Political News

In a survey of every Democratic governor in America, not a single state leader told The New Republic that they would move to dismantle state and local police participation in the FBI task forces carrying out investigations into political speech and organizing. Of 24 governors contacted, only two gave The New Republic extensive answers about Trump’s executive order criminalizing speech and protest, and the FBI entities carrying out these orders. 

In 2025, Donald Trump released National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, or NSPM-7, a sweeping directive instructing the departments of State, Treasury, Justice, and Homeland Security to pursue a dramatic effort to counter “domestic terrorism and organized political violence.” The memorandum also instructs the attorney general to submit a list of groups and entities deemed to be domestic terrorists to the president. 

Among the many indicators of the new violent domestic threat in NSPM-7 are “anti-fascism, anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

The mechanism for investigating and prosecuting these new thought crimes is a post-9/11 invention that fuses the FBI with state police, local police, the National Guard, DHS, military intelligence components, and sometimes even the CIA into a Joint Terrorism Task Force, or  JTTF. A national network of over 200 JTTFs was expanded through the justification of preventing the intelligence-sharing gaps that allowed hijackers to attack the twin towers on 9/11. 

In the intervening years, JTTFs have been used to deputize state and local police into federal agents, injecting federal directives like NSPM-7 directly into local communities. A study of 14 JTTFs conducted by the Brennan Center described their functioning as “organized chaos,” writing that the network functions as “a sprawling, federally subsidized, and loosely coordinated system designed to share information that is collected according to varying local standards.” 

The Brennan Center report also found that JTTFs’ headlong rush into intelligence work has “created risks that hurt counterterrorism efforts and undermine police work” and that the “lack of oversight, accountability, and quality control over how police collect and share personal information about law-abiding Americans not only violates the civil liberties of Americans, but creates a mountain of data with little to no counterterrorism value.”

That sprawling chaos is now being weaponized by the Justice Department to pursue investigations and intimidation of activists across the country. The FBI has even stood up a NSPM-7 Joint Mission Center composed of 10 federal agencies to organize the JTTFs’ NSPM-7 investigations. According to internal FBI documents first obtained by the nonprofit Property of the People, NSPM-7 investigations began in dozens of blue states, including New York, California, and Illinois.

But the governors from all three of those states equivocated in response to The New Republic’s inquiry about whether they were taking any action to stop the implementation of NSPM-7. 

Gavin Newsom of California shirked the question, telling The New Republic in a written statement only that “California’s security efforts operate wholly under state law and appropriate safeguards.”

New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s office attempted a more acrobatic maneuver, claiming that “New York State Police assigned to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force focus only on genuine criminal or terrorism investigations, follow New York’s laws, and do not participate in civil immigration enforcement or the NSPM-7 Joint Mission Center.” That answer is misleading. The FBI Joint Mission Center is the central hub for administering NSPM-7, but its participants are only a few dozen federal employees based in Washington, D.C.

As the map of NSPM-7 investigations makes clear, the New York JTTF—which is chock-full of NYPD intelligence officers—is actively pursuing NSPM-7 investigations. The governor’s office also acknowledged that New York State Police members and command staff are assigned to the New York JTTF and that those members work in partnership with the FBI and the other agencies represented on the JTTF under the supervision and oversight of state police command staff.

“Governor Hochul’s top priority is public safety, and she expects all law enforcement agencies to utilize resources responsibly to fight crime and keep communities safe, while respecting New Yorkers’ right to exercise their First Amendment right to freedom of speech and assembly,” her office said in a statement. 

Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker also demurred on the question of how exactly local and state police are participating in the FBI’s ongoing Illinois NSPM-7 investigations, telling The New Republic, “Regardless of any actions taken by federal officials under the direction of the Trump administration, Illinois remains committed to maintaining the integrity of its own processes and will continue to ensure law enforcement information is handled appropriately and focused on legitimate public safety purposes, not political agendas.” 

The Illinois State Police, or ISP, who also provided a statement, wrote that the JTTF information process is a critical state asset but that the current gubernatorial administration does not tolerate abuse of the process. “The State of Illinois is committed to protecting free speech and ISP officers do not participate in the potential targeting of First Amendment rights. ISP personnel assigned to JTTFs remain under the authority of ISP, are subject to Illinois law, and are bound by the U.S. and Illinois constitutions. Any violation of the ISP rules of conduct is subject to discipline, up to and including termination, under the independent ISP Merit Board process.”

How this firewall squares with the FBI’s ongoing Illinois investigation remains unclear. 

The office of Hawaii’s Governor Josh Green simply responded to questions about NSPM-7 with: “This is not relevant to Hawai’i state law enforcement or National Guard personnel.” The office of New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill told The New Republic, “I’d refer you to the NJ Office of the Attorney General on this.” The office of Delaware Governor Matt Meyer said they’d respond, then never did. 

The universal support for FBI JTTFs makes sense given the fear most elected officials have around the scaling down of the national security establishment. Should an attack take place under their watch after a downsizing or reduction in budget and scope, they could end up catching the blame. 

But earlier this year, there was one democratic gubernatorial candidate who broke with the ranks of the Democratic herd to proffer that the FBI’s JTTFs scouring the country for dissidents should and could be kicked out of Wisconsin—the home state of the progenitor of the Red Scare, Senator Joseph McCarthy. 

