The New Republic

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The news about the news has been terrible over the last year: CBS News taken over by Bari Weiss; Jeff Bezos pushing The Washington Post opinion section to the right; CNN, The New York Times, and other outlets often choosing to downplay the radicalism of President Trump so they can portray themselves as neutral and objective; numerous local and national outlets laying off reporters. But The Guardian US is the rare positive news media story. The London-based paper is vastly expanding its audience and staff size in the United States. It’s covering Trump honestly and directly. Steve Sachs, managing director of The Guardian US, explains the paper’s strategy in the latest edition of Right Now. The paper’s core journalism is global, independent, and free, and he argues all three are essential.

America will reach a historic milestone at the end of this week as it celebrates its semiquincentennial, but the people that comprise this storied nation have reportedly never felt so detached from its identity.

An AP-NORC poll published Monday (but conducted in April) found that American pride has dropped significantly over the last decade. Negativity surrounding the government has seeped into public perception of the core components of America’s story, such as its history, its foreign influence and impact, and the way the country’s democracy works.

Pride in American democracy has dropped 14 percentage points since 2017, when it was measured at 42 percent. It is now at 28 percent.

The survey also found that a majority of Americans are disillusioned with the American dream: They are not confident in their current financial situations, do not believe they can find a “good job” in the current market, do not believe they have the ability to purchase new homes if they want, and do not believe they’ll have enough money to retire when the day comes.

A Gallup poll, also published Monday, found that just 33 percent of U.S. adults were “extremely proud” to be an American. That’s the lowest rating since the polling group began asking the question in 2001, when 55 percent of the nation’s adult population answered similarly.

Another 20 percent of U.S. adults said they were “very proud” to be an American, indicating that just over half of the country feels a deep sense of pride in their national identity.

The falloff is represented most extremely amongst self-identified Democrats, of which just 14 percent said they were “extremely proud” to be an American in 2026. Right behind them were registered independents, 28 percent of whom offered the same response. Independents, according to Gallup’s data, have experienced a steady decline in national pride since 2004.

Meanwhile, 70 percent of Republicans said they were “extremely proud” to be an American when polled this year—a sharp uptick from when they were asked the question between 2020 and 2024.

President Donald Trump seems to be catching on that people aren’t impressed by his disastrous Great American State Fair.

“Do you think people appreciate what a fantastic job we did in building and operating the Great American State Fair at the National Mall, packed with happy people, and everybody loving it?” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social Monday morning.

“Ask yourself this simple question, ‘DO YOU THINK THAT OBUMA OR SLEEPY JOE BIDEN COULD HAVE DONE IT?’ THE ANSWER IS NO!”

Since Trump’s pet project opened on the National Mall last week, it has been beset by a slate of issues, including technical difficulties and disappointing weather delays. Over the weekend, The New Republic’s Malcolm Ferguson visited the festival in-person and confirmed it was a ghost town, marred by low energy and few attendees.

If you don’t believe us, check out posts from Trump’s allies:

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt posted pictures from the president’s festival on Sunday. Barely anyone else seemed to be around.

Actor Dean Cain, a vocal supporter of Trump, also posted a picture from the top of Trump’s towering Ferris wheel, revealing thin crowds below.

Oh, and the food really is that overpriced.

The Supreme Court ruled Monday to scrap a key protection and allow President Donald Trump to fire whoever he wants, whenever he wants.

In a 6–3 decision along ideological lines, the Supreme Court found that the “for cause” removal provision for the Federal Trade Commission violated the separation of powers, allowing Trump to fire Rebecca Slaughter, a Democratic commissioner on the FTC.

In the process, the high court voted to overturn Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, a 1935 Supreme Court case that established Congress’s ability to limit the president’s ability to fire executive officials of independent federal agencies.

“If anything more is left of Humphrey’s, the Court overrules it,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority ruling.

The decision grants the president broad firing powers across independent federal agencies. However, in a separate 5–4 decision on Monday, the Supreme Court found that the Federal Reserve was a different kind of entity, and blocked the removal of Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook.

In a scathing dissent in the FTC case, Justice Sonia Sotomayor insisted that Congress could limit the reasons for removing the head of a federal agency.

“In holding otherwise, the Court gives the President a power unknown even to the English Crown against which the Founders revolted, elevating him above his once coequal branches by transforming a duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed into a license to act in defiance of those very laws.”

The court previously issued a 6–3 ruling along ideological lines approving Trump’s emergency request to remove Slaughter from the FTC. Trump attempted to fire Slaughter in March, leading the commissioner to challenge the move, as presidents may only legally remove FTC commissioners for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” In July, a federal court blocked Trump’s “unlawful” attempt to remove Slaughter, citing the Humphrey decision, which was upheld by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

The Supreme Court has blocked President Trump from firing Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, preserving the central bank’s independence for now.

In a 5-4 decision Thursday split across ideological lines, the Supreme Court blocked Trump’s attempt to become the first president to remove a Federal Reserve official since it was created in 1913.

Conservative Chief Justice John Roberts and fellow conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined the court’s three liberal justices to rein in Trump.

Last August, Trump declared that he was booting Cook—the first Black woman on the Federal Reserve board—over claims she committed mortgage fraud with two primary residencies. Cook refused to step down, and sued, stating that “President Trump purported to fire me ‘for cause’ when no cause exists under the law, and he has no authority to do so.”

A lower court ruled that Cook could not be dismissed while her case proceeded. The Department of Justice then requested that the Supreme Court stay that ruling, so that Cook could be removed from her position. The Supreme Court refused.

“No matter the precise definition of cause, or the scope of our review of any such determination, the President failed to afford Cook the procedural protections to which she was entitled by statute,” wrote Roberts, who wrote the majority’s ruling.

The case will now return to a lower court, where Cook will fight to save her job. Cook was appointed by former President Joe Biden, and her term was set to expire in 2038.

In a separate decision Monday, the Supreme Court gave the president more power over independent agencies, ruling that Trump had the authority to fire Rebecca Slaughter. The ruling shifted quite a lot of power from Congress to the president, and has ushered in one of the largest changes to the federal government in decades.

This story has been updated.

The Supreme Court on Monday rejected President Donald Trump’s appeal of the E. Jean Carroll verdict, in which he was found guilty of sexually abusing and then defaming Carroll.

This means Trump will still be required to pay Carroll $5 million.

Carroll, a former writer, accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in 1996. When she spoke out publicly against him, he posted on social media that the case was “a complete con job” and a “Hoax and a lie.” In 2022, she sued him for both sexual abuse and defamation, seeking damages, and the jury agreed with Carroll that Trump was liable.

Trump’s lawyers appealed the case, arguing that the jury heard “highly inflammatory” evidence—including testimony from two other women who claimed Trump assaulted them, and the infamous Access Hollywood tape.

The Supreme Court justices did not provide any explanation for why they rejected Trump’s appeal. But, they may consider another similar case. A separate jury found Trump liable for defaming Carroll in 2024, and he was ordered to pay the writer $83.3 million—Carroll’s lawyers argued that a significant settlement was the only way to get Trump to stop attacking her. Trump’s lawyers have said they plan on appealing that verdict to the Supreme Court as well.

However, that case is solely focused on defamation. Carroll’s claims that Trump sexually abused her in the ’90s have been affirmed by a jury, and Trump has now run out of ways to contest them.

This story has been updated.

The Supreme Court has demolished Republicans’ efforts to delegitimize mail-in ballots, upholding a Mississippi law that allows a grace period to count ballots received after Election Day.

In a 5-4 decision Monday split across ideological lines, the court ruled that ballots are valid up to five days after Election Day, so long as they were postmarked before it. Justice Amy Comey Barrett and Chief Justice Roberts were the two conservatives who sided with the liberal justices, and Barrett authored the majority opinion.

Eighteen states and territories, including Mississippi, currently allow for mail-in ballots to be received after Election Day. That includes big Democratic states like California, Illinois, and New York. The ruling also protects states and territories that allow a grace period for ballots returning from overseas, such as for military service members.

“The Constitution’s Elections Clause empowers state legislatures to ‘prescrib[e]’ the ‘Times, Places and Manner of holding’ congressional elections. Congress may ‘override’ most of these choices,” Barrett wrote for the majority. “By ‘default,’ however, ‘responsibility for the mechanics of congressional elections’ belongs to States. As Alexander Hamilton put it, the Constitution lodges power over congressional elections in state legislatures ‘primarily’ and in Congress ‘ultimately.’”

Mail-in voting is a very basic, safe tactic that Trump himself has even used, despite crusading against it as fraudulent. By upholding it, the court has protected voting rights for thousands of Americans voting at home and abroad.

This story has been updated.

The opening weekend of the Great American State Fair in Washington, D.C., was, to put it simply, miserable. It was extremely muggy, with rain pouring down seemingly every hour. A child rolled around in the grass, crying and screaming, “I. WANT. TO. GO. HOME!!!” Creed’s “Higher” blared over the loudspeakers, and a sparse crowd milled about the various exhibitions. The bare-bones setup—flimsy, fake two-dimensional columns that looked like something Wile E. Coyote would run into while chasing the Road Runner—left much to be desired, as America’s 250th anniversary was celebrated with kitsch and ennui rather than grandeur and appreciation. 

More than anything, the event lacked energy—and people. There wasn’t any line or wait to get in. The vibe was more conference-like than celebratory, and the state exhibits varied wildly in effort and presentation. Utah and Guam had particularly involved setups, while others like South Carolina felt totally sterile. Connecticut and Maine shared a space that looked like the waiting room of a pediatrician’s office, while Hawaii and Alaska didn’t have anyone attending to visitors. There were $25 pretzels, an AI George Washington, an interactive “Loyalist or Patriot?” test, and a whiteboard wall full of messages from attendees, one of which read “a felon and predator resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave!!”

“It feels more like a campaign event than a fair,” said M., a D.C resident who didn’t want to be named and was visiting with his wife and son. “There was potential here. I think that the state exhibits they had, some of them were very well done, others didn’t really have much effort put into them.… My four-year-old enjoyed the carousel, but I think that if this was done a little bit more thoughtfully it could’ve been really fun. I’ve been going to state fairs for most of my life, I’m from Minnesota. And so seeing what a really thought-out, well-done state fair looks like—it’s an incredible experience.”   

Bit of a flimsy set up at the Great American State Fair pic.twitter.com/4H1YauQgp4

— Malcolm Ferguson (@malc_ferg) June 29, 2026

“Kind of disappointing they don’t have anywhere to sit, especially if you get food—you’re just standing,” said Virginia resident Anita, as we were being ushered out of the “rain-or-shine” event Sunday afternoon due to the weather. “Right now, we’re being postponed because of lightning. Where are we all supposed to go? We drove two hours, we’re not just gonna go jump in the car. It’s kinda sad there’s not a backup plan.”  

“I think if [Trump] wanted to make a bigger splash, he should’ve gotten Disney, or somebody who knows how to do this,” said Haven, another D.C. resident attending the fair. 

While many states and artists opted out of the event, corporations did not. The presence of companies like Northrop Grumman, United Health Group, Chime, and others was very apparent.

“I understand that people are advertising here, that there’s sponsors,” said a visitor named Ryan. “Coming in and seeing SpaceX, or like Micron was kind of like, ‘Oh, I wasn’t expecting that.’ But it’s America, so maybe I should’ve.” 

When asked about defining American moments of their lifetimes, attendees’ answers were about as bleak as the scene, as almost all the answers included 9/11, Covid-19, and pretty much every war the U.S has been in. “The Revolutionary War, World War II, the Vietnam War, the Iraq War,” said Haven. “It’s a shame you think of war first.” 

Of course, not everyone was underwhelmed by the fair.

“I know how much [President Trump] loves the country, so I’m not the least bit surprised that they’re going all out,” said Nicki Hannigan, in her seventies, who came all the way from Grand Rapids, Michigan, with her husband, Jack.

“There’s not a weed in this grass!” Jack said. “I don’t know if anybody’s noticed that, but that takes some doing. If the administration can do that well, they can do a lotta stuff well.” 

