MPs and peers tell UK to stop winging it on AI regulation
The Proud Boys Next Door
Michael Premo was gasping for air. It was January 6, 2021, and Premo and his partner, fellow filmmaker Rachel Falcone, were crushed against a wall in the Lower West Terrace tunnel at the US Capitol. Between the gas mask and the body armor compressing his torso, Premo was struggling to breathe.
Then Premo made eye contact with a man he recognized from past rallies, who used his body to wedge Premo and Falcone free. When they were safely outside, Premo’s first thought was to find a Proud Boy named Chris Quaglin, whom they’d been following but had lost in the melee. They had to decide whether to leave or continue to film.
“Now it’s dawned on us, the sort of gravity of this historical moment that we are bearing witness to, and at that point it’s like a war photographer,” Premo says. “I’m just following the story wherever it goes.”
The moment was the climax of a story Premo had been working on for three years. His documentary, Homegrown, follows three members of the far-right nationalist Proud Boys—Quaglin, Thad Cisneros, and Randy Ireland—before and after the 2020 election, which they believe was stolen from Donald Trump. The film, which recently won a 2026 duPont-Columbia Award and is currently streaming on GATHR, traces Cisneros’ attempts at bridge building with Black Lives Matter, Ireland’s steady role as an organizer and Proud Boys ideological anchor, and Quaglin’s radicalization. It is a verité film, showing the ordinary texture of the men’s daily lives alongside the violence, with no narration or talking heads to tell viewers how to feel about either. And it feels less like documentation of a historic event and more like access into a current reality—one that many people would rather dismiss as extreme.
I watched the film as part of Project All, an initiative of the equity-focused research institute PolicyLink that argues the country’s way forward means bridging ideological gaps. The invitation to the viewing stated: “Americans still hold a deep love for their country and for one another—an untapped source of energy that can be mobilized to chart a new course above the fray of polarization.”
For viewers eager to condemn the Proud Boys, Homegrown replaces moral distance with something more uncomfortable: the idea that these men are not extraordinary.
It seemed an odd choice to use a film about the Proud Boys as an opening to connection. But Homegrown raised some questions for me, including: How did Premo, a Black man, manage to embed himself within an organization that, while describing itself as non-racist “Western chauvinists,” has been repeatedly linked to white supremacy? And then there’s his portrayal of the men in the film. For viewers eager to condemn the Proud Boys, Homegrown replaces moral distance with something more uncomfortable: the idea that these men are not extraordinary. Premo’s refusal to editorialize or explain his subjects means viewers see men who are in many ways familiar, who love their kids, who push back against racism in their own ranks, and who genuinely believe they’re on the right side of history—just as many viewers might believe themselves to be.
Michael Premo attends the Homegrown green carpet during the 20th Zurich Film Festival in October 2024.Joshua Sammer/Getty
Premo, 44, says he’s always been driven to understand people across differences. Growing up in Albany, New York, the son of civil servants who worked for the state, he recalls as a child reading The Big Book of Peace, which included a drawing of an Israeli and a Palestinian. “I think the headline was something like, ‘Which is the Palestinian and which is the Israeli?’ and my younger self was trying to discern the difference,” he says. “And the point is there is no difference. They’re just people.”
When he was older, Premo went to college in Boston. He told me about an incident in which someone smeared urine and feces on his dorm door and wrote: “Michael Premo is a bitch N—.” While Premo says the school administration was sympathetic, they ultimately did little to resolve the issue and framed it as the person “acting out.”
“I told them that I wanted to make a film about people fighting for America and I wanted to understand what they were fighting for, and why.”
So in the aftermath of the 2016 election, Premo was surprised by how many people were shocked at Trump’s victory. He made Homegrown, in part, as an explanation. “To me he seemed to epitomize everything that America is but pretends it’s not,” he says. “I feel like Donald Trump was saying all of the quiet things out loud.”
He approached the men in the documentary from a place of wanting to understand. “I told them that I wanted to make a film about people fighting for America and I wanted to understand what they were fighting for, and why,” he says.
Before Premo started filming, he assumed that the far-right groups he met with would be predominantly white and was nervous about how he would be treated. But that didn’t turn out to be the case with the Proud Boys.
Founded in 2016, the group became known for street violence and confrontations with left-wing protesters. In 2020, Proud Boys tore down Black Lives Matter banners from two historic Black churches in Washington, DC; their leader, Enrique Tarrio, later pleaded guilty to burning one of them.
What Premo found was that the Proud Boys were multiracial, and, once he had earned the trust of Ireland and Cisneros, who were the leaders of their respective Proud Boy chapters, he was accepted. When some members did make racist remarks, Premo says Ireland defended him.
Still, Premo found the constant macho rhetoric and violence he witnessed while filming mentally and emotionally exhausting. He went to rallies dressed in protective gear, prepared for a riot. Even if there weren’t skirmishes between the Proud Boys and other groups, there were men talking about what they wanted to do to antifa or others.
While he included the violence in his film, Premo is clear that it is not meant to make these men exceptions, but to situate them within a broader pattern.
“One of my critiques of American history and polite, middle-class white liberal society is this idea that violence is only an aberration of the norm. It’s only something that is carried out by the fringe or the extremes of society, when fundamentally, the American project is a project built by violence,” he says.
Pro-Trump protesters gather in front of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, in Washington, DC.Jon Cherry/Getty
In Homegrown, the result is an intimate if uncomfortable look that complicates existing narratives about the Proud Boys—and violence in America. Cisneros, Quaglin, and Ireland see themselves as fighting on behalf of disenfranchised men like themselves—middle and working-class people who have been ignored by a government that benefits the wealthy—and for a return to the ideals upon which they believe this country was built.
Quaglin, a 39-year-old electrician from New Jersey, becomes the film’s center of gravity. He and his wife—a Chinese immigrant who he says “100 percent is for Trump”—are preparing for the birth of their first child while his activism ramps up. We watch as he gets “punched in” to Ireland’s chapter after a rally—an initiation that involves reciting a pledge and getting decked by five Proud Boys. The film tracks Quaglin’s parallel storylines until they collide on January 6.
Premo chose to center Quaglin because his story was emblematic of many people Premo met while filming—men who had not been politically active before Trump’s 2016 election, but who then saw him as a solution. “Chris seemed to embody that individual who had these series of grievances, was trying to achieve something, though he wasn’t sure what he was trying to achieve,” Premo says. “It was really Trump that made him sort of hop up and go.”
Quaglin welcomed Premo and Falcone into his personal life. On the first day that they went to his house in New Brunswick to film, he woke up early to slow-cook pork on the grill for them. The night of January 6, Premo says that Quaglin left their hotel and returned with alcohol to celebrate. He’d remembered from some past conversation that Falcone liked Balvenie scotch and bought her a bottle.
It suggests something more uncomfortable: that the difference is often not one of belief, but of expression—who says what out loud, and who knows not to.
When I first watched Homegrown, I didn’t make it all the way through. The unfiltered look at Quaglin, in particular, was unsettling—not because of the violence or his racist comments, but because of the sense of normalcy with which they are presented. The opening scene shows Quaglin putting together a radiator cover in a nursery, in preparation for the birth of his son. Later, he outfits his truck to splatter paint over the Black Lives Matter sign on New York’s Fifth Avenue, carrying it out with methodical calmness. He is the only one of the men featured in the film who was at the Capitol on January 6, planning to go armed with knives and firearms for what he says will be a “CIVIL WAR.”
I found the ease with which Quaglin committed these acts astounding. The interspersion of political violence and domesticity doesn’t allow viewers to compartmentalize what’s on screen as fringe behavior, safely outside the bounds of ordinary American life. It suggests something more uncomfortable: that the difference is often not one of belief, but of expression—who says what out loud, and who knows not to.
As a Black woman, I know the quiet racism of liberal spaces, and the pretense that it is only perpetuated by those, like the Proud Boys, who are seen as extreme. The brilliance of Homegrown is that it forces viewers to confront that.
Ireland was the first of the Proud Boys in the film that Premo met, when they talked in a bar after a Trump rally in New York City. Ireland, 51, said that Premo shared that he was working on a film: “It was very much in general terms,” says Ireland. “That started a kind of friendship, I suppose.”
Ireland says Homegrown is a distortion of the Proud Boys because it focuses so heavily on Quaglin. “Chris is an extreme individual,” Ireland says. “I would say that Michael himself is more the standard.”
Cisneros, 49, challenges viewers’ preconceptions of who the Proud Boys are—and how they view the world. Before he agreed to participate in the film, Cisneros had his Proud Boys chapter in Salt Lake City watch Premo’s film Water Warriors, about Indigenous and white community members fighting to protect their water from a natural gas company. The “common man fighting the system” aspect of Water Warriors was something that resonated, Cisneros said.
One of the more surprising moments in the film is Cisneros’ partnership with Black Lives Matter activist Jacarri Kelley. Cisneros, who is Latino, says the Proud Boys and Black Lives Matter had shared goals in fighting for equality, because both groups were responding to a political system that had failed many working-class people. Kelley and Cisneros appeared together at rallies and public events. “The only way that we’re going to fix that,” Cisneros says in the film, “is if we recognize that we’re all sitting on the same plane and we’re all crashing into the same damn mountain.”
Cisneros was grateful that Premo was there to bear witness. “I’m honestly glad that I let Mike in in that way,” he says.
While some in his chapter were supportive of his decision, Cisneros says that within the nationwide Proud Boys Telegram chat, there was pushback. In the end, the partnership with BLM led to Cisneros being forced out of the Proud Boys.
His life spiraled out of control after January 6. He lost the Proud Boys, his dog, his relationship, and his freedom—he was recently released having served two years in prison in Texas for aggravated assault. Premo filmed some of Cisneros’ losses, including his father in hospice, but out of respect chose not to include them. Cisneros was grateful that Premo was there to bear witness. “I’m honestly glad that I let Mike in in that way,” says Cisneros, who has not yet seen Homegrown.
Meanwhile, Quaglin was incarcerated for his role on January 6 and was released in January 2025, after being pardoned by Trump. His wife divorced him, and Homegrown ends with a note that he had not held his son since his arrest in April 2021. Premo says Quaglin—who declined to speak to me for this story—blames him for the divorce.
Still from “Homegrown”Credit tktk
While the film focuses on the Proud Boys, Premo also followed other groups he describes as explicit white supremacists. He filmed what one framed as a border protection exercise, in which they patrolled in southern Arizona, some dressed in Nazi uniforms. One man told Premo he was an abomination who should be exterminated. Premo felt it was wiser not to respond and just let the man speak. “That just tested every sort of emotional thread I had,” Premo says.
Premo couldn’t watch the footage he shot on January 6 for more than a year.
He hasn’t yet processed the toll that working on the film has taken. He couldn’t watch the footage he shot on January 6 for more than a year. When the editors asked for his input during their first pass, Premo refused and asked them to just send the clips they thought they might use. Even then, he was reluctant to watch.
Premo tried therapy to cope with the mental and emotional exhaustion. “One therapist told me that in stressful situations I should take my shoes off and connect with the ground, and that didn’t seem to be applicable in my scenario,” he says. What worked was “bubble baths and cognac.” He also built in time, while filming, for hikes or to be in nature.
Premo and Falcone applied to film festivals in anticipation of the 2024 election cycle. While the film premiered at the Venice Film Festival that August, they encountered resistance from festival organizers in the United States. Some programmers saw little urgency, Premo says, doubting Trump could be re-elected. Others felt the film was platforming a hate group.
That shifted after Trump won. Homegrown now has been screened at more than 50 film festivals and won the duPont-Columbia in January. Along with its streaming agreement, it’s also available through an educational distribution agreement with New Day Films.
In making the film, Premo says he found that what people were fighting for came down to something more fundamental than politics: “I discovered,” he says, “that people are looking for belonging, meaning, and purpose.”
