Donald Trump hates embarrassing failures even when they are, ultimately, his own fault. So when the sealant on his $13.1 million-turned-$16-million Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool renovation started peeling off in sheets days after the pool reopened and the water turned green with algae, he couldn’t simply say that a rushed, no-bid contract handed to his golfing buddy’s company produced shoddy work. Instead he demanded a villain, and the weaponized Justice Department complied.

On July 2, 2026, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro held a triumphant press briefing to announce a felony indictment against former Olympic canoeist David Hearn. Pirro claimed her office possessed solid evidence of guilt proving beyond a reasonable doubt that the 67-year-old had committed a deliberate, forceful and violent act causing over $1,000 in damage to the pool liner when he stopped his bike in June, reached down and touched a loose piece of lining that had already come apart before he ever laid a hand on it. When pressed by journalists like NBC’s Ryan Reilly about photographic evidence showing the liner was already peeling long before Hearn ever stepped near the water, Pirro grew combative, waving off the question with the same on-air contempt she perfected across 14 years as a host at Fox News, and insisted her office would prove the damage in court with expert testimony.

Weeks later, the Justice Department acknowledged something dramatically different.

By late July, as Hearn’s defense counsel moved for release of the grand jury transcripts to expose glaring prosecutorial irregularities, Pirro’s case collapsed. Facing the real possibility of judicial sanctions, an inspector general investigation and disbarment, her office filed a 20-page motion to dismiss the indictment. The filing threw the Interior Department under the bus, claiming Secretary Doug Burgum’s agency had withheld 695 megabytes of crucial documents revealing the damage was caused by contractor error during the rush to finish before the America 250 Independence Day festivities. The department’s own records described repeated installation failures and extensive peeling of the pool liner weeks before the alleged vandalism was ever said to have occurred. Prosecutors asked that the charges be dismissed because the evidence no longer supported Pirro’s claim, evidence that, it bears repeating, had been available to the government the entire time.

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Can #JeaninePirro survive the Reflecting Pool debacle?

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The dismissal did not stop with Hearn. Within days, Pirro’s office also moved to drop misdemeanor charges against three more people accused of the same phantom vandalism. Justin Carreno, Sophie Dennison-Gibby and Cameron Thiers all faced lesser counts of destroying property worth less than a thousand dollars, and their attorneys told reporters the common thread was simple: The federal government had just spent millions repainting and relining the pool, and when the work failed, the Trump administration needed a scapegoat. The entire theory of the case — that ordinary citizens had descended on a national monument with knives to sabotage it out of political spite — evaporated once anyone with subpoena power actually looked at the evidence.

The saga of the Reflecting Pool is emblematic of everything amiss in America right now, a perfect diorama of how right-wing media turns Trump’s fantasies into public reality, and then tries to quietly conceal the wreckage once the facts catch up. Fox News was happy to amplify the vandalism narrative when it was useful. But once the case fell apart, the network gave it barely cursory treatment, a striking silence from an outlet that had spent weeks covering the alleged desecration of a national monument when the story served the White House.

That silence makes sense once you remember Pirro’s origins. She spent years at Fox telling viewers whatever the moment required. By her own network’s private assessment, she was a “reckless maniac” whose 2020 election fraud claims helped make Fox liable for one of the largest defamation settlements in American history: a $787.5 million payout to Dominion Voting Systems. 

Pirro’s appointment as U.S. attorney represented the full realization of the MAGA media pipeline, in which performative loyalty on television is treated as the primary qualification for federal law enforcement authority. What she is now discovering is that a courtroom does not run on the same rules as a cable television set. At Fox, Pirro could tell her audience whatever she wanted without personal consequence. Telling a federal judge the same kind of thing carries the threat of disbarment and perjury charges, and no amount of bravado previously reserved for on-air broadcasts could change that math.

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Predictably, the moment Pirro chose self-preservation over total subversion of the law, Trump turned on her. He spent days publicly berating her, complaining to reporters that she had “folded like an umbrella” and writing on Truth Social that he fully disagreed with his own Justice Department. In a rambling, incoherent stream of consciousness to reporters from the Oval Office on Monday, he continued to insist on the existence of security tapes showing mysterious figures cutting the pool lining with box cutters — tapes no one has ever produced — while simultaneously trying to shift blame for the pool’s historical leaks onto previous administrations. On Monday, Trump met privately with Pirro and Burgum while reports circulated that he was considering replacing her.

After her Senate confirmation in August 2025, Trump promised Pirro would be a powerful crusader, and she has spent the year since prosecuting his perceived enemies with a zeal that has not been matched at trial. Her record in court is poor, with her office winning only half of its first eight criminal trials in 2026 a rate CNN reported was far below the national average. Bloomberg Law’s reporting describes a string of similarly threadbare cases: a man charged with assaulting a federal officer using a Subway sandwich following Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops in the District, who was acquitted by a jury but forced to flee his home after receiving threats; a Maryland woman jailed nearly a week for spitting on an officer at the National Zoo before the charge was quietly reduced and then dropped; a man left with permanent injuries after being tased during a high-speed chase, and whose federal charge also collapsed into a misdemeanor plea. The latter was interviewed by a Bloomberg Law reporter about his ordeal and was, according to the outlet, found dead behind a Washington rowhouse a month later. 

As people swept up in this kind of prosecutorial overreach have noted, the goal is not really conviction. It is using state power to inflict maximum disruption on a person’s job, housing and relationships, and to send a chilling message to anyone else who might draw the government’s attention. A conviction, when one happens, is treated as a bonus. The process itself is the punishment.

Pirro will likely survive this particular episode. Trump did not fire her over the weekend, and by Monday he had already moved on to blaming the judge instead. But something has shifted. 

The former Fox star who built a television career on never conceding a point is now the first prominent member of this administration to publicly contradict Trump’s own account of a story he has told, in increasingly baroque detail, for weeks. It turns out that feeding Trump’s delusions is a great deal easier from behind a Fox News desk, where no one can hold you in contempt, than standing in front of a federal judge who can.

The post Jeanine Pirro’s Reflecting Pool reckoning appeared first on Salon.com.

Even if you scorn Boomer myth-making, the 50th anniversary of “Revolver” — perhaps the Beatles’ best album — is a big deal. It not only sent the band in a new direction, it showed new possibilities in rock music. Look at the state of rock music in the 21st century — when so much of popular music is about artfully recycling existing tropes and styles — and it can be hard to see what the fuss was about. But the album was groundbreaking for a bunch of reasons, and it’s aged better than almost any of the great records of the era.

One way that “Revolver” immediately stood out was its eclecticism. The album that preceded it, “Rubber Soul,” saw the band mostly in acoustic-folkie mode, and the one that followed it, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” was mostly expansive, psychedelic, and orchestrated. Both are masterpieces. (The hype around “Sgt. Pepper’s” has led some to dismiss it, but go listen to it sometime — even overlooking the backstory and concept-album pretensions, it’s packed full of good tunes.) But “Revolver” shows a complex band stretching all over the place: Between an Indian tune, chamber pop, acid-influenced psychedelia, muscular rockers, and everything in between, the album is so wide-ranging that, with the inclusion of one more genre, it would probably not have held together.

Part of the reason “Revolver” worked so well was that the on-again, off-again battle between the band’s three songwriters has reached a point of productive detente. The Beatles had begun as John Lennon’s band, and would soon become Paul McCartney’s: Drugs and indifference and general orneriness would take Lennon far away from the collaboration that a rock group needs. McCartney’s curiosity and squareness — his avoidance of hard drugs, his interest in contemporary art and experimental music, his earnest band diplomacy — was making him more sophisticated and essential with each album. But both were still at the top of their game and working together at least some of the time.

The emergence of George Harrison completed the perfect chemistry: Frustrated over the years by being pushed aside, the guitarist saw three of his songs — the opener, “Taxman,” the Indian “Love You To,” the moderately dissonant “I Want to Tell You” — sneak onto the album.

Throw in Lennon’s rocking “And Your Bird Can Sing” and his psychedelic breakthrough “Tomorrow Never Knows,” and McCartney’s “For No One” and “Eleanor Rigby,” and you have a collection of timeless songs even with an entire side to go.

As lively and inventive as the early Beatles albums were, “Revolver” is also the one that saw them unleashed in the studio. Abbey Road was quite primitive by the standards of our day, and less sophisticated than studios in California. But producer George Martin and Geoff Emerick went out of their way to make instruments sound uncanny, to allow Lennon to indulge strange ideas (a microphone, wrapped in a condom, submerged in water), to incorporate tape loops and unorthodox instruments into the sound.

“Revolver” was so sonically advanced, in fact, that the band stopped playing live around the time of its recording: They saw no way to play its songs outside the studio. In some ways, the process deepened an insularity that would hurt the band creatively and personally.

“Revolver” isn’t perfect. McCartney’s chipper “Good Day Sunshine” and his Motown-inspired “Got to Get You Into My Life” are not among the band’s best music: They’re musically derivative and emotionally forced. Despite its charm, “Yellow Submarine” may not quite fit on the album. “Revolver” would be too grim and brooding with all three of these numbers removed, but they tear its fabric a little bit.

But it’s still a wonder. Part of what’s odd about “Revolver” is that its eclecticism and psychedelia didn’t last long. Music and culture was changing so fast in the ’60s: Bob Dylan released the forward looking “Blonde on Blonde” the same year, and the Rolling Stones briefly dabbled in psychedelia. But by 1968 and ’69, musicians were turning back from the restlessness of “Revolver.” The Stones were in retro-country mode, as was Dylan. Between The Band and Joni Mitchell and Van Morrison, many of the most talented musicians were looking backward. By 1970, Jimi Hendrix — who seemed the most likely to extend the Beatles’ experimentation — was dead.

It’s also safe to say that “Revolver” was the album that kids who grew up in the’70s and ’80s grew into, once their pre-pubescent fascination with earlier, less-challenging Beatles albums wore off. It was the record they were listening to as teens, and it was the one that, possibly more than any other album, was a touchstone for the indie-rock movement of the ’90s. (Just try to imagine the Stone Roses or Oasis or Pavement or Radiohead without it.)

The Beatles experienced a backlash in the United States just before the release of “Revolver” because of Lennon’s remark that the band was “more popular than Jesus now.” More popular or not, as great as their earlier work had been, it was “Revolver” that made them deities.

The post Why “Revolver” still matters: The 50th anniversary of a Beatles masterpiece appeared first on Salon.com.

Throughout July, The Swell celebrated the lasting cultural inspiration of animator Hayao Miyazaki and the legendary films he created with Studio Ghibli. As part of GKIDS’ annual Studio Ghibli Fest, which kicked off in June, you can enjoy theatrical re-releases of some of his most famous works.

While I would never deign to speak for all critics — I’ve been around enough to know I don’t need that smoke — we’re not generally fans of inscrutability. A little layered mystery is just fine. Many of us appreciate artistic execution that leaves plenty of openings for wild interpretations. But once we’re venturing into the territory of “What in the hell was that?” the knives tend to come out.

