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To the investors at Bill Gates's Breakthrough Energy, the coming wave of electrification will make data center energy demands look quaint by comparison. Here's how they're preparing.

Inside two years of fraught AI data center debates in Pennsylvania.

Freedom Fest in Kentucky—headlined by MAGA artist Kid Rock—has been canceled after barely selling any VIP tickets.

The host blamed the cancellation on a lack of enthusiasm from his wealthiest friends, noting that he was only able to sell six VIP tickets (at $1,000 each).

“I am never ever, ever, ever, ever doing this event again,” former Kentucky GOP gubernatorial candidate and event host Eric Deters, who throws the event on his farm, said on Facebook Monday. “When I put together Patriot State Freedom Fest, I put it together with the game plan and the idea that I could pay for it with the VIP sales of $1,000 from these hundred people that I interact with on a regular basis that have money.”

The Freedom Fest began in 2022 and has drawn large crowds in the past, while featuring speakers like Donald Trump Jr., Candace Owens, and Eric Trump. But this year saw a massive drop in VIP ticket sales and general interest, possibly due to Trump’s horrendous approval rating, rising costs tied to the Iran war, or an oversaturation of MAGA events (like that barely watched Republican midterm convention). Either way, Deters is pissed, lashing out at people whom he apparently expected to attend.

“Out of all these people that have money that I interact with, who I do favors for all day long. They ask me for something, I never say no. I never said no to these people,” he said. “None of these people will ever, ever, ever get a favor from me again, ever. Not only will they never get a favor from me again, they do not have Bulldog immunity.” He also lashed out at the media for not adequately covering the event.

This was the last straw for Deters, who has said he’s done throwing the Freedom Fest from now on.

“I’m never gonna do this event. Somebody else can do such an event,” he said. “I’m sorry for all the people that were gonna attend. But I can tell you right now, I feel great relief that I ain’t gonna put this burden all by myself.”

A cartoon by Drew Sheneman. Related | Real estate mogul Trump doesn’t want affordable houses…

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The British AI data center developer depends on tech giants Microsoft and Anthropic for most of its revenue.

UK cloud provider Civo plans to build 40 edge datacenters to bring sovereign AI services closer to customers, with the first due to open in Hertfordshire by March 2027. The longer-term target is 1 GW of capacity across the country, with Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 systems providing the computing power to run AI applications from UK-owned facilities. The Hertfordshire site is expected to open with 8 MW of capacity and eventually expand to 38 MW. Civo says it has secured five further sites in Lancashire, Greater Manchester, London, and Oxfordshire, which it expects to bring the total to 150 MW within three years. "For the past two years, we've surveyed 1,000 UK IT leaders about AI sovereignty," chief exec Mark Boost said at the firm's Civo Navigate event in London. "Last year, 61 percent said it was a strategic priority, and this year that's risen to 73 percent and that's really not a trend. That's the tipping point." Civo is pitching its UK ownership to customers wary of relying on US-controlled cloud providers. The US CLOUD Act adds to those worries because it allows American authorities to seek data from US companies even when it is stored in datacenters overseas. A recent report found that at least 80 percent of UK businesses using cloud services depend on AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud. "Your data sits in a UK building, but the company is owned and controlled from overseas, so your data is still subject to foreign laws," Boost said. "Sovereignty isn't just where your data sits; it's about who has it and who they answer to. And in these uncertain geopolitical times, there's a growing concern around who holds the digital kill switch." The "kill switch" concern is not entirely theoretical. In June, a US export control directive prompted Anthropic to suspend access to two of its advanced models. The controls were lifted later that month, but the episode showed how abruptly access to a US-hosted AI service could change. Civo also argues that placing capacity closer to customers will reduce the delay between an AI request and its response. Nvidia estimates that inference – running a trained model – accounts for about 35 percent of AI workloads today and could reach 60 to 65 percent by 2030. Civo claims it will be among the first cloud providers in the UK to offer the Vera Rubin platform once its Hertfordshire site is operational. It is taking orders now, alongside existing capacity on Nvidia's older B300, B200, H100, and H200 instances. Early access pricing for Vera Rubin starts at $10 per hour. ®

Campaigners are urging Prime Minister Andy Burnham to defend the UK's Digital Services Tax (DST) when he meets Donald Trump in New York later today. Civil society organizations have written to Burnham and Chancellor John Healey, asking them to resist pressure to scrap the tax. Trump regards it as one of the European levies that create unfair trade barriers for US companies and has threatened the UK with a "big tariff" if it keeps the DST. Introduced in 2020, the DST applies a 2 percent tax to certain revenues from UK users of search engines, social media services, and online marketplaces. It applies to groups generating more than £500 million globally from those activities and more than £25 million from UK users, with the first £25 million of UK revenue exempt. The tax was introduced to address what the government described as a mismatch between where digital businesses generate value and where their profits are taxed. It is separate from corporation tax rather than a replacement for it. In their letter, signatories including Tax Justice UK, the National Education Union, 38 Degrees, Global Witness, and Cost of Living Action press the government to keep the DST and extend it to AI companies and other digital services. They also call for measures to prevent multinationals from shifting profits through low-tax jurisdictions. Faiza Shaheen, executive director at Tax Justice UK, said: "Under no circumstances should the UK be cutting taxes for some of the richest corporations to please Donald Trump. Let's not forget, these businesses are often huge monopolies that have enormous power and more money than entire countries. If the UK caves in to this demand, what will Trump and the USA come after next? Burnham should stand strong and strengthen the DST to include booming AI companies, with the revenues invested to ease the cost of living for people all across Britain." The tax raised £800 million in 2024-25. Its scope includes activities run by companies such as Amazon, Google, Meta, eBay and TikTok. With government borrowing rising, scrapping the DST would also mean giving up revenue ahead of Healey's first Budget. The campaigners argue that the government should collect more from digital giants, not less. ®

This story was originally co-published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

For 38 years, Josh Armes worked as a coal miner in West Virginia and Virginia.

After retirement, Armes, 74, of Grundy, Virginia, was diagnosed with black lung disease, medically known as coal workers’ pneumoconiosis (CWP), caused by breathing in coal dust over long periods, which irreversibly damages the lungs.

Armes has required an oxygen tank to breathe for the past four years or so, along with regular doctor visits and an albuterol inhaler to help when he has trouble breathing. Even with the supplemental oxygen, he’s severely limited in what he can physically do.

In 2014, Armes received notice that the federal black lung benefits he had been receiving for more than three years were being appealed against by a coal operator. For the last 12 years, he and his family have been in an appeals process limbo, trying to regain their benefits while Armes’s condition progresses.

The federal black lung program was created in 1969 to provide coal miners disabled by black lung with monetary compensation and medical benefits. But the Armes family is just one of many who have struggled with appeals and long delays in obtaining federal black lung benefits.

Those delays come as the Trump administration moves to boost the coal industry and as cases of black lung are surging—reaching a nearly 50-year high, according to data published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine last month.

“They can appeal it, get a different judge, and it’s stripped away from you, which I find absolutely insane. They fight you at every single step of the way. “

According to a May report by the government accountability office (GAO), 7,709 miner beneficiaries were receiving black lung benefits in 2024. The report was requested in 2023 by Democratic senators Mark Warner, John Hickenlooper, Tim Kaine, and John Fetterman, who have also introduced legislation to improve the black-lung benefits system.

In the fiscal year 2025, about 22,500 beneficiaries, including dependents, survivors, and miners, were receiving black lung benefits.

Between 2013 to 2024, 40 percent of approved claims by the Department of Labor were disputed, generally by coal operators.

The May report said miners have expressed problems with obtaining black-lung benefits. It said miners have been forced to wait several years for their claims to be approved, and raised issues with coal operators filing appeals. “I can’t figure out one thing. They sent me a paper that said I got first- and second-stage black lung. That ought to be enough, or do you have to be dead?” Armes said.

His daughter, Crystal Armes, said obtaining the black lung benefits is an arduous process, involving paying out of pocket for medical tests and finding a lawyer to take on the case. She also argued that the law should change so that coal companies shouldn’t be able to appeal after benefits are awarded.

“The burden of proof lies on the coal miner to prove that he has black lung,” she said. “We have appealed it and appealed it and appealed it. Still appealing it. He [Josh] does have black lung. Hopefully, soon we will be awarded the black lung benefits again. But I’m not holding my breath on that one.”

The GAO report said: “Miners in all six groups expressed their belief that mine operators were either ‘waiting for them to die’ or ‘waiting for them to give up’ so they could avoid paying benefit.” It noted between January 2013 to mid-August 2024, 390 beneficiaries whose claims were initially approved had their claims denied after appeal, leaving them responsible for paying back the benefits.

According to the report, the median length of an appealed claim was three years or more.

“If the Trump administration actually cared about protecting coal miners from black lung, we’d have a strong silica rule in place right now.”

Among 53,000 closed claims between January 2013 and August 2024, 11 claims took longer than 10 years to close. The report did not state how many open cases have surpassed 10 years.

The Armes family are still waiting for their black lungs benefits appeals process to complete, while not receiving benefits.

“When you’re awarded it, they can appeal it, get a different judge, and it’s stripped away from you, which I find absolutely insane,” added Crystal Armes. “They fight you at every single step of the way. They’ll send you from one doctor to another doctor to go do another test and another test. You got to go to this doctor. You got to travel over here, and it’s very costly. And some people don’t have the means to be able to do that. I don’t feel like the process should be this difficult.”

According to data published in August in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, researchers at the National Institute for Safety and Occupational Health found 32.5 percent of veteran underground coal miners in central Appalachia are suffering from black lung disease, a rate unseen since 1978.

Between 2020 and 2023, more than 1,700 coal miners in the US died from black lung disease. The rise in cases has been attributed to silica dust that is more common in the coal seams being mined today.

In April, E&E Greenwire reported that the Trump administration’s Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) would “indefinitely delay” a federal silica dust rule, “pending judicial review”—but any judicial review is on pause due to the agency requesting an abeyance on court action.

Rebecca Shelton, director of policy for Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center, in a statement on the agency’s freeze on enforcing the rule, said: “If the Trump administration actually cared about protecting coal miners from black lung, we’d have a strong silica rule in place right now. Instead, they are hiding behind a ridiculous legal process to delay action while miners get sick and die.”

The United Mine Workers of America has pushed to unfreeze the federal silica dust rule, which would mandate engineering and ventilation controls to protect miners on the job. It was passed in April 2024, but funding for the rule was blocked by Republicans in Congress in June 2024, and the MSHA under the Trump administration indicated to the union it has no plans to enforce the rule.

“Every day [that] federal regulators drag their feet and sit on this rule, another working father, mother, husband, wife, sister or brother contracts an incurable, fatal disease,” Brian Sanson, president of UMWA International, in a statement. “Someone’s life is forever changed. A company’s profit margin cannot take precedence over a miner’s right to draw a breath.”

Meanwhile, miners already dealing with black lung disease are still facing difficulties in trying to obtain federal benefits.

“These people, like my dad, he gave his life to mining to support his family, and now you know we’ve been fighting this fight for over 10 plus years now. Everyone should be outraged by this,” added Crystal Armes. “We’re hardworking, everyday Americans who go to work every day, pay our taxes, try to do the right thing, and then, we can’t get what was promised us.”