Revolut falls for fake government requests, hands over customer data
States Already Have a Good Way to Ensure Election Integrity—and MAGA Hates It
In January 2022, at an event hosted by one of the scores of local “election integrity” groups inspired by Donald Trump’s fraudulent assertion that voter fraud had cost him the 2020 election, Louisiana Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin made a big announcement: His state was leaving ERIC.
This was puzzling because, amid all the Republican pearl-clutching over election integrity, ERIC was the single organization best equipped to help states ensure exactly that.
And suddenly MAGA Republicans wanted nothing to do with it.
Conspiracy theorists “spread lies about me… They spread lies about ERIC’s funding, what ERIC does, how ERIC works.”
ERIC is short for Electronic Registration Information Center. It’s a nonpartisan, nonprofit coalition established in 2012 by elections officials from seven states—then four red, three blue—who joined forces to bulletproof their voting processes. This, of course, was before the right twisted the term “election integrity,” much as they’d previously usurped the word “patriot,” as a partisan identifier somewhat opposite from its original meaning.
And what does ERIC do? Well, member states submit voter registration and vehicle registration data through secure channels, allowing for cross-referencing. That’s valuable because people frequently move within and among states. Young people become eligible. Noncitizens become citizens. Former felons have rights restored. Newly incarcerated people lose them. And lots of people die.
ERIC helps its members track voter moves and purge their lists of duplicate registrations (Michael Mechanic vs. Mike Mechanic) and dead people (hopefully neither of those). It identifies people who are eligible yet unregistered. And after a national election, if requested, ERIC will produce reports flagging any signs of potential illegal voting—of a person casting ballots in two or more states or casting more than one ballot in one state, or voting on behalf of a recently dead relative, for example.
“These are all laudable, uncontroversial goals that have made our voter registration rolls more accurate and our elections more accessible and secure,” Jonathan Diaz, an executive with the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, wrote in an article extolling ERIC’s virtues.
ERIC attracted more new members every year. By the time of Ardoin’s announcement, it had 31 member states, plus DC, and was respected on both sides of the aisle as a powerful tool to help keep voter rolls in shape, improve access, and flag potential fraud. John Merrill, Alabama’s secretary of state from 2015 to 2023, recalls that ERIC had more Republican-run than Democratic-run states at the time. “Its integrity has been intact from its creation,” he told me.
“The people who decided that they did not want to be a part of ERIC did so for political reasons,” says Alabama’s former secretary of state. “And I have a problem with that.”
And yet his state was next to fall. In January 2023. Merrill’s predecessor, Wes Allen, withdrew Alabama from ERIC as his first official act. (“Providing the private information of Alabama citizens, including underage minors, to an out of state organization is troubling to me,” he stated in his announcement.) Allen was followed by a parade of red-state officials, some echoing baseless conspiracy theories, such as a bogus claim that ERIC got funding from George Soros. David Becker, a nonvoting board member who’d helped establish ERIC but is no longer involved, also came under attack.
“Conspiracy theorists targeted ERIC. Apparently, it was working too well for them,” Becker, also the founder and director of the “fiercely nonpartisan” Center for Election Innovation and Research, recalled at a CEIR press briefing on Friday. “They spread lies about me,” he said, and “They spread lies about ERIC’s funding, what ERIC does, how ERIC works. We continue to see that.”
Trump himself piled on: “All Republican Governors should immediately pull out of ERIC, the terrible Voter Registration System that ‘pumps the rolls’ for Democrats and does nothing to clean them up,” he wrote on Truth Social in March 2023, showcasing his complete ignorance of ERIC’s role.
Red-state officials played along. After Alabama came Florida, Missouri, and West Virginia, then Iowa, Ohio, Virginia, and Texas. By 2024, nearly a third of the member states had bailed, though a handful of reliably conservative states (Alaska, Kentucky, South Carolina, and Utah) remain. Officials from the departing states “succumbed to that disinformation, even as they admitted that they knew it was false, and within days of leaving, were proudly trumpeting voter fraud investigations and prosecutions they did that came solely from ERIC,” Becker said. “We saw this in several states.”
“I think that the people who decided that they did not want to be a part of ERIC did so for political reasons,” Merrill told me. “I don’t know anybody that had a factual base for removing their state because of an exposed vulnerability, inconsistency, or irregularity that they felt was a problem for ERIC’s integrity—and if they did, they never shared that publicly. Never. And I have a problem with that.”
In 2022, the year Louisiana bailed, ERIC flagged some 2.4 million interstate moves, 7.3 million intrastate moves, 203,210 duplicate listings, and 65,437 dead voters. Four years later, post-exodus, those numbers were much reduced: roughly 604,000 interstate, 881,00o intrastate, 61,000 duplicates, and 17,000 dead. To boost election integrity, Republicans officials might well have considered recruiting more states to join ERIC instead of taking their ball and going home.
Member states do have some obligations. They must agree to use ERIC’s list maintenance reports to keep their rolls accurate. They must review all potential cases of illegal voting that ERIC flags and refer the credible ones to law enforcement regardless of which party benefitted. They also must, and this is another reason some red states soured on ERIC, use its “Eligible but Unregistered” report to offer basic voter registration information to the people it identifies.
“I don’t think there are five justices who want to own the chaos that would ensue” if the Supreme Court let Trump interfere with voting by mail.
Part of any secretary of state’s job is, or should be, to encourage voter participation. But apparently they don’t make ’em like they used to.
Merrill, who now runs a consultancy called Morning in Alabama LLC that sometimes works with voting groups, has experienced pushback for his outspokenness. “I’ve had conservative ideologues who have said, “Oh, you, you embrace the liberal agenda,” he told me. “I’m like, ‘What? Where’s the agenda?’ I never saw an agenda. I used ERIC as a tool, just like we use the Kansas Interstate Crosscheck System, to multiply our efforts in Alabama to ensure that we had the best election administration system that we could have.”
If anything, he says, withdrawing from the compact has damaged election integrity in those former member states, including his own.
Becker concurs. Those states, he said, “have really kneecapped their own ability to maintain accurate voter lists and potentially combat fraud, and all in service of conspiracy theorists who seem more concerned with raising money and diminishing American election integrity than actually contributing anything substantial.”
The red-state ERIC exodus isn’t a new story, but it’s timely again as Trump’s Department of Justice ramps up attacks on states that refuse to hand over their voter rolls to the feds. In its effort to obtain those lists, the DOJ has taken 30 states to court—and lost in 23 of the 23 cases decided to date. Administration officials have even threatened to prosecute election officials for ill-defined missteps, and have hinted, also vaguely, that they could dispatch ICE or federal troops to polling places. (“This is not going to happen,” Becker said on Friday.)
Most recently, and egregiously, the administration has made moves to monkeywrench postal delivery of ballots in those blue and purple states unwilling to hand over their lists—to a government, mind you, that has obliterated any presumption that it will play fair, and that it won’t weaponize state voter data for partisan advantage.
On Friday, Becker said he didn’t believe the Supreme Court would allow Trump to interfere with mail voting so close to the midterms. “I don’t think there are five justices,” he said, “who want to own the chaos that would ensue and, in some ways, the chaos that might affect Republican voters worse than Democratic voters.”
But if the administration’s purpose is to undermine public confidence in an election in which Trump’s party is expected to fare poorly, then they’ve already succeeded.
Carmageddon: Capitola City Council approves short-term repairs for Stockton Avenue Bridge to extend lifespan
The Capitola City Council approved a short-term repair for the Stockton Avenue Bridge that city officials say is likely to extend the life of the aging structure by roughly 10 to 15 years.
The bridge spanning Soquel Creek near where it empties into Monterey Bay is 93 years old, and while there is no immediate safety concern according to engineering experts, a 2024 analysis by San Francisco-based civil engineering firm CSW Consultants showed widespread deterioration and erosion, and recommended a bridge replacement.
Transcript: Trump Rages as Awful TV Speech Ratings Humiliate Him Badly
The following is a lightly edited transcript of the September 14 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Donald Trump’s effort to salvage the midterms for the GOP doesn’t seem to be going well. His make-believe proposal to send five-thousand-dollar checks to everyone has been widely panned, and even Republicans are leaking that they think it’s an act of desperation. Tellingly, Trump raged wildly at a reporter who asked a simple question: If your policies are succeeding, why pay people to vote Republican?
It all highlights a deep contradiction in Trump-MAGA psychology right now. Republicans are all required to pretend Trump has been a stupendous success, yet that very posture is dragging them toward electoral catastrophe. We’re talking about it all with New Republic senior editor Alex Shephard, who’s our go-to person when it comes to Trump losing the culture. Alex, thanks for coming on.
Alex Shephard: It’s great to be back.
Sargent: So let’s start here. Trump’s promise of a $5,000 check to every American if Republicans hold Congress is one of the centerpieces of their quote-unquote plan to win the midterms. But one Republican operative tells Politico, quote, “No one thinks it’s a serious proposal. It does reek of desperation.”
Another says it’s, quote, “obvious in its political calculation.” And Republicans are also leaking word that they were totally blindsided by the idea, pouring cold water on it, you name it. Alex, your reaction to all that?
Shephard: I think the question about this entire farce of a midterm convention was, what is Trump going to talk about, since his entire second term is up in flames right now? And what they’ve done is concocted, you know, I think a plan that’s a complete sham in a couple of ways, right?
One is just that Trump has said he does not need Congress to send these checks. And he’s sort of suggested—OK, some Republicans in the Senate have said, we’ll draft a bill—but they could just do this right now if they really wanted to. Of course. And they’re not. And I think that people are seeing through it.
But I think the other thing about it, to get to the point about losing the culture, is that Trump’s rise came from this idea that he was a different type of politician, right? He was not somebody who would say something just to get elected and then not do it. And of course, he’s governed in a completely different way. But to me, this is like the biggest possible version of that exact problem—that this is someone who’s just doing shameless electioneering.
And I think that people see through it too, which is the other part here, right? Which is that, you know, gas is rising again, is going to go up a whole lot more after what we’ve seen happen in Saudi Arabia on Friday. So, you know, this is just a mess. And I think the only thing that Trump can respond to—we’ve seen this going back before he was a politician—is marketing. This is marketing, but it’s not real politics.
Sargent: Exactly. And so this is the context for Trump’s bizarre eruption at a reporter. The reporter says, if your economic policies are working, why do you need to create an incentive for people to turn out to vote? Listen.
Reporter (voiceover): If your economic policies are working, why do you need an incentive for people to turn out to vote?
Donald Trump (voiceover): I think what you’re going to do—I didn’t do it for turning out to vote. I’ve done it as a reward for people having to put up with five years, and four years, of a horrible situation caused by Biden.
So you heard there that Trump denies that the money is an incentive to turn out to vote, and then spins a bunch of garbage about Biden. Then, amid some crosstalk, the reporter tries to ask a second question, and Trump erupts.
Trump (voiceover): It’s almost a reward for the people having to put up with Biden’s policy.
Reporter (voiceover): Yeah, but you—you also offered checks during the tariff refund—
Trump (voiceover): Not you. Not you. You’re the worst.
Sargent: So there you hear Trump saying, “Not you, not you, you’re the worst.” And he even leans in and glowers at her in this really menacing and creepy way. Alex, I think this is a critical moment because of the question that was asked.
Republicans fear that voters aren’t at all motivated to vote Republican because of Trump’s failures. And it’s the pointing out of that fact that got Trump so angry. Your reaction to that?
Shephard: Yeah, I would say that. And I think it’s a woman reporter who’s asking the question too, which I think is a classic. It’s reminiscent of the “piggy” moment to some extent. And I think, you know, you really see the kind of Roy Cohn outer-borough menace of Trump in that clip.
But I think that the other part of this, right, is that they’re trying to recreate 2024 to some extent. If you recall, Elon Musk had this, like, lottery, that if you could prove that you voted Republican you could win money. And I think that they had certain things on their side at that point, right?
They had inflation, and they had the sense that Joe Biden was not fully cognizant. And they don’t have any of that right now. So he’s resorting to a form of even more ludicrous bribery, right?
