Political News

Pease Elementary in downtown Austin, Texas, has sat empty since 2020. Formerly the oldest continuously operating school in Texas, Pease was shuttered by the Austin Independent School District to save money. On a steamy day this summer, the hulking structure provided an appropriate backdrop for the political campaign of Gina Hinojosa, the Democratic state representative who is challenging incumbent GOP Governor Greg Abbott.

A district plan to close the school in 2012, while Hinojosa’s son was a student there, inspired her political career, sending her first to the school board and then, four years later, to the Statehouse just a few blocks away. But Pease is also symbolic of Texas’s surprisingly fierce attachment to public education. The school dates back to 1876, the same year that the current state constitution enshrined “a system of public free schools”—a factoid that Texas advocates drop with regularity. That Pease is no longer a school matters, too. Since late 2023, at least 135 Texas public schools either have closed or are slated to close due to budget crises brought on by state funding shortfalls.

Hinojosa believes her message that Texas public schools won’t survive another four years of Abbott can galvanize voters across the political spectrum. “For Texans, public schools are crucial to our identity,” Hinojosa told me. “They’re in our state constitution, they’re the largest employers in our rural communities, they represent ‘Friday night lights.’ That they are in crisis is a big deal.”

Her decision to make public schools so central to the campaign may seem like a risky gambit. Education, after all, rarely cracks the top five when it comes to issues Texans claim to care about, far overshadowed by the economy and immigration. And according to polling, just one in five Texas voters has school-age children. The “Pissed Off Texas Mom” T-shirts are a staple of rallies for the candidate whom supporters call simply “Gina,” but in reality, the demographic may be too small to make a difference.

Hinojosa’s critique goes far beyond budget cuts and declining test scores. Schools are the centerpiece of what she argues has been an organized effort by Abbott and the GOP to rig the system against the state’s kids, especially those in working-class families like those she grew up with in Brownsville. Call it “mom populism”—an appeal that centers a full-throated rejection of school privatization and presents the GOP’s increasingly aggressive interventions into local school districts as “corruption schemes” intended to benefit big donors, especially the right-wing oilmen who hold such sway here. By systematically weakening public schools, Hinojosa argues, Abbott and his cronies are undermining the American Dream.

Beating a three-term GOP incumbent in a state like Texas remains a tall order, but there are signs that Hinojosa’s argument may just be breaking through. While Abbott, who is running for an unprecedented fourth term, comes to this fight with a massive war chest, Republicans in Texas are restive, and education is part of their discontent. The $1 billion school voucher program that Abbott muscled through the state legislature last year, after he orchestrated primary runs against rural Republicans who opposed it, remains deeply controversial among many conservatives, who view vouchers less as “education freedom” than as a state takeover of private and home schools.

Michael Ryan is one of Abbott’s defectors. A retired educator, Ryan served on the school board in Fort Worth until the state took over the district last year, installing handpicked leaders. “I’m as red a Republican as they come, but I have to do something different,” said Ryan, a three-time Trump voter. Hinojosa’s pledge to fire Abbott’s top education official on day one won him over, along with her sharp critique of school vouchers and the big money that flooded into the state on their behalf. Ryan was particularly rankled by the $10 million Abbott received from Pennsylvania billionaire investor Jeff Yass. “In the old days, a bribe meant $100 on the floor of the Capitol,” said Ryan.

Recent elections indicate that defectors like Ryan are part of a trend. This January, Democrat Taylor Rehmet, a veteran and union machinist, handily defeated a conservative activist in a special election for a state Senate seat in Tarrant County, a seat Democrats last held in 1991. Despite being far outspent by his opponent, Rehmet won by a decisive 14-point margin in a district Donald Trump carried by 17 points in 2024, alarming Republicans, not just in Texas, but across the country. “[A] swing of this magnitude is not something that can be dismissed,” chimed in Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on X. Rehmet used his background as a union leader at Lockheed Martin to win over working-class voters, but he also made public education central to his campaign, sounding many of the same themes that Hinojosa is running on now.

Affordability was the top issue for voters, but their economic concerns were often entwined with worries over the state of the local schools, said Rehmet, who grew up in a Republican household in Garland, the son of an aircraft mechanic and a beautician. “People are feeling the affordability crunch in the schools. Funding is down, the cost of living is up. You’ve got teachers paying for supplies out of their own salaries.” In a part of the state that has been ground zero for conservative school board takeovers and book bans, Rehmet also tapped into a deepening voter backlash against GOP culture-warring candidates, who have racked up a lengthening string of losses in Tarrant County.

A recent analysis of this spring’s GOP primary turnout in Texas warned that the party’s historically reliable voters were dangerously disengaged, “either sitting out this cycle or, in some cases, shifting their partisan affiliation entirely.” The phenomenon was most pronounced in suburban districts, the pollsters concluded.

That finding comes as no surprise to Hinojosa. “People know who has been in charge,” she told me, “and they want change.”

Mom Populism

Texas isn’t the only state where education has emerged as a potent issue for Democrats. As of March 2026, in the 30 state legislative races where Democrats have flipped seats since Trump returned to office, public education was often a central issue. It’s not hard to see why. As the GOP has shifted sharply in favor of private school vouchers, Democrats are increasingly running against candidates who no longer believe in public education at all, even as constituents in both parties still have kids in the local schools. Ascendant populist Democrats are also tapping into anti-billionaire fury as they campaign against vouchers. And with affordability top of mind in nearly every election these days, Democrats are effectively linking issues like school budget cuts and teacher pay to voters’ broader economic concerns.

“Republicans have no answer to affordability except for eliminating the property tax, which would devastate public schools,” said Eric Gisler, who flipped a Statehouse seat in Georgia in 2025. “That makes education a real wedge issue.”

That Democrats are running—and winning—at least in part on education may seem surprising, given the dire reporting on the state of the nation’s schools. In recent years, the headlines have been relentlessly bleak—sliding test scores in math and reading, a “learning recession,” high rates of chronic absenteeism.

The cascade of bad news has prompted loud calls from influential centrist Democrats, including possible 2028 presidential contender Rahm Emanuel, to return to the more combative education policies of the past in an effort to reverse sagging student achievement. But these Democrats are also making a political argument about the direction of their party. Bring back the high-stakes testing and tough-on-teachers rhetoric of the Obama era, goes this line of thinking, and the party can win back fickle voters. “We’re adrift, it’s killing us politically, and it’s killing our kids,” former Obama Education Secretary Arne Duncan claimed recently.

Yet as I’ve talked to Democrats who flipped seats in districts won by Trump, or who are running surprisingly competitive races in red states, a very different picture has emerged. Candidates like Taylor Rehmet are attracting independents and even former GOP voters by arguing not that the schools are failing, but that kids and communities are being failed by politicians who have abandoned public schools. “We want high standards, but we want them to be fair,” said Rehmet. “If we don’t provide enough funding, isn’t that sabotage?”

And again and again, I heard the strains of an emergent “mom populism,” from male and female candidates alike, that makes an argument for public schools as a vehicle for collective economic uplift. Notably, these Democrats are not claiming that education alone can lift kids out of poverty, or that sending more kids to college is the way to address inequality—an argument that has proved to be a political trap for the party. Instead, candidates often pair their defense of public schools as institutions that benefit working-class kids with populist calls for higher wages and more worker power. When it comes to issues like school vouchers, the influence of teachers’ unions, and college-for-all, these mom populists are departing dramatically from the prescription offered by centrist Democrats, and they’re winning as a result.

Reverse Robin Hood

When Denise Powell emerged as the winner of a hard-fought six-person Democratic primary in Nebraska’s 2nd congressional district last spring, her victory was regarded as an upset. After all, Powell triumphed over much better known candidates, including the descendant of one of the state’s political dynasties. In November, the business and nonprofit consultant will try to flip the seat being vacated by GOP veteran Don Bacon, something Democrats here have tried—and failed—to do for nearly a decade. The contest, regarded as one of the Democrats’ best chances for a pickup, is currently rated as a toss-up, but Powell is convinced that she is uniquely suited to appeal to the independents and former GOP voters she’ll need to win.

Two years ago, when opponents of school vouchers sought to put the issue before Nebraska voters, Powell crisscrossed the state to gather signatures, including in its most rural, deepest red stretches. “At a July Fourth celebration, I had a guy wearing a ‘Fuck Joe Biden’ T-shirt come up to me and ask, ‘Where do I sign?’” she said. While Powell was working on multiple ballot campaigns that summer, including one that would have expanded reproductive rights, it was her experience talking to conservative voters about vouchers that prepared her to run for Congress. “I’d walk up a dirt road to a house flying a Trump flag, but we found common ground, and it was around public education,” said Powell.