“Well” is relative, as the event has been shrouded in tumult as Trump took over. What was originally supposed to be a weeks-long blockbuster festival to celebrate the nation turned into a politically charged event, where even B- and C-list artists like Flo Rida, Milli Vanilli, Vanilla Ice, and the Commodores dropped out. Soon, nearly a dozen states did too, as it became more and more obvious that Trump was using this event for partisan purposes. As everyone bailed, Trump petulantly declared the fair would instead be kicked off with a rally that he would headline—but even that didn’t get much of a turnout. That timeline of chaos still felt prescient, as the haphazard, thrown-together nature of the event stood out more than anything. And that distracted from what people were actually there for: to celebrate the anniversary of their country.

Some attendees were able to acknowledge Trump’s heavy-handed involvement in the 250th while trying to remain appreciative of what the event represented. 

“I don’t really take [Trump] into consideration. He’s gonna be gone in three years, dead in ten,” said Scott. “He’s not gonna take away my joy of this event. He’s the president, but he’s not God—even though he thinks he is. I wasn’t gonna come to this, but then I thought, ‘Ya know, I’m not gonna let him take it away.’” 

I wish I shared that optimism. 

President Donald Trump and his family continue to dominate the field when it comes to corruption, with two new scandals exposed just within the last 24 hours.

On Sunday, The New York Times reported that the Trump family stands to reap the financial benefits of a deal that gives the U.S. access to one of the earth’s largest reserves of tungsten, a metal needed to make fighter jets, computer chips, and missile warheads.

American company Kaz Resources was awarded $1.6 billion in federal financing to mine tungsten in Kazakhstan. Just weeks after the deal was made, a firm partly owned by Trump’s sons joined up with other partners to take a 20 percent stake in a “corporate entity related to the Kazakhstan project,” the Times reported.

And it’s not just the Trumps—the sons of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who was also involved in the deal, raised capital for one of the project’s investors, a move that is expected to net them millions of dollars.

Between the Trumps and the Lutnicks, one or both families have ties to at least 14 companies that are working with the federal government on mining deals, the Times reported.

And on Monday, CNBC reported that the president bought up to $5 million in shares of Axon Enterprise, a company that makes tasers, body cameras, and other policing software, just two weeks before ICE sought a $220 million contract that only a company like Axon could fill.

Though the ICE notice doesn’t name Axon specifically, the company makes 90 percent of all U.S. tasers, and experts told CNBC that the weapons called for in the notice would only match Axon products. If ICE buys the roughly 17,800 tasers it seeks, it would quadruple its total tasers.

According to a White House spokesperson, there are “no conflicts of interest.” The White House has said that Trump’s investments are managed by independent, third-party firms, and that his children control his assets—as if his children aren’t routinely profiting off of government deals.

The amount which the Trump family has personally profited off of the presidency is unprecedented.

Abdul El-Sayed, a primary candidate for U.S. Senate in Michigan, released an ambitious AI policy platform Monday, joining other progressives like Senator Bernie Sanders in a push for regulation and public ownership. But El-Sayed’s proposal also goes a step further: not just public ownership, but also public governance.

Earlier this month, an AI super PAC spent millions to ensure that Alex Bores, the author of a comparatively weak New York state AI accountability law, wouldn’t make it to Congress. El-Sayed’s proposed changes to the AI industry go far further than Bores’s legislation. When asked whether he was worried about industry political action committees targeting his campaign over his new proposals, El-Sayed shrugged it off. “I’m just not afraid of them or AIPAC or any of the others. What’s another hundred-million-dollar super PAC, I guess?”

El-Sayed’s policy proposal, which he shared exclusively with The New Republic ahead of its release, has three key components: democratic governance of AI, public ownership of AI companies, and safety requirements. His proposal takes inspiration from Sanders’s American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund bill, proposed earlier this month—and like Sanders’s bill, calls for the creation of a sovereign wealth fund to distribute AI companies’ cash into Americans’ pockets. Sanders envisions establishing that via a one-time 50 percent tax on the country’s biggest AI companies, generating an estimated $7 trillion for social safety net programs, plus a yearly dividend for Americans. El-Sayed proposes using that money to fund education and job training, increase unemployment benefits, and boost small business loans.

“I love the senator’s point that we need to own the outcomes of this, in part because it is our data and our knowledge that went into creating it,” El-Sayed said about Bernie’s proposal. They both reason that, since AI has been trained on human writing, research, and collective knowledge, it is a good that belongs to all Americans. “But I think the ownership part needs to go a step further, because we also need some control,” El-Sayed added.

To get that control, he proposes democratic governance of AI companies. He proposes that frontier AI labs be chartered as public benefit corporations, legally mandating them to balance public interest with profit margins. Additionally, he suggests that a majority of board seats at these companies should be democratically elected or publicly appointed, rather than selected by shareholders. And, importantly, he calls for major tech companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta to divest from frontier AI companies. El-Sayed also recommends the establishment of a Food and Drug Administration–style agency to evaluate models before they’re deployed, a ban on AI-generated political media, and requiring companies to work with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Health, and Federal Emergency Management Agency to protect against biosecurity breaches.

El-Sayed’s breezy response to TNR’s question about possible industry retaliation—“What’s another hundred-million-dollar super PAC, I guess?”—references the unrelated money that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, has already spent on the race. Through United Democracy Project PAC, AIPAC has spent over $2 million to support one of El-Sayed’s opponents, Representative Haley Stevens, who is the Democratic establishment’s favored candidate. El-Sayed has repeatedly criticized both the Israeli government and AIPAC’s influence in politics. El-Sayed is also facing State Senator Mallory McMorrow, though polls suggest the race is largely between El-Sayed and Stevens.

McMorrow released an AI policy proposal last month that focuses on creating a professional apprenticeship program funded by a token tax, which would charge by the number of tokens used (tokens are the basic units of data that AI models use). Stevens has not released an AI policy plan.

Despite a broad consensus among voters that politicians should regulate the AI industry, few bills have actually been passed. Following AI industry super PACs’ massive spending to defeat Alex Bores in retaliation for the RAISE Act, some feared politicians might become even more reluctant to try.

El-Sayed is hopeful that American voters are ready to push back against money in politics. “We live in an era right now where people are really smart to the old system of money coming in to buy elections. They see the wool being pulled over their eyes and they don’t like it,” he said.

He also doesn’t think politicians have the luxury of time when it comes to regulating AI. “We need to act yesterday,” he said, “and at best, we can act tomorrow.”

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 29 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

The saga involving Donald Trump’s Reflecting Pool renovation is getting stranger and darker. Federal prosecutors are now saying they’re aware of citations that have been issued to the supposed vandals that, according to Trump, have sabotaged the renovation, but no details and no records of any kind are being released.

Meanwhile, Trump is rambling in a truly crazed way about this, describing the people who have received citations or have even been arrested as enemies of our country. This is really taking on the cast of an unhinged tyrant, and while it’s tempting to laugh at the story, there’s something about it that signals a profound degradation that’s underway.

Former federal prosecutor Ankush Khardori has been writing well about how Trump has been degrading the rule of law and arguing that we need to be thinking now about how to address that down the line. So we’re working through all this with him. Ankush, thanks for coming on.

Ankush Khardori: Thanks for having me.

Sargent: So we know very little about this right now. Trump is very angry that the Reflecting Pool has gone off the rails. There’s been the algae and the peeling paint. Trump has posted on Truth Social that six people have been arrested and seven others have gotten citations, some he says for cutting a 350-foot gash in the pool’s sealant with a knife or with razors.

But there doesn’t seem to be any clear evidence of these arrests. Ankush, this has gotten truly weird, hasn’t it?

Khardori: Yes, this is quite strange. Ordinarily you would expect a little bit more clarity from the federal government in a situation like this.

Sargent: You sure would. And there’s one guy we know of who says he’s gotten a citation—the former Olympic canoeist David Carter Hearn. He’s 67. I believe there’s another woman who’s been quoted saying something similar, that she got a citation or was temporarily detained.

I mean, a 67-year-old former Olympian who was biking in on the National Mall doesn’t seem like an Antifa vandal, does he?

Khardori: No. This thing seems like it’s gotten quite out of hand and that federal law enforcement, the Park Police in particular, seem to have been dispatched to preserve the president’s ego, I guess.

Sargent: Can you talk about that a little? In other words, you think that maybe the park police were in some sense directed to find something wrong out there?

Khardori: It kind of seems like they were directed to watch things very, very closely and to behave in a way that they ordinarily wouldn’t.

Sargent: Right. And we should just clarify for people that the Reflecting Pool is on the National Mall. It’s in front of the Lincoln Memorial. And that’s why the Park Police, I guess, have jurisdiction or something. But here’s where it gets murky. It gets really murky here.

The New York Times just got a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s office in Washington, which handles prosecutions in D.C. And all they said was, we are aware of citations being issued, meaning by the park police. But the U.S. Attorney’s office provided no specifics, no number of people given citations. Here’s how the Times put it: “No records of arrests or citations have been produced by the administration or law enforcement officials to support the president’s claims.”

Ankush, he said six people were arrested and seven people were given citations for serious vandalism. And they’re not putting out anything about this, the Washington office of the U.S. Attorney’s office. What on earth could this possibly mean?

Khardori: Look, my first suspicion is that they don’t want to put out information that would contradict the president’s claims about what’s happening there. Because bear in mind that the U.S. Attorney’s office in Washington, D.C., under Jeanine Pirro, has been more than happy to speak publicly on pending matters when it serves the administration’s preferred narrative.

I think the most prominent example that comes to my mind is when they arrested the sandwich guy. Jeanine Pirro put out a video taunting him. Now, that video is deeply hilarious for the wrong reasons for her in hindsight, since they totally flopped on that case—they couldn’t even get a misdemeanor conviction on the guy.

But of course, that’s just to say that when there’s a thing of public interest to them where they want to produce information and make a show to the public, they will absolutely do it. So we should infer that the facts would not reflect well upon them if they were being forthright about them.

Sargent: It’s such a good point. The U.S. attorneys have been willing to bend over backwards to support even the most tenuous and ridiculous things that Trump wants to make true. And here he is out there saying there have been six arrests, seven citations or whatever, and now they’ve just gone completely quiet.

I guess, if I understand you correctly, you think that if they were to say in some form on the record, here’s what’s actually happening, all of a sudden the Trump claims about these arrests would fall apart, right? In other words, Trump got it into his head somehow that there were six arrests and now nobody wants to contradict the despot. Is that the basic likelihood here?

Khardori: Well, I think more than about the numbers, it’s about what the arrests would have been for, right? Because Trump has been claiming that there’s been this serious vandalism, the gashes through this covering or whatever, and that should be readily provable—whether there were arrests or citations for that.

So just to give you and your listeners a sense of what should be at hand for the government to produce if they want to: the citations are just tickets usually, right? So they’re in the possession of the park police, who maintain their half of the ticket. They have to be provided to the federal government eventually, when the people show up in federal court, and they can be provided or summarized at any point in time after the citations have been issued.

So the park police can give this information to the U.S. Attorney’s office. The U.S. Attorney’s office can ask for it at any moment and provide it to the public—when the citations are for, what the citations were issued for. All readily available information if they wanted to make it public.

An arrest connotes something different, right? Now, I don’t know if they’re actually properly dividing these things up, whether they have the numbers right, the buckets right. An arrest, however, connotes an actual physical detention of some sort—whether it’s an arrest on a complaint, an arrest just in plain view, and that they have to show up at a later date on something like a criminal complaint. An arrest could happen if there’s an indictment, but it doesn’t seem like anything like that has happened in this context.

Now, in either of those contexts that I’ve just described—whether it’s complaint or indictment—there’s paper that is produced for the public and for the defendant about what the arrest was for and about, right? We don’t have secret court proceedings. We’re supposed to have court proceedings that make these things available to the public.

So none of this needs to be a secret. The government could produce this information easily if they wanted to.

Sargent: And I think reporters have been beating down the doors of both the Washington office, the U.S. Attorney’s office, and of the park police saying, provide us with evidence, tell us what is happening here. And they’re getting little to nothing back.

I’m really taken with your point about these secret arrests. We don’t know that anything like that happened here. In fact, there may not have been any arrests at all. But it’s really got that vibe, the situation, where all of a sudden stuff is really proceeding under cover of darkness in some sense. I mean, it’s literally proceeding under cover of darkness, right?

Khardori: Yeah. Well, look, we know very little. And I think broadly speaking, there are two possibilities. One is the worst-case scenario, which would be, to your point, the secret arrests—arrests where the details are not being processed in the courts correctly or made public correctly, in the ordinary fashion.

