Wait a minute, Doc. Are you telling me you built a Democratic PAC out of Republicans?

The “Democrats for Mike Rogers” PAC, which recently rebranded as “Together for Michigan” (TFM), has a straightforward pitch: It represents the interests of, well, Democrats who support Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers.

The group launched to much fanfare after Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic primary, playing up the idea that he would be undone in the general election because his candidacy would fracture the Democratic coalition. But the PAC’s latest Federal Election Commission filings indicate that, notwithstanding its original name or its primary political theme, the operation is predominantly Republican-backed.

The group’s two biggest donations came from GLCF, Inc. (Great Lakes Conservatives Fund) and American Unity PAC, which donated $50,000 and $25,000 to the PAC, respectively. GLCF is a super PAC dedicated to supporting conservatives, and it has already spent a lot of money to run pro-Rogers ads this cycle. American Unity PAC’s stated mission is “focused exclusively on protecting and promoting Republican candidates for U.S. Congress who support freedom for all Americans, including people of faith and the LGBT community.”

TFM’s roster of individual, non-organizational donors is rather short—and the filing it made with the FEC likely does not cover the donations and expenditures it made when it was operating previously as Democrats for Mike Rogers. But of the four people TFM did list as having donated, several have a history of Republican support.

Michael Sandler, a donor based in Michigan, contributed $1,000 to TFM. While Sandler has donated to several Democratic campaigns, he’s also contributed to Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, one of the most vulnerable Republican House candidates this election cycle.

A $2,500 donation from William Orgel, a donor from Tennessee, fits a pattern of Republican contributions: Orgel gave thousands to Republican Sen. Bill Hagerty’s campaign, as well as Nikki Haley’s 2024 presidential campaign.

Fellow Tennessean Corey Trotz contributed a few hundred dollars to TFM in September; his mix of past support for the campaigns of members of both parties includes a donation to former Republican Rep. Steve Fincher in 2009.

TFM’s treasurer is Karen Whitsett, a conservative-coded former Democrat in the state legislature who campaigned alongside Rogers at a Democrats for Mike Rogers event last month, before the PAC’s name was changed.

TFM has spent nearly $5 million in either support for Rogers or opposition to El-Sayed, according to their annual expenditure totals. The group has also paid $30,000 to former Pontiac, Michigan council member Melanie Rutherford for “Grassroots Consulting” services. Two weeks after receiving those payments, Rutherford appeared on Fox News, touting Rogers and attacking El-Sayed—a clip that was amplified by numerous MAGA accounts. During the segment, it was never disclosed that she had received those payments.

On X, the Democrats for Mike Rogers account regularly bashes Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, posting that he is “endorsed by the enemies of America,” that El-Sayed “would be Senator for U.S.-designated terrorist groups,” and that he “hates Black Michiganders.”

If those sound eerily familiar to the Republican attack lines against El-Sayed, well, now you have a good idea why.

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I’ve seen this one. This is a classic.

Despite the Trump administration’s repeated efforts to undermine the security of American elections (to say nothing of what this president did last time an election didn’t go his way), the Democrats tasked with shoring up the legal protections in advance of next month’s midterms are confident that the elections will go smoothly. There are a few reasons for that.

In a call with reporters Monday, Rep. Joe Morelle (D-N.Y.), who is leading House Democrats’ election security agenda, said that after identifying a wide range of threats, Democrats have headed off a number of them, but many still remain active.

“I will say we started with about 150 threats,” Morelle said. “We’re down to about 70 because threats keep getting taken off the board. We talked about the postal service and [Trump’s] efforts to stop mail-in balloting—that’s gone away.”

Morelle’s confidence in the integrity of voting by mail isn’t something he shares with everyone in the party right now, but the courts have offered some reassurance in recent weeks.

“[Trump’s] efforts to try to invoke the SAVE Act and the SAVE America Act—those haven’t happened,” Morelle added. None of the several competing versions of the SAVE (America) Act passed.

Morelle also mentioned a post–Election Day strategy meant to make sure electoral processes remain fair and transparent through the first day of the new Congress on Sunday, January 3, 2027.

Morelle explained he has enlisted around 270 Democratic congressional staffers to function as election observers. They are being trained to take notes and provide evidence backups in the event of tampering.

“I will send them all across the country. They will be in their official capacities to be able to observe counts and recounts, to take firsthand accounts,” Morelle said of the House staffers. “We want contemporaneous notes should there be a challenge or a contest for anyone and we have to, in the Committee on House Administration, make a recommendation to the House about who to seat. But we’re on it.”

On the legal front, Democrats are preparing for the possibility of MAGA-related scheming to affect between forty and sixty of the more consequential congressional races. As Democrats have beefed up their legal rapid response and decided where to invest resources, they’ve had to put some thought into determining where local officials might engage in the kinds of election subversion that occurred in some precincts in 2020.

“Obviously, there are a lot of very good election officials, but there are also the Tina Peterses of the world,” said Marc Elias, a Democratic election attorney, referring to the Colorado elections clerk convicted of crimes related to her shenanigans trying to prove 2020 election conspiracy theories. (Her sentence was commuted by Colorado Gov. Jared Polis in May following a pressure campaign from Trump.) “There are also the bad election officials,” Elias said.

The attorney recalled the legal fights that followed the 2020 presidential election, when Trump used any ready-to-hand conspiracy theory or election-denying narrative he could find to make his case, and much of the Republican party felt bound to follow his lead. Elias expects a similar pattern to take shape if this year’s midterms result in overwhelmingly Democratic victories.

“I think that Donald Trump collects optionality of what he may find useful at any time, and then he sort of progresses through from the least preposterous to the most preposterous, and loses, right?” Elias said. “And that’s what we saw in 2020 when I was representing President Biden. We saw a series of cases in the days after the election—we won those—and then the cases got more and more preposterous, and then ultimately escalated to violence on January 6th.”

“So, I’m not saying there’s going to be violence,” Elias clarified. He added:

I do think, though, that we will see this escalation afterwards from the counties and what they can try to do there. Those will be defeated, but there’ll be a lot of activity, I suspect, and then they may try to create an uber-narrative around non-citizen voting that they use to argue that states shouldn’t certify results, that people shouldn’t get certificates of election at the state level . . . and then, ultimately, whether they take those to the floor and whether they take those to election contests under the Federal Contested Election Act—we’ll see.

Current polling strongly suggests the 2026 midterm elections could go very well indeed for Democrats. Trump and his administration have been seeking to preemptively undermine the results to maintain their power in Congress, but the House Democrats believe they are well positioned to prevent any further tampering or scheming that could compromise the results. In a particularly consequential-feeling election cycle, they hope they aren’t missing anything.

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This is heavy… denim

While other American industries have recently contracted largely as a result of Trump’s tariffs or his continuing elective war with Iran, there are signs of hope within one industry in particular—one that once fostered and then neglected one of our nation’s greatest inventions.

That invention, of course, is American selvedge denim. We haven’t produced it at scale domestically for years. But a new factory is now up and running, and fans of high-quality jeans across the nation have greeted this news as a beacon of light in a dark time.

Jeremy Freed writes:

In early November last year, Mount Vernon Mills, a 180-year old fabric mill and America’s largest denim producer, posted an Instagram video of a semi truck backed into a loading bay, its cargo shrouded in a white plastic sheet. The video, set to the opening chords of AC/DC’s “Hell’s Bells,” didn’t reveal much, but for those attuned to the fate of American-made selvedge over the last few years, it marked a major milestone. Under that white sheet was one of 40-some Draper X3 looms salvaged from the legendary Cone White Oak denim mill in Greensboro, North Carolina. To those who worship at the altar of 20th century workwear, it represented nothing less than the salvation of American denim. A little less than a year later, that machine and 20 others like it are up and running, fabric samples are being shipped to clothing brands across the country, and a new chapter in a 120-year story is beginning.