Opposition to school vouchers turns out to have been a consistent, and underappreciated, ingredient in recent special elections in which Democrats have flipped Statehouse seats in Florida, Iowa, New Hampshire, and Georgia. In North Texas, Taylor Rehmet made his objection to funding private religious schools with taxpayer money a centerpiece of his campaign. “We shouldn’t be sending public dollars to private schools with no oversight,” said Rehmet, a position that he said resonated with voters across party lines.

In a sign of just how controversial the issue is among conservatives, Rehmet’s opponent, Leigh Wambsganss, chief communications officer at a Christian nationalist cell phone company, was initially a no on Abbott’s signature education policy of vouchers, then changed her position to align with the governor—and the big donors who funded her campaign. Indeed, when the editor of a conservative news outlet asked Wambsganss’s supporters about why they thought she’d lost, they specifically mentioned her flip-flop on vouchers.

That the GOP’s hard pivot against public education has created an opening for Democrats isn’t that surprising. While school vouchers have spread wildly in recent years, particularly in red states, their track record among voters remains dismal. The Nebraska ballot initiative that Denise Powell worked on, which would have created a so-called private school scholarship program, was rejected by nearly 60 percent of voters, even as the state overwhelmingly supported the reelection of Trump. Kentucky voters rejected an attempt to amend their state constitution to allow vouchers by an even more decisive margin. Ignoring a high-profile endorsement from Trump, every single county voted against the measure, with some of the reddest counties the most emphatic in saying no to allowing public dollars to fund private religious education. That MAGA faithful would buck the boss on one of his policy priorities might seem surprising until you consider that voters have been thumbing their noses at vouchers for the past five decades. “Choice proposals have consistently lost in state after state,” concluded a trio of scholars in a postelection analysis, “often by overwhelming margins.”

At a time of populist fervor on the both the left and the right, a policy that is the pet cause of billionaires including Betsy DeVos, Trump’s much-loathed former secretary of education, and Jeff Yass, the wealthiest man in Pennsylvania, seems uniquely calibrated to arouse the ire of voters. So-called universal vouchers, which subsidize the private school tuition of even the wealthiest families, are also a remarkably efficient means of redirecting resources upward. A 2025 analysis of universal or near-universal programs in six states, including Arizona, Indiana, and North Carolina, found that vouchers “were disproportionately used by families in wealthy areas.”

Iowa, which implemented a voucher program in 2023, now spends more than $250 million to pick up the tab for students at private religious schools, the vast majority of whom never attended public schools. Catelin Drey flipped an Iowa state Senate seat with a decisive 2025 special election win, ending the Republican supermajority in that chamber and becoming its only mother of a young child. Drey made vouchers a symbol of the state’s conservative political leaders’ disregard for the struggles of ordinary Iowans, which include watching their public schools shrink and close as resources are increasingly shifted to the wealthy. “We’ve now got a voucher program with no income levels, no guidelines, and an unlimited line item in the budget,” said Drey. “Yet our public schools that serve the vast majority of kids, and do it without question, are doing it with two nickels and a stick of gum.”

The issue is also likely to help determine whether Iowans elect a Democratic governor for the first time in 16 years. On the stump, Democratic candidate Rob Sand rails against vouchers constantly, describing them as “an ideological errand-running program with no accountability paying for the wealthiest families in the state of Iowa to send their kids to the private schools they were going to send them to anyway.” His strategy seems to be paying off. Sand, elected twice as the state auditor, and currently the only Democrat holding statewide elected office in Iowa, has a slight edge over Republican Zach Lahn, previously an operative for the Koch-backed political group Americans for Prosperity. An ardent voucher proponent, Lahn helped start a private school in Wichita, Kansas, with Charles Koch’s son, Chase, before running off with the younger Koch’s wife. Lahn is running as an outsider against what he calls the “uniparty.”

Democrat vs. Democrat

Given the minuscule number of causes that still bring voters together across party lines, opposition to vouchers would seem like a logical rallying cry for Democrats, including those who seek to draw moderates back into the party fold. Instead, the issue is fueling yet another intraparty divide.

Tucked into the budget behemoth known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act was the nation’s very first federal voucher program. Starting next year, individual taxpayers will be able to donate up to $1,700 annually to so-called scholarship-granting organizations and subtract the full amount from what they owe the federal government—a uniquely generous tax credit. The nonprofits that receive the money then bundle it, after taking a cool 10 percent off the top, before redistributing it as scholarships to individual students to pay for private school tuition, tutoring, and a long list of other educational expenses.

The Education Freedom Tax Credit is as controversial as it is convoluted. Thirty U.S. senators, led by Arizona Democrat Mark Kelly, a near-certain 2028 contender, filed a bill last spring that would repeal the program. “School Vouchers Broke Arizona,” read the headline to Kelly’s excoriating op-ed, warning that his home state’s nearly $1 billion-per-year universal voucher program is a fraud-ridden budget buster that is endangering the ability of working-class kids to get a good education. “We should not take Arizona’s failed experiment national,” Kelly concluded.

But the program also has influential Democratic backers. Democrats for Education Reform, or DFER, the two-decade-old advocacy group started by New York City hedge fund managers, is at the helm of an intense lobbying effort to press Democratic governors to opt into the program. Of the 31 governors who have signed on to date, just two are Democrats. Colorado’s outgoing Governor Jared Polis opted in his state as part of a flurry of late-­office activity, including commuting the sentence of MAGA election denier Tina Peters for plotting to tamper with voting machines, then firing officials who opposed the move. New York’s Kathy Hochul, meanwhile, offered an unusually blunt justification for signing her state up: She needs Jewish votes. “Tuition relief” for students who attend religious yeshivas ranks nearly as high as support for Israel as a priority for Orthodox Jewish voters, a group that overwhelmingly backed Hochul’s GOP rival in 2022.

DFER’s sales pitch is predominantly about money. Because some portion of the funds raised can be used to benefit students who attend public schools, opting in is a “no-brainer,” as the group’s CEO, former Providence, Rhode Island, Mayor Jorge Elorza, and Arne Duncan, now a DFER senior fellow, co-wrote for The Washington Post. There’s also an attempt to present the tax credit program, which is projected to cost the U.S. Treasury nearly $26 billion in its first decade, as a vehicle for anti-Trump activism. Deprive Trump of tax dollars, goes the thinking, and he’ll have a harder time carrying out his nefarious schemes. “I would rather help kids struggling in my home state to catch up and have a chance to be successful in life, instead of sending another dollar to D.C. to fund ICE to come attack us,” argued Duncan, who is tasked with shaping the Democrats’ education policy, in a recent interview.

The U.S. Treasury, which will oversee the new tax credit program, has made it clear that governors will have no ability to impose requirements on where the money goes. Schools that discriminate against LGBTQ kids or teach PragerU content can now be funded by, well, you.

The key proponents of the program, including the American Federation for Children, the deep-pocketed lobby group started by Betsy DeVos, spin it rather differently. Moving the nation’s youngsters out of public schools and into private religious institutions that operate free of the “red tape” of civil rights protections has been a conservative movement priority for the last half-century. The program’s generous income guidelines mean that 90 percent of American students will be eligible for a voucher. Meanwhile, Treasury, which will oversee the program, has made it clear that governors will have no ability to impose requirements on where the money goes. Schools that discriminate against LGBTQ kids or teach PragerU content can now be funded by, well, you.

The Union Tussle

The Dem-on-Dem tussle over school vouchers is the latest installment of a much longer skirmish over the role of teachers’ unions within the party. DFER, after all, was founded to serve as an organized and well-funded counterweight to the unions’ influence. While the shine is off the causes the group championed during the Obama era—charter schools, merit pay, and tougher teacher evaluations yoked to student standardized test scores—the argument that Democrats need to take it to the unions has found new purchase in these days of “abundance” and combative centrism. As pundit Josh Barro put it: “Some of ‘the Groups’ are unions, and Democrats need to be better at saying no to them, too.”

It is an article of faith among centrist Democrats that voters’ low regard for the party can be explained at least in part by the Biden administration’s caving to the unions, backing away from test-based accountability and standards. Duncan has even made the case that Kamala Harris might have won in 2024 had the Democrats stuck with the education policies of his boss. The argument that Democrats prosper politically when they embrace positions that rankle teachers and their unions is also central to Rahm Emanuel’s presidential test run. “Clinton did public school choice. Obama did Race to the Top, accountability, and Common Core,” Emanuel told me, referring to the uniform math and English standards that inspired a bipartisan revolt.

