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When Americans tune into UFC Freedom 250, the series of mixed martial arts fights taking over the White House on President Trump’s 80th birthday this Sunday, one key element of the sport will be missing: female fighters.

To the unfamiliar, that might seem unsurprising given the hypermasculine stereotypes that surround MMA. But as Kyle Green, a sociologist who writes on the intersection of sports and politics, recently told me, UFC cards for major events nearly always feature women. In fact, MMA is one of the rare sports in which women appear on the same cards as men and are not subject to different rules. For example, most sports have separate leagues for women; in boxing, women can only fight for a maximum of ten rounds, whereas men’s matches can generally go up to 12. And for more than a decade, the Ultimate Fighting Championship embraced the tradition, with its CEO Dana White touting the inclusion of women as evidence that the organization offers an “even playing field.”

But flexing such feminist bona fides wasn’t always the case, and White admits as much. “I completely own up to saying women would never fight in the octagon,” he said in 2019, referring to his past, staunch opposition to allowing women to fight in the UFC. “But you’ve got to remember at this time, I was trying to get people to accept the men fighting in the Octagon. It wasn’t allowed on pay-per-view. It wasn’t allowed on TV.”

“When the promotion stages its most politically symbolic event ever, and women vanish from the card, that’s not a glitch. “

“The reason that the women’s MMA has taken off and it’s so big is because these women are legit,” White continued. “Really good, very technical, and it’s amazing, and I never saw it coming.”

Yet in the days before the White House spectacle, where a hulking claw-like structure has essentially ripped through the South Lawn, White doesn’t appear to prioritize the female fighters he supposedly admires. In fact, when asked about the absence of women, White told Time that he had tried, but “we couldn’t get it done.” The CEO said that he had initially wanted a fight between Zhang Weili and Mackenzie Dern, but according to White, Weili was taking time off. When reached for comment, she did not respond to Time.

It’s a curious rationale coming from one of the most powerful men in sports, and to believe it is to extend White significant latitude, as it belies multiple realities: the UFC’s Rolodex includes many prominent women, ostensibly making it relatively easy to “get it done.” Not to mention the outsized attention given to arguably more extraneous logistics, such as the bathrooms designed to mimic a stay at the “fucking Four Seasons.”

Mackenzie Dern and Amanda Ribas meet in the octagon for a 5-round main event at UFC Apex for UFC Fight Night – Dern vs Ribas 2 on January 11, 2025 in Las Vegas, NV, United States. Louis Grasse/PxImages/Zuma

“When the promotion stages its most politically symbolic event ever, and women vanish from the card, that’s not a glitch,” Jenn McClearen, author of Fighting Visibility: Sports Media and Female Athletes in the UFC, said. “It tells you whose presence is considered essential to the story being told on that lawn and whose is optional.”

“When he says stuff about equality in UFC for men and women, in a sense, yes, it’s true. But in the sense that they treat them equally badly.”

For Julie Kedzie, a retired mixed martial artist and former UFC fighter, shutting women out of the White House reflects White’s inclination to take on platforms that are “politically expedient for him.” That includes his muted response to the sexism that continues to vex the UFC, despite commanding a singular power to shape the opinions of the political right.

“People still say women can’t fight, that they suck, that when women fight is when they go and get a sandwich,” Kedzie said. “It’s a pervasive attitude that can be proven wrong. But White hasn’t put a stop to that, and he holds the court of public opinion. He has such a lock on the media and could change that story himself by saying, ‘Women can fight, shut the fuck up.’ But he hasn’t.”

Consider what happened with Bud Light. In 2023, after igniting conservative ire with its partnership with trans TikTok personality Dylan Mulvaney, the beer brand sought to curry favor with the political right by partnering with the UFC. It was then that Ben Fowlkes, a sports writer and host of the Co-Main Event podcast, said that White carried out an aggressive campaign to rehabilitate Bud Light’s image with the right. “He essentially provided Anheuser Busch the cover they were looking for, with somebody to go over to the right-wing crowd and tell them, ‘Come back over, you can buy Bud Light again, it’s safe.’ And it worked.”

Construction continues on the White House South Lawn as final preparations are made for the upcoming UFC Freedom 250 event, now just days away. Matt Kaminsky/Zuma

The sidelining of women at UFC Freedom 250 comes as White insists that he and the UFC are apolitical despite their uncannily close ties to Donald Trump. Even the right-wing, anti-trans, anti-immigrant trash talk widely embraced by some of the organization’s most visible fighters can be traced along the contours of Trump’s political rise.

“Before 2016, it was a rarity to ever hear a fighter who had any political opinions or any political awareness,” Fowlkes said. “Every once in a while, you’d get somebody who had strong feelings, and they were almost always Republican—or anarchist.”

“But fighters just loved Trump. It baffled me because these fighters have worked their whole lives to be able to spot a fake tough guy or a bully. And here’s one, but you love him.”

“It genuinely is remarkable. Women in the UFC fight under the same rules, on the same cards, in the same cage as men, and they can headline over men. There’s no asterisk on a women’s fight.”

It’s through the lens of an undeniable rightward shift within the UFC and its fanbase that the absence of women fighting on the White House card can be seen as indicative of the conservative gender ideals held by MAGA: hyperfeminine and reinforcing the “norms and differences between femininity and masculinity.” In short: not a fighter. It makes sense, then, that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has publicly argued against women in the military, is playing an unusual role in dictating strict physical requirements for military members attending the upcoming White House fight.

The UFC’s defenders are often quick to point to Ronda Rousey, the former UFC champion credited with single-handedly paving the way for women to compete in the UFC, as Exhibit A against such sexist accusations, as well as the MMA’s integrated gender structure.

“It genuinely is remarkable,” McClearen said. “Women in the UFC fight under the same rules, on the same cards, in the same cage as men, and they can headline over men. There’s no asterisk on a women’s fight the way there is in sports where people argue the women’s game is somehow a lesser version.”

But the impetus behind such a progressive structure, McClearen added, was partly business-related.

“The UFC figured out that promoting diverse fighters helps it reach diverse global audiences, so women’s visibility serves the brand,” she said. “Which is empowering and precarious at the same time, because visibility that’s granted for business reasons can be withdrawn for business reasons.”

As for Rousey’s role in reversing White’s fierce resistance to welcoming women in the UFC, Kedzie said, “Her star power was undeniable. She was also a very beautiful woman, and she was going to make [White] a lot of money.”

It isn’t criminal, of course, for the CEO of a major sports organization to prioritize profits. But it’s the nakedly transactional motivations with which White wades into the political that can cause someone to bristle. Take, for instance, White’s “equal playing field” boasts.

“When he says stuff about equality in UFC for men and women, in a sense, yes, it’s true,” Fowlkes said. “But in the sense that they treat them equally badly.”

Kedzie agreed, calling the UFC’s notoriously low fighter pay “poverty wages.”

In one sense, Kedzie said that the absence of women fighting on the South Lawn came as something of a relief. “Not because women can’t be just as fascist as the men,” she said. But ultimately, opting to compete at the White House, with its overwhelming sheen of corruption and disrepute, was a “moral choice.”

“I have absolutely no respect for any fighter that competes on that card,” she noted, “or for anybody who corners somebody who competes on that card.”

A cartoon by Drew Sheneman. Related | Republican blames ‘big, bad Biden’ for scary ethics probe…

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Google has sued an alleged China-based cybercrime operation it says used AI-powered phishing kits to blast out millions of scam text messages and funnel victims to fake websites designed to steal passwords, payment cards, and other sensitive information. The complaint targets a group Google refers to as the "Outsider Enterprise," which the company describes as a sprawling criminal network that operates on Telegram and supplies phishing tools to other fraudsters. According to Google's filing, the operation has been linked to more than 9,000 fraudulent websites, over one million malicious URLs, and scams that have allegedly defrauded hundreds of thousands of people. The group's biz model centers on distributing phishing kits that enable criminals to impersonate Google and other trusted brands through large-scale text message campaigns, Google claims. Victims are directed to fraudulent websites designed to steal login credentials, payment card details, and other sensitive information, it adds. Google's allegation is not that AI is somehow breaking into people's phones, but rather that the technology appears to have been used to help churn out phishing content, allowing the operation to push more scams, more quickly, and with less effort. Android users flagged more than 55,000 spam texts linked to the operation during a two-week period in May, we're told, while the company detected roughly 2.5 million messages containing links to Outsider-controlled websites sent to Android devices during the same time frame. The lawsuit forms part of a broader effort involving federal law enforcement and US telecom providers. Google said it is coordinating with the FBI, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon to disrupt the infrastructure behind the campaigns and block malicious messages before they reach users. "The criminals behind the Outsider Enterprise built a business out of impersonating trusted brands to defraud hundreds of thousands of victims," said Brett Leatherman, assistant director of the FBI's Cyber Division. "Criminals increasingly use AI to make fraud like this more convincing and harder to detect. Together with partners like Google, we can disrupt criminal networks in ways no single organization could on its own." The lawsuit may never put the alleged operators in a courtroom, but it could still help pull apart the infrastructure behind the campaigns. ®

Watsonville High School students participate in a nationwide walkout on Jan. 20. The action is in protest against the killing of Renee Good and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s tactics. (Amaya Edwards — Santa Cruz Local/CatchLight Local)

SANTA CRUZ COUNTY>> Local leaders announced they’re joining a lawsuit against a planned federal immigration enforcement facility near Gilroy.

The suit was first brought by the California Attorney General and Santa Clara County, which they jointly filed on June 10. It is alleging the project was undertaken without required local review and permitting processes. Despite the proposed location not being within county boundaries, Santa Cruz County leaders warned the impacts would be felt throughout the Central Coast region.

“Santa Cruz County communities are deeply connected to those throughout the region,” said Supervisor Monica Martinez in a Thursday press release.

A private developer leased the property to the federal government for use by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, in January 2025, possibly as an Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) office, according to a June 10 press release by California Attorney General Rob Bonta. ERO’s have come under fire and have been the subject of multiple lawsuits under President Donald Trump’s administration. They’ve been criticized for overcrowding, long-term confinement and inhumane conditions, Bonta’s office stated.

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“President Trump’s mass detention and deportation campaign has led to cruel, inhumane, and unacceptable conditions at immigration holding and detention facilities across California. But instead of working to improve conditions at these facilities — instead of enforcing ICE’s own detention standards — the Trump Administration is trying to jam through a new facility on a community that doesn’t want it,” Bonta stated.

Supervisors Felipe Hernandez and Martinez created the SHIELD ad hoc subcommittee in January to address local immigration concerns. SHIELD – Safeguarding Health, Inclusion, Essential Services and Local Defense – coordinates closely with county staff and community organizations serving immigrant residents to come up with possible next steps and solutions as fears rise nationwide.

In March, supervisors supported a proposal brought by the subcommittee to ban federal agents from using county property for civil immigration enforcement. County leaders said joining this lawsuit is a natural extension of the work SHIELD is already doing for immigrant communities. 

“Many residents throughout our region are experiencing uncertainty and fear regarding federal immigration enforcement activity,” Hernandez said in the press release. “We have a responsibility to understand and prepare for the impacts these actions may have on local families, schools, healthcare systems and community organizations. Our participation reflects that commitment.”

ICE notified local law enforcement of activity in Santa Cruz County 23 times between Jan. 25, 2025 and Jan. 26, 2026. Santa Cruz Local is tracking this activity to help give communities affected by immigration enforcement more information about what’s happening in their community, and help separate facts from rumors.

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After “The Lost Boys” first transformed Santa Cruz into Santa Carla, fans from around the world still make the pilgrimage to the Beach Boardwalk and Atlantis Fantasyworld. The final installment of Lookout’s series explores the movie’s enduring cult following, the return of Frog Brother Jamison Newlander and why the annual beach screening has become a summer ritual.

The spy law known as Section 702, which authorizes the NSA and FBI's warrantless surveillance, will all but certainly expire on Friday for the first time.

SpaceX has priced its blockbuster initial public offering at $135 a share, raising $75 billion and valuing Elon Musk's rocket biz at roughly $1.78 trillion. The haul could rise to about $86 billion if underwriters exercise their option to buy more stock, making it the largest IPO in US history. The company confirmed [PDF] that 555.6 million shares of Class A common stock were sold in the offering, with another 83.3 million available to underwriters. SpaceX is a loss-making company. In its Form S-1, filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, it divided operations into Space (Falcon 9 and the like), Connectivity (Starlink), and AI. Only the Connectivity segment is turning a profit, to the tune of $4.4 billion in 2025, while the others continue to rack up losses. Making a profit from AI continues to elude many companies – SpaceX is not the only entity where investment exceeds revenue, and Starship remains a work in progress. In the company's Form S-1, SpaceX reported a net loss of $4.9 billion on revenue of $18.7 billion in 2025. The IPO values the company at more than 90 times that revenue. According to The Financial Times, the IPO was heavily oversubscribed – orders exceeded the number of shares on offer by more than three times. Retail investors also ordered more than $100 billion of shares, and were allocated between 20 and 25 percent of the shares sold. The record-breaking IPO reflects investor appetite for AI-related companies, as well as a bet that SpaceX's estimate of a $28.5 trillion total addressable market, including $22.7 trillion in "Enterprise Applications," proves realistic. Skeptics may recall that promises and assurances associated with Elon Musk rarely survive contact with reality. We will update when trading kicks off today. Depending on how trading goes, Musk could be a paper trillionaire by the end of the day, thanks to his shares in SpaceX. That figure could climb further if SpaceX ever delivers on its more ambitious plans, from a human settlement on Mars to space-based datacenters. Musk may also be in line for a vast Tesla payout if the carmaker hits targets including a sharp rise in valuation and the delivery of a million robots over the next decade. ®

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

Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown is largely targeting people from the countries most vulnerable to displacement from climate-driven disasters, a Guardian analysis shows.

As the Trump administration pushes policies to boost planet-heating fossil fuels, millions of people are being forced to flee their homelands due to storms, floods, and droughts worsened by the climate crisis.

