The New Republic

Iran’s national soccer team is dealing with unnecessary hardship during the World Cup thanks to the Trump administration, with acquiescence from FIFA, international soccer’s governing body.

The team was forced to leave the U.S. immediately after its World Cup match with New Zealand Monday night in Los Angeles, which ended in a hard-fought 2–2 draw, and head back to their Tijuana, Mexico, base camp.

“After the game today they said to us, ‘You have to leave immediately,’” coach Amir Ghalenoi told the press after the match. “Whereas today it’s very important for us to have recovery.

“We’ve been asked to get on a plane and return to our camp in Tijuana, and we are really troubled by that. They are forcing us to go back early. They are making the situation more and more difficult, more hurdles, but we’re not going to let that stop us from doing our best.”

Iran wasn’t even supposed to have its tournament base camp in Mexico. They were forced to abandon their original plans for a base camp in Tucson, Arizona, thanks to the Trump administration, which isn’t letting them stay overnight in the U.S. despite their group stage games taking place in Los Angeles and Seattle. Their fan base is also being punished: Iran’s entire ticket allocation was taken away last week, although it’s not clear if that was a U.S. or FIFA decision.

Before their match, the team had to go through five hours of travel and security checks on Sunday, despite the distance between Tijuana and Los Angeles only being 140 miles.

“We don’t know why they’re returning us, to be honest. I think it’s very strange. It seems like others are doing the planning for us.… We were supposed to arrive two nights before the game, but they didn’t permit [it],” Ghalenoi said. “We were supposed to stay here tonight to recover and return tomorrow lunchtime.

“I think our team is the most oppressed one in the whole World Cup. Our federation isn’t here, our media isn’t here, our management isn’t here.”

The U.S. government initially denied visas to 15 of the Iranian team’s support staff, later reducing that number to 11 after some visas were approved. Those excluded from the U.S. include both of the team’s media officers, analysts, and Iranian Football Federation President Mehdi Taj.

Inexplicably, winger Mehdi Torabi’s visa has also expired, as he was only granted a single entry visa to the U.S., Iranian state media reported. The Iranian federation is scrambling to get Torabi a new one that lets him take part in the remaining matches.

“I think it’s not good for the football,” team captain Mehdi Taremi said of the team’s situation. “In [the] World Cup, you have to prepare good for the next game, which is a lot of stress for the players and the staff and everyone. But we don’t have that support, and I think FIFA have to help us more than this. Let’s see what’s going to happen in the future.”

🚨🇮🇷 BREAKING — World Cup “Disaster”

Mohammad Mohebi and Mehri Taremi Say:

“Not to Make Excuses but This Is Not a Fair Competition.”

Iranian Players argued they should arrive 2 days before matches instead of traveling, training, and playing while exhausted by 5 hours in… pic.twitter.com/Z0ViTFEoRO

— Pamphlets (@PamphletsY) June 16, 2026

Republican senators are being kept in the dark about the exact terms of Donald Trump’s deal with Iran—and they’re not happy.

The Trump administration has yet to release the text of the memorandum of understanding officials signed with Iran, leaving senior GOP members frustrated at everything they don’t know, Politico reported Monday.

Senator Lindsey Graham, a defense and Iran hawk, voiced concern about discrepancies between different parties’ descriptions of the deal. “The MOU being described by us sounds really very good; the MOU being described by Iran sounds awful,” he told Politico.

The South Carolina Republican fretted that the deal would resemble former President Barack Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which defense hawks despised.

“If they can enrich [uranium] anywhere at all, then it’s the same as JCPOA. If they can’t enrich, then that makes it a good deal,” he continued, and added in a separate conversation that he was “skeptical that Iran will ever go there.”

It seems that the similarities between Trump’s deal and the JCPOA are already coming into sharp relief: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth crumbled on live television when trying to explain the difference.

Some Republican senators are wary of the deal, believing they will have to review and vote on it.

“If you want a deal to last, it can’t be an executive agreement,” said Oklahoma Senator James Lankford. “We’ve got to have a vote of Congress to be able to solidify [it] long term.”

But others suspect that, like the JCPOA, the deal will be a political agreement.

“They’ll try to write it around the treaty requirements, so I don’t expect we’ll vote on it,” said Texas Senator John Cornyn.

GOP lawmakers aren’t the only ones wary of Trump’s deal with Iran: Even his own Cabinet members seem to hate it. Trump has claimed he will release the text of the deal on Friday, after the formal signing ceremony.

Half the cost of President Trump’s $600 million ballroom will be placed on the shoulders of U.S. taxpayers like you. This development, based on financial records obtained by The Washington Post, comes just two months after Trump promised the project would be “taxpayer free,” with no U.S. citizen paying even “10 cents.”

The ballroom has already eclipsed the $400 million Trump originally said it would cost. And while Trump has defended the necessity of the ballroom profusely, it’s become abundantly clear that this is simply another vanity project for him to feel like he’s actually done something successful, even as there’s no real need or demand for the ballroom—especially not if Americans are paying for $300 million of its price. And the wealthy individuals who are actually paying for it are getting government contract kickbacks for doing so.

“I guess ‘privately funded’ meant Trump was keeping it private that he’s stealing hundreds of millions of the public’s money for his ballroom. All this while gutting health care and raising costs,” Democratic Representative Gabe Amo wrote on X. “Shame. We have to stop this grift.”

The Trump administration’s plan to approve $300 billion in aid for reconstructing Iran has only become more confusing.

Vice President JD Vance all but confirmed to CBS’s Ed O’Keefe Monday morning that the $300 billion was a real proposal in the Iran peace deal. Yet within hours—and after some monumental backlash from his party—Vance seemed to change his tune, telling Fox News’s Sean Hannity that Iran would not receive a “single dime” of U.S. money.

“The agreement says they are not getting a single dime of American money, that’s just not what this is,” Vance said Monday night. “What the agreement does say, Sean, is again, if the Iranians behave, and if there are sanctions relief, and if the Iranians are integrated into the world economy, we would invite other countries—not us—but other countries to invest in their country.

“That’s fine, but only if they comply with the terms of the agreement,” Vance added.

Hannity: There’s a report that the Qataris are giving them $300 billion with the approval of the US. Did the U.S. Ever sign off on the Qatari paying them that money?

Vance: No, the agreement says they are not getting a single dime of American money, that is just not what this… pic.twitter.com/qk024IvfLS

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 16, 2026

Vance did not elaborate on how the administration planned to manage or gatekeep foreign aid packages intended for Iran.

The White House and Tehran have already signed a peace deal, though the exact specifications of the agreement have not yet been revealed (and are still being hashed out). The final draft reportedly proposes the immediate reopening of the Strait of Hormuz under Iran’s direction, a commitment from the U.S. not to interfere in Iranian affairs, and a reiteration of Iran’s commitment not to produce nuclear weapons, echoing language included in the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, according to a senior Iranian official who spoke with Reuters.

The most contentious point of the plan, however, is a reported $300 billion reconstruction fund, as well as billions more in unfrozen Iranian assets and forfeited sanctions—which were originally understood to be provided at cost to U.S. taxpayers.

Donald Trump similarly tried to cast doubt on the proposal Monday evening, claiming on Truth Social that “the story that the U.S. is paying Iran 300 million Dollars is Fake News, put out by the Dumocrats!!!”

But not everyone in the administration is on the same page. Earlier that day, a U.S. official told reporters that the White House had “discussed the possibility of releasing frozen funds, sanctions relief, you know, a big $300 billion fund to rebuild their country, and all of these things are going to be tied to performance.”

President Trump is defending America’s tentative deal with Iran, claiming that the U.S. is not “investing any money.”

Trump told reporters at the G7 summit in France Tuesday morning that unlike with 2015 JCPOA agreement with Iran, the U.S. was not transferring cash to Iran, ignoring the fact that reports of the still-unpublished deal include Iranian access to $300 billion in reconstruction funds and releasing $25 billion in Iranian assets.

“We’re not investing any money. We have the right to if we want, but we’re not investing any money. We didn’t pay for it like Obama did. He paid billions of dollars, he paid $1.7 billion from an airplane, all green cash. I watched that, I couldn’t believe it,” Trump said. “But the one that’s happening that’s of note, frankly the only thing that matters to me is that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon.”

Trump: "I want to mention Iran. We appreciate the relationship we've had over a short period of time with Iran. We're not investing any money. I have the right to if we want, but we're not investing any money. We didn't pay for it like Obama did. He paid billions of dollars." pic.twitter.com/zBqNl2cGe9

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 16, 2026

The JCPOA also included a commitment from Iran that it would not pursue a nuclear weapon. Plus, it included the U.S. lifting sanctions and sending Iran $1.7 billion to settle decades-old failed contracts between the two countries. In Trump’s new deal, the funding sources for the $300 billion reconstruction fund for Iran are unclear, although Vice President JD Vance said Monday that they would come from the “Gulf coast coalition.”

Is that some combination of Persian Gulf countries and the U.S., or did Vance actually mean to refer to the Gulf Cooperation Council? If some of that money does come from American taxpayers, that’s not going to go over well with most of Congress, except a few of Trump’s most sycophantic supporters.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe and others within the Trump administration don’t think Iran is being serious about its promise not to develop or attain nuclear weapons, according to anonymous sources from Axios.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, and Ratcliffe each voiced their doubts regarding Iran’s commitment to the memorandum of understanding announced on Sunday, as each detailed “intel” that led them to doubt Iran’s side of the MOU agreement.

“The intelligence reflects that the Iranian intentions are not in line with their commitments under the deal,” one source told Axios.

While the full text of the deal has yet to be released, it is understood that the MOU requires that Iran reopen the Strait of Hormuz for 60 days and refuse to develop nuclear weapons, while the U.S. must end its blockade of Iranian ships in the strait and Israel must withdraw from Lebanon. It’s important to note that the strait was already open before the war, and this commitment to no nukes from Iran was already in the original deal from 2015—a deal that Trump canceled in 2018.

It’s also not clear just how seriously Trump will take this “intel” from Rubio, Ratcliffe, and Hegseth, as his son-in-law Jared Kushner and envoy Steve Witkoff are supportive of the MOU.

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

The widespread opposition to the construction of data centers is a huge opportunity for liberals and Democrats, says author and organizer Astra Taylor. In the latest episode of Right Now, Taylor argues that Americans are frustrated about data centers in part because they are being built in communities without residents’ knowledge and consent. Rural residents and Republicans also oppose data centers, making them fertile ground for politicians. Taylor also discussed her upcoming book on “end times fascism” and the importance of Democrats defending higher education and debt-cancellation programs.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 16 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.

Donald Trump has signed a deal with Iran to cease hostilities and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. We still haven’t seen the document, but all of the reporting suggests a very simple story: Trump lost. He got nothing of any significance. Trump himself plainly has no idea what happened, as he revealed in a strange ramble to reporters. But JD Vance does know what happened, even though he’s trying very hard to sugarcoat it in a pretty revealing way.

We’re really lucky to be talking about all of this with Tom Nichols, a staff writer for The Atlantic, who has a good piece arguing that Trump capitulated to Iran. Tom, great to have you on, man.

Tom Nichols: Good to see you, Greg.

Sargent: So let’s just sum up where we are. We haven’t seen the document, but all the reporting suggests that while the Strait of Hormuz will reopen, all that does is return us to where we were before Trump’s war.

Meanwhile, they’ve punted the discussion over Iran’s nuclear program until later. And the Iranian regime has survived. So basically, Trump’s tens of billions of dollars in bombing didn’t compel Iran to do what he said he’d make them do. Tom, is that basically the size of things?

Nichols: I think it’s worse than that. The bigger problem is that he counted on regime change. This was what the war was really about. So when that wasn’t going to happen, when it became clear a week or so in that this regime wasn’t going to collapse, this outcome, I think, was more or less inevitable.

And the people that are now waiting and saying, Well, we need to see the details of this MOU. That’s fine. But even without knowing the details of the MOU, the Americans have been defeated here. And that pains me to say as an American. Because the regime is still intact, their nuclear material is still in their country. They’re actually politically more powerful now that they’ve flexed muscle and done some serious harm to the other Gulf states as a warning not to cooperate with the United States. There’s going to be some money going back into Iran, whether it comes through third parties or not.

If you had said any of this to Donald Trump on the first night of the war, he would have said, That’s impossible, we’re going to get unconditional surrender. Well, we didn’t. And all of these things are going to happen. Without even knowing what’s in the MOU, you can know at least this much.

Sargent: Right. Trump absolutely did expect unconditional surrender, even though he was told by lots and lots of different people within his administration, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, that that wouldn’t happen. He was told that the strait would be closed by Iran and that that would exercise leverage over the global economy and over us.

Trump couldn’t fathom that possibility because he’s strong. It’s just that simple, right? He’s strong, he wins, he’s a winner, so there’s no way that things won’t go exactly the way he says they will.

Nichols: It’s bitten him before and caused him problems before, but there’s this weird quirk in Trump’s personality where he really believes that saying things makes them real. That, like a child, he can sort of wish-cast things into existence.

And you can play that game with domestic politics and tariffs and taxes and do some fancy dancing around where the money is in terms of things like revenue. You can bully other Republicans to agree with you. What you can’t do is do that with a war where the enemy gets a vote.

Every day that Trump said they’re eager to make a deal, there’s going to be a deal, a deal is imminent—the Iranians are not Republican House members. They are a foreign country and an enemy of the United States. And there’s nothing to stop them from saying, No, there is no deal. And now that we have one, it’s not great. It’s basically an acknowledgment that the United States failed to gain any of its strategic objectives.

Sargent: That seems beyond clear. So Trump talked to the media about his deal today. He blasted Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal, which unfroze tens of billions of dollars that Iran could then access in foreign accounts. Listen to Trump.