The White House deferred comment to the Department of Labor. NIOSH did not respond to multiple requests for comment. A spokesperson for the MSHA at the Department of Labor said in an email: “Until pending litigation and limited rulemaking on respirable crystalline silica are resolved, MSHA continues to vigorously enforce the permissible exposure limit of 100 micrograms per cubic meter.”

Since 2021, US Rep. María Elvira Salazar has represented the 27th congressional district in Miami-Dade County, where more than 70 percent of residents are Hispanic. As a Republican candidate, she ran with Trump’s seal of approval, nabbing his endorsement that year and in subsequent elections.

But last week, Salazar jeopardized her good standing with Trump and shocked the GOP with her first official campaign ad. In it, she called out the president for his anti-immigrant agenda. “Some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far,” Salazar said, noting that half of the people arrested by ICE in July had no criminal records. “The same Hispanics that helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today,” she added. “I’m not talking about giving them amnesty. I’m talking about giving them a dignified life in this promised land. And only you can do that.”

A Message to President Trump on Immigration | María Elvira Salazar pic.twitter.com/memcf4jags

— María Elvira Salazar (@MaElviraSalazar) September 17, 2026

Within hours, the 30-second ad had circulated through political circles. Many Democrats, including her opponent, retired South Florida TV news anchor Eliott Rodriguez, saw the move as an election ploy. In a Facebook post, Rodriguez criticized her for her support of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which gave billions in funding to ICE, and for her defense of conditions at the now-shuttered Alligator Alcatraz, a state-run immigrant detention center in the Everglades. “María Elvira Salazar did this,” Rodriguez said. “Make no mistake about it. She owns all of these deportations.”

Meanwhile, the ad drew the ire of some Republicans and the Department of Homeland Security. “Whether Congresswoman Salazar likes it or not, the men and women of ICE are enforcing the laws passed by Congress,” the agency said in a statement. Last weekend, Trump told a reporter that he disagreed with her, but described Salazar as a “nice person.” He then noted, “I got her elected. Without me she wouldn’t have gotten elected.”

A Cuban American, Salazar was a veteran TV journalist before joining Congress. She handily won her district in 2024 with a 20-point lead. But political experts I spoke to say November’s race will likely be a tighter one. Last week, a Miami-based pollster working for the Rodriguez campaign found that the two former television journalists are tied, with both candidates getting 45 percent support of voters. A few earlier polls also downgraded the race from “solid Republican” to “likely Republican.”

“She may survive,” said Orlando J. Pérez, political science professor at the University of North Texas at Dallas and a Cuban American who grew up in this district. “If she wins, it’s not going to be by 20 points. It’s going to be narrow.”

The district is among those with the highest percentage of Latino voters in the US, and many experts view this race as a test of how far Trump’s popularity has cratered with the Latino community, which gave him significant support in 2024. In fact, Pérez told me, this district “is a microcosm of how far Latinos, and in this case Cuban Americans, which are a core bedrock group for the Republicans and Trump, have shifted.”

This district “is a microcosm of how far Latinos, and in this case Cuban Americans, which are a core bedrock group for the Republicans and Trump, have shifted.”

Even before this public break, he added, Salazar has been a voice inside the Republican Party asking for a more moderate immigration enforcement approach. She sponsored a bipartisan proposal called the Dignity Act, which provided a pathway to legal status for Dreamers and undocumented immigrants who came to the US before 2020. She’s also been outspoken against the end of TPS protections for Haitians and Venezuelans. But the fact that she has taken a bolder stance, especially against Trump himself, “is a real sign that that community is really angry,” Pérez said.

Salazar’s campaign has not responded to my request for an interview. On CBS Face The Nation on Sunday, Salazar said she spoke with the president after the ad aired and told him to maintain the “pot of gold that you brought to the GOP in 2024” through the Latino vote. “No other president was able to convince the Hispanics to vote 55 points for a GOP president. Please preserve that fortune that you have brought to the party,” she recalled telling him. “We need to continue winning elections because we have this very big threat called the socialists on the Democratic side.”

Eduardo Gamarra, political science professor and director of the Latino Public Opinion Forum at Florida International University, said Salazar is “trapped between trying to defend her position as somebody who is very supportive of the president, and at the same time trying to demonstrate that she is a dedicated defender of immigrants in her district. Those two things have been diametrically opposed objectives.” 

Also working against Salazar is that her opponent, Eliott Rodriguez, is, as Pérez told me, “familiar to people” in South Florida. The son of Cuban immigrants, he was born and raised in New York City. His family moved to Miami when he was 12. He worked for nearly 50 years as a journalist, spending the latter half of his career at CBS News Miami, where he spent many years as a news anchor before retiring last year.

Rodriguez can also run on the affordability crisis unencumbered by the political baggage of being in the governing party while gas and everyday costs for families have risen in the last year. “Eliott can run on affordability; he can run as the real defender of immigrants,” Gamarra said. “And he can also differentiate himself from Trump without any penalty.”

During an interview in May, Rodriguez told me running for political office was not part of his plan following retirement. But recently, one of his daughters left Miami for North Carolina because she and her husband, both professionals with six-figure salaries, couldn’t afford to live there. He sees other young families being priced out of their hometown, now one of the most expensive cities in the United States.

“People were gracious enough to allow me into their homes to bring the news, and I worked hard to earn their trust,” he said. “And now I’m trying to earn their votes, because I am horrified by what’s happening in this country, and I’m also horrified that our representative in Congress has done nothing about it, and she’s just a rubber stamp for Donald Trump and MAGA.”  

Gamarra said his team is about to begin work on a Florida poll focused on Latino voters, with results expected in mid-October. He pointed to a recent Colorado poll in which 66 percent of Latino voters said the country was on the wrong track and 68 percent disapproved of Trump. “The Colorado poll provides very strong evidence that Republican gains among Latinos are vulnerable,” he said. “But we’re not seeing yet a national reversal or a guarantee that dissatisfaction will become a Democratic turnout.”

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the September 22 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.

Three news organizations just sued the Trump administration after Donald Trump banned them from the White House grounds. They alleged that their First Amendment rights had been violated. Amusingly, to show that Trump is retaliating against them for their reporting, the organizations leaned on Trump’s own words and tweets, which state explicitly that this is what he’s doing.

Trump’s rage at the media is backfiring in another way, too. Other news organizations, in solidarity with Trump’s targets, have joined in suspending the pool, so Trump isn’t getting TV coverage for some very big events. Meanwhile, Trump’s aides are leaking that Trump is lashing out at the media because he feels increasingly powerless as a potential election loss looms.

We think Trump is headed for a major humiliation here in more ways than one, so we’re working through it all with Kristy Parker, counsel at Protect Democracy. Kristy, thanks for coming on.

Kristy Parker: Thanks for having me.

Sargent: So on Friday, Trump banned CNN, MS Now, and Politico from the White House grounds, openly due to their coverage. They just sued the Trump administration. Now TV networks have joined them, so there’s no pool coverage, and Trump’s events are already not getting covered. Kristy, maybe we can start here. How unusual is it for any of this to happen?

Parker: I don’t think we’ve ever seen another political leader in this country be so blatant and overt in his desire to eliminate freedom of the press as it pertains to the way they cover him. I don’t think we’ve ever seen anything like that.

We’ve certainly seen politicians have contentious relationships with the press. We’ve seen them try to control narratives and curtail the press in various ways. I don’t think we’ve ever seen anyone behave the way Trump does.

Sargent: The lawsuit filed by CNN, MS Now, and Politico argues that Trump and the White House engaged in discrimination against them for their viewpoints or reporting. And to do this, they cite Trump’s own words and tweets. For instance, on Friday, Trump announced this ban during an eruption of rage on Truth Social, in which he said: “I am proud to announce that, effective immediately, I am banning fake news CNN, MS Now, and Politico as a result of their constant reporting fake news.”

Kristy, there he says, I’m banning them as a result of their reporting, right? I mean, that’s the essence of this, isn’t it?

Parker: I mean, as a lawyer, I almost have to thank him, because he makes the job of lawyers very easy when it comes to doing something that typically has been considered difficult, which is proving motive.

He announces his motives, makes it very plain what he’s doing. And you know, we’ve heard the old saying, when people tell you who they are, believe them. And, you know, that’s what we should do with him.

Sargent: There are some other good examples of this as well. The lawsuit cites Trump justifying his ban this week. He said this: “There’s something wrong with a country that can allow people to write purposely negative stories.” Then he reiterates that, saying they “purposely write negative news.”

He doesn’t get to make that decision, though, Kristy. He actually thinks he has this power, I think. He thinks he has dictatorial power, that he can decree that something doesn’t count as actual news and then ban it. But what’s funny, I think, is that in declaring this power for himself, he admits the corruption of it all and creates an actual legal vulnerability, right? Like, there really is a legal vulnerability in these admissions, isn’t there?

Parker: I mean, he’s giving away the whole game with the admissions. He is expressly saying, I am retaliating against the press because of the content of their speech. I am denying them access to me because I don’t like what they report. And when he’s saying that there’s something wrong with a country that allows things like that, what he’s really saying is there’s something wrong with America, because that is fundamentally who we are.

We distinguish our democracy from other forms of government because we do allow the people to criticize the government. That’s the central feature of the whole thing. It’s, you know, the government answers to us. We can criticize the government. And the press is our intermediary in doing that.

Sargent: I think it’s important to underscore what you said there, because he actually means that. Like, I don’t think it’s a glib construction on what he’s saying. He means that there’s something wrong with America that it allows the press to criticize a leader like him. He means it.

Parker: He has said repeatedly that our ideals, our laws, our previous leaders are very stupid. His entire movement, his agenda, his ideology are attacks on the United States of America as the world’s leading democracy. That is in essence what he is about.

Sargent: Right? Free press, democracy—all stupid.

Parker: He believes that he is above the law, and that he as president should be above the law, and that the presidency is more of a king-like institution that can do anything it wants, rather than is one of three coequal branches of government that again answers primarily to the people, who are the ones who are supposed to be in charge.

Sargent: Right. At least he thinks that as long as he’s in the presidency, right? He would not apply this to Barack Obama or Joe Biden or any other person who’s been president. So let’s dig into the legal guts of this a little more. The key to this, I think, is that federal courts have previously found that once the White House has granted access to news organizations, it can’t rescind that access on this basis, correct? Can you walk us through the legality of this, and where this lawsuit goes?

Parker: Sure. So, you know, in essence, without getting too weedsy about it, from a First Amendment point of view, the White House has for many years granted reporters access. It’s in everyone’s mutual interest, both the media and the government’s, to have reporters explaining to the public what the government does. So for years it’s granted access to reporters.

So it’s created essentially a limited forum whereby reporters can have access. When you create a forum like that, the First Amendment prohibits you from denying access based on the viewpoint of the reporter. So that can’t be the reason you don’t let a reporter in the White House—the content of their coverage.

Sargent: Right. And he’s saying very explicitly that that’s what he’s doing.

Parker: Again, he does not hide it. There’s no hiding the ball here. There’s no mystery to uncover. He has made it very clear that he is banning these reporters because he does not like the content of their coverage. And that is what is specifically prohibited by the Constitution.

