Vivek Ramaswamy Booed Off Stage After Being Called “Political Cretin”
Ohio’s Republican nominee for governor, Vivek Ramaswamy, got booed off the stage Wednesday in Cleveland while speaking to the Young Americans for Liberty.
Ramaswamy was supposed to speak for half an hour at the libertarian student group’s national convention but had to end his remarks after only 14 minutes due to backlash from the crowd. The heckling started the moment he took the stage and continued as Ramaswamy was pressed on issues like Israel, and as he took shots at the less than friendly audience.
“The truth of the matter is, you know no matter what happens in whichever direction we go, people in my generation have already made it. We’re gonna be fine. It’s going to be your generation that pays the price. That choice belongs to you,” Ramaswamy said, nearly being drowned out by boos.
Vivek Ramaswamy is booed offstage after telling Ohio crowd, 'The truth of the matter is, people in my generation have already made it. We're gonna be fine.' pic.twitter.com/Ptm3KHwXY2
— FactPost (@factpostnews) July 30, 2026“We don’t want to hear your bullshit talking points. You’re a political cretin, and you need to get the fuck out of here,” one audience member yelled to Ramaswamy at one point.
Ramaswamy also said that the real divide in America was not between Democrats and Republicans but “winners and whiners.” He responded to one heckler by saying, “You want to give a speech? … Well, you can get on when they give you a slot, alright? So, until they do, you can sit down.”
It’s not the first time the former presidential candidate has drawn a backlash from his own party’s base. In December 2024, he caught MAGA’s ire after saying that companies prefer the work ethic of foreign employees over the laziness of American ones.
While the speech was part of the YAL national convention, and not necessarily representative of all of Ohio, Ramaswamy is not polling well in the governor’s race. A New York Times/Siena University poll has him dead even with Democratic nominee Amy Acton. This speech is certainly not going to help him, even when presented in full.
🚨 Ohio
By request here is the full 14 minutes that Vivek Ramaswamy lasted on the stage at Young Americans of Liberty Conference, at Xavier University yesterday.
It's very important that you watch, and hear for yourself the revisionist history he has and still is selling… pic.twitter.com/aDDp9zqELQ
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How Can US Factories Get Cleaner Heat? These Ideas May Help.
This story was originally published by Canary Media and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
American households are all too familiar with the pain of high electric bills, which are climbing nationwide. The same problem is quietly hindering the country’s factories from cleaning up their operations, too.
Hundreds of thousands of US manufacturing facilities burn fossil fuels to produce the heat they need to make packaged foods, bottled drinks, construction materials, and likely everything in your bathroom cabinet. It’s why the industrial sector accounts for nearly one-third of the country’s carbon dioxide emissions from energy use.
Cleaner technologies like industrial heat pumps, electric boilers, and heat-storing batteries are already commercially available. Yet even companies that are committed to decarbonizing can find it hard to justify making the switch. The underlying problem is that in virtually every state, electricity costs more than natural gas for industrial users.
“We have to have solutions that are at the very least competitive with the existing cost of fuel,” said Neil Brown, a chemical engineer at Tennessee-based Eastman Chemical, which has over a dozen manufacturing sites in the US and more abroad. “In some places where Eastman operates, in parts of the Southeast and Texas, it is very difficult to compete with the low cost of natural gas.”
Brown was speaking on a webinar last month held by the Renewable Thermal Collaborative and Industrial Heat Pump Alliance. The groups looked at electrifying low- to medium-temperature processes, and estimated it would add roughly 250 terawatt-hours to the industrial sector’s annual electricity demand by 2035—or nearly 25 percent more power than manufacturers currently use.
On the plus side, deploying clean industrial technologies could generate around $471 billion in total economic output over the next decade, even when accounting for the lost jobs and diminished business activities of gas utilities and equipment makers, according to the groups’ June report.
“In states where you have very good solar quality and natural gas prices are high, … it makes economic sense for the industry to do this.”
But reaping those benefits will first require finding ways to drive down the cost of electricity for manufacturers. A growing number of climate and energy experts are studying that challenge and proposing solutions for policymakers and utilities to consider.
One of those strategies could be to build renewable energy projects directly beside factories.
Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, recently modeled what would happen if factories themselves installed off-grid solar or wind projects on-site and used the clean electricity to power thermal storage systems and heat pumps. The team looked at nearly 3,600 locations across the country, evaluating land availability, solar-power potential, and local natural gas prices for each site.
Renewable-powered heat systems could economically supply up to one-third of the studied industrial heat demand by 2035, they said in an analysis announced last week.
The researchers found that such an approach would make it more cost-effective to run heat pumps than gas boilers for industrial processes below 200 degrees C (392 degrees F)—a broad category that includes beer making, paper production, and textile manufacturing. Meanwhile, thermal batteries would offer “competitive or lower costs” for scorching-hot operations like glass melting and steel manufacturing.
“In states where you have very good solar quality and natural gas prices are high, like in California, it makes economic sense for the industry to do this, because they will save some money on their heating costs,” said Amol Phadke, a co-author of the report and an adjunct associate professor at UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy.
However, even states without California’s abundant sunshine can still produce low-cost solar power, thanks to declining solar-panel prices. The vast majority of sites in the study have sufficient buildable land to install solar projects.
Phadke added that building off-grid systems would give factories faster access to renewables, since grid-tied wind and solar farms have to wait in long interconnection queues, which can delay projects for years. Ditching the utility would also let manufacturers avoid paying steep grid-delivery charges and other expenses—and sidestep competition with data center operators for power from an increasingly strained grid.
The new site-level data “is really helpful for project developers and technology developers to know how to prioritize their efforts, in terms of where to go and pitch industries on,” said José Domínguez, the study’s lead author and a research affiliate at the Goldman School.
The fact remains, though, that many factories will continue to rely on the electric grid in the near term. To get these facilities to consider transitioning to cleaner heat, the cost of electricity needs to come down.
The concept of electricity rate reform is gaining traction among decarbonization advocates, state policymakers, and manufacturers like Eastman as a tool for narrowing the gap between electricity and natural gas prices.
“Reforming electric rates is a good way to improve the economics of electrification while taking advantage of our clean electricity generation.”
In California, Senate Bill 943 would authorize the state’s Public Utilities Commission to fix utility rates and fees to make it more affordable for large industrial and commercial customers to switch from fossil fuels to electric heat. The bill passed the Senate in May and is now headed to the state Assembly’s Appropriations Committee.
In the Upper Midwest, the utility Otter Tail Power recently developed a novel electricity tariff that is designed to boost the bottom line of thermal energy systems and to ensure they benefit everyone on the grid. The first project to take advantage of this new rate is Antora Energy’s 5-gigawatt-hour battery in South Dakota, which turns cheap wind energy into clean industrial steam for Poet’s nearby ethanol-production plant.
“Reforming electric rates is a good way to improve the economics of electrification while taking advantage of our clean electricity generation,” said Lauren Kubiak, a senior scientist for the Natural Resources Defense Council who works on California climate and energy policy.
Kubiak led a new study analyzing how this strategy could improve the costs of operating industrial heat pumps in two major manufacturing states: California and Michigan. While heat pumps are significantly more energy-efficient than gas-fueled boilers, they’re typically not cost-effective to operate in either state, given current electricity prices.
The study examined what would happen if companies paid only “marginal” electricity costs, which reflect the actual cost of generating and transporting an additional unit of electricity. Today, ratepayers also pay “non-marginal” costs that help cover things like grid maintenance and infrastructure upgrades, net-metering programs for rooftop solar, and, in California, wildfire-prevention efforts.
“In California, [marginal-cost] rates enabled heat pumps to become pretty cost-competitive with gas boilers,” Kubiak said. That’s particularly true for major subsectors that require low-temperature heating.
For Michigan manufacturers, the impact is more muted, since the state’s electricity rates are lower than California’s and don’t include as many non-marginal costs. However, charging factories marginal rates would still reduce the size of the electricity-gas cost gap, enough that layering on other industrial policies—such as a tax credit that rewards low-carbon heat production—could bridge that divide almost entirely.
In the report, Kubiak and her co-authors suggest that utilities could offer marginal cost rates only to new heat pumps that displace fossil fuel–generated heat. These rates could also be set to encourage manufacturers to use electricity during times when solar projects are producing excess electricity, or when overall grid demand is low. That should help avoid saddling other ratepayers with the non-marginal costs that these new heat pumps won’t be paying.
“Electric rate reform is a tool in our toolbox that hasn’t been used to its fullest extent just yet,” Kubiak said.
She’s Remaking the Abortion Landscape One Pill at a Time
For most of the three years it’s existed, the second-largest telehealth abortion provider in the country has operated out of an office not much bigger than some bathrooms. “That is what half a million dollars of mifepristone looks like,” Dr. Angel Foster tells the Tufts University medical students crowded around the conference table, nodding toward the cubicle across the hall. The bins lining the plate-glass windows are filled with Priority Mail packages containing abortion pills, ready to be labeled and shipped. Shelves hold supplies of mifepristone and misoprostol, the two drugs in the gold-standard abortion-pill regimen, all waiting to be packed.
Foster is a leader in the movement that has revolutionized telemedicine abortion care in the post–Roe v. Wade era. The Massachusetts Medication Abortion Access Project, or The MAP, which she co-founded in 2023, is the culmination of a 30-year career on the cutting edge of global reproductive care. Figuring out how to get abortion pills to people who need them, while preparing for a future in which those pills may no longer be legal, is a core part of Foster’s—and The MAP’s—mission.
“We’ve got thousands and thousands of pills with the idea that we’ll be able to provide care for months if we need to weather any storms,” Foster tells the students, her hair pulled into a bun sturdy enough to withstand the harshest of elements. That stockpile is in addition to the more than 3,000 pill shipments The MAP has been sending out every month. “We just want to be able to provide care for as long as possible when there are disruptions,” she adds, knowing a series of Category 5 hurricanes looms on the horizon. Her personal mantra, echoing Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny, is The MAP’s organizational one: “No anticipatory obedience.”
It’s a Thursday evening in mid-April, and Foster—a professor of medication abortion studies at the University of Ottawa in Canada, as well as The MAP’s head of operations at its Boston-area base—has spent the past week traveling and brainstorming with her abortion access allies about how to innovate and even expand care amid the escalating threats. Although she’s renowned among her colleagues for needing half as much sleep as most people, tonight she seems distinctly tired, not that the rapt students seem to notice. They wolf down dinner—pizza from a neighborhood joint with Oregon pinot and a crisp rosé in plastic cups—as she runs through The MAP’s origin story (thank you, Dobbs), radical philosophy (who needs doctors?), and ever-widening ambitions. Then she asks everyone to clear away their greasy plates for the highlight of the evening: the famous MAP assembly line.
This story will be part of the Reveal episode “The Post-Roe Surprise: More Abortions” on Saturday, August 1. Subscribe to Reveal here or wherever you get your podcasts.
First, they put together Priority Mail cartons, big enough to hold the correct dosage of abortion meds and inconspicuous enough to pass for, say, crafting supplies from Etsy. Then they pass the cartons around the table, each person slipping in something different: orange boxes of mifepristone and white plastic bottles of misoprostol, instruction sheets, information about ectopic pregnancies and patient privacy, and a handwritten card that says, “We wish you the best, [heart drawing] The MAP.” The last student checks the contents, seals the package, and drops it into a plastic bin. Since its launch, The MAP has sent abortion pills to more than 60,000 patients, 95 percent in states where abortion is subject to harsh restrictions and near-total bans. “How are you able to get this amount of volume out?” a dark-haired young woman asks incredulously.
Every package sent by The MAP includes medication, informational materials, and a handwritten card—which these days includes a drawing of a heart.Kayla Bartkowski/The Boston Globe/Getty
The MAP’s pill-packing parties are fueled by pizza and wine—but never chardonnay.Emily Schiffer
A big part of the answer can be found in work sessions like this one, which happen twice a week. The MAP has a long waiting list of volunteers eager for a chance to help thwart red-state attorneys general and subvert draconian laws. Not only have these events become integral to The MAP’s operations, but they’re a highly effective way of trolling conservative extremists who believed the end of Roe would mean the end of abortion access for much of the US.
