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Last month, I wrote about a DHS Office of Inspector General report that revealed alarming conditions inside Alligator Alcatraz, an immigrant detention center opened last summer in the Everglades that held up to 1,500 people. Among the worst violations was the use of metal cages as “calming areas” where detainees were often held, the report stated. As Corene Kendrick, deputy director at the ACLU’s National Prison Project, told me then, the report “reaffirms the cruelty of Alligator Alcatraz.”

Alligator Alcatraz is now closed. But buried deep within the DHS report was a warning about possible similar conditions at the other state-operated immigrant detention center in Florida: the Baker Correctional Institution in northern Florida, nicknamed by Gov. Ron DeSantis as “Deportation Depot.” The inspectors pointed to the concerns raised in the report, and concluded “ICE’s level of oversight and responsibility for immigration detention remain consequential… Baker has not been internally inspected by ICE’s Office of Detention Oversight, nor was it scheduled for inspection in FY 2026 or FY 2027.”

For months, Alligator Alcatraz captured the public’s attention, and it’s easy to understand why. Its name, a punchline for jokes within MAGA circles, was unusual. And its optics—with detainees living in fenced areas within large white tents on a little-used airfield in the middle of the Everglades—were vivid and controversial, including a visit by Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and then- DHS secretary Kristi Noem. Because of its proximity to Miami, a melting pot of immigrants, families whose loved ones were detained there could attend and speak out at vigils outside the center’s entrance.  

But shortly after Florida officials opened the Everglades center, they also began operations at the Baker Correctional Institution. Originally a state prison that closed in 2021, the facility is remote and surrounded by forest land. It’s located on a two-lane highway and Jacksonville, which is the closest metro area, is nearly 50 miles away. As of last month, approximately 1,000 detainees were living there; some are elderly, others are legal DACA recipients, and many have pending asylum claims. They are from countries such as Cuba, Venezuela, Honduras, Guatemala, and Russia. With the closure of Alligator Alcatraz, those who have been detained and their families, not to mention human rights organizations, are sounding bells about conditions inside the center.

Every month, members of the Micah Solidarity Project, a group of Floridians from different Christian denominations advocating for immigrant rights in northeast Florida, gather on the edge of US Highway 90, next to the facility. The gatherings sometimes attract up to 100 people from all over Florida, including Gainesville, Jacksonville, Tallahassee, and Tampa. They hold a procession, walking up to the point where the Baker cell blocks are located. They pass around a speakerphone, hoping that those detained inside can hear their prayers and worship music in Spanish.

Clara Sowers, one of the organizers, said their gatherings have also attracted the attention of the center, which is run by the GEO Group and a few other contractors. At one of their larger gatherings in April, the demonstrators saw drones flying over them, and a few sheriff’s office cars circling nearby. That afternoon, they heard a faint whistle coming from the prison. Clara’s husband, she recalls, whistled back. “All of a sudden, the entire prison erupted in whistles and cheers,” she told me. “They were so excited to see other humans.”

Sowers, a Cuban American from Jacksonville, has recently been in touch with eight Baker detainees. She’s heard of at least two men suffering seizures. She has seen how Alligator Alcatraz had consistently remained in the news as lawmakers, advocates, and detainees’ loved ones called attention to the camp month after month until its closure this summer. She grew up in Miami and thinks a big part of the coverage was the city’s proximity to the Everglades camp. Many Miami families had loved ones sent there. For detainees at Baker, the level of outrage has been less because it’s in a remote area of the state, with fewer immigrant communities in the surrounding cities. “Because they’re not seeing their family members being detained and missing at the table, they’re just not affected by it,” Sowers told me. “Even when they hear about it, it sounds far away, as far away as Ukraine or the Gaza Strip.”

“Because they’re not seeing their family members being detained and missing at the table, they’re just not affected by it. Even when they hear about it, it sounds far away, as far away as Ukraine or the Gaza Strip.”

In the last few weeks, I’ve spoken to eight people—including current detainees, former detainees who were either deported or released, as well as their loved ones—about life inside the Baker facility. They all described the same conditions, including detainees who report delays in medical care, and describe living in cramped dormitories lined with 50 bunk beds for 100 men, small portions of food, and stifling heat due to malfunctioning A/C units and broken windows. “We are practically living in our boxers,” one Venezuelan currently at Baker told me over the phone. “The heat is unbearable.”

The ACLU is also investigating and exploring litigation against the state and the contractors running the facility, said Amy Godshall, a Florida-based attorney for the legal nonprofit. Notably, detainees have reported many of the same obstacles for obtaining legal access that others faced at Alligator Alcatraz, such as delays in scheduling attorney calls, prison staff failing to take detainees to their court appointments, and mail from their attorneys getting lost. 

“A lot of what’s happening here is very similar to what was happening in the Everglades facility,” Godshall said. “They don’t have a commissary set up, so that people can’t buy extra food and are just starving with the insufficient food they’re given.” She added that families had no options for visiting. In the end, she noted, “The facility is designed to torture people and push them to their breaking point so that they will self-deport.” When I reached out to ICE with questions about the Baker center, a spokesperson referred me to the state of Florida. Officials from the Governor’s Office and the Florida Division of Emergency Management, which runs Baker, did not respond to my requests for comment.

Among those with whom I spoke was Jose Andres Urbina, a Venezuelan who arrived at the US-Mexico border in 2022 to seek political asylum. As he awaited the decision on his case, Urbina lived in St. John’s County on the east coast of Florida, where he worked in construction and as an Uber driver. He had a driver’s license, a work permit, and paid federal taxes, he told me. On May 9, 2026, he was parked outside a rock music festival, waiting for potential clients, when a state highway trooper asked for his ID. He then told him that he had a pending immigration hold and arrested him. “That’s when the torture and the tragedy began,” he told me in Spanish. Over the next several days, he was transferred through several county jails before his family could track him down. “I was basically kidnapped,” he said.

“The facility is designed to torture people and push them to their breaking point so that they will self-deport.”

Urbina ended up at Baker, where he remained until requesting voluntary departure and being deported back to Venezuela in September. What most troubled him during his time there was the inconsistent meal times. Breakfast, which often was two spoonfuls of scrambled eggs, some bacon, unflavored oatmeal, and fruit cocktail, was served somewhere between 3 a.m. and 6 a.m. Lunch was usually a sandwich and Lays chips, followed by dinner, which tended to be the better meal of the three. Lunch would sometimes be served at 11 a.m., and dinner at 6 p.m. The men would sneak out leftovers in their pants or socks to eat later in their cells. The portions were so small, Urbina lost 40 pounds during his four months at Baker. Now, he is with his wife, who was also in Florida but chose to move back home to be with him. 

I also spoke to Esther, whose boyfriend is currently detained at Baker. We’re not using her full name, given her immigration status. In 15-minute phone calls over the last six months, she has heard the details of her boyfriend’s detention experience. He recently developed white patches on his skin and hasn’t been able to get medical care. He tells her he drinks lots of water before and after meals so that he stays full longer. Many detainees are on edge, so he tries to avoid other people and plays solitaire to pass the time. “Sometimes, they barely have energy to move,” Esther told me. ICE officers have repeatedly offered him the option of voluntary departure, but he has consistently refused. “He wants to wait here,” Esther said, “and see what happens.”

As long as the Baker facility is open, the Micah Solidarity Project will continue to gather outside its walls. “We’re going back until we’re not needed anymore. This is solidarity,” Sowers said. “Part of that is showing up consistently. Part of that is letting them know they’re not alone.”

Like many conservative evangelical pastors with whom I had worked for almost four decades, Rev. David Corbett is a mild-mannered, white-haired, avuncular 75-year-old who carries a handgun on his belt and quotes liberally from the King James Version of the Bible. A former lobster fisherman, he’s had two key vocations throughout his long ministry career: preaching on Sundays and spending the rest of the week in various law enforcement roles—from serving as a local beat cop to teaching criminal justice at the fundamentalist Pensacola Christian College in Florida. 

Corbett has served in several Maine churches, but his current congregation is the Oak Ridge Bible Church in Biddeford, a mostly unknown hamlet only 18 miles from Portland and 11 miles from Kennebunkport. I say “mostly  unknown,” because on July 13, 2026, it commanded headlines when ICE agents killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a Colombian immigrant with a work permit and pending asylum application hearing who was in his car at the corner of Hill and Pool Streets.  After mistakenly stopping the 25-year-old food delivery worker, ICE agents shot into his vehicle. 

Rev. Corbett has a lot to say about that incident, especially because he is running as the Republican Party candidate for York County sheriff.  He’s been critical of Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin for not sharing details of an internal investigation that was ostensibly conducted by ICE Acting Director David Venturella. “We need to have transparency,” he said. “But if they’re not being transparent, you have to ask the question, why?” 

Nevertheless, should he win his election, Corbett intends to work with DHS and have all his officers deputized as ICE agents so that they can help federal agents with arrests and detentions, part of a national program known as 287(g). For him, some blame for Durán’s death rests with his state’s Democratic majorities because of their opposition to local law enforcement helping ICE. In a YouTube video addressing the deadly episode, Corbett argues, “The policies of the Democrats brought us down this path to where a person got killed.” The ultimate responsibility for all the problems around immigration, he says, rests with former President Joe Biden for not adequately defending US borders. 

Not all Maine clergy agree with Corbett. About 6 miles from Corbett’s church is the historic Saco & Biddeford Unitarian Universalist Church, a congregation that does not follow a specific creed or doctrine but is a diverse community with shared values and a commitment to spirituality and social justice. Founded in 1827, the church is now led by the Reverend Dr. Lori Whittemore. A clinically trained, board-certified interfaith chaplain specializing in mass-casualty response, she had previously organized and led Spiritual Care Services of Maine, a nonprofit organization for people in crisis, including those affected by a mass shooting in 2023 that left 18 dead and 13 wounded in the city of Lewiston. 

As soon as she heard the news of Durán’s death, which occurred only a short distance from her church, Whittemore recruited local volunteer clergy and nearby professional chaplains to provide solace and spiritual care to immigrants, anti-ICE demonstrators, and the scores of people who flocked to the improvised memorial at the spot where Durán was killed.

Rev. Lori Whittemore, minister at the Unitarian Universalist church of Saco & Biddeford.Courtesy of Rob Schenck

I met with Corbett and Whittemore during an unexpected trip to Maine in July. Originally, I planned to go to Houston following the July 7 ICE shooting and killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old construction business owner who had lived in the United States for 35 years. Traveling with his crew, he was on his way to a job site, when ICE agents shot him in the abdomen. His killing sparked protests in the community, including by clergy, who had staged similar prayer vigils and protests after the increasing numbers of these kinds of tragedies.

One of them was in January in Minneapolis, Minnesota, after Renée Good was killed by immigration agents, and the community rose in protest. I responded to the call for clerics across faith traditions to appear and demonstrate. While I was there, Alex Pretti was gunned down by federal agents as he shielded a woman from their assault. Kneeling in prayer at the site where Alex bled out, I resolved that each time such federally sanctioned violence against immigrants and their allies erupted, I’d join other clergy who were similarly outraged by the unwarranted violence. As I wrote following my time in Minnesota:

I had participated in more than my share of protests, and many of them, over decades, when I helped lead an extreme wing of the conservative religiopolitical movement. I blockaded abortion clinics, demonstrated in pro-life marches, and held press conferences after Supreme Court decisions that cut to the heart of the conservative agenda–gay marriage, for instance. Obviously, this Call to Minneapolis was very different, and I answered because, for the last twelve years, I have been trying to make amends for having played such a significant role as an evangelical Christian minister in the aggressive push to transform the United States into a “Christian nation.” I helped lay the groundwork for Donald Trump’s presidency and the imposition of Christian Nationalism as America’s officially privileged and highly destructive religion. I was dead wrong in doing so.

I am committed now to “put the same level of energy and commitment into causes aligned with the teachings of mercy, tolerance, and love that first drew me to evangelical Christianity.” I saw Minneapolis as such a cause, as was Texas. And, as it turned out, Maine.

As I was firming up my plans to travel to Texas, the news broke of Durán’s fatal shooting, so I went to Portland instead. But this time, with a different sense of my mission. I planned to meet with church leaders from across the ideological spectrum to learn more about what they thought had happened. How did their perspectives differ?  How were they, and their congregations, dealing with ICE and its brutality? I also thought that showing up when his death was so recent, especially in my capacity as bishop of the Methodist Evangelical Church, a conservative denomination, might offer support to fellow evangelical leaders needing further reinforcement. It may be difficult to imagine that this reprehensible abuse of power is not contrary to our most cherished beliefs as Christians, but as we have seen for decades, for many, it isn’t.

What I found during my time there and a few weeks later when I attended a gathering of progressive clergy, was that quietly and then more assertively, there are signs of a renewal of progressive religious activism that seemed to have completely disappeared during the Trump years—and even before. Maine, for example, has consistently been rated among the most secular states, with many existing churches declining in membership and even closing. Until recently, any engaged and vibrant church life had generally favored Trump-friendly rural congregations north of Augusta.

But after this killing, I wondered whether what I saw in Portland, Biddeford, and other points in the more populated and politically purple south indicated a kind of spiritual awakening on the left. Could it be that, amid all the horrors of the Trump administration’s cruel policies regarding migrants, theologically liberal and socially progressive faiths may at last have discovered the energy and visibility that they have lacked for many years? An energy and visibility that religious conservatives have long claimed as exclusively their own.