That’s part of the reason I left “Howl’s Moving Castle,” adapted from British author Diana Wynne Jones’ novel, for the last flight in our monthlong look at Hayao Miyazaki. The plots of “Spirited Away,” “My Neighbor Totoro,” “Princess Mononoke” and “Kiki’s Delivery Service” are as lucid and pure as spring water, relatively speaking. “Howl’s Moving Castle,” on the other hand, is an unconventional love story wrapped inside an anti-war plot about a prince who gave his heart to a demon and a young girl turned into an old woman by a jealous witch. It’s also about curses and a giant house that moves around on chicken legs and a turnip-headed scarecrow and pollution and . . . see what I mean?

 

 

It’s nice to know I was never alone in my befuddlement. “There’s much to admire in ‘Howl’s Moving Castle,’ which is precisely the problem,” remarked film critic Stephanie Zacharek in her 2005 review for Salon. “Its whimsical grandiosity practically invites us to use the passive voice, a kind of verbal genuflection.”

The benefit of returning to a story like this 20 years after a first viewing is that presumably, time has softened us. For “Howl’s Moving Castle,” that matters since its heroine, Sophie Hatter (initially voiced in the English dubbed version by Emily Mortimer), spends much of the film waxing and waning between young and elderly selves. When she’s youthful, Sophie catches the eye of a handsome, richly dressed stranger who gallantly escorts her away from two men harassing her on the street. He introduces himself as Howl (Christian Bale), a flamboyant wizard who whisks her across rooftops on her way home.

But Sophie, an introverted milliner, never asked for anyone’s attention and is convinced she’s plain and unattractive. The Witch of the Waste (Lauren Bacall) echoes her insecurities back at her when she strides into Sophie’s shop, insults her, and with a wave of her hand, transforms Sophie into a hunched-over dowager (with Jean Simmons taking over the role).

I could easily hail “Howl’s Moving Castle” as a tribute to maturity, especially when placed against other Miyazaki stories starring young heroines setting out on adventures. That feel especially valid at a time when we have plenty of shoppable salves to soothe midlife crisis ego death in whatever forms that it takes. (I have no idea what the Turnip Scarecrow’s significance is in all this, other than to be this fairy tale’s frog prince.)

 

But when viewed in one way of many, “Howl’s Moving Castle” is an encouragement to look inward and see the truth about ourselves honestly and kindly. Most of us aren’t the same person on the inside as we seem to be on the outside — including Sophie, a woman in the early bloom of her life whose dedication to work has shriveled her vitality.

(© 2004 Diana Wynne Jones/Hayao Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli, NDDMT)

Trapping Sophie in a crone’s body and making her realize how much harder it is to cross rolling hills and climb stairs gives her a new appreciation for everything she’s been taking for granted. But more than this, as an old woman Sophie abandons her insecurities about taking up space in the world — especially when she crosses paths with the Witch of the Waste again, and a more powerful wizard’s magic deflates said Witch into an enfeebled pile of skin.

Instead of taking pleasure in the Witch’s undoing, Sophie tenderly cares for her. She understands what it’s like to be unloved and ignored more than most, after all. Eventually, Sophie’s demonstrated empathy makes Howl fall more deeply in love with her.

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That’s one strand in this tale’s tangle. When following “Howl’s Moving Castle” as the story of Calcifer (voiced by Billy Crystal), the fire demon who holds Howl’s heart and fuels the castle, the movie becomes a fable about nurturing and destruction as two sides of the same coin. When Howl loses himself to a beastly form after attacking opposing forces in the war into which he’s drawn, it’s an allegory about how armed conflict robs us of our humanity. Its complexity makes the movie a treasure.

Ultimately, though, this vision of Miyazaki’s comes down to a lesson about the chameleonic nature of the human heart and soul, how we change to adapt to every situation and interaction, and how the those who love us must love every version. It champions the bravery of embracing maturity with a young heart.

But that’s just my take. Zacharek accurately referred to Miyazaki’s narratives as “wriggly, noodle-shaped things,” and not in offering her compliments to the chef. I get it. I’ve also come to understand that some of Miyazaki’s offerings are tastes worth acquiring through a few tries, even for skeptics. His filmography is as vast and varied as this bizarre castle’s meanderings, with life lessons for anyone.

 

 

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On July 26 in Pennsylvania, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries introduced the party’s Fighting for an Affordable America agenda to mark 100 days until November’s midterm elections. The plan, according to the Associated Press, calls for “restoring healthcare cuts, bringing the cost of living down and ending the war in Iran to beat Republicans and hold President Donald Trump accountable.” 

Democrats always want to run on kitchen table issues, and this time they have an opening you could drive the Titanic through. Even among Trump’s most fervent followers, the war in Iran is unusually unpopular; it’s the first time I can ever remember Republicans not rallying around a war started by a GOP president. In fact, the party used to rally around so-called “Democrat wars” too, at least most of the time, even as they condemned them for being mistakes. Trump, though, seems to have broken that knee-jerk reaction, which, if it lasts, may end up being one of the only things he has done right, even if it was by accident. 

“Holding Donald Trump accountable” is obviously a necessary goal, and we can only hope that if they take back the House, and perhaps the Senate, Democrats will spend the next two years hammering Republicans on corruption, malfeasance, criminality and incompetence, pounding as many nails into the MAGA coffin as possible in anticipation of a hard-fought 2028 campaign. After Trump and the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, there are no Democrats — and vanishingly few independents — who are clamoring for a “return to normal,” if anyone can even remember what that looks like.

As we get further into Trump’s second term, the rise of the progressive left, generated at least in part by the desperate need for generational change, is bringing some longstanding issues to the surface. Younger Democrats aren’t talking about politics in technocratic terms, as the party’s politicians have been doing for the last 30 years, offering up 10-point economic plans and telling the public how they can work the system more efficiently. They see politics in largely moral terms, and they are ready to address some of the thorniest moral issues we face. 

Oligarchy is at the top of the list, an issue that has animated the left since at least the Occupy Wall Street movement began in 2011. Fifteen years later, a global backlash against billionaires who have outsize influence over politics — and who do not pay their fair share — is taking shape.

The left also rejects America’s global role as security guarantor, particularly in light of the tragedy taking place in Gaza, which has been aided and abetted by the U.S. government. The party’s mainstream has moved substantially in their direction, leading to an unprecedented split in the House caucus in July that saw over a hundred House members vote to cut off aid to Israel. Whether it was done out of genuine desire to end the blank check or simply to allow members a symbolic vote going into the midterms, it’s clear that the intense opposition to Israel’s actions have made a difference, despite the ongoing debate about the scope of the policy. 

These moral issues are animating a significant faction of the party, and they are having an impact. But I find myself wondering why another moral issue, much closer to home and shocking almost beyond comprehension, isn’t getting much play on the campaign trail. 

We are witnessing a fascist crusade taking place on the streets of America every single day that has seen federal immigration officers shoot and kill at least eight people since January. Over the weekend, a Salvadoran immigrant being held at the notorious Delaney Hall detention center in New Jersey died after experiencing a medical emergency, the second death the facility has seen since December.

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The treatment of immigrants of all statuses, and sometimes American citizens who happen to look “foreign,” is an abomination. But aside from perfunctory nods to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement, it seems to have become background noise.

Masked federal agents are killing people with impunity. They are splitting up families without compunction, throwing people in camps and deporting them to countries they have never even visited. Now, with the permission of the MAGA-compliant Supreme Court, the Trump administration is in the process of deporting Haitians who have been here legally for decades by forcing them to leave immediately or wear an ankle bracelet in anticipation of being sent to a country which our own State Department says is too dangerous to visit. These are people who own property and businesses, and many of them have American-born children. They also happen to be Black. 

This is not a popular policy. While most congressional Republicans still approve of Trump’s immigration agenda, many of them aren’t thrilled with the administration’s deportation policy. According to Strength in Numbers, most Americans are appalled and prefer a path to citizenship for non-criminals. Trump’s cruel priorities clearly work for many rank-and-file Republicans, and this seems to have some timorous Democrats spooked. But if there has ever been an issue that the left should be screaming about every single day, it’s this.

Many Americans are out in the streets protesting and putting themselves on the line. In fact, average voters may be more up in arms than Democratic politicians. If the progressive left wants to consolidate the party behind a more virtuous set of values, this is the issue that will rally the entire spectrum of ideologies. Jeffries and party leaders should move it to the very top of the agenda, and make Trump’s abuses a rallying cry across the country.

The Democratic Party should not play politics with this; the president’s abuses are happening right here on our own streets, in our own communities. It is the moral issue of our time.

The post Democrats’ missed opportunity on Trump’s immigration cruelty appeared first on Salon.com.

Two government watchdog groups have demanded investigations into whether Federal Communications Commission members violated ethics requirements by accepting luxury gala tickets from Paramount as the company sought government approval for its $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery.

The complaints filed by Democracy Defenders Fund and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington cite a recent ProPublica investigation that detailed how CBS or its parent company, now Paramount, have for years given FCC commissioners tickets to the Kennedy Center honors gala, which the television network sponsors. The commissioners accepted the gifts even as the FCC was reviewing or about to review major Paramount business decisions, including two megamergers.

Commissioner Olivia Trusty’s most recent financial disclosure said Paramount gave her two tickets to the December 2025 honors gala that together were worth more than $12,000. Trusty was one of two commissioners who voted last year to approve Paramount’s merger with another media company, Skydance.

ProPublica’s investigation found FCC members had long enjoyed a night out at the Kennedy Center courtesy of CBS or its parent company. Seven of the 10 commissioners who served since 2016 accepted tickets worth more than $260,000, according to a ProPublica analysis of ethics disclosures.

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FCC Chair Brendan Carr’s financial statements show he has reported accepting honors gala tickets from CBS or its parent company eight times since his 2017 appointment to the commission, totaling over $75,000 in gifts.

Carr, who also voted in favor of the Paramount-Skydance merger last year, sat with his wife in a private skybox at the December gala with Paramount CEO David Ellison and other executives from Paramount and CBS. Such seats sold for $125,000 a ticket, according to Kennedy Center guidelines.

Carr disclosed on his latest financial statement that he accepted tickets from Paramount for himself and a guest to the 2025 gala and reception worth $12,390. Carr did not respond to a request from ProPublica to clarify the apparent difference in value between those tickets and the skybox seats. 

The FCC only released Carr’s disclosure late on Friday, more than a month after ProPublica had first requested it. The document says the agency certified it on June 22. 

Federal ethics rules ban employees from taking gifts from any entity that does business with, is regulated by or seeks official action from their agency.

“The federal gift regulations and the gratuities statute exist to ensure that government decisions are made on the merits, free from the influence of private benefits,” the Democracy Defenders Fund said in its complaint. “The public must have confidence that the FCC’s merger review process is not compromised by self-dealing or the appearance of impropriety.”