Sargent: He’s even going further and saying that he intends this as an express effort to get them to change their behavior, meaning change their speech about him. Let’s listen to Trump talk about this ban. In this snippet here, he’s a bit confused by his questioner at first, but then he figures out that the ban is what the questioner’s asking about, and he answers this way.

Donald Trump (voiceover): The ban on the free press, right? A very simple ban. I don’t want them in my office. I don’t want them here. I would say the ban would go as far as you can. And if they could straighten themselves out, you know, if they could straighten themselves out, I’d love it. Look, they’re very dishonest people.

Sargent: So, Kristy, two things about this. Number one, he says straight out that this is a ban on the free press. That’s something you mentioned earlier. I’m pretty sure that was accidental, but, like, you know, we’ll take it or whatever. But then I think the real guts of it is where he says he’d be thrilled if they responded to his ban by offering coverage that pleases him.

And so that sort of takes it to another level, right? Because he’s not just saying, I’m banning them because I’m retaliating against them for their speech. He’s sending a message to the rest of the press. He’s saying, you need to straighten out, otherwise this is the fate that awaits you too. Isn’t that what’s going on here?

Parker: I mean, sure. And that’s what we call government restrictions on speech creating a chilling effect on speech generally. So when he punishes three reporters and three networks for their coverage, his intent is to send a message to everyone else that the same thing will happen to you if you don’t shade your coverage in the way that I want you to. So yes, exactly that.

Sargent: And he’s basically telling CNN, MS Now, and Politico that you’ve got to, you know, fix your coverage of me in order to get back in, right?

Parker: Right. And that is precisely why we have the Constitution that we have and the laws that we have, because we don’t want government using its coercive powers to quash dissent, to quash information, to coerce certain kinds of stories being told about the government. The reason we don’t allow these types of bans under our Constitution is precisely to stop this sort of behavior from a tyrannical president.

Sargent: So where do you see this all going? Can you walk us through what happens now? The three news organizations have asked for relief. I assume we’re going to see a temporary restraining order or some sort of injunction, maybe very quickly.

Parker: They sought what’s called a temporary restraining order from the court, which means they’re asking the court to immediately block the administration from taking away these reporters’ access. There will probably be a hearing on that in very short order. I think the government has been required to respond to this filing by Tuesday. So I think we’ll be hearing something from the court fairly soon.

And based on the letter of the law and previous actions this administration has tried to take, I think we will be seeing a restraining order entered in very short order against this. And then there will be litigation around a more permanent injunction against this action. And that could take a few months to unfold.

But I expect to see these reporters having access restored fairly quickly, just because that is the law. And that’s what we’ve seen the courts do, and this particular judge do, in a previous case.

Sargent: Well, here’s where it gets even darker. Trump advisors and confidants leaked to Axios that what worries them is that Trump feels the end coming on, meaning the end of his presidency, that his power is slipping away from him. As Axios puts it, quote: “Trump often retreats to his worst impulses when he feels most powerless. That helps explain Trump’s decision to ban three news organizations from the White House for the sin of reporting what he doesn’t like.”

I mean, Kristy, that is real mad-king stuff. His own advisors are letting us know that our country is in the grip of a madman, basically, don’t you think?

Parker: He lashes out when things are not going well for him, by defaulting to whatever it is he thinks he can do to, you know, drop a hammer on somebody, even in the short term. You know, so he likes to announce criminal investigations of people, direct the Department of Justice to prosecute people, pardon people who are ridiculous criminals, because he can do that with the stroke of a pen.

So he likes to default to things that he believes he can do immediately that make him look powerful, when he is feeling at his weakest. So I think that is a fair assessment, both of him and of what we are likely to see in the coming days and weeks.

Sargent: There’s kind of a dark irony to it as well, I think, because for Trump, the corruption is explicit—not just because he likes to blurt out his corrupt designs, but because that’s sort of how his movement functions. He essentially tells his supporters that he is openly corrupt and that nobody can do anything about it. He sort of invites his supporters to say to themselves, well, Trump’s corruption benefits me, and so I’m for it.

And so when Trump kind of goes out and says, I don’t pay my taxes, or goes out and says, I’m banning three news organizations because they displeased me, he’s saying to his supporters, look, I can do this, right? I have the power to do this and nobody can stop me.

But of course, the open admission of it, which is sort of central to MAGA ideology—it’s where the energy of it all comes from—ends up kind of coming back to bite him, doesn’t it? Because the courts just sort of look at it and say, well, you know, you can’t do that.

Parker: Well, I think that’s where people really should take some hope, you know. Because he definitely wants to show his supporters that he is powerful and he is strong and he is doing things. And this lashing out that he does, by manipulating the levers of government power, is how he does it.

But what we have seen in the last two years now is that he really doesn’t have that power. There are always actors within the system who can stand up to him, if they will. The people are the primary ones.

We’ve seen them in grand juries refuse cases that he has tried to bring there, or that he’s directed the Department of Justice to bring against his enemies. Now we’re seeing the media band together, and today he’s got no coverage of stuff he’s trying to do. Like, there’s no video of him, there’s no audio of him. He can’t project the trappings of the presidency when the media decides that they are going to band together and exercise their power.

So what we are seeing actually from him is a manifestation of his fundamental weakness. The more he does these sorts of things, the more he’s going to show that he’s really the Wizard of Oz. Dorothy’s going to get back there and see what’s really back there, as we continue to see these sorts of behaviors.

Sargent: Well, let’s just close on that. Should we actually take heart from this? It sort of seems to me that it’s double-edged, right? On the one hand, you really can see the system holding in certain ways, like the grand juries turning away the prosecutions of his enemies, prosecutors quitting rather than bringing his corrupt cases.

But then on the other hand, you’ve got people like Todd Blanche, who’s now the attorney general of the United States, who basically says straight out that he’s willing to carry out whatever Trump orders him to. In fact, that’s why Trump chose him for the job.

And you’re going to have an interim period here where news organizations actually had to make a real decision, right? Like, these news organizations have to say to themselves, do we cover Trump truthfully, when there’s this big penalty to pay for it?

And so I think it’s heartening, because the news organizations are coming down on the right side of that question, and they’re all banding together against him. But there’s sort of a sense that it’s slipped in a major way as well. I wondered if you could reflect on all that.

Parker: I mean, you’re right. It is always double-edged, because as he exercises these powers, he certainly is going to be able to harm real people and their interests in the short term. As he does it, he’s going to cause them to have to hire lawyers and go through all sorts of turmoil.

Some of the things he does result in tremendous harm to people, and they’re people who are less powerful than the mainstream media, or some of the folks that he’s tried to prosecute. So it’s definitely always double-edged.

But I do think it’s never not been a fight to have the kind of democracy that our founders set in motion in seventeen seventy-six. Like, it’s always been something that we’ve had to fight for. It’s always been something that people have had to sacrifice for, because there are forces out there that don’t want it to exist.

So I think the heart to take in it is that when people do decide, hey, democracy is worth sacrificing for, freedom of the press, freedom of speech—that is worth putting whatever interests I have on the line. And when we see people doing it, they are having ultimate success. So I think if people can just take heart in the idea that when you do stand up to the tyrant, he is not nearly as tough as his talk.

I think we can come out on the other side. And that’s what we have to hang on to here: we can come out victorious on the other side.

Sargent: I think that’s true. I just wish it didn’t require Trump slipping to, like, a 35 percent approval rating for people to figure this out. Because if you think back to the beginning of this whole catastrophe, there was a lot of folding and a lot of capitulation and a lot of institutional cowardice.

Most of that’s passed and blown over, and we’re seeing some standing up going on, but it took a while, and there was sort of a sense there for a while that maybe it wouldn’t go that way.

Parker: Well, I guess I’ll take it back to something I said earlier. I mean, I completely agree with that. And I think people need to not dismiss crazy rhetoric from people who seek power. And then they need to not dismiss the things that they actually do when they see them in power. We saw Donald Trump as president once before.

The things he’s doing now are more aggressively extreme in the way that they are playing out than the first iteration was. But we could have seen what was coming the first time. And so it would be nice if we didn’t have to have these object lessons over and over, and we would just go from first principles, which is: if you come in trying to violate our Constitution and say that you’re a king and not a president, we’re going to stand up to you. All of us are, and not work an angle for our personal interests. And then we’ll all be better off.

Sargent: Yeah, it would have been nice if our institutions had seen it that way at the outset of Trump 2.0. But we’re headed in what may be a salutary direction. Midterms coming, the people are going to weigh in, and that’s going to, I think, potentially change the equation even more, right?

A sizable midterm victory, and all of a sudden, on the other side of that, this kind of emperor-has-no-clothes weakness you’re talking about, this kind of facade, is even flimsier, really falls apart, I think. What do you think?

Parker: Well, I mean, I’m a huge sports fan. I like to think this is halftime of his second term. We’re making the halftime adjustments. We’re smart, savvy people, raised in a democracy and in the belief that we the people are sovereign, and we’re going to come out and we’re going to have a good second half and continue winning these battles.

Sargent: I love it: We’re going to have a good second half, people. Kristy Parker, always a great pleasure to talk to you. Thank you so much.

Parker: Thanks, Greg.

➤ Para leer el artículo en español, haga clic aquí.

Watsonville officials will revisit the city’s contract with controversial surveillance technology company Flock Safety on Tuesday evening, just a year after it renewed its agreement, amid growing concerns from community members. 

The world is freaking out about the dangers of artificial intelligence, and no wonder: Every day brings news of AI agents breaking out of containment, hacking their way through the internet, and conspiring to evade humans. And the AI companies are responding that a) their systems could kill us all within a few years, but b) they should be allowed to keep going, if maybe just a tad more slowly.

Can they be trusted? On that, we here at Mother Jones have some relevant experience. Two years ago, we sued OpenAI and Microsoft for training their model on copyrighted content from our newsroom and many others. And now, documents from that lawsuit have provided an extraordinary window into how executives at these companies think about the rules, the law, and the rights of others. 

Our lawsuit (which is similar to others filed by The New York Times, The Intercept, and other publishers) argued that the companies built their immensely valuable product via “astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions” and perhaps “the largest theft of labor in human history.” 

A Microsoft executive warned that AI has started a “doom loop” that will “threaten the economic foundations of its essential suppliers” and eventually make the internet infinitely worse.

Actually those were not our words. They came from Microsoft’s director of applied science, Brent Hecht, and we were able to uncover his statements and many other instances where tech executives talk in unfiltered terms, through the lawsuit. You can read the full document—a brief we and the other plaintiffs filed on September 4—here. But in case you don’t have the stomach for 84 pages of legalese, here are a few of the most amazing bits. (No one except the lawyers is allowed to see the original documents from which these quotes were taken—but we are also petitioning the judge to let us uncover those, so stay tuned!) 