What I became aware of only after my visit was that the glimmerings of a progressive political revival that I saw in Maine are also reflected in this year’s midterm elections. A surprising number of ministers and religious professionals are running as Democrats this year. Religion News Service estimates, “At least 12 pastors, seminarians and former clergy have run for federal office as Democrats this year,” in contrast to only seven evangelical pastors who are running as Republicans. Among the Democrats, perhaps the most prominent is Presbyterian seminarian James Talarico, who is running a surprisingly strong campaign against Ken Paxton for a Texas Senate seat. But there’s also Methodist minister Adam Hamilton in Kansas, who has paused his preaching as a senior pastor at the Church of the Resurrection, which is the largest United Methodist Congregation in the US.

Of course, in important ways, this is nothing new. Religious progressives have long been engines of positive social change. From the abolitionist Quakers of the 18th century to the social gospel movement in the late 19th century to the Civil Rights and anti-war movements of the mid- to late-20th century, Christian ethics were applied to pressing social problems such as poverty, labor exploitation, and racial injustice. During these periods of high visibility, strategic organizing, and great orators, progressive religion enjoyed enormous institutional prosperity, cultural popularity, and political influence. 

But beginning in the 1970s, as the religious right gained prominence in the public arena and some of the greatest assaults on Christian values of empathy, charity, and tolerance in generations were being perpetrated by a series of administrations that claimed religious primacy, the religious left grew quieter. Aside from a relatively short reaction following the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, progressive church leaders nearly disappeared by the end of the first Trump administration, eclipsed by the power of evangelical Christian leaders who had aligned themselves with the Republican Party and, perforce, with Donald Trump. 

But I am realizing that powerful as the opinions of a Rev. Corbett have been in defining what it has meant to be a religious conservative leader, their power may be starting to fade. And the gospel of mercy preached by Rev. Whittemore and other progressive religious figures may be experiencing a renaissance. Writing for Religion News Service in March of this year, Reverend Dr. Paul Raushenbush of the Interfaith Alliance observed that the rising voices of progressive Christians reflect actual US religious demographics. “According [to] the Pew Research Center and the Public Religion Research Institute, the majority of Christians actually support LGBTQ+ equality and abortion rights,” he wrote. “Meanwhile, PRRI’s most recent survey shows that only a third of Americans sympathize with Christian nationalism, and two-thirds of Americans are skeptical or outright reject the ideas and goals of Christian Nationalists.” 

Raushenbush, a great-grandson of an early progressive theologian and architect of the early 20th-century Social Gospel movement, is among a growing chorus of prominent progressive Christian leaders in the United States. They include Bishop William Barber of the Moral Mondays movement, although others such as Dr. Diana Butler Bass, a public theologian and expert on American Protestantism and spiritual life, and evangelical pastor Doug Pagitt, co-founder of Vote Common Good, which works to move conservative Christians away from Republican fealty represent a new generation. When I went to Maine, what I found appeared to be a microcosm of a tectonic shift, one in which neo-progressivism is gaining prominence in the religious landscape once dominated by the right.

Residents of Saco and Biddeford attending one of many prayer vigils held in remembrance of Durán and led by the progressive church leaders seen in the other photos. This one is at Mechanics Park, not far from where he was killed. Courtesy of Lori Whittemore

But first, what is happening in Maine requires some context.

While the United States as a whole ranks among the most religious countries compared with others of similar size and wealth, the Pew Research Center’s 2024 Religious Landscape Study indicates 39 percent of Mainers identify as religiously unaffiliated, just 16 percent of adults attend religious services weekly, and under a quarter say religion is very important to them. The Reverend Sara Ewing-Merrill, of the Hope Gateway Church in Portland, calls herself the “instigator” of the Greater Portland Multifaith Organizing Group, a collective of diverse spiritual communities tackling systemic inequities. She explained, “Until recently, most Mainers, who are statistically overwhelmingly nonreligious, were suspicious of religious leaders,” adding that they saw clergy like her “as an irrelevant and even a harmful and judgmental influence in the community.” For many, she said, religion is only a source of divisiveness, exclusion, and manipulation.

“Satan fights for every inch of territory Christ’s people seek to claim.” 

Meanwhile, conservative religious leaders also have long complained about a stubborn rejection of their message. Maine-born theologian and former professor at Midwestern Baptist Seminary, Owen Strachan, even singled out his home state, declaring it to be a place where “Satan fights for every inch of territory Christ’s people seek to claim.” 

On May 15, 2026, one of the larger evangelical churches in the Portland area sponsored a Turning Point USA “Make Heaven Crowded” evangelistic event. Calvary Chapel Greater Portland rented a venue with a capacity of more than 3,000, but only several hundred people showed up, far fewer than the thousands who had attended the same event in other cities across the country.

That is not to say that the religious left fared any better. In Portland, a simultaneous gathering dubbed “Love Is The Point” was designed as a direct, inclusive alternative to the Turning Point USA event. Promotional materials described it as being pro-trans and queer rights, as well as “pro-immigrant, pro-wealth equality, pro-women’s rights, and anti-white christian (sic) nationalism,” among other ideological descriptors. The program featured local musicians, spoken-word blessings, interfaith worship, and fundraising efforts for communities that organizers felt were targeted by right-wing religious ideologies. More than two dozen congregations co-sponsored the event, yet only 350 people participated. Still, Rev. Devin Green, one of the event organizers who helps Rev. Ewing-Merrill with the Multifaith Organizing Group, emphasized that it was a great success because liberal and progressive groups have been very slow to turn out at all for such events in the past.

Liberal church leaders have long worried about the perception that the church and its clergy are irrelevant, and haven’t wanted to exacerbate that tension by being too bold in their words around public controversies. But during our long conversation in the sanctuary of her church, she explained that there has been a significant change: “People are seeing that we have a unique role, which is needed.” Later, in an email, she described hearing from several people in the community who did not consider themselves a part of any faith tradition. “They are grateful for the space I hold along with clergy colleagues on street corners and for what we share at the mic at protests, vigils, and press conferences,” she wrote. “During those times, they departed from whatever tradition they happened to be part of and focused instead on the shared experience of despair and hope that we are all carrying. We speak not just from a Christian understanding of hope, but a universal human perspective on hope.”

Rev. Whittemore of the Unitarian Universalist Church has noticed more people attending worship and anticipates this will continue. When she has been out in the community, during some demonstrations, people have described feeling the need to return to church for some spiritual centering. She assures them that the particular spiritual tradition doesn’t matter; what’s most important is to “find a community because if nothing else, it will be a comfort,” she has advised. “It will be all the things that we need right now for staying hopeful and not being separated, but being together.”

“I’ve had folks say to me some version of ‘If I’d known people of faith actually stood for things like justice and equality and stood against racism, xenophobia, and fascism, maybe I’d go to church once in a while!’”

Statistical data have been slow to show any change in church attendance in Maine. Still, the most reliable source, published by the Association of Religion Data Archives, was last updated in 2020—and a lot has happened during those intervening years. Since the 2024 presidential election, two other Portland-based Unitarian congregations have seen significant growth, and it has only accelerated since the ICE surge in January of this year, particularly after the deadly episode in Biddeford. Rev. Jane Field, executive director of the Maine Council of Churches, who connected me to some of the most prominent clergy in the state, told me, “People are pleasantly surprised to see clergy on the front lines, speaking out against authoritarianism, and putting themselves squarely in the corner of our immigrant neighbors.” She noted that until recently, there was the assumption that to be involved with a church community inevitably implied support for the Trump administration, Christian nationalism, and ICE.  “I’ve had folks say to me some version of ‘If I’d known people of faith actually stood for things like justice and equality and stood against racism, xenophobia, and fascism, maybe I’d go to church once in a while!’”

Memorial volunteer Michelle’s tattoo of her mother’s rosary.Courtesy of Rob Schenck

Maine is home to a growing foreign-born population of approximately 66,000 residents, accounting for roughly 4.7 percent of the state’s total population. Unlike in many parts of the country, the Hispanic immigrant population is among the smallest, far outpaced by Asians, who account for 25 percent of immigrants, followed by Europeans at approximately 24 percent. There is also a rapidly growing African immigrant community in the state, now about 20 percent of the population. 

This past January, as Gregory Bovino, who was then “Commander-at-Large of the US Border Patrol,” launched his grotesquely high-profile and deadly campaign against immigrants and their allies in Minneapolis, its much less visible complement was underway in Maine. Under the cruel moniker “Operation Catch of the Day,” a deliberate play on the state’s iconic seafood and commercial fishing industry, an undisclosed number of agents surged into the predominantly blue southern part of the state, as opposed to the more rural and sparsely populated northern red counties. In the first seven days of this operation, the Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition’s ICE hotline logged hundreds of sightings of federal agents. Even after the surge ended, with with DHS reporting more than 200 arrests, ICE’s ongoing presence in the state had increased by at least 44 percent.

Maine’s most visible and vibrant churches tend to be evangelical, and, as Rev. Scott Terry of the Maine Gospel Alliance, representing scores of conservative congregations throughout the state, put it to me, they “are conservative with their personal responsibility, with their religious viewpoints, and their political viewpoints.” Those same churches have largely remained silent about ICE operations. As Terry explained, this could be a simple lack of imagination; there just aren’t very many immigrants in the parts of the state where evangelicals tend to live, so the local community has little exposure to them. Still, he went on to concede that nor did those congregations consider the plight of immigrants to be important. 

The National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, a component of NIH, monitors the percentage of foreign-born residents by county in each state, and shows that these populations range from 1.5 percent to 4.1 percent in northern counties with the highest numbers of evangelical congregations. Many of these immigrants are religious conservatives, and they often form their own congregations. My experience over more than four decades of evangelical leadership, including on the national level, leads me to believe that the majority white congregations likely at least know of these immigrant co-religionists, if not to engage with them in various ways. 

In contrast to the evangelical disinterest or apathy around ICE, both the surge and Durán’s killing have sparked formidable, highly visible opposition from progressive church leaders, Islamic clerics, Jewish rabbis, Quaker ministers, and Buddhist practitioners. Groups such as Multifaith Justice Maine, which seeks to unify religious communities across differences to advance social justice causes, and the aforementioned Greater Portland Multifaith Organizing Group, which stages local public events, have mobilized scores of lay and ordained participants to advocate for immigrants in visible and less-visible ways.

Clergy and community volunteers regularly stand watch outside local businesses, such as the American Roots apparel factory in Westbrook, where a significant portion of the staff are asylum seekers or legal green card holders living in fear. Clerics will line up shoulder to shoulder as “human shields” during employee shift changes. Dressed in yarmulkes, prayer shawls, and clergy stoles, they sing hymns and read scripture to block the line of sight and act as a physical buffer between workers and DHS or ICE agents waiting outside.

During January’s ICE surge, the Maine Council of Churches and other groups spearheaded an effort to pressure Republican Senator Susan Collins to vote no on a bill funding ICE’s continued operations. Filling the hallway outside Collins’ office in Portland, several clergy members who refused to obey police orders to disperse were taken into custody. Collins eventually voted for the measure anyway, but her office did not press charges against the protesting clergy, leading to the case being dismissed. 

Progressive and mainline liberal church groups are also using the courts to defend immigrants’ human and constitutional rights. Congregations of the Evangelical Lutheran Churches in America, a progressive denomination, are plaintiffs in a regional New England lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security seeking to stop the administration from carrying out immigration enforcement at houses of worship.

There’s a quieter side to all of this, as well. Rev. Whittemore took me on a tour of her church’s commercial-style kitchen, where parishioners prepare bagged meals and other household necessities to deliver to the homes of vulnerable immigrant families, some of whom—whether or not they have legal status—are afraid to go to a grocery store or pharmacy for fear ICE will take them into custody. When the surge began in January, other congregations organized rides to and from schools and work, medical appointments, and even arranged to accompany immigrants to mandatory immigration court hearings.

All that I had seen and learned during my time in Maine came vividly into focus on my last day there, as I joined Rev. Whittemore at the site of Durán’s brutal slaying, where ICE had rammed his car. Rev. Whittemore offered me a regulation black chaplain cap, and I engaged in quiet, brief pastoral-style conversations with several of a dozen or so members of the community who had come out to refresh the drooping flowers, remove weather-beaten paper signs, and sweep up debris on the sidewalk and roadway.

Rev. Whittemore, in her capacity as chaplain at the improvised memorial where Johan Sebastian Durán Guerrero died.Courtesy of Rob Schenck Rev. Whittemore converses with visitors and volunteers who gathered to mourn in Biddeford, Maine.Courtesy of Rob Schenck

At one point, an angry young shirtless white male drove by in a pickup truck, gunned his engine, raised a middle finger, and shouted, “Go home, f*gg*ts! We don’t need his kind here!” At that moment, Rev. Whittemore took charge. With a controlled deep breath and a serene look on her face, she made caring eye contact with each of us and demonstrated what her chaplaincy was all about: setting the frame for inner peace, self-control, and love of neighbor. Later, she led the group in a spiritual exercise that included breathing, silence, and a spoken meditation. It’s what we evangelicals call, “Havin’ church outside of church.”

