If and when you find yourself in need of music that will meet you at the intersection of I love you more than oxygen and I hope you become a ghost in a house that I can burn to the ground and then build and burn again, Phoebe Bridgers will most certainly have something for you.
On “Lost Weekend,” Bridgers’ third full-length solo release and her first major release of original material since wrapping up her work with boygenius, the musician’s name is one of many in the stacked liner notes that include everyone from her partner Bo Burnham (who co-wrote seven of the album’s 16 tracks) and Maya Hawke (co-writer of two tracks) to Jack Antonoff (who produced the album), American Football’s Mike Kinsella, boygenius bandmates Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus and Conor Oberst, who adds harmonica to the song “I Can’t Wait” — but it’s still all her.
While standout tracks “I Can’t Wait,” “Kill Me” and “Haunted” are different in tone than the album’s main single, “Lost Boys,” that’s to be expected on an album that isn’t just about heartbreak or grief or the persistent search for joy, but all of that and more. In this one album, Bridgers not only mourns the loss of her father (who died in 2022) and the end of her highly publicized relationship with Paul Mescal, she sings of the everyday pain and pleasure that comes with just living.
“I have no secrets, only feelings/And I know those go away/There is a difference/Between lying and deciding what not to say,” she sings on “Haunted,” and that just hits so hard, as her songs are known to do and do especially well here, regardless of what mood you need them to help you through, which is the sign of a musical success.
Nearly two years ago, Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was shot and killed in New York City. A massive manhunt followed, resulting in the arrest of Luigi Mangione, who quickly became a sort of folk hero for people fed up with the state of healthcare in the U.S., even if they may not support the use of violence in fixing or protesting the system.
On Friday, Mangione pleaded guilty to federal stalking charges in Thompson’s death.
“I shot Mr. Thompson and he died,” he told the court. “I knew what I was doing was illegal.”
Mangione also explained his motive: his back injury and experience with the U.S. healthcare system as a patient drove him to kill Thompson, although he was not specifically a customer of UnitedHealthcare. However, the company has a large reputation for denying claims to customers, especially compared to other insurers.
Mangione was arrested at a McDonald’s on Dec. 9, 2024, and police said they found a 3D-printed gun and a 3D-printed silencer in his backpack, as well as a notebook describing grievances with the healthcare industry, such as “Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming.”
Mangione is to be sentenced at a separate hearing on Dec. 18, which will be determined at the full discretion of the judge. At the state level, Mangione still faces murder charges and the possibility of life in prison, though his defense is expected to argue that both cases cover the same alleged conduct, which is essentially double jeopardy.
Before we glimpse the opening title card for “Lanterns,” co-creators Chris Mundy, Damon Lindelof and Tom King establish the stark disparity between what qualifies Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) to wear the Green Lantern’s ring versus what’s expected of John Stewart (Aaron Pierre). As with every comic book superhero, it’s all in their origin stories.
Hal Jordan, who became Earth’s first Green Lantern decades ago, exudes the confidence and charisma of a white man whose exceptionalism has been validated by the universe. Back when Hal was still a novelty to the public, we see 10-year-old John disobeying his father’s TV ban to watch the hero’s first-ever interview on “60 Minutes.” And Hal knows how to play to his audience – especially kids like John and his brothers.
“I’m a regular person, like you,” Hal says, gazing directly through the fourth wall at the tiny people he assumes are worshipping him from afar.
“In many ways, Hal Jordan was born for the role he would eventually play,” says his interviewer in a voiceover, listing all boxes of American heroism that he checks: Hal is an Air Force veteran. A test pilot. He’s fearless.
Then John’s father gets home, takes him outside to the family’s garage and shows us, most shockingly, that fearlessness is not inborn. It’s forged.
“Lanterns,” which unfolds across two timelines, is the boldest entry so far in James Gunn’s remade DC Universe. That must be a relief for longtime DC Comics fans, given its emergence on the heels of the lukewarm critical and audience reception for “Supergirl.” But out of all the co-creators and producers’ names listed in the drama’s credits, it’s Lindelof’s that heightens our expectations, owing to his outstanding success with his 2019 reinterpretation of “Watchmen.”
Where “Watchmen” indicted America’s addiction to white supremacy, “Lanterns” skeptically spotlights the durability of our meritocracy myth.
Lindelof’s involvement, along with that of “Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow” series author Tom King, signals a seriousness of intent amplified by the placing the series’ showrunner stewardship under “True Detective” and “Ozark” producer Chris Mundy.
And as Lindelof did with “Watchmen,” he and his co-creators place this fable in the universally recognizable framework of a cop drama, casting Chandler’s Hal Jordan as the grizzled veteran reluctantly training Pierre’s John Stewart to succeed him eventually.
Those familiar with this mythology know this trainee dynamic isn’t how the Green Lantern’s succession usually works. Those who trust these writers’ capabilities with using comic book properties as springboards to examine thornier issues can probably deduce that “Lanterns” is employing it for a specific reason.
Kyle Chandler in “Lanterns.”
Galactic power and privilege literally placed themselves on Hal’s finger simply because he answered one question correctly. Meanwhile, John was raised knowing he must be three times as good as everyone else to get a foot in opportunity’s door, let alone a place in the front passenger seat of every vehicle Hal insists on driving. John is an ex-Marine with a reputation as one of the top snipers in the world – the best of the best. But as Hal arrogantly reminds his trainee, John won’t be ready until the ring says he is. Even then, Hal says, he doesn’t plan on giving up that piece of jewelry any time soon. And Hal taunts John about his second-class status every chance he gets.
But John knows he doesn’t have the luxury to reveal his frustrations. As his father reminds John during a venting session that occurs after Hal nonchalantly almost kills him, “They’re allowed to have tantrums. We’re not.” So it goes, even when Hal uses his ring to zip into the sky at supersonic speed from California to Rushville, Nebraska, leaving John to fly coach and rent a car to meet him there.
In Rushville — population 1,001, says the sign on its city limits — Hal and John find a mystery that seems to be out of their jurisdiction as intergalactic law enforcers, the town’s sheriff, Kerry Kane (Kelly Macdonald), testily reminds them. But the present and possibly future Green Lanterns were summoned there for a reason best left unsaid here, and in keeping with HBO’s extensive spoiler embargo.
In Chandler and Pierre, “Lanterns” has an extraordinary pairing that sustains enough frustration, humor, passion and regret to keep us rapt through the episodes provided for review. Chandler flexes the charisma that made his “Friday Night Lights” father figure Coach Taylor such an indelible figure, while Pierre’s buttoned-down smolder slowly simmers the tension between them.
Where “Watchmen” indicted America’s addiction to white supremacy, “Lanterns” skeptically spotlights the durability of our meritocracy myth.
Teaming them up as a testy odd couple allows “Lanterns” to both highlight Hal’s insecurity and use the Green Lantern universe’s rules to interrogate systemic imbalances. Even when intergalactic forces take pains to make the Lantern Corps’ selection process fair, Earth’s unspoken dictates about worthiness make that impossible.
Exhibit A is Nathan Fillion’s Guy Gardner, who also appears in this season. Guy is probably the worst human to be granted the Green Lantern’s powers: He’s pompous, ill-mannered and insecure. But since the rings select their bearers by asking whether they’re afraid during an ambush designed to create dread, the test favors those for whom life never presents anything to fear.
By keeping the action and themes largely Earthbound and removing the interstellar glamour associated with flying supes and suits, “Lanterns” reignites our consideration of a superhero long written off in the live-action realm. Among comic book readers, the Green Lantern is on par with his Justice League peers Batman, Wonder Woman, Superman and The Flash, each of whom has anchored culturally significant live-action films and TV shows over the last 50 years or so.
In contrast, Hal Jordan’s Green Lantern was immortalized on the big screen in 2011 by way of a laughable debacle that’s considered one of the worst career decisions Ryan Reynolds ever made. John Stewart’s legend fared better in the animated “Justice League” and “Justice League Unlimited” series, which established him as a favorite among newcomers to the franchise.
Want more from culture than just the latest trend? The Swell highlights art made to last. Sign up here
Pierre’s Stewart holds the gravitas of that portrayal while also capturing the original intent of his character’s co-creator, Neal Adams, to have him evoke a young Sidney Poitier. While he’s a terrific scene partner with Chandler, he also shares a torrid chemistry with Poorna Jagannathan’s Zoe, one of the very few nonwhite Rushville residents who’s immediately drawn to John. Once we meet Rushville’s unofficial power broker, William Macon (Garret Dillahunt), we understand why. Dillahunt’s Macon embodies the sinister darkness lurking beneath the surface of any American small town, especially for outsiders.
But the writers don’t paint Macon as a simple villain, or anyone else as a cut-and-dried protagonist. Not John, certainly not Hal and not even the Guardian of the Universe tasked with watching them (played with a sunny headmistress’ formality by Laura Linney).
The world of “Lanterns” prefers to be bracingly honest about our false assumptions about heroism and whether the people we deem to be noble really are. One unquestionable element is its success in raising the low estimation of Green Lantern created by a particularly clumsy movie, simply by imagining possibilities in much bigger terms. That is what makes a Lantern a hero, and this adaptation one of the best of its kind in a long time.
“Lanterns” premieres at 9 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 16 on HBO and HBO Max.
That’s no small confession for someone who prides herself on listening to serious music. I’ve evolved from preteen grunge aficionado to high school punk fan to college indie rocker and finally become a somewhat omnivorous 20-something with ears for everything from noise-rock to tropicalia. As a woman who writes about music, I’ve worked extra hard to distance myself from teeny-boppers and groupies and drippy sentimentality.
This is all to say that nothing embarrasses me more than my secret love of Bright Eyes, once the drippiest act in all of indiedom. Primarily a vehicle for singer-songwriter Conor Oberst, whose new album, “Conor Oberst,” came out this week, the ever-rotating group of musicians known as Bright Eyes formed when he was only 15. Unlike most celebrities who are supposed to have “grown up in the public eye” — child actors, teenage pop stars, offspring of the rich and famous — Oberst was the rare young artist who wrote his own songs and found a sizable audience while still in high school.
Much of that audience was made up of teenage girls. A few years younger than the now 28-year-old Oberst, I fit right into that demographic, catching on to Bright Eyes around the turn of the millennium. It wasn’t his musical talent — which consisted at the time of some rudimentary guitar arrangements — that attracted me. And while I’ll concede that Oberst’s brooding, elfin good looks didn’t hurt, it was his unmediated laments on loneliness and heartbreak that won me over. I reveled in Bright Eyes’ earliest material, “A Collection of Songs Written and Recorded 1995-1997,” “Letting Off the Happiness” (1998), “Fevers and Mirrors” (2000) and a raft of singles and EPs.
Even then I recognized Oberst’s melodramatics for what they were, but couldn’t deny that they affected me. When he feebly insisted, on “Kathy With a K’s Song,” “Love is real/ It is not just in long distance commercials,” he vocalized my own desperation to believe it was true. The summer I turned 18, I sublet a sleeping loft in midtown Manhattan and his phrase “the coffin you call your apartment,” from “Something Vague,” permeated the space. The teenage Oberst, who attended a private high school just like I did, perfectly articulated the sorrow and angst that seem trivial to the adult world but feel epic to adolescents blessed with intact, financially comfortable families.
Of course, serious indie-rock fans — a group I would have liked to belong to — dismissed Oberst as a pretentious whiner, and cooler-than-thou critics at publications like Pitchfork grouped Bright Eyes among the most syrupy and hackneyed of emo bands. At first, even I joined in trashing him, so ashamed was I to admit to my male music-nerd friends that I was yet another girl who had fallen for Bright Eyes’ self-pitying histrionics.
Around the same time, Oberst must have started to feel as embarrassed by his reputation as I was. Too smart and self-aware to stagnate among mediocre acts like Dashboard Confessional, he did some serious growing up between “Fevers and Mirrors” and his 2002 breakthrough, “Lifted, or the Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ears to the Ground.” Less emotionally assaultive but just as personal as his earlier albums, “Lifted” embraced American roots music with an instrumental sophistication Bright Eyes had never even hinted at before. Songs like “Lover I Don’t Have to Love” and “Let’s Not Shit Ourselves (To Love and Be Loved)” diluted the extremes of emotion with the college-age apathy and detachment that I was also growing into. Oberst had learned how to stop being a teenage train wreck and start becoming a flawed but functional human being.
With its toned-down theatrics and newfound songwriting chops, “Lifted” launched Oberst’s career. His audience widened beyond disgruntled high schoolers, and he delved deeper into country, folk and blues, expanded his lyrical repertoire to include politics (a move that earned him premature comparisons to Bob Dylan), and even unsuccessfully experimented with electronic music on 2005’s “Digital Ash in a Digital Urn.”
But just when it became socially acceptable to like Bright Eyes, I found myself falling out of love with him. Though Oberst’s intimate lyrics couldn’t have been more nuanced, surprising and uncannily accurate, his political stuff was painfully literal and disappointingly simplistic. His most famous protest song, “When the President Talks to God,” sounds more childish than even his most narcissistic teenage material. “Does he ask to rape our women’s rights and send poor farm kids off to die? … Does he ever smell his own bullshit, when the president talks to God? I doubt it,” Oberst rasps, in an obvious and futile attempt to evoke Dylan, who would surely shudder at such graceless lyrics. By the time “Cassadaga,” another foray into lefty dogma, came out last year, I could barely bring myself to listen to it.
As the first widely distributed album he has recorded under his own name, “Conor Oberst” must be yet another stab at a new beginning. I had hoped it would herald a return to introspection — a close-up portrait of the artist post-“Lifted.” Though Oberst thankfully obscures or dispenses with the grating political appeals, the persona he replaces them with is almost as annoying.
Oberst’s rootsy style has begun to bleed into his lyrics, an affectation that doesn’t work for someone who wrote an entire song (“Loose Leaves”) about prep-school summer vacation. His compositions are about what they’ve always been about (isolation, memory, love and lack thereof, fear of death), only Oberst isn’t singing in his own voice anymore — he’s weaving together scraps of Bob Dylan and Neil Young and Johnny Cash. He’s trying to sound as old as the hills when the main virtue of his lyrics has always been their youthfulness.
