Political News

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

Recent attacks on US universities by the Trump administration have built on decades of efforts by libertarian donor networks, fossil fuel companies, and conservative think tanks to reshape university governance and increase outside influence, according to a new study.

The authors of the new perspective study argue that the erosion of university autonomy has left colleges more vulnerable to corporate interests, especially within climate and energy research.

In 2025, the Trump administration froze billions of dollars in research funding, launched investigations into 75 institutions and pushed colleges to sign agreements supporting administration policies in exchange for federal funding. The federal government canceled $4 million in climate research grants at Princeton University alone and accused scientists of fueling “climate anxiety.”

If you’re a young researcher watching that, you might think twice about asking a question that could cost you your funding, said Noel Healy, of Salem State University, the lead author of the study published in the journal Energy Research & Social Science.

“Climate policy is only as good as the evidence behind it. When the industry being regulated gets to shape the questions researchers ask, it ends up shaping the policy too,” he said.

The Academic Freedom Index, which measures how freely scholars and universities can teach, research and express ideas without interference, found that US institutional autonomy fell from 3.3 in 2019 to 1.7 in 2025, on a scale of 0 to 4.

“In other countries, attacks on university legitimacy paved the way for faculty purges, campus closures, and centralized political control.”

“Since 2025, scientists have been deleting words like ‘climate change’ from their grant applications because those words can get an application rejected,” Healy said. “Some universities have shut down programs before the government even asked them to, hoping to avoid becoming a target. You don’t have to ban speech if people fear that speaking up will cost them their funding. People start deciding it’s safer to stay quiet.”

Outside influence on US universities is not new. In the 1920s, electric utilities worked with academics to defend their monopoly positions and oppose regulations. Fossil fuel companies followed suit in the 1950s, funding research to sow doubt about the public health impacts of their products. Internal industry documents have shown that companies viewed academic research as a way to build credibility and influence public debate.

Corporate-funded research was only one way powerful interests influenced universities. Libertarian donor networks also influenced program content, faculty hiring and gained appointments to university governing bodies. For example, David Koch, the billionaire industrialist whose wealth came from Koch Industries, gave more than $185 million to his alma mater, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and served as a lifetime member to the elite research university’s highest governing body.

Between 2010 and 2020, six fossil fuel companies alone gave more than $700 million to US universities, helping to legitimize industry solutions to the climate crisis and undermine regulatory approaches. Some of this funding came with donor agreements that gave outside actors control over decisions traditionally made by faculty, such as in hiring and curricula.

At the same time, donor-influence models were written into state law. For example, in 2016, the Arizona state legislature created the first publicly funded libertarian academic center. Other states have followed suit. These centers bypass faculty control, instead answering to legislators. These centers are expected to receive $50 million in US taxpayer dollars during the 2025-2026 school year, according to reporting by the Hechinger Report.

State legislatures have also tried to limit faculty power through legislation that could abolish tenure, block faculty participation in lawsuits, and police educational programming. From 2021 to 2023, more than 150 state bills were introduced targeting tenure, faculty governance, and diversity, equity and inclusion, according to the Energy Research & Social Science perspective.

“Faculty need the power to review major gifts before they’re accepted and to refuse the ones that threaten academic freedom.”

Soaring tuition and student debt, which are also products of the corporate model, have contributed to mistrust in higher education. The authors of the study argue that to regain public trust, administrators must confront how corporate donors have reshaped their priorities, disclose donor contributions and influence, and give faculty committees the ability to reject funding that undermines the university’s public mission and create conflicts of interest. Union contracts can protect faculty and empower them to confront corporate capture.

“Transparency lets you see the deal, but it doesn’t let you stop it. Faculty need the power to review major gifts before they’re accepted and to refuse the ones that threaten academic freedom,” Healy said.

Universities don’t have to start from scratch. For example, the national UnKoch My Campus campaign published a model gift-acceptance policy that gives faculty a say before gifts with conditions are accepted, makes donor agreements public, and sets clear grounds for rejecting gifts that give donors influence over hiring or teaching. Universities can draw on examples like this to write their own rules, Healy said.

“In other countries, attacks on university legitimacy paved the way for faculty purges, campus closures, and centralized political control,” he said. “Universities came under attack before those governments had full control, not after.”

MIT has previously said it would not divest its endowment from fossil-fuel companies, arguing that working with industry could help develop climate solutions. The MIT Energy Initiative has also said that funders have no control over the content or findings of its research reports.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the September 29 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

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

We’re a little more than a month out from the midterms, and the GOP leaks of panic and fear are unlike anything we’ve seen in some time. Words like “wipeout” are filling press reports. When a GOP pollster privately told Republicans things might be OK, he was mocked by Republicans themselves as delusional. Trump himself has erupted repeatedly in the last few days in an angry panic about what’s coming. But all this bad news for Trump and the GOP is getting us nervous about Democratic and liberal overconfidence.

So to see where voters really are right now, we’re checking in with Melissa Toufanian, the executive director of the progressive group Navigator Research, which has done interesting polling lately on public sentiment about Trump. Melissa, thanks for coming on.

Melissa Toufanian: Thanks so much for having me.

Sargent: So let’s start with some of these leaks. One Iowa Republican strategist told The Washington Post that this midterm could rival the Dem rout in 2006, saying, “it feels like it could be a wipeout.” Lots of stuff like that coming out of Iowa.

Melissa, that’s striking. Trump carried Iowa by double digits. It’s heavily rural. What do you make of those Republicans’ fears?

Toufanian: It’s funny to hear that, because I was just in Iowa a few weeks ago, and I sat down with two different focus groups with farmers. So these farmers were mostly lean Republicans, strong Republicans. Almost all of them voted for Trump. And what we heard from them is that Trump’s tariffs, and the market volatility caused by those tariffs, is a huge pain point for them.

I mean, they were really upset about diesel prices. If we’re looking at diesel prices now, we’re looking at a cost per gallon of over six dollars and fifty cents. What we heard from them is that’s up more than three dollars from last year. And what that translates to for Iowa farmers, and farmers across the country, is they’re going to be spending thousands of dollars more this harvest season, which is right around the corner, running combines and working in their fields. So that’s a huge pain point that even Trump supporters, Trump voters, are feeling.

Sargent: And are these Trump voters who are speaking to you guys in focus groups, are they blaming Trump for the situation? What’s the nuance there?

Toufanian: It’s a great question. It was mixed. So again, the groups being more lean to strong Republicans, I mean, some were defending Trump. Some said when it comes to tariffs—some said, you know, he’s playing 40 chess. He’s got this long-term plan, this idea of short-term pain. We’re paying higher costs now, but it’s going to be long-term gain. That these tariffs are going to even the playing field when it comes to trade.

So there was that group. But then there was a far more pessimistic group that said, like, I don’t think he has a plan. I don’t think there’s a grand strategy whatsoever. I’m just feeling it in my business, in my family’s expenses. All I’m getting are higher costs.

Sargent: And you probably don’t need much erosion among those people in order to make a real difference, but I want to come back to that. In a series of posts on Truth Social over the last couple days, Trump has really been losing it. I’m just going to read from one here.

First, he talks about how stupendous the economy is, then says:

“Because no one ever wants to give me credit, no one is talking about these Historic Numbers. The FAKE NEWS and DUMOCRATS hate these reports and these record-setting numbers. They hate the TRUTH. Just look at these numbers, THE BEST IN HISTORY. VOTE FOR REPUBLICAN AND ‘TRUMP’ CANDIDATES IN THE MIDTERMS.”

The stuff at the end there about voting for Republicans is in caps. He’s really, really, really starting to unravel, I think. Melissa, your outfit polled recently in a bunch of states that Trump carried by large margins. What did you find?

Toufanian: So we recently polled in Alaska, Ohio, Iowa, and Texas—four states with key battleground Senate races. And across all four states, which Trump won by double digits in 2024, he actually has a net approval of negative 14.

He’s underwater in each of those states. And looking at Iowa in particular, he is most underwater. He’s underwater by 17 points. So in states that helped him get back to the White House, people are now deeply pessimistic about how he’s handling the economy, his job overall as president, and especially the war with Iran.

He’s got 57 percent disapproval in Alaska, 58 percent disapproval in Iowa, 56 percent disapproval in Ohio, 56 percent disapproving in Texas.

Sargent: I think it’s worth underscoring how red that territory is. You know, this cycle is a weird one, where all of a sudden we’re talking about places like Iowa and Texas flipping. But that’s, like, really crazy.

OK, I mean, these are places that Trump won by huge margins. They are Republican states, they are red states. Melissa, can you talk about how long progressives have looked at states like these as being completely out of reach?

Toufanian: Yeah. And these states—Alaska, Ohio, Iowa, Texas—I mean, they’re Republican-controlled states. And Republicans have held power for a very long time. People in these states, looking at our data, looking at other polling, have been really down on Democrats.

They voted for Republicans, and even in our own data, we see they’re still pessimistic on the Democratic Party. They’re not sure if Democrats can deliver for them. At the same time, they’re down on the Republican Party.

An interesting trend that we saw in the data is there’s a growing number of people who, when we ask about party trust—which party do you trust more to deliver on the issues you care about most?—we’re seeing a lot of people in that “neither party, don’t know” category, meaning that they’re feeling frustrated about politics in America right now, and in our political parties and our political system.

Sargent: In a midterm election, voters like that who are profoundly disgusted with the system are going to turn on the party in power, and hopefully, for the first time, open their ears in a new way to Democratic and progressive policy ideas. Is that something you think might be going on?

Toufanian: No, I think you raise a really good point. There are really two things that we’ve been keeping an eye on from Navigator. So the first is kind of that intensity of disapproval. So take a state—we’ve been talking about Iowa, right?

Let’s take a state like Iowa. Sixty percent of Iowans disapprove of how Trump’s handling the economy, but that includes 50 percent who strongly disapprove. So it’s not just people feeling a little frustrated or a little pessimistic. There’s this intense disapproval of how Trump is handling the presidency, and how he’s handling the economy.

I think the other piece that we’ve been tracking closely at Navigator is this what we call gap in focus. So this idea, in every single survey wave—so every single month, we ask Americans, what do you want your elected officials, the president and Congress, to focus on? And then, what do you think Trump and Republicans in Congress are most focused on?

So wave after wave, it’s the pocketbook issues. People want a focus on inflation and the cost of living, jobs and the economy, health care, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security. Those are always at the top.

When we ask people, what do you think Trump and Republicans in Congress are focused on? Overwhelmingly, it’s immigration, foreign conflicts. And if you notice, what I said people want their elected officials to focus on is not at all what they perceive Trump and Republicans in Congress focusing on.

In fact, in the battleground—so in that battleground polling I mentioned—we actually see that only 2 percent of people in the battleground perceive Trump and Republicans focused on health care, when we know that’s a top issue for Americans.

Sargent: OK, so in all four battlegrounds, only 2 percent think that Trump and Republicans are focused on health care?

Toufanian: Yeah, it’s almost nothing. What we hear in our focus groups, I mean, across different partisan ideologies—Democrats, Republicans, independents—they just want their elected officials to deliver for them. They just want to feel like they are actually working every single day to make their lives better, and that they have their best interests at heart. They don’t want to feel like their elected officials have been bought out.

In talking about those Iowa focus groups that I mentioned that were with farmers, one farmer said, you know, our elected officials, they go off to Washington, I think they should wear a NASCAR jacket that shows you who they’re sponsored by. And they just—this feeling that they don’t have their interests at heart, and that they’re not delivering for them.

Sargent: And it seems to me that you’ve got these Democratic candidates who are laser-focused on the affordability stuff. And in fact, Trump rages about this constantly, saying it’s a hoax when Democrats talk about it. But for some of these voters, they’re hearing Republicans defend Trump’s record, and they’re hearing Democrats talk about affordability. Is that more or less what’s happening?

Toufanian: I mean, what they’re telling us is the most important issue is affordability, right? So I think it’s extremely important, no matter what the party, to talk about these cost-of-living issues, because that’s where people are struggling. I mean, across our data, whether it’s in our data or in our focus groups, I mean, we’re hearing about people who are skipping meals.

We have a report coming out this week talking about people who are eating less, skipping meals so their kids can eat. I mean, really struggling. We did polling a few months ago where one in 10 people told us that they are selling their blood plasma just to make more money.

So the most important thing for any elected official that I can glean from our data is to connect with people on the issues they care about most, and that is absolutely cost of living.

Sargent: And it seems to me that in this environment, what you’re hearing from Trump is just almost tailor-made to drive people away from Republicans. Because you’ve got Trump raging constantly that it’s just a hoax when people say the economy is not working well. One thing he said on Truth Social is, he quoted Fox saying, “the United States has the best employment numbers in history.”

And then he said: “The Fake News Media REFUSES to report this rather significant development, however!!!”

He repeats this over and over and over. Affordability’s a hoax. Best economy ever. How does that stuff land?

Toufanian: And the irony is, if you look back to the Biden administration, that something that everyone should take note of is, when people are feeling a certain way, when people are upset, when they’re struggling, if you tell them, actually, just look at the numbers, we’re doing great—I mean, it doesn’t work.

And so the irony is, we’re seeing that now, that people are telling us in our data, in our focus groups—you know, just go talk to people at the grocery store, I’m sure they’re going to tell you the same thing, that they’re just really struggling.

And so to be told that their concerns and their worries, especially when it comes to their personal financial situation, to how they’re going to take care of their families—to say that that’s a hoax, I mean, it doesn’t land with people. It doesn’t resonate at all. And if anything, it just adds to their anger and frustration about elected officials in the political system.

Sargent: Well, these Republican leaks are getting worse and worse and worse. I’m just going to read some more. There was an Axios report in which a pollster for Senate Republicans told GOP donors and operatives that they might be able to grow the majority. And one attendee called this, quote-unquote, “delusional.”

Toufanian: I think that the other piece that we’re seeing that should be a warning sign, to show just how disconnected this is, is now we’re seeing Republican defections on support for the war with Iran. Because in our polling, that shows that is one of the issues that people are opposed to. They don’t think it was worth it.

They know it’s raising their fuel costs, which people are filling up the tank to go to work, drive their kids to school every single week. And so that’s a cost that they are continuing to see is so much higher than even just a year ago.

Sargent: Well, let’s talk a little bit about what your firm has found in terms of why people are really rejecting Trump. It’s a complicated thing, right? It isn’t just the economy. You guys polled on what you called Trump regretters, who are voters who regret their support for Trump in the past. What’d you find there?

Toufanian: So we found that about one in five people who voted for Trump in 2024 now regret their vote. And also, when we look a little bit under the hood at the numbers behind that, it’s younger voters, it’s voters of color, it’s even white suburban moms who regret their vote at a higher level than men. So there are definite cracks in that coalition that Trump brought together to win in 2024.

And then when we ask them, you know, why do you regret your vote, what started to make you feel that way—the major answers are broken promises, the war with Iran, and high prices. A lot of times people are just telling us that the economy isn’t working. Trump said that he would keep us out of wars. We’re in another one.

And when you cite the fact that their estimates—the war’s cost, you know, over forty billion dollars—people are thinking, you know, why are we spending forty billion dollars on the war, yet I can’t have Medicaid or SNAP here at home? So it just doesn’t add up for people.

Sargent: Right. I don’t think anybody understands why the hell he’s doing this in Iran. And I think that really cuts very, very deep for him.

