Mother Jones

On Tuesday, US Rep. Tom Kean Jr. (D-NJ) returned to Congress after a four-month previously unexplained absence, during which he received his full salary despite missing over 100 votes.  He revealed on the House floor that he sought treatment for depression.

“I am grateful that I accepted help because today I stand before you healthier, stronger, and excited to return to the work that I love,” Kean said. 

But during his two decades in the New Jersey Senate, Kean consistently opposed paid sick leave for his constituents.

He voted against New Jersey’s historic Earned Sick Leave Act, which mandates 5 paid sick leave days per year for New Jersey workers. He also voted against New Jersey’s No Surprise Medical Bills act and two of its paid family leave laws, in 2008 and 2018.

For Yarrow Willman-Cole of the nonprofit New Jersey Citizen Action, who organized for the Earned Sick Leave Act in 2018, Kean’s four-month absence is bitterly ironic. “He’s been able to rely on things he directly voted against,” Willman-Cole said. 

On the House floor on Tuesday, Kean said he has been a longtime “supporter of mental health care.” But, he hasn’t made it easier for others to take the leave they need. 

“You want your lawmakers to really be connected to their constituents and understand what their constituents need,”  Willman-Cole said, “and this disconnect with a lawmaker clearly not representing the needs of the average worker, the average family, is a problem. That’s not what government should be like.”

Matthew Camarda, the advocacy and public policy director of the nonpartisan NAMI New Jersey, said that all politicians should recognize the importance of the need for mental health care. 

“All individuals with mental health conditions deserve that opportunity to get care and to recover on their own terms,” Camarda said. 

Kean also notably voted for Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which establishes work requirements for people on Medicaid. For low-income people on Medicaid, the need to fulfill work requirements to keep their health care could be a barrier to treatment as they go into effect.

“All of it makes it very challenging for millions of Americans in this country who do have mental health conditions like depression to get the care that they need without risking their employment and the rest of the stability of their lives,” Camarda said. 

Whether or not Kean’s voting record and absence are dealbreakers will be up to constituents in his district come November, when he is facing Democratic challenger Rebecca Bennett to keep his seat. 

“Many of our lawmakers are out of touch with the reality of most working people,” Willman-Cole said, “but the good news is there [are] always elections.”

The Supreme Court affirmed on Tuesday that that birthright citizenship is the law of the land. The decision, by Chief Justice John Roberts, upholds the clear meaning of the Constitution and knocks down the Trump administration’s attempt to deny citizenship to thousands of newborns every year. It’s no exaggeration to say that the case was a test of whether this would remain a nation where everyone is born on equal legal footing, or whether the country would revert to a caste system in which one’s place in society is determined by the status of one’s parents. And the decision was scandalously close.

“Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights—to freely participate in our political community,” Roberts wrote in his 5-4 majority opinion. “The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land.’ We keep that promise today.”

But Roberts’ sweeping ruling commanded only a bare 5-4 majority on the meaning of the Constitution’s citizenship clause. Justice Brett Kavanaugh would have struck down Trump’s executive order based on Congress’ previous codification of birthright citizenship, but does not believe it is required by the Constitution. Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Samuel Alito dissented. That math is too close for comfort.

Court-watchers generally expected an overwhelming rebuke for Trump in this case, with perhaps one or two dissenters. Instead, birthright citizenship—and with it the promise of a casteless society of equals—hangs by a thread. To be clear, if one Democratic appointee leaves the court while Trump or another Republican is president, the promise of equality for all under the law may fall.

On his first day back in the White House, President Donald Trump signed an executive order attempting to deny birthright citizenship to the children of temporary visitors and undocumented people, claiming that such a policy is the proper interpretation of the citizenship clause. But the first sentence of the 14th Amendment, added to the Constitution after the Civil War, states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” The only exceptions, carved into the jurisdiction requirement, are the children of ambassadors, invading armies, and, at the time, American Indians under tribal authority. Today’s decision upholds this long-held understanding of the Constitution.

This isn’t the first time the court has ruled that the citizenship clause means what it says. In a landmark decision in 1898, United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the court found that birthright citizenship is the rule for virtually everyone born in the United States. Today’s court upheld all of Wong Kim Ark. “We see no reason to depart from that view today,” Roberts wrote. While the decision is a rebuke of Trump, the majority didn’t need to take this case in order to shut down Trump’s executive order—as the majority acknowledged today, it was already unconstitutional under the plain meaning of the 14th Amendment and Wong Kim Ark. Today’s ruling, Trump v. Barbara, didn’t change that. Some may nonetheless credit the court for striking down Trump’s order and point to it as evidence that the court is not overly obsequious to the president—though it has used recent terms to grant him vast new powers and reserved rebukes for rare occasions. But this case is too close to give the court any credit—instead, it portends a dark future, despite Roberts’ fulsome defense of birthright citizenship.

The very fact that the country came within one or two votes of undoing our system of birthright citizenship is a sign of how far the Trump administration has succeeded in throwing into contention the country’s most basic freedoms. The 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause was added to the Constitution after the Civil War to overturn Dred Scott, the 1857 Supreme Court decision that denied citizenship to Black people. But the amendment’s drafters went further in writing a broad rule for the ages, ensuring that no future politicians could discriminate against a disfavored minority by taking away their citizenship and consigning them to a permanent underclass. Roberts’ majority opinion affirms this: “The Fourteenth Amendment was intended to repudiate Dred Scott,” Roberts wrote. “However, the goal was even grander—to put the ‘great question of citizenship’ ‘beyond the legislative power’ altogether, to settle the issue once and for all.”