It isn’t that I always crave confessional music. Some of my favorite artists, such as David Bowie, have made entire careers on assuming and casting off personas. Bowie’s kind of artifice works, though, because he’s aware of it, and his talents have more to do with character creation than introspection. And at a moment when the indie buzz band of the year, Vampire Weekend, is both exploiting its upper-crust image and disguising it under layers of filched African pop, it’s easy to see why Oberst may be ambivalent about his own, privileged voice. But nothing reeks of entitlement like the unearned authenticity he attempts to assume in lines like, “And it’s such a long way back/ To all the fun I had/ When nothing ever seemed to bother me/ But what can you do?/ Sleep ‘neath the stars and toil in the sun” and “There’s nothing the road cannot heal.”
Oberst is so determined to show us that he’s no longer a self-pitying teenager that he has replaced all semblance of self with the image of a smooth-talking drifter who dispenses cowboy clichés. Only at rare moments — such as on “Danny Callahan,” a song about a boy who dies of cancer, and “Lenders in the Temple,” which pleads, “I’d give a fortune to your infomercial/ If somebody would just take my call” — does the sensitive, perceptive lyricist make an appearance.
This is frustrating because, musically, the new album may be Oberst’s best. Backed by the Mystic Valley Band, which includes several Bright Eyes alums, he balances an impressive variety of moods and styles, from sad, tranquil guitar ballad (“Milk Thistle”) to carefree foot stomper (“NYC-Gone, Gone”) to loud-quiet-loud singalong (“Get-Well-Cards”). In fact, I was so enchanted by Oberst’s melodies it took me a few listens to realize how shallow I found his lyrics. And though I’m not about to throw “Conor Oberst” out the window, it won’t join his early releases in the relatively large canon of records that have personally impacted me.
For a few years Conor Oberst was the older brother I never had — he experienced everything first and left me a detailed map of the empty apartments, serious breakups and unquenchable longings that define late adolescence. These days, my anxieties involve repaying school loans, carving out a professional life and fitting all of my responsibilties into roughly 17 wakeful hours a day. While these concerns are surely less romantic than what preceded them, I can’t help wondering what Oberst would have to say about early adulthood. If he has half the insight and descriptive power at 28 that he had at 16, I can only hope the dust and tumbleweeds clear so we can hear what’s really on his mind.
I’m standing in the produce aisle of my neighborhood supermarket, between the fresh vegetables receiving their bi-hourly overhead mist and a long refrigerated wall of salad kits. Lately, the store has been running sales on the Taylor Farms ones. The discount tags have been placed, carefully it seems to me, directly over the Taylor Farms logo, giving the display the slightly furtive quality of merchandise that has recently acquired an unfortunate reputation.
Instead, I pull out my phone and open an app called Taylor Detector, which is exactly what it sounds like. Scan the barcode of a grocery item and the app tells you whether it has a documented connection to Taylor Farms — including connections that may not be obvious from the package.
There really is, apparently, an app for everything.
Taylor Detector was created by programmer Jonathan Goldner, whose other projects include Air Aware, which tracks air quality, pollen and environmental health risks, and Friday Night Lights, which reminds users when it is time to light Shabbat candles. His portfolio, taken together, suggests a particular interest in the invisible forces governing everyday life: particulates, sundown, industrial produce conglomerates.
I start scanning.
One salad kit: no.
Another: no.
For a moment, Taylor Detector is an exceptionally boring slot machine. Then I round the corner toward the bagged vegetables and point my phone at a package of Earthbound Farm broccoli florets.
This is how I learn that Earthbound Farm is owned by Taylor Farms, as is Eat Smart. The company also supplies private-label and store-brand packaged salad greens and kits for numerous major retailers from Whole Foods to Kroger to Aldi.
That small revelation — broccoli in hand, phone glowing red — gets at the gap Goldner says he built the app to address. Shoppers trying to identify Taylor Farms products themselves have occasionally been advised to look for packaging codes beginning with “TF” or similar letters. But there is no standardized public key for deciphering them; codes vary among plants and products, and the absence of an obvious “TF” is no guarantee Taylor Farms wasn’t involved.
In his FAQ, Goldner puts the problem plainly: consumers shouldn’t have to be “decoding packaging on the fly.”
Which, when you think about it, is an extraordinary activity to have entered the modern grocery-shopping repertoire.
But there is a reason people are trying.
Taylor Farms has spent much of the summer at the center of a strange and confusing food-safety story. And this week brought another recall: The company pulled prepared foods, including salsa and guacamole sold under brands such as Trader Joe’s and Walmart’s Freshness Guaranteed, after receiving jalapeños connected to a multistate Salmonella outbreak.
We have entered a moment when the government tells Americans to scrutinize their food, corporations operate supply chains consumers can barely see, and states and Washington are fighting over who gets to regulate them — and someone has responded by building an app so I can stand in the produce aisle and scan my vegetables to determine who, exactly, is behind them.
That’s somewhat funny.
It is also an awfully revealing picture of where American trust in the food system is right now.
When Taylor Farms went to the White House
In July, FDA traceback and epidemiological evidence linked shredded iceberg lettuce produced by Taylor Farms to a major Cyclospora outbreak. Then came a confusing correction: A product sample the agency had initially described as positive was later determined to be a false positive. Taylor Farms used the revision to push back on the idea that its lettuce had been definitively identified as the source; federal officials, though, maintained that the broader epidemiological and traceback evidence still pointed there.
As if that were not enough to make the average salad eater develop a mild interest in supply-chain forensics, the story soon acquired a political subplot.
Taylor Farms and its CEO, Bruce Taylor, have donated millions to conservative and Republican-aligned political groups, including a $1 million contribution to the pro-Trump super PAC MAGA Inc. in 2025. In July, as scrutiny of the outbreak intensified, company executives and lobbyists met privately with the White House. Rep. Robert Garcia, the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, subsequently demanded answers about both the outbreak and the circumstances surrounding that meeting.
None of that establishes that political access changed the government’s response. But the optics are almost laboratory-designed to produce suspicion: A company tied to a sprawling foodborne-illness investigation, whose leadership has given substantial sums to the president’s political operation, gets an emergency audience at the White House while regulators and the company publicly disagree about what the evidence means.
This is also an administration that very much wants Americans thinking harder about their food.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — who recently added cooking-show host to his duties at HHS, presiding over salmon cakes and homemade vinaigrette on “The Real Food Show” — has made distrust of the conventional American food system one of his signature themes. The show promises to teach Americans how to eat “real food,” presenting recognizable ingredients and home cooking as an antidote to a processed-food culture portrayed as artificial, addictive and imposed from above.
But the ideal MAHA consumer occupies a curious position. She should be discerning. She should read labels, mistrust mysterious additives, interrogate old nutritional orthodoxies and learn to distinguish “real” food from whatever came before it. She should, perhaps, even become a little suspicious.
Just not indiscriminately so.
Because once that skepticism travels backward through the supply chain — past the emulsifiers and dyes, toward corporate ownership, political donations, private meetings and the government agencies charged with keeping food safe — the questions become rather less tidy.
Discernment is encouraged. Distrust is curated.
When the recalls blur
Back in the produce aisle, the app has done exactly what it promised.
I now know that the broccoli florets in my hand have a documented connection to Taylor Farms.
What I do not know is whether that means I should put them back.
I have not received a recall alert for broccoli. There is no red banner telling me this particular bag is unsafe. And Taylor Farms is hardly the only name appearing in food-safety notices lately: Recent recalls have involved tomato bisque soup over possible Listeria contamination, a Chinese-style spice mix over possible Salmonella and blueberries over possible E. coli.
At a certain point, the alerts begin to blur together.
Taylor Detector can tell me who is behind the package. It cannot tell me what level of risk I should assign to that fact.
That part is still mine.
Which may be the strangest feature of this new age of food vigilance. Americans are being encouraged to become sharper, more suspicious consumers — to read more closely, question more aggressively and demand to know what is really in their food. But information arrives in fragments: a barcode result here, a recall notice there, a corrected FDA finding, a corporate statement, a congressional inquiry.
The broccoli remains broccoli.
I am simply standing in front of it with considerably more information than I had five minutes ago, and no corresponding increase in certainty. So I make the decision myself — and leave it behind.
On most days in what many people still call the “United” States of America, our president sets the daily national news agenda with noxious blasts from his favorite media platform — the one, of course, that he owns and operates.
To put it another way, our president is making money selling us information we are due as members of what’s supposed to be an open democratic society. Reporting to us is in the job description. Donald Trump simply doesn’t care.
For Trump, this proposition is a win-win. Those who need or want to hear what he has to say keep him in business. Those who disapprove or try to ignore him have no effect. Trump has been impeached twice, is a convicted felon and publicly defends insider trading. You think he gives a squat about what you think? Honestly, he doesn’t care what he thinks. He only cares about the money.
I must confess that I long ago lost interest in what he was selling. Since it is a professional necessity for me to stay tuned in, I also must confess that I can only do so now by envisioning Trump as a failed standup comic, or a Hallmark movie watched while on bad hallucinogens and cheap speed — the kind we used to call a “greenie.”
I find it difficult to stomach people who are only half as annoying as Trump. Who wants to watch the dozing Mad Hatter, doped up on stimulants, while his cursed kitchen demons poke and prod him through another “Weekend at Bernie’s” moment in the Oval Office? Sometimes I wonder what would happen if he didn’t wake up. Would he find a way to make money off that?
If he could, he would, and Truth Social would be involved somehow. After all, that platform remains Trump’s trumpet for his “Darwin Mayflower” agenda of total world domination.
On Wednesday, by way of this gateway to his shallow soul, the president told us that one of his “most trusted aides” was leaving the White House. Did Secretary of State Marco Rubio or Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent offer their resignation? After all, he’d left them holding the bag on Air Force One while he snuck away in a catering truck before being evacuated on a military jet from Turkey last month.
No. So far both Rubio and Bessent are still around. But we’ll see. Rubio didn’t look happy on Wednesday, as he stood before a group of reporters and was asked about Trump using him as a human shield. He smiled weakly and quickly turned away.
The person actually leaving, of course, is White House “pep secretary” Karoline Leavitt, who returned from paid maternity leave about a month ago and has only briefed the press corps twice since returning.
Did I miss anything?
Trump said on Truth Social that Leavitt is departing her role at the end of the month so she can spend more time with her children and family: “A decision I totally understand and respect!”
Leavitt, with her cheerful brand of obfuscation, lies and propaganda, has the potential to go much further than Sarah Sanders did. In today’s politics, the bar is so low that the sky is unlimited for someone like her.
That’s almost word for word the same explanation Sarah Sanders gave when she left Trump’s first administration. Trump’s response was also similar. Then, a few short breaths later, Sanders was running for, and winning, the Arkansas governor’s office once occupied by Bill Clinton.
Leavitt, with her cheerful brand of obfuscation, lies and propaganda, has the potential to go much further than Sanders did. In today’s politics, the bar is so low that the sky is unlimited for someone like her.
In fact, Leavitt may well become the gold standard for press secretaries into the foreseeable future. In politics, success creates imitators. Leavitt, by never failing to placate, flatter and worship her boss, has displayed a singular and decisive pathway, although not a very original one, to political success. And she has a singular talent for it.
In Leavitt’s world, Trump is always right. He has won every election by a landslide, slayed the dragons, corraled the wild beasts and brought peace, tranquility and a great economy to his kingdom. Don’t worry about Jeffrey Epstein, the Iran war or anything else. All is well, except that the Democrats are communists and ravenous beasts who probably eat their young. The price of eggs is down, and the price of gas will be, any day now
In reality, Leavitt is without a doubt the worst White House press secretary that I’ve ever had the displeasure of encountering since the day I first met Larry Speakes during the Reagan administration. Larry was polite and professional. I never had a problem getting access to ask a question. In this administration, reporters aren’t allowed access to the press secretary’s office. So much for transparency.
Trump’s escape from Ankara was a huge embarrassment, exacerbated by a floundering and incompetent press secretary. When the Secret Service devised a plan to transport Bill Clinton from India to Pakistan in 2000, it was similar to the plan that Trump employed on July 8. But back then, press secretary Joe Lockhart got the Secret Service to change the plan.
“Protecting the president is important, but there was a way we could protect the president without putting other lives at risk. We didn’t want to use the press and staffers as decoys,” Lockhart explained.
He worked with the Secret Service to develop a strategy whereby people who were present or watching on television could see that Clinton did not board the same plane as the staff and press. Three smaller military jets were nearby and was impossible to tell which plane Clinton had actually boarded. “That’s the difference between a public servant who serves the public and a monarch who believes the public serves him,” Lockhart said. “We didn’t lie, we included the press and we kept everyone safe. In Trump’s case it isn’t that they didn’t know the protocol. They didn’t care.”
In 2026 in Turkey, Trump ditched us and didn’t bother to tell us about a threat that could have gotten us all killed. Later, he said, “If I go, you go,” when apparently, he already went. Leavitt lacked the understanding, intelligence or inclination to manage the situation. Her value does not lie in critical thinking. The planning, and consideration employed by someone with Lockhart’s experience is simply beyond her capabilities, although the required empathy really shouldn’t be.
Trump lavished more effusive praise on Leavitt than anything he has recently said about Jeanine Pirro, Pete Hegseth or Kash Patel. Of course, they still fared better than Bessent and Rubio, who were offered up as a potential sacrifice on Air Force One.
Ironically, Bessent and Rubio are among the most experienced and professional of Trump’s closest advisers and top officials. Sure, that’s a low bar, but nothing Trump does encourages deep thought and professionalism. He favors those like Leavitt.
It’s all part of his “simple approach” to life, as exemplified in his so-called Patriot Games, conducted on Tuesday. Some compared this event to the fictional Hunger Games, but according to reporter John Bennett from CQ/Roll Call in a Tuesday pool report, it was “more like American Ninja Warrior.”
Trump lavished more effusive praise on Leavitt than anything he has recently said about Jeanine Pirro, Pete Hegseth or Kash Patel. They still fared better than Bessent and Rubio, who were offered up as a potential sacrifice on Air Force One.
Trump, regarding the final competition with the air of a Caesar, praised the teenage competitors’ “deep love for the country,” and went on to say that, “love of … our great country has never been better.”
All I know is that this event, which was supposed to represent one male and female from every high school in the United States, looked suspiciously monochromatic.
