Nigel Farage wants to scrap 'suffocating' UK GDPR
Runable hits $21M to bet AI agents can go from building businesses to growing them
Santa Cruz fences off Coral Street sidewalks, initially citing wrong law
The City of Santa Cruz recently fenced off sidewalks along Coral Street near homeless services provider Housing Matters, blocking access to the area. Signs on the fences initially cited the wrong code — a city spokesperson said they should have referenced a state penal code. Homeless advocates question the legal grounds for this move, calling it a tool to discriminate against unhoused people who were already subjected to frequent sweeps in the area.
The post Santa Cruz fences off Coral Street sidewalks, initially citing wrong law appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.
The Cult and Corruption of Cryptocurrency
Ben McKenzie might seem like an unlikely choice to launch an investigation into the complicated world of cryptocurrency. But the television actor known for shows like The O.C. and Gotham did exactly that.
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His documentary film, Everyone Is Lying to You for Money, is a deep dive into the people and companies at the heart of crypto. The film focuses on McKenzie’s journey to discover why people continue to invest in digital currency even while knowing the risks of this highly under-regulated market.
“I think crypto is not only not the future of money, it’s the past of money,” he tells host Al Letson. “And it’s something we’ve tried before and it’s failed.”
On this week’s More To The Story, McKenzie shares his concerns for what he calls the cult-like behavior of those investing in digital currency, talks about his interview with disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried just months before his arrest, and discusses the poignant conversations he had with everyday people who trusted the power of digital currency and lost everything—yet are still crypto believers.
Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.
Meningitis Is a Horrible Way to Die. Trump Will Make It More Common.
It might sound cliché, but it was true: Emily Stillman had a smile that lit up the room and arms that were open to the world. She was interested in everyone she met, and she was deeply funny, with dead-on accents and impressions of other people. Her dream was to work for Saturday Night Live, so she double-majored in drama and theater at Kalamazoo College, a small liberal arts college in Michigan, where she thrived.
When the 19-year-old called her mother, Alicia, one Friday evening in 2013 and mentioned she had a headache, it didn’t seem that strange; she’d been studying hard. It was the last time she would speak to her mother.
Emily’s headache worsened that night. At 10:30 p.m., after sleeping for a few hours, she asked her roommates to take her to the hospital so she could get some pain relief. She brought her textbooks to pass the time, thinking she’d be there for an hour or two. But she soon deteriorated.
Emily didn’t have a migraine. She had bacterial meningitis, an incredibly swift and deadly swelling around the brain and spinal cord. The doctors moved quickly, removing parts of her skull to relieve pressure. But it couldn’t stem the damage underway; Emily’s brain tissue was too damaged by the swelling. Her mother arrived the next morning, but Emily never woke up after the surgery.
“When I said goodbye to my daughter, it was a really, really cold February morning. She had tubes coming out of every part of her body,” Alicia Stillman said. “I told her, ‘You go. You can be at peace. I’ll figure out what happened.’”
After her daughter’s death, Alicia needed to know what she had done wrong. Where had she dropped the ball? Hadn’t she gotten her daughter all of the recommended vaccines? She remembered very clearly that Emily had gotten a booster dose right before leaving for college—but that was the MenACWY shot, she learned. Emily died of meningitis B—a bacterial infection for which a vaccine had been approved in other countries, including a few miles north in Canada, but not yet in the United States. Meningitis B is responsible for all known college outbreaks since 2011.
Alicia threw herself into advocacy, creating first the Emily Stillman Foundation and later co-founding the American Society for Meningitis Prevention. She knew she needed to understand the systemic issues behind her daughter’s death, so she even got a Master of Public Health degree. In the months after Emily’s death, she organized trips across the Canadian border for anyone who wanted to get the MenB vaccine, and she did everything she could to advocate for approval of the vaccine in the United States. In 2014, her dream came true: The first MenB vaccine in the U.S. was authorized. “I was thrilled,” she said.
On August 10, Alicia watched President Trump attempt to erase all of that progress with the stroke of a pen. His executive order on vaccines seeks to classify meningococcal vaccines only for those at high risk or after “shared clinical decision-making,” a previously obscure category of vaccines where the risks may not outweigh the benefits—which would not be the case for these and other vaccines in Trump’s sights. While the order has no legal standing, it directs agencies—including the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which similarly attempted to slash vaccine recommendations in January before being halted by a court order—to create plans for reducing vaccinations, and it takes aim at states allowing only medical, not religious, exemptions to school vaccination requirements.
It was a gut punch to Alicia.
“I’m scared for all of the kids who would have been protected but aren’t now,” she said. “I’m scared for them, and I’m sad for them … for the families that are going to go through what I went through. Because they don’t have to.”
Meningitis is unsparing. It kills about half of people who aren’t treated—and that treatment must come quickly. Symptoms might start with a fever, headache, or stiff neck, but patients can die within hours.
Several types of bacteria can lead to meningitis, and it can also come from fungal and viral infections, parasites, and other causes. But it’s largely preventable. There are three types of bacterial meningococcal vaccines in the U.S.: MenACWY, MenB, and the combined MenABCWY, also known as the pentavalent vaccine. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention currently recommends meningococcal vaccines for all teens and preteens, as well as children and adults at risk, such as those living in communal settings. Trump’s new order, if government agencies act on it, would change that—and meningitis cases would undoubtedly rise at a faster clip. Even without making any changes, Trump’s order and rhetoric around vaccines will increase confusion and hesitancy.
The first meningitis vaccine was invented by American physician-scientist Emil Claus Gotschlich in 1970, and it was soon deployed in other countries to stop outbreaks. In 1981, a vaccine called MPSV4, or Menomune, was approved for use in the U.S., but because of its short duration of protection it was never widely recommended for children and was only deployed among members of the military, travelers, and others at high risk. A much longer-lasting vaccine, MenACWY, was finally approved in the U.S. in 2005; MenB followed in 2014; and MenABCWY came out in 2023. Once the meningococcal vaccine was widely deployed, illnesses dropped by 90 percent compared to the 1990s, when the disease sickened thousands of Americans and killed hundreds each year. But there has been a sharp uptick since 2021 amid a rise in vaccine skepticism, particularly on the right.
When the vaccines were approved for wide use in the U.S., “it was a great success,” said Abby Wold, an advocate for the American Society for Meningitis Prevention. “I helped work to get it recommended,” she said. She’s worked with meningitis organizations for the past 23 years, and she’s testified before state legislatures about the importance of recommending the vaccines.
Wold is also a survivor. In 2003, at age 22, she went out with her friends for one last hurrah, two days away from leaving for basic training with the U.S. military. She didn’t have much to drink, but still, she was stricken with nausea, and she started vomiting profusely. At one point, she passed out on her friend’s bathroom floor. In the morning, she asked her friend to take her to the hospital. It was February, so her friend helped her change into warmer clothes—and that’s when they saw the freckle-like rash across her stomach that didn’t fade when she pressed her fingertips against it. She immediately knew why: A year before, a survivor of bacterial meningitis who knew her brother had described the petechial rash to her and explained how serious it was.
By the time they arrived at the emergency department, Wold couldn’t walk anymore. The rash spoke for itself; within 10 minutes, she was in a room receiving antibiotics, but after half an hour, her kidneys were failing. That night, she went into a coma, with multiple organ failure, for three weeks. When she finally woke, her feet had become necrotic; 11 surgeries couldn’t save them, and she had below-the-knee amputations on both legs. Her adrenal glands also stopped functioning, which is why she has to take steroids for life and has to handle stress very carefully (since adrenal glands create stress hormones). That means she’s unable to work. She also had to undergo skin grafts and serial debridements for the deep wounds in her necrotic skin. All told, she was hospitalized for three months. “And it’s an expensive disease,” she said. “I have lifelong medical costs. My initial hospital bills were $1.4 million.”
She has devoted herself to advocacy. At the time, the vaccine wasn’t available to the public yet; in a deep irony, Wold would’ve been vaccinated days later at basic training. Then again, the Iraq War would begin a month after she got sick, and she likely would’ve been deployed; she wonders what her fate would have been. “Even though I lost a lot, I’m still lucky,” she said—a harrowing type of luck to involve loss of limb and organ. “I was so thankful to be alive.”
When Trump signed the order earlier this month, Wold was thinking about soaring meningitis rates in the 1990s. “Without that vaccine recommendation in place, they’re going to rise back up to that ’90s level, if not more,” Wold said. Pediatricians have an obligation, she said, to remind people about the dangers of vaccine-preventable diseases that many of us have forgotten or never seen in our lifetime—not just meningococcal disease, but also RSV, hepatitis A and B, the flu, and other vaccines that Trump would like to make optional.
“People forget how serious these diseases can be,” and what a “miracle” the vaccines have been, she said. She hopes stories like hers will remind them.