To be clear, the reopening of a single stateside denim factory is not going to make the slightest difference in the larger economic outlook of the United States, which remains dim. But the Mount Vernon Mills story shows that at least some Americans still crave strong craftsmanship enough to be willing to pay extra to support production on U.S. soil. That’s objectively a good thing.

Read the whole article.

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Though they deny any involvement, the Trump administration and Elon Musk are apparently helping Putin escalate his campaign of terror against Ukraine. Civilian casualties across Ukraine are rising—including women and children—but Trump said Monday that Russia "has been fine on Ukraine." At the same time, Team Trump looks to be lining up business deals with Russian energy companies. And Marco's whitewashing of it all is sickening. Plus: Zelensky is tired of Trump's games, China is playing a curious role on both sides of the war, and JD has another whopper to add to his stack of lies.

Former Amb. Michael McFaul joins Tim Miller.

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show notes:

• McFaul’s book, “Autocrats vs Democrats: China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder”

• Tim’s ‘Take’ with Caolan Robertson in Ukraine

• The NYT on potential Kushner/Witkoff deal with Russian company Lukoil

• Bulwark LIVE show in Atlanta TONIGHT

• The Bulwark’s campaign to help the Haitian community of Springfield

• The Bulwark store

• Closing Song: Orville Peck - “It’s the End of the World”

As always: Watch, listen, hit the like button or leave a comment. We want to hear from you.

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One of the last decade’s most consequential changes to how the Supreme Court operates is the growth of the so-called shadow docket — a process that allows the justices to decide cases unusually quickly, and often without full briefing or oral argument.

Historically, the Court would typically allow contentious legal issues to percolate in the lower courts for months or even years before the justices agreed to decide one of those issues. Then they’d spend months reading briefs, hearing arguments, and debating the case amongst themselves before they finally issued an opinion. This slow process existed because the Supreme Court is the final word on many legal questions — the Court can even override Congress if it claims a law is unconstitutional — and so it should be cautious before it hands down a decision that cannot easily be displaced.

A new case, which recently arrived on the Court’s shadow docket, embodies all the reasons why America’s highest Court should act carefully and slowly. K.M.K. v. Washington Interscholastic Activities Association involves a highly contentious issue — the plaintiffs in the case effectively want the Supreme Court to bar transgender women from women’s sports teams at high schools and universities, even in states that support trans inclusion in sports.

It also involves an appalling sexual assault allegation. One of the plaintiffs in the case is a high school women’s team wrestler who is identified only by her initials because she is a minor. She claims that one of her wrestling opponents, who is transgender, “forcefully” penetrated the plaintiff’s vagina with her fingers during a match.

As a memo from the local prosecutor’s office points out, if these allegations are true then K.M.K. is the victim of a very serious crime — rape in the third degree. The prosecutor’s office, however, decided not to prosecute because it concluded that it could not prove that a sex crime was committed beyond a reasonable doubt. Among other things, prosecutors spoke to the referee who officiated the match, and he said that “nothing stood out to him during the match” and that “after watching the video of the match, he could not say that the suspect’s hand placement was ‘anything out of the ordinary.’”

The school district, meanwhile, says that it has reviewed video of the match, interviewed both competitors, and that its investigation into the allegation is “still ongoing.”

K.M.K., in other words, is exactly the sort of case that the justices should step away from, sending it back down to the lower courts to gather more information and to fully think through the difficult legal issues presented by the case. Setting aside the horrifying allegations against her one-time opponent, K.M.K.’s lawyers — most of whom work for a Christian right law firm, the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) — make novel legal arguments that ask the Court to make broad pronouncements that go far beyond its previous precedents. 

One of their arguments, if taken seriously by the justices, could potentially make it impossible for any school athletes, whether cis or trans, to participate in competitive sports of any kind.

There is a very real risk, in other words, that the Supreme Court will, if it moves too quickly in this case, harm millions of school athletes throughout the country. The factual question of whether a particular wrestler committed a crime is separate from the legal question of whether federal law strips states of their authority over trans participation in women’s sports. And this legal question deserves more deliberation than the Court can give it if it decides this case on the shadow docket.

So what are the actual legal issues in K.M.K.?

In West Virginia v. B.P.J. (2026), the Supreme Court warned that judges should not be given the power to decide which athletes may compete on a women’s sports team. “The legislatures and the schools are better equipped — and under the Constitution, are the more appropriate entities,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for his Court, “to assess the competing medical and scientific considerations and draw appropriate lines.”

B.P.J., of course, was a loss for transgender rights. The Court rejected a constitutional challenge to state laws that forbid trans women from playing on school sports teams within that state. But the legal question in B.P.J. was whether laws barring trans women from women’s sports are allowed — a question that the Court’s Republican majority answered in the affirmative. A victory for the plaintiffs in K.M.K., by contrast, would likely establish that no state may permit trans women to compete on women’s sports teams, regardless of what the people of that state want.

This Court is often skeptical of claims by trans rights advocates, and it almost always resolves disputes between cultural liberals and religious conservatives in favor of the religious right. That said, this Court has thus far respected states’ rights on another contentious issue that is a high priority for the religious right: abortion. Although the Court’s Republican majority overruled Roe v. Wade and eliminated the constitutional right to an abortion, it has rejected some attempts to restrict abortion in blue states — including by repeatedly ruling against litigants who seek to ban the abortion medication mifepristone.

So it is, at least, possible that this Court will follow a similar path in K.M.K. and conclude that the question of which team trans women should play on should be answered by the states and not the Supreme Court.

Broadly speaking, ADF raises two legal arguments against Washington state’s policy allowing trans women to play on women’s sports teams. It claims that Title IX, a federal law that bars “sex” discrimination by most schools, implicitly requires those schools to have sports teams that only cisgender women may play on. It also claims that the Court’s recent decision in Mirabelli v. Bonta (2026), which requires public schools to out trans students to their parents even if the students wish to keep their gender identity secret, also requires those schools to exclude trans women from women’s sports.

There’s no reason for the Supreme Court to decide either of these questions now, however. As Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in Lux v. Rodrigues (2010), when a party that lost in the lower courts seeks an injunction from a Supreme Court justice before their case is fully litigated in those lower courts, they must demonstrate that “the legal rights at issue are ‘indisputably clear.’” This rule, like many old rules disfavoring shadow docket decisions, exists to prevent the justices from rushing into a decision that may later prove unwise.

There is no plausible argument that Title IX “indisputably” bars trans women from women’s sports. That’s because, just a few months ago in B.P.J., the Court held that it was not deciding the question of “whether, under Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause, schools may allow biological males who identify as female to participate on girls’ and women’s sports teams.” So that’s a recent Supreme Court precedent holding that the answer to this legal question remains open.

Mirabelli, meanwhile, is an unusually thinly reasoned decision. The Court’s Republican majority held that schools must out trans students because of a judicially created doctrine saying that parents have “primary authority with respect to ‘the upbringing and education of children.’” But the Court’s analysis of this issue was just a single paragraph long, it relied on the most malleable doctrine in all of US constitutional law, and it had nothing to say about sports. 

