Martin, Tennessee, is a small, out-of-the-way town that is ultimately best explained to strangers by relaying its travel time from Memphis. (Two hours and some change.) It’s not the sort of place where grand history happens, and yet, in 1971 this sleepy burg was the site of a world-historic upset.
Inside the local university’s gym, the Harlem Globetrotters had come up short. The classic lineup featuring Meadowlark Lemon and Hubert “Geese” Ausbie had tried and failed to beat their perennial foils: the Washington Generals, playing that night as the New Jersey Reds. An audience expecting acrobatic basketball stunts and on-court clowning set to “Sweet Georgia Brown,” the Globetrotters’ signature song, was instead treated to a real, close-fought exhibition. At the end of overtime, the Reds pulled out a one-point victory, their first in more than 2,000 games. Lacking champagne for the occasion, they poured orange soda on owner-coach-player Herm “Red” Klotz’s head.
The upset might not have been what the exhibition’s management wanted, and it definitely wasn’t what the crowd paid to see, but it was a healthy reminder that the Reds’ squad was more than just the butt of an endless string of hardwood jokes. The losingest jersey in sports masked five no-funny-business basketball players who could give superstars a scare. When Abe Saperstein, the Globetrotters’ founder, stormed the Reds locker room in a huff, Klotz warned him, “If you let your guard down, we’ll get you again.” But the Reds/Generals would go on to lose their next 17,000 games, an unbroken streak of ignominy that continues to this day.
I was reminded of the 1971 fluke while reading that the Supreme Court handed Donald Trump a rare loss at the Supreme Court on Monday. Chief Justice John Roberts and Company once again rejected his bid to avoid paying the $5 million in civil damages awarded to the writer E. Jean Carroll, after a jury found the president had sexually abused her at a Manhattan department store and later defamed her.
The president had appealed that verdict, as well as a larger defamation verdict in a separate lawsuit, all the way to the Supreme Court. The high court rejected Trump’s first attempt to overturn the verdict in June.
The news was applauded across Bluesky, the largely liberal social media platform, with posts calling Trump “Senile Satan” and characterizing the decision as a rebuke for a “adjudicated rapist.” (The president has not been convicted of rape; he was found guilty of sexual abuse by a jury in a civil trial.) But for me, the ruling brought to mind Klotz’s orange soda bath and empty boasts.
Across its 2025-2026 term, the Court has proven that it’s more than willing to let Trump dunk all over them, doing everything short of giving him a boost on the way to the rim. In June, they allowed the president to pull Congress’ athletic shorts down, giving him the power to revoke the temporary protected status that lawmakers had granted to Haitian and Syrian immigrants.
That same month, Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the Court’s liberal justices to ward off an attack on birthright citizenship, allowing liberals to claim victory while the dissenting conservatives laid out a road map for future cases.
But within a week, Roberts and Barrett had returned to their squad, getting caught up in the magic circle that surrounds Trump’s actions as president. In a decision that overturned nearly a century of precedent, the conservative majority granted Trump the ability to fire the heads of independent regulatory agencies in the executive branch, effectively letting the administration bowl over any career officials and oversight that might stand in the way of the president’s radical agenda.
Notably, there was an exception to the Court’s stooge act: They won’t allow Trump to toy with the Federal Reserve. Messing with the nation’s money is off-limits, apparently even for Republicans. You have to wonder how the Generals’ unwelcome win would be remembered if it had hurt the Globetrotters’ gate receipts.
All of this is downstream from the Roberts Court’s most egregious ruling: Trump v. United States. In a 6-3 decision that fell along partisan lines, the Court held that Trump could do almost anything he wanted while in the White House and be largely immune from prosecution. Writing for the majority, Roberts found that so long as Trump could provide the barest of cover, even illegal actions are allowed as part of his presidential duties. The chief justice’s ruling shredded an essential part of the Constitution to confetti, and like Meadowlark Lemon, Roberts loaded it into a bucket for Trump to toss into the air whenever he needs a distraction.
The fiction being peddled by the Court — that this is the legitimate carrying out of the checks and balances enshrined in the Constitution — is similar to the one used in basketball arenas across the country when the Globetrotters come to town.
The fiction being peddled by the Court — that this is the legitimate carrying out of the checks and balances enshrined in the Constitution — is similar to the one used in basketball arenas across the country when the Globetrotters come to town. The team is free to carry out any number of obvious fouls, double-dribbles and prop-assisted scoring plays so long as the audience maintains the idea that what they are watching is a refereed game of basketball. The Court is free to play-act at being a check on Trump’s power, so long as the majority of Americans consider it a legitimate body. Keeping that ruse going is crucial for the aims of the wider right-wing project. And to do that, the conservative majority can’t just rubber stamp every last thing this president does.
By handing Trump a highly publicized and embarrassing loss on an issue that doesn’t hamper Republicans’ agenda, the conservative justices are continuing their smoke screen by reinforcing the Court’s legitimacy as an impartial body at a time when they’re more captured by partisan politics than ever. Occasionally ruling against the president keeps up the charade.
Trump might have been sent packing this time, but don’t expect his foils on the Court to go on a winning streak. SCOTUS will be back to their regularly scheduled losing soon enough.
As you may have noticed, many members of the American media and political classes are currently rending their garments in terror and despair at the perceived threat of “socialism.” It’s not at all clear what that word means in 2026, in this context or any other.
It only helps a little to observe that whatever “socialism” is supposed to refer to these days, it doesn’t have much to do with an economic or political system where the state or the working class control the means of production. I’m sure we could find people out there who advocate that. Hell, I might be among them, if it were a remotely realistic possibility. But none of those people are prominent in the current (and long overdue!) internal power struggle within the Democratic Party and the American left writ large.
Come to think of it, you know who really wants state control of the economy, if only in an incoherent, ass-backward, “Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler” kind of way? Donald Trump, that’s who. For all his extended excoriations of Democrats as woke America-hating Marxist radical traitors, Trump has meddled more extensively and more directly in the economy than any Democratic president since Franklin D. Roosevelt.
It’s clearly going too far to call Trump a socialist, largely because profoundly corrupt autocratic or oligarchic regimes like his cannot easily be captured in ideological categories. He’s definitely not a democratic socialist (or a constitutional democrat of any other variety). But there’s no way around the fact that his fantastical DIY presidency has consigned conventional right-wing ideology about the sacredness of free-market capitalism to the proverbial dustbin. Let’s put it this way: Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu called himself a socialist; legendary Argentinian president Juan Perón did not. Trump belongs on the same historical shelf as those guys, if only as a wannabe.
Almost everything about Trump’s management of the economy during his second term, and pretty much everything else, has been disastrous. But even if we assume that the epic personal and institutional graft of his presidency will not survive his departure, he has created a haphazard regime that’s so deeply enmeshed in fossil fuels, Big Tech and AI, rare earths, pharmaceuticals, shipbuilding, semiconductors and the weapons industries that no one will be able to disentangle it anytime soon.
It’s going too far to call Trump a socialist. But his fantastical DIY presidency has consigned conventional right-wing ideology about the sacredness of free-market capitalism to the proverbial dustbin.
As Indiana University scholar Sarah Bauerle Danzman told Foreign Policy in 2025, it’s “jarring” to encounter “a Republican administration embracing state capitalism in a way we haven’t seen in a long time, while all the time decrying ‘socialism.’” According to more recent reporting in Forbes, the federal government now holds equity stakes in roughly 30 different companies across a range of industries. “What started with a ‘golden share‘ in U.S. Steel,” writes Keith Johnson of Foreign Policy, “has morphed into a government takeover of vast swathes of the economy,” best exemplified by capricious tariff policies that seem motivated by the president’s personal whims and grievances. As libertarian economist Tad DeHaven tells Johnson, since all this “is driven by one man’s personal desires, there is no plan and no strategy. It changes by the day.”
Fanatical Republicans from deep-red districts can keep staging government shutdowns and preaching the defeated gospels of Milton Friedman as much as they like. But it’s difficult to imagine any future GOP putting the genie all the way back in the bottle and entirely undoing this unexpected turn to oligarcho-socialism or state capitalism or, ahem, national socialism or whatever else it might be called. The Econ 101 term would be “dirigisme,” which was coined to describe the highly interventionist, quasi-socialist economy that rebuilt France after World War II and has more recently been applied to China, Singapore, South Korea and so on.
This raises the amusing possibility that the mainstream Democratic Party — always ready to turn itself into the punchline of historical irony — will once again end up holding the bag for a set of policies supported by their donor class and literally no one else. More than 70% of registered Democrats, according to a Fox News poll taken in March, say that capitalism is “not working very well or not working at all.” So naturally the party leadership seems prepared to go to the barricades to defend it.
To be entirely fair, in some cases the centrist moral panic over “socialism” seems to refer to rational or at least straightforward electoral concerns. Fairly or otherwise, mainstream Democrats convinced a tiny plurality of Wisconsin voters that gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong was too much of a humorless leftist to survive exposure to the mythical but coveted “median voter” in November. They may well have been correct; we don’t get to re-run the experiment and find out.
But in other instances, such as Zohran Mamdani’s historic victory in New York in 2025 and a series of Democratic primary wins by progressive or socialist-aligned candidates in that city and across the country, the hysteria has more to do with generational and attitudinal change — yeah, I’m sorry, with a vibe shift — than with specific policy proposals or ideological labels.
On one level, it seems incredible that deep-dyed Democratic insiders like James Carville or former DNC chair Jaime Harrison are surprised that their party, which collectively decided to “resist” the second coming of Trump by doing absolutely nothing and steadfastly ignored the scale of Israel’s war crimes in Gaza for as long as possible, is seen as hopelessly weak by its own voters. Carville recently called for a “schism” (a delightfully old-fashioned word) within the Democratic Party, and Harrison has urged the so-called socialists to leave the Demo-normies alone and “focus on building the party you actually support.” That old saw about being careful what you wish for comes to mind.
Guys like James Carville and Jaime Harrison were raised on ancient fables of the ideological excesses of the 1960s and ‘70s, and no doubt still get misty-eyed over Bill Clinton and the “New Democrats” of 1992.
On the other hand, there’s nothing especially mysterious about those attitudes. Those guys and others like them were raised on ancient fables of the ideological excesses of the 1960s and ‘70s, and no doubt still get a bit misty-eyed over Bill Clinton and the “New Democrats” of 1992. Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow!
Their version of the Democratic Party eagerly devoured the devil’s candy, in the form of unbreakable partnerships with Madison Avenue, Wall Street and Silicon Valley and closed-door, $10,000 fundraising dinners in East Hampton and the Napa Valley. There’s no escape from that kind of political bargain on this side of the apocalypse.
They have always viewed left-wing opposition as childish and contemptible, but not far below the surface they have dreaded the day it rises up to bite them in the ass and destroy their glorious temples of political triangulation. That day has now come, and they are in danger of becoming the last advocates of a faith that both the right and left have abandoned. They can only hope that Donald Trump’s corruption and incompetence will save them from their own.
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from Andrew O’Hehir on our dazed and confused world
The most notorious press conference Donald Trump ever held was the one in which he told a scientist in attendance to look into the possibility of using household disinfectant inside the human body to kill the Covid-19 virus. He had watched a demonstration of how the product worked on surfaces, you see, and he thought they hadn’t considered the possibility that humans could ingest it and achieve similar effects. That day, April 23, 2020, marked the last of Trump’s daily televised pandemic press briefings, and it may very well have been the last straw for many of those who voted against him just a few months later.
At the beginning of the pandemic, Trump told the public that everyone at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was astonished at how well he understood the science. He mused that he probably could have been a doctor. Despite the utter humiliation of that famous press conference, the president remains undeterred in that fantasy in his second term.