Carr, Trusty and the FCC did not respond to requests for comment. The agency’s inspector general declined to comment. An FCC spokesperson previously told ProPublica that agency ethics officers have for years cleared commissioners to accept the tickets, finding it consistent with ethics law. And Paramount’s chief of communications said it was a decades-long “CBS practice to invite government officials from both parties” to the Kennedy Center show. Carr last year defended the FCC’s approval of the Paramount merger with Skydance, saying it “advances the public interest.”

The FCC’s review of the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger is one of the final federal hurdles facing a historic consolidation of two of the five largest film studios in Hollywood. The deal would unite Paramount Skydance with Warner Bros., bringing under the control of one company Paramount+ and HBO Max streaming services; CBS and CNN; and scores of other major broadcast channels, cable networks and digital platforms.

Four ethics experts told ProPublica that by accepting the tickets, Trusty and Carr had compromised the FCC’s impartiality and should not take part in any upcoming decision on Paramount’s proposed merger.

The Democracy Defenders Fund — led by Norman Eisen, former ambassador to the Czech Republic and White House ethics czar under President Barack Obama — filed its grievance on Thursday with the federal Office of Government Ethics, the FCC’s inspector general and the FCC’s ethics office.

The group said the investigation should examine whether Carr and Trusty broke rules on accepting gifts or broke criminal laws prohibiting federal officials from accepting illegal gratuities.

Carr and Trusty should be required to repay Paramount the “fair market value” of any improper gifts and the federal ethics agency should refrain from certifying Carr’s annual disclosure report until he can prove that he has complied with ethics laws, Democracy Defenders Fund wrote. Its letter to the FCC and the Office of Government Ethics also requests that Carr be disqualified from further participation in the commission’s decision on the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger.

The nonprofit organization noted that hours after last year’s honors gala ended, Paramount announced it was launching its hostile takeover bid of Warner Bros. Discovery, a move that would later result in a merger agreement that requires FCC approval. About three months later, Carr publicly endorsed the deal on CNBC, promising swift approval.

“The facts that have been reported raise serious questions about the integrity and impartiality of FCC Chairman Carr in particular matters involving Paramount,” including the attempted merger with Warner Bros. Discovery, the letter said.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the other group that filed a written protest, requested an FCC inspector general probe of the luxury gifts.

“The reported gifts to FCC officials from businesses that are not only subject to agency regulation but presently engaged in billion-dollar mergers and acquisitions that must be approved by the commissioners themselves are extremely concerning threats to the integrity of FCC operations,” the CREW letter stated.

CREW, founded in 2003 as a nonpartisan organization dedicated to government accountability and ethics, is headed by Donald K. Sherman, a former House Ethics Committee attorney and special assistant to President Joseph Biden.

“Government officials have the power to make decisions that impact huge swaths of the American people,” Sherman said in a statement about the organization’s demand for an inspector general investigation. “With this tremendous power comes a higher ethical standard that apparently wasn’t met. The IG can and must get answers for the public.”

The proposed merger between Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery has drawn a flurry of legal opposition.

California, New York and 10 other states filed a lawsuit seeking to block the merger under federal and state antimonopoly laws. The Writers Guild of America, the Freedom of the Press Foundation and the Public Interest Project filed similar court challenges in recent weeks.

Paramount has recently agreed to pause its merger until the litigation is resolved or until June 1, 2027, whichever comes first.

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If you need any proof that climate change is not some far off problem for future generations — it’s our disastrous present — look no further than the unfolding wildfire crisis gripping the globe. In Spokane County, Washington alone, three major wildfires have devastated the area, prompting the evacuation of almost 65,000 people and destroying more than 700 homes. But there are at least 14 other fires raging throughout the state. In nearby Oregon, a record-shattering 2 million acres have burned, with 102 new fires reported across the nation on Aug. 2 alone, seven of which are large. Meanwhile, across the pond, Europeans are battling their own record-breaking wildfires in the U.K., France, Greece and elsewhere, where two crew members were killed in a midair collision.

High winds and hot, dry weather have fueled the blazes, but these conditions have been worsened by climate change. Fires are a natural phenomenon, of course, but what’s unnatural is their intensity and the level of heat. Every time we burn fossil fuels, it adds more chemicals to the atmosphere that trap more heat, creating a positive feedback loop that makes everything hotter and drier.

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Indeed, months of drought and heat waves tend to foreshadow the fiercest wildfires. As a recent analysis found on fires in Spain, Portugal, Turkey, Cyprus and Greece, “human-caused climate change was a key driver of the fire weather conditions, primarily through its influence on exceptionally high temperatures, but also by exacerbating drought conditions.”

WATCH: Hundreds of structures destroyed after Spokane wildfire pic.twitter.com/js5p9AoZjz

— BNO News (@BNONews) August 3, 2026

The circumstances that make these wildfires so severe are becoming more and more common across the world. “Anywhere can burn under the right conditions, and unfortunately all of those conditions are changing,” Erica Smithwick, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University, told Scientific American recently. All of this serves as a warning. The question remains if anyone is still listening.

The post Spokane wildfires are a warning to the rest of the world appeared first on Salon.com.

For a time, John F. Kennedy Jr. was one of the most famous boys in America. He was three years old when a photographer captured him saluting his father’s casket, and for many years, that was how most of America pictured him. Until the 1990s, that is, when relentless tabloid coverage reinvented him as New York City’s Adonis.

“Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette,” which stars newcomer Paul Anthony Kelly as JFK Jr. and Sarah Pidgeon as Carolyn, hangs its justification on that faint memory and his Cinderella-style courtship with Bessette. Next to exes like Madonna and Daryl Hannah, she was a commoner, a Calvin Klein stylist who somehow snared the heart of an American prince.

After a courtship that unfurled in fits and starts, they married in 1996. Three years later, they died together in a plane crash. Given that these details are the extent of what most people know about the couple, one assumes “Love Story” has so much more to give.

Since this is another Ryan Murphy product — this one created by Connor Hines — we should not be surprised to discover that most of the blanks are filled in with squabbling, private anguish and stretches of scenery that could double as feature-length ads for a designer perfume. CK One, perhaps?

As long as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. retains his starring role in the current administration, “Love Story” won’t be the worst thing to happen to the Kennedy clan or America. This first installment of Murphy’s latest anthology franchise is a serviceable romance in a time when such stories rarely receive even modest studio budgets, let alone wide theatrical release. Remember those? Some were better than others; a few defined for a generation what true love could look like, albeit inaccurately.

But this one stretches a basic courtship that could be covered in about 90 minutes, tops, over nine episodes and a total runtime landing between seven and eight hours. In comparison, “Ghost,” one of the genre’s standard-bearers, got it done in two hours and seven minutes. And neither of those characters is a Kennedy.

However, the “Love Story” forebear that matters most in this discussion is not John F. Kennedy or Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, played here by “Feud” star Naomi Watts. It’s O.J. Simpson.

Ten years ago this month, “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story” became the first and still best entry of a Murphy-produced franchise to seriously engage with the anesthetizing myth Americans like to tell themselves about themselves.

The first “American Crime Story” arrived at an inflection point for race relations in the United States, debuting in the waning months of Barack Obama’s second term and the heat of the presidential race that pitted Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump. When it premiered, we’d already heard Trump vilify Mexican immigrants and the Movement for Black Lives, in addition to calling for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”

Recreating the theatricality of Simpson’s eight-month-long murder trial using extremely famous actors as bait — John Travolta, Cuba Gooding Jr., David Schwimmer and Courtney B. Vance, among them — persuaded us to sit with one of the most famous and broadly televised examples of the unresolved racism baked into our supposedly liberal society.

That it came to TV more than two decades afterward aided in our understanding of the phenomenon less as a murder trial than an unscripted soap opera playing out in front of our eyes, casting otherwise anonymous prosecutors Christopher Darden and Marcia Clark as either heroes or villains.

Some people wanted to see Simpson punished, while others viewed his acquittal as vindication, however meager, for decades’ worth of societal abuse. Either way, the limited series catapulted the careers of Sterling K. Brown, who played Darden, and Sarah Paulson, already a repeat Murphy trouper via “American Horror Story,” to stratospheric heights thanks to their Emmy-winning performances.

It also proved Murphy’s glossy approach could coax viewers into considerate contemplation about systemic ills by wrapping them in celebrity skin.

But eventually, style overwhelmed substance. “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” tried to examine institutionalized homophobia by following the trails of missed opportunities to halt Andrew Cunanan’s escalating malevolence until he appeared on the fashion designer’s doorstep with a loaded gun in 1997. Only this time, its star power (by way of a cast toplined by Oscar Ramirez, Penelope Cruz and Ricky Martin) distracted from the narrative critique.

“Impeachment” was a step-by-step drill-down on the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal that strayed wildly from its original intent. Murphy meant this third “American Crime Story” to be a clear-eyed analysis of abusive power differentials in politics and the workplace. Instead, its parade of latex prosthetics and wigs pulled the spotlight, especially the Linda Tripp fat suit that wore Paulson instead of the other way around.

Murphy had better success in creating a more obvious political parable with the “Cult” season of “American Horror Story” in 2017. But in matters of conversation-shifting achievement, “Pose” represents his post-O.J. apex.

Not only was “Pose” a celebratory masterpiece told from the perspective of trans and queer people at the center of the 1980s ballroom scene, but it also provided a keenly intimate view of life on the margins during the AIDS epidemic while never forgetting its dedication to beauty and joy.

For each of those successes, there are several messy misfires: The wan camp of “The Politician.” The bland, if inclusive, speculative history of “Hollywood.” The mucky end-of-days morass that was “Grotesquerie.” The missed opportunity of the Jeffrey Dahmer chapter of “Monster.” 

Many of these high-profile attempts to foster serious conversation through art drowned it in vanity. Think of “Ratched,” the pretty and pointless “Halston” and his recent ludicrous, gorgeous disaster “All’s Fair.” (As for “The Beauty,” the jury’s still out on its lasting effects.) Others are frustratingly inconsistent — “Feud: Bette and Joan” wasn’t perfect, but Jessica Lange and Susan Sarandon’s work boosted its excellence more than the superstar cast of “Feud: Capote vs. The Swans” could for that project.

Great performances hide within even the worst of Murphy’s shows, nevertheless. Murphy gave Niecy Nash-Betts enough space and material in “Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story” for her to deliver an award-winning performance that muscled to the fore.

Watts’ take on Jackie O doesn’t hit such heights, but the actor does, in some scenes, achieve a gracious splendor that does justice to her subject’s memory.

And this returns us to “Love Story.” If Murphy’s work can be divided between pulp like “American Horror Story” and prestige, “John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette” aspires to the latter.

Regardless of how promising the conceit may seem — it’s based on a book titled “Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy,” after all — this is American history for fashion influencers. There isn’t much holding it together, but the looks are on point. Kelly closely resembles JFK Jr., while Pidgeon has Bessette’s fragile, elven bearing. Both photograph well.

