A Republican representative has a new conspiracy about the January 6 insurrection, and despite the GOP’s laundry list of theories about the attack, this might be one of the strangest yet.

Representative Greg Murphy floated the idea Wednesday night that Donald Trump’s secretary of the army “slow-walked” the deployment of National Guard troops to the Capitol on January 6 “in order to allow more chaos to occur” so that he could get a job in the Biden administration.

“They were ready to act, and they were slow-walked by the Secretary of the Army, apparently with some thoughts that he was going to join the Biden administration,” Murphy told Newsmax. “I don’t have first-hand knowledge of that, but that’s one of the general working diagnoses is, as we say.”

Wow, new Republican conspiracy theory just dropped and this one is out there pic.twitter.com/PXORazEC5u

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 17, 2024

This is an incredible theory, to say the least. If anyone is guilty of delaying a response to the riots, it’s Donald Trump. Those close to the president that day even claim that he wasn’t interested in any swift action. This is coupled with the fact that many of those arrested in connection with the riots say that they were answering a call to action from then-President Trump himself.

Republicans have repeatedly downplayed the attack, insisting that it was full of fake Trump supporters who arrived on “ghost buses,” that the government instigated the whole thing, and even that rioters were just taking a walk.

For a party with a reputation of pushing military pride and “support the troops” rhetoric, Republicans have engaged in baseless attacks against U.S. military leaders in the post-Trump era, from holding up military promotions to attacking “supposed wokeness” within the armed forces. Murphy’s new theory really goes to show that to MAGA Republicans, no American institutions are considered off-limits if you can use them to score political points.

Funding for Ukraine and Israel has been hotly contested in Congress. For Marjorie Taylor Greene, it’s just fodder for trolling.

As two separate supplemental aid packages make their way through the House, Greene has proposed a series of outlandish amendments to both bills. For a measure on Ukrainian military aid, Greene submitted amendments requiring members who vote for the aid to “conscript in the Ukrainian army,” and directing President Joe Biden to withdraw from NATO.

And for Israel, Greene, far from requiring aid to be conditioned on Israeli compliance with international law, played one of her old hits: She proposed that funding in the bill be allocated to “the development of space laser technology on the southwest border,” a callback to her previous antisemitic remarks about “Jewish space lasers,” with a bit of gratuitous eliminationist rhetoric about migrants.

There are plenty of good reasons to oppose military aid to Israel, and opposition to arming Ukraine has become a signature position of the hard right. But Greene appears to have no interest in engaging with the subjects on their merits at all. Instead, the amendments are part of Greene’s campaign against House Speaker Mike Johnson, whom she has threatened to oust for bringing aid bills to the House floor.

Johnson has struggled to get his caucus behind the aid packages; it’s the reason why he divided up the countries into separate bills. Greene is one of the faces of Republican resistance to Johnson’s leadership, but hard-line GOP dissatisfaction with Johnson dates back to his first days as speaker.

Greene’s opposition to aid for Israel puts her in the minority of her party, while Ukrainian aid has divided the Republican Party, prompting senior members to declare that their colleagues are repeating Russian propaganda. Greene has come under fire recently for praising Vladimir Putin and suggesting that Ukraine is waging a “war on Christianity.” But her latest stunt, emblematic of a distinctive style of conservative politics, suggests that her positions aren’t particularly principled. She’s just happy to get off a few jokes.

Columbia University brutally cracked down Thursday on ongoing student protests against Israel’s ruthless war on Gaza, sending in city police officers to arrest some demonstrators.

Students at both Columbia and Barnard College have been protesting for months, demanding the university divest from companies doing business with Israel. As part of the protest, students set up an encampment in the middle of campus on Wednesday.

In response, police on Thursday deployed a drone and brought five corrections buses, according to Talia Jane, a freelance journalist at the scene.

Videos of the encampment showed police entering campus on Thursday and beginning to arrest students. Meanwhile, university officials have reportedly barred people visibly carrying food from entering school grounds, in an attempt to prevent protesters from getting supplies.

BREAKING: NYPD have begun arresting members of the Columbia University Palestine solidarity encampment pic.twitter.com/h3NhYsERXa

— BreakThrough News (@BTnewsroom) April 18, 2024

Another video shows students flooding the streets outside of Columbia’s campus, preventing the corrections buses from leaving with the arrested protesters.

🚨UPDATE: Students have taken to the streets to prevent the corrections buses with the students from leaving. The student body is on the side of the Encampment and Palestine!!! COME TO 114 and AMSTERDAM to show solidarity and protect our own!!! pic.twitter.com/6SxFkJPA8e

— sebas 🇵🇸🇸🇩🇨🇩🇵🇬 (@cybersebb) April 18, 2024

Three students have reportedly been suspended for participating in the protest, and their college IDs were reportedly deactivated. One of the three is student organizer Isra Hirsi, the daughter of Democratic Representative Illhan Omar.

The university’s dramatically heightened response comes a day after university President Minouche Shafik testified before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on antisemitism on college campuses. Shafik insisted that “antisemitism has no place on our campus, and I am personally committed to doing everything I can to confront it directly.”

The hearing, however, seemed to be more focused on the opinions of college faculty members, with Republicans Elise Stefanik and Tim Walberg specifically asking about disciplinary measures against two professors who made comments that were perceived as antisemitic.

Omar, on the other hand, asked Shafik about protests specifically, pointing out several attacks against antiwar as well as Palestinian solidarity protests, including an alleged chemical attack against pro-Palestinian protesters in January that is still under police investigation, according to Shafik.

Columbia has also been sued by five Jewish students and two student organizations after the university suspended the student groups Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine in November.

Thursday’s police involvement at Columbia is further evidence that the response to campus protests over Gaza across the country has mostly been one of censorship and hysteria designed to suppress pro-Palestinian activism, as Osita Nwanevu wrote for The New Republic in December. The crowds at protests both on and off college campuses are diverse, with Jews, Muslims, Black, and brown demonstrators. Critics, particularly Republican lawmakers, often hide behind allegations of antisemitism as a way to launch attacks on academic freedom.

Just months away from a presidential election that could decide the future of reproductive rights, congressional Democrats and abortion rights groups are not on the same page.

Many Democrats are warning that the right wing plans to revive the Comstock Act, a “zombie” law from 1873 banning the shipment of “every article or thing designed, adapted or intended for producing abortion.” The act could be used as a de facto national abortion ban in the post-Dobbs environment, a move that conservative Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have backed.

Several Democrats are pushing to repeal the law before the election, claiming that leaving it on the books would hand Donald Trump a loaded weapon with which to outlaw abortion nationwide without having an explicit ban on the procedure. But, NOTUS reported Thursday, they’ve received pushback from mainstream abortion rights groups. The organizations warn that passing legislation to repeal the law could cause complications with active litigation they are pursuing to challenge abortion restrictions.

“There’s a lot of litigation playing out that’s specific to this that many of the reproductive rights groups are in the middle of. They’re actually wanting to, they’re not wanting to see [the Comstock Act] change in the middle of that litigation. So that was at the request of Planned Parenthood and other reproductive freedom groups that have been fighting this for a long time,” Democratic Representative Pat Ryan said.

Critics of inaction on Comstock have called this strategy “akin [to] leaving [a potential Trump administration] a nuclear bomb.” Under a government willing to wield it, the Comstock Act could be used to ban birth control, condoms, and even sex toys.

“In this era of abortion winning elections, if Democrats don’t force votes in both chambers—yes, even the House—and campaign on this very out-in-the-open Republican plan to further subjugate women and pregnant people, it will confirm the party’s antipathy to delivering anything of substance on abortion,” Susan Rinkunas wrote for The New Republic in March. “But if Democrats do sound the alarm on Comstock, they might save us all from a Victorian prison—and they could even win in November.”

Trump recently declined to publicly endorse a national abortion ban, instead saying restricting access to the procedure should be left to the states. But in doing so, Trump tacitly condoned every single Republican-backed law on abortion. And the Republican record speaks for itself.

House Republicans traded personal barbs on Thursday as disagreements over foreign aid packages to Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan threaten to throw the caucus into further chaos.

During a morning huddle around Speaker Mike Johnson, who has struggled to rally his party around the aid bills, Wisconsin Representative Derrick Van Orden got in Florida Representative Matt Gaetz’s face and called him “tubby.” Van Orden later confirmed the insult.

“He felt like he should call me a squish, and I wanted to remind anybody who has not been in combat and held his friend’s hand as they died being shot by the enemy really doesn’t have any business calling someone else a squish. And so, in fact, I did call him tubby and I stand by that,” he said.

Later, on the steps of the Capitol, Gaetz fired back at his Republican colleague who, along with Marjorie Taylor Greene, has called for a motion to remove Johnson from the speakership.

“The only thing I gleaned from [the exchange] is that Mr. Van Orden is not a particularly intelligent individual,” Gaetz said.

Gaetz led the charge in October to oust former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, whom Johnson replaced. While Gaetz opposes the foreign aid packages, he has not called for Johnson’s ouster.

Johnson, physically and figuratively “surrounded by folks who have taken issue with his foreign aid plan,” reportedly “put his head in his hands and shook his head” on the House floor. The image sums up his brief time as speaker of the House. As for Gaetz, this is what he asked for.

During jury selection at Donald Trump’s hush-money trial on Thursday, a potential juror was excused for making an apt comparison: The former president reminded him of former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

The man, who is originally from Italy, said it would be “hard to be fair and impartial” because of the similarities.

Berlusconi and Trump do have some things in common: Both were business professionals who went on to be elected to political office, and both faced (and continue to face) criticism for unethical business practices, both in and out of office.

The major difference, though, is that Berlusconi seems to have been far more successful politically, as well as financially. He served as prime minister in four different governments for nine years, and he was the third-wealthiest person in Italy with a net worth of $6.8 billion when he died in 2023. His holdings included real estate (like Trump), the largest media company in Italy, and the soccer club AC Milan.

Like Trump, Berlusconi was also in legal trouble due to his business activities, with a long list of charges including fraud, false accounting, soliciting prostitution, bribery, and defamation. Unsurprisingly, he called these charges “judicial persecution” and said the goal was “subverting the votes of the Italian people.”

Trump, however, has never been upfront about his net worth, remarking in the past that it changes based on his daily mood. Lately, though, it seems to be dropping.

So far, Trump has only been elected to office once, and he didn’t even win the popular vote. And while Trump’s legal cases have only just begun, he can’t pretend to have the wealth and influence that Berlusconi used to skirt any serious legal consequences, regardless of the Republican Party’s influence over the Supreme Court.

Donald Trump is not known for restraint when it comes to social media, particularly regarding people he doesn’t like. And when one of his lawyers tried to deny it during his hush-money trial Thursday, the judge called him out.

Prosecutors warned Judge Juan Merchan that the former president would likely attack the prosecution’s witnesses against him during the trial, noting he appears to have violated his gag order seven times since the start of the week. Trump’s attorney Todd Blanche tried to promise his client would stop posting like that on social media, but Merchan saw right through it.

“That he will not tweet about any witness? I don’t think that you can make that representation,” Merchan said.

Merchan has a lot of evidence to back up that stance: Trump repeatedly attacks his critics on social media, dating back to his days on Twitter (now X). His posts on Truth Social have resulted in multiple gag orders against him, and he’s already attacked the prosecution, Merchan, and Merchan’s daughter in this case. He even posted Wednesday night about a liberal jury conspiracy he heard on Fox News.

The witnesses against him will likely include his former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen, as well as adult film actress Stormy Daniels, who allegedly received the hush money payment. Trump and Cohen have a long history of animosity, and we all know Trump doesn’t ever hold a grudge for a long time.

Trump already has been told off by Merchan for talking out loud in court, and has to attend a contempt hearing next week for alleged gag order violations. And, regardless of what his former attorneys say, witness intimidation and criticizing Merchan’s daughter are not protected in the Constitution.

At a fundraiser with oil and gas industry executives last week, Donald Trump reportedly ranted angrily about, of all things, wind power. “I hate wind,” Trump told the executives. That may seem like a joke, but it gets at a deadly serious topic: If Trump wins this fall, he’d very likely try to repeal President Biden’s climate policies. We chatted with David Roberts, author of a great energy Substack called Volts, about Trump’s prospects for success at that project, about its potential consequences for the world, and about an intriguing concept known as “petro-masculinity.”

In March 2022, U.N. delegates met in Ottawa and struck a historic agreement to produce, by the end of 2024, a legally binding treaty to “end plastic pollution.” “Plastic pollution has grown into an epidemic. With today’s resolution we are officially on track for a cure,” Espen Barth Eide, then Norway’s minister for climate and the environment, said at the time. Now, more than two years later, the mission looks dangerously close to derailing.

Next week, when delegates reconvene in Ottawa, it will be their penultimate chance to achieve their stated goal (the final meeting is in November). “This meeting is, to a degree, make or break,” the International Pollutants Elimination Network’s Björn Beeler told Inside Climate News.

Given the proliferation of plastics alternatives these days, you might think this treaty would be in the shrimp shell–derived sustainable bag, so to speak. Nope. A meeting in Nairobi in November 2023 ended with very little progress. Perhaps relatedly, as this newsletter noted at the time, the Center for International and Environmental Law tallied 143 fossil fuel and petrochemical industry lobbyists registered to attend that meeting. It’s not known yet how many have registered to attend next week’s.

Since last November, several new reports have shed further light on the deception of the plastics industry. In February, the Center for Climate Integrity released a report on what it called a “decades-long campaign of fraud and deception about the recyclability of plastics,” as newly uncovered documents from trade group the Vinyl Institute explicitly acknowledged in the 1980s that “recycling cannot go on indefinitely, and does not solve the solid waste problem.”

Last month, the Environmental Integrity Project announced another finding: that some $9 billion in U.S. taxpayer money has been used, via tax breaks and subsidies, to build plastics manufacturing facilities. Many of those facilities, in turn, have “repeatedly exceeded legal limits on the air pollution they release into surrounding communities, disproportionately affecting people of color,” DeSmog’s Sara Sneath wrote. Volatile organic compounds of the sort released by these plants have been “tied to a broad range of potential health impacts, from nosebleeds to cancer.”

These two reports aren’t the first and won’t be the last to showcase the plastics industry’s bad faith or the catastrophic consequences of public credulity. But taken together, they’re a striking indictment of the position that reportedly tanked the talks in Nairobi in November. The basic problem then was that countries with big petrochemical industries, like the United States, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and China, opposed the idea of “binding provisions” for reducing plastic production, and in some cases explicitly advocated focusing on recycling instead.

In light of these two reports, at least two things may be said about this position. First: Given that the plastics industry has admitted internally for decades that recycling doesn’t work, a recycling-first approach to plastic pollution is basically a pro-pollution stance. And second: While countries may value the wealth produced by their large fossil fuel industries, they also have ample evidence that these industries will not hesitate to take taxpayer money and, in return, poison taxpayers.

Meanwhile, the political systems for addressing this problem are deeply dysfunctional. It’s not uncommon, in U.N. climate talks, for oil industry execs to actually be part of official governmental delegations for some countries. And in the U.S., even if a useful treaty does get drafted this year, a Trump victory in November “would likely impact how such an agreement gets implemented in the U.S. and ratchet up the already long odds that any final accord would be approved by the U.S. Senate,” E&E News reports.

Still, kicking straight-up lobbyists out of the talks shouldn’t be too much to ask. U.N. member nations are well overdue in acknowledging what many credible news outlets have now reported, and what ought to be common sense: that plastics industry representatives are not disinterested parties here. Any sincere attempt to curb the global disaster of plastic pollution isn’t going to come from them.

Good News/Bad News

reports one small, potentially positive development in Europe: Around 500 barriers (think dams, fords, etc.) were removed from European waterways last year, helping to restore riparian ecosystems and allowing fish to travel upstream to breed.

Stat of the Week

$150,000 per lease

That’s the new price for drilling on federal lands, up from $10,000. The rule was finalized by the Bureau of Land Management on Friday, part of a big push to finalize environmental rules before President Biden’s term runs out.

What I’m Reading

How Fast Fashion Is Driving Land Grabs and Violence in Brazil

While brands like H&M promote their cotton clothes as particularly sustainable, courtesy of the Better Cotton Initiative, environmental nonprofit Earthsight has cast doubt on that, Sophie Benson reports for Atmos. Earthsight examined two major cotton producers who export to manufacturers that make clothes for H&M and Zara:

SLC and Horita Group stand accused of deforestation on a grand scale.

In 2014, Bahia’s environmental agency Ibama found 25,153 hectares of illegal deforestation on Horita farms at Agronegócio Condomínio Cachoeira do Estrondo, a vast agribusiness estate, the report outlines. In 2020, the same agency stated it could find no permits for 11,700 hectares of deforestation carried out by the company between 2010 and 2018. Between 2002 and 2019, Horita Group’s owners were fined over 20 times for environmental violations, totalling $4.5 million.

Meanwhile, three of SLC’s cotton farms lost at least 40,000 hectares of native Cerrado wilderness in the last 12 years, per Earthsight’s reporting. SLC has also been fined around $250,000 by Ibama since 2008 for environmental infractions in Bahia. Both companies are further alleged to have cleared land which has been legally earmarked for regeneration or preservation.

Read Sophie Benson’s full report at Atmos.Earth.

This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.

Another week, another blockbuster Supreme Court case that could have lasting consequences for American politics: On Tuesday, the nation’s high court heard arguments in a case challenging whether federal prosecutors could charge rioters in the January 6, 2021, siege of the Capitol using a law that criminalizes what is known as “obstructing an official proceeding.” The Justice Department has argued that defendants violated this law, enacted in the wake of the Enron scandal more than two decades ago, by attempting to prevent the certification of President Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory in 2020.

More than 350 people have been charged, and more than 100 have pleaded guilty or been convicted, under the statute, which has a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. Perhaps the most prominent person charged under the federal obstruction statute: former President Donald Trump.

But the justices seemed to be divided on the issue in arguments on Tuesday. Some conservative justices, who comprise the majority of the court, worried that the statute grants federal prosecutors overly expansive authority to target protesters. “Would a heckler in today’s audience qualify, or at the State of the Union address? Would pulling a fire alarm before a vote qualify for 20 years in federal prison?” Justice Neil Gorsuch asked.

Justice Clarence Thomas—whom Democrats hoped would recuse from the case, due to the efforts by his wife, Ginni Thomas, to overturn the 2020 election—questioned whether the law had been used in relation to other violent protests. (Although the case will not be decided for months, federal judges in lower courts have allowed several of the defendants who were imprisoned because of the law to be released from custody.)

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 includes a provision that applies to anyone who “alters, destroys, mutilates, or conceals a record, document, or other object, or attempts to do so, with the intent to impair the object’s integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding,” or “otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so.” The Biden administration’s arguments rest on the word “otherwise,” maintaining that it is a catchall that refers to obstruction that goes beyond the shredding of documents. But Chief Justice John Roberts argued that “the general phrase is controlled and defined by reference to the terms that precede it”—in this case, “alters, destroys, mutilates, or conceals.” (This would not be the first time the executive branch has been stymied by the judiciary in using Sarbanes-Oxley: In 2014, the Supreme Court limited the interpretation of the law outside of corporate fraud cases.)

Perspectives on the case from Capitol Hill, somewhat predictably, were divided along party lines. GOP Senator Josh Hawley argued that the federal application of Sarbanes-Oxley in this case ran “far, far afield” of the original intent of the law. “You want to charge rioters, go right ahead. Charge them with trespass, charge them with assault, charge them with whatever,” Hawley said. “They have applied that so broadly, and they’ve completely lifted it out of the records context, and that could be applied to just about any situation to any government proceeding.”

If the Supreme Court were to limit the use of the law, it’s unclear what effect this would have on prosecutions relating to the January 6 riot; many defendants, including the former police officer who brought this case before the court, were charged with multiple other crimes. Jack Smith, the special counsel overseeing the federal case against Trump, has argued that a narrower reading of the law would not prevent the former president from being prosecuted under the statute. The two obstruction counts against Trump involve him conspiring to create false slates of electors, which Smith says would apply even under a stricter interpretation of the statute.

“I’m curious to see what the Supreme Court will say, but nothing in that particular legal adjudication affects in any way our sense of the criminal character of the violent and fraudulent assault on the 2020 election,” said Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin, who was a member of the House select committee that investigated the riot in 2022. “I don’t think there’s any cause for a narrowing construction of that statute. But I think that if it did happen, again, it doesn’t change the essential character of the events we’re talking about.”

This article first appeared in Inside Washington, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by staff writer Grace Segers. Sign up here.

Vibe check: The future of the Affordable Connectivity Plan

I’ve previously written in this newsletter about the Affordable Connectivity Program, which helps connect millions of low-income Americans to the internet—and which will end in May if Congress does not approve additional funding. The program grew from a pandemic-era benefit, and has been used by around 23 million households. Despite bipartisan and bicameral support for the Affordable Connectivity Program Extension Act, which would boost funding for the program by $7 billion, the future of the bill is uncertain. Congress is preoccupied with a host of other priorities, including approving a supplemental package of aid to Ukraine, Israel, and the Indo-Pacific.

Despite these complications, a group of Democratic representatives is pressuring Johnson to take up the legislation. I spoke with Representative Annie Kuster of New Hampshire, the chair of the New Democrat Coalition, about how her caucus of centrist Democrats is pushing to keep the Affordable Connectivity Act a priority. This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

The ACP is set to end in May. Do you believe Congress can approve legislation to extend the program before that deadline?

I certainly hope so. I mean, that’s our goal. We’ve waited too long, obviously. This was a bipartisan bill when it passed; the extension has two dozen Republican co-sponsors. And we were hoping that they would help us to get it to the floor quickly. Now we’re really running up against the deadline. And so we want to make sure that we keep the pressure on the House Republican leadership.

These enrollees are all across the country, in red and blue districts, so we’ve got to put aside partisan politics and work together. It’s a lifeline for American families, for students doing homework, or people applying for jobs. We have very low unemployment, and our companies are looking for people to do jobs, to cover their job openings. And if you don’t have the internet from home, you can’t apply for the job. You can’t look up the bus schedule to get to the job. You can’t be in touch with your employer to send or receive messages.

The way America works and lives, and the way our communities function—for schools, for hospitals—everyone has the expectation that people will be available via the internet. And 23 million Americans have had this access to affordable internet. We’ve been closing this digital divide. This is true for low-income communities, but it’s also true for rural communities like my district to provide access to affordable broadband. We did this during Covid because it became immediately apparent how important it was for telework, for telehealth, for education online. And then now it’s being stripped away—just in my own state, we’re talking about 40,000 households. So that is a significant number of people who will no longer be able to participate in the normal course with our community and with our economy.

What do you believe is the best pathway for approving the Affordable Connectivity Program extension?

Well, the best pathway would be to just attach it to a bill that’s going to be considered, and get it to the president for his signature as quickly as possible. If the Republican leadership is unwilling to do that, then we would have to consider alternative pathways.

What kind of bill would you want to see it attached to?

Whatever passes the relevancy test. It’s such a popular bipartisan program. It shouldn’t be difficult to identify it—you know, a path to get this done. This should be a priority, really, with the deadline bearing down on us?

Well, that does bring me to my next question. There is a lot happening in Congress right now.

Yes, yes. Maybe we could attach it to Ukraine aid. [Laughs]

How do you convince Speaker Johnson that this is a priority?

I think it’s so popular that we should be able to do it on suspension, and now we’ve got a few extra days here. Let’s do it on Friday under suspension. That might be the way to go.

[Author’s note: Approving a bill under suspension of the rules requires a two-thirds majority to pass.]

The bill does, as you mentioned before, have significant GOP support. But there are a few Republicans who say that the ACP is redundant or that it has not truly connected a meaningful number of Americans. How do you respond to those criticisms?

Twenty-three million Americans is a meaningful number to me, and certainly 40,000 households in New Hampshire. We’re a state that has, I think we’re at 2.3 percent unemployment.… We can’t afford to have 40,000 people isolated, not connected to our economy and our society to the extent that they can’t fill out a job application, they can’t apply for a new position, they can’t go online to get new skills. Health care is a great example. So much of health care is working your way up from an entry level [licensed nursing assistant] to getting your credentials, working your way up to nurse practitioner. The way these things happen is that people take classes online, over the weekend, at night. And you’re just, like, squashing all of that talent. I wish I had a sophisticated word. I’m just thinking of just pushing people down. You’re not giving people the opportunity to thrive, and it will impact our economy.

I have one health care provider with 750 openings, they need to be able to communicate with everybody. And if you take 40,000 people out of the pool of potential applicants, just simply because they don’t have access to know about the position, to look online for a job, to fill out the application, to pull down their transcript from their school—everything happens online. Put yourself in the position of trying to apply for a job and not being able to go on a computer. It’s ludicrous in this day and age. And so to me the ACP is the equivalent of basic infrastructure. It’s like having public roads and high winds and phones and everything that we need to function. This is the modern version. The twenty-first-century infrastructure includes access to affordable internet.

I would be remiss if I didn’t ask you a question related to the news of the week. So, specifically, consideration of the package of national security bills and what that could mean for Johnson if the House is able to pass this new legislation. Do you think Democrats would be prepared to vote to keep Johnson in office if there is a motion to vacate against him?

So what I have said publicly is that, first and foremost, we’re focused on the substance. So we are taking today to ensure and reassure ourselves that all the parts of the set package are included. So, aid to Ukraine, aid to Israel, humanitarian aid to Gaza; there’s a fourth piece that has to do with Taiwan. We need to absolutely confirm that all of the pieces [are there]. But if I accept your proposition that all of the pieces will be passed, I have said publicly that if he’s a man of his word, and he told me directly, personally, that that’s what would happen, then I would personally have no reason to remove him from the chair.

That seems like a very conditional statement.

Entirely. Entirely conditional. And frankly, I wouldn’t even make that decision until that decision had been made by my leadership. You will see Democratic unity on this issue. We will negotiate together. This will be in conjunction with a decision that’s made by our leadership, Leader Hakeem Jeffries and our whip, Katherine Clark. I would never get out in front of them.

