Too many AI agents can get in each other's way
Can This Well-Known Florida Democrat Survive the Progressive Surge?
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.
Florida Republicans totally changed the state’s districts earlier this year to create more GOP-held U.S. House seats. Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the one-time Democratic National Committee chair who has been in the House since 2005, is among those whose district has been redrawn. So instead of running in the now Republican-leading 25th District that she currently represents, the congresswoman is seeking another term from the 20th District in South Florida, which is heavily Democratic. But the area that now comprises the 20th District has long been represented by a Black House member. So the 20th District primary has turned into a battle over race and ideology. Several Black candidates are running and blasting Wasserman Schultz for pursuing a seat that could be held by a Black person at a time when Republicans are diminishing Black representation throughout the South. One of those Black candidates is Elijah Manley, an educator. In the latest edition of Right Now, Manley discussed both his candidacy and the divides within the Democratic Party. He criticized Wasserman Schultz for past votes for military aid to Israel, said the Democratic Party needed more fighters, and described himself as a progressive in the mold of Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The primary is August 18.
Hyperscale, hypersensitive: US teacher cuffed for applauding datacenter critics
Trump Administration Moves to Open American Samoa’s Waters to Deep-Sea Mining
This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
The Trump administration is moving closer to opening up US waters for deep-sea mining—a contentious and largely untested industry focused on extracting mineral-rich deposits from the ocean floor containing cobalt, copper, nickel, and manganese.
Last week, the Department of the Interior’s newly created Marine Minerals Administration (MMA) announced a proposal to hold a lease sale for deep-sea mining activities in federal waters off the coast of American Samoa in the South Pacific. If the plans move forward, it would be the first deep-sea mining lease sale in the world. Interested deep-sea mining companies could bid for 20 years of mining rights across more than 31 million acres of American Samoa’s outer continental shelf in an auction tentatively scheduled for November 19, 2026.
The announcement has drawn widespread criticism from environmental advocates and scientists who say any deep-sea mining activities, including preliminary exploratory activities, could pose irreparable harm to the marine environment and the American Samoan people, whose culture and livelihoods are deeply entwined with the ocean.
“Pacific people have made our position clear: we do not want deep-sea mining in our waters,” Sabrina Suluai-Mahuka, founder of Finafinau, an environmental advocacy group in American Samoa, said in a press release. “Our ocean is our home, our food, our culture, and our future, and we are calling on the Administration to stop this reckless lease sale before irreversible harm is done.”
The proposal marks the latest step in the Trump administration’s push to pave the way for deep-sea mining in the US and abroad. Since President Donald Trump signed an executive order last April directing federal agencies to fast-track the issuance of seabed mining permits, the government has sought to position the US as a leader of the emerging industry, despite global opposition.
Supporters of deep-sea mining say critical minerals found on the seafloor may be eventually used to manufacture green technologies and military defense systems.
“It is an incredibly reckless and destructive move to deep seabed mine in this area.”
“Critical minerals have become a strategic asset in global competition, and China’s dominance in the supply of many of these materials creates unacceptable risks for America’s energy, defense and manufacturing sectors,” said Matt Giacona, acting director of the Marine Minerals Administration, in a statement about the latest proposed lease sale. “Advancing this notice is an important step toward building a secure domestic critical minerals supply chain, strengthening US economic and national security, and ensuring America can compete and win in the 21st century.”
But deep-sea mining has not yet been conducted at a commercial scale anywhere in the world. There are still no formalized regulations to govern the industry in the US or globally.
In fact, global delegates are gathering this month in Kingston, Jamaica, at the International Seabed Authority to continue negotiating a long-debated Mining Code that would regulate activities related to extracting deep-sea minerals, including prospecting, exploration, and commercial exploitation in international waters.
Forging ahead without such regulations in place and paving the way for future mining near American Samoa will inevitably result in harm to critical marine ecosystems and the people who depend on them, said Taryn Kiekow Heimer, a senior attorney and director for ocean energy at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
“It is an incredibly reckless and destructive move to deep seabed mine in this area,” she said.
In a statement to Inside Climate News, the MMA wrote that “plans will not be approved before completion of additional technical and environmental reviews to ensure that the activities described will be carried out in a safe and environmentally responsible manner.”
Directly adjacent to the proposed lease area is the Rose Atoll, a national wildlife refuge and marine national monument that was established by President George W. Bush in 2009.
For generations, the remote coral atoll served as a waypoint for Polynesian navigators, and it is still highly revered amongst Indigenous peoples in the Pacific as part of their cultural heritage.
Activities associated with deep sea mining would likely disrupt this precious interconnected ecosystem.
From an ecological standpoint, this atoll is extremely important, said Alan Friedlander, an affiliate researcher at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, based at the University of Hawaii, who conducted a survey of the area with NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, in the early 2000s.
“It’s one of the last largely intact marine ecosystems that we have under US jurisdiction,” Friedlander said.
Its remote location and protected status have allowed its colorful reefs to flourish even as others around the world suffer from global warming and threats like overfishing, dredging, and pollution. The corals are largely nourished by nutrients deposited by thousands of seabirds that nest on the remote atoll’s two islands. Sharks and other apex predators are abundant in surrounding waters, as are giant clams, which are now scarce throughout much of the Pacific due to overharvesting. Migrating humpbacks pass by the atoll, and critically endangered hawksbill sea turtles also nest on its shores.
Activities associated with deep-sea mining would likely disrupt this precious interconnected ecosystem, Friedlander said. That includes everything from increased shipping traffic and underwater noise to sediment plumes generated by some of the machinery that is needed to extract mineral deposits from the seabed.
“We probably should take the precautionary approach to this, and try to understand this complex ecosystem better before we go into activities that potentially have pretty long-term deleterious effects,” he said.
There are still several steps that must be completed before the Marine Minerals Administration finalizes the decision to hold a mining lease sale, including the publication of a final leasing notice.
“Issuance of the notice does not guarantee that a lease sale will be held, nor does it guarantee that any exploration or collection activities will occur should MMA move forward with a sale,” officials said in a public statement.
American Samoa’s governor, Pula’ali’i Nikolao Pula, has 60 days to review and comment on the proposed leasing notice.
“The governor does have a chance to object during these next 60 days,” said Kiekow Heimer.
In the meantime, the governor has encouraged his constituents to share their thoughts on deep-sea mining and any recommendations they have.
“This is an opportunity for our community to provide informed input,” Gov. Pula said in a statement. “I remain steadfast in my position that any such development must be fully transparent, responsible, science-based, and carefully managed to protect our environment, safeguard our vital tuna fisheries and cultural heritage, and deliver meaningful, tangible benefits for the people of American Samoa.”
The History of the NEA Is the History of the Culture Wars
In 2020, four major museums were set to showcase the first retrospective of painter Philip Guston’s work in over 15 years. Spanning five decades, the Canadian American’s work responded to injustices in an ever-evolving style of painting. His art includes a series of paintings made during the ’60s that feature a cartoonish hooded Ku Klux Klansmen as a commentary on the social upheaval Guston saw happening around him. This motif made museums nervous, and they decided to take time to contextualize “the powerful message of social and racial justice that is at the center of Philip Guston’s work,” ultimately delaying the retrospective until 2022.
Artists, curators, and critics said in an open letter that the decision was made because the museums “fear[ed] controversy” and “lack[ed] faith in the intelligence of their audience.” To author and cultural historian Isaac Butler, the decision to postpone was particularly absurd because Guston was a lifelong anti-racist. But more broadly, according to Butler, art isn’t something people need to be protected from; in fact, sometimes it should provoke us.
As he mulled over this art world controversy, he watched the “Don’t Say Gay” bill become law, people lose their jobs over support for DEI, and right-wing figures use free expression to undermine the rights of those who disagreed with them.
His rumination and research culminated in The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America’s Culture Wars. Released in June, the book borrows its name from Robert Mapplethorpe’s posthumous 1989 retrospective, decried by conservatives who claimed a gallery set to display his work was using its National Endowment for the Arts grant to endorse explicit photography. This controversy and the subsequent introduction of an amendment restricting what the NEA could fund marked the official beginning of the war between American art and the “New Right” brewing since the 1970s.
The Perfect Moment maps the history of the NEA, the largest arts funder in the US, and archconservatives like Jesse Helms and Pat Buchanan, who used provocative pieces of art to stir the right’s base into a moral panic. Structured like both a two-act play and nonviolent military history, Butler builds a case for how the battle over American contemporary art laid the groundwork for our present moment.
This history feels particularly urgent now. Since 2025, artists, institutions, and organizations have been questioning how they will survive after $27 million in NEA grants were canceled due to the Trump administration’s DOGE cuts. In the aftermath, several NEA staffers resigned, numerous creative projects halted, and artists like Amy Sherald and Victor “Marka27” Quiñonez reported museums’ efforts to censor them. The Trump administration’s proposed 2027 budget would permanently wind down operations of the NEA, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Institute of Museum and Library Services.
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During my conversation with Butler, we discussed the fight for the arts, where the NEA currently stands, the power of provocateurs, and private funding’s growing influence in art. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
You once said that this story is one “I thought I knew and understood, but I discovered again and again that I didn’t know the half of it.” I was wondering if you could expand a bit on some of those discoveries?