As I resumed my cleaning tasks along with the others, I noticed a classic steepled white clapboard church building immediately across the street. A colorful banner above the double-entry doors read, “With God…”

All Things Are Possible

EXPECT GREAT THINGS”

Underneath it was the name of the church: Victory Chapel Independent Holiness Pentecostal—just the kind of church I used to make rounds preaching in as an itinerant conservative evangelist for nearly four decades. I asked the volunteers if anyone was familiar with the congregation, as most were from the immediate neighborhood. Nearly all of them shook their heads no. One woman named Michelle said, “Funny, I only live over there,” pointing to a nearby row of modest homes, caddy-corner from where we were standing. “I never even noticed that church there.” 

In the distant past, evangelicals were known for their care of the poor, the forgotten, and the despised, but no longer. Today, we are presumed to be callous toward the needy, indifferent toward the marginalized, and contemptuous of the despised.

Now, here I was with a collection of good-hearted, mostly irreligious souls, laboring in the hot sun to afford some dignity to a young man most of them didn’t know. I thought of the many churches like the one across the street that I had kept company with for so long, whose preachers would have classified the people around me as lost, deceived, or maybe even wicked hellbound sinners.

Earlier that day, I had met the conservative Rev. Terry in his library-like church study, arrayed with the dour portraits of evangelical patriarchs Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Jonathan Edwards. I described to him some of Rev. Whittemore’s work in Biddeford. “I think that caring for people, the way the Unitarian Universalist wants to, is noble,” he allowed, before referring to the vast gulf that exists between them. “But it’s not the Gospel. And I believe the church is commissioned to proclaim the Gospel to save people from their sins.” 

“I think that caring for people, the way the Unitarian Universalist wants to, is noble. But it’s not the Gospel. And I believe the church is commissioned to proclaim the Gospel to save people from their sins.” 

I once agreed with him, believing that my principal task was to convert sinners so they could be assured of spending eternity with God when they died. Too much concern for their earthly needs was a distraction from that paramount mission. I also told believers that their good works would never get them to heaven, so they should concentrate on winning souls rather than practicing charity. Evangelicals do give generously to churches, but the vast majority of those donations go to maintaining their own church buildings, staff, religious programming, evangelistic and missionary work. For many evangelical churches and clergy, this results in our ignoring people’s real felt needs.

Yet, as I saw it in Maine and in Minneapolis, Rev. Whittemore and the crew of volunteers were doing just what I believe Jesus would have been doing at a memorial for a young father unjustly killed by imperial guards: honoring the victim, consoling those in trauma and grief, and seeking ways to care for their temporal needs.

Progressive clergy stage one of their weekly public prayer vigils in Biddeford’s Mechanics Park to memorialize Durán, who was killed nearby, as well as other victims of ICE violence.Courtesy of Rob Schenck

Why did it take so long, and demand this measure of human suffering, for progressive church leaders to be seen and heard, and for their churches to start growing again? I put that question to several liberal colleagues at the recent annual Wild Goose Festival, an outdoor camping event that’s been described as a Christian Woodstock meets South by Southwest. It drew about 2000 clergy, artists, musicians, community organizers, and social justice activists over the Labor Day weekend in Harmony, North Carolina. 

The Reverend Jennifer Butler is executive director of Faith in Democracy, an Atlanta-based nonprofit that builds coalitions of faith and faith-adjacent communities to resist the religious right, confront nationalism, and defend democracy. A graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary, she is a Presbyterian minister who has been a progressive since joining the Peace Corps in 1989. She later lobbied for women’s rights and against the Iraq war at the UN, worked for the Presbyterian Peacemaking Office in New York, and wrote a book warning of the new right’s global reach.

Butler believes the recent emergence of progressive church leaders, like those in Maine, is inextricably connected to politics. She offered a brief history lesson, explaining how, in the 1970s, Democratic party split from progressive religion as part of its commitment to its separation of church and state, interpreting this to mean that religious voices did not belong in the conversation about public policy. Meanwhile the Moral Majority was ascendant and as “the Christian right began to dominate the public square, the Party and the Progressive Movement grew wary of religion. Rather than seeing good religion as the answer to bad religion, they insisted on legal strategies and messaging around the separation of church and state.” The result? Those who were part of a progressive religious, social gospel movement “lost the ability to speak to highly religious Americans that we needed to get behind our policy issues.” 

It was Bill Clinton’s Chief of Staff, John Podesta, that Rev. Butler credits with reversing this trend. An observant Catholic, he founded the Center for American Progress in 2003, which in turn funded Faith in Public Life, a project aimed at building a coordinated voice for the religious left. Before this liberal religious resurgence, Butler said even her own clergy colleagues warned her not to bring theology into her public advocacy, “but some of my secular, feminist colleagues came to me, and were like, ‘We never knew what to make of you, but thank God you’re saying what you’re saying!’” 

The Reverend Dr. Russell Meyer, a Lutheran pastor and head of the Florida Council of Churches, told me that, beginning more than ten years ago, he and other ecumenical leaders were active in calling for school boards to direct customized resources for students who face the biggest barriers—such as those with disabilities, facing language learning challenges, and those from low-income families. “We’d go to school board meetings with lots of speakers. We were controlling the agenda. And we were successful.” In comparison to the amount of attention groups like the conservative Moms for Liberty, religiously progressive public advocates received very little attention. “I would have conversations with reporters, and I’d say, ‘Look, you got a whole section devoted to sports. There are more people in churches on Sundays than there are in stadiums. And there’s more money being put into offering plates than there are in beer sales at games, but you’re not reporting on that.” 

“I call it the great reshuffling. They were able to choose a congregation or faith community that better aligned with their values.”

The Reverend Dr. Lori Walke, who is 42 and describes herself as an “elder millennial,” is pastor of the Mayflower Congregational United Church of Christ in Oklahoma City, which has grown by at least 40 new members each year since 2021. Walke said that she and her congregation are unapologetically progressive. “We are working for abortion access, immigration justice, and are practicing full affirmation and inclusion of LGBTQ plus folks,” she said. “If you Google ‘gay church, Oklahoma,’ Mayflower will come up.’” 

As far back as 2014, when a lower court ruling legalized same-sex marriage in Oklahoma, a year before the US Supreme Court declared it a constitutional right, Walke’s church became what she refers to as “a marriage equality mecca for the Midwest. Texas, Arkansas, everyone was coming to Oklahoma because it was legal.” She said she performed 14 weddings on the first day the County Clerk issued licenses for same-sex couples. By the time the Supreme Court issued its Obergefell v. Hodges opinion, guaranteeing the right for gay couples throughout the country to marry, on June 26, 2015, Walke said she had solemnized more than 100 such marriages. 

Walke said her church has seen spikes in attendance, involvement, and membership after they responded with special programs to the SCOTUS decisions in Obergefell and Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe. v. Wade, or state and federal elections. The church has even hosted Planned Parenthood trainings for clinic defense and escort accompaniment. 

Attracting newcomer during times of social upheaval and tension is less challenging than retaining them after the crisis has passed. “For a while there,” she said, “it seemed our back door was as wide open as our front door.” She examined the problem as part of her doctoral research project at Emory University in 2020. “For Gen Xers, millennials, and younger generations, there is no obligation to join a group or organization that does not share your values,” Walke explained. While older Americans, such as Boomers, may have at one time felt obligated to stick with their family’s church, without reference to if they were comfortable with its principles and practices, after the COVID pandemic, when some churches suspended meeting in person, or streamed their services online, it allowed even the most dedicated members to explore both their faith and other churches that may more closely reflect those beliefs. “I call it the great reshuffling,” she told me, “they were able to choose a congregation or faith community that better aligned with their values.”

Walke tried to help people anchor their social and political commitments to their religious convictions. Disconnecting enduring Christian values from partisanship requires that progressives must become more visible since, she noted, conservatives enjoy “a smorgasbord of options, but for folks who are more progressive, do those places even exist?”

“Our focus is not on an afterlife, but on the only world we know. We are partnering with God and God’s salvific work in the here and now.”

One factor that has acted as a dividing line between churches that are thriving and those that are fading is the difference between those that are “performative”—in which members of the congregation are effectively a relatively passive audience—and those that are participatory, like hers and the ones that I saw in Maine. “Our focus is not on an afterlife, but on the only world we know,” she told me. “We are partnering with God and God’s salvific work in the here and now.”

The practical expression of religious life is what first drew me to evangelicalism more than 50 years ago. An early influence was The Cross and the Switchblade, which recounted how David Wilkerson left his comfortable church to minister to gang members and addicts in Brooklyn. Inspired, I joined his network of residential treatment centers and later launched mobile homeless shelters in my home city of Buffalo, New York, and mobile medical clinics in Mexico City and Cairo.

My focus on meeting “real felt needs” was eventually eclipsed by my becoming fully engaged in culture war combat, with the same Moral Majority so disparaged by the people I have gotten to know. Evangelical orthodoxy was weaponized, replacing compassion for the poor with rigid loyalty tests on abortion, sexuality, gender, and political affiliation. This shift has proved catastrophic, driving young people and longtime congregants away in droves due to intense politicization. While preparing for ministry, a popular adage was, “People don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care.” I view this not as Rev. Terry of Maine Gospel Alliance does, a contradiction to the gospel, but as the fulfillment of the Christian mandate to love our neighbors by actively ensuring their basic needs are met.

The Pentecostal church across the street from the memorial site.Courtesy of Rob Schenck

Back in Maine, my last conversation at Johan Sebastian Durán Guerrero’s memorial was with Michelle, the woman I had asked about the evangelical church across the street. I remarked on the beautiful, tattooed image of a blue-and-pink rosary, a stringed loop of beads used in Catholic prayer rituals, on the inside of her left forearm. “Oh, that was my mom’s rosary,” she said, stroking it with great affection. “I just loved her so deeply, and she loved her rosary. So, after she passed, I gave it to my tattooist and said, ‘Put it right there, so I can lay it across my heart and remember her.’” Then, her face hardened and her voice became angry. “But I’ve had it with religion. I left the church. Do you know that during Covid, I couldn’t even get a priest to come and give my dying mother last rites? They just wouldn’t do it.”

At that moment, I was no longer part of the crew who was working with her, but a minister with whom she shared her pain and anger. The first person I knew of who died of Covid, I told her, was a Franciscan Friar. Brother John Sebastian Laird-Hammond lived in a monastery near my home in Washington, DC, where he ministered to the poor and marginalized. She picked up on his middle name, Sebastian, and his hyphenated last name, “like Johan,” she said, surprised at what felt like an important coincidence. I shared my impressions of all the good work I had seen the clergy doing for immigrants like Johan over the last several days, and she interrupted me, smiling, “And there’s this one,” pointing enthusiastically to Rev. Whittemore.

“You know, Chaplain,” Michelle said, planting the broom she had been using to make her point. “I should get my ass back into church. This has gotten me thinking differently about it.” Smiling back, I gave her my card and offered to make some recommendations.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 6 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

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

Donald Trump has been holding rallies lately to energize his voters for the midterms, but he’s running into problems. Press scrutiny of his declining crowd sizes has been harsh, and he exploded in a crazed rant over this, fuming that in fact his rallies are “HOTTER” than ever.

But if anything, these rallies are an admission of weakness and failure. Republicans themselves are leaking word that Trump’s campaigning is a signal of the midterm emergency the GOP faces in deep red areas. And one rally in Ohio displayed a scene that’s doubly revealing along these lines.

We’re getting into all of this with Salon’s Amanda Marcotte, a skilled interpreter of MAGA, who has a good piece on Trump’s epic but failing struggle to make voters like him. Amanda, always good to have you on.

Amanda Marcotte: Thanks for having me.

Sargent: So Trump has done rallies in Ohio, Oklahoma, Alabama, and Texas, and he’s doing one Monday night in Nebraska. The Times had two pieces showing his crowd size is diminishing considerably.

In Alabama, the Times reports, upper sections were, quote, “almost completely empty,” in an arena that’s smaller than previous ones. And there were empty sections at an even smaller arena in Ohio, the Times noted. Amanda, even more to the point, polls are showing Republicans turning on him in spite of all these efforts. Your thoughts on all that?

Marcotte: Yeah, I think it’s twofold. I think obviously he’s aging, he’s getting even weaker. The political situation is so embarrassing right now that even his loyal supporters are beginning to be uncomfortable. We are hitting that same portion of, like, Bush’s second term, where even his voters just didn’t want to defend him anymore.

It feels, I think, for a lot of the people that support him, it feels kind of pointless at this point. Like, so much of the reason that a lot of Trump supporters kept doubling down and doubling down and doubling down was that they wanted to never admit they were wrong to liberals, first of all.

And second of all, as long as this political project had legs and they could kind of keep reviving the corpse and pushing into the future, it had value to them. So there was a purpose behind blind loyalty. But you can’t reelect Trump. It’s not worth it anymore, now that he’s a lame duck and there’s only so much juice they can squeeze out of this lemon.

Sargent: So Trump raged wildly at the Times for questioning his crowd sizes. He posted on Truth Social that his Ohio rally was “great” and “PACKED,” in all caps. He accused the Times of dishonesty. And he said this about his rallies:

“The rallies are HOTTER than ever. The networks refuse under any circumstances to show the crowds, but you can hear the thunderous applause, and you know that it represents thousands and thousands of people.”