“Because of the seriousness of the Trump threat, I would use my authority over state police forces to cease any cooperation with a federal joint operation task force that is designed to target American citizens exercising their civil liberties,” Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong told KLIP News in July. She also said that the memorandums of understanding that authorize state and local police to work with the FBI “are a loophole to essentially federalize local police forces. I do not wish to see Wisconsin become a patchwork of communities where people are unsure if they are safe depending on which side of the county line they may find themselves.”

Wisconsin’s current governor, Tony Evers, did not respond to The New Republic’s request for comment. 

The New York Times has a massive, almost hegemonic influence on the political discourse among liberals in America. That’s a bold statement, and not one I can easily prove. But I think that’s the reality. The Times’ Nikole Hannah-Jones’s piece on her struggles to find a racially diverse and academically strong school for her child single-handedly created a weeks-long debate about the state of K-12 education that eventually Mayor Zohran Mamdani was forced to weigh in on. Ezra Klein’s podcasts and columns are often quoted by Democratic activists and elected officials. Pundits treat the polls that the Times conducts with Siena University as the definitive account of who’s ahead in key races and how various demographic groups are shifting politically. Maggie Haberman is considered the nation’s chief authority on President Trump’s thinking. The guest op-eds in the Times are widely quoted and debated. 

And while I know that the overwhelming majority of Democrats don’t subscribe to the Times, they are still influenced by the paper’s perspectives. Why? Because other news outlets that Democrats consume, both left-leaning places like MS NOW and more centrist ones such as ABC and CNN, take their cues from the Times on what to cover and how. (The Times isn’t so important among Republicans, who tend to distrust both the paper itself and other mainstream media.) 

The power of the Times isn’t new. But American politics has changed in fundamental ways. And that makes the American left’s attachment to the Gray Lady more problematic. A liberalism that forcefully confronts authoritarianism, oligarchy, climate change, and the numerous other enormous challenges that we face will almost certainly be one that is less attuned to the views of America’s most influential paper. The Times implicitly and at times explicitly advances a centrist, status quo politics, and that’s exactly what liberals must abandon to save the country. 

The Times has been the most influential news outlet in America for decades. But when I started out in journalism in the early 2000s, that power was more contested. Back then, I remember people would say a story was really important if it were “on the front page of the Post or the Times.” But The Washington Post’s influence had waned even before owner Jeff Bezos shifted the op-ed pages rightward and the paper laid off dozens of journalists the last couple of years. I worked at the Post from 2021 to 2025, and our pieces got nowhere near the same attention from the public or follow-up from other outlets as those in the Times. 

I am not sure exactly how or why the Times became the national news outlet. My theory is that the American political economy of today creates one megawinner in every industry. That’s Google in web search, Apple in smartphones, and the Times in national media. 

But the problem isn’t that lots of people read the Times. The problem is that lots of liberal activists and elites are having their perspectives shaped by the Times in 2026. The Times believes deeply in the nonpartisan, nonideological form of journalism that has dominated in the United States for the last eight decades or so. In prior eras, news outlets were more open about their ideology and policy preferences. Even as television networks and newspapers such as the Post and the Times embraced this more neutral approach in the twentieth century, Black-owned newspapers in particular took a different tack, leaning into their concerns about segregation and white supremacy. 

Times leaders describe their approach as being an “independent” news operation. They don’t explicitly state this, but I suspect those leaders are quite aware the paper’s audience is largely Democrats and otherwise left-of-center readers. So the paper is signaling that it’s independent from the Democratic Party. But the coverage of the Times is best described by other words and phrases: nonpartisan, bipartisan, centrist, neutral, a “view from nowhere,” and, at its worst, false equivalence. 

However we describe this vision, in practice the Times’ news coverage (meaning outside of the opinion section) avoids consistently describing the Trump-era Republican Party as antidemocratic, Islamophobic, racist, and plutocratic. The paper seems interested in portraying conservatives and liberals as equally problematic, or at least implying that there are major excesses on the left as well as the right. The paper’s coverage of higher education and transgender rights in particular leans into the idea that the left has gone too far, as opposed to centering the right’s authoritarian conduct on those issues (e.g., bans on gender-affirming medical care and the study of ideas like critical race theory). The overall product is a factually accurate portrayal of American politics that misses the big story: The Republican Party is a far-right entity at war with democracy; the Democrats are a normal party in a liberal democracy. 

The paper’s opinion section, while overall left-leaning, similarly often whitewashes the political conflict in the United States. The correct treatment for Christopher Rufo, the conservative activist behind all the bans on teaching about racial issues in schools and universities, should be constant columns and editorials blasting him as an authoritarian, not extended interviews that treat him as a normal political actor. Klein’s infamous column titled “Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way” encapsulated this approach. 

The Times has the right to cover America in 2026 this way. And there is nothing inherently wrong with centrist, nonideological media, or coverage that doesn’t use blunt language to describe today’s Republican Party. The problem is the paper’s coverage approach combined with its huge influence on Democrats and liberals. The mistakes that Democrats have made in fighting the MAGA right have been numerous and deeply costly: believing that Trump won in 2016 largely because of economy anxiety, trusting that Joe Biden’s conciliatory approach would bring politics back to normal, refusing to push Biden to stop fully supporting Israel’s war in Gaza, spending much of last year not fighting hard against Trump’s destruction of federal agencies and radical immigration policies. 

