Political News

It is both staggering and utterly unsurprising to get proof positive that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. bald-faced lied to the Senate during his confirmation hearing. Honestly, with this administration, not lying is probably a rarer occurrence, but nonetheless. The Guardian and The Associated Press got their mitts on letters proving that Kennedy’s claim that a…

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A cartoon by Pedro Molina. Related | ICE finds heinous new way to spend millions and terrorize people…

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The U.S. military is experiencing a “beyond critical” shortage of advanced missile interceptors in Europe largely driven by President Donald Trump’s war with Iran, a U.S. defense official in Europe and a NATO official told The Associated Press, raising concerns about vulnerabilities in NATO countries to a potential Russian attack. The U.S. defense official said the most concerning shortfall…

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House Speaker Mike Johnson told a room full of GOP acolytes that the Republican midterm convention is not a desperate attempt to engage voters but a chance to remind them of President Donald Trump’s disastrous stewardship of the country. Johnson recalled a phone conversation in which Trump ordered him to hold a “midterm convention,” remarking, it’s the “first time in history any party’s ever…

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Wyoming’s Republican Governor Mark Gordon is sounding the alarm about the Trump administration’s “aggressive” and “irregular” elections monitoring.

Speaking at a canvassing board meeting Wednesday, Gordon expressed concerns about the Department of Justice’s surprise efforts to monitor election sites in the state during primary elections last week, WyoFile reported.

“To my knowledge, the U.S. Attorney was unaware of it, and it sounded like the behavior of the observers was a bit aggressive,” Gordon said.

“It just was irregular, and I have asked the attorney general to start looking into, you know, kind of the nature of the visits and all that sort of stuff,” he said.

It’s typical for federal observers to monitor elections, but Gordon claimed that the behavior of those at last week’s voting seemed to overstep the authority Congress had granted to them. “I’m not saying anything went wrong or anything else, and I certainly think the conduct of this election was phenomenal,” he said.

“I feel very strongly about federal government coming in and taking our guns,” Gordon said. “I don’t like that. And I don’t like federal government coming in and taking our votes either.”

In a statement to WyoFile Wednesday evening, Debra Lee, the chief election officer for Laramie County, recounted two monitors’ behavior after they arrived at a polling station in Wyoming’s most populous district. Lee said she was not aware that they were coming, and they did not offer credentials until requested.

The two monitors arrived at the busy polling station and asked staff questions that appeared to be “outside the scope of federal voting rights laws,” including questions about poll worker training and new election equipment. They also asked to examine their tabulators, according to Lee.

When Lee discovered the monitors intended to interview voters in order to “assess compliance with federal civil rights and voting rights laws,” the election official denied their request. “We do not allow interviews to be conducted in polling places,” she said.

“This was a poorly managed exercise and one that showed complete disregard for our state laws and administration of our elections,” she concluded.

The controversy follows a set of primary elections where candidates claiming elections are safe as is did extraordinarily well in Wyoming.

Monday’s Supreme Court ruling has set off a new court scramble to block the mail ballot restrictions for this November’s election. By Dion Nissenbaum for Votebeat Monday’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling in favor of President Donald Trump’s attempt to restrict mail ballots via executive order is procedural and narrow, but it’s fueling broad confusion and uncertainty as the November…

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A cartoon by Clay Bennett. Related | Remembering Dolly…

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Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s administration “misappropriated” $10 million from a state Medicaid settlement to lobby against weed.

According to a Florida grand jury report, which was first obtained by CBS News, the money moved from a state Medicaid settlement, to a charity tied to the governor’s wife, Casey DeSantis, to a pair of dark-money PACs, and finally into a campaign to help kill a marijuana legalization ballot measure opposed by the governor.

It is not clear who directed the transfer of funds, which were meant to help poor children receive health insurance, the grand jury noted. As a result, the grand jury found “insufficient evidence to charge anyone criminally.”

“Nobody will take responsibility for deciding the $10 million of taxpayer money would go to Hope Florida,” the jury concluded. “While we can’t prove who is responsible, we can plainly see that taxpayer money was misused for political purposes and we would like to see changes made to prevent this from happening again.”

The grand jury’s report is dated January 28, 2026, and is still officially sealed.

The Hope Florida Foundation is the fundraising arm of a charity, Hope Florida, started by Casey DeSantis in 2021. The organization intends to connect low-income families with churches and local groups to keep them off public assistance. In its own words, Hope Florida goes “beyond government to create a pathway for Floridians to live up to their God-given potential and accomplish the American Dream.”

The $10 million transferred to the charity was initially part of a Medicaid settlement between the state of Florida and Centene Corporation, a for-profit health care company, over claims of over-billing. In February 2023, Centene Corporation offered to pay the entire $67,048,611 settlement to the state. More than a year and a half later, the settlement was split up: “On September 27, 2024, State of Florida officials agreed that Centene would pay $57,048,611 to the State of Florida and $10,000,000 to Hope Florida Foundation, Inc.,” the grand jury’s report read. “Within days, the $10,000,000 was transferred to other organizations for political purposes because money was spent on a political campaign and went to the Republican Party of Florida.”

According to the grand jury report, “after the money was transferred to Hope Florida, it was quickly funneled from there into two political action committees”—$5 million to Secure Florida’s Future and $5 million to Save Our Society From Drugs, both “dark money” groups that are not required to release detailed financial reports. The two groups then used the cash to bankroll Keep Florida Clean, another PAC created specifically to oppose a ballot initiative to legalize marijuana. Although the marijuana amendment was popular across the state, it ultimately failed.

The report goes on to implicate a series of officials in Florida state government who may have had knowledge of the transaction, including Republican Senate candidate Ashley Moody, who was the state’s attorney general at the time. Moody allegedly “authorized” her chief deputy, John Guard, to sign the settlement agreement diverting $10 million to Hope Florida.

When asked about the grand jury’s report on Thursday, DeSantis claimed the only crime that was “apparent was whoever leaked the grand jury report.”

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz is at it again spinning anti-vax conspiracies. This time, he’s casting doubt on the two measles deaths in Pennsylvania earlier this week. “We don’t know exactly what happened in Pennsylvania yet,” Oz told Fox Business. “We don’t know if these children died from measles or they had another condition that was already attacking…

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Representative Max Miller is needling his former father-in-law, Senator Bernie Moreno.

The embattled Ohio Republican representative issued a veiled threat against Moreno at the Cuyahoga County family court Wednesday, claiming that his marriage to Moreno’s daughter had revealed things that he believed the senator would like him to “remain quiet about.”

“I was a part of that family for a very long time,” Miller told Mother Jones’s Abby Vesoulis on video. “There are certain things that he would like me to remain quiet about, and I respectfully have and I will always intend to do that because that’s not my business to share. But it’s politically motivated.”

The comment came right after a hearing in Miller’s contentious custody battle over his two-year-old daughter. Miller initially declined to speak with reporters, but then decided to cut his attorney off mid-sentence to voice the warning.

“No, no,” Miller’s lawyer could be heard saying in the background of the clip.

Emily Moreno, Miller’s ex-wife, alleges the congressman physically hurt her and their toddler. In court filings and police reports, Moreno has accused Miller of throwing her against a wall, leaving an “obvious grab mark on her upper arm”; throwing scalding water on her (an incident that Miller refuted as “horseplay”), and having “held a gun to her head.” Moreno also recounted an instance in which their daughter told her, “Daddy kill you.”

Medical records submitted during the couple’s custody dispute cited several injuries to their young daughter, as well, including a broken collarbone that Moreno claimed occurred during Miller’s care.

In other instances, Miller allegedly withheld his daughter’s favorite toy from her, and accidentally published audio recordings alleging his drug abuse as well as naked images of his daughter in misguided attempts to prove his own innocence.

It took the Ohio senator weeks to get publicly involved in the dangerous affair affecting his daughter and granddaughter, but Bernie Moreno finally denounced Miller earlier this month, writing in a post on X that the Donald Trump-backed Republican should “not serve in the House of Representatives.” At least five other senators have also urged Miller to drop out of his respective House race.

Miller has categorically denied the allegations and sued his ex-wife for defamation in May. He was never charged with a crime, and the Department of Children and Family Services did not find evidence to substantiate allegations of child abuse, according to court filings.

President Donald Trump on Thursday followed through on a threat to rename Lake Ontario to “Lake America,” issuing an executive order to “Make the Great Lakes Even Greater” amid a collapsed trade deal with Canada, further escalating tensions between the two former allies.

The lake in question has been known as Lake Ontario since the 1600s. Trump, contends that it should be renamed because America spends more money on it than Canada does.