In September, Trump announced that pregnant women should not take Tylenol during pregnancy, claiming without evidence the drug is linked to an increased risk of autism. On Monday he donned his imaginary white coat again to issue an executive order changing the U.S. government’s recommendation for the childhood vaccine schedule — because he is convinced that the vaccines cause autism.
Neither of those assertions is grounded in scientific fact, and both have negative ramifications for women and children if they are followed. The recommendations to break up the combined measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccines into individual doses because today they “look like the size of a bottle of soda poured into a little child’s body,” as Trump stated, are plainly absurd. Any association between these vaccines and autism has been thoroughly debunked, and all the major medical and scientific associations immediately issued statements that they would not follow these recommendations.
Trump is aided in his crusade to personally cure autism by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his loyal health and human services secretary and anti-vaccine crusader, who dutifully stood by his side on Monday and parroted the same nonsense. The new recommendations will likely be followed by millions of MAHA moms who have fallen down the rabbit hole of misinformation and disinformation that Kennedy and Trump have been digging. But the pair are just the latest in the long line of hustlers, fraudsters and canny opportunists who have been working to undermine science in this country for more than a century. In fact, doing so is an all-American tradition.
Two groups have long been especially successful in challenging the public’s confidence in science: Christian fundamentalists, a religious force that grew into a political juggernaut, and Big Business.
Two groups have long been especially successful in challenging the public’s confidence in science: Christian fundamentalists, a religious force that grew into a political juggernaut, and Big Business. While neither has openly colluded with the other, they have both furthered each other’s goals and ended up in a political alliance. One wouldn’t think these two disparate institutions would have much in common. But they share similar tactics: lying to their followers and customers for power and profit. And both have their reasons for rejecting science that interferes with their own interests.
Christianity and science have been in tension ever since the Catholic Church placed Galileo under house arrest for suggesting that the earth wasn’t the center of the universe. But for the most part, the tension was at least somewhat manageable, and both carried on in their own spheres. In the early 20th century, however, a new Christian movement formed that took direct aim at science on the grounds it constituted a threat to the belief in the Bible’s inerrancy, and the modern war began.
In the beginning, this new movement was largely financed by a pair of Los Angeles oil magnates. Milton and Lyman Stewart were religious zealots who were horrified by the encroachment of modernist ideas on society. The Stewarts published a book called “The Fundamentals,” giving the movement its name, and shipped copies all over North America at their own expense, literally spreading the fundamentalist gospel and influencing massive numbers of Americans to reject scientific knowledge wherever it conflicted with literal biblical interpretations.
Fast forward to the 1980s, and Christian fundamentalism had become a powerful political force as evangelical organizations like the Moral Majority and Focus on the Family aligned directly with the Republican Party, wielding huge influence on right-wing politics. In doing so, they signed on with the most powerful GOP faction, Big Business. Using their influence with their followers, they managed to help convince millions to doubt any science that interferes with the interests of huge corporations, and reject regulations and taxation to mitigate the problems that came with their products.
Once again, the fossil fuel industry led the way. Another pair of brothers, Charles and David Koch, zealous libertarians rather than fundamentalist Christians, ran a global conglomerate that dealt in energy and chemicals, and they were determined to stop the growing consensus that fossil fuels were warming the planet. Like the Stewarts before them, the Koch brothers financed a massive campaign to convince people that the science was wrong, and they brought a lot of their friends in the industries along with them.
In the 2000s, a tsunami of money was released into the political system to block climate legislation, particularly during Barack Obama’s presidency. This has shown no signs of stopping, despite mounting evidence every day that the planet is under increasing stress and people are starting to suffer in vast numbers. The result of these efforts is obvious: Less than half of all Americans now believe climate change is caused by human activity. Only 21% of Republicans do.
Science denialism comes from many directions, and unfortunately we are in a period where it’s flourishing. There have always been hustlers and snake oil salesmen, but today the internet provides endless opportunities for people to “do their own research” and find whatever feels right to them, so conspiracy theories have become the lingua franca of our society. Delusional narcissists like Trump and Kennedy, occupying powerful positions and spreading nutty medical advice, are now just par for the course.
Some of the medical and scientific skepticism is a result of people feeling adrift in a rapidly changing world and drowning in competing information. But make no mistake: Powerful societal interests are also benefiting from all this, and it’s not by accident. They have spent a lot of time and a whole lot of money creating this environment of mistrust and suspicion, each for their own purposes but sharing the same goal, and it’s paid off handsomely.
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.
In MAGA’s self-mythology, they are a family first movement that encourages Americans to have more babies. Over the past year, some of the coalition’s most prominent figures have touted a responsibility to pro-create. In December 2025, Lara Trump said on Fox News, “We’re going to be in a pickle if we don’t get more babies coming.” Three months later, in a speech at the 2026 March for Life, Vice President JD Vance congratulated himself for impregnating his wife Usha, saying he “practices what he preaches” when he calls for “more families and more babies.” Katie Miller, the podcaster and wife of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, used the same wording to announce her pregnancy on X in late 2025: “The White House practices what they preach about increasing the fertility rate.”
Even Donald Trump has gotten in on the act. At a Women’s History Month event in March 2025, he bizarrely referred to himself as the “fertilization president.”
So when Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took to Instagram recently to announce she is freezing her eggs, surely MAGA was resoundingly grateful to her for carrying forward this pro-baby message, right? Not quite. As the 36-year-old New York Democrat was no doubt aware would happen, MAGA commentators lashed out at her for preserving her ability to have kids in the future. Christian right commentator Allie Beth Stuckey said she was “selfish.” Podcast host Matt Walsh called Ocasio-Cortez’s choice “backwards and ridiculous.” The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway argued that the congresswoman’s video was a “sad public performance/display of unnecessarily unwise decision making.”
In the MAGAsphere, it’s not enough for a woman to want motherhood. If she doesn’t give up her career and even her personal happiness in the process of making babies, it doesn’t count.
In the MAGAsphere, it’s not enough for a woman to want motherhood. If she doesn’t give up her career and even her personal happiness in the process of making babies, it doesn’t count. Being pregnant isn’t enough. Conservatives also seem to require the “barefoot” and “in the kitchen” parts of the traditional job description.
In the case of Ocasio-Cortez — and many women like here — the problem is that she has ambitions for higher political office, hinting repeatedly that she’s considering a run for the Senate or even the presidency. For the right, babies aren’t an end in themselves; they are also a weapon to use in MAGA’s ongoing war on women’s equality.
“She’s glamorizing the lie that women can have it all,” Stuckey said. “You can’t.”
Hemingway agreed. “Ladies, get married to a good man as young as you’re able and have your babies,” she said.
Blinded by their own sexism, none of these pundits considered the possibility that Ocasio-Cortez, a savvy politician who is skilled at social media, knew how MAGA would react to posts where she injected the medications on camera or answered people’s detailed questions about the process. She even hinted at this in her video. “Don’t be weird about this,” she said as she gave herself an injection. “Even though I know you all will be.”
The right’s reaction revealed what the White House has been trying to hide from swing voters all along: Their chatter about fertility rates was never about happy families or a prosperous nation. To the contrary, as evidenced by the draconian bans in red states, Republicans will gladly sacrifice happiness and prosperity for the goal of subjugating women. One White House official even told Axios that it’s “not helpful” and “isn’t really a winner” for conservative influencers to say the quiet part out loud.
Notably, none of these MAGA pundits have called Elon Musk “selfish” for having kids in his 50s. Or Vance, who is 42 with an infant at home. Or Trump, who was 59 when his youngest child, Barron, was born. The mandate to have kids young, even if it ruins your career or railroads you into an unhappy marriage, applies only to women.
Ocasio-Cortez flagged this in an Instagram story discussing why women might freeze eggs. “So much of this discussion around parenthood and fertility is focused on women, but it takes two to tango,” she said, going on to explain that often women want to get married and have kids, but “they haven’t found their person.” According to Puck News’ Leigh Ann Caldwell, who cited “a reputable Democratic source,” the congresswoman and her fiancé Riley Roberts called off their engagement “about 18 months ago.”
Regardless of her own relationship status, Ocasio-Cortez spoke a simple truth that is typically ignored by right-wing pundits: Women aren’t “delaying” marriage. The verb itself implies young women are turning down viable offers, but no evidence exists for such a claim. In fact, an increasing number of conservative women are starting to publicly complain about all this pressure to get married and have babies young, since they can’t magically conjure suitable men out of thin air. Last week, annoyance over this burbled up in far-right women’s circles on X. Despite being openly anti-feminist, these women were nonetheless complaining. “Many of us would have happily gotten married young . . . if we had the choice,” one wrote. Another said, “You can’t snap your fingers and get a spouse on demand, sadly.”
Alex Clark, a popular podcast host in the Turning Point USA network, has also been struggling to tamp down her anger over this. In May, the 33-year-old published an ill-advised newsletter complaining that “[w]hores get married first” because, she felt, liberal women had an easier time attracting eligible men. The following month, at the TPUSA women’s conference, Clark was less overtly angry, but she still expressed frustration at her deceased mentor, Charlie Kirk, for telling young women to get married: “Right-wing men act like we’re supposed to just, I guess, live under an overpass and wait for our husband to fall from the sky.”
Considering that young conservative men outnumber young conservative women, one would think it shouldn’t be so hard to find a Mr. Right who is also Mr. Right Wing. Recent high-profile stories about younger Republican politicians, though, offer a reminder of why the pickings can seem so slim.
In Texas, a 30-year-old Republican congressional candidate, Brandon Herrera, was recently exposed for posting a video in which he scolded mothers because “you let somebody [vulgar term for ejaculation] you” and calling a child a “c*m trophy.” When asked for comment by the Austin-American Statesman, his campaign replied with a picture of a whipped cream-covered pie, a reference to a term shaming women who have had sexual intercourse.
Even more high profile has been the divorce of Rep. Max Miller from Emily Moreno, the daughter of another prominent Ohio Republican, Sen. Bernie Moreno. Miller has been accused of breaking his two-year-old daughter’s collarbone, pointing a gun at his then-wife’s head and scalding her with hot water. The accusations are inextricable from his over-the-top public posturing as an alpha male, including an admission that despite being just 37, he has taken testosterone injections.
Not every Republican man is as repulsive as these three. Democrats aren’t immune from bad men either, as recent scandals involving former California Rep. Eric Swalwell and former Maine Democratic Senate nominee Graham Platner have shown. The difference, though, is that Democrats made clear to both men they needed to step down once the evidence against them stacked up. Republican politicians, on the other hand, are rewarded for demonstrating abusive and misogynistic behavior, as evidenced by the robust support and fundraising given to Herrera, Miller and Mills by GOP leadership.
It’s incredibly hard to square the pious claims that young women should marry a “good” Christian man young and start having babies with a Republican culture that is so welcoming, even encouraging, of such vile men. Women aren’t respected in MAGA. Despite the Christian right’s false claims, mothers aren’t venerated either. Instead, ugly, sexually demeaning language about mothers and children is normalized. Abuse is also tacitly accepted, and women are shamed if they speak out. As with the attacks on Ocasio-Cortez, all this talk about family and motherhood is a paper-thin disguise for hate, and for putting women under the boot.
The timing of Ocasio-Cortez’s egg-freezing announcement dangles a once-unimaginable prospect: that we could have a pregnant president of the United States. If she, as many assume, is putting off pregnancy until after a presidential run, then such a scenario is at least a possibility.
Republicans can complain, but most Americans understand that a pregnant woman is more capable of doing a high-level job than a man in his 80s, especially one in such seemingly poor health as Donald Trump. A pregnant President Ocasio-Cortez would also further reveal their hypocrisy. After all, these are the people who, not so long ago, were holding up a pregnant press secretary, second lady and whatever it is that Katie Miller does as role models. Surely, a pregnant president would send that pro-baby message they say they crave even more loudly.
