Political News

It’s football time in Tennessee, and while the Volunteer State might be washed in orange for its college athletes, its congressional map is burning red. Earlier this year, state Republicans passed a gerrymander that seeks oust all Democrats from its nine-seat House delegation. As for University of Tennessee alumnus Charlie “Chaz” Molder, the Democratic nominee in Tennessee’s 5th District…

Source

The midterms are officially one month out, and Republicans are desperate to try anything to save themselves from the impending blue wave. But even as President Donald Trump recruits the Supreme Court in his voter fraud sham and tries to disrupt mail-in voting, the midterms are closing in—and they’re not looking good for the GOP. To celebrate the final stretch of voter mobilization…

Source

The Conversation is a weekly dive into the most popular stories on Daily Kos and what it tells us about the national political environment. The GOP is not just a clown show. It’s a fascist cult that pursues cruel and inhumane policies, lacking even a hint of empathy, intellectual curiosity, and charity toward their fellow Americans. It’s what happens when a political movement is…

Source

By Ali Swenson and Linley Sanders for The Associated Press and Sarah Jane Tribble for KFF Health News About half of rural voters identify with Make America Healthy Again, a sprawling political movement championed by the Trump administration, but most said President Donald Trump’s healthcare policies have not benefited their communities, according to a new poll from The Associated Press…

Source

A cartoon by Clay Bennett. Related | Hegseth focuses on T levels and haircuts while he fails in Iran…

Source

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

During the Sand Creek Fire, which has burned since the start of August in southwestern Montana, difficult terrain and fire-weakened trees posed hazards to crews searching for areas still smoldering on steep slopes after the blaze passed. So instead of relying only on firefighters to find hidden embers, fire managers used unmanned aircraft to seek out heat sources. 

The operation is part of a broader technological shift underway in wildfire response. The US Forest Service is evaluating firefighting robots on the ground, and researchers are exploring how artificial intelligence could help predict where wildfires will ignite and how quickly fires will spread. Federal agencies already use drones to map fires, detect hotspots and ignite prescribed burns, and are testing their capability to drop firefighting foam and water on blazes. 

“Drones are now a critical tool in federal wildfire response, providing real-time infrared imagery to map fire perimeters, detect hotspots, and monitor dangerous or inaccessible terrain, which helps firefighters make safer, faster tactical decisions,” said Meredith Hollowell, a Forest Service press officer, in a statement to Inside Climate News.

The Federal Aviation Administration said drones provide real-time situational awareness by detecting hotspots, mapping fire perimeters and aiding firefighter efforts in dangerous  environments.  

But drones are no longer being used just to watch fires from above.

During aerial ignition operations in which fire managers intentionally burn vegetation to expand control lines or remove fuels before the main fire reaches them, unmanned aircraft can reduce the exposure of pilots or firefighters to some high-risk conditions, Hollowell said. 

The technology has become established enough that federal agencies now have specific positions for UAS pilots, managers, module leaders and data specialists, as well as procedures for ordering drone resources for wildfire incidents.

The Forest Service is also testing autonomous ground vehicles that could carry equipment and supplies into areas where conventional vehicles or manual transport may be difficult or unsafe. In June, the agency and its partners tested robotic vehicles on rough terrain in Georgia that was designed to replicate conditions encountered during wildfire operations.

The vehicles were expected to carry payloads of up to 800 pounds, including firehose packs, heavy hand tools, water containers, and medical supplies. Evaluators tested their ability to navigate rocky roads, uneven ground, and slopes while carrying operational loads.

While the technology is not yet ready for routine wildfire operations, Charlie Gray, a Forest Service district fire management officer, said it shows promise for reducing firefighters’ exposure to risk while getting equipment and supplies to the fireline.

Hollowell said the Forest Service expects advances in AI-enabled unmanned aerial systems, combined with improved fire-behavior models and data from satellites, cameras and weather models to revolutionize wildfire detection and tracking, suppression efficiency and firefighter safety. 

Researchers are already examining the potential advantages of combining drones with artificial intelligence. 

Phinehas Lampman, a researcher at the University of Idaho, developed a system using thermal-infrared images collected by drones and machine-learning models to analyze fire behavior and predict a fire’s rate of spread. Lampman spent seven years working on engine and hotshot crews for the Clearwater-Potlatch Timber Protective Association and the Forest Service before turning to research, according to his University of Idaho bio. 

Lampman’s  study, published in May in the International Journal of Wildland Fire, focused on three measures of fire behavior: rate of spread, fireline intensity, and radiative power. Researchers repeatedly flew a drone equipped with a thermal-infrared sensor over a prescribed grassland fire and used the imagery to generate high-resolution measurements of those characteristics. 

Lampman and his colleagues used the drone-collected data to train machine learning models to predict how quickly the fire would spread. The models performed well in making short-term predictions during the experiment, the researchers reported. Drones that can collect observations directly from a fire for machine-learning systems to analyze for their predictions of what the blaze may do next could be a valuable addition to incident commanders’ toolbox. 

Fire managers currently make decisions using multiple sources of information, including weather reports, maps, observations from firefighters and aerial information from airplanes and helicopters. 

“Most incident commanders in the field rely on their vast experience to assess and ultimately predict wildfire movement,” Lampman said in an August article published by the University of Idaho. 

But while conventional aircraft can provide critical information, they cannot operate in all conditions. 

“Sometimes those aerial assets are grounded, or the visibility is really poor,” Lampman said. “But drones can usually still fly and gather information.” 

That could make drones useful not only as another set of eyes over a fire, but also as a data source  for models designed to estimate fire behavior. 

Lampman’s research remains a proof of concept, and no AI system yet exists that fire managers can rely on to accurately predict a wildfire’s movement. But federal fire officials are already looking toward a future in which drones, artificial intelligence, and other technologies could work together to give firefighters more information while reducing their exposure to dangerous situations. 

“Looking ahead, advances in AI-enabled UAV systems, improved fire-behavior modeling, and expanded use of decision-support tools, along with satellite, camera, and weather-model integration, are expected to enhance early detection, tracking, suppression efficiency, and firefighter safety,” said Hollowell, at the US Forest Service. 

Researchers are also exploring how drone-collected data could improve models of wildfire smoke and its potential effects on people downwind.

“UAS provide critical access to researchers who are expanding our understanding of the relationships between fire behavior and smoke emissions in real time,” Leda Kobziar, a professor of wildland fire science at the University of Idaho and a co-author of the study, said in an email to Inside Climate News. “These relationships are key to building and improving models (including AI models) that can help us predict what types of smoke-borne microbes and concentrations of smoke we would expect people downwind to be exposed to.”

Daniel Ellsberg’s ninth and final book, Truth and Consequence, was published this spring, three years after his passing, and this is a fitting moment—a time of political upheaval much like the one in which Ellsberg first made his mark—to commemorate this remarkable and neglected American hero. 