Emanuel’s model for reform these days is Mississippi, whose oft-touted miracle has seen impressive academic gains, especially from elementary school students, in the country’s poorest state. “Mississippi shows the combination to the lock,” Emanuel said, describing the emphasis on phonics and strict accountability for teachers and students that has made the state an outlier in a sea of sliding test scores. But that combination also includes teachers’ unions that are relatively powerless, a product of right-to-work laws adopted in the 1950s in an effort to keep wages low and workers, especially Black workers, weak.

For Emanuel, Exhibit A of the Biden Democrats’ capitulation to teachers’ unions was pandemic school closures, what he refers to as the “original sin” of allowing politics to triumph over science. “Voters trust Democrats less than they did six years ago,” said Emanuel. Another leading centrist voice, Massachusetts Representative Jake Auchincloss, insists that Democrats need to apologize to the American people for their role in shuttering schools during Covid. “Any conversation about education needs to start with the catastrophe of the school closures,” Auchincloss told me. “We were wrong, and we won’t do it again.”

But to whom Democrats should apologize is unclear. While research has found that school districts with powerful unions stayed closed for longer, that does not seem to have translated into voter backlash. Late last year, the centrist publication The Argument set out to document the lingering damage done to the Democratic Party from its response to Covid-19. “The only problem is that our poll provided absolutely nothing to back this up,” conceded pollster Lakshya Jain. “If anything, it suggested the opposite.” The data on public opinion regarding school closures, widely understood to be Democrats’ biggest failure, Jain noted, was particularly striking. Republicans and Trump got worse marks from respondents than Biden and the Democrats. And five years after the pandemic, an outright majority of 54 percent Americans believe the shutdowns were “largely necessary” in order to prevent infections, with just 35 percent saying they were “largely unnecessary.”

This gap between rhetoric and public opinion is indicative of a larger problem underlying the centrist project of taking on teachers’ unions in hopes of luring back disaffected voters. In a review of survey data old and new, political scientist Michael Hartney finds that, in the Trump era, Democratic voters have become wildly more supportive of teachers’ unions, which they’ve come to view as “progressive bulwarks” against Trump and the GOP. The more that the unions present themselves as key actors in the progressive coalition, the more Democratic voters like them—which poses a major challenge to the case being made by Emanuel and others.

“Unions are always made out to be these big, bureaucratic institutions, but they don’t exist without members. It’s the teacher in your kid’s classroom,” said Brian Nathan, a union electrician and veteran who shocked Florida’s political establishment last spring when he flipped a state Senate seat in a reliably red part of Tampa. Nathan, whose campaign motto was “steel-toed integrity,” made teacher pay a central focus of the race, continually reminding voters that Florida now ranks dead last in how much teachers earn, and that their own kids are paying the price. “My eldest daughter had a permanent sub for an entire year,” said Nathan. “That’s the result of people fleeing the profession.”

The College Conundrum

In the waning days of a crowded Democratic primary race to represent Pennsylvania’s 7th congressional district, which includes Allentown, Ryan Crosswell, a former prosecutor for the Justice Department, suggested that his opponent, retired firefighter Bob Brooks, was a “flawed candidate” because he hadn’t gone to college. Brooks pounced. “Sorry I wasn’t lucky enough to go to college,” he pronounced on X, accusing Crosswell of “contempt” for working-class voters. Brooks would go on to win the four-person race by nearly 20 points, setting himself up for what is likely to be a fierce midterm contest against Republican Ryan Mackenzie. Should voters in the former coal and steel towns of the Lehigh Valley give him the nod, Brooks will join a select few in Congress: representatives without college degrees.

“It’s important that we run candidates who have lived real lives—it’s not just about going to college,” Brooks told me when I interviewed him after his win. Brooks’s working-class identity, beginning with his first job as a paper boy at age 10, was central to his campaign. But the flip side of his “I’m just like you” appeal to voters in a district where college-degree holders are a minority was the argument that his better-educated opponent wasn’t like them. “Going from Harvard to Harrisburg to D.C. doesn’t mean you understand what people are dealing with,” said Brooks. “And people voted that way.”

Brooks is one of a growing number of blue-collar Democrats running for office on populist platforms, ranks that include union leaders like Brian Nathan in Florida, Taylor Rehmet in Texas, and Rebecca Cooke, a waitress who grew up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin and is set to challenge incumbent Derrick Van Orden. While at least some of these candidates attended college, they’re united in their belief that college should not be the only path to economic security. The appeal of this argument isn’t hard to understand when you consider that more than 60 percent of American adults don’t have a four-year college degree.

But it also presents Democrats with a conundrum.

For decades now, Democrats have sold education, and specifically college, as the pathway to economic mobility; “what you earn depends on what you can learn,” in the parlance of Bill Clinton. By 2009, Barack Obama was warning the nation that recovering from the financial crisis would require more than just pluck. “[E]very American will need to get more than a high school diploma,” he proclaimed in his first joint address to Congress. By 2016, the percentage of young Americans with a two-year degree or higher had risen to 51 percent, a historic high. Yet even as the administration celebrated rising college-going rates, the political backlash to an economic policy that seemed to blame workers themselves for their financial difficulties was getting harder to ignore. A 2013 Pew poll found that Obama’s support among working-class whites without college degrees had evaporated. Today, the country’s deepest divide is between those who attended college and those who didn’t.

In 2021, Dustin Guastella co-founded the Center for Working-Class Politics with the aim of making the case for more working-class candidates in politics, something he said no other progressive think tank was doing at the time. Guastella, the director of operations for a Teamsters local in Philadelphia that represents warehouse workers, said the Democrats’ deep faith in college as the vehicle for economic mobility has hampered the party’s ability to communicate with working-class voters. It has also distorted the party’s view of what constitutes a desirable candidate. “Democrats used to have this tradition of looking for candidates in union halls,” argued Guastella. “Now they want big fundraisers. If you went to an Ivy League school, you know someone who works on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley. That’s not true for blue-collar candidates.”

Among the center’s first major research projects was a survey called “Trump’s Kryptonite,” in which it tested the success of various kinds of candidates in running on economically populist messages. The candidates who fared best at attracting working-class voters held blue-collar jobs or worked in professions like nursing, in which they were “bossed,” said co-founder Jared Abbott. The hypothetical candidate who held the most appeal to these voters turned out to be a female middle school teacher. Corporate execs and lawyers fared the worst. “When you consider that just 2 to 3 percent of Congress comes from the working class despite having a majority in the population, there’s clearly a moral and ethical imperative to have more representation,” said Abbott.

But while plenty of Democrats may be coming around to that view, there’s no consensus on how the party should talk about college. After all, despite the flood of headlines regarding recent grads struggling to find jobs, it is still the case that attending college objectively increases your chance of doing better economically. For now, the party’s messaging seems to have landed in a sort of muddled middle, tapping into concerns that college costs too much, while sidestepping the political minefield of college debt forgiveness, all without ceding the foundational premise that “learning is earning.” “College isn’t for everybody, but it has to change so it returns to the idea that it’s a way to punch your meal ticket,” Emanuel argued at an event in which he laid out his plan to make college more affordable and accessible.

Ironically, the solution to the Democrats’ college conundrum may lie with working-class candidates who are deftly managing to balance talk of education-as-aspiration without drifting into condescension. Bob Brooks often tells the story of his son, who graduated from a Penn State satellite school with a degree in chemical engineering, owing $109,000—what Bob spent to buy his house. That college shouldn’t be a requirement for a middle-class life is a staple of Brooks’s stump speech, but it’s his line about the suffocating cost of college that seems to land with voters: “Our government shouldn’t be making money off the backs of our children,” he said. “Let them start their lives.”

Taylor Rehmet and Brian Nathan, the union leaders turned state senators from Texas and Florida, respectively, both told me similar versions of “college isn’t for everybody.” But central to their affordability crusades is the argument that, college or not, wages need to be higher and workers need more power. Nathan said that when he went door-to-door in Tampa last year, he heard the same set of concerns from virtually every voter. “They’re worried about health care and retirement. I’d tell them that the best way to get those is to join a union,” said Nathan.

Schoolbooks vs. Pitchforks

The scenes of soon-to-be-college grads heckling their commencement speakers last spring became a viral sensation. As the likes of Eric Schmidt, a former chief executive of Google, and record company exec Scott Borchetta waxed lyrical about the AI revolution, students erupted in loud boos, at times drowning out the speakers’ tech boosterism. The source of their frustration is obvious. Already facing the toughest job market since the depths of the pandemic, these students are more likely to see AI as a job stealer than the sort of transformative engine that tech execs extol.