There have been many changes in America’s political system in the last decade or so, but some things are perennial. If you would have told me in August 2015 that we would be in the middle of Donald Trump’s second term, in which he’s slapping his name on buildings all over Washington, building monuments to himself and declaring that the country is under attack by communists, I would have laughed out loud. But if you had told me instead that the media would be framing the upcoming midterm elections as a referendum on the Democrats going too far left and alienating the rock-ribbed Americans who matter, I would have shrugged and said, “What else is new?”
If there is one thing we have been able to count on for the last 30 years, if not longer, it is that it doesn’t matter how extreme the right wing might become or how far down the conspiratorial rabbit hole they go. The media interprets all political events in this polarized environment as validation of the belief that conservatives are always more in touch with Real America, and therefore more deserving of positions of leadership. According to this thesis, if Democrats want to win power, they will have to radically change their positions.
That’s the conventional wisdom when it comes to the Michigan Senate race. After Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s win on August 4 in the Democratic primary, an avalanche of articles, editorials and op-eds — not to mention analysis by television pundits and social media influencers — have appeared claiming that he is too far left for Michigan’s general election voters. Practically no one is doing the same for his GOP opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers, who has tacked so far right that he has become a Midwestern hologram of the president.
This pattern is fascinating, especially considering the fact that in the last 35 years, Democrats have won the presidency five times to the Republicans’ four, a number that includes the two times (George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016) the party lost the popular vote but won the anachronistic Electoral College. Coupled with the fact that control of Congress has been evenly split, it’s not as though the GOP has had their fingers on the American pulse this whole time. Instead, they have built a massive partisan media infrastructure and stolen Supreme Court seats to further put their thumbs on the scale of the electoral system with big money and voter suppression.
With the deep unfairness of the Senate giving far more power to small, rural (and conservative) states, the institutional advantage held by Republicans is profound. And yet, according to conventional wisdom and the predictable knee-jerk reactions by too many establishment Democrats, when Republicans win it’s because conservative ideas have won over the people, and when the Democrats win it’s also because conservative ideas have won over the people.
This dynamic was on full display Sunday when CNN’s Fareed Zakaria analyzed the Michigan Senate race by saying that working class voters have abandoned Democrats as the party has moved left — even as they have tried to appeal to people on economic grounds and offer ideas that will help them materially. “The lesson is not that economics don’t matter,” he said, “but the Democratic Party’s problem is not that it is seen as too centrist on economics. Democrats routinely lead Republicans on issues like healthcare, and even now, the cost of living. Their liabilities are cultural and social issues — crime, immigration, the border and the so-called woke agenda.” In other words, Democrats must move right on cultural issues to win elections.
When Republicans lose — which, as we’ve seen, happens at least half the time — they aren’t harangued to take up diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, open the borders or clamp down on excess policing, even though their excesses on those issues could just as easily be seen as dispositive.
When Republicans lose — which, as we’ve seen, happens at least half the time — they aren’t harangued to take up diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, open the borders or clamp down on excess policing, even though their excesses on those issues could just as easily be seen as dispositive. The press will blame Trump or individual candidates for a lack of character, but they rarely apply the kind of analysis that Zakaria does, which essentially demands that Republicans abandon elements of their base to pander to Democrats.
The result is that only Democrats have agency to break the impasse.
When Bill Clinton won the presidency 34 years ago, Democrats had been in the presidential wilderness for 12 years. Their last two presidents, Jimmy Carter and Lyndon Johnson, had left office under the clouds of the Iran hostage crisis, in the case of the former, and Vietnam with the latter. The party decided to do just as Zakaria suggested, and Clinton won a plurality of voters in the 1992 general election on a platform of fiscal and personal responsibility, challenging the Democratic base on, you guessed it, culture war issues. Two years later, the GOP won the House majority for the first time in 42 years. So, that worked out well.
According to surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center, over the past 35 years, the public has actually moved left on culture war issues, following a progressive shift among Democrats, while the right has clung to its prejudices. (Republicans’ cult worship of Trump and conspiratorial thinking is hard to measure in these terms, but there is no doubt they have changed dramatically in this regard.)
It should come as no surprise then that Democrats, feeling their strength in opposition to the extremely unpopular Trump, would see an opportunity to more explicitly push their message. Generally speaking, midterm elections are seen as a referendum on the party in power, and with the economy in an ongoing slump and Trump more polarizing than ever, you cannot blame them. As the New York Times reported, the party’s left wing has been energetically organizing all over the country, and it’s paid dividends in primaries in blue and purple states alike in the upper Midwest. And, once again, the media is falling back on the same old fear-mongering about the left alienating the Real Americans.
We have article after article hand-wringing over El-Sayed’s primary win because he supports issues they consider beyond the pale, such as Medicare for All, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement and ending unlimited support for Israel, even though each of these issues have majority support. His primary opponents are now holding unity rallies to bring the various factions of the party together after the bruising campaign, and the national party has mobilized in support of his candidacy, including former President Barack Obama and former Transportation Secretary — and current Michigan resident — Pete Buttigieg, both of whom carry serious clout among more conservative members of the Democratic base and independent voters. In other words, Democrats are doing everything they can to reach out to the broad middle of the state.
Rogers, meanwhile, is doing the opposite, tacking hard to the right and even going so far as to join the most noxious, destructive conspiracy theory of all: election denialism.
Rogers, meanwhile, is doing the opposite, tacking hard to the right and even going so far as to join the most noxious, destructive conspiracy theory of all: election denialism.
As a member of Congress between 2001 and 2015, Rogers was a standard conservative in the George W. Bush mold, voting for tax cuts and deregulation, and later chairing the powerful House intelligence committee in the last four years of his term. When he retired from the House, Rogers worked as a talk radio host and commentator for CNN. Although he supported Trump after he won the GOP presidential nomination in 2016, he refused to go down the road of the Big Lie following Joe Biden’s win in 2020. In an op-ed for the Washington Post — published the day before the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol — Rogers called Trump’s call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which he urged the secretary to find him additional votes, “more gangster than presidential.” Rogers wrote, “This trend of refusing to accept free and fair elections, without any proof of fraud, must end for the sake of our democratic republic.” A year later, he said Trump’s political career was over.
But times have changed.
In 2024, when Rogers ran for the Senate against Elissa Slotkin, who would go on to win the race, he needed Trump’s endorsement. He gave his in return. Rogers has also adopted the president’s Big Lie, which should be disqualifying among thinking people everywhere.
I’m not seeing a lot of hand-wringing among the pundits about how Rogers is losing Real Americans with his extreme views; that criticism is being reserved for El-Sayed. Likewise, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is locked in a close Senate race against Democrat state Rep. James Talarico, isn’t being browbeaten to moderate his views.
The Democrats may very well lose those races. But in this closely divided electorate, they might have lost them anyway with more moderate candidates. After all, Republicans have been running on racism and left-wing hippies for decades, no matter what their views were. The very centrist Clinton was vilified 35 years ago because he played the saxophone with sunglasses on “The Arsenio Hall Show.” Barack Obama’s middle name — Hussein — remains an Islamophobic meme all these years later. So, it’s not as if Republicans wouldn’t deploy the same insults to other candidates, no matter their positions.
This year, Democrats are talking straight and taking it right to the people, and both El-Sayed and Talarico, with their populist messages, are powerful communicators. Maybe it won’t work. But it’s long past time for the Democratic Party to stop allowing candidates to be harassed by the conventional wisdom that says the only way to win is to run to the right.
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.
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.
Former Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene recently posted an odd picture on social media. A group of people were gathered around a large dining table beneath a massive chandelier of antler, a tableau that evoked some kind of Viking summit. Tucker Carlson sat at the head of the table like a preppy Ragnar Lothbrok, and he was surrounded by fellow Trumpist apostates Greene, former Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie and Joe Kent — the former MAGA cultist who resigned as Donald Trump’s director of counterterrorism — and their respective spouses. “The movement has begun,” Greene captioned the picture.
Their new political movement began to take shape on Wednesday when he revealed the 10-point manifesto during a livestream. While he was vague about the specific form he expected this movement to take, it was later reported that Greene, Massie and Kent had visited Carlson’s Maine estate to urge him to run for president in 2028. The manifesto would seem to be the first step toward a third-party bid, since all these people are persona non grata with the GOP establishment, and have attempted to seize the MAGA mantle with varying degrees of success.
Considering the split in the Republican Party these days between the MAGA cultists, the MAGA populists and what is now a rump establishment, the timing does seem ripe for a third-party to form from the right, and Carlson is a likely candidate to lead it.
Considering the split in the Republican Party these days between the MAGA cultists, the MAGA populists and what is now a rump establishment, the timing does seem ripe for a third-party to form from the right, and Carlson is a likely candidate to lead it. After having debased himself for years by behaving as a Trump toady while trying desperately to maintain something of an original persona, Fox News fired him in ignominious fashion in 2023. Shortly after, he retreated to Maine to reinvent himself as a podcaster and the leader of the populist, isolationist right.
Carlson has had quite a bit of success in that role, which was massively enhanced when Trump went to war with Iran and tightened the already symbiotic relationship with Israel. The opening is here, and Carlson seems ready to seize the opportunity.
The problem, of course, is that third-party presidential bids in American politics never win, and they often end up being spoilers for one of the two main parties, although they can have quite a lot of influence on the agendas of both. The most successful — those that earned the largest shares of the popular vote — signal a discontent with one or both parties that can serve as a wake-up call that the country is looking for change.
Four third-party campaigns have resulted in double-digit vote counts, starting with Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party in 1912. By then a former president after passing the baton to William Howard Taft, a decision he came to regret, Roosevelt got 27.4% of the vote, showing that progressive ideas around workers’ rights, business regulation, constitutional reform and conservation, among other things, were potent political issues among voters who had been buffeted by an unregulated financial system and exploited by the Gilded Age barons. Roosevelt’s campaign shook the system, earning 88 electoral votes and dooming Taft’s reelection campaign in favor of the Democrat Woodrow Wilson.
Twelve years later, although he received 16.6% of the popular vote, the third-party run of progressive Robert LaFollette was less consequential; he only carried Wisconsin and its 13 electoral votes. In 1968, George Wallace, the Southern populist, racist and former governor of Alabama, received 13.5% of the popular vote and 48 election votes, carrying all five states of the Deep South.
In 1992, wealthy businessman Ross Perot seized the public imagination with his economic nationalism — “that giant sucking sound of jobs going overseas” — and fiscal conservatism seemed to speak to disaffected members of both parties who felt that the country had abandoned the average worker. Despite his great wealth, Perot had a homespun approach and used the media very effectively. When he ran in 1992, he received 18.9% of the popular vote, support that most pollsters said came equally from both parties, but garnered no electoral votes. Four years later, Perot garnered a respectable 8.4%, and his Reform Party lasted until 2000, when Donald Trump made a brief attempt at a run under its banner.
Third-party presidential bids have perversely had the greatest impact in moments where the country has been closely divided between the two parties.
The 2000 election comes to mind. The national popular vote was almost equally divided, with Vice President Al Gore receiving 500,000 more votes than George W. Bush, the Republican governor of Texas, but the presidency was decided by a series of events in Florida, where the tally ended up being 537 votes for Bush, giving him the state’s 25 electoral votes. But without the presence of Green Party candidate Ralph Nader, Gore would have won Florida — and the presidency. Nader’s 97,488 votes in the Sunshine State, which would have likely been cast for Gore had he not been in the race, made sure it went for Bush, and consigned the country to years of war and economic distress.
In the lead-up to 2028, you can already see the influence of Carlson’s faction of the right putting pressure on the GOP. His manifesto is an eccentric amalgam of populist right-wing nationalism, woo-woo Make America Healthy Again anti-science beliefs, isolationism, anti-elitism, natalism, degrading education and xenophobia, and ideas of “beautifying” the country and rebuilding manufacturing and farming. Carlson side-stepped the issues of abortion, religion, and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, which is surprising since he’s been in the middle of those culture war issues for years.