The book is a collection of reflections and reminiscences lovingly assembled by Daniel’s son Michael Ellsberg and longtime aide Jan R. Thomas. Much of it pivots off his signature role in the 1971 leak of what became known as the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret history of the US war in Vietnam that he had helped write as a RAND Corp. analyst. 

The Pentagon Papers were a searing 20-year record of governmental incompetence and duplicity, and thanks to the ensuing Supreme Court battle between The New York Times and the Nixon Administration, their publication is remembered as a dazzling triumph of an independent press. But as the new book shows, Ellsberg was always much more than a Vietnam-era renegade. He also used his stature as an analyst and activist—he estimated he was arrested some 90 times—to call attention to the plight of the whistleblower and the looming menace of nuclear war, both immensely worthy causes that we have largely consigned to the outback of our national conscience. 

I got to know Ellsberg in the Teens, toward the end of his life, when I became dean of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. I was surprised to discover that, although he lived not two miles from campus, this key figure in a defining moment of US journalism history had no relation to our program or anyone else’s, near as I could tell. I still don’t know why that was, but he accepted my invitation to join the school’s advisory board and, even better, stepped up in successive years as a keynote speaker at our orientations for incoming master’s students. 

At a time of unrelenting attacks on media independence by the federal government, the Pentagon Papers affair is a powerful reminder of what the press uniquely can do.

There, he shone. He was already well into his 80s, slender and straight-backed, and wearing a dark suit and tie—a rarity on the Berkeley campus. He spoke softly, without notes, recalling with precision events and names our students had no prayer of recognizing: Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, the Tet Offensive. Yet our students were riveted. Instead of heading for the exits when Ellsberg was done, they stayed behind to ask questions, and listened as he remembered. 

He steered well away from claims that his Pentagon Papers leak hastened the end of the war, although that was a refrain in some of the obituaries that followed his death in 2023. Ellsberg never believed any such thing. The papers reflected a historical record that ended nearly three years before they were leaked. They didn’t cover the subsequent and no less disgraceful management, by President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, of a war that wouldn’t end for nearly four more years. The students were drawn, I believe, not by proximity to somebody who’d made journalism history, but to what they perceived as a man of humility and moral courage.

Ellsberg’s explanations for his actions were always somber and self-effacing. He’d decided to leak the Pentagon’s mortifying secrets to follow the example of Bay Area antiwar activist Randy Kehler, who’d told Ellsberg he was going to prison rather than cooperate with the draft. That Ellsberg’s unprecedented disclosures prompted clandestine measures by the White House—which included creating the infamous “Plumbers Unit” that spawned the failed Watergate break-in and fatally undermined the Nixon Presidency—was a consequence he neither sought nor anticipated, and he never accepted credit for bringing Nixon down.

As he told Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! in 2019, “My message to [young people] is: Don’t do what I did. Don’t wait until the bombs are actually falling or thousands more have died before you do what I wish I’d done years earlier, in ’64, or even ’61 on the nuclear issue, and that is reveal…the dangerous truths that are being withheld by the government at whatever cost to yourself, whatever risk that may take. Consider doing that because a world’s worth of lives may be at stake.”

Ellsberg and his friend and Pentagon Papers codefendant, Anthony Russo, take questions outside the federal building in Los Angeles, January 1973.Anonymous/AP

The self-portrait that emerges from the essays and reflections in Truth and Consequence is of a man both brilliant and haunted. His parents, ethnically Eastern European Jews, became what he described as “fanatical Christian Scientists”—Ellsberg never saw a doctor until he went to boarding school at the age of 12. He was a gifted musician, and his mother steered him with an obsessively heavy hand toward a life she imagined for him as a concert pianist. From an early age she kept him home from school so he could devote his afternoons to practice, four to six hours a day, eight hours on Saturdays. 

That was his routine for a decade until, at age 15, he performed Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto with musicians hired for the occasion from the Detroit Symphony. His mother then moved him to a more demanding and knowledgeable music teacher who, after an introductory lesson and what seemed to be a careful inventory of his background, musical knowledge and performing skills, declared that Ellsberg had great talent but no future as a professional pianist.

It was a heartbreaking verdict for his mother but an emancipatory moment for him. He carried on playing for the new teacher, but his mother was devastated. Two months later, she and Ellsberg’s young sister were killed in a car crash, and his father, who was driving, was seriously hurt. After that, apart from a music theory class in college, Ellsberg didn’t touch the piano again for 25 years. 

In The New York Times’ retelling of the story, Ellsberg is denied agency: It was “How Neil Sheehan Got the Pentagon Papers.”

He returns often to the legacy of his abandoned musical path, not with regret at having disappointed his mother but in wonderment at her coercive powers, which trapped him in a decade of servitude to her dream. He was shamed by his compliance, a prelude to the eager obedience he would observe later in his career among people of dazzling intellectual capacity who nonetheless enthusiastically carried out policies they recognized were murderous, futile, and morally indefensible.

Ellsberg graduated from Detroit’s prestigious Cranbrook School and majored in economics at Harvard before joining the Marines, where he served for three years, was commissioned a lieutenant, and rose to command a rifle company. After a year in England at Cambridge University, he returned to Harvard and finished his PhD in economics, distinguishing himself in the arcane field of game theory with a breakthrough concept now known as the Ellsberg Paradox, which describes the inclination of people to avoid choices whose odds of success are ambiguous. 

I had never heard of the paradox until Ellsberg mentioned it in passing one day, noting that it was considered enough of a conceptual innovation to be the subject of scholarly conferences. Still, his work and notable Harvard national security connections brought him to the attention of the influential think tank known as the RAND Corp., where he started as a summer consultant in 1958, soon after the Soviet sputnik launches triggered a panic over the intensifying nuclear rivalry and the incoherence of the strategic doctrine of deterrence. 

Ellsberg divided his intellectual efforts for RAND, the Pentagon, and the State Department over much of the next decade between nuclear strategy and the deepening disaster in Vietnam. (Much of the latter is recounted in his riveting 2002 book, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.)

At a time when the news media’s independence and civic value are under unrelenting assault by the federal government, the Pentagon Papers affair is a powerful reminder of what the press uniquely can do. It was an instance of unquestionable public illumination that exposed the lethal deceptions of a generation of top leaders, exposure that no institution of civil society other than the press could ever have delivered. True, the news media claim an undeservedly heroic role in engineering the disclosures that were actually driven by Ellsberg and his helpmates, but in the final analysis the media did come through—in all, 19 newspapers published material Ellsberg originated, even while a criminal prosecution seemed inescapable. 

It’s chilling to wonder now—when most of those newspapers have withered or died in the drought of the digital age, whistleblowers serve years behind bars (Ellsberg spent not a single night in jail), and the Trump administration has unleashed regulatory and commercial pressure on news media for ideological sins far less egregious than frontal defiance over an ongoing war—whether the Pentagon Papers would have ever seen the light of day. 

