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This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Two-thirds of Utah voters support restoring the boundaries of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments to the previous boundaries they had before President Donald Trump reduced them to less than a quarter of their original size.

That’s according to new polling commissioned by the Grand Canyon Trust, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting the Four Corners region, and conducted by New Bridge Strategy, and comes as the Trump administration’s actions prompt the reignition of major lawsuits from environmental organizations, conservation groups and outdoor apparel maker Patagonia.

“Whether every elected official agrees with the results or not, these findings are profoundly telling and should not be ignored.”

“Utahns are currently speaking up, and they’re saying that the decision made regarding Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments being shrunk down are wrong and tribes should have been consulted,” said Autumn Gillard, the cultural resource manager for the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah and coordinator of the Grand Staircase-Escalante Inter-Tribal Coalition, at a press conference hosted Wednesday to announce the poll results. 

Before their downsizing, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments collectively stretched across over 3 million acres of public lands in southern Utah. Via two executive orders in July, Trump cut the monuments to just 302,600 acres to better align with the administration’s goal of opening up public lands for mining. 

Gone are many of the two monuments’ protections for scores of archeological sites and some of the country’s last intact landscapes. Already, mining interests have begun staking claims in the area, even before the downsizing was complete. The executive orders also dissolved the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, which spearheaded the monument’s groundbreaking co-stewardship efforts. 

The polling found 69 percent of Utahns opposed terminating that coalition, and 82 percent say tribal voices are important for managing the sites. Nearly three-quarters of Utah voters support presidents’ authority to designate national monuments under the Antiquities Act, a long-standing piece of legislation that Republicans have targeted, and 81 percent of Utahns oppose selling public lands to private interests, which Utah Republicans have advocated for. 

“Whether every elected official agrees with the results or not, these findings are profoundly telling and should not be ignored,” said Davina Smith-Idjesa, a member of the Navajo Nation and part of both monuments’ inter-tribal coalitions, about the polling. “They reflect broad support within Utah for protecting these national monuments and ensuring that tribal nations have a meaningful and lasting role in their future.”

Having “earth-moving equipment, flags staked, and a just general industrial presence within these really beautiful, undeveloped landscapes is a tragedy.”

Other polls have found similar results: Colorado College’s 16th annual Conservation in the West Poll found 91 percent of voters in the Western US support keeping existing national monument designations in place. 

In a statement, White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said previous administrations abused their power under “the Antiquities Act to lock up millions of acres of Utah’s public lands, impoverishing local communities and sharply restricting access for recreation, grazing, resource development, and fire prevention” and downsizing the monuments “allow for common sense land use in these areas.”

Trump’s downsizing of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante this year isn’t his first attempt. In 2017, he reduced Bears Ears by 85 percent, and cut Grand Staircase-Escalante nearly in half. Environmental groups, including the Grand Canyon Trust, filed suit, as did local tribes, Patagonia and Access Fund, the national rock climbing advocacy organization.

That litigation was paused after the Biden administration restored the monuments. But it has since been reignited, with Patagonia, Access Fund, and the coalition of environmental groups filing to restart their lawsuits. The tribal groups, for now, have not refiled. 

Those challenges rest on the Antiquities Act of 1906. That law gives presidents the power to create national monuments, but not to downsize them. That power rests with Congress. Last year, the Department of Justice outlined its reasoning for the opposite in a memo, but legal scholars have questioned that position and how it would hold up in court, if used. 

Tom Delehanty, senior attorney with Earthjustice, which represents the coalition of environmental groups, said Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante are treasured for their significance to scientific research, cultural and historical significance to local tribes and opportunities for public recreation, and that’s why protecting them is so important. Delehanty expects developers to move quickly to try and stake claims. 

“Having things like earth-moving equipment, flags staked, and a just general industrial presence within these really beautiful, undeveloped landscapes is a tragedy,” he said. “It’s very much something that we want to avoid, and it’s part of why these lawsuits are so important.”

Santa Cruz County rarely does heat like this.

For a stretch of days this week, temperatures pushed into the 90s and touched triple digits in some spots.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the September 11 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

Donald Trump’s numbers on the economy have taken another big dive. A Quinnipiac poll finds him at a record low, and a CNN analysis finds him in much, much worse shape on the issue than in 2018. But Trump has an answer. He’s just promised to send $5,000 to every American if Republicans hold Congress. The idea is so ludicrous that even Fox News figures are gently mocking it. All of which raises a question: Have Trump’s magical reality-bending powers finally run out?

We’re breaking it all down with political scientist Tom Schaller, who has a good piece for the Public Notice Substack on Trump’s ongoing inflation catastrophe. Tom, good to have you on.

Tom Schaller: Good to be back, Greg.

Sargent: So let’s just start with Trump’s announcement that he’ll send $5,000 to all Americans if Republicans hold the House and Senate. As many people quickly pointed out, Trump has promised to send people money over and over again. His contempt for his voters here is just boundless. Tom, your quick reaction to all that?

Schaller: Well, he won’t deliver on it, and I think we all know that. We didn’t get a rebate for the tariffs that we paid—the corporations did. So in effect, his tariffs, one of the things I talked about in the new piece, were a retail sales tax on Americans that was paid initially by corporations, but they’re getting made whole. And of course, they’re not going to give any of the money back. So you can count on that $5,000 like you can count on getting your tariff money back. That’s my gut reaction.

Sargent: You know, the funny thing about this is it highlights another layer of contempt for Americans that Trump shows here. He’s saying that he’ll be able to send $5,000 to all Americans because the tariff revenue has been so big, which he casts as money that we’re getting from other countries.

So he’s basically saying, all this money that we’re getting from other countries, we’ll send it to Americans. But of course, the truth is literally the exact opposite. The tariffs are being paid by Americans, and nothing will be sent back to them.

Let’s talk about some of this polling. The new Quinnipiac poll has Trump’s approval rating down at 33 percent. On the economy, it’s 32 percent, his lowest ever in Quinnipiac polling. On the war with Iran, he’s at 29 percent. And on trade with Canada, he’s at 28 percent. Extraordinarily terrible numbers.

You wrote in your piece that all of Trump’s policies are conspiring to push up prices and hurt the economy. I think this polling shows that voters really understand the connection here between all these things. Your thoughts on all that?

Schaller: You have more faith in the voter than I do. Let me just start by saying that. And I’m a political scientist, and I’m sure I’ll take some crap for saying this, but I don’t have a lot of faith in voters. So if voters had a substantial knowledge of how the economy works, Greg, they would have known during the campaign that two of the three policies that I talked about in the Public Notice piece—not the Iran war, because obviously that hadn’t happened yet.

But Trump ran on immigration reform and taking all the immigrant labor out of the country. And of course, he ran on tariffs. And if you thought about those two policies for a moment: one is essentially an inflationary policy on domestic production, because it raises labor costs when you eliminate some of the most efficient and lower-paid workers. And the second, of course, tariffs, as we already discussed, is just a tax, a retail tax on imports. And so Trump was campaigning to end inflation on two inflationary policies.

It’d be like if you and I were picked by our local town to sit on a panel to pick the new fire chief. And we interviewed a guy, and he was kind of brusque and he didn’t have good manners, but he had two really great ideas when he explained to us his philosophy of putting out fire. One is, he shows up with a giant flatbed truck of dried hay and he dumps that on top. And then if that doesn’t work, he brings a tanker of kerosene and sprays that on, because we know that liquids douse fires. And we said, let’s hire that guy, what a genius.

And then, halfway through his term—now I’m analogizing to the Iran war—he said, well, no, what you really do to put out a fire is you throw a bunch of firecrackers in there, because that disseminates the fire and that puts it out. So this is the person that Americans hire to fix the economy, even though he can’t do basic percentages, much less understand global macroeconomic politics.

Sargent: It’s a fair point. I would add, though, that when actual conditions force people’s minds to concentrate a little, they actually do. I do take it as heartening that he’s in the twenties on his trade war with Canada and in the twenties on the Iran war. Put it this way: we’ve never had a situation, I don’t think, where the direct connection between policy and outcome on the economy—which is something that presidents often don’t really have a lot of control over—has been so clear.

And so for him to be polling in the twenties on tariffs and trade, when that was one of his quote-unquote strengths, I take that as a sign that maybe voters are starting to see what’s going on here.

Schaller: Well, I mean, I do think voters, rightly or wrongly, they have these, you know, cues that they take. Obviously the gas price is one of them, and grocery prices and housing prices are another. And as I showed in the piece, because so much of the construction industry, residential or commercial, is staffed by immigrant labor, you’re going to raise the cost of housing prices to buy a house. And then of course, when the housing prices go up, then the landlords can charge more in the rent, because of the market situation.

And then of course the groceries, right? Almost every meal you eat, whether you eat it at a restaurant, whether you eat it at home, is made with fruits and vegetables and other produce items, whether fresh or processed, that are planted, picked, you know, and delivered by immigrant labor.

So, Trump’s policies are very inflationary. My point is not that people can’t figure out that they’re paying more for a pound of beef or a gallon of gas. My point is, they should have figured this out during the election. That’s all I’m saying.

Sargent: Well, speaking of the situation here, CNN’s Harry Enten made an astounding observation. He looked at Reuters and CNN polling and concluded that Trump is now fifty-two points underwater with independents on the economy.

Back in 2018, the last midterm, he was at plus ten with that demographic. So as Enten notes, independents have swung sixty-two points against him on the economy. Tom, I keep saying this, but Trump’s collapse with independents is an undercovered story. We haven’t seen anything quite like this. Independents really matter in midterms. What do you make of all that?

Schaller: Well, first of all, I’m shocked. I didn’t realize it was that bad. And I didn’t realize it was that good for him in 2018, which was a bad cycle for Republicans. So if Trump was plus ten with independents and they still took a shellacking in 2018, boy, are they really in trouble here in 2026, eight years later.

So yeah, that is a shocking number, minus 52, even without the baseline of plus ten. But it’s doubly shocking. I was surprised—I thought you were going to say he was minus 20 or minus 15 back in 2018. But to have been plus ten and still Republicans took serious losses in 2018—yeah, I am very, very surprised.

And yeah, people are upset because Trump promised to fix the economy and lower inflation and lower the price of your energy bill. And of course he promised to end the Gaza-Israel war and the, you know, Russia-Ukraine war, and he hasn’t delivered on any of that stuff. And maybe people are starting to realize that he’s high on promises and low on delivery.

Sargent: Well, I think you actually put your finger on an important point, an underlying factor to all this that’s really worth drawing out a little bit, which is that during Trump’s first term, he really did remain above water on the economy. That’s the big difference between then and now.

The fundamental thing here is that during the first term, Trump didn’t actually get his way on a lot of these policies to nearly the same degree that he has in the second term. The first time, he was in positive territory on the economy. Now he’s in absolutely abysmal territory. What do you think of all that?

Schaller: Well, I think that’s true, that the pure effect of his policies was significantly muted, because he at least had some adults in the room instead of a Cabinet full of sycophants.

But I think the other difference you cannot overlook is that—despite, at one point, on what was then called Twitter, Trump claiming that the unemployment rate under Obama was 42 percent when it was literally a tenth of that, it was about 4.5 percent—Trump inherited a smoking hot economy in January 2017, when he first took office, despite his claims that America was in the economic toilet. And he was riding the fumes of that for those first two years.

Whereas the economy was in much worse shape when he came into office in January 2025, following post-COVID inflation. But, you know, Americans, fairly or unfairly, they give extraordinary credit to presidents when the economy is good, whether they deserve it or not. And sometimes they give undeserved blame when the economy is bad. So Trump is being, you know, sort of penalized for the very thing he benefited from in the first term.

Sargent: Well, I would add one nuance, just to throw this out there. It’s true that the economy was worse when Donald Trump took over in 2025 than it was when he took over in 2017. But the key thing to remember is that the whole world was recovering from post-COVID shock and post-COVID trauma. And The Economist described the American recovery as the envy of the world.

So in a sense, while the comparison that you’re making holds, it’s still also true that he twice inherited a good situation, and both times he flushed it down the toilet. The first time he flushed the economy down the toilet by screwing up the COVID handling to a catastrophic degree, right? Like, hundreds of thousands of deaths, probably needless. And then the second time, he’s just flushed it away with policies—with immigration policy, with tariff policy, with war.

He’s just an absolute calamity, always. Everything he touches dies, as the great man said. And so what do you think of all that, Tom? I mean, this is a guy who just keeps fucking everything up. And I’m hoping finally the world is catching up with him. Is that possible?

Schaller: Yeah, I think the world is catching up with him, and I think the world is turning its shoulder to us. I’m in Canada right now, in fact, and Canadians have had it with Trump. And they are essentially a European ally here on the North American continent, to the NATO alliance, and increasingly are behaving like Europeans—which is finding other trade partners around the globe instead of trading with us. And that’s going to affect our long-term import and export ability.

And you know, Trump is really destroying things in a way that—were we not the world’s largest economy and most powerful military, the kind of decisions that we’ve seen him make, I know we’ve been talking about this with the Defense Department and Pete Hegseth—other countries wouldn’t be able to survive those kinds of mistakes. Other economies might collapse with the leadership of Trump.

And so in a weird way, Trump is benefiting from the fact that the United States is such a powerful and rich country that you can screw things up at the margin, to great pain for many Americans and many people who aren’t Americans economically, and the country isn’t going to fold.

Sargent: Well, anyway, his cratering numbers on the economy are the context for his promise to send $5,000 to every American if Republicans hold Congress. Fox News figures were practically mocking this. First, listen to this Fox anchor call bullshit on it.

Fox News anchor (voiceover): We should note, though, it is not the first time he has promised a cash payment like this. He promised Americans two-thousand-dollar rebates during his tariff policy when that was enacted, but after court challenges to the tariffs themselves, those two-thousand-dollar checks so far have not materialized.

Now listen to Fox’s Bret Baier, who’s practically snickering while he makes these points.

Bret Baier (voiceover): But if Republicans win the House, five thousand dollars for every adult citizen. So you do the quick math, that’s about one point three trillion dollars. I can hear the critics’ heads exploding. They’re saying out loud, I guarantee you, the president is bribing voters to vote for Republicans to take over the House, and then he’s bankrupting the country, because the deficit and debt is huge and inflation would come back if this comes into play.

And finally, here’s Laura Ingraham asking a very good question about the idea.

Laura Ingraham (voiceover): Why not just give the money now? If you have the money, why not just—

Donald Trump (voiceover): They can’t. I’ll tell you what, because the Democrats can’t do it. Because with them it’s negative growth. With us it’s so positive.

Sargent: So Ingraham says, why don’t you just give people the money now? It’s a good question. And Trump has absolutely no answer to this. For Fox News, that’s pretty harsh stuff, isn’t it, Tom?

Schaller: Yeah. If you’re going to bribe people, you want the money up front. And of course, it’s hard to buy votes anyway. I always joke with my students in Poli 100, if anybody wants to pay me for my vote—since it’s a secret ballot, I’ll take as little as 50 cents, because you can’t enforce the bribe, right?