Toufanian: Absolutely. I mean, the war with Iran, we’ve been tracking since, you know, even before the U.S. and Israel launched attacks in Iran. And it’s only grown more and more unpopular. We’ve continued to track, do you think this war was worth it?

And even more and more people, especially independents—which, you talk about, that is a key category to keep an eye on right now—even independents are becoming more pessimistic about the war. And we found, when you remind people of the costs, they turn even more negative on it.

Sargent: It’s really interesting that you found very pronounced regret for support for Trump among these demographics, like young voters, nonwhite, working-class, I guess you said, right? And white suburban moms.

Toufanian: Yeah, we said the highest level are people of color, our young voters. Even white suburban moms was one group. It’s really moms—moms regret their vote at a higher level than dads. So there’s some very interesting pieces kind of within that overall number.

Sargent: And in that finding, I think you can really see the MAGA coalition dissolving, can’t you? Because it’s the young voters, it’s the nonwhites, it’s the white women, who just sort of took a flyer on Trump in 2024 because of the economy. They took a risk. They weren’t really ideologically MAGA people in any real way. They just, I guess, forgot what Trump did to the economy in 2020—but whatever, that’s another story.

And they decided that the business guy could really snap his fingers and get stuff moving again. And those are the people that are moving away from him now. That’s the MAGA coalition kind of coming apart, isn’t it?

Toufanian: Yes. I mean, I think people took a chance in 2024. I mean, we still had high levels of inflation, costs were still up. I say this as someone who served in the Biden administration. Like, we had the—the economy still wasn’t doing well, it was doing better than during COVID, but it wasn’t yet at a place where people could feel like they were getting ahead. Now it’s even worse. Now people—not only do they feel like the economy isn’t working, they have even higher levels of disapproval about it.

We also, on top of that, have ICE and immigration enforcement that they’re seeing that is driving disapprovals, especially among Latino voters. We spoke with several different groups of Latino voters who now regret their vote for Trump. And I mean, the regret was so deeply palpable, in these kind of heartbreaking stories of them talking about coworkers or, you know, family members who have been deported. And they said, you know, this is not what I voted for.

Sargent: It is what they voted for, in the sense that Trump said he was going to do that. They just didn’t really hear it, is what I think happened.

Toufanian: I mean, the other interesting piece too is that, you know, from Navigator, we break out MAGA Republicans, which is, you know, in some ways kind of this immovable coalition that they stick with Trump through everything. And then we say the non-MAGA Republicans. So it’s self-identified people who don’t identify within the MAGA wing of the party.

So within that non-MAGA Republican group, it’s one in four who say they regret voting for Trump. So even to have that crack within the Republican Party, I mean, that’s really significant.

Sargent: Yes. And that’s how you can see your way to a wave election, right? Like, I just want to stress for people, you know, we’re still a month out. Things can go wrong. The polling could be wrong. You never know. But the data points we’re seeing right now are that Donald Trump is sliding in approval fairly steadily. He’s at 35 percent or under in some of the approval averages.

Dems are leading in the generic ballot matchup by eight, nine points, depending on the averages. All indications are that that’s growing. People like James Talarico have led in just about every poll in a state like Texas. We’re seeing people like Josh Turek in Iowa leading in some polls. Sherrod Brown leading in most polls in Ohio, which Trump turned red. This is extraordinary stuff.

So just very bluntly, as a public opinion researcher yourself, do you think that what you’re seeing in all this data out there in the public realm—do you think it’s close to right or not?

Toufanian: I think so. I think the only word of caution that I would add, though, is, in our polling, when we look at whether it’s party trust or which party is better positioned to handle different issues—while we’re seeing a pretty even split between people who say they trust the Democratic Party more on, let’s say, lowering costs, versus those who say they trust the Republican Party more, those are pretty even.

But there is that about one in four people, sometimes as high as one in three, who just don’t trust either party. So I think the polling and the data may absolutely be correct as far as the results for the midterms and the direction in which we’re heading. But I would just say, the day after any elected official wins, you’ve got to start working on how to deliver.

And actually, in my mind, in some ways, just as important as winning is being able to deliver—to actually show that you understand these concerns that we’re hearing, that they’re not a hoax, as Trump said, and to actually show people that you can make their lives meaningfully better.

Sargent: Right. All these dynamics can turn against Democrats real quick. We just saw them against Democrats two years ago. So I think maybe the way to understand the fact that both parties are roundly disapproved of by voters is to look at some of these individual Democratic candidates.

James Talarico in Texas, Mary Peltola in Alaska, Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Roy Cooper in North Carolina, Josh Turek in Iowa. These candidates seem like they are able to outrun their party in some way, because they’re strong personalities. They’re doing what it takes—even if I don’t like to see it sometimes—they’re doing what it takes to distance themselves from progressivism and the Democratic Party, the national party.

Does that look like what’s happening? I know you don’t poll on this stuff yourself, but as someone who follows this stuff as an educated consumer, do you think that these Democratic candidates probably are outrunning their party? Is that the dynamic?

Toufanian: I think that can be true, right? Let me just full-stop there. I think, at the same time, what we are just seeing is that Trump might not be on the ballot—that’s what a lot of, you know, people point to—but Trump and the Republican Party are so deeply unpopular that I think it’s important to see almost a multifaceted equation to get there, right?

That, like, what you said can absolutely be true. At the same time, there’s just, like, the fact that Republicans in Congress are not seen as focusing on the issues that Americans care about the most. And at the same time, again, in our battleground polling, Americans in those battleground states blame Republicans for this economy. They’re not pointing—you know, the majority of them are not pointing to the Biden administration. They’re pointing to their elected officials.

So I think it’s the disappointment, resentment, you know, outright outrage at the current electeds, and the hope that someone else can deliver. The desire for change is unbelievably high.

Sargent: Right. It seems like there’s a bunch of things that are lining up in a row that have to line up in a row. And right now they are. Melissa Toufanian, really great to talk to you. Thanks so much for talking to us.

Toufanian: Thanks for having me.

This is a lightly edited transcript of the September 27 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: I’m joined by Paul Frymer. He’s a great political scientist. He’s written several really interesting articles and books, including Uneasy Alliances: Race and Party Competition in America; Black and Blue: African Americans, the Labor Movement, and the Decline of the Democratic Party; and the most recent one is Building an American Empire: The Era of Territorial and Political Expansion.

We’re going to talk about the Democratic Party, because Paul’s written a lot about unions and minority groups and how they influence and are influenced by the party. So Paul, thanks for joining me.

Paul Frymer: Great, thank you. Thanks for inviting me.

Bacon: So where I want to start, what made me think about you, was you had a book published in the late ‘90s, and it was updated after that, about the idea that African Americans and the Democratic Party are a—I think the phrase is—captured minority, where because they give all their votes to the Democratic Party, they have very little ability to influence either party, because the Democrats have their votes and the Republicans ignore their votes.

And what I’ve been watching the last few weeks is various Democratic candidates distance themselves from transgender Americans, the transgender rights movement, on sports and on other issues too. You’ve seen this with Talarico. You’ve seen this with the candidates in Iowa and others too.

And I’m curious if that analogy plays out here, where transgender Americans are—the Republican Party is very opposed to transgender rights, so you’re in a party that doesn’t really fight for you and wants to move away from you when it’s time to reach swing voters. But do you see that parallel existing between transgender Americans today and maybe African Americans in the past, and maybe still today?

Frymer: Sure. Yeah, I think the parallel is there. And I should say first that with African Americans it is a historical, longstanding process, that the party system itself was in many ways constructed out of conflicts over slavery and over race and over racism. So when we look at current events and parallels, we find certain parallels, but obviously the same kind of systematic historicization of it is much different.

But yeah, the concept in real time is that neither party wants to advance a group’s votes. And there are moments when transgender rights, in our current moment, is seen as toxic for the party that is claiming typically to represent them. And of course, the other party is trying to take advantage of that. And so yeah, you see the Democratic Party pulling away from that and trying to distance themselves, leaving transgender populations without many options.

Bacon: Are African Americans still a captured minority in your view?

Frymer: I think in important ways, yes. Obviously it’s complicated, and it’s had different historical moments. In our current moment, where it becomes most transparent is when conflicts over race, and particularly with regards to African Americans, come up, and both parties try to remove themselves from this conflict.

And that was historically, in the 19th century over slavery, the design of the two-party system was to focus on the median voter, right? And that median voter is historically a fairly moderate voter, if not conservative voter, on issues like civil rights. And so it leads the two parties to try to avoid the topic. When civil rights issues come up, the party system tends to struggle over that.

So we’re in a current moment. President Trump’s agenda certainly includes things like attacking numerous minority groups. There’s probably more intensity towards immigrants of a wide variety. Transgender issues, of course. Communists, as the Democratic Party are described. And certainly Trump is still in the aftershocks of President Obama and the racial politics there. So I do think there are certainly a lot of parallels there, but it’s certainly changed a bit over time, in form.

Bacon: Uneasy Alliances is written in the sort of Clinton era, right? Can you talk about—we’re talking about the book and when it was written, and so it’s describing the period of the Democratic Party post-civil rights era, of the 1970s and ‘80s mainly, right? That’s the time period for that book. And it’s describing, to be very reductive, the party breaking with Jesse Jackson in a certain way as the kind of framing, right?

Frymer: Yeah, so the Clinton era was very transparently strategic. Jesse Jackson had run for president in the ‘80s two different times. He was blamed by Democratic Party elites for the failure of the Democrats to win, especially in 1988.

It was thought that he was linked by Republicans with Michael Dukakis, who ran that year, was the candidate that year. And was seen by many Democratic elites as too powerful, as too much of a—again, to use the word toxic—symbol of the Democratic Party.

And Bill Clinton invented that term, the Sister Souljah effect, where he turned on Jackson as a way to strengthen his own place as a Democratic Party candidate, and as for the Democratic Party, that he was going to distance himself from Jackson and from African American interests in the party. And so that was a really strong component of Clinton. And it was part of the Democratic Party playbook for quite a while.

There’s a lot with President Obama as well. Certainly when he was running, he too distanced himself quite a bit from Jesse Jackson and the symbolic nature of Jackson. He made very clear over and over that he was running not as a raceless candidate, but certainly a de-emphasis on that, right?

It was others who continually brought race back into the fold with Obama, and he of course is skilled. But a lot of Obama’s strategic sense was not that different from Clinton. Since that time we’ve had a different set of politics, that we have Trump—

Bacon: Let me stop you there, because I want to come back to that. Your book, you did a new edition in 2010, and it ends with Obama, and I want to come to the last 10 years. But let me just talk about, why for Black people is this approach to politics problematic? The sort of Clinton, Obama de-race, distance themselves from the Black electorate. Why is it a problem?

Frymer: There’s pros and cons, right? You want to be a part of a majority. And so one of the things that happened in the Clinton era, this was over the crime bill, going back to a pretty notorious crime bill in our current context, as it’s been discussed.

The Congressional Black Caucus in Congress rejected a more conservative version that Clinton was pushing. And it led to a controversial bill. It still was quite conservative in many ways, but it had important things that the Congressional Black Caucus fought for.

That led to the 1994 midterm elections. Democrats lost those midterm elections. The Congressional Black Caucus lost an enormous amount of power in Congress.

Bacon: Ranking memberships, chairmanships, ability to influence the president, media.

Frymer: And in fact, if I remember, I think one of the things Newt Gingrich did as speaker was to get rid of a lot of the institutional aspects of the Congressional Black Caucus. And they, in certain ways, ceased to exist formally.

So being a majority is important. Everybody knows that. African American voters, among many others, they’re very pragmatic voters, and they recognize the importance of majorities. And African American voters are extremely loyal voters to the Democratic Party in a way that no other group is consistently the same since the 1960s.

The issue there is that because both parties are focusing on winning majorities, when the Democratic Party is trying to distance itself from African American voters, obviously the forms of representation are not ideal. Sometimes that form of representation is via attack, as Clinton used as a foil. Sometimes with Obama, it is extreme caution.

But what it is not—and this is the kind of theoretical argument of a captured group—farmers can get subsidies that hypothetically could be controversial, but the public doesn’t pay attention to them, right? Farmers are represented, whether they’re a majority group or not. They’re just added into coalitions. There are lots of groups. They’re added into coalitions. They’re given different factors.

And for African Americans as a captured group, there are elements of that, but there are important elements where the opposite is happening. There’s a real attempt by their own party, the Democratic Party, in the modern era to use them as a foil to distance themselves. And again, as a form of representation, that’s neither ideal, and it’s also quite unique in our political system.

Bacon: And how did that change the agenda that Black groups pushed? Did it minimize their agenda? Did they pull back their agenda? Did they stop demanding things? How did that play out? So you have the Voting Rights Act and the civil rights era, so what happens in those 30 years after that?

Frymer: So a lot of it goes through litigation. Litigation is a somewhat quieter method, or it can be. President Obama used the administrative state, and litigation over the Voting Rights Act, litigation within the EEOC. So a lot of his measures were quieter.

Where you see the real dramatic impacts, and this is actually where I kind of first got the sense of this, is during the Clinton era, I was a voter registrar within the Democratic Party. And we were sent—I was still a college student—and we were sent consistently to focus on these moderate voters.

And moderate voters are white voters, over and over. You think of the terms, the soccer moms, the NASCAR dads. They are symbolized as white voters. And so they sent us to the suburbs over and over.

Bacon: Although we should emphasize, Black people play soccer. These are code words in a certain way. We’re avoiding saying white by saying these other words instead, right?

Frymer: Yes, that’s exactly right. And so we were constantly sent to the suburbs, and these suburban white voters, we were trying to mobilize them to vote, and they’re constantly like, Yes, I know the issues. Yes, I’m registered. Yes, I know what’s going on.

And then a group of us on our own went into the neighborhoods which were on our maps listed as unnecessary to go into, because these neighborhoods were thought to be already strongly Democrats. Where I was living, this is New Haven, Connecticut, these were neighborhoods that are overwhelmingly African American and partly Latino. And you walk into these neighborhoods on your own, very few people are registered to vote. Many people didn’t know the major issues of the moment.

There’s both a huge mobilization that takes place around these moderate voters, and there’s a lack of mobilization, especially around the Black community. The way campaigns work, and they still operate this way, is the focus is on these moderate voters, and then on election day, get out the vote, right? You go and you rally people. But the long-standing mobilization, the real kind of engagement, the attempt to bring in especially communities that have long-standing been left out of politics, that’s critical, and that hasn’t changed in important ways.

It is reliant there on civil rights groups themselves, whether for Black interests or Latino interests, other immigrant interests and the like. They need to do this themselves. That puts obviously a huge weight on them, whereas the party is mobilizing other groups. You see this now, so much focus on the white working class voter, or the moderates of Michigan and Ohio and the like, right?

So this kind of thing takes place. One more line, I know I’m going on here, but another notable aspect with captured groups is that, again, there are many moments where African American voters are pivotal for elections. They turned the ‘20 election in Georgia, in Pennsylvania, right?

All those voters that Trump said were getting counted at 3:00 in the morning, those were largely Philadelphia, Atlanta, right, in those areas. But the Democratic Party doesn’t reward them, and reward that pivot, in the same way that it rewards the pivot around, again, the Wisconsin suburbs, right? Or Milwaukee.

Bacon: So I guess if we got one of the consultants on the phone, they’d say two things. One, they’d say there are more white people than Black people, obviously.

Frymer: Yes, obviously.