Donald Trump (voiceover): It was a horrible deal for the United States. It was a deal where billions of dollars was given to Iran. It was a deal where $1.7 billion in cash was put on a Boeing 7—well, not a 757, I guess, right? But on a big, beautiful Boeing 757. They needed a Boeing 747, to be honest with you, because it was a lot of cash. $1.7 billion was taken out of the banks and given to Iran. And on top of that, tens of billions of dollars was spent. So they tried to bribe them to make a deal and that didn’t work. It never works.

Tom, as far as we know now, Iran will also be able to access a huge tranche of funds under Trump’s deal too. Can you explain that? How do you respond to what Trump said there?

Nichols: Well, I was a critic of the JCPOA because I didn’t like how much of it was front-loaded. But I also have to be honest and say that in the years that followed, the deal seemed more or less to work.

Now Trump has wandered into a crappier version of the JCPOA, starting all over again, with the argument that they’ll get access to this money if they clear certain gates and engage in certain things. And the Iranians are just better at this than he is. I think that money is going to start coming to them again through third parties.

That’s why you keep hearing Trump and Vance both being careful to say, Well, we’re not just going to give them cash. No, you’re going to open up the ability to have cash get to them with your OK. And I suspect that once people are tired of this whole process, which will be very soon, and once Trump is no longer paying any attention to it, the Iranians are going to get what they want. How soon, how much—that’s just a matter of working out the details.

Remember, in the end, this was supposed to be giving the Iranian government back to its people, who would then dismantle the nuclear program, end support for terrorism, restrain their proxies, blah, blah, blah. None of that’s going to happen. They’re going to get the money one way or another.

Sargent: What’s the basic difference between what Obama did with the money and what Trump is doing with the money? Do we know?

Nichols: Well, without seeing the MOU, hard to say. But I would say that Obama did it without completely disrupting the international economy, blowing billions of dollars’ worth of expensive American weapons, getting some Americans killed, getting many hundreds more wounded, and then weakening the United States by forcing us to basically admit that, yes, the Iranians own the Strait of Hormuz.

Sargent: Right. The bottom line here is that Trump is in some sense using the mechanism Obama used, which is a financial incentive to get Iran to cooperate with oversight of its nuclear program. Obama did this through negotiation.

Trump did it through spending tens of billions of dollars committing massive war crimes, bombing an Iranian school filled with children, et cetera, to practically melting down the global economy. That’s the difference. They’re using more or less the same mechanism.

Nichols: Trump blew up a lot of things, expended a lot of weapons, messed up the global economy, and now is doing it exactly the way Obama did it. And we’ll probably not get as good a deal, because now the Iranians have made sure to do things like booby-trap the uranium. Even if international inspectors get in there—and whatever Pete Hegseth says, you’re not going to have Marines in there digging this stuff out—getting inspectors in there is going to be a lot trickier than it was 10 years ago. It was just stupid and pointless.

Sargent: I think there’s actually another reason for that that I want to get to in a second. But first, let’s listen to JD Vance for a second. There’s a bit of confusion about how Iran will get access to this money. It’s being described as $300 billion. JD Vance was asked about this. Listen to this.

Reporter (voiceover): The Iranians are saying that they’re going to have access to a $300 billion reconstruction fund. True or false?

JD Vance (voiceover): Well, that’s the sort of thing they could have access to, funded by the Gulf Coast coalition, so long as they honor their end of the obligation. I think that one of the things you’re going to see, Ed, and people have to be skeptical of this, is that the hardliners in the Iranian system will overemphasize the benefits that Iran gets while underemphasizing all the things that they have to concede and all the things they have to provide in order to get these benefits. So we absolutely are open to the Gulf Coast countries investing in the reconstruction of Iran, but only if Iran ends their nuclear program, ends their enriched stockpile of material, and is really open to an inspections and enforcement regime that gives the American people confidence they’re never going to have a nuclear weapon.

Sargent: So if I understand this correctly, the U.S. will allow Iran to get access to this money if and only if Iran agrees to some kind of binding long-term constraint on its nuclear program. What you’re saying is that once the nuts and bolts really hit, when they really start to talk about this, probably Iran will be able to get access to that money fairly quickly, or at least before any final commitment is made.

And when JD Vance says this money will come from other Gulf Coast countries investing, what’s he referring to there? And what’s your overall reaction to what you heard from JD?

Nichols: Well, I don’t know how quickly they’ll get it. This is where I will be cautious and say that until we see this MOU—which for some reason the administration really doesn’t want to release to the public, which should tell you something right there—I don’t know how quickly it’ll get here. But basically, we’re committing to supporting the reconstruction of the country we just blew to smithereens after getting nothing.

It really is staggering to have the administration claiming, We finally got a commitment not to build nuclear weapons. Look, I was never in favor of attacking Iran, but I was a real hawk on the issue of, if they ever get close to a nuclear weapon, that could actually be the trigger for war. But there was no evidence of this, and there’s been no evidence of it for 10 years, since the JCPOA.

So again, we’re back to this problem that they’re going to get a lot of money, they’re going to get reconstruction support from the Gulf states that they have pounded and inflicted punishment on for cooperating with us. How does this not leave Iran—even though Iran is temporarily militarily weakened—in a strategically more powerful stance?

That’s why, when you listen to that part we just listened to, Greg—where you ask JD Vance these questions and he does the Jackie Gleason thing, where he’s trying to explain his way out of it—the reality is Trump wants out. And he’s willing to buy his way out if he couldn’t bomb his way out.

Sargent: Right. Obama actually ended up getting more because he had an actual deal that laid out what oversight of the Iranian nuclear program would look like. Trump doesn’t have that. He’s just now doing what Obama did, which is using money to try to get it.

Nichols: And doing it without the support of the international community.

Sargent: And after spending tens and tens of billions of dollars committing war crimes, destroying the global economy—

Nichols: I’m not there yet on war crimes. I think that waits for an investigation. But he started a preventive war. He started a war of choice, which itself is horrific, because this didn’t even have the rationale of the Iraq War behind it. I said at the beginning of this, the Iraq War looks like it was competently lawyered up compared to this.

Bush went to the United Nations, he had allies on board with at least some of it. He made a case, he put a clock on it about the inspectors. This was Trump just getting up one morning and saying, you know what, it’s time to take out Iran.

Which itself is a problem when you’re talking about war crimes and crimes against humanity. But in the end, I will also say that had he toppled this regime, Greg, I would have been one of the people shrugging and saying, Well, you have to congratulate him if he managed to get rid of one of the worst, most dangerous regimes on this planet. I may not have liked the way he went into it, but I would have had to certainly congratulate him on coming out of it.

Now he’s gotten the worst of all worlds. He’s taken America on a discretionary war, didn’t get what he wants. He’s going to have to pay off the bad guys so that he can get out of this. And basically he’s going to paper over his own mistake here with dollars. That’s what he’s going to do.

Sargent: I think that’s basically the size of it. I just want to say one more thing about JD Vance’s strange ramble there. He’s basically admitting that Trump is using the same mechanism that Obama used—a financial incentive to get Iran to cooperate with oversight of its nuclear program. Doesn’t JD just end up making Trump look like a complete moron, given that it comes right after Trump compared his deal favorably to Obama’s unfreezing of funds to Iran?

Nichols: No part of this administration communicates within itself. And what we’re seeing here—given the concerns about Trump’s health, his state of mind—JD Vance’s answer was sort of stumbling and bumbling, but within the normal range of political dissembling, if that makes any sense.

Trump, I think, just doesn’t have any idea what’s going on. That’s the bigger worry—that Rubio and Witkoff and Kushner are saying, OK, we’ve got it, but I don’t get the sense that Trump himself really understands anything that’s going on here. The idea that Trump and Vance aren’t on the same page isn’t surprising at all. I really wonder how much Trump understands any of this at this point.

Sargent: So Tom, I just want to close on a point you make in your piece, which is really interesting. Trump is threatening to restart hostilities against Iran if it doesn’t agree to surrender its nuclear program. You point out that Iran just won’t believe that, because Trump has shown that he wanted an exit from all this. I want to add to your point and get you to talk about this. As we get closer to the midterms, it becomes next to impossible for Trump to restart military action of any kind, let alone using any kind of ground invasion. Republicans will just not allow that to happen because it’ll utterly crush them in the midterms.

So I think, Tom, what Trump has really done here is lock in a time frame that actually weakens his leverage over Iran over time. It weakens his leverage over Iran’s nuclear program over time. And Iran knows that. Am I right?

Nichols: I think so. And he’s also alluded to using a nuclear weapon at one point. He said, We still have the ultimate, you know. But I just find it hard to believe—although with this administration and this president you never know—that right after Labor Day, as everybody’s going into the midterms and he’s still trying to wait for good news on the economy … remember, what he really cares about is international markets. He’s going to say we’re starting up the war again? On what pretext? And by that time, he really will have to go to Congress or do something.

He surprised the country and the American people and the world by doing this when he did it. I don’t think you can go to that well twice. And I could be wrong—I just don’t believe him when he says, Well, if this doesn’t work out and they don’t behave, I’ll just start up the war again.

That means he’s willing to tie down huge numbers of U.S. forces halfway around the world on a maybe while negotiators negotiate. At some point, ships have to come home. Soldiers and sailors need to be cycled through so they can do the things they need to do. They can’t just sit on ships for three or four months. I just don’t buy it.

Sargent: So just to boil this down, we’re now entering the really hard part, which is the part where we negotiate over the future of the Iranian nuclear program and the nuts and bolts of that have to be worked out. And Trump has weakened his leverage going into that. And Trump has also strengthened Iranian leverage because Iran knows it can hold the global economy hostage now. Is that the size of it?

Nichols: Right. And the Iranians get to appear like the aggrieved party now that they’re the ones that have lost thousands of people and been attacked. And even with a competent team that understood the issues and knows what it’s doing, trying to negotiate a nuclear program after you’ve bombed it and put it under a lot of rubble takes a long time. It’s going to take even longer here.

So the idea that somehow in 60 days, sometime again around Labor Day or something, Trump’s going to say, That’s it, everything’s fixed, we’ve got it—none of that’s going to happen. This is going to be a long cold war with the Iranians, just like the one we’ve been in with them for 47 years. And Trump made it worse. So I don’t see any way out of this in a way that enhances American security anytime soon.

Sargent: Utter catastrophe all around. Tom Nichols, awesome to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.

Nichols: Thanks for having me, Greg.

Monday’s batch of orders brought a rare bit of good news at the Supreme Court. The justices announced that they will hear Kian v. Florida next year, setting the stage for the court to strike down Florida’s Jim Crow–era law allowing six-member criminal juries.

The Sixth Amendment requires, among many other things, that criminal trials be conducted before an “impartial jury.” In nearly every state, this jury consists of 12 members of the community where the alleged crime was committed. But in a handful of jurisdictions, states use fewer jurors to more easily secure convictions.

Hamed Kian, the defendant in this case, is a chiropractor in Jupiter, Florida. State officials suspended Kian’s license in 2021 while they investigated allegations of sexual misconduct against him. Kian allegedly continued to treat patients in the years that followed, leading state prosecutors to bring five counts of practicing chiropractic medicine with a suspended license.

Under Florida law, trials for capital offenses are held before a 12-person jury. Defendants who face noncapital felony charges, however, are instead prosecuted before a six-person jury. One of those smaller juries convicted Kian on all five charges. He was sentenced to one year in prison and five years of probation.

On appeal, Kian sought to overturn his conviction by arguing that the Sixth Amendment required him to be tried before a 12-member jury. Forty-four states in the Union currently impose that requirement for all felony trials. Florida and five other states—Arizona, Connecticut, Florida, Massachusetts, and Utah—allow at least some trials to be held before juries with fewer than 12 members. No state allows juries with five or fewer members.

In 2022, an Arizona man asked the Supreme Court to review his conviction of felony offenses by an eight-member jury on Sixth Amendment grounds. While the court declined to do so, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh publicly indicated that they had voted to review his case. Gorsuch also wrote a solo dissent where he forcefully argued that the court should have taken up the case.

Twelve, Gorsuch argued, was not some arbitrary number. By the time the Framers adopted the Sixth Amendment in 1791, their English ancestors had upheld the right to a 12-member jury for nearly four centuries. (Other accounts date the 12-member jury even further back, to around the enactment of Magna Carta in 1215.) As a result, founding-era Americans understood “the right to a trial by jury for serious criminal offenses meant a trial before 12 members of the community—nothing less.”

Florida’s deviation from this legal norm came as federal troops withdrew from the South, heralding the end of Reconstruction. Kian noted that the Florida legislature first enacted a six-member jury law in February 1877, one month after President Rutherford B. Hayes ordered the military’s withdrawal. “The jury-of-six thus first saw light at the birth of the Jim Crow era as former Confederates regained power in southern states and state prosecutors made a concerted effort to prevent blacks from serving as jurors,” Kian told the justices in his petition for review.

Historians have long noted that Southern Redeemers used a variety of subjective legal tests to eliminate Black civic and political participation, both at the ballot box and in the jury box. Along with this historical evidence, Kian pointed out that Black jury participation in Florida became so rare in the Jim Crow years that state newspapers treated it as remarkable and newsworthy on the rare occasions when a Black juror was actually empaneled.

The Supreme Court is well aware of this general history. In 2020, the justices struck down another Jim Crow–era jury restriction in Ramos v. Louisiana. Two states, Louisiana and Oregon, allowed nonunanimous jury convictions for felony offenses. This allowed states to convict defendants even if one or two members of the jury voted to find them not guilty. (Though Oregon was not technically a Jim Crow state, it is well established by historians that the Ku Klux Klan played a key role in the restriction’s adoption in the 1930s.)