But the story reminds me less of any supposed fairy tale than the memory that Murphy once intended to devote a limited series treatment to Prince Charles and Princess Diana of Wales’ bad romance under his “Feud” umbrella. “The Crown” beat him to it, so we got “Capote vs. The Swans” along with its greatest accomplishment: Bowen Yang’s Truman Capote impersonation on “Saturday Night Live.”

Theoretically, the romantic journey of JFK Jr. and Bessette should hold an equivalent pull on us as Charles and Di once did. JKF Jr. was the scion of American political royalty, and Bessette was the commoner who won his heart by side-eyeing his fame. But when two of her Calvin Klein coworkers gush, “You’re going to be the American people’s princess!” my inner narrator countered, “No. Not so much.”

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The difference between what Charles and Diana — or Diana, specifically — meant to the world and the legacy that JFK Jr. left behind is vaster than the span of ocean between Britain and New York. Prince Charles is now England’s king, and Diana devoted herself to a life of service that helped her triumph in the international court of opinion before her untimely death.

America’s “royal” couple didn’t live long enough to make such a definitive mark. The iconic president’s son failed the New York bar exam twice and co-founded George magazine, a glossy devoted to waltzing at the intersection of politics and popular people.

Bessette was lovely and statuesque. For the public’s purposes, she was a cipher onto which we were urged to project our romantic fantasies. Beyond that, the main point of similarity between Bessette and Diana is that the paparazzi hounded both – Diana to death, and Bessette to resentful exhaustion. Is there an urgent lesson in their story for us to ponder? Not really, but even lacking that, the series fails its obligation to entertain. Watts’ Jackie delivers a moving speech or two about what families like the Kennedys owe to the public, but beyond that, the only turn that took me by surprise within the first two episodes is the unexpected death of a pet.

Every producer wants to achieve ubiquity, and Murphy is one of the few that’s done it. But while his influence has certainly grown mightier over the decade since “The People v. O.J. Simpson” conquered the 2016 TV season, the quality and memorability of most of his work since has fallen. This does not mean he isn’t still a reliable viewership magnet; he’s one of the few auteurs whose work commands conversation regardless of its quality. But to paraphrase Norma Desmond, it’s his ambition to say something meaningful that’s gotten small.

“Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette” premieres with three episodes at 9 p.m. ET/ 6 p.m. PT Thursday, Feb. 12 on FX, Hulu and Disney+.

The post The shrunken ambition of Ryan Murphy’s “Love Story” appeared first on Salon.com.

President Donald Trump continued to claim the United States and Iran were in active peace talks on Monday, despite denials from Iranian and U.S. officials. 

“Iranian Leadership is unbelievably duplicitous!” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “They ask for a meeting, some would say’ beg,’ talks begin, with more scheduled in the immediate future, and they say, openly and proudly, that they’re not having any discussions, that nothing is being talked about, and they’re only dealing with ‘Oman.'”

Trump told reporters over the weekend that Iran came to the U.S. hat in hand to avoid further airstrikes. The president said that the Pentagon had planned “the biggest attack since World War II.”

“It would have been disastrous for them,” he said. “They didn’t want us to do it, and frankly, Saudi Arabia didn’t want it either.”

Iranian officials denied any such communication and said they had no planned talks with the U.S.  

“We currently do not have negotiations with America,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei shared, per NBC News.

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Trump called the denial a bit of “their usual bather.” He said that Iran needs to reach a deal with the U.S. or surrender unconditionally. Speaking to a reporter in the Oval Office on Monday, Trump said he was offering Iran “every last chance before decapitation.”

“Very tough to do what we have planned, still planned,” he said. “We’ll see what happens.”

The post “Last chance before decapitation”: Trump threatens Iran over stalled peace talks appeared first on Salon.com.

No popular music genre despises the present as much as country music. Through quirks of form and function, all other radio-ready music is incredibly focused on its immediate surroundings. Pop has trendiness in its very bones, and its songwriters’ striving for universality tends to create songs focused on broad, current feelings: the sharp sting of a fresh heartbreak, the effervescence of new heartbreak, the joy of dancing in this club right now. 

Rap is usually made quickly by impossibly young stars for an equally young audience, so it tends toward today’s fashion. Micro-trends in production, slang and topics come and go quickly. Last month was another era. Last year might as well be prehistoric.

Country music, though, is a different animal, born out of the urban migration of the 1930s as a way to sell a slice of an idealized past on wax to newly minted city-dwellers longing for home. Sonic trends — from the slick countrypolitan in the 1970s to the neo-traditionalist 1990s and on through the trap-indebted 2010s —  have come and gone. Demographics on the dial have shifted. Stars are younger and more male than they’ve ever been. But that focus on greener pastures is as persistent as the apparent blood feud between Texas and Tennessee. 

The average country listener wants to have their past misremembered for them, whether it’s the Judds asking Grandpa about the good old days or Tim McGraw missing the nebulous “back when.” The biggest hits sand down the rough-hewn edges of Mama’s metaphorical front porch to up their resale value, perhaps never funnier than Luke Bryan’s bullet-point summer vacation on “Fish, Hunt, Golf, Drink.” All that cornpone Luddism floating around made Gillian Welch’s “Everything Is Free” feel remarkable upon its release 25 years ago.

The concerns of the track from 2001’s “Time (The Revelator)” are topical and immediate. Welch responds to the then-new phenomenon of online music piracy with practical concerns. How am I going to pay my bills if no one wants to pay me for my music? How do I put gas in the car right now? Nearly a decade before the launch of Spotify, Welch saw clearly that someone was bound to “hit the big score” off of the new model — it just wouldn’t be her.

“Everything is free now, that’s what they say. Everything I’ve ever done, gonna give it away,” she sings, before immediately shifting toward plans to make money elsewhere so that she can keep performing.

A quarter century on from the song’s release, the U.S. economy is overrun with people who believe that nothing should come with a price tag. The finance industry is dominated by private equity firms that offload the debt of their corporate acquisitions onto other companies, the better to walk away clean when those companies collapse. The biggest players in Silicon Valley are building data centers to more efficiently run copyright-infringement machines built on terabytes of pirated material. 

The journalism industry was hollowed out by the same forces that sliced up Welch’s catalog, leaving few journalists to report on the graft and theft this post-payment class of billionaires are carrying out across the country. The Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post, once a world-class newspaper, has turned into a shell of its former self following a conservative reorientation of its opinion pages and a corporate downsizing that saw over 300 of newsroom journalists laid off in February, representing about 30% of its total staff.

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More recently, Louisiana officials recently inked a secret agreement with Meta to build a five-mile-long data center in the state. The New York Times eventually sniffed out the backroom deal. The local papers were too busy covering the hors d’oeuvres at Mark Zuckerberg’s celebratory luncheon.

At the same time, the ham-fisted hollowing out of regulatory agencies by the Trump administration has had predictable results. Outbreaks of new livestock diseases, parasitic produce and slower responses to global crises followed the Department of Government Efficiency’s wild budget-slashing even as Elon Musk, the man who helmed that project, is richer than anyone else in the history of earth — and he’s gearing up to throw millions into the 2028 presidential and congressional elections.

It would be a stretch to say that Gillian Welch saw all this coming. But listening back now, it’s hard not to marvel at how timeless this timely track feels. You can’t help but sympathize with her desire to skip the coming crisis in her industry. She “never minded working hard,” she sings, but she had a lot of concern about “who I’m working for.” Seeing into the future that she’d soon be asked to work for pennies while someone else got obscenely rich, she passed.

“If there’s anything you want to hear,” she says, “you can sing it yourself.” 

If only we all could have opted out in a similar fashion.

The post Gillian Welch’s “Everything Is Free” warned us all along appeared first on Salon.com.

For a good portion of “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” we watch all versions of the film’s namesake arachnid-juiced hero (Tom Holland) — full leotard, half leotard, sans leotard —cyberstalking Ned (Jacob Batalon) and MJ (Zendaya), his best friend and love interest, respectively, who now have no memory of him at all since the last time Spidey put them both in harm’s way, in 2021’s “Spider-Man: No Way Home.”

If you’re new to the Spider-verse, or you’ve forgotten the details of what took place in “No Way Home,” Spider-Man called upon Doctor Strange to wipe the memories of MJ, Ned and the rest of the world during a tear in the multiverse in which Peter Parker’s identity was made known, which was obviously bad news for him and everyone around him. Shortly before this spell is cast, Parker makes a promise to MJ that once things stabilize and there’s no longer the threat of a dimensional collapse, he’ll find her and make her remember not only who he is, but that she’s in love with him. At the end of the film, we see Parker pay a visit to a donut shop MJ is working at and make the choice to leave her be, rather than tip her for his coffee and cruller by backflipping onto the counter and throwing a posterboard with “YOU LOVE ME” written on it in her face.

But flash forward just short of five years, and here he comes again, putting the woman he claims to love in harm’s way just as she’s gotten settled into a relatively danger-free life without him, newly graduated from MIT and nuzzled up with a boyfriend who, while considerably less exciting, will almost definitely not get her killed.

What is the plot of “Brand New Day?” You may be asking yourself this regardless of whether you’ve already seen the film or not. Well, given the amount of Marvel Cinematic Universe hooey thrown into this thing . . . what isn’t the plot? But don’t worry, amidst all of the flippin’ and swingin’ and jizzy web-shootin ‘, MJ and other women characters such as a movie-saving Jean Grey (Sadie Sink) and Black Widow (Florence Pugh) are given a few lines so that, regardless of what’s going on, men in the audience will receive flashes of someone to fantasize about saving or showing their pepperoni nipples to.

The fact that superhero movies always cram in a love story element is both annoying and ridiculous, but it makes sense. Big-budget films of the “Superman,” “Batman,” “Spider-Man” variety need to make sure they turn a profit by getting butts in seats, and that means layering on whatever (and however) they’ve determined each and every one of those butts will be expecting to see in order to make it seem worth tapping their cards for the price of admission and concessions. Romantic threads are a standard given annoyance in these films, put in so there’s something for everyone, to advance the plot when there is no more plot to be had, and to give me the opportunity to jump into the debate of: “They’re just men when they’re not saving the world, they should be allowed to date” with an emphatic: No they shouldn’t!

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Batman has a crush on someone? Cool! She’s probably gonna die. Superman has been in love with Lois Lane for years? Awesome, she’s never gonna be safe again because every one of his enemies is going to try and throw her off a building. Spider-Man finds time to haunt MJ’s Instagram stories amidst all manner of chaos breaking out in the streets of New York and beyond? Well, sure, let’s just do whatever, at this point. Just like the average moviegoer likes to chuck some Reese’s Pieces in their tub of popcorn to get that salty and sweet action going, most people like for their eyeballs to get breaks from the stomach kicking and face punching by watching implied or actual grab-ass. We’re a simple species. And that’s OK. Still ridiculous though.