Of the 39 countries from which the Trump administration has fully or partly restricted entry to the US, 22 are ranked within the most vulnerable quarter of nations in the world to climate impacts, according to a Guardian analysis of data from the Notre Dame Global Adaptation Initiative, which assesses how prone jurisdictions are to the climate crisis.

“Nearly all of the most vulnerable countries are on a ban or visa pause,” said Danielle Wood, an associate professor at Notre Dame. Immigrants from Chad and Niger, the two most climate-vulnerable countries in the world according to the index, are now fully barred from the US, as are people from Sudan, Somalia, and Sierra Leone—also among the 10 countries most exposed to climate impacts.

Among the most vulnerable half of countries is Honduras, which has seen stronger rainstorms, droughts, floods, and coastal erosion in recent years. When Hurricane Mitch crashed into the country, killing 7,000 people, one affected family surveyed the unsalvageable ruins of their home and realized they had a lifeline—to move to the United States.

Evelyn, who did not want to share her full name, was a teenager when Mitch hit in 1998 and recalls how her relatives in New York City pleaded with her mother to bring her and her sister to the US.

“People are being displaced by climate change, the number is growing every year and, increasingly, the displacements are permanent.”

“There were bodies and dead animals floating in the water, the house was messed up, the furniture was all gone—doors, windows gone. It was so, so sad,” said Evelyn. “I got sick because of the mosquitoes too. My uncle and aunt were just like: ‘OK, just bring the kids over here, don’t stay. It’s dangerous.’”

Storms of the deadly ferocity of Mitch are even more likely today because our atmosphere and oceans have rapidly heated up due to the burning of fossil fuels.

Yet Trump’s curbing of immigration and asylum has made it far harder for people like Evelyn to flee to the US. “Every day it’s more barriers,” said Evelyn, who still lives in New York and has two daughters, both studying at university. “It’s sad to know that people will not be able to apply for a status or something to help their situation and also help the people back home.”

The administration has also sought to terminate the temporary protected status (TPS) of people from Honduras and 12 other countries who already reside in the US, with nearly half of these countries ranked by Notre Dame as among the most climate-vulnerable places in the world.

The US Supreme Court is now considering an appeal to the TPS revocation for people hailing from two of the affected countries: Syria and Haiti, which have suffered recent droughts and hurricanes, respectively, as well as violent unrest. Environmental perils in these and other countries have been cited by the federal government when granting TPS status to allow people to remain in the US.

But the current administration’s sweeping bans on entry to the US will “keep the radical Islamic terrorists out of our country” and resolve deficiencies in vetting people, Trump has said. (The State Department was contacted for comment about climate-related immigration.)

Most of the banned countries are at the epicenter of an escalating climate displacement crisis, with the United Nations estimating severe heatwaves, droughts, storms, and floods have uprooted 250 million people globally over the past decade, the equivalent of 70,000 displacements every day.

Resident walks through what remains after flood waters hit Comayaguela, Honduras, during a tropical storm on October 31, 1998. Yuri Cortez/AFP via Getty

It’s unknown how many of these people flee over borders, with most migration taking place internally—in 2025, nearly 30 million people were forced by disasters to move within their countries, recent figures show. Wildfires, such as those that incinerated parts of Los Angeles last year, were the largest cause of such displacement.

But experts agree that there is a growing cohort of so-called “climate refugees” fleeing their home countries as the planet continues to dangerously overheat. There are currently no official pathways to do so, however, with neither US law nor the UN’s 1951 refugee convention recognizing environmental disasters as a reason to gain protection in another country.

“People are being displaced by climate change, the number is growing every year and, increasingly, the displacements are permanent,” said Jocelyn Perry, program manager of the climate displacement program at Refugees International. Residents of developing countries now blacklisted by the US struggle to deal with the loss of crops, sea level rise, and other upheavals worsened by global heating, she added.

“A house in Florida may be able to withstand a category four hurricane, but there are people around the world unable to deal with that in any way and they are bearing the brunt of this,” said Perry.

Advocates say that people will typically be displaced by a climate-fueled disaster, which leads to a separate but related misfortune, such as violence, that spurs them to leave their country. War or persecution can, unlike climate change, be used as a reason to claim asylum.

“Climate change is not necessarily the first issue that displaced people raise,” said Perry. “But if, say, a family’s crops fail for three years and they have to move to an urban area and they can’t find work or it’s dangerous there, climate change has played a key role in their movement—even if their asylum claim is because of the violence that follows.”

A man with cholera symptoms is being carried to a small clinic, in Randelle, Haiti, on October 19, 2016.Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty

The US is the world’s largest emitter of planet-heating pollution in history. However, Trump has dismissed any need to act on the climate crisis, which he calls a “hoax” and “bullshit,” and has demanded the world remain wedded to fossil fuels.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has effectively shut down the US refugee program, other than to white South Africans, and dismantled overseas aid that ameliorates the symptoms of a warming world, such as the spread of disease. Cuts to USAID engineered by Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, are forecast to result in the deaths of about 4.5 million young children, in places such as sub-Saharan Africa, over the next five years.

“All of these actions will increase displacement, and the Trump administration will try to dissuade people from coming to the US border through cruel and inhumane policies, third-country deportation, and child detention,” said Perry.

“I don’t know if that will deter people if the other option is risking death or injury at home, though, so people will still make that journey,” she added. “We are seeing political decisions in the US and in Europe, too, that will leave more people stuck in vulnerable places and unable to respond. With worsening climate change, this is going to be horrific for the rest of the world.”

A farmer shows his dried out crops while Syria’s Idlib region faces severe drought for the first time in its history on October 28, 2025.Kasim Yusuf/Anadolu via Getty

The one part of the US immigration apparatus that does factor in the climate crisis is TPS, by which foreign nationals already in the US are granted renewable one- or two-year stays if war or natural disaster hits their homeland.

Syrians were granted TPS in 2024 on the basis, among other things, of falling wheat production and “drought-like conditions” that have plagued the country in recent years. Ethiopia has been hit by severe drought and flooding, displacing more than 4 million people, the country’s TPS status from the same year concluded, while about 350,000 Haitians in the US would risk returning to one of the countries “most affected by extreme weather events,” according to a 2023 determination granting a TPS extension.

The Trump administration has terminated TPS status for a swathe of countries, however, with the courts set to decide on the status of several of these, including the Supreme Court case involving Syria and Haiti. “There are tens of thousands of people who have fled because of natural disasters,” said Geoffrey Pipoly, a lawyer representing six plaintiffs from Haiti, which has been hit by two huge hurricanes since 2016. “Haiti has been smack dab in the middle of this for decades.”

Even those still protected by TPS face uncertainty. A doctor originally from Sudan, who did not want to be named, said he left for the US after drought accelerated conflict in his country, which has been locked in a civil war for the past three years.

“If the tide was to turn, it might be more for adaptation funding to help people stay where they are, rather than a new visa.”

“It’s too dry, there’s not enough water, the lands were just left without anyone to cultivate them and millions have fled,” he said. “The conflicts are affected by climate change and the difficulty of people sharing resources in that part of the world. I did not see any hope in things improving.”

Sudan is still on the TPS list but only until October. “It would be very, very tough, very difficult to go back,” said the doctor, who has still not heard whether an application made for a work permit has been successful. “One of the reasons people come to the US is because they think there is a law, everybody is treated equally. But I think this is no longer the case.”

The Supreme Court ruling is expected by late June or early July.

Efforts to update the US immigration system to include consideration of the climate crisis have so far floundered. The 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) defines a “refugee” as anyone who is unable to return to their home nation due to a well-founded fear of persecution based on race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political viewpoint.

It does not include protections for those displaced by environmental degradation—something researchers and advocates have long said is necessary. In 2021 and 2023, Democratic lawmakers aimed to codify such a change with the Climate Displaced Persons Act, which would amend the INA to provide durable legal status and resettlement support to people forced to relocate to the US due to climate disasters.

“As disasters supercharged by climate change cause disruption and devastation around the world, the Trump administration wants to both destroy programs meant to build more resilient countries and make it impossible for those without recourse to seek refuge in the United States,” said the Massachusetts senator Ed Markey, who introduced the proposal both times.

Such legislation is needed now more than ever, Markey said. “Trump’s attacks on foreign aid programs, his disregard of climate science, and his attacks on immigrants all come from the same playbook,” he said.

Emaciated cattle being fed in Kenya during Horn of Africa drought on September 1, 2022.Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP via Getty

The bill would also ensure that agencies collect data on climate-related displacement. That could remove a major roadblock to establishing and maintaining protections for those affected, said Hannah Flamm, deputy director of policy at the International Refugee Assistance Program (IRAP).

“There’s vast data globally on internal displacement on account of climate, but there’s virtually no data on international displacement on account of climate,” she said, adding that Markey’s proposal is a “valiant effort.”

“Whether or not it passes, it is critical to mobilize advocacy and to reinforce the need to meet this need,” she said.

Given the current political environment, however, the prospect of a new climate migration framework appears dim. “I wouldn’t say there’s a lot of optimism right now that any change could occur anytime in the near future,” Perry said.

Amid a broader push for mass deportations by the administration, “climate has been put on the back burner to safeguard the very concept of regular migration as a whole,” she added.

A future administration could try to implement a sort of climate visa to the US, but it’s more likely that it would focus on limiting damage around the world that displaces people in the first place, according to Yael Schacher, director for the Americas and Europe at Refugees International.

“If the tide was to turn, it might be more for adaptation funding to help people stay where they are, rather than a new visa,” Schacher said.

“We have our own displacement in the US, too—we aren’t immune from this. Right now the sympathy for immigrants, even people displaced by the worst persecution, is nil. It’s hard to see any sort of expansive opening—up, even if that’s what people need.”

Dharna Noor contributed additional reporting.

Vilès Dorsainvil has thought a lot about desperation recently. Specifically, what desperation forces people to do, and the tragedy it seems to attract. As a Haitian immigrant and the executive director of the Haitian Support Center in Springfield, Ohio, he has seen a desperate community seeking stability in the United States, only to find that the ground has shifted.

Dorsainvil has lived in the US since December 2020, when his mother insisted that he leave Haiti after he began receiving anonymous threats and demands for funds. He landed in Fort Lauderdale with just enough money for his rent and the burden of supporting a family back home. The only person he knew when he reached his destination was his nephew who lived in Springfield, Ohio. Within 72 hours, Dorsainvil went there.

Dorsainvil arrived in Springfield, a small city of about 60,000 residents, an hour west of the state capital, before the Haitian population began to soar. The island country had never recovered from the 7.0-magnitude earthquake in 2010 that devastated it and created the circumstances for subsequent prolonged food insecurity, rising gang violence, and deteriorating access to medical care. When Haitian President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in July 2021, Dorsainvil was relatively settled as a factory worker in Springfield. Given the chaos back home, he applied for and was granted Temporary Protected Status, a humanitarian designation that protects people from deportation if their country is deemed unsafe. It meant that as long as the Secretary of Homeland Security renewed Haiti’s TPS, Dorsainvil could live and work in Springfield.

After Moïse’s assassination, more than 100,000 people living in Haiti became eligible for TPS, and eventually about 15,000 Haitians settled in Springfield. They paid taxes, raised their children, started businesses, and worked many jobs that others wouldn’t take. They also became the lightning rods for much of the free-floating anti-migrant sentiment fomented by Trump’s 2024 campaign and, then, his administration.

Soon after baselessly claiming that Haitians were “eating the pets” of Springfield residents during a presidential debate in September 2024, Trump vowed that should he be reelected, he would deport Haitians. That November, Trump won Clark County, of which Springfield is the seat, with nearly two-thirds of the vote. During his second term, he came close to fulfilling his promise when then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem began the process of terminating Temporary Protective Status for countries that came up for review, including Venezuela, Afghanistan, and Haiti. Established by Congress in 1990, TPS grants legal status to people fleeing war, natural disasters, or unrest, and is designated in 6-, 12-, or 18-month increments. Many countries’ designations have been renewed continuously for years, if not decades, because conditions remain unlikely to improve. After Noem announced she wouldn’t renew Haiti’s TPS, Haitians and Springfield itself prepared for ICE to descend soon after the designation was set to expire on February 3, 2026.

Faith leaders from across the United States sing together as a sign of support for Haitian migrants fearing the end of their Temporary Protected Status, gather at St. John Missionary Baptist Church in Springfield, Ohio, on Feb. 2, 2026.Luis Andres Henao/AP During the statewide “Stand With Haitians!” protest at Fountain Square in Cincinnati, Ohio, demonstrators seek to expand and defend TPS of Haitian immigrants living in Springfield.Jason Whitman/NurPhoto/AP

But the ICE wave never came. Haitian TPS holders, including Dorsainvil’s younger brother, had sued the administration, and on the eve of Haiti’s TPS expiration, a federal judge postponed it. Since then, more than 330,000 Haitians living in the US with TPS have been in legal limbo as they wait for the Supreme Court to decide whether to allow their protections to expire. State by state, the ramifications quickly appeared. In Ohio, for example, the driver’s licenses of Haitian TPS holders expired in mid-March, and they have been unable to renew them. Until June 5, when a federal judge in Rhode Island ruled against the Trump administration, the federal government also stopped issuing work permits and processing asylum claims from Haiti and 38 other Latin American, Asian, and African countries and Palestine.

“I call it, ‘To leave or not to leave,’ because where are you going to go? If you leave to go somewhere else in the USA, you will still be a target.”

“Our immigration system prior to Trump has suffered from really long backlogs for people seeking asylum specifically,” said Emily Brown, director of the Ohio State University law school’s Immigration Clinic, which provides free legal representation to immigrants facing deportation. The sweeping halt of immigration processes only exacerbates that, Brown said, and has also closed a vital path to family reunification. Immigrants who have fled their home countries can petition for immediate family to join them only once they are granted asylum or refugee status. Many immigrants who have been in the US for years, Brown’s clients included, have been stuck on the threshold of approval—some have completed the steps and only need an asylum officer’s sign-off.

