Political News

The northern spotted owl is in trouble—per usual.

This vanishingly rare subspecies of spotted owl earned its iconic status in the late ’80s and early ’90s, during the height of the Timber Wars in the Pacific Northwest. For forest defenders, the spotted owl is a sacred totem. For loggers, it’s been a pest. In 1990, federal officials reclassified the raptor as a threatened species, and greens won the Timber Wars with the establishment of the Clinton-era Northwest Forest Plan. The spotted owl left the trees standing—yet the number of spotted owls continued to decline.

The culprit? The barred owl, a more aggressive species that has been expanding westward since the 19th century. While the northern spotted owl survives almost entirely on tree-dwelling rodents, the barred owl is a voracious predator that has easily outmuscled its more timid cousin. Today, just 15,000 spotted owls remain across North America; in comparison, there are some 3.5 million barred owls. So officials with the US Fish and Wildlife Service have come up with a bold plan to help the spotted owls: Shoot the barred owls.

In September 2024, the agency released its Barred Owl Management Strategy, which calls for trained “removal specialists” to kill up to 15,600 barred owls annually in Washington, Oregon, and Northern California over the next 30 years. By one estimate, this could cost up to $1.35 billion, or roughly $3,000 per feathered carcass.

The idea of blowing away nearly half a million owls to protect another owl has sparked green-on-green infighting and led to some strange bedfellows. Last year, the animal rights groups Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy worked with Republican lawmakers on a Congressional Review Act resolution that would have halted the owl-killing program. It failed to pass. But those animal welfare groups notched a win for their cause when Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency nixed some federal owl-related grants.

And if a hands-off approach leads to the extinction of the northern spotted owl? “I acknowledge that it’s a real risk,” says one advocate.

Meanwhile, some of the environmentalists behind the ’90s logging ban are in the odd position of siding with their age-old nemesis, the timber industry. Logging companies are now fans of the barred owl culling because, oddly enough, the program will reopen permits that waive penalties if the loggers accidentally kill spotted owls, thus enabling timber harvesting in habitats that were previously off-limits.

The controversy has split the National Audubon Society, whose staff did not respond to our request for comment. The group’s eponymous magazine has expressed cautious support for the barred owl culling, but at least 18 local chapters—including four in the Pacific Northwest—have come out against it. Biologists are also flummoxed. William Ripple, a professor of ecology at Oregon State University who was involved in some of the early research on the northern spotted owl, tells me, “Reasonable people can disagree on the best path forward.”

Noah Greenwald, endangered species co-director at the Center for Biological Diversity, says he and his organization take no joy in the prospect of shooting thousands of barred owls, but he insists there is no other choice. “We don’t love that an owl is being killed…I just don’t want to see the spotted owl go extinct, and it will go extinct without some barred owl control.”

Animal welfare advocates argue that the Fish and Wildlife Service’s plan is inhumane and unworkable. “In the long run, we don’t think it’s going to help any species,” says Jennifer Best, the wildlife law program director at Friends of Animals, which has sued the agency to halt the program. “And in the immediate term, it is cruel and will result in hundreds of thousands of owls being shot down from their homes.”

Lurking over the debate is the larger, knottier question of which species should be considered invasive. Greenwald argues that the barred owl is an invasive species, even if it made its way west due to vast ecosystem shifts wrought by people—“and invasive species are the second leading cause of extinction.”

But should we punish the barred owl for adapting to a human-created environment while the northern spotted owl has failed to do so? “The Fish and Wildlife Service is essentially saying that any species that changes its range can be considered an invasive species,” Best says.

And if a hands-off approach leads to the extinction of the northern spotted owl? “I acknowledge that it’s a real risk,” she says.

This isn’t the first time humans have targeted one bird with the goal of saving another. For decades, the Fish and Wildlife Service killed brown-headed cowbirds that were laying their eggs in the nests of the Kirtland’s warbler, an endangered species. The program worked, and in 2019, the Kirtland’s warbler was removed from the endangered list. But now, the little songster is what’s known as a “conservation-reliant species”—its survival depends on constant human intervention.

The spotted owl is on the path to becoming another conservation-reliant species. Such nonstop vigilance is the price we pay when humans pick winners and losers in the wild world. We might like to think that nature is a harmonic arrangement, but in truth, it’s a constant competition—red in talon and beak. “I see this as a complex ecological and ethical issue rather than a simple conflict between a good species and a bad species,” says Ripple, the Oregon State ecologist. “The challenge is that there are no easy solutions.”

