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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 details of Donald Trump’s ceasefire deal with Iran have now been released, and it’s exactly what we expected. Trump got nothing of any significance. And a surprising group of people are now admitting this—Trump’s MAGA allies. Some Fox News figures and right-wing media figures are taking apart the deal in surprisingly harsh terms. Meanwhile, Trump let out a few tirades today attacking Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal, even though all indications thus far are that Trump has fared substantially worse than Obama did.

We think the big story right now is this: everything we know right at this moment strongly suggests that the next stage of the negotiations with Iran will be even worse for Trump.

We’re working through all of it with Sina Toossi, an Iran expert at the Center for International Policy. Sina, good to have you on.

Sina Toossi: Hey, Greg, thanks so much for having me on.

Sargent: So both sides have released the agreement. Here’s the short version. Strait of Hormuz reopened with no charge for passage, but that’s only for 60 days. U.S. blockade lifted—a victory for Iran. Iran also gets relief from sanctions. Iran reaffirms it won’t procure or develop nuclear weapons, which it has already said in many other instances. The U.S. is working with regional partners to open up $300 billion in reconstruction aid to Iran.

Sina, what did the United States get here? And what do you make of this deal?

Toossi: Yeah, so I think the most important thing is that this is not a nuclear deal. We’re already seeing comparisons to the Obama-era nuclear deal, the 2015 deal. This makes no nuclear obligations of Iran. That most critical issue has been deferred to this 60-day period of negotiations. And what this deal really is, is just a framework deal outlining the ostensible end of this war.

And as part of this deal, the most important thing really is the U.S. lifting its blockade on Iran and Iran lifting its blockade on the Strait of Hormuz—this problem that did not exist before the war. But as part of that, Iran is actually getting upfront concessions.

Most significantly, these oil waivers to sell oil during this period of negotiations, as well as access to its own frozen money that’s been frozen due to sanctions, as well as a region-wide ceasefire, including Lebanon. And these are major upfront concessions that Iran is now receiving as a result of this war.

Sargent: Just to boil this down in really simple terms, basically what happened here is that Trump said, we’re opening up $300 billion in reconstruction aid to Iran, provided you meet a bunch of conditions later, but we are opening it up—in order to undo the mistake I made in launching this war in the first place and closing the Strait of Hormuz and bringing the global economy to its knees. Is that what happened?

Toossi: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it straight up says that there’s this $300 billion investment fund. It’s worth being skeptical about whether that will actually materialize. But what Trump has agreed to right now is, yeah, on paper, such an investment fund is being created. And for a deal that was already on the table in the past that he left—and then he launched his dumb war and only created this big quagmire.

Sargent: So let’s talk about the nuclear component for a second. As you pointed out, what it does is defer the discussion. But in the deal, there’s some text, not much. Iran agrees not to procure or develop nukes, but that is what it has always said. It said the same thing in the 2015 Obama nuclear deal.

The deal now requires Iran to dilute its enriched material but doesn’t require it to ship the material out of the country—and that was in Obama’s deal, right? And so now the details on the constraints on Iran’s nuclear program have to be negotiated. Is that about the size of it? And what’s your take on all that?

Toossi: Yeah, I think if this does lead to a nuclear deal, by all accounts—and this text also reinforces this—it’s going to look something similar to what Obama got. And what was actually on the table before this war, because Trump himself in his second term was engaged in nuclear negotiations with Iran. And in the middle of them, they launched surprise attacks on Iran, both last June and again in February.

And in this February track, we actually had this British national security advisor who was there. And he himself said that the deal was basically at hand. And the Omani intermediary at this time said that it was at hand too. But yeah, basically the contours of this deal, much like the JCPOA, seem to be Iran accepting more intrusive transparency mechanisms, inspections mechanisms, committing to get rid of its large stockpiles of enriched uranium. So right now it has 60 percent enriched uranium.

It’s agreed to dilute this within Iran—or at least that’s what the idea of this agreement is—as opposed to sending it abroad. Iran has many political constraints. And so it seems like Trump has accepted that this dilution can occur within Iran, and previously has said it should come to the U.S. or something.

But yeah, it’s basically a very intrusive compromise nuclear deal to enhance the transparency of the nuclear program. But it is a compromise. It’s not like they’re destroying their nuclear capabilities, giving up their nuclear capabilities. They’re still going to be allowed to, much like the JCPOA, operate a basic nuclear program. And the Iranians are very intent on what they say is their rights within the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to basically produce their own nuclear fuel.

And in the long term, this may very well still give them that ability. But in the shorter term, it seems like they’re agreeing to very intense restrictions that can prevent them from having a pathway to nuclear weapons.

Sargent: I just want to pick up on one thing you said there because it’s so batshit insane. We could have had this set of negotiations before the war started. I think people don’t really realize how absurd Trump’s handling of this has really been. Just one more time—Iran and the U.S. were talking about this stuff before Trump launched the war. And it probably wasn’t out of the realm of possibility for them to have negotiated to the very point we are at now without the war happening. Is that right?

Toossi: Absolutely. Again, before the war, from the records we have, the British national security advisor said a deal was at hand. The Omanis said a deal was at hand. If anything, Iran’s position is much stronger now after the war. The card that the U.S. always had hanging over Iran, which is the military card, the threat of military action—now they used that card. They launched 13,000 airstrikes against Iran, 13,000 sorties, an unprecedented aerial campaign.

At the end of it, what do we get? According to The New York Times and other outlets that have reported on this, 70 percent of Iranian ballistic missiles are intact. Some similar amount of drones. Their underground missile cities, their ability to hit back in the region, close the Strait of Hormuz.

So they’ve withstood everything that Israel and the U.S. threw at them, absorbed that punishment, hit back, exacted a high cost on the U.S. And now this deal is reflecting ultimately the battlefield reality, where the U.S. engaged in what was a regime-change war, engaged in going for the maximalist demands—total surrender, total capitulation. Trump listened to Netanyahu, listened to all these war hawks that are now criticizing him. And what he got was a huge quagmire, inadvertently strengthened Iran’s hand. It was classic hubris, classic imperial hubris.

And now he’s giving Iran upfront sanctions relief, trying to get them to let go of the Strait of Hormuz, and is seemingly on a path to accepting a deal that was at hand before the war.

Sargent: And is, if anything, probably not as good as Obama’s, or will in the best circumstances be as good as Obama’s. Now, pro-Trump media has been really harsh on this as the details have leaked out over the last few days. Media Matters had a good roundup of stuff. I’m going to read a few.

The New York Post says this: “Trump’s Iran deal gives Iran big wins up front—and America nothing.”

Ben Domenech said, “This doesn’t feel like a victory.”

Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade suggested that parts of the nuclear settlement here are, quote-unquote, “not acceptable” while trying to throw JD Vance under the bus for this failure.

Fox host Mark Levin said he’s, quote-unquote, “very skeptical.”

Sina, what do you make of all that?

Toossi: Yeah, so I would say that within the Trump world, within the MAGA camp, there have been some divisions on this issue. Right now you’re definitely seeing the traditional Republican hawks, the neoconservatives, the very ardent pro-Israel ideologues—they are coming out hard against this. They wanted this war. They got it. So it’s unclear what they wanted—this war to go on more? But it’s easy for them now from the outside to criticize Trump. They have no skin in the game.

But I think Trump is ultimately sitting in the situation room. He’s been hit with political, economic, military, and geopolitical reality. It’s not like Donald Trump was someone who—if he could go all the way with Iran, he would have gone all the way with Iran. And he said today at the G7 that, I could have bombed them for many more years. What would have happened is the Strait of Hormuz would still have been shut and we would have been in a global depression.

So he was faced with the reality of the situation. And he was, I would argue, ultimately forced to come to this compromise. It’s imperial overstretch. America expended so many munitions that it couldn’t afford to expend. It expended tens of billions, if not hundreds of billions, of dollars on this war.

And it racked up this immense cost with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, all the knock-on economic effects, the impact on global markets, the impact on global oil reserves, including America’s oil reserve—the latest headlines are that it’s reached the lowest level since 1984, the year it was established. And so this is a critical crisis. And I think Trump is right when he said if this dragged on, it would have led to a recession, a depression.

And so this is again part of the reality. But Trump listened to these people. He was all on board until he had to now face—it blew up in his face. And so now he’s forced to try to get this deal. And these people are still attacking him. So we’ll see if Trump can withstand this pressure. Obama got so much pressure in 2015 from similar actors when he got the deal, and he withstood it. He fought hard against it. And we’ll see if Trump can now withstand this pressure.

Sargent: Well, Fox News’ Trey Gowdy had another quote criticizing Donald Trump. He said this: Iran is “better off than they were before hostilities began, and that should not be the consequence of war.”

Now again, Trey Gowdy is committing the same mistake that all these guys did, and Donald Trump did, which is that America wasn’t going to bomb its way to a successful outcome here. But I think it’s a very profound vulnerability for Donald Trump to have all these figures out there beating the hell out of him for failing, because the base was really sold a bill of goods on this. MAGA was absolutely sold a bill of horseshit on this whole thing by all these people and by Donald Trump.

The White House and Donald Trump are trying to sell the story that the great and mighty and glorious Donald Trump subjugated Iran. All of his enemies are always on the run and they’re always losing and he’s always winning. And that’s why I think it’s so lethal for him to have all these figures in right-wing media saying, no, that didn’t happen. Actually, you lost, Donald Trump. And so I think that’s good to see.

Toossi: Yeah. And it’s interesting because I remember during the war, he had this one Truth Social post where he really attacked Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, and a lot of those right-wing pundits who were against the war. So he kind of threw them under the bus.

But now you’re seeing that JD Vance went on Megyn Kelly’s show yesterday and he’s doing the media circuit. So it’s like he’s going to need those people at his back again. So I think he’s going to have to get Tucker back. He’s going to have to get Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens—all these various right-wing personalities that were critical to his rise, but were critical of this war, as opposed to that Fox News traditional Republican establishment machinery that is very much against this deal and is coming out against it.

Sargent: That is fascinating. We’re going to really be working hard to mend fences between JD Vance and all those figures, especially with JD Vance’s 2028 run coming up.

I want to listen to a couple of things that Donald Trump said about Obama’s nuclear deal. First, he said this.

Donald Trump (voiceover): And then we terminated—I terminated the JCPOA. That’s Barack Hussein Obama’s horrible deal. It gave them a nuclear weapon. And I terminated it. And I stopped it.

And he also said this.

Trump (voiceover): He tried to bribe his way out. I didn’t do that. Nobody mentions that. $1.7 billion and hundreds of millions of dollars. They tried to bribe their way out of it. And you know what the Iranians did? They laughed at Obama and they said he’s a stupid son of a bitch.

Sargent: So, Sina, what do you make of that? I mean, there’s just no indication whatsoever that Donald Trump has any idea what was in Obama’s 2015 deal. All he knows is that he’s strong and Obama’s weak. That’s all he knows.

Toossi: Yeah. I mean, I think one of his arguably main drivers for his whole 2016 campaign and his presidencies has really been undoing everything Barack Obama did. He really hated Obama. I would argue personally that a lot of that is driven by racism.

But Obama’s signature foreign policy achievement was the Iran nuclear deal. And when Trump came to office in his first term, all his advisors were saying, don’t leave this deal. At the time we had Mattis as secretary of defense, we had McMaster as national security advisor.

All these people were advising him not to leave because it would weaken America’s position and it would ultimately harm American interests. And that bore out. But he didn’t listen to their advice. He did leave the deal. Again, I would argue for a variety of factors, but a chief one is undoing Obama’s legacy, trying to do everything better than him, quote-unquote.