Nevertheless, the Trump administration tried to undo that final decision. If Trump had succeeded, thousands of newborns each year would grow up deprived of the social welfare benefits and opportunities afforded to citizens—a permanent, stigmatized subclass unable to escape their lack of legal status. Restrictions could have also applied retroactively, ultimately ensnaring millions.

The Trump administration’s arguments were legally absurd. Solicitor General John Sauer argued that the term “jurisdiction” implied a compact of allegiance in exchange for the government’s protection, and that this can only be achieved if the parents have permission to stay indefinitely in the country. But the allegiance-for-protection rule is nonsensical because it would have excluded the emancipated people whom the amendment was explicitly intended to grant citizenship. Moreover, the requirement of permanent residence—what Sauer termed “domicile”—would hand politicians the right to deny citizenship to classes of people because the legal definition of domicile can be changed by Congress or, possibly, the president. It’s a theory that would have essentially nullified the citizenship clause.

Birthright citizenship, and with it the idea that anyone born here has a shot at succeeding in this country, is deeply ingrained not only in American laws and institutions, but also in our national identity. The very notion of the American dream is that once here, you and especially your children can succeed. If legal status is inherited, the dream is shattered. That is the real import of the Trump administration’s attempt to restrict birthright citizenship; not just to launch a cruel and chaotic experiment in sending federal officers into maternity wards, but to rewrite the fundamental character of the country, from a society of legal equals to one of inherited caste.

The dissenters would have given Trump all or nearly all of what he wanted.

But the citizenship clause doesn’t mention parental status, it refers to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States.” By arguing that a child’s citizenship depends on the immigration status of their parents, the administration’s arguments departed from the text of the 14th Amendment and the history of its creation. “That’s part of the understanding of the birthright citizenship clause—that whatever the sins of the parents are, the clause breaks that connection,” Cristina Rodríguez, who is now dean of Yale Law School, told me last year. “What matters is where the individual was born.” Rodríguez has called the citizenship clause our “constitutional reset button,” ensuring that “each generation starts fresh, and we don’t worry about status because of what’s in our past.”

In a concurrence that spotlights the role Black people played in shaping the 14th Amendment, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson hammers this point. “The Reconstruction Amendments were an anticaste, antisubordination reset for the Nation,” she wrote, “not a mere spot treatment for the dark stain of slavery.”

To bolster his weak arguments about the past, Sauer also relied on the assertion that the government needs power to restrict birthright citizenship for national security concerns. “We’re in a new world now, where eight billion people are one plane ride away from having a child who is a US citizen,” he told the justices at oral arguments. Chief Justice John Roberts responded with a zinger that signaled that the court wasn’t buying it: “Well, it’s a new world. It’s the same Constitution.”

Kavanaugh, however, bought Sauer’s contention that the 14th Amendment didn’t constrain the political branches from responding to modern-day immigration challenges by exempting the children of undocumented immigrants or temporary visitors.

Three dissents presented fractured ideas about why some or all of Trump’s executive order is legal. Thomas, Gorsuch, and Alito all believe that the 14th Amendment does not give citizenship to the children of temporary visitors, which would include people who have lived in the US for years as, for example, students, doctors, or professors. Alito and Kavanaugh think Trump can likewise bar the children of undocumented immigrants from birthright citizenship. Thomas and Gorsuch reserved judgment on the status of an undefined group of undocumented immigrants who have been in the country of a long time—though they don’t specify how much time. Taken together, the dissenters would have given Trump all or nearly all of what he wanted.

Thomas, in a long dissent joined by Gorsuch, launches into an alternative history of citizenship since the founding. Whereas the majority recognizes that the framers of the 14th Amendment were incorporating the long-tradition of citizenship by place of birth, jus soli, imported from British common law, Thomas argued that the Americans never adopted what he derisively referred to as a “feudal” principle. Instead, he argued that the US only gave citizenship to the children of people “domiciled” in the country. To Thomas, the 14th Amendment applied only to the freed people after the Civil War because they were domiciled in the US and owed no allegiance to a foreign power—interpreting the rule as limited to one period and one population. “The Court adds to the sad history of the Fourteenth Amendment, which was designed and understood to secure equal rights for the freed blacks but has instead been repurposed for political projects that the Reconstruction Congress did not support,” he wrote.

Thomas’ dissent is littered with references to bunk scholarship hastily put forward over the last year by a small band of radical scholars who tried to give academic cover to the executive order. As my colleague Isabela Dias and I have detailed, they spent the past year attempting to muddy the historical record. Despite their tortured arguments, they helped move the Overton window, as one Trumpian scholar boasted after oral arguments, and Thomas approvingly cited two of those professors’ work.

Perhaps Alito’s solo dissent is the most shocking, not only how far it would go in undoing our system of citizenship but also for the racial animus that jumps out of the language. Alito argues that “subject to the jurisdiction” excludes anyone subject to another power, and thus excludes children who would also be afforded citizenship in the home country of their parents. He names some of those countries, including Mexico, El Salvador, and Guatemala. Alito despairs at the “problem” of undocumented immigration, describes American citizenship as “precious,” states that the current rule “degrade the concept of United States citizenship,” and frets that today’s ruling invites more undocumented immigration. In upholding birthright citizenship, Alito warns that his colleagues have “made a mistake that will seriously affect the country’s future.” It does not take much parsing to see the racial anxiety animating Alito’s dissent.

