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

Homeowners in Hispanic and Black communities nationwide are paying a disproportionate share of skyrocketing home insurance costs, according to a recent report. The disparities leave communities of color at greater risk as climate change increases the frequency of billion-dollar disasters.  

The report, released in July by the Consumer Federation of America, a nonprofit representing nearly 250 consumer groups, concluded that homeowners in predominantly Hispanic zip codes pay on average a 30 percent higher premium ($950 more annually) compared with homeowners in white communities. In predominantly Black zip codes, homeowners pay, on average, a 16 percent higher premium ($500 more annually).

The findings were based on an analysis of identical policies across communities, eliminating the possibility the inequities were related to differences among homeowners, their homes or what they chose to insure, the report said. Local risk factors could be responsible for some of the disparities, although even when such factors were accounted for the gap remained large.

“A lot of this bias can kind of creep in if they’re not paying attention to potential unequal impacts.”

“We’ve talked a lot about our insurance affordability crisis,” said Sharon Cornelissen, director of housing at the Consumer Federation of America and a co-author of the report. “What we haven’t really talked about is sort of the racially inequitable impacts of that, and that Black and Hispanic homeowners are particularly struggling.”

The inequities add up to at least $28,500 in additional insurance costs over the span of a 30-year mortgage for homeowners in Hispanic communities and $15,000 for homeowners in Black communities, according to the report. The situation points to a legacy of redlining in home insurance that continues to challenge communities of color when it comes to homeownership and exposure to risk, although the discrimination today may be inadvertent.

The historical practice of redlining involved the designation of certain neighborhoods as “hazardous” for mortgage lending, based largely on the race of residents. People in these neighborhoods were denied home loans, leading to lower home values and less homeownership. Although redlining ended in 1968 with the Fair Housing Act, the practice has left a legacy of segregation and disparities in these neighborhoods that endures today when it comes to health care, education, incarceration, access to nutritious food, and public investment in infrastructure. The inequities also have left these communities more vulnerable to climate impacts such as heat. 

Mark Friedlander, spokesman for the Insurance Information Institute, an industry group, said premiums are based on risk and not race or ethnicity and that the system used to establish premiums is actuarially grounded and heavily regulated.

“Using race, or any proxy for race, to set insurance rates is illegal in every US jurisdiction, and state insurance regulators review and approve the rating factors insurers use precisely to guard against that,” he said in a statement provided to Inside Climate News. “Many of the communities cited in reports like this are located in areas with objectively higher catastrophe exposure or higher costs to rebuild and repair after a loss.”

The report found the most acute home insurance disparity among homeowners in predominantly Hispanic zip codes in Florida, where they pay on average 58 percent more ($5,014 annually) for the same coverage as those in white communities. In the next four states, the gap was pronounced, but smaller: 20 percent ($431) in New York, 18 percent ($278) in Washington, 16 percent ($244) in Massachusetts and 15 percent ($633) in Kansas.

Source: CFA, based on Quadrant Information Services and American Community Survey data.Paul Horn/Inside Climate News

The inequities in Florida, where homeowners have been particularly hard-hit by insurance costs, represent “an enormous amount of money,” said Moira Birss, senior fellow at the Climate and Community Institute, a progressive think tank. “And so when we’re thinking about how we’re having an affordability crisis in this country…that’s unconscionable.”

When it comes to predominantly Black zip codes, the inequities are greatest in Michigan at 74 percent ($1,768 annually), followed by Pennsylvania at 57 percent ($1,048), New Jersey at 22 percent ($332), Massachusetts at 20 percent ($321) and New York at 19 percent ($417).

Source: CFA, based on Quadrant Information Services and American Community Survey data.Paul Horn/Inside Climate News

Meanwhile, the cost of insurance for the typical homeowner jumped by 24 percent between 2021 and 2024, according to the report, based on previous research by the Consumer Federation of America. Greenhouse gas emissions, primarily those associated with fossil fuels, are heating the global climate, shifting weather patterns and leading to more extreme disasters such as hurricanes and wildfires. That risk is moving insurance companies to raise rates.

Insurance companies have provided fewer and more expensive options in communities of color compared with white communities, the report said. It highlighted a $17.5 million settlement from the 1990s over a lawsuit alleging the insurance company Nationwide discouraged agents from selling coverage in Black neighborhoods, labeled Black zip codes as undesirable, and used racial profiling to deny insurance to Black homeowners. American Family Mutual Insurance Company similarly agreed to pay more than $16 million in a settlement to Black homeowners who were provided inferior policies and, in some cases, denied coverage based on race.

More recently insurers have adopted new proprietary methods for determining premiums and claims payments, including some incorporating artificial intelligence, that raise concerns about possible discrimination, according to the report. For instance, previous research by the Consumer Federation of America found that homeowners with lower credit scores pay an average penalty of $1,996 annually, or 99 percent more, for insurance, a concern considering longstanding structural factors that have meant communities of color tend to have lower credit scores.

“I’m not saying that they have some secret race factor that they put into their model,” Cornelissen said. “A lot of this bias can kind of creep in if they’re not paying attention to potential unequal impacts. A lot of this could be through AI models or other factors that have a disproportionate impact on Black and Hispanic communities.”

Friedlander said the best way to make insurance more affordable and equitable is by reducing risk through resilience efforts such as strengthening building codes and increasing mitigation funding. 

The report called on states to enforce fair housing laws and demand more transparency and accountability.

“Unless the insurance industry wants to give us more information about why this is happening,” Birss said, “it’s pretty hard not to interpret this as pretty serious racial discrimination.”

Usually when someone celebrates an anniversary, it’s singular. An anniversary.

However, local musician Rick Walker is no ordinary somebody.

Charlie Kirk’s assassination—and the days immediately following it—saw the ultraconservative agitator go from a tertiary character in MAGA’s youth culture war to an avatar for the right’s ultimate vision for America. He became a patron saint for persecuted patriots everywhere, his name invoked as a zealous call to arms before his body was even buried in the ground. 

“Let me tell you something I’ve not shared with anybody. The last message that Charlie Kirk gave to me before he joined his creator in heaven … he said that we have to dismantle and take on the radical left organizations in this country that are fomenting violence. That was the last message that he sent me, before that assassin stole him from all of us” White House adviser Stephen Miller hollered on Fox News two days after Kirk was shot. “I don’t care how.... We are going to do what it takes to dismantle the organizations and the entities that … are trying to inspire terrorism.” 

“You want us to live in fear? We will not live in fear. But you will live in exile,” Miller concluded.

This threat became the right’s rhetorical marching order for the next year. What followed was a frantic, McCarthyist campaign that led to hundreds of people getting fired or disciplined for expressing their First Amendment right, a renewed federal attack on the so-called “radical left,” and the whitewashing of Kirk as a normal guy who just wanted to talk tough subjects with everyday Americans with civility and in good faith—all of which looks funny in the light 365 days later. 

In just the two months following Kirk’s death last September, more than 600 people were punished in some way by their employers for their online comments about Kirk. Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission biologist Brittney Brown was fired after the conservative Libs of TikTok X account sent a mere repost of hers to her boss. It read “they care exactly as much [about the shooting of Kirk] as charlie kirk cared about children being shot in their classrooms, which is to say, not at all.” Austin Peay State University professor Darren Michael was fired after posting an old article on something Kirk himself said: “Charlie Kirk Says Gun Deaths ‘Unfortunately’ Worth it to Keep 2nd Amendment.” The Washington Post’s Karen Attiah was fired for criticizing gun violence and posting a racist quote of Kirk’s, and retired Tennessee police officer Larry Bushart was actually thrown in jail for reposting a quote from Trump saying America needed to “get over” the 2024 Perry High School mass shooting. “Seems relevant today…” Bushart commented. 

Each of these cases failed to hold up to legal scrutiny. Brown was awarded $485,000 in a settlement; Michael got $500,000. A private arbitrator last month ordered the Post to rehire Attiah, who was also rewarded backpay dating back to her termination, and Bushart got $835,000. According to Forbes, the victims of this witch hunt have been awarded a total of at least $2 million as of May. 

This was perhaps the most vexing outcome of Kirk’s assassination. Lawmakers and pseudo-intellectuals targeted their fellow Americans for expressing their opinions about a man who—at least on paper—championed the First Amendment at any and all cost. And while not everyone who was punished got hundreds of thousands of dollars of vindication (sorry to MSNBC’s Matthew Dowd), the numerous legal rejections of the witch hunt revealed just how toothless the whole thing was to begin with.  

Then there was the Miller narrative, the notion that the radical left of America was directly responsible for Kirk’s death and should be hunted down and rooted out of society.

“There is nothing left to talk about with the left. They hate us. They assassinated our nice guy who actually talked to them peacefully debating ideas,” then-Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene posted five days after Kirk’s assassination. “Then millions on the left celebrated and made clear they want all of us dead. To be honest, I want a peaceful national divorce. Our country is too far gone and too far divided, and it’s no longer safe for any of us. What will come from Charlie Kirk being martyred is already happening.”

This ominous sentiment spurred actual policy proposals to target the left. Representative Nancy Mace urged the Department of Education to “cut off federal funding from any elementary, secondary, and post-secondary educational institution refusing to hold teachers or administrators accountable for celebrating the murder of Charlie Kirk.” Representative Anna Paulina Luna called for the Trump administration to go after longtime boogeyman and liberal donor George Soros because that was “exactly what Charlie Kirk dedicated his life to fighting.” 

Democratic Senator Chris Murphy called it then. 

“The murder of Charlie Kirk could have united Americans to confront political violence. Instead, Trump and his anti-democratic radicals look to be readying a campaign to destroy dissent.... The right has been looking for a pretext to destroy their opposition for a long time,” he warned four days after Kirk’s assassination. “That’s why it was so important for Trump sycophants to take over the DoJ and FBI, so that if a pretext arose, Trump could orchestrate a dizzying campaign to shut down political opposition groups and lock up or harass its leaders. This is what could be coming.” 

While everything on the Republicans’ wish-list didn’t come true, some did.  Less than three weeks after Kirk’s death, Trump in his name signed the National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), a chilling executive order that directed federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies to go after antifa, defined as anyone with opinions “associated with anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity … and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.” Even if the plans for such a sweeping order were in place before Kirk’s death, his killing was most certainly used to further justify it. 

“Even in the aftermath of the horrifying assassination of Charlie Kirk, some individuals who adhered to the alleged shooter’s ideology embraced and cheered this evil murder while actively encouraging more political violence,” the second sentence of the memorandum reads. “Charlie Kirk’s alleged assassin engraved the bullets used in the murder with so-called ‘anti-fascist’ rhetoric.”  

The hunt for leftists quickly became global, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio spearheading an international crackdown on leftist organizations, referring to them as “far-left terrorists” and “enemies of civilization.” The State Department put targets on just about everyone—including the Democratic Socialists of America, Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, Amazon union leader Christian Smalls, and environmental activist Isra Hirsi, the daughter of Representative Ilhan Omar—all of whom are overwhelmingly peaceful. 