Oregon’s nonunanimous jury law had been previously upheld by the Supreme Court in the 1972 case Apodaca v. Oregon. But Gorsuch, writing for the Ramos majority, rejected what he described as the “functionalist” reasoning of the Apodaca justices, where they looked to the rule’s “function” in “contemporary society.” Gorsuch instead adopted an originalist approach to require jury unanimity in all felony trials.

“When the American people chose to enshrine that right in the Constitution, they weren’t suggesting fruitful topics for future cost-benefit analyses,” he wrote in his Ramos decision. “They were seeking to ensure that their children’s children would enjoy the same hard-won liberty they enjoyed. As judges, it is not our role to reassess whether the right to a unanimous jury is ‘important enough’ to retain.”

When the court declined to hear the 2022 case involving juries with fewer than 12 members, Gorsuch took the same approach. “For almost all of this Nation’s history and centuries before that, the right to trial by jury for serious criminal offenses meant the right to a trial before 12 members of the community,” he wrote. “In 1970, this court abandoned that ancient promise and enshrined in its place bad social science parading as law.”

That 1970 case was Williams v. Florida, where the court upheld Florida’s six-man jury law as a constitutionally permissible change to the long-standing tradition of 12-member juries. “That mistake,” Gorsuch explained, “continues to undermine the integrity of the Nation’s judicial proceedings and deny the American people a liberty their predecessors long and justly considered inviolable.”

Kian’s appeal received a favorable hearing from a Florida appeals court that reviewed his conviction. At the same time, that court concluded that it was bound by the Supreme Court’s earlier holding in Williams, even though the precedent’s reasoning had been severely undermined by the court’s 2020 ruling in Ramos. The appeals court effectively signaled to the justices that they hoped to be overturned by praising Ramos, when “the light of originalism began to [peek] out from the darkness of functionalism.”

Florida, for its part, had urged the justices to maintain the status quo. The state claimed in its brief that Kian had made “no serious attempt to show that overruling Williams is warranted under traditional principles of stare decisis.” Florida also warned that overruling Williams “would imperil thousands of criminal convictions in Florida and five other states that for more than 50 years have relied on its rule.” Though the state could not provide exact numbers on how many Floridians had been convicted by six-member juries since the 1970s, it noted that “roughly 5,000 criminal convictions are currently pending on direct appeal.”

Those numbers would likely pose little impediment for the Supreme Court to overturn Williams when it hears Kian’s case next term, however. When the Supreme Court handed down its ruling in Ramos six years ago, the ruling took effect for future trials and those that had not yet exhausted their appeals. In a follow-up case, however, the court declined to apply it retroactively, meaning that finalized criminal convictions remained intact.

It is always a fool’s errand to predict exactly how the Supreme Court will decide a case. One subtle sign of Kian’s confidence is that he and his lawyers declined to file a reply brief to Florida’s brief that urged the court not to take up the case, as if they had already said everything they needed to say. The stage is now set for the Supreme Court to further strengthen one of the great bulwarks of American liberty—in the few states, at least, that have gotten away with diminishing it for so long.

Abdul El-Sayed ran for governor of Michigan in 2018, emphasizing his progressive views and endorsement from Senator Bernie Sanders. He didn’t gain much traction and ultimately lost by more than 20 percentage points in the Democratic primary to Gretchen Whitmer, who was backed by the party’s center-left establishment. Eight years later, El-Sayed, now seeking a U.S. Senate seat, is running the same kind of campaign. But this time, he’s effectively tied in polls with the establishment’s favorite, Representative Haley Stevens, and could win the August 4 primary.

Candidates often do better in their second bids for office. But El-Sayed’s strong performance is emblematic of broader trends. Progressives, after struggling in 2022 and 2024 in primaries against more centrist Democrats, are in the midst of an electoral revival. And they are breaking through not just in very blue areas but in purple ones, such as Maine, Michigan, and California’s Central Valley.

Why? Because the Democratic establishment has made some huge blunders, and the party’s left wing has made some smart tactical adjustments. Put all of that together, and the battle for the soul of the Democratic Party is alive again, with progressives winning key primaries around the country and positioning themselves to potentially capture the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028.

We’re now a decade into intense primary battles between the Democratic left and center-left, with both sides having strong and weak periods during that time. Sanders’s surprisingly strong campaign against Hillary Clinton back in 2016 reinvigorated the Democratic left and inspired a spate of other progressive challengers to more centrist Democrats. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the most prominent of the numerous Sanders-aligned progressives who defeated more centrist Democrats in 2018 and 2020.

But centrist Eric Adams’s win in the 2021 New York mayoral primary was the first of a string of major defeats for progressives. Two years ago, Representatives Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman, who had been elected in 2020 as part of the initial progressive wave, were defeated in primaries by opponents who got heavy support from centrist organizations. Centrist Democrats successfully painted progressives as ignoring practical issues like crime and damaging the Democrats’ national brand by pushing overly liberal ideas. They also were shrewd in fighting the intraparty war, targeting progressives like Bush who had controversies around them unrelated to their policy stands.

So how have progressives come back? In large part because of own goals by the Democratic establishment. Zohran Mamdani was greatly helped by city’s center-left backing a candidate (Andrew Cuomo) who was lethargic on the campaign trail and had to resign the governorship in shame after being accused by numerous women of sexual harassment. Graham Platner is the Democratic Senate nominee in Maine because the party establishment backed a candidate (Janet Mills) who was lethargic on the campaign trail and almost 80 years old, annoying Democratic voters who are leery of older candidates after Joe Biden’s failed 2024 run.

Peggy Flanagan, the progressive candidate in Minnesota’s Democratic Senate primary, is leading in part because her centrist opponent, Representative Angie Craig, stupidly voted for a Trump-backed anti-immigration bill, angering the state’s liberals. In nearly all of these races, the progressive candidates can straightforwardly condemn Israel’s atrocities in Gaza, while centrist donors insist that the candidates they support take pro-Israel stances that are out of touch with Democratic voters.

Broadly, the Democratic establishment has discredited itself with the party base, with massive electoral (2024) and policy (the Gaza war) mistakes. So endorsements from centrist leaders such as Joe Biden, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Chuck Schumer no longer carry much weight and arguably hurt centrist candidates more than they help them. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, is so toxic in liberal circles that it tries to hide its role in backing centrist candidates, thereby limiting AIPAC’s effectiveness. A candidate such as El-Sayed can brush aside the establishment’s claims that he is unelectable in a general election because the center-left’s political acumen is no longer trusted by voters after it lost the White House, Senate, and House in 2024.

“When you have 70, 75 percent of the Democratic base saying, ‘We don’t agree with what Netanyahu’s doing in Gaza,’ but you have members of your party who are still voting to send arms to that government and who are telling you that the issue is complicated, when you’re seeing children being blown up … you start to question them not only on that issue but on other issues, as well,” Mamdani adviser and longtime Democratic Party operative Patrick Gaspard told me on a Right Now episode last year.

At the same time, the progressives have sown the seeds of their recent successes. They have smartly changed their rhetoric. Mamdani and numerous other progressive candidates deleted their tweets calling for defunding the police and have broadly stopped calling for police reforms.

In terms of policy, that’s disappointing. The police in America deserve much scrutiny and accountability. But this shift is shrewd politics. Progressives are no longer fighting on an issue where public sentiment is against them. Leftist candidates still support Medicare for All, free college, and other big expansions of government programs, but they fixate on those ideas a bit less than a decade ago, perhaps aware that even voters who agree with those proposals doubt they will ever happen.

Instead, the left these days leads with an anti-billionaire, anti-Washington populism, along with more incremental affordability proposals. Candidates such as Flanagan and California House hopeful Randy Villegas decry the growing power of billionaires and call for banning members of Congress from selling stocks. Both of those positions are extremely popular with the public.

Progressives have also gotten savvier and more ruthless in their campaign strategies. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and New York Governor Kathy Hochul are as centrist as Representative Dan Goldman and even more powerful. So why did New York progressives opt against aggressive primary challenges to Jeffries and Hochul while focusing attention on taking down Goldman? Because Goldman is in a very progressive district and therefore easier to beat.

Progressives, while still decrying the outsize role of money and big donors, are creating their own super-PACs, aware that they can’t win races if they are vastly outspent. Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders, and Mamdani often endorse the same candidates, creating a kind of progressive crescendo behind their choices. In Nebraska, populist candidates are running as independents, realizing they can’t win under the mantle of the Democratic Party in places where the party is super unpopular.

None of this guarantees progressive success this November or in the future. Mamdani could fail as mayor. Platner could be hit by another scandal, and he and other progressive candidates could lose in November. It will still be extremely hard for Ocasio-Cortez, Representative Ro Khanna, or another person closely associated with the party’s progressive wing to win the Democratic presidential nomination. All that said, in the days after the 2024 election, when party strategists were blaming progressive causes and groups for the losses, I was deeply concerned that the Democratic Party would move decisively to the right. It hasn’t. Instead, progressives have led the fight against Trump, forced the party’s establishment to admit its failings in the Biden years, and reinvented their own strategies in winning ways. A Muslim man named Abdul, backed by Bernie Sanders and calling for a new kind of politics in America, could be the party’s candidate in Michigan. Progressives are making progress.

The alt-comedy-to-auteur-pipeline keeps pumping away: Jordan Peele, Zach Cregger, Bo Burnham, and now John Early. The 38-year-old stand-up and sketch-scene staple is familiar to millions for his handpicked cameo in Taylor Swift’s music video for “Antihero,” and is deeply beloved by fans of the pitch-black, premium-cable cult series Search Party, in which he played a callow, sociopathic influencer who faked lymphoma for clicks, among other things. “Oh my God, I would never lie about abuse,” says his character, Elliott Goss. “And I lied about cancer.” 

The perils of social media notoriety—and the dangers of dishonesty—also figure in Early’s feature directorial debut, Maddie’s Secret, an homage-slash-send-up of 1980s TV movies set in the present. The film takes its cues (and its title) from Kate’s Secret, a corny 1986 NBC production starring Meredith Baxter as an aerobics instructor struggling with an eating disorder (the film was considered a landmark for portraying bulimia on prime time; “I didn’t know if I wanted to be the one throwing up on television” the actress told the Los Angeles Times on the eve of her premiere). Early’s eponymous heroine, Maddie, is a wannabe barefoot contessa whose Instagrammed kitchen vignettes unexpectedly go viral, transforming her pretty much overnight into a big-time (though reluctant) foodie-chic influencer.

The stress of keeping up appearances—and the specter of imposter syndrome—triggers Maddie’s long-submerged and potentially lethal bulimia: the secret she’s keeping unsafely at the risk of esophageal rupture or cardiac arrest. On the eve of a particularly important meeting with network executives on a restaurant-based reality show called The Boar (one vowel away from you know what), Maddie falls ill and gets checked into a hospital in-patient program. There, amid fraught group therapy sessions and dark nights of the soul, she’s forced to come to terms with her appetite for self-destruction.

Early speaks a kind of humane truth about how certain physical and psychological frailties get packaged within pop culture. The sheer artificiality of Maddie’s Secret is the realest thing about it.  

On its surface, Maddie’s Secret doesn’t scan as a comedy. But its surfaces, all stilted line readings and redolently cheesy dramaturgy, are what’s funny about it. They belie but don’t blot out the essential empathy on display here; these ostensible alienation effects are really gestures of solidarity, offered by a filmmaker working outside the studio system (and getting away with an uncompromised vision as a result). Far from mocking his heroine’s plight, Early uses the camp strategy of placing everything on-screen in playful, flamboyant scare quotes—the characters, the situation, the dialogue—in order to speak a kind of humane truth about how certain physical and psychological frailties get packaged within pop culture. The sheer artificiality of Maddie’s Secret is the realest thing about it.  

The first time we see Maddie—played by Early wearing a blonde wig and prosthetic breasts—she’s bouncing her way through sunny Los Feliz to what sounds like a synth-thetic cover of Hot Fudge’s “You Keep Me Hanging On.” The risks here are real, and they’re spectacular; like much else in Maddie’s Secret, Early’s performance—all fluttering eyelids, wan smiles, deep-chested breaths and a mild vocal fry seemingly derived from the Aaron Spelling Televisual Universe—is suspended between deadpan rigor and earnest expressivity. To paraphrase Sontag on camp, Maddie is very much “a woman” in quotes, but she’s also an intrepid, endearing, and desirable heroine whose talent is emphasized alongside her decency, and whose pain is never played for laughs. Early’s decision to cast himself—inspired by the legendary drag queen Harris Glenn Milstead—feels like an unveiling of aspirations and influences from the bad-taste extravaganzas of John Waters to Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls to the postmodern brinkmanship of Todd Haynes, whose shadow falls over Maddie’s Secret and then some. 

Todd Haynes’s controversial 16 mm short Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987) used a series of strategically carved Barbie dolls to dramatize the singer’s battles with anorexia. The film’s miniaturized melodrama style invited pearl clutching while winning critical plaudits. Haynes was inveighing against the kind of prime-time docudrama dreck that sought to reduce artists and celebrities to their afflictions. Maddie’s Secret isn’t as stark or as confrontational as Superstar, but it’s obviously a spiritual descendant of sorts, adopting a hyper-specific form for the express purpose of demolishing it. Early’s mash-up of allusions and straight-up see-what-sticks goofiness is novel, like a bold combination of Haynes (whose critically acclaimed movies are often very funny) and the deadpan alt-comedy pastiche master David Wain, venerated by creators of Early’s generation for superbly skewering glossy, popular genres like summer-camp sex farces or big-city rom-coms. (A corny portmanteau for those in the know: Wet Hot May December.) But Early isn’t simply cracking in-jokes; instead, he’s inviting fellow campers and normies alike to revel on his particular, slippery wavelength.   