And so now you see all these years later—2018 was when he left the deal—but now in 2026, after this disastrous war, his marketing pitch for this deal is still, it’s better than Obama’s, Obama was so weak, the Iranians were laughing at him, et cetera, et cetera. When the Iranians are the ones who fought him in a war and basically had him by the balls, if I can say that. And he’s backed off.

You can let history make the judgment. But obviously this is a strategic retreat, arguably, from America. Even America on a transpartisan basis was very hawkish on Iran—the foreign policy establishment and all these demands: Iran has to give up its missiles, Iran has to end its support for its regional alliance network and proxies, as we call them. And there’s a retreat on those demands. They’re not even in this deal. It’s just the nuclear issue now.

Sargent: Well, let’s just try to look forward to what comes now. They enter into this stretch of negotiations in which they try to figure out what the details of the constraints on Iran’s nuclear program are going to be. And it looks to me like Trump is not in a very good position here.

First, it’s the stuff you said earlier, which was that Iran has now discovered that it can bring the global economy to its knees and that that will actually get the United States and Trump to move.

But second, and also important, is the fact that every day that passes, we get closer to the midterm elections. And Trump keeps going out there and saying, if Iran doesn’t do what I say, I’ll just start bombing again. That’s pure bullshit, because that will be something that Republicans really do not want as the midterms are approaching.

There will come a point where Republicans are in such a bad political position due to Trump trying to restart the war that they will probably actually say no. And there will be a vote in Congress, and I think you would see Republicans at that point, with their careers on the line, suddenly saying, we can’t do this.

And so Iran’s got to know this, right? Iran’s got to understand these dynamics pretty well, don’t you think?

Toossi: Yeah. So the biggest thing that this war did for Iran is it allowed it to activate this leverage that it had but didn’t have before and couldn’t demonstrate before—which is disrupting the Strait of Hormuz, closing it, taking everything the U.S. and Israel could throw at it, and still maintaining that pressure on the Strait of Hormuz. So this is a new geopolitical reality that, as you say, gives Iran lasting leverage.

Even as part of this deal, the Iranians are saying they’re not going to collect payments for ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz in the 60-day period. But very much the Iranian rhetoric and this deal leaves an opening for that. They’re saying that the new status quo is going to be them collecting service fees, and they’re going to administer it with Oman.

But on this question of Trump going back to war—the Iranians can’t trust him at all, obviously. He left the JCPOA. He attacked them twice during negotiations. And they’re not trusting him at all. So that’s why I’m kind of skeptical, or I’m not bullish that this is actually going to lead to this broader nuclear deal.

This is kind of a temporary arrangement for now that achieves some interests on both sides. I mean, Trump just wants his Strait of Hormuz open. The average gas price in America was almost $5 a gallon just a couple of weeks ago. And all the inflation went back to as bad as it was under Biden during the Ukraine war. And so all these bad economic consequences that, as you say, were going to have a big consequence for the midterms.

Now, if Trump wants to restart this war ahead of the midterms, those consequences are going to come back fast. But it very well could be that this is a temporary arrangement to push past the midterms and then potentially try to restart. They’ve already attacked Iran twice. They’ve already started this war twice.

Maybe they could be thinking third time’s a charm. And that’s definitely what the most hawkish groups in D.C. are saying. People like Mark Dubowitz at the neoconservative, pro-Israel Foundation for Defense of Democracies—he’s basically saying, third time’s a charm, try it again, do it again.

But even then, I think there’s a new reality at play. The Strait of Hormuz, and Iran is going to be rebuilding its capabilities with all this money that they are already getting. They’re going to get these oil waivers. They’re going to get their frozen assets. So it’s going to be a new geopolitical dynamic. And I think overall the U.S. hand is weaker vis-à-vis Iran now than it was before the war.

Sargent: And you know what happens next year, if there’s discussion about another war or the negotiations of the nuclear deal continue? JD Vance is starting to run for president in earnest and he’s really not going to want to be associated with those positions. Sina Toossi, really good to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.

Toossi: Thanks for having me. This was great.

UC Santa Cruz graduate Airielle Silva was honored with the John R. Lewis Good Trouble Award after five years of student leadership and activism. As she addressed fellow graduates at commencement, Silva reflected on her advocacy work while urging the university to continue addressing longstanding Black student demands.

Transport for London (TfL) has extended supplier Capita's two road user charging contracts at a potential cost of £912 million including VAT after delaying the start of a combined replacement by two years. TfL announced it was directly awarding the contract extensions to Capita on June 11, saying this was required given the time it will take to buy and implement a replacement support service for its road user charging schemes. These comprise the congestion charge, Low and Ultra Low Emission Zones (LEZ/ULEZ), tolls for the Blackwall and Silvertown tunnels, HGV safety permits, and traffic fines, with the work including processing data from thousands of automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras along with customer account management, payment, and billing. In May 2025, TfL said that it wanted to replace Capita's current contracts for Business Operations (BOps) and Enforcement Operations (EOps) for Road User Charging with a single deal. It planned to publish a full tender notice for this around March 31, 2026, and start the new contract on September 30, 2027. In a revision of this notice in February this year, it pushed back the tender notice to April 15, 2027, and the contract start to October 2, 2028. Last week, TfL said it plans to award the new combined contract in mid-2029, in procurement notices extending the BOps contract at a cost of up to £510 million and the EOps one by up to £402 million. Both extensions are for five years with the option to extend them to a total of seven. "Due to the scale and complexity of the existing services and the need to design, build, integrate and safely deploy a replacement solution, the full procurement, mobilisation and transition is expected to require a minimum of five years based on current programme assumptions," TfL said in the notices. It added that it will have rights to end the extended contracts early, "enabling TfL to transition to a replacement supplier at the earliest point at which it is technically feasible and operationally safe to do so." TfL expects the new combined contract to be worth more than £2 billion over 20 years. Last month, TfL disclosed that its Revenue Collection Services contract, which it awarded to Spanish defense and tech group Indra Sistemas in January covering almost all public transport ticketing in London, could be worth up to £1.964 billion if all extensions and variations are exercised. ®

Santa Cruz’s rental inspection program was created to protect tenants from unsafe housing, but property owner Darius Mohsenin argues it has evolved into a system focused more on permits, paperwork and minor violations than actual habitability. He contends that inspectors increasingly rely on bureaucratic enforcement rather than practical safety expertise, allowing complaints to trigger sweeping property inspections and costly citations. He urges the Santa Cruz City Council to refocus the program on genuine health and safety issues instead of what he sees as regulatory overreach that raises housing costs and strains relationships with property owners.

The United States has a storied history of medical charlatanism. In the 1890s, a Pennsylvania newspaper reporter turned publisher turned patent medicine mountebank named James Monroe “Money” Munyon peddled “a Munyon Pill for Every Ill,” promising to cure rheumatism, neuralgia, “female problems,” and dyspepsia. Other quacksalvers and confidence men sold Kickapoo Indian Sagwa, Snake Oil, Dr. Kilmer’s Swamp Root, Hamlin’s Wizard Oil, and other excellent remedies. Many of these people ran into legal trouble after some killjoys in the Progressive Movement persuaded Congress to pass, in 1906, the Pure Food and Drugs Act, which created the agency known today as the Food and Drug Administration.

Fond thoughts of this tradition were revived this week by a New York Times investigation by Kenneth P. Vogel and Christina Jewett about efforts by Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullen, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy, Jr., and possibly President Donald Trump to clear a regulatory path for a dietary supplement called kratom that “interacts with the brain’s opioid receptors” and “has been linked to liver toxicity, seizures, and thousands of deaths.” (Trump’s role in this mess is hard to pin down because the public statement he made on the subject was, characteristically, incoherent.)

The GOP actions are in response to a multimillion-dollar influence campaign led by Jerry W. Ross, founder of a kratom manufacturer called Botanic Tonics, a company in which Mullin invested between $500,000 and $1 million. Ross founded his company seven years after being released from prison, where he’d been sent for diverting $10 million from Oklahoma oil and gas companies that he ran under the name Jerry D. Cash. In 2023, the FDA seized 250,000 bottles of Botanic Tonics kratom from a Tulsa warehouse and posted on its website that “kratom is not lawfully marketed in the U.S. as a drug product, a dietary supplement, or a food additive in conventional food.” But last December the Justice department abruptly dropped its prosecution of Botanic Tonics. Just another day in the Trump administration.

But the Times story got me thinking: When did patent medicines—which today go by the more polite name dietary supplement—become the exclusive province of the Republican Party?

If this legacy of chicanery possesses any political pedigree at all, it’s Democratic. That’s because, after the Pure Food and Drugs Act put most peddlers of liniments and kidney renovators and bladder remedies out of business, medicine shows continued to flourish in the then-solidly-Democratic South. The last great medicine show was the Hadacol Caravan, which barnstormed through the 1940s featuring stars like Hank Williams and Mickey Rooney. The Caravan’s impresario was one Dudley J. LeBlanc, a Democratic state senator in Louisiana. LeBlanc manufactured a “vitamin supplement” called Hadacol whose popularity, especially in dry counties, derived from its alcohol content of 12 percent, memorialized in a popular country-western song called “What Put the Pep In Grandma.”

Asked by Groucho Marx, in a 1951 appearance on “You Bet Your Life,” what Hadacol was good for, LeBlanc replied: “It was good for $5.5 million for me last year.” A few months later the Federal Trade Commission came calling. It concluded that LeBlanc was engaged in “false, misleading, and deceptive” business practices by marketing Hadacol as “an effective treatment and cure for scores of ailments and diseases.” LeBlanc’s answer was to run for governor of Louisiana. He lost.

I struggle to pinpoint the historical moment when medical quackery stopped being a Democratic pastime and became a Republican one. It didn’t happen all at once. One transitional figure may have been Ronald Reagan, who in the 1940s, while still a Democrat, appeared in magazine ads for Chesterfield cigarettes touting their mildness, a characteristic that tobacco companies encouraged smokers to believe made cigarettes more healthy. Reagan would later oppose creation of Medicare (in league, bizarrely, with the American Medical Association, which was slow to realize that Medicare would make doctors rich). The GOP eventually made peace with the program’s existence, but it argued endlessly for privatization schemes and budget cuts on the false premise that Medicare and its sister program for the poor, Medicaid, were riddled with fraud.

Demonizing the medical establishment as crooked probably helped encourage Republicans to fill the void left by Dudley LeBlanc after he died in 1971. Capitol Hill’s last gasp of Democratic quackery was a 1976 bill sponsored by Wisconsin Senator William Proxmire prohibiting the FDA from “establishing standards limiting potency of vitamins and minerals in food supplements or regulating them as drugs based solely on potency.” After that, the cause was taken up by Republican Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah.

Why Hatch? Because herbal medicine was a strong Mormon tradition (Joseph Smith disdained medical doctors). The state is home to so many manufacturers of herbal and dietary supplements that a stretch of highway running through Salt Lake City is nicknamed Cellulose Valley. In 1994, Hatch sponsored the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, which allowed manufacturers to sell these products without first demonstrating that they are safe. One FDA commissioner later complained: “Products that contain substances similar to those found in prescription drugs are marketed for children as dietary supplements. Likewise, products with ingredients that simulate illicit street drugs are marketed as dietary supplements to adolescents via the Internet and shops specializing in drug paraphernalia.”

Steven Pray, a professor of pharmacy at the University of Oklahaoma, complained in The Journal of Child Neurology that “Patients who purchase dietary supplements take the place of the laboratory rats used in legitimate safety research…. The United States is little better than a third-world country in regard to access to unknown products.”