Unlike the social media witch hunt, this fallout from Kirk’s assassination has resulted in lasting, top-down consequences that we are still just beginning to witness. Most pertinent is the case of anti-ICE protesters in Prairieland, Texas, who were given extreme federal sentences that collectively amounted to hundreds of years in prison, including 30 years for someone who simply moved a box of zines. This is the dangerous radical left that the right is fighting in Kirk’s name. 

It doesn’t matter that antifa isn’t really a thing, or that most leftist groups lack any kind of real institutional power, especially compared to that of the MAGA movement. In death, Kirk has been most effective as an excuse to reaffirm the Trump administration’s greater aim of casting as wide a net as possible to wipe out any kind of left-leaning opposition, wherever it may be—a far cry from Kirk’s insistence on free speech. 

The right’s biggest failure in their response to Kirk’s assassination was their attempt to lionize him, to recast him as a sort of political Johnny Appleseed who traveled the country, spreading reasonable conservative ideals to campuses dominated by the left’s all-powerful “cultural marxism.” That narrative fell apart with each of Kirk’s resurfaced debate clips, along with the pomp and circumstance that accompanied the public grieving of his widowed wife, Erika Kirk.

Instead, Kirk’s death has been memed even more than George Floyd’s (whom he called a “scumbag”). There’s the “We Are Charlie Kirk” AI song that has gone number one on Spotify—not in a good way—and there’s the “kirkification” of various individuals, real or fictional—superimposing Kirk’s face onto Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man or the Silver Surfer, among many others. Then there’s the absurd true crime narrative that has been placed on his death by former friend and collaborator Candace Owens, who has spent the past year pushing conspiracy theories about Kirk’s death—and Erika’s supposed role in it. 

Kirk’s killing sorely lacks the gravity or solemnity of other prominent assassinations, instead becoming completely consumed by the dry nihilism of the internet. But the right only has itself to blame. Frenzied purge aside, it’s almost like they didn’t care either—from FBI Director Kash Patel’s Valhalla comment, to Erika Kirk’s WWE entrance at her husband’s memorial, to Trump brushing off his death to talk about his ballroom.

“All that Charlie ever did was have conversations with people. He didn’t insult anyone. He made arguments. He debated. He wasn’t an extremist in any way,” The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh wrote the day of Kirk’s assassination. “Everyone who knew Charlie personally loved him. That’s the kind of guy he was. And they still killed him.” 

There will be versions of this quote going around forever. They’ll never be true. Kirk was an extremist. He despised Martin Luther King Jr., and thought being gay was an “error.” He’s quoted saying, “If I see a Black pilot, I’m gonna be like, ‘Boy, I hope he’s qualified.’” He called for a “Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor,” and called Islam “the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America.” He was no William F. Buckley, a bona fide intellectual debating the likes of James Baldwin and Gore Vidal. He was one of many right-wing commentators who, for most young Americans, existed entirely on the internet—on Jubilee videos and YouTube shorts debating zoomers about abortion, gender roles, and affirmative action. He was not “practicing politics in exactly the right way,” as The New York Times’ Ezra Klein claimed. He was a bigot til his last breath, and one year later, his death has only begotten firings, suppression of free speech, countless memes, and even more bigotry.  

Kevin Reddington’s media appearances this week Tuesday capped off a big summer for him. Reddington, who has practiced law in Massachusetts for 50 years, won sudden fame for his swashbuckling defense of Lindsay Clancy, the Duxbury nurse accused of killing her three children in 2023.

In a hard-fought trial, Reddington argued Clancy wasn’t criminally responsible for the murders because her mental illness had eclipsed her moral discernment. As the trial ended with the jury deadlocked 11–1, with the majority evidently voting not guilty, Reddington was also knighted on social media for his passionate defense of women’s mental health.

But what stood out in Reddington’s post-trial interviews has not been his advocacy for women. It’s his advocacy for civics. For him to promote the duties of citizenship, at such a low point for our constitutional democracy, was somewhat startling. You could almost find a shred of faith in the benighted American experiment.

What Reddington said that deserves our attention came in two parts. First, George Stephanopoulos pressed him on his earlier boast that he had “crushed” the prosecution. After the trial, Reddington had indeed flexed outside the courtroom. “That was bravado,” he said now. “I could have been more circumspect.”

This dialing back of his earlier bluster was not just good manners. It’s how due process works. The Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution safeguard an adversarial system in which legal opponents fight hard, aiming to, yes, crush each other’s arguments. This is why courtroom trials play like thrillsports in America. But then comes the rule of law. When a jury—or an electorate—renders a decision, both sides absolutely must turn “circumspect” and accept the legal outcome.

Reddington’s emphasis on deference to the rule of law stands out during a decade in which Donald Trump’s chronic refusal to accept any law that disfavors him, most notably the outcome of the 2020 election, has caused the slow-rolling constitutional crisis that continues to engulf the nation.

On September 4, in typical fashion, Trump blew past the presumption of innocence on the subject of Lindsay Clancy, recklessly claiming she’d have to “pay a price” because she’d done a “horrible, horrible thing.” Trump will always choose vigilantism over the rule of law.

Reddington also spoke insightfully about the holdout juror. This is the person, remember, whose refusal to vote with the majority cost Reddington a massive courtroom victory—and a lifetime of book and movie deals. If Trump were in Reddington’s place, this juror would be identified, maligned, and threatened.

But Reddington did nothing of the kind. “I would defend that individual’s right to be a holdout forever,” he said.

“That’s part of our judicial system,” he went on. “I respect that.”

(Enlightenment 101: “I may disagree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”)

In a constitutional democracy, individuals campaign, compete, advocate, and argue. And when it comes to capitulating to a consensus or a decree, an American is indeed empowered to be a “holdout forever.” To make this point to Stephanopoulos, Reddington even cited Sidney Lumet’s Twelve Angry Men, the patriotic 1957 film used (once upon a time, at least) to teach high schoolers about the duties of juries, constitutional rights, and the freedom to dissent.

But Reddington then rounded on the subject of the law itself. His concern, he said, was that the holdout evidently “refused to apply the law of reasonable doubt” during the deliberations. In her own post-trial appearances, the jury’s foreperson has further said the holdout harbored full-fledged reasonable doubt but still wouldn’t vote to acquit.

This procedural twist deserves more attention. Who decides if a juror’s doubt is reasonable? If a juror acknowledges having reasonable doubt but won’t acquit, is he engaged in some form of individual nullification? These are the kind of thorny questions that should be discussed in civics classes, along with a screening of the Lumet film. They get at some of the Constitution’s founding conceptions of universal rationality, individual rights, due process, and how deliberation works.

The jury mechanics in American common law can seem chaotic to Europeans. After all, their civil-law courts rarely use juries at all. Instead, judges in France and Germany hand down decisions not after unruly debate among peers but on the strength of their intime conviction, or strong private belief.

But Americans tend to trust juries that boisterously deliberate more than judges who solemnly reflect. Public polling shows that about half of Americans trust a jury to be fair, while only 23 percent place that same trust in a single judge.

What’s more, the fastest way to raise people’s trust in the judicial system seems to be to have them serve on juries. According to a recent report by Duke Law School, people who do jury duty come to trust the judicial system more and see U.S. courts as more legitimate.

The idea that a democracy should have “a government of laws, not men” is still hype music in Massachusetts, where John Adams codified it and wrote it into the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780. Among the government’s laws are the ones that guide due process. Due process gives authority to the law of the land, while also protecting individuals from it.

Much reporting on the Lindsay Clancy trial has focused on the extrajudicial chatter and tinfoil-hat speculations that have no place in our justice system. Rather than appealing to Trump to pardon Lindsay Clancy—as he did on Good Morning America—Reddington should condemn reckless conspiracy-mongering, which could lead to Trump-style vigilantism or preempt a fair retrial.

Meanwhile, Trump’s manful efforts to rig the midterms may continue to make a mockery of the Constitution. But during America’s 250th summer, and during a trial about a terrible tragedy, we got a glimpse of what civics is supposed to be, in Duxbury, Massachusetts, 10 miles from Plymouth Rock.

When Republicans are faced with an affordability problem, they eagerly try to turn it into a culture war issue, every time. The latest example is a draft plan from the White House to raid a federal program that subsidizes care for low-income families in order to provide subsidies to married couples in which one parent stays home. The proposal, which is backed by Vice President JD Vance and appeared in Project 2025, the conservative policy blueprint that has guided some of President Trump’s worst ideas, is a clear attempt by the administration to use federal money to impose traditional family roles on the working class.

Opening these subsidies up to married couples—and doing so without dramatically expanding funding for childcare for working parents—is reactionary trad wife nonsense. (Not that any low-income woman could live the Instagram trad wife dream with the additional infusion of only $9K a year, the typical amount that parents receive from this Clinton-era program.) Yet families do need help. Democrats need to emphasize that families’ affordability struggles can’t be addressed by pitting different groups against each other—and that they have a better plan, one which will help all parents in need.

There is nothing wrong with stay-at-home moms receiving government help, but that help shouldn’t come at the expense of working parents, as even some conservative policy experts have pointed out. Patrick T. Brown, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, told The New York Times that while he is “a big proponent of more support for stay-at-home parents,” he opposes this plan because it doesn’t increase funding, which “would mean more parents competing for the same dollars, and leaving more parents—particularly single working parents—worse off.” One consequence of this increased competition for the same pot of money is that it almost certainly would drive some childcare providers out of business—and that would leave working parents in those communities with fewer, and more expensive, options.

Working families are already struggling to afford the cost of childcare, a situation that 80 percent of voters viewed as a “crisis” in January of this year. This is a bipartisan concern, with almost two-thirds of Republicans agreeing with the “crisis” framing. An even greater percentage of voters see increased federal funding for childcare as an important part of the solution. But the Trump administration has been going in exactly the opposite direction, exploring numerous creative bureaucratic routes to dismantling Head Start, a preschool program upon which many low-income families depend. Eliminating Head Start is another Project 2025 goal, and while it’s not legally possible, the administration is working hard to weaken and undermine the program. The administration also froze over $2 billion in federal funds for childcare based on a combination of exaggerated and outright false fraud claims.

One reason democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani won the mayoralty of New York City and remains so popular is his focus on expanding free childcare, a campaign promise he began delivering on almost immediately with the support of centrist Democratic New York governor Kathy Hochul. New Mexico, thanks to the Democrats in charge there, will have universal childcare by the end of this year. But such ideas have yet to advance far in Republican-controlled Washington—though that could change if the expected Blue Wave materializes in the November midterms.

