Political News

From at least the 1880s through the early 1970s, it was illegal for parents in Idaho to choose prayer over medical care when a child’s life was at stake. By Audrey Dutton for ProPublica In Idaho, parents who say their faith prohibits lifesaving medical care for their children can’t be charged with child neglect or manslaughter. Supporters of this protection over the years have…

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We did it! The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy is officially a New York Times “Instant Bestseller.”

My book debuted at #3 on the hardcover nonfiction list. Thank you to everyone who pre-ordered the book or bought it the first week—or who requested it at their local public library and/or spread the word to others. It’s not easy for a first-time book author to make the list. I could not have done it without you, my first readers.

I am especially grateful to my agent, Caroline Eisenmann of Frances Goldin Literary Agency. She took me seriously at a moment when no other agent would return my queries, and here we are.

I was also super fortunate to have an amazing editor in Shannon Welch of Avid Reader Press, who gave me space to cook and coached me toward the best version possible. The entire team at Avid Reader has been amazing, scoring major media appearances (Fresh Air, Democracy Now, MS NOW, The Guardian) during launch week.

There’s more to come, and hopefully the bestseller status will erode some of the lingering hesitancy among certain legacy media institutions and personalities.

And if you didn’t get the book on launch week, now is a great time to do so! Buy it here to support this newsletter (or get it at your local independent bookstore).

In the meantime, I’m doing a ton of podcasts and interviews. Here is one of my favorites so far, my talk with Paris Marx of Tech Won’t Save Us. Paris was one of the first journalists to give me a platform back in 2024, so it was great to catch up.

‘The independent side is pretty scary’

Thor Benson interviewed me about why I became a journalist, and what it’s like to be an independent journalist taking on powerful billionaire interests. From the interview in Long Lead:

I made a tremendous investment of my own money to do the work that eventually became my book. There were moments when I thought, “Am I making a really stupid mistake here?” And I’ll be honest, there are days when you’re like, “Let’s just drop this and look for a damn job right now.” I was in politics. I could go make hundreds of thousands of dollars to advise people on what to say in a press release. Journalism is what I want to do, but there are moments where you think, “Is this just a dead end? Am I having a midlife crisis by trying to be an independent journalist?” That’s what it could seem like. But I persevered through that and got some pieces published. Those got a bigger reaction than almost anything else I had even published in a newspaper.“It’s all AI and bots and space travel — and people don’t have jobs.” Gil Durán’s new book explores big tech’s democracy hatersPulling from his careers in politics and journalism, Durán wants the public to understand the dystopian influence of Silicon Valley’s billionaires on global politics.Where To Find Me

My Instagram is blowing up, with 10,000 new followers in the past week. Click here to find me.

Or connect with me on LinkedIn (mention “newsletter”).

As always, I’m on BlueSky and Mastodon and Threads.

Nerd Reich Newsletter On Tour

Oakland: Clio’s Books, September 9, in conversation with Adam Becker. Click here for tickets.

Chicago: Fighting Technofascism, September 19. Click here for tickets.

Baltimore: Red Emma’s Bookstore, Baltimore Book Festival, September 20. Click here for info.

More to come!

Please join the team that makes it possible for your friendly neighborhood comic strip Tom the Dancing Bug to exist in this hostile Trumpverse! JOIN US IN THE INNER HIVE, and be the first kid on your block to get each week’s Tom the Dancing Bug comic – before it’s published anywhere. * Sign up for the free weekly newsletter, The Tom the Dancing Bug Review! Not nearly as good as joining the…

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In the frenzied, finger-pointing days following Charlie Kirk’s assassination last year, institutions across the country rushed to appease online mobs and vitriolic politicians who demanded takedowns of anyone critical of the right-wing influencer. 

In the year since, courts and arbitrators have forced a growing number of institutions to answer to something much more enduring than right-wing pressure: the law.

The latest is the Washington Post, which was ordered this week to reinstate Karen Attiah, the opinion columnist it fired last year for her social media posts in the wake of Kirk’s assassination.

The decision from an independent arbitrator is a major win for Attiah, who, alongside the union that represents Post employees, spent the past year fighting her termination through a union grievance process. 

“I started squealing,” Attiah said in an interview, recalling her union representative calling with the news of her win. “My first thought was like, when is the party?”

Post management fired Attiah on September 11, one day after she posted a series of comments on Bluesky about the public’s response to the Turning Point USA founder’s assassination in Utah earlier that day.

“Part of what keeps America so violent is the insistence that people perform care, empty goodness and absolution for white men who espouse hatred and violence,” she wrote in one post. “Refusing to tear my clothes and smear ashes on my face in performative mourning for a white man that espoused violence is … not the same as violence,” another read.

The Post argued Attiah’s comments had “harmed the paper’s reputation and integrity” and “created safety risks” for its staff. It also accused her of violating its social media policy by disparaging white men — a claim the arbitrator said was “unsupported” and “unpersuasive.” 

“The Post, this world-renowned newspaper that’s known for standing up to presidents, authoritarians, and speaking truth to power, was saying, ‘well, we got scared,’” Attiah said. 

Firing Attiah, an 11-year veteran of the paper, was an “absolutely disproportional” penalty, arbitrator Sarah Miller Espinosa wrote in her decision, which the Washington-Baltimore News Guild shared with Mother Jones.

Under Jeff Bezos’ ownership, and in particular since Donald Trump’s return to office, the Post’s opinion section has lurched rightward. In February 2025, Bezos announced that the section would shift its focus to “personal liberties and free markets.” Two months before Attiah was fired, opinion editor Adam O’Neill told Attiah during a meeting that he didn’t think her body of work was consistent with that vision. 

“Without the union, you’re naked. You have no protection.”

Her firing ignited concerns about a chilling effect on the press and outrage toward the Post’s leadership. “She was paid, and she was trained, and she was hired to express opinions,” said Amos Laor, general counsel at the Washington-Baltimore News Guild, who represented Attiah in the arbitration process. “Obviously, not everyone will agree with a columnist on every issue, but her role is to create lively debate on issues of public concern.”

The Post respects the arbitration process, a spokesperson for the newspaper wrote in an email, but declined to comment further. Attiah says she’s open to returning to her role on the Opinion desk but hasn’t heard from the paper.

“The Post has created quite an awkward situation for themselves,” she said. 

Her case adds to a growing number of firings in the wake of Kirk’s assassination that have proven legally unsound.

“The Charlie Kirk situation caused … institutions to completely have this meltdown of cowardice, fear, temporary insanity,” Attiah said. “Now, they’re facing the year-long Charlie Kirk hangover from their moment of drunkenness — the hangover of having to pay people, of having to reinstate people, of having the negative publicity.”

In the aftermath of Kirk’s killing, “we saw a coordinated effort to chill any speech critical of his legacy,” Viktoya Vilk, senior director for digital safety and free expression at PEN America, wrote in a statement to Mother Jones. More than 600 people were fired, suspended, investigated, or otherwise disciplined by their employers for their social media posts about Kirk after his death last fall, according to Reuters. 

In the year since, dozens have challenged their firings. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression has tracked 28 lawsuits filed in federal court by public employees who were terminated over their Kirk-related posts. Fifteen cases are active, and 13 have been settled, six of those for at least six figures, according to FIRE. 

• Darren Michael, a theater professor at Austin Peay State University in Tennessee, was reinstated and awarded a $500,000 settlement from the university in January. Austin Peay State’s president also apologized to Michael, who was terminated after he reshared a 2023 article that quoted Kirk saying, “I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”
• An administrative hearing judge ruled Mariah Roller, a Florida public middle school teacher, should be reinstated and receive back pay in August. Roller was suspended after posting criticism of Kirk’s support of the Second Amendment and writing “Bye Charlie,” with a waving emoji and fire emojis.
• Maria Ruhtenberg, a public defender in Iowa, returned to work in November 2025 after appealing her termination and received $125,000 in damages. Ruhtenberg had posted on her private Facebook account “you reap what you sow” and “live by the sword, die by the sword” after Kirk’s death.

Several other employees at public institutions received payouts from their employer, though they didn’t return to work. The University of Tennessee agreed to pay an assistant professor $1.9 million earlier this summer. It had fired the professor, Tamar Shirinian, after she commented on a friend’s Facebook that the “world is better off without [Kirk] in it.” An administrator at Ball State University in Indiana received a $225,000 payout in May. In total, colleges have paid nearly $3 million to employees they fired for their comments about Kirk.

As a private employee, Attiah’s case relied not on the First Amendment but on her contract as a member of the Post’s union, the Washington-Baltimore News Guild, whose collective bargaining agreement requires “good and sufficient cause for termination.”

“We don’t have robust speech protections for non-public employees. Without the union, you’re naked. You have no protection,” said Matthew W. Finkin, a research professor of law at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Only six percent of private-sector workers are unionized, Finkin added.

Still, Attiah sees a common thread between her case and the increasing number of settlements at public institutions.

“Collective hysteria and fear infected so many of the institutions that were supposed to be better than this,” Attiah said of the wave of firings. “[They were] supposed to rise above impulse, supposed to rise above making massive decisions based off of fear and emotion.”

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

As power slowly returns to homes and businesses in Gary and across Northwest Indiana, Black faith leaders and elected officials alike are turning their focus to restoration, accountability, and solutions for future weather events. 

Fewer than 2,500 Northern Indiana Public Service Company (NIPSCO) customers in Gary remained without power as of Tuesday morning, but that is more than 70 percent of the nearly 3,500 customers still without service countywide.

“What we are witnessing in Gary is not an unavoidable natural disaster, but a man-made crisis.”

Gary’s prolonged restoration has sparked calls for accountability from residents, faith leaders, and elected officials, including Gov. Mike Braun, who has ordered state utility regulators to investigate NIPSCO’s storm response and spending. The utility also faces a class-action lawsuit over allegations that its vegetation management practices contributed to the widespread outages.

Pastor Eric Boone of Tree of Life Missionary Baptist Church in Gary was among the faith leaders who saw firsthand the hardships residents faced during the blackout. “You name it, we saw it,” Boone told Capital B Gary.  

“Some people are 70 and 80 years old, in hot conditions with no air conditioning, and it’s 85 degrees in the house,” Boone said. “People who were already living check to check are now trying to put gas in cars and generators while needing baby formula and diapers. We’ve seen it all.”

Some families even lost their homes, Boone said, prompting him to open the church to temporarily house multiple families.

The length and severity of the outage have drawn attention from religious leaders outside Gary, who have sent resources to the city while also organizing around questions of accountability. The National Baptist Convention on Sunday called for reforms at NIPSCO. Nearly 40 Gary churches have joined in the effort.

In a statement, the Rev. Boise Kimber, pastor of First Calvary Baptist churches in New Haven and Hartford, Connecticut, and the convention’s president, said the organization stood in “unyielding solidarity” with Gary residents who had been left without basic necessities.

“What we are witnessing in Gary is not an unavoidable natural disaster, but a man-made crisis born of corporate greed and environmental injustice,” Kimber said.

In an interview with Capital B Gary, Kimber said residents should be compensated for what they lost during the outage without being forced to navigate complicated processes.

“We believe all residents should be made whole quickly,” he said. “Too many times…promises are made,” he said, but “barriers have been put in their way. People should not be forced through this unnecessary hurdle.” 

The convention isn’t alone in seeking answers after what became Gary’s worst power outage on record.

After criticizing NIPSCO’s response, Braun called on the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission to investigate the company, including how it has spent money collected through rate increases approved by the commission.

“What’s going to be different? What’s going to change?…We have a list of demands” for the utility.

“NIPSCO is a monopoly utility that Hoosiers pay every month with the expectation that it will use its considerable resources to maintain its system, prepare for severe weather and restore service as quickly as possible when disaster strikes,” Braun said in a news release. “NIPSCO has failed to keep its end of the bargain.”

The pressure from the governor’s mansion comes on the heels of a class-action lawsuit filed in Porter County Superior court on behalf of a woman in nearby Portage and “all similarly situated.” The lawsuit alleges NIPSCO’s vegetation management practices caused or worsened the disruption of electrical service and widespread power outage.  

NIPSCO has denied the allegations.

The company’s response time in Gary has also come under fire from residents and leaders across the state.