In my view, the Times helped lead Democrats to all of those fateful decisions. The paper’s coverage hints that the Republican Party is reasonable and parts of the Democratic Party base are unreasonable. That approach pushes Democrats away from the reality: The MAGA right must be defeated, not negotiated with. 

If the biggest problem is that the Times’ approach is ill suited for liberals fighting against a radicalized GOP, a smaller but important problem is the Times’ approach to skepticism toward progressives. As progressives gain more influence, the intraparty fissures among Democrats are more important than at any time in decades. And the Times, in my view, is very much on the side of an ineffective center-left. 

The paper’s editorial board has strongly embraced the center-left argument that moderate candidates reliably do better in general elections, despite research from scholars Adam Bonica and Jake Grumbach and others that question that conclusion. The paper’s skepticism toward Mamdani during his campaign was obvious. The editorial board, which had previously announced it would no longer endorse candidates in local races, published a column urging New York Democrats not to rank the socialist upstart among their top five candidates in the ranked-choice election. The paper’s news section used documents obtained from a hack of the computer systems at Columbia University to write a story that implied Mamdani was being deceitful because he checked “Black or African-American” on his application to the school. Mamdani was born in Uganda and was not admitted to Columbia.  

The Times coverage of the post–October 7, 2023, conflict was heavily skewed toward Israel’s perspective, according to reporting from journalist Adam Johnson. For example, the paper used terms like “slaughter” and “massacre” far more to refer to Israeli deaths than those of Palestinians. 

Again, there is nothing wrong with a newspaper, particularly its opinion section, having points of view. The problem is that Democratic activists and politicians are taking their cues from the paper. The Democratic left has been prescient and correct on so many issues in the Trump era: the dangers caused by billionaires, the Immigration Customs and Enforcement agency, and local police departments; the weaknesses of Biden’s political approach; the electoral challenges caused by his Gaza policy; the problem with so many of the party’s leaders being in their seventies and eighties; Mamdani himself. I think the Democratic Party would have listened to progressives more had the Times not regularly cast the left as unrealistic and impractical. 

For America to right itself, we need changes on the scale of Reconstruction and the New Deal. And I worry that’s not going to happen if Democrats and the broader anti-Trump left are taking their cues about what’s necessary and politically possible from the Times. If Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Pete Buttigieg win a few of the early primaries in 2028, will the paper portray Democrats as facing a choice between a candidate who will clearly win the general election (Buttigieg) versus one who will clearly lose (Ocasio-Cortez) or acknowledge Bonica and Grumbach’s research and the inherent uncertainty of projecting election results? I worry the Times will take the former approach. 

To be sure, the Times provides reliable and impressive coverage of events in the United States and abroad. It often breaks news. The paper’s news and opinion sections have at times been a critical bulwark against Trump. I say this as both a reader of the paper and occasionally a contributor to it. (I am part of a group of political analysts writing short pieces each month about the midterms for the paper’s opinion section.) 

What I am calling for is for liberals to expand their news diet. If the Times is implicitly and at times explicitly pushing an incrementalist, centrist, MAGA-tolerant agenda at a time when America needs a fundamental shift in the direction that Mamdani and Ocasio-Cortez are urging, liberals largely relying on that paper to shape their worldview are misguided.

So if you’re listening to Klein’s podcast, make sure to listen to Johnson’s Citations Needed too. Hannah-Jones writes brilliantly on race and racism, and so does Michael Harriott. The New Republic’s breaking news team doesn’t have much access to Trump and his aides. And that often means its coverage of the president is more blunt and frank and prescient than that of Haberman and people who talk to Trump’s team. If you want another catchall news source, The Guardian covers everything without seeming to worry much about being too mean to Republicans. 

The correct way to practice politics in 2026 is to read The New York Times but remember that much of the essential news to save our democracy has been fit to print elsewhere. 

Some cultural objects seem to tell the future. They may strike us as urgent or novel or strange when they first appear, but, in retrospect, we understand them to be prescient, to have seen something long before the rest of us. Moby-Dick seems to have gotten the message about literary modernism about six decades early; Zadie Smith’s White Teeth is one of the best novels about the post-9/11 global order despite coming out the year prior; The Matrix understood how digital cultures could warp and transform our social lives long before most people were continually logged on. But there maybe isn’t an example of this kind of cultural prescience that’s more uncanny or uncomfortable than that of HBO’s Watchmen.

Watchmen, Damon Lindelof’s “remix” adaptation of Alan Moore’s already revisionist superhero graphic novel, appeared in October 2019. It was, and remains, a radical piece of television. Pulling the critique of white supremacy that was latent in Moore’s comic to the surface, this Watchmen looked hard at America’s legacies of racial violence. The Tulsa Race Massacre, the Ku Klux Klan, the FBI, a compulsorily masked police force tracking down masked vigilantes—this new Watchmen came to life as an evisceration of the institutions of racism in U.S. society and as a reminder of how recently Jim Crow was the law of the land. TV Twitter was obsessed, the think piece industrial complex whirred overtime, it was crowned an achievement of unusual complexity and even importance. And its spectacular finale aired right around when a novel coronavirus started passing from person to person in Wuhan.

So, right at the beginning of the global pandemic, and a few months before the U.S. would be gripped by new protest movements and police conflicts in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, HBO ran a limited series about mask politics and the racial animus of the police state.

Watchmen’s transition from speculative to reflective has been almost too much for it to bear. When I’ve shown it to contemporary college students—many of whom began college during the pandemic—they often read it as too on the nose, a cringe relic of Woke 1.0 earnestness. It’s hard, even knowing its release date, not to see it as post-Floyd, pandemic media.