And I think the other thing, which you raised in the question, is that the issue here is that it’s clearly a naked bribe, right? They can’t say anything else. Trump tried to frame this as if it’s a dividend from all of the glorious money that’s from the tariffs—that, by the way, are the primary driver of these price rises that we’re seeing, along with the war in Iran.
And you look at that money, it’s $300 billion. It’s not an insignificant amount of money, but it’s less than a quarter of what you would need just to pay for these checks. This is an economic policy that’s not working. It’s an economic policy that is making things more expensive. It’s an economic policy that people hate. And a five-thousand-dollar check that will never appear is just not enough to make a difference there. It’s ridiculous.
Sargent: Yeah, and I think there’s an enormous contradiction at the center of all of this. At the center of everything MAGA right now, really—they just put on this two-day festival designed to push the storyline that Trump has been a world historical success, a smashing success.
Yet the very need to stage this thing to motivate voters itself shows that they know that’s a massive lie. And the second that contradiction is pointed out to Trump, he melts down. But it really is at the core of this moment, isn’t it?
Shephard: Yeah. And I think that the other core of it, right, is this enthusiasm problem that I think has always been there with Trump. That, like, Trump has this secret sauce with some voters, I should say, in both directions, if he is on the ballot, right? There are people that will show up and they’ll be excited for him.
And if you contrast him with a Democrat, a woke Democrat or an old Democrat like Joe Biden, people will turn out. When he’s not on the ballot, and especially right now, nobody cares, right?
I look at Ocean City, Maryland, right? Not exactly a hot spot, but I recall driving down that way, you know, a couple of years ago, and you would see Trump flags everywhere. You’d see them on the road. And I was down there this weekend, and you didn’t see anything. There’s just not any, like, actual enthusiasm.
You’re seeing generic polls now—two generic polls in the last week, right, the most recent of which was a Quinnipiac poll from this week that showed Democrats at plus eleven on the generic ballot. They’ve got a huge enthusiasm problem. And Trump’s response is always to try to astroturf it.
But I think if you look at the way that he has generated enthusiasm before, it has to some extent always been organic, right? It emerged from him running for president on a message. Whatever you think of that message that’s where it’s come from. And he just cannot. You saw this in 2018, right, with the migrant caravan. They tried the same kind of thing, and it doesn’t work.
And this time I think it’s even more shameless because again, say what you will about the migrant caravan, but it was still a policy message that was tied in some way to recreating what Trump had done two years earlier. Now they’ve just run out of gas on every front, to the point that it’s just a kind of—it’s Ed McMahon’s, whatever, Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes.
Sargent: Well, to your point about driving around the Eastern Shore, which is absolutely pretty Trumpy—last weekend I spent a lot of time driving around a county in western Virginia, in the mountains, that Trump won by well over 40 points. And I only saw one Trump sign. Just one. In many, many hours of driving around really, really Trumpy territory.
So I thought that was a key tell. And when you’re on Twitter or Bluesky or whatever, you constantly get people reporting that in. And I take that very seriously, by the way, Alex. I think we should, don’t you? People are constantly saying on the socials that they were in this Trumpy county, that Trumpy part of the country, and there are just no signs.
Shephard: Yeah. And I think that because with Trumpism, right, it is a different type of political movement. It’s not an endorsement of it, in that it is a sort of—it’s a forever war, right? And I think you’ve seen people respond to it that way, where they, you know, you keep your lawn signs up, you just change them, right? You move the Trump 2020 to the Trump “no more bullshit” sign or whatever. And what we’re seeing now is that people have taken that stuff down.
And like, anecdotally, again, I drove across the country last year, and you were seeing—like, around this time, I think you were still seeing them up. Like, wherever you went, they would kind of be there ambiently. And it’s just gone now. That’s what he is up against, right? And that’s what this midterm convention thing was about—was about trying to get this movement back on that kind of footing. But the problem is that he’s failed, right?
He’s failed on the core reasons he won, which were all driven about inflation, and about, I think also, the idea that you have an executive who is accountable to people and up front with them, right?
And I think what you’re seeing is that aside from maybe the deportation regime, even among his biggest supporters, right, people are frustrated, because the number one promise that he made was to bring prices down. And now all he can do is say, well, maybe I’ll give you a five-thousand-dollar check that everybody knows they’re never going to get.
Sargent: So we actually have some data that supports the arguments we’re making here, and really sheds light on some of the deeper currents of all this. Nate Silver has the Dems leading in the House generic ballot matchup by over eight points. And critically, that’s in the likely voter model—not the registered voter model, or all adults, or anything like that. The likely voter model.
So now you can see the dynamics kicking in that worry Republicans. You can see where the energy is. You can see that when the model screen is for likely voters, all of a sudden the Democratic lead grows. And that’s what this convention’s supposed to correct. But a ludicrous promise like this $5,000, and a bunch of stupid, infantile bashing of Dems—it’s just not going to be the kind of thing that moves these tectonic plates to the degree that Republicans need them to move, right?
Shephard: Yeah. I mean, I think the other thing with that convention that you saw was, I thought, a really concerted, if somewhat marginal, effort to win over three groups that were instrumental to Trump winning in 2024: Black voters, Latino voters, and young voters. So you saw a lot of the speeches, particularly earlier on Wednesday before Trump spoke, were aimed at Black and Latino voters. And then Vance’s speech, which was ridiculous, was, I think, aimed at sort of contrasting him with other millennial politicians, most notably Abdul El-Sayed, but also Zohran Mamdani as well.
And I think it’s just not convincing, right? Because they just don’t have the sauce anymore. And I think that they thought that there was more depth, or at least that there was more of a—we’ve talked about this before—but that there was more of a sort of cultural or even ideological generational shift happening.
And I think what we’re seeing is just that these voters have become much less automatically drawn to the Democratic Party than they were before, but that does not mean that they are moving over to the Republican Party. And I think that this is the larger problem here, is that people are just tuning them out culturally, which I think was still, again, not true—I think there was a willingness among some voters in all three of these groups to sort of hear out Trump and Vance in 2024. And that’s just not the case now.
And, like, Anna Paulina Luna giving a speech at this ridiculous convention is not going to change the fact that Trump is underwater with Latino voters in a way that, you know, is both deserved but also extraordinary, given where he was with those voters two years ago.
Sargent: Yeah. And your point is really well taken on that, because another thing that this convention was supposed to portray was a man in total mastery of the culture, right?
So that’s another big lie at the core of this, because they wouldn’t need to do this if he actually mastered the culture, and he was wielding the mastery that this sort of smoke-and-mirrors show was meant to portray. Can you talk about that?
Shephard: Yeah, I mean, I think this is, like, the idea of Trumpism. And I think what was so alarming about what we were seeing less than two years ago now was this idea that there was just kind of ambient Trump ascendancy, or at least ambient Trump interest, everywhere—which just had not been true. There were, you know, either—it was because it was taboo in certain communities, or just because people just hated the guy. And that had just shifted.
And now I think that what you’re seeing is this effort to try to recreate, like, what was essentially lightning in a bottle. But it was not complicated. It had everything to do with, I think, misplaced frustration about pandemic-era restrictions and misplaced frustration about post-pandemic rises in prices. That’s it, right?
And I think that they just overlearned that lesson completely. And now you’re seeing what Trump has always done in these situations, which is to try to, like, conjure this thing that he can occasionally generate on his own. And they just don’t have it anymore. You’re just like, well, why would anyone want to tune into this, right?
I mean, Wednesday and Thursday, right? These are the first two days of the NFL season. And I think that Trump’s arrogance in sort of counterprogramming that, I think, says a lot too about his, like, larger cluelessness. Like, yes, I would say, as both Canada and Iran clearly know based on actions that they have taken over the past week, the American midterm calendar starts after Labor Day.
But I think Trump was trying to kind of, yeah, generate momentum out of nothing. And I think all he did was just call attention to everything that he doesn’t have. And finally, hosting this thing in Texas just put way more attention onto James Talarico, who spent the entire week on television. You know, I think it’s going to backfire spectacularly.
Sargent: It absolutely is. And we’ve got still more data to talk about here, which is that the speech on the opening night of the convention drew about 2.5 million viewers on Fox News. This is according to Nielsen data. And Fox was the only major network to carry Trump’s two-hour address in full. Two point five million is just absolutely humiliating, Alex. Can you talk about what the context is for a number like that?
Shephard: Well, I mean, I think one context of it is that there are not full opening day NFL numbers yet, but it would be less than 10 percent of what opening day of the NFL reached last year. And again, since this year the opening game was a literal repeat of the Super Bowl, I would suspect that those numbers might be higher than twenty-eight million, which they were last year. It is about a tenth of the number of people that watched Trump’s 2024 speech at the RNC.
I mean, these are, you know, by some measures, it’s about twice the viewers that CNN had. I think CNN had 1.1 million viewers at the same time. So basically he got twice the normal cable viewership of America’s second most popular cable news network. And that’s just not a lot of viewers. And I mean, the speech itself was almost two hours long.
To some extent, right, the $5,000 check promise, based on media coverage afterwards, is probably going to get more eyeballs than that. But again, that just gets back to the point—they might say, yeah, that’s great, because that’s what we want people to take from it. But I think that all that communicates is their desperation, and the fact that he’s lying, right? This is just the thing that people hate about Trump, is that he’s a blowhard and he’s just saying stuff that he thinks will win votes.
Sargent: Man, we really screwed ourselves pretty royally in the last election, dude. Just to wrap this up—you had this good piece arguing that Iran and Canada have found Trump’s Achilles’ heel. You just alluded to that, which is that he can just be bled out politically in the run-up to the midterms.
Iran is just holding out and pushing global prices higher, energy prices higher, and Canada’s going to accept some short-term pain in a trade war, which will be real, in order to hurt Republicans in some of these border states with big Senate races.
But Alex, just to get to the big theme here, there’s almost another emperor-has-no-clothes narrative unfolding on the global level here, right? Like, because the story that Trump tells is that his power is limitless and he’s vanquished all his enemies, right? And this must not be questioned by Republicans. That story cannot be questioned.
And the result is that they aren’t allowed to seriously work with congressional power to end these conflicts. They could just protest a little, but that’s it, right? And that hurts them above all. That’s the ultimate hilarious irony to it.
Shephard: Yeah. And I think there’s a lot of things to be rightly angry about, but the two biggest reasons why people are upset with the president is really just one, right? Is that the war in Iran and the trade war are causing prices to rise. And actions taken by Iran—I mean, over the last several months, but really over the last week. Like, the Houthis now control a vital second strait, right? A second Strait of Hormuz has basically emerged, this time in the Red Sea.
Canada, I think, has been very open about the fact that they are choosing tariffs that will affect key Senate races in places like Kansas and Maine. Kansas is a very interesting one, right? Because Trump is four points underwater in Kansas right now, which is just a truly insane thing to say.
And so I think what we’re seeing is in the piece that I wrote was about the kind of delicious irony of this—that Trump’s second term has marked, I think, a real aggressive and troubling shift in American foreign policy, to the extent that he’s just openly doing election interference in other countries. He’s using tariffs to try to get candidates that he wants to win.
He’s using most-favored-nation status, using all kinds of tools to try to help other people that he likes—it usually backfires. And you know, what we’re seeing now is that Canada and Iran are hitting him, I think, much harder and more strategically, in ways that will hurt and are going to prolong what’s the biggest driver of his unpopularity right now.
Sargent: That absolutely seems like the key dynamic. Alex Shephard, always awesome to talk to you, man. Thank you so much for coming on.
Shephard: This is fun. Thanks.
CPython eases Rust requirements as assimilation continues
Santa Cruz County Fair just got cheaper – here’s how much you’ll save
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Admission and parking prices at the Santa Cruz County Fair are dropping this year – a deliberate move by organizers to bring back families priced out by rising costs.
If you go
What: Santa Cruz County Fair
Where: Santa Cruz County Fairgrounds, 2601 East Lake Ave., Watsonville
When: Wednesday, Sept. 16 through Sunday, Sept. 20. Hours vary by day; check the county fair website for more information.
