Day, Fourth of July and even Halloween that appeared on her unscrubbed X account. Asked by CNN’s Kaitlan Collins about her Nov. 16, 2020, call to “cancel Thanksgiving,” Hong passed up the chance to disavow the tweet and instead talked about how she cooked a Thanksgiving meal at 16. Two days later, she told POLITICO’s Irie Sentner that it was her “favorite holiday” while admitting, “I’m kind of a curmudgeon when it comes to holidays in general.”
Hong might as well have changed her campaign slogan to I HATE FUN. It’s a tale as old as Dickens: No one likes a Scrooge.
Hong might as well have changed her campaign slogan to I HATE FUN. It’s a tale as old as Dickens: No one likes a Scrooge.
A more adept progressive, such as New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee, would have easily batted away the questions. Ocasio-Cortez, in fact, did just that during an appearance on ABC News’ “This Week” two days before the primary. When host Jonathan Karl asked her about Hong’s social media history and past positions, Ocasio-Cortez laughed it off.
“I have a local city councilman that has this saying that ‘Woke 1 was crazy,’” she said of Hong’s tweets, some of which came during the Covid-19 pandemic. “And I think that what’s important is that we have to assess what a candidate is saying now.” Describing some of the ideas raised during this time as useful, Ocasio-Cortez said, “during lockdown, of course — rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric that we would use today.”
The congresswoman’s response demonstrated an agility and awareness that Hong clearly lacks, something that was surely a factor in Ocasio-Cortez’s decision to not endorse her fellow democratic socialist. When asked by Karl, she said she was focused on “winning back the Congress, winning back the House and positioning ourselves to have the best chance possible to win the Senate.”
But the diss was notable — and shrewd. For the left to succeed, Ocasio-Cortez knows they must move beyond functioning as scolds. Dourness rarely plays well in politics, and it’s a particularly unbecoming quality in progressives, who can sometimes come off as humorless. The most electable progressives are instead happy warriors, a quality Ocasio-Cortez and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani have in spades.
Witness Madmani’s recent conversation with the New York Times’ Lulu Garcia-Navarro. In a telling exchange, Garcia-Navarro asked the mayor about traits that make a good politician, and then she pointed to his smile and innate optimism. He replied, “You are showing something to the world about who you are, what you’re for, how it makes you feel, and I think oftentimes it feels like politicians are blank canvasses, and everyone else is supposed to paint them in. I think it’s time to show people ‘This is whom I am. Maybe you don’t like it, maybe you do like it. But this is me.'”
Despite her efforts and compelling personal story, Francesca Hong allowed everyone else to paint her in, and had she prevailed in the primary, it would have likely doomed her in November. She was an imperfect messenger for the left, and instead of being a setback, her loss on Tuesday was a gift to progressives.
Amid weeks of compounding foreign policy failures and an economy that lost a revised 103,000 jobs across May and June, conservatives are grappling online with a brutal realization that the Republican Party as a whole is desperate to ignore: What do you tell working-class voters who are drowning under the weight of unrelenting inflation and sluggish job growth, when your entire economic platform is built on a foundation of gaslighting?
The GOP has spent the better part of the last decade telling Americans it is the party of economic populism. Donald Trump was supposed to be the politician who understood the frustration of people who felt left behind by globalization and stagnant wages. But 18 months into the president’s second term, Republicans have arrived at a remarkable place: running the Biden administrations’ failed playbook on inflation. Now conservatives are fighting with one another over whether a $20 burrito is actually too expensive.
The current food discourse is not about the price of avocado toast or organic eggs, but it is a similarly mundane symbol of a much larger problem confronting Trump and the Republican Party heading into the November midterms. It started, as these things do now, with a tweet.
Last week, Daily Wire host Matt Walsh complained that grocery prices were “insane” and still rising. Then Turning Point USA spokesman Andrew Kolvet relayed a comment from one of the organization’s college students: “A burrito shouldn’t cost $20.” Kolvet added his own gloss — that it’s “a hangover from Covid and Biden-era inflation” — but he noted that “the lived experience is the same: It just feels like basic things cost too much.”
Inflationary pressures on grocery prices and supply chains have caused the cost of a standard beef burrito to climb 50% since 2020. For workers at the 50th percentile — the middle class, in other words — wages have not kept pace with fast-food prices, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics price index for limited-service meals and snacks. Rather than reading the room, conservative politicians and pundits immediately rushed to echo the White House line that affordability concerns are a Democratic hoax, and then pivoted to calling young people lazy and irresponsible. This is a remix of the lecture supposedly spoiled millennials, who refused to sacrifice every small pleasure on the altar of homeownership, heard for years about $7 lattes.
In response to what he called the “burrito debate,” Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, told people to “get a job” and “eat Ramen.” Ben Shapiro responded as if the student had demanded that the federal government provide what he curiously described as gourmet burritos. Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen reminisced about working two jobs, living with roommates and eating ramen after college. When he reminded college students that burritos are covered by their meal plans, he got fat shamed by Vice President JD Vance. Fox Business blamed the commotion on young people and their supposed addiction to “little treats.”
What these responses revealed is that a large segment of right-wing media would rather lecture struggling families — cook at home, get a roommate, eat ramen, skip Starbucks — and condemn their lifestyles than acknowledge the obvious reality about out of control prices.
What these responses revealed is that a large segment of right-wing media would rather lecture struggling families — cook at home, get a roommate, eat ramen, skip Starbucks — and condemn their lifestyles than acknowledge the obvious reality about out of control prices. Babylon Bee editor Joel Berry generated a pile on after he suggested in a viral post that he could feed a family of eight for under $20, only to admit he was entirely skimping on meat and loading up on beans.
Trump has called affordability concerns a Democratic “con job” and “hoax,” and a meaningful chunk of MAGA media’s older guard will not, under any circumstances, hear a complaint about the cost of living. But by engaging in the burrito debate, many of them unintentionally exposed the fact that despite their comments on the youth, they have not actually spoken to a young person in years. The pushback they experienced from Trump’s younger supporters was swift — and remarkable.
Far-right activist and conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec questioned how Trump could claim this is a “Golden Age” with the disappearance of McDonald’s Dollar Menu. “Let’s be frank about it,” Fox News host Tomi Lahren wrote on X, “some Americans are turning to socialism because Republicans have failed us so dismally that even the most destructive economic model imaginable feels palatable to people who are struggling to make ends meet and buy groceries.”
Even as Trump’s own base was arguing about burritos, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent went on CNBC and announced he was “sick” of hearing about the so-called K-shaped economy, the idea that gains are flowing overwhelmingly to the wealthy while everyone else stagnates or falls behind, and declared it flatly over. In its place, Bessent said, America now has a “C economy,” in which lower wage earners are, in his telling, finally clawing their way back.
The secretary cited a 2% wage gain for the bottom quarter of earners as proof. But the Atlanta Fed’s own wage tracker showed the bottom quarter of earners had the lowest median wage growth of any income group, a pattern that has held every month since October 2024. Bessent, in other words, picked the one statistic that told a happy story and built a press appearance around it, while the broader data he was being asked about pointed the other way.
But if Chipotle has genuinely become a luxury good in just a couple of years, the administration’s economic policy is a complete and utter failure. A reliable indicator of economic health is real disposable income, which tracks how much extra money people actually have after essentials are paid for. Since February 2025, the month after Trump returned to office, it has remained completely flat. Every other time in modern history that real disposable income has flattened out for that long, the nation has been stuck in a recession.
Pocketbook issues have always been the single strongest motivator for the electorate. During a 1980 debate against the incumbent Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan famously asked voters if they were better off now than they were four years ago. Trump can obfuscate, lie or blame the media for only so long before even his most ardent supporters look at the empty space in their wallets after a trip to the grocery store and realize the truth. While they aren’t suddenly going to vote for Democrats, many of his MAGA followers will simply sit on their hands and stay home in November after concluding they are definitively worse off.