The reporting was colorless too. Here’s what passed as a pool report from the event: “’I knew what I wanted to do so I just did that,’ the kid from Utah told a camera afterward. It was aired on the screen here.” A reminder for those who didn’t know or had forgotten: The White House press pool is in place to report on the president, not write P.R. copy on a teenage athlete from Utah.
What was the president’s goal with this event? Who knows. Don’t look for his communication staff, or his press secretary, to provide useful information. On the other hand, if you want to insult the press, obfuscate the facts, ignore important questions and call the media people “fake news” and the “enemy of the people,” you want Karoline Leavitt.
If you want facts, here’s one they’ll probably miss: The term “Patriot Games” may be a weak callback to an inferior Harrison Ford political thriller, but at root it is a reference to an Irish folk ballad about a teen going to war that satirizes and questions the political fervor of people like Trump. As I recently learned, Bob Dylan once considered recording it.
Some press secretaries have bucked their boss, understanding that their true audience isn’t the audience of one in the White House but hundreds of millions of people across the United States, and billions more around the world, whatever their political views.
It’s been a long time since we’ve seen anything like that from a press secretary, but no one has mastered the dark art of hucksterism with Leavitt’s aplomb. She has been the cheering cherub of disinformation, the bright face and upbeat smile of divisiveness and the wholesome All-American grin of hate, death and destruction.
She fits in well with the phony Patriot Games, the potentially disastrous escape from Turkey and the monotonous daily march into madness this administration represents. Trump will miss her, but the rest of us shouldn’t.
If Leavitt is being honest about her reasons for leaving, which few people in the Trump administration ever are, then I wish her well. You only get one chance to raise your kids, and if more of us took that seriously, the world would be in far better shape.
But Leavitt rarely tells the truth, so we’ll probably soon find her anchoring a Fox News show or running for office in her home state of New Hampshire, where she lost a congressional race in 2022. One could certainly lead to the other.
After all, the sky is the limit for this new breed of press secretary, an unabashed public worshipper of the king who is more like a court jester than an information node; one who is wholly ignorant of the commitment, fortitude and intelligence the job requires, but entirely devoted to the art of covering their boss’s exposed rear end.
Welcome to the Brave New World. Join us at the Patriot Games.
In era when so much about the news is just plain depressing, what stands out about the burgeoning public rebellion against Flock security cameras is just how fun it all is. The artificial intelligence-powered surveillance cameras, which are sold by Flock Safety as mere “license plate readers” to local governments, have spurred a national cat-and-mouse game between vandals and cops that is being merrily followed on social media, mostly by people rooting for the vandals. City council meetings in which citizens swarm to protest paying for the cameras are the new must-see TV.
In Huntington, West Virginia, a small city in the heart of Appalachia, one man became an internet folk hero when he stood up at a city council meeting and said, “I’m not gonna waste your time; I’m kinda hungry. But one last thing: Every single Flock camera has about 2-3 pounds of copper and about 1-2 grams of gold. Do with that information what you will.” He then walked off in triumph.
By targeting Flock cameras, activists are building momentum for a larger rebellion against the tech industry — and against political leaders who are complicit in their assault on our freedoms.
As with opposition to AI-fueling data centers, the revolt against Flock cameras is drawing support from across the political spectrum, uniting Republicans and Democrats in red and blue America. Their frustration isn’t just rooted in annoyance at having surprise speeding tickets show up in the mail. Flock cameras have become a symbol of growing anger over the efforts by technology oligarchs to impose their dystopian fantasies on the country, replacing liberal democracy with a surveillance state. As Jill Lepore recently noted in Wired, it’s as if tech leaders read George Orwell’s “1984,” Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” and other sci-fi classics “as instruction manuals” rather than “cautionary tales.” By targeting Flock cameras, activists are building momentum for a larger rebellion against the tech industry — and against political leaders who are complicit in their assault on our freedoms.
Flock Safety embodies the dishonesty that has been the prevailing theme of tech corporate communications and marketing for at least the past decade. While the cameras are sold to the public as a banal traffic safety measure, they have prompted an outpouring of stories about how they’re being used to violate civil liberties and undermine democracy.
“Flock from the first has been quite deliberate in sequestering decision making processes — where these things are placed, what they gather and for whom — and the data gathered through them from the general public,” Adrian Daub told me. A comparative literature professor at Stanford University, his forthcoming book, “What Tech Calls Governing,” examines the increasingly authoritarian politics of Silicon Valley.
“The intersection with state actors is particularly worrisome,” Daub said. “Governments can outsource the dodgier aspects of data collection and use, while the private sector gets to disavow the obvious political implications of this kind of massive surveillance.”
According to an exhaustive 10-month analysis by Electronic Foundation Frontier, a nonprofit dedicated to defending civil liberties in our digital age, local police were using the cameras to track protesters, such as those at No Kings rallies, who were then put in a national database to be used across all jurisdictions. Despite claims that the cameras only record license plates, the technology-focused outlet 404 Media found that the database is also being used to collect information on individual people whom cops can then search for using descriptions of clothing, race, gender and body type. In Johnson County, Texas, police officers fixated on a woman suspected of having an abortion, and used the database to track her movements in an effort to prove it — even though state law is supposed to exempt the patient from criminal prosecution. Police have been outed for using the cameras to stalk people for personal reasons, such as having a conflict — or even a sexual obsession — with them.
Flock has claimed the company will reform its policies to address these issues, but history suggests it would be unwise to trust them. One former Flock employee, Jonathan Paz, has accused the company of lying about its intentions to gain government contracts, which are then abused by law enforcement to harm the public. Paz told 404 Media that company management had assured him they weren’t feeding information to agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a falsehood he passed on to city governments in his sales pitch. After finding out about a secret pilot program to help track down and detain immigrants, Paz left the company.
Flock’s behavior represents a microcosm of a larger trend in tech that should alarm freedom-loving Americans, regardless of political affiliation. Silicon Valley enriched itself with promises that the cyber revolution would mean more freedom and democracy by enabling the flow of information and communication. But in recent years, there has been a dramatic about-face as the C-suite class has become increasingly authoritarian. Algorithms and AI are used to choke off people’s access to information and make intra-human communication more difficult. Journalism is faltering as an industry, even as social media and search engines are being programmed to dissuade users from reading or watching real news sources. Surveillance is starting to feel ubiquitous, between online bots tracking our every move to cameras everywhere, including the faces of other people wearing AI glasses. Billionaires like New York Knicks owner James L. Dolan reportedly use spying tech to harass people who criticize them.
“Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on,” Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, a major donor to pro-Trump groups, observed at a recent meeting of financial analysts about the future of AI.
“There is a link between technology (whether it ‘works’ or not) and repressive state apparatuses,” Daub explained. For example, while Flock cameras expand the ability of the government to crack down on people, they also allow officials “to claim it’s not their fault when some poor sucker gets snared” unjustly by blaming poor technology. “It’s not an accident that their politics have tacked more openly to the right in recent years,” he said of the tech CEO class.
The goal of this isn’t mysterious. Tech CEOs, mimicking the villains of sci-fi, are telling the public that resistance is futile.
This can all feel overwhelming at times, which is very much by design. Silicon Valley’s hype machine portrays an AI-controlled future as inevitable, even equating the technology to a god that will overpower us humans, rendering democracy a quaint artifact of the past. AI was swiftly embedded in innumberable computer programs, often not even allowing a user to opt out. The goal of this isn’t mysterious. Tech CEOs, mimicking the villains of sci-fi, are telling the public that resistance is futile.
The Flock uprising, though, is the stirrings of public understanding that none of this inevitable — and we have the right to fight back. The public has some leverage points. Despite their elaborate efforts at secrecy and unaccountability, Flock works through government contracts. Citizens can petition leaders to avoid or drop contracts, a tactic that has been working across the country. There are still transparency laws that apply to Flock databases, which is how 404 Media and other media outlets have discovered abuses of the technology. Activists have been building maps alerting people where the cameras are.
The maps intersect with what has been the most controversial part of the Flock uprising: the vandalism. Although it appears the vandals aren’t organized in any meaningful way, they are being egged on by social media users who cheer from afar as people shoot, steal or otherwise disable the cameras. It’s understandable that the vandalism is the most compelling front of the rebellion, and not just because petty, victimless crime is a cheap thrill. Vandalizing the cameras is a sharp rebuttal to Silicon Valley talk about how technology will liberate us from the limitations of the physical world.
The reality is that bodies and physical space are still of paramount importance, which is why tracking and controlling people’s movement is a priority for tech-obsessed authoritarians. But while they’d like to pretend they are gods on an invisible mountain, bending us to their wills, the reality is that they need old-fashioned metal — copper and gold, even! — to get it done. Destroying a camera sends a strong and unmistakable message: They are finite, physical entities, just like us.
Like it or not, the vandalism sends an emboldening signal to the public that tech oligarchs are not omnipotent. If you toss a brick at their expensive cameras, they squawk. It’s crass and illegal, and yes, the cameras are insured and immediately get replaced. But the boost to human self-esteem and the reminder that our squishy bodies still matter more than all the data in the cloud? It’s hard to argue against it.
There are still plenty of pitfalls. MAGA leaders like Tucker Carlson are clocking the anti-Flock movement and trying to hijack it. Using conspiracy theories, he and others can redirect attention away from real enemies — tech oligarchs and compliant politicians — and toward blaming phantasms like the “deep state,” falsely insinuating that the tech spies are left-wingers doing some poorly defined socialism. This has the twin benefits of ginning up outrage at innocent people, while also shielding the very right-wing forces that are actually the source of the problem.
Still, it’s promising sign that people are rebelling against Flock cameras. Along with protests against data centers, it’s a sign that the public is desperate for a way to fight back against not just AI, but also the anti-democratic forces fueling this latest tech wave.
For much of the 20th century, there were two relatively straightforward ways to win elections in the United States. Conservatives espoused their belief in traditional family values and getting out of the way of the wealthy. They defended the status quo against various liberation movements and labor coalitions, fighting to keep everything as it had always been in service of the people who most benefited from the old arrangement. With their natural orientation toward the past, conservatives would run on the good old days and attack anything that read as newfangled, trusting voters who thought similarly to show up at the polls in defense of American values.
Liberals did the same, but in reverse. They fought for the rights of all people and defended the working class from the attempts of the wealthy to claw back hard-won protections. They pushed a larger, protective federal government that held back retrograde currents looking to lock people of color, women and other minorities into a permanent underclass. They ran on these values, trusting unions and activists to back them at the ballot box.
But in the late 1980s, a new path to electoral victory emerged, blazed by people who pushed left-leaning politicians to erode labor victories and sell out loyal constituencies, creating a tacked-together centrist position that left almost everyone a little bit unhappy. This “Third Way” urged Democratic politicians to adopt the hands-off economic policies of their rivals while making welfare programs more punitive, all in the hopes of netting a few wishy-washy right-wingers come election time. For nearly four decades, this thinking has birthed a seemingly endless parade of candidates, political strategists and columnists pushing the idea that the ideologues are wrong. “Shut up,” they have said to anyone believing a better world is possible, “the adults are talking.”
Outside the masthead of The Atlantic, no one better represents this political tendency better than James Carville. The “Ragin’ Cajun” first rose to national prominence in 1991 by encouraging Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, who had just announced his presidential bid, to point out to a strapped country that the economy wasn’t doing so hot. At the same time, Carville encouraged Democrats to carve up the welfare state that was buoying Americans taking the brunt of the economic downturn. Democrats had been locked out of the White House since 1980, and they were willing to try anything to win. These counterintuitive policy solutions were assumed to be smart, and Clinton’s victory in November 1992 proved it. Carville was a kingmaker, and his “please nobody” politics were the Democratic Party’s future.
A congressional wash-out just two years later couldn’t knock the bloom off the Third Way rose among Washington’s Democratic consultant class. Carville’s reputation for colorful turns of phrase, and his tendency to stomp on any calls for the party to move left, made him a favorite of cable news programmers looking to make entertaining television.
As progressives and democratic socialists have notched recent wins across the country, Carville has been there to tell the activist wing of the Democratic Party to pipe down and tack toward Republican stances on issues like transgender rights and police reform.
Now 81, Carville has remained a stock choice for cheap heat, even as his positions became more predictable, such as a recent slam on left-wing media personality Hasan Piker in which he called the streamer a “raving antisemite” due to Piker’s opposition to America’s support of Israel and his comment that he would “vote for Hamas over Israel every single time.” As progressives and democratic socialists have notched recent wins across the country, Carville has been there to tell the activist wing of the Democratic Party to pipe down and tack toward Republican stances on issues like transgender rights and police reform.
“I actually do think it’s time for Democrats to talk the ‘s’ word: schism,” he said. “I really do. Everybody’s always said, ‘No, no. We’re a coalition. We’re a big tent.’ There’s just some s**t I can’t be in the same tent with.”
All this wouldn’t grate quite so much if it were coming from someone else, someone who could point to real, sustained political wins outside of a few choice Novembers. To borrow Carville’s folksy schtick, the Ragin’ Cajun was born on third base and has spent his whole life telling network anchors he hit a triple. Tagged by the Clinton campaign and a fascinated media as a strategic genius, his standard strategy of tacking toward the center has been taken as gospel by many in the Democratic Party ever since. In truth, Clinton was a neutron bomb of charisma running against an unpopular president in a bad economy. If you need proof that the tactic doesn’t work without a generational schmoozer as its face, just look at the presidential elections since Clinton term-limited out.
Extenuating circumstances in Florida provided useful cover for the Democrats’ 2000 loss in an election that never should have been close. John Kerry blew it against George W. Bush’s 40% approval rating. It took Barack Obama, another hall-of-fame charmer, to win back the White House in 2008. Then came 2016.
Trump’s win should have forced reflection among Carville and his ilk, some admission that the project of the New Democrats had ended in obvious failure. Kamala Harris’s Liz Cheney-boosting, Glock-boasting campaign should have erected the tombstone on Third Way’s grave. Instead, Carville can still be counted on to punch left for the cameras while his ideological allies fill out the opinion pages of most major American newspapers.
He defended Graham Platner, the former Maine Senate candidate who ended his campaign in disgrace following allegations of sexual misconduct, seemingly because of an innate need to be on the opposite side of every issue from Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who recently told TMZ, “James Carville has an opinion on everything, and I pay attention to almost one out of 10.”