In “Brand New Day,” as Spider-Man is dealing with his genes mutating in a way that increases his powers, gives him migraines and makes it so that he no longer needs the use of synthetic webs because real (real gross) ones now shoot from his wrists, there’s so much else going on in this still, somehow, pretty boring movie.

Extras are flash-mobbing in the background as Jean Grey telepathically hops from body to body to do a mixed-bag of whatever she wants: infiltrate the Department of Damage Control, mess with Spider-Man, look for her sister who’s dead. The Punisher (Jon Bernthal) is grunting and groaning around, helping Spidey and providing elbow-jab opportunities for guys in the audience to turn to their dates and loudly whisper: That’s me. Black Widow is holding meetings in a Russian bath. The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) is like, “Did I kill anyone?” And where’s Spider-Man? Putting flowers on Aunt May’s grave each day and pouting when MJ is finally like “Thanks for saying you love me . . . I don’t know you.”

How about this? Maybe in the next Spider-Man movie, and every superhero movie to follow, we put to rest this shoehorned lovey-dovey nonsense and leave viewers with the big takeaway that sometimes the best way to love someone is by leaving them the hell alone and that, in certain circumstances — especially if you’re tasked with saving the world on a daily basis — your job actually is more important. 

The post Spider-Man should give up romance and focus on his job appeared first on Salon.com.

They must have hoped the photos would dispel conspiracy theories that he’s dead, or at least incapacitated. But the two proof-of-life pictures taken of Sen. Mitch McConnell and his wife, former Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, purportedly from his room at a rehabilitation center, have only generated more speculation about what has really happened to the 84-year-old Kentucky Republican, who hasn’t been seen or spoken in public since being hospitalized in mid-June. In both pictures, the typically sharp-minded senator is staring with a vacant smile at the camera, while the 73-year-old Chao has a firm grip on his arm that reads less as affection and more like direction.

In the first, taken July 12, McConnell holds the day’s newspaper, a tradition familiar more commonly seen in hostage photos. Even that pretext was dropped from the second picture, released July 27, which was accompanied by a note from the Senate attending physician insisting that McConnell is working “to rebuild strength and reduce the risk of future falls.” This followed the senator’s continued refusal to say much about what happened besides that he fell down and was “briefly unconscious.” 

McConnell has a long history of dirty tricks — culminating in functionally stealing a Supreme Court nomination from then-President Barack Obama and holding it for Donald Trump — so it’s not surprising that many progressives suspect the former Senate Majority Leader has sinister motives in refusing to step down from his seat. There has also been boundless speculation that he’s using this to gain some illicit power for Republicans. The rumors have gotten so bad that Andy Beshear, Kentucky’s Democratic governor, publicly demanded that McConnell “directly and verbally address the people of Kentucky and provide proof of your capacity to serve, or resign.”

Despite the chatter, it’s almost certain that McConnell isn’t doing this to benefit Republicans in the Senate. In commentary for MS NOW, independent journalist Lindsay Beyerstein pointed out the senator’s absence means “the GOP is down a vote in a closely divided Senate.” Trump’s struggle to get his attorney general nominee Todd Blanche across the finish line is a reminder of how every vote counts for the party. 

But it’s hard to fault conspiracy theorists when it really does seem that McConnell — or whoever is making decisions for him — is hiding something. Efforts to convince the public that he is communicative backfired when people noticed that the Republicans claiming to have spoken with him appeared to be working from the same script. As Beshear noted last week, even McConnell’s doctor noticeably avoided addressing whether the senator can “speak, reason, or carry out” his duties. Already set to retire at the end of the year, it’s becoming clear that McConnell is never coming back to the Senate chambers. 

Despite the conspiracy theories, the likeliest reason to conceal McConnell’s condition is more pathetic than calculating: It’s hard for these powerful old men and their families to let go of power.

In their controversial book “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” Jake Tapper and Alex Johnson examined the role that ego and status play in keeping politicians in office long after they’re capable of doing the job. The writers uncovered evidence that Biden’s delusions were bolstered by both his family and his top staff, who seemed loathe to give up the elevated status and power that comes from being close to the president. This impression has only deepened in recent weeks, as Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, has been on a bizarre media tour for no other apparent purpose than squeezing his famous last name for one more bout of attention.

This is why there’s been such a focus on Chao’s role in her husband’s health drama, starting with the clothes she’s wearing in the proof-of-life photos which are being examined and analyzed for clues.

“I can’t imagine Elaine, one of the most put-together people in existence, releasing a pic wearing a thin shirt over a visible black bra, UNTUCKED,” writer Jeff Yang, who claims to know the Chao family, argued on Bluesky about the second photo taken from McConnell’s hospital room. Others argued that the shirt is too cheap-looking to be something Chao, who is every inch the wealthy socialite, would wear.

To be fair to Chao, she is a private person; most of our perception of her fashion comes from glimpses of her at public events. In the real world, people don’t typically dress to visit a medical facility the same way they do for work. Nonetheless, internet sleuths sussed out that the shirt Chao is wearing on the July 26 photo appears to be the same one she was seen wearing on July 15. But whatever her level of responsibility, it’s not surprising that McConnell’s wife is the center of many conspiracy theories. It wasn’t that long ago that then-First Lady Jill Biden was engaged in ham-fisted efforts to deny and downplay her husband’s inability to do his job.

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Like the aging politicians themselves, family members often benefit from the status and power they get through their famous relatives. Chao is no different. Not only did she serve in the Cabinets of Trump, George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush, Chao was also appointed to government positions by Ronald Reagan, and she continues to engage in power-brokering around the world. When McConnell was rushed to the hospital in June, she was in China having meetings with high-ranking officials, including the country’s vice president Han Zheng. The trip was so important that she didn’t cut it short to return to her husband’s side. Whatever dealings she has with foreign leaders, she surely gains leverage from her connection to such a powerful man. 

We don’t have any specifics on what McConnell and Chao are hiding or why, but after the Biden debacle, it’s silly to pretend such these cover-ups are implausible. If anything, they’re starting to feel like the norm. The late Dianne Feinstein, who served as senator from California for 31 years, faced intense scrutiny and accusations about her obviously failing health before her death in September 2023. The following year, it was revealed that GOP Texas Rep. Kay Granger had been absent from Congress and living in a dementia ward for months. Earlier this year, Rep. Tom Kean Jr, R-N.J., disappeared for months with no explanation, and when he returned, he only shared vague details about a mental health episode after the growing outrage became impossible to ignore. In the past year, six members of Congress have died in office, and while a couple were surprises, most of them had health issues they minimized or ignored until it was too late. 

It’s hard not to feel some sympathy for these politicians, and even for McConnell, who has long been especially private and, as reporter Andrew Egger noted on a recent Bulwark podcast, “had a very stage-managed political presence even when things were doing great.” Rare is the person who faces impending mortality with total grace and humility, and being in denial about it, at least some of the time, is a normal part of aging. But McConnell, like Biden and others before him, has a level of presumption that is not acceptable in what is supposed to be a democratic system. Politicians on both sides of the aisle get so accustomed to the power and privilege of their office that they seem to forget it doesn’t actually belong to them, but to the people they are elected to serve. 

This is especially troubling when we have an 80-year-old president who is clearly in decline but yearns to be regarded as a king or even a god, and apparently to serve an illegal third term in office. The Trump situation is not helped when so many other politicians, including the previous president, have acted entitled to hold office well beyond what’s reasonable. Dying in office should be a rare and surprise occurrence, not a norm that our authoritarian president can exploit. 

The post Mitch McConnell is never coming back to the Senate appeared first on Salon.com.

Matt Long stood before the Granbury City Council at an April zoning meeting to oppose the influx of proposed data centers in Hood County, likening them to a spiritual abomination.

“I’d consider us a Christian city inside a Christian county,” said Long, a member of the county’s development commission who lives near Granbury. “As Christians, do we think that trading 2,100 acres of natural beauty for godless technological complexes is moving us closer to the creation, or further away?”

“Do we think that entering into negotiations with Google, Meta and Amazon are closer to making a covenant with God, or making a deal with the devil?” he asked the council.

Christians, Long concluded to applause, must stand up to data centers.

Controversy surrounding data center construction has roiled Texas in recent months, fostering a bipartisan coalition of opposition, particularly among rural and suburban residents. With at least 248 planned data center projects and 335 in operation, Texas is poised to become a leader in data center development.

Opposition has also coalesced around religious appeals from a theologically diverse group of residents, leaders and politicians who see data center development as an affront to their most sacred values.

Much of the opposition focuses on environmental impact and the large amounts of water and power needed by massive facilities that operate AI applications.

Clayton Tucker, a Democrat running for Texas agriculture commissioner, is a leader in the anti-data center movement. A Catholic, he wonders if data centers are akin to the apple in the Garden of Eden.

“If we take a bite of that apple of knowledge, is that what’s going to kick us out of this blue marble of Eden … that we call Earth?” Tucker said.

 

Religion isn’t solely the domain of the opposition. Texas Railroad Commissioner Wayne Christian, a Republican, said he supports data center construction because “throughout history, Christians have embraced innovations that improve lives, from the printing press to modern medicine.”

“We should approach data centers the same way: embracing their benefits while ensuring they’re built responsibly,” Christian said in a statement.

For Long, biblical passages such as Daniel Chapter 2 and Revelation Chapter 13 reveal that there are spiritual implications to replacing God’s creation “with things created by man.”

The books of Daniel and Revelation, known as apocalyptic literature, have been interpreted in some theological circles as warnings about the misuse of technology — such as artificial intelligence — in ways that threaten God’s intended order and vastly increase the government’s ability to conduct surveillance.

“They’re going to be able to track where we go, they’re going to track our money. … You’re going to have to essentially stay in line socially,” said Long, who believes this generation will be judged by its response to data centers.

“I just don’t want to read that everybody complied, everybody gave in, everybody quit. I want to hear about this small contingent of people that stood on their principles, that saw it coming from a mile away, and said, ‘We’re not budging,’” he said.

Joseph Locke, a professor of Texas and American religious history at the University of North Texas, said he was not surprised that Texans were making religious arguments against data centers.

“Texans have often drawn on religion when they want to enact social or political change,” he said in a statement, adding that “the rhetoric of spiritual warfare is pretty common, especially among today’s Christian nationalists and their conservative allies.”

Long has hosted well-attended prayer meetings in his home and taken his fight online, where he is not alone. Religious arguments are a periodic feature of comments on several dozen Facebook groups dedicated to opposing data center development.

Last month, Clarendon resident Maria Miller asked members of the Texans United Against Data Centers Facebook group to pray against data centers.

Miller said she sees parallels between the rapid development of data centers and the story of the end times told in the Book of Revelation at the end of the New Testament. “It’s kind of a no-brainer,” she said in an interview.

“People of faith feel a moral duty”

Not all religiously grounded opposition sees data centers as apocalyptic or part of a larger cosmic battle between good and evil.

“People of faith feel a moral duty to make sure that people have the things they need to live lives of dignity and thriving, and so water and energy are really important for that,” said Rev. Dr. Becca Edwards of the interfaith policy advocacy group Texas Impact.