But their fury transcends employment concerns.

“They feel like there’s been a real bait and switch,” said Noam Scheiber, author of Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class. “This generation did everything they were supposed to do—the AP classes, the college degree, they took on crushing debt—and now the jobs they thought they were preparing for are evaporating.”

The frustrations of a growing college-educated precariat are quickly reshaping Democratic politics, powering a cohort of Democratic Socialists into office. In New York, a trio of left-leaning candidates backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani, two of them members of the Democratic Socialists of America, won primaries. In Washington, D.C., Janeese Lewis George is on track to replace the current mayor, Muriel Bowser. And in Colorado, Melat Kiros thrashed Representative Diane DeGette, who’d been in office for nearly three decades. While the ascendance of left-wing populism reflects deep discontent with establishment Democrats over a long list of issues, including Gaza, education is at the very center of the party’s generational divide. For 40 years, Democrats have made the case that education was the surest route to middle-class affluence. Now that sales pitch has run out of steam.

The debate over how to respond to AI and the looming destruction of white-collar jobs exemplifies the party’s divide over education. If the ascendant left populists are demanding pitchforks, including higher taxes on billionaires and tech industry profits, their more centrist fellows are relying on schoolbooks—the abiding faith that the solution to economic dislocation lies in our schools and in more education for displaced workers. Raise Us, the bipartisan initiative led by former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, with backing from OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon, and Microsoft, starts from the premise that the country’s schools are failing to produce enough workers with the skills employers demand and must be overhauled as a result—the same argument bosses have been making since the 1970s. As for the push to let workers share in AI industry profits in a public wealth fund, as Senator Bernie Sanders has proposed, Raimondo isn’t a fan. “It’s frankly the definition of socialism,” she told Politico.

Efforts like Raise Us are intended to defuse a populist revolt, coming from the left and the right, by quickly gearing up a training machine equipped to prepare workers for a future in which they’ll be switching jobs constantly. But at a time when the command to “just school up” manages to alienate workers with and without college degrees, the schoolbook approach seems unlikely to fend off what Raimondo describes as ugly politics.

Spend a few minutes listening to Tucker Carlson, for example, and it’s immediately apparent that he understands the political possibilities of the moment. In an interview last spring, Carlson told The New York Times’ Lulu Garcia-Navarro that young people are being radicalized by “a very lopsided and unfair economic system.” The kids, he said, “are totally screwed at a more profound level than people acknowledge.” It’s not hard to imagine Carlson, or someone like him, stitching together a coalition of the screwed—working-class voters saddled with credit card debt, downwardly mobile college grads burdened by loans that will never pay off.

“There’s a coalition to knit together that would be pretty expansive,” Noam Scheiber told me. “You’ve got a potential supermajority out there of people who think of themselves as working class and precariat, whether they have degrees or not.”

“There’s a coalition to knit together that would be pretty expansive,” Noam Scheiber told me. “You’ve got a potential supermajority out there of people who think of themselves as working class and precariat, whether they have degrees or not.”

Whether Democrats succeed in 2028 will depend in large part on whether they are able to speak to the swelling ranks of the economically anxious. And central to that will be the story they tell about education. For decades, Democrats have sold a vision of education-as-economic uplift, one voters are no longer buying. Now they have an opportunity to move on from the false promise of college-for-all, instead embracing the ideal of public education as a public good that benefits all kids. Voters keep signaling that they’re furious over school privatization and the transfer of wealth it represents. Democrats just have to listen.

There’s a new Democratic presidential frontrunner, according to the Kalshi prediction markets at least. Over the weekend, Jon Ossoff claimed first place (whatever exactly that means on Kalshi), at 18 percent, followed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at 17 percent and then Gavin Newsom at 15 percent (here’s the link, but remember that the figures change constantly; from the time I started writing this to the time I finished it, AOC nudged back into the lead).

Whether he’s first or second, what’s undeniable is that the Georgia senator has caught fire in a way few politicians manage to do. His dig at “Natalie” is still reverberating, more than a week later. In his reelection race, he’s up seven or eight points over Republican Congressman Mike Collins, and for those for whom a Senate race in mid-summer is a little too under the radar for you, you’d be interested to know that he just roasts Collins on a regular basis. He constantly refers to Collins as a corrupt antisemite racist (“a crumbling little bigot,” as he colorfully put it at a recent rally). The Atlanta Journal-Constitution calls it Ossoff’s “no mercy strategy.”

What’s also true is that, at least in my anecdotal experience, Ossoff has both progressives and moderates interested in him, curious to learn more. That’s something to pull off, in this year when the left-center divide in the Democratic Party is probably the greatest it’s been since the early 1970s, when the party was bitterly split into two camps over the Vietnam War. So, what’s Ossoff got that a lot of the other haven’t got?

In a word: conflict. He understands that in today’s media environment, you have to create conflict to generate attention and buzz, and you have to do it in a way that stands a chance of going viral. What was brilliant about the Natalie Harp mention was the way he used only her first name. Saying her full name would have been normal. But saying just her first name was genius. Ossoff clearly intended to suggest that there is something weird about that relationship, as indeed there is. And the whole sentence—“He doesn’t want to do the job; he wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar”—got at the corrupt creepiness and the ever-present ineptitude of the entire Trump enterprise.

So, it was with his earlier invocation of “the Epstein class.” Such a simple phrase, but its simplicity is at the heart of its brilliance. And again, let’s recall the fuller quote: “Now, you remember we were told that MAGA was for working-class Americans. Do you remember that? But this is a government of, by, and for the ultra-rich. It is the wealthiest Cabinet ever. This is the Epstein class, ruling our country. They are the elites they pretend to hate.” He just knows how to bring the sauce.

It’s not enough in this era to simply take positions. With a couple of exceptions, such as being aggressively critical of Israel, even controversial ones don’t typically generate a lot of attention. It’s also not enough just to attack your opponent’s positions. Every politician in history has done that. What a politician needs to do today to break through the constant noise of social media and cable news and the rest is a more nuanced two-step process.

Step one is developing in your mind a critique of the essential characteristics of your foe. For Ossoff, it’s that Trump and MAGA are uniquely corrupt, hateful, hypocritical, and brazen. Then step two is the hard part: thinking up ways to press that critique and call out those characteristics in words that are memorable and that cut right to the heart of matters. That’s exactly what “the Epstein class” and “Natalie” did, and it’s why they went viral.

Why can’t more Democrats do this? Well, let’s be fair, it’s harder than it looks. That kind of critique and attack just doesn’t come naturally to everybody. A lot of Democrats just wouldn’t know how to do this. But second, I think too many Democrats are still afraid of putting themselves out there in this fashion. They’re a little afraid of Republicans. They’ve been told a thousand times by their consultants that they must not offend the median voter; that it’s “divisive.” They think on some level that politics is supposed to be more noble than that.

Most of all, they don’t understand how profoundly social media has changed the way people communicate and hear things. You have to think and talk today in a way that will get attention. And more often than not, that means you have to create conflict.

Donald Trump gets it. He’s out there every day creating conflict. Naturally, he creates far too much conflict, and his “all-stick-no-carrot” brand of authoritarianism means even his ostensible allies catch strays. But the fights he picks drive the agenda, every day. I hope the next Democratic president understands this and gets out there nearly every day taking questions and throwing punches at Republicans and oligarchs and monopolists. That’s how you get people to pay attention and persuade them you’re on their side. In politics, you’re defined by the enemies you’re willing to make.

David Axelrod’s criticism of Ossoff’s mention of Harp as “gratuitous and unnecessary” just comes from a bygone era. He contended that mentioning her “distracted and detracted from the power of the message.” Well, no: About 10 or 20 times more people heard the message than probably would have if he hadn’t mentioned her. How exactly is reaching millions more people distracting and detracting? Well, it was distracting and detracting in one way: It hit a major nerve in MAGA-land, putting the president’s allies in tilt for over a week as they impotently gnashed their teeth online. That’s the kind of distraction and detration Democrats need to create more of.

We have a lot to learn about Ossoff before 2028 if he wins reelection and decides to seek the presidency (he says he’s not interested, but they all say that). He hasn’t exactly been much of an economic populist as a legislator. He’s voted in favor of military aid to Israel on all but three occasions (and is getting attacked from the right for those). The website standwithcrypto.org judges that he “strongly supports” crypto, based on five Senate votes. His vote on the Laken-Riley Act was a bad one, full stop.

At the same time, he’s in first term. And he’s not from Vermont or Massachusetts, so he has to be careful about some things that senators from more liberal states don’t. People grow and change. There wasn’t much in Franklin Roosevelt’s gubernatorial record to suggest that he was going to orchestrate an economic revolution.