You don’t need to look at Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s approval ratings to know the centrist wing of the Democratic Party is clearly out of gas. The energy of the party is now with progressives like El-Sayed, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Ocasio-Cortez’s early wins proved that Democratic voters had an appetite for left-leaning solutions to the ongoing economic crises. Mamdani offered an amiable leftist alternative to “making the trains run on time,” flexing state power to make life easier and more affordable for average citizens. In his recent primary election, El-Sayed showed that centrists’ belief in playing nice with the opposition was played out.
Recent progressive wins have shown that there’s no need to accept the framing of conservatives on issues like reeling in corporations and the war in Gaza. Allowing debate about the party’s supposed core beliefs on Republican terms is the sort of milquetoast politics that led us to where we are now: constantly fighting against whatever fantasy Carville’s counterparts on cable news have cooked up instead of talking about substantive issues.
Republican Ken Paxton and Democrat James Talarico portray their U.S. Senate campaigns as a fight for the soul of America — one in which God plays an active yet vastly different role.
Talarico, believing God is on the side of the oppressed and the marginalized, focuses his message to voters on equity and protecting personal freedom.
Paxton sees God as on his side — a force safeguarding his ability to protect Texas and the nation from disaster at the hands of the “radical left.”
“I truly believe that God just delivered me, not because I am a great person, because God is sovereign and he does what he wants to do,” Paxton said on Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’spodcast, referring to tribulations that included an unsuccessful 2023 impeachment on corruption charges.
“I don’t take credit for it, it’s really by the grace of God,” Paxton said.
In Texas — where two-thirds of the adult population identifies as Christian and 45% say religion is “very important” in their life — the candidates are asking voters to choose between two dramatically different views of Christianity. Paxton’s version insists conservative Christian values — such as protecting the unborn and preserving the nation’s Judeo-Christian heritage — must prevail. Talarico’s Christianity celebrates pluralism, affirms LGBTQ+ individuals and believes God transcends all partisan divisions.
“Scripture says you can’t love God and hate other people,” Talarico, a seminarian, said in a sermon posted on TikTok in December 2025. “You can’t love God and abuse the immigrant. You can’t love God and bully the outcast. You can’t love God and oppress the poor.”
“We spend so much time looking for God out there that we miss God in the person sitting right next to us, in that neighbor who bears the divine image. In the face of a neighbor, we glimpse the face of God,” he said.
Talarico has made the New Testament command to love thy neighbor a centerpiece of his campaign. That focus has also given Paxton ammunition to portray his opponent as out of touch with Texas values and Scripture.
“So, what are the differences between me and my opponent?” Paxton said in a July campaign rally in McAllen in a now viral X clip. “I’m sure you know some of them. One of them is family.”
“Actually, let me talk about faith first,” he said.
Paxton spent the next minute critiquing Talarico’s faith, stating the Democratic nominee had said that God is nonbinary and that supporting the oil and gas industry is un-Christian.
Talarico has dismissed the criticism, saying his statements were taken out of context, but the Republican continues to assail his opponent’s faith, implying and outright stating that Talarico cannot be considered a Christian.
Talarico’s views, Paxton said on Patrick’s podcast, are “antithetical to historical Christian views” and “adopted from liberal theology that do not reflect what Scripture says.”
The message is a frequent theme in Paxton’s stump speeches.
Talarico has gone on the offensive as well, criticizing Christian nationalism, an ideology that depicts the U.S. as a nation founded on Christian principles that must be protected by the government. Many Paxton-supported policies, according to Talarico, advance that agenda.
Talarico pointed to a state law requiring Texas public school classrooms to display donated copies of the Ten Commandments — a law that Paxton supports and has defended in court as state attorney general.
“It’s using political power to elevate one religious tradition over all the others,” Talarico told podcaster Joe Rogan in July 2025. “It’s using governmental power to dominate our neighbors instead of loving them as ourselves, which is exactly what we’re called to do as Christians.”
The Texas Tribune and Religion News Service requested interviews from both candidates. Paxton’s campaign did not respond to the interview request but had sent an earlier statement criticizing Talarico’s understanding of Christianity. Talarico’s campaign pointed to the Democrat’s extensive comments about his faith in sermons, speeches and interviews.
“Founded on the rock of Biblical Truth”
Paxton is an evangelical Christian, though his denominational affiliation is unclear, who has questioned a strict separation of church and state, arguing the phrase does not appear in the U.S. Constitution. Last year he encouraged Texas students to recite the King James version of the Lord’s Prayer in support of a law allowing school districts to dedicate class time for prayer.
“In Texas classrooms, we want the Word of God opened, the Ten Commandments displayed, and prayers lifted up,” Paxton wrote in a message on the office of attorney general’s website. “Twisted, radical liberals want to erase Truth, dismantle the solid foundation that America’s success and strength were built upon, and erode the moral fabric of our society.”
The U.S. was “founded on the rock of Biblical Truth,” he wrote, vowing to fight “far-left attempts to push our country into the sinking sand.”
Paxton has also said his faith — and the Constitution, which he said was “written by people of faith” in a 2015 interview with the Tribune — informs his opposition to abortion and gay marriage, and he has called gun ownership a God-given right protected by the Second Amendment.
Paxton’s combination of religion and politics is rooted in the alliance between the Republican Party and conservative Christianity that dates to “the late 1970s and early 1980s in the formation of the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition,” said Janine Giordano Drake, a professor of history at Indiana University.
There were “many efforts at that time to define a so-called Christian moral politics around what they call family values, personal responsibility, what they defined as appropriate expression of sexuality and patriotism,” Drake said.
Talarico, disagreeing with many of the theological and political positions commonly associated with the religious right, rejects the idea that faithful Christians must oppose abortion and says he trusts women to make decisions about their own bodies.
“That’s a belief I have not despite my faith, but because of it. Jesus never talks about abortion. The Bible is silent on abortion,” he said in an interview with Jamie Kern Lima in late May.
Talarico’s campaign emphasizes the need to get the government out of private personal decisions, and the Democrat advocates for a version of Christianity that accepts all people as made in God’s image.
Talarico attends Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary and is training to become a pastor in the Presbyterian Church (USA), the nation’s largest Presbyterian denomination. He is currently on leave from his degree program.
Both Senate candidates have been criticized for falling short of being an authentic or true Christian — Talarico for his progressive Christian message, and Paxton for two alleged extramarital affairs whose wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton, filed for divorce “on biblical grounds” in July 2025.
Elesha J. Coffman, a professor of American intellectual and religious history at Baylor University, traces debates over the “correct” practice of Christianity to the Civil War, when Christians on both sides of the conflict disagreed over interpretations of the Bible.
“The pro-slavery factions were picking on specific verses like ‘slaves obey your masters’ and saying, ‘Well, we’re clearly advancing the more biblical society because look, the Bible says exactly what we’re doing,’” Coffman said.
“The Northern abolitionists had some specific verses, but it was also bigger picture — what do we understand to be true about God? What do we understand to be true about human nature and human flourishing? So even if the Bible says these specific things, like let’s nuance that, let’s contextualize that, let’s acknowledge that our world is different,” she said.
A recent Fox News poll found 78% of white evangelicals would choose Paxton over Talarico. Support for Paxton drops to 57% for “regular worship attenders.” The same poll found 51% of registered voters in Texas preferred Talarico, as did 63% of moderates.
“Forcing our religion down their throats”
Protecting religious freedom and practice has been a Paxton priority since he became attorney general in 2015, generating loyal support from grassroots conservatives.
“I was thinking about one of my very first cases when I was attorney general,” he said during a July campaign speech in McAllen. “There was a teacher in Bell County, just an innocent teacher who put up a Linus cartoon over Christmas that said ‘Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given.’ And the school board voted to make her take that down.”
“We defended her,” Paxton said. “She has a right to her free expression, her religious liberty.”
Over the last 10 years, Paxton has championed religious freedom in court, often defending groups or individuals with conservative Christian views, particularly on marriage and gender.
Paxton has filed legal briefs defending Christian prayer as an acceptable way to open court proceedings, supporting an employer’s right to refuse to supply contraceptives, defending foster parents who “hold traditional beliefs about marriage,” defending a baker who refused on religious grounds to make a cake celebrating a “gender transition,” supporting a football coach who was fired for praying after games, and more.
Tisa Wenger, a professor of American religious history at Yale Divinity School, said religious liberty has long been understood as “an all-American ideal that many Americans are very proud of.”
“It’s a kind of principle that lots of people can claim, and do claim — and they claim it for their own purposes,” Wenger said in an interview.
“It is not restricted to one group or one side of the political spectrum,” she said, adding that the past two decades have seen a “more conservative approach to religious freedom.”
This shift prioritizes the expression of conservative Christianity over other religions, replacing “older American traditions” that believed the separation of church and state was the foundation of religious freedom, Wenger said.
At the nation’s founding, “the fear was religious tyranny of one particular church over others,” she said.
“In some ways, we are also returning to that moment now,” Wenger said. “Conservative Christians have a lot of public power, and there are many minorities — including Christians who are more on the left — who are protesting that on very similar grounds that people like Baptists did in the Revolutionary period against a kind of established church.”
As the Republican Party has increasingly embraced blurring the line between religion and government, Paxton has called the Ten Commandments an expression of America’s legal, moral and historical heritage, even as families have sued — and are suing — to remove them from classrooms, arguing the displays violate their right to practice religion and improperly expose students to religious doctrine.
On the floor of the Texas House, where Talarico has served since 2019, the Austin-area representative said displaying the Ten Commandments in public schools was un-American and un-Christian.
“I believe this bill is idolatrous, I believe it is exclusionary, and I believe it is arrogant,” he said in a May 2023 clip that went viral on X with over 5.7 million views. “And those three things, in my reading of the Gospel, are diametrically opposed to the teachings of Jesus.”
Talarico expanded on the notion during a February appearance on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, saying: “We are called to love all of our neighbors, including our Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh, agnostic, atheist neighbors.”
“Forcing our religion down their throats is not love. It’s why I’ve fought so hard for that sacred separation in our First Amendment,” he said.
“If God wants me here, no one can stop me”
Paxton, a vocal supporter of President Donald Trump, has frequently portrayed himself as a victim of political witch hunts. And like Trump, Paxton believes he is destined to usher in a greater, God-ordained future.
“Despite the fact that the left and the establishment wanted me out, there’s a greater power,” Paxton said during the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority Conference in June.
“I’m not here because of some great thing I did, I’m here because God delivered me,” Paxton said, likening himself to other “not particularly perfect” biblical figures like Peter, Paul and David. “If God wants me here, no one can stop me. If God doesn’t want me here, no one can help me.”
Daniel Shelton attended an early August campaign rally in Houston and said he admired Paxton’s common sense.
“A lot of people say, ‘Well, he’s got baggage, he cheated on his wife.’ Well, so did King David. Get over it,” said Shelton, 66. “I’m voting for the office. I’m praying for the man that’s going to fill that office.”
Across the political spectrum, invocations of divine favor have a long history in the United States, said Heath Carter, professor of American Christianity at Princeton Theological Seminary and author of “Union Made,” a book about the 19th-century labor movement in Chicago.
“The workers that I write about in Union Made, they believed God was on their side,” Carter said. “They looked at the Bible and they said, look, Jesus said the labor is worthy of his hire.”
Black Christians during the civil rights movement also understood “that God was on their side, that God was the God who led the Israelites out of Egypt and out of slavery and into liberation,” he said.
Over the last four decades, members of the Christian right “felt that they have the momentum, the kind of wind in their sails, and that God is with them in their righteous fight to take back America,” Carter said.
Talarico said he does not believe Jesus would be on the side of Democrats or Republicans. ”Jesus is far more radical than any political party. … I think he would challenge both political parties to keep working toward a more radical vision for democracy,” he said in an interview with The Breakfast Club.
Paxton has described his political fights with Democrats in terms of spiritual warfare.
“The fight is vicious,” he told the Faith & Freedom Coalition crowd after encouraging them to pray for him and the future of the country. “They try to put us in jail. They try to disparage us. … They try to ruin our families.”
“This is a battle not with flesh and blood, as we know, this is a spiritual battle,” he said.
Colleen DeGuzman contributed to this report.
This story is published through a collaboration between The Texas Tribune and Religion News Service.
Disclosure: Baylor University and Fox News 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.
If you’re also a pop culture obsessive, it was probably around early 2025 when alarming photos of Ariana Grande began rolling up in your text messages and DMs; images of the star looking particularly gaunt, shoulder bones and clavicle protruding. With the recent release of her new music video for “Petal,” those messages intensified to establish a troubling refrain: “Is Ariana Grande OK?”
It’s hard to tell when, exactly, raising legitimate concern about a woman celebrity’s appearance became synonymous with your run-of-the-mill misogyny or bullying. But somewhere between the “you go, girl” and #MeToo eras emerged a dishonesty around how we discuss women’s bodies.
That was a total vibe shift from the tedious “extreme theater kid energy” discourse that popped up whenever Grande and her “Wicked” co-star, Cynthia Erivo, so much as breathed in the same room together throughout the film and its sequel’s exhausting two-year press tour. The new messages carry with them a deep sense of concern and bewilderment, because they come from people who are mere spectators with neither the medical degree, language, nor relationship with Grande to perform the appropriate wellness check. Still, what comes across is the sincere questioning of the health of celebrities like Grande and, more recently, Kaia Gerber and Jenna Ortega, both of whom have also raised alarm bells with their extremely thin bodies. Potentially, this questioning is a call for an intervention.
Attempts to bring concern from intimate settings to social media are too often met with accusations from masses of strangers, some who even call themselves fans, of body shaming replete with suggestions that these women celebrities are just “petite” and other accompanying body positivity platitudes.
It’s hard to tell when, exactly, raising legitimate concern about a woman celebrity’s appearance became synonymous with your run-of-the-mill misogyny or bullying. But somewhere between the “you go, girl” and #MeToo eras emerged a dishonesty around how we discuss women’s bodies at a time when there’s been a frightening return of the ‘90s “heroin chic” look and amid an increasingly worrying dependence on GLP-1s. Consider it an overcorrection of hypercritical commentary that has historically targeted female stars throughout Hollywood history.
Even with constant access to information about medical breakthroughs, counseling on how to support or approach someone who may be experiencing a health crisis, people aren’t much more equipped to confront female body issues today, including their own, than in the ‘80s.