In the leadup to the elections, Democrats are running on long-overdue federal solutions to working families’ childcare woes. Senators Chuck Schumer, Elizabeth Warren, and others released a report detailing Trump’s failings on the issue this summer, and there are proposals in both houses of Congress to improve families’ access to high-quality childcare. Some of these proposals are even supported by some Republicans. But Republicans and conservative Democrats are reluctant to spend the money required to develop a truly high quality and affordable system. Senator Elizabeth Warren—backed by Representative Alexandria-Ocasio-Cortez in the House—has proposed legislation for a program modelled on the military’s approach to childcare affordability, a sliding scale under which half of American families would pay no more than $10 a day for childcare. For a blueprint on how to think even bigger, lawmakers could look to the Roosevelt Institute’s vision of a federal system of care that’s free or nominal for all, universally available, and staffed by workers receiving pay and benefits on par with K-12 teachers. 

Of course, low-income mothers who want to stay home with their kids should receive resources to do so. Cash subsidies are a fine way to help them as long as these don’t come at the expense of working parents. Catching up with the rest of the world on requiring employers to give all workers paid time off with a new baby would be another step forward. The Roosevelt Institute’s proposal for expanded federal childcare includes a much-needed proposal to mandate a year of paid parental leave—exactly one year more than  the law currently requires for private sector workers. Making choices about how to balance work and childrearing shouldn’t be a luxury reserved only for the rich. There’s just no reason—other than a far-right agenda—to favor one group’s domestic life choices over the other. Even some on the right are arguing as much in the wake of the Times’ report. “I don’t believe that we should be using the tax code to sway people’s decisions one way or the other, to penalize people for having more children, or to incentivize people to have more children,” said Joel Griffith of Advancing American Freedom, a think tank founded by former Vice President Mike Pence. (Some have also pointed out that natalist policies like this, contrary to their architects’ dreams, don’t incentivize that many people to have more kids.)

Subsidies aimed at helping all families would be much more helpful. One of the underreported factors in President Biden’s unpopularity was that families appreciated the near-universal child subsidies—and then that help vanished. Some congresspeople are working on bringing them back, by expanding eligibility for the existing child tax credit to include lower-income families. Like the congressional childcare proposals, the effort is bipartisan—Maria Salazar, a Florida Republican, just signed on this week. But bringing back the more universal version of the child tax credit that American families enjoyed under Biden would be even better.

It is possible—just ask anyone who lives in Sweden or Denmark, or even more socially conservative Germany—for governments to provide robust cash supports for families and universal child care. While the Trump administration aims to help a minority of parents who are living in the traditional fashion that some right-wing white men extol, a Democratic-led agenda that helps all families to raise children—including grandparents and unmarried partners, and regardless of who else is or is not living in the home—is undoubtedly popular with a much broader swath of America.

 

Donald Trump instigated a war against America’s democracy on January 6, 2021. He and his Republican allies would have crippled America’s democracy that day had his own vice president not refused to be party to the gravest constitutional offense a president can commit—the refusal to relinquish and peacefully transfer the power of the presidency to his duly elected successor.

Today, almost six years later, Donald Trump and his Republican congressional allies are even more determined to prosecute the president’s war against American democracy to its catastrophic end than they were on January 6, 2021.

That catastrophic end could well come on January 3, 2027, when Trump and his Republican congressional allies wage the final battle in Trump’s determined war to corrupt America’s democracy and deliver a lasting political victory over the Democrats for his MAGA Republican Party.

Trump and his Republican allies have been preparing for this final battle since January 6, 2021. For the past six years, they have embarrassed themselves and the U.S. with their preposterous, win-at-any-cost denial that Trump lost the 2020 presidential election and their deceitful slander of America’s democracy. Since his return to the White House, Trump’s every unconstitutional act in his effort to seize control over the midterm elections—each hailed by his prostrate Republican Congress—has been toward the end of ensuring that Republicans retain a majority in the 120th Congress.

Trump told talk show host Dan Bogino on February 2, “The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over. We should take over the voting.’... The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.’” The Republicans have dutifully fallen in line.

Before Donald Trump arrived, it was the Republicans who professed to stand for the Constitution, principle, truth, honesty, integrity—even honor. Republicans were the proud party of Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan. It was our party that could be expected to put country before party when the time came, as when Barry Goldwater and other party elders told Richard Nixon in 1974 that it was time to resign the presidency. That was then. None of this is true of today’s Republican Party and this Republican Congress. So enthralled with the forty-seventh president are today’s House Republicans that they long ago abandoned everything the Republican Party has stood for since its founders first met in Ripon, Wisconsin, in 1854.

Today’s congressional Republicans took a blood oath six years ago not just to put their party before their country, but to put Donald Trump before their country. And so it is that only weeks before the midterm elections, House Republicans have already sworn their allegiance to Donald Trump and doomed the U.S. to another January 6 next January 3.

So unalterably subjugated to Trump is today’s Republican House that even a decisive victory for Democrats and a resounding repudiation of Trump and the MAGA Republicans at the polls in November will not guarantee that a Democratic majority-elect will be seated in the 120th Congress on January 3.

All year long, Trump has been dragooning House Speaker Mike Johnson and the congressional Republicans into prejudging as fraudulent the upcoming November elections of the presumed Democratic majority, as he himself has already prejudged those elections. His dragooning appears to have worked. House Republicans are now poised to claim that the midterm elections were stolen from them when they meet on January 3 to decide which members-elect will be seated in the 120th Congress.

Over the past year and a half since his return to the White House, Trump has exploited every conceivable unlawful means possible to rig the midterm elections in favor of the Republicans, and the federal courts have struck down as unconstitutional every one of these unlawful attempts. He will try every unlawful means over the remaining weeks to ensure that Republicans handily win the midterm elections in November. Those of us who oppose his illegality will look to the courts, but the federal courts will be institutionally incapable of checking his final unlawful rampage.

Trump punctuated his expressed intent to interfere in the midterm elections eight weeks ago in a national prime-time address on “election integrity,” accusing the Democrats and the Chinese in particular of threatening the free and fair elections in November. In that address, he claimed without evidence or support (as usual) that the 2026 midterm elections were being threatened by noncitizen voting, weaknesses in voter registration systems, foreign interference, and vulnerabilities in electronic voting systems.

The concocted address was universally panned as purely partisan, devoid of evidence and support, and anticipatory of his forthcoming claim in November that the Democrats won a majority in the House of Representatives only because of fraud in their respective elections.

Everyone knows that the greatest threat to the upcoming midterm elections is not the Democrats or the Chinese, noncitizen voting, or electronic voting machines, but the president of the United States and his servile Republican Congress.

Every member of Congress takes a solemn oath to support and defend the Constitution, an oath that obligates them to honor the will of the American electorate. It is a sacred imperative that the Congress of the United States must defend our constitutional right to choose our representatives to Congress against all enemies, domestic as well as foreign, who would deny us this fundamental right.

There was a time not long ago when virtually every member of Congress could be expected to commit to the peaceful transfer of congressional power in advance of an election, just as every president could be expected to commit to the peaceful transfer of presidential power. But those times came to an abrupt end upon Donald Trump’s arrival in January 2017. In a damning indictment of the president and today’s congressional Republicans, it would be hard to find even one congressional Republican with the integrity, sense of duty to country, honor, and courage to put America above the Republican Party, let alone above Donald Trump.

Yet America’s only hope for saving its democracy and avoiding another crippling constitutional crisis on January 3 is for the House Republicans to decide that they are not going to betray their oaths and their country one last time for Donald Trump, and telegraph to Trump and Mike Johnson that any unconstitutional plan they might be contriving to deny Democratic members-elect their rightful seats in the 120th Congress would be dead on arrival January 3.

If there are any such Republicans in the Congress today, they should announce well before November 3 that they will not be party to Trump’s and Johnson’s attempt to steal the midterm elections from the American people.

In fact, the House members of both political parties should stand united before November 3 and affirm to the American people that in the United States of America, government derives its just powers from the consent of “We the People”—the governed. They should campaign in the fall on any refusal by their political opponents to affirm the same. Their political opponents should in turn campaign on House members’ refusal to affirm that they will not be complicit in any attempt to steal the midterm elections.

Standing united before the midterm elections against any attempt by Trump and Johnson to overturn those elections would go a long way toward restoring Americans’ lost trust in their Congress and their government. It would send a powerful message to Trump and Johnson that Americans will never again be forced by their own government to endure another January 6.

While it is small solace, Americans are not entirely at the mercy of this Republican Congress to suddenly decide to honor its oath to the Constitution and the American people. It will be the Supreme Court, not Trump, Johnson, or even the House of Representatives, that will have the final word as to who will be seated in the 120th Congress of the United States.

Article I, Section 5, Clause 1 of the Constitution provides that “Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members.” Under Clause 1, the House of Representatives is the “judge” of its “elections” and “returns.” But the House’s power is not plenary. The Constitution constrains how the House can exercise its power to refuse to seat members-elect. Indeed, in 1969, in Powell v. McCormack, the Supreme Court ensured that the House constitutionally exercised its power to “judge the qualifications” of members-elect when it ordered the seating of New York Representative Adam Clayton Powell, who had won reelection in 1966 despite a House vote to refuse to seat him. Just as the court intervened then, so also will the Supreme Court ensure that the House exercises its power to “judge” its “elections” and “returns” within the limits imposed by the Constitution. At least we hope it will, but can we be sure with this court?

Whether the House constitutionally exercises its power not to seat members-elect will ultimately be determined by the federal courts and the Supreme Court—not by a majority vote of the House of Representatives.

This is how the crisis would unfold. The precursor of the crisis will come sometime before noon on January 3, when Speaker Johnson removes current House Clerk Kevin McCumber and replaces him with a person loyal to Johnson and House Republicans who they know will refuse to list on the statutory roll of representatives-elect to the 120th Congress any Democrat-elect whom Johnson and the Republicans direct him or her not to list. Under Rule II, Clause 1 of the Rules of the House, the Speaker of the House has the unilateral power to remove the incumbent clerk, and then the power under Title 2 U.S.C. § 5501(a) to replace him temporarily with whomever he wishes until the House elects a successor. McCumber is a Republican appointed by former Speaker Kevin McCarthy. He is widely respected for his integrity and faithful adherence to the Constitution and is reputed to be unwilling to carry out orders he considers to be unconstitutional.

The first moment of constitutional crisis will come when, sometime before the 120th Congress has been gaveled into session, the loyal temporary clerk refuses to list Democrat representatives-elect on the clerk’s roll of representatives-elect that determines who may participate in organizing the new Congress. At that moment, interested members-elect and others will be forced to seek a writ of mandamus—a court order to a government official instructing him or her to perform a mandatory duty—from the federal court to the temporary clerk, ordering him or her to list on the clerk’s roll all members-elect who have been certified by the states as having been elected from their districts to the new Congress.

Members-elect will argue that the clerk has a ministerial duty under 2 U.S.C. § 26 to list all representatives-elect whose properly filed state certifications show that they were “regularly elected in accordance with the laws of his state or of the United States.” Because the clerk has no authority to omit any duly certified representative-elect, even if a representative-elect’s election is contested, the clerk unquestionably has a ministerial duty under law to list all duly certified representatives-elect. But this begs the question whether a court will issue the writ of mandamus to the acting clerk.

