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Donald Trump returned to power in large part through a campaign of scapegoating, promising to rescue his supporters from the immigrants and transgender people who he claimed endangered America. That these MAGA-designated outgroups posed no threat to the country was no obstacle, so long as Trumpworld found new ways to pitch that narrative and keep it going in ever more distorted forms. Thus arrived last week a chilling new report from the Department of Health and Human Services that attempts to paint support for trans people as an “ideological accelerant” capable of directing the left toward political violence.

Titled “Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology?,” the “study” was something that the department had “commissioned,” according to an August 26 press release. HHS Assistant Secretary for Health Brian Christine said the publication “raises important questions” and that “the association between sex-rejecting clinical beliefs, authoritarian attitudes, and the justification of political violence warrant serious scientific scrutiny.” Here, the department has unwittingly raised another “important” question: Why has HHS decided to commit public resources to investigate an alleged “association” between support for transgender people and political violence? That question demands actually serious scrutiny.

Don’t mistake this publication for science. Functionally, it has more in common with the president’s anti-trans and anti-left executive orders than it does with any scientific paper subject to peer review. Its authors position the report as an intervention, countering existing literature that regards “opposition towards ‘gender affirming’ norms” as “a symptom of prejudice,” as well as challenging work that “assumed” that “authoritarianism was primarily a right-wing phenomenon.” This is not much more than a lightly sourced remix of common right-wing talking points, amounting to the same old thing: Have you considered that the right are unfairly painted as bigots, when it’s the left that are the real aggressors?

It makes sense that in commissioning this report, then, HHS turned to think-tank fellows whose other work aligns with the administration’s goals, specifically its broad campaign to characterize the left—and queer and trans people, in particular—as a security threat or as domestic terrorists. One of the authors, Colin Wright, hails from both the right-wing Manhattan Institute and the anti-trans group Genspect’s own think tank, the Killarney Group. Genspect is a leading player in an international network of anti-trans groups known for using pseudoscience to undermine efforts to protect the health and rights of trans people. Another report author, Joel Finkelstein, is the co-founder of the Network Contagion Research Institute, or NCRI, which has repeatedly sought to link the left with ”extremism,” including by espousing false equivalencies between political violence from the left and the right. Finkelstein is the only author disclosed as an NCRI affiliate, but the three other authors have co-authored previous NCRI reports (such as “The Corruption of the American Mind” and “Instructing Animosity: How DEI Pedagogy Produces the Hostile Attribution Bias”). However, they are identified in the HHS report only as being affiliated with Rutgers University—with which NCRI is itself affiliated.

It is not surprising, given these authors, that the report recalls earlier Network Contagion Research Institute work; as respectably as it may be packaged, it delivers content ready to drive right-wing news cycles. One 2024 NCRI report warned that diversity, equity, and inclusion programs “may implicitly or explicitly characterize members of so-called ‘dominant’ groups—or those who disagree with ‘anti-oppressive,’ ‘anti-racist,’ or contemporary ‘anti-fascist’ frameworks—as oppressive, racist, or fascist.” (Four of the five authors of the HHS report worked on that one.) Another NCRI report on “militant anarcho-socialist networks” from 2020, which shares two co-authors with the HHS report, included subheads like, “ACAB-LINKED MEMES APPEAR WITH CLEAR CALLS FOR VIOLENCE VIRTUALLY AND ARE USED TO SYMBOLICALLY OUST STATE AUTHORITY AND MARK TERRITORY IN THE REAL WORLD.” (ACAB, of course, is international shorthand for “All Cops Are Bastards.”) Lately, NCRI has accused the Democratic Socialists of America of being a “foreign agent”—dovetailing nicely with Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s own attempts to drag DSA into his vintage midcentury anti-Communist crusade.

To be clear: The publication of this anti-trans report is not a case of decent, evidence-minded experts at HHS being deceived. The agency’s Assistant Secretary for Health Brian Christine, who promoted the report, and whose X profile includes a banner reading “Make America Healthy Again,” regularly promotes medical misinformation about transition popularized by anti-trans groups. On August 13, promoting another recent HHS “commissioned” report, called “Wolves in White Coats,” Christine accused providers of gender-affirming care of having “mutilated, and then cast aside,” children “for profit and politics.” In fact, Christine was a speaker at a 2026 Genspect lobby day in Washington. That HHS turned to someone who works for some of those same anti-trans groups to produce this latest “study” also, unfortunately, tracks.

The new HHS report does do something quite unique, however, even as it recalls both historic Red and Lavender scares: It provides the appearance of a scientific basis for the administration’s obsession with connecting what it calls “gender ideology” with political violence. Here, I’m using its terminology only because it speaks to an umbrella category that doesn’t quite have an affirmative term. In essence, the administration is referring to people who are trans and those who defend trans people. This is the cohort the authors attempted to capture in their whopping sample of 1,208 participants, who were recruited through a platform on which people are paid to take surveys. (I reached out to the report’s co-principal investigators through Rutgers University, with which they as well as NCRI are affiliated, but received no response.) Through that platform, respondents were asked to do essentially two surveys: one to evaluate what the authors called “endorsement of ‘gender-affirming’ norms” and one about their support for “left-wing authoritarianism.” Taken together, the authors claimed, the results “suggest that gender ideology is associated with [left-wing authoritarianism] and willingness to justify political violence.” To say that one thing suggests an association with another thing is certainly a sentence that suggests such an association—but it’s not a finding.

The report HHS published does not prove that “gender ideology” radicalizes people; it demonstrates only that the administration is trying to make that case, and that’s why this is so chilling. Unfortunately, this report is not the only evidence of the administration’s aims. In Trump’s blitz of executive orders after he returned to office last January, one of the first was titled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” At the same time, Trump issued his pardons of January 6 rioters. Altogether, the administration would now position trans people, not Trump supporters, as the “real” extremists.

Since then, the administration has only accelerated its efforts to link trans people and violent extremism. In the Justice Department’s attempts to prosecute people for resisting Immigration and Customs Enforcement, among those charged in some of the highest-profile cases, trans people are vastly overrepresented. Take, for instance, the Prairieland cases, which resulted in multiple trans and nonbinary activists sentenced to decades in prison, as well as the Spokane 3 cases, in which one ICE agent’s transphobic posts on X were revealed. Then there is NSPM-7, a national security memo issued by Trump nearly one year ago, which attempts to define as “domestic terrorists” people who espouse “extremism on migration, race, and gender,” as well as “hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.” The new White House counterterrorism strategy, released in May, pledges to “prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.” It also claims that Charlie Kirk was killed by “a radical who espoused extreme transgender ideologies.”

There is more, and worse—much of which is not worth dignifying, like the right’s immediate attempts to claim each new mass shooter as trans, or the Heritage Foundation pressuring the FBI to designate what it calls “Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violence and Extremism” as domestic terrorism.

The propaganda that pulls it all together, however, comes from White House and Homeland Security adviser Stephen Miller, who spoke this July on “the resurgence of political terrorism.” Miller did not name trans people directly, but given all of the above, how the administration has worked to collapse “the left” and “trans people” and “extremists,” it is hard not to read gender in this screed. I apologize for quoting from it at length, but keep in mind: These are the words of the White House and of Homeland Security at what was supposed to be a counterterrorism event.

“The leftist looks at a perfect family with a perfect life and a perfect job and perfect kids that goes to church every Sunday and is filled with a feeling of inadequacy and jealousy, and they covet,” Miller began. “It’s not a coincidence that when you look at these violent antifa demonstrations, you see any photograph of those who were assembled—to be blunt, not one of the people that is demonstrating looks like a normal person. Not one looks normal. They’re all deformed in some way—in their appearance, in their dress, in their mannerism.” He went on: “Every one of them, through the course of their life and their decisions, has scarred their body and their appearance, in many different ways, to the point in which their outer appearance becomes a manifestation of their inner hatred.”

Then Miller invoked the opposite of the “deformed”: “Trust your instincts—to all people and across all civilizations. You know what normal is. You know what beautiful is. You know what good is,” he said, sounding like a children’s book. “You know that children are precious and beautiful and must be protected.” Protected from what? When the “violent leftist” sees all that normal, beautiful goodness, Miller said, “that burns an ember in them, and that’s how you end up with the horrors we’ve seen throughout history, where good families are dragged out into the street and executed.” He was asking without asking: What wouldn’t you want us to do, if it could save your children?

That sentiment is the true backdrop to the publication of this HHS report: not only the acceleration of anti-trans misinformation and bad science but the pattern of scapegoating trans people and anyone who defends them. As with other Trump administration attacks on trans people, the report didn’t have to be well executed or even believable to work as designed. As much as anything voiced by Trump or Miller, the report functions as propaganda, built on a question that can’t produce an answer, only dehumanization and fear.

Youth may be wasted on the young, but what if the young are already wasted? The writer Nancy Lemann coined the term “wastrel-youth contingent” to describe characters who squander their early adulthood and pickle themselves in gin. A writer of heady and humid prose, Lemann is an observer of character, an idle reflector, a melancholic meditator. The drift and sway of her fiction feels tipsy—warm and languid, flushed with booze and the muggy mood of the tropics.

Her debut novel, Lives of the Saints (1985), is her best-known work, now reissued by New York Review Books. Her book-length courtroom reportage, The Ritz of the Bayou (1987), has been reissued by Hub City Press. Lemann’s unofficial title for The Ritz of the Bayou, a perfect companion to Lives of the Saints, is “Lives of the Sinners.” And a new novel, The Oyster Diaries, caps off the renaissance. Also published by NYRB, it has a charmingly discursive, drawer-emptying quality, a novel stitched together from journal entries, stray vignettes, and perhaps the once-discarded heels of other projects.

Lemann’s career revival arrives during a boom of rediscovery, a golden age for reclaiming a lost author. Reissued work is sometimes overpraised, out of an urge to embrace a great artist who went out on the tide of obscurity. And so it’s exciting and alarming to discover how worthy Lemann’s work is of reclamation: her crackling humor, her sharp and soulful observations of character. Her fiction, thin on plot and thick on atmosphere, defies many tired rules of novel writing, just as Ritz defies the rules of journalism. Tina Brown, who originally commissioned it to run in Vanity Fair, found it unpublishable due to Lemann’s total disregard for the details of the case. Lemann was in pursuit of something greater than telling a story or holding attention.