Moreover, as the school district points out in its brief, the Court has never held that a parent’s right to direct the upbringing of their child includes a right to dictate which rules will be used by school sports teams. If such a right existed, a parent might insist that a school bar players of a particular race. Or they might demand that their child be allowed to play football without being tackled.

Competitive team sports simply cannot exist if one player’s mother is allowed to demand changes to the rules that neither the league nor the other players support.

In any event, at this stage in the litigation it should be enough for the Court to say that the unique right claimed by K.M.K.’s mother — the right to dictate which rules a multischool competitive sports league will use — is not “indisputably clear” under current law. 

What should happen when the Court eventually decides whether blue states may allow trans women to play on women’s teams?

It is, to borrow from Lux, indisputably clear that the Court should not give the K.M.K. plaintiffs the sweeping policy change that they seek in a shadow docket ruling. But the justices cannot avoid, forever, the question of whether federal law forbids trans women from playing on women’s teams. So how should they resolve this question when it is more properly presented to them?

Let’s dispose of the plaintiffs’ Mirabelli argument first. While the Court has held that parents have some right to direct the education of their children, prior to Mirabelli, this right was construed narrowly. One older case held that states may not forbid parents from sending their children to private schools. Another held that the government may not bar teachers at these schools from teaching the German language.

Prior to the Court’s barely explained decision in Mirabelli, however, the Court had never held that parents may dictate how public schools operate, and the school district’s brief in K.M.K. cites several court decisions warning against giving parents too much authority over public schools. (The Court did hold, in Mahmoud v. Taylor (2025), that parents who object to a school’s curriculum on religious grounds may opt their children out of certain lessons. But the K.M.K. plaintiffs do not raise a religious objection.) As the Supreme Court said in Prince v. Massachusetts (1944), states may “restrict the parent’s control by requiring school attendance, regulating or prohibiting the child’s labor and in many other ways.” 

It’s clear from Mirabelli that the Court’s Republicans do not share this caution about judicial control over public schools. But, because Mirabelli was so thinly reasoned, it’s also impossible for outside observers to determine why these justices want an unprecedented amount of control over public schooling, or whether they have good reasons for asserting this new power.

I will simply reiterate the school district’s objection that, once the Supreme Court opens the door to parents dictating which rules will be used in school sporting competitions, the lawsuits will not end with parents seeking to kick trans women out of women’s sports. The next parent may object to their child wrestling Black people. Or they may demand that their child be given protective gear that gives them a competitive advantage. Some parents may also demand rules changes that conflict with changes demanded by other parents. And there is no principled way to distinguish these requests from a request to exclude trans women.

There are myriad problems, meanwhile, with the K.M.K. plaintiffs’ Title IX argument. That statute provides that schools that receive “Federal financial assistance” may not exclude individuals from “any education program” on “the basis of sex.” This statute has long been read to require equal treatment of men’s and women’s sports by schools that receive federal funds.

But, as the school district argues in its brief, Washington schools do not discriminate on the basis of “sex” — which the Court has defined to mean sex assigned at birth in this context. Instead, they classify athletes on the basis of gender identity. There is one team for all people who identify as male, whether trans or cis, and another team for all people who identify as female. Social conservatives may object to this arrangement, but it does not classify students based on their sex assigned at birth at all.

The K.M.K. plaintiffs’ argument is also undermined by federal regulations implementing Title IX. Those regulations provide that schools generally should not separate women and men in sports, but that they “may operate or sponsor separate teams for members of each sex where selection for such teams is based upon competitive skill or the activity involved is a contact sport.” It is quite a stretch to read regulations saying that schools “may” have sex-segregated teams to say that schools must ensure that their teams are strictly sex segregated.

Finally, recall that Title IX only applies to schools that accept federal funding — schools have the option of rejecting Title IX’s requirements if they also forego federal grants. This matters because, as the Court recently held in Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections (2026), “Congress must clearly and unambiguously alert a grant recipient to any condition on federal funds.”

Thus, if there is any ambiguity about whether Title IX requires schools to exclude trans women from women’s sports, that ambiguity must be resolved against imposing any requirements on public schools. Title IX may only be read to ban trans women from women’s sports if it “clearly and unambiguously” does so.

Again, there’s no reason for the justices to resolve either of these questions because, at this early stage in the litigation, the Supreme Court should simply decline to decide K.M.K. because the plaintiffs’ legal rights are not “indisputably clear.” But this Court is often impatient, especially in cases involving culture war issues. Mirabelli was also a shadow docket case, but that didn’t stop the Court’s Republicans from inventing a new legal rule compelling teachers to out their trans students.

There’s a serious risk, in other words, that this Court will rush to decide K.M.K. before it fully considers the legal arguments on either side, or even learns whether the genuinely shocking allegations raised by the plaintiffs have merit.

Visit our bookshop.org page to purchase this week’s new books and support your local bookstore. And us!

Barnes, J.S.: Ebenezer Scrooge: Ghost Hunter (Titan Books UK 978-1803362946, $27.99, 288pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, 10/20/2026)

Horror novel. Seven years after the events of A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge now works as an eradicator of troublesome spirits.

Blacke, Olivia: The Key to a Killer (St. Martin’s/Minotaur 978-1250336736, $29.00, 368pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 10/20/2026)

Supernatural mystery novel, third in the Ruby and Cordelia series. Roommates and co-investigators Ruby (living) and Cordelia (ghost) investigate their most difficult case yet: Cordelia’s own hazily-remembered death.

Blackwood, Lauren: Knight of the God King (St. Martin’s/Wednesday Books 978-1250891167, $21.00, 384pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 10/20/2026)

Young-adult fantasy romance novel. Aspiring knight Calliope and her handsome squire Beric are drawn into the schemes and secrets of a God King, who’s been waging war with something called The Dark for centuries.

Blake, Olivie & Adams, John Joseph: The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2026 (HarperCollins/Mariner 978-0063441521, $19.99, 432pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 10/20/2026)

Year’s best anthology, 12th in the series, with stories from 2025 by authors including Thomas Ha, Sarah Langan, Naomi Kanakia, and Alex E. Harrow. Introduction by guest editor Blake; foreword by series editor John Joseph Adams, who also provides a list of additional notable stories.

Card, Orson Scott: Ender’s Tribe (Blackstone Publishing 979-8228744219, $29.99, 288pp, formats: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook, 10/20/2026)

Collection of 8 science fiction stories from the Ender Universe. Includes the original story version of “Ender’s Game.”

Clarke, Susanna: The Bishop of Durham Attempts to Surrender the City (Bloomsbury Circus US 978-1639739813, $16.99, 96pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 10/20/2026)

Fantasy short story set in the universe of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. Faeiries attacking medieval Durham surround it with trees, and the savvy Bishop seeks the new King, leader of the fairy host. llustrations by Victoria Sawdon. Simultaneous with the Bloomsbury Circus UK edition.

Cooke, C.J.: House of Cursed Daughters (HarperCollins UK 979-0008775681, $20.00, 400pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 10/22/2026)

Historical supernatural novel. In 1312, 1865, and 2026, three women in England and France confront terrifying curses and madness.

Daniel, Katherine: When the Night Comes Knocking (Penguin Random House/Berkley 979-8217191338, $30.00, 304pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 10/20/2026)

Horror novel. Siblings Jane and Thomas, estranged after a near-fatal accident, encounter a mutilated man at a gas station in the North Georgia Appalachians.