Through the 1980s, dietary supplements and herbal remedies had been the exclusive province of granola-crunching New Age lefties. Indeed, Marin County remained an anti-vaxxer haven until 2020, when the MAGA right’s stubborn resistance to the Covid vaccine rendered that position no longer socially tenable. But after the Hatch bill became law, vaccine-skepticism increasingly became a right-wing thing. Alex Jones’s online store is a pharmacopeia of alt medicines: methyline blue, t-3 trifecta iodine tincture, turmeric gummies, sea moss capsules, and so on. Fox News is so reliant on pitches for dietary supplements and dubious gold-based retirement strategies that I’ve long argued the FTC should investigate the cable network as a form of elder abuse, on the grounds that its conspiracist news programming is a retiree-sorting mechanism to deliver the biggest suckers to advertisers. As Paul Krugman put it in 2021, “There are big financial rewards to extremism, because extreme politics sells patent medicine, and patent medicine is highly profitable.”

That’s no secret to the Republican former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell. A decade ago, McDonnell got busted for accepting gifts and money while in office in exchange for smoothing the regulatory path for a dietary supplement called Antabloc. His conviction was later overturned by the reactionary Supreme Court in one of a series of decisions decriminalizing political bribery. Bill O’Reilly, Doctor Phil, and Mike Huckabee can’t say enough good things about something called Relaxium. I doubt they’ve done so for free.

“Dear NewsMax Reader,” read a note to Rick Perlstein, a best-selling student of right-wing movements, as related in a 2012 Perlstein piece in The Baffler that documented how wholly the conservative movement had given itself over to scammers and hustlers:

If you have shied away from profiting from the immense promise of stem cells to treat disease because of moral concern over extracting stem cells from fetal tissue, pay close attention. You can now invest with a clear conscience. An Israeli entrepreneur, Zami Aberman, has discovered “an oilfield in the placenta.”

And now kratom.

If the GOP is going to bring back patent medicines, then I demand we be entertained by the medicine shows that used to go along with them. It was on a bus for Hadacol Caravan, legend has it, that Hank Williams plucked the first notes of “Jambalaya.” That beats the hell out of a UFC Freedom 250 Match.

This is a lightly edited transcript of the June 17 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon.

Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon. This is Right Now on The New Republic. We have a great guest today. Sarah J. Jackson is a University of Pennsylvania communications professor, and she has a great book out this week. The book is called Second Sight: How the Wonder and Vision of Black Media Makers Push America Toward Freedom. So Sarah, welcome.

Sarah J. Jackson: Thank you so much for having me, Perry. It’s great to see you.

Perry Bacon: And obviously, this book speaks to me—and I read it. Sarah had it sent to me a few weeks ago, and I read it. But, because I’m a black person in media, I think it actually has resonance to readers beyond just people who work in the media or people who are Black. I might be the target audience in a certain sense, but I think it has a broader resonance. I think it’s a great book, and I’m recommending it to people.

But I want to talk about it a little bit. I want people to actually read the book. It’s called Second Sight. It came out yesterday or today?

Jackson: It officially came out yesterday, yeah. So very exciting. I’m still on the new publication high.

Bacon: Do show it. Bring it back again.

Jackson: Yeah, so here it is.

Bacon: OK. That’s a great cover, too. I like that.

Jackson: And the back cover—look, if you read it on a bus or a train, you really look cool, because this graphic designer did a great job on the cover for me.

Bacon: So explain the concept of second sight, first of all.

Jackson: Yeah, absolutely. So a lot of people are familiar with Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness, where he talks about the experience of being Black in America as this jarring and oppressive experience of awareness of who you are, who your community is, what your values are, et cetera.

And then the always-present skewed and warped vision of Blackness—of you as an individual and of your community—that comes from white supremacy. And this has created what a lot of theorists of double consciousness took from Du Bois and have written extensively about. So people are probably very familiar with that.

But what I have always been fascinated by is this thing that has gone less explored in Du Bois’s theorization of double consciousness, where he says one of the consequences of double consciousness—which of course is the consequence of marginalization and oppression—is this profound gift called second sight.

And second sight is this gift that allows African Americans to have a sort of pulled-back and expanded view of the country. Because when you’re on the margins, or when you’re an outsider looking in, as bell hooks would later frame a similar idea, you can see a more expansive picture.

So you can both see and subscribe to and care about and be invested in the values, the norms of the nation, the identity of the country, and so forth. But you can also better see and better assess and better critique the gaps—where the values don’t come together, where there is room for improvement, where people have not yet imagined alternatives.

And so second sight is really this beautiful gift that Du Bois says results from double consciousness. And so I really wanted to explore how, in the case of my work—because I am a media scholar, and I work on technology, media, all these other kinds of media forms and the role they play in democracy and the public sphere—I really wanted to think about how that African American second sight gets built in, across generations, into the stories that Black media makers like you tell.

Bacon: Yeah. Media makers—I want to talk about the way you define the term, because I think I initially thought the book was going to be about journalists who work at the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. But you have a definition of media—we have Phillis Wheatley, we have Ryan Coogler.

We have a long tenure in terms of years and decades. We also have a very diverse definition of media. Talk about why you chose “media makers” as in not just—because you’re telling a story about politics and values, but you chose media makers, not just journalists. Talk about why.

Jackson: Yeah, absolutely. So look—the American public sphere is fundamentally shaped, and the stories we tell about ourselves, the narratives we have about the country, are fundamentally shaped by media. Journalism, of course, is core to that.

A healthy journalistic system and democracy should go together like this. But our public consciousness, our public politics, our public culture aren’t only shaped by journalistic media. They’re shaped by narratives at large, stories that we tell about ourselves.

And one of the great examples of this in the very negative sense is the film Birth of a Nation. For folks who are tuning in who are familiar with Birth of a Nation—it was this white supremacist propaganda film that glorified the Ku Klux Klan, really helped to perpetuate in popular culture Lost Cause myths.

And this film was extremely powerful in normalizing those myths in the culture. And in fact, there’s some research that shows that it also directly caused violence against Black communities in areas where it was released and shown at the time.

And so what we know is that journalism and these other forms of media work hand in hand—filmmaking and, as you mentioned, in the book I talk about slave narratives and literature, because people forget that the printing press was a form of revolutionary technology. We’re all living in an era where we think of the internet as our era’s form of revolutionary technology.

But at one period, the printing press was a revolutionary technology that made it possible to circulate media, circulate ideas, whether those were newspapers or pamphlets or books of poetry. In another era, photography was a revolutionary medium, and that was helping people reimagine and envision what America looked like. And so Black media makers were engaged in intervening in photographic technologies.

Film, podcasts, journalism—all these things. This is why I use the scope and the framework of media making, because you can really see how they speak and talk to each other.

Bacon: The book is organized not chronologically but in some ways around these three ideas where the second sight—so let’s talk about those. You first describe Black media as a second sight to what you call “life.” Explain what you mean by “life.”

Jackson: Yeah, absolutely. I’m going to jump ahead from your question a little bit.

Bacon: Sure.

Jackson: When people get their hands on the book, which I hope they will, they’ll see that the three core chapters of the book are “Life,” “Liberty,” and “The Pursuit of Happiness.” And we know these ideas by heart, we think, because they come from the Declaration of Independence. And of course, we’re a couple of weeks out from the semi-sesquicentennial—which nobody wants to say—but it’s the 250th anniversary of the first Fourth of July.

And I sandwich those three values between these Black theoretical concepts of second sight and sankofa, which is a West African ideal that you must look back to look forward—you must understand the past in order to imagine the future.

And so really what I’m trying to do by engaging life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the book is think about how we might reimagine those ideals, those ideas, through the second sight of Black media making over the course of time.

And so in the “Life” chapter, I take up stories from across different historical contexts that Black media makers were telling about what American life could be if its values were really adhered to and embraced. And what American life was, and how life was or wasn’t valued. That’s one of the chapters where I talk a lot about the struggle of Black journalists to really make everyone’s lives matter in this country, in terms of being able to tell those stories. But I do a similar thing also with “Liberty” and with “The Pursuit of Happiness.”

Bacon: Talk about “The Pursuit of Happiness” chapter a little bit now.

Jackson: Oh, yeah, absolutely. That was one of the more fun chapters to write, because a lot of the imagination stuff comes up in that chapter. I got to write about the film school—the LA film school called the LA Rebellion, which includes folks like Julie Dash, who is an incredible and very influential filmmaker who made a film called Daughters of the Dust, where she uses speculative futurity to tell a multigenerational story.

In that chapter, I get to talk about things like Octavia Butler’s writing and also things like the BlackStar Film Festival, which is based in Philly, where I am. And I really try to think about, in that chapter, what the stories are that Black media makers have told us about what happiness looks like.

There’s this great quote from Du Bois—I think I lead that chapter with it—about it not just being these constrained ideas of the American dream, but the ability to live freely, to love freely, to—I think he says something like “stretch one’s arms and one’s soul.” That’s what happiness looks like.

And so in that chapter, I really try to think about how Black media makers have given us a map towards a bigger, better future where Americans could actually be happy and experience joy and embrace complexity and do all these things. So I love that chapter, because it comes after the “Life” and “Liberty” chapters, which have some harder content in them.

And I hope that I can tackle both the harder content and also think about some of what is, I think, the dual role of second sight in Black media. The first role is the critique—really tackling this gap: what isn’t being addressed? What isn’t being covered? Whose lives aren’t being valued? How might we expand how we understand life and liberty? And how are there still really severe issues to solve in our country around those?

But then also the imaginative power of imagining a future where we have those things, and then we can get to the happiness part. We can get to these visions that we haven’t even gotten close to yet, but we can imagine.

Bacon: Let me talk about some media products you mention in the book, so people can understand the idea a little better. You mention the movie Sinners and write about that extensively. Talk about how that is an example of second sight.

Jackson: Yeah, absolutely. There are so many things about Sinners, and I love talking about Sinners right now because Sinners this year became the most Oscar-nominated movie of all time.

Bacon: Oh, OK.

Jackson: Which is amazing.

Bacon: Meaning it had the most Oscar nominations?

Jackson: Yeah, exactly. It received the most Oscar nominations of any film ever.

Bacon: Wow. OK.

Jackson: Which is remarkable. So yeah, I talk about Sinners because Sinners is an example where Ryan Coogler is a contemporary filmmaker—compared to his predecessors, he has, relatively and extremely, much more freedom, much more economic support and power. But he still faces some of the same challenges in telling stories that center African American second sight.

And so the film itself, of course, centers that second sight. Because ostensibly it’s a film about vampires, but anyone who’s seen it knows that it’s a film about dispossession, about the stealing of Black culture, of the spirit of Black tradition, and the violence—the real violence—that is typical, whether it’s the scenes about sharecropping or the very remarkable monologue about lynching.

And so at the same time, he’s using this speculative form and the horror form of the vampire to give us an allegory that can better help us understand what the Black experience has been in the United States, which is a bit of a vampiric one in terms of our relationship to the nation. And so these are the ways that he embodies this in the film itself, in writing the film itself.

But the film is also a great example of the ongoing challenges that Black media makers face, even in this era where they receive great recognition. Because he talks in interviews—and I interviewed dozens of contemporary Black media makers for the book, as well as doing the historical and archival work—and Ryan Coogler has talked about the fact that Sinners was really the project he wanted to make. He made this incredible independent film, Fruitvale Station, about the murder of Oscar Grant by BART police in Oakland. It was this remarkable, well-received independent film.