Explaining the Right is a weekly series that looks at what the right wing is currently obsessing over, how it influences politics—and why you need to know. Republicans are having a bad time ahead of this year’s midterm elections, where the momentum has consistently been with the Democrats. This past week, after losing the Minnesota gubernatorial primary by double digits despite an…

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A cartoon by Mike Luckovich. Related | Trump’s airplane switcheroo proves he’s a selfish coward…

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If Uber and Lyft resort to the stalling tactics corporations commonly use to block higher pay and better working conditions, gig workers will still have a fight on their hands. By Mark Kreidler for Capital & Main After a yearslong battle for worker rights that pulled the governor’s office and state legislators into the fray, Uber and Lyft drivers in California are on the doorstep of…

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A cartoon by Clay Jones. Related | A look back at Karoline Leavitt’s legacy of lies and propaganda…

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Utility-scale solar leads by a mile, followed by batteries. Fossil fuels, not so much. By Dan Gearino for Inside Climate News It’s been a wild first half of the year in the U.S. power sector, with announcements of gigantic natural gas power plants and some long-awaited renewable energy projects coming online. At times of rapid change, forecasting is difficult. So I feel a…

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It’s official: This morning, YouTube announced it will delete The Nerd Reich podcast next week—the same week my book comes out.

YouTube’s reasons are silly. Over the last few weeks, someone has targeted the Nerd Reich channel with a campaign of false and frivolous complaints. After 1.5 years on YouTube with no problems, we’re suddenly being hit with multiple, almost-daily complaints—just in time for my book launch this Tuesday.

And YouTube’s ridiculous policy is to delete our videos—and now our channel.

We’ve fought back against these false complaints, but the sheer volume is overwhelming. Someone is obsessed with deleting our channel. YouTube is playing along.

This follows a familiar pattern.

When Elon Musk bought Twitter, I was banned for eight months. Last year, Facebook banned The Nerd Reich newsletter from being posted there (a policy they reversed after media attention). In April, Musk permanently banned me from X for posting about fascism. And now, our YouTube channel—with 26,000 subscribers—will be disabled just in time for my book launch.

It’s great publicity! But I’d rather have the channel, which reaches a global audience with videos that have received 818,000 views so far. In fact, our number of YouTube subscribers is larger than our number of newsletter subscribers.

One way or another, we’ll persevere. But it’s clear that someone is very upset about my work, and they have succeeded in deplatforming me from YouTube.

Wanna help me fight back? Buy my book, which gets released this Tuesday! Available wherever you get your books.

Use this Bookshop link to support independent booksellers and this newsletter.

Use this link to find all other options.

My Interview on KQED Political Breakdown

“We can have billionaires or we can have democracy. We cannot have both. The billionaires see a future without us, so we have to start imagining a future without them.”

This week, I joined Marisa Lagos of KQED to discuss the billionaire war on democracy. Click below to watch our conversation on PBS.

Click here for audio-only version on KQED.

Political Breakdown | Do Silicon Valley Billionaires Want to End Democracy?Gil Durán warns that Silicon Valley billionaires are trying to overthrow American democracy.

Injustice for All is a weekly series about how the Trump administration is trying to weaponize the justice system—and the people who are fighting back. This week, we’ve got a lineup of the worst suspects. T. Elliot Glaser is here, protecting Trump. Judge Roy Altman is also here, protecting Trump. Jeanine Pirro is also also here, making sure Trump can hurt people. Oh hell yeah…

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A cartoon by Pedro Molina. Related | Trump finally admits his pool guy screwed up the Reflecting Pool…

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This week, Health and Human Services Secretary and famed roadkill connoisseur Robert F. Kennedy Jr. hosted a MAHA event to promote his “Eat Real Food” initiative. This came on the heels of the Trump administration dismantling the framework for childhood vaccine schedules, courtesy of Kennedy’s warped worldview. Meanwhile, progressives are winning big primaries by running on Americans’…

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A cartoon by Tim Campbell. Related | Democrats gain momentum in flipping the Senate…

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Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, pushed the United Kingdom into a needless war in Iraq in a wild-goose chase for weapons of mass destruction. Then, he helped British companies make money from that war. Now, his son Nick is carrying on the family legacy.