The biggest discovery here—the one that led to the title of the book—was simply how many different enormous social forces were intersecting all at once in this story. The three biggies, of course, are the rise of the religious right, the end of the Cold War, and the AIDS crisis.
A more disheartening discovery was just how much there was a low-key civil war within the art world. I really thought that the art world was unified about free expression and the NEA. But the large institutions really were far more worried about their own funding and prestige than they were about solidarity with artists and smaller organizations.
You finished the book in November 2025. In January, Congress restored 2026 funding to the NEA, NEH, and IMLS. In May, a federal judge ruled that NEH grant cancellations were unconstitutional. But President Donald Trump has now proposed a fiscal budget that would permanently wind down the three agencies. After tracking so much of its history, how do you feel about what’s happening with the NEA now?
I think there’s, like, a really good chance that the NEA does not survive the Trump administration and that we’re going to have to figure out a way to build some new mechanism for arts funding, while also taking care to support state arts agencies, because fully half of the NEA budget just immediately goes to state arts councils. So they’re going to be hurting a lot if the NEA goes away, and that is a local fight that we could all be engaged in, whether we live in Wyoming or Los Angeles.
What you said about the local fight within arts reminded me of a story in your book about how former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani tried to censor the Brooklyn Museum’s 1999 exhibition of Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection for “desecrating religion.” You talked about how it didn’t work because “the arts in New York are big business.” It begs the question of the differences between rural and urban art spaces.
The city runs on art, and in New York City, the arts are big, big, big business—like, the arts pull in a lot of money. So the arts have real power here. The arts are never going to have that kind of power in North Dakota; that’s no knock on North Dakota.
You can still build power. We should not neglect the rural arts. We should not let those go away just because it’s easy to focus on the cities. They do absolutely vital, important work, both from a social perspective and genuinely from an artistic one. And as the attacks on the NEA grew, the endowment turned even more to funding that stuff, so in a weird way, a lot of the art that’s going to be affected by the NEA going away is actually art in red states, because they don’t have the same support funding on a local level.
In the book, you discuss the work of artists like Andres Serrano, Robert Mapplethorpe, and David Wojnarowicz. Could you talk more about the importance of provocateurs in art?
One of the things that art can do is transgress or shock us. I think, as a society, we have a very complicated relationship to that idea. Within the context, specifically of my book, transgressive art had a really important value beyond the artistic, because what was going on was the AIDS crisis. What was going on was that people were dying and our society did not give a shit about the fact that they were dying. Their experiences and their lives and their personhood and their worth was being totally discounted by mainstream society.
Part of why you provoke as an artist is to make the person who has been provoked ask why it was provocative. There’s sort of cheap provocation—like, I could get up on stage and murder a puppy—but that’s not true provocation, that’s just being an asshole.
Art is fundamental to the human condition. It is how we explore it. It is how we express it to other people. It is how we understand it for ourselves.
If you look at the art that’s covered in the book, so much of it is about “This is a point of view that you don’t want to look at and I’m going to force you to look at it and figure out how you feel about it.” And then there was another kind of provocation that was done by artists like Annie Sprinkle, that was actually much more generous. Annie Sprinkle used to do this thing in one of her shows where she would invite the audience to look at her cervix. She gave them like a little flashlight and a little speculum and literally sat there with her legs spread; you would come look at her cervix. That’s very provocative, don’t get me wrong, but the point of that provocation was “Why are we so provoked, it’s just the human body, man? Like, let’s enjoy the fact that we have bodies.”
And people who were at those events, who I interviewed, were just like, “It was so warm and loving and nurturing and healing.” So in a weird way, that’s a provocation as an act of healing. I would say the other thing is sometimes art is created for personal catharsis. Sometimes in the act of that personal catharsis, you create something that is shocking to someone else, even if that wasn’t the intent. So I think there’s a lot of things that transgressive art can do.
In the book, you say, “If art is the dream life of the self, then a nation’s culture is the closest thing it has to a collective unconscious.” What do you think our nation’s relationship with art is saying now unconsciously?
Right now, we’re in a very weird place with art. Now what’s going on is this kind of rise of algorithmic art. You are just being fed things that you already like, so there’s no real discovery. I think that is incredibly deleterious to our souls, to only [ingest] art that we like. The auto play at the end of a video on YouTube or Netflix, like that is literally, I think, anti-human. There’s something very oppressive about it. What the algorithms want is a form of addiction because they monetize your attention. So that’s one thing that’s going on that I think is really dangerous.
You wrote: “The transformations of the Endowment and the field were part of a sea change in how we conceive of our society, one that is less humane and more governed by the relentless logic of capitalism. Our nation’s soul, which the arts are meant to enrich so that we could be wise stewards of our democracy and control our technology rather than the other way around, has suffered for it.” It’s interesting to think about the importance of art to our humanity, while also considering how elitism within art has exacerbated that communication issue you mentioned.
John Frohnmayer, who’s the chair of the NEA for the first half of my book, makes this point when he has his first congressional confirmation hearing. People are like, “Well, the arts are elitist, why are we funding them?” He’s like, “If you want the art more elitist, cut government funding,” and he was absolutely right. They did. In fact, institutional art, the elite arts, got more elitist as a result.
I firmly believe in the importance of art to our humanity. And I just think it’s sort of obviously true, and the way we know that it’s obviously true is that human beings have always made art. They made art in the gulag. They made art in Auschwitz. They made art during slavery. You can put people in the worst possible, most degrading, dehumanizing, genocidal circumstance, and they will make art about that experience.
So clearly, art is fundamental to the human condition. It is how we explore it. It is how we express it to other people. It is how we understand it for ourselves. So the more impoverished the cultural life of the nation, I genuinely believe the more impoverished on a kind of soul level we are.
I’m not saying reading books creates empathy or whatever. I think there’s, like, a cheap way that we talk about it that’s not true. The Nazis loved classical music, so, like, what are we even talking about? But I do think that it is true that art is a necessary part of being a human being and that when we as a nation decide that art is not important or art is just a consumer product or whatever, we are making a decision about what kind of people we want to be, and it’s a very dark one.
I found how you describe where art institutions are today with private funding particularly evocative, because it showcases how the arts have been sort of backed into a corner trying to survive. I wondered what you thought the role of the general public is in these conversations, if at all? For example, when buildings are named after corporations or when Lauren Sánchez Bezos is an honorary co-chair at the Met Gala, there seems to be a healthy amount of criticism about the role of private funding in art, but it doesn’t seem like conversations can evolve much beyond outrage and distrust of those art institutions.
I mean, the public just doesn’t have a lot of agency when it comes to shaping and persuading large arts institutions. I don’t know if you saw that extraordinary documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed about Nan Goldin and her efforts to get the Sackler name removed from arts institutions around the world. She put in a herculean effort with a whole community of people working with her, but the most important thing she had on her side is that she was a famous artist who could withhold her work to punish arts institutions.
The major constituents of large nonprofits are not their ticket buyers, but their donors. Ticket revenue accounts for less and less of the annual funding needed to keep these institutions afloat, and so, absent funding from elsewhere—like the state—this is all going to get worse. The nonprofit arts system is, at heart, an idealistic enterprise. Nonprofits have to commit to mission statements, filed with the government, in order to get that status. People work for peanuts for those organizations, usually because they believe in the work and believe in the power of art. I am worried that, absent robust state funding, it will simply be impossible for them to truly serve the greater good because they’re often in such financial precarity. The only other revenue source is ticket prices, and museums and theaters and so on continue to jack those up as well, which makes the art in turn less accessible. It’s a vicious circle.
The IRS Is Imploding
In many years of paying taxes, I’ve never had a problem with the IRS. So, I was surprised to receive a letter dated May 25 informing us that my husband and I owe lots more money than we had paid for our 2025 taxes—and of course interest and fines. After reviewing the somewhat cryptic letter, we realized that we did not, in fact, owe any money. The IRS had simply failed to credit quarterly payments that we’d made on time. Because we had all the bank records, it seemed as if this would be a relatively straightforward problem to fix—until I picked up the phone and called the IRS.
Two hours on hold later, I gave up. When I tried again a few days later, the outgoing message informed me, “Due to the high call volume, we are unable to answer your call. Please call back later today or tomorrow.” And I was disconnected. After several more fruitless phone calls over the next week, I asked my accountant for advice. Unfortunately, she said, the dedicated lines for tax practitioners were going unanswered, too. She had never seen it so bad. She had clients who had serious issues to resolve, and there was “no contact available at all.”
At that point, I realized the IRS was finally imploding.
Tax professionals, journalists—including those from Mother Jones—members of Congress and former IRS commissioners had warned this would happen. When Elon Musk’s DOGE service swept into the federal government like a buzzsaw in February last year, one of the first agencies it targeted for wholesale destruction was the IRS. DOGE slashed about a third of the entire IRS workforce in just a few short months. The agency hasn’t had a confirmed commissioner since August last year.
“When, literally overnight, you lose that many people, you’re losing leadership,” former IRS Commissioner John Koskinen told my colleague Michael Mechanic last year. “You really are disabling the IRS.”
“You can’t get rid of 30 percent of your staff and expect to be functional. Things are starting to break.”
In October, the administration created what members of Congress have dubbed the “fake job” of IRS CEO, which Congress never authorized. Trump filled the post with former finance executive Frank Bisignano, even though he is simultaneously in charge of the Social Security Administration.