Bacon: And the second they’d say is that a swing voter is worth more than an unmobilized voter, because a swing voter takes one out of the Republican camp and into the Democratic camp, versus a person who doesn’t vote at all only moves one vote to the Democratic camp from the non-camp. So those things are both true, but that doesn’t—I’ll let you respond to that.

Frymer: Sure. So, one reality there. Consultants to parties, first of all, they’re not there to be historically-minded. They’re not there to think about a 10-year goal of the Democratic Party, or social justice, or any of that, right? Or the health of democracy. They’re there to win an election.

So they’re on the ground in a moment, and they’re dealing with realities that have been framed in that specific moment, as they’ve interpreted them. But—sorry, I’m losing my train of thought. The question was—

Bacon: I asked about swing voters counting twice, because they pull one. And then the second is that there are more white people than Black people.

Frymer: Yes. So there’s also a reality here. There are groups out there that are not terribly popular with the Democratic Party, right? The Democratic Party as it’s currently construed, its relationship with white rural voters, for instance, is tense. But it doesn’t lead to a sense within party elites of, we have to stop reaching out to these voters, because reaching out to these voters is—again, I don’t think it’s the best word, but toxic, or disruptive to the party coalition.

There is a sense that reaching out to Black voters, and especially in specific moments, is disruptive to a party that has often held together different coalitions that don’t always fit that well, especially when race is at the forefront, and that is seen as disruptive to this moderate median voter, again, in a different way.

The Democratic Party has the liberty to reach out to different racialized groups in a way that it feels, and its consultants feel, is more disruptive, contested, when it does so with African Americans. And again, you’re seeing it with transgender issues. With transgender issues we’re dealing with very small populations. We’re dealing with very symbolic matters, and yet there is this sense that a word here or there is enough just to set everything on fire for the Democratic Party.

Bacon: It’s an interesting question. In 1992, do we think that being for civil rights was toxic? And in 2024, or 2026, do we think being for transgender rights is toxic? Part of this is, I’m not sure about that.

Some of my friends on the more left say you can be for civil rights and win elections, and that part I am not sure about. I think the party strategy is often overdoing it, and it has real downsides to these interests. I’m actually not sure that you can win an election in the moral way that I would like.

Frymer: Yes, I absolutely agree with that. So there is a conventional wisdom that gets set out, and as we know, we don’t know why elections turn, ultimately at the end of the day.

Bacon: It’s very complicated.

Frymer: It’s very complicated. Everyone is trying to interpret. Everyone is saying, “Oh, the Democrats on transgender issues.” Democrats on Black Lives Matter. Democrats on COVID. Any of these things, right? So there’s this constant theme.

One of the things with largely white consultants, part of their own, I guess we could say, ambivalence about race, is they overreact a lot to what they think might be happening, right? A lot of white consultants, and just generally mainstream consultants in the Democratic Party, including many Black consultants, thought it was a bad idea for Barack Obama to run in 2008. That he wasn’t going to win because of his race. He brilliantly showed that doesn’t have to be the case. He ran a great campaign, and he really transformed things.

A quality of a lot of these candidates, you can include Donald Trump here, is you ignore the conventional wisdom. Because everyone told Trump he couldn’t win in 2016 either. Or ‘20, or ‘24. And so we get these conventional wisdoms, these truths, and we’re seeing that in the popularist movement now, among consultants.

They use their own ambivalence about race and they overreact. And no doubt Clinton was an element of that, in overreacting to Jesse Jackson. So their own deeply embedded politics are loaded within that.

Civil rights groups, progressives, other groups are not wrong to say there is a different form of politics that can address this. There is one that is also mobilized, right? Mobilized long-term. Change the politics. Focus with transgender rights as well. You don’t need to be scared of it. Focus on it. Or address it, right? I agree with all of that.

And so part of what, in making arguments about African Americans as a captured group—I’m not a consultant, right? I’m trying to be a kind of political historian in understanding the dimensions here and why it is recurring. Again, a lot of that is historicized and institutionalized and the like. But I completely agree with you that the political transcript that can be written can be very different.

I will just add one point there, which is that the conventional wisdom does work to demobilize progressive arguments. Because if progressives lose once, they’re thrown out the window. The conventionalists can lose 15 times in a row.

Bacon: Run the same campaign over and over again.

Frymer: That’s right, and they’re still the convention.

Bacon: You’ve written a lot about—in the same period you were writing about African Americans, you also wrote about unions and the study of unions in this period. Are unions also captured by the Democratic Party, or is that a little bit different? Because the period from the 1970s to the 2010s is also a decline in the influence of unions in the Democratic Party as well.

Frymer: Yeah, so it’s pretty incredible that what was a third of the private workforce was unionized, right? Hugely Democratic Party. Major role in legislation, major role in voter mobilization, major role in society and organization. That under the Democratic Party watch, it declines dramatically. What is it, 6 percent now, the private workforce today.

Most of that is under the Democratic Party watch. NAFTA is a Bill Clinton policy, right? The NLRA is not reformed by the Democratic Party despite having majorities across all the federal branches many years. That is stark, right? That the Democratic Party would allow that to happen under its watch.

And that is suggestive, again—the labor movement has been historically, certainly over this time period that we’re talking about, the ‘70s to the ‘20s, maybe changing a bit now, but has been in the shadows. You don’t see the Democratic Party, when they’re looking for a vice presidential candidate or anyone besides the Department of Labor, being a person from a union, right?

They are there to do the grunt work, but they’re not at the center of things, and they haven’t been. Again, because of history, these are short-term analogies as opposed to the same category.

But I want to say one other thing there. Part of my interest in labor is that the labor movement, going back to the early 20th century, was an opportunity, right? If you really want to create the alternative—the people who argue that the Democratic Party should be colorblind, focused on class, right? The union movement was the way forward to that. To try to create a really diverse labor movement. And there were a lot of huge voices that wanted that, from a Walter Reuther, A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Cesar Chavez. You can go on and on, right?

There was a real opportunity there, and so part of my interest that shifted to the labor movement was the failure of that. That fell apart, and it leaves you today also with this white working class movement, much of which was formerly labor union, that is left out of the Democratic Party and left out of a broader coalition where they might have felt a greater attachment to it.

Bacon: So let’s go to the 2010s now. You were hinting at it, and let’s come to that now. It felt like Black activists may have read your book or something like that, because there is this period where it seems like Black Lives Matter rises and makes an argument like, “We are currently captured and ignored by the current Democratic Party. Let’s do something different.”

The fact that a movement called Black Lives Matter erupts while a Black man is sitting in the White House is very ironic on some level, but I think captured is exactly what you’re getting at. And so how do you see both the rise and maybe the decline of the BLM movement in these last 15 years, let’s say?

Frymer: Yeah. Obama is important to it, certainly symbolically, right? He raises the stakes. He raises the hopes.

Bacon: That’s a good term, yeah.

Frymer: He mobilized voters. So even though in some ways when he’s running, he’s playing a bit on the Clinton playbook, he’s not Bill Clinton. He is a different candidate. And again, he’s raising hopes and dreams of people that we can live in a different America. And a lot of that is not just him as a figure, it’s also a lot of what he’s saying. He makes the comment about Trayvon Martin. That’s not nothing, right? These are big comments.

Prior to that, and as we know, he’s also somewhat of a Clinton Democrat on crime. He wasn’t a huge progressive on crime. He made some symbolic claims. But even actually during Black Lives Matter, the height of it in the 2020s, I’m trying to think of his role there. He’s quiet.

Bacon: He made some generic comments encouraging the protests in 2020, but he’s not at the front lines of them. He’s following the public as opposed to leading it.

Frymer: Yeah. That’s always been his place there. So on the one hand, he’s not unimportant. On the other hand, the idea of Black Lives Matter, as you say, during the Obama era and moving forward, is suggestive of the fact that this is not a coalition that is attached to the Democratic Party.

Even at its height, it had expressions of the Democratic Party, but not huge efforts by legislators to make any kind of meaningful changes. I think there was a constant sort of, “Where are we going here?” And here again, everybody is kind of trying to spin their wheels as to what is now publicly possible and what is not.

Bacon: What does a median white person think about Black Lives Matter becomes the question, right?

Frymer: And there are overreactions on multiple sides. When Obama was elected in 2008, it was the end of race in America. We had solved all problems. And so there’s some of that. But certainly the Black Lives Matter movement, those who are—I hesitate to use the word leaders, because part of the movement is that it’s supposed to be—

Bacon: Kind of leaderless.

Frymer: Leaderless. But yeah, it sees itself certainly not as an arm of the Democratic Party in any way, shape, or form.

Bacon: And this argument that African Americans need to have a different voice and need to not be so tied to the party, I think that has taken hold. You see more efforts. My sense is Black Lives Matter doesn’t have any formal leaders, but I think there now is a clear fissure among Black activists between sort of Clyburn and the people on Twitter who are more aligned with Black Lives Matter. And their argument is that Clyburn is captured and we need to have another force. I think this is what’s happening now.

Frymer: Yeah. The other thing that’s going on right now that the Democratic Party’s been struggling with is Donald Trump. He raises the stakes.

Bacon: He raises the stakes on all these things.

Frymer: A loss is catastrophic. A loss in this midterm election is catastrophic. Now historically, Democrats have been saying that for a long time. Now it seems real, right?

Bacon: Electability was an argument Clinton was making on some level, being made today. But the difference between George Bush’s second term and Donald Trump and JD Vance’s first term is much different, obviously.

Frymer: Although in 2005 or so, George Bush was pretty catastrophic.

Bacon: I meant Bill Clinton compared to the first George Bush. George H.W. Bush seeking a second term was actually not as catastrophic as George W. Bush became.

Frymer: I don’t know if your memory is this, which I’ll say to my students, in 2000 when Al Gore and George Bush tied, this is the younger George Bush, it was almost like a shrug from the American public, right? Kind of like, “Oh, we got these two candidates.”

Bacon: Who cares who wins? Legacy men whose dads have been in politics. They seem normal, and then it turned out to be very consequential, yes.

Frymer: Whereas if the ‘26 midterms, the Republicans win them, there’s a lot on the line here. And one of the interesting things actually that Trump has been doing—Trump throws so much out at you, right?—but one of the things that he has really done a lot, with less attention, is the civil rights agenda. He has dismantled so many pieces of that long-standing civil rights agenda, and it’s not the headlines, right?

Bacon: I think this goes to what you’re hinting at, that the Democratic Party is nervous about talking about, like as it was running the Department of Education or DOJ, these issues. The party, I would argue, both the sort of mainstream but even the popularist, the Bernie, AOC progressive wing, both have agreed the problem is winning the white working class. So talking about civil rights, talking about government agencies, talking about democracy itself—I would argue the party is unified, the centrists and the progressives, around, we need to do economic policy that attracts the white working class.

They might have different views of the economic policies. One might be Medicare for All, say progressives, Medicare for those who want it, say the centrists. But both of them, defending the DOJ Civil Rights Division is a priority of neither one right now, right?

Frymer: Yeah, no, it’d be an interesting hypothetical: what if the economy was going well? What would be the Democratic Party message? And obviously even if the economy was going well, there’s going to be great inequality.

Bacon: Inequality, no matter what.

Frymer: But if the economy was going well, and the public felt the economy was going well, which is part of Trump’s success in ‘24, was a memory of the economy being pretty good—

Bacon: When he was president the first time.

Frymer: Yeah, the first time. So what would be the Democratic Party message? And it would be interesting to think, because you’re right, we mobilized around certain key principles, and Trump has helped us with those, because he’s tanked the economy. And healthcare, all of that.

But would the Democratic Party focus on things like civil rights? Would it focus—there’s been more local focus on ICE, obviously, out of Minneapolis, Los Angeles. But yeah, where would the focus be? Affirmative action, I assume, is just dead in the water for the Democratic Party.

Bacon: But this view that the party has to move to the right on, quote unquote, social issues, I think is not just shared by centrists right now. I worry that Bernie Sanders has internalized that in a certain way too, and I worry AOC and those people have internalized it a little bit too.

Frymer: Yeah. I think AOC I would see different than Bernie Sanders here. Even historically, Bernie has not been a huge person on that. Mamdani is another. It’s unclear whether that’s a huge concern for him. So yeah, you have also the issues over Gaza that are also a part of the party. There’s so much going on, right? And things to be sorted out. And it’s happening so fast and furious.

But I do think when there is a step back and a discussion of this, where does the party stand on these broad standing issues of civil rights? Title IX is another, right, involving gender and college education, and it also expands into the workplace. These have been left out. And I think, as you say, there is a goal among a lot of progressives to focus on the economy.

It’s obviously an earnest, meaningful goal. But there are things that are not being discussed, and it’s not clear as well, right? I know my colleague Jake Grumbach points a lot to youth voters among African American voters, Latino voters, being very supportive of a DSA agenda on all these types of fronts. But I think a lot of this still needs to be sorted out, as to the consequences of it.

Bacon: So let’s finish by talking about the latest book you’ve written, Building an American Empire: The Era of Territorial and Political Expansion. Talk about that book and what that’s trying to do. And I’ll emphasize I’ve not read that book.

Frymer: Yeah, so my work in general across these themes has been about the importance of whiteness, to use the woke term. But an identity of the United States as a white nation throughout, and the consequences that has had, whether it’s for partisan politics like captured groups, whether it is for unions, where race has also been central historically. And so that led me to be interested in empire, the ideas of the US empire and the ideas of expansion. And President Trump has brought a lot of this alive, obviously, in a lot of different dimensions.

And so it led me to go out of my comfort zone of the 20th century and 21st century and all the way into the 19th and even 18th century, and understanding the idea of America as an expansionist nation and as an empire. And what was really striking from the start and throughout was the heavy consciousness of being a white nation. And it is not something I have to parse out. It is everywhere in the language.

And it exists really—I think the breaking point maybe is the New Deal. It might even be a bit after the New Deal. The civil rights movement isn’t just a moment of trying to eradicate discrimination and its policies. It changes the whole tenor of what America is, right? 1965 is also an immigration law that opens up the United States to much of the world. All this, of course, is part of the backlash that we’re seeing right now.

But so the argument of the book is that the United States is attempting to expand, and it is doing that throughout the 19th century. It is using—because I’m also interested a lot in boring words like institutions and structures. The party system serves as that, with different groups in terms of representation and captured interests. Institutionally, the United States used a number of different ways to generate a politics of both expansion, but also a way of handling matters when the United States confronted populations that were not white and were not European.

And part of expansion is you confront populations that are not your own. And so as the United States expanded and thought of itself as a white nation, thought of itself very broadly as a white nation, in the sense that pretty much all Europeans were included in that—but as it came into conflicts, whether it was with African slaves, whether it was with Native Americans, either within US borders or in Mexico and elsewhere, whether as we moved to the Pacific with Asian immigrants, there was this constant talk and fear among party leaders and among the populace of, “How do we keep America white?”

And throughout the book there’s a lot of explicit—

Bacon: Keep America white. This is not a Donald Trump invention. This has been the historic trend.

Frymer: No. He is pulling out a lot of themes. And in this book, part of what I try to do, I quote a lot, and I quote at length a lot, because the language is stark.

One of the things that has been lost in history is Abraham Lincoln’s efforts at colonization in the early Civil War years.

Bacon: Meaning that African Americans should be emancipated and move.

Frymer: Emancipated and sent off.