“We’re called to be stewards of creation, which means caring for the world as God does. And I think what we see in the creation story is that the world was created to be a place of fruitfulness and plenty,” Edwards said.

Locke said many Texans have drawn on their faith “to attack inequalities, provide for the needy and, yes, advocate for environmental protections.”

In addition, conservative Christians have been “generally supportive of Texas’ conservative economic and environmental policies,” Locke said.

“The oil industry, for instance, has long been wed to conservative Christianity,” he said. “Billy Graham was backed by Texas oilmen, and George W. Bush, who helped bring Texas’ religious politics to Washington, D.C., was rooted in the oil industry.”

Texas churches also spoke out against inequality during the Gilded Age — a late 19th-century period of rapid industrial growth that produced extreme wealth inequality, Locke said. Evangelical leaders “helped to organize the Populist revolt of the 1880s and 1890s” and others “urged Texans to see the sins of our economic system,” he said.

“Texas’ conservative Christian nationalism may win the most headlines, but Texas religion contains multitudes,” Locke said.

Tucker, the Democratic candidate for agriculture commissioner, is a fifth-generation Texan who ties his campaign to Texas’ populist movement and focuses on issues that receive the most petition signatures on his website.

A petition on data center development has been a top performer, and as long as it remains popular, “that’s gonna be our top issue,” Tucker said while driving between anti-data center meetings, many of them held in churches.

“Had you told me a year ago that running for agriculture commissioner, I’d be talking mostly about data centers, I would have looked at you funny,” he said, adding that the facilities’ high-volume water use caught his eye.

“If we run out of water, nothing else really matters,” he said.

 

Long, who identifies as a conservative-leaning libertarian, said Tucker, although a Democrat, is “the only politician that is saying anything negative about data centers.” Older Republicans, he added, “don’t understand, like, the good versus evil fight that I believe we’re in.”

Polls show in many cases opposition to data centers transcends political partisanship. According to a June poll by the Texas Politics Project, 71% of registered Texas Democrats and 44% of registered Texas Republicans oppose data centers, with only 14% of Republicans strongly in support. National polls indicate even greater bipartisan alignment: a May Gallup survey found that 63% of Republicans and 75% of Democrats oppose data centers.

Long said he’s also found himself in a surprising alliance over data centers with some “liberal white women.”

“After the meeting … we’re hugging, and we’re all on the same page, trying to fight this,” he said.

“Humanity over injury and profit”

Elizabeth Dempsey Beggs, a Democrat running for the U.S. House in Virginia, called opposition to data centers a “unifying factor” that crosses political lines. Virginia is home to the world’s largest data center market, with about 685 operating or planned, and Texas advocates have looked to the state as a cautionary tale.

“I guarantee you Jesus would be outside right now flipping tables,” Beggs said in a recent public testimony against data centers.

People “deserve a place that is safe to raise their children, and we know the harm that data centers are doing,” Beggs said in an interview. “That’s not something you can tolerate as a mother, as a citizen, and as a Christian.”

Long, who has nine children, said in testimony earlier this year that data centers create “a sacrificial zone” that negatively harms children. It is ironic, he said, that Hood County adopted a “sanctuary for the unborn” ordinance while not being a sanctuary for the born.

 

Some Jewish leaders have also based their opposition on religious grounds.

“At the core of most religious traditions is a recognition of the sanctity of life and humanity over injury and profit,” Rabbi Jennie Rosenn of the Jewish climate advocacy group Dayenu said in a statement.

Rosenn said data centers are an affront to Judaism’s most foundational teachings of “life, not death (bacharta bahayim), protect creation (shomrei adamah), pursue justice (tirdof tzedek), not waste (bal tashchit), protect the most vulnerable (shomer ger yatom v’almanah), and ensure that life can continue l’dor v’dor (from generation to generation).”

“If this sounds like Judaism’s greatest hits, it’s because it is,” Rosenn continued. “That is how fundamentally the explosive growth of data centers across our nation threatens the values we — and many other people of faith — hold most dear.”

Jane Bannor, treasurer of Unitarian Universalists for a Just Economic Community, a progressive advocacy group, said Unitarian Universalists around the nation are calling for moratoriums on data center construction based on a “respect for the interdependent web of life of which we are all a part.”

“We want to see businesses benefit not just corporate shareholders, but also the surrounding population,” Bannor said.

Tucker hopes religious-based opposition can affect the data center debate in Texas.

Faith appeals carry extra weight, he said, “when you can kind of tie [data centers] to those stories that are foundational to Christianity, that are foundational to a lot of our worldviews.”

(Mark Weinberg / Food52) 

This story is published through a collaboration between The Texas Tribune and Religion News Service.

Disclosure: Amazon, Facebook, Google, Meta and University of North Texas have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in The Texas Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.

The post “A deal with the devil”: Religion motivates data center opponents in Texas appeared first on Salon.com.

An Australian library has welcomed home a book roughly 150 years overdue after it was discovered inside a tea crate bricked into a sealed fireplace.

Ross Simmons found the water-damaged copy of “The Antiquities of Athens” while renovating a house in the seaside town of Kiama, south of Sydney. The book was published in 1858 and carries the number 506, placing it among the roughly 1,000 volumes held when the Kiama Library opened in 1872.

Simmons believes the book may have been borrowed by his great-great-grandfather, John Simmons, who owned the house when the library first opened. The library’s original borrowing records have been lost, however, leaving the identity of the delinquent reader — and the reason the book was sealed inside a fireplace — a mystery.

Had the library applied the overdue rate printed in the volume, the theoretical fine would have reached approximately 28,000 Australian dollars, or about $19,500 in U.S. currency. Fortunately for the Simmons family, the library no longer charges late fees and has no intention of pursuing a 19th-century borrower’s descendants.

The old lending rules discovered with the book offered another glimpse into library life during the 1870s. A household needed at least three people capable of reading before borrowing, and patrons were prohibited from collecting a book while intoxicated.

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Despite some water damage, the volume survived its century and a half inside the fireplace and has now been added to the library’s local history collection.

It will not, however, be returning to circulation.

“We’re not going to allow it to go back out again,” library manager Michelle Hudson said, joking that staff did not want to wait another 150 years for its next return.

The discovery gives Kiama Library an unusually complete local mystery: an unidentified borrower, a hidden fireplace, a theoretical five-figure fine and, after approximately a century and a half, a very late happy ending.

The post Library book found in fireplace returns 150 years late appeared first on Salon.com.

A Florida English professor is suing her former public college, alleging she was fired after its president objected to an award-winning short story she assigned in a freshman literature course.

Vinita Prabhakar filed a federal lawsuit against South Florida State College President Fred Hawkins and the school’s board of trustees, arguing her dismissal violated her First Amendment rights and academic freedom. The lawsuit seeks reinstatement, damages and a declaration that the college acted unlawfully.

Prabhakar had assigned “Bettering Myself,” a short story by acclaimed author Ottessa Moshfegh, in her Freshman English II course. The award-winning story follows an alcoholic Catholic school teacher whose increasingly self-destructive behavior illustrates themes of addiction, alienation and moral decline through the perspective of an unreliable narrator.

According to the complaint, Prabhakar had taught the story for nearly a decade without incident and used it in a unit on unsympathetic and unreliable narrators alongside works by Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver. The story won the Paris Review’s 2013 Plimpton Prize for Fiction and has appeared on syllabuses at other universities.

One student reportedly told Prabhakar that the material made them uncomfortable. Prabhakar discussed the story with the student, who later said they felt better about the assignment, according to the lawsuit.

Hawkins nevertheless summoned Prabhakar to a meeting, called the story “political” and ordered her not to teach it again, the complaint alleges. Prabhakar said her department chair, dean and a college vice president supported her explanation of the story’s academic purpose.

The next day, she was placed on administrative leave and told her contract would end after the semester. Prabhakar alleges she received no formal complaint, hearing or explanation of which college policy she had violated.

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The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which is helping represent Prabhakar, argues that public colleges may establish curriculum requirements but cannot punish professors merely because administrators dislike ideas expressed in relevant course material.

The allegations have not yet been tested in court. The lawsuit places the latest Florida education dispute at the intersection of academic freedom, faculty discretion and the authority public institutions exercise over classroom instruction.

The post Florida English professor alleges political firing over class reading appeared first on Salon.com.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. repeatedly clashed with CNN’s Dana Bash on Sunday’s “State of the Union” over vaccines, COVID-19, autism research and the nation’s growing measles outbreak, with the veteran anchor challenging the health secretary’s claims by citing decades of scientific research and public health data.

The contentious interview came as the United States experiences its second consecutive record-breaking year for measles cases, with Bash noting on-air that infections have reached a 35-year high and that roughly 93% of cases have occurred among unvaccinated people.

Asked whether he accepted any responsibility for the resurgence after years as one of the country’s most prominent vaccine skeptics, Kennedy responded, “Absolutely not,” arguing the outbreak is part of a broader international trend and pointing to higher per-capita case rates in several other countries.

Kennedy instead blamed the COVID-19 lockdown period for reduced childhood vaccination rates, arguing that missed immunizations during the pandemic created today’s vulnerable populations. He also maintained that his department has responded quickly to outbreaks by deploying federal public health teams to affected states.

Throughout the interview, Bash repeatedly interrupted Kennedy to challenge claims she said conflicted with the broader scientific consensus, particularly on COVID-19 vaccines and autism research. At one point, she told Kennedy that “study after study after study” has found no link between vaccines and autism, citing findings from the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Kennedy rejected those conclusions, arguing existing research has not adequately examined vaccines administered during the first six months of life and accusing Bash of relying too heavily on experts rather than the underlying research.

The exchange grew increasingly tense after Kennedy accused CNN of contributing to misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic and suggested Bash was repeating claims without independently examining the evidence. Bash pushed back, defending her role as a journalist.

“My job is to find out and tell the truth,” she said.

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The interview also touched on a Wall Street Journal report that President Donald Trump has encouraged Kennedy to pursue additional research examining possible links between vaccines and autism. Kennedy confirmed Trump supports further study while also saying his department is investigating a broader range of potential environmental factors that may contribute to autism.

The nearly 20-minute interview ended with Bash defending the role of scientific expertise in public health reporting while Kennedy maintained that federal health agencies should continue reexamining longstanding assumptions about vaccine safety and other medical issues.

A statement was released by a CNN spokeperson to Salon regarding this interview.

Dana Bash is a veteran journalist who conducted a newsmaking interview with Secretary Kennedy in which he stated that he supports parents getting their children vaccinated against measles and addressed President Trump’s push for further study into autism and vaccines. Asking tough, substantive questions to those in power is the job of every journalist, and Dana did hers incredibly well today. We stand behind Dana, her reporting, and CNN’s overall coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic.

UPDATED: Aug. 2, 2026 at 2:12 p.m. to include statement from CNN.

The post “My job is to find out the truth”: Dana Bash grills RFK Jr. over vaccines appeared first on Salon.com.