Dewitt, Amanda: Devil’s Advocate: The Anti-Divine Comedy (Peachtree Teen 978-1682638682, $19.99, 320pp, formats: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook, 10/20/2026)

YA contemporary fantasy novel. Ada Faust, daughter of the devil, attempts to become her father’s successor by sabotaging a do-gooder senator, only to fall for Hasan, a half-angelic intern.

Everson, John: The Witching House (Flame Tree Press UK 978-1805520238, $26.95, 366pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, 10/20/2026)

Horror novel. Giana tests an urban legend by writing the name “Madelyn” in blood on the mirror, only for Madelyn to appear and demand revenge for her murder.

Foster, Alan Dean: Lost on Paradise (Blackstone Publishing 979-8236033794, $32.99, 272pp, formats: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook, 10/20/2026)

SF novel. Trash scavengers Jonos and Liina try to escape polluted Earth for the alien-run planet Paradise, which they’ve seen in videos.

Grothe, Taylor: Lethal Kiss (Tor/Nightfire 978-1250433879, $19.99, 384pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 10/20/2026)

Horror romance novel. A new hire at Preston University, Marcella is a monster that feeds on humans, but a spate of murders that don’t involve her cause her to align with desperate postdoc Lacie. Simultaneous with the Macmillan/Tor Nightfire UK edition.

Harrow, Alix E.: The Slantwise Histories and Other Stories (Tordotcom 978-1250345363, $29.99, 304pp, formats: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook, 10/20/2026)

Collection of stories, centered around alternate timelines and pasts. Includes 5 new stories and Hugo-winner “A Witch’s Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies.”

Hellmund, Wanda: Our Dark Incantations (Ace 979-8217190737, $32.00, 528pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 10/20/2026)

Fantasy romance novel. In a university of deadly magic and demonology, ex-healer Mira encounters Aidric, a frustratingly handsome soldier, only to discover a mystery that threatens the kingdom.

Kikic, Natalie: The Haunting of Lavender House (Harlequin/Park Row 978-0778307198, $30.00, 162pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 10/20/2026)

Horror novel. Magdalena, a healer in 1895 Croatia, is suspected of being a witch; in 2026 Petra learns that her Croatian grandmother is still alive, living in their ancestral home surrounded by lavender fields.

King, Ani: Family Night (Mason Jar Press 978-0951853259, $21.00, 156pp, formats: paperback, ebook, 10/20/2026)

Collection of 52 magical realist flash-fiction stories. Queerness, family, and retro oddness center in tales, including a girl summoning her missing mother with yacht rock and a woman tries to raise daughters from the bones of her rabbits.

Marie, I.V.: Twisted Vows (Penguin Random House/Delacorte 979-8217234530, $17.99, 192pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 10/20/2026)

Young-adult fantasy novel, third in The Souls of Blackwood Academy series. Wren is dropped at the gates of Blackwood, a school in purgatory, and is assigned a project with bad boy August.

Morris, Mark: Ghost Lights (Flame Tree Press UK 978-1805520115, $26.95, 288pp, formats: hardcover, paperback, ebook, 10/20/2026)

Horror anthology, 7th in the ABC of Horror series. Contains 20 original stories by Josh Malerman, Eric LaRocca, Rachel Harrison, and more.

Onoh, Nuzo: The Turning of Sally-Mae (Titan Books UK 978-1-835416075, $18.99, 320pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 10/20/2026)

Horror novel. Assaulted and impregnated by wealthy ranch heirs, Sally-Mae Jenkins is sent from Texas to Africa on a missionary ship, and her unborn twins become the focus of Aja-Mmo, a spirit entity who’s also claimed local healer Amara.

Qurratulayn: Soot & Sacrifice (Page Street 979-8890035028, $22.99, 272pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 10/20/2026)

Young-adult historical horror novel, second in the Blood & Breat duology. Evan Wilde got her revenge, but in the process unwittingly freed many devils from their Necro masters, and must team up with Rhys to stop the devil Jack.

Raughley, Sarah: The Queen’s Command (HarperCollins 978-0063344433, $19.99, 384pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 10/20/2026)

Young-adult historical fantasy. Victorian courtier and heiress Vicky Davis attends Cheltenham Ladies College, where a secret game among senior girls allegedly grants the winner’s wish.

Robert, Katee: The Tarot Trials (Tor 978-1250412355, $32.99, 400pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 10/20/2026)

Fantasy novel, first in the Tarot Trials series. Kestrel, daughter of the executed Moon Champion, enters the deadly Tarot Trials to try to find the other Champion who killed her mother. Simultaneous with the Macmillan/Tor UK edition.

Singer, Alex T.: Angel Country (Simon & Schuster/Saga Press 978-1668216521, $20.00, 448pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 10/20/2026)

Historical horror novel. Scientist Ada Franklin wakes in her own grave in 1904 and finds her lab abandoned and her life’s work — a device that enables human-angel communication — missing.

Woodroe, Alex: Tatratea (Clash Books 978-1968043360, $17.95, 164pp, formats: paperback, ebook, 10/20/2026)

Eco-horror novel. Armed with gear and sanity-check protocols, researcher Errata investigates strange signals coming from Tatratea, an abandoned Romanian manner, while the world outsidegoes insane.

Wynne, Douglas: Wellspring (Promethean 979-8995262510, $20.00, 318pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 10/26/2026)

Folk horror novel. Three former bandmates, fans of the classic rock band Bad Mother, investigate their friend Adam’s disappearance, all surrounding an infamous well that inspired Bad Mother’s magnum opus and drove its lead singer to madness.

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One month ago Nina Schick, “sovereign AI strategist”, published on Twitter a long list of “things AI has done so far”, all allegedly good, to advance or strenghten seven vital sectors of society, namely: Medicine, Scientific Discoveries, Environment, Clean Energy, Transport and, last but not least, Learning and “Jobs and Growth”.

As far as I can tell, all the accomplishments Schick lists for the first five sectors are big, actually useful stuff, and all share a really important characteristic: they all prove that AI can do stuff that’s really beneficial FOR all people... when it’s used by competent professionals, not students faking homework, “content creators” famous for being famous, trolls and fraudsters of every kind, or people whose only real problem is they don’t talk enough with other humans. Every item of that part of that list proves that universal access to AI is, as a minimum, not necessary for real progress. What AI has already done and will keep doing TO the masses, instead, is something else entirely.

What AI is really doing to the masses, economically…

Unlike the first five, the “Learning”, “Jobs” and “Growth” parts of that list are, at least highly questionable.

Growth? It takes some guts and big rose-colored glasses to say that AI “fuelled an investment boom” instead of saying that “AI is the only thing that keeps the US formally out of recession”“, and that it can only do that by hijacking (not just in the US) all the money that should have really gone to better uses (says a Nobel laureate, not me), all with the not-so-side effects of eviscerating Global Decisionmaking and making central bankers rave of acting unpredictably to keep AI at bay.

Jobs? What’s happening thanks to AI to way too many jobs these days, including many of the most prestigious posts, is the same things that was already happening before, just faster and wider: employees, consultants and managers, all more or less reduced to perform the appearance of meaningful work, or connect “systems that could probably talk directly to each other”, often trying to ignore that those systems themselves serve no real purpose. The only thing that’s really different this time is that, if AI keeps even half of its promises, it will make much much faster, that is much more devastating, two effects of previous economic revolutions, plus one not seen before:

First, replacing hiring new workers with AI bots lead by expert workers will leave no expert workers to lead AI when the experts of today retire

Second, both “upskilling” and radical career changes for those laid off by AI will be useless. If someone spent twenty years trying to become, say, the greatest accountant, technician, supervisor or middle-manager they could be, instead of becoming a coder, a content creator, or anything else new enough and far enough from AI to be safe... 90% of the time the reason is that they could never learn to do it well enough to make a living, no matter how much upskilling you throw at them, and not before they end up under a bridge for sure. Next time anyone preaches upskilling as a solution to unemployment today, for any meaningful number of people, just laugh in their face.