Her career has been refreshingly unproductive. She writes the only way she knows how: comic, intuitive, frustrating, discursive, self-doubting. Her novels are light on plot because she views life as unplotted. She writes toward her idiosyncrasies—with repetitions, streaks of reverie, and narrative self-effacement—and her novels model and reward a form of attention akin to worship. These tendencies have crystallized into the style of a great artist, one of the most charming American prose writers alive today.

Lemann was born in New Orleans in 1956. She grew up across the street from the writer Walker Percy, who became her literary mentor and hero. Much like Louise Brown, the narrator of Lives of the Saints, Lemann attended Brown University before returning to New Orleans, where she got a job at a law firm, lived a vibrant social life, and forced herself to write a novel. Freshly returned to the city of her birth, and seeing it with a new love and longing, Lemann wrote Saints in three months, filling it to the brim with a nostalgia for youth even as her youth was still unfolding.

Invoked more as a term of endearment than of caution, the “wastrel-youth contingent” of the novel is best represented by Claude Collier, an improbably dashing alcoholic. Claude is a clever inventor—his shrimp-peeling machine is a hit—a blue-eyed Catholic, and, sitting squarely in the crosshairs of Louise’s longing gaze, the novel’s leading man. There’s the will-they-won’t-they question of romance, as well as another will-they-won’t-they: Will Louise succeed or fail in saving Claude from himself? “I’m falling apart,” says Claude. “She’s falling apart,” he says, pointing at Louise. “Everyone is falling apart,” he concludes. Saints is a haunted book, its young people settling prematurely into the neuroses and shortcomings that will stunt their chances at happiness.

Claude’s family is an eccentric collection of members of the New Orleans patrician class: the father an oyster-obsessed lawyer who’s studying ancient Greek, the mother a Northern transplant studiously adapting to the customs of high society Southern living. Louise, drawn to Claude and the Colliers, hangs around like a chronicler of their antics, serving as the solo audience for their performances of self. Louise’s own family is more roughly sketched. Raised by her aunts—who never appear—Louise is the heiress to a Mississippi lumber fortune, of which Mr. Collier is a trustee.

The novel opens with a long party scene, the wedding reception to celebrate the union of Henry Laines and Mary Grace—peers of Claude and Louise—who offer a grim picture of marriage in the upper crust. Henry Laines is also “falling apart” because “he was made that way. He was made to scream wild declarations of love to women in dressing rooms and gardens, and then throw pots and pans on them.” And Mary Grace? “Life ran high in Mary Grace,” observes Louise. “It takes generosity to love … and she had loved many. But she was in a state of Total Chaos, among the madcap palms and honorable oaks, as society shed its bloodshot eyes upon the scene.” In Saints, the palms—like the people—are madcap, the rain slashes into the azaleas, love is a little doomed, and Louise cuts through the brush to see into the clearing of a person’s troubled soul.

For the first half of the novel, it seems Lemann is content to move from one languid set piece to the next: first the wedding, then a sprawling Sunday afternoon and evening at the Colliers’. Then tragedy strikes, interrupting the rhythms of the book. In the middle of the night, Saint—Claude’s younger brother—falls from the balcony; in the morning he’s found dead in the garden. Without him, the Colliers lose their engine of purpose and suffer the stuckness of grief, the “unlawfulness” of loss.

Writing for The New York Times in 1985, Michiko Kakutani described Saints as a “musically patterned novel,” its repetitions powerfully accumulating over its span. It’s a near perfect work, and even my quarrels—the on-the-nose play on words of the title (Claude’s younger brother is named Saint), the noisy gimmick of Lemann’s intermittent capitalization—are subsumed by its merits. Lemann’s repetitions of description and pronouncement are her most conspicuous flourish of style, and they imbue her prose with a hypnotic and cyclical rhythm. Her characters do things over and over too, as when Louise says at breakfast: “Scrambled eggs, scrambled eggs, scrambled eggs, scrambled eggs,” and Claude replies, “Could you, uh, reiterate that?” These repetitions arise from an artful and persistent narrator approaching her subjects again and again from slightly altered angles; they speak to a keenness to remember things just so—to preserve the memory of a place and its people.

Rather than a book of recollections, Lives of the Saints is about the willful manufacture of memory, and of a nostalgia to be felt in the future.

Louise is honing her observational skills, preparing for the life of a writer. But she is also placing her loved ones behind glass, protecting the artifacts of a cherished world: her home. “I don’t want it to be just in my memory,” says Claude, speaking for both of them, all. “I don’t want to forget.”

Although Lives of the Saints takes place over only three months, this single season of Louise’s young adulthood lends the orbiting people and events an outsize gravitational weight. Lemann’s book inverts one of the novel’s most useful tropes: Rather than have an older Louise look back on her younger self, Saints features the young Louise enshrining this period of her life, predetermining its importance and predicting—shaping—her own future: She will become someone for whom the Summer of Claude was monumentally consequential. Rather than a book of recollections, Saints is about the willful manufacture and prioritization of memory, the curation of a nostalgia to be felt in the future.

Oyster Diaries is a less heady dose of Lemann’s prose. It can feel less substantial than Saints, but its digressiveness lets in a refreshing breeze. Delery, a volunteer court monitor, lives in Washington, D.C., but she returns to New Orleans to visit her dying father. Delery sees herself in him, the man who never forgave her mother for being unfaithful; now Delery grapples with her own partner’s infidelity. Oyster Diaries is a sort of sequel to Saints, and Lemann returns to old themes, like the fallen angel Claude Collier, whom she can’t keep out of the book. In one of Delery’s remembrances of their wastrel youth, he materializes on a motorcycle wearing a black suit. Years later, they meet again, and Claude looms as the forbidden love of her life—an “old flame,” she calls him. “It is surprising how much you can love someone,” Delery reflects, although there is a “tortured quality” to her love for Claude. Claude married her dear friend Louise, a Pyrrhic victory that earns her the epithet “the long-suffering” Louise.

Do people change? “No man can escape himself,” Louise observes, referring to Claude, whose excess of alcoholic kindness reads as an evasion of his own despair—a faith in others to paper over the void of faith in himself. Or as Delery sees him: “His angelic self-effacement was causing him to ruin his life. Or at least it dampened his will to fight patent infringements.”

Delery and Claude share a common reverence. “He was in awe of his father,” Delery says of Claude, and she is too—of his and of her own. She is the adoring daughter of the titular oyster diarist, a lawyer who lunched: For 20 years he kept a careful record of the oysters he consumed at a restaurant across the street from the courthouse. The log includes such entries as “Sept . 19—passable” and “Sept . 29—not so hot.” Delery assesses the diary and its keeper: “It is the work of a madman.”

The Oyster Diaries the novel is about the death of the fathers—Delery’s, her husband Jack’s, Claude’s, all. Squinting, one can even read the novel as an ode to a vanishing place. “You won’t find a new country,” reads the book’s opening epigraph from C.P. Cavafy. The dads are dying, taking the world with them. Claude’s father drops dead in his seersucker suit, which only further enrobes Claude in melancholy. “The hero is one already well acquainted with grief,” Delery notes. Her own father lives on and on for years, long enough to marry her best friend—once a peer, now her stepmother.

Delery’s own children only pity her. Rather than deify her, her daughters see their mother as a child. Annoyed with her for suffering Jack’s transgressions, they find out about their father’s affair before she does—and force him to confess. Delery is like Louise in Saints, if Louise grew into the elder guardian of her own naïveté. “Idiotic innocence” is how Delery describes her state. For isn’t the gauzy glow of nostalgia a form of enforced naïveté—the deliberate selection of the good, the convenient omission of the bad?

Ritz of the Bayou is a different kind of portrait of home. Lemann’s work of gonzo journalism is ostensibly about the corruption trial of Edwin Edwards, governor of Louisiana, but she can barely bring herself to discuss the specifics of the charges, so busy is she describing the elegance of the defense attorneys and the cracked and attractive nobility of the governor himself. A shaggy, sweaty riff on the proverb that the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know, Ritz asks who would trust, or lust after, a governor who wasn’t corrupt? Our leaders should be brutally human, she suggests, lousy with imperfection and contradiction.

Nancy Lemann is a writer of uncommon commitment to capturing the genie-soul of New Orleans. Her repetitions are the persistent attempts to meet and master its memory and essence.

“A flawed thing may be more full of life than a perfect thing,” Lemann writes in Ritz; the line could serve as a summary of her broader artistic project and her attraction to the beautiful and broken. Lemann shows a weakness for white-haired men, and her writing is full of a tenderness toward the patrician Southerner, the august but fragile figure of faded glory. In Oyster Diaries, there’s the father, who marries Delery’s best friend; in Saints, there’s Mr. Collier, Claude’s father, who listens to opera while he gardens in seersucker shorts. In Ritz, there’s the defense attorney Camille Gravel, “a drawling white-haired gent of seventy” who was “perhaps the hero of the courtroom”—not to mention Governor Edwards himself, the white-haired and scandal-clad leader of Louisiana who once said the only thing that could take him down was being “caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy.” Lemann, starry-eyed with esteem for the crooked man, seems to agree.

Lemann doesn’t shy from grand pronouncements about the South and its people. From Saints: “The way your slip was showing,” Claude says to Louise, “it reminded me of the South.” “He had the levity of the Southerner, a brave thing, being actually desperation masked by levity.” “Southerners need carbonation.” “I was experiencing life in the slow lane—the South.” “Southerners do not like philosophical conversations.” Lemann even posits his and hers Southern traits: “his Southern-boy crackpot streak,” “his Southern inscrutability, his Southern good-old-boy aspects”; her “Southern butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-her-mouth demeanor.”

It was Walker Percy, Lemann’s beloved mentor, who wrote in his novel The Moviegoer about “the genie-soul of the place which every place has or else is not a place.” He observed: “One step out into the brilliant March day and there it is as big as life, the genie-soul of the place which, wherever you go, you must meet and master first thing or be met and mastered.” Nancy Lemann is a writer of uncommon commitment to capturing the genie-soul of New Orleans. Her repetitions are the persistent attempts to meet and master its memory and essence, and these three books reveal just how faithfully and lovingly Lemann has strived to capture its spirit.

President Donald Trump is building an illegal ballroom on the ruins of the White House’s East Wing, which he destroyed last fall. Congress forbade the construction of any building on federal property in Washington, D.C., “without express authority of Congress.” Congress did not authorize the ballroom’s construction, nor did it appropriate funds to build it. (Hundreds of millions of dollars in private “donations,” so to speak, have funded it instead.)