John Kerry, then head of Vietnam Veterans against the War, exchanges a handshake with Ellsberg.Ken Feil/The Washington Post/Getty

Even if today’s New York Times still found the courage to publish, the likelihood of finding another 18 news organizations to join in is far from certain. And with Trump and his minions suing CBS and its compliant parent company over the editing of a political rival’s TV interview, routinely threatening to revoke broadcast licenses over comments that displease him, demanding the dismissal of on-air talent he deems insufficiently supportive, ousting news outlets he doesn’t like from the Pentagon and White House, and using investigative resources to undermine the business fundamentals of media owners, the range of reprisals that would undoubtedly be used to punish resistance on a Pentagon Papers scale is almost unimaginable.

Getting the story out wasn’t easy even back then, and the treatment Ellsberg endured from his supposed allies was far from gentle. In a 2015 interview, Neil Sheehan, lead writer on The New York Times’ Pentagon Papers coverage, described how the papers came to be published, a story Sheehan embargoed until after he died. It was impossible to discern from his remembrance how hard Ellsberg had worked over the previous two years to find a way to make the papers public, first laboriously photocopying the thousands of pages and then appealing repeatedly to a roster of antiwar senators in hopes of getting the material entered into the Congressional Record. Finally, in frustration, he approached Sheehan, a Times stalwart whom he knew in Vietnam, and to whom he had leaked stories previously.

But in The Times’ retelling, Ellsberg is denied agency: It was “How Neil Sheehan Got the Pentagon Papers,” which were framed as a “blockbuster scoop” and “arguably the greatest journalistic catch of a generation.” 

In fact, Ellsberg had invited Sheehan to review and take notes from his copy of the papers but refused to give him a copy until he had assurances that The Times intended to use them fully. Sheehan ignored those conditions and surreptitiously made his own photocopies with the help of his wife, New Yorker writer Susan Sheehan. Times staffers worked on those copies for weeks, and Sheehan lied repeatedly about the paper’s plans, leaving Ellsberg and his wife, Patricia, to scramble on the eve of publication to hide boxes of incriminating documents. 

The Supreme Court’s June 1971 ruling in New York Time v. United States blocked the Nixon administration’s attempt to halt publication of the papers but did nothing to prevent Ellsberg and his co-defendant, Anthony Russo, from being tried for violating secrecy laws—a prosecution that was thrown out only after the court learned of the White House Plumbers’ burglary of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office. During the two-year prosecution process Ellsberg and Russo got no financial support from the media they had helped. 

Ellsberg in 1990 at an anti-War Demonstration on the Boston Common.Kenneth Martin/ZUMA

Ellsberg was always puzzled by the ambivalence, even hostility, that news outlets characteristically show toward their gutsiest and most determined sources. One of his admirers, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who had turned over extremely newsworthy material to The Times and other news organizations in 2010, was thanked with an especially venomous New York Times Magazine cover story, authored by the paper’s own executive editor, Bill Keller, describing Assange, among other things, as petulant, ill-tempered, and foul-smelling. I once asked Ellsberg why the media often treats whistleblowers so harshly.

“They don’t trust us,” he said. 

Still, others have followed Ellsberg’s example in exposing unwarranted secrecy, and many suffered consequences incomparably worse than he did. Assange was pursued by US law enforcement and intelligence agencies for 14 years, enduring various forms of confinement before his case was essentially discarded and he was repatriated to Australia; his source, Chelsea Manning, served seven years in prison, including a year in solitary, before her 35-year sentence was commuted, and later served yet another year for refusing to testify against Assange. Yet it is almost invariably the Pentagon Papers and Daniel Ellsberg that these and other whistleblowers point to when they explain and justify what motivated them. A global consciousness about high-level deception and the duty of citizens to expose it claims Ellsberg as its historical and moral forebear. 

Regarding nuclear weapons, “we’re in a more dangerous situation than any time in my lifetime,” Ellsberg told The Times two months before his death.

When it comes to whistleblowing, Ellsberg’s legacy flourishes. But the second focus of his career-long engagement remains orphaned. It wasn’t Vietnam, he wants us to understand, that accounted for his most consuming fears.

In his 2017 book, The Doomsday Machine, Ellsberg says that between fall 1969 and August 1970 he had photocopied the entire top-secret contents of his safe at RAND, perhaps 15,000 pages, of which the Pentagon Papers constituted only 7,000. Most of the documents he was risking his career to expose consisted of notes and documents involving what he believed was the greatest threat to humanity, nuclear weapons, the prospects for their use, and, most harrowing, the government’s ramshackle and entirely inadequate measures to prevent their unintended use. 

Some of that purloined material aligned with things he’d witnessed as a RAND employee during the early 1960s, inspecting nuclear weapons at US Air Force forward operating bases in the Northern Pacific. That firsthand reporting, his basis for The Doomsday Machine, was decades old by the time the book was published, but the details were enthralling and pertinent, and the likelihood that nuclear war could be unleashed at a preposterously low level of command authority remained terrifyingly plausible. The estimates Ellsberg coaxed from the heads of US military officers as a 30-year-old analyst during the Kennedy administration pegged the expected death toll from America’s Single Integrated Operational Plan for General Nuclear War at more than 600 million people in the Soviet Union, China, and Europe. That excluded the incalculable harm to the United States, and the global nuclear winter that might well follow. 

The fundamental strategic conundrum Ellsberg addressed was unchanged in 2017 and is sullenly unchanged now: Nuclear weapons are unimaginably lethal and inherently, irremediably unsafe. The logic of deterrence requires a certainty that anyone who uses them in a military confrontation will themselves be destroyed. But deterrence could be assured only if America’s weapons are sure to be launched while the capability to use them remains—that is, when an enemy attack is believed, not proven, imminent.

The possibility of a catastrophic error is inescapable. It was narrowly averted during the 1962 Cuban missile, Ellsberg noted in Doomsday Machine, only thanks to a single, hesitant Soviet submarine skipper who did not launch a nuclear-tipped torpedo he had been authorized to use. The hair-trigger possibility of preemptive first use is inextricable from the guaranteed destruction that deterrence rests upon.

Like Marlon Brando’s rogue colonel in Apocalypse Now, Ellsberg “was being groomed for one of the top spots in the corporation.”

When Ellsberg copied those 15,000 pages of top-secret RAND documents in late 1969 and early 1970, his initial priority was to publicize those pertaining to the nuclear program. Antiwar activist Kehler, whose draft resistance had inspired Ellsberg, told him he believed there were few new revelations in the Vietnam War materials, whereas the documents regarding the nation’s shocking lack of nuclear safeguards were new and harrowing. Still, Ellsberg calculated that the Pentagon Papers would have the most immediate impact—“It’s where the bombs are falling right now,” he recalls saying.

So, he entrusted the notes and documents on strategic weapons controls to his brother, with the expectation that he would make them public after the Pentagon Papers leak ran its course. Ultimately, through a series of mishaps, the RAND nuclear weapons files were lost or destroyed. It was only after what Ellsberg deemed largely equivalent material was declassified that he finally was able to write the book.  