The split in MAGAland is not really over burritos. It is over whether MAGA can admit that the economic anger which carried Trump back to power was real, whether it persists under his administration and whether working people deserve anything better than a lecture on personal responsibility. The conservative scolds are not offering a solution because they do not believe there is a social problem to solve. In their worldview, a family’s shrinking purchasing power is primarily evidence of bad character.
The structural depression is looming large, and as the administration prepares to slash welfare programs further, the online rhetoric from the right will inevitably paint anyone hurt by safety net cuts as a lazy loser. Already, an estimated four million people have lost critical food assistance through SNAP benefits. In any normal political climate, mocking average Americans for being anxious about the economy by calling them lazy or entitled would be immediate political suicide. Imagine Republicans trying that stunt in August 2006 when they were already facing a brewing blue wave in November. But in today’s hyperpartisan and media-fragmented ecosystem, millions of voters are expected to fall in line and vote for the ruling party — regardless of how badly they are squeezed at the checkout counter.
Perhaps it is because I’ve been nursing a slight and recent obsession with zany detective movies of the 1960s — prompted by “The Pink Panther,” then by following the Peter Sellers trail to “A Shot in the Dark” and “After the Fox” — but when I first heard that President Donald Trump had reportedly escaped Turkey in an “airport catering cart,” the scene arrived in my mind already blocked and costumed: a white-tableclothed trolley, steered by a nervous waiter in a bow tie, perhaps topped with a silver cloche. Beneath the linens, taking care that his shoes did not give him away, Trump crouched while he was wheeled past a succession of unfriendly eyes, their owners somehow oblivious to the president concealed at knee height.
The reality was, of course, considerably less cinematic.
The cart was not really a cart at all, but a truck: a large white box fitted with a hydraulic lift, the sort of airport machinery designed to rise neatly to the door of an aircraft. No tablecloth. No cloche. No perspiring waiter trying to look casual. Trump could, essentially, simply walk inside.
And, according to reports, that is more or less what happened. The BBC described footage from July 8 showing Trump boarding the presidential jet at Ankara airport; according to the Washington Post, he was then secretly transferred, by way of an elevated catering truck positioned on the aircraft’s far side, to a smaller C-32A military plane — a modified Boeing 757 more commonly used by the vice president. The operation was reportedly prompted by an Iranian assassination threat.
The internet, however, wasn’t particularly interested in this version.
Within hours of the original Washington Post report, social media had begun supplying its own: AI-generated images of Trump hunched in a cramped compartment over a small mountain of McDonald’s hamburgers; jokes that the operation was going to require “a bigger catering cart”; and, in perhaps the fullest realization of the bit, a mock announcement that, for the president’s “food truck extraction operation,” a team of top operatives had been assembled, all uniquely suited to the task. The operatives were Chef Boyardee, Ronald McDonald, the Burger King and Colonel Sanders.
It is worth considering why this particular image struck such a chord. In another context, a president being quietly transferred between aircraft in a service vehicle might register as little more than a piece of security choreography — unusual, perhaps, but hardly ready-made for farce. Trump in a catering truck was different. For years, he has made food part of his political stagecraft: something to display, serve, pose beside and use as shorthand for abundance, familiarity and a particular vision of American life.
The exquisite comic reversal of the Turkey episode was that, this time, he was no longer directing the tableau. He had been swallowed by the scenery.
One image from Trump’s first presidency still looms especially large for me. In the middle of the 2019 government shutdown, he filled the White House State Dining Room with McDonald’s, Wendy’s and Burger King to celebrate Clemson’s national-championship football team, telling the players that he had ordered roughly a thousand hamburgers — “everything that I like, that you like.” The photographs were almost absurdly theatrical: silver serving pieces and candelabras, the gilt-and-cream grandeur of the White House, and, arrayed beneath it all, mountains of branded fast-food packaging. The incongruity was the point. Trump stood behind the spread as host and Quarter Pounder impresario.
Five years later, he took his relationship with McDonald’s a step further. During the 2024 campaign, Trump appeared at a franchise in Feasterville-Trevose, Pennsylvania, where the restaurant had been closed to regular customers for the occasion. Instead of bringing McDonald’s into his political theater, as he had at the White House, Trump stepped into McDonald’s theater: apron on, fries in hand, leaning through the drive-thru window. The staging was unusually literal. The restaurant had become a set, the counter a stage, and Trump had given himself a part.
Even the strange little culture war over Cracker Barrel’s logo found Trump acting as something like both dramaturg and producer. When the chain’s 2025 redesign set off a backlash, Trump urged the company to restore its old logo and immediately translated the controversy into the language of show business: Cracker Barrel, he wrote, had received “a Billion Dollars worth of free publicity” if it knew how to use it. “Make Cracker Barrel a WINNER again,” he advised. Restore the old set. Bring back the familiar character. Capitalize on the attention. Trump wasn’t merely offering an opinion about restaurant branding; he was giving notes.
The White House soon made the conceit almost embarrassingly literal. Its official X account posted a doctored version of the familiar Cracker Barrel logo in which Trump had replaced the old man beside the barrel. The barrel itself now read “America First”; beneath it: “America is back.” Trump had not simply inserted himself into a debate over the restaurant’s iconography. He had been cast inside it.
There is, of course, nothing inherently funny about a catering truck, much less about the security concerns that reportedly put Trump inside one. But political imagery is not entirely under the politician’s control. Spend enough years standing behind pyramids of hamburgers, posing at fry stations and inserting yourself into the iconography of American restaurant chains, and eventually the props begin to accrue meanings of their own. McDonald’s becomes not merely something Trump eats or campaigns beside, but part of the visual vocabulary through which people understand him.
Which may explain why, when news broke that Trump had been spirited between planes in a catering truck, the internet required almost no time to dress the scene. The hamburgers were already there. So were Ronald McDonald, Colonel Sanders and the Burger King. Trump has spent years directing the food theater. The catering truck was funny because, for once, he disappeared backstage.
The only thing missing, really, was my nervous waiter in the bow tie.
The spectacle of Laura Loomer touching down in a Kyiv bomb shelter to announce her sudden conversion to supporting Ukraine in its war against Russia has been covered by much of the media as a sort of a political awakening. In a series of recent interviews with America’s most prominent news outlets, the MAGA influencer and conspiracy theorist took a victory lap for discovering — nearly four-and-a-half years after Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine — that Vladimir Putin is a liar. But what looks to be a surprising shift away from Russia is not a moral reckoning. It is a petty turf war amongst MAGA media — and Ukraine stands to benefit.
Our unfortunate reality is that the shallow personal ambitions and petty feuds of MAGA influencers can dictate foreign policy. Loomer holds no elected office and possesses no genuine policy expertise, yet because she knows how to flatter the vulnerabilities of Donald Trump, she wields terrifying influence on the administration and its agenda. After years of parroting Kremlin talking points and even calling on Putin to swallow Ukraine whole, Loomer recently took a tour of Ukraine, arranged and paid for by unnamed handlers, and had an epiphany. She has suddenly rebranded herself as Kyiv’s most unlikely defender, telling the New York Times that Ukrainian officials now “view me as an extension of the Trump administration.” She recorded a glowing, highly produced interview with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the gardens of the presidential palace, dined with the chief rabbi of Ukraine and declared that she had been “bamboozled” by Russian propaganda.
“You don’t need to listen to a podcaster and let them influence your opinion about a country. You can look at those facts yourself,” she told the Associated Press, blaming American social media platforms for banning her in the aftermath of Trump’s 2020 election loss, which led her to try Telegram, where Russian media is widely shared. “The Russians are very good at capitalizing on people’s rage. And I was very angry.”
She elaborated six days later in an interview with NewsNation’s Batya Ungar-Sargon: “I really have come to understand that everything that I was led to believe while living in this echo chamber, a very toxic echo chamber, that is supported by foreign governments.
The old MAGA formula — distrust Ukraine, NATO and GOP hawks, and view Putin as a potentially useful counterweight to American liberalism — is colliding with a newer reality related to Trump’s ongoing and unpopular war of choice against Iran.