“The United States is the greatest protector of the Great Lakes, including the body of water currently known as Lake Ontario,” Thursday’s executive order reads. “The United States Coast Guard supplies 9 of the 11 ice breaking vessels on the Great Lakes, securing commercial shipping lanes free of charge.  The United States has invested nearly $4 billion in protecting the Great Lakes freshwater ecosystem in the last decade, while Canada has invested far less in similar initiatives over the same period.”

My colleague Alex Nguyen covered Canada’s response to the escalating trade war—a large support package for Canadian workers and firms—on Tuesday:

While the plan aims more at support for businesses than direct funds for individual Canadians, it is a meaningful step that far exceeds any the Trump administration has taken or tried to take, with the White House largely ignoring the foreseeable harm of its tariffs on American workers and consumers… Nearly every state has experienced blue-collar job losses as a result of the tariff agenda, even as the policies deliver few apparent results in improving US manufacturing or lowering the trade deficit.

The “Lake America” decision is a return to a Trumpian theme: governance as branding exercise. That includes renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America,” the Defense Department as “Department of War,” the Kennedy Center as “Trump-Kennedy Center,” and (unofficially) ICE as NICE.

Trump cannot force Canada or any other country to follow his preferred naming conventions. It remains to be seen whether independent news, weather, and mapping firms will fall into line.

This is a lightly edited transcript of the August 26 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Michael Podhorzer: We’re going to kick off, and folks will join. Hopefully you all know our guest today. He’s been on here before, but more importantly, I hope you’ve been following his writing, as I have, from when I first encountered him writing for the old FiveThirtyEight, when it was Nate Silver and independent, and was really bringing a not sort of data-nerd-alone exclusive view of the world. And this is someone who actually could map it to what was happening in the world and how it actually affected people, as opposed to, how do we tweak the model so we can improve our forecast by a couple points or whatever.

And from there went on to write a really great column in The Washington Post, which, like, naming it as a great column should be the spoiler alert for what comes next. Because then Bezos shows up, and great columns are no longer part of what The Washington Post is about. It’s not part of the editorial model anymore. And so now he’s at The New Republic, and both writing and doing his own Substack live, which hopefully you’re subscribed to.

So we don’t have as eventful a day after primary as we’ve had for the last couple months. But I thought we’d start, Perry, just getting your sense there. This is an area you’ve covered a lot, which is, what’s going on inside the Democratic Party, and what should we take away from the series of primaries now for 2026?

Perry Bacon: Thanks for the nice introduction first. And, people who don’t know I’ve been doing this so long, I also worked at Time magazine, The Washington Post, and MSNBC before I worked at FiveThirtyEight, too. So I’ve been doing this a long time.

But anyway, the primaries have been interesting in that, as I tell people all the time, the average Democrat in Congress, their politics are probably still closer to Joe Biden’s than Bernie Sanders. I think that’s still true. I worry sometimes we take the sort of a DSA candidate or two winning in a few races—the average Democratic member of Congress is not from the DSA and would not want to be associated with the DSA, and I think that’s still true even in the House.

And also, the primaries themselves, I still can’t tell if these have been referendums on Gaza, on Israel, on socialism, on progressivism, or just, like, looking at the Colorado specifically, are just, we want somebody who’s different and not boring like Michael Bennet. I feel like a lot of these races are explained by somebody generic who’s unmemorable. I’ve been covering Michael Bennet my entire life. What has Michael Bennet done in Congress? Michael Bennet, guys, ran for president. Who remembers that in 2020? Because he was so unmemorable there too.

So I think a lot of cases, you have maybe an outsider, a young person, a person from an unusual job, a person who’s charismatic, running in a primary against a forgettable Democrat who’s either been a state legislator or been in Congress. And the new person may be more progressive, or more anti-Israel, or more pro-Palestinian, or more pro-peace, but they also just are not boring.

If people feel like the party has failed and has not fought Trump hard enough, and they’re open to anybody different, I think is what’s driving a lot of these results. You may not agree with all of that, but that’s part of what I think is going on.

Anat Shenker-Osorio: Yeah. I can see that, and that through line and that explanation makes sense to me. I think that an additional element in the primaries, which is very different to the general election—and I also think, just as an aside, that Democratic primary voters and Republican primary voters are very different to each other.

And so that is one of the asymmetries between the parties, where Democratic primary voters on average are more kind of diehard party stalwarts, perhaps more conservative in the original definition of that word, meaning, like, more let’s-not-shake-things-up-too-much conservative, conserve. Whereas Republican primary voters, I think, tend to be more like white nationalist, super MAGA, and so that has—

Podhorzer: Actually, that actually now is the conservative perspective for the Republican Party.

Shenker-Osorio: Sorry to confuse you with word choice.

Podhorzer: That is actually, like, the mainstream.

Shenker-Osorio: That’s true. OK, but in an attempt to be explanatory. So I think, going back to the point that you made, Perry—and also thank you for joining us, I was saying before we went live that it is fun to turn the tables and have the question asker be the question answerer, so always a good time.

I think that another through line, and this may be motivated cognition on my part, is the difference between sort of the economic message that I think more mainstream Democrats are trying to give, which I basically just liken to being on an episode of The Price Is Right, where they’re trying to prove that they know how much things cost, and they’re basically just, Lettuce. Test me. Try me. 635, 702, gallon of milk. What is it? Which, like a lot of focus group participants, they can tell you how much milk is at 12 different stores in their town. It’s actually astonishing the degree to which people know the prices of things down to the cent. So there’s that model, which is like, I am going to demonstrate empathy by telling you how much things cost.

And then there is, I would argue, a more effective economic message, which is not just, I’m going to prove to you that I can recite prices, but, Here are things I’d actually like to do. And obviously, Mamdani is the standard bearer for this, with the three repeated refrain thing that we saw not just all the way across the country, but people in Europe can tell you what are his three things. But also, Milakiro, speaking of Colorado, Frannie, who obviously came short in Wisconsin, Francesca Hong, Abdul in Michigan, even James Talarico.

It’s much more not just, I’m going to talk about how expensive things are. I’m going to say, These are the things that I would like to do that would alter the material conditions of your life. And part and parcel of that, I would argue, is that they actually provide an origin story for people’s pain. They name a villain, and they’re presenting an economic populist argument, as opposed to, affordability is important, without laying out, “And that’s why we actually need to stick it to the billionaires.”

Podhorzer: Actually, Perry, before you jump in, I want to do, hopefully, a friendly amendment to your Price Is Right metaphor, which is where I thought you were going, because the purpose of that game is to get as close to the right price without going over. And the attitude of most Democrats is to be much more afraid of being too ambitious rather than underselling what they’re doing. But anyway, sorry.

Shenker-Osorio: That’s totally the point I wanted to make. 100 percent, that’s what I was saying.

Podhorzer: OK.

Bacon: But I agree with what she said about the economic populism side, and then how the insurgent progressive—pick your term—candidates are doing something different in terms of specifics. And also, they’re naming villains. They’re much more willing to talk about—I think Talarico talks about corruption a lot. Others talk about billionaires a lot. Some talk about oligarchs a lot. But there is, like, not just things are unaffordable, but things are unaffordable because of these people.

And otherwise you’re left with the things are unaffordable because—the mainstream Democrats would say the gas is unaffordable because of Trump. And so there is a story there, so there’s some story there. But otherwise the story is, things are unaffordable, hands up, not a lot of solutions and not a lot of villains either.

Podhorzer: Yeah. And I think another way of saying it for a lot of them is, like, the origin story is that you didn’t elect me.

Bacon: Yes.

Podhorzer: That right there—like, the only program they’re offering is them being in the majority, which hasn’t worked, and people know that. One thing I would try—I think there’s another big difference in Democratic and Republican primary voters, in a way that, like, may, where it actually matters, which is in places where they’re going to actually win the general election, because of gerrymandering or because of the nature of the state, which is that those primaries are the only ones left in America where a majority of the people who are voting in them are part of an organized movement, right?

Where in the South you have evangelical churches who have become political, and white evangelicals, especially in rural southern states, constitute about 60 percent of everybody who votes in Republican primaries. And so essentially that controls who can be a Republican candidate in districts where the lines are drawn so Republicans are going to win. And even in certain southern districts, it gets around 50 percent for white evangelicals, which is the bonkers part of why we’re all the way the country is, because nationally they only constitute 18 percent. But instead, between gerrymandering and the states they are, they’re able to exert this enormous influence.