Bacon: Sent. That’s correct. Sent, not moved.

Frymer: And there are long conversations with lots of statistics of how, the number of people necessary to move via boats, and all this kind of stuff. So the kind of stuff that Trump is talking about, mass deportation, it goes back to Lincoln. It failed, fortunately, under Lincoln. It of course reappears in the Eisenhower years and the like. So we had Chinese exclusion in the late 1800s. It’s been a constant thematic.

And one of the interesting things about the US, for the purposes of this book about empire, is it actually ends up in many ways constraining our empire ambitions. So for instance, the US had opportunities, this is now in the 1840s, 1850s, of taking all of Mexico. In the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which gave us the land that became much of our Southwest, again, very transparently, the conversation was, how do we get as much land as possible with as few people as possible? And I think we took 60 percent of Mexico’s land, and we got a little less than 1 percent of its population. We looked for empty land because we wanted—

Bacon: To keep America white.

Frymer: To keep it. We wanted to settle it with white Europeans. So it’s a really powerful story that admittedly I learned a lot about as I was reading. And this is what Trump has really brought back out, right? This sense of white European imperialism. Although he at times, as he is apt to do, says things that don’t necessarily fit his agenda, right? Venezuela as a 51st state probably doesn’t fit.

Bacon: It would not fit. I’ll finish with this. I guess there are two theories competing in liberal Democratic politics, both kind of here and abroad, I think. One—I had Thomas Zimmer, he’s a historian, on. He was talking about how you need to have people who lean in and really defend the multiracial, pluralistic project.

The idea that that’s the way to fight for liberalism, is to admit that we want a thing that has all races and ethnicities and religions as part of it, and defend that pluralism. And you have to defend it formally, because the right is fighting it formally, so you can’t just do it sideways. The project has to be to formally defend that.

Others say, and I think Mamdani might be in this group himself, that the way you defend that project is to talk about economics and class issues, and therefore you win more of the white majority, whether you’re in Britain or Germany and so on.

I tend to think the first thing is correct, that you do have to fight the pluralistic fight and win that, while talking about economics too, but it can’t just be done through economics only. But where do you stand on that? And I’m reducing a lot of arguments very simply, but I think those are the two strands, and there are good faith arguments on both sides of that.

Frymer: Yeah, I agree with you. There are good faith arguments on both sides. They have meaningful supporters. There is the New Deal argument, right? The New Deal was the biggest success of the Democratic Party. It brought in the working class. It raised the working class, and in important ways it raised the living conditions of African Americans and everybody in the United States.

The question is, the New Deal was exclusive in many ways over civil rights. And the arguments were made, it’s going to help everybody, and let’s just keep riding it, and then we’ll find opportunities to make more specific progress. Those opportunities never really arise fundamentally.

And so I agree with those who say we need to confront the divisions in our society. We need to confront the history of our society. And we need to have honest conversations about that. It’s hard to say that, for me, honestly, in this moment where we are having even the most basic mentions of that we were a slave nation taken out of our politics. So is this our moment?

There has to be a momentary pragmatism of a certain level, again, to win an election. Elections are seen as the foundation of our democracy, but they’re also not so great for our democracy.

Bacon: No, they’re not. Yes, that’s a good point.

Frymer: They force this goal of winning, and they put aside all the things that we need to have these conversations of. And people say, Oh yes, we do need to have those conversations tomorrow.

Bacon: Tomorrow never comes.

Frymer: Tomorrow never comes, right? And I think that’s why a really important part of the progressive movement is pushing for things like proportional representation that might change some of these dynamics, take away the pressure of having to win these winner-take-all elections. I think that’s something that is meaningful going forward.

But yeah, absolutely, for greater representation and equality and the health of our democracy, we need to have these conversations be transparent. But they’re not going to happen in national politics. I think that’s reality. And people like Trump recognize that some of the places that are having that are universities, so we’ve got to gut them as well.

Bacon: Yeah, as well.

Frymer: Or high schools, or go all the way on down. Or museums, parks.

Bacon: You used the word pragmatism. Just to drill down, to me, pragmatic means James Talarico should not call for reparations, probably, in this term. I don’t think that necessarily means that Marcy Kaptur needs to say, “I voted to ban the education of gender ideology,” which is code words for being—I agree that the Democrats probably can’t press forward on civil rights that much right now.

I guess my concern is that they’re embracing things that are going backwards at times. That’s where I would say the pragmatism maybe is, try to stay even. Don’t embrace moving backwards, though. That would be my concern.

Frymer: Yeah, actually I think that’s a great point. And I think the best politicians do that, right? They don’t go back. They don’t emphasize, but they say it matter-of-factly, and they keep moving forward. At times Obama did that. At times Obama did make the comments about pull your pants up and the like. But I think Obama often was good at just saying, “Let’s stay focused here.” But not, as you say, not trying to step backwards.

And I think from what I’ve seen, Jon Ossoff has been pretty good on that. Again, not emphasizing, but not stepping back, and often using half a sentence or a sentence. Not to be provocative, but to make clear it’s still part of our liberal agenda.

I think AOC, personally, I think she’s shockingly good in a lot of ways of bringing in a politics, and I’d be very excited to see. She’s going to be a great example if she were to run for president, right? Is America ready for her? Maybe, right? It’s not clear. I don’t think the conventional wisdom’s clear. I don’t think America is where Trump is at.

Bacon: No.

Frymer: I think we’re going to uncover that there’s been so much work done from Black Lives Matter, from so many different movements, and diversity, and immigration. We are a nation that is not what Trump is envisioning. And so I think we’ve overreacted in a sense there. A lot of that’s going to come back.

But is AOC ready to do that now? I think she’s incredibly skilled. That would be the interesting example. Could she pull that out? She would be able perhaps to do that, certainly in a way that Bernie would not emphasize or provide, both symbolically and articulating it.

So as the Democratic Party thinks about those kinds of issues, right? She would be that candidate in 2028 that I think could definitely provide it. But you probably read the article too, right, the interview with her just the other day, which mentioned her support among Republicans is 1 percent.

Bacon: Also we’re in this partisan era where that number’s going to go down. But in talking to you, I’m thinking, if you’re Jon Ossoff, you’re a middle-aged white man, you might be able to—this is a tricky thing. His campaign can be, I’m appealing to civil rights issues in a subtle way, and people don’t see me that way because I’m a white man. AOC will have to spend the whole campaign saying, I’m not as civil rightsy as you think I am, even though I’m a young person of color.

I don’t know which approach is better, because there are some days where I actually thought Joe Biden, in a lot of ways, pushed forward on racial issues more than Barack Obama did in many actual policy cases. But having a Black man in the White House is obviously very important.

Frymer: Yeah. I think Joe Biden will get his moment at some point in time. He has been attacked so thoroughly by the Democratic Party, among everything else.

Bacon: For losing, basically.

Frymer: Yeah. But I think he actually—we forgot. He was trying, in some different ways. Not always successfully, but not always unsuccessfully either.

Yeah, I think it’s going to be a really interesting moment. You’re right, the white male candidate has a liberty to go in directions. The opportunity that somebody like an Obama or an AOC has is they can speak another language, and their personhood provides an opportunity there, right?

For people to envision what they mean. It’s funny, even my mom would always say in the Obama years, what’s happening, he’s becoming that moderate conservative, but he was so progressive when he ran. And I said, “All he kept saying was, ‘We’ve got to bring everyone together.’”

Bacon: Yes. He was not progressive when he ran. He would admit that himself if you asked him.

Frymer: No, yes. But everybody saw something in him. And so that’s the tough thing there. Ideally we have these huge conversations, but how do we do it, and where do we do it, and what forum do we have them take place? Certainly our national politics are nasty and all about the 15-second sound bite and the like.

So we really need to restore our communities. It’s cliche to say this, right? But to figure out ways to have these conversations, ongoing conversations, and then jump at the moment when the opportunity is there and try to win that moment. That’s what Trump did, right?

Bacon: That’s what Trump did, yes. He really created and seized on a moment.

Frymer: We have a lot to learn from Trump strategically, right? Because I don’t think American politics was ever where he was.

Bacon: No. But he managed to win anyway, and to change a lot of issues. Actually, if you look at the polls, there wasn’t huge anti-immigrant sentiment in March 2015. He created something. It was latent, but he mobilized it into a political force in a way that is a lesson.

And I do think that—I used to work at The Washington Post, the billionaires did a lot of bad stuff, but I also think that Bernie and Warren did a good job of building out the problem in America, that what connects everything is the inequality and the billionaires, not what Nancy Pelosi or John Boehner is doing. And I think they did a good job. They didn’t win the presidency, but they actually did change the conversation a lot.

Frymer: No, absolutely. I think a lot of the terrain that we’re fighting on is from their efforts. And from the reality of that. The billionaires are unheeded by any warnings. And they just keep going and going. Yeah, I think that agenda has been changed.

But it is interesting. I’ve said this to different friends. The moment at the Super Bowl when Kendrick Lamar is singing about Drake and the whole crowd is singing, and all of America, not all, but is singing along with Kendrick Lamar against Drake. And I sat there thinking, Drake was massively popular like a minute ago.

And I keep hoping and thinking, actually deep down, that moment is going to happen again post-Trump. Where he’s going to be Drake. I was never a Drake fan. Just because I do think there is a mass public that has not bought into Trump at any point in time. And they’re not mobilizing around it, and that’s depressing. The public has not done more about a lot of the egregious hatred that has been out there, and evil towards our fellow people. But I do think there’s a bigger public out there that doesn’t want this.

Bacon: I always thought he would never really get below 38 percent, I would say, because I thought there’s a permanent 40 percent who’s with the person in their party no matter what. And Biden never—I think the G. Elliott Morris polling, I don’t know if you’ve seen this, I think he’s now at 35 percent and maybe 34.

I think his approval ratings are the lowest for any modern president at the midterm. I think Bush fell to the high 20s at the very end, but Bush wasn’t this low this early. So obviously Hurricane Katrina, this huge event, and the Iraq War, huge events, and nothing like that has happened, fortunately, in a certain way.

But I wonder if we get to the point—because at some point in 2009, no one would say they voted for George Bush, who won two terms. And I wonder if we’re getting to that point, where beyond the sort of hardcore 25 percent, no one else—I do have people I know in my life who voted for Trump who are increasingly like, “I voted for him, but I don’t agree with this. Obviously, I don’t want people killed who protest ICE.” ICE is becoming more unpopular. I wonder if we’re not realizing that we are at that point right now where voting for Trump became embarrassing. I wonder if we’re almost getting there right now.

Frymer: Yeah. I’ve been hearing that anecdotally from people who go to the Jersey Shore, which is Trump country. That the flags are gone.

Bacon: The flags are gone. That’s a good symbol.

Frymer: I have a neighbor, actually, even here in Princeton, New Jersey, who’s had big Trump signs up, and they’re all gone. And there was a moment where you didn’t have to just be a Trump voter, you could be a proud Trump voter.

Bacon: Yes, correct.

Frymer: And I think some of that is dissipating. I think one difference between Trump and Bush: Bush deflated as a person, right? He was depressed even at the end of his term. He was saying he didn’t do a good job, and he hasn’t been seen much since. Trump isn’t going to do that, right? He’s going to triple down to the very end. But I do think that a lot of the public isn’t listening to him anymore.

Bacon: Yeah, that’s what I’m getting at.

Frymer: Yeah. When he’s coming up with these threats, when he’s saying, I just did the greatest deal ever, I’ve got this greatest economy ever, I do think a lot of the public is just tuning out.

Bacon: And maybe we might look back, and it’s not Hurricane Katrina, but the Iran war creating these massive high gas prices. That might end up being what took him from 42 to 33, and he never comes back. Even though it’s not Katrina or Iraq in terms of influence on everyday Americans, or deaths. It’s not as catastrophic for deaths in the US. Iran is different. But I think it might end up being politically as toxic.

Frymer: Yeah, and hopefully it stays so. It is, again, a long-term discussion the left needs to have, is, what if he did well on the economy, and didn’t go into Iran? Would we have just allowed all of this other stuff to happen?

Bacon: The authoritarianism to happen.

Frymer: The authoritarianism, the racism, the xenophobia, just the cruelty, right? And we’ve seen incredibly brave people have lost their lives fighting against that on the streets. But as an American public—you probably as well, since the day Trump was elected in ‘25, I furiously click the polls looking for, when is it going to drop? When’s it going to drop, right? And throughout a lot of that early ICE period, it wasn’t dropping, or it was dropping very slowly.

Bacon: And the period when he was destroying higher education—he was destroying universities with no backlash, and in fact being encouraged by news outlets and things like that.

Frymer: Yeah, it’s a pretty depressing statement about America.

Bacon: No defense from the Democratic Party for higher education, or anything.

Frymer: Yeah, it’s something we need to not forget. And obviously we want this economy to be our vehicle to get past it, but it does worry us long term. Would a smarter, less unhinged racist authoritarian—

Bacon: If he did not tank the economy by doing an unnecessary war, would he be able to sustain popularity? That’s unfortunately probably maybe. Because the first year, if they had not—the ICE overreach, I think Minnesota was another inflection point, but if they avoid Minnesota and the Iran war, is he at 43, probably? Something like that?

Frymer: Yeah, I think that’s right. Again, overreaching was part of his whole thing. And a belief that they could proudly try to make America white again is a big part of who they are. And that coalition is still there, and it’s going to stay there.

These coalitions don’t disappear entirely, especially when they get built up over time. And the MAGA right is there, and especially the younger MAGA right is going to stay there, and they’re institutionalized in certain ways. They have some power.

But yeah, I think it’s concerning how much the left kind of sat back. Again, we were stunned. We had a lot of things to focus on. And a lot of the left’s still angry at Biden, and angry about all sorts of different matters. I’m not sympathetic to all this.

But I think these are important conversations we need to have, of what does it mean to be an American today? I hope, and I do think it’s still a post-civil rights message in a good way, that we are a diverse nation. That we have huge things we still need to face and won’t face, but that we’re not a MAGA nation either. That we don’t want to go back. But yeah, I’m humbled and worried about where we’re at.

This is where I think on the left, there are some on the left who argue America is very left and just needs to be harnessed, and there are others on the left who are like, I’m not sure where America’s at and how we go here with.

Bacon: I’m closer to the second group. I take it you are too?

Frymer: Yeah, I’m closer to the second. I just think historically, for so much of our nation, we have had features that are not great. We’ve also had features that are amazing, right? And that’s why we’re a complicated, fascinating nation, and a nation that I am proud still to call my own. I am an American, and I say this with my students. But I am an American who—the nation is a complicated nation, and it was from day one. And you can’t ignore—complicated is a nice word, right?

There’s some really awful stuff. And Trump is not new to that, right? A lot of these people are like, Trump is against American values.

Bacon: Which ones? As you said, there’s a long history of Americans sounding like Trump. The idea that Lincoln wants Black people to be—what’s the phrase—ejected from the country is something I think people don’t know. I knew that, but it’s worth focusing on.

Frymer: Yeah. And so it’s just, I think, these realities. And deportation has been a piece of America throughout our history.

Bacon: The entire time.

Frymer: Including President Obama, right? Again, not with the same desire to be so forefrontly hateful in the things that Trump has done. But Jamelle Bouie says this time and time again in a really good way, is, Trump is not new, but he is. Or he’s doing it in a way that we didn’t perhaps—

Bacon: You can always find the antecedents of things Reagan did or so on, but Trump is doing it in a more forward, direct, aggressive, authoritarian way.

