The Passion of Doug Wilson
On a brilliantly sunny day in early May, I found myself in Moscow, Idaho, eating brunch with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s spiritual leader, Doug Wilson.
We dove into the quiche, studded with bits of bacon and onion, prepared by his wife, Nancy, as we sat in the sun-drenched breakfast nook of their compound, high on a hill above rolling farmland. The emerald-green wheat fields below looked like a golf course for giants.
Wilson, a self-proclaimed Christian nationalist, is the 73-year-old senior pastor and founder of Christ Church, a congregation of approximately 3,000 in Moscow. But his influence extends far beyond this small town. Wilson has spoken at high-profile conservative events, including the 2024 National Conservatism conference, where then-Sen. JD Vance was also a headliner. He appeared on a political strategy panel with Russell Vought, President Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget director and a key architect of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 conservative blueprint. He’s also the co-creator of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, a global network of 160 congregations—including the one Hegseth attends in Washington, DC. A few months before my visit to Idaho, Hegseth had invited Wilson to the Pentagon to deliver a sermon to troops and officials on the importance of faith in times of war.
A core tenet of Wilson’s beliefs is that a patriarchal society, what he calls “biblical masculinity,” is both a religious mandate and “cultural gluten,” as he wrote in his 2023 book, Mere Christendom. “Without it, the cookie just crumbles to pieces in your hand, and is tasteless on top of that.” In a previous book, Fidelity: How to Be a One-Woman Man, he wrote: “The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.” For that reason, he went on, the dynamic of a dominant man and a submissive woman is “an erotic necessity.” As Wilson put it in an interview with CNN last year: “Women are the kind of people that people come out of.”
He also has called feminists “a large army of singularly unattractive and bitchy women” and said women serving in the military are “loathsome” to God—an observation that may inform Hegseth’s hostility to women in senior military leadership. In all matters, he believes, wives should defer to their husbands, the “covenant heads” of the family. Women shouldn’t assume church leadership roles, or speak in church, and heads of households, overwhelmingly male, should vote on behalf of their entire families.
For the last two years, as I’ve covered the rise of Christian nationalism, Wilson and I have developed a mildly adversarial email rapport. I ask questions; he answers, sometimes working in a little dig, like calling Mother Jones a “commie publication.”
As Hegseth was bragging about his “kinetic strikes” on narco-terrorist vessels and then launching the attack on Iran, I began to realize that the secretary’s determination to eradicate “woke” from the US military tracks consistently with Wilson’s teaching of a warrior-like Christian faith. So I decided it was time Wilson and I met in person. I invited myself to Moscow, and he graciously accepted. Over the course of my five-day trip, I had unprecedented access to the world he has carefully built, which serves as a model for what he imagines a Christian United States might someday look like.
I would meet happy and prosperous families in Wilson’s realm, but also witness aspects of his faith’s exacting standards and obsession with discipline that align closely with Hegseth’s enthusiastic embrace of US military aggression and shed light on what it means for biblical masculinity to become the so-called Department of War’s defining ethic.
“God has called men to be aggressive leaders. If they fail to follow through, then they are disobeying God.”
For Wilson’s followers, manliness isn’t optional. Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a professor of history at Calvin University in Michigan, has spent much of the last decade studying Wilson and his domain. In his view, “God has called men to be aggressive leaders,” she told me. “If they fail to follow through, then they are disobeying God.”
At first glance, Moscow, home to the University of Idaho’s flagship campus, looks like a quintessential couches-on-porches kind of college town, with ample coffee shops, cozy diners, and homages to the school mascot, a cartoon character named Joe Vandal. I arrived just before graduation, when there was a palpable giddiness in the air. As the breeze picked up white tufts of cottonwood seeds, it looked as though a down pillow factory had exploded. Tattooed and pierced students buzzed about in clusters.
New Saint Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho.Bryce Duffy
But as I wandered around, I noticed another Moscow, one in which Wilson’s influence is omnipresent. On one downtown corner is a brick building housing New Saint Andrews College, which he helped found, where clean-cut young men in button-downs and khakis and women in crisp blouses and knee-length skirts milled about. Nearby are the offices of Canon Press, his book publisher. One of Wilson’s spinoff churches, King’s Cross, hosts a service inside an old movie theater. Another building, spanning an entire city block, is labeled “Kirker Commons.” (Wilson is heavily influenced by Scottish Calvinist tradition, and his congregants call themselves “Kirkers” after kirk, an old Scottish word for church.)
Nearby are other businesses owned by present or former Christ Church members: a Kirker pizzeria, a Kirker bar (they do like to drink, especially whiskey for the guys), a Kirker cafe, and a Kirker real estate office. My tour guide, a former Kirker, pointed out a common hallmark of Kirker families: stylishly dressed young moms pushing strollers, often trailed by a small flock of toddlers.
If you ask members of Wilson’s denomination to describe the distinction between reformed Christians and other evangelicals, they will rattle off a doctrinal list: They believe that people will go to Heaven because of God’s grace rather than good works; they don’t believe in the Jesus-is-coming-look-busy version of the end times; they baptize members as infants rather than wait for adults to choose for themselves. But there are profound aesthetic differences as well. Forget megachurches with jeans-and-goatee pastors telling amusing anecdotes, or worship bands singing about, as one Kirker scoffed, “how Jesus is your boyfriend.” Wilson’s network of churches can feel almost puritanically unadorned—the music consists strictly of hymns and psalms; the sermons can be theologically heady, and even little children are expected to sit through them. Attendees will find these churches “uniformly hostile to the leftist agenda,” a pamphlet produced by Canon Press helpfully notes.
So confident are the Kirkers in their interpretation of the Bible that they believe people who don’t share their specific beliefs are not only going to Hell, but are doomed to earthly suffering. For them, Christian nationalism is redemptive, a lifeboat launched in a sea of drowning souls. One Kirker woman, who requested that I refer to her by her middle name, Linda, said she found upsetting the mere idea of an interfaith event that was happening in town that evening. It’s like saying, “We’re going to pat you on the head, you Baha’i, you Jew; we’re going to be like, ‘It’s okay,’” she said.
Not only would this be “lying,” Linda continued, growing increasingly adamant, “it’s kind of gross, actually, because if you believe that this is right, you wouldn’t want to tell someone, ‘What you believe is also right.’ That really hurts my heart.”
The Kirkers’ world is a fairly closed ecosystem. People who move to Moscow to join the church often send their children to Logos School, a classical Christian academy that Wilson and his wife helped found in 1981. Newcomers often find employment in one of the Kirker entities. If not, they can plug into the network of church-affiliated local businesses, which includes construction companies, an outpost of a major supplier of electrical transformers, and RedBalloon, an anti-woke job board that recently scored a contract with the State Department. Moscow’s Kirker community has swelled since the pandemic—so high is the demand for Logos School that it opened an impressive new campus last year and its roughly $7 million in revenue was almost double the previous year’s.
With so many families flocking to Moscow to attend his church, Wilson wrote an entire book last year with advice for the transplants. A Kirker real estate company is working on new builds for a planned community on the outskirts of town, where I spotted scores of freshly framed skeletons of future homes designed with ample space for large families.
Kirkers make up only about 10 percent of the town’s population of 27,000. But their influence is outsize, locals told me—in May, one Kirker won the Republican primary for the state legislature. Their presence is a particular thorn in the side of the Mormons, who have inhabited Idaho for generations and generally see Wilson’s camp as presumptuous upstarts.
Newcomers to Doug Wilson’s Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, can find housing in a new plannedcommunity on the edge of town.Bryce Duffy
Kirkers told me that they often feel unwelcome in Moscow. They showed me photos of the words “pedo” and “scum” spray-painted on a church affiliate’s campaign signs and a Wilson grandchild’s truck. Several people affiliated with the church mentioned that the church office had received anonymous death threats.
My first evening in Moscow, I attended a prayer event—the one Linda found objectionable—hosted by the town’s Interfaith Association. Folk dancers stepped in time to a local cantor’s version of the Hebrew folk song “Hinei Ma Tov”; Baptist pastor Hannah Brown read a poem she had written about love; a singer performed the Christian rock anthem “Hold Me Jesus.” Jews, Baha’is, and members of progressive churches were present, as were some Catholics and Mormons. The crowd of about 300 held candles and sang spirituals like “This Little Light of Mine.”
Afterward, Brown, who’d helped plan the event, told me that the organizers had not explicitly invited Kirkers because they would not have expected them to participate. One requirement for membership in the Moscow Interfaith Association is that “you have to be open to promoting religious freedom and religious liberty for all faiths, and that’s not something that they are able to really get behind.”
If Moscow is a tale of two cities, it is also a tale of two Doug Wilsons. Brunch Doug was affable and warm, bearing little resemblance to the pugnacious Online Doug. A teddy bear of a guy dressed in a grandfatherly button-down, he eagerly showed me around his enormous study with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Nancy, too, was a muted version of her online persona. Her viral moments are not as numerous as Doug’s, but there are some bangers: One is a video in which she recalls spanking her preschool-age daughter for not being excited enough to see her at the end of a playdate; another is a passage from her 1997 book, The Fruit of Her Hands, arguing that there is no such thing as marital rape: “Of course, a husband is never trespassing in his own garden, though he can be made to feel as though he is an intruder.” Brunch Nancy, by contrast, gushed about her grandchildren and kept my coffee mug filled.
Between bites of quiche, the couple answered my questions about some of Doug’s more provocative statements in a manner so careful and measured that it was almost boring. Doug’s line about women being “the kind of people that people come out of” had been intended as a joke, one that the liberal media was obviously too sanctimonious to laugh at. The whole wives-being-submissive thing had also been overblown by the media—they could count only a handful of times in their own marriage when Doug had to overrule Nancy. Sure, they spanked their kids, but never in anger, and the children had grown into well-adjusted adults who endorse the discipline they received in their youth.
Wilson’s own childhood was a quiet one. When he was in high school, his pastor father moved the family from Maryland to Ann Arbor, Michigan, and then, after his graduation, they moved to the Moscow area to open Christian bookstores. Before finishing his stint in the Navy, Wilson met Nancy at his parents’ home—she was moving to Moscow to work at his father’s bookstore. The next year, Wilson returned to Moscow, enrolled at the University of Idaho, and worked at the bookstore with Nancy, to whom he eventually proposed.
Doug and Nancy Wilson at home in Moscow.Bryce Duffy
They married in 1975; by then, Wilson was involved in a new Moscow church. Deeply influenced by the hippie-adjacent Jesus People Movement, he strummed a guitar during services and taught Sunday school. Two years later, he became the pastor of a congregation that would eventually become Christ Church. Over the next decade, though, Wilson grew wary of the wishy-washy elements of evangelicalism—some of his congregants had even begun questioning whether God could be omniscient. He was drawn instead to the more absolutist theology of Calvinism, which emphasizes an all-knowing God who has already preordained who goes to Heaven. His own brother ended up leaving Christ Church over their theological differences and started his own congregation. But for Nancy, the conversion to Calvinism was “wonderful.” She recalled, “I thought, ‘It’s not all gray and muddled anymore.’”
The Wilsons officially became “reformed”—another word for Calvinist—in 1988, and in the following years, Doug’s influence grew. Logos School became a robust K–12 institution, one of the nation’s first classical Christian schools. He started Canon Press, which published his popular homeschool curricula, in 1988 and in the ’90s launched the nationwide Association of Classical Christian Schools and helped found New Saint Andrews College. A series of new churches planted outside Moscow grew into an entire neo-Calvinist denomination, now known as the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches.
During the pandemic, Wilson and other church leaders flouted public health restrictions, organizing maskless outdoor psalm sings. These protests garnered media attention, which helped grow their flock as remote work allowed people to relocate to Moscow. Doug estimates that the church has doubled in size since the pandemic.
At the Wilsons’ compound, it wasn’t hard to see the appeal of the Kirker life. Nancy showed me a display she had made of her 18 grandchildren’s Logos graduation announcements and brought me up to speed on Judah, who had just graduated from New Saint Andrews and planned to work in DC. Belphoebe, sharing a name with a huntress character in Edmund Spenser’s classic poem “The Faerie Queene,” was now a mother of two. All the grandchildren remained devout and were raising their own kids—Doug and Nancy’s great-grandchildren—in the faith.
“You never know how your kids are going to turn out. When we became reformed, it’s like, no, the covenant. You know you are. You’re one of us.”
“We want to keep the covenant and not lose any of the kids or the grandkids or the great-grandkids to this alien way of thinking,” Doug said. In other Christian denominations, Nancy added: “You never know how your kids are going to turn out. When we became reformed, it’s like, no, the covenant. You know you are. You’re one of us.”
In Moscow, Wilson declared in 2024 on a podcast called Abounding Grace Radio, “we have happy families. It’s characterized by psalm singing, by feasting, by joy, by Sabbath dinners, by exuberant worship on the Lord’s day, a liberal arts education.”
In the Kirker families I met, the bliss that Doug described was on full display.
After brunch, I drove to the home of Emily and Nethaniel, a Kirker couple in their 40s whose five children ranged in age from 6 to 13. All attend Logos. Emily—tall, tan, and athletic with long, shiny brown hair—showed me around her Craftsman home. She and Nethaniel, who remodel houses as part of their construction business, had added an airy kitchen.