The 14th Amendment is the cornerstone of our democracy. It was supposed to provide equality under the law, to ensure rights to all, and to preserve those rights through a casteless system of birthright citizenship. Not long after ratification, however, the Supreme Court began chipping away at the meaning and enforceability of the amendment. The Roberts Court has picked up where its predecessors in the 19th century began, from rolling back programs and laws aimed at racial equality to allowing insurrectionists to run for office. On Tuesday, the court held back from dismantling the fundamental right to birthright citizenship, but with a slim majority that makes the reprieve not just a relief, but a warning.

The Texas Senate race between Attorney General Ken Paxton and James Talarico looks to be in a tie, according to several voter polls published in the past month.

A Tuesday survey by the New York Times and Siena University has the two candidates both locked at 47 percent of likely voters. A win for Talarico, a Democratic state legislator, would represent the first statewide election win for the party in Texas since 1994. 

The New York Times/Siena poll was conducted among 656 likely voters from June 19 to June 27, with a sampling error of 4.5 percentage points.

Polling suggests that Talarico’s numbers are largely down to a majority of likely voters seeing the Democrat as having good character—he is a former public school teacher and is currently training to become a minister—as opposed to Paxton, who was indicted for securities fraud and impeached as state attorney general by the Republican-dominated Texas state House (although the Republican-majority state Senate acquitted all 16 articles of impeachment against him). Paxton is also a Trump loyalist, and may be associated with President Trump’s mishandling of the economy amid a widespread struggle with affordability.

My colleague Tim Murphy, who has covered the Senate race extensively, noted that many Senate Republicans favored incumbent John Cornyn but Trump endorsed Paxton late in the primary race. And on Talarico, Tim wrote in March that Talarico is “unsullied by doings in Washington” and his “faith-based populism impressed Joe Rogan and Barack Obama and showed strength in the places the [Democratic] party has been hemorrhaging support.” 

Given that Democrats need to flip four Republican seats while defending all of their seats to win a Senate majority this November, Paxton vs. Talarico is definitely a race to watch.

This November, California voters will weigh what could become America’s first-ever tax on net worth. The Billionaire Tax Act, a ballot initiative put forth by health workers after President Donald Trump blew holes in the state Medicaid budget, would impose a one-time tax of 5 percent on personal wealth exceeding $1 billion. With polls indicating majority support, tech oligarchs have threatened an exodus and crafted competing measures, bankrolling them to the tune of at least $118 million—of which $82 million came from Google’s Sergey Brin, according to the Associated Press.

On the other side is University of ­California, Berkeley, law professor Brian Galle, who helped write the initiative, along with several other, federal, efforts to tax the obscenely rich. These bills seldom go anywhere, even though ordinary Americans would very much like their government to do just that, as a 2024 report from the amusingly named ­Excessive Wealth Disorder Institute made clear.

The nonprofit examined 56 national and state polls on specific redistributive proposals and found majority support for most. People favored surtaxes on incomes over a million bucks, and for the rich to pay at least the rate on their investment gains as workers pay on their wages. They also wanted Congress to kill intergenerational dynasty trusts that grow, untaxed, in perpetuity, and they favored a dramatic reduction in the gift and estate tax exemption—now $30 million—which is the amount of money a superwealthy couple can pass along to their heirs without paying a dime.

Direct wealth taxes were the most popular: Roughly two-thirds of respondents, including 51 percent of Republicans, favored the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act first introduced in 2021 by Sen. ­Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and again this year by Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.). That bill places a 2 percent annual tax on net household assets exceeding $50 million and 3 percent on those over $1 billion. Similar bipartisan support went to proposals from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), and others that would tax unrealized gains on billionaires’ unsold assets, paper profits the IRS currently won’t touch.

Nobody has managed to pass a federal tax on wealth, or on the unrealized gains that represent the majority of income for the very rich.

That these bills have not come close to passing hasn’t stopped new proposals like the Oligarch Act, reintroduced in 2025 by Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.), which puts a 2 percent tax on wealth exceeding 1,000 times the national household median, rising to 8 percent on assets over a million times the median. (Only five families qualify, its author assured me.) In March, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) introduced the Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Act, a 5 percent annual tax on net household assets exceeding $1 billion.

The challenge with any federal wealth tax, as Galle explains to me over chocolate-infused green tea at an Oakland cafe, is not just overcoming well-heeled opposition, but passing constitutional muster. Even the income tax as we know it wasn’t allowed until the 1913 ratification of the 16th Amendment. Before then, it was—as any federal tax on wealth would almost certainly be deemed by the Supreme Court—a “direct tax,” which the Constitution says is subject to “apportionment.”

To impose a direct tax, in other words, lawmakers would first have to decide how much money they wanted to collect, and then direct each state to raise its share of the total according to its share of the nation’s population—not its billionaire population. It was unworkable even in the 1800s. As Galle put it: “A direct tax at the national level has to ride in on a unicorn.”

But no unicorn is needed at the state level, where the Constitution’s direct tax rule does not apply. In fact, every state already taxes wealth by way of property taxes, though even those favor the rich: Most of a middle-class homeowner’s assets tend to be tied up in their primary residence, whereas a very rich family’s home usually accounts for a small fraction.

DC and seven states have passed so-called millionaire taxes, the latest being Washington, which enacted a law that will charge zero tax on incomes up to $1 million, but 9.9 percent on each additional penny. Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) and Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) introduced a federal version in March.

Alas, such taxes don’t touch unrealized investment income—an exemption that enables America’s richest to dodge income tax almost entirely via an infuriating tactic known as “buy, borrow, die.” Rather than sell stock for money to live on, ultrawealthy investors simply take out low-interest loans against their assets. When they die, thanks to a legal abomination called the “step-up in basis” rule, their princelings inherit the unsold assets at market value—thus avoiding the 23.8 percent capital gains tax their parents have now deferred to the grave. “We don’t tax wealth, we tax income,” explains Harvey Dale, a New York University tax law professor who advises billionaire clients. “For people who have a huge amount of property and are ultrawealthy, they can avoid having very much income.”