The whiplash is breathtaking, but it requires profound gullibility to take her transformation at face value. There is no ideological conversion here. Loomer’s evolution comes at precisely the moment when the Republican coalition is undergoing a bitter fight over what “America First” is supposed to mean. The old MAGA formula — distrust Ukraine, NATO and GOP hawks, and view Putin as a potentially useful counterweight to American liberalism — is colliding with a newer reality related to Trump’s ongoing and unpopular war of choice against Iran. Russia is increasingly difficult to portray as a friendly or even neutral power while it cooperates with the Islamic Republic. Ukraine’s resilience and effective drone campaigns, meanwhile, have made it impossible for even the most hardened cynics to paint Moscow as the inevitable victor.
Loomer’s reversal is also inseparable from her rivalry with fellow podcasters Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Megyn Kelly and other right-wing media figures who have become increasingly hostile to Trump over Israel, Iran and the use of American military power. Loomer herself has said the right-wing split over Iran prompted her to reconsider Ukraine, and she claimed to have noticed that people she regarded as opponents of Trump were simultaneously advancing Russia-friendly arguments. Now she worries those pro-Russian voices inside the MAGA coalition have become “the biggest detriment to social cohesion” heading into what, by all credible predictions, will be a brutal midterm cycle for Republicans.
Owens’ decision to travel to Putin’s marquee conference in St. Petersburg and Carlson’s ongoing pushing of lines amplified directly by Russian state media have provided Loomer with a tactical opening. She realized that her online nemeses had cornered the market on reflexive Kremlin apologetics. By pivoting to a pro-Ukraine posture wrapped in the language of America First security investments, she’s weaponizing patriotism against her rivals while positioning herself as the true guardian of the movement’s ideological purity. This evolving narrative frames support for Ukraine not as an act of charity or foreign aid, but as a hard-headed business transaction, one Trump appears to have welcomed. He publicly endorsed her meeting with Zelenskyy, and Loomer has said she spoke twice with Trump while in Ukraine.
None of this happens in a vacuum. In September 2024, the Justice Department indicted two Russian state media employees for funneling nearly $10 million into Tenet Media, a Tennessee outfit whose talent roster included right-wing podcasters Tim Pool, Benny Johnson and Dave Rubin, all of whom produced content the indictment says was crafted to inflame American divisions and tilt coverage toward candidates the Kremlin found useful. Pool was allegedly pulling in a $100,000 an episode while insisting he had no idea where the cash originated, a claim that got considerably shakier once reporters noted he’d made major real estate purchases the same month Tenet launched. After Loomer arrived in Kyiv last month, Pool experienced his own conversion and posted that Ukraine had been “fighting for their very existence against an evil dictator” and hoped Trump would “lend their support.”
Republican voters have also been moving in this direction. In January 2026, Pew Research Center found that 47% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents described Russia as an enemy of the U.S, up from 40% the year before. Republican confidence in Zelenskyy also rose four points to 34%.
While Loomer works to convert MAGA to the Ukrainian cause, the press should stop treating her reversal as a heroic story about one brave influencer seeing the light. They should instead frame it for what it actually is: a split in MAGA media over Ukraine and Russia that is ultimately a domestic turf war disguised as statecraft.
Recently, a man I was rock climbing with told me about how he'd used AI to make a motivational poster for himself, which he'd hung on his bedroom wall: a bear, walking a slackline over a canyon, holding a sign that said, "Do cool shit." I made what I hoped was a polite noise. What reaction was this man looking for? He probably hoped someone, maybe me, would say it was cool or inspiring. It seemed I was not the first person he'd told about this poster. "You know, it's funny," he said to me. "No one ever says anything about it."
I have been thinking about this now for several days. There's a sort of turducken of things that I find off-puttin …
For people outside of Donald Trump‘s MAGA coalition, the renewed Republican harassment campaign of Dr. Anthony Fauci makes no sense. It’s been more than five years since the Covid-19 lockdowns ended. With the November midterms looming, most Americans are far more focused on present-day concerns, such as the high cost of living and a tough job market, than a disease that has faded from a “mortal threat” to a “minor annoyance” for the vast majority of people. But that didn’t stop Senate Republicans, led by Kentucky’s Rand Paul, to haul the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases before a Senate committee in late July to be harangued with coronavirus conspiracy theories — even though Fauci’s tenure ended four years ago.
The good doctor exercised his Fifth Amendment rights in response to most questions, correctly pointing out that Paul has an “obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution.” Furious that Fauci wouldn’t give him even minor discrepancies as an excuse to launch go-nowhere perjury charges, Paul and other Republicans on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted several days later to hold the 85-year-old in contempt.
Most voters don’t even want to think about the pandemic anymore. But the social media response to the Fauci hearing showed that one group of people wishes it could be 2020 all over again: MAGA diehards. Right-wing accounts went buck wild with posts reviving all their favorite lies from the pandemic, from claiming vaccines don’t work to insisting that the virus is a Chinese bioweapon. The What’s Resonating newsletter laid out the astonishing levels of media coordination on the day of the committee hearing:
Right-leaning accounts posted 2,300 times about Fauci yesterday—for comparison, that’s more post volume than the Super Bowl (1,900 posts for right-leaning accounts, same for left-leaning accounts). The coordination is notable—Fauci was mentioned in an astonishing 20% of all right-leaning posts yesterday, with three entities mentioning him more than 75 times in a day.
It was an era when the GOP got to do what they love more than anything: play the victim as loudly as possible before huge audiences that were especially vulnerable to disinformation.
For normal people, yearning for a time when we were socially isolated and afraid of dying from a highly contagious virus is downright bizarre. MAGA, though, has a reason to feel nostalgia for a pandemic that killed millions. It was an era when the GOP got to do what they love more than anything: play the victim as loudly as possible before huge audiences that were especially vulnerable to disinformation.
The pandemic was a painful, scary time that many of us have tried to block out. But at the height of the pandemic, the right found both unity and energy by denying the seriousness of a virus that was, at its height, killing thousands of people a day. Echoing Trump’s “hoax” language about the pandemic, MAGA decided the whole thing was being exaggerated — or even made up altogether — by Democrats for hazy but nefarious purposes. This created endless opportunities for conservative white people to insist that they are the most oppressed, put-upon people on the planet.
This was the era of angry white people going into grocery stores unmasked, so they could film themselves throwing tantrums when the underpaid, scared clerks asked them to follow the rules. It was a moment when evangelical preachers, always hungry for proof that Christians are facing persecution, claimed it was a violation of religious freedom when they were asked to obey the same bans and restrictions on large indoor gatherings as everyone else. When a vaccine was finally released that offered protection against the deadliest version of the disease, MAGA was unwilling to give up a pandemic that was clearly serving their political purposes. Mass numbers of conservatives refused the vaccine, which cost many Republican lives and drew out the pandemic — and their opportunity to play the victim — for months longer than necessary.
Fascist movements have historically thrived in times of great social stress that leave people vulnerable to misinformation and eager for scapegoats to blame, and the pandemic era was no different. With people isolated and bored at home during the lockdown, many were more willing to engage in conspiracy theory content that runs rampant online. The pandemic was the peak of QAnon, sucking in millions with elaborate fantasies that Trump was a savior out to defeat a worldwide Satanic child cannibalism cabal. Many people, some of whom had even identified as liberal in the past, were radicalized to the right. Fauci became a favorite scapegoat for people who wanted to believe there was an evil mastermind behind the virus, instead of viral replication and transmission. It’s easy to forget it now, but Jan. 6 was fueled by Covid-19 and the sense of disconnection that drove a lot of once-ordinary people to lose their intellect and rationale.
Five years later, MAGA isn’t doing so hot. Between the Iran war and a faltering economy, Trump’s presidency is failing, and his approval ratings are in the toilet. In this environment, it has become increasingly hard for conservatives to play the victim when Trump has unleashed a secret police in the form of Immigration and Customs Enforcement that is rounding up people and sending them to detainment camps. People aren’t as isolated; they are reconnecting with the real world. MAGA media is fracturing, and their audiences are a small fraction of what they had during the pandemic. Republican in-fighting has grown to the point where podcaster Tucker Carlson, once a loyal Trump ally, is fueling speculation that he’s going to start a third-party.