Exhibit A for how much Foster has enraged “the antis” (as she calls them) is a blockbuster lawsuit by the state of Louisiana that threatens mail-order mifepristone nationwide. On the gray spring afternoon we were huddled in her office, lawyers for Louisiana were putting the finishing touches on a petition asking the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals to block Biden-era FDA rules that allow the medication to be prescribed via telehealth and sent through the mail. Although Foster wasn’t a defendant in the case, page 24 of the initial complaint included a photo of her presiding over a pill-packing party in 2024. Describing the gathering as a “scheme,” the lawsuit quoted from the Wall Street Journal article in which the photo appeared, in which middle-aged volunteers “sip[ped] chardonnay in red plastic cups.” (The Journal got that part wrong, Foster insisted later, in mock outrage: “I would never serve chardonnay!”)
The story “infuriated the anti-choice movement,” she tells me, sounding as gleeful as you’d expect from someone whose email signature used to include a drawing of the female reproductive system with the ovaries in the shape of middle fingers pointing up. The article also reached a vital audience for securing The MAP’s future success: progressive donors. The day after it appeared, Foster says, a wealthy retiree in a neighboring state pledged $250,000.
“Even if mifepristone became banned, medication abortion is here to stay. You can’t put this genie back in a bottle.”
Four years after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision ended the national right to abortion, Foster and her allies have managed to create an entire healthcare, legal, and financing infrastructure—what The MAP’s medical director, Dr. Maureen Paul, calls a “shadow” system—that has kept abortion pills flowing, with stunning efficiency, into some of the most abortion-hostile parts of the country. In the process, they’ve mainstreamed pills to such an extent that even a nationwide abortion ban, the anti-abortion movement’s No. 1 priority, might be futile. “Even if mifepristone became banned, medication abortion is here to stay,” Foster says. “You can’t put this genie back in a bottle.”
The irony is that while abortion foes see The MAP as an existential threat, many of the patients it serves still can’t quite believe it’s real. Imagine being a woman in an environment where abortion is painted as dangerous, evil, and illegal, Foster tells the students. “You get pregnant, you don’t want to be, you go online, and you find out that there’s this group of clinicians in Massachusetts that will send FDA-approved abortion pills to your home for $5. It sounds absolutely bananas.”
She calls this “the legitimacy challenge,” and it breaks her heart to think of how desperately people want to believe. Several times a week, she says, “we’ll have patients who email us saying, ‘I just paid my last $5. Please don’t be a scam.’ And we email ’em back and say, ‘We’re not—promise.’”
Before the assembly line begins, volunteers organize Priority Mail boxes for maximum efficiency. They typically pack 500 shipments per session., Foster says.Emily Schiffer
On Friday, May 1, two weeks after my visit, the ultra-conservative 5th Circuit granted Louisiana’s request to suspend FDA rules allowing mifepristone to be prescribed and dispensed via telehealth. It was one of the nightmare scenarios the movement had been dreading since Dobbs: a rogue ruling by an extremist court that could catastrophically disrupt care for tens of thousands of patients. Nearly two-thirds of abortions in the US now involve the two-drug regimen, and almost 30 percent occur via telemedicine; in states with the harshest laws, it’s almost 100 percent.
“There was a tremendous amount of scrambling, a lot of panicked people,” says Susan Yanow, The MAP’s director of community engagement and an abortion access pioneer. The ruling’s timing—just before a weekend and at the beginning of the month—was guaranteed to cause maximum havoc. Hundreds of The MAP’s patients had started ordering pills earlier in the week but were waiting for their paychecks to send in their money. Now they were in limbo.
But the ruling didn’t affect the other medication in the standard abortion-pill regimen, misoprostol. Foster knew from her decades spent working in global settings that misoprostol is a highly effective and safe abortifacient on its own. And because it has so many other uses, from treating ulcers to inducing labor and stopping postpartum hemorrhages, it is relatively easy to obtain and difficult for abortion opponents to control. If the Supreme Court didn’t step in, The MAP and other telemedicine providers had a backup plan. “We’re prepared to switch to misoprostol alone if we need to,” Foster had said back in Boston. “No precompliance.”
Four years after the end of Roe, clinician-supported abortions are up 16 percent, thanks largely to telemedicine and shield laws.Jacquelyn Martin/AP
That weekend, Yanow deployed volunteers to pack mailers with jars of misoprostol alone. Meanwhile, Foster reached out to patients and answered their frantic questions: If their mifepristone was already in the mail, would the Postal Service still deliver it? Was misoprostol a real abortion pill? New medication instruction sheets had to be finalized, patient consent forms resubmitted, and The MAP’s website revamped. Foster also recognized a rare chance to generate much-needed data about misoprostol-only abortions via telemedicine in the US, so she designed a study that could compare the experiences of a thousand MAP patients on the single-drug protocol with the same number using the two-drug regimen.
“There are people who tend to say, ‘Oh my gosh, the boat’s going down!’” says Yanow, who’s known Foster for more than 25 years. “Angel is one of the people who looks around and says, ‘Okay, where’s the opportunity? How can we fix this?’”
“It made me so happy, when he wrote, ‘They’re undermining Dobbs.’ I was like, yeah, exactly.”
As it turned out, SCOTUS wasn’t ready to take the politically dangerous step of stopping telemedicine abortions—yet. After temporarily pausing the 5th Circuit ruling, the justices issued a one-paragraph order in mid-May that kicked the case back to the lower courts. For the foreseeable future, mail-order mifepristone remained legal. Justice Samuel Alito, the anti-abortion hardliner who authored the Dobbs decision, vociferously dissented, railing about how providers like The MAP had “perpetrat[ed] a scheme” to circumvent the red-state bans that Dobbs made possible.
“It made me so happy,” Yanow says, “when he wrote, ‘They’re undermining Dobbs.’ I was like, yeah, exactly.” As terrifying as the Louisiana case had been, Foster says, it was also confirmation of the abortion access movement’s surprising resilience. (The study could wait for another time.) “I was really proud of the different groups within the [abortion] ecosystem,” she says. “I’m really proud of how everyone rallied to make sure that patients could continue to get care.”
Misoprostol is a highly effective and safe abortifacient on its own.
“We’re prepared to switch to misoprostol alone if we need to. No precompliance.”
Now 52, Foster has spent decades helping to build and fortify that movement, often behind the scenes as a researcher, strategist, collaborator, and cheerleader, more recently as one of its most visible innovators. Four years after Dobbs, the infrastructure that she and her allies started creating in the 2010s includes mail-order abortion-pill providers, online information clearinghouses, and training initiatives for doctors and community activists. Abortion funds have helped hundreds of thousands of low-income patients pay for care and travel across state lines. Medical and legal hotlines have kept untold numbers out of emergency rooms and jails. New systems have emerged for tracking abortion trends, as well as research initiatives to improve delivery of care. The sum of the parts, another abortion access leader tells me, has been “revolutionary.” Far from buckling under Dobbs, she says, the access movement has created “a whole new way of doing healthcare.”
The “deep irony,” Foster says, is that if the Dobbs ruling had been narrower, “I think we would be in a very different situation.” Had SCOTUS simply upheld the 15-week ban at the heart of the Dobbs case, she suspects Americans—and the mainstream pro-choice movement—would have adapted as they had to all the other incremental restrictions on Roe over five decades.
Instead, the extremism of the decision galvanized “a new kind of creative thinking,” she says—ideas such as shield laws, blue-state statutes that protect abortion providers who deliver care to patients from places where abortion is restricted or banned. Almost every Democratic-run state now has some type of shield law, and eight states explicitly protect telemedicine. By trying to crush abortion in much of the US, conservatives have paradoxically created the conditions for patients and advocates to wrest control of abortion care from the medical and legal systems that have sought to restrict it.
When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, the extremism of the decision galvanized “a new kind of creative thinking,” Foster says.Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times/Getty
The result, Foster says, is that although abortion rights have been drastically curtailed in much of the country, abortion access has significantly expanded in some of the most unlikely places. Foster’s favorite example is Mississippi, where the Dobbs case originated. In 2022, the state had a single abortion clinic, Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the other party in Dobbs. Women there are among the poorest in the country, and the cost could be prohibitive—an average of $600 for the abortion itself, plus travel, childcare, and time off. (For context, a minimum-wage worker in the state earns $290 a week before taxes.)
Now, with telemedicine and sliding-scale fees, “you can get abortion pills sent to your home for $5,” Foster marvels, “without having to go through all the steps that were required for in-clinic care.” Since April 2022, clinician-supported abortions in Mississippi, as tabulated by the Society of Family Planning’s #WeCount project, have risen a mind-boggling 85 percent—all thanks to telemedicine. Across the US, according to the #WeCount data, abortions are up 16 percent.
None of this is to suggest that the end of Roe has been good for reproductive care, and many people I talked to worried that the abortion access victories of the Dobbs era will be misconstrued or that the herculean efforts required to achieve them will be minimized. For women with uncomplicated pregnancies in their first trimester who have some access to technology, “it’s just not as bad as you thought it was going to be,” says Tracy Weitz, an abortion policy expert who teaches at American University, “and in some ways, in some places, it’s actually better.”
But for the 70 percent of abortion patients who can’t or don’t want to rely on telemedicine—if, for example, they are later in pregnancy or have medical conditions that require clinic-based care—the picture isn’t nearly as rosy. Criminalization of pregnancy loss is on the rise. Harsh laws have wreaked havoc on medical training and emergency obstetric care. “People with wanted pregnancies are at far more risk than people with unwanted pregnancies,” Yanow says. “Because if you want to be pregnant and something goes wrong, you can’t manage it yourself. You have to have somebody empty your uterus. When doctors don’t know how to empty a uterus, pregnant people die.”
“People with wanted pregnancies are at far more risk than people with unwanted pregnancies. Because if you want to be pregnant and something goes wrong, you can’t manage it yourself.”
Foster is the first person to agree with the grim assessments. But she also sees an opportunity to “be the change we want to see in a dysfunctional US healthcare system.” She returns to this theme often. How can the access movement rectify the most glaring social, racial, and economic inequities of the Roe era? “We can use this to build back better,” she says. “What do we want to see this system look like? How can we do this differently?”
![Seen over the shoulder of a volunteer, a handwritten purple note card reads, "Wishing you the best! [Heart drawing] The Map."](https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/20260801_Post-Roe_g.jpg)
The MAP’s handwritten cards are carefully worded to be supportive yet neutral—“Wishing you the best.” “It’s the thing our patients say they like the most,” Foster says.Emily Schiffer
Foster started thinking about abortion access when she was 10. That’s when her mother, Nancy, told her about her own illegal abortion in Mexico in the late 1960s. To pay for the procedure—$300, the equivalent of almost $3,000 today—she had to sell some of her possessions. Then she was robbed at knifepoint by one of the gangs that preyed on American women crossing the border with purses full of cash. She returned to Los Angeles, sold more stuff, and eventually got the abortion. The whole experience “was terrifying,” Nancy tells me, and deeply disturbing to her daughter. “My mom was the most important person in the world to me,” Foster says. “And I thought, ‘I want to be an abortion provider so nobody has to go through what my mom went through.’”
As an infant, she and her mother spent months traveling from Australia, where Foster was born, through Asia and Europe, back to the US. “I can’t tell you how many women around the world held her when she was a baby,” Nancy says. “I can’t help but think that molded her.” In high school in Portland, Oregon, in the early 1990s, Foster won a scholarship to Jordan, where she spent time with Palestinian refugees and orphans and decided she wanted to be a humanitarian as well as a doctor. Her undergraduate studies at Stanford took her to labor-and-delivery wards in Egypt filled with women her own age suffering from sepsis and perforated uteruses—“the consequences,” she says, “of abortion bans.” As a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, her focus turned to Tunisia, an Islamic country that had integrated abortion into its health system, leading to some of the best maternal and infant outcomes in the region. “I was just desperately curious,” she recalls. “How did this happen?”
She had just begun her medical studies at Harvard when, in September 2000, the FDA approved mifepristone for use in the US. Despite the thrilling possibilities that abortion pills presented, the restrictions on its use were disheartening, as was the dearth of medical school training for abortion, “even in blue, blue Boston.” She threw herself into activism and met Yanow, a founder of what was then called the Abortion Access Project (now the Texas-based nonprofit Provide), who was organizing a training with chapters of Students for Choice. “Every year, [the students] would say they would do things,” Yanow recalls, “and our staff did 99 percent of it.” So when Foster volunteered to help, Yanow was skeptical. “But within a week and a half, Angel produces this rock-star list of speakers.” She even came up with tabletop centerpieces made from gourds. Yanow decided, “This is the woman for me.”