At the same time, Vice President JD Vance has been laying the groundwork for his own run by releasing “Communion,” a book focused on his religious faith and conversion to Catholicism. He has also been trying to thread the needle between the anti-elite message, which is at the center of the present populist movement, and his devotion to Trump, the most corrupt president in American history. Vance seems to be trying out a strategy in which he will portray himself as the great crusader against fraud in day care centers and hospice care, for which he blames the so-called scourge of immigrant labor.
The vice president is coming to the defense of those who are economically disadvantaged in this economy, which he has said shows that “40 years of bipartisan economic policy has failed.” (The Trump years, which the president insists have been the greatest economy the world has ever known, evidently don’t count.) Vance has even taken to social media to position himself against a Trump-supporting elite. Responding to right-wing columnist Marc Theissen’s rude “cry me a river” response to a college kid lamenting that “a burrito shouldn’t cost $20,” Vance responded with a Trumpian insult, saying, “I’m surprised to hear Mark say this. If you’ve ever met him in person, it’s quite obvious the man has never missed a burrito.” I guess this is supposed to endear him to the MAGA folks while subtly acknowledging that the affordability crisis is real.
Vance seems to know that such a magic trick will be difficult, if not impossible, to pull off in 2028. He will have to defend Trump’s economy, which will be necessary to attract the hard-core cultists who still love the president despite the nation’s sluggish economy.
Carlson, meanwhile, sitting outside the administration, has a much better chance of snagging this populist right-wing movement that’s evolved from Trump’s original “America First” movement, which could serve as a way for many disillusioned Trump voters to maintain the fiction that they really only cared about policy all along.
This fissure has every chance of splitting the GOP and helping Democrats take back the White House. Go, Tucker, go.
Ariana Grande has been concerningly thin for years now, but the online discourse about her body exploded this week after she released the music video for “Petal,” the title track of her most recent album. The video’s storyline, in which the 33-year-old pop singer gets “Carrie”-style revenge for men’s misogynist judgments, was completely overshadowed by fan alarm at Grande’s apparent emaciation. Set in the 1960s, the colorful retro fashions hang off her skeletal frame.
“I can’t even enjoy the video without thinking she looks sickly every second she is on the screen,” one person posted on YouTube.
“At this point, im [sic] judging her team, friends, and family,” the video’s top commenter said. “This is insane.”
“She’s is surrounded by enablers,” another wrote. “Eating disorders are not a joke.”
These comments aren’t outliers. To the contrary, the entire discussion on YouTube was about Grande’s body, not the video’s visuals or the music, a lovely torch song where she compares herself to a “petal in the pavement.” While she likely intended the lyric to be empowering, instead it feels more like a metaphor for her apparent physical fragility.
Grande’s public relations team responded to the furor with denial, announcing that the singer would be “taking a step back from visibility” after finishing her tour, insisting that she’s living “both healthily and happily,” while blaming “endless, ongoing public scrutiny” for the move. Her retreat includes a withdrawal from a highly anticipated West End stage production of Stephen Sondheim’s musical “Sunday in the Park with George,” alongside her “Wicked” co-star Jonathan Bailey. The announcement also follows previous comments from Grande scolding people to “be gentler and less comfortable commenting on people’s bodies.”
In response to the news, the famously outspoken actress Jameela Jamil posted an Instagram story in which she argued that the calls of Grande’s team for privacy are missing the point. Jamil, who says she nearly died from her own eating disorder, pointed to Grande’s impressionable fans, “[m]any who have no support system equipped to handle the deadly clutches of anorexia.” Jamil later defended her post, pointing to the “young girls” who are watching the situation unfold, adding, “We don’t have to pretend we are blind because it’s a pop star.”
The ongoing battle over health, thinness and women’s bodies has become more political in recent years, as MAGA and MAHA influencers have turned weight into a culture war battlefield.
Jamil may be blunt, but her point is truer now than ever. The ongoing battle over health, thinness and women’s bodies has become more political in recent years, as MAGA and MAHA influencers have turned weight into a culture war battlefield. Many right-wing figures have become increasingly vocal in their belief that women shouldn’t only be skinny, they should also look weak. Conservatives aren’t just anti-fat anymore. Even building muscle is viewed as suspiciously feminist. Instead, women — and girls — are being told to strive to look frail instead.
Fueled by access to illicit use of GLP-1 appetite suppressants, recent years have seen a surge of online influencers who explicitly push starvation over health — and especially over strength — as a feminine ideal. On TikTok, the trend was even called “SkinnyTok,” where influencers like Liv Schmidt build a fanbase with videos highlighting their perilously meager diets. Most of this content is not explicitly political. But as The Atlantic’s Annie Joy Williams chronicled in June 2025, the right-wing politics aren’t far below the trend’s surface.
As soon as she started looking at SkinnyTok content, Williams wrote, “the tradwife content began to sneak in” to her algorithm. Soon she was being served videos not just about being super-thin, but also geared toward “embracing my divine femininity” and “my natural role.” Experts she spoke with noted this is a common right-wing recruitment tactic of grabbing people with seemingly apolitical content — such as “diet tips” — and then steering them toward far-right propaganda.
This is most clearly evident in the way that Evie Magazine, a far-right Christian magazine that sells its message using the aesthetics of popular women’s magazines like Vogue or Cosmopolitan, has embraced SkinnyTok influencers. In 2025 the publication profiled Schmidt, insisting that she’s merely “being honest” when telling followers that the only pathway to romantic and professional success is to eat as little as possible. Carmen Schober, the profile’s author, ignored the way members of Schmidt’s online forum, Skinni Société, commiserated about their hair loss and inability to stand without getting dizzy. The magazine also raved about “skinny queen” influencer Amanda Dobler for “not apologizing” after coaching followers to avoid even wasabi and soy sauce, because their negligible calorie counts are deemed excessive.
When I purchased a copy of Evie’s print magazine in May, I was alarmed at how the magazine not only promoted radical skinniness but also discouraged women from healthy habits like exercise. The issue explicitly told women to avoid exercise that builds muscle in “quads, hamstrings, and thighs,” on the grounds that it allegedly alienates men. The editors also discouraged women from cardio exercise, falsely claiming it will “throw your hormones off.”
“A woman who is sample size looks great in virtually everything she puts on,” Evie advised, implying throughout the issue that failure to maintain a size zero could ruin your marriage, or even drive your husband to cheat.
This hostility to women exercising has been accompanied by MAGA valorizing fitness as rightfully a masculine endeavor. Even members of Donald Trump’s administration, such as Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, regularly post workout videos that frame exercise as men’s work, all about grunting and showing off muscles. While it’s rare they explicitly exclude women, the lack of female bodies becomes notable if you watch enough of the videos.
There is one form of exercise Evie and other right-wing influencers tacitly allow women: Pilates, a low-impact exercise similar to yoga. Pilates has a lot of benefits, but it’s not known for being especially sweaty or for building larger muscles. As The 19th reported in March, this has led to right-wing influencers extolling the “Pilates girl” as the ideal, since both strength and sweat are deemed too unfeminine. As a bonus, some on the right even claim there are no men in Pilates classes, a false claim that serves to protect fragile male egos from the possibility that a wife or girlfriend might speak to another man without supervision. But as any woman could tell you, Pilates isn’t exactly a calorie-burner. A woman who limits her exercise to Pilates will still have to subsist on very little food to get the delicate, bone-thin look these men conjure with the “Pilates girl” image.
Ariana Grande is an outspoken progressive who incorporates feminist themes in her music, and she would no doubt be horrified by the way the right is using the idea of thinness to bully women into submission and self-loathing. Indeed, Grande seems distressed by the discourse around her body, and she has said she wants people to leave her alone.
But this is where Jamil, perhaps in an impolitic way, is making a point that is both true and uncomfortable. Romanticizing extreme thinness contributes to eating disorders, which can do serious damage to the health of sufferers. In many cases, it might even kill them. That’s been true for decades, but now, as the issue has taken on political salience, the situation is even more alarming.
Women already have an uphill battle trying to maintain a healthy body image. It’s harder now that taking basic care of yourself is demonized as being “woke.”
On July 26 in Pennsylvania, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries introduced the party’s Fighting for an Affordable America agenda to mark 100 days until November’s midterm elections. The plan, according to the Associated Press, calls for “restoring healthcare cuts, bringing the cost of living down and ending the war in Iran to beat Republicans and hold President Donald Trump accountable.”
Democrats always want to run on kitchen table issues, and this time they have an opening you could drive the Titanic through. Even among Trump’s most fervent followers, the war in Iran is unusually unpopular; it’s the first time I can ever remember Republicans not rallying around a war started by a GOP president. In fact, the party used to rally around so-called “Democrat wars” too, at least most of the time, even as they condemned them for being mistakes. Trump, though, seems to have broken that knee-jerk reaction, which, if it lasts, may end up being one of the only things he has done right, even if it was by accident.
After Trump and the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, there are no Democrats — and vanishingly few independents — who are clamoring for a “return to normal,” if anyone can even remember what that looks like.
“Holding Donald Trump accountable” is obviously a necessary goal, and we can only hope that if they take back the House, and perhaps the Senate, Democrats will spend the next two years hammering Republicans on corruption, malfeasance, criminality and incompetence, pounding as many nails into the MAGA coffin as possible in anticipation of a hard-fought 2028 campaign. After Trump and the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, there are no Democrats — and vanishingly few independents — who are clamoring for a “return to normal,” if anyone can even remember what that looks like.
As we get further into Trump’s second term, the rise of the progressive left, generated at least in part by the desperate need for generational change, is bringing some longstanding issues to the surface. Younger Democrats aren’t talking about politics in technocratic terms, as the party’s politicians have been doing for the last 30 years, offering up 10-point economic plans and telling the public how they can work the system more efficiently. They see politics in largely moral terms, and they are ready to address some of the thorniest moral issues we face.
Oligarchy is at the top of the list, an issue that has animated the left since at least the Occupy Wall Street movement began in 2011. Fifteen years later, a global backlash against billionaires who have outsize influence over politics — and who do not pay their fair share — is taking shape.
The left also rejects America’s global role as security guarantor, particularly in light of the tragedy taking place in Gaza, which has been aided and abetted by the U.S. government. The party’s mainstream has moved substantially in their direction, leading to an unprecedented split in the House caucus in July that saw over a hundred House members vote to cut off aid to Israel. Whether it was done out of genuine desire to end the blank check or simply to allow members a symbolic vote going into the midterms, it’s clear that the intense opposition to Israel’s actions have made a difference, despite the ongoing debate about the scope of the policy.
These moral issues are animating a significant faction of the party, and they are having an impact. But I find myself wondering why another moral issue, much closer to home and shocking almost beyond comprehension, isn’t getting much play on the campaign trail.
The treatment of immigrants of all statuses, and sometimes American citizens who happen to look “foreign,” is an abomination. But aside from perfunctory nods to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement, it seems to have become background noise.
Masked federal agents are killing people with impunity. They are splitting up families without compunction, throwing people in camps and deporting them to countries they have never even visited. Now, with the permission of the MAGA-compliant Supreme Court, the Trump administration is in the process of deporting Haitians who have been here legally for decades by forcing them to leave immediately or wear an ankle bracelet in anticipation of being sent to a country which our own State Department says is too dangerous to visit. These are people who own property and businesses, and many of them have American-born children. They also happen to be Black.
This is not a popular policy. While most congressional Republicans still approve of Trump’s immigration agenda, many of them aren’t thrilled with the administration’s deportation policy. According to Strength in Numbers, most Americans are appalled and prefer a path to citizenship for non-criminals. Trump’s cruel priorities clearly work for many rank-and-file Republicans, and this seems to have some timorous Democrats spooked. But if there has ever been an issue that the left should be screaming about every single day, it’s this.