When the Covid pandemic hit, longtime vaccine opponents like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now the HHS secretary, saw an opportunity to take their fringe beliefs to the mainstream, turbocharging anti-vaccine sentiment and a general mistrust of expertise and evidence.
“When there are mixed messages and not-clear messages, people don’t know who to believe, and they don’t know where to turn,” said Alicia Stillman, who saw the changes in the public’s attitude while she was completing her degree in public health during the pandemic. “Sometimes parents get misinformation, and then they don’t protect their children. When my daughter died, that vaccine was not available to protect her, but it is available now.”
Trump’s executive order also recommended spacing out vaccines. But the evidence is clear that spreading out doses will create barriers to immunization, and it means children go without critical protection. “Because their parents can’t take that extra appointment to go back to the doctor to get one at a time, and the medical professionals in many areas are overworked and don’t have the time to talk about the vaccines that are now shared clinical decision-making vaccines—they won’t even know that their kids are missing it,” Stillman said. When deaths inevitably rise because of lower vaccination coverage, parents will be stricken with the knowledge that their children’s deaths could have been prevented. “God forbid,” she said, “but I know it’s going to happen.”
Since Emily died, her two siblings have gotten married and had children of their own, both naming their babies after the aunt they will never meet. The Stillmans’ lives go on, but they don’t, not fully. Every family gathering, every celebration of a milestone—graduations and birthdays, weddings and births—is bittersweet. “There’s something missing,” Stillman said. “Your family is never complete again.” Emily didn’t get to graduate college; she didn’t get to leave her teen years; she didn’t get to marry or have children. “You lose every future experience with them,” she said.
Stillman tells everyone she can: When you go to the doctor, bring a list of vaccines, and ask when your child will get them. Don’t leave it up to the doctor to bring up vaccines that might now be thought of as optional, even though they’re life-saving. “In these uncertain times, a person needs to take a more proactive approach to protecting themselves,” she said. “We are blessed to live in a time period that [these vaccines] are available to us. Not everybody, including me, had that blessing.”
She thought back on her decision to focus on public health. It seemed like the only way she could go on, this unshakeable belief that Emily had died so that she would do this work of preventing poor public health decisions—like the delay in approving the MenB vaccine in the U.S. Sometimes, like on the day Trump signed that order, she wonders what she can really do.
But then she rallies. She thinks about the times she’s run into someone and they’ve said, “I saw your information,” or, “I saw you on the news, and because of you, my kids are protected.” It’s incremental, yes, but it’s tangible success. Each child vaccinated is a life saved. “It’s working,” she said.
Transcript: Why Minneapolis Has Become the Center of 2020s Politics
This is a lightly edited transcript of the August 25 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
Perry Bacon: Good morning. I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of Right Now on The New Republic. Right now, I’m joined by Michelle Phelps. She’s a sociologist at the University of Minnesota. She wrote a book about the protests in Minneapolis in 2020, and the sort of reckoning in police and this discussion of policing and so on that happened there afterward. And so I’m going to talk to her about what happened in 2020 and what happened in 2026 here in Minneapolis, and kind of connections between the two. Professor Phelps, thanks for joining me. I appreciate it.
Michelle Phelps: Thanks for having me.
Bacon: So let me start with 2026, because the reason I want to ask, in part, is I think it’s become conventional wisdom now that Trump is unpopular. But I think what really happened was Minneapolis had a big resistance to show the country, in a certain way, that ICE was opposed and people did not like this immigration approach.
And so the first question I wanted to ask was, did the resistance in 2026 come from nowhere, or was some of that built in 2020 or even before then?
Phelps: Yeah. I’m a sociologist, but I like to pretend periodically that I’m a historian. And as any real or pretend historian will tell you, nothing comes out of nowhere, right? There’s always this longer history. And in Minneapolis, I think the 2020 memory was really salient for people, and salient in a couple of different ways, sometimes working at cross-purposes. Let me start with the most obvious.
I think the most obvious was that the people of Minneapolis and the broader Twin Cities metro area had built up this muscle memory of resistance. And actually, we can think about 2020 as the culmination of years of organizing efforts, and seeds being planted that then blossomed in 2020.
But even if we start the clock at 2020, as literal as, there’s networks of neighbors that have each other’s contact information, so when things flip to Signal, it’s easier to invite people, because you know each other, right? It also means that people were used to getting out and protesting, and people were used to thinking about state narratives of violence with a critical eye, right? And so when we hear that first news about what had happened in Minneapolis, people were immediately critical of DHS’s narrative, right? Immediately critical about whether this lethal use of force was justified or not.
But you can go farther back. So in addition to the sort of decade or so before 2020, where you start to see more organizing around police violence, you can go back even farther. If we go back to the 1960s, Minneapolis is one of many cities across the country that erupts in protests around what we now understand as a fight for racial justice.
You can go back to the 1940s, when Hubert Humphrey was the mayor of Minneapolis, and Minneapolis was at the forefront of racial equity policies at a city level. Some would trace it even farther back, to our Scandinavian roots of immigration, or the very cold winters and the way that causes people to pull together in moments of crisis.
But the other thing that’s important to tie to 2020, and that doesn’t have to do with Minneapolis in and of itself and its resistance capacity, is that we were on Trump’s target list, right? And there were lots of indications that the administration was directly trying to prompt a redux of the unrest of 2020, and to have it end with more state violence. And that was in people’s minds too, this idea that the president is attacking the city politically, that this is a politically motivated invasion of federal agents, and that there is an attempt of federal provocation to get people to riot, to instigate a more repressive state response.
And people remembered the memories of 2020, for both good and bad. The helicopters circling reminded people of traumatic memories, but so did the community coming together in protest and solidarity. And I think that really helped in terms of people resisting, but also resisting in ways that didn’t play into that hand, right? Resisting in ways that kept a public order, even in the midst of this pretty active resistance to a federal occupation.
Bacon: So you’re hinting at 2020 lessons learned, but I’ll ask it more explicitly. So I guess, what is the reception among the population of Minneapolis, hard to stereotype, about the 2020? Was it successful, in that the officers were convicted, or failed, in that there was a perception of disorder and no lasting police changes happened?
Phelps: Yeah, I think it’s a range of responses, and those aren’t the only two. You can see different configurations of things. I think people on the kind of farthest left of the political spectrum believe that the protests were effective and radical and profound, and also that there have been fewer changes in public safety than they wanted to see, particularly with the failure of that 2021 charter amendment to replace the Minneapolis Police Department with the Department of Public Safety.
You have people further on the right, which, in Minneapolis, is largely kind of a centrist Democrat but leans into sort of the beginning of the Republican Party, if we’re thinking about the political spectrum. And I think those folks that are towards the center and further to the right in Minneapolis see the protests of 2020 as having gotten out of hand, and the critique of the police as having gotten out of hand, and see as having reestablished what should be a deference to police and policing in the city, in part by growing the budget of the police, and by working to address the staffing shortages that have still continued to impact the department.
But I think most people in Minneapolis are in the middle. I think most people in Minneapolis think that the protests were a righteous cause, that they were largely peaceful, which they were, and that those protests were spotlighting what was a true injustice of state violence, and that there have been changes since then, though the pace and the scale of them, I think people have varied perceptions of how quick or effective that has been.
But certainly, I think the kind of modal perspective is that 2020 was spotlighting an important injustice in Minneapolis, across the country, and that it has led, in complicated and not always as far as people want them—but that has led to changes, and changes around policing and public safety that have nudged us in a better direction.
Bacon: To be extremely reductive, the mayor of Minneapolis is more, quote unquote, “center left.” He was opposed by someone who was more progressive in 2022 or 2023?
Phelps: It would’ve been—I’d have to go back and look. I think it was 2022.
Bacon: And he won, but it was narrow. It was close. So there’s a divide, the divide that might be a good parallel for—there’s a divide here, but neither side is overwhelmingly one or the other.
Phelps: Yeah, and I would say the mayoral politics tend to skew towards the kind of center left. So Mayor Frey has been in office for longer than any of the mayors in recent political history, actually, and certainly skews more centrist. But in some of the wards, some of the city council members, we’ve seen DSA members, we’ve seen other people that are farther to left-wing, and then we have some council members that are to the right of the mayor.
And so I would say that kind of center left is about the kind of center of gravity, at least for people who are showing up at the polls, which is not, of course, a perfect representation of the city itself.
Bacon: So the anti-ICE organization we saw, does that mostly happen after Renee Good is killed, or before even? What is the timetable, when does the sort of activity really start?
Phelps: Yeah. So I would say, much earlier than even the initial surge into the Twin Cities, people were doing things like mass distributing whistles. I think workplaces were getting together and talking about how we were going to protect neighbors. We had seen what was happening in other cities, and there was a sense in the city that Minneapolis would be a target and would be a central focus at some point, although it was unclear when that would happen.
So there had been lots of prep work. I would say the whistles and the trainings were the kind of entry point for a lot of people, on getting prepared and getting connected to people in your neighborhood.