But he couldn’t get the kind of funding and support from the Hollywood studios to make a film like Sinners at that point, even though he had made this beautiful, remarkable film. Because there are biases built into all of these industries, whether it’s journalism or film or anything else. They say, Will mainstream audiences want this? Will this sell? Is it worth investing in?

And we know—we could get into a political economic conversation for the rest of our time if we wanted to about where the money’s coming from and how much folks in media are dependent on that.

And so Ryan Coogler has said essentially that he had to make the Black Panther movies and the Creed movies and prove that he could make box office hits that made a lot of money before he could make a film like Sinners, which is really his heart project. Because the only way for him to get the funding and the studio support for Sinners was to make these other big box office hits.

And of course, I get into in the book how there’s a bit of a double standard there, because most white filmmakers don’t have to make a movie like Black Panther—which was, I believe, the highest-grossing Marvel film up to the time that it came out—in order to be taken seriously for funding for another movie. They don’t have to do quite so much overachieving.

And so yeah, there are multiple ways where his experience as a filmmaker—which he also talks about being really influenced by the folks that came before him, John Singleton and Spike Lee and Gina Prince-Bythewood—is this pull-through legacy of Black media making in second sight.

Bacon: So talk about Du Bois himself. He is an intellectual, but he’s also in some ways a magazine editor. So talk about that role in second sight.

Jackson: Yeah. I love this. I hope people—I’m a nerd and I’m always happy to talk about Du Bois or honestly any of the folks in the book. But people understand and know Du Bois as this really foundational thinker across a few fields—sociology, primarily, in the United States, but also across theories of identity and difference, of race, of propaganda and so forth. In fact, if you want to nerd out later, we can talk about how Du Bois was one of the first people to use the concept of misinformation in his writing.

Bacon: Really? OK.

Jackson: But Du Bois was also a media maker, and this goes back to your earlier question about why I use this expansive framework of media making. Because yes, Du Bois was the editor of The Crisis magazine for several decades, which was the NAACP’s magazine. And he oversaw what he really understood as a project of positive propaganda—countering the denigrative representations of African Americans in this country, and also engaging in a lot of really heated, sometimes political, debates about things like whether Black men should join the military, and things around housing and housing segregation and so forth. And he was this very fiery editor.

He, of course, in that regard, was a journalist. He also often wrote editorials for Black newspapers and so forth. But he was also a creative. A lot of people don’t know—Du Bois also wrote speculative fiction. And again, I think this goes back to why I use this broader term of media making, because I think we would be doing Du Bois himself a disservice if we just said, Oh, he was a scholar and a journalist, or He was a scholar and an editor, or He was a scholar and an activist. Because Du Bois was also writing kind of kooky, honestly, speculative fiction throughout his life.

Bacon: I’ve not read any of it. It’s interesting.

Jackson: Yeah, it’s fun if you can get your hands on it. It’s fun to think through what he’s thinking when he’s writing this stuff. Alien invasions, all kinds of things in his writing.

But he was also supporting multiple types of media projects, and so one example of that was that when Paul Robeson was blacklisted during the McCarthy era, Du Bois was an ally of his and helped to found an alternative radical Black newspaper called Freedom, which Paul Robeson and his wife, Eslanda Robeson, edited and ran. And this was a really—at that point, Du Bois had actually stepped down from working at The Crisis because it had taken on a more conservative bent, and Du Bois, over the course of his life, became more and more politically radical.

And so you see this in his own work, how he’s constantly engaging in media in these different ways. And you find this around a lot of different figures who you think you know what they did. Like Gordon Parks is a great example. Gordon Parks, incredible photographer—quite literally helped to shift American consciousness about what American life looked like, how expansive it was, what Black life looked like in particular, both the beauty and the nuances and the hard things and all of it. He worked for Life magazine.

But what a lot of people don’t know about Gordon Parks—and I was actually thrilled to learn this—was that Gordon Parks was the artistic director for the first issue of Essence magazine, which is a women’s magazine focused on Black women, fashion, style, women’s issues, et cetera.

He was one of the founding powerhouses behind the founding of that magazine. He also made documentary films. He also made what is now called one of the first blaxploitation films. And I would argue that a lot of the blaxploitation films that came after tried to do what Parks did in the blaxploitation genre and never quite got there.

And he was doing a lot of different types of media. He was a media maker, just like Du Bois or Ida B. Wells or you or any folks that are working across registers and across technologies.

Bacon: Let’s talk about the Code Switch podcast for NPR. I think people will know what that is already. Talk about that as an example of second sight, because it’s something very contemporary.

Jackson: Yeah, absolutely. If you’ll allow me to do a small shout-out here—Gene Demby, who is one of the founders of the Code Switch podcast and remains one of the hosts, and it’s been long-running now, will actually be in conversation with me about the book in Washington, DC, this Friday for Juneteenth.

So for folks in Washington, DC—Gene Demby and I will be at Solid State Books this Friday to talk about this book.

But Code Switch is a great example of what happens when Black media makers actually are able to integrate second sight into these more mainstream spaces like NPR. And the story behind it is really a great story, because it shows the networks and the development of second sight as a collective.

So the story here is that Gene actually was a blogger. He founded a blog called Post Bourgie, and it was in the Black blogosphere era, leading up to before Obama was elected the first time—so before 2008. He had this blog Post Bourgie, and Post Bourgie was this really vibrant space in the Black blogosphere where a lot of people who you then wouldn’t have heard of but now you have heard of were engaged in these political debates about race in America, politics, and Blackness—

Bacon: Most famously, Jamelle Bouie, right?

Jackson: Jamelle Bouie wrote for Post Bourgie. The list could go on and on. There are names everywhere. There are many people who have associations with Post Bourgie. I list them all in the book. They ended up being editors at the Los Angeles Times. They ended up going on to do all kinds of things.

But this was really a vibrant space for what we might now call the elder millennial or younger Gen X cohort of Black media makers who couldn’t find a voice in the mainstream media that continued to exclude their voices but were engaged in the blogosphere.

And what happened was this moment opened up where, when Obama was elected, all of a sudden all these mainstream, historically white media spaces said, Oh, we need these young, vibrant Black voices to explain this young, vibrant Black president.

And so people like Gene Demby and many of the other people—Jamelle Bouie and others—were able to break into mainstream media. Gene first worked at the Huffington Post, then he worked at The New York Times, and then eventually he went on to co-found the podcast Code Switch with Shereen Marisol Meraji.

And I want to point out—Shereen, who was the other co-founder of Code Switch, is Iranian and Puerto Rican American. So you can be a part of second sight, you can be a part of uplifting alternative narratives and stories—you don’t have to be Black. This is a political and cultural project of telling bigger, better stories about the nation.

But to this day, the podcast continues to interrogate both American politics and American culture through the lens of race, centrally—insisting on race being a foundational way of understanding our nation. And that is simply something that has been absent, largely, from public radio, mainstream radio, and so forth, until we got this crop of shows. And there are a lot of other now—people will know—Black podcasts and Black radio shows. I interviewed other folks in the book from various ones, including folks like Eric Eddings and many others.

But yeah, that’s a great story of how this happens. Now of course, there are a lot of challenges along the way. I kind of told the triumphant version of this. But yeah, it’s a great podcast to this day.

Bacon: We emphasize—and you talk about this in the book—there’s not one single second sight. Stephen A. Smith and Adam Serwer are writing and doing different kinds of media with different kinds of views. The Kevin Hart roast on Netflix was a kind of media—I’m not necessarily a huge fan of it. So let’s discuss the diversity of the second sight, so to speak.

Jackson: Yeah. So I really appreciate that you asked this question, because this is a very important nuance that I want people to understand about my argument here. This is not a racial essentialism argument. This is not an argument that all Black Americans think the same or agree on politics or are participating even necessarily in the same political project. In fact, I would argue that there are some people who are outside of this project.

My book really traces the folks who have a shared sense of, one, wanting to improve American democracy through the stories they tell, whether that’s through film or through journalism. And two, Black freedom—a commitment to what Black liberation or Black freedom means, and an understanding that imagining a freer nation will make us all better.

So of course, there are many people who are not in the book. And I hate to call out names, but since you called out names, I want to give some examples. Candace Owens is an African American. She is not engaged in a collective project of political second sight.

There is a political valence to being part of this project that involves being in community and in earnest and honest debate, even across difference or disagreement, in community around issues that have to do with the liberation of Black people, the end of things like police brutality, and so forth. She’s not really a part of that.

And so that’s a great example of how just because someone’s Black and they’re a media maker, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re making media that reflects Du Bois’s concept—this political concept of second sight. That’s a perfect example.

But there is an immense amount of diversity within how Black people engage in these projects. And I try to show this in the book through thinking about the historical Black press. The historical Black press—there were always Black radicals who were really engaged in radical projects around labor, around anti-militarism, around Black power and so forth, who were part of the Black press. And often the owners and editors—who were Black—of Black newspapers were more conservative. They often came from families that were part of the Black bourgeoisie, and they tended to be more conservative, and sometimes they were itchy about certain things.

But what I show in the book is that this actually provided a really generative—people talk about now how we need to hear different views and be exposed to different ideas. But if you looked at the editorial pages of a Black newspaper, you would see the Black radicals and the Black conservatives debating each other in the editorial pages. You would see the editor and the fiery young reporter arguing.

And I want to say, Black newspapers always included white writers as well. In fact, many Jewish American writers wrote for Black newspapers at different periods of time, who were also engaged in questions around labor and inequality and other things. And so it’s very similar to the HBCUs, historically Black colleges and universities, and the Black churches, where yes, there is often, especially in the leadership positions, a more conservative valence.

But that sort of protects the radicals in their midst, in a way that—because it’s an internal community debate—they can really be engaging across registers in a way where it’s understood that everyone shares an interest in Black liberation, even if they think the means or the goals are different.

So yeah, absolutely, people aren’t speaking in one mind. But I do try to show in the book how people, even when they’re critical of each other—and some of the contemporary folks I interviewed were critical of other contemporary folks I interviewed—even when they’re critical of each other, they assume that people are also interested in this greater project of expanding democracy and of Black freedom. And so there’s an earnestness in the engagement and debates that is actually, in my opinion, quite generous, for the most part.

Now, again, like I said at the start, there are a few people who fall outside of this.

Bacon: Yeah. We’ll discuss Stephen A. Smith offline. Talk about—you said it’s not racial essentialism. I think that was important to say. But could you imagine a book about the second sight that Native American media makers or Latino media makers or female media makers have? This is not saying that Black people have some original insight that no one else has, or that we have insight above others, right?

Jackson: I do think Black people have some original insight, because there’s something unique about being Black in America and that experience, for sure. So I would say—but what I’m saying is, obviously not all Black people think the same, or apply their second sight the same. And there are actually—I want people to see this book as an alternative media history of the United States. There are, of course, many other media makers who have engaged in projects to try to make the country better, try to make the country broader, more inclusive, more beautiful, more free.

And so yes, of course, there are other folks. And in the book, I give a few examples of white media makers who have allied themselves with Black media makers to show how you don’t have to be Black to be a part of this project. You can uplift.

One of the great examples I give in the book is this—I don’t know if you’ve seen the film Sing Sing.

Bacon: No.

Jackson: It’s a really great film. It’s based on a true story, because I talk about prison media and the newspapers that come out of prisons as being one example of where, unfortunately, because of mass incarceration, Black second sight is also often revealed. But Sing Sing is about a theater project inside Sing Sing Prison where Black incarcerated men learned Shakespeare and performed it and led it.