On one hand, the impulse to protect women in the public eye who have been especially vulnerable to criticism that too often ties their physical appearances to their success and, sometimes consequently, their self-worth is fair. On the other hand? The urge to deflect from difficult conversations, distorting concern for something ugly or otherwise pejorative, is misleading and unproductive.
That kind of response too often is more about proving a sense of standom than actual concern for a fave.
(Anna Webber/Getty Images for Cold Stone Creamery & Wetzel's Pretzels) Ariana Grande and Taylen Biggs
Want more from culture than just the latest trend? The Swell highlights art made to last. Sign up here
The silence, and silencing, of what may or may not be a serious issue that these young celebrities are experiencing feels reminiscent of the kind of culture that women such as Karen Carpenter were immersed in several decades ago. The kind that shrouded The Carpenters’ silky-voiced singer’s emaciated appearance in a quiet shame until her death in 1983 at age 32.
At the height of her fame and success in 1981, Carpenter weighed about 80 pounds. Her fans, some “who knew something was terribly wrong but assumed she had cancer or some other disease,” were aghast at her appearance whenever she took the stage. Few people then, not even Carpenter’s closest confidantes, knew how to talk about what was actually an eating disorder, much less manage it. “If this had happened in today’s world, I think Karen would have lived,” Frenda Franklin, Carpenter’s friend, said in a 2010 interview with The Guardian. “I think we would have had a good shot. They know so much more. We were dancing in the dark.”
While Grande has not publicly confirmed either way, Gerber recently opened up about her own “disordered eating,” as reported by People, and a clip of Ortega has been circulating in which she looks back on her struggles as a child actor, saying, “I would go all day without eating, drinking, whatever, because I wanted so badly to not be in the way of anybody.”
The truth is even with constant access to information about medical breakthroughs, counseling on how to support or approach someone who may be experiencing a health crisis, people aren’t much more equipped to confront female body issues today, including their own, than in the ‘80s. It might actually be worse. Not only do people still struggle with how, if, and when to talk about it, but whether that concern is wrapped up in their own self-image in a social media era that too often normalizes untenable and outright unrealistic female bodies.
(Tommaso Boddi/Variety via Getty Images) Kaia Gerber and Hayes Warner at FX’s “The Shards” party
To that end, when Grande recently said “that sh*t is not mine to carry,” following a statement from her team that she is planning a break from the public eye after the “Petal” tour due, in part, to public scrutiny, she has a point. Hopefully her personal circle gives her the love and support that she deserves during that time. She has become the latest poster child for body issues, who the masses have decided to stack a mountain of (some of their own) baggage on top of.
In the last several years, Grande has been ubiquitous. She’s been on virtually every major red carpet, nominated for an Oscar, released a new album, launched a new tour, was cast in one project after the next, and appeared in countless social media and magazine interviews. During that time, people from every corner of the world online seemed to take every opportunity to scrutinize every contour of her frail frame.
But, as she also said, “many things can be true at the same time.”
It’s true that this article will undoubtedly bring even more unwanted attention to Grande’s body, but hopefully in a way that compels people to engage in more honest conversations about body image and their own complicity in female body issues. The discourse around these celebrities shouldn’t center, for instance, on whatever message their body image might be sending to young people who look up to them. To Grande’s point, and to be especially frank, that is more on those people and how their support systems help them better understand those images than her.
This is about how people express concern for young women whose bodies we’ve witnessed deteriorate on screen — and that they do at all.
Francesca Hong’s narrow loss in Tuesday’s Wisconsin Democratic primary for governor has been billed as a setback for progressives following a string of high-profile wins. A “stunning loss,” the New York Times proclaimed on Wednesday. POLITICO declared the democratic socialist’s defeat by David Crowley, a mainstream Democrat and the Milwaukee County executive, “is undercutting the narrative of an emerging insurgency.” Both publications agreed the result exposed “the limits of the left” and its power.
In fact, what the race revealed were the weaknesses and limitations of an ineffective candidate who would have almost certainly flamed out in the general election. Democrats across the political spectrum, and especially progressives, should all be breathing a sigh of relief at her defeat.
Hong had a compelling story. The child of South Korean immigrants, she has confronted the high cost of college — she was once forced to drop out to find work — and has experienced financial hardship. As a single mother and service-industry worker, Hong carries relatable and valuable lived experience that is often missing from the halls of state and federal government.
The problem was that the 37-year-old assemblywoman couldn’t quite manage to assemble a compelling narrative from all those memorable, resonant elements. At nearly every turn, she allowed herself to be defined: as a well intentioned candidate with some wacky views (“Abolish the Senate,” anyone?); as a provocateur who, to quote one Wisconsin voter, was “sort of inviting some controversies”; as being, in the words of the Wisconsin Elections Commission’s Democratic chair, “willing to sell out the Jews of Wisconsin for a few bucks”; as the contender most likely to prevail in a primary that sometimes seemed like a Marx Brothers comedy, with candidates dropping out of (and, in the case of Crowley, reentering) the race according to shifting fortunes.
Hong was never fully in control of her own narrative. By the end, and by her own hand, she was reduced to being a joyless hater of holidays and an avowed enemy of All Things Fun.
Her interviews didn’t help. While Hong described herself as a “hustler” in a July interview with MS NOW’s Antonia Hylton, the energy she gave off was anything but. She appeared out of her element, far too hesitant even in the friendly environment afforded by the liberal-oriented network, and her performance set the stage for a test she was bound to fail when it came three weeks later. In an appearance on Fox News, Hong withered under host Dana Perino’s questioning about how much her views aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America platform and her provocative social media history, which included calls to “[d]efund then abolish” the police.
Worse were Hong’s attempts to confront her apparent antipathy toward holidays including Thanksgiving, Valentine’s Day, Fourth of July and even Halloween that appeared on her unscrubbed X account. Asked by CNN’s Kaitlan Collins about her Nov. 16, 2020, call to “cancel Thanksgiving,” Hong passed up the chance to disavow the tweet and instead talked about how she cooked a Thanksgiving meal at 16. Two days later, she told POLITICO’s Irie Sentner that it was her “favorite holiday” while admitting, “I’m kind of a curmudgeon when it comes to holidays in general.”
Hong might as well have changed her campaign slogan to I HATE FUN. It’s a tale as old as Dickens: No one likes a Scrooge.
Hong might as well have changed her campaign slogan to I HATE FUN. It’s a tale as old as Dickens: No one likes a Scrooge.
A more adept progressive, such as New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee, would have easily batted away the questions. Ocasio-Cortez, in fact, did just that during an appearance on ABC News’ “This Week” two days before the primary. When host Jonathan Karl asked her about Hong’s social media history and past positions, Ocasio-Cortez laughed it off.
“I have a local city councilman that has this saying that ‘Woke 1 was crazy,’” she said of Hong’s tweets, some of which came during the Covid-19 pandemic. “And I think that what’s important is that we have to assess what a candidate is saying now.” Describing some of the ideas raised during this time as useful, Ocasio-Cortez said, “during lockdown, of course — rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric that we would use today.”
The congresswoman’s response demonstrated an agility and awareness that Hong clearly lacks, something that was surely a factor in Ocasio-Cortez’s decision to not endorse her fellow democratic socialist. When asked by Karl, she said she was focused on “winning back the Congress, winning back the House and positioning ourselves to have the best chance possible to win the Senate.”
But the diss was notable — and shrewd. For the left to succeed, Ocasio-Cortez knows they must move beyond functioning as scolds. Dourness rarely plays well in politics, and it’s a particularly unbecoming quality in progressives, who can sometimes come off as humorless. The most electable progressives are instead happy warriors, a quality Ocasio-Cortez and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani have in spades.
Witness Madmani’s recent conversation with the New York Times’ Lulu Garcia-Navarro. In a telling exchange, Garcia-Navarro asked the mayor about traits that make a good politician, and then she pointed to his smile and innate optimism. He replied, “You are showing something to the world about who you are, what you’re for, how it makes you feel, and I think oftentimes it feels like politicians are blank canvasses, and everyone else is supposed to paint them in. I think it’s time to show people ‘This is whom I am. Maybe you don’t like it, maybe you do like it. But this is me.'”
Despite her efforts and compelling personal story, Francesca Hong allowed everyone else to paint her in, and had she prevailed in the primary, it would have likely doomed her in November. She was an imperfect messenger for the left, and instead of being a setback, her loss on Tuesday was a gift to progressives.
The most notorious press conference Donald Trump ever held was the one in which he told a scientist in attendance to look into the possibility of using household disinfectant inside the human body to kill the Covid-19 virus. He had watched a demonstration of how the product worked on surfaces, you see, and he thought they hadn’t considered the possibility that humans could ingest it and achieve similar effects. That day, April 23, 2020, marked the last of Trump’s daily televised pandemic press briefings, and it may very well have been the last straw for many of those who voted against him just a few months later.
At the beginning of the pandemic, Trump told the public that everyone at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was astonished at how well he understood the science. He mused that he probably could have been a doctor. Despite the utter humiliation of that famous press conference, the president remains undeterred in that fantasy in his second term.
In September, Trump announced that pregnant women should not take Tylenol during pregnancy, claiming without evidence the drug is linked to an increased risk of autism. On Monday he donned his imaginary white coat again to issue an executive order changing the U.S. government’s recommendation for the childhood vaccine schedule — because he is convinced that the vaccines cause autism.
Neither of those assertions is grounded in scientific fact, and both have negative ramifications for women and children if they are followed. The recommendations to break up the combined measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccines into individual doses because today they “look like the size of a bottle of soda poured into a little child’s body,” as Trump stated, are plainly absurd. Any association between these vaccines and autism has been thoroughly debunked, and all the major medical and scientific associations immediately issued statements that they would not follow these recommendations.
Trump is aided in his crusade to personally cure autism by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his loyal health and human services secretary and anti-vaccine crusader, who dutifully stood by his side on Monday and parroted the same nonsense. The new recommendations will likely be followed by millions of MAHA moms who have fallen down the rabbit hole of misinformation and disinformation that Kennedy and Trump have been digging. But the pair are just the latest in the long line of hustlers, fraudsters and canny opportunists who have been working to undermine science in this country for more than a century. In fact, doing so is an all-American tradition.
Two groups have long been especially successful in challenging the public’s confidence in science: Christian fundamentalists, a religious force that grew into a political juggernaut, and Big Business.
Two groups have long been especially successful in challenging the public’s confidence in science: Christian fundamentalists, a religious force that grew into a political juggernaut, and Big Business. While neither has openly colluded with the other, they have both furthered each other’s goals and ended up in a political alliance. One wouldn’t think these two disparate institutions would have much in common. But they share similar tactics: lying to their followers and customers for power and profit. And both have their reasons for rejecting science that interferes with their own interests.
Christianity and science have been in tension ever since the Catholic Church placed Galileo under house arrest for suggesting that the earth wasn’t the center of the universe. But for the most part, the tension was at least somewhat manageable, and both carried on in their own spheres. In the early 20th century, however, a new Christian movement formed that took direct aim at science on the grounds it constituted a threat to the belief in the Bible’s inerrancy, and the modern war began.
In the beginning, this new movement was largely financed by a pair of Los Angeles oil magnates. Milton and Lyman Stewart were religious zealots who were horrified by the encroachment of modernist ideas on society. The Stewarts published a book called “The Fundamentals,” giving the movement its name, and shipped copies all over North America at their own expense, literally spreading the fundamentalist gospel and influencing massive numbers of Americans to reject scientific knowledge wherever it conflicted with literal biblical interpretations.
Fast forward to the 1980s, and Christian fundamentalism had become a powerful political force as evangelical organizations like the Moral Majority and Focus on the Family aligned directly with the Republican Party, wielding huge influence on right-wing politics. In doing so, they signed on with the most powerful GOP faction, Big Business. Using their influence with their followers, they managed to help convince millions to doubt any science that interferes with the interests of huge corporations, and reject regulations and taxation to mitigate the problems that came with their products.
Once again, the fossil fuel industry led the way. Another pair of brothers, Charles and David Koch, zealous libertarians rather than fundamentalist Christians, ran a global conglomerate that dealt in energy and chemicals, and they were determined to stop the growing consensus that fossil fuels were warming the planet. Like the Stewarts before them, the Koch brothers financed a massive campaign to convince people that the science was wrong, and they brought a lot of their friends in the industries along with them.
In the 2000s, a tsunami of money was released into the political system to block climate legislation, particularly during Barack Obama’s presidency. This has shown no signs of stopping, despite mounting evidence every day that the planet is under increasing stress and people are starting to suffer in vast numbers. The result of these efforts is obvious: Less than half of all Americans now believe climate change is caused by human activity. Only 21% of Republicans do.
Science denialism comes from many directions, and unfortunately we are in a period where it’s flourishing. There have always been hustlers and snake oil salesmen, but today the internet provides endless opportunities for people to “do their own research” and find whatever feels right to them, so conspiracy theories have become the lingua franca of our society. Delusional narcissists like Trump and Kennedy, occupying powerful positions and spreading nutty medical advice, are now just par for the course.
Some of the medical and scientific skepticism is a result of people feeling adrift in a rapidly changing world and drowning in competing information. But make no mistake: Powerful societal interests are also benefiting from all this, and it’s not by accident. They have spent a lot of time and a whole lot of money creating this environment of mistrust and suspicion, each for their own purposes but sharing the same goal, and it’s paid off handsomely.
Amid weeks of compounding foreign policy failures and an economy that lost a revised 103,000 jobs across May and June, conservatives are grappling online with a brutal realization that the Republican Party as a whole is desperate to ignore: What do you tell working-class voters who are drowning under the weight of unrelenting inflation and sluggish job growth, when your entire economic platform is built on a foundation of gaslighting?
The GOP has spent the better part of the last decade telling Americans it is the party of economic populism. Donald Trump was supposed to be the politician who understood the frustration of people who felt left behind by globalization and stagnant wages. But 18 months into the president’s second term, Republicans have arrived at a remarkable place: running the Biden administrations’ failed playbook on inflation. Now conservatives are fighting with one another over whether a $20 burrito is actually too expensive.
The current food discourse is not about the price of avocado toast or organic eggs, but it is a similarly mundane symbol of a much larger problem confronting Trump and the Republican Party heading into the November midterms. It started, as these things do now, with a tweet.