While her husband did chores, Emily, who requested I not use the family’s last name, set up a table and chairs in the shade of a tree that arched over their sprawling backyard. She told me she’d met her husband 20 years ago, right around the time she joined Wilson’s church as a young adult. “I’m a strong, very resilient woman, and I’m so thankful that I have a man in my life that I can look up to,” she said. “I can unload some of that pressure that I’m not built to carry on him—so it actually makes me softer and more delightful.”
During the nearly four hours I spent at Emily’s house, her five children played harmoniously in the yard: no fighting, tattling, or complaints of boredom. No one whined for a screen or a snack. When the old trampoline began to creak noisily from all the jumping, Emily gave a little call and motioned her kids off—they immediately and cheerfully obeyed.
“I’m a strong, very resilient woman, and I’m so thankful that I have a man in my life that I can look up to. I can unload some of that pressure that I’m not built to carry on him—so it actually makes me softer and more delightful.”
It was, quite honestly, glorious, and I asked Emily her secret. “We’ve got this little mini-Taser we keep inside the house,” she joked. But really, she said, the key was their faith. “When you know who you are and what you’re for, everything else is so much more joyful.”
Another evening, I dined with one of the longest-standing Kirker families, the Mortimores, in their Bauhaus-style home nestled in the woods just outside town. From their back patio, over a dinner of steak fajitas with homemade salsa and guacamole, we watched the sun set over the fields below. Sarah and Tim, now in their early 50s, joined the church a quarter century ago—they loved the idea of raising a family in such a tight-knit community. Now they run a thriving construction business, which helped build the new Logos campus. Their teenage daughters, Grace and Catherine, were students at New Saint Andrews and Logos, respectively. Their son, Eliot, and his fiancée, Lucy, both 20, were due to be married the following weekend.
The Mortimores (from left): son Eliot (with fiancée Lucy), Sarah, Frost the dog, Tim, and daughters Grace and Catherine.Bryce Duffy
They were eager to hear my impressions of their community: Did it match what I read in media reports? They marveled at the fact that their very own Doug Wilson had become famous and got a kick out of his online controversies. They knew him as a benevolent guy who handed out Hershey’s Kisses to kids at church, shied away from the spotlight at parties, and rarely included personal anecdotes in his sermons. After dessert was cleared, we debated whether to continue the conversation outside or inside. “You decide, covenant head of the family!” Sarah joked to Tim. We finally settled on the living room, where we watched the hills turn purple through floor-to-ceiling windows.
Throughout the evening, their kids occasionally offered observations and opinions. “It’s a cultural expectation that kids hit a certain age and then they start to not like their parents, and they start to become surly—this is what we expect,” Sarah said. “And to be in a community where that is so rare, I’ve never even seen it.” The key, Tim told me, was simple: “to teach them the standard and to love the standard.” By this he meant, essentially, the idea that right and wrong are objective truths and that all questions are answered in the Bible.
I asked Eliot and Lucy about their plans. After their wedding, the couple would move to Cleveland, where Eliot had secured a tech job. Lucy intended to work until they started having babies and would then become a full-time mom. I asked whether they planned to follow the Christ Church model of marriage.
“She’s under her father’s headship, following her father’s lead,” Eliot explained. “I know she will do that for me. I know she will follow my lead if we’re going to move across the country, and she will do it cheerfully.”
“In a week—which is crazy!—when we stand up at the front of the church, and Pastor Wilson asks, ‘Who will give this woman to marry him?’” he added, “he’s transferring that headship of Lucy to me.”
June, a friend of the Mortimores who had joined us for the evening, seemed to read my mind, saying, “What the mainstream world hears is this little wallflower who’s just getting passed around, and she’s gonna wash some dishes, and she’s gonna change some diapers, and shut up, Lucy!” But it wasn’t like that at all, she said. “The ladies here, they’re a force. They are extremely fulfilled, super-smart, read a ton.”
Soon the conversation shifted from the power of the women to the unhappy fate of transgender people. Lucy, who had been quiet up until that point, motioned for Eliot to pass her one of my wireless microphones. “Kids that are growing up in pagan homes that have absolutely no standard, and they’re told, ‘Do what your heart desires, follow your heart, do whatever you think is best for you,’” she said in a quiet but deliberate voice. “We have a goal for raising a family and one day building a kingdom, and our children are going to be our greatest thing that we’ve ever done. And then we’ll go to Heaven and live eternally, and they have absolutely no plan afterwards.”
But how do you teach children to love “the standard”? For Kirker families, part of the answer lies in doling out harsh and immediate consequences and their belief in corporal punishment. Linda likens discipline to a violin string. “When you put it on the pegs, and you start cranking the peg until it’s nice and tight, it’s pulled almost to its limits, only then can it sing,” she said. “That’s kind of like with little children: If you don’t give them boundaries, they get really antsy.”
In his parenting videos on YouTube, Wilson and his team advise parents to mete out physical punishment liberally (but not publicly), especially in the first five years of a child’s life. At first, a mother may use her fingers to flick a baby on the cheek or hand—say, if the baby bites while nursing. By toddlerhood, a parent should use a dedicated implement, like a wooden spoon or a rod. At one point, Wilson, chuckling, told me about putting his 2-year-old son to bed with the wooden spanking spoon in the crib with him to remind him to stay put.
After a spanking, Kirker children must ask God to forgive them and are not permitted to sulk; they are expected to rejoin the family with a spirit of good cheer. In one 2021 parenting video, Ben Zornes, the pastor of a Wilson-affiliated church in Moscow, explained: “If you fuss and scream, it’s going to be more spanking. If you’re gonna mope and you’re going to be sad afterwards, it’s going to be more spankings.”
“Boys need to get knocked down, and knocked down a lot, and your sons need to get knocked down by people who don’t love them nearly as much as you do. Why? Because the world is a cold place, and he needs to be tough.”
Home isn’t the only place Kirker kids get swats. At church, children can be taken out of the service and disciplined in a dedicated “training room.” Logos administrators also employ corporal puIr nishment. In Idaho, like most states, the practice is still legal in private schools—only five states explicitly forbid it.
Infractions that might merit a spanking include hitting, biting, talking back, or fighting with a sibling. But simply not meeting the family’s expectations is another one. In that same parenting video, Toby Sumpter, a pastor at Christ Church, recalls watching a friend carry his 3-year-old out for a spanking; afterward, the child returned to the room, walked over to the vacuum cleaner, and kicked it. The father later explained that his son was afraid of the vacuum cleaner, so they’d required him to kick it every time he passed by. He was spanked because he had forgotten to do so.
Boys in particular require such tough love, Wilson says. “Boys need to get knocked down, and knocked down a lot, and your sons need to get knocked down by people who don’t love them nearly as much as you do,” he says in one 2021 parenting video. “Why? Because the world is a cold place, and he needs to be tough.”
It is also the job of parents to discourage boys from “anything that is frilly, playing with dolls, anything that looks like effeminacy or growing effeminacy,” Wilson told me. “You want to say, ‘We don’t want you to grow up in a way that sets you up for failure, and we’re going to teach you not to go down that road.’”
Discipline for effeminacy isn’t often necessary because the kids learned to enforce masculinity standards themselves. At one point, my conversation with the Mortimore kids turned to the casual use of slurs, like “retarded” and “gay.” I said I probably wouldn’t use those terms even to tease, because I would be afraid of hurting people’s feelings. Eliot said he didn’t have that worry. “For ‘gay,’ yeah, we would use it in our circles,” he explained, “because we don’t have gay people in our community, so we’re not worried about offending.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
He stopped, as though he’d never considered the possibility before. “That’s a great question,” he said.
The Kirkers’ beliefs about masculinity go beyond just discouraging effeminacy in boys. Rather, it’s central to their philosophy for building a more durable Christianity. As Kristin Kobes Du Mez, the historian, put it to me, they believe “American culture, the American church, and American evangelicalism have all become wussified, led by effeminate men who are not even leading…and as a result, the church and society are in a shambles,” she said. “So you need to work from the ground up. You need to work with young boys and teach them how to fight, how to be aggressive.”
Nancy Wilson books at Canon Press.Bryce Duffy
In the offices of Canon Press, I met lead pastor Joe Rigney, who once presided over a Wilson-affiliated church in St. Paul, Minnesota—one that made national news in January when protesters outed one of its pastors as an ICE officer. Rigney is also the author of the 2025 book Leadership and the Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits, in which he argues that a fixation on empathy has led mainstream evangelicals astray.
Women are naturally more empathetic than men, Rigney told me, a disposition that makes them unsuitable for church leadership, combat, and, in most cases, roles like CEOs of companies and professors at colleges. (All but three of the New Saint Andrews faculty are men.) “Women being the glue that often holds communities together through relational connection, nurture, care, hospitality—that’s a really great thing,” he said. But public life requires a man’s steely resolve. “Behind a lot of our political dysfunctions, whether it’s on things like abortion or the LGBT stuff or immigration, the throughline is that we can’t enforce boundaries because empathy overrides what’s truly good.”
“Behind a lot of our political dysfunctions, whether it’s on things like abortion or the LGBT stuff or immigration, the throughline is that we can’t enforce boundaries because empathy overrides what’s truly good.”
The idea of empathy as a sin is having a moment. Conservative Christian podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey published a book, Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion, elaborating on the same theme. JD Vance hinted at the notion of misplaced empathy in 2025 when he talked about the Christian idea of ordo amoris, Latin for rightly ordered love. “I think it’s a very Christian concept that you love your family and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and then after that, prioritize the rest of the world,” he said in a Fox News interview. “A lot of the far left has completely inverted that.” (Pope Francis disagreed with Vance’s interpretation, describing the concept instead as “love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”) In an appearance last year on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Elon Musk famously said, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”
Hegseth, too, has waged war against empathy, Wilson told me. “The woke military, the DEI military—all of that was possible because people had accepted as an ethical responsibility to be empathetic, to step into other people’s shoes without judgment,” he said. “Hegseth has emphasized the job of the military is lethality, developing a warrior ethos, not to feel sorry for the guy who wishes that he could wear a dress.”
Ostensibly, Wilson was referring to one phrase in Hegseth’s proclamation at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia, last year, “No more dudes in dresses…we’re done with that shit!”—a statement that has a distinctly Wilsonian ring to it. Since becoming defense secretary in January 2025, de-wokifying the military has been the focus of Hegseth’s tenure. He has ended affirmative action and trans-inclusive policies, dissolved the Pentagon committee that supported female troops, and blocked female and Black military leaders from being promoted. But it is in Hegseth’s unapologetic assertions of hypermasculinity that Wilson’s influence is most apparent. In his Quantico speech, he reaffirmed his commitment to the military being “tough as shit” so it could “completely destroy” adversaries.
US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth addresses senior military officers at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Quantico, Virginia, on September 30, 2025.Andrew Harnik/AFP/Getty
In his 2024 book, The War on Warriors, Hegseth writes that the Geneva Conventions are unfair because the United States and Europe are the only ones that follow them. Instead, “America should fight by its own rules,” he declares. The nation’s soldiers should be “the most overwhelmingly lethal as they can be.”
Hegseth also bemoans a defense force infected, he writes, with the “fucking scary” disease of progressivism, which “will not stop until trans-lesbian Black females run everything!” He warns, “Sometime soon, a real conflict will break out, and red-blooded American men will have to save their elite candy asses.” In July, Hegseth announced an initiative to screen troops for low testosterone and offer hormone replacement therapy to those found deficient.
It wasn’t until after Wilson entered his life that Hegseth became obsessed with decrying the woke US military. He and his wife found their way to Wilson’s denomination in 2018, and by 2022, he had moved his family to Nashville so his children could attend the Jonathan Edwards Classical Academy, a school in Wilson’s network. In 2023, when Hegseth was still a Fox News host, Nashville Christian Family magazine ran a profile of him in which he mentioned being a member of a “Bible and book study” that focused on Wilson’s book My Life for Yours: A Walk Through the Christian Home.
Hegseth, a Princeton grad, has since said he’d never send any of his seven children to Harvard, but rather to New Saint Andrews. On an episode of the podcast CrossPolitic that aired shortly before Hegseth became secretary of “war,” he railed against Godless America, lamenting that liberals “used patriotism to untether us from timeless truth, from the Bible.” He also praised classical Christian schools for providing “a comprehensive worldview that prepares them for the battle to come, because we’re in a spiritual battle, and otherwise we’d be sending our kids in as fodder.”
Hegseth’s 2022 co-authored tome, Battle for the American Mind, is essentially a book-length extension of that metaphor. “Charging the ‘commanding heights’—the leftists’ educational Death Star—with Nerf guns will not suffice,” he writes. “We don’t want martyrs, we want victors.” Classical Christian education is our only hope to “give our kids and grandkids at least a fighting chance to save America and Christendom,” Hegseth concludes. He exhorts parents to “join the insurgency!” Children educated in this way, he believes, might stand a chance at defending their nation—because the wokes have failed miserably.
Hegseth is so fanatically macho that he can come off as camp. Was his talk of “trans-lesbian Black females” a parody—or deadly serious? I had the same question when I saw Canon Press’ slickly produced No Quarter November video series, which Eliot Mortimore assisted with. In one scene, Wilson dons a flamethrower and obliterates what he views as symbols of candy-ass leftist culture: cardboard cutouts of Disney princesses, a Mister Rogers-esque set, and a surveillance drone.