The reason a show like Watchmen has this kind of power is because of its desire to use the format (and valuable IP) of a superhero show to tell a story way bigger than a series of capers or battles with archvillains. In this way, it shares a conceptual approach with other big franchise swings like Star Wars’ Andor, a show likewise tethered to a political moment with which it only kind of lines up. These were shows that took on the rich lore of their franchises and crafted something new with it. Shows about fascism and revolution, power and emergency.

Lindelof’s newest prestige superhero series Lanterns—co-created with Chris Mundy and Tom King—seems unlikely to carry that kind of uncanny resonance. Based on the Green Lantern comics, the show is clearly meant to be a mash-up of the DC Studios mythos and the HBO sensibility—much like its recent predecessor, The Penguin, which transformed the canonically silly archvillain into the anti-hero of a premium cable crime saga. Numerous reports have cited True Detective as a model for Lanterns, and it indeed has a similar format and Instagram filter. But, though Lanterns is about intergalactic gumshoes, it’s missing much of True Detective’s cosmic inquisitiveness. Green Lanterns may fly, but this show is defiantly ground-bound, in ways that are both compelling and confusing. In an era of franchise TV production that veers wildly between ambitious experiment and fan service hackwork, Lanterns is content to chart a middle course. It hurtles forward with purpose, but it never quite takes off.

I don’t know anything about the Green Lantern comics. The aspects of Lanterns that run counter to the established lore are essentially unknown to me and while I’m sure DC Studios would prefer I catch up by, at minimum, watching James Gunn’s Superman, I have no real contextual knowledge of the show’s broader universe. As a viewer of the show, this is both a liberation and a constraint. Lanterns is both made for me, and not.

The show introduces itself as a buddy cop detective series, and, for all of the cosmic kinks that twist up that genre structure, that’s basically the show it stays. At the center is John Stewart (Aaron Pierre), a young, chiseled recruit to the Lantern Corps, an intergalactic law enforcement agency. He is  apprenticed to Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler), the aging, creaking Green Lantern whose precinct is Earth. As Green Lantern, Jordan carries a ring that makes him essentially omnipotent, though, as Jordan readily admits, carrying such an object takes a toll. What both men know, but neither will say, is that Stewart is being primed to replace Jordan, rather than inherit his position once the older Lantern retires or dies. Jordan carries this knowledge crankily, belittling Stewart, sending him on absurd and dangerous errands, sabotaging the “training” he’s ostensibly there to receive. Meanwhile, Stewart carries this knowledge with a clenched fist and a chip on his shoulder. Pierre plays him as a man who is constantly in the midst of a breathing exercise.

The good news is that Chandler and Pierre are among the best in the business at playing these respective responses. Chandler doesn’t try to escape his iconic role as coach Eric Taylor on Friday Night Lights so much as he uses it as the raw source material for his Hal Jordan. Hazy eyed and heartsick, his Green Lantern is a loser, and he handles his current situation without a wisdom and maturity commensurate with his great power. (Chandler also plays an outdated hologram of Jordan, who is still gruff, but much friendlier, even more fatherly.) Pierre, on the other hand, is a born action hero, able to oscillate between quietly mournful charisma and yippee-ki-yay dynamism. They are a great pair, and much of the show’s pleasure comes from watching their fraught chemistry develop and devolve.

HBO loves dramas of succession, but this is neither the Iron Throne nor Waystar-Royco we’re talking about. Has Lanterns done enough to make us care who will eventually wield that ring of power?

All of this takes place in 2016, just one of this show’s three timelines. In this 2016 timeline, there is supposedly a rogue interstellar robot hiding out amongst the survivalists, militiamen, and high school football players of Rushville, Nebraska, and Stewart and Jordan jet in to smoke it out. The second timeline takes us back to Stewart’s childhood in the late 1990s during which his parents train him to handle a series of nail-biting scenarios—including playing William Tell with his father—with a single-minded focus on his one day donning the Green Lantern’s ring. His father, it seems, was the preferred candidate, back when Earth received its first member of the Lantern Corps, but, due to his fearfulness, the ring passed, instead, to Jordan. The Corps’ representative (a welcome Laura Linney) treats this decision as something like a clerical error, solvable by putting the young Stewart next in line for the job that, by rights, should have belonged to his father. Of the handful of storytelling risks the show takes, this timeline’s detailed depiction of perilous parental expectation and willful loss of innocence is among the show’s most affecting. Showing us John Stewart as a Black child bearing the weight of his family’s dreams—and his father’s regrets—gives the show an emotional texture that the hayseed noir of its 2016 timeline struggles to provide.

The third timeline, though, unfolds in 2026, when we quickly learn both that Hal Jordan is dead and John Stewart is still not the Lantern. The meat of the show remains the 2016 tale, as Jordan and Stewart ingratiate themselves with the skeptical townsfolk, poking and prodding to find the alien intelligence hidden among the locals, but the knowledge of that 2026 endpoint hangs over everything. In some ways it reminds us always that we’re heading towards disappointment. The good guys will win—or survive, at least—and we have to imagine that Stewart’s ring cycle is not quite over, but the future is bleak anyway. HBO loves dramas of succession, but this is neither the Iron Throne nor Waystar-Royco we’re talking about. Has Lanterns done enough to make us care who will eventually wield that ring of power?