Last week, Daily Wire host Matt Walsh complained that grocery prices were “insane” and still rising. Then Turning Point USA spokesman Andrew Kolvet relayed a comment from one of the organization’s college students: “A burrito shouldn’t cost $20.” Kolvet added his own gloss — that it’s “a hangover from Covid and Biden-era inflation” — but he noted that “the lived experience is the same: It just feels like basic things cost too much.”
Inflationary pressures on grocery prices and supply chains have caused the cost of a standard beef burrito to climb 50% since 2020. For workers at the 50th percentile — the middle class, in other words — wages have not kept pace with fast-food prices, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics price index for limited-service meals and snacks. Rather than reading the room, conservative politicians and pundits immediately rushed to echo the White House line that affordability concerns are a Democratic hoax, and then pivoted to calling young people lazy and irresponsible. This is a remix of the lecture supposedly spoiled millennials, who refused to sacrifice every small pleasure on the altar of homeownership, heard for years about $7 lattes.
In response to what he called the “burrito debate,” Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, told people to “get a job” and “eat Ramen.” Ben Shapiro responded as if the student had demanded that the federal government provide what he curiously described as gourmet burritos. Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen reminisced about working two jobs, living with roommates and eating ramen after college. When he reminded college students that burritos are covered by their meal plans, he got fat shamed by Vice President JD Vance. Fox Business blamed the commotion on young people and their supposed addiction to “little treats.”
What these responses revealed is that a large segment of right-wing media would rather lecture struggling families — cook at home, get a roommate, eat ramen, skip Starbucks — and condemn their lifestyles than acknowledge the obvious reality about out of control prices.
What these responses revealed is that a large segment of right-wing media would rather lecture struggling families — cook at home, get a roommate, eat ramen, skip Starbucks — and condemn their lifestyles than acknowledge the obvious reality about out of control prices. Babylon Bee editor Joel Berry generated a pile on after he suggested in a viral post that he could feed a family of eight for under $20, only to admit he was entirely skimping on meat and loading up on beans.
Trump has called affordability concerns a Democratic “con job” and “hoax,” and a meaningful chunk of MAGA media’s older guard will not, under any circumstances, hear a complaint about the cost of living. But by engaging in the burrito debate, many of them unintentionally exposed the fact that despite their comments on the youth, they have not actually spoken to a young person in years. The pushback they experienced from Trump’s younger supporters was swift — and remarkable.
Far-right activist and conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec questioned how Trump could claim this is a “Golden Age” with the disappearance of McDonald’s Dollar Menu. “Let’s be frank about it,” Fox News host Tomi Lahren wrote on X, “some Americans are turning to socialism because Republicans have failed us so dismally that even the most destructive economic model imaginable feels palatable to people who are struggling to make ends meet and buy groceries.”
Even as Trump’s own base was arguing about burritos, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent went on CNBC and announced he was “sick” of hearing about the so-called K-shaped economy, the idea that gains are flowing overwhelmingly to the wealthy while everyone else stagnates or falls behind, and declared it flatly over. In its place, Bessent said, America now has a “C economy,” in which lower wage earners are, in his telling, finally clawing their way back.
The secretary cited a 2% wage gain for the bottom quarter of earners as proof. But the Atlanta Fed’s own wage tracker showed the bottom quarter of earners had the lowest median wage growth of any income group, a pattern that has held every month since October 2024. Bessent, in other words, picked the one statistic that told a happy story and built a press appearance around it, while the broader data he was being asked about pointed the other way.
But if Chipotle has genuinely become a luxury good in just a couple of years, the administration’s economic policy is a complete and utter failure. A reliable indicator of economic health is real disposable income, which tracks how much extra money people actually have after essentials are paid for. Since February 2025, the month after Trump returned to office, it has remained completely flat. Every other time in modern history that real disposable income has flattened out for that long, the nation has been stuck in a recession.
Pocketbook issues have always been the single strongest motivator for the electorate. During a 1980 debate against the incumbent Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan famously asked voters if they were better off now than they were four years ago. Trump can obfuscate, lie or blame the media for only so long before even his most ardent supporters look at the empty space in their wallets after a trip to the grocery store and realize the truth. While they aren’t suddenly going to vote for Democrats, many of his MAGA followers will simply sit on their hands and stay home in November after concluding they are definitively worse off.
The split in MAGAland is not really over burritos. It is over whether MAGA can admit that the economic anger which carried Trump back to power was real, whether it persists under his administration and whether working people deserve anything better than a lecture on personal responsibility. The conservative scolds are not offering a solution because they do not believe there is a social problem to solve. In their worldview, a family’s shrinking purchasing power is primarily evidence of bad character.
The structural depression is looming large, and as the administration prepares to slash welfare programs further, the online rhetoric from the right will inevitably paint anyone hurt by safety net cuts as a lazy loser. Already, an estimated four million people have lost critical food assistance through SNAP benefits. In any normal political climate, mocking average Americans for being anxious about the economy by calling them lazy or entitled would be immediate political suicide. Imagine Republicans trying that stunt in August 2006 when they were already facing a brewing blue wave in November. But in today’s hyperpartisan and media-fragmented ecosystem, millions of voters are expected to fall in line and vote for the ruling party — regardless of how badly they are squeezed at the checkout counter.
This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.
Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.
This news analysis was originally distributed in Votebeat’s free weekly newsletter. Sign up to get future editions, including the latest reporting from Votebeat bureaus and curated news from other publications, delivered to your inbox every Saturday.
A 2004 paper on the history of presidential election betting markets kicks off with a partial quote from the transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau’s 19th-century essay “Civil Disobedience”: “All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it.”
Not everyone agrees with that last part. And the rapid rise of online prediction markets such as Kalshi and Polymarket are bringing that tension to the fore.
Prediction markets are websites that sell contracts that allow users to wager on event outcomes. Political examples could include which party will control the U.S. House or Senate after the midterms, for example. Typically, there are fixed payouts and the price of the contract reflects the market’s expectation of the odds of the outcome.
It isn’t yet entirely clear who regulates prediction markets and how, and markets have regularly clashed with state officials trying to rein them in. When it comes to elections, most states have laws prohibiting election betting in some form or fashion, according to a Pew Research Center analysis released in June. But many such laws predate modern prediction markets and haven’t necessarily been tested in court recently.
Kalshi recently pushed back on Wisconsin election officials after they issued an advisory about a state law dating back to the 19th century that says voters can’t cast ballots in races they’ve bet on. A Kalshi staffer said on social media the Wisconsin advisory meant election officials were engaged in “active voter suppression.”
However the legal situation shakes out, betting on elections is happening. An NBC News analysis found nearly $200 million in trading volume on midterm election outcomes on prediction markets Kalshi and Polymarket, and election officials say they are concerned about how the odds on such sites could influence public trust in election outcomes — particularly when election results differ from those the markets had favored — and about creating incentives for manipulation.
“I think it is something that we are going to have to wrestle with going into the November election and forward,” said Dean Logan, the registrar-recorder and county clerk for Los Angeles County, California, the country’s single most populous election jurisdiction, during a webinar organized by the Partnership for Large Election Jurisdictions this month.
Logan said in the Los Angeles mayoral primary in June, “early election returns differed from market expectations, and that resulted in suspicion and questioning of normal ballot processing and canvassing procedures in California.” The bottom line, he said, is that “elections administration right now is very much affected by perception and misinformation, and in our field we have to be prepared to respond to that.”
‘This is all bad’
Prediction markets say their odds reflect the wisdom of the crowds and can be more accurate than polling. And these markets have been pretty good at predicting elections in the past. For example, the 2004 paper that quoted Thoreau, by economics professors Paul Rhode and Koleman Strumpf, analyzed data on election gambling between 1868 and 1940 and found that the historical markets “did a remarkable job forecasting elections in an era before scientific polling.”
But prediction markets differ from polls in important ways. Polls are representative samples of just the voters who live in the state or district in question; prediction markets are open to anyone, and the more money a person bets, the more influence they have on the odds.
And election officials, already worried about low public trust in elections, are concerned the odds on these markets could be manipulated to influence public perception of a contest or create new financial incentives to shape outcomes. Kalshi and Polymarket did not respond to requests for comment.
Jim Allen, the elections director of Delaware County, Pennsylvania, which had already banned election workers from directly betting on elections, earlier this year added a ban on using prediction markets to do so. He likened it to referees betting on the outcome of a basketball game.
The new language, he said during the PLEJ webinar, “kicked off a conversation at our poll worker training. There was one person out of 383 precincts, one person who stood up and they said, ‘Well, what if we just want to make a minor bet on what turnout will be? That’ll keep things interesting.’ And we said, ‘No, this is all bad.’”
Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s editor-in-chief and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.
Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.
President Donald Trump announced Wednesday that one of his “most trusted” aides is leaving his administration at the end of the month. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, 28, the youngest person to hold the role, has been one of the biggest and most controversial mouthpieces for the president, describing Democrats as “terrorists,” making “your mom” jokes and organizing a White House “media offender” list.
Leavitt is leaving “so she can spend more time with her beautiful young children and family, a decision I totally understand and respect!” Trump wrote on his social media site Truth Social. “Karoline will now be one of my top outside advisors, and an influential voice within the Republican Party, as we work to defy History, and conclusively win the Midterm Elections.”
In May, Leavitt took time off from work for the birth of her daughter. She also has a two-year-old son. She entered politics soon after graduating and in June 2020 became an assistant White House press secretary. After Trump lost the election, Leavitt campaigned for House of Representatives in New Hampshire’s first congressional district, branding herself a “pro-Trump” candidate, but ultimately losing to Democratic incumbent Chris Pappas. After a stint as a spokeswoman for Trump’s super PAC, MAGA Inc., Leavitt became the press secretary for his 2024 presidential campaign.
She presented an enormous lie during her very first press briefing on Jan. 28, 2025, claiming the Trump admin had “found that there was about to be 50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza.” There is no evidence this happened. She also made claims that a double-tap strike on a boat in the Caribbean was “self-defense” and downplayed Trump’s appearance in the Epstein files.
In her time as secretary, Leavitt attempted to elevate “non-traditional media” like One America News Network, LindellTV and The Daily Wire, and mirrored Trump’s antagonistic approach to the press. “Because Karoline’s boss is so vociferous, she is vociferous,” Ari Fleischer, the press secretary under Republican George W. Bush, observed after her first year. “She channels Donald Trump in a way that I’m certain makes Donald Trump very happy.”
So far this, most of the departures, voluntary or not, from the Trump administration have been women, including Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem; Attorney General Pam Bondi; Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
Trump has yet to announce who will replace Leavitt.
Director Matt Johnson’s latest feature, “Tony” — a biopic following a young Anthony Bourdain (Dominic Sessa) through his first kitchen experience, slinging cheap fish in a Provincetown greasy spoon — exists inside a quote. The film opens with a pull from Bourdain’s beloved pseudo-memoir, “Kitchen Confidential,” in which Bourdain reminisces about his 19-year-old self, trolling around Cape Cod trying to impress a girl and become a writer, with zero experience doing either. “I was — to be frank — a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, and badly in need of a good ass-kicking,” Bourdain writes early in the book.
From the jump, it’s hard to shake the feeling that “Tony” is mistakenly aligning itself with the public’s idea of Bourdain rather than the man’s reality. When I think of Anthony Bourdain, I think of two people. The first is the enigmatic yet ultimately unknowable chef, whose charm and good nature sometimes dulled a cloud of unmistakable darkness to the eyes of the public; the second is the idealistic version of Bourdain, who exists in half-remembered citations and GIFs of his many travel shows removed from their context — rosy, nostalgic tributes to an image, rather than a person.
Regrettably, “Tony” operates in the latter state: all sentiment and little practical truth, different from the ways Bourdain’s effusive, colorful work and writing make people feel when they really dive into it. It’s part biopic, part coming-of-age story and all gung-ho idealism, battered and fried until golden and palatable, before being spritzed with a fresh splash of lemon, providing the film a brief, compelling tartness that fades all too quickly. Like a lobster roll made with imitation crab meat — or a guy who lists Bourdain as his biggest inspiration in a prompt on his Hinge profile — “Tony” is economical and satiating, but far less satisfying than the real thing.
(Seacia Pavao/A24) Dominic Sessa in “Tony”
Bourdain gave fellow outsiders an insider’s view of the kitchen. He made people fall in love with food, its rituals and its culture. And though “Tony” doesn’t entirely lack that heady romanticization, its choice to amplify its introductory quote — making Bourdain an even more insufferable lout for dramatic effect — feels antithetical to Bourdain’s raw candor.
What’s more, the film is bizarrely undercooked when it comes to Bourdain’s experiences in the kitchen. To be fair, Johnson has his work cut out for him. “Tony” is adapted from only the first 50 pages or so of “Kitchen Confidential,” meaning Johnson and his co-writer Matthew Miller (working from a screenplay originally written by Todd Bartels and Lou Howe) essentially had to flesh out a pitch draft’s worth of detail into a feature-length film. And for those who like their biopic by-the-numbers, the finished product is a perfectly serviceable entry into the canon.
But I get the sense that, in comparing Bourdain’s writing to the film, true die-hards will long for his quippy, evocative storytelling that’s absent from “Tony.” Bourdain gave fellow outsiders an insider’s view of the kitchen. He made people fall in love with food, its rituals and its culture. And though “Tony” doesn’t entirely lack that heady romanticization, its choice to amplify its introductory quote — making Bourdain an even more insufferable lout for dramatic effect — feels antithetical to Bourdain’s raw candor.
Now, I’m not exactly a stickler for precise detail. All book adaptations, whether from novels or memoirs, could stand to embellish the facts here and there, or go ahead and reinvent the wheel when possible. This irks literature purists. But cinema is a different medium, and as such, changes must be made. It did strike me as odd, however, that “Tony” is forged on a factual alteration that diverts Tony from the kitchen far too often — the movie’s cardinal sin.
After pitching a bogus novel to the Vassar English department in hopes of scoring a writing fellowship that will provide his summer with a sizeable goofing-off stipend, Tony’s sure he’s got the prize in the bag. At a college bar, he drunkenly peacocks for his high school crush and fellow Vassar student, Nancy (Emilia Jones). Tony tells her that he’s going to be a famous writer, before challenging her comprehension of a few five-dollar words. Repelled, Nancy replies that she will be happily spending her summer slinging pizzas in Provincetown.