As Haitians and TPS holders around the country wait for the Supreme Court’s decision on whether to allow the Trump administration to end their legal status, in Springfield, they’ve retreated into the shadows. Haitians are leaving the city, Dorsainvil says, though it’s been far from a “mass exodus.” Some have attempted to go to Canada, others to Columbus. “I call it, ‘To leave or not to leave,’ because where are you going to go?” Dorsainvil tells me. “If you leave to go somewhere else in the USA, you will still be a target.”

Volunteer teacher Hope Kaufman leads Haitian students during an English language class at the Haitian Community Help and Support Center in Springfield, Ohio, while the 2024 presidential campaign rages in the background.Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty

If you aren’t looking for Springfield’s Haitian Support Center, you likely won’t find it. It’s tucked discreetly in the back of a church on the city’s east side, surrounded by single-family homes on one of the city’s main thoroughfares. The sole indicator of the center’s presence is a sign on a locked door bearing its logo and welcoming visitors in English and Haitian Creole. When I arrived on a recent Friday afternoon, just two other people were there. Neither was Dorsainvil.

About 45 minutes later, he arrived and ushered me into a windowless room he shares with a colleague, their desks an arm’s length away from each other. Between two laptops and a desktop, notebooks and files, and more than a dozen yellow sticky notes plastered beside his screens and along his walls, Dorsainvil’s desk is as cluttered as his to-do list. As he answered his ringing phone, I studied the back wall of the office, where a framed print bears a simple inscription: “Piti piti zwazo fè nich li.” It’s a Haitian proverb meaning “little by little, the bird builds its nest.”

As thousands of Haitians flocked to his city, Dorsainvil realized Springfield had no nest, or even a branch to land on. He helped found the Haitian Support Center to serve as a “bridge” between Haitians and legal, financial, and material resources, particularly because immigrants are vulnerable to scams and exploitation.

When we met, he had just returned from a failed attempt to recover a $1,900 security deposit a rental agency was holding for a woman who had moved to New York. She took a Greyhound bus back to Springfield when neither she nor Dorsainvil could reach her property manager. When the pair showed up to the agency’s office that morning, the property manager was nowhere to be found. “Come back Monday,” agency staff told the woman. She boarded a Greyhound back to New York, unable to miss work to wait until Monday. Dorsainvil promised to return to the agency himself.

This same woman, Dorsainvil told me, tried to help her younger brother apply for asylum. A New York firm told her they’d do it for $24,000. She put down $3,000 for a service nonprofits and immigration clinics, like Ohio State’s, can do for free. Brown noted that while some firms charge “exorbitant fees,” the cost of litigating asylum claims has risen as backlogs make cases lengthier and more complex. “Good attorneys are cost-prohibitive for a lot of people,” Brown said, “and it leads them to having to choose between funding their legal case and their basic needs.”

“Good attorneys are cost-prohibitive for a lot of people, and it leads them to having to choose between funding their legal case and their basic needs.”

Dorsainvil’s cases are a litany of awful experiences: women and men vulnerable to human trafficking because they lost their work authorizations; families coming home to eviction notices with less than $20 in their bank accounts; people who have “nothing” and nowhere to go. There is parallel desperation between Haitian immigrants and the families they support back home that Dorsainvil can’t ignore; if a Haitian in the US gets detained or deported, it’s a matter of “life and death” for them and every person in Haiti who relies on them.

Because the Haitian Support Center’s reach is restricted to the Springfield community, he cannot help recover the $3,000 from the “predatory law firm” the woman who moved to New York engaged; nor can he help the immigrants frequently calling from Columbus or elsewhere in the state. Money flows to the center through small donations, some as little as $5. And, like Dorsainvil, most of its staff are Haitian immigrants. Should TPS expire, they face the same fate as the people they help.

Dorsainvil doesn’t know how much longer the Haitian Support Center can continue its work, including paying people’s rents and utility bills. But he feels obligated to continue until he’s forced to stop. He acknowledged that his work and status as a high-profile Haitian TPS holder place him at significant risk, but he calls it the “ultimate sacrifice.”

 
“Folks keep asking me what I am doing here, why I am exposing myself knowing I am not a citizen,” Dorsainvil said.
“I consider myself nothing when I know—when I experience firsthand— how people are going to suffer.”

Viles Dorsainvil, executive director of the Haitian Community Help and Support Center at Rose Goute Creole Restaurant, sits with interpreter James Fleurijean, left, a board member of the Haitian Community Help and Support Center, in Springfield, Ohio, Saturday, January 25, 2025.Jessie Wardarski/AP

Of the 1.3 million TPS holders in the US, 97 percent are from just five countries, with the lion’s share coming from Venezuela and Haiti. Less than three weeks after Trump retook office, Noem announced her decision to terminate TPS for Venezuelans and began moving down the list soon after. By August 2025, DHS announced its intent to terminate TPS for more than a third of the 17 countries with active designations, Honduras, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, and Haiti among them. When the Supreme Court ruled in October 2025 that the Trump administration could terminate Venezuelans’ TPS designation even as litigation continued, the unsigned and unreasoned order offered no guidance for the wave of lawsuits behind it.

Haitians have been granted TPS continuously, either through DHS or court order, since the 2010 earthquake. Especially after 2021, thousands have flocked to Springfield, drawn by the promises of stable factory and warehouse work, a relatively low cost of living, and a burgeoning community of fellow resettled Haitians.

Many Haitians who were trained as physicians back home have taken nursing and other healthcare jobs in Clark County, including serving as interpreters. Vilès Dorsainvil’s younger brother, Vilbrun, is one such physician who became a nurse and worked at Springfield Regional Hospital. Vilbrun is a lead plaintiff in the TPS case before the Supreme Court; Vilès, who was already a plaintiff in a separate federal case challenging the termination of TPS, recruited him.

Like countless other Rust Belt cities, Springfield struggled with decades of depopulation as manufacturers moved out. And like other Ohio towns, particularly in the western part of the state, Springfield was devastated by the opioid epidemic, ranking consistently among US cities with the highest rates of fatal overdose. With thousands of new residents more than eager to work hard jobs for low pay, Springfield’s tax revenue increased, its unemployment rate decreased, and nearly a dozen Haitian-owned businesses opened in town.

Even with the benefits that may have come to the city, anti-Haitian sentiment in Springfield started long before Trump and Ohio’s own Sen. JD Vance capitalized on it during the 2024 campaign. The spark that ignited the flame came in August 2023, when a Haitian TPS-holder crashed into a school bus near Springfield, killing an 11-year-old boy. The driver, Hermanio Joseph, did not have a valid US driver’s license, because, he testified, he had not yet gathered the required documents. In May 2024, a jury convicted him of involuntary manslaughter and vehicular homicide, both felonies, and he was sentenced to 9 to 13 years in prison.

In the last several weeks, my office has received many inquiries from actual residents of Springfield who've said their neighbors' pets or local wildlife were abducted by Haitian migrants. It's possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false.

Do you know…

— JD Vance (@JDVance) September 10, 2024

Joseph’s arrest and conviction only fueled the growing resentment against Haitians in Springfield. By the time Vance claimed in early September 2024 that his office was fielding reports of pets and wildlife being “abducted by Haitian migrants,” outraged residents had already swarmed city commission meetings, claiming Haitians were “invading” the community, driving up housing costs, and bringing a “flood of drugs” with them. The Blood Tribe, a neo-Nazi group Springfield is currently suing, descended on the city multiple times that summer, lobbing racial slurs at city officials and insisting the influx of Haitians threatened the city’s “good White residents.”

Trump’s targeting of Haitians has splintered Ohio’s Republicans. In the House of Representatives, Springfield-area’s two Republicans joined Democrats in April in voting to extend Haitians’ TPS through April 2029. But they remain largely loyal to Trump’s immigration crackdown, following Ohio’s two Republican senators voting to give ICE and Customs and Border Protection $70 billion over the next three years. One of those senators, former Lt. Gov. Jon Husted, is opposing the man who appointed him to replace Vance.

Gov. Mike DeWine, who with his wife helped establish a network of free schools in Port-au-Prince that closed due to violence, has repeatedly defended Ohio’s Haitian immigrants and called ending TPS the “wrong” choice. The situation in Haiti has “never been worse,” DeWine told reporters in February. After a federal judge halted the TPS termination from going into effect, First Lady Fran DeWine said she and the governor were “happy” for both Haitians and Springfield at large, noting immigrants’ contributions to the economy and community. “We’re just all praying for good things to happen in Springfield for everyone,” she said.

“He’s acting like, ‘Well, there’s nothing I can do, I’m just the governor of Ohio.’”

The governor’s prayers and verbal support fall flat to immigrants and advocates, however, when followed by inaction; even as he opposes ending TPS for Haitians, DeWine has clarified that Ohio would “follow” whatever the court decides. “He’s acting like, ‘Well, there’s nothing I can do, I’m just the governor of Ohio,’” Lynn Tramonte, executive director of the Ohio Immigrant Alliance, said. She compared DeWine to Illinois’ Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker, whose “fire-in-the-belly” response to ICE enforcement included calling Trump’s bluff on his arrest threat and standing behind legislation protecting immigrants at courthouses and hospitals, even as the federal government fights it. In Ohio, in contrast, immigrants rights advocates told me of asylum seekers, Haitian or otherwise, detained at their immigration check-ins, shuttled off to private prisons and county jails in the northeastern and southwestern corners of the state, and deported.

A temporarily closed Haitian grocery on February 3, 2026 in Springfield, Ohio. A federal judge issued a temporary stay blocking the Trump administration’s attempt to strip TPS for Haitian immigrants, but Haitian TPS beneficiaries and residents of Springfield continue to face uncertainty over their protected status.Jon Cherry/Getty

“There are people who will be glad they’re gone,” Marjory Wentworth, a Springfield resident and organizer with the local immigrant rights organization G92, told me. There is a burgeoning housing and homelessness crisis in Springfield, which some city officials have blamed, in part, on out-of-state companies buying properties and jacking up rents. The anger and blame may be wrongfully placed on immigrants, Wentworth said, but she can understand the dynamic.

The city has also faced serious consequences from the national attention sparked by the Trump administration’s attacks. It extends beyond the dozens of bomb threats made on schools, houses of worship, and government buildings. Within months of Trump assuming office, Clark County lost $4.25 million in federal funding, including $2.7 million from a Health and Human Services critical disease grant. Without that grant, the county health department laid off crucial staff, including disease investigators and medical translators, and had to abandon its plans for a new health facility and mobile clinic—important steps in improving access to primary and preventative care, especially in an area with little to no public transportation.

Now, with Haitians unable to lawfully work, Springfield’s economic outlook has deteriorated. Federal data show that the Springfield metropolitan area lost more jobs than any other area in Ohio, losing more than 1,000 between 2024 and 2025, nearly all from the manufacturing industry. Between 2021 and 2022, as large numbers of Haitians began settling in Springfield and tax policies shifted to accommodate remote work, the city generated $9.2 million in income taxes; between 2023 and 2025, income tax revenue was only $3 million. By June 2025, Springfield’s city finance director asserted Springfield’s economy was at a “critical juncture”: Income tax revenue, the “backbone” of the municipal budget, sharply declined and then stagnated. Between the loss of income taxes and the exhaustion of federal pandemic rescue funds, “Our general fund is under real strain,” Finance Director Katie Eviston told the city commission last June.

Publicity, as Wentworth and other Springfield activists have learned, is a double-edged sword; not only have Haitians been the targets of death threats and vandalism, but advocates themselves have faced harassment, including a social media conspiracy campaign that claimed local churches and community organizations were running a human trafficking scheme, stealing donations, and working with ICE to convince Haitians to self-deport. After the district court postponed Haitian’sTPS expiration, schools and government offices closed due to a renewed wave of bomb threats.

“There is no safe place in Haiti.”

G92 and the Haitian Support Center are part of a sprawling web of community organizations advocating for Haitian immigrants in the Springfield area. They’ve offered rental assistance, food drives, transportation, and know-your-rights training to immigrants and advocates anticipating ICE activity. But beyond material support and prayers, Wentworth acknowledges there’s nothing advocates can do when Haitians’ futures ultimately lie in the hands of nine Supreme Court justices.

In late April, the court heard oral arguments in Trump v. Miot and Mullin v. Doe, cases brought by Haitian and Syrian TPS holders, respectively. The TPS holders argue that Noem ignored the necessary process in her review of TPS for both countries, including consulting other agencies about conditions in those nations. In ending TPS for Haitians, Noem insisted that renewing humanitarian protections would be “contrary to the national interest of the United States,” because Haiti lacks a central government to flag criminals attempting to enter the US. Even as the State Department maintains a “do not travel” advisory for risk of kidnappings, sexual assault, and robbery in Haiti, Noem declared the country acceptable for immigrants to repatriate to. Haitians will face the same dangers if deported back, Dorsainvil emphasizes: “There is no safe place in Haiti.”

Trump administration lawyers argue that all aspects of Noem’s determination are immune from judicial review. Ruling otherwise would open a hole “a truck could be driven through,” Solicitor General John Sauer told the justices. TPS holders’ attorneys, meanwhile, insisted that siding with the Trump administration would write it a “blank check” to enact federal policies without following required steps to prevent politicization and abuse.

And in Haitians’ case, attorney Geoffrey Pipoly argued, Noem’s decision was motivated by Trump’s racist views and his “bare dislike of Haitians in particular.” While the administration bolsters a refugee program for white South Africans, the president has called Haiti a “shithole country” whose immigrants, alongside those from other nonwhite countries, are “poisoning the blood” of America. “He vowed that he would terminate Haiti’s TPS, and that is exactly what happened,” Pipoly said.

Viles Dorsainvil (R), Executive Director of the Haitian Support Center, and an ordained minister, prays with Associate Pastor Brandon Peterson (C) of Greater Grace Temple in Springfield, Ohio, outside the US Supreme Court, which has the power to decide the fate of TPS holders in the US.Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty

The court is expected to issue its opinion in late June or early July. Springfield advocates aren’t feeling optimistic, but even if the court sides with TPS holders, Wentworth said it will not feel like a win. “The administration is making it as difficult as possible” for Haitians to remain and communities to support them. Ohio State’s Brown agreed, describing the Trump administration’s immigration policy generally as a “mass delegalization” project with one goal: “They are trying to push people into the shadows and encourage people to just give up and leave,” she said.

