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The White House Office of Budget and Management is planning massive changes to the way federal grants are handed out, making it so that government funding can only be spent on programs that are “aligned with administration policies and priorities.”

If passed, the new rules would also allow President Trump’s political appointees to supersede federal agencies’ merit-based decisions in order to ensure the grants “demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities.” There is also a portion of the proposal that bans the use of “theories of disparate-impact liability”—a legal concept that helps determine when a policy is disproportionately discriminatory.

Experts argue that the change would give Trump’s political appointees, most of whom are not experts, undue control over what kind of research gets funded. 

“This touches all parts of American life,” Veterans Administration psychiatrist Dr. Eric Rafla-Yuan told the Los Angeles Times in an article published Friday. “Control of how all of the federal grants and programs are funded will fall under a small group of highly partisan individuals who would have very few limits on how they spend these billions of taxpayer dollars.… If there’s a specific age range that is at higher risk for suicide, and we want to figure out, well, what’s going on with people that are aged 14 to 19 … we can’t do that under the wording in this rule.”

A massive group of various experts in fields ranging from cancer research to public housing have come out against the proposal, and there are over 100,000 comments on it. OMB published the proposed rule in the federal register in May, and the comment period ends July 13.

“A significant number of the provisions in this proposal would in fact increase administrative complexity, create uncertainty for grant recipients, reduce transparency in funding decisions, and undermine the merit-based processes that have effectively guided federal research investments,” the American Association for Cancer Research said in a statement. “This OMB proposal is reckless and does not meet the high U.S. standards required for a meritorious, impactful research grant program.”

The Planetary Society wrote in its own statement, “Science is the backbone of the American economy, generating a 3-to-1 return on the taxpayer’s investment. Our nation has always relied on merit-based, independent scientific review to select the best ideas and new technologies for development. The proposed rule changes would all but end the use of scientific merit in the selection of grants and programs across the government.”

Even Republican Senator Susan Collins expressed her concern, writing that it would “inject uncertainty into the Federal award process, especially for awards that span multiple years and phases and make these awards more costly.” She also noted that the “termination of clinical trials would leave patients without treatment and could well result in significant scientific and financial losses to both the recipient and the Federal government.” 

The OMB, led by Project 2025 architect Russell Vought, has been one of the president’s most favored tools of administrative destruction, as it’s helped him do everything from slashing crucial programs like U.S. Agency for International Development to shifting money toward his White House ballroom.  

Donald Trump is pitching a fit over a potential bipartisan legislative win in a futile attempt to advance the SAVE America Act.

“I will not sign the Housing Bill, which has been fully approved by Congress and sent to the White House, in PROTEST over the fact that the United States Senate is not capable of passing THE SAVE AMERICA ACT, which is polling at 97 percent with the Republican Party, and very high with the non-politician Dumocrats,” Trump posted on Truth Social Friday morning.

But Trump’s protest is pointless: The Constitution states that bills automatically become law after 10 days if the president neither signs nor vetoes them. The housing affordability measure passed both chambers of Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support, and Trump has not indicated that he will issue a last-minute veto of the measure.

The SAVE America Act, on the other hand, sparked nationwide controversy earlier this year, particularly over a detail in the first version of the bill that would have made it more difficult for married women to vote. Backlash over the bill has been so severe that, in the months since Trump insisted it should be Congress’s top priority, dispute over the voter ID bill has gummed up efforts to fund the Department of Homeland Security, stalled attempts to pass the National Defense Authorization Act, and upended Trump’s own Cabinet nominations.

The original SAVE America Act suggested numerous amendments to the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, including line items that would abolish mail-in voting, require voters to bring proof of citizenship and proof of residency to register to vote, require voter ID, and mandate voter roll purges every 30 days.

But the bill has been radically pared down since then, in large part due to the improbability of passing it in whole. House Speaker Mike Johnson has claimed that the current iteration of the act proposed by the lower chamber preserves the “backbone” of what Trump is pushing to pass in the Senate. That includes requirements to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote—such as a birth certificate or a U.S. passport—and a mandate to present photo identification when casting a ballot. Trump has also insisted that the bill ban mail-in voting, describing the procedure as “crooked” and “corrupt,” despite the fact that he himself has cast several mail-in ballots.

“THE SAVE AMERICA ACT’S non-passage is CRAZY, and a serious threat to any politician who votes against it!” Trump continued in his Friday post. “If the Dumocrats, or any RINO (or worse!) working with them, do not allow a positive Vote on SAVE AMERICA, TERMINATE THE FILIBUSTER, and pass this, and every other Bill that true Republicans have ever dreamt of (In addition to the upcoming Budget BOMB and the 1929 catastrophic style DEBT CEILING BILL!).”

This is a developing story.

A newly released video appears to show Senator Mitch McConnell being loaded into an ambulance on a stretcher as he was transported to the hospital last month.

CNN spoke to a neighbor of the Kentucky senator and former Senate majority leader, who said that they saw two ambulances, a fire truck, and Capitol Police officers blocking their street at 8:30 a.m. on June 14. That neighbor took a video of emergency responders pushing a person, whose face is not visible, on a stretcher to an ambulance.

Breaking new video obtained by @cnn shows Mitch McConnell being carried out on a stretcher.

America deserves answers now! This Republican coverup needs to stop! pic.twitter.com/q8yTAGBn52

— Ed Krassenstein (@EdKrassen) July 10, 2026

When the neighbor asked what was going on, police officers said that there was a medical emergency. The neighbor then asked if the person having the emergency was McConnell, to which the officers replied they would close the street for any person, according to CNN. The neighbor said that another witness told them that McConnell was the person on the stretcher and wasn’t wearing an oxygen mask.

“He’s in a stretcher, and he’s in some sort like orange foam looking blanket type thing,” the neighbor told the news outlet, adding that they could see McConnell’s uncovered feet, which did not appear to be moving. The first responders did not seem to be moving urgently, the neighbor noted.

“In a situation where perhaps time is of the essence, there seems to be a little bit more urgency, but there was no urgency here,” the neighbor said to CNN.

Very little information is known about McConnell’s condition, as his office hasn’t divulged much information in the nearly one month he’s been at George Washington University Hospital, only to say that he’s been receiving “excellent care.” Some on the right speculate that McConnell is brain dead or worse, as no pictures or audio of the senator have been made public.

McConnell’s congressional colleagues claim to have spoken to him on the phone, but the public has not seen anything about McConnell’s physical or mental state. Kentucky’s Democratic Governor Andy Beshear is demanding answers from McConnell’s office on what’s going on.

Donald Trump has completely neutered the Election Assistance Commission.

The last three remaining members of the four-member bipartisan commission were forced out of the independent agency Thursday. The two Democratic appointees—Thomas Hicks and Benjamin W. Hovland—were fired via an emailed notice from the White House Presidential Personnel ​Office, according to inside sources that spoke with Reuters. The agency’s Republican commissioner—Christy McCormick—recieved a call and was asked to resign, reported NBC News.

“On behalf of President Donald J. Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as Commissioner of the Election Assistance ​Commission is terminated, effective immediately. Thank you for your service,” read the termination email delivered to the two Democratic appointees.

The EAC was created by the Help America Vote Act of 2002 to help states administer elections. It has also provided consultation on voting procedures. Its fourth commissioner left the agency in April.

The mass overhaul comes in the immediate wake of a Supreme Court decision—Trump v. Slaughter—that granted the president more power over independent agencies late last month. The 6-3 decision overturned Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, a 91-year-old precedent that had historically shielded staffers at such agencies from political interference by protecting them from being fired by the president at will.

The White House confirmed the terminations later Thursday, suggesting that the EAC commissioners had not passed the Trump administration’s loyalty test.

“The President, and head of the Executive Branch, reserves the right to remove individuals that may not be totally aligned with the important task of securing America’s elections and ensuring ​every legal vote is counted,” a White House official said in a statement that cited the Supreme Court’s decision.

The White House told NBC News that all of the EAC’s members “will be replaced,” though doing so will require presidential appointments and subsequent Senate confirmations. Considering Capitol Hill’s current appointment turnaround times (as influenced by Trump’s SAVE America Act demands), that process could take an extraordinarily long amount of time at a point when America only has a few short months until a contentious midterm season.

If President Donald Trump’s brazen meddling didn’t give you enough reason to cringe at the World Cup, there’s some more bad news for soccer fans. France’s national team, which beat Morocco 2-0 in their quarterfinal match on Thursday, has been traveling to game venues in Canada, Mexico, and the U.S. on the same airline that the Trump administration uses to deport immigrants.

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The federal immigration agents who shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican father of three in Texas, weren’t even looking for him.

When ICE agents conducted a deadly traffic stop in Houston on Tuesday, they were looking for two people from Guatemala, two people familiar with the matter told The New York Times. Agents believed one of the people they were looking for drove a white van—instead, they found Salgado Araujo and three men he was driving to work.