The other, which is my suspicion candidly, is that they’re withholding this information because if they were to make it public, it would contradict the president’s claims about what’s actually been happening at the pool. He’s got this theory that there was this vandalism, and now he’s trying to sort of hang all of the messiness around the pool around this vandalism.

There’s just not—I haven’t seen any evidence that this actually happened. And the most readily available evidence would be to produce arrest records for it—a criminal complaint, a citation, whatever. And my operating hypothesis is that this information is not being produced to the public because it would not support the president’s claims about what’s been happening.

Sargent: And Trump is very visibly invested in these claims. Let’s listen to something Trump said about the situation. Here he’s talking about this 350-foot gash that he says the vandals cut in the sealant of the pool. Listen.

Donald Trump (voiceover): They tried to destroy it. They cut it up with a box knife and tried to destroy it. And it’s in great shape now. They’re terrible. They’re vandals. They’ve caught six, I guess, maybe more. They’ve got others in line to be caught. But we just inspected it. We’ll fix it right after the Fourth of July. Got to let the water out, just fix it. But we caught—they would cut it and they would grab this very expensive and very good material, totally waterproof, and they rip it. These people are sick. They ripped a scar 350 feet long through the side of the reflecting pool. These are the people we’re dealing with. These are the people that want to destroy our country.

Sargent: Now, someone with the National Park Service has said in a court filing that there was some kind of cut to the sealant, but it’s not clear what evidence the Park Service has, according to CBS. And critically, I think Trump is saying here that the vandals who have been arrested are basically enemies of the state.

What do you make of what you heard there, and this business of there being a filing that the National Park Service put in saying there was some kind of cut?

Khardori: Look, maybe there was some kind of cut. But—by the way, I think the number of feet he’s been using has also grown as he’s been telling this story more and more. I think it was like 200, then 250, now I guess we’re up to 350.

Look, I don’t believe him. I’ll just be honest, I don’t believe him. And at a minimum I’m unwilling to take his word for it. And I will not take his word for it unless and until the government produces records from the criminal system that would back it up. And thus far they’re not doing that.

And what I infer from that, as I just said, is that if they were to produce it, it wouldn’t corroborate the president’s claims. It would be extraordinarily embarrassing. And it would reflect very, very poorly on him, because either he has fabricated this claim or he’s incapable of sorting truth from fiction. Maybe he was told this and doesn’t know it’s false. All of the possibilities are just different forms of bad.

Sargent: Yes, I think that’s an essential point about this, because if you listen to Trump talk about this topic, it’s now clear that he’s grown quite obsessed with it. And he has turned it into a matter of intense public interest by talking about it all the time.

This is the president of the United States who’s kind of toggling back and forth between talking about war in the Middle East and talking about deep 350-foot gashes that he thinks were cut in his reflecting pool. And so this is what I find troubling here, given that we really need to know what the hell he’s talking about—whether there’s any kind of reality to this at all. You’d think the government would be forthcoming, but they’re not. That’s what I don’t get about the situation.

Khardori: I agree with you. Right. And that’s why I draw the inference that I do about it.

Sargent: Well, let’s step back and talk about the big picture. You did this very good piece for Politico laying out the extent of the degradation we’re seeing to the Justice Department and to the rule of law. Can you just recap that big picture case for us?

Khardori: Gosh. Yeah, I think in some ways the degradation of the Justice Department has been underappreciated. We have seen this administration really aggressively shift law enforcement priorities away from what we typically associate with high-operating federal law enforcement to what they basically call street crimes in many respects. That’s been a massive shift.

So that means there’s less prosecuting of public corruption, less prosecuting of financial fraud, white-collar crime, all that sort of thing. All that is being borne out from data and reporting.

But what has happened also within that framework is that the professionalism and the comportment of the prosecutors in the department has just dramatically declined. A lot more people have left than I anticipated would leave voluntarily, right? There were a lot of firings, but most of these people left voluntarily, the prosecutors.

And the staffing at these offices—the U.S. attorneys are unqualified often, and they’re making major mistakes. And you’re seeing prosecutors in these cases, some of the more high-profile ones, like the Broadview Six case out of Chicago, making extraordinary missteps in their cases, engaging in what we would ordinarily describe as intentional or unintentional prosecutorial misconduct.

And I’ve spent—at least I’ve been thinking about this the last year—a fair amount of time thinking about, well, what’s happening in Washington, D.C. But I think we have underappreciated what’s going on in the U.S. attorneys’ offices, which is, these major metropolitan jurisdictions where the U.S. attorneys’ offices are vitally important. Manhattan, Northern Virginia, Chicago, LA, Miami, all of them.

In these you’re seeing really, really bad conduct on the part of prosecutors, shoddy cases, grand jurors refusing to indict cases at a level we have not seen before. And critically, we’ve seen a fair number of judges in these jurisdictions saying to line prosecutors, what you’ve done here is inappropriate, and you’ve totally cratered the credibility that your office has earned over the decades.

Sargent: Well, a big part of the story, of course, is Donald Trump essentially turning DOJ into an instrument to go after his critics.

Khardori: This is very much a department that is operating under Trump’s thumb. And what we have seen, as you alluded to, is a series of politicized investigations and prosecutions, including the indictments against Letitia James and James Comey that got thrown out because the prosecutor, Lindsay Halligan, another Trump sort of private lawyer, was improperly appointed to the position. And she was improperly appointed to the position because the actual prosecutor who held the position was unwilling to indict the cases, and the career prosecutors were unwilling to indict the case.

So they indict cases, the cases are silly, then they get thrown out. They have since come back with a new indictment against James Comey for his seashells, in the “86 47” business. So, you know, James Comey the seashell scoundrel or whatever. I mean, that seems like a ridiculous case.

There was an effort to prosecute six members of Congress who put out a video telling members of the military—reminding them, in their words—that they should be disobeying illegal orders. Now, setting aside the wisdom of that video, there is nothing illegal about it.

And prosecutors, again under Pirro—the same office that is now not giving us the information on these arrests at the mall—took a case to the grand jury and got zero votes to return that indictment against those six members. I cannot even begin to tell you how remarkable that is.

A high-profile case involving high-profile defendants, which presumably is attracting the highest level of attention within the U.S. Attorney’s office—getting zero votes from a grand jury. I’ve actually never heard of an indictment of any kind getting zero votes in a grand jury. Any kind. And so for it to have—I mean, it’s just remarkable. And it tells you that this was an absolute piece of junk. I use a different word in another setting, but an absolute piece of junk.

And so there’s that case, but just to a slightly broader picture as we’re talking here today, John Bolton has pled guilty to mishandling classified information. A lot of people put that under the rubric of a revenge prosecution, because the motive of resurrecting that case does appear to have been because Trump hates John Bolton. But it also appears to have been the case that John Bolton did the thing he’s accused of. So we do have to keep that possibility in our mind.

But I kind of suspected Bolton did it, actually, when the first reporting came out, you know what I mean? I was like, I kind of think that of the cases, this is the one that maybe they’re going to get a conviction on.

But no, for the most part, it’s been a series of very, very aggressive politicized prosecutions. I was just talking about the big names, but I would place the Broadview Six case, the Chicago case involving protesters, as also a politicized prosecution, right? Political motives, political interests, and a deeply politicized process that produced a wildly embarrassing outcome. The government had to dismiss the case itself.

Sargent: Is it fair of me to say that in some basic sense, what we’re seeing from these prosecutors right now—their refusal to level with the public about this, their willingness to, I guess, keep a sham going in order to protect the despot from embarrassment—is that in some sense another form of corruption and degradation?

Khardori: Yeah. Yes. Yes. I think when you have the president going out saying that criminal conduct has occurred, and you’re not producing readily available information either to back it up or information that you believe would contradict it—yes, this is not appropriate and it’s not leveling with the public. That’s not how cases ordinarily proceed. You don’t normally have the president talking about that.

Once that has happened, you’ve hit a very, very tiny subset of criminal cases where, yes, the public expects and deserves an accounting of what has happened. And there’s this too-oft-repeated notion that the government only speaks through its filings—it’s not really true.

When there are public cases, cases that are of significance to the sitting administration, the Justice Department is more forthright. They produce more material. They make themselves available to answer questions, they provide documents. That is what the government does when there is a criminal prosecutorial effort that they want the public to know about and pay attention to. And this seems like, if Trump had the facts to back him up, this would be one of those.

Sargent: Well, there you have it. Where do you think this is going to end up? I gather that in your interpretation of events, at some point, because people will have to have their moment in court—because we still have that as part of our legal system—when that happens, maybe we’ll see that there were no actual arrests, or we’ll see that these 350-foot cuts maybe didn’t exist or were something made by construction workers. I don’t know. How do you anticipate it unfolding in a practical sense at this point?

Khardori: I think it’ll kind of fizzle out, actually, is what I suspect. I mean, of course people like you and me will want to see how this actually unfolds, just to complete the record, so to speak. But I think the government’s move here is kind of just to hope that people stop paying attention. Trump will be the biggest obstacle to that. You just kind of go away quiet, hope it just kind of fizzles out. Because eventually, if they’ve issued citations, people will have to show up.

But usually this is just money. We’re talking about tickets, right? Like a hundred bucks, whatever, it was 75 bucks, I don’t know. And assuming that there were actual arrests of any consequence, that will become public at some point too. Thus far, that has not happened.

So I expect that one way or another, we will get clarity, even if it’s by omission. And I remain very skeptical. I just—I don’t believe the president. I’ll just say it forthrightly. I don’t believe the president about this gigantic gash. Maybe there was some small little thing. He’s blown it out of proportion, or someone else has lied to him and he’s just running with it. I don’t know.

I don’t have to tell you—after the 2020 election, we all learned the man is capable of zeroing in on a lie, hewing to it tightly, and then persuading a large number of his supporters that it’s actually true. And it seems like he’s kind of trying to run the same play here, except it’s lower stakes, so to speak, but the same modus operandi.

Sargent: And by the way, he persuades himself that something’s true and then all bets are off and it just stays true no matter what. And the entire world needs to sort of bend itself around that.

Khardori: I think there’s a point at which—and I think we’re maybe there on the 2020 election—he loses the ability to tell the difference himself, which is very disturbing.

Sargent: I think that’s exactly right. And I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that no matter how hard the Justice Department tries, it’s not going to be able to protect Donald Trump from embarrassment at the end of the day here. Ankush Khardori, great stuff. Thanks so much. Really appreciate it.

Khardori: Thanks for having me.

Two versions of history began when, one fall night in 1957, a two-stage rocket lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome and deposited a Soviet satellite called Sputnik into orbit around Earth. The first version is the one that is well-known: the grand romance of a terrestrial species bounding out of its cradle, the sharpening of America’s own hunger for this scientific adventure, the astonishing realms of knowledge bequeathed to us by the Space Age. The alternate history casts the space race, first and foremost, as a surly, selfish contest for military and ideological supremacy.

The prospect of being snooped upon from space by the Soviets got the Americans worked up enough to accelerate the development not only of Explorer 1—the first U.S. scientific satellite, launched in January 1958—but also of the Corona program of spy satellites. Just as worrying for the Eisenhower administration was the rocket on which Sputnik rode: an R-7 Semyorka, the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile. (Edward Teller, who helped build the hydrogen bomb for the United States, described the news of Sputnik as “a technological Pearl Harbor.”) If you could put a satellite on the R-7 and send it into orbit, you could also put a nuke on it and send it to Chicago. The Russians had set a precedent, Eisenhower’s advisers insisted in a closed-door conference; the United States, too, could and should lob missiles into outer space. Moscow was surreptitious and scheming in its own way. To dupe the Americans, the spaceport referred to as the Baikonur Cosmodrome was, in fact, nearly 200 miles southwest of the mining town of Baikonur. These cold warriors had not so much thoughts as afterthoughts of science.

All narrators of the Space Age as a sordid geopolitical competition will invite several accusations. That they’re narrow- and mean-minded, so intent on sweating the politics that they’re unable to cherish the scientific advances—not to mention the glorious vistas of our universe—that our spacefaring has brought to us. That they’re Luddites. That they’re too idealistic, too eager to believe that we would have reached the moon when we did even without the pants-on-fire urgency of Cold War militarism. Or that they’re not idealistic enough, because they aren’t able to imagine the egalitarian space bound future that will rescue us from our ramshackle present.