And the filmmakers who made the film are white, but they did this thing that is very easy to do. Instead of taking the story, writing it themselves, taking the credit, taking the money—instead of appropriating the story—they actually hired and paid equally the formerly incarcerated men who were a part of this project when they were incarcerated. And they gave an equal share. The directors, these men who both starred in it and helped to write it and direct it—there was an equal share of the proceeds of the film.

And it’s actually really unique and really remarkable, because that doesn’t usually happen. Usually the person at the top is being paid more. And so I write about that in the book as an example of the ways that second sight can be supported by anyone in the media industry. Anyone in the media industry—I don’t know about you, but many of the folks I talk to have white editors, or white bosses. They have to go to white investors to get their films green-lit or whatever.

But it’s not that it’s impossible for those folks to understand second sight. They can read my book and then really understand it. It’s that they can make the choice to say, This person’s vision, this person’s insight, this person’s perspective is needed, and I can find ways to support this, to expand the kinds of stories that are being told.

Bacon: So my final two questions are these. I guess the first is just from reading the notes for the book, it sounds like the book contract was signed in 2020 or early—in a period in which it appeared that Black media makers would have growing influence. And now we’re in this sort of what I would describe as a backlash period where a lot of Black journalists have lost their jobs or have lost their influence.

I have to say, to some extent the second sight has been objected to by Republicans who are trying to ban it. But I would also argue a lot of liberals, or people who consider themselves liberal, who are complaining about wokeness having gone too far—which is like a subcode and a deep criticism of the second sight in ways that I think are a bit over the top these days.

And so I guess reading your account, you might say that there are always ups and downs in the ability of Black people to be in media. But are we in some kind of real decline? I worry we’re in some kind of real decline. How do you view it? This backlash era feels very difficult, in part because I’m personally living in it right now in the media. But is this a dip, or is this a real permanent change? Can Code Switch survive as NPR tries to appease the right, is what I would argue? Where are we right now?

Jackson: Yeah. I think that this is a pattern, and I trace this across the different sets of historical moments in the book. There’s this real pattern that happens in America that—my argument is, if we actually listened to second sight and applied it, we wouldn’t keep being in this pattern.

But what happens is there’s some kind of national crisis. And that might be a war. It might be George Floyd is murdered on video and the country erupts. It might be whatever the crisis is—the civil rights movement, et cetera. And then there’s this opening. There are these openings where Black voices and Black stories aren’t just being pulled in to say, Oh, we’re an integrated newsroom, but you have to do it the same way we always did it. But to actually say, We need bigger, broader stories. We need more critique. We need more imagination. And there are these openings.

And anybody who lived through the Obama era or the post-2020 moment knows that these openings have happened multiple times in our lifetime—where people pledged to do better. They pledged to tell bigger stories. They pledged to fund Black-led projects. All these things.

And then, because this is America, there’s always a backlash. There’s always a fatigue of talking about race. And there’s always this retrenchment. And this has happened many times. In politics, Trump is the epitome of one of these retrenchments.

But if you look at history, this has happened many times. If you think about the aftermath of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery—we had Reconstruction. Reconstruction was this shining, very short, 15-year moment where there was greater Black political representation. There were multicultural governments all across the South of both Black people and white people working together. There were all kinds of renewed ways. In some ways, there were the beginnings of reparations and repair.

And then—because the policies that made Reconstruction possible were not enforced by the U.S. government, as we all know—we had the violent retrenchment of Jim Crow. We got lynching. We got hardline segregation. We got new forms of plantation economies that were no longer based on slavery but were based on sharecropping.

And if you look through history, you see this in every moment. There are moments like this around World War II. There are moments like this around the civil rights movement.

And so I think, if it’s any consolation for you and other media makers, one thing we have to keep in mind is that we’re living in one of those moments of backlash and retrenchment. There’s no doubt. But the stories that are being told through second sight are crucial in terms of our democracy to getting us back out.

And what I really hope when people read the book is that they can imagine a world in which we get out of this cycle of progress and backlash, because we finally apply and think about and really embrace the critique and imagination that second sight offers us.

Bacon: So the last question will be—we’ve talked about a lot of different kinds of media. But where is the second sight? There was a period from 2014 to 2020 where I would say there’s a site for the second sight—it’s Twitter, and you would see Black voices saying important things.

And I don’t want to overcelebrate that, but there’s a period where I think you did see one medium. And I had Kathy Roberts Ford on here last week, and she’s talking about the period where there were a lot of Black newspapers that were very vibrant. I don’t really feel like we’re necessarily in that period now.

So when we’re talking about where is the second sight—is it everywhere? I’m a little nervous about that. But if you were looking for where the second sight is today, where would you tell people it is?

Jackson: I am a great person to ask this question, because my last book was about Twitter. I wrote a book about Twitter activism and hashtag activism and the ways that it was used in the 2012, after Trayvon Martin was murdered, through 2020 moments.

But I do want to say, I think it’s really important that we talk about these kinds of platforms with realism and nuance—which is that the majority of Americans were never on Twitter. In fact, if you look at the percentage of people that were ever on Twitter, it was a very small minority. It just happened that a lot of people in the media and political sphere were on there, and so we all felt like it was really important, and I wrote a book about it, et cetera.

And of course it was important. My last book really traces and shows through evidence how this shifted public discourse, public conversations about things like police brutality, about things like racism and the death penalty and many other issues.

So it was important, but there’s never been a single space. There’s never been a single space where, This is the space where second sight happens and where we have our hope for democratic media.

And again, I think this goes back to your question at the start about the broad definition of media making, because this is a collective project. People are engaged in this project here on Substack. People are engaged in this project once on the blogosphere when the blogosphere was it, once on Twitter when Twitter was it, but also through traditional media, through print newspaper, through radio.

Yesterday I had an event in Philly with Sara Lomax, who’s the CEO of WURD Radio, which is the only Black-owned radio station in the state of Pennsylvania. And honestly, more people listen to talk radio than are on TikTok or Instagram or whatever. And so it’s important that we have these institutions where members of our community hear and learn about civic issues, about democracy, about why they’re invested, why they’re involved.

And of course—again, this might be another episode—we really need to tackle the conglomeration and political economic problems in our media system that mean that billionaires and trillionaires increasingly own more—

Bacon: That Bari Weiss gets to run CNN and CBS and fire all the Black people that work there. Yes. More.

Jackson: More. And that of course restricts whether folks in rural areas get the information they need, whether folks in cities like Philly and New York get the information they need. And there are policy solutions to this, but it is a group project.

So when the 1619 Project came out, for example, this was in an era where everybody was saying that the internet had killed newspapers, that the internet had killed print. Nobody buys and picks up and reads a newspaper anymore. And I believe it went through four print editions that kept selling out.

And this was hilarious, because there had been all this hand-wringing about how nobody will buy a newspaper anymore. The New York Times magazine issue with 1619 goes into the newsstands and sells out instantly. People in bodegas and corner stores and gas stations on the highway—everybody is buying it. And they have to print another edition, and then they have to print another edition.

And so it kind of suggests that if media tells stories that matter, that there is a thirst for among the public, there is an audience regardless of the technology or the platform.

But of course, the reason that project was possible was because somebody like Nikole Hannah-Jones had to work her way—and I interviewed her in the book—through a lot of racist media experiences as a Black journalist and had to prove herself. And then her editors had to say, Yes, now is the time that we’re willing to offer this expansive project. We know it might be controversial. We know it might face backlash—which of course it did. We know it might be open to critique—which of course it was. But it’s worth it for our democracy to engage in these interrogations and questions.

So yeah, I think everybody has a hand in this. I don’t think there’s one place you can go.

Bacon: Because now that I think about it, when we first connected, I think you said something on Bluesky about the idea that we were talking about Twitter being over, and therefore there’s no public square. And you were like, There’s never really been a public square where we’re all equally able to show up and speak equally. In America, there’s never been that kind of—

Jackson: There never has been—because the public sphere in the United States is fundamentally shaped by our media systems, the stories we all share. And for so long in U.S. history, our media systems were segregated—and segregated in multiple ways. There weren’t people of color, but there also weren’t women. There also weren’t—and still, still, working people’s voices are very neglected in our media systems.

And the idea is that we would have a healthier media system if we had more platforms, more outlets, more voices. And if the ones that have power—the big ones that have been here all along—actually adhered to the commitments that they made in 2020, which many have since very much rolled back on. To include the voices of the people—to include an expansive set.

And the irony, of course, is that the people who say that they care about intellectual diversity and political debate in media are often the first people to essentially foreclose the more challenging perspectives that come from Black second sight, or come from other kinds of alternative media spaces. But we actually do need that in our media system.

Bacon: Sarah, thanks for joining me. Anything else you want to say about the book or about your events for the next few weeks?

Jackson: No, I’m excited. I hope people will come out. I’m on Instagram @sarahjjacksonphd if folks want to follow me on Instagram. That’s where I’m posting all the book stuff and book events. I’ll be across a few different cities—New York, Chicago, Boston, DC, Baltimore, et cetera.

And yeah, I hope people read it. I’m really interested to hear how folks receive it. It’s been a real honor for folks like you, who are Black media makers, to tell me they feel really seen in this book. That is phenomenal. And I hope folks both in the media industry and the public—because we’re all consumers of media—will really take some of these stories and lessons to heart.

Bacon: A great book. I really appreciate you writing it. Thanks for joining me. Great to see you. Take care.

Jackson: Thanks so much, Perry.

Bacon: Bye.

A fifth of the world’s oil supplies typically flow through the Strait of Hormuz. Amid America’s disastrous war of choice against Iran, it’s now been closed since March. As the United States and Iran edge closer to a prospective deal to end that war, analysts have marveled at the fact that oil markets have taken it mostly in stride. Prices never soared to the $200-per-barrel heights many feared. Before news of a possible agreement earlier this month, the price of a barrel of Brent crude—the global benchmark—remained below $100 per barrel. Gasoline prices stateside have risen only modestly.

Extractive interests in the U.S. brag that this stability is a product of their own dynamism. “The lesson from this moment is not that the United States is immune from global disruption,” the American Petroleum Institute argued last month. “It’s that decades of growth in American oil and natural gas production have fundamentally strengthened America’s energy position during periods of global instability. Maintaining that advantage will require continued investment in the infrastructure needed to connect abundant supply to growing demand—both at home and abroad.”

But the strength and nimbleness of the U.S. oil and gas industry isn’t the whole story. We don’t actually know how drivers in the U.S. might have fared if global prices had really soared. Booming U.S. domestic production is only part of why they didn’t. Pipelines across Saudi Arabia and the UAE kept about five million barrels per day flowing from the Persian Gulf. China ratcheted down fossil fuel demand, reducing imports by nearly 40 percent from 2025 averages. Affordable Chinese solar panels, electric vehicles, and two-wheelers helped other countries in Asia to destroy demand for imported fossil fuels too.

Wealthier nations, meanwhile, were able to draw on preexisting stockpiles to mitigate price shocks. The U.S. did this using its Strategic Petroleum Reserve. One of many federal energy security policies prompted by the oil shocks of the 1970s, the SPR is now emptier than it’s been since 1983. Earlier this month, oil executives warned the Trump administration behind closed doors that those stockpiles in the U.S. and elsewhere could start to run out and cause global energy prices to jump. Just because prices haven’t spiked doesn’t mean they never will.

One clear takeaway from all this is that oil markets can put up with a lot more disruption than even top oil executives claimed. If a climate-conscious government had credibly threatened to bring about “the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market,” as the International Energy Agency has called the monthslong closure of the Strait of Hormuz, fossil fuel producers would have rioted. During the Biden years, executives whined endlessly that the administration’s climate policies were suffocating them. In reality, those years were fat ones for this country’s fossil fuel industry. Drillers enjoyed record profits and production. What if Biden had tried holding back 15 million barrels of oil every day for three months?