The impact of the Hegseth-Wilson military leadership style was brought home during Wilson’s address at the Pentagon, which referenced Lt. General Lewis Burwell “Chesty” Puller, the most-decorated Marine in history, famous for dramatically thrusting out his chest, and for his unwavering commitment to crushing America’s enemies. “When you learn how to stand firm in the Lord and in the strength of his might,” Wilson told the troops, “you are going to start sounding to your wife like a spiritual version of Chesty Puller…‘We’ve been looking for the enemy for some time now. We’ve finally found him. We’re surrounded. That simplifies things.’”
At the end, Hegseth clapped Wilson on the back. “Thank you for your leadership, for your mentorship, for the things you’ve started, the truth you’ve told, your willingness to be bold,” he told the pastor. “It’s the type of thing we’re trying to exercise here.”
The Kirker culture of extreme masculinity, nonetheless, can be a positive force. “Especially for little boys, you are told that you are strong and that you will be a leader, that you are a leader,” Kobes Du Mez said. But not conforming or questioning “these teachings to any extent, that’s not going to go well for you as a man.”
A male former Kirker I talked with, who didn’t want me to use his name for fear of retaliation, told me, “A lot of the harm is propagated through boys and men. But it starts out harming boys.”
I also spoke with Cy Whitling, a 32-year-old former Kirker now living in Bellingham, Washington. Whitling’s father was the principal at Logos School when he was growing up and is now its superintendent. The oldest of seven, Whitling described “a very pugilistic childhood.” Boys were encouraged to identify with the war heroes they learned about in history; boxing class was not optional. From the time he was 10, guns hung above his bed. Young Cy “would go to sleep dreaming of somebody breaking into the house so I could shoot them.”
Effeminacy in any form was stamped out. “If I [sat] with my legs crossed like a girl, I got a bunch of spankings, because it was ‘gay,’” he recalled. Boys who spent too much time on their appearance were bullied; high school gym class included coach-sanctioned games of “Smear the Queer.”
Boys who spent too much time on their appearance were bullied; high school gym class included coach-sanctioned games of “Smear the Queer.”
Whitling eventually distanced himself from Christ Church and came out as bisexual. He hasn’t spoken to his family since 2019, but the effects of his Kirker upbringing linger. He doesn’t plan to have children because “the experience I had with being a child did not prepare me to be the kind of parent that I would want to be.”
Still, he considers himself relatively unscathed compared to some of his former classmates. “I could go through and name the two kids with behavioral divergences in every class,” he said. “They got 90 percent of the spankings, and their life was definitely hell—and I definitely helped to make it hell.”
Some of the boys who don’t fit the Kirker mold grow into men who overcompensate by wielding a cruel authority over their wives and children. Sarah Bader, an ex-Kirker who now works to help get women out of the church, has witnessed this dynamic firsthand. Men are required to “be successful, look successful, be fit, be a man, be part of this army for Doug—for God,” she said. “A lot of these men have suffered greatly, and we’re seeing a total breakdown of those who can’t quite perform well enough to be the masculine man.”
Another problem with enforcing one set of standards, of course, is that men aren’t all the same, Kobes Du Mez said. “If you have a loving, decent man who uses that authority, or actually doesn’t even use that authority sometimes, it’s going to hit very differently than when a husband and father is abusive or bullying or selfish.”
Bader says she has talked with hundreds of women who have experienced abuse in churches in Wilson’s denomination. Helping them get out in places like Moscow can be difficult because of how deeply intertwined the church is with life there. Multiple sources told me, for example, that Christ Church members or affiliates have served on the town police force, which can make Kirkers reluctant to file reports of abuse. For those who leave the church, it’s “hard to get a job, it’s hard to get a rental,” Bader told me. “It’s an unsafe place.”
In a 2021 article for Vice, journalist Sarah Stankorb chronicled the stories of 12 women who said Christ Church leaders, including Wilson, looked the other way when they reported physical abuse and sexual assault at the hands of their husbands. Since then, several more women have come forward to tell their stories. Logos students have reported being groomed and, in some cases, molested by members of the faculty. A Moscow man who helps Kirker women escape from abusive situations told me that he regularly hears about marital rape. “A lot of our cases are like, ‘My husband wants to have sex five times a day, and I’m not allowed to say no,’” he told me.
Some Kirker women have spoken out on Sons of Patriarchy, a podcast about Wilson’s spiritual empire produced by Bader and theologian Peter Bell. Women tell of being warned by Logos teachers that their developing bodies are dangerous and that friendliness could be misconstrued as flirtation. One former Logos student, Emilie Dye, described being groomed by a teacher in his 50s, Jim Nance. Another alumna reported being groomed by her English teacher. Both women alleged that the church failed to protect them. In 2005, church member Steven Sitler was convicted of child sex abuse after he was convicted of lewd conduct with a minor. In 2022, another church member, Alex Lloyd, was convicted of possessing child pornography. In Sitler’s case, Wilson wrote to the judges asking for “measured and limited” sentencing because Sitler had repented for his sins.
Wilson denies that he sanctions abuse; in the case of Dye, he told me, Nance was dismissed from Logos after his infractions were discovered. In the case of Sitler, he has written, church leaders quickly turned the case over to police. Sitler was arrested and sentenced to life in prison, but he was released on probation after just a year and allowed to return home, where the court later discovered he had been sexually aroused by his infant son.
When I asked the Wilsons about these cases, they agreed that child sexual abuse was horrific and that Lloyd’s case was “really sad.” But Nancy expressed irritation with the media’s fixation on the issue. It was hypocritical, in her view, because “we have this culture where they have transvestites doing library hours for kids,” which no one in the secular world seemed to mind. I pointed out that drag queens weren’t molesting children. “No,” Doug replied, “they’re just grooming them.”
A few weeks after my visit to Moscow, I told Whitling about my conversation with the Mortimores. I mentioned the moment when Eliot said he didn’t mind using the word “gay” in a derogatory way because there were no gay Kirkers. He paused. “Man, I knew Eliot when he was a little kid,” he said, his voice catching. “Makes me really sad. Sorry.”
Christ Church HallBryce Duffy
The campus of Logos School features an imposing brick chapel abutting a barnyard; in addition to serving as the school worship hall, it’s also where Christ Church meets on Sundays. Sitting in the back row, I saw mothers in long flowered dresses with infants strapped to their chests; older sisters distributing bottles to babies and crayons and paper to preschoolers; dads marching restive toddlers out to the hall.
It was Mother’s Day, but you wouldn’t have known it from the sermon. Wilson preached on the Old Testament Book of Esther, the story of the Jewish queen who stood up to a wicked Persian tyrant. The story, he said, offered a valuable lesson for how to be “a beleaguered minority in a heathen empire.” Religious pluralism, he told the congregation, was an “idol,” and Christians should focus on “getting rid of it.”
After a time, the congregation rose and joined together to sing Psalm 28, which asks God to punish Christians’ enemies. “Render to them what they deserve, because they do not regard the works of the Lord nor the operations of his hands,” they sang. “He shall destroy them and not build them up.”
I thought of the Chesty Puller quip Wilson shared during his Pentagon sermon: “They’re on our left, they’re on our right, they’re in front of us, they’re behind us…they can’t get away this time.” But it wasn’t Chesty speaking at the Pentagon—it was Wilson: Wilson’s rigid definition of a warrior, Wilson’s quest to infuse the military with his muscular version of Christianity, Wilson’s laser focus on aggression as a hallmark of successful men and a successful American republic.
After the service, Wilson descended from the pulpit. He greeted a few congregants, smiling and shaking their hands. Then he went over to play the role for which he is famous among Kirker children. Seated on a stool by the main entrance, the benevolent Santa, he distributed Hershey’s Kisses from a large metal bucket. Children swarmed around him as their parents spilled out onto the patio, blinking in the bracing sunlight of a spring day in Idaho.
Framework loses customer data in Metabase zero-day attack
Transcript: Trump Blurts Out Huge Midterm Weakness as MAGA Cracks Up
The following is a lightly edited transcript of the August 10 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
In a new interview, Donald Trump lavished extensive praise on himself as always, but in the process, he made a surprising admission. He said straight out that his voters might not turn out for Republican candidates in the midterms. Then he said that voters are not angry at him, they’re angry at Republicans.
For a lot of reasons, that’s really not what Republican candidates want to hear right now. It also comes amid many new signs that Trump and MAGA voters really might not turn out. Yet it comes as well as polls show the Democratic lead in the House ballot matchup isn’t quite as high as it needs to be. To dig through how all this is really playing on the ground, we’re talking to Shripal Shah, who oversees ad expenditures at the Dem-aligned House Majority PAC. Shripal, thanks for coming on.
Shripal Shah: Appreciate you having me. Good to see you.
Sargent: You too, man. Let’s start with the striking Trump quote. Speaking to Punchbowl News, Trump is talking here about his voters and asks if they’ll turn out in the midterms with him not on the ballot. Listen.
Donald Trump (voiceover): If I don’t run, will those people go out and vote? And that’s the one thing I can’t te—I’m going to ask them to. The question is, will they vote? ‘Cause a lot of them are very angry at Republicans, to be honest with you.
Reporter (voiceover): Why is that?
Trump (voiceover): They’re angry at Repu—I don’t know. They’re angry at Republicans, but they’re not angry at me. That’s an interesting thing.
Reporter (voiceover): Why, though?
Trump (voiceover): They’re not angry at me, but they are angry at Republicans.
Sargent: Shripal, not only does he admit here that GOP voters might not turn out, he also says that voters are angry at Republicans and not angry at him, which I think a lot of his voters will hear as discouraging them from voting in the midterms. What do you make of all that?
Shah: I think for the first time in what seems like a long time, he’s actually spot on as far as his voters not showing up in a midterm. And that’s not spin coming from a Democratic operative or anything like that. We have evidence, right? Based on history, you can likely bank on that. And I think that one underscores a lot of the challenges that Republicans saw across the board in 2022. And I would not be surprised to see this cycle continue on that trajectory for 2026.
The interesting thing that we’re seeing in a lot of polling that we’re doing right now across the battleground, in specific districts—including districts outside of those tier-one coin-flip districts that were won by a Democrat or a Republican by a few thousand votes in this direction or that one—I’m talking about districts that Trump won by double digits in certain places, some in Ohio, some in Iowa, et cetera, et cetera.
It’s not just that he’s underwater. The data that we are seeing suggests that the intensity behind his negative approval, or strongly disapprove or strongly unfavorable—there are places, it’s not uncommon what we’re seeing, that number north of 50, which is unprecedented.
Sargent: I do agree that it’s a big and undercovered story that Trump’s strong disapproval numbers are just wildly crazy. Nobody’s ever seen anything like it, as he would say. CNN’s Harry Enten points out another good point—that nationally, House Republicans are running about nine points ahead of Trump’s approval, which is stuck at around 37 percent.
Trump’s numbers are just terrible. But it’s a little unclear to me, at least now, whether Democrats are orienting their strategy around that. Very roughly speaking, do you anticipate that Trump will appear in a lot of House Majority ads this fall, or only some, or not too many?
Shah: I don’t know that you will ever see a scenario where uniformly you just put Trump in every single piece of communication. And I think that’s for a few different reasons. One, Trump is already baked into the cake, right? We’re not actually offering any new information to a voter about Donald Trump’s agenda. And voters generally already believe that the House Republicans and Trump are joined at the hip, rightfully, because they are.
Now, are there certain exceptions? Absolutely, there will be exceptions, particularly with certain audiences. But what we have found is that you don’t necessarily need to lead with that in a way that makes the argument incredibly over the top and in your face, because I think voters already fully understand that.
I think our task is more informing people about how House Republicans have supported or amplified the consequences of the Trump agenda on the voters and on the American people, and that’s where you’ll see us focus.
Sargent: Trump is so unpopular that he’s even losing parts of his base. A recent Politico poll finds only a little more than one-third of MAGA voters say the war is now worth the costs, and there’s been a sharp drop in MAGA support for the war. Now, let’s listen to this as well. It’s an interviewer talking to Trump voters. The first voice is the reporter, and then you’ll hear the Trump voters. Check this out.
Reporter (voiceover): Is this how you expected the second Trump term to go?
Voter (voiceover): No, not at all. I hoped it was going to be so much better.
Reporter (voiceover): He also promised no new foreign wars. We’re obviously in this war in Iran, which is why we’re seeing the gas prices so high. What do you make of the president not keeping those campaign promises?
Voter (voiceover): He just told us what we wanted to hear to vote him back in.
Reporter (voiceover): What would your message be to him about the economy right now, about prices, about day-to-day life?
Voter (voiceover): I would tell him, ‘You promised us you would lower prices, bring back what it used to be.’
Voter (voiceover): I was hoping that gas was going to go down so I could do something. You can’t do anything with gas prices. And you just can’t, you can’t afford to breathe at this point.
Reporter (voiceover): Are you regretting your vote right now?
Voter (voiceover): I have. The past two years, yeah, I have. I’m actually not even voting the next time.
Sargent: Shripal, MAGA is plainly cracking up here. The coalition is in major fracture mode. Can you tell us what you’re seeing both in the data and on the ground on that front?
Shah: Yeah, I think it’s very real, and it’s not a difficult thing to comprehend when you realize he ran on releasing the Epstein files, and then they keep voting to block ‘em. He ran on lowering costs. Costs continue to go high, and that’s driven by foreign policy, but also tariffs. Promised no more wars, and now we’re in a war that allegedly has ended 30 times over in the last six weeks and is continuing to go and go. And so you can only lie to people for so long, and so many times, before they start to turn on you, and you’re seeing that.