For most of our conversation, Dorsainvil spoke in soft, yet emphatic, tones indicative of his theological training as a Moravian pastor. But when he recalled the vulnerable, desperate people he’s helped in just the past week, he sounded exasperated. “Why is the administration doing that?” he often asks himself. He supplies the answer: In the Trump administration’s view, “I see you as the other, and once I see you that way, your life, your misery, and your experience don’t matter to me.”

UC Santa Cruz move-out week often transforms into a massive treasure hunt, with students rescuing items like vintage tech and gaming chairs from donation bins. It’s a campuswide scavenger hunt for free, high-value gear.

London's Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) is planning to cut around 700 extra frontline posts after being blocked from awarding a software contract to US supplier Palantir, Commissioner Mark Rowley said. On May 20, the capital's deputy mayor for policing and crime Kaya Comer-Schwartz refused to approve the MPS's plan to hand its Unified Operational Analytics (UOA) contract, worth up to £50 million over two years, to Palantir. The force already uses Palantir in professional standards investigations into its own officers. In the written version of his report to the London Policing Board on June 11, Rowley said the MPS has to reduce its full-time equivalent (FTE) headcount by 1,150 in the current financial year to balance its budget. The UOA would have covered around 500 of these by reducing staff time spent on backroom work including intelligence reports, mobile device analysis, and data processing. "Following the decision not to award the contract with the preferred supplier Palantir, the delivery of these circa 500 FTE reductions are now at risk," Rowley wrote, adding that the UOA also looked likely to allow the force to cut a further 200 FTE serious and organized crime (SOC) posts. "We are now in a scenario where, in the absence of additional new funding, we must identify and implement in-year cuts to our services to Londoners, rather than using technology to automate administrative and research-heavy areas of the MPS," the Commissioner wrote. The MPS "may be able to take the edges off these reductions" if it can quickly find an alternative route to UOA functionality, Rowley said. But as any procurement would likely take months, the force must plan greater cuts in frontline policing. A spokesperson for the Mayor of London said: "The mayor fully supports the Met using modern technology to drive efficiencies and improve the performance of the police. However, as with all procurement, we must always ensure the correct processes are followed and that Londoners get value for money. "In this case, the Met did not present its procurement strategy for approval, as required, and the process followed by the Met did not adequately demonstrate value for money for Londoners for a proposed contract at this value. Given the tight budgetary constraints the police are operating under, it's even more important that robust processes are followed when awarding large contracts. "The Met does face a difficult financial situation, which stems from the huge cuts implemented by the previous government and the significant underfunding of the Met's capital city responsibilities. The mayor has already doubled the policing budget from City Hall and he will continue to do everything he can to support the Met and secure the national funding needed for policing in our city." The dispute comes as the Home Office announced an expansion of AI use across policing in England and Wales, with large-scale pilots in up to ten forces this financial year aimed at helping officers process digital evidence. The work will be run centrally by a new body, PoliceAI. ®

Plymouth City Council has joined the growing ranks of public bodies defeated by the humble BCC field after exposing the email addresses of around 500 home-schooling families in a mass-mailing mishap. The blunder comes barely a week after City of York Council disclosed a similar mistake that exposed the email addresses of hundreds of disabled residents, suggesting that some public sector workers remain engaged in an ongoing battle with one of email's oldest features. The message, sent by Plymouth's Elective Home Education team, was meant to share information about upcoming legislative changes, but it also shared the email addresses of hundreds of home-schooling families with one another. A Register reader who contacted us about the incident described the aftermath as "a bit of a mess," claiming follow-up communications caused further confusion among recipients. Plymouth City Council did not respond to The Register's questions, but in a statement provided to local media, it admitted the incident was caused by human error and affected approximately 500 families. "Unfortunately, due to human error, a recent email was sent to approximately 500 families without using the BCC function, meaning recipient email addresses were visible," the council said. The authority said it contacted recipients as soon as it became aware of the problem, apologized, and asked families to delete the email and refrain from using any details they had received. It stressed that the message included no information relating to children and consisted solely of a general update. The council said the email mishap was investigated internally and that affected families were contacted again once officials had pieced together what went wrong. It also promised extra checks designed to keep future mailing lists out of public view. The council also reported the matter to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO). An ICO spokesperson told The Register: "We can confirm that we received a report from Plymouth City Council regarding this incident. After carefully assessing the information in the report, we provided data protection advice and closed the case with no further action." While the exposure appears limited to email addresses rather than more sensitive personal information, the incident serves as another reminder that some of the most common data breaches do not involve sophisticated cybercriminals or ransomware gangs. Sometimes all it takes is sending an email to a few hundred people and clicking the wrong box. ®

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 12 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.

CNN reports that Donald Trump is “furious” because his bombings of Iran this week were not portrayed by the media as strong and powerful. He’s apparently “frustrated,” according to CNN sources, who are clearly leaking out of concern for his mental state. On another front entirely, Trump is smashing new records in the polling. He’s reaching new thresholds on inflation. Thanks to Trump, Democrats may now be leading Republicans by a key polling metric for the first time in many decades.

We think these stories should all be connected to each other. The rage and frustration over Iran is basically rage and frustration over his political situation, because the former is causing the latter. He’s in a political bind we don’t think we’ve ever seen before.

So we’re parsing through all this new data and new Trump lunacy with Democratic strategist Christina Reynolds, who has worked on a lot of midterms and can explain how all this is playing on the ground. Christina, thanks for coming on.

Christina Reynolds: Thanks for having me.

Sargent: So let’s start here. CNN polling analyst Harry Enten made a point I haven’t heard before. He said Trump is the only president ever to hit a net approval on inflation of negative 50 points. And he’s done this in many polls. Listen to Enten.

Harry Enten (voiceover): Inflation net approval: minus 50 points or worse. Fifty points underwater or worse. Total polls per president. Trump in 2026—already at least eight polls in which his net approval rating on inflation or the cost of living is negative 50 points or worse. Every other president in every other year, the answer is zero.

Sargent: So just to reiterate, in eight polls, Trump has hit a net approval on inflation of negative 50 points. No other president has ever done that. Christina, I don’t think I’ve seen polling quite this bad on the economy for a president ever! As long as I’ve been following politics! Maybe something under George W. Bush? I don’t know. What do you think?

Reynolds: I don’t think it was this bad. I worked at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in ’06, and we took back the House. Bush was certainly not a popular president at that time. But these are numbers that I would send back to the pollster and say, Can you double-check? I don’t know that I’ve seen numbers this bad.

Republicans have an even bigger problem than those numbers. They have a president who absolutely wants credit for fixing everything. He believes his own spin, certainly, but also he believes he’s taken action and should get credit for that action. That happens with a lot of politicians, but this president is especially guilty of that. He is not going to fade away into the background, which Bush did largely in 2006. He is not going to let the Republicans go out and shift the conversation.

Not that they would be able to shift the conversation. When inflation is growing higher than your wages, voters understand that. They know it. They live it. You can’t convince them things are better when they’re literally not. But Trump is not just going to go out and talk about things and remind voters of that—he’s going to go out and talk about his ballroom. He’s going to go out and talk about the reflecting pool, as he did in Wisconsin when he went to one of the most vulnerable Republicans. So this is a huge problem for Republicans. It’s not just the polling number, it’s what Trump’s going to do because of the polling number.

Sargent: You raise a really interesting point there, which is that Donald Trump isn’t being at all accommodating of the situation that Republicans find themselves in. They’ve urged him to try to talk about the economy in a way that makes it look as if he understands what people are going through and makes it look as if he’s doing stuff. But he won’t do that, because it makes him look like a failure.

Since everything has to always be about his lionization, his glorious greatness, he just says, I don’t care about inflation, or, Affordability’s a hoax. There’s no sensitivity or awareness of the situation the rest of his party is in, in any sense.

Reynolds: Absolutely not. That is counter to George Bush. It’s counter to what Nancy Pelosi did when she was House Speaker and understood that some people were going to speak out against her. As long as she had the votes, she was OK. There’s some level of what gets the party, what gets the values that you support where you need to go. And Trump is about what gets Trump where he needs to go. It’s a huge problem for Republicans.

You heard it in the “I don’t care about the midterms” comment. You hear it in everything that he does. If I was a Republican, I would want him to take a back seat on things outside of maybe fundraising. He’s doing the exact opposite. If you’re a Republican and you’re forced to stand up there and praise him for gold-plating the White House, that’s a pretty tough campaign ask.

Sargent: That’s really interesting. By the way, Harry Enten also notes that, according to his calculations, Democrats are more trusted on inflation than Republicans for the first time since the 1970s. Enten also notes that Trump is the only president to ever hit 80 percent disapproval on gas prices. Eighty percent disapproval on gas prices! Trump is just crushing records all over the place. I swear I have not seen numbers like this, ever.

Reynolds: No, me neither. It’s pretty impressive when you think about it. It also is a sign that you can’t pull the wool over voters’ eyes on things like this. Everyone goes to the gas station. Everyone has to deal with the prices going up because of gas prices.

You can’t fool them. Trump talking the way he does and acknowledging that it’s OK, but it’ll get better, doesn’t help them now. He’s really leaving Republicans in a rough spot.

Sargent: It’s really extraordinary. So all this is key context for what’s coming next. CNN’s Dana Bash reports that sources are saying Trump is, quote-unquote, “furious.” Why? Because after Trump struck Iran this week, the media didn’t view his action as powerful enough.

Dana Bash also reports that Trump is “frustrated” that Iran didn’t seem to be taking the strike seriously. Amazing.

So now Trump is saying that he won’t strike Iran again because they’re now close to a deal. He says—maybe by the time people listen to this, there will be a deal. Maybe not. I don’t think so, because he’s now talking about this weekend. But put that aside. I want to focus on the connection between Trump’s rage and his terrible polls.

The reason Trump is angry isn’t just because Iran won’t do his bidding. It’s that by not doing Trump’s bidding and keeping the Strait of Hormuz closed, Iran has him cornered. It’s driving up prices, destroying his numbers, and destroying GOP midterm hopes. The anger and the polling are connected in that sense, right, Christina?

Reynolds: Absolutely they are. His frustration is coming out in what voters are understanding. It’s one of the reasons he can’t stop talking about things that are incredibly unpopular.

He is just clinically unable to move on because of that rage and that frustration, because it didn’t go the way he assumed it would go. So we are stuck in a war that people didn’t ask for, that we proactively started. But we are domestically stuck with higher gas prices and everything that stems from that.

That’s all because he didn’t get what he wanted, and no one is giving him credit for what he thinks he should get credit for. I am a little baffled as to what he thinks he should get credit for at this point, but no one is giving him any credit. They are giving him, rightly, the blame. He can’t handle that.

Sargent: I think that’s exactly right. He’s in a rage because the media is portraying him as being fundamentally ineffective and unable to resolve the very situation that’s creating the high prices.

By the way, even if he gets a deal—I don’t know, by the time people listen to this, or on the weekend, whenever—even if he gets one, those prices, especially on things like energy and gas, are going to stay up for a long time. As someone who’s worked on midterm elections, how do you anticipate the impact of this playing out on the ground in all these races over the next few months? What’s it going to look like politically?

Reynolds: It’s going to look like a few things. We’re going to see more retirements. We’re seeing that at every level of the ballot, where Republicans are choosing just not to run again in this environment. We’re going to continue to see voters open for a change in surprising places, voters who understand—maybe it’s not forever, maybe we rent some seats for a little while—but they see it’s not working.

Where we have candidates that are out there talking about issues that matter versus a candidate that is forced to talk about a ballroom or to praise a war that they’re not that into, you’re going to continue to see voters give a chance to those candidates.

I think we’re running better candidates, and we have candidates who understand their districts and are willing to take a chance. One big difference in the shift that I’ve seen from 2002 and 2006 to 2018 and now—there’s some power in looking at Donald Trump getting elected for people who are not traditional politicians to say, Maybe I can give it a try. Maybe I can offer something different, or I can connect better with my community. That means we see some interesting candidates out there who offer something different. Different is good in a change electorate.

It’s going to make for some challenging elections for Republicans that they’re not expecting. What also happens in those places, when we expand the field—you have candidates that aren’t used to hard races. You have candidates who got a little lazy.

They have not done their constituent services, they have not gone out and had a tough campaign schedule, versus a candidate that’s new, that’s trying again, that has the fire in their belly. I can tell you which candidate I’d rather work for every time in that scenario.

Sargent: I want to pick up a little bit more on that because we have a piece up at NewRepublic.com right now about American Bridge, which is a Democratic group. They’re investing $50 million in trying to expand the House map. The Senate map as well, but let’s focus on the House for now.

They’re trying to expand the House map by really going into some very difficult districts traditionally for Democrats—ones that lean Republican by four or five, six, seven, eight, that kind of thing. Some of these are in North Carolina, some of them are in central Pennsylvania, some are in Iowa.

But Democrats, not just American Bridge, but as a party generally—it now looks like there’s a new level of commitment to going into harder races, to contesting tougher places and really trying to shake loose whatever can be shaken loose. That’s what happens, right, in an environment like this? If you go contest these races in hard places, things happen. Funny things happen. Surprising things happen.

Reynolds: You expand the field at a time like this because we look at what’s happened since Trump got elected. Since Trump got elected, Democrats have flipped 30 state legislative seats, Republicans have flipped none. Democrats have overperformed in the elections that have happened—a variety of special elections, state legislative elections. Democrats have overperformed in 85 percent of those seats. That number in 2006 was about two-thirds. We’re overperforming all over the place.

You’re going to see it at the House level, you’re going to see it at the state legislative level, where we’re looking for where we can play. Where they have an incumbent that has gotten lazy or is standing with Trump too much against the interests of their people. They have an electorate that’s just a little tired of what’s happening or is particularly impacted by the economy, by gas prices. Ag communities are great examples of this.