Many Americans are out in the streets protesting and putting themselves on the line. In fact, average voters may be more up in arms than Democratic politicians. If the progressive left wants to consolidate the party behind a more virtuous set of values, this is the issue that will rally the entire spectrum of ideologies. Jeffries and party leaders should move it to the very top of the agenda, and make Trump’s abuses a rallying cry across the country.
The Democratic Party should not play politics with this; the president’s abuses are happening right here on our own streets, in our own communities. It is the moral issue of our time.
In Church, Merch, and State, Sarah Posner writes about the intersection of religion and politics in the United States.This column is part of Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
Following his attendance at the funeral of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and a meeting with President Trump about the Iran War, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with evangelical leaders at the historic Blair House in Washington last Wednesday. Among the participants were Christian Zionist leader Mike Evans; Larry Huch, a televangelist deeply embedded in the Christian Zionist world; MAGA evangelical influencer Lance Wallnau; and broadcaster Erick Stakelbeck, whose dispatches from the Middle East can be seen on the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN) and YouTube. Evangelicals and Jews, Netanyahu told the assembled group, are part of the same “Judeo-Christian heritage” that is “under attack from the rising tide of antisemitism and anti-Evangelicalism.” Our enemies, his message was, are the same. “It’s not accidental that the two are coming under a joint attack,” Netanyahu said, “because we are one.”
They are one, Netanyahu’s evangelical supporters believe, in a war not against the far-right antisemites and anti-Zionists who have both defined and rocked Trump’s coalition, the ones who admire Hitler and engage in Holocaust denial. The true enemy, they contend, are Israel’s critics on the left. Similarly, critics of Christian nationalism are, in evangelical thinking, solely from the left. They conflate criticism of the Israeli government with antisemitism, and criticism of an American theocracy with anti-Christian bigotry.
By most objective standards, the 2026 FIFA World Cup tournament — which concluded two weeks ago in New Jersey with Spain’s grueling 1-0 victory over Argentina — was a major success. Despite global anxiety over the collision between the world’s largest sporting event and Donald Trump’s “America First” regime, stadiums were mostly full across North America, fans and players from all sorts of large and small countries seemed to enjoy themselves (and tried to smuggle home large quantities of ranch dressing) and, of course, something like $15 billion flowed into FIFA’s coffers.
Just below the surface, however, the soccer world was seething with discontent. That erupted into all-out rebellion this week, which could finally bring down Gianni Infantino, the Swiss administrator who has served as FIFA chief executive for the last decade. Unpacking the byzantine history of alleged or actual corruption within FIFA and the numerous regional and national federations under its purview would be a dissertation-length project. But it’s definitely not wrong to say there’s a Trump angle, and that Infantino’s marriage of convenience and shared sensibility with the U.S. president may bring his downfall.
Even before this year’s tournament, Infantino stood accused of commercializing or “Americanizing” world soccer — a process he did not start but has certainly accelerated — and of shamelessly cozying up to Trump, whom he presented with the newly-invented FIFA Peace Prize, aka the “Temu Nobel,” last December. That was all inarguably true, and the guy has form, as they say on British cop shows. Back in 2022, while seeking to justify holding the World Cup in Qatar, an autocratic monarchy with a famously dreadful human rights record, Infantino launched a thousand memes with this memorable monologue:
“Today I have very strong feelings, I can tell you. Today I feel Qatari. Today I feel Arab. Today I feel African. Today I feel gay. Today I feel disabled. Today I feel a migrant worker.”
If it seems extraordinary that a major executive of any enterprise, anywhere in the world, could say stuff like that and still have a job four years later, you are beginning to appreciate the hallucinatory Infantino experience. Anyway, in 2026 Infantino seems to have swapped all those intersectional identities for an adjunct MAGA membership, and this year’s World Cup pushed the soccer world’s bizarre love-hate relationship with its leader into overdrive.
Even before this tournament, Infantino stood accused of “Americanizing” world soccer — a process he did not start but has certainly accelerated — and shamelessly cozying up to the current occupant of the White House. This was inarguably true.
Tom Burrows of the Athletic did a nice job this week of summarizing the indictment: Infantino drove World Cup ticket prices to previously unimagined levels, introduced “commercial breaks in each half [of matches] dressed up as hydration breaks” — a network-friendly innovation that global football had resisted for decades — capitulated to Trump in reversing a red-card suspension for U.S. star striker Folarin Balogun, and introduced a “surreal halftime show” featuring Madonna, BTS and Justin Bieber in the final match, in obvious (and inept) imitation of the Super Bowl.
All of that, mind you, came before Infantino’s big surprise this past week: Apparently without consulting any relevant stakeholders, he announced a plan to spin off commercial rights to the World Cup into a new for-profit company (FIFA is a nonprofit, like other international sporting federations) and then sell off a big chunk of that company to an investment consortium led by Joshua Kushner, the younger brother of Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner. So it’s not entirely accurate to say that Infantino wanted to sell world soccer’s biggest brand to the Trump family. But it’s not exactly false either.
To coin a phrase, you can’t make this stuff up. But the good news, or the kind-of good news, or the “why in God’s name did this take so long” news, is that Infantino has finally choked on an overdose of hubris. His proposal collapsed within 48 hours and as of this weekend has been abandoned completely. (Soccer fans will discern unmistakable echoes of the European Super League, a proposed NFL-style closed competition for Europe’s top club teams that was announced in 2021 and imploded within a few weeks.)
UEFA, the federation that governs European soccer and is by far the most powerful of FIFA’s regional subsidiaries, wasted no time in rejecting Infantino’s scheme and announcing that none of its 55 national teams would participate in any FIFA competitions until the proposal was ditched. That was almost certainly enough to torpedo this galaxy-brain plan, and other regional confederations — most notably Concacaf, which represents North America, Central America and the Caribbean, and therefore includes the U.S. — soon followed UEFA’s lead, if not as aggressively.
Donald Trump did not pick up the phone on this occasion. (“Johnny who? Really, I barely know the guy.”) Only the Confederation of African Football — whose member nations, fairly or otherwise, are perceived as Infantino supporters — remained silent. More on that shortly.
Anyone who follows world soccer already knows that UEFA has its own extensive history of political intrigue and internal scandal, and is not well positioned to play populist hero in this drama. But as is so often the case in world affairs, there are no good guys in the story and you have to pick your poison. One could draw a rough analogy with the European Union, a deeply flawed entity that nonetheless represents some degree of ideological or economic counterweight to Trump’s America. In this particular confrontation, Europe held nearly all the cards.
If Infantino somehow pushes through his scheme to sell shares in the World Cup, he will do so — believe it or not — by casting himself as a defender of the downtrodden and underprivileged. He feels gay and African and disabled, remember?
While the next men’s World Cup, FIFA’s biggest golden goose, is still four years away, the consequences of a European boycott would have been felt immediately. The under-20 Women’s World Cup begins in Poland about a month from now, and qualifying playoffs for FIFA’s second-biggest event, the Women’s World Cup (to be held next summer in Brazil) are set for October. Given his avowed commitments to promoting the women’s game and youth soccer at all levels, Infantino simply couldn’t afford to play chicken with UEFA and risk losing those tournaments. Joshua Kushner and his family, one imagines, will not starve.
This may be stretching the point, but there’s a thematic resemblance at work here to the worldwide pushback against Big Tech data centers, and against the opaque government processes that gets them built, as well as to the popular and legal resistance that has stalled the $110 billion merger between Warner Bros. and Paramount. It’s also true that Infantino is now understood, both to soccer fans and the world at large, as a proxy for Donald Trump, which looks like a much worse bet than it did a year ago. Infantino was cruising to likely re-election as FIFA president next year, but right now it’s an even-money bet that he can survive the next month.
Like his White House buddy, Infantino has thrived on a remarkable ability to weaponize greed and cynicism, both on an epic scale and at ground level. He fully intended to push through his scheme to sell shares in the World Cup by casting himself, believe it or not, as a defender of the downtrodden and underprivileged. He feels gay and African and disabled, remember? The uncomfortable truth is that he has ruled over a vast global sports and merchandising empire largely by fulfilling his promises to channel lots of money into regional and national federations in the Global South that have historically had few resources.
Under Infantino’s proposed plan, each of FIFA’s 211 federations — at least the ones who supported him! — would have received an immediate cash infusion of $40 million, with further annual installments to follow. That sum would barely make a difference to the football gods in England, Spain or France, but would been enormous in Malawi or Madagascar. Affluent European nations don’t need infusions of private equity capital to build new stadiums and support younger players, and can afford to stand up to Infantino’s Trump-flavored bribery scheme. For players, parents, coaches and local officials in sub-Saharan Africa, the equation might have looked very different. Why should they care where the money comes from? This particular grift may have failed, but in a world built on massive structural inequality, grifters tend to prosper.
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from Andrew O’Hehir on our wonderful and terrifying world
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.
In a private ceremony on Sept. 17, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stood at a podium inside the National Archives building in Washington, D.C., and praised a Florida nonprofit for what he called a singular achievement in American education. The attendees were celebrating the Foundation for Liberty and American Greatness, which announced that it had reached 2 million children with civics education since its founding in 2016.
“I hope you understand how important this is,” Hegseth told the room. “What we pour into the next generation will determine whether we keep our republic or not.”
FLAG’s founder, Nick Adams, had spent nearly a decade building toward this moment. An Australian-born conservative commentator and MAGA influencer, Adams had created the nonprofit, raised $7.7 million for it over 10 years, and garnered repeated praise from President Donald Trump. In March, Trump appointed Adams as the special presidential envoy for American tourism, exceptionalism and values — a position created for him after his nomination as ambassador to Malaysia stalled the previous year.
But a review of FLAG’s finances, donor operations and online donation network reveals a less celebratory picture. There is little evidence that the nonprofit has provided the civics education it claims. And Adams and his nonprofit have engaged in a pattern of questionable financial arrangements, including paying Adams and his mother more than half its recent annual revenue, while raising much of its money through a sweepstakes operation that has promised donors a chance to win $1,000,000 — a prize FLAG’s records show no evidence of ever paying.
Adams moved to the United States from Australia in 2012 and has since become an outspoken champion of the American political and economic system. Now 41, he has built a following as a conservative commentator and self-described “alpha male” influencer, making frequent media appearances and amassing roughly 2.1 million followers on Facebook and 640,000 followers on X on his personal pages. Adams authored books including “Retaking America: Crushing Political Correctness” and “Trump and Churchill: Defenders of Western Civilization.”
In 2016, Adams founded FLAG, registering it as a nonprofit with the mission to bring high-quality civics education to K-12 students across America. FLAG has produced civics materials like the Student’s Constitution, the Student’s Declaration of Independence and the Student’s Federalist Papers — kid-friendly editions of the country’s founding documents. By 2023, FLAG was reporting annual revenue of nearly $1.5 million, consisting of donations and merchandise sales. “Thanks to the support of 40,000+ grassroots patriots,” the organization’s website states, “over 1 million FLAG resources have been distributed in classrooms all across America.”
To give FLAG credibility in conservative circles, Adams assembled an advisory council of movement leaders including Hegseth, then a Fox News host; the late Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA; the late Edwin J. Feulner, founder of the Heritage Foundation; and Dennis Prager, the conservative radio host and co-founder of PragerU, a nonprofit that produces conservative educational materials. (The council has since been replaced with a board of directors.)
Adams did not respond to a detailed list of questions about FLAG’s financial practices, sweepstakes operation and educational programming. A Pentagon spokesperson declined to respond to questions but reiterated Hegseth’s support for FLAG.