At an April congressional hearing, Bisignano assured lawmakers that IRS customer service had not suffered at all from the sudden, massive cuts in its workforce. He called 2026 “the most successful filing season in IRS history” and claimed that the Trump administration was proving it was possible to have both “less people and better results.”
My experience, that of many other taxpayers and tax professionals I have spoken with over the past month, as well as the IRS’s own data, suggest otherwise. “You can’t get rid of 30 percent of your staff and expect to be functional,” says Traci DiMartini, the former IRS human capital officer who was one of the first high-ranking officials DOGE pushed out last year. “Things are starting to break.”
Members of Congress have also started to notice. “The Administration laid off close to a third of the IRS workforce, sabotaging its mission, and making it impossible to get someone on the phone to answer even the simplest of questions, let alone resolve issues,” Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.), ranking member of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, said in a statement to Mother Jones. “Yet this Administration refuses to acknowledge the predictable consequences of gutting an agency and keeps telling taxpayers not to believe what they are experiencing.”
Contacting the IRS has never been easy. The agency has been badly underfunded for decades, as Republicans have made it the bête noir of the federal government and starved it for resources. Several of them, including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), have called to abolish the IRS outright. “There are 93,000 agents at the IRS,” he said in June. “I think we should put a padlock on that building and put every one of them down on our southern border.” (His numbers were actually outdated: Thanks to the DOGE cuts, as of January 2026, the IRS had fewer than 75,000 employees, according to the Treasury Department’s Inspector General for Tax Administration.)
In 2022, under President Joe Biden, Democrats in Congress pushed through the Inflation Reduction Act, a kitchen-sink bit of legislation that included some $80 billion over 10 years to shore up and modernize the IRS. The new funding allowed the agency to hire and train thousands of new customer service employees.
Republicans like Cruz, who have long believed that the IRS has unfairly targeted conservatives, immediately launched a conspiracy theory suggesting that Biden was going to use the money to hire a shadow army of 87,000 armed agents to harass innocent Americans. They eventually clawed back most of that funding, but the IRS nonetheless invested what remained in trying to make life better for ordinary taxpayers. In 2024, the service answered more than 1 million more calls from taxpayers during filing season than it had the previous year, and reduced the average hold time from 28 minutes to 3, according to IRS data.
Since Trump took office, all of those metrics have reversed, particularly after the DOGE workforce cuts fully took effect in October. “It’s infinitely worse in 2026 than it was in 2025,” says Richard Champion, a New Jersey lawyer who has practiced tax law for nearly 50 years and represents low-income taxpayers in federal tax court pro bono. When he used to call the IRS practitioner line, he says he used to be able to get into the call-back queue so he didn’t have to sit on hold for hours. That option is increasingly unavailable. Now even when he does manage to reach someone, he says, they are often new and can’t help, so they forward him to someone else, and those calls inevitably get dropped. “I have at least four or five cases where I’m just stymied,” he says.
“There are some days I will literally be on the phone with the IRS five or six hours. And that’s because my call dropped, so I’m calling back again. It’s horrible. It’s the worst that I’ve seen.”
Sakinah Tillman runs the tax clinic at the University of the District of Columbia’s David Clark School of Law. She has worked with low-income taxpayers for more than a decade and says a few years ago, she’d get someone on the phone in 15 minutes. Now, however, “There are some days I will literally be on the phone with the IRS five or six hours,” she told me. “And that’s because my call dropped, so I’m calling back again. It’s horrible. It’s the worst that I’ve seen.” Even more troubling, she told me, is that the managers have all but disappeared. “Every time I’ve been making a request for a manager in the last year,” she said, “I’m not getting a call back.”
These aren’t just anecdotal one-offs. A June report to Congress from the Taxpayer Advocate Service, an independent agency within the IRS, found that live humans answered 20 percent fewer calls during this year’s tax filing season and that hold times jumped anywhere from 81 to 161 percent, depending on the line called. Only 17 percent of the calls handled by the “voicebot” system were completed. Most callers got frustrated and either asked to be transferred to a live person or hung up.
The worst service came on phone lines dedicated to people who owed money and needed help, such as an installment plan. Live operators answered only 30 percent of more than 3 million such calls this year between January and April 18. Those lucky taxpayers who got through waited an average of 45 minutes on hold.
The nonprofit Center for Taxpayer Rights this year also conducted its own research on how bad the IRS call responsiveness has gotten. The group discovered that the government’s own measurements showed that wait times increased more than 70 percent in 2026, even though the agency received 50 percent fewer calls to its main 1040 help line than during the previous year. CTR testers then called various IRS phone numbers and found that nearly 40 percent of the calls were disconnected—mostly by the IRS.
Nina Olson, the executive director of the Center for Taxpayer Rights, ran the Taxpayer Advocate Service inside the IRS for nearly 20 years. She spent a day on hold herself during filing season as part of the study. Since then, she says, the service has likely gotten even worse because the IRS had shuffled staff to cover the phones during that busy time. “Where I deal is the morning after,” she said. “The morning after April 16.” Which is exactly when people like me start getting threatening notices from the IRS and can’t get anyone to pick up the phone. “There’s no one there,” Olson said.
During my many hours on hold with the IRS, the outgoing phone messages encouraged me to try to resolve my issues online. But when I logged into my IRS account, I discovered this message: “Account features limited due to partial outage. While you can still access your account, some features are unavailable, including account balance and payment history. If you don’t see what you need, please come back later.” After more than a month of coming back later, I still couldn’t access my payment history.
Tech problems have been a persistent problem at the chronically underfunded revenue service, which is why Biden’s IRA had allocated money for upgrades. Fixing IT problems, though, requires actual humans to do the work. Last year, the Trump administration pushed out more than 40 percent of the agency’s IT department. Most of the remaining employees were moved to Bisignano’s office or deployed to answer the phones during the greatest filing season of all time. Needless to say, the tech-forward team at DOGE did not improve the IRS technology.
Stephanie Liuzzi, a seismic engineer in California, got a letter from the IRS this year saying her tax payment had been rejected because of a problem with the bank account number on her return. The letter instructed her how to pay online, which she did. But in May, she got another letter saying that not only does she still owe money, but she now also owes penalties. After hours on hold with the IRS, she finally reached someone who confirmed that she had in fact paid her bill. But that person couldn’t waive the penalties and transferred Liuzzi to another line for help, where no one ever picked up. “I think everyone just went home,” she told me.
“It is currently refusing to let me reset my password. It keeps trying to send a text to a cell phone I had years ago. I have emailed in scans of my ID, my passport, but without access to that phone, it won’t let me in.”
After many more fruitless calls, she finally paid an $8 penalty online, but she hasn’t been able to confirm that her case is resolved because she can’t access her online account. “It is currently refusing to let me reset my password,” she told me. “It keeps trying to send a text to a cell phone I had years ago. I have emailed in scans of my ID, my passport, but without access to that phone, it won’t let me in.”
As the deadline for responding to my IRS letter rapidly approached and I continued to fail to reach anyone on the phone, I thought perhaps I could try to seek assistance in person at one of the IRS’s Taxpayer Assistance Centers. The Inflation Reduction Act had included funding to expand them, but the Trump administration has cut the number of fully staffed TACs to 42, from 102, according to a report by the Taxpayer Advocate. But the one where I live is still open, so I was hopeful—until I discovered that taxpayers can’t just walk in without an appointment. And the only way to make an appointment? Call the IRS.
I never got an appointment.
DiMartini, the former IRS human resources chief, has a vivid memory of her first time volunteering to help people with their taxes at a walk-in clinic in Philadelphia in 2024. “It was so humbling,” she recalled. DiMartini encountered lines of people around the block who had been victims of identity theft or unscrupulous tax preparers and women whose ex-husbands had illegally claimed their kids on his taxes. “What are these people going to do now?” she wonders. “As much as the tech bros want to automate everything, you still have to meet people where they’re at. People just want to pay their goddam bills. Why are we making it so hard?”
The IRS’s Taxpayer Advocate Service can help people cut through the bureaucracy, but Trump has decimated that office, too. Barbara Heggie, the managing attorney of Empire Justice Center’s Tax Advocacy Program in Rochester, NY, told me that now, when she really gets stonewalled by the IRS, she goes straight to Congress. “Every congressional office has staff who work on constituent services dealing with federal agency problems,” she said, “including IRS problems.”
“As much as the tech bros want to automate everything, you still have to meet people where they’re at. People just want to pay their goddam bills. Why are we making it so hard?”
Sadly, I am a disenfranchised resident of the District of Columbia, where we are taxed without representation. The closest thing we have to a member of Congress is Eleanor Holmes Norton, an 89-year-old nonvoting delegate with the same power as someone from Guam. Last year, I wrote about her mental deterioration and figured no one in her office would lift a finger to help resolve my tax issues, even if they did such things.
All of these roadblocks left me with one final option: snail mail.
The US Post Office is the last resort for the ever-growing cadre of people who can’t get through the IRS phone lines. Of course, the Trump administration has also gutted the IRS mail room—with predictable results. According to a recent report by the Taxpayer Advocate, the number of unprocessed correspondence and amended returns languishing at the IRS jumped from 3.8 million in 2025 to 7 million this year. “And that was before all the people like you were sending in letters,” CTR’s Nina Olson told me.