Nick Blair, a 40-year-old former football agent, is seeking funding for a military technology startup called “Pyra” to the tune of 200 million dollars. It’s not clear what, exactly, Pyra needs all that money to do: its website only says “Deploying Summer 2026…Stand By.” Blair is at the moment the only active officer of the company, according to UK government filings. In an article published this week, an unnamed source told the Financial Times, vaguely, that Pyra “is developing technology that will allow users to integrate different systems into a single source.”

During his time as Prime Minister, Blair’s father helped UK companies cash in on the Iraq war. After he was forced to leave the country’s government amid growing discontent over the war, he built a dizzyingly massive global business empire. And he’s making moves that could allow him to profit from the reconstruction of war-torn places: in January, he was appointed to President Donald Trump’s so-called Board of Peace, charged with overseeing international efforts in Gaza.

Blair the younger, meanwhile, is now founding his second military-tech company. His first, Skyral, is a war-games simulator. Its co-CEO, Naomi Hulme, recently described its work as “Fortnite on steroids.” The company won a $2.7 billion dollar contract to train the British military, which is betting big on AI. Pyra, meanwhile, does not yet have a product—but hopes to raise a great deal of funding nonetheless.

General Dynamics opened a Texas factory to churn out artillery shells for Ukraine, but the machines kept breaking. Robot arms smashed into things. Hunks of metal crashed to the floor. There was even a real-life dumpster fire. By Jesse Coburn for ProPublica A robot was on fire. Again. It was the summer of 2024, and the cutting-edge robots inside General Dynamics’ sweltering…

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Federal regulators have given President Donald Trump’s family crypto business a conditional approval to operate like a bank. On Friday, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency—led by Trump appointee Jonathan Gould—announced that World Liberty Financial, a crypto venture controlled by the Trump family, was on track to receive a banking charter. This will allow World Liberty Financial to issue its stablecoin tokens—called “USD1″—inside the United States without an intermediary.

“The decision stands to give new powers and federal credibility to a venture in which Trump and his family retain a substantial financial interest,” as Politico‘s Michael Stratford and Declan Harty put it. “It’s also among the most direct official actions that the administration has taken involving the president’s private finances.”

Zach Witkoff, son of Trump’s special diplomatic envoy Steve Witkoff and co-founder of World Liberty Financial, applauded the decision on social media. “Our ambition is clear: to build the most trusted and widely used digital dollar in the world while strengthening the role of the U.S. dollar across the global economy,” he wrote.

The move certainly seems likely to strengthen the pocketbooks of the president and his family: as my colleague Russ Choma reported, Trump made $65 million in 2025 by selling shares in World Liberty Financial. According to his financial disclosures, Trump also made almost $600 million selling stablecoins and other digital assets through World Liberty Financial that year.

Democratic lawmakers are pointing to the regulatory green light as an example of Trump’s corruption. On Friday, as the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency announced the move, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) wrote on social media that “this is the most brazen act of self-dealing our system has ever seen.”

The Conversation is a weekly dive into the most popular stories on Daily Kos and what it tells us about the national political environment. GOP screwups. That’s the broad theme this week—all the ways Republicans just suck at life. They were handed full power—the White House, Congress, and the Supreme Court. And they’ve somehow managed to turn the whole country against them…

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A cartoon by David Horsey. Related | The medical world slams Trump’s harmful anti-vax quackery…

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In 2022, Assistant Chief Adam Glueck, of the Cape Girardeau Police Department in southeastern Missouri, purchased electric shock gloves for his officers after learning about them at a trade show. And his employees, he said, couldn’t get enough of them. “If I try to take away the gloves from those officers at this point I think we may have a mutiny on our hands,” Glueck joked on a podcast interview a couple of years later. “They’ve grown really attached.” 

The shock gloves, he went on to explain, allow their wearer to inflict pain without leaving the sort of marks that could look bad to witnesses or leave an officer vulnerable to lawsuits. 

“In today’s society, you know, everybody’s filming everything, everybody has a cell phone,” Glueck said. If an officer punches someone on camera, that can go viral in an instant; even a standard taser leaves puncture wounds. But “the glove is low optic, and it looks better on camera, and it looks better to those witnesses. With a glove, there are no burn marks or scars.” 