Renee Good’s killing really accelerated all of that. So I would say people were already ready. We saw, even with Renee Good, right, there were people on the street. There were people on the street with whistles. She had been part of organizing at her kids’ school. There was that infrastructure starting to build, but certainly it explodes in terms of interest in the Monarca trainings, or other legal observer trainings, and really rapidly proliferates.
And I think there’s been really a series of kind of transition moments, right? So there was the kind of initial building moment. There was the, like, mass escalation and crisis moment, when Good and Pretti are killed. And then in the aftermath of that, things shifted again, as people started to get more nervous about federal infiltration of a lot of the community networks. And then of course, once the surge shifted and there was this visible pullback—even as we still see people being deported, but not the same sort of flooding of the streets in this hyper-visible way—those networks have shifted yet again. So it’s a very dynamic process.
Bacon: The federal pullback, as you say, is not full, but there was some. Is there a sense of victory there, or a sense that we—not victory in a sort of, we won the NBA finals, but a sense of, a concession that they were wrong, and they did something bad?
Phelps: Yeah, again, I think it depends where you sit, but I would say, for the average person in Minneapolis, I think there is this sense of, we fought back and we won, at least the immediate fight. We may not have won the war, but we won the battle and pushed them out. I think the people who are really active still in the grassroots day-to-day work resist that narrative, in part because they worry that it’s demobilizing, right?
So if ICE is gone and the threat is gone, then nobody needs to do patrol anymore, right? Nobody needs to be on their guard. Nobody needs to be going to Whipple. And of course, across the country, ICE abductions and deportations continue, but they’re much more targeted.
And so in a way, we’re in this strange phase where the problem persists, but it’s a different kind of problem, in that it is not the sort of mass stop and frisk, but it is these more targeted operations, but they’re quieter, and they’re quieter by design. Because the Trump administration saw that this massive public campaign would have political blowback. And I think political blowback that the administration was somewhat not prepared for, the kind of scale and intensity of that political blowback.
But in some ways, it’s a hollow victory, right? In that the deportations haven’t actually stopped. The vulnerability of immigrant communities hasn’t dramatically changed. What has changed is the probability that the, like, average everyday person will see these agents in their day-to-day life. But the deeper problem and crisis around enforcement hasn’t actually been resolved, but it’s now off the political radar. In a way, it was a pyrrhic victory, right? In that we appeared to have won the battle, but also at this cost of, now it’s no longer this massive political liability for the Trump administration, and people are still vulnerable.
Bacon: So talking about the protests—I live in Louisville, so in 2020, the protests of Breonna Taylor being killed initially were biracial, and as they extended, it was mainly a Black cohort who was doing the protests. My perception was that that was a national trend as well, was, the protests, for a while you had all these white people, and pictures of it, and then gradually it became more Black people were being killed and more Black people protesting.
I’d be curious what Minneapolis was like in 2020, and their perception of these 2026 protests, is intentionally lots of white people being involved because Latinos are the ones being protected. I don’t know where Blacks and Asians would’ve fit into that, but talk about the sort of racial demographics of the protests, both in 2020 and today.
Phelps: Yeah. I think this is another place where you can draw these connections between 2020 and 2026. So I think part of the political conversation in 2020 was about white people and how they showed up for racial justice, and those lessons, I think, get accelerated in 2026. So in 2020, the protests were multiracial. And Minneapolis is still the most diverse place in the state of Minnesota, but the state of Minnesota is overwhelmingly white. So Minneapolis is still a majority white city. Its Black population is less than 20 percent of the city population.
And so all throughout the BLM era, Black Lives Matter protests just had lots of white people in them, right? Like, you weren’t going to get just the kind of, like, really boots on the ground, without having a sizable number of white leftists who were also present. And so it’s been intentionally a multiracial community, and a multiracial community that has tried to really balance these tensions around how to have an initiative that was focused on the value of Black lives, but that had so many white participants.
A lot of the movement leaders were Black. A lot of the, like, core organizers were Black and other folks of color. There would be moments at protests where they would ask the white folks to physically stand back in the crowd, so that Black folks could have a space of solidarity and to be around other Black people, right? So that they weren’t in a sea of white people at this protest around racial justice.
So there was a lot of this negotiating the whiteness of a movement around responding to anti-Blackness and state violence. And I think those lessons really show up in 2026, when you see white people saying, This is our moment to step out in front, because we’re a buffer, right? We’re a buffer for that state violence, and we have the privilege in order to do so. In 2020, yes, those movements were much whiter on the streets, and that was deliberately and intentionally—
Bacon: You mean 2026, right?
Phelps: 2026, excuse me. And that was deliberately, right? And you would still see these moments of interracial solidarity. There was a group of women who would pass out samosas at the protests to keep people fed, right? And, I think the Latino community here, there were these moments where people were expressing that solidarity and co-organizing events, even if it was an ask for people who were less vulnerable to step up front, and white citizens were understood to be the group that would be least vulnerable.
Yeah, I think both of the protests were multiracial in different ways, but who was sent to the front—both for visibility and protection—and the meaning of the movement shifted over time. But the logic was the same. It was just that the external conditions looked different.
Bacon: Can I ask this question, and maybe, hopefully, you can answer it candidly. Can Minneapolis, both in 2020 and 2026, be a place where activism this aggressive is described as activism and not rioting, always immediately, because Minneapolis is a white city, and Los Angeles is a Black and Latino city, and Chicago is a Black city, and Baltimore is a Black city, and I don’t know what Louisville is—but Minneapolis definitely is—I’m going to say, I know Minneapolis is not all white, but is it coded white in a way that is helpful both locally and perhaps more importantly nationally?
Phelps: Yeah. And not just coded white, but coded white and Midwest, which is the—Midwest, the blandest of the whites.
Bacon: Not San Francisco white either, yeah. Not San Francisco white. Yeah, that’s a good point.
Phelps: Midwest white.
Bacon: Not elitist Boston white, and not San Francisco radical white either, yes.
Phelps: That’s exactly right. Heart of the heartland, heart of the country. Heartland. Although still a city, right? So we’re going to get the city’s earnest—
Bacon: Sports teams. Kevin Garnett.
Phelps: That’s right. That’s right. And I would say, because of the political leanings of the city, from the beginning in 2020, people in Minneapolis were very hesitant to call any of what happened riots, although there were these moments. So, like, the politicians, like the mayor and the governor, were very careful to distinguish between the peaceful protest that is happening during the day is different than the looting that is happening, or the arson that is happening at night.
And so even in the midst of, you had these press conferences at 2:00 in the morning where our elected officials look just exhausted, right? You could see the bags under their eyes, you could see their hair going sideways, and still they were very careful to say, some of what is happening, the protests that are happening, that is for a righteous cause, right? And so the way in which 2020 gets read as predominantly in this framework of a riot isn’t happening in the city. It is happening as you zoom out, right, and as you go into more conservative media spaces. But in Minneapolis, we understand 2020 primarily as a summer of protest, not as a riot.
And I think you’re right that the racial demographics here gave us a little bit of protection, although ultimately we lost some of that, right? In the same way that kind of racial stigma can rub off on people who are allies or who are in the fight. In some ways, I think Minneapolis, its reputation as this sort of, like, white Midwestern, high quality of life utopia gets tarnished for a moment. And one of the things that’s been interesting to see is how that tarnish has worn off over the years, as 2020 recedes from public memory in the national conversation, but then flares back to life in 2026, but with this sort of, we are the progressive warriors.
And in 2026, what’s different is, the entire city can come together to fight the federal government, in which there is uniform opposition from the everyday person at the protest all the way up to the governor’s office. Whereas in 2020, it was, of course, the city’s police department, and then the city’s residents sparring against police and National Guard and others. And so those politics were more complicated in 2020, whereas in 2026, everybody could say, This is our righteous protest. This is us pushing back against state oppression.
Bacon: Because there were anti-ICE actions in Chicago and in Los Angeles in 2025. It wasn’t as if you were the only city that fought this—that Minneapolis did maybe a better job, or gotten better praise for it. That’s kind of what I was getting at. Is that a part of, because of what Minneapolis represents as a city in this sense? Yeah, Middle America.
Phelps: Yeah. And what’s interesting is, I have this sentence in my book that says, before 2020, few might have predicted that Minneapolis would be the epicenter of this national cry for police abolition, right? And a lot of the cities that had sparked these massive BLM protests and really extensive global coverage had been places that were less white, right? And so people were surprised that it happened in Minneapolis, and in some ways that was part of, I think, what was so newsworthy to the media about it, was like, this was a place where you didn’t expect that to happen.
And but if you ask some of the Black organizers in Minneapolis, they did expect it to happen, right? They expected that Minneapolis was on the precipice of this explosion of protests, in part because the gaps between Black wellbeing and white wellbeing are so stark here, because of the racial demographics. So again, it plays out a little differently locally than it does in sort of the kind of national perception of what kind of city Minneapolis is.