Before conducting the traffic stop, federal agents knew they had the wrong man. They reportedly looked up the owner of the van and learned it was Salgado Araujo, who was undocumented. The supposedly “targeted operation” ended in ICE’s tenth fatal shooting this year.

In the hours after the shooting, the Department of Homeland Security claimed the officer had fired in self-defense after Salgado Araujo refused to comply with orders and “weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer.”

But the other three men in the car who were arrested by ICE told their lawyer that was a lie—there were no officers in front of or behind the vehicle. Surveillance footage from the traffic stop also doesn’t support DHS’s claim. One video showed that agents boxed in Salgado Araujo’s car, before he attempted to U-turn and drive the other way. Another video showed that there was no damage to the ICE agents’ vehicle.

In another potentially dark turn in the saga, the three men who were with Salgado Araujo are under pressure from immigration officials to agree to self-deport, Juan Proaño, a representative for the families and CEO of the League of United Latin American Citizens, said in an interview with The New Republic.

Brig. Gen. Eric Widmar, senior legal adviser to the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he is retiring “for personal reasons.” He is the latest high-profile departure among the military’s top leaders and lawyers in the Trump administration. By Raquel Rutledge for ProPublica The senior legal counsel to the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — the principal military adviser to…

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A cartoon by Drew Sheneman. Related | GOP desperately insists Mitch McConnell is alive and well…

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

Life has colonized every corner of the planet by evolving ingenious survival strategies, but these are increasingly being overwhelmed by destructive human activities, this year’s red list of endangered species has revealed.

Many snails, limpets and clams have adapted to life at crushing depths in the oceans on hydrothermal vents where water temperatures can reach 450 degrees C (842 F). But an assessment for the red list found that two-thirds of the hundreds of mollusk species found only on deep sea vents were at risk of extinction because of deep-sea mining.

“There is a clear path out of the biodiversity crisis: Nature conservation works.”

Mining for diamonds has put another extraordinary creature at risk of disappearing—the desert rain frog. Most frogs rely on water for survival but the bulbous desert rain frog has evolved to need almost none. It hides from the southern African sun by burying itself deep in the sand, coming out only at night to hunt insects.

However, dwindling species can be saved, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which produces the red list, said. The new list shows the numbat, a stripy, termite-eating marsupial from Australia, has come back from the brink thanks to protection from feral cats and foxes.

“Life on Earth has adapted to survive in the most hostile and unusual habitats [but] as pressures on biodiversity mount across the planet, even the creatures with the most ingenious survival strategies are under threat,” said Dr Grethel Aguilar, the IUCN director general. “But there is a clear path out of the biodiversity crisis: Nature conservation works. By protecting the astounding range of biodiversity on this planet, we can preserve a welcoming environment for humans and wildlife alike.”

An IUCN update in April declared emperor penguins officially in danger of extinction owing to the mass drowning of chicks as sea ice is melted by the climate crisis.

More than 200 species of mollusk are known to live only on hydrothermal vents, where water heated by volcanic rocks jets out from the seabed. Many have been discovered only in the last decade but already face extinction.

“This global assessment reveals that [vent] mollusks are one of the most highly threatened of all animal groups.”

The exploration and extraction of deep-sea minerals throws up sediments that smother the animals. One snail, Lirapex felix, is classed as critically endangered because of mining activity in the Indian Ocean.

However, more than 30 vent species are not in danger, as they live in marine protected areas where mining is not allowed. These include an ornately shelled snail, Provanna exquisita, that lives only in the Mariana Arc of Fire national wildlife refuge in the Pacific Ocean.

“This global assessment reveals that [vent] mollusks are one of the most highly threatened of all animal groups,” said Prof Julia Sigwart at Senckenberg Nature Research, the IUCN red list partner that coordinated the assessment. “It provides important information as the International Seabed Authority meets in Jamaica this month.” The IUCN voted for a moratorium on deep-sea mining in 2021.

The desert rain frog is classed as vulnerable owing to diamond mining and energy infrastructure expansion into its range along the west coast of South Africa and Namibia. There is further pressure on the frog because of rising demand from the exotic pet trade following a viral video of the species squeaking its distress call.

The good news on the numbat comes after decades of conservation work, which has helped numbers rebound from a low of just 300 in the late 1970s to between 2,000 and 3,000 today. The numbat has moved from endangered to near threatened on the red list.

The impact of feral cats and red foxes has been reduced by baiting and predator-proof fencing, as well as captive breeding at Perth zoo and translocations from healthy groups. As a result, at least five more self-sustaining populations have been established. However, the species occupies only 0.04 percent of its original range across southern Australia, meaning continuing conservation work is essential, experts said.

Another five Australian marsupials have been confirmed as extinct on the red list, with no sightings for at least 60 years. The crest-tailed, southern, northern, and little mulgaras were rat-sized carnivores, while the little bettong was a rabbit-sized jumping marsupial. They are likely to have fallen prey to feral cats and foxes. More than 40 modern mammal extinctions have been recorded in Australia.

“The [numbat] assessment shows that long-term conservation effort works; without it, invasive cats and foxes will continue to drive Australia’s small marsupials and native rodents to extinction,” said Prof John Woinarski, co-chair of the IUCN species survival commission group on Australasian marsupials and monotremes.

“Continued management is vital not only to maintain the numbat’s unique evolutionary line as the last surviving member of the Myrmecobiidae family, but also to support its role in maintaining a healthy ecosystem, as digging for the termites it eats increases rain penetration into the soil, helping protect woodlands,” he said.

The IUCN red list includes 175,909 species of which 49,505 are threatened with extinction, although many species have yet to be formally assessed.

One fall night in 1979, two best friends went to a small club in their hometown of Washington, DC, to see a band. The show was so extraordinary, the band so singular, that decades—and thousands of shows—later, even at “AARP age,” as one of them now puts it, they still talk about it. They were especially taken with the lead singer, a lanky, glamorous Frankenstein-esque character who, by the show’s conclusion, was up on the bar, crooning merrily as he punched through ceiling tiles while the club owner looked on and laughed. 

“I’ve never recovered from that show,” Henry Rollins recalls. “I’ve never gotten better. Ian and I talk every Sunday. We’ve been best friends for 52 years. We talk about that time we stood next to each other and watched the Cramps.”

Rollins, now 65, was a frontman for the legendary Southern California punk band Black Flag and later the MTV mainstay Rollins Band. Since retiring from music, he’s been a spoken word artist, radio host, actor, journalist, and TV presenter. The best friend he mentioned is Ian MacKaye, who fronted Minor Threat and Fugazi and co-founded and still co-owns Dischord, one of the most influential DIY record labels of all time. Their friendship is the stuff of punk legend; they also worked at Häagen–Dazs together as teens. And like so many punks and rockabilly fans—and millions of other freaks and weirdos—Rollins and MacKaye fell fast and hard for the Cramps. 

The Cramps were the brainchild of singer Lux Interior (Erick Lee Purkhiser) and guitarist Poison Ivy (Kristy Marlana Wallace), who met as art students in Sacramento in the early 1970s, when Ivy caught a ride with Lux and a friend while hitchhiking. They became partners in life and art for the next 37 years, and the only two continuous members of the band until Lux’s death in 2009.

Poison Ivy and Lux Interior, September 1994.Bertrand Alary/Dalle/ZUMA

The Cramps coined the word “psychobilly” to describe their music—a louche, wild, leering, slithering blend of surf rock, nascent punk, mutated doo-wop, and blues-derived guitar. This they combined with bizarro-Americana lyrical matter: teenage werewolves, bikini girls with machine guns, Elvis, witchcraft, B-movie horror flicks, insanity, lust, death, and the beyond. Lux and Ivy were the Cramps’ most memorable visual elements: tall, thin and cadaveresque, he would moan and writhe across the stage, often wearing high heels and lingerie—their song “I Want to Get In Your Pants” was, as Lux cheerily told interviewers, about his love for wearing women’s clothes.

Onstage, Ivy would stand watchfully nearby—lithe, implacable and feline, with curly red hair and a constantly changing selection of vinyl, latex, and animal-print garments. (She’d previously worked as a dominatrix, she once said, and between that and being in the Cramps, she eventually developed a latex allergy and had to retire her collection of such garments.) She often played a Gretsch 6120, an enormous, hollow-bodied electric guitar, and is rightfully included in Rolling Stone’s list of best guitarists of all time, often cited as central in shaping the “primitivist” rock-and-roll style.  

By the time Rollins and MacKaye first saw them, the Cramps had played a show at Napa State Hospital, a mental health facility, that became an instant legend. They brought the house down to the extent that about a dozen patients were inspired to escape during the show. (“Those people at Napa hospital were less unusual than some of the crowds we’ve played,” Lux wryly observed to Dick Porter, whose book Journey to the Center of The Cramps is considered the definitive work about the band.) The patients found the Cramps fairly unusual, Porter wrote, screaming “Ward T” at the stage. Ward T was, the band later learned, was the section for lifers, “the ward no one comes back from,” Lux told Porter. 