What I’m reading

‘I’m gonna O.J. you’: How the Simpson case changed perceptions—and the law—on domestic violence, by Sonja Sharp in the Los Angeles Times

The coiled ferocity of Zendaya, by Matt Zoller Seitz in Vulture

The truth about organic milk, by Annie Lowrey in The Atlantic

How climate change turned camels into the new cows, by Chico Harlan, Rael Ombuor, and Malin Fezehai in The Washington Post

Into the Tubi-verse, by John Wilmes in The Ringer

How the dream of a financial aid upgrade became a nightmare, by Grace Segers in The New Republic. (It was recently pointed out to me by my mother, of all people, that I often include my own stories in the “What I’m reading” segment. To which I respond: How else will I get people to read what I write?)

Pet of the week

The fact that Donald Trump is being forced to sit in a chilly New York courtroom for weeks, during a period when his presidential campaign should be kicking into gear, is satisfying in and of itself. Yes, the charges he is facing—which involve hush-money payments made during the waning days of the 2016 election to adult film actress Stormy Daniels to cover up their affair—may not stick. But Trump has spent most of his life being immune to consequences for his unethical and illegal acts, so it is a relief to see the American legal system finally treating him like the career criminal that he is.

But Trump’s trial is also immensely satisfying for another, baser reason. As part of jury selection, presiding Judge Juan Merchan regularly has to read mean social media posts about Trump from prospective jurors. Many of these posts are from the heyday of the #Resistance. Merchan, for instance, read a Facebook post from the husband of one (soon to be dismissed) potential juror that features a photograph of Trump and Barack Obama captioned, “I don’t think this is what they meant by Orange is the new Black.” But others are blunter and funnier. Another potential juror had posted a 90-second video of an A.I. Trump saying, “I’m dumb as fuck.”

“I honestly don’t remember,” the juror, a middle-aged bookseller in Midtown, said when asked about it. “I thought it would be funny. I don’t recall watching it.”

Trump is used to being made fun of. He is apparently still upset about jokes made by longtime nemesis Jimmy Kimmel when he was hosting the Oscars in early March; on Wednesday, he took to his own social media platform, Truth Social, to blast the late-night comedian for “choking” at the Oscars. (Trump was, in fact, confusing him with Al Pacino.) Trump has, over the course of the last several years, feuded with a number of celebrity critics: Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, Alec Baldwin, Robert De Niro. He is not, however, used to normal people making fun of him—or even to people making fun of him to his face. He is now spending several hours a day being subjected to the contempt that ordinary people hold him in. Judging by his demeanor at the trial—when he’s not asleep, he’s scowling—it’s clear he doesn’t enjoy it.

“Over the course of this week, Trump has effectively been made to watch a parade of normal people who really don’t like him. One juror posted “Lock him up!”—a play on Trump’s anti-Hillary slogan from the 2016 campaign—early in his presidency. One posted a video from Manhattan—the site of the trial—of dozens of residents dancing in the streets after his election defeat in 2020. Another posted a 2016 get-out-the-vote video from Mark Ruffalo, in which he promised to “get naked” if Trump was defeated. Another posted a joke from an Onion rip-off referencing the rescue of more than a dozen Thai children from a cave in 2017: “Trump invites Thai boys to White House. Boys request to return to cave.”

The whole ordeal has the feel of a Saturday Night Live cold open. It will almost certainly be the cold opening to SNL this weekend—albeit with (slightly) funnier material. That Trump has to sit there and take it is funnier than anything that has been read to him. We know he hates criticism of all stripes. One theory about his decision to run for president in 2016 was that it was prompted by mean jokes made by Barack Obama during the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner. “That evening of public abasement, rather than sending Mr. Trump away, accelerated his ferocious efforts to gain stature in the political world,” reported The New York Times in the spring of 2016. It was a farcical but plausible origin story: Trump was so humiliated that he had no choice but to get revenge.

It’s also worth noting just how rare it is for Trump to hear what regular voters outside of his own base think about him. As president, he regularly watched clips of comedians and cable news panelists being mean about him, sure. But those people aren’t representative of any voting bloc; criticizing or making fun of him is literally their job. And because they’re public figures of one stripe or another, Trump could single them out on Twitter. A notorious counterpuncher, he has historically dealt with the feeling of humiliation by attempting to get back at his critics.

As a president and postpresident, however, Trump has rarely had to face criticism in person. He carefully curates his public events so as to almost never encounter critics of any stripe. His life is spent at a private club or on a golf course. He skipped every White House Correspondents Dinner as president. His rallies are filled with gushing supporters. He lives in a fantasy world in which Hollywood, the media, and political elites despise him—but the people love him. One key pillar of his conspiracy theory that he was the real winner of the 2020 election was that he regularly drew large crowds to rallies and Joe Biden did not. The subtext here is barely that: He has the support of the people, and it takes the full force of the establishment to defeat him, whether in court or at the ballot box.

This week’s jury selection is blowing up that notion, one mean tweet at a time. And Trump just has to sit there, staring icily ahead, and take it without a word.

Of all the individuals and institutions implicated in the global migration crisis, you’d be hard-pressed to find a figure more universally detested than the human smuggler. U.S. immigration authorities routinely vilify the “ruthless smugglers and transnational criminal organizations who exploit vulnerable migrants” with “disinformation.” Smugglers, one Customs and Border Protection officer recently claimed, treat migrants as a “commodity” no different from “vegetables or drugs.” In these polarized times, villainizing those who make money helping others illegally cross international boundaries has provided a rare point of bipartisan consensus. “Smugglers use migrant children as human pawns to exploit our laws and gain access to our country,” thundered Donald Trump in his 2019 State of the Union Address. They’re “out recruiting,” President Joe Biden said last year, trying to “convince migrant groups to cross illegally.”

“Everyone says that we are all bad, but that’s not true,” a Honduran smuggler working in southern Mexico tells anthropologist Jason De León in his new book, Soldiers and Kings. “It’s just that no one ever listens to our stories.” This is at once a somewhat trite sentiment and a basic truth about this hypervisible, poorly understood occupation, whose practitioners are often typecast, in De León’s formulation, as “pot-bellied Latinos with silver-capped teeth and slick hair” who “reek of cologne and drive shiny trucks bought with the hard-earned (or borrowed) money of desperate people trying to get to la USA.” De León set out to correct these misperceptions, to understand who smugglers are and how and why they get caught up in the work that they do. For nearly seven years, the former MacArthur fellow listened to their stories during impromptu tattoo sessions, in between bouts of partying in ramshackle safe houses, and over meals of roasted iguana on the tracks of la bestia, the Mexican trains so-named for their tendency to devour the limbs and lives of migrants hitching rides north.

“You will not find any crime kingpins on the train tracks in Mexico,” De León reports. “What you will find are desperate people living complicated, ambiguous, and often violent lives.” The labor smugglers perform is “necessary and sometimes lifesaving” for those whose flight from poverty, violence, and climate catastrophe crashes into a gauntlet of ever-tightening border controls, he writes. But they can “also be thieves, traffickers, murderers, and/or rapists.” Many are just as poor as the migrants who purchase their services—one of the main smugglers profiled in the book rarely has more than $20 to his name—and have often themselves fled from the same increasingly unlivable locales, turning to smuggling after either failing to make it to the United States or being deported. Most have witnessed or been victims of horrifically barbarous acts, often at a young age, and seem to exhibit the typical symptoms of PTSD.

De León makes clear that he is not seeking to airbrush the more unsavory realities of smuggling work. Instead, his book forces us to consider multiple truths: that human smuggling is indeed an “exploitative and violent” process for the human beings forced to rely on it, and that those who “try to make a living guiding people across hardening geopolitical boundaries are themselves human”: flawed, complex, capable of both cruelty and mercy. What is inhuman, De León suggests, is the structural forces that set this entire system of clandestine movement in motion. Human smuggling is a symptom of the grotesque inequalities generated by capitalism and the draconian border policies erected to enshrine them. By training such a close lens—quite literally, as the book is filled with intimate photographs of smugglers taken by De León’s longtime collaborator, Mike Wells—on the lives of those who often take the brunt of the blame for the migration crisis, De León throws our attention back to these deeper structures. Wherever a border wall bisects two unequal societies, he writes, you’ll find “desperate migrants and enterprising smugglers on the other side, working their way over, under, and through those barricades at all costs.” So do we blame the smugglers, or do we blame the walls and the societies that built them?

For more than a decade, De León has traversed the Western hemisphere, tracing the hidden traumas of the migrant crisis from Queens, New York, to Cuenca, Ecuador. His first book, The Land of Open Graves, based on five years of fieldwork in and around the Sonoran Desert, was a stunning ethnographic examination of the murderous consequences of “prevention through deterrence,” the Clinton-era border policy that beefed up enforcement at popular urban ports of entry, funneling migrants into remote desert regions where thousands perished over subsequent decades. De León finished his research for that book at a major inflection point in the dynamic of undocumented migration into the U.S., a period that provided the impetus for his new project. During the summer of 2014, thousands of unaccompanied children from Central America arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border, fleeing growing violence and poverty in Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. The flood of children generated a sustained political crisis for the Obama administration, which responded by pressuring Mexico to crack down on migration from the Northern Triangle countries. The result was Programa Frontera Sur—literally, the “Southern Border Program”—a Mexican policy that ratcheted up immigration detention and enforcement, particularly on la bestia.

From the U.S. perspective, De León explains, Programa Frontera Sur was effectively an “extension of prevention through deterrence,” in that it further outsourced and invisibilized the dirty work of clamping down on desperate migrants attempting to make it to the U.S. If the 1990s-era policy farmed out this often-deadly task to the desert’s scorching temperatures, predatory fauna, and inhospitable terrain—where nature picks corpses clean, turns bones to dust, and effectively “sanitizes the killing floor,” in De León’s memorable phrasing—Programa Frontera Sur did something similar with Mexico’s vast geography and its (often corrupt and violent) immigration enforcement apparatus. And just as prevention through deterrence ended up fueling smuggling across the U.S.-Mexico border, so too did Programa Frontera Sur. (“It’s simple. Immigration gets tougher and we invent new routes,” one smuggler puts it to De León matter-of-factly.) By fragmenting traditional migration paths through Mexico, the policy increased reliance on smuggling, helping transform it from a “mom-and-pop business into a billion-dollar global industry” and putting the subjects of De León’s book to work.

De León first encounters them one year into this sea change in immigration enforcement in Pakal-Na, a working-class Mexican town near the Guatemalan border that has become a major waystop for Central American migration. The five Honduran nationals—three men, two women—to whom De León devotes the bulk of his attention are denizens of what they ironically refer to as the “Pleasure Palace,” a cardboard “communal rug” in front of a migrant shelter where people “eat, sleep, kill time, kill each other, drink, do drugs, sell drugs, talk shit, and involve themselves in various activities associated with clandestine movement.”

De León’s long-term immersion in the lives of the Pleasure Palace crew gives him a privileged insight into the conditions that chased them out of their native country, which boasts both the second-highest poverty rate and the second-highest homicide rate in all of Latin America. The book lingers on each of their stories, but the ingredients are startling in their general consistency: abandonment by older relatives forced to migrate north; death (by murder or disease) of fathers, husbands, brothers, best friends; backbreaking labor on a tiny plot of land or in a street-corner stall; paltry wages barely enough to maintain “plywood houses with mud floors”; extortion or recruitment by local gangs. Nearly all of them have witnessed the killing of a loved one. It can be easy to forget, given their typecasting as transnational criminal masterminds, that most of the smugglers De León encounters have fled their homes long before their 18th birthdays.

With the Pleasure Palace as its geographic and narrative core, the book floats from smuggler to smuggler and from present to past. In a way, this structure befits the lives under inspection, which unfold in a “violent world of cycles with no end in sight.” This is a world where the same gangs that have chased you out of your childhood home show up again on the migrant trail; where you are perennially at risk of being picked up by immigration agents and deported back home, only to be forced to head north once again; where a smuggler you befriend is liable to disappear for months, stories of their death circulating “like a game of migrant telephone,” before they suddenly resurface.

Because these low-level smugglers know little about the broader criminal networks that facilitate their (meager) living, the book generally substitutes breadth of view with depth of detail. De León vividly renders the polyglot slang of the Pleasure Palace crew, picked up during undocumented stints in the U.S. working in low-wage industries. He captures their gallows humor and improvised religiosity (one smuggler reads a passage from the Book of Revelation before every trip). He lingers on poignant moments in which they express a desire to leave the smuggling world and find “a normal life like the people you see going to work and coming home to their houses and relaxing without any worries,” as another smuggler puts it. But he also doesn’t shy away from depicting the thrilling (if fleeting) pleasures that come with their line of work—the ways that moving people on the migrant trail can open up “worlds of adventure” for kids perpetually on the run.

As his fieldwork branches out from Pakal-Na across Latin America and the U.S., De León is ultimately able to work his way up the chain of smuggling command, introducing us to the book’s so-called “kings” (though they might better be described as the smuggling industry’s middle managers). We meet Flaco, who, like his “soldier” underlings, fled Honduras at the age of 13. He later puts in a decade-plus of work in Los Angeles for a Honduran gang, which both lands him in prison for a violent crime and gives him connections that later help him broker safe passage for migrants moving north, especially as transnational gangs came to exert increased control over the migrant trail in the wake of Programa Frontera Sur. On a slightly higher rung is a smuggler De León calls Kingston, a true veteran of the business whose roundabout journey to smuggling is the book’s most memorable: recruitment first by local gangsters and then by the U.S.-backed Honduran military as a child soldier; aimless wandering across international borders during the pre-9/11 era; gang activity in the Bronx for the Bloods; 25-to-life for violently avenging the mutilation of a best friend; stints in New York’s most infamous prisons (Rikers, Attica, Sing Sing); a successful sentence commutation; deportation back to Honduras; and into a long career facilitating illicit movement.

If the low-level smugglers at the Pleasure Palace exist in ambivalent relation to the industry, Flaco and Kingston are more firmly ensconced. They have grown comfortable with violence, are more openly acquisitive, and therefore are more distasteful characters, even if De León openly admits that he is “charmed” by their charisma. They both speak incessantly of cash: “Motherfucker, I’m making it! $1,500, $5,000, $10,000. Goddamn!” Kingston boasts. When De León asks what the most important thing to know about the smuggling business is, Flaco replies, “Money, money, money.” But their lives also possess a tragic dimension. De León cites research on how former child soldiers like Kingston “have difficulties in controlling aggressive impulses and have little skills for handling life without violence.” Moreover, both Kingston and Flaco are caught between the Scylla of their obligations to high-level gang members and the Charybdis of their criminal records in the U.S., making it difficult for them to contemplate leaving the world of smuggling, even as it grows increasingly violent and unstable in the wake of Programa Frontera Sur. “It’s like a tattoo,” Kingston laments of his life in “el show,” his name for the smuggling industry. “All that you do in your life is recorded on you like a tattoo.”

How does one adequately represent the perpetual motion machine that is the illicit migration of millions of people through the Western hemisphere? How to sketch the range of actors and forces—governments, nongovernmental organizations, transnational gangs, drug cartels, climactic patterns, capital flows—that shape clandestine movement? De León is admirably up-front about the representational limitations of any single project, even one based on such extended and immersive work. In a world where “you never know the truth about what is happening,” as one smuggler puts it, the best any observer can hope for is to capture a “blurry snapshot of a fragment” of the whole picture. “The diagrams we draw will always be missing pieces,” he writes.

And so certain perspectives will inevitably be sidelined. In his previous book, for example, De León mostly focused on the experiences of men crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, which largely kept him from learning about the ubiquitous sexual assault of women on the migrant trail, except “through the eyes of men who bore witness.” There are similar perspectival elisions in Soldiers and Kings. For one, De León informs us up front that, for safety reasons, he decided to never physically travel with smugglers as they moved migrants north, which means that the book doesn’t illuminate much about how migrants encounter their guias while making the 1,600-mile journey through Mexico. When De León writes of how Flaco experiences “the thrill of calling the shots and being a boss” on the migrant trail, where he is “an authority figure, an expert, a king,” one is left to imagine how this might be experienced from the other side. De León also tells us that he avoided smugglers who gave off a “bad vibe,” especially ones he suspected of being implicated in abuse and assault. As a result, the violent targeting of migrants that is so ubiquitous in el camino is largely rendered off-stage, entering the narrative solely in the comments of the characters De León has come to trust.

Yet the book’s great virtue is in its close attention to the individual lives of its small group of central characters. De León picks his epigraph from American country singer Jason Isbell: “Are you living the life you chose? / Are you living the life that chose you?” The lyric gestures at De León’s interest in toggling between the macro and the micro: the globe-spanning, incomprehensibly vast forces that have brought these smugglers’ lives into being, as well as their own individual struggles to make something of what the world has made of them.

De León ends the book with an obligatory “what to do” chapter, but the solutions he proposes are delivered with something of a shrug. “I am an anthropologist, not a policymaker,” he writes, lamenting that “the types of observations and recommendations that my kind tends to make only frustrate those who are looking for easy answers to incorporate into campaign slogans and white papers.” Building a world that would put the Pleasure Palace crew out of business would require, he argues, addressing “the monstrous injustices created by capitalism”: “poverty, political corruption, the drug trade, transnational gang violence, climate change patterns created by the richest countries and disproportionately felt by the poorest.” But for the foreseeable future, our policy landscape will be dominated by people possessed of the “myopic and naïve vision,” largely shared by our current Democratic president, that illicit migration is just a national security problem to be solved with more guns and barbed wire.

Until we can come to address the root causes of migration and its “ugly symbiote,” human smuggling, we’ll have to reckon with the fact that, as De León writes, “cemeteries across Central America are full of the skeletons of people just like” the ones profiled in this book: “children born into generational poverty whose bleak futures are predetermined before they can even speak; kids who live fast and die fast because those are often the only choices they are given.” There will be many more like them.

If the United States economy is an old Chuck Jones Warner Brothers cartoon—and who’s to say it isn’t?—then Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell is Wile E. Coyote. Wile E. Coyote is always trying and failing to vanquish Roadrunner, who in this allegory stands for economic growth. Wile E. Coyote uses every instrument of destruction he can think of to kill Roadrunner. None of them work. Instead, these assaults make Roadrunner stronger and faster. Wile E. Coyote’s instruments of destruction are mail-ordered from the ACME Corporation. Here, ACME is an allegorized FOMC—that is, the Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee—and ACME’s anvils, hand grenades, exploding tennis balls, etc., are FOMC’s interest rate hikes. 

For nine months, Powell and his FOMC have kept interest rates high, yet the economy continues to grow at a brisk pace. How can it be that Wile E. Coyote’s depredations make Roadrunner stronger and faster? That riddle is addressed in a contrarian new economic theory that, according to Bloomberg’s Ye Xie, “borders on heresy.” According to this theory, higher interest rates do not dampen economic growth, as they’re supposed to, but rather accelerate it. If you want Roadrunner to die, this theory says, stop trying to kill him.

Powell isn’t trying to kill the economy, but he is trying to cool it down in order to contain inflation. Inflation stopped being a serious problem a year ago, but this month it ticked up a mildly worrisome 3.5 percent. “The recent data have clearly not given us greater confidence,” Powell said this week, “and instead indicate that it’s likely to take longer than expected to achieve that confidence.” Translation: There will be no rate cuts any time soon.

Powell wasn’t talking just about inflation. Public opinion to the contrary, the economy is performing extremely well under President Joe Biden. Gross domestic product is up 3.4 percent, corporate profits are up 4 percent, and unemployment remains quite low at 3.8 percent. In March, 303,000 new jobs were created, which was well above expectations. To quote Roadrunner: Mmeemeep!

The idea that interest rate hikes boost economic growth rather than slow it derives from modern monetary theory, or MMT, of which, for complicated reasons I won’t get into here, I am wary. So that’s one strike against it. Another strike is that the concept is quite brilliant. Brilliant ideas tend to be wrong. (See Daniel Farber’s authoritative 1986 law review article, “The Case Against Brilliance,” later adapted into a New Republic article. Before you ask, yes: Farber addressed in both essays the difficulty that his own argument might be brilliant.) 

On the other hand, brilliant ideas do occasionally turn out to be right, and we can’t rule out that possibility. The MMT guru Stephanie Kelton, professor of economics at Stony Brook University and author of The Deficit Myth, made the case for rate hikes greasing the economy (and increasing inflation rather than reducing it) in a January post for her Substack newsletter, The Lens.  

Kelton’s main argument was that interest hikes “force the Treasury to pay out hundreds of billions of dollars in additional interest,” showering wealthy T-bill investors with cash. Ordinarily, the rich are likelier to bank windfalls than spend them. That’s why tax cuts for the rich, for example, are a lousy way to stimulate the economy during a downturn. But it’s different when interest rates are high, because “tighter credit impedes investment.” Might as well buy that yacht instead! Also, because the economy is beset by monopolization, a lot of businesses “with pricing power” will pass higher borrowing costs on to the consumer, “just like they would if they faced rising wages, shipping, materials, or other costs.” All this is very inflationary. 

In the Bloomberg piece, Xie explains that in years past, when higher interest rates goosed spending by bondholders, this effect wasn’t “nearly enough to match the drop in demand from those who stop borrowing money.” Why would it be different this time? Because government debt has gotten so gigantic ($35 trillion) that bondholders rake in $50 billion more than they did a decade ago. 

Who else benefits from high interest? “Homeowners holding cheap legacy mortgages,” write Robert Armstrong and Ethan Wu in The Financial Times. A locked-in low mortgage rate makes you less willing to sell your house because you’d have to take out a more expensive loan to buy a new house. The collective result is a drop in supply and an increase in housing costs, already elevated by higher interest rates. If you own a house that you bought before rates went up, send Jerome Powell a thank-you note.

But FT’s Armstrong and Wu don’t actually believe lowering interest rates would cool the economy. Partly, they say, that’s because there’s a long-standing supply shortage in housing. Lower interest rates would increase housing supply, yes, but that wouldn’t lower demand because demand is just too high. Housing prices would continue to rise.

There are other reasons, too, to question the theory that higher interest rates stimulate economic growth, not least that when the Fed started raising interest rates two years ago economic growth did in fact slow, and inflation did indeed come down, even as the Biden administration was moving to stimulate the economy with the infrastructure bill and the CHIPS Act. Today the economy, yes, is booming, but job and wage growth are slowing. 

Something to fear is that slowing job and wage growth may not slow the overall economy like they used to. Remember Thomas Piketty’s equation that r > g, where r is capital accumulation and g is economic growth? If the Fed really is inadvertently stimulating rather than slowing the economy by maintaining high interest rates, then we may have to conclude that r and g amount to the same thing—that capital accumulation has so completely swamped labor income in driving the economy that labor income might as well not exist. If you don’t own any capital, or you don’t own a house, that’s hard cheese for you. 

Maybe this is why so many Americans have a difficult time believing the economy is firing on all cylinders. If you live on your salary and not your investments, it remains true that—even if the new thinking on interest rates is correct—lower interest rates would serve to make your life easier. Since that describes most Americans, don’t stop hoping Wile E. Coyote will quit chasing Roadrunner and interest rates will come down.

It was a remarkable moment: After introducing a package of bills that includes military aid to Ukraine, Mike Johnson flatly told reporters on Wednesday that enabling Ukraine to defend itself is in the best interests of America and the world. This surprised a lot of people who had wrongly assumed the House speaker was effectively functioning as a stooge for Vladimir Putin—and Donald Trump—and would thus slow-walk Ukraine aid to death before ever allowing a vote on it.

Johnson’s new stance has attracted a good deal of positive attention. But I want to highlight an aspect of it that’s been overlooked because it’s an important tell about the true state of MAGA ideology and what it’s demanding of Republicans these days.

“I really do believe the intel and the briefings that we’ve gotten,” Johnson said, in a moment that became a mini-speech. “I think that Vladimir Putin would continue to march through Europe if he were allowed. I think he might go to the Balkans next. I think he might have a showdown with Poland, or one of our NATO allies.” If so, he added, we might find ourselves sending troops to defend allies from Putin later.

Did we really hear the speaker say that he believes what our intelligence services have told him about the long-term consequences of cutting off aid to Ukraine?

This is a direct challenge to the MAGA worldview in multiple ways. Johnson is treating Putin as the aggressor in the Russia-Ukraine conflict and acknowledging his broader imperialist designs, which is heresy to some MAGA Republicans. But he’s also flatly declaring that on these matters, the deep state is very much to be believed.

A big MAGA conceit is the idea that a nefarious deep-state network of senior federal bureaucrats, nongovernmental experts, and technocratic and managerial elites lurks behind the push to fund Ukraine—and that it’s making up lies about Russia’s war to create a pretext to fulfill a broader set of sinister globalist aims. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene recently tweeted this:

The Ukraine scam is up.

If our Republican majority in Congress funds Joe Biden’s war against Russia on behalf of Ukraine (because he’s a puppet on strings) then Republicans are tools of the foreign war loving deep state.

This is probably MAGA’s most elaborate exercise in up-is-down totalitarian-style propaganda of all: Biden is being manipulated by a deep-state “scam”—i.e., the idea that Ukraine is worth defending—to carry out a war against Russia, which has been  magically transformed from aggressor to victim.

The horrible atrocities against Ukraine the world has witnessed, Putin’s declarations that the sovereign democracy of Ukraine isn’t a real country and shouldn’t exist, the consequent effort to erase it with murderous conquest—all of that disappears in this fog of MAGA propaganda. This sort of thing is why even some senior Republicans suggest that a number of House GOP lawmakers are operating under the influence of Russia.

Johnson’s affirmation that he believes our intelligence services on these matters is a direct rebuke to those MAGA tendencies. 

The bills that GOP leaders have introduced—which are scheduled for votes on Saturday—are also surprisingly faithful to the intel agencies’ apparent understanding of this geopolitical moment. They include $61 billion in aid to Ukraine, $26 billion for Israel, funding for Taiwan, and humanitarian assistance, including for victims in Gaza, which is essential to winning the support of Democrats who will be needed when right-wing Republicans oppose the package.