He also said: “I never have empty seats, never have and never will.”

Amanda, I don’t know, for someone who’s doing so smashingly well, Trump sounds awfully angry and unhappy. Your thoughts about that?

Marcotte: I mean, wasn’t it at one of these rallies he literally got up and said that he knows more about every subject on the planet, on the whole planet, than any other person knows about anything? When you’re standing there being like, I’m the greatest of all time, and to a half-empty crowd—it’s like the trope on television when somebody says something and then comically they get disproven the next minute.

Sargent: And on top of that, this actually gets at a real thing, which is that in three of these states that he’s held rallies in, there really are tough Senate races—Texas, Ohio, and even Nebraska, which has somehow become closer now. In fact, one GOP lawmaker from a state Trump recently visited told CNN, quote, “this is a five-alarm fire.”

Amanda, the five-alarm fire is among MAGA and Republican voters. Obviously, the internal data is showing cratering support among Republican voters, especially MAGA ones. The Fox poll of Texas actually showed non-MAGA Republicans not approving of Trump. Like, more non-MAGA Republicans disapprove of Trump than approve of him.

Marcotte: I think it’s also true that they have this perception, and I don’t think it’s incorrect, that whatever Trumpism is, was, and whatever they got out of it, that’s coming to an end. And no one wants to be the last person at a party, right?

Sargent: Right. Right. I think that’s a real dynamic for sure.

Marcotte: Yeah. And I think that it’s not unreasonable for people that saw Donald Trump as their pathway to the kind of culture war victories that they were hoping to get, many of which they did—deportations, abortion bans coming back, you know, homophobia has been surging back, that sort of thing.

I mean, they got a lot of victories. Open racism has been normalized again. So they did get a lot of victories. And now he’s just this embarrassment. He got them into this war, he’s ruining the economy. He’s a lame duck. So this is a good time to sort of do an Irish exit.

Sargent: At this rally in Ohio, Trump talked about how Haitian immigrants who used to get temporary protected status are now getting deported. And he lied about how they’ve hurt the town of Springfield. In fact, the Haitian influx has done a lot to help reinvigorate the place.

Immigrants have reinvigorated the left-behind heartland in many ways, the places where Americans, especially young Americans, have deserted. But that aside, the crowd got very excited when Trump said the Haitians are getting sent back to their home country, where the conditions are horrific. They started to chant: “deport, deport.”

Amanda, before we get to the culture war stuff here, they get mad when people like us say that the lifeblood of MAGA is sadism, but there you have it on full display. That is the lifeblood of MAGA.

Marcotte: Yeah. And I think the reason that Trump rallies have been as popular as they are, even though it’s the same thing over and over again, is precisely this. There’s safety in numbers.

I think a lot of the people that have this sadistic desire to inflict pain on women, minorities, LGBTQ people—they don’t necessarily feel comfortable saying that on an individual basis. But when they go to a rally, they can chant hateful, racist things like that and get that glee, and they’re kind of anonymous.

Sargent: They’re actually kind of losing the culture wars over immigration, in a certain sense. And I think this Ohio scene displayed it in an interesting way. The New York Times had some polls over the weekend of these Senate races. Just going to read the top lines. James Talarico, the Democrat, is ahead in Texas, 51 to 45. Mary Peltola is ahead in Alaska, 50 to 43, also the Democrat. In Ohio, Sherrod Brown is up three points. In Iowa, Josh Turek, the Democrat, is down one. And Kansas is tied, which is incredible.

But here’s the thing I want to get to. In all these states, Donald Trump is underwater on immigration. That means that among likely voters, more than half disapprove of his performance on immigration. Again, this is in Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, and Texas. All states Trump won by double digits. And get this: the percentages who strongly disapprove are in the forties in all these states.

I have not seen numbers like this before. I mean, he has completely lost the deep red states on his best issue. And here you’ve got, like, a bunch of MAGA people in a bubble chanting the words “deport, deport, deport,” thinking that they’re winning this debate in some sense. But in reality it’s just crushing Republicans, even in these red states. What do you make of all that?

Marcotte: After the shootings in Minneapolis, I felt like this was probably going to—I’m surprised at how much it has turned around, but I felt like this was going to happen. Thomas Edsall in The New York Times had a really good article recently where he shared some research that showed that while Republican voters have become kind of more racist under Trump, the opposite has happened to Democratic voters.

Which is to say, I think they’ve had to think about some of these issues a little bit more than they used to, and they’ve discussed them. And I think their racial tolerance levels have gone up in response. And that’s an interesting thing.

And I suspect that’s happening kind of in the center too, where a lot of people who had a delusion about this country’s racism and had convinced themselves it wasn’t that serious are seeing this happen, and they’re finally admitting that, like, Haitians are just, like, normal people that want to work hard and raise their families, you know?

Sargent: Yeah, absolutely. I do want to point out, though, that there’s a little bit of cause for optimism in this. Because if you’ve got majorities in these states that Trump carried by double digits turning against Trump on immigration, what it means is that the people that were chanting “deport, deport, deport” kind of represent an increasingly fringe minority.

The MAGA sadism is a minority position at this point, even in some of these red states. And it’s kind of creating this opening for Democrats to capture some of these much softer Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who are horrified by what they’re seeing, don’t relish it the way the MAGA sadists do, and could potentially be looking for something else.

I think there’s potentially cause for real gains to be made there, in terms of building a larger consensus kind of in favor of immigration. What do you think?

Marcotte: Yeah, I think absolutely. And I think it’s moments like this that you can actually start to change people’s minds, right? The door has been cracked open. You know, they took it so far that they’re causing some people that otherwise were kind of softly racist towards immigrants to feel bad, and to maybe reconsider some of the opinions they had.

Sargent: For MAGA, Trump’s promise was that he would defeat us, right? He would crush you and me, basically. He would crush liberal America, you know, destroy us culturally, rout us in the culture wars permanently, put America back on a anti-woke path, or whatever the precise thing they want is.

But that hasn’t happened, right? It’s not happening, in the sense that majorities are rejecting him on immigration. They’re rejecting the white nationalism. And, you know, their candidates are in trouble in very deep red areas as a result of this.

And so maybe the fact that liberal America is fighting back and is mobilizing and is so energized and is really ready to take this all the way, right—take this to the mat, as it were—is itself a dissuading factor for some of these MAGA Republicans.

They say, well, OK, you know, he’s not actually crushing them. He’s not crushing Amanda Marcotte and Greg Sargent, or whatever. You know what I mean? He’s not crushing those libs. So I don’t know, man, I’m not sure I’m on this train anymore. Does that seem crazy?

Marcotte: No, that’s really perceptive. I love it. I love it. That’s amazing. Because it’s like—you’re right, like, many broken promises from Trump. He’s going to lower prices. He’s going to keep us out of wars. He’s going to crush the libs. Add that to the list of broken promises. I love it.

And yeah, I think, you know, it also just—there was that one moment, like right after he won, for a few months, where there was this sense that MAGA was, like, culturally ascendant. And it started to crack apart, right? Basically right when Charlie Kirk died, honestly. And like, Jimmy Kimmel—they tried to fire him, and instead it showed, like, there was this support for Jimmy Kimmel.

And I think at that point they began to realize that actually most Americans still think that they are not cool, and they will never be cool. And I think that that’s been a shot in the arm culturally for the left, and has been very depressing for the right. And you love to see it.

Sargent: Well, you know what else happened at around the time when that supposed cultural ascendancy seemed to suddenly waver and start tailspinning down? Two things. Kilmar Abrego Garcia was sent to a foreign torture prison, and ICE started invading cities. I think that really was one of the things that started the unraveling.

Marcotte: Yeah, no, I mean, part of what MAGA was able to do to sort of make themselves seem cool, even for a minute, was they presented their fascist ideas as, like, arch irony, right? They’re like, these are jokes and memes and silly stuff.

But you can’t, like, pull a gun on somebody and force them into a concentration camp in a joking way. And they tried. They really did try. Like, ICE and DHS were putting out all these memes. They had, like, the cartoon meme of the woman crying as she was getting arrested and stuff. But it’s not funny. It’s not funny, because that’s a real person.

Like, I think for normal people that voted for Trump—they lied, a lot of people allowed themselves to believe it really was just jokes, that the Haitians eating cats and dogs thing was just a joke. No, they meant that. They meant that in the same way that Nazis saying similar things about Jews meant it.

And there becomes the moment where the proof starts to happen that they meant it. And that clip about Donald Trump leading a bunch of people chanting “deport”—like, those are real people. Now, they were always real people, but I think in a lot of people’s imaginations that was a joke. And now you cannot deny that they are actually uprooting these people and sending them to a violent country that they were trying to escape.

Sargent: And if you think about the videos that just absolutely saturated the culture, saturated social media, of the shooting of first Renata Good and then second Alex Pretti—in the Renata Good one especially, you could hear the crack of gunfire. You could hear the shots.

And those break through all the memes and all the cartoon stuff and all the hilarity and all that sort of stuff. And then the car just sort of slowly rolling down the road with a dead person slumped over the steering wheel, and then essentially hitting a pole. Like, that just broke the memes, I think.

Marcotte: Yeah. It’s very reminiscent of how a lot of the Black Lives Matter protests rose up out of seeing video of people getting killed by police. And you know, that has a clarifying effect on the mind. Because yeah, now it’s not a cartoon anymore. That’s a person. That person has a family, you know.

Sargent: Yeah. Well, just to completely wrap this up, where do you see this going? You’ve got Trump doing these rallies. He’s obviously struggling to boost energy in MAGA country. I fear it’s going to be a little bit successful.

Like, they are going to bring Republicans back into the fold, especially because they’re going to outspend Democrats by around $200 million or something. And we’re going to see potentially the polls tighten. I think people should be prepared for that.

Marcotte: I cannot emphasize enough how much, in some communities in this country, the idea of voting for a Democrat is the equivalent of selling your child into slavery. It’s treated as—they are literally told that it’s demonic, that you will literally go to hell if you vote for a Democrat. And so I think a lot of people are going to struggle to do that, even though they know in their heart that it’s the right thing to do.

So yeah, I think a lot of them, if they go to the voting booth, I think they’re going to vote for the Republican. That said, they’re going to have a turnout problem. I think a lot of people aren’t going to want to make that choice. And so they’re probably just going to sit this one out.

Sargent: Yep. It sure looks like it’s trending in the right direction. Amanda Marcotte, always awesome to talk to you. Thanks so much.

Marcotte: Thanks for having me.

“There’s no Dracula here,” the head of the Norwegian welcoming committee proudly tells a Romanian family in an early scene in Fjord. They have just arrived in the picturesquely chilly hamlet of Ålesund, where Mats (Markus Scarth Tønseth) is the principal of the local elementary school, a locus of sleek, platitudinous inclusivity. (“Love doesn’t have borders,” one of the teachers remarks.) His latest hire, Mihai Gheor­ghiu (Sebastian Stan), is an IT whiz who has moved from Bucharest with his Norwegian-born wife, Lisbet (Renate Reinsve), and their five children—two moody high schoolers, a pair of adorable preteens, and an infant—in tow. A former aeronautical engineer, Mihai is now applying his talents to Wi-Fi, a humbling, downward trajectory that seems to exacerbate his natural reticence.

Mats is trying to break the Nordic ice by joking about vampires, but the gag is lost on Mihai, a devout Christian who sees paternity as a cross to bear, and his faith as a cudgel to wield in a daily crusade against malign progressive forces. These include YouTube, which is banned in his home, much to the shock of the extremely online children next door, who retreat nightly into their iPad playlists. Lisbet, who works as a nurse in an elder-care facility, appears more moderate than her husband. She’s a genuinely kind, considerate person, who is skilled at her job and possesses a lovely bedside manner. Still, she can’t help sneaking a crucifix, unsolicited, into the casket of a recently deceased patient.

The trickiness of the Gheorghius’ position as true believers living in a hotbed of agnosticism manifests initially in a series of misunderstandings and microaggressions, like when Mihai is admonished for plunking out “Amazing Grace” on the school’s piano. (“Can we have something more cheerful,” he’s asked.) Later, there’s another, more unsettling skirmish involving a kindergarten class discussion around gay marriage: Mihai’s younger daughter, Judith (Teodora Sabina Barau), claims she’s been told at home that it’s a sin. Then a gym teacher notices bruises on the back of Judith’s older sister, Elia (Vanessa Ceban), marks that weren’t visible before the class started doing full-contact wrestling drills.

From there, Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s film mutates fully from a modern, mirthless comedy of manners to full-on horror show, with Norway’s child protective services unit descending on the Gheorghius’ modest home and taking their children away until such time as their parents can mount a legal defense. Their first lawyer is so appalled by Mihai’s bossy attitude that she quits. Her replacement, Mia (Lisa Carlehed), is Mats’s wife, who tries to dampen her own skepticism about the pious interlopers and their ideas about what it means to lay on hands.