The Biden administration had been making some headway in reducing the mail backlog after it had reached epic proportions during the Covid pandemic. With funding from the IRA, the tax agency was able to staff up critical chokepoints in the system, including the mailroom. Charles Garn was one of the recruits hired in 2024 to work at the massive Ogden, Utah, IRS service center, where he was on the frontline opening the mail and sorting and processing 1040 forms and other correspondence from taxpayers.
Almost as soon as he finished his training, DOGE pushed him out. He left in October, along with thousands of other IRS workers who’d taken the “deferred resignation” plan that paid them not to work for three months and then essentially fired them. But he was there long enough to see first-hand the impact of “crippling” staff losses.
When Garn first started, his division would get a massive delivery of papers first thing in the morning. “We’d wipe it all out by the end of the day,” he explained. By the time the staffing cuts had fully kicked in, “We weren’t clearing out the deliveries. People were working harder and pumping out more, but we still weren’t able to meet what we needed to.”
The IRS might not be opening a lot of the mail it receives, but somehow it’s still sending it out. Even before the deadline to respond to my first letter had passed, the IRS sent me a new one reminding me that I have a past-due balance. “If you don’t act now, the IRS may consider levying (seizing) your income or bank account,” my newest missive warned.
The letter was a stark reminder that the collapse of the IRS customer service functions isn’t just an occasional annoyance for taxpayers. It can literally ruin people’s lives. If a taxpayer fails to respond to letters like the ones I got, and to pay an outstanding balance, even if it’s wrong, the IRS can eventually garnish their wages, seize bank accounts, or even take their cars or houses to settle the bill.
These consequences land heavily on those who can least afford it: the elderly, people whose first language is not English, and of course, poor people of all sorts. “Clients don’t have scanners,” says Tillman, who says a lot of correspondence with the IRS now requires such things. “Some don’t have laptops, or if they do, they don’t know how to use them.”
Low-income people are also particularly vulnerable to fraud. “Tax season is one of the most vulnerable times for low-income taxpayers because you have crooked preparers that prey on them,” Tillman says. She usually sees these clients after they get a letter from the IRS ordering them to repay thousands of dollars of the refund they weren’t entitled to.
The Trump administration’s destruction of the IRS has other less obvious harms—even beyond the nearly $900 billion in revenue it won’t be able to collect over the next decade thanks to the staffing cuts. “A lot of the anti-poverty structure of the safety net is embedded in the tax code,” explains Omeed Firouzi, director of the low-income tax clinic at Temple University law school.
The Earned Income Tax Credit, child tax credit, plus the new provisions in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill that exempted tips, overtime and some Social Security payments from taxes—all of that requires people to accurately file a tax return. At the same time, the Big Beautiful Bill also made massive cuts to anti-poverty programs like SNAP and Medicaid, making the credits provided through the tax code even more important.
The Trump administration seems to have grudgingly recognized that the IRS needs more people, if only to collect taxes to pay for its ruinous war in Iran. In February, the Treasury Department gave the IRS permission to hire 8,000 people through September. “These hiring events are an important step in strengthening our workforce and improving the taxpayer experience,” Bisignano said in a June press release announcing a series of hiring fairs across the country.
“Kudos for that, but no one is showing up [to the fairs] because they don’t trust the federal government,” says DiMartini. “It is going to take decades to recover.”
In the meantime, I worked on this story one day to the backdrop of IRS hold music. After an hour and a half of waiting, I stayed on the phone while I went to Sweetgreen and got lunch, ate my salad while I watched Todd Blanche testify before Congress, and then at the two-hour mark … got disconnected.
Transcript: Trumpworld Quietly Shivs Andrew Tate as MAGA Cracks Up
The following is a lightly edited transcript of the July 28 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.
The Trump administration has quietly let it be known that it will not block the extradition of Andrew and Tristan Tate to Britain, where they’re set to face new criminal charges of rape and sex trafficking. This is dividing MAGA, with most MAGA figures rapidly distancing themselves from the Tates, who are big MAGA manosphere superstars, and other MAGA figures defending them. Yet there’s another layer to the story that matters for Democrats and liberals. The Tate brothers’ travails highlight a failing on our part. We all overread the meaning of Trump’s 2024 successes with young men, and as a result, we’ve hamstrung ourselves in winning them back now.
Moira Donegan, a columnist for The Guardian, has a good new piece arguing that we have to break out of that rut. So we’re talking to her about all of it today. Moira, nice to have you on.
Moira Donegan: Thank you so much for having me, Greg. It’s great to be here.
Sargent: So let’s start with who the Tate brothers are. Why are they so important in the MAGA manosphere and MAGA universe? And what is it that they reflect about Trump’s successes with young men?
Donegan: Yeah, so the Tate brothers are really a pair of influencers. Andrew and Tristan Tate are brothers who grew up in the U.K. And Andrew had a career as a professional kickboxer before a star turn on the British reality TV show Big Brother.
But he was kicked off of that show for his alleged treatment of women. And that really became a jumping-off point for the brothers, who became far-right, anti-feminist, anti-woman influencers, as well as running an online pornography business. And they parlayed that into a really pretty massive following, and into some connections with the American right.
And I think in 2024 in particular, the Donald Trump campaign tried to harness what is known as the manosphere—this kind of network of often very popular, far-right, anti-feminist, sort of ideologically misogynist content creators who have achieved a pretty widespread degree of popularity with young men and teenage boys. And the MAGA movement’s courtship of Andrew and Tristan Tate was really the sort of centerpiece of that project.
Sargent: All right, so the Tate brothers were just arrested in Miami, and the U.K.’s prosecution service says they face seven counts of rape, three counts involving sex trafficking, three counts of assault, and 19 related to porn. The Trump administration has quietly announced that it won’t intervene, which means they are going to get sent back.
But that’s not all. Many people around Trump are abandoning the Tates now, including Donald Jr., Barron Trump, Alina Habba, Candace Owens, and many more. Given all this, it’s likely that Trump has signaled to his loyalists that the Tates are now finished in MAGA world, right? Moira, what do you make of all this?
Donegan: Well, it’s a real 180 from where we were just under a year ago. Because last year, the Tates were actually under house arrest in Romania, where they had headquartered their sort of porn camgirl empire, and where they were accused, once again, of sexual violence and sex trafficking.
In that case, members of the Trump administration, then sort of newly restored to power, leaned on the Romanian authorities quite heavily to allow the Tates to leave the nation of Romania, to be released from house arrest, to be released from their travel ban, and to escape the prosecution there. That Romanian investigation has since really ground to a halt, right?
And this is also kind of a revival of the British charges, because these incidents that the Tates are being prosecuted for now in the U.K. stem from actions they allegedly took between 2010 and 2017. That British investigation had been further hampered—a sort of civil review indicated that there was widespread police misconduct in that case, right?
So what you have seen now is these old charges being revived, after the Tate brothers had been protected both by police malfeasance and by the Trump administration’s intervention in these other jurisdictions.
Sargent: Right. So it’s not like Trump is shy about intervening on behalf of the Tates. By the way, you do have some in MAGA standing by the Tates. Tucker Carlson says the Tates are getting prosecuted because they “criticized Israel.” One Republican congressman, Abe Hamadeh, opposed extradition, describing the prosecution of the Tates as lawfare. Prominent MAGA influencer Vincent Oshana called the charges politically driven.
Moira, I think the key thing here is that Tucker and these others are actually speaking to a real existing constituency with this stuff. There’s still a bloc of young men out there who in some sense see Trump, or at least some around him, as kind of MAGA establishment sellouts, right? They’re allied with Israel, they’re going to war for Israel, they won’t stand by the Tates when they’re getting prosecuted for rape. They’re total establishment squishes, basically, right?
Donegan: You know, I think it’s really interesting to see who is lining up behind the Tates even now, in 2026, and who is throwing them overboard after sort of sticking their necks out for them in 2025. The MAGA coalition is big, and it’s always been more internally contradictory than I think the conventional media narratives about it have given credit for, right?
So MAGA, the far right in America in general, really has unified a bunch of different interests, a bunch of different styles of conservatism, around, among other things, a real contempt of women—anti-feminism, misogyny, male supremacy, and male domination. These have been a glue that has held together a lot of different strands of conservatism, right?
But of those different strands, Tate’s style of vulgar, aggressively sexual, lewd, promiscuous masculinity is not the sole style. I think it is closest to Donald Trump’s personal preferred style of masculinity—the sort of tight clothes, fast cars, and sort of sexual braggadociousness. That does seem Trump to me.
But there’s other elements in the coalition that are looking for a more, you know, puritanical rather than prurient form of sexual politics. I’m thinking, of course, of Ben Shapiro, the far-right Jewish but, quite sexually staid, we might say, influencer, who has tried to make his mark on the MAGA coalition. I’m thinking of JD Vance, who is trying to position himself as a sort of emissary between Silicon Valley and the Christian far right.
And I think as we look to the post-Trump reordering of this coalition, you’re going to see these kinds of masculinity come into question. Not because any of these guys or these forces on the conservative right are suddenly rediscovering the value of women’s dignity and having some sort of woke feminist awakening, but because their preferred style of masculinity, their preferred sort of aesthetic of power, doesn’t really have room for guys like the Tates.