When Foster was in her second year at Harvard, she accepted a job—on top of her studies—leading the Middle East portfolio for a new research group called Ibis Reproductive Health, which put her in a global network of researcher-advocates working to make medication abortion more accessible worldwide. Much of that work became the foundation on which The MAP is built. “We don’t usually think of low-resource humanitarian settings as having lessons for the United States,” she says. “But that’s absolutely what’s happened here.”
“We don’t usually think of low-resource humanitarian settings as having lessons for the United States. But that’s absolutely what’s happened here.”
One groundbreaking project took her to a Burmese refugee settlement on the Thai border, where illegal abortions and postpartum hemorrhages contributed to horrific rates of maternal mortality. Her friend Cari Sietstra, founder of Law Students for Choice, had reached out for help figuring out how to train people in the settlement to use misoprostol to bring down maternal deaths. Together, they created a community-based distribution network to get the drug into the hands of 918 abortion patients over three years, then studied how the women fared. More than 96 percent of the abortions were successful, meaning the pregnancy ended without the need for a follow-up procedure. Foster is “fearless,” says Sietstra, who now heads an incubator called Innovations in Reproductive Health Access, “a true ride-or-die.”
While she was a college student, Rhodes scholar, and young researcher, much of Foster’s work focused on sexual and reproductive health, often in the Middle East.
When Foster and a different group of colleagues replicated the project in rural Pakistan, the misoprostol-only success rate was 100 percent. Before then, misoprostol’s promise as an abortion drug in crisis settings was undercut by the lack of rigorous studies, but this research proved it could be used safely even where there wasn’t access to backup care.
The findings completely contradicted the American anti-abortion activists’ cherished narrative that medication abortion was so dangerous that it needed to be strictly controlled, if not banned. According to Foster’s research, “demedicalizing” abortion pills—her preferred term vs. the “self-managed” framing often used—didn’t make them unsafe, any more than had demedicalizing Tylenol in 1960. “We began to feel very confident in no-touch, no-test protocols and the idea that routine ultrasound, bloodwork, or physical examinations were not necessary,” she says. Almost more important was the element of patient autonomy.
At The MAP, Foster has returned to one of the key lessons from this time: If this model of care worked in resource-starved villages and refugee camps with minimal medical infrastructure, she knew it would succeed in places with smartphones, paved roads, and functioning postal systems. “If we can trust illiterate and semi-literate women from eastern Myanmar to make decisions about their own bodies,” she asks, “how is it that we can’t trust women in Texas to do the same thing?”
“How are you able to get this volume out?” someone asks.
A big part of the answer is packing parties like this one.
When Foster joined the University of Ottawa health sciences faculty in 2011, Canada presented a fascinating opportunity to help improve access to medication abortion on a nationwide scale. It had a single-payer healthcare system that was the envy of American progressives. On the other hand, it hadn’t decriminalized abortion until 1988, and it still hadn’t approved mifepristone 11 years after the FDA had done so. A major part of Foster’s new job was to help build the research argument for the drug’s acceptance. Canadian authorities finally gave their blessing in 2015.
Foster’s reach expanded in 2020, when she came to rescue of Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, one of the few journals publishing high-level, peer-reviewed studies on abortion. When the Guttmacher Institute decided to shut it down, “there was a panic” among researchers, says Weitz, a close friend of Foster’s for 20 years, “and of course, people looked to Angel, and she gets the University of Ottawa to take it.” She and Weitz are now the editors, focusing exclusively on abortion-related topics around the world.
The leak of the draft Dobbs decision in May 2022, just as the National Abortion Federation was a winding up its first in-person meeting since the pandemic, was “huge gut punch,” Foster recalls. As a member of the federation’s board, she was in the middle of the planning frenzy that followed: “What do we do? How do we move on this?” The final decision a month later stunned her with its “cruelty.” Not only did it overturn 50 years of precedent, “in so many places, there was an immediate change in policy with no consideration to what was happening to actual people and patients and providers on the ground.”
Then Massachusetts enacted its shield law in July 2022, the first in the country to explicitly protect telemedicine providers, and Foster saw a perfect opportunity to operationalize her middle-finger rage. After kicking around a few ideas with Weitz and others, including for an abortion-pill pharmacy, she settled on creating an organization—that would become The MAP—offering telemedicine nationally, supported by the new Massachusetts law. It would operate within the formal medical system but use a demedicalized model. “It was like, ‘We’ve got this law. It seems strong, but if nobody leans into it, we’ll never show its strength.’”
“It was like, ‘We’ve got this law. It seems strong, but if nobody leans into it, we’ll never show its strength.’”
Foster already had an essential piece of infrastructure in place—Cambridge Reproductive Health Consultants, a research nonprofit she had co-founded with Sietstra years before to do politically sensitive work, including a study on the lack of abortion access for Peace Corps volunteers. She also had an impressive brain trust. Foster’s co-founder was a nationally known abortion provider who needed to stay in the background to protect her family. Yanow, a social worker by training, had spent decades leading initiatives to expand access for marginalized communities around the country, inspired in part by the killing of a young woman she’d been mentoring, in an abortion clinic shooting spree in 1994.
Dr. Maureen Paul, an OB-GYN who had served as the medical director for three Planned Parenthood affiliates across the country, assumed the same role for the new organization. Paul’s passion for abortion access dated to her own experience as a pregnant 18-year-old in pre-Roe Massachusetts, when women hoping for a hospital abortion had to make their case to a special committee. “The social worker came back from the committee hearing and said, ‘They denied your request, but you can go to England or Puerto Rico to have an abortion,’” Paul recalls. “And she might as well have said, ‘You can go to the moon.’” Paul carried the pregnancy to term and gave up the baby for adoption—a heartbreak that, all these years later, remains close to the surface. After Dobbs, when she was looking for a way to channel her fury, The MAP “checked all the boxes.”
Lawyers in the pro-choice mainstream were less enthused, Foster says, fretting that shield laws were untested in the courts and might end up hurting the entire abortion movement. “I finally had to say, ‘We are going to do this, I don’t want to hear about how we can’t,’” she tells me. To get the full protection of the Massachusetts law, Foster and the team decided The MAP would be completely Massachusetts-based, from the doctors prescribing the medication to the malpractice insurer paying the legal bills if anyone got prosecuted or sued. This contrasts with the largest telemedicine provider, Aid Access, which has partner doctors scattered around the US but is based in Europe.
The downside was that The MAP would also have to comply with Massachusetts laws they disagreed with, such as the state’s parental involvement law for patients under 16. The goal was to show the law’s strength without provoking a backlash—to be fearless but not reckless.
As the volume of pill orders has risen, the number of packing parties has increased as well. Some 95 percent of The MAP’s shipments go to states where abortion is severely restricted or banned.Emily Schiffer
As an added layer of protection, the team adopted a distributed-risk model, meaning that every step of The MAP’s operations was performed by a different person—from prescribing pills to packing shipments and lugging them to the post office. Although Foster is an MD, she is not a practicing clinician, nor is she one of the five prescribers. “To the outside world,” she says, “it is really hard to identify an individual person who provided pills to an individual patient.” Crucially, the team was the first in the US to leave doctors’ names off drug and shipping labels, making it much harder for someone in a red state to target them for legal action. If, say, a suspicious boyfriend in Texas finds a mailer and Googles “The MAP,” instead of being directed to abortion-related content, he might be drowned in links to actual maps. Seven states have now adopted similar protections as part of their shield laws.
One of the biggest innovations is the pricing structure. For the first year after its 2023 launch, The MAP charged $250 a patient—enough to more or less break even. Then Foster and the team convinced foundations and abortion funds to finance a bold experiment: dropping the cost of pills to a maximum of $150 per patient with a sliding scale that allows people to pay as little as $5 an order, though if a patient can’t afford even that, The MAP will send pills anyway. “It’s a very feminist vision of empowerment,” Yanow says. The team makes up the difference by constantly fundraising—a business model that requires Foster to be front and center.
The vast majority of patients use the medication immediately to end a confirmed pregnancy. But The MAP offers other options as well. Women who think they might be pregnant but can’t take a test or don’t want to know can pay $75 for “period pills”—the same drugs that induce abortions can be used to “bring down” missed periods. Or for $150, patients can purchase medication to stash away for future use. Orders for “just-in-case” pills tend to spike after seismic events like the 2024 election or the Louisiana-FDA scare. It turns out that bad news about abortion is a form of free publicity, getting the word out to women who might otherwise not have known The MAP existed.
Amid it all, Foster must also contend with the ever-present legal risks. While she has not (yet) been charged or sued by red-state authorities, Cambridge Reproductive Health, as The MAP’s official sponsor, has received cease-and-desist orders from Alabama and Arkansas. Other providers in New York, California, and Delaware have been targeted by authorities in Texas and Louisiana. Massachusetts’ shield laws, though among the strongest in the country, protect Foster only while she’s in the state, so she drastically limits how she moves within the US—her biggest regret about her work. When she travels into and out of the country, it’s always through Canada. The only state where she’ll drive a car is Massachusetts. Everywhere else, her husband of almost 27 years serves as her chauffeur, “which is a little bit of a problem for him but lovely for me, because I can work in the car.”
Travel to red states is too dangerous, which means Foster can no longer visit the woman who inspired her life’s work: her 78-year-old mother, who now lives with Foster’s stepfather in South Carolina. Last year, Foster’s beloved mother-in-law, who was Dutch, died in the Netherlands. “I was able to see her and say goodbye,” she says. “It was very hard and sad and also really beautiful at the same time, and I’m so grateful to have been a part of that.” When she and her husband were getting ready for their flight home, he asked her how she felt about the fact that if this were her mother, she wouldn’t have been able to be by her side when she died. “It was really hard to absorb,” Foster says. “Um, yeah, so I feel sad.”
Almost two-thirds of abortions in the US happen using pills. Orange boxes of mifepristone and plastic bottles of misoprostol make up the gold-standard regimen.Emily Schiffer
Increasingly, the anti-abortion movement has been pushing a narrative that the care offered by telemedicine providers is substandard and irresponsible, leaving women to fend for themselves in emergencies and allowing them to be cajoled or tricked into having abortions they don’t want. “We are not just about mailing pills,” Paul counters, “we’re following people from start to finish, trying our best to help them get the care that they need.” She tells a story about a woman in Texas who ordered abortion pills last fall, only to have a pregnancy test after taking them come back positive. After an ultrasound, The MAP sent her a second batch of pills that also didn’t work. When she was around 10 weeks pregnant, the woman traveled to a small town in Mexico for a death in her family. She started bleeding, and a clinic diagnosed her with a type of ectopic pregnancy in which the fetus implants in cesarean scar tissue—a potentially catastrophic complication the clinic didn’t have the capacity to treat.
So the Mexican doctors sent the woman back to Texas with a picture of her ultrasound. “This is where we really bumped up against how broken the healthcare system is for people living in abortion-ban states,” Paul says. “The patient could have died from this. The fetus wasn’t viable.” But doctors at the Texas emergency room “refused to even look at the ultrasound because they said those people in Mexico don’t know what they’re doing,” Paul says. Telling the patient that bleeding during pregnancy was not unusual, they sent her home to “pray.”
Instead, she got back in touch with The MAP’s doctors, who reached out to their network of high-risk providers in the state, eventually finding someone two hours away who was willing to perform the lifesaving procedure. Paul was on the phone with the woman on and off during the long drive. “She was so afraid: ‘What if they won’t see me? Am I going to be arrested?’” The procedure went well, and the woman told them it was the best medical care she’d ever received.
“I have been an abortion provider in different settings for 40 years. I have never heard stories like the ones I hear from my patients now.”
What has surprised Paul the most about her nearly three years at The MAP, she says, is the level of desperation among her patients. “I have been an abortion provider in different settings for 40 years, and I have never heard stories like the ones I hear from my patients now.” In survey this spring, 9 percent of The MAP’s patients said they’d been victims of some type of violence or reproductive coercion in their current pregnancy. Many patients have four or more children. And the stories they share are harrowing. “I need to do this as discreetly as possible,” one woman wrote. “I’m in a relationship that I’m trying to safely get out of, and I can’t be pregnant while I do it. I can’t have a baby with him. I can’t have another baby, period.”
But the story that haunts Paul the most was from a patient in Texas who already had two small children and could afford only $9.22 for her pills. “I read this comment,” Paul says, “and sat there trying to imagine this person figuring out what it took for her to put food on the table and clothes on her kids and pay her rent, and after counting it all up, finally say: ‘I can pay you $9.22.’”