At the start, about 370,000 customers countywide were without power, with 36,000 of those being Gary customers. On August 19, more than a week after the storm, Gary still had 22,000 customers off the grid. 

Residents were forced to fend for themselves. 

Dale Pugh, a resident of the city’s 3rd District, said he was grateful to have his power restored, but said the time without electricity was difficult to get through. 

“The house was burning up. We had let up all the windows and open all the doors just to stay cool,” he said. “It was unacceptable.”

Latrice Farmer, a native of the Marshalltown neighborhood, said she was out of town when the storm hit. She said she returned to devastation wider than she’d ever seen.  “I was on the road, and my mom immediately tried to get my aunt out of Marshalltown,” she said. “There’s only two ways in that neighborhood and both of them had a tree down. Residents had to carve themselves out.”

Farmer has been assisting the elderly in her community who have been largely shut in by helping provide meals. Some of her neighbors went a full two weeks without power. 

Gary Mayor Eddie Melton has also criticized the length of the restoration process, drawing on his own experience working for the utility.  “I worked at NIPSCO for 15 years,” he said. “It does not take that long to turn the lights on.”

With power restored to most residents, Melton said his focus with NIPSCO now is on the immediate aftermath and helping residents. 

“What’s going to be different? What’s going to change?” Melton said. “We have a list of demands that we present to them. There should be no disconnections for the next 60 to 90 days. There should be no disconnect notices going after folks. What are you going to do to prepare us for the next storm?” 

As Boone continues to serve community members, he said this situation could be a turning point for relations between NIPSCO and the community. 

“It shouldn’t be NIPSCO versus us,” he said. “I believe we are better together, and this storm has fixed it for us to have a relationship that’s beyond them just reading meters and us paying bills.”

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the August 27 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’s advisors have figured out why his approval ratings are in the toilet. The problem is that voters just aren’t aware of how stupendous all his accomplishments have truly been, and reportedly, this is what they’re privately telling him in discussions about the midterms. Oddly, this comes amid new and clear indications that Republicans are panicking about their inability to explain his disastrous rule to voters, and amid new polling that really underscores their perils.

Here’s the upshot. No one around Trump is allowed to tell him the truth. And if this helps take down the GOP in the midterms, it’ll be a real dose of poetic justice. We’re working through it all with Mona Charen, a writer for the Bulwark, who’s been pointing out that Republicans really don’t want him anywhere near the midterms. Mona, nice to have you back on.

Mona Charen: Hi, Greg. Always fun to be with you. And poetic justice is the best justice.

Sargent: Yes, and you know, it’s looking good right now.

Charen: Let’s, let’s hope so.

Sargent: So these new leaks to The Atlantic are really something. Trump’s advisors are privately telling him all the bad poll numbers reflect the fact that voters still don’t know about his accomplishments. As examples, advisors cite new stock market highs, declines in fentanyl deaths, the closed southern border, and the increase in domestic manufacturing production.

Mona, that’s funny. I mean, maybe the border is a fair one, but stock market highs and manufacturing jobs have declined. Your reaction to all this?

Charen: Yeah, I was just going to mention that. So a little sleight of hand there. The fact is that manufacturing output is up, but manufacturing employment has lagged. And for a while it was in steep decline. Now it’s ticked up a little bit, but it’s nothing like a boom. And that’s because this has been going on for decades, where we’ve been getting more and more automated ways of manufacturing things. That’s just a fact of life. And Trump sold people on a fairy tale of returning the kind of manufacturing jobs that were prevalent in the 1950s and 1960s, and that world is gone.

But so, yeah, they’re trying to say, you know—this reminds me of, like, a medieval king, you know, who’s a mad king, and all the courtiers are forced to sort of tiptoe around, and nobody can ever say the truth, which is the king is mad. So they try to placate him, and they say, yes, yes, Your Majesty, it’s true, the reason that the polls are looking the way they are is because people just aren’t aware of all the wonderful things you’ve done. And the stock market—I mean, this is Mr. Populism, right? Mr. I’m for the working guy. And so he expects them to be thrilled about stock market gains. No, no, I don’t think so.

Sargent: Yeah. And there are a couple of other elements to the sleight of hand, as you put it, that I’d like to quickly highlight. They’re telling him that the manufacturing renaissance is happening. It isn’t. The amount of extraordinary upheaval that he’s inflicted on the country, and really on global trade, to produce these tiny little gains—which aren’t even gains—is really incredible, right?

And then the other thing is, it’s striking that they cite the closed southern border. He is deeply, deeply unpopular on the broader issue of immigration right now. In fact, he’s thrown away his best issue. And so none of this adds up to a real argument in any sense.

Charen: Both parties, I think, have a tendency to misread the American public and overread their mandate. So people did not like chaos at the southern border, as they perceived it under the Biden administration, and they wanted a crackdown on border crossings. They did not want what the Republicans have delivered, which is a kind of reign of terror—and grabbing grandmothers out of their homes who’ve lived here for 30 years and have no criminal record at all, et cetera.

And so they have so overdone it that there’s been a backlash against it. And as an electoral matter, Greg, this could be highly significant. You think about the number of Hispanic men who voted for Trump in 2024, for example. If the polls are right, those voters are gone.

Sargent: The numbers really do show that Trump is absolutely bleeding Hispanic men. I want to move on to The Atlantic’s other thing that they reported here, which is that Trump’s answer to this situation is to order Republicans to focus more on him.

He’s ordered up TV ads about his record that will apparently be used in these House and Senate contests. And as far as I can tell, this isn’t really idle chitchat. There is a big looming question about how Trump’s super PAC will spend the hundreds of millions of dollars it’s holding—how it will spend that money on the midterms, if it will spend it.

This might be the answer: More hagiography of Trump. Mona, do you think Republicans want that?

Charen: So this is just what endangered Republicans want to hear, right? That yes, Trump is going to dig into his huge war chest, and he’s going to produce ads that are all about Trump and how great he is. And so, when they are trying their damnedest to get away from this being a referendum on Trump—because that’s their only hope, is if it’s about other things, about how crazy the Democrats are, about communism, about something else—Trump is saying, no, no, it should be all about me. Where you have his just Titanic ego being a ball and chain for the Republican Party.

Sargent: It absolutely is. And we have a bunch of new data that really underscores that point. It’s from some different directions, but it adds up to a striking picture. A new Marquette poll of Wisconsin finds his approval at a net negative nineteen points. That’s 40 to 59 percent, his worst yet in Marquette polling. Sixty percent say his policies boost inflation, seventy percent say the war’s not worth the cost. That’s in a state Trump won, right in the heart of the Rust Belt. And the Rust Belt is where a lot of these big races will be decided.

Meanwhile, Mona, there’s another poll, a national poll, this one from Strength in Numbers. It finds Trump at 37 percent approval to 60 percent disapproving. That’s absolutely dismal. On prices, he’s at a record negative 48 points underwater. And for the first time, he’s also underwater—get this—on border security.

Remember how his advisors cited that as a positive? He’s actually underwater on border security. And that last one I take as an indicator of across-the-board collapse, like deep collapse, in his public standing. What do you make of all these findings?

Charen: Yes, a hundred percent, it is a real reckoning for Trump. And it is worth remembering that in 2018, when he faced his first midterm elections, he was at close to 50 percent popularity—49, something like that. So to be down in the 30s is really devastating. And, people are willing, sometimes too willing, to give presidents a pass.

Like, for example, voters didn’t hold Trump responsible for the bad economy when COVID hit, because they felt, well, it was an exogenous event, he didn’t cause it, you know, it’s not his fault. And the economy was great up until then, so we’re going to give him a pass.

But this time, everybody is aware that he made the decision to impose those tariffs, that it was his choice. He made the decision to launch a war that he was completely unprepared for and did not fight in any way that was likely to succeed—and without getting the approval of the American people and the Congress, et cetera. And that it has driven up the cost of gas and fertilizer and many other things.

It is obvious and attributable to his own decisions. He cannot say it’s an exogenous event. He can’t blame Biden—though in that same Atlantic piece you were quoting, they do several times talk about how this is Biden’s fault. But that doesn’t fly. It’s 2026.

Sargent: Well, the Strength in Numbers poll has something else of interest here. Democrats are leading the GOP on a number of specific economic metrics. They’re plus nine on prices, plus seven on jobs—this is Democrats leading Republicans—plus seven on trade, which is obviously in the news now, and plus twenty-two on health care.

Mona, a big pundit narrative has been that, OK, Trump’s very unpopular, but Democrats have a huge brand problem, which could offset it. And I don’t dispute that Democrats have a brand problem. I think that’s a real thing. But for them to be leading the GOP by all these economic metrics is significant, highly so, I think, given the Republican Party’s longtime advantage on economic issues.

And I think it goes right back to what you just said, which is that the voters can see very clearly—with uncommon clarity, unusual levels of clarity—that Donald Trump is wrecking their economic hopes and economic position and so forth. And so they’re directly linking the Republican Party to Trump.

And I don’t know to what extent they’re hearing Democrats or not. My general sense is that Trump’s horrific unpopularity is making it possible for Dems to be heard by voters who might otherwise not hear Democrats. But basically, Trump is the reason that the Republican Party is now behind the Democratic Party on economic issues. And that’s an extraordinary turn of events, I think.

Charen: It is. Midterms are always a referendum on the president. And so that’s what the voters are going to focus on, is: are they happy or not happy with the tenure in office of the president? And you know, they are saying no. They’re extremely unhappy. Therefore, the other guy. And the other guy are the Democrats. The Democrats are benefiting from that.

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’m in the camp that believes that the Democratic Party should be in the center as much as possible, and should keep a huge tent, and bring in people who are disaffected and who for whatever reason in recent years have been abandoning the Democratic Party. I think they should be sort of moderate in their policy approach, but incredibly fierce in their rhetorical approach.

So I think that’s what voters want. They want somebody who will fight this and who will show real passion about what Trump is doing to the country, but who doesn’t say that they want to abolish the police and, you know, end the Senate and do a lot of the things that are on the DSA’s website, you know?

Sargent: Yeah. Well, the DSA is actually giving Democrats a very big opportunity to say that they’re not for those things.

Charen: Well, and that’s a really interesting way of putting it. I hope they take them up on that.

Sargent: Yeah, well, I just think that what we’re looking at here is that Democrats are suddenly able to reach voters who I think were not within their reach before. And this seems like an essential thing. A lot of pundits have pointed this out, but what’s happening with independents is quite extraordinary right now.

Trump’s numbers with independents are just so unbelievably awful that you can’t even believe it when you look at them. But one poll after another is just showing that he’s absolutely cratered with the middle of the country. And I think a lot of those voters are now tuned into some of these Democratic candidates. And by the way, there are a lot of good Democratic candidates out there.

Charen: There are.

Sargent: Right. And that has very heavy 2018 vibes in that sense, I think. You’ve got a lot of good Senate candidates, and you’ve got a lot of good candidates in these very difficult House races in places like Iowa, Wisconsin.

Charen: And governors.

Sargent: Yes, good gubernatorial candidates as well. It’s my sense that they can now speak to voters who wouldn’t have listened before. And there’s real transformative potential there, I hope. What do you think?

Charen: I do. I agree. I mean, I think that’s what you’re seeing, for example, in a place like Texas. Texas, like, you know, that was just out of the question—not even remotely in the realm of possibility a year ago, right? And now James Talarico is doing incredibly well. And I don’t know if he’ll win, but the fact that we don’t know is amazing, in Texas.

So yes, I do think that the failure of Trump—and one more thing, though, to say. You were saying, you know, that you look at these numbers and you almost can’t believe how bad they are for Trump. And part of me is nodding along. The other part of me is saying, why did it take this? Why did it take so long for people to finally see the reality of how awful he is? I don’t know, but thankfully they are seeing it now.

Sargent: Yeah, that’s for sure. And there are new signs as well that Republicans are panicking. Politico reports that some of this is spurred by his new trade war with Canada and his plan to flood the country with foreign beef to bring down beef prices. Just going to read some quotes. GOP Representative Tim Burchett of Tennessee told Politico that the beef flooding is going to hurt small farmers and ranchers, and added: “I think it could hurt us at the polls.”

Meanwhile, you’ve got two Republican Senate candidates, Maine incumbent Susan Collins and John Sununu, who’s running in New Hampshire—they’re criticizing Trump’s trade war with Canada. West Virginia Senator Jim Justice said “folks out there” are “hurting.”