There’s, like, this isn’t—DSA is not this for Democrats, right? People don’t go to DSA every Sunday morning to get their instructions about how to vote, right? And I think because we’ve been focused on Republican primaries somewhat in other areas too, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that doesn’t matter. It’s curious because they’re probably not going to win this year. But in the places they are, that’s where it matters.

And I think one of the perspectives which I can bring to this, as someone who lives in Kentucky, is to really get people to see how politics is different in the rest of the country, especially in the South, from the way most of the people probably on this Zoom are experiencing politics.

Bacon: Let me, I’m going to jump on that. Let me add more about the primaries first, which is that I did think the Wisconsin race showed that this electability issue—whether I, speaking for myself, think it’s, like, fake, or imagined, or that we don’t know who’s electable, let’s have the election first. The Democratic voting base, I think, is very consumed by this, and takes cues from party leaders about that.

And so I was telling people—I live in Louisville, as was mentioned here, but I was telling my friends in Wisconsin, “I’d be worried if I was for Hong, because it seems like the governor is, like, saying every day she can’t win, in these very aggressive terms, and that is going to make a difference.” And it did.

And I think it would seem to me, as a person who wants progressive candidates to win more, watching Bernie Sanders and Senator Warren lose because of Joe Biden’s electability every hour, and watching this process in primary after primary, it would seem to me, if you’re AOC, if you’re Ro Khanna, whoever is running who’s to the left needs to sit down and say, A core part of our campaign message needs to be how I can win Wisconsin. And if Tony Evers or Joe Biden or Neera Tanden says I can’t win Wisconsin, here’s the evidence. Like, I agree that electability may be fake and made up, but as long as Democratic primary voters think it’s real, it may be worth addressing it instead of losing because—

Podhorzer: Go ahead, Anat.

Shenker-Osorio: Can I use my Wisconsin privilege? This may be the second time that phrase has been uttered. Except with respect to Ohio. Sorry, Ohio. You know how it is—that was a sports thing, not anything else.

I don’t disagree with you. I think that the one complicating thing about Wisconsin, for folks who are not in the weeds, is that there’s a temptation to draw a parallel between the Senate races in Minnesota and Michigan respectively, and the gubernatorial race in Wisconsin, that I just want to—which isn’t what you were saying, I’m adding a point.

But Crowley is not Haley Stevens, and is not Angie Craig. He is basically much more, I would argue, like Evers, maybe even slightly more progressive than him. And Hong—yeah. So I just want to—I’m just throwing in that complication that, like, there’s a little bit more to it than, you’re choosing between kind of a very cookie cutter standard, like Chuck Schumer pick, and someone else. That’s not the dynamic there.

It’s also interesting, I guess, in a way it’s heartening that Crowley is deemed electable in a state that, I’m embarrassed to say, has never elected a Black person governor, and that sort of didn’t factor in, which thrills me, and I hope that is correct, and—

Bacon: A Black person from Milwaukee, not just—yes, who as far as I know is not the editor of the Harvard Law Review.

Shenker-Osorio: Yeah. And so it is interesting, kind of, when and where electability—everything is relative. Everything is relative.

Bacon: You mentioned the South, Michael, I’ll go to the South now. We talked about this when I came on here about a year ago, when I changed jobs, and one thing I was talking about was, like, if you live in the South, we’ve had this discourse about—there’s a story in the Post, I think. The Washington Post actually does some good journalism, and they did a story, in the news section, about how Black studies and African studies departments are being banned and closed all over the country.

The actual crisis in higher education in America is not that the president of Harvard may not have had enough references on her thesis, and it’s not that person X at Yale cannot say conservative things. It’s actually that in 20 states, they are closing departments, banning words, banning the curriculum.

And one of the biggest problems we have is, we have a media landscape where most of the powerful journalists live in New York and Washington—and I’ll pretend, like, Los Angeles, but really New York and Washington—places where a DSA candidate is more likely to be elected than a MAGA candidate. But in the rest of America, most of America, particularly in 20 states, I would say a MAGA candidate has a much bigger chance. And therefore, also, just to be particularly blunt about this: if you live in New York or Washington, you’re more likely to lose your columnist job, or lose your job speaking on television, or not have your book sales be as good, because of a person to your left in New York or Washington.

But in the real America, your competitors are actually more on the right. There are more people on the right. The threat to democracy is coming from the right. The canceling is being done by Republican legislators, not liberals on Twitter. And we can’t have a discourse—what’s actually happening in America—because the people who shape the discourse live in three places that are not like America. No mayor representing the DSA will get anywhere close to winning the electoral majority in Louisville, Nashville. These are the liberal places in the blue areas, forget about the conservative areas.

So having Zohran be so prominent is useful, but having politics discussed nationally based on people who can vote for Zohran—Andrew Cuomo will be the most liberal person in Kentucky in many races. And so the idea that he’s the conservative tells you all you need to know, in some ways.

Podhorzer: Yeah. One thing, to go back and also end up coming back where you are, like, when you were talking about electability, and to also pull back, having been doing politics for as long as I have and, like, remembering the ‘60s and ‘70s—my sense is that, when you put aside, like, a David Duke or someone who had some personal scandal as the reason that people within their party are saying they’re unelectable, the sort of generic unelectability argument is almost always because the person saying it objects to that candidate’s positions, but knows that those positions or ambitions, whatever, are in fact in line with what their party’s voters want.

And so they can’t say that they’re against them on substantive grounds, because it exposes them to being out of step with what’s the mainstream of the party. And it takes away the—it’s a kind of status hoarding, where if you can position yourself as a judge of that, as opposed to being part of the debate about what Democrats or Republicans should be, then you’re always on the high ground punching down, right? Which is what we’re experiencing.

And the interesting thing was that a lot of this was aimed when Ronald Reagan was trying to run for president, right, as someone who really was in step with the Republican Party voter base, but was an insurgent against what was then the mainstream Republican Party. And interestingly, that was the birth of what they called the 11th Commandment, which is you don’t say anything bad about fellow Republicans, and that held for a long time.

And there’s no movement afoot on the Democratic side for that kind of thing. But I think that’s an important thing to unpack, because, again, like, if someone was accused of Me Too, or if they embezzle, like, electability is a legit thing, right? But when it’s not, it’s really someone saying, I don’t want you because of your positions, but I’m not going to say that, because then people are going to agree with you.

Bacon: Where we might disagree, Michael, is—I agree that electability is an ideological weapon. I just don’t agree that fighting it should be done based on ideolo—I think it has to be fought directly.

Podhorzer: That’s what I’m saying. The answer to someone who says so-and-so is unelectable is to move the conversation to just why, right? Because usually they’re just hand waving, right, saying that they’re too left or they’re too liberal or something like that. Exactly how, right?

Bacon: No, I’m saying something much worse than that. I’m saying, in 2019, Senator Warren should have flown to Wisconsin and given a series of speeches—they were aimed at Nate Cohn and not humans. Whatever. Nate Cohn is a human, but were aimed at pollsters and so on, to lay out, here’s the electoral map. She should have done interviews with Ezra Klein. If AOC actually wants to be president, I would advise her to spend less time thinking about policy and more time thinking about how to appeal to numbersy white guys and show—

Podhorzer: Oh, yeah.

Bacon: —that’s what I. And but, like we’re saying, yes, but these people keep refusing to do this. I’ve been saying this for six years now. If a progressive wants to win the nomination, there’s going—we cannot keep saying electability is fake, and it’s a tool.

Podhorzer: Yeah, I totally agree with you.

Bacon: And now, would you like to win, or would you like to lecture me about why electability is bad? Because I’d like you to win, and I’d like you to try. And Hong might not be a perfect example of that, but in that 10 days when Tony Evers was saying she can’t win, the only thing she should have done in those 10 days was to show up in some swing county, Wisconsin, and say, I can win the election. I will win over cultural conservatives and turn out the Black vote, and whatever she said.

I don’t care what she said, as long as she gave a compelling case for winning. That was the most important thing, and I don’t remember seeing her do that.

Shenker-Osorio: I don’t know. I think—

Bacon: In a strong, compelling way, in a clear speech. Go ahead, sorry.

Shenker-Osorio: Yeah. I think a lot of things happened in those 10 days, and there was a concerted effort in the media, which we’re going to come to, to lift up past statements that she had made to sort of make her answerable for things that—do I wish we weren’t talking about the celebration of Thanksgiving?

Yeah, that was all unhelpful. There were ways to address that, but it’s easier said than done. I don’t know. I think she was trying—maybe not to your satisfaction, maybe it didn’t break through.

Bacon: I gave you, Elizabeth Warren’s a better example, because she had a whole year to do what I’m saying and didn’t. And is very prepared, and still didn’t think she’d had to overcome this. Anyway, sorry, I’ll stop.