More: For a detailed schedule of daily exhibits and entertainment, visit the Santa Cruz County Fair website.
County fair CEO Dori Rose Inda said the move is in response to community feedback that the yearly event had become increasingly expensive to attend. After hearing that feedback, Rose Inda said that she and her team “put their heads together” to think of ways to make the fair more affordable and accessible to the community.
The new prices are roughly $1 to $2 less than prior years. Tickets for adults (ages 13-61) are $20, compared to last year’s price of $22. Tickets for kids and older adults are priced $10 and $13, respectively, decreasing by $1.
In celebration of the United States’ 250th birthday, Rose Inda told Lookout that fair admissions on opening day – Wednesday, Sept. 16 – will be $2.50, cash only, at the gate. On Thursday and Friday, Sept. 17 and 18, attendees can save $4 per ticket from noon to 5 p.m. if purchased at the gate, according to the county fair website.
She added that there are additional discounts on prices throughout the fair’s run through Sunday, Sept. 20, such as kids day on Sept. 17, when children 12 and under are free.
Visitors to the 2025 Santa Cruz County Fair watch the drone show. Credit: Kevin Painchaud / Lookout Santa Cruz
“We anticipate more attendance,” said Rose Inda. “We anticipate people to be able to spend money once they’re inside a little more comfortably if they haven’t had to spend it as much coming in.”
In addition to admission costs being lowered, Rose Inda said prices for parking have also decreased by $5. Attendees can also take advantage of free offsite parking at the Santa Cruz County government building on Westridge Drive and the Elks Lodge on Martinelli Street in Watsonville, with Santa Cruz Metro offering free rides from there to the fairgrounds.
“I’m excited about families coming and about seniors being able to get in because it’s more affordable,” Rose Inda said.
Rose Inda told Lookout she’s excited to highlight local talent at this year’s fair, including singers such as Andy Vargas and James Durbin, and to celebrate the local agriculture community. She recommends attendees check out the art exhibits, and added that they can look forward to a new drone show every night of the fair.
Attendees can also expect all the yummy food and baked goods, including the famous Country Fair Cinnamon Rolls, which will feature a special flavor to celebrate this year’s theme, “Apple Pies and Starry Skies.”
Have something to say? Lookout welcomes letters to the editor, within our policies, from readers. Guidelines here.
The post Santa Cruz County Fair just got cheaper – here’s how much you’ll save appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.
The myth of killer AI is a self-serving attempt at regulatory capture
Transcript: America’s Big Political Problem Isn’t Polarization
This is a lightly edited transcript of the September 11 episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
Perry Bacon: Welcome to another episode of Right Now, The New Republic’s twice weekly video podcast about politics and policy. I’m Perry Bacon, the host. I have a great guest. Shannon McGregor is a professor at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill School of Journalism and Mass Media. So Shannon, welcome.
Shannon McGregor: Hi. Thanks for having me.
Bacon: We’re going to talk about two ideas. You write a lot about politics and media and communication and the intersection of those concepts. We’re going to talk about two kind of ideas that I think are at the core of—we have a lot of episodes here about media and higher education and politics, and I think there are two ideas that are at the core of those fields. They’re polarization and neutrality. They’re two concepts that have become these defining concepts.
And polarization, I’m going to admit to having fallen into that myself a lot. But I want to talk about—I don’t think people were using the word polarization that often in 1995 or what have you, but it’s become this sort of, over the last decade, if you read an article about politics, or particularly a book, you’ll almost always see “Americans are polarized,” “Politics is polarized.”
It’s a word you don’t see in many other contexts beyond politics. And I want you to talk about the roots of that first. Where did this sort of polarization discourse come from, as far as you can tell?
McGregor: Yeah. At least some of the earliest roots of it trace back to—I can’t remember what year it was, but sometime earlier in the 1900s, actually, the American political scientists said the problem is the parties aren’t polarized enough, and Americans don’t know how to make decisions because they can’t tell the differences between the parties. That’s like the—not that the word didn’t exist before.
But I think where it has come up, within more recent memory, is this idea of, how do we explain how divided people are? Why are politics so fraught? Why does it seem like people hate each other? It’s clear that is true. And so polarization has captured the mind, I think, of both, like you said, scholars, but also journalists, philanthropists—the Carnegie Organization, who said for the three years, like, all Carnegie grants will go to projects focused on solving for polarization.
But to my mind, one of the reasons that it’s become so popular as a way to diagnose what’s going on in our world is because it’s a way to talk about politics, but without really talking about politics. It’s a very power neutral way of diagnosing something, and it has a sort of ingrained both sides. I’m just going to go like this, but you can’t see. Two sides of the poles. And so it’s everyone’s problem and everyone’s responsible for it.
Bacon: And so what is the problem with the polarization frame? Because you’ve written about this eloquently. A few years ago, I’ve read a few—you were the first person I saw that really, within academia—there were certainly people on the left who were writers, but I think you were the first person who has a PhD, who really said maybe we should—you and Daniel, is it Crease or Kreiss?
McGregor: Kreiss. Yeah.
Bacon: Daniel Kreiss, another—I guess he has moved, but another colleague of yours—wrote a piece arguing this polarization frame was wrong. Talk about what the problem is with that frame.
McGregor: So there’s a couple problems with it. First of all is what I mentioned, it has no analysis of power. And what it means is, like, why are we polarized? What are we polarized over? Why is this actually this huge problem? And that sort of obscures what’s actually happening, which is that we have this sort of extremism coming, at this point in our country, although in many countries around the world, from the right, that has a very anti-democratic streak to it.
And if we are solving for things like polarization, and there’s two poles, that sort of makes it seem like the answer then is if both sides move together. But should we move together to reach consensus on whether people should have human and civil rights if they are trans or not white? That doesn’t seem like the small-D democratic answer, right? And so it allows journalists, academics to have this sort of conversation that isn’t really a conversation about politics and power.
And I think one of the other points that we make that I think is really important is that there’s this whole idea that polarization is bad. Certainly there are parts of it that can be bad, and people have looked at that. But also what that does is obscures the fact that polarization has always happened when we have had movements in this country towards greater equality, right? So there’s all this sort of hand-wringing against the polarization of Americans after the Black Lives Matter movement at its peak in 2020.
First of all, if you dig into the public opinion data, it’s actually that liberal white Americans moved more in favor of supporting the right of Black Americans to not be murdered by police. So that polarization obscures that. But the argument is polarization might in fact be necessary for democracy. People in power will always hold on to that power, but if that means we’re polarized against movements towards democracy, towards equality, then that doesn’t really seem like the right diagnosis for the problem.
Bacon: Let me dig in a little bit. So it is fair to say that, like, Bull Connor and Martin Luther King were probably polarized against each other, to use a very reductive example. In a very silly way. And I think Bull Connor and Martin Luther King probably may have voted for the Democratic candidate in whatever year. But I think we’re now saying there’s more division by party than there used to be.
Like, in the 1960s, there were conservative Democrats and conservative Republicans, and liberal Republicans, and right now, the two parties are more—I think the more accurate term might be, the parties are more sorted now. If you are, like, pro-choice, you’re likely to be a Democrat, and if you’re anti-choice, to be Republican. We can go through a bunch of these. So the parties are sorted.
So people who maybe—I live in Kentucky, so people who maybe used to vote for a conservative Democrat, or an anti-choice Democrat, now vote for a Republican. I think the sorting is correct.
McGregor: 100 percent.
Bacon: So we have fewer people who are swinging from one party to another. There’s still some swing voters. There’s a little fewer of these voters. I think the sorting is a true thing. The difference between saying something is sorted and saying something is polarized is a little bit different. Can you talk about why?
McGregor: Yeah. One of the things that’s different about it is polarized means that there’s some equidistant relationship, is what it sounds like, right? I’m not a mathematician, but I think neither are most people, right? So when we use that word, it sounds like then these two poles are equidistant from some mythical and idealized center, which is where we should all be moving, both maybe at the political level, but even at the sort of individual level, right?
And even to relate this to the sorting—in some ways that’s what these political scientists in the 1900s were arguing, which was, like, People can’t sort themselves correctly into parties because the parties aren’t different enough. Now we’ve gone—I wouldn’t say the parties are different enough, but in some ways we’ve gone to the other end of these things, right? But the problem is, as far as it relates to polarization, the parties have not sorted along similar lines, right?
The work of good friend and colleague Lilliana Mason has talked about this, right? The ideological sorting into the Republican Party is a very homogenous group of folks, and everyone else is in the Democratic Party. And so those beliefs are not as coherent, and it’s not as strong of a coherence along those lines. Where on the right, there’s very clear coherence, not only sort of homogeneity and identity, but also in what you think, and maybe who you don’t like.
And so to diagnose that as polarization isn’t really what we’re getting at. And then I think the next step that both academics but also a lot of journalists take then is, if we’re polarized, these two equidistant poles, and we have to try and get to the middle, how do we get there? When we think about it among the public, people say, People can’t talk to each other anymore. If they can just talk to each other, then that will solve so many things.
First of all, not only is the empirical evidence on that not great, that has any impact, but also the idea that a person from a group that has been not only perhaps historically marginalized, but that someone on the other side hates, says shouldn’t have civil or human rights, should engage in a conversation with a person who feels that way about them to reach some middle ground on that—which at the best is going to be uncomfortable and at the worst could be harmful for that person—is an idea that I find frankly ridiculous.
Bacon: So if there’s differences, like I think you said to me a few minutes ago that I want to come back to, which is, polarization also—even if we use that term, let’s forget that term—polarization obscures, what are we arguing about, right? And so if we talk about what are the parties sorted on, what are the differences between parties, it would seem to me that what they’re sorted on is, one party is for multiracial, multicultural democracy, the other kind of isn’t. One party’s for election results should count.
I think it’s important to say what are we talking about here. We’re talking about the parties are different is what we’re really saying, right?
McGregor: Yes. Yeah, and I think that is one of the many things that this sort of meta idea of polarization obscures. We say people are polarized about what? That people should have guns everywhere and in schools to protect against people with guns in schools, or not, right? Do we live in a multiracial pluralistic society, or should it be a white Christian nation?
And those different ideas are not only far from one another, but one is democratic, small D, I don’t mean partisan, and the other one is not. And that is what’s then really hard to get to when we’re thinking about it through the lens of polarization.
Bacon: So I’m reading this paper by someone named Peter Törnberg. He teaches at the University of Amsterdam. I don’t know him, but the title is, and it may remind you of—”It’s Not Polarization, It’s the Radicalization of the Political Right.” And he argues that the polarization frame has been modified by scholars and journalists who use the phrase asymmetric, affective.
There’s all this new literature that sort of tries to—asymmetric polarization is a coded way to say the Republicans are more radical. But in some ways, he argues maybe if the frame doesn’t work, we should stop applying the frame and stop adding adjectives to it. Do you agree with that?
McGregor: Yes, 100 percent. And this is part of what we argued, like you said, in this other piece I wrote with my colleague Daniel Kreiss three years ago, which is, it is extremity. It is, even historically in this country, white racial repression that has been far more dangerous for democracy than polarization has ever been. And adding these little adjectives to it doesn’t make it any better of a way to look at things.
Bacon: So part of what’s going on here, and you hinted at some of the answers, is that if you’re a journalist and you don’t want to offend some of your readership—you work at CBS, no, a bad example. You work at ABC or NBC, a network at least in theory trying not to do one party’s political task for it. You don’t want to offend your readers, so calling the Republican Party radicals, that’s going to offend them.
You teach at a University of North Carolina public university, purple state, so I assume maybe some of your colleagues might be leery of calling one party radical. So part of what I assume is happening is, polarization is a way to not offend.
And so people are placing being inoffensive over being accurate, right? Is that part of what the story is, you think? Or do you think people actually genuinely believe polarization, and the parties are equally divided or equally radical? Let me not get into motives here.
McGregor: Yeah. I think the idea—and this is part of what I think has happened in academia, but specifically in the media as well—there’s this conflation with the idea of objectivity and neutrality. So I teach in a journalism school, right?