Mona, the trade war is really going to hit these Senate races in some of these very big states. How do we square all of this with Trump’s advisors telling him that the real problem is no one knows how great Trump is?

Charen: So look, part of this is just what happens to many presidents when, you know, they become isolated and they live in a bubble. Arguably it happened to Biden. Biden was out there saying, people don’t know all the great things I’ve done. Look at all the legislation we passed, et cetera, et cetera.

On the other hand, this is a particularly pathological kind of narcissism that Trump has. And he has only hired, in the second term, the kinds of people who will be yes-men and toadies and lackeys. And so he has made a kind of impenetrable bubble around himself.

He used to spend, in the first term—he spent a lot of time watching TV, and watching MSNBC at the time, and constantly, was responding to criticism of him. And in every speech, you could tell he’d been listening to his critics, because he would say, they say blah, blah, blah, you know, or, I’m not supposed to say this because they say, you know—that sort of little thing.

But he’s not doing that now. He’s not even responding, because he has sealed himself off. And he has surrounded himself with people who will facilitate that. I don’t want to go over the whole Natalie Harp thing again, but you know, her job was the human printer—the person who would simply deliver good news. And that is a fatal weakness for a would-be autocrat, because he loses touch with where the people are.

Sargent: The Natalie Harp parallel is interesting. Maybe the fact that Trump’s advisors are essentially acting as a bunch of Natalie Harps internally—it’s the Natalie Harp political strategy at work, really, isn’t it?

Charen: Yes.

Sargent: So, about the trade war with Canada—I still think that this is going to be a much bigger factor than people are noticing. Throughout the Midwest, you’ve got already a lot of pain from Trump’s tariffs. And you’ve got a lot of races in these regions that are going to decide this thing. And now you’ve just got Trump going out there saying, fuck you, Canada, I’m going to take Lake Ontario.

There’s not even a scintilla of any sense that he thinks he needs to talk to voters about how they might be experiencing what’s happening. And this trade war is going to hurt people. Republicans themselves are saying it.

Yet he’s just off in the bubble you’re talking about, thinking to himself that if I tweet a visual about Lake Ontario becoming Lake America, all of a sudden that’ll just make things politically right. What do you make of all that?

Charen: Welcome to the world of cartoons, which is where we live now. I mean, it is a cartoon. You’re going to impose tariffs? You’re going to respond with tariffs to my tariffs? Well, in that case, I’m going to—I’ll show you. I’m going to rename Lake Ontario. That’ll teach you. I mean, it is so juvenile and so dumb and embarrassing.

And by the way—I, you probably have Canadian listeners. I feel so terrible about what this country is doing to Canada, our great friend and neighbor who, we love. And it isn’t us, it’s just this moron in the White House who’s doing this. But I’m very, very sorry.

It is going to hurt the Canadians more than it hurts us. But that doesn’t mean it’s not going to hurt us. It’s going to hurt us a lot, which is why you have all of these Republicans—even Republicans—criticizing the trade war. And we have very important races in Maine and in Michigan and in Ohio, and places that are right on the border that are going to be very directly impacted.

We’ll all be impacted, but it is going to hurt people. And once again, it is just—he can’t escape responsibility, right? I mean, it’s just like we were talking about with the Iran war and with the earlier tariffs. This lands directly in his lap. It’s not anybody else’s fault. He can’t blame Biden, he can’t blame a virus. He did this. He’s doing this.

And people will know, when their toilet paper becomes unaffordable, and other things. That is, by the way, one of the things on the list—apparently we get our toilet paper from Canada. But yeah, so it’s going to be very significant politically, in just a few weeks.

Sargent: I agree. Mona Charen, thanks so much for coming on with us. Really great to talk to you, as always.

Charen: Likewise. Thanks, Greg.

A certain segment of American elites has recently realized that people don’t like AI, data centers, and the Silicon Valley oligarchy that is foisting these things upon this country.

One of the many blinking red lights for the AI industry came in the form of a Gallup survey in May. It found that a whopping 71 percent of Americans oppose the construction of new data centers in their communities to support the AI industry, with 48 percent of those polled saying they were strongly opposed. For comparison, Gallup noted that the peak opposition to nuclear power plants in one of its long-running surveys was only 63 percent.

Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer reported earlier this month that his own outlet’s survey found an extraordinary depth and breadth to public opposition to AI data centers. “Data centers are 43 points underwater with Republicans, 65 points underwater with independents, and 75 points underwater with Democrats,” he wrote. “Notably, local data centers are 63 points underwater with rural voters, a group that has skewed more Republican over the past decade.” In an age of hyperpartisanship, there’s something almost comforting about how many people, from all walks of life hate AI.

This opposition has translated into electoral blowback for AI companies and data center proponents. In Utah, longtime state senate president J. Stuart Adams lost his seat in a Republican primary in June over local opposition to a planned sprawling complex that would’ve transformed 40,000 acres in a rural county into the nation’s largest data center. Residents in Virginia, the world’s largest hub of data center infrastructure, and nearby Maryland have also ousted local officials over their support for the proposals.

Leaders in blue, purple, and red states are now scrambling to impose moratoriums and audits on future construction. Multiple state legislatures are considering bills that would repeal lucrative tax exemptions. Members of Congress have proposed a wave of new bills to halt data center construction, impose new environmental and energy restrictions on them, and/or tax them to offset the harms they represent.

AI’s problem is threefold. First, it is a fundamentally harmful product for American society. Second, it has been relentlessly marketed over the last few years as a fundamentally harmful product for society. Third, the AI industry’s grip on the economy and our nation’s politics is fairly brittle—at least for now.

We’ll start with the harms. The biggest one is jobs. Roughly 340 million people live in the United States. About 210 million of them working-age adults. They need employment to provide food, housing, transportation, and all the other necessities of life, both for themselves and the 72 million children they are raising. A further 75 million people depend on their payroll taxes to fund Social Security and to maintain the American economy, which keeps millions of Americans’ retirement portfolios from reaching zero.

I point out the obvious here because, according to the AI barons, their product threatens to wipe out a huge portion of those jobs, and with it, a large portion of the real economy. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told Axios last year that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next five years and spike unemployment levels to as high as 20 percent. That rate would rival the worst of the Great Depression. “Most of them are unaware that this is about to happen,” he told the news outlet. “It sounds crazy, and people just don’t believe it.”

Amodei now says he overstated the potential damage caused by AI, but he is far from alone. The dominant messaging from AI companies is that they will make large swaths of the American economy automated and their current workforces obsolete. Numerous companies have fired thousands of employees hoping that AI could pick up the slack—or disguising layoffs by blaming AI—while applying for jobs is now a Kafkaesque nightmare. AI’s ultimate purpose is to create a world without labor costs—salaries, health insurance, paid time off, and so on—without really caring what happens to labor itself along the way. As The New Republic contributor Brian T. O’Connor noted back in June, certain CEOs have turned the layoff process into a reason for braggadocio—the better to demonstrate to investors that they’re only too eager to replace their workforce with AI.

Some AI proponents, like xAI’s Elon Musk and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, have suggested from time to time that universal basic income could offset these problems. Even if that were true, they have also taken practically zero steps to make it happen. (Musk, for his part, has argued vociferously against a social-safety net since his far-right turn over the last decade.) Instead these tech barons have put tremendous resources into building their own personal compounds designed to keep out angry mobs and ride out a potential societal collapse.

AI could allow rogue scientists to generate lethal super-viruses. It could hack into companies, banks, and governments to steal your personal and financial information. (An OpenAI test model, in fact, hacked a rival company’s servers just a few weeks ago.) It could wage cyberwarfare against national infrastructure without hesitation or conscience. It could wage actual wars by operating fleets of armed drones, as we’ve seen in the war between Russia and Ukraine. It could enable dystopian levels of government surveillance, as seen by the parallel ongoing backlash against Flock cameras.

All of this is before I get to what AI is actually used for. What it really allows is fabrication, in the sense that people can do or make fake things. AI encourages a society where people lie about their own capabilities. It can simulate knowledge and intelligence without any of the thought or effort that make it possible. At worst, it offloads a person’s mental capabilities and may ultimately diminish them, causing “cognitive atrophy.” Schools and universities are confronting an epidemic of AI-driven cheating and plagiarism by students, harming their long-term educational performance. In short, AI appears to be making people dumber and less trustworthy.

AI companies know this and don’t care. Google briefly allowed people to use AI to generate false images on Google Maps earlier this summer, including scenes of destruction of major landmarks. I cannot possibly imagine a good use for this; tech companies are just releasing products into the wild to see what happens at this point. Elon Musk’s xAI company is suing the state of Minnesota to challenge its anti-deepfake law, arguing that it has a First Amendment right to algorithically generate fake nude images of real people without their consent. (Imagine explaining that sentence to James Madison.) The Trump Justice Department is supporting them in federal court.

There is no real social value or moral justification for using AI. Some proponents now claim that it could be used to invent new medicines or diagnose illnesses more quickly, hoping that this would blind us to the deeper harms. More troubling is how aggressively AI proponents actively praise its harms. It’s as if the good people at Phillip Morris and R.J. Reynolds wouldn’t shut up about how much their cigarettes cause cancer or bragged about how much secondhand smoke they produced.

Silicon Valley used to be good at designing and marketing products that people want to use. Now it is almost cartoonishly bad at it. An insulated coterie of Bay Area venture capitalists and CEOs appear largely detached from what ordinary people want and need.

Earlier this month, ChatGPT CEO Sam Altman offered what he thought was a fun use-case for his company’s product. “Cool use case of chatgpt work I heard last night: connect your family calendars and explain your kids’ interests,” he wrote. “Every morning for the drive to school, have it make a podcast that talks about one kid’s soccer game that afternoon, one kid’s upcoming birthday, some news, etc.”

Twitter’s reaction was sharply negative, as best summarized by a response from Gravity Falls creator Alex Hirsch: “What if you just talked to your children?” Some AI enthusiasts and proponents seem eager to replace vital aspects of the human experience with soulless, heartless computer interactions. Many Americans are so far unwilling to do so.

Back in 2023, Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen wrote an essay titled “Why AI Will Save the World.” His eagerness to promote AI as a public good is unsurprising since his venture-capital firm is intertwined with so many AI startups that the Justice Department has reportedly opened an antitrust investigation into it. I wrote about his essay-slash-manifesto a few years ago in the context of our Second Gilded Age, in which Andreessen plays a central role.

In the essay, Andreessen asked readers to consider “what it would mean for literally all existing human labor to be replaced by machines.” He argued that it would lead to an “absolutely stratospheric” increase in “economic productivity growth,” one where “prices of existing goods and services would drop across the board to virtually zero” and “consumer spending power would skyrocket.” I am unsure how an economic system can have all three things of those things at the same time.

To usher in this imminent utopian age, Andreessen said, Americans need only let his AI companies do whatever they want as long as it didn’t threaten other AI companies and their investors. “Big AI companies should be allowed to build AI as fast and aggressively as they can—but not allowed to achieve regulatory capture, not allowed to establish a government-protect[ed] cartel that is insulated from market competition due to incorrect claims of AI risk,” he argued. And if you don’t, he said, China will win the AI race instead, injecting a little bit of nationalistic fervor into the mix.

Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg published his own AI manifesto earlier this month that was, to his credit, slightly more down-to-earth. He emphasized the widespread value of agentic AI, where each person would have an “exceptionally capable personal agent that understands your goals, and everything you care about,” all through a Meta-equipped device. This agent would “work 24/7 on your behalf to improve your relationships, health, career, finances, home management, hobbies, and more. It will free up time for the things you enjoy, and help you accomplish more than you could otherwise.”

That doesn’t sound so bad, right? One problem is that there isn’t really a need for it beyond mere convenience. I am skeptical that the AI industry has spent trillions of dollars to help me figure out who the Los Angeles Dodgers are playing this week or when my wife gets home from work, especially when Silicon Valley’s existing products already help me with those tasks. I’m sure there are some people who would enjoy that. No doubt a few of them will email me about it after this is published. But it seems like an extraordinary gamble to assume there will be a critical mass of users willing to pay for it, and insufficient to justify the knock-on harms that AI will also bring.