Shenker-Osorio: Yeah. I think, Mike, you brought up the Reagan example—I am old enough to remember when Trump was unelectable. That was felt very—

Podhorzer: And he wasn’t elected.

Bacon:, I think many people are electable. Just, like, one wing of one party says no, is always saying this all the time. Anybody can win, that’s what I think, but in general, yeah.

Shenker-Osorio: Yeah. I don’t know that I have deep meaningful things to add. I just, I agree with both of you that it’s an ideological masquerade, making believe, and an unwillingness to actually talk about issue differences.

Because if you were to, then voters would actually find out that somebody wants you to make more money and have a less shitty life, and someone wants to keep you having a shitty life. And if people were to find out about that, maybe they would like nicer things, and for billionaires to finally pay for them.

Bacon: Let me come to the media thing, because I do want to talk about that, which is—it’s not just that Kaitlan Collins, when she was interviewing Francesca Hong, focused on Thanksgiving tweets. That makes sense to me, and that’s, CNN’s going to, quote unquote, “objective network” and so on.

I have been struck by, when Morning Joe and Pod Save America, when they have progressives on too—I think Pod Save America and Morning Joe want Democrats to win, I think, as far as I know. But when they have progressives on, they tend to lead with the, DSA says you want to abolish prisons and abolish— and they go through this whole list. I don’t know how helpful it is to say, “Do you—” the questions imply, Here’s a bunch of crazy things other Democrats believe. Do you believe these things too?

I can’t imagine Angie Dixon, in her national moment on TV, probably wants to talk about things that matter to Floridians every day. Even if she agrees with abolishing the Senate, which I’m for, that’s probably not the most relevant issue in the next two or three months. So if I’m a left-leaning outlet and I want to help Democratic candidates win, I don’t think asking them to disavow DSA policies is the best tactic. But I think this is a sincere effort to help them, because the idea is, you can seem normal on national television. But I actually don’t think that helps that much.

Podhorzer: And, one more note—did either of you see the New York Times Magazine interview with Zohran Mamdani?

Bacon: That’s mostly more hostile media, but anyway, sorry. Go ahead.

Podhorzer: No, but, no surprise, he handled that question so well. And should basically be, like, the training video for everybody who gets on one of those things. And he’s, like, saying this back to the Times, and they’re really trying to get him. It’s like, Hey, I’m a Democrat. I belong to the DSA, I belong to other organizations. Let’s just talk about the issues, right? Why are you presuming that, like, I’m their operative?

And, like, he didn’t have to disavow them, and he made it really awkward for them. Because you can watch it in real time. Because the interviewer didn’t see that coming, right? And anyway, but it showed that it can be disarmed. So it’s not just what the people at CNN decide to do, it’s folks who are getting interviewed being smarter about it and moving with it. Were you going to go to—go ahead.

Shenker-Osorio: I was going to come back to Kentucky, just to be a good hostess.

Podhorzer: Have you been there to come back to?

Shenker-Osorio: I absolutely have been there. I’ve been to Louisville. I have been to the Ark Experience in northern Kentucky. So boy, have I been.

Bacon: Not as proud as that. I wish you said you went to the Derby, or saw college basketball, or went to a bourbon tour, or something like that. Anyway, all right.

Shenker-Osorio: We’ll talk about the Ark Experience at a different time.

Bacon: Please.

Shenker-Osorio: So Andy Beshear recently did the disavowal, non-disavowal, I would argue, really beautifully.

Bacon: Oh, he did a good one. He did a bad one too recently, but anyway—what’s the good one? I’ll be curious, yeah.

Shenker-Osorio: That’s sort of him, though, right?

Bacon: Yeah.

Shenker-Osorio: It’s like, wow, yes, and then, ugh, and I don’t know what’s going on for—

Bacon: I have a theory about that. I’ll come back to it. But anyway, yeah.

Shenker-Osorio: I want to hear your Andy Beshear theory. The one I’m referring to, which I hope is different than the one you’re referring to—as opposed to us being Siskel and Ebert for a moment and having a different evaluation of the same movie. He basically was like, Look, like, I have my views, this other person has their views. We don’t agree on everything. Here’s what we do agree on. We do agree that you should— I’m not quoting him verbatim, but in essence, like, We do agree that you should be able to put food on the table. We do agree that this bag of regimes is entirely corrupt. We do agree that—

And he just was like, Yeah, we don’t agree on everything. Here’s what we do agree on, and they’re all things that, you know, the majority of people desperately want. And I thought that—it’s a variation on the Mamdani thing that you lifted, Mike. I thought he did it really—

Bacon: Four days earlier, he was on MSNBC and said socialism is an outdated ideology, and went through trashing it. So I think he got blowback and gave a better answer. That’s what I—I saw the clip too. He has moments. What I’ll say is, when he was running for governor of Kentucky in 2019 and 2023, living here, I can tell you I’m to the left of him on probably many issues, but he rarely said anything I disagreed with, because he didn’t go out of his way.

He doesn’t do the Joe Manchin, Let me show you how—let me punch left to show you how moderate I am. He rarely did that. He just talked about jobs and schools, and I’m Christian, and I love God, and that, and this. But he rarely thought to attack the left was useful, because there are enough progressives here. And also the thing Anat says all the time—he wanted the chorus to be talking about him.

People who are very left-wing in Louisville will be like, I love Andy Beshear. He’s not a socialist, but he’s a great governor. He stands up for us. He vetoes anti-trans bills. He’s not Mr. Climate Change, but he stands up for us, and we love him for that. And people really appreciated him.

My concern right now is that he’s now running for president, and I think his perception, perhaps correctly, is that the first primary is the sort of center-left donor primary. And to win that—and he’s not rich—to win that, you probably do need to trash the social—he’s competing with Josh Shapiro and 19 other white guy governors, and for that, I worry. I think Andy Beshear actually knows, to win the primary and to win the general election, you need to have people to his left be enthusiastic about him. I think he knows that because he did that here.

So I don’t think he’s unaware of that, but I do think he has to prove to these sort of, the donor types who hate the left more than Trump some days—I do wonder if he’s around those people a lot, and now hearing socialism is bad and Zohran is terrible and repeating that stuff, because he’s now in the fundraising. These governors are now in the—would-be candidates, if you’re not AOC or Ro Khanna, you’re mainly in that donor community trying to figure out who’s going to fund your campaign, and those people are more outraged by Zohran than Trump most days. And so I wonder if he’s around that crowd too much right now. That’s my concern.

Podhorzer: Yeah. I want to go back to something really important that you touched on that we got pulled on, which is about what’s being done to higher education—in terms of the whole, like, just what we can’t talk about, and all of that stuff is a big problem. And connect it to something—I don’t know exactly what you’ve written, but something we’ve talked about a lot, in terms of the kinds of pundits and sense makers and people who are telling Democrats what to do, and all of that over the last six years. Especially as, like, now there’s this whole thing about woke 1.0.

Coming off of the 2020 election, when red state legislatures started passing all these different kinds of terrible voting bills, when DeSantis and others were doing the anti-CRT stuff, and there’s that backlash—by and large, the smart crowd was, on the one hand, like, talking about how, Don’t worry, you can’t really suppress the vote,” or “Don’t take the bait, it’s really just messaging stuff. And not being able to see that it was creating the predicate for what we’re experiencing now, which is, like, under the guise of DEI, basically firing every woman and person of color who’s a general or wants to be, just across the board, right?

But it was not just that there was that effort to arrive at the point we are, it’s that for the most part, this crowd was telling us that we were being counterproductive if we were calling it out, right? That, like, it was just, Oh, those silly people who stormed the Capitol, you can’t pay too much. Oh, look at all these academic studies that say, oh, you can’t really suppress the vote, don’t worry about the elections.

And we’re at a moment where they should be categorically discredited for that perspective, and I haven’t seen a single one even acknowledge that they had any connection to basically tearing down the defenses against this massive regression.

Bacon: In fact, I would argue the leading progressive endorsed their point of view essentially—when I think the woke one was crazy comment was actually really problematic, invoking the language of the right, however she framed it. When I call things crazy, I’m usually not praising them.

And so I just thought that comment encapsulated, six years after these massive protests about something important, that we are now having advocates, leading figures in that, say it was crazy, and so that was problematic. But I want to distinguish between two different groups here, I think. I thought 2021 and ‘22, I was like, every other column, Can you believe what’s happening in the South? They are banning us from, like—hair on fire.