“The people who really hate, hate, hate taxes? Most of them have already left [California].”

Unrealized gains are, essentially, ­income—just ask the bankers who accept them as collateral. But Congress has never touched them. If it did, the Roberts court has signaled it wouldn’t play along. “We all thought that there’s no way the Supreme Court’s going to say that income only gets measured at sale,” says Galle, who had helped craft one of Cohen’s efforts to tax unrealized gains. But the court’s 2024 ruling in Moore v. United States made clear that it would do just that. The takeaway is that a federal tax on either wealth or paper gains will require another constitutional amendment, the likelihood of which, Dale says, “seems to be something slightly below zero.”

Which helps explain why voters and lawmakers are exploring local options like New York City’s pied-à-terre tax (which passed) and San Francisco’s “Overpaid CEO” ballot measure (which didn’t). Every such move begets a flurry of op-eds warning that the “golden geese” will fly off to another city, state, or even country, as some of Dale’s clients have. History suggests few actually will. As an analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes, California already has the nation’s highest marginal tax rate, but boasts the second-lowest rate of out-migration among households earning more than $200,000. Then again, we’re talking about billionaires.

Allen Prohofsky, who spent 15 years as the chief economist at California’s Franchise Tax Board, told me he suspects the fear of billionaire flight is overhyped when it comes to the tax initiative, but he isn’t certain. “If anybody tells you they’re sure they know what’s going to happen,” he says, they’re either lying or “delusional.” He adds: “The people who really hate, hate, hate taxes? Most of them have already left.”

Brin, up in arms over the proposed billionaire tax, now says he spends just enough time across the border in Nevada to qualify as a resident—the Franchise Tax Board has a special enforcement unit that may ask him to prove it, Prohofsky notes. David Sacks, Mark Zuckerberg, and Peter Thiel, too, have made moves toward the door. But for most wealthy people with families and important business and social connections in the state, Prohofsky explains, there’s “a host of variables” that keep them around. Dale agrees. Leaving one’s state or country is “a very complicated and ultimately personal decision, but it doesn’t blend down easily into something simple,” he says.

It’s too late, anyway, to flee this tax, which is set to apply to any billionaire who was a California resident on January 1, 2026. Proponents calculate that the state will gain about $100 billion. Foes at the conservative Hoover Institution claim departures will ultimately cost California $25 billion. (Galle helped write a thoughtful takedown of the Hoover analysis, but emailed me a more succinct response: “LOL.”) Op-eds opposing the tax have pointed out that ­California’s richest 1 percent account for nearly 40 percent of income tax revenues, which, if true, is meaningless: The billionaires targeted by this proposal are but a tiny sliver of that 1 percent. An analysis by Galle, UC Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez, and two colleagues estimates California’s roughly 200 billionaires account for only about 1 percent of state tax revenue.

Brian Galle’s “fair tax” proposal doesn’t touch wealth, but it does have the potential to eliminate “buy, borrow, die.”

Galle’s latest idea: taxing unrealized gains constitutionally through a “fair share tax,” a strategy he helped mastermind and that is on track to be introduced as a House bill this summer. The tax would apply only to households with more than $15 million in lifetime investment gains, targeting—and yes, this sounds weird—their realized unrealized gains.

Normally, when a rich family holds stock or another asset for years, they pay a 23.8 percent tax on the profits when they eventually sell—or pass the assets to their kids at death and pay zero. Under Galle’s proposal, the tab would be substantially higher, calculated as though the unsold stock’s appreciation were taxed every year—with interest tied to the annual increase. This would wipe out the advantage of holding stocks forever. It also deals with the “step-up” rule, because the tax burden moves with the asset, not the person. An heir can sell inherited stock or not, but either way, someone eventually has to pay up—with interest.

Because the tax is imposed only after the income is realized, Galle is convinced his approach will satisfy the Supreme Court. To be fully effective, though, it would need to apply to assets held in complex trusts. After all, an “inevitable part of the tax planning game,” Dale says, is that every new rule prompts an army of $3,000-an-hour lawyers to scurry for loopholes.

The Fair Tax isn’t an actual wealth tax, but something like Galle’s approach has the potential to kill “buy, borrow, die,” and to begin to tame a democracy-distorting gap between rich and poor in a nation where billionaires now flex their political power openly and shamelessly. Passing it would be quite the feat—if only our elected officials can somehow, miraculously, summon the fortitude.

Two years ago, Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old sociology graduate student at the City University of New York, was sitting in a tent on Columbia University’s quad as part of the pro-Palestine encampment on its campus. This month, Chevalier, the daughter of a truck driver and a case worker from the Dominican Republic, soundly defeated five-term incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat to become the presumptive next member of Congress for New York’s 13th congressional district, where Columbia sits. 

“I kept thinking of all of the folks who have really been let down by a lot of establishment Democrats. I was thinking of my friend Mahmoud [Khalil],” Chevalier said in an interview: the Palestinian campus organizer and recent Columbia masters graduate who became the face of a new, more punitive phase of Donald Trump’s policy of political detainment and deportation when DHS agents kidnapped him from his apartment building last year.

When Khalil was taken, Espaillat sent out a two-sentence statement urging due process: too little, too late, Chevalier said. Khalil was released the same week Zohran Mamdani won New York’s Democratic mayoral primary. A year later, with Mamdani’s backing, Chevalier won her own race alongside a slate of New York candidates who championed the Palestinian cause throughout their campaigns—often in ways that, until very recently, constituted a political third rail.