At first blush, a court will be reluctant to order the clerk to list all duly certified representatives-elect because of an instinctive belief that such an order would interfere with the constitutional process of the House to judge its own elections and returns. The wise and learned judge, however, will understand that rather than interfering with the House process, issuance of the writ will actually enable the House process to proceed to completion without judicial interference. Were that wise and learned judge to issue the writ, his or her order would immediately be appealed to the Court of Appeals, and from that court to the Supreme Court, while the country and the world wait in suspense.

The next moment of constitutional crisis will come if and when, after appeals, the court finally issues the writ of mandamus, and the clerk refuses to obey the court’s order to list the Democratic representatives-elect. At that point, it is possible there will be no further federal court involvement until such time as the 120th Congress officially convenes and votes not to seat representatives-elect. Then, that vote by the 120th Congress will be immediately reviewable by the federal courts, up to and including the Supreme Court of the United States.

Judicial review of the House’s decision not to seat Democratic representatives-elect in the 120th Congress would take weeks, if not months, during which time the United States would be in the throes of a paralyzing constitutional crisis, helplessly vulnerable to all the world’s evil, as it would have been in January 2021 had Mike Pence not thwarted Donald Trump’s plan to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

It is not difficult to imagine the many possibilities, some of the most critical being entirely realistic. It would be the ideal moment for China to move against Taiwan, by way of military blockade, attack, or even invasion. It would be the perfect moment for Vladimir Putin to complete his conquest of Ukraine, and perhaps even to move militarily against Estonia. Every passing day could bring a deepening economic crisis, worsened by our angry allies around the world who would welcome the opportunity to requite Donald Trump for his belittling mockery of their countries and presidents. Without the Congress, the United States would be powerless to respond to any of these crises.

The House has historically claimed that its decision not to seat a member-elect because of fraud or irregularities in the elections is unreviewable by the federal courts. But its decision is reviewable. The Constitution unquestionably requires the House to seat a member-elect who was validly elected in a free and fair election. The Article 1, Section 5 power of the House to be the judge of its elections and returns does not give the House the power to deny a seat in the Congress of the United States to a candidate elected by the American people in a free and fair election on the mere assertion, pretextual or otherwise, by a simple majority of the House that the candidate’s election was tainted by fraud.

Thus, on and after January 3, if congressional Republicans were to determine that a Democratic member-elect was elected because of fraudulent voting and refuse to seat him or her, that determination would be scrutinized by the federal courts, up to and including the Supreme Court.

It will never be a nonjusticiable political question whether the United States House of Representatives by simple majority vote can refuse to seat a member elected to Congress by the American people in a free and fair election on the pretextual and unsupported assertion that the member-elect’s election was tainted by fraud. Such is the very opposite of a nonjusticiable political question committed to the House of Representatives. For in the decision of this question lies the answer to perhaps the most fundamental question under the Constitution: Is the United States of America a democracy, in which “We the People” elect our representatives to the Congress and to the presidency, or is it not?

I don’t intend to be overly sanguine about this Supreme Court. This is the court that shattered the one constitutional truth in the U.S. since 1789 that “no man is above the law” and placed Donald Trump of all presidents above the law in Trump v. United States. This is the court that betrayed the Constitution by refusing even to decide whether Trump was disqualified from the presidency under the Fourteenth Amendment because of his insurrection against the Constitution, which he clearly was. This is also the court that has cynically authorized Trump’s lawlessness for the past two years through its aptly named “shadow docket,” without so much as briefing, argument, or written opinion.

But surely by now this court must understand what it has wrought for the U.S. and the Constitution, and is aghast as we all are, even if it is not penitent. Surely, surely, it will understand the signal moment in American constitutional history that would be presented, and this time understand its supreme obligation to the nation.

Between now and November 3, congressional Republicans would do well to ponder one last time the fate of their Republican Party were the Supreme Court of the United States to reverse a fraudulent determination by the 120th Republican Congress not to seat Democratic members-elect who would give the Democrats majority control of the House.

Two hundred and fifty years into the greatest experiment in self-government in the history of the world, the Republican Party would finally meet the fate to which it has been destined since January 6, 2021, and cement its place in history as the most corrupt political party ever to emerge in the United States of America for its second attempt in six years to defy the will of the American people on Election Day.

If we Americans are to save our democracy from the forty-seventh president and his MAGA Republican Party, we must disenthrall ourselves from our political bondage to Donald Trump and MAGA, as Abraham Lincoln urged the nation in 1863 to disenthrall itself from its bondage to the ruinous political dogmas of its time. “We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country,” the sixteenth president admonished. The Republican Party in particular must finally loose the chains of its political and moral enslavement to Donald Trump and separate itself from the MAGA political party cult.

The writing is already on the wall, Republicans.

Canadian officials aren’t being coy about it: The retaliatory tariffs imposed Tuesday against the United States were deliberately chosen to hurt vulnerable Republicans before the midterm elections. “We are picking products that will target states in the U.S.,” Mélanie Joly, Canada’s industry minister, said late last month while announcing the tariffs. “We’re being wise and strategic to put political pressure, and that’s why we think it’s ‌the right thing to do right now.” Canada, fed up with Donald Trump’s bullying since he returned to office last year, is hitting the president where he’s most vulnerable —namely the slim congressional majorities that have allowed him to govern with more or less total impunity.

The tariffs particularly focus on vehicles, fish, and dairy, and will hit states with key particularly hard in states with key elections, like Maine, Michigan, and Kansas. There are early indications that they’re working. Nearly two-thirds of voters in Maine and Michigan view the trade war negatively, according to a CNN poll released on Wednesday. That trade war—and Joly’s comments—are extraordinary examples of the sharp rift that has emerged between the U.S. and Canada under Trump 2.0. But they’re hardly surprising. Trump has repeatedly attacked the U.S.’s northern neighbor, a close ally and biggest trading partner, and even mused about making Canada the “51st state” (an odd riff, given it would almost certainly be a blue one).

These tit-for-tat tariffs are also just desserts, however. Trump has spent much of his second term flouting the longtime convention of U.S. administrations avoiding direct involvement in other countries’ elections. He has endorsed right-wing and far-right candidates and parties in Argentina, Hungary, Brazil, and, most recently, Germany. He has used sanctions against Brazil to try to help spring his his pal and former President Jair Bolsonaro from prison, and sent Cabinet officials to Hungary to aid Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s reelection campaign. He has used tariffs to try to pressure voters to back his preferred candidates or politicians to back his preferred policies in Canada, Brazil, and Mexico (and sanctions relief in a similar way in Hungary). Now, Republicans in tough races will face an even steeper climb—and they’ll have to deal with the kinds of headaches that Trump has tried to inflict on liberal candidates in other countries.

Canada is not the only foreign nation whose actions will affect the midterms. Although no Iranian official has made as explicit a comment as Joly’s, there has been speculation for months that many of the nation’s actions in the stop-start Iran war, particularly those that lead to spikes in already skyrocketing energy prices, are intended to damage GOP chances in the upcoming midterms. “The Iranians are not dumb,” longtime Republican strategist Karl Rove told Fox News in late June. “They know that the fall campaign starts in earnest on Labor Day. I would not be surprised to see them attempt to have an influence on the outcome by creating problems in mid-August and causing oil prices to rise and uncertainty to grow.”

That is exactly what has happened, with strikes resuming in recent weeks and Iran now looking to escalate further, according to The New York Times, which reported Wednesday that “Iran’s leadership believes that now may be the best moment to raise the stakes, ahead of the U.S. midterm elections in November when an unpopular war could hurt Mr. Trump and the Republican Party.” Even Trump himself buys this line of reasoning. “They’re desperate to try and affect the election,” ​he said on Wednesday (though he spuriously claimed this means “war is going to end immediately ​after the election because they can’t hold out any ⁠longer”).

Still, Canada marks the most pronounced and deliberate—and Trumpian—attempt to punish Trump by targeting the midterms. The Canadians, too, seem to know that the fall campaign starts in earnest on Labor Day. And vulnerable Republicans are already reeling. “This is not China we’re dealing with; it’s Canada—our best friend, a country with whom our economy is completely intertwined,” Maine’s incumbent Republican senator, Susan Collins, said last month. (Polls say she’s trailing Democrat Troy Jackson by single digits.) But not everyone has Collins’s history of breaking with the president. In Michigan, Republican Senate nominee Mike Rogers is attempting to sidestep tariffs entirely, even though they’re hated in the state—an apparent gamble to maintain the president’s backing in a winnable race against Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed. Still, it’s hard not to see the entire issue as the president shooting his party in the foot—an avoidable debacle, like the Iran war. Now it’s one that may very well sink his party.

The irony of all of this is that much of Trump’s attempts at interference failed. He went all-in backing his close allies in Brazil and Hungary, and both failed to accomplish what he wanted—Bolsonaro is still serving a 27-year sentence for election interference, and Orban was defeated, ending a 16-year stretch in power. But Trump’s greatest faceplant may have come in Canada. Shortly after he won the 2024 election, he began to attack the nation’s liberal government, first with “51st state” mockery and then with tariffs. It failed spectacularly. Canadian voters had appeared ready to elect a conservative government, but instead kept the liberals in power. That backlash swept Mark Carney into power as prime minister, and he has emerged as a persistent thorn in Trump’s side—a vocal critic who is attempting to rally America’s estranged allies to be less dependent on the U.S. Now, Carney seems to be on the verge of doing something Trump couldn’t: Help to install a more favorable government abroad.

It’s hard to keep loving the movies when we realize how much damage they’ve done. In A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies, longtime critic David Thomson takes a far warier approach than previously to a medium he has adored in print and in private for seven decades now. According to this century-spanning “revisionist history,” film isn’t (as many of us fool ourselves into believing) a gloaming, magical realm of bigger-than-life people, landscapes, and emotions; rather it has, like an excellent cinematographer or cosmetician, feathered over and even romanticized the worst neuroses and most unsavory desires of human life. In other words, by teaching us how to see them, movies simultaneously taught us how to unsee our actual world, and the real, all-too-human lives we lead in it. They have, to paraphrase an earlier Thomson title, brought us the “gift of unreality,” and it may be time to find out if we can still get reality back.

Within the flickering light of cinemas, Thomson writes, “our grasp on life was stimulated but compromised by the invention of the lifelike.… For when we can now fabricate the imagery—we have bypassed light and nature.” The ultimate problem with movies, Thomson argues, is not simply that they divert us from the real world, but that they want to replace it entirely. In his previous books, such as The Big Screen: the Story of the Movies and What They Did to Us, Thomson delivered a more optimistic history of film, as he did in his biographies of Orson Welles, Ingrid Bergman, and Gary Cooper. He assembled a dense nonchronological compendium of smart, absorbing assessments in Have You Seen...?: A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films; he compiled the highly regarded Biographical Dictionary of Film (he is at his best when recounting the lifelong careers of individual actors and directors); and he achieved cultish success with one of the most unusual meta-novels of the last century, Suspects (1985), a “family romance” detailing the intertwining kinship networks of famous (and sometimes not-so-famous) film characters, from the goody-goody husband of Ilsa in Casablanca, Victor Laszlo (who not so many years after World War II betrays fellow travelers to the House Un-American Activities Committee), to Jack Torrance, the manic-obsessive writer in The Shining. Suspects (like all of Thomson’s books) bristles with countless macabre branches of a film family tree in which buffs might enthusiastically lose themselves.