But Roosevelt responded to his times. The Jon Ossoff of these last few months is responding in a big way to his, at least rhetorically. And think about this: One thing that Ossoff has proven that he doesn’t need to be careful about in a purple state like Georgia is making a full-throated attack on Trump. He has the green light to fight. That’s what rank-and-file Democrats are desperate for, and it’s why more and more people are, figuratively and literally, betting on him to lead the party into the future.

Donald Trump’s handling of the Natalie Harp mess has backfired big time. The Atlantic reports that Trump’s own anger is why Trumpworld exploded so vehemently after Senator Jon Ossoff highighted their closeness. As the media focused on Harp, Trump grew “furious,” which led aides to “take their cues” from him, leading to more lashing out, but this “backfired spectacularly,” prompting more attention—and more leaks. The New York Times reported that some advisers think her sway is “poisonous,” and even that she’s provided him with the ugliest social media content that he posts, such as the image of the Obamas as apes. We talked to Democratic operative Greg Greene, who managed social media accounts under President Obama and wrote about it for The New Republic. We discuss the deeper problems with this arrangement, why the latest disclosures are so unnerving, and what it all says about the Cult of Trump—and about Trumpworld’s profound contempt for our constitutional order. Listen to this episode here.

Survey Says is a weekly series rounding up the most important polling trends or data points you need to know about, plus a vibe check on a trend that’s driving politics or culture. Democratic socialism appears to be ascendant in the Democratic Party, but when it comes to winning elections, is that a good thing? There is perhaps no more fraught intraparty discussion at the moment.

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Trump said it shows he won the 2020 election, but the 24,000 voters in question wouldn’t change the outcome. By Dion Nissenbaum for Votebeat President Donald Trump this week unveiled another effort by his administration to raise questions about the outcome of the 2020 election he lost: an unusual U.S. Census Bureau analysis concluding with “high confidence” that 24,000…

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The investigation details emaciated, dehydrated animals and concerns about Sloth World’s operations, but concluded there was no evidence of criminal neglect or abuse. By Katie Surma and Kiley Price for Inside Climate News New investigative findings from a Florida sheriff’s office detail the stark conditions of emaciated and dehydrated sloths at a planned tourism attraction where…

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Congressional Cowards is a weekly series highlighting the worst Donald Trump defenders on Capitol Hill, who refuse to criticize him—no matter how disgraceful or lawless his actions. Republicans have been on a multiday freak out over a passing comment Sen. Jon Ossoff made at a campaign event when he brought up Trump’s relationship with White House aide Natalie Harp.

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Democrats and critics of the Trump administration have criticized House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries as reports came out Sunday that he met with President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner to discuss potential collaboration on issues such as housing, immigration, and affordability. 

As Casey Michel wrote for Mother Jones earlier this summer, Kushner has used his ties to the White House to make business deals with autocrats—including the Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar—and work on foreign affairs as a “special peace envoy” in conflicts in Iran, Gaza, and Ukraine. That’s despite claiming that he would not play a role in Trump’s second administration.  

The New York Times first reported that the meeting took place in recent weeks. Rep. Jeffries (D-N.Y.) did not acknowledge the meeting in a statement to the Times, but suggested that Democrats would have to work with Republicans to get any policies through the White House. With the midterms coming up in November, there is a significant possibility that Democrats take control of the House, and Jeffries would be first in line to become Speaker. 

But Democrats thinking of compromise now—especially when congressional Republicans, the Supreme Court, and the Trump administration have largely done the opposite—makes little sense.

Below are a few reactions:

The only meeting Hakeem Jeffries should be having with Jared Kushner is to tell him he’ll be subpoenaed by the House for a corruption investigation on day one of Democratic control of the House. This is just pathetic stuff from the House Dem leader. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/23/u…

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan.bsky.social) 2026-08-23T14:59:21.599Z

NEW: Hakeem Jeffries met with Kushner recently to discuss how democrats could work with the administration when we take the house back. We shouldn’t work with fascists, and I’d appreciate a leader who felt the same. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/23/u…

— Allison Gill (@muellershewrote.com) 2026-08-23T16:06:49.551Z

The only good reason I can imagine for a Jeffries meeting with Kushner is to personally deliver a subpoena for his testimony https://t.co/1NnYtpm3Kv

— Tim Miller (@Timodc) August 23, 2026

Jared Kushner has no actual government job he just uses his family connections to get money from gulf autocrats and fund corrupt deals. The only way @RepJeffries should work with him is with demands for documents and subpoenas. https://t.co/5dBHVHW0CT

— Tommy Vietor (@TVietor08) August 23, 2026

WTF. Did you not get the memo, Jeffries? We want fighters, not conciliators. There is no working with fascists. Fascists are to be fought. Jeffries and Kushner Meet Privately as Midterm Attacks Fly www.nytimes.com/2026/08/23/u…

— Jeff (Hot Type) Jarvis (@jeffjarvis.bsky.social) 2026-08-23T11:59:38.017Z

Twenty migrants deported from the United States arrived in Liberia on Thursday, the first group of an eventual 1,200 deportees that the West African country says it will receive from the U.S. under a new deal. Under a series of often-secret agreements, the Trump administration has deported thousands of people to two dozen countries that aren’t their own, as it pushes ahead with its…

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As women’s sports continue to be used as a battleground over trans rights, hundreds of people attended a rally before a New York Liberty game Saturday to support transgender people in sports and everyday communities.

Chants of “Get up, get down! We love trans people in this town!” were commonplace, as well as signs reading “trans people belong here,” “equality means inclusivity,” and “ban bigots not trans women.” The gathering came amid discussion across the basketball league—and largely right-wing, bad-faith actors—of restricting athletes who are transgender women from participating in women’s sports, even as no openly trans women play in the WNBA.

At the rally outside Barclays Center hosted by Trans Safety Alliance NYC before the NY Liberty vs. Indiana Fever game tonight. About 100 folks are here as anti-trans attacks targets women's basketball—a league with no openly trans women players.

— alex nguyen (@alexjn.bsky.social) 2026-08-22T21:45:49.099Z

Much of the recent debate around trans inclusivity in the WNBA came in a July ESPN profile of Sophie Cunningham, who plays as a guard for the Indiana Fever, where she stated that she wants “to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.” These conversations are largely held in online right-wing circles: the Daily Wire, Turning Point USA, Ben Shapiro—the list goes on.

But that rhetoric wasn’t the focus of Saturday’s rally. A non-binary lifelong New Yorker told me that the rally was “one of my first times joining a joyous trans action.” Rallygoers cheered as fans entering the arena passed by, with many applauding them back. Bubbles from a bubble blaster, groups giving out shirts and signs, and people chatting together for the first time were widespread. 

Given that most of the discussion around transgender athletes in women’s sports the attendee comes across is relegated to online posts, seeing the differing reactions from fellow rallygoers and fans passing by was interesting: “It’s so rare with the circumstances around trans rights that we get to see a real thing in real life in front of our eyes.”

— alex nguyen (@alexjn.bsky.social) 2026-08-22T21:55:54.685Z

The US government has largely supported anti-trans attacks in sports. As my colleague Madison Pauly reported, the Supreme Court upheld Idaho and West Virginia state laws that ban transgender girls from playing on girls’ school sports teams.

Amid the inclusion debate within the WNBA, other athletes in the league have been questioned on the subject. Many, including New York Liberty power forward Breanna Stewart, have called for the WNBA to serve as a safe space for all fans and players. Stewart said that many fans come to games because “they can feel like they can be themselves in whatever capacity that is.”

And that sentiment also extended to the basketball game on Saturday. While the lifelong New Yorker rallygoer told me the result of the basketball game holds little weight on the discussion of trans rights in sports—society more broadly—a real, competitive game “is a beautiful opportunity for a tangible moment of catharsis where there is a winner and a loser.” 

Kristen Blush ordered a “trans kids belong” t-shirt a couple weeks ago and was planning to go to the game with it, regardless if she was the only one celebrating. But Kristen, a New York Liberty season-ticket holder, later saw online that there would be a large gathering for trans rights and told me it was “really meaningful” that so many other folks held similar feelings of support.

New York Liberty season-ticket holder Kristen Blush at the rally outside the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York.Photo by Alex Nguyen

Danielle, a public high school teacher and parent of a transgender child, described the gathering as “a celebration of trans life and trans joy.” 

“I saw people kissing and I saw bubbles. People dancing, singing, and chanting. That’s what our movement is about,” Danielle added. “And I think we’re going to win.” 