The family’s plight echoes the 2015 Bodnariu case, which saw Romanian-Norwegian couple Marius and Ruth Bodnariu separated from their five children following accusations of corporal punishment, and which served in the European press as a flash point for discussions of religious persecution, xenophobia, and the zealousness of Norway’s Barnevernet (child protection unit). The latter was described in one petition, signed by dozens of lawyers, psychologists, and social workers, as a “dysfunctional organisation which makes far-reaching errors of judgment with serious consequences,” and Mungiu leans into the characterization. Terrified at the prospect of handing over her baby, who is still in the midst of breastfeeding—and having difficulties latching—Lisbet tries to push back, only to be informed, with an unmistakable air of even-keeled menace, that it would better, for all involved, to run through the formalities as smoothly as possible. The implication is that good intentions might be paving the road to you-know-where. So much for Scandi tolerance.

From his own perch on the proverbial fence, Mungiu tries to see the big picture. “If you have a mindset of fundamentalism, it’s not such a big difference between right-wing and left-wing fundamentalism,” he said at Cannes, implying a shared continuum of radicalization. The movie’s mindset is oh-so-equanimous; it’s just asking questions. Such as: whether the secular Norwegian humanists, with their meticulous procedures and concern-trolling protocols, are genuine guardian angels or bloodsuckers? And is Mihai—who admits under interrogation to giving his children the odd slap on the butt, but also worries he’s being misquoted, on the record and in an adopted language—a true fire-and-brimstone monster from the Old World? Or is he a victim being impaled on the stake of political correctness? “They never had Communism,” scoffs a weathered, battle-weary Romanian official, who gets called as institutional heavy artillery once news of the Gheor­ghius’ plight breaks containment. He knows overreach; in a movie filled with selectively deployed euphemisms and double-talk, this old hand speaks in the cracked voice of historical—if not moral—authority.

The talking points here are many: not just political polarization and cultural relativism, but also generational conflict, euthanasia, surveillance technology, and the discombobulating echo chamber of internet activism, which begins driving the action once the Gheorghius become semi-willing mouthpieces for the online anti-woke mob. Mihai’s friends back home have collected thousands of signatures, and encourage him to post in the comment sections of various wing nut influencers; there’s a thick irony in this Luddite turning into a YouTube cause célèbre. The sheer density of socially relevant themes and the loosely ripped from the headlines plot, combined with Fjord’s precisely engineered form and above-the-line pedigree—not only the established award-magnetism of its acclaimed writer-director, but also the commercial clout of its Hollywood-ratified stars—are such that a good, liberal-minded film festival jury in 2026 has little choice but to bestow prizes on it.

Big ones, as it turns out. Fjord took the Palme d’Or at Cannes in May and is already being earmarked for possible Oscars beyond the foreign-language category, as Parasite, Drive My Car, and Anatomy of a Fall were before it. The latter is the real precedent here; like Justine Triet’s 2023 film, Fjord finally adopts the structure of a courtroom drama, one pitting Norway’s bureaucracy against a defiant clan of outsiders. There are, inevitably, plot twists, surprise witnesses, and impassioned testimonies; crucially, the onus of judgment—legal and otherwise—is placed on the audience. We’re privy to more evidence about the case and how the Gheor­ghius operate behind closed doors than the presiding judge, but only just barely. The real subject of Mungiu’s script, beyond all the aforementioned topical maladies, is—wait for it—the elasticity of truth, and how there are two sides to every story, whether or not they’re created or perceived equally.

Ideally, a drama like this one, calibrated for dramatic and ideological ambiguity, would challenge consensus; that a tribunal of international a-listers found common ground in Fjord’s morality play suggests it may be a safer bet than it seems.

Feeling good about feeling bad, to the point of getting off on melancholy, is a hallmark of contemporary European art house cinema. Mungiu is a master of the form. Since his first Palme in 2007 for 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, a pressurized portrait of a student trying to get a back-alley abortion in the waning days of the Ceauşescu regime, the Romanian director has honed his style to a fine point. Mungiu is a staunch realist who favors spare, unvarnished compositions and quotidian scenarios; his preferred form of punctuation is the pregnant pause.

The upshot of such austerity measures is that Mungiu’s films, including Fjord, wear their seriousness as a badge of honor. The director traffics in symbols and subtext; each strategically locked-off frame and declamatory piece of dialogue is an invitation to read between the lines. (“We don’t do evangelization at school,” observes one educator, several scenes after the church-versus-state setup has been established.) The problem is that Mungiu’s subtlety is often inscribed in all-caps. For instance: When Lisbet is surprised at home by the child-welfare services representatives who have arrived to take her kids away—even potentially the baby who’s been struggling with bottle feeding—the Navy blue cross of the Norwegian flag can be seen through the living room window, the billowing standard of the nanny state.

There are other on-the-nose moments, like an early allusion to an impending avalanche and later the loaded image of a senior citizen in a wheelchair, gazing out at the harbor, hoping to topple in. These awkward moves contrast with the nearly flawless work of the actors, starting with Stan, who doesn’t just disappear into the role (something he didn’t quite manage as Donald Trump in The Apprentice) but captures a withdrawn nature that comes off as authentic. Because of the way Mungiu parcels out information, Mihai is simultaneously the film’s protagonist and its most mysterious figure; he stridently voices his opinions, but we rarely if ever see the action from his point of view. There’s a similarly adept conceptual trick in Reinsve’s performance as Lisbet, which suggests a woman caught intractably between righteousness and denial.

In a different and probably more palatable version of Fjord, Lisbet might begin to question her husband’s backward-leaning beliefs, or break with him for the sake of their children, complete with movie-star close-ups of Reinsve’s tear-streaked face. But there are no explosions here, in private or otherwise. The Gheorghius present a united front, even when Mihai explains in court—once again striving, with a sincerity abutting on condescension, to contextualize his inspirations—that “beating comes from heaven.” This claim leads to the story’s most absurd moment—an invitation by a grandstanding prosecutor to the defendant to slap him—which at least spikes the pulse of this otherwise scrupulously controlled movie.

Mungiu is determined to maintain an appearance of objectivity, even as he creates a series of contrived escalations. There’s a difference between diagramming the problems of characters trapped by their class positions and moving them around like pieces on a chessboard, and Mungiu tends to do the latter. He is clumsy in his handling of the contrast between the Gheor­ghius’ tense but tight-knit family dynamics and Mats’s implied coddling of his own moody teenage daughter Noora (Henrikke Lund-Olsen). When Mats loses his patience with her at the dinner table and bangs his fist, like Mihai, the scene is staged for our benefit, as a gotcha moment: Look who’s the hotheaded authoritarian now. Mihai, meanwhile, is not as bad as he’s made out to be: He seethes and copes without definitively crossing any lines, at least on our watch. The film drapes these characters in ambiguity, less out of open-mindedness and more as a way of quietly flattering certain factions—like, say, sophisticated viewers who see themselves as hovering above the fray, or reactionaries unduly pleased to see social workers presented, however ambivalently, as stooges of totalitarianism.

It’s not quite a spoiler to say that the forecast avalanche arrives before the end of Fjord; Mungiu treats it conspicuously as an anticlimax and an indicator of other, less visible things being dislodged. By only barely disguising his metaphors, he stakes his claim to art-cinema Valhalla, and yet the final act leaves the machinery exposed, with a shameless coda that finds Noora racing against time to catch a ferry out of town. Her long-repressed parting words are predictable, as is the fact that they’re lost on the breeze; what we have here, the film says, is a failure to communicate. Mungiu might mean for Fjord to cut through the noise and register as a howl into the void, but it’s finally more like an echo chamber: loud and discombobulating, spacious and hollow.

Claire Valdez, the New York state assemblymember now running to represent New York City’s 7th congressional district in the House of Representatives, joined a union long before she ever entered politics. It’s her history with unions that she credits with giving her the experience she needed to think about running for office in the first place. “I think my perspective as a political person really started with the fact that I was a worker and that I did not control my hours.… And that sense of kind of powerlessness is one that is shared by so much of the working class,” she told me in an interview earlier this year.

That changed when she started work at Columbia University, which was unionized, she said. “My union gave me—it really gave me—time,” she said. She started to use that time to learn about political organizing and think about the way she could help make workers’ lives better. That ultimately led to her race against Antonio Reynoso, the Brooklyn borough president, in the congressional primary in June, which she won by more than 20 points. The race was often portrayed as Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who backed her, versus the machine, socialism versus the establishment. But there was another way to frame the battle: the union member versus the political insider.

At least five other candidates are new to national politics this year but are running for seats in the House and Senate because of their experiences with unions. Like Valdez, their rhetoric is worker focused. They believe that their worker-led agenda is key to Democrats winning back some of the disillusioned middle-income voters who have flipped to President Trump or stopped showing up for elections at all. Earning their votes is essential for the Democrats to return to power. But the key question is, assuming the Democrats do return to power, will the presence of these union member legislators result in a governing agenda that really tries to deliver for working people?

First, these candidates have to win in November. Some are running in states and districts where they have an advantage—Valdez is almost certain to win her heavily Democratic New York City district—but others don’t have it so easy.

What the candidates —who include Troy Jackson, a former logger running for Senate in Maine; Bob Brooks, a Pennsylvania firefighter running in the state’s 7th district; Dan Osborn, an industrial mechanic and labor leader running as an independent in Nebraska; Sam Forstag, a wildland firefighter and forest worker organizer running for Montana’s 1st congressional district seat; and Brian Poindexter, an ironworker running in Ohio’s competitive 7th district—have in common is that their campaigns promise to truly represent the workers left behind in today’s economy, and especially by the Republicans so many put faith in in 2024.

They are promising that, if elected, they will force a potential Democratic majority to finally deliver on policies the party has promised for years, like increasing wages, lowering the costs of health care, and providing federally guaranteed paid sick days and family leave.

In Maine, Jackson, the former president of the state Senate, rose to the Democratic nomination after Graham Platner’s implosion this summer. While he’s not entirely new to Maine state politics, his campaign leans hard on his history as a fifth-generation logger, and his campaign website shows him in coveralls and a baseball hat standing in front of a yellow bulldozer.

His task is unseating five-term Republican incumbent Senator Susan Collins. Collins has tried to have it both ways by portraying herself as an independent who’s not in the Trump MAGA camp while still mostly supporting Trump: That, plus her incumbency, gives her an advantage with independent-minded Maine voters. But the political gods have blessed Jackson with a newly reported scandal from the news outlet ProPublica. Collins was at the center of an FBI probe in which a defense contractor allegedly donated to her 2019 campaign in exchange for contracts. ProPublica reported that Trump stopped the probe when he returned to office.

This plays into Jackson’s case against Collins, which he’s made at least since a Democratic candidate debate in July. “Senator Collins is just a rubber stamp for the wealthy elite in this country, and that is nothing that’s ever going to help the people here in Maine,” Jackson said onstage then.

His campaign has been hammering her over the scandal. But before that, his position as the candidate to help working-class Mainers against Washington insiders may have already been working. Recent polling shows him with a slight edge, though definitely within the margin of error.

All of the other candidates face uphill battles trying to turn red districts blue. In Pennsylvania’s 7th district, Brooks, the firefighter, is trying to overcome a slight Republican advantage to defeat the one-term incumbent Representative Ryan Mackenzie. Cook Political Report rates the contest as a toss-up, and it’s a critical seat for Democrats to win if they want to gain control of the House. Brooks is betting on voter dissatisfaction with the Trump economy. “The number one thing I hear from my neighbors is how unaffordable life has gotten, and that’s what I’m running to fix,” he said in an email. “I’ll fight for universal health care, crack down on private equity buying up our housing, and work to pass the PRO Act so workers have bargaining power again.”

While Democrats have long supported unions and been endorsed by them, rank-and-file union workers have split with leadership over the past few election cycles to sometimes support Republicans, especially Trump, who has made a big show of wearing hard hats and climbing into big rigs to give the appearance of fighting for working Americans. Brooks is trying to push back against that illusion. Like the other candidates, he is speaking like a member who knows how to fight on the workers’ side of the bargaining table.

“I decided to run for Congress because I’ve watched career politicians like Ryan Mackenzie fail the working people of the Lehigh Valley,” Brooks said. “Washington is a dumpster fire, and Mackenzie is the arsonist who helped light it.” Brooks, a firefighter, promises to put it out.

Forstag, the smoke jumper, is running for the Montana seat against Aaron Flint, a combat veteran and radio host. The district leans Republican after shifting toward Democrats this year, according to the Cook Political Report. (The seat is being vacated by Republican Representative Ryan Zinke, who also served as Secretary of the Interior in Trump’s first term and left amid numerous ethics investigations.)

Forstag has been endorsed by Our Revolution, and his district is home to the college town of Missoula, where New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined him for a rally in May. There, he struck a similar tone to Brooks. “If we want to build a country that works for working people, we need to start sending working people to Congress,” he said at the rally.

In Ohio’s 7th, Poindexter, the ironworker, is gaining ground after his R+5 district has moved from a relatively safe seat for Republican Max Miller, who’s faced horrific abuse allegations concerning his ex-wife and daughter, to a toss-up.

Poindexter highlights another critical promise these candidates are making; they say they will support unions, not just working families. “I don’t have to be pro-labor, folks. I am labor,” Poindexter said in July at the North Shore AFL-CIO headquarters in July, according to the Ohio Capital Journal. “My friends, my family—I would not be able to look them in the eye if I went to Washington and forgot where I came from.”

“Working people are tired of politicians who talk about their struggles without having lived them,” an AFL-CIO spokesperson said in a statement, echoing the sentiment. “For too long, the people writing the rules on wages, health care and retirement have no real experience with what those rules mean for the rest of us.”