You’re going to see this more and more, where organizations, campaigns expand out, and we’re going to pick up some of those seats. The Republicans also have to try and expand their map. And they’re not ready for that. They don’t have the message for that, to actually reach and connect with voters.

Sargent: Fascinating. To bear this all out, we have this new Emerson poll. It has Democrats leading in the generic House ballot matchup by 10 points, 50 percent to 40 percent. That’s 50–40.

Now the polling averages have it a little tighter—50PlusOne, they have it at six points, the average is 49 to 43. But this 10-point poll makes me think that the average could start to widen as well. And if Democrats are up at seven, eight, nine points, you’re looking at a wave.

Where do you think it is right now? Do you think it’s closer to six or do you think it’s closer to 10? And where do you expect the spread to end up this fall?

Reynolds: I am usually a pragmatist, maybe a pessimist. But I think this is going to be a wave election. We spend a lot of time talking about very few candidates, and we miss some of the amazing candidates who are running in races down the ballot.

We have a lot of phenomenal women running around the country who are working-class candidates who’ve been really in their communities. We have a number of people who are doing surprising things on the state level. We have some phenomenal candidates.

Between the environment, between the precedent, and between what Trump’s going to be able to do and how little they are going to be able to control that, and how much they’re going to have to walk with him off that cliff—I feel good about where Democrats are.

One of the reasons that generic ballot is at 10 points right now is we are reminding people—and one of the reasons, most importantly, that Democrats are winning on inflation—is we are reminding people that we understand that costs are important, that there is work that government can do, important work, to help make things a little bit easier for families. Trump is not doing that at all.

That’s part of how he won: communicating with voters and telling them he understood. Now he has moved on to ballrooms, to wars they didn’t ask for, and [saying] these price increases don’t matter.

Sargent: And you’re talking about House candidates when you talk about these working-class women around the country?

Reynolds: House candidates, state legislative candidates, in some cases gubernatorial candidates. They don’t get as much attention as Senate candidates, but there’s some really great candidates out there doing great work. And that’s going to make a difference, too.

Sargent: It’s very similar to 2018, where Trump’s first election just brought in this whole new class of public servant just out of nowhere. We’re seeing a new wave of it right now, and it really is heartening stuff to see.

I want to flag something else from the Emerson poll. In the generic House ballot matchup, Democrats are leading the GOP among independents by 15, 45 to 30. Now, how important are independents in midterm elections? What do you make of that number?

My sense is a lot of what we’re seeing now is making it possible for Democrats to have conversations with certain constituencies and types of voters that they couldn’t really reach before. They’re more attuned to listening to what Democrats have to say now.

Reynolds: That’s exactly it. I think that number is huge and hugely important. More and more, people are finding themselves unaffiliated. They are deciding, Maybe I’m not connected to either party. Some of this is the divisiveness, some of this is the way we paint both sides. Count me as someone who—I don’t love where the Democratic Party brand is right now. But I’m not as worried about it because each candidate is running their own race on Democratic values, and those values are incredibly popular. That’s why we’re appealing to independents right now.

Sargent: Well, it’s sure looking really good right now, Christina. Tell us, what could go wrong?

Reynolds: Haha. Lots of things. We never know what’s going to happen in the world. We never know how things are going to change and what voters exactly are going to care about. Will there be massive world events? Will there be natural disasters and things like that, all of which throw a campaign off its axis a little bit? We never know that.

But I feel very good about the fact that we have a class of candidates across the country and up and down the ballot who know how to talk to voters, who have an agenda that they can sell. This is not just “Trump stinks.” Those messages, those ads write themselves. He keeps giving us content. That’s out there. But we have to provide something positive for voters. And I actually think we’re doing that.

I feel good about that. We keep laying the groundwork, we keep supporting those candidates. And—gosh, I’m not usually an optimistic person, Greg—but we’re doing what we need to do, and voters understand where the world is right now, and they need change.

Sargent: It’s really got the same nose-to-the-grindstone feeling that 2018 had.

Reynolds: It does. It very much does.

Sargent: Christina Reynolds, on that note—we don’t usually end on a positive note around here, so let’s grab this opportunity while it’s there. Christina, awesome to talk to you. Thank you so much. Come back, please.

Reynolds: You too. Thanks so much.

The UK government has set up an advisory board for its digital ID project, intended "to challenge the government on emerging ideas or policy decisions to ensure the system works for everyone," says the Cabinet Office. The board includes David Rogers, an Internet of Things security expert and CEO of security consultancy Copper Horse. He is no stranger to government advisory panels, having previously sat on a group formed in 2020 to consider telecoms diversification. A year later, as chairman of the GSMA's fraud and security group, he backed the then-Conservative government's Product Security and Telecommunications Infrastructure Act 2022. Rogers has provided El Reg with comments over the years, and in 2014 discussed iPhone 6 biometric security, arguing that better usability would cut data loss overall because most people found PIN locks too cumbersome. Justine Roberts, founder and chief executive of UK parenting forum Mumsnet, is also on the board. The site experienced a data breach in 2019 due to a cloud migration affecting 46 user accounts, leading Roberts to apologize. More recently, some Mumsnet posters have been unimpressed by the government's digital ID plans, with one responding to the prime minister's October 2025 announcement with "Honestly, who is he kidding?" and "Desperate stuff to justify this authoritative bs." During the public consultation, some posters promoted the Sex Matters campaign to let Brits include their sex in their digital IDs. Another board member, Victor Dominello, has relevant experience as the minister who launched New South Wales' digital driver's license in 2019, saying it was more secure than the physical equivalent. In 2022, a researcher at security company Dvuln found numerous security flaws in the Service NSW app that hosts the license and other government services, although the state government said these did not pose a risk to customer information. Other members include John Fallon, former chief executive of Pearson and the lead non-executive board member of the Cabinet Office; Anne-Marie Imafidon, who runs social enterprise Stemettes, which encourages people to consider jobs in tech and science; and digital regulation lawyer Emma Wright. The board will meet quarterly for as long as the digital ID program lasts. The government is also setting up engagement exercises with the digital verification and financial services sectors. It is currently running a People's Panel with around 100 to 120 participants meeting in Birmingham and on Zoom to hear from experts and ministers before producing recommendations, in return for £550 in cash or vouchers. ®

In Oscar Wilde’s 1895 comedy The Importance of Being Earnest, the epigram-spouting Lady Bracknell is told by Jack Worthing, her daughter’s suitor, that he’s lost both his parents. To this, the lady replies imperiously: “To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.” I thought of Lady Bracknell this week on learning that Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson has now let not one but two pro-union bills tiptoe past him to win a House floor vote. Even in a Democratic House, passage within a six-month period of two measures to expand labor rights would be a rarity.

I’d begun to wonder when we’d see a third when I learned that the House Armed Services Committee last week adopted an amendment to this year’s defense authorization bill restoring collective-bargaining rights for civilian workers in the Defense Department, and that the same language last year cleared the House as part of that year’s defense authorization bill before the Senate stripped it out in House-Senate conference prior to final passage. Clearly the legislative politics surrounding labor rights are shifting in labor’s favor.

Having said that, I advise you not to get too excited. The first of these labor bills, introduced by Representative Jared Golden, Democrat of Maine, would restore collective-bargaining rights to all federal workers; like the defense authorization amendment, the Protect America’s Workforce Act would reverse a couple of union-busting executive orders (here and here) from President Donald Trump. But after clearing the House in December, 231–195, it’s going nowhere in the Republican Senate. The second labor bill (text; summary) was introduced by Representative Donald Norcross, Democrat of New Jersey (who also sponsored the defense authorization amendment). The Faster Labor Contracts Act would make it easier for newly established union locals to win their first contract. But after passing the House on June 9, 230–193, Norcross’s bill faces similarly dismal odds in the Republican Senate.

Even if the Senate managed to pass one or both bills, it wouldn’t matter, because the dependably anti-labor Trump (who, bafflingly, increased his share of the working-class vote from 51 percent in 2016 to 56 percent in 2024) would veto it. Norcross’s defense authorization amendment, if it clears the House again, will attract less notice, and Trump might not bother to veto an entire Defense bill over a labor provision. But my guess is he won’t have to, because the Senate will likely strip it out again before it gets to his desk.

I can’t tell you how to get a pro-labor bill through the Senate. But to get one through the House, it seems pretty clear that, so long as Republicans are in the majority, you must avoid the Education and the Workforce Committee. None of the three pro-labor bills under discussion cleared that committee, which is so anti-labor that every time the GOP retakes the House, Republican leaders change its name from “Education and Labor” to “Education and the Workforce” because the very word “labor” disturbs their sleep.

The defense authorization amendment bypassed Education and the Workforce because it lacks jurisdiction over the military. December’s bill to restore collective-bargaining rights to all federal workers and this week’s bill removing management obstacles to negotiating union contracts both got to the House floor by discharge petition, a parliamentary procedure by which any House member may collect signatures to force a vote on a bill bottled up in committee. Once that member has acquired 218 signatures (i.e., a majority), they can bring the bill to the floor.

Organizing a workplace can be a pyrrhic victory if management refuses to agree to a contract. Bloomberg’s Robert Combs calculated in 2022 that it took 465 days on average to negotiate a union contract, and that was when we had a pro-labor National Labor Relations Board. It almost certainly takes longer now. According to the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute, Starbucks baristas in Buffalo have been negotiating a contract for 1,645 days, and Amazon warehouse workers in Staten Island have been at it for 1,532 days.

There isn’t much a union can do about such management foot-dragging except file an unfair labor practice complaint with the NLRB, and if a Republican is in the White House, the NLRB won’t likely be very responsive. Even under Democratic administrations the NLRB lacks statutory authority to level meaningful penalties. The Faster Labor Contracts Act would amend the 1935 National Labor Relations Act to require that employers begin negotiating a labor contract within 10 days of a union election. If 90 days pass without an agreement, the matter will be referred to a mediator, and if the mediator can’t hammer out an agreement within 30 days the matter will be referred to a binding three-person arbitration panel. Getting a bill like that to the House floor was no small accomplishment.

Labor bills aren’t the only measures that are moving through the House by discharge petition these days. As Trump’s popularity plummets, Johnson is losing control over his caucus, resulting in the House turning into a sort of discharge-petition rager. There have been 23 in this Congress, of which nine have been successful. That’s an excellent batting average. One discharge petition was used to compel Trump to release the Jeffrey Epstein files. Another was used to pass a Ukraine aid package. What’s unusual about the labor discharge petitions is that they cross an ideological boundary. Republicans don’t intrinsically oppose releasing files about child predators or containing Russian aggression. But they do intrinsically oppose labor unions. Now a breakaway Republican faction is challenging that.

Five Republicans signed the discharge petition to bring the Protect America’s Workforce Act to the House floor. They were: Representatives Nick LaLota and Michael Lawler of New York; Representatives Brian Fitzpatrick and Robert Bresnahan of Pennsylvania; and Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska. All except Bacon represent blue states. That was a year ago. In March and April, all five signed the discharge petition for the Faster Labor Contracts Act, joined this time by two red-staters: Representatives Max Miller of Ohio and Riley Moore of West Virginia. And in the final vote, these seven Republicans were joined by 13 more. In both last December’s bargaining rights bill and this week’s union contract bill, 20 House Republicans voted for a pro-union bill. That tells me the December vote was not a fluke. When more than one-third of the Republican House caucus casts pro-union votes, even though few of these members supported labor rights in the past, that’s news.

Notably, this latest vote is about something the business lobby cares about a lot more than it does about whether federal workers organize; federal workers don’t work for private employers. The Education and the Workforce Committee website (controlled by the Republican majority) posted a list of objections to the Faster Labor Contracts Act from business leaders: “an unconstitutional taking,” “a rushed floor vote,” “undermines the principle of voluntary agreement,” and so on. Meanwhile, the committee’s ranking Democrat, Representative Bobby Scott of Virginia, took to the floor to praise the bill for “making the right to organize real, not theoretical.”

In the end, it didn’t matter what the Education and the Workforce majority thought. The bill cleared the House anyway. Those 20 pro-union Republican votes aren’t yet able to make much difference. But they’re a sign that labor solidarity is starting to undermine partisan solidarity. Senate Republicans, take heed.

It’s hard to think of a cohort of rich people in recent history as extravagantly exhibitionist as today’s tech billionaires. For the modal Silicon Valley oligarch, the life of easy luxury is not enough. The point of being unfathomably rich in our time is not simply to enjoy the fruits of extreme wealth, exert a crushing influence over the course of politics and public life, or hold up one end of the K-shaped economy: It’s to become the center of global attention, which is where real power in the digital era resides. The sheer visibility of the have-yachts today is staggering. Not only do we have to suffer their opinions elaborated at length on podcasts and in X posts; every squalid little detail of life at the top is out in the open now, freely available for public consumption. We’re intimately familiar with the ins and outs of Jeff Bezos’s time in space and his nuptials in Venice, and there are whole subindustries devoted to parsing Mark Zuckerberg’s T-shirt and jewelry choices.

And then there’s Elon Musk. In the ranks of the billionaire exhibitionists, there’s no one who tries harder or squeaks louder. In 2022, Musk bought Twitter, later renaming it X, and promptly set about turning it into an online mess hall for right-wing lunatics; by 2024, he was posting on X an average of 60 times a day and sometimes up to 40 times every hour. At any given moment on X, Musk can be seen posting with the sweaty eagerness of a teen in the first flush of puberty: On a recent sampling, his feed included a signature mix of self-promotion (plugs for Grok, X’s in-house AI chatbot; the satellite internet service Starlink; and the self-driving Tesla), competition-targeting shitposting (a tweet claiming ChatGPT, OpenAI’s rival to Grok, is “pretending to be ‘unbiased’” scored the Musk retweet), C minus memes (a graphic showing four descending pairs of increasingly bloodshot eyes superposed with the words “Alcohol,” “Weed,” “Cocaine,” and “Monitoring the Situation”), transphobia (“People can pretend or dress up all they want and that’s fine, but they can’t force their mental illness to be my new reality!”), and white nationalist race panic (an approving “100” emoji slapped over the top of a tweet from a verified account claiming that “if White men become a minority, we will be slaughtered”), along with countless variations on the classic theme of middle-aged white guy whining about the state of the world today. A smattering of cruel and lazy jokes about trans people, some indignant quote tweets of garden variety racists like Stephen Miller and British far-right activist Tommy Robinson, a stray “Hmm” or “Troubling” in response to tweets about things like tech regulation, fertility rates, or anti-white racism? In Muskworld, that’s called a Monday.