So if voters want to ask for $5,000 ex ante for their votes—heck, I’d take $5,000 from Trump, especially if he wrote it from the Trump business organization, and send me a check. I’ll promise to vote for Republicans from the top or the bottom of the ballot. Just send me the $5,000, wire it to my bank account. I promise, and I’ll keep that promise, much like Donald Trump has kept so many of his promises.

Sargent: So the ludicrousness of the five-thousand-dollar promise is really a desperate effort to mask his terrible polling situation.

What’s your sense of the fundamentals now? Do you think these polls are pretty much capturing how bad it is for Republicans? The Quinnipiac poll I mentioned earlier has Democrats plus 11 in the House generic ballot matchup. I really doubt it’s that high right now, but another poll had it at plus 11 recently.

And so I’m wondering if those are leading indicators that the Democratic lead is starting to expand now, because the polling averages have had it at around six, right, or seven. And so I think maybe the lead might be expanding now. What’s your sense of it?

Schaller: Yeah, if the two recent polls, even if they’re slightly outliers or they’re off by a couple of percentage points, it could pull the, you know, the sum of the averages from, you know, plus six to plus seven, plus eight, plus nine. And if you get up into those high single digits, or make it to 10 percent, you know, then that’s going to be a slaughtering.

And it’ll be interesting to see if some Republicans, where they’ve sliced it a little too thin with their strategic gerrymandering and have created some 54–46 districts and so forth—that could be enough to tip a district that they sliced a little too close in order to maximize the number of Republican-leaning seats in a particular state. And some incumbent makes a mistake, is underfunded, or just there’s voter anger, or those independents show up, and suddenly Republicans who thought they were safe lose their seats.

And then I think finally you’ll have an intraparty revolt, because Republican members of Congress for the most part have backed Trump as a matter of self-survival. They’re petrified of MAGA voters. They know that they can’t win without them, but they might come finally to the realization that they can lose with them, and/or with only them. And so, if we start to see some people that the Charlie Cooks of the world didn’t have as even leaning Republican or as solid Republican seats fall, then there will be recriminations.

Sargent: Well, just to underscore that point, let’s remember that Trump is the one who forced Republicans to enter into this mid-decade gerrymandering spree. It would be really a great dose of poetic justice if the result of that was to get Republicans to move safe seats into somewhat less safe territory, and then, because Trump is such a catastrophe, all of a sudden the wave sweeps those seats away. That would be really something, wouldn’t it, Tom?

Schaller: What’s also funny about this is that—and actually, give Donald Trump credit for this—he wants his name to be metaphorically on the ballot, even though he’s not standing for reelection in the midterm. And he said that in Dallas, like, vote as if I’m on the ballot. So maybe that answers our earlier question about whether he knows that they’re really bad and he’s lying about it. That’s probably not true.

He probably really believes he’s super popular and beloved by the American people. So, you know, he’s smoking his own supply, so to speak, and his staff won’t give him the hard news, which is, he’s extraordinarily unpopular, frankly hated.

And give him credit for the guts of it, because if they get slaughtered in the midterms, he can’t say it’s not my fault. He can’t say, well, I wasn’t on the ballot. He said, vote as if I’m on the ballot. So he’s going to own the election results in a way that he normally doesn’t take responsibility for anything. I’m sure after the election he’ll blame—he’ll say we had bad candidates and they ran bad campaigns and it’s not my fault.

We know he’s in denial about people he’s endorsed who’ve lost primaries, and is suing the media for telling the truth about his endorsement records. So, you know, I actually never give the guy credit, but give him credit for, like, owning his numbers and saying, make me the central focus point for your vote this November. So I say, go for it, America.

Sargent: I agree a hundred percent. Tom Schaller, thanks so much for coming on, man. Always good to talk to you.

Schaller: Great to be here. Cheers.

Capitola will unveil a new public artwork along Monterey Avenue’s railing Saturday, welcoming visitors into the village with a sea of brightly colored jellyfish, otters, seahorses and other marine wildlife native to Monterey Bay, as painted by local artist Bruce Harman. 

Visitors can enjoy the piece, which spans the 625-foot railing, during this weekend’s Capitola Art & Wine Festival, when Monterey Avenue will be closed to vehicle traffic. 

The artificial intelligence industry is homing in on Ohio’s 7th congressional district race. Several super PACs with financial ties to Anthropic, the company behind the AI assistant Claude, have invested heavily in the House race, ramping up fundraising for both the Democratic and the Republican candidates.

One such PAC, Public First Action, was formed in 2025 as the brainchild of former Democratic Representative Brad Carson and Republican Representative Chris Stewart. Their aim, per the nonprofit’s own materials, is to advance efforts to regulate AI across government and to increase public education about the burgeoning industry.

Over the course of 2026, Anthropic donated $40 million to Public First Action. In a press release, Anthropic said the funds were exclusively for driving the nonprofit’s public education campaign and policy goals, specifying that the money “cannot be used to influence the election of any candidate for federal, state, or local office.”

Yet Public First Action’s approach in Ohio—in which it has decided to offer significant financial backing to both candidates—suggests that it might be more interested in shaping the House race itself.

Exactly why AI-backed money is funneling into the Ohio race boils down to a perfect confluence of factors across the state. Ohio has relatively cheap land, plentiful resources, and enough power plants to fuel the data centers required to support the AI industry’s seemingly imminent boom.

Some of the industry’s biggest players are already tuned into that fact, and are well on their way to maximizing the apparent opportunity. As of last month, Nvidia is reportedly in talks with OpenAI and the Japanese investment group Softbank to develop a $500 billion data center in southern Ohio. Amazon Web Services previously announced a $10 billion infrastructure investment in the state to expand its AI capabilities. Meta has already spent $1.5 billion on a data center in New Albany.

“Given what’s at stake, it’s not surprising at all that they want to sway the legislature,” David Bieri, an economist and associate professor at Virginia Tech’s School of Public and International Affairs who analyzes the costs of data center development, told The New Republic.

Anthropic has a specific angle on the national regulatory fight. The trillion-dollar company is in favor of states drafting their own AI regulation, and has spent an enormous sum of money opposing federal efforts to block regional constraints, lest that create a uniform national market. Anthropic has also argued that companies developing powerful AI models should face accountability requirements. In a statement released in July, Anthropic specified that it was willing to invest in candidates open to “sensible AI safeguards.”

Those parameters haven’t always fallen along party lines: The company has supported Democrats and Republicans who agree with its regulatory worldview, including Republican Tennessee gubernatorial hopeful Marsha Blackburn, who blocked a congressional effort to bar states from passing such laws.

Public First Action announced in July that it would donate $15 million to support a slate of Republicans across the country, including Max Miller, the representative for Ohio’s 7th district, who is currently drowning in scandals related to domestic violence accusations levied at him by his ex-wife.

Meanwhile, the group is tied to at least three other political action committees, one of which—Jobs and Democracy PAC—spent more than $512,000 on a pre-primary advertising campaign for Brian Poindexter, Miller’s Democratic challenger. That sum accounts for roughly 84 percent of all the contributions to his campaign, according to campaign finance data collected by the Federal Election Commission.

Miller, who was initially projected to dominate the race, had staked out a pro-AI position, championing protections for digital industries. In May, Miller co-sponsored the Deterring American AI Model Theft Act, legislation designed to prevent foreign encroachment on U.S. AI models, and introduced the Digital PARITY Act, which would adapt the U.S. tax code to “keep pace with the rapid growth of digital assets and modern financial technology,” according to Miller. He has also accepted thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from the likes of Amazon, Oracle, Intel, Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon. Yet his district’s proximity to the epicenter of Ohio’s AI boom has changed his political opinions: In August, Miller announced his full support for Ohio House Bill 983, a local data-center accountability bill.

But the horrific allegations against Miller that have recently come to light have put his political future in jeopardy. Early last month, the House Ethics Committee announced it was opening an investigation into his alleged misconduct. Days prior, Miller was denounced by his ex-father-in-law, Ohio Senator Bernie Moreno, who wrote in a post on X that the Donald Trump–backed Republican should “not serve in the House of Representatives.”

Miller also seems to have lost favor with his electorate, 55 percent of which voted for Trump during the 2024 election. As of publication, Poindexter’s odds of a November victory sit at 79 percent, while Miller has plunged to 22 percent, according to the private betting platform Polymarket.

It appears Public First Action has seen the writing on the wall. Last month, Miller’s name was unceremoniously stripped from the group’s online announcement. Public First Action did not respond to a request for comment about its decision.

Poindexter, a Brook Park council member, has framed himself as an untraditional congressional candidate. He has centered his experience as an ironworker in his campaign messaging, relentlessly promising to fight for Ohio’s working class and strip money out of politics. If he succeeds, Poindexter has the potential to influence AI regulations in Washington, but only time will tell if he will.

In an interview with Signal last month, Poindexter admitted he doesn’t know why the AI-affiliated PAC spent money on his race. Poindexter’s campaign manager, Thomas Dufour, told TNR that he had not made contact with Anthropic or its affiliated super PACs, and specified that none of Poindexter’s positions are influenced by campaign contributions.

“He believes that while AI has the potential to make transformational scientific breakthroughs, we need to balance that against the risks it poses—especially when it comes to workers and the safety of children,” Dufour said. “This is also an opportunity to set clear regulations around the construction and operation of data centers that put workers and our communities first, without jeopardizing our natural resources.

“That’s why he’s running for Congress in the first place, to break that cycle,” Dufour added.

A spokesperson for the Jobs and Democracy PAC, Anthony Rivera-Rodriguez, described Poindexter to Cleveland.com as “a champion for workers” as he sought to tie their respective missions together.

“Fundamentally, AI issues are worker issues,” Rivera-Rodriguez said. “As this rapidly evolving technology creates new risks for labor, we think Poindexter’s voice will be critical in the debate over how to stop AI from harming American workers.”

At his first inaugural in 1861, Abraham Lincoln warned that if we allowed the Supreme Court to rule that laws were unconstitutional, we would cease to be a democratic nation. Lincoln accepted the court’s responsibility to resolve actual disputes, like those that judges typically decide. But what he said justices could not properly do was declare laws themselves unconstitutional. In Lincoln’s view, the Dred Scott ruling in 1857 exceeded the court’s authority by invalidating the “Missouri Compromise,” federal legislation that limited slavery’s expansion. And so upon taking office in 1861, Lincoln’s Republicans defied the Supreme Court, passing a law that restricted slavery’s spread westward.

In Supremacy, Harvard Law professors Nikolas Bowie and Daphna Renan recount this history. As they remind readers, judicial authority to determine a law’s validity has no basis in the Constitution. At the 1787 Constitutional Convention, some Framers intended the Supreme Court to have this authority; others did not. Delegates were meticulous about specifying the president’s right to veto a law but could not agree that justices should have similar authority. The court itself seized this role early in the nineteenth century, and we’ve accepted it since with only weak protest.

The Constitution’s Article 1 empowers Congress to enact “necessary and proper” laws. These are not legal terms; they describe policy judgments. The 1860s amendments, guaranteeing emancipated slaves’ equality, authorized Congress to implement them with “appropriate” legislation. “Appropriate” also has no legal definition. When the Supreme Court eviscerated civil rights laws passed in the 1860s and ’70s, it merely imposed its own judgment of appropriateness—a legislative, not judicial, activity.

Supremacy supports an even more powerful constitutional clause to limit the court’s role. Quoting Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, the authors call Article 4 a “sleeping giant,” for its guarantee to every state of a “republican” form of government. The senator observed that treating all persons equally is an essential characteristic of such a system. In defining a republican form of government, the court’s expertise doesn’t exceed that of Congress.

Bowie and Renan describe the legislative and judicial branches as being on an equal plane. They label what they deem justices’ impermissible evaluation of federal legislation “horizontal review.” But the authors say that the court should properly judge the constitutionality of actions taken by lower bodies, i.e., states (“vertical review”). They acknowledge that vertical rulings may be terribly wrong but grant the court full authority to err in its vertical judgments. Because many of the court’s right-wing rulings have regarded state, not federal, laws, Supremacy’s opposition to judicial review is less radical than it may appear.

In Dobbs (2022), the court considered whether the Fourteenth Amendment permitted Mississippi to ban abortion after 15 weeks of gestation. According to the Bowie-Renan theory, the Supreme Court had the right to vertically review the law and uphold its constitutionality. If, however, interpreting the same Constitution, Congress adopted a law it considered “appropriate” prohibiting states from restricting abortion, and if Mississippi then adopted a 15-week restriction, the Supreme Court’s duty would be to enforce federal law and rule in favor of a plaintiff who challenged the state’s prohibition—regardless of the justices’ personal views about its appropriateness.

In the notorious 1905 Lochner case, the court rejected New York’s law that capped bakers’ working hours. Outraged progressives called for ending such judicial power. Bowie and Renan’s dichotomy, however, allows such vertical review. But if Congress authorized states to regulate working hours, justices would have no choice but to respect the law and rule against bakery owners who required longer workweeks than their states permitted.

No topic in our political history has generated more hypocrisy than judicial supremacy. Bowie and Renan narrate how, when justices were reactionary and canceled laws that protected African Americans, workers, women, or immigrants, progressives denounced not only the decisions’ substance but the court’s right to make them. When justices were liberal and took the opposite tack, conservatives denounced judicial supremacy.

The left has done so more frequently than the right for most of the court’s history, simply because the court has been more consistently reactionary than liberal: In 1895, the Supreme Court ruled that manufacturing monopolies could not be regulated because the Constitution didn’t define “manufacturing” as a type of “commerce.” Provoked, Eugene Debs’s Socialist Party called for the elimination of judicial review. Debs called his party the successor to Lincoln’s Republicans.

During the Lochner era, Theodore Roosevelt ran for reelection as president in 1912, calling for popular referenda to overturn Supreme Court decisions. His candidacy had the support of  prominent intellectuals like Walter Lippmann, America’s most widely read political columnist; Herbert Croly, a theorist who inspired Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism” campaign program; and Felix Frankfurter, a prominent progressive lawyer. The three soon founded The New Republic. In 1917, the magazine editorialized that the court “must be shorn of its present power of upsetting social legislation.”

When, in 1922, the court banned a federal law that restricted children’s employment, the American Federation of Labor denounced the legitimacy of judicial review. Its argument was a rare precedent for Bowie and Renan’s unusual proposal to ban judgments about federal law but permit it for state legislation. The New Republic praised the labor federation’s “sound judgment.” The Nation editorialized that “until this power of judicial veto is limited or eliminated, [we will not have] government of, for, and by the people.” Progressives in Congress argued for their right to override court decisions by majority vote.

Another backward-looking court was led in the 1920s by Chief Justice (and former President) William Howard Taft, who knew he was too old, in failing health, and no longer fit to serve. Yet, as Bowie and Renan note, he vowed not to retire to “prevent the Bolsheviki from getting control.” His was a political, not judicial, agenda.