Right-wing politics has always been about escaping from contemporary problems by hiding in nostalgia. After all, “Make America Great Again” is a painfully literal version of that mentality. So it’s no surprise that the movement is responding to their current stress with fantasies about bringing back the glory days. By reviving the harassment campaign against Fauci, the GOP has inadvertently revealed the time they long to return to, an era that is remembered by most people as miserable and deadly.
There’s no more compelling indictment of MAGA than this: The moment they felt most ascendent was when everyone else was in hell.
For 58 seasons, through wars, impeachments and the corporate dismantling of the network news business around it, “60 Minutes” remained America’s highest-rated newsmagazine. Viewership of the CBS News program was up 9% during the 2025-2026 season and generated more than 2.5 billion social-media video views, according to the network. Yet in a bizarre case of fixing something that does not need fixing, the program became the one CBS property executives chose to radically remake.
David Ellison, the network’s new owner, appears determined to test whether the rare commercial-news institution that persuaded millions of Americans to spend an hour with investigative reporting can survive the removal of the very people who made it matter. In barely a year, under the ownership of Ellison’s Skydance and the editorial stewardship of Bari Weiss, that legacy has been stripped down, gutted and reassembled as an instrument of political appeasement. By sacrificing seasoned investigative reporters and filling the vacuum with anti-woke contrarians, Ellison and Weiss have defanged a national treasure.
“60 Minutes” was imperfect, sometimes badly so. Every institution with a half-century of history is. But the program retained an essential public purpose.
“60 Minutes” was imperfect, sometimes badly so. Every institution with a half-century of history is. But the program retained an essential public purpose. And in its zeal to purge the newsroom of dissent, CBS and Weiss may have inadvertently triggered the creation of their most dangerous future competitor — and accidentally set the stage for its own undoing.
The journalists Weiss pushed out did not simply disappear. Bill Owens, the former “60 Minutes” executive producer who resigned in 2025 over corporate interference before Weiss even arrived, has reportedly been assembling a business plan and pitch deck for a rival investigative newsmagazine, seeking something in the neighborhood of $50 million to fund two years of programming. The names attached to it read like a “60 Minutes” reunion special. Such a group — joined potentially by Anderson Cooper and the former producers who resigned in protest — could sell itself as carrying the true DNA of gold-standard television news.
There is a reason Ellison spent billions acquiring a legendary news brand. His $8 billion purchase of Paramount and his aggressive right-wing revamp of CBS News is an overt attempt to smooth the waters for an infinitely larger prize — a $111 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, which includes cable news giant CNN. With Donald Trump long signaling his disdain for traditional media, Ellison’s moves at CBS functioned as a high-stakes litmus test. When the Department of Justice cleared the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger in June, Ellison passed.
But after 12 state attorneys general and the Writers Guild of America filed anti-trust lawsuits to block the merger ahead of a trial next March, Ellison took to the opinion pages of The New York Times on Tuesday to defend his growing empire. Pushing back against speculation regarding his political loyalties, Ellison pledged “independence” for his newsrooms and argued that the combined entity would control only a fraction of the streaming market. But his pleas for personal trust ring hollow. You do not demonstrate a commitment to objective journalism by spending $150 million to acquire The Free Press and handing the keys of a legacy news division to Weiss — an opinion columnist with zero television management experience and a well-documented history of tendentious reporting.
Now, at CBS News, her editorial interference has been disguised as routine management. At her infamous first staff meeting, Weiss vowed to “do the f**king news,” but what followed instead suggests a systematic effort to reshape reality.
When veteran correspondent Cecilia Vega reported on the fatal shootings of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis, network executives pressed her, she claims, to include footage of protesters assaulting undercover officers, despite Vega finding no credible examples of such altercations. She said they also urged her to feature Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey declaring he wanted law enforcement to target Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, a statement that was never made. When covering the conflict in Iran, Vega said she was instructed to open her segment by declaring the nation “totally outgunned by the United States and Israel” — framing that skewed favorably toward the Trump administration’s telling of events. (CBS News has disputed the broader claim that it sought to inject bias, saying its editorial process reflects ordinary review.)
Elsewhere, Weiss personally blocked a deeply reported piece by Sharyn Alfonsi on El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison, where the Trump administration has deported hundreds of individuals into conditions marked by horrific human rights abuses. Though the story eventually leaked in Canada and later aired on CBS in its original form, the message Weiss sent to the newsroom was unmistakable. The effect was to launder censorship in the language of journalistic standards.
Producers say Weiss was also involved in choosing which correspondent got to interview Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu, sidelining “60 Minutes” stalwart Lesley Stahl, who is famous for decades of forensic interviews with presidents and world leaders, in favor of Major Garrett. Most recently, it was revealed that Alfonsi had been sitting on a major scoop regarding Jeffrey Epstein’s financial ties to Wall Street giants like Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America — complete with an on-camera interview filmed in March 2026 with Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who was heading his own investigation into Epstein’s finances — before being fired by Weiss in May. CBS claimed the piece simply was not finished by the end of last season, and has not said whether it intends to air it this fall. Wyden is now pushing legislation to hold individual bankers personally accountable for exactly this kind of institutional silence.
The optics are damning regardless of the internal timeline: The network fired the reporter chasing one of the biggest financial accountability stories of the year in the middle of a purge explicitly aimed at correspondents who resisted political pressure, and the story broke three months later, just not on CBS.
This should be the central concern about the Ellison era at CBS. Not whether Ellison privately considers himself a conservative, a liberal or a man above ideology, nor whether Weiss thinks of herself as a dissident or a reformer. The question is whether their actions are creating the practical conditions under which reporters can hold power to account.
The upheaval has been extraordinary. Tanya Simon, the executive producer who oversaw the program’s recent success, was removed alongside correspondents Alfonsi and Vega, as well as senior editors and producers. Scott Pelley was fired shortly after publicly challenging the appointment of Nick Bilton as executive producer and accusing Weiss of “murdering” the broadcast. Cooper had already departed. The result is a “60 Minutes” with a drastically depleted bench heading into a new season.
In place of these decorated investigative journalists, Bilton and Weiss have assembled what the former reportedly referred to as “the Avengers of news.” But, as longtime media critic Eric Deggans pointed out, a look at the roster reveals a strategy straight out of the old Fox News playbook: Hire a token investigative journalist to construct a thin facade of balance while filling the remaining ranks with anti-woke contrarians.
Bringing on “The Perfect Storm” author Sebastian Junger provides comfortable camouflage for stocking the rest of the newsroom with figures like Times opinion columnist Ross Douthat and former Free Press staffer Tanya Lukyanova, whose primary qualification appears to be an eagerness to challenge progressive consensus. When an organization hires a conservative columnist known for asking whether liberal feminism ruined the workplace, or a producer whose major contributions include reframing starvation in Gaza through the lens of pre-existing health conditions, it signals a troubling shift in focus.
Yet in their rush to destroy the old guard, Weiss and Ellison have overlooked the fact that they left behind an elite corps of unemployed, highly motivated investigative journalists with nothing left to lose. Whether this exiled team finds a home as the investigative video arm of an outlet like ProPublica, launches a streaming-native newsmagazine or partners with an independent distributor, the potential is staggering. Pelley and Alfonsi are now set to serve as journalists in residence at Columbia Journalism School during the 2026-27 academic year. While that is not a launch announcement, it is evidence that their careers and credibility did not disappear when CBS took away their airtime.
Somewhere out there, a rival show called “Stop Watch” is writing itself, and CBS built the pitch deck for it, one firing at a time.
Elon Musk in the Oval Office on May 30th, 2025. | Photo by Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images
For roughly an hour this week, Telegram vanished from Apple's App Store. Even during that blip, it was a stunning absence for such a major app: an avenue of communication for more than 1 billion users around the world, used widely as a secure platform for people who live in countries under censorship. Apple later revealed that it had removed the app due to the presence of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and restored it once that content was removed.