For Michael Podhorzer, a former political director at the AFL-CIO, the decline of unions helps explain why Democrats have stopped truly representing working people and also stopped getting credit for the policies they do pass. Unions were a trusted intermediary that helped voters connect their daily struggles to the political solutions that could help them; even more critically, they gave working people a true seat at the table.

In a piece published in The Contrarian on Labor Day, Podhorzer wrote: “Today, too many Democratic and media professionals talk about working people the same way that Coca-Cola executives would talk about regaining a prized market segment they’ve lost to Pepsi—which is not the way anyone in a democracy should be talking about its citizens, regardless of their demographic group. That most commentators ask how Democrats can ‘win back’ the working class—not ‘represent’ or ‘answer to’ them—reveals this dynamic in action.”

Even if these candidates win, advancing a worker agenda in Washington will be a tough task. Decades of labor law have tilted the playing field in favor of corporations, and these candidates will have to convince the Democratic Party as a whole that it’s a fight worth taking on, even when there’s so much else to do.

But for them, fighting for unions once in office is a fight that’s critical for the Democrats to take on. “This is a really essential time for people who have familiarity with the labor movement, who have been union members themselves, to step up,” Valdez told me. “Union density is still low, and far too few workers are able to organize with their co-workers … and so I think that’s a really important aspect of the affordability crisis that we talk about a lot.”

The political ascent of Donald Trump has forced me to adjust upward my estimation of the American public’s gullibility. That Trump is a fraud is something I would have been able to perceive when I was 7 years old. Yet Americans twice elected him president. If I possessed the ability at age 7 to see through Trump (and I was no kind of prodigy), then gullibility about Trump can’t logically be a matter of his base lacking a college education (“I love the poorly educated”). Rather, it reflects the public’s perverse attraction to promises it understands to be hollow. As the former TNR editor Michael Kinsley observed way back in 2008, “The routine acceptance of obvious lies now corrodes our politics as much as … money.” 

Trump does Kinsley one better by attaching his obvious lies to promises of money. The most ludicrous example is Trump’s pledge, restated this week, to give every adult citizen $5,000 if Republicans keep their majorities in the House and Senate. Set aside that this is essentially a bribe for votes; it’s also never going to happen because doing so would cost $1.3 trillion. Trump has a history of pledging to send out money that never arrives. Last year he promised $2,000 rebates to compensate American families for his tariffs. That didn’t happen. Neither did his promise last year to share 20 percent of DOGE savings with U.S. citizens (possibly because DOGE saved no money at all, but rather added $244 billion to the federal deficit). 

Now Trump is claiming fictional economic development projects to be underway in two states where Republicans are at risk of losing Senate seats. These are Iowa (where Republican Representative Ashley Hinson is in a dead heat with Democratic state Representative Josh Turek) and Alaska (where incumbent Senator Dan Sullivan is trailing Democratic former Representative  Mary Peltola).

The make-believe project in Iowa is a $15 million Mesabi Metallics steel mill that will create 1,750 jobs (plus 6,000 temporary construction jobs) in Iowa’s Lee County, where Republican Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks may also lose her seat. A White House press release called it “the largest steel plant ever built in the United States” and posted a Des Moines Register front page with the headline “Steel Project Hailed As ‘Transformational.’” “This deal is done,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick assured reporters at an Oval Office ceremony that Hinson attended on September 28. “They’ve already worked it out. That’s why we’re all together with the president. The president doesn’t bring people together unless it’s a done deal.” Trump pitched in: “They’ve already started building.”

But Lutnick and Trump were lying (and shame on the Register’s Bri­anne Pfannen­stiel for not calling them on it). The deal was not done, and Mesabi Metallics certainly hasn’t already started building; it hasn’t even purchased the land, according to Matt Christensen of KWQC in Davenport, who reviewed Lee County land records after Trump’s announcement. (Iowa’s TV news reporters are beating the crap out of the Register on this story.) Lutnick’s “this deal is done” comment was in response to a question about whether the deal was contingent on the state granting tax breaks. But if the deal was not contingent on state tax breaks, why did Republican Governor Kim Reynolds scramble to call the legislature back into session four days later to provide up to $1.4 billion in tax incentives? Five Republicans voted against it, including Dan Dawson of Council Bluffs, who chairs the state Senate’s Ways and Means Committee. Dawson told CNN that the state would end up losing $880,000 in tax revenue for every job created.

Despite that dismal accounting, the bill passed, and Reynolds signed it into law Friday night. Still, that doesn’t mean Mesabi Metallics has yet secured the billion-dollar state tax break on which the deal pretty obviously is contingent. As Amanda Rooker of KCCI in Des Moines reported October 2:

The credit would be based on the project’s qualifying investment, which can include land, site preparation, infrastructure, construction and certain business assets. The Iowa Economic Development Authority would determine how much of the credit to authorize, up to the 10 percent limit.

The company would … have to meet certain requirements before receiving the credit. The project, or a designated portion of it, would have to be operating, and at least half of the jobs associated with that portion of the project would have to be added to the company’s payroll. Those jobs would have to pay at least 140 percent of the state’s qualifying wage threshold

No permit applications have yet been received at the county level, according to KWQC’s Christensen. 

There’s also some question whether Mesabi Metallics will follow through. Lana Zak of CBS News reported October 4 that Mesabi and its Indian parent company, Essar Group, “have a long history of missed deadlines and unfulfilled job promises.” In 2008, Zak reported, Essar announced plans to build a $1.6 billion iron mine and steel mill in Minnesota that promised to create 700 jobs. It was never built. KCCI’s Rooker reported that as recently as July Mesabi was planning to build the Iowa steel mill in Kentucky, and it isn’t clear its talks with Kentucky state officials have entirely ended. Memories are still fresh of Trump’s 2017 promise that Foxconn would build a plant in Wisconsin that would create 13,000 jobs. Nine years later, a much scaled-back plant has created only about a thousand jobs. 

For all the unacknowledged obstacles to “the largest steel plant ever built in the United States,” Iowa’s steel mill is a slam dunk compared to a $54 billion liquid natural gas pipeline Trump’s promised for Alaska that Trump announced at a separate Oval Office ceremony on September 30. The pipeline, Trump said, is to be paid for by South Korea in partial fulfillment of its 2025 pledge to spend $350 billion in the United States (in exchange for lower tariffs). A Commerce Department press release said the United States and South Korea had “agreed to commence working on the Alaska LNG project.” 

Almost immediately, South Korea disputed this. “Putting figures or using definitive language goes far beyond what was agreed,” Kim Jung-kwan, South Korea’s minister of trade, industry, and resources, told the South Korea news agency Yonhap on October 2. Indeed, the veteran Alaska commentator Dermot Cole (he spent 37 years at the Fairbanks Daily News-Minor and four at the Anchorage Daily News) reported that there are no signed agreements. Seoul Broadcasting Service reported: “The South Korean government has never agreed to this.” Cole quoted “a leading official of Korea’s ruling party” saying, “The Alaska LNG project will be decided on the basis of sufficient review in accordance with our domestic legal procedures in accordance with the principle of commercial rationality.” 

Trump also announced on Truth Social that South Korea had agreed to spending $8.4 billion on an enhanced oil recovery project, prompting the South Korean government to reply that it had no earthly idea what Trump was even talking about. Trump responded by threatening to double South Korean tariffs.

The South Koreans did, however, confirm that a separate Trump announcement on September 30, of a $22.3 billion gas-fired plant to power an AI data center in La Salle County, Texas, was truthful. Texas, of course, is another midterm trouble spot for Republicans, with Senate candidate James Talarico, a Democratic state senator, pulling ahead of Republican state Attorney General Ken Paxton. 

In this case, though, Trump’s announcement is unlikely to do Talarico much damage because Talarico is already campaigning against new data centers. “A lot of these giant data center companies are running over local communities,” Talarico said the day Trump announced the gas-fired plant, “and these giant data centers are popping up in people’s backyards and there’s no input.” Even Republicans are split on whether building data centers is a good idea, with 46 percent in favor and 44 percent opposed. 

The irony is priceless. For once Trump tells the truth, and it bites him in the ass. Maybe he should stick to lying.

In the autumn of 2001, a new national security threat arrived by mail. Envelopes carrying a fine, nearly invisible powder had begun traveling through the postal system. One letter reached a tabloid’s newsroom in Boca Raton, Florida, killing a photo editor within a few weeks. Other letters arrived at NBC News and the New York Post. In mid-October, a letter addressed to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle was opened in the Hart Senate Office Building, releasing anthrax spores and shutting down the building for months. By the time the letters stopped, five people were dead and 17 more infected.

Still reeling from September 11, lawmakers scrambled. How easily could a biological weapon be acquired or made? What might happen if the attack were larger and more sophisticated?

At a congressional hearing that November, lawmakers cited findings from a 1993 report titled “Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction: Assessing the Risks.” Written in plain language, the report described various weapons’ effects, the technical aspects of monitoring and controlling production, and the trade-offs among nonproliferation tools. It happened to specifically warn that under the right weather conditions, 100 kilograms of anthrax released in the nation’s capital could kill up to three million people—a casualty outcome that, “pound for pound of weapon,” could exceed a nuclear bomb’s. According to one journalist, “in the rush to sort out fact from fiction, rumor from real scientific fact, Congress was using reliable information from a group that was charged with studying the real ramifications of bioterrorism.”

That group, the Office of Technology Assessment, or OTA, had in fact been defunct for years. Created in 1972, OTA had been a small but proud agency that worked for Congress alone, helping lawmakers navigate science and technology issues with nonpartisan expertise. When advances in genetics raised the prospect that a blood test might reveal a disease-causing mutation, it was OTA that examined what that knowledge might mean for privacy, insurance, and discrimination. Over the years, the agency took on acid rain, mammograms, telecommunications, drug abuse, missile defense, intellectual property, pest control, electronic surveillance, agricultural technologies, and the disposal of nuclear waste, among hundreds of other issues. Wherever Congress might be caught flat-footed as the world changed, OTA could be found nearby.

Congress appreciated the help. A 1990 survey of congressional staff reported that zero percent of respondents found OTA “not useful.” (Half of them said “very.”) A 1993 study by the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution concluded that “the agency is considered highly credible by members of both parties.” Nonetheless, in a mad rush to slash federal spending in the mid-’90s, Congress defunded it. “We are cutting off one of the most important arms of Congress when we cut off unbiased knowledge about science and technology,” lamented Republican Representative Amo Houghton. A few years later, as a biological weapon made its way through the mail, Congress reached for the work of a team it had let fall by the wayside.

Right about now would be a good time to bring OTA back. In recent months, a parade of senior researchers and executives from the country’s top technology companies has issued alarms about artificial intelligence, using terms like “human extinction.” Jacob Coxon, a former researcher at Anthropic, wrote that companies like OpenAI and his own former employer are “gambling with our lives.” The prospect of advanced artificial intelligence escaping human control is not a new worry, but the very public warnings by industry insiders have very suddenly shaken Washington.

Company leaders have their preferred approaches. OpenAI wants mandatory national safety requirements and industry-led standards. Anthropic has called for independent safety evaluators inside companies and a slowdown in development. Nvidia argues that slowing down is unnecessary and that speed and safety are a “false choice.” The executive branch, meanwhile, has its own technical experts, while lobbyists, trade associations, academics, labor groups, and AI safety organizations press their own theories of problems and solutions. Congress is hearing from no shortage of people with something to say about the way forward.

The issue facing Congress, at least initially, is not one of selecting a particular approach among a clear set of options. It is to determine which claims being made are true, what remains unknown, and what each proposed intervention would likely accomplish. The principal and overwhelming challenge is to wade through an extraordinary amount of information—much of it technical, some of it contradictory, and most of it laden with uncertainty. It is precisely the sort of problem OTA was designed to solve.

This September, Axios reported that more than two dozen members of Congress and governors said they either don’t use artificial intelligence or have used it only rarely. Axios called it a “striking admission.” A House Democrat, meanwhile, called it “fucking absurd”—that people overseeing the technology might not be regular users.

This view of things suggests that if only lawmakers knew more, from personal experience or otherwise, they would legislate better. But we similarly expect Congress to legislate on issues like war without serving in the military and on agriculture without ever having tilled the land. Why, in this case, should we expect them to be users of a particular technology in order to regulate it? Of course, we don’t actually expect lawmakers to be personal experts in most things. No one seems to have an issue with lawmakers overseeing the work of NASA absent experience with space travel. But we do expect them to rely on the expertise of others—to gather it, to assess it, and to make informed decisions with it. The problem facing Congress is not really a question of knowledge but a question of capacity.

Congress is drowning in advice. Lawmakers are inundated from think tanks, trade associations, lobbyists, advocates, and armies of experts from the executive branch, all telling Congress how to do its job. Talk with anyone on Capitol Hill today, and what you will not hear is a complaint about too few meetings with too few people offering their ideas. What Congress lacks is the ability to make sense of it all: to sort through the torrents of information flooding the institution and pull out what’s important—and also true—so that lawmakers can make informed choices. A lack of capacity is the underlying deficiency.