Musk’s presence on X can often feel like performance art—one of those continuous “bits” that have turned much of social media into a form of digital vaudeville. But where most extremely online victims of internet brain damage emote into the void, Musk is the rare oversharer who’s managed to turn the “based” and “epic” style of memeverse comedy into something more tangible. Dogecoin, the meme coin that has historically soared in value whenever Musk has tweeted about it, eventually became the inspiration for DOGE, the Big Government slash-and-burn operation that Musk led at the start of Donald Trump’s second term. In 2023, Musk committed $100 million in seed money for a new STEM-focused school in Austin that he chose to name the Texas Institute of Technologies and Sciences, or TITS: Every thumbnail on tits.academy, the still-unrealized university’s home page, now takes visitors to an “About Us” screen headed “Take a look at TITS” that includes an embedded YouTube video of Rick Astley’s 1987 pop classic “Never Gonna Give You Up”—an online prank of ancient vintage known as “rickrolling.” In August 2025, Musk announced a plan to launch a fully AI-simulated software company that could supplant all the functions and products offered by Microsoft; he called it “­Macrohard.” LOL! Not content with sitting on the world’s largest personal fortune, Musk seems desperate to be taken seriously as a comedian, too.

Maybe there’s something else at work here. According to the authors of a new book, Musk’s transformation into a hyperactive super-troll expresses a serious purpose. “Musk’s online persona,” write Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff in Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed, is often “misunderstood. Critics see immaturity or malice; fans see relatability or authenticity. Both fail to see that, in Muskism, trolling is infrastructure.” The point of these outbursts is for Musk to gauge whether he can bypass the ordinary institutions of grown-up accountability—the media, elections, quarterly earnings reports—and affect outcomes in the world of money, politics, and popular belief through the sheer force of his own personality. They are a stress test of society’s tolerance for the Muskian worldview.

“Muskism” is the name that Slobodian, a historian, and Tarnoff, a technology writer, give his worldview: a kind of techno-maximalism in which autonomy for individuals and for nations is only achievable through an ever-deeper fusion between human and machine, and can best be guaranteed through the adoption of technologies offered by Musk’s own companies. Just as Fordism was “the operating system of the twentieth century,” Slobodian and Tarnoff contend, Muskism might provide the basis for a new consensus about economic and social life, the Fordism of our time. After all, Fordism, like Muskism, once seemed an intimate reflection of one man’s personality (The Washington Post defined it in a 1922 article as “Ford efforts conceived in disregard or ignorance of Ford limitations”). Only later did it come to mean the belief in mass production and standardization on the factory floor, high wages, and mass consumption as the chief motors of industrial growth. The clarifying and unsettling argument at the heart of Muskism is that, in a deglobalizing and increasingly digitized world, Musk’s vision of the future might win out. But is it possible to separate Muskism from Musk?

Musk may need no greater reason to post than that it flatters his ego. He currently has 240 million followers on X—more than double the following of the second most popular account, that of Barack Obama. This grants him a kind of insurance against failure whenever he tweets, even for his weakest stuff. The “Monitoring the Situation” meme above, for instance, generated more than 900,000 likes, a return out of all proportion to the quality of the material presented—proof, if ever we needed it, that meritocracy in America is dead.

Online ubiquity is also a moneymaking tool. Musk has long been a master of what Slobodian and Tarnoff call “financial fabulism”—the art of extracting ever-higher valuations and capital commitments from investors through confidence, showmanship, and a compelling view of the world to come. When raising money for online business directory Zip2, his first company, in the mid-1990s, Musk covered a normal PC with a big case and wheeled it around to venture capitalists to make them think his software ran on a supercomputer. Zip2 was still losing money when Compaq bought it for $307 million in 1999; Musk walked away with $22 million, and a valuable lesson in the power of his unstinting belief in the future. Musk has channeled this gift for financial fabulism into the digital world, which has compressed and supercharged the feedback loop between words and money. In 2018, he tweeted: “Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured.” The market missed (or ignored) the weed joke in “420” and took him at his word; the company’s stock price jumped nearly 11 percent by the end of the day. In January 2021, he added #bitcoin to his bio on Twitter (as it was then known), and the cryptocurrency surged 20 percent within an hour. The shocking immediacy of cause and effect online, coupled with his embrace of Twitter, helped make Musk “as close to a free-money perpetual motion machine as you’ll ever see in finance,” Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine has written.

But Slobodian and Tarnoff see in Musk’s online presence a deeper expression of his idiosyncratic vision of the future. From the mid-2010s onward, Musk became convinced that humans and machines were becoming one, and that success—for Musk as an entrepreneur, for humanity as a species—would involve accelerating this fusion rather than resisting it. Musk has often warned of a Terminator-style apocalypse from rogue artificial intelligence, but his solution is “not less technology, but more,” Slobodian and Tarnoff write: The risks inherent in the digital cognitive revolution mean we should “merge with AI,” Musk argued in 2016.

All of Musk’s juvenile foolery stems from his “cyborg turn.” Modern Musk—the man as empire, the man as meme—is an embodiment of online culture.

Under Muskism, the path to salvation lies in human-machine symbiosis. All of Musk’s juvenile foolery over the past few years—the insults, the weak memes, the hyperactive posting, the alliance with Trump, the dadly insistence that “I am become meme,” even the bit with the chainsaw at CPAC—stems from this “cyborg turn,” as Slobodian and Tarnoff call it. This turn, they write, “did not mutate out of one man’s cyberpunk delusions, but out of a bipartisan consensus about where America needed to direct its brightest minds and deepest investments.” Modern Musk—the man as empire, the man as meme—is an embodiment of online culture. Or as Slobodian and Tarnoff put it, he is “a hypervisible indicator species for the consequences of fusing the economy ever more tightly with the digital world.”

Whether the future synthesis of human and machine emerges in perfect or imperfect form, few people will benefit from it more than Musk himself. His companies are building much of the infrastructure—the rockets, robots, satellites, collective intelligence networks, and brain-computer interfaces—that will shape the fusions to come. When he left his self-described political “side quest” in Washington last year, he explained that it was to return to his real quest, which is to build the future world of “humanoid robots and digital superintelligence,” to seed our “future machine descendants.”

Slobodian and Tarnoff’s analysis of Musk’s cyborg turn is reassuring and discomfiting at the same time: reassuring because it suggests an intelligible strategy at the heart of Musk’s actions, making him an outlier at a time when most big decisions in politics—kidnapping Maduro, bombing Iran—seem guided by nothing more than the uncut essence of poster brain; discomfiting because, well, it also suggests we’re all about to become replicants welded to a Tesla bot or a SpaceX nozzle.

Mechanization of the human is the logical end of a sequence of fusions that have defined Musk’s career. Social media has allowed him to merge, in some way, his own intelligence with the hive mind, to become one with the scroll. With SpaceX, he engineered a marriage of firm and government, grafting his enterprise onto the state, taking over some of the state’s functions, and exploiting its guarantees for private gain. While many in Silicon Valley profess to dream of liberation from the state, of wholesale exit from its mess of obligations and compromises, Musk’s business interests have pushed in the opposite direction, toward an ever-deeper coupling of public and private: His ultimate goal has always been power over the state rather than freedom from it.

All technology businesses in the digital era arguably free-ride off the state—the internet and its foundational infrastructure, after all, were funded by DARPA, the Pentagon’s R&D arm. Yet few entrepreneurs have been as skilled at piggybacking off public resources as Musk has. Zip2 used GPS data from military satellites, for example, while Musk’s late-1990s online payments company X.com—which would later become PayPal—rested on the federally insured stability of the U.S. financial system. SpaceX—founded in 2002, now valued at $1.55 trillion, and preparing for a public offering that early reports suggest could become the biggest IPO in history—is perhaps the company that has benefited most from government resources.

Speaking at Stanford the year after he launched the company, Musk acknowledged that NASA had already done the hard work “by spending the money to develop some of the fundamental technologies,” and now the door was open for the private sector to swoop in, build on those state-funded foundations, and monetize the gains. Twenty-three years later, SpaceX is firmly enmeshed with U.S. infrastructure. “By 2025, SpaceX accounted for 95 percent of all orbital launches in the United States and more than half of all launches globally—a position that made the Pentagon, NASA, and other government agencies deeply reliant on Musk,” report Slobodian and Tarnoff.

Timing was key to this success. Musk founded SpaceX right as the United States launched the global war on terrorism, which collided with the neoliberal mania for privatization and outsourcing to create a bonanza for corporate defense contractors. But SpaceX’s elevation into an indispensable arm of the modern military, not only in the United States but for countries abroad, also reflected Musk’s real business acumen. Satellites had been around for decades when Musk announced plans for what would become Starlink, a satellite internet service, in 2015. Slow speeds were always a barrier to greater adoption of satellites for global communication. Musk’s solution was to bring the satellites closer to the ground, putting them into low Earth orbit—around 342 miles up, versus 20,000 miles in the air for traditional geostationary satellites. The only catch was that orbiting so close to Earth required a lot more satellites to ensure quality of connection. The result? Starlink now has more than 10,000 functioning satellites in orbit, around two-thirds of all active satellites: The fusion of SpaceX to the state has led the way, quite naturally, to the company’s colonization of the heavens.

Tesla is yet another Musk vehicle that has benefited from state largesse. Musk did not create the company, but he invested in it and took over as CEO in 2008—right at the launch of the first federal tax credit program for buyers of electric vehicles; the company was saved from almost certain death by a $465 million Department of Energy loan awarded a year later. That loan helped Tesla survive the lean years that followed the collapse of the clean tech and renewables sector in the early 2010s—the result of the “shale revolution,” which touched off a surge in U.S. oil and gas production.

But the real reason Tesla prospered through the downturn—eventually becoming the world’s leading EV automaker, a title it relinquished to Chinese firm BYD earlier this year—was that Musk insisted on sourcing and assembling as many of the company’s critical production inputs in-house rather than relying on the global market. At a time when manufacturing consensus was in favor of free trade, offshoring, and global supply chains, Musk seemed to have already begun to anticipate a deglobalizing, post-Covid world by embracing “vertical integration.” The real innovation here was the construction of the first Gigafactory in Sparks, Nevada—what Musk envisioned as a “truly gargantuan factory of mind-boggling size”—that allowed Tesla to make its own lithium-ion batteries. (Since then, fresh Gigafactories have sprouted in Buffalo, Shanghai, Berlin, and Austin.) When the world awoke, a few years ago, to a reality of reshoring, export controls, tariffs, and emerging trade blocs, Tesla was relatively insulated; Musk had built Tesla for a world in which self-reliance, rather than reliance on others, would become the key to survival.

Musk’s fantasy of the future, the authors of Muskism propose, is “a fantasy of the factory,” stripped to its leanest and trimmed of human encumbrances. In 2016, Musk first mentioned his goal of creating an “alien dreadnought”—a factory with no human workers at all. Macrohard is perhaps the first serious attempt at realizing that goal: a company that relies for labor on AI agents. He’s not alone in this ambition: AI’s incursion into labor markets has already begun, and the dream of a fully post-human economy can be felt in every giddy LinkedIn post about the leaps in “productivity” that technologies like Claude Code are now making possible. Under Muskism, humans can either become obsolete or fuse with machines, becoming one with the factory itself.

The sheer number of countries and institutions that rely on Musk’s technologies gives him a bullying leverage that he seems unafraid to flex. For many countries, the exercise of sovereignty brushes up against the whims of a single, unpredictable, and often quite petty man. In March 2025, Musk boasted that Starlink is “the backbone of the Ukrainian army,” and that “their entire front line would collapse if I turned it off”; when the Polish foreign minister, in reply, warned that his own country would be forced to look elsewhere for Ukraine if Starlink was an “unreliable provider,” Musk spat back, “Be quiet, small man.” Exchanges like this highlight the real problem for Muskism as a social project, which is that Earth is a place populated by humans not named Elon Musk, and that many of them disagree, often quite fervently, with his views and methods. Not everyone wishes to be transformed into a widget on the floor of the Muskian factory of the future.

Humans are Musk’s greatest enemy, the source of his keenest humiliations and most obliterating rages: Who could forget the world’s richest man, on the verge of tears, telling Fox News in March 2025 that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz was “a creep,” and “a huge jerk,” all because Walz made fun of Tesla’s plummeting stock price at the height of DOGE-driven chaos in Washington? Empathy, Musk famously once said, is the “fundamental weakness of Western civilization.” That seems untrue, and Musk’s own direct involvement in politics has shown that a lack of empathy is no model for government.

Slobodian and Tarnoff trace Musk’s attempts to correct a listing culture, to rewrite society’s operating code and clean it of the real bugs in the system: people. Twitter had helped propel Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and #MeToo; under Musk, its replacement, X, would reinstate a public square built on precontamination hierarchies of class, gender, and race. Large language models promised a future of objective truth and universal information, but were trained on leftist propaganda; Grok would be refined in “post-training” to reflect Musk’s own anti-woke biases and priorities. The state was overrun with illegitimate claims on the public purse; DOGE would empower a set of very young software engineers to swiftly terminate grants and contracts and lay off public servants en masse.