Wisconsin Senator Robert La Follette, the 1924 presidential candidate of a new Progressive Party, complained that “sovereignty has been wrested from the people and usurped by the courts. Today, the actual ruler of the American people is the Supreme Court.” His supporters included the African American sociologist W.E.B. DuBois, the educator John Dewey, and the pioneering social worker Jane Addams, as well as many who had opposed judicial supremacy since Lochner.

In the 1950s and ’60s, when the court defended civil rights and liberties, it was reactionaries’ turn to denounce judicial supremacy. A conservative magazine, The National Review, denied that the court is “the ultimate and only constitutional arbiter,” acknowledging that it was contradicting its previous stand. Southern segregationists, whose forbears applauded a court that canceled civil rights, now sang a different tune. In 1956, almost all Southern congressmen and senators signed a “manifesto” that denounced justices “undertaking to legislate, in derogation of the authority of Congress.”

In 1939, President Franklin Roosevelt appointed Felix Frankfurter to the Supreme Court. Frankfurter was known to insist that, right or wrong, Congress had the right to enact New Deal reforms without judicial interference. When the pendulum later swung and Congress passed laws infringing on free speech, Frankfurter still insisted on judicial restraint, earning the hostility of former allies who denounced his tolerance of bad legislation.

Frankfurter’s consistency was not quite unique. In the present era, liberals, after falling in love with the court over Brown v. Board of Education, have mostly maintained their infatuation—while the court has imposed 55 years of mostly reactionary policies on affirmative action, campaign finance, environmental protection, gun possession, public health, religious practice, financial regulation, and voting rights. Although liberal scholars temper support of judicial supremacy with calls for modest reforms such as judicial term limits, none go so far as Abraham Lincoln’s unqualified rejection of judicial review.

For example, in The New York Review of Books in 2023, Harvard professor Laurence Tribe recalled the few occasions when the court endorsed progressive legislation, and the 1954–69 period when it frequently did so, to warn that “exclusive focus on the dangers of a right-wing, interventionist Court also ignores the arguably even greater risks of an autocratic president.” Yet since Dred Scott, the court has imposed liberal policies much less frequently than conservative ones. It’s created a foundation for the imperial presidency we have today.

Still, holding a slim reed that the court might occasionally restrain an authoritarian executive could seem astute, however slim that reed might be. Tribe’s most telling point is that if we consider Congress the court’s equal, wishing for court reforms is not enough. Legislators should step up and act like equals. When the court says that it can’t interfere with partisan gerrymandering, Congress could itself prohibit it. When the Supreme Court denies that reproductive choice is a right, Congress could legalize it nationwide.

If actions like these create an impasse between the judicial and legislative branches, Congress could use powers granted in the Constitution’s Article 3. It permits laws to specify that particular topics are not reviewable by the Supreme Court: for example, that justices may not consider the constitutionality of laws to prohibit partisan gerrymandering or restrict reproductive choice. Tribe calls this tactic “a cure worse than the disease.” But Bowie and Renan chronicle how, after the Civil War, the House proposed to ban any court review of laws that protected rights of former slaves; it likely would have passed in the Senate, as well, if that body’s time was not suddenly consumed by President Andrew Johnson’s impeachment trial. In our own moment, it is also unlikely that Congress will use this Article 3 power anytime soon. A House created by partisan gerrymandering and a Senate hobbled by a self-imposed filibuster rule are unlikely to assert their rights.

No other prominent legal theorists have embraced Bowie and Renan’s horizontal-vertical distinction. Would there have been less hypocrisy, perhaps even some consensus, if when justices issued mostly reactionary decisions, liberals proposed prohibiting only horizontal review of federal legislation, leaving untouched the court’s power to vertically review state laws? In rarer periods of liberal rulings, might conservatives also content themselves with rejecting horizontal review and withholding criticism of vertical judgments?

Left unaddressed in Supremacy is how we get from here to there. Judicial review of legislation has relied solely on voluntary obedience. Undoing it also requires voluntary consent. The most we can expect is continued deference to the court, with modifications like changing the number of justices to create temporary partisan advantages. Supremacy’s goal can only be to spur conversations that may, in some unforeseeable future, become relevant.

It may now be too late even for modest reforms. Abraham Lincoln’s fear has come to pass. We have an unrestrained executive whose powers rest largely on decrees of nine unelected lawyers who’ve routinely overruled policies enacted by the people’s representatives. We’ve passively accepted this judicial coup as normal.

This is a lightly edited transcript of the September 10 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: And we’re going to talk about politics in Germany. I think people probably know that the far-right party in Germany just won an election, or won about 40 percent of the vote in an election there. We’re going to talk about what that election on Sunday means, both for German politics, European politics, what this is about the United States, what this is about far-right politics. So Thomas, thanks for joining me. Great to see you again.

Thomas Zimmer: Thanks so much for having me. I’m excited to be talking about far-right extremism on this side of the Atlantic.

Bacon: On this side, yes. You and I met when you were here in the US, and you were one of the earliest and most prescient observers of what was happening in the far right here. And so I guess, first of all, AfD, because we’re talking to an American audience—talk about how is AfD, and how is it unlike kind of the Trumpian Republican Party?

Zimmer: Yeah, if you approach it as the German equivalent to MAGA, that gets you actually pretty close. It gets you very much in the correct direction. It’s make Germany great again. They definitely share the same enemies. They’re similarly fueled by this sort of sense of radicalizing grievance, right? It’s defined by this sort of resentment towards a society that has been moving away from them, right?

In a sense that this is of this desire to restore dominance over those who they deem lesser somehow. And who they deem lesser—that’s very much—or who they deem deserving, right, of a sort of a higher status in society. That’s very much racialized and gendered. It’s the grievance of predominantly white male people who are consumed by this feeling of having been deprived of their rightful place at the top.

So it’s very anti-egalitarian more than anything, anti-pluralistic. And I think it’s also, just like the MAGA movement, not at all conservative, right? In no reasonable sense of the word, in conserving, preserving, is this a conservative movement. They’re all in on radical measures. They talk about revolutionary change. They’re extremists.

And it’s best described, I think, as a kind of radical revisionism or revanchism, right? It’s defined by this idea, we need to wipe away all these developments over the past few decades that have deprived us of our rightful place at the top.

Bacon: OK, so very—and anti-immigration, anti-multicultural, all the—OK, so very similar. All right.

Zimmer: No, it’s fundamentally ethnonationalist, in the sense that they want a Germany only for what they call, quote-unquote, “biological Germans.” So you can already tell that’s where the wind is coming from with these people. There’s no subtlety here. There’s no more dog whistling with them. They’re now more openly, more aggressively embracing that sort of very openly ethnonationalist, anti-gender-egalitarianism, anti anything they call deviant behavior, right? Queer people. That all needs to go. These people need to be pushed out of the public sphere.

Again, I think, if someone wants to figure out, what is the agenda, what would Germany look like if those people actually got to be in power and got to do what they want to do? Think what MAGA wants to do to America, and it gets you pretty close. It’s not a coincidence that the AfD, they’re all big Trump fans, and the Trump government and the MAGA movement also very much AfD fans. That’s not a coincidence. It is because they’re fundamentally engaged in the same project.

Bacon: So now, what I know less about is Saxony-Anhalt. And I’m not a German expert, so you may have to pronounce it better for the audience as well. But there are 16 states in Germany, so give me a sense of that area and what it’s like, with maybe a US comparison as well.

Zimmer: Yeah. So it’s in Eastern Germany, so on the territory of the former GDR. Germany has 16 states. It’s a federal system with a lot of similarities to the American system. This is not a direct comparison, of course. But Saxony-Anhalt is a small state. It has a population of a little over two million. That’s about the ballpark of Nebraska, or New Mexico, or Idaho, right? That sort of thing. It’s also been, for quite some time, a stronghold of the far right in Germany.

So this was a state election for the state parliament, which also is for the control of the state government, because this is a parliamentary system. If you get the majority of seats in the state parliament, you get to be the state government. So they barely missed out on an outright majority of seats. They got about 44 percent of the vote, which is exactly as much as all the democratic, small-D democratic parties together, right?

What you have now in the incoming parliament, state parliament, is a sort of stalemate situation. No one has an outright majority. The AfD is three seats shy of an outright majority. None of the democratic parties—so this is a multi-party system. You have a conservative party, a green party, a social democratic party, a more what you might call a democratic socialist party. And then all of these parties together are exactly as strong as the AfD.

And then there’s a weird sort of kingmaker faction. It’s called the BSW, which is an offshoot of the sort of democratic socialists to an even pretty extreme far left kind of position. But mostly defined by a kind of grievance towards the liberal system, towards the mainstream. And they’re very pro-Russia, which the AfD is also. They’re all Putin fans.

And they have five seats. So the most likely scenario, if the AfD is to manage—if they manage to get a majority of the seats, they probably get it by getting two or three of those far left candidates to actually support them. But that is all very much up in the air. So the immediate sort of political ramifications of this are, it’s a very volatile situation, and honestly, no one knows exactly what’s going to happen there.

Bacon: So this is going to sex me a little bit, just in terms of what it’s like. I guess I’ve read, even though the population is fairly anti-immigrant, it actually has a fairly low immigrant population. It’s working class. Or is it, in terms of, is it like the places in the US that have been drawn to Trump, in terms of being economically struggling, more white, less educated? Does it have some of those same demographic and economic characteristics as the places in the US that have been drawn to Trumpism?

Zimmer: Yeah. So, it’s definitely, you might say, economically struggling, low growth, a relatively high unemployment, relatively old population, and so the population is shrinking. So a lot of young people, especially, are moving away from the state.

That already sounds quite a bit like—and then also, even more so if you look at the characteristics of who actually voted for the AfD in this—this was a very high turnout election, by the way, like almost 80 percent turnout, so this is very high turnout. And the AfD has managed to mobilize among people who have previously been non-voters far more than the democratic parties. Once again, that is sort of what Trump also managed to do, right?

And the social profile is—got to be careful with this, this is mostly still based on exit polls. Exit polls in Germany are a little more reliable than American exit polls, generally speaking. But still, it’s exit polls, which means it’s self-assessments mostly, right? So, careful. But it aligns with what we know from other elections across Germany.

Relatively high support among people who describe themselves as workers, so working class. Significantly higher among non-college educated, stronger among men than women, stronger in rural areas than in urban areas. So yeah, a lot of similarities to the profile of what we think of as the sort of core Trump supporters, or the people who vote Trump. Definitely in this sort of 2024 coalition, yeah.

Bacon: So the next federal elections to decide who runs the government in Germany are not till 2029, correct?

Zimmer: Yeah, if the current coalition holds up until then. Because this current coalition government is a coalition between the conservatives and the social democrats, and the conservatives are in charge. So the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, is a conservative from the Conservative Party, so Angela Merkel’s party, right? And the chancellor is remarkably unpopular, right? No one likes him.

Absolutely no one likes him, and he’s been doing an absolutely terrible job. Not just in terms of actual policy—in terms of, he himself has proven remarkably struggling with the job of being chancellor, including the politics of it, right? Just communicating with people. So no one likes him.

And this, of course, is more than anything—the strong result of the AfD is the result of a disastrous result of the Conservative Party. The Conservative Party, compared to four years ago in Saxony-Anhalt, has lost over half of its voters. So it’s shrunk to, I think, 17 or so percent in Saxony-Anhalt. That is a disaster for the Conservative Party.

In the next state election, also in East Germany, that’s coming up 10 days from now, the Conservatives are polling at 6 percent. This is supposed to be Germany’s by far strongest, biggest party, and they’re just being decimated. And mostly decimated because, like I said, the AfD were very successful mobilizing among non-voters, and the other sort of big reservoir of voters that they’ve tapped into is conservative voters moving to the far right.

And so there is a lot of talk right now about maybe the Conservatives just also need a change at the top. And that might mean that—who knows—but that also might mean that this federal government, I would not bet a lot of money on them actually making it through the end of this regular term. But yeah, you’re right. If they go through the end of the term, it wouldn’t be until 2029.

Bacon: This is also a US equivalent, in that some of the people I know who write about European politics, what they argue is that you’re seeing the mainstream Conservative party, like in Britain, lose votes to the far-right party. And in the US, what happened was the sort of Mitch McConnell—since we only have two parties—the Mitch McConnell wing sort of lost votes to the Trump wing. But to say, if we had four parties, you’d probably see a similar kind of pattern.

Zimmer: I think that’s exactly right. This is both a key parallel and a key difference between either side of the Atlantic. So what happened in the United States is basically a far right faction managed to take over the Republican Party from within, right? Move to the center of power within the Republican Party. Whereas in Germany, what you saw was, basically when the AfD was founded in 2013, you had the right wing of the Conservative Party splitting away from the Conservative Party. They founded their own party.

And so it’s as if you had—it’s as if Trump came down the golden escalator in 2015 and had said, “Hey, I’m actually not going to run as the Republican presidential nominee. I’m going to do my own party. We’re calling it the MAGA party,” and that’s what’s happening. Which, of course, in the American system doesn’t make sense, because of the political system. But the German system, because it is a multi-party system, a representative system—so basically it means if you get 10 percent of the vote, you get 10 percent of seats in parliament, right?

So you don’t have to win your district outright. And so in this sort of representative system, smaller parties make sense, or it makes sense for smaller parties to do their own thing, which is why Germany has this sort of multi-party system. And that’s what happened, right? We basically have a separate MAGA party, instead of this faction, this wing or this coalition, attempting to take over the Conservative Party from within.

Bacon: Now, the good thing in Germany has been, up to now, is none of the other parties will work with AfD. So they can’t be part of a coalition, because the center-right party and all the other parties have—and talk about why that’s happened, where the center-right party will not work with them. Which is not—if the McConnell faction had stopped working with Trump, we would never be here. So the Germans did something different than the US did, right?

Zimmer: Yeah. No, absolutely. So far, in Germany, this has been discussed under the term firewall. It’s, we’re holding the firewall against the far right. And so far, you have to say Germany is more or less the only country in Europe where the other parties of the mainstream, broadly speaking, have so far refused to work with and cooperate with the far right.

Everywhere else, this sort of firewall has already fallen. Sometimes it has fallen long ago. France, Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands, Italy, wherever, right? Everywhere, basically, usually the mainstream conservative parties have given themselves permission to work with the far-right parties.

That has not happened so far in Germany. The reasons for that are mostly historical. Coming out of the Second World War and the Nazi dictatorship, it became the sort of foundational national myth, right? The foundational myth of national identity in post-war, first West Germany, and then after reunification in 1990, of this sort of reunified Germany, has been this thing that, OK, we cannot let that happen ever again, right?

We’re going to draw a very strong line here, and we’ll keep those people, we’ll not normalize them, we’ll not make them respectable. And again, this was always more of a sort of elite consensus, elite political, elite sort of published opinion sort of consensus. It was never a broadly shared, everyone, the entire population on board. That’s not the case. But it was, until recently, a fairly clearly shared elite consensus in Germany.