The Cramps after their legendary show at Napa State Hospital, June 13, 1978.Ruby Ray/Getty

The Cramps came to an abrupt end in 2009 when Lux, then 62, died suddenly and unexpectedly from an aortic dissection. Poison Ivy withdrew from the public eye: no interviews, no reunion tours with a stand-in singer, no reissues of Cramps records. Even so, the band’s legend continued to grow, attracting new generations of fans. Wednesday star Jenna Ortega had a surprise viral moment last year when her titular character, the Addams Family’s sullen Goth daughter, did an appropriately weird little dance to the Cramps’ “Goo Goo Muck.” Bootleg albums and merch have proliferated. (Full disclosure: I may have a few off-brand Cramps shirts in my closet.) You can even buy a beer named after one of their most beloved albums, with a can that’s “a nod” to (translation: completely lifted from) the cover art.

“I’ve never been more excited about a record and I’m not even on it!” Rollins told me. 

Earlier this year, Rollins and MacKaye began working with a small group on a secret project: reviving the Cramps’ own Vengeance Records and starting a new business, Cramps Inc. The first order of business for the reformed Vengeance Records is to release a 1977 album that had, until earlier this year, been sitting unheard on tapes in Ivy’s Los Angeles garage. Titled Gravest Gravy, it was produced by Alex Chilton, a beloved producer, songwriter, musician, and co-founder of the iconic indie band Big Star. The album will be released on August 21, and Cramps Inc. intends to reissue at least nine other Cramps records.

MacKaye and Rollins are not being paid for this—in a meeting with Ivy, Rollins says, he told her, simply, “I would just love to be your archivist.” Cramps Inc. will also release merchandise—including t-shirts and highly sought-after colored-vinyl pressings of Gravest Gravy—to help Ivy benefit from the wildly popular, and mostly illicit, market for Cramps merch.

Henry Rollins. Courtesy Ross Halfin/Vengenance Records Ian MacKaye at Dischord Records HQ. Courtesy Pat Graham/Vengeance Records

“Of course Ian and I are going to work for free,” Rollins told me via Zoom. “No money was ever offered or asked for. I don’t want a dollar. I’ve got the bucks. Isn’t this what you spend money on? What would you rather do? Do fentanyl or work with a Cramps catalogue?” 

Releasing an unheard Cramps album required listening to every mix of every song on Gravest Gravy and trying to decide which were the best, a task Rollins says he undertook “with fear, trepidation and awe.”

“This is not a small deal,” he says. “You’re now speaking for a band. One of the best bands ever, a band that means so much to me.” After listening to every version, he adds, “I sent my notes and mixes to Ian, whose ears I trust more than anyone I know.” (MacKaye offered his own notes, and adjusted the levels on a few songs, though they both found Chilton’s work nearly unimpeachable.)

“I’ve never been more excited about a record and I’m not even on it!” he says. “We’re not on the cover. We’re in the fine print at the bottom and that’s the way I want it to stay. When you go to the Smithsonian and see the big T. Rex bones standing up, you know that’s a team of expert people who put that up in a dark night and vanished like dew on the hood of the car. You don’t know their names. That’s what it’s all about. Me and Ian, we don’t need a hurrah.”  

Larry Hardy and Henry Rollins.Courtesy Robyn Ginsburg/Vengeance Records

Besides Rollins and MacKaye, the group reviving Vengeance Records includes Larry Hardy, owner and operator of In The Red Records and longtime friend of Ivy and Lux, and Jimmy Maslon, a producer who made some of the Cramps’ music videos. Poison Ivy is described as the “major beneficiary” of the project, which Rollins says is being undertaken with her full permission, although she’s not deeply involved in the day-to-day operations of Cramps Inc. (She also is still not doing interviews, even if you all but beg, and have been pestering her PR reps intermittently for a decade.)   

“I listened. I paid attention. I read. I’m always trying to lose my primordial tail and the glistening gills that throb on my neck.”

“If you’ve ever been in a band, it’s a very intense relationship,” Rollins explains. “You get to know your bandmates more than you really want to. I’ve been in bands with people I love like family and you hope you never see them again. For Ivy, the Cramps were the past, and when she remembers them, it comes with a lot of memories.” 

It doesn’t immediately make sense that Rollins would be such a diehard fan of The Cramps, who inhabited a completely unique sector of the music world: outside gender, genre, and preconceived notions about what a “rock” band should look or sound like. By contrast, Black Flag, Rollins’ most famous band, became singularly associated with the violence of the 1980s Southern California hardcore scene, which was often incredibly hostile to women and nonwhite people. Rollins recalls women getting their shirts torn off at Black Flag shows and a disturbing influx of neo-Nazis and skinheads who were more than happy to pay a cover fee for the chance to beat up Black or Hispanic fans, sexually harass women, and sieg heil the stage. 

The band didn’t want violent thugs at their shows, Rollins says, but he’s not surprised they were attracted. “Did Black Flag set up a permission structure? Perhaps. Wittingly? No.“

Henry Rollins with Black Flag in 1983.Bob Chamberlin/Los Angeles Times/Getty

“I’m sure our very presence, we bore some responsibility,” Rollins adds. “Could we have been better actors in that scene? I’m not sure. I’m not sure if there’s more we could’ve done. It’s been so long ago. I can’t accurately tell you.”

Rollins says he responded to Nazis at Black Flag shows by mocking them. “I would call things out. I was the fake comedian. I’m getting sieg heiled by a bunch of overweight Anheuser-Busch fans between songs, and I said, ‘You can’t make Army boot camp, much less the Third Reich.’ The audience is laughing. The security has to get around me because now those eight knuckleheads want to beat me up. I made an enemy of those people very fast. I didn’t just let it go.”

Rollins also keeps an eye on the so-called manosphere, and “masculinity influencers” like Andrew Tate, viewing them as targeting the same kinds of young, impressionable, angry, horny young men who used to populate Black Flag shows. “They’re being sold a bill of goods,” he says, bluntly. “What I beg young men to do is listen to and believe women.”

He’s had to do so himself, he adds. “I listened. I paid attention. I read. I’m always trying to lose my primordial tail and the glistening gills that throb on my neck.”

The meathead and white supremacist presence at Black Flag shows seemed to peak in 1986 or so, Rollins says, and those people didn’t come to shows for his next project, the Rollins Band, at all. “Either the tickets were too expensive or they hated the music. They simply stopped showing up.” 

“In times of trouble, art gives us the backbone to keep fighting… Keep your eyes on the ball and have a beat.”

Since retiring from music, Rollins has slipped comfortably into a role as a music archivist, moving to Nashville about three years ago to try to open a punk rock museum. Given the expense of owning or leasing a building, the “museum” is much more likely to be a series of pop-up events, Rollins says, with one planned for “later this year,” although he’s not yet ready to provide details. Besides the Cramps, he’s also now working with the “estates” of other great bands, he says. “That’s equally bitchin’ news for another time.” 

Having known Poison Ivy since the Black Flag days, Rollins says, he’s happy to be part of any structure that allows her to benefit from the Cramps’ legendary status while living the quiet, private, deeply spiritual life she wants. “I don’t need to speak to Ivy,” he says. “I need to work for the Cramps.” 

“We’ll be the historians,” he adds. “We’ll do the heavy lifting.”

Poison Ivy plays with the Cramps at the Town & Country Club, London, April 1, 1990.Rudi Keuntje/Geisler-Fotopress/DPA/ZUMA

He means that literally. When Hardy, Ivy’s old friend, discovered that the tapes in her garage “were showing signs of moisture,” Rollins says, they needed to be moved, very quickly, to a climate-controlled environment. Rollins flew from Nashville to LA, rented a cargo van, and drove “30 hours and 45 minutes” back to Nashville, pounding energy drinks, the van sagging under the weight of the tapes. Rollins was pulled over in Arkansas for drifting across the white line. He told the cop, cheerily, “I’m riding the Red Bulls, sir!” and was let off with a warning. 

Gravest Gravy, recorded in 1977, will be released for the first time on August 21 on the revived Vengeance Records.Vengeance Records

“I paid to do this!” Rollins said, referring to financing the trip with his own money, “Because in my mind I owe the Cramps a part of my life.”

It can be hard, at this moment in time, to imagine caring deeply about something like a newly released album, no matter how legendary the band or thrillingly obscure the recording.  The chaos of the second Trump administration has taken its toll on Rollins too. He’s a DC native, after all. He says he wept when Trump paved over the White House Rose Garden. “I try not to let any of this stuff get to me, but that got to me.”

For years, Rollins volunteered with the USO, doing tours in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Egypt, and visiting wounded soldiers in their beds at Walter Reed. (“You see a person half your age and half their face is gone…You do five hours of that and get back to me.” At the end of a day like that, he says, “I have no appetite. All I can smell is that antibacterial soap.”) He’s particularly outraged by the 13 American service members who have thus far died in the war with Iran. “Every day, Trump and Vance are covered in their blood like a patina.” 