If all these enjoyable books highlight one fact about Thomson, it’s that his fondness for movies isn’t simply about the stories they tell or the techniques they use to tell them—it’s about the fantasy world they create in our collective imagination. The basic problem for Thomson is that, amid current political horrors, this film world is starting to seem inimical: “Fantasy fills all the available space. And when fantasy overwhelms law and politics, it leaves only the bitter energy of disappointed dreaming. That is our violence. And all we have left?”

Exploring, if not answering, that hanging rhetorical question, is what drives this provocative book. Are movies, and the alternative worlds they offer, “all we have left?” Or, like Jim Carrey’s character in The Truman Show, can we eventually find a way out of them?

The problem with movies, Thomson argues, is not simply that they divert us from the real world, but that they want to replace it entirely.

In many ways, the figure that haunts Thomson’s deepest concerns in this book is the current American president—along with that sense, shared by many of us, that a culture addicted to entertainment led us to put a reality-TV businessman in the White House. The book’s final sentence couldn’t make Thomson’s dissatisfaction clearer: “For a century the fallacy had reigned that watching [movies] would make us better. Instead of just indifferent.” This is where movies have taken us, Thomson concludes: the reckless elevation of a dangerous buffoon.

Thomson argues that movies were quick off the mark to lead people and civilizations into their flickering light of unreality—especially since filmmaking’s earliest pioneers included the likes of stage magician Georges Méliès (immortalized in film buff–emeritus Martin Scorsese’s 2011 Hugo), who was perhaps the first to discover that the new “reproductive” lens of the camera could be used to swallow up objective visual realities, digest them, and transform them into a duplicitous world of illusion. As Thomson writes:

He had long appreciated that photography was a tricked reality, a medium begging for subterfuge, “effects,” and bare-faced lies. But that potential was accelerated by what the Cinématographe offered. He saw that one image might be superimposed on another; he realized how scale could be played with; he saw that duration could be slowed or hurried; he understood that the fake and the actual could be married without us losing faith in the process. He even recognized that the Cinématographe need not be limited to running forward. Surely it was possible for the film to run through the apparatus backward. Whereupon the sheer daft beauty of life in reverse was revealed. That is still a treat that too few films have the wit to employ.

In Méliès’s many dozens of short films, which were played in music halls to enthusiastic crowds, ghosts appeared and vanished, living bodies were dismembered and put back together again (without any apparent pain to them at all), and in his most famous work, A Voyage to the Moon, a bullet-shaped rocket ship is fired into the whipped cream–like eye of the pie-faced man in the moon. When the ship’s astronauts go outside to explore the lunar surface, they are watched over by mystically appearing and disappearing stars, comets, and attractive young women in leotards and short pants posing as celestial demigoddesses. (There are even some pyrotechnic explosions here and there.) The key to Méliès’s stewardship of this new medium wasn’t simply his flair for illusion as entertainment; it was his conviction that even when audiences were fooled into believing they saw things they didn’t, they wouldn’t “lose faith” in what they saw. In other words, they didn’t mind being fooled. They actually liked it.

But Méliès was not the only notable pioneer who used film to make audiences believe in things that didn’t exist; even “realistic” directors developed their own techniques for misrepresenting reality, or perhaps simply skewing it to their purposes.

While most students and teachers of film history remember D.W. Griffith for directing what Thomson calls the “first fascist picture,” The Birth of a Nation (1915), Thomson attributes that film’s racism largely to its producer, a Baptist preacher and author of The Clansman (1905), the novel on which the film was based. More unforgivable, in Thomson’s eyes, was Griffith’s perfection of deceptive technical skills he had developed in earlier, shorter films. By intercutting between individual characters and expressions and things they saw, he established point of view on the audience’s behalf, teaching them to view the characters in blackface as savage evildoers possessed of wild desires to degrade nobly born white women. At the same time, his use of a dashing actor (the soon-to-be director Raoul Walsh) as John Wilkes Booth provided an early example of how the “medium flatters killers.” The extraordinary success of Birth (200 million people paid to see it worldwide in 1915 and 1916) led to financial consolidation of the first large studio under Louis B. Mayer, an original investor in Birth who came away with enough money to build an empire that was less concerned with the accurate representation of history, and more concerned with turning big profits. Among the “darker meanings” of Birth was that it signaled the “riotous birth of a business.”

The technical innovations of early filmmaking did more than simply tell dishonest stories about history; they convinced audiences to believe in those stories and to help in their manufacture. The early Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov (a major influence on Sergei Eisenstein) tested audiences with a series of cuts between the close-up on a famous actor, Ivan Mosjoukine, and shots of “a bowl of soup, a child in a coffin, and a charming woman on a sofa.” The effect was that the audience felt in each case the man was hungry, grieving, and attracted to the woman. The experiment showed how quickly the audience would bring their own sense of inner reality to movies; they didn’t simply believe what they were shown, they contributed their own meaningful connections between shots.

Films had an overpowering effect on the crowds who came to watch them. When sound came along—and with it, the sweeping grandeur of motion picture soundtracks—it made the cinematic world even bigger, richer, and more attractive. With so much power to entrance and misinform audiences, it’s no surprise that the major politicians who first recognized the medium’s usefulness were Hitler and Goebbels, not to mention their chief propagandist, Leni Riefenstahl.

For all its power to manufacture illusions, the film industry was largely marshaled into existence by the relatively poor and uneducated. Most of the major studio heads, such as Louis B. Mayer and Marcus Loew, were the children of Jewish immigrants; and almost all of them had failed at earlier entrepreneurial efforts before they landed, almost as a last resort, in the rapidly booming motion picture business. (As Thomson writes of Loew, who began by investing small amounts of money into any available movie venues he could find: “No one said he favored one film over others; he wanted whatever the crowd wanted.”) William Fox (formerly Fuchs) started off selling newspapers; and the Warners sold shoes and bicycles before selling romantic comedies and swashbucklers.

It was an industry driven by corporate profits over individual creative expression, and so it wasn’t surprising that the first widely proclaimed “genius” of the early studio system was a 20-year-old, chronically ill man named Irving Thalberg, promoted by Carl Laemmle at Universal in 1919, who went to Hollywood to design studios to produce movies the same way Ford’s factories produced cars: large studio sets and sound stages were built for filming the scenes of many different movies, often simultaneously; musicians, writers, and actors were hired on contract to be moved from one set to another like stage furniture; and in a very short time, Thalberg became the first studio head to fire a hot-headed, brilliantly original director by the name of Erich Stroheim (the son of a Jewish hatmaker), and relegate his way-over-budget film, Greed, to the studio cutting room. This event served almost as a template for future “negotiations” between film’s money providers and its greatest creative forces. Many believed (like Groucho Marx) that Thalberg saved the film industry from itself (though sadly, the Marx Brothers never made movies as brilliantly hilarious as Monkey Business (1931) and Duck Soup (1933) after their characters and storylines had been routinized by Thalberg.) Others, like Welles, called him “the biggest villain in the history of Hollywood.”

Over the next several decades, the greatest commercial directors would produce their best (and most influential) work largely outside the studio system, but it wouldn’t be easy. Robert Aldrich, Robert Altman, and Francis Ford Coppola would set up their own studios, only to go bust producing movies that didn’t make enough money. Maverick directors such as John Ford and Howard Hawks managed to keep creatively working only by moving between studios, seeking the right place to make the right movie at the right time. (In his Biographical Dictionary, Thomson claimed that his 10 favorite “desert island” films would all be by Howard Hawks, the master of those Hollywood genres—gangster melodramas, screwball comedies, and Westerns—that weren’t taken seriously until the Cahiers du Cinema crowd rediscovered them in the 1960s.)

Far more common were those directors, from Mervyn LeRoy to Michael Curtiz, however talented, who did what they were told, stapling together preapproved scripts, actors, and sets. When a studio-bound director did achieve “auteur status,” like Frank Capra at Columbia under Harry Cohn, it was due to his gift for making people believe in an America that didn’t exist, a place where homespun philosophers like Mr. Smith (in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)) could pass legislation by acting “folksy” during an endless congressional filibuster. Or then there’s Capra’s other hometown hero, George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart again), who could count on his modest neighbors to help him oppose the evil, crippled-by-ugliness big American banks in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). Life was the sort of “plea to the common people,” Thomson writes, that made believable “the airy hope that public conscience and common sense can beat off the threat of corruption and greed.” And of course it doesn’t take more than a couple quick glances around ourselves to realize that, for many decades at least, our “public conscience” has been outmatched by greed maybe 10-to-one.

Thomson finds it difficult to accept how the “screens” of romance and melodrama have seduced us into endlessly feeding off the adventures of people who don’t exist—from Sam Spade and Scarlett O’Hara to Ratso Rizzo and Luke Skywalker. And yet even after they have grown so small they can fit into the palms of our hands, the screens of illusion and delusion have conquered our world, along with our collective ability to make human sense of it. Which is perhaps why so many of our favorite, most unforgettable movies are about voyeurs who are as devoted to the act of observation as we are—such as Jimmy Stewart in Hitchcock’s Rear Window, or Carl Boehm in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, or even David Hemmings in Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966). The voyeur may be the most pertinent image of contemporary human consciousness, at a time when people believe less in what they have experienced firsthand than in what they observe—much like Ronald Reagan, our first (and certainly not last) movie-star president, who “would literally believe he had been at events in World War II because he had done the narration for brisk documentaries about them.”

The screens that surround us are more than mere entertainments; they drain us of attention for anything but them. Flat or curved, pixelated or Technicolor, handheld or wall-mounted, they are almost everywhere, and wherever we don’t find them, we devise ways to bring them with us—into the streets, our jobs, and even the bathroom. We no longer take them into our homes; rather, the screens are now taking us home with them, where presumably every bit of information we possess will be incorporated into artificial intelligence–driven systems of knowledge, perception, and infinitely streamable nonsensical stories.

It’s hard to believe there is a film buff worth his or her popcorn who hasn’t already enjoyed Thomson’s work, and this latest volume confirms all of his familiar, well-practiced skills. He is incapable of writing an uninteresting sentence or an inelegant paragraph and he sparks off lovely epigrammatic ideas on almost every page. At one point he writes: “And so we let the lifelike distract us from life. That is how we became fantasists, all set in our solitary ways.” At another, he describes the movie Psycho as “a rat that got into my house in 1960 and that I have never managed to exterminate or train.”

We have become a nation of watchers who don’t care what it is we watch so long as we are watching.