I think Joe Biden sincerely believes in racial equality and so on, and sincerely thought Barack Obama had this backlash, on some level, because he’s Black. Hillary had the backlash, she’s a woman. I, Kamala, would not be popular, because she’s a Black woman. I, Mr. Old White Guy, go to Catholic church every week—if I talk about jobs and infrastructure and boring shit till the end of time, I will be popular, I will restore democracy, Republican voters will vote for me.

I didn’t think that was correct. I thought that ignored lots of research and political science evidence, and was deluded, and kept trying to tell his staff—but I think that was believed sincerely by Joe Biden, and just wrong. I would categorize a lot of the pundit types we’re talking about, New York Times columnists, FiveThirtyEight editors, et cetera, et cetera, as in a different place, which is like which is, they were opposed to some of what was happening. And so you saw, when the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in colleges, you saw some of these people admit, Actually, I was basically for that. I was against affirmative action, and I was for that decision.

So their view was like, 2020, and the 2014 to 2020, was too much wokeness, too much diversity and inclusion, too much focus on systemic inequality on gender and race. And so they may have not wanted 2025, where Donald Trump is, like, defunding colleges, but they certainly wanted something to the right of 2020, decidedly maybe to the left of 2025. And so on some level they were doing political analysis and saying, The Democrats are losing because they went too far to the left on racial issues.

The Democrats, of course, won the 2020 elections and won a trifecta. What their actual view was, I opposed the way the left and progressive spaces in New York, in San Francisco, how progressive they were on race and on gender, and how Black people got promoted into jobs I wanted, and that couldn’t be stated as easily.

And so we ended up with this sort of, like, backlash to 2014 to 2020 that was, like, endorsed by prominent liberals and Democrats and so on. I think that’s what it is. But I would separate the sort of—I do think Joe Biden himself was not necessarily resentful of 2020, but genuinely thought the politics of unification could work.

Shenker-Osorio: Can I go in deeper on this media thing, because it’s just too—because you’re here, Perry. And we want the tea, we want the dirt, we want to know what it looks like backstage. Like, I feel like one encapsulation of the way that the media covers—waves hands—all of this, is often positioning Democrats as actors and Republicans as reactors, as if everything Republicans do was merely a response to a Democratic overreach. And I think, Mike, you brought up CRT, so I’ll use that, because I think it is probably the canonical example.

The number of people who were thinking about critical race theory before Chris Rufo decided to make people think about critical race theory, outside of the storied academics who are, like, doing interesting legal scholarship around it, was precisely zero. People did not know what that was. They had not heard of it. And I would even say, in the focus groups—I refer to this often—that we do every single month, and have been doing since the end of 2020, when you ask people, What is your biggest beef with Democrats? the number of times they volunteer pronouns, or they volunteer CRT, or they volunteer trans sports, is zero.

You can make them do that. You can lead them on that merry chase, but the things that upset them are the things that you would think upset them, which is basically, they don’t seem to do anything. They don’t seem to actually improve my material conditions. They also seem corrupt, et cetera.

And so what is this impetus, if you agree with my diagnosis, where everything is—and I’m exaggerating for comedic effect, hopefully—where everything is caused by Democrats and Republicans are, like, reacting to it, or voters are reacting to it, instead of explicitly lifting up what Republicans are saying and doing, and how they manufacture topics and controversy and so on. What is that?

Bacon: Part of it is this. I’m obsessed with this geography issue, because it really matters, and I’m going to just, coming together, come back to it again. There was a piece in 2023 in The New York Times, and they were like, it’s not clear what the Republican agenda is, and they quoted John Thune and four of the Republican congressmen and a couple Republican governors.

And I was like, if you look at the 20 Republican states, they all pass the exact same bills every session. Abortion ban here, trans ban here, CRT ban there, massive tax cut. So all you have to do is look down—there’s a very... And then when Donald Trump in 2025 became president, they passed the exact same agenda federally.

So I do think part of it is just purely, the Republicans, I think smartly, a lot of their agenda is executed by state legislators, governors, and judges, the Supreme Court and the lower courts. So on some level, I think journalists—Donald Trump does stuff, I’m not denying the obvious here. But on some level, the Republicans have smartly distributed how they do power. Think about how many, just in a media sense, there’s a huge media assigned to cover Congress and follow around Susan Collins and ask if she’s voting for whatever Trump did that day. I’m not saying that stuff is not important, but the Texas and Louisiana legislators pass these huge sweeping bills all the time and have four people covering them combined.

And so in certain ways, I do think that is part of it, is, like, the agency—the Republicans who are actually doing stuff with lots of agency, who are passing the CRT bans, are random Republican legislators. Even though if you have 1,000 Republican legislators vote for a CRT ban, that’s a lot of people doing stuff, but the media is not—think about the last Thomas Friedman column about a state legislator in any state.

And I think that gets to a part of it, is, versus the Democratic Party—and this is a flaw, is, I would argue our trifecta states don’t do enough. There’s been a controversy about how Gretchen Whitmer was vetoing some bills that the legislature passed in the majority. I don’t feel like we have to beg our—Newsom, and Hochul, we have to beg them, Can you guys do stuff, since you have power? Greg Abbott is not being begged to do stuff. Ron DeSantis is doing stuff.

And so there is a media agency problem, but I do think it’s worth thinking about, part of what’s going on is, the Republicans that are the most strategic are the ones who are not being interviewed each day. John Roberts does not get—John Roberts has done a very effective job moving the country to the right. He does not give a lot of interviews discussing his political plans, and that is probably pretty useful. John Thune does, but John Thune’s is not very tactical or effective, and it doesn’t really matter that much.

Podhorzer: Yeah. So is that, like, a really mean trick question to see if either of us would admit we’d ever read a Tom Friedman column?

Bacon: I used to, I’ll confess. No, during the Gaza War, I read a fair amount, because he actually is very informed about Israel and Palestine. So I haven’t read it. So, yes.

Podhorzer: Yeah. But I think one of the things, though, a couple things on what you were saying: first is, I don’t know that I give Republicans credit for being clever about where they’re getting this done. I think it is just, these are the only places they can win elections and get it done.

Bacon: But they do get a lot done in the places they run, and I would—

Podhorzer: No, that’s what I’m saying.

Bacon: —be concerned if the Democrats—

Podhorzer: But I’m saying, it’s not like they are saying, “We’re only going to talk about this agenda in our states, right? They’re talking about it everywhere, which is why they’ve marginalized themselves as a party in much of the rest of the country. And in that brief moment after the 2010 election, when Scott Walker got elected, when Rick Snyder got elected, they were trying to do the same thing in those states, right?

We had the Flint emergency manager. Like, all of it, like, they were pedal to the metal doing the things they’d been successful at in, like, their solid states. So I think it’s just, we only see it there because everywhere else it’s taken them off, like, the ballot for general elections, right? And—

Shenker-Osorio: But—

Podhorzer: Sorry.

Shenker-Osorio: No, I was just going to make another point in Perry’s geographic analysis column. I was going to issue him a point, but I don’t want to cut you off.

Podhorzer: No, go ahead.

Shenker-Osorio: Just to state the obvious: Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries live in New York, which is, as you noted to us, and I think we were aware, a media center. And Mike Johnson and Mitch McConnell doesn’t live anywhere anymore.

Bacon: I was going to say that, but you got there before I did, yes.

Shenker-Osorio: He doesn’t live anywhere, but he is whatever he is in—

Bacon: In Kentucky, whatever he’s doing.

Shenker-Osorio: Yes.

Bacon: Whatever his status is.

Shenker-Osorio: It’s not in New York. And Thune—yeah, back to your geographic point, if part of the contours of this issue are that the media is covering what Democrats say and refusing to cover what Republicans do—

Bacon: Yes, that’s what I was going to get.

Shenker-Osorio: —it’s because that doing is falling outside of, as you were saying, media centers, because that is, as Mike was saying, where they have power and control. And the saying is falling inside of major media centers, because that is where Democrats have neither power nor control, but titles. It is where they have titles. That makes sense.

Bacon: In New York they have power. They don’t use it, but they have power.

Shenker-Osorio: Yeah. Same with California. I think one of the extraordinary things about working in Minnesota as long as I have is watching them, with a one-vote majority hustle and get themselves 22 pieces of legislation in basically no time. And, granted, it’s cold there, so they have to move their bodies more, and maybe that’s the entire explanation. But I’m joking, Mike. And for those of us in blue trifecta states, and having had them for a while, New York and California—like, where’s the hustle, yo?

Bacon: You made this media point that I want to come back to, which is—I think about the Harvard president, and how The New York Times ran—that’s, like, the prototypic example of that. That was a story that the Harvard president is accused of not doing enough about the anti-Israel protests after October 7th. Then there’s this thing about maybe she didn’t cite enough things in her thesis, and they write story after story about that, and eventually she resigns.