But Rollins also argues that art still matters—even amid the chaos, outrages and endless travails of Trump 2.0. “No one will say ‘bad dog,’ for putting on a record in the middle of all of this horror,” he says.

“If you lose culture in your society, the society dies,” Rollins says. “If you lose your art museums and your galleries, all you have is thugs and fighting and people being mean. In times of trouble, art gives us the backbone to keep fighting. It gives you inspiration…You want to rebel against this awful war and this awful situation we’re in, you don’t take your eyes off the ball. But it’s not bad to have a soundtrack. Keep your eyes on the ball and have a beat.”

Art and culture are “what you have to lose with an administration like this,” Rollins adds. “They hate science. They hate literacy. They hate women. They hate nonwhite people. They hate LGBTQ people. Those aforementioned groups, they make things that make life great. They want to eradicate it and erase it. You can do more than one thing at once. You can entertain many things. And so you can be concerned and fight the good fight, and you can also put a record on and love the Cramps.”

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the July 10 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.

A 52-year-old man named Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was shot dead by an ICE officer this week. ICE claimed it was in self-defense, but this account deserves serious skepticism. And indeed, this story has now gotten even darker. A representative for the victim’s family now says the three other men in the van with Araujo are not just in detention, they’re also under pressure to self-deport.

All this comes as even some MAGA judges are starting to reject Trump’s deportation policies in surprising numbers. So it’s time to take stock. Trump and Stephen Miller are escalating deportations in a big way, but trying to do so very quietly. We’re at a real crossroads moment here that will determine how far they can get with their lawless ethnic cleansing campaign. We’re talking about all this with New Republic staff writer Melissa Gira Grant, who has a great piece laying out why people need to care a lot about this shooting. Melissa, good to have you on.

Melissa Gira Grant: Hey, thank you, Greg. Yeah, the piece is called “ICE Is Hoping You Won’t Notice the Man Agents Killed in Texas.”

Sargent: And ICE really is hoping that. Let’s start with this shooting. It was around six in the morning. Lorenzo was driving to a construction job with three other guys. He stopped as part of a targeted operation. ICE now claims that he attempted to evade arrest, refused to follow verbal commands, and then weaponized his vehicle against an officer, who then fired in self-defense. It hit Araujo in the stomach, and he died at the hospital. Melissa, can you explain why this account is worthy of skepticism?

Grant: So we’ve been hearing a lot from ICE and from DHS that people are using their cars as deadly weapons, or to potentially injure an officer. And that was certainly the case they made, for example, with Renée Good. They lied and said she was driving into them. We know that’s not the case.

So at the time, Araujo, his brother, and two other men—the three of them were part of a construction crew. You know, Araujo has been working in construction for like 35 years in Houston and then the suburbs around there. He was on the way to work.

When ICE approached him, as I understand it, they were in their vehicle. And we know from other ICE stops in other cities, they tend to drive vehicles that are unmarked. They tend to use their car to box someone in. And at times they approach people very threateningly without clearly identifying themselves as law enforcement. And I think we have every reason to believe that that is part of what happened in this case. It would be their pattern. If they didn’t do that, it would be a break with their pattern.

Sargent: Let’s talk about who Araujo is. He’s 52 years old. He’s been in this country for 35 years. He started his own business. He put several children through college. They’re all now grown up. And Araujo’s son, Ronaldo Salgado, says that the family had actually been preparing for the possibility that he might be picked up.

And they had a whole plan in place where he would just cooperate, and then the family would try to get him freed. So it’s a little hard to see this guy as someone who would try to commit vehicular manslaughter against law enforcement, isn’t it?

Grant: Yeah, it doesn’t make any sense that he would do anything to endanger himself when he had family support in a plan that ran counter to that. It is very clear from listening to the press conferences and reading some of what his son Ronaldo has posted on social media that this is somebody who had a lot of support, and I don’t think would make a rash decision in the moment.

Sargent: It really doesn’t seem like it. Now let’s talk about these three other guys who are in the van. As you mentioned, one was Araujo’s brother. The other two were workers at Araujo’s business. As we reported at NewRepublic.com on Thursday, a representative for all these families, Juan Proaño, who’s the CEO of the League of United Latin American Citizens, now says those three guys are in detention, and that they’re under pressure to sign self-deportation orders. As Proaño says, these could be the only witnesses that could contest the government’s account of the shooting.

There doesn’t appear to be any video of the shooting itself. There’s been video of the aftermath, but not the shooting itself. And yet these guys who saw this happen—presumably, we don’t know that they did, but it seems highly plausible that they might have—they might be removed from the country. Melissa, what do you make of that?

Grant: It is possible that they are the only witnesses, and it’s possible that that is factoring into how DHS is looking at this. And again, you said we don’t know what they witnessed, but I have to believe that they have more context, and that context is probably not favorable to the ICE and DHS story.

Sargent: Absolutely. It does seem like that. By the way, I want to quickly note that in response to my questions about this, ICE put out a statement that entirely dodged the matter. It was just boilerplate repeating what it had said before, and then adding that this is a developing situation. They won’t say any more.

They just referred all further questions to the FBI. So as of this recording, ICE is not denying that they are pressuring several witnesses to this thing that just happened to self-deport, remove themselves from the country.

And by the way, one other thing—we should note that Juan Proaño, who represents the families, did say on a conference call today that he does think the three men are illegal. So they may actually be deported, or at least subject to deportation. And it’s possible ICE is trying to deport them to prevent them from sharing their account of what happened, which is just amazing.

Grant: It’s something that stuck out as I was working on the background to ICE killings for my story. That, you know, we have 16 examples in the second Trump administration of the administration’s story coming to the conclusion that the shooting was justified before an investigation had even concluded. And so that’s the context in which I understand the statement that ICE made in response to your reporting. They’re going to allude to there being an investigation.

The other thing about any kind of investigation—local law enforcement, including the Harris County District Attorney’s Office, they have tried to join the investigation, offer assistance. They have been denied that. And that includes being denied access to key pieces of evidence.

So we’re being asked to, again, very similarly with Renée Good and Alex Pretti, we’re being asked to fall for what I don’t think you could ever call an independent investigation at this point, and they’re rejecting any outside law enforcement participation. I would not be surprised if the White House comes out and just says this is justified, moving on, and tries to let that be the end of the story. And as I understand it, this community will not let that be the end of the story.

Sargent: Well, it sure looks like there’s a major groundswell for Araujo right now. You had this very good piece about this shooting as well. I want to highlight one thing you wrote—how the government’s cavalier response to this killing really shows that Trump and Stephen Miller and MAGA just don’t regard people like Araujo as fundamentally human. You wrote, “The lives of people who aren’t worthy of citizenship have no value.”

And they really tried to create a second-class caste out of undocumented immigrants by pushing the end to birthright citizenship. They failed there, but they are going to do everything they possibly can to try and treat undocumented immigrants—and plenty of legal immigrants as well—as an inferior caste. That’s what’s happening now. Melissa, can you expand on that?

Grant: Sure. That comment, I was trying to capture the Trump administration’s ethos. That is certainly not my belief, that the lives of people who aren’t worthy of citizenship have no value. That is what this administration’s been telling us, I mean, since 2015, right? Since Trump came down the escalator.

This is where they’ve started. And, this idea of dehumanizing any immigrant in the course of this campaign—I feel like they’ve shown us multiple ways that they’re doing that, whether that’s in the legal arena, whether that is the news that they make, whether that is the panic that they’ve been kicking up over this. They’re fighting this in multiple arenas.

And there are two representatives from Congress who’ve also called for a full investigation. There may be others by now, but as of now, one of them is Christian Menefee, who I think has just very recently come to Congress—I think he only showed up in February. And he said something just completely perfect, honestly, at a press conference the family held earlier this week.

He said, what other profession has the power to take somebody’s life in the street? And meanwhile, our administration’s in court fighting to make sure people like Ronaldo and Lorenzo Jr.—which is another one of his sons—can’t be citizens in this country, right? Like, Ronaldo, Lorenzo Jr., and the third—they are here because their father came here and they were born here.

Sargent: There’s a big tool that the administration has been using to try to maximize the deportations and maximize the ethnic cleansing. ICE is trying to detain people without bond—even if they’ve been in the country for many years, when they’d ordinarily be afforded bond.

Politico’s Kyle Cheney, who’s done great reporting on this, has just done a big count. He put out a piece saying that this has now been rejected by judges 15,000 times. Melissa, can you walk us through what this thing is about, what this policy is about, what they’re trying to do, and why it’s not working?

Grant: Sure. So, we’ve had decades of immigration laws that were and weren’t enforced in various ways. Like, I think that’s a good place to start. Every administration kind of comes in and is like, what are going to be our priorities? And even though this law has been sitting on the books for 30 years, it has never been used in this way.