Sargent: I think it’s worth reviewing some history here just for a second to get at what you’re saying. So Donald Trump wins in 2016, and in a very big and famous moment, he insults Hillary Clinton’s looks from behind during a debate. So he abuses Hillary relentlessly, misogynistically. It’s just disgusting all the way down. Same happens in 2024. He abuses Kamala Harris, only there’s not just misogyny, there’s also racism thrown in.
And so back to 2016 for a sec—remember, the “grab ‘em by the you-know-what” video broke, and that actually got a certain demographic kind of excited about Trump. And so I think that the group of men, the constituency that Tucker is talking to and the others who are defending the Tates, is worth dwelling on for a sec.
What is this group? This is a group that saw Trump say “grab ‘em by the you-know-what,” that saw Trump insult Hillary, that saw Trump insult Harris, and thought, a violent misogynist—that’s what I want. That’s what they really want, isn’t it?
Donegan: I think there is a section of right-wing populism in America that has really succeeded in casting anti-feminism and ideological misogyny as a kind of anti-elite sentiment, right? After the 2010s—when women’s workforce participation, their cultural visibility as leaders and consumers and arbiters of culture, was sort of at its peak—there was an effort in these online spaces, particularly targeting young men, to cast feminism as sort of the ideology of the elites, to cast the corporate overlords who were screwing over the working man as a bunch of women.
You see this glossed sometimes in vernacular parlance as “HR lady” politics, right? The sense of Democrats, of corporate elites, of the wealthy, of the credentialed, as being both, girls—and girls in the sense of scolding, unfun, maternal figures who are telling you to clean your room.
And Donald Trump positions himself as a vindication of masculine prerogatives, somebody who would not tell men to cultivate virtues, but would encourage them to sort of signal and embrace their own vices. This sort of male id was really at the center of that style of right-wing populism.
I think now, a decade into the project, that notion is wearing a little thin, right? Because people are sort of waking up to the reality that not only are their corporate bosses and overlords not exactly women in anything like a majority or even preponderance—the masculine far right has been in power, with the Biden interregnum excluded, for that past 10 years.
I think people are looking at their own pocketbooks, at the price of gas, at the state of the country, and saying, well, I’m not really sure that these guys have done such a good job either.
Sargent: So let’s talk about what’s really going on with young men right now. Republican pollster Mitchell Brown told The Washington Post that men under 40 are the most at risk for Republicans at this moment. That group was important for Trump in 2024. So that’s a real sea change, for men under 40 to be deserting Republicans. It goes to kind of the core of what you said earlier, which is that now that people are getting a glimpse of, you know, manosphere governance, it’s not looking so good right now.
But I think it’s also clear, though, that Democrats got overly spooked by Trump’s success with that group. They decided that he had tapped something deep and enduring and essential about the current generation of young people in America, especially young men. I think all the talk about finding a Democratic Joe Rogan was symptomatic of that sense of being spooked. How do Democrats get out of this?
Obviously, they have this opportunity right now. Young men are realizing, holy shit, we made this huge mistake. This guy’s trying to send us to war. He’s making our economic situation even more precarious. He promised us that we’d be really economically powerful. And so how do Democrats break out of that weird rut that they’re in, where they just keep deciding that Trump has tapped something essential, and speak to the young men who really are now in play?
Donegan: It goes to the heart of how you interpret the 2024 election, right? Either the 2024 election was a historically bounded and contingent moment about a global backlash to incumbent parties and to rising inflation, or the 2024 election reflected a sort of permanent cultural shift that revealed an implacable truth about America. I think in the months immediately following that election, a lot of people put their money on the latter, and are now sort of coming to understand that maybe it was more like the former.
You know, these young male voters did shift pretty dramatically to the Republican Party in 2024. But the drama of that shift indicates to me now, as we look towards the 2026 midterms, that perhaps that shift was a little shallow. Perhaps the commitment to a far-right Trumpist MAGA vision was less firm than a lot of people initially said.
I do think you’re right, Greg, that the Democrats really got spooked after 2024 about men. They took the lesson that, you know, they ran Hillary Clinton in 2016 and lost, they ran Joe Biden in 2020 and won, and then they ran Kamala Harris in 2024 and lost. And they took this lesson that their own party was not sufficiently masculine.
I should say, this is not a uniform assessment within Democratic Party operatives. It’s not exactly an ideologically coherent assessment within Democratic Party operatives. You see people from the left, right, and center of the Democratic Party all trying to make the party a little more masculine, trying to recruit more manly men, trying to court male voters.
But there is this sort of over-identification, I think, with the Republicans’ theory of the case—that, only white male candidates can win, and only white male votes are really worth getting. And I think you see that in a few of the missteps that the party has made over the past few months, such as—I’m sorry to say it—the selection of Graham Platner in Maine, who was chosen by a small but influential group of Democratic Party strategists who felt very strongly, and I think many of them still do, that the party needs white male candidates and really will not be able to govern, or be worthy of governing, until it collects more white male voters.
Sargent: Just to reiterate, this Republican pollster told the Post that men under 40 are the most at risk for the Republicans right now. That’s really an amazing sea change, I think. And importantly, this comes as Donald Trump is doing things like holding the big fight on the White House lawn and sending Pete Hegseth out there to engage in these hyper-masculine, almost cartoonishly grotesque displays of machismo, and talking about blowing things up and stuff.
None of that’s working to hold on to this group. Because this group that was seduced, maybe temporarily, by the masculine displays of Donald Trump during the 2024 campaign and so forth are seeing, my God, this guy isn’t really doing anything for us, and there’s a real world we have to function in, right? I mean, isn’t that the size of it?
Donegan: I think that’s a decent explanation. I think these guys are seeing that they’re not actually being elevated in their own status by this hyper-masculine style in governance, right? They’re not getting better jobs. They’re not able to afford homes. They’re not able to consume in a way that makes them feel comfortable. They’re not as secure about the future, right?
The thing about making these promises that you’re going to restore this fantasized past of prosperity and male domination is you can’t actually deliver that if you don’t have cultural competence or policy competence. And those are things that have never been in particular abundance in the Trump administration.
Sargent: So just to close this out, Moira, and bring this back to the Tate brothers for a second—what would you recommend that Democrats say right now about what’s happening with the Tates? And more broadly, what would you like to hear Democrats saying to young men that will kind of create a sense that they represent a better vision of masculinity than the one Donald Trump has tried to foist on the country and so forth? How would you advise Democrats to proceed right now?
Donegan: I think Democrats should describe Trump and Tate’s style of masculinity for what it is, which is bigoted, cruel, and stupid. Donald Trump started his national political career by calling Mexicans rapists. Now, a decade later, he intervened to import an alleged rapist, Andrew Tate, from house arrest in Romania into the United States.
He is putting immigrant families in detention and terrorizing our cities. And he himself has been alleged to have committed sexual misconduct by no fewer than two dozen women, one of whom he was just ordered to pay $5 million to. This guy is lewd, he is pathetic, he is violent, and his is a kind of masculinity that reveals its own inadequacy by victimizing others.
I think there is abundant room to point out that Donald Trump isn’t just morally offensive, he’s kind of transparently insecure in a way that undermines his own claims to male domination—and to put forward an alternative vision of masculinity that has a little bit of self-respect.
Sargent: And we could add, Donald Trump’s vision of masculinity won’t do anything for young men in the real contemporary world.
Donegan: It certainly hasn’t so far.
Sargent: Right. It certainly hasn’t. And I think maybe a vision like the one we’re talking about here would be premised on the understanding that what happened in 2024 was not the deep cultural shift that certain pundits discerned. And on an understanding that when Tucker Carlson goes out and defends the Tate brothers, he’s speaking to an extremely tiny constituency in the United States, right?
Donegan: I think it would be a little bit naive to say that the constituency that is pro-Tate, that is ideologically misogynist, that is really committed—I don’t think that’s an imaginary group of people. They’re definitely out there. But I think the people who are buying that right now might not buy it forever. I think there’s a lot more people, including young men in this country, who are ready for something different.
Sargent: Moira Donegan, that’s really well said. Thank you so much for all this.
Donegan: Thank you so much for having me, Greg.
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The Costly Cruelty of the Kansas Anti-Trans Driver’s License Law
Victoria Kelly moved across the border from Missouri to Kansas about four years ago in search of more physician-assistant job opportunities and life in a bigger city. It was also around this time that she came out as trans. Back then, the ability to change the gender marker on a Kansas driver’s license was held up in court, so her first Kansas license had her legal female name with a marker for male. “Anytime I had to pull that out and use that, I had to answer a lot of questions and got a lot of strange looks,” she said. It made her more hesitant to travel by plane, knowing she’d have to use it at the airport. “It just caused a lot of unnecessary friction in my life,” she said.
Once she was legally able, she quickly got a new one with the right gender marker. It cost her $50, and she had to get a letter from her physician vouching for her, which felt strange. But it helped her be “one step closer to living life as my true self,” she said.
“I thought I was in the clear,” she added with a laugh. She ended up being wrong. This February, the Kansas legislature rushed through an emergency measure, Senate Bill 244, that not only blocked transgender people from changing their driver’s licenses to reflect their gender but also applied it retroactively, invalidating any state driver’s licenses and birth certificates with gender markers that differ from sex assigned at birth. It also mandates that people use the bathrooms in government buildings that align with their sex assigned at birth and allows people to sue if they feel someone in the bathroom with them is violating the law. Governor Laura Kelly vetoed the measure, only to have the legislature override it.