But the decision once again stirred up questions and confusion about Apple's moderation policies and how it treats different companies. And one company in particular sprang to manypeople'sm …
Dr. Anthony Fauci is under congressional scrutiny following an appearance before a Senate committee last week, in which the former National Institutes of Health immunologist was grilled by elected officials over his response to the COVID-19 pandemic. On Thursday, the Senate Homeland Security Committee voted to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress over his repeated invocation of the Fifth Amendment.
The committee’s chair, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has not been shy about his scorn toward Fauci, who led the pandemic response in the first Trump and Biden administrations. Paul floated conspiracy theories that the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID, was leaked from a Chinese lab and that Fauci covered up this info. There is no conclusive evidence that the virus leaked from anywhere but nature, but that hasn’t stopped the Trump administration from promoting such theories.
Seemingly at the advice of his lawyers, Fauci declined to entertain this political side show. Nonetheless, he serves as a convenient scapegoat for the ongoing public health failures under President Donald Trump and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
As unfortunate as this sounds, COVID did not go away. The virus that sparked a global pandemic still regularly infects, disables and kills hundreds of people per week. Although it’s not anything like previous waves, right now cases are rising slightly across the country, especially in Alaska and Missouri, but also in California, Nevada, Hawaii, Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi. Waning immunity, viral mutations and a refusal for some people to stay up on vaccines are part of the reason why COVID is returning.
This isn’t a pandemic anymore, according to experts, but that’s because the virus is now endemic — it’s a part of our daily lives like flu, HIV and other infectious diseases. Even once-eradicated diseases like measles are now all too common. COVID is also now a preventable disease. Vaccines, masking, improved indoor air quality and acquired immunity have all kept the virus at bay so that morgue trucks no longer fill the streets. Still, even a “mild” infection these days can be devastating and lead to long-term health problems.
But a big part of the reason COVID is endemic in the first place is because it wasn’t controlled early, like MERS and SARS-1 were, related viruses that never became pandemics. The first Trump admin completely botched its response to containing COVID, but now they can deflect from their past and current failures — including letting things like the cyclospora outbreak slip or allowing Ebola to balloon into the second biggest outbreak in history — by attacking Fauci and plugging baseless conjecture about COVID’s origins. Unfortunately, for some people, this strategy seems to be convincing.
On Wednesday morning, shortly after Dr. Abdul El-Sayed won the hotly contested Michigan Democratic Senate primary in a slender victory, the Republican Party let slip the dogs of war. Barely 15 minutes after the Associated Press called the race for the unabashed progressive and first-time candidate for federal office over the centrist Rep. Haley Stevens, Donald Trump was crowing on Truth Social that the 41-year-old El-Sayed’s win was “great news for the Republican Party.” The newly minted Democratic nominee, he wrote, is “a Communist loser who hates Jews and Israel.”
As he has for 10 years, the president set the tone for the rest of the GOP.
By the noon hour, the National Republican Senatorial Committee had fired off an attack ad that led with Islamophobia and recalled the attempts from some quarters to define a certain Illinois senator who carried the name Barack Hussein Obama. “Abdulrohman Mohamed El-Sayed,” the ad began, making a point to use the candidate’s full name, an obvious move to launch the process of otherizing him to voters in Michigan and across the country, “[is] the most radical Senate candidate in America.”
But the day’s vilest moment came three hours later when Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville, who has always demonstrated a willingness to go there, invoked the T-word in a brief interview.
But the day’s vilest moment came three hours later when Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville, who has always demonstrated a willingness to go there, invoked the T-word in a brief interview as he boarded an elevator after voting to confirm Dr. Erica Schwartz, Trump’s controversial nominee to head the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“The guy was basically a cheerleader for 9/11,” Tuberville told me, linking El-Sayed to a comment made by the popular far-left streamer Hasan Piker, with whom the candidate campaigned, that “America deserved 9/11.” (When asked in April by POLITICO about Piker’s remarks, El-Sayed characterized the question as a “gotcha game” and said “I’m not here to disavow people’s views”; Piker later apologized for the comments, calling them “inappropriate,” “messed up” and a failed attempt at satire.) “I mean, come on,” Tuberville continued, “the country’s changed, but it hasn’t changed this much to put people in [office] that are basically terrorists.”
When I asked if he was calling El-Sayed a terrorist, the senator replied, “I say he’s got the ability to become one.”
Tuberville has the political incentive to make such inflammatory remarks; they will play well to Republicans in Alabama, where he is running for governor, and he has no grand designs on national office. But they and the GOP’s larger response to El-Sayed’s win reflect another emotion that is running throughout the party. Although Republicans got the Democratic opponent they professed to want for former Rep. Mike Rogers, who lost a Senate race to Elissa Slotkin in 2024 only by the thinnest of margins, they are also scared — and with good reason.
El-Sayed has got game. When I approached his campaign for comment on Tuberville’s remarks, I was directed to an exchange he had on Wednesday night with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, in which he addressed the Republican onslaught.
“There are people like J.D. Vance or Donald Trump or Mike Rogers, who want to define America as being too small to include some kinds of people, and they point to my name, they point to my faith, they try to insinuate that somehow I’m less American because of those things,” El-Sayed said. “They want America to be small. I believe that America is big. It’s open-minded. It’s big-hearted. It can include any of us, regardless of how we pray, regardless of where our families come from, regardless of who we love or how we identify. That’s the America we’re building. And I think America, in Michigan in particular, has an opportunity to remind us just how big we are.”
Although El-Sayed has never run for federal office, these are not the words of a political novice. He is a gifted communicator, able both to make open-hearted, aspirational appeals and channel anger at billionaires and elites, a needle Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., for all of his influence on the Democratic Party, has never quite been able to thread.
But unlike eloquent politicians known to be showhorses, enjoying the social media clips from their media hits, El-Sayed is a workhorse, and this combination makes him formidable. One reason for his primary win is that he simply outworked Stevens, visiting over 110 cities, according to his campaign, holding over 500 public events and, in the process, building a genuine movement. This tenacity, along with rallying cries of “Medicare for All” and getting money out of politics, helped him overcome the opposition of the Democratic establishment and over $60 million in spending by super PACs supporting Stevens.
Nevertheless, after the race was called for El-Sayed, the Democratic Party quickly coalesced behind him and he was reportedly fielding calls from former Vice President Kamala Harris, former Transportation Secretary — and Michigan voter — Pete Buttigieg and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
The stakes are high. Polls taken before the primary showed El-Sayed trailing Rogers by a larger margin than Stevens. Democratic control of the Senate runs through Michigan, and as many have pointed out, El-Sayed’s win has teed up a first-of-its-kind test: whether a progressive can win in a swing state that narrowly voted for Trump in 2016, went for Biden four years later and returned to Trump in 2024. El-Sayed will need to be even more nimble than he already is and avoid giving the GOP talking points.
Despite generous overtures to Stevens and assurances to the Jewish community El-Sayed made in remarks on Wednesday morning after the race was called, there are intraparty divisions left to heal. He must set to work convincing centrist and moderate Democrats, Black voters in urban areas and suburban voters, all of which Stevens carried, as well as disaffected independents, that he is worthy of their vote. The race will be tough, but it is winnable, even as he continues to face GOP efforts to define him on their terms.
Responding to a reporter who asked about how Republicans are deploying his name in their attacks, El-Sayed said, “That’s the only play they got.”
Whether that’s true or not, between now and November, we’ll see if it works.
At the end of the debut episode of “The Real Food Show,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spears a single bite of salmon cake and brings it to his lips. “Amazing,” he says, giving chef Andrew Gruel a slack thumbs-up. The salad on the plate — arugula, white beans and sliced apple — remains untouched. Kennedy does not go back for another bite.
“Thank you,” Gruel replies. “First time I’ve cooked for a dignitary.” Kennedy pats him quickly on the back, then turns to the camera. “We’re here today to teach Americans how to eat real food, high-quality food at affordable prices,” he says, “and we’ll see you next time.”
The bite, it turns out, was less a culmination than an exit cue.
This is the central uncanniness of “The Real Food Show,” which contains all the familiar furniture of a cooking program — the studio kitchen, the chef, the recipe, the price graphics, the ceremonial final bite — but almost none of the curiosity or pleasure that ordinarily gives the form life.