The show that Lanterns resembles most, far more than Watchmen or Andor, Game of Thrones or Succession, is Surf Dracula. In a now-infamous 2021 tweet, a writer named Topher Florence posted,

back in the day if you did a tv show called surf dracula you’d see that fool surfing every week in new adventures but in the streaming era the entire 1st season gonna be a long ass flashback to how he got the surfboard until you finally get to see him surf for 5 min in the finale

Lanterns is HBO’s Surf Dracula.

Lanterns is a process story, an HR saga set within the world of cosmic supercops.

Rather than escaping the pressure of its source-text’s mythology or making itself an engine of that lore, Lanterns finds a niche deep within the DC televisual universe. But the show is neither freed by its distance from the core nor buoyed by its nearness. Instead, Lanterns is a process story, an HR saga set within the world of cosmic supercops. You don’t need to know much about the DC universe to understand its plot, but, not knowing anything about that universe also makes it hard to care who’s in charge of policing it. More than that, though, it’s hard for viewers—even casual ones—to dwell this long in anticipation of an outcome whose, presumably, spectacular payoff lurks just offscreen. As the critic Joshua Rivera put it, “If this isn’t a story about John Stewart becoming the Green Lantern, then what is it?”

Even as Lanterns lurches, in this final week, toward some resolution of that arc, the dawning understanding that this is a show about disappointment might be, for some, disappointing. Not every show needs to tell the future. Not every show needs to seethe with ambition, either. But a show with an identity crisis can only be fun in spurts. Lanterns is a cop show, and it’s a show about a family, and it’s a show about surrogate fathers, and it’s a show about small towns and authoritarianism (only a little bit), and it’s about corrupt hiring practices at intergalactic corporations, but all of those shows remain adjunct to a show about a big, glowing MacGuffin. Stewart’s ambivalent feelings about the ring aside, we know, as well as he, that he’s destined for it. It’s a lot to ask viewers to be disappointed along with him for a whole season. Sometimes you just gotta let that fool surf!

Recent polling by Strength in Numbers and Verasight paints a dismal picture for Donald Trump and the GOP as they head into the midterms. Trump’s approval rating has fallen to the mid-to-low 30s, driven mostly by plummeting approval with Republicans. In years past, Trump’s approval ratings with Republicans hovered in the high 80s or low 90s. Today, it stands at closer to 70 percent.

These numbers are driven by public anger at the state of the economy, the increasing cost of living, and Trump’s poor leadership. A plurality of voters says that this midterm election is a referendum on Trump (who isn’t on the ballot), with independents saying this the most. As a result, the generic congressional ballot favors Democrats by 12 points among registered voters in one poll, and by 11 points among likely voters in another.

To put these numbers in context, the 2018 election’s blue wave saw Democrats win the national vote in the House by “only” 8.6 percent, and by 10.6 percent in 2008. The latter happened under a Republican president about as popular as Trump, at the height of the Great Recession and the flailing war in Iraq. Democrats ended up carrying 257 seats to 178 that year.

But tucked away in all this relatively good news are some disturbing trends that say a lot about both Republicans and the United States in general. Many of Trump’s most violent, authoritarian policies remain broadly popular with his base, and are his most popular ones among the public in general. Notably, for example, the public in general approves (barely) of his policy on deportations.

The same Verasight poll found that the public gives Republicans a one-point advantage on their handling of deportations, a five-point edge on crime and public safety, and an eleven-point cushion on border security. These would seem to show public support for Trump’s most violent and authoritarian policies, including ICE murders of civilians, air strikes on random boats, and ensuring “public safety” by forcing transgender people out of public life.

For anyone who has forgotten, Trump has assembled a brutal, unaccountable national police force that operates in secrecy and arrests anyone it wants to based on skin color or how they speak. There is no effective oversight to be found. They’re running concentration camps with a significant body count, with at least 57 people dying in ICE detention in Trump’s second term, according to the ACLU, and torture rooms at the infamous and since-closed Alligator Alcatraz.

American citizens, and those in the country legally, are routinely and violently detained and experience great bodily injury and even death. ICE has shot and killed at two Americans who were no threat to them. After Alex Pretti and Renee Good were murdered by officers, they were initially labelled as domestic terrorists. ICE agents also murdered Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, who was shot and killed during a traffic stop in Houston. ICE claimed he tried to run over an agent, but multiple witnesses contradicted that statement. The Trump administration has blocked states from investigating ICE when its agents randomly kill people.

It is disturbing that roughly half the U.S. population is ok with all this, and 77 percent of Republicans are all for it. Sixty-one percent of Republicans want no pathway to citizenship, and instead prefer deporting everyone, including those brought into the country as children. For these individuals, deportation to places where they neither speak the language nor have any connections is effectively a death sentence. In some cases, people who were in the country legally and face deportation are committing suicide rather than returning.

Republicans are still trusted more on “crime and public safety” than Democrats. Though somewhat ill-defined in the polling, the most prominent “crimes” that Republicans are seemingly interested in fighting are transgender people receiving health care, using bathrooms, renewing their passports, or playing kindergarten t-ball. What Republicans aren’t interested in fighting are white collar crimes, child rape (if the perp is a Republican donor or owns an island), public officials taking bribes, or attempts to overthrow the government.

Polling on all these issues shows that a majority of the public have adopted Republican anti-transgender talking points. Even Democrats are starting to fall in line behind them. It is the number one issue Republicans are campaigning on this election cycle, and they see it as a political winner.