Kelly warned that it would “cost Kansas taxpayers millions of dollars to comply with this very vague legislation.” Her prediction has now come to pass: Transgender Kansas residents have had to shell out money for gas to drive to DMVs and secure new licenses, take days off of work to deal with it, and even contemplate the steep costs of moving out of a state in which they no longer feel safe.
After the law passed, Kelly assumed she would likely have at least until the summer to get her ducks in a row and change her license. New state laws typically take effect in early June. But then she got home from work on February 25 to find a letter from the state telling her that her license would be revoked as of February 26 if she didn’t change the gender marker. It also said that driving without a valid license would be potentially punishable by jail time. “I read it two or three times. I’m like, ‘Am I missing something?’” she said. She wasn’t: The law, passed February 18, offered no grace period, invalidating licenses as of February 26.
She had to act immediately—she works at four different clinics around Kansas City, one of which is a 20-minute drive from her home. She knew she needed a valid license to get to and from work. She also knew that the potential cost of being arrested and serving jail time would have far-reaching consequences—it would likely get reported to the state medical board, putting her professional license and, therefore, her career, at risk. “The panic started to set in,” she said.
Her partner was able to drop her off and pick her up at work the next day, and then the following day, a Friday, she had off from work. But she knew she needed to be able to drive to work the following week. The DMVs in Kansas don’t take walk-ins, and all of the appointments in her area were full that Friday. The closest she could find was an appointment in Lawrence, an hour away. Her partner had to work, so her retired mother-in-law drove her there and back. “It was definitely an extra cost to her,” she said. She also had to track down her birth certificate and her name-change paperwork.
In the end, she was able to get a new license the same day. It cost her about $20, less than she was expecting given that she paid about $50 for a new one after she changed her name. She also had to take a new photo. “It felt more like a prison mug shot,” she said. “I was basically being forced to do this against my will and paying for the privilege of it.
“The whole process felt very accusatory,” she added, “[as if] we were being retroactively criminalized for something the state had approved and stamped.” Normally, a driver’s license is taken away from someone who’s broken a law. But she hadn’t done anything wrong.
Having a license with the wrong gender marker has meant not just friction but fear. In May, Kris Ripper, a trans woman living in Kansas, was pulled over by a police trooper who asked for her license. After explaining that she had changed her gender marker to male due to the law she was allowed to go on her way, but she later got a letter saying she had missed a court date for a charge of driving without a valid license, a misdemeanor punishable with up to six months in jail. Although her case was eventually dismissed, Kelly thinks of it often, especially on her drive to one of the clinics that takes her past a sheriff’s office and detention center that also has a particularly low speed limit. “I sweat bullets every time I drive by there,” she said. It’s always in the back of her head, no matter which clinic she drives to for work: “Am I going to get pulled over and thrown in jail today?” She drives under the speed limit just to be safe. “It feels like I’ve got a target on my back,” she said.
She’s also gotten “a lot of invasive questions, a lot of invasive security measures,” she said. On a recent trip back home from Florida, she got flagged by the TSA scanner and had to get a pat-down in her groin area. It “caused a lot of extra distress,” she said. “I ended up going to the restroom and crying for a few minutes.” She’s rethinking her desire to travel both domestically and internationally and is considering avoiding it for a while. She feels “hemmed in,” adding that it “makes you just want to stay home and hide from the world sometimes.” On a day-to-day basis, she tries to go about her life not thinking about being trans until someone at the liquor store questions her ID or a bouncer looks askance at it, asking if it’s really her. What if one of them tries to confiscate it, believing it’s fake? “You don’t realize how often you use and need your driver’s license,” she said. “It’s a huge burden.”
Transitioning can feel like “a never-ending marathon,” she said, an endless string of tasks from name-change paperwork to medical intervention. Before this, she felt that she had finally gotten close to the finish line. “It’s really, really discouraging to take a step backward.”
Many trans Kansas residents feel like they can’t stay in the state with this law in effect. “This was the final straw on a lot of trans people in Kansas,” said Matthew Neumann, executive director of the LGBTQ Foundation of Kansas. He gets three to five requests every week from people asking for help with moving. That isn’t a cheap thing to pull off. After Senate Bill 244 passed, his organization started helping people with relocation costs for the first time, covering safety deposits and first month’s rent, typically about $500. But he knows there are many other costs they’ll face—he estimated people need $2,000 to $3,000 each. “We wish we had the funds to just move people,” he said. It’s frustrating when he has to turn someone down or tell them they have to wait. “That could be devastating to somebody, to keep them from moving.”
Susan (a pseudonym) moved to the U.S. over a decade ago after “meeting a girl online” and falling in love. She’s been living in Kansas ever since. She loves the state’s natural beauty. “The Flint Hills grew on me,” she said. “The sky is incomparable.” Her wife, meanwhile, is a lifelong Kansan. The two live in the house her wife grew up in. “This is her home,” she said. The two of them have built a close-knit community that they consider chosen family.
“As much as I love Kansas, Kansas does not love me back,” Susan said. For many years, Kansas springs have meant the same thing: The legislature debates anti-trans laws, and she and her wife contemplate moving away from the home they’ve built. But when Senate Bill 244 passed this year, she says, “That was kind of our hard line.” Susan was never able to change her license gender marker—it’s far harder to do as a green card holder—but the bathroom part of the bill is forcing them to move. Even though the law only impacts government buildings, the general public doesn’t always know that. “There have been a couple instances of me trying to go into a restroom and being told that I’m not allowed to be there,” she said. Even weightier is knowing that getting arrested—even if it doesn’t end in a charge—could lead to her green card being revoked.
If the November midterm elections result in big Democratic congressional wins, they’ll move within the U.S., to a blue state with strong trans rights protections. But if not, they’ll leave the country altogether. No matter which they choose, they’ll be leaving behind their family and “starting fresh,” Susan said.
They are selling her wife’s childhood home to enable the move. They’ve been fortunate to find affordable options in other states, and Susan works remotely, which means she can keep her job after they relocate. But the costs of renting a U-Haul and actually moving will be hefty, reaching several thousand dollars. They’re trying to get rid of as many of their belongings as they can before they move, selling some to defray the costs. The process has been stressful, as has helping her wife prepare for what it’s like to move to an entirely new place. They are “trying to think of all the positives of moving so that the stresses of it don’t hurt so much,” she said.
“If they weren’t trying to whittle away my rights every year, we would absolutely stay here,” she said. “This has become home.”
Kansas is home for Charley too, and he’s determined to stay. He’s lived in the state most of his life and loves being able to see endless sky from the top of a hill or watch the Milky Way from his back porch. “I love the grasses and the way they turn red in the fall,” he said. In 2022, he changed his gender marker on his driver’s license and passport, paying hundreds of dollars in fees to get it completed and spending a year on the effort. After Trump was reelected in 2024, he changed his birth certificate too. It was “a relief to have things match how I present,” he said. “It just makes life simpler to have it all match what people expect to see.” He had been following Senate Bill 244 as it was debated, and before it passed he got his license with the correct gender marker on it renewed, costing him about $23.
But then Charley saw a copy of the letter being sent to people saying their licenses were no longer valid, posted online late at night before bed. “I’m like, ‘Oh shit, I’m going to wake up tomorrow morning and my license is not going to be valid,’” he recalled. Luckily his boss was understanding, allowing him to take a half day off work to get driven into town by a friend so he could get his license changed, paying another $8. Before he went into the office, he gave himself a fresh haircut and wore a shirt that displayed his biceps. “I scowled into the camera when they took my picture,” he said. “I deliberately went in just as masculine as I could get.”
It was only later that he learned that many trans people haven’t received letters from the state; now he regrets acting so quickly. He’s left in a situation where his license doesn’t match his birth certificate. He’s insulated from a lot of the effects—he doesn’t tend to get carded due to age, and he’s started using his passport in airports instead of his license—but it does pop into his mind when he passes police while driving. “It’s just a little extra anxiety,” he said.
He’s contemplated moving somewhere else, but Kansas is the first place he really put down roots, buying a house he’s put not just money into but “a lot of my heart,” he said. “I am not going to lose my house, I am not going to lose my job for this,” he said. He has a secure financial situation and a community of chosen family. “I might as well fight it here where I’ve got a foundation under me.”
“They can pry it from my cold dead hands,” he said. “And they’re kind of trying.”
Like Charley, Neumann also hasn’t received a letter from the state even though he changed the gender marker on both his birth certificate and license. For a while after the letters started going out, he would go on the state’s website daily to check whether his license was valid or not. When we spoke in late June, it still was. The situation has led to “mass confusion,” he said. “The emotional damage was really, I think, their goal towards the trans community. That fear, panic, confusion.” For him personally, it means that when he visits a specialist doctor, an 85-mile drive he does three or four times a month, he’s started driving well under the speed limit just in case. “You’re always waiting for that second shoe to drop,” he said.
Anytime he drives to his doctor’s office and has to use the bathroom on the way he knows he could get in trouble depending on where he stops. His physical therapist accepts Medicaid and Medicare; does that make it a government building, and does that mean he’s breaking the law when he uses the men’s room there? He’s already anticipating problems when he needs to use the bathroom at his child’s volleyball games at her public high school, technically a government building. “I’ve received threats,” he said, people referencing their guns.