Frymer: That’s right. Reagan did a lot of this. Bush had elements of this. A different form, especially on things like immigration. He saw it as a positive. But these features are here in the United States.

And I think the left, we also probably do need to have conversations. How do we address this? I can say as well, as a university professor, that the over-the-top, as AOC called it, Woke 1.0, it’s not always terribly successful either. It’s not completely as unsuccessful as some make it to believe either.

But we need to rethink how we promote messages that are inclusive and yet don’t lose the important thread that we have inequalities that need to be addressed, right? We’re a nation at a huge crossroads. We have huge issues, but we have the skills and the weapons to do good things. They’re still here. Trump hasn’t gotten rid of all these things, including a populace that I think wants a different America.

Bacon: Great, optimistic, so rare these times. Paul Frymer, thanks for joining me. Great to see you. Take care.

Frymer: Great. Thank you. Thanks.

Texas Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa, who is surprisingly close in polls against Republican incumbent Greg Abbott, attributes that strong standing to her campaign strategy. She says her secret sauce is avoiding the “culture wars.” “I think that has to be the way forward for Democrats, to focus on the economic issues and not take the bait when it comes to the culture wars,” she told Politico in an interview last week.

Politico treated that comment as a bold, surprising declaration. It isn’t. While progressive and centrist Democrats disagree on a lot, politicians in both camps often make comments similar to Hinojosa’s. And this perspective is widely shared among many pundits. Writers at both the socialist publication Jacobin and the center-left Bulwark have recently echoed this view.

But just because there’s a consensus doesn’t mean it’s correct. The “economic issues not culture wars” frame shared by much of the Democratic Party is entirely wrongheaded. It’s an example of intellectual dishonesty, moral cowardice, historical inaccuracy, and flawed electoral politics all wrapped together. The sooner Democrats drop this perspective, the better off the party and country will be.

Let me start with the intellectual dishonesty. When most people think of “cultural” issues, I suspect their mind goes to movies, music, sports, or other elements of popular culture. “Democratic politicians should not focus on which musicians perform at the Super Bowl or which shows win Emmys” is perfectly fine advice. But Democratic politicians are rarely fixated on football or Taylor Swift. What gets lumped into “cultural issues” these days includes all manner of meaty matters: higher education, K-12 education, immigration, racism, transgender rights, policing, abortion, sexism, religion, voting rights, and numerous other matters. And it’s true that some Democratic politicians and activist groups emphasize those issues.

As they should. Labeling those issues as “cultural” or “social” trivializes them. But Republicans trying to restrict the teaching of sociology, African American studies, and other academic fields they disagree with, bar transgender Americans from getting the medical care they need, deport people to countries that they have never lived in, and the hundreds of other radical actions that the Trump administration and state-level Republicans have taken on the vast range of issues I listed above is very important. Overly aggressive police departments kill innocent people. Restrictive voting laws limit Americans’ participation in our democracy. These efforts to rig the political system are no mere “culture war.”

The idea that you can easily separate “economic” issues from these “cultural” issues is nonsense. It’s very expensive for transgender Americans to move to blue states so they can live freely. It’s harder to buy a house in a neighborhood with rising home values if you are Black and harder to get a job if your name is Shanice, Terell, or something else synonymous with African Americans.

I suspect that Hinojosa, who has worked as a civil rights attorney, knows all that. So why is the longtime state representative acting as if she doesn’t? Because “cultural issues” is a coded way to hint at the realities of American politics. Despite all the fixation these days on the Democrats’ declines with voters who don’t have college degrees and voters of color, the real fissure in American politics remains the same as it was four decades ago: race. In most states, white voters favor Republicans, while Asian, Black, and Latino voters combined favor Democrats. In 2024, Trump won about 66 percent of white voters in Texas, compared to about 43 percent of voters of color.

“Democrats must get more support from white voters to win elections, and white voters in particular either don’t care that much about policing, racism, and immigration or have conservative views on those issues” would be an accurate statement. But such frankness wouldn’t help Hinojosa or other Democratic politicians win over those white voters. Hence, they engage in misleading rhetoric about the electorate and the issues.

But this rhetoric isn’t just words. Labeling a whole suite of matters as “cultural” provides the pretext to ignore or even adopt Republican positions on them. And that’s exactly what Democratic politicians are doing. The party was extremely slow last year to react to Trump’s hyperaggressive deportations and deployment of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to terrorize liberal cities because of the post-2024 consensus that Democrats were too liberal and focused on so-called cultural issues. It’s why national Democrats have been silent as the Trump administration forced colleges across the country to eliminate diversity and inclusion programs. It’s why Democratic politicians are adopting conservative language (“transgender ideology,” “boys playing in girl sports”) and conservative ideas (restrictions on gender-affirming care) instead of forthrightly defending transgender Americans from the full-scale assault they are facing from the Trump administration.

This is moral cowardice. The overwhelming majority of Democratic politicians are in heavily blue states and districts. They can defend immigrants, transgender Americans, professors, and anyone else with absolutely no fear of losing reelection. But the “cultural issues” frame has not only given Democratic politicians an excuse to not stand up for the marginalized but allowed them to cast that silence as smart and savvy. It’s not. It is the height of irresponsibility and fecklessness to refuse to defend the victims of an authoritarian, bigoted regime.

The usual explanation given for the Democrats’ “economic issues not culture wars” mantra is electoral history. According to centrist Democrats and even some on the left, the story of the last several years is one of cultural excess by the party. Democrats won the 2020 elections but would have gotten more seats in the House and Senate but for the backlash to the “Defund the Police” slogan that emerged from the George Floyd protests, according to this narrative. The party lost the 2024 elections because Kamala Harris was perceived as too liberal on these so-called cultural issues. Some in the party take the story even further back: The Democratic Party has ignored economic issues and obsessed on so-called cultural ones dating back to the 1980s.

That’s historical inaccuracy bordering on fiction. There was a time when the Democratic Party leaned heavily into racial issues: the 1960s. The passage of the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts was followed by a white backlash that eventually turned the entire South Republican. It’s sad and unfortunate that some of the greatest actions taken by a political party in the history of the United States became an electoral albatross. But if anything, the Democrats have over-learned the lessons from that backlash. From Jimmy Carter to Bill Clinton to Barack Obama to Nancy Pelosi to Joe Biden, Democratic Party leaders for the last six decades have relentlessly focused on “economic issues” and not racism or anything that could be labeled cultural, desperate to win back those white voters.

Biden somewhat reluctantly embraced the 2020 protests. But once in office, he governed on economic policies, like expanding infrastructure, that were intended to win over moderate and conservative white voters. By early 2022, he declared, “Fund the police, fund them, fund them” in his State of the Union address to distance himself from the Black Lives Matter movement. In 2024, Harris not only didn’t emphasize liberal stands on these so-called cultural issues but called for more restrictive policies on the U.S.-Mexico border.

The idea that somehow Democrats have too often “taken the bait” on cultural issues, as Hinojosa suggested, is wildly inaccurate. What’s actually happened is that Republicans have harped on race, immigration, and other “dog whistles” for decades to appeal to white voters, in particular, and also some conservative-leaning people of color. Democrats occasionally respond, in part because African Americans, transgender people, and other members of the party’s coalition plead for support from the politicians that they voted for. Usually, that Democratic support is half-hearted and temporary, like what Biden and Harris offered to the Black Lives Matter movement.

Then the party makes a big show of regretting even its half-hearted defenses. The rhetoric from Hinojosa and other Democrats that the party lost in 2024 because it was overly focused on so-called cultural issues is nothing new. Such critiques also emerged after Democratic defeats in 1984, 1988, 2004, and 2016. If moving to the right or ignoring these issues were the key to winning elections, Democrats would never lose. They have been adopting this strategy for decades—lather, rinse, repeat.

That brings to my final point: “Economic issues not cultural wars” is a terrible electoral strategy. What issues resonate with voters is entirely dependent upon the conditions of the country at that time. Casting Trump as a racist authoritarian helped Democrats in 2018 and 2020. Leaning into abortion rights aided the party in 2022, in the wake of the Dobbs v. Jackson ruling. Democratic candidates are smartly tapping into the backlash against ICE this year. The reality is that the number of issues that Democrats and the media have labeled as “cultural” is so vast that the party is bound to be on the politically useful side of some of them at any given time. And while Americans may not agree with Democrats on every “cultural” issue, polls suggest that most Americans favor the multiracial, pluralistic society pushed by Democrats over the white, heterosexual, Christian, male-dominated society advanced by the GOP.

Campaigning on economic issues isn’t some panacea. Democratic candidates who relentlessly harp on such issues lose all the time. Which economic issues Democratic politicians push and when really matters. Talking about raising the minimum wage rarely helps Democratic politicians win elections. Most Americans agree with paying low-income workers more, but that’s not an issue that energizes or engages them. In contrast, calling for limits on data center expansion, as Hinojosa and other Democratic candidates are doing, is really useful right now, as hostility to billionaires and Big Tech companies is rising. But that tactic would not have been as effective in, say, 2016.

Hinojosa claims that she’s doing well in the polls because she’s emphasizing economic issues and downplaying so-called cultural ones. Bullshit. The reality is that Hinojosa is doing well because Trump is deeply unpopular overall and has lost huge ground with Latinos, a big bloc in Texas. Those are national trends, so I seriously doubt they have much to do with Hinojosa offering the usual Democratic boilerplate of expanding Medicaid and supporting public schools. What’s driving Trump’s unpopularity is a specific economic issue: high gas prices. And what’s making Trump toxic among Latinos is those high prices and also the excesses of his immigration policies.

“Emphasize economic issues not cultural wars” isn’t even good advice for Hinojosa, never mind something that the rest of the party should adopt.

I hope that Hinojosa and other Democrats who have adopted this “economics not cultural wars” frame win their races, because they will support better policies than Republicans once in office. But I am deeply concerned that if a few Democrats in red states win on this rhetoric, this perspective will become even more entrenched in the party. And that would be terrible. “Economic issues not cultural wars” produces a party that both loses elections and abandons moral causes and vulnerable people. That’s not a theoretical argument—it’s the story of the Democratic Party of my entire adulthood.

The reality is that there are no silly culture wars happening in America. There are equality wars and justice wars and fairness wars. Democrats should try to win those wars—and the elections that involve them.

You can watch this episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon above or by following this show on YouTube or Substack. You can read a transcript here.

Democratic candidates in swing states are distancing themselves from transgender rights. That approach in some ways resembles how the party in the past broke with civil rights causes and Black leaders to court white voters. Paul Frymer, a political science professor at Princeton University, wrote a book called Uneasy Alliances: Race and Party Competition in America that argues that African Americans are a “captured minority.” They are so supportive of the Democratic Party that both parties ignore their interests, he says. In the latest edition of Right Now, Frymer discusses the plight of African Americans, transgender Americans, and other voting blocs whose policy goals are strongly opposed by the Republican Party. He also discusses how the Democrats have positioned themselves on racial issues over the last few decades. The “post-racial” approach of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama isn’t in vogue among Democrats, but nor is the more focused attention that the party gave racial issues in the midst of the Black Lives Matter protests.

If you can think of an example of everyday people holding huge corporations accountable for harming the public, it was probably made possible in large part by a single legal theory: public nuisance.

Public nuisance was a primary basis for the litigation against Big Tobacco in the 1990s, and was the foundation of the opioid cases over the past decade. It’s played a prominent role in lawsuits on lead paint, predatory lending, water pollution, and “forever chemicals” like PFAS. It was the most important hook in recent successful cases against social media companies like Meta for designing their platforms to addict and endanger children. And most recently, it has been a key cause of action in litigation in several states against data centers for the air, water, and noise pollution they cause.

But not in Utah, Kansas, or Montana. Though it largely passed under the national radar, these states enacted laws this year or last that dismantle public nuisance as a cause of action—laws that, according to the Utah State Legislature’s own Office of Legislative Research and General Counsel, will make claims against data centers and other corporate wrongdoers “more difficult to pursue.” These states are not outliers, either—they’re forerunners. Their laws closely mirror a model bill published this summer by the American Legislative Exchange Council, the corporate oligarchy’s primary conduit for enacting right-wing laws at the state level. As I write this, ALEC’s Public Nuisance Reform Act is likely being distributed to Republican legislators in dozens of state houses around the country—and you can bet that Big Tech, eager to suppress a valuable tool of data center opponents, is lining up lobbyists to coax its passage.

Indeed, if this year was about trialing this extremist proposal, leaders on the ground believe that next year the real onslaught will begin. “Big corporations and the politicians they purchase use states like Utah as a testing ground for their regressive agenda,” Utah state Senator Nate Blouin, a Democrat, told me. “But make no mistake, these corporate immunity laws are coming for you wherever you are. I wouldn’t be surprised if they get introduced in nearly every state next year.”

These attacks on public nuisance law constitute just one offensive in a multi-front war the right has been waging against our ability to use the courts to hold the wealthy and powerful to account. On October 5, the Supreme Court will hear Suncor v. Boulder, in which Big Oil companies will make their case for immunity from legal repercussions for the fires, droughts, air pollution, extreme heat, and other harms they’ve caused to communities.

Boulder, the Colorado county and city, sued Suncor and Exxon Mobil in 2018 over the damage that climate change—and the companies’ lies about their role in fueling it—had done to its residents. After the state Supreme Court ruled that the case should go to trial, Suncor and Exxon Mobil—clearly terrified of what would happen if communities like Boulder were allowed to have their day in court—asked the high court to intervene, arguing in legal briefs that “state tort law is not the solution to global climate change.” As TNR’s Matt Ford wrote recently, the companies “effectively argue that because they and their products have caused damage everywhere, they cannot be held liable for it anywhere.”

In case the Supreme Court doesn’t give Big Oil a get-out-of-jail-free card, it’s pursuing other means. In addition to its public nuisance model bill, ALEC recently published the Energy Producers and Consumers Protection Act, which immunizes all corporations—the fossil fuel industry, certainly, but also all other industries—from liability for any misconduct that is even marginally related to climate change, including “negligence, gross negligence, recklessness, strict liability, products liability, failure to warn, fraud, fraudulent concealment, misrepresentation, unjust enrichment,” as well as all related “criminal charges, indictments, or prosecutions.” In other words, under this legislation, fraud is legal—if you’re a powerful corporation. Meanwhile, Texas Senator Ted Cruz has introduced similar legislation at the federal level.

This right-wing blitzkrieg to shield big business from liability for its misconduct extends far beyond the issue of climate change. On a recent Federalist Society panel about climate immunity for corporations, O.H. Skinner, the executive director of Alliance for Consumers—one of numerous front groups spun up by conservative legal activist Leonard Leo—explained that these efforts need to cover not just fossil fuel companies but every major industry, from Big Ag to Big Tech: “A lot of people in this space only talk about climate. And it frustrates me … I’m the kind of person that, because I care about all these products, I start thinking, well [Big Oil immunity] doesn’t do anything about pork, and it doesn’t do anything about AI regulation.” Earlier this year, the Supreme Court also issued a ruling protecting Monsanto and other pesticide producers from thousands of lawsuits by families and farmworkers devastated by the cancer-causing effects of glyphosate products like Roundup.