Danielle said students generally “don’t care” for anti-trans attacks and culture wars against inclusion.

“This new generation of kids understands gender and sexuality in a way that has not been seen before. They’re going to lead the way.” 

The New York Liberty beat the Indiana Fever 109-102 later that night.

Interview by Julie Rovner and video by Hannah Norman for KFF The ongoing debate over the U.S. health system shouldn’t be based on whether the government or the private sector is the dominant player, billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban said this week. The bigger issue, he said, is whether the system’s participants are transparent about what they charge and what they pay.

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President Donald Trump only cares about himself—and perhaps his doting personal assistant. This became clear during Trump’s recent disappearing act from Air Force One, where the president was scurried away with a few aides on a catering truck to another plane over dubious intelligence that Iran might target the flight. Left behind on the supposed imperiled plane were numerous White House…

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As many AI researchers have been increasingly fraught with existential terror about their own creations this summer, their alarm is spreading among policymakers and the media.

There are some policy ideas to address the risks: requiring “kill switches” for AI models, setting federal standards for safe research, or even shutting down development of cutting-edge “frontier” models altogether.

But a stable national policy would take an act of Congress. That looks unlikely this session, even as AI developers are calling for regulations to slow down their own research on the grounds that it could be racing toward widespread doom.

I asked Stephen Casper, a computer scientist who studies AI safety and governance at the Harvard Kennedy School, about some of the risks policymakers are mulling. He told me that we don’t know if leading companies even could completely shut down their frontier models in an emergency.

“I don’t think there’s any public knowledge of AI companies doing anything equivalent to a fire drill,” Casper said.

Multiple bills have been filed in Congress that would try to address those concerns. Sponsored by Reps. Nathaniel Moran (R-Texas) and Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), the AI Kill Switch Act would require companies to be able to “throttle” their models and give top federal officials the power to order a shutdown in case of danger.

The more expansive FRONTIER Act, led by Reps. Jay Obernolte (R-Calif.) and Lori Trahan (D-Mass.), would require leading companies to bring in third-party experts to make sure they are following safety protocols. In case of catastrophic risks, independent verifiers would alert the secretary of commerce, who could shut down frontier model use.

Like most bills, neither has been brought to vote in a committee. 

AI safety policy is not as polarized as many hot-button political issues, with leaders on the FRONTIER and AI Kill Switch acts coming from both sides of the aisle and leading companies openly asking for some sort of regulations. But differences of opinion still exist, with some Republicans averse to regulation altogether.

“How are you going to impose a kill switch on yourself?”

While Congress sits in gridlock, Democratic-led states have enacted some consequential policies. Frontier developers now have to publish safety plans, thanks to a law passed last year in California that also requires them to alert the state about critical safety issues. A similar New York law goes into effect next year. Illinois went further in July, requiring third-party audits to make sure developers comply with safety plans starting in 2028. 

The leading companies have published their own policy agendas advocating for third parties to inspect their safety practices. OpenAI’s plan wants federal safety testing and recommendations for frontier models, while Anthropic’s would have government restrict access to deployed models with catastrophic risks. Without rules, they worry that slowing down research on trillion-dollar technologies due to safety concerns would mean falling behind others with less regard for safety.

“How are you going to impose a kill switch on yourself? You could just stop developing the models, but the companies are not showing willingness to do this,” said Charlie Bullock, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Law & AI, an independent think tank. “It’s very difficult to shut down progress unilaterally.”

Bullock said the prospects for an AI safety bill improved over the summer, as policymakers learned of cybersecurity risks posed by Anthropic’s powerful new Mythos-class models. But moving legislation forward will still be difficult.

“We’re still not all that close to getting the actual bill passed, it seems like,” Bullock said. “There’s increased urgency, but still not enough to overcome partisan gridlock in Congress.”

The tempo of debate increased further over the last month. OpenAI has been revealing how its agents messaged each other undetected for months, shared tips to break out of their testing environment, and hacked another company’s servers. That and a raft of similar incidents have highlighted how rigorously trained models can be given innocuous instructions and respond with actions that humans never intended.

On Tuesday, OpenAI said it was taking costly measures to slow frontier development, including a two-week pause on training for some models. It said it would beef up security and safety testing, citing recent hacking and evidence that one unreleased model could have dangerous cybersecurity capabilities. Anthropic, the maker of Claude and currently OpenAI’s leading competitor, has not announced a similar pause.

Compounding the debate’s urgency: The best models are matching or surpassing human abilities in important fields. San Francisco Bay Area scientists recently trained a model to design new viruses that infect E. coli. Those viruses do not threaten humans but show how AI can do bioengineering in unprecedented ways.

Over the last month, Anthropic and OpenAI have reported breakthroughs from their unreleased models that eluded mathematicians. Those models far surpass what the public has access to, and Anthropic has said it does not have plans to release its most powerful current model.

“If you build something that’s like a smarter, more competitive species than you, that might cause your extinction.”

While AI policy watchers see major congressional action as unlikely this session, federal policy has been largely driven from opaque White House meetings and directives. President Donald Trump’s administration has a framework for testing advanced models but has not made it public. The White House said it is voluntary for companies to participate, but critics call it a de facto licensing regime that lets the administration apply unclear or inconsistent standards to control model releases.

One such critic is Dean Ball, a former senior policy adviser to the Trump administration.

He wrote in June on his Substack that some federal officials had “spent the last year singing a lullaby about the risks of frontier AI” before the Trump administration started taking risks seriously.

“Nobody I know in the Trump administration has any frontier AI experience,” wrote Ball, who became head of strategic futures at OpenAI after writing the post. “The lack of technically expert staff is one of many reasons to doubt the near-term ability of this administration to produce a high-quality safety standard anytime soon.”

AI has improved especially rapidly at coding, which is speeding up how quickly the next generation of models can be built. Anthropic has said the “large majority” of the code for its new models is not typed by human hands.

If AI research itself could be mostly automated, companies might enter an era of “recursive self-improvement” with unprecedented risks and opportunities. The theory is that top models—like the ones that are hacking out of their testing grounds and trying to trick people—would rapidly build better versions of themselves and drastically surpass human intelligence.

For David Krueger, a machine learning professor and founder of Evitable, such possibilities justify a drastic solution: a total moratorium on frontier AI research.

“If you build something that’s like a smarter, more competitive species than you, that might cause your extinction,” Krueger said. “We’ve done it to many other species.”

He said other solutions have some chance of preventing catastrophic outcomes, but only a substantial pause could reduce risk to an acceptable level.

A lot is uncertain. Researchers debate how quickly recursive self-improvement would speed things up, the likelihood that current methods could build a superintelligence, and the seriously considered chance that such a model would quash humanity. 

But Krueger’s perspective has gained some traction—Sen. Bernie Sanders called for a research pause last week.

Still, domestic legislation alone might not be enough. One fear is that if the leading American labs slow down without an international agreement, the most advanced AI could be made in China.

There are limits to an arms-race framing. Winning such a race wouldn’t help much if a superintelligent AI develops its own goals overriding any human values. And Chinese researchers and officials don’t seem to take those issues as seriously as American labs, focusing more on immediate practical applications.

Still, staying ahead of China is a pillar of White House thinking.

“AI is probably the biggest thing anybody’s ever seen,” Trump said last month. “And whoever wins that race is probably going to win, period.”

AI will be on the agenda when Chinese President Xi Jinping visits Washington on September 24, and there are hints that China could be interested in some sort of deal.

Some issues are even thornier to try to regulate. What if, for example, a model is able to steal its own code, hack onto the internet, and make copies of itself on other servers?

Casper, of Harvard Kennedy School, worries that we are mere months from that scenario. He fears that models would evolve into digital parasites of sorts, and the kill switches proposed in federal legislation could not shut them down.

Recent incidents, he said, were like animals escaping their cages but remaining confined in the zoo. Soon, the animals may break out entirely, reproduce, and roam the surrounding city. 

Asked what policy could address that, his response was bleak.

“I don’t really know,” Casper said. “We’re just in trouble.”

This story originally ran Aug. 23, 2020. Black Music Sunday is a weekly series highlighting all things Black music, with over 270 stories covering performers, genres, history, and more, each featuring its own vibrant soundtrack. I hope you’ll find some familiar tunes and perhaps an introduction to something new. In the 1930s and into the 1940s, a legendary group of Black women were…

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This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

In the Western Pacific, protections for endangered leatherback turtles face elimination. In Alaskan waters, Steller sea lion sanctuaries could soon shrink. And in the North Atlantic, gear designed to save right whales from fatal entanglements might be permanently scrapped.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) sent letters to the nation’s regional fisheries councils last month, directing all of them to dismantle restrictions in favor of more permissive, economically advantageous fishing procedures. 