MAP volunteers haul bins of packaged abortion pills to a nearby post office. Emily Schiffer
When Foster and her team launched The MAP in September 2023, Foster didn’t consider it to be just a telehealth platform. It was a demonstration project, one she hoped would inspire providers in other shield-law states to follow her lead. One of her long-term goals has been to build redundancy into the US abortion access infrastructure, which is essential to ensuring its resilience. But so far, The MAP is the only telemedicine provider of its kind, with the entire medical practice based in a single state. “I think it’s intimidating for folks to create a new practice,” Foster acknowledges. “It feels like a heavy lift.”
In June, The MAP switched to new computer software designed to streamline the patient intake process and improve protections for confidential information. To Foster’s shock, the number of orders nearly doubled to more than 6,000 patients a month, which has created enormous new pressures—for more inventory, more packing parties, and a lot more money. Instead of the $60,000 to $70,000 The MAP had to raise each month when I visited Boston last spring, it’s now closer to $120,000 a month. “That is the biggest challenge—what it means for us financially. It’s keeping me up a little bit at night, I’m not gonna lie,” she says.
There’s also the impact that comes with being a major player in a resource-starved movement. The MAP’s fee structure has made it the equivalent of a “safety-net facility,” Foster says, helping to fill a gap for low-income women that goes back to the Hyde Amendment, which banned federal funds for abortion care. But most telemedicine providers haven’t had the level of philanthropic support that makes those low prices possible, and clinics are even worse off: They rely on abortion pills—at an average charge of $600 per patient—to subsidize care for people for whom pills aren’t an option. As more patients order pills online, some clinics could be forced to close—a disaster for women who need later abortions and something the entire abortion ecosystem needs to reckon with.
At the end of June, Weitz—who as the former US program director of one of the largest funders of reproductive care, the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, knows the landscape better than most—convened a meeting of about 30 abortion access leaders. “It’s time for an honest conversation about what it’s going to take to make a service-delivery sector that makes sense to both the patient and to the providers,” Weitz says.
That conversation comes as the legal and political campaign to restrict mifepristone access has ratcheted up. Abortion opponents have been pressing President Donald Trump’s FDA to rescind a variety of Obama- and Biden-era rules that have made mifepristone more accessible or to overturn approval of the drug entirely. Despite decades of evidence to the contrary, they insist mifepristone is unsafe, and to buttress their case, they have been churning out junk science, claiming abortion pills are sending large numbers of patients to emergency rooms, polluting the water supply, and enabling the coercion of women. The same abortion foes are pushing for the revival of the Comstock Act, a Victorian-era anti-obscenity law that bans the mailing or transport of abortion-related drugs and supplies; it hasn’t been enforced for decades. But if it were, the result would be tantamount to a national abortion ban.
After almost two years of resisting such sweeping measures, the Trump administration has recently taken a series of steps—the nomination of Todd Blanche as attorney general, a stepped-up FDA review of mifepristone’s safety—that could signal a willingness to give conservatives what they want, possibly after the midterms.
Meanwhile, various lawsuits against mifepristone are moving through the federal courts, including the Louisiana case. The 5th Circuit is expected to issue another ruling in the not-too-distant future, and Foster and her colleagues doubt it will go any better than the last time. Until then, Foster says, they are watching, preparing, and serving as many patients as they can. “We try not to get sucked into the noise of all the things that are bad that could happen,” she says, “and just do the work.”
A typical daily run to the nearby post office includes hundreds of packages bound for all 50 states.Emily Schiffer
Scotland's university procurement center confirms cybercrooks broke in
Transcript: Trump Blurted Out Vile Plot to Censor ABC—and It Backfired
The following is a lightly edited transcript of the July 31 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.
It’s been a while since we checked in on Donald Trump’s use of government power to silence networks that displease him, and there’s a new development. ABC just put out their challenge to the Federal Communications Commission’s vile efforts to punish it by going after its broadcasting licenses. And something funny happened. Trump’s own tweets and declarations have become evidence of his corrupt intent to use the FCC as a weapon of censorship. And this captures something really essential about Trump’s open corruption and whether our institutions are capable of constraining it.
So we’re talking about all of it with one of our go-to people on these things, University of Michigan law professor Leah Litman. Hey, Leah, always good to have you on.
Leah Litman: Glad to be back.
Sargent: So at the center of this sordid story is FCC Chair Brendan Carr, who’s one of Trump’s most slavishly devoted accomplices. Whenever Trump gets upset about networks telling the truth about him, Carr is right there in the background. In the spring, Carr launched an early review of broadcast licenses at eight TV stations owned by ABC, which is a network Trump hates because of Jimmy Kimmel and other things. Leah, can you just bring us up to date on this, and what Carr is really all about?
Litman: Yeah, so Carr has been basically attempting to use the Federal Communications Commission’s power over these media companies in order to get them to ensure there is favorable coverage for the president, and coverage that the president likes. And sometimes he does this by threatening to review licenses that allow these companies to distribute their programming onto other channels. Other times he uses the FCC power by threatening investigations into the companies that might impose regulatory sanctions on them.
And so this is not the first time this has happened. You know, we saw, for example, the FCC kind of try to coerce Disney to cancel Kimmel. We saw them trying to strong-arm CBS to cancel Colbert. And they do this, again, by threatening the agency’s regulatory authority to award benefits or impose punishments on companies that are subject to their control.
Sargent: And these agencies, particularly FCC, have huge power, right? If they don’t grant licenses, that’s the end of the company. They don’t have business anymore. Yeah. And we should note here that the FCC claimed that its review of the broadcast licenses of these stations was about looking at their DEI policies. And I think we know that’s bullshit, right?
Litman: Yeah, I mean, I don’t know what this administration thinks DEI stands for. You know, on our podcast, we’ve joked that it’s “dicks, ex-husbands, imbeciles.” In light of the diarrhea—it’s “diarrhea for everyone, because of incompetence,” right? Like, I don’t know. But they kind of use that word as their go-to for saying, we don’t like something that you’re doing, and so we are just going to target you.
Sargent: Yeah. There’s almost like a Soviet quality to it. It’s like they really just say it, and they’re visibly full of shit, and they know it. And that’s part of the exercise of power.
Litman: Yes, indeed. We can just toss this label out and use that to go after anyone we want.
Sargent: And there’s nothing you can do about it. So ABC put out its formal response to the FCC’s review, and it’s scathing stuff. I’m going to read one line. ABC says, “The retaliation against ABC is a signal to every media company in the country: Accommodate the administration’s view of what news coverage should look like, or pay the price.” Leah, that’s the plain truth, isn’t it?
Litman: No, absolutely. And I think the president has taken this approach to many different regulatory initiatives or prosecutions. You know, he’s tried to indict, for example, former FBI director Jim Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James. And it’s clear that those prosecutions also serve as a warning, right? Like, do our bidding, or stand down, or you will face the penalty.
And so this attempt to bully ABC is just another example of that. And here, in the context of media coverage—and I think another manifestation of this are the president’s litigation against different media companies. You know, he sues them for running a story that he doesn’t like. And here he’s leveraging the immense power of the federal government to serve the same purpose.
Sargent: Now, here’s the really good part. In order to show that the FCC is trying to punish ABC for its content and its viewpoints, punish it for its reporting and its speech, ABC cites one of Trump’s own tweets, in which Trump says this directly.
The tweet says: “Why is it that ABC and NBC Fake News, two of the worst and most biased networks, aren’t paying millions of dollars a year on license fees? They should lose their licenses for their unfair coverage of Republicans.”
Now, NBC doesn’t seem to be a part of this right now, but you get the point. There, Trump said openly that ABC should be punished for what it says about Republicans. And ABC is now using this against Trump. Can you tell us what ABC has to establish here to push the FCC off its back, and whether there’s a real chance that citing something like this thing here works?
Litman: Yeah, so one of the claims that ABC is making is that the administration is targeting them for exercising their First Amendment right—for deciding what to publish and what to air. And so if the administration, if the federal government, is targeting someone because of views they express, because they don’t like the viewpoint they express or the content that they are publishing, that is a violation of the First Amendment.
And so because the reason for the enforcement action, the reason for the investigation, could potentially make it unconstitutional, ABC is trying to establish why this investigation or review of the licenses is happening.
Sargent: And could this work? I mean, there you have ABC citing Donald Trump saying, in his own words, they should lose their licenses for their unfair coverage of Republicans. Could that be effective for ABC in making this argument?
Litman: I would certainly hope so. And these kinds of arguments have been effective, at least in the lower federal courts, where there’s a big “OMG, he admitted” vibe to a lot of what the lower courts are doing. In cases challenging the president’s revocation of temporary protected status, lower courts said, this is unconstitutional, it was driven by racial discrimination, because look at the vile racist smears you—you, president—directed at Haitian nationals. This has also come up in the cases challenging the ban on transgender service members.
Look at all the awful things that the president has said about transgender individuals. This has also come up in some other First Amendment cases, challenging the president’s and administration’s rescission of federal grants to organizations that were engaged in advocacy that the president didn’t like. And lower federal courts have often pointed to presidential statements and effectively presidential admissions that, of course he was retaliating against them, of course he was doing this because of an individual’s race, of course he was doing this because of some impermissible reason.
But the big question is: is the Supreme Court ever going to allow that to happen? Because of course the Supreme Court said the president’s awful statements about Haitian nationals, those were not overtly racial, and they excused that racial discrimination. And they have allowed the administration to implement the ban on transgender service members, despite the horrific smears and transphobic statements. And so there’s right now, I think, a disparity between lower federal courts saying, the president said what he said, we can’t ignore that, and the Supreme Court saying, no, actually, we can and we will, and we’ll just pretend it didn’t happen.
Sargent: Well, I want to come back to the Supreme Court in a sec, but first, ABC’s filing goes on to quote numerous other examples of Trump making this threat explicit, especially during the 2024 campaign. In one case, he says ABC is corrupt and the FCC “ought to take away their license.”
In another, he says, “ABC should lose its license because of what they’ve done.” So here you have Trump blurting out on Truth Social, and even in one case at a campaign rally, that he wants to weaponize the FCC against the network to censor it. It was basically an open campaign promise: elect me and I’ll censor ABC. And now he and Carr are trying to do that, right?
Litman: Yes, no, absolutely. But so too was the president’s promise for a “complete and total shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” And yet when the challenge to the president’s travel ban—you know, that applied to individuals from several Muslim-majority countries—reached the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court said, well, we’re not actually sure if campaign statements are even relevant.
And in any case, we’re just going to say there is a reasonable, non-racial, non-religious reason why the president might have done this. Now, of course, they relied on the fact that that was an immigration policy where the president receives additional deference. But I am not at all convinced that they would take even, again, this specific promise to do the very specific thing that his administration is now trying to do, for a very specific unconstitutional reason, seriously and literally, and actually hold him to that, even though they absolutely should.
Sargent: Point taken on the Supreme Court and how corrupt it is and so forth. And we should note here that Leah Litman wrote a very good book about that. So check it out, folks. It’s all about the Supreme Court. What’s the title again?
Litman: Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes.
Sargent: Well, there you go. That sums it up pretty neatly. But I want to ask you, though—I’ve got to think that administration lawyers would prefer that Trump hadn’t said this stuff explicitly, right?
Litman: Of course, right? They have to be desperately begging the people around him to shut down his phone and tell him to shut the F up, because of course it’s making their jobs that much harder. It’s hard to say, well, of course we should presume that the government is acting normally. You know, there is this presumption of regularity that courts traditionally afford to the federal government, and that administration lawyers will often invoke.
But that’s just supposed to be a presumption. And you should be able to rebut that presumption if you have an administration and a president just outright saying, of course, we’re doing this for unlawful reasons, here’s what we’re doing—it’s not actually following these processes and procedures, I just promised to penalize ABC because I didn’t like them.
Sargent: One last question about the Supreme Court. I’ve got to think they’re going to be a little more sensitive here, because it’s First Amendment and it’s broadcast licenses. It’s so clear. As opposed to something like TPS, which, you know, the president has a lot of power over immigration and so forth. And it feels to me like the Supreme Court might—let’s hope, anyway—want to be a little more solicitous of the First Amendment rights of news organizations than they might be in other cases. No?
Litman: I mean, perhaps. You know, on the other hand, this is the Supreme Court that often protects the First Amendment rights of some but not others. You know, it has said, for example, nonprofit corporations, they have a First Amendment right not to disclose their donors, in part because when they disclose their donors, their donors are heavily criticized for contributing to right-wing organizations that are accused of racist, homophobic behavior.
The court has not, let’s say, protected the rights of union organizers to exercise their free speech rights to actually organize people and register people for unions, even though it’s protected the rights of the mega-rich to donate near unlimited amounts of money to elections.