The law that the Trump administration is weaponizing here concerns when someone can be detained, and for how long they can be detained, when they’ve come into the country. And standard practice had been, for decades in this country, even before this law, that people weren’t detained for crossing the border. That is a very insignificant crime. There’s a whole process for that person to get status in the country. It is optional for the government to detain someone for crossing the border. That is on them.

And now we’ve swung all the way to actually every single person—and actually not every single person who crosses the border, but every single person who doesn’t have legal status, or people who we have profiled as not having legal status, is fair game to be detained.

And an even older legal principle, of habeas corpus—literally “show us the body,” produce the body—using this tool, attorneys and families have been able to get people who are now being swept up by the thousands into immigration detention. I mean, we’re detaining more people in immigration detention than we ever have. I think it was 63,000 was the most recent number that I saw. That might already be out of date.

It’s really fascinating. It’s a kind of super simple, super basic principle. Like, you can’t actually just hold somebody for as long as you want without giving them due process. And immigration court is not the same thing as our criminal or civil courts—it’s its own process. People don’t have the same rights to counsel, for example. So what we have seen is this upswell of lawyers and community organizations using the habeas process to get people out, and seeing that in numbers that we’ve never seen before.

So the fact that, you know, more than 15,000 times judges have rejected this mass detention policy—the flip side of that is that that is 15,000 habeas petitions that succeeded. That’s 15,000 people, potentially, who were released.

And so it’s this cat-and-mouse of, like, the more people you detain, the more habeas petitions we’re going to throw at you, and the busier the courts are going to get, and the more incentivized judges are going to be to let people go. They can’t simply keep up with these numbers. And that’s the story I see behind that number too.

Sargent: There’s one other nugget of reporting from Kyle Cheney that I want to highlight here. He did this big count, and he found that even a majority of Trump-appointed judges who have considered this detention policy have ultimately rejected it. That seems to me to be pretty remarkable.

We’re talking about MAGA judges, judges who were picked by Donald Trump, who agree with more liberal judges that this major tool that they’re using—again, this is absolutely central to their entire mass deportation campaign—this major tool that they’re using is too much for a majority of Trump-appointed judges who have considered it.

Grant: This novel legal argument, this real stretch of a legal argument that has not been made before—I mean, it could just be like a true small-c conservatism on the part of these judges, is like, no, you can’t do this. You can’t just make up a new interpretation. This is too far.

I do suspect, though, that part of it is the sheer number of cases. None of these judges have been called upon to deal with this kind of volume, this many habeas cases, this many immigrants who have been detained.

Like, in a way, Trump and Stephen Miller, who I’m assuming is a significant architect of this policy interpretation—they have created the situation for their own failure. It just simply cannot circulate this many people through the system. And when you increase the number of people who are being harmed by this, there’s more people who are going to fight.

And then there’s other people—attorneys are looking at the success that attorneys are having in other circuits, and they’re going for it. It’s sort of a snowball effect at this point. And it only stops if they actually stop detaining people.

Sargent: So that brings me to the concluding question here. We’re sort of in this split-screen moment. On one screen, Trump and Stephen Miller have amassed really tremendous power to carry out this ethnic cleansing. They’ve gotten billions and billions, tens of billions of dollars, that’s basically not subject to any serious oversight, which they’re using to build massive detention centers and hire God knows how many ICE agents. They’ve got this real army at this point, which is armed with paramilitary weaponry in a very serious way. So they’ve got that, they’ve got all this power.

Yet on the other flip side of this whole thing, we’re seeing tremendous resistance to what Trump and Stephen Miller are wanting to do. You saw this backlash in Minneapolis. Public polls have shown that solid majorities are rejecting this. They reject the mass deportations as a policy, not just the tactics that we’re seeing in the streets.

You’ve got the courts really drawing a very hard line in many cases against this. There’s serious institutional resistance. You had the Supreme Court—not by enough, but still, the Supreme Court upheld birthright citizenship. And you have Trump-appointed judges in enormous numbers saying, no, you can’t do this.

So where are we? How far are they going to get? I tend to think that they’re not actually going to get that far towards what they want. What’s your reading of it?

Grant: I mean, there’s optics, and then there’s what’s happening in the courts, and then there’s what’s actually happening in people’s neighborhoods. So one of the things I found pulling my piece together—there was that big moment after the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti of an alleged drawdown in Minneapolis.

There were some personnel changes—Gregory Bovino, the guy in the greatcoat with the kind of Nazi-appealing haircut—he’s out, we’re bringing in Tom Homan. He’s an old hand. He looks more legitimate, even though arguably he’s in the same exact lane ideologically as the rest of them.

A few months later, we get rid of Kristi Noem, we bring in Markwayne Mullin. I think there’s something going on where they at least want to change the optics. They at least want to make it look like grown-ups are in charge. And that to me says, like, what was sort of building up to Minneapolis—they took that very seriously. They don’t want to be in that position again.

However, we are seeing this huge increase in arrests and detentions. You know, we have double the amount of detentions daily happening in some cases. There were five days in June this year where 10,000 people were arrested by immigration agents. That’s double what would be the normal rate even under this administration.

So it’s important right now for people to maintain their focus, maintain the work that they’ve been doing to challenge these policies, and press for more. This is, I think, exactly what the administration would like—is for us to turn away and believe that things have changed. And they certainly have not.

Sargent: A hundred percent. Couldn’t have said it better. I really agree with that. I really hope people take that to heart. Folks, you saw what happened in Texas. That’s a very good sign that Melissa’s really onto something here. So stay in this, people. Please stay on top of it. Melissa Gira Grant, awesome to talk to you. Thanks so much for all this.

Grant: So good to talk with you. Thanks.

Sargent: Folks, a quick announcement. The Daily Blast is taking a short break to recharge. The pod will return in a week, early in the morning on Monday, July 20. See you all then.

In 2012, as a 33-year-old staff writer at The American Prospect in D.C., I had the opportunity to travel around the country, looking for stories that would show how real people were connected to the decisions made by politicians inside the Beltway. On a trip to Colorado, while interviewing voters in a suburban swing district just west of Denver, I met a young couple staying in a homeless shelter who mentioned that they had previously stayed at a slightly rundown hotel, paying weekly rent, until they could no longer afford it. I had been looking for a chance to write a long narrative feature on the rise of suburban poverty during the Great Recession, and when I checked out the hotel, I found many other families living in it and in other hotels nearby.

Back in D.C., I pitched my editor and later returned to the Denver area to live in the hotel for about five weeks. I got to know the people living there—how they lost their home and what life living in a hotel was like. My article, “The Weeklies,” ran in March 2013. I remain incredibly proud of it, because it highlighted the struggle ordinary Americans were facing as the economy slowly recovered from the housing crash.

I thought of all of this recently when I came across a link to a website called In the Weights. Designed to look like a 1980s computer game, it’s a database where you can “find out whether you live on” in large language models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini, and assigns a score based on your prominence. That’s how In the Weights frames it, anyway—a naked appeal to vanity. In reality, the site shows you how much of your work has been used to train AI chatbots. I found that a lot of mine was: I was given a “strength” score of 735, which put me in the top 5 percent.

So I turned to the chatbots themselves for details. Some would not divulge which works of mine were used in their training, but Gemini cited my work at The American Prospect and TNR:

Your Reporting on Class and Poverty: I have access to the core concepts and reporting from your career, such as your pieces for The American Prospect covering the shredded social safety net, food insecurity among military families, and health disparities, as well as your recent coverage of working-class politics and economic anxiety for The New Republic.

There have been more than a few times lately when I wanted to throw my laptop across the room, drop everything, and go live in the woods. This was one of them.

“The Weeklies” wasn’t just a 7,000-word article; it was months of work. In fact, you could say I’d begun work on it even before I’d formed the idea. I had spent most of my twenties in low-paid, low-level journalism jobs, building up the reporting and writing expertise to even contemplate tackling such a story. Journalism jobs famously do not pay well: Into my mid-thirties, by the time I was writing long narratives, my salary remained $50,000. I struggled to pay rent in D.C. while also repaying my student loans from journalism graduate school. (I am still making $611.31 monthly payments and likely will continue to do so until I retire.)

I don’t want to throw too much of a pity party, but as someone who went to college thanks to financial aid and then borrowed to go to graduate school because I didn’t know how else to move into my desired career, I never had family money or connections to rely on. During these years, I struggled to keep up with my bills and to stay one step ahead of the layoffs devastating the entire industry. At various times, I put my student loans in forbearance, had a Honda Civic repossessed, and defaulted on credit cards. It took me years to dig out of that financial hole.

These are fairly common ups and downs for someone who grows up working-class in the U.S. These are also the kinds of trade-offs many people make early in their careers, as they hope to cash in on the experience later. Working hard at a low-paying job is supposed to allow you to step up a ladder to a more stable career. At least, that’s what we’re promised when we borrow money to get an education and then live on ramen, with multiple roommates, as we embark on a career.