Greene had threatened to hold a motion-to-vacate vote to oust Johnson if he moved forward with Ukraine aid. If so, there are signs that Democrats will vote to save Johnson if Ukraine aid passes. Either way, Johnson appears prepared to brave MAGA’s fury—and the word of U.S intelligence services is a key reason for it.

To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with healthy skepticism of what our intelligence services are saying. That’s reasonable. After all, they contributed to whipping up the ultimately false assertions about weapons of mass destruction that helped justify the Iraq War. 

But reasoned skepticism is not what MAGA Republicans are offering. Instead, they’re pushing carefully choreographed propaganda that seeks to entirely erase Russian agency from the story of the conflict and to transform Ukraine’s allies into the true warmongers here.

Greene’s effort at this is obvious. Then you have Donald Trump Jr., who tweeted that the aid bills will “hurt my father’s ability to negotiate an end to the war between Russia and Ukraine” if he’s reelected president, whereas “globalist” Republicans who support the package want indefinite war. 

But that’s absurd. As international relations professor Nicholas Grossman shows, the idea behind rhetoric like this—a ruse that other MAGA Republicans regularly employ—is to recast our choice as one between “peace” (which we’d attain by refraining from aiding Ukraine) and “war” (which we’re facilitating with Ukraine aid). In reality, withholding aid is not antiwar at all; it merely makes Russian conquest more likely to continue and succeed (which is perhaps the whole point of this framing).

Even supposedly shrewder MAGA Republicans play a version of this sleazy game. Ohio Senator J.D. Vance recently wrote a New York Times op-ed arguing that Ukraine is losing and our aid won’t give it what it needs in equipment (or soldiers) to prevail. Democrats have effectively rebutted those claims. But Vance also slips into his piece the idea that in providing aid, “we”—meaning the United States—would “prolong a long and bloody war,” and suggests the primary obstacle to peace is President Biden’s unwillingness to negotiate toward it.

But how does Vance himself envision the war ending? Couldn’t it mean Russia gobbles up much or even all of Ukraine? Vance doesn’t say, beyond insisting we should forget about Ukraine regaining all of its stolen territory. Thus he too frames the choice as one between peace (ending aid) and war (continuing it). Presto: Opposing the package suddenly becomes the antiwar position, and being for the package becomes the pro-war one. That’s slippery, dishonest rhetorical trickery that you’d think is below Times standards.

This is the sort of deceitfulness that Johnson has effectively taken on. By affirming what abandoning Ukraine would really mean, and stressing that the deep state is telling lawmakers the truth about it, Johnson has for the time being taken a stance against one of MAGA’s most cherished—and most toxic—propaganda tropes. No wonder Greene is beside herself with rage.

Almost every professional athlete hopes to be famous one day—to shatter records and break streaks; to enshrine themselves in their sport’s history. On Wednesday, Jontay Porter achieved fame in perhaps the most ignominious way he could: He became the first athlete in the North American major leagues to receive a lifetime ban for gambling since Major League Baseball excommunicated Pete Rose, a player-manager for the Cincinnati Reds, in 1989.

Porter, a benchwarmer on the NBA’s Toronto Raptors, received the ban for what the league described as a series of bets on NBA games this spring that he placed through intermediaries. “There is nothing more important than protecting the integrity of NBA competition for our fans, our teams, and everyone associated with our sport, which is why Jontay Porter’s blatant violations of our gaming rules are being met with severe punishment,” NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said in a statement.

“While legal sports betting creates transparency that helps identify suspicious or abnormal activity, this matter also raises important issues about the sufficiency of the regulatory framework currently in place, including the types of bets offered on our games and players,” Silver continued. “Working closely with all relevant stakeholders across the industry, we will continue to work diligently to safeguard our league and our game.”

It is unclear what Silver meant by an insufficient “regulatory framework” in this context. The framework actually seemed to work pretty well in this instance. The legal sportsbooks that Porter and his associates used quickly identified the bets as suspicious and alerted the league about them. The real problem, to put it bluntly, is that almost anyone can place bets almost anywhere just by pressing a few buttons on their phone.

Until recently, gambling in general, and sports betting in particular, existed in a world bounded by natural barriers. For one thing, it wasn’t legal in most states. Gamblers who wanted to make high-dollar bets often had to travel in person to legal sportsbooks to place them, or else rely on underground sportsbooks to get their fix. This wouldn’t be enough to stop people with addiction issues, of course, but it would deter almost everyone else—or at least remind them of the risks involved.

The leagues’ most effective deterrent against gambling scandals was to avoid it altogether. In some ways, Las Vegas is an ideal city for a professional sports team. It’s a large media market in its own right. Its reputation as an entertainment and leisure hot spot would help guarantee higher ticket sales, since traveling fans would be more likely to visit there to see their team play than comparable cities. And the team’s stadium or arena would also be more likely to host concerts and other events for offseason revenue than those of other cities of similar size.

But the four major leagues refused to put a team in Vegas for years because of fears that it would lead to a scandal. The temptation for local players to gamble, they reasoned, would be too great—as would the reputational risks for the leagues themselves. In 1999, then–NBA Commissioner David Stern reportedly told the city’s newly elected mayor that “over my dead body will Las Vegas ever get a team with legalized sports betting there.” A few years later, the NFL refused to run ads from the Las Vegas tourism commission during the Super Bowl.

Paul Tagliabue, the NFL’s commissioner at the time, admitted in 2021 that he would have tried to block the Oakland Raiders from moving to Las Vegas if he still oversaw the league. (The Raiders relocated there after the 2019 season.) “I still worry about some young guy ... and someone says to him, ‘Take the money,’” he told The Las Vegas Review-Journal.

The NCAA, by its very nature, couldn’t avoid having teams located in Nevada. But the association refused to schedule any significant basketball tournament games in Vegas until last year. One can’t blame them: College basketball used to be infamous for point-shaving scandals—a perfect mix of unpaid student-athletes, high public interest, low scrutiny, and a sport where just one player can significantly affect a game’s outcome. Henry Hill, who helped orchestrate Boston College’s widely publicized point-shaving scheme in the late 1970s, later became the inspiration for Ray Liotta’s character in Goodfellas.

Now Las Vegas is home to two teams from the big four leagues. The National Hockey League’s Vegas Golden Knights set up shop in 2016 and have since won two Stanley Cups. The NFL’s Las Vegas Raiders moved into a gleaming new stadium on the Strip in 2020. (The beleaguered Oakland Athletics may relocate there later this decade if all goes well; they’ll be playing in Sacramento until then.) There are always rumors that the NBA might put a team there too, with LeBron James interested in ownership.

So what changed? Las Vegas didn’t, but the rest of the country did. The Supreme Court opened the doors by striking down a federal law that had banned sports betting in all but a few states, in the 2018 case Murphy v. NCAA. Dozens of states legalized sports betting in the years that followed. After that ruling, the difference between Vegas and the rest of the country faded, and the cordon sanitaire that had kept the leagues out of the city no longer had a practical purpose.

There were other cultural changes along the way, as well. The growth of paid fantasy sports made the leagues soften their hard-line stances even before the Supreme Court stepped in. In a post-Murphy world, the league’s embrace of the sports-betting “partners” also had a practical purpose: In exchange for funneling fans toward them, the sportsbooks would also help the leagues identify players and officials who tried to cash in.

Before this, major sports-betting scandals in recent decades typically occurred outside legal channels. The two biggest betting scandals in the years between Rose and Porter were discovered almost by accident. In 2007, federal prosecutors charged NBA referee Tim Donaghy with conspiracy and wire fraud for betting on games that he officiated with the help of illegal bookies. Prosecutors only learned about Donaghy’s bets while investigating the bookmaker as part of an unrelated organized-crime inquiry.

Earlier this month, federal prosecutors also charged former MLB interpreter Ippei Mizuhara with bank fraud for allegedly stealing millions of dollars from Los Angeles Dodgers superstar Shohei Ohtani to place bets with an illegal bookmaker in Orange County. (California is one of a handful of remaining states that still bans sports betting.) According to the Los Angeles Times, investigators uncovered Mizuhara’s thefts by investigating the bookmaker himself. Mizuhara did not bet on baseball games; in text messages to the bookie, he said Ohtani had no knowledge of the bets or wire transfers and described his actions as “stealing.”

If anything, the most troubling thing about the Porter saga is how clumsy he was in executing his gambit. According to the NBA, Porter told an unidentified associate about his “health status” while knowing that his associate was an active bettor on NBA games. That associate then proceeded to place an $80,000 bet on how long he would play in a March 20 game. Had the sports-betting company he used not flagged the bet as suspicious, it would have paid out almost $1.1 million.

To understand how big of a mistake this bet was, one must consider Porter’s brief career. He is not a household name. Porter went undrafted in 2019 and played brief stints with the Memphis Grizzlies, the Denver Nuggets, and the Detroit Pistons. But he spent most of his time playing for the NBA’s developmental leagues prior to being signed by the Raptors in January, and even then it was on a lower-paying two-way contract that meant he could be reassigned to those leagues at a whim.

No matter whether Porter was a talented athlete, he was certainly an unlucky one. In 2018, he tore both his medial collateral ligament and his anterior cruciate ligament during a scrimmage as a college athlete. He then re-tore his ACL the next year shortly before the draft. A SportsNet profile on Porter noted how he constantly wrestled with knee pain during his first NBA season; Porter told the news outlet that his knee felt like it was “crumbling” while he played. One can’t help but wonder if he could almost hear a ticking clock around him, knowing that he would likely miss out on the millions of dollars in lifetime earnings that other NBA athletes can make.

Prop bets like the one he placed are generally common in modern sports betting, and it wouldn’t be surprising to see high-dollar bets on whether LeBron James will have a triple-double in the playoffs or whether Steph Curry will make a certain number of three-pointers in the All-Star Game. But it is hard to imagine a more suspicious bet than wagering $80,000 on the playing time of one of the league’s least-known players, especially one with a well-publicized history of debilitating injuries, on a random March game. A little more circumspection might have allowed him to fly under the radar.

In an even more damning detail, Porter also placed some bets himself through an associate’s betting account, including multi-leg parlays where he bet on the Raptors to lose. That may well have been the fatal blow in the NBA’s eyes. On the spectrum of gambling-related offenses by athletes, there is no greater one than betting against one’s own team. It is corrupt and dishonorable. It is tantamount to defrauding the fans who pay to watch the games; it is a fundamental betrayal of the imagined community of which every sports team’s supporters are part. It is unforgivable.

For that reason, gambling scandals are a serious threat to any professional sports league. In baseball’s early days, betting on the outcomes of games was commonplace among fans and even some players. While this usually took the form of betting on oneself to win, it also took more insidious forms. Allegations of bribery and match fixing in games culminated in the 1919 White Sox scandal, where the team allegedly threw the World Series. Professional baseball restructured itself after the scandal and installed a federal judge as its first commissioner to restore public confidence.

Even setting aside the moral and ethical issues, there is little financial incentive for the best athletes in sports to gamble these days. Big contracts and big endorsements pay too well to justify the risk. But the big four leagues are also filled with less talented players whose financial future is much different. They see their co-workers sign multimillion contracts, they know that the career of a professional athlete is often a short and painful one, and they realize that their chances to make serious money are fleeting at best.

Those players don’t even need to go to Vegas or some mob-connected bookie anymore to cash in on their chances. They may only have to be a little bit smarter than the last guy who got caught. For Porter, payday was only a few clicks away. He may have been the first to make this calculus in a post-Murphy world. He certainly won’t be the last.

Surprised by Bill Barr? Don’t be. Oh, yes, it’s shocking that he said on Fox News on Wednesday night that if push comes to shove, he’ll be voting for what he euphemistically referred to as “the Republican ticket.” I’m not denying that it is. The frequency and ferocity with which Barr has attacked Donald Trump—a “consummate narcissist” whose second term would be “chaos” and a “horror show”—has led many people to believe that there was no way on God’s earth he’d endorse Trump.

Barr hates disorder and all the rest of it. But he hates something else more: liberalism. And when I heard the endorsement news Thursday morning, my mind raced back to October 2019, and a speech Barr gave at Notre Dame University on government, religion, and the perceived assault thereupon. It was shocking to me at the time—as extreme (though evidently quite honest) a profession of fears and lamentations about modern secular society as you’re likely to hear at an Opus Dei convention, let alone from a sitting U.S. attorney general.

The speech’s, and the man’s, core philosophy were laid out in these sentences:

No society can exist without some means for restraining individual rapacity.

But, if you rely on the coercive power of government to impose restraints, this will inevitably lead to a government that is too controlling, and you will end up with no liberty, just tyranny.

On the other hand, unless you have some effective restraint, you end up with something equally dangerous—licentiousness—the unbridled pursuit of personal appetites at the expense of the common good. This is just another form of tyranny—where the individual is enslaved by his appetites, and the possibility of any healthy community life crumbles.

Barr reaches into his hat to grab a few statistics that allegedly make his point about the sewer into which we have descended. First up, out-of-wedlock births, which have indeed gone up since the 1960s from under 10 percent to around 40 percent. Is the main culprit here that society has lost its religious moorings? Some would put that spin on it, sure.

But specifically, social science seems to have settled on these explanations: wider availability of birth control and abortion (things that Barr laments but are available in just about every developed nation in the world) and the ending, starting in the 1970s, of shotgun marriages. Barr surely thinks this an evil. I would imagine a lot of Americans consider it not a bad thing at all that two immature and incompatible 19-year-olds aren’t forced to marry out of a social convention that traps them in a probably unhappy marriage where the wife may end up the victim of some kind of abuse.

He also cites “record levels of depression and mental illness, dispirited young people, soaring suicide rates, increasing numbers of angry and alienated young males, an increase in senseless violence, and a deadly drug epidemic.” Again, all true. But the society for which he pines didn’t even measure many of these things and locked mentally ill people away in facilities where we wouldn’t put dogs today. And is the answer to these ills greater piety, or maybe more opportunity in the places that forge all these alienated young men?

It was a very revealing and, as I say, honest speech. He regrets pretty much everything that has happened in America since Elvis. He uses the phrase “moral chaos” twice. And he clearly believes we are in an age of secular tyranny.

So you see, Barr is against Trump, but not in the same way that you and I are. He eventually took a stand against Trump, but let’s recall that it did take him a long time. It wasn’t until Trump’s election denialism after the 2020 election that it all became too much for Barr to swallow. Until then, he was with Trump all the way: through the Muslim ban, through the family separation policies, through the Putin love, through the climate denialism, through the various expressions of racism, through the relentless dividing of the country into an Us and a Them, through the reactionary response to George Floyd’s killing, through the famous walk across Lafayette Park to use a Bible as a prop for the cameras, in which Barr, I remind you, was a happy participant—through every bit of it.

But he objected when Trump tried to overthrow democracy. And good on him for doing so. His was a necessary voice at a crucial, brittle time.

But now we see the real nature of Barr’s Trump opposition. Many conservatives have beheld Trump, contemplated how the GOP could have come to this, and become pretty different people than they used to be—Stuart Stevens, Nicolle Wallace, Jennifer Rubin, many others. That the party and the movement of which they were once proud members was so easily captured by Trump made them see the hollow core of its belief system, and they took on a new belief system instead.

Barr has had no such revelation. Trump the election denier was a danger to the republic. Everything else, though, was jake.

So let’s not kid ourselves. There are a lot of Barr Republicans out there, and it’s clear how they’re going to vote. “A continuation of the Biden administration,” Barr said on Fox, “would be national suicide.” The tyranny of licentiousness. He laid it all out for us back in South Bend.

House Republicans are still going at it amid their continued failure to unite behind foreign aid packages. The newest target? Matt Gaetz.

Gaetz, who yesterday bickered with Wisconsin Representative Derrick Van Orden after the latter pushed to vacate Speaker Mike Johnson over his surprising Ukraine reversal, now faces more criticism from his own party, this time from New York Representative Mike Lawler.

Speaking with CNN’s Anderson Cooper Thursday evening, Lawler did not hold back when asked about GOP infighting over the aid bills.

“I look at this very simply,” Lawler said. “In October, the House was thrown into chaos by Matt Gaetz and seven useful idiots that teamed up with him within the Republican conference and 208 Democrats. And at this moment, when you see what happened in the aftermath of vacating the chair and Israel attacked in a terrorist attack a week later, to do that again would be detrimental to the country and global security.”

The United States has an obligation as leader of the free world to support our allies at this most critical juncture and to make it clear to our adversaries that we will not tolerate their actions and what they have done to undermine and destabilize the free world. pic.twitter.com/9JUmccTb8x

— Congressman Mike Lawler (@RepMikeLawler) April 19, 2024

Lawler’s “useful idiots” comment is not even the first inter-Republican dig at a colleague’s intellect this week; Gaetz responded to Van Orden’s “tubby” comment by calling him “not a particularly intelligent individual.” It’s also not the first time Gaetz has been singled out as the GOP’s chief agent of chaos. Last week, former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, whom Gaetz helped oust, speculated about Gaetz’s motivations for the October motion to vacate.

Johnson has looked overmatched as speaker, unable to control a caucus held hostage by hardliners like Gaetz, who has not yet called for Johnson’s ouster, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has. As a result, he hasn’t just failed to get aid packages through Congress; he’s allowing intraparty feuds between pro-aid members like Lawler and holdouts to fester.

In an unusual move, Judge Juan Merchan has refused to disclose the prosecution’s first three witnesses in advance to Donald Trump’s defense team in his hush money trial.

Assistant District Attorney Joshua Steinglass revealed the move on Thursday, in response to a request from Trump’s attorney Todd Blanche. Steinglass pointed out how much Trump posts about possible witnesses and even jurors, which has already affected jury selection.

“I can’t fault them for that,” said Merchan, agreeing with Steinglass. Merchan is no stranger to Trump’s posting history, as Trump has attacked his daughter in previous weeks, resulting in a gag order. Trump’s defenders have also made the ludicrous claim that he has a constitutional right to attack witnesses and jurors.

Merchan’s decision is an unusual one, according to legal analyst ​and former prosecutor Renato Mariotti, who noted that it could be more effective than a fine.

Trump is facing 34 felony charges after allegedly paying off adult film actress Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election to cover up an alleged affair. The witness list in the case is said to include several of his former employees from the Trump organization, as well as his longtime White House aide Hope Hicks.

The witnesses who might have the most damaging testimony include Daniels herself, as well as Trump’s former fixer and attorney Michael Cohen, who allegedly made the payments on Trump’s behest. Cohen and Daniels have both been on the receiving end of Trump’s angry Truth Social posts, especially since trial proceedings began.

Want to die young? Immerse yourself in conservative media, and vote Republican. Seriously. We should have known, but, still, the science is shocking: When conservatives run governments, suicides and homicides go up; when liberals run governments, suicides and homicides go down.

We got the first clue back in 2002, when, in a 100-year longitudinal study published that year in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, Australian researchers found that the suicide rate in that country and the U.K. increased throughout the twentieth century whenever a Conservative government was in power and declined measurably when the Labour Party was in charge.

The BBC picked it up, under a headline that was unambiguous: “More Suicides Under Conservative Rule.” The piece read: “When the Conservatives ruled both state and federal governments, men were 17 percent more likely to commit suicide than when Labour was in power. Women were 40 percent more likely to kill themselves.”

Referencing the researchers’ work, the BBC concluded: “Overall, they say, the figures suggest that 35,000 people would not have died had the Conservatives not been in power, equivalent to one suicide for every day of the 20th century or two for every day that the Conservatives ruled.”

More recently, here in the United States, a 2014 study by Bandy X. Lee, Bruce E. Wexler, and James Gilligan published in the journal Aggression and Violent Behavior found pretty much the same outcomes for periods of Republican versus Democratic rule in our country.

Arguing that “violence is not random but a problem in public health and preventive medicine,” the researchers were blunt: “Suicide, homicide, and combined suicide/homicide rates from 1900 to 2010 were found to be associated with an increase under Republican presidents and a decrease under Democratic ones with statistical significance.”

On Thursday, I interviewed Lee. She was emphatic about their findings:

“My colleagues and I did a study about 10 years ago looking at the two different parties in the United States—not in terms of ideology or policies but purely in terms of violent death rates—and, astonishingly, we found that over a 110-year period, almost without exception, whenever there was a Republican president who was elected, the murder and suicide rates would double, and whenever there was a Democratic president elected, the murder and suicide rates would halve.”

She added that people don’t generally notice this because there’s a roughly two-year time lag between elections and the time the increases or decreases in suicide and homicide measurably set in.

And, she said, it wasn’t just the economic policies of the parties that was driving the violence; it was primarily how they talked about America and thus caused us to think about ourselves and each other: “Whenever Democrats are elected, we tend to do well, to prosper not only in terms of unemployment but also in terms of rising GDP, but [we] also see a change in violent death rates, so that showed that there was not just an ideological difference or a policy driven difference, but a difference based on whatever the party brings, whether it’s rhetoric or public perception. The party alone made the difference in violence rates.”

We’re apparently seeing that dynamic right now. Murder, suicide, and violent crime rates increased during the Trump presidency and began a rapid downward slide by the second year of President Joe Biden’s tenure.

As the Brennan Center for Justice noted seven weeks ago:

“In 2020, President Trump’s last year in office, murder rates climbed by nearly 30 percent and assault rates by more than 10 percent.…

“But since 2021, violent crime has started to fall. According to the FBI, as of 2022 violent crime rates had fallen by 4 percent and murder rates by roughly 7 percent since 2020. Preliminary data suggests those declines accelerated in 2023.”

If, as Dr. Lee suggests, a major factor is the kind of rhetoric that Democrats use (“we, us”) versus Republicans (“they, them”) then Trump’s constant rants about Americans from “shithole countries” and “murderers and rapists” from south of the border apparently drove some Americans into a homicidal or suicidal frenzy.

Republicans, after all, lean heavily on hate and fear as primary motivators to get people to the polls: Gays are coming for your kids, immigrants want to rape or kill your wife, Black people are stealing your job, and Democrats love to kill babies the minute they’re born.

When people are marinated in such rhetoric, it’s almost impossible not to end up drenched in fear, anger, and hate—the necessary precursors to violence and self-harm.

This isn’t new. Back in 1996, Virginia Tech’s Dr. L. David Roper did a single-year analysis of suicide rates in states that voted for Democratic President Bill Clinton versus states that went for Republican Senator Bob Dole. He found: “Democratic votes for the states had a 57% negative correlation with increasing [suicide rates] and the Republican votes had a 45% positive correlation. States with high suicide death rate vote much more Republican than Democratic and vice versa.”

Another study, published by the peer-reviewed, open-access journal Plos One in 2022, looked at the relationship between political policy and mortality rates between 1999 and 2019. They found strikingly similar statistics:

We modeled the associations between working-age mortality rates and state policies during 1999 to 2019. We used annual data from the 1999–2019 National Vital Statistics System to calculate state-level age-adjusted mortality rates for deaths from all causes and from [cardiovascular disease], alcohol-induced causes, suicide, and drug poisoning among adults ages 25–64 years.…

Especially strong associations were observed between certain domains and specific causes of death: between the gun safety domain and suicide mortality among men, between the labor domain and alcohol-induced mortality, and between both the economic tax and tobacco tax domains and CVD mortality.

Simulations indicate that changing all policy domains in all states to a fully liberal orientation might have saved 171,030 lives in 2019, while changing them to a fully conservative orientation might have cost 217,635 lives.

NBC News, reporting on the study, quoted Syracuse University sociology professor Dr. Jennifer Karas Montez, one of the study’s authors, who summarized the consequences of states putting Republicans or Democrats in charge of policy:

“This analysis points to another major player, and that’s state policymakers. Policymakers may not feel that they’re responsible for our health or think that they’re responsible for our health, but the reality is every decision that they make affects our health and our risk of dying prematurely.”

Ya think?

Donald Trump is finding campaigning for the 2024 presidential election more difficult than his last time around, and his criminal trial in Manhattan is a big reason why.

Jury selection began this week, which means that Trump is required to be in the courtroom. He’d much rather be out on the campaign trail fundraising, and as The Daily Beast reported Friday, it’s starting to have financial consequences.

The former president, accused of a hush-money scheme involving porn star Stormy Daniels, has already missed a major House GOP fundraiser in Texas because of the trial schedule, and will likely be forced to cancel on similar events for the same reason. His legal fees have driven him to all kinds of shady grifting, and Joe Biden continues to outraise him.

Trump’s campaign has attempted to bridge the donation gap by scheduling fundraisers in nearby states. Trump will use his weekend outside the courtroom to attend a rally in Wilmington, North Carolina, and the campaign has scheduled another in New Jersey on May 11.

Media attention hasn’t been a problem for Trump, even as he spends most of the day in a courtroom. He’s been posting on Truth Social so frequently that the judge has asked him to put away his phone, and a campaign stunt at a bodega made headlines. But for any candidate, especially one as cash-strapped and with as much prior name recognition as Trump, funding is the lifeblood of a campaign. With the trial now scheduled to run longer than the originally planned two months, his money problems won’t be going away anytime soon.

Before he was an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spent nearly 30 years working as a senior attorney for an environmental activist group. Now those former colleagues are urging voters to steer clear of the presidential candidate. 

Nearly 50 of Kennedy’s colleagues from his time at the Natural Resources Defense Council  have come out against his candidacy, taking out full-page newspaper ads expected to run over the weekend in six swing states, The New York Times reported Friday.

“A vote for RFK Jr. is a vote to destroy that progress and put Trump back in the White House,” says the ad, which will run in Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

The ad comes as several other national environmental organizations wrote an open letter criticizing Kennedy for his political turn. 

“Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is not an environmentalist. He is a dangerous conspiracy theorist and science denier whose agenda would be a disaster for our communities and the planet,” the letter states.

Former colleagues and mentors were even more blunt when speaking to the Times. Gina McCarthy, who headed the Environmental Protection Agency under President Barack Obama, slammed Kennedy as an environmentalist “no more.”

“He’s against science, he’s against vaccines, he talks jibber jabber on climate. I don’t know what he stands for,” she said.