So, yes, in principle, this court does care about the First Amendment. In principle, of course, it should care about news organizations’ ability to publish material that they decide to publish. There are a host of right-wing news organizations that publish all sorts of crap that you would hope, right, they would recognize they don’t want to allow litigation for. And yet this court has time and time again found a way to be selective in whose rights it’s protecting, even when it purports to be applying some general principle.
Sargent: The Supreme Court really does like big corporations.
Litman: Yes, they do.
Sargent: And ABC is a big corporation.
Litman: Yes.
Sargent: So it has that going for it. I want to try to get at a key thing about Trump’s corruption here. The open and explicit nature of it really is a critical piece of it, in the sense that Trump wants it known that he will, in fact, use the FCC to bully networks whose reporting displeases him.
This is both a demonstration of his power to his base—like, look, I can do this openly, because I can—but it’s also an explicit signal to many institutions in this country to bend the knee to him. He can’t let go of the open and explicit nature of this. It’s central to his whole project. But now, at least to some degree, it’s backfiring. Can you talk about that?
Litman: Yeah. So I want to first talk about how it is central to his project, and how doing it openly very much seems to be a feature in their eyes. You know, it’s partially a way of normalizing the conduct. If they do it all the time, if it happens all the time, if they flood the zone, right, with BS, it’s harder to stop or challenge any of it. But another important part of it is the signaling. We are talking about, as we said, ABC, a big corporation.
There aren’t always going to be big media entities with the resources of ABC that are making a calculus about whether they can or should publish a story that might upset the administration or the president or someone in his circle. And so they will look at the kind of retaliatory campaigns that the president is openly engaged in and openly threatening against these companies, and have to make a calculus. Are we in a position to potentially fight that, if the eye of Sauron, you know, turns its gaze to us? And some will make the calculus of no. So yes, the openness of this is a big part of the story, and also part of the problem.
I do hope that it is also part of what allows us to push back against Donald Trump, because it is much easier, I think, to organize opposition when you can point to, look at what he is doing, look at what he is saying.
Obviously, right, you can’t allow a president to do that—just imagine how that power could be used. And so hopefully, right, the openness of it will also make counter-organizing, counter-political opposition easier. And hopefully it will also make legal challenges easier, you know, as we were talking about. Because when the president admits he has an unconstitutional motive, that should matter under the law. It really should. And I think it is backfiring, at least to that degree.
Sargent: So I think there’s a big question here about whether Trump is succeeding or not in cowing the news media. And there’s like a lot of fatalism out there about this. And I get that, right? You look at The Washington Post, what happened there. You look at CBS News, what’s happening there. And there’s a lot to be kind of despairing about. But I think the story is generally a decent one, though, that aside, because the American news media is just really big and sprawling, and it’s diffuse. Yeah. And it’s robust, it’s energetic. And I think I’m seeing some of the most aggressive reporting right now on Trump that I’ve seen in, I don’t know, in my lifetime. What do you think of that? What’s your sense—is he succeeding or is he not succeeding? And where do you think this particular thing is going to go?
Litman: Look, he’s succeeding in some ways. I’m sure there are some stories, right—some turns of phrase—that we are just never going to see, because organizations make the calculus that it’s not worth it. On the other hand, you’re absolutely right that the American media landscape looks very different than, let’s say, the media landscape in Hungary, where there are fewer organizations and therefore easier to control and take over.
Here there are some big media institutions, including some like ABC or The New York Times that have opted to fight back against Trump when he targets them. The New York Times successfully quashed some subpoenas that had been directed at it over its reporting about the president’s use of the Qatari Force One, you know, the jet gifted to him. And there are also a bunch of independent media organizations that have been kind of more faithful in a lot of ways to the aggressive reporting, even earlier in the administration.
So I think that the media landscape is, you know, concerning in some respects. Obviously the consolidation of several big media entities into the hands of some Trump supporters is not a good development for democracy. But it’s not maybe quite as dire as people might think, at least if you are conscientious enough to ensure you are getting a media diet that includes a lot of independent media and media that hasn’t been taken over by Trump allies.
Sargent: And where do you think this is going to go with ABC? What’s your gut tell you?
Litman: I think ABC will be able to push back the threats against its licenses. I just do.
Sargent: And what will that look like, basically?
Litman: I think either the administration will fold—you know, if ABC, for example, gets a favorable court hearing, or some initially favorable judicial decision—or they will get a favorable judicial decision and the Trump administration will opt not to appeal it, because they just don’t think it’s one of their better cases.
And there have been lots of examples where they have elected not to appeal unfavorable lower court rulings. So even though they’ve had a bunch of success in the Supreme Court, they haven’t taken all of the cases they have lost in the lower courts to the Supreme Court. So my guess is that will be how this episode resolves.
Sargent: And if that happens—which I think it will as well—it will be a huge deal, not least because Trump himself keeps drawing attention to his own corrupt motives. Leah Litman, always great to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on. That was great stuff.
Litman: Thanks for having me.
Abolish FIFA
Picture this: It’s December 2033. Puerto Rico’s “Huracan Azul,” (“Blue Hurricane”), the national soccer team in a country better known for baseball, basketball, and boxing, face off against Scotland in the Deutsche Bank Men’s World Cup, brought to you by Fanatics—your home for World Cup swag. Until this winter, Puerto Rico had never qualified for a major tournament; Scotland, meanwhile, had never qualified for the knockout round in a World Cup. As the teams kick off play at Saudi Arabia’s NEOM, you idly watch, wondering if an upset will take place.
It won’t; Scotland quickly score once, twice, three times. The score is 4–0 by the time the referee whistles for the Michelob ULTRA Hydration Break to take place. It’s 5–0 at halftime; Puerto Rico scores a consolation goal before the second hydration break, but the Scots hang three more in the final minutes as the game finishes 8–1. As the game ends, bored spectators streaming out, the camera briefly flashes on the luxury boxes. A grinning Gianni Infantino, the FIFA commissioner, mugs obscenely with the Saudi king and other potentates. History, of a kind, has happened.
If you see nothing wrong with this, you’re probably either one of Infantino’s staffers or a blood relation. Certainly, Infantino thinks such a display would be amazing. According to The Times of London, the FIFA chief is working closely with Thrive Capital’s Joshua Kushner (brother of Jared Kushner!) and JP Morgan on a proposition that would all but radically transform the men’s and women’s World Cups as we know them, and not coincidentally shovel millions into his acquisitive little mittens. The proposal—now roundly condemned by virtually everyone who’s heard about it, including Britain’s new prime minister—involves creating a private company that would control the World Cups. Each of FIFA’s 211 national member associations would have a financial stake, estimated at around $20 million each. The Times estimates that the company would be valued at around $20 billion.
The report makes for wild reading. Now, stop for a moment. Think of how quickly and quietly this whole thing went from “consultations” to a set of signed, nonbinding agreements. This isn’t an idle contrivance, set for a slow burn; banks like JP Morgan and people like Kushner don’t engage in that kind of deal. This is a fast-moving plan of action, set in motion before anyone outside of FIFA’s holiest of holies in Zurich even knew what was going down.
Suffice it to say: It’s a spectacularly bad idea. The pressure to expand the World Cups, to play them every other year, or even annually, would be immense. The arm twisting to turn them into something that would make college bowl season look staid and decorous would be even greater.
We already know this, because Infantino is not a creatively corrupt schemer. He’s running the same playbook from his failed 2018 SoftBank-Saudi deal. The reason he thinks he can pull this off now is because he thinks he’s suddenly obtained more room for success: a friendlier political environment, working with investors who are cozy with Trump and a compliant FIFA Congress of 211 federations full of staffers eager to get their hands on cash that’s dangled in front of them.
Naturally, FIFA is no stranger to tawdriness. It closely resembles an international scandal factory with a sideline in soccer tournaments. This is hardly the first critique of the organization that’s been penned. But Infantino’s latest grift offers us the opportunity to do more than critique. Now is the perfect moment to imagine something better for international soccer than anything FIFA and its gang of thieving jabronis can offer the sport.
Let’s be clear about what FIFA actually is: It may say it’s a tax-exempt Swiss nonprofit, squatting on around $15 billion in World Cup revenue, but it’s brazenly acting like a for-profit rights holder. This is why this cockamamie idea is even possible! FIFA wouldn’t be selling the tournaments themselves; they’re creating a subsidiary that would do that dirty work because it controls the tournaments’ commercial upside, thus giving Infantino and his cronies the cover necessary to pretend like they’re doing this for the good of the sport.
Reading this—let alone writing it—makes anyone feel like they need a shower, which is why we need to talk about the sport-washing elements driving this scheme. Every mechanism that makes a privatized World Cup possible—and more profitable—is also one that FIFA uses to sanitize the reputations of some of the seamiest regimes imaginable. If you expand the tournaments, you increase the number of billion-dollar hosting rights up for auction. If you hold the World Cups every couple of years, or even annually, you’ve instantly multiplied your leverage. This isn’t a thought experiment: Infantino’s already said that a South American suggestion to expand the World Cup to 64 teams from this year’s 48 will “definitely” be considered. Shareholders who stand to reap a financial bonanza from this kind of expansion will always keep pushing for more, more, more, regardless of what it demands from host countries bidding for the action.
We know what that cost looks like. Qatar’s 2022 World Cup was built on the bodies and blood of a horrific labor system that human rights groups say killed hundreds, if not thousands, of migrant workers. Under pressure, Qatar rolled out meager labor reforms, but Human Rights Watch’s global initiatives director said at the time that those changes came too late and were either too weak or too narrow and weakly enforced to help those workers. A year after the World Cup, Amnesty International found that even that pitiful progress had mostly stalled out.
It wasn’t for a lack of money; FIFA had that. It had its haunches scooched on roughly $6 billion of World Cup revenue. It simply chose not to create a remedy fund, and turned its back on the misery its greed caused. This is not a resource problem, it is a priorities problem. FIFA will always prioritize money over morality, and privatization will not change that; it will simply add shareholders with hands out demanding that the priorities be ever more profitable.
This is not limited to construction workers. For the last three years, FIFPRO, the global players’ union, has told FIFA ever more stridently that the playing calendar is physically unsustainable. A FIFPRO workload report found that 54 percent of the 1,500 players it monitored recently were burdened by excessive or high playing demands. Last year, the union recommended that playing seasons be capped at around 55 matches; this came in the wake of a growing group of elite players exceeding 69 or 70 matches in a single season.
FIFA merely shrugged, expanded the Club World Cup to 32 teams, and played it in the punishing heat of an American summer. FIFPRO said that decision came without putting further player workload safeguards in place, showing a marked disregard for players’ mental and physical well-being, and in keeping with the fact that FIFA’s promised working group on player health had gone nowhere for years. FIFA’s disregard drove the union and some of Europe’s top leagues to file a formal complaint with the European Commission, arguing that the playing calendar violates competition law. Spain’s Rodri, the Golden Ball winner as the top player in this World Cup, said that players came close to striking over this.
This is the same organization that wants to sell off stakes in the same tournaments driving that workload. Do you think investors are going to want fewer games? Of course not! And if you put the spotlight on the women’s game, it tells the same story from a different direction. “Everyone watches women’s sports,” according to a popular T-shirt, and it’s true: 50,000 people jammed into the 2024 Women’s Champions League to watch Barcelona beat Lyon 2-0; 38,000 saw Arsenal beat them the following year. You wouldn’t know it by the lack of investment that FIFA puts into the women’s game, coupled with the embarrassing, ham-handed objectification it routinely engages in during its ceremonies.
Let’s be real: If FIFA won’t fund player safety or gender equity now, when it has $15 billion in its accounts, there’s absolutely no version of a privatized FIFA Forward Enterprise, accountable to Jared Kushner’s kid brother and JP Morgan rather than to the players and supporters, that funds them more. That’s not how this works. Investors don’t invest in properties to slow them down!
This is why people are reacting like this, and why on Thursday morning, UEFA took the drastic step of pledging a World Cup boycott if this squalid enterprise moves forward. And if UEFA can boycott the World Cup, then we can imagine something even greater: a World Cup, and a sport, without this scabrous institution.
Imagine this, instead: a restructuring of soccer’s finances around redistribution instead of extortion. In this world, wealthy federations like England and Spain help subsidize the sport’s development, using their cash from domestic broadcast revenues to underwrite federations that can’t afford academies, referee development, or basic youth infrastructure. Picture a virtuous cycle of money moving sideways inside the sport, instead of disappearing into the pockets of shareholders.