What can be done to stop him? Nothing, says the Supreme Court. Five of the six conservative justices ruled on Monday evening that a historic-preservationist group did not have standing to challenge the project in court, which means it is likely to proceed unhindered for the rest of Trump’s second term.

“Today, we do not pass upon the legality of the government’s East Wing project,” the majority wrote in an unsigned per curiam order. “We conclude only that, based on the submissions before us, the government is likely to prevail in showing that the Trust lacks Article III standing to challenge the project in federal court and that the remaining stay factors favor relief.”

The court’s flawed decision sheds new light on a pernicious issue: the conservative justices’ narrowing of Article III standing to weaken Congress and supercharge both the executive branch, at least when Republicans control it, and the Supreme Court itself.

Standing is, in general terms, the right to bring a lawsuit at all. Article III of the Constitution lays out the powers and limits of judicial power. One of those limits is that the federal judiciary can only hear “cases and controversies.” Among other things, this means that federal courts cannot render advisory opinions on acts of Congress or executive-branch decisions. There must be some kind of legitimate and articulable interests at stake.

In the ballroom case, the National Trust for Historic Preservation in the United States sued the president, via the National Park Service, to stop construction of the ballroom. A federal judge temporarily granted that request earlier this year, enjoining further work on the above-ground ballroom while allowing construction for the below-ground security complex to go forward. The Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to lift the lower court’s injunction, which it duly did.

The majority’s mistakes in this case start with their first sentence: “In October 2025, the federal government started a project to replace the East Wing of the White House.” In reality, the president is only one part of the federal government, albeit an important one. The majority’s phrasing gives a benign, normalized gloss to the president’s illegal decision to tear down the East Wing of the White House. Congress authorized no such thing by law and, through other statutes, expressly forbade it.

Another prong in the court’s analysis at this stage is whether a party will suffer “irreparable harm” and how the “balance of the equities” should fall when reviewing a lower court’s injunction. The executive branch exists to “take care” that federal law is executed. Logically speaking, the president cannot suffer “irreparable harm” when a court stops him from doing something illegal. But five of the six conservative justices disagreed, instead crediting a vague national-security justification for the project without questioning the validity of that claim.

The government has also presented declarations from the Director of National Intelligence, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Director of the United States Secret Service, and the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Homeland Security, and the Secretary of the Army, among others, attesting to national security and other harms that would likely arise from enjoining a “single, coherent” project that cannot be readily cleaved into distinct below- and above-ground pieces.

In an earlier age, these declarations may have deserved at least some deference. But this is the era of the unitary executive. The same justices who nodded along to this passage also insist to Americans that the president can and must wield absolute, untrammeled control over the executive branch, even among the Senate-confirmed officials who help lead it. In that sense, citing them is akin to using my cats and my two-and-a-half-year-old son as sources for one of my columns.

But the real problem is with the majority’s standing analysis, which essentially makes it impossible to challenge the project in court. The National Trust argued that it could bring the lawsuit because at least one of its D.C.-residing board members, Alison Hoagland, would suffer an “aesthetic injury” if the project went forward. Courts, including the Supreme Court itself, have often recognized similar injuries for standing purposes—for example, in cases involving the loss of endangered wildlife. (More on that later.) The illegal destruction of a world-renowned symbol of American republicanism would certainly seem to qualify under that threshold.

The conservative majority—except for Chief Justice John Roberts—disagreed. It reduced the Trust’s alleged “aesthetic injury” to a personal grievance against the Trump administration. “To the contrary, we have repeatedly held that mere offense, disagreement, or distaste does not qualify as a concrete and particularized injury under Article III,” the majority wrote in an unsigned opinion, quoting from recent precedent. “As we have put it, ‘this Court has long made clear that distress at or disagreement with the activities of others is not a basis under Article III for a plaintiff to bring a federal lawsuit.’”

I am almost surprised that whoever wrote this opinion did not call Hoagland and the Trust a woke liberal snowflake. It fell to Roberts to explain, without apparent success, how the law actually works to his colleagues in the majority. “A historic preservationist such as Hoagland can be aesthetically injured in a concrete, particularized way by the transformation of a historic building that she frequently enjoys,” he wrote a dissenting opinion joined by the court’s three liberals, “just as an environmentalist can sustain a concrete, particularized aesthetic injury from the extinction of a particular animal or the transformation of a particular forest or river that he regularly enjoys.”

Environmental law keeps coming up in this discussion because of a major precedent that significantly narrowed Article III standing. The pivotal case was 1992’s Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife. Under the Endangered Species Act, federal agencies must consult with the secretary of the interior when the agency does or funds something that threatens an endangered species or its habitat.

The Interior Department initially held in the 1970s that this consultation process applied to actions undertaken by a federal agency anywhere in the world. In the early 1990s, the Bush and Clinton administrations changed the rules so that the consultation requirement would only kick in if a federal agency did something within the United States or in international waters. Defenders of Wildlife, an environmental group, sued the department in federal court to challenge the rule change.

Defenders identified two members who would have the right to challenge the department’s new rule. One of them told the courts that she had traveled to Egypt in 1986 to view the “traditional habitat of the endangered Nile crocodile,” which she said was threatened by U.S. support for that country’s Aswan High Dam project. The other litigant said something similar about Asian elephants that she had previously encountered in Sri Lanka in 1981, which would be imperiled by USAID funding for a project there.

Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for a 7-2 court, ruled that the plaintiffs had not shown that they had Article III standing to challenge the department’s then-new rule. A plaintiff, he wrote, must demonstrate three things. One is that they have what Scalia called an “injury in fact,” meaning that they face the “invasion of a legally protected interest.” Second, the plaintiff must show that the injury is “concrete and particularized,” meaning that it is not merely abstract or imaginary. Finally, a litigant must show that the injury they face is “actual or imminent,” by which they mean it is not merely hypothetical or possible.

“Of course, the desire to use or observe an animal species, even for purely esthetic purposes, is undeniably a cognizable interest for purpose of standing,” Scalia acknowledged. But he concluded that the plaintiffs’ injury was too remote to justify their lawsuit here. Their past visits to these countries was insufficient, he explained, and their future plans to return were too hazy and uncertain to justify a court’s intervention. An intent to return someday to see endangered animals, Scalia concluded, was not concrete enough to stop the executive branch’s rule change.

Scalia went further to suggest that citizen-suit provisions, like the one found in the Endangered Species Act, might be unconstitutional if applied too broadly. He argued that it was not the courts’ role to “vindicat[e] the public interest,” as he put it, without a strict approach to Article III standing. If Congress could authorize private citizens to sue “regardless of whether they suffered any concrete injury,” he reasoned, it would “transfer from the president to the courts the chief executive’s most important constitutional duty, to ‘take care that the laws be faithfully executed.’”

Much of this is highly technical, but the impact of the decision was straightforward. Lujan represented a sea change in how Article III standing worked when challenging the executive branch’s actions in court—and, more importantly, how Congress could define it. One legal scholar noted that it was the first time in modern legal history that the court had limited Congress’s power to “bestow standing on a potential plaintiff” and had seriously injured the legislative branch’s ability to make “judicially enforceable policy decisions.” Another observed that Scalia’s triumphal invocation of history and precedent was surprisingly thin: The oldest Supreme Court case that the justice had cited for his holding, he pointedly noted, was from 1972.

Scalia himself had championed such a reversal long before taking the bench. In a 1983 law-review article, he argued that policing the bounds of standing was important for separation-of-powers reasons. A narrow version, he argued, “roughly restricts courts to their traditional undemocratic role of protecting individuals and minorities against impositions of the majority” and “excludes them from the even more undemocratic role of prescribing how the other two branches should function in order to serve the interest of the majority itself.”

By claiming judicial humility, Scalia effectively argued for expanding the executive branch’s powers and curbing those of Congress. But he also made clear that policy outcomes, not only constitutional theory, were at the forefront of his mind. “Strict enforcement of the environmental laws” by public-interest litigants, Scalia sneered, “met with approval in the classrooms of Cambridge and New Haven, but not in the factories of Detroit and the mines of West Virginia.” He also opined, somewhat nonsensically, that allowing this form of standing was bad for democratic governance.

“It may well be, of course, that the judges know what is good for the people better than the people themselves; or that democracy simply does not permit the genuine desires of the people to be given effect; but those are not the premises under which our system operates,” he wrote with apparent sarcasm. Here he seems to forget that Congress is the primary vehicle through which our democratic system of government is meant to operate, and that upholding its policy decisions through laws is the most elementary way to carry out the people’s will.

Scalia’s faux populism even led him to champion the notion that some laws might go unenforced or disregarded if no one had standing to challenge their non-enforcement by the executive branch. “The ability to lose or misdirect laws can be said to be one of the prime engines of social change, and the prohibition against such carelessness is (believe it or not) profoundly conservative,” he wrote. “Sunday blue laws, for example, were widely unenforced long before they were widely repealed—and had the first not been possible the second might never have occurred.”

That might be understandable for forgotten municipal ordinances, but it does not really make sense for acts of Congress. The lives and fortunes of hundreds of millions of Americans are shaped by the laws that Congress enacts. It is not a stretch to say that the global economy is more or less built on them. Our entire system of government is built on the notion that Congress can pass laws, and that those laws matter. The notion that a president charged with enforcing the laws can defy them so freely turns our constitutional order upside-down.

After Scalia transmuted this position into constitutional law in Lujan, he received widespread criticism from various legal scholars. One of his defenders was a future colleague: John Roberts, then in private practice, who wrote a 1993 law-review article defending Lujan in the Duke Law Review. The blandly titled article, “Article III Limits on Statutory Standing,” is a revealing pre-judicial window into Roberts’ basic views on the separation of powers.

The future chief justice echoed Scalia’s theories about judicial restraint, albeit without Scalia’s caustic insinuations. “The legitimacy of an unelected, life-tenured judiciary in our democratic republic is bolstered by the constitutional limitation of that judiciary’s power in Article III to actual ‘cases’ and ‘controversies,’” he wrote. This limitation, he argued, gave the courts the legitimacy it needed to countermand the elected branches of government.

Like Scalia and other conservatives, he embraced a sharp divide between the branches. Twentieth-century governance was defined by Congress delegating certain regulatory powers to independent agencies kept at arm’s length from the president. This productive mixture of two branches’ powers has no place in Roberts’ constitutional worldview. “Separation of powers is a zero-sum game,” he wrote. “If one branch unconstitutionally aggrandizes itself, it is at the expense of one of the other branches.”