“I swear to God, Maddie, it’s like you’re out of some modern-day fairy tale,” says Deena (Kate Berlant) to her work bestie as they clock in for dishwashing shifts at the premium cooking brand GourMaybe. The avidity of the line reading is amusing in and of itself while establishing the very real—and inherently perilous—happily-ever-after stakes of the narrative to come. Like most princesses, Maddie is a bit oblivious: She can’t tell, for instance, that Deena regards her as her own personal thirst trap, an infatuation that manifests in increasingly aggro-platonic postures. The more that butch lesbian Deena brags about her other sexual conquests, the clearer it is she wants to stick her tongue down her hetero pal’s throat—a shameless genre cliché that Early and Berlant take giddy pleasure in pushing to the breaking point. The pair have been working together for more than a decade now in shorts and sketches, and their chemistry is positively pharmaceutical; Berlant, who’s got a touch of wild genius, weaponizes her lanky limbs and angular jawline every time she walks into frame, as if Deena were trying to puncture the invisible bubble of the friend zone with her body.

Deena is transparently jealous of Maddie’s sweetly and sweatily ursine husband, Jake (Eric Rahill), the main beneficiary of his love’s off-the-clock cooking talents. “Did you throw away the mango pickle from the Indian we ordered?” Maggie asks after sashaying home, one of many delectable lines that turn the low-hanging fruit of TV-movie dialogue into gourmet fare. Another one, after Jake gently suggests uploading footage of Maddie’s culinary skills to the cloud: “I just wanted to make my husband some dinner, and now I’m in postproduction.”

Maddie won’t cook or eat meat, because of a childhood trauma around food and body image. “The camera adds ten pounds,” chides Maddie’s mother, Beverlee (Kristen Johnson), when her daughter calls her to talk about the possibility of her becoming a brand ambassador for her company—a “Gourmaybe Girl.” Early’s stricken reaction shot on the other end of the phone—blue-hued in the moonlight, and held for an extra beat beneath a tinkling piano score—perches firmly at the precipice of winking excess without tipping over. Every aspect of the film exhibits this level of discipline, from the writing and directing and acting to the mise-en-scène; the wonderfully stylized cinematography is by Max Lakner, who keeps floridly color-coding the characters’ psychological states. We get blood reds and deeper purples; enveloping shadows and ring-light halos; ghostly window reflections and heart-to-hearts. The food that Maddie prepares looks variously appetizing and ersatz depending on whether we’re in her home kitchen or at the fluorescent Gourmaybe offices. There are plenty of less stridently artificial movies that could benefit from a small fraction of such expressivity.

As the plot develops, Early includes all kinds of superfluous shtick, like interludes in a queer-dance group that are basically an excuse for cast frolicking on the clock. Still, he keeps an admirably tight handle on the various character dynamics, including Jake’s yearning to become a father, a plan held in check by Maddie’s mommy issues. Crucially, Early refuses to trivialize Maddie’s recovery in the hospital scenes, even as he populates the ward with killer supporting performers like Vanessa Bayer and Leah Hennessey. Sad moments are played straight, despite the absurdist flourishes around them, as when another patient, Connie (Hennessey), eulogizes a fellow patient who didn’t make it: “Your existence was inconvenient to me because you were the living embodiment of the parts of myself I’ve tried to obliterate.” Simple tear-jerking is easy, but the articulation of genuine angst—especially in this context—takes real sensitivity and nerve. For anyone who might still be disoriented by the way Maddie’s Secret plays with tone, the eulogy sequence wipes the smirk off the movie’s face—or their own—once and for all. 

The abruptness of Maddie’s Secret’s ending underlines Early’s desire to create something stranger and more bracing than expected.

Early’s softheartedness is winning, but he’s hardly edgeless. Besides working through his nostalgic ambivalence for the shock tactics of Kate’s Secret and its ilk, he’s taking aim at the lifestyle-brand fakery of GourMaybe and its craven head honcho, Zach (Connor O’Malley), who addresses his staff megalomaniacally, like a true believer. “Play nice, we’ve got content to make,” he bellows, with O’Malley torquing his delivery as if he knows the line is destined for future screencap-meme status. It’s telling that a comedian like Early, who developed his skills and following in an extremely online setting, would cast the internet in such ambivalent terms; crucially, Maddie’s catharsis bypasses the zone of public performance altogether. 

The question of whether Maddie will get another chance to be famous for her cooking is one of several loose ends that Early leaves conspicuously dangling; others include the fate of her marriage to Jake (Rahill is given plenty of directorial leeway in a part with more bruised dignity than expected) and Deena’s mental health (Berlant is intrepid enough to survive being the only member of the cast treated in the end like a cartoon character; the movie loses a bit of spark when she’s sidelined in the home stretch).

The abruptness of Maddie’s Secret’s ending is in sync with its TV-movie inspirations, but it also underlines Early’s desire to create something stranger and more bracing than expected; to swap out a benign, crowd-pleasing sort of cognitive dissonance for a sometimes disorienting ambiguity. Maddie doesn’t hold onto all of her secrets—she can’t—but she’s still finally a woman of mystery. The highest compliment that Early can be paid is that even when the movie ends, Maddie seems to exist beyond the final (freeze) frame.

Parsons, Kansas, is larger than the “haphazard hamlet” Truman Capote visited to write In Cold Blood, but not by much. With a population of about 9,600, residents largely pass the time hunting, fishing, and watching high school football. (Under head coach Jeff Schibi, the team is reportedly on the up.) The few tourists sucked into city limits are usually on their way to visit Big Brutus, the world’s largest electric shovel, located a half-hour drive away. “It’s small-town charm,” the city’s economic director, Jim Zaleski, said.

The most noteworthy part of Parsons is probably the industrial park next to it. At 14,000 acres, Great Plains Industrial Park dwarfs its home city in both size and economic impact. The area was an Army ammunition plant until 2005, when, in an atypical move, it was shut down and donated to the local government. “It was like turning the keys of a Ferrari over to somebody that has a learner’s permit,” park director Brad Reams joked.

Today, Great Plains is a manufacturing hub leased by powerful companies in the energy, engineering, and transportation sectors. While the park’s board of directors is appointed by county commissioners, it doesn’t use any taxpayer funds, and generates its own private revenue, at which it is apparently quite good.

“We have about $12 million in assets,” Reams said. “We lease about 4,000 acres for agricultural purposes. We lease buildings, over two million square feet … for warehousing for various goods and services. We have 26 miles of rail that we lease out to a rail company.”

Ammunition manufacturers Day & Zimmermann also lease land there; the explosive thuds from weapons-testing projects can irritate nearby homeowners. Still, Parsonites are proud of the park. “It was a place that helped in the Korean War,” Joe Beachner, who has spent his whole life in the city, said. “Something that helped our economy.”

But last December, something changed. The Parsons Sun had it first: a deal struck between industrial park board members and the nuclear company Deep Fission. A first-of-its-kind nuclear reactor was coming to the park. “I saw it on Facebook, and I thought it was a joke,” Marjorie Reynolds, a home nurse who lives in the area, said. The public was not informed before the deal was completed: Even county commissioners were only told “a week or two” prior, according to Commissioner Terry Weidert. “They just announced it in the newspaper December 4, like it was a done deal,” anti-nuclear activist Ann Suellentrop said. “So arrogant and so dismissive of the public.”

Park officials said they could not inform the public because they were under nondisclosure agreements with Deep Fission and the Department of Energy. “You’ve got intellectual property that … they like to keep under wraps,” Reams said. “If you’re the DOE, it’s a national security risk. It’s an energy project that has national implications.” Zaleski concurred, arguing that the agreement with Deep Fission was a standard one. “That’s just how the cookie crumbles in this industry,” he said.

Holger Meyer, a particle physics professor at Wichita State University with a background in nuclear energy, said the public should have been informed regardless. “There sometimes are good reasons for the desire for nondisclosure agreements,” he said. “But this isn’t something that just impacts the land it is on. It impacts the entire county—the entire region.… There is obvious public interest.”

It didn’t matter. Five days later, park officials, executives of Deep Fission, a smattering of locals, and roughly 40 TV stations gathered in the park for a groundbreaking. Parsons may not have liked it, but it was going nuclear.

Founded three years ago, the California-based start-up Deep Fission was thrust into prominence last August, when its reactor project became one of 11 selected as part of Donald Trump’s “Nuclear Reactor Pilot Program.” The pilot program, created by executive order, fast-tracks the companies’ ability to receive commercial operating licenses. The stated goal at the time was for three reactors to achieve criticality by July 4, 2026; one already has, and the DOE claims two more are on track. Deep Fission is not among them.

This rapid schedule is possible in part because Trump has overhauled the Nuclear Regulatory Commission since the start of his second term, relaxing regulations and inspections to meet demand from data centers. In May 2025, the president ordered the theoretically independent NRC to submit to the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, and cut the annual hours spent on nuclear inspections by an estimated 38 percent. Hundreds of staff members have since departed the agency, and the two remaining Democrats on its board have expressed fear they could be fired after Democratic Chair Christopher Hanson was canned last year. Suellentrop warned that the NRC will be “gutted” if Trump continues to get his way. “The DOE will rubber-stamp whatever he wants, and to hell with people’s safety, their health, the environment,” she said.

Hanson declined to comment on his firing and whether he was worried about the NRC under Trump, but posited that a reduction in NRC inspection time was fair. “The industry does have a really strong track record of sustained operational and safety performance,” he said. “I’m not going to second-guess what the commission’s done.”

For advocates of Deep Fission, the government’s promotion of the project is evidence of its safety. “The federal government isn’t desperate enough for nuclear reactor projects that they’re going to take a flyer on somebody,” Reams said. “It’s just not worth it.”

But others warned against such implicit trust. Meyer said “industry interest” was behind the Trump administration’s embrace of nuclear power. “Environmental regulations are being dismantled in all areas,” he said. “It’s clear that nuclear safety isn’t prioritized by the Trump administration.” Kent Rowe, a retired professor of aeronautics and anti-nuclear activist from near Parsons, stated that the Deep Fission project was “a scheme to bury [reactors] haphazardly and worry about consequences later.”

A March letter signed by 11 state attorneys general condemned the DOE for creating an exemption allowing certain nuclear projects to skip previously mandated environmental reviews. Paul Gunter, director of the group Beyond Nuclear, said he was concerned the exemption would allow Deep Fission to bypass proper safety measures.

“There should be no question about whether or not a novel nuclear technology without a designed reactor containment system can avoid an environmental review for potential severe accidents and the long-term consequences,” he said. When asked whether Deep Fission would indeed be exempt from the review, a DOE spokesperson said, “No determination has been reached.”

While the other nuclear companies in Trump’s pilot program are working on more or less traditional reactors, Deep Fission is getting weird with it, forecasting a reactor it has described as both “discreet” and “bespoke.” A laudatory Forbes profile on company founders Richard and Liz Muller outlines the plan: “Drill a 30-inch-diameter borehole a mile into the earth, fill it with water, then insert a teeny-tiny nuclear reactor that will boil the water at the bottom and send it up a separate pipe to run a steam turbine. Each hole will generate 15 megawatts, enough to power 12,000 homes.” (The profile fails to note some less savory details from Richard’s past: He was a vocal global warming skeptic until 2012, and has been criticized for taking research funding from the oil and gas tycoon Charles Koch.)

A small, scalable reactor is Deep Fission’s Theranos-esque goal, perfect for supporting Silicon Valley’s new obsession: AI data centers. Seventy in-house reactors can power one data center, according to Forbes. Deep Fission has been open about a desire to “meet the explosive demand for power from artificial intelligence” with a system “designed to scale modularly.” They have already seduced the likes of Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, who owns an 8 percent stake in the company.

Speed is one of the company’s core tenets, which is concerning to some critics. Deep Fission’s website proudly states its reactors take an “estimated six months” to build, and the company told Parsons in December it aimed to have a test reactor running by July. “We have to build fast enough to meet data center demand before they decide to go with something else,” Liz Muller told Forbes.

It turns out, though, that building a nuclear reactor is quite difficult. The company now will not say when its test reactor will be ready, and is unsure on whether it will be able to open a commercial reactor at all. Deep Fission recently completed a test well in Parsons 6,000 feet deep and eight inches in diameter. That may sound impressive, but it’s far smaller than the mile-deep, 30 to 50 inch–wide borehole that will be needed for the real thing.

While a white paper sent to the NRC gives insight into the proposed reactor blueprint, Deep Fission’s design is not final yet. The company has not submitted a preliminary safety analysis to the DOE, nor applied for the NRC license it will need to sell energy, according to federal officials. Deep Fission declined to speak with The New Republic for this piece, with vice president of communications Chloe Frader citing the “active registration process.”

Reams said Deep Fission was never going to hit the deadline it set for itself. “I think even if it had gone perfectly, they probably wouldn’t have hit July 4,” he said. As to why the company may not be selling its energy anymore? “They weren’t sure [of] all the P’s and Q’s that they had to make sure were covered,” Reams said. “It’s been a learning process for them.”

Parsons, according to Reams, is a tough ol’ place, the sort where residents don’t freak out about advanced new tech. “There’s a certain panache,” he said. “There’s not a lot of sky-is-falling mentality.”

But some have been vocal in their opposition to Deep Fission, particularly Reynolds, who founded a local group called Prairie Dog Alliance for the express purpose of fighting the development. In a matter of months, Reynolds has assembled a hodgepodge of community members, among them farmers, business owners, activists, and professors. (Suellentrop, Meyer, Rowe, and Gunter have all been in contact with the group.) Prairie Dog Alliance now boasts over 500 Facebook followers and about 15 members who attend regular meetings.