Bacon: So you mentioned the local differences in 2020. There is some difference between—it’s an interesting state, where Flanagan won the Senate race as the sort of Bernie Sanders candidate, but Klobuchar does not like Bernie Sanders and would tell you so herself. Jacob Frey is doing well, but so is Ilhan Omar. So are there two kind of politics in Minneapolis? There’s the normal Democrat and the progressive Democrat, both reigning pretty well in Minneapolis at the same time.
It seems like it’s not like New York City, where the progressive Democrat is having their sort of moment right now. It’s more divided in Minneapolis, or you judge the person? Or how does it work there?
Phelps: Yeah. I think each of those contests is a slightly different demographic, and we’re in a particular moment. I think Flanagan’s campaign was helped in part by the sort of anti-ICE protest, right? This is a moment in which it is safer to run with more lefty candidates, because the kind of public rage at the federal administration is so stark, right? And so it seems like there is an opening here. But I’ll also say, Flanagan has served under Walz, who is more of, somewhere between a centrist but progressive—
Bacon: He’s somewhere between, yeah. He’s not a good fit for either camp, really. Klobuchar is more in one, and Ilhan is more in the other.
Phelps: That’s correct. That’s correct. Walz is hard to pin, and in some ways his policies were quite progressive, but to come back to your earlier point, he’s got this kind of Oshkosh, Minnesota masculinity in a way that allows for a bit more coverage for some of those progressive policies. So I would say, just like the mayor’s office tends to be more centrist, so too does the governor’s office. And I would say that we’ll continue to see, in Minneapolis, whenever you have the biggest geographical swaths, you get this sort of skewing towards the more center left. Whereas when you get these campaigns that can run on more targeted congressional areas or council wards, you can get these more progressive.
And so I’d say both the progressives and the centrist Democrats have a lot of support in Minneapolis, and then Minnesota. The state, when you get farther and farther away from the cities, it gets more conservative, as you do in any state. But certainly in the Twin Cities, I would say those are the kind of two—those are, in all intents and purposes, like, those are our two political parties, not Democrats and Republicans, but progressives and center left.
Bacon: So what’s happening now? As you alluded to, the fact that there’s still ICE operations, so there’s not a—are these communities and Signal groups and so on still going, or what’s happening now in terms of the activism? You said ICE is less public and less active. ICE is less publicly aggressive, I think that’s correct. So what’s going on now?
Phelps: Yeah. And Minneapolis is no longer the center of the storm, in the way that it was in that moment. So I would say there are still active Signal channels, but the volume is way, way down, and a lot of those groups are really focused on community needs in the wake of the surge. The occupation went for a long time, and so if you didn’t feel safe, like, you could leave the house to go to work—there are people who are in rent crises, there are people that are in food crises, there are people that are in medical crises. And then there’s all the families and the networks of the people who have been deported, or who are expecting still to be deported. A lot of that kind of immediate response of, “Let’s flood people on the streets,” a lot of that has shifted to managing the community fallout from the surge.
And it’s been hard—just like in every month after the summer protests in 2020, and then every year since then, the attention fades from the room. People get exhausted, and they step back, and that makes it really hard to maintain these networks. I would say that the kind of fervor in which people were engaged in all of this work has faded, but those networks remain.
And I think it’s still an open question whether or not the Trump administration continues to attempt to make an example out of Minneapolis or not, or just goes to other cities where they expect to find less public resistance moving forward. But those networks are there and ready to be activated should there be another very high-profile event. And there are certainly still people who are monitoring the Whipple Building. There are still people who are tailing federal agents.
But the recent legal cases, I think, have really shifted people’s focus and attention to defending the people who are being tied up in those legal cases, and also being more careful about, like, what gets said on a Signal network, for instance. So if you’re part of any of these Signal groups, every, like, couple of weeks, there’s something that people get panicked about, and then you see a whole list of people, like, changing their profile name, or changing their phone number, or changing their email. So it’s kind of this cat and mouse surveillance game.
Bacon: Last question. This is not centered in Minneapolis, but I know you saw Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez used the phrase Woke 1.0—or she was quoting someone saying Woke 1.0 was crazy. Since you wrote a book about this whole period, I’d be curious, without debating whether she’s running for president or not, I’d be curious to say what you thought about what she said, and the discourse that’s happened since then about this sort of 2020, and what it meant then and what it means now.
Phelps: Yeah. And I saw you had Deva Woodly on, who’s brilliant, on this question.
Bacon: Yes.
Phelps: So I would say, stepping aside from AOC’s specific comments, I would say in general, there has been this kind of pivot on the left to thinking about 2020 as this moment of failure, right? And this moment of, there was an overreaction, and now there needs to be this correction. And I would say particularly on the center left, but even in farther left circles. And I find, even in academic spheres—you can find Loïc Wacquant recently published a piece that was against abolition, against abolitionism.
So it’s not just happening in the political sphere. I think there are all of these places, from the, like, everyday community organizing work all the way up to the most high-profile comments about Woke 1.0, where people are looking back on 2020 and experiencing, I think, internal distress about how they responded in 2020, and how they tie that or not to the rise of the Trump administration and what we’re currently going through.
And to me, I would say a lot of these reflections, I think, are learning the wrong lessons about 2020. I think anybody who was prepared for 2020, anybody who had been steeped in these movements, anybody who had thought about the history around protest, around racial justice and police violence, predicted the backlash.
The backlash is not a thing we need to explain. The backlash is, in fact, the most predictable outcome that we should expect from a massive national uprising against police violence and racialized police violence. And so the fact that we see this pivot rightward shouldn’t surprise us at all. The same thing, of course, happens in the sort of transition from the 1960s to 1970s.
And there were a lot of really important lessons from 2020 that people held onto for a moment, and that I worry the, like, small gains in which are starting to be crawled back. So for instance, one thing we learned, or a lot of people seem to learn in the moment, is that it’s very difficult to regulate police violence. It’s very difficult to say, OK, we’re going to have a police force that is going to use lethal violence to eliminate lethal threats, but they’re only going to kill the right people in the right context in exactly the right way every single time.
Like, that is, at best—even if you think the police are fantastic defenders of democracy, like, that is always going to be difficult. And so anything we can do to reduce friction between communities and police, and reduce those moments where people could be killed by the police, should be seen as a positive development—not because, or not necessarily because, police are inherently flawed, but because violence is endemic to the police role, and that means that when we can prevent crises, when we can better respond to people’s needs, we should embrace that.
And the whole abolitionist premise that a lot of crime is driven by insecurity and precarity—if we give kids summer jobs, there is less crime. If we invest in school programs, if we invest in healthcare, if we give people drug treatment who otherwise wouldn’t have had health insurance, all of that can reduce crime.
So there were all of these really important evidence-based ideas about, how do we reduce the likelihood of state violence, that I worry have gotten lost today, and that too much of the blame for the rightward swing is being put on the 2020 protests. Whereas that is always the history of resisting state violence, right? Is that you’re going to have resistance, and then you’re going to have pushback. You’re going to have resistance, and you’re going to have pushback.
There are, I think, important lessons to learn from 2020 for organizers. I talk about that a bit in my book. I think there is a conversation that should happen among the left about, how do you win meaningful public campaigns and also mobilize people on the ground outside of traditional political structures? There are really important, I think, lessons to be learned there.
But the way the public conversation is going of, abolition was doomed, this was a terrible idea, and also it probably caused Trump—I think each step of that logic, there are problems with, and I think that is not a productive context in which to start a real conversation about what are the lessons organizers ought to take from 2020.
Bacon: Professor Phelps, this is a great place to end on. Tell people where they can find your book and other work you’re doing.
Phelps: My book is available at Princeton University Press and anywhere that you can find books.
Bacon: Give the title of it again, the whole title, just so I can—because I don’t think I did that.
Phelps: Yeah, it’s right here. It looks like that. The Minneapolis Reckoning: Race, Violence, and the Politics of Policing in America. And you can learn more about my work at michellesphelps.com. So that’s michellesphelps.com.
Bacon: Are you on Bluesky, Substack, Twitter, et cetera?
Phelps: Ah, it’s such an unsettled moment for social media. You can find me on Bluesky. You can find me on LinkedIn now. You can find me, as of this morning, on Substack. So I’m working on it. I used to be on Twitter. I’m not over there anymore. But you can still see my icon and see what I thought about the world years ago.
Bacon: You’ve not erased them all. You’re not running for office yet, it seems like.
Phelps: Yeah, that’s right. I haven’t nuked it.
Bacon: Professor Phelps, thanks for joining me. I appreciate it. Good to see you.
Phelps: Thanks for having me.
Bacon: Bye-bye.