This is made all the more difficult because most of the information coming into Congress has a source with something at stake. Advice givers are rarely providing lawmakers with unvarnished analysis. As a member once griped to me during a 2019 interview on Congress’s capacity constraints: “We all have our biases here, but we also sometimes just want information we actually think is free of political leanings. This is harder to find than you think.” Which is to say, Congress lacks the ability not only to make sense of all the information but also to feel confident about its impartiality. Enter OTA.

To understand how OTA worked, consider a debate over commercial explosives. In 1980, Congress was contemplating a bill that would have required manufacturers to add chemical markers to explosives, known as taggants, that supposedly made it easier for law enforcement to trace the materials after a bombing. When a bomb detonated, investigators could theoretically recover the markers from the debris and trace the explosive back through the supply chain. Explosives manufacturers strongly opposed the idea, telling lawmakers that the solution was both costly and ineffective. Also chiming in were federal, state, and local law enforcement; aviation and airport-safety officials; and scientists and weapons engineers. Each had pieces of important information—some of it contradictory—and also preferred outcomes. The questions involved, moreover, were technical: For example, would the markers actually survive an explosion? Would they yield useful information? And at what cost?

Lawmakers turned to OTA, whose job it was to gather the evidence and make it legible. What questions could be resolved? What was still unproven? OTA wasn’t performing original research as much as it was analyzing the scope of what was known, in light of scientific uncertainty and disagreements. In this case, it found that taggants could in fact be useful to law enforcement. But its analysis also raised genuine technical concerns regarding their safety and the costs of a tracing regime. It did not collapse those findings into a thumbs-up or thumbs-down answer, but rather laid out the various policy paths Congress could take, with the trade-offs of each. Congress ultimately came out where the manufacturers wanted it to, declining to impose the taggant mandate. But OTA had given lawmakers a basis for getting there that did not depend on taking the manufacturers’ word for it. OTA equipped lawmakers with the capacity to make an informed judgment.

Having an independent source of in-house expertise also helped strengthen Congress’s hand in its dealings with the executive branch. In 1983, the Reagan administration moved to expand the government’s use of polygraphs to investigate leaks of classified information. Congress asked OTA to examine whether the machine could actually do what its proponents promised. OTA concluded that the technology could register physiological signs of stress but could not reliably tell whether that stress arose from deception or some other form of anxiety. Congress imposed a temporary moratorium on the proposed expansion while it considered the evidence. A few years later, as it weighed restrictions on private employers’ use of polygraphs, it again drew on OTA’s findings. The resulting Employee Polygraph Protection Act generally prohibited private employers from using lie-detector tests.

In neither the explosives nor the polygraphs case did OTA tell lawmakers what to do. It did not tell Congress that taggants should or should not be required; instead, it laid out for lawmakers what each choice would likely buy, cost, and risk. Nor had it told Congress that the executive branch couldn’t pursue leaks or that employers had no legitimate interest in theft and fraud. But it had separated the promise attached to a technology from the evidence for what it could accomplish. OTA acted as an “impartial ‘honest broker,’” said Representative Houghton. “Members of Congress are deluged with advice from many quarters, but it is often tinged with the underlying bias and political agenda of the bearer.”

Perhaps almost to a fault, the agency was fanatical in its commitment to analysis, not prescription. OTA’s leadership and staff knew that in a highly partisan environment, any move in the wrong direction—any whiff of seeming like it was taking sides, on policy or politics—would imperil its reputation, and ultimately its usefulness. So its mandate was treated seriously: Translate an issue’s complexity into relevant knowledge for members and staff, and articulate the potential trade-offs associated with different courses of action. Said John Gibbons, the agency’s director, in 1984: “There are many advocates of particular solutions—even the scientific community is an advocate in its dealings with the Congress—but OTA is unique in its almost idealistic mandate to remain free of advocacy.” That restraint had some costs. OTA could leave both sides of a policy dispute dissatisfied: It would not bless anyone’s preferred solution, and it would not reduce a hard question to a recommendation lawmakers could simply adopt. But this was OTA’s own trade-off. The agency supplied Congress with the best available account of what a policy choice would do and avoided any suggestion about which choice to make.

Over the course of its life, OTA published roughly 750 products for its congressional clients across a bewildering scope of topics. As it happens, there are few policy domains where science and technology do not play a meaningful role. The work was substantial and consequential. Indeed, OTA staff may have been committed to impartiality, but they understood the stakes. After news reached staff that the agency was being disbanded, most chose to stay on till closing day, “vigorously pursuing its mission to the last,” reported The New York Times. “Even as they empty desks, pack boxes and circulate resumes, staff members working in offices a few blocks from the Capitol are rushing to complete and distribute as many studies as possible before the deadline.”

In the 1990s, despite its broad appeal across Congress and across the aisle, OTA became a minor casualty in a much larger fight over the federal budget. Certain members thought it wise to show the public that Congress, too, was tightening its belt as it simultaneously recommended eliminating a much broader array of federal programs. But it was hard to see the move as anything other than optics.

For one, OTA’s funding peaked at $21.3 million in 1995—in inflation-adjusted terms, less than the cost of returfing the grass on the National Mall. But OTA also paid for itself many, many times over. A single OTA study in 1994 on the Social Security Administration’s computer procurement policy saved the government an estimated $368 million—more than 16 times OTA’s budget that year. Its broader impact on evidence-based policymaking is harder to quantify in dollar terms. But as one analyst put it: “If conducting [an OTA study] costs less than one-tenth of one percent of the money at stake in a decision, and increases the odds that we’ll get the decision right, that is a considerable bargain.”

There have been calls for reconstituting OTA in some form or another since not long after it closed its doors. A notable one came in 2019, when a House appropriations committee approved $6 million to begin reopening OTA. (In 1995, the agency was defunded, but the statute creating it is still on the books.) In 2020, the bipartisan House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress recommended “reestablishing and restructuring an improved” OTA. Indeed, no serious proposals—and there are a number—imagine simply recreating the agency as it existed in 1995. Analyses, including by the Congressional Research Service, have suggested a number of new design recommendations if it is one day brought back. In 2019 and again in 2023, a bipartisan, bicameral group folded some of these recommendations into companion bills that would have created an updated OTA.

However, the money did not survive the final appropriations process, the recommendation did not make it into the House’s eventual modernization package, and the bills stalled. Still, in recent years, Congress has repeatedly recognized the problem.

There have also been other efforts to provide Congress with more support. In 2019, the Government Accountability Office created a Science, Technology Assessment, and Analytics team, which now produces technology assessments, short explanatory “spotlights,” and audits of federal science and technology programs. It has done serious work, including on generative AI, deepfakes, biotechnology, and brain-computer interfaces. A reconstituted OTA could be viewed as duplicative.

But STAA is a team within an agency whose central job is auditing how the government spends money and carries out its programs. OTA solved a different problem: sorting through a barrage of information in order to clarify options, often in close partnership with lawmakers and their staff. As the Washington Post editorial board once argued: “GAO’s institutional culture centers on audits and investigations, and it lacks the hallmarks of OTA in its heyday,” which include “experts with whom legislators can build relationships.” Indeed, the relationships mattered as much as the mission. OTA staff attended meetings with lawmakers, commented on draft legislation, and generally made themselves accessible. Lawmakers even sat on OTA’s governing board. GAO, meanwhile, is not deeply embedded within Congress; it operates at arm’s length. An OTA annual report from 1981 proudly underscored the opposite: that the agency functioned as a kind of “shared staff.”

The OTA was a model of legislative expertise so distinctive that other democracies came to study it—and, in various forms, to borrow it. In the late 1980s, Britain sent a delegation to examine the agency, and in 1989, it established its own Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology. Germany followed with the Office of Technology Assessment at the Bundestag in 1990. So did France, Finland, Japan, and the European Parliament, among others. The agencies differed in their designs but generally reflected a shared idea that lawmakers confronting the consequences of new advancements in science and technology should not have to depend entirely on another branch of government, outside interests, or their own overextended staff. The great irony of the decision to shutter OTA was that so many others thought it a good enough idea to replicate themselves.

Even the White House stood up its own science and technology body. In 1976, it created the Office of Science and Technology Policy, which advises the president and coordinates policy across the executive branch, and which still exists. Only Congress decided it could do without its own source of independent judgment.

Naturally, as civilizational-stake issues like artificial intelligence mount, a reconstituted OTA is not the only solution to Congress’s capacity problem. For decades, the institution has been shedding staff, as have its support agencies. Between 1975 and 2015, the combined staffs of the Congressional Research Service, the Government Accountability Office, and the Congressional Budget Office fell by 45 percent, with minor fluctuations since. Over the past two decades, despite being charged with making the country’s laws and overseeing the entire federal government, Congress has allocated roughly one-tenth of one percent of the federal budget to itself. The result of this self-inflicted hollowing-out has probably not been more capable policymaking. For those who want Congress to do something useful, starving the institution has been an unhelpful approach.

Bringing back OTA should be one component of a broader effort to seriously invest in congressional capacity—to dispense with the idea that somehow, an ascetic legislature is capable of doing the work expected of it. A revived OTA alone is not coming to the rescue, but it is one easy and obvious and urgent place to start.

Donald Trump has been holding rallies in red states, and in a pair of articles, The New York Times reported that his crowd sizes have been diminishing. This triggered an epic tirade from Trump: He raged that his rallies are “PACKED” and claimed they are “HOTTER” than ever. He even accused the media of dishonestly ignoring their “thunderous applause” from “thousands and thousands of people.” This comes as Republicans themselves admit that the rallies actually reveal the weakness of the Trump-GOP position, which is requiring Trump to desperately energize his most loyal supporters to salvage races in deep-red areas. As one Republican told CNN: “This is a five-alarm fire.” We talked to Salon’s Amanda Marcotte, who’s been writing well about Trump’s struggles with his unpopularity. We dig into the latest polling showing red-state Senate races trending Democratic, discuss whether GOP-leaning voters will really be able to support Democrats, and look at how MAGA may be getting deenergized by Trump’s failure to vanquish liberals in the culture wars. Listen to this episode here.

There are 29 days until the midterms, and Republicans’ chances of holding their congressional majorities have gone from bad to worse. Democrats’ lead on the generic ballot has continued to grow, now sitting at 8.9% according to analyst Nate Silver—a crushing blow to GOP operatives who expected polling to tighten in the home stretch. Meanwhile, The New York Times released a spate of…

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A cartoon by Tim Campbell. Related | Trump can’t make ‘super intelligence’ happen…

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Congratulations are in order for Kash Patel, Alexis Wilkins, and the entire taxpayer-funded SWAT team that he orders to follow her around. They’re engaged! “Went and got the law involved,” Wilkins, 27, posted on X Sunday. The two have been dating since January 2023, but their relationship didn’t really take off in the public eye until Patel was sworn in as FBI director at the start of…

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According to President Donald Trump, reporting on his small crowd sizes at campaign events ahead of this year’s midterm elections is a criminal act. Trump took The New York Times to task on Monday in a social media post complaining about the outlet noting empty seats at a recent Trump rally in Ohio. “The New York Times said, ‘There were empty seats’ when, in fact, there were none…

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The midterm elections are still 29 days away, but Republican Ken Paxton is preemptively blaming others if he loses Texas’ Senate race to Democrat James Talarico. Paxton lamented that the messaging in his race is being orchestrated by party operatives in the nation’s capital and that he has no control over what is being said in ads, according to audio obtained by Politico from a closed-door…

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Vice President JD Vance took time away from lying to America to lie to a reporter about the recent spate of President Donald Trump’s taxpayer-funded propaganda ads. “If you look historically—go back to the Obama administration with the Affordable Care Act, you have the people’s government using tax dollars to advertise about what the government is doing,” Vance said. “You have to be honest…

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President Donald Trump had a petty meltdown on social media Monday after news outlets reported on the light attendance at his weekend rally in Ohio.

Trump held a rally at a 4,500-person capacity high school gymnasium in Vandalia, Ohio, on Saturday. By the time he finished speaking, several areas of an upper deck had completely emptied out, The New York Times reported.

Multiple photographs of the event confirmed that there were empty seats in the upper sections, but in a series of lengthy posts on Truth Social Monday, Trump claimed the reporting was false and called for the news outlets stating otherwise to be arrested.

“The Ohio Arena was already full to the brim—And yet these people were still trying to get in,” Trump wrote in one post, including a 30-second clip of a large line of people waiting in the parking lot outside ahead of the rally. It’s not clear, however, that these people were not admitted.

The president claimed that there had been no empty seats (though photographs show that isn’t true), and that “thousands of people had to be turned away” from the event.

“The New York Times, and many other Artificial Media Outlets, should be arrested for their dishonesty and disservice to our Country,” Trump wrote. “When Bernie Sanders has 500 to 1,000 people, they make it sound like it’s the biggest event that ever took place. When PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP has 50,000 people, they make it sound like nobody showed up!”

In another post, Trump continued to insist that the so-called “arena” was “totally MAXED OUT.” (Again, it was a high school gymnasium.)

Trump then tried desperately to spin the empty seats, which he’d previously claimed did not exist. “What does happen at all of my SOLD OUT Rallies, is that the people in the upper sections tend to migrate down to the Main Floor—The ‘migration’ process always happens! The Times knows this, and so does everyone else. I never have empty seats—Never have, and never will!”