Republicans in Congress and in state government are increasingly framing transgender people as dangerous, mentally-ill degenerates who should be locked away in mental institutions against their will. The internet roundly mocked GOP Senator Tuberville for bemoaning “furry airline pilots,” but lost in the social media buzz was the fact that it was part of a 20-minute tirade against transgender people where he demanded their involuntary commitment. Republican policies for transgender people have direct parallels to Germany’s policies between 1933 and 1945, and Republican calls for institutionalization should be an uncomfortable reminder of the Nazis’ Aktion T4 program, which institutionalized and killed people with mental illness and disabilities.

The other keystone of the Republican “law and order” focus is their support of airstrikes on boats suspected of drug smuggling. In days past a Navy or Coast Guard helicopter would disable the craft with a single rifle round to each engine, after which they’d board the boat, inspect the cargo, and take people into custody. Today, over 230 people have been killed by the U.S. military in airstrikes against vessels only suspected of having drugs on board. More Americans approve of this than disapprove (48 percent to 41 percent per a YouGov poll), which includes  83 percent of Republicans.

The United States has become judge, jury, and executioner on the high seas, which is likely a crime against humanity. A plurality of Americans approves of this, despite the strikes having no measurable impact on the supply of illicit drugs to the U.S. It is performative cruelty, the government knows it, and far too much of the American public likes it.

The uncomfortable conclusion to be drawn from all of this is that many Americans would (and did) happily vote for authoritarianism and cruelty, so long as gas stays under $3 per gallon and ground beef below $4 per pound. Trump broke the bargain by attacking Iran, disrupting and draining global energy supplies, starting perhaps the stupidest trade war in history with Canada, and raising the price of everything in the process.

Republicans campaign on two platforms: brutalizing Untermenschen, and pursuing tax cuts and policies friendly to corporations. They absolutely swear their economic policies will improve standards of living. Which, quelle surprise, they do not. Even Republicans feel like they cannot get ahead financially, which is causing the downturn in Trump’s approval rating with them. A New York Times/Siena University poll showed that the share of Republicans saying the economy is better than a year ago dropped from 72 percent in January to just 29 percent by September 2026.

This leads to the uncomfortable conclusion that, like average Russians, many Americans would be largely okay with fascism so long as they felt the economy was improving for themselves personally. The problem for the GOP is that fascism caters to the wealthy elite, causing average Americans to suffer economically.

History shows that fascism promises economic rewards to the herronvolk but instead gives the spoils to the elites and cronies. The Nazis slashed taxes, outlawed labor unions, privatized much of industry, and the elites grew far richer. In the process they drove 20 percent of small businesses under. Wages were frozen, and the average workweek increased by 20 percent in just a few years. One has to wonder when, or even if, the American public will ever figure this out. Rather than delivering bread and circuses, the only thing fascism delivers is heaping misery on disfavored groups.

It is an open question how long it will take for the MAGA base, as well as much of the American public, to realize a fundamental truth about the Republican Party: They will happily hurt the people you hate, but if you’re not one of the oligarchs at the table when it comes to economic matters, eventually, you’ll be on the menu as well.

Donald Trump has been running propaganda ads starring, well, himself as a way to help the GOP in the midterms. The ads are government-funded, and one official even suggested that the payment scheme is partly designed to get media attention to the ads, amplifying them further. It’s appallingly corrupt and potentially illegal. But, amusingly, they’re backfiring: A new Quinnipiac poll shows that Trump is more toxic for the GOP than we thought. It finds his approval at an abysmal 34 percent, and at 31 percent on the economy, a record low for him. Worse, Democrats now lead Republicans on the economy, international conflicts and immigration, three traditional GOP strengths, underscoring just how big a drag he’s become. We talked to David Corn, author of the new book How Russia Won and a New Republic piece on Trumpian propaganda. We discuss how badly Trump is screwing the GOP, why those TV ads are destined to fail, why he’ll grow more dangerous as Election Day approaches, and how to prepare for it. Listen to this episode here.

With 34 days until the midterms, Republican strategists see at least five U.S. House seats are a lost cause for their party as President Donald Trump’s abysmal approval rating threatens to drag the GOP into the political abyss. Punchbowl News reported that Republicans are broadly resigned to losses in California’s 48th District, Iowa’s 1st District, Nebraska’s 2nd District, New Jersey’s 7th…

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A cartoon by Clay Bennett. Related | Republican efforts to distance themselves from Trump reek of desperation…

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In what’s an all-too-predictable fascist arc, President Donald Trump’s behavior is getting odder every day. He’s entirely convinced his dominion and power are infinite, and he’s surrounded himself with people who will never disabuse him of that notion. On Wednesday, this weirdness came in the form of an executive order banning ticks and mosquitoes from Washington, D.C. Yes, really.

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New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced that his administration had secured $607 million in funding to modernize a public housing complex in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn—only for some reporters to ask about lawsuits, brought by wealthy plaintiffs, against his tax on second homes worth more than $5 million. In response, Mamdani once again centered the people who voted for him and reminded…

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When Republicans corruptly redrew Texas’ congressional map to try to nix as many as five Democratic seats, it was the 9th District that they expected to be the easiest flip. That seat, held by Democratic Rep. Al Green, went from one that former Vice President Kamala Harris won by 44 percentage points in 2024 to one that President Donald Trump carried by nearly 20 points.