Civics education has become a rallying cause across the Make America Great Again movement, whose slogan invokes a return to a specific vision of the country’s founding principles. PragerU is an approved curriculum provider in at least eight states. Turning Point USA pursued a similar goal through Turning Point Academy, a network of private schools. Along with those organizations, FLAG is now part of the America 250 Civics Education Coalition, a partnership of the U.S. Department of Education formed with over 40 conservative groups.
Trump’s return to office has been a boon for Adams. The president has called Adams one of his favorite authors, and a foreword in Adams’ 2024 book, “Alpha Kings,” credited to Trump calls Adams someone whose “work ethic equals his moral responsibility and faith in God.” Although Trump wasn’t able to attend FLAG’s 2023 annual gala, he sent a video praising the nonprofit and Adams, telling attendees that “tens of thousands of teachers are being trained and hundreds of thousands of parents and grandparents are now standing up for our kids.”
“It takes Nick from Australia to come and teach us about American greatness and to help us fight for our country,” Trump added. “He’s an American now, and we’re very lucky to have him.”
The White House press office declined to comment.
FLAG’s website invites teachers to request free classroom presentations, delivered by “certified FLAG Ambassadors,” including Adams himself, alongside guest speakers described as entrepreneurs, business leaders and immigrants. In 2016 and early 2017, FLAG regularly posted photos documenting visits to schools. After that period, however, ProPublica could not find similar documentation of FLAG representatives visiting schools.
Since 2016, as FLAG’s annual revenues grew from $68,000 to $1.1 million in 2024, there is almost no indication in the organization’s annual federal tax filings that it was spending money on its stated mission. No line item in FLAG’s federal tax filing identifies a payment to a school, a teacher or an educational distributor. Only two lines, in a 2017 federal filing, indicate $26,925 for “Student’s Constitutions, Printing” and $5,670 for “Book Donations, Shipping & Supplies.” In the last six years, while FLAG operated under Adams, the only documented instance of FLAG activity that appears to fit the definition of “educational” is a 2020 video showing Adams speaking at what is described as a teachers’ conference.
But the nonprofit has been lucrative for the Adams family. In 2024, Adams, who was born Nicholas Adamopoulos, and his mother, Angelika Adamopoulos, collected a combined $587,279 in compensation and benefits from FLAG — 53% of the organization’s revenue that year, according to the nonprofit’s federal filing.
Adamopoulos was paid $201,861, including benefits, as FLAG’s secretary. In the same filing, FLAG answered no when asked by the IRS whether any officer or director shared a family relationship with another director or officer. Adamopoulos did not respond to requests for comment.
Experts were troubled that the organization spent so much on Adams and his mother. “The amount being paid, both in absolute dollar terms and as a percentage of the organization’s revenues and expenses, is very high,” said Lloyd Mayer, a nonprofit law professor at Notre Dame Law School and a leading authority on tax-exempt organizations.
Mayer said Adams’ salary increases since FLAG’s founding are more of “a yellow flag,” than a clear violation. For FLAG’s first three years, Adams received no salary. He first took compensation in 2019 of just $20,400. Then his annual pay rose steadily to reach $411,209, or about 30% of the group’s total revenue, in 2023. Adamopoulos was the first employee outside of Adams to be paid a significant salary, in 2024. No other employee was paid more than $5,000 from 2016 to 2024, according to FLAG’s federal filings, obtained through ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer.
The legal test, Mayer said, is whether the board was clear that it was making up for early years of low or no pay: “Were they explicit in saying, ‘We’re not just paying you for this year; we’re paying you for your past service, which you were not fairly compensated for’?”
The IRS asks nonprofits whether their executive compensation was reviewed by independent people and if they used comparisons to other similar organizations — a standard safeguard against self-dealing. In all filings from 2017 to 2024, FLAG answered no to both questions.
Philip Hackney, a nonprofit law professor at the University of Pittsburgh and former IRS official, said the absence of an independent review creates its own legal exposure. “Technically, that can be an excess benefit transaction on its own,” Hackney said, referring to the IRS category that triggers taxes on compensation paid to nonprofit insiders above fair market value.
FLAG claims that 66% of revenue goes toward program service expenses, according to a separate financial report filed with the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services in Florida, where the organization is now based. But the salaries of Adams and his mother, social media spending and travel expenses account for $755,541, or 86%, of the $878,208 allocated to program services.
Mayer said the classification is not automatically improper under federal law. “Education as a charitable purpose is a very broad category,” he said. “Spending money on staff, online communications and even fundraising appeals that have informational content can all be considered programmatic.”
“What [the IRS is] looking for is not inflated spending,” Mayer said. “They’re looking for disguised personal spending.”
In Australia, Adams was accused of spending taxpayer dollars on personal expenses. In 2006, when Adams was 22 years old, he served as a councillor in Ashfield, Australia. He was formally condemned by fellow councillors for running up thousands of dollars in phone calls and taxi charges for personal use while claiming them as council expenses. He repaid the charges after a formal investigation, according to a 2006 article in the Inner-West Weekly, an Australian newspaper.
FLAG’s online store sells Adams’ personal books — including “Alpha Kings” and “From Mar-a-Lago to Mars,” several marketed as signed copies for as much as $40 — alongside its own educational materials. One of Adams’ personal books, “Trump and Churchill,” is on the front page of FLAG’s online store, accompanied with language that says, “Proceeds from all sales go directly to promoting our mission and providing students and teachers with high-quality educational resources.” It is the only book with language that distinguishes which purchases fund FLAG’s mission or pay Adams directly.
In September, FLAG posted a photo from a conservative women’s convention showing Adams standing behind a table stacked with copies of his personal books displayed alongside FLAG-branded resources with the organization’s banner behind him. Adams’ books have also been advertised for sale on FLAG’s Facebook page, with links going directly to Adams’ personal website for the books rather than FLAG’s shopify page.
“He’s free to market his books,” Mayer said, “but if he has a charity do it, that means it’s not really a charity anymore, in that respect. It’s not about public benefit — the private benefit to him overrides the public benefit.”
In addition to the disclosure discrepancies, FLAG appears to have violated rules for conducting sweepstakes. Nearly all of FLAG’s revenue originates from individual donors, and most of that money is raised through a direct-mail sweepstakes operation that offers the chance to win prizes, in one case $1,000,000.
For years, FLAG has run a direct-mail sweepstakes campaign under names like “Payout Decision” and “Winner Search Swps.” Sweepstakes are regulated primarily at the state level, and organizations that run them are often required to register and report to state officials. Not every state requires this, but Florida, where FLAG is registered as a charity, does. FLAG does not disclose a sweepstakes program in its federal filings, and ProPublica could not locate any official sweepstakes registration for the organization in any state.
Nine years of FLAG’s federal filings contain no transaction consistent with a $1,000,000 payment. Hackney said any such payout would be expected to appear on the organization’s tax filings. “It should be an amount paid out at some point, and that would show up in a 990,” he said, referencing the name of the tax return filed by nonprofits, which is public. At its financial peak in 2023, FLAG held roughly $512,000 in total assets — about half the value of the prize it has offered to donors.
Mayer said the absence of a documented prize payment raises further legal questions. “If the promise is that someone will win $1,000,000 and no one ever does, that’s fraud,” he said. “That’s lying to induce people to support you.”
Internal records from a mailing list exchange database, which details how often and for what purpose organizations use mailing lists of potential donors, shows a shift in FLAG’s emphasis. Notes in FLAG’s record state that as of July 2020, FLAG was “not mailing much” through conventional fundraising channels and was “focusing on the sweeps side.”
In April 2024, someone filed a Better Business Bureau complaint against FLAG, alleging that its sweepstakes drawing deadlines had been repeatedly postponed — along with those of more than a dozen other charities the complainant said used the same practice. In a follow-up filing, the complainant cited FLAG’s timeline: a drawing originally set to run from January 2022 through December 2024 that had, by then, been pushed to run from December 2023 through January 2025.
“I just want them to pay me back my hard earned money,” the complainant wrote, “since I am a retired senior citizen who happened to love this country.”
FLAG told the BBB on May 6, 2024, that it had responded to the complainant.
FLAG marks its 10th anniversary on Wednesday, and is throwing itself a gala with tickets for the occasion priced at $1,000; $5,000; and $10,000. Adams is still listed on the website as FLAG’s founder but ceded the role of CEO in March to Cooper Rodenburg, a recent graduate of Stetson University, around the time he accepted his State Department role to promote tourism to the United States.
Reached by phone, Rodenburg requested that questions be sent by email but did not respond to them.
Rodenburg has since increased FLAG’s public activity, launching a TikTok account and a Substack newsletter, meeting with educational representatives and speaking to groups like the Shelby County Republican Women’s Club in Tennessee. A Substack post in April described FLAG, represented by Rodenburg and Adamopoulos, delivering founding documents to schools in Mississippi. This was one of the only specific program activities the organization has documented in recent years.
JD Vance sees himself in a former president. In a recent on-stage conversation about his memoir “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith,” the vice president was apparently inspired when talking about how this politician was a “political genius” and “peacemaker” who pulled America out of an unpopular war. “Young senator, writes some bestselling books,” he said, ticking off a number of shared qualities. “It kinda sounds like JD Vance.”
Vance will likely never say this out loud. It’s possible, though unlikely, that he’s unconscious of it. But following his recent book tour, it’s hard to ignore how much the vice president fancies himself to have the charisma, demeanor and even the wife required to be the GOP’s answer to Obama.
Vance’s public arrogance certainly suggests he believes himself equal to the former president in both intellect and charm. In this, he’s utterly deluded, nor it is it clear that Republican voters, despite the persistent bitterness over Obama’s continued popularity, would even want a candidate who possesses these traits. Vance may well end up bumbling his way into the Republican nomination, giving him a real shot at the White House, but it would only be because the GOP has a dearth of contenders to replace Donald Trump.
Between his camera-hogging and social media addiction, Vance is ubiquitous. This serves to conceal how thinness of his political resume. Besides his victory as Trump’s running mate, he has won only a single election: the 2022 Ohio Senate race, an easy victory in a mostly-red state. He skipped the line of career politicians, not by beguiling ordinary Republican voters, who aren’t impressed with Ivy League degrees or his tendency to pontificate like a wannabe philosopher-king instead of a baby-kissing politico. It was because of money from tech billionaire investor Peter Thiel and other Silicon Valley types who seem to equate being rich with being learned.
For tech bosses like Thiel, having a Barack Obama of their very own is an appealing prospect. On paper, Vance seems to check all the boxes. Humble background but an Ivy League education? Check. Gorgeous, accomplished wife who was induced to set her career aside for her husband’s ambitions? Check. A talented wordsmith who writes his own books, and with a bestselling memoir penned before he considered running for office? Check. Youth appeal, down to listening to actual pop music and an agility with 21st century slang? Check.
Like any cheap knock-off, with Vance the ruse becomes clear at even a cursory examination. The vice president’s long list of Obama-esque attributes read like ill-fated attempts at parody in the real world.
Sadly for Vance, in politics, as in art and sex, it’s less about your stat block and more about your ability to execute. Like any cheap knock-off, with Vance the ruse becomes clear at even a cursory examination. The vice president’s long list of Obama-esque attributes read like ill-fated attempts at parody in the real world.
When it was published in 2016, Vance’s first book, “Hillbilly Elegy,” got a similar glowing reception to the one Obama received when his debut, “Dreams from My Father,” was published in 1995. Although both authors were only 32, they had lived unusual enough lives to justify memoirs. But while Obama’s tome remains beloved for its nuance and grace, Vance’s book has soured with time as many critics and readers come to recognize the shallow Appalachian stereotypes and conservative agenda it contains. “Hillbilly Elegy” was turned into a 2020 film by Ron Howard, but it is mostly remembered as an embarrassment.