“This didn’t just go away because they passed a law. This is our lives,” Neumann said. “It’s still here, and it’s still affecting us.”
Why Elena Kagan is Defending the Roberts Court
Justice Elena Kagan offered a notable defense of her colleagues on the Supreme Court last week by rejecting claims that the justices were simply doing Trump’s bidding. “I don’t see this as a court that is just like, ‘We’re just going to rubber-stamp what the current administration does.’ You know, quite the opposite,” Kagan told an audience last week in Washington state, according to Politico. “I think that that is a bad rap.”
Kagan is generally correct, with a few notable exceptions. It is important to understand why she is correct to better appreciate what the second half of Trump’s term will look like, and what the playing field will look like for the next Democratic administration.
It is true that Trump has scored a number of major victories at the Supreme Court in his second term. But they have largely been on matters in which the court’s six-justice conservative majority would have supported any Republican president. “You just have to deal with the fact that there’s a conservative court doing things that conservative jurists have long thought it appropriate to do, and I can really dislike that,” Kagan explained last week. “But it has nothing to do, I think, with becoming the arm of this current administration.”
In Trump v. Slaughter, for example, the Supreme Court ruled that Trump could fire commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission, giving him de facto control over multiple federal regulatory agencies that Congress had designed to be independent. The obvious beneficiary of that ruling is Trump. But legal conservatives have been gunning to overturn Humphrey’s Executor v. United States—the 1935 case that upheld for-cause removal protections—for decades.
On voting rights and campaign finance laws, Trump also has very strong views on the matter. The president has been an enthusiastic champion of partisan gerrymanders over the past 18 months in a desperate attempt to maintain GOP control of Congress. He also welcomed efforts by Elon Musk and other Silicon Valley billionaires to bail out his struggling presidential campaign in the summer of 2024 with large cash infusions into friendly super PACs, abandoning his past calls to overturn Citizens United.
The court’s recent rulings in this direction have nothing to do with Trump. The Supreme Court’s current hostility toward the Voting Rights Act of 1965 dates back to a 2009 case when the justices hinted that certain portions might no longer be constitutional. That ruling not only predates the Trump administration itself by eight years but also predates Trump himself becoming a major presence in American politics by roughly a year. The high court’s war on campaign finance laws also began in earnest with the Citizens United decision one year later in 2010.
Every administration faces tough decisions about whether to appeal certain cases to the Supreme Court. A temporary defeat in the lower courts might ultimately be preferable to a permanent nationwide defeat from the justices. The second Trump administration has shown itself to be highly adept at predicting which cases are worth running up this particular flagpole, so to speak.
In the first few months of his second term, for example, Trump accrued a deeply lopsided margin of defeats in the lower courts. One analysis estimated that his administration had lost in 96 percent of rulings at the federal district court level. Rather than appeal most of those decision to the Supreme Court level, the administration quietly took the losses unless it strongly believed that the six conservatives would back it with a reversal.
This selective approach resulted in a lopsided margin of victory at the Supreme Court. By last September, Trump had prevailed in more than 20 different cases on the high court’s shadow docket, according to a Courthouse News analysis. His administration only faced substantive defeats in two interim cases during that span: the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case and one involving frozen USAID funds for work already completed.
By only bringing cases before the high court that appear to be surefire winners, the Trump administration has greatly inflated its overall winning percentage at the high court. Naturally, none of this means that the Supreme Court is actually more liberal than it appears. Trump and his Justice Department team simply seem to have a good read on what the high court will and won’t allow.
The Trump administration’s worst losses have come when it tried to force the issue upon the justices. In Learning Resources v. Trump, the high court rejected his efforts to use a Cold War–era law to levy hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs on American businesses and customers who buy overseas goods. This was essentially the centerpiece of the president’s economic agenda, and Trump appeared to take an unusually personal interest in orchestrating what he saw as a blank check to impose tariffs for any reason or virtually none at all.
Nonetheless, the Supreme Court happily struck it down in a 6–3 margin last fall. Trump’s baldly illegal tariffs split the court’s conservative majority down the middle, pitting three justices who favored a maximalist approach to executive power against three justices who were averse to adopting a maximalist reading of statutory language. That enabled the court’s three liberal justices to tip the balance.
In Trump v. Barbara, the high court also rejected Trump’s broadside attack on birthright citizenship. Some legal conservatives tried to boast afterward that they had shifted the Overton window on the subject after a century and a half of consensus. This is what youngsters these days call “cope.” As I noted earlier this month, only two justices endorsed Trump’s position in any meaningful sense, and only one of them—Justice Brett Kavanaugh—is still likely to be serving on the court in 10 to 15 years.
The conservative legal movement has shown itself adept at building internal consensus around other major constitutional shifts in recent decades, such as the now-magisterial view that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms. Conservative legal scholars also spent decades laying the groundwork for the high court to overturn Roe v. Wade, which it eventually did in 2022. The slipshod pseudo-academic work that sprang up last year to justify Trump’s birthright citizenship order failed to convince most of the court’s conservative justices.
Perhaps Trump’s most foolish defeat came in Trump v. Cook. In a shadow-docket ruling last year, the court’s conservative justices effectively ruled that Trump could fire any Senate-confirmed official at will despite federal law to the contrary. The sole exception they made was for members of the Federal Reserve’s board of governors, whom the court said in an unsigned order were protected by a “unique historical tradition” dating back to the early-nineteenth-century central banks.
Trump nonetheless tried to remove Lisa Cook last August. The Supreme Court, unsurprisingly, did not take this pseudo-defiance very well. First, the justices voted to keep Cook in office pending litigation last year—a step that they had explicitly declined to take in similar non-Fed cases. Then, last month, they constitutionalized the Fed exception to presidential removal powers.
Another advantage for Trump is that he and his allies have largely constructed his second term around what they think the Supreme Court’s conservative majority will let them get away with. Project 2025 is the best example of this approach to governance. The Heritage Foundation’s policy project is largely a blueprint of what conservative elites thought the Supreme Court might uphold: a more centralized executive branch, fewer federal agencies and regulations, mass deportations, and so on.
To the extent that parts of Project 2025 haven’t been implemented, it is either because congressional approval would be necessary (and hasn’t been obtained) or because the Trump administration has abandoned or delayed those items for tactical reasons. One proposal in Project 2025, for example, is to revitalize the Comstock laws to criminalize the distribution of abortion medications and birth control methods. Trump has personally resisted this plan, perhaps fearing an electoral backlash in the upcoming midterms, to considerable frustration from anti-abortion groups.
The Supreme Court’s rulings have even allowed the Trump administration to claim some victories it didn’t earn. The White House and some conservative organizations have bragged about dismantling diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and pressuring corporate and academic institutions to do the same. But the real cudgel is the Supreme Court’s embrace of a “colorblind Constitution” in the affirmative-action ruling two years ago, meaning that even remedial efforts to address racism are presumptively unconstitutional. Trump and his allies are claiming wins for decisions that these organizations’ own lawyers would have likely reached anyway.
Even the high court’s ruling in Trump v. United States can be chalked up to long-running trends in right-wing constitutional thought. There is no shortage of resentment in legal conservative circles for Watergate and Iran-Contra, which respectively ended the Nixon presidency and overshadowed the later Reagan administration. Five of the court’s six conservative justices would have happily signed on the ruling if it protected a President Rubio or a President Vance instead.
That said, if there is one case that can’t be justified under Kagan’s thesis, in my view, it is Trump v. Anderson. The disqualification clause case was a rare moment for the court to interpret part of the Constitution on a blank canvas and, well, it blew it. It cannot be justified on originalist grounds, and reading the clause out of the Constitution for mere convenience is indefensible. Rarely does the court hand down such a transparently outcome-driven ruling. I do not expect Kagan to criticize the court for this one, though, because she and the other two liberal justices joined it.
Why does all of this matter as we look toward the future? There have been talks in some liberal and left-wing policy circles about Democrats creating their own version of Project 2025 for the upcoming presidential election cycle. One can hardly blame them for wanting to build their own version of what may be the most impactful policy manifesto since the New Deal. It is also a prime opportunity for American progressivism’s various factions to claim a leadership mantle for the next election cycle.
But Project 2025’s true power did not come from how it was written, or which stakeholders were involved, or even whether a presidential candidate touted it on the campaign trail. Its success can be entirely attributed to the inescapable fact that there are six conservatives and three liberals on the Supreme Court who would uphold almost all of what a president did with it. Had there been six liberals and three conservatives on the high court for the last two years, Project 2025 would simply be the world’s most unreadable work of fan fiction.
The only real way for Democrats to create their own version of Project 2025—and, more generally, to enact their own policy agenda, regardless of its ideological underpinnings—is to add more justices to the Supreme Court. Policymaking and governing strategy still matter, but everybody to the left of Mitt Romney should lower their expectations of what the next Democratic president can actually achieve unless the court’s ideological makeup is changed. The Roberts court will happily enforce its own conservative vision upon the country, no matter who happens to sit in the White House right now.