Ellsberg, who authored a memo outlining the alleged US introduction of nuclear weapons into Japan in the 1960s, at the start of a June 1981 news conference in Tokyo. Ellsberg was invited by the General Council of Trade Unions (Sohyo), a key Japanese anti-nuclear group. Katsumi Kasahara/AP

Nuclear weapons are once again the ghost at the banquet. They are mentioned repeatedly  in connection with Ukraine, when the possibility was raised that Russia would move so-called tactical weapons to Belarus as a warning to NATO, and with Taiwan, around the decades-old question of whether the United States would stand by its willingness to use nukes to deter a Chinese invasion. Also the Middle East, where, for the second time this century, the US has gone to war using fears of weapons of mass destruction—most recently Iran’s nuclear program—as a rationale. And the United States has embarked on an unparalleled $1.7 trillion reconstruction of its aging nuclear arsenal, a vast project undertaken before a mostly slumbering media and a wholly ignorant public, with no national debate of any kind.

“We’re in a more dangerous situation than any time in my lifetime,” Ellsberg told The New York Times two months before he died. The doomsday clock maintained by Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists—the group created by Alfred Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, and the founding wizards of the atomic age—that indicates the likelihood of nuclear war now stands at 85 seconds to midnight (detonation), the closest it has been since the clock debuted in 1947.

In short, Ellsberg’s inability to rein in humanity’s gravest threat became an abiding source of disappointment. But the darkness at the heart of his conclusions in Truth and Consequence has less to do with policy than with people—with the endless corruptibility of the elite class of disciplined, loyal, and committed professionals he trained alongside, collaborated with, and then, for much of his life, fought against. 

It’s important to remember that Ellsberg was, early in his professional life, close to the pinnacle of national power, a man with the ear of the country’s top officials. Like Kurtz, the Special Forces colonel who went rogue in Apocalypse Now, “he was being groomed for one of the top spots in the corporation.” But then he watched his peers stumble and fall. He witnessed their failure to meet the moral challenges before them, to wrongly trust their own consciences as sources of principled authority as opposed to their corrupted reflections of the dubious missions they were rewarded to pursue—their failure to put their souls ahead of their careers.

“Do not give decent, well-intentioned humans at the apex of large, hierarchical organizations instruments of mass destruction that may be wielded as solutions to narrow, parochial, egotistical, short-run problems, which challenge their perceived success or position of control,” Ellsberg pleads in the conclusion of his final published work. “These men are all too likely to discover, in such circumstances of duress, that the long-run strategic interests of their nation and humanity demand and compel their use of all instruments at their command.” 

This week, one of the most talked-about stories has been President Donald Trump’s decision to spend taxpayer money on campaign ads that the administration is misleadingly characterizing as “public service announcements.” The move is vintage Trump in that the ads are both staggeringly corrupt—the administration is spending $20 million of the Department of Homeland Security’s money on them, in violation of the Hatch Act—and propagandizing slop. One ad, which uses a song without the artist’s permission, has Trump asking people, “Love me.” Another warns of a “final battle.” So far, the administration has only spent a fraction of the money that’s been allocated to this endeavor, so you can count on seeing many more iterations of these fake PSAs, which Trump is said to be guiding.

But rather than think of this as some kind of flex, or one more scandalous abuse of the public trust, I want to suggest that what these ads represent is desperation—an acknowledgment that if Trump’s goose isn’t cooked yet, the pot is at least boiling. I also think, if anything, this fusillade of propaganda will likely backfire.

These ads haven’t generated good news for Trump; very few people outside of the administration and its obvious sycophants have tried to defend them. Moreover, the media seems resistant to give this story the “both sides” treatment. As with Trump’s 25-minute prime-time ramble last July, the political press seems wise to what’s going on. Of that aforementioned speech, TNR editor Michael Tomasky said, the overall reaction to the president’s attempt to shine us on “tells us that that power he had over people and institutions a year or 15 months ago has evanesced.” I think these PSAs do little else than advertise that fact.

I am not sure that Republican lawmakers necessarily agree with that assessment, but their own appraisals range from avoidant to withering. As MS NOW reported this week, “even congressional Republicans are expressing concern that the ads may violate the laws governing PSAs.” Senate Majority Leader John Thune is quoted in the piece as saying that he didn’t mind the message of the ad but believed “it shouldn’t be paid for with taxpayer dollars.” That’s about the nicest thing any Republican who made their way into the story had to say about it, with Senator Mike Rounds saying, “It’s not something I would have done” and the outgoing Thom Tillis comparing it to Viktor Orbán. “I hate it,” said Tillis, bluntly.

Trump’s midterm activities aren’t limited to these controversial ads. According to reports, the president is planning to spend 32 of the next 35 days on the road campaigning for Republicans. As Politico notes, many of his intended destinations suggest the GOP is in tremendous peril. Instead of swing states and traditionally competitive districts, Trump is visiting “bastions of conservatism” like Alabama, Oklahoma, Ohio, and Texas. He’s even going to trek out to Alaska, “a significant commitment of time and presidential resources that underscores how dire the situation is for Republicans.” As one GOP donor told Politico, “The problem is that the fires are everywhere right now.”

The biggest question is whether Trump’s growing effort to further inject himself into the midterm cycle is going to help or hinder the electoral hopes of Republican lawmakers. In at least one contentious race, the Republican candidate is calling Trump an albatross. According to leaked audio obtained by The New York Times, Texas Senate candidate Ken Paxton told a room full of donors that Trump’s weird midterm convention in early September—which was held in Texas, in the hopes it would boost Paxton—had the opposite effect. “So to be honest with you, the numbers—when we did that convention—it dropped our numbers. Everybody’s numbers dropped. Right now, yeah, not good.” (As Lawfare editor Eric Columbus pointed out, it’s also not good “when your 12-person private fundraiser includes someone who hates you enough to leak damaging audio.”)

The Paxton audio is a potent snapshot of some larger trends. All across the country, we’re seeing stories of GOP strongholds edging toward collapse as onetime Trump voters bear the weight of his administration’s incompetence. There are daily reminders that other Republicans are trying to create distance between the president and their campaigns, and even defying him on key matters. On Wednesday, in fact, West Virginia Senator Jim Justice broke with Trump on the matter dearest to the president’s heart—his mass deportation machine. “Maybe we’re doing something wrong here or there,” he said. You think?

Over the course of the year, as Trump’s approvals hit new lows and began to decimate the GOP’s midterm ambitions, I’ve tried to figure out what Trump and his fellow Republicans could do to reverse or even just arrest those trends. For a brief mad moment, I thought that the negotiated Memorandum of Understanding between the U.S. and Iran might provide a springboard Trump could use to extricate himself from his crazy war. This didn’t come to fruition. The truth is, to save their bacon, Republicans would have to do things they are genetically incapable of doing: improve people’s lives and fix the economy. As I pointed out two weeks ago, Republicans—despite their misgivings about Trump—are still touting their One Big Beautiful Bill Act: a document that says the wealthiest among us deserve thousands of extra dollars, and the rest of us deserve some measure of pain.