Food is everywhere, but appetite is nowhere.
Officially, “The Real Food Show” is a new HHS cooking series intended to bring the Dietary Guidelines for Americans to life through affordable recipes, easy techniques, practical nutrition advice and special guests preparing their “healthy signature dishes” alongside Kennedy.
(Kennedy is not, apparently, the only member of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet to have recently heard the siren call of the web series. In May, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced “The Great American Road Trip,” a family travelogue starring Duffy, his wife, Rachel Campos-Duffy, and their nine children. It was supposed to premiere in June; as The Bulwark’s Will Sommer noted this week, August arrived without a single episode. Kennedy may, for now, be the only Cabinet host who has actually managed to get his show on the air.)
The premiere opens with Kennedy standing inside a low-budget digital cornucopia. A red cartoon hunk of steak, a bronzed turkey, a few shrimp, a tub of unsweetened yogurt, an apple and a bag of frozen peas cascade alongside him. The show keeps insisting on “real food” while representing it through some of the fakest, cheapest-looking imagery available.
Thanks to President Trump, Kennedy announces, “we’ve flipped the food pyramid and put real food back where it belongs, at the center of the American plate.” He plans to travel across the country showing families how to cook delicious, nutritious meals with real ingredients at affordable prices. At the word “affordable,” a blizzard of dollar bills begins to fall behind him.
The digital collage gives way to a more familiar cooking-show fantasy. Kennedy joins Gruel — a chef, restaurateur and prominent opponent of COVID-19 restrictions in 2020 — in a bright white studio kitchen. They wear matching “The Real Food Show” aprons. Behind them, cookbooks line the shelves, fruit has been arranged decoratively across the counters and every surface gleams with aspirational domestic ease. The set, at least, knows exactly what a cooking show is supposed to look like.
Gruel begins with an entirely reasonable proposition. The ingredients will be familiar to home cooks, he says, but he will introduce a few “cheffy tricks” along the way.
Before much cooking can occur, however, Gruel explains that many Americans are addicted to processed foods because those foods have been chemically engineered to be addictive. With a few whole ingredients, he says, they can make something just as delicious. This, too, is familiar enough advice. What is strange is the air of grim discovery around it, as though the pleasures of cooking with recognizable ingredients had only recently been recovered from a hostile laboratory.
Gruel selects seafood, one of what he calls the country’s “bounty items,” and announces that they will make salmon cakes. The recipe calls for a pound and a half of frozen salmon; an on-screen graphic prices it at $8.99, without naming a retailer or indicating that the fish is on sale. When I checked my local Mariano’s in Chicago, the same amount, even at its sale price, came to about $12. The difference is not ruinous, but it is the first indication that the show may be playing loosely with its promise of meals costing less than $5 per serving.
Gruel notes that home cooks can use another kind of fish, even canned fish — useful, flexible advice that is also so broad as to become generic. Rather than explain how a leaner fish or one packed in oil might change the cake, the recipe simply expands to encompass nearly anything.
There is a brief detour about frozen salmon. Gruel explains that freezing fish kills parasites. Kennedy listens attentively. Given the secretary’s own much-discussed brain-worm story, the moment lands like a joke no one on set appears to notice.
The salmon goes onto a sheet pan. In the kitchen, Gruel recommends rubbing it with avocado oil, salt and fresh herbs. The accompanying graphic quietly offers two additional fats: olive oil and beef tallow, the latter a favorite within the administration’s anti-seed-oil discourse. Viewers are then instructed to roast the fish at 400 degrees for eight minutes. There is no meaningful guidance about the thickness of the fillets, the temperature they should reach or how to tell when they are done.
Yet, the salmon reappears cooked and cooled. Before the hosts can begin flaking it, however, the show pauses to consider why Americans eat so little fish compared with people in Japan.
Kennedy suspects the difference is cultural: In the United States, he says, people tend to think of meat when they think of protein.
It is a curious diagnosis from an administration whose senior officials have lately been swapping notes on a regimen nicknamed the “sauerkraut diet.” Kennedy and several other Cabinet members have reportedly embraced versions of the plan, which emphasizes grass-fed meat and fermented foods while eliminating alcohol and sugary foods. The physician behind it advertises direct consultations costing as much as $18,000. The show, meanwhile, suggests that ordinary Americans priced out of meat try fish — any fish, even canned.
The advice is useful. The asymmetry is difficult to miss.
Then, at last, they cook together. Kennedy flakes the cooled salmon into a metal bowl while Gruel adds an egg, panko, Dijon mustard, chopped red onion, chives, nutritional yeast and avocado-oil mayonnaise. Small price graphics pop up beside the ingredients as they go: 25 cents for the egg, another modest sum for the breadcrumbs. Gruel talks Kennedy through the mixture, offering the kind of loose, adaptable instruction home cooks have received from television chefs for decades.
The recipe proceeds in the key of perfectly fine. The ingredients are accessible, the substitutions sensible, the salmon cakes plausible weeknight fare. The show’s strangeness does not arise from strange cooking advice, but from the ideological burden placed upon it: An ordinary fish cake becomes evidence that Americans might eat their way toward a healthier, more fiscally disciplined nation.
It’s time for a side.
First, however, Kennedy pauses to relitigate the federal government’s recent nutrition policy. The Biden administration’s dietary guidelines ran 453 pages, he says, with the number offered as self-evident proof of their absurdity. His department threw that work “in the trash,” assembled a new group of nutritionists and, he jokes, locked them in a room for 11 months to produce recommendations actually grounded in science. For decades, Kennedy says, the government has lied to Americans about saturated fat.
When the cooking resumes, several salmon cakes have already been shaped and set aside. Gruel explains that resting allows the panko to absorb moisture, though he does not say how long that takes. The finished cakes are browned and appealing.
Pleasure is never quite sufficient justification for cooking something yourself; the viewer must also understand that the old version was artificial, addictive or imposed upon them by a corrupt system. Even the vinaigrette arrives as evidence in a case.
The side dish is a salad of apples, white beans and greens with a simple vinaigrette. Gruel recalls growing up in what he calls the “microwave generation,” in a house stocked with cereal, pasta, refined carbohydrates and premade salad dressings. He describes himself as having been “addicted” to them. Making your own dressing, he says, is one of the easiest ways to improve your cooking.
He is right. Homemade vinaigrette is quick, inexpensive and generally much better than the bottled kind. But “The Real Food Show” cannot recommend a salad dressing without first convening a tribunal. Pleasure is never quite sufficient justification for cooking something yourself; the viewer must also understand that the old version was artificial, addictive or imposed upon them by a corrupt system. Even the vinaigrette arrives as evidence in a case.
That moral framing has consequences beyond the kitchen. “The Real Food Show” never explicitly argues that a salmon cake can replace a social safety net. Some viewers, however, appear ready to complete the thought. “Exactly the type of videos a HHS secretary should be posting,” one commenter wrote. “Good food = Good health = Drastically reducing healthcare budgets.”
It is only one comment, not an official statement of policy. But it articulates the logic hovering around the episode: If Americans can be taught to eat correctly, perhaps they will require less care — and perhaps the government can spend less providing it. That implication is particularly grim after Trump and congressional Republicans enacted legislation projected to reduce federal Medicaid spending by nearly $1 trillion over a decade and leave over 10 million more people uninsured in 2034. The same law is expected to cut federal SNAP spending by roughly $187 billion through expanded work requirements, narrower eligibility and new costs for states.
None of this makes the show’s basic proposition false. Nourishing food can support good health, and learning to cook can make daily life cheaper, easier and more pleasurable. But nutrition instruction cannot substitute for the money, time, access and medical care required to follow it. The kitchen can do many things. It cannot absorb the obligations of the state.
Back in the studio, the final stretch is the show at its most conventionally useful. Gruel demonstrates a knife-sharpening technique, assembles the salad and plates the salmon cakes. Even with Kennedy looming over the counter more than sous-cheffing beside it, “The Real Food Show” briefly becomes the cooking program it has been dressed to imitate.