His enthusiasm for great (and even not so great) movies is contagious; in fact, it’s not possible to read this new volume without cranking up the old DVD player several times to rewatch movies—such as Sturges’s The Lady Eve, or Tourneur’s Out of the Past, or Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, or the first two Godfather movies—along with his remarks about them. In fact, the only weakness about this “revisionist history” is that while Thomson expresses clear and convincing opinions about the dark roads down which movies have led us over the last century and a quarter, he continually gets distracted by his career-long love of the medium, and gets his readers lost along with him.

“For several decades,” Thomson writes, “people went to the movies without knowing what the picture was. The way now we can’t face the day without scanning our phone.” It’s a pretty distressing idea, and probably accurate. Just as the early twentieth century’s moviegoers would “submit to,” more than “choose,” their trips to the movie theater, we have now, each in our miniature psycho-theater, learned to submit to whatever arrives on the screens of our phones and laptops. We have become a nation of watchers who don’t care what it is we watch so long as we are watching. It’s a vision of doom that isn’t best represented by a mushroom cloud but by the pale, complacent, well-fed face of Chauncey Gardiner in Being There. “I like to watch,” Chauncey reiterates, again and again. As if there could be anything else left to say.

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As the school year begins, there is a new law that affects all school districts in California known as Assembly Bill 715, which was co-authored by Central Coast Assemblymember Dawn Addis. The votes in support of the bill were near-unanimous, but the bill faced strong opposition from teachers unions, civil liberties organizations, and Arab American, Muslim and Palestinian advocacy groups.

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

An ambitious bill to keep toxic “forever chemicals” off California produce lost its teeth after the chemical and agricultural industry spent hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying against it.

The bill that landed on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk last week simply requires regulators to track and disclose pesticide applications in the state. 

It’s “a shell of what we set out to do,” said its author, Assemblymember Nick Schultz (D-Burbank). “We missed an opportunity this year to really be a national leader on this issue, and to catch up with a handful of other states that are already pursuing this legislation,” he added, referring to Maine and Minnesota, which have already enacted laws restricting PFAS pesticides. 

PESTICIDES IN THE PAJARO VALLEY: Read Lookout’s news and Community Voices opinion coverage here

Early versions of Schultz’s bill, Assembly Bill 1603, would have prohibited state regulators from approving new pesticides with perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, starting in 2028. In 2030, the legislation would have outlawed the sale of 23 PFAS pesticides already banned in Denmark and started to phase out the rest of the already approved products in 2035. 

“I was shocked to learn that the state was not doing anything about PFAS-containing pesticides that are regularly used on crops,” Schultz told his colleagues when he sought their support in April. 

He said he was even more shocked to learn that the pesticides taint the fruits and vegetables consumers feed their families, after reading that nearly 40% of conventional California produce have PFAS residues in an Environmental Working Group report from March.

“AB 1603 would phase out the use of PFAS pesticides once and for all,” Schultz said.

PFAS earned the nickname “forever chemicals” because their nearly indestructible carbon-fluorine bonds, extremely rare in nature, remain in living tissue and the environment for years. PFAS has contaminated nearly half of drinking water supplies across the country—which researchers recently linked to higher rates of several types of cancer—and 79 percent of 150 public water systems tested across California in 2022.

While Schultz was trying to persuade his colleagues to support a PFAS pesticide phaseout, the chemical and agricultural industries spent nearly $900,000 to lobby legislators, regulators and other California officials on AB 1603 and other issues, an Inside Climate News review of state campaign finance disclosures filed between January and June found. Lobbyists distributed more than $1,000 worth of pistachios, strawberries and fruit boxes to legislators and treated them to a $300-a-person steak dinner, the disclosures show.

The American Chemistry Council, which represents chemical manufacturers, spent nearly $179,000 to influence state officials on AB 1603 and other bills during that time. 

The American Chemistry Council supports policies that protect human health and the environment, said spokesperson Erich Shea when asked about his organization’s opposition to the bill. “ACC supports risk-based approaches that evaluate pesticides individually and makes regulatory decisions based on scientific evidence and actual product data.”

Syngenta, which makes pesticides with PFAS, spent more than $20,000 between April and June to influence just one issue: AB 1603.

The state Capitol in Sacramento. Credit: John Lee / Lookout Santa Cruz

Syngenta’s head of sustainability and government affairs, Val Dolcini, served as director of California’s Department of Pesticide Regulation for two years, starting in 2019. Inside Climate News asked Syngena if Dolcini lobbied his former agency, but did not receive a reply.

Schultz was optimistic that his colleagues would protect consumers from PFAS since the Legislature had recognized what he called their “very problematic properties” when they prohibited or limited their use in cosmetics, food packaging, carpets and other products. 

But after hearing objections from colleagues representing agricultural districts, Schultz tried to find a compromise and assured them in May that the bill would address their concerns. By the end of June, a Senate version of the bill had removed provisions to phase out the chemicals, which have been linked to a litany of serious health conditions besides cancer, including obesity, immune suppression, hormone disruption, reduced fertility and neurodevelopmental problems. 

The amended bill also ditched a provision to classify PFAS pesticides as restricted materials, which require a permit and typically cannot be used by homeowners. Now, the bill just requires regulators to track and disclose pesticide applications.

“Ask them to do better”

The industry pushback was not a surprise to Susan Little, California legislative director for Environmental Working Group, an AB 1603 sponsor. “The agriculture and the pesticide industries are just vehemently opposed to any kind of reasonable, logical public health efforts to rein in or to reform pesticide use in California,” she said.

California growers applied more than 14.2 million pounds of dozens of PFAS pesticides on crops between 2018 and 2023, the most recent publicly available data, averaging more than 2.3 million pounds a year. Another 1.9 million pounds of these pesticides were used during that time to kill pests in non-agricultural settings like green strips along roads and golf courses. 

Growers in California’s $2.7 billion almond industry used far more PFAS pesticides than other farmers, applying more than 734,000 pounds of the chemicals, including more than 416,000 pounds of bifenthrin and oxyfluorfen. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency classifies both chemicals as possible human carcinogens, and laboratory evidence suggests they also disrupt hormone function. 

The Almond Alliance’s concerns with earlier versions of AB 1603 were not about opposing appropriate protections for human health or the environment, said Amanda Russell, a spokesperson for the trade group. “Our concern was with imposing broad restrictions on crop protection products through legislation rather than allowing California’s Department of Pesticide Regulation to evaluate individual products based on science, exposure, risk and actual use,” she said. 

Department of Pesticide Regulation officials told the Assembly appropriations committee that the agency would lose close to $18 million in fees from registration and taxes on PFAS pesticides if they were banned. 

Inside Climate News asked the agency, known as DPR, how it balances its mission to protect human health and the environment while depending on fees from registration and sales of pesticides. Spokesperson Amy MacPherson replied, “DPR’s work is guided by our mission to protect human health and the environment by fostering sustainable pest management and regulating pesticides.”

MacPherson said the agency is supported through special‑funded revenue sources, primarily the fee on pesticide sales. That funding arrangement has undergone independent review, she said, and has been adjusted to “ensure we can carry out our statutory, regulatory, and legal responsibilities.”

Schultz told Inside Climate News he was expecting a tough battle. He knew the agriculture industry would worry that alternatives would be unavailable or too costly and that his colleagues feared that restricting agricultural tools would hurt California’s economy, the fourth largest in the world. 

Schultz understands both concerns but pointed out that the European Union also has a “pretty dang large economy” and still banned some of the most dangerous PFAS pesticides. 

Environmental advocates and other supporters of Schultz’s bill are hopeful that Newsom will sign it.

On the whole, the governor has supported bills trying to get PFAS out of the environment and away from consumers, and AB 1603 has no official opposition now, said Environmental Working Group’s Little. “But we have no idea what he’s going to do with this bill.”

Little credits Schultz with sending the governor what she considers a meaningful bill in the face of “tremendous spending on opposition activities.”  

When Little started looking into PFAS pesticide use in California, she was surprised to discover that farmers and local governments had no idea the chemicals were being applied to their lands. She sees the bill, even in its narrowed focus, as an important first step in requiring regulators to track PFAS pesticides and educate farmers, local officials and the public. 

As a father who was shocked to learn that the strawberries he buys his kids every week could be contaminated with 10 different PFAS pesticides, Schultz said he is committed to fighting for safer products. 

Just over 40 legislators passed a more ambitious version of AB 1603 in the Assembly, Schultz said. He urges consumers to educate their representatives about the issue and “ask them to do better.”

Schultz does not believe the agricultural industry is trying to put unsafe products on the market. But the data shows there are very serious and significant long-term health effects from PFAS pesticides, he said. “We have got to do a better job of regulating them.”

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California has long been farm country, and its oceans soon could be, too.

The California Coastal Commission voted Wednesday to allow a plan to build the United States’ largest kelp farm 6 miles off the Ventura County coast to move forward as the Trump administration seeks to ramp up aquaculture in the Pacific Ocean.

After Canada’s reciprocal tariffs kicked in this week, Donald Trump spiraled on social media. He posted a deranged map suggesting he wants to annex all of Canada. He posted a demented visual of himself domineering over Canada’s prime minister. And he posted an unhinged rant attacking Canada with convoluted threats. Now, Republican strategists tell The Hill in a baffled tone that they’re worried the trade war has become a big liability in the midterms. That comes as Republicans like Susan Collins and Kansas’s two GOP Senators have appeared at a loss to explain Trump’s approach. In short, even Republicans are flummoxed by Trump’s motives here. We talked to Vox’s Zack Beauchamp, who has reported deeply on the roots of Trump’s trade-warring. We discuss how unmoored Trump is from basic trade realities, how Canadians see the situation, what it means that even working people oppose his tariffs, and why it all gives Democrats an opening to restate the case against MAGA nationalism. Listen to this episode here.

Nearly 6,500 residents in Capitola and Live Oak were out of power Wednesday afternoon, according to PG&E spokesperson Stephanie Magallon. 

The outage spans the 41st Avenue corridor, Capitola Village, areas in Pleasure Point and neighborhoods north of Live Oak near Dominican Hospital.

Magallon told Lookout that the outage was first reported just before 5 p.m. Wednesday, and that crews are in Capitola working to identify the cause of the outage. Currently, PG&E does not have an estimated time of when residents can expect to get their power back, she said. 

On its website, the utility company expects power to be restored by 9:30 p.m. 

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Quick Take

• An original story by Nicholas Sparks and M. Night Shyamalan, Remain is based off of the book of the same name.
• The new trailer shows Jake Gyllenhal and Phoebe Dynevor in a kind of rom-com situation, quickly turning into a darker mystery when Phoebe Dynevor’s Wren turns ghost-like and attempts to smash her brain all over a bathroom wall.
• Nerdist’s Take: This combo of cozy Cape Cod romance and horror-mystery—with the cinematography to match—has us interested to know more.