John Hamilton Adams, who co-founded the Natural Resources Defense Council and hired Kennedy to represent the group, said in a statement, “I mentored Bobby as a young environmentalist. I do not recognize the person he has become. His actions are a betrayal to our environment.”

In response, Kennedy told the Times that the environmental movement “is making a mistake to settle for crumbs that have been given to us by the Biden administration.”

In another blow, Joe Biden was endorsed by 15 members of the Kennedy family at a rally in Philadelphia Thursday, following a White House visit in March.

“We can say today, with no less urgency, that our rights and freedoms are once again in peril,” Kerry Kennedy, one of Robert Kennedy Jr.’s sisters, said. “That is why we all need to come together in a campaign that should unite not only Democrats but all Americans, including Republicans and independents, who believe in what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature.”

Kennedy’s candidacy seems to be serving Donald Trump and the Republican Party more than anything else. His donors skew heavily to the right, and pro-MAGA ideologues keep publicly praising him. While a fundraiser in Los Angeles for his campaign earlier this month was packed with environmentalists, fans of the Kennedy political dynasty, and wealthy New Age hippies, the pushback from his family and environmental colleagues could discourage those supporters.

Climate change is on track to cause $38 trillion worth of damages worldwide by 2049. That’s according to a study published this week in Nature by researchers at Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. That outcome is likely regardless of how quickly emissions are reduced before then, as the “net benefits of mitigation only emerge in the second half of the century.” Failing to take adequate action before midcentury could increase the costs of climate destruction threefold through the rest of the century, reducing global incomes by 60 percent below what might be expected in a world without rising temperatures.

So what are the institutions ostensibly created to protect the world’s economic health—the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which conclude their annual spring meetings in Washington, D.C., this week—doing to avert this catastrophic outcome?

The headline announcement from World Bank head Ajay Banga this week was that the bank has lowered its equity-to-loan ratio from 20 percent to 19 percent, freeing up another roughly $4 billion per year by allowing it to lend more freely. It pledged, as well, to boost its share of total annual climate finance by 10 percent, from 35 to 45 percent. Banga downplayed what the institution he runs, or the countries that comprise its membership, could do to bridge the $2.4 trillion climate finance gap on their own, emphasizing the need for corporations to step up. “The only way forward,” he told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria in an interview this week, “is to find a way to get the private sector to believe that this is part of their future.”

The private sector isn’t so sure. JP Morgan Chase—the bank that’s financed more fossil fuel development than any of its competitors since the Paris Agreement was signed—concluded that moving from hydrocarbons to renewables just isn’t a good enough deal. In a strategy report sent out to clients this week, the bank said that those pushing for more ambitious climate targets were in need of a “reality check”: Renewable energy, the report noted, “currently offers subpar returns.” The energy consultancy Wood McKenzie similarly found that higher interest rates are making wind, solar, and other low-carbon energies look “even harder and more costly” to those who might fund them.

In other words, despite the staggering figure published in Nature, today’s titans of industry are gambling that they’ll be sufficiently insulated from the economic chaos wrought by rising temperatures, and that they therefore don’t need to worry about how they’re contributing to that phenomenon or the consequences for their bottom lines. They’re companies, though: The only thing we can reasonably expect them to do is to try to make as much money as possible, as quickly as possible. The trouble is people who should know better assuming they’ll do anything else.

The common wisdom in institutions like the World Bank—shared by top U.S. climate officials—is that the key to “mobilizing private finance” is to make the elements of adaptation and (especially) mitigation efforts “bankable.” If projects cannot on their own generate enough returns to satisfy potential investors, then governments will need to step in and supplement, or “de-risk,” those returns. That approach can go a long way for projects on the road to profitability that need a little push—say, electric vehicle production in the United States. But building a comprehensive zero-carbon grid in some of the world’s poorest countries might never be profitable enough to coax Wall Street into coughing up cash. That’s especially true given that poorer and middle-income countries in the global south now face the worst debt crisis since record-keeping on those figures began. More than three billion people now live in countries that pay more for debt service than health care and education; subsidizing private-sector returns on wind and solar farms probably isn’t at the top of the list in those places, particularly if loan packages require such states to boost oil and gas development.

Banga and other top decision-makers who frequent spring meetings and U.N. climate talks are pretty Pollyannaish about prospects for low-carbon development despite plenty of evidence to the contrary. They insist on presenting climate action as a win-win that promises higher profits for all. It’s an attractive fantasy. But the rich countries that make up the majority shareholders of the World Bank, particularly the U.S., have routinely sought to avoid the historical and distributional questions at the heart of the climate challenge: Who bears the most responsibility and the most risk? In other words, if $38 trillion in climate damages are coming down the pike, who’ll foot the bill? In continuing to punt those question down the road, hoping for private-sector generosity while neglecting structural fixes, they seem to have come up with the same answer as the banks: someone else.

Donald Trump fired off an all-caps rant on Truth Social Friday about his presidential immunity Supreme Court case—despite sitting in the courtroom for his hush-money trial as the posts went up.

Trump complained bitterly about the importance of presidential immunity to protect sitting and former presidents, one of his go-to lines of argument as insists that he should be shielded from criminal prosecutions.

Trump simply can’t stop posting, despite having been warned by the judge presiding over the trial to stay off his phone, both inside and outside the courtroom. And it’s starting to hurt his case: On Thursday, Judge Juan Merchan refused to provide Trump’s lawyers with a list of the prosecution’s first three witnesses. 

This isn’t the first time Trump’s account has mysteriously posted while the former president himself was indisposed. During his defamation trial in January, his account made 30 posts disparaging E. Jean Carroll while he sat in court without access to his phone.  

If it’s not Trump behind these morning social media screeds, then who is it? It may be Dan Scavino, former White House deputy chief of staff and current adviser to the Trump campaign. Scavino ghostwrote many of Trump’s tweets during his time as president, and even though Trump no longer posts on X, formerly known as Twitter, the two maintain a close relationship that may include sharing access to Trump’s social media accounts. Trump recently joked that Scavino “could say, ‘I don’t like you voters, I don’t like you at all. I’m fed up with you. I can’t stand you.’ And that’s the end of my political career.” 

Regardless of who’s actually doing the posting, Trump’s Truth Social account has gotten him in trouble in a number of courtrooms as of late. He’s been accused by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg of violating a gag order against attacking witnesses in the hush-money trial. Like any seasoned poster, though, Trump (or whoever he shares his account with) keeps posting through it. Maybe he’s just trying to juice the stock. 

Trump Media & Technology Group CEO Devin Nunes got told off Friday for his company’s terrible stock performance in a blistering statement that puts Donald Trump’s angry Truth Social barbs to shame. 

Nunes, a former congressman who helms Trump’s social media venture, wrote a letter to the CEO of NASDAQ, Adena Friedman, asking her to prevent “naked short selling,” a technique used to try to benefit from an asset declining in value. Nunes asked Friedman to make sure trading firms disclose whether they are short-selling $DJT stock.

Truth Social’s stock value has plummeted since it debuted on the stock market a few weeks ago. As of Friday, it is worth about $35 a share, half of its initial price.

Citadel Securities, one of the firms named in the letter, had some choice words in response to Nunes’s complaint.   

“Devin Nunes is the proverbial loser who tries to blame ‘naked short selling’ for his falling stock price. Nunes is exactly the type of person Donald Trump would have fired on The Apprentice. If he worked for Citadel Securities, we would fire him, as ability and integrity are at the center of everything we do,” the firm said in a statement, the likes of which is not usually heard on Wall Street. 

Trump Media fired back with a statement of their own. 

“Citadel Securities, a corporate behemoth that has been fined and censured for an incredibly wide range of offenses including issues related to naked short selling, and is world famous for screwing over everyday retail investors at the behest of other corporations, is the last company on earth that should lecture anyone on ‘integrity,’” a spokeswoman told The Wall Street Journal.

Naked short selling, an illegal practice, differs from conventional short selling, which is when traders borrow stock shares before selling them, hoping to profit later by buying back the stock at a lower price. In naked short selling, a trader never follows through on the promise to borrow. This can severely hurt a company’s stock price, and there is no shortage of people who would want to see Trump’s stock fail. 

But the former president’s social media venture might not need the help. While its stock price was slightly up today, it has plummeted since its initial public offering a few weeks ago, hurt by the news that two of its investors were arrested for insider trading as well as poor revenue numbers reported from its SEC filings. Trump is legally barred from selling any shares in Trump Media for six months without board approval, and who knows what the company will be worth by the time he decides to sell.

Matt Gaetz isn’t having a great week. It just got worse.

The House Ethics Committee, which is investigating Gaetz for illegal drug use as a member of Congress, received a sworn statement alleging that Gaetz attended a 2017 party in Florida where cocaine and MDMA use occurred, ABC News reported Friday. The statement also alleges that the girl at the center of a Department of Justice investigation into Gaetz attended the party and was seen naked.

The Justice Department began investigating Gaetz in 2020 over allegations that the Florida representative had paid a convicted sex trafficker to have sex with the girl, who was 17 at the time. It concluded the probe in 2023 and declined to charge Gaetz.

Gaetz has denied using drugs as a member of Congress. But, according to Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin, he has bragged to co-workers about taking erectile dysfunction medicine–energy cocktails to “go all night.” He also allegedly, while standing on the House floor, showed colleagues nude photos and videos of women he had slept with.

The Florida Republican made headlines earlier this week after he and Wisconsin Representative Derrick Van Orden traded insults amid House GOP chaos over foreign aid packages. He also drew the ire of another colleague, New York Representative Mike Lawler, who on Thursday charged him and his “seven useful idiots” with sowing division in the Republican caucus by moving to oust former Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

McCarthy, for his part, has pointed to his refusal to shut down the ethics investigation into Gaetz as the motivation behind Gaetz’s October motion to vacate. Gaetz has admitted as much privately.

Whatever the ethics probe turns up, it’s clear that his colleagues in the House are sick of him.

New York state Attorney General Letitia James on Friday asked the judge presiding over Donald Trump’s civil fraud trial to reject the former president’s bond, which has been dogged by reports of the insolvency of the company backing it.

Earlier this month, James gave Trump and Knight Specialty Insurance, the insurance company that underwrote his civil fraud case bond, 10 days to guarantee that the $175 million surety could be justified. Those 10 days are now up.

Trump and Knight Specialty Insurance, which is not licensed as a surety in New York state, could not prove the surety “meets the requirements of trustworthiness and competence,” according to a memo from James’s office,  and thus failed to demonstrate that they would be good for the $175 million. 

It’s not exactly a surprise, given that the bond would account for more than a third of Knight Specialty’s assets and more than its surplus funds. The company may also have not actually legally agreed to pay the bond for Trump. Trump has struggled to come up with the money to pay the various legal fees against him on his own; he enlisted the insurer Chubb to loan him the $91 million needed for the E. Jean Carroll defamation judgment.

As a result, James wants to give Trump a week to post another bond, this one backed by someone more trustworthy than the “king of subprime car loans.” If he cannot, James may begin seizing his assets to cover the judgment against him. 

Judge Arthur Engoron is set to hear arguments on the surety’s validity on Monday. Trump, meanwhile, won’t be far: His criminal hush-money trial, which now has a full jury, is set to proceed in New York the same day.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s conspiracy theories, vitriolic language, and xenophobia have made her a darling of the right and a pariah on the left—and now, she’s gained admiration from Russian state television.

Greene’s attempts to block aid to Ukraine, her criticisms of NATO, and her beliefs that the United States should withdraw from the alliance have drawn plaudits from TV hosts in Russia, The Daily Beast reported Friday.

“She believes that Americans should help Putin win. Yes, you heard that right. To help him win in Ukraine,” says host Evgeny Popov in one clip.

Yet again, Marjorie Taylor Greene's comments are being used by Kremlin propagandists on Russian state TV. State TV host and State Duma member Evgeny Popov is interpreting her statements to mean that she wants Americans to help Putin win in Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/nYLntOYdtb

— Julia Davis (@JuliaDavisNews) July 2, 2022

It’s a new development for Greene, who previously was mocked in the country for confusing gazpacho with Gestapo and claiming that Jewish space lasers caused the California wildfires. Russian TV even said her words were proof of “mental debilitation” in Western politics. But Greene may be happy to know that her echoing of Russian propaganda in the House of Representatives has paid off, despite the fact that the issue of aid to Ukraine has divided the Republican Party. It looks like former Representative Ken Buck was right on the money when he called her “Moscow Marjorie.”

Some experts have even suggested that Russia is buying off American politicians just like they do in Europe. Greene wouldn’t be the only Republican to spew Kremlin talking points, but she seems to be the most popular so far. As the new darling of Russian state TV, she’s filling a void left by Speaker Mike Johnson, who in recent days has come out in support of aid in Ukraine after months of blocking it. Johnson was so beloved on Russian television for blocking aid to Ukraine that one TV host called him “Our Johnson.”

Green also appears to have usurped erstwhile Fox News host Tucker Carlson, whose February interview with Putin fell flat, ending Russian TV’s love affair with him.

Russia’s praise of Greene, and other conservative personalities before her, is just further proof that post–Donald Trump, a large part of the Republican Party has pledged its allegiance to Vladimir Putin.

A Washington, D.C., judge issued a dire warning Friday about the effects of the January 6 attack.

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan sentenced Scott Miller, a former Proud Boys leader  who fought with multiple police officers while trying to storm the Capitol building, to 66 months in prison. This is one of the longest sentences that Chutkan has given. She cited Miller’s actions at the Capitol, as well as evidence that he held Nazi beliefs and thought that Washington, D.C., residents should be executed. 

Previously, the longest sentences Chutkan had handed down related to the insurrection were 63 months long, given to two other violent offenders at the Capitol. Chutkan described the storming of the Capitol as “close to as serious a crisis as this nation has ever faced.” 

“It can happen again,” Chutkan, who is expected to preside over Donald Trump’s criminal trial for trying to overturn the 2020 election, said Friday. “Extremism is alive and well in this country. Threats of violence continue unabated.”

Those threats have become normalized in Republican discourse, with right-wing figures across the country invoking violence and urging their supporters to arm themselves. The man behind it all, Donald Trump, has yet to face any consequences thanks to the Supreme Court holding up his case over questions of presidential immunity. 

Since the January 6 attack, Trump has not toned down his own rhetoric, saying that 2024 could be the “last election we ever have”—and his far-right supporters could try to make that a reality. Not to mention that many Republicans still believe in conspiracies about the Capitol riot, a sign that the right isn’t concerned about inciting political violence, let alone the violence itself. 

In short, Miller’s sentence shows that the consequences for political violence in the U.S. right now only come after the fact, and do not deal with those who incite it beforehand. This does not bode well for the aftermath of the 2024 elections, no matter how they go.

Next week marks the last week of oral arguments in this Supreme Court term, leaving little more than a sprint through the remaining decisions left unsettled. As of this writing, some heady matters remain unresolved. The ruling on the abortion pill has yet to be decided; there is a consequential gun rights case on the docket; and as always, the fate of the administrative state hangs in the balance. For many ordinary people, it will be another white-knuckle stretch, as they hope for narrow rulings that might limit the potentially life-altering—and precedent-shattering—damage.

For Democrats, the 6–3 split on the high court is a generational problem. At least, that’s how it’s often framed. In a recent post, my colleague Matt Ford stated the matter pretty starkly: “By some estimates, liberals may not have a chance to appoint a majority of Supreme Court justices until the 2050s. If Barrett stays on the court until she is the same age as Ginsburg, she will serve until at least 2059.” To think about this dilemma in these terms is to resign oneself to the idea that the solution won’t be arriving for several decades. But a lot can happen between now and 2059, and perhaps even sooner, because of another immutable law that holds that “shit happens.”

With that in mind, has anyone noticed that something seems to be up with Justice Clarence Thomas lately?

This past Monday, it was reported that Thomas was absent from the court and not participating remotely in the oral arguments of the day, with Chief Justice John Roberts assuring everyone that Thomas would get the full range of “briefs and transcripts” after the fact, ensuring that he’d be able to participate in the cases. Thomas doesn’t miss many days of work, and unlike a previous instance two years ago in which he missed a number of sessions during a hospital stay, no reason for his most recent absence was offered.

Into this blank space in the story, allow me to remind everyone that Thomas, 75, is the oldest of the justices, the longest-serving member of the court, and while I don’t doubt that Harlan Crow’s Garden of Dictators may be the venue for eldritch incantations of all varieties, there is no reason to believe that Thomas is immortal. In other words, he is still subject to the vagaries of the Universal Law of Shit Happening. (Fun fact: Samuel Alito is only a year younger than Thomas.)

It’s really no one’s fault that the comings and goings of sitting Supreme Court justices can be such a macabre business. Given the opportunity to amend the Founders’ work, I imagine that ending the whole “lifetime appointments for wizened, unaccountable elders in robes with the final say over American life” arrangement would be near the top of the list of improvements. But Democrats are probably too physiologically incapable of stating the potential stakes of the upcoming election to their voters in terms as stark as “Clarence Thomas might not be long for the bench; send Biden back to stem the tide of far-right jurisprudence.”

It’s not as if taking the high road hasn’t led anywhere: As The New Republic contributor Simon Lazarus has pointed out several times, a combination of consistent pressure and high-minded critique from liberals has, over the course of the past few terms, seemed to play a role in the justices taking a more tempered approach to their rulings. This strategy may yet bear more fruit this term, and forestall the kinds of extreme rulings that the conservative bloc’s two elder statesmen might hope to wrangle.

Still it’s weird to watch how some on the left are raising the salience of the justices’ mortality: by urging Democrats to bring Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s career to a premature end, the better to install a younger jurist now while Biden is still president. In that aforementioned article, Ford took a dim view of this way of thinking and suggested instead that Democrats might be better off simply winning elections. Regardless, this is a debate worth moving on from. It’s silly for Democrats to be divided in an election year over anything, let alone Sotomayor’s career, and anyway, no one’s run this plan to pull a late-in-the-day switcheroo past Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, whose permission is still required for such stunts.

Nevertheless, there is definitely a ruthlessness gap between the parties in this regard. Republicans have had enormous success in dispensing with the polite traditions that govern the high court’s promotions and relegations. That the GOP went to elaborate lengths to prevent Obama from appointing Merrick Garland to the bench was, during that ongoing folderol, evidence of how far they were willing to go to consolidate power. But it is also a reminder that there was once a time when the makeup of the Supreme Court wasn’t in their favor and they were staring down the tunnel of the same kind of generational problem that Democrats now face.

But the right has benefited from the happenstances of the Shit Happens Law, as well. The misfortuned timing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death created the opportunity for the 6–3 split and provided the catalyst for the Democrats’ recent agita over Sotomayor. Still, the lessons of the recent past—combined with all this recent talk of court-vacancy gamesmanship—illuminates a simple idea that Democrats should perhaps find the courage to speak aloud, regardless of the grisly implications: Elections matter, because you never know when the chance to appoint a new justice might arise. There is a clear mission at hand: Don’t let any of the court’s elder conservatives have the opportunity to make their escape through the safe harbor of a Trump presidency.

This week, arguments begin in Donald Trump’s hush money trial in Manhattan, and he’s raging over the unfairness of it all. Amazingly, some are rushing to insist the trial won’t pose a serious problem for his presidential chances. But progressive political strategist Anat Shenker-Osorio disagrees: She writes in a new piece for Slate that due to some hidden public opinion dynamics, the case is already damaging him. So we chatted with Shenker-Osorio about why the trial and Trump’s impulsive conduct at it is so alienating to voters outside the MAGA bubble—and why this dynamic will only get worse.

Earlier this month, an Indiana appeals court delivered a great victory to two causes that often find themselves in opposition: reproductive freedom and religious freedom. A group of women successfully argued that the state of Indiana’s ban on abortion, enacted in the immediate wake of Dobbs, violated their rights to religious freedom. The state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or RFRA—signed into law, not incidentally, in 2015, following Obergefell and the national legalization of same-sex marriage—guarantees that sincere religious individuals can be exempt from government actions that “substantially burden” their exercise of religion.

In this case, unlike many other religious freedom controversies, the claimants’ beliefs and practices involve bodily autonomy, the beginning of life at birth, and the precedence of a pregnant patient’s physical and emotional health over that of the potential life. This issue is far from settled, though. The decision will likely be appealed, and this case is one of many to come. Now, and in the coming years, the religious right to abortion will be a pivotal political issue. As more states criminalize reproductive health care, and abortion specifically, religious freedom has become a potentially powerful tool, a “sleeper strategy,” in the fight for reproductive freedom.

For the past decade, many of the most prominent and successful religious freedom claimants have been conservative Christians. Judges and lawyers, even the liberals among them, have had no trouble understanding these claimants as obviously sincere and paradigmatically religious. Powerful right-wing organizations such as Alliance Defending Freedom and First Liberty Institute have leveraged religious freedom into expansive protections for their claimants, carving out space for them to flout antidiscrimination law, reject vaccines, and avoid “complicity” in practices with which they disagree. From liberal and left perspectives, these cases already have caused great societal harm, with more of the same likely on the way. To allow a sincere believer to break laws with such ease could be, as the Supreme Court feared in 1879, to make “the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and, in effect, to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself.”

Whether religious freedom should function this way is one question. But there are other pertinent questions about how to respond to the current moment. Since religious freedom is often a right-wing tool for oppression and discrimination, should liberals and leftists be fighting to beat it back, or does it make more sense to embrace this doctrine and use it to further their own ends? Is it possible to do both?

Progressive cases for the free exercise of religion could be understood as a reversal to the decade-long rightward lurch of religious freedom. Or they could extend and abet it, exceptions that help legitimate the rule. On the one hand, showing that abortion is a matter of religious conscience demonstrates that religious belief is not just for the right. If progressives leave religious freedom to conservatives, they end up tacitly agreeing that only conservative Christians are truly and sincerely religious and that other people are not. Using free exercise law to (attempt to) protect the right to abortion access, to operate safe injection sites, or to give aid to migrants at the border is to argue credibly that these believers are, in fact, both sincere and religious. There is no reason that sincere believers have to be conservatives. And ultimately, contesting their special access to free exercise protections could undermine the whole system.

On the other hand, selective progressive inclusion will not stem the tide of right-wing free exercise lawsuits. Indeed, it might even give them cover, offering evidence that religious freedom is not just a right-wing strategy. Conservatives maintain a well-organized legal network, not to mention control of the courts. They are unlikely to start losing just because others also win sometimes.

The Indiana decision is notable for its unambiguous acknowledgment of the religiosity and sincerity of the plaintiffs’ beliefs. While conservative Christian beliefs have generally been assumed to be sincere and religious, especially when they are focused on sex and gender issues, progressives have received more scrutiny. This discrepancy exposes the normative assumptions embedded in public understandings of religion, even among judges and lawyers. The court’s rejection of these assumptions could mark an important shift.

The state’s primary argument was that the plaintiffs’ objections to the abortion ban were insincere. Becket—a law firm whose motto is “Religious Liberty for All,” and which represents some claimants who are neither conservative nor Christian—filed an amicus brief on the side of the state, arguing that there is “powerful evidence that [the] Plaintiff’s beliefs are not sincere.” They alleged that the plaintiffs “think RFRA will serve as a ‘cloak’ for their non-religious objections” to the abortion ban.

These insinuations express what legal scholar Elizabeth Sepper has called “the worry about lying women.” Sepper shows how arguments that such believers are really political, not religious, “alternate between painting women as unscrupulous political actors and describing them as pawns of the abortion rights movement.” As I have argued elsewhere, the sincere religious believer is often imagined against her opposites, the credulous fool and duplicitous knave. The former does not understand her own beliefs well enough to hold them sincerely; the latter does not believe what she says, and she dupes others along the way. When Becket and others accuse these women of lying, they imply that they knavishly mask (or “cloak”) their true intentions, while also being duped by political actors above them who are really pulling the strings. Either way, they are not eligible to play the role of the sincere believer.

A common objection to progressive claims is that the beliefs are not just insincere but fundamentally not religious. Speaking to Politico last year about the abortion challenges, Becket attorney Lori Windham said, “I think these are much more like political stunts than they are viable court cases.… You can have a sincere political belief or policy preference, and it can be passionate and deeply held, but that doesn’t make it a religious practice.”

The precedents for many contemporary free exercise issues can be traced to conscientious objection cases. In the 1960s and early 1970s, courts counted huge numbers of individual objectors as religious, as long as they could, in keeping with the draft act, explain how their beliefs were religious and not “political, sociological, or philosophical views or a merely personal moral code.” This framework implied that religious beliefs had to be disconnected somehow from real-world concerns, abstract concepts not related, or at least not responding, to particular political situations. Politically involved objectors, especially those who were Black and/or had connections to civil rights organizations, were disproportionately interpreted as political actors and, therefore, not religious.

A rigid religious/political binary is untenable. The state of Indiana seemed to suggest that any action or belief that might also be secular or political cannot then be religious. But this makes no sense: As the court recognized, many practices stem from religious beliefs but could also stem from nonreligious ones. You could, for example, reject a vaccine because you believe it was created with tissue from aborted fetuses, or it contains microchips used to control you, or the Bible tells you to keep your body pure. Which of these reasons is religious, and which is political? Whatever the case, it is clear that someone could do a particular activity—feeding the poor, to take a different example—for a religious reason or a political one, or some combination of the two. Trying to isolate something called “religion” from other aspects of life is an incoherent project from the start. And yet, religious freedom rests on such an impossibility.

The best arguments liberals and leftists can make, in my view, do not hinge on demonstrating that conservatives are actually the political-not-religious ones. That is a trap. Rather, they ought to argue that if those conservatives are religious, then these liberals are as well. They should point out inconsistencies. Here is one example. Conservative legal scholars such as Josh Blackman have argued (or offered “tentative thoughts”) that liberal Jews are insufficiently religious, as their doctrines lack seriousness because they are not “binding” or required by religious authorities. This is basically what Becket argued in its brief, saying that the Jewish plaintiffs had not specified just how much “‘physical, mental, or emotional’ impairment” they would suffer from an unwanted pregnancy, and “testified that [abortion] is ‘ultimately an individual decision.’”