It would never have happened. Although you wouldn’t have known it from the CEOs’ grousing, the Biden administration never took a serious interest in phasing out fossil fuels. It opted for tax breaks and modest regulations to gradually incentivize lower-carbon alternatives; after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, former Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm promptly begged our fossil fuel industry’s top brass to drill more. Ironically, it took one of the world’s biggest coal, oil, and gas enthusiasts—Donald Trump—to trigger “the largest fossil fuel capital annihilation event in history,” as French philosopher Pierre Charbonnier called it in the first month of the Iran war.

Comparing Trump’s actions with the visions of climate advocates is grimly instructive. No climate law or treaty promised to knock out even a fraction of the supplies that were taken offline during the Iran war. Drillers nevertheless persisted in warning that the sky would fall if climate policymakers got their way, explaining that they had a moral duty to satisfy surging fossil fuel demand in fast-growing Asian countries. In the last days of the Biden administration, in November 2024, ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods complained that the climate policies “that have been pursued to date are very narrowly focused on limiting the supply of traditional sources,” which wasn’t remotely true. He cautioned that such (nonexistent) strategies threatened global economic growth and prosperity for the world’s poor. The same year, the CEO of Saudi Aramco talked about the need to “abandon the fantasy of phasing out oil and gas,” which was never on the verge of happening at any meaningful scale.

If there is a silver lining to be found in the last few months, it’s that middle- and low-income countries are increasingly seeing the fossil fueled development that Exxon and Aramco have tied their futures to as a bad bet for energy security. If the Strait of Hormuz does reopen—and supplies gradually come back online in the coming months and years—the International Energy Agency predicts that newly accessible supplies of oil will overwhelm demand. For a Trump administration more committed than ever to drill, baby, drill, that could spell disaster for its favorite industry, tanking margins for smaller and midsize producers who need higher global prices in order to break even on pricier, unconventional drilling.

The main things that have allowed the U.S. to insulate itself from the effects of the stupid, illegal war it started were big government policies passed decades ago—from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to early-stage investments in fracking. While executives in the U.S. whinged constantly about the Biden administration’s alleged War on American Energy, Trump has already dealt them much longer-lasting damage. He has pushed countries long considered new sources of fossil fuel demand to embrace electrification instead. He has imposed tariffs that make production more expensive. And he has needlessly exhausted the reserves that have helped oil producers stave off a consumer revolt. Fossil fuel executives in the United States aren’t complaining about Trump because they are right-wing, and because he says lots of nice things about them. Windfall war profits won’t change the fact that he’s done more enduring damage to their industry than Biden’s most enterprising climate hawks.

The opening of Barack Obama’s presidential library in Chicago this Friday has inspired a new round of conversations around his remarkable rise and presidency. And there’s so much to celebrate. The election of a Black president was a landmark event in American history. From the Affordable Care Act to the legalization of gay marriage, Obama and his team helped advance a wide swath of policies that made life better for Americans. And Barack and Michelle Obama acted with such poise, grace, dignity, and humility that most Americans were proud that they were our First Family.

But while Democrats and liberals should look back upon the Obama years with fondness, they must finally and fully move on from them. The Democratic Party has something of a cult of Obama, a “What Would Barack Do?” mindset, and a fixation with 2008. Liberal columnists call for the party to return to Obama’s policy positions and rhetoric, voters and donors make every presidential primary a search for the next Obama, the words of David Axelrod, David Plouffe, and others involved in the 2008 campaign are treated like gospel. Enough. Barack Obama is a great man. A great Democratic Party will treat Barack Obama as a person, not a messiah.

What’s wrong with Democrats harkening back to their best recent politician, who won in a landslide, got reelected, and governed the country effectively? Three things. First of all, while Barack Obama still walks the earth and looks remarkably similar to when he first ran for president, we are living in much different political times. So we can’t learn much from his successes or failures.

You can believe that the rise of far-right politics in America and the Democratic Party losing ground among voters without college degrees and in rural areas are largely the failures of Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and “woke” activists. Many of my fellow political journalists do. They are wrong though. Conservative parties in Europe are also winning over less-educated people and those in rural areas. The far-right is surging across the globe. In 2012, Barack Obama won Michigan by nine percentage points, Iowa by six, and Ohio by three. I doubt Obama himself thinks he would do that well in those states today, even if he used the exact same rhetoric and tactics as he did 14 years ago.

So much about American politics has dramatically changed since 2012: the widespread adoption of social media and decline of traditional news sources; the growing strength of both the MAGA right and the progressive left; an oligarchy that has more money than ever and increasingly uses it to shape politics. One clue that Obama’s approach would be less successful today is that a man with a very similar ideology to Obama (Biden) just left office as one of the most unpopular presidents in recent memory.

There is one issue where the Obama model is particularly useless now: race. In 2008, it was easy to argue that America’s racial divides were diminishing and that a unifying Black leader might further accelerate that process. No one would claim that now. Raphael Warnock, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, and Wes Moore are optimistic Black politicians with cross-racial appeal. But on the campaign trail, they can’t position themselves as post-racial figures as Obama did. They must respond both to the racism of Trump, which is more overt than past Republicans, and the more fervent anti-racism of today’s Democratic Party.

Second, there is the man himself, and his limitations. We don’t have to ask “What Would Barack Do?” since the former president remains deeply involved in the machinations of the party. But while Obama made two brilliant decisions in the 2000s (opposing the Iraq War and running for president sooner than most anticipated), his record since then is more mixed. While in office, he suggested that the Republican Party would normalize, seemingly not realizing that Tea Party version of the GOP was the real thing.

Obama discouraged Biden from running for president during the 2016 cycle, effectively backing Hillary Clinton instead. On the eve of the 2024 election, he implied Black men who hadn’t yet backed Kamala Harris were motivated by sexism. His political advice these days, such as suggesting that Democrats should avoid speaking in super-wonky terms, isn’t particularly novel.

I am not singling out Obama—-American politics is very complicated and unpredictable. Many people, myself included, never thought Trump would be elected president. The problem is that the Democratic Party has a few oracles (Obama, Plouffe, Nancy Pelosi, James Carville) who are treated as political geniuses based on their wins long ago. I’m glad that Obama, Pelosi, and other party leaders eventually convinced Biden to drop out in 2024. But a more effective party would not be looking to its 2008-era elders to make obvious decisions like sidelining a deeply unpopular 81-year-old candidate.

Third, the cult of Obama and 2008 leaves the party in a state of nostalgia, always trying to repeat a kind of fantasy version of the past. I covered the 2008 campaign closely, and there were moments when Hillary Clinton’s team was outsmarting Obama’s. But what’s taken hold in the Democratic Party is the view that Obama and his aides ran near-perfect campaigns in 2008 and 2012 and Democrats have gone wrong by not repeating them.

So you end up with Pluoffe, who hadn’t held any senior political jobs since his work with Obama, chosen as a top adviser for Harris in 2024. Democratic presidential candidates should actually be listening to the political operatives who have advised Warnock, Andy Beshear, Josh Shapiro, Gretchen Whitmer, and others who have won in tough states in the 2020s, not people whose heyday was working for Bill Clinton or Barack Obama. I suspect there is more for Democrats to glean from the successful campaigns of Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum, Canada’s Mark Carney, and Hungary’s Péter Magyar than the 2008 Obama campaign, which happened before the authoritarian/oligarch/social era of today.

What’s the alternative to an obsession with Obama and 2008? I worry that many Democrats are desperate to find another eloquent wunderkind (perhaps Pete Buttigieg or Jon Ossoff would fit the bill), charismatic leader (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), team of consultants (those who advised Zohran Mamdani) or ideal campaign operation (Mamdani 2025) to put on an Obama-like pedestal.

Please no. Instead, Democrats need a strong party, with electoral strategies and policies not dependent on a single person or time. That won’t be easy to create. There are no shortcuts. It will require painful internal debates. Autopsies will need to be fully completed and then actually released. Democratic heroes (Pelosi, Obama) might deserve some criticism; the political tactics of the party’s enemies (Trump) perhaps praised and copied.

I’m sure I will eventually make it to the Obama library. The best president of my lifetime (and probably yours) is worth commending. Ten or 15 years ago, I would have also said Obama should also be emulated. But Democrats have tried that, over and over again, leaving America in the hands of Donald Trump. Democrats should celebrate 2008 this week—and then adapt to the reality of 2026.

Have you seen Donald Trump lately? You may have spotted him attempting to spin his “not final” Iran deal as anything other than a total capitulation. Maybe you caught him falling asleep in the Oval Office. You may have seen him talking about how handsome the leaders of India and Egypt are. But lately, most Donald Trump sightings have been at sporting events.

The self-described “sports president” has been everywhere lately—most notably at Game 3 of the Knicks-Spurs series in New York City, where he became the first president to attend an NBA Finals game, and at the slate of UFC fights staged on the White House Lawn. Come July 19, he will be in New Jersey, this time to hand the World Cup Trophy to a victorious U.S. captain Tim Ream. (Or, you know, some other nation’s captain.)

Sports—especially combat sports and football—have always been important to Trump’s political project, never more so in this second term. It’s an area that’s meant to show the president the way he likes to be seen: not just an avatar for the nation—he’s just another one of those regular joes that support him—but as a culturally dominant force. Trump is inescapable. He pops up even in places presidents haven’t before (like the NBA Finals). At the same time, those appearances are also often carefully choreographed to show him receiving maximum adulation. Hence all the MMA bouts and Army-Navy games.

There’s just one problem: Trump has lost his fastball. Those ordinary people taking in a game? They hate him now, thanks to a destructive political agenda and the ongoing economic fallout from his global trade war and the war in Iran. Far from showcasing Trump at his peak, over the last week—and likely in the forthcoming World Cup final—we’ve seen a weakened leader who is not just losing his grip on power but on the culture, as well.

Let’s take stock of Trump’s most recent forays into sports. Last Monday, he attended the NBA Finals. There, he was greeted with a cannonade of boos, undeniably killed the vibe—and subjected the New York Knicks to their only loss since April. On Wednesday—with the atmosphere cleansed by some sage-sporting Gothamites and a halftime performance by the Wu-Tang Clan, the Knicks completed the biggest comeback in NBA Finals history—something that didn’t seem possible with the president in the building. On Saturday, they won their first title since 1973 and New York City exploded with joy: Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people took to the streets to cheer and embrace one another.

Trump tried to stage his own version of that triumph on Sunday, at a lavish 80th birthday celebration put on by the UFC. The event took place in a massive, garish cage on the White House lawn, with 4,000 business and political elites looking on—the real fans had to watch from far outside the security perimeter set up around the building. The event was a disaster in most respects. Marred by rain delays and a lack of marquee fights, it was a bit of a dud, an event mostly memorable for one fighter lobbing a transphobic slur at former first lady Michelle Obama.

It was a stark contrast with the real party in his hometown a night before. And the good vibes have only continued since then, as dozens of U.S. cities have welcomed tens of thousands of visitors from all over the globe to attend the 2026 World Cup.

American soccer fans have shown up with open arms and sportsmanship. In Lawrence, Kansas, fans have embraced the Algerian team with cries of “Rock Chalk Algeria”—a variant on a cheer for the University of Kansas’s basketball team—and a University of Kansas marching band that learned the nation’s national anthem (which, frankly, goes hard). In Boston and Rhode Island, residents have welcomed (and shared pints) with Scottish fans (the word on the street is that Boston bars have been drained of beer). In New York, fans of Senegal, Morocco, and Brazil have all been embraced by the locals. The World Cup: It’s fun, and Americans like hosting it! Whether in Dallas or Los Angeles or Kansas City, Americans genuinely like having people from around the world visit, and they’re showing them a good time. It’s a refutation of Trump’s entire political program.