Allow me to sing, o Muse, of a recent dinner conversation about “The Odyssey.” The setting was not a Greek restaurant but a Vietnamese joint. My friend Sharon and I had just settled at our table and ordered our dinner and drinks when she steered our conversation toward Christopher Nolan’s latest opus.

Have I seen it? she asked. Of course. What did I think? It was fine, I said. A little too long, definitely overhyped. I think I described it as Nolan’s baroque reward for “Oppenheimer.”

Then, like Odysseus himself, she aimed at her main target of derision: Matt Damon. What on Earth possessed Nolan, a notoriously detail-oriented director, to tap the all-purpose flour of movie stars to portray one of the most storied heroes in literature?

“What, was Leo not available?” she asked, as if petitioning the gods. But divine entities stopped intervening in man’s affairs long ago; besides, I had the answer drawn and nocked since I’d walked out of the theater days before.

Why not Leo? Because nobody would believe Leonardo DiCaprio could string that bow.

I can only imagine that at this point, restaurant waitstaffs across the world have picked up crumbs and slices of chatter about Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s 2,700-year-old blockbuster. Nolan’s work is designed to bring out everyone’s inner critic and professor, but his execution of “The Odyssey” tosses us plenty of bones to pick.

By now the distinctiveness of Nolan’s cinematic ruminations is common knowledge. Whether we’re talking about “Oppenheimer,” “Interstellar” or his “Batman” trilogy, Nolan is a seasoned explorer in the realm of man’s hubris and its relationship with personal history, time and memory, especially the selective variety, among many touchstones. The nonlinear nature of Homer’s epic poem lends itself to his style.

But perhaps the least appreciated aspect of Nolan’s approach is his conscious use of modern celebrities in his version of one of the earliest stories to question the human compulsion to reach for fabled immortality at the cost of the people beside us. In essence, Nolan chose a superstar cast to drive home the interpretation of Homer’s saga as a legend about fame.

Spinning that lore for a modern audience, then, calls for fronting the cast with a star whose popular persona is outsized compared to his dramatic proficiency. Damon is the simplest and most reliable vehicle to tell us about a complicated man, as the highly lauded translator Emily Wilson describes Odysseus.

By this, I don’t mean to call Damon a bad actor. I’m just saying that his “Odyssey” performance is workmanlike. Wilson, for her part, walked away from the film with an impression of Nolan’s efforts that makes a person picture the Muse Calliope whispering in her ear, “Drag him.”  Thus inspired, she wrote a long and brutal essay for the London Review of Books.

In my view, though, if the idea is to position Odysseus as an everyman hero swept up in a maelstrom of ordeals too vast for him to conquer, Damon was always going to be Nolan’s guy.

Which brings us back to the hero’s mythical recurve. Odysseus’ bow is an extension of his valorous identity. It is his Excalibur, his Andúril, the vaunted weapon only he can string and use to hit a bullseye through a row of twelve crossed axes. The fact that none of Penelope’s suitors could do that marked them as unfit to take his place as Ithaca’s king.

And while my friend made very good points about Hollywood personal trainers and physics and how, through creatine, all things are possible, the simple fact is that we’re more likely to buy that the man synonymous with Jason Bourne would be the only one who can bend that buster, string it, and make it sing.

It might seem strange to look this deeply into the why of Matt Damon as Odysseus, since his casting didn’t agitate right-wing trolls. The MAGA crowd whined early and loudly when the trades announced Lupita Nyong’o’s selection to play Helen of Troy, a fuss only slightly outdone by the news of Elliot Page’s casting as a Greek soldier named Sinon. When the rumor mills incorrectly assumed Page was playing Achilles, heads exploded.

But Nyong’o’s Helen, admirably performed though it was, contained few of the metatextual implications of Nolan’s other casting choices.

Tapping Travis Scott to play the Bard singing the tales of Odysseus’ exploits, for example, doesn’t merely reframe the role of ancient storytellers and poets as that age’s rappers. Scott is a 10-time Grammy nominee whose ability to combine spectacle with his lyrical craft has gained him a significantly passionate following. He is a brand unto himself and a sought-after corporate ambassador. If a queen like Penelope (played by Anne Hathaway) desired to send a message to her unworthy suitors about their inadequacy, she’d choose a rhapsodist with that kind of pull who also blends in with a boisterous crowd.

Then we have Benny Safdie as Agamemnon, the king of Mycenae, whom Odysseus follows to Troy and, ultimately, his cursed fate. Placing famous directors in front of the camera is a classic auteur filmmaker flourish, and Safdie is both an actor and a director mainly associated with indie films.

Notably, unlike Damon’s Odysseus, Safdie’s Agamemnon is not jacked. But his intimidating onyx armor obscures all that, much in the way Darth Vader’s helmet and cloak overcompensate for his shriveled form. We don’t see Agamemnon’s face for most of the movie until the end, when his wife and Helen’s twin Clytemnestra (also Nyong’o) murders him in the bathtub as revenge for sacrificing their daughter. Only then do we see this dark colossus for the slight creature he always was.

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Admittedly, that’s a lot more flexible interpretation than the obvious reasoning behind Damon’s selection. Yes, Nolan has worked with some of the most distinguished actors of our time, including Christian Bale, Cillian Murphy and Leo.

But when reading the famous opener of one longstanding translation — “Speak, memory, of the cunning hero/The wanderer, blown off course time and again” —  few broadly popular A-list actors besides Damon live up to that picture.

Damon’s Odysseus captures all the heroic arrogance, bravery and selfish stupidity of an action-flick brawler who would shoot a giant cyclops in the eye as he’s making his escape, just because. Moves like that make it easy to comprehend that his ill-fated meanders could have been avoided if he’d followed the same directions that got everyone else home sooner.

But really, it all comes back to that bow. Only a true and blustery hero can string it, much as we believe that only Damon can win a knife fight by wielding a pen. And if we’re being honest, DiCaprio may have earned an Oscar for his performance in “The Revenant,” but he does not have the biceps to take on that CGI grizzly.

The post Christopher Nolan’s Odysseus could only be Matt Damon appeared first on Salon.com.

The American Civil Liberties Union and its state affiliates have filed 54 administrative claims against the federal government on behalf of people who allege they were harmed by federal immigration enforcement, launching what the organization says is one of its broadest coordinated legal efforts challenging ICE operations.

The claims, filed under the Federal Tort Claims Act, span 17 states and Washington, D.C., and represent the first legal step required before individuals can sue the federal government. The ACLU said the filings allege a pattern of misconduct by federal immigration agents, including excessive force, unlawful arrests, racial profiling, retaliation against people exercising their First Amendment rights and abuse while in detention.

Among the claims is one filed on behalf of Dr. Norma Bowe, a New Jersey nurse and Kean University professor who alleges she was assaulted by federal agents while providing medical care outside Delaney Hall, an immigration detention facility in Newark. Other claims involve U.S. citizens and legal residents who say they were wrongfully detained or subjected to aggressive enforcement actions despite having legal status.

“These are not isolated incidents,” the ACLU said in a press release announcing the coordinated filings, arguing the claims reflect a broader pattern of unlawful conduct by federal immigration authorities.

The Department of Homeland Security rejected the allegations, defending its immigration enforcement efforts and criticizing the ACLU’s characterization of federal operations. The agency said its officers are trained to enforce immigration laws while protecting public safety and complying with federal law.

The administrative claims do not themselves constitute lawsuits. Under federal law, agencies generally have an opportunity to review and respond before claimants can pursue litigation in court. If the claims are denied or remain unresolved after the statutory review period, the individuals may seek damages through federal lawsuits.

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The coordinated filings come as immigration enforcement remains a central issue in the Trump administration’s agenda and as civil rights organizations continue mounting legal challenges to enforcement tactics across the country.

The post ACLU launches nationwide legal challenge over alleged ICE abuses appeared first on Salon.com.

By most objective standards, the 2026 FIFA World Cup tournament — which concluded two weeks ago in New Jersey with Spain’s grueling 1-0 victory over Argentina — was a major success. Despite global anxiety over the collision between the world’s largest sporting event and Donald Trump’s “America First” regime, stadiums were mostly full across North America, fans and players from all sorts of large and small countries seemed to enjoy themselves (and tried to smuggle home large quantities of ranch dressing) and, of course, something like $15 billion flowed into FIFA’s coffers. 

Just below the surface, however, the soccer world was seething with discontent. That erupted into all-out rebellion this week, which could finally bring down Gianni Infantino, the Swiss administrator who has served as FIFA chief executive for the last decade. Unpacking the byzantine history of alleged or actual corruption within FIFA and the numerous regional and national federations under its purview would be a dissertation-length project. But it’s definitely not wrong to say there’s a Trump angle, and that Infantino’s marriage of convenience and shared sensibility with the U.S. president may bring his downfall. 

Even before this year’s tournament, Infantino stood accused of commercializing or “Americanizing” world soccer — a process he did not start but has certainly accelerated — and of shamelessly cozying up to Trump, whom he presented with the newly-invented FIFA Peace Prize, aka the “Temu Nobel,” last December. That was all inarguably true, and the guy has form, as they say on British cop shows. Back in 2022, while seeking to justify holding the World Cup in Qatar, an autocratic monarchy with a famously dreadful human rights record, Infantino launched a thousand memes with this memorable monologue:

“Today I have very strong feelings, I can tell you. Today I feel Qatari. Today I feel Arab. Today I feel African. Today I feel gay. Today I feel disabled. Today I feel a migrant worker.”

If it seems extraordinary that a major executive of any enterprise, anywhere in the world, could say stuff like that and still have a job four years later, you are beginning to appreciate the hallucinatory Infantino experience. Anyway, in 2026 Infantino seems to have swapped all those intersectional identities for an adjunct MAGA membership, and this year’s World Cup pushed the soccer world’s bizarre love-hate relationship with its leader into overdrive. 

Tom Burrows of the Athletic did a nice job this week of summarizing the indictment: Infantino drove World Cup ticket prices to previously unimagined levels, introduced “commercial breaks in each half [of matches] dressed up as hydration breaks” — a network-friendly innovation that global football had resisted for decades — capitulated to Trump in reversing a red-card suspension for U.S. star striker Folarin Balogun, and introduced a “surreal halftime show” featuring Madonna, BTS and Justin Bieber in the final match, in obvious (and inept) imitation of the Super Bowl. 

All of that, mind you, came before Infantino’s big surprise this past week: Apparently without consulting any relevant stakeholders, he announced a plan to spin off commercial rights to the World Cup into a new for-profit company (FIFA is a nonprofit, like other international sporting federations) and then sell off a big chunk of that company to an investment consortium led by Joshua Kushner, the younger brother of Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner. So it’s not entirely accurate to say that Infantino wanted to sell world soccer’s biggest brand to the Trump family. But it’s not exactly false either. 