The gloves, manufactured by a company called Compliant Technologies, have been used by police, sheriffs, jail wardens, and even school resource officers for years. They’ve been described by groups like Amnesty International as “readily misused for torture.” And this week, ICE published a plan to order $20 million worth of them. 

The device is called a GLOVE, which stands for Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter. It looks like a regular padded black utility glove, but when the wearer presses a small button on the glove’s wrist, it produces a painful electric shock. 

Nelson County, Ky., jailer Justin Hall shows an electric shock glove that is used at his facility, Thursday, Aug. 13, in Bardstown, Ky. Dylan Lovan/AP

“We have a saying: Feeling is believing,” Compliant Technologies CEO Jeff Niklaus said in one 2022 YouTube video. In promotional clips, you can see people losing control of their limbs, falling to the ground, and crying out in pain after a light touch from the GLOVE. In 2022, the company called it a “weapon” in Instagram posts. Since then, though, it’s downgraded the language to “a Conductive Distraction and De-escalation device,” branding the technology on its website as “humane.”

Human rights organizations like Amnesty International have long raised concerns about electric shock devices like the GLOVE, as well as other products that Compliant Technologies sells, like electric shock belts and vests, which the company recommends for prisoner transport, courtroom use, and use on “combative individuals” during medical procedures like blood draws. 

The technology is unregulated “despite the clear human rights risks associated with its use,” Amnesty International researchers wrote in a 2025 report detailing instances in which electric-shock devices have been used for torture. The report ends with a recommendation that countries “cease use of, decommission and destroy any stockpiles of such prohibited electric shock weapons.” Yumna Rizvi, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Victims of Torture, called the gloves “inherently abusive equipment that facilitates torture.” Some police departments that use the devices issue guidance saying they shouldn’t be deployed against pregnant women, the elderly, or people in shackles. A 2021 user manual for the GLOVE notes that it can cause an “increase in blood pressure” and “changes in heart rhythm,” and recommends that users avoid shocking “those with obvious health conditions.” The manual also includes a graphic saying “evil is powerless when the good are unafraid,” laid over a Blue Lives Matter flag.

“How in the world is ICE just going to be walking around with these gloves?” Rizvi asked. “It is inherently harmful. It has no legitimate law enforcement purpose.” 

 “Our officers are highly trained in de-escalation tactics and regularly receive ongoing use of force training,” an ICE spokesperson told Mother Jones; Compliant Technologies did not respond to a request for comment. The devices “will be issued to Homeland Security Investigations (H.S.I.) and Enforcement Removal Operations (ERO) officers and agents,”  according to a notice DHS published August 10. They will be delivered by the end of March 2027.

Compliant Technologies was founded in 2018 by Jeff Niklaus, a former Army Blackhawk helicopter pilot in Afghanistan and Somalia, who believes that President Donald Trump has been “anointed” by God. He is also a sometime conspiracy theorist: In a podcast interview in 2025, he blamed the fatal crash of a passenger plane and a military helicopter on “the vaccines,” and on the Biden administration’s inclusion of women and LGBTQ people in the military. 

In an interview with the International Law Enforcement Educators & Trainers Association last month, Niklaus said he was inspired to start his company after participating in the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu, on which the book Black Hawk Down is based. 

“If you look at the why…I mean, we lost 18 guys in one day,” Niklaus said. (Hundreds of Somali people were killed on that day, alongside 18 Americans.) “So, for me personally, if we can help save or stop the injury of at least 18 people, then I feel like we did something as a company,” he said. 

But his technology has also hurt people. A pending wrongful death lawsuit alleges that a 43-year-old man named Jonathan Mansfield died because corrections officers shocked him 27 times with the gloves and 13 times with a Taser. Two of the glove shocks lasted 45 and 99 seconds. The manufacturer’s recommended limit is 15 seconds. A man with heart problems sued over allegations that he was shocked at a Las Vegas trade show, as the Associated Press reported. And in 2023, a man who was incarcerated in Kentucky’s Bullitt County Jail sued an employee of that jail for shocking him repeatedly with the gloves. “The gloves feel just like a taser,” Josh Elswick, who was in handcuffs and shackles when he was shocked, said. Bullitt County Jail representatives told local media they would stop using electric shock gloves shortly thereafter. 