Third, the people hit hardest by those two waves will not be the people at the bottom, but those right above them, at least historically. They will be either highly educated youngsters, left with nothing that could repay their student debt, or their forerunners who have been used throughout their whole working life to “be the automaters, not the automated. And if you ask real historians, more than one will likely point out that’s just when those two classes lose their privileges that real, bad revolutions happen.

Of course, all this is what will happen if AI keeps half of its promises. What’s much, much more likely to happen, instead, is that it crashes spectacularly, ), and the recent pathetic call of AI CEOs to slow down may be just a confirmation that they too feel the same way. Never too soon, if you ask me. On to the easiest and most interesting part now.

… and mentally (this is the superheroes part)

Learning? Schick writes that AI has made personalised learning available on demand, and helped students learn twice as much in less time, and it sure can look that way. What’s really happening, however, is that (from a Stanford study) the big growth of the “context” capabilities of AI chatbots has happened in parallel with contraction of human sustained-attention capacity, and that (from China) high school students who increased their homework scores 18% thanks to AI performed 20% worse at their final exams, 2.5 years later. In other words, children that actually learn much more and much faster thanks to AI and that can keep and put to good use all they learned that way when adults surely exist, but they surely are very few. Making every child use AI to learn all the time because those exceptions exist is like giving every child a Saturn V rocket because we know for sure that some humans are excellent astronauts.

The truth is different, and we saw it the first time twelve years ago, when a much better picture of what unleashing on the masses the strain of software inappropriately called AI really does appeared in volume 2 of The Justice League comics:

in that story, a virus called “Amazo” developed by the some mad scientist gives every ordinary human it infects superpowers based on their actual desires and personality traits... for one day, after which their brain boils and, if they survive, they become brainwashed zombies controlled by the Amazo Virus Patient Zero. Sounds familiar?

AI spreading to everybody, virus-like, ist just that, the Amazo Virus made real. Forget any fantasy that simply throwing AI or any other technology at everybody, prepared or not, will ever be enough to make the world a better place. It’s the same bullshit they said thirty years ago about the Internet (remember the “independence of cyberspace”?), and fifteen years later about social media (remember the Arab Spring?).

AI can do a lot of good in the hands of everybody who’s not an immature sociopath like the current horde of AI executives, and is actually prepared to handle it to solve real problems. But this doesn’t mean the rest of us is powerless. Quite the contrary, actually: our real world can and must be saved only by ordinary people who remain real. People who, when it comes to AI, understand that this AI is not unavoidable, and above all that there is no need to get everybody high on it, every day, to get all the real benefits of AI. Universal access to general purpose AI chatbots and search services is an Amazo virus that must end now. Demand it.

Final, very short public service announcements:

1. If you like what you find here, thanks in advance for considering a (possibly paid) subscription or, even better, one-time donations for any amount via PayPal (mfioretti@nexaima.net) or LiberaPay.

2. I am available for one-hour video-meetings with current or future parents to discuss everything, not just social media, about parenting in a digital age. For details, please see the “what I am going to do about it” paragraph of this other post, and then email me at mfioretti@nexaima.net.

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Today's links

• The death of history's most successful publisher: Google has a scorching case of "main character syndrome."
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Civil War x 4,400 ceramic cats; Okaysellers; Frankenstein hat; Clockwork Fagin; Tracking trackers; "Fever Beach."
• Upcoming appearances: Victoria, Vancouver, Ottawa, Vienna, Kilkenny, Couretnay, Vancouver, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Montreal.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

The death of history's most successful publisher (permalink)

I published my first story in 1988, when I was 17 years old. Today, at 55, I've published more than 30 books, with three more coming in the next year or so. In the intervening years, I've spent a lot of time thinking and talking about publishing.

I've had plenty of opportunity to reflect on publishing: I've been a bookseller and worked in libraries, I wrote a column for Publishers Weekly, self-published a few books of my own, published the first-ever book licensed under Creative Commons, and broke several Kickstarter records for audiobook projects. But most of all, I've worked with publishing professionals: publicists, marketing directors, operations people, copyeditors, and, above all, editors.

My first novel editor was the magnificent Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who supported my publishing career from the very start, donating to help send me to the Clarion science fiction writers' workshop and inviting me to come read slush at Tor Books whenever I was in New York. Patrick didn't teach me everything I know about publishing, but he sure taught me a lot about publishing, and hardly a day goes by without my having cause to reflect on one of our many discussions over our decades-long professional and personal association.

Out of all the things I learned about publishing from Patrick, one truth stands out above all: publishing is "the act of making something public." Publishing may or may not involve editing, layout, printing, binding, marketing or other activities that we associate with publishing houses, but publishing always involves identifying a work, identifying an audience, and finding ways to connect that work to that audience.

This definition does a lot of useful work. For one thing, it locates publishing as part of the hard problem of human society, namely, "getting people to care about something that matters to you." Beyond publishing, this is the crux of politics, religion and commerce:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/04/self-publishing/

For another, this definition lets us understand that (for most of its existence) Google was the most successful publisher in human history. No other institution of any kind connected more works with more audiences. Lots of people have heard of Google's wildly unsuccessful motto "Don't be evil," but far fewer are familiar with Google's wildly successful mission statement, "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

But all of that is in the past tense. With its AI projects – AI summaries, the Gemini chatbot – Google has abandoned the practice of "connecting works with audiences." Today, Google's function is to plunder all the works on the internet and chop them up and arrange them in an unimaginably vast, multidimensional array for the explicit purpose of preventing audiences from connecting with those works.

For most of its history, Google operated in a virtuous cycle with publishers whereby they allowed Google to crawl their sites and Google located audiences and connected them with the pages on those sites. Today, that cycle has turned vicious, with Google acting as a parasite that extracts value from the web's publishers and offers nothing in return.

This is entirely in keeping with the enshittification hypothesis: that once a platform is liberated from the disciplining forces of competition, regulation, labor and interoperability, it will squeeze its suppliers and users and harvest all the value for itself:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

But AI represents a new phase in enshittification. Google has assayed enshittificatory gambits in the past, like deliberately worsening its search results in order to force you to search repeatedly, which gave the company more chances to show you ads:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

But as sleazy as those gambits were, they were profitable. In some important sense, they were sustainable. Assuming Google could carry on indefinitely scamming its users in this way, they'd continue to bring in more cash than they spent, and continue to be the world's most successful publisher, connecting works and audiences (albeit in a deliberately degraded way).

Contrast this with AI, the money-losingest endeavor in the history of human civilization. Google is losing hundreds of billions of dollars on AI. The more AI Google does, the worse the company's financial footing becomes. If Google does this for long enough, it may cease to exist altogether. This collapse can only be prolonged by Google's ongoing extraction of value from web publishers, who no longer have their works connected with audiences via Google search results. Instead, Google usurps those audiences, shows them as many ads as it can, and still loses money in the bargain.