To coin a phrase, you can’t make this stuff up. But the good news, or the kind-of good news, or the “why in God’s name did this take so long” news, is that Infantino has finally choked on an overdose of hubris. His proposal collapsed within 48 hours and as of this weekend has been abandoned completely. (Soccer fans will discern unmistakable echoes of the European Super League, a proposed NFL-style closed competition for Europe’s top club teams that was announced in 2021 and imploded within a few weeks.)

UEFA, the federation that governs European soccer and is by far the most powerful of FIFA’s regional subsidiaries, wasted no time in rejecting Infantino’s scheme and announcing that none of its 55 national teams would participate in any FIFA competitions until the proposal was ditched. That was almost certainly enough to torpedo this galaxy-brain plan, and other regional confederations — most notably Concacaf, which represents North America, Central America and the Caribbean, and therefore includes the U.S. — soon followed UEFA’s lead, if not as aggressively. 

Donald Trump did not pick up the phone on this occasion. (“Johnny who? Really, I barely know the guy.”) Only the Confederation of African Football — whose member nations, fairly or otherwise, are perceived as Infantino supporters — remained silent. More on that shortly.

Anyone who follows world soccer already knows that UEFA has its own extensive history of political intrigue and internal scandal, and is not well positioned to play populist hero in this drama. But as is so often the case in world affairs, there are no good guys in the story and you have to pick your poison. One could draw a rough analogy with the European Union, a deeply flawed entity that nonetheless represents some degree of ideological or economic counterweight to Trump’s America. In this particular confrontation, Europe held nearly all the cards. 

While the next men’s World Cup, FIFA’s biggest golden goose, is still four years away, the consequences of a European boycott would have been felt immediately. The under-20 Women’s World Cup begins in Poland about a month from now, and qualifying playoffs for FIFA’s second-biggest event, the Women’s World Cup (to be held next summer in Brazil) are set for October. Given his avowed commitments to promoting the women’s game and youth soccer at all levels, Infantino simply couldn’t afford to play chicken with UEFA and risk losing those tournaments. Joshua Kushner and his family, one imagines, will not starve. 

This may be stretching the point, but there’s a thematic resemblance at work here to the worldwide pushback against Big Tech data centers, and against the opaque government processes that gets them built, as well as to the popular and legal resistance that has stalled the $110 billion merger between Warner Bros. and Paramount. It’s also true that Infantino is now understood, both to soccer fans and the world at large, as a proxy for Donald Trump, which looks like a much worse bet than it did a year ago. Infantino was cruising to likely re-election as FIFA president next year, but right now it’s an even-money bet that he can survive the next month. 

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Like his White House buddy, Infantino has thrived on a remarkable ability to weaponize greed and cynicism, both on an epic scale and at ground level. He fully intended to push through his scheme to sell shares in the World Cup by casting himself, believe it or not, as a defender of the downtrodden and underprivileged. He feels gay and African and disabled, remember? The uncomfortable truth is that he has ruled over a vast global sports and merchandising empire largely by fulfilling his promises to channel lots of money into regional and national federations in the Global South that have historically had few resources. 

Under Infantino’s proposed plan, each of FIFA’s 211 federations — at least the ones who supported him! — would have received an immediate cash infusion of $40 million, with further annual installments to follow. That sum would barely make a difference to the football gods in England, Spain or France, but would been enormous in Malawi or Madagascar. Affluent European nations don’t need infusions of private equity capital to build new stadiums and support younger players, and can afford to stand up to Infantino’s Trump-flavored bribery scheme. For players, parents, coaches and local officials in sub-Saharan Africa, the equation might have looked very different. Why should they care where the money comes from? This particular grift may have failed, but in a world built on massive structural inequality, grifters tend to prosper.

The post Trump’s FIFA pal in trouble as plan to sell off World Cup collapses appeared first on Salon.com.

Right-wing media looks to have made a profound miscalculation. They put Hunter Biden through an unrelenting public pressure cooker, convinced that by turning a private citizen’s darkest personal rock bottom into a daily political circus, they could break both the man and his family. Now, seven years into his sobriety, Biden has picked up a podcast mic and won’t stop talking. The man whom the right spent years trying to destroy is now walking into rooms they open up for him — and setting them on fire from the inside.

For the better part of the past decade, conservative media made a concerted effort to turn Biden into the ultimate avatar of political corruption: the degenerate failson as a symbol of Democratic rot. During his father Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign, the right devoted extensive attention to Hunter’s overseas business dealings, particularly his role on the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma and allegations stemming from a laptop Hunter owned that surfaced in GOP hands shortly before the election. The laptop story became a defining example of modern media dynamics after the major social media companies temporarily limited distribution of an October 2020 New York Post article that included information taken from the laptop, a decision that conservatives still cite as evidence of a massive, multi-institution coverup. Republican lawmakers spent endless congressional hours investigating his digital footprint, but were ultimately unable to establish that the elder Biden had engaged in a criminal bribery scheme tied to his son’s business activities. 

The meandering story is what makes the current public rehabilitation of Hunter Biden one of the stranger spectacles in American politics. Right-wing media turned him into a household name to hurt his father, and now that notoriety is precisely what gives him leverage. 

Having emerged from severe addiction, public humiliation and federal prosecution, Biden is now truth-telling about his past and single-handedly roasting the right wing’s bad-faith outrage ecosystem on its own home turf. This year alone Biden has sat for hours-long interviews with independent outlets that cater to the very audience the GOP spent a decade cultivating against his family. He talked to Andrew Callaghan’s Channel 5, whose YouTube following runs past three million and skews toward people who trust almost nothing coming out of U.S. institutions. He talked to Shawn Ryan, a former Navy SEAL and CIA contractor who spent years amplifying allegations against him. Ryan then hooked him up with MAGA podcaster Candace Owens, who once called him a degenerate who belonged in prison. 

Biden’s media strategy is dangerous and fascinating. He has described his media blitz as partly about addiction recovery and partly about strategy. Independent podcasts and YouTube channels have replaced the legacy media gatekeepers that used to referee these fights, and Biden figured out faster than most Democratic operatives that the audience he needed to reach was sitting in exactly the media ecosystem built to hate him. “No one gives a shit with what anybody says on CNN,” he told one interviewer, arguing that years of investigations and public scrutiny had lowered expectations to the point where audiences were surprised simply to hear him speak coherently at length. His approach appears designed to replace years of secondhand portrayals with direct exposure. 

Biden’s rapid growth on X further underscores this tactical evolution. Joining Elon Musk’s platform just days before his interview with Owens dropped, Biden began tweeting with relentless energy, sometimes authoring over 100 posts a day. Commentators quickly dubbed him a “MAGA whisperer” as he systematically dismantled right-wing talking points and exposed media figures he accused of building careers off bad-faith attacks. When CNN anchor Jake Tapper published a scathing review of Jill Biden’s memoir — which defended the former president’s fitness for office — Hunter immediately went on the offensive, blasting Tapper and corporate media for what he viewed as complicity in weaponizing personal family dynamics for television ratings.

Biden’s new approach mixes vulnerability with nuclear-grade anger. Instead of avoiding controversy, he frequently addresses it head on. On a Barstool Sports podcast this week, he joked about signing a laptop and openly discussed his struggles with crack cocaine addiction. For a movement that has invested years in hyping “Hunter’s laptop” as a civilization-ending scandal, seeing the man himself turn it into a potential merchandising opportunity should be humiliating.

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On that same Barstool appearance, he delivered an expletive-filled rant about Donald Trump’s entire family: “F**k him. F**k his sons. F**k his daughter. I mean it, all of them, the whole family, down to the grandchildren. I hope for the rest of time that I am on this earth, that their names live in ignominy.” Biden backed that rage up with a substantive critique, pointing out that the Trump sons received $3.2 billion in Defense Department contracts in just 18 months and that son-in-law Jared Kushner, despite holding no government position, is reportedly receiving more than $110 million from the Saudis, tied to nuclear enrichment authorization and billions in investment funds. 

But Biden is also reaching out beyond the right-wing media ecosystem. He has appeared on NPR’s “Newsmakers,” podcasts hosted by California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Don Lemon, and the “I’ve Had It” podcast with hosts Jennifer Welch and Angie “Pumps” Sullivan. Yet his aggressive, unapologetic posture does not spare Democrats. He has openly torched party leaders who pressured his father to abandon his 2024 reelection bid following the president’s disastrous debate performance, specifically calling out Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer as a “piece of s**t” for his role in pushing his father aside. “I’m not running for anything, so I can say whatever the f**k I want,” Hunter Biden declared, giving voice to millions of frustrated progressives who are sick and tired of watching Democratic leaders play by polite, outdated rules while right-wing extremists burn down democratic norms. 

It makes you wonder: Had the party embraced Biden’s willingness to fight back early on, perhaps they could have deployed one of the most effective anti-MAGA communicators in the country to stop Trump’s return.

To be certain, Biden’s media strategy has generated intense criticism, especially his decision to sit down with the extreme, far-right activist Nick Fuentes. The interview, filmed in a Philadelphia studio dressed up to resemble a seedy motel in a wink at the laptop scandal, quickly became a viral sensation, generating millions of views. During the interview, which reportedly nearly escalated into a physical confrontation, the two found common ground, trading skepticism about American support for Israel, with Fuentes framing his objections as political rather than religious, a distinction that will comfort no one who has watched what he actually says about Jews. When discussing their public reputations, Biden joked, “I’m a crackhead,” to which Fuentes replied, “I’m a racist,” prompting Biden to shoot back, “Mine is true!”

Biden defended the pairing on social media in terms that sound almost reasonable — until you remember who he is talking about. He argued that people who profit from keeping Americans separated have built a business model on it, and that he would sit down with anyone who sees Trump as an enemy, regardless of what else they believe. He was explicit that Fuentes’ views on race and women are indefensible, and that what Fuentes has said about the Holocaust and Nazism cannot be defended. But he argued that one issue — stopping Trump — mattered more than any daylight between him and a man who leads an online movement built substantially on racial grievance. 

This is a coherent argument. It is also the argument every troll counts on succeeding, because it leads and allows audiences to conclude that platforming extremist speech and views like Fuentes’ is a savvy tactical maneuver rather than what it actually is: a laundering operation. In this particular wash cycle, Fuentes needed laundering a great deal more than Biden needed an outlet. 

The instinct to give Fuentes and people like him a bigger microphone under the banner of anti-Trump unity deserves more skepticism. There is no common ground with someone whose political project is ethno-nationalist authoritarianism, and treating a two-hour conversation as evidence that the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” echoes the bad faith politics that lets extremists claim they were misunderstood or “just joking” the whole time. It’s just whitewashing bigotry for clicks. 

But Hunter Biden’s choice to sit with Fuentes exposes something crucial about our current media environment. At a moment when fascism is organizing through podcasts and X feeds, he has stumbled into a role Democrats should have desperately filled: that of a loud, media-savvy fighter who doesn’t care about decorum. By owning his flaws and speaking directly to the public, Biden has stripped the right-wing outrage machine of its primary power source.

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