Those relative outsiders—many backed or recruited by groups like Justice Democrats and the Democratic Socialists of America, new kingmakers like Mamdani, and influencers like Hasan Piker—are notching upset victories against incumbents with decades of experience.

It echoes the wave that brought challengers like New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar to office—and eventually made them icons of the Democrats’ left flank. But those races, close to a decade ago, didn’t feature Israel-Palestine politics in anything like the same way, a door opened in part by Zohran Mamdani’s unusual willingness to engage frankly on the issue, and language, of genocide.

Chevalier’s congressional cohort includes former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, who has called Israel’s conduct in Gaza a genocide and beat AIPAC-supported Rep. Dan Goldman by a 30-point margin, as well as New York State Assembly member Claire Valdez, who defeated Brooklyn borough president Antonio Reynoso in a race for the House seat now held by retiring Democratic Rep. Nydia Velázquez, and who regularly joins protests calling for an arms embargo. Both candidates explicitly condemned US military aid to Israel, for decades a bipartisan pillar of US politics, in their campaigns.

“This electoral cycle has truly signified that we can no longer have a progressive-except-for-Palestine dynamic in electoral politics,” said Aber Kawas, a socialist candidate whose June win in a New York State Assembly primary will make her the first Palestinian-American in that body. Pro-Israel money is no longer a boon, Kawas said, but a liability. “The Israeli lobby, AIPAC, they’re still strong influencers in the Democratic Party, but this victory, and the victory of all of our races in this moment is chipping away at that in real substantial ways.”

In June, Army veteran and former combat surgeon Adam Hamawy, won his primary in New Jersey’s suburban, Democratic-leaning 12th congressional district—and he made opposition to AIPAC a cornerstone of his candidacy.

Hamawy, throughout his campaign, talked about his time as a volunteer physician in Gaza, and promised to fight for an arms embargo. “This is what prompted me to run,” Hamawy said to Al Jazeera of his time in Gaza. “I felt I had to go to Washington to fix this myself.”

In Philadelphia in May, self-described democratic socialist Chris Rabb beat two deep-pocketed and well-established candidates to win the Democratic primary for Pennsylvania’s 3rd congressional district. Two years earlier, when Temple University students faced trespassing charges for their participation in encampment protests, Rabb, then a state representative, was one of only a few local elected officials to back the students, calling their charges a “cruel and reckless abuse of power.”  

And in a primary taking place Tuesday in Denver, Melat Kiros, a 29-year-old democratic socialist who calls herself a “recovering lawyer,” is running against incumbent Democratic Rep. Diana DeGette, who has held her seat since 1997.

Two years ago, as a new lawyer in New York, Kiros wrote an open letter defending law students who organized for Palestine. “I myself am from the northern region of Ethiopia, where a genocide had also taken place a few years ago,” Kiros, whose parents immigrated to Colorado when she was a baby, said.

Her employer asked her to take the letter down. Kiros refused, was fired, and moved back to Colorado within a week. She took a gig as a barista (“the best job I’ve had”) to make ends meet, and is now running on a familiar progressive platform: Medicare for All, universal childcare, AI regulation, ICE abolition and an arms embargo on Israel. The newcomer is polling well against DeGette, who is in her 15th term: the only available public poll, conducted by the progressive polling firm Data For Progress in June, has Kiros leading by 5 points. 

Dark money groups are all in against Kiros, including a trio of super PACs that have spent at least $1.3 million to oppose her in the final weeks of the race, the Colorado Sun reported. Much of that money has gone to attack ads that claim Kiros is from out of town (“I came here in ‘98!” Kiros said) and critical of Democrats (“So are most Democrats.”) 

AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying organization which has invested heavily in establishment candidates in many such races, has shifted to a diversity of electoral tactics: promoting spoiler candidates, creating new political action committees with names unrelated to Israel, funneling money through pre-existing but unrelated PACs, running ads that don’t talk about Israel at all.

But those efforts have targeted even mainline progressives who, for example, back the Block the Bombs Act, which would suspend arms shipments to Israel. Efforts to paint such candidates as far-left radicals are hard to maintain when only 13 percent of Democrats expressed positive views of Israel as of March—and by brooking no legitimate political opposition to Israel, AIPAC increasingly compels even mainline progressives to treat its wrath as a given.

AIPAC’s open support “is becoming a kiss of death to candidates they support in deep-blue districts, and I think that’s abundantly clear through the means in which they have had to operate throughout this cycle, which is through a network of shell PACs and pop-up PACs that obscures their funding,” said Usamah Andrabi, communications director for Justice Democrats, which is backing Kiros, Valdez and Chevalier.

Those who still take the group’s money are being more circumspect about it, even as those that refuse AIPAC cash trumpet their refusal with pride—much as candidates in the wake of Citizens United and the first Bernie Sanders campaign began advertising their rejection of dark money and emphasizing small donations.

“Money in politics is the issue,” Kiros said. “Every single thing that you care about, from social justice to economic justice to environmental justice, all of these things are intertwined with who has the money and the influence to wield power over our government.”

Voters rarely make their decisions based solely or even primarily on foreign policy, but candidates like Chevalier and Kiros have drawn connections between violence in Palestine and affordability at home.

“Our tax dollars are going towards a war machine that is just insatiable,” Chevalier said shortly after her primary win. “And when I hear from folks directly, they want their tax dollars to be coming back home. This is money that we are working hard for, right? We deserve to reap the benefits of it, to be able to use those resources to live dignified lives.”