This effort really does represent an attempt to fundamentally restructure our corporate governance model in the U.S., which has always relied on robust private litigation. All the way back in 1803, Chief Justice John Marshall, in his famous Marbury v. Madison decision, wrote that the “very essence of civil liberty certainly consists in the right of every individual to claim the protection of the laws, whenever he receives an injury.” While most developed countries overwhelmingly rely on public enforcement of laws, private enforcement—not just to compensate injured parties, but to affirmatively deter corporate malfeasance—has long played a key role in America, where regulatory state capacity has traditionally been much weaker than in places like Europe. This dynamic has become even more pronounced in recent years, as far-right billionaires have succeeded in dismantling significant portions of the administrative state and stacking federal regulatory offices with shills for the industries they’re supposed to be regulating. In this context, public nuisance litigation and other lawsuits that rely on state law are communities’ last—and sometimes only—line of defense against the unchecked avarice of powerful corporations that have been fully unleashed by the Trump administration.

So it’s no wonder that the oligarchy has set its sights on dismantling the basic architecture of our civil legal system. This isn’t an entirely new effort: The corporate right has been waging a version of this war, whitewashed as “tort reform,” for decades. But to outright immunize corporate wrongdoing across the board—from Big Oil’s climate crimes to Big Tech’s data center disasters—would be a whole new level of elite impunity. The oligarchs are coming for every last tool the American people have ever used to restrain corporate abuse, deception, and overreach. And the fight to save these rights will be happening right in your community, no matter where in America you live.

The first hint that I needn’t be so anxious to interview Min Jin Lee came as the bestselling author descended the creaky stairs of her five-story Harlem townhouse and pronounced my name. Not in the way my brain has articulated it for decades, smoothed over by an anglicized version that made it easy for teachers to call out from an attendance roll. Which is to say, Lee, on a Friday afternoon in August, pronounced my name the way the people who brought me into this world had intended.

The next came when Lee, smartly dressed in a gray vest and jeans, with a pair of delicate drop earrings, doled out lively profanities. She was recalling her time attending Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the landmark case that would later reach the Supreme Court and dismantle race-based affirmative action, as part of her nearly decade-long research process for American Hagwon, the much-anticipated third installment of a planned quartet dedicated to Korean diasporas. As a supporter of affirmative action, she witnessed testimony teeming with stereotypical portrayals of Asian American students, including, as Lee puts it, making them out to be like “machines.”

“I sat there in the press box, and I remember thinking, this whole idea that Asian Americans have shitty personalities—that’s really shitty. It’s a really shitty thing to say.”

“Also, we’re talking about children,” she continued, her voice intensifying. “How dare you insult the children of my community?”

To hear Lee condemn the racial stereotyping of Asian Americans, including the “stupid, horrible racial epithet called ‘tiger parenting,’” with such blunt rigor, in a living room sumptuously bedecked with books, was deeply satisfying. My own fondness for profanity, my Korean-born mother used to warn, was a sign “of an uneducated person.”

“I think your mom was right,” Lee said, warmly laughing as I shared the memory with her.

American Hagwon is Lee’s third novel and follows Pachinko, the vast 2017 saga that traces four generations of a Korean family as they weather war, discrimination, and cruelty in Japanese-occupied Korea and in Japan. A finalist for the National Book Award, Pachinko established Lee as a master of sweeping historical narrative. American Hagwon, on the other hand, takes place in more contemporary times, with Lee’s aperture shifting between a multigenerational family drama and broader meditations on the human costs of heedless ambition.

What are the human costs of endless ambition? Would we choose differently if we were liberated from the pursuit of educational status?

“I asked myself, if I had one more book to write, I wanted to write about what’s most important to Koreans around the world, and it was so clear to me that it was education,” Lee said. “It’s not money. It’s not religion. It’s not status. It’s actually education. This kind of faith in it, even if you hated it.”

As its title telegraphs, the Korean for-profit tutoring academies known as hagwons provide a central motif in Lee’s latest novel. Hagwons typically offer classes from elementary school all the way through high school, but it is the courses aimed at boosting test scores for college entrance exams that they are best known for. (If you’re imagining a Korean equivalent to a Kaplan prep, think bigger; in South Korea, hagwons are a multibillion-dollar industry that one of the country’s leading English-language newspapers once described as “thriving on anxiety.”) To outsiders, they can conform to a long-standing stereotype of Asian students: relentlessly driven, much to their own personal misery, with cutthroat parents digging into their bank accounts to further their children’s competitive advantage.

The criticism hagwons attract can be well earned; as I once experienced, fierce competition, at times bordering on toxic, is often central to the hagwon mentality. But for Lee, sensationalistic portrayals of them risk reinforcing simplistic racist tropes. For kids in the United States, hagwons are also often places of community, one of the few spaces, in a white world, to connect with other kids of Korean descent. They can also function as de facto daycare centers, she said, where parents can have their kids picked up from school, safely driven to the hagwon, and “given a juice box, pretzel rod, and worksheets” instead of having a child “stay at home and have a shelf fall on them.” In a country lacking adequate childcare, Lee sees hagwons as “an ethnic solution to a state problem.”

American Hagwon arrives amid a wider reckoning over the value of a top-tier education, particularly in the United States, as the yearly total cost of some colleges surpasses $100,000 and AI threatens the very foundations of what it means to hold knowledge. There’s an “anxiety that the modern person feels right now,” Lee said, referring to the existential questions born out of AI.

A similar anxiety courses through American Hagwon, as multiple families of Korean ethnicity, compelled as so many émigrés are by the desire to secure better futures for their children, are upended by unexpected outside forces, including the 1997 Asian financial crisis.

When we first encounter the novel’s central family, the Kohs, John and Helen appear to be typical middle-class parents who had just moved to Seoul from Sydney, Australia, dutifully attentive to their three children’s education, while John toils away as a manager at a large corporation. But when he endures a devastating betrayal, both professionally and personally, it forces the family to emigrate, eventually landing in Southern California. Throughout the sacrifices that follow—John takes up a physically demanding job at a fish-fry restaurant; Mido, the youngest and only daughter, pauses her college education and works at an American hagwon to support her family, including her brothers’ education—the thread of familial devotion grows only stronger.

It is through this lens of empathy, paired with prolific research, that Lee shows us how hagwons reflect the deep-rooted desires of a culture fixated on upward mobility and one that has long identified education as the ticket to a vertical trajectory. As one mother in American Hagwon notes: “The cost doesn’t matter. We all know you have to pay up for the best coaching.” Still, such a narrow view of success inflicts its own damage, raising some of the deeper questions in the novel: What are the human costs of endless ambition? Would we choose differently if we were liberated from the pursuit of educational status?

Min Jin Lee once worked as a corporate lawyer, but quit to become a novelist after thinking: “I don’t want to die working this way.”Mary Kang

The middle child of three sisters who emigrated with their parents from Seoul to the Elmhurst neighborhood of Queens, New York, when she was 7, Lee did not attend a hagwon. But she wrestled with such questions during the brief period she worked as a corporate lawyer after Georgetown Law, its own kind of pressure cooker. “The more work I would do, the more work I would be given,” she recalled. “Capitalism, right? Because I am not getting paid more. The more hours that I bill, the more the firm makes.”

“I was really thinking,” she told me, “I don’t want to die working this way.”

So Lee, who was diagnosed with a serious liver disease in high school, quit law to pursue a full-time career in writing, publishing her first novel, Free Food for Millionaires, in 2007.

Were her parents—Korean immigrants who owned a wholesale jewelry store in midtown Manhattan—ever disappointed by her decision to quit law to pursue something as impractical as a career as a novelist? I wondered. “My parents aren’t pushy,” Lee replied. She stressed, however, that the support for the literary ventures she now enjoys did not always come easily. On the same day Pachinko was published, her husband lost his job in finance.

What followed is a familiar middle-class story, a moment of great upheaval not unlike the devastating twists that upend the families of American Hagwon. Lee, who was 48 at the time, and her husband struggled to obtain healthcare and navigate the administrative hellhole of COBRA; her efforts to find a job in teaching were regularly dashed. “Absolutely nobody would give me interviews,” Lee said. “It didn’t matter that I had two published novels. So what? So does everybody else. Some people were very unkind. Truly, it kind of struck me how cruel younger people could be to somebody older.”

In a gentler world, locking eyes with a life-threatening disease would not be the only way to clarify how we want to live. But Lee’s decision to quit law cuts to the central tension that roils throughout American Hagwon: What constitutes a meaningful life? Toward the end of the novel, Mido and her hagwon colleagues ask their students’ parents: What does an impressive résumé, all that schooling, and a lucrative career amount to if you’re miserable?

“Our children cannot know everything,” Lion, one of the hagwon’s co-owners, tells the parents during a lecture he organizes about the value and pressures of education: “This flawed but worthy American project of immigration, reinvention, and multiple chances creates more possibilities, but it requires us to explore different paths in order to have lives of greater purpose.” Any sense of “failure” that creeps in when kids don’t get into their top-choice school, Lion continued, is “a terrible way to start their higher-educational experience, and adulthood.”

“The inability to live with your truthful self determines the tragedy of your own life.”

“The inability to live with your truthful self determines the tragedy of your own life,” Lee said. “What I really saw when I was doing the research is that the people who are doing the best were not necessarily the wealthiest or the most elite; they’re the ones who actually had love in their lives.” The Kohs, despite having lost so much, are clearly animated by such love.

After we spoke for about an hour, we climbed the creaky stairs and reached Lee’s office on the third floor of the townhouse, where, surrounded by family photos, she offered snacks. First, a pack of black garlic almonds, and then Kopiko, an Indonesian coffee-flavored hard candy that she noted is ubiquitous in K-dramas—even though it’s not Korean.

I wasn’t familiar with either and accepted both. As I left her Harlem home, I couldn’t help but walk faster, excited to share the Kopiko with my mom. After all, it was her sacrifice and hers alone that afforded me my own time at a hagwon in Edison, New Jersey, while she picked up shifts at a nearby dry cleaner. I’ll always have a sense of uneasiness about that time. But at that moment, picking up the pace as I headed down to the subway clutching coffee candies, I felt only gratitude.

A sign is placed in the yard of a residential property off US Route 322 approaching the small town of Philipsburg in central Pennsylvania. The sign appears almost as if it is floating in the lush green grass. Greeting passersby entering this town of some 3,000 residents, it displays a weeping Statue of Liberty covering her face in shame and sorrow before Route 322 twists and curls through the heart of town.

Philipsburg is a town with a history built on timber, industry, and coal. Industry has disappeared, and it’s been decades since coal was a significant employer. Yet one employer has remained in Philipsburg: GEO Group, the second largest for-profit prison company in the US. 

Yard sign on US Route 322 at the southern entrance to Philipsburg.

Eager to replace lost jobs, developers from the private prison company Cornell Corrections, and the state, believed the construction of a prison would fill this need. Built on the grounds of an old strip mine, Moshannon Valley Correctional Facility opened in 2006 and operated as a federal prison for fifteen years. Cornell was acquired by GEO Group in 2010, and in 2021, the prison temporarily closed only to reopen later that same year as an immigration detention center. ICE signed a 5-year agreement with Clearfield County. Clearfield County then signed a “management agreement” with the owner and operator of the prison, GEO Group. The prison was renamed the Moshannon Valley Processing Center (MVPC). 

Buried away and completely hidden out of sight in a dense forest, more than 1,600 immigrants are imprisoned there on any given day in what is the largest immigration detention center in the northeast. Eighty-five percent of those detained in MVPC have no criminal record. In 2025, two immigrants died in ICE custody in MVPC, including 32-year-old Chaofeng Ge, found hanging by his neck in a shower stall on August 5.

In April, dozens of detainees launched a hunger strike to protest conditions. While anti-ICE and anti-detention advocates have sustained an active campaign to shut down the facility, many Philipsburg residents and local officials see things differently. An annual $200,000 administrative fee to Clearfield County for serving as the middleman in this pass-through of federal funds is one reason for keeping it open. The benefits of local tax revenue and jobs remain the other. 

Moshannon Valley Processing Center Philipsburg, Pennsylvania

“I have no problem with the facility,” a local resident told me at a Knights of Columbus pancake breakfast one Sunday morning. “When jobs are lost, that place provides something for people here. If they don’t put immigrants here, they’ll find somewhere else. Keep the jobs here. I don’t have an issue with it.” 

Outside its major urban centers—Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Allentown, and the capital, Harrisburg—as well as the town of State College in Center County, home to Pennsylvania State University, Pennsylvania voters helped return Trump to office. Despite Democratic control of the governor’s office and House, rural counties have driven Pennsylvania to rank fifth nationally in 287(g) agreements, which allow local law enforcement to help carry out some ICE duties. Currently, 130 township and borough police departments, county and district attorney’s offices, constables and sheriffs statewide assist ICE. In 2026, nearly 5,500 immigrants have been arrested and detained in Pennsylvania. None of the state’s eight ICE detention facilities compare in size and function to MVPC. It incarcerates locals and out-of-state transfers in a system structured to sever and isolate immigrants from family, community, legal counsel, and due process. Moshannon has become a vital instrument in Trump’s mass deportation—rather, mass detention—machine. 

An ICE bus filled with detained immigrants travels down GEO Drive from the Moshannon Valley Processing Center (MVPC). Light from MVPC in the distance illuminates storm clouds during a heavy rain.

It’s also a valuable piece of GEO Group’s “secure services” portfolio. Invoices obtained through open records requests show that from January 2025 to May of this year, GEO earned nearly $90 million in revenue from MVPC. As ICE retreats from using warehouses to expand detention capacity, it has spent more than $2.2 billion to directly purchase existing detention facilities from GEO Group’s competitor, CoreCivic. During a Q2 earnings call, GEO Group CEO George Zoley reported that the company was in an “active process” for the sale of several turn-key facilities. In late August, ICE published a solicitation to award contracts for “turn-key detention facilities” in four regions in the US, including central Pennsylvania. In early September, with the contract for MVPC set to expire at the end of the month, DHS requested a 6-month extension. Two weeks later, Clearfield County Commissioner approved the extension in a 2-1 vote.

Church service at Christian & Missionary Alliance Church in Philipsburg. July 19, 2026. “It should stay because of jobs,” a man named Larry tells me before the service. “Because they give $200,000 to Clearfield County for every year of that contract. And it’s not hurting anybody. That money goes to the county. Even if it helps pay for the annual fair, it’s still worth having people there. They got to have a jail anyway. They got to put the people somewhere.” After a Sunday service at Bible Baptist Church of Philipsburg, July 19, 2026. “Politics fade into everything. This is not a local issue where people are against it. If they were being mistreated up there, I’d say, ‘This has to stop.’ That’s where I stand on moral issues. But heaven has its policies to get you in and our country has its policies to get in too. The law of the land must be obeyed. They’re in there for a reason. They didn’t take them because they didn’t do nothing.”

Activists like Timothy Smith, who chairs the Bill of Rights Defense Committee-Keystone State, anticipate based on these moves that DHS is either preparing to contract directly with GEO Group or outright purchase MVPC.

“This will give DHS and GEO more long-term stability and release both from the local risks and oversight that have strained the operation of MVPC. I truly think it will be an outright purchase,” Smith says. Both situations would enrich GEO Group shareholders while landing a financial blow to Clearfield County and Philipsburg. In both scenarios, immigrants and the pain, trauma, grief and loss experienced by their families—including US citizens—are both the raw materials and byproducts of profit-making maneuvers.  