An individual decision is somehow less religious or less sincere? The premise of that argument, as legal scholars Micah Schwartzman and Dahlia Lithwick explained in response to Blackman’s piece, is “absolutely wrong.” A tentpole concept of contemporary free exercise law is that sincere individuals, even those with idiosyncratic beliefs, are guaranteed the right to free exercise. Consider Coach Joe Kennedy, the football coach whose free exercise of religion (praying on the field while serving as a public school employee) was important enough to the Supreme Court that it decided to protect it, despite establishment clause concerns. Kennedy’s own beliefs were unsystematic, far from doctrinaire, and, one could argue, theologically unserious. But that does not matter. My point is not that Kennedy is not a sincere religious believer. It is that it is difficult to argue in good faith that he is but the Indiana plaintiffs are not.

The state of Indiana, along with Becket and other allies, does not make a serious constitutional argument. But it does take a view of religion that rings true to plenty of Americans. Some of those Americans might be judges. One reason that people might not understand liberal Jews, or progressives in general, to be really religious is that they do not know very much about progressive religions. For this reason, a group of historians filed an amicus brief explaining the history of religious belief and activity in support of abortion rights. They attempt to correct the record, showing that progressive religions do in fact exist, have a long history, and are not convenient “cloaks” for political activity. If judges do not know that, then they lack important historical information and context.

The history of American religion is complex and diverse, and few people know much about it. As Sepper notes, “We rarely hear from religious people who choose abortion. Less often still do we encounter religion as a motivating factor in their decisions.” These are stories that need to be told and heard. Learning these histories or understanding Jewish theology will not change everyone’s mind. People can still make their arguments, defining religion or politics as they will, but ignorance should not be an excuse. And over time, a better understanding of American religion in all its diversity could lead to more respect, rights, and protections for religious minorities. However, bigots are not always ignorant. Often, they know exactly what they are doing and who their targets are.

Given the current composition of the courts and recent politics of religious freedom, is free exercise litigation a viable path toward justice and progress? Won’t it just extend the reach of bad laws that are so often used for ill? And what about nonreligious people? Our dignity, self-determination, bodily autonomy, and so much else should not depend on whether we can convincingly play the role of the sincere religious believer. Carving out exceptions to a rule generally does not help dismantle the rule. But what if it is true that, as legal scholar Xiao Wang has put it, “religious free exercise today is our most powerful and effective means of civil disobedience”? First, it shouldn’t be. Second, if it is, then it should be used, as much as possible, toward just ends. In a better world, we wouldn’t need religious freedom. In this one, maybe we do.

The most nauseating, addictive thing about writing is the uncertainty—and I don’t mean the is-anyone-reading? or will-I-make-rent? kind. The uncertainty I’m talking about dogs the very act. This business of writing an essay, for instance: Which of ten thousand possible openings to choose—and how to ignore the sweaty sense that the unseen, unconceptualized ten thousand and first is the real keeper? Which threads to tug at, without knowing where they lead, and which to leave alone? Which ideas to pick up along the way, to fondle and polish and present to an unknown reader? How to know what sentence best comes next, or even what word? A shrewd observer will note that I am complaining about the very essence of writing itself, but that has been the long-held privilege of writers—and they enjoyed it in the secure comfort of their uniqueness. Who else was going to do the writing, if not the writers who grouse about writing?

Now along come these language engines, with suspiciously casual or mythopoeic names like ChatGPT or Bard, that suffer not an iota of writerly uncertainty. In what can only be called acts of emesis, they can pour out user manuals, short stories, college essays, sonnets, screenplays, propaganda, or op-eds within seconds of being requested for them. Already, as Naomi S. Baron points out in her book Who Wrote This?, readers aren’t always able to tell if a slab of text came out of a human torturing herself over syntax or a machine’s frictionless innards. (William Blake, it turns out, sounds human, but Gertrude Stein does not.) This unsettles Baron, a linguist who has been writing about the fate of reading for decades now. And it appears to be no lasting consolation that, in some tests, people still correctly recognize an author as artificial. Inexorably, version after version, the AIs will improve. At some point, we must presume, they will so thoroughly master Blakean scansion and a chorus of other voices that their output—the mechanistic term is only appropriate—will feel indistinguishable from ours.

Naturally, this perplexes us. If a computer can write like a person, what does that say about the nature of our own creativity? What, if anything, sets us apart? And if AI does indeed supplant human writing, what will humans—both readers and writers—lose? The stakes feel tremendous, dwarfing any previous wave of automation. Written expression changed us as a civilization; we recognize that so well that we use the invention of writing to demarcate the past into prehistory and history. The erosion of writing promises to be equally momentous.

In an abysmally simplified way, leaving out all mentions of vector spaces and transformer architecture, here’s how a modern large language model, or LLM, works. Since the LLM hasn’t been out on the streets to see cars halting at traffic signals, it cannot latch on to any experiential truth in the sentence, “The BMW stopped at the traffic light.” But it has been fed reams and reams of written material—300 billion words, in the case of ChatGPT 3.5—and trained to notice patterns. It has also been programmed to play a silent mathematical game, trying to predict the next word in a sentence of a source text, and either correcting or reinforcing its guesses as it progresses through the text. If the LLM plays the game long enough, over 300 billion or so words, it simulates something like understanding for itself: enough to determine that a BMW is a kind of car, that “traffic light” is a synonym for “traffic signal,” and that the sentence is more correct, as far the real world goes, than “The BMW danced at the traffic light.” Using the same prediction algorithms, the LLM spits out plausible sentences of its own—the words or phrases or ideas chosen based on how frequently they occur near one another in its corpus. Everything is pattern-matching. Everything—even poetry—is mathematics.

We still don’t know precisely how humans grasp language, although it isn’t the LLM way; no infant that I know of consumed 300 billion words before saying “Mama.” But in his slim new book, Literary Theory for Robots, Dennis Yi Tenen, an associate professor of English at Columbia University, proposes that the way we use language to create works bears some similarities to the machines. “Thinking and writing happen through time, in dialogue with a crowd,” Tenen maintains. “Paradoxically, we create new art by imitating and riffing off each other.” Subconsciously or otherwise, a writer milks inspiration out of libraries and conversations, and draws assistance from dictionaries, thesauruses, and style guides. “We think with our bodies, with tools, with texts, within environments, and with other people.” A writer relies in less calculating fashion on the books she has ingested than an AI does, but they’ve made her into a writer all the same. It was always an error, Tenen writes, “to imagine intelligence in a vat of private exceptional achievement”—to buy into the fable of the writer in her lonely garret, manufacturing words and ideas de novo.

In this notion of distributed intelligence, there is something both democratizing and destabilizing—a sneaky but egalitarian mode of murdering the author. Tenen insists, though, that we shouldn’t agonize too much over the source of intelligence. Who cares if our thinking is closer to the synthesis of LLMs, rather than the divinely ordained originality held dear by the Romantics, as long as we have an effect upon the world? Certainly not Aristotle. “In the Aristotelian model,” Tenen writes, “intelligence is the GOAL of thought.” (The caps lock letters are Tenen’s, not mine or Aristotle’s.) It’s Plato who held intelligence to lie within the department of the interior—a private, nebulous thing that occasionally led to enlightenment. Pick your philosopher.

Even at the summit of literary creation, fiction writers yielded to the seeming inevitability of recombination. Tenen’s potted history of authorial hacks, the richest section of his book, begins with Georges Polti, an enterprising Frenchman who in 1895 published a book called The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations, to help dramatists write new plays. Once you’d eliminated supplication, deliverance, vengeance, pursuit, disaster, revolt, and the other 30 symptoms of the human condition, he implied, what else was left? (Polti wasn’t afraid to get specific: Among the subtypes of the “pursuit” situation were “pursuit for a fault of love” and “a pseudo-madman struggling against an Iago-like alienist.”) “They will accuse me of killing imagination,” Polti wrote, but in fact, his primer aspired to free playwrights from the pursuit of mere novelty, so they could devote themselves to truth and beauty. Mark Twain invented a self-gumming scrapbook for authors, into which they might paste notes, newspaper snippets, and images, for subsequent inspiration. (His secretary once filled six scrapbooks with clips about the Tichborne trial in London, involving a no-name butcher who claimed the title to an English peerage. Twain concluded that the tale was too wild to be of use to a “fiction artist”—but it did form the basis of Zadie Smith’s latest novel, The Fraud.) Companies sold devices like the Chautauqua Literary File and the Phillips Automatic Plot File Collector, into which writers stuffed their reference materials, so that they could later pluck out a setting, a character, or the seed of a plot. It was ever thus, Tenen implies—the magpie approach to thinking, the collage as the modus operandi of writing. Why are we unnerved by LLMs following those same principles?

When I reached this juncture in Literary Theory for Robots, I let out a silent, screaming plea for our species. The art of the novel doesn’t lie in the combine-harvesting of details and plotlines. It lies in how a writer selectively filters some of them through her own consciousness—her deliberations, the sum of her life, the din of her thoughts—to devise something altogether different and more profound. This, and only this, makes any piece of writing meaningful to those who read it. The AIs of the future may meet other yardsticks for creativity. They may, say, grow aware of themselves as creators, satisfying the neurosurgeon Geoffrey Jefferson’s dictum that a machine will equal the brain when it not only writes a sonnet but also knows that it has written it. Their cogitations may seem as bleary and inscrutable as those of humans. (Already we are hard-pressed to say how precisely some hallucinations emerge from AIs.) But they will never have experiences the way we have experiences, I quarreled with myself. They can’t lose a friend to suicide, or feel the pain of a twisted ankle, or delight at their first glimpse of the rolling Caucasus, or grow frustrated in a job, or become curious about Dutch art. (And that was just my 2023.) Any texts they furnish will be intrinsically hollow; they will fail to hold us, like planets without gravity. Or so I contended.

But not very far into Baron’s Who Wrote This?, I realized I was being defensive—that I was arguing for a special exemption for writing and language because I consider them such immutable aspects of the mind, and of being human. Baron, with the dry eyes of an actuary, sets about deromanticizing writing. She presents classifications of creativity—ranging from the “mini c” creativity of personal satisfaction, where you tweak the recipe of a peach cobbler at Thanksgiving, through the “little c” rung of winning a county fair ribbon for said recipe, up to the cobbler-less “Pro C” of professional creations like the Harry Potter series and the “Big C” league of Shakespeare and Steve Jobs.

Baron invokes these distinctions in part to understand human creativity. But she is particularly interested in whether AI imperils the Big C. She points out that the high art of literary writing is merely a sliver of all writing turned out by humanity. Much of the rest is “everyday writing by everyday people,” and it includes grocery lists, birdwatching journals, emails, social media status updates, and office memos. Another subset—Baron loves her taxonomies—consists of writing for professional or financial gain. Here rest advertising copy, chemistry primers, white papers, earnings reports, and business case studies—texts to which we rarely look for deep meaning, “Big C” creativity, or personal connection. Not only will AIs be capable of producing these artifacts of writing, but a reader will feel no acute sense of loss in discovering where they came from. Tenen would note that, even today, such texts already repurpose previous writing to a large extent. To resent AIs for similarly relying on the work of others would be as fatuous as dismissing a novelist who employs a spellchecker to correct his usage of “who” and “whom.”

Both Tenen and Baron are cautious boosters of AI, saluting its potential to relieve us of many “lesser” forms of writing. But they also predict that more literary writing—Big C writing—will resist the encroachments of the machines. “It’s simply that, however effective or powerful, a muscular artifice for the sake of artifice isn’t that intelligent or interesting to me,” Tenen says. For truly human writing, an AI needs to gain a wider sense of the world, he adds. “But it cannot, if words are all it has to go by.” A machine cannot (as yet) watch a film to review it, and it cannot (also as yet; one must cover one’s rear) interview legislators to write a political feature. Anything that it produces in these genres must be confected out of reviews and interviews that have already been written. That lack of originality, Tenen would contend, will forever keep true creativity beyond the reach of AI.

Still, I remained unsure. One might argue that it is always the audience that creates meaning out of a text—that a book is merely a jumble of words until it provokes responses in a reader, that the act of reading summons the book into being. In doing so, we wouldn’t just be going back half a century, to reader-response theory and Roland Barthes’s essay “The Death of the Author.” More than a millennium ago, the Indian philosopher Bhatta Nayaka, in a literary treatise called Mirror of the Heart, reasoned that rasa—the Sanskrit notion of aesthetic flavor—resides not in the characters of a play but in the reader or spectator. “Rasa thus became entirely a matter of response,” the Sanskrit scholar Sheldon Pollock wrote in A Rasa Reader, “and the only remaining question was what precisely that response consists of.”

Bhatta Nayaka today, digesting the relationship between our AIs and us, would ask us an uncomfortable question. If, in a blind taste test, some readers are moved by a poem or a short story by ChatGPT, will we continue to prize their experience, and hold their response to be more important than anything else? It’s bound to happen, at some point—and the computers don’t even need to be sentient to get there. Alan Turing knew it. In his 1950 paper, when he proposed an inquiry into the question “Can machines think?” Turing swerved quickly into the question of whether machines could play the imitation game—whether they could merely fool human beings into concluding that they were thinking. The outcome, for all practical purposes, is the same—and the difference between moving us and fooling us isn’t as great as we’d like to believe. 

So much for readers. But what of writers? The twentieth century is cluttered with the vacated chairs and discarded uniforms of workers whose jobs have been automated. Human hands once stuffed sausages, riveted cars together, and transferred calls in telephone exchanges. Once again, it is tempting to claim an exemption for writing. “Because mind and language are special to us, we like to pretend they are exempt from labor history,” Tenen notes. But “intellect requires artifice, and therefore labor.” In the commercial sphere, a lot of writing is not so far removed from sausage-making—and the machines have already begun to encroach. Realtors use ChatGPT to pump out listings of houses. The Associated Press turns to AI models to generate reports on corporate earnings. Context, a tool owned by LexisNexis, reads judicial decisions and then offers lawyers their “most persuasive argument, using the exact language and opinions your judge cites most frequently.” When you consider that some judgments are now drafted by AI as well, the legal profession seems to be on the cusp of machines debating each other to decide the fate of human beings.

It won’t do to be snobbish and describe these kinds of writing work as thankless, because they have occupied people who have been thankful for the income. Roughly 13 percent of American jobs are writing-intensive, and they earn more than $675 billion a year. Many of these jobs are likely to evaporate, but when this is aired as a concern, the champions of automation have a standard lexicon of liberation. “Freed from the bondage of erudition, today’s scribes and scholars can challenge themselves with more creative tasks,” Tenen writes. If he’d been speaking that sentence, perhaps he’d have ended it with an upward, hopeful lilt? Because little about the modern economy suggests that it wishes to support even the creative writers who already live within it, let alone the thousands on the verge of being emancipated by AI.

However, there is supposedly freedom on offer for novelists and poets as well. In one of Baron’s scenarios, AI tools provide the divine spark: “Think of jumpstarting a car battery.” But cars start the same way every time, and they really just need to reach their destinations. For writers, trite as it sounds, it’s about the origin and the journey. In the cautionary parable of Jennifer Lepp, as narrated by Baron, the writer is cold-shouldered out of her own writing. Lepp, a one-woman cottage industry turning out a new paranormal cozy mystery every nine weeks, recruited an AI model called Sudowrite as an assistant. At first, Sudowrite helped her with brief descriptions, but gradually, as she let it do more and more, “she no longer felt immersed in her characters and plots. She no longer dreamt about them,” Baron writes. Lepp told The Verge: “It didn’t feel like mine anymore. It was very uncomfortable to look back over what I wrote and not really feel connected to the words or the ideas.”

Here, at last, is the grisly crux: that AI threatens to ruin for us—for many more of us than we might suppose—not the benefits of reading but those of writing. We don’t all paint or make music, but we all formulate language in some way, and plenty of it is through writing. Even the most basic scraps of writing we do—lessons in cursive, text messages, marginal jottings, postcards, all the paltry offcuts of our minds—improve us. Learning the correct spellings of words, according to many research studies, makes us better readers. Writing by hand impresses new information into the brain and sets off more ideas (again: several studies). And sustained writing of any kind—with chalk on a rock face, or a foot-long novelty pencil, or indeed a laptop—abets contemplation. An entire half-page of Baron’s book is filled with variations of this single sentiment, ranging from Horace Walpole’s “I never understand anything until I have written about it” to Joan Didion’s “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” Sometimes even that is prologue. We also write to reach out, to convey the squalls and scuffles in our souls, so that others may see us better and see themselves through us. The difficulty of writing—the cursed, nerve-shredding, fingernail-yanking uncertainty of it—is what forces the discovery of anything that is meaningful to writers or to their readers. To have AI strip all that away would be to render us wordless, thoughtless, self-less. Give me the shredded nerves and yanked fingernails any day.  

Nearly two years after the leak of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion overturning Roe v Wade, abortion refuses to step out of the spotlight on center stage in American politics. 

Virtually every week there is a new outrage: Arizona, one of six states that will likely decide the 2024 election, is reeling from a state Supreme Court decision last week bringing back an 1864 ban on virtually all abortions. Florida’s draconian six-week abortion ban (a gift to the Sunshine State from Governor Ron DeSantis) recently cleared its last legal hurdle before it takes effect on May 1. And a bizarre decision by Alabama’s highest court in late February that frozen embryos should be considered children jeopardized IVF fertility treatments in the state and prompted a national outcry. 

Donald Trump’s desperate efforts to defuse the issue keep colliding with reality. The oft-indicted former president tried to tiptoe away from religious conservatives earlier this month by insisting that abortion laws should be left to the states. Rather than getting to bask in the cynical cleverness of his new position, he immediately had to deal with the reality that all-power-to-the-states could produce the anti-abortion rigidity of Arizona’s 1864 law. Also, Trump’s ego always has to be fed: He could not resist continuing to brag about appointing the three justices who overturned Roe.

Even a huckster with Trump’s disdain for the truth cannot spin away the fact that Republicans are on the unpopular side of the abortion debate. Fifty-nine percent of voters in a Fox News poll in late March said that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. And a Wall Street Journal poll in mid-March found that a stunning 39 percent of suburban women in swing states consider abortion to be their most important voting issue in 2024.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this for Republicans. In the spring and early summer of 2022, as the Alito draft became the official opinion of the Supreme Court in the Dobbs case, the prevailing GOP view of the political aftereffects of the decision was, in effect, “It will all blow over.” No Republican predicted that abortion would still be a powerful weapon for the Democrats in 2024 and beyond.

Writing in Politico, Rich Lowry, the editor of the conservative National Review, declared that the Dobbs decision was “a fizzle” as “a quick-acting elixir for Democratic political woes.” His logic in the July 2022 piece was that the Alito leak gave everyone a chance to brace for a reversal of Roe, “limiting the shock value and making the decision a dominant story for days rather than weeks.”

In an interview with NPR, Mitch McConnell—who, via efforts to block Merrick Garland and rush through Amy Coney Barrett, played arguably as big a role in Roe’s reversal as Trump did—seemed unfazed by the political implications of his anti-abortion handiwork. “I think it will be certainly heavily debated in state legislative and governor’s races because the court will have, in effect, returned this issue to the political process,” McConnell said after the Alito draft leaked. “My guess is in terms of the impact on federal races, I think it’s probably going to be a wash.”

Since everything for McConnell is political, it is tempting to wonder if he would have pursued the abortion issue with break-the-rules zealotry if he knew that it would turn out to be anything but a wash for the Republicans. There are hints from McConnell’s early days as, yes, a liberal Republican that he once supported Roe. If there was no conviction behind McConnell’s rush to approve anti-abortion judges, it suggests that this was a major miscalculation by a man who was always prized for his political sagacity. 

GOP Senate flamethrower Josh Hawley, whose raised fist of support shortly before the January 6 insurrection lingers in memory, offered a novel why-Republicans-will-gain theory in an interview with the Kansas City Star after the Dobbs decision. According to Hawley, millions of Americans will relocate based on the availability of abortions in their states. “The effect is going to be that more and more red states are going to become more red,” the Missouri senator said, “purple states are going to become red and the blue states are going to get a lot bluer. And I would look for Republicans as a result of this to extend their strength in the Electoral College.”

Other right-wing senators, who had been leading the anti-abortion bandwagon for years, adopted the implausible argument that the uproar over the leaked Alito memo was all sound and fury, signifying nothing. Texas Senator Ted Cruz argued in a TV interview, “Angry leftists, many of whom are pretty ignorant and don’t even know what overturning Roe means, I think a month afterwards are gonna be surprised—‘Wait, nothing about my life changed.’” (Something tells me that voters in Arizona and Florida might not agree.) 

Concerned about the political blowback from the decision, Senate Republicans circulated a memo (scooped by Axios) that was little more than a big smiley button on how to handle abortion. Written immediately after the Alito leak, the memo recommends, “Be the compassionate, consensus-builder on abortion policy.… While people have many different views on abortion policy, Americans are compassionate people who want to welcome every new baby into the world.” An ad script for a mythical female Republican suggests this deliberately bland wording: “Here’s my view—I am pro-life, but in reality, forget about the political labels, all of us are in favor of life.” 

When anyone in politics says, “Forget about the political labels,” realize that they are trying to squirm out of the losing side of an argument. 

Conservative Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan, who is sincerely anti-abortion, offered some wise recommendations for Republican men in May 2022: “Don’t fail to embrace compromise because you can make money on keeping the abortion issue alive.… Use the moment to come forward as human beings who care about women and want to give families the help they need. Align with national legislation that helps single mothers to survive.”

You may have noticed that none of this has happened over the last two years. Instead, the abortion issue has been defined for the nation by reactionary state judges and insensitive, good-old-boy GOP state legislators. The result is that the Dobbs decision was not a single event, but a torrent of regressive policies. It is telling that, despite Trump’s urging, the GOP-controlled Arizona state House failed again Tuesday to soften the state’s abortion laws. 

Many Republicans in Washington embraced the anti-abortion movement out of political convenience. With the issue gathering momentum nearly two years after Dobbs, this Faustian bargain doesn’t seem very convenient after all.

Donald Trump extended a dangerous message to his Truth Social followers on Monday: descend upon U.S. courthouses.

The post, which also lambasted American university students for a wave of pro-Palestinian protests last week, came mere hours before the GOP presidential nominee was scheduled to return to his New York hush money on trial in New York, where opening statements are expected to begin.

“Why are Palestinian protesters, and even rioters, allowed to roam the Cities, scream, shout, sit, block traffic, enter buildings, not get permits, and basically do whatever they want including threatening Supreme Court Justices right in front of their homes, and yet people who truly LOVE our Country, and want to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, are not allowed to ‘Peacefully Protest,’ and are rudely and systematically shut down and ushered off to far away ‘holding areas,’ essentially denying them their Constitutional Rights,” Trump questioned, referring to dozens of protests during which hundreds of students were arrested and not allowed to practice their First Amendment Rights.

“America Loving Protesters should be allowed to protest at the front steps of Courthouses, all over the Country, just like it is allowed for those who are destroying our Country on the Radical Left, a two tiered system of justice,” Trump continued. “Free Speech and Assembly has been ‘CHILLED’ for USA SUPPORTERS. GO OUT AND PEACEFULLY PROTEST. RALLY BEHIND MAGA. SAVE OUR COUNTRY! ‘THE ONLY THING YOU HAVE TO FEAR IS FEAR ITSELF.’”

Trump’s comments are eerily similar to those that prompted many of his supporters to descend on Washington, D.C., in January 2021. That rally eventually turned into the January 6 insurrection. Fortunately, turnout has been much lower this time around.

Trump is accused of using former fixer Michael Cohen to sweep an affair with adult film actress Stormy Daniels under the rug ahead of the 2016 presidential election. The trial is expected to last several weeks. He faces 34 felony charges in this case for allegedly falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime. Trump has pleaded not guilty on all counts.

Donald Trump’s legal defense in his hush-money trial may be doomed before it begins.

Trump is on trial for 34 felony counts for allegedly falsifying business records after his lawyer and fixer at the time, Michael Cohen, paid $130,000 to silence adult film actress Stormy Daniels from speaking about her affair with the former president. Trump claims that those payments were simply part of Cohen’s ordinary fees.

Ex-prosecutor Andrew Weissman wrote on X (formerly Twitter) Sunday that even if Trump tries to claim that those payments were actually legal fees, there are notes made at the time that are more specific.

“Trump’s latest defense, which we will see at trial I’m sure, that the 34 business records were not false because they were legal payments (reimbursing his lawyer Cohen for making the $130,000 hush money payment) is BELIED by contemporaneous notations that the payments were for ongoing legal services rendered during a certain month,” Weissman explained. “Oops.”

But Trump’s legal team isn’t exactly on the ball, as all of their blatant attempts to delay proceedings in this trial have been shot down. One attorney, Alina Habba, has claimed that Trump’s being required to attend every day of his hush-money trial, per state law, is a violation of due process, and has tried to excuse away his dozing off in court by saying he “reads a lot.”

Presiding Judge Juan Merchan has also refused to let the team know who the prosecution’s first three witnesses are, lest Trump try to attack the witnesses on social media.

This is Trump’s first criminal trial, and he’s under a gag order that prevents him from speaking about court staff or their families. It hasn’t prevented him from attacking about Merchan’s daughter, though, and he has a contempt of court hearing this week about it.

Now, as jury selection ends and his trial begins in earnest, the proceedings aren’t going to be an easy experience for the former president. The witness list includes his former employees, his White House aide Hope Hicks, Daniels, and his former fixer Cohen. If Cohen’s words are anything to go by, Trump and his lawyers have reason to “be worried.”

Back in 1967, a friend of mine and I hitchhiked from East Lansing, Michigan, to San Francisco to spend the summer in Haight-Ashbury. One ride dropped us off in Sparks, Nevada, and within minutes of putting our thumbs out a city police car stopped and arrested us for vagrancy.