These charges hold varying levels of merit. You’d certainly have to be staggeringly cussed, for instance, to dismiss the images of Saturn’s rings captured by the Voyager and Cassini probes, or the truths that space telescopes, picking up cosmic microwave background radiation, revealed about the age and shape of our universe, or just the daily conveniences of GPS, memory foam mattresses, and runners’ Mylar blankets that have spun out of space missions. The clear-eyed will see, on the other hand, the utter hokum that is the space utopia now hawked to us by a handful of libertarian billionaires. They will also spot the bright, continuous line that connects the space race of the twentieth century to that of the twenty-first. Just as scientific universalism was once used, at least in part, as a cover for the power struggles of the Cold War, today’s techno-libertarian drive outward into space cloaks a steroidal American urge to impose its will upon the world. The signs can be read through the history of space exploration, right up into Artemis—the recent lunar mission hastened along by Donald Trump’s vanity, his desire to “never be second,” and the plot to “establish U.S. dominance on the moon.” It’s futile to deny that we got the Space Age we got because one country grew drunk on capitalism and is still zealous about defending its mythic exceptionalism beyond the literal ends of the earth.

For David Ariosto, the author of Open Space, that defense must be led by U.S. companies, with an aim to grab their share of space before China does. Ariosto describes himself as the founder of a “strategic communications and intelligence firm redefining how organizations navigate the space frontier,” and while his book is scattered and incoherent, it is revealing in one way. In being thoroughly and constantly obsessed with what China is up to, Ariosto reveals the id of America: its paranoid lust for military and industrial preeminence, its self-regard, its delusion that the future belongs to no other nation. During his first spasm of panic about China, which comes as early as the second page of the prologue, Ariosto writes that “we” ought to “acknowledge that it is wiser to have trusted stewards at the table than to surrender control to those who may do us harm.” It’s uncertain whom he means by “we,” but he leaves no doubts that the stewards should be Americans—or American corporations.

This clumsily posed binary choice has a rich heritage. In the “battle that is now going on around the world between freedom and tyranny,” John F. Kennedy told a joint session of Congress in 1961, the time had come “for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key to our future on Earth.” It was almost existentially important for humanity to see that the American system—or the Soviet system, as the case may have been—was the best to grasp the universe, and also to weaponize it en route. Again and again, the space programs of the two Cold War antagonists were waylaid or warped by the priorities of their militaries. When, in the late 1940s, the Soviet engineer Sergei Korolev wanted to propose building a satellite, his superiors, wary of subversive talk, warned him to back off. Practically as soon as satellites confirmed the existence of the Van Allen belt, a zone of charged particles high above the atmosphere, the United States began detonating nuclear bombs within it, trying to generate enough radiation to disrupt the mechanisms of Soviet warheads. Both Yuri Gagarin and John Glenn rode to space on ICBMs; so useful was NASA to the Pentagon, the political scientist Daniel Deudney writes in Dark Skies, that “Lyndon Johnson claimed the space program had saved ten times as much as it cost by reducing arms expenditures.”

The Pentagon wanted the space shuttle to be designed so that it could fly over Soviet latitudes, release a spy satellite or capture one, and then return to its launchpad after a single orbit. As a result, the wings had to be shaped differently, the cargo bay had to be enlarged to hold the bigger reconnaissance satellites that were in the offing, and the spacecraft itself grew heavier. When the shuttle lagged behind schedule and ran over budget, Jimmy Carter kept funding it in the hope that it could be used to check up on the Soviets, to see if they were sticking to the terms of arms-limitation treaties.

In the Reagan era, NASA’s scientific funding shrank, even as the Strategic Defense Initiative, which relied so heavily on space-based missiles that it was nicknamed “Star Wars,” received more and more money. In 1986, when NASA’s entire budget clocked in at $7.4 billion, Reagan asked Congress for $5.4 billion for Star Wars alone. And then, when the Cold War petered out—when the United States felt it had won, when history ended—America’s space adventurism deflated. To be sure, there was serious and excellent research conducted aboard the International Space Station and by observatories on the ground and in the sky. But the once-frantic ambition to push ever upward seemed to fall in America’s priorities when there was no burning strategic or military objective to tether the space program. Net-net, Deudney writes with provocative boldness, “the consequences of what has actually happened in space are much less positive than space enthusiasts and many others believe.”

It can’t be total coincidence that the U.S. space sector revived around the dawn of another rivalry of great powers and their clashing ideologies. Beijing didn’t offer tactful euphemisms for its aspirations. Ye Peijian, the head of the Chinese lunar exploration program, said of the moon in 2019: “If we don’t go there now even though we’re capable of doing so, then we will be blamed by our descendants. If others go there, then they will take over, and you won’t be able to go even if you want to. This is reason enough.” This kind of directness has been the rhetorical equivalent of the R-7 rocket: a license to freely frame the new space race as a tussle for control and wealth.

If Ariosto is any measure of the U.S. space industry today, everyone has an anxious eye turned eastward. When he suggests that space has become a “gatekeeper to humanity’s AI-driven future, offering solar energy, abundant resources, and natural cooling”—a thorough deromanticization of the universe if there ever was one—he frets in the very next sentence that China has surged ahead in batteries, solar cells, rare earths, robotics, and quantum technologies. An Iranian-born space entrepreneur working in the United States tells Ariosto that he wants to “ensure the Chinese never surpass us in space technology.” If the high seas might be read as an analogue to deep space, Ariosto writes elsewhere in the book, China signed the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea but then showed its willingness to ignore the treaty whenever

it saw fit. (He neglects the fact that the United States has refused to sign up to UNCLOS, just as it has rejected treaties that ban nuclear testing, act against climate change, and recognize the International Criminal Court.) In detailing how satellites might help build “digital twins”—real-time models—of practically anything on Earth’s surface, he points out that the notion raises “major questions of privacy.” He means, of course, not the capacity of governments to intrude into the lives of their citizens, but the possibility that China could obtain critical insights into Western infrastructure.

Ariosto devotes two whole chapters to China’s construction in Argentina of a ground station to support its space missions; he is allowed to visit the facility, he watches scientists and engineers at work in their labs—and then he seems to hint that the station is likely to have been set up to intercept U.S. electromagnetic signals. (Las Lajas, the town in the Andean foothills where the Chinese built this complex of buildings, is thousands of miles from the continental United States—much too far to eavesdrop on the president’s cell phone calls.) It’s never wise to be too credulous of the subterranean motivations of great powers, as the United States itself has taught us again and again. But Ariosto’s manner implies that, for Americans, space wouldn’t be worth a second look if they weren’t mightily alarmed about China’s interest in it. When he describes Apophis, an asteroid that will pass uncomfortably close to Earth in 2029, I half-expected him to urge America to load it with explosives before the Chinese can make a move.

For that is really what Ariosto thinks it will mean for the United States to excel in space: weaponize better, extract more, and colonize faster than anyone else. In this, he resembles most of the Americans he speaks to and writes about—even Barack Obama, who in 2015 made it legal for U.S. companies to own minerals and other resources found in space. The act may well violate the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which banned governments from claiming sovereignty over any celestial body. But the flag bearers of the modern space race must view the 1967 treaty as part of a brief and regrettable infection of idealism in the American establishment. They certainly regard that establishment as not being aggressive and cutthroat enough in its extraterrestrial pursuits. (One of Ariosto’s sources, deciding that words really hold no intrinsic meaning, ascribes the laggardness of the United States in the 1960s to the “socialist paradigm” of the time.)

Today’s space titans—including those in China—plan to avoid those old-timey, rookie mistakes. The only reason, really, to send probes to asteroids is to figure out how best to strip-mine them. (“Will we actually land on an asteroid and get these beautiful samples? Probably fucking not,” says the CEO of AstroForge, an American space mining startup, sounding as if he were assessing his chances of rushing a frat. “But do we hope to … show people the price point we’re doing this at is doable? I hope.”) A senior Chinese official envisaged a “special economic zone” between the moon and Earth that might, by 2050, yield $10 trillion in yearly revenue. The Adam Smith Institute published a report arguing that we should privatize the moon altogether, sweetly pretending that the objective is to “turbocharge scientific discovery.” The abject lack of any enforceable space law is a feature, not a bug; SpaceX’s general counsel has said that his company would “move to impose our own legal regime” on Mars. The laissez-faire code of outer space will, it is implicitly believed, engender better civilian technology—which will, in turn, prove useful in preparations for war. For the Americans in Ariosto’s book, this future cannot arrive fast enough. What better way, after all, to champion the free market, the military-industrial complex, the internalized hallucinations of Manifest Destiny, and all the other pillars of the American way of life than to put them to use, nakedly and in concert, in the conquest of space?

Open Space likes to valorize the entrepreneurs it portrays. These aren’t the very grandest names in the business; Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, who coined their wealth in other fields and then spent it on SpaceX and Blue Origin, only transit briefly through the book. They aren’t even the founders of companies in the next tier: the New Zealand-born Peter Beck, for instance, whose Rocket Lab has ferried more than 200 satellites into space, or the trio behind Planet Labs, whose Dove satellites, like manic shutterbugs, photograph Earth from orbit thousands of times a day. Rather, Ariosto takes us to startups striving to cash in on the space race. One company, Lonestar Data Holdings, wants to repurpose the moon “as a kind of off-world backup for Earth’s data.” Ariosto suggests that the eventual result of a lunar mission launched by another company, Intuitive Machines, will be the mining of the moon for iron and titanium. A third, D-Orbit, wishes to take apart old satellites and recycle their parts for profit.

The men—usually men—who lead these companies wear the heroic sheen not of philosophers at the frontiers of knowledge but of accountants toiling over their P&L statements. As a habit, in describing these endeavors, Ariosto will say: “Yet, admittedly, the path forward will not be easy” or “Turns out, it wouldn’t be easy” or “Of course, it wouldn’t be easy.” (Once, to change things up, he writes: “Failure was a very real possibility.”) Perhaps he intends to signal that he is a realist, a cool and clinical analyst of the state of play. But he offers no satisfying insights into what it means for the space sector to have intersected so neatly with Silicon Valley, and why that even came to be.

One factor behind this unholy marriage is the confluence of economic trends, as Ashlee Vance explains in When the Heavens Went on Sale, a closely observed account of the people and companies propelling the modern space business. Some things got cheaper—consumer electronics that could survive in space, materials for rockets, software—and some people got epic rich. It became possible to build a satellite for $100,000, rather than $1 billion, just when tech magnates like Musk and Bezos grew wealthy to the point that $100,000 was a meaningless sum of money—and also when they believed that they ruled their industry and wished for more worlds to master. They could have improved health care or paid off student debt, but these wouldn’t have been very American things to do. Just like the tech sector circa 2000, space exploration today holds the same promise of titanic and impersonal engineering challenges (“Of course, it wouldn’t be easy”), untold riches for first movers, and an unregulated playground. Aspiring to exploit the cosmos for personal gain is one exponential leap from aspiring to build an online store that crushes every other online store or to build a thinking machine that replaces humans. The hubris of it all, which Vance captures so well, and also the harm-be-damned approach of it all—that is very American. It may be corporations that are running this race, but they’re still direct and rather obvious proxies for national power.

It helps, too, that the tech moguls had, like their predecessors in the space sector, learned to garb their real motivations in do-gooding platitudes. Just as Neil Armstrong claimed to be arriving on the moon for all mankind but was really there for the United States alone, so, too, the pitch decks of Silicon Valley routinely talk about making the world a better place while pledging their loyalty in blood to shareholders. These new pioneers of space expansionism guarantee nothing less than utopia at the other end of the journey. In Open Space, Ariosto points to previous such projects that he deems to have succeeded: The expansion of Western empires, he writes, was driven by fine things like “new financial incentives and stock options [that] spurred entrepreneurial growth.” And the settlement of Mars, he says, might resemble the settlement of Jamestown: with some “tensions” between the early colonists, distant investors, and the English crown. He has left out the racist subjugation and extractive greed of imperialism, and the “tensions” with Native Americans that resulted in their large-scale slaughter. To forestall the possibility of industries ravaging outer space, Ariosto ponders some vague “earthly legal overseer,” but he isn’t very interested in details. It’s too important to dupe the world into thinking that this space mania—into which billions of dollars have been invested—will truly bring about colonies wonderfully low on violence, servitude, and greed, pies in the literal sky.