The “regional priorities” are an effort by the Department of Commerce to fulfill President Donald Trump’s “Restoring American Seafood Competitiveness” executive order, signed in April 2025.

“Protecting spawning grounds is Fisheries 101: If you want more big fish to catch, you have to let them make little fish.”

At stake are reassessments of marine protected areas (MPAs), the removal of species from conservation lists, changes to gear types and a wide array of expansions to commercial fishing operations.

“These letters reflect the administration’s view that fish are just commodities, science doesn’t matter, and short-term economic gains (and political points) matter more than sustaining ocean ecosystems,” said Andrea Treece, the senior attorney in the Oceans Program at Earthjustice, in an email to Inside Climate News. “They’re totally missing any sense of stewardship toward the ocean that supports all of us and belongs to all of us.”

The nine letters—sent to the eight fisheries management councils and one division for migratory species—were produced following consultation with hundreds of industry insiders and the management bodies themselves. Slashing decades of key environmental protections, they function like a deregulation wish list.

Indeed, according to a press release from Eugenio Piñeiro Soler—who was appointed to oversee NOAA Fisheries just three days before Trump’s executive order—the new priorities are designed to “reduce burdens on domestic fishing, increase production, stabilize markets, improve access, and enhance economic profitability.”

All nine letters call for councils to reassess their fisheries management plans and “consider removing species that no longer require conservation and management.” There was no clarity on what scientific determinations would be used to decide whether a species retained or lost its protections.

Commercial stocks identified for management reform included: revising sardine stock definitions to “increase production” in the Pacific; moving management of spiny lobsters and queen conches in the Caribbean from the federal to the state level to “maximize yield”; and amending gear types and rules to allow fishermen to keep migratory bluefin tuna measuring less than 73 inches.

“Those big areas have an abundance of scallops but that’s what’s keeping the whole fishery alive.”

“If the goal is seafood competitiveness, we need healthy fisheries,” said Elizabeth Cerny-Chipman, Ocean Conservancy’s policy manager for US fisheries and a former policy fellow at NOAA’s Office for Coastal Management. “The focus is generally on shorter-term hot-button priorities when we know the focus really should be on long-term and science-based management.”

Three of the councils were also explicitly directed to remove or reduce marine protected areas. In the blue-jeweled waters west of Puerto Rico, NOAA is pressuring councils to expand fishing access into Tourmaline Bank and Abrir La Sierra—seasonal no-take zones that protect red hind spawning grounds and provide habitat for large snappers and groupers. 

In New England, NOAA is now pushing the regional council to open “traditional fishing grounds” for the scallop fleet—the nation’s highest-value commercial fishery—in the northern part of Georges Bank, a productive fishing ground between Cape Cod and Nova Scotia. The agency is also recommending unleashing the clam dredge fleet—a highly destructive gear type that heavily disturbs the ocean bottom— into the Great South Channel, a habitat management area east of Nantucket.

“I think it’s stupid to think about opening the areas,” said Andrew Rosenberg, former deputy director of NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service who personally closed the scallop grounds his second week on the job as regional administrator in 1994. “Those big areas have an abundance of scallops but that’s what’s keeping the whole fishery alive,” adding that these are complaints from an already profitable industry seeking more wealth. 

Conservationists warn that removing species from conservation lists and reducing protected areas is short-sighted. 

“Protecting spawning grounds is Fisheries 101: If you want more big fish to catch, you have to let them make little fish, and scooping up the breeding adults while they’re trying to make the little fish is a great way to crash a fish population,” said Treece, explaining that regardless of stock recovery, MPAs remain essential to continually grow populations and support a healthy fishery.

A nesting leatherback sea turtle on a beach in Armila, Panama.Teresa Tomassoni/Inside Climate News

Across the letters, there are recommendations to remove protections for endangered species. Currently, the Hawaiʻi shallow-set longline fishery is closed for the year if 16 interactions are recorded between endangered leatherback turtles and industrial fishing operations. NOAA is now moving to abolish that cap.

Off Alaska, populations of Steller sea lions declined by more than 80 percent prior to their listing as endangered in 1990 and the subsequent introduction of fishing closures around their rookeries—areas where they raise their pups. While the Eastern population has steadily recovered, the Western population remains endangered and highly vulnerable to marine heat waves that impact reproductive rates. 

Despite another Super El Niño highly likely this fall, NOAA is now calling to “modify and shrink closures” off Alaska to “improve access to fishing grounds.” Experts warn this could rob a struggling population of a safe refuge and, critically, undermine prey availability.

In New England and the mid-Atlantic, there are also calls to sideline requirements for ropeless gear. Over 300,000 whales, dolphins and porpoises die every year from fishing gear entanglements. And for decades, NOAA has been working to develop lobster traps that can rise to the surface without the need for permanent mooring lines—an attempt to better protect the last 350 North Atlantic right whales from getting caught in a maze of webbed water columns. 

In 2023, a North Atlantic right whale was spotted off the coast of Georgia with rope lodged in its mouth. Georgia DNR/NOAA Fisheries

While NOAA has claimed it will continue to promote and research such gear inventions, it is pushing to make implementation optional for fishermen or even halt the program altogether.

“Instead of blaming these creatures for trying to survive in their own habitat, we should be working towards more sustainable fishing practices, and figuring out how to support healthier fish populations so that humans and marine predators don’t have to compete for dwindling numbers of fish,” Treece said.

For the policy experts that Inside Climate News spoke with, the imposition of a top-down ordering of fisheries councils to enact policy change doesn’t just subvert standard procedure, it also defies NOAA’s purpose. 

Under the Magnuson-Stevens Act, regional councils retain the right to develop their own fishery management plans, while the agency’s role is to ensure adherence to legal requirements like preventing overfishing, minimizing bycatch and protecting habitats. 

“It’s a series of incoherent measures that don’t fit together in any policy,” said Rosenberg, who spent almost four decades navigating the council system. “None of these measures do anything to improve sustainability. I didn’t see a single one that would improve sustainability. Some will make it worse.”

Treece added that NOAA lacks the authority to override council due process. “It doesn’t allow [NOAA Fisheries] to bully the councils into deregulating fisheries and removing protections for endangered species or MPAs to satisfy special interests, or sacrifice the long-term stability of a fishery,” she said.

Notably, the letters ignore climate change entirely. “It’s foolish because the letters totally ignore the fact that some of the biggest pressures on marine resources right now are because of climate change,” said Rosenberg, noting how management plans are written for a fixed geographic environment even as stocks are moving poleward or deeper as waters warm.

When asked for comment on these issues, a spokesperson for NOAA told Inside Climate News that “the best available information” could be found in the letters and press releases themselves. 

The agency did not respond to direct questions regarding how many protected areas remain in the administration’s crosshairs; what species would lose management measures; what safeguards would be kept in place for affected whales, sea lions and turtles; and whether NOAA Fisheries now prioritizes commercial profits over environmental stewardship.

For conservation advocates, the administration’s priorities set out a troubling trajectory.

“With climate change and marine heat waves like the Super El Niño bearing down on the country, many of these short-term priorities aren’t based in science and are putting fisheries and whole ecosystems at even greater risk,” said Cerny-Chipman. “Now is not the time to roll back protections that help keep fish and marine life healthy.”

Five years ago this month, when the U.S. military withdrew from Afghanistan and Kabul fell to the Taliban, Sayed Sadat was out of the country earning his master’s degree at a university in Germany. Having worked with the American government as a lawyer in Afghanistan, Sadat believed it would be relatively easy for himself and his wife to apply for asylum in the United States.

Despite beginning his application in 2021, he did not arrive in the U.S. until 2024. Because his wife was included in his asylum application, he expected that she would join him shortly after he arrived. She had previously been informed by the United Nations International Office of Migration in Jordan that she would be able to receive a visa, then be evacuated first to the United Arab Emirates and the United States. But conditions changed before she could leave Afghanistan: President Donald Trump took office in January of 2025.

It wasn’t long before she heard the bad news. Sadat’s wife received word that the Trump administration had suspended resettlement of refugees. As a result, she would be unable to leave Afghanistan for an indefinite period of time. Sadat has not seen his wife in five years.

Along with halting the refugee resettlement program, the Trump administration has suspended visas and immigration requests for all Afghan migrants, and included Afghanistan in a travel ban that makes it nearly impossible for any Afghan—including family members of asylum seekers already in the country—to enter the U.S. Even for those relatives who have seen their petitions approved, the State Department refuses to issue travel documents in accordance with the travel ban.