• “Millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,” an internal Microsoft document warned before acknowledging that “almost no one intended for content they created to be used in this fashion, nor are they compensated for its use.” 
• The companies know full well that by ingesting content and training the AIs to spit it back out again, they are destroying the audience for publishers and other creators. OpenAI policy director Jack Clark wrote that the company was “creating systems that substitute for the labor of the people that define the culture of society.” Microsoft’s own research found that when people used AI search versus traditional search engines, there were 90 percent fewer clicks to news articles. Microsoft’s lawyer said that chatbots are “designed to answer your question” rather than “giving you a series of links to things you can go look for yourself.” Another expert found that referral traffic to publishers from Google Search and Google Discover has dropped by at least 30 percent since Google introduced AI overviews. 
• They also knew that, ultimately, destroying the economic foundation for humans making content while also making it easy to generate slop by the bucketful, would wreck the internet—and, thus, their own content supply chain. Hecht warned that AI had started a “doom loop” that would “threaten the economic foundations of its essential suppliers” and eventually make the internet infinitely worse (a process for which the media critic Cory Doctorow has created the term “enshittification,” and that you may recognize from searching for… pretty much anything on the internet).
• Greg Brockman, who started OpenAI with Sam Altman and serves as its president (he is also one of Silicon Valley’s most generous donors to Donald Trump and his PACs, giving $50 million in the last two years) excitedly told his colleagues about how good the company’s products were at spitting out publishers’ content. “[It] seems to be particularly good at predicting text of news articles like whenever i have it complete in the middle of a sentence in a NYT article, it seems to complete the sentence on point.” When a fellow executive told Brockman about “a hack to get around nytimes paywall” to help the company scrape the Times’s site, Brockman responded “ah nice.” (OpenAI also hosted custom tools its users had made using ChatGPT to get around the Times’ paywall.)
• The AI companies didn’t just randomly grab text from the internet. In one version of their training data, they specifically zeroed in on quality content—and news articles ended up being the most prevalent type of content in that dataset. OpenAI also said its goal was to “crush freshness…in the domain of real-world news.” They also downloaded existing datasets, such as one intended for linguistic research that contained countless articles from paywalled news sites, even though its terms of use expressly prohibited using it for commercial purposes. 
• Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testified that AI companies should not “access data in violation of a term of service.” Glen Weyl, who founded a key Microsoft research unit, noted that compensating creators is “in the best interests of my employer, of my country, and of many other groups I belong to.” And yet, when the companies created their datasets, they systematically stripped out data that would indicate who actually owned the content—copyright notices, author information, terms of use, and so on. As another Microsoft document noted, “most LLMs (including those from OpenAl) are built on millions of scraped webpages and other large text datasets, and almost none of this content has been obtained with its owners’ knowledge or consent.” 
• Right after the lawsuits were filed, OpenAI built a special filter to stop its models from spitting out the content of the news organizations suing it. As the legal brief notes, “OpenAI did not suppress the output of content from any entity that had not sued it…The purpose […], in other words, was not to prevent OpenAI’s models from infringing copyrights, but to stop Plaintiffs from gathering evidence of OpenAI’s copying for use in litigation.” This probably explains why, when a Columbia Journalism Review writer ran an experiment last year to get all her news from ChatGPT, it refused to cite content from the Times, Mother Jones, The Intercept, or any other publication that had sued it. Hecht, the Microsoft executive, warned that this filter could result in an “accidental cover up” because it would result in “people who have a right over the content having less visibility into what was used for training.” 
• This one was surprising to me, even after being involved in this lawsuit for two years: OpenAI took 20 million ChatGPT responses and had one of its experts search for chunks of text—specifically “25-grams,” aka chunks of 25 words in a row, that were identical between ChatGPT’s responses and a news article. They found more than 400,000 of these 25-word overlaps between ChatGPT and Mother Jones articles—just about the same number as for the New York Times. (Not every one of those overlaps might constitute a “regurgitation” of our content—if one of our articles quoted something, and the AI quoted the same thing, that would show up as an overlap.)

In the legal filings, we and the other news organizations argue that the AI companies created their product by disregarding the rights of humans to their creativity and content—and that the companies themselves are now trapped in their own cycle of accelerating enshittification. AI is creating vast amounts of garbage content on the internet, while at the same time making it hard for news organizations like Mother Jones to stay afloat. “Yet AI companies remain powerless to break out of this ‘doom loop’,” the brief argues, “because, while the industry as a whole would benefit if every company paid… each individual company is better off taking content for free while others pay.” 

Seem familiar? This is the same prisoner’s dilemma we’re watching play out as the AI agents go rogue: It would be better for everyone, including the AI companies, if everyone slowed down and figured out the technology. But for each individual company, the incentives are to plow ahead while waiting for others to slow down. 

Bottom line: We cannot leave these decisions to the AI executives. Not when it comes to stealing content, and not when it comes to the fate of humanity. Left to their own devices, they will make the wrong choices—even when they know those choices are bad for them, too.

Meta is giving plastic recycling a boost in a new deal with startup MacroCycle, which is building its first commercial plant.

Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust managed to overwrite a maternity database spanning more than a decade after someone forgot to change a setting in a reused set of computer instructions. The mishap happened on August 18, when staff carrying out routine technical work to copy a radiotherapy database for reporting used a set of pre-written instructions that had previously been run against another hospital system. There was just one problem: a setting needed changing first, and nobody changed it. The process ran against the wrong database and overwrote the Trust's old Medway maternity records database, which contained information about women and babies treated between September 2011 and November 2022. Nottingham University Hospitals (NUH) said the incident was the result of human error and was escalated within minutes of being discovered. The good news is that the Trust has managed to recover the clinical information it needs for patient care, including notes, observations, and test results. Current maternity patients and services are also unaffected, and NUH said no patient information was accessed or used inappropriately as a result of the incident. The bad news is that one part of the database has proved harder to resurrect. NUH has been unable to completely restore the audit history showing who viewed maternity records during the 11-year period covered by the database. That means the Trust may now be unable, in most cases, to establish whether a particular person looked at a patient's maternity record between September 2011 and November 2022. The Trust brought in external specialists and went looking through other sources of information to recover as much of the lost data as possible, but the complete access history remains missing. The Information Commissioner's Office has been notified, as has Nottinghamshire Police, which is assessing whether the loss has any impact on Operation Perth, its investigation into deaths and serious injuries involving mothers and babies at Nottingham City Hospital and Queen's Medical Centre. NUH said it has completed a patient safety incident investigation and strengthened its technical controls and processes to prevent a repeat performance. Andy Callow, chief digital and information officer at NUH, apologized to affected women and families and said the Trust had taken "immediate action" to investigate and recover the information. "The information needed to support patient care has been restored and there has been no impact on current maternity services or the care provided to women and babies today," Callow said. "However, to date, we have been unable to fully restore the historical record showing who viewed maternity records between September 2011 and November 2022." There are plenty of elaborate ways for an organization to lose data in 2026. Sometimes, though, all it takes is an old set of instructions, the wrong setting, and someone pressing go. ®

Local theatergoers have been to some pretty disastrous cocktail parties this year.

There was the alcohol-soaked evening from hell in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Then came Noël Coward’s “Private Lives,” where cocktails, old lovers, and spectacularly bad judgment proved to be a combustible combination.

Many of the new Democratic candidates making a splash this cycle are the progressives who ran to the left of the party establishment in the primaries and defeated their more centrist counterparts. But there’s another intriguing trend that’s been obscured in all the hype: the outsider candidates who built their careers mostly away from the political arena and are now taking on the career insiders. Naturally, it’s not new to see nonpoliticians parlaying their real-world bona fides into a new career in Washington, D.C., but what does feel new this year is how many farmers are doing it. Specifically, the farmers that have been battered during the Trump years.

Trump’s tariffs and war in Iran have raised the prices of goods and gas and closed global markets, making what was already a U.S. farming crisis even worse. In some races, farmers are stepping up to try to connect their stories to the myriad disasters the Trump administration has brought to all voters in their districts. They’re making this effort while drawing on the farmer populism of the Democratic Party’s bygone era, and blaming Trump for the ways his bad policies have hurt their rural communities: Think lost jobs and closing hospitals.

The biggest challenge they face? They have to run a high-wire campaign that proves their claims while not alienating their farmer colleagues who, as a whole, have supported Trump since the beginning.

One of the most interesting races featuring a farmer turned politico is in my home state of Arkansas, where Hallie Shoffner is running for Senate against two-term Republican Tom Cotton. Shoffner grew up in the Delta, in a small town named after her family, and returned to Arkansas after graduating from Vanderbilt University. She also earned a master’s degree at the Clinton School of Public Service in Little Rock. She took over her family’s farm about 10 years ago, after her father was diagnosed with dementia, but she had to close operations last year. “I wouldn’t be running for the United States Senate if last year I hadn’t had to close my family’s farm,” she told me. “It did not matter what we did or what crops we planted financially. It wasn’t enough, and that is true for hundreds of farmers across Arkansas. We’ve lost 25 percent of the family farms in Arkansas in the last 18 months.”

Shoffner realized that if she didn’t close, she’d risk gambling away her family’s land by relying on loans, and her father needed stability and care. “I was so angry. I was so angry because farming’s the best job in the world, but when you’re not making any money, it eats you alive because it’s not just a job. It’s a lifestyle. It’s almost an obsession. You really got to love digging in the dirt to do it because you never really make any money,” she said.

The farming crisis in Arkansas has been particularly acute; the state led the nation in farm bankruptcies in 2025. But Shoffner and others think the experience they earned navigating the challenges of the industry is comparable to the affordability crises facing everyone, especially in the rural areas where they live.

Blake Gendebien, a dairy farmer running for Republican Representative Elise Stefanik’s open seat in New York’s 21st district, said the problems facing farmers are directly impacting everything from grocery store prices to the loss of opportunity for young people in rural communities. “We’ve got immediate things to focus on that can help our small businesses keep employing people, and focus on success and development and opportunity for people to stay here and live and work and thrive in the North Country,” he said. That especially means ending the war in Iran and repairing relationships with Canada, which borders his district across the St. Lawrence River. The lack of cross-border travel is hitting businesses in his area hard, he said.

Don Coover is a veterinarian and cattle rancher in Kansas running to defeat Representative Derek Schmidt, a Republican ending his first term serving the state’s 2nd district, which covers much of the state’s eastern border. He says everyone should be concerned about how the impacts of Trump’s changes at the policy level are affecting them. “If you’re concerned about the cost and the health of the nutritional environment in the United States … you better be concerned about the [agricultural] industry because that’s the foundation of it,” he said. “None of these things exist in isolation or in a vacuum. Everybody’s dependent on everybody else, and so we need to make decisions like that.”

The loss of global markets arising from Trump’s trade wars have hit his district hard, he said. “A lot of decisions have been made capriciously without a real understanding of the long-term effects and the unintended consequences,” he said. “We’ve got to get away from that. We’ve got to have people that are interested in putting in the work to understand what the hell they are making decisions about and making better decisions.”  

Shoffner, Coover, and Gendebien are running in red areas of the country where Democrats are often painted as caricatures. They have tough races. Coover is rated as having a very slim chance of victory; Gendebien’s race is tightening but tilting Republican. Cotton is favored to win reelection in Arkansas. I asked Shoffner if Arkansans think she’s a socialist, given the rise of Democratic Socialists of America–aligned candidates around the country, and she said their platform doesn’t work for her but that voters across the spectrum are tired of being put into boxes. “DSA is the political box, MAGA is the political box, and neither one tells you everything about the millions of Americans who vote Democrat or Republican, or in Arkansas, those who split their tickets,” she said.

Cotton has been in D.C. since his first election to the House in 2012. It’s a difference she tries to emphasize. “I do know what life is like here right now,” she said. “And let me tell you, nobody likes Tom Cotton.… He’s too far away from the problem. He doesn’t bother to come home and find out.”