The tragedy of this space race is that it has left us unable to imagine or craft an alternative one. Because of course it’s essential for humans to know this universe that holds us, not only for what we will learn about the nature of matter, space, and time, but also for the genuine potential of this enterprise to unite us. Nothing about our recent record suggests that we’re even able to come together to combat threats that imperil us right this minute, let alone capable of forming world governments and moon cities that are just and free. If the future of humankind in space is to look any different from the state of humankind on Earth, it can’t be left, by default or out of despair, to the tech firms of Silicon Valley. We need other space programs, other agencies, other men and women to obsess over our role out among the stars. This won’t be easy, as Ariosto would no doubt say—but the moon shot will be worth it.

For more than a decade, right-wing Christian groups have taken issue with the Southern Poverty Law Center, the nonprofit organization founded more than 50 years ago that researches and challenges those it characterizes as hate and extremist groups. The right-wing groups’ grievances have varied, but they tend to boil down to the claim that it’s the SPLC that’s hateful and extreme for labeling other groups that way. Recently it appears that, after an FBI investigation and a subsequent criminal indictment, the Department of Justice has taken the complaints of these Christian right groups seriously. In an April press release, FBI Director Kash Patel accused SPLC of having “lied to their donors, vowing to dismantle violent extremist groups, and actually turned around and paid the leaders of these very extremist groups—even utilizing the funds to have these groups facilitate the commission of state and federal crimes.” The government has yet to prove any of these accusations, but it is eager to keep the narrative going. When announcing the charges, acting attorney general Todd Blanche summed up the case: “The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence.” It appears that the government has sided with the organizations that long populated SPLC’s hate-group lists.

Federal prosecutors have specifically alleged that SPLC defrauded its donors by using their funds to pay members of hate and extremist groups for tips on their activities. These practices are not a secret, least of all to the FBI, with which the SPLC had shared tips. Months before the indictment was made public, Kash Patel suspended any relationship between the FBI and SPLC; after the indictment, Todd Blanche claimed on Fox that SPLC had never shared information obtained from its confidential informants with federal law enforcement. “The Department of Justice is well aware that the SPLC provided helpful information, through the use of its confidential informants, to law enforcement,” said the SPLC in one court filing. “The Department of Justice also knows that these confidential informants helped law enforcement put violent extremists in jail.”

Blanche’s claims to the media are indicative of how the government’s narrative about the case has taken prominence over the legal process. In June, for instance, the Department of Justice sent a superseding indictment to the media before it was filed in federal court. SPLC’s lawyer Abbe Lowell told CBS News that sharing the indictment first with the press was “another example of the government’s troubling and unusual handling of this case.” In a later filing, the government said that “media members erroneously received the draft document.” It all only underscored the fact that what the government said in public showed their intentions more clearly than anything written in the court filings.

Groups that the SPLC placed on its Hate Map greeted the indictment eagerly, as an opportunity to turn public scrutiny back on a group that has long monitored them. Some are going further. At a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee earlier this month, a senior staffer at the Southern Poverty Law Center–designated hate group Alliance Defending Freedom testified that his group, contrary to the SPLC’s characterization, is actually “mainstream.” Ryan Bangert, senior vice president for strategic initiatives as well as an advisor to the president of Alliance Defending Freedom, did not dispute that his organization had done what had warranted the SPLC’s designation: rolling back the rights of LGBTQ+ people by way of social stigma and the law. It is an agenda evident in its interventions at the Supreme Court, such as its 2003 brief arguing in favor of laws criminalizing sodomy, and in the words of its founder, who in 2012 described the group’s mission as a “battle” against “the homosexual legal agenda.”

This legal agenda is hardly mainstream. It wasn’t mainstream in 2003, either, when 74 percent of adults surveyed at the time supported overturning sodomy laws, including 70 percent of those adults who described their political views as “conservative.” But ADF has worked overtime in the years since to remake the courts and the country to serve its Christian nationalist enterprise. (Sometimes, as it did in arguing to overturn the landmark abortion rights case Roe v. Wade, it succeeded.) But in this moment, when the Trump administration has marshaled the Justice Department to serve as the president’s enforcers, ADF may get to have it both ways: casting itself as an innocent victim of hatred for Christian conservatives, and recasting the whole idea of “hate groups” as a variety of fraud. It also appears, based on a new filing last week in the federal case against the Southern Poverty Law Center, that Alliance Defending Freedom may have played a more direct role in the FBI’s recent investigation into the SPLC than was previously known.

The Christian right’s grievances against SPLC go beyond the Hate Map. When ADF’s Bangert testified before the house committee in June, he not only positioned his group as a purported victim of SPLC, but he also called on Congress to “reach beyond the indictment,” to take “critical steps toward dismantling” SPLC’s work, which he called a “shadow censorship regime,” that had “tarred mainstream conservative organization as ‘hate groups.’” The examples of SPLC’s “censorship regime” were thin, and beside the point. Bangert was jumping onto the government’s attempt to unmake SPLC.

Bangert himself has worked for state attorneys general who supported ADF’s mission, such as former Missouri attorney general Josh Hawley (whose wife, Erin Hawley, works for ADF, arguing its failed attempt to ban medication abortion via telehealth in 2024). He also worked for Texas attorney general Ken Paxton (whom Bangert later testified against in his 2023 impeachment trial). He knew what he was doing when he repeated the indictment’s allegation that SPLC had been “funding the racist groups they claimed to fight,” mischaracterizing payments made to informants inside those groups for tips that informed SPLC’s research and publications, and which they also shared with law enforcement. But Bangert quickly pivoted to what he called the “broader story” behind those “shocking allegations.” That’s the story, he said, of “how the SPLC tarred mainstream conservative organizations as hate groups.”

For ADF, it’s not just about refuting the “hate group” label, but casting doubt on the idea that opposition to LGBTQ+ rights could constitute hate. “We’ve been on the SPLC’s hate map since 2016, which is odd given that we reject racism,” Bangert also testified. Given that ADF has been listed for more than a decade, one might think he was familiar with the actual reasons why. “The SPLC lists ADF as a hate group because it has supported the idea that being LGBTQ+ should be a crime in the U.S. and abroad and believes that is OK to put LGBTQ+ people in prison for engaging in consensual sex,” a 2020 story on the SPLC website begins. “ADF has played a role in the passage of religious exemption laws that lead to discrimination against LGBTQ+ people,” it goes on. “ADF is not only attempting to erase transgender people through its litigation and policy work but by deliberately misgendering them in media and on its website.”

For ADF to acknowledge the reason SPLC has designated the group as it did, however, would require ADF to acknowledge that queer and trans people have civil rights, which ADF is dedicated to eroding. It is extremely disingenuous for ADF to pretend that SPLC only labels racist groups as hate groups, but the pretending is strategic: ADF appears to allow the claim that there are “real” hate groups, if only to state that it is not one.

Now, Alliance Defending Freedom has appeared in the SPLC case by name—in documents the government had to hand over. A new filing from the Southern Poverty Law Center made these part of the court record. They point out that a prior investigation into SPLC, opened under Trump’s first administration, continued into the Biden administration, and then was dropped. “The investigation sat closed for approximately four years,” the filing states. “It was suddenly reopened during the Trump Administration at least as early as September 2025. The question before the Court is why.” A letter to Stephen Miller, produced by the government in discovery, could provide an answer.

That letter, which appears to have been sent in August 2025, complains that SPLC, a “biased” and “politicized” organization “unmoored from its original mission,” has “begun placing traditional value and faith-based organizations” on its Hate Map, such as “Alliance Defending Freedom” and “Moms for Liberty.” It goes on to claim that “the SPLC places many groups on its ‘Hate Map’ as a smear tactic solely because they disagree with its radical leftwing ideology.” (They may as well have called it a “homosexual agenda.”)

The Miller letter was signed by the head of Alliance Defending Freedom, Kristen Waggoner, as well as Tina Descovich of Moms for Liberty, Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk, Christian pseudohistorian David Barton, reactionary conspiracy theorist James Lindsay, and the founder of Gays Against Groomers, an anti-trans group that has operated in the vein of Libs of TikTok. Parts of the groups’ letter to Miller appear lightly paraphrased in another document the government turned over: a redacted FBI incident report dated October 24, 2025, not long after the killing of Charlie Kirk and Trump’s directives to investigate the left over alleged “political violence.” As SPLC put it, the FBI incident report reads like a “rehashing” of the letter sent to Stephen Miller by these groups, some of which appear on the Hate List, and were the main ones to complain about it. If groups like ADF protesting their appearance on the Hate Map is what prompted the FBI to reopen an investigation, SPLC contends, then the case wasn’t really about the financial crimes the government alleges. Rather, what provoked the investigation, it appears, was speech that these groups find objectionable.

If that is true, then the case against the Southern Poverty Law Center was at bottom motivated by Christian nationalist groups that want to punish SPLC for accurately describing their agendas. Also, notably, it was SPLC that exposed, based on scores of leaked emails, Stephen Miller’s links with white nationalists, pushing a shared anti-immigrant agenda that dates back to Trump’s first administration. A Department of Justice spokesperson told HuffPo that Miller “had nothing to do with FBI-Mobile’s investigation of the SPLC.” However, the spokesperson also said that the Miller letter “was provided by one of the signatory groups in the initial stages of an investigation of potential criminal law violations committed by the SPLC.” They did not say which group.

We may be hearing more about how this case came about soon, thanks to a whistleblower. The whistleblower’s allegations have not yet been made public, but they were described in an April 30 letter that Representatives Jamie Raskin and Mary Gay Scanlon sent to Aakash Singh, associate deputy attorney general. The congressmembers received reports that Singh “ordered the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Alabama to rush through the indictment of the SPLC despite serious concerns about the strength of the case,” their letter states. Singh had also previously instructed the leaders of each U.S. Attorney’s Office that the president is their “chief client.”

It was perhaps with a bit of authority, then, that at the June House Judiciary hearing where ADF’s Ryan Bangert testified, Representative Raskin called the prosecution of SPLC “a tissue of lies, that will join the pantheon of debunked, fraudulent prosecutions that DOJ has been excoriated for by dozens of judges across the land.” He added, “I predict it will not be long before another federal judge casts this obscene prosecution to the winds.”

If an investigation into the case itself results, we may hear more from Stephen Miller and from the groups on the Hate Map. But we may never learn whether an anti-LGBTQ group—whose founder said of its mission that it aimed to stop “the homosexual agenda,” and which argues major cases before the Supreme Court, sometimes with a sitting senator’s wife making the arguments—also has the influence to wield the Department of Justice against its political opponents. Perhaps ADF is simply fortunate enough to share some enemies with the “chief client” of the Justice Department: the president.

The Supreme Court struck down a Hawaii law on Thursday that forbid concealed-carry permit holders from bringing their guns onto private property without the owner’s express permission. “This regime hobbles what the Second Amendment protects: the right of Americans to carry arms for self-defense as they go about their daily lives,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the court. “We hold that the law is unconstitutional.”

The 6-3 decision in Wolford v. Lopez, which fell along the usual ideological lines, is the court’s latest effort to apply its relatively new history-and-tradition test to state gun-control laws. Along the way, the court raised new questions about what kinds of “historical analogues” can be used to defend gun restrictions—and whether the bigotries of past generations should be a factor.

In 2022, the Supreme Court adopted a new Second Amendment test for lower courts in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen. At issue in Bruen was New York’s restrictive law for granting concealed-carry licenses. In a 6-3 ruling, the court’s conservative majority held that the law violated the Second Amendment because it fell outside the historical bounds of gun rights in America.

Bruen’s history-and-tradition test, as articulated by the court, has two steps. “When the Second Amendment’s plain text covers an individual’s conduct, the Constitution presumptively protects that conduct,” Justice Clarence Thomas explained in his majority opinion. “The government must then justify its regulation by demonstrating that it is consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation. Only then may a court conclude that the individual’s conduct falls outside the Second Amendment’s unqualified command.”

At first, lower courts found themselves applying Bruen to a wide range of long-standing gun restrictions. Different courts also reached wildly different conclusions on when and how to use historical evidence to decide whether a law fit within “the nation’s historical tradition.” Two years years later, in United States v. Rahimi, the conservatives clarified the Bruen test: the government need only identify a “historical analogue” to survive judicial scrutiny, not a perfect match or a “dead ringer.”