In Tim Wu's Age of Extraction, Wu lays out a thesis about how intermediaries – middlemen who perform a useful function connecting different groups, firms and individuals – are prone to developing "main character syndrome," abandoning their role as facilitators for others and abusing their position to make themselves the prime beneficiary of the transactions they facilitate:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/691177/the-age-of-extraction-by-tim-wu/

Google has a scorching case of main character syndrome, and nowhere is that more obvious than in its AI-fueled transformation into web-scale parasite. The fact that this gambit might well destroy Google and the publishers the company once served – rather than merely enshittifying search with worse results and more ads – makes the whole thing look more like a Mafia bust-out than the enshittification of the first half of the 2020s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bust_Out

It's certainly an ignominious end for history's most successful publisher (as was).

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Trump says Google kisses his ass https://www.theverge.com/policy/1013485/trump-google-kiss-my-ass

• Tell Doug Ford: Say NO to Waymo https://techfordemocracy.ca/2026/04/29/say-no-to-waymo/

• Bizarre Blanets and Weird Worlds https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2026/10/bizarre-blanets-and-other-weir.html

• The Showrunners Network https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/spacecommand/the-showrunners-network?ref=8rypb4

• Christian Conman Jim Bakker is Dead https://skepchick.org/2026/10/christian-conman-jim-bakker-is-dead/

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Reenacting the Civil War with 44,000 ceramic cats in handmade uniforms https://web.archive.org/web/20011021022729/http://www.phillyburbs.com/intelligencerrecord/news/news_intell/1332513.htm

#20yrsago More on publishing and “okaysellers” https://www.nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/bestsellers_oka/#008116

#15yrsago HOWTO make a Frankenstein hat https://web.archive.org/web/20111022194802/http://deliacreates.blogspot.com/2011/10/hey-frankie.html

#15yrsago Copyright policy in the UK: an evidence-free zone https://www.openrightsgroup.org/publications/cant-look-now-finding-film-online/

#15yrsago Clockwork Fagin on Escape Pod https://delivery-edge.libsyn.com/shows/18601/items/1737698/EP315_ClockworkFagin.mp3

#10yrsago At long last, America’s racist, crazy tough-on-crime prosecutors are losing elections https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2828803

#5yrsago Imperfections in your Bluetooth beacons allow for unstoppable tracking https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/21/sidechannels/#ble-eding

#1yrago Carl Hiaasen's 'Fever Beach' https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/21/florida-duh/#strokerz-for-liberty

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20
  https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020

• Vancouver: Life After AI (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 22
  https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/46

• Ottawa: Life After AI (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 24
  https://writersfestival.org/event/life-after-ai

• Vienna: TED AI, Oct 28-30
  https://tedai-vienna.ted.com/

• Kilkenny (Kilkenomics), Nov 6-8
  https://kilkenomics.com/

• Courtenay: Enshittification (Sid Williams Theatre Society), Nov 10
  https://www.sidwilliamstheatre.com/events/cory-doctorow-talks-enshittification/

• Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12
  https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/

• Oxford: Ministry of the Future, Nov 23
  https://ministryforthefuture.co.uk/events.html

• Sheffield: Reverse Centaur at Juno Books, Nov 25
  https://www.outsavvy.com/event/40274/cory-doctorow-in-conversation

• Virtual: Enshittification, AI, and the Future of Technology (UBC Master of Educational Technology), Nov 28
  https://met.ubc.ca/2026/09/met-speaker-series-cory-doctorow-enshittification-ai-and-the-future-of-technology/

• Oxford: Bennett Oxford Symposium on Open Code in Science, Dec 9
  https://www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/events/2026-bennett-institute-symposium/

• Montreal: World Science Fiction Convention, Sep 2-6
  https://montreal2027.ca/en

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Life After AI (Brain Bar)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPPa43-n0vI

• Terms of Service with Clare Duffy (CNN)
  https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/terms-of-service-with-clare-duffy/episodes/458ce968-af5d-11f0-b539-13ed2afe25f8

• AI, Work, and Power (Software Engineering Daily)
  AI, Work, and Power https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/podcasts/cory-doctorow-on-ai-work-and-power/

• AI, Corporate Power, and the Fight for Worker Control (Plutopia)
  https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-ai-corporate-power-and-the-fight-for-worker-control/

• How to Think About AI—Before It’s Too Late (Daniel Solove)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0xR3uEgGcc

Latest books (permalink)

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

• "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

Upcoming books (permalink)

• "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

• "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 514 (27116 total).

• "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

This article first appeared at ProPublica.

A few months into President Donald Trump’s second term, political appointees at the Department of Homeland Security made an unusual request of its agency focused on cybersecurity: Secretly acquire a voting machine and hack it.

I corresponded with a TPM Reader from the tech world recently who marveled at the political salience of data centers when data centers have been around since the late 90s. Many data centers today are orders of magnitude larger than their pre-AI relatives, gobbling up much more energy, making more noise and physical pollution. But he noted that the bulk of them aren’t nearly that large. These points each have some truth to them, though I think it understates the real-world impact of hyperscaler data centers. And, as I’ve noted, a lot of our collective social angst about data centers and AI is really focused on oligarchy — the way that it appears to be the tech oligarchs’ world and we’re just living in it. The ability for town and county councils to say no to data centers is irresistible precisely because it’s the one case where democratic self-government is in a position to say “NO!” and that’s so contrary to all our other experience these days. But there’s an entirely different vantage point on this question I want to focus on.

The impact of particular data centers in particular places is one issue. But the macro-story is even bigger and more jarring. Axios has a piece this morning about how the housing sector is getting hammered by the hyperscaler AI boom, both buildings and buyers. And as you may have heard the lack of affordable housing is a rather pressing issue in American society today. This applies to everything from inflation/scarcity of the physical building blocks that are used for building housing to the scarcity of capital to fund it. If that sounds overstated look at this chart from a study we discussed late last month and which got written up in various publications.

Open and Ongoing Ratfuckery

The Trump DOJ — corruptly deployed by the White House as an unprecedented election interference tool — sure is getting the headlines it wants from its campaign to prosecute alleged noncitizen voting while the midterm elections are already underway:

• NYT: Justice Dept. Charges 28 in California With Voting-Related Crimes
• AP: Justice Department arrests more than 2 dozen in California sweep targeting alleged noncitizen voters
• NPR: DOJ charges 28 in California with voting crimes as election tensions escalate

Even though those stories include the usual caveats — about the rarity of noncitizen voting, Trump’s track record of inflating the risks thereof, and the administration’s disinformation campaign targeting the election — the top-line news remains arrests and prosecutions.

DOJ says it has charged 113 people in 20 states with illegal voting and illegal registration offenses over the last seven weeks. 

The timing is no accident, of course.

Rolling out alleged noncitizen voting prosecutions right before the election instills fear in Black and brown communities, may dampen voter turnout, provides a ready-made excuse for GOP losses, serves as a pretext for challenging/delegitimizing the election results, and generally is a brazen display of ratfuckery.

The DOJ has not been discreet or muted in its approach. It has issued press releases touting its noncitizen voting prosecutions that contain photos of the defendants (albeit with their faces digitally obscured). Yesterday, acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter held a press conference in California — where mail-in voting is already underway — to announce the 28 new prosecutions there, which DOJ has dubbed “Operation Protect the Vote.”

The arrests weren’t low-key either. The wife of a 72-year-old man from Belize said federal agents showed up at their house before dawn in full tactical gear with guns drawn — along with camera crews and news helicopters. He later appeared in court still in his pajamas. He is reportedly a registered Republican.