Some locals say Prairie Dog represents the majority opinion. Librarian Heather Fouts estimated that “at most 25 percent” of residents support the nuclear project. “I would say most of Parsons is against the reactor,” echoed Beachner, who recently joined the group. “But I also feel … nobody believes they can do anything.” In contrast, Zaleski and Parsons Sun editor Hannah Emberton cast Prairie Dog as a vocal minority.

The group forced a public meeting with Deep Fission in March after rejecting private talks. There have been a handful of meetings since, but Prairie Dog still wants more transparency. Member Jill Blankinship said the first meeting was “turned into a meet-and-greet”; during the only in-person meeting where company officials took questions, participants were made to write them down ahead of time. Deep Fission also promotes a “community advisory group” in Parsons, which doesn’t seem to exist yet.

“It’s very difficult for us to get any information,” Reynolds said. “I might as well beat my head against the wall.”

Prairie Dog has a list of concerns: Could the high temperatures of the underground nuclear reactor disrupt the rock? (“There’s going to be a lot of water around it to keep it at a pretty good temperature,” Reams said. “And the rock that’s down there that level is granite. It’s not going to do a whole lot to granite.”)

What about the ammunition testing going on nearby? A division of Day & Zimmermann, in fact, is leading the construction of the Parsons reactor. (Reams said such testing is “several miles away” from the site of the reactor, and there is “constant communication” about risks.)

What about the natural gas in the area? “There is a lot of danger, especially with the larger boreholes, of hitting natural gas reserves,” Reynolds said. “The closest house to the borehole they’re drilling right now—you can stand on his porch or his yard and see the drill rig—he has natural gas wells on his property.” Reams disputed this, saying there are no natural gas reserves near the project. There are no active wells on park property, though the site is in a part of Kansas listed in federal geologic assessments as potentially containing undiscovered gas.

The biggest concern among residents is simply how the reactors, and the waste they leave behind, will affect Parsons over time.

To cool one Deep Fission reactor, water from industrial park treatment plants will flow within the mile-deep borehole at a rate of about a gallon per minute, Reams said. More reactors—not to mention the data centers they aim to attract—will require far more water taken from the nearby Neosho River. “Water is the issue nobody’s talking about enough,” Meyer said.

Deep Fission is also drilling its boreholes at the edge of the Roubidoux aquifer, an underground water source that’s part of the larger Ozark system. While Parsonites get their drinking water from nearby Lake Parsons, the Ozark system is used for commerce, farming, and rural water districts all over the shop. “If something did happen, there’s potential that it could contaminate groundwater, which then contaminates the Neosho River, which goes … all the way down to Oklahoma,” Blankinship said. “Thirty-six towns, all kinds of people.”

Reams said that the reactor cores will be placed below the groundwater, and that the pneumatic drilling pushes the groundwater away before it is sleeved by cement and metal. “You’re encasing it in complete concrete and a mile of water,” Zaleski added. “Why hasn’t natural gas or oil that is drilled all over Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas ruined any aquifers?”

There’s also the issue of nuclear waste. Deep Fission’s founders said in April they wanted to just abandon their spent fuel rods underground after each reactor’s six-year lifespan. “Instead of pulling them out of the hole, they’ll pour in a mix of cement and rock to seal it all in place,” the Forbes profile states happily. Activists called the idea dangerous. “The abandoned oil wells are enough trouble here in Kansas,” Meyer said. “We don’t need abandoned nuclear reactor wells on top of that.” Rowe scoffed at the idea that the nuclear waste wouldn’t affect the rock over time: “How could it not, if you’re going to leave that radioactive material down there that’s enriched to 5 or 6 percent?” (Deep Fission has told the NRC it is using uranium enriched at “less than” 5 percent.)

A month after the Forbes piece, Deep Fission seemingly changed its tune. Chief Operating Officer Mike Brasel said in a May public meeting that the company will only leave spent fuel underground temporarily and that “we do not plan on disposing fuel down in that hole.” While the federal government is “contractually required to take the fuel,” Brasel said, Deep Fission aims to have a recycling or disposal facility in place before its boreholes begin to collapse in “40 to 50” years.

By then, things could already be going very wrong. Reynolds’s doomsday scenario is that radiation poisoning of the city’s soil and water will turn Parsons into something akin to Picher, Oklahoma, a small town 35 miles away. Once a bastion of lead and zinc mining, the town underwent dangerous corporate practices that caused irreconcilable environmental damage to the land; Picher was soon declared uninhabitable, and the municipality was officially dissolved in 2013.

In the event of a disaster, Deep Fission is seeking liability insurance under the Price-Anderson Act, which indemnifies the company in the event of a nuclear accident, providing costs fall above a certain threshold. “They’re going to … look for being indemnified from an accident that they’re saying will never happen,” Gunter said. “That’s a clear no-confidence vote.”

City officials, though, are growing fed up with all the perceived fearmongering. “All they want to do is make noise,” Zelenski said of Reynolds’s group.

If Deep Fission receives the federal go-ahead, it wants to build more than one measly reactor. The company is leasing 100 acres from the park, after all, and Reams said the board will accept as many reactors as it can get. In the future, hundreds of boreholes and little reactors could dot the plains. City and company officials suggest that nuclear energy could revitalize Parsons, a town that has seen its population dwindle since the Army jumped ship. Brasel claimed the test reactor would create 30 to 40 jobs, during a public meeting, and that the number could be “in the 700s” as the company expands.

“Good paying jobs are what we need in Parsons,” the mayor at the time, Verlyn Bolinger, said at the December groundbreaking. Zaleski agreed, arguing that Parsons needed more people in high-income positions, rather than mass employment. He welcomed the idea of data centers flocking to town to suck up the nuclear energy, calling them “absolute necessities to run our country.” But residents aren’t sure they’ll be the ones getting those lucrative jobs—if in fact they exist at all. “AI data centers and this nuclear thing is going to bring nothing for jobs other than short-term construction,” Beachner said. “I don’t see this as being a long-term project that actually helps us.”

There is a fatalism to Prairie Dog’s protestations. While Deep Fission is behind schedule and remains tied up with the DOE, both advocates and opponents of the reactor expect the thing to switch on eventually. The company is digging two new test wells in the next few weeks; after that, a test reactor will come online. “It’s probably going to happen no matter what we do,” Blankinship said. “We can’t control it. At least we know we tried.”

Like all battles worth a damn, the battle over the backyard nuclear reactor centers around power. Atomic power, community power, the power of the river and the aquifer and the earth. The process of generating nuclear power begins when a single neutron is flicked into a chunky uranium atom, causing the uranium to split. Steam fills the room, red lights turn on, turbines begin to spin. An almighty energy is created—not by the combination of these entities, but by one of them falling apart.

There is a nonzero chance that Jared Kushner will play a pivotal and entirely accidental role in bringing down the government of Albania. Over the last several weeks, the Balkan nation has been roiled by protests stretching from the capital, Tirana, to rural coastlines and cities around the world. The demonstrations were sparked by the government’s giving the green light to firms linked with Kushner to develop a 10,000-bed luxury resort near the city of Vlorë on the Narta Lagoon and protected wildlands in Zvërnec. Kushner and Ivanka Trump also have plans to turn Sazan Island, which belongs to a national park, into a smaller coastal enclave for the wealthy. On Saturday, some 200,000 people turned out as anger spread from the Kushner project to other luxury developments. Roughly 200 protesters in northwestern Albania tore down barbed-wire fencing around the construction site of a non-Kushner-linked five-star resort on the Adriatic Coast. As one participant told Reuters, they were demanding “compensation” for 200 local families whose “land has been seized.”

International coverage of the protests in Albania—a country relatively unfamiliar to many in the United States—has focused largely on the environmental concerns being raised by demonstrators, and the projects’ ties to the Trump family. The fledgling Kushner resorts threaten pristine wilderness and critical ecosystems that sustain a rare colony of the world’s largest freshwater birds, endangered Albanian water frogs, and loggerhead turtles. Among the species that stand to be affected are flamingos, whose last remaining habitat in Albania could be threatened by the developments. But the “Flamingo Revolution,” as the wide-ranging, horizontalist movement has become known, is about much more than flora, fauna, or Donald Trump. As Albania vies to become a top tourist destination and a member of the European Union, the ongoing protests aim to do nothing less than upend its political system. “At the core of this protest is not just environmental issues,” said Gresa Hasa, a doctoral researcher at the Faculty of Law and the Center for Southeast European Studies at the University of Graz. “This is a fight for freedom and democracy, and a future where the resources and the state works for all of us and not just for some of us, and where we are not excluded from our own beaches and public spaces.”

In addition to halting the developments on Zvërnec and on Sazan Island, protests are demanding the resignation of Socialist Party Prime Minister Edi Rama, who’s been in power since 2013. Demonstrators have also targeted opposition leader and former Prime Minister Sali Berisha. A member of the Democratic Party, Berisha was until last November under house arrest as a result of corruption charges. “It’s called the Socialist Party of Albania,” Hasa clarified of Rama’s party, “but has nothing to do with socialism.” Both he and Berisha have been supportive of the developments in question as they look to cozy up to Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, as a means of endearing themselves to the U.S. president. Last week, the Trump administration lifted restrictions against Berisha imposed by the Biden administration.

Rama has played a more active role. He had a chance dinner meeting with Ivanka Trump and Kushner in southern Albania. Months later, the president’s son-in-law approached him in Davos about investing in his country’s coastline. Rama has championed the project ever since. Just before Trump’s inauguration, the Albanian government granted Atlantic Incubation Partners—a firm linked to Kushner’s Affinity Partners—the status of a “strategic investor.” The Narta Lagoon resort is slated to be officially developed by the Netherlands-registered Zvërnec South Adriatic Development, an offshore trust that reports have linked to Kushner, Qatari billionaires, and a string of questionable characters.  The Sazan Island project is being led by Sazan Real Estate Development LLC. A P.R. agency for that development told Al Jazeera that any investors involved in it were acting “in a personal capacity.” 

The strategic investor designation entitles Atlantic Incubation Partners to expedited approvals, and the Zvërnec project was officially approved to begin construction in January 2025. Demonstrations began locally at the end of May. On May 30, footage showed private guards for Albanian oligarch Shefqet Kastrati—who’s reportedly been working closely with Kushner—beating up activists protesting around the fence protecting the site of the slated development. The images only further inflamed Albanians, and protests spread rapidly.

Since then, the protests have become the largest since the fall of Albania’s Communist government in 1991. Protesters’ demands reflect their long-running frustrations. Besides seeking Rama’s resignation, the Flamingo Revolution is demanding the repeal of the legal framework that allows the government to grant “strategic investor” status to developers. It’s further demanding the withdrawal of a recent initiative to offer generous tax breaks and special regulatory treatment for private development on state-owned land in rural areas. Protesters are also trying to reverse recent amendments to the Law on Protected Areas and the Law on Cultural Heritage, which they argue have streamlined investors’ ability to build on and near important environmental and cultural sites. “This project broke the camel’s back,” Hasa said. Albanians are enraged at “an economic model where political parties and businessmen are so entangled that you cannot figure out where one starts and the other ends.”

Understanding why Kushner’s seaside ambitions have kicked off an uprising in Albania requires a look back at the country’s tumultuous last century. Albania was ruled from 1944 to 1985 by Enver Hoxha, who broke with the Soviet Union over what he saw as Nikita Khrushchev’s insufficient commitment to Stalinism. The country’s increasing isolation—from neighboring Yugoslavia, the USSR, and eventually China—led to mounting economic difficulties in the lead-up to Hoxha’s death and the ensuing collapse of the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania. Like many other formerly socialist countries in the 1990s, Albania underwent a period of rapid, chaotic privatization of state-owned industries as part of a transition to capitalism marked by graft, speculation, and—in Albania’s case—disastrous pyramid schemes. 

Among the most enduring legacies of that period is a controversial 1991 land-reform law meant to redistribute property that had been collectivized under Hoxha. The result has been decades of ownership disputes, including in coastal areas that stand to become more valuable as the country continues to court foreign tourists to its sandy beaches and lush pine forests. Residents claiming land—and without the resources to fight for those claims in lengthy court processes—have been forced to give up their parcels and move away. Conversely, enterprising developers with more cash, including foreign investors and organized crime syndicates enriched by transition-era graft, can falsify documents and contest locals’ ownership claims. 

These legal gray areas have made it easier for Rama to court “strategic investors” like Kushner with the promise of both cheap land and cheap workers; as Rama once bragged to prospective Italian investors, “Fortunately, here we have no trade unions.” Last week, the Democratic Party expressed support for the protests as means of confronting government corruption, and introduced legislation aligning with several of the protesters’ demands. Demonstrators, however, have continued to call for Berisha to be thrown in jail, and to express frustration with the two parties that have dominated Albanian politics and economic development since the 1990s. 

In recent years, smaller parties have sprouted up in an attempt to pose alternatives. Redi Muçi was elected to Parliament last year, as a member of the left-wing Lëvizja Bashkë—the Together Movement, in English. The party formed out of student protests that were violently repressed by Berisha’s government in 2011, and another wave of demonstrations against educational reforms in 2018 and 2019. As Muçi points out, popular frustrations with both Rama and Berishi have been fueled by rampant corruption and the rising cost of living in one of Europe’s poorest countries. 

“Practically the whole Albanian economy has been directed toward the construction industry and tourism,” he told me. “The fuel that pushes this through is money laundering from drug traffickers. What has been happening along the Albanian coastline, but also in the capital city and elsewhere, is money coming from investors that hide behind shell companies that pour huge sums of money into the country through the construction, and which has made the city of Tirana an unlivable place” as public spaces are turned into enormous private developments backed by shady investors who drive up property prices through speculation. In rural areas, especially, he added, there are “investors who come from God knows where to build these huge resorts, destroying nature and ecosystems and habitats, as well as taking away property rights for local communities.”