All of those manifestos may sound good to Silicon Valley venture capitalists but hold little water for anyone else. For the average American, AI destroys far more than it creates. Most Americans can’t do much about LLM model guardrails or Silicon Valley capital allocation, but they can do something about data centers. The physical incarnation of our prophecied digital overlords are the soft underbelly of Silicon Valley’s dominant business model.

Data centers by themselves do not create many jobs. Constructing them does create growth in construction sectors while they are built, of course, but they do not produce lasting economic benefits for a community. AI proponents tend to obscure this by lumping together the short-term construction work needed to build them and the permanent staff needed to maintain them. The Wall Street Journal reported last year that an OpenAI facility in Abilene, Texas, employed about 1,500 people to build it and will only need about 100 employees to operate it.

Another perennial concern is the energy cost of running a data center. Many Americans now associate them with rising utilities costs. New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced the nation’s first statewide moratorium on data centers partially in response to concerns about the impact on electricity and water resources for New Yorkers. “As data center development threatens to hike up utility bills, deplete our natural resources, and create uncertainty for New Yorkers, it’s my responsibility to take action and lead,” she said in a statement.

So too did Texas Governor Greg Abbott, whose state has a separate electrical grid from the rest of the nation. His office revealed earlier this month that ERCOT, the state grid operator, was considering “approximately over 474 gigawatts of requests to connect to the Texas grid,” which alone represents more than five times the state’s record for peak electricity demand. About 90 percent of that energy would go to planned data-center projects, the governor’s office said.

Tech companies have tried to allay these concerns by building on-site power generation as well. In theory, this should be a win-win: Data centers get the power they need without driving up costs for nearby residents, while operators can theoretically shunt the excess load into the grid and lower costs all around. But this has only created other problems: Many data centers, especially in red states, have opted to quickly build gas plants to provide those power needs.

A report by InsideClimateNews earlier this week estimated that roughly a dozen gas plants in the planning stages for data centers in Texas would emit more than 100 million tons of carbon emissions every year, which the outlet compared to the annual emissions of a “mid-sized industrialized country.” This problem is not exclusive to Texas, either: The Guardian recently reported that two planned data centers in central England would produce more carbon emissions than ExxonMobil. Even if the AI doomers are wrong about its apocalyptic capabilities, the infrastructure behind AI might make it impossible to stave off the worst effects of climate change.

The Trump administration also plans to make it harder for Americans to learn about and respond to the impact of these plants on their local communities. Earlier this week, the Environmental Protection Agency reportedly moved to scrap a federal rule that requires states to announce and receive public feedback on air-pollution permit applications for data centers and their power plants. This would make it much harder for communities to challenge the construction of plants that would release hazardous chemicals into the air, with a host of downstream health effects for residents.

Tradeoffs are common when talking about modern industry, and we often accept them if only on a subconscious level. Abolishing oil and gas consumption would solve climate change overnight while also collapsing our civilization. With AI, any benefits for the average American are marginal at best, while the immense personal and societal costs are immediate and increasingly visible.

The data-center backlash, which The New Republic contributor J.J. Anselmi explored in interviews with people across several states who have have had their lives upended by these projects, has helped expose just how fragile the pro-AI coalition currently is. For one thing, AI’s small personnel footprint also shrinks its power as a political constituency. It is easy for elected officials to turn against AI when so few of their voters are employed by the industry or benefit from its existence. Widespread adoption of AI has also been largely involuntary, meaning there is a limited groundswell of genuine users to champion it. Were it not for our largely deregulated campaign-finance system, the AI industry would likely be in far greater peril than it currently is.

Silicon Valley’s top leaders also made a disastrous choice two years ago by throwing in their lot with President Donald Trump. There may have received some immediate benefits from this alliance in the form of deregulation and federal funding. The long-term costs of the association will likely be far greater. Linking the industry with the most divisive figure in American public life, one whose majority-level public support after the 2024 election eroded almost immediately. Ironically, his illegal war against Iran also caused an energy price shock that many red-state Americans are probably more willing to blame on AI data centers than Trump’s Middle East mistakes.

If there is one thing to take heart from, it is that the AI backlash exists at all. After the 2024 election, there was a palpable sense in elite tech circles that they had somehow permanently solved politics—that their newfound alliance with the MAGA movement would supercharge a new golden age for the American tech industry, making all of them important and influential and fabulously wealthy. What they are experiencing now is a blunt, painful reminder that 340 million other people live in this country with the oligarchs, and they still get a say in how things work for now.

The sweeping success of progressive candidates this election season and the rapid growth of the group with which many of them are aligned—the Democratic Socialists of America—has triggered a spate of recent articles that range from sympathetic handwringing over these political upstarts to thinly veiled suggestions of hypocrisy.

Journalists at The New York Times stalked Gustavo Gordillo, co-chair of New York’s DSA chapter, to figure out whether he actually lived in the million-dollar rowhouse owned by his wealthy father, explaining that the “question was relevant, in part, because many of the high-profile activists are the offspring of affluent parents who have not experienced working class life and basic financial pressures, like paying rent.” The New Yorker’s Jay Caspian Kang, meanwhile, has penned two essays this month attempting to explain the rise of the “Subaru socialists,” and last week The Atlantic’s Tyler Austin Harper elucidated why “rich kids love socialism.” The New Republic, too, has weighed in on the “problem of middle-class socialism,” with Vinnie Rotondaro raising “concern” that the DSA “simply is not a working-class organization.” (Conservative media, of course, has been much more withering, such as this New York Post editorial on Monday: “Are they Democrat socialists or just deadbeat scammers?”)

Attacks on the privilege of American democratic socialists emerge from a long history of epithets: champagne socialist, cashmere communist, Bollinger Bolsheviks, Neiman Marxists, gauche caviar, or more recently, Lulu Lenins. Critics have derided Senator Bernie Sanders for owning three homes and cast aspersions on Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for spending $250 on her hair. Whether these charges of hypocrisy come from liberals or conservatives, the idea is that middle-class activists can’t possibly represent the interests of the working class because they don’t share their economic circumstances.

This is silly. Why would you have to be poor to hate poverty? It’s like saying you must have cancer before you’re allowed to want it cured. People of all political persuasions care about the welfare of others. Even staunch anti-socialists like Friedrich Hayek agreed that there should be some basic level of social protection for workers: “some minimum of food, shelter and clothing, sufficient to preserve health” and “a comprehensive system of social insurance in providing for those common hazards of life against which few can make adequate provision.”

More important is the rational belief that life might be better for everyone, including the wealthy, if our society’s vast resources were shared in a more egalitarian manner. One of the most prominent philosophical defenders of liberty, John Stuart Mill, declared himself a socialist on utilitarian grounds. The sum total of well-being, he believed, would be greater after a fairer distribution of wealth. Just because you are at the front of the rat race doesn’t change the fact that it is a rat race.

The middle-class origins of prominent leftist leaders is not at all unique to the United States. Political activists have debated Vladimir Lenin’s theory of vanguardism against Antonio Gramsci’s theory of the “organic intellectual” for over a century. But from its very roots, the fight to end exploitation relied heavily on the leadership and resources of those most privileged by the system they hoped to overthrow. Friedrich Engels, co-author of The Communist Manifesto, was the educated son of a wealthy German textile industrialist who bankrolled Karl Marx’s work in England for years. For his 1845 book, The Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels toured cities like Manchester and Liverpool, where the earnest 24-year-old witnessed atrocious living standards. Cramped quarters and lack of basic sanitation meant that workers died from cholera, typhus, and smallpox at four times the rate as people in the surrounding countryside, potentially unleashing epidemics that affected all members of society.

In imperial Russia, the abuses of the despotic Romanov Dynasty grew unbearable by the early twentieth century. Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin) hailed from a comfortable middle-class family with aristocratic roots. Largely apolitical in youth, Lenin was only radicalized after the Tsar’s regime executed his older brother at the age of 21. The polyglot Alexandra Kollontai, the first Bolshevik Commissar of Social Welfare and later Soviet ambassador to Norway, Mexico, and Sweden, was the daughter of a Ukrainian nobleman who traced his lineage back to the thirteenth century. Her own fervent embrace of socialism followed the tour of a textile mill in Narva where she found children playing around a dead baby on the floor in the workers’ dormitory. 

Closer to our time, Fulgencio Batista was the military dictator of Cuba who tortured and murdered his own people to maintain power between 1952 and 1959. Fidel and Raul Castro were the sons of a wealthy Spanish farmer. Fidel was studying law at the University of Havana before he became a student activist. Che Guevara was the scion of a high-status Argentine family studying to be a doctor. Vilma Espín, a revolutionary leader and later president of the Federation of Cuban Women, studied chemical engineering and sang soprano in the university choir in Santiago de Cuba. Her wealthy father even sent her north to MIT for a year in a futile bid to dissuade her socialist sympathies.

Over in Tanzania, Julius Nyerere, one of the fathers of African socialism, was the son of a tribal chief. He worked as a schoolteacher and attended university in Scotland before returning to lead his country’s struggle for national independence against the continued brutalities of British colonial rule. And in Social Democratic Sweden, the long-serving, left-wing prime minister, Olof Palme, came from an upper-class, conservative Lutheran family with deep ties to Scandinavian royalty. He attributed his own radicalization to his time as a student at Kenyon College in Ohio, where he wrote an honors thesis on the United Auto Workers union. He despised the deep American class divide and abhorred the racism he witnessed against Black people.

Whatever your opinion of previous experiments with different varieties of socialism, their leaders all fought against corrupt, unjust, and violent systems of oppression that eventually crumbled in the face of popular resistance. When judging the merits of economic and political systems, it helps to have time and energy. It also helps to know about the past, which often means having a good university education.

For fifteen years, I taught courses on these complicated histories at Zohran Mamdani’s alma mater, Bowdoin College, which is one of those idyllic “potted Ivies” of the northeast where professors get to know their students. I also once served as the faculty liaison to our campus affiliate of the Young Democratic Socialists of America—which has been racking up off-campus victories of late—and later worked with other progressive clubs. Although I never had Mamdani in class, I’ve engaged with students from all socio-economic backgrounds, and witnessed firsthand how harsh economic realities sometimes erode political conviction.

My working-class students—smart, industrious, and making the most out of generous financial aid packages—loved learning about progressive history but often didn’t have the luxury of sustained activism after graduation. I’ve sat across many a first-generation or immigrant student explaining their resigned choice to go into banking, consulting, or finance. One student needed to help his younger sister get through college. Another wanted to earn a big salary to help pay for her uninsured mother’s medical care.

It was usually the more privileged students who chose the life of non-profit work or grassroots organizing. Rather than just cosplaying at socialism, many remain deeply committed activists who practice cross-class solidarity. They are well-educated about the past successes and failures of different socialist policies in different international contexts. They have studied political strategy and have the social capital necessary to maneuver within the duplicitous corridors of power. They enjoy a safety net which allows them to take chances, to pursue their ideals of making this country a place where everyone enjoys some level of basic security.

Demanding that fighters for the working class should only come from their ranks is a disingenuous way to shut down necessary discussions about severe economic inequality. Rather than debating whether these activists and politicians are hypocrites, we should admire their resolve to fight against their own comfortable status quo.

“I never want to repeat myself, and all my films have been on the money,” said Sir Ridley Scott, promoting his new film, The Dog Stars. “I’ve been ahead of the game frequently, and if you’re ahead of the game, you’re an influencer. So I’m not a filmmaker, I’m an influencer.” 

This quote is certainly on the money, insofar as it exemplifies its source’s robust—some might say megalomaniacal—sense of self-regard. If there’s one prerequisite for any filmmaker determined to produce mega-budget epics at regular intervals for 50 years, it’s a healthy ego. At 88, Sir Ridley is in fighting trim. He’s always good for a quote; the press tours for Napoleon and Gladiator II were exponentially more entertaining than the plodding, pachydermatous movies that they were attached to. Scott has his champions among the auteurist set, but his legacy is more set as an industrial-strength craftsman than a vanguard artist. He’s got a keen eye and the instincts of an adman; his default mode is in the hard sell. With this in mind, his comment indicates something more than brand-name bravado; beneath the bluster, you can hear a veteran pro’s anxieties about wanting to remain in the conversation.