But local police across the country are still eagerly buying the gloves—in large part so that they can harm people and avoid being sued for it. It’s been successful “from the patrolmen to the jailers,” Lumpkin County Sheriff Stacy Jarrard said in a Compliant Technologies promotional video. “It’s been a great tool as far as mitigating liability,” according to Nelson County Jailer Justin Hall. Bob Couey of the Floyd County Sheriff’s Department sung the GLOVE’s praises, too: “I highly recommend these gloves to anybody that’s looking for a utility they can use that is conducive to not leading to lawsuits.”

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

Krzysztof Wasowicz, mayor of Justice, Illinois, has some concerns about solar: that it takes up farmland and enriches China. But he’s all-in on the community solar array that was recently deployed at a Public Storage facility in his village, a suburb of Chicago.

The panels are located on otherwise unused roof space and could provide significant savings for Illinoisans who subscribe to the project, while also helping the state meet its goal of 100% clean power by 2050.

“This creates more opportunities for people, job creation, and revenue that can be taxed by our state,” said Wasowicz, who has been mayor of Justice, home to about 12,000 people, since 2007. ​”This is going to be an excellent addition to this village.”

The 763-kilowatt array, which went online in March, is one of 60 planned projects for the rooftops of Public Storage facilities in Illinois. Ten such projects are now online, and once completed, the portfolio will cover 5 million square feet of roof space, provide 44 megawatts of solar capacity, deliver $36 million total savings, and create 300 construction jobs, according to Solar Landscape, a leading developer of rooftop community solar sites nationwide.

Only a fraction of industrial and commercial roof space is currently used for solar, because those projects are generally more expensive to build and interconnect than ground-mounted arrays in rural areas. But thanks to new incentives, developers, utilities, and building owners nationwide are increasingly considering the possibilities.

Federal data analyzed by the solar company Lumen Energy found that commercial, industrial, and school rooftops could host enough panels to provide 581 gigawatts of power, nearly enough to meet the entire country’s energy demand. Cook County, Illinois, which includes Justice, is among the metropolitan areas with the greatest potential, that analysis found.

Mark Schottinger, president and chief legal officer of Solar Landscape, said that working with large companies like Public Storage allows his company to deploy rooftop projects quickly at multiple sites.

“The beauty of commercial-industrial real estate is the speed and scalability,” he said, noting that major logistics, storage, and big-box companies ​”have millions of square feet around the country.”

Community solar allows households, businesses, and organizations to reap savings and support clean energy even if they can’t have their own solar panels. By subscribing to a community solar array, customers get credit on their energy bill for a portion of the solar power generated.

Illinois is among the nation’s leaders in community solar capacity, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association, with more installed than even California. It is among the two dozen states that have laws enabling community solar, which typically leads to more arrays than in states without specific policies.

Illinois’ 2016 clean energy law created generous incentives for community solar, leading to a boom in projects of up to 2 MW each. An energy law passed last fall made the incentives available for projects of up to 10 MW.

Most of the state’s community solar has been built on rural land or industrial brownfields. About a fifth of the arrays are on rooftops, with the rest being ground-mounted. The rooftop arrays are concentrated in the Chicago area, and rooftops are an increasing priority for community solar, according to Paul Kovacs, project execution manager for distributed energy resources for utility ComEd, which serves northern Illinois.

Solar developers are still in the ​”early innings” of using rooftops for community solar. But ​”it’s growing exponentially.”

At a July 30 event promoting the Justice project, Melissa Washington, ComEd’s senior vice president for government relations and external affairs, called rooftop community solar ​”an elegant solution” for deploying clean energy to meet rising demand.

She listed three mandates for the utility: supplying power to businesses and residents, keeping electricity affordable, and addressing climate change—a necessity underscored by violent storms three days earlier that had left many ComEd customers without power.

Rooftop community solar, she said, ​”checks the box for every single one of those three critical priorities.” The utility plans to have over 400 community solar arrays in service by the end of this year, she added. Kovacs said about 100 of those will be on rooftops.

In a typical setup, a company like Solar Landscape develops and owns the array and collects revenue from incentives and subscribers. Those subscribers get savings on their energy bills, the property owner hosting the panels gets lease payments, and the utility gets credit toward renewable energy mandates. The utility works with the developer to make any upgrades needed to connect the array to the grid, which the developer pays for so that costs are not passed on to ratepayers.