Like you said, we do teach this idea that means that you should go into something, reporting the story without any preconceived notions perhaps of what is going on. That’s objectivity. There’s issues with that.
Bacon: That’s going to be a topic for a whole nother day. Everyone walks into a story knowing murder is bad and not good, so the idea that you walk into a story neutrally about whether someone kill—there’s no sort of—everyone has preconceived notions. I think we should dispense with this kind of crazy objectivity idea.
McGregor: Yes. View from nowhere. But nonetheless, objectivity is still a thing that is core to the idea of journalism, and journalism especially, I think, in very mainstream journalism. The same people who might critique it—it’s so built into the norms and routines of the way we cover things, especially politics.
So objectivity gets conflated then with neutrality, and so then thinking about things through the lens of polarization is easy, because it seems very politically neutral, and it lets you describe a conflict without taking a position on which one might be wrong or right, to use the murder example perhaps, right? Much less to what we were talking about earlier, about what the conflicts are actually over.
Bacon: And I think that, in some ways, you could be describing the conflicts, points you toward one side. Because as you said, if the conflict is over multiracial democracy versus X, then X seems bad. So even describing the conflict is part of the problem here.
McGregor: Yeah, because providing that context, then you are at risk—I think journalists think you’re at risk then of being called partisan, or biased, right? But being neutral does not make, I think, anyone seem objective when the asymmetries are so clear also, for example, I think even to the vast majority of the public, right?
And this results in things like, I think, a lot of, at the best, maybe double standards in coverage when we think about it along political lines. But I think also then it results in this idea that people can’t understand the democratic consequences of what is happening with the extremism and the authoritarianism that is growing in this country.
Bacon: I was going to ask about neutrality. So I think most people, if you ask what should journalists be, they would say some combination of balanced, objective, and neutral. Those are not all the same word, but talk about what the problem is with this sort of mix of things, or the phrases we use here.
McGregor: Yes. Wow. There’s lots of problems, right? The idea of objectivity, balance has been critiqued, I think rightfully, as this view from nowhere, like you mentioned earlier, as if people don’t exist in the world and have ideas. And I think especially with the idea of being balanced—this is obviously very exacerbated by the fact that we have a two-party system—but what that ends up in reporting style is, like, the Republicans said this, which is that, for example, Black people shouldn’t have the right to vote as equally in the South. And Democrats said, We think they should, right?
That every vote should count. And then there’s sort of no context around, what are the implications of that for the fact that we are supposedly trying to live in a democracy, where it does matter that every person’s vote should count, and that’s not actually a partisan statement.
And one of the things that I’ve been thinking about more in some recent work is, like, how even when the press covers issues with democracy, and talking about authoritarianism and backsliding, they attribute what might be the critiques of authoritarianism, backsliding, to partisan actors. So rather than it being a thing that is actually a problem—and we can even have an expert to say it, if you don’t want to have to say it in your voice—it gets attributed to partisan actors. So this idea that wanting to strive for a democracy is partisan comes up, I think, in this way of looking at balanced coverage.
Bacon: I love that. Because in some ways, once democracy became an issue in politics, it weakened support for democracy, because the media can’t cover democracy as a—once the Republicans became against democracy, the media functionally has to be somewhat neutral on democracy, right?
McGregor: And there’s this sort of schizophrenic coverage that happens. Because many large news organizations do have journalists who I would describe as being on, like, the democracy beat, right? And these journalists are explicitly not doing what we’re talking about, right? They are covering democratic backsliding, threats to civil rights, threats to democracy, outside of this sort of balanced frame.
But then other folks at that very same news organization who are covering politics—which I’ll just point out the fact that that’s divorced from coverage of democracy is, in and of itself, a problem—are then covering it through this sort of both sides. Democracy itself has become a partisan thing.
And when I’ve spoken to journalists about this before, some folks have said, “We can’t have, like, an idea. We’re just reporting what’s happening.” OK, but the press exists the way that it does in this country and in other democracies because of democracy. So are you trying to write yourself not only out of a job, but our country out of a democracy? This seems like a very non-problematic stance to take, which is that we live in a democracy and should be trying to.
Bacon: I think the implicit assumption is that Donald Trump will not outlaw them. But if he has a second term—I guess he already has a second term—but if we keep going on in this direction, we’re going to have fewer journalists. I don’t think people in my field really understand, the right wing in its current form is a threat to my field, and I would argue your field is experiencing it more directly.
McGregor: Very much.
Bacon: And so that’s an interesting way to put it. So what is an alternative? OK, so you linked together—I was going to ask about neutrality and objectivity separately from polarization. But you think these ideas are tied together in some way?
McGregor: Yeah. Yes, I do. And I think the link is that then talking about something as polarization allows you to appear—
Bacon: To be neutral.
McGregor: —balanced and neutral, because it’s both sides’ problems. And the answer is in the middle.
Bacon: OK, so if we agree that the radicalization of the right is the problem, then I guess that makes a lot of the work we do much different, right? I hadn’t really thought about the fact that if universities are giving, or philanthropies are giving money to projects that are based on polarization, it’s just a much safer way to describe the problem, right? This is part of where we’re getting at, is, this is a safe way to describe the problem.
McGregor: Yeah, it’s a safe way to describe the problem. And in the paper that I wrote several years ago with my colleague Daniel Kreiss, we talk about, like, the historical and empirical and normative shortcomings of polarization.
The problems with it. I think, as we’re talking about as it relates to both philanthropy and journalism and academia, those historical, empirical, and normative shortcomings of polarization are a feature, they’re not a bug, that make it attractive to these groups, because it obscures rather than illuminates these democratic troubles that we have.
Bacon: So if you had a philanthropy that was focusing on the radicalization of the right, why would that be bad? Why would they not want—if that was, if the real problem—
McGregor: First of all, they’d be getting attacked right now, and having their 501(c)(3) status, like, potentially revoked.
Bacon: I see. And if you’re a news outlet, you have some readers who are going to move on to other things. OK, I see.
McGregor: Yeah. And I also think part of this is about, especially if you’re a journalist who’s covering politics right now, right? And you ideally have sources that you talk to in office, or their staffers, in the Republican Party and Democratic Party. If you call it the extremism and the authoritarianism of the Republican Party, you’re going to lose those sources.
Now, I would argue I don’t think that is necessarily a problem, and folks refusing to talk to you because of that would in fact itself be worth reporting. But that’s pretty far outside the norms of what standard sort of DC political reporting looks like.
Bacon: Yeah, it’s not a great situation when one of the most famous journalists is known for her access to Donald Trump staffers. I can tell you not a lot of Black people have a lot of access to Donald Trump staffers. We can talk about why that might be the case, and so we might want to dig into that a little bit.
Let me finish on another subject, because it’s about communication. I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Whenever I hear people talk about the media and politics, they have two thoughts. The first is, No one’s reading anything anymore. Traffic is down to websites. People don’t read. Young people don’t read anything. All they do is look at social media and TikTok. Fine. That might be true. The second is, Can you believe The New York Times, on paragraph 19, did not say Trump is a fascist, or say he’s anti-democratic?
So it feels contradictory to me, in the sense that—I’m not trying to defend the journalists, but if no one’s consuming the media as such broadly, then whether it’s too neutral or not doesn’t really matter. Are we at the point where that mainstream media coverage and that critique is outdated, because the media people are consuming is some combination of Instagram, TikTok, Substack, X?
Explain to me, is there an inherent tension in these critiques, or are they still both kind of valid critiques? People don’t consume the media, and the media is too both sides.
McGregor: I think yes and. So I actually think they’re related in some ways, because I think for a long time, the mainstream media has not covered what’s going on in the world in a way that seems true to people.
And it doesn’t seem true to people that they would be neutral. Like, in this economy, right? So they seek out other sources where there’s not the same idea, and people are talking about what does feel actually relevant to them. So I’d actually say I think they’re a bit related.
Bacon: And the media may be participating in its own demise by being so—
McGregor: To some extent. Now, do I think this explains all of it? No. But some of it, sure.
Bacon: That’s helpful. I myself, a person who’s been in the media their entire life, do seek out other things. Like, I read a paper based in Britain each day called The Guardian, because if I want to know what Trump did and hear about it without the sort of false equivalency, I can’t read The New York Times, because they believe in that. So The Guardian’s an alternative to the US press that I use, because I feel like I need it.
McGregor: And are more upfront about where they’re coming from, in the same way that content creators on TikTok or Instagram are as well, right? It doesn’t mean I think that either of those things aren’t problematic. But especially to your sort of second idea of, does it matter then what the mainstream media is doing?
Bacon: My point being that I hear people saying, Can you believe Bari Weiss did X for 60 Minutes? And sometimes I agree with that, but I’m also like, “Since you’re not over 70, when was the last time you watched 60 Minutes?” Or really the CBS News, the morning. So Bari Weiss is doing things I don’t agree with at CBS, but I am trying to probe, does that matter? And I think yes, the answer is yes, but I want to hear why from someone who gets more—
McGregor: So I think it matters, A, partially because of what I just said. I think it’s still driving other people’s media habits, so whatever the mainstream media is doing has that impact. I also think it matters because we have a lot of research actually in my field that shows that mainstream media—New York Times, CBS, Washington Post, et cetera—set the agenda for what coverage looks like. Very broadly, right? When we then look at local media, when we look at how other people are going to interpret it—
Bacon: So I know that’s true for, like, local media. I know that’s been a long time, The New York Times sets the agenda for, like, local TV news. Is that true for, like, social media too, or do we know that yet?
McGregor: I don’t know. I would have to look and see exactly how this plays out. But to some extent, yes, even if it is just reacting, right? Like, all these things of, “Oh, The New York Times doesn’t cover this or that.” People are arguing about this because that’s how The New York Times covered it. So it’s still setting the terms of the debate of how we’re talking about all these things.
And then also, CBS, New York Times, Meet the Press, et cetera, all of these outlets are still really important for political elites and politicians. And again, then that sort of feeds into this reciprocal way of covering things, and in this case, maybe not pointing out some of the real issues.
We also, to the social media side of things—from mainstream media, get quoted, clipped, recirculated. Like, I have never sat down and watched an episode of Stephen Colbert when he had the late night show. But man, my internet shows me, you know what I mean, clips of it. And same thing with things that might be on some of the morning shows.
And I think the last point is, it also matters because many of these changes and these issues that we’re talking about with the media, they’re not just happening, right? They are a response to not only very recent, very clear actual attacks, right, on individual journalists, on media outlets, but are part of a decades long project by those on the political right to undermine and attack the media.
And I think that is why things like the polarization lens becomes so attractive—even if, I don’t mean that this is, like, a conscious thing, right, that journalists are doing. No. But it becomes attractive because then you’re not alienating those folks.
I’ve thought about how I think the mainstream media sometimes is in what I might call similar to the dynamics of a domestic violence situation, with an abuser and their victim. Which is, the goalpost keeps getting moved of what you need to do. And that’s problematic in and of itself if you are supposedly being neutral and balanced as a press.
Bacon: Just meaning, being neutral before meant covering George Bush, who you might not agree with, as being a normal president. Now it means covering Donald Trump, who doesn’t honor election results, as a normal president. The goalposts keep moving to the right, basically.
McGregor: Yes, it keeps moving. And also there is no way to satisfy it, right? They’re never going to be satisfied.
Bacon: The Republican Party will never wake up and say The New York Times actually is fair and balanced. They’re never going to say that.
McGregor: Yeah. Because part of the identity of being conservative and of being Republican is to be anti-media. Anti-mainstream media. So whatever the mainstream media does is never going to be the thing that is going to be appealing.
Bacon: I was on a panel at APSA, which is the political science conference you were at, and you were on the panel, and it made me think—part of it is, I feel like our industries are the same, media and academia, in one sense, in that, is it worth recognizing that certain kinds of right-wing politics are going to be against the media and academia, because those are sources of independent authority and power, and both industries push a pluralistic democratic form of government?