A bipartisan push to turn Albania into a prime destination for real estate investment has seen rents skyrocket as foreign investors snap up properties for short-term rentals and glorified safety-deposit boxes, making housing prices “utterly unaffordable” for ordinary renters, Muçi said. A report from the nongovernmental organization Transform Europe found that the average price per square meter of housing in Tirana reached approximately $1,700. The average salary was less than $800; housing prices that year grew more than twice as much as wages. The combination of rising costs and low purchasing power has made Albania’s capital more expensive than Rome and Barcelona. A significant part of that, the report adds, is likely the result of money laundering: 32 percent of homes sold in 2021 were acquired by nonresidents. As of 2023, 33 percent of Albanian residencies—and more than 17 percent in Tirana—remained unoccupied.

While rising tourism has been a boon to the country’s economy in aggregate, the jobs created in the tourist sector tend to be poorly paid and vulnerable to exploitation. Migrant workers making just 700 euros (around $812) a month for grueling 12-hour days in restaurants and hotels have had their passports confiscated by employers as soon as they land in Albania. Lëvizja Bashkë is pushing for the state to direct investment toward more productive sectors that can create year-round, broader-based economic opportunities and prevent the rapid emigration of young Albanians seeking better-paid job prospects abroad. 

Protests may already be bearing fruit. Politico noted still unconfirmed reports that Kushner’s Affinity Partners had withdrawn from at least one multibillion-dollar resort project. That may not stop the demonstrators. Rama seems worried. The European Commission warned his government to “act without delay” to stop any prospective violations of the bloc’s environmental rules—or endanger Albania’s bid for EU membership. Under mounting pressure, Rama has accused protests of being the product of foreign meddling by “enemies of Israel and Albania,” and complained that marches were causing tourists to cancel their reservations to visit the country. 

The image of nefarious foreign actors sowing chaos bears little resemblance to the images being broadcast from the streets of Tirana and elsewhere, of peaceful parades with areas for kids to sit and draw. “You have grassroots left-wing movements, LGBTQ+ activists, environmental movements, representatives of all four major religious communities, and conservatives,” Hasa said. “You even have individuals who are right-wing, or a little bit far right.” Muçi agreed. “In such big numbers, you have people there from all walks of life, beliefs, and ideologies,” he told me. What unites them, he said, “is this call for a new Albania—for a different kind of politics that is not the one represented by Rama and Berisha.” 

It’s no secret that the Trump family has been eager to make itself richer while the patriarch occupies the White House. Here in the U.S., awareness of these activities hasn’t yet made much of a dent in Trump’s grasp on power. Abroad, however, it may help bring down politicians who thought they could use that grift to their advantage. Let’s hope Americans take note. 

This is a lightly edited transcript of the June 12 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: We have a great guest today: Astra Taylor, one of the smartest people I know. She’s done documentary filmmaking, she’s written a ton of books, she’s an organizer with the Debt Collective, and she’s a person who’s just studied and is very thoughtful about a lot of different subjects. So Astra, thanks for joining me. Welcome.

Astra Taylor: Thanks for having me. Glad to be here.

Bacon: So we’re going to start with the topic of the year, millennium, decade—I want to talk about AI for a bit, because you wrote a piece I’m interested in. The title’s in The Guardian: “The fight against data centers isn’t just about tech, it’s about democracy.” But let me start with a basic premise here, which is: Are data centers inherently bad, and is AI inherently bad? So talk about those things first.

Taylor: Oh, those are some big questions. Are data centers inherently bad? No. And data centers aren’t new. They’re new in the news. But data centers, 20 years ago, before we were talking about AI—data centers are where we store our data. We were storing our data for old-fashioned social media usage or streaming services.

So data centers have been around for a long time, and there was a big boom, a data center build-out during Covid, actually, when internet usage exploded and there was a lot of access to low-interest capital that facilitated the build-out.

One way of thinking about data centers is they’re the backbone of the internet. It’s where the cloud comes to earth. But they’re obviously much more prominent now, and they’re just being built at a different scale—hyperscale, to use the term.

Bacon: Let me come back to that, though. Data centers themselves have existed a long time. That’s what I wanted to get at.

Taylor: Yeah. They’re not inherently evil.

Bacon: It’s new in the news, but it’s not new. We’ve had data centers. That’s what I was trying to draw out a little bit.

I want to ask—a lot of people, on the left, are very AI-skeptical. And I wonder—we can talk about the economics of it and the growth of it, but is AI inherently bad itself? It’s a very broad question, but I’m curious what you think.

Taylor: I think AI in this economic model, in this political economic paradigm, is veering towards inherently bad. You cannot separate the technology from the economics. This is a point I’ve been making since my first book, which is called The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age, which came out in 2014. That was essentially a political economy of the old-fashioned, pre-AI internet.

And my argument there was that you cannot separate technology from the underlying business model of these firms. That just seems to me like one of those basic eternal insights we should not lose sight of. In a sense, this is the same movie but on steroids. The AI boom is happening in a period of much more intense wealth concentration.

So the “inherent” question—people like to say technology is neutral. I think that’s a bit wrong. Yes, you can use machine learning to assist a robust scientific infrastructure, or you can use machine learning to enhance a drone that is engaged in a genocide.

Bacon: That’s what I’m getting at. Could there be a world where AI is used nicely?

Taylor: Technology is flexible. But we would need very different societal conditions and be operating under a different government with a lot more constraints. On the “neutral” point: You can use a knife to kill someone or to make a sandwich, but that doesn’t mean it’s neutral. It’s a tool that cuts things.

The AI that is being designed right now is being designed for specific purposes. OpenAI—the definition they have of AGI, artificial general intelligence, that they’re looking towards is a tool that can do economically valuable labor. In other words, they’re trying to build a human worker replacement engine. So I don’t think this technology is neutral, but I also don’t think it is inherently bad or good. It’s embedded in societal conditions.

Bacon: So we’ve talked about data centers and now AI. Now we’re talking about AI data centers. How did this happen? You’re in North Carolina, but it’s nationwide. I feel like … in the last 18 months, you’ve had AI data center protests, bans, really [in] almost every part of the country—rural, urban, suburban. Not really urban, because data centers are mostly in more spread-out areas, but how did this happen?

Taylor: It’s actually becoming more urban. There are protests in the streets of Vancouver right now over a big data center. Seattle just issued a moratorium, which is interesting because Seattle is a big tech hub.

So absolutely this movement is growing, and there are different reasons for it. One is people don’t like this infrastructure. It has all sorts of negative consequences. These are absolutely massive build-outs. They often have real consequences for people in the vicinity—incredible noise that keeps people up at night, that makes people want to move, but by that point it has destroyed their property values.

They’re often run on what should be temporary power sources—gas turbines, methane turbines that have very immediate consequences for the air people are breathing. Sometimes it smells bad. Even if you can’t sense it, there is extra pollution. Depending on the locality, there can be strains on the water supply. They often raise utility bills.

And then people don’t really like what it’s about. There used to be a compact, which was, OK, we’re going to do industrial development, but you’re going to get some jobs. Maybe you’ll get a few hundred jobs. You may get a few thousand jobs.

These data centers—sometimes they’re billion-dollar build-outs, and there are 30 jobs, 100 jobs. There’s a company now that’s offering robot security dogs to replace the human security workers that were guarding these places.

So the jobs that are permanent tend to be low-wage security jobs or janitorial jobs. The higher-paid work is temporary—it’s in construction or building the actual computers. It’s a bum deal. People are also finding out that they are being built with incredible tax incentives that often don’t benefit the community. So there are all sorts of reasons that people are questioning this.

Then there is the bigger context of: Hold on, what does this portend for our collective future? Do we want to live in an AI world? And then amazingly, something as amorphous as AI or the cloud—you go, Oh, it’s actually in my backyard. They’re trying to build it here.

And people are realizing that they can fight back. I’m on some Signal chats, one with people from 45 states, who are fighting back against these developments and definitely seeing themselves as part of a bigger push. I wrote the piece in The Guardian with Saul Levin, a longtime environmental organizer—he’s from Michigan, and he’s been on the data center beat for a long time. We were actually replying to those folks who were like, Oh, is that really the best way to fight AI? It’s kind of whack-a-mole.

Our point is: We’re on incredibly complicated political terrain. It’s actually amazing that there is a space where people can gather, find each other, and push back. And when people do gather, they’re finding out, Actually, we might not have voted the same way. We might not have a lot in common in terms of culture war issues. But we actually all object to this. It’s creating these new solidarities. The physical space that these data centers offer is actually providing an incredible opportunity for organizers.

Bacon: I want to ask: How did this get politicized? The reason I want to ask this is because it appears the Democrats have decided they oppose them now, but they followed—

Taylor: Not all Democrats.

Bacon: Yeah, some of them are. But what I’m getting at is: It seems to me that AI data center proliferation was fine with most elites in media, business, politics, both parties. Yet a groundswell of people started opposing it. So I’m curious—it’s unusual in our culture today. You often find political movements are top-down. Sometimes they’re bottom-up, but usually … Black Lives Matter, there were at least active civil rights groups that existed for a long time.

So I’m curious: How did these people figure out, Oh, this is something we can oppose? Because a lot of these cities, the city council was trying to hide the tax credits from them. It was not very transparent. A lot of places where the media’s not very strong. So how did people get informed on this?

Taylor: That’s a really interesting question. I do want to just linger on your point about the lack of transparency, because that’s a huge element that is pissing people off.

Bacon: That also causes that. Yes.

Taylor: All of these deals are under the cover of these NDAs, where often much of the city council doesn’t even know what’s going on.

Bacon: The government in the city has decided either to cover it up, or they don’t know themselves. The mayor or whoever has done it without them knowing.

Taylor: I did some reporting in Memphis, where Elon Musk has built his Colossus supercomputer—there’s actually now three of them in Tennessee and Mississippi, all in this area—and just, absolute secrecy. That’s part of what created this incredible outrage. As people dug, they realized they’re secret for a reason, because it’s these temporary polluting turbines and because he’s not keeping his other promises.

That’s a big part of it. There are a lot of reasons. On the progressive side, one is that on Inauguration Day, there was the phalanx of tech executives and the sense that tech had gone MAGA. And so suddenly people were like, Hold on, what side are you on? Now you want to totally merge with the U.S. government and build this AI dystopian future.

That doesn’t really explain what has happened on the right. On the right, big tech has been their enemy. For years, Silicon Valley was this techno-democratic formation, and—in the views of the right—they felt social media companies were censoring the truth, whether it was about Covid or about election conspiracies. There was a lot of animosity to big tech.

Then you have these AI executives going, In the future, we’re going to be eliminating half the jobs, maybe all of them. And by the way, we’re building a transhumanist digital God. And people were like, We don’t want to be replaced. We hate that. They just haven’t built up a lot of public goodwill on either side.

And even though the populism of the right is fake, there’s an anti-billionaire vibe. These guys are like, We don’t even want to be billionaires. We want to be trillionaires. We are talking in a moment when Elon Musk, on paper, is a trillionaire. We have entered a new phase of oligarchy, a new phase of plutocratic power. Today is a tragic day. The vast majority of people who have two brain cells are not for this. It’s just the perfect—

Bacon: Also, in this case, it went local to national as opposed to the opposite. Usually so much of our culture is national to local, and in this case, I think it bubbled up. The New York Times did not invent the data center rollback. In some ways, it was covered in a local paper first.

Taylor: Part of this is, people [say], My utility bill is being raised, and I don’t like the noise from this thing, I can see this ugly thing. But there’s also part of it that’s like, These billionaires from Silicon Valley want to replace us, and we don’t like that.

It’s both at the same time, and that is powerful. But I don’t think the Democrats have polarized against this or taken this opportunity to the degree that they can or should, given how it’s shaping up to be such a huge issue.

Bacon: So “the fight against AI centers isn’t just about tech, it’s about democracy.” We use this word “democracy” all the time, and usually it’s a predictable Democrat saying Trump is bad. But you have written about democracy before the Trump era and thought about it deeply. So what do you mean when you say this is a fight about democracy? Because you mean something more than just “Trump bad.”

Taylor: Yeah. I mean, Trump is bad. Bad, bad man. [laughing]

Bacon: Yeah, I know.

Taylor: For me, it comes back to political economy. You cannot have democracy under conditions of incredibly concentrated wealth or oligarchy. One of my favorite definitions of democracy comes from Aristotle, who said democracy is the rule of the poor, because the poor outnumber the rich. If democracy is the rule of the majority of people, then it should not be the rule of the super rich. And again, this is a pivotal day in terms of the history of oligarchy.

Bacon: Did Musk just today become a [trillionaire]? Is that what you’re—

Taylor: Yesterday, the SpaceX IPO. I was just reading this Guardian piece, and it said that for somebody who’s a trillionaire, $100 million is the equivalent of $19.27 for the median American. And I was like, “Can that be right?” That is so mind-boggling.

But democracy means that people have a say in the conditions that affect their lives, and it also means they’re not ruled by the super wealthy. The AI fight is absolutely connected to both of those things. We weren’t asked whether we want this AI revolution. It is being forced on people. It’s being forced on people at their jobs. It’s being forced on people in their search results.

The government is essentially backstopping—the way that Trump has fully merged with Silicon Valley, he is putting an incredible amount of government force behind this industry and bet his presidency on it in a sense, because it’s been floating the stock market. So that’s absolutely a democratic issue.

And again, what direction is this tech going? Are we building tech that serves humans’ needs? Or are we building tech that aims to replace a lot of human jobs and human relationships, to further concentrate wealth? Are we building AI as a wealth-siphoning straw, or something that could help people?

I’ve been thinking about what it would take to have the best iteration of this technology, and fundamentally, I think it requires a robust welfare state, it requires labor protections, it requires environmental protections. Those are things that are not on the table with this administration. So in a sense, this AI revolution is happening in the worst of all possible worlds.