Then comes the first and final bite. Kennedy takes a stab at the salmon cake, brings one bite to his mouth and calls it “amazing.” He offers Gruel a lazy thumbs-up, accepts the chef’s joke about cooking for a dignitary and immediately turns to the camera to recite the show’s mission statement.
After an episode filled with warnings about addiction, government deception, processed food and discredited fats, the meal itself receives one adjective and one bite. Kennedy does not remark on its flavor or texture. He does not try the salad. He does not return to the plate.
The food has already performed its function. Nobody has to want a second bite.
The brand trip is a right of passage for influencers. It's a mark of legitimacy that a sponsor wants to invite them on an all-expenses-paid vacation, often with luxurious freebies and activities. Trips can also spur hard feelings from uninvited influencers, trigger criticism from the public, and project a certain frivolousness.
Usually it is fast fashion companies or beauty brands flying out influencers with the goal of flooding social media with sponsored content. This time, it was a major AI company.
Over the weekend, several influencers began posting about OpenAI's "first ever brand trip," which appears to have taken place outside of N …
Donald Trump hates embarrassing failures even when they are, ultimately, his own fault. So when the sealant on his $13.1 million-turned-$16-million Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool renovation started peeling off in sheets days after the pool reopened and the water turned green with algae, he couldn’t simply say that a rushed, no-bid contract handed to his golfing buddy’s company produced shoddy work. Instead he demanded a villain, and the weaponized Justice Department complied.
On July 2, 2026, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro held a triumphant press briefing to announce a felony indictment against former Olympic canoeist David Hearn. Pirro claimed her office possessed solid evidence of guilt proving beyond a reasonable doubt that the 67-year-old had committed a deliberate, forceful and violent act causing over $1,000 in damage to the pool liner when he stopped his bike in June, reached down and touched a loose piece of lining that had already come apart before he ever laid a hand on it. When pressed by journalists like NBC’s Ryan Reilly about photographic evidence showing the liner was already peeling long before Hearn ever stepped near the water, Pirro grew combative, waving off the question with the same on-air contempt she perfected across 14 years as a host at Fox News, and insisted her office would prove the damage in court with expert testimony.
Weeks later, the Justice Department acknowledged something dramatically different.
By late July, as Hearn’s defense counsel moved for release of the grand jury transcripts to expose glaring prosecutorial irregularities, Pirro’s case collapsed. Facing the real possibility of judicial sanctions, an inspector general investigation and disbarment, her office filed a 20-page motion to dismiss the indictment. The filing threw the Interior Department under the bus, claiming Secretary Doug Burgum’s agency had withheld 695 megabytes of crucial documents revealing the damage was caused by contractor error during the rush to finish before the America 250 Independence Day festivities. The department’s own records described repeated installation failures and extensive peeling of the pool liner weeks before the alleged vandalism was ever said to have occurred. Prosecutors asked that the charges be dismissed because the evidence no longer supported Pirro’s claim, evidence that, it bears repeating, had been available to the government the entire time.
The dismissal did not stop with Hearn. Within days, Pirro’s office also moved to drop misdemeanor charges against three more people accused of the same phantom vandalism. Justin Carreno, Sophie Dennison-Gibby and Cameron Thiers all faced lesser counts of destroying property worth less than a thousand dollars, and their attorneys told reporters the common thread was simple: The federal government had just spent millions repainting and relining the pool, and when the work failed, the Trump administration needed a scapegoat. The entire theory of the case — that ordinary citizens had descended on a national monument with knives to sabotage it out of political spite — evaporated once anyone with subpoena power actually looked at the evidence.
The saga of the Reflecting Pool is emblematic of everything amiss in America right now, a perfect diorama of how right-wing media turns Trump’s fantasies into public reality, and then tries to quietly conceal the wreckage once the facts catch up.
The saga of the Reflecting Pool is emblematic of everything amiss in America right now, a perfect diorama of how right-wing media turns Trump’s fantasies into public reality, and then tries to quietly conceal the wreckage once the facts catch up. Fox News was happy to amplify the vandalism narrative when it was useful. But once the case fell apart, the network gave it barely cursory treatment, a striking silence from an outlet that had spent weeks covering the alleged desecration of a national monument when the story served the White House.
That silence makes sense once you remember Pirro’s origins. She spent years at Fox telling viewers whatever the moment required. By her own network’s private assessment, she was a “reckless maniac” whose 2020 election fraud claims helped make Fox liable for one of the largest defamation settlements in American history: a $787.5 million payout to Dominion Voting Systems.
Pirro’s appointment as U.S. attorney represented the full realization of the MAGA media pipeline, in which performative loyalty on television is treated as the primary qualification for federal law enforcement authority. What she is now discovering is that a courtroom does not run on the same rules as a cable television set. At Fox, Pirro could tell her audience whatever she wanted without personal consequence. Telling a federal judge the same kind of thing carries the threat of disbarment and perjury charges, and no amount of bravado previously reserved for on-air broadcasts could change that math.
Predictably, the moment Pirro chose self-preservation over total subversion of the law, Trump turned on her. He spent days publicly berating her, complaining to reporters that she had “folded like an umbrella” and writing on Truth Social that he fully disagreed with his own Justice Department. In a rambling, incoherent stream of consciousness to reporters from the Oval Office on Monday, he continued to insist on the existence of security tapes showing mysterious figures cutting the pool lining with box cutters — tapes no one has ever produced — while simultaneously trying to shift blame for the pool’s historical leaks onto previous administrations. On Monday, Trump met privately with Pirro and Burgum while reports circulated that he was considering replacing her.
After her Senate confirmation in August 2025, Trump promised Pirro would be a powerful crusader, and she has spent the year since prosecuting his perceived enemies with a zeal that has not been matched at trial. Her record in court is poor, with her office winning only half of its first eight criminal trials in 2026 a rate CNN reported was far below the national average. Bloomberg Law’s reporting describes a string of similarly threadbare cases: a man charged with assaulting a federal officer using a Subway sandwich following Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops in the District, who was acquitted by a jury but forced to flee his home after receiving threats; a Maryland woman jailed nearly a week for spitting on an officer at the National Zoo before the charge was quietly reduced and then dropped; a man left with permanent injuries after being tased during a high-speed chase, and whose federal charge also collapsed into a misdemeanor plea. The latter was interviewed by a Bloomberg Law reporter about his ordeal and was, according to the outlet, found dead behind a Washington rowhouse a month later.
As people swept up in this kind of prosecutorial overreach have noted, the goal is not really conviction. It is using state power to inflict maximum disruption on a person’s job, housing and relationships, and to send a chilling message to anyone else who might draw the government’s attention. A conviction, when one happens, is treated as a bonus. The process itself is the punishment.
Pirro will likely survive this particular episode. Trump did not fire her over the weekend, and by Monday he had already moved on to blaming the judge instead. But something has shifted.
The former Fox star who built a television career on never conceding a point is now the first prominent member of this administration to publicly contradict Trump’s own account of a story he has told, in increasingly baroque detail, for weeks. It turns out that feeding Trump’s delusions is a great deal easier from behind a Fox News desk, where no one can hold you in contempt, than standing in front of a federal judge who can.
If you need any proof that climate change is not some far off problem for future generations — it’s our disastrous present — look no further than the unfolding wildfire crisis gripping the globe. In Spokane County, Washington alone, three major wildfires have devastated the area, prompting the evacuation of almost 65,000 people and destroying more than 700 homes. But there are at least 14 other fires raging throughout the state. In nearby Oregon, a record-shattering 2 million acres have burned, with 102 new fires reported across the nation on Aug. 2 alone, seven of which are large. Meanwhile, across the pond, Europeans are battling their own record-breaking wildfires in the U.K., France, Greece and elsewhere, where two crew members were killed in a midair collision.
High winds and hot, dry weather have fueled the blazes, but these conditions have been worsened by climate change. Fires are a natural phenomenon, of course, but what’s unnatural is their intensity and the level of heat. Every time we burn fossil fuels, it adds more chemicals to the atmosphere that trap more heat, creating a positive feedback loop that makes everything hotter and drier.