The Public Storage projects are part of Illinois’ Community-Driven Community Solar program, meant to incentivize solar arrays whose subscribers are predominantly local households and small businesses or nonprofits, as opposed to a few large subscribers hogging the savings.

Under state law, owners of community solar can sell renewable energy credits to utilities for revenue that makes the financing equation more favorable for all the partners involved. The incentives are awarded through a highly competitive process, and proposals gain points for being in designated low-income or environmental justice census tracts, having a large proportion of local subscribers, involving the community in design and planning, and hiring through the state’s workforce training programs, among other factors. The community solar credits are also worth $5 more per megawatt-hour for rooftop installations.

The Justice project earned points for making charitable contributions and for hosting a workforce training program in conjunction with the New Jersey–based training and education nonprofit STEP-UP Solar, according to Solar Landscape marketing director Samantha Kanipe.

State incentive programs are critical to facilitating community solar development since the expiration of federal tax credits under the Trump administration’s 2025 spending bill, advocates note. Meanwhile, arrays on industrial and commercial sites, like the Public Storage ones, can still qualify for federal tax credits if they are operational by the end of 2027, or if they started construction by July 4 of this year.

“We began construction on a ton of projects before July 4,” including all the Public Storage ones, said Schottinger of Solar Landscape, noting that his company can build an array like the one in Justice in about six months.

He said his company and other solar developers are still in the ​”early innings” of using rooftops for community solar. But, ​”it’s growing exponentially,” he added. ​”There’s a lot of blank space out there.”

While the media has been agog and aghast at the occasional successes of 2026 candidates aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America, I haven’t been feeling the hype. A canny read of the electorate reveals that establishment Democrats, like Xavier Becerra and Amy Klobuchar, are doing just fine. Many primary winners are getting lumped in with the DSA despite not being members, or even socialists, like Brad Lander and Abdul El-Sayed. And as Lander would attest, the electorate isn’t looking for leftist bona fides from their candidates; they simply want fighters, not fakers.

But no one is more choleric over the occasional success of progressive politicians than the dismal corporate dullards at Third Way. After the aforementioned El-Sayed won his Senate primary in Michigan, the centrist organization announced that it was going to “war” with a $15 million campaign against democratic socialist candidates between now and 2028. Both the sense of aggrievement and the paltry amount of money being dispensed makes this extremely sad.

The opening salvo in this supposed “war” is also pretty sad: a wan op-ed by the organization’s top dogs, Jon Cowan and Matt Bennett, in the pages of The Washington Post. The two combine for a few hundred words of grievance, in which they argue that the Democratic Party’s recent woes can be attributed to its extreme politics, which is a very strange thing to say about a party whose recent standard-bearers were Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Cowan and Bennett, in fact, fault Harris for not doing enough to pivot from the leftier positions she espoused on the 2020 stump. This makes me wonder if they were in a coma during the 2024 election, because I distinctly remember Harris both veering wildly toward the center, abandoning previous positions with something approaching a frenzy, and even campaigning with Liz Cheney.

The op-ed is, nevertheless, revealing. Third Way’s politics seem frozen in amber. There’s scant evidence that Cowan and Bennett have spent any time ruminating on the political shifts we’ve undergone since the 2024 election. There’s no mention of the hot-button issues that are fueling the fires of the Democratic electorate, such as the high costs of early childhood, opposition to data centers, the war in Iran, or the GOP’s corruption. The only thing they point to that could be called “recent” is a New York Times poll showing that 62 percent of the Democratic electorate identifies as either somewhat or very liberal, and that most voters want “a fighter for working people who gets things done and is authentic in his or her beliefs.”

That doesn’t describe the kind of candidate that Third Way would support. As Robert Reich wrote this week, “If you bother to look at the funding sources of Third Way ... you’ll find a Star Wars cantina of billionaire megadonors, Fortune 500 CEOs, corporate dark money bundlers, and giant corporations.” Third Way’s donor base is a “Trojan horse” packed to the gills with scoundrels: Wall Street cretins and private equity goons; “members of the GOP-aligned American Legislative Exchange Council,” best known for producing cookie-cutter right-wing legislation that is diametrically at odds with just about every Democratic Party policy priority; and supporters of the Republican Attorneys General Association, “which helps elect Republicans who fight federal environmental and other regulations.” In addition, Reich points out that two of the organization’s former honorary co-chairs are Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. Enough said! (Sludge’s David Moore also reported this week that Third Way has received donations from health insurance interests that undoubtedly oppose Medicare for All, which was the centerpiece of El-Sayed’s campaign.)