Surprise, surprise: Tony doesn’t get the fellowship, and instead, flees his childhood home early in the morning to catch a bus and a ferry to Provincetown. With no money but plenty of blind devotion to Nancy — whose character, it’s worth mentioning, has subzero charm and nuance, making Tony’s staunch affection feel like a ruse to the viewer — Tony arrives hapless and hopeless. It turns out Nancy’s got a pizza-slinging beau, so Tony drowns his sorrows in fried fish and cheap beers at the ramshackle clam shack The Flagship. When he can’t pay for his meal, Tony’s tossed out by the head Chef (Antonio Banderas) and his flighty kitchen cohort, Sal (Leo Woodall). Long story short: Tony wants to stay and pursue Nancy, Chef lets Tony sleep on his hammock in exchange for washing dishes at the restaurant, and the film can never decide which narrative to give more time to.
Want more from culture than just the latest trend? The Swell highlights art made to last. Sign up here
In “Kitchen Confidential,” Bourdain describes his decision to head to Provincetown as an impulse motivated less by romantic desire than by general apathy. “I went in with some friends on a summer share in Cape Cod. It was what my friends were doing, and that was enough for me,” he writes. A brief mention of a pizza-spinning girlfriend is tossed off immediately after, replaced by vivid stories about his first summer working at the real-life Flagship, given the pseudonym The Dreadnaught. Each member of the kitchen crew in Johnson’s film is as scraggly and unpredictable as Bourdain describes them in the book, teaching him as much about sex and drugs as they did broiling lobsters and frying up clams.
Johnson is so concerned with conforming to the auspicious, nostalgic idea of who Bourdain was that he makes his biopic far too safe. He reduces Bourdain to a zygote who simply needed enough nurturing to become his older, cooler self, when he could, instead, read between the lines to find what makes young Tony special.
Here, “Tony” is in its element as Johnson crafts the intimidating yet irresistible camaraderie of a kitchen, and all of the misfits who work inside it. But when Tony leaves for the day and is left to his own devices in Provincetown, the movie falls hard into all of the trite trappings of your average biopic. Tony and Sal get into all kinds of trouble, snorting coke and banging broads, but these things often happen in freewheeling montages with little consequence. It’s nearly impossible to get a sense of how Tony himself is actually feeling. Watching this version of him is akin to seeing Sessa bang his hands against the confines of that Bourdain quote, desperately trying to make something substantial out of this thin rendering of a very significant persona.
All of the men who idolize Bourdain for their imagined notions of who he was — who model themselves after the image of him sitting in a leather jacket and tiny sunglasses, with a pack of cigarettes on the table of a Parisian cafe — will love it. Under a clip of Bourdain sitting at this cafe, one person commented (before Bourdain’s death), “When I grow up I am going to be just like Anthony Bourdain.” That’s the perfect summation of the toothless film Johnson has crafted.
(Seacia Pavao/A24) Dominic Sessa and Leo Woodall in “Tony”
“Tony” tries to distance itself from the public’s quixotic version of Bourdain by making the younger depiction casually unbearable, the kind of person you wouldn’t enjoy working with — and especially not mentoring — in a kitchen. But these attempts largely come off as cloying, even silly. There’s one moment where Tony witnesses Sal score drugs before watching him shoot up on the boardwalk, as if to say, “We may not show it here, but Anthony Bourdain will later struggle with heroin use!” The dope is dopey, and it’s unfortunately only a foray into mushier territory. Banderas provides his mentor figure with a delightful vigor, but Johnson can’t quite figure out what to do with him, or how to make Chef feel like a real person. (How fitting we never learn his real name.) Even a few flowery sentences in “Kitchen Confidential” about lessons learned working at The Dreadnaught dwarf “Tony” in comparison. For a film about the origins of a foul-mouthed culinary renegade, beloved for his thoughtful musings on food and life, there’s bafflingly little interiority.
One could argue that’s Johnson’s point: Tony hadn’t yet become Anthony. Bourdain’s singular reflections could only come from a life well-lived and filled with mistakes. But that doesn’t mean that this version of Bourdain has to lack depth. Johnson is so concerned with conforming to the auspicious, nostalgic idea of who Bourdain was that he makes his biopic far too safe. He reduces Bourdain to a zygote who simply needed enough nurturing to become his older, cooler self, when he could, instead, read between the lines to find what makes young Tony special. Bourdain’s writing is far more tender and interested in other people than “Tony” ever is. And as intent on vivifying culture as Bourdain was, I think he’d watch this movie and feel that there’s an authenticity that is deeply missed. But we’ll never know that for sure. If “Tony” must open with a quote and confine Bourdain to his words, as he so often is posthumously, I’ll close with one that appears just a few sentences before it: “The less said about that part of my life, the better.”
Perhaps it is because I’ve been nursing a slight and recent obsession with zany detective movies of the 1960s — prompted by “The Pink Panther,” then by following the Peter Sellers trail to “A Shot in the Dark” and “After the Fox” — but when I first heard that President Donald Trump had reportedly escaped Turkey in an “airport catering cart,” the scene arrived in my mind already blocked and costumed: a white-tableclothed trolley, steered by a nervous waiter in a bow tie, perhaps topped with a silver cloche. Beneath the linens, taking care that his shoes did not give him away, Trump crouched while he was wheeled past a succession of unfriendly eyes, their owners somehow oblivious to the president concealed at knee height.
The reality was, of course, considerably less cinematic.
The cart was not really a cart at all, but a truck: a large white box fitted with a hydraulic lift, the sort of airport machinery designed to rise neatly to the door of an aircraft. No tablecloth. No cloche. No perspiring waiter trying to look casual. Trump could, essentially, simply walk inside.
And, according to reports, that is more or less what happened. The BBC described footage from July 8 showing Trump boarding the presidential jet at Ankara airport; according to the Washington Post, he was then secretly transferred, by way of an elevated catering truck positioned on the aircraft’s far side, to a smaller C-32A military plane — a modified Boeing 757 more commonly used by the vice president. The operation was reportedly prompted by an Iranian assassination threat.
The internet, however, wasn’t particularly interested in this version.
Within hours of the original Washington Post report, social media had begun supplying its own: AI-generated images of Trump hunched in a cramped compartment over a small mountain of McDonald’s hamburgers; jokes that the operation was going to require “a bigger catering cart”; and, in perhaps the fullest realization of the bit, a mock announcement that, for the president’s “food truck extraction operation,” a team of top operatives had been assembled, all uniquely suited to the task. The operatives were Chef Boyardee, Ronald McDonald, the Burger King and Colonel Sanders.
It is worth considering why this particular image struck such a chord. In another context, a president being quietly transferred between aircraft in a service vehicle might register as little more than a piece of security choreography — unusual, perhaps, but hardly ready-made for farce. Trump in a catering truck was different. For years, he has made food part of his political stagecraft: something to display, serve, pose beside and use as shorthand for abundance, familiarity and a particular vision of American life.
The exquisite comic reversal of the Turkey episode was that, this time, he was no longer directing the tableau. He had been swallowed by the scenery.
One image from Trump’s first presidency still looms especially large for me. In the middle of the 2019 government shutdown, he filled the White House State Dining Room with McDonald’s, Wendy’s and Burger King to celebrate Clemson’s national-championship football team, telling the players that he had ordered roughly a thousand hamburgers — “everything that I like, that you like.” The photographs were almost absurdly theatrical: silver serving pieces and candelabras, the gilt-and-cream grandeur of the White House, and, arrayed beneath it all, mountains of branded fast-food packaging. The incongruity was the point. Trump stood behind the spread as host and Quarter Pounder impresario.
Five years later, he took his relationship with McDonald’s a step further. During the 2024 campaign, Trump appeared at a franchise in Feasterville-Trevose, Pennsylvania, where the restaurant had been closed to regular customers for the occasion. Instead of bringing McDonald’s into his political theater, as he had at the White House, Trump stepped into McDonald’s theater: apron on, fries in hand, leaning through the drive-thru window. The staging was unusually literal. The restaurant had become a set, the counter a stage, and Trump had given himself a part.
Even the strange little culture war over Cracker Barrel’s logo found Trump acting as something like both dramaturg and producer. When the chain’s 2025 redesign set off a backlash, Trump urged the company to restore its old logo and immediately translated the controversy into the language of show business: Cracker Barrel, he wrote, had received “a Billion Dollars worth of free publicity” if it knew how to use it. “Make Cracker Barrel a WINNER again,” he advised. Restore the old set. Bring back the familiar character. Capitalize on the attention. Trump wasn’t merely offering an opinion about restaurant branding; he was giving notes.
The White House soon made the conceit almost embarrassingly literal. Its official X account posted a doctored version of the familiar Cracker Barrel logo in which Trump had replaced the old man beside the barrel. The barrel itself now read “America First”; beneath it: “America is back.” Trump had not simply inserted himself into a debate over the restaurant’s iconography. He had been cast inside it.
There is, of course, nothing inherently funny about a catering truck, much less about the security concerns that reportedly put Trump inside one. But political imagery is not entirely under the politician’s control. Spend enough years standing behind pyramids of hamburgers, posing at fry stations and inserting yourself into the iconography of American restaurant chains, and eventually the props begin to accrue meanings of their own. McDonald’s becomes not merely something Trump eats or campaigns beside, but part of the visual vocabulary through which people understand him.
Which may explain why, when news broke that Trump had been spirited between planes in a catering truck, the internet required almost no time to dress the scene. The hamburgers were already there. So were Ronald McDonald, Colonel Sanders and the Burger King. Trump has spent years directing the food theater. The catering truck was funny because, for once, he disappeared backstage.
The only thing missing, really, was my nervous waiter in the bow tie.
Poor Helaena Targaryen never stood a chance. George R.R. Martin’s fantasy world of Westeros in “House of the Dragon” is a particularly cruel place to be sensitive, whether to the declining fortunes of a kingdom or the machinations of the spirit world. Notably hard and remarkably sexist, the people in power treat women who happen to be a little weird with twice-over disdain.
A seer whose talent only seemed to arise when she needed to share bad news, Helaena was an unwelcome presence in her feuding family. Having seen her worst predictions come to pass, she grabbed hold of the only future she was able to change: her own. In the season three finale that aired Sunday night, the pregnant Helaena leapt from her window, checking out of the war and leaving behind one final, unwelcome prophecy: an embroidered image of her half-sister and captor, Rhaenyra Targaryen, on the Iron Throne, surrounded by flame and crowned in blood.
Even in death, though, no one was listening to Helaena. Her only sin was being right too early and too often — and the world never stopped hounding her for it.
Though they’re remarkably different in terms of age, style and dragon-riding ability, Helaena reminded me of Sen. Bernie Sanders, whose uncouth objections to the Democratic Party’s neoliberalism and various Middle Eastern wars have earned him the lifelong label of Capitol Hill Crank.
The Vermont Independent’s vehement opposition to the Gulf wars made him an odd man out in Congress more than a full decade before it became fashionable — and politically expedient — to turn on expensive Middle East boondoggles. Now 84, Sanders has advocated for universal healthcare since the 1970s while watching Americans fall deeper into medical debt. In the late 1990s, he was a loud voice against the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act’s financial guardrails, and after banking adventurism nearly destroyed the global economy in the financial crisis of 2008, he managed to keep his told-you-sos muted.
In boom and bust times alike, Sanders has been unshakeable on the idea that the U.S. is uniquely rigged against the lower classes, spoiling the party thrown by the winners of the go-go ‘90s and the Great Recession’s recovery. His Brooklyn honk has been a constant in the halls of Congress, sharing portents of doom and Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
On Monday Sanders issued another unwelcome proclamation in a career full of them, sending a letter to the CEOs of the three largest artificial intelligence companies that called on them to pause the technology’s development. The letter follows news of several AI prototypes breaking the confines of their testing sandbox and accessing the internet. In the most shocking example, an agent made by OpenAI hacked into Hugging Face, a platform that AI programmers use to share datasets and models. The news prompted the company Anthropic to review its own tests; it discovered that models had found a way around their parameters to access the internet in three cases. Meta also shared that one of its own prototypes had done the same.
A breach of an AI-equivalent of GitHub was never going to bring about doomsday, but an AI agent that can ignore the bounds set by its creators and users has massive potential to cause widespread harm.
A breach of an AI-equivalent of GitHub was never going to bring about doomsday, but an AI agent that can ignore the bounds set by its creators and users has massive potential to cause widespread harm. Sanders certainly thinks so, in any case. He called on Anthropic, Meta and OpenAI, the big three of the industry, to stop work until they can get a better handle on the machines they’re creating.
“Almost every day, there is a new story about how your companies are losing control of the AI technology you are developing, with potentially cataclysmic results,” he wrote. “Last month, the world found out OpenAI lost control of an AI model. The result? The model hacked into another company’s computers—a clear violation of federal law.”
AI models have been rolled out quickly and haphazardly across the wider internet. Though the major players haven’t yet found a way for this technology to make money and ensure its long-term survival, a cycle of hype, government contracts, and integration into software and search have made the models an inescapable part of digital life. AI has been spun up into all the surfaces the average internet user touches, and along the way it has warped academia and embedded itself with the U.S. military with reportedly disastrous results.
The Maven Smart System, an AI-powered platform built for the Pentagon by the analytics firm Palantir, generated over 1,000 airstrike targets in the early hours of the Iran war. When the U.S. carried out a deadly strike on an all-girls school, legislators were quick to ask if the AI model was to blame. Fears of a bombing-run-capable Skynet striking children halfway around the globe spread, but the truth was a little more nuanced. Some of the U.S. intelligence fed to the system was outdated, not accounting for the presence of the school. Whipped up and given a sheen of analytic legitimacy by the Maven, military officials did not do their due diligence in the midst of hundreds of similar, simultaneous strikes. As The Guardian put it, “people failed to update a database, and other people built a system fast enough to make that failure lethal.”
Even if AI models never got one iota more powerful than they are today, Sanders is still right to call for a pause. The damage companies like OpenAI can do to working Americans is very real. Layoffs will come from CEOs who buy AI’s spiel: that large-language models can replace humans in the service sector, which accounts for nearly 70% of U.S. jobs. The data centers and infrastructure built to support these technological advances will strain our utilities. The tax breaks and incentives to attract these companies are a drain on state and local coffers. Weigh those cons against the things AI has reliably proven it can do – cheat on homework and write janky code – and it’s easy to understand Sanders’ urge to stand and yell “stop!”