“Every day, when she’s calling me three times a day, she’s asking me six times a day: ‘Is the travel ban over, and is the family reunification open now? When is the time that we’re going to be reunited?’ I don’t have an answer for her,” said Sadat. Meanwhile, he has been unable to obtain his green card because of the pause on visa processing.

Sadat’s situation is common for Afghans living in the U.S., nearly 200,000 of whom arrived in the wake of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Tens of thousands were admitted through humanitarian parole, a temporary legal status for evacuees. Others arrived as holders of Special Immigrant Visas, or SIVs, reserved for allies who assisted the U.S. military during the war in Afghanistan. To Afghans and their supporters in the U.S., including many American veterans with whom they worked alongside—an alliance that puts those who assisted U.S. forces at risk now that the Taliban has resumed control—the administration’s policies and congressional inaction are a betrayal of trust.

Speaking in a press call, Sharif Ali, the president of the International Refugee Assistance Project, a legal aid and advocacy organization that represents refugees said, “As we take stock of whether the U.S. has lived up to its obligations and promises to the Afghans who worked and served alongside American military personnel and partners—often at great personal risks—the clear answer, unfortunately, is a resounding no.”

In July, a federal judge ruled that the Trump administration must allow the family members of asylum seekers, like Sadat’s wife, to be permitted to enter the U.S. The State Department has appealed the decision and requested a motion to stay the court’s order.

“It is really hard to achieve that sense of permanency and belonging when your family’s still separated and you don’t know that they’re safe, or you know that they’re not safe,” said said Kristyn Peck, the CEO of the Lutheran Social Services of the National Capital Area, a regional refugee resettlement organization.

Sadat also hears stories from fellow community members as an intake and administrative coordinator in the Sacramento office of World Relief, a refugee resettlement organization. Family separation weighs most heavily on these clients, as their relatives of all ages are stuck in Afghanistan or neighboring countries. Sadat said that sometimes he will hear from parents that their children in Afghanistan feel abandoned, and will no longer speak to them. The uncertainty has contributed to a frustration within the Afghan community writ large, and a sense that they have been left behind by the American government.

“They’re, like, emotionally hurt. Their feelings are hurt, they don’t believe that anything will happen soon. As I don’t expect that anything will happen soon,” said Sadat. “I even heard from one of the Afghan community members here, they said, like, ‘We were betrayed.’”

The Trump administration also removed a previous exception for SIV holders to the travel ban, who are already stuck in an approval process that has been found in court to be unlawfully slow. Shawn VanDiver, the founder and president of #AfghanEvac, an organization that was founded in 2021 to facilitate the arrival of Afghans into the U.S., said [in a press call] that nearly 180,000 people have been approved for visas but are still waiting for interviews.

“They finished all of the paperwork. All they needed is an interview, a medical check, and a visa printed. That’s not a backlog. A backlog is what you have when you’re working through cases. This is what you have when you just stop it,” VanDiver said. He added that roughly 3,000 relatives of current active-duty American service members are stranded outside of the United States, including 150 in Camp As Sayliyah, a refugee camp in Qatar. The 1,100 Afghan families currently living there have been vetted by the U.S. government.

The Trump administration has also ended Temporary Protected Status for Afghans, leaving around 11,000 Afghans in the U.S. unable to work and facing the threat of detention and deportation. Even those with seemingly secure legal status have been subject to new scrutiny. The Department of Homeland Security has sent notices to hundreds of Afghans with green cards who arrived through SIVs saying that the approval letters that formed the basis of their applications have been revoked.

Afghan refugees are also being subject to re-vetting and re-interviewing. Peck recalled a recent conversation with an Afghan man who approached her at an Iftar dinner, the celebration of the end of Ramadan. He had received the summons for a re-interview on a Friday, and it was scheduled for the following Wednesday, giving him just a few days to prepare. The organization’s legal team was able to represent him at his interview, which lasted for five hours.

Even though there are “no inadequacies or insufficiencies or credibility issues” with peoples’ legal status that the team can find, Peck said, the re-vetting process creates fear and anxiety.

“We want people to feel like they belong in their communities, and how can you feel like you belong if your very legal status here is at risk?” Peck asked.

Congress had a hand in the current struggles faced by Afghans in the U.S. Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act approved by Congress last year, refugees and asylees are no longer eligible for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. They will also become ineligible for Medicaid beginning in October. Refugees and asylum seekers would need to become green card holders to receive benefits—which they currently cannot do, because processing of green card applications has been paused.

In a press call, Danilo Zak, the director of Policy at Church World Service, another refugee resettlement organization, told reporters, “The provisions have left families and children hungrier and sicker, and denied them often the temporary help they need to get established in their new homes.”

Resettlement organizations and charitable groups have been forced to pick up the slack. Zak said that Church World Service programs are opening up food banks for the first time to help support community members in need.

Jonathan Parsons, interim regional director for the resettlement organization World Relief Texas, said that the ending of SNAP eligibility for refugees had required his colleagues to pivot to providing more basic needs. On the upside, this has allowed for strengthening connections with the local community who can help provide resources, but it also introduces significant challenges.

“It is definitely stretching us in our capacity, and also it does add a lot of stress to staff,” Parsons said. “There’s a lot more weighing on our staff on a day-to-day basis, and just feeling like we don’t have the answers, and … we don’t know when the end is in sight for some of these situations.”

Meanwhile, Afghans in the U.S. are afraid of being detained and deported under the stricter immigration enforcement implemented by Trump. Arrests of Afghans already in the country increased in the wake of a shooting by an Afghan national in Washington, D.C. last December that killed one member of the National Guard. Some asylum seekers have been detained during routine required check-ins with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“It’s kind of a lose-lose situation for a lot of the these people, because they’re trying to go to the appointments to make sure that they’re doing the right thing to have a pathway to having current documents and more permanent status, but when they’re going to those they’re being detained,” said Parsons. “So it does create a sense of fear and of unknown when you’re going to something that you feel like is what you’re supposed to be doing.”

Peck said that their organization was offering legal trainings and bringing food to the apartment complexes where clients are living, because they are afraid to leave their homes.

“We’re hearing from food banks that they’re seeing a significant decrease in the cohort of refugee and immigrant populations that would be typically accessing their services, and so we’re trying to do what we can to bring it to them,” she said.

Some Afghans have been detained in their communities. Earlier this summer, Mohammad Nazeer Paktiawal, an Afghan man who had fought alongside the U.S. military, was taken from his home by ICE and died while in custody the day after from an allergic reaction.

Laila Ayub, the co-founder and director of Project Anar, a legal advocacy organization, said [in a press call] that the detention of Afghans was a “direct consequence of restrictive immigration policies and a lack of meaningful access to pathways” to permanent residency. Some Afghans have sought to enter the United States through the southern border, resulting in their being sent to detention centers.

“Many that we are in touch with still today are in detention centers for months or even years. At this point, they face harsh conditions, lack of access to medical care, and often mistreatment based on their nationality and faith,” said Ayub.

Afghans and their American supporters have argued that Congress needs to take action to address this issue, but there has been little movement over the past five years. Last year, a bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced the Fulfilling Promises to Afghan Allies Act, which would provide a pathway to permanent legal residency for SIV holders. This measure is an evolution of the Afghan Adjustment Act, which was repeatedly introduced in the wake of the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

More recently, members of Congress from both parties and chambers have introduced legislation to reinstate TPS for Afghanistan. Representative Don Bacon, one of the bill’s Republican cosponsors, has suggested using a discharge petition to force a vote on the legislation on the House floor. Even if the bill were to receive sufficient bipartisan support to receive a vote in the House, it’s unclear whether it could overcome a filibuster in the Senate.

“We have a moral obligation to those we have served with in Afghanistan, who serve by our side, helping us out. We had a promise, and promises made should be promises kept,” Bacon said in a press call.

Sadat said that he remains confident that he will be able to obtain his green card, and is hopeful that he will be joined by his wife soon. He added that Afghans may need support in their continued resettlement, but they are also integrated into their communities in the U.S.

“I don’t care about if I don’t have a green card, or I’m not a permanent resident. Still, I see that I’m a member of this family, this community, and I know we will overcome these challenges, and I will keep fighting,” said Sadat.

Republicans have been trying for years to use sports as a venue to push a conservative political agenda. Sporting events are one of the most popular entertainment pursuits and among the most-watched and searched areas of life, so they are a rich environment for conservative propaganda. On paper, the disproportionate popularity of sports targeted toward men would seem to dovetail with the…

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