The timing is especially glaring because some of the new alleged noncitizen voting cases go back years, to 2020 and earlier. A couple of the new California cases allege fraudulent voter registration as far back as 2002 and 2003. Some of the cases don’t even allege illegal voting per se, but rather making false statements on naturalization paperwork. One lawful permanent resident charged in North Carolina has been in the United States for so long that DOJ identifies her as a “national of former Yugoslavia.”

Why The Timing Is Extra Pernicious

But the timing isn’t accidental for another reason: Bringing these cases so late in the cycle leaves no time to test these allegations in court before the election. If the cases later fall apart, if they’re dismissed, if they result in acquittals, then … too bad, so sad.

The attempted prosecutions will have served their election disinformation purposes, and there’s no way to roll back the clock and undo the damage.

There are already early signs that some of the new prosecutions in California are flimsy. Some of the newly charged immigrants said they had no memory of ever registering to vote, the LA Times reported:

At the federal courthouse in downtown Los Angeles late Monday, several green card holders arrested in a crackdown on alleged California voter fraud expressed confusion over the charges — with some saying they had no recollection of registering to vote, as Trump administration officials accuse them of doing.

Among them was Ana Domínguez, 60, a native of El Salvador living in Long Beach as a lawful permanent resident. Federal authorities accused her Monday of fraudulently registering to vote in July 2006 and then lying about it in her naturalization paperwork in March 2026.

Domínguez said she did not have any memory of registering to vote.

Another man accused of the same crimes as Domínguez said the same: He wasn’t aware of ever registering to vote, as federal prosecutors claimed he had.

It’s not uncommon for noncitizens to end up being unknowingly registered to vote during previous interactions with the government. “There is only a crime if the government can prove willful violations of federal law,” election law expert Rich Hasen noted.

DOJ’s One-Two California Punch

The new round of criminal cases is happening in parallel with the Trump DOJ’s lawsuit against California trying to force it to segregate and not count alleged noncitizen mail-in ballots — again, while voting is already happening.

The administration continues to try to ratchet up pressure on California election officials. In a letter Friday, the DOJ reportedly warned that state election officials who knowingly process ballots cast by noncitizen voters are at risk of investigation.

In a striking admission, acting DAG McCotter, the DOJ’s No. 2, conceded yesterday that the list of some 20,000 alleged noncitizen voters that the administration is demanding California use to segregate ballots may contain some citizens:

Ultimately, the most pernicious aspect of this campaign against the phantom scourge of noncitizen voting is the risk that the administration’s sloppiness, indifference, and aggressiveness results in legally cast ballots from U.S. citizens not being counted.

In a 180-degree turn, the Justice Department has gone from its historic role of protecting and defending the individual right to vote to being the leading threat to free and fair elections.

Why California?

I remain puzzled why so much of the Trump administration’s election-interference and disinformation campaign is focused on California. The electoral math doesn’t add up. Thoughts?

Good Read

ProPublica:

A few months into President Donald Trump’s second term, political appointees at the Department of Homeland Security made an unusual request of its agency focused on cybersecurity: Secretly acquire a voting machine and hack it.

The appointees wanted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to procure the machine, examine it and report back the findings so they could be given to the White House, according to two former administration officials with knowledge of the request. 

This scheme appears to have never gotten off the ground.

Just In …

WaPo: A small group of about 10 current and former U.S. national security officials with DoD experience has been discreetly advising state governments and members of Congress on how to prepare for the possibility that the Trump administration will attempt to interfere in November’s midterm elections.

Quote of the Day

“Our number one risk at this point is the federal government.”—Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold (D) on the biggest threat to free and fair elections

Pure Unadulterated Racism

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Perfect Play ran over 300 million games of Monopoly to determine the best strategy and the most common mistakes players make.

I turned eight classic Monopoly strategies into computer players and made them play 312,898,560 games against each other. At a table of four, the best one won 43% of its games. The worst one won 3%.

The gap doesn’t come from one clever trick. It comes from four common mistakes: being picky about what you buy, saving your cash, stopping at three houses, and refusing to trade. Then I let the computer tune every habit at once, to see how far a carefully tuned player can go and which color set is really worth fighting for.

P.S. I don’t actually play Monopoly anymore — it is the world’s most maddening game (along with Sorry) and I childishly refer to it as “Monotony” — and an aside about 3 minutes into the video is why: “roughly one game in six never ends”. Exactly! And you want me to haggle? For fun? No thank you. I imagine there are folks whose idea of a good time is visiting used car dealerships for funsies when they don’t need a car, but I am not one of them.

See also How to Win at Monopoly and Piss Off Your Friends.

Tags: games · Monopoly · video

Protestors Criticized For Looting Businesses Without Forming Private Equity Firm First. “It’s disgusting to put workers at risk by looting. You do it by chipping away at their health benefits and eventually laying them off.”

Using an LLM’s “superhuman ability to parse through galactic quantities of data”, a very amateur astronomer has found a possible exoplanet candidate. MIT is going to point their satellite at the candidate planet to collect more data soon.

Will Saletan gives his take on the growing panic inside House Republican leadership as bad polls, shrinking campaign budgets, and vulnerable races threaten the GOP’s hold on Congress. Even friendly voices on Fox News are pressing Mike Johnson, Tom Emmer, and Steve Scalise on why Republicans are struggling ahead of the midterms. From Texas districts where Republican gerrymandering may be backfiring to rising frustration over fuel prices and the Iran war, GOP leaders are running out of explanations.

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1. Asymmetry

Joe Manchin will be in Maine tomorrow campaigning for Susan Collins. Literally. Manchin told Semafor that he was motivated to get off the sidelines—where he merely endorsed Collins—because, well, here’s Semafor:

The moderate West Virginian said his visit is motivated by the attacks on Collins for voting too often in support of President Donald Trump.

However mad you are, it’s not mad enough. Because this isn’t just about Joe Manchin. It’s a fundamental asymmetry between Democrats and Republicans that’s driving the fascist movement in America.

Give Manchin the finger: Join Bulwark+.

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Of all the ludicrous things written about Sofia Coppola’s beguiling “Marie Antoinette” upon its theatrical release 20 years ago (and after being booed at its Cannes premiere, there were so frighteningly many), the most absurd is the hand-wringing over its anachronistic soundtrack. Coppola filled the film tip-to-couture-heeled-toe with songs from ’80s punk and new wave groups, creating a throughline between her own teenage preoccupations and the adolescent Queen of France’s frivolities. 

Looking back now, the decision is even more inspired than it was then: a bold, personal choice that helped Coppola’s film stand out from the otherwise stuffy welcome it was bound to receive. This was not, after all, your conventional period piece. Coppola was granted unprecedented access to film in and around the grounds of the Palace of Versailles. But beyond the exclusive entrée, Coppola — only on her third feature, but already known for her affinity for youth culture — would bring Marie Antoinette a jouissance the history books had never afforded her.

Critics, of course, didn’t see it that way. Writing about the soundtrack, The Denver Post’s Michael Booth said the music was “not interesting enough to save this bauble,” and that Coppola “doesn’t even have the conviction to remain new wave throughout.” Time Out’s Dave Calhoun professed: “The soundtrack — like the distracting cakes, costumes and production design — does everything to stress youthful decadence and nothing to throw any light on the woman who gives the film its name.” Most curtly, The San Francisco Chronicle’s Mick LaSalle wrote that Coppola’s “reductive approach illuminates nothing about the queen except to suggest that she was an idiot, and portentous shots of her rushing down opulent corridors to a rock soundtrack can’t lend her stature.”