That much is true in this case. By allowing the ballroom’s construction to go forward, the Supreme Court has allowed the president to break a constitutionally valid law without consequence. (What else is new?) The court has also further weakened congressional primacy by subordinating Congress’s power of the purse and explicit authority over federal property to the whims of a self-aggrandizing president who has given up actual governance in favor of treating the nation’s capital as a personal sandbox.

As a stop-gap measure, Congress should consider giving a statutory grant of authority to challenge future illegal presidential building projects to the mayor of the District of Columbia. The imposition upon city streets and public utilities, combined with Congress’s plenary authority over the District and federal property in general, should overcome even this court’s strict interpretation of Article III standing. Lawmakers may also want to consider empowering committees, ranking members, or even a specially designated legislative-branch official to challenge patently illegal acts by presidents in the future.

Ironically, as Roberts suggested in his dissent, he also had the better read of Lujan. Scalia’s opinion did not foreclose all forms of aesthetic injury. As quoted earlier, Scalia acknowledged that the mere “desire to use or observe an animal species, even for purely esthetic purposes, is undeniably a cognizable interest for purpose of standing.” He simply ruled that the plaintiffs in that case hadn’t met it because their ability to actually view the animals in question was too abstract and unsupported.

The five conservative justices in the majority appear to have gone much further than that, adding a new hurdle for standing in environmental cases where aesthetic injury is the basis for standing. Contrary to the expressed wishes of Scalia and Roberts, narrowing Article III standing also doesn’t appear to have reduced the court’s role in public policymaking. Take, for example, the Supreme Court’s decision last month to allow the U.S. Postal Service and other federal agencies to implement Trump’s executive order to undermine state mail-voting systems.

Congress did not grant the Department of Homeland Security any power to create “state citizenship lists,” nor to coerce states to use those lists by threatening prosecution from the Department of Justice, nor to refuse to deliver states’ mail ballots if they do not meet the Postal Service’s standards for whether a ballot is valid or not, which they have no legal authority to do. And yet those agencies can do precisely that, over the loud objections of multiple states with the congressional authority to run elections, precisely because the conservative justices (all six that time) were so narrow and exacting on Article III standing.

The court’s ruling did not mean that implementation of the order “will necessarily be lawful,” the majority reassured Americans in yet another unsigned opinion. “On that score, time will tell.” But the conservative justices felt obligated to let the Trump administration go forward because the states had failed the Article III standing test. As I noted, the court’s framing of the issues at hand gave little comfort that they will ultimately stop Trump’s midterm gambit, though some of the recently reported details of what USPS has planned might go too far for some of them.

The court’s strict approach to Article III standing when challenging Republican presidents also does not apply to Democratic presidents with equal force. In Biden v. Nebraska, the conservative majority allowed a coalition of GOP-led states to challenge—and ultimately defeat—Joe Biden’s student-loan debt relief plan, which was authorized by a 2003 act of Congress. Though the states were not injured in any rational way by the debt-forgiveness order, they claimed an independent student-loan debt servicer created by Missouri would be affected, and therefore Article III’s standing threshold has been met.

Except the servicer in question was fully legally and financially independent from Nebraska, and it had chosen not to challenge the relief plan. “MOHELA is fully capable of representing its own interests, and always has done so before,” Justice Elena Kagan noted in her dissenting opinion. “The injury to MOHELA thus does not entitle Missouri—under our normal standing rules—to go to court.” The court’s conservative justices, who could not disguise their antipathy for the Biden policy at oral argument, ignored those constraints and let the lawsuit continue so it could rule against the administration. So much for judicial restraint.

On Monday the Supreme Court told Donald Trump he can proceed full steam ahead to construct his monstrous ballroom. That’s not because the project is lawful: the per curiam 5-4 order on the shadow docket expressly offered no opinion on the merits. Indeed, every court to consider the question—plus four dissenting justices on the high court—have concluded that the project is likely unlawful. It’s also a vile and fairly hideous affront to the most visible symbol of our democracy.

Rather, the court held that the stay on construction should be lifted because the plaintiffs lacked standing and the order was irreparably harming the administration. Both aspects of the decision were flawed.

To sue in federal court you need standing, and the bedrock of standing is injury—something “concrete and particularized” that is “actual or imminent.” The typical injury is financial or physical, but the court has long recognized the possibility of aesthetic injury, particularly in environmental cases. So, for example, in Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, the court held that the “desire to observe an animal species, even for purely esthetic purposes,” is “undeniably a cognizable interest for purpose of standing.”

There’s an ethereal quality to aesthetic injury, but that doesn’t make it vaporous. We can appreciate a landscape, or work of art, or historical battlefield, or public building with sustained passion and intensity, and its loss takes something valuable from us, whether it costs us money or not. That was the basis for standing in the ballroom lawsuit, and it’s difficult to see how it could be more concrete.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation brought the lawsuit. To sue as an organization, it had to put forward one member with standing in her own right. And in this case that was Alison Hoagland. Hoagland is not, as Trump sneered, some lady who happens to walk by. She is a professor of history and historic preservation, an authority on American architecture, and a Washington resident who goes to look at the White House because looking at it is, for her, the whole point.

The five-justice per curiam, or unsigned, opinion, did not purport to overrule the cases that say so. Rather, it pooh-poohed Hoagland’s felt harm, recasting her documented, decades-deep professional interest as “mere offense,” no different, in the majority’s telling, from “virtually every citizen” who wants “to challenge virtually every government action that they do not like.”

The court carved off the environmental precedents on the ground that those plaintiffs did “more than” look: they fished, they swam, they hiked. In his dissent for four justices, Chief Justice John Roberts fairly demolished that argument, pointing out that the principal way anyone enjoys a historic building is precisely by looking at it, and that the court had misconceived Hoagland’s injury.

What the majority actually did by way of determining that the administration was likely to prevail on the merits was narrow aesthetic standing to the vanishing point. As of now, “I want to look at a crocodile” passes muster while “I want to look at the White House” does not. And since it’s hard to think of any prospective challenger to the ballroom who would not be relying on aesthetic injury, there is no clear path around the Court’s tacit reframing of the doctrine.

To grant the stay, the Supreme Court also needed to find that the administration would be irreparably injured if the stay weren’t granted.

The court’s first recognition of irreparable harm was the mere fact that the executive will was frustrated. That is blatant bootstrapping that just restates the court’s legal judgment, but it’s a move that has become routine for the conservative supermajority.

The court also credited an argument from the administration that the ballroom’s “height and mass” are “crucial” to shield the underground installation from “kinetic impacts,” lest engineers “dig impractically deep.”

But this second theory was a mid-litigation invention. Roberts’s dissent guts it in a single devastating footnote. It points out that the government had earlier told the district court the opposite—that its below-ground security work was driven by concerns having nothing to do with the ballroom above it. And the injunction never touched that work: It barred only the ballroom, leaving the government free to build the underground facility and whatever was needed to protect it.

In fact, the actual irreparable harm is plainly on the plaintiffs’ side of the ledger. With the court’s decision, the crews will return to 20-hour days, with the goal of building the project up to a point where it may be impossible to undo.

With the majority ducking the merits, Roberts’s dissent went to the heart of the case. Not surprisingly, Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson joined without a word of their own, because the chief’s voice packed the most powerful punch.

Roberts’s opinion begins with the straight declaration that the ballroom is likely unlawful, in effect a raw power grab. Congress has expressly forbidden any building on federal park grounds in the District of Columbia without its express authorization, and it has given none. The two statutes the government waves around come nowhere near authorizing the president to raze the East Wing and put up a private ballroom with hundreds of millions in outside money.

He concludes with the true stakes of the disputes, and the enormous social injury of the court’s casual dismissal on standing grounds. “The White House,” he writes, “is not just any building, and…Hoagland is not just any person.” And he saves the perfect quote from Winston Churchill for his final paragraph: “We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.”

That’s the real tragedy of the case, the point that eclipses standing doctrine and irreparable harm. Every court to consider the ballroom’s legality has found it likely unlawful. Four justices now say the same, and not one justice has written a word defending it. The five in the majority say only that they “do not pass upon” it, but that’s cold comfort when their ruling means that the unlawful project now resumes at deliberate breakneck speed.

It’s not simply the illegality. It’s vastly unpopular with the American people, the actual owners of the “people’s house.” It would destroy the neoclassical serenity of the most important public building in America. And it’s hideous.

The White House’s serene neoclassical design is the shape of democracy; Trump would convert it to a bloated monument to his own megalomania. Only a consummate and abject failure of all of government—a corrupt president, a pliable and quiescent Congress, and a cynical Supreme Court refusing to confront the real stakes of the case—could even make it possible. But that’s precisely what is now staring us in the face.

Meat is back.

Not that it ever really went anywhere—but for a few years around the turn of the decade, the centrality of meat in the American diet came under real scrutiny. A slew of highly publicized academic papers detailed the massive environmental toll of animal agriculture, including its outsize contribution to climate change. Plant-based burgers popped up on menus around the country, and oat milk became a coffee-shop staple. Greta Thunberg extolled the virtues of veganism, while conservatives wrung their hands about the Green New Deal taking away their hamburgers. American meat consumption, which had been growing for decades, dipped ever so slightly.

What a difference a few years, and a change in administration, can make. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services and a proudly ravenous meat eater, has turned the principles of the growing Make America Healthy Again movement into government policy: The Trump administration’s new Dietary Guidelines for Americans, promoted to the public as “Eat Real Food,” enshrine a national obsession with consuming more protein and fewer processed foods. Meat (ideally red, usually beef) and milk (ideally whole fat, potentially raw) are now being lauded as saviors of the American diet.

It’s an expensive diet. Beef prices are skyrocketing as cattle herds have shrunk to their lowest level in 75 years, owing to drought, increased costs to ranchers, industry consolidation, and international competition. President Trump responded last week with a proclamation pausing tariffs on 300,000 metric tons of beef that will be sold to the U.S. at a 25 percent discount. Agricultural economists don’t expect the move to make a meaningful difference in the cost of a hamburger. Not that it matters. Americans are spending record amounts on meat and are projected to eat more meat than ever this year. Meanwhile, sales of plant-based meats and even plant-based milks are declining.

This is an unfortunate vibe shift. The case against meat has not weakened. It is still unhealthy to eat in excess, environmentally damaging to produce, and extremely profitable for the industrial farms and multinational conglomerates that make up Big Agriculture. Therein lies the contradiction at the heart of MAHA’s meat fixation: Eating more of it will only exacerbate the very problems that the movement purportedly wants to solve.