The contrasts become worse in looking at Vance and Obama’s second books, both of which were more obviously written with an eye toward running for higher office. Obama’s “The Audacity of Hope,” released in 2006 less than four months before he announced his candidacy for president, is an exemplar of the form, with authentic autobiographical details that remind readers the book was not primarily the work of a ghostwriter. Vance’s “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith,” released in June, has mostly raised questions about whether the vice president cares for anything but his own ambition. His high-minded rhetoric about his conversion to Catholicism sounds hollow in light of his willingness to spread racist lies about immigrants and rebuke Pope Leo for opposing war. In a passage a more compassionate editor might have removed, Vance reveals the higher power he seems to actually worship. Of hearing Thiel speak for the first time in 2011, Vance writes he saw the man who would become his patron as “[p]ossibly the smartest person I’d ever met.”
Obama endeared himself to voters, especially younger ones, by coming off as the cool college professor who manages to sound erudite without being condescending. A former community organizer, he used youthful slang and pop culture references with the same ease he played pick-up basketball games. Vance’s efforts to seem hip come across as forced, as if he has never met a fellow millennial and can only approximate their lingo and cadence from reading old magazine reviews of movies like “Clueless.”
When it comes to relatability and authenticity, perhaps no better example of the differences between the two men can be seen in their marriages. Both have beautiful wives with impressive careers of their own. Michelle Obama and Usha Vance were arguably more accomplished than their husbands were at the start of their political careers. Both women were openly wistful about having to leave that behind for one spent supporting their husbands in Washington, D.C.
The difference is that the Obamas appear to like each other and, especially in the early years of his presidency, had palpable chemistry that induced romantic fantasies. The Vances, however, can’t seem to shake off suspicions that they loathe each other, no matter how many smiles they flash at the camera. It doesn’t help that the vice presidents constantly runs down his wife in speeches, comments he tries to play off as jokes, but which are too hard-edged to sell as jovial.
Vance has admittedly been getting better in interviews and speeches in recent months. He managed to get through his entire book tour, including a stint on “The View,” without clips of his awkward behavior going viral. That may seem like a low bar, but this is the man whose time on the campaign trail in 2024 is mostly remembered for his angry “cat lady” obsession and an unfortunate incident in which he attempted to seem normal (and failed) while ordering donuts.
Vance will never have Obama’s easy charm. But if he keeps practicing, he might start being read by Republican voters as person-shaped enough to shrug his way into the nomination.
Ultimately, Vance has erred in a way Obama was smart enough to avoid. The vice president tied himself to another politician whose stink rubs off on everyone around him. Obama’s political talents helped him rise quickly through the Democratic ranks, but his best asset was that he was able to plausibly run as an anti-war candidate, while his opponent for the 2008 Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton, couldn’t escape her early support for the Iraq War.
Nearly two decades later, the public is yearning even more for an outsider uncorrupted by the failings of the Washington political establishment. Vance, however, didn’t have the foresight to see what should have been obvious: that Trump would make easily avoidable mistakes, like the Iran war, which has resulted in historic disapproval numbers that could well taint everyone who associates with him.
No amount of slang or smug chuckling will be able to get Trump’s stank off the vice president.
The new federal Education Freedom Tax Credit will soon allow parents, including parents earning $500,000 a year or more, to send their children to private schools at public expense. In fact, many of them already send their children to private schools, and they will now be reimbursed by federal tax dollars.
According to the Department of Education, students “from a household with income not greater than 300% of the area’s median gross income qualify.” The EFTC, part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed in 2025, defines “area” as any county, including those with median incomes upwards of $200,000. This encompasses an estimated 18 million school-aged children. EFTC funds will come from donations repaid in full by federal tax credits — money that would have been paid to the federal government in taxes but will now be diverted.
What will this taxpayer money be buying? In North Carolina, which has had a program broadly similar to the EFTC since 2014, 74% of the 143,998 private school students receiving state-funded scholarships had already been attending private schools. A Rand Corporation study of a similar Arizona program found that, just like North Carolina, nearly 75% of the 64,000 students who were awarded money had already been enrolled in private school, or were already being home-schooled, before participating in the program. According to the Brookings Institution, under Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account program, “more advantaged communities are securing a highly disproportionate share of the funds” while “families in the poorest communities are the least likely” to get them.
Over the past five years, the number of states implementing some form of voucher or ESA program has swelled. A 2025 Brookings Institution analysis of six of them found that the problematic enrollment patterns prevalent in North Carolina and Arizona hold true for state programs in general.
Supporters see the EFTC as a remedy for what they often refer to as “failing public schools.” Conservative syndicated columnist Star Parker recently asserted that teachers unions have a “vice grip” on public schools and parents need the opportunity to get their children out of them. As evidence of America’s failures, she pointed to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Programme for International Student Assessment, an examination in reading, science and math given annually to 15-year-olds in 80 countries. “The US, she wrote, “ranks 18th behind Poland, Czechia, and Denmark.”
While America’s education system has problems, these scores are hardly indicative of “failing public schools.” This is particularly true since, unlike most of the countries ranked by the OECD, the student body in major American school districts is overwhelmingly low-income and heavily immigrant. Moreover, our students have to contend with high levels of crime and violence in their neighborhoods; the U.S. has the seventh highest murder rate among the OECD countries. All of these problems inevitably drag down students’ test scores.
Proponents of the EFTC assure concerned lawmakers and parents the move won’t harm public schools. Yet schools have many fixed costs, such as maintaining, repairing, heating and cooling school buildings, operating cafeterias and managing many administrative functions that cannot easily be scaled down when enrollment declines inevitably reduce funding.
In 2018, one detailed study of the Los Angeles Unified School District found that 55% of its costs were fixed. While that figure is higher than most, school districts’ fixed costs have been found to be a third of overall district costs at minimum, and generally higher. Moreover, when students leave public schools for private academies, the students left behind are disproportionately special needs students who cost more to educate.
The EFTC’s supporters are correct that schools’ variable expenses — which is primarily the cost of educators and administrators — can be adjusted downward. But they often make this process sound simple and painless. At the Los Angeles Unified School District high school where I teach, this exact type of “adjustment” is happening for the 2026-2027 school year because of declining enrollment. The students’ process of losing teachers they had bonded with, come to trust and looked forward to having again is anything but painless. There were a lot of tears at my school on June 10, the last day of school, not just from students but from many teachers as well.
With messianic zeal, conservatives have long sold school choice programs as a way to liberate low-income and minority children from “failing” public schools. But state school choice programs have turned out just as teachers unions and other critics predicted — as little more than a way to subsidize well-off families whose kids are already in private schools, or who seek to place them there.
For opponents of public education and teachers unions, these programs come with the added benefit of undermining public schools. The EFTC threatens to expand and accelerate this destructive process.
On July 16, Secretary of State Marco Rubio led a gathering of over 60 nations to discuss “political terrorism” by leftist organizations. Rubio, whom every Democratic senator voted to confirm, used dehumanizing language to describe the left, deeming them “enemies of civilization.”
This was followed, on July 20, by the State Department issuing a 100-page report on Cuba’s connection to American leftists in an alleged “campaign of subversion against the United States.” As activists, artists and politicians in the U.S. begin to face increasing charges of communism and even terrorism by the current administration, there are lessons to be gleaned from mid-20th century America, and they are not solely confined to the McCarthy era.
One set of lessons comes from the life of Lillian Smith, the white Southern civil rights activist and best-selling author of “Strange Fruit,” who was the subject of a multi-decade surveillance project conducted by the FBI beginning in the early 1940s. Accused by agents of being a communist or at least a “fellow traveler,” the FBI compiled a 134-page file on Smith — longer than its file on Ernest Hemingway, and nearly as long as the one on John Steinbeck.
Like many of the artists and activists being targeted today, Smith’s writings advocating peace and equality for all people made her a primary target of the state. From the pro-integration magazine South Today she edited in the 1930s and 1940s to her column in the Black-owned Chicago Defender to her seven books, both fiction and nonfiction, dealing with white supremacy and colonization, Smith challenged the status quo her entire life.
Putting her career and reputation on the line, and risking more surveillance, Smith chose to place the safety and well-being of others first, and often paid the price.
Smith’s response when her friends and colleagues were threatened by the government offers us a model for our own actions now. Putting her career and reputation on the line, and risking more surveillance, Smith chose to place the safety and well-being of others first, and often paid the price: In addition to book bans and professional blackballing, she lost everything to arsonists in a 1955 fire, and dealt with frequent death threats and other attempted arsons.
In 1942, when one of the leaders of the House Un-American Activities Committee baselessly accused the famous educator and civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune of being a communist, Smith sprang into action. She crafted a letter to Congress defending her longtime friend. Bethune believed the letter helped exonerate her from the allegations for which no charges were formally brought, and she wrote to Smith personally to thank her, generously offering to set up an in-person meeting with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.
(St. Martin's Press) Keri Leigh Merritt’s “An Inconvenient Woman: The Extraordinary Life of Lillian Smith, the Southerner Who Defied Jim Crow America” will be released Sept. 29, 2026
The following year the FBI opened a file on Smith, keeping tabs on her travel, her friends and colleagues, and her publications. On the very first page, a memorandum addressed to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover expressed concern over “a friend of Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt” who was known to be “a social uplifter in favor of the Negroes.” That was Smith.
By 1945, the bureau flagged news articles announcing that Smith had joined the Committee for Equal Justice for Recy Taylor, the Black woman whose white rapists were acquitted — twice — in Alabama. In further memos, agents seemed particularly interested in Smith’s association with the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, a group that promoted New Deal-like reforms, likely due to the unfounded allegations of SCHW serving as a communist front.
In August 1949, four years after the end of World War II, HUAC accused Paul Robeson, the artist and activist who was another of Smith’s longtime friends, of being a communist after he stated that Black Americans would not fight the Soviet Union in yet another war. Smith published one of the most empathetic pleas from any white writer of the time: “I cannot see how any white person who has a grain of sportsmanship in him can criticize any Negro, who, in confusion, has turned to communism for the answer that democracy has not yet given.” Communism may not have been the best answer, Smith continued, “but we white folks have not yet given Negroes in the South a better one. Until we do, I wish we had the grace to keep our mouths shut.”
Perhaps a testament to the persistence and power of her work, when the revised edition of Smith’s book “Killers of the Dream” was published in 1962, the FBI clipped an article from the Atlanta Journal announcing she would “be an honored guest at an autograph tea” for the book’s release. The column’s last sentence was undoubtedly the reason for its inclusion in the bureau’s files: “Mrs. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., was listed as one of the hostesses of the affair.”
The targeting of Smith — who herself was never a communist, and did not support the party — shows that in times of questionable politics, anyone can be put on a government list by simply advocating for basic human rights, equality and peace. The allegations rarely have anything to do with communism; the term is merely a scare tactic Republicans use when they begin to worry their power is in peril.
The Trump administration isn’t being shy about naming names. Rubio’s own “enemies list,” which was included in the State Department report, targeted individuals and groups such as New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (for not denouncing the Democratic Socialists of America’s tribute to Assata Shakur, who was convicted of killing a police office in 1973 before escaping to Cuba), journalist Amy Goodman (for attending the wedding of CodePink co-founder Jodie Evans to Neville Roy Singham, the tech tycoon and nonprofit funder who has been accused of financing Chinese propaganda), the Amazon Labor Union, Black Lives Matter, Democratic Socialists of America and the People’s Forum, a community center located in Manhattan. (Full disclosure: I have spoken at the People’s Forum, and I’m scheduled to speak there again this fall).
As Rubio and the State Department try to dehumanize people who support human rights while ramping up programs to take legal actions against them, Americans with the most power and privilege must act by fighting on behalf of the persecuted, just like Lillian Smith did.