Gendebien and Coover are trying similar messages, which is partly an anti-D.C. message, as well. Gendebien said he’d be willing to listen to good ideas, but he did sign the pro-capitalist, anti-socialist “Promise to America” unveiled at the centrist WelcomeFest earlier this year. “When we’re working to reduce costs at the grocery store, that is not a Republican or a Democrat issue,” Gendebien said. “And if you want to save rural health care, that is not a Republican or Democrat issue. So I am the alternative that is working for everybody, both Republicans and Democrats.”

His opponent, Republican nominee Anthony Constantino, is the owner of a custom sticker company who is known for making controversial and offensive comments. But Gendebien’s focused on running against Stefanik’s legacy, as well. That includes passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which has jeopardized rural health care across the country and in his district. 

“We have over 150,000 families in the district that require help from Medicaid in one form or another,” he said. “We also need to bring back the Affordable Care Act premium subsidies because without them, the health care is too expensive and people are just dropping off.… That’s what I am laser focused on, and our current congresswoman has not been in person to any of our hospitals to say I’m going to fight for rural health care for you.”

One thing these unique candidacies are making clear is that there are issues much more pressing than the internecine squabbles between the DSA and the Democratic establishment. And if these candidates win in November, it likely won’t be because of any party’s national platform. It will be the combination of local issues and a massive blue wave that puts even the least likely candidates over the top. Still, we may be on the cusp of the first return of real farmer politicians since President Jimmy Carter—candidates who are well versed in how politics and policy have directly led to the demise of their professions. What could come next? The potential severance of the Republican Party’s ties to farm country, and the revival of an older connection to a worker-aligned Democratic Party.

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.

Lily Geismer, a history professor at Claremont McKenna College in Southern California, has argued in a series of articles and books that Democrats shifted after the 1960s from a party titled towards unions and the working class to one dominated by lawyers and a more technocratic mindset. She says that Bill Clinton and Barack Obama in particular embodied this shift, with the former’s more centrist approach and the latter’s emphasis on his “smart” policies. Ahead of the 2026 midterms, Geismer says party is now caught between two impulses. Party leaders such as Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer practice the more incremental politics of Clinton and Obama. Pete Buttigieg has a technocratic ethos. At the same time, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Zohran Mamdani, and Bernie Sanders are pushing a more populist, union-centered politics that echoes the New Deal Democrats, she says.

I don’t mind the laughing. On Good Hang, the video podcast interview show hosted by Amy Poehler, there’s always faint laughing in the background. I assume the chuckles are emanating from producers and others lingering in the studio, off-mic, during taping. Some people find it annoying, but I don’t. On Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, the host’s executive assistant Sona Movsesian and his producer Matt Gourley sit at the table with him, mic’d up, and they laugh uproariously at his jokes—the job Andy Richter used to do on his late-night shows. That, I have a harder time with—the laughter as blinking “Applause” sign to cue listeners. In comparison, the chortles on Good Hang bring a kind of authenticity. When Poehler or one of her guests says something unexpected or lands a solid bit, you’ll often hear one of these nameless shades, faintly audible, erupting in laughter. As if they’re not supposed to, as if they can’t help it. You can visualize their conversation as a hangout, with all the looseness and social porousness that implies.

But you don’t have to visualize. Like an increasing number of podcasts, Good Hang is filmed and edited as a bare-bones TV show. You can watch it in its native environment on Spotify or cross-posted on YouTube. You can find clips circulating near-constantly on Instagram Reels and TikTok. Good Hang launched in 2025, in a podcast landscape that was in the midst of a gigantic pivot to video. Video podcasting has been around since Apple’s launch of video podcast support on iTunes in the aughts, and shows like The Joe Rogan Experience have streamed video from the start. But the shift from audio-only to video—and the prioritization of YouTube as a distribution channel—is a phenomenon of just the past few years. The New York Times started pushing its popular podcasts onto YouTube in 2023; Call Her Daddy used to post video clips but has shifted to full episodes on YouTube; The Ringer podcast network began releasing video episodes of many of its shows in 2024, and then, in 2025, signed a deal to air its shows on Netflix, including a video version of the long-running The Bill Simmons Podcast. It’s probably not a coincidence that Marc Maron, who was outspoken against video podcasting, ended his extraordinary WTF With Marc Maron in 2025. The holdouts are no longer holding out; podcasting is video now.

There are a lot of commercial reasons for this shift, and few aesthetic ones. Most video podcasts have a stripped-down look, featuring little in the way of compelling editing, production design, or cinematography. They present what you were probably picturing anyway: the host and the guest talking in front of microphones. The video version of Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend is set, like many of these shows, in a dark room with a conference table in the middle. The now-defunct Charlie Rose is a frequent aesthetic inspiration. On Good Hang, we see Poehler and her guest on opposite sides of a round table in a bright room filled with tchotchkes and houseplants. The show has three shots—a shot of Poehler, a shot of her guest, and, occasionally, a two-shot of them both—and no other real visual appeal.

But video podcasting is big business. As John Herrman observed in a New York magazine article, titled “HOW YOUTUBE ATE PODCASTING,” Gen Z consumers vastly prefer video to audio-only, and podcast producers have found that the easiest way to go viral and attract new listener-viewers is to circulate video clips on TikTok and other short-form video apps. Pods are moving to video because it’s how you get discovered.

In the streaming era, much attention has been paid to the ways that TV is becoming less and less like its historical self: Episode dumps have functionally done away with time slots; binge-watches have warped audience relationships to serialization; subscription streamers have dispensed with commercial breaks as structural elements; studios have shrunk writers’ rooms; algorithms dictate green lights. In an age when TV doesn’t look like TV anymore, podcasts are looking more and more like TV every day.

The Ringer podcast network launched Good Hang in spring 2025. Only a few years ago, this might have seemed like a bizarre trajectory for a star of Poehler’s magnitude. A legendary SNL performer and all-time great four-time host of the Golden Globes, Poehler was also the lead of Parks and Recreation, one of the most beloved sitcoms of the twenty-first century. Parks and Rec was one of a few sitcoms that saw a resurgence during the pandemic lockdowns, so it’s notable that, of all the directions she could have taken, what Poehler decided to do was sign a podcasting contract with Bill Simmons. A-list actors spurned TV until Matthew McConaughey and Nicole Kidman broke the dam; now, Poehler joins the ranks of Oprah Winfrey and Michelle Obama as a lowly podcaster. In January 2026, Good Hang won the inaugural Golden Globe award for best podcast, beating out veteran blockbusters like SiriusXM’s SmartLess and Call Her Daddy as well as NPR’s daily news pod Up First.

Each weekly episode is built around Poehler’s interview with a celebrity guest—from SNL veterans like Tina Fey and Julia Louis-Dreyfus to guests as wide-ranging as Cole Escola and Judge Judy. Her style as an interviewer is chummy and informal—this isn’t Fresh Air—but, despite the show’s title, it isn’t a pure “hangout” pod. Poehler is a curious and prepared interviewer, even when interviewing old pals. Her conversation with Viola Davis becomes unexpectedly intimate, and her episode with former SNL writer Paula Pell is surprisingly emotional, as Pell talks about her late coming-out and the small tragedies of spending her formative years in the closet. “The most heartbreaking thing is to go home and not be able to be heartbroken,” she tells Poeh­ler, tearing up. “I’m cryin’ already, guys. This is supposed to be lighthearted, right?”

Lacking Maron’s searching melancholy, Rogan’s dumbass philosophizing, or O’Brien’s constant efforts to lob jokes to his guests, Poehler projects a kind of friendly hospitality. Whereas traditional late show hosts were ironically courtly, and the more journalistic interview shows operated in a mode of skeptical prodding, Good Hang is all about making guests comfortable through constant praise. In a recent episode, Mindy Kaling even told Poehler how refreshing it was to be able to give and receive compliments on the show after recalling that producers on the Late Show used to warn guests not to compliment David Letterman. Your relative tolerance of this interview tactic will vary—it’s easy for the mutual appreciation society vibe of the show to become grating. But Poehler is good at portraying this cheeriness as just part of her social manner, and, because such a large proportion of the guests thus far have been friends or former co-workers, the praise rarely feels fully insincere.

Because so much of the appeal of Good Hang lies in the chemistry Poehler and her guest develop over the episode, the video actually does add to the experience. The same is not true, for example, of any of The New York Times’ pivot-to-video podcasts: There’s not a soul alive whose experience of The Ezra Klein Show is meaningfully altered by seeing the blank podcast studio in which Klein conducts his interviews and nods politely; nor did seeing the anguished slump of Ross Douthat particularly enhance an episode of Interesting Times. On the other hand, Poehler’s interview with Cole Escola gains a layer of tension when you can watch the two interlocutors feeling each other out, trying to make each other crack, even to impress each other. The same goes for Poehler’s episode with SNL alum Will Forte—Poehler’s shifting reactions to Forte doing old bits on-demand wouldn’t come through on audio alone.

Yet the limits of the Good Hang format are fairly clear. If Poehler’s improv background makes her a uniquely attentive and supportive interviewer, the interview, as a structure, restricts what Poehler can do improvisationally. Her wild physicality and manic range as a sketch performer have nowhere to go on Good Hang. On the show, she is a performer at rest, comfortable, no longer living or dying on every line.

It’s easy to imagine that there’s a clear line between TV and not-TV. House of the Dragon is a TV show; You’re Wrong About is not. But this distinction takes for granted the degree to which we reflexively grandfather in a lot of streaming television’s claim to medium-specificity. Sure, Yellowstone is a straightforward network prime-time soap, but Stranger Things, with its multivolume episode dumps and inconsistent run times, some stretching to feature length, is all but straightforward. It’s TV, perhaps by birth, but now only TV by association. Or, rather, TV in lieu of some other more holistically accurate category to claim for itself. Lots of shows operate like that now.

What’s striking, however, is not the fluidity of TV’s formal boundaries; it’s that podcasts, encroaching on TV’s terrain, seem much more like old-time TV than lots of the things we call “TV” now. Poehler and Rogan and Klein and O’Brien are all working in the very familiar televisual mode of the talk show. No longer merely an aping of NPR-style interview programming, these shows are tapping into their inner PBS.

Meanwhile, the TV talk shows on actual TV are becoming an endangered species. The Late Show is off the air, and ratings are down for all the remaining network late-night variety shows. CBS News has become the television arm of Bari Weiss’s The Free Press. Decades ago, Jon Stewart lambasted the vapidity of political debate show Crossfire, but if Crossfire were on TV today, it would look like the Algonquin Round Table. It’s easy to critique a podcast like The Ezra Klein Show, which has sometimes given an all-too-sympathetic hearing to bad-faith actors (such as Christopher Rufo and Ben Shapiro), but most cable news interviews these days operate at the discursive level of an NFL sideline report. The kinds of conversations that used to happen in corners of TV are increasingly happening on YouTube, on shows that only recently feature moving images.