Meat is by far the most environmentally damaging part of the American diet. Most animals are raised on industrial farms, not on open pasture—and even still, livestock grazing accounts for about 85 percent of all American land. Livestock make up about half of all agricultural greenhouse gas emissions, or 5 percent of all national emissions, most of that coming from methane belched by cows and manure expelled by factory farms.

Now consider the damage caused by growing feed for livestock. Cropland for feed—mostly hay, corn, and soy—accounts for another 8 percent of all land, and more water is used to grow feed than for any other agricultural purpose. For instance, about a quarter of all water withdrawn from the Colorado River, which is facing historic lows, goes to alfalfa for cattle feed. Furthermore, growing vast amounts of feed crops requires the widespread use of artificial pesticides and fertilizers that often contaminate soil and drinking water.

Every year, close to 10 billion animals are slaughtered in the United States, most of them chickens. Ninety-nine percent of those chickens come from factory farms, as do close to 99 percent of pigs, and north of 75 percent of beef cattle are fattened for slaughter on industrial feedlots. This massive volume of production enables Americans to eat more meat per capita annually—about 225 pounds each, not counting seafood—than almost any other country on earth.

Given all of this, it’s odd to see meat arise as the dominant food choice of those ostensibly committed to improving our food system. The arguments in favor of meat tend to break down along three often overlapping appeals: purity, processing, and protein.

Proponents of meat, given pride of place in Health and Human Service’s new dietary guidelines and discussions of improving American agriculture, tend to trot out the idea that meat is as real as “real food” gets, associating it with small-scale ranching and “regenerative” grazing on bucolic farmscapes unsullied by agricultural industrialization. This is an old idea that has taken firm hold in food circles, from Michael Pollan through the Food Babe. Even food journalists get drawn into this frame, with The New York Times’ Kim Severson, writing about meat’s resurgence, casting it as a happy meeting between liberal farm-to-fork enthusiasts and the right-wing “‘don’t tread on me’ crowd, who prize family tradition and less-processed food—much of which they might grow or hunt themselves.”

But preindustrial meat is not what most Americans eat. It represents maybe 1 percent of the meat consumed in the country. And even if we were to somehow reorganize our food system to increase this sort of farming, there are hard limits to how much we could produce. A study that modeled land use requirements to meet our current demand for beef with entirely free-range cattle found that we would have the capacity to produce only 45 percent of our current supply. Meeting current demand for chicken with pasture-pecking birds would require 60 percent more land. In short, without factory farms there would be far less meat and it would be far more expensive.

If the MAHA movement were remotely coherent, it would push for this less-but-better meat vision. But simply calling for more meat inherently means calling for more factory farms. And that, in turn, runs directly counter to MAHA-aligned policies like taking on Big Ag and reducing agro-industrial pollution. Eating more meat means producing more meat, which in turn means more mass-produced cheap feed, factory farming, and industrialized slaughterhouses.

This is also the big blind spot for those who see meat as an alternative to so-called “ultra-processed food,” or UPF. Kennedy Jr. and many in MAHA-adjacent meatfluencer circles tout meat as an unprocessed alternative to the industrial slop they see as polluting American diets. The government’s new guidelines explicitly urge Americans away from processed food and toward meat. Lest this be dismissed as bro-science, this is also how Nova, the Brazilian food schema from which we get the idea of UPFs, classifies meat. Nova, which is shaping food policy from Brazil to Belgium to California, clusters foods into groups based on their level of processing, and deems any food that is produced using industrial processes or industrially produced additives as “ultra-processed.” The term creates an easy bogeyman and facile shorthands, such as RFK Jr.’s claim that products with ingredients “that I can’t pronounce” are dangerous (a lukewarm reheating of Pollan’s equally anti-intellectual suggestion, “If you can’t say it, don’t eat it”).

Putting aside the debate over the actual validity of the term and its applicability to adjudicating the healthfulness of food, Nova and other definitions of “ultra-processing” start at the farm gate, when harvested food begins its journey from field to fork. Thus, soy beans processed and mixed with other ingredients like methylcellulose to make an Impossible Burger, or even some types of tofu, are branded as ultra-processed, as if they were nutritionally equivalent to Doritos. Meat, meanwhile, escapes scrutiny because schemas like Nova have nothing to say about the process of commodity production itself. A pig or chicken genetically modified to grow extremely fast and fed a steady diet of soybean meal and industrially produced feed additives like phytase will, when slaughtered, become meat that is considered “unprocessed.” So the production process at factory farms, where most U.S. meat comes from, is made to disappear with a definitional sleight of hand—and meat, arguably the most industrial of America’s major foods, emerges as somehow anti-industrial. This, in turn, conceals not just meat’s provenance but the fact that it is both far more environmentally harmful and likely less healthy than an “ultra-processed” plant-based alternative.

It’s all the more troubling, then, to see meat being touted as a health food. HHS’s guidelines have almost doubled the recommended daily intake of protein over its predecessors, and nutritional advice online is increasingly pivoting to describing meat as a nutritionally dense superfood. And yet, protein deficiency is not a generalized health risk in the U.S. The USDA’s Healthy Eating Index shows that Americans are not eating enough fruit, vegetables, and whole grains. Meanwhile, the average American male already eats as much protein as the new guidelines suggest (or about twice as much as the old guidelines did).

Not only is there no health rationale for urging Americans to eat more meat, but there is extensive evidence suggesting that they should eat less of it. This was the conclusion of the original committee of nutrition and public health experts gathered by the Biden administration to advise the government on revising the dietary guidelines. But the Trump administration ignored this advice and sidelined the committee, replacing it with an ad hoc one created by Kennedy that included experts with direct ties to the meat industry (and one who co-authored a paper downplaying the climate impact of meat). No wonder the new guidelines ignore the vast evidence of meat’s health risks. Walter Willett, a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, called them “simply wrong and dangerous to the health of Americans,” and they’re now being challenged by a lawsuit filed by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.

But if MAHA adherents’ arguments in favor of meat crumble under cross-examination, why have they proven so popular? The answer is politics—and more specifically, popularism. If there is one truly bipartisan activity in the United States, it’s eating meat. Doubling down on an existing practice but recasting it as healthy and socially responsible is a way to promise change without changing anything. It is also a way of subsuming the real hunger among the public for healthier eating by treating the status quo as desirable. When Michelle Obama urged Americans to eat more salad, conservatives raged against her and whined about government overreach because—if the Healthy Eating Index is to be believed—they probably weren’t eating much salad. When RFK Jr. tells them to eat meat, they cheer because they already are. This is the obvious political advantage of cheerleading for orthodoxy. It is extremely difficult and fraught to try to change Americans’ diets, and especially to reduce their meat consumption. It requires the building of permission structures, to use a term Barack Obama popularized: psychological scaffolds that allow people to change deeply ingrained beliefs and behaviors. MAHA’s push for meat doesn’t need permission structures; it just gives people permission to carry on.

And so we get fast food, one of the root causes of our dietary woes, being transformed by the right into a paragon of health—with a side of owning the libs. “MAHA meal,” conservative influencer Benny Johnson posted on X last week, along with a video of his family eating at Steak ’n Shake. “Seed oil free. Grass fed, grass finished beef. Beef tallow fries. Real milk milkshake.” As The Wall Street Journal noted this week, the restaurant chain has gone “full MAGA” by switching to grass-fed beef, cooking fries in beef tallow, and launching a “Protein Steakburger”—all spearheaded by its “chief MAHA officer,” who of course is a former HHS staffer under Trump.

But the bill will come due for all of us, in one way or another. If Kennedy and the MAHA movement are successful in convincing Americans to eat even more meat, it will not only cause more heart disease and diabetes, but necessarily lead to more factory farms, more cancer-causing pesticides, and more rivers polluted by runoff. That is the reality. The MAHA fantasy is just a road to the very future that MAHA claims to oppose, in which we’re all in poorer health and Big Ag is bigger than ever.

This story was originally published by EdSource. Sign up for its daily newsletter.

California’s mandate requiring later start times for middle and high schools is already yielding results, with students sleeping more, reporting better mental health and scoring higher math and English scores, according to a new study. 

The new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research examines the effects of Senate Bill 328, California’s statewide mandate for later school start times. The law, which went into effect in 2022, requires most middle schools to start no earlier than 8 a.m. and high schools no earlier than 8:30 a.m. 

The study found that the new law increased the share of students sleeping at least eight hours per night by 13%, meeting the minimum recommended for adolescents by health experts. The largest jump was among boys. 

The study shows that “rest and sleep are incredibly important in the function of schools,” said Osea Giuntella, an author of the report. Although the short-term increase in sleep is moderate, it has led to significant improvements in mental health and academic outcomes, he said.

Giuntella, a University of Pittsburgh researcher who studies sleep and economics, said the study’s first-year results are consistent with previous research linking better sleep to improved student well-being and academic performance. The study used changes in teachers’ commute arrival times from the American Community Survey as a proxy for later school start times, comparing sleep and mental health data before and after SB 328 took effect in the 2022-23 school year and tracking academic gains from 2022 through 2025.

Gains in sleep, mental health, English and math 

Students reported experiencing better mental health since schools shifted to later start times, with boys reporting the largest reductions in sadness, hopelessness and suicidal ideation, and Hispanic students reporting the biggest drop in difficulties concentrating. 

Terra Ziporyn, executive director at nonprofit Start Schools Later and longtime advocate of later school start times, said SB 328 was a key part of California’s response to what schools have described as a student mental health crisis. 

Students in class at San Lorenzo High School. Credit: Florence Middleton for CalMatters

“The first step in addressing student mental health problems is to not create them in the first place,” Ziporyn said. “You can get a lot of counselors, but systematically depriving an entire adolescent population of adequate sleep is a surefire way to hurt their mental health.”

The study also found significant improvements in academic achievement, with eighth grade students making measurable gains in math and English, particularly among Hispanic and economically disadvantaged students.

Giuntella, the study’s author, said the improvement in scores was likely “largely driven by the change in sleep” based on comparable studies where increased sleep led to higher GPAs. That’s also why Hispanic students, who are already less likely to get adequate sleep than white students due to lower family income and family and work responsibilities, improved their math and English scores the most, Giuntella said.

Parents struggle with new schedules

The state mandate is the only one in the nation.