The cop, a young guy with an oversize mustache who was apologetic for the city’s policy, drove us to the desert a mile or so beyond the edge of town, where we hitchhiked standing by a distressing light-post covered with graffiti reading “39 hours without a ride,” “going on our third day,” and “anybody got any water?”

Vagrancy laws were so twentieth century.

The Supreme Court on Monday is hearing a case involving efforts by the city of Grants Pass, Oregon to keep homeless people off its streets and out of its parks and other public property. The explosion in housing costs has triggered two crises: homelessness and inflation. The former is harming the livability of our cities and towns, and the Fed’s reaction to the latter threatens an incumbency-destroying recession just as we head into what will almost certainly be the most important election in American history.

The problem with housing inflation is so severe today that without it, the nation’s overall core CPI inflation rate would be in the neighborhood of Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell’s 2 percent goal.

Both homelessness and today’s inflation are the result of the United States—unlike many other countries—allowing housing to become a commodity that can be traded and speculated in by financial markets and overseas investors.

Forty-three years into America’s Reaganomics experiment, homelessness has gone from a problem to a crisis. Rarely, though, do you hear that Wall Street—a prime beneficiary of Reagan’s deregulation campaign—is helping cause it. Thirty-two percent seems to be the magic threshold, according to research funded by the real estate listing company Zillow. That is, when neighborhoods hit rent rates in excess of 32 percent of neighborhood income, homelessness explodes.

And we’re seeing it play out right in front of us in cities across America because a handful of Wall Street billionaires want to make a killing.

It wasn’t always this way.

Housing prices have spun out of control since my dad bought his house in 1957, when I was six years old. He got a Veteran’s Administration–subsidized loan and picked up the brand new three-bedroom, one-bath ranch house my three brothers and I grew up in, in suburban South Lansing, Michigan. It cost him $13,000, which was about twice what he made every year working a good union job in a tool-and-die shop. 

When my dad bought his home in the 1950s, the median price of a single-family house was 2.2 times the median American family income. Today, the Fed says, the median house sells for $479,500, while the median American personal income is $41,000—a ratio of more than ten to one between housing costs and annual income. And remember, wherever housing prices become more than three times annual income, homelessness stalks like the grim reaper.

We’re told that America’s cities have seen this increase in housing costs since the 1950s in part because of the growing wealth and population of this country. There were, after all, 168 million people in the United States the year my dad bought his house; today there are 330 million.

And it’s true that we haven’t been building enough new housing, particularly low-income housing, as 43 years of neoliberal Reaganomics have driven down wages and incomes for working-class people relative to all of their expenses while stopping the construction of virtually any new subsidized low-income housing.

But that’s not the only, or even the main dynamic driving housing prices into the stratosphere—and, as a consequence, the crisis in homelessness—over the past decade. You can thank speculation for much of that. 

As the Zillow-funded study noted: “This research demonstrates that the homeless population climbs faster when rent affordability—the share of income people spend on rent—crosses certain thresholds. In many areas beyond those thresholds, even modest rent increases can push thousands more Americans into homelessness.”

So how did we get here?

It started with a wave of foreign buyers over the past 30 years (particularly from China, Canada, Mexico, India, and Colombia) who, in just the one single year of 2020, picked up over 154,000 homes as their way of parking money in America. Which is part of why there are more than 20 times more empty houses in America than there are homeless people.

But foreign investment has been down for the past few years; what’s taken over and is really driving home prices today are massive, multibillion-dollar U.S.-based funds that sweep into neighborhoods and buy everything available, bidding against families and driving up housing prices.

As noted in a Wall Street Journal article titled “Meet Your New Landlord: Wall Street,” in just one suburb of Nashville, Spring Hill, “four firms … own nearly 700 houses … [which] amounts to about 5% of all the houses in town.”

This is the tiniest tip of the iceberg. The same thing is happening in cities and suburbs all across America; the investment goliaths use finely tuned computer algorithms to sniff out houses they can turn into rental properties, making over-market and unbeatable cash bids often within minutes of a house hitting the market.

After stripping neighborhoods of homes families can buy, they then begin raising rents as high as the market will bear. In Spring Hill, for example, the vice mayor, Bruce Hull, told the Journal you used to be able to rent “a three bedroom, two bath house for $1,000 a month.”  Today, the Journal notes, “the average rent for 148 single-family homes in Spring Hill owned by the big four [Wall Street investor] landlords was about $1,773 a month…”

Ryan Dezember, in his book, Underwater: How Our American Dream of Homeownership Became a Nightmare, describes the story of a family trying to buy a home in Phoenix.  Every time they entered a bid, they were outbid instantly, the price rising over and over, until finally the family’s father threw in the towel. 

“Jacobs was bewildered,” writes Dezember. “Who was this aggressive bidder?” 

Turns out it was Blackstone Group, now the world’s largest real estate investor. At the time, Blackstone was buying $150 million worth of American houses every week, trying to spend over $10 billion. And that’s just a drop in the overall bucket.

In 2018, corporations bought one out of every 10 homes sold in America, according to Dezember, who notes that, “Between 2006 and 2016, when the home ownership rate fell to its lowest level in fifty years, the number of renters grew by about a quarter.”

This all really took off around a decade ago, when Morgan Stanley published a 2011 report titled “The Rentership Society,” arguing that—in the wake of the 2008 Bush housing crash—snapping up houses and renting them back to people who otherwise would have wanted to buy them could be the newest and hottest investment opportunity for Wall Street’s billionaires and their funds. 

Turns out Morgan Stanley was right. Warren Buffett, KKR, and the Carlyle Group have all jumped into residential real estate, along with hundreds of smaller investment groups, and the National Home Rental Council has emerged as the industry’s premiere lobbying group, working to block rent control legislation and other efforts to regulate the industry.

Housing is one of the primary essentials of life. Nobody in America should be without it, and for society to work, housing costs must track incomes in a way that makes housing both available and affordable. This requires government intervention in the so-called free market.

— Last year, Canada banned most foreign buyers from buying residential property as a way of controlling their housing inflation.
— New Zealand similarly passed their no-foreigners law (except for Singaporeans and Australians) in 2018.
— Thailand requires a minimum investment of $1.2 million and the equivalent of a green card.
— Greece bans most non-EU citizens from buying real estate in most of the country.
— To buy residential housing in Denmark, it must be your primary residence and you must have lived in the country for at least five years.
— Vietnam, Austria, Hungary, and Cyprus also heavily restrict who can buy residential property, where, and under what terms.

This isn’t rocket science; the problem could be easily fixed by Congress if there was a genuine willingness to protect our real estate market from the vultures who’ve been circling it for years.

Unfortunately, when Clarence Thomas was the deciding vote to allow billionaires and hedge funds to legally bribe members of Congress in Citizens United, he and his four (at the time; now five) fellow conservatives opened the floodgates to “contributions” and “gifts” from foreign and Wall Street interests to pay off legislators to ignore the problem.

If ever there was a time to solve this problem—and regulate corporate and foreign investment in American single-family housing—it’s now. 

Donald Trump won’t be getting his way in his New York hush money trial—at least, not without consequences.

Presiding Judge Juan Merchan decided Monday that prosecutors can cross-examine the former president on prior judgements and gag order violations. This is only relevant if Trump takes the stand, but given he has said he would “absolutely” testify in the trial, he seems pretty eager.

But his legal team might not allow him to, especially considering the previous times Trump took the stand in an effort to change the narrative behind prior judgments.

Last week, the district attorney’s office signaled that they would be interested in bringing up a slew of Trump’s prior lawsuits to paint a picture of an untrustworthy man. Those cases include the New York civil fraud trial in which Trump was ordered to pay nearly half a billion dollars to the state, and the defamation trials brought against him by E. Jean Carroll, who won a payout of $83.3 million.

So far, Merchan has decided that he will allow questioning pertaining to Trump’s defamation of E. Jean Carroll (he did not mention the sexual assault ruling), the New York bank fraud trial, a 2018 case that led to the dissolution of the Trump Foundation over financial irregularities, and Trump’s repeat violations of the gag order issued by Judge Arthur Engoron after he refused to stop attacking the judge’s law clerk.

That last bit is noteworthy, considering that Trump has already teetered several times on violating another gag order issued in this trial, using his Truth Social account to disparage witnesses, court staff, and their family members, including Merchan’s daughter.

Merchan told the court Monday that he had “greatly curtailed” what elements of Trump’s legal history could be questioned, and warned the GOP presidential nominee that the decision was “a shield and not a sword” to which his testimony could become a “door to questioning that has otherwise been excluded,” according to The New York Times.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s failed fight to end aid to Ukraine, and her sort-of-serious crusade against House Speaker Mike Johnson, has cost her the support of right-wing media.

The Sunday front page of the New York Post, owned by the conservative Murdoch family, was the latest outlet to attack Greene, invoking the “Moscow Marjorie” nickname coined by former representative Ken Buck.

Fox News, another arm of the Murdoch media empire, had already taken aim at the Georgia Republican last week, with columnist Liz Peek calling her an “idiot” and saying she needs to “turn all that bombastic self-serving showmanship and drama queen energy on Democrats.” This follows an editorial last month from The Wall Street Journal, also in the Murdoch portfolio, that called Greene “Rep. Mayhem Taylor Greene” and accused her and her allies of being “most interested in TV hits and internet donors.”

Even a non-Murdoch outlet is on the attack, as conservative Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist Debra Saunders demanded to know “who put Marjorie Taylor Greene in charge?”

It was only a matter of time before Greene’s antics cost her friends in the world of conservative media. She has an old reputation for peddling crazy conspiracy theories; she’s been in a feud with fellow far-right Representative Lauren Boebert for quite a while; and she has parroted Russian talking points on Ukraine, to the point that even Russian state television is gushing over her. Over the weekend, a Russian state TV host described Greene as “a real beauty. She is a blond who wears white coats with a fur collar. She’s demonstrably heterosexual.”

Meanwhile, Johnson successfully passing aid to Ukraine shows that he is able to deflect her attacks, despite the GOP’s razor thin-majority in the House. If Greene keeps losing allies, he won’t have to worry about her at all.

“The people call David Pecker”—the former publisher of the National Enquirer and former CEO of its parent company, American Media Inc.

Pecker, the first witness in Donald Trump’s first criminal trial and an old friend of the former president, took the stand on Monday. In brief testimony, he started detailing a media coverage scheme handcrafted between Trump, Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen, and himself.

In opening statements just minutes prior, Manhattan district attorney prosecutor Matthew Colangelo proclaimed that “The National Enquirer ran headline after headline that extolled the defendant’s virtues.” Colangelo noted that the Enquirer also “ran stories attacking Mr. Trump’s political opponents” such as Ben Carson and Ted Cruz.

Pecker participated in an August 2015 meeting with Cohen and Trump to arrange the Enquirer’s catch-and-kill campaign, buying potentially damaging stories about Trump and his affairs with women with the intent to never publish them. The trio also allegedly discussed adult film actress Stormy Daniels, who had an affair with Trump after meeting him at a golf tournament in 2006, shortly after Trump’s wife Melania had given birth to their son Barron. Cohen later paid Daniels $130,000, allegedly at Trump’s behest, to keep the entanglement under wraps—but it wasn’t the first time Pecker was involved in a catch-and-kill scheme.

The Enquirer had also purchased rights to the story of another one of Trump’s alleged mistresses—former Playboy model Karen McDougal—for $150,000, in order to ensure the story would never see the light of day.

Pecker’s testimony on the stand offered some initial insights into the machinations of the Enquirer, including a key detail that all big stories pertaining to celebrities had to go through him.

“We used checkbook journalism and we paid for stories,” Pecker testified. “I gave a number to the editors that they could not spend more than $10,000 to investigate, produce or publish a story.”

Pecker agreed to cooperate with prosecution back in 2018, and is expected to continue his testimony on Tuesday. And the details he provides could be damning for the former president.

Trump is accused of using Cohen to sweep an affair with Daniels under the rug ahead of the 2016 presidential election. The trial is expected to last several weeks. He faces 34 felony charges in this case for allegedly falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime. Trump has pleaded not guilty on all counts.

The Supreme Court on Monday heard arguments on perhaps the most consequential case on homeless policy in decades, weighing how far cities can go in criminalizing people for sleeping outside.

And liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor kicked things off with a particularly damning hypothetical.

Under a law punishing people for sleeping outside, would people who stargaze outside not be punished? What about people who fall asleep on the beach? Or babies in public with blankets over them?

Sotomayor’s line of questioning in City of Grants Pass, Oregon v. Johnson highlighted the obvious flaws in the 2019 law that the court is considering. The town of Grants Pass, which has no public homeless shelters, effectively banned homelessness by imposing escalating fines starting at $180 on those who sleep outside. One of the original plaintiffs in the case against the city had over $5,000 in penalties before she died.

The Supreme Court’s decision in this case will determine whether localities can criminalize homelessness by punishing those who sleep out on streets using tents, blankets, or even a piece of cardboard. The court must weigh if doing so when no beds are available violates the Eighth Amendment and constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.

And like Sotomayor, the other liberal justices weren’t so impressed.

The Grants Pass legal team tried to argue that homelessness is “conduct,” something someone does, rather than “status,” something that someone is. But justice Elena Kagan pushed back saying matter of factly “homelessness is a status, it’s a status of not having a home.”

“Sleeping is a biological necessity,” she added. “It’s sort of like breathing, you could say breathing is conduct too but presumably you would not think it’s okay to criminalize breathing in public.” For a homeless person who has no place to sleep, Kagan continued, sleeping in public is the same as breathing in public.

“It seems both cruel and unusual to punish people for acts that constitute basic human needs,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson told lawyer Theane Evangelis, whose previous legal work for Uber and Grubhub has been described as “keeping the wheels of the gig economy turning.”

As the hearing continued, both Sotomayor and Jackson became increasingly incensed with Evangelis, who complained about the crime and unsanitary nature of unsheltered encampments, which she called harmful and dangerous.

“Suppose the city decided that it was going to execute homeless people... It would solve the problems that you are talking about,” Jackson quipped.

“Where do we put them if every city, every village, every town lacks compassion and passes a law identical to this, where are they supposed to sleep?” asked Sotomayor. “Are they supposed to kill themselves not sleeping?”

Evangelis continued that homelessness is a difficult and complicated problem.

But as Sotomayor responded: “What’s so complicated about letting someone somewhere sleep outside with a blanket if they have nowhere to sleep?”

Columbia University tried to squash a pro-Palestine protest on their campus last week, but it hasn’t worked. In fact, it has prompted solidarity protests across the country.

On Monday, 47 demonstrators were arrested at Yale University after taking part in pro-Palestine protests urging the university to divest from weapons manufacturers. Protesters had also set up an encampment on campus Friday night.

Halfway across the country, student protesters at the University of Michigan set up an encampment on the university’s famous Diag, also demanding their school divest from businesses with financial ties to Israel.

Over the weekend, protests sprang up in Boston-area universities, including MIT, Tufts University and Emerson College, with students setting up encampments on each campus. Students at the New School in Manhattan set up a “liberated zone” on campus on Sunday to show solidarity with Columbia’s protesters, and New York University students staged a march.

These demonstrations came a few days after Harvard University students rallied in support of Columbia students, with the university’s famous Harvard Yard closed until Friday to seemingly prevent a student encampment there. Students at the University of North Carolina also set up tents on Friday in solidarity.

Columbia sent city police officers onto campus last week to break up the encampment, resulting in the arrest of more than 100 students. In an effort to keep a lid on things, the school canceled in-person classes on Monday. One Columbia professor, Shai Davidai, who has attracted criticism over alleged threats to pro-Palestine students and calls to bring in the National Guard to shut down the protests, was also told to stay away from campus Monday.

In response to the canceled classes, several Columbia faculty members led a class walkout. The day before, 54 Columbia law school professors sent an open letter to the university condemning the school’s decision to authorize a police raid and suspend student protesters.

At Barnard College, which is affiliated with Columbia, three student admissions representatives, who work in the university admissions office, give tours, and speak with prospective students and families, resigned in protest Sunday over the university’s treatment of protestors.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that Columbia University’s attempt to shut down protests has only brought them more attention—and spread the movement to different universities. If police crackdowns continue, the pictures and heavy-handed actions could echo protests over the Vietnam War decades ago, including at Columbia.

Just before the 2016 election, Michael Cohen secretly taped a phone conversation with Donald Trump discussing how he would pay off former Playboy model Karen McDougal. Now, prosecutors for the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office say they intend to use the audio in court.

“You will get a chance to hear that recording during this trial,” said Manhattan district attorney prosecutor Matthew Colangelo on Monday, according to MSNBC’s Adam Klasfeld. “You’ll hear the defendant’s own voice, on tape, working out the intended agreement.”

Like adult film actress Stormy Daniels, McDougal was also victim to a catch-and-kill scheme by longtime Trump friend David Pecker, the former publisher of the National Enquirer and former CEO of its parent company, American Media Inc., to suppress stories of Trump’s extramarital affairs by purchasing the rights to the stories and then never allowing them to be published. On her end, McDougal was paid $150,000 by the publisher for her story.

“I need to open up a company,” Cohen can be heard saying on a copy of the two-minute tape, which was first released in 2018. “For the transfer of all of that info regarding our friend David. I’m going to do that right away.”

“Give it to me,” Trump responded. “We’ll pay with cash.”

Trump is accused of using Cohen to sweep an affair with Daniels under the rug ahead of the 2016 presidential election. The trial is expected to last several weeks. He faces 34 felony charges in this case for allegedly falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime. Trump has pleaded not guilty on all counts.

Donald Trump’s attorney Alina Habba should be more careful speaking.

Habba, who is not representing Trump in his hush-money trial, still showed up at the Manhattan courthouse on Monday to offer her opinion. “We’re here because of something that happened when he was in the White House that wasn’t even wrong,” she told reporters.

“You hire lawyers to solve problems, lawyers solve those problems, you pay them. That’s it!” Habba said, in language reminiscent of Trump’s rally speeches.

Alina Habba dismisses Trump's hush payment to a porn star: "You hire lawyers to solve problems, lawyers solve those problems. That's it." pic.twitter.com/bOiYHEjf59

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 22, 2024

Whether they solved problems or not, Trump’s payments in 2016 to his lawyer and fixer at the time, Michael Cohen, allegedly were made to ensure that adult film actress Stormy Daniels kept quiet about her affair with the then-presidential candidate. Trump now faces 34 felony charges for allegedly falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime.

Habba’s vehement defense of Trump may impress him, but they don’t deny a crime, nor the facts of the case. In fact, it almost sounds like she’s admitting he paid Cohen to keep Daniels quiet.

Habba often goes to crazy lengths to defend the former president, whether it’s claiming that he dozed off in court because “he reads a lot” or comparing him to Nelson Mandela. She even, in trying to defend Trump in a safe audience on Fox News, almost admitted that he could be bought by foreign countries to pay off his debts.

Habba’s words on Monday are not the first time she has seemingly displayed ignorance of the law, either. She has claimed the New York state law requirement that Trump attend every day of his trial is a violation of “due process,” and she was rebuked in court 12 times in one day in the E. Jean Carroll defamation case. She even had to abandon her attempt to have the Carroll case dismissed.

A newly unsealed FBI interview with an unidentified Trumpworld character unearths some eyebrow-raising details regarding Donald Trump’s classified documents case—namely, that family members were told to beg him to return the sensitive material back to the federal government.

In late October/early November of 2021, the unidentified individual pleaded with the former president, telling him that “whatever you have, give it all back,” according to the FBI memo, made public Monday.

But attempting to reason with Trump directly didn’t work. Instead, Trump “wanted to know how anyone knew of the issue.” When he was informed it was all documented in writing, he replied “we’ll check and think about it.”

So, in lieu of that, the unidentified individual claimed they tapped several people around the president in a coordinated effort to get Trump to return the documents, believing that hearing a ubiquitous call to return the federal property would influence Trump to actually do so. That included reaching out to some of his children.

The message was, essentially, “there are issues with the boxes. They belong to the government, talk to your dad about giving them back, It’s not worth the aggravation,” according to the FBI memo.

While the names of the individuals interviewed or involved in the scheme were redacted prior to the interview’s release, other Trumpworld individuals have already speculated as to who could have been behind or involved in the scheme to return the trove of documents to the government. According to former Trump fixer Michael Cohen, that may have been Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner.

Trump has since outright admitted to taking the sensitive records. In a prerecorded interview on Newsmax, Trump claimed point blank that he actually did take the classified documents, describing the process of shamelessly packing them away while leaving office.

“I took ’em very legally,” Trump said. “And I wasn’t hiding them.”

Donald Trump took aim at Joe Biden on Monday for trying to ban TikTok, conveniently forgetting how hard he worked to ban the popular app during his own presidency.

Trump posted an angry screed on TruthSocial claiming that “Crooked Joe Biden” is responsible for banning TikTok after a bill attached to a major foreign aid package passed the House of Representatives over the weekend. The bill would ban TikTok from U.S. app stores if its parent company, China-based ByteDance, doesn’t sell the platform within a year.

“He is the one pushing it to close, and doing it to help his friends over at Facebook become richer and more dominant, and able to continue to fight, perhaps illegally, the Republican Party,” Trump wrote, urging young people to remember this on Election Day.

Either Trump’s memory is suspect, or he’s trying to pull a fast one on the public. He attempted to ban the popular video-sharing app in an executive order back in 2020, ostensibly to protect Americans’ data from the Chinese government. The ban was later shot down in court.

Just last month, however, he claimed in an incoherent TV interview that a ban would help Facebook, and even expressed support for the social media platform on TruthSocial.

“If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business,” Trump posted in March. “I don’t want Facebook, who cheated in the last Election, doing better.”

Since then, two possible explanations for Trump’s dramatic shift in position have emerged. One of Trump’s allies, former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, revealed plans to purchase TikTok. And billionaire Jeff Yass, a powerful backer of Trump’s reelection campaign, reportedly owns a 15 percent stake in TikTok worth billions of dollars.

Over the last several months, the app, popular with younger Americans, has come under fire for allegedly being too pro-Palestinian from the right, as well as from pro-Israel Democrats. As inflated an argument as that seems, Trump may see supporting TikTok as helping his reelection efforts by encouraging more criticism of Biden’s policies in Israel and Gaza. Not to mention that keeping the app around keeps powerful allies happy.

Now that Mike Johnson allowed Ukraine aid to pass the House on a broad bipartisan basis, an enraged Marjorie Taylor Greene is ramping up her threats to oust the Speaker. But a funny thing has happened: For many reasons, Greene’s efforts could end up accomplishing little for the MAGA right, even as they do more to endanger GOP control of the House. We chatted with Democratic Representative Brendan Boyle of Pennsylvania, a shrewd observer of all these dynamics, about the possibilities of more coalition governing, the future of MAGA in the House, and the threat posed by the ticking time bomb otherwise known as MTG.

The Supreme Court appeared to be split on Monday on whether an Oregon city’s ordinances that make it illegal to sleep outdoors in public spaces violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. While most of the justices seemed reluctant to “constitutionalize” local homelessness policies, there was plenty of hesitance about leaving homeless people with no legal recourse.

In City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, federal courts blocked officials in Grants Pass, Oregon, from enforcing city ordinances that make it a civil violation to sleep outdoors with a blanket. Theane Evangelis, who argued on behalf of the city, faced pointed questions from the court’s liberal members about this policy.

“Presumably, you would not think that it’s okay to criminalize breathing in public,” Justice Elena Kagan noted during one exchange. “And for a homeless person who has no place to go, sleeping in public is kind of like breathing in public.”

It is no surprise that the justices struggled with the issue: Addressing homelessness is a perennially vexing problem for state and local officials across the country. Most of the court’s conservative members, for their part, appeared unwilling to draw the federal courts into it. That approach could have dire implications for some of the most vulnerable Americans if the justices green-light laws that effectively criminalize homelessness.

But it was unclear exactly how the justices would resolve the case, and a few of the conservative justices appeared uneasy with the prospect of saying the courts should avoid it altogether. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who asked hard questions for both sides, noted at one point that “our nation has a history and tradition of not saying you can shunt homeless people or the poor out of your jurisdiction and on to others.”

The case reached the Supreme Court after years of homelessness litigation on the West Coast. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Martin v. City of Boise in 2019 that states and cities could not enforce criminal anti-camping laws against homeless residents if they had nowhere else to go. The Supreme Court declined to review that decision in 2020, and it remains the law of the land in the Ninth Circuit, which is home to the bulk of the nation’s homeless population.

The Grants Pass ordinances instead focused on the materials that a person might use for sleeping, such as “bedding, sleeping bag, or other material used for bedding purposes.” The ordinances also made it a civil offense to violate them instead of a criminal one, with offenders racking up hundreds of dollars in fines instead. But failure to pay those fines could ultimately lead to jail time. Drawing upon the Martin precedent, the Ninth Circuit also ruled against the Oregon city’s ordinances.

“The City interprets and applies the ordinances to permit non-homeless people to rest on blankets in public parks while a homeless person who does the same thing breaks the law,” Kelsi Corkran, the lawyer representing the homeless persons challenging the law, told the court. “The ordinances by design make it physically impossible for homeless people to live in Grants Pass without facing endless fines and jail time. “

At the heart of the case is a question of what counts as “cruel and unusual punishment.” In the 1962 case Robinson v. California, the Supreme Court struck down a state law that made it a criminal offense to be addicted to narcotics. The justices, citing the Eighth Amendment, held that it was unconstitutional to punish someone simply for the status of being addicted to narcotics. In Martin, the plaintiffs successfully argued that the same reasoning applied to their status.

“Any conduct at issue here is involuntary and inseparable from status—they are one and the same, given that human beings are biologically compelled to rest, whether by sitting, lying, or sleeping,” Judge Marsha Berzon wrote for the Ninth Circuit in Martin. “As a result, just as the state may not criminalize the state of being ‘homeless in public places,’ the state may not criminalize conduct that is an unavoidable consequence of being homeless—namely sitting, lying, or sleeping on the streets.”