It’s all adding up to defeat. The Cook Political Report says a Democratic takeover of the House is a “done deal” and that winning the Senate is “very realistic.” The Quinnipiac generic poll of the House has Democrats opening up a 51 percent to 39 percent lead, which are bloodbath numbers. The only headwind Democrats face is that while voters seem willing to give them their vote this year, they’re not as ready to give them their affection. Still, you’d rather be the Democrats right now than the GOP, who like Vice President JD Vance have been left begging voters for a “second chance” without understanding that they’ve already received that second chance—and they’ve blown it.

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

When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took the stage at the United Nations last month, diplomats streamed for the exits. Three years after October 7, when much of the Western world rallied behind Israel in the wake of Hamas’ attack, the political ground has shifted.

jQuery(document).ready(function(){prx("https:\/\/play.prx.org\/e?ge=prx_149_0824839a-e3ca-4c0a-9263-832ee73f063c&uf=https%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.revealradio.org%2Frevealpodcast", "prx-1", "embed")});Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.

Some of the biggest changes are happening here in the US. Two years ago, Abbas Alawieh helped lead the Uncommitted movement, pressuring Democrats over Gaza. Now he’s running for Michigan state Senate, and Kamala Harris is calling him. Elsewhere in Michigan, AIPAC and its allies spent close to $30 million backing Abdul El-Sayed’s opponent in the Democratic Senate primary. El-Sayed won anyway.

For some voters, the prominence of Israel itself is striking.

“I don’t know why Israel has become the pivotal point,” said Mimi Price-Miletic, a  Democratic voter in Michigan. “There are so many issues in this country that we should be dealing with, and you’re worried about what’s happening, like, millions of miles away?”

And the divide crosses party lines. Younger Republicans are questioning US support for Israel, even as party leaders advance deeper defense cooperation. Meanwhile, AIPAC faces new challenges to its influence, as younger Jewish political groups, like J Street and Jewish Voice for Peace, offer sharply different visions for what should come next.

This week on Reveal, reporter Najib Aminy follows the new fault lines forming around the US–Israel relationship and asks: As the old political consensus is tested, who gets to shape what replaces it?

House Democrats on Friday announced plans to invest in eight more House districts that they say are now competitive thanks to President Donald Trump’s sinking popularity, bringing the total number of seats the party is targeting for pick ups to 66. Trump won all eight of the districts the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee says it will divert resources to by double-digit margins.

Source

A cartoon by Brian McFadden. Support my Patreon for early access and exclusives. Follow me on Mastodon, Bluesky, or at my website. Related | Trump can’t make ‘super intelligence’ happen…

Source

Right-wing conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec was allowed to hold a one-on-one interview with Vice President JD Vance Friday, and the conversation was just as gross and blatantly racist as you’d expect. “What young men are kind of responding to is that there’s so many pressures now on that labor market that just didn’t exist when a lot of those tone-deaf Republicans that you mentioned…

Source

On Thursday, a group of men dressed like extras from Les Misérables erected a giant statue outside Elon Musk’s company town of Starbase, Texas: a 50-foot bronze rendition of the Titan Prometheus. Building a godlike figure in honor of the world’s richest man reportedly cost the sculptors, of the French outfit Atelier Missor, $1 million of their own funds.

The statue of Prometheus is finally finished.

It was cast in Paris, crossed the Atlantic, and was assembled at Starbase. It took us 100 days to go from nothing to this.

People of the West, we have lived through an era devoid of dreams, devoid of destiny.

But the time has come… pic.twitter.com/JkQbTGV1My

— Atelier Missor (@AtelierMissor_) October 2, 2026

Atelier Missor, active since 2021, describes itself on X as a “classical foundry in Paris, on its way to building a new Rome.” Its founder, Missor Movahed Ghaleh Nouri, has claimed he was drawn to pursue classical sculpture after receiving a vision of Napoleon I while wandering the Place Vendôme in Paris. His staff wear identical tan suspenders, billowy shirts, and unkempt facial hair, and—per previous versions of their website—spent much of the first half of the 2020s producing bronze and clay busts of such figures as (of course) Napoleon, Nietzsche, and Jordan Peterson.

In a now-deleted mission statement, Mohaved appears to allude to the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests as one of the reasons he started his foundry.

“I was shocked to see ignorant people tearing down statues,” he wrote. “These fools who weren’t even in the same league as those they were trying to destroy. These ungrateful people who had never done anything in their lives.”

Across their social media channels, the foundry now posts about bringing back the West and bemoans modern artistic sensibilities. “Make art so epic it will raise the birthrate,” they say. Nor have they forgotten their particular commitment to white, European manhood.

For one statue destroyed, we will craft ten more. https://t.co/SZN6ELrwfe

— Atelier Missor (@AtelierMissor_) March 18, 2026

After first arriving in the United States last year with help from the Peter Thiel–linked 1517 venture capital fund, the men of Atelier Missor wasted no time ingratiating themselves with the American right. They welded an 11-foot bronze George Washington for Trump’s “Freedom 250” celebrations. (They also, judging by their posts, appear to have acquired cowboy hats.)

“You cannot just imagine a view of the world and impose it,” Mohaved reportedly said in June of 2025. “You have to submit to the dream that unites us—the dream of Western civilization.”

To that end, his foundry has spent the past year flirting hard with Elon Musk.

Dear @elonmusk

We want to build a statue of Prometheus in titanium and offer it to Starbase — a gift from the people, in gratitude for pushing humanity forward.

Let's make Starbase the most spectacular city, as it will be depicted as a true milestone in history books. pic.twitter.com/jtRnDjIi3j

— Atelier Missor (@AtelierMissor_) June 18, 2025

But the statue—which now hoists its torch into the sky and teeters, plinthless, on the ground—is not on Starbase property. Nor is it made of titanium, as its sculptors initially planned. Instead, it sits by the side of a Texas road about ten miles away.

Nonetheless, the hollow, welded-together Prometheus went up overnight on Wednesday. Neither SpaceX nor Atelier Missor immediately responded to a request for comment.

Rewarding their months of desperate posting—and real, actual statue construction—Atelier Missor recieved curt recognition from their idol on October 1st.

“Nice work,” Elon posted.

So apparently FBI Director Kash Patel has gifted FBI employees with a report, snappily titled “Patel Report,” about all the times the bureau “fell short” in chapters of its history. The notion that the least-competent and least-qualified dude to ever helm the agency is here to tell everyone how it did badly in the past is ridiculous, but to be fair, it makes for terrific content.

Source

The Kennedy Center Honors have been forced to relocate from the historic venue for the first time—and it’s all thanks to President Donald Trump’s pettiness. This year’s ceremony will be held at the Capital One Arena in Washington, D.C., after being evicted from its home as the board—composed of loyalists installed by Trump—voted to close the center instead of complying with court orders to…

Source

The Trump administration has spent much of this year rewriting the federal government’s approach to guns. Just last month, the Justice Department concluded that the ban on selling handguns to 18-20-year-olds is unconstitutional and would no longer be criminally enforced.