“California set a huge precedent for the whole nation by saying, ‘We cannot leave what is essentially a public health decision in the hands of local districts,’ ” Ziproyn said. “It’s not just a negotiable school budget item that you trade off against anything else.”

But some parents have said later start times complicate work commutes, push back sports and extracurricular activities and lead to some students simply pushing back the time they go to bed. 

The study found that sports and extracurricular activities did start later after the change to later start times, but the changes were “marginal and not statistically significant,” Giuntella said. 

“And it’s true that, yes, students may even go to bed a little later than they were, but they are definitely sleeping in more in the morning,” she said. 

Guintella described later start times as just “one institutional factor” that may help address a complex sleep-deprivation problem, pointing to issues like the rise in nighttime screen use. 

‘Too hard and too expensive’ for some districts

Some school districts found the transition to later school start times “too hard and too expensive,” Ziporyn said. Ziporyn said district administrators could have received more guidance from the state Department of Education to explain the benefits of later start times, and involve families in finding solutions to logistical problems.

“[Schools] have to fully understand why this is being done and communicate it with confidence to the community that they’re doing the right thing for kids,” Ziporyn said. 

San Francisco Unified, for example, worked with operations experts at the Yale School of Management, Georgia Tech University and Northwestern University to redesign their bus routes in response to the change. With more than 120 schools and 18 different start times, the district generated about 1,000 new feasible bus schedules, which ended up saving the district about $5 million and with a majority of families and staff members satisfied with the transition to later start times, according to a report by Yale Insights.

But most schools in California did not have access to dedicated consultants to ease the transition, Ziporyn said. 

“California could have improved making these resources more readily available to the districts,” Ziporyn said. “Built into the law was that there was supposed to be help from the state Department of Education about getting this done, and building that community buy-in is part of it.” 

Giuntella said the state can improve its implementation of SB 328 by collecting statewide data on later school start times to “assess the impact of the reform.” In the meantime, schools can take from the study that later start times are “effective and powerful tools” for student outcomes.

“This happens often with some shock to individual and families’ habits, and so it also requires the ability to navigate this transition in a way that doesn’t backfire,” Giuntella said.

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

The business of military contracting is booming in Southern California. 

The total value of defense contracts won by companies in Los Angeles County more than doubled in the last 10 years after adjusting for inflation, according to an analysis by CalMatters and The Markup. In the same period, the defense budget rose by about 19% in adjusted dollars.

The $15 billion in contracts won in L.A. County last year went largely to old-school defense contractors with headquarters elsewhere, like Boeing. But startups claimed a growing share of the pie, selling defense systems like low-cost missiles, drones, surveillance satellites, artificial intelligence tools and much more. In 2025, 10 startups in the LA area were crowned “unicorns,” becoming companies valued by investments at more than $1 billion, according to the Los Angeles Business Journal. Most of those 10 companies were aerospace or defense businesses. 

In 2015, 14 of the top 100 defense contracts won in California went to businesses focused on drones or space, according to the CalMatters and Markup analysis. By 2025, that share was up to 21. The shift is similar if measured by dollars, from 13%to 18%. 

Details like whether you count obligations for where businesses are based or where the projects are launched all affect those numbers. By some counts the increases in contract dollars could be larger. 

The contracts have been kindled by a surge of venture capital. Private investment in aerospace and defense since 2008 has fueled massive gains, according to a report from The Aerospace Corporation, a federally-funded nonprofit. 

But all the new money is now causing awkward political tensions. 

The war in Iran, which has depleted American munitions, is poised to drive demand even higher. The Trump administration’s latest budget proposal includes a record-setting $1.5 trillion for the military. Meanwhile, the Defense Department has signed off on the earliest contracts for the “Golden Dome,” a proposal to build a missile-defense system above the United States that could eventually cost hundreds of billions of dollars. 

Most of the Golden Dome winners are based in or have ties to the Southern California area. 

“You saw this huge rise in capital and now you’re seeing just much, much bigger government budgets for space,” said Sam Wilson, a researcher at the Aerospace Corporation. 

The collision of venture capital and military spending has alarmed some advocates, who see a frightening trend toward privatization and the risk of a space arms race. Even Congressional Democrats are pushing back against the spending.

That’s noteworthy because it has tended “to be a bipartisan, equal effort to increase the budget” of the military, said Lindsay Koshgarian, director of the National Priorities Project, which tracks defense spending. “I think we are maybe seeing the limits of that now.”

Despite the pushback, some of the congressional districts that saw the largest defense contract increases in recent years are beneficiaries of signature Trump-era projects. Many are in solidly blue Los Angeles County, and among the most Democrat-leaning districts in the country. 

California’s 36th Congressional District includes El Segundo, a high-tech defense hub outside Los Angeles. In the district’s 2024 House race, incumbent Democrat Ted Lieu took nearly 70% of the vote over a Republican challenger. The increase in defense contracts between 2015 and 2025 in that district alone was more than $3.3 billion.

Another district, California’s 43rd, is represented by Maxine Waters, who in 2021 signed on to the proposed No Militarization of Space Act, which described the Space Force as an unnecessary waste of resources and sought to abolish it.

Trump recently proposed to double the budget of the Space Force, another potential boon to the area. Meanwhile, Waters’ district has seen its share of obligated defense department spending grow over the past decade by more than $1.6 billion, or more than 500%, adjusted for inflation. Waters’ office didn’t respond to a request for comment.

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Seamus Daniels, who studies the defense budget at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the proposed $1.5 trillion dollar defense budget for fiscal year 2027 “would surpass the peak of defense spending during World War II.” 

The administration is seeking that money in place of traditional Democratic priorities, like healthcare funding, he points out. “The budget requests of the second Trump administration have been contentious because, while they have sought to increase defense spending dramatically, they’re also aiming to cut non-defense spending,” Daniels said.

Koshgarian said Democrats have largely been open to an increased defense budget, especially if it brings money to their congressional districts. But that may be changing.

“That tension is definitely real, even in left districts,” she said. “But I think we’re reaching a level of extremity now that that might be starting to flip.”

A new chapter

There’s no question California has become a major player in defense technology.

Every year, the Silicon Valley Defense Group, an industry nonprofit promoting military technology, releases a list of the top 100 tech-forward national security companies. When they charted the companies’ headquarters by state for 2026, they found that 47 were based in California, more than five times those in the number two state, Colorado. 

It wasn’t always that way for California. 

The state became a hub of manufacturing during World War II, building the planes en route to the Pacific Theater. During the Cold War, it was home to pioneering aerospace firms like Lockheed, Northrop, and Convair. But by the 1990s, the collapse of the Soviet Union gutted defense spending and consolidation stripped the region of its leadership, eventually sending Lockheed Martin’s headquarters to Maryland and Northrop Grumman’s to Virginia. Many were sounding the industry’s death knell. The nonprofit RAND Corporation noted that military aerospace sales peaked in 1987. They had declined by 32% just six years later.

The seeds of a comeback were sown when the Predator drone, built by General Atomics of San Diego, first took flight above the California desert in 1995. The craft, armed with Hellfire missiles, became the symbol of the War on Terror.

Then came the private investment surge, and an administration with new priorities.

As far back as the first months after Trump’s first inauguration, in 2017, aerospace industry 

investors were celebrating massive stock gains. Government contracts have since turned defense companies like Costa Mesa-based Anduril into multi-billion-dollar operations.

Venture capital meets military dollars

Southern California likely benefits from the fact that the Space Force’s seed funding arm is based in El Segundo, where it decides where to send hundreds of millions of government dollars. The arm often chooses to fund companies in or around the small, seaside city, which has built buzz as ground zero for defense tech.

When Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently went on tour to promote the “Arsenal of Freedom,” a plan to massively increase munitions building, he told the workers at a Long Beach company, Rocket Lab, that “dominance of space” was key to the military’s future. 

“This company, you right here, are front and center, as part of ensuring that we build an arsenal of freedom that America needs,” he said.

The partnership between private venture dollars and public defense contracts often unfolds like this: First, a startup comes up with a business plan for a product or service with military applications. 

SpaceWERX, the El Segundo-based Space Force venture arm, selects some of these projects for early seed funding. Since 2021, SpaceWERX has awarded 380 contracts worth more than $461 million to businesses in California, more than any other state, SpaceWERX spokesperson Matthew Clouse said.

Private investors often follow on, seeing SpaceWERX money as a “demand signal,” said Arthur Grijalva, director of SpaceWERX. Billions have flowed into California-based companies in recent years this way. 

Some local politicians have spent years pushing for similar investment in local military applications. El Segundo Mayor Chris Pimentel said he and his team traveled north in the state to personally court financiers while dealing with an enormous business dip early in the pandemic.

“It really paid off with large dividends,” he said. “We started showing up and being in the room with some of the larger venture funds and saying, ‘we can make these things happen down here. We can build stuff.’”

“Agnostic of politics and agnostic of individual ideologies, our core belief is that this is where the future has been made historically,” he said, pointing to Southern California’s long aviation history. 

Some companies that take Defense Department contracts, like Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which started in the Los Angeles area, are now valued at billions. SpaceX’s recent initial public offering became, by far, the biggest IPO of all time in June. 

Other small space companies are rapidly building with government contracts. True Anomaly, a space defense company, was founded in Colorado in 2022 but now has its largest office in Long Beach. “When you’re building this type of company, it’s frankly somewhat of a necessity to have a footprint here,” said Chief Financial Officer Mark Seidel.

The company has worked on Space Force missions and was recently announced as a contractor for the Golden Dome project. In April, a $650 million funding round put the company at a valuation of more than $2 billion. 

The increasing spending, while bringing jobs to some parts of the country, continues to rile critics.

“We very much risk getting into a space arms race, where China invests more, so we invest more so China invests more and we invest more,” Koshgarian said. “Where does it stop?”

Data from usaspending.gov for Defense Department obligations to organizations listing a California address. Awards may be to California businesses for projects in another area. Download the data here. 

Mohamed Al Elew contributed data editing to this report.

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For the past few months, Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio) has been embroiled in a growing list of scandals and allegations of harm. Miller’s ex-wife, the daughter of Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio), has accused the Republican congressman in legal filings of being an absentee father, abusive husband, and having a history of violence and misconduct towards women dating back to his high school days. Miller has repeatedly denied these allegations.

As Mother Jones’ Abby Vesoulis reported in July:

For instance, one of [Emily] Moreno’s legal filings in their ongoing child custody case asked Miller to comment on the accusation that he pushed a female peer down a set of stairs during his high school years.