The Films That Foretold Fascism
On April 15, 1941, the small steamship Nyassa slipped out of Lisbon carrying 816 refugees, nearly double its legal capacity of 457. Among them were Siegfried Kracauer, former film and literature editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung, and his wife, Lili, who had spent years on the run—fleeing Germany for Paris a day after the Reichstag fire, enduring exile and twice being interned in France, and finally navigating the desperate bureaucracy of visas, affidavits, and passage through Spain and Portugal out of Europe. Conditions aboard the Nyassa were “abominable.” Ten days later, it docked in Brooklyn Harbor.
Having witnessed the collapse of Weimar democracy and the consolidation of Nazi power at close range, Kracauer arrived in the United States with a question that was deeply personal and would shape his life’s work: How had a cultured, modern society come to embrace barbarism?
Lili found them an apartment at 56 West 75th Street, within walking distance of Kracauer’s new job as “special assistant” to Iris Barry, the formidable curator of the Museum of Modern Art’s legendary Film Library. Funded by a $2,000 Rockefeller grant, Kracauer spent a year researching German propaganda films, screening prints and scribbling notes in the dark. A year stretched into six, as he began to develop an exhaustive history of German cinema.
From that discipline came Kracauer’s thesis: To understand how a society drifted toward authoritarianism, one had to look at the archive of its collective psychology, where its obsessions were stored. In the screening room, patterns emerged—figures of authority and submission, paranoia and control—that seemed to anticipate the political reality to come. From Caligari to Hitler was his attempt to teach us to see the patterns.
In the screening room, patterns emerged—figures of authority and submission, paranoia and control—that seemed to anticipate the political reality to come.
Born in 1889 in Frankfurt into a middle-class Jewish family, Kracauer trained as an architect until World War I, after which he turned to journalism and criticism. At the Frankfurter Zeitung, one of the era’s leading liberal papers, he became a central figure in a circle later associated with the Frankfurt School. Among his younger acquaintances was Theodor Adorno, who later recalled that Kracauer taught him to read Kant.
Kracauer’s Weimar-era criticism was shaped by currents from phenomenology to Marxism. But his distinctive move was to turn from high philosophy to the seemingly trivial. In essays collected in The Mass Ornament and in his sociological study The Salaried Masses, he argued that modern life revealed itself not in official narratives but in its surfaces and subconscious: leisure, office routines, dance revues, the choreography of crowds. Mass culture mattered because it was mass—its formulas, repetitions, and banalities were not defects to dismiss but evidence to read.
Kracauer befriended Walter Benjamin and shared with him an effort to corral and understand mass culture. Both saw Charlie Chaplin as an accidental critic of power, exposing modern cruelty through gesture and parody. Benjamin, fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe like Kracauer, died by suicide in September 1940 after being denied passage at the Spanish border. It was a loss that devastated Kracauer. It happened a month before the release of The Great Dictator, Chaplin’s great anti-Hitler satire. Insights the two had traced in popular culture finally took urgent form on-screen, too late for Benjamin to see.
When Kracauer fled Europe, he carried not just trauma but a conviction that culture could offer early warnings of political disaster. In exile in the United States, he set out to trace a line from Weimar expressionism to the psychic conditions that enabled the Third Reich. If it had happened in Germany, who was to say it couldn’t happen in the United States? As he was in New York working on From Caligari to Hitler, the unthinkable was spreading in an unfathomable scope in Europe. In 1942, Kracauer learned that his mother and aunt had been deported to Theresienstadt and then “to Poland,” where they were murdered, likely in Auschwitz or Treblinka, but he never found out where.
A decisive essay he wrote while studying the German film reels at MoMA turned his method toward the present and toward his new home. In “Hollywood’s Terror Films: Do They Reflect an American State of Mind?” (1946), Kracauer warned that “the kind of horror formerly attributed only to life under Hitler … has now been acclimated to the American scene,” and that this was “more than accidental.” In discussing movies like Henry Hathaway’s Dark Corner (1946); Billy Wilder’s Lost Weekend (1945); Orson Welles’s The Stranger (1946); George Cukor’s Gaslight (1944); Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941), Shadow of a Doubt (1943), and Spellbound (1945); and even Disney’s The Three Caballeros (1944), he somehow noted a “genuine and constant affinity between sadism and fascism,” and suggested that the “sadistic energies” circulating in American society might be “specifically suited to provide fuel for fascism.” In a year, the McCarthy era would begin.
In From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947), Kracauer at last finished reading Weimar cinema as a kind of psychological archive, tracing a line from its haunted authority figures and distorted worlds to a growing readiness for authoritarian rule. “The films of a nation reflect its mentality in a more direct way than other artistic media for two reasons,” Kracauer famously put forth his reasoning. “First, films are never the product of an individual.… Second, films address themselves, and appeal, to the anonymous multitude. Popular films—or, to be more precise, popular screen motifs—can therefore be supposed to satisfy existing mass desires.” The films, he argues, register “psychological dispositions”—fear of disorder, a craving for control, a drift toward submission.
The archaic period of German cinema, roughly 1895 to 1918, produced films that treated myths and legends as nightmares—forebodings. A key example is The Student of Prague (1913), produced by Paul Wegener, in which a man sells his mirror reflection and is destroyed by his double—a story that introduced what Kracauer calls a lasting obsession with the divided self. Another is The Golem (1915), this time directed by Wegener, where a clay figure brought to life to defend the Jewish ghetto of medieval Prague ends up nearly destroying it. Together, these films anticipate modern psychological concerns—split identity, ambition, and the dangers of creating powers that escape control.
The postwar period of German cinema, roughly 1918 to 1924, reflected a society shaken by defeat, upheaval, and a profound uncertainty about authority and order. Filmmakers turned to stylized, psychological storytelling—what became known as German expressionism—to register these anxieties, projecting inner turmoil onto the screen. The period’s defining work, Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), with its jagged sets and nightmarish plot, tells of a hypnotist who controls a sleepwalker to commit murders. The film depicts a world of hidden power and unstable reality, where individuals are reduced to instruments and the boundary between sanity and madness collapses—what Kracauer called the “soul at work,” revealing a collective psyche caught between chaos and submission. “Caligari is a very specific premonition in the sense that he uses hypnotic power to force his will upon his tool—a technique foreshadowing, in content and purpose, that manipulation of the soul which Hitler was the first to practice on a gigantic scale.”
At its core is what Kracauer saw as an obsession with tyranny—he called it the “procession of tyrants” as he applied it to other films of the period: Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922)—again, about a master criminal and hypnotist; F.W. Murnau’s symphony of horror Nosferatu (1922); and Murnau’s The Last Laugh (1924), where an old hotel porter who derives his authority entirely from his uniform—a symbol that binds him to a social order he reveres—gets it taken away. He collapses into humiliation and self-pity, shunned by the very people who once admired him. “The forlorn old man would have little to look forward to but death,” the film’s only title card reads, in part.
During the stabilized period of Weimar cinema—roughly 1924 to 1929—German film moved away from expressionist distortion toward the cooler realism later termed New Objectivity. The mood had shifted: Inflation stabilized, cities expanded, and filmmakers turned to the textures of modern urban life. Yet beneath this surface calm lay a fixation on class division and the tensions of industrial capitalism, epitomized by Metropolis (1927), Lang’s vision of a futuristic city split between a glittering elite above and an oppressed workforce below. It portrays a society built on invisible exploitation, where prosperity rests on labor reduced to mechanical servitude.
Films of the early 1930s depict a society gripped by fear, suspicion, and moral breakdown. Kracauer saw them as portraits of a democracy in total collapse.The years 1930 to 1933 mark what Kracauer called the pre-Hitler period, when the republic’s political crisis could no longer be ignored. Films of this era abandon expressionist allegory and New Objectivity’s detachment, instead depicting a society gripped by fear, suspicion, and moral breakdown. Kracauer saw them as portraits of a democracy in total collapse.
In Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel (1930), a tyrannical high-school professor falls in love with the cabaret star Lola Lola, played by Marlene Dietrich, loses his job, and ends up performing as a clown in Lola Lola’s troupe. “The masses are irresistibly attracted by the spectacle of torture and humiliation,” Kracauer warned. “Their sadistic cruelty results from the very immaturity which forces their victim into submission. It is as if the film implied a warning, for these screen figures anticipate what will happen in real life a few years later. The boys are born Hitler youths, and the cock crowing device is a modest contribution to a group of similar, if more ingenious, contrivances much used in Nazi concentration camps.”
Another defining film is M (1931), again by Lang, the story of a child murderer hunted by police, criminals, and ordinary citizens alike. Society organizes into an informal surveillance network, with authority both everywhere and nowhere. As trust in institutions erodes, the public grows willing to bypass the law. The climactic criminal tribunal exposes a society rehearsing authoritarian justice, driven by panic rather than principle.
In the end, “economic, social and political factors do not suffice to explain the tremendous impact of Hitlerism,” Kracauer insists. “Many observant Germans refused until the last moment to take Hitler seriously, and even after his rise to power considered the new regime a transitory adventure.” Films like The Blue Angel and M tell the story, however: “In the wake of retrogression terrible outbursts of sadism are inevitable. Both films bear upon the psychological situation of those crucial years and both anticipate what was to happen on a large scale unless people could free themselves from the specters pursuing them.”