The leads of The Dog Stars could not be more Instagram-ready. Jacob Elordi and Margaret Qualley are authentic Gen-Z A-listers, and well matched as romantic leads. The postapocalyptic setting of Scott’s film, adapted from Peter Heller’s 2012 bestseller about the ravages of a global influenza, positions the characters as the last hope for humankind, the long and lanky duo who might just repopulate the world with giraffe-like children. To the extent that there’s an influencer vibe here, it’s a reactionary one. It’s a curiously—and perhaps unconsciously—trad-coded blockbuster, suffused with longing for both bygone movie genres (it’s got the pacing and iconography of an old-school Western) and an analog way of life. Despite the 2035 dateline and armory’s worth of sophisticated weaponry—necessary accessories for good guys trying to hack it in bad times—The Dog Stars glances backward; its future-shock setup belies a yearning for the cozy comforts of yesteryear.

The idea that the end of the world as we know it might paradoxically return us to the primal scene is not exactly novel. Just last year, Danny Boyle and Alex Garland did a brilliant job of collapsing together various eras of British history into the numinous ruins of 28 Years Later; even more recently, David Robert Mitchell’s The End of Oak Street mulched together Reagan-era Americana and Cretaceous flora and fauna to fertilize a sly allegory about our perpetual proximity to extinction.

Scott is not breaking new ground so much as hovering over it. The Dog Stars opens with a series of breathtaking aerial shots that map the fallout of a plague that stopped humanity in its tracks. The hollowed-out labyrinth where the camera finally comes to rest is Denver, or what’s left of it; an image of the local basketball arena, its electronic signage still flickering faintly decades after the final buzzer, makes one wonder if Nikola Jokić made it out alive. 

Scott’s images are loquacious and even eloquent; the film’s problems begin when the characters open their mouths.  

We’re never told what caused the outbreak, or why a small portion of the population survived; Scott is an adroit enough visual storyteller that the lack of outright exposition doesn’t matter. The opening section of The Dog Stars is, in its way, rather gorgeous, and reinforces Scott’s status as a master of landscapes, especially when seen from a godlike remove: Think of the lunar vistas of Thelma and Louise, or the charbroiled ziggurats adorning Blade Runner. His hushed tableaus of a fallen metropolis evoke journalist Alan Weisman’s 2007 thought experiment, The World Without Us: “The Earth holds ghosts, even of entire nations.” Scott’s images are loquacious and even eloquent; the film’s problems begin when the characters open their mouths.  

“Civilization’s mask had to come off for you to see it,” snarls Bangley (Josh Brolin), an ex-Marine living on a sprawling, heavily fortified ranch a few clicks from the city on the other side of Colorado’s towering Front Range. He’s talking to—or at—his fellow survivor Hig (Elordi), a mechanic and civilian pilot who’s determined to keep up appearances. Bangley’s worldview basically boils down to shoot first and ask questions later; his rhetoric is as steady as his trigger finger. Hig, though, is compelled to turn the other cheek; during one of his regular flights into town to gather supplies and pay respects at the graveside of his late wife—who died from the flu a few months after suffering a miscarriage—he spares a crossbow-wielding stranger who’s fixing to mow him down. Hig is handy with a wrench and a rifle and makes a good beef stew; his real superpower, though, is optimism. He holds fast to the idea that somewhere beyond the Rockies, there’s a brave new world, or maybe a remnant of the old one; he’s even potentially willing to fly away in search of it.

That anguished wanderlust kicks into high gear after a failed raid on the compound by a cabal of Gothy marauders seemingly on loan from Cormac McCarthy. (An alternate title for Heller’s nicely written but derivative source novel could have been: The Middle of the Road.) That bloody nighttime siege leaves Bangley and Hig unscathed but results in the death of the latter’s beloved dog Jasper—his co-pilot, traveling companion, and comfort animal. (The film’s title refers to a constellation named in the pooch’s image.) In the book, Hig’s pal was an Australian cattle dog, but it seems Bluey has cornered the pop-culture market on Heelers; the trio of Belgian Malinois deployed to play Jasper have true star wattage. 

Jasper’s demise robs the movie of its most appealing presence; Elordi’s puppy-dog eyes are a poor substitute. Hig decides to fly away, and Bangley—always a pragmatist—offers him a going-away present in the form of a bag of grenades, which he advises should be dropped from a great height. (Somewhere, the ghost of Anton Chekhov is smiling wryly.) Our hero’s vision quest doesn’t go smoothly; he’s downed by a leaky fuel tank and nearly flattened upon landfall by a stampede of CGI buffalo. His salvation arrives in the form of Cima (Qualley), who materializes out of the woods the very picture of a homesteader, clad fetchingly in denim and trailing her very own pet donkey. 

Cima lives on a secluded farm of her own with her Pops, who’s actually named Pops and played beneath a bushy beard by Guy Pearce. (Like Brolin, Pearce is too good for this but he gives good coot all the same; his reaction to being offered his first cigarette in decades is sweetly funny.) Cima’s also handy with a wrench and a rifle, and skillful with a skillet; she has a wedding ring and a sob story to rival her visitor’s. “You aren’t the only one who’s grieving,” she yelps, a few evenings into their outdoorsy courtship, after Hig rebuffs her advances in his sleeping bag. Meanwhile, back on the (other) ranch, Bangley sips scotch and makes a series of lonely preparations to repel yet another round of intruders, prompting us to wonder if Hig is going to finally kiss Cima (or Pops) and then fix his plane in time to fly back and save his buddy.

For a movie set in a wasteland, The Dog Stars is cluttered with plot points and symbolic gimmicks; the pileup distracts from the fact that it isn’t really about anything at all. When Scott gets a good script, like the one for 2021’s The Last Duel, he’s a percussive storyteller, but he doesn’t have the sort of curiosity to push through or against subpar material. His much-vaunted professionalism is a form of detachment, and while The Dog Stars isn’t as inept and soulless as Gladiator II—a woebegone blockbuster without a single memorable shot or piece of dialogue—it treads the path of least resistance. The film moves with purpose but not urgency; screenwriter Mark H. Hall, who did the picaresque thing more successfully in The Revenant, embraces narrative and character clichés like long-lost friends.

The cringiest bits in The Dog Stars oblige Elordi and Qualley to do some meet-cute shtick as a means of goldbricking between action set pieces. And, later, a moment where Hig asks Cima to close her eyes and tenderly places a pair of headphones over her ears hints that not even the apocalypse can extinguish memories of Garden State. (Sadly, the song he plays for her isn’t up to the level of “The New Slang.”) When The Dog Stars isn’t being goofy, it’s going nuts, as in an extended, hallucinatory detour to a far-flung airport staffed by waxy psychopaths (including Alison Janney in old-timey stewardess garb). This passage is styled, for whatever reason, like the Overlook Hotel from The Shining: Call it the Executive Lounge of the Damned.

There is plenty of gratuitous violence, including a gnarly decapitation involving a propeller blade; the geysers of blood don’t alleviate the boredom.

The wild tonal shift of the airport sequence is the most interesting thing about The Dog Stars. It doesn’t work in the context of the movie, but it’s a reminder that Scott is often at his best when he lets his freak flag fly: Who can forget Michael Fassbender seducing his own doppelgänger while playing a pan flute for two in Alien Covenant? (“I’ll do the fingering”). There is plenty of gratuitous violence, including a gnarly decapitation involving a propeller blade; the geysers of blood don’t alleviate the boredom. The extended scenes of Brolin mowing down feral, Mad Max–style gang-bangers through night-vision goggles recall the behind-enemy-lines firefights of Black Hawk Down (one of the most racist studio films of the twenty-first century; Quentin Tarantino loves it) and yet Scott can’t even work up that movie’s atmosphere of stark, pressurized terror. 

The common denominator between the corn and carnage is the sense of journeyman on cruise control, drifting toward a coda so banal—barn dances and potlucks and contented canoodling beneath the Dog Stars—that we can’t help but lean in and squint, as if to see the quotation marks around the images, as in the director’s cut of Blade Runner. But there aren’t any. Scott’s cynicism has sometimes been his saving grace, but not here; in this case being on the money means playing strictly to the cheap seats. It’s good to know that Scott doesn’t want to repeat himself, because The Dog Stars is one of his weakest features—a slick, frictionless hymn to the endurance of the human spirit; it will itself be lost in time, like slop in rain. 

On the day we met in early June, Philip “P.J.” Haynie III’s gears had ground him awake just before 4:30 a.m. By the time I got into his truck, he had already spent the morning farming in his head. Rain was coming at 10 a.m.—half a day earlier than previously forecast, but still three hours out—and Haynie was rearranging the day’s chores, toggling between calls to his crews at two farms. In eastern Arkansas, where I’d watched his tractor kick up big clouds of Delta dust as it prepared seedbeds, drainage ditches that could wait yesterday needed to be quickly put in today, before the sky opened. “These big old flat fields don’t drain very well,” he explained to me, and a downpour threatened to drown the young plants. There was a newly planted field of rice—still germinating underground, shoots not yet poking through the soil—that needed spraying, so that the rain could seep the herbicide into the ground.

But at the southern farm, an hour and a half away, the rain threatened the herbicide’s effectiveness. “I need a good hour of drying time so the herbicide dries on the plant before the rain washes it off,” Haynie told me. Between the two farms there were nine men, six machines running, and a Delta sky so wide you can see weather coming miles ahead of time. “I’ve got to watch this weather and stop their spraying before the rain starts down there.”

Haynie—broad-shouldered, quick to smile, with the restless energy of someone perpetually calculating what comes next—is a fifth-generation Black row crop farmer who farms land split between Virginia and Arkansas. The United States Department of Agriculture, or USDA, has an admitted history of denying and intentionally delaying loans to Black farmers—driving tens of thousands of them into foreclosure and transferring nearly 16 million acres of their land into white hands. This history renders Haynie a rarity in U.S. agriculture. That he is also one of the few Black farmers who grows rice—a crop requiring expensive irrigation, precision-leveled fields, and specialized equipment—is yet another legacy of USDA racial discrimination and exclusion.

Haynie is careful not to reduce Black farmers to what he calls “woe is me” narratives. Not because he minimizes history—few people speak more bluntly about it—but because there’s more to the story. He spends equal time trying to engage Black kids in farming as he does explaining why so few Black farmers remain. “There are more bald eagles in the lower 48 states than there are Black farmers,” he tells me. He had just finished talking about the federal programs created, enacted, and expanded to save one endangered species from extinction. Haynie is doing all he can to ensure another doesn’t disappear.

“Mother Nature drives our bus,” Haynie is fond of saying. The weather may determine a day’s work, but federal policy has too often seemed determined to separate Black farmers from their land. As Donald Trump’s tariffs and trade wars exacerbate one of the worst agriculture crises in decades, his administration has scrapped USDA programs designed to help remedy that history. Haynie is fighting to ensure Black farmers have a future—by not just surviving, but trying to forge one.

From the Beginning, False Promises

That so few Black farmers remain is neither accidental nor inevitable. Haynie is one of roughly 46,000 Black farmers in the United States today—just 1.4 percent of all American farmers, down from 14 percent in 1920 (Black farmers themselves contend that even the 1.4 percent figure is inflated). There are today just barely 30,000 Black-owned farms, mostly in the Deep South—with more than 11,000 Black farmers in Texas alone—covering roughly three million acres.

That so few Black farmers remain is neither accidental nor inevitable. Haynie is one of roughly 46,000 Black farmers in the United States today—just 1.4 percent of all American farmers, down from 14 percent in 1920.

The first great post-emancipation betrayal of Black Americans was, of course, over land. At the end of the Civil War, the federal government had its earliest chance—of what would later be many—to make a good-faith attempt at recompense for nearly 250 years of brutal chattel slavery by creating a Black landowning class. Instead, it restored the very white planter class that had waged war against the United States to preserve slavery. Thus, the famous promise of “40 acres and mule” to the formerly enslaved went unfulfilled. Union General William Tecumseh Sherman gave the order, and 400,000 confiscated coastal acres were given to freed families. But within a few months, President Andrew Johnson rescinded Sherman’s order, pardoned former Confederates, and forced Black families off the land.

The famous promise of “40 acres and mule” to the formerly enslaved went unfulfilled. Union General William Tecumseh Sherman gave the order, but within a few months, President Andrew Johnson rescinded it and forced Black families off the land.