It all goes to show that the idea that Trump is somehow the “sports president” is wrong at the core. Game 3 at the Garden showed it: No one can really have fun with him around. He looked genuinely bored at the game and was accused of falling asleep. More broadly, the cultural influence that seemed to be bending in his direction in November 2024, when the “Trump dance” was inescapable at college football and U.S. Men’s National Team soccer games has been obliterated. He tried to be a part of the greatest moment in New York City sports history and nearly blew it for everyone—his mood-killing influence will be part of Knicks lore forever. His UFC party was a disaster. Next month, he will try—and fail—to ruin a World Cup that he has done everything to blemish but has not quite destroyed. When he bestows the trophy on the winner, he will be booed. But the booing will stop, and people will return to doing what they were doing before he slouched onto the scene—having themselves a pretty good time.

Oracle has shocked its customers by releasing new end-of-life conditions for its middleware products that thousands of large organizations rely on in their enterprise application deployments. In a missive published online earlier this month, Big Red warned that support for the widely used Oracle Fusion Middleware 12c Release 2 was approaching a “critical milestone.” Top-level Premier Support is set to end in December 2026, while Extended Support will stop by the end of December 2027. “After these dates, Oracle will no longer provide updates or security fixes for this product version. Technical assistance will be provided as defined in the Oracle Lifetime Support Policy. All customers and partners are strongly encouraged to begin planning and executing upgrades or migration strategies to currently supported Oracle Fusion Middleware releases as soon as possible,” the note said. Martin Biggs, vice president and general manager of third-party support specialist Spinnaker, said users would be concerned about the lack of time to plan for the migration or strategic change to a new platform and to recruit scarce skills. “That version of Fusion Middleware has been around for quite a while now, and the announcement of Extended Support being only a year is quite unusual — normally it's two to three years. In part, that's because they kept the Premier Support going for so long, and then telling everyone it's going to be managed, ‘Market Driven Support’ after Extended Support is not what the market was expecting,” Biggs said. In its note, Oracle said that “to help reduce the time sensitivity of these upgrade programs”, it planned to offer a Market Driven Support program for Oracle Fusion Middleware 12.2.1.4/12.2.1.19 on a yearly basis beyond 2027. “Details of this program, including scope, terms, and availability, will be communicated at a later date,” the vendor said. Biggs described Market Driven Support — a fee-based service which offers a lower level of support than Premier or Extended Support — as an “extraordinarily limited product” which does not provide full patching. “The situation right now is you've got so many security vulnerabilities being announced all the time, who knows what Market-Driven Support is going to include? They're basically saying, when it comes to January 2028, it's unclear what they’re going to do. By the way, Market Driven Support is far more expensive for a far weaker support product. That's the big surprise to the marketplace,” Biggs said. The Register has offered Oracle the opportunity to comment. The good news is that Oracle is broadening platform support by confirming future versions of Oracle WebLogic Server and Oracle Fusion Middleware will be available on IBM's AIX Unix operating system for its mid-range POWER processor architecture. The move would offer “a more deliberate approach to modernization, allowing upgrades to be aligned with infrastructure lifecycle planning, application dependencies and business-driven transformation timelines,” IBM said in a statement. Oracle has also promised more details — at some point in the future — about its plans for Fusion Middleware. It plans to deliver the next Oracle Fusion Middleware suite release on a Jakarta EE 11-based container [for Java-based applications]. "This release is intended to extend support for the next generation of Java and WebLogic Server capabilities across the broader Fusion Middleware portfolio,” it said. ®

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for its newsletters.

A union wants California’s billionaires to rescue the state’s healthcare system. The billionaires have other ideas.

On June 17, an initiative to tax the state’s wealthiest residents qualified for the ballot, according to the secretary of state’s office, which verifies petition signatures.

Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has consistently swatted down the idea of tax increases throughout his tenure, emerged early as an opponent of the proposed tax. Wealthy allies in Silicon Valley joined the fray armed with deep pockets and threats to leave the state, which depends disproportionately on high earners for revenue.

The union funding the measure, Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West, says California needs the revenue that would be generated by the measure to rescue the healthcare system from deep cuts that the Trump administration made last year in the president’s tax reform package, known as the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.”

Newsom is reportedly trying to negotiate a last-minute deal that would pull the initiative before the ballot is finalized next Thursday, June 25.

What would it do?

The proposed initiative would levy a one-time 5% tax on California residents whose net worth exceeded $1 billion at the start of this year. The tax would hit roughly 200 people, and billionaires could pay in installments over five years. 

Proponents of the measure estimate it would generate $100 billion for the state. The revenue would go into a special fund with 90% reserved for healthcare spending and 10% for education and food assistance programs. 

The Legislature would control the funds and could allocate up to $25 billion annually to designated programs including Medi-Cal and CalFresh.

It needs a simple majority to pass. 

Who is supporting it?

The state’s largest healthcare workers union is bankrolling the measure, pouring more than $31 million into the campaign. “We are facing literally a collapse of our healthcare system here in California and elsewhere,” Dave Regan, president of SEIU-UHW, said in October when the campaign launched.

The union, which is known for wielding ballot measures aggressively, argues that federal healthcare cuts will result in hospital and clinic closures, worsened patient access and thousands of lost jobs if the state doesn’t step in to backfill tens of billions of federal dollars. The group also points out that the Trump tax breaks for income, businesses and investments disproportionately benefit the wealthy people who would then be subject to the proposed billionaire tax.

“Whether or not folks support this, they can’t deny that these massive cuts to healthcare are coming,” said union spokesperson Renée Saldaña. “Nobody else has a solution to fill this massive $100 billion funding gap that is facing California.”

Saldaña noted that people signing the initiative petition were supportive and sometimes wanted the tax to be continuous rather than one-time. 

“This is popular. The public is feeling the strain of their own healthcare costs,” she said.

The measure has won high-profile support from Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich. A handful of local unions as well as the Teamsters and AFSCME California have also backed the measure.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (left) and California Gov. Gavin Newsom are on opposite sides of a proposed tax on billionaires in the Golden State. Credit: Associated Press Who is opposed to it?

Newsom is an unsurprising and vocal critic of the proposal. He has long argued that increased taxes would drive wealthy people and businesses out of the state. In a recent appearance on “Real Time with Bill Maher,” Newsom claimed that “we’ve already seen dozens and dozens of people leave the state.”

Google co-founder Sergey Brin, with a net worth of $300 billion, according to Forbes, reportedly moved to Nevada because of the tax threat. Brin, a onetime supporter of liberal causes turned Donald Trump supporter, is also the biggest spender among opponents. As of June 15, he has contributed $82 million to Building a Better California, which is funding multiple countermeasures designed to invalidate or weaken the initiative should it pass. The committee has not, however, taken a position on the wealth tax.

The top two measures — the Retirement and Personal Savings Protection Act and the Improving Transparency, Effectiveness and Efficiency in California Government Act — will also likely appear on the November ballot. The retirement act would prohibit new state taxes on personal property, effectively canceling the billionaire tax if both measures pass. The transparency act would require audits of state programs funded by special taxes.

Other tech and industry titans, including Google CEO Eric Schmidt, worth $43.3 billion, Kleiner Perkins chairman John Doerr, worth $25 billion, and The Wonderful Company president Stewart Resnick, worth $5.4 billion, have donated millions of dollars to Brin’s committee.

Ripple Labs co-founder Chris Larsen, worth an estimated $12.4 billion, also started Golden State Promise, a political action committee dedicated to opposing the tax initiative directly. Venture capitalist Ron Conway, who does not appear on Forbes’ billionaires list, is funding a third group, Stop The Squeeze.

Collectively, the opposition campaigns have raised $107.9 million as of June 15, according to state campaign finance data.

Robert Lapsley, president of the California Business Roundtable, said one of the most concerning parts of the proposal is a provision allowing the Legislature to amend the tax after passage. “They can change the level of taxation; they can change how often they get taxed; they can keep ratcheting down the income level of who pays it.” The union disputes this claim.

Progressive groups such as Planned Parenthood and the California Teachers Association have opposed the measure in recent weeks. Healthcare industry groups like the California Medical Association, California Primary Care Association and California Hospital Association also oppose it.

What’s really going on with healthcare?

The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” which Congress passed last year, enacts a number of sweeping changes to Medicaid, the health insurance program for low-income people and those with disabilities. 

Over time, experts say the changes will dramatically reduce the number of people with publicly funded insurance through mandates such as work requirements and shorter eligibility periods. The law also limits federal Medicaid spending. Because Medicaid programs draw on state and federal dollars, reductions in enrollment or federal spending mean less money for states like California.

The state Department of Health Care Services projected early on that federal cuts could cost California $30 billion annually. Roughly 14 million people rely on Medicaid, also known as Medi-Cal, in California.

State lawmakers have also grappled with successive budget deficits and ballooning program costs. Last year, Newsom and the Legislature limited Medi-Cal enrollment for low-income people without legal status. State leaders are eyeing additional cuts this year to align with new federal requirements.

Miranda Dietz, director of the Health Care Program at the UC Berkeley Labor Center, said close to 3 million Californians will lose healthcare over the next two years as a result of state and federal changes. 

“The need for health insurance and healthcare is not going anywhere,” Dietz said.

What are the challenges?

Should the measure pass, it will surely face legal challenges that could tie the potential revenue up for years, experts say. The seemingly retroactive nature of the tax invites a constitutional challenge, many say, though supporters reject those concerns. The initiative proposes taxing those who are California residents as of Jan. 1, 2026, meaning those who have since left the state would still owe it. 

Mark Peterson, a public policy professor at UCLA School of Law, said revenue from the initiative would “make a huge difference” in helping the state offset federal funding losses, but that’s only if the initiative survives legal challenges and efforts by billionaires to move or hide assets.

Economists and state budget watchers are also wary of the number of billionaires who have already left the state, taking their assets and businesses with them. Only six people moved out of state last year before the proposed tax would apply to them, but their collective worth would have generated the state $27 billion, Fortune reported. Others, including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, worth $231 billion, have also reportedly moved out but not before Jan. 1.

On the other hand, there’s no evidence yet that a majority of the state’s 200 billionaires are leaving. Some, including former gubernatorial candidate and billionaire Tom Steyer, have stated they support the proposal.

Early polling shows 50% of voters favor the initiative, with most strongly behind it, according to the UC Berkeley Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research-POLITICO poll. But that is not as strong a position as it might seem: 54% of voters are concerned about wealthy individuals leaving the state, and 63% are concerned about them taking their businesses with them. A UC Berkeley Institute of Government Studies-Los Angeles Times poll from March showed similar division among voters, with 52% in support. 

Generally, campaigns running ballot initiatives want their early polling numbers to be much higher because support nearly always dwindles as the election creeps closer. 

Have something to say? Lookout welcomes letters to the editor, within our policies, from readers. Guidelines here.