That’s the kind of story where it’s like, the power of the media is not to tell you what to think—obviously Ronald Reagan and George Bush and Donald Trump would never have become president if the journalists got to vote, because the journalists are not for those people. But the media does control what people think about, and we can make something a big story. And the fact that The New York Times made the presidency of Harvard, and what she may have done in her thesis, like, front page news day after—that’s the best example I can think of, like, where the media coverage was so out of bounds.

That was, like, a campaign to get her fired that succeeded, and that would not have succeeded without the nation’s biggest newspaper, a newspaper not based in Boston. It was not a local story. It’s local for them because half their staff went to Harvard, but it’s not local in any sort of real way.

And so, having that happen that way, versus no one in Louisville—that never made the Louisville local news. I’m not sure if it made ABC World News, which my mom would watch. It was purely a New York Times, MSNBC. It wasn’t even covered in The Washington Post that much. That’s the kind of thing where it’s like, there’s where the media power is, and why would The New York Times decide to weigh in there?

That’s not a Republican-Democrat story, but I do think that’s a—The New York Times had, has, more of a pro-Israel position, I think, at that point at least did. Claudine Gay, as the Black president of Harvard, had become a symbol of the DEI has gone too far, and that was a position that The New York Times held, even though that’s not necessarily a Republican—even though The New York Times isn’t Republican, that was just something they held. And so that’s the place where it’s like, here’s where the media has decided, yes. And it’s not like Claudine Gay wrote her thesis last week.

They decided, for whatever reason, that Chris Rufo acted like that was the case. They made him their—his assignment their—and those are the places where, like, that’s the story where you can take off the sort of partisan hats and think about, what kind of media covers Claudine Gay like it’s the most important story in the world? That’s the media you want to change.

Podhorzer: So, yeah. We’re getting close to the end, but I wanted to pull a couple things together. One—and you may have followed this more closely than I did, and I’m pulling sort of other things to inference on this, but my sense, like, on Claudine Gay, was that it’s much more about disciplining universities about Gaza than it was about DEI, and that it was the trustees, and the sort of, who decided they were really dissatisfied with their university administration.

Bacon: I think that “this person might be dumb and didn’t write their thesis” thing is easier to lodge against Claudine Gay than against Larry Summers.

Michael Podhorzer: But why, right?

That why then, as opposed to some other time. The other thing that does, in a way, bring this full circle is that—when we were talking, you both were talking a minute ago about, like, blue trifecta states, right? I think, and you said you’re experiencing this every day, like, where you live.

But to me, like, blue trifecta states are profoundly different from red trifecta states in one important area, which is that there’s still substantive electoral competition, right? The fact that Republican primaries in blue states are the remaining wackos who call themselves Republicans means that the primary races are between the people who used to be electable Republicans but now have to run as Democrats. And we saw it actually happen in the world, like when Arlen Specter left the Republican Party to be run as a Democrat in Pennsylvania, right?

But a lot of the folks—and I think this is in some ways counterproductive, because it doesn’t really acknowledge that there isn’t one blue, and that there are real stakes. There’s, like, factions within these states that, like, confuse us, because they’re both wearing Democratic jerseys, and therefore you think, wow, that other person is a bad blue team member because they’re doing it. And that’s only because you’re not acknowledging that the Republican Party in the North has to wear blue jerseys.

And I don’t think the same thing exists anymore in the South, where maybe someone’s a little more extreme in a primary fight, but not as profoundly in disagreement with abortion bans, or with trans, or with the sort of pillars of what’s become the orthodoxy there.

Bacon: Or, to put it in terms you might—I wish I had said this before—is that it might be, in blue states, the core fight is between, I don’t want to be too reductive, but corporate Democrats and non-corporate Democrats probably gets you most of the way there. And in some ways those are, like, in Massachusetts, for example, which is a one-party state, they have very intense battles over policy, and it’s always between who—the donor-funded Democrat or the non-donor-funded Democrat.

And so on some level, the blue states can’t pass a lot because people with Ds on their name are not really in the same agenda. And I agree, in red states, we just have the Republicans who love Trump extra a lot, and the ones who under-like him two times a lot, and there’s not a lot of—like the sort of the Mitch McConnell Republicans, which I used to refer to almost as people who were pro-immigration and pro-diversity, because Mitch McConnell in iterations of his life.

The history of Mitch McConnell is, Mitch McConnell spent a lot of time promoting this guy named Daniel Cameron, who ran for governor. Mitch McConnell used to care about diversity, and used to really try to promote making more Black people in the Republican Party, and used to really—because he used to be pro-immigration, pro-diversity. There were certain issues. There’s a center at the University of Louisville founded after Mitch McConnell, who used to be very much for education, and used to be very promoting of higher education.

There used to be a kind of Republican that is now gone, and there was an ideological difference between those people. What Marco Rubio was in 20—he’s conservative, but what he was in 2015 was different than what Cruz and Trump are now. And so I think that is an important distinction, and probably why, yes, blue states are actually having a real policy fight between the, yeah, the Gavin Newsoms and the Zohrans.

Podhorzer: Yeah. And it’s not just—it’s not, the important thing for people to understand is, it’s not because Gavin is in some way disloyal to what Democrats are. It’s because there’s still a fight about what Democrats are.

Bacon: What Democrats are for, yeah.

Podhorzer: Yeah.

Shenker-Osorio: I think that sort of takes us. Perry, if you have any parting words, if you want to say anything about—I don’t know, where you see media going, if there’s any bright lights at the end of this dark tunnel, if you just want to spew about The Washington Post, the mic is yours.

Bacon: I’m going to spew about the—I am happy that The Washington Post lost that arbitration case, and my former colleague, Karen Attiah—I don’t know if she’s going to actually go work back there, but they lost. They still have to give her some money, at least, and that’s a good thing, because they fired her unfairly and unjustifiably. I would say The Washington Post, as I mentioned, does some great work in the news section still. They didn’t want the columnists who were left of center, they were not encouraged to stay—but I think that the paper does some good work.

I would say that there’s a lot of great—we’re in this moment where I’ve criticized The New York Times and The Post in this conversation a couple times, and I think that the sort of mainstream CBS News, oh God, CBS News is a particularly bad example, but ABC News—I don’t think the sort of mainstream has risen to the occasion.

But I do think, if you look at The Guardian—the thing that I get up and read each morning—has done a good job. It’s not like they’re saying Democrats are good, they’re saying Trump is breaking rules, and they don’t say that scholars say Trump broke rules, or Trump may have broken rules, but some say the rules, whatever. They just say it. The New Republic, I think, is more openly liberal, but I think we’re doing some great work too. And I’m struggling, I read Drop Site News, I read—I’m struggling right now to name all the things that I read these days. I read Capital B.

But I think we’re in a moment where I encourage people all the time to spend a little less time—if you’re on Bluesky particularly, maybe the time you spent tweeting about paragraph four of New York Times story zero, Z, would be better off spent where you find a story in The Guardian, or The New Republic, or someone’s Substack, and you promote that story. We’re in 2026. People know that The New York Times, The Post, and CBS are going to do a lot of both-sides-ing. People get that.

So maybe you should promote what you want people to read, instead of saying, Don’t read this story that I’m broadcasting for you to not read. Instead, model the behavior you want to see. The American Prospect—somebody noted on the chat—a great publication. The American Prospect, David Dayen, do some great work. They do some excellent work. Great place to read about the Democratic Party in particular.

Shenker-Osorio: Yeah. That’s a great place to leave it. Tell people what you want them to do. Stop promoting what you don’t want them to do. Perry, thank you so much.

Bacon: Thanks for having me. Great to see you guys.

Podhorzer: Yeah. Take care. Bye.

A science professor says he was fired from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, for refusing to ignore the human causes of climate change, and is now suing the institution in federal court.

Dr. Adam Kalkstein, a professor of geography, told The New York Times that the dean of West Point’s academic board, Brigadier General Shane Reeves, in a meeting last year ordered him to remove everything about human contributions to climate change, as President Trump sets the agenda as commander in chief. Kalkstein told Reeves that such a change would be immoral, and possibly illegal. When Reeves suggested Kalkstein resign, Kalkstein declined, after which the dean stormed out of the room.

“We’re only telling cadets part of the story. We’re lying to them, deceiving them. It would be like trying to teach the law without being able to even mention the Constitution,” Kalkstein reportedly said during the meeting, according to Stars and Stripes.