But amid dozens of changes to federal firearms regulations is one you might have missed. If finalized, it could fundamentally transform the way Americans buy guns.

The ATF’s proposed Non-Over-the-Counter rule would allow gun dealers to conduct many firearms sales entirely remotely, so eligible buyers could verify their identities online and have a gun shipped directly to their home, no in-person interaction required. It’s a move that has even rattled the gun industry’s own leading trade lobby.

Enter the president’s son. Donald Trump Jr. is a shareholder and board member of GrabAGun, a company that bills itself as the “Amazon of Guns” and boasts that it’s “uniquely positioned to capitalize on this potential opportunity.”

Currently, someone who orders a gun online generally must go in person to a federally licensed firearms dealer to verify their identity, undergo a background check, and eventually pick up their gun. Under the ATF’s proposed rule, eligible in-state buyers could verify their identity online, undergo a background check, and have a gun shipped directly to their home, without ever setting foot in a gun store.

The ATF estimates that as many as half of all gun buyers might choose to take advantage of fully remote sales.

GrabAGun has been positioning itself for a future where more gun sales happen this way. As the public face of the company, Trump Jr. has touted the ease of online gun sales “in an age where our right to bear arms is under constant attack from anti-gun politicians and woke corporations.”

“GrabAGun allows you to [buy a gun] the way you’d buy everything else, like you would on Amazon if you’re buying home décor or other goods,” he explained to Bloomberg last July, ahead of the company’s public debut on the New York Stock Exchange.

Donald Trump Jr. holds a shotgun at Tombstone Tactical gun store in Phoenix, Arizona, on October 23, 2024. (Photo by REBECCA NOBLE/AFP via Getty Images)

Months before the ATF unveiled its proposal, GrabAGun had already begun expanding into a new business designed to help firearms manufacturers sell directly to consumers. In January, the company launched PEW Logistics, a subsidiary that provides manufacturers with a “white-label direct-to-consumer fulfillment solution.” Four months later, the ATF announced its proposed rule expanding remote firearms sales.

Democratic Sens. Chris Murphy and Richard Blumenthal sounded the alarm about what the company knew, and when—and pressed the Department of Justice on whether Trump Jr.’s business ties influenced the proposed rule. “It appears that GrabAGun had information about the potential change in the regulatory landscape and made a series of business decisions to capitalize on the moment,” they wrote in a July letter to then-acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.

Trump Jr.’s spokesperson has maintained that the president’s son had “zero involvement in this particular decision.”

“Don is a lifelong businessman and vocal advocate of our Second Amendment rights,” Andrew Surabian said in a statement to Reuters. “He does not interface with the Federal Government as part of his role with any company that he invests in or advises.”

ATF Director Robert Cekada also pushed back on ethical concerns, asserting that the “ATF has had no engagement with any retailer in developing [the rule].” The ATF has framed the Non-Over-the-Counter rule as a way to modernize gun sales and take advantage of technical advances in remote identity verification.

The proposal has drawn alarm from anti-gun-violence advocates and even some members of the gun industry, who say that removing in-person encounters could make it harder to detect suspicious sales and easier for guns to reach the criminal market.

“This allowing of online gun sales is probably the most dangerous action taken by the US government to increase gun violence,” warned Jon Lowy, founder and president of Global Action on Gun Violence and a veteran gun violence prevention attorney.

“A brief video interaction cannot detect if the purchaser is actually an illegal straw purchaser buying for someone else, a gun trafficker just supplying the criminal market, somebody who’s intoxicated, somebody who is on drugs, someone who is clearly mentally unstable and dangerous,” Lowy said. “I really was shocked.”

A promotional poster from the ‘Don’t Lie for the Other Guy’ campaign, a joint initiative of the ATF and the National Shooting Sports Foundation. (atf.gov)

The ATF and the gun industry’s largest trade organization, the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), have partnered for more than 25 years on the “Don’t Lie for the Other Guy” campaign, educating dealers on how to identify and prevent straw purchases—when a “straw man” illegally buys a gun for someone else, one of the most common sources of gun trafficking, according to federal data.

Earlier this year, ATF Director Robert Cekada told the Senate Judiciary Committee that federally licensed firearms dealers are “our first line of defense in the fight against firearms trafficking.”

Now, the industry’s own trade group is warning that removing face-to-face encounters could undermine that role.

In August, the NSSF told the ATF that its membership was “overwhelmingly opposed” to the Non-Over-the-Counter rule, citing concerns that remote sales “would be exploited by bad actors to conduct illegal straw purchases.”

“When you have an online background check you lose the emotional point,” Florida gun dealer Marc Bernstein told Spectrum News 13. “A lot of the ways that we stop straw purchases are through conversations and we terminate the sale right away. And it happens pretty frequently.”  Bernstein said that happens at least once a week.

The Non-Over-the-Counter rule is still under review and, if finalized, will likely be challenged in court. It’s unclear if a legal challenge would delay the rollout.

“I’ve spent most of my career trying to stop the flow of crime guns,” said Lowy, the gun control attorney.

“Then this whole other mechanism that makes it completely easy and seems largely untouchable is created—and it looks like there’s virtually nothing you can do about it.”

Last week, The Washington Post reported that David Flippo’s congressional campaign falsely claimed on multiple occasions that the Nevada Republican earned a Bronze Star with valor as an Air Force officer. Flippo’s response was to blame anonymous staffers who he claimed had accidentally conflated two different awards he received for his service in Iraq.  

But there is a major problem with that explanation: For years, Flippo wore a hat that suggested he earned the Bronze Star with valor—the rare award he admits he does not have.

Specifically, as first reported by the conservative outlet Nevada News & Views, Flippo frequently wore a hat that included a Bronze Star with two V-shaped emblems next to it. Pictures of him wearing the hat were included on his campaign website and in posts on its social media feeds. According to veterans, the emblems on the cap bear a striking resemblance to the valor devices—or V devices, as they are known in military circles—used by the US military to show when awards are earned for valor. Lately, he appears to have stopped wearing that version of the cap.

The Bronze Star hangs below a red and blue ribbon. For those who received the award with valor, a small V is normally attached to the ribbon. In Flippo’s case, his hat featured two Vs next to his Bronze Star. (The other V could have been related to the Outstanding Unit Award with valor he received; that award was given to his unit as a whole rather than for individual acts of heroism.)

Part of a photo on Flippo’s campaign website showing two V-shaped emblems next to his Bronze Star.Flippo campaign website

Flippo’s campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Text messages sent to two numbers listed for Flippo in public records went unanswered. Flippo’s campaign answered some questions from the Nevada Independent for an article published on Friday that covered his military service, but it did not respond to those about the V-shaped symbols he has worn.

Daniel Casentini, a retired Air Force Master Sergeant who was interviewed by Nevada News & Views, told me via email that photos he has reviewed appear to show V devices next to Flippo’s Bronze Star. “I cannot conceive of any explanation for why Flippo would display two V devices unless he was implying he earned a Bronze Star with a V device,” he said.