Kracauer was, above all, a diagnostician. What happens if we turn his method on today’s American cinema? Looking back from the rise of Trump to now, what patterns emerge if we treat our movies as clues to the deeper currents shaping political life?
The modern equivalent of Kracauer’s archaic period can be glimpsed in films like Mulholland Drive (2001), There Will Be Blood (2007), and The Dark Knight (2008), which interrogate enduring anxieties about identity, ambition, and authority in audacious ways. The figure of the golem—the protector who risks becoming uncontrollable—finds a clear echo in The Dark Knight’s Batman, summoned to restore order. Yet his power places him outside the law, raising the same question posed a century earlier: What happens when the force meant to save society becomes one it can no longer contain?
A modern analogue to the postwar moment is Get Out (2017), which, like Caligari, centers on hypnotism, domination, and a kind of waking sleep. In both films, a master hypnotist exerts control that strips individuals of agency: Cesare sleepwalks under Caligari’s command, while in Get Out, Black victims are subdued by their white overlords into the “Sunken Place”; they remain conscious but become powerless in an imposed social order. The horror lies in this enforced passivity—a state in which one sees but cannot act—revealing systems of control that operate not through open violence but through psychological domination that renders resistance impossible.
The New Objectivity period appears in films that confront crisis with stark clarity. Joker (2019) echoes The Last Laugh: Arthur Fleck seeks recognition but finds only humiliation, which erupts into broad social breakdown. Parasite (2019) returns to the architecture of inequality. Like Metropolis, it stages class division as spatial separation—wealth above, poverty below—and shows how a society that appears stable conceals profound divides and shaky foundations.
The pre-Hitler mood captured in M finds an echo in films like Civil War (2024) and One Battle After Another (2025). Conflict no longer appears as a temporary crisis but as a permanent condition; politics becomes an endless chain of confrontations rather than a system capable of resolution. Like M, these films imagine a world of eroding norms and ambient violence. Kracauer’s warning, reaching across decades, is not that such outcomes are inevitable but that when a society begins to normalize this atmosphere, it grows more susceptible to the promises of demagogues—and to the conflicts that follow.
That films carry with them “psychological dispositions” may not seem like a shocking thing to say today, but nobody thought like that at the time, and Kracauer’s novel approach to criticism was met with considerable ridicule. After all, he didn’t publish From Caligari to Hitler in 1933, but 1947. He wrote it during the 1940s, not as a prophet, but reconstructing a pattern after the fact, years after Hitler had seized power and while the destruction of European Jewry was underway. He could select, emphasize, and connect films in light of what he knew had happened, tracing a line that may feel inevitable in retrospect.
Critics argued that From Caligari to Hitler risks confirmation bias. The same danger applies to any attempt to apply his method to recent American films: We too are tempted to see patterns that confirm what we already suspect. And in any case, the rise of authoritarian tendencies has hardly been hidden. One did not need cinema alone to register it; political rhetoric, media ecosystems, and public life have made the signals unmistakable.
But applying Kracauer’s method to contemporary cinema still yields something valuable. He was among the first to treat films as social symptoms, but today we do it all the time. In fact, Kracauer’s urging was to keep doing it, to persistently and perpetually train our eyes to read the signs and see the patterns. “I have reason to believe that the use made here of films as a medium of research can profitably be extended to studies of current mass behavior in the United States and elsewhere,” he wrote in the preface of From Caligari to Hitler. “I also believe that studies of this kind may help in the planning of films—not to mention other media of communication—which will effectively implement the cultural aims of the United Nations.”
Across genres, our films today are loudly warning about the failure of appeasement—the sense that conflict cannot be absorbed, only deferred until it erupts. The movies of 2024 and 2025 signal almost zero confidence that democratic systems can manage antagonism without collapse. Kracauer would not ask whether these films are “about” authoritarianism. He would ask what they assume: whether democracy feels resilient or already compromised, whether catastrophe appears exceptional or inevitable.
The movies of 2024 and 2025 signal almost zero confidence that democratic systems can manage antagonism without collapse.What matters, then, is how we respond. Kracauer is not offering prophecy, where fate is fixed and agency disappears; he is offering diagnosis. And diagnosis calls for treatment, not capitulation. The films he studied revealed a widespread longing for order, submission, and escape from democratic instability. If such longings can be identified early enough, they might also be confronted—before they harden into political reality.
There is something almost poignantly optimistic in his appeal to the “cultural aims of the United Nations.” After everything he had witnessed, Kracauer still believed mass media could be directed toward a more stable, peaceful world. That faith now reads as one of the most striking parts of his project.
Conflict may be a recurring theme on-screen. Whether it becomes destiny off-screen in the United States is still undecided. Kracauer’s answer was modest and demanding at once. “Fear can be exorcised only by an incessant effort to penetrate it and spell out its causes,” he wrote. The task is to understand what our fears reveal. He imagined films that could stage not just collapse but resistance—works that would show “the principles of human integrity at grips with a deranged world,” as positive forces equal to cruelty and violence. Yet even he conceded that cinema alone cannot supply those principles; it can only reflect them. Their truth must be proven in life.
The Supreme Court Joins Trump’s Insidious War on Voting Rights
The Supreme Court lifted a lower court’s stay of President Donald Trump’s executive order seeking to commandeer state vote-by-mail systems in a 6-3 vote on Monday night. Its explanation for the decision began with a lie. “About five months ago, President Trump issued an Executive Order designed to maintain public confidence in federal elections,” the court claimed in an unsigned order.
In reality, Trump has no interest in maintaining public confidence in federal elections. He has spent the last 14 years publicly undermining confidence in election results, even in ones that he won. His executive order was intended to sow discord in and seize control of state election processes ahead of the midterms, where his party is preparing to lose one or both chambers of Congress.
Monday’s order in Trump v. California does not give Trump a full green light to pursue his plans. A separate lower-court injunction in League of Women Voters of Massachusetts v. Trump remains in effect for now. The Supreme Court’s order also left room for the states to renew their challenge to a key part of the executive order at a later date.
At the same time, the court’s framing of the dispute in Monday’s order inspires little confidence that it will protect state vote-by-mail processes from Trump’s attacks. It gives extraordinary deference to the executive branch while ignoring the systemic threat that Trump’s efforts represent to the midterm elections. That does not bode well for future litigation against the executive order.
“For its part, the court has opted to take a blinders-on approach to evaluating the merits of the government’s arguments about the order’s directives, present impact, and anticipated effects, despite this court’s admonition that courts ‘are not required to exhibit a naiveté from which ordinary citizens are free,’” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in a dissenting opinion, quoting from a 2019 ruling written by Chief Justice John Roberts. Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan also dissented separately.
This case springs from the president’s opposition to American democracy. Trump has treated any presidential election result that he dislikes as illegitimate for the last 14 years. Since 2020, he has been obsessed with promoting the phantasmal threat of significant fraud from mail-in ballots, despite uncovering no evidence that it exists or has played a role in any U.S. presidential election. (And despite the fact that he casts his own vote by mail.)
After news outlets called the 2012 election for Barack Obama on Election Night, Trump posted on Twitter that the result was illegitimate. “This election is a total sham and a travesty,” he wrote in a since-deleted post. “We are not a democracy!” Other tweets complained that “more votes equals a loss” and called for “revolution!” Finally, he called on Americans to “march on Washington and stop this travesty,” foreshadowing his own coup attempt eight years later.
In 2016, Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by narrowing winning key battleground states to secure a majority of electoral votes. Clinton, however, secured a majority of the popular vote by a margin of three million ballots. Trump had suggested ahead of Election Day that voter fraud might be his undoing before his surprise victory. When the size of Clinton’s popular-vote margin became apparent, he brought it up again. “I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally,” he lied.
Trump’s plan to retain the White House in 2020 centered on a convoluted and half-baked scheme to dispute the results in key states, create fraudulent slates of electors, and eventually have then-Vice President Mike Pence discard the legitimate ones during a joint session of Congress. Trump hoped to claim an early victory on Election Night when the states showed him ahead and then challenge subsequent ballot counts as illegitimate. This plot fell apart after Fox News’s election analysts swiftly called Arizona for Joe Biden on Election Night. Courts rejected Trump’s subsequent lawsuits, Pence declined to carry out the plot on January 6, and a mob summoned by Trump to D.C. attacked the Capitol later that day.
In 2024, Trump again planned to use legal challenges and other procedural tactics to undermine public confidence in the election results if he lost. Those plans never came to fruition because Trump won a majority of electoral votes and the popular vote on Election Night. Faced with this indisputable proof of the American election system’s integrity—if the results were rigged in 2020, why not do it again in 2024?—Trump nevertheless pursued his plot to attack mail-in voting earlier this year ahead of the midterms.