Six months later, Kalkstein, a tenured professor, was told his contract wouldn’t be renewed, and on Monday, he sued the institution in the Southern District of New York, alleging that his First Amendment rights were violated. The lawsuit states that the institution’s order would require Kalkstein “to omit a massive, fundamental, essential component of the court and to defy science.”

According to the Times, Kalkstein is a conservative Republican who believes military cadets need to know the truth about climate change for national security reasons rather than social justice. He wrote a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth arguing that knowing the causes of climate change was important for competing over resources in the Arctic and understanding why sea ice was melting.

Hegseth, along with the rest of the Trump administration, is trying to purge “wokeness” from government and military institutions, including any acknowledgment of climate change. Early in his tenure last year, Hegseth boasted on X that “The @DeptofDefense does not do climate change crap. We do training and warfighting.”

That’s a major departure from previous administrations. In 2021, the Pentagon concluded in a report that “increasing temperatures; changing precipitation patterns; and more frequent, intense, and unpredictable extreme weather conditions caused by climate change are exacerbating existing risks.”

Those risks still exist, but the Trump administration is flat-out ignoring the science for financial and culture-war reasons. Professors like Kalkstein, and the knowledge of America’s future military officers, are among the casualties.

More than a dozen local law enforcement agencies across the country have used opioid settlement money to procure Flock cameras and other AI-powered automated license plate readers (ALPRs), an investigation by Mother Jones has found.

Settlement funds began flowing to states and localities in 2022, after major pharmaceutical companies agreed to resolve thousands of lawsuits over the industry’s role in the opioid crisis. Altogether, state and local governments secured more than $50 billion in funds, to be paid out over 18 years, from the various manufacturers, distributors, and pharmacies accused of fueling the deadly epidemic.

Public health advocates hoped the settlements would provide lifesaving resources for historically underserved communities ravaged by opioid addiction. But as the money has been disbursed, local officials have come under fire for putting crucial dollars toward policing instead of prioritizing addiction prevention, recovery, treatment, and harm reduction services: KFF Health News found that police spent settlement money on Tasers, firearm silencers, drones, and more; in West Virginia, some rural counties used the funds to pay off their jail bills.

“Whatever funds you’re spending on a camera, you’re not spending on getting someone into treatment.”

But little attention has been paid to how police departments have used those opioid funds to build out AI-powered surveillance networks like Flock, whose ALPRs have become increasingly popular with police even as they’ve drawn intense bipartisan pushback in the communities where they’ve been deployed. A review of meeting minutes, local reporting, state opioid expenditure disclosures, and invoices obtained via public records requests reveals that at least twelve sheriffs’ offices and police departments have since 2024 spent their opioid funds on Flock cameras. Another seven law enforcement agencies used the money to purchase similar ALPR technology from competitors Motorola, Axon, and Verkada.

In sum, Mother Jones found that 19 agencies in ten different states spent more than $920,000 in opioid funds on Flock and other ALPRs, a likely undercount given the inconsistency with which opioid settlement expenditures are tracked and disclosed across states and local jurisdictions.

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In city council and county commission meetings, police sought to convince local officials that the cameras were a good use of the opioid money because they would help catch drug traffickers and reduce drug-related crimes. But Robyn Oster, director of policy at the nonprofit Partnership to End Addiction, said that this type of spending doesn’t honor the spirit of the settlements.

“It’s just really not the way to make the most impact in addressing addiction,” said Oster. “While $50 billion may seem like a lot of funds, once it’s divided up over 18 years and thousands of localities, a lot of places really aren’t getting that much, particularly given the scope of the crisis…Whatever funds you’re spending on a camera, you’re not spending on getting someone into treatment.”

At a June 2025 meeting in Sunnyside, Washington—an agricultural hub where roughly one in five people live in poverty—council members were thrilled by the prospect of spending their opioid settlement money on a Flock camera. Around $200,000 had been sitting, untouched, in the city’s coffers since 2022, even as the area faced a dire need for expanded treatment services: Yakima County lacks a medical detox center and has one of the highest overdose death rates in Washington state.

“We’ve had several people … in that strip mall next to the hotel … that have complained about drug use and things like that behind their business, and they’ve asked us to place a trailer there,” the Sunnyside police chief told city councilmembers. He requested the approval of $24,000 in opioid settlement funds to go to a one-year lease for a mobile Flock security trailer, which would integrate with the city’s existing Flock surveillance system.

“I was trying to find creative ways to pay for one because $24,000 wasn’t in our budget this year,” he added, “but we’ve got this opioid settlement money, and if we’re tying it to the drug use problem we’re having at these hotels, I think we can justify the expenditure there.”

The city council unanimously voted to approve the police chief’s request. “Can we afford two of them?” one councilmember asked with enthusiasm.

Thousands of miles away, in Ohio County, West Virginia, county commissioners also voted unanimously in favor of spending opioid money on Flock cameras. In September 2025, the commission approved the sheriff’s office’s request for six Flock ALPRs, totaling $57,900 for the first three years. According to meeting minutes, Chief Deputy Kent Lewis “said a representative from the company is able to come and give a presentation,” and “added that Walmart and Lowe’s use FLOCK, so we may be able to tie into their system as well.” When one commissioner asked whether the cameras were an appropriate use of the funds, the deputy sheriff responded that they would “[help] track drugs coming into our area.”

Three months later, Sheriff H. Nelson Croft Jr. gave an update on Flock to the commissioners. According to meeting minutes, the system logged 28,000 license plate readings on Black Friday alone. Ohio County has a population of around 40,000.

The surveillance industry has taken notice, explicitly encouraging cops to spend opioid money on the technology. A December blog post from the multinational security firm Leonardo called opioid settlement funds “a major new opportunity” for law enforcement to invest in license plate readers.

“Eligible spending categories vary by state,” the blog post noted, but approved uses often include “LPR technology due to its role in detecting vehicles tied to drug trafficking, overdose events, and fugitive recovery.” In June, 404 Media reported that Leonardo planned to add sensors to its ALPRs that “would also sweep up unique identifiers of mobile phones, wearables, and other Bluetooth-enabled devices” in passing cars, enabling the cameras to track not just cars but “the location of particular people.”

“The funds that are supposed to go to the public to help build back and reverse the nightmare that we lived through are being appropriated to use artificial intelligence to surveil us.”

Mother Jones identified four additional locations where local officials explored using opioid money to pay for Flock cameras but ultimately funded them through other parts of city or county budgets. In Green, Ohio, for instance, the city council approved the purchase of 14 Flock cameras in 2024, and the mayor stated at the time that the city could use $20,000 of opioid money to offset the cost. But Shelley Goodrich, Green’s director of finance, told me the city ultimately paid for the first two years of the contract using a different funding source. “We were planning to use Drug Task Force funds beginning in 2026; however, we have not made any payments in 2026,” she wrote. This month, the Green City Council voted against renewing its contract with Flock, citing concerns about privacy and oversight.

In Etowah County, Alabama, commissioners authorized two disbursements from the opioid settlement fund to pay for ten Flock cameras in August 2024 and March 2025, totaling $42,267. But minutes from October 2025 show that the sheriff department’s budget was increased by $42,267, “to reimburse the Opioid Settlement fund for the FY 2024 and FY 2025 annual contract for the Flock safety cameras.” The Etowah County Sheriff’s Office did not respond to questions about why it reimbursed the funds or whether it plans to use opioid money for future renewals of the Flock contract.

Opioid spending on police surveillance technology isn’t limited to ALPRs. Mother Jones also identified six locations that have used opioid settlement money to fund contracts with Peregrine Technologies, an AI-powered software platform that integrates law enforcement surveillance data from a variety of sources.

In October, the city of Campbell, California, approved a three-year, $71,500 annual contract with Peregrine using opioid settlement funds. A publicly accessible copy of the contract states that “the initial Customer Data sources and systems” integrated into Peregrine would include both Flock and Axon ALPRs, as well as Axon body cameras, police records, and the Axon Fusus intelligence platform. Two months later, the city council in Chicopee, Massachusetts, approved a five-year, $837,500 contract with Peregrine, to be paid using opioid funds.

Chicopee was among the western Massachusetts cities hit hardest by the opioid crisis, and in 2024, it still had the second-highest overdose rate in Hampden County. In meeting minutes, the Chicopee mayor noted there was “quite a bit of money in the opioid agreement account” and said that the Hampden County Sheriff’s Office supported increasing the Peregrine contract from three years to five years.

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Peregrine itself has been proud to announce “new partnerships” with police departments in Cranston and South Kingstown, Rhode Island. “Both agencies leveraged opioid settlement funds to invest in their communities by strengthening interagency collaboration, operational awareness, and investigative workflows through Peregrine,” stated a July LinkedIn post from the company.