But I think what’s happened here—and this is why what is happening now, and even though this is just a small state, Saxony-Anhalt, you could say, like, in a vacuum, you could say, “Who cares?” This is half the size of Berlin in terms of population. But first of all, the AfD is now strong everywhere. It is still much stronger in the east, in the former GDR, than nationally. But even nationally, it got almost 21 percent in the last federal election a year and a half ago. It is now polling at around 30 percent, as clearly the strongest party, even nationally.

And this is such a fundamental sort of assault on the foundational myth that post-war Germany was building its national identity around, which was precisely this idea that, OK, this will not happen here again, because we have supposedly learned our lessons from Nazism, and by learning our lessons and educating the population, whatever, we have immunized ourselves against right-wing extremism. Clearly that’s not true. Obviously, that is not true.

And so I think, regardless of whether or not the AfD will manage to take over the state government in Saxony-Anhalt, the most immediate implication of what happened here is that the AfD has broken containment, right? It’s now fully normalized. There’s no more shame. There’s no taboo around voting for them in a significant part of the German population. So whatever was still left of a kind of anti-fascist consensus is just out the window.

Bacon: OK. So in other words, you think AfD could eventually win a federal election in Germany?

Zimmer: I do not see them, not in the sort of near or medium term, win an outright majority in a national election. So 50 percent plus, I don’t think that is—again, like I said, they’re currently polling at around 30 percent nationally. So you still have, if you turn this around, you could still say there’s 70 percent of the population opposing them still, right?

But I think—and again, this is something that 10 years ago or so, very few people would have said this, but now it seems very clear, without a question to me, the by far the most likely scenario is that the AfD will emerge as the strongest party nationally in whenever the next national election is. I don’t see any way around this.

It will clearly remain by far the strongest party in all of Eastern Germany, so the five East German states. There’s no question about it, that it is currently polling at around 45 percent in the territory of the former GDR. That is basically wiping away—again, remember, this is not like, when I say they’re currently polling at 45 percent, that doesn’t mean there’s a second party that is polling at around the same kind of number.

Bacon: There’s many parties.

Zimmer: The other half is split up in five, six parties, right? So the second strongest party right now is polling at around below 20 percent, right? And yeah, no, they’re by far the strongest party right now. And the question then becomes, at what point will this sort of firewall thing—it’s already being discussed as, oh, it didn’t work, and not only did it not work, maybe it’s actually making them stronger.

And here, this is precisely the kind of discussion that the United States had after the 2024 election. This general sort of intellectual and political climate that is going all in on accommodating, acquiescing, right? Or, maybe we just need to stop being so mean to them. If the people want us to work with them, we should work with them. So you have all the sort of normalizing, accommodating discourses that are going into overdrive right now.

Bacon: Let me ask maybe something to come back to. First of all, you agree with the firewall. That’s what you think should be the case. Don’t work with AfD is the right approach, and what the US should have done.

Zimmer: I generally very much think, do not normalize far-right extremism. Do not make them respectable. And I 100 percent think—and also, by the way, this is borne out by actual research. We have mountains of research from the past 15 years or so from every, quote-unquote, “Western country,” right? From political scientists and sociologists and whatever, who look at, does it actually work to ostracize far-right extremism, right? Or does it only make them stronger, because it plays into their sort of victim mentality, or it allows them to play the victim, blah, blah, blah, right?

The overwhelming consensus in these empirical studies is, no, it actually does work, right? It is better to ostracize them, keep them contained, do not normalize them, do not make them respectable. Try to uphold these sort of taboos around voting for, supporting far-right extremism. But unfortunately, that is just not what our political leaders on either side of the—

Bacon: Let me just stop you. You kind of paused when I asked, do you support the firewall. Was there some reason? I just want to make sure I understood. Something to do with understanding firewall?

Zimmer: No, you’re right. I only paused because the term itself has become such a—it’s not even clear what people mean by this anymore, right? To me, it always meant, firewall means we are trying to keep far-right extremism from exerting political power, by refusing to go into coalitions with them, right? Because again, like, Germany needs—if you want control of any sort of state or national government, you need a coalition, right? No one gets 50-plus percent of the vote.

The why I would say the firewall actually worked is to say, it kept them from exerting power, right? They have not been able to take over a state government or the national government. So it is about harm prevention, right? It’s about preventing harm, right? So to me, that means it worked.

But the way people are now discussing it is more, oh, but is it about, should we still treat them as, like, extremists, or should we treat them as, like, a normal part of the political spectrum? And again, I just want to say, the problem with the firewall thinking—the biggest problem is that the ideas of the far right, ideas and policies and positions, there was no firewall around those. I wish there had been, right? So I only hesitated because, to some extent, this discussion is long over. We can still pretend we have a firewall, and in terms of narrowly defined cooperating with them, yes. But all their positions, like all the anti-immigration stuff, has been completely adopted by the Conservative Party, even by the Social Democrats.

It is the consensus among most of the sort of center in Germany that, oh yeah, no, immigration is the biggest threat and problem and whatever, and there’s a very strong anti-immigration policy being enacted by this current conservative social democrat coalition already. So the problem is that their positions and their sort of ideology has already been normalized to the point where, does it even make sense to pretend we’re even having a firewall? That’s the problem.

Bacon: Let me ask—I’m going to jump to where you’re headed, but I want to ask the question. Both in the US, in Europe, in Germany, what do you think are the roots of why the far right is growing in popularity? You can start about Germany, you can talk about America. What is the root of why they’re doing better? Why, the last decade, are they growing in support?

Zimmer: So, fundamentally, I think we’re basically having the same struggle or conflict on both sides of the Atlantic. It’s a conflict between two fundamentally incompatible ideas of how we should organize society, how we should organize—who should be allowed to be part of our societies? Is it a pluralistic sort of egalitarian democratic society, right, where people should be able to be part of society, and power and status should not be distributed along racial and gender lines and according to wealth and religion? But no, regardless of all that, we’re having a pluralistic, egalitarian kind of thing.

And then on the other side, you have people who refuse this, and not only don’t like it, but think this is the downfall of Western civilization or whatever they call it, and they cling to this sort of ethnonationalist understanding of, no, we have to have these sort of racially defined national communities, and they have to be organized along lines of race, gender, religion, and wealth, with strict hierarchies. Strict hierarchies of race, gender, religion, and wealth, and everything else is, again, the sort of the destruction of Western civilization.

And I think the reason why this conflict has radicalized so much is that, over the past few decades, all our societies, both in North America and in Western Europe specifically, have moved away significantly from this sort of ethnonationalist understanding of white Christian societies and the sort of strict hierarchies of race and gender.

We have become—and I mean we, because it really is on both sides of the Atlantic—we have become significantly less white, significantly less Christian by self-description, by self-assessment. We’ve become, in that sense, more liberal and significantly more pluralistic, mostly for demographic reasons, right? And I think a lot of people find this threatening or dangerous, or they reject it for whatever reason. And I think that is the foundational conflict.

And on top of that, and that is very unfortunate, we’re having right now a significant sort of anti-system resentment building up across the political spectrum. This is not just a right-wing thing, obviously, right? A very strong sense across the political spectrum that the status quo is not working anymore, right? That those who are in charge politically are not finding answers to the challenges that we are facing that in any way commensurate with the problem.

So it’s this strong sort of anti-system, anti-status quo resentment building up. And I think the reason why this is helping those far-right people with their sort of ethnonationalist idea of what we should do and what our society should look like, is that they are offering something that is first and foremost wiping away the status quo, right? They’re not offering just reform, or defend the system, or defend the institutions, none of that, right? It’s not status quo politics. What they are offering is this sort of revolutionary uprising against the status quo.

And I think, unfortunately, that is quite attractive even for people who might not, ideologically speaking, be fully on board with their sort of ethnonationalist vision of what the society should look like in the end, right? But who probably think, “OK, anything is better than just conserving the status quo.” And so I think it opens up a kind of reservoir of voters for them that is just frustrated with the status quo.

And I think that is what happened in 2024 with Trump, right? Half of his voters were all in on sort of the white nationalism and the proper Trumpism, and then the other half was like, This sucks. This system sucks. It’s not working for me. The status quo is not working, and who cares? So that sort of thing. And I think those two things are coming together here.

Bacon: Let me lead with the first one I want to ask about, because I think this is the one that we have so much trouble with in the US. You talked about basically—you didn’t use the words demographic change, but this idea that, both in Europe and in the United States, women are in the workplace, and more Muslims, and that kind of thing. That gets cast as, you’re calling them all racist, and that’s not exactly what you’re saying. But you think the fundamental conflict here is—what you led with is about this sort of, like, the cultural change.

This is the sort of moving from a white Christian male-dominated society to something more egalitarian. You think that’s the sort of conflict that is driving all of this, and the far right has tapped into resentments about that change. That’s what you led with. That’s a very important part of this, you think. This is not just about economics, in other words.

Zimmer: Oh, look, I think we need to be clear. What is the exact question we’re trying to answer, right? If you asked me, “How do we explain a specific election result?” Like, how do we explain the 2024 election?

Bacon: Yeah, I’m asking the broader question, yes.

Zimmer: No, but I know you are getting the different—yeah. But I think those two get often conflated, right? Because if the question is more specifically, how do we explain the 2024 election result in the United States, then we know, beyond sort of any reasonable doubt, that was driven a lot by relatively minor shifts among a relatively small part of the electorate, and that part of the electorate was mostly frustrated with, the prices are too high, and inflation, and that sort of thing. And that then had massive political ramifications.

But you’re not asking—and that’s important, I think—you’re not narrowing it down to just an election result. You’re asking me, what is the fundamental conflict, and why is it that in this particular situation, we have on either side of the Atlantic these openly ethnonationalist, right-wing, sort of authoritarian parties that are rising and becoming stronger. And honestly, I don’t want to be too flip about this, but I’m getting a little tired with the mental gymnastics that are necessary to look at the situation, right, and make it into something other than what it looks like.

Because what it looks like—I’ll give you one specific example. There was a very, I think, revealing question in these exit polls on Sunday in this Saxony-Anhalt election, where people were asked, do you feel like you’re getting what you deserve in Germany, or less than you deserve, or more than you deserve? And the voters who said, “I’m getting less than I deserve,” the AfD got most of those people, right?

And so, to look at this and say, Oh, they probably mean wages or social security, or they don’t know how to pay the rent—no. They didn’t say that, because they were also asked those questions, but that’s not what they said. They said, “I don’t get what I deserve.” And the deserving—who’s deserving? That is the question. And this who is deserving is so clearly defined in racial, and gendered, and sort of ethnic terms, right?

Why do they gravitate towards the AfD or towards MAGA? Because these parties or these movements are offering them an idea of, Hey, you deserve better, because you are a true German, or a real American, or an authentic American, all these terms that these people are using, right? And so they think, Yeah, no, I deserve—because I am a, quote-unquote, real German, I should be at the top of this society, and not just in politics, but in the family, in the workplace, in the public square. Why do I have to, quote-unquote, “share” my country with all these undeserving others, who are then again these racialized and gendered sort of categories.

And I think, again, that to me is why are we not—usually when you are faced with a sort of an important question in life, and there is a very clear, pretty obvious answer that seems to be explaining the things, that should be our default assumption. Rather than saying, “Oh, it clearly looks like this has something to do with race and gender and ethnonationalism, but how about we do all these mental gymnastics to find other ways to make it look like something else?”

Bacon: So when you and I met in 2019, 2020, what you were saying about the sort of racial, cultural dynamics of Trump was obvious and everyone agreed upon. Right now, I think that has become more debated. What I see as the reactions to the rise of the far right are two reactions. One, what I saw in Britain with the Labour Party, what I’m seeing in Germany, is the sense that, OK, this is about race and culture and so on, so we need to crack down on immigration. So you’re seeing the center-left and center-right parties crack down on immigration. So that’s one reaction, which is almost saying, “We’re the problem. We need to move to the right on immigration.”

The second reaction is in the sort of left-wing populist parties—I’ll say the sort of Zohran Mamdani, Bernie Sanders wing in the US—which is to say, “This is really about economics, and if we just have a more populist economics program, that’ll take the energy out of the far right.” I’m guessing you have some concerns about both these approaches. Can you talk about why neither one of them was probably likely to work?

Zimmer: It’s remarkable to me that after the Keir Starmer debacle in Britain, where you had a Labour government that went all in on adopting far-right positions on immigration, right? Properly all in, far more—

Bacon: And transgender issues as well, but yes.

Zimmer: Yeah, but I’m taking sort of immigration as the most salient issue. Going all in on this, far more than what the Democratic Party has done. And it didn’t work.

Now, that is not surprising if you read anything from any sort of political scientist, sociologist, whatever. Again, we have a mountain of evidence that adopting these far-right positions on immigration and on any other sort of, quote-unquote, “culture war issue,” and adopting their framing—the effect of that is, you’re not gaining back voters from them.

Because A, voters will generally see this as merely a tactical adjustment. They will not believe you, right? B, you are constantly legitimizing and normalizing this sort of framing of the problem. If the Labour Party in Britain constantly tells the people, Oh yeah, no, the far right is correct. Immigration is this great threat. It is the biggest problem that we’re facing, then people do not vote for the Labour Party. They vote for that party that says, We are the answer to this, the far right, these sort of ethnonationalists.

And so the only thing you’re doing is you’re shifting the entire discourse to the right by adopting their frameworks and their answers to the problem, and you’re shooting yourself in the foot.

Again, we have 15 years at least of mountains of evidence of why this sort of normalizing doesn’t work. It is absolutely remarkable that anyone is still even considering it. It is stupid. And I’m not even saying it is morally abhorrent, right? Or normatively—which I also think it’s normatively wrong, or morally. But that’s not even what I’m talking about. I’m talking about, as electoral politics, it is a disaster, and it doesn’t work, and yet everyone thinks, “Got to do it.”

Bacon: As far as I can tell, the governing party in Germany, their solution is going to be, and they’re going to move to the right more, right? That’s what they’re going to do. All indications are that’s what they’re going to do.

Zimmer: That’s already what they’ve been doing since they came into power in early 2025. Immigration is way down in Germany. And we’re not just talking illegal immigration. Like, asylum has basically been cracked down on. It’s gotten way more difficult. They’re already doing all this, right? And it’s not working. It’s just clearly not working, right?

OK, so that’s the one thing. And then on the economics front, I want to be clear. My point is not to say, there is no economic deprivation, or social and economic deprivation has no role in this story, that has nothing to do with it. No, it’s not helpful. It doesn’t help if people are generally thinking the system doesn’t work for them because they’re under too much sort of social, economic, financial, whatever pressure, right?

Again, there is this general sense of resentment towards the system, and clearly that is something that the far right, with this sort of promise to wipe away the status quo, can tap into. And so it’s not good if we have this sort of general sense of resentment. And to the extent we can fight that with a different sort of more egalitarian—that’s my position, right—economic policy, I am all for it. I am all for it. I’m all for redistributing wealth downward, right? And sharing that more equally. I’m all for it.

I just think, we have, again, all these studies that tell us, for instance, about, where is the support, who are the people who supported the Tea Party? Who are the people who are hardcore Trump? And then sometimes people will say, Yeah, but isn’t it true that a lot of that support comes from poorer regions in the United States, regions that are economically struggling?