“Why did you not pursue a defamation lawsuit against [redacted] for alleging you pushed her down a flight of stairs?”

Miller’s response: “OBJECTION; relevance, scope of admissible evidence.”

According to Politico’s 2021 report, “Miller pushed a girl out the door of his room and she fell down some stairs after he became enraged when she resisted his attempts to touch her, according to three people who were there and many more who heard about the incident in the aftermath.”

Miller categorically denied to Politico that the altercation took place. But reached for comment this month, the woman in question told Mother Jones that while the event “happened 20 years ago,” it remains “one of the more traumatic nights of my life.”

Vesoulis recently traveled to Ohio where she and our producer got a chance to speak with Miller directly following a family court hearing between him and his ex-wife. While visiting, Vesoulis made a stop at the public library in the town that Miller grew up and attended high school in. She wanted to see if there was anything more to be learned from his old high school yearbooks.

“We’re going to flip through all these yearbooks and we could find nothing,” says Vesoulis, sitting in one of the library’s study rooms. “We could find something interesting.”

Interesting, indeed. Here’s what she saw:

ph @spikkia

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced a one-year moratorium on AI use for elementary and middle school students on Wednesday. 

The decision, which comes a week before New York City public schools begin the year, “includes all software that uses student-facing generative AI.” Elementary and middle school students—about 600,000 students in total—will receive screen-time restrictions that loosen over advancing grades, ranging from zero to 45 minutes per day. Companion chatbots will also be prohibited for all grade levels. 

The city is also introducing biannual AI critical thinking training for high schoolers that cover determining what is and is not AI, impacts on careers and future skills, and AI-related biases, among others, along with limited pilot programs for a few classes per high school that incorporate AI tools into students’ learning “under the direct supervision of a trained educator.” 

“Children need their teachers and human connection in order to learn and in order to grow. And they need to develop skills alongside their peers, build relationships with their teachers, and wrestle with tough problems on their own,” Mayor Mamdani said in a Wednesday press conference. “The tech industry wants us to believe that AI in early education is not only inevitable, but that it is necessary. We do not see it that way.”

The new policies will not apply to cases such as assistive tools to help students with disabilities, those who are multilingual learners, and students in career programs like computer science. 

Other school districts have considered AI policies and guidance—such as screening AI tools prior to incorporation into the classroom—but, according to Tech Policy Press, few so far include enforceable, school system-wide rules. 

New York City’s policies permit teachers to use AI to plan lessons and operational tasks.

United Federation of Teachers president Michael Mulgrew expressed support for the policy’s limits to screen time but told the Associated Press that it left “many questions unanswered,” including around the implementation of “AI safeguards” in software.

“Let’s start at the source, rather than expect school communities or individual educators to figure out after the fact if what their school uses fits the new policy,” he said.

The mutants are finally making their way to the MCU, but which storylines from the comics will we see make their way to the big screen? Kyle Anderson is putting on his Cerebro helmet to break down all the X-Men comics we’d love to see adapted (or not) on today’s video!

The post X-MEN: Comics We DO and DON’T Want In the MCU appeared first on Nerdist.

Quick Take

• September is here and we cannot wait to watch these 6 shows and films this month.
• From horror to a college drama revival, many of these choices will get you into the Fall and Nerdoween mood.
• Read More: Want even more options? Check out these 12 cozy movies that you should watch to make Fall feel delightful.

September is here and with it comes new films and TV shows to get into. While this month is not the content juggernaut that June and July were with House of the Dragon, The Odyssey, and Spider-Man: Brand New Day, among other releases, it offers a nice variety of films for everyone. From a witchy sequel to an iconic college drama revival to a dose of horror, these are the TV shows and films that we cannot wait to see this September. 

Practical Magic 2  Warner Bros.

This long-awaited sequel will bring our beloved Owens women back to the big screen. This time, there’s a new generation in the mix as Sally, Gillian, their spinster aunts, and their daughters dive into family history that threatens the present and future. The trailer gave us that cozy magical vibe that will really help set the Fall mood. 

When & Where to Watch: In theaters on September 11

Resident Evil  Sony

Zach Cregger is bringing Resident Evil back to the big screen with a fresh story. Raccoon City is more dangerous and diabolical than ever as we watch Bryan, a medical courier, try to survive a wild outbreak. We were lucky to see the opening minutes of the film, and it looks like it is off to a great start. And, what better way to get ready for Nerdoween than watching a horror movie? 

When & Where to Watch: In theaters on September 18

Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom Aardman/Studio Canal

One of our favorite forms of art is stop-motion animation. It looks so cool and the level of work that goes into creating these types of films and shows is truly a marvel. Shaun the Sheep and his fellow flock members are back for an adorable yet creepy story that actually takes place not too long before Halloween. Shaun is trying to science his way through fixing a destroyed pumpkin patch but things go awry when the Farmer goes missing and a beast appears. Interestingly, it will arrive in theaters alongside Resident Evil, so maybe this could be your double feature this month. 

When & Where to Watch: In theaters on September 18

A Different World 

It’s a different worrrrllllddd, than where you come from! Back in the late 1980s, this Cosby Show spinoff series changed the game, immersing viewers in HBCU culture at the fictional Hillman College. The show inspired a generation of young Black people to attend HBCUs and tackled controversial issues like abuse, sexual assault, classism, and much more. Now, decades later, we are going back to Hillman in this series, which shows Dwayne Wayne and Whitley Gilbert-Wayne’s youngest daughter navigating her parents’ alma mater. Let the nostalgia flow. 

When & Where to Watch: Netflix on September 24

American Horror Story: 13 (Season 13)

American Horror Story has been a TV horror staple for over a decade, and it is coming back for yet another season. This installment will wind in characters from beloved previous seasons, like Coven, for a story that will surely be deliciously wicked. It will focus on the number 13, which is known to be bad luck, and include a character called Twisty the Clown. We are totally in.

When & Where to Watch: FX/Hulu on September 24 

Primetime

To Catch a Predator’s Chris Hansen isn’t very happy about this A24 film about his life and how he created this series. But it is happening anyway and we are intrigued, especially considering that Robert Pattinson is portraying Hansen. His voice and the promise of complex behind-the-scenes drama is enough to make us want to watch it. 

When & Where to Watch: In theaters on September 25

Tai Gooden is the Features Editor for Nerdist, a fictional villain apologist, and a horror aficionado who is forever waiting for her trip in the TARDIS.

The post 6 Shows and Films We Can’t Wait to Watch in September appeared first on Nerdist.

It’s been exactly one year since the Trump administration began indiscriminately attacking small watercraft traversing the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean.

In that time, the U.S. military has killed at least 227 civilians in some 65 strikes, according to an analysis published Wednesday by The Intercept.

“It’s been a year of murders,” a defense official told the outlet. “The Trump administration has normalized murder.… It’s absolutely criminal.”

The White House has insisted the violence is justified, broadly accusing the boats of trafficking narcotics to the U.S. from Venezuela and Colombia. A classified opinion penned last summer by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel attempted to shield the forthcoming attacks by claiming that suspected drug boats amounted to legitimate military targets.

But U.S. lawmakers have been more than skeptical on the matter. That’s partly due to the fact that several of the targeted boats were thousands of miles away in international waters at the time that they were struck by U.S. forces. Another reason is because the vast majority of the attacks were conducted without prior investigations or interdiction, leaving little ability to gather evidence that could support or refute the government’s allegations.

The administration’s lawless behavior has even restructured foreign governments. After blaming Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro for the attacks and the alleged drug pipeline, U.S. forces stormed Caracas and abducted Maduro in the early morning hours of January 3.

The strikes themselves have been criticized as extrajudicial killings.

“There is no plausible legal justification for the strikes. They’re obviously not occurring in the context of an armed conflict and outside of armed conflict, the term for premeditated killing is murder,” Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer and specialist in counterterrorism issues and the laws of war, told The Intercept.

On September 2, 2025—a year ago today—the Trump administration first drone-bombed a small boat in the Caribbean Sea. That strike killed 11 people. Then, according to members of Congress who saw classified footage of the attack, the drone circled back for a “double-tap” strike, killing two survivors as they clung to the wreckage.

Administration officials claimed without evidence that the attack was a necessary measure against alleged drug-smugglers.

As justification for the strikes, the administration has relied on and publicly cited a memorandum prepared by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. But it has kept the memo secret, despite pressure from lawmakers and civil society groups. And the bombs haven’t stopped: in the year since, the US military has launched 68 “boat strikes” that have killed at least 227 people.

The most recent strike, on August 25, killed four people the administration claimed were “narcoterrorists.” The military, according to the Associated Press, again offered no evidence that the vessel was carrying drugs.

“The United States is simply killing individuals unilaterally without any legal basis or process.”

The UN Human Rights Office released a statement on Wednesday condemning the strikes and stating trafficking drugs, even with evidence, would not justify extrajudicial murder.

“Drug trafficking is a law enforcement matter governed by international human rights law on the use of force. Calling it war does not make it one,” the statement reads. “No armed conflict exists with the United States under international humanitarian law, since there is no military combat between two sides. The United States is simply killing individuals unilaterally without any legal basis or process.”

While many of the strikes’ victims remain unidentified, some victims have been identified by their families as ordinary fishermen with no relationship to the drug trade. The families of Chad Joseph and Rishi Samaroo, two Trinidadian men killed in a US boat strike on October 15, 2025, are suing the Trump administration under the Death on the High Seas Act and the Alien Tort Statute.

“For a year now, the Trump administration has engaged in a terrifying, lawless killing campaign at sea and has yet to provide the public with anything beyond the most threadbare justifications,” said Jeff Stein, a staff attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project. “These strikes have devastated countless families, terrified communities, and, by the administration’s own admission, failed to achieve their purported goal of stopping drugs from entering into the United States.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said two weeks ago that he intends to expand his campaign to land in Latin America.

It will be “like you saw with the strikes on the drug boats,” Hegseth told reporters during an August military drill in the jungle in Panama. “Same effect on land. And so we’re working with Ecuador. We’re working with Colombia. We’re working with partners to bring the fight to the designated terrorist organizations on land. Anywhere you traffic drugs, or you threaten the American people, or our partners, you are a target, just like ISIS or Al-Qaeda.”

Quick Take

• Peacock’s new docuseries Fan Level Midnight: Devoted to The Office will explore how the sitcom become a beloved cultural juggernaut.
• The show will feature archival footage, new interviews, and share fan perspectives.
• Nerdist’s Take: Thirteen years after the show ended, it’s clear that The Office is a gravy train with no signs of slowing down.