AI is not the first technology to upend that promise, but it is the latest—and the one that has touched me most personally. It makes sense that I would be In the Weights. I wrote a lot of words during the early years of internet publishing, creating a body of work that is easy to find and offers free material for the LLMs to suck into their gaping maw. But it is a mistake to think of everything I published under my name as just internet writing. Each word came from years and years of labor.

A number of organizations are trying to tackle how AI is used in the workplace, and how workers might have say in its use and be protected from job loss. The AFL-CIO, in a platform released after its national convention last month, demanded that “working people have a say in how and whether AI and other advanced technologies are developed and deployed.” Former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo is working with states, policymakers, industries, and Big Tech to design policy, training, and payment programs that help transition workers who may be displaced by AI. New America released a report late last month about “centering workers in the AI economy,” using lessons learned from major labor disruptions of the past. Even the pope has weighed in.

We definitely need to talk about where we’re headed, but what about where we’ve been? Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is the rare voice on Capitol Hill to acknowledge that AI “is based on the collective knowledge of humanity and the creative work of tens of millions of people.” Last month, he introduced a bill that would levy a one-time 50 percent tax on the stock of the largest AI firms to create a $7 trillion sovereign wealth fund, which every year would pay out more than $1,000 to everyone in the U.S. It would also give the federal government voting shares and positions on company boards to allow the public to have a say in its future use.

This legislation recognizes the real problem. I lived paycheck-to-paycheck to create the work that helps fuel LLMs today, yet I get zero compensation for it while global investment in AI is in the billions and it’s making Silicon Valley even richer. Elon Musk’s SpaceX absorbed his AI model, Grok, to increase the aerospace company’s value ahead of an IPO that briefly made Musk the world’s first trillionaire. AI may be a bubble, and I agree with the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci that AI can’t possibly steal all of our jobs, but it will make many people extremely rich no matter what. And they will have gotten rich because AI relied on the labor of working people without paying a cent for it.

Of course, this is part of a broader trend in which executives and investors mint millions while workers get an increasingly thin sliver of the pie. If you want one chart to explain why people are mad about the economy right now, look at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis’s chart showing how labor’s share of gross domestic product has declined since the 1950s.

These trends are global, but in the U.S. the divide is more extreme than in other countries. Our productivity keeps going up, but the gains are rewarding capital and pumping up CEO salaries. If the past is any guide, the people who will be the most hurt by AI disruptions are the workers who are later on in their careers who have built up a specific expertise and don’t easily transition into new jobs at the same salary as their previous jobs—and this chart shows that these are the workers who’ve been underpaid this whole time.

While anger at Big Tech is growing, I don’t know if people are angry enough, and I wonder if that’s partly because a lot of the work that has fueled social media platforms and now AI is in creative fields like art and writing, which are misunderstood or esoteric to many Americans. The writing that many people do in their own working lives might be annoying paperwork, like a self-evaluation, or a cover letter in a job application—typing, basically. But writing, whether a quick take on the day’s news or months of reporting, is really the product of months or even years of labor. Writing also demands thinking, which is work in itself. Generative AI can write, albeit very poorly, but it can’t really think—not as humans do. The best it can do is scan all of its inputs—the result of human beings’ thoughts—in order to approximate the output a human would provide.

Big Tech wants us to believe they’re concerned about the effects their models might have on real people, like creating mass unemployment. Anthropic positions itself as an ethical AI company, and its CEO, Dario Amodei, has aligned with the Vatican on its concerns about the human costs of AI. Other tech CEOs make noises about policies like guaranteed income that would allow people to earn salaries even without jobs. But that kind of generosity is at odds with the way they built their models in the first place—by stealing others’ intellectual property.

Only politics can address the problems with AI, but for the past 50 years our leaders in Washington have largely abandoned labor in favor of companies’ capital growth. Wages, taxes, and regulations have undervalued the work and safety of real people, driving the K-shaped economic growth we see now. Political and economic systems won’t change course unless we force them to. To use an example from the past, the Luddite rebellion was not a wholesale rejection of modern advances. The Luddites were textile workers angry about how mechanization was being used to exploit working people, and they protested by destroying automated power looms. My desire to smash my laptop comes from an old tradition.

Many commentators, myself included, perceived a different headline to the Supreme Court’s rejection in Trump v. Barbara of Trump’s executive order in the birthright citizenship case. The real gobsmacking detail was not the court’s holding, which was broadly signaled in oral arguments, but the fact that four justices—Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh—were prepared to uphold a radically counter-textual reading of the plain text of the Fourteenth Amendment to exclude from citizenship children born here to parents who were in the country illegally or only temporarily.

In fact, the dissenting opinions, in particular those of Thomas (joined by Gorsuch) and Kavanaugh, are far loonier and more unorthodox than just their offensive bottom line. The dissenters didn’t simply reach a result aligned with the administration’s wishes; they got there by abandoning the method of interpreting the Constitution that mainstream judges and scholars, conservative and liberal alike, have firmly adopted.

The first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment prescribes a clean two-part test: Anyone (1) “born … in the United States” and (2) “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” is a citizen. Period, full stop.

It’s not difficult to apply the first part: Trump’s flights of fancy aside, it’s clear what it means to be born here. So any play in the joints has to be in the interpretation of “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”

The five-person majority opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts applied the conventional and commonsensical meaning of that phrase. The opinion holds that the clause “uses jurisdiction in its ordinary sense—referring to the power of the United States to govern those within its territory.” You are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States if you are bound by the web of obligations and privileges that apply to us all. That’s the same way the court’s 1898 opinion in Wong Kim Ark, which figured heavily in the oral argument and the opinion in Barbara, construed the phrase.

The dissenters’ principal theme is that the “subject to the jurisdiction” clause incorporates, for elaborate historical reasons, a notion of domicile: that the child’s parents were not merely in the country but had set down roots and developed a sense of loyalty to the nation.

The obvious challenge, which I think they don’t come close to surmounting, is how to wrest that reading from the simple words of the first clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Thomas, in the principal dissent joined by Gorsuch, begins not with the words of the text but with a history of Dred Scott, Frederick Douglass, and John Bingham, the Ohio Republican congressman who was the principal drafter of the Fourteenth Amendment. He builds methodically toward the claim that the amendment was, in his words, “designed and understood to secure equal rights for the freed blacks.” This theme continues throughout the 90-some pages of the dissenting opinion, which argues that the amendment’s Framers had a narrow purpose in mind: undo the Dred Scott abomination and secure citizenship for the children of the freed slaves.

Interpreting constitutional text based on the intent of the drafters, what was subjectively in their heads, has a name: intent originalism. It also has a provenance: It was once a mainstream method of constitutional interpretation, but it has since been firmly rejected, especially by conservatives. No less an avatar of conservative thought than Justice Antonin Scalia disavowed it, insisting that the inquiry was never the search for “the intent of the Framers” but for the original meaning of the text. He put it bluntly: “It is the law that governs, not the intent of the lawgiver.”

The classic demonstration of why original-intent originalism collapses is the canonical case of Brown v. Board of Education. The plaintiffs in Brown built their argument around the notion that racial segregation in public schools violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which states simply that no state shall “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” Yet, the Reconstruction Congress plainly didn’t intend the Fourteenth Amendment to outlaw segregated schools: After all, many of its own drafters ran segregated schools in Washington, D.C. Therefore, if the Framers’ intent governs, and not the words they inscribed into law, Brown looks to have been wrongly decided.

In fairness, that consensus may have been overstated. Judge Michael McConnell and others have shown the Framers’ views on school segregation weren’t as monolithic as assumed. But that revision only reinforces the deeper point: Relying on what was privately in legislators’ minds, rather than the words they put to paper and voted to approve, is an unstable method that can flip an outcome depending on which stray comment you excavate. That’s why original-intent originalism is not merely flawed but effectively moribund; it barely appears anymore in serious Supreme Court jurisprudence.

The reading of the Barbara majority of the “subject to the jurisdiction” language was no different from how the court’s 1898 opinion in Wong Kim Ark read the phrase: An alien present in the country, Justice Horace Gray wrote, “is completely subject to the political jurisdiction of the country in which he resides”—owing obedience to its laws and answerable to them, just as a native-born citizen would be. The court identified a narrow set of exceptions described above in which persons born here, the children of foreign diplomats, would not be subject to our laws in the normal sense.

Domicile appears in the 1898 opinion only as a description of the parties actually before the court; nowhere does Gray treat it as a legal requirement of jurisdiction itself.

There’s much more detail to Thomas’s argument, but it’s in service of the same private-meaning project, notwithstanding his own claim, at one point, that he’s simply applying original meaning. He spends many pages arguing that “subject to the jurisdiction” secretly encoded the nineteenth-century legal concept of domicile—a person’s fixed, permanent home—and that domicile implied something more freighted: exclusive, undivided allegiance to the United States.