The post California union’s billionaire tax qualifies for ballot amid fierce opposition appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

Donald Trump’s ceasefire agreement with Iran has now been released, and it confirms what we all expected: He got nothing of any significance. A surprising number of his allies agree. Fox News personalities, visibly angry and rattled, are saying they’ve “very skeptical” of the deal, that it “doesn’t feel like a victory,” that the U.S. “lost the most,” and that Iran is “better off” than before. Others are already throwing JD Vance under the bus, with one even suggesting the agreement is so bad that it (gasp!) might have “let the president down.” We think the story now is that the next stage of the negotiations with Iran will be even worse for Trump. We talked to Sina Toossi, an Iran expert at the Center for International Policy. He walks us through the details of the deal, why it falls short of what Barack Obama got, why the criticism from allies creates a tough situation for Trump, and how his failures have created a new geopolitical reality—one that’s worse for America than before. Listen to this episode here.

The UK Cabinet Office is looking for an AI and Innovation Director who can develop civil servants' use of artificial intelligence and change the way the civil service works. The task of persuading public sector workers to love AI involves "re-imagining the future workforce and business model" for the UK's civil service, promoting adoption of AI tools, "championing, coordinating, and tracking AI adoption" across government departments, and instilling an "AI-first culture," according to the job advert. As that list implies, the individual will need to be "a natural influencer" with a "deep understanding of the AI landscape," both traditional and generative, ideally with experience of building AI services. "My ambition is for the civil service to be a global leader in AI government transformation, to enable a more productive civil service that achieves world-class outcomes for citizens and a country that is equipped for an AI world," writes Cabinet Secretary Antonia Romeo in an information pack published with the job ad. "We are seeking an exceptional individual who is an experienced strategic leader, can deliver under pressure, and will help shape the direction of the civil service at a pivotal time." The exceptional individual in question will need to be content to serve King and country for a relatively modest £100,000 to £163,000 a year, albeit with generous pension contributions, compared with some private sector equivalents. They will have to agree to an expected assignment period of at least three years, although this is not contractual, and be British, a national of most European countries, or any Commonwealth country. The right to work in the UK is another requirement. Reg readers who fit the bill can apply by submitting a CV and a 1,000-word statement about why they are suitable by five minutes to midnight on Monday, July 13. While candidates can use AI in applying, "all examples and statements provided must be truthful, factually accurate, and taken directly from your own experience," so perhaps championing AI adoption should wait until after getting the job given the technology's propensity to make things up. ®

The database a business depends on shouldn’t be a potential point of failure; it should be a competitive asset. That’s the proposition Cockroach Labs will put to enterprise architects and database administrators at Convene's Bishopsgate venue in London on Thursday, June 25, 2026. The one-day RoachFest London 2026 event will examine how a database makes that transition from costly liability to competitive advantage. Modern infrastructure grows more complex and harder to manage by the year: Today's challenge might be a traffic spike or a cloud provider outage; tomorrow's could be an AI agent that needs durable context across long-running sessions. At RoachFest London, Cockroach Labs will show why the database should not sit as a passive store, but act as the resilient layer that a modern enterprise depends on: one that lets teams operate without fear, build with confidence, and adapt to what's next. What to expect Tracks at RoachFest London 2026 cover: AI and agentic workloads Resiliency Migrations Operational efficiency Hands-on workshops range from foundational distributed SQL through multi-region architecture to vector storage, indexing, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) built on ACID guarantees. Databases in the age of AI In the keynote, Spencer Kimball, co-founder and CEO of Cockroach Labs, will walk through why the database industry is at an inflection point, facing a complexity tax and the sprawl of hundreds of alternatives that enterprises are struggling to operate and modernize. He'll connect those pain points to the wave of agentic AI that's creating data pressure the industry has never seen before, and make the case that distributed databases are no longer a luxury but an emerging requirement. He will also discuss how CockroachDB is evolving to meet this moment by collapsing cost and scaling elastically. He’ll close with the vision that the database of the next decade will operate itself, with humans elevated to policy and judgment, not log files and escalations. A separate panel session, led by Memori Labs co-founder Adam B. Struck, focuses on where long-term agent state should live and how to keep it consistent as conditions change. Cloud-busting on purpose Form3's vice president of engineering Kevin Holditch will walk attendees through a payments architecture that runs active/active/active across AWS, GCP, and Azure. Form3 takes disaster-recovery testing seriously enough to pull down a cloud provider for 24 hours in production, not staging. What's next for CockroachDB Cockroach Labs' vice president of product Igor Stanko will lay out the CockroachDB roadmap, including bring your own cloud, AI-powered migration tooling, and improvements to the database's price-performance ratio. Operating without fear The afternoon's featured guest knows high-stakes environments. In his session "Operating Without Fear", Major Tim Peake CMG, the first British astronaut to reach the International Space Station (ISS), draws a parallel between astronaut training and the discipline of building systems that thrive under adversity. RoachFest London 2026 takes place at Convene Bishopsgate on June 25. Workshops open at 9am, main stage sessions begin at 1:05, capped off by an evening reception from 4:30 to 6:00. Registration is free with promo code SP100 – register now as space is limited. See the full agenda and register at cockroachlabs.com/roachfest/location/london. Sponsored by Cockroach Labs.

PWNED Welcome back to PWNED, the weekly column where we register some of the worst tech security mistakes our readers have ever seen. Our goal: to help you not do the same. Have a story about someone leaving a gaping hole in their network? Share it with us at pwned@sitpub.com. Anonymity is available upon request. This week's tale of code carelessness comes courtesy of a database administrator we'll Regomize as Joker. Back in the first decade of the 21st century, she went for a job interview at one of the USA's leading national cellular carriers. What she saw would make you want to swap your SIM. After a successful meeting with a hiring manager, Joker was hired on the spot. Within hours the company sudo-level access to a database server, then instructed her to "take a look" at some of the databases. Joker soon realized the carrier's security was no laughing matter as she found herself accessing the main production server for the company's data services division, overseeing all services for the mobile web. This story took place in a time before the iPhone, so she was looking at nasty little versions of websites comressed for viewing on their BlackBerries or flip phones. After peeking around some more, Joker discovered that she had access to the master customer table. It contained nightmarish quantities of personally identifiable information: names, addresses, Social Security numbers, billing info, and even full 16-digit credit card numbers. All of this info was stored in the clear, with no encryption or obfuscation. The CVVs were missing from some credit card info, but many were present. "There was a central billing system upstream on Amdocs servers, but this database also had billing details so they didn't have to reach back upstream to Amdocs if users asked to provision new services," Joker said. After Joker informed management about the mess, they deleted the offending info and forced the developers to go upstream again for billing information, just like they should have been doing in the first place. Joker, like any reasonable DBA, assumed access to this information would be tightly controlled - not made available to new staff with full access rights on their first day. She also assumed her new employer would tokenize key pieces of data because that technique means certain info – say credit card and Social Security numbers – would not be visible in the same table as a customer's name and address. Instead, there would be tokens linking back to the actual numbers stored in a secure token vault. This is common in payment systems. If Joker were less ethical or someone else had gained admin access, they could have exfiltrated large amounts of sensitive data. Permissions should start from a zero-trust assumption and provide only what someone needs to do their job. Joker said that when she later moved on to work for a major online retailer, security was front and center, proving that some people did get it, even back in the George W. Bush era. ®

Relativity Space—a rocket maker acquired by former Google executive chair Eric Schmidt last year after stumbling on the path to orbit—might just beat SpaceX to Mars.

Cybercrime now accounts for more than 30 percent of all offenses across the Asia and South Pacific (ASP) region, according to the latest figures from Interpol. The international cop shop said on Wednesday that the region has seen “a dramatic increase” in the number of recorded cybercrimes, driven largely by an uptake of digital infrastructure, new technologies, and the increasingly organized nature of criminal networks. Interpol’s latest ASP Cyberthreat Assessment Report states that online scams and phishing attacks dominate cybercrime in the region. Data taken from 2024-2025 shows that phishing campaigns have matured beyond the spray-and-pray mass emails of yesteryear and now resemble the more sophisticated techniques deployed elsewhere in the world. Targeted spear phishing is more common nowadays, and the growing use of AI helps even low-skilled script kiddies to apply a layer of authenticity to their attacks. The region’s problem with organized scamming gangs that run camps where hundreds of people are compelled to commit crimes is especially pronounced and well-documented. A United Nations report published last year described scam call centers across Southeast Asia as an epidemic that is metastasizing across the region “like a cancer.” These compounds can be found across countries such as Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and the Philippines, and often see vulnerable individuals trafficked into the scam centers to work under poor conditions – or even as slaves. Interpol cited Singaporean research, which estimated the regional scam industry generates close to $40 billion each year. AI tools, especially those capable of generating convincing deepfake imagery, have also proven popular with cybercriminals across ASP, just as they have beyond the region. In 2024, the same scam compounds were found using deepfake imagery to support romance scams. In February 2024, an employee at a multinational business in Hong Kong was duped into authorizing a $25 million payment because the faces of company execs were convincingly deepfaked on a video call. A similar case was also reported in Singapore in March 2025, when a finance director at a different multinational was tricked into transferring more than $499 million following a Zoom call in which fraudsters assumed the identities of company chiefs, including the CEO and CFO. Interpol’s report highlights how cyber threats are evolving into large-scale challenges for multiple jurisdictions, and no longer represent relatively uncommon, isolated incidents. While digitization across the region is growing, opening new economic opportunities for these countries, law enforcement agencies are struggling to keep pace with the increase in cybercrime. Many lack the skills and tools needed to investigate these crimes. The issue is especially pronounced in developing countries and small island states in the Pacific, which face “significant resource and capacity constraints,” and are thus more vulnerable to direct targeting in attacks by criminals who have a greater chance of evading consequences. Neal Jetton, cybercrime director at Interpol, said: “The findings in this report highlight a rapidly evolving cyber threat landscape across Asia and the South Pacific, where cybercriminals are leveraging artificial intelligence, ransomware-as-a-service models, and sophisticated social engineering techniques on an industrial scale. “As digital adoption accelerates across the region, strengthening operational cooperation, information sharing, and cyber resilience remains essential to protecting communities and critical infrastructure.” Some improvement Interpol lauded many jurisdictions and governments within the ASP region for their proactive approaches to countering cybercrime growth. Hong Kong and the Republic of Korea are two areas that have made strides by introducing new cybersecurity legislation, while others have established national task forces, codified national action plans, and launched awareness campaigns. But even in more developed countries globally, and those with more mature cybersecurity regulatory and legislative landscapes, the issue of increasing rates of cybercrime persists. While Interpol does not collect cybercrime figures for other regions, such as Europe and North America, in the same way that it does for ASP, it’s easy to see that problems persist everywhere. The UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) publishes crime rates by type across England and Wales each year, and while computer misuse offenses in 2025 decreased by 58 percent compared to 2017’s figures, there were still an estimated 735,000 cases across the year. Expanding the data to look beyond pure cyber offenses to cyber-supported crimes, such as banking and credit fraud, these offenses account for more than 2.7 million of the circa 9.6 million total crimes committed. The FBI in the US produces its annual IC3 report examining the rates of cybercrime across the country. Although it doesn’t compare it to total offenses or other crime types, the latest report reflecting 2025’s figures showed cybercrime reports topped one million for the first time, and total losses reached a record $20.87 billion. ®

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A daily roundup of the best stories and cartoons by Daily Kos staff and contributors to keep you in the know. Trump keeps making things weird at G7 summit He can’t stop saying really strange things about his fellow world leaders. Kash Patel throws around lots of cash—but still has no clue how to do his job Did you know the FBI director seems to have his own little slush…

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Honestly, this is getting as predictable as the sun rising in the east. The Department of Justice just ran to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to say that a foiled plot to attack President Donald Trump’s big UFC birthday bash on the White House lawn proves that Trump needs his giant ballroom. You see, this was actually an “assassination plot” against the president, but if Trump had his…

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