Third Way’s limitations as a political organization stem from the fact that its leaders have an umbilical connection to Republican money and probably haven’t talked to a human outside of a cable news green room in years. In fact, the last time anyone from the organization sought to learn what life is like for normal Americans, it was chronicled by Molly Ball in The Atlantic, who trailed the researchers the organization dispatched to Wisconsin after Donald Trump’s first election to find the mythical 70 percent of the population that they believed occupied a position of non-partisan purity.

As Ball’s piece described, things didn’t go the way Third Way expected. Instead of finding a centrist majority out there in the hinterlands, it found a population that was extremely partisan—and fairly skeptical of the organization’s donors. But Third Way’s superpower, it turns out, is the ability to perform vertiginous mental hijinks when its priors are challenged. As Ball reported, the study that Third Way published after its tour of flyover country neatly omitted any of the doubts that she watched the researchers wrestle with on the road. “The report surprised me when I read it,” Ball wrote. “Despite the great variety of views the researchers and I had heard on our tour, the report had somehow reached the conclusion that Wisconsinites wanted consensus, moderation, and pragmatism—just like Third Way.”

This is the biggest irony: The successful politicians who so terrify Third Way are actually really good at listening to the concerns of voters and then organizing those voters around campaigns to address those needs. A recent New York Times report on the insurgent left reveals that these candidates aren’t really reinventing the wheel, they’ve just—well, mastered politics: “The campaigns themselves say the secret is in the basics. They have built old-fashioned ground games, harnessing the anger and energy on the left to recruit armies of volunteers, who in turn have greeted the moment’s protest movement with open arms.”

In fact, if there’s one thing that the smattering of successful DSA-aligned candidates have done in recent campaigns, it’s been the thing Third Way refuses to do: show a willingness to abandon preconceived dogma when it doesn’t survive an encounter with reality. As Nathan Newman recently wrote, the local DSA-aligned politicians who are winning elections have learned something that the national DSA is still struggling to accept: “To win local office, you not only have to activate the maximum number of DSA members possible, you need to reach out to a wide range of other progressive individuals and organizations to win election.” There’s something nifty going on here: It turns out that the successful socialists, through their mastery of retail politics, are showing that they’re capable of a little moderation.

Third Way could really stand to learn a thing or two from the politicians it disdains. But that’s not what the Republican funny money backing its every move wants. Instead, you are going to get $15 million worth of Red Scare fulmination. And that rhetoric will be used by the right to disparage every single Democratic candidate—not just the ones who want to enact Medicare for All. Third Way will be arming both the conservative media machine and the slop merchants at CNN and The New York Times with talking points, and using its phony-baloney identity as a liberal organization to color these attacks as coming from the illusory center.

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

Skidaway Island, Georgia, is home today to a luxurious community that the mostly white residents consider paradise: waterfront views, live oaks, and marsh grass alongside golf courses, swimming pools, and other amenities. 

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In 1865, the island was a thriving Black community, started by freedmen who were given land by the government under the 40 acres program. They farmed, created a system of government, and turned former cotton plantations into a Black American success story.

But it wouldn’t last. Within two years, the government took that land back from the freedmen and returned it to the former enslavers. 

Today, 40 acres in The Landings development is worth at least $20 million. The history of that land is largely absent from day-to-day life. But over a two-and-a-half-year investigation, journalists at the Center for Public Integrity unearthed records that prove that dozens of freed people had, and lost, titles to tracts at what’s now The Landings. 

“You could feel chills to know that they had it and then they just pulled the rug from under them, so to speak,” said Linda Brown, one of the few Black residents at The Landings.

This week on Reveal, with the Center for Public Integrity, we also show a descendant her ancestor’s title for a plot of land that is now becoming another exclusive gated community. And we look at how buried documents like these Reconstruction-era land titles are part of the long game toward reparations.  

This is an update of an episode that originally aired in June 2024.