Is it worth acknowledging that the media and academia are, to some extent—not intentionally hostile to the right wing, but the right wing as it is currently strong in America and Germany, those are against media and academia, right? There’s no way around that, right?
McGregor: Yeah. And I do think it’s worth recognizing, and it is very hard to recognize that. I don’t mean it’s hard for me to say it at a panel at APSA, or even to write about it. But for, certainly, I would say news leaders, or deans, or university presidents, this is almost impossible to say. And I don’t want to say it’s impossible to say, because I think that’s true—I’m saying I think that’s how it feels to them.
Because in fact, I would put it similar to how you were just saying it: these attacks on media and these attacks on universities are themselves ideological and partisan attacks. So responding to them by defending what have been the perhaps troubled but long-held small-D democratic beliefs of these two institutions is not a partisan response.
Bacon: They’re the partisans, not us, is what I wish people could say.
McGregor: Yes. And that is really a message that I wish I could hear more from people like university presidents, rather than this academic neutrality, or let’s fund a new civility center—which we could have a whole other half an hour talking about that side of things, and the problems with the civility push on campus.
Bacon: Institutional neutrality is the new thing at universities, which it sounds like is a very journalism-esque phrase for how we’re going to not offend Republicans. Last thing, this is a little bit off, but what did you think of the Woke 1.0 discourse? I’d be curious if you have any thoughts about that.
McGregor: I think this is actually in some ways very much a response to, or informed by, I would say, this idea of polarization, right? As if the reaction was to these movements that very rightly pointed out widespread racial violence committed by police and the state and the government. Issues of widespread physical and sexual violence against women in this country by men in positions of power. As if now our responses to that are supposed to be viewed not only out of context, but as hysterical.
Bacon: Yes. And I would say MAGA and Woke 1.0 are being cast as polarized opposites. Oh, I hadn’t thought of it that way. That’s a good way to put it.
McGregor: So that’s one of the ways that I think about it.
Bacon: Shannon, thank you for joining me. I appreciate it. Where can people find your work?
McGregor: I’m on the internet. You can Google me. My work is available on Google Scholar, and much of it is linked to on my Bluesky.
Bacon: Good. Shannon McGregor, thanks for joining me. I appreciate it. Good to see you.
McGregor: Thanks, Perry. Always good to talk to you. Bye.
Bacon: Bye-bye.
Iceland Just Got Played
On August 28, roughly a quarter of a million Icelanders took to the polls to register their thoughts on whether Europeans would steal their fish. Well, that wasn’t the question on the ballot. But it proved to be all Icelanders cared about. And as a result, Icelanders may have committed a Brexit-esque act of self-sabotage.
For the last three months, the island nation of roughly 400,000 people has played host to a heated referendum campaign on whether to reinitiate talks to join the European Union. Already a member of the European Common Market and the Schengen visa-free travel zone, Iceland has long flirted with the idea of EU membership. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, which exposed the vulnerabilities of the microstate’s currency, it launched a formal application to join, only to see talks stall in 2013 with the election of a Euro-skeptic government.
But following President Donald Trump’s repeated threats to annex Greenland—which he confused with Iceland in a high-profile speech at Davos—the idea of EU membership was greeted with new enthusiasm.
For Europe, Iceland is a valuable prize in the mid-Atlantic. Already aligned on trade and values, it is perfectly positioned to help further project the EU’s influence into increasingly contested Arctic waters. For Iceland, which maintains no standing army of its own, EU membership could replace the security guarantee offered by a struggling NATO alliance, as it faces the existential threat of Trump’s self-interested unilateralism.
But almost as soon as the referendum campaign was formally launched in May, these geopolitical considerations largely faded into the background. Instead, a tidal wave of op-eds and social media posts marked by bad faith and paranoia stoked fears that negotiations on membership would inevitably lay Iceland’s prized fishing industry bare to the predation of European megacorps.
Fishing is a cornerstone of Icelandic identity; it accounts for roughly 8 percent of the island nation’s gross domestic product. But tear-jerking op-eds eulogizing the freedom of the noble Icelandic fisherman are already too late. Through its free trade agreement with Europe, Iceland already accepts thousands of EU rules and regulations over which it has limited say, as it lacks a seat at the European Council. And since the 1990s, Icelandic governments have progressively sold off the vast majority of its fishing quota to private interests, leaving just a meagre fraction for the small-boat fisheries that sustain the rural, coastal communities that overwhelmingly voted “no” in the referendum.
Today, just a handful of massive companies dominate the Icelandic fishing industry—as they do across most major industries on the island.
It’s these interests, the Yes campaigners grumble, that were behind the flood of misinformation from corporate-owned media outlets in the lead-up to the vote: claims that EU membership would cost billions of dollars a year (more like $70 million, according to independent estimates) or that Icelandic youth would be conscripted into a European army. “They were worried about sending people to an army that didn’t exist,” Tinatin Akhvlediani, an analyst at the Centre for European Policy Studies, marveled.
“Political power lies with the oligarchs,” the Icelandic economist Thorvaldur Gylfason, a campaigner for the Yes side, told me. “Some might say that this is inevitable in a small country, but no. Foreign trade allows countries to free themselves from that.”
The EU, meanwhile, in a characteristic self-own, remained aloof, failing to counter even obvious misinformation or offer a glimpse of what benefits membership might bring. For many Europhiles, the campaign elicited a profound sense of déja vu. “You could almost hear the echoes of Brexit, and the whole Brexit playbook was part of it,” Dagur Eggertsson, an Icelandic member of Parliament and former mayor of Reykjavik, told Euronews. Rumors are already circulating of foreign influence and meddling—this time, EU Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos said, “from east and west.”
It’s unlikely the real extent of foreign influence will ever be known. “Iceland lacks the infrastructure to adequately monitor and detect this kind of activity,” Hulda Thórisdóttir, an Icelandic researcher of political misinformation, told me. But the result was clear: a 12-point polling swing over three months, and a nearly 53 percent majority for the No campaign, foreclosing on any chance of negotiations with the EU for at least the next two years—a result all the more galling because a Yes vote would have committed Iceland to absolutely nothing.
For those in Brussels who counted on cool Icelandic heads, the result came as a shock—a “warning,” said Sandro Gozi, a member of the European Parliament, that “the EU must change.” But it’s not hard to deduce who will benefit from Iceland closing the door on EU membership for another generation.
Iceland’s oligarchs maintain their status quo, doing business with the same politicians already in their pockets. The U.S. can still bully a strategic ally by threatening to crumble the NATO alliance. Russia stalls the momentum for EU enlargement spurred by its invasion of Ukraine. And both countries prevent another prosperous Arctic nation from falling further into the orbit of the rival EU.
All this is bad enough. But for leading lights of the reactionary right, it’s also yet more reassuring evidence that the supposed champions of liberalism have yet to rise to their challenge.
“Congratulations to Iceland on voting to keep their independence,” Nigel Farage, Britain’s far-right prime minister-in-waiting, posted to X. His French equivalent, convicted criminal and perennial presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, offered similar sentiments. “This vote reminds us that another Europe is possible,” she wrote, “a Europe of free, sovereign nations cooperating voluntarily on matters of common interest.”
The losers, of course, are the Icelandic people. Akhvlediani rightly points out that EU institutions are structured to give great power to small countries like Iceland. With a seat on the European Council, Iceland would have an effective veto over the bloc’s foreign policy and security decisions—even with no military to speak of.
Unable to see the forest for the trees, Icelanders gave up their chance at disproportionate influence to protect an industry long since sold out by their leaders from a fictitious foreign threat. “The mood was the fear of change … of something new and something different,” Prime Minister Frostadóttir, a supporter of the talks, lamented. “Fear has made people not see the opportunity.”
It’s no surprise people are calling it Iceland’s Brexit moment. Thank God there’s still the fish.
The Mother of All Assault Weapons Cases Is Coming
The Second Amendment protects the right to “keep and bear arms.” But what counts as “arms”? The Supreme Court will answer that question this term when it hears a challenge to state assault-weapons bans.
Gun rights groups have spent almost two decades trying to get the Supreme Court to hear a case like Viramontes v. Cook County, which centers on assault-weapon bans in Illinois’s largest county and Connecticut. The justices consolidated Viramontes with a near-identical case from the latter state. For convenience’s sake, I’ll use the term “assault weapons” throughout this article to describe a wide range of banned rifles. Please do not email me about the terminology debates.
The underlying dispute is fairly simple: The plaintiffs want to own rifles banned by the state laws in question, but cannot lawfully do so. They argue that this restriction violates their Second Amendment right to bear arms. “Under this Court’s precedents, there can be no doubt that AR-15 platform and similar semiautomatic rifles are in common use and therefore protected by the Second Amendment,” they told the justices in a brief filed last month.
Connecticut and Cook County, on the other hand, claim that the bans fall well within their power to “strictly regulate” certain types of weapons, especially those that are the “weapon of choice for criminals and terrorists.” The Cook County district attorney’s office told the justices in a court filing earlier this year that this regulatory power extends to weapons that are “fundamentally incompatible with ancient common-law principles of moderate, proportionate self-defense” and are “not commonly borne in public for a lawful purpose.”
In a way, both sides are right. The Supreme Court has said that guns are presumptively considered “arms” for Second Amendment purposes. It has also held that certain types of “arms” can be regulated and even banned by state, local, and federal laws. Whether the AR-15 and other assault weapons fall into the latter category is what the justices must decide.
The basic dispute traces back to the foundation of modern Second Amendment jurisprudence. In the 2008 case D.C. v. Heller, the Supreme Court recognized an individual right to bear arms in the Second Amendment for the first time. That case involved a D.C. man who wanted to own a handgun for self-defense in his home.
The court also recognized that this right was “not unlimited,” as Justice Antonin Scalia put it in his majority opinion. Scalia described a range of existing gun restrictions that would be presumptively constitutional in the post-Heller world. Lower courts have often relied on this portion of Heller to uphold limits on where people can bring guns and who can lawfully own them. One of those Scalian restrictions was for unusual weapons.
“We also recognize another important limitation on the right to keep and carry arms,” he wrote for the court. “[United States v.] Miller said, as we have explained, that the sorts of weapons protected were those ‘in common use at the time.’ We think that limitation is fairly supported by the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of ‘dangerous and unusual weapons.’” Scalia indicated that this applied to “weapons that are most useful in military service—M-16 rifles and the like.”
Miller was a 1939 Supreme Court case involving the National Firearms Act, which (among other things) banned the transportation of certain weapons across state lines. The defendants had been charged with transporting sawed-off shotguns, which were widely associated with criminality at the time. They argued the ban violated their Second Amendment rights. The Supreme Court disagreed, concluding instead that the amendment only protects guns with a “reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia.”
On those grounds, lower courts have generally upheld assault-weapon bans for the last two decades. Eleven states currently have some kind of assault-weapon ban on the books. So does the District of Columbia, which I’ll come back to later. Congress enacted a federal ban on assault weapons in 1994, but it lapsed without reauthorization in 2004.
Those laws have existed alongside a major shift in the Second Amendment over the last two decades, and especially in the last few years. In 2023, the Supreme Court laid out a new two-step test for Second Amendment cases that first asked whether the challenged law was covered by the “plain text” of the Second Amendment, then looked at historical analogues if it was.
In these cases, the lower courts still concluded that assault weapons were not “arms” for Second Amendment purposes. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals had previously cited Scalia’s reasoning in Heller and applied it again to the Viramontes lawsuit. It and other lower courts have concluded that assault weapons are similar enough to “M-16s and the like” to qualify as “dangerous and unusual.”
Gun-rights advocates, however, hope to constitutionalize AR-15s by emphasizing their popularity. “The controlling question here is whether a given type of arm is ‘in common use today,’” the plaintiffs wrote, quoting from Bruen. (Emphasis theirs.) “The inquiry therefore is one that accounts for the American people’s judgment regarding what sorts of arms are appropriate for typical, lawful possession according to contemporary social and technological conditions.”