(Sofia Coppola) Jason Schwartzman, Sofia Coppola and Kirsten Dunst on the set of “Marie Antoinette”

What’s funny, especially in retrospect, is how widely these men whiffed the point. Historical stature and new discoveries are irrelevant. (So, too, is mature conviction — though I’d argue Coppola displayed exactly that when she didn’t make the entire soundtrack new wave.) Coppola conveys that the answers about who Marie Antoinette was have been written into history, but overlooked by the men who most often dictate it. She was a teenage girl suddenly saddled with the fate of a country, tasked with making decisions well beyond her purview or experience. Marie Antoinette was out of her depth from the moment she set foot in France from Austria, entrusted with overseeing war and peace, money and poverty. She tried her best, did what she felt was right, and they had her head for it. What better analogy for Coppola and the bitter response to her brilliant, evergreen third film?

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Twenty years on, “Making Marie Antoinette” — which screened at this year’s New York Film Festival and premieres in theaters October 23 before streaming on MUBI November 6 — sheds ravishing new light on Coppola’s masterpiece. Co-directed by Coppola alongside her late mother, Eleanor, and drawn from over 90 hours of behind-the-scenes footage Eleanor shot during production, the documentary is an instant essential for anyone ravished by the original film or the filmmaking process. 

Up-close and personal, Eleanor’s camera reveals the massive undertaking of producing a movie at this scale, honing in on small, intricate details to convey her daughter’s meticulousness. Her footage is teeming with maternal pride, observant and heartwarming. One gets the sense that, for a filmmaking dynasty like the Coppolas, filming the production of “Marie Antoinette” is Eleanor’s version of a parent at their child’s Christmas pageant, ducking down in the aisles and contorting themselves to ensure they don’t miss a single moment. If “Marie Antoinette” says as much about its director as it does about its subject, “Making Marie Antoinette” is the perfect companion piece: A film about letting art and life stay in constant conversation, and how that dialogue makes for a rich existence. It’s the perfect example of how movies can make something as intangible as love go on forever.

Sofia and Eleanor Coppola began work on “Making Marie Antoinette” together during the pandemic. Locked away in their quarantine pod, the isolation proved the perfect opportunity to comb through hours of archival footage, stitching a story from B-roll and memories, both of which Eleanor had plenty of. A dedicated archivist of her own life via journals and film, Eleanor spent much of her time trailing her husband, Francis Ford Coppola, and children between their movie sets to document the arduous filmmaking process. She eventually broke into her own work beyond documentaries and videography, directing two narrative feature films before the pandemic began. At her daughter’s side, “Making Marie Antoinette” made progress but remained unfinished when Eleanor died in 2024. Sofia decided to finish the film as a tribute to her mother, and both women’s touch can be felt throughout — two hands held together, always.

Even those critics who panned “Marie Antoinette” 20 years ago could find something to adore here. For all the derision heaped upon Sofia’s keen directorial eye and scrupulous vision, a behind-the-scenes look only makes the details all the more impressive. It’s a production with a capital “P”: hundreds of extras, an immense principal cast, throngs of below-the-line team — costumers, production designers, historical advisors, translators — and one giant, very expensive castle that must be handled with the utmost care. One doesn’t have to hear Sofia say “this is a lot” to understand that it’s far more than just a lot. It’s visible in every shot. For a director whose previous two films were microscopic in comparison, shooting “Marie Antoinette” may as well have been going to the moon.

(Sofia Coppola) Kirsten Dunst on the set of “Marie Antoinette”

But that’s also what makes it such a feast. It’s a film unlike any other period piece, as sumptuous as decadent as a French pastry. One can practically taste the butter on their lips as Kirsten Dunst glides through ornate halls and indulges in raspberry-topped sweets. This surplus of opulence is what gives the film its edge, too. Think about who you were at 14. If you were thrust into a world where everything you could ever want is at your fingertips, where love blossomed as freely as the gardens adorning your magnificent estate, wouldn’t you, too, lose yourself inside the pomp and circumstance? Is that not the very feeling of being a teenager, so certain that everything and anything is possible, that when one gets a taste of the world, it’s nothing short of intoxicating?

For Sofia, the fantasy is the film. It’s integral to Marie Antoinette’s tragedy, to making the viewer empathize with a girl who had no choice but to get in over her head. In Eleanor’s camera, Sofia has that same impish desire, taking on a film so gargantuan that she can’t possibly understand that her eyes are bigger than her stomach. Eleanor watches dutifully, admiring her daughter as she leads rooms full of men, asserting that her decision is not only the best one, but the right one, because she is the person in charge.

It’s frightening to watch someone you care for so deeply balance all that power. But through journal entries from that time, narrated in the film by Diane Lane, the audience can piece together where the fear and the pride meet. After all, Eleanor understood from decades of experience that filmmaking is, most often, a boy’s club — even when a woman is at the helm. And as the long, 50-some-day production schedule rolls on, the viewer can feel Eleanor’s anxiety ease, allowing pride to take full control. Sofia has this, and Eleanor’s job might be the best one on set: watching the daughter she raised come into her own.

“Maybe making movies is a way of moving back and forth, in and out, of linear time,” Eleanor says in one of her journal entries. It’s a reference not only to the period production, but to her daughter’s thoughtful directorial anachronisms, the very decisions that would make “Marie Antoinette” last for 20 years and beyond. What a glorious, warm and strangely pertinent observation — something Eleanor couldn’t have understood the relevance of at the time. Here we are, two decades on, watching her documentary further cement Sofia’s film as the modern classic it is. More than a meta perspective or conventional behind-the-scenes doc, “Making Marie Antoinette” is a tender portrait of familial love from mother and daughter alike. Now, the pride moves in both directions — with Sofia as reverent of her mother’s work as Eleanor was of hers — meeting in the middle to stretch into the future.

The post “Making Marie Antoinette” is a tale of two Coppolas appeared first on Salon.com.

Andrew Egger and Bill Kristol give their takes on Trump’s increasingly desperate push to save Republicans two weeks before the midterms. As Trump’s approval rating sinks and Democrats build a major polling advantage, the president is struggling to make the case for his party, resorting to racist attacks, religious bigotry, and bizarre defenses of vulnerable Republicans.

Plus, Trump continues to side with Vladimir Putin as Russia escalates its attacks on Ukraine and Marco Rubio is left defending the White House’s actions on Ukraine as Trump’s pro-Putin rhetoric grows harder to ignore.

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SOUTH CAROLINA DEMOCRATS HAVE HAD their hearts broken before.

In 2020, future Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison spent a gajillion dollars (okay, $132 million) and lost to Lindsey Graham by 10 points.

Now, after Lindsey’s passing, his sister, Sen. Darline Graham, is running for a full term against Dr. Annie Andrews, a physician who previously ran for Congress in 2022.

South Carolina is a tougher state for Democrats to compete in than some of the others we’ve covered, like Iowa, Texas, or even Kansas. Donald Trump won here by 18 points in 2024, and racial polarization can also make it even less elastic than other states that are competitive this year.

But there are glimmers of hope. Darline Graham hasn’t had her patients arrested like Roger Marshall or been comically corrupt like Ken Paxton, but South Carolina Republicans didn’t send their best when they sent Darline.

Democrat Dr. Annie Andrews is running a good race. I got to see her up close last week, and she’s incredibly charismatic.

But still, the voters who will decide this race are reverting to their tribal instincts. Last week, we conducted two groups of disaffected 2024 Trump voters, many of whom were from South Carolina and had some choice words for the GOP Senate nominee there.

Those groups tell you why Andrews could get close. And even getting close could mean

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