Indeed, months of drought and heat waves tend to foreshadow the fiercest wildfires. As a recent analysis found on fires in Spain, Portugal, Turkey, Cyprus and Greece, “human-caused climate change was a key driver of the fire weather conditions, primarily through its influence on exceptionally high temperatures, but also by exacerbating drought conditions.”
The circumstances that make these wildfires so severe are becoming more and more common across the world. “Anywhere can burn under the right conditions, and unfortunately all of those conditions are changing,” Erica Smithwick, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University, told Scientific American recently. All of this serves as a warning. The question remains if anyone is still listening.
Right-wing media looks to have made a profound miscalculation. They put Hunter Biden through an unrelenting public pressure cooker, convinced that by turning a private citizen’s darkest personal rock bottom into a daily political circus, they could break both the man and his family. Now, seven years into his sobriety, Biden has picked up a podcast mic and won’t stop talking. The man whom the right spent years trying to destroy is now walking into rooms they open up for him — and setting them on fire from the inside.
For the better part of the past decade, conservative media made a concerted effort to turn Biden into the ultimate avatar of political corruption: the degenerate failson as a symbol of Democratic rot. During his father Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign, the right devoted extensive attention to Hunter’s overseas business dealings, particularly his role on the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma and allegations stemming from a laptop Hunter owned that surfaced in GOP hands shortly before the election. The laptop story became a defining example of modern media dynamics after the major social media companies temporarily limited distribution of an October 2020 New York Post article that included information taken from the laptop, a decision that conservatives still cite as evidence of a massive, multi-institution coverup. Republican lawmakers spent endless congressional hours investigating his digital footprint, but were ultimately unable to establish that the elder Biden had engaged in a criminal bribery scheme tied to his son’s business activities.
Right-wing media turned Hunter Biden into a household name to hurt his father, and now that notoriety is precisely what gives him leverage.
The meandering story is what makes the current public rehabilitation of Hunter Biden one of the stranger spectacles in American politics. Right-wing media turned him into a household name to hurt his father, and now that notoriety is precisely what gives him leverage.
Having emerged from severe addiction, public humiliation and federal prosecution, Biden is now truth-telling about his past and single-handedly roasting the right wing’s bad-faith outrage ecosystem on its own home turf. This year alone Biden has sat for hours-long interviews with independent outlets that cater to the very audience the GOP spent a decade cultivating against his family. He talked to Andrew Callaghan’s Channel 5, whose YouTube following runs past three million and skews toward people who trust almost nothing coming out of U.S. institutions. He talked to Shawn Ryan, a former Navy SEAL and CIA contractor who spent years amplifying allegations against him. Ryan then hooked him up with MAGA podcaster Candace Owens, who once called him a degenerate who belonged in prison.
Biden’s media strategy is dangerous and fascinating. He has described his media blitz as partly about addiction recovery and partly about strategy. Independent podcasts and YouTube channels have replaced the legacy media gatekeepers that used to referee these fights, and Biden figured out faster than most Democratic operatives that the audience he needed to reach was sitting in exactly the media ecosystem built to hate him. “No one gives a shit with what anybody says on CNN,” he told one interviewer, arguing that years of investigations and public scrutiny had lowered expectations to the point where audiences were surprised simply to hear him speak coherently at length. His approach appears designed to replace years of secondhand portrayals with direct exposure.
Biden’s rapid growth on X further underscores this tactical evolution. Joining Elon Musk’s platform just days before his interview with Owens dropped, Biden began tweeting with relentless energy, sometimes authoring over 100 posts a day. Commentators quickly dubbed him a “MAGA whisperer” as he systematically dismantled right-wing talking points and exposed media figures he accused of building careers off bad-faith attacks. When CNN anchor Jake Tapper published a scathing review of Jill Biden’s memoir — which defended the former president’s fitness for office — Hunter immediately went on the offensive, blasting Tapper and corporate media for what he viewed as complicity in weaponizing personal family dynamics for television ratings.
Biden’s new approach mixes vulnerability with nuclear-grade anger. Instead of avoiding controversy, he frequently addresses it head on. On a Barstool Sports podcast this week, he joked about signing a laptop and openly discussed his struggles with crack cocaine addiction. For a movement that has invested years in hyping “Hunter’s laptop” as a civilization-ending scandal, seeing the man himself turn it into a potential merchandising opportunity should be humiliating.
On that same Barstool appearance, he delivered an expletive-filled rant about Donald Trump’s entire family: “F**k him. F**k his sons. F**k his daughter. I mean it, all of them, the whole family, down to the grandchildren. I hope for the rest of time that I am on this earth, that their names live in ignominy.” Biden backed that rage up with a substantive critique, pointing out that the Trump sons received $3.2 billion in Defense Department contracts in just 18 months and that son-in-law Jared Kushner, despite holding no government position, is reportedly receiving more than $110 million from the Saudis, tied to nuclear enrichment authorization and billions in investment funds.
But Biden is also reaching out beyond the right-wing media ecosystem. He has appeared on NPR’s “Newsmakers,” podcasts hosted by California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Don Lemon, and the “I’ve Had It” podcast with hosts Jennifer Welch and Angie “Pumps” Sullivan. Yet his aggressive, unapologetic posture does not spare Democrats. He has openly torched party leaders who pressured his father to abandon his 2024 reelection bid following the president’s disastrous debate performance, specifically calling out Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer as a “piece of s**t” for his role in pushing his father aside. “I’m not running for anything, so I can say whatever the f**k I want,” Hunter Biden declared, giving voice to millions of frustrated progressives who are sick and tired of watching Democratic leaders play by polite, outdated rules while right-wing extremists burn down democratic norms.
It makes you wonder: Had the party embraced Biden’s willingness to fight back early on, perhaps they could have deployed one of the most effective anti-MAGA communicators in the country to stop Trump’s return.
It makes you wonder: Had the party embraced Biden’s willingness to fight back early on, perhaps they could have deployed one of the most effective anti-MAGA communicators in the country to stop Trump’s return.
To be certain, Biden’s media strategy has generated intense criticism, especially his decision to sit down with the extreme, far-right activist Nick Fuentes. The interview, filmed in a Philadelphia studio dressed up to resemble a seedy motel in a wink at the laptop scandal, quickly became a viral sensation, generating millions of views. During the interview, which reportedly nearly escalated into a physical confrontation, the two found common ground, trading skepticism about American support for Israel, with Fuentes framing his objections as political rather than religious, a distinction that will comfort no one who has watched what he actually says about Jews. When discussing their public reputations, Biden joked, “I’m a crackhead,” to which Fuentes replied, “I’m a racist,” prompting Biden to shoot back, “Mine is true!”
Biden defended the pairing on social media in terms that sound almost reasonable — until you remember who he is talking about. He argued that people who profit from keeping Americans separated have built a business model on it, and that he would sit down with anyone who sees Trump as an enemy, regardless of what else they believe. He was explicit that Fuentes’ views on race and women are indefensible, and that what Fuentes has said about the Holocaust and Nazism cannot be defended. But he argued that one issue — stopping Trump — mattered more than any daylight between him and a man who leads an online movement built substantially on racial grievance.
This is a coherent argument. It is also the argument every troll counts on succeeding, because it leads and allows audiences to conclude that platforming extremist speech and views like Fuentes’ is a savvy tactical maneuver rather than what it actually is: a laundering operation. In this particular wash cycle, Fuentes needed laundering a great deal more than Biden needed an outlet.
The instinct to give Fuentes and people like him a bigger microphone under the banner of anti-Trump unity deserves more skepticism. There is no common ground with someone whose political project is ethno-nationalist authoritarianism, and treating a two-hour conversation as evidence that the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” echoes the bad faith politics that lets extremists claim they were misunderstood or “just joking” the whole time. It’s just whitewashing bigotry for clicks.
But Hunter Biden’s choice to sit with Fuentes exposes something crucial about our current media environment. At a moment when fascism is organizing through podcasts and X feeds, he has stumbled into a role Democrats should have desperately filled: that of a loud, media-savvy fighter who doesn’t care about decorum. By owning his flaws and speaking directly to the public, Biden has stripped the right-wing outrage machine of its primary power source.
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