That’s shaky on its own terms; domicile has never required renouncing competing loyalties, only living somewhere with intent to stay. But the bigger problem is simpler, and insuperable: The Fourteenth Amendment doesn’t say “domicile.” It says “subject to the jurisdiction thereof”; and, as the majority holds, those words refer, in 1868 or 1898 or 2026, to the “power of the United States to govern those within its territory.”

Whatever you think of the result the dissenters wanted, they didn’t reach it through any interpretive method that survives contact with the last 40 years of debate about how to read the Constitution. They got there by asking what the Framers intended to accomplish, instead of the meaning of what they actually wrote. That’s a method nearly every serious originalist, including the conservative justices who built modern originalism, has definitively rejected.

Finally, a quick word on Justice Kavanaugh’s separate opinion, which in a way is even worse. Kavanaugh concluded that a 1940s statute repeating the Fourteenth Amendment’s exact words already forbids Trump’s order. He then gratuitously went on to say that Wong Kim Ark was wrong to treat its exceptions as a closed, exclusive list, and that Congress could just add a new one for children of unlawful or temporary immigrants. But he never explains—and it’s hard to see how he could—why those children would actually fall outside U.S. jurisdiction.

Kavanaugh’s concurrence permitted Trump to seize a partial victory from what would and should have been a decisive loss. Trump immediately seized on Kavanaugh’s suggestion, insisting Congress could still legislate his own, xenophobic definition of citizenship, notwithstanding that it plainly would contradict the holding in Barbara. Explaining Kavanaugh’s odd separate opinion may call for a discipline other than law.

The Atlantic is a magazine about the imminent loss of all that we hold dear. That’s a business model likely pitched to older readers, whose keener understanding of their own mortality can sometimes make them project it onto the world around them. The median age of an Atlantic reader, according to an August 2025 Pew survey, is 51, or eight years more than The New York Times, seven years more than The Washington Post, and four years more than The Wall Street Journal. The only print publication in Pew’s survey with an older median reader was Newsweek (57). The median age of readers of The New Republic, which was not included in Pew’s survey, is somewhere between 45 and 54, according to a sampling of roughly one-fifth of the total audience.

I don’t dispute that some things in life end, or that the United States right now has a very serious governance problem, or that the humanities are going through a pretty gruesome patch. Many aspects of life that I cherish are under siege. Independent coffee shops are disappearing, newsstands are repurposed to sell candy and snacks, and movie theaters are shuttering. On the other hand, an Oxford mathematician named Andrew Wiles finally cracked Fermat’s Last Theorem; deaths from heart disease are down 66 percent since 1970; the Democrats will likely win back the House in November; and Ann Patchett’s latest best-selling novel is a delight.

I mention this last because the latest Atlantic cover story announces “The Age of Reading Is Over,” and the story itself is headlined “The End of Reading Is Here.” Everything is always ending in the Atlantic. Did you know, for instance, that “The Golden Age of American Jews is Ending?” Neither did I. An otherwise strong March 2024 piece by Franklin Foer, about the troubling recent rise in anti-Semitism, went haywire in its final paragraph.

“The forces arrayed against Jews, on the right and the left, are far more powerful than they were 50 years ago,” Foer wrote. Okay, but that’s an unexceptional observation because antisemitism was negligible in 1974. The better point of comparison would be 70 years ago, which was right around the time my Jewish father spent a whole interview with a Madison Avenue personnel chief dodging the question, “What kind of a name is ‘Noah’?” Or maybe even 60 years ago, when it was still common to change your surname to sound less Jewish. Antisemitism is on the rise, and that’s worrying. But it’s nowhere near the level that pervaded the U.S. as late as 1964.

Foer went on to argue that antisemitic societies “are prone to decline” in other ways. “England entered a long dark age after expelling its Jews in 1290.” But excepting an epidemic of bubonic plague that crashed ashore 58 years later, I can’t fathom what Foer’s talking about. “Czarist Russia limped toward revolution after the pogroms of the 1880s.” That’s more plausible, because many of the revolutionaries were Jewish, including Leon Trotsky. “If America persists on its current course, it would be the end of the Golden Age not just for the Jews, but for the country that nurtured them.” Yes, it would be bad for the Jews. But we’re only 2.4 percent of the U.S. population, and America, sad to say, prospered through a much more fierce surge of antisemitism stretching from the Gilded Age through the Roaring Twenties. Can’t a recent increase in antisemitism be evaluated as its own specific problem?

Other things that the Atlantic has declared to be ending: “The End of Men” (July/August 2010); “The End of Diplomacy” (February 2026); The End of High-School English” (December 2022); “The End of Minimalism” (July/August 2020); “The End of Trust” (November 2021); “The End of Human Rights” (March 2026); “The End of Democracy Has Already Begun” (September 2024); “This is the Way A World Order Ends” (April 2025); “The End of Rule of Law in America” (May 2025); “How America Ends” (December 2019); “The End of the West” (November 2002); and, most hyperbolically of all, Francis Fukuyama flagging “More Proof That This Is Really the End of History” (October 2022). Only very occasionally does the thing that’s ending merit a “good riddance,” but in September 2025 the Atlantic did post a Hanna Rosin podcast under the heading, “Is This the End of Kids on Social Media?” Alas, it wasn’t, except on Facebook.

Sexual activity declines as people age (including, presumably, Atlantic readers), so it shouldn’t surprise us that the Atlantic repeatedly announces the end of sexual congress. “Why Are Young People Having So Little Sex?” was a reasonable question to ask in December 2018, as the word “incel” was starting to acquire currency. But did we also need “The Bored Sex” (i.e., women, sexually) in February 2019, and “The Death of the Sex Scene” in February 2023, and “The Slow, Quiet Demise of American Romance” in December 2024, and “Sex Without Women” (about hetero male preference for porn) in March 2025? After all, Atlantic readers had already been fed “Dear Therapist: My Husband Doesn’t Want to Have Sex Anymore” in 2018 and “The Real Problem With Hookup Culture: Bad Sex” in 2013. What’s it going to take to get a little fucking going in the Atlantic?

I asked Google AI: “How often has the Atlantic announced the end of something?” The bot turned out to be even more fed up than I am:

The Atlantic has proclaimed “the end of” various cultural, political, and societal concepts hundreds of times over its long history. It is one of the magazine’s most famous and frequently deployed headline tropes, framing everything from macro-political shifts to tiny cultural trends as a grand finale.

The publication has a well-documented fondness for “apocalypse stories,” routinely declaring that an era, a habit, or an institution has officially reached its expiration date.

In fairness, neither of the sources Google AI cited supported this interpretation, and the one used to undergird the claim that the Atlantic fancies “apocalypse stories” was neither an apocalypse story nor an assertion that the Atlantic runs a lot of them. Rather, it was a characteristically excellent analytical essay by Adam Kirsch about the appeal of apocalypse stories, under a headline (“Apocalypse, Constantly”) that would serve just as well for the piece you’re reading now. So Google AI’s assessment framed the guilty. On the other hand, Google AI had no trouble finding “End of” Atlantic stories. It furnished many of the examples I’ve cited already. (For the record, in anticipation of glass-house accusations, I acknowledge that The New Republic also has used “The End of ...” in a handful of headlines over the years, but nowhere near as frequently as The Atlantic.)

I then asked Google AI: “Has the Atlantic ever announced the beginning of anything?” Yes, it replied. But then I looked at its examples. The first was “The Beginning of a New DOJ” from last October, about the wrecking ball the Trump administration is taking to rule of law at the Justice Department, so really that was about the end of responsible prosecutions. Strike one. The second was “The Beginning of the End of NATO” from last September. Strike two. The third was “Caitlin Clark Is Just the Beginning.” That was a genuine “beginning of” piece about the (hopeful) future for female college athletics. But Google AI had to admit that beginnings in the Atlantic tend to be endings in disguise:

The publication frequently uses the beginning-of-a-new-era narrative to document profound changes in society. For instance, their writers have pondered whether we are witnessing the beginning of a postliterate or post-reading age, or the beginning of entirely new, reality-altering conspiracy networks.

In other words, the Atlantic published pieces about the end of reading and the end of accurate perception of reality.

Please don’t mistake my criticism for an argument on behalf of chirpy good-news stories. Rather, it’s an argument against Doom Porn (for which I’ve criticized the Atlantic before) and overgeneralization. Part of the difficulty is that the Atlantic cut back on-scene reporting decades ago, I presume to save money, though money doesn’t appear to be in short supply lately. It’s harder to issue grand pronunciamenti, either optimistic or pessimistic, after you’ve interviewed a lot of people face to face. Even if you don’t circle the globe, though—I certainly don’t—you can report and write about bad stuff in a spirit not of defeat but defiance. While I was reporting early last year a comprehensive guide to resisting President Donald Trump, I felt in a near-panic that some other news organization—maybe even the Atlantic—would scoop me. I needn’t have worried. Neither did The New Republic have to fret about being scooped by the Atlantic (or many others) when it initiated a series of short profiles about people who were resisting Trump in promising ways.