It’s not only AI itself that concerns Sanders. In March, he and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., introduced legislation calling for a moratorium on new data centers until critical safeguards are put into place. These massive sites, which are proliferating across the country, produce loud noise and pollution, rely on enormous amounts of water and electricity, tax power grids and inflate utility bills. Data centers are also proving massively unpopular, even among conservative voters in rural areas. The CEOs of companies that run these large-language models have often done end-runs around democratic controls, ingratiating themselves with Donald Trump and circumventing traditional pathways for their planned construction projects via backroom deals. They’ve managed all this even as their AI products have not proven they can reliably do any of the things OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg claim they can do. Merely mentioning the potential power of their models is enough to boost investment.
A nationwide movement opposing the continued construction of data centers offers some hope, with both Republicans and Democrats noticing the popular sentiment is largely anti-AI. But given the speed at which these data centers have been built, and the secretive lengths companies will go to avoid rowdy town halls full of angry crowds, even that groundswell of opposition is unlikely to put AI development on ice.
The result is that Sanders’ warnings are likely to go just as unheeded as Helaena Targaryen’s. His threat of legislation will die, written off by other members of Congress as more grumping from a lifelong stick-in-the-mud.
Don’t expect a similar dramatic exit from Sanders, though. He’s lived long enough to get used to the feeling of being unfortunately, awfully correct.
In MAGA’s self-mythology, they are a family first movement that encourages Americans to have more babies. Over the past year, some of the coalition’s most prominent figures have touted a responsibility to pro-create. In December 2025, Lara Trump said on Fox News, “We’re going to be in a pickle if we don’t get more babies coming.” Three months later, in a speech at the 2026 March for Life, Vice President JD Vance congratulated himself for impregnating his wife Usha, saying he “practices what he preaches” when he calls for “more families and more babies.” Katie Miller, the podcaster and wife of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, used the same wording to announce her pregnancy on X in late 2025: “The White House practices what they preach about increasing the fertility rate.”
Even Donald Trump has gotten in on the act. At a Women’s History Month event in March 2025, he bizarrely referred to himself as the “fertilization president.”
So when Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took to Instagram recently to announce she is freezing her eggs, surely MAGA was resoundingly grateful to her for carrying forward this pro-baby message, right? Not quite. As the 36-year-old New York Democrat was no doubt aware would happen, MAGA commentators lashed out at her for preserving her ability to have kids in the future. Christian right commentator Allie Beth Stuckey said she was “selfish.” Podcast host Matt Walsh called Ocasio-Cortez’s choice “backwards and ridiculous.” The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway argued that the congresswoman’s video was a “sad public performance/display of unnecessarily unwise decision making.”
In the MAGAsphere, it’s not enough for a woman to want motherhood. If she doesn’t give up her career and even her personal happiness in the process of making babies, it doesn’t count.
In the MAGAsphere, it’s not enough for a woman to want motherhood. If she doesn’t give up her career and even her personal happiness in the process of making babies, it doesn’t count. Being pregnant isn’t enough. Conservatives also seem to require the “barefoot” and “in the kitchen” parts of the traditional job description.
In the case of Ocasio-Cortez — and many women like here — the problem is that she has ambitions for higher political office, hinting repeatedly that she’s considering a run for the Senate or even the presidency. For the right, babies aren’t an end in themselves; they are also a weapon to use in MAGA’s ongoing war on women’s equality.
“She’s glamorizing the lie that women can have it all,” Stuckey said. “You can’t.”
Hemingway agreed. “Ladies, get married to a good man as young as you’re able and have your babies,” she said.
Blinded by their own sexism, none of these pundits considered the possibility that Ocasio-Cortez, a savvy politician who is skilled at social media, knew how MAGA would react to posts where she injected the medications on camera or answered people’s detailed questions about the process. She even hinted at this in her video. “Don’t be weird about this,” she said as she gave herself an injection. “Even though I know you all will be.”
The right’s reaction revealed what the White House has been trying to hide from swing voters all along: Their chatter about fertility rates was never about happy families or a prosperous nation. To the contrary, as evidenced by the draconian bans in red states, Republicans will gladly sacrifice happiness and prosperity for the goal of subjugating women. One White House official even told Axios that it’s “not helpful” and “isn’t really a winner” for conservative influencers to say the quiet part out loud.
Notably, none of these MAGA pundits have called Elon Musk “selfish” for having kids in his 50s. Or Vance, who is 42 with an infant at home. Or Trump, who was 59 when his youngest child, Barron, was born. The mandate to have kids young, even if it ruins your career or railroads you into an unhappy marriage, applies only to women.
Ocasio-Cortez flagged this in an Instagram story discussing why women might freeze eggs. “So much of this discussion around parenthood and fertility is focused on women, but it takes two to tango,” she said, going on to explain that often women want to get married and have kids, but “they haven’t found their person.” According to Puck News’ Leigh Ann Caldwell, who cited “a reputable Democratic source,” the congresswoman and her fiancé Riley Roberts called off their engagement “about 18 months ago.”
Regardless of her own relationship status, Ocasio-Cortez spoke a simple truth that is typically ignored by right-wing pundits: Women aren’t “delaying” marriage. The verb itself implies young women are turning down viable offers, but no evidence exists for such a claim. In fact, an increasing number of conservative women are starting to publicly complain about all this pressure to get married and have babies young, since they can’t magically conjure suitable men out of thin air. Last week, annoyance over this burbled up in far-right women’s circles on X. Despite being openly anti-feminist, these women were nonetheless complaining. “Many of us would have happily gotten married young . . . if we had the choice,” one wrote. Another said, “You can’t snap your fingers and get a spouse on demand, sadly.”
Alex Clark, a popular podcast host in the Turning Point USA network, has also been struggling to tamp down her anger over this. In May, the 33-year-old published an ill-advised newsletter complaining that “[w]hores get married first” because, she felt, liberal women had an easier time attracting eligible men. The following month, at the TPUSA women’s conference, Clark was less overtly angry, but she still expressed frustration at her deceased mentor, Charlie Kirk, for telling young women to get married: “Right-wing men act like we’re supposed to just, I guess, live under an overpass and wait for our husband to fall from the sky.”
Considering that young conservative men outnumber young conservative women, one would think it shouldn’t be so hard to find a Mr. Right who is also Mr. Right Wing. Recent high-profile stories about younger Republican politicians, though, offer a reminder of why the pickings can seem so slim.
In Texas, a 30-year-old Republican congressional candidate, Brandon Herrera, was recently exposed for posting a video in which he scolded mothers because “you let somebody [vulgar term for ejaculation] you” and calling a child a “c*m trophy.” When asked for comment by the Austin-American Statesman, his campaign replied with a picture of a whipped cream-covered pie, a reference to a term shaming women who have had sexual intercourse.
Even more high profile has been the divorce of Rep. Max Miller from Emily Moreno, the daughter of another prominent Ohio Republican, Sen. Bernie Moreno. Miller has been accused of breaking his two-year-old daughter’s collarbone, pointing a gun at his then-wife’s head and scalding her with hot water. The accusations are inextricable from his over-the-top public posturing as an alpha male, including an admission that despite being just 37, he has taken testosterone injections.
Not every Republican man is as repulsive as these three. Democrats aren’t immune from bad men either, as recent scandals involving former California Rep. Eric Swalwell and former Maine Democratic Senate nominee Graham Platner have shown. The difference, though, is that Democrats made clear to both men they needed to step down once the evidence against them stacked up. Republican politicians, on the other hand, are rewarded for demonstrating abusive and misogynistic behavior, as evidenced by the robust support and fundraising given to Herrera, Miller and Mills by GOP leadership.
It’s incredibly hard to square the pious claims that young women should marry a “good” Christian man young and start having babies with a Republican culture that is so welcoming, even encouraging, of such vile men. Women aren’t respected in MAGA. Despite the Christian right’s false claims, mothers aren’t venerated either. Instead, ugly, sexually demeaning language about mothers and children is normalized. Abuse is also tacitly accepted, and women are shamed if they speak out. As with the attacks on Ocasio-Cortez, all this talk about family and motherhood is a paper-thin disguise for hate, and for putting women under the boot.
The timing of Ocasio-Cortez’s egg-freezing announcement dangles a once-unimaginable prospect: that we could have a pregnant president of the United States. If she, as many assume, is putting off pregnancy until after a presidential run, then such a scenario is at least a possibility.
Republicans can complain, but most Americans understand that a pregnant woman is more capable of doing a high-level job than a man in his 80s, especially one in such seemingly poor health as Donald Trump. A pregnant President Ocasio-Cortez would also further reveal their hypocrisy. After all, these are the people who, not so long ago, were holding up a pregnant press secretary, second lady and whatever it is that Katie Miller does as role models. Surely, a pregnant president would send that pro-baby message they say they crave even more loudly.
As the western United States is gripped by record-shattering wildfires, some unscrupulous people aren’t just contemplating what it will be like for future generations living in our new normal of erratic weather patterns, or wondering whether climate change is making this situation worse. They’re thinking about how much money they can make.
Prediction market apps like Kalshi and Polymarket allow people to bet on pretty much anything, whether it’s some boring sports thing, election results or perhaps even war crimes. You can even bet on the outcome of clinical drug trials and whether cancer drugs will be approved by the Food and Drug Administration, which experts criticize as undermining the integrity of medication research. The father of a seventh-grader living with cancer recently raised the issue of “whether researchers in a trial could be motivated by prediction market profits,” something so heinous it is difficult to contemplate.
While the makers of these apps insist they are “future exchanges,” not digital gambling parlors, regulators in places like Singapore, France, Belgium and elsewhere aren’t convinced and have banned the platforms altogether. There are several mechanisms inherent to prediction market apps that make them a little different than putting it all on red. They involve binary contracts that resolve based on whether certain events happen or not, using some complex math to factor in a probability of an outcome. Critics are increasingly looking into the consequences of making almost everything wagerable.
Mainstream economists may want you to believe all this is driven by Darwinian forces that follow some natural law, simplified as “the cost of doing business,” or even by Adam Smith’s invisible hand. But that’s pretty unscientific.
On Aug. 3, Democratic senators from six states sent a letter to the chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the independent government arm that regulates Polymarket and Kalshi, warning that the apps are allowing bets to be placed on wildfires, which could incentivize arson. They highlight previous examples of bets placed on the January 2025 Palisades and Eaton fires, which razed large areas of Los Angeles County, killing 31 people and destroying more than 16,000 structures.
“Offering bets on destructive wildfires threatens to minimize communities’ suffering all so the rich and powerful can profit,” the letter’s authors, who include Sens. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., wrote. “There’s also the heightened risk — according to state and local fire officials — that individuals could be tempted to commit arson in order to make sure their bets are successful.”
For example, someone might bet on how big a fire might get or how many buildings it might destroy. I wanted to know what unexpected stuff I could find on the apps, so I downloaded Polymarket and Kalshi, seemingly the two most popular platforms or at least the ones I’m tired of seeing ads of the most. Both were littered with sports events, which I scrolled past, but also had sections for elections, politics, tech and a lot more. Polymarket seemed to have fewer and more bland options for betting, with the most shocking queries I could find being things like who will get kicked out of Trump admin next or if Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be arrested by year’s end.
After giving over way too much private data to Kalshi, I was able to browse entire categories dedicated to natural disasters and climate change, such as if 2026 will be the hottest year ever or if the U.S. will ever meet its climate goals. I also found weird things like how many Atlantic hurricanes this year or if California will be hit by a magnitude 8 earthquake, which goes without saying but would be extremely bad. For context, the recent Colombia and Venezuela earthquakes were both magnitude 7.4 and 7.5 respectively. All of these things are likely to kill countless people if they happen, but climate change is already widely treated like an abstract future problem, rather than our disastrous present, so maybe this shouldn’t be surprising.
Both apps allowed wagers on the number of “explosive diarrhea” cyclosporiasis and measles cases this year, with both outbreaks shattering records. I could not find anything related to fires, presumably such content being recently removed, as there have been plenty of cited examples of bets on fires in the past, such as how many acres or locations the Palisades fires would reach.
So many of the scenarios on these apps present classic examples of a perverse incentive, in which the structure of a system encourages undesirable results. The classic example is of dubious historical accuracy, but originates from the British occupation of India. Weary of venomous snake bites, British authorities put a bounty on dead cobras — but this only incentivized locals to breed more of the snakes, in order to collect even more reward money. If you allow people to earn cash from dead snakes, you risk getting a lot more living snakes in the process.
Are we already seeing this with wildfires? It’s hard to say, but it’s true that arson is, strangely, a common catalyst for wildfires. One man was arrested outside of Spokane a few days ago, admitting to starting the Old Trails Fire, which burned entire neighborhoods to a crisp. Police say that Aaron Farinacci admitted to having set two dozen other blazes since 2025.
The conditions that make these blazes so out-of-control are thanks to climate change, which is causing hotter and drier conditions. According to a 2021 study supported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the increase in fire weather in the western U.S. is primarily due to climate change. (Still, trying to explain that level of nuance to a climate denier is like teaching rocks to play Risk.)
What these apps do best is lay bare the ways in which our entire economy is structured like a betting app strung together by incentive perverts. It’s why the market rewards the most amoral and destructive behavior, from hedge funds that short the market and destroy company value to vulture capitalists who gut businesses like Toys “R” Us or Radio Shack, and then escape on their golden corporate parachutes. Even when such behavior results in a recession, the government is likely to bail big corporations out, while any form of assistance for the working class is branded as “socialism.” In fact, the entire stock market could be best described as a casino that incentivizes absurd growth like the historic tech bubble provoked by the spread of artificial intelligence.
Mainstream economists may want you to believe all this is driven by Darwinian forces that follow some natural law, simplified as “the cost of doing business,” or even by Adam Smith’s invisible hand. But that’s pretty unscientific.
Money itself is just a construct, one with rules dreamt up by humans. We don’t have to live in a world where people profit from tragedy, be it wildfires or a child with cancer, housing foreclosures or weapons manufacturing. I’m willing to bet we can actually achieve such a utopian outcome, even if it takes another century. The alternative is to continue draining everything of value as it goes up in smoke.
Login