After Bruen, states that historically favored greater restrictions on guns rewrote their laws to accommodate the Supreme Court’s ruling. Among those states was Hawaii. One of their changes was to the state’s “default rule” for trespassing. Before Bruen, it was lawful to bring a concealed weapon onto private property that is generally open to the public—restaurants, stores, gas stations, and so on—unless the owner specifically prohibited it. (For brevity’s sake, I’ll just refer to this as “private property” from now on, even though I am not literally referring to all private property in the state.)

Hawaii reversed that presumption: Now it would be illegal to bring a gun onto private property unless the owner had explicitly allowed it. With only a handful of exceptions, the law requires private-property owners to provide “clear and conspicuous signage” that grants permission or “unambiguous written or verbal authorization.” As Alito noted in his opinion, Hawaii also bans concealed carry altogether in a variety of other locations, like public buildings, parks, banks, schools, hospitals, beaches, playgrounds, and so on.

A group of Hawaii gun owners sued to challenge the law in federal court, arguing that it violated their Second Amendment rights by depriving them of the ability to feasibly carry their concealed weapons anywhere in public. The state defended the law by arguing that the individual right to bear arms does not supersede an owner’s right to exclude people from their property. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the state last year.

Since the Bruen decision was announced, lower courts and litigants have sharply disagreed on what counts as evidence of a “historical tradition” in Second Amendment cases. Hawaii, which had a unique path to entry into the Union, cited legal texts from the Kingdom of Hawaii in the early 19th century that strictly limited when and how weapons could be carried in public. This tradition, the state argued, supported Hawaii’s passage of a new default-rule law. Not so, said Alito.

“The Second Amendment has the same meaning in all parts of the United States,” the justice wrote in his majority opinion. “It cannot give way to ‘the spirit of Aloha’ in Hawaii, any more than it can yield to the spirit of the Big Apple (Bruen) or the Windy City (McDonald [v. Chicago]). It applies in the same way to our 50th State (where about 8 percent of adults possess guns) and our 49th State (where the figure is roughly 59 percent).”

In other words, the Second Amendment’s interpretation must flow from British common-law sources and those found in the colonial and early founding era, the court held. (There is an ongoing dispute over how Reconstruction-era sources apply, but I’ll come back to that later.) Hawaii cited those laws as well, pointing to 18th-century statutes in Maryland, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania that restricted gun owners from carrying their weapons in private fields at certain times of the year.

Unsurprisingly, Alito dismissed their value as historical evidence as well. The laws that Hawaii cited, he wrote, “consist almost entirely of laws that prohibited unauthorized hunting of deer or small game on someone else’s private property,” and did not implicate stores, restaurants, and the like. “They had little if any impact on the Second Amendment’s central objective: protecting the fundamental right to self-defense,” Alito claimed. “And their obvious aim was to prevent the distinctive harms and risks associated with unauthorized hunting.”

The three liberals justices disagreed in their dissents. Justice Elena Kagan, writing only for herself, noted that Bruen envisioned that historical analogues might be enacted for different purposes. Both the Hawaii law and the colonial-era laws cited by the state meant to address, in her view, the problems that would come with unauthorized gun possession on private property.

“The ‘how’ is identical: The new law, just like the old ones, sets a default rule against gun carry that a private landowner may reverse,” Kagan explained. “The ‘why’ is sufficiently close. Both sets of laws respond to the dangers and harms that someone with a gun can cause on another person’s property. That the old laws had a special (though by no means exclusive) concern with poaching does not matter.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in a separate dissent joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, took the same view of Hawaii’s historical analogues. She additionally argued that the case should be primarily viewed as a property-law case where the state is owed more deference than a Second Amendment case. Alito countered that Bruen clearly applied, since it commanded judges to apply it in any case involving gun restrictions.

Perhaps the most controversial citation made by Hawaii was to an 1865 law in Louisiana that made it illegal to bear arms “on the premises or plantations of any citizen, without the consent of the owner or proprietor, other than in lawful discharge of a civil or military order.” Alito dismissed the statute because it was an isolated example and not “widespread, well-known, or widely accepted.”

The conservative justices have left open a debate over whether Reconstruction-era gun laws have any weight in the Bruen test. Under the court’s precedents, the Second Amendment applies to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. Therefore, the “original public meaning” that the court claims to seek might naturally take them to the 1860s when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, and not just the 1790s when the Second Amendment was adopted or earlier.

But there’s a complicating factor here: Louisiana did not adopt the 1865 law in a vacuum. Instead, it enacted the restriction as part of what became known as the Black Codes—laws specifically designed to deprive formerly enslaved Black Americans of the fundamental rights that they would otherwise enjoy. In other cases, states have cited founding-era gun restrictions drafted to disarm Native Americans and enslaved people. To what extent does that reflect the “original public meaning” of the Second and Fourteenth Amendments?

In Alito’s eyes, such laws hold no weight. He concluded that the Radical Republicans who drafted and ratified the Fourteenth Amendment intended to protect Black civil rights, including an individual right to bear arms, and that this intent supersedes that of Southern state legislatures. “Unless we put history entirely out of our minds, Hawaii’s claim that this tainted artifact illuminates the original understanding of the right to keep and bear arms cannot be taken seriously,” he wrote.

Alito was not the only conservative member of the court to criticize Hawaii for its choice of historical analogue. Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote a separate concurring opinion where she specifically castigated Hawaii for invoking the Black Codes, which she described as “vile laws,” in a 21st-century case.

“The State seems to think Bruen is a matching game: Southern states enacted broad default rules, Hawaii reasons, so it can do the same today,” Barrett wrote. “But even if Hawaii is right that the how is analogous, it also must identify an analogous why.” She noted that the Black Codes were enacted to “subordinate newly freed slaves,” and that since Hawaii did not have the same intent, the laws did not count as a historical analogue.

It is always a welcome sight to see the Supreme Court condemn the bigotry and discrimination of the past. The majority’s words would also carry slightly more weight, however, if they were more consistent about it in the present. Their condemnation, for example, would have more moral weight if she and her conservative colleagues had not gone out of their way to sanitize Trump’s racist bile towards Haitians as merely a strong, constitutionally permissible critique of immigration in Mullen v. Doe—a case decided on the same day as Wolford.

Alito’s appeal to the intent of the Reconstruction Amendment’s drafters is also laudable. At one point, he cites the Republican Party’s platforms in 1856 and 1860 to illustrate how the Fourteenth Amendment’s drafters meant its protections to operate for certain rights. One can only hope that he and his colleagues show the same deference to the Reconstruction Amendments’ purpose when they decide the imminent case on birthright citizenship next month. It is lamentable that Reconstruction’s lessons have already been forgotten or disregarded by Alito and his allies in cases on voting rights, racial gerrymandering, and insurrectionist disqualifications.

Jackson agreed with her colleagues in the majority that the Black Codes were “ugly” and “racist.” She also argued that the court “cannot have it both ways” by selectively drawing from relevant statutes. Though Jackson was not on the court when it decided Bruen, she criticized its approach to constitutional law in follow-up cases and described it on Thursday as “a grave mistake.”

“Either history does matter, and if so, all potentially relevant historical experiences must be thoroughly examined to determine whether they reflect our Nation’s history and tradition of firearm regulation,” Jackson argued. “Or, it does not, and the Court should just admit that the test it has created is boundless, allowing it to accept or excise any historical analogue it chooses for any reason it prefers.”

That is problematic, Jackson explained, because the court’s original rationale for the Bruen test was to rein in lower courts that were upholding too many gun restrictions. “Of course, the real irony is that the Court’s effort to rein in judicial discretion has resulted in an arbitrary rule that unleashes judges to thwart gun regulation at every turn,” she explained. It is hard to disagree with that assessment, just as it is hard to believe that future Second Amendment cases will not be similarly arbitrary.

A gloomy financial prognosis for Social Security by the program’s trustees could spell a reduction in benefits for millions of Americans in just six years. The cuts to Social Security benefits would come amid changes that already make it more difficult for low-income adults to access key federal nutrition and health programs.

A June report estimated that, barring congressional action, the Social Security Old Age and Survivors Insurance trust fund, or OASI—which includes both retiree and survivor benefits—is expected to be depleted by the end of 2032. Incoming revenue for the program will only be able to pay out 78 percent of full benefits, a cut of 22 percent applicable to current and future beneficiaries.

Around 70 million Americans receive Social Security benefits, the majority of which is paid through the OASI trust fund. If combined with a separate, far smaller trust fund that pays out benefits for disabled workers and their families, the OASI fund could remain solvent for an additional two years—but this would also require action from Congress. The earlier timeline is due in part to the Republican tax and spending law that was approved by Congress and signed by President Donald Trump last year, which reduced revenue going into the Social Security trust fund. Lower expected rates of immigration and births will also contribute to the fund’s depletion.

Social Security is not an anti-poverty program, and the pending bankruptcy of its primary trust fund would affect millions across wealth brackets. But low-income beneficiaries will likely be the hardest hit.

“There are a significant number of Americans who only have Social Security, and so any type of reduction in benefits would have a much more dramatic effect on those who have no other source of income,” said Joel Eskovitz, senior director of Social Security and savings at the AARP Public Policy Institute.

The Republican law foisted onto states a share of benefit costs for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, and Medicaid. It also tightened work requirements and narrowed eligibility for both programs. For SNAP, this includes the expansion of work requirements for able-bodied adults without children, applying to adults up to age 65, where previously people over age 54 were exempt. The new work requirement also removes exemptions for homeless people and veterans.

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, approximately 1.4 million adults between the ages of 55 and 64 receive SNAP benefits. Another report by the Urban Institute found that the Republican law would result in 480,000 families with a member between the ages of 55 and 64 losing their SNAP benefits entirely, while 312,000 would see lower benefits.

The new work requirements for Medicaid are applicable to adults living in states that  expanded the program under the Affordable Care Act. There is not total overlap between the exemptions for SNAP and Medicaid work requirements, further complicating the process of applying for and maintaining both benefits.

For the first time, millions of enrollees between the ages of 55 and 64 will need to prove either that they are working or that they qualify for an exemption, a significant burden that could result in people losing their benefits. According to the AARP, nearly 80 percent of the 4.6 million adults between the ages of 55 and 64 who receive both SNAP and Medicaid benefits reported being either retired or unemployed. For those roughly 20 percent that do work, more than half did not meet the minimum 80-hour-per-month requirement.

Tracey Gronniger, the managing director for economic policy for the advocacy group Justice in Aging, said that the work requirements do not accurately “reflect the disabilities and the challenges that older adults may be facing in terms of age discrimination, or being able to maintain work, or other kinds of health issues.” Meanwhile, given the higher burden of expenses on states, legislatures may choose to cut SNAP benefits or narrow eligibility for the program, as well as slash Medicaid payments to health care providers, both of which would result in people being booted from the program.

Even when they are no longer subject to work requirements, these older adults who have struggled to maintain their benefits may be faced with further economic hardship. Imagine a childless 59-year-old SNAP and Medicaid recipient who must now work 80 hours per month to obtain their benefits. Assuming that this person is able to find a job and maintain employment for the next six years, they decide to retire at age 65 in 2032. That person may no longer be subject to work requirements, but if Congress has not taken action to raise revenue for the Social Security fund, the individual is now receiving payments that have been cut by 22 percent.

For those older Americans who rely entirely on Social Security payments as their only source of income, these cuts would feel like salt in a wound already gouged by stringent program requirements for their other benefits.

“We’re going to see older adults who should be economically secure, who should have these benefits that are helping them to maintain their economic security, instead finding that it’s harder and harder to keep up with costs of health care and shelter and all the other expenses that people continue to have,” said Gronniger.

Once a person reaches age 65, their difficulties in obtaining benefits will not necessarily come to an end. Jessica Johnston, senior strategist for economic wellbeing at the National Council on Aging, noted that SNAP already has low participation rates among eligible adults. In 2023, only 38 percent of eligible adults over age 65 received SNAP benefits. This low number is due in part to significant administrative hurdles and personal reluctance to accept assistance from the government. SNAP participants already need to regularly recertify their benefits, and requiring states to screen for the new requirements and exceptions could further complicate that process.

“We already have an enrollment problem, and so when you add on the number of older adults who might fall off the rolls due to not meeting a work requirement or not understanding new recertification requirements, the likelihood that they will unexpectedly lose the benefit becomes much higher as well,” said Johnston.

There is also a complicated intersection of eligibility for nutrition and health care assistance. In 2022, nearly nine million adults ages 65 and over who were eligible for SNAP were not eligible for the Medicare Savings Program, which covers premiums for qualifying low-income elderly individuals. (Separately, the hospital trust fund for Medicare is expected to be depleted by 2033, with money enough to pay 89 percent of full benefits.)