I think people are no longer willing to just turn a blind eye to what is in front of them when it has such a deep impact on their day-to-day lives, like that woman who was talking about filling up her tank and not being able to afford to breathe. You can’t continue to try and pull one over on people when their reality is directly at odds with what you’re trying to sell them.
We saw this in 2009 and ‘10 as well, but it was very similar. People, with each passing week and month—Obama owned the economy more and more, even though people believed that George Bush was responsible for the underlying challenges. He’s in charge now. You can’t continue to look backwards and expect people to give you a pass, and that’s where I think the reckoning is going to be really rooted in.
Sargent: OK, so there are around 58 GOP-held districts that are really in play right now. Can I ask, this fall, as we really approach the election, how many of those districts do you think House Majority PAC will really fully play in? Like, real investments and real money.
I know you can’t give me an exact number, not asking for that. Roughly, like a big chunk of those districts, or half, or less than half? What?
Shah: I think that what you’re going to see—in the same way that you saw in 2006, 2008, 2018, et cetera—is that it’s not necessarily playing in every single place, but the battlefield is going to move pretty dramatically from early September to mid-October, in that we could hypothetically, if things continue on a good trajectory, not necessarily have to expend a lot of resources in tier-one places that six months ago I would’ve told you, like, We are going to be there till the end, because the environment is shifting in such a rapid way, where Republicans are cutting and running from certain districts that just don’t have paths to them that they thought maybe they were going to, and the terrain just shifts.
So we could be potentially moving away from places from an offensive posture—this district doesn’t need these resources anymore because the Republican doesn’t have a path to victory. That’s what’s happened in a lot of positive election cycles dating back to 2018, 2006, et cetera, et cetera. I would not be surprised if that’s what happens this time around.
But we are competing with MAGA Inc., that has close to a trillion dollars to spend, and that is one of the dynamics that could make it more consistent, where you’re just in a lot of places, as opposed to things shifting from one to another. A lot of it depends on how September plays out.
Sargent: OK. So to ask it a little differently, of the 58 districts that are in play right now, how many do you expect will really genuinely be in play, to the point where you’re really putting money into them?
I understand that there’s going to be a core of races in the middle, the most competitive races, where you may just actually pull resources out ‘cause they’re pretty much squared away. What’s the size of the battlefield at the end of this, do you think?
Shah: That, you’ve got to come back to me in about a month, because it could be as low as 30 to 40, or it could be as high as 50. It’s really hard to say right now. We’re still looking at every district very closely. We’re still doing a lot of polling. We’re still figuring out where we have identified opportunities for offense and to pick up a seat.
Look at the—the map is dynamic because of their activities as well, right? Chuck Edwards sits in North Carolina, his 11th District, which is a district that I believe Trump won by close to double digits last time around. Couple days ago he announced he’s not running anymore, right? And so they’ve got to find a new candidate. We don’t know what that does to that race.
I would be willing to bet that there’s still opportunity for us over there. But until we know who we’re running against, it’s hard to handicap that race until we have the opportunity to do the things that we need to do.
There’s districts like Michigan’s 8th Congressional District, where a guy who dropped out on the Republican side about a month ago won the primary over a Trump-endorsed nominee who had run a real campaign, because MAGA voters weren’t going to vote for that guy—for whatever reason they decided not to vote for him, and I think we could probably guess why.
And the map is continuing to shift pretty rapidly due to external events. So it’s just hard to say, the first week of August, where we think September’s going to look like and what do we think October’s going to look like.
Sargent: So right now Dems lead in the House generic ballot matchup by around six or seven points, depending on which set of averages you use. That strikes me as not big enough. It would be big enough to win the House, but not by what I think we’d like to see, not by the big margins we’d like to see, and it certainly wouldn’t be enough to get you the Senate.
Do you guys regard six or seven points in the generic ballot matchup as big enough? And where do you expect it to be after September and October and early November?
Shah: I think it is big enough, because it represents a roughly eight- to nine-point shift from 2024, right? We lost the House in 2024 by what, 6,000 votes spread out across a handful of districts. An eight-point shift not only sweeps us to victory in a lot of those coin-flip places, but it puts all these second-tier places in play too.
It’s also—despite the fact that we’re only 90 days out from election day, we’re still early. A lot of these campaigns have not really begun in earnest, particularly in the House, where the races are a lot smaller than these Senate races, and you don’t start communicating until September and litigating your case against the Republican incumbent or the Republican challenger in earnest until September.
I do think you will see a pretty dramatic shift come mid- to late September in the generic ballot. If you do not, that doesn’t worry me, because the generic ballot in a lot of these polls—I do think that people are still, by design or not, potentially building out samples that are still a little conservative. And I think that pollsters don’t want to be wrong in the wrong direction, right?
So they’re making their data potentially a little more conservative than it ought to be, because they don’t want to bet on being too aggressive and too optimistic for the Democrats and be wrong. It’s easier to say, “Oh, we actually won by a lot, not just by a little,” and I think you will start to see those models and those screens start to shift a little bit as we get into September as well.
But I think we are where we want to be. The trajectory that we’re on is the most important thing, and that feels good. And I think that once these races really start to get litigated in September, particularly in these tier-two, tier-three races that haven’t seen robust campaigns in recent years at the House level, that’s when you’ll start to have a better understanding of the trajectory and the environment in which we’re operating in 2026.
Sargent: You guys are polling a lot. House Majority PAC has released a lot of its internal polls, so I’m going to ask you a question about the polling. Right now, in HMP polling, are Dem candidates leading in enough districts—in a number of districts that’s sizably larger than the handful of seats that Dems need to flip to win the House? In other words, are Dems up in a big enough bloc of districts in your polling that you have a real cushion over what you need to get?
Shah: As of now, we are.
Sargent: OK. How many?
Shah: Oh, God, I don’t have all our polls memorized. But if the election were today, we would take back the House, yes.
Sargent: All right. So it sounds like you guys think you’re on this trajectory to win the House. You said that if it’s a national advantage of six or seven points in the generic ballot matchup, you guys would win the House. Like, how big a margin would six or seven points get you, though?
As far as I can tell, a lot of the analysis shows that because of the redistricting successes, the gerrymandering successes that Republicans had, Dems need to win the House national ballot by three points just to take the House to begin with. If you get to six points or seven points, which is where it is now, roughly how many seats are we talking about flipping here?
Shah: You need to also remember, though, that the way that this gerrymander has taken place in places, particularly in Texas—they were relying on Trump 2024 numbers to draw those maps. That might be where you find that Republicans made the biggest strategic error, because I think that they believed that they had a lock on the Latino vote in South Texas particularly, when in reality, the Latino vote, dating back to 2016 if not before, is the most swingy of swingy electoral blocs there is, right?
By definition, the Latino vote goes back and forth, and you have to fight for that vote. And so I don’t think that you can just take that calculus that you just described, where you’ve got to win by this number to do this, and this—it doesn’t account for those swings, I don’t believe.
And so I think that is where some folks are making a little bit of a miscalculation on where there is opportunity for us. You’ve seen us put out a poll last week in Texas 15 that says Pulido is winning over Congresswoman De La Cruz, and I think that is a real opportunity for us. That is a district that Trump won by double digits last time around, right? And so I just want to be clear on that.
I think it’s hard to give a number at the moment because I don’t have a comprehensive view of the battlefield just yet. I’m still polling in a lot of places. But I do feel like, if election day were today, you would see a margin for the House Democrats that’s north of 10 seats probably.
Sargent: Shripal, can you explain the strategy behind putting data centers in so many ads? It seems like Dems are looking for a villain who isn’t Trump. Am I right in saying that, and what’s the theory of the case here?
Shah: I don’t think it’s necessarily looking for a villain. I think it’s tapping into something that people are already mad about, which is their high electricity bills. You understand why people would be pissed off about that, because it plays into this larger argument about government corruption and people being on the take for their donors and stuff like that.
And it taps into the sentiment that Washington’s not looking out for these people, and they only care about their donors while I’m getting screwed. That’s the cost of the Republican corruption. And all of that together is a pretty solid argument to make, and you will see us do more and more on that over the next 90 days.
Sargent: All right, Shripal, just to circle back to where we started. Donald Trump is extremely unpopular. His base is falling apart. He’s losing MAGA voters on a number of different fronts. You guys are competing in a number of very Trumpy districts, in rural districts with a lot of Trump voters in them.
Do you really think that you can flip some of those, or is it just going to be, at the end of the day, the low-hanging fruit? What are you seeing in the Trumpy rural districts right now? Is there a genuine opportunity to finally make inroads with some of these voters that have been so hard for Democrats to get to? And if so, how is that happening?
Shah: I think there is a genuine opportunity. I think there is a genuine backlash and unhappiness at a high intensity with the way that Republicans, led by Donald Trump, have managed the country and managed to make things worse on the economy since getting into office about 18 months ago.
And I think for us, it is capitalizing on that with our own vision for how we would do things differently. And you are seeing candidates do that at scale, and will see candidates do that at further scale in September and October, and I think that’s where opportunities in some of these more traditionally red-leaning districts exist for 2026.
Sargent: Are you concerned about the Democratic brand? Is that holding back the ability to convert some of these voters or not?
Shah: I think that voters are generally unhappy with politicians across the board, and that is not new. I think where our opportunity lies is that a lot of the terrain is offensive terrain, where an individual candidate can run and create their own brand by communicating with the voter.
And they’re not running necessarily in these offensive opportunity districts on a brand that is rooted in Washington, D.C. And so that gives them opportunity to create their own brand, to communicate about their own agenda, and to articulate how they would serve and how they would do the job differently, and that’s where the opportunity comes to have the success in some of these places that you might not have otherwise.
Sargent: Shripal Shah, thanks so much for coming on, man. Good to see you. Appreciate it.
Shah: Appreciate it. Thank you so much.
After Santa Cruz banned Flock cameras, activists push to expand fight against license plate readers
Local grassroots group Get the Flock Out was chosen to kick off the National Week of Action Against Automated License Plate Readers in the Bay Area with a rally this Sunday. It’s meant to celebrate the City of Santa Cruz canceling its Flock Safety camera contract earlier this year, and to call attention to the nearly 50 cameras still active in Capitola and Watsonville, the group said.
Claude Code puts auto mode in the driver's seat
Carmageddon: County’s Go Bike! incentive program; RTC hosts coastal resilience workshop
It’s the last month for Go Santa Cruz County’s Go Bike! incentive program, which offers potential big discounts on a variety of bicycles and programs. Later this month, the Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission will hold a public workshop on the San Vicente-Waddell Coastal Resilience Project.
Memo to Those Who Fear Socialism: Why Don’t You Try Fix Capitalism?
Everywhere I look, I see people expressing alarm about the popularity of socialism. It polls in the mid-to-high 30s, and considerably higher among younger people. Older people, who have a living memory of the various socialist regimes that once dotted the planet that at best didn’t deliver prosperity to their people and at worst threw them in jail by the thousands, can’t understand how this can be and seem to want to talk endlessly about it.
I, however, marvel at the other consistent result of all these polls, which these people don’t seem nearly as interested in talking about. I refer to the ratings Americans give to capitalism. They’re terrible. A big Gallup poll from last fall is representative. Socialism won the approval of 39 percent, while capitalism’s positive number was 54 percent.
That is pathetic—barely half the country! In the country that invented modern capitalism and where it is worshipped by the elite class. And you know what? It’s entirely deserved. In fact, it deserves to be a little worse (as it is among Democrats). The kind of capitalism we’ve been practicing in this country over the last 40-plus years is cruel, corrupt, and a perversion of what a humane capitalism ought to be. The people who are so freaked out about socialism ought to realize that the only way they’re going to arrest its rise is to change capitalism for the better.
From the founding of the country until the stock market crash of 1929, the general belief was that government should be small and markets should not be regulated. Some people say it worked pretty well until 1929, but in fact that isn’t true. It worked well enough to perpetuate itself, because if capitalism is anything it’s elastic and dynamic, but that’s about it.
First of all, 15 states had slavery up until it was prohibited, along with the obscene concentrations of wealth that came with that evil system. Also, throughout the nineteenth century, there were five major depressions and roughly 15 or 20 recessions. These downturns stemmed from a range of causes, but a common theme through many of them was the speculative bubble; that is to say, conmen trying to make a quick buck and bamboozle investors.
After the Great Depression hit, Franklin Roosevelt hired a few thousand cops to police this beat, creating the Securities and Exchange Commission and other entities that kept an eye on Wall Street. Human nature being what it is, this did not create a nirvana, but it improved matters considerably.
The New Deal did four other things that reined in capitalism and made it more humane. Roosevelt raised taxes on the rich, which had the dual benefits of bringing in more revenue and just being the right thing to do morally. He vastly increased public investment—Keynesianism—producing for example the water power that still delivers electricity to 10 million homes and businesses down in states where they curse the federal government and where a Democrat couldn’t get elected dogcatcher (its power sources today go beyond water to nuclear and gas). Third, he signed legislation that made it possible for many more workers to join unions, which gave them better wages and more humane working hours and conditions.
Fourth—and this is as important as the first three but isn’t mentioned as often—he cracked down on monopoly power. Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson created antitrust enforcement, but FDR really amped it up. In addition, his 1944 Economic Bill of Rights contained eight provisions. Most of them were rights he wished to confer upon people simply for being born: an adequate wage, a good education, decent health care. But one right was directed specifically at owners of businesses: “the right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad.”