That remains this country’s most infamous Black land betrayal, but even that was hardly the first. The 1850 Donation Land Act offered parcels of Oregon Territory land to “every white settler,” but excluded Black people. The citizenship requirement for the 1862 Homestead Act—signed days after Congress created the USDA—implicitly excluded both free and enslaved Black folks, whom the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision had declared incapable of citizenship. An estimated 93 million living Americans descend from those original homesteaders. As sociologist Thomas Shapiro has argued, that means roughly one-quarter of the country’s current population “potentially traces its legacy of property ownership, upward mobility, economic stability, class status, and wealth directly to one national policy—a policy that in practice essentially excluded African Americans.”

Between emancipation in 1865 and 1910, against every obstacle the country could construct, Black Americans—nearly all of them formerly enslaved or just one generation removed from enslavement—managed to acquire an estimated 16 to 19 million acres of farmland. But over the twentieth century, roughly 90 percent of it was lost.

Historically, the theft of Black farmers’ land has been both extrajudicial and institutional. Terrorist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan and White Caps—racist, masked paramilitary groups who operated in the South—drove Black farmers off their land at gunpoint. So did ordinary white mobs, as in the 1919 Elaine Massacre, when hundreds of Black farmers in Arkansas were killed merely for gathering to organize for fair cotton prices. A decades-old Associated Press investigation found tens of thousands of additional acres stolen through these and other means—land that has since become, in just a few of the many documented cases, “a country club in Virginia, oilfields in Mississippi, a baseball spring-training facility in Florida.”

Institutionally, most Black land was stolen through the ordinary machinations of the government. The USDA’s discrimination against Black farmers is among the best documented examples of racial discrimination in American history. Government reports dating back to 1965, including by the USDA itself, document how the agency’s racist loan denials and intentional delays, discriminatory debt collection, foreclosures, and other practices stripped Black farmers of their land. No policy would facilitate that discrimination more than the New Deal decision to leave the administration of federal farm programs in local hands.

In exchange for supporting Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s programs, Southern Democrats demanded that the agency’s loans, subsidies, and modernization funds remain under local control. The 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act gave them what they wanted in the form of county committees—elected panels of white landowners, often literal heirs of the Confederate planter class, who decided how USDA funds were steered across the Jim Crow South. Thomas W. Mitchell, a 2020 MacArthur fellow and property law scholar at Boston College, noted they were charged with making “decisions that determine whether a farmer will be successful or unsuccessful.”

“And perhaps not surprisingly, you have a certain percentage of these farmers who are racist,” he told me, “and they do whatever they can to suppress Black farmers’ ability to succeed.”

“They would delay loans for Black farmers and wouldn’t approve them until June,” Haynie told me. “When June comes around, it’s too late to plant corn. But because you put it on your crop budget, you have to plant corn. When the neighbors who planted in April are yielding 200 bushels, yours is only yielding 100. And at 100 bushels, you can’t repay your loan.”

The technological advances that followed World War II would only exacerbate the divide. Dewayne Goldmon, the USDA’s senior adviser for racial equity under the Biden administration and a third-generation Black Arkansas farmer, identifies this as one of the “big government winks and nods that allowed the system to manifest itself.”

“When farming shifted from manpower to machines that cost more but were more efficient, you had to have the up-front capital to acquire those machines, and if you didn’t, your fallback position was to keep doing it the way Daddy and Granddaddy did it—and not being able to follow the modern trends of agriculture,” Goldmon told me. “Knowing what to do on a farm and having the resources to do it are two totally different things, and that’s where discrimination can really play an unfair role.”

The “prevailing practice” in local USDA offices—including the arm that provides loans, disaster assistance, and other forms of aid to farmers—was to “follow local patterns of racial segregation and discrimination in providing assistance paid for by Federal funds,” according to a 1965 government study. “Equal Opportunity in Farm Programs,” a Great Society–era report, was the first to formally document the racism Black farmers had always known. It changed almost nothing.

Finally, a Little Progress—and Immediate Backlash

More than three decades later, in a 1998 report, the USDA’s own advisory commission report noted the “blatant discrimination” Black farmers were subjected to; another from the same era cited “years of bias, hostility, greed, ruthlessness, rudeness, and indifference not only by USDA employees, but also by the local county committees.” That was the same year that P.J., who was about to graduate from college, and his father had a local USDA employee pull a gun on them.

Finally, some hope: Pigford v. Glickman was a landmark 1999 class-action lawsuit in which Black farmers were found, as a class, to have endured decades of USDA discrimination so systematic that a federal court estimated it to be worth at least $2.25 billion in restitution. Even the judge approving the settlement acknowledged that the story began over 100 years before the lawsuit. Instead of civil rights law or legal citations, his ruling opened with the words, “Forty acres and a mule.” The settlement could not possibly “undo all that has been done,” he wrote, but was merely “a good first step” toward ending the discrimination “visited on African American farmers since Reconstruction.”

The optimism was short-lived. To enumerate everything that went wrong with Pigford is an article in itself (and is one I’ve written before). Of roughly 22,700 claimants, fewer than 400 ever received any debt relief. Despite Black farmers’ class win, “the Justice Department opposed blanket mediation, arguing that each case had to be investigated separately,” according to the Congressional Research Service. In effect, Black farmers had to individually relitigate and again prove their victimization to collect. The George W. Bush–era Justice Department spent $12 million and 56,000 attorneys’ billable hours fighting farmers’ claims. In 2010, President Barack Obama and Congress authorized another $1.25 billion in debt cancellation, dubbed Pigford II, to make up for those errors, but few Black farmers were made whole. A federal appeals court wrote that class counsel’s incompetence in the 1999 Pigford case had caused Black farmers to suffer a “double betrayal: first by the Department and then by their own lawyers.” Counsel would ultimately collect more than $100 million across two settlements, despite nearly all of their clients getting nothing.

But organizing never stopped. Lawrence Lucas, president emeritus of the USDA Coalition of Minority Employees, and Lloyd Wright, who had led the USDA’s Civil Rights Office under both Bill Clinton and Obama, were among a coalition of Black farmer advocates who spent years building the legal and political groundwork for more. In 2019, that coalition sent an open letter to presidential candidate Senator Elizabeth Warren that helped push the issue onto the national agenda. “We want something very simple, something that white farmers in this country have enjoyed for more than a century,” the letter stated. “We want a department that works for us, not against us.” The following year, New Jersey Democratic Senator Cory Booker introduced the 2020 Justice for Black Farmers Act. It was the murder of George Floyd, and the brief window for anti-racist policymaking that followed, that pushed the federal government to at last take action. In 2021, President Joe Biden signed legislation to provide roughly $4 billion in debt cancellation for Black and other “socially disadvantaged” farmers.

The amount was, in reality, modest. The bitter irony of the legislation was that it applied only to farmers with USDA loans, which few Black farmers—Wright estimated less than 8 percent—had received, precisely because of the USDA’s racist lending history. It did not mandate removal of staff in the USDA’s local agency offices, where officials “regularly engage in many types of discriminatory conduct,” according to the Committee on Government Operations report. Nor did it promise to return any of the millions of acres of land stolen. Mitchell, the property law expert, co-wrote a 2022 study published in the American Economic Association’s AEA Papers and Proceedings journal, with economists Dania V. Francis and Darrick Hamilton, along with two other experts, that conservatively valued the land lost by Black farmers between 1920 and 1997 at $326 billion.

“Our estimate is conservative for a couple of reasons. It only accounts for land lost between 1920 and 1997. There was land lost before 1920, and land lost after 1997. And our research team made decisions to use conservative assumptions about compounding interest,” Mitchell told me. “But what we don’t do in that study is talk about the additional consequences of losing that land—how it could’ve been leveraged to generate further economic mobility, to finance children’s higher education. All we did was look at how the land would’ve appreciated over time. We didn’t do a deeper dive on how that landownership could’ve generated all this other wealth.”

And still, America First Legal—the right-wing legal foundation co-founded by extremist Trump aide Stephen Miller, who is not a lawyer—quickly sued to stop it. AFL, which had announced its launch less than a month before, boasted it was “led by senior members of the Trump Administration,” a list that included ex-Trump officials Mark Meadows, Matthew Whitaker, and Gene Hamilton (Russell Vought, current director of the Office of Management and Budget, was also on the list). The suit’s arguments were as cynical as its origins—for example, that the “socially disadvantaged” category should comprise various groups that were once discriminated against, “including Irish, Italians, Germans, Jews, and eastern Europeans,” and that the lead plaintiff had “approximately 2 percent African-American ancestry.”

After the AFL lawsuit, other conservative legal groups helped flood the zone, filing at least nine lawsuits, in nine different federal court districts, over less than 90 days; five of these were by Pacific Legal Foundation alone. Banks joined in, too, openly arguing debt cancellation would cost them interest they planned to collect on loans made possible by a century of racist lending. In a letter to Biden USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack, three banking groups suggested they might be less “incentivized” to lend to “socially disadvantaged” farmers in the future, a fairly brazen admission, considering they had mostly refused to lend to them at all.

Black farmers, whose history with both the USDA and the U.S. government had given them countless reasons to be skeptical, blamed not only the litigants and their conservative backers but also USDA head Vilsack—who had served in the same role during Obama’s term—for not moving faster. Many felt that Pigford II had failed due to his indifference. An investigation by The Counter, a former news site that focused on the politics of food, found the USDA was over six times more likely to foreclose on a Black farm than on a white farm from 2006 to 2016, a period when the agency was mostly under Vilsack’s watch (from 2009 onward). Biden had signed off on debt relief in March, and advocates such as Wright, a consultant to Vilsack during the Obama years, had pushed for checks to go out immediately. “They could have done it within weeks,” he told The Guardian in August 2021. “They were aware some angry people were trying to stop it. I think we’ll get the debt relief around the same time we get the 40 acres and a mule.”

As lawsuits from white farmers mounted, Democrats, led by Booker, rewrote the program, folding it into the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act and purging any references to race. The new legislation split relief into two funds: $2.2 billion to farmers who had experienced discrimination by the USDA, and $3.1 billion in relief for “financially distressed” farmers of any race. The discrimination fund reached Black farmers, who made up roughly 90 percent of recipients. But of the nearly 48,000 who received assistance from the race-neutral distressed fund pool, fewer than 500 were Black. White farmers received 64 percent of payments.

Not to mention the Black farmers who were rejected. Igalious “Ike” Mills, a third-generation Black farmer who farms with his three brothers in East Texas, showed me the USDA rejection letter he received for his family’s discrimination claims. Just as with Pigford, farmers who were denied had no right to appeal.

“We went through that process and laid out that information in that application, and we got not one penny,” Mills told me. “And we’ve never heard anything back in regards to trying to find out more about it, because I understand it was one and done.”

Today, under the Trump administration’s anti-anti-racist agenda, the tentative efforts the USDA was making have been dismantled altogether (though a recent court order pushed back, ruling that the administration must restore $127 million in grants to Black and other underrepresented farmers). In July 2025, the Trump USDA announced it would eliminate all programs aimed at farmers defined as “socially disadvantaged”—a category established in the 1990 Farm Bill for groups that had faced discrimination, including Black Americans, Native Americans, Alaskan Natives, Asian Americans, Hispanics and Latinos, and Pacific Islanders—and even declared it would scrap the term itself. Earlier that summer, a USDA press release described USDA programs aimed at remedying racial injustice as “waste, fraud, and abuse.”

Today, under the Trump administration’s anti-anti-racist agenda, the tentative efforts the USDA was making have been dismantled altogether. In July 2025, the Trump USDA announced it would eliminate all programs aimed at farmers defined as “socially disadvantaged.”

But the justification the administration offered was legally threadbare. The rule change cites Strickland v. USDA, a 2024 lawsuit in which white farmers, represented by both the Southeastern Legal Foundation and Mountain States Legal Foundation, sued over disaster relief programs aimed at socially disadvantaged groups. Both organizations also partnered in Miller’s scheme to end debt relief.