This time, he hopes to wield the machinery of the federal government against state election officials. Trump’s executive order in March had three interlocking parts. One requires the Department of Homeland Security to create “state citizenship lists” of voting-age U.S. citizens for distribution to state election officials. Another provision instructs the Department of Justice to “take all lawful steps to deter and address noncompliance with federal law,” including by prosecuting state and local election officials and withholding federal funds from states.
Taken together, those two provisions strongly imply that state and local officials who do not use the “state citizenship lists” will be prosecuted by the Justice Department. Finally, the order also directs the United States Postal Service to, among other things, not transmit mail-in ballots from states that don’t submit their own voter registration lists to the agency. It would require states to conform their own ballot tracking procedures to federal control.
This amounts to an unprecedented attempt to bring American elections at least partly under direct presidential control. The Constitution gives no role whatsoever to the president in the running of federal elections. Article One reserves that power to the states, which actually run elections, and to Congress, which can legislate rules about the “time, place, and manner” of federal elections. The vice president has a purely ministerial role in presiding over the joint session of Congress that counts votes from the Electoral College every four years.
To that end, a coalition of states led by California sued earlier this year to block the executive order from taking effect, describing it as an unconstitutional attack on how they run their elections. A federal district court judge in Massachusetts agreed and enjoined the executive branch from carrying out the three aforementioned provisions.
In explaining its decision, the conservative majority described the March executive order as generically as it possibly could. “The order is an internal directive from the President to his subordinates mandating that certain agencies pursue certain policies,” it claimed in Monday’s order. “It neither requires nor forbids anything of anyone outside the executive branch.” From there, they adopted a backbreakingly deferential reading of the executive order’s text in favor of the White House.
On the state citizenship lists, the court said the order’s provision “is an internal directive from the president to a subordinate” that “imposes no concrete harm on the states.” Therefore, the court said, the states had no standing to challenge it. The same is true in the majority’s eyes for the prosecution directive. “Setting prosecutorial priorities lies within the president’s Article II power,” they noted, arguing that the investigation and prosecution is based on “existing federal laws.”
If this was all that the executive order contained, perhaps that reluctance to enjoin the executive branch might be understandable. The courts could still intervene when the Justice Department brought subpoenas or indictments down the road. But the court also rejected—only for now, as I’ll explain later—the states’ challenge to the USPS rulemaking process.
Part of the justices’ reasoning was that the lower court’s stay was premature because the Postal Service hadn’t yet released a rule to comply with the order. That rendered the states’ claims hypothetical in its view. “[The district court] first had to speculate about whether the Postal Service would propose a rule,” the majority wrote. “Then it had to speculate about how the agency would weigh the comments it received. Then it had to speculate about whether the agency would issue a final rule. Then it had to speculate about what the final rule would say. Finally, after all that, the district court still had to speculate about whether the text of a hypothetical final rule would harm the states.”
One small flaw in this reasoning is that the district court’s speculation was correct. The Postal Service announced its final rule on Friday, three days before the Supreme Court’s order to lift the stay was issued. (The Justice Department said the agency would take no action on the rule until the court issued a decision on its legality.) As expected, it set out regulations that would allow it to not deliver mail ballots in states that refuse to cooperate with the Trump administration’s “requests” for state voter data.
If the USPS rule goes into effect, it could upend the midterm elections altogether. Many states allow mail voting; some, such as Oregon, rely on it entirely. The USPS rule imposes specific requirements for state mail-voting envelopes that those states could not have known about until recently. Allowing Trump’s executive order to stand for the midterms opens the door to widespread confusion among election officials and the possibility that millions of Americans will be disenfranchised by an illegal presidential act.
Whoops! Not to worry, the majority said in Monday’s order, because it had to evaluate the states’ standing claims at the time that they filed the lawsuit. It was hardly speculative that Trump and his subordinates were trying to engineer a very specific outcome here. An executive order is hardly a suggestion, and Trump’s public comments made his priorities clear. If you thought otherwise, you were intruding on the president’s constitutional prerogative to issue constitutionally dubious orders to his subordinates.
Instead, Monday’s order leaned heavily on deference to the “internal operations of the executive branch” when weighing the irreparable-harm standard for shadow-docket relief. “Because reversal of the district court’s judgment would come too late for the 2026 midterms, the district court’s errors deal ‘a serious setback’ to the executive’s ‘goals’ while this litigation unfolds,” the majority claimed, quoting from earlier rulings. “When a federal court ‘improperly intrudes on a coordinate branch’ in this way, interim relief is justified.”
The dissenting justices found this argument absurd. They noted, as I already have, that the Constitution allocates the power to run federal elections to the states. “The majority says it was speculative to think there would be a final rule at all when this suit was filed, seemingly accepting the government’s representation that it may not actually implement the executive order,” Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, which Kagan joined. “Yet even as the government represents that it may not implement the executive order at all for purposes of defeating standing, it insists that it seeks to implement the executive order immediately for purposes of establishing irreparable harm. The government cannot have it both ways.”
Thanks to the six conservative justices, apparently it can. The problem is not so much what Monday’s ruling did—though that was deeply flawed as well—but how the court reached its decision and how it appeared to process the situation at hand. The majority could have hardly done more to express sympathy with Trump’s order and its goals. At every turn it treats the Trump administration’s goals as legitimate and defensible; the states’ interests are deemed abstract, hypothetical, groundless, intrusive, or premature.
“What makes today’s ruling so off-base is the [majority’s] lack of situational awareness regarding this equitable judgment,” Jackson explained. “It treats the government’s stay application as if the whole point is merely to demonstrate that the plaintiff states’ claims are not justiciable. Taking its eye off the ball, the majority misses the government’s actual objective: to secure our imprimatur for its effort to foment chaos ahead of the November elections.”
Even this may be an understatement. The entire posture of Monday’s ruling is that the real constitutional violation here is from the states and the lower court as they intrude into the sacred space of internal executive-branch deliberations, as if they were wiretapping the Postmaster General instead of asking a judge to uphold the Constitution. Again, for procedural reasons, Monday’s order is not the end of the legal battle against Trump’s attack on the midterms. Even so, it strongly suggests that he may have already won the war.
Why Minneapolis Has Become the Center of 2020s Politics
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.
Minneapolis was a major hub of racial justice activism in 2020 after the killing of George Floyd and then again earlier this year, aggressively protesting the anti-immigration actions of the Trump administration. Why Minneapolis? Michelle Phelps, a University of Minnesota sociologist, discusses the city’s activism in the latest edition of Right Now. She explains that the anti-ICE protests built on the infrastructure and some lessons learned from the 2020 activism. At the same time, she argues that too many on the left, both in Minneapolis and nationally, have wrongly concluded that the protests of 2020 were ineffective and resulted in a backlash that helped elect Donald Trump in 2024. In reality, Phelps says, backlash to racial justice movements are inevitable. Phelps is the author of “The Minneapolis Reckoning: Race, Violence, and the Politics of Policing in America.”
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We fought over it. Now what will we make of our new library in downtown Santa Cruz?
Santa Cruz’s new downtown library and affordable housing project has hardly been without controversy — but after years of debate, the building is rising, writes affordable housing advocate and former mayor Don Lane. Now the question is less about who supported the project and more about what we want this new civic space to become. With its expanded Life Literacies Center, free resources and room for people to gather, Lane believes the library could become downtown’s living room – and a place to bring a divided community together.
The post We fought over it. Now what will we make of our new library in downtown Santa Cruz? appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.
Debian polls its developers on whether to burn the bots, tame the bots, or let 'em loose
Trump’s Fury at Canada Takes Unhinged Turn—and Backfires Badly for Him
Donald Trump’s rage at Canada is growing more unhinged. He just posted a deranged threat to rename Lake Ontario with the phrase “Lake America.” But it gets worse: He also intimated that the U.S. won’t be “doing much business with Ontario any longer.” That would be seismic, but here’s the thing: Trump appears to actually want this outcome. That’s why he’s plunged us into a trade war with our ally. But it’s backfiring: Canada just released its list of American products that will face retaliatory tariffs, and it appears aimed at harming local economies in ways that will hurt GOP incumbents and candidates. We previously reported this would create problems for Republicans. Now that it’s happening, we recorded an episode about it with Democratic strategist Christina Reynolds, a veteran of midterms. We discuss why the trade war could have outsized impact in the Midwest, how this might badly hurt GOP chances, what the Midwest’s political transformation reveals about the decline of Trumpism, and how Democrats can seize this moment going forward. Listen to this episode here.
Federal wildfire crews are stretched thin. California is stepping in to help
This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for its newsletters.
California’s last working nuclear power plant sits cradled in a landscape that would worry any firefighter when the wind picks up.
The Pacific Ocean and its perpetual fog lick the western edge of the coastal bluffs holding the Diablo Canyon Power Plant. But the Irish Hills rise steeply to its east — their slopes rugged, dark with scrub and oak. Difficult to access, and full of fuel.