But this gets to very fundamental issues about who has power in our society. The last thing I’ll say on that is: To me, democracy is not just the political sphere. It is something broader than that. To go back to the labor issue—the fact that AI is being sold as something that can do economically valuable labor, the dream of a one-billion-dollar company with only one employee—

Bacon: The nightmare, in my view, but the dream to them.

Taylor: Yeah. Sam Altman has said that he has a chat with his executive buddies betting on when that will happen—when they’ll finally have this employee-less company. This tool is being developed to degrade labor, but also to further erode what power American workers have.

These are companies that are backing lawsuits against unions and would love to get rid of the NLRB and all of that. So that just seems deeply undemocratic to me. And I’m very happy that people from all walks of life are rising up against this.

Bacon: You said the Democrats are not seizing this issue—Democrats in the parties. So let’s talk about that, because one of my favorite writers, Tressie McMillan Cottom, has a column in the Times today, and the headline is, “This Could Be the Winning Issue for Democrats”—talking about AI data centers and AI more broadly. Is the answer to this question very simply that the rich like data centers and AI and the Democratic Party is captured by the rich? Is there anything more to say than that?

Taylor: There’s a lot of that. I haven’t read Tressie’s piece, but I fully endorse it in advance because I know that she’s right on about this.

That’s a huge part of it. The reason billionaires and trillionaires are a threat is in part because there are no rules, or very minimal rules, on how much they can spend on elections and how much they can spend to buy off politicians.

We know that there’s a lot of dark money flooding into races at every level right now. That’s part of it. A lot of Democrats are looking to either tap into those resources or actually to just not trigger a huge spend, because they’re fighting really dirty.

Bacon: Crypto companies defeated Sherrod Brown’s functioning. It is a real thing.

Taylor: Yeah. Or there’s the New York congressional primary that Alex Bores is in. This is a guy who worked at Palantir and then quit, because he had—I wouldn’t say a moral awakening, because he’d been involved in labor and other causes before—but left in protest due to some of their dealings with Trump 1.0.

These super PACs funded by Silicon Valley are now trying to use that against him: Oh, he’s a Palantir employee. In other words, they’re shameless. They are willing to absolutely punch below the belt, and they’re funding millions of dollars into this, and that’s just one race.

So politicians are afraid. I think, though, a lot of voters are tired of fear. They’re tired of fearful politicians. And the way to cut through the noise is to stake a clear moral position, name the proper enemies, speak to this discontent, and believe what the tech executives have been saying. Believe them when they say their agenda is to replace human workers and to replace our relationships. They want to be our bosses, and they want to be our girlfriends and our boyfriends. And believe them when they say that they’re willing to risk ending the world.

A lot of what they say about their superintelligent machines and stuff is sci-fi. But I believe Dario Amodei, and I believe Elon Musk when they both say they think there’s a 20-to-25 percent chance that AI will annihilate humanity. I don’t think their computers are as good, as great, as conscious as they think they are. But I do believe them when they say that’s an acceptable level of risk. That’s what I believe. And that is demented.

Bacon: I interviewed somebody who’s made the same point of just, Listen to what they say. That person’s name is Bernie Sanders. Sanders has come up with this idea of a sovereign wealth fund where the government controls how these companies—I’m not sure how I feel about it. It’s an idea that’s out there, and I’m glad he’s pushing stuff, but I’m not sure that’s where I want to land. I’m curious what you think.

Taylor: I’m with you. What worries me about it—and you can see this in OpenAI’s openness to some version of this—these companies are not against it. They have very inflated stock valuations at this point. They might like to have—they’ve been seeking to merge with the federal government.

Bacon: Sure.

Taylor: They’re like, Let’s do it. Let’s get married. I don’t love a scenario where the American people have even more exposure or investment in these firms and this technology being, quote-unquote, profitable—the profit is, at this point, based on very socially pernicious consequences. The displacement of labor, the burning of immense amounts of fossil fuel.

The climate dimension of this is just incredibly critical. There was just a very reputable academic study that came out that said due to the build-out of new crypto and AI data centers, the demands of the energy sector could increase by almost 30 percent in the next four years alone. I don’t want the American people to have a piece of a toxic asset. That’s it.

Industrial policy, though—Trump has shown that industrial policy is possible. Under different conditions, in different countries or with different leaders, you can use those tools in really powerful ways. You can say renewable energy only. You can say labor protections. You can say privacy protections. You can say accurate data sets. You can say all sorts of things using the power of the state. But the proposal on the table is not going in that direction.

I also think one of the biggest bulwarks against this technology is investing in social services. In other words, the more excellent our health care is, the less we want an AI doctor. The better funded our schools are and the lower the teacher-to-student ratio, the less we’re tempted by the idea of plugging every kid into a Google-controlled iPad.

In this book with Naomi Klein that we have coming out in September, that’s part of it: We need to make the real human living world irresistible and supportive and secure enough that part of the appeal of these virtual tools is diminished.

Right now, people are turning to AI because sometimes it’s the only option. That’s the vicious cycle that we are in, where the diminishment of public services feeds a demand for tools that further degrade those services and also further enrich the people who own them.

Bacon: You mentioned the book you’re doing with Naomi Klein. The title is End Times Fascism. So tell me what “end times fascism” is.

Taylor: Yeah. The subtitle is And the Fight for the Living World, so it’s not all negative. “End times fascism”—it’s our attempt to understand what kind of fascism we are living through, what has changed. It’s based on a piece that we wrote for The Guardian that came out not this April but the April before. Essentially, it’s looking at the main constituencies of this far-right alliance. Fascism historically is always a weird amalgam. That’s what the word “fascism” comes from—it’s a bundle. It’s always contradictory. We’re looking at what is making up the reactionary right today. The tech sector is a major prong, as well as the religious right and this ethnonationalist front as well.

Bacon: Let’s pursue one piece. What is the “end times” part? I think people know what fascism is.

Taylor: The “end times” part is that this is an alliance that is flirting with the end of the world. They’re so comfortable in the sense that we will make it. On the tech side, this is just part of being alive today: You’re like, Oh, there’s another bunker. There was a recent piece about Peter Thiel going to Argentina, and part of it is he loves Milei and his libertarian policies, and also, if there’s a nuclear war, maybe it’ll be OK there.

Or we have people leading the charge into these wars in the Middle East thinking that they’re going to hasten Armageddon, because they’re in these biblical narratives.

We are operating in a moment of unprecedented global crises. The climate crisis, as much as we’re not talking about it these days, is very real. The threat of artificial intelligence—my idea of what the threat is might not perfectly align with what Musk is saying, or Altman, or Amodei, but there are very real dangers here.

The dangers are real, and we have world-destroying tools that our species has not had before. So we’re trying to think about what that means for our politics and how the hell we get out of this.

Bacon: You and I met in 2022 or 2023. You were working at the Debt Collective, and the thing you all were working on then was getting the Biden administration to forgive—you always said “don’t say forgive”—

Taylor: Don’t say “forgive.”

Bacon: Cancel. It’s an important distinction. Cancel student debt. I want to ask you about—we’re about to start this Democratic primary. Why Biden lost and why Biden wasn’t popular—I think the narrative the Democratic Party has concluded is that he was a little too left on economics and a little too focused on the college grads and not focused on the working class.

And the embodiment of bad ideas was canceling student debt. I think you’re going to hear 15 candidates say a version of that, even the quote-unquote progressive ones. So respond to the [idea that] the student debt policy was emblematic of Biden’s bad instincts.

Taylor: Certainly an idea, and it’s being pushed by the corporate wing of the Democratic Party, mostly.

Zooming out—I helped found a group called the Debt Collective, which is the first union of debtors. We have been organizing people—student borrowers, also medical debtors, people with back rent debt—to fight, inspired by the example of the labor union. Essentially, people who lack wealth need to have power in numbers. We need to have solidarity in order to push for political change.

We never talk about forgiveness because we don’t think that people need to be forgiven for going into medical debt, or going into student debt, or going into credit card debt. If you live in a state where the minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, I don’t really think it’s your fault if you end up having to borrow to make ends meet.

Yesterday, there was news that the Trump administration is now thinking about further eroding the Affordable Care Act, but offering people loans to cover their medical emergencies. So debt’s not always a choice.

What we are saying at the Debt Collective is, again, a clear and moral position. Guess what? People should have the right to be educated. We live in an incredibly complicated society. We at some point decided that public education, K-12, should exist, and that people should be able to go to school and get that level of education. We live in a more complicated world. Let’s add four years.

This is how higher education in the United States actually began, if you go back and you look at the GI Bill and the building of these incredible public institutions of learning and research. These were public goods that became privatized over time and became financed by tuition, which means financed by debt. That is a new development. So that’s our proposition: Let’s cancel student loans and let’s make college free as a public good.

That feels to me all the more urgent right now in this moment of AI. It’s actually very connected to the AI discussion. When we’re talking about, Oh my God, what is knowledge? What is truth? How do we discern fact from fiction?—the fight for public education is actually incredibly urgent.

And the right knows this! Why is the right laser-focused on attacking education, attacking academic research, attacking funding for science? Because they know that it is a threat to their oligarchic and racist and misogynist ambitions. In fact, the Heritage Foundation released a report recently that said, Too many women are going to college because they get subsidized student loans and there’s federal investment. And when they do that, they just don’t have enough of the right kind of white babies that we want them to have. This should be a Democratic Party issue. And instead they’re—

Bacon: When you said “this,” you mean free college, higher education, defending colleges.

Taylor: Defending it as a public good, not, Oh, you’ll get job training. Maybe we’ll fix the economy with some education. No. Education is something that matters for a democratic society and that people should be able to access.

Biden should have listened to us, because we laid out a way to cancel student debt quickly and efficiently. If I had been in charge, I would have also canceled all the debt owed to veterans from military hospitals and created an alliance, presented it as solidaristic. Instead there was a lot of misinformation about the demographics—who is a student debtor. There was always this idea as though they all went to Harvard or something.

No—if you go to Harvard, you actually don’t graduate with student debt, because there’s this huge endowment that is owned by this tiny little university. Most people with student debt went to for-profit colleges, to vocational colleges, to public schools. Forty percent of people with student debt don’t have college degrees because they couldn’t manage to get through school because they worked three jobs.

So this is definitely going to be a live issue. Right now, the Debt Collective is continuing to fight. We think there should be another payment pause, because people are in such a financial emergency and the Trump administration has thrown the student loan system into such incredible disarray.

Debt is exploding under Donald Trump because cost of living has not come down, because of the changes to the student loan system. They’re attacking programs like the SAVE plan, which listeners probably know about. They’re attacking subsidized student loans looking forward.

This is going to be, unfortunately—it’s very tragic to say—more of an issue and more of a pain point for the American people. Instead of running away from this issue, the Democrats should own it and say, We’re going to do it, and we’re going to do it right this time, and we’re going to understand why the right has made higher education such a focus of their attacks.

The last thing I’ll say is: If they don’t, the right is going to take this issue. Just like the Democrats risk the right owning the data center issues and the antiwar space, I have spent the last year listening to right-wing podcasters. I have taken in so much Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes and Nick Shirley. You name it, I’ve listened to it.

Bacon: Bless you, because I’m not going to.

Taylor: They talk about debt all the time. Tucker Carlson took the stage at CPAC, the big conservative conference, and said, We need debt strikes against credit card lenders. Nick Shirley—why are people believing this kid when he’s doing these investigations into the welfare state? [Because] he’s like, We’re all mad because we have student debt. This is an issue in American people’s lives. People are in debt. They cannot pay.

And the problem is … when the right takes these issues, guess what? The problem isn’t the economic system at large. It’s not capitalism. No, it’s the Jewish bankers. It’s the immigrants somehow driving up the cost of something, so you have to borrow more. It’s incredibly dangerous for the Center for American Progress—or name other names—to run away from this issue, because they are then ceding very real pain and a very real problem to faux-populists who will only deepen the problem.

That is something I’m worried about. What does it say about a party when you can’t just say, People deserve education. We stand behind education as a public good. We want people to use their real minds. We want people to learn things?

Bacon: So last question. I got an early edition and mostly finished reading this book called Crossing the Red Line: Biden, His Advisers, and Israel’s War in Gaza. The author’s name is Akbar Shahid Ahmed. He was at the Huffington Post for a while and is now at a place called NOTUS. He was one of the leading reporters in the behind-the-scenes accounts of the Biden administration ignoring federal law in terms of arming the Israelis and allowing the genocide to happen.

The question I’m going to ask you in a democracy sense is: What do we do with a political party that I’m going to be voting for that legitimized the genocide? There’s talk now about how the people who worked for Biden, who were involved in the policy, should not get jobs in government in the future. I’m not really sure—if Jake Sullivan can’t be secretary of state, I’m not sure what that really does for me.

But in a certain sense, what should we do? How do we deal with a party that wants to say, We’re going to defend democracy in this country, but leaned into legitimizing a genocide and really won’t apologize for it even now? A lot of the leaders in the party are still much more focused on Israel is good than genocide is bad.

Taylor: That’s a huge question. How do we build the power to transform American electoral politics when we are locked into this two-party, first-past-the-post system that I know you have talked about a lot with your listeners?

There are major impediments in terms of just the way our politics are structured, and it’s getting worse—with the attacks on voting rights and the all-in on gerrymandering. Now you can do it for partisan purposes.

Bacon: And it’s happening everywhere, yeah.

Taylor: People need to get organized. Often when I give talks in public, people raise their hand and go, What can I do about all the problems you’re naming? My response is always, You have to join with other people. You have to find some political home where you are. It doesn’t have to be perfect. There is no perfect solution. There is no button that will save the world. You have to build power with people where you are.