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

It’s been nearly eight years since Congress reauthorized the farm bill, the massive legislative package that funds programs run by the US Department of Agriculture. What used to be passed roughly every five years, the farm bill touches nearly every aspect of agricultural production in the US. It puts billions toward conservation programs, nutrition assistance, rural development, crop insurance, and climate-smart practices. 

But persistent disagreements between lawmakers over these and other programs have stymied the process of passing a new farm bill. The federal government has instead resorted to stop-gap measures and one-year extensions of a small handful of programs.

“The farm bill…should not be a way for large industry groups to overturn the will of voters.”

If farmers were hoping to see a new farm bill this year, they may very well be disappointed—as a new schism between the two houses of Congress was made clear this week, when the Senate agricultural committee released a draft of its farm bill that excluded a law known as the Save Our Bacon Act. The measure was included in the House draft farm bill earlier this year with vocal support by Rep. G.T. Thompson (R-Penn.), who chairs the House agricultural committee. 

Save Our Bacon (SOB), would override state and local laws like California’s Prop 12, which bans the sale of pork, chicken, and veal products that come from farms using the most extreme forms of animal confinement, such as gestation crates for hogs. Factory farming operations where animals have the least amount of space to move around result in a lot of manure, which is typically consolidated and stored in lagoons that can pollute the local air and waterways.

Advocacy groups argue laws like Prop 12 are common sense and popular among voters who want to know where their food comes from. There are currently 14 states with similar laws on the books, according to the American Meat Producers Association (AMPA), an industry group that opposes SOB.

“It’s just disappointing that we’re even talking about this because the farm bill should be about supporting sustainable farming and healthy food and food security. It should not be a way for large industry groups to overturn the will of voters,” said Molly Armus, who works on animal agricultural policy at Friends of the Earth, an environmental nonprofit. 

Armus notes that transitioning away from extreme confinement of livestock can have positive environmental and climate impacts if producers move toward a pasture-raised system. (Prop 12 only establishes minimum space requirements for animals.) A recent analysis from the USDA found that 27 percent of hog farmers, or 1 in 4, are already Prop 12 compliant—suggesting that the transition away from extreme confinement is underway. 

“The industry is completely divided on this.”

“Most hog farmers do not support the Save Our Bacon Act,” said Holly Bice, president of AMPA, which was founded last year in response to an earlier attempt to skirt Prop 12 in a previous draft farm bill. For many hog farmers, Prop 12 has “been an important opportunity for them,” said Bice, because investing in crate-free operations allows producers to sell their products at a premium. “It’s helped them keep their heads above water at a time when consolidation has increasingly driven out farmers,” she said.

However, Brent Hershey, a hog farmer in Pennsylvania and member of AMPA, said the issue of extreme confinement has sparked a “civil war” among pork producers. “The industry is completely divided on this,” he added. Personally, Hershey said, he was reluctant to change the way his operation did things, but after years of receiving negative feedback, he began to see things differently. Today, Hershey’s farm has been crate-free for three years. Passing SOB, he said, would be “devastating” for producers like him who invested time and money into improving their operations.

Experts also argue that passing a farm bill that allows industrial animal agriculture operations to skirt state laws sets a bad precedent for broader environmental and public health goals. 

“When you’re doing something that, in a more macro sense, erodes states’ abilities to rollback some of the more harmful aspects of massive commercial agricultural operations, how does that impact any law that could impact agriculture?” said J.W. Glass, senior policy specialist at the Center for Biological Diversity. For example, he added, “How does it impact state laws to restrict the use of pesticides?”

In the Senate, at least for now, it seems like a measure that allows animal agricultural producers to skirt Prop 12 is a nonstarter. “That is why [Boozman] did not put this in his bill. He knew it,” said Sara Amundson, president of the Humane World Action Fund (formerly the Humane Society). “And that’s why it’s critical to keep up the noise on it.”

Still, it’s unclear what happens next—whether the House will fold and exclude SOB from its draft farm bill, or whether, if the two chambers of Congress cannot reconcile their differences on extreme confinement, the gridlock lasts into next year.

It’s a blisteringly cold Monday night in February, and I’m sitting in an office building in Brooklyn trying to maintain eye contact with a woman I’ve just met. We hold each other’s gazes for several seconds, then I look away. My eyes return to her face, but I avoid her dark eyes, peering from under a ballcap, and instead stare at a spot on her forehead, maintaining the illusion of eye contact without actually holding it. I let my eyes wander and glance at the silhouette of the Manhattan Bridge looming through the nearby windows. My gaze returns to my partner, and we lock eyes again. She adjusts her hat. I give a slight, toothless smile. Her eyes flick away as she straightens her glasses. 

Over the next few weeks, I’d find myself in similar situations—staring at something or someone for a prolonged period of time, taking note of where my mind wandered—at a series of evening “Attention Labs” hosted by the Strother School of Radical Attention in Dumbo, Brooklyn. 

At these workshops, attendees explore “radical human attention” through various group activities, which might include studying a piece of music, talking with a partner, or observing the details of their physical surroundings. Whatever form the labs take, they all end with a call to action, inviting participants to join the School of Radical Attention in what it calls the Attention Liberation Movement. 

The School of Radical Attention is one of several projects created by a group calling themselves the Friends of Attention, an informal collective of artists, scholars, and activists founded in 2018. Earlier this year, the group published Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement, with D. Graham Burnett, Alyssa Loh, and Peter Schmidt credited as co-editors. Attensity! is the latest in a recent boom of literature discussing the attention economy, including Jenny Odell’s 2019 How to Do Nothing and Chris Hayes’ 2025 The Sirens’ Call, among many others. 