A mother sells everything and relocates to Maryland so she and her son can be closer to her husband. He’s languished in MVPC now for over 500 days. A father and his 18-year-old son, detained together during a routine check-in with ICE, put the pieces of their lives back together. ICE separated them. The father remained detained in Philadelphia. The teenager was transferred to MVPC. A woman in New York City struggles to find legal strategies to stop the deportation of her husband to eastern Europe. As we talk, he’s now in his eighth day in MVPC’s solitary confinement unit. A man sits alone in his studio apartment outside of Pittsburgh and confronts the “empty space” in his life. Faced with the reality of spending more months detained in Moshannon, his husband made the decision to self-deport. 

Charlotte

Charlotte’s husband has been detained in Moshannon Valley Processing Center for over one and a half years. She was born in California; her husband is from Afghanistan and arrived in the US in 2016 on a valid student visa. They met in 2019, had a child together and got married in 2021. They lived in Illinois, where he received a REAL ID driver’s license and a work permit valid until 2029. In early 2025, while visiting family in Maryland, he was pulled over by a sheriff in West Virginia. No reason was provided for his arrest. He was transferred to ICE detention at Moshannon Valley Processing Center. To be closer to her husband in detention, Charlotte sold everything and moved to Maryland.

Charlotte talks about the impact of her husband’s detention on their son JJ.

“I’m a US citizen and I have a child. They want us to be left with nothing. So then do we give up? But at this point, we can’t give up. Because they won’t even let him self-deport. They won’t let him sign voluntary departure. They won’t let him do anything.”

At the age of two, Charlotte’s son was diagnosed with ADHD and autism. He was incredibly close to his father: “I wish daddy was home. We’re going to fight for daddy to get home. We’re not going to give up.” Charlotte holds hundreds of pages of personal documents, including her marriage license, birth certificates, tax returns, and deeds to homes she and her husband have owned. She prepared the paperwork for an interview with US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to support the change of her husband’s status. The interview date was postponed.

“They want us to be left with nothing, so we do give up.”
We cry everytime we leave a visit.
It’s still so sad.
We can’t even hug him.

Charlotte talks about the pain of going to visit her husband in the detention center.

“We went for my child’s birthday. We went for Father’s Day and Mother’s Day. We sit there with him all day wishing we can hug him. But we can’t…We’re trying to get him out and we’re just at a loss. Like, what’s next? What are we going to do?…We just want something other than being locked up. We just want a hug. We just want to move on with answers. That’s all we’re asking, but we still have none of that.”

“Even though the person didn’t pass away, it kind of feels like that. Like he’s been taken away from us. The only thing that’s been helping us is our visits. It’s him being there and seeing him behind the plexiglass. That’s what’s kept us going. If we couldn’t do that, we would be completely lost.”

Elsewhere in the state, networks of trained volunteers accompany immigrants to ICE check-ins, observe courts for ICE waiting outside, and monitor neighborhoods for ICE activity. As Pennsylvania provides no state funding for the defense of immigrants facing detention and deportation, nonprofit legal service providers take on as many clients as possible yet find themselves stretched beyond capacity. Activists and community members attend local government meetings to stop involvement with ICE or end detention. 

Kris

Kris, 28, met his partner in mid-2024. Originally from Brazil, his partner fled to the US and was permitted to stay in the country. Immigration officials scheduled his first hearing for 2028. The two fell in love and were legally married in Pennsylvania in December 2025. At a routine ICE check-in, he was detained and transferred to Moshannon Valley Processing Center. Faced with months in detention and deportation, he asked for “voluntary departure.” The judge approved the request, and he voluntarily deported himself to Brazil in the middle of June.

Kris, whose partner self-deported after being detained at a routine immigration check-in.

“We provided all of the evidence under the sun,” Kris told me. “Everything you could have with your spouse we had, but nothing was recognized. They only tried to twist it into a fraud. My husband had no criminal charges, nothing wrong, not even a parking ticket, no traffic violations. None of it mattered. I’ve been left with a silence that I wasn’t used to.

“My husband had no criminal charges, nothing wrong, not even a parking ticket, no traffic violations. None of it mattered.”

“Growing up, knowing I was gay before gay marriage was legalized and having that stigma placed upon people who were gay, I felt persecuted at that time. And now I’m encountering another form of persecution; I feel like I can’t marry who I want. I can’t live the life that I’m entitled to have with the person that I love. It’s so dehumanizing. It’s like he’s less-than. I feel persecuted for loving an immigrant and marrying an immigrant. ‘Oh, you married an immigrant? This is what you deserve.’”

Eastern Europe

This woman’s husband has been detained in Moshannon Valley Processing Center for five months. She’s a US citizen. Her husband was born in Eastern Europe and settled in the United States in 2023. He received a work permit, had been through USCIS biometric processing, and was issued an ID. In early 2026, while working as a delivery driver in Nassau County, he was pulled over for a broken headlight. He was arrested and then released. When released, ICE arrested and placed him in detention. He found out his lawyer had never filed his asylum paperwork with the courts. He had no criminal record.

Asking to remain anonymous, this woman sits in her apartment in New York.

“Initially he was hopeful he would get out. Then he started getting angry, especially when they put him in solitary confinement. He couldn’t understand what was happening. They put him on major depression medication, but he started losing his emotions. I wasn’t sure if he was at risk of suicide, because I knew how he was changing. It’s like watching somebody die in front of you for a prolonged period of time.”

“I think for the majority of the detained, there’s at least two people on the outside who are fighting for them, struggling. There’s a lot of people who are unseen. You can count the number of detained individuals in ICE facilities, but you can’t really count the number of people affected.

After we met, her husband was transferred to detention centers in Louisiana and Texas. In late July he was deported on a series of flights to his country of birth.”

Father and Son Detained

At the age of fourteen, this young man and his family arrived at the US border, immediately applied for asylum, and followed all US immigration and asylum policies and procedures. In early 2026, just after his eighteenth birthday, ICE asked him and his father to appear early for their immigration-check in. When they arrived, ICE detained both of them “due to available bed space.” Within days, ICE separated the two. The young man was transferred to Moshannon Valley Processing Center.

After two months in detention in Moshannon and weeks of lawyers tirelessly working and battling his case through the immigration court system, an immigration judge evaluated the actual merits of his asylum claim, and granted him asylum. As a result, he was immediately released. The father, 35, and his son, 18, sit together in their home.

“You could never be calm in there.”

“I didn’t think they could arrest me for just being there,” he said of the ICE appointment. “The second day I was in Moshannon, I got a bloody nose—and I would get bloody noses often. I think it was the stress, my fear, or worrying about what was going to happen. I’d never done anything wrong and I felt undignified. There were a lot of older adults and I didn’t know any of them, so I was very scared because I was the youngest person there. There was a lot of stress and a lot of fighting. There were people who had been in there for years and others who were there for one or two days and then deported. You could never be calm in there.”

John Streno, Mayor

“It’s always been important to the community. It’s never been a big problem. It’s only been a positive for us in this town,” Mayor John Streno said to me as we sat on the front porch of his home in Philipsburg.

John Streno has been the mayor of Philipsburg for over twenty years. Prior to retiring, he spent ten years as a correctional officer for GEO at Moshannon, before it was an immigration detention facility.

When describing Moshannon Valley Processing Center as an ICE facility, the mayor said, “To me, in a way, it’s no different than a cemetery. It’s a place where people come and end up and you never see them again. They come to the prison, they end up there, and then they go away.”

Bobbi Erickson, co-founder of the advocacy group Indivisible: Mayday, addresses county commissioners at a Clearfield County Commissioners Meeting on July 14, 2026. The state of Pennsylvania does not provide any sustained funding to Legal service providers. Demand for Defender Association of Philadelphia services has rise three times more than the capacity.

Community members provide comments on why the current 5-year contract between the county and GEO should not be renewed: “I come here today with a broken heart. My plan for today was to have somebody from Moshannon call and give his testimony and his words to you. Last night he told me he was too scared to do so, that he was afraid his case would be impacted, that he would be taken away from his family and he would lose his home. He was scared to speak about his experiences. You don’t hear the stories inside this facility because it’s run-on fear. People inside ask me, ‘Why am I here?’ The only thing I can ever tell them is, for profit, and because the men in charge won’t listen to their stories.”

The state of Pennsylvania does not provide any sustained funding to legal service providers. The state ranks fourth in the number of habeas corpus petitions filed by immigrants since the beginning of Trump’s second term. Since December of 2025, habeas petitions filed by the Defender Association of Philadelphia have resulted in the release of 303 people—but demand for their services is three times more than they have the capacity to provide.

“In January 2025, they just started detaining everyone for non-criminal reasons. Regular asylum seekers living their lives, contributing to their community, not doing anything wrong,” Lilah Thompson, chief of immigration for the community unit at the Defender Association of Philadelphia, said to me. “Detention numbers just shot up. There are all these ways in which ICE began ramping up detention, stripping people of rights and status or pending status—detaining people that have no business being in detention, because nothing had changed in their situation to warrant it. ICE is just churning bodies into the detention system.”

Legal Support

“My client is a gentleman who is married to a US citizen. He was on his pathway to citizenship. He was literally one month away from getting his green card when he was detained by ICE, completely unjustly, no warrant whatsoever. He was moved to Moshannon, but thankfully we got him moved back to the Federal Detention Center in Philadelphia. I was prepared to not really lose this case, but try to encourage my client to stay in detention for the six or eight months needed to wait out his appeal. I kind of sent this lawsuit against the court as a Hail Mary, just to show that we did everything we could do. And the fact that not only did we get the decision we wanted, but also got it pretty quickly to me, it’s a blessing and a miracle.”

Standing outside the ICE office in downtown Philadelphia, immigration attorney Albert Robles waits for a client to be released from the FDC Philadelphia immigration detention center.

The Witnesses

Moments before the photo above was taken, in Evans City in Butler County north of Pittsburgh, local police and ICE pulled over the driver for a broken taillight. He was a 23-year-old man from Ecuador who worked laying carpets; he showed his ID but was arrested and detained by ICE. “I told them he has a work permit but he didn’t have it on him,” said his co-worker, who was sitting in the passenger seat when the arrest happened. “They arrested him anyway.”

A reflection of Jenny, a volunteer for the organization Frontline Dignity, in the window of a work van.

Official Legal Observers from Frontline Dignity stand outside the Domestic Violence court in downtown Pittsburgh. “We’ve witnessed ICE make detentions inside the courthouse and outside when people are on their way in. That’s why we stage ourselves outside, because people wouldn’t even have a chance to get in.” Jenny patrols areas of Cranberry Township for potential ICE activity. Any ICE sightings or incidents of ICE arrests are witnessed and reported to a larger network of monitors. In July 2026, Frontline Dignity documented 55 confirmed ICE incidents in their area and 67 known detentions.

“It’s devastating what’s been going on in Pittsburgh for the last year and a half,” Jenny says. “And it feels so incredibly heavy and dark, and it feels like everything escalated so quickly. Showing up and making sure we’re there to observe and help seems like the only hopeful thing to do at this point, to try to help everybody through what’s going on. It’s sad and it’s devastating.”

In Philipsburg, organizers and activists canvas the town, educate residents and ask for their support and signatures on a petition to push the three county commissioners to not renew the management agreement with GEO Group.

“I think they should ship all of them motherfuckers back to wherever they came from and then all of you Democrats should go and follow them,” a man says to one canvasser.

“That’s very American of you,” the canvasser politely replies. 

To me, in a way, it’s no different than a cemetary.
It’s a place where people come and end up
and you never see them again.

A bus transfers immigrants detained by ICE from Moshannon Valley Processing Center.

It’s Saturday, July 11. Several thousand people sit in folding chairs along Presqueisle Street in downtown Philipsburg. They wait for the 2026 Heritage Days Festival parade to start. The theme this year is “Let Freedom Ring.” I walk the length of Presqueisle Street, randomly asking people for their feelings about detaining immigrants at Moshannon. One woman says she has friends who were recently hired there and now make $30 an hour.

“I have no problem with those illegals being put up there,” her husband adds.

Another man says jobs and money are the only things that matter, while another says, “Those people detained there bring money to the town.”

A woman talks with me in a whisper away from her family.

Parade for the Philipsburg Heritage Days, a 3-day festival that runs the week after the 4th of July. The theme of the 2026 festival was ‘Let Freedom Ring’. People sit in front of the Philips Hotel for the Philipsburg Heritage Days Parade.

“To treat people like they are all criminals and animals, that’s where I have to draw the line. It’s morally wrong,” she says.

“All the years I’ve lived in this town, I’ve never heard too much about that facility until ICE took it over. Until people from ICE went in there,” a woman shared with me as she sat with family on their porch on Presqueisle Street. “For a long time I didn’t realize it was an ICE facility. And I didn’t even know what the difference was. I don’t really agree with the whole way the immigrant thing’s being handled. I think they’re taking people they don’t need to take. They’re not taking the worst of the worst, you know? They’re taking anybody. But here and the way I feel, we’re the minority.”

“They’re not taking the worst of the worst, you know? They’re taking anybody.”

On this same Saturday, on Route 322 at the opposite end of Philipsburg, volunteers set up a canopy and table on a corner of a small road that leads up to Moshannon Vallery Processing Center. They provide information and resources to families who have driven hours to visit loved ones. Families have come from New York, New Jersey, Maryland and other parts of Pennsylvania. “We have no idea what’s going to happen to him,” a man says of his son-in-law. “It’s been so painful on his mother.” He and the young man’s mother drove four hours from New York to visit him. 

Visiting Moshannon

For entry, GEO requires visitors to adhere to strict dress code rules. That day, two parents drove four hours from New York to visit their son who had already been detained for three months. Unaware GEO does not permit entrance to female visitors with metal supports in their bras, the mother used the tent to change into a new bra, part of a collection of free clothing available to visitors.

On Saturday, July 11, volunteers set up a changing tent on the corner of the road leading to Moshannon Valley Processing Center.

This man, a US citizen, drove four hours from Maryland to visit his brother who has been detained in MVPC for over a month. His brother has lived in the US for 26 years. GEO Group employees denied his visitation, citing his open-toed shoes, which they said did not adhere to dress code rules. He drove to a nearby Dollar General and bought a pair of sneakers, then returned.

“He was pulled over while driving home from work, arrested and put here. He’s never done anything wrong.,” he said. “It’s my third visit. What’s happening is crazy. It’s like they took a plate of spaghetti and threw it against the wall to see what sticks. That’s what happened to my brother.”

Behind them and their SUV parked on the corner, a large roadside billboard funded by several activist groups provides a backdrop to the efforts of the volunteers and the stories of the five other families that stop to ask questions. The billboard compares the costs to detain one immigrant in Moshannon Valley Processing Center for a year versus the cost to educate one child in Philipsburg, and asks who benefits from the detentions. It’s not only a parting message to everyone as they leave Philipsburg on 322, but also a harsh reminder of the yard sign, and Lady Liberty’s somber greeting to visitors, a few miles back.  

A tent set up by volunteers to provide information and assistance to people visiting family members detained in MVPC on July 11, 2026, and an anti-ICE billboard at the road that leads to MVPC off US Route 322 as one exits Philipsburg. The billboard is funded by Invisible: Mayday, the Shut Down Detention Campaign and Pittsburgh Women for Democracy,.

Greg Constantine produced this work, the third in a series documenting immigration detention and its wider impact in Oklahoma, Indiana, and Pennsylvania, as part of the 2026 Bertha Challenge Fellowship.