“Any fire within the Diablo power plant area could be catastrophic,” said Dave Erickson, a division chief and forester with the Cal Fire San Luis Obispo unit. The property, he said, is in a very high fire severity zone. “So we just take precautions.”
It’s one of the many places where California is now stepping into federal gaps created by Congress’ long-term underinvestment in fuels management on federal lands, the Trump administration’s cuts, and firefighters stretched thin by blazes raging across the West.
A local organization with state funding, the San Luis Obispo County Community Fire Safe Council, started carving a fuel break into the surrounding ridgelines. And Erickson put his crews to work closing the gaps, to create a critical toehold for firefighters to get ahead of flames.
In the past, the patchwork of landowners around the power plant — which includes the U.S. Bureau of Land Management — could have derailed Erickson’s plans.
But a 2023 agreement Cal Fire signed with the bureau enabled Erickson to use state resources on federal land to complete the fuel break earlier this year. The bureau managed key environmental surveys, planning and approvals.
“The project was designed from the beginning as an interagency effort,” said Philip Oviatt, a spokesperson for the Bureau of Land Management California in an email to CalMatters. “No single agency could have achieved this outcome independently.”
The stakes are high for California, where wildfires have burned through millions of acres in the last decade — killing more than 220 people, hastening the deaths of tens of thousands more, and racking up tens to hundreds of billions of dollars in damage.
But the costs are high, too. California has spent nearly half a billion dollars in grants for wildfire resilience and forest health projects on federal lands since Gov. Gavin Newsom took office, according to the California Natural Resources Agency.
Jonathan Fitch, manager of Cal Fire’s vegetation management program, spearheaded three new agreements Cal Fire reached last year with the U.S. Forest Service. The deals allow California to clear fuels, collect cones for seed banks, replant burned lands, manage timber and more on California’s national forests, according to Fitch.
The Forest Service kicked in $4 million for the agreements across the state, some of which will go toward fuels-reduction projects, Fitch said. But the overall need far exceeds the federal funds.
“The true value is unlocking the state’s potential and resources on the federal landscape,” Fitch said.
From left, Dave Erickson, Cal Fire forester and division chief, talks with Jeff Benyo, fire captain at Diablo Fire, and Jonathan Fitch, program manager of vegetation management, as they walk through a fuel break carved into a ridgeline near Diablo Canyon Power Plant in San Luis Obispo County on July 22, 2026. Credit: Larry Valenzuela / CalMatters
It’s a question Fitch says he hears often: why should California put its money, people and equipment to work on federally-managed lands?
“My response is, well, wildfires don’t stop at boundaries,” Fitch said. “We cannot disregard what happens in the federal space, because we’re one state. We’re one landscape.”
‘A finite number of firefighters’Ever since President Donald Trump accused California of failing to adequately rake its forests — more than half of which the federal government manages — Sacramento and Washington have been feuding over fuels management and federal funds.
Gov. Gavin Newsom taunted Trump with a “Make America Rake Again” model executive order last year, and blasted him for withholding roughly $1.5 billion in federal aid following the catastrophic Los Angeles wildfires in January 2025.
But for all the fighting, California frequently crosses federal borders to manage land and fire.
As the Timber fire kicked off in Los Padres National Forest near Big Sur — burning nearly 16,000 acres as of Tuesday of rugged terrain and forcing the closure of Highway 1 — federal incident management teams were busy.
Some were on other fires, in Hoopa and the Pacific Northwest. Others were taking mandatory rest, according to U.S. Forest Service spokesperson Adrienne Freeman.
“So we were going to be looking at ordering a team from across the country, and even those are few and far between,” Freeman said.
Instead, the federal agency called in a Cal Fire Incident Management Team to orchestrate the fire response and manage logistics, food, planning, finances, repairs, showers and medical care.
A Cal Fire hand crew training at the Glenwood Fire Center in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Credit: Kevin Painchaud / Lookout Santa Cruz
Freeman, Cal Fire and others say that the federal drawdown of incident management teams reflects surging wildfire activity across the West.
But Bobbie Scopa, retired firefighter and vice president of the organization Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, said that the Trump administration’s cuts to the Forest Service have exacerbated long-term staffing problems.
“When we DOGE’d everybody, we lost people from the teams,” Scopa said — referring to Elon Musk’s ill-fated government efficiency program. “We’ve been having a hard time staffing the teams for the last 10 years.”
Freeman said the decision to have Cal Fire coordinate the Timber Fire helped keep federal resources free to deploy to other places they were needed.
“This is not the first time we’ve done this, but it’s something fairly unique to California,” Freeman said. “There are a finite number of firefighters, but California is in a better position than some states — than most states — because of this relationship.”
Federal blind spotIn other areas, it’s harder for California to fill federal gaps.
As the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency slashed federal agencies, the Forest Service lost at least 20% of its staff last year, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
The administration’s reorganization and proposed closures to research facilities have destabilized the agency and gutted morale. Key California scientists left after Trump took office, two former U.S. Forest Service employees told CalMatters.
Alan Talhelm, assistant deputy director for climate and energy at Cal Fire, said federal staff losses and job changes have gutted the personnel and expertise that he and his colleagues need to incorporate federal data into the Governor’s Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force’s fuels treatment dashboard.
“Those data still exist. … But we have nobody to help us interpret those data,” Talhelm said. “If we see something that looks unusual, it’s harder for us to verify that it is what it should be and that it’s accurate information.”
A spokesperson for the U.S. Forest Service said that because the agency tracks fuels treatment differently, it’s “challenging to consolidate our data with our state and local agencies.”
The data, which lag by a couple of years, are important for tracking California’s progress toward state and federal fuel management targets.
The dashboard provides a bird’s-eye view of who is thinning or burning fuels, and where. It’s critical information for state agencies targeting grant dollars and staff towards reducing fire risk — and can help plan where to send firefighters to take a stand against a blaze, Talhelm said.
“They can look at this database and say, ‘Oh, there was a prescribed burn here. Oh, there was a fuel break here,’” he said. “That’s a consequence right there. If we don’t have the correct information, it makes the data less useful.”
A firefighter works in a prescribed burn area at the Sugar Pine Point State Park near Lake Tahoe on Sept. 25, 2024.Credit: Miguel Gutierrez Jr. / CalMatters
Talhelm said federal cuts are also slowing the U.S. Forest Service’s portion of surveys needed to update the Forest Inventory and Analysis — a census of the nation’s forests.
The data help scientists and land managers understand how climate change, drought, fire, disease and pests are changing forests — and what that means for fuels, fire risk and even timber in California.
“It’s literally the foundational information that then goes into everything from where you site your mills, to what carbon is doing, to the benefits of wildfire mitigations,” said John Battles, a professor of forest ecology at UC Berkeley.
But the data rollout is slow: California ties with Alaska for surveys that date back as far as 2021.
Cal Fire has tried to increase the pace — sending out contractors to survey California’s forests. The federal government, according to Talhelm, isn’t keeping up.
“We’re not there yet. And we’re not there in part because of the reduction in forest service staffing,” Talhelm said. “I don’t know that they have scaled back their ambition, but they’ve scaled back their ability to implement that mission.”
A spokesperson for the Forest Service said the agency is doing a final review of forest inventory data collected from 2022 through 2024, and plans to release it publicly within the next few weeks.
“We share CAL FIRE’s interest in seeing more plots measured and more frequent update(s),” the spokesperson said in an email, adding that several unspecified factors pushed California’s review cycle to seven years, rather than the hoped-for five.
The pace is a problem, Battles said: “Think about how many fires there have been since 2021 that don’t show up yet in the dataset,” he said.
“There’s always a lag in the data, because it takes awhile. But now it’s just getting to be five years. … You’re making decisions with wrong, not up-to-date information.”
Funding the fight against fireCalifornia has been able to fill federal gaps because of its outsize spending on fire, which has skyrocketed to reach roughly $4 billion a year. But the money devoted to forest health and fuels management has always made up a relatively small proportion — and now, it’s in trouble.
The Newsom administration’s changes to a key climate program have already gutted a critical pot of polluters’ money that historically funded up to $200 million a year for wildfire resilience projects.
That number is rapidly dropping — down to $38 million, according to the Department of Finance’s latest numbers, which won’t be final until next year. The Legislative Analyst’s Office reported this spring that the Newsom administration’s climate overhaul risks zeroing-out the money completely.
This pot of money has funded many of the grants Cal Fire has awarded for work on federal lands, Talhelm said.
On a July morning, Fitch trekked to the ridgeline to see, for the first time, the fuel break that his work on state and federal land agreements enabled. The sun beat back the remaining tendrils of fog tangling with coyote brush and scrub to either side of the fuel break.
Fitch called it a testament to strong partnerships.
“Land is fragmented,” he said, the fuel break stretching along the ridge behind him. “For Cal Fire to be successful, we can’t do it alone.”
Larry Valenzuela contributed reporting.
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