Revelations that local governments spent residents’ opioid money on Flock cameras has stoked furor in both Pensacola, Florida, and Monongalia County, West Virginia. In Pensacola, the mayor approved a two-year, $108,000 contract for 18 Flock cameras using opioid funds. After seven months of public backlash, the Pensacola City Council announced in June that it would no longer allow opioid money to be spent on Flock cameras when the contract next came up for renewal.

In Morgantown, West Virginia, constituents have shown up at the Monongalia County Courthouse every Wednesday morning to speak out against local officials’ support for Flock. In November, the Monongalia County Commission approved the sheriff’s request to use up to $180,000 of settlement funds to install 20 Flock cameras across the county. To some people in the area, this use of the opioid money felt like salt in an all-too-fresh wound.

“As somebody who has had family members directly affected by the opioid crisis, I find the use of these funds absolutely disgusting,” said Harrison York, a 25-year-old electrical engineering student at West Virginia University in Morgantown. “The thing that got my family members clean were methadone services, and that’s what this opioid settlement money should be used for.” He pointed to research showing that criminalization does little to help people struggling with drug addiction, and contended that further policing “would punish the poor and the working class, who are victims” of the opioid epidemic.

Adam Menear, a 45-year-old father born and raised in Morgantown, started a petition in March calling on the Monongalia County Commission to halt the installation of Flock cameras that has received more than 1,500 signatures to date.

“There is not a single human being inside the state of West Virginia who was born and raised here who has not been adversely affected by the opioid crisis,” Menear told me. “The new crisis is the fact that the funds that are supposed to go to the public to help build back and reverse the nightmare that we lived through are being appropriated to use artificial intelligence to surveil us.”

You can watch this video above. You can read a transcript here.

The spring and summer featured a number of primaries where progressive candidates faced more center-left challengers. TNR’s Perry Bacon discusses those primaries with progressive political strategist Anat Shenker-Osorio and former AFL-CIO political director Michael Podhorzer on their Substack show Meeting the Moment. Perry argues that progressive candidates are making a huge mistake by not forcefully addressing the electability issue and explaining how they can win, particularly in key swing states. Podhorzer argues that centrist Democrats often cast a progressive candidate as unelectable to change the subject, because voters might agree with the progressive’s policy views. The three also discussed how the media covers progressive and Democratic candidates.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWfClU_QgVE

The Iran war has gravely exacerbated the U.S. military’s advanced missile interceptor shortage in Europe.

The shortage is “beyond critical,” as supplies have been quickly and unexpectedly drained by the Iran war, according to a Europe-based U.S. defense official, as well as a NATO official who spoke with the Associated Press Thursday.

The deficit is most serious for the country’s Patriot missile interceptors, which are capable of shooting down ballistic missiles and aircraft but have been heavily relied upon during the war to stave off Iran’s Shahed swarming attack drones.

The deficit boils down to a supply chain problem. Iran’s drones are small, simple to manufacture, and cost roughly $20,000 to produce. They can be launched from almost anywhere, and use GPS to find their target. They’re typically launched en masse to overwhelm opposing defense systems.

Patriot missiles, meanwhile, cost between $3 million and $4 million per unit. An entire Patriot battery system can cost as much as $1.1 billion, including the launcher, radar, and missiles. As a result of the missiles’ enormous price tag, production of America’s highly sought-after Patriot system is relatively slow compared to its demand. In 2025, Lockheed Martin created 620 units of the Patriot missile. Iran, in comparison, is capable of producing about 10,000 drones per month, reported Reuters.

U.S. missile stockpiles were transferred from Europe to the Middle East to aid the war effort, but that has left NATO and American forces based in Europe empty-handed in the face of a potential Russian attack on the continent. The U.S. defense official told the AP that the situation could force America or its European allies “to take punch after punch in the mouth” should the Kremlin decide to launch an assault on a regional military base or nuclear facility.

European and NATO officials have warned that Russia could be in a strategic position to attack the alliance by 2030—though defense contractors have projected that America’s Patriot missile stockpiles should rebound by that point.

Russia has been involved all along: Just over one week into the conflict in March, The Washington Post reported that Russia had funneled military intelligence to Iran to assist the country in targeting U.S. forces. Afterward, Iran systematically destroyed U.S. missile defense systems across the Middle East, including radars and command infrastructure. In the early days of the war, an Iranian drone attack on a Kuwait operations center killed six U.S. soldiers and seriously wounded dozens more.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has rejected opportunities to buy tech that could have given U.S. forces a dramatic advantage in the war. Kyiv offered its expertise, as Ukraine has more experience fighting Shaheds than practically any other country, downing the same design under Russia’s flag (Russia rebranded the military tech as “Geran drones”). But the Trump administration passed.

However, the White House has expressed little public concern over the rising tensions. Speaking with reporters Thursday, Donald Trump said that he recently had “good talks” with Russian President Vladimir Putin and that he believed Putin’s “not going to be attacking.”

Well, well, what have we here? A state governor and his team actively participating in Medicaid fraud? With the help of his wife? And a kinda fake-y charity? How DARE Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and his wife Gw— Wait, sorry. I’m getting word that this is about Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis and his wife Casey’s lil fake-y charity, Hope Florida. CBS Miami broke the news Wednesday night…

Source

While Americans pay the price for President Trump’s war in Iran, he appears to be cashing in on it.

Trump made more than 1,000 dubiously timed stock trades in June, including thousands of dollars in exchanges with companies directly impacted by the Iran war, according to a CNN analysis of a filing with the Office of Government Ethics. As the war drags on, Trump’s portfolio seems to be thriving.

The filing reveals that Trump got involved with U.S. defense contractors including Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, and RTX. Although the exact amounts the president traded are not disclosed in the filing, the dates conspicuously coincide with Iran negotiations between June 12 and 24. According to the filing, Trump purchased Lockheed Martin stock on June 15 and sold on June 16, one day before signing the now-defunct memorandum of understanding with Iran. He purchased Lockheed Martin stock again on June 23, less than a week after signing the deal.

Alongside those eyebrow-raising investments, the president bought and sold energy stocks with Exxon Mobil and Chevron, each to the tune of somewhere between $1,000 and $1500, as oil and gas prices skyrocketed for consumers.

Those investments join others in Palantir, Meta, Boeing, SpaceX, Broadcom, and Nvidia, all of which are currently in business with his administration. It’s no secret that Trump has used the presidency for profit—according to his 2025 financial disclosure, he made over $2 billion in his first year back in the White House alone. His personal gains, boosted by cryptocurrency ventures, foreign real estate, and his many, many stock trades, eclipse what any of his predecessors made during their time in office.

Still, the White House claims that Trump is not personally involved in his own investment portfolio. According to spokesman Davis Ingle, there are “no conflicts of interest,” and Trump’s assets are in a trust managed by his children.

The Iran war has made life more expensive for Americans. Gas prices are higher, groceries are more expensive, and inflation has crept back up. For Trump, it’s another investment opportunity.

I’ve been reporting on campaigns and elections for over a decade now, cutting my teeth at Roll Call and working alongside the smart folks making the race ratings at Inside Elections before I took the dive into partisan media. And knowing what I do for a living, my friends and families without fail will ask me every election cycle: “What do you think is going to happen in November?

Source

Six percent of Texas’s voters—over 1.2 million people—have had their voter registrations suspended, and many might not even know about it.

The designation, which means that the voter’s county doesn’t know their address or thinks they’ve moved, doesn’t stop people from voting in November’s midterm elections, but it does make the process more difficult. If a voter shows up on Election Day and their registration is suspended, they have to fill out a “statement of residence” form, and if they’ve moved to a new county, they’ll either be required to vote in their old one or be given a provisional ballot, The Dallas Morning News reported.

The suspended registrations span the whole state, but also some of Texas’s largest counties, including Dallas County, where more than 129,000 voters are suspended; 56,000 voters in both Collin and Denton counties; and over 73,000 voters in Tarrant County.

Voters have until October 5 to update their registrations and can check their status on the Texas secretary of state’s website, at a county election office, or by mail. But with a number as high as 1.2 million people, the message may not reach many voters in time—especially if they haven’t moved and it’s the fault of a clerical error.

That margin could also be pivotal in a state where polls are close in multiple races, especially the Senate, where Democratic state Senator James Talarico has a narrow edge over Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton. Texas is also cooperating with the Trump administration’s attempts to take control of elections by handing over its voter rolls. If a significant number of Texans are blocked from voting on Election Day, that could make all the difference in what the Senate looks like the next four years.