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An unvaccinated resident in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, was confirmed to have died from measles, according to an announcement by the state Health Department Wednesday.

The death marks the fifth measles-associated death in the Keystone State this year, per state statistics. At least 943 measles cases have been reported within the state so far.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were, comparatively, far behind in recording national figures related to measles: As of Tuesday, the CDC reported just two measles deaths in the entire country.

That discrepancy has sparked a fierce debate between Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over the health agency’s decision not to rely on state data but instead to use mortality figures from the National Center for Health Statistics.

Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told Reuters Tuesday that the incongruous statistics could undermine public confidence and even lend ammunition to Kennedy’s anti-vaccine followers who would argue that the deaths were “invented or inflated.”

“To the public, that gap looks like either incompetence or concealment,” Adalja told the newswire.

Kennedy’s flippant and dismissive rhetoric regarding the measles vaccine has left many Americans confused as to his own stance on the jab. A survey published Tuesday by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center found that just one in three Americans believe Kennedy recommends the MMR vaccine, despite his belated decision to support the scientifically backed shot on August 2.

Yet the measles situation has only become more grave as the country descends into the cold season. Pennsylvania authorities reported 114 new cases over the last week, a third of which were children under the age of 18. Overall, there have been 176 hospitalizations.

But those who are vaccinated against the virus stand a much better chance of remaining healthy: Less than one percent of the total number of cases involved people who were fully vaccinated against measles.

Measles was declared eradicated from the U.S. in 2000, a status determined by the lack of continuous transmission of the disease over a period of 12 months or more. That designation could be lost in November, when the U.S. is scheduled to undergo another review.

As of September 24, at least 3,659 measles cases were confirmed by the CDC—by far the highest count across the country since 1991.

Former President Barack Obama has not been president for almost a decade now, but according to Republican Rep. Rich McCormick of Georgia, current high gas prices are Obama’s fault. McCormick made his argument during an appearance on the right-wing Newsmax network on Wednesday. “Gas prices are artificially inflated but that’s going to be temporary. Get the truth out there.

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Republicans have finally identified why voters hate them, and apparently, they just need better messaging—you know, the kind that distracts from the fact that we are at war, everything is getting more expensive, and millions of people are losing their healthcare. This week on Daily Kos’ “Room Temp” podcast, Janesh and Markos dig into the increasingly desperate advice conservatives are giving…

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

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Pete Hegseth’s “State of the Force” address Wednesday was a bizarre journey in which he rehashed or remixed his most common talking points in Ted Talk fashion.

Hegseth got to the culture war stuff early on in his address, bragging about firing a slew of longtime military leaders at the beginning of his tenure as Defense secretary.

“I think the generals heard the message. Those who responded positively … are leading newly focused, and newly empowered and disciplined formations,” Hegseth said. “Those generals who did not? Who clung to the woke department, or seemed to think civilian control of the military is simply a suggestion? Well, they no longer work here.”

“It’s worth saying again, so that the fake news understands it. We are no longer the ‘woke’ department, or the ‘weak’ department. Simple translation of that? No fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos,” Hegseth said, calling back to an often used slogan and transphobic slur. “No wimps, no radicals. Just warriors. Just tough, ready, committed troops.… The ideological clowns are out,” he continued. “The patriotic cowboys are in—with testosterone testing on top.”

Hegseth: "It's worth saying again so the fake news understands it. We are no longer the woke department or the weak department. Simple translation of that -- no fatties no trannies no beardos no weirdos no wimps no radicals. Just warriors." pic.twitter.com/ClP833GT5J

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 30, 2026

Hegseth also took time to take cheap shots at the press, of which he used to be a part.

“Our so-called press makes Iranian state media look reasonable,” Hegseth said. “Our media’s shameful lust for political retribution blinds them to the consequences of reckless, so-called ‘reporting.’ So-called ‘journalists’ juiced up on Trump Derangement Syndrome think they’re fighting against our president. But they’re really undermining you. Our warfighters.”

Hegseth: "Our so-called press makes Iranian state media look reasonable" pic.twitter.com/NrhXiTcKs0

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 30, 2026

The Defense secretary also announced Project Meridian, a massive upcoming study on the “future of warfare” led by Elon Musk, Newt Gingrich, and Palmer Luckey. He unveiled the Office of Religious Affairs, an outfit that will report “straight to the top” to “strengthen religious support,” and revealed that he’d be making a further 20 percent cut to military leadership.

The Defense secretary sounds ridiculous. Patriotic cowboys and testosterone testing are not things you want to hear coming from the mouth of the head of the largest military in the world. And yet here we are.

“Send me,” Hegseth concluded, heavily paraphrasing the Bible. “Send me to fight the redcoats. Send me to fight the communists. Send me to fight the Islamists. Send me.”

Hegseth: "Send me to right the Redcoats, send me to fight the communists, send me to fight the Islamists. Send me." pic.twitter.com/M3VjDvIDQD

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 30, 2026

Some 600 attendees at Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s State of the Force speech at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia Wednesday received an unexpected keepsake during the officer-reduction announcement: a 144-page “field manual” filled with Hegseth’s “no fatties, no tr*nnies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals” philosophy.

The booklet is a collection of Hegseth’s speeches, but also included a noteworthy foreword by Donald Trump that—seven months into the Iran War—pledged not to send American soldiers into “dumb wars.”