This new spate of podcasts may not have the reach The Dick Cavett Show once had, but they also don’t rely on the power of a big broadcaster. Instead they run on the star power of the host and guests. At the beginning of every Good Hang, Poehler briefly interviews a close friend of her guest, who offers a question only they would think to ask. Oftentimes, it’s someone not-so-famous: a spouse or a former roommate. Most of the time, though, it’s another ultra-famous celebrity (Natalie Portman dropping by to big-up Lena Dunham; Christopher Nolan warming us up for Matt Damon). I will admit that I am usually disappointed when it’s a normie, or, worse, a niche celebrity I’ve never heard of. There’s a thrill—even if it’s artificial—in the experience of seeing a star with their guard down, humbled into the same Zoom square you or I might occupy. It might seem like a demotion for them, but it’s fun for us. And stars aren’t particular—they go where the cameras are.

On September 10, in a continuation of what is now a nearly decade-long war on the national head count, the Trump administration proposed unprecedented changes to the 2030 U.S. census. Among the most important of these is a new rule that violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s command that the census count “the whole number of persons in each state” by effectively replacing the word “persons” with “citizens.”

The Trump administration defends this change with a mix of bad legal history and a convoluted argument about its need to “distinguish between foreign citizens in the United States who are counted for apportionment and those who are not counted for apportionment.” But its real goal is simpler: to build districts “advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites,” as the late Republican mapmaker Thomas Hofeller put it, which a citizens-only count would do.

Indeed, armed with census tabulations that exclude large numbers of U.S. residents, states with large immigrant populations could adopt legislative maps that significantly entrench Republicans’ power. And introducing a question about citizenship status, especially in the context of the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement policy, could deter participation in the census, even among naturalized citizens.

As other census experts have pointed out, Congress is currently abdicating its constitutional responsibility to protect the integrity of the census. If new congressional leadership is sworn in next year, that could change. But the critical task of defending the census does not belong to Congress alone. As I document in my book, Counting Like a State, states, cities, counties, tribes, and nongovernmental organizations played a central role in defending the 2020 census from the Trump administration’s assault. This time, they may have an even more important role to play.

It is already time to renew this fight. Most immediately, state and local officials must head to the courtroom—much as they did in 2020. As my book shows, coordination among state attorneys general, cities, and nonprofits played a significant role in beating back the Trump administration’s attempt to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census. These coalitions also used litigation to slow down the administration’s bid to exclude noncitizens from the tabulations used in reapportioning seats in Congress and the Electoral College.

The administration’s new rule invites similar legal challenges. It flies in the face of plain constitutional and statutory text, and rests on a frankly bizarre reading of the words “usual residence.”

The public comment period on the proposed rule, which is open until October 13, will give state and local officials their first opportunity to document the rule’s legal flaws. This period is also the time to show the potential consequences of the rule for state representation in Congress and the Electoral College, legislative maps at every level of government, and allocations of trillions in federal and state dollars.

Winning in court, however, is not the same thing as protecting the count. Even if, in the best-case scenario, state and local officials succeed in challenging the new rules—and even if a subsequent Congress or presidential administration reverses these rules—the Trump administration will have already accomplished its quiet work to eradicate trust in the census. Every signal that the census might be used to identify and detain U.S. residents teaches a lesson that it is safer not to respond to the census. That chilling effect will likely spread far beyond noncitizens, jeopardizing resources and representation for communities across the country, effects that could be locked in until 2040.

The second front for state and local officials, then, is investing in trusted, local outreach. Beyond mundane tasks like making and checking address lists, in 2020 state and local officials funded and coordinated outreach in hard-to-count communities. In doing so, they counteracted the fear spread by the Trump administration’s efforts to install a citizenship item on the 2020 questionnaire. Amid a climate of disinformation and the chaos of the Covid pandemic, these networks of officials and community partners were vital to boosting census participation and safeguarding its integrity.

Nevertheless, state and local investments in the 2020 census were uneven. Many states at risk for significant undercounts—including Texas and Florida—did not invest in census outreach. States and cities with severe resource disparities also struggled to invest in the census.

State and local officials need to take stock of the tremendous challenges that the Trump administration is creating for the 2030 count, even if its recent policy proposals are blocked. Hopeful signs are emerging in the states: Arkansas has already created its 2030 complete count committee. The Massachusetts Senate has convened a standing committee on census operations. New York and New Jersey are weighing bills to fund state census offices, and philanthropic funders are organizing to seed state coalitions before the Census Bureau’s own preparations, which lag their 2020 pace, catch up. But given the scale of the Trump administration’s attack on the 2030 count, the time to redouble these investments is now.

The lesson of the last decade is that Washington alone will not save the census. State and local officials should file comments and join lawsuits. But they must also fund outreach, stand up complete count committees, and start now. Litigation may stop this rule. Only states and cities, working with the organizations their residents trust, can make sure the count survives it.

This is a lightly edited transcript of the May 1 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon, and I’m the host of Right Now on The New Republic. I’m joined by Lily Geismer. She’s a historian at Claremont McKenna College, and she’s written a few books that have been very influential on my thinking, and a lot of other people’s thinking, about the Democratic Party. There’s one about the Boston suburbs. There’s one about the Clinton administration and kind of neoliberalism. The title of it is Left Behind: The Democrats’ Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality. She has a recent anthology called Master in Drift: Professional Liberals Since the 1960s. So Lily, thanks for joining me. Welcome.

Lily Geismer: Oh, thanks so much for inviting me on.

Bacon: And so what I want to talk about is, you’ve had what I would say is—I don’t know if it’s an analysis or a critique. There’s a through line about how you talk about the Democratic Party. So explain to people this sort of professional-classization of it. Give people your general sense of where liberalism and the Democratic Party have gone since the 1960s.

Geismer: Yeah. So one of the kind of through lines or focuses of my research has been the class-based transformation of the Democratic Party, in terms of the composition of its base, moving away from union members in the Northeast to professional knowledge workers in the suburbs. And so that was the focus of my first book, and what that did to the priorities of the party.

I’ve then increasingly looked at professional classes as the leaders of the party. So how this group of people who were professionals, who went to Ivy League schools, who often are trained in professional schools, like law and various other arenas, became the leaders of the party, and what that has done to its policy priorities. And so that was one of the focuses of the last two books that you have brought up. And just what that shift has meant for priorities, but then also who’s been left behind from it.

And I think then another big question is how that focus has created a lot of animosity, actually, among voters on both the left and the right.

Bacon: Define professional class. I assume you mean college graduates, but when I read the books, I think it probably also means—you mentioned Ivy League in the middle here. So talk about professional class. I don’t want to broaden it too much, so what are you talking about when you say professional class?

Geismer: Yeah. So when I use it—there’s been this interesting question beginning in the 1970s. I can really bore you on this if you want me to go on. But there was a big question of this new class of people that had come to the forefront, who were college educated is another way of thinking about it. Often actually gone to graduate school, so even beyond just a basic college education. And how to define them.

And the famous version of this is what is now used as shorthand, the PMC, which came out of Barbara and John Ehrenreich. They had an article, and they used the idea of the professional-managerial class, this group of people who weren’t the full kind of capitalist leaders, like the millionaire, billionaire class, but they weren’t really part of the working class either. So how to characterize them. And one of the core ideas about this group is that they used their knowledge. They were in knowledge-based professions.

So I looked at it in my first book, primarily people who worked in law or academia, but also a lot of engineers, like the tech industry figures—not the Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, but the actual engineers. So that’s a version of the professional class. And then oftentimes it’s very Ivy League educated, very committed to ideas of meritocracy. And also an idea that this works for them, so this should be reproduced by other people. So that’s who I’m thinking of.

And I think, in shorthand for the Democratic Party, you can see the leadership increasingly really taking hold in this group of people who were known first as the Watergate Babies, then as the Atari Democrats, but their embodiment is really in people like Bill Clinton. And then I actually think even more so Obama. To me, the ultimate professional class figures are Obama and the figures around him in the Obama administration. So a lot of their politics emerge from that.

And a lot of it is ideas of using rationality. So faith in meritocracy is a huge part of this. For the Clintons in particular, I looked at their uses of market-based solutions, so that you’d use the market. You can see that with Obama too. And then also things like really using tech-based ideas and data-driven solutions. I always think of this as a really powerful one. It came from somebody else, but my co-author Brett Siebel and I found that Obama used the word smart to describe his own policies 900 times.

So it’s like, what we’re doing is smart. My favorite of all of them is that there was a program for school snacks called, like, Smart Snacks or something. I looked if it was sponsored by Smartfood, which it was not. But they’re obsessed with this idea of using intelligence, and that will create the best kinds of policies.

Bacon: OK, so, professional class: Perry Bacon, graduate of Yale, writer at The New Republic; Lily, graduate of Brown. We’re in this ourselves. Does this—

Geismer: Oh, 1,000 percent. I think that’s actually one of the things. I always joke that my kids ask me, and I think I got to, like, the 24th grade or something. If you think about how much education—but yes. And I think actually that’s been an issue, going back even to the 1970s, when they were trying to figure this out. Most journalists and academics are part of this group, and so it’s an interesting phenomenon.

That’s actually its own question, that those jobs in the 1980s and ‘90s were far more secure jobs than they are today. And so that’s actually an interesting question of the class-based group. But yes, I’ve been obsessively interrogating my own class position, I think. It’s complicated.

Bacon: I think you’re describing the politics of this class, right? We’ll come into your politics in a bit. But the politics of this class as a group—Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, maybe you’d say Jake Sullivan at the staffer level.

These people have a lot of degrees from the fanciest schools, and their politics are this technocratic—you use smart. They would say themselves they’re non-ideological, or they’d say their ideology is what works, in a certain sense, right?

Geismer: Yes. And I would say actually, Clinton was slightly more ideological in his orientation. He had a kind of set of beliefs. I think for Obama, the ideology was pragmatism. That’s how they describe themselves, that this is deeply pragmatic. That’s what we’re doing. We’re finding the best solutions. We’re finding the tweaks. We’re finding the ways around it.

And so one of the things I’ve looked at, at the policy level, is the ways in which it’s led to these very incremental sets of changes and small-bore policies, away from the Democratic Party and liberalism’s commitment to a more redistributive approach to politics.

And the other side of it, actually, is a real narrowing of government. There’s been all this attention to DOGE as what has hollowed out government. But I actually think much of this comes from having 50 years of Democrats saying—it’s a bipartisan effort—that government is inefficient. The famous Clinton line, “The era of big government is over.”

You try to make government as small as possible and look to the private sector to do a lot of the work of what government once did. So that’s part of their politics, and that feeds an idea of technocratic—this is the best approach, we’re doing the best thing, we’re being the most efficient.

Bacon: So the professional class leading a sort of—I’m going to avoid that word for now, neoliberalism. But the professional class leading this kind of technocratic pragmatism. The contrast is with the New Deal, led by unions. Is that the contrast, implicitly?

Geismer: Yeah. The New Deal, Great Society—you can get into the nuances, because those were also technocratic in their own way. But yeah, so you have a big social welfare state, and your policies are redistributive. These are policies that are much more focused on a small approach.

And I think one of the things that I’ve looked at is that there are actually policies that have benefited, or stand to benefit, certain other aspects of the professional class. Especially economic policies that are much more weighted towards certain sectors, like tech, finance, and trade, and those can lead the economy in various different ways.

Bacon: I want to distinguish. There’s a whole literature, particularly after 2024, about the downfall of the Democratic Party, and I don’t think you’re doing exactly the same thing as that group.

So you’re saying college graduates have more power in the Democratic Party than in the 1940s. I think that’s true. Talk about the sort of, the wokesters have killed the Democratic Party. How do you view that?