And what happened as a result of these changes? What the economists Claudia Goldin and Robert Margo called “the Great Compression”: a roughly 30-year period when income gaps decreased as never before in this country or pretty much any other peer nation. In addition to the vast reduction in economic inequality, the economy did great, too, with GDP growth in the 1960s for example averaging around 4.5 percent a year. That was capitalism working at peak.
Today? Capitalism is badly broken. At least four big things are wrong.
First of all, it’s rapacious and corrupt, yes, but it is also, to use a word cold-blooded economists might actually care about, inefficient. There are young people in rural Appalachia, inner-city Detroit, or on a New Mexico reservation who might have the potential to grow up to cure Alzheimer’s or invent a nifty device or write a great novel. But the way we refuse to educate and invest in these kids, we’ll never know, and they’ll end up being hospital orderlies. Among other things, that’s inefficient.
Second, monopoly power today is wildly out of control. And monopoly power, as FDR knew, is a complete bastardization of capitalism. It kills competition. It stifles shared prosperity. It gives rise to cronyism, corruption, and robber barons. These fraud-idiot free marketeers who bomb us with their propaganda and sing the praises of Adam Smith ought to take 10 minutes to go read about what an inveterate foe of monopoly Smith was. The damage done on this point to our country by Milton Friedman and Robert Bork (among others) is enormous, far greater than any socialist could inflict in his wildest dreams.
Third, these vast fortunes are just sick. Would you like to venture a guess as to what Elon Musk was worth in 2015? Go ahead. I’ll wait.
Ready? It was $13.9 billion. Today, as we all know, he briefly became the world’s first trillionaire, although I guess it depends on the day. That is sick. There is no other word for it. The same thing has happened with Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and so many others. Their fortunes have increased tenfold or more in the past decade. They constitute an oligarchy that is gaining more political power every year.
Fourth, technology has made it possible for corporations with bad intent to nickel-and-dime people in ways that just weren’t possible until the invention of these algorithms. People are getting hammered by hidden fees, all-but-secret subscription service price increases, and now, even surveillance pricing, which is just a disgusting practice. Brad Lipton of the Roosevelt Institute asks these disturbing and not-so-hypothetical questions:
Should people with iPhones pay more than Android users for food delivery? Should delivery drivers earn different amounts for the same job, based on personal information the app has about them? Do we want nurses who staff shifts at hospitals bidding against each other for work, competing over who will accept the least amount of money? Should people who live in certain zip codes be charged more for online test prep? What about single parents?
These four factors, among others, have given this country a capitalism today that is—well, to use Bernie Sanders’s favorite word, rigged. Everybody knows it.
I believe capitalism has two compelling qualities that make it, to borrow from Churchill, less bad than all the other economic “-isms.” The first is that at its best, it fosters healthy competition. The old Econ 101 textbook thing about the guys starting shoe stores on opposite corners is, or should be, true. The one who offers a better product at a better price will thrive, and consumers will benefit. The other guy needs to go find something else to do, but that’s life, and usually, in a balanced economy that offers ample opportunity, he will.
Second, capitalism does encourage innovation. It’s not a coincidence that most of the great inventions and scientific discoveries have happened in capitalist societies. Capitalism gives individuals room to experiment and tinker and grow. Of course, government can play a huge role here, too, with sufficient public investment in medicine, science, and related fields.
We do have competition and innovation in the United States today. But we could have a lot more of both if we had the right people in office passing the right laws. What we mostly have is system in which hard-working middle-class people are feeling more and more left behind, and in which young people in particular see very little opportunity and are convinced that Social Security, the crown jewel of United States public policy, won’t exist when they hit 67. And that is why socialism is gaining in popularity.
People who think they can stop this socialist renaissance by caviling about the state seizing the means of production or by issuing warnings about our becoming like Bolivia are going to get exactly nowhere. Those kinds of arguments are theoretical and very remote from people’s daily lives.
Anyone who’s interested in stopping socialism needs to work on fixing capitalism. If we had a more humane capitalism in which workers made a solid wage; in which basic health care was a right and was free or at least affordable; in which the government was investing in the small towns where opportunity has vanished; in which those kids in Appalachia and Detroit and New Mexico were given the tools they need to fulfill their potential; in which the very rich were appropriately taxed; if we had these things, socialism wouldn’t be so popular.
Any foe of socialism who doesn’t see this and isn’t working to change capitalism just isn’t a serious person. If the form of capitalism that we have now in this country continues unchecked and unchanged, socialism’s popularity will rise and rise. In this sense, the uber-capitalists and all those who ignore these deformities are dooming themselves, perpetuating a system that … well, contains the seeds of its own destruction. Didn’t a famous guy once say that?
Why Does the World Put Up With the Dollar?
The most powerful tool of the American imperium is not, as is generally supposed, its military, but rather its currency. Other nations (China, India) possess more troops, but none possesses more legal tender. There were 57,000,000,000 dollar-denominated bills in circulation last year. By comparison, euro-denominated bills—the world’s second-most-widely circulated currency, minted not by one nation but by 21—numbered 31,000,000,000. The combined monetary value of the 57 billion greenbacks was $2.4 trillion; for the 31 billion euro notes, $1.6 trillion.
And that’s just paper money. How much of your net worth resides in your wallet? In our increasingly cashless society, I sometimes go months absentmindedly forgetting to pull dead-tree dollars out of my ATM. Serious money resides in banks and other financial institutions. Economists speak of “reserve currencies,” or currencies held round the world by central banks and other government institutions like our Federal Reserve. These reserves can be paper currency or paper bonds or gold bars, but mostly they’re just blips on a computer screen. Well over half of this money, or about $7 trillion, consists of U.S. dollars. Euros account for less than $3 trillion. Most international trade occurs in dollars, too, not just in the United States but throughout the world, and when foreign corporations hedge against currency fluctuations, they do so overwhelmingly with dollars. In effect, the dollar is not merely American currency; it’s a global currency, too.
The dollar has ruled the world for the past 80 years, and in the past 50, it has displaced gold as the anchor of the world economy. As a consequence, Republican presidents have been able to cut taxes on the rich without reducing government spending to any meaningful degree. Economic logic dictates that, if the United States runs up irresponsibly large budget deficits—as of March 31 the deficit exceeds 100 percent of gross domestic product—the result will be cripplingly high interest rates as the bond market becomes glutted with U.S. debt in the form of Treasury bonds. But that hasn’t happened, because the global appetite for Treasurys has been limitless. Debt is America’s leading export.
With countries as with people, there’s bound to be some point at which so much debt accrues that the debtor can’t repay. Over the past four decades, deficit hawks have been consistently wrong about where, for the United States, that point lies, and in the view of some modern monetary theorists, no such point exists. A more likely answer is that that point, though more distant than previously we dared believe, will one day be stumbled upon, and when it does the United States will renege on its obligations through either hyperinflation (thereby reducing its creditors’ expected return) or outright default.
Foreigners who buy U.S. Treasurys aren’t stupid; they’re well aware of this danger. Yet they continue to buy Treasurys, bolstering what Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, when he was France’s minister of finance in the 1960s (later he was president), described resentfully as America’s privilège exorbitant. The U.S. government, Giscard complained, can manage its economy however it wishes and never diminish the dollar’s dominance. In 1971, for instance, President Richard Nixon wished unilaterally to tear up the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement by taking the United States off the gold standard. Treasury Secretary John Connally casually told emissaries from our leading trade partners: “The dollar is our currency, but it’s your problem.” It was our trading partners’ problem because their currencies’ value was now pegged to a dollar that was losing value. But did our trade partners uncouple from the United States? They did not.
At the moment, President Donald Trump is doing his inadvertent damnedest to throw America’s exorbitant privilege away. During the brief period of extreme financial turmoil that followed Trump’s announcement of his “Liberation Day” global tariffs in April 2025 (before a market tumble persuaded Trump to delay their implementation to permit negotiations), there was no rush to buy Treasurys; instead, there was a sell-off. That prompted speculation that the dollar would never again be a safe haven. Trump also threatened not-so-obliquely to default on the nation’s debt. Overall, Trump’s presidency has driven the dollar’s value down about 10 percent. But in spite of all this, the dollar retains its dominance in global finance. It’s harder to kill than Rasputin.
Why do other countries put up with our dollar? Why do foreign investors enable exorbitant privilege no matter what?
The biggest reason the U.S. dollar reigns supreme is liquidity. When you have a lot of money, you’ve got to stash it someplace, and your choice of where will depend a lot on how easily you can extract it when you need to. As the Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff puts it in Our Dollar, Your Problem, “U.S. Treasury debt is very easy to sell quickly and without excessive transaction costs.” It’s easy to extract because there’s so goddamned much of it. With the U.S. national debt totaling about $39 trillion, nobody who sells a lot of Treasurys in a hurry need worry that doing so will drive down the price.
Why do other countries put up with our dollar? Why do foreign investors enable exorbitant privilege no matter what?
Another reason foreigners put their money in Treasurys is stability. The dollar’s governing structure is more consistent than that of the multilateral euro, and the rule of law is much stronger in the United States than in, for instance, China, whose renminbi might otherwise be an excellent substitute. Granted, the rule of law is taking a heavy beating under Trump, including within the realm of finance. But the world operates under the TACO hypothesis (“Trump Always Chickens Out”) that Trump’s most erratic governing impulses will always be checked by adverse market signals.
Another check on Trump has been the independence of the Federal Reserve. The primacy of the dollar makes the Fed chair a sort of central banker to the entire world. This extraordinary power has always created tension between presidents and the Fed. Trump differs in carrying it to an extreme by, for instance, attempting to fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook (resisted thus far by the courts) and harassing then–Fed Chair Jerome Powell with the threat of frivolous prosecution (ended by the refusal of Republican Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina to advance Trump’s nomination of Kevin Warsh as Powell’s successor, until the investigation was dropped). Should Trump successfully gain control of a previously independent Fed and set interest rates irresponsibly low even as inflation rises—which is what Trump wants—then Treasurys will get harder to sell.
Even if that happens, though, it remains likely that the dollar will maintain its global primacy. A notable test was the Great Inflation of the 1970s. In 1973, Arab members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC, imposed an oil embargo against the United States. These countries were already angered by Nixon’s ending the gold standard two years earlier, because it reduced the value of their petrodollars. Now they pushed inflation even higher because they were furious that the United States supported Israel in the Yom Kippur War against Egypt and Syria. The embargo quadrupled the price of oil, creating an enormous windfall for Saudi Arabia, and the Saudis had to figure out where to put it. You can guess the rest. In secret negotiations, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Treasury Secretary William Simon persuaded the Saudis to park it (shh!) in Treasurys sold on uniquely favorable terms—never mind that this benefited the same United States that the Saudis were trying to punish. International skirmishes come and go, but the dollar is forever.
The paradoxes multiply. Foreign nations nearly always buy Treasurys in times of international turmoil … even when that turmoil originates in the United States! Remember the 2008 global financial crisis? “The bulk of the misfeasance, nonfeasance, and malfeasance,” the former Washington Post and Wall Street Journal reporter Paul Blustein explains in King Dollar, “stemmed from problems in the United States,” mainly through reckless securitizing of mortgages on houses that buyers couldn’t afford. “Yet money rushed into the dollar.” Heads we win, tails you lose.
For the United States, the dollar isn’t only a tool for borrowing on the cheap; more ominously, it’s what Rogoff calls “a de facto branch of the U.S. armed services.” In recent decades, presidents and the Treasury have gotten bolder about weaponizing the dollar against enemies through the imposition of economic sanctions. If we’ve been slow to notice this, that’s probably because the only high-profile target we’ve seen surrender unequivocally to sanctions is South Africa’s apartheid regime. Cuba, the Soviet Union, Iraq, Russia, and Iran all found ways to defy American sanctions.
But shift your eyes from our enemies to our friends, and you’ll see how powerful sanctions can be. The United States uses the threat of secondary sanctions against U.S. allies to compel them to participate in our embargoes. Under Trump, such bullying of America’s friends has been routine. Thus when Trump in 2018 declared, largely out of petty personal animus toward President Barack Obama, that we would withdraw from the multilateral agreement restricting Iran’s nuclear program and reimpose sanctions, the European Union declined to reimpose sanctions alongside us. But because Trump’s secondary sanctions barred U.S. banks from engaging in any transactions with foreign companies that did business with Iran—effectively exiling those companies not only from the United States but also from other countries with which they bought and sold in dollars—foreign firms were forced to comply with the sanctions.
In King Dollar, Blustein argues persuasively that the dollar will remain the world’s reserve currency for the foreseeable future. In Our Dollar, Your Problem, Rogoff is less confident about that. “It would be folly,” Rogoff writes, “to ignore the many ‘this time is different’ Pax Dollar assumptions built into today’s markets that may well be upended over the next decade, if not much sooner.” In his preface to the paperback edition of King Dollar, Blustein in effect says he hopes Rogoff is right and that he is wrong, because after observing the first year of Trump’s second presidency, he’s concluded that the dollar is too dangerous a weapon for Trump to possess. “Trump has been using economic coercion for purposes that I consider boneheaded and shameful,” Blustein writes, citing, among other actions, his threats to annex Canada. “With the dollar,” Blustein continues, “Trump can wield an even more fearsome bludgeon than the tariffs he has imposed. I wish Trump didn’t have that kind of power, but no good will come of pretending that it isn’t so.”