Johnston said that the assistance offered by SNAP to cover food purchases would not offset rising health care costs—and that these struggles could in turn be compounded by cuts to Social Security.

“A cut to their Social Security benefit is likely going to mean that they have to make even more difficult decisions about whether to pay for housing or for food or for medications,” said Johnston. “We hear from our community-based partners regularly that older adults will come in and talk about cutting pills in half or not being able to afford food that helps them manage chronic conditions, and so a cut to Social Security is only going to exacerbate those types of situations.”

States are already responding to the new limits on SNAP and Medicaid, but there is some time to address the pending bankruptcy of the Social Security fund. There are a few strategies that Congress could employ to keep Social Security solvent, such as eliminating the limit on taxable income. The trust fund largely receives revenue through payroll taxes, but there is a taxable maximum of $184,500. This means that most people earning less than that amount will pay taxes on 100 percent of their income, whereas a person with a far higher salary will only pay taxes up to that $184,500 limit. Rising income inequality has exacerbated the issue, with the fund unable to benefit from higher earners’ pay.

Lifting the cap on the payroll tax has bipartisan support and polls well among Americans, although making any change to Social Security is easier said than done. Other strategies, such as raising the tax rate, increasing the retirement age, or slimming down benefits, would likely be less popular with Americans. But Eskovitz said that lawmakers could not afford to kick the can down the road.

“The quicker Congress acts, the less dramatic the changes will need to be,” Eskovitz said.

So Democratic Congressman Tom Suozzi of Long Island has come out swinging against the socialists. “We are capitalist, not socialist,” reads a letter that The New York Times reports he and 14 other legislators signed and began circulating last week. This went out Thursday, two days after three self-described democratic socialists backed by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani won Democratic congressional primaries in the city.

The letter, which is on the short and vague side, states two broad principles to which the signatories adhere. The first is “growth, competition, and broad prosperity.” “Growth” and “prosperity” are time-honored centrist buzzwords, as they’re hoisted into use to send the message that these Democrats value economic dynamism more than “fairness,” which is a word that moderates fear signals endorsement of excessive statism, although interestingly, the concept is tucked into the first sentence (“We believe in a growing, fair, and competitive economy…”). The second is “safety, security, and human dignity,” under which the letter lists four components: fiscal discipline, a government that works, free speech, and patriotism.

There’s nothing wrong with these things as far as they go. But they don’t go far enough. In particular, there’s one big missing word. I’ll circle back to that, but first, let’s talk about why these democratic socialists are winning in some places.

The first reason is that people are really pissed off at a system they see as totally rigged. Suozzi is roughly my age. He and I grew up in a United States in the 1960s and ’70s that Lord knows had many problems, but that was at least trying to build a robust middle class and was taxing excessive wealth appropriately.

The Gini coefficient is a number that measures economic inequality. Like golf, lower scores are better, and the lowest Gini scores, invariably logged by the Scandinavian countries, are in the mid-20s. The highest is always South Africa, in the low-60s.

When Suozzi and I were toddlers, the U.S. number was fairly high—around 37. Then came the Great Society—the civil rights, fair housing, and other anti-discrimination laws that first brought large numbers of Black families into the middle class, and other anti-poverty programs. The right has sold middle America on the idea that the Great Society—which I’d hope most Democrats today are proud of, but much of which was, as the word is used today, “socialism”—was a failure. But by the 1980s, right before Ronald Reagan took office, the U.S. Gini number reached its lowest point in modern history, 34.7.

Then came Reagan and supply-side economics and the war on the War on Poverty. By the time Bill Clinton took office, the number was north of 40. Today it’s 42 and climbing. We’re worse than Russia and Iraq and about on par with Argentina and Mexico.

People aren’t stupid. They may not know what the Gini coefficient is or who Gini was (an Italian economist), but they know what’s been happening to the country and their money in their bones. And they know how they’re being ripped off by corporate actors, as these hidden junk fees become more and more just a fact of life, especially for working-class people paying rent to private-equity landlords or trying to take their kids to a ball game. So, it’s small wonder that more people are voting for the candidates who are saying most emphatically that they’re going to try to do something about all that—specifically, fighting back against the people who’ve been cheating the middle- and lower-classes for years.

The second reason socialists are winning elections is that the Democratic base has moved well to the left of where it was even just 10 years ago. Early this year, The New Republic commissioned a poll of 2,400 rank-and-file Democrats. We asked respondents to identify themselves ideologically, giving them five choices: conservative, moderate, moderate-to-liberal, liberal, and progressive. There were little descriptions of each, so it should have been clear to all that “progressive” was the left-most choice.

I thought “progressive” was going to finish third. It finished first (within the margin of error): Progressive got 32 percent, liberal 31, and moderate-to-liberal 21. Moderate was way back at 12 percent. Back in the Obama days, moderates were around 35 percent of the party. Indeed, liberal overtook moderate as the top Democratic category only around 2012, according to Pew.

So that’s a huge change. Now it’s true that other polls, which unlike TNR’s didn’t offer five categories, show a higher moderate share, but the overall move leftward by Democratic base voters is undeniable. They haven’t done so because they want the government to take over the means of production. They’re enraged at the way they’re getting nickel-and-dimed by these billionaires who have more and more power, and they want their party to take on that fight, and the democratic socialist candidates are, in most cases, the ones who are being clearest that they would take up that challenge.

Moderates can choose to recoil at that word “socialist” if they want. The branding carries some amount of risk: We have a diverse population and many people who reside here now remember when totalitarian regimes that called themselves socialist ravaged their lives—a far cry from the way socialism is practiced in Canada and the Nordic states (all of which are, or course, capitalist countries at their core). Still, it’s not even clear it’s such a dirty word, at least to Democrats. In our poll, we asked people if they thought the word was a plus or a minus or didn’t matter. Results: plus 31, minus 24, didn’t matter 43.

I’d rather see moderate Democrats try to make common cause with this resurgent left to the extent possible. As recounted in the 2024 book, The Truce, this is a feat that President Joe Biden managed for much of his presidency, so it can be done. I should note that I think the left bears some responsibility for this as well. As I wrote in a long piece back in our March issue, both sides are just too emotionally invested in regarding the other side with suspicion. As political psychologist Drew Westen explained to me in that piece, Democrats tend to discuss politics and policy in a way that emphasizes their differences and not their points of commonality.

Members of Congress form a lot of caucuses and coalitions. It’s telling that to my knowledge, there isn’t one, not one, that tries to bridge the differences between the two sides and highlight some things they agree on. It would be nice if a prominent left leader and a prominent moderate leader formed some kind of coalition that said to America hey, we agree on these X number of things. For starters:

1. That the rich should pay higher taxes, with a top marginal rate somewhere above 40 percent.
2. That Social Security must be made solvent forever, probably by reimposing the Social Security tax above a certain income level (the so-called “donut hole” approach, which by the way polls through the roof).
3. That the minimum wage should be raised to $18 an hour (there’s been a lot of inflation since the Fight for 15) and that Congress should index it to inflation so that it never has to worry about passing increases again.
4. That the expanded child-tax credit enacted in the wake of the pandemic—which as The New Republic’s Grace Segers reported was a historically successful anti-poverty program—should be made permanent.
5. That they will pass laws cracking down on monopoly power.

Doing this would send the almost unprecedented signal to voters and the media that Democrats are less interested in fighting each other than in uniting to pass an agenda that actually improves people’s daily lives. These five positions would signal such a commitment. They should all be completely uncontroversial.

Ah, but that last one … And here we return to the Suozzi letter. It sings the praises of competition. Great. I’m all for it. But what force today in the United States is crushing competition? It’s not the Democratic Socialists of America. It’s not the government. It’s not Zohran Mamdani.

It’s the billionaire class, or “the Epstein class,” if you prefer Jon Ossoff’s acerbic locution. You call yourself a capitalist, Tom Suozzi? Well, monopoly is the most grotesque perversion of capitalism that exists. There’s a reason Adam Smith hated monopolies. Centrist Democrats should familiarize themselves with that history, if they don’t know it.

And this is a telling point on which Suozzi’s letter comes up short. That missing word I alluded to above is “monopoly.” You can’t praise competition without criticizing monopoly. Monopoly kills competition—period, end of story.

But to criticize monopoly is to be willing to make powerful enemies. The democratic socialists—and by the way, in proper historical terms, they’re really social democrats; go Google “difference between social democrat and democratic socialist”—are willing to do this. The centrists are not. And until they are, their happy talk about competition won’t mean much. Rank-and-file Democrats want their party to fight. That doesn’t mean just fighting Donald Trump. It means fighting the powerful interests that are screwing them deeper into the ground every day.

Fareed Zakaria, who I’m pretty sure is not a card-carrying DSA member, made the point forcefully in his Washington Post column over the weekend. Discussing a new book on liberalism by Adrian Wooldridge, Zakaria wrote that liberalism “was once the most radical force in politics. It attacked inherited privilege, monopoly power, censorship, aristocracy, clerical authority, and closed guilds. It was not the ideology of the establishment. It was the battering ram against the establishment.”

That’s what this country needs. I don’t care that much whether it’s called liberalism or socialism. I prefer that it be called liberalism, but if others want to call it socialism, I won’t go into hysterics. The point is that the Democratic Party better do it, or it will lose again in 2028, and it, and our democracy, will die.

Donald Trump has insisted six people have been arrested and many more have been given citations for vandalizing the renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. This allegedly includes carving a 350-foot gash in the pool’s sealant, and in a dark and angry tirade, Trump just described these people as akin to enemies of the state. But The New York Times just obtained a new statement from federal prosecutors. While they confirmed some citations, the Times also reports that administration officials and prosecutors are refusing to provide a single detail about what happened, refusing to divulge anything about who’s been targeted or what their offenses were, and refusing to confirm any arrests of any kind. As former prosecutor Ankush Khardori tells us in today’s episode, this is deeply strange. We discuss why it’s unusual for officials to clam up about such a high-profile claim, how this raises unnerving possibilities about the unhinged despot in the Oval Office, and why it all points to a deeper rot of Trumpian corruption. Listen to this episode here.

Every once a while I encounter a quote that brings me up short and helps reframe how I see the world. Such was the case when I came across this quote by Theodor Adorno as I researched the rise of Nazi Germany and the origins of the Holocaust: “A wrong life cannot be lived rightly.”

Adorno meant it as a critique of life under capitalism, but out of context, I interpreted it to mean that if a person is the wrong sort of life (Jewish, Sinti, disabled), nothing that person can do can grant them the grace of being “one of the good ones,” or being life worthy of life. No matter their character, achievements, or capability, a “wrong life” can have only a negative value to society. The only way to balance the equation is to eliminate that wrong life and bring the sum to zero on both sides.

This thought stopped me in my tracks, and I could hear the paradigm shift without a clutch, because it explained everything I was both feeling and seeing over the past year. It was the grand unification theorem of my inner world and explained what I was seeing that was external to me.

I am wrong life in the United States. And despite my efforts to live rightly, it simply does not matter. Nothing I can do will change the equation, other than my eradication. Internally, this realization is what fuels my anger. I genuinely tried to be a good person and contribute in ways that are lauded in others. I’m angry at the breaking of the American compact that supposedly we should be judged by the content of our character and not by government fiat that people like me are incapable of leading “honorable” or “disciplined” lives. I’m furious at the hypocrisy and having wasted my life trying to earn a place in a country that ultimately decided I must be destroyed.

I’m being kicked out of the National Guard. I can’t legally use a public bathroom on federal property or at most airports. As a veteran, I have a free pass onto national parks that I effectively can never use because I’m wrong life. I will never be able to work in my field again because I am wrong life. At the VA, the only treatments I can receive are essentially reeducation—namely, unwanted therapy and medical treatment aimed at detransition.

I spent decades of my life as a service member, and in my final years I chose to be a MEDEVAC pilot to save people rather than kill them. I volunteered as a superhero cosplayer to raise money for desperately ill children and their families. I spent my summer flying as a firefighter, saving ranches owned by Trump donors, properties owned by the Mormon Church, and Bible camps run by people who would never let people like me attend.