NBC’s The Office might have followed employees at a local paper company, but the series has ultimately proven to be an international gravy train. And it’s one ride NBCUniversal clearly doesn’t plan on stopping anytime soon. Peacock has acquired the rights to Fan Level Midnight: Devoted to The Office. The new docuseries will explore the show’s rise from little-watched remake to a cultural juggernaut.

NBC

Deadline reports that on September 7, Peacock will debut a new documentary series it has purchased the rights to. Director Shawn Cauthen’s six-episode show will cover both “the history and cultural impact” of The Office. The doc will feature archival footage and old interviews. It will also include breakdowns of important episodes, the unlikely journey the show took on its way to becoming a sitcom powerhouse, and new insights from those involved with making it. Viewers will hear from former NBC Entertainment President Kevin Reilly. Director and executive producer Paul Feig also sat down for a new interview. As did stars Andy Buckley and Leslie David Baker.

Fan Level Midnight: Devoted to The Office will also include what sounds like a piece of meta filmmaking. Deadline reports creators will also “turn the camera toward the fans themselves.”

“…People have built friendships around it, found comfort in it during incredibly difficult moments, and continue discovering it for the first time,” Cauthen said. “We wanted Fan Level Midnight to tell the story of the people who made the show, but just as importantly, the people who never stopped loving it.”

NBC

The docuseries’ debut will kick off a big week for the franchise. Peacock’s The Office spinoff, The Paper, will debut its second season on September 9. Clearly the people can’t get enough of this universe. And that’s why even though The Office went off the air in 2013, this paper-fueled gravy train isn’t slowing down anytime soon.

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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Donald Trump’s beloved White House ballroom is moving ahead—at a reported cost of $900 million and counting—thanks to a 5-4 ruling Monday from the Supreme Court.

The ballroom is just one of a slew of active or would-be construction sites where the president is hoping to leave his mark on Washington. But for now, it’s an exception. Many of Trump’s other pet projects are in limbo, stalled by botched construction and legal challenges. Congress has declined to appropriate billions of dollars the administration wants for so-called “beautification” efforts in DC, but the White House has used money from elsewhere in federal budget, including roughly $100 million collected as National Park entrance fees, to pay for the work.

A mile west of the White House, the Kennedy Center remains closed—a tarp obscuring the facade where a federal judge ordered Trump’s name removed.  Trump’s plans for the performing arts center, including custom marble armrests, more shows like “Cats,” and his name on the wall, have so far failed. His dismay seemed to animate a recent court filing in which the Justice Department threatened that the center could be demolished if Trump’s plans remained blocked in court.

A mile or so south, the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool sits drained and fenced off—months after the president trumpeted its grand reopening. Following its renovation, the pool closed due to algae blooms and peeling “American flag blue” liner. In late July, the Justice Department acknowledged the peeling resulted from flawed work by a contractor that had received a no-bid contract, worth more than $15 million so far, from the Trump administration. That admission came in a court filing dropping felony charges against an alleged vandal who Trump had blamed for the damage. Trump recently claimed the reflecting will re-open, again, within weeks. But his track record on this topic suggests skepticism is warranted.

Across the Potomac River via Memorial Bridge, the administration hopes to construct what critics have dubbed the “Arc de’ Trump.” The plan for that 250-foot monument, which Trump has said is for “me,” received initial approval this summer from a key federal commission packed with Trump allies, and backing from the Trump-controlled National Park Service. But the proposal has faced stiff legal opposition, in part because the arch would block views of Arlington National Cemetery, leaving its future is uncertain.

Even less likely to be built is the so-called “National Garden of American Heroes.” That’s the statue garden featuring sculptures of 250 Americans that the president hopes to plant along the Potomac near the Jefferson Memorial. Trump first floated the statue garden in 2020 as a sort of anti-woke answer to the removal of statues of Confederates, slave owners, and other historical figures around the country. Congressional Republicans allocated funding for the project, and the administration initially hoped to complete it by July 4 of this year—in time for the semiquincentennial. Trump’s team also set up a nonprofit and began seeking  corporate donations for the plan. The same foundation is also raising funds to build a luxury golf course on a flood-prone island in the Potomac, where Trump has claimed construction will start soon. 

But July 4 has come and gone, and the statue garden is nowhere close to ready. Sculptors have called the plan “unworkable” due to limited statue-making capacity. And the site also sits in a location where new “commemorative work” cannot be built without additional congressional approval. Congress has not approved this specific plan for the garden, meaning a lawsuit seeking to block the effort might well succeed.

Trump has, however, planted statues elsewhere. He put a new statue of Christopher Columbus on the White House grounds—take that, Indigenous Peoples’ Day.  And in Freedom Plaza, a park just southeast of the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue, the administration in April installed 14 statues. These include a large equestrian depiction of Caesar Rodney, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. That statue had sat in storage since 2020, when it was removed from a perch in Wilmington, Delaware, due to Rodney’s status as a major slaveowner. We reported in July that Trump’s Interior Department paid $527,000 for rushed construction of the pedestal on which it now stands. That’s around twice what the department had estimated the statue base should cost. “The work was expedited to ensure it is done before our nation’s 250th,” an Interior Department official told Mother Jones.

Back by the White House are other public works projects the administration rushed to complete by July 4. The National Park Service spent $17.4 million through a no-bid contract to repair two ornamental fountains. The contract, first reported by the New York Times, was secretly awarded to Clark Construction, the same firm that is building the ballroom. The fountains now work. But they are hard to see because of the 13-foot steel fences the administration installed around Lafayette Park. That fencing was supposed to be temporary, but the administration has now proposed permanently fencing off the park. For now, the whole park, including the refurbished fountains, remains closed to the taxpayers who paid for it.

The first ever Republican midterm convention is being fueled by a dark money web with a MAGA super PAC at its center.

The unprecedented gathering will take place on September 9 and 10 in Dallas. But the private group organizing the conference, a nonprofit known as the Dallas 2026 Host Committee, has not yet disclosed any of its donors (federally mandated filings that would offer such transparency still aren’t due for several months). The only insight available as to who’s behind the multimillion-dollar operation stems from the nonprofit’s address.

An OpenSecrets investigation published Tuesday found that the Dallas 2026 Host Committee shares an address with Make America Great Again Inc., a super PAC formed in 2022 to back Donald Trump and his endorsed candidates.

Further still, the treasurer of MAGA Inc.—Charles Gantt—is also the listed custodian of the convention’s nonprofit, according to an FEC filing and an IRS letter that tied Gantt to the self-advertised “nonpartisan” nonprofit.

Last month, the Dallas 2026 Host Committee told The Dallas Morning News that it raised $45 million in just 27 days from various independent and corporate contributions. That sum didn’t include the revenue expected from sales for the ticketed event, which requires even invited House members to pay a minimum of $25,000 to walk in the door with a guest.

The committee did not elaborate on who’s been filling its coffers.

The group’s nonprofit status legally prohibits it from sponsoring political candidates or aiding elections. Instead, organization leadership told the newspaper that the money it obtained would go toward aiding Dallas’s local economy and covering government costs.

“This Dallas Host Committee, if it stuck to just promoting Dallas, making Dallas look good, that would be permissible—as long as it’s not crossing that line to making contributions to the RNC or the state party,” Shanna Ports, senior legal counsel for campaign finance at Campaign Legal Center, told OpenSecrets. “Then, it would be operating within the realm of campaign finance laws and tax status.”

But that doesn’t seem to be the primary motivator for the GOP conference. Trump and Vice President JD Vance are both expected to deliver speeches to the conservative assembly, which has been strung together at the eleventh hour to give Republicans a boost ahead of a contentious midterm cycle.

President Donald Trump appeared to short-circuit Wednesday during a meeting with travel executives in the Oval Office.

“On 11 separate days, more than three million travelers flowed through the American flies, they, they, uh … American skies were loaded up with planes,” Trump, 80, said while seated at the Resolute Desk.

Trump: "On 11 separate days more than 3 million travelers flowed through the American flies they. They, uh, American skies were loaded up with planes." pic.twitter.com/Cag833amM0

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 2, 2026

It’s clear that Trump meant to say “American skies,” but that his brain got in the way. The meeting was ostensibly supposed to be a chance for the president to brag about high levels of tourism in the U.S. over the summer, but not only did Trump fumble his lines, Americans have actually spent a lot less money on vacations these past few months. Flights and road trips have also declined compared to last year. Foreign tourism into the U.S. has also dropped sharply since Trump resumed office.

Trump’s ongoing cognitive decline seems to be getting worse each day. He’s fallen asleep dozens of times throughout his second term as president, frequently slurred his speech, and last month seemed to forget how to spell the word “dumb” at a speech in Las Vegas with cameras rolling. Just last week, the president fell asleep during a health care announcement at the White House.

Meanwhile, Trump’s decisions are increasingly erratic, from abruptly signing an executive order to rename Lake Ontario to “Lake America” to his continued poor handling of the ill-advised war with Iran. Hours before his meeting Wednesday, Trump proposed renaming the Strait of Hormuz after himself. All of this clearly points to a man who is not well, yet has just over two more years of being president left.

ALT

President Donald Trump wants to rename the Strait of Hormuz, which the U.S. doesn’t control, after himself.

“Now that we have it under U.S.A. control, should we change the name Hormuz Strait to TRUMP STRAIT??? Like America itself, it would be ‘hotter’ than ever before! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP,” the president posted on Truth Social Wednesday morning.

The move wouldn’t have any support beyond his fans, and it is a terrible idea due to Iran currently being able to throttle maritime traffic through the crucial narrow waterway. Trump’s executive order to change the name of Lake Ontario to “Lake America” last week was unpopular with Canadians and many Americans, although Google and Apple decided to bow to Trump’s demand by renaming the lake on its map services.

Trump has sought to rename everything from buildings to aircraft carriers after himself in his second term as president, and even has his sights on naming New York’s Penn Station. Florida just renamed Palm Beach’s airport after him: it’s now officially the President Donald J. Trump International Airport, complete with the code DJT.

At a time when Trump claims to want a deal with Iran, changing the strait’s name would undoubtedly hurt the prospects for peace. It’s not likely to go over well with the other countries in the region, such as Oman and the UAE. If Trump is serious, the move is sure to invite more comparisons between him and historical dictators who also sought to rename everything.