Yes, but we also have studies that show us pretty clearly that within those, generally speaking, economically struggling regions, it’s not the poor, it’s not those who are really devastated, who are gravitating towards the far right. It’s those who are, relatively speaking, within those regions, relatively well off, and fear for the loss of status.

So that is just not the same as saying it’s the poor, and those who are really struggling, they don’t know how to pay the next rent. That is not the core support group for Trumpism. So we have to at some point just accept, that’s not what’s happening here.

Bacon: So part of what I think is going on is, the analysis you’ve given about the Trump supporters, even if you read that pretty well—the far right supporters are not poor people. They’re people who fear a loss of status. I assume as a politician you can’t say that out loud, because you’re not going to win their votes then. So I think part of what’s going on is, politicians, even the ones who probably have read these studies, probably can’t discuss what is the actual root of the far right. Is people resenting changes that make minorities and women and so on more powerful? That gets close to the Hillary Clinton thing.

And so I think part of it is, our analysis is harmed by politicians who can’t speak honestly about this stuff, and then pundits and so on who are playing politician and want to discuss these things dishonestly in a certain way. Does Ezra Klein really think Charlie Kirk is doing politics in the best way possible? I doubt it.

I just think there’s a lot of performance that’s going on here. Is it fair to say—I think these analyses have been read. It’s not clear to me politicians can speak honestly about the conclusion that what is driving the far right is this kind of cultural resentment.

Zimmer: I think there’s a few things coming together helping us explain why these sort of economic anxiety—that’s the thing, right? And everything else is downstream from that. All the racial stuff, and all the cultural resentment, and all the—that’s all downstream from what is at its core an economic anxiety. That sort of story, right?

Bacon: Despite, as you say, reams of evidence that the cultural anxiety is a huge part of the story. Despite that, people want to write that away.

Zimmer: At the very least, we have to see this far more holistically. As not, there is this one core issue and everything else is downstream from that. Far more holistically—which, by the way, is one of the big advantages the far right has, because they have a holistic sort of understanding of it. If you ask the far right, Hey, are you guys all about race, or gender, or religion, or is it wealth? they will just say, Yes, Exactly, right? Because they see this as, like, yeah, look, it’s about all of those dimensions. And so we would be much better served with coming up with an equally holistic sort of understanding of the problem.

But I think the question, why is this sort of economic anxiety tale so attractive, why are people clinging to that despite, again, empirically it just doesn’t work. First of all, I think there’s just this sort of enormous incentive to sanitize the discourse, and sanitize these sort of political choices of people who are coded as, quote-unquote, “regular folks.” And that’s sort of white people, right? That’s white conservative people.

We are constantly asked to come up with explanations of what they’re doing politically that sort of preserve their innocence, right? There’s this sort of idea of white innocence, right? And, by the way, this is not a new thing. When David Duke in the early ‘90s was close to winning a governorship in Louisiana, the next day what you read in the Los Angeles Times was, Oh, goodness me, economic anxiety must really be quite pressing in Louis— That sort of thing, right? It’s always been like that, right? Sort of this sanitizing thing.

And the other thing is also, I think, what you touched on, is—look, this is a coping mechanism, in the sense that if it were economic anxiety, then we would have a recipe to fight that, a political answer, right? We would say, “OK, you can fight this with a different distribution of wealth,” right? Redistributive policies can answer this and solve the problem. And that is just—honestly, that is almost a soothing kind of thought.

Rather than accept—and that would be my position—accept that, unfortunately, a significant portion of the people around us are simply not on board with this idea of an egalitarian pluralistic democracy, and that is a fight that you cannot hug away. You cannot find the right tone, and then they will be all, OK, we get it now. You can’t just—I don’t know. Again, you can’t just solve it with just economic policy. But then what do you do?

And at that point, I have to admit, me personally, I have to admit, I don’t know. Other than, you have to fight the fight, right? You have to accept you are in this fight, and you have to fight it and win it. But that is a far less attractive sort of message.

Bacon: I was going to ask, the next is, so what is the Thomas Zimmer plan to fight the far right? It’s not to talk about economics only in a sort of Bernie Sanders 2016 way. It’s not to move to the right on immigration or trans rights. So what would that kind of—you don’t have to have a full platform, but give me a sense of, what does this look like? And not as candidates, but what does a society—because I think a lot of your work is like, what does a media—I think part of it is, it’s not just Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or Angela Merkel.

I think we’re putting too much on this one candidate, or one person. What does a society look like that’s trying to stop the far right from growing and entrench multiracial democracy? What does that look like? What does a plan to do that look like?

Zimmer: Yeah, again, I’m just glad I’m not a politician. But yeah, I think, so first of all, we need to stop pandering to the supposed needs and whims of these far-right voters. And so centering everything around what they may or may not want, it’s just not working. We need to break out of this vicious cycle of, right-wing parties are rising, that leads to democratic, small-D democratic parties adopting their framings and ideas, especially on migration and trans issues and whatever, and then that only helps the right. And in reaction, democratic parties double down. And we need to break out of this cycle. It doesn’t work.

What we need is, I think, any sort of progressive egalitarian democratic vision—you need your own agenda, and it cannot be just defend the system, defend the institutions, defend the status quo. I think what is very clear to me is that any sort of clinging to any kind of status quo politics is just not going to work. I think it’s also entirely inadequate as a response to the problems that we’re facing.

So substantively, it’s also the wrong thing to do. But we’re talking even in terms of just strategically, electorally, right? And I think, to me, again, one big advantage the right has is that they are pursuing what I would call a transformative vision, right? They do not want to just preserve—

Bacon: And you would say Labour, the Christian Democrats, the Democrats in the US are all doing some status quo-like politics. That’s part of the problem. They might debate that, but they, in general, come off to people like status quo parties.

Zimmer: Yes, I think so. I think they have, in response to the far right assault, unfortunately, I would say, accepted the role of defenders of the system, defenders of the status quo. And that, by the way, that also very much includes the Green Party in Germany, for instance, supposedly a progressive party, right? This is, I think, most likely the equivalent to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. That would be sort of the Green Party in Germany, right? They’ve all accepted, oh, we can’t do transformative politics right now, right? Because we are in a crisis. We’re in this crisis of liberal democracy, so we have to defend the system, right?

And it’s just not working. Again, you need a transformative vision. You need something that does not just promise to restore the status quo from before Trump or whatever, right? Because no one wants that. That, I think, is to me also the lesson from the Democratic primaries in the United States. I do not read the sort of relatively strong support for DSA candidates, or pretty sort of left-wing candidates, or DSA adjacent candidates—I do not read this as a pervasive longing for the party to move significantly to the left.

I read it as a pervasive longing for candidates who will just not do status quo politics, who can be trusted to pursue a transformative vision, right? To just move beyond the status quo. Not necessarily in a kind of far left kind of a sense, but in a, defending the status quo is not good enough. A political project that is just centered around the restoration of, or defending the system and restoring the status quo before, right—I think that is destined to fail. It’s just incapable of winning elections.

Bacon: That seems obvious. What about the sort of economic bit of, OK, if the transformative thing is basically only economics, I’m going to expand Medicare for All. Is that more transformative? I agree the status quo is not working, but is a political program that’s very economics-only focused, but I’m going to make everything free and so on—is that going to help?

Zimmer: Again, this is not a magic bullet to solve, like, right-wing extremism, right? I think we need to very quickly move away from that sort of—because again, look at what’s happening over here in Western Europe. Every single one of these Western European countries, aside from the UK, has a significantly stronger social welfare net than the United States. It doesn’t matter.

There’s no correlation whatsoever across Northern and Western Europe between the strength of the social welfare net and the strength of the right-wing parties. There’s no correlation whatsoever. You have countries with super strong social welfare systems, like the Scandinavian countries, and yet the far right over there is also basically as strong as anywhere. Like, polling at 25 to 30 percent, whatever, right? And sometimes they get more and sometimes they get less, but roughly speaking, they have gotten stronger and stronger.

Bacon: And by the way, there are countries in Western Europe that already have the Bernie Sanders economic plan, has already been implemented basically, and the far right—OK, I hadn’t really—I’m glad you put it that way.

Zimmer: It’s simply not a magic bullet, right? It’s simply not a magic bullet. But yes, a transformative vision must very much also mean a socioeconomically transformative vision, but it must mean more than that. Also transformative in the sense that, why are we not having a strong sort of political leadership that says, You know what? Yes, we are the party of pluralism. Of cultural, social, ethnic, racial pluralism, and that is our vision. Yes, that is the offer we are making to you, the electorate.

We’re not just offering you anti-immigration policy light. We’re not just offering you a kind of ethno state light. Because that offer is already out there, right? That’s already on offer, if you want that.

Bacon: So in the US, I think people think Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris offered a muscular multi—and I would argue they offered status quo with different race and gender, but the sort of strong, robust defense of a new multicultural world, I would argue Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris did not articulate. But I think that’s why in the US, I think people feel like that vision has been rejected. I would argue it’s not been articulated yet. But go ahead.

Zimmer: It’s not being rejected. Again, I think in the United States, if you look at the actual empirical evidence we have from, like, really good survey data, right? Something like what PRRI does every year, right, where they ask deeper questions, not just do you like Trump or not, but proper questions like, hey, should America be a pluralistic, multiracial democracy, or should it be a white Christian nation? And very clearly you see a stable majority of the population, somewhere between 60-ish percent or so, that say, No, we don’t want America as a white Christian nation. That’s not what it is supposed to be. It’s supposed to be a pluralistic country where people can come, and if they agree with sort of the egalitarian idea, then they can come and be here with us.

Again, not saying this is any sort of magic bullet, but can we please have a little more of a robust sort of a kind of muscular defense of that sort of vision, rather than an almost, like, Oh, yeah, no, so sorry, I also feel bad about being a Democrat right now. I also feel bad about being progressive. I also feel really— Almost like a sort of almost apologizing constantly for not being a sort of white conservative Christian. What are we doing here? That offer is already out there, right?

Bacon: I think the word woke is used almost to attack that kind of view that you’re expressing, right? I think that’s what that word is coming to mean, is, like, someone who cares too much about inclusion and so on. I think that’s what that has come to. It’s become a pejorative almost.

Zimmer: I think, to me, in the United States especially, people who prefer to live in a multiracial, pluralistic, gender egalitarian democracy should, with a lot of force and courage, tap into the national myth that has always been—hey, it says all men are created equal. It’s literally sort of the country’s founding, almost like a religious sort of status document. Let’s just say, look, we all know it’s never been realized in any serious way, but it’s also always been a very strong something to refer to, something that people could refer to as a sort of foundational myth.

Why do we let the far right—the same in Germany, by the way—why do we let the far right pretend that they are representing the national mythos, right? They are the ones who are the guardians of the nation, and what the real nation is supposed to—instead of saying, no, in the United States, right from the start, there was this other egalitarian idea. An outrageous idea, by the way. It’s remarkable. We’ve never had it.

In world history, it would literally be the first time, right? First time in world history that you would actually create a society where the status of the individual would no longer be determined to a significant degree by race, gender, religion, or wealth. We’ve never tried this anywhere in any country in the world, right? So what a remarkable vision that is.

And again, I do not—if you look at the voting public on either side of the Atlantic, it doesn’t seem like people want a kind of ethnonationalism light. That is just very clearly electorally not working. So if the choice is, you could either move from ethnonationalism light to full on ethnonationalism, or you got to offer something else, right? A sort of robust defense of a transformative multiracial egalitarian vision—then why don’t we try this? Again, it’s remarkable to me. Keir Starmer—we should be grateful to him. He tried. It’s almost as if he said, Hey, guys, look, we’re going to do this. This is the experiment. I’m going to—

Bacon: We’re going to run the populism experiment in the UK. We’re going to let the UK do it. The US can just watch it. He literally followed the David Shor playbook to a T. So it’s amazing how unpopular he was.

Zimmer: I don’t know how many more times we need—how much more evidence, right? But I wanted to bring this back to the German case one more time. Again, this current German government, right, is doing the same stuff. Is all in on a very harsh sort of immigration restrictionist approach.

And the Conservative Party that is leading the German government right now is basically being decimated by the far right in response. So if the approach actually is, Oh, hey, if only we reduce immigration, then this problem goes away—OK, we’ve tried this several times in many countries over about a 15-year period.

At some point, can we at least—you know what really bugs me is when people pretend to be dumb. I just don’t want to play dumb. It bugs me, right? If someone wants to do something else, OK, but don’t expect me to play dumb and not look at the actual evidence we have. I don’t like that very much. It makes me angry. So let’s not do that, right? It’s been tried. It doesn’t work. We need to try something else.

Bacon: I think that’s a great place to end, actually. Thomas Zimmer, thanks for joining me. It sounds like there’s another state that’s having an election in East Germany in 10 days, so we might have to come back and have this same conversation, or a similar one.

Zimmer: The situation is slightly different, in the sense that over there, there’s currently a social democratic state government.

Bacon: What’s the name of the state? Sorry to interrupt you. What’s the name of the state?

Zimmer: It’s called Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. It’s in the northeast of Germany, at the Baltic Sea. And the AfD is again polling as the strongest party. But something interesting is happening there, in the sense that the Social Democrats have decided in that state, Hey, how about we tap into our sort of anti-fascist roots? Social Democrats were, in the early Nazi period, the ones who led the resistance against Nazism, right? And so they’re tapping into this, and basically saying, Hey, listen, the most anti-fascist sort of force in German history has always been Social Democrats. Come over here. We’ll prevent them from taking over state government.

So they’re running that sort of experiment, right? Rather than normalizing, which is what the conservatives tried in Saxony-Anhalt, the sort of, Oh, who knows? Maybe they’re not so bad. And if so many people vote for them, can they really be that bad? That sort of normalizing discourse. The Social Democrats are trying something very different in that other state. Let’s see if it works or not.

But I think Germany is looking at a series of elections, just like Western Europe is looking at a series of elections over the next few months, where my general sense is, unfortunately, that the far right is just so strong now, and it has broken containment. That to me is the biggest challenge, right? Is, how do you contain them again? And I don’t just mean politically, I also mean in terms of political culture. How do we make it not OK again to vote for far-right extremists? That to me is maybe the bigger challenge.

In the United States also, Perry, you’ve seen that so many times. You go to the airport, right? And you wait for boarding, and next to you sits some guy in, let’s say, a white middle-aged person, right, with some T-shirt that says, Hey, make leftists disappear again. And it’s like a silhouette of a helicopter, right? And it’s a reference to the Pinochet regime in Chile, where they put all the dissidents on helicopters and threw them out of the helicopters or the airplanes, right? This sort of thing, right?

We need to make that not OK again, because it’s not OK. We live in a society, and to put on a T-shirt that basically is an immediate violent threat to half the population—that is basically running around in the airport with a T-shirt that says to half the population, If you disagree with me, I want you to be thrown out of a helicopter, right? This sort of almost, quote-unquote, “playful” endorsement of political violence. We need to make that not OK again, because it’s not OK, right?