Some of the court’s members appeared uninterested in applying Robinson to other situations. Chief Justice John Roberts was foremost among them. In a series of questions for Evangelis, he suggested that a homeless person no longer becomes homeless if that person “buys a home or finds a home or is given a home” or even if they stay overnight at a homeless shelter.

“Is that consistent with the definition of ‘status’ in Robinson?” he asked, suggesting that he thought the answer was no.

Justice Clarence Thomas put that viewpoint even more succinctly. “Robinson actually included a crime of, as I read it, either to use narcotics or to be addicted to the use of narcotics, and the Court was concerned about the status of being addicted to the use,” he asked at one point. “Is there a crime here for being homeless?”

Other justices took issue with that narrow approach. “Could you criminalize the status of homelessness?” Kagan asked. “Well, I don’t think that homelessness is a status like drug addiction, and Robinson only stands for that,” Evangelis replied, citing a 1962 precedent at the heart of the case. “Well, homelessness is a status. It’s the status of not having a home,” Kagan noted.

Justice Neil Gorsuch suggested that even without the Eighth Amendment to rely upon, a homeless person might be able to invoke other common-law defenses to avoid punishment if they had nowhere else to go. “Do you concede that there are instances in which a necessity defense, long recognized at common law, would apply to eating in public, sleeping in public, or other things like that?” he asked. Evangelis agreed and claimed that Oregon law already incorporated that defense.

That option also seemed appealing to Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the court’s median vote. “Given the line-drawing problems that we’ve been going through, if a state has a traditional necessity defense, won’t that take care of most of the concerns, if not all, and, therefore, avoid the need for having to constitutionalize an area and have a federal judge superintend this rather than the local community?” he asked at one point.

Kagan, however, noted that it would still require a certain amount of police interaction with otherwise law-abiding homeless persons. “You’re not willing to say ‘no, we’re going to tell all our police officers that they shouldn’t give a citation in that circumstance?’” she pointedly asked Evangelis. “You know, ‘we’re going to give a citation, and then we’ll see how the courts deal with it,’ is all you’re going to tell me?”

The court’s liberal justices also took issue with the broader implications of overturning the lower court’s ruling. “Where do we put them if every city, every village, every town lacks compassion and passes a law identical to this?” Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked, referring to homeless people. “Where are they supposed to sleep? Are they supposed to kill themselves [by] not sleeping?”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson also appeared reluctant to relieve the city from facing Eighth Amendment claims. “I mean, suppose the City decided that it was going to execute homeless people,” she asked. “Very extreme, I know, but it would solve the problems that you’re talking about. Do we have an Eighth Amendment issue in that circumstance?”

“Yes. I think there, you look at the punishment,” Evangelis replied. “That—again, here, we’re looking at the punishment, which is [a] low-level fine—”

“That would be both cruel and unusual, wouldn’t it?” Gorsuch interrupted. “Yes, it would be,” Evangelis eventually said after briefly dissembling on the matter. “Why not just yes to that?” he asked.

The most likely outcome for the case is that the court adopts the Gorsuch-Kavanaugh-Barrett approach, which would allow homeless people to raise a necessity defense after they receive a citation or are arrested. But the court appeared to be unsettled on whether they should remove the Eighth Amendment from the equation entirely, and that majority may ultimately change while the rulings are drafted. The justices have until the end of June to figure it out.

I can’t account for the mainstream press’s peculiar impulse to downplay the United Auto Workers’ important victory Friday at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Granted, The New York Times called it a “milestone,” The Washington Post called it “historic,” and The Wall Street Journal called it a “breakthrough.” But all three papers kept this news off Page One, where historic milestones and breakthroughs logically belong, and instead buried the news deep inside. The Times followed up with a story by labor reporter Noam Scheiber explaining why this probably won’t lead to more successful union drives in the South, except (yawn) maybe next month at a Mercedes-Benz plant near Tuscaloosa.

Those who lost this battle aren’t treating the matter as a ho-hum affair. “We want to keep good paying jobs and continue to grow the American auto manufacturing sector here,” the Republican governors of Tennessee, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Alabama, and Texas said in a joint written statement issued shortly before the Chattanooga workers started voting. “A successful unionization drive will stop this growth in its tracks.” 

The claim is of course absurd. The South already has a few unionized auto plants; there’s a General Motors plant in Arlington, Texas, for example, that’s represented by UAW Local 276, and a Ford plant in Louisville that’s represented by UAW Local 862. Even so, the six governors made clear they were terrified at the prospect of losing the third plant-wide vote in Chattanooga, after winning the first two in 2014 and 2019. And lose they did. It was the first time in history that a foreign-owned auto plant was unionized in the South, after years of Southern states throwing money at foreign automakers to invest in the United States.

You probably think union votes entail conflict between labor and management. That is, in fact, how it usually goes. But foreign auto manufacturers, especially German ones, operate under certain constraints when the UAW comes calling. Powerful labor unions and works councils back home (especially in Germany) are apt to disapprove of union-busting, and (less exaltedly) German workers don’t relish competing with cheaper foreign (in this case, United States) labor. Consequently, even when foreign manufacturers oppose union drives, they don’t union-bust with the same gusto as Americans. Republican politicians, therefore, step in. 

These Republicans oppose giving the UAW more of a toehold in the South partly because labor unions tend to breed Democratic voters. But more urgently, Steve Silvia, an American University economist, told me, they oppose it because they’ve spent so much “taxpayer money to bring in these foreign plants that they feel a bit of ownership.” You could almost call them socialists, except socialists don’t usually bust unions. The Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, which writes pro-business laws for state legislatures, has lately been peddling a “Taxpayer Dollars Protect Workers Act” that bars state subsidies to any business that recognizes a union voluntarily based on the collection of union authorization cards. Another way of saying that is that the state in question will pay private companies not to recognize unions voluntarily. 

I find this hard to square with the conservative notion that government should be limited and not interfere with the workings of the free market. Conservatives are supposed to believe that a private corporation is better situated than some politician to decide what to do about a union drive. That’s what the Wall Street Journal said, anyway, in its editorial about the Chattanooga victory. In doling out funds from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, the Journal complained, “Democrats have used funding to, er, persuade auto makers to welcome unions.” But where was the Journal editorial page’s dudgeon last year when Tennessee became the first state to enact the ALEC law? Wasn’t that Republicans using funding to, er, persuade automakers to spurn unions? Georgia will become the second state to enact the ALEC law after Governor Brian Kemp signs it, and Alabama will likely be next. These will provide ideal news pegs for the Journal to correct this oversight and demonstrate consistency.

In Chattanooga Round One, back in 2014, Volkswagen management stayed neutral, to the profound annoyance of Tennessee’s Republican politicians and Grover Norquist, whose Center for Worker Freedom, a spinoff of his anti-tax group Americans for Tax Reform, campaigned against the union drive.  Bob Corker, then the Republican senator from Tennessee (and previously mayor of Chattanooga), stated publicly two days before the vote that he was “very certain that if the UAW is voted down” Volkswagen would step up investment “in the next couple of weeks.” That prompted VW’s chief of operations in Chattanooga to effectively call Corker a liar by stating publicly that the union vote would have no bearing on new investment. It was a very weird situation. Anyway, the union vote lost. VW subsequently opposed unionizing the Chattanooga plant, emphatically in the 2019 vote and less so in 2024, when the UAW won a 73 percent majority. 

Management at Mercedes-Benz in Alabama is taking a harder line against the union drive there, including holding captive meetings in which the company’s United States chief said workers “shouldn’t have to pay union dues that generate millions of dollars per year for an organization where you have no transparency where that money is used.” As the UAW pointed out, this pretty explicitly violated Mercedes-Benz’s own Principles of Social Responsibility and Human Rights, which state: “In the event of organization campaigns, the company and its executives shall remain neutral.”  

Also taking a harder line in Alabama—a harder line even than Mercedes management—is Republican Governor Kay Ivey. “Do you want continued opportunity and success the Alabama way?” Ivey said in a written statement as the Mercedes organizing drive picked up steam. “Or do you want out-of-state special interests telling Alabama how to do business?” Never mind that ALEC, whose anti-union bill Ivey will surely sign if it reaches her desk, resides 800 miles away in Virginia. The Alabama way is no different from the Tennessee way or the Georgia way or any other Southern way: It’s to pay non-union autoworkers less than union autoworkers. 

It isn’t very flattering to tell a Mercedes worker that the only thing he’s got going is that he’ll work for less money. Mercedes workers are starting to notice that. Jeremy Kimbrell, a measurement machine operator and member of the Mercedes organizing committee, has publicly called the Alabama way the “Alabama discount,” and pledged to end it. The Mercedes union vote will take place May 13–17.

The UAW doesn’t call union elections until it knows, through the collection of union authorization cards, that 70 percent are ready to join. So even at Mercedes, which is fighting the union drive more vigorously than Volkswagen did, odds seem better than even that the UAW will rack up another victory. “I believe a big majority there will vote in favor,” UAW President Shawn Fain told Steven Greenhouse in The Guardian. A Hyundai plant in Montgomery, Alabama could be next.

These union drives, which vindicate my extremely high opinion of Fain, put the Republican party in an awkward spot. The GOP is, of course, single-mindedly committed to killing off organized labor. But at the same time, it’s positioning itself as the party of the working class. How can you be for the working class when you not only oppose government policies that favor unions, but also pressure private-sector companies not to recognize unions? 

Democrats, of course, do the opposite, pushing private-sector companies to embrace unions, starting with President Joe Biden, who said after the Chattanooga vote, “I am proud to stand with auto workers now as they successfully organize at Volkswagen.” The Journal is right when it says Democratic politicians pressure companies that want IRA funds to embrace unions. I wish they pushed even harder. When Democrats behave this way they show consistency in their support for the working class. When Republicans work to kill off organizing drives they show a pretty glaring inconsistency. It makes them look like phonies. We are, I realize, living in a sort of golden age for phonies, where phonies can count on a shockingly large measure of support from the working class. But surely there are limits.

Allow me to impart some important life advice: Do not divorce, or allow yourself to be divorced by, a memoirist. Regardless of what a marital saint you were, you’re not going to come off well in the retelling—if a public reckoning with an ex’s crimes weren’t somewhere on the agenda, would the divorce memoir exist as a genre in the first place? Nevertheless, dissecting a marriage at book length is a high-risk wager for an author: You will lay yourself bare for our scrutiny, and we will take your side. But will we?

Leslie Jamison’s Splinters and Lyz Lenz’s This American Ex-Wife are willing to chance it. For one thing, there’s shame to be expiated—both were the ones who chose to leave, and fear being judged badly for it. Plus the guilt—both had young children (Lenz’s were two and four, Jamison had a 13-month-old). But after grappling with a similar question—Is it legitimate to break apart your life to be happier?—both ultimately found divorce liberating. Outweighing the sorrow of ending relationships are, for both, relief and, even at this late date, the glow of hard-won victory—independence reclaimed from yellow-wallpapered conjugal enclosures. Jamison: “Once you’re finally out of a broken marriage, it feels like you’re just dripping with love.” Lenz: “True freedom and power begin with refusal.”

At a time when the discontentedly coupled are turning to energetic remedies for ailing marriages like swinging and polyamory—the couple that strays together stays together—it’s almost refreshing to hear anyone favor just euthanizing the patient. Lenz’s is the more political book, packed with stats about gender inequity and marshaling all the pragmatic reasons other women should follow her example, namely economic freedom from men and liberation from household drudgery. Jamison is more ruefully attuned to the way divorce means living with absent presences, the ghosts of past lives that didn’t happen. Both books occasionally left me pondering the wobbly distinction between candor about ex-intimates and score-settling, even when artfully executed.

Among the cul-de-sacs of modern coupledom is that the intimacy you once craved with a beloved also requires ongoing proximity to another needy human’s most jaggedly uncensored self, which is likely to be exactly what ends up putting you off them. Their deepest selves turn out to be rigid, angry, lying, and petty; they’re a bottomless well of hurt wrapped in sarcasm. There’s such a thing as getting to know someone too well, knowledge which can, of course, be weaponized, not to mention transcribed for literary posterity.

When Jamison met the novelist she calls C, she was 30; he was a widower in his mid-forties whose wife had died after a protracted battle with leukemia. They married after six heady months, eloping at a Las Vegas wedding chapel. There are some lovely sentences about him—“Falling in love with C … was like ripping hunks from a loaf of fresh bread and stuffing them in my mouth.” He got her face tattooed on his bicep. He was offbeat and made her laugh.

The marriage lasted five years, though they were in couples therapy the last four. The schisms kept growing, including tensions about disparities in their levels of career success. His first novel did well, while the second, a semi-autobiographical account of his first marriage, didn’t. Jamison’s bestselling essay collection, The Empathy Exams, had been a breakout hit. Compounding the injury, her latest book garnered acclaim and a 19-city publicity tour. He attempts to handle this graciously, though she also reports him once saying before a party, “I’ll be damned if I’m going to stand there holding your purse.”

Aha, one thinks—do I smell emasculation fear? Jamison is a savvy enough writer not to spell it out, also to emphasize that she’s telling just one side of the story. But as a well-known literary figure whose name will forever be linked, for better or worse, with the word empathy, she has a fan base that requires her to be relatable, thus she has some impression management to accomplish. When it comes to abandoning a man whose first wife had died tragically young, leaving him grieving and traumatized—who’s going to root for her in these circumstances, she admits to worrying.

The specter of C’s first wife loomed large in the marriage: “another woman’s death was nestled inside every moment between us. It was the house we lived in.” Jamison wants to believe she can repair C and assuage his suffering, though then there are occasions such as her talking about having had an eating disorder, and him interrupting to tell her how little his wife had weighed when she was dying. It leaves her feeling trivial by comparison, though also “some part of me had wanted to finish my sentence.”

Such is Jamison’s deftness at scene-sketching that an entire universe of botched reciprocity can be glimpsed in that moment, and the kernel of every disenchantment to follow. But how can one puny relationship encompass every injured party’s sensitivities and traumas simultaneously? How to adjudicate the clash of competing wants and wounds: I need this from you, but you’re giving me that.

Also C turns out to have anger issues. She’s drawn to his rough edges, less so to living with someone so easily affronted and short-tempered. His work is never going well. He can be mean. Daily life becomes a minefield of barbed comments that leave her frayed. He says a lot of shitty diagnostic things about her, none of which she’s forgotten, because some part of her believes them. According to him, even though she’s managed to convince the world she’s a good person, it’s all a facade—the true story is selfishness and ambition, “the virtue-signaling others mistook for virtue.” Jamison doesn’t defend herself, just lets his comments sit there stinking. “Where others looked at me and saw kindness, he saw the elaborate puppetry of a woman desperate for everyone to find her kind.”

When couples get this nastily ontological, they’re obviously spiraling the drain, but one of Jamison’s subtler talents turns out to be dexterity at table-turning. With the skill of a jiujitsu master, she neutralizes the opponent with his own weapon—repeating his taunts makes him look worse than she does. If she gets a little bloodied in the process, she also wins on sympathy points, which perhaps lends credence to his cynicism about her need to secure approval; but he’s vanquished by that point anyway. If you’re familiar with Jamison’s work, C’s assessments don’t necessarily seem wrong, they’re possibly even astute—she surrounds herself with yes-men, he charges, “part of an elaborate internal machinery designed to secure praise and affection from other people”—but the cruelty of him saying it is her get-out-of-jail-free card.

Reading the grisly details of other people’s fractured intimacies can be perversely fascinating, though in this case also disquieting, because C’s identity is no secret. And because, as Jamison explains in a brief paragraph, she’s agreed with C’s request not to write about his child from his first marriage. In other words, there was another person present throughout the relationship: C had been a single father when they met, making Jamison a stepmother when they married. The reader is left to fill in an even more painful story than the one Jamison is able to tell, because leaving C also meant leaving a child who’d already lost a mother. This is the kind of thing people love to judge.

After they separate, C’s meanness gets, no surprise, worse, which at least validates her decision to leave. “Why don’t you eat something, you anorexic bitch?” she reports him shouting during one of their twice-a-week child drop-offs. On another occasion, when she asks him to speak to her less angrily, he retorts, “I speak to you like you deserve.” His anger is protecting him from grief, she hypothesizes when he spits at (or maybe just distressingly near) her, after he’s had to wait 10 minutes outside her apartment because her buzzer is broken. A friend says that C’s anger is a sign of how much he loved her, but by then Jamison has decided it’s just who he is, and readers are likely to concur—you’d have to read very energetically against the grain to conclude differently.

Even if it’s an elegant hit job, Jamison is such a sheepishly charming persona on the page: Despite her shrewd observational acuity, she’s in a perpetual state of self-bafflement. Saddled with a psychology that demands her existence be justified, which necessitates “frantic” ambition, she’s so self-lacerating that she’ll happily accuse herself of every manner of failure, even that writing is a form of self-love and thus a kind of poison. She’s aware that people who want too many contradictory things from the universe can be exhausting—a friend confesses needing to step away because of drama fatigue—but the insatiability is also, she knows, her superpower as a writer; her big subject is the “great emptiness inside,” the only thing she ever really writes about. The compulsive self-effacement is a great way of deflecting her readers’ potential judginess: She is, after all, enviably talented, successful, and prolific, or, in the contemporary arsenal of finger-pointing, “privileged”—apologies for which arrive punctually.

Such are the hoops the socially attuned memoirist must negotiate. In addition to being adept at this, Jamison has a genius for quirky lyricism, for stretching the emotional lexicon into unexpected configurations. She knows her way around what T.S. Eliot called an objective correlative: Every children’s book she reads to her daughter, even if ostensibly about animals having picnics, is the story of her leaving her marriage; in Donald Judd’s cold and withholding sculptures is her relationship with her father and all subsequent impassive male faces; every cheesy movie plot evokes her own ordeals and yearning and disappointment. All this eloquence and self-scrutiny doesn’t appear to produce any greater contentment or self-ease, nor relationship success; it’s just a pathway to linguistic originality.

If they ran a contest for the best reasons to get divorced, Lyz Lenz would win hands down (a bigamy revelation would be a distant second). The whole time she was married, she seemed to be always mysteriously losing things. Her husband calls her absent-minded, and she agrees—she’d mislay her head if it wasn’t attached, etc., etc. Then, during a bout of spring cleaning, she discovers, stuffed behind the old wedding decorations in the basement crawl space, a box containing every item she thought she’d lost—coincidentally all items her evangelical husband disapproved of. A mug with the slogan WRITE LIKE A MOTHERFUCKER. A copy of Madame Bovary. Two favorite shirts. Their couples therapist makes him promise to stop hiding her stuff. (Is this really a sufficient response?) Six months later, another missing item—a little wooden sign that said, DRINK UP, WITCHES (one can’t help suspecting it was on display to goad him)—and she’s finally out the door.

This is a raw, angry, rabble-rousing book: “Do you want to know how I finally got my husband to do his fair share? Court-ordered fifty-fifty custody, that’s how.” For Lenz, the price of marriage was the loss of her entire self, and she’s decidedly bitter about the enterprise as a whole—“a political and cultural and romantic institution that asks too much of wives and mothers and gives too little in return.”

One of eight children, raised in small-town Texas and South Dakota by deeply conservative parents, Lenz pledged her purity to Jesus and her daddy at age 16 in exchange for a gold ring symbolizing chastity (though Daddy was himself a bit of a hound dog—as was Jamison’s father, incidentally). She attended a Lutheran college in southern Minnesota, and got engaged at age 22. Her fiancé was, it was clear—and well before they married in 2005—an uptight, controlling prig. He said her college friends were bad influences, and that she should keep her distance from them. Committed to faith and abstinence, he refused to sleep with her before marriage and wouldn’t allow wine to be served at the wedding. Lenz had wanted to keep her maiden name, having been published under it by then; he insisted she take his. On all this she acceded.

Married life somehow failed to make him any more of a compromiser. Reluctantly, Lenz moved to Cedar Rapids for his job, with promises that someday they’d move for hers (which never happened). They buy a horrible moldy house that comes to seem like a metaphor for their marriage. He’s bossy about the renovations and, ever the gaslighter, insists the rot doesn’t smell as bad as she thinks. Much of the book is devoted to housework wars: She wants him to do some, he wants her to write less. He tries to persuade her to have a third kid rather than embark on a book: “It soon became clear I could be successful or I could be married.” Though he’s “a good man,” the sex sounds awful—Lenz has some tart things to say about men’s failures of reciprocity in oral sex—and after 11 years and countless couples therapy sessions, she’s done.

But, as Lenz herself says, her husband never pretended to be anyone other than who he was: someone who wanted a tradwife. She was the one who changed. That’s a fascinating story, but the book is wrongly framed, reaching too often for sweeping pronouncements about sex and gender: “Women and their work have always been disposable”; “We make women feel brave for sticking it out”; “We tell ourselves that true love happens completely outside of the forces of culture and time.” But Lenz isn’t the American ex-wife. She is chronicling a highly specific milieu: white evangelical Trump country. Breaking ranks with religious traditionalism meant breaking not just with her husband, but with a tribe devoted to controlling women’s bodies and, not incidentally, shoving their doctrine down the rest of America’s throat.

Her husband, no surprise, supported Donald Trump in 2016, while Lenz voted for Hillary Clinton. The connection between their domestic miseries and the evangelical political agenda, between her husband’s Trumpism and the inequalities in their marriage, would have been a great subject to explore, but Lenz turns to generalities instead. It’s a very didactic book—like most converts to a cause, she wants to instruct a flock—but the lessons are rote ones, marshaling citations from Henrik Ibsen, Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Susan Faludi, and Arlie Russell Hochschild to make familiar arguments about equal pay, housework inequities, and the disparities in women’s sexual pleasure versus men’s. It’s like Feminist Groundhog Day.

The one feminist issue we never hear about, oddly, is abortion. I take her Clinton vote to mean she’s pro-choice, and her husband’s Trump vote to mean he was not. What kind of conversations did that entail? Or birth control discussions, or prenatal testing decisions? We don’t hear, though Lenz does report discovering in year seven of their marriage that her husband was anti–gay marriage, leaving her “stunned and embarrassed.” But could this possibly come as news to someone who’d married a sex-fearing evangelical?

It’s not that gender inequalities don’t persist in secular America, but they persist differently than in the tradition-bound world Lenz inhabited. The more she strives to present herself as Everywoman, the more empty truisms pile up: “Sexuality is a spectrum, and so are our relationships,” “Divorce is both personal and political,” “Rarely do we consider what must be exchanged for a life lived with someone else.” The condescension started making me querulous—I feel pretty sure that literary history is teeming with tales of marital self-mutilation, and that lots of us have considered them plenty, not that such a reading program necessarily improves things on the domestic front.

This framing is too bad, because when Lenz observes the world she knows, as she did in a previous book, God Land, she’s textured and insightful. The journey from evangelical to Hillary voter to divorcée is meaningful not because it’s the shared condition, but because of what a rare bird it makes her, a minority of a minority. Despite their outsize political clout, only 14 percent of the electorate are white evangelical Christians, and a mere 16 percent of them supported Clinton. But if women in the heartland are in the throes of late-breaking feminist rage, fleeing their Trump-voting, bad-in-bed husbands, this is great news. Welcome aboard, all escapees and renegades!

Post-separation, both Lenz and Jamison embarked on sex and dating sprees involving apps, shifty men, and self-discovery; freedoms are regained, dignity is lost. Both think it’s their fault when men dump them.

Jamison is drawn to trouble and intensity—she’s not giving up on recklessness, and good for her. She meets a charismatic traveling musician with tattoos and healed cutter scars on his arms, who finds monogamy impossible, fucks her in ways she’s never been fucked, and gives her chlamydia (about which she’s amusing—googling whether it can be transmitted through breastfeeding, a nice little glimpse at the perils of wanting everything). She yearns, improbably, to tame him and settle down together (there’s also a hilariously self-deluded sentence about feeling maternal toward his other girlfriends), though his self-mythologizing starts to strike her as a failure of imagination, a way of staying stuck: “He was a man in love with the way he broke things.” Even when Jamison is skewering men, she doesn’t reduce them to their gender: Each is a motley collection of specifics. The problem is that she keeps seeing through them—and thus does hotness fade.

Lenz finds herself equally baffled by her desires: “So much of my life had been ruined by men…. And yet, I still wanted them.” She discovers at long last that sex can be pleasurable, though the men she meets are invariably assholes. Including or especially the supposedly enlightened liberals and male feminists, one of whom rapes her in his apartment, though she doesn’t use that word.

An inherent risk of the divorce memoir is that the memoirist, naturally steeped in resentment and tacit self-exoneration, may be the person least equipped to tell the story. You end up second-guessing them, as when Lenz says, about her husband’s anti-gay politics, “How had I failed to see the truth?” or asks plaintively, “How had I gotten here?” Well, as she herself says, marriages are built on intentional ignorance. Which is also the pitfall for confessional writers generally: You’re producing a map of your blind spots, and if you do it at all well, your readers will likely come to feel they know you better than you know yourself.

When Jamison mentions loving a line from G.K. Chesterton—“How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it. You would find yourself under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers”—I couldn’t help noticing that it was an aspiration supremely at odds with the emotional maximalism of her book and its relentless interior gaze, none of which is exactly a self-reduction plan.

Would the divorce story of one of these imaginary slimmed-down selves be in any way interesting? The thing that makes divorce memoirs so compelling is knowing what an ongoing calamity it is to attempt to merge two gargantuan interiorities. But such is our condition, living as we do in self-besotted times. We’re very avid about ourselves! Perhaps most of all. It makes even the failed mergers poignant. You spend a lifetime figuring out how to navigate your befuddling, outsize emotions, and then you die, though if you’re fortunate, you’ll have loved and felt loved somewhere along the way by someone willing to put up with you in all your helpless enormity.

The White House Correspondents’ Dinner, that lavish, storied fundraiser held every April at the Washington Hilton to honor journalists covering the capital, confers on its deep-pocketed attendees the implicit assurance that they belong among the powerful. Buy a ticket, and between your terrine of jumbo lump crabmeat and your foraged wild mushroom ragout you will have the chance to chat with someone of superlative influence: if not a lawmaker, then a reporter granted coveted access; if not a reporter, then a celebrity; if not a celebrity, then a well-heeled media financier. Excluding Donald Trump, every president since Calvin Coolidge has attended the event.