Turns Out France Has an Oligarch Problem Too
As recently as 1957, it was news when an American, the oil man H.L. Hunt, ranked among the five richest people on earth. In those days, the only path to that kind of wealth was oil, and the other four richest people were all Mideast monarchs: King Saud of Saudi Arabia; Sheikh Abdullah Al-Salim Al-Sabah of Kuwait; Sheikh Ali Bin Abdullah Al Thani of Qatar; and the last Nizam of Hyderabad, Mir Osman Ali Khan (who’d lost his royal title in 1948 when Hyderabad was absorbed into India with the end of the British Raj).
Today it’s quite different. The five richest people on earth, according to Forbes, are all tech bros—Elon Musk, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Jeff Bezos, and Michael Dell—and they’re all American. Royalty no longer figures. The world’s richest monarch, King Maha Vajiralongkorn of Thailand (net worth: $45 billion), would just barely make the top 50 if Forbes bothered to include royals in its billionaire tally, which it doesn’t. Too small-time! In the 1990s the Sultan of Brunei (since 1967, Hassanal Bolkiah Muiz’zaddin Wad’daulah) was the world’s richest person. Today he’s the world’s second-richest monarch after Thailand’s, with a net worth of $30 billion, an amount that would rank him a pitiful 79th in the Forbes tally, right after the ex-wives of Bezos and Bill Gates. (It was Gates who displaced Brunei’s Sultan.)
If we tend today to speak of the American oligarchy and the global oligarchy as one and the same, that’s because mostly they are. Great political power no longer propels you to the top of the Forbes billionaire rankings (though President Donald Trump is giving it the old college try). Did I say the five richest people in earth are all American tech tycoons? You might almost say the same of the top 10. But there’s one exception—a foreigner who is not in tech, not in oil, and not of royal blood. He is the ninth-richest person in the world (net worth: $142.7 billion), and a couple of years ago he was the richest. Now he’s just the richest person in Europe, leaving its crowned heads in the dust. Most Americans have never heard of him.
I’m speaking of the Frenchman Bernard Arnault, founder and CEO of LVMH. Arnault got rich selling expensive stuff to rich people. LVMH owns the luxury brands Louis Vuitton, Tiffany & Co., Christian Dior, Givenchy, Bulgari, Guerlain, and Sephora. It also owns the makers of Moët & Chandon and Dom Pérignon and Veuve Cliquot. If there’s something your wife or girlfriend would like that you can’t afford to buy, odds are Arnault sells it. And according to a six-part newspaper series published last week in Le Monde by Raphaëlle Bacqué and Vanessa Schneider (English translation here), l’État, c’est lui. Arnault wields too much power in France.
This comes as a terrible disappointment, as I’m a bit of a Francophile. On a trip to France last year, my wife and I rhapsodized about the more plentiful public squares, the safer roadways, the more beautiful urban vistas, and—of course—the food. France also has one of the better single-payer health care systems in the world, though, happily, we didn’t need to use it. I published a history 14 years ago of America’s post-1979 growth in income inequality in which I used France as Exhibit A for my argument that, since incomes were growing more equal there, expanding economic inequality is a political choice, not an inevitability. I still believe that, but in France, alas, that trend has reversed.
Let’s take Le Monde’s tour of l’oligarchie en français.
Inside the company, almost everybody refers to Arnault as Monsieur; a handful will call him “BA” (which doesn’t carry the vulgar associations we Americans give it). Arnault’s children are addressed as Monsieur or Madame as well, only with them it’s attached to a first name (e.g., “Monsieur Alexandre”). This is the same locution that foreign-born American housekeepers apply to subvert their employer’s insistence on addressing one another on a first-name basis. At LVMH, it is used to address even Arnault’s grandchildren after they reach the age of 7, making even high-ranking LVMH executives sound like a stiff-backed butler in a drawing-room play. Arnault himself shuns physical contact and, according to his wife, “has no friends.”
Arnault does have five children from two wives, and all of them work for the company, which should make these Le Monde pieces catnip to anyone who followed Succession, the TV series about a thinly-veiled Murdoch family. Arnault is 77 and, yes, he hasn’t settled who among his five children will inherit his luxury empire. We learn that “tensions and rivalries tear at his clan” and “it’s now difficult to get everyone around the same table.” The very existence of these six articles both reflects and intensifies family tensions because Arnault’s son-in-law, Xavier Niel, is effectively Le Monde’s principal shareholder. (It’s a little complicated. Niel transferred his majority shares two years ago to a nonprofit to preserve the paper’s independence, and Le Monde’s disclaimer calls him merely “an individual shareholder.”) Arnault’ s wife Hélène says of Niel: “He is not the kind of person we want in the family.” Niel is no longer invited to family occasions. Hélène’s also got chilly relations with her stepson Antoine, Arnault’s son from an earlier marriage. Antoine hasn’t spoken to Hélène for two years.
Proceeding now to Arnault’s role as oligarch: France will have a presidential election next year. At the funeral last month for former president Jacques Chirac’s widow (who Arnault had placed on LVMH’s board), three candidates walked to the front of the basilica, where Arnault was seated among the country’s past and present political elite, to pay homage. Arnault isn’t sure he likes any of them. In April he agreed to meet, for the first time in his life, the far-right candidate Marine LePen, who, like Trump, kicked off a presidential run with a felony conviction (in LePen’s case, for embezzling public funds, a ruling upheld earlier this month by an appeals court). Arnault told LePen that “On security and illegal immigration, you have real credibility, but on the economy, it feels like you’re close to” France’s political left in wanting to “over tax” businesses. Two of Arnault’s sons met recently with Jordan Bardella, president of LePen’s repellant National Rally party. This is a moment for France’s financial leaders to unite in opposition to incipient fascism. It didn’t happen in the United States in 2024, and it isn’t happening in France today.
Arnault wields remarkable influence over France’s current president, Emmanuel Macron. In 2020, Macron directed his finance minister to permit Arnault to renegotiate LVMH’s contract to purchase Tiffany, which had already been signed. Arnault felt he’d paid too much because after he agreed to a price Covid reduced Tiffanys’ sales. This was, Le Monde observes, a matter in which the government had no legitimate reason to interfere. In 2021, Macron appeared for the opening of a department store, something he’d never done before; it was LVMH’s Paris flagship, La Samaritaine. In 2024, Macron awarded Arnault the Légion d’Honneur, France’s highest honor. “During Macron’s time in office,” writes Le Monde, “the Elysée has never refused anything for Arnault.”
The United States government, at least in the person of French Ambassador Charles Kushner (Trump-pardoned ex-con father to Jared) treats Arnault better than it treats Macron. Kushner has twice refused Macron summonses to the Elysée Palace, but he celebrated America’s semiquincentennial by throwing a party for Arnault, who Kushner calls not Monsieur but “Beurrernarte.” Arnault and Trump have been friends since the 1980s. In 2019, Arnault and his son Alexandre travelled with President Trump on Air Force One so they could attend the opening of a Louis Vuitton factory outside Dallas. “You are an artist and a visionary,” Trump said in his speech. Arnault got Trump to exempt LVMH’s champagnes from European tariffs; later, Louis Vuitton rented space from the Trump Organization in midtown Manhattan. Alas, Arnault had less luck in Trump’s second term fighting Trump’s 20 percent tariff on European imports, which cost LVMG tens of billions of euros.
Arnault was so angered by the Le Monde series that he took to social media for the first time in his life and posted a lengthy response on X. It’s mostly a series of sarcastic ripostes (“I haven’t received such treatment since the takeover of Boussac in 1984. Back then, they called me ‘The Terminator.’ I prefer ‘the last royal family’ – it’s more elegant”). The family soap opera should end once Arnault chooses a successor. L’oligarchie, however, seems settled in for a long run, especially if, God forbid, LePen wins. Please somebody make France stop aping the United States.
We’re making permitting easier in Santa Cruz County – have you noticed?
Santa Cruz County is making it easier to get a permit. Here, Matt Machado, deputy county executive officer and director of community development & infrastructure, discusses how the county has redesigned its permitting process over the past few years to make it more customer-friendly. The new unified permit center offers expanded online service, but also an in-person option, he writes. He explains how the changes are making permitting more accessible, efficient and transparent while maintaining the standards that protect public safety and the environment.
Arista patches actively exploited VeloCloud bug as CISA puts admins on the clock
Trumpworld Shivs Hyper-Masculine Guru Andrew Tate as MAGA Cracks Up
Andrew and Tristan Tate, two major “manosphere” influencers, were recently arrested in Miami and now face charges of rape and sex trafficking in Britain. The White House now says Donald Trump will not intervene in their extradition, a turnaround for two top MAGA figures who are close to Trump’s inner circle and helped him win young men in 2024. Worse, many MAGA figures are following Trump and deserting the Tates. Still, MAGA is cracking over this: Tucker Carlson and several other figures are expressing sharp skepticism of the charges, treating the Tates as martyrs and raging at the charges as “politically driven.” As Guardian columnist Moira Donegan and I conclude in this episode, their dissent is significant: It’s clearly speaking to a sizable chunk of MAGA that actively lionizes the violent misogyny that the Tates represent. We discuss the deeper causes of MAGA’s divisions over the Tates, why the MAGA vision of masculinity is imploding, how Democrats got spooked by 2024 into overreading Trump’s successes with young men, and how they can speak to this constituency more effectively. Listen to this episode here.
Openreach nudges another 112 exchange areas toward full fiber
Lyft and Baidu enter London’s robotaxi battleground as testing begins
Cisco close to releasing more AI models, this time for deep networking ops
Street Talk