Man, people really do like putting Jake Gyllenhaal in situations. M. Night Shyamalan has joined the list with his most recent outing, Remain. The story was an original writing collaboration with Nicholas Sparks (talk about unexpected bedfellows) and released as his 2025 book that goes by the same name. Now it’s heading to the big screen from one of the men who helped create it. Shyamalan, who also wrote the screenplay, is directing and producing Remain.

Remain follows New York architect Tate Gordon (Jake Gyllenhaal) as he temporarily moves to Cape Cod to build his friend a house. He is in the throes of depression, brought on by the death of his sister. It’s there that he meets Wren, played by Phoebe Dynevor, a seemingly kindred soul.

The first chunk of the Remain trailer seems like one of those cozy warm rom-coms you watch with your significant other, on the couch under some warm blankies. Tate has bought a new game for he and Wren to play, which they do, laughing and smiling. It shows them cooking and eating dinner together, then playing chess against one another. We see a whole wall of board games he’s collected. It very much feels like the classic story of Broken Sad Man meets Youthful Radiant Woman. Together they find happiness. Or something.

Then with the line “Why can’t we be together, Tate?” the M. Night Shyamalan of it all comes out to play. The Remain trailer turns otherworldly and eerie as Tate replies, “I think you know.” The tone and coloring shift completely. From Mitski’s “My Love Mine All Mine” comes the ominous tones you would expect of a creepy supernatural thriller. It’s after this that Tate finds a ghostly-looking Wren in the bathroom, twirling her hand in the air before levitating over to do a big bang-bang on the porcelain with her skull.

And then the trailer tells us to “TRUST THE UNKNOWN”, which is a fascinating and ominous tagline! This might not be the heartwarming Valentine’s Day film most would expect, especially with Nicholas Sparks’ involvement. However, it does look like a compelling supernatural mystery with elements of horror and romance abounding. Themes of loss and grief that are likely to resonate with viewers.

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

The post Trailer For Romance-Mystery REMAIN Seems Like a Horror Movie appeared first on Nerdist.

Quick Take

• Polygon recently asked a few burning questions to creator Michael Dante DiMartino and executive producers Sehaj Sethi and Ethan Spaulding about the upcoming Avatar sequel series, Avatar: Seven Havens.
• They’ve revealed the amount of time that’s passed between The Legend of Korra and the new series—225 years. In addition, we learned new lore about the city of Ellora, one of the titular Havens.
• Nerdist’s Take: A post-apocalyptic Avatar series? Where one of the former Avatars went mad and caused a ‘cataclysm’ that nearly destroyed the world? Sign me up, take my money, whatever you want.

Wake up, Avatar stans. We’ve got new info on Avatar: Seven Havens—the post-apocalyptic second sequel series to Avatar: The Last Airbender. When the initial teaser dropped at SDCC, we didn’t know just how long the time-skip between Legend of Korra and Seven Havens would be. Well, thanks to Polygon, we have an answer. Per Sehaj Sethi, “Avatar: Seven Havens takes place about 225 years after Legend of Korra ends.”

So, somewhere between Legend of Korra and Seven Havens, the ‘cataclysm’ happened. An Avatar betrayed their role as a hero and instead wrought destruction on the planet. This is the primary reason why modern cities are built almost entirely with survival in mind. Sehaj Sethi goes on to explain more about Ellora, the massive metropolis Haven Pavi comes from. The initial inspiration for the city was the Ellora Caves, an ancient Indian complex of monasteries and temples. “Just as the this ancient complex is a harmonious mix of several religious practices, (Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism), Ellora (along with the other Havens) is a harmonious blend of all bending practices,” says Sethi.

Paramount, Nickolodeon, Avatar Studios

The city, with all but the city center built into slot canyons for maximum protection from the harsh desert storms and tornadoes, is a multicultural melting pot. It’s a fresh spin on the world of Avatar, taking into account the way that cultures diverge and hybridize over centuries, especially in wake of sweeping disasters—such as the cataclysm, for instance. Ethan Spaulding says the population of Ellora is over 1,000,000! Between the new visual direction—reminiscent of Jean Giraud’s comic work—and the significant change in tone, Seven Havens looks to have a much different atmosphere and vibe from both The Last Airbender and Legend of Korra.

The producers went on to emphasize the high stakes of the story. The public no longer sees the Avatar as the world’s savior, but the world’s destroyer. The Avatar is the enemy. Pavi has to navigate a city that is hostile towards the very concept of her existence. Sethi shares the city’s motto: “Ellora must survive.” I think the quiet part is, at all costs.

Paramount, Nickolodeon, Avatar Studios

Avatar: Seven Havens drops on October 9th, and the date can’t come fast enough. Here’s hoping the producers share even more tidbits before the official release!

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

The post How Long Does AVATAR: SEVEN HAVENS Take Place After LEGEND OF KORRA? appeared first on Nerdist.

The Trump administration announced an arrangement with Venezuela last week that would see the US take control of 65 billion barrels worth of oil fields and a significant share of the country’s production of 800,000 barrels of oil per day—the latest development after an American strike on Caracas abducted the country’s president Nicolás Maduro in January.

According to the White House statement, Venezuela will grant a firm called North American Blue Energy Partners, rights to 17 oil fields for 100 years; that company will give the Pentagon a 35 percent stake in its corporate parent and the State Department the ability to buy 20 percent of its oil, with right of first refusal for the remaining 80 percent. The US government can also veto any appointment to NABEP’s board of directors.

The deal is one of the public-private partnerships that have become customary in Donald Trump’s foreign relations. But its workings in practice, and diplomatic and corporate reactions to the deal, are unclear at best. Just days after the White House announcement, Chevron said it would expand its operations in Venezuela. But Chevron is already the largest foreign oil operator in the country, and others have indicated that the uncertainty of Trump’s plan, let alone how long the process of scaling up production would take, has made them hesitant to invest.

What is clear is that the oil deal is a direct seizure of another country’s resources under threat of force, what political scientist Jeff Colgan, who directs the Climate Solutions Lab at Brown University’s Watson Institute for Public and International Affairs, calls “petro-imperialism.”

“We should be watching to see whether Trump’s own family takes a piece of this thing, as [they] have with so many other foreign business arrangements.” 

In March, I spoke with Colgan, who has long studied the role of oil in international politics and war about how the idea of military intervention in global oil markets to support the US oil industry informed Trump’s actions in Iran. A similar pattern is in evidence again in Venezuela.

Trump has publicly signaled that he is interested in making Venezuela the 51st state, and according to reports Tuesday, is seeking more access to the country’s minerals, including gold. To better understand what to make of all of this, I spoke with Colgan again last week.

Much isn’t known about Trump’s agreement to secure partial control of Venezuela’s oil industry. What are you watching out for?

I’m keeping an eye on the different ways the Venezuelan government and the US government are describing the deal, because of course, their two audiences want very different things, and I’m not sure how easy it’s going to be for politicians to try to square that circle.

Already, you see significant criticism from the political opposition in Venezuela [led by officials like conservative María Corina Machado], and even from some of the old [Nicolás] Maduro regime members saying, “This oil is ours, we don’t want to give it to the United States, and this is a form of neo-colonialism.” 

There’s also criticism of the interim president in Venezuela [Delcy Rodríguez] for making this deal. She, of course, is trying to finesse that by saying, “Look, this is an arrangement that will bring in American investment into an oil sector that really needs it,” because [Venezuela’s oil industry] has been inefficiently run for 20 years or so. It is true on some level, but American dollars going into the Venezuelan oil sector is different from what President Trump is telling Americans—that this is going to be a great deal by which Americans get access to Venezuelan oil at zero cost to American taxpayers. Those two messages seem fundamentally incompatible.

The Trump administration claims that Venezuelan oil will lower American gas prices amid the war in Iran. What do you think?

I think the argument is complete nonsense. Yes, there might be new investment that comes in, but then you’re really talking about production that is years down the road. And because the oil system is very globally integrated, what happens in Venezuela is not going to lead in a direct fashion to lower prices for Americans. In fact, if anything, more investment in Venezuela might drive out investment in the rest of the world as companies react to wherever they think is the most profitable approach to meeting oil demand. They can cancel or just not make investments elsewhere in the world. 

The disruption in [the Strait of] Hormuz is going to affect oil prices in the next few years, well before any new Venezuelan production.

Are there any historical comparisons to what we know about the Trump administration’s oil deal? I know a British company owned a lot of Iran’s oil sector before Iran nationalized it in the 1950s.

I think the comparison to Iran is a good one. The Anglo-Iranian oil company, which today we know as BP, did control the Iranian oil sector and made all the decisions about it from London rather than on behalf of Iranians. That’s one of the reasons, of course, why you had [Mohammad] Mosaddegh get elected [as prime minister of Iran] in 1951 and a coup against him in 1953 as he tried to nationalize the oil sector, and that continues to be a grievance that Iranians feel against both Britain and the United States as evil overlords of their oil sector.

The winner is “not going to be the average American consumer, certainly not the average Venezuelan. But it is going to line the pockets of some American companies.”

Another is PDVSA, the Venezuelan national oil company that was created out of mostly American oil companies. It used to be Exxon, Mobil, [what is now] Chevron, [and others]. These companies were operating Venezuela’s oil sector until, in 1976, the government nationalized them, saying “okay, everybody who’s currently working for those companies: now you’re working for PDVSA.” And they showed up to the same office the same the next day doing the same job, just for a different company. 

It very much was an American institution. It was nationalised, and since the ’70s, Venezuela has tried to close the sector off and concentrate the profits of the oil sector in Venezuela. That only works for so long, and they need more foreign investment. So then they open the sector back up and close it again every 10 or 15 years. 

Now we’re in a new phase of [Venezuela] needing foreign investment to reinvigorate their oil sector. But there are good and bad ways of doing this, and this is one that is very likely to be seen by Venezuelans as just Americans stealing Venezuelan oil. I think it would be hard to shape that perception because of the way that Maduro was taken out of the country and also because you have President Trump saying how this [deal] is acquiring all of these resources for America.

Is there anything else that jumps out to you in recent reporting on what the Trump administration is saying about the deal?

All of the relevant actors are aware that this is fundamentally political—that Trump wants to make a case that he is generating economic returns for America, and the best argument he’s going to be able to make is that those returns are coming in the future. There’s certainly not going to be any impact before the November elections, or even, frankly, the 2028 elections. 

The other main thing here is a story about who benefits. It’s not going to be the average American consumer, and it’s certainly not going to be the average Venezuelan. But it is going to line the pockets of some American companies, and in particular, we should be watching to see whether Trump’s own family takes a piece of this thing, as he and his family have with so many other foreign business arrangements. 

I continue to go back to this framing of “petro-imperialism,” where the US is turning its foreign policy in this new direction to extract resources and profits away from other countries in an old-fashioned, 19th-century imperialist mode. This is what this Venezuelan deal is doing. 

Based on the limited information we have now, how is the Venezuela deal different from other iterations of Trump’s petro-imperialism, like Iran?