I went on to fly air ambulance helicopters in one of the reddest parts of the country while awaiting my Canadian permanent residency paperwork. When I was flying people around who needed urgent medical care quickly, I could take a pretty good guess that they were likely the sort of people who voted for Trump and would happily support “putting all those transgenders in mental institutions where they belong.” But they couldn’t because they were intubated, and I was busy flying them to a better hospital, regardless of what they might think of me.

But none of it matters. My government, and the people who voted it into office, have declared me wrong life, and there’s nothing I can do to change it. Indeed, the president explicitly ran on the idea that I am wrong life; it was a feature and not a bug. His campaign spent hundreds of millions of dollars promoting the idea that anyone who doesn’t want wrong life eliminated is against the Herrenvolk. It was messaging straight out of the Nazi playbook, just targeting a different group.

At the same time, this sentence helps me understand why this level of bigotry reminds me more of the Holocaust than other civil rights atrocities in American history. At the end of the day in that history, for most other marginalized groups, it was still possible to be one of “the good ones.” For Black people, there was room for acceptance of those who “knew their place.” Whites needed them for their labor. Indeed, the South fought the Civil War because they needed slavery for their economy. Japanese Americans were interned but allowed to fight in the European Theater of Operations. Hispanics and Latinos were long used for their labor or valued as reliable Republican voters in Florida. Their lives had less value than other Americans’, but it wasn’t a negative number.

Mine is.

And that’s the fundamental difference between the oppression and demonization of transgender people today and the civil rights issues of the past. It’s also why the policies being enacted look far more like Nazi efforts to push Jews and LGBT people out of Germany as noncitizens of the Reich than previous government efforts to keep certain classes of people “in their place” as second-class citizens.

The Adorno quote snapped into place why I have felt far more comfortable framing current events within the scope of German history than within that of the United States. It’s also the most useful framework for understanding why Republicans around the country are targeting transgender people with literally over 1,000 bills per year designed to make life impossible enough that they either emigrate, detransition, or live in a country (this one) where they aren’t allowed to leave their houses for fear of arrest because a minor might see them in public.

They see us as wrong life. And even those who do not see us as such are willing to go along with it because it is the dark side of politics: It looks like the quick and easy path to power to take this position in public. Any Republican who does not behave as if transgender people are all wrong life is likely to be forced out of the party, and away from the levers of power. Democrats and hospital administrators in blue states aren’t generally willing to enforce their own civil rights laws for fear of the federal government and the belief that transgender people aren’t worth the effort of protecting.

I have expressed some of these frustrations before, and people have expressed sentiments along the lines of, “Well, I don’t think of you that way.” While I am appreciative of such support, people saying this simply doesn’t matter since they have no institutional power. My own sense of self-worth is completely irrelevant to this equation, and changes nothing in practice. Neither do the sentiments of people with no authority.

Not to put too fine a point on it, my sense of self-esteem, and what some powerless people think about me, is meaningless if I’m spending my last moments holding my breath and trying to claw my way through concrete with my fingernails while taking a “shower” with 100 strangers.  All it provides is a further sense that the situation is unjust. It does nothing to keep me alive in the face of a movement that controls the government and has officially declared us to be “wrong life.”

If this seems like exaggeration: It’s not. One of the cruelest ironies is that my friends and I constantly receive messages that are some variation of “Kill yourself, tranny faggot,” sent by the same sorts of people who five years ago smugly informed us that “all lives matter.” The world’s first trillionaire routinely brags about “killing the woke mind virus” on his own social media platform.

Only the government’s opinion matters. And no matter what I do, I cannot be anything other than wrong life in their eyes. That incumbent party has made it clear it intends to remain in power in perpetuity at any cost, no matter how people vote. I would always be wrong life if I remained in the United States. The only way to change the equation to zero without expiring is to remove myself from the equation the same way Jews did from Germany: by emigrating to a place where their lives can have some value greater than zero.

I want my life to have a positive value again as seen by the people who matter. I cannot express how much of a relief it was when I did not have to spend every waking moment aware of being wrong life. If you wondered what being trans in America is like today, it’s being in a constant state of sadness, betrayal, and futility at the possibility of leading a life that matters. 

We’re closing in on July Fourth and the nation’s 250th birthday, and right on time, the all-knowing digital algorithm deposited a memory from 2015 on my screen: That year, burning the Confederate flag on Independence Day was in vogue, sparked by the mass shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Carolina. My fondness for desecrating rebel iconography is not restricted to either a national holiday or a national tragedy—we should have fully conquered the Confederacy when we had the chance, instead of allowing them to commemorate their traitorousness. Maybe those nine parishioners would be alive today if we’d done a better job discrediting that toxic ideology.

That’s some food for thought here in 2026, as an ailing, flailing President Donald Trump sets his sight on being the ringmaster of the clown show he has planned for the Fourth. When Trump’s not losing wars or setting the economy on fire, he’s busy turning the nation’s capital into an orgy of self-aggrandizement ahead of next week’s semiquincentennial celebration. At Wednesday’s kick-off event for his “Great American State Fair,” Trump announced that “America is back.” Where had it gone? The president proclaimed that “a short time ago we were a dead country. We were dead. Now we’re the hottest country anywhere in the world. We’re respected by everybody. Nobody’s laughing at us anymore.”

As a thin crowd made for the exits, he also touched on the matter of state that’s consumed most of his time lately: “The Reflecting Pool that you’ve heard so much about, which is so incredible, it’s been gruesomely vandalized by thugs, bad people, but soon will be looking as beautiful as it looked just two weeks ago,” Trump said. “In fact, I looked at it just a little while ago. It looks perfect already, but we’re fixing it.” As it happens, the Reflecting Pool is still green, still peeling, and half-assedly stashed behind some chain-link fence. It may be a federal crime for me to report this, it’s not really clear.

All of this is definitely a product of ego, but it’s also highly reminiscent of Confederate kitsch. Trump’s drive to commemorate himself, which has even run afoul of some of his fellow Republicans, is animated by the same idea as the Lost Cause: to lend legitimacy to a period of betrayal and to ensure this malevolent force lives on. Allowing the Confederacy to commemorate itself was a profound failure on our part, and it seeded the earth for the weakening of our democracy. As Trump plans to sully the District of Columbia’s skyline with his triumphal arch (now with more fist!), I can see history repeating: Trumpism as the new Lost Cause.

I am hardly the first to evoke this comparison. As The Atlantic’s David Graham wrote back in 2020, Trump spent his Independence Day marinating in a variety of Lost Cause grievances: the decision to remove the Confederate iconography from the Mississippi state flag and NASCAR events, the renaming of the Washington Redskins and Cleveland Indians, along with the usual suspects (“the radical left, the Marxists, the anarchists, the agitators, the looters, and people who, in many instances, have absolutely no clue what they are doing”).

As Graham noted at the time, Trump’s Lost Cause fetish was his campaign schtick, the red meat he used to rally his base. In 2020, that playbook failed, in no small part because the Covid-19 pandemic was foremost on the minds of voters. But Trump played the same game in 2024 and won back the White House. And as the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Rivka Maizlish wrote last year, the “unrelenting propaganda of the Lost Cause” returned with a vengeance. The names of Confederacy luminaries stricken from U.S. military bases were restored, there was a renewed push to whitewash the sins of slavery, and the Civil War era’s insurrectionists were conflated with the nations’ Founders. It’s no accident that Trump believes our latter-day insurrectionists should be the ones to get government reparations.

As Maizlish noted, ’twas ever thus:

Lost Cause mythology is central to Trump’s movement. He romanticizes the gender and racial hierarchies of the Old South, valorizes Confederate leaders and symbols, and demonizes those who would remove Confederate memorials as “angry mobs” trying to “wipe out our history.” The Confederate anthem “Dixie” played at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally on Oct. 27, 2024, an event filled with racist harangues and ridicule.

Trump is now deep into his dotage (and perhaps his inexorable decline). He has no campaigns left to run and no further need to worry about uniting the American people to build some kind of sustainable electoral coalition. These days, the president is motivated entirely by thoughts of his legacy. But the Lost Cause schtick remains the same—only now it’s manifesting itself in his relentless pursuit of various vanity projects and alterations to Washington, D.C.

The possibility that he might not be remembered seems to vex Trump, whose administration moved with the same sort of alacrity to forestall the removal of his name from the Kennedy Center as it did in fighting its inane war with Iran. As Brian Beutler reported in his Off Message newsletter, Trump’s name only came off the building because Ohio Democrat Joyce Beatty, as an ex-officio member of the center’s board, had the standing to sue over the matter and she took the opportunity. Some other Democrats who had standing for the same reason decided to pass, including House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries and outgoing D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser.

Beutler hails Beatty as a model for other Democrats to follow, given what can happen to a country when a traitor to the Constitution is allowed to remain commemorated. Every lasting monument to Trump is really a monument to accommodating his misrule, celebrating his corruption, and a signal to the public that it’s OK to forget his criminal legacy and accept the Trump era as legitimate. “It will be much easier to arrest the normal process of forgetting,” writes Beutler, “if Democrats embrace the goal of Trump humiliation now. If peeling Trump’s name off the Kennedy Center is just a taste of what’s to come.”

Tearing Trump’s various architectural vanities down isn’t what I’d call a top priority. Like TNR’s editor, Michael Tomasky, I think Democrats need to commit themselves to freeing us from the iron grip of oligarchy and radically reshaping the Supreme Court. Still, as Tomasky wrote earlier this week, we should look to future Democratic presidential candidates to follow in the footsteps of Beatty and commit to a cosmetic de-Trumpification. It would send a strong signal that the party will brook no attempts to commemorate a discredited president—and that it has the stomach for the civic deworming this nation needs to kick off its next century.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

Former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg and his family were the victims of a false child protective services report, he wrote on his Substack Friday.

“Many times over the years, I have been denounced, yelled at, protested, threatened, and heckled. I’ve been through political attacks in office, death threats in public life, and rocket attacks in war. But this is the ugliest thing that has happened to me since my career in service began,” Buttigieg wrote.

Buttigieg said that earlier this week, a police officer and CPS worker showed up at his Traverse City, Michigan, home, where he lives with his husband, Chasten, and their twins, Joseph August and Penelope Rose. They told Buttigieg that a serious allegation had been made against him regarding his children, and that he couldn’t be alone with them until they received a forensic interview the next day, without him or any relatives present. Then they would discuss the allegations with the former South Bend, Indiana, mayor.

The officer and social worker wished to see the two 4-year-olds, so Buttigieg told them to wait until Chasten would be returning with the children from summer camp. When they arrived, the kids were fascinated by the police officer’s car, and the adults agreed that the children would stay with their grandparents overnight before their interview the next day.

“The twenty-four hours until they returned are among the darkest hours of my life. I tried to get my head around the idea that I had been accused of something so serious that I couldn’t be alone around my own children, and had consented to have them interviewed by strangers, without my knowing where the accusation had come from or even what it contained,” wrote Buttigieg.

After the children were interviewed, they went to stay with their grandparents, Buttigieg wrote, and then the police officer and CPS worker met him at his home for an interview. The officer said that an anonymous woman had contacted CPS, saying that she had met Buttigieg years ago at a conference in Alabama, who allegedly told her that he had committed “unspeakable violent crimes, and the caller believed my children were still at risk.”

The police officer asked if Buttigieg had been to a certain town in Alabama, to which he replied no, as well as “a couple of obvious questions.” After that, the officer said that he believed the accusation was politically motivated and that it would not be referred to a prosecutor. The CPS worker also said the allegation could not be substantiated, although her process would take longer to complete.

But Buttigieg was allowed to be alone with his children again, and Chasten was told the same information from the officer and CPS worker, and the two were able to pick up their children.

“For twenty-four deeply distressing hours, we had no idea what I was accused of or what was about to happen. We could not understand someone abusing the system like this in order to hurt me and my family with an absurd and easily refuted allegation of a horrific crime,” Buttigieg wrote.

“We’re used to nasty, hateful, and sometimes violent things being said about us and even about our family. But this is the first time someone managed to invade our lives like this—and drag our children into it,” Buttigieg added.

Buttigieg has been targeted by the right for his same-sex marriage and position within the Biden administration, facing false allegations of sexual assault in 2019 and, bizarrely, receiving mockery and criticism for taking paternity leave as a Cabinet secretary during the Biden administration. Making a false allegation and targeting a politician’s children is an egregious crime, and should be roundly condemned across the political spectrum. Let’s see if conservatives actually do the right thing.