If you’ve read one of these books, you might have been motivated to change your personal relationship to technology. Maybe you’ve repeatedly deleted then redownloaded social media apps, bought a Brick, or attempted a “digital detox”—only to fall prey once again to the attention-sucking powers of Big Tech. The Friends of Attention aim to remedy that, arguing that to truly reclaim our attention from tech conglomerates, we need more than individual action; we need a collective movement. Attensity! is framed as a political manifesto, full of fiery language and liberal use of capitalization that can occasionally elicit an eye roll. The authors refer to Big Tech as “human frackers.” Just as fracking drills into the earth and extracts hidden oil and natural gas, human fracking “breaks up our deep reserves of attention into smaller and smaller fragments,” selling those fragments for a profit. To fight that, we need to engage collective resistance on par with the modern environmental movement or 19th-century labor activism, the authors argue. “The movement of attentional liberation exists and has a name: ATTENTION ACTIVISM,” they write. 

But what exactly is attention activism? To find out, I attended my first Attention Lab this winter, two days after a storm that left Brooklyn covered in about 20 inches of snow. On my walk from the train to the School of Radical Attention, I didn’t know what to expect. I had no idea what “exercises of attention” were, and the heated language of Attensity! made me half fear I was walking into a cult recruitment event. But I was curious. I already felt like my hours spent scrolling had made me less able to recall small details and information like I once had, so if someone was offering a solution, I was willing to listen. 

That night, I entered a warmly lit room with a circle of metal chairs filling most of the space and a table stacked with oranges, cookies, tea, and water in the corner. It felt less like a classroom than a cozy basement cafe, with bookshelves lining the walls, art hanging in a makeshift gallery wall, and plants in every available space. No more than a dozen people gathered that night, each drawn to the lab for different reasons. Over the course of the three labs I attended, I met academics and artists, New Yorkers and vacationers, young and old, believers and skeptics. Some were scholars of attention with a wealth of knowledge on the subject, like the anthropology PhD student I met who had flown out to visit the school from California. Others were brand new to the field, like a young guy I saw at two separate labs who had heard about the school from a stranger in a bar and found himself in an Attention Lab only days later. One participant said reading Attensity! had changed her life. 

Even the language we use to describe attention commodifies it: We’re conditioned to believe that attention is something to be paid, something owed to another person.

Each lab begins with participants turning to a partner and sharing their definition of attention. At my first one, I explained to my partner that growing up, attention always felt like something demanded from me by my parents and teachers. In school, we were always told to “pay attention,” and over the years, my math teachers frequently left notes about my “careless mistakes” and inattention to detail.

Even the language we use to describe attention commodifies it: We’re conditioned to believe that attention is something to be paid, something owed to another person. This definition of attention, rooted in focus and task completion, is itself indicative of the problem the School of Radical Attention is trying to solve. In a January New York Times op-ed, Schmidt, Burnett, and Loh describe this view as the “narrowest possible” perspective, which treats attention as “something that can be measured in terms of device-engaged, task-oriented productivity, then optimized and operationalized and profitably controlled.” Even our valiant efforts to remedy the problem by trying to improve focus or repair our attention span are a response to this narrow understanding. At work, the hours you spend focusing on a task will help generate profit for your employer; at home, the time you spend watching a movie on a streaming service or reading an article on your phone will be translated into ad dollars for Big Tech. 

Attensity! asserts that there’s more to attention than focus and task completion. “Indeed, the WORLDS of human attention are innumerable—genuinely infinite, and full of infinite promise,” they write. I think what the Friends of Attention hope to emphasize is that attention isn’t something that can be quantified—it’s in everything we do. Looking out of the window of a car or bus and daydreaming—that’s attention at work. Taking a walk around your block and stopping to pet a dog or chat with your neighbor—attention. Going through the motions of pulling a shot of espresso—also attention. 

When participants begin a practice at an Attention Lab, they receive a card with step-by-step instructions and an accompanying text excerpt or quote from an artist or scholar who inspired it—anyone from bell hooks to Langston Hughes to Yoko Ono or Karl Marx. The eye contact practice I engaged in during my first lab draws inspiration from Marina Abramovic’s 2010 “The Artist Is Present” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. 

Rather than focus one’s attention inward, like in many forms of meditation, these attention practices direct you to focus on an object or person. There’s actually not much that feels radical about the attention practices themselves, except that you’re taking the time to deliberately direct your attention to new things and to appreciate how other people might experience those practices during the group debriefs that conclude each practice. Quinn Marchman, a facilitator at the school, called this the “ritual of listening” and said that taking the time to hear what other participants experienced is a key component of the Attention Labs. 

Like the distinctiveness of our fingerprints or eye color, our attention, too, is unique.

At one Attention Lab I attended, we did an exercise where we wandered through Dumbo alone, picked a spot, and took notes on what we observed. My tiny notebook is filled with notes from this lab, a very literal list of the sights and sounds of the block where I stood. “Overflowing puddles,” “dog poop but no dogs,” and “fake plants.” But in the debrief, others had written flowery, poetic lines describing the East River and the moon and the quietness of the street. Time and time again I learned that, while we each did the same practices, we experienced them differently. The practices manage to tap into each person’s unique interests and skills. Like the distinctiveness of our fingerprints or eye color, our attention, too, is unique. I didn’t notice the way the lights glittered on the water, but I did count the number of people on the street and watched as a puddle spilled over the edge of the sidewalk. Perhaps it’s my journalist’s impulse to compile small facts and details. 

At the School’s Attention Labs, facilitators compare the work of attention activism to a house fire—a dire situation in which there are different roles with different priorities working together to put out the fire. “There are some people that are carrying out all the furniture. There are some people that have water and they’re putting out the fire. And there are some people that are on the phone calling 911,” Jahony Germosen, the partnerships coordinator at the School of Radical Attention, explains. “We think that the attention activism movement is exactly like this.” 