If it’s a data center fight, join a data center fight. If it’s Indivisible or a chapter of DSA, or if you have the ability to form a union or join a union. A tenant union. Join the Debt Collective. We have to join things, because they have money, and we have the many in theory, but we have to be organized to exert collective power. We need that organizational force, and then we need that moral clarity.

We were told right after the 2024 election, Oh, there’s a vibe shift. Cruelty is cool now. We can say now that was bullshit, and it was wishful thinking, not just on the right, but among some in the Democratic Party.

Bacon: Today is the day to abandon trans people was literally said, from November to January after the election, by all these people.

Taylor: It was real wish-casting. I think, no, we’re not throwing people under the bus. We’re going to have moral clarity. Naomi and I end this book by saying: Yeah, we need to say, International law, we should try it. Universality, let’s try it. Let’s really mean it. These are principles that we take for granted. But if you actually try to enact them, they’re really radical. That’s the horizon we need to work for.

At this point, on the issue of Palestine, the American people in general are absolutely opposed to what happened and what transpired. There’s still just enough democracy in our diminishing and racing-towards-fascism society that the party is going to have to respond to that.

We just need the courage of our convictions, and we need to organize. That’s it. That means doing Substack Lives and talking, but it also means getting offline, meeting with people, and building those relationships and doing the annoying work of social change.

Bacon: The thing I’ve been heartened by the last year—until this conversation—was thinking about the New York race where they had this unknown person who brought enthusiasm, energized people, and also had a lot of moral clarity in Zohran. But the data center fight might be a better example of the organized democracy we really need. It’s not about one person—it’s about the many.

Taylor: And it is an opportunity for people to see how much they have in common with each other and to break us out of these cartoonish narratives about each other. That’s also why I stay committed to the Debt Collective, because medical debt—that’s another huge unifying point.

Something like 92 percent of people, according to polls, believe that medical debt should be all canceled. There are so many issues. The issue of money out of politics. There are so many issues that people could organize around.

On the electoral reform front, it’s more parties. You know what we hate? We hate the Democrats and the Republicans at this moment. A more-parties movement could actually be one way of framing a horizon—more proportional representation, money out of politics.

That’s not to downplay what we’re up against. I’ve been in the trenches for a long time at this point, and it’s hard out there. The presence of a fascist trillionaire is going to make it that much harder. But that means we have to meet the moment, and we have to get organized. There’s so much to work with right now. That whole moment where they were like, Progressives are over. We’re on this reactionary train. Get on board—no. That was a total lie.

There’s something bubbling up in this moment. As a result, even after writing a book called End Times Fascism, I’m not completely discouraged.

Bacon: That left me thinking, is it better to be focused on one person or one movement these next couple of years? How important is it that AOC or Ro Khanna fill all our needs and runs the greatest campaign of all time? Is there any alternative to that?

Taylor: To me, the electoral dimension is important. But the American political system is geographically based. Ultimately, I vote in a primary, I vote in an election, I donate to people I like. But that’s not where the work is. These people are not messiahs. AOC’s one person in a large Congress, and she’s in a party that has the minority. So it really should only take a tiny amount of my brain space.

What really matters is how we are organizing in other realms to change conditions or to spread different ideas. That’s why I’ve stayed dedicated to the Debt Collective for all these years—it’s a space where I can help build power with other people and change the political conversation and maybe change the political terrain.

But sometimes we spend too much time on the horse race and expect too much of people who are in these elected positions, when what we need to do is continue to work so that they actually are able to exercise more power in the ways that we want them to.

Bacon: Great place to end. Astra, tell people where they can find your work—I know you’re on social media and so on.

Taylor: On all of the platforms that are bad. But really, what I want people to do is: If you have debt, or if you consider yourself an ally of people who lack wealth, join the Debt Collective. That’s my top request all the time.

Bacon: Astra, thanks for joining me. I appreciate it. Good to see you.

Taylor: Thanks for having me.

Now that Donald Trump has reached a ceasefire with Iran, the scrutiny of it has been brutal, making it obvious that he got nothing of significance. In a rambling monologue to reporters, Trump excoriated Barack Obama’s Iran deal for making billions in funding available to the Iranians. But this is actually a self-own: Trump’s own arrangement uses a very similar mechanism, opening up funds as an incentive to get Iran to agree to constraints on its nuclear program later. As Tom Nichols, a staff writer at The Atlantic, says on today’s episode, Trump is “doing it exactly the way Obama did it.” And that’s after Trump also waged a needless war that cost us tens of billions of dollars, depleted our stockpiles, killed some Americans and many Iranians, strained our alliances, and wrecked the global economy. Nichols discusses his new piece arguing that the U.S. capitulated to Iran, explains how Trump left us worse off than before, and walks us through what will happen next, with Trump in a weakened state. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.

After nearly four grueling months, President Donald Trump is trying to end the war he and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu kicked off in February—but neither Republicans nor Israeli officials are happy with the “Art of the Deal” guy’s dealmaking.

Trump gloated that a deal to end the war was complete on his 80th birthday on Sunday. “I hereby fully authorize the toll free opening of the Strait of Hormuz, and, simultaneously herewith, authorize the immediate removal of the United States Naval blockade,” he wrote on Truth Social.

But despite the president’s insinuation that he had just created peace and opened a vital trade route with one social media post, the deal isn’t actually done. The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that Trump is actually hoping to open the Strait and finish his peace deal on Friday. Trump appropriately backtracked in comments to reporters. “Ships are starting to go out now, and on Friday it will be completely opened,” he said.

And Trump may still be promising a shorter timeline than he can actually achieve. Senior U.S. officials told reporters on Monday that it could take over two weeks for the strait to fully open. The officials also said the text of the deal between the U.S. and Iran would be released by Wednesday—Trump said he expected it to be released Friday.

But the inconsistent statements don’t end there. While the White House has been saying for weeks that Iran won’t get financial relief until it dismantles its nuclear capabilities, Trump said on Sunday that the nation will be allowed to export oil and open its ports immediately after the peace deal is signed. Iran has alleged the deal will give it a whopping $12 billion in relief before negotiations even begin, and that the U.S. has agreed to support reconstruction efforts worth $300 billion down the line. American officials have denied this.

Trump’s contradictory messaging, as well as his perceived reconciliation with Iran, has annoyed Netanyahu—one source told the Journal the Israeli leader is seeking a meeting with the president ASAP—and Republicans back home, who have criticized the president’s refusal to release the details of the peace deal he claims is complete.

“If you want people to stop speculating about the [Memorandum of Understanding], release the MOU,” Fox News host Mark Levin wrote on X. “Don’t brief a few anointed ones to control the narrative and expect everyone else to sit silently. That’s not how our country works.… Controlling the narrative can only last so long.”

The editors of National Review, a conservative magazine frequently critical of Trump, chimed in with an op-ed titled, “Release the Text of the Iran Deal,” lambasting the president for the disparities between his public statements and those from Iran.

“There is the possibility that Trump would return the U.S. to Obama’s failed Iran deal that Trump rightfully tore up in his first term, which would have all the makings of a humiliation after all of the president’s tough talk,” the piece reads.

No less than James Lindsay, an author and mathematician who made a name for himself posting far-right conspiracy theories on social media, called the agreement a “very bad deal built on a very fundamental misconception.”

The Trump administration doesn’t appear to have its story straight on the tentative peace deal between the U.S. and Iran.

President Trump said on Monday that “the deal is already signed and the strait is already partially opened,” referring to the Strait of Hormuz. “Ships are starting to go out now, and on Friday it will be completely opened.” But senior U.S. officials told The Wall Street Journal at the same time that it could take over two weeks for normal shipping traffic to resume in the strait. On top of that, a spokesperson for the Iranian Foreign Ministry said that a “maritime service fee” would still be charged for ships traversing the strait.

Those same U.S. officials also said that the full text of the deal would be released within two days, contradicting Trump, who said he expected the full text of the deal to be released by Friday.

A major sticking point for Iran, the end of Israeli strikes on Lebanon, is being disputed by Israeli officials. Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said Monday that the Israel Defense Forces wouldn’t withdraw from southern Lebanon, and far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said that “Israel is not subordinate to the United States, and we are an independent and sovereign state.”

“We must not withdraw from any territory that our fighters have occupied and cleared of terrorist infrastructure,” Ben-Gvir added. Trump already criticized Israel on Sunday for airstrikes on the southern suburbs of Beirut “on a special day when we are so close to a Peace Deal with Iran.”

Trump and Vice President JD Vance digitally signed the tentative deal on Sunday, and a formal signing ceremony is scheduled to take place in Switzerland on Friday. But no U.S. allies in Europe, or the G7, have seen the full text, nor has Israel or anyone in Congress. Their objections could still hamstring the agreement, especially if Trump has made unacceptable concessions.

There can only be one Dan Sullivan.

A top Alaskan election official ruled Monday that a man sharing the same name as Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan is ineligible to participate in the Last Frontier State’s Senate primary in August.

In a letter addressed to the challenging Sullivan, Division of Elections Director Carol Beecher wrote that his declaration of candidacy was “not filed in order to declare an actual good-faith candidacy for the office of United States Senator, but was instead filed with a purpose to confuse or mislead and to thereby compromise the ballot’s fairness or neutrality.”

Beecher said she had reached that conclusion based on evidence that the 69-year-old retired teacher had “never used” the moniker Dan Sullivan and had similarly “never before professed” a Republican Party affiliation.

“Indeed, I conclude that the preponderance of the evidence is that you chose this new nickname and party affiliation because that name and party affiliation happen to be the name and party affiliation of another candidate in the race,” Beecher wrote.

She added that he had 30 days to appeal the decision but noted that ballots for the August primary would be printed on June 28, a timeline that will likely shut him out of the race altogether.

The new Sullivan filed to run as a Republican in the Senate primary last month, days before the filing deadline. State Republicans have since argued that Sullivan worked with Democrats to cook up the scheme, accusing him of attempting to snatch votes from the two-term senator in a flagrant bid to aid Mary Peltola, a former U.S. representative and the leading Democrat on the ballot.

In a social media post Sunday, Sullivan said he believed he “met the qualification” to run.

“I entered this race because I am unhappy with the 12 year record of the current Senator and I feel we need a change,” he wrote. “It’s that simple.”

President Donald Trump says he’s made a solid peace deal with Iran—but isn’t there someone he forgot to ask?

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is looking to schedule an immediate meeting with Trump, likely back in Washington, a person familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal Monday.

There is just no way that Netanyahu is thrilled about Trump’s plan to stop bombing Iran, something the Israeli leader has been dreaming about for decades.

It was Netanyahu who pulled the United States into this “joint” conflict, selling the narrative that Iran was building nuclear weapons—even when U.S. intelligence confirmed there was no imminent threat. In the early days of the war, Secretary Marco Rubio admitted that the U.S. went to war because the administration “knew that there was going to be an Israeli action. We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces.”

If Trump ends the war now, Netanyahu won’t walk away with anything. It’s unclear what the exact terms of the peace deal are—or whether any firm commitments have been made at all—but the U.S. has failed to satisfy Israeli objectives to execute regime change, undermine regional militias, or significantly upend Iranian missile production.

It’s also not clear what this deal will mean for Israel’s military campaign in Lebanon. On a phone call Monday, U.S. senior officials made clear that an Israeli withdrawal was not a condition of the deal, and that if Iran was not able to control Hezbollah, then Israel would have the right to respond.

Israeli officials were quick to condemn Trump’s deal with Iran, The Washington Post reported earlier Monday.

Itamar Ben Gvir, Netanyahu’s national security minister and an influential far-right leader, slammed the deal on social media. “Trump’s agreement does not bind us. Israel is not subject to the United States, and we are an independent and sovereign country,” he wrote on X. Of course, Israel’s and U.S. military efforts are thoroughly linked.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, another far-right member of Netanyahu’s coalition, said that Trump’s agreement was “bad for Israel and the entire free world. Period.”

The Republican Party is gung-ho for the second coming of former President Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, though this time, reaching similar terms will come at a tremendous cost to American taxpayers.

In spite of the GOP’s well-worn insistence on federal frugality, some conservative lawmakers are suddenly in favor of the Trump administration’s reported plan to provide hundreds of billions in reconstructive aid to Iran.

In an interview with Fox News Monday, Florida Representative Brian Mast defended the expense on the basis that “we destroyed so much.”

“OK, maybe they do end up getting $20 billion, let’s say—we’re still $300 to $500 billion ahead considering we destroyed their Navy, destroyed their Air Force, destroyed all those nuclear facilities I already spoke about, their steel manufacturing, their drone manufacturing,” Mast said.

“We destroyed all that, and closed their ports,” he added. “We’re pretty far ahead.”

Rep. Brian Mast: "Ok, maybe they do end up getting $20 billion, let's say. Let's say we're still $300 to $500 billion ahead considering we destroyed their navy, destroyed their air force ... "

(So American taxpayers paid both to bomb Iran and then for Iran's reconstruction ... ) pic.twitter.com/kYNSNs4zhu

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 15, 2026

The White House and Tehran have already signed a peace deal, though the exact specifications of the agreement have not yet been revealed (and are still being hashed out). The final draft reportedly proposes the immediate reopening of the Strait of Hormuz under Iran’s direction, a commitment from the U.S. not to interfere in Iranian affairs, and a reiteration of Iran’s commitment not to produce nuclear weapons, echoing language included in the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, according to a senior Iranian official who spoke with Reuters.

The most contentious point of the plan, however, is a reported $300 billion reconstruction fund, as well as billions more in unfrozen Iranian assets and forfeited sanctions—all of which will be bankrolled by U.S. taxpayers.

That’s nearly 160 percent of the financial investment that the U.S. has put into Ukraine since Russia attacked it in 2022. That sum hovers around $188 billion, according to the U.S. special inspector general for Operation Atlantic Resolve.