Brendan Greeley, after 20 years at the FT, Bloomberg Businessweek, and The Economist, chucked full-time journalism to pursue a doctorate in economic history at Princeton and write a passion-project narrative history of the dollar. Deeply researched and almost giddily contrarian, The Almighty Dollar treats the dollar not as an instrument of imperial might but rather as an itinerant hunk of metal, piece of paper, or blip on a screen with something resembling free will. In Greeley’s conception, the Fed chair and the president don’t control the dollar; the dollar controls them. His book transports the reader out of the distressing present into distant times and places that echo loudly into the present.
“The biography of the dollar,” Greeley explains, “is not the biography of America.” The dollar was born 506 years ago in what today is the Czech Republic; it was raised to maturity in what today is Spain; then washed ashore in the American colonies. No nation invented it. It was extracted initially from the Ore Mountains dividing Bohemia and Saxony—two kingdoms within the Holy Roman Empire—by a minor Bohemian nobleman named Stephan Schlick. Schlick was, Greeley writes, “an ambitious huckster.” He had no clear claim to the land and lacked permission from the Bohemian crown to mine it. But there was a lot of silver there, so he took it.
Schlick’s purpose was not to create currency. The Holy Roman Empire already had a currency, the silver groschen coin and the gold Rhine florin. Rather, Schlick extracted hunks of silver to ship in ingots to Nuremberg, located outside Bohemia and therefore an illegal destination for Bohemian silver. The ingots were to pay off a debt of 34,000 Rhine florins that Schlick borrowed so he could live beyond his means. Schlick never paid off his loan in full, situating the dollar’s origin story in a familiar mire of insolvency.
To pay for his operations, Schlick had to mint coins—crummy little silver pennies mixed with copper for his peasant employees, and big, prettily milled silver coins to pay dividends to his Saxon investors. The big coin, first created in 1520, was named the joachimsthaler after the Bohemian town where it came from, Joachimsthal (“the Valley of Saint Joachim”). The Saxon investors who received joachimsthaler dividends resided in Leipzig, a key center of finance and trade. That enabled the stateless and abundant joachimsthaler to spread far and wide. Within a decade, joachimsthaler were known familiarly as taler, a nickname later corrupted into dollar. “By the middle of the sixteenth century,” writes Greeley, “merchants in Leipzig, Hamburg, Antwerp, Amsterdam, and even Florence and Genoa had come to expect their silver in taler.” In 1566, the Holy Roman Empire, bowing to reality, adopted it as official currency.
Meanwhile, Spaniards (specifically Castilians) were finding fantastic quantities of silver in Mexico, Peru, and Bolivia. They hired Saxons and Bohemians, by now Europe’s recognized silver experts, to mine it and mill it into a deliberate knockoff of the taler. The result was a real de a ocho (piece of eight), made to look like the taler, that came to be known as the Spanish dólar. Spanish dollars were made in even greater quantities than the joachimsthaler and its various other knockoffs minted throughout Europe. Extracted from the bottomless silver mines of the New World, the dólar eclipsed them all. By 1611, the coin was sufficiently familiar to Elizabethan audiences that William Shakespeare could spin wordplay out of it in The Tempest, with Sebastian speaking of “a dollar” and Gonzalo answering, “Dolour comes to him, indeed; you / have spoken truer than you purposed.”
The Spanish dollar rocketed north to the American colonies because the Crown wouldn’t let its American territories mint or print currency. Urging London’s Council of Trade and Plantations to allow the Massachusetts Bay Colony to build a mint, Increase Mather and William Phips—shortly to become president of Harvard and governor of the colony, respectively—said there was “practically only Spanish money in New England.” When the new nation of the United States established a mint in 1792, Congress decreed that the U.S. dollar would be “of the value of the Spanish milled dollar.”
“Congress did not create an American dollar,” Greeley argues. “It simply consented to the silver dollar that had already been in place well before the American Revolution.” Greeley scoffs at the notion of “fiat currency,” which says that governments create money. In Greeley’s telling, governments race to keep up with and control money’s creation by private opportunists, plunderers, and freelancers who see a need for money someplace and race to fill it. In the modern era, these players are commercial banks. Greeley recognizes the importance of the Federal Reserve, but he believes it’s the banks that manufacture dollars when they make loans. Greeley’s notion that banks create money is really a semantic difference, because the ability of banks to make loans has a lot to do with reserves supplied by the Fed and financed by loans that the Fed makes to the federal government through the purchase of Treasurys. But banks predate the Fed, which has only been around since 1913.
Even after the United States started minting silver dollars, it allowed foreign silver dollars (mostly Spanish and, later, Mexican) to be circulated as legal tender until 1857. The timing was dictated by yet another matter of happenstance outside the government—the 1848 gold strike at Sutter’s Mill. Over the next decade, the California Gold Rush doubled America’s quantity of gold and silver (for which gold could be traded), finally giving the United States enough precious metal to make all of its own dollars.
Human agency is not entirely absent from Greeley’s story. Powerful East Coast bankers preferred a single gold standard to the existing silver-and-gold standard because it was less inflationary, and in 1873 Congress obliged by dropping its legal definition of a dollar as a fixed weight of silver, “severing,” Greeley writes, “the last remaining legal link to the joachimsthaler.” A Free Silver movement arose in the West to restore the silver standard and boost farm prices—inflation be damned. That was what the dollar wanted. But the bankers beat back these pitchfork-wielding Populists and proceeded (in the later words of William Jennings Bryan) to crucify the American farmer on a cross of gold. Restrained in the late nineteenth century from proliferating as fast as American farming was growing, the dollar yielded “a long, slow deflation,” with crop prices falling even as well-fed plutocrats ushered in what was, in more senses than one, a Gilded Age.
Later, after the onset of the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt seized control of the dollar in a more helpful way by extending federal insurance to bank deposits to lure out of hibernation money stashed in coffee cans and under mattresses. Greeley’s discussion of this breakthrough is a bit grudging, because it killed off small-town experiments to revive local commerce by issuing scrip.
Still, the dollar does have an uncanny ability to slip the surly bonds of regulation. The foreign dollar, exiled in 1857, staged a comeback a century later with the postwar advent of eurodollars—not physical dollars but tradable ones, manufactured first in London and then elsewhere. This started as a way for large multinational American banks to get around the Fed when it moved to tighten the money supply to curb inflation. That large American bank could simply borrow money denominated in dollars from a British (or other foreign) bank. In effect, Greeley writes, foreign banks “were just doing exactly what banks in America had already been doing for a century and a half.” They were manufacturing dollars. The eurobond followed, wherein London banks issued dollar-denominated bonds. It was, writes Greeley, “a triumph of practice over theory.”
If we ask, again, why other countries put up with our dollar, Greeley might answer: because it’s their dollar, too. Foreign countries can make and remake dollars for their own purposes. For example, it was the eurodollar that allowed postwar London to reestablish itself as a global capital market center after the pound had lost its status as a reserve currency. If a foreign bank runs into trouble with its eurodollars, the Fed will often step in with an emergency loan or some other intervention to keep a local dollar problem from going global. America’s exorbitant privilege can sometimes be an exorbitant burden.
Greeley’s alternative history can, and probably will, be read as justification for minimal bank regulation in general and for unfettered cryptocurrency in particular. If the dollar has a mind of its own, why can’t bitcoin? But Greeley is no libertarian; he thinks American currency needs to be regulated much more aggressively, because, all the way back to when Stephan Schlick paid his miners in bad pennies, letting the dollar do what it wants usually means that very little money finds its way to those who need it most.
The dollar is very difficult to control, but it is not uncontrollable. The United States demonstrates its governability whenever it weaponizes American currency to bully our friends into sanctioning our enemies. A better way to assert mastery over the dollar would be to allocate credit to better reach ordinary Americans. There are ways to achieve this without letting inflation run wild; the dollar is smart, but we humans are smarter. Sadly, the dollar has seldom been used to the betterment of humankind, not because our government lacked the ingenuity, but for the simpler and more depressing reason that it lacked the desire.
Trump’s Reflecting Pool Fiasco Is About to Get Even Worse for Him
You’d be forgiven for thinking the saga involving Donald Trump’s vile prosecutions of innocent people over his Reflecting Pool fiasco has finally come to an ignominious end. On Thursday, a judge officially threw out felony charges against former Olympic canoeist David Hearn, who’d been falsely accused by Trump of vandalizing his disastrous renovation of the landmark.
Not long after, Hearn projected an air of resolution by going on CNN. Asked if he had any “final message” for the president. Hearn criticized Trump for wrongly accusing him and added: “Leaders don’t do that.”
But this is not the final chapter in this story—not by a long shot. And what happens next will help settle whether we are capable of dispensing real justice to all those Trump accomplices who are helping make our slide into authoritarianism possible.
Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee are set to launch an investigation into the decision to criminally charge Hearn and others over the Reflecting Pool fiasco, I’m told. Although Democrats are in the minority, their probe offers a blueprint for what they’ll pursue with subpoena power if they control the House in six months.
This week, Representative Jamie Raskin—the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee and potentially its future chair—will formally demand that the Justice and Interior Departments turn over a wealth of documents related to the charging decisions made in this case.
“Judiciary Democrats will investigate who lied, who buried the evidence, and who decided to threaten an American citizen with prison simply to protect Trump’s wounded feelings and continuing corruption,” Raskin said in a statement to me. “Participants in this frame-up will be held to account.”
At the center of this saga is Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for Washington, DC, a longtime Trump confidante. Pirro’s office eagerly indicted an innocent man after the ailing despot in the Oval Office, embarrassed over reports of algae and other problems plaguing his Reflecting Pool renovation, raged that his underlings must produce a scapegoat to spare him humiliation. Pirro did subsequently move to dismiss the case. But there’s a ton we still don’t know about all these corrupt machinations.
The more we learn, the worse it will likely get. Hearn, 67, had claimed he’d merely stopped to observe the already-widely-discussed failures at the Reflecting Pool and dipped his hand in the water. Yet despite the plausibility of this account, when Pirro charged him July with felony property destruction (several others received lesser charges), she declared she had “tremendous evidence” of his guilt.
But only weeks later, when Pirro moved to drop the case in late July, her office admitted that a wealth of information provided to prosecutors by the Department of the Interior—which oversees management of the Reflecting Pool—showed that the damage had been caused by a “botched installation and not vandalism.”
What remains to be answered fully is this: How did Pirro’s office secure the July 2 indictment of Hearn for a felony, and what happened inside the Trump administration leading up to it?
Pirro’s office has defended itself by insisting that at the time of this indictment, the Interior Department misled prosecutors by initially failing to provide them info indicating that bad contracting caused the damage. Pirro’s office has also argued that the Interior Department provided limited evidence that Hearn had tampered with the project. But even that evidence looks awfully thin for felony charges.
Making the Keystone Kops nature of this even more buffoonish, Pirro has now angrily accused Interior Secretary Doug Burgum of deliberately misleading her office by persuading prosecutors of Hearn’s guilt. But under ethics guidelines, prosecutors aren’t supposed to bring indictments unless they really think the charges are supported. Shouldn’t Pirro have looked more skeptically at this “evidence” before throwing the book at Hearn?
Indeed, none of Pirro’s excuses explain why her office brought the indictment when it did. After all, her office hadn’t yet gotten a full accounting from the Interior Department of how the damage had been caused. Heck, the government’s own sole witness testified to the grand jury that this damage was visible before Hearn ever touched it, and it was obvious to the naked eye that something far more than vandalism had marred the project.
“The notion that they did not know that there was a botched, rushed renovation of the Reflecting Pool does not hold water,” Norm Eisen, a lawyer for Hearn, told me.
Eisen and Hearn’s other lawyers are not letting this drop. For some time now, they’ve been seeking access to full transcripts of the grand jury proceedings—including instructions that prosecutors gave jurors on charging guidelines—to determine whether prosecutors misled them to secure Hearn’s indictment.
Eisen confirmed to me that the push for those grand jury materials will now continue, despite Hearn’s exoneration. That’s because the court dismissed the case without prejudice—so prosecutors can theoretically revive the charges later. Getting those materials will hopefully persuade the court to rule that prosecutors cannot bring back this case, Eisen said, because they will “reflect on whether prosecutors were candid with the grand jury.”
True, success on that front will be difficult; for many good reasons, defense lawyers rarely are permitted to view grand jury materials. But it’s not unheard of. “Courts are generally very reluctant to grant access to grand jury transcripts,” Daniel R. Alonso, a former prosecutor and law professor at Cornell, told me. But here, Alonso said, the defense has “more than a colorable argument.”
Recall that well before the indictment, Trump was already publicly stating as fact that the project had been vandalized. This was surely understood by Pirro and Burgum as a command to make it true that vandalism caused the renovation’s failure. And that provides more grounds for transparency on grand jury materials, as Alonso noted: “If anything, the president’s involvement strengthens the defense’s position.”
The stakes here are very high. The Justice Department has become the site of an epic struggle over Trump’s lawless efforts to unleash law enforcement on his critics. Hearteningly, many of these gambits have imploded on contact with facts and law. Many prosecutors have resisted, leading to resignations and firings.
Yet the authoritarian abuses continue, relying on underlings who are willing to carry them out—some eagerly, and others no doubt because going along is easier than resisting, as there’s no perceived accountability in the offing. That’s why it’s critical to seek all manner of censure and redress. In the Hearn affair, this will likely include civil lawsuits against the government, asking the courts to impose professional sanctions on key actors, and seeking their disbarment—possibly up to Pirro herself.