The Friends of Attention identify the many different skills and talents needed to make attention activism work. In Attensity!, they argue that there’s room for everyone in attention activism because we all have distinct attention practices that we’re already doing. For example, rappers, poets, and stand-up comics—all people with unusually close attention to language—are “BARDS and RECITERS.” Meanwhile, people with a knack for bringing others together for shared experiences—dinner parties, game nights, etc.—are “GATHERERS.” It might sound a little cheesy, but the book captures something I felt intuitively at the labs I attended—that we all have something different to offer and learn when it comes to attention. 

I realized the School of Radical Attention is right about at least one thing: it feels good not to have to do this work alone.

After reading the book and attending a few labs, I’ll admit that there’s something that feels slightly woo woo about this whole thing. One minute you’re staring deeply into a stranger’s eyes, then you’re staring at your hand and trying to “feel” it, and eventually you’ll find yourself listening to the same song four times in a row, searching for new details and feelings. 

The latter exercise is part of a lab called “Deep Listening,” modeled after the work of composer Pauline Oliveros. The first time the facilitator played the song we were supposed to just listen. The second time we were to recall what we noticed the first time, the third time was to discover new things, and the final time we attempted hearing but “not listening.” By the third listen, hearing the tinny sound of the music, I found myself thinking about my middle school band class, remembering how it felt to practice a new piece of music until I’d committed it to memory. I imagined counting myself in and joining my classmates in an arrangement of the Pirates of the Caribbean theme song. Perhaps counterintuitively for a group so focused on collective action, the Attention Labs often offer a space for introspection. But I think what’s gained through that introspection is a longing for a community to share it with. During the Deep Listening exercise, one attendee remarked that the music helped decrease the noise in her head, to which several other people sounded off in agreement. “This exercise made me think of listening to my favorite albums,” another participant said. “Did anyone else feel that way?” Not everyone did, but they started peppering him with questions, trying to understand what he meant, or sharing how their experiences were different. When someone mentioned that the sound of the train rumbling outside the window distracted them from listening, a chorus of people piped up, detailing the sound of the train and identifying other distracting noises. It was in these moments I realized the School of Radical Attention is right about at least one thing: it feels good not to have to do this work alone.

But I also left the labs pretty unsure of what to do next. The School of Radical Attention offers plenty of ways to stay involved in its attention activism: you can take online courses, participate in “sidewalk studies” in public spaces across the city, study the texts from its suggested reading lists, or even follow its toolkit for starting an “attention sanctuary” in your own community. The ideas the school is presenting are valuable, but it seems like a stretch to argue that sitting in a room listening to a piece of music four times is activism—especially when there are sections of Attensity! that situate the authors’ project among the work of suffragists and civil rights marchers. (“These are disputes about human dignity—about the fullness of what people are and what they deserve,” the Friends of Attention write. “Attention Activism stakes a claim for human dignity.”) 

I asked the school’s co-founder about this—doesn’t this all feel a bit abstract, I wondered, at a time when anti-ICE and pro-Palestine protesters are organizing for real political change? Schmidt, one of the co-founders, acknowledged that, because attention is hard to “nail down,” attention activism is different from how we think of activism otherwise. The school isn’t lobbying for antitrust laws that limit the power of the tech companies they call human frackers, or protesting AI data centers, or helping organize tech workers. Instead, they are pushing for cultural change, which Schmidt explained is about involving people and creating community. “The laws of a country cannot push through the people of a country,” he said. “You can’t have laws that protect something if you don’t have people who want to protect it.” 

It’s the early stages of the movement, so Schmidt said this is the kind of work that needs to happen now to regulate the tech industry later. The school wants to model its work after other successful social movements which often have a pre-existing community and shared language that allows them to flourish. Schmidt said there’s no equivalent to that with attention activism, so creating the attention liberation movement will require building a shared language for the problem, a shared understanding of attention, and a community who cares about it all. That can happen through the school’s programming—which is being offered in New York City, across the US, and even across the globe. 

I didn’t leave the School of Radical Attention newly fired up to take down Big Tech, but I did leave it feeling eager to connect with others who wanted to reclaim control of their attention.

Still, I ask if this isn’t a little like treating the symptom and not the cause. Schmidt resisted that characterization; the labs aren’t about “self-help” or having a group therapy session, he said. He makes what is a repeated distinction at the school and in Attensity!, which is that it’s not about fighting to improve our attention spans, but to enrich our understanding of attention in general. In this way, this work is about getting people on the same page, showing that attention is bigger than we think, and that the human frackers’ power is detrimental to humanity. 

It doesn’t mean the School of Radical Attention might not eventually get into policy work or forms of activism that we’re more familiar with, but for now the work is about building community organizing to create a “critical consciousness around attention” in our culture. 

I didn’t leave the School of Radical Attention newly fired up to take down Big Tech, but I did leave it feeling eager to connect with others who wanted to reclaim control of their attention, and with a more nuanced understanding of the many forms attention can take. That might not feel like much at a time when Meta is marketing discreet wearable tech and Google is training AI with your search data, but it’s a step in the right direction.  

In the broader attention activism landscape, the School of Radical Attention’s work is more about hope, Schmidt told me. “Right now, with like four dudes in this AI arms race that’s just very destructive and hubristic and depressing, it’s just very easy to despair,” he said. “And the real spirit of all this for me, and what makes all the people who come here so wonderful is, we’re not exactly optimists, but I feel there’s a lot of hope.”