Hosting and tournament-expansion decisions ought to carry stringently enforceable labor and human rights standards that have independent oversight, not the kind of tissue-thin pledges that Qatar made once we were all paying attention. And the sport needs a governing institution that has actual checks and balances, not a pathetically compliant assembly of 211 members eager to have their votes bought in exchange for their silence and complicity.
There’s one thing worth protecting here; it’s not FIFA’s revenue stream, and it’s certainly not Gianni Infantino’s post-FIFA career. It’s what the World Cups do: getting a few billion people, for one glorious month, to care about players and countries that they’ve never thought about before. That’s beautiful beyond any price, and it has nothing to do with whether Thrive Capital has a piece of the action.
Gianni Infantino and his minions want this decided in their sleazy fashion, by a Congress with every financial incentive not to ask questions, let alone disagree. The people who actually make the World Cups—and soccer—matter, players and supporters most of all, must have their say before this happens. Already, they are.
In the name of all that matters, all that is beautiful about the simplest game, Gianni Infantino and FIFA have disgraced this sport for far too long. For the preservation of all that’s good about it, they must go.
The Jewish Radicals Who Wanted Equality for All
History forgets most activists, but future generations can benefit from exhuming their ideas. Take the Jewish Labor Bund, the lefty, anti-Zionist liberation party that agitated for worldwide socialism while defending its members against the scourge of antisemitism. Formed in 1897, the Bund was the largest insurgent group in the Russian Empire at the time of the 1905 revolution. After the Tsar fell, the Bund reached a new peak in the newly formed Second Polish Republic. And then it all but died, targeted for murder along with most of its members by the Holocaust.
Surviving Bundists and their descendants came together in other socialist organizations, and so perhaps it shouldn’t surprise that the tremors of a party formed in the nineteenth century resonate with today’s left. As Zionism gained traction in cities and shtetls, the Bund condemned the oppression of Arabs in Palestine, lamenting that “Zionists have built all their hopes on stripping away the political rights of Palestine’s existing Arab population, who constitute the oppressed majority … and on forcing them from all positions of power.” The Bund published Palestinian voices in its newspapers and denounced the Pandora’s box of chauvinism that Zionism had pried open. Women were equal participants in Bundist affairs during an era when gender parity was vanishingly rare, even if they were subject to the condescension of male comrades. Bundists and their fellow travelers in the United States organized against anti-Black racism: After the 1908 race riots in Springfield, Illinois, Yiddish newspapers called for demonstrations and pooled money for victims; meanwhile, Black newspapers, such as The New York Age, committed extensive coverage to the anti-Jewish pogroms erupting across the Russian Empire. The Bund supported liberation movements throughout the world, resisting a rising tide of fascist governments, land wars, bigotry, and apartheid.
While the Bund was primarily active in pre-1945 Europe, the wails of its epoch haunt the present in Molly Crabapple’s new history, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: A Story of the Jewish Bund. Crabapple begins her inquiry with her great-grandfather, the teenage Bundist Sam Rothbort, who may have been involved in the shooting of a plunderous police officer in his native Volkovysk and transformed from a scrappy rebel to a mournful painter and sculptor after he passed through Ellis Island. Though he died before she was born, Crabapple takes the buried past as “a guide for our contemporary moment, in all its horror and possibility, in all its repression, courage, and loss.”
Crabapple is perhaps best known as a visual artist, the creator of striking illustrations and lithographs from the Occupy Wall Street protests. She’s also a dogged reporter who has worked in combat zones. She sees a precedent for today’s progressive firebrands in the example of Jewish freedom fighters who opposed prejudice, tyranny, and class stratification in their home countries, without seeking solutions in nationalism and the colonization of distant lands. Anyone, anywhere, she suggests, can tune themselves to the wavelength of revolution.
From its early days, the Bund put principle before power. As factory strikes roiled turn-of-the-century Russia, the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party attempted to gather Marxist revolutionaries into a cohesive bloc. Their Second Congress, held in 1903 between Brussels and London, was pivotal—Lenin consolidated control, and the Bolsheviks, who wanted immediate revolution, split from the more gradual Mensheviks. But this summit sidelined another group: the Bund, which, in spite of having 30,000 members at the time (compared to a few thousand Bolsheviks and Mensheviks combined), received just five delegates out of 51. And so they walked out, a decision that did not give them much of a say in the future of Russian politics, Crabapple admits. Yet it’s evidence of a faction that rejected bad compromises and was willing to organize outside of the electoral system.
Crabapple takes the buried past as “a guide for our contemporary moment, in all its horror and possibility, in all its repression, courage, and loss.”And organize they did. By 1906, when Russia tempered the long-standing absolutism of its monarchy with a parliament, the number of Bundists in the empire had swelled, by some accounts, to 40,000—as the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks grew at even faster rates. Membership in the Bund plummeted in the early 1910s, and, after the Bolsheviks assassinated the royal family, they liquidated the Russian Bund, suppressing the political activities of its members unless they joined the Jewish Section of the Communist Party. Yet with the restoration of Polish independence in 1918, the Bund became a social force in Poland. They printed their own Yiddish-language publication, the Folkstsaytung. They opened the Medem Sanitorium in Warsaw to treat needy children for tuberculosis—an institution that offered kids a chance to edit their own newspaper and elect representatives from their ranks to participate in self-governance; corporal punishment, too, was outlawed in this facility, during a period in which much of Europe treated flagellation as an ordinary aspect of child-rearing. Women founded an organization, YAF, that pushed for equal wages and free childcare, established day-care centers, and circulated information about birth control.
Among the tenets of the Bund was a commitment to improving the political situation in their home countries—whether in Central and Eastern Europe or new havens in the United States and even Palestine—instead of seeking to establish a Jewish state. They were neither assimilationist, religious, nor supremacist; they believed in secular Jewish culture and in ending a legacy of persecution without inflicting the same subjugation on others. The problem with Zionism, the Bund believed, was not necessarily Jewish emigration to Palestine—if you must go there, why not just try and live alongside Arabs?—but the desire for Jews to reign over others. “The most important condition for a peaceful life together, for the entire population of Palestine, is the renunciation of the Zionist plan to rule the land against the will of the majority,” the Bund declared in a 1929 resolution. Meanwhile, it was becoming harder for Jews to imagine living anywhere: Many fled to Palestine because the United States effectively stopped the flow of Jewish immigrants with the Johnson-Reed Act in 1924.
Here Where We Live Is Our Country denies any narrative defined by victimhood, particularly one that suggests hopelessness as an essential theme of Jewish existence.The Bundists predicted that Zionism would perpetuate a cycle of imperial brutality: “Zionism drew its vital juices from defeats and catastrophes,” wrote the Bundist Emanuel Nowogrodski in his history of the Polish Bund, written before his 1967 death and published posthumously in 2001. Nowogrodski was a general secretary for the Bund’s Central Committee until World War II, a position he relinquished because he was visiting New York when Hitler invaded Poland. (His wife, Sonia, stuck in Warsaw, became a leader of the underground until she was murdered in Treblinka.) For Crabapple, the fiery, foreshortened life of Sonia Nowogrodska is an inspiration, not just a tragedy: She ran a soup kitchen out of the Bund’s headquarters until it was bombed, when she restarted operations around the corner. Here Where We Live Is Our Country denies any narrative defined by victimhood, particularly one that suggests hopelessness as an essential theme of Jewish existence.
This feels more surprising than it should. Crabapple proceeds from a refreshing assumption that Jews were agents of history and not mere casualties of its worst tendencies, that the footprint of anti-Zionists in the twentieth century was robust and central to Jewish history at large, and that exclusionary notions of Jewish identity were already outdated a century ago. In her book, Jewish forbears are models for anti-colonial fervor and action: staunch souls who, while fending off starvation, disease, overcrowding, and lethal violence in the Warsaw Ghetto, found space and energy to support Gandhi and the cause of Indian independence. Isolated from the world, the Bundists sent telegrams praising Gandhi’s Quit India campaign, a push for Indian self-determination that was sparked by the martial law that Britain instituted to maintain order while it fought the Nazis. No matter that the Brits, like the Bund, were battling Hitler—the Bundists knew that their allies were the colonized, marginal, and exploited.
In the interwar period, the Bund had made a place for itself in the civic fabric of Poland, teaming up with the Polish Socialist Party, with whom in 1926 they reluctantly supported a coup by socialist leader Jozéf Piłsudski, who had dreams of a pan-ethnic Poland yet ended up being a vindictive authoritarian—Piłsudski even dissolved Parliament in 1930, jailing his political opponents. The Bund and the Polish Socialist Party grew closer in the subsequent months, their fates bound by a shared enemy. The Polish Socialist Party also understood antisemitism as a serious threat, even as its members became more embattled and, after the 1939 Nazi invasion, increasingly unable to aid Jewish compatriots.
The Jews were confined to ghettos, most famously the Warsaw Ghetto, which Crabapple describes with devastating eloquence:
People slept everywhere, in corners, hallways, cellars, curbs. The streets were so crowded it took an hour to walk five blocks. You shoved through peddlers, scammers, and feral skeletons who would snatch the bread out of your hands and eat it even while the crowd showered them in blows. The horses had all been slaughtered, so former professionals yoked themselves to rickshaws.
Crabapple builds grand, gritty set pieces for the dozens of pages she devotes to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the largest Jewish revolt against the Nazis during World War II. She compares the effectiveness of the Jews to the success of so many guerilla combatants who use their superior knowledge of terrain to humiliate foreign armies. When the Nazis tried to burn the ghetto, the Jewish Combat Organization burned Nazi factories. They donned stolen German uniforms and cloaked their footsteps at night with rags fastened to their feet. Crabapple digs into the fates of the Bundists who helped helm the rebellion, their extraordinary efforts to cling to life, hiding beneath floorboards and fleeing through sewers, and their self-sacrificing deaths.
She also chronicles Zionist atrocities toward Jews in Palestine who strayed from the party line. Crabapple writes of Labor Zionists under the British mandate who kidnapped and sexually abused Jewish women if they had romantic relationships with Palestinian men. She explains how, in March 1948, after David Ben-Gurion called for a draft of Jewish refugees in Europe (people who had no formal connection to Israel, a country that would not exist for two more months), officials in displaced persons camps fined, blacklisted, and denied rations to refugees if they refused to enlist in the Haganah, a pre–Israel Defense Forces military. Crabapple tells of a refugee camp in Ulm, Germany, where residents beat the elderly parents of Jews who wouldn’t sign up for the draft. The Bundist newspaper Unzer Shtime expressed shock “that Jews, the standard victims of Fascism and terrorism, would be capable of the kinds of violence Zionists in the camps exercise toward their Bundist and other non-Zionist political rivals.” Chaim Weitzmann, later the first president of Israel, described Zionism’s biggest enemy, back in 1903: This indomitable foe was not the Cossacks carrying out pogroms or the ethnonationalists scapegoating Jews or the empires that pit minorities against one another; it was the Bund.
In the United States, the Bund was never at the center of Jewish life. In certain ways, this reflects the group’s guiding ethos. Instead of mapping the same vision they had in Eastern Europe onto the U.S., they coordinated their own experience as Jewish Socialists with the melting pot of a country that was hardly free of antisemitism but also did not target Jewish immigrants for mass butchery. Bundists were a major presence in the Workmen’s Circle, a social justice organization that provided mutual aid—including health insurance and elder care—to socialists across the U.S. and Canada. Bundists headed major unions, such as the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, became leaders in the Socialist Party of America, and helped collect donations for Jews back in Europe. One of the Bund’s major American fundraisers, Meyer London, became a congressman who represented New York’s Lower East Side. Crabapple offers an overview of the Bundists who fled Europe, but there are more detailed surveys of the Bund outside of Europe, such as David Slucki’s The International Jewish Labor Bund After 1945: Toward a Global History. Crabapple’s main interests are the threads that link her back to the old country, where the Bund experienced both its glory days and its gravest challenges.
What she does astonishingly well is reframe a decisive, often misconstrued period of European Jewish life, restoring a sense of diversity and complexity to the conversation. Bundist Marek Edelman, a leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, wrote an invaluable book about the resistance in 1945, which was not sold in Israel or published in Hebrew until 2001. It’s no mystery why: The nation furnished a narrative that such a monumental insurrection was enacted nearly exclusively by Zionist youth militias. Crabapple reorients this tale toward the truth, gifting her readers a compass for their exploration of the past, and a rallying cry for battling the oppressors of now.