“You can’t just limit this to the lowest person on the totem pole or the highest,” prominent legal commentator Katie Phang told me. She argued that “each and every lawyer who’s had their fingerprints on this illegal indictment” are complicit in “the collective destruction of the rule of law.”
Raskin’s committee, then, will demand documents relating to the decision to prosecute Hearn; inter-agency communications relating to the decision, including with the White House; and evidence presented to the grand jury leading up to Hearn’s indictment.
Subpoena power would help fumigate all this. Were there internal objections to this prosecution based on lack of evidence? Were they overridden? What communications about this went on with the White House? Why did Burgum look away as the prosecution proceeded—and why did he continue to allege vandalism—even as his own agency knew what really caused the damage? Democrats should put Pirro and Burgum under oath and take them apart. Impeaching Pirro should be on the table, too.
On this affair and so many others, Democrats should proceed in the following spirit: Any and all insiders and whistleblowers who want to come forward can be confident Democrats will have their back. But those who corruptly enable Trump’s vile lawlessness should know that on the other side, accountability is waiting.
The Arizona Tribe That’s Been Dragged Back Into Trump’s Border Wars
On April 28, Chairman Verlon Jose of the Tohono O’odham Nation received a message from a representative of the Department of Homeland Security. A contractor working on behalf of DHS to construct an additional border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border had destroyed part of a site sacred to the Tohono O’odham—Las Playas Intaglio, an archeological site featuring art engraved in the earth in the shape of a fish (comparable to the Nazca Lines in Peru).
Angered, Jose told media that day: “This was a devastating and entirely avoidable loss. There is nothing more important than our history, which is what makes us who we are as O’odham. This site was also an irreplaceable piece of the United States’ history, one none of us can ever get back.”
Now the Tohono O’odham Nation finds its lands at the center of a dispute with the Trump administration over the building of new segments of the U.S.-Mexico border wall.
As part of the Trump administration’s attempt to enforce mass deportations, the Department of Homeland Security has hired contractors to construct new additions to the U.S.-Mexico border wall. Using funds earmarked by last summer’s spending bill, DHS has hired several construction companies to build new segments, adding on to the existing wall originally built during the first Trump administration. One of those segments would cut through the Tohono O’odham Reservation.
The Tohono O’odham are facing another battle, in addition. Since construction began in April, workers for Sullivan Land Services, a Texas-based construction firm, have desecrated several religious landmarks sacred to the Tohono O’odham—the aforementioned Las Playas Intaglio among them. Other sacred sites, such as Horse Peak, would be affected by the wall construction, as well. In response, the Tohono O’odham Nation is now suing the Trump administration to block future construction of the wall, arguing that it undermines both tribal sovereignty and a long-standing precedent of cooperation between the nation and the federal government.
The recent contract to expand the current wall project is another unconstitutional vanity project that comes at the expense of the American people. Like the first border wall, the project is mostly spectacle that won’t actually achieve its ostensible goal of reducing migration.
In this case, it is also representative of Trump’s and DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s unprecedented challenge to tribal sovereignty, whether through this or the unlawful detention of Native Americans across the country in immigration raids. As Chairman Verlon Jose told The New Republic, “This attempt to unilaterally diminish the nation’s reservation is just the latest example of the federal government violating its own rules regarding sovereign tribes. It should be of grave concern to all 575 federally recognized tribes in the U.S., as the same thing can happen to them.”
It also underscores the kickbacks given to Trump donors who receive lucrative contracts for building the border wall. For an administration that has already declared having “the most secure border in American History,” it begs the question: Why build the border wall?
Following the contours of the high Sonoran Desert in southern Arizona are the lands of the Tohono O’odham Nation. For thousands of years, the Tohono O’odham have lived in a region that encompasses southern Arizona and northern Sonora, Mexico, occasionally moving during winter and summer seasons throughout the Colorado River region.
The Tohono O’odham first came to the attention of the U.S. government when, in 1854, Mexico sold the U.S. a strip of land in northern Sonora, in what became known as the Gadsen Purchase. Suddenly, the new border split the Tohono O’odham Nation into two. President Ulysses S. Grant identified the nation by the old Spanish term, the Papago, which would remain the tribe’s legal name until 1986, when Tohono O’odham members called for the tribe to be recognized by its traditional name.
In federal terms, the land of the Tohono O’odham was delineated during the early twentieth century, amid the restructuring of Native lands. On January 14, 1916, President Woodrow Wilson penned an executive order that set aside 2.8 million acres of land from the new state of Arizona for a reservation for the Tohono O’odham. A few years later, Congress enacted legislation affirming Wilson’s executive order.
By American legal standards, the Tohono O’odham Nation is transnational, with its lands straddling the U.S.-Mexico border. Today, the Tohono O’odham lands encompass, among Native American tribes, the second-longest territory along a border. On May 27, 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt issued a proclamation stating that space within 60 feet of the U.S.-Mexico border belonged to the federal government, to help monitor the border. When Wilson penned his February 1, 1917, executive order outlining the boundaries of the Tohono O’odham Reservation, there was no mention of the U.S.-Mexico border. It should be noted that, until the late twentieth century, the border was nothing more than a series of stone markers in the high desert. The first time a fence was erected, it was to keep encroaching ranchers from claiming Tohono O’odham land as their own. In 1918, Congress directed the building of a border fence for cattle.
This did not mean that the Tohono O’odham Nation neglected the border. Starting in the late 1970s, the Tohono O’odham began working with Border Patrol on monitoring traffic across the dividing line. In the decades since, the Tohono O’odham tribal council has hosted Customs and Border Protection officers and permitted the construction of CBP bases. During the late 1980s, instances of border crossings ranged from 50 to 60 per month.
Then came Operation Gatekeeper. Beginning under the Clinton administration in 1994, the Border Patrol and Immigration and Naturalization Service (the predecessor to ICE) implemented a strategy of “prevention through deterrence” to reduce the number of immigrants entering via the southern border. Border walls were constructed around metropolitan areas and ports of entry, checkpoints were militarized, and detention centers were expanded. Entry into the U.S. was also more restrictive. One key aspect of this policy was that it forced undocumented migrant movement to dangerous terrain, where migrants could be easily spotted or deterred by the forces of nature.
The result was a movement of migrants through the Sonoran Desert, where many perished. In increasing numbers, border crossers entered through Tohono O’odham land. In the decade that followed, thousands of immigrants ventured toward the Tohono O’odham lands to bypass more securitized border entries. On April 27, 2003, The Arizona Republic, in a multipart series on the border, reported that from 2001 to 2002, 85 of 145 immigrant deaths at the border occurred on Tohono O’odham land.
Tribal Chairman Edward Manuel approached Congress, requesting additional funding for border protection and social services to address the rise of migration through the reservation. Since 2003, 1,500 migrants have died on Tohono O’odham lands while attempting to cross the border, and the tribal government has spent $6 million of its own funds to process those deaths.
The nation also faced additional concerns over the border: the harassment of tribal members by Border Patrol agents. Already, in November 2001, members of the Tohono O’odham Nation raised complaints against Border Patrol agents who targeted nation members for undocumented crossing despite being U.S. citizens. In response, Tohono O’odham members pushed for the recognition of Tohono O’odham membership cards as valid proof of citizenship, which could serve as U.S. passports for crossing the border to visit ancestral lands in Mexico. Congress has not yet recognized Tohono O’odham IDs as such.
The federal government did, however, help bolster border security—with the consent of the Tohono O’odham. In 2007, tribal leadership agreed to work with CBP to erect large vehicle barriers along the border. During the first Trump administration, in 2019, tribal members approved of the construction of an Integrated Fixed Tower system, which installed sensors that alerted CBP agents about border activity.
Yet the Tohono O’odham protested the Trump administration for attempting to construct a new border wall that cut through Tohono O’odham land. In 2019, the Tohono O’odham Nation submitted an amicus brief in support of the Sierra Club in its lawsuit against the border wall, Trump v. Sierra Club.
In February 2020, CBP contractors destroyed a burial ground at Monument Hill and damaged Quitobaquito Springs during the construction of a border wall. Construction of the wall, however, stopped following the election of Joe Biden in November 2020.
During the Biden years—even during periods when thousands of asylum petitioners camped by the U.S.-Mexico border for entry—members of the Tohono O’odham lobbied against future border wall construction, arguing that the current tower system worked effectively and that wall construction would produce more harm than good.
In 2024, Tohono O’odham Nation Chairman Verlon Jose testified before the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations on the status of the border. Jose implored the subcommittee that a wall would do nothing to help with border issues. “As the Nation and others have warned for years, the border wall is particularly ineffective in remote geographic areas like our homelands, where it can easily be circumvented by climbing over, tunneling under, or sawing through it.… CBP data shows that most illegal drugs are smuggled through ports of entry rather than through the borderlands. The data clearly shows that federal funds would be put to much better use supporting tribal and federal law enforcement and border security services and public health services.”
Since the return of Donald Trump to the White House, Native Americans have found themselves directly affected by new policies. During the first year of the Trump administration, Native Americans were severely affected by funding cuts ordered by the Department of Government Efficiency. DOGE terminated leases for at least 12 Indian Health Service facilities that provide medical care on Indian reservations. Among those impacted were the nearby Tucson IHS facility.
In the first year of Trump’s second term, the border remained in the background as the Trump administration centered its immigration policy on mass deportation. Many victims of immigration sweeps were Native Americans. In several ICE operations, as reported by El País, members of the Oglala Sioux and the Navajo Nations reported being detained by ICE agents. In April 2025, the Trump administration issued a memorandum excluding federal Indian reservations from any border construction plans. To expedite construction, former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem waived dozens of regulations under the National Environmental Policy Act.
That changed in February 2026, when the Trump administration announced new plans to construct a border wall through Tohono O’odham land, reversing its previous memorandum. On April 19, Jose announced that legal protection was needed to stop the construction of the two new border walls. In an interview with the Arizona Daily Star, Jose told reporters, “The wall does not work. There are so many other things we can work on together to address this issue. What happened to the government that’s supposed to be for the people, by the people, when the people have no voice?”
On June 16, legal representatives of the Tohono O’odham Nation filed an injunction through the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia to halt anticipated construction of a new border wall.
Ten days later, the Trump administration awarded a contract to Sullivan Land Services, or SLSCO, a construction company based in Galveston, Texas, to build the segment of the wall on Tohono O’odham land. The project, which is estimated to cost north of $1 billion, is dubbed the Tucson 5 Project. The design includes two 30-foot, 62-mile walls that run directly through Tohono O’odham land. For the current border wall construction, SLSCO was also awarded contracts to work on the Del Rio 3 Project and the Laredo 2 Project; it previously built several segments for the border wall during the first Trump administration.
In 2021, the company was sued when a whistleblower alleged that it overcharged for construction costs and even illegally hired armed Mexican nationals to guard border wall construction sites. Most importantly, the Houston Chronicle’s report detailed how the Sullivan brothers have carved a monopoly out of federal construction projects ranging from disaster relief in Haiti to construction work on the Port of Galveston.
Weeks later, on July 7, representatives of the DOJ’s Environmental and Natural Resources division challenged the Tohono O’odham’s injunction in a brief, claiming that allowing the nation to block construction would be a threat to national security.
“According to Plaintiff Tohono O’odham Nation, however, Congress silently left a sixty-two mile stretch of the Arizona border unprotected,” wrote DOJ attorney Stacy Stoller. “That stretch, Plaintiff says, shares a border with its reservation (the Tribal Reservation). As Plaintiff tells it, the Secretary may secure that portion of the border only if it [the Nation] agrees. Under this theory Plaintiff wields veto power over any border-barrier project in this area. Plaintiff’s theory would, to say the least, break new legal ground.”
Except the challenge does not break new legal ground. If anything, it preserves a status quo between the nation and DHS that has existed for decades. What would be unprecedented, however, is DHS’s move to challenge tribal sovereignty and create the illusion that the nation dictates all border policy.
On July 22, attorneys representing the Tohono O’odham and the Department of Justice convened at the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia for a preliminary hearing. Presiding over the case was Judge Richard Leon, who had already made headlines when he blocked the Trump administration’s construction of the new White House ballroom after it demolished the historic East Wing.
In the courtroom, attorney Riyaz Kanji, on behalf of the nation, argued that the Trump administration engaged in ultra vires actions—that is, going beyond its legal power—to construct the wall on Tohono O’odham land. Kanji noted that on several occasions, the Tohono O’odham Nation had warned the federal government that building a border wall through the nation’s lands would do nothing to deter migration, that migration levels were at an all-time low, and that such a project would desecrate sacred sites and have environmental impacts. Rather, Kanji noted, the existing border system worked well and border crossings were down dramatically from past years.
Judge Leon questioned Kanji about the nation’s case, citing the government’s argument that President Theodore Roosevelt had initially designated the lands of the border as a public reservation, regardless of tribal jurisdiction. Noting that the 1907 Roosevelt executive order designated all land 60 feet within the border as government property, Leon asked Kanji to explain why the 1907 order did not grant the federal government the power to build the wall. Justice Department attorneys asserted that the border remains U.S. government property, that the project would pose no environmental threat, and that the national security threat of immigration was real. By the end of the hearing, Judge Leon asked both parties to bring in written statements, delaying a final judgment by a few weeks.