Geismer: There’s a couple of different things going on with that kind of approach. My first book was about the ‘60s and ‘70s, and that was a period where you saw a really vibrant left. In my second book, I looked at the ‘80s and ‘90s, and one thing that was interesting is you have a real silencing of the left during that moment, the left critiquing the center, so there’s no real tension. That has reemerged.

But I think one thing that’s fascinating about this group—and I’ll use Clinton as the example—was combining that with a politics—it was a somewhat distinctive moment—of a belief in broad affirmative action. So on the question of racial equity or racial equality, if that’s wokeism, and LGBTQ rights, tolerance and things like that. But then there’s the question of who you’re actually trying to appeal to.

So the other piece of the Democrats during this period, and the particular group that I look at, is that they believed the party had become too beholden to special interest groups, primarily to labor, but also to people of color, and also made a calculation. And if I’m getting too inside baseball, I can go back.

Bacon: Let me ask the question differently. So there’s a group of people whose critique is that there are too many college graduates having too much power, and their critique is also that the Democratic Party is too left, and they want to move it to the center on economics and on race.

And I think you’re saying the Democratic Party is controlled by college graduates, but you’re not calling for moving to the right. And I think that’s an important distinction—

Geismer: No, totally.

Bacon: —between the sort of Matt Yglesias crowd and you. That’s what I’m trying to get at here. Go ahead.

Geismer: Yeah. When you think about it, if we’re parsing it out, there are different types of college-educated people. So I think the Matt Yglesias argument is, all the people like me have too much power. That like all the history professors, the American studies professors, journalists all somehow found our place and were able to ram this through. I think that’s the shorthand of that argument.

What I’m saying is—and this is another thing that I find really interesting—the Democratic Party itself has moved much more to college-educated people as its base, but that in and of itself has a lot of different variations of who that category actually entails.

So the group that I’ve looked at, this question of who’s historically had power: they saw the future of the party in moderate, college-educated suburbanites. And really, at that point in the ‘80s, they said, we have to move away from—I use the shorthand that this is when Jesse Jackson had his moment, but that’s not the future of the Democratic Party.

The Democratic Party lies with these college-educated voters, who are more centrist leaning. Our message should be, we can say we support racial equality, but we’re not doing anything beyond that.

And I think what you saw happen in the last decade has been a pushback from certain groups against those kinds of ideals. But that’s not saying we have moved to woke and that’s the problem. Actually, in so many ways, it’s the opposite—that we actually have not stood for these values for generations.

Bacon: OK, so you’ve talked about Clinton. I think everyone agrees Clinton embodies a certain kind of—I’m going to use the word neoliberalism now. Obama: meritocratic, pragmatic. OK, but was Biden—because Biden gave some speeches where he didn’t quite say, I’m done with neoliberalism, but his speeches implied we are trying to do something different.

So was Biden a break with this, or a continuation, or something in between?

Geismer: I think a combination, actually, which is really interesting. It’s fascinating to me what Biden himself believed.

Bacon: I’m not sure if he knows either.

Geismer: No, I don’t think he knows. But I actually think what he knows is that he believes he’s a Democrat. And he wanted to be a vessel for what the Democratic Party’s politics were in that moment. And so I think he did see this idea that this veneration of the market, and the various different approaches that come out of it, and the kind of techno-utopianism that you see under the Obama years—that was not what people were responding to. And because there had been a quite contentious primary, where you had these different visions out on the table, he actually seemed to embody and imbibe a lot of those kinds of things.

And then bringing in the more progressive or left side of the party, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, actually getting their counsel on who his advisers should be. I think because they had a say over that, it actually did lead to a certain kind of moving away from the overtly neoliberal policies. I think you’re right in saying—Jake Sullivan still had a huge amount of power. So it’s not like it was entirely—I think you still see a lot of continuation. But I think in terms of some of those top lines, this is not actually our approach.

Bacon: So the reason I wanted to talk to you is, in part, because it feels like we’re in a moment of debate about these visions and about where things are. So I’m going to go through different groups of the Democratic Party.

So if you say from 1980 to 2016—I hate “neoliberalism,” but we’ll call it that for now. So how do you see Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer? Are they continuations? Are they changes? How do you see them?

Geismer: I find them fascinating, actually. I think there are continuations in certain things. I don’t think that they were ideologically committed to neoliberal policies in the same way as the Clinton-era people. My theory is they want power and they want to maintain power in some meaningful way. That’s what it seems to be.

But the idea is that how you maintain power is by this kind of message of certain kinds of continuity, and this has worked for a really long time. This is what the party and the country need, and so we need to keep that going. That’s my understanding. Schumer, probably a little bit more than Hakeem Jeffries, seems to be actually committed to Wall Street and its perpetuation, and finding policies that will pursue that. But I think that seems to be their major focus.

Bacon: In other words, they’re less pragmatic—they’re less smart, in Obama’s words, or neoliberal—and they’re probably just more status quo. Is that sort of what you’re hinting at?

Geismer: Yes. I think they’re like, the status quo has worked, we need to keep the status quo going. Both in terms of politics—this is how you win elections. And there’s been so much pushback to Schumer’s famous comment in 2016 that as many working-class voters as we will lose in western Pennsylvania, we’ll just pick them up in the suburbs of Philadelphia.

But they have not seemed to change that as their approach. It wasn’t like there was a lesson there. And so I think that’s the continuation. Another thing that’s interesting about that group is that they come out of Congress, so they think about things in terms of how you create coalitions in Congress.

But I think their policies too are such that we continue the status quo. We are broadly committed to ideas of government, and the Democratic Party should be there to help people, but in its broadest strokes.

Bacon: So they’re still doing professional class liberalism, on some level.

Geismer: Yeah, I think they’re still part of it. And both of them represent New York, which is the epicenter of this, so they have to respond to their constituents too.

Bacon: Now, how the two leaders of the Democratic Party end up being from New York might reflect what you’re getting at, right?

Geismer: Absolutely.

Bacon: OK. So talk about AOC, Bernie Sanders, and Zohran Mamdani. They’re all different people, but I do feel like the Fighting Oligarchy tour and the Zohran campaign, and now Abdul El-Sayed—I think we’re all talking about the same drift in the party. So is that a break from professional class liberalism?

Geismer: I think there are aspects of—but actually, none of them have a full Ivy League pedigree background, if you look at where they come from. That’s not the kind of world they emerged through. I don’t think any of them went to graduate school and were trained as lawyers, if that’s the baseline. So I think there’s a different mentality.

I think they come out of a much more socially democratic tradition within the Democratic Party. So I see their roots actually in certain aspects of what liberals and Democrats have stood for going back to the New Deal. But it’s an emergence of a different thing.

And Bernie Sanders is interesting, because he was like the lone voice in the ‘90s and 2000s coming out against a lot of this, but now has more people there. And then I think the other major thing that they embody is a populist tradition too. This idea of really challenging, and doing that on economic terms as well.

Bacon: You said it’s a different thing—different than the professional class liberals, or different than the New Deal, or different than both?

Geismer: I think they’re definitely different than the professional class kind of liberal approach.

Bacon: And they would define themselves as running in the New Deal way. Zohran talks about the New Deal a lot. Bernie talks about the New Deal a lot.

Geismer: Oh, totally. I think that’s the fascinating thing. I think they see themselves as carrying on a New Deal tradition, and actually see groups like DSA as a mechanism to do that, or that’s where the policies come from. But I think they’re actually deeply committed to some of these core things that the Democratic Party or liberals have long stood for.

Bacon: How are they different than the sort of New Deal liberals?

Geismer: On a couple of different levels. I think one is their own backgrounds, in composition. The New Deal was run by white men. Maybe Bernie Sanders is the most of that, but he’s probably the oldest. I think that they also combine that with what I would say is a kind of post-’60s, more left-leaning politics, especially on social issues, that the New Deal did not stand for.

The New Deal has a lot of different pieces, but that was not a core part of its tradition. So I think they combine the most left aspects of the New Deal’s economic liberalism with a different social orientation.

Bacon: We’ve bounced between defining the professional class in terms of the leaders, activists, and the voters. But talk about the voters here. What we’re seeing in these primaries is that the sort of more populist left candidate often wins postgraduates, college graduates, and the sort of non-college people, the sort of lower income, what I would define as the working class, often votes for the Haley Stevens, Joe Biden type.

So talk about why the candidates trying to do the New Deal are not winning the sort of electorate of the New Deal.

Geismer: Yeah, that’s been this fascinating question. I think there is a component of the ways in which certain candidates have been painted as too far to the left on social matters. And to certain constituencies, that is a fundamental challenge, even if you actually look at their policies and they’re doing different kinds of things.

I think there’s also, frankly—and I’m struck with this—still a lot of animosity to government. And also a lot of people who haven’t actually seen the benefits of that. And so I think that’s one of the problems.

This might be a little bit of a tangent, but you asked about Biden’s economic policies. They went away from neoliberalism, but they were still really technocratic. And if you think about something like industrial policy, it’s not saying, We’re giving you this check tomorrow. It’s saying, In 10, in 20 years, this is going to pan out and everything’s going to be great.

And I think there’s still hostility to that approach, probably with the voters who have leaned towards the Republican Party and Trump. So I don’t know. That’s not a great answer to the question.

Bacon: That’s OK.

Geismer: I think there’s a lot going on with those kinds of Haley Stevens voters. One of the things that I have been struck by is the assumption that those kinds of swing voters who would support her can carry the whole race. And that would be the Chuck Schumer or Hakeem Jeffries theory of politics: if we run exactly the same campaign we’ve been running for 30 years, we can win over those voters. Some of them are there, but they’re not responding enough.

I think the other issue, and this is where the taxonomy gets a little complicated, is there’s a lot of college-educated people who are not affluent. And so that’s an important question and distinction.

Bacon: That’s what I was trying to press you on in the beginning. Professional class, to me, might be useful distinguishing between lawyers at law firms and people with a BA who can’t get a job that has healthcare. College educated is the thing that—

Geismer: Totally. I think we have this category. Many more people are going to college than ever in the past, and actually are emerging from it with a tremendous amount of debt. So there’s the professional class, the lawyers and the private equity people. But there’s also college educated as this different kind of category, who are professionally trained but are not in jobs where they’re making a huge amount of money.

I think, frankly, unless you are working at a corporate law firm making half a million dollars a year or more, even if you’re in a job that would be considered at the top, there’s still a sense of profound insecurity around fundamental issues.

I will use our two sectors as examples of this. They’re in a state of tremendous turmoil. Wages have declined. I think journalism is actually a case study in these kinds of questions—jobs that were once somewhat—if you worked at The Washington Post, that was a stable job. And now there’s so much sense of insecurity. So I think that’s really appealing to a lot of people.

There’s the joke—I think Abdul El-Sayed won Ann Arbor, and there were, like, three voters in Ann Arbor who didn’t vote for him. But that’s not just, oh, all these fancy professors who are sitting around and don’t actually know what’s going on. I can say this—I went to grad school there, and I lived in Ann Arbor. There’s a lot of contingent faculty and grad students who are in really insecure positions, who are college educated but are not seeing their job prospects in a particularly rosy place, and are very much responsive to a lot of the things around universal healthcare, universal childcare, that have been critical to that group of Democrats’ politics.