Don’t Be Fooled: America Hates These Toxic Right-Wing Gasbags
After the assassination of Charlie Kirk in September, Christian nationalists were expected to unite for their martyr. Indeed, the global right wept. Argentinian President Javier Milei, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Hungarian P.M. Viktor Orbán, and an Afrikaner lobbying group all sent condolences.
Netanyahu called Kirk a “lion-hearted friend of Israel.” Right-wingers variously blamed the “progressive-liberal left” (Milei) and “radical Islamists” (Netanyahu) for his death. Donations poured in to Turning Point USA, Kirk’s right-wing youth organization. The small-donor support excited MAGA leadership. For 13 years, only elite megadonors—libertarians, Birchers, the Heritage Foundation—had kept TPUSA in business. Finally it had popular support from young conservatives, whom it purported to speak for and who, now, would surely support Trump.
In The New York Times, Ezra Klein helped canonize Kirk for a more moderate audience, admitting to having “envied” him as “one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion.”
On it went. Flags were hung at half-mast. First Amendment protections were even suspended in Kirk’s honor. Hundreds of enemies of Kirk’s Christian nationalism, including Jimmy Kimmel, were censored, suspended, or fired for telling jokes or for grieving insufficiently.
And there was that moving pop dirge: We are Charlie Kirk, his courage our own / Together unbroken, we’ll make Heaven known.
But privately MAGA wasn’t together, and it wasn’t unbroken. And today, Turning Point is not what it once was. Its events, featuring charmless pundits like Jack Posobiec and Blake Neff, are lackluster.
What’s more, as Trump’s star has fallen with the young, Kirk’s MAGA-aligned organization is struggling to hold onto its power over young hearts and minds. “Young voters are conflicted over the war in Iran and how the Epstein files were handled,” Andrew Sypher, Turning Point’s chief field officer, admitted to the Times in April. “The headwinds we’re facing now are anti-Trump.”
But it’s not just the young. The right is broadly a wreck.
Essentially, “e pluribus Charlie Kirk” gave way to MAGA struggle sessions over Kirk’s legacy. Would Kirk, the poster boy of Christian nationalism, have stuck with Trump as he backed Israel right up to the current war with Iran? This has been hotly debated among right-wing influencers all year.
Ben Shapiro seems to believe Kirk was a thoroughgoing Christian Zionist who would have supported, as Shapiro does, Trump’s war in Iran. Right-wing podcasters Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, as well as former Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene have said otherwise—that Kirk was killed just as he was standing up to neocon Turning Point donors who thought his support for Israel was waning.
The isolationist MAGA splinter group America First, which broadly includes Owens and Carlson, now saturates the right-wing airwaves. On any given day, you can now hear former Trump stalwarts, many of them close friends of Kirk, shivving the president. Megyn Kelly called Trump “grifty.” Carlson called him a “disloyal to the United States.” Theo Von called the Trump administration “fucking terrorists.” Owens called him a “genocidal maniac.”
Joe Rogan and Andrew Schultz, who once plumped for Trump on their popular podcasts, now regularly disparage him. And of course MAGA booster Greene left Congress and MAGA, and then, just last month, quit the Republican Party altogether.
Finally, on Wednesday, maximalist MAGA zealot Alex Jones called for Trump’s immediate impeachment. At the time of Kirk’s assassination, 93 percent of Republicans approved of Trump. Today, 78 percent do. Only one in five is “enthusiastic” about the rest of Trump’s final term.
And then there’s Nick Fuentes, the neo-Nazi and Kirk’s longtime rival from the far far right. With Trump’s strength diminished, and Kirk gone, “young people right now are looking for someone to follow, like they followed Charlie,” Jonathan Coon, a TPUSA chapter president, told the Times. “Fuentes [is] enticing to some of them.”
If that’s so, the midterms might get weird. Fuentes is urging his culty followers, the Groypers, to sit out the election or vote for Democrats. (“The liberals were right,” he has said.)
The mudslinging has left few reputations unsullied. Owens, Shapiro, and Erika Kirk are all deeply disliked by voters, according to a recent poll by Overton Insights.
Owens, who has regularly attacked both Shapiro and Erika Kirk, is the least unpopular. She’s at -23 percent. Erika Kirk (-26 percent) and Ben Shapiro (-27 percent) are doing even worse. Within the GOP, according to the same poll, Republicans dislike both the pro-war Shapiro and the antiwar Owens.
Erika Kirk gets positive marks with Republicans (+41 percent), but, after its autumn heyday, TPUSA has quietly struggled under her leadership. Some Turning Point leaders have resigned. One said the organization’s “mission and purpose have been lost.” TPUSA’s All-American Halftime Show at the Super Bowl, at which Erika was a no-show, was widely considered a bust.
Ben Shapiro’s media empire is doing even worse. The media company he co-founded, The Daily Wire, has “irrevocably collapsed,” as The Washington Post summarized popular opinion. Reduced traffic, massive layoffs, and expensive gambles in the entertainment business now threaten to put it out of business.
The terrible truth is that assassinations of charismatic leaders enfeeble political movements at least as often as they galvanize them.
After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, ties between civil rights groups and organized labor frayed, which stymied economic reform. After the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, the peace process in Israel essentially ground to a halt.
It’s not just losing the leader that hurts. It’s the Game of Thrones aspect of it all, the squabbling among apostles. Maybe the Christian nationalists need a new verse to their battle hymn. We were Charlie Kirk, his courage was our own / But how can we, divided, now make Heaven known?
As Europe Burns, a Climate Cover-Up Continues
“To cover up 1 high level report … looks odd,” remarked Caroline Lucas, the former leader of the United Kingdom’s Green Party. “To cover up 2 looks like a pattern.” Lucas was commenting on reporting in The Guardian revealing that the Labour government was again burying an explosive report by U.K. military and intelligence leaders warning that the global collapse of ecosystems poses grave threats to the U.K.’s security and food supply within as little as five years.
The U.K. “has no future” if it cannot “restore the natural world on which we rely for our food, water, and clean air,” said Chris Hinchliff, who is among the members of Parliament pressing the government to release the full report, rather than a shorter, redacted version. Even that version, which was obtained by The Guardian’s Fiona Harvey, “paints a devastating picture of severe food shortages, price rises, migration, political destabilisation, and possible war, resulting from the collapse of ecosystems, fuelled by the human-induced climate crisis and over-exploitation,” Harvey wrote.
Meanwhile, massive wildfires in France and Spain have been forcing hundreds of thousands of people to evacuate—and prompting forthright countermeasures from governments. In Spain, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said the fires were effects of the “climate emergency.” For the second year in a row, the prime minister responded to ferocious wildfires by calling on political parties across the ideological spectrum “to reach an agreement, a State pact, to address the climate emergency.”
As if to validate the U.K. spy chiefs’ report in real time, food production in Europe is already suffering from the extreme heat of recent weeks, which has been “sucking soils dry.” France’s maize harvest is the lowest in 50 years; across Europe, nine million tons of grain have been lost. Such losses are of particular concern for the U.K., which imports much of its food.
The U.K. report is notable for highlighting not only climate change but the related problem of biodiversity loss and collapsing ecosystems. For example, scientists have warned that continued logging and high temperatures are pushing the Amazon rainforest toward an irreversible shift into a savannah. That would drive further climate chaos as the Amazon transforms from an absorber into an emitter of carbon.
Aides to former Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer twice quashed plans to release the U.K. report, Harvey reported, allegedly for fear that the climate-denying Reform UK Party would attack Labour for putting climate concerns ahead of the cost of living. Climate denial persists in the U.K. media as well: Even as wildfires scorched Europe, the front page of the Rupert Murdoch–owned Times (of London) featured a rant against the net-zero-emissions goal that scientists say is essential to preserving a livable planet. And across Europe, most news outlets are still not reporting that climate change is what is driving these fires and heat waves, even as the outlets illustrate their stories with “fun in the sun” images of people at the beach. “The pictures do not convey the severity of the moment Europe finds itself in,” observed Al Jazeera English.
Andy Burnham, who replaced Starmer as prime minister on July 20, has yet to speak publicly about the buried report or climate change in general. He has said, however, that he is open to approving increased drilling for oil and gas off Britain’s coast in the North Sea. This, as the smoke from wildfires in France and Spain—and in Scotland, in the U.K.—is estimated to cause “well over 100,000 excess deaths globally,” according to Dr. Theodore Keeping of Imperial College London.
Covering Climate Now’s 89 Percent Project spotlights the reality that 80 to 89 percent of the world’s people want their governments to take stronger climate action. In this summer of smoke and fire, the public is waiting for their politicians and their press to respond. “Voters are much more tuned into this than most of our [elected] representatives are,” author George Monbiot said on the U.K.’s Channel 4. “And indeed than most of the media is.”
This article is published as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.
Why Trump’s 250 Grand Prix Is a Really Bad Idea
President Donald Trump is a whiz at creating problems out of things that you never, ever worried about before. The latest concerns the Freedom 250 Grand Prix (“Let Freedom Rev!”), an Indy 500 race set for August 22 and 23 around the National Mall. The Grand Prix threatens damage to what may be the densest concentration of historic, scientific, and fine arts treasures anywhere in the United States, from the 76-by-30-foot Calder mobile dangling from the ceiling of the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art to the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights at the National Archives to the Wright Brothers plane and Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis hanging in the National Air and Space Museum. These objects, and many more, reside in buildings situated along the Grand Prix route, and the vibrations caused by two days of twin-turbocharged V-6 engine-powered Indy cars tearing past them at 200-plus miles per hour won’t exactly be good for them.
If you haven’t heard of the Freedom 250 Grand Prix, that’s probably because you’re distracted by the Iran War, or the 60 or so people that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has killed during the past 18 months, or the 33 arrests, prosecutions, and investigations of Trump’s political enemies thus far by the Justice department, or the outrageous self-enrichment that has allowed Trump to increase his net worth by roughly $3.5 billion. Or, if you’ve been following my coverage of the pending sale of the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, perhaps you’re worried about the threat to New Deal murals by Ben Shahn, Philip Guston, and Seymour Fogel in that building—which also figure in the Freedom 250 Grand Prix story, because the Cohen is on the Grand Prix route, too.
It’s hard to imagine a worse place than the National Mall for an Indy 500 race. Apart from the National Gallery, the National Archives, the Air and Space Museum, and the Cohen building, the Freedom 250 Grand Prix route will roar past the National Gallery’s outdoor sculpture garden, the Museum of the American Indian, the Hirschorn, Frank Gehry’s Eisenhower Memorial, and the National Museum of Natural History. The National Museum of American History, which contains Francis Scott Key’s Star-Spangled banner and the Revolutionary-war era Gunboat Philadelphia, is one block away. The gunboat, an extraordinary thing to see, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, even though it isn’t precisely a “place.”
These facilities are bracing for potential damage from vibrations. At the National Gallery, I’m told certain artworks have already been moved away from the side of the building facing the racetrack. Chris Abanavas, a press officer there, declined to confirm that, but said in a written statement that the museum “has conducted a vibration study and based on those results will take any precautions necessary to ensure the safety of our staff, visitors, art, and facilities during the race.” Oy.
The race is the brainchild of Bud Denker, president of the Penske Corporation, which owns the Indianapolis 500 Speedway, and Erik Shanks, chief executive of Fox Sports, which will broadcast it. They sold Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy on the idea, but Congress wouldn’t agree to a route that would zip past the Capitol. So in January, Denker shortened the route to keep it off the Capitol grounds and Trump signed an executive order authorizing Duffy to “take steps to ensure that all permits, approvals, and other authorizations as are necessary … are issued and granted as expeditiously as possible.” Lisa Delpy Neirotti, professor of sports management at George Washington University, told CNN: “It’s easy to pull off because they have an executive order that they can basically do what they need to do to get this thing done. If they had to go through public hearings, if they had to go through a lot of other hoops, it would not be enough time.”
The big hoop to jump through is Section 106 of the 1966 National Historic Preservation Act, about which I wrote last week. Section 106 regulations do include protections against vibrations, typically from construction or buses or subways. As expected, the Trump-controlled Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, or ACHP, last week endorsed a drastic curtailment of Section 106 regulation. But that’s a proposed regulation that must be published in the Federal Register, and on which the public must be given 30 days to comment before it can be made final. There’s no way the scaled-back Section 106 rule will be in effect when the race takes place on August 22 and 23.