Republicans leaking about the midterms are growing more alarmed. One GOP operative in Iowa says this: “It feels like it could be a wipeout.” In story after story, Republicans are confiding about their mounting panic. A GOP pollster who privately told donors that the Senate might hold was mocked by Republicans themselves as “delusional.” Meanwhile, over the last few days, Trump has unraveled in a series of panicky Truth Social posts. In one, he ranted at length about how great the economy is and fumed extensively about the media’s refusal to recognize it. He even ordered Americans to “VOTE FOR REPUBLICAN CANDIDATES.” In several other posts, he raged at the media for reporting “Fake Polls” while not reporting all the fabulous economic news. We talked to Melissa Toufanian, managing director at the progressive firm Navigator Research, which has done interesting polling on Trump supporters who now regret their vote. She explains what’s really happening with voters in red states with big races, what focus groups reveal about how Trump-backing constituencies see him now, and why politicians from both parties should listen carefully to what voters are really telling them. Listen to this episode here.

Mike Fragoso bills himself as the former legal counsel to former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, so you’d think he’d be smart. Well, you’d be wrong. “What I have heard from professionals explaining why we have so many competitive races in red states boils down to R voters thinking of the president’s antics, ‘it’s not funny anymore…

Source

A cartoon by Pedro Molina. Related | Republicans lie to themselves as polls predict midterm devastation…

Source

This story, originally published by Grist in collaboration with Montana Free Press/Mountain Journal as part of the Report for America Local News Initiative, is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

There are many ways to enjoy the outdoors, but thrill-seekers visiting the nation’s national forests often turn to motorized recreation. They might ride ATVs along dirt trails, snowmobile down winding tracks, or go off-roading in 4x4s. The United States Forest Service’s approach to all such forms of recreation on trails can be summed up in four words: closed unless designated open. 

Unless a trail is explicitly designated as open to off-highway vehicles, such as side-by-sides and dirt bikes, it can only be used for nonmotorized recreation. Most national forests have travel management plans that outline when a trail is open for nonmotorized use like mountain biking, horseback riding, or hiking, and when it’s open to off-highway vehicles. These plans tend to be exhaustive and list which types of motorized or nonmotorized access are allowed on every trail, two-track, and road. The strict guidelines are a result of a Forest Service policy called the travel management rule. 

But the Trump administration wants to turn the current rule on its head. In late August, the Forest Service announced its plan to revise the rule so that trails are open unless designated closed. It would mean forest managers would be expected to prioritize motorized access on service roads, trails, and even backcountry airfields. 

The US Department of Agriculture, of which the Forest Service is a part, has said that the move will increase recreation access and “simplify regulatory requirements.” The change is being opposed by sportsmen, backcountry horsemen, conservation organizations, and nonmotorized recreation groups. They say opening up all Forest Service trails to motorized access could have devastating consequences for the ecosystems and wildlife that rely on these lands. Healthy, intact forest ecosystems are also critical for sequestering carbon in a warming world.

“I’m totally OK with appropriate machine use in the forest. But there are just places where the ecosystem is too sensitive.” 

Hillary Eisen, the federal policy director for Wild Montana, a public lands advocacy organization, said everyone who uses forest lands, from recreationists and ranchers with grazing leases to those in the timber industry, relies on the clarity provided by travel management plans. The Forest Service’s formal announcement to revise the rule is “vague,” “somewhat poorly written,” and “difficult to follow,” Eisen said. Without clear guidelines in place, she fears motorized users could end up anywhere on the landscape. 

“Any sort of feature that you could interpret to be a trail or a road would be open to every type of use, unless closed,” she said. “That could mean if you can get your side-by-side on there, have at it.” 

Chris Edgington, a watershed project manager with Montana Trout Unlimited, witnessed firsthand the environmental damage that can happen from off-highway vehicle use on the Middle Fork of the Judith River, which runs through the Little Belt Mountains of central Montana.

Prior to 2023, there were more than 80 entrances and 27 shallow spots along a 6-mile stretch of the river, where various types of vehicles, including cars and side-by-sides, crossed. As these vehicles cut across, they caused erosion and an influx of sediment that coats rocks along the riverbed, suppressing insect life and the ability for fish to successfully spawn. By 2020, the sediment runoff had gotten so bad it was choking out nearly all the fish, Edgington said. 

“The fish population was estimated to be less than 10 percent of what we’d expect of a river that size and character,” Edgington said. “The river had become over-widened and shallow, creating unusual riffles, and the river couldn’t manage its sediment load.” 

So Edgington brought together a diverse coalition of groups, including the off-highway vehicle community and the Great Falls Trail Bike Riders Association, environmental groups, and federal and local government agencies to address the issue. They rebuilt 1,000 feet of riverbank, reduced the number of crossings by 80 percent, and built a new section of the off-highway vehicle and jeep trail so the area could still be used for recreation, without harming the river. It’s been a huge success, Edgington says, and the work is already paying off.

“Fish numbers are up,” he explained. “The work we did to remove the sediment is restoring water quality and the fish population in that incredible backcountry setting.”

The vehicles crossing the river weren’t breaking any rules; the Forest Service had designated the area open for motorized recreation, but the number of stream crossings degraded the health of the river and the threatened species that lived there, including the cutthroat trout. “I’m totally OK with appropriate machine use in the forest,” Edgington said. “But there are just places where the ecosystem is too sensitive to use this equipment.” 

The travel management plan, written by the Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest, recognized this impact to the river and the need to reroute the road out of the river corridor. Parts of the Middle Fork are protected as a Wilderness Study Area and an Inventoried Roadless Area. Edgington said that because of those protections and the travel management plan, it was worth investing in this restoration; he knew the conservation work would last. 

He said a full repeal of the travel management rule would create more problems than it intends to solve. A change of this magnitude, he said, could be a devastating blow to river health and restoration projects like the Middle Fork Judith. 

“Whether that’s off-highway vehicles in the river or motorcycles on horse trails, it’s going to create a lot of conflict and confusion and animosity between different user groups.”

“This is public land, and people with disabilities, the elderly, need some sort of transportation to get out there.” 

The process to change a federal rule is a long one. The Forest Service is accepting public comments on the plan to revise the rule, which is the first step in the process, through September 23.  

These proposed revisions to travel management aren’t occurring in a vacuum. They are one of several widespread policy changes that could take effect across the 193 million acres of land the Forest Service manages, including more than 19 million acres in Montana alone. Last month, just before the travel management revision, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced the USDA was moving forward with rescinding the roadless rule, a policy that prevents road building and commercial logging on 45 million acres of Forest Service land. The Forest Service and other scientists have conducted extensive research showing how roads fragment habitat, disturb wildlife, introduce noxious weeds, and increase human-caused wildfires. In the first round of public comment, 99 percent of commenters opposed removing roadless protections. 

The short public comment periods have received public backlash. On September 11, the Forest Service announced it was adding 15 days to the comment period for the roadless rule; it is now open until October 6. In a statement about the decision, the agency wrote the extension was “to provide interested persons additional time to review the proposed rule and supporting materials.” 

Eisen, the federal policy director for Wild Montana, said the roadless rule and travel management rule help uphold the purpose of public lands.

“The intent in Congress is that they support current generations,” she said. “That they are also available for future generations, that’s the sustained yield, conservation piece of it. And the regulations we have that connect to public lands all tie in to that in one way or another.” 

The roadless rule, she said, ensures intact habitat remains for clean water and wildlife, but the travel management rule affects far more people every time they visit a national forest.  

“Anytime you go anywhere on national forest land outside of wilderness, the travel management rule is part of your experience,” she said. “And your experience is not an accident.”

“This administration does not appear to value what our public-land system is rooted in.”

Supporters of these changes, like Kerry White, who runs the Bozeman-based nonprofit Citizens for Balanced Use, say making trails open unless designated closed would create more opportunities for recreation. Citizens for Balanced Use is an organization that advocates for motorized access on public lands. 

“Without roads and trails, people can’t get out in the woods,” said White, who represented a section of Bozeman in the state legislature from 2013 to 2021. This is public land, and people with disabilities, the elderly, need some sort of transportation to get out there.” 

White said these new changes will allow for better access and clarity for visitors on ATVs, e-bikes, and other motorized vehicles. “By making everything open unless posted closed,” he said, “it puts a bit more onus on the Forest Service to do due diligence and, if a trail is closed, make sure those signs are posted and maintained and kept in place.”

Karla Gagby, who can’t hike because of a lung injury, rides through the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest in southwestern Montana on July 4.Gary Friedman

White also believes these changes won’t have negative environmental impacts. “People are freaking out [that] we’ll have strip malls and open-pit mining in these areas, and that’s simply not the case,” he said. “There’s a lot of regulation that has to be done to do any kind of projects in these areas.”

But Eisen with Wild Montana said these changes are occurring alongside the Trump administration’s rollback of a myriad of the nation’s bedrock environmental protections, including changes to the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act.

“This administration does not appear to value what our public-land system is rooted in,” she said. “It’s more about, ‘How can I make a quick buck off of this for my benefit?’ I think it gets back into that interest in privatizing.”

To Edgington, these changes are a concerning pile-on. “Many of these rules were created with a thoughtful balance of forest use,” he said. “And there are probably areas where we could improve these rules, but a full repeal would be devastating to fish and wildlife resources beyond our comprehension.” 

He spent years overseeing restoration work and conservation for some of Montana’s most beloved trout fisheries. “Cold, clean water is a finite resource,” he said, “and we need to do whatever we can to protect it.”

While Edgington is proud of the work he and partners did to restore the Middle Fork of the Judith River, he doesn’t know how work like that happens without policies like the roadless and travel management rules.

“This project was funded by three federal sources,” Edgington said. “If protections are possibly lifted and those investments are diminished? It is pretty counterintuitive to the responsible use of taxpayer dollars.”

Andrew Bailey, the co-deputy director at the FBI, is out the door. And yes, this is a story of how the administration is in comical disarray, but it is so, so much stupider than that, because of course it is. A little over a year ago, your tax dollars went to work double-time to hire Bailey, the one-time Missouri attorney general and extreme fan of President Donald Trump, the latter being the…

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Republicans are facing an imminent blue wave this November, and it seems like their secret weapon is … Nicki Minaj? The MAGA-adored rapper appeared on Fox News over the weekend, urging people to “vote red.” “We need you guys involved. We need you guys involved more than ever before. This is your country, this is your world,” she told President Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump…

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As the Trump administration plays tough about a migrant caravan purportedly heading toward the U.S.-Mexico border, former GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene exposed the truth: The GOP frequently uses these stories to rile up voters before elections. On Sunday, the Department of Homeland Security posted a montage of former Philadelphia Eagles safety Brian Dawkins tackling other players in…

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Donald Trump’s response to the ongoing Rwanda-Congo conflict involved deflecting to the Ebola virus before shutting down the line of questioning entirely.

The question came from White House correspondent Hariana Verás, the first African journalist accredited to the White House.

“She loves Africa, she always asks about Africa. She never talks about any other place,” Trump said before hearing Verás’s question. “Good job. Go ahead.”

“You, among many other administrations … you are the only one who started to do something to end the 30-year war in the [Democratic Republic of Congo],” said Verás, referring to the peace agreement Trump brokered between the presidents of the DRC and Rwanda at the White House last December and again in March.

The fighting has continued since then as most of the peace deal remains unimplemented. Meanwhile, more than seven million people have been displaced as a result of the worsening conflict, according to the Center on Foreign Relations.

“Rwanda is still violating,” Verás continued, probing if Trump intended to do anything about the shattered arrangement.

“Yeah, we’re going to stop it, if there is a violation we know about it,” Trump shrugged. “We ended the war with Congo and Rwanda and they both signed it and both agreed so, well look, I just heard about it a little while ago, if there’s a problem we’ll stop it.”

But Verás wasn’t satisfied by the president’s response.

“Mr. President, I just came from the DRC. I was there a month ago. I witnessed, again, Rwanda still killing a lot of Congolese,” Verás pressed.

“And you witnessed that?” Trump asked.

“Yes, Mr. President,” Verás continued. “And I have evidence.”

That apparently inspired Trump to switch gears.

“How is Ebola going?” Trump retorted, bringing up the regional viral crisis aggravated by federal cuts to USAID earlier this year.

“Oh, Ebola is under control,” Verás said. “I spoke with the director of the World Health Organization at the [United Nations] and he said it is under control. But still the country needs some help to fight Ebola. But still, the biggest problem is the war.”

“I’ll make sure it works out,” Trump mumbled. “That’s what I do. I make sure things work out.”

Then he pivoted to the next reporter.

Now, how do you feel, @HarianaVeras? 🤣🤣

Don’t you see how ridiculous you look? Tshisekedi’s money won’t make you relevant or get you heard.
——-

Hariana Verás: Rwanda is still killing people in Congo.

Trump: How is Ebola going?

Hariana Verás: Ebola’s under control…..I… pic.twitter.com/8wp1Elb56h

— Fabrice Rugumire (@FabRugumire) September 28, 2026

It seems like the fact that things are getting hella dire for the GOP’s midterm election prospects may just have broken through the fog of war. Or, because we’re talking about Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, it’s more like it broke through the fog of nicotine pouches, cheap whiskey, and testosterone injections. Hegseth faced his fears by filming a video, one where he is exceedingly shiny…

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On Monday, Nvidia, the multinational tech company—which has become one of the most valuable companies in the world in significant part thanks to its role in developing chips for AI processing and model training—announced the launch of a new safety platform that will monitor and contain AI agents, amid recent reports of “rogue AI” incidents like OpenAI’s Hugging Face hacking fiasco.

As my colleagues and I have previously reported, accounts of autonomous hacks by AI models belonging to OpenAI and its rivals have exacerbated concerns about the minimally regulated AI sector, even as leading figures like Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang argue that AI oversight is an “engineering problem” that the industry can largely handle without government involvement—echoing statements by President Trump, who has lashed out at demands to legislate guardrails around what he now calls “superintelligence.”

Nvidia says its Open Agent Safety Platform, which it launched Monday with a number of leading tech and AI firms, can quarantine agents that attempt to escape containment within “milliseconds.” Among company’s collaborators on some of its new safety measures are Microsoft, Palantir, SpaceXAI, JPMorganChase, and Hugging Face—the online forum where users can share and build AI systems that was the subject of the hacking incident involving OpenAI.

Nvidia says its Open Agent Safety Platform, which it launched Monday with a number of leading tech and AI firms, can quarantine agents that attempt to escape containment within “milliseconds.” The company’s collaborators on some of its new safety measures include, among others, Microsoft, Palantir, SpaceXAI, JPMorganChase, and Hugging Face—the online forum where users can share and build AI systems that was the subject of the hacking incident involving OpenAI.

But in the context of Huang’s remarks, the company’s proposals for developing safe AI are in effect being presented as an alternative to regulatory action. The idea that AI safety isn’t a problem for state agencies, or that the recent spate of rogue AI incidents don’t call for swift political action, amount to an argument that companies like OpenAI and Anthropic can police themselves. It’s often AI firms’ own conduct, and the words and actions of their leaders, that have made self-regulation a hard sell—especially as public opinion sours towards the technology’s sprawling infrastructure demands and footprint in daily life.

Disclosure: The Center for Investigative Reporting, the parent company of Mother Jones, has sued OpenAI for copyright violations. OpenAI denies the allegations.