Iran is very different because the US has not been able to acquire any of Iran’s oil resources. But in the early parts of the war, he did say before the new supreme leader had been chosen that the United States should have a say in who that person is [like Delcy Rodríguez in Venezuela]. [It’s] very much the same kind of petro-imperialistic thinking, where he wants to be able to control what another oil producer was doing. 

But it hasn’t worked. Iran has found a way to fight back, and the idea that the US is going to dictate who’s in charge of the Iranian government is completely off the table. That’s just not feasible, and the Trump administration would be very lucky to get back to the pre-war status quo in Iran, which I don’t think is going to happen.

“Countries will fall. Industries are gonna collapse,” Andrew Garfield, the actor playing OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, says in the teaser trailer for Artificial. “And we get to be the ones to shepherd people into this new world.”

The film’s set against the backdrop of the five days in November 2023 after Altman was ousted and then reinstated as CEO. The drama of that week is now the stuff of legend: text messages between Altman and then-interim CEO Mira Murati, later released in court documents, show him desperately pleading for the board to reinstate him. Even more extensive reporting from the time turned up dozens of Atlman’s former co-workers, all of whom describe him as someone with an implacable drive for more power. Will Artificial have any sympathy for him? Or will he be a monstrous villain undeserving of such consideration?

The trailer doesn’t do much to dispel this notion. In it, Garfield gets out of a Batmobile-looking car and walks into a futuristic blue-light room stacked with automatic guns encased in glass shelves. The question for audiences isn’t subtle: can and should Altman be trusted with a tool as powerful as artificial intelligence?

The movie’s marketed as a thriller, which makes sense because OpenAI has undeniably done things worthy of the genre. This week, the Intercept reported that the Pentagon asked the company, which signed a $200-million agreement with OpenAI back in February, to design automated tools that would rarely deny their requests.

Then on Monday, OpenAI announced that it had solved a 200-year-old math problem, and on Tuesday, said it only took its AI agents 88 hours to complete and provided its full solution to the public. That would be a monumental achievement, evidence of AI’s efficiency over human intelligence. But mathematician Tristan Buckmaster said on Monday night the company actually rushed to solve the equation after learning about his and his colleague’s, Levent Alpöge, an Anthropic employee, progress on the problem using Anthropic and OpenAI tools. It wasn’t about the good of humanity. It was about competition.

On Tuesday, OpenAI said it heard rumors last week that two complex, long-unsolved math problems had been solved—one of which was the problem Buckmaster and Alpöge were working on. “Inspired by these rumors,” the company said it tried to use one of its internal models to solve it and said it did not realize until later that Alpöge was an Anthropic employee.

The movie, scheduled to release on December 25, also has drama of its own: Amazon dropped the project in June, following its partnership with OpenAI, which integrates the company’s models into Amazon Web Services.

Garfield notably portrayed Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin in The Social Network, a 2010 film about Mark Zuckerberg’s time in college. That film seemed to sympathize with Zuckerberg as a tragic figure leading a company that hadn’t yet leaked tens of millions of users’ personal data, failed to stop its platform from being used to “foment division and incite offline violence” in the ongoing genocide of the Rohingya people in Myanmar, or become a hotbed of dangerous AI slop.

Public sentiment has turned so squarely against companies that profit from social media that even West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin—who also wrote the screenplay for the 2010 film—has returned to the action with another dramatic rendering of Zuckerberg due out in October and aptly named The Social Reckoning.

On Wednesday morning, in a Manhattan press room containing about 50 reporters and union members, one of the largest teachers’ unions in the US announced an agreement with Microsoft that, among other things, prohibits the tech company from tracking student use of its AI tools and applying student and teacher data to train AI models.

The guidelines listed in the American Federation of Teachers’ deal with Microsoft apply to any school district “that desires the same principles” when forming their own customer agreements with the company and purchasing its AI products.

The union also gives Microsoft—and any other tech company that signs on (AFT President Randi Weingarten mentioned ongoing conversations with OpenAI and Anthropic during Wednesday’s announcement)—a 180-day deadline to delete records of AI data use from students and school districts on its active systems following a request.

Microsoft agreed not to use student and teacher data to train its AI — but there are exceptions. The guidelines point out “narrow safety and security” situations, including letting the company use “the minimum amount” of school user data to detect, prevent, investigate, or remediate harm to users or security threats to its AI products and retain it “for as long as reasonably necessary.”

The contract also lists “contractual remedies” for school districts that sign on, such as the ability to pause or discontinue Microsoft’s deployment of its AI systems if the company commits any material breaches of its agreement obligations.

The current guidelines do not present explicit, quantifiable rules for what is considered remediation by a “reasonable” time—it’s something that both Microsoft and the customer will “engage in good faith” to come up with. 

When I asked Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith about specific guidelines on how an accountability process will work if Microsoft fails to comply with remediation on Wednesday, he largely dodged the question, saying that Microsoft has to publish reports that provide transparency to the AFT and school districts and have tight deadlines for fixes.

“Obviously, this [remediation process] becomes part of our broader contract with each school district, and all of those [existing] contracts already have built-in remedies,” Smith told Mother Jones. “I think that there’s just an unprecedented amount of transparency associated with the commitments that are in this agreement.”

When I asked again about specific steps that will be taken if Microsoft fails to comply, Smith said they are “connected back into the provisions that we have in our contract with each school district. Those can vary.”

“Mostly, what I find is that what people want when something goes wrong is just to go fix it. People don’t want to end up with more time with lawyers,” he continued. “That’s always an option if somebody wants to take action, but let’s just fix problems when they arise.” 

While accountability applies to how each school district will work with Microsoft in the near future, the company seemingly not holding discussions now raises questions about the feasibility of contract enforceability.

Microsoft, and other companies like Google, have a history of promoting their AI products to schools and educators, and a healthy skepticism is needed when relying in part on tech companies to police AI and previous failures of implementing educational technology.

Weingarten and Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers representing New York City public school educators and others, who were also taking questions immediately following the announcement, did not respond to the question.

The contract comes a week after New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced a one-year moratorium on AI use for elementary and middle school students in the city’s public schools, and the Los Angeles Unified School District announced restrictions to generative AI platforms for all students for the 2026-27 school year. 

The AFT’s contract with Microsoft contains the sentence “When in doubt, protect the student.” on the bottom of each of the 31 pages. But exactly how any of these policies around AI use in schools will actually work remains unclear.

President Trump has made millions on his oil and gas investments thanks to the Iran war. 

CNBC reports that the president’s investment holdings continued to trade energy stocks during the first six months of the war. Between February 27 and August 31, his nine largest fuel assets grew between $1.5 million and $4.4 million, the network estimates, referring to his annual financial disclosure. 

Trump reported owning stock in Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil, Kinder Morgan, Marathon Petroleum, Occidental Petroleum, Phillips 66, Valero Energy, and the Williams Companies. CNBC calculated Trump’s gains based on what he said in his June disclosure about his assets, looking at how each stock performed over the six-month period. 

The last time Trump disclosed any stock trades was June 29, so the data is incomplete. It’s also hard to get a completely accurate estimate as Trump’s disclosure doesn’t reveal exact share counts.

CNBC stated that it didn’t find any evidence that Trump or his financial advisers used advance knowledge in their decisions, that his finances influenced policy decisions, or that he personally directed specific transactions. A White House spokesperson also issued a flat-out denial. 

“Neither President Trump nor any member of his family has any ability to direct, influence, or provide input regarding how the portfolio is invested or when investments are bought or sold,” Davis Ingle told CNBC. “All investment decisions are made entirely by independent managers. There are no conflicts of interest.”

Still, many of the trades occurred at big moments in the war, such as the first trading day after the February 27 attack or just hours before Trump announced a (now-collapsed) two-week ceasefire.

Meanwhile, Trump on Wednesday declared that the Iran war won’t end until after the midterm elections, adding that he is no longer pursuing negotiations with the country.

It’s bad enough that Trump’s statements and Truth Social posts can manipulate the markets, but the fact that they can also affect his own wealth is a glaring red flag. Trump frequently disparages certain companies and praises others, even mentioning stock symbols at times. He also owns stakes in several defense companies that have done well thanks to the Iran war.  

Even if he isn’t directly involved, Trump knows what is good for his money and what isn’t. The idea that he makes decisions without any regard to how it affects his portfolio, or the assets of his friends and allies, is absurd. He’s already made billions of dollars since being elected president for the second time, and he’s not about to deliberately wreck his net worth. 

A massive immigration operation is happening in Memphis. It’s been underway for just under a year now—hundreds of arrests, streets filled with officers. But most people I talk with have never heard of it. Why?

As I previously documented for this magazine, the occupation of one of America’s largest majority-Black cities began last September: ICE arrived in Memphis along with more than a dozen local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies. Today, more than 1,200 officers are still stationed there as part of the Memphis Safe Task Force, according to a spokesperson from the US Marshals Service.

You might not have heard about this just because there’s a lot going on (gestures everywhere). Also, Tennessee’s Republican governor supports the task force, and the Trump administration has framed it as a crime-fighting operation rather than an immigration operation, so it’s gotten less coverage than, say, ICE’s actions in Minneapolis. But there’s another reason why this surge hasn’t gotten much attention: It’s harder to record ICE in Tennessee than it is in many states.

Just ask Hunter Demster, who runs a soup kitchen and has spent the last year driving around Memphis with his phone, trying to document immigration arrests so he can post the videos online. With help from the ACLU, he and other activists sued the task force in May for allegedly violating their First Amendment rights to record by, among other measures, invoking Tennessee’s Halo Law.

Passed last year, the Halo Law makes it a crime for someone to come within 25 feet of an officer after they’ve been warned to step away. Demster’s lawsuit accuses agents of using the statute inappropriately. Now he’s sharing evidence to show what he means.

In a video published this week, you can watch as Demster records a group of federal officers standing on the side of the road. He’s there for 20 minutes before they pull a man out of a ditch to make an arrest. Demster tries to capture the moment, taking care to remain 25 feet away, according to his court declaration.

But the officers aren’t satisfied—they want him back even farther. “I am filming, I am not impeding, I am not doing anything!” Demster yells as an officer continues walking toward him and away from the scene, forcing him so far back that he can no longer see or hear what’s happening. Eventually, Demster, who curses in frustration, refuses to retreat any more and finds himself tackled and handcuffed.

This second video, shot from across the street, shows another view of the encounter.

Since the task force began last year, officers have invoked the Halo Law against Demster dozens of times, according to the lawsuit. Other community members have similar stories. “This lawsuit is laying out partially why you aren’t hearing as much from Memphis,” Demster told me a few months ago. “There’s an intention to operate in the shadows.”

A handful of other states have passed similar laws requiring a buffer zone around police; courts recently struck these laws down in Indiana and Louisiana because they were too vague. In June, a bill was introduced in Congress to help people sue federal officers who violate their right to record. One of the lawmakers behind the bill, Rep. Maxwell Alejandro Frost (D-Florida), cited the situation in Memphis as inspiration.