This is not a piece about the Atlantic’s new End of Reading piece. I haven’t read it, and for all I know it’s superb. Certainly it’s a legitimate social problem that high school and even college teachers struggle to get young people to read books (especially those published before 1900). The protagonist of Patchett’s novel Whistler is a middle-aged woman named Daphne Fuller who teaches English at an exclusive all-girls private school in New York modeled on Spence or Chapin. Her students, Fuller tells her stepfather, who’s a longtime editor at Random House, still read books. “When they read David Copperfield,” she says, “they read the whole thing. They read The Return of the Native. The AP girls read Anna Karenina and Moby-Dick last semester. Moby-Dick!” This is the only part of Patchett’s narrative that required, from me, a willing suspension of disbelief.

I’ve valued some of the Atlantic’s End-ist pieces in the past (Foer’s anti-Semitism piece minus its Endism; Hanna Rosen’s “End of Men” piece, which was really about economic displacement; Kate Julian’s Young-People Sex piece, which persuasively identified the problem as a “sex recession”; recessions don’t last forever). But The Atlantic is addicted to framing these and other stories as the End Of something. You’d think that a magazine that’s been around for 169 years would possess a better sense of life’s continuities. What I’d like to see end is “End Of” pieces in the Atlantic as it sails into its next 169 years.

Over the last two days, the United States has struck nearly 200 sites in Iran and killed 14 people, according to Iranian state authorities. Iran, meanwhile, is back to lobbing missiles at military sites in Jordan, Qatar, and Kuwait. The Strait of Hormuz is all but closed. The Israeli military is “ready and on alert for a resumption of fighting,” said Defense Minister Israel Katz.

“The attacks were four to five times more extensive than other strikes launched since the agreement to end the war was signed last month,” a senior Trump official told The Wall Street Journal. That official also told the Journal that “the U.S. still considers the ceasefire in effect.”

Another official was much blunter to Axios’s Barak Ravid, saying, “We’re going to slap them a bit so they understand we’re not fucking around.”

It’s been roughly a month since the U.S. and Iran reached a memorandum of understanding aimed at ending the war, and three months since the two sides first agreed to a ceasefire. And this is hardly the first flareup in hostilities over that time. So what do you call a ceasefire that is punctured by expansive, destructive strikes every few weeks, if not days? Is it still a ceasefire? Is the goal still to reach a deal to end the war? Or are we entering a new phase, in which both sides insist they are working to reach a permanent solution while maintaining the tit-for-tat status quo for ... how long, exactly?

Every day, this conflict looks more and more like Trump’s forever war. It may not ever involve boots on the ground or “regime change” on par with Iraq or Afghanistan. But it shows every sign of persisting as those wars did—and every sign of being left for his successors to truly resolve.

The ceasefire is still in effect even as the U.S. fires missiles into five Iranian provinces and Iran fires back at U.S. military bases across the Gulf. A legal agreement, it can withstand—as several have, most recently in Gaza—widespread violence without being formally “broken.” But how different is the current situation than the one that preceded last month’s agreement? Even if both parties cling to the “ceasefire,” it’s hard to argue that there has been much improvement since April, when negotiations to end the Iran War began in earnest.

It is, I suppose, good news in and of itself that both sides agree the ceasefire is still in effect, even amid periodic bombing; it suggests that neither intends to fully resume hostilities. But the larger picture is bleak: a war that continues indefinitely, via extensive strikes that occur for a few days at a time, when it suits the regional interests of the Iranian regime or the economic ones of the U.S. It’s clear that the Trump administration is frightened that a long-lasting closure of the Strait of Hormuz would cripple the global economy and trigger a recession in the U.S. But it also seems clear that periodic closures of the strait do not worry them. Iran, meanwhile, has proven able to withstand the U.S. strikes, though is careful not to retaliate in a way that would trigger a more devastating (and potentially nuclear) reaction from Trump. So it flexes its muscle largely by showing it’s capable of controlling the strait enough to deter commercial maritime traffic.

Thus, the current quagmire.

The biggest problem with the Trump administration’s handling of the Iran War has always been its lack of clear objectives at the beginning. It was clear that the president, misled by key advisors, began the conflict under the mistaken belief that it would end so quickly that Iran wouldn’t even have the time or capability to close the Strait of Hormuz. Iran proved otherwise, of course, and ever since it has had the upper hand. The U.S. now has few ways to end the war without granting clear concessions to a regime it had set out to topple in late February.

Regime change, at least, now seems off the table. But the U.S. also seems intent on “slapping” around the Iranians whenever it feels like it—even though it’s still not clear what the administration hopes to get out of a longer and more robust peace agreement—beyond, perhaps, an end to nuclear enrichment similar to the one included in the Obama administration’s “Iran Deal” that Trump canceled—than the ceasefire deal that was reached last month. At least, it’s not clear what they want from Iran in order to permanently end the war. What they do seem content with is a new kind of forever war, one that muddles on endlessly until, like Iraq and Afghanistan, it becomes someone else’s problem.

Big developments on the immigration front: First, ICE killed a 52-year-old undocumented immigrant in Texas this week. ICE’s account was already suspect. But now a representative for the man’s family says that the three other men driving with him—who are likely witnesses to the killing—are getting pressured to self-deport in a potential effort to silence them. That’s utterly damning. Second, Politico reports that a key piece of Trump’s deportation agenda—detentions without bond—has now lost in court a staggering 15,000 times. And get this: A majority of Trump-appointed judges who have considered the policy have rejected it. These things are related: The mounting lawlessness on many fronts is alienating even Trump judges. We talked to New Republic staff writer Melissa Gira Grant, author of a good piece on the Texas shooting. We discuss why it’s essential to focus on this one killing, why Trump judges turning against him constitutes a vulnerability for his agenda, and why the American people can’t get complacent, now that he’s trying to deport huge numbers a lot more quietly. Listen to this episode here.

President Donald Trump’s hacking away at food assistance benefits affects all Americans, obviously, including plenty who voted against him. Those people are genuine victims. But what about the others? “Michelle Flowers says it took eight months for her to get her food stamp benefits reinstated after they lapsed last year—and she only got it done, she said, because she was laid off from…

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On Tuesday morning, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican immigrant and a three-decade Houston resident. It was the second ICE-involved shooting this week alone—and since the start of Donald Trump’s second term, federal immigration agents have shot and killed at least ten people.

Now, as hundreds march in Houston and Salgado’s family demands an impartial investigation, DHS is using a familiar playbook: they are blaming Salgado for his own death by asserting he “weaponized his vehicle.”

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s son, Ronaldo Salgado, held a press conference Wednesday calling for an independent investigation into his father’s death. “I want to tell you about my dad,” Ronaldo Salgado said. “He was a hardworking family man. He was also a man of routine.” Every day, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo got up before dawn and drove to work on a construction site, just as he had done for 35 years.

“At 6:45 a.m., he should have been picking up the last of his guys before heading to North Houston to finish up construction on some houses,” Ronaldo Salgado continued at the press conference. By 6:55 his father had been shot by ICE agents who followed him in an unmarked car.

In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security said had Lorenzo Salgado Araujo had attempted to evade arrest and “weaponized his vehicle,” echoing the language used in the hours after an ICE agent shot and killed Renée Good in her car in Minneapolis in January.

DHS, at the time, alleged that Good, too, had “weaponized her vehicle.” Independent investigators disputed that characterization, but the officer who killed Good was never indicted. Before Renée Good, there were Carlito Ricardo Parias and Marimar Martinez. Both were shot at by federal agents in 2025, and were then accused of trying to ram those agents with their vehicles. Both survived. Ruben Ray Martinez, who was shot by an ICE agent in March of 2025, was killed. The agent who shot him in the heart said Martinez was using his car as a weapon.

It’s a narrative that law enforcement agencies frequently employ to justify fatally shooting of unarmed motorists. A New York Times investigation found that US police officers killed over 400 unarmed drivers between 2015 and 2021. In many of those cases, the officers involved said they fired because the vehicle itself was a weapon.

The data shows that ICE is no exception. In 2024, journalist Lila Hassan identified 18 ICE shootings that involved a moving vehicle between 2015 and 2021. Over that same time period, public records show ICE agents shooting at least 59 people total and killing at least 23. Not a single indictment resulted from any of those incidents. Since that study, ICE’s budget has ballooned by tens of billions of dollars—and its internal oversight offices have been gutted. The killings haven’t stopped.

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo “did not deserve to die,” Ronaldo Salgado said on Wednesday. “He did not deserve to be reduced to a headline of Mexican man shot and killed by ICE.” Salgado learned of his father’s passing, he said, from a video on social media. He recognized him immediately. “Not from his appearance, but from his voice, crying for help as he lay on the street bleeding out.”