A Texas federal court issued a preliminary injunction, which the Biden administration didn’t appeal. The Trump USDA claims that the failure to appeal is “clearly an uncontroverted admission that it had acted illegally,” using that reasoning to justify torching programs the Strickland case had zero to do with. In January 2026, Booker—who actually is an attorney—and other signatories noted in a letter that there had been no public input, and that the rule was not “necessitated by Strickland v. USDA,” since the case’s outcome remains undecided, and the new USDA rule cuts programs the lawsuit never touched. “A race-neutral approach,” they wrote, “is not race-blind in outcome.”

The “socially disadvantaged” designation remains a provision in federal law, but the Federal Register final rule takes pains to note—in language that feels particularly Miller-esque—that “past discrimination has been sufficiently addressed,” and that any other policies aimed at equality “are no longer necessary or legally justified.”

“Trump has relentlessly attacked Black farmers since the day he took office,” Senator Booker wrote me in a statement when I asked his thoughts on that declaration. “USDA has a long, well-documented history of intentionally discriminating against Black farmers, and the Trump administration’s assertion that past USDA discrimination has been sufficiently addressed is a lie. Trump has canceled programs and policies that support Black farmers at a moment when many of them are struggling to stay on their land, and the consequences of these harmful actions will be felt for generations to come.”

Ohio Democratic Representative Shontel Brown, who is the vice ranking member on the House Committee on Agriculture, issued a letter at the time indicting the move as part of “Trump’s resegregation agenda.”

Agriculture “Secretary [Brooke] Rollins and Trump are claiming that they’re restoring these ‘merit-based programs,’ but agriculture has never really operated on a level playing field,” she told me. “Ignoring barriers does not eliminate them.”

Even under Biden, an NPR investigation found that in 2022, just 36 percent of Black farmers were approved for USDA direct loans, compared with 72 percent of white farmers. In 2021, less than 10 percent of white farmers were rejected for USDA loans, while 42 percent of Black farmer applicants—the highest of any racial-ethnic group—were. The Trump administration’s anti-DEI hysteria is extreme, but this administration is just the latest contributor to an American story in which Black farmers are always denied resources to build because of racism.

The bipartisan nature of that failure has been heartbreaking for Black farmers and their advocates. “I don’t think they have abandoned the cause, but they just don’t have any faith in the leadership,” Lucas told me. “They were let down by Democratic leadership, and they certainly don’t have faith in the Republican administration that we have today. So, I would say Black rural America is disappointed—not only with the past administration and what it didn’t do when it had an opportunity to correct the problem, but now with a new administration that cares even less.”

Violence, Rip-Offs, and a Failed Marriage

In spite of all the obstacles placed in his way, Robert Haynie, P.J.’s great-great-grandfather, nourished a land-longing. Today, 60 of the acres P.J. farms are from Robert’s original tract on the Virginia peninsula known as the Northern Neck, where Robert Haynie was born enslaved in 1823, emancipated, and became the first freedman to buy land in the county, in 1867, according to the family. He was not alone. W.E.B. Du Bois estimated that Black farmers managed to acquire three million acres by 1875, eight million acres by 1890, and 12 million acres by 1900.

P.J.’s father—christened Philip, like his own father, but nicknamed “Rickey” to avoid confusion—graduated from what is today Virginia State University in 1976. That was the same year that Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz joked that Black people want only three things: “First, a tight pussy; second, loose shoes; and third, a warm place to shit.” The elder Haynie got a USDA loan because the state director happened to be Black. “We called him, and he called and made sure they followed the rules and regulations,” Haynie told me.

Once the director left the agency a couple of years later, he would never receive another loan. He’d used the ones he had to ambitiously expand the family’s farm throughout the early 1980s—adding hundreds of acres at a time—and faced violent racist attacks from neighboring white farmers. “We had some buildings that were set on fire, some livestock that was burnt up, some equipment that was shot up,” Haynie told me. “I wasn’t supposed to have more land and bigger equipment. So, as a result, this was the action they took to try to hurt me and derail me.”

There was also attempted financial sabotage by the USDA—loan denials, liens on his property, a bankruptcy declaration. In old footage from a 1997 Congressional Black Caucus forum on USDA loan discrimination, Haynie testifies that his loan has been incurring interest at a rate of $352 a day for 10 years. “All of the farmers around me have had debt write-downs and,” he states. “All of the white farmers have been allowed to do debt restructuring and to go on with their lives. I feel like the system has economically castrated me.” The debt eventually ballooned to more than $3.6 million.

“When a farmer, particularly a Black farmer, stays in their prescribed lane—smaller acres, older equipment, struggling—they don’t have too many problems,” Goldmon told me. “But when you elect to modernize your equipment, expand acres, and that’s when you start facing more headwinds. And there’s a strong historical basis for that statement.”

Rickey opted out of Pigford, because the limited damages for individual farmers was $50,000, far less than the USDA claimed he owed. The law firm of Steptoe & Johnson took up his case pro bono and won. He noted that his legal fees totaled $1,000,000—an impossible amount for most farmers. Incredibly, he said, the USDA stipulated in its settlement that he could never borrow money from the agency again.

“I got some relief, but it’s what you can’t get back,” Rickey told me. “And the stress and the strain that it puts on relationships. That financial stress is what basically led to my divorce from the mother of my children. It was just too much, she couldn’t bear it.”

P.J. Haynie frequently notes that his grandfather sold corn for $4 a bushel, his father sold corn for $4 a bushel, and he, too, sells corn for $4 a bushel—but his combine cost $700,000 instead of $60,000. The math only changes when you stop selling the raw commodity and start selling the end product it becomes. “There’s more money in a two-pound bag of wheat flour than in a 60-pound bushel of wheat I’d sell as a farmer,” Haynie said.

In 2021, Haynie co-purchased a commercial Arkansas rice processing facility, becoming one of the few Black owners of a rice mill in the United States. It is the kind of achievement that should be unremarkable but is extraordinary precisely because the USDA has prevented so many Black farmers from accessing it.

The next year, P.J. joined the USDA’s Equity Commission, one of the agency’s efforts that had only just begun to address 160 years of documented discrimination. Under Trump, the commission has since been rendered moot. Also cut was the $80 million climate-smart agriculture grant won by the National Black Growers Council, which P.J. Haynie co-founded and previously chaired. It would have helped rice farmers switch to more sustainable irrigation practices.

Haynie and other Black farmers were also side casualties of another Trumpian assault on government: the dismantling of USAID by Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency. USAID had long been a reliable buyer of surplus U.S. rice, but the fact that it could no longer do so contributed to a glut that sent rice prices into free fall. As well, USDA staff was gutted by DOGE, which pushed out about 20 percent of its workforce, forcing office closures and program cancellations. Riceland, the country’s largest rice miller, announced in June that it is temporarily shuttering grain-drying facilities and weighing layoffs. Arkansas, where rice is the signature crop, is projected to plant its smallest crop in five decades this year—down as much as 40 percent from historical averages. Growers, including Haynie, are projected to lose some $200 per acre this year.

“When they dismantled USAID, and then you couple that with a large crop of rice that farmers produced over the last couple of years, it’s a snowball effect that’s gotten bigger,” P.J. told me. “Now you’ve got a bunch of rice that USAID would normally take out of the supply pipeline just sitting in farmers’ bins. In other countries, rice farmers are being subsidized to produce rice that we import while U.S. rice farmers are hurting.”

A Crisis Affecting All

The farming crisis didn’t begin on Trump’s watch. Commodity prices were already dropping, even as fertilizer, seed, and fuel costs remained high. But Trump’s tariffs and trade disputes have turned an agricultural downturn into an economic catastrophe. The USDA itself projects net farm income nationally will drop to $153.4 billion this calendar year, down $4.1 billion from 2025 after inflation; farm debt, conversely, will hit a record high of $624.7 billion. Perhaps nowhere is the pain felt more acutely than Arkansas, where agriculture is the state’s biggest industry, contributing $24 billion annually to its economy, and rice its most important crop. Farm bankruptcies in Arkansas more than doubled in 2025 over the year prior, giving the state the highest number of Chapter 12 filings in the country (that is, the Chapter 11 equivalent for farmers and fishermen), and the most it has registered in the current century.

It was against this backdrop that hundreds of Arkansas farmers gathered in September last year with state representatives to pray, literally—heads bowed, hands folded—for economic relief. Video of the meeting, which went viral across social media, featured an anchor voice-over solemnly noting that “until the federal government steps in to save them, farmers have no one to turn to but God.” A white farmer named Chris King spoke directly to the president. “Mr. Trump, you looked at me sir, and you said, ‘I love you,’” King declared into a passed-around microphone. “Mr. Trump, I need to see the fruit of your love.”

They had voted for this man and his policies three times. Arkansas, one the country’s most rural states, has only gotten redder since Trump first ran in 2016. (Its Blackest counties remain blue.) That’s actually true in nearly 444 U.S. counties the USDA labels “farming-dependent.” Trump won 433 of them in 2024, with more than 100 giving him at least 80 percent of their votes. Now they were pleading for federal intervention to save them from the consequences of the government they voted in.

The irony was not merely that white farmers—who had largely opposed debt relief for Black farmers despite decades of well-documented, court-acknowledged discrimination—were openly demanding a check in their own time of need. It was also that the fecklessness of Trump’s tariff strategy had been made apparent in his first term, when the resulting trade wars caused more than a $27 billion drop off in agricultural exports in 2018 through 2019. “The Trump administration responded not by changing its trade policies,” the National Foundation for American Policy would dryly note in a report, “but by shoring up the president’s political support from farmers.”

The Market Facilitation Program, the euphemism the administration used for its trade policy bailout, allotted $12 billion in aid the first year. Out of the first $8 billion that was distributed where the race of the farmer was identifiable, more than 99 percent went to white farmers; similarly, a second $16 billion payment that followed overwhelmingly benefited white farmers. As well, the Trump administration’s 2020 Coronavirus Food Assistance Program provided just 0.1 percent of its payments to Black farmers. In total, along with a third year of trade bailout payments, ad hoc subsidies to farmers hit close to $46.5 billion in 2020. That’s nearly four times the $12 billion 2009 auto bailout, and even more than the $37.4 billion federal government spent in 2020 maintaining the nuclear arsenal.

Perhaps more notably, it is almost $46 billion more than the mere $210 million collective total that Black farmers were estimated to owe the USDA during Biden’s administration.

These billions moved through the Commodity Credit Corporation, or CCC, a USDA discretionary account that lets the agriculture secretary use funds without needing a cosign by Congress. It is, ironically, the same account that Black farmer advocates—specifically Lawrence Lucas and Lloyd Wright—had begged Vilsack to use when lawsuits by Stephen Miller and white farmers stalled Black farmer debt relief. Vilsack had refused, but here was Trump using it without hesitation or scrutiny. Even as the payments hit record levels in the third year without ever having been appropriated by Congress, Politico noted the lawmakers took “a largely hands-off approach, letting the department decide who gets the money and how much.”

There was reason for public concern around the size, speed, and lack of oversight of the payments, Neil Hamilton, emeritus professor at Drake University’s Agricultural Law Center, told Politico. “It’s just, ‘Here’s your check.’”

Interestingly, there was not a peep over these payouts from Representative Sam Graves, the Missouri Republican who called Black farmer debt relief “wrong and un-American” on social media days before it was even signed back in 2021—though, as Mother Jones has noted, Graves’s family farm has taken in nearly three-quarters of a million dollars in USDA subsidies. Nor from Pennsylvania GOP Representative Glenn Thompson, who wrote that he was “deeply concerned with the lack of transparency” on who would qualify for Biden’s 2022 funding through a congressional appropriation but expressed no qualms when Trump moved $46 billion in the other direction, most of it through an unappropriated account.

The largest payments flow to growers of commodity crops—corn, cotton, rice, soybeans—on land with established “base acres,” a designation that relies on decades of USDA-financed production history. Black farmers were systematically excluded from the lending programs that would have allowed them to build that history.

“Farm subsidies are really concentrated to the largest and wealthiest farms that really don’t need the help,” Anne Schechinger, a senior director at the Environmental Working Group who has tracked federal farm payments for over a decade, told me. “People who are smaller and growing different crops and who might actually need the support are not the ones getting the majority of this money.”