And yet, here we find ourselves today: On X, there are still as many jokes about Nazis as there are Nazis; Grok is not a serious competitor to ChatGPT or Claude; and DOGE accomplished little more than causing chaos and inflicting misery on federal workers. Its outcomes may have satisfied MAGA ideologues such as Russell Vought, whose express wish was to dismantle the federal bureaucracy by making working conditions unpleasant (“When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work”). And in the midst of his DOGE spree, Musk seemed to share this wish, brandishing a chainsaw on stage at CPAC and bragging about cuts. But if, as Slobodian and Tarnoff argue, Musk had imagined DOGE as a program through which “engineers disciplined society like a factory floor,” it was a failure. Because, as they write, “society is not a factory.”

Musk presents an intriguing contrast with Trump, his on-and-off-again political ally. Both are inveterate posters, both often sound deranged, both have a lot of money (Musk has considerably more, but much of it is illiquid, since it’s mostly held in stock in his companies). Trump is sui generis, a freak of nature whose coalition seems unlikely to survive his departure from the White House (assuming he ever leaves it). Vestiges of Trumpism will survive, but actually existing Trumpism? Only Trump can carry the brand. His interests are superficial: What animates him is a desire to enrich himself and elevate the status of his clique, even at the expense of America’s general welfare and standing in the world. That’s not a political realignment; it’s kleptocracy. And yet, despite all his shortcomings, despite his leaden approval ratings, Trump has twice been elected president. Musk spent less than six months in Washington before he was forced to skulk back to the Gigafactory. The argument that Muskism asks us to take seriously is that Musk, though less charismatic and less popular than Trump, is more symbolic of our era.

Amid institutional breakdown and the overpoliticization of everything, Musk’s companies, his words, and his dogmas might represent a durable shift to a new common sense, a new model of political and economic order. Trump has pioneered a style, but Musk is a master of infrastructure, and the future is always shaped by matter rather than manner. The liberal international order is effectively dead, popular faith in institutions across the democratic world has cratered, and in the United States, the Trumpian wrecking ball has done serious—perhaps lasting—damage to the Constitution and the stately old politics of checks and balances. Muskism offers a set of solutions and arguments suited to the fragmented, paranoid, and militarized world in which we now find ourselves: Independence seems more appealing than integration at a time when multilateralism is at a historic ebb; genocide and wars of choice have normalized the exclusionary thinking and antipathy to empathy on which Musk’s businesses thrive; multipolarity and the return of great power competition invite a deepening fusion of technology and the state. Muskism is a tool kit for a world where concentration matters more than cooperation, where control trumps trust.

Muskism-lite is not the Muskian way; the insults, the trolling, and the inhumanity are inseparable from Musk’s way of doing business.

Still, a future defined by all-out Muskism is not inevitable. It’s not hard to imagine a greater role in years to come for a detoxified version of Muskism, characterized by a turn away from supply chains and globalization, a deepening digitization of daily life, and government by meme. But Muskism-lite is not the Muskian way; the insults, the trolling, and the inhumanity are inseparable from Musk’s way of doing business. There is little utopian promise in the future he portends; the Musk-led tech industry’s vision of collective life is a weird amalgam of sports, speculation, and collective dissolution into the jaws of the machines. Many people, as Musk himself has discovered in recent years, do not want this. Muskism may be one version of the future, but cyborgian oblivion is not our only choice.  

At last week’s WelcomeFest, Matt Yglesias, the longtime blogger turned centrist Substacker, moderated a panel with two Democratic members of Congress from big blue states—Tom Suozzi, who represents part of Long Island, New York, and Adam Gray, who hails from California’s San Joaquin Valley. He ended up making a remark that immediately struck me. I’ve been thinking about it for more than a week.

“The problem for Democrats is that most people see great things about California and about New York, but they don’t think of them as places where government is functioning well,” he said. “The taxes are relatively high, and it’s not obvious that people are getting anything extra for it.” He asked how Democrats could make outcomes better for people in these high-tax states.

The reason this statement rang my bells is that I moved to New York almost three years ago, and taxes were a big reason why. My then partner—now husband—and I decided to move here from Arkansas. That’s right: We wanted to pay more taxes. And I’ll tell you why.

It is true that New York and California have some of the highest income tax rates and estimated share of personal income residents pay in all taxes when property, sales, and local taxes are taken into account. I’m not sure what evidence Yglesias was considering when he said it wasn’t clear what people were getting from their high taxes—or what benefit he specifically thought those taxes were failing to deliver. But then, it’s not always easy to evaluate what bang we’re getting for the buck. How do we measure the effectiveness of the government? These are the questions I found myself asking.

On one level, people experience their taxation in a personal way: There is an amount of money withheld from our paychecks or paid to their state finance departments (or refunded to them) every spring. That is also, usually, how they experience government services, or services largely subsidized or regulated by the government: who decides their county or city’s operations, how transparent are they, how reliable are their utilities, what is a trip to the DMV like? For the most part, they’re only paying individual taxes and living in one state at a time.

Indeed, most people spend the vast majority of their lives in one state, and they’ll spend their working lives paying only one state’s income tax. People don’t make interstate moves that often: The Harvard University Joint Center for Housing Studies calculated in 2020 that about 13 percent of Americans move each year, and only about 14 percent of those moves are across state lines. Most people stay local. Of the people who move, most move for personal reasons having to do with jobs and family—or the chance to buy a new home instead of renting. Which is to say: Most people can’t make a real assessment on what they’re getting for their taxes on an individual level because they lack the information needed to make informed comparisons.

My husband and I lived in my home state of Arkansas together for a little more than five years; like most people, we decided to move for a number of reasons. One was that we could no longer stand the South’s blazing hot summers and were worried about climate change, so we looked for more climate-resilient places to live, which mostly led us up north. We wanted to live somewhere near an Amtrak station with frequent service, near mountains, and we really wanted to buy an older home that we could comfortably afford. We also wanted to leave the South for political and cultural reasons. We landed in central New York.

All that being said, if I had to name the catalyst for the move, it was when I had to write a check for my 2022 Arkansas state income taxes. I was self-employed for most of my time in Arkansas, which meant I frequently owed some amount of taxes at the end of the tax year, and in the spring of 2023 that amount was a little more than $7,000. That was, coincidentally, the amount that the state would soon be giving to individuals who wanted to use tax money to send their children to private school under the newly passed LEARNS Act.

The LEARNS Act gave almost anyone, regardless of income, taxpayer money to use toward private school tuition. I realized the same amount of money I was sending to the state could be used by someone with more money than I had to send their children to a school that promoted teachings I disagreed with, while also robbing the public school system of funds. I simply decided that I didn’t want to live in a state that used its tax dollars—my tax dollars—that way. I wanted to move to a place where my taxes were spent more in line with my values. Even if it meant paying more.

It was a clarifying moment. We had lived for years in a very rural part of the state that looked different even from where we live now, near New York’s dairy country. We often had to take our own trash to the dump, our roads fell into disrepair after the slightest winter storm, and the county often relied on private help to fix them. There were knock-down, drag-out fights over even small amounts of tax increases that funded things like my local library. There was no county-funded animal shelter, and animal control was spotty at best, which meant stray and abandoned animals were everywhere, and my husband and I, dog and cat lovers, spent thousands of our own money to rescue animals, spay and neuter pets for people who couldn’t afford it, and send homeless pets to friends around the country.

Getting even basic information about services, and service interruptions, from the county government or local utilities was difficult. I once FOIA-ed information about county water shutoffs from my local water utility and got a large folder with handwritten records. When the pipes burst at my house—for complicated reasons I won’t go into—I called to ask if the water company could shut my water off so that I could have it fixed, and the person I spoke to told me—and I am deadly serious—to find my water meter and “just stick a screwdriver down there.”

I have spent many years complaining about rural Arkansas only because I loved living there and think my neighbors deserve better. But when we finally left the second time, I realized how stressful the daily indignities of life there had been. We live in a place now where things just work. The roads are plowed in winter, they’re repaired in the spring, the local utilities text and email us when there are service interruptions and they repair them quickly, we have a well-funded library system.

Across the board, the services and benefits I get for my tax money outstrip what I got from my former state. I regularly receive booklets in my mailbox with reports from the county government and the county schools. We live near a city, Utica, with a beautiful train station with services that can get us to most places in the country, and the DMV is in that train station and is one of the quickest, politest places I have ever been. Utica, which has a third of the population of Arkansas’s state capital, Little Rock, is served by a public transit system that provides nearly three times the annual rides that Little Rock’s does. Hourly wages are higher here, and the safety net provides to those in need better.

Moving to New York was the good kind of culture shock. My husband and I are constantly asking each other, “Is it just me, or are the vibes here just … better?” The answer is yes. Together, we have lived in four cities across three states; separately, you can add four more cities and three more states to that list. They vary in their level of taxation and politics, and we have developed a personal metric for assessing the quality of a place, which we call the Potts-Suarez Theory of County Dumps. How easy is it, and how much does it cost, to get rid of your household trash?

In Arkansas, we resorted to piling our own trash into our 2003 Subaru Forester and taking it to the dump on Saturdays, usually spending about $20 a week to do so. Many people in my home county simply burned their own trash in their yards, violating an ordinance to do so because it’s easier and cheaper. In New York State, our trash and recycling services cost half that amount and are reliable, and when we have to make a trip to the county eco-station to dump hazardous waste—we are DIY-ing much of our old house, including removing lead paint—it is open more hours, well organized, clean, and well staffed.

Obviously, this is a very silly and subjective measure. But there are some data points hinting that it’s not just us. The states that rank higher in health outcomes tend to be more progressive states with a higher tax base, while those at the bottom are across the low-tax, low-wage South. Maps look similar for educational attainment, food security, and median income. A recent study ranking states on overall measures of well-being found New York and California in the middle, while the states at the top were a mix of high- and low-tax states, number one being Minnesota, and states at the bottom included much of the mid-South, like Arkansas. Surveys that try to assess happiness find similar results. New York and California are also some of the least affordable states to live in in the U.S., but the supply-side housing folks ought to know that some of that is because the supply is outpaced by demand: People want to live in these states.

Some of my problems are particular to the South, which, as my colleague Perry Bacon Jr. wrote last month, has long been antidemocratic and especially focused on disenfranchising Black citizens. “Whether the United States overall is a liberal democracy or can become one again, the states in the South are at best electoral democracies and are veering toward electoral autocracies,” he wrote, and he details the ways those states restrict freedoms of their residents and liberal voters’ abilities to shape their own cities and communities.

There is, at base, a set of questions each state, or city, or country, has to organize itself around. How can we form a community? How do we create a good life for the people who live here? Most people don’t truly have any way to assess how their own communities are answering that question compared to others. There are very few objective measures on which we can rank states on how nice it is to live there—and they would be imperfect at best because different people value different things. Taxes are one objective measure, but taxes have long been framed as a burden weighing on people, not as an investment we’re all making so that the place we’ve chosen to live is as good as it can be.

Viewed as an investment, the basic level of taxation can fund the services that free up time and energy for its residents to work, care for their families, enjoy their leisure, make art, and build cool things together because they’re less worried about basic things like how hard it is to dispose of the household trash. States that don’t invest in their public infrastructure and well-being are shifting the burdens to individuals.

The great things about California and New York are inextricable from these states’ tax systems. But the vast majority of political writers who question taxes in places like Washington, D.C., New York, or California—or who hold up places like Texas as an example of housing abundance, have never seen what that looks like for the people who live in those places on a daily basis. The lack of taxes, the lack of investment, can take the form of all manner of imposition, from a county dump that is too expensive for people to use to inadequate reproductive health care, to never knowing if your vote will be counted. From 30,000 feet in the air, these can look like separate issues. At ground level, they’re all born from the neglect that comes in the lack of real investment. I know exactly what I’m getting from my taxes in New York. And I suspect other low-tax boosters know what they’re getting too, which is why they haven’t moved en masse to places like Arkansas.

Sports are governed by rules. Those rules separate a ball from a strike, a fumble from an incomplete pass, and foul balls from a fair. Without rules, sporting events are nothing more than random people getting some exercise. And without people to enforce those rules, there is no integrity, no fairness, and no genuine competition.

By those standards, college sports is currently the world’s most lucrative workout club. A state judge in Texas ordered the NCAA earlier this month to reinstate Brendan Sorsby, a quarterback at Texas Tech University who has admitted to placing bets at sportsbooks on, among other things, his own team at a previous school.

The NCAA had refused to reinstate Sorsby while it conducts an investigation into the scope of his gambling policy violations. He then sought a temporary injunction that would allow him to continue playing in 2026 and “clarify” his status before he would have to apply for the NFL’s supplemental draft later this summer. The judge sided with Sorsby; the NCAA has vowed to appeal.

Sorsby’s case is far from the only legal battle that the NCAA has found itself in in recent years. But the lawsuit speaks volumes about the constitutional crisis in which collegiate athletics now finds itself—and the shortcomings of the NCAA’s solutions. As long as it resists treating athletes like workers, these problems will only get worse.

The most recent crisis for college sports began in April when Texas Tech announced that Sorsby, who had transferred there from the University of Cincinnati in January, had entered an inpatient treatment facility for gambling addiction. NCAA rules prohibit student-athletes from placing bets on collegiate or professional sports.

Sorsby is far from the first athlete to be embroiled in a gambling scandal since 2018, when the Supreme Court struck down a federal ban on sports betting and paved the way for its widespread legalization by states. But his case may be the most egregious one on record.

According to court documents filed in May, Sorsby wagered more than $90,000 on online sportsbooks over a four-year period. He used accounts registered to friends and family members to evade detection by sportsbooks and school officials. His claims of addiction are also hard to dispute: In an 18-month span while attending Indiana University, for example, he reportedly placed a minimum of 2,900 bets on various sports.

“It became a habit for me to bet,” Sorsby told the NCAA in a statement, according to ESPN. “My betting became a compulsion which made it virtually impossible to resist the constant notifications I received from betting apps. I lost complete control of my addiction. I now realize the apps controlled me and I did not control them.”

The news outlet reported that Sorsby placed at least 40 bets on Indiana University football while playing for the school. The bets were small amounts—ranging from a single dollar to slightly more than $100—but each represents a massive ethical breach. While major sports leagues have adopted a wide range of rules on sports betting over the past few years, none of them allow players to bet on their own sport, let alone their own team.