Meanwhile, with a few notable exceptions, the newspapers, magazines, and TV networks where these reporters work are inexorably shrinking, disappearing. Mass layoffs, buyouts, closures—the legacy institutions trample their own inheritance; the startups stutter and stop. Social platforms tug at our scarce attention. “Is the Media Prepared for an Extinction-level Event?” asked one recent headline. There’s much to worry about in this unsettling new journalistic landscape, and the future of democracy sometimes feels like the least of it.

Of course, it’s hardly news that traditional media has in many ways been superseded by social media, even as the platforms themselves rapidly morph—Twitter’s sad devolution into the chaotic world of X and TikTok’s uncertain future in the United States offering cases in point. There are many excellent reasons to mourn this development, but a few aspects, we insist, are worth celebrating, particularly the famous leveling of the playing field, where, in theory, anyone has access to anyone. In the spirit of celebration, The New Republic sought to identify an alternative set of political influencers: 25 people shaping our national conversations whom you’d be less likely to find at the Hilton in April (though we’re not, to be clear, ruling out their appearance).

The term “influencer” is more typically applied to lifestyle gurus hawking subscription smoothies, and some of the people on our list—who care passionately about trans rights, abortion rights, the Supreme Court, the war in Gaza, police brutality, and criminal justice reform, to name just a few of their preoccupations—might balk at the description. But the members of this stylistically and ideologically heterogeneous bunch are all trying to influence us, in the best sense of the word—to engage us, change our minds, compel us to act. They are activists, lawyers, historians, comedians, media critics, journalists, and, yes, a few politicians. If their medium is unapologetically contemporary, they display a commitment to old-fashioned principles: that communication breeds community, that educating the public is not in vain, and that it would be dangerous, especially in an election year of staggering consequence, to leave politics to those walking the halls of power.

Rhiannon Hamam, Michael Liroff, and Peter Shamshiri

“The media tends to talk about the law and the courts as if they exist outside of politics and ideology. We want to make the case that you can only really understand the Supreme Court as a political institution that crafts policy without real democratic input.” –Peter Shamshiri, 5–4

Reeling from the Supreme Court conservative supermajority’s gutting of many long-cherished rights, thousands of listeners have turned to 5–4, a podcast founded in 2020 by three lawyers: Rhiannon Hamam, Michael Liroff, and Peter Shamshiri. The show is an irreverent and sometimes vulgar exploration into, as its tagline puts it, “how much the Supreme Court sucks.” Episodes cover individual SCOTUS decisions, from the most infamous to the lesser-known-but-equally consequential, as well as explore the seamy underbelly of American legal education and culture. “The media tends to talk about the law and the courts as if they exist outside of politics and ideology,” said Shamshiri, who was publicly known only as “Peter” until late 2022, when his employer, a major insurance company, found out about the show and promptly fired him. “We want to make the case that you can only really understand the Supreme Court as a political institution that crafts policy without real democratic input.”

Kat Abughazaleh

Media Matters for America, a progressive research and information center devoted to correcting conservative misinformation in media, has been plying its trade since the dawn of digital journalism, but there’s never been anyone on staff quite like Kat Abughazaleh, who “watches Fox News for a living,” as she puts it, and was seemingly born to conquer the video realm—her standout work on YouTube and TikTok (@katmabu on those platforms and @abughazalehkat on X) has earned her a legion of fans. Abughazaleh’s work exemplifies a key lesson that so many others who have attempted the fabled pivot-to-video forgot to learn: You can’t just point a camera at something and call it a day. Video isn’t done, it’s made; the two key ingredients being whip-smart writing and editing. Whether Abughazaleh is laying waste to right-wing talking points, explaining the latest culture-war obsession in conservative circles, or tormenting Tucker Carlson, her work brims with wit that’s more Edgar Wright than Beltway wonk. “In such a chaotic media ecosystem, many bad actors are counting on people to feel overwhelmed,” Abughazaleh told The New Republic. “I hope that my videos help counteract what right-wing media are pushing.”

Imani Barbarin

There are more than 42 million Americans with disabilities today—but still they’re often left out of our conversations about politics. Imani Barbarin takes issue with that. The disability rights activist, who posts as @crutches_and_spice, is trying to change how we talk about bodily autonomy. If she uses her platform to share her own experiences with cerebral palsy, she also zooms out to the bigger picture, discussing disability, ableism, racism, and, more generally, what it means to take care of your mental, physical, and spiritual health in 2024. She reminds people that Covid still exists, she advocates for reproductive rights, and she’s never afraid to call out those on the left when they deserve it. She has been a vocal critic of the Biden administration and its support for Israel’s atrocities in Gaza, which she has called a “mass disabling event.”

Averie Bishop

Averie Bishop is used to being first: the first in her family to complete a four-year college degree; the first Asian American to win Miss Texas, in 2022; and, if she wins her race for the seat in Texas’s House District 112, northeast of Dallas, the first Filipino American to serve in the state House. Bishop, whose handle is @averiebishop, downloaded TikTok on a whim around 2019 to chronicle her life as a first-year law student at Southern Methodist University. (“I’ve been on Insta since like seventh grade.”) Her Miss Texas tenure took a high-profile political turn with the Dobbs decision, when she began posting pro-choice videos. And when Bishop announced her candidacy last August, her robust social media campaign likely helped deter potential Democratic primary opponents from entering the ring. Her videos range from day-in-the-life snippets to conversations with voters about how to fill out a primary ballot and where to research candidates. Bishop herself is quick to point out that her considerable following “doesn’t exactly convert to monetization.” Raising money, she lamented, is “a pain point for a young woman of color.” She’ll face an uphill battle against incumbent Angie Chen Button (the district was recently redrawn redder) as she beats the drum for diversity and inclusion policies—which were recently outlawed in the state’s higher education system.

A.B. Burns-Tucker

A.B. Burns-Tucker, a graduate of Southwestern Law School who goes by @iamlegallyhype on social media, attracted her sizable TikTok following by making irreverent, lively explainer clips about complex legal and political issues in the news. Burns-Tucker started posting videos in 2020, as a way of drawing attention to the plight of her younger brother, Brandon Parks-Burns, who was sentenced to 50 years to life in prison for a murder that happened when he was 15 (he maintains his innocence). Today, Burns-Tucker is a board member of California Innocence Advocates and hosts a weekly segment, “Believe the Hype,” on the nationally syndicated radio show The Morning Hustle. She seeks to make current affairs intelligible to an audience historically ignored by the media. “I figured I could put the information out there in a way that people will understand, enjoy, and be able to interpret,” she told the Black News Channel in February 2022. As she suggested to CNN’s Van Jones in 2022, politicians ignore young people in particular at their peril; the younger generations are “bolder” and “ready to go toe to toe” on issues they feel passionate about.

Brittany Packnett Cunningham

“I really try to use my platforms to build the context that is missing from so many of our societal conversations, to help people understand the connective tissue... systems, institutions. Institutions were created, and they can be recreated.” –Brittney Packett Cunningham

Brittany Packnett Cunningham is perhaps best known for her unflagging criticism of police brutality. As an appointee of President Barack Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, as a member of the Ferguson Commission, and as a key participant in the 2014 Ferguson protests themselves, Cunningham has helped broadcast the urgent need for police reform in the United States to a mass audience. But her political activity is not limited to any one domain: The activist, who posts as @MsPackyetti, has spoken out against gun violence, the suppression of Black history in public schools, and Israel’s assault on Gaza. “I really try to use my platforms to build the context that is missing from so many of our societal conversations, to help people understand the connective tissue”—namely “systems, institutions,” she told TNR. “Institutions were created, and they can be re-created.”

Courtney Dorritie

Courtney Dorritie is TikTok’s “Narcan fairy.” Her account is a veritable clearinghouse for important harm reduction strategies and advocacy: tutorials showing how to prevent an overdose with the nasal spray with which she’s become associated, Good Samaritan Law explainers, and vlogs that chronicle her days as a specialist at a harm reduction center in the Bronx. She dispels myths about addiction in one video, and poses for fit pics, complete with her signature dangling Narcan pouch necklace, in another. Dorritie, whose handle is @courtOoO, also documents her life as a former drug user and unhoused person, offering advice for navigating the shelter system and turning her comment section into a celebratory space for followers to share their own stories. Dorritie’s feed is as informative as it is compassionate, a digital social support system and training center. As homeless services are defunded in New York City and remain underfunded across the country, her work is more critical than ever.

Carlos Eduardo Espina

Carlos Eduardo Espina (@carlos_eduardo_espina on Instagram and TikTok) immigrated to Texas from Uruguay when he was five years old. Like many of the state’s residents who weren’t born there but “got there as fast as they could,” as Texans like to say, Espina has worked from a young age to make his adopted home a better place. Best known today for his Spanish-language politics coverage on TikTok and Instagram—including explainers on whatever draconian immigration law Republicans like Governor Greg Abbott and company have cooked up—Espina, a law student at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, started his own nonprofit when he was just 17. He was motivated by seeing how much his hometown college, Texas A&M University in College Station, charged for a three-day soccer camp: around $400. “I was like, ‘No one can ­really afford that!’” he told TNR. He and his soccer-playing friends decided to offer a free camp for local kids. In the video pinned to the top of his TikTok profile, Espina describes how much money he made with his social media presence in 2023: more than $1.2 million. Half of that revenue he put toward constructing a 15-acre community center north of Houston, including soccer fields. “It’s been my dream for many years now,” he said. “Thanks to social media, we’ll be able to achieve it a lot sooner than expected.”

Representative Maxwell Frost

“I have a lot of hope for the future of the country,” Maxwell Frost, who represents Florida’s 10th Congressional District, told TNR. “I know it feels a little weird to say that now, the way things are. But I do. I do have a lot of hope.” The first Gen Z member of Congress and a former national organizing director for March for Our Lives, Frost still thinks like an activist. It’s yielded results: The 27-year-old Orlando-area native, who posts as @MaxwellFrostFL, has already used his influence to help create the first federal office focused on gun violence. He is focused on issues that are important to young people—climate change, immigration reform, ending gun violence—and his hope for the future is rooted in what he calls “the most politically active generation in this country’s history.” Despite a historically unproductive Republican-run Congress, Frost has found success by channeling his experience as an organizer. “As younger people, organizers, working people get up and run for office,” he said, he believes change will come. “That’s what gives me hope: The people are on our side in terms of the issues.”

Imani Gandy

“Abortion is still healthcare, motherfuckers”: This was the tweet pinned to the top of Imani Gandy’s X profile for the better part of March. Levying her ire at the right’s onslaught against reproductive rights, this legal expert and editor at large for Rewire News Group has, by her own description, “zero chill.” She joined Twitter in 2009 and began making a concerted effort to accrue a following a couple of years later. After Elon Musk’s takeover of the social platform, she wasn’t sure she’d stick with it: “I actually quit Twitter for a whole seven days at the beginning of this year,” she told TNR. “But I really think that in this age of misinformation and the way the platform is being run, it’s important for the ‘old hands’ to step up.” From her perch as co-host of the podcast Boom! Lawyered, Gandy (@AngryBlackLady) has debunked the junk science attacking medication abortions, punctured the “Lawyers for Fetuses” movement, and taken Constitution “originalists” to task for wanting to arm domestic abusers. “I mostly go where the abortion winds blow,” she said. She was also a fairly early adopter—among political streamers at least—of the gaming platform Twitch, streaming “Let’s Play” series and chatting with folks while she played Witcher 3, The Last of Us, and SnowRunner, an off-road driving simulation game.

The Good Liars

Jason Selvig and Davram Stiefler, the comedy duo known as The Good Liars, are best known for conducting prank interviews as a means of exposing the hypocrisy and ignorance of many on the right. In their inaugural stunt, during Occupy Wall Street, they posed as investors protesting the demonstrations. Five years later, in 2016, they released the election comedy Undecided: The Movie, in which they pranked the presidential candidates. More recently, they’ve filmed interviews at the March for Life, at NRA conventions, and at Donald Trump rallies. They also launched a podcast, The Good Liars Tell the Truth, on which they explore the news with guests from the worlds of both comedy and politics. It can be maddening, even “nauseating,” to follow the train accident that is politics these days, Stiefler observed in a conversation with TNR. “People reach out to us and say that they would not have been able to keep paying attention, that the only way to stomach politics is through humor.” In fact, he said, some of their viewers have confessed to not watching straight news at all anymore, and only keep up with The Good Liars’ videos. So if the duo didn’t start out with the aim of helping to maintain an exhausted, queasy citizenry’s connection to politics, they now embrace the mission. “We either have something extra in our brains or something missing from our brains that allows us to ... do this,” Stiefler said. “But we have enjoyed it.”

Mehdi Hasan

“My purpose as a journalist—and in life?—is to make people in power uncomfortable. Everything else is noise.”  –Mehdi Hasan

Mehdi Hasan, a prominent British American journalist known for his incisive commentary and fearless questioning of his interviewees, has worked for Al Jazeera, The Intercept, and the Huffington Post UK; currently, he writes a column for The Guardian. His work often focuses on issues of social justice, foreign policy, and politics. The Mehdi Hasan Show began on Peacock in October 2020 and was hosted on MSNBC from March 2021 to January 2024. Hasan, who is Muslim, frequently critiqued Israel’s war on Gaza, and late last year the network announced it was canceling his show, a move that drew fierce backlash. An anonymous source close to the situation at MSNBC told The Washington Post the decision was unrelated to his commentary about Israel and instead the result of a “broader restructuring” of the network’s weekend lineup. In February, Hasan (@mehdirhasan on social platforms) announced he was starting a digital media company, Zeteo. He had launched the venture, he explained to CNN’s Jake Tapper, because he wanted to “be able to speak in a blunter fashion” than most people in media do, and offer a platform for others to do the same. “My purpose as a journalist—and in life?—is to make people in power uncomfortable,” he told TNR. “Everything else is noise.”

Annie Wu Henry

In 2022, if you enjoyed any of now-Senator John Fetterman’s viral TikTok posts, you can thank Annie Wu Henry. The Gen Z digital maven was the social media producer on the Pennsylvania lawmaker’s campaign and ran his TikTok account. Henry—known as @Annie_Wu_22 on social media—has also worked with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Working Families Party, and Helen Gym, who lost in the 2023 Democratic primary for mayor of Philadelphia. Henry believes in the importance of using social media to connect with young progressive voters in particular. “I think, on their own, younger people on the left have harnessed the power of mobilizing online where the right has not,” she told TNR. In 2024, as President Joe Biden tries to connect with young voters, that insight into how Gen Z voters operate will be more salient than ever.

David Hogg

Six years ago, David Hogg survived the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida. Since then, he has become a leading activist for gun control and youth empowerment. Hogg co-founded March for Our Lives, a movement advocating for stricter gun laws, which flooded the nation’s capital with hundreds of thousands of protesters the month after the Parkland massacre. He has been a vocal advocate for political change, using his platform to push for legislative action on gun violence prevention. The 24-year-old (@davidhogg111 on X) recently graduated from Harvard with a bachelor’s degree in history and co-founded the Leaders We Deserve PAC, which is committed to helping elect young people to Congress and state legislatures. On social media, he engages with his audience on pressing issues and encourages civic participation. His aim, he explained to TNR, is to demonstrate to young people that our political system is not so broken that it’s unfixable. “There’s nothing more rewarding than showing other young survivors that they’re not alone,” he said. “And that we’re not powerless.”

Olivia Julianna

Nobody speaks to Generation Z quite like Olivia Julianna. The 21-year-old Houston native, who posts as @0liviajulianna, began using TikTok to get political news in 2020; for her, like many Americans, that summer’s racial justice protests were politically formative. Today, Julianna’s videos range from in-depth explainers on the right’s assaults on reproductive rights and democracy to advice for young organizers. A queer, disabled, fourth-generation Mexican American, she is a spirited guide to the political moment; her posts mock Republican hypocrisy, alert followers about upcoming elections and ballot measures, and celebrate hard-won Democratic victories. And she’s masterfully co-opted the right’s political lexicon of trolling; when Florida Representative Matt Gaetz body-shamed her on X, Julianna responded by raising more than $2 million for abortion access. If TikTok is not only where young Americans go to kill time but where they get their news, Julianna is making Democratic politics and progressive causes accessible for the next generation of voters and leaders.

Mariame Kaba

The career of abolitionist organizer and author Mariame Kaba long predates social media. She has written numerous books—including We Do This ’Til We Free Us and Let This Radicalize You—and has a preternatural knack for distilling her diverse work into memorable language. Over the decade-plus she’s been an active presence on social platforms, her refrains that “hope is a discipline” and “prison is not feminist” have become movement aphorisms that travel far from movement spaces. But Kaba, who posts as @prisonculture, is also able to move people to act: She has raised thousands of dollars for abortion funds and bail funds and documented her co-creation of a mutual aid project housed at the New York bookstore Bluestockings. Recently, she organized For the People, a leftist project in response to the attacks on public libraries, countering book bans and the conservative takeovers of library boards by helping to educate and support people who want a seat on boards governing their own community libraries. She saw Twitter as a way to “uplift local organizing, share resources, and raise funds,” but recently stopped posting—a move that was “a long time coming,” she told TNR—and joined the Twitter alternative Bluesky. A year ago, she started a Substack newsletter, Prisons, Prose, and Protest. “All of these platforms are fraught,” she said, “so we’ll see.”

Alec Karakatsanis

Civil rights lawyer Alec Karakatsanis (@equalityAlec on X) notes that most tweets and Instagram posts assume that people “know way too much about an issue.” Among many high-profile victories, he won O’Donnell v. Harris County—which resulted in a 2019 consent decree ordering Harris County, Texas, to limit bail requirements for nonviolent offenders. Around the same time, Karakatsanis started tweeting distinctive threads “that situated news in the history of, say, bail and mass incarceration.” As people began sharing his threads and approaching him about them, he thought, “How can I make this engagement actually educational?” Karakatsanis acknowledges the increasing difficulty of posting on X, now that it’s harder to embed links. “You have to think about the algorithm … how to frame the first tweet, build suspense, then give people a place to go to learn more.” After the George Floyd protests, Karakatsanis, who founded the carceral reform nonprofit Civil Rights Corps, began critiquing public assumptions and media coverage about crime. Many of his threads, he said, are in response to requests from educators, advocates, and even journalists themselves. He publishes, he said, “in service of a shared goal—to counter a lot of the propaganda around crime.” His tweets gave rise to his Substack newsletter; his 2019 book, Usual Cruelty; and Copaganda, which will be published next year.

Parker Molloy

If Parker Molloy (@parkermolloy on social platforms) has worn many hats over her long career—editor, award-winning media critic, freelance essayist—she’s brought them all to her eclectic and winningly conversational newsletter of political and cultural commentary, The Present Age, which showcases her keen eye and sophisticated critical skills. The Present Age is an excellent destination for people who want to break free from fast-and-loose takes or analysis that gets laden with in-group shorthand. This is part of the plan, Molloy told TNR: “When I’m writing a newsletter, I’m doing so with two distinct groups in mind: journalists and the average politically minded American. If members of each group can read one of my posts and come away with a new outlook on things, I’d call that a success, even if their outlook isn’t a mirror of my own.”

Bisan Owda

Bisan Owda, 25, is a Palestinian community activist and filmmaker turned war correspondent by the inescapable crush of Israel’s war on Gaza. Before the war reached the Gaza native’s doorstep, she worked with the United Nations on gender equality and the European Union on climate change. She also hosted her own TV show, Hakawatia (the Arabic word for “storyteller”), leveraging social platforms to speak on women’s rights in the Middle East. Since October 7, Owda has radically transformed her social media presence, dedicating herself to providing glimpses into the horrors and humanity from the Gazan side of the war front. In TikTok and Instagram videos, Owda (@wizard_bisan1) captures the emotional toll of the conflict—filming children protesting for a cease-fire, the desperation for food amid a systemic starvation, the tent cities built by the displaced, and, against it all, the will of the people to survive and thrive. Even before the war broke out, Owda had a powerful philosophy about the might of social media. “Online content plays a major role in shaping our conception of the world, opinions, and values,” she told UN Women, an agency promoting gender equality. “Through influencing public opinion, social media is also one of the most effective tools to mobilize and advocate for change.” Despite this, The Times of Israel has derided her as a “professional Hamas propagandist.” Still, she persists: “Hey everyone, it’s Bisan from Gaza, I’m still alive.”

Hasan Piker

If you haven’t heard of the Twitch livestreamer Hasan Piker at least once, you might be living under a rock. Piker’s goal is simple, he explained to TNR: “Make left-wing politics more accessible and more easy to digest.” With nearly 2.6 million followers on Twitch alone, Piker (@HasanAbi on Twitch; @hasanthehun on X; and @hasandpiker on TikTok and Instagram) is helping shape an entire wing of the progressive community. Nevertheless, he insists modestly that he is “not a serious figure by any means”: “Honestly, I’m still a himbo at the end of the day.” But he understands the role that the media plays in politics, and he wants to fight back against right-wing propaganda and indoctrination. If he gets even one person to change their mind, he told TNR, that’s a win. “I’ve tried to use my privilege for good as best as I can,” he said. “I think my goal is to get transphobic people to not be transphobic, right? My goal is to get racist people to not be racist.” That’s no short order, he acknowledged, but he’ll take it one stream at a time. Meanwhile, he’ll probably keep calling out Democrats for yelling at progressives in the face of rising fascism.

Jason Slaughter

Cities would be better if they were designed with people in mind, not cars. That is the fundamental belief animating the videos of Canadian YouTuber Jason Slaughter, who runs the wildly popular channel Not Just Bikes. Slaughter cares about the environment, and he laments the pollution that cars cause, but these are not the only reasons he promotes walkable cities and critiques car-dependence. A more basic and strategic rationale is at work in Not Just Bikes, where videos with titles like Why City Design Is Important (and Why I Hate Houston) get millions of views: As Slaughter has put it, his premise is simply that “driving sucks in car-dependent places.” By analyzing cityscapes in an informal and accessible style, and by arguing for the aesthetic and economic benefits of reducing car use as much as the environmental ones, Slaughter’s videos make a compelling case for an overhaul in contemporary urban planning across the globe.

Waleed Shahid

Growing up in post-9/11 Arlington, Virginia, Waleed Shahid’s Muslim parents told him not to talk about politics, because it would land him in trouble. Naturally, he did the opposite, leaping into progressive activism from a young age. As director of communications for Justice Democrats from 2017 to mid-2023, he oversaw Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s meteoric rise, and left just as the group began to falter. Most recently, Shahid, who goes by @_waleedshahid on X, dedicated himself to the Vote Uncommitted movement that rocked Michigan and seeks to do the same elsewhere. “Twitter is primarily a medium where operatives and journalists and organizers live,” Shahid told TNR. “Instagram and TikTok are places where voters and regular people live.” Users of those platforms also skew younger than mainstream TV news viewers; Shahid may have left Justice Democrats, but he remains an important voice informing young progressives.

Adam Tooze

Once a relatively obscure academic, Adam Tooze, a Columbia economic historian, saw his public profile skyrocket during the pandemic, when readers—including a cohort of younger men memorably dubbed “Tooze Bros” or “Tooze Boys”—flocked by the tens of thousands to his Substack newsletter, Chartbook, so named for its heavy use of visual aids. Tooze is credited with popularizing the term “polycrisis” to describe the interlocking and mutually exacerbating crises—political, social, economic, climatic—that have come to define the post-2008, post-Trump, post-Covid era. “The diverse and open-ended format of Chartbook, its regularity, what some call its relentless pace are responses to the intellectual crisis and disorientation that is the polycrisis,” Tooze (@adam_tooze on X) explained. The range of material in the newsletter, in which contemporary art, poetry, and film frequently abut data on interest rates and CO2 emissions, offers both Tooze and his audience a “psychological and emotional release,” he said, from the stultifying quality of much writing on political economy.

Molly White

Molly White daylights as a software engineer in Massachusetts. But online, White is better known as GorillaWarfare, a prolific Wikipedia editor who has written more than 100,000 edits on articles ranging from emo bands to right-wing extremism, fending off disinformation as if it’s a full-time job. While White’s contributions to the site are vast (she has, in addition, served six years on the digital encyclopedia’s arbitration committee), she is also an excellent tech critic in her own right and a reliable skeptic about overhyped arenas in the tech kingdom, offering moments of pause and reflection amid Silicon Valley’s headlong breakthroughs and the moral dilemmas they often occasion. To make sense of the whirlwind, White (@molly0xFFF on X) has developed a website, Web3 Is Going Just Great, that covers developments in blockchain and cryptocurrencies. “When I saw the cryptocurrency industry beginning to position itself as ‘the future of the web’ ... and beginning to advertise to laypeople,” White explained to TNR, “I felt that it was important to expose the dangerous and predatory industry—particularly in a time when I felt the media was mostly buying the hype.” She provides witty commentary by way of her newsletter, Citation Needed, and posts regularly to a YouTube channel. At a time when the stakes of technological development could not be higher, it helps to be able to turn to a writer who doesn’t just cover digital processes but practically lives within them.

Zooey Zephyr

Montana state Representative Zooey Zephyr came to prominence last year, when the state legislature’s far-right Freedom Caucus led the charge to censure her for remarks she made against an anti-trans bill that banned gender-affirming care for minors. Zephyr had told her fellow legislators that she hoped they would recognize the “blood on [their] hands.” It was a sentiment widely shared across the country in a year—like the year before, and the year before that—when more state-level anti-trans bills were introduced than ever before. The right’s outrage campaign backfired, revealing how Zephyr and her rhetoric were being held to a different standard than her counterparts’, and making her a national political figure. Montana is out of legislative session this year, but on social media, Zephyr (@ZoandBehold on X) continues to share news from other states’ similar anti-trans bills, in posts that focus on the legislators and activists working to stop them. She’s part of a broader network organizing against anti-trans legislation—a network moving as fast as bills are introduced and hearings are held—that no single state can shut down.