All these years later, the inequality still lives in Census data. Just 1,736 Black farmers grew corn and soybeans per the 2022 Census of Agriculture, and only 150 grew cotton. Roughly 70 percent raised livestock while another 10 percent grew fruits and vegetables, which get none of the subsidy price guarantees. Just 1,590 Black farmers operate farms larger than 500 acres. The average Black farm today is just 150 acres, less than one-third the national average of 463 acres, and more than half of Black-owned farms are under 50 acres. Since subsidy payments are also tied to acreage, even the relatively few Black farmers who grow covered commodities receive smaller payments than their white neighbors.

“Historically, because Black farmers haven’t grown rice and haven’t had those base-acre allocations, they miss out on those payments,” P.J. Haynie told me. “The recent Farmer Bridge Assistance Program paid $132 an acre for rice farmers versus $30 for soybean farmers. Because Black farmers didn’t get their loans on time—and had to make it with half the amount of loans the county committee system gave them—we didn’t have the money to risk growing those more expensive crops. That’s why we haven’t historically grown them.”

Wright has watched this dynamic play out for four decades. “The base acres system that was set up in the ’80s—the yields associated with it are higher for white farmers on the same soils,” he told me. “So they’re going to get a bigger check. The bailouts might hurt Black farmers more than the tariffs have. Because if at the end of the day one group has more money than the other, they can survive—and buy out the folks who didn’t get any money. If neither of them received money, we’d all be equal and we could compete. But we can’t compete if one gets money and the other doesn’t.”

Trump’s $12 billion farmer bailout in February 2026, this time dubbed the Farmer Bridge Assistance Program, again went through the CCC. The fund had to be replenished through an act of Congress. Again, there was little to no outcry.

White farmers insisted they don’t want handouts, ever. An Iowa farmer’s Wall Street Journal op-ed from late last year was headlined, “AMERICAN FARMERS WANT FAIR TRADE, NOT HANDOUTS.” “They won’t like it,” John Hansen, president of the Nebraska Farmers Union, told Wisconsin Public Radio last fall, “but it’s better than losing the farm.”

“Once you send farmers billions of dollars from a program, it’s hard to get rid of that,” Schechinger told me. “Every time there’s a program added, it’s never like one is really taken away.”

In 2019, a study from the University of Missouri suggested that soybean farmers were reimbursed more than double for their losses by Trump subsidies. In a political culture obsessed with the idea that even the most minimal government aid will have corrosive effects when the recipients are Black, it seems no one worried whether these payments might foster dependency among white farmers. And yet, a 2019 survey by Purdue University found that 58 percent of farmers said “they expect another MFP [Market Facilitation Program] payment to be made to U.S. farmers for the 2020 crop year.” The word “handout” seems to apply based only on who’s doing the receiving.

Some farmers, Schechinger said, may have voted for Trump specifically because of those payments, calculating that other rounds would follow. “That would make sense for these corn and soybean mega farms,” she said. “They were voting for this administration in order to get more of these subsidies.” And I suppose credit where it’s due. Unlike the Democrats, the Republicans deliver for their people.

A staggering 70 percent of farmers said they cannot afford the full cost of fertilizer to meet their needs this year, according to an April study by the American Farm Bureau Federation. Wright, a soybean farmer, told me he is getting out of farming, renting his land. ”Farmers are all going to be damaged by this,” he told me. “But right now, Trump is trying to convince his supporters that he’s already given too much to Black people.”

“We as farmers, we’re all hurting,” P.J. Haynie said. “But because of the resources some of our neighbors have, and because their land is paid for and has more equity, they have more options in financing and banking.” Black farmers, who have never had those options, have never had a cushion to fall back on.  

Donald Trump is reportedly instructing advisers to spend big on midterm ads...about himself. Sources leak to The Atlantic that Trump advisers are telling him the real reason the polls look so bad is that voters are unaware of his many stupendous successes. He is apparently so unwilling to accept the reality facing Republicans that he’s nixing their efforts to make their races more local—and less about him. All this comes as Republicans openly fear Trump’s trade war with Canada will hurt their chances. That Trump is going haywire with his anti-Canada mania—even as the GOP begs him not to, and even as he plans new ads about himself—all constitutes a new level of unraveling. We talked to Mona Charen, who’s been arguing at The Bulwark that Republicans badly need Trump to stay away from them. We discuss how Trump’s autocratic nature bars advisers from telling him the truth, why Republicans aren’t permitted to seek distance from him, and what some remarkable new polling reveals about Trump-MAGA weakness. Listen to this episode here.

For all his self-created lore of being a consummate dealmaker, President Donald Trump actually sucks at deals, mostly using legal threats and actions to bully his way to his preferred outcomes. And those outcomes aren’t even particularly good ones. There is that famous calculation that Trump would’ve made far more money had he simply put his inherited wealth into an index fund. And we’ve seen…

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A cartoon by Clay Jones. Related | Canada and US unite to mock Trump’s tariff buffoonery…

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Texas Attorney General and Senate candidate Ken Paxton operates best in the shadows. But his Democratic opponent, James Talarico, is working hard to drag his shit into the light. According to The Washington Post, Talarico just filed a motion seeking to make public two depositions Paxton sat for in 2019 and 2022 in a roiling mess of a case from his time as a board member and attorney with the…

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The Trump administration has futilely projected a victory in its trade war with Canada, despite the obvious losses for the American public.

The White House’s official X account shared an image of a bald eagle attacking a Canada goose Wednesday, responding to a statement released the day before claiming that “President Trump is finally ending Canada’s free ride.”

“Canada has been ripping off the United States for decades—and President Donald J. Trump is done letting them get away with it,” the statement continued. The White House derided Canada’s previous trade commitments as “abuse” and insisted that, rather than negotiate, Canada “chose unreasonable demands, walk-backs, and flat-out rejection.”

But that’s not true.

According to Canadian officials, the trade talks collapsed after the Trump administration issued last-minute demands that Canada curtail its culture, asserting that two Quebec laws protecting the region’s use of the French language unfairly infringed upon American industry.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney suspended the talks on Friday, triggering Trump’s 50 percent tariff rate on roughly $28 billion in Canadian exports. Carney, in turn, promised to match the tariffs “dollar for dollar,” with the reciprocal levies expected to begin September 8.

In a powerful speech delivered the following day, Carney referred to the U.S. as untrustworthy and unreliable, informing the Canadian public that the country would need to forge a new path without its longstanding economic alliance with the U.S.

The “new U.S. tariffs are designed to hurt us and divide us,” Carney said. “They’re a miscalculation.”

The two nations had spent months drafting a suitable trade agreement—talks that, according to Trump, were fruitful. Last week, Trump told reporters that the countries had reached a deal and were fine-tuning some details. On Friday, hours before Trump’s midnight tariff deadline, the president insisted again that he believed a deal could be reached.

Canadian officials did not paint the same picture. Quebec Premier Christine Fréchette told reporters Saturday that the U.S. had approached a “red line” with its demands.

“Our culture, our language, is central to our identity, and it is important to exclude that from the negotiating table,” Fréchette said, according to The Montreal Gazette.“Even though we are threatened with different tariffs, it won’t change. We will stay the way we are.”

Carney, similarly, said that the U.S. had “asked too much.”

Trump, for his part, appeared not to have even realized he ruined the talks. When asked Tuesday about the late-stage demands blowing up the deal, the president appeared to have no memory of the events.

“That sounds like me,” he said, adding, “They have to pay a fair amount. And if they don’t pay a fair amount, we won’t make a deal. That’s fine.”

Author Gil Durán says the rise of ‘tech fascism’ is putting our democracy in peril – and asks us to imagine a world without billionaires. By Nick Romeo for Capital & Main Silicon Valley has spawned many innovations with destructive potential: social media, cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence. In a new book, author and journalist Gil Durán argues that another…

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This week on “Room Temp,” the Daily Kos podcast, Markos Moulitsas and comedian Janesh Rahlan remind everyone that White House aide Natalie Harp is never far from President Donald Trump, the Democrats seem to finally be learning that pearl-clutching isn’t a strategy, and “America First” ranchers are getting served mystery beef with a side of buyer’s remorse. Markos relayed reports that Trump’…

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A cartoon by Tim Campbell. Related | Canada and US unite to mock Trump’s tariff buffoonery…

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A nationwide social media addiction trial against Meta came to an abrupt end on Wednesday, with the company announcing a sweeping settlement with 52 attorneys general. As part of the proposed settlement, the company promised to pay around $18 billion to participating states over a ten-year period and enact a set of changes to make their apps, like Facebook and Instagram, supposedly safer for teenagers, including by enacting a default two-hour limit for teenage users and setting up “night” and “school” modes to block the apps or reduce notifications during certain times. In their press release, the company also pointedly urged rival companies like YouTube and TikTok to do the same. 

“While this is an important step, the fact is that teens move fluidly between dozens of apps a day,” the announcement read. “All platforms should empower parents and support teens by putting the same measures in place, because we know that when teens are restricted on one app, they simply move to another.” (Though it was somewhat buried in the announcement, Meta also stipulated that it would only commit to enforcing its time limits and “night” modes for five years, but said it would extend that commitment to ten years “if industry peers sign on to the agreement.”)  

All of this, of course, builds on a series of recent losses for Meta: the company also lost two phases of a similar trial in New Mexico, with the jury finding that the company misled consumers about the safety of its platforms and intentionally built its products to addict minors. The state also claimed that “Meta’s design features enabled pedophiles and predators to engage in child sexual exploitation on Meta’s platforms,” a claim the jury also agreed with. 

These judgments won’t much affect Meta’s bottom line; the company made $200.97 billion in revenue last year. And they also will have virtually no effect on Meta’s emerging focus: becoming, primarily, an AI company. Meta told investors in January that its biggest expense was “employee compensation, driven by investments in technical talent. This includes 2026 hires to support our priority areas, particularly AI.”

And co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg released an addled 6,500 word essay-shaped object on August 10 titled “The Future is For Everyone,” outlining what he called his “positive AI” future. The essay amounted to an argument that AI is good and thus that Meta should be able to keep building data centers wherever it wants, with Zuckerberg claiming that the centers will be “water efficient” and create jobs. (A Meta contractor flushed bacteria-contaminated wastewater into public water systems while building a data center in Wyoming, a controversy Zuckerberg didn’t address.)  

Meta has also aggressively promoted its AI agents for businesses, touting them in a press release as a way for businesses to “show up for every customer as if they had an infinite team behind them.” (Grandiose claims like these have gotten more complicated as Meta, like several other tech companies, have had to disclose that besides working as helpful little robot employees, their AI agents also supposedly hacked into another company’s internal systems during testing.)  

The company’s other big AI-related product rollout is Meta Glasses; the company describes the glasses’ AI capabilities as “a helpful voice in your ear,” which is probably meant to be less chilling than it sounds. But the glasses, too, have been met with intense controversy over privacy and nonconsensual filming using the glasses. They are unpopular in a rich variety of settings: UK cinemas are considering banning them entirely, while Immigration and Customs Enforcement has banned employees from wearing them at work. HateAid, a German digital advocacy group, has lodged a criminal complaint seeking to stop them from being sold in that country at all. 

Ironically, another bold Meta AI initiative was internal—and that, too, has been a disaster. Reuters’ Katie Paul reported on Wednesday that Zuckerberg had explored a plan to replace up to 60 percent of Meta staff with AI. Meta’s human staff responded with anger and alarm in internal chatrooms, Paul reported: “One person trolled Zuckerberg, sarcastically likening his internal announcement of an AI initiative for small businesses to Prometheus, the figure from Greek mythology, giving fire to humanity.” Meta staff also had to spend a remarkable amount of time cleaning up messes made by AI, Paul reported: “Major technical and security incidents, such as service disruptions and possible data leaks, spiked 40 percent from the previous year, with the time staffers had to spend “firefighting” them up 70 percent, according to the internal posts.”

Like virtually every other tech company, then, Meta executives have turned from social media as their core product, to a gauzy, pie-eyed future of AI as the future of work, business and everything else.  Laws, legislation and jury settlements are often backwards-looking when it comes to tech companies. This particular settlement attempts to mitigate the harm of their current products, while companies like Meta are already focused, for better or much more likely worse, on what’s next. 

Florida chef Elijah Button was chopping onions in June when his knife slipped and sliced his middle finger to the bone. It was his worst kitchen accident to date. But having given up his Affordable Care Act health insurance plan in January because of a $100 monthly premium hike he couldn’t afford, the 21-year-old in St. Cloud didn’t have the money for emergency care.

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