And that is what I am really concerned about. How can we contain that again? How can we rebuild these sort of boundaries around that sort of behavior, that goes far beyond just winning elections, but goes to a kind of social consensus, right? That sort of behavior is not OK, and it needs to be ostracized, and you need to be ostracized from mainstream society if you are a person running around in a T-shirt like that. And that is, I think, where we need to get back to.

Bacon: Let’s end there. Tell people where they can find your work and how they can support your work. And I know you have a great newsletter you’re working on right now, so talk about that a little bit, and also talk about what social media you’re using these days.

Zimmer: Yeah, I’m mostly using Bluesky. You’ll find me there under my name. So, mostly Bluesky. And then I write a newsletter called Democracy Americana, where every week I try to go big picture and put into perspective what just happened in the news. It used to be very much focused on the American far right and sort of American conservatism. And now, I guess since I now live in Germany and we have the situation over here, I’m also going to write a little bit more about the international dimension of this struggle, and the global far right assault on democracy.

So this weekend, for instance, I’ll write something about MAGA and the AfD, and the relationship between MAGA and the AfD, and the sort of America First foreign policy that is basically actively trying to force regime change across Western Europe, and actively intervening in the domestic politics over here on behalf of these right-wing extremists, which is, again, outrageous. But I think I’ll start writing more about that also, I think, because it seems appropriate.

Bacon: And Democracy Americana you can find—it’s not a Substack newsletter, right? You have to find it on a different platform?

Zimmer: It is still on Substack, so you can still find it on Substack, you can still subscribe on Substack. But it is mainly hosted by a platform called Steady. So if you want to support the work financially—I’m a full-time independent writer, so if someone wants to support me financially, that is via the Steady platform. But it doesn’t matter, if you subscribe on Substack you’ll find it.

Bacon: Great. Thomas, thanks for joining me. Great conversation. Take care.

Zimmer: Thank you so much. Bye.

Bacon: Bye-bye.

Bruce Blakeman, the Republican vying to be New York’s next governor, has an uphill battle ahead of November: The 70-year-old Nassau County executive will have to overcome an incumbent Democratic governor in one of the nation’s fiercest Democratic strongholds. But his recent efforts to boost his public profile before the New York electorate have been dubious at best, as he happily ties himself to multiple 9/11 conspiracy theorists.

Last week, Blakeman offered a “full endorsement” of Joel Anabilah-Azumah, a Republican running to represent New York’s 9th congressional district, which is situated entirely in Brooklyn. Anabilah-Azumah is the founder of a citywide private bus company and a former volleyball coach. But over the span of his rootless political career, Anabilah-Azumah has also publicly declared that 9/11 was the sinister machination of the U.S. government.

“9/11 was an inside job. I don’t even bother to argue it any more. You don’t have to believe it, but that is what happened and history is pretty clear on that,” he wrote on X in 2024.

“Whoever had the put option on the American Airlines stock dropping is still spending that money and their children are still spending that money,” he added, referring to unusual stock trades that took place before the attack that effectively bet the airline would drop in value. Investigators from the FBI and the Securities and Exchange Commission concluded in 2004 that the trades were not connected to terrorism, and were not made with insider knowledge of the attacks.

The native New Yorker also offered his bus service to shuttle MAGA protesters to the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and later called on President Donald Trump to pardon “our January 6 friends.”

Nonetheless, Blakeman tied himself to Anabilah-Azumah, campaigning with the conspiracist in Brooklyn’s Brownsville neighborhood on September 1. “He is going to make a great member of Congress,” Blakeman said of Anabilah-Azumah, in an endorsement video Blakeman ultimately chose not to circulate. “We need fighters like that in Congress.… Joel, you have my full endorsement.”

Anabilah-Azumah reiterated his 9/11 stance twice in the last 24 hours, continuing to question the destruction of the Twin Towers while simultaneously claiming that he was “not the kind of prick that harps on this issue every September 11.”

Anabilah-Azumah is not the only 9/11 truther in Blakeman’s orbit. Last week, Blakeman filmed a campaign video with Marcus C. Williams, a onetime Republican candidate for the New York State Assembly who shared a video in December claiming that 9/11 “was planned and executed by the Zionists.” “We’re gonna win because of people like you, Marcus,” Blakeman said in a clip Williams posted to his Facebook page.

Blakeman has also protested New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s participation in the upcoming 9/11 memorial event marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the attack. Blakeman has claimed that the mayor is “not welcome” at the ceremony, and that Mamdani’s reluctance to condemn the phrase “Globalize the intifada”—which pro-Palestine activists have used as a universal call for Palestinian liberation from Israeli occupation—should disqualify him from attendance.

“He’s not welcome there because he has yet to say anything in opposition to the global intifada. As a matter of fact, it seems like he supports that phrase, which is part of the reason why we had the tragedy we had on 9/11,” Blakeman told reporters in early August. (It does not appear that Palestinian liberation movements had anything to do with the Al Qaeda attack.)

Blakeman’s position echoed a bogus July report that thousands of 9/11 families had signed a petition to keep Mamdani away from the event. But by the time of Blakeman’s comments, the petition had been debunked: Its creator admitted that there was no verified list of families that opposed Mamdani’s participation, and that the online petition’s “verified signatures” could have come from anyone, anywhere.

Neither Blakeman’s campaign nor Williams responded to a request for comment prior to publication. Anabilah-Azumah told The New Republic that his comments were not about 9/11 victims, their families, or the first responders who acted that day, but were instead commentary on the militaristic shift that occurred in the country following the attack. “I believe that elements within the US government orchestrated 9/11 in order to get the public to accept mass surveillance and ‘forever wars,’” Anabilah-Azumah told TNR.

Local leaders were outraged by Blakeman’s attachments. Democratic Representative Jerry Nadler, whose district includes Ground Zero, said that it was “downright appalling” that Blakeman would “campaign with, and seek endorsements from dyed-in-the-wool 9/11 conspiracy theorists.”

Nadler’s colleague Representative Nydia Velazquez shared his sentiment. “I’ve spent more than two decades fighting for 9/11 victims and their families to get the care they need after that horrific day,” she said. “I never thought I’d see someone, like Bruce Blakeman, running for governor while associating with 9/11 conspiracy theorists.

“These were no casual meet and greets: Blakeman filmed campaign endorsements and videos with these extremists,” Velazquez continued. “New Yorkers deserve better than this.”

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

The far-right Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD, won about 44 percent of the vote in this week’s election in Saxony-Anhalt, a state in the eastern part of the country. AFD finished far ahead of other parties there. It was the party’s strongest showing in an election and the latest illustration of AfD’s growing popularity, particularly in Eastern Germany. In the latest episode of Right Now, Thomas Zimmer, a German historian and author of the newsletter Democracy Americana, discusses the results in Saxony-Anhalt and what they tell us about far-right politics in Germany, Europe, and North America. Zimmer says that pro-democracy, centrist parties, such as Germany’s Christian Democrats, the British Labor Party, and the Democrats in the United States, keep making the same mistakes in fighting the far right. These parties, instead of directly confronting the far-right’s ideology, keep trying to accommodate those sentiments by moving to the right, particularly on immigration. These parties, he argues, also keep offering fairly standard agendas that don’t engage voters frustrated with the status quo. He calls for a robust defense of multicultural, pluralistic democracy in both the United States and in Europe, along with bold policy agendas that might excite voters.

The Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed earlier this month a resolution that “condemns and denounces socialism in all its forms, including the Democratic Socialists of America, and opposes the implementation of socialist policies in the United States.” The vote was 220-192, with eight Democrats voting “aye” and zero Republicans voting “nay.” The resolution said that “socialist ideology necessitates a concentration of power that has, time and time again, collapsed into communist regimes, totalitarian rule, and repressive dictatorships” and “has repeatedly led to famine and mass murders, and the killing of over 100,000,000 people worldwide.” 

By equating democratic socialism with communism, the resolution was intended to create voter hysteria over the Democrats’ nomination of about eight democratic socialists in the midterm congressional elections. It was also a stalking horse for the SAVE Act, Trump’s desperate attempt to disenfranchise Democratic voters in advance of the midterms. Voter disenfranchisement has nothing at all to do with opposing socialism, so set that aside. What interests me is that the House’s condemnation of socialism made no mention of the 30 companies in which President Donald Trump has acquired an ownership stake for the federal government during his second term. Trump’s got his tiny fingers on what The Communist Manifesto famously called “the means of production.” The number of companies in which the government acquired a stake during the Democratic presidency of Joe Biden was zero.  

Because the shares in those 30 companies, some purchased and some expropriated, were acquired without input from Congress, and because the legal language for at least one of these acquisitions mentions Trump by name, as if “Donald J. Trump” were synonymous with “United States government,” we might call Trump’s variety undemocratic socialism. I’ve called it fascist corporatism because it seems to take a leaf from Benito Mussolini’s “Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato” (“Everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State”). In its current iteration, though, it’s more like Tutto nello Trump, nienta al di fuori della Trump, nulla contro lo Trump.  

Yet another possible way to describe Trump’s covetous attitude toward the means of production is Soviet-style socialism, which is to say communism. It remains an open question whether that’s fair because we don’t yet know whether Trump will mimic the Soviet practice of spouting pro-worker propaganda while harboring a cynical indifference to the proletariat’s actual welfare. But given Trump’s anti-worker policies thus far, I think the answer will turn out to be: He will. We’ll know more by the end of September, when a one-month extension of contract negotiations between the United Steelworkers and United States Steel expires. 

Allow me to explain. As a condition of President Donald Trump approving in June 2025 Nippon Steel’s acquisition of U.S. Steel, the United States acquired something called a “golden share” in U.S. Steel. As I explained at the time, a golden share is a share in a publicly-held corporation that grants the shareholder unilateral power to overrule management on certain matters. It was invented by the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as a condition for privatizing government-owned companies like British Airways and British Steel. The golden share in these instances allowed the British government to veto any planned sale of these assets to foreign companies. That makes Thatcher’s golden shares the opposite of Trump’s, which was intended to allow the sale of U.S. Steel to a foreign company. There’s also a difference in directionality. Unlike Thatcher, Trump is nationalizing rather than privatizing. 

But like Thatcher’s golden shares, Trump’s is justified on conservative grounds of protecting national security. In the case of U.S. Steel, any national security justification is bullshit. Nippon Steel’s acquisition of U.S. Steel never threatened national security because U.S. Steel is no longer the dominant economic player that it was in the 1950s. At least three other American steel companies bring in more revenue, and two employ significantly more workers. But the political symbolism of the looming sale was sufficiently powerful to persuade President Joe Biden to bar the sale. Trump wasn’t wrong to reverse Biden’s decision. But in doing so he played his own kind of political game by showily demanding the power to protect U.S. Steel’s workforce from plant closings, underinvestment, offshoring, and wage cuts.  

The golden share was codified in a national security agreement that was never made public. But a June 2025 tweet by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick conveyed the gist, and a U.S. Steel filing that same month to the Securities and Exchange Commission provided more detail. Indeed, the wording in the U.S. Steel filing is very likely identical to wording in the national security agreement, because it wouldn’t make sense to describe a legal obligation with one set of words in one document and another set of words in another document. 

The question now, as labor and management duke it out over a new U.S. Steel contract, is whether Trump has any interest in exercising the power granted by that golden share to protect workers’ interests. Early signs indicate that he does not.

Negotiations between the United Steelworkers and U.S. Steel began in late July and were set to expire at the end of August. With no agreement in hand, the negotiators extended talks another 30 days. That isn’t uncommon, and the talks are proceeding in orderly fashion. The main sticking point is whether U.S. Steel’s new owner, Nippon, will keep workers’ health insurance costs low.  U.S. Steel’s opening bid was an impressive-sounding 18.2 percent over the next five years and a $4000 bonus when the contract is ratified. But on health care, U.S. Steel said that if health insurance costs exceed 3 percent, a labor-management committee will “work together to identify cost-saving opportunities.” If no such savings can be found, the company will impose “additional employee costs.” 

That didn’t go down well with the Steelworkers. Their lead negotiator, Bernie Hall, told me that years ago labor and management agreed to make controlling health costs a priority in contract negotiations. To that end, Hall said, “sacrifices were made over the years” by workers, such as foregoing a pay raise over multiple years. “We have zero interest,” Hall said, in any plan that limits to 3 percent management’s commitment to absorbing health cost increases.  
 
The golden share agreement, as outlined in U.S. Steel’s June 2025 filing, says Nippon may not, without “the written consent of Donald J. Trump” or his designee, or of any successors, “reduce the base salary of employees” prior to June 18, 2030. Health insurance benefits exist apart from base salary, but they affect total compensation, and any effort to reduce them ought to attract notice from the Commerce officials Trump has designated to represent him on the golden share. These are William Kimmitt, who’s Commerce undersecretary for international trade, and David Shapiro, chief counsel for Commerce’s new Investment Accelerator. 

The choice of these two individuals is telling. Neither Kimmitt nor Shapiro wastes much of his day worrying about the American worker. The undersecretary for international trade advises the Commerce secretary on trade and global competitiveness, while the Investment Accelerator exists to clear away regulatory barriers to billion-dollar-plus new ventures in the United States. Trump outlined the two men’s respective duties in a November 2025 letter published in the Federal Register. Kimmitt, the letter said, will “closely monitor U.S. Steel and its compliance” with the golden share agreement, and Shapiro will sit on U.S. Steel’s board.  

I find no evidence that either Kimmitt or Shapiro is paying the slightest attention to U.S. Steel’s labor contract negotiations. My queries on this question to the Commerce department, by telephone and email, went unanswered. My queries on this question to U.S. Steel, by telephone and email, also drew no answer; the company replied only with this link to U.S. Steel’s opening bid. That leaves the Steelworkers. Hall said he hadn’t heard from Kimmitt, Shapiro, or anyone else in the Trump administration. Nor had he seen any evidence that they’re following the negotiations. “From our perspective,” Hall said of the golden share, “while it’s a nice shiny thing, it doesn’t provide the kind of commitments that these workers need and that we’re demanding…. It’s too open-ended.” For example, Hall explained, while the agreement sets yearly minimums for investments at various plants, it doesn’t stipulate which projects should get the investment. That’s left to the union to negotiate.  

The most unsettling aspect of the golden share agreement is how it defines a “force majeure” (i.e., act of God) event that would free U.S. Steel from its stated obligations. Force majeure is defined in the SEC document in some typical ways—natural disasters, pandemics, war, terrorism—but also in some atypical ways—”strikes, lockouts, boycotts, picketing, labor disturbances.” A lockout is an action initiated by the employer, so conceivably U.S. Steel could void the the golden share strictures merely by executing this “act of God.” Or, the United States government could void the golden-share agreement just because a few workers had the temerity to wave protest signs. And as Bloomberg Law’s George Weycamp observed earlier this month, the golden share language does nothing to prevent U.S. Steel from shifting work to non-union plants.  