And even the new rule might well require a Section 106 review of the Freedom 250 Grand Prix, because the entire Mall is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and so, individually, are the National Gallery, the National Archives, the Cohen building, the Hirshorn, the National Museum of Natural History, and the National Museum of American History. There are also some outdoor items on the Grand Prix route that are listed independently on the National Register, including “Man Controlling Trade,” a 1942 statue by Michael Lantz outside the Federal Trade Commission; the 1882 Temperance Fountain; and a statue of Civil War General Winfield Scott Hancock.
Sara Bronin, who chaired the ACHP under President Joe Biden, told me: “You wouldn’t want to see some of these things topple over because of the rumblings and the vibrations.” In the case of the Ben Shahn frescoes in the Cohen building, already there are cracks in the plaster. David Olin, a GSA preservation contractor, told a GSA tour group in March, “There is active cracking in the wall substrate and there is active cracking in the plaster”—just from everyday wear and tear—“slowly and systematically undermining the aggregate within the plaster.”
Did the Trump administration go through the required Section 106 process? Only half-assedly. The National Park Service consulted in March with the DC State Historic Preservation Office, describing the route (1.7 miles), the number of turns (7), and the necessary installation of barriers, grandstands, pedestrian bridges, and so on. The National Parks Service saw “no adverse effects” under Section 106. It made no mention of the museums along the route and what’s contained inside them. Neither was there any consultation with the National Trust for Historic Preservation. That isn’t required in every case, but it’s expected when there are obvious complications, as there are here.
In an April 21 letter, the DC State Historic Preservation Office more or less said godspeed with all your semiquincentennial plans, just make sure to secure the necessary permits and clean up afterwards. For its part, the General Services Administration said in a written statement: “Out of an abundance of caution, GSA reviewed the proposed route for potential impact to our nearby assets and identified no areas of concern. Like millions of other Americans, we fully support the patriotic celebrations happening in our Nation’s capital, including the Freedom250 Grand Prix.”
There’s zero evidence that the National Park Service or any other government agency considered the possible impact of vibrations. That fell to Mary Okin, assistant director of the Living New Deal, who raised it with specific reference to the Cohen building. “It has become clear to us,” Okin wrote in a July 27 letter to the National Park Service and other agencies, “that this event would include substantial potential for adverse effects due to vibratory impacts likely with sound waves in excess of 130 [decibels] during the race.” That level of vibrations, she wrote, is “well above normal street traffic and even go beyond those of jackhammers, pile drivers, and even freight trains.”
“Like many others,” Okin continued, “we question the necessity and cost of this event.” But if it must take place, Okin urged the installation of temporary sound barriers and monitoring of the frescoes by a conservator during the event. “I’m very concerned not only about the buildings but the collections [and] the outdoor sculpture,” Michelle Arcari Rose, a former associate general counsel at the National Trust, told me. “Why would we risk any of that just for a Grand Prix at a place that is just patently not appropriate?” An email I sent to the Freedom 250 press office went unanswered.
Ordinarily, when construction work takes place near a protected historic property, consideration of vibrations’ effect precedes the groundbreaking. If damage is detected, the work comes to a halt while mitigation methods are applied. But there is, of course, no chance that the Freedom 250 Grand Prix will be brought to a half if there’s damage to the Shahn murals, the Wright Brothers plane, General Winfield Scott Hancock, or anything else along the route.
Look, I’m no expert on the impact of vibrations on museums. But I do know that museums keep track of vibrations created by mere footfalls. According to one study, a noise level above 80 decibels can cause damage to certain historic artifacts. The noise level at an Indy 500 race is closer to 140 decibels, which is roughly equivalent to standing next to a jet engine.
The usual standard for measuring vibrations is “peak particle velocity,” or PPV, which is the maximum speed at which ground vibrations move molecules. A 2012 memorandum of agreement among the ACHP, the National Highway Administration, and state historic preservation officers for Kentucky and Indiana, concerning a bridge built over the Ohio River, stipulated that the maximum PPV during construction should be 0.20 inches per second. That same level was required in 2009 when the Coast Guard was building a new headquarters at the former site of St. Elizabeths mental hospital in Washington, D.C. No such requirement is imposed on Trump’s Indy 500 car race.
The Freedom 250 Grand Prix is supposed to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Let’s hope it doesn’t end up smashing the case that contains it in the National Archives’s Rotunda for the Charters of Freedom.
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Father of boy rescued at Seabright: ‘We’re so grateful’ to teen lifeguard who saved his son
Sumit Rai, the father of Nathaniel Rai, the 10-year-old boy from Texas who nearly drowned this weekend at Seabright Beach amongst rough ocean conditions, said he’s been trying to reach out to Ryder Williams, the lifeguard who saved his son, so he can thank him personally. Rai said Williams should get every honor and medal possible for his bravery.
After a wave of rescues, Santa Cruz experts share the beach safety lessons everyone should know
Everytime I hear about people dying or getting hurt in the ocean, it reminds me just how vital ocean safety is. People who live in Santa Cruz County are often well aware of the dangers the beach can bring, but that does not mean the dangers are any less severe; I believe it is always good to have a refresher on what safety looks like.
As someone who has grown up going to Capitola Beach either with my family or attending the Junior Lifeguard program, I was taught how to be safe. Whether I was doing a dolphin dive through a strong current or never turning my back to the ocean, I have always been aware of potential ocean dangers, even on days with seemingly perfect weather.
I often feel frustrated when I see people taking unnecessary risks in our waters. I have to remind myself that not everyone has had the opportunity to learn how to recognize those dangers or how to respond to them. Sometimes, even when you take every precaution, things simply happen. The ocean is unpredictable and no amount of experience can eliminate every risk.
In light of the recent beach hazards warning and the high number of rescues in the area, I decided to interview a local surfer and lifeguard to share their tips on beach safety.
Curtis Koppel
I first spoke to Curtis Koppel, a longtime Santa Cruz resident who has been surfing and sailing in these waters for over 60 years and asked for his best advice, and he offered these surfing “rules:”
Rule No. 1: Do everything you can to hold onto your board. If the wave hits you and you bail on your board it can hit other people and they can get hurt.
Rule No. 2: Don’t let someone misguide you to a place you are not comfortable with – don’t let them take you to the black diamond of surfing. When you go to a location and condition that aligns with your surfing level, you will be more safe and comfortable. Location can be crucial, for instance Steamers (which is for advanced surfers) vs. Cowells or Capitola (best for beginners).
Rule No. 3: Be aware of your surroundings. It is important to understand where the wave breaks and that every wave is different, especially when you do not always know what is below you.
Rule No. 4: Have patience. There is a lot of waiting for a wave and you need to feel the way the ocean moves and know which waves are ones you can catch. Many people start out overconfident and end up getting hurt, whether by the water or hitting the bottom. “I am not going to surf a wave I cannot catch” is a good mantra for people to think about.
Rule No. 5: Take safety seriously. You have no business going out there when it’s not safe. If there are warnings about the conditions you should not go out to surf.
Koppel, who happens to be my grandfather, has a reputation for storytelling and talking about his experience, which is an amazing quality to have. After going over his list of rules, he shared with me some common mistakes and misconceptions people make or have about surfing.
When people are coming into the waves, “the biggest mistake is to paddle right in front of where they’re going. That’s a common mistake and you are looking to get hurt,” he says. “So find a way to time your paddle out and to be respectful of where people are on the wave and where you can expect trouble. You’ve got to know the waves and the people around you.”
A lot of people think surfing is about standing up. Koppel tells people who are new to the sport that standing up isn’t important; it’s about trusting yourself first and feeling comfortable before coming off your board.
“If I give you a board and you just stand there, you’ll fall over. It is like a bike where you need the element of movement,” he says, adding that surfing is all about finding your balance.
And above all, ask yourself, “are you having fun?” Because that is what surfing should be.
For more ocean safety tips, I spoke to Jack Snyder, who works for the Santa Cruz City Fire Department’s Marine Safety Division at Main Beach, located next to the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, and he offered these tips:
On rip currents, which are strong, narrow and localized streams of water moving directly away from the shore, Snyder says to look for these signs to identify one: A narrow channel of darker, choppy water moving away from shore; it’s usually in the shape of a mushroom cloud; look for a break or gap in the pattern of incoming waves; and lastly, look for discolored water from stirred up sand.
If you get stuck in a rip current, stay calm, never try to swim directly against it, try to float on your back and take some deep breaths, and try to swim parallel to shore to get out of the rip current, and then swim back onto the beach.
If you are getting tumbled by waves and you can’t get out, he shares that the best thing to do is to stay calm and take deep breaths in between diving under the waves. If you feel like you are getting pulled out before the wave hits you, the best thing to do is to let the wave tumble you as far in towards the beach as possible to help you get out. It may seem counter-intuitive, but using the ocean’s power to help you get out is a really helpful skill to have.
Don’t turn your back on the ocean. It is so unpredictable and conditions change every minute. The last thing you want to do is have your back facing the ocean and a big wave comes and sweeps you out to sea.
When there is a big swell in the water and you are thinking about heading to the beach, please make sure to check in with a lifeguard to see what the conditions are like. Sometimes with big swells, the ocean looks calm and inviting, but as soon as a set of waves comes, it looks like a completely different place. Hazards are everywhere.
There are other risks. Many people also underestimate strong shore break waves, changing tides, sun and heat exposure, cold water, and the dangers of alcohol around the water.
Credit: Kevin Painchaud / Lookout Santa Cruz
Cliff jumping. At Main Beach, we sometimes have people who try to jump off of the railroad trestle into the river, or they try to jump off of San Lorenzo point into the river. But what most people don’t know is that sometimes the river is only a few feet deep, which makes it extremely dangerous to be jumping off of something that high. Our main job as lifeguards is prevention, so we try to make sure that we stop something from happening before it happens. Usually, we will talk to the people who are trying to jump and inform them about the dangers of jumping off of the trestle or the cliff. We do not allow people to jump at any time because the risks are much higher than the potential reward.
We ended our conversation with Snyder sharing that the best way to stay safe in the ocean is to be aware of your surroundings, know your limits, and always swim near a lifeguard. Paying attention to beach conditions, following warning flags and looking out for others can help prevent emergencies before they happen. And finally, being prepared and respecting the power of the ocean are the most important steps to keeping yourself and others safe, he says.
In researching this story, I found other useful tips. Among them:
Weather can change quickly. So it is important to always stay up to date on the conditions and check for any beach hazards. Even when the ocean appears calm, it is still important to follow the basic rules and follow them regardless of how the ocean conditions appear.
Check for flags in the area, and know what they mean.
Green: Low hazard; calm conditions, safe for swimming.
Yellow: Medium hazard; moderate surf and/or strong currents. Exercise caution.
Black Ball Beach Flag: Non-powered watercraft are prohibited in that area, including surf boards, paddleboards, etc.
Orange: Environmental hazard indicating poor air or water quality.
Purple: Dangerous marine life is present (e.g., jellyfish, stingrays).
Red: High hazard; rough conditions with high surf and/or dangerous currents. Swimming is not recommended.
Double Red: Water is entirely closed to the public; entry is prohibited
Check the tides. People often go to the beach when the tide is low but do not realize the tide is slowly rising. During low tides, waves are less intense. One beach in Santa Cruz, for example, has a stair access point, the 38th stairs. When the tide is low it is easy to walk down to the beach to find a spot on the cove. But as the tide rises the path is no longer there as the waves block the exit causing people to get stuck. To check what the tides are like in your area go to NOAA Tides and Currents.
Additional resources:
Ocean Safety | City of Santa Cruz, CA
Ocean Safety for the Beginner Santa Cruz Surfer – Capitola Beach Company
Sloane Birnbaum is an incoming senior at Soquel High School and a summer intern at Lookout Santa Cruz.
The post After a wave of rescues, Santa Cruz experts share the beach safety lessons everyone should know appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.
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Trump Blurted Out Openly Corrupt Plot to Censor ABC—and It Backfired
Donald Trump and his dutiful Federal Communications Commission chair, Brendan Carr, have been targeting ABC’s broadcast licenses, and ABC just challenged this hard in a new filing. In an interesting move, ABC cited Trump’s own social media postings and remarks at speeches to show that he is corruptly trying to censor the network as punishment for its content and viewpoints, in violation of the First Amendment. Amusingly, in those examples, Trump blurted right out in public that he does in fact want the FCC to punish ABC precisely because of its speech. Now this has become a weapon against Trump. We talked to law professor Leah Litman, author of a good book about the Supreme Court. She explains why Trump’s public bullying should undermine his case, walks us through the legal ins-and-outs here, details why ABC might prevail, and discusses how open, explicit corruption is intrinsic to his political project. Listen to this episode here.