What counts as “typical”? What are “contemporary social and technological conditions”? How do the American people exercise their “judgment”? The plaintiffs fall back on opinion surveys and market data. The AR-15, they note, “is the most popular rifle in America.” Exact ownership numbers are difficult to determine, so researchers and pollsters typically extrapolate figures by polling gun owners. A major survey earlier this month, for example, estimated that around 30 percent of gun owners own an AR-15 or similar rifle. That would equal about 26.4 million owners in a country of 340 million people, the survey estimated.
Read another way, assault weapons do seem fairly unusual. Fewer than one-third of gun owners own one. They are not the principal weapon for personal self-defense outside the home and they are of dubious utility inside the home, as well. (A handgun is much easier to store and wield against a home intruder, for example.) It is telling that a different poll cited by the plaintiffs noted that 74 percent of assault weapon owners purchased one “in case law and order break down,” which is far afield from common or everyday use.
To privilege raw ownership numbers and polling surveys when determining whether a type of gun is in “common use” is also incongruous with how the conservative justices have approached other constitutional rights. A core principle of the court’s Eighth Amendment jurisprudence since the 1958 ruling Trop v. Dulles is that the definition of “cruel and unusual punishment” is not fixed, but rather shaped by “evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.”
Legal conservatives often loathe this principle and have occasionally called for it to be overturned in favor of a fixed meaning set in 1789. Trop, Scalia once fumed in a 2015 concurring opinion, “has caused more mischief to our jurisprudence, to our federal system, and to our society than any other that comes to mind.” (A slight exaggeration.) Conservative justices have also criticized the use of opinion surveys to gauge “evolving standards” on Eighth Amendment issues, with then–Chief Justice William Rehnquist arguing that the acts of state legislatures are the best indicators of public consensus.
Perhaps the most striking argument comes from a brief filed by the National Association for Gun Rights. The brief, written by former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, argued that the Second Amendment’s purpose is “deterring tyranny.” This is a common argument among gun rights advocates but one that rarely makes its way into legal reasoning. The Supreme Court has only obliquely addressed that concept in bare passing, when it referred in Heller to the early modern English concept of the right to bear arms as “an individual right protecting against both public and private violence.”
“The objection that tyranny is a Founding-era abstraction fails on this Court’s own account of the Fourteenth Amendment,” Cuccinelli wrote. “American tyranny has typically been local and racial and the disarmed were its victims. McDonald recounts the Black Codes’ arms confiscations, the militia disarmaments, and Congress’s response in the Freedmen’s Bureau Act, which expressly secured ‘the constitutional right to bear arms.’”
Cuccinelli also noted that a “perennial objection” to this principle is that “modern military technology has rendered the citizen militia obsolete, and the constitutional check on tyranny with it.” He argued instead that it served as a deterrent. “A deterrent need to be used is not obsolete,” Cuccinelli wrote. “It is working—unless the government may first ban the arms that make it credible.” It is worth noting here that the AR-15 and similar rifles have only existed since 1959.
I have written before on this pop constitutional concept, which is essentially a purported Second Amendment right to murder civil servants and assassinate elected officials. Other briefs make no mention of this tyranny-deterrence principle because of its obvious flaws. For one thing, tyranny is entirely subjective: More than a few Americans thought the public health measures enacted to fight the Covid-19 pandemic were tyrannical, for example. It is awkward to articulate to Supreme Court justices, who have faced an extraordinary uptick in violent threats and at least one incident where someone drove up to a justice’s house with a handgun after plotting to assassinate them.
This principle also runs counter to other Second Amendment precedents that emphasize how the right to bear arms only extends to lawful purposes. The lawful-purposes framing can itself be slippery—a constitutional right conditioned on statutory lawfulness is a half-right at best—but is even trickier if imposed as a defense against tyranny. Armed resistance to government authority may be morally justified in some circumstances, but it is always unlawful by definition. Had the British captured the Founders, they would have almost certainly been hanged.
There is also a strong counterexample to Cuccinelli’s historical narrative: the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. A mob of the president’s supporters attacked Capitol Hill five years ago hoping to stop the counting of electoral votes that would confirm President Joe Biden’s victory. They succeeded, but only temporarily.
Investigators later discovered that members of the Oath Keepers had stashed a cache of weapons, including AR-15s, in nearby Virginia. The far-right group’s leaders had decided against bringing them into the District of Columbia because of the capital’s strict gun laws. Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes later said that they “should have brought rifles” after the insurrection failed. Had he and the president succeeded in crippling Congress and disrupting the electoral transition of power, many would have called what remained tyranny.
I doubt the Supreme Court will address this tyranny-deterrence concept directly in this case. But it is nonetheless worth noting because it is so common outside the marble hallways of the Supreme Court. Many people use rifles for hunting or sport and keep handguns around for self-defense. The AR-15’s legitimate purposes, on the other hand, are much narrower unless one anticipates—and perhaps even desires—some kind of societal collapse.
“Under Heller, the decision whether a type of arm is too dangerous for ordinary Americans to possess is one that the people are entitled to make, not one that courts are empowered to make for them,” the plaintiffs wrote. “That is the fundamental principle animating the common use test.” That much is true. The American people have already made that decision in 11 states—through their elected representatives, not by responding to surveys or by boosting a gun manufacturer’s profit margins.
How Keisha Lance Bottoms and David Crowley Can Make Political History
Many Americans who live in suburbs and rural areas don’t like the big, left-leaning metropolitan areas nearby. And while it’s hard to say exactly how much that anti-urban resentment is tied to race, we know that big cities often have high percentages of people of color, particularly African Americans. So in red and purple states, the Democratic Party has in the past sometimes shied away from nominating Black candidates for statewide offices, especially politicians closely identified with their states’ urban areas.
But because of how American politics has changed over the last two decades, as well as the specific politics of 2026, former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms and Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley have very strong chances of winning in November. If they triumph, they will become the fourth and fifth Black Americans elected governor in U.S. history. Their victories would be the latest illustration of how American politics has fundamentally changed in the Trump era—creating many new obstacles to greater racial progress but also some fresh opportunities.
Since the Voting Rights Act and other changes spurred by the civil rights movement, hundreds of African Americans have been elected to the office of mayor or U.S. representative. But very, very few Black politicians have become senator or governor. Most of that small group, such as Barack Obama, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Wes Moore, were elected in blue states. Red states in the South have big Black populations, but their white residents are overwhelmingly Republican and rarely elect Democrats of any race. That provides an opening to the few Black Republican politicians, such as Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina and Representative Byron Donalds of Florida, who could become the Sunshine State’s first Black governor in November.
Purple states are complicated. Sometimes Black candidates, such as Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams and Wisconsin Senate hopeful Mandela Barnes in 2022, win the Democratic nomination but lose the general election. Other times Black candidates are either discouraged to run statewide by party operatives who suggest that they can’t win the general election, or are defeated by white opponents in part because Democratic voters think those white candidates are more viable. While party officials never state this explicitly, their ideal politician in a purple state has traditionally been someone like ex-governor and current North Carolina Senate candidate Roy Cooper: white, male, Christian, center-left, and who lives outside of the state’s urban areas or has at least kept their drawl. They believe those candidates can win by wooing some voters who would otherwise back GOP politicians.
Bottoms and Crowley aren’t in this mold. Bottoms was born in Atlanta and attended the historically Black college Florida A&M. She served on the Atlanta City Council for two terms and then as mayor from 2018 to 2022. The city is 46 percent Black, while the state of Georgia overall is 32 percent. Crowley was born in Milwaukee and has spent almost his entire adult life there. Milwaukee County, which Crowley has led since 2020, is 27 percent Black; the state overall is just 7 percent.
So how did Democrats end up with Bottoms and Crowley as their nominees in Georgia and Wisconsin? First and probably most importantly, there has been a dramatic increase in partisan voting over the last two decades. Americans increasingly back the same party, no matter the individual candidates. So it’s harder to claim that a white candidate, a male one, a moderate, a Christian, or one with any other attribute traditionally considered advantageous will do significantly better in a general election than another candidate from that same party.
Georgia powerfully illustrated this in 2020. Joe Biden won there six years ago, as had past white male Christian center-left candidates such as Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter. But essentially everyone who voted for Biden in Georgia also backed Jon Ossoff, who is Jewish and born in Atlanta, and Raphael Warnock, who is Black and leads one of the city’s most prominent Black churches. Both had fairly progressive records. It’s hard to imagine either of them being elected U.S. senators from Georgia in less partisan eras.
So when Bottoms opted to run, there wasn’t a drumbeat of people claiming that she couldn’t win the general election because she’s a Black woman from Atlanta. She certainly has a chance in a state that just elected Ossoff and Warnock. Barnes lost by one point in 2022. The state keeps reelecting Tammy Baldwin, who is a gay progressive woman. So of course Crowley can win.
Secondly, there’s a big shift happening within the Democratic Party over the last decade that likely helps Bottoms and Crowley. African American politicians have traditionally been on the left end of the Democratic Party. That’s because they often emerge from the Black community, which pushes for an active role for the government to make up for past racism and current inequalities in America. But Democratic Party operatives don’t want politicians linked with the party’s left running in swing states, because they don’t think those pols can win. (That’s not the reality. Often progressive candidates win in swing states.) The Democratic Party establishment, looking for the most “electable” candidate in its view, was rarely landing on a Black one in a swing state.
But the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America, the presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and other developments in Democratic politics have created a new left flank in the party that is not defined by Black people or issues specifically related to African Americans. So Bottoms positioned herself as a center-left candidate during the primary, using the term “moderate” to describe her politics. She emphasized her experience as mayor and a senior White House aide to Biden and ran on issues like expanding Medicaid, not the aggressive populism of progressives. Biden endorsed her during the primary, further solidifying her center-left branding.
Crowley explicitly ran a primary campaign focused on electability, hinting that he could appeal to right-leaning voters better than his rivals. That was highly unusual. Black candidates don’t usually make that argument because voters won’t buy it. But in this case, Crowley’s main opponent was Francesca Hong, an Asian American woman who is a member of DSA and had made numerous controversial remarks. Crowley could credibly run as the moderate alternative to Hong. He did and won.
“Crowley has made clear that he is not afraid to cut deals with Republicans as needed to get things done for his county,” University of Wisconsin political scientist Barry Burden told me.
Crowley and Bottoms now have to win the general election. And the recent losses of Abrams, Barnes, and numerous non-Black Democrats in Georgia and Wisconsin show that won’t be easy. But they have an asset: Trump’s massive unpopularity. Most elections since the start of 2025 have featured high Democratic turnout, somewhat lower Republican turnout, and swing voters backing Democrats. That includes the 2025 state Supreme Court race in Wisconsin, where the Democratic Party–backed candidate won. The most likely scenario for Bottoms and Crowley is that voters treat them like the other Democrats on the ballot—so they win because 2026 is a good year for Democrats.
But there are two less optimistic scenarios. First, anti-Black and anti-urban sentiment could defeat them. One of the books that was widely cited after the 2016 election to explain Trump’s stunning victory and strength with white rural and non-college-educated voters was Kathy Cramer’s Politics of Resentment. Cramer is a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and her book is grounded in extensive interviews with rural Wisconsin residents who describe their hatred of Madison and Milwaukee. Crowley must win some rural voters who hate his hometown so much that there have been books written about that animosity. That won’t be simple.
Bottoms was the mayor of Atlanta during the protests after the killing of George Floyd. Fox News and other conservative media falsely portrayed Atlanta and other cities as essentially being burned to the ground. Bottoms probably symbolizes what people outside of the city hate about Atlanta more than Ossoff or Warnock. So that makes her particularly vulnerable to attacks from Rick Jackson, the Republican nominee for governor, that are centered on race and Atlanta.
“To some, Atlanta represents all that’s wrong with Georgia. And Jackson is trying to make Bottoms—and her record in office over a term as mayor—an avatar of the big-city politics gone wrong,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution chief political reporter Greg Bluestein told me.