Even so, the timing of these union contract negotiations is very awkward for Trump. If September 30 arrives and U.S. Steel and the United Steelworkers have no deal, extensions will likely be limited to 48 hours and the airing of differences will grow more heated. Should the Trump administration remain on the sidelines, Democrats will have a powerful issue on which to campaign for working-class midterm votes. This president said he’d protect American workers, they can say, but look how he’s selling steelworkers out! Or: Trump gave U.S. Steel to a foreign corporation and we got nothing in return! Or simply: What a phony!  

It could go even worse for Trump if U.S. Steel used a lockout or he used a strike as an excuse to kill the golden-share agreement. The resulting protests would definitely help Democrats win elections to the House and Senate. Trump’s been saying he hates socialism while practicing it. Now he may start to hate practicing socialism, too.

Some couples fall in love.

Some fall out of love.

Artificial Intelligence is going to destroy the world, or humanity at least. In the meantime, it’s solving unsolvable math problems, possibly with dirty tricks; spying on activists; and stealing our jobs. At least, that’s what recent headlines tell us. But the actual research on the real-world adoption of the myriad tools we lump under the AI label, especially large language models like Claude or ChatGPT, has been slim. That’s slowly beginning to change.

The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, with a joint grant from the Washington Center for Equitable Growth and the Russell Sage Foundation, has been digging deeper into who is using AI, in what fields, and for what tasks, and released the results from their latest survey this month. What they found complicates the picture of how AI is being integrated into the workplace—rapidly, yes, but not yet deeply. How this impacts workers going forward is just a guess at this point. But what’s clear is that there’s a yawning gap between Big Tech’s promise of a technological revolution and regular people’s interest in using that technology.

The St. Louis Fed’s research surveyed workers in a range of occupations about their work lives, and found that the use of AI programs—ChatGPT is the most common—is surprisingly widespread for such a new technology. The survey found that in 75 percent of occupations, at least a fifth of the workforce used AI. “That’s kind of just a wider distribution than we were expecting,” Adam Blandin, a St. Louis Fed research fellow and an assistant professor of economics at Vanderbilt University, told me. “Everybody expects computer programmers or executives or something like that to use it, but it’s just more widely spread across occupations than we realized.”

But even though adoption is fairly widespread, most people don’t use it for huge chunks of their jobs. They used it for just a few tasks. And there was almost no task defined by the survey that had been overwhelmingly taken over by AI. Even the tasks for which it’s most used for—reading documents to gather technical information, preparing research reports, and analyzing data to identify trends—had adoption rates of about 60 percent. Different workers use it for different parts of their jobs. Even people in the same jobs might not both use AI, or use it at the same rates.

There were some patterns in the use of AI that made intuitive sense. Computer programs use AI often, for example, and people who use AI often for their job are more likely to use it outside the workplace, in everyday life. Some of the differences in uptake could come down to individual preferences, worksite practices, or something else completely unknown. “Understanding those personal differences, I think, is underexplored,” Blandin said.

Some past predictions about how AI would be used were a bit off the mark. Many experts had thought that health care professionals might use AI to help them diagnose conditions and come up with treatment plans. But that adoption hasn’t been widespread, which could be because health care workers don’t trust AI with sensitive information, or don’t trust the work it does. At the same time, some very hands-on jobs, like testing materials for environmental hazards or repairing machines, have seen higher uptake than expected. These jobs tend to rely on manual labor, but workers are using AI for research on what tools to use or how best to make a repair.

The researchers asked workers who said they use AI how much longer their tasks would have taken without it, and estimated that use of these tools increased productivity by about 5 percent. There is a huge caveat to that number, of course, because it’s self-reported. But it suggests that workers are using AI because it makes them marginally more productive. That doesn’t necessarily mean AI can do their entire job and replace them. In fact, in the recent past, when workers adopted computers, jobs that relied on computers became more in demand and the people who used computers at their jobs started to earn more than those who didn’t. If AI proves to be similarly useful for workers, but not as useful as workers, it could do the same.

One big difference, though, is that there was a huge gap between jobs that required workers to learn to use computers and those that didn’t, but today, more workers across more fields are using AI, so there isn’t much of a divide. That could potentially mean that everyone’s job becomes a little more in demand and maybe makes everyone a little more productive in countless ways. “There’s a bunch of occupations where adoption is kind of in the middle,” Blandin said. “That again just suggests it may not be as concentrated as we saw with computers, and so maybe more people will benefit from AI. I should just be clear: That’s speculation. But that’s a possibility.”

Of course, as computers were adopted through the 1980s and ’90s, even many of the knowledge workers and workers in other fields who adopted them to become more productive didn’t always see their increased productivity turn into more pay. How much people make in their jobs, and how protected their jobs are, isn’t something that happens without intervention like union contracts and new employment laws to help workplaces and people adapt to changes. An AI industry that is forcing its technology—and data centers—on society without our input, while also warning of a potential apocalypse caused by that technology, certainly can’t be trusted to act in workers’ best interest.

Donald Trump just tailspinned again in the polls. In a new Quinnipiac survey, his overall approval is at 33 percent and he plummeted to a record low on the economy. Meanwhile, a CNN analysis finds that on the same issue, Trump is an astounding 52 points underwater with independents. That’s the context for Trump’s fake-promise to send $5,000 to every American if the GOP keeps Congress. Many critics dismantled the idea. But even Fox News is gently mocking it: One anchor pointed out that he’s made empty promises of cash before. Bret Baier noted that it would cost $1.3 trillion. And Laura Ingraham pressed Trump: Why not send people the money now? That gets to the heart of this idiotic effort to use federal money to rig the elections. We talked to political scientist Tom Schaller, author of a good piece for the Public Notice Substack on Trump’s inflation disaster. We discuss why the polls look much worse than in 2018, how Trump’s policies created this disaster for the GOP, and why Trump’s magical reality-bending powers might finally be deserting him. Listen to this episode here.

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for its newsletter here.

Natural gas is fading from California’s electricity mix more quickly than seemed possible just a few years ago.

The state hit its peak for gas-fired electricity in 2014 and has fallen in eight of the 11 years since. The retreat is accelerating, with a 15% decrease in 2025 compared to 2024, and a 26% drop in the first half of this year compared to the first half of 2025, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Renewable sources now generate more of California’s electricity than gas. So how did this happen?

First, California built an immense amount of utility-scale solar. Then, the state built a whole lot of battery energy storage to soak up that solar. At the same time, grid operators in California and neighboring regions found ways to share electricity more efficiently.

Consumers did their part by installing rooftop solar and batteries, reducing demand on the grid.

None of this was by accident. California officials adopted laws and rules aimed at reducing carbon emissions. The state still shoots itself in the foot sometimes—such as with rooftop solar net metering rules that hurt the industry—but the overall direction is clear.

I spoke with Ed Smeloff, a longtime energy analyst and consultant, to understand California’s shift away from gas power and whether it’s replicable in other states.

“The key story here is batteries,” he said.

To show this, he used a chart of electricity supply on the California Independent System Operator grid on Aug. 26, a day when demand hit a yearly peak at 5:55 p.m. with 46,015 megawatts.

He compared those results to a chart from Sept. 6, 2022, the all-time peak, with 52,061 megawatts.

The differences show a state that has made a leap in the transition away from fossil fuels.

Let’s focus first on Aug. 26, where the green line for renewable energy towers above the brown line for natural gas for much of the day, with both resources outpacing everything else. (California lists “large hydropower” as its own category, which is the blue line, as opposed to counting it with the other renewables.)

Now, look at the black line for batteries. It’s below zero most of the time as the batteries charge using power from the grid, then rises sharply to its peak just after sunset.

The batteries use plentiful solar power to charge when demand is low and then discharge when demand is highest.

On Sept. 6, 2022, utility-scale solar and batteries were significant resources, but much less than they were last month.

The increase in solar and batteries meant the state needed less natural gas and imported much less power from other states.

When imports dip below zero that means the state is a net exporter of power at that moment.

Those two days are a small sample, but similar trends become clear when looking at California’s electricity mix over longer timeframes.

The decrease in gas power mostly came from reducing the need for peaker plants, which are built to run for a few hours to cover peak demand. Peakers are some of the least efficient and most expensive power plants.

Over time, a shift to solar and batteries instead of peakers should reduce costs for consumers, but Smeloff’s research doesn’t address prices.

The drop in gas-fired power in California is notable just about every way you want to look at it. For example, California’s gas consumption for producing electricity has fallen from 10% of the country’s total in 2014 to 4% in 2025, the result of California’s reduction and an increase for the country as a whole, according to EIA data.

Notice I haven’t yet mentioned coal. It’s a tiny part of California’s electricity mix, having faded to almost zero.

I got in touch with Smeloff after reading a blog post he wrote in July for GridLab, the nonprofit research firm, about the many factors behind the decline in gas power usage in California.

There, he explained additional factors:

• Regional grids are getting better at communicating and sharing resources. One result is that hydropower in Oregon and Washington is more likely to be exported to California than before.
• The newly deployed SunZia wind project is located in New Mexico, but the California grid counts SunZia as a local resource because most of its power flows to California over a dedicated line as part of a firm contract. The wind farm is the largest in the country.

California also leads the nation in customer-owned solar and battery systems, which reduce demand on the grid. It’s difficult to quantify the precise effect on the grid, but it’s safe to say that the growth in these resources is part of the reason gas demand is shrinking.

Smeloff has done recent work for Vote Solar, an advocacy group, and has decades of experience in energy business and policy, including time with Sacramento Municipal Utility District and the Pace Energy and Climate Center in New York.

He said California’s decreasing use of gas is a sign that a cleaner grid is within reach.

Texas is the best example of another state where solar and batteries are helping to reduce the need for dirtier power sources, he said. But a similar formula can work almost anywhere.

Jayme Ackemann, a spokeswoman for California ISO, said there is a clear decrease in natural gas on the grid, but she is wary of focusing too much on the recent peak day. There is “a more nuanced conclusion” when looking more broadly at the system and seeing that gas provides benefits for reliability by being available, even if it’s used less, Ackemann said.

I also spoke with Jonathan Koomey, the California-based energy researcher and author, to see if he agreed with the idea that solar and batteries are largely responsible for pushing down demand for gas.

Koomey said this phenomenon is clear enough that it’s become “pretty obvious.”

While it’s obvious to energy researchers, I don’t think the public grasps the scale of the change in California. This is especially relevant as the Trump administration takes action to increase natural gas production and sales, and many new gas peaker plants are in some phase of planning or construction across the country.

We’re watching multiple visions of the grid of the future playing out in real time, and we all will see which one ends up being cleaner and cheaper.

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

The post How California is kicking its natural gas habit appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

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

California teens will be barred from “addictive” social media products and limited in their interactions with chatbots under two of the 13 bills signed into law Thursday by Gov. Gavin Newsom to protect kids online. 

The law on addictive social media might be the most controversial. It will require social media companies to either stop offering “addictive” tools like infinite scroll and autoplay to users under 16 or to keep those users off their platforms entirely. 

Authors say the law is necessary to address a teenage mental health crisis and that it will force social media companies to take long-awaited action.

“Parents can’t compete. Can’t compete with the engineering, can’t compete with the algorithms,” Newsom said at a news conference announcing the laws. “You feel like you’re a lousy parent.”

But digital rights organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation urged Newsom to veto the bill, calling it “well-intentioned, but deeply flawed.” That organization said the bill defines “addictive features” so broadly that it would effectively create a full ban on social media for kids under 16 and cut off youth from “essential information and experiences.”

The measure limiting artificial intelligence chatbots is more broadly supported, even by tech juggernaut OpenAI. Named after California teen Adam Raine, who died by suicide in 2025 after receiving tips from ChatGPT, the new law will impose time limits for minors and require built-in mental health resources. It will also mandate safety plans for chatbots. If a chatbot detects a threat of self-harm, the chatbot operator will be required to alert parents. Companies like OpenAI or other creators of chatbots could face legal liability for failing to act. 

“Raising teens at this moment, those of us that are, we know the youth mental health crisis in an everyday reality,” Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, one of the bill’s authors, said after the bill’s signing. “There isn’t one of us that hasn’t seen it first hand.”

OpenAI has said the law “pairs strong protections with continued access to useful AI tools.”

The law builds on existing regulations on chatbots in California, like requiring the tools to notify users that they are interacting with AI.

Those two were the most notable among several related measures Newsom also signed. 

One makes social media companies legally liable for damages if their platforms harm a child. Another expands and revises age-checking requirements, while a third expands companies’ responsibilities for acting on child abuse content. 

Another will place a four-year moratorium on AI-powered chatbot toys for kids under 16. 

Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks about his state budget proposal May 14 in Sacramento. Credit: Jeff Chiu / Associated Press

Earlier this week, Newsom also signed two bills that create standards for independent AI tool auditors. Another new law clarifies requirements for businesses that create products “likely to be accessed by children,” preventing them from collecting children’s data as a condition of using their services.

The laws come amid mounting concern over how social media and AI tools might be damaging kids’ mental health.

Adam Raine’s death was one in a string of incidents that alarmed parents about how their kids might be interacting with chatbots. Those concerns go beyond teens, too, as the tools are linked to increasing incidents of so-called “AI psychosis,” in which chatbots seem to encourage and feed delusional thinking. 

The new legislation also comes on the heels of a landmark legal settlement between Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta and a coalition of state attorneys general, including California’s Rob Bonta. 

In a major suit, the states accused Meta of knowingly damaging teens’ mental health through addictive features like infinite scrolling and continued to promote those products even after the damage became clear internally. The suit has been compared to the Big Tobacco lawsuits of past decades.

Last month, as the trial started, Meta agreed to pay up to $17 billion to settle the case. Some of that money will be earmarked to address mental health harms for kids and states will decide where to spend the rest. 

The settlement also requires Meta to change its products to address some of the mental health concerns. Under the terms of the agreement, the company will limit “likes” for underage users’ accounts and stop sending notifications during school hours, among other limits.

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

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Quick Take

• IKEA, with Kinggath Creations, has developed and released an official (and free!) mod for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Matt Berry voices Kallax Storageborn, a new companion that is a sentient IKEA Kallax bookcase.
• Along with the new companion, the mod provides a full quest with two IKEA-themed dungeons, and a boss fight against a creature called the Clutter Golem.
• Nerdist’s Take: It’s not the weirdest Skyrim mod, but full disclosure? It’s up there.

I did not expect to write the sentence “Matt Berry is voicing an IKEA bookcase in a Skyrim mod” today, nor at any point in my life, but here we are. In an unexpected move from IKEA, they’ve teamed with developer Kinggath Creations to release an official IKEA mod for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. The new mod is free on the Creations store and features a new companion, and a new two-dungeon quest. Your new companion, Kallax Storageborn—named for the infamous Kallax bookcase—joins the Dragonborn on their quest. It fits right in with the rest of Skyrim‘s companions, in that its (…his?) primary purpose is to hold all your sh*t so you can loot more corpses before having to trudge back home.