After reviewing photos of Flippo wearing the hat, a former Army Ranger told me Flippo was “clearly representing” that he was awarded a Bronze Star with valor. “He was publicly knowingly misrepresenting the award he received,” he added in a text message. “He lied.” 

Scott Maryott, a retired Army Lieutenant Colonel who lives in northern Nevada, where he volunteers at the VA and teaches a university course on military history, asked, “Why would you put those Vs that represent valor on your hat in the first place?” He also wanted to know why Flippo no longer appears to be wearing them. “He could say, ‘I made a mistake putting them on my hat,'” Maryott said. “That’s okay. Be honest.”

A photo posted to Flippo’s Instagram account in 2024 featuring the V-shaped emblems.Instagram

The news about Flippo’s Bronze Star comes in the final weeks of a competitive House race in his Reno-based district. In 2024, Trump won the district by 14 points. But Flippo’s many weaknesses as a candidate—including the fact that he moved to Reno only this year—have helped put the seat in play for his Democratic opponent, Teresa Benitez-Thompson, a former state Assembly majority leader. On Wednesday, veterans in Nevada filmed a forthcoming ad AFL-CIO-funded ad criticizing Flippo. As I reported earlier this week, Flippo is also facing questions about the source of the nearly $2.5 million he has reported putting into his 2024 and 2026 congressional campaigns.

Flippo told the Post that he received a standard Bronze Star, as well as the Outstanding Unit Award with valor. Flippo said that his campaign team mistakenly conflated the two awards when it claimed he had a Bronze Star with valor. Rory McShane, the founder of the political consulting firm through which Flippo has routed most of his campaign spending, accused the Post of “trying to fabricate a scandal” based on “an honest mistake that has been apologized for.”

The false claim that Flippo received a Bronze Star with valor, when he actually received a standard Bronze Star, may sound like a minor distinction. In the military community, it is not. “A Bronze Star with a V device indicates you were directly involved in combat, under hostile fire, for the actions the Bronze Star is being awarded for,” Casentini explained. Maryott shared a similar perspective. A standard Bronze Star is “for showing up” and “performing successfully in a combat zone,” he said. “With valor, it’s a far different level.”

During the Iraq war, about 100,000 Bronze Stars were awarded. Only about 1 in 40 came with the additional valor distinction. The former Ranger explained that a Bronze Star with valor is so different from the regular version that it might as well be a different award.

On Friday, the Nevada Independent published the citation for Flippo’s Bronze Star, which was shared with the outlet by a campaign spokesperson. Among other achievements, the citation states that, while in Iraq, Flippo “was the first to promptly respond” to extinguish flames and provide “life saving medical care” to a soldier with severe burns on his body. Maryott said that Flippo clearly deserved a Bronze Star for the conduct described in the citation but not a valor device. 

Flippo was photographed wearing the hat as early as August 2023, when he was running for Congress for the first time. He continued to wear the hat with the apparent V devices until at least June 2026. Recently, Flippo has been photographed multiple times wearing a similar hat that has neither a Bronze Star nor the apparent V devices. 

Maryott said that it is strange for an officer to go out of their way to tout a standard Bronze Star. “If you’re an officer and you served overseas during this operation you probably got a Bronze Star,” said Maryott, who has a Bronze Star of his own. “I would never lead with that.”

During President Donald Trump’s red-state rally tour, he decided that the best way to address one of his biggest failings was to pretend that the word “affordability” simply does not exist. “Remember they came up with the word ‘affordability.’ So from Day 1 they said, ‘Well, what about your prices?’” he said. “They always come up with these words: ‘Affordability.’ So the fake news starts…

Source

President Donald Trump is once again offering “exclusive” access to buyers of his meme coin—this time in the form of an invitation to a dinner with him and three secret “legends” to be named at a later date.

All you have to do is purchase—and then resist the temptation to immediately sell—a lot of $TRUMP. If, come November 12, you’re one of the top 185 holders of the coin, you’ll get to attend the special event later that month at Trump’s golf club in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC. The marketing is not subtle, with the coin’s official website promising access to “The Most Exclusive Dinner in the World” and an “evening with 3 Legends and President Donald J. Trump.” In smaller letters, it notes that there will also be a private meet and greet with an unnamed “legend.” Sadly, though, “No attendees will be granted a private meet & greet with the President.”

The top 29 holders of the $TRUMP meme coin will also get to go to a special VIP reception “with your favorite President and one of the Legends.” As an added bonus, the top four holders will get a gold Trump-branded watch. Again, however, it notes that there won’t be any private time with Trump, and no gifts will be accepted. Because, you know, ethics.

The White House referred questions about whether Trump had been involved with planning the dinner or would be paid to attend it to the event’s host, who did not respond to a request for comment. The event was first reported by the Washington Sun.

This isn’t the first gathering of this sort. There have been two previous exclusive events involving the president, one at Mar-a-Lago and another at the same Virginia golf club. The coin’s backers—who have a licensing deal with Trump—have also set up contests with access to swanky hospitality suites at the World Cup and Super Bowl. Another contest currently running offers the winner tickets to the F1 grand prix in Singapore, next weekend.

Other than rewarding people for holding onto the coins, there isn’t really a point to this particular bit of blockchain boosterism. As I wrote in April, shortly after the Mar-a-Lago event:

Donald Trump launched the $TRUMP meme coin (and the associated $MELANIA meme coin) just three days before his second inauguration. The price of the coin immediately rocketed past $74, giving it a total market capitalization of around $15 billion—a rather absurd figure for a brand new digital asset that can’t actually be used for anything. The coin has no inherent value. It has no transactional use. It essentially functions as a digital endorsement of Trump—so perhaps fittingly, it’s price has since fallen even faster than the president’s approval ratings.

Since that high point of $74, the value of the coin dropped drastically and, in recent months, has maintained a steady low price. As of Friday afternoon, it was priced at about $2.00.

When he returned to the White House last year, Trump declared he would be the “crypto president” and would do what he could to advance the blockchain economy. But even many crypto enthusiasts were not particularly happy when he launched the meme coin shortly before inauguration. And it has proved to be a spectacularly bad deal for many investors. According to an analysis from June, more than 1 million investors lost around $3.8 billion, combined, as the coin’s value dropped.

On the other hand, according to Trump’s latest personal financial disclosure, he appears to have earned about $635 million from the arrangement.

Utah Governor Spencer Cox has been making the rounds of national media recently promoting his new book, Off Ramp: How to be a peacemaker in an age of contempt. On Jon Stewart, CNBC, and CNN, Cox drilled down on a theme that brought him into the national spotlight last year after the assassination of conservative youth leader Charlie Kirk in Utah: political depolarization. This was nothing new for Cox, who launched a “disagree better” initiative as the head of the National Governor’s Association in 2023.