According to court documents reviewed by The Athletic, Sorsby also claimed that he had “never placed any bets on any Indiana football game that I participated in or that I reasonably expected that I could have participated in.” At the time, he noted, he was on Indiana’s scout team “with several quarterbacks ahead of me on the team’s depth chart” and “no reasonable chance that I would play.” Sorsby reportedly claimed that he had never used nonpublic information when placing the bets—which is both unverifiable and extremely hard to believe.

None of this mattered under the most recent version of the NCAA’s ban on sports betting by student-athletes. Current rules prohibits student-athletes from placing bets on any sport that the NCAA sponsors, even at the amateur or professional level. The NCAA voted last November to restore its ban on betting in professional sports after federal prosecutors charged multiple NBA players and coaches for their alleged roles in illegal gambling operations.

NCAA athletes who violate the organization’s gambling policy can face permanent loss of eligibility. Under NCAA rules, Texas Tech declared Sorsby ineligible after the NCAA opened its investigation into him in April. The school claimed the right to request Sorsby’s reinstatement to restore that eligibility on his behalf.

In a lawsuit filed against the NCAA in May, Sorsby claimed that he faced imminent and irreparable harm if the organization did not reach a decision on his eligibility soon. The deadline to apply for the NFL’s supplemental draft is later this month, which would be his last chance to play in the league for its 2026 season. If the NCAA does not reach a decision until after that deadline, Sorsby argued, he could face the loss of both his final year in college football and an entire year in professional football.

Judge Ken Curry agreed and granted Sorsby’s request for a temporary injunction, concluding that he was likely to prevail at trial. Curry also scheduled the trial date for February 8, 2027—two weeks after the 2026 college football season ends. As a result, even if the NCAA were to ultimately prevail on the merits, Sorsby will already be out of college athletics. (The judge, for the record, did not attend Texas Tech as an undergraduate or as a law student.)

Legal disputes between the NCAA and college athletes aren’t uncommon. Ole Miss quarterback Trinidad Chambliss successfully challenged the NCAA’s decision to deny him a sixth year of eligibility, for example, in Mississippi state court earlier this year. But the Sorsby ruling struck the college sports landscape like a thunderbolt because it called into question the NCAA’s basic ability to sanction players for egregious policy violations.

“The NCAA strongly disagrees with the court’s ruling in Sorsby’s case and is deeply concerned about the damaging, far-reaching and broadly destabilizing ramifications of this outcome—which undermines and corrupts the integrity of sports,” the organization said in a statement after the ruling was issued.

The university is not a party to Sorsby’s lawsuit, but has expressed a strong interest in having him play in the upcoming season. Sorsby was among the most highly sought players in the transfer portal this spring. Texas Tech struck a NIL deal with him in January that could bring the fifth-year quarterback roughly $5 million for one season of play.

“I’ve heard the word ‘integrity’ used a great deal in the last 48 hours,” Texas Tech athletics director Kirby Hocutt said in a statement on Wednesday. “As someone who has dedicated his career to college sports, I, too, believe integrity is central to our industry’s success. I also think integrity applies on more than one front. The integrity of sport matters. So does the integrity of how we treat a 22-year-old who sought help, entered residential treatment, and is working every day toward recovery. These two things don’t have to be in conflict.”

Hocutt’s voice appears to be a solitary one. There are widespread reports that other schools and conferences may try to collectively punish Texas Tech for the scandal by refusing to schedule games against them at all levels, effectively freezing its athletics program out of competitions. Texas Tech has responded by threatening to pursue litigation if the other schools try to hold the school accountable for enabling Sorsby’s tactics.

College football coaches and officials were openly horrified by the prospect that a court would require a player who admitted to betting on his own team to play in the upcoming season. “As someone who grew up reading about the Black Sox Scandal, and seeing what happened to Pete Rose and just understanding how bright that line seemed to be in all of American sports, I’m stunned that there would be a question at the court level that this is acceptable,” Scott Stricklin, the athletic director for the University of Florida, told ESPN.

It is hard to not draw comparisons to baseball’s own gambling scandals, which had a seismic impact on the sport itself and led to fundamental changes in how it operates. The Black Sox scandal, in which several Chicago White Sox players helped gamblers fix the 1919 World Series, led Major League Baseball to create a commissioner’s office with far-reaching powers to regulate the sport’s integrity.

Baseball had other advantages that the NCAA lacks. Thanks to a controversial 1922 Supreme Court ruling, Major League Baseball enjoys a free-standing exemption to federal antitrust law. Other major sports leagues are also exempt from antitrust law to some degree by the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, which allows teams to collectively negotiate television deals without fear of anticompetitive charges.

The NCAA, on the other hand, has faced a decade of legal struggles precisely because it lacks an exemption. The greatest blow came in 2021 when the Supreme Court unanimously upheld a lower court decision that found some of the NCAA’s compensation rules violated federal antitrust law. That ruling opened the door to the NIL era, where players can be compensated semi-indirectly for the use of their name, image, and likeness rights. During oral arguments and in the ruling itself, justices sharply castigated the NCAA for its long-standing opposition to compensating players while reaping millions of dollars in profits from their labor.

“Nowhere else in America can businesses get away with agreeing not to pay their workers a fair market rate on the theory that their product is defined by not paying their workers a fair market rate,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a concurring opinion. “And under ordinary principles of antitrust law, it is not evident why college sports should be any different. The NCAA is not above the law.”

The NCAA evaded legal scrutiny for so long for a variety of reasons, but at least partly through sheer inertia and its byzantine structure. While the NCAA has a governing board and a president—currently Charlie Baker, the former governor of Massachusetts—it is also a largely decentralized organization. Individual schools wield significant power through the various conferences that also oversee college sports, like the Southeastern Conference and the misleadingly named Big Ten Conference. Many of those schools are also public universities, which means they are governed directly by state governments to varying degrees.

As a result, it is hard to even describe the NCAA as a sports “league” in any meaningful sense. One crucial difference between NCAA sports and professional leagues is the absence of collective bargaining, which sets ground rules between players and owners. Instead, college athletes are free to accept NIL money and transfer almost at will. Sorsby, for example, is currently facing a lawsuit from the University of Cincinnati over a $1 million exit fee in his NIL contract that the quarterback has not yet paid since refusing to play in last year’s bowl game and transferring to Texas Tech.

To “save” college sports from the daunting threats of antitrust enforcement and a robust market for athlete compensation, the NCAA and colleges are doing something unthinkable these days: asking Congress to pass legislation. One bipartisan proposal, the Protect College Sports Act, was drafted by Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Washington Senator Maria Cantwell. It would impose new restrictions on transfers and eligibility that strongly favor schools and constrain student-athletes.

Some of college athletics’ top voices, such as former Alabama football head coach Nick Saban, embraced the bill earlier this month during Senate hearings. But significant obstacles remain. The SEC—the conference, not the financial regulator—and the Big Ten said they opposed the bill, in statements earlier this week. Though their reasoning was vague, the bill would prevent conferences from breaking away from the NCAA to form a more lucrative “super league” of top schools. It would require them to potentially share more broadcast revenue with other schools.

The NCAA also has not yet endorsed the bill. ESPN’s Dan Murphy noted last month that it lacks one of the organization’s main demands: to bar athletes from being classified as employees, which could open the door to collective bargaining. It would be fitting if the NCAA missed out on vital legal protections because it wanted to preserve its original sin of uncompensated labor.

A collective-bargaining agreement would’ve been helpful in the Sorsby case. When major-league players cheat and gamble, they are punished by the procedures laid out in their collective-bargaining agreements, with no role for meddling state judges to override things. Saban lamented during this week’s hearing that “right now in college football we have no rules.” He’s right, but it may be even more accurate to say that the NCAA hasn’t been playing by any rules all along.

David Hockney, a treasured British artist whose paintings of shimmering pools and colorful iPad drawings became icons of contemporary art, has died, his publicist said Friday. He was 88.

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

California Senate Democrats want to put the brakes on a new program by Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration that steers free pollution permits to oil refineries and other major polluters — and they’re using the state budget to force the issue.

In the spending proposal they released last month, the senators moved to block the program until the state funds a three-party climate deal the governor struck with the Legislature last year, an agreement they say Newsom is now breaking. They call their counterplan “Deal is a Deal,” signaling a standoff that could stretch through the summer.

“We really need to stay to the deal,” said Sen. Eloise Gómez Reyes, a San Bernardino Democrat and chair of the Senate’s climate budget subcommittee.

At stake are billions of dollars earmarked for public transit, safe drinking water and affordable housing raised from climate market auctions. The Senate is also threatening to hold up many of Newsom’s own priorities, including funding for high-speed rail and wildfires, electric-car tax credits and a clean jet fuel subsidy.

At issue is a new incentive program created last month by the California Air Resources Board, which overhauled the state’s carbon market under pressure from Newsom and heavy lobbying by the oil industry. It offers free pollution permits worth as much as $4 billion to companies that pledge to invest in clean energy and efficiency initiatives, with half slated for the fossil fuel industry.

That program threatens to drain funds for a series of air quality, housing and transit programs that lawmakers and Newsom agreed to fund last year, when they extended the state’s carbon market through 2045, rebranding it “cap and invest.” The overhaul also puts up to $1 billion guaranteed to the Legislature for discretionary projects in jeopardy.

A climate bargain under threat

California’s carbon-trading program, launched in 2013, is California’s way of putting a price tag on greenhouse gas emissions responsible for climate change.

Last year’s late-session deal set a new pecking order for the billions of dollars the program raises by auctioning pollution permits.

Under the deal, high-speed rail gets $1 billion a year before many other climate programs are funded; another $1 billion annually is dedicated to lawmakers’ priorities. 

Last in line are the programs that turn carbon-market money paid by polluters into tangible benefits for some of California’s most burdened communities: affordable housing projects near transit, cleaner buses and rail, safe drinking water, wildfire protection and neighborhood air monitoring. 

Last month, following intense lobbying by the oil industry and ballooning gas prices, the air board adopted rules to cut the number of auctioned pollution permits drastically through 2030 with Newsom’s blessing. It also created a new incentive for oil and gas refineries and other industries investing in decarbonization.

“It’s unfortunate that the state of California empowers the oil industry to freak everyone out and adopt bad policies,” said Sen. Scott Wiener, a San Francisco Democrat.

The Legislative Analyst’s Office projects the changes could cut annual auction revenue for state climate programs from roughly $4 billion to $2 billion, which would wipe out community-focused programs.

Newsom spokesperson Anthony Martinez said the changes keep the carbon market “durable” while helping consumers and industry.

“That is not a retreat from climate leadership — it’s how California keeps leading while the federal government is retreating,” Martinez said.

Senate holds Newsom priorities hostage

Senate Democrats have countered with their own plan. It would protect the $1 billion lawmakers control, then steer as much as $2 billion to the housing, transit, clean air and drinking water programs. Newsom’s priorities would move to the back of the line, meaning if the climate fund brings in only $2 billion, Cal Fire, high-speed rail and other programs would get little or nothing.

“Why, at this time … would we take away critical funding to build affordable homes in California?” said Sen. Jesse Arreguín, an Oakland Democrat and chair of the housing committee.

Construction on the high-speed rail project over a ramp above Highway 99 in south Fresno in 2023. Credit: Larry Valenzuela / CalMatters/CatchLight Local

Wiener said public transit should not have to fight for survival. “Every year, transit funding becomes a political football.” 

Meanwhile, Assembly Democrats are mum on the rule change in their budget plan and have not proposed any alternatives.

Assemblymembers Jacqui Irwin and Cottie Petrie-Norris, Democrats who chair key climate and energy committees, have supported the air board’s plan, saying the changes reflect the Legislature’s focus on affordability, including potentially more money for Californians’ electric bills. 

The governor and the Legislature have until June 30 to agree on a budget deal before the new fiscal year starts. But much of the climate funding tied up in negotiations is not bound by the deadline and can be hashed out before the legislative session wraps in September.

The Senate’s opposition is threatening to hold up many of Newsom’s priorities.

One is his January proposal to spend $200 million on electric vehicle incentives, $115 million of which would come from the climate fund. Senate Democrats have deferred negotiations on it and talks could last through the summer. 

The Senate also rejected Newsom’s proposed sustainable aviation fuel tax credit, which Newsom argues would encourage the production of greener fuel and boost refinery jobs. The initiative, which would allow eligible producers to pay less into the state’s road repair funding, followed intensive lobbying by petroleum refining company Phillips 66, the only company that has publicly announced it would benefit from the credit.

The climate funding dispute turns on the idea that California may be using its carbon market to soften the rules for some of the state’s biggest polluters.

Air regulators say the permits created through its new program, the Manufacturing Decarbonization Incentive, will go only to companies that cut their own emissions. They say the program has guardrails, including requirements to return the permits if companies fail to deliver. They argue the program will help keep refineries and other major industries in California while sustaining clean-energy investment as President Donald Trump withdraws federal support.

“The cap-and-invest program was updated to do what it was always designed to do: reduce pollution cost-effectively, protect ratepayers, and keep businesses operating in California,” Lindsay Buckley, a spokesperson for the board, said. “The program was never designed to maximize auction revenue.”

Critics of the new program see only a subsidy for polluters that does not guarantee emissions reductions. They argue the new program could threaten California’s ability to meet its legally mandated 2030 emissions targets. 

Several board members shared concerns. The overhaul passed 10-3, but only after the board required further review before the new incentive program launches.

The Senate plan would block climate-fund spending unless the Department of Finance certifies that last year’s deal can be funded. It would also stop the air board from handing out the new industrial permits unless state officials show they align with California’s climate targets, lower gasoline prices and leave enough money for threatened climate programs.

The budget fight could have political consequences for Newsom as he defends his climate record beyond California, said Katie Valenzuela, a policy advocate who focuses on environmental justice issues.

“If this [rule] goes forward and isn’t fixed, this is a huge stain on his climate legacy,” Valenzuela said. “He is showing loud and clear that the most vulnerable residents who are most impacted by climate change are not his priority.”

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