“Our goal is PEACE, which is why we prepare for War—Especially the Wars of the future,” Trump’s foreword declared, according to a copy obtained and shared by ABC News’s Steven Beynon.

“As your Commander-in-Chief, I will not ask you to fight dumb Wars,” it continued. “I will unleash you to be violent, lethal and unstoppable—and I will always have your back. Godspeed, Great Warriors. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

But actions speak louder than words. Since returning to office, Trump’s approach with America’s military has been brash, careless, and at times completely irrational. See: the midnight raid to abduct former Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro, the indefensible airstrikes against small watercraft in the Caribbean and Pacific, the sudden abandonment of longstanding U.S. responsibilities in Ukraine and Taiwan, and the White House’s sudden interest in invading Cuba.

U.S. involvement in Iran was arranged following a February 11 meeting between Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and several U.S. and Israeli officials in the White House Situation Room.

It was reportedly Netanyahu’s direct influence—and ensuing pressure campaign—that thrust America into the war. Trump opted for violence without congressional approval, and against the advice of America’s top military commanders, who argued at the time that components of Netanyahu’s plan to attack Iran were “farcical,” according to a New York Times report published earlier this year.

Since then, the war has killed at least 22 U.S. servicemembers and wounded more than 820 others. It has also killed more than 3,500 people in Iran and injured tens of thousands of locals, according to data published by Al Jazeera.

After 23 years of war and occupation, the last US soldiers officially left Iraq on Wednesday, Chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell announced in a statement on the “successful conclusion” of operations against the Islamic State organization in Iraq.

The war, launched on false claims that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, led to hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and cost, conservatively, more than a trillion dollars (though tallying government war funding, like counting the dead, can be difficult).

In 2002, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld confidently predicted that the war would be short: “I can’t tell you if the use of force in Iraq today would last five days or five weeks or five months. But it certainly isn’t going to last any longer than that.”

US troops have withdrawn from Iraq at least twice before. After the Bush administration launched the war in 2003, US troops formally withdrew from Iraq in 2011. George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” banner was, reportedly, packed up and sent to his presidential library. At the time, one military analyst called the whole thing the “least effective war for oil in American history.”

But it wasn’t over yet: the US military ramped up its presence in 2014 under “Operation Inherent Resolve” to combat ISIS. Mother Jones maintained a “We’re Still At War” daily series between roughly 2009 and 2014. US soldiers stayed in the country for the rest of the decade, and beyond, until their “combat role” in the country ended in 2021.

Even then, about 2,500 US soldiers remained stationed in Iraq as “military advisers.” Today, all those troops, too, are gone.

“A new phase has begun, characterized by Iraq’s sovereignty, the strength of its institutions, the readiness of its forces, the unity of its decision-making, and balanced partnerships with its friends,” Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi said in a statement.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced onetime trillionaire Elon Musk, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, and right-wing entrepreneur Palmer Luckey as the new heads of “Project Meridian”—a massive upcoming study on the “future of warfare.”

Hegseth made the announcement at his “State of the Force” address on Wednesday afternoon, describing the trio of Trump loyalists as “the best forecasters of future conflict.”

“There are obvious biases and risks to asking ourselves to both ask the questions and answer them. So today we are leveraging a unique source of American advantage—one our adversaries do not have: our innovators, our senior leaders, and our technologists. Big thinkers and doers who will forecast the creative solution to tomorrow’s conflicts,” Hegseth said. “And that’s why today … I’m announcing Project Meridian, an effort led by America’s best minds to study the future of warfare.”

Musk, Luckey, and Gingrich will work with private sector leaders, experts, and Pentagon chief technology officer and former Uber vice president Emil Michael to “creatively look to the future and identify the domains that we must conquer.”

Hegseth:

I’m announcing Project Meridian, an effort led by America’s best minds to study the future of warfare.

Project Meridian will be co-led by three of our nation’s best minds: Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey, and Newt Gingrich.
pic.twitter.com/rBupINU71r

— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) September 30, 2026

Before the Project Meridian announcement, Hegseth introduced the Autonomous Warfare Command, a unit focused on robotic, artificial intelligence and drone warfare—domains in which Musk and Luckey have a particular interest. Hegseth noted that Project Meridian’s findings would be submitted in the next 120 days with a “full public rollout.” He will be meeting with the three “great minds” later Wednesday.

We’ll have to wait and see what comes of Project Meridian and the rest of Hegseth’s bizarre, Ted Talk–style speech. What makes Luckey, Musk, and Gingrich so uniquely good for the job? Does he really think other countries don’t have industry leaders and politicians as smart as them? That the collective minds of a dotcom-era billionaire, a Zionist VR entrepreneur, and an old partisan really give the U.S some kind of military edge?

“Project Meridian will ruthlessly map the trajectory of wars, domains, and technologies to ensure this War Department, your War Department, dominates the future,” Hegseth promised.

Did you hear about the massive data breach currently rocking the Trump administration? No, silly, not the FBI data breach. Sure, ShinyHunters, a legendary hacking group, snatched up the personal data of what appears to be every FBI employee, including information on sensitive job assignments, but that’s only a paltry 38,000 people or so. This time, we’re talking about a hack that put up…

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Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan spoke at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on Wednesday, where she warned that Americans must stay vigilant during the midterms as President Donald Trump and the GOP become increasingly desperate as their prospects dwindle. “The authoritarian playbook is very clear: When you’re at risk of losing, you either A, make up a threat that only…

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