Bacon: So unions are a big anchor for the New Deal. So how do you see unions today? Because we’ve mentioned the sort of New Deal group, and you mentioned DSA in your answer, but we haven’t even brought up unions yet. I don’t perceive unions to be a big part of politics the way they were then, or even a big part of politics, period. How do you see unions where we are today?

Geismer: One thing that’s fascinating, looking at the relationship over the course of the ‘80s and beyond between the Democrats and unions, is that in terms of donations, it actually goes up.

But unions were long essentially why Democrats felt like they didn’t need a lot of things that Republicans were going after, because they had this really strong union support that was doing a lot of their grassroots work. Union density in the United States dropped precipitously over the course of the ‘70s onward. And I think there was this idea of Democrats moving away from that as their core voter.

Or, the other side of it is, I think they thought union rank and file would always vote for them, even though that was not true. That was not true with Reagan. You can see this interesting long-term trend.

And then I think a lot of the actual policies of the Democratic Party moved towards promoting sectors that were historically quite non-union, especially when you look at tech and finance, and promoting globalization. So all of these things have actually come to harm unions. I do think unions have had a resurgence over the last decade, as a mechanism for forms of collective action.

We’ve seen a lot of big union drives, actually, among a lot of college-educated workers. Journalism especially—white-collar sectors are unionizing. I read Noam Scheiber’s book Mutiny, which is really fascinating about the college-educated drive of the Starbucks workers and various different things. So I think that has been a really powerful force, and I think it’s still one for Democrats, certain efforts to support unions. Biden famously said he was the most pro-union president ever.

But it is interesting that in this election cycle, unions have not had the kind of cultural hold that groups like DSA seem to be having. Even though, comparatively, there are many more people in the United States who are members of a union than are members of DSA.

DSA is still a really small organization numerically, compared to the amount of attention that it is getting in this particular moment. But I think also none of those people I just mentioned—Mamdani, Sanders, or AOC—are from a union background. That’s not their origin story, so that also affects this kind of composition.

Bacon: How do you see—I hate to use the term “the groups,” to reward the people who I think are doing harm—but the sort of NARALs and the Planned Parenthoods and the NDL place. The people who are demeaned as moving the party too far left, both in the ‘80s and now.

But I think there’s a legitimate critique—I don’t know how big the SCLC membership was in 1962, so I’ve always found the groups thing to be a little weird. But I think it’s fair to say a lot of the groups do not necessarily have huge on-the-ground numbers they can mobilize today. So how do you see the groups working in the party?

Geismer: Yeah, I think that is a really interesting question. They themselves have their own money bases, so that’s probably how they’re operating. And then they’re able to have an influence over policy, in shorthand, as if they represent—I think for a long time it was like NOW and NARAL represent all women, and that’s not actually the state. That doesn’t have the same kind of hold that it once did. And I think frankly that’s probably the question of not delivering the same kind of voters.

This isn’t my expertise, but just watching this, I think unlike after 2016, where you had this large surge in—to save democracy, we have to give money to the ACLU and to Planned Parenthood. That’s not happening in the same way.

I think there’s a sense that didn’t actually—not to say—I think those are amazing organizations, and full disclosure, my husband is a former ACLU lawyer. I think it’s an incredible place. But I don’t think there’s the same sense that that’s the route to protect all these different things. So I think that’s actually lessened their influence in certain ways, as far as I can see.

And I do think it’s important to acknowledge that this is a really complicated political moment on all fronts, with certain kinds of attacks from the right and from the Trump administration, where I think there’s also fear of attaching or aligning with certain kinds of groups who stand for certain types of politics. And so that’s lessened their power in certain ways as well.

Bacon: Let me talk about the Democratic electorate. Is part of the case that you’ve been making that the actual Democratic electorate has become more professionalized, or just a group of them has? Americans are becoming more college-educated. I think that’s just broadly true. But are we saying that the Democratic Party voter him- or herself has become more of a professional class liberal in their views and ideology?

Geismer: I think there’s a couple things. And I was going to say too, actually, to go back to my very underdeveloped, half-baked theory of different moments and where people are—I was struck by, post-2017, we had so much attention for these kinds of organizations. And that has gone away.

But I also think there’s a question about economic matters actually coming to the forefront at a different moment. And so groups like DSA stand for a different kind of economic message that has taken precedence right now, in a way that some of these other groups haven’t.

But yeah, I think one of the things is, you’ve seen the parties—and this is just at the presidential level, which is not always the best marker—but voters have become more college-educated. That doesn’t mean necessarily all of them share this kind of—it’s not like there are millions of little Obamas out there who are like, “All I want is—” No, I don’t think that’s what’s going on. I think that is a particular group.

One thing I’ve always said, and this goes back to my long-standing look at suburban liberals and other kinds of groups, is they’re actually a really small part of the population, but they hold disproportionate cultural capital. So I think they still hold a particular kind of cultural capital. If you read a lot of The Atlantic, that is who seems to run the world.

Bacon: So the elites have power. That’s obvious. When you say this group has a lot of power, do you mean the sort of small cohort of voters, because these people give money? They go to rallies and that kind of thing?

Geismer: Yes. They follow the news. So I think because of that. But I think it’s also the question of the Democratic voter. That’s been one of the issues, is who is actually—because there’s a lot of people who are not voting in every single election and showing up.

And one thing that has been happening is more voter turnout among certain kinds of groups and constituencies. So I think those constituencies are very much out there, of a more working class, lower middle class voter.

Bacon: If you follow the Senate race in Florida, that makes me think of it, where I assume Vindman is the MSNBC hero. He’s probably getting the professional liberal suburban vote, but Dixon is winning regular Democrats, the New Deal Democrats, in a certain sense.

Geismer: Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s a great example. And I know there’s been so much attention to Mamdani, and especially for both of us who don’t live in New York, it becomes a little bit exhausting.

But I do think there’s a question there, that he was able to win over those groups in a way that Cuomo was not. And so that’s also really interesting to see play out. But yeah, I think that’s a great example of it. Vindman very much stood for that anti-Trump thing.

And I think the other thing I will say, to go back to the Schumer, Jeffries component, is that I think there was a sense that just running against Trump would be enough. And I think the other piece of these candidates—the candidate in Florida, El-Sayed, I think Mondaire—is they’re not just saying Trump’s the problem. It’s actually about having some sort of a formative vision too, and that’s also where you can see certain constituencies responding to it.

Bacon: I think affordability is a way to bridge these things. My sense of it is, for Schumer and Jeffries, it functions like kitchen table, and you can come out with your bland expand-Medicaid-by-4-percent plan.

But it also functions as, if you want free buses, that’s an affordable—it allows both wings of the party to sound like they’re proposing something, and sound like they’re proposing something similar, I think.

Geismer: Yeah, I think that has been really interesting to see. Now that you have some of these more progressive candidates who’ve won, and because the races are so tight right now, the party has to go support the candidate in some way. And that has been a way to bring things together, which I think is a positive.

I think that’s actually a really positive thing. But the question is how that’s actually panning out, and is that just actually preventing the debate—Medicare for All, or this tiny incremental change? How are we going to find some common ground here?

Bacon: I’ll finish with looking forward a little bit, to this next year. So Buttigieg is the most in the mold of Obama and Clinton. Is that fair to say? The most technically—this is the thing you’re talking about, literally McKinsey.

Geismer: Yeah. And he embodies all of it. He’s the representation.

Bacon: Newsom and Harris, to some extent, represent those same kinds of voters you’re talking about, I assume.

Geismer: Yeah.

Bacon: Anybody beyond AOC, who we’ve mentioned, anybody else who obviously represents something different?

Geismer: Yeah, it’s an interesting question. I would’ve said Ossoff a couple months ago, but I feel like he’s not a traditional sort of professional class person. But I can’t figure out if that’s actually its own strand or not. There seems to be a kind of alignment. I think the other fascinating question, at a pure politics level, and maybe not to the question around the policies or ideologies—I think one of the problems with Democrats is they’ve waited for these once-in-a-generation talents. That’s also Clinton.

So I was probably giving the worst of Clinton and Obama, but they were also both really gifted politicians, and able, at least rhetorically, to speak to multiple different audiences. So that’s its own kind of power. And I think a lot of people look to Ossoff as standing in for that, that he can speak to a lot of different people. I think there’s actually a question of what’s the policy landscape behind that.

So those would be other people. I think there’s a question of whether AOC is going to run or not. That would be its own distinctive version. And one of the things I think happened in 2020 is that because there was no primary—or 2024, I’m sorry.

Bacon: 2024.

Geismer: 2024. I think a lot of these tensions are things that often get worked out in primaries. And because that didn’t happen, that is happening right now. But I think a primary is actually an important time to work out some of these kinds of tensions, for them to come to the forefront, so that could very well happen.

Bacon: We didn’t talk about Gaza in this conversation, and I’m not sure the most recent book you all did, the anthology, talked about it either. How do you see Gaza in this story about professional class liberalism, and whether that’s changing in the party or not?

Geismer: Oh, I think that’s a huge piece of it. That is another main fault line. I think if you go back to the question of both the status quo and technocratic, pragmatic solutions as the way you navigate these situations, there’s been a real frustration with that kind of approach. And I think it actually has been a place where you’ve seen Democrats responding to their constituencies in really important ways.

Because for so long, the Democrats took a very straight line, and I think there has been some important variation. So I think it’s a huge component of it, and it’s worth considering how it will fundamentally change this.

The other piece is, when people talk about neoliberalism, a huge part of what neoliberalism is, is foreign policy. That’s not the piece that I’ve looked at as much, but it is a really core piece of it. And so I think we’re also actually at a fundamental place of reimagining—what I have to go do after this is teach my class, Cold War America, which is all about the United States’ place in the world, and how it understands its place in the world. And this is a moment of actual transformation for that too.

So I do think that will be a major component of the 2028 presidential primaries, understanding what actually is the Democrats’ foreign policy vision. I haven’t looked at the polls of how voters perceive Democrats on some of those issues, but I think that’s an important question too.

Bacon: So let’s close with just broadly: the Democrats were this party of professional class liberalism for a few decades. Are they now? Are they drifting out of that? Are they still mostly in it? Is 80 percent of the party that, 20 percent of the party that? How would you rank it now? Because Obama’s been the most popular person in the Democratic Party by far, I think.

Geismer: I know. I think this is the question. I think there’s a really important move. I’m also really reluctant to make big sweeping claims. I’ve been really struck that after every primary vote, it’s been like, DSA is on the ascent, DSA is over.

So I think these hot takes have not been all that useful. I think it’s really interesting. I think they don’t hold the same power they once did, but I still think it’s a very dominant component of the party. And it’ll be interesting to see in the next several years how much that changes.

Bacon: OK. What are you working on now? Anything you can tell us about?

Geismer: Yeah, I’m working on a project about school politics. I’m looking at professional class anxiety around education. It’s a case study of DC. I’m looking at the professional class both as parents and policymakers, so how they are both making decisions about their own children, but then also making major kinds of education reforms. And so I’ve been doing a lot of research into DC and looking at school politics. So it’s still about Democrats. I can’t seem to get away from them. But the focus is on schools.

Bacon: Interesting. Lily Geismer, thanks for joining me. Great conversation. Good to see you.

Geismer: Thank you so much.

Bacon: Bye-bye.