Smith was committed to fighting hate, in all its forms, with art. Creativity helps form and inspire social movements, and Smith believed that art serves as spiritual and psychological nourishment for activists. She also believed in fighting oppression at the local level, knowing that small actions in our own communities are not only effective and immediate, but they also shut out the despair that often arises in the face of a seemingly unconquerable task. Much like her friend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Smith considered love as a generative force essential to overcoming hatred, and believed that the more each of us cultivate relationships based on loving kindness, the harder it would be for hate to prevail.
Noting both the profound sadness and farcical tragedy ahead “if those who are gifted stay silent,” Lillian Smith in 1951 hoped for a better future. It “seems to me a fine time to be alive, in this age of falling walls,” she asserted. “It is an age full of risks but the stakes are high and worth the risk.”
The shift was as swift as it was cold. Standing before reporters in the briefing room on Thursday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked a direct question: Would President Donald Trump or his administration intervene to stop the extradition of Andrew and Tristan Tate to the United Kingdom on 59 charges of rape, sex trafficking, assault and extreme pornography? Her single-word response — “No” — denied the brothers, who have been championed by many MAGA media figures as examples of white male persecution, a lifeline.
On Thursday, federal marshals in Miami took the Tates into custody. In addition to the charges they face in the U.K., the brothers remain embroiled in grave human-trafficking and minor-exploitation proceedings in Romania and investigations in Florida about new allegations.
In the days since their arrest, their attorney Joseph McBride — who has also represented Jan. 6 defendants — has insisted the arrest is political persecution, and he has been amplifying supportive commentary online from media figures with close ties to the Trump administration. MAGA influencer and white nationalist Nick Fuentes wrote that it would be a “national humiliation” if Trump agreed to extradite the brothers to Britain over what he called “trumped up ‘Me Too’ charges.” Other far-right influencers reportedly joined in, but to no avail.
For years, the brothers were treated by the MAGA ecosystem not as alleged traffickers facing serious criminal scrutiny, but as useful avatars of male grievance and anti-feminist rebellion.
Trump’s refusal to intervene in the Tates’ extradition fight is a much-delayed correction. For years, the brothers were treated by the MAGA ecosystem not as alleged traffickers facing serious criminal scrutiny, but as useful avatars of male grievance and anti-feminist rebellion. That bargain is now boomeranging in the direction of a different Trump: Barron.
The key to understanding how the Tate brothers rose to such political heights — and why their collapse now threatens to drag the president’s youngest son into a potentially damaging congressional spotlight — can be found in the conservative media ecosystem that laundered Andrew Tate into a right-wing icon.
When mainstream platforms like YouTube, Meta and TikTok finally moved to deplatform the Tate brothers in 2022, the right-wing media apparatus stepped in to grant Tate a second — and far more dangerous — life. Tucker Carlson first gave Tate a platform on Fox News back in 2022 and later hosted a long, sympathetic interview. Elon Musk reinstated Tate’s X account, restoring his reach to over 11 million followers while repeatedly tweeting defenses that hand-waved sex trafficking allegations as political distractions. The late Charlie Kirk chimed in on behalf of Tate: “What he says is so powerful. Our society is configured towards collapsing the American man.” MAGA podcaster Candace Owens dedicated hours of airtime to declaring the Tates’ innocence while launching vicious smear campaigns against their victims.
The brothers were indicted in Romania in 2023 on charges of rape and human trafficking, accused of running a criminal operation that lured women — including, prosecutors allege, a 17-year-old — into pornography and prostitution. But in February 2025, weeks after Trump’s second inauguration, Romanian authorities lifted the travel restrictions that had kept the Tates in the country, and the pair immediately boarded a private jet to Florida. At the time, the country’s foreign minister Emil Hurezeanu said that a U.S. official had expressed interest in the case. Trump, for his part, said he knew “nothing about” any pressure his administration might have applied.
The reporting since then has filled in the blanks. ProPublica reported that federal authorities were told to return electronic devices they had seized from the Tates during an investigation and chided by political appointees like Paul Ingrassia — a vocal Tate defender appointed to the General Services Administration. Heidi Blake, the New Yorker reporter who has covered the Tates more exhaustively than perhaps anyone else, has traced a direct line from a Munich Security Conference conversation between U.S. special envoy Richard Grenell and Hurezeanu to Romanian prosecutors reaching out to the Tates’ lawyers within days, asking what the Americans wanted. Experts labeled the political interference highly inappropriate, but it worked. The travel ban on the brothers was lifted.
Within days of Andrew Tate landing back on U.S. soil, another woman came forward accusing him of assault and strangulation — the same pattern of abuse, Blake has said, described by victim after victim in this case.
This machinery surrounding was never a secret. What has been less investigated, at least until this week, is how deep the personal relationships ran — specifically, the friendship between Andrew Tate and the president’s 20-year-old son.
According to reporting in the New York Times, Tate spoke with Barron Trump over a Zoom call last year with a mutual friend present, and the two discussed their shared belief that the Romanian case against Tate was an effort to silence him. That claim — the idea that a rape and trafficking prosecution amounts to censorship — is the same framing Tate’s MAGA allies have pushed for years. Barron’s older brother, Donald Trump Jr., has called Tate’s 2023 detention “absolute insanity.” Tate publicly boasted about his access to MAGA’s top circles, bragging in 2024 that he was “very close with the Trump family” and that he was looking forward to reminding Donald Trump that he was a “bulletproof bada*s.”
For Trump’s presidential campaign, the alliance delivered results. By leveraging the manosphere media network that Tate helped anchor, the campaign mobilized a wave of low-propensity young male voters in 2024.
So why did the Trump White House suddenly cut the Tate brothers loose? The breakdown was not sparked by a sudden moral awakening regarding sex trafficking or rape. It was likely sparked by the cardinal sin of the MAGA media universe: political disloyalty.
In February, as the administration weighed military action in the Middle East, Andrew Tate took to his livestreaming platform to launch a furious, unhinged tirade against Trump’s strike on Iran.
“I do not support war with Iran for Israel,” Tate raged to his audience, accusing the administration of driving the country into disaster while ignoring domestic collapse. “If you’re at home in America right now and you feel like your country is f****d… and moral degeneracy is out of control . . . why would the U.S. going into a war with Iran benefit anybody in America at all? Give me one possible reason. NOBODY WANTS THIS WAR.”
For a White House that demands absolute, unyielding fealty, Tate’s high-profile attack was an unpardonable breach.
When the British government authorized 38 new criminal charges against the Tates and submitted an updated extradition request to the Justice Department, the White House’s calculation was simple. The political cost of protecting two alleged serial rapists, one of whom was actively attacking the president on foreign policy, far outweighed any remaining value they brought to the youth-culture strategy. The administration threw them to the wolves.
While the administration may hope that cutting the Tates loose will close the book on this embarrassing chapter, the fallout from their tangled relationships with the first family and the wider MAGA sphere may just be beginning.
Rep.Yassamin Ansari, D-Ariz., has formally urged House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer to open a swift investigation into the Tate brothers’ relationships within Trump’s inner circle. In a searing letter, she highlighted grave diplomatic and ethical concerns regarding whether political networks leveraged their influence to shield accused human traffickers.
It doesn’t help the administration’s case that the Tate brothers were, by multiple accounts, still socializing with Trump-world figures in Washington in the days before their arrest. Ansari said she learned only this week that the brothers had traveled to D.C. for meetings, including one with Rep. Wesley Hunt, R-Texas.
The Arizona congresswoman wants the committee to subpoena communications between the Tates and administration officials, and she wants Barron Trump to testify under oath about whether he “influenced official actions or administration policy” about the brothers.
There is no evidence that Barron engaged in criminal wrongdoing or played any role in the government’s decisions involving the Tates. But his choice to enthusiastically fraternize with a self-described misogynist facing dozens of horrific felony counts has exposed him to scrutiny.
Barron Trump was not an unwitting bystander dragged into a media storm. He was an active participant in defending Andrew Tate, using his influence to validate an accused predator because it fit the edgy, anti-establishment aesthetic of the modern manosphere media. Now, as congressional scrutiny looms and the Tate brothers prepare to face trial in a U.S. federal court before being extradited to London, the president’s youngest son is left facing the stark consequences of his MAGA alliances.
Your chances of running into a marketer at a neighborhood bar are slim but never zero. Given the remote-capable nature of the work and the continued growth of their economic sector, marketers have spread across the U.S., making the most of their relatively high salaries by moving away from the more expensive coastal centers of industry.
By and large, they’re lovely people. But I live in fear of the moment when the conversation takes that dreaded turn toward the last redoubt of small talk: What do you do? Posed with that question, any halfway enthusiastic marketer is likely to let loose a litany of acronyms and jargon that cause a physiological response in listeners, or at least in me — a glazing over of the eyes that is instant and unavoidable. As with Microsoft Outlook, the board game CATAN and the rules of hurling, there’s something there I can’t bring myself to grasp, a Lovecraftian boredom that lies just beyond the borders of what I can perceive.
I’m not one of those rubes who thinks a job is unimportant just because I can’t make sense of it. My lack of understanding of aircraft engineering doesn’t make the people who design them any less valuable, and the same goes for marketers. I’m sure these people act on the world and see it changed in ways that bring them fulfillment. Their employers presumably think it’s a fair trade. It might all sound like gibberish to me, but that doesn’t mean it’s fake. Sometimes, you just have to accept that you’re talking to an expert who is speaking in terms beyond your ken.
But this is not how the modern conservative movement operates. From the “What is a woman?” wing of YouTube provocateurs to the snowball-holding, climate change deniers on the floor of Congress, Republicans reject the idea that experts might know more than them. You see it in the pushback against the medical consensus on how to treat trans youth. It’s there in the Trump administration’s constant attacks on institutions of higher learning. To the GOP, any discussion of U.S. history that doesn’t reach the same conclusion as a Ram truck ad is nothing more than woke nonsense.
That’s the pretense that brought Anthea Hartig, an historian and the director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, before a House committee on Tuesday. Hartig’s grilling was a chance for Republicans to score points with simple, black-and-white questions about the past that no historian could answer succinctly.
Rep. Brandon Gill, R-Texas, interrogated Hartig over the museum’s assertion that Mickey Mouse drew inspiration from blackface minstrelsy. Reducing the idea to the point of absurdism, Gill asked Hartig if the cartoon character on countless children’s backpacks was “racist.”
“It’s rooted in minstrelsy,” she replied.
Any close examination of the design of Walt Disney’s most famous creation makes it obvious. The white gloves are an obvious tell, even before you even get to early film shorts that the House of Mouse would rather you forget or overlook altogether. There’s a direct line between much of American pop culture and the minstrel show, and pointing that out doesn’t mean that the country or the character are irredeemable.
Hartig pointed this out in her testimony. “We tell the truth about the times that the country fell short of its own founding ideals,” she said. “Telling our story fully is a form of respect for the American people and a commitment to constantly being in pursuit of a more perfect union.”
Explaining history is all about context; nothing happens in a vacuum. You could say that the United States lost its mind and elected a game show host in 2016, and that might even be satisfying. An historian would likely recommend a deeper dive into the backlash against former president Barack Obama and the uneven recovery from the global financial crisis that he oversaw. Other historians might place Trump in the context of white rage and anti-immigrant sentiment. Hartig defended that drive to put moments in context because it’s what gets her up in the morning. It’s what she and countless other historians set out to do when they first started studying the past. They want to tell a good story, but with the added benefit of it being the truth. Republicans’ inability to grasp that, like my befuddlement at marketing-speak, doesn’t make what Hartig does any less real.
Of course, the more complicated view of the past advocated by the people who study it for a living will never fly with conservatives. They’re dead-set on excising any shagginess that doesn’t fit their hidebound worldview, attacking textbooks and museums that dare to push beyond a straightforward explanation. They want simple answers to simple questions, which is not what the true study of history — and America — offers.
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