“In actuality, my Events for very good Republican Politicians are probably more crowded than ever. There are no empty seats, there haven’t been for years, and there never will be. The Rallies are ‘HOTTER’ than ever,” he wrote.

The Times wrote that Trump’s dismal turnout in Ohio was part of a wider trend of waning enthusiasm for the president’s speaking events, which have come to feel less like pep rallies and “more like a farewell tour.”

Trump even took aim at his favorite show, Fox & Friends, on Sunday for choosing not to cover the less-than-bursting event.

President Trump’s reaction to the death of a lab worker in Russia due to a suspected plague is not reassuring.

Speaking to reporters Monday, Trump was asked if he was concerned, and he tried to explain the U.S. government’s response, saying that he was concerned about what he called “the pneumonia plague.”

“Well, I hate to see them having it, it’s a rough, it’s a rough disease, you know that’s a disease that we used to be able to control, but somehow those microbes have gotten stronger and smarter, they’re like an army. And we don’t have the same medical,” Trump said. “Even with great advancement, the germs have really become relatively stronger than they were, and things that used to work on pneumonia don’t work as well anymore, so, uh, but we’ll help. Anybody that has that kind of a problem, we’re always willing to help, we’ll help.”

Trump’s word salad evokes memories of his disastrous response to the Covid-19 pandemic during his first term, as well as his bizarre explanations. It’s pretty clear that the president was briefed on the suspected outbreak in Russia, which has led to a quarantine in the Siberian region of Irkutsk, but didn’t understand what he was told.

Unexplained pneumonia cases in Wuhan, China is also how news of the Covid-19 outbreak spread. That led to a pandemic that left about 2.05 million people worldwide dead of confirmed Covid-19 cases, with the U.S. making up 400,000 of those deaths, close to 20 percent of the total.

Trump’s claim that the U.S. is “always willing to help” belies the fact that his administration has cut funding to Ebola response in Africa, which has exacerbated the spread of the infectious disease on the continent. Hopefully, this outbreak in Russia is contained early, because Trump can’t be trusted to handle another pandemic.

We all knew that, somehow, former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem would not go gently into the good night when President Donald Trump fired her. But boy, did she go buck wild on her way out the door. Literally in the last hours of her job, she gave the sweetest of sweetheart corruption deals to one of her donors—spending hundreds of millions of dollars on airplanes. Honestly…

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The Supreme Court appeared to be splintered over how to decide a major climate litigation case from Colorado at oral arguments on Monday. The eight justices who heard the case—the first of its new term—signaled no clear consensus on how they will resolve the case, though most of them were more skeptical of the fossil fuel companies that asked the court to intervene.

The case, Suncor Energy v. County Commissioners of Boulder, pits two fossil fuel companies against the town of Boulder, Colorado. The town sued Suncor and Exxon Mobil in state court in 2019 for damages over the harmful effects of climate change, arguing that their products contributed to a range of climate-related woes and that they knowingly lied about the harms they imposed on the community for decades. Boulder, like many Western communities, is wrestling with higher drought and wildfire risks, all of which it blames on oil and gas production.

The two companies have sought to squelch the litigation on multiple grounds. One is statutory: They argue that Congress preempted state and local governments from suing them for climate-related harms by enacting the Clean Air Act, which sets up a national regulatory scheme for air pollutants like carbon emissions. The other is constitutional. Boulder can’t sue them for alleged harms in one state caused by out-of-state oil and gas production on federalism grounds, the companies claimed.

Beyond the precise legal points, the companies have also leaned heavily on the near-existential consequences that they will face from litigation. “If Boulder’s claims are allowed to go forward, some 90,000 municipalities across the country will have the ability to make national and international energy policy by asking juries to impose catastrophic damages on selected fossil fuel producers,” Kannon Shanmugam, who argued for the companies, told the justices in his opening remarks.

At least one justice appeared to strongly sympathize with the companies’ stance. Justice Brett Kavanaugh told Shanmugam that he thought a raft of previous Supreme Court rulings “make crystal-clear that interstate air and water pollution are matters for federal law unless Congress specifically preserves state law.” That position would strongly favor the companies since Congress did not explicitly carve out this type of litigation for the states to pursue in state courts.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett also appeared to lean toward the companies’ position on preemption. Her apparent position was slightly more balanced than Kavanaugh’s, suggesting that Congress had not displaced the states altogether with the Clean Air Act. Barrett suggested, by way of a hypothetical, that “here was some room for some state law nuisance claims for pollution, but it was just much more circumscribed,” perhaps excluding the broad case that Boulder is pursuing here.

She also appeared sympathetic toward Suncor’s arguments on federalism and extraterritoriality issues with the Colorado lawsuit. “Everybody agrees that state tort law is a form of regulation,” she told Kevin Russell, who argued on behalf of the town. “But what if Colorado passed a law purporting to cap emissions in the other 49 states? Is there any principle that would prevent that?”

Russell argued that they were fundamentally different methods of approaching the same actions. A lawsuit like this one, he argued, “doesn’t prohibit them from engaging in the conduct. It requires them to internalize a portion of the cost of their activities by paying for some of the damage that those activities inflict.” Russell added that the companies “ultimately don’t disagree with that, they just say this case is social because it involves water and air.”

Boulder argued that their lawsuit, which is based on traditional nuisance claims, was hardly novel or ground-breaking. They rejected the companies’ allegations that the town was trying to enforce Colorado law in other states against their will, or that Congress had preempted such lawsuits altogether. “It has never been thought that only federal law can provide a remedy, simply because the tortious conduct and the injury occurred in different states, because the harm was widespread, the damages were large, or the defendants were part of an important industry,” Russell told the court in his own opening statements.

Other members of the court’s conservative majority appeared to lean toward that stance, as well. Chief Justice John Roberts sounded skeptical about the federalism argument in particular, quizzing Shanmugam on a hypothetical in which someone from one state throws a rock at someone in another state. “[The rock] wasn’t directed at State A,” he asked. “But, if you’re in B and you’re aiming at C, but you hit somebody in A, that doesn’t make a difference, does it?”

Shanmugam agreed in principle, but countered that it was too difficult to establish who threw the rock at all, so to speak, in this case. The companies have argued at every stage of litigation that Boulder can’t prove that their particular emissions caused the harms for which the city is suing. Shanmugam said that there was no support in precedent for creating such an exception to what he described as the “venerable prohibition against extraterritorial regulation.”

The chief justice also had pointed questions for Russell and Boulder. “Presumably if you prevail, the next day, a municipality in every single state will file a lawsuit [and] they’ll probably copy your pleadings,” Roberts asked him. “How would you think that will work out on the ground?” But this may have been a less hostile question than it sounds: It gave Russell the opportunity to point out past examples of major multistate litigation, such as asbestos litigation in the 1990s.

Justice Elena Kagan made a similar comparison in her own questions. “In multiple respects, this suit appears to be based on the old 1990s tobacco suits that were brought by states and local governments,” she told Shanmugam, where they alleged that tobacco companies had misled the public about the harm of their product. “I suppose the opioid litigation more recently follows the same model,” she added. “This is chapter 3.”

The court’s liberal justices, for their part, appeared skeptical of resolving anything at this stage—either by punting on procedural grounds or by remanding it to the Colorado Supreme Court for further clarification on certain aspects of the case. Justice Neil Gorsuch also did not seem to embrace the companies’ preemption argument. At one point, he implicitly compared the case to one where a car manufacturer’s negligence in one state caused harms in another state. “Is there anything anomalous, in your mind, to applying state law here to worldwide conduct?” he asked Russell, who replied no.

Finally, Justice Clarence Thomas’s questions were more Delphic than usual and largely focused on questions of jurisdiction. That aspect of the case could still be decisive to the outcome. One of the questions presented to the court is whether it has jurisdiction to decide the case at all. Suncor asked the justices to intervene after the Colorado Supreme Court rejected its motion to dismiss the case. Since the companies may yet prevail at trial or another later stage of the litigation, Boulder argued that it would be inappropriate and unlawful for the Supreme Court to intervene now.

The jurisdictional question could allow the justices to punt on this case without reaching the ultimate merits about preemption, federalism, or climate change harms. Another complicating factor is the last-minute recusal of Justice Samuel Alito, who announced last month that he would not be participating in the case. The court does not generally shirk cases because of recusals from one justice. At the same time, Alito’s absence could further complicate efforts to form a five-justice majority by making a 4–4 deadlock more likely.

Even a 4–4 split is hard to predict, however, because the justices appeared to be pulled in multiple directions on the case, and no clear consensus emerged from oral arguments. Sending it back to Colorado state courts might be the likeliest outcome by default. After all, if the court is unable to reach a decision in this particular climate litigation case, it will have no shortage of future ones to revisit the matter.

Big Tech is back on the big screen—but its bosses might not be thrilled.

This fall, Hollywood will release four movies on tech executives: Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial, on CEO Sam Altman’s tumultuous time as the head of OpenAI; Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning, on the investigation into Facebook and CEO Mark Zuckerberg dismissing its platforms’ negative impacts on young users and inciting violence and hate speech; the all-encompassing Musk, by documentarian Alex Gibney, on the Tesla and SpaceX CEO’s family life, corporate controversies, and engagement in right-wing politics; and You Can See Everything, an unsettling documentary in which directors Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim follow Elizabeth Holmes, who invited them to film her in the weeks before she began serving her federal prison sentence for defrauding investors at the now-defunct health tech company Theranos.

If the 2010s brought the first major wave of examining Silicon Valley leaders, such as relatively human depictions of Zuckerberg with The Social Network and multiple movies on longtime Apple CEO Steve Jobs—they largely paint pictures of difficult, ambitious individuals who may have burned a few bridges to achieve the remarkable—this recent group represents an opportunity, as I wrote in September, to rethink that perspective. 

Since the 2010s, public opinion about Big Tech companies has tanked. My colleagues and I have extensively covered the increasingly apparent harms that tech CEOs have overseen, including using AI in wars overseas and the continuing development of a mass surveillance state at home. 

In a July poll reported by Axios, about seven in ten Americans said they believe tech companies and their CEOs hold too much power. 

On Politico’s Decoded podcast this week, Altman asserted that “the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this [AI] technology” as people will do “tremendously—orders of magnitude more—good stuff than bad stuff” with it.

Early reports around Artificial, directed by Challengers’ Luca Guadagnino, starring Andrew Garfield as Altman, and covering his firing and reinstatement as OpenAI CEO in under a week in 2023, suggest that the film will have a more critical view on the executive—the Altman of Artificial says “yes” to everyone, Vulture wrote in a piece interviewing Guadagnino on Friday.

“The narcissist has the ability to understand the terrain and adapt to it, shape-shift,” Guadagnino told Vulture—which he sees as having larger ramifications: “People that have a lot of power should be very much aware that you must be responsible for the community.”

“I think anyone who takes on that level of responsibility for a company or a technology that you know is going to do a hell of a lot of damage to the soul of humanity [must have] a certain ability to dissociate,” Garfield told Esquire in August.

Amazon MGM Studios dropped the movie in June, shortly after Amazon announced a $50 billion investment into OpenAI. Big Tech and the wealthy elite are now more closely tied to culture, art, and media. In a Vanity Fair cover story released Monday, Altman said that he did not speak to anyone at Amazon about Artificial and that, based on the movie trailer, he didn’t feel the filmmakers were “going for accuracy.” 

“Countries will fall. Industries are gonna collapse,” Garfield says in that trailer. “And we get to be the ones to shepherd people into this new world.”

Artificial, which independent film company Neon acquired later that month, premieres Monday at the New York Film Festival.

The Democratic party will refuse to approve any of President Trump’s Supreme Court nominations in the event they take back control of the Senate, drawing perhaps the strongest line in the sand against the White House to date. 

“The bottom line is: One of the reasons we want to do everything we can to take back the Senate is not let Trump put such horrible justices—MAGA justices—on the Supreme Court and the lower courts,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told NBC News in a Monday report. 

The rest of the ranks echoed the sentiment. 

“No, we’ve got to do exactly what McConnell did to us,” said Senator Ruben Gallego, referring to Mitch McConnell’s 10-month obstruction of President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland, a spite-fueled move that resulted in Justice Neil Gorsuch’s appointment to the court instead. “I don’t think you know you want to go down that road... But clearly you know McConnell and Trump used... their power, whatever you want to call it, to change the makeup of the courts. And I think we have to start moving it back.”

“Well, given the history of Trump nominees, I think it is slim to none that we would support a nominee from this administration,” Senator and Senior Judiciary Committee member Richard Blumenthal said. “Because we’ve seen this movie, we know how it ends, which is a politician in robes who is following Trump’s orders on most major questions.”

This report comes just a day after conservative Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito told CBS News he was considering retirement, saying it was “something I think that somebody at my age has to think about every term.” Alito is 76 years old, and fellow conservative Justice Clarence  Thomas is 78, leading both sides of the aisle to start thinking about their replacements. 

“A major reason why I’m running to serve South Carolina and why it’s so important to keep the Senate conservative this November. Should Justice Alito choose to retire next year, a Republican-majority Senate will be needed to vote and hopefully confirm a Supreme Court nominee from President Trump,” Senator Darline Graham wrote on X last Friday. “If Democrats control the Senate, they will not even allow a vote. And if they allow a vote, they will defeat a Trump-nominated candidate regardless of their qualifications.”