Secondly, there’s a downside to Crowley and Bottoms being experienced, moderate politicians. We’re in an anti-incumbent, antiestablishment moment in American politics where voters are deeply frustrated with traditional politics and politicians. Crowley and Bottoms are ill suited to tap into those sentiments. While basically everyone in politics, including Crowley’s Republican opponent, Tom Tiffany, sees that voters hate data centers and is rushing to oppose them, Crowley is circumspect on the issue. He’s expressed opposition to a full moratorium on their expansion in Wisconsin. (In contrast, Bottoms has smartly called for a pause on data center construction in Georgia.)
Bottoms is running on an unusual (and I think misguided) proposal to suspend local taxes on groceries. But otherwise, she and Crowley have pretty traditional, dull platforms. Neither is likely to excite young voters or people who don’t traditionally vote. Their political approach is similar to Biden’s or Kamala Harris’s: to cast Republicans as radical and Democrats as the commonsense alternative. This style might work in 2026, since Trump is in office and deeply unpopular. But it just failed in 2024.
Polls suggest that Bottoms and Crowley are narrowly leading. But as we’ve relearned this year, state-level polls are often wrong. And it’s hard to take comfort in surveys when Bottoms and Crowley are running against history and racism. No Black woman has ever been elected governor anywhere in the U.S. Atlanta and Milwaukee have often been cast as poverty and crime-ridden cities because they have large Black populations. Keisha Bottoms and David Crowley are not as progressive as I prefer, but their wins in November would be historic breakthroughs that all Democrats can celebrate.
It’s Not Just Trump Who’s Dumb about Economics—It’s the GOP Generally
On her Substack over the weekend, Mary Trump, the good Trump (there had to be one), recalled the following word salad her uncle gurgled out on the 2024 campaign trail:
“Under the Trump economic plan, we will cut your energy prices in half. Mark it down. And you can get very angry at me if we don’t do it. Within 12 months, your energy prices will be cut in half. My plan will cut energy prices in half, or more than that, within 12 months. We will cut energy and electricity prices in half within 12 months. And that means for your homes, too. I will cut your energy and electricity prices in half within 12 months of taking office. We are going to bring energy down by 50 percent, 50 percent, 50 percent within 12 months from January 20th, which is the day we go into office.”
This is relevant to us today on two levels. The first is the more obvious: He was lying out his know-you-what without any regard for whether these words would end up being true. They just sounded good at the time, so he said them. Fifty percent in a year. Whoopee. I continue to be amazed that anyone was stupid enough to believe this con man, but let’s ponder that question another day.
The second level is more interesting—and more damning not only of Trump but of the entire Republican Party and of conservatism generally, in this country and across the world, and not just in Trump’s second term, but for all time. And that is this: There is probably some way in which Trump actually believed he could lower energy prices; maybe not by 50 percent in a year, but lower them substantially and noticeably. Why would he believe this?
He believed it because conservatives believe stupid, simplistic things about how the capitalist economy works. They believe that if you just let the free market do its thing, wonders will arise and all will be well. They believe this first and foremost because their big-money donors believe it. But they also believe it because the economists—or more precisely, the economists they prefer to listen to—say so, and they must know what they’re talking about.
This all goes back to what the discipline refers to as “neoclassical” economics—the ideas propounded in the late 1800s by economists like Alfred Marshall about supply and demand. These economists said some really silly things, notably two: first, that people act independently on the basis of perfect information; second, that people are “rational actors” who will always act to maximize their economic advantage. They’re silly ideas because almost nobody has perfect information, and because people act emotionally far more than they act rationally.
In our time, the economics profession has undergone tremendous change for the better, and those neoclassical nostrums have been subjected to intense scrutiny by a new generation of economists who have seen with their own two eyes that markets do not always self-correct (another neoclassical assertion) and that sometimes, government intervention is required to achieve good ends.
Republican politicians didn’t get the memo. Nor did the American electorate. So, it’s very easy to tell people, for example, that you’re going to open up federal lands to more drilling, and there’ll be more oil, and prices will go down. That’s about as much economics as your average person remembers from high school, and it makes intuitive sense.
Trump himself is fool enough to think this. And indeed, to the extent that he promulgated an “energy policy” in 2024, it was just what I said above: drill, baby, drill.
So, what has happened? Well, we are drilling, baby, drilling. Yep—there’s a promise he kept! Permits to drill on federal and Native American lands are up 55 percent since Trump returned to office. His administration has also dramatically increased lease sales (auctions where the government gives a company the right to explore for oil or gas), covering 328,000 acres of public land (that’s a little more than the city of Los Angeles). Yet the price of gasoline is up; ditto diesel gasoline (above $6 a gallon for the first time ever), home heating oil, home electricity bills … pretty much everything. Why?
There are specific answers. Some have to do with Trump, others don’t. His tariffs have roiled world markets with confusion. His war on Iran, I think you know the dreadful effects of that. Non-Trump factors include things like these data centers (which Trump of course supports), which have caused a huge demand surge. Utilities are spending more and more on grid modernization, which is a good thing in general, but it means of course that they pass those costs onto consumers. Ukraine has launched a number of successful drone strikes on Russian oil refineries, and God bless ’em for that, but it does contribute to higher prices.
It could be those factors, it could be other factors. But here’s the point: The world is complicated, and there will always be any number of factors that will interfere with the old, simplistic neoclassical theory of supply and demand. That’s why we’re drilling like crazy and gasoline prices are higher. Because the world doesn’t work the way 10th grade economics—and GOP talking points—say it does.
In the midterm campaign, Democrats are understandably focused on attacking Trump for his lies and making these higher prices we’re paying all about him. That makes political sense. When the opposing party president is sitting at 33 percent in the polls, you tee off on him and make it all about him. Rarely does that president oblige by insisting on making it all about himself, but hey, so much the better.
But longer term, the Democrats need to do much more. It would be great if they nominated a presidential candidate in 2028 who had the guts and the rhetorical skill to indict not just Trump, but conservatism and traditional economics more generally. It’s not an accident that the last three (now four) GOP presidents have wrecked the economy: Bush, Bush, Trump, and Trump. It’s not a coincidence that the last five recessions, and seven of the last eight, going all the way back to Richard Nixon, have hit during Republican presidencies. Republicans screw up the economy, and they screw it up because they believe in economic fairy tales that fit on a bumper sticker and sound plausible to most people but that ignore the world’s deep complexity and irrationality, and the constancy of the reality that no one, not even a president of the United States, has perfect information.
Democrats can win the short-term battle by banging away at Trump. But to win the longer war—which includes not just getting elected, but governing in a way stands a chance of improving people’s lives—they need to go much bigger than one man.
America’s Big Political Problem Isn’t Polarization
You can watch this episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon above or by following this show on YouTube or Substack. You can read a transcript here.
The term polarization is constantly used to describe American politics today by academics and journalists. Many in both fields cast their work as neutral, objective, and balanced. But a growing number of academics and journalists are arguing that notions of polarization and neutrality downplay the radicalism of today’s Republican Party and lead to misleading and inaccurate descriptions of American politics. One of them is Shannon McGregor, a professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill’s school of journalism and media. In the latest edition of Right Now, McGregor explains why media, academia, and philanthropy are fixated on defining polarization as the central problem in America, why that perspective is misguided, how neutrality and polarization feed into one another, and alternative approaches for both journalists and academics.
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La Feria del Condado de Santa Cruz acaba de bajar de precio: aquí te contamos cuánto ahorrarás
Los precios de entrada y estacionamiento de la Feria del Condado de Santa Cruz bajarán este año, una decisión deliberada de los organizadores para atraer de nuevo a las familias que han dejado de asistir debido al aumento de los costos.
Si vas
Qué: Feria del Condado de Santa Cruz
Dónde: Recinto Ferial del Condado de Santa Cruz, 2601 East Lake Ave., Watsonville
Cuándo: Del 16 al 20 de septiembre. El horario varía según el día; consulta el sitio web de la feria del condado para obtener más información.
Para consultar el programa detallado de las exhibiciones y actividades de entretenimiento de cada día, visita el sitio web de la Feria del Condado de Santa Cruz.
La directora ejecutiva de la feria del condado, Dori Rose Inda, dijo que la medida responde a los comentarios de la comunidad, que señalaban que asistir al evento anual se había vuelto cada vez más costoso. Después de escuchar esas opiniones, Rose Inda dijo que ella y su equipo se “pusieron a pensar juntos” en maneras de hacer que la feria fuera más económica y accesible para la comunidad.
Los nuevos precios son aproximadamente entre $1 y $2 más bajos que en años anteriores. Los boletos para adultos (de 13 a 61 años) costarán $20, en comparación con los $22 del año pasado. Los boletos para niños y personas mayores costarán $10 y $13, respectivamente, lo que representa una reducción de $1 en cada caso.
Para celebrar el 250.º aniversario de Estados Unidos, Rose Inda dijo a Lookout que la entrada a la feria el día de la inauguración, el 16 de septiembre, costará $2.50, únicamente en efectivo y pagando en la entrada. Los jueves y viernes, 17 y 18 de septiembre, los asistentes podrán ahorrar $4 por boleto entre el mediodía y las 5 p. m. si compran sus boletos en la entrada, según el sitio web de la feria del condado.
También señaló que habrá descuentos adicionales durante los días que dure la feria, como el Día del Niño, el 17 de septiembre, cuando los menores de 12 años podrán entrar gratis.
Credit: Kevin Painchaud / Lookout Santa Cruz
“Esperamos tener una mayor asistencia,” dijo Rose Inda. “Esperamos que las personas puedan gastar un poco más cómodamente una vez que estén dentro, si no han tenido que gastar tanto para entrar.”
Además de reducir el costo de entrada, Rose Inda dijo que el precio del estacionamiento también ha disminuido $5. Los asistentes también tendrán estacionamiento gratuito fuera de las instalaciones en el edificio del gobierno del condado de Santa Cruz, ubicado en Westridge Drive, y en Elks Lodge, en Martinelli Street, en Watsonville. Desde ambos lugares, Santa Cruz Metro ofrecerá transporte gratuito hasta el recinto ferial.
“Me entusiasma que vengan las familias y que las personas mayores puedan entrar porque ahora es más accesible,” dijo Rose Inda.
Rose Inda dijo a Lookout que está entusiasmada por destacar el talento local en la feria de este año, incluidos cantantes como Andy Vargas y James Durbin, así como por celebrar a la comunidad agrícola local. Recomienda a los asistentes visitar las exhibiciones de arte y agregó que podrán disfrutar de un nuevo espectáculo de drones todas las noches de la feria.
Los asistentes también podrán disfrutar de toda la comida deliciosa y los productos horneados, incluidos los famosos Country Fair Cinnamon Rolls, que tendrán un sabor especial para celebrar el tema de este año: “Pasteles de manzana y cielos estrellados.”
The post La Feria del Condado de Santa Cruz acaba de bajar de precio: aquí te contamos cuánto ahorrarás appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.
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Trump’s Rage Erupts as Brutal “Convention” Ratings Humiliate Him Badly
Donald Trump raged at a reporter who asked about his “midterm convention” offer to send $5,000 to voters if the GOP holds Congress. He snapped at her repeatedly, called her “the worst,” and even leaned in and glowered menacingly in her face. What makes this significant is her question: Why, she asked, do you need to pay voters to turn out if your economic policies are the smashing success you claim? This captures the core absurdity of the moment, and Trump has absolutely no answer for it. It’s no accident that this comes as the preliminary ratings for his first-night speech viewership on Fox News were a scant 2.5 million, even less than a Sean Hannity episode. The Times reported: “No Trump bump.” Mediaite called it a “dud.” We talked to New Republic senior editor Alex Shephard, author of a good piece on Trump’s political weakness. We discuss new data that shows the enthusiasm gap favoring Democrats, why those bad convention ratings are so humiliating for Trump in a deeper sense, how Trump-MAGA’s hold on the culture is vanishing, and the profound contradictions at the heart of MAGA’s Trump-worship. Listen to this episode here.