While the work has earned him national plaudits and calls to run for president, it hasn’t exactly endeared him to people at home. In Utah, the two-term governor is, in fact, rather polarizing. A new poll released on Tuesday shows that his net approval rating in Utah has fallen 23 points since April.

It’s not hard to see why. He has signed laws supporting extreme Republican gerrymandering and taking fluoride out of the drinking water. This year, he officially declared June as “Fidelity Month,” instead of its more familiar name, Pride Month. He has supported data center construction over the intense objections of Utah residents of all political stripes. And in 2024, the soon-to-be author signed one of the country’s most extreme book banning laws—a decision that’s now coming back to haunt him as he tries to get people to buy his own book.

Since the law’s passage, Utah has now banned 44 books from all of its public school libraries and AP class curricula—everything from Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye to popular books by Stephen King, Jodi Picoult and Sarah J. Maas. (The full list can be found here.) Some local school districts have banned three times that number, most of them because of LGBTQ-related content or what the book-banners like to call “pornography.” (An example: Elizabeth Gilbert’s 2006 midlife crisis book Eat Pray Love was challenged in the Davis County school district because, among other things, it “refers to a penis as a banana.” It survived after another reviewer pointed out that the author writes favorably about celibacy.)

I was in Utah when Cox’s book came out and thought I’d try to go see him talk about it while I was there. But the governor wasn’t doing any book events in his own state. I eventually saw him in DC, where he spoke last week at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

Since I couldn’t find the governor in Utah, I went to see the legendary Salt Lake City bookstore owner Ken Sanders, proudly displays a sandwich board outside his store announcing, “We Buy Banned Books.” Born in Utah, Sanders has been selling books in the state since 1975, and he’s lived through various waves of state-sponsored censorship. I showed him a copy of Cox’s new book. When he saw the book jacket highlighting Cox’s “dedication to depolarization and a commitment to peacemaking,” he exclaimed, “Oof. That ain’t you, babe.”

“I would have to say he doesn’t understand irony at all, or how would he title his book like that?”

“I would have to say he doesn’t understand irony at all,” Sanders said. “Or how would he title his book like that?”

Sanders isn’t the only Utah resident to notice the contradiction between the subject of Cox’s book and his support for the book banning law. In late April, The King’s English, a venerable independent bookstore in Salt Lake City, announced a promotion of the governor’s book, similar to those it does with other prominent authors. Customers who pre-ordered his book would receive a signed copy as soon as it came out. But the store was forced to cancel the offer in the face of furious outrage from its customers. “The book banner is partnering with a bookstore?” wrote one of hundreds of posters on the Salt Lake City sub-Reddit upset about Cox’s book promotion. “Gross and ill-advised.”

Cal Crosby, co-owner of The King’s English, says that the backlash was worse than when a bomb threat in 2023 forced them to cancel drag queen story time. The bomb threat turned out to have come from somewhere overseas, but the attacks over Cox’s book came from close to home. “It was very personal,” he said, noting that many of the most aggressive critics were among the store’s longtime customers or business connections.

Utah’s book banning law, according to critics, has a sweeping mandate. Here’s how it works: If three school districts, or two districts and five charter schools, ban a book because they decide it meets the state definition of obscenity or “sensitive materials,” the book is automatically removed from every school in the state. A Salt Lake Tribune analysis in May found that almost all of the statewide book bans originated in only two of the state’s 41 school districts.

Of those nine, most of the bans initially originated from just one district: Davis County, a conservative area north of Salt Lake City, where fringe conservatives have taken over the local Republican party. In 2021, after a two-year investigation, the US Department of Justice forced the Davis school district to address widespread racial harassment against Black and Asian-American students. Shortly afterward, a 10-year-old Black girl with autism died by suicide after allegedly suffering from intense bullying in a Davis County school.

Yet Davis County activists are leveraging the book-banning law to dictate what every school in the state is allowed to teach or stock in its library. And once the state bans a book, it can’t be assigned, even for AP classes. And schools must destroy all their copies lest the offending materials make their way into a Little Library or the hands of an unsuspecting youth.

Cox signed the first version of a book banning law in 2022 that allowed individual school districts to ban books. After it passed, a small but motivated army of people aligned with the far-right activist group Moms for Liberty marched into local schools to scan the bookshelves for books they deemed smutty. The law required school districts have committees to review book challenges, and people without children in the district schools were ineligible to challenge reading materials.

But state records showed that those rules have been routinely ignored, according to an investigation by the Utah Investigative Journalism Project. In Washington County in Southern Utah, for instance, most book challenges were made almost entirely by a woman who homeschooled her kids.

In 2024, when the state legislature expanded the law to make it easier to ban books statewide, Utah education advocates and civil liberties groups called on Cox to veto the bill. If enacted, they argued, the law “would encourage individuals to stifle the voices of diverse authors and perspectives, casting a chilling shadow over the sanctity of our First Amendment rights.”

Cox signed it anyway.

“I think calling on people to depolarize and to tone down the rhetoric is a very good thing to do,” says Jessica Horton, co-founder of Let Davis Read, an advocacy group fighting book bans in Davis County. “But as a leader, sometimes you have to stand up to your friends and say, ‘Hey, what you’re doing is not okay.’  And unfortunately, I don’t think that’s always the case with our governor.”

“Calling people to depolarize and to tone down the rhetoric is a very good thing to do. But as a leader, sometimes you have to stand up to your friends and say, ‘Hey, what you’re doing is not okay.’  And unfortunately, I don’t think that’s always the case with our governor.”

When I reached out to Cox’s publisher for a comment on his support for the book banning law, a spokesperson said in an email that the governor had no role in removing books from schools. The spokesperson disputed the idea that Utah was banning books, saying that local leaders and librarians have always chosen age-appropriate books for their schools. “We’re not going to agree on every policy, including which books should be available to children in public schools,” they said. “And refusing to engage with people we disagree with is a big part of how we got to our current political environment.”

Authors whose work has been banned, the estate of Kurt Vonnegut, as well as several students have sued the state over the law. Represented by the ACLU, they have argued that, among other things, it is depriving young people of constitutionally protected literature and personally harming the authors. On September 15, a federal judge ruled that the plaintiffs have standing to sue and the case is moving forward.

Meanwhile, Cox has been promoting his book, and a state literacy effort, as if none of this ever happened. “Civilization cannot continue if we can’t read,” he said at an event in August. He even retweeted a recent Atlantic story heralding the death of literacy, calling it “sobering.”

The Atlantic’s story this week on America becoming a post-literate society is sobering. The statistics are dark. But they are also reversible. I know because I’ve done it. After deleting social media from my phone, I unlocked my focus and started reading recreationally again. https://t.co/YeF57vVujt

— Spencer Cox (@SpencerJCox) July 10, 2026

“With one hand, he is saying, ‘I want children to learn to read.’ With the other hand, he is taking away the books that teens actually want to read,” such as Stephen King novels, notes Susan Heiner, an organizer of Let Utah Read, which has been fighting the book bans. “You get kids and teenagers to read by giving them things that they are interested in.”