For now, the case remains in limbo. Following the hearing, Representative Adelita Grijalva of Arizona’s 7th district, which encompasses the Tohono O’odham lands, released a statement in response. Joining in support of the nation, Grijalva reminded the press that “it is against the law for DHS to unilaterally alter the boundaries of a sovereign Tribal Nation, yet that is exactly what they are trying to do—usurping authority that only Congress has.”
Chairman Verlon Jose told me, in response to the trial, “The Nation has worked closely with CBP and other agencies for decades to protect the U.S. homeland. A clear purpose for undertaking these extensive security efforts was to avoid an unnecessary wall that would separate our people, desecrate our sacred sites, and devastate our environment. History and experience with the terrain in this part of the country clearly show that an expensive wall won’t work. That is why we implemented multiple levels of technology and personnel, which has been effective. The administration has repeatedly stated for months that the current border is 100 percent secure. As a result, the only impact of building a wall is to curry political favor, all at great expense to the taxpayers.”
In the meantime, the Trump Administration has decided to take advantage of the delayed ruling to act. On Thursday, August 6, DHS stated it would send contractors to the Tohono O’odham Reservation to resume construction on the wall. The following day, the Tohono O’odham Nation announced that any contractor who enters the Nation’s lands to work on the wall without prior authorization would be found illegally trespassing.
Other judgments have been granted to the Trump administration to continue wall construction. On August 3, federal Judge Reggie B. Walton allowed the Trump administration to move ahead with the construction of the border wall through the levee system near the town of Presidio, Texas. Environmental groups argued doing so would ruin the structure of a nearby levee, which would lead to flooding. The ruling underscores the legal uncertainty facing border communities regarding their ability to have a voice in the border wall construction.
The current attempt to construct two border walls on Tohono O’odham land reeks of the political graft and backroom deals typical of the Trump administration. The outcome of the trial is about more than just another one of the president’s many vanity projects. It could have long-standing consequences for Native American sovereignty. By ignoring these precedents, as outlined by Congress, the current border wall project on Tohono O’odham land would mark an erasure of Native American rights in the U.S. Most of all, it represents another obliteration of checks and balances between the branches of government. By allowing Trump to sidestep its authority, Congress sets another precedent to allow an unchecked executive to dictate federal policy, to the detriment of those who must live in the aftermath.
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This HOUSE OF THE DRAGON Season 3 Death Hints at a Bleak Future
House of the Dragon’s season three finale was a big one that impacted both Team Black and Team Green. Both sides took some major losses, thanks to the Battle of Tumbleton, and those fractures and betrayals will inform big decisions next season. While some deaths gave us great delight, there was one that was rather sad and somber. The death of Helaena Targaryen didn’t happen onscreen in House of the Dragon, but we felt the impact all the same… and so did Rhaenyra.
⚡ Quick Take- Helaena Targaryen dies by suicide in the season three finale of House of the Dragon.
- She takes her own life after a warning from Mysaria and continued harassment from Rhaenyra.
- Rhaenyra finds Helaena’s needlepoint work, which contains a bad omen for her own future demise.
In the episode, Helaena was still refusing to eat despite being pregnant. This, coupled with her limited time outdoors and lack of engaging with others, was taking quite the toll on the princess. Her mother Alicent was off to murder her son Aemond (and failed miserably) and Rhaenyra was harassing her about dreams and s**t when all she wanted to do was needlepoint and chill. She dreamed of a life where she could be free from all of this political drama and anger, but that wasn’t meant to happen for her.
Helaena receives a warning from Mysaria to not trust the queen and that Aegon was alive. She said that her child would be a pawn in this fight for the throne, and Helaena takes her words to heart. Of course, Mysaria is upset about being dismissed coldly by Rhaenyra and this is a jab back at her. But she’s not wrong, either.
RELATED ARTICLE
Every Major Character Death in HOUSE OF THE DRAGON Season 3After finishing her piece, Helaena jumps out of the window to her death, which we find out about at the end of the episode. Rhaenyra enters her quarters to see the window open and finds what Helaena was working on. The artwork depicts her death and tears but also shows Rhaenyra standing in front of the Iron Throne. There’s fire and blood (ha) and dragons, signaling a horrific end to her reign.
Whether Rhaenyra truly believes this is her fate is debatable because 1) she’s delusional and 2) she could think that Helaena did this as one last middle finger to her. Either way, she will now have to answer to Alicent, who assumes that Aemond is dead and now will return to discover that her daughter and unborn grandchild are dead.
Ollie Upton/HBO
It is sad that the only way Helaena could find peace and freedom in her life was through dying by suicide. We will have to wait and see what prices are paid when House of the Dragon returns for its fourth and final season.
The post This HOUSE OF THE DRAGON Season 3 Death Hints at a Bleak Future appeared first on Nerdist.
Does HOUSE OF THE DRAGON’s Alys Revelation Connect to a GOT Character?
This post contains major spoilers for House of the Dragon season three, episode eight. If you want to avoid them for now you can instead check out our coverage of episode seven.
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Quick Take
- House of the Dragon‘s season three finale revealed some shocking facts about Alys Rivers’ past.
- Her history with the Children of the Forest and immortal curse dates back to Aegon’s Conquest of Westeros.
- Could Alys Rivers’ long life and relationship with Aemond Targaryen mean they’re the parents of an infamous Targaryen bastard?
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Alys Rivers has long been one of Blood and Fire’s most fascinating figures. Self-taught medicine woman? Woods witch? Greenseer? Enchanting servant with a knack for trickery and wooing Targaryen princes? Dark sorceress? In House of the Dragon‘s season three finale, we learned she is somehow all of that and so much more. She’s an immortal woman more than 150 years old who is also cursed to remain in the Riverlands for trying to cheat death. She tried to use very old magic to save her son from Aegon the Conqueror’s dragonflame.
While that makes her fascinating enough on her own, Alys’ relationship with Aemond One-Eye also suggests she will also play a role in saving the world of men. There’s reason to believe one of the most important players in the Game of Thrones is her son.
Who Was Alys Rivers Before Aegon the Conqueror Came to Westeros?Alys Rivers has been a mysterious character since she first arrived in House of the Dragon to tell Daemon he will die at Harrenhal. Part de facto maester, part possible witch, and entirely unknowable, the “bastard” woman of Harrenhal has somehow been aware of events that should have been impossible to know. That included things that hadn’t happened yet. She also knew the castle, its grounds, and its history intimately. And she helped Daemon see the vision of the prophecy of Ice and Fire, one she also knows about, via the castle’s sacred weirwood tree.
You don’t have to be highborn to be a greenseer capable of seeing the past, present, and future through weirwood trees. But during season three, Alys also said she is cursed, and it did not seem to be knowledge that made her say that. In the finale, we found out exactly what she meant when she told Aemond why she’s so alone.
Her curse began roughly 130 years prior when Aegon the Conqueror burned Harrenhal and with it the last King of the Isles and the Rivers. The cruel ruler who built the Realm’s largest castle with torture and the wood of sacred weirwoods was Harren the Black of House Hoare. Aegon also killed all of Harren’s sons, ending the line of Harren entirely… but not right away. One of Harren’s sons survived for a little while after Aegon’s dragon burned him. Alys did everything she could to save the boy because it was her child. She was Harren’s wife and Harrenhal her home. Here’s what she told Aemond about her past:
When the dragon Balerion burned this place, it was to end Lord Harren’s line. But his line was not so easily ended. A child, a boy, lived on. Burned terribly, but alive. His mother would have given anything to save him. She summoned maesters from across the Seven Kingdoms, but to no avail. So, she turned to older cures. She uncovered incantations more ancient than the land. She treated with things that lived in the forest. But none of it could unmake what dragon fire made. And when the boy was gone……she…she tried to go with him.
And that is when she learned the cost. She discovered then she was cursed to live on, to remain within the bounds of the river kings of old, cursed for sharing in Harren’s avarice. Stripped of her name, her title, her castle. And sentenced to serve every ha’penny lord who came here to rule it.
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The history of the Riverlands long predates the arrival of the First Men. When they moved into the region,
they warred with the Children of the Forest, whose own history in Westeros is much older than anyone will ever know.
When the First Men and the Children agreed to The Pact that ended their war, they did so at the God’s Eye lake. It sits near Harrenhal. The island in the middle of the God’s Eye where they signed it, the Isle of Faces, is full of weirwoods. The sacred order created to protect the Isle and its trees are known as the Green Men. They have lived there for thousands and thousands of years. Those strange little men with antlers have also kept eye on Harrenhal’s woods on House of the Dragon.
Read more about one of the most fascinating and important places in all of A Song of Ice and Fire with our History of Thrones: Gods Eye and the Isle of Faces.
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The “incantations more ancient than the land” and the “things that lived in the forest” Alys treated with sound like the Green Men, the ageless Children of the Forest, and the deep lost magic that predates the arrival of men. But even those ancient powers weren’t enough to undo what dragon fire had done, and Alys lost her son. Only then—just as Daenerys will one day learn the price of trying to save her dying husband Khal Drogo with dark magic—did Alys learn “the cost.”
Her hubris in trying to cheat death meant she couldn’t die, and despite being at least 150 years old she hasn’t aged since Aegon the Conqueror burned her sons. But eternal life didn’t just stop her from joining her son. Her attempts to cheat the Stranger also cost “Alys” her real name, her title, and “her castle.” Instead of being Harren’s wife (someone we know nothing about) she became Alys Rivers, an immortal with incredible powers bound to the Riverlands she cannot leave. Instead of ruling in her family’s castle, she must atone for trying to defeat death. Part of her punishment for using ancient magic that belonged to the Children of the Forest is serving every lord who comes through the cursed castle. (All of whom die.)
HBO
Alys wanted Rhaenyra to grant her Harrenhal because Alys believes it’s rightful hers. But she doesn’t want to be alone when she reclaims it. She wants Aemond to be her dragonlord and she is Lady of the Water. Even if she can’t leave, she can still rule from there. And they have the dragon eggs, and now it seems the knowledge of the magic needed to hatch them, to do exactly that.
But it might be a different kind of dragon Alys will give birth to who will carry on her legacy.
Warning: We’re going to get into some future spoilers from Fire & Blood. There is no guarantee they will happen on House of the Dragon. But just in case, if you want to avoid them entirely skip ahead.
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Is One of the Most Important Figures in Westeros’ History The Offspring of Alys Rivers and Aemond Targaryen?
When Daemon saw the vision of Aegon the Conqueror’s prophecy,vd he saw a descendent of House Targaryen. He saw the Three-Eyed Raven. (He’s called the Three-Eyed Crow in the books, but we’re dealing with HBO’s Westeros, so he’s a Raven for now.)
Read more about one of the most fascinating and important places in all of A Song of Ice and Fire with our History of Thrones: Brynden Rivers, The Three-Eyed Raven of King’s Landing
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Before his body was overtaken by the roots of a weirwood tree beyond the Wall, the Three-Eyed Raven was known as Lord Brynden Rivers, also called Bloodraven. Brynden Rivers was a Great Bastard of House Targaryen who remained loyal to the crown during the family’s second civil war. He served as Hand to multiple Kings and went on to become Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch. Many also believed him to be a dark sorcerer who knew things he shouldn’t. That was partly true because he was a greenseer who could also disguise himself with magic.
He also far outlived his mortal life, living long enough to train Bran Stark so he could help stop the Night King. The albino Bloodraven also lost an eye to a family member and wielded the Targaryen ancestral sword Dark Sister, which currently belongs to the man who might actually be his father.
Now that we know Alys Rivers’ past, everything we know about Brynden Rivers—who developed a sacred bond with the Children—makes him sound like the child of Alys and Aemond. At the very least, he sounds like their direct descendent. His mother was a woman of the Riverlands, but she spent many years in King’s Landing where Brynden was born. Or was he? Was the baby swapped out? Did Alys learn how to leave her cursed chains, take on the form of a Blackwood woman, and head to King’s Landing?
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There are many specifics that seem to make it impossible for her to be Brynden’s actual mother. But not really. When you’re dealing with ancient magic, rules and logic don’t apply. Who is to say what’s possible for a baby born decades earlier to an immortal woman? And this seems even more possible since Fire & Blood tells us Alys gave birth to Aemond’s son, ruled over Harrenhal, was said to have a dragon, and then disappeared from history entirely.
What happened to the boy? What happened to Alys Rivers? We don’t know. But the Three-Eyed Raven—the man who Alys helped Daemon see in his vision—certainly does.
Aemond will one day say Alys “sees much and more.” Just as people will whisper Lord Bloodraven has a “thousand eyes and one.” They will fear his powers that let him see across time and space. They will be right about him just as Aemond was right about Alys.
Is House of the Dragon‘s Alys Rivers Revelation Canon?
Ollie Upton/HBO
Nothing on the show is canon to the books. But this revelation about Alys Rivers doesn’t conflict with the tale told in Fire & Blood. If true, it actually answers many questions raised by the in-world history. It has also raised even more about the real legacy Alys will leave behind when she is lost to history. None are bigger than the child she had with Aemond. Is it possible she bore a powerful, strange Targaryen bastard we already know? Because if she did, he sounds just like his mother and father.
Mikey Walsh is a staff writer at Nerdist. You can follow Mikey on Bluesky at @burgermike. And also anywhere someone is ranking the Targaryen kings.
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