IKEA, Kinggath Creations, Bethesda Game Studios

Playing Kallax Storageborn is the aforementioned What We Do In the Shadows alum, Matt Berry. Matt Berry has seemingly been everywhere in the gaming world lately. He voiced the Mr. Handy robots in Fallout and, hilariously, Bane in the new LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight. Along with your fully-voiced ergonomic companion, players get access to a new quest with two IKEA-themed dungeons. You won’t go at it alone, but you also won’t be unprotected or unarmed. The mod features the Meatball Helmet, presumably of the Swedish variety. You can protect your noggin while eating the new in-game meatball food items! Better yet is the Dwemer Allen Key weapon, the Mighty Allenblade. I can feel my hands blistering already.

Obviously, this is shameless product placement. But in a sea of hundreds of thousands of Skyrim mods, at least this one is a) free and b) funny. I’m still laughing about the custom Thu’um the mod comes with. To summon your pal Kallax Storageborn, the Dragonborn need only bellow—AYE-KEY-YAH! If this speaks to you—or shouts to you—the mod is available now in Creations.

Jess Harshbarger writes about movies, books, TV, games, comics, and all things nerdy for Nerdist.

The post SKYRIM Mod Features Matt Berry Voicing a Kallax Bookcase appeared first on Nerdist.

Choosing a college, planning for a career or figuring out how to pay for higher education can feel overwhelming. Cabrillo College’s College & Career Family Night 2026 gives students and families the opportunity to explore their options, connect with college representatives and get answers to important questions — all in one evening.

Join Cabrillo College from 6 to 8 p.m. Monday, Oct. 19, for a free event open to the public. Meet representatives from public, private and out-of-state universities, learn about Cabrillo’s degrees and programs, attend helpful workshops and explore resources designed to help students plan their next steps.

Explore your options at Cabrillo

Start your evening at the Cabrillo Career & Academic Pathways destination in the Library, Building 1000. Families can learn about Cabrillo’s educational opportunities, take a quick career assessment, discover learning communities and support programs, and explore campus resources and clubs.

Students can also connect with university representatives in the Gymnasium, Building 1100. Representatives from numerous colleges and universities will be available to answer questions and help students explore potential paths after high school.

Want to see where you could live while attending Cabrillo? Visit the Costa Vista Housing Leasing Office in Parking Lot S to learn more about student housing and tour a model unit.

Get answers to your biggest college questions

College & Career Family Night also offers workshops focused on some of the most important decisions students and families face.

How will you pay for college? The Financial Aid Workshop will walk families through the financial aid process, with sessions at 6:10, 6:45 and 7:20 p.m. in the Library’s second floor.

How can high school students get a head start on college? The Empowering Futures: Dual Enrollment Workshop for Families will explain how Dual Enrollment works, its benefits and how families can get started. The workshop begins at 6:45 p.m. in the Library’s second floor.

How can you transfer to a four-year university? Cabrillo College academic counselors will outline transfer pathways and programs designed to help students pursue a bachelor’s degree. Sessions take place at 6:30 and 7:30 p.m. in Gymnasium Room 1118.

Make an evening of it

Families can grab a quick bite from food trucks on campus while exploring the event. Parking is available in student parking areas, and visitors do not need a permit. Please avoid staff, handicap and red-zone spaces.

Whether your student is just beginning to explore college or already planning the next step, College & Career Family Night offers a chance to gather information, ask questions and discover new possibilities.

Make plans to attend Monday, Oct. 19, from 6 to 8 p.m. at Cabrillo College and take the next step toward your student’s future.

Learn more here!

The post Plan your next step at Cabrillo College’s College & Career Family Night appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

Quick Take

• The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is a stunning achievement, a monument to the art of storytelling in all its forms.
• Although the Lucas Museum contains a large Star Wars presence, it also features an impressive collection of fantasy, sci-fi, comic book, manga, and traditional fine art.
• The Norman Rockwell gallery is sizable, one of the best collections of the artist most associated with nostalgic Americana.
• Nerdist’s take: If you love visual storytelling in all its forms, you must make a trip to the Lucas Museum.

At the 2025 Comic-Con in San Diego, George Lucas described his upcoming museum as a “temple to the people’s art.” And now that we’ve actually visited the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which opens to the public on September 22, we can say that was a very apt description. This museum is a shrine to the kind of popular artistic expression that other museums stick their noses up to. But Lucas’ dream project of the past decade has had many bumps and bruises on its way to completion. It was meant to open in San Francisco, then Chicago, before finally settling in Los Angeles. And then, the pandemic halted construction for years. But it’s finally ready, and we can say with certainty that it is an astonishing achievement. And if you can make it to Los Angeles, a trip to the Lucas Museum is a must.

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The Lucas Museum sits across 300,000 square feet and 11 acres of park space. It’s big, and aside from the galleries, there are also two movie theaters inside, and a restaurant called the Skywalker Grill (which was not yet open to guests). Architect Ma Yansong created a building that is a work of art itself. And if guests want a closer look at the building’s intricacies? Don’t worry, there’s a scale model inside, which is a nice touch. The museum even has a research library, which truly represents George Lucas’ aesthetic. It’s an antiquated Craftsman-style library housed inside a sleek futuristic space. It’s like both sides of the man’s personality manifested in one room. He’s an artist obsessed with the old, but always looking toward the new.

The George Lucas Museum of Narrative Art

So what does the Lucas Museum actually contain within its five levels of space-age walls? “Narrative Art” can mean many things. At least in George Lucas’ view, narrative art is any artistic representation that tells a story. That can mean book and magazine covers, comic book art, and advertising. Of course, film and television, photography, and murals count too, along with just some good old-fashioned paintings. Street artist Banksy was a last-minute addition who made it in. It’s a rather wide net, but you probably won’t see any abstract sculptures here. (But hey, don’t quote us on that.)

The first floor is maybe the least impressive, if only because it features a lot of video screens and reproductions. This is “The History of Narrative Art: Heroes, Myths, and the Sacred.” While it’s neat to see projections of classical European, Asian, and African art, most of this part of the museum is a history lesson you can walk through. Although for people who may never make it to the Vatican, seeing large-scale reproductions of the Sistine Chapel is pretty cool. Luckily, things get more interesting (and not just virtual) when you go up to the main floor.

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The fourth level of five holds the bulk of the Lucas Museum collection, and it’s pretty jaw-dropping. There are portions dedicated to some of the most iconic artists of the past century, including Maxfield Parrish, Andrew Wyeth, and Thomas Hart Benton. Original comic book art hangs across many walls. For this lifelong comic book fan, seeing original pencil-and-ink art of Jack Kirby’s Captain America or Neal Adams’ Superman felt like going to church.

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More than that, by giving comic book and manga art so much real estate, it validates an important art form. One usually dismissed by the mainstream. It means something to see an Astro Boy painting in the manga gallery in the same building as Frida Kahlo’s self-portrait. Yes, her work is on display here too. And yes, the main floor is also where the Star Wars collection is housed. We know a lot of folks are just here for the Star Wars of it all.

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A lot of people are already mistakenly referring to the museum as “the Star Wars museum,” which is wildly reductive. Yes, there’s a metric ton of Star Wars artifacts that make the museum a destination for all fans of the Force. If you’re a Star Wars fan, these are indeed holy relics from the Lucasfilm archives. It’s hard not to get emotional in front of screen-used costumes and props, going back fifty years to A New Hope. From the droids R2 and 3PO, to Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher’s costumes, to the Tatooine landspeeder. There’s a lot from the first six episodes of Star Wars, and yet it all only makes up 7% of the museum.

The Star Wars collection is located in the Cinema gallery. And it seems for now, the film collection almost entirely consists of property from Lucasfilm cinema. There’s a random Batman outfit from The Dark Knight, and the Cowardly Lion’s costume from The Wizard of Oz. Even one of the aliens from Close Encounters. But at least for now, “Cinema” mainly means “Star Wars.” And honestly, that’s okay. The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures is just a few miles away. We’ll let George Lucas use the label “cinema” for mostly showcasing his own stuff. It is what paid for this place to exist in the first place, after all.

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Having said all that, the Star Wars of it all does permeate beyond the bounds of the Cinema gallery. A Naboo N-1 starfighter floats above the lobby. Outside in the gardens, large statues of Princess Leia killing Jabba the Hutt and Padmé Amidala in battle adorn the grounds. There’s a Yoda and Grogu fountain. It may be reductive to call this a “Star Wars Museum,” but Lucas’ space opera keeps poking out from many corners. If anything, it’s a reminder to visitors that this is the house that Lucas’s cinematic empire built, and don’t you ever forget it.

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However, just as impressive and sizable as any Star Wars in this museum is the massive collection of Norman Rockwell paintings. Perhaps no American artist is as well represented here as Rockwell. And it’s fitting, as his artwork encapsulates how middle-class Americans mythologized everyday life in the 20th century. And it doesn’t matter how many times you’ve seen it on screen, standing before “The Problem We All Live With,” Rockwell’s seminal piece depicting Ruby Bridges, simply hits different. We’re going to go out on a limb and say the Lucas has the biggest collection of Rockwell art outside the Rockwell Museum itself.

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During his lifetime, Rockwell was incredibly popular, maybe the most popular American artist of his era. And yet, he was almost completely critically dismissed in his heyday. Can you see why George Lucas feels a strong kinship with him? The Lucas Museum has the largest section for a single artist dedicated to Norman Rockwell. And when you finish looking through this collection, you’ll understand why Lana Del Rey named one of her albums Norman F***ing Rockwell. Because he was THE guy. No one beautifully depicted the myth of the American century (mixed in with some truth) better than he did. As much as for any Jedi, the Rockwell collection is enough reason to go to the Lucas Museum.

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Quick Take

• Apple’s first foldable iPhone, the iPhone Duo, has been announced, and it will cost $2,000. But is it worth the price?
• From cameras, to storage, to video game capabilities, we break down the iPhone Duo.
• Sadly, the iPhone Duo MAY just be worth the price tag.

Look out Samsung Galaxy Z series, here comes the new Apple iPhone Duo, the company’s first outing into the burgeoning foldable phone market. Why have one screen when you can have three screens? This foldable phone release also marks both Apple’s thinnest iPhone and its largest. The Duo clocks in at a 7.6inch inside display and a 5.4inch cover display. In its open version, the phone is 5.2mm thick. Closed, 11.3mm. But, of course, it’s the price tag that’s caught our eye. Apple iPhone Duo will cost $2,000—yikes!

Apple Apple’s iPhone Duo Has a Hinge Made of Over 100 Components

Apple emphasized the smoothness and the flatness of the iPhone Duo’s screen, which is made up of ten ultra-thin layers, reinforced with nano textures. The Duo’s all-important hinge is noted to be durable, pairing well with the titanium-reinforced ceramic frame. The hinge is also made up of over 100 components. Which…seems more like neutral information, rather than a flex, but what do I know? Regardless, Apple promises perfectly balanced torque when it comes to the folding of the screens in its phone.

You Can Play Video Games on the iPhone Duo

The iPhone Duo, naturally, has dual batteries. They’re kept from bursting into flames by the vapor-cooled A20 Pro Chip. This significantly improves the phone’s ability to maintain high performance, particularly when it comes to playing video games. Needless to say, it’s got power comparable to a computer, even more so than the typical iPhone. Break out your Steam Links, y’all. What’s the point of having a phone if you can’t play Crusader Kings 3 on it?

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Steam Machine Gets Pricing and Release Date The iPhone Duo Is the Swiss Army Knife of iPhones… And You Can Use 2 Cameras at Once

The 48MP camera is impressive, and handy if you want to study every pore on your face in tremendous detail. The iPhone Duo can also be its own tripod! No more scrabbling for something to lean your phone against to get the right angle. Plus, the Duo can use its front and back cameras, simultaneously. Along with packing the same punch as a computer, you can fold the iPhone Duo in to a computer! It’s the Swiss Army Knife of iPhones.

Max Out Your Storage? How Does 2 Terabytes Sound?

One of the Duo’s biggest selling points is its memory storage capabilities. It starts at 256GB, but can go all the way up to two terabytes of storage. This can be your iPad, your laptop, and your iPhone, all on the go. With that eye-watering $2,000 price point, it better be! If you’re in the market and the iPhone Duo feels right for you, Apple starts pre-orders on 10/16, and the phone will be officially out 10/23.

So, Is the Apple iPhone Duo Worth $2,000?

Well, we guess it depends where your priorities lie… and what $2,000 means to you. We hate to say it, but, for some people… It might just be worth the price tag. If you can trade in all your tech for one phone, and you’re one of those young ones who do everything on it… It could make sense. We have to say, nothing about it sounds unappealing. But, we are children of our age.

Jess Harshbarger writes about movies, TV, games, comics, and all things nerdy for Nerdist.

The post Is the iPhone Duo Worth $2,000? We Break Down Apple’s First Foldable Phone appeared first on Nerdist.

Quick Take

• On September 9th, prolific anime voice actor Mike McFarland passed away at age 56.
• Mike McFarland underwent surgery in January of 2025 to remove a brain tumor. He was diagnosed with Glioblastoma in August of 2025.
• Before his death, McFarland voiced hundreds of iconic characters throughout his jam-packed career.

Mike McFarland has been a ubiquitous and treasured voice talent for thirty-six years. On September 9, 2026, his longtime friend and Dragonball co-star Tiffany Volmer reported his death on Facebook. McFarland underwent surgery in January of 2025 to remove a brain tumor. Doctors discovered it when he’d gone in for what he thought was an inner-ear infection. Later, in August of 2025, McFarland was diagnosed with Glioblastoma, an aggressive, fast-moving brain cancer that starts from a growth of malignant cells in the brain or spinal cord. After a year of battling the disease both at home and in a skilled nursing facility, it eventually took his life.

Before his death, McFarland lent his voice to just about every anime goliath of the past thirty years. McFarland’s voice acting can be found in Attack on Titan, Dragonball Z, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Lupin III, Tokyo Ghoul, Black Clover, Ouran High School Host Club, Initial D, My Hero Academia, and dozens and dozens more. Many of his friends, creative collaborators, and fans have come out since his death to mourn the legendary VA’s passing. CrunchyRoll also issued a statement to TMZ regarding the loss of Mike McFarland:

Mike brought so much to all of us who knew him, and to all of the anime fans who knew his work. He was an incredible talent, a good friend to so many of us, and will be sorely, sorely missed.

From left to right: Gainax and Tatsunoko Productions, Toei Animations, WiT Studio

Maybe you know Mike McFarland best as Dragonball Z‘s Master Roshi and Yajirobe. Maybe you first heard his voice as Buggy the Clown in One Piece. Maybe you’ll never forget his performance as Jean Kirstein in Attack on Titan. I initially encountered him as Komada and Butajiri in Yu Yu Hakusho. I invite every anime fan to look through Mike McFarland’s IMDb page. Even if you think you think you knew the actor, it will likely stun you just how many characters you know were brought to life by McFarland’s expert voice acting. Suffice it to say, he will never be forgotten.

Rest in Peace, Mr. McFarland.

Jess Harshbarger writes about movies, TV, games, comics, and all things nerdy for Nerdist.

The post Legendary Voice Actor Mike McFarland Dead at 56 appeared first on Nerdist.