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On Tuesday, May 19, the U.S. House passed H.R. 2616, the "Stopping Indoctrination and Protecting Kids Act," by a vote of 217-198. The bill would hand the Trump administration enormous leverage to strip federal funding from any school that “teaches or advances concepts” related to transgender people, codifying into federal law the anti-trans definitions from Trump's executive order 14168, "Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism." It would also require public schools to forcibly out transgender students to their parents before using their pronouns or chosen names. The bill is significant on its own terms for the harm it would inflict on transgender youth if it became law. But what made Tuesday's vote especially notable was the eight Democrats who joined every Republican to pass it—the largest Democratic defection on any standalone anti-trans bill of this Congress.
The bill's most consequential clause is its second section, which amends the federal education code's existing list of "prohibited uses of funds" to add: "to teach or advance concepts related to gender ideology, as defined in section 2 of Executive Order 14168 (90 Fed. Reg. 8615; relating to defending women from gender ideology extremism and restoring biological truth to the Federal Government)." That single sentence slots an anti-trans line item into Section 8526 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the foundational federal law governing K-12 education in the United States. Adding "concepts related to gender ideology" to that list places the existence of transgender people on the same legal footing as activities the federal government considers prohibited. And by tying the definition of "gender ideology" to Trump's executive order rather than the statute itself, Congress would be handing enormous power to the president to strip public school funding.
The language "teach or advance concepts related to" is dangerously broad. At its most basic level, simply acknowledging that transgender people exist could be construed as "teaching" gender ideology. Books featuring transgender characters would likely be pulled from classrooms—an outcome already playing out in states with similar laws on the books. But the phrase "advancing concepts" could spiderweb in much more aggressive directions. Is a transgender teacher who uses their own name and pronouns "advancing concepts" related to transgender people? Is allowing a trans student to use the bathroom matching their gender "advancing concepts"? Is a high school production of Twelfth Night—a Shakespearean play built entirely around cross-gender performance—"advancing concepts" of gender ideology? These hypotheticals may sound far-fetched, but the Trump administration and its allies have already targeted versions of every one of them.
The bill would also require any school receiving federal funds to obtain a parent's consent before using a student's chosen name or pronouns, or before allowing them to use any sex-based accommodation matching their gender identity. In practice, the provision functions as a forced outing mandate. A transgender student who feels safe enough at school to use a gender-neutral office restroom or bathroom of their gender identity, or to be called by the right name in class, would lose access to those accommodations unless their parents had already been notified—and approved. Transgender youth face notoriously high rates of family rejection and abuse, and in the wake of the Supreme Court's Chiles v. Salazar decision last year, an outed trans student could face the prospect of court-greenlit conversion therapy.
But most devastating for transgender people was the uptick in Democratic support. Previous anti-trans bills had drawn defections from only a handful of habitually anti-trans Democrats—usually just Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez of Texas, who have voted with Republicans on several anti-trans bills and amendments brought to the House floor. Tuesday's vote was different. Eight Democrats joined every Republican to pass the bill—the largest Democratic crossover on a standalone anti-trans bill in recent memory. The eight: Vicente Gonzalez (D-TX), Henry Cuellar (D-TX), Don Davis (D-NC), Cleo Fields (D-LA), Laura Gillen (D-NY), Marcy Kaptur (D-OH), Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-WA), and Eugene Vindman (D-VA).
The move to target transgender people has been pushed for some time now by a small but vocal wing of Democratic-aligned strategists, pundits, and benefactors who portray themselves as "moderate"—from outfits like Third Way and the Searchlight Institute, to individual lawmakers like Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton and Rep. Tom Suozzi of New York, who have spent the past two years arguing the party should drop its defense of trans people. The wing remains small, but it continues to push to grow its influence—and its most significant elected proponent is California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a likely 2028 presidential contender, who platformed Charlie Kirk on his podcast to declare himself "completely aligned" with the late far-right activist on banning trans athletes, vetoed multiple pro-LGBTQ+ bills in California, and on a separate podcast appearance appeared to entertain the idea that trans people shouldn't transition before age 25.
For now, H.R. 2616 heads to the Senate, where the legislative filibuster requires 60 votes to advance—a threshold no standalone anti-trans bill has cleared in this Congress. Senate Democrats blocked the federal trans sports ban earlier this year on a straight party-line vote, and the most likely fate of the “Stopping Indoctrination and Protecting Kids Act” is that it dies on the same procedural wall. Whether that holds—and whether the number of House Democrats willing to vote yes the next time keeps growing—is going to be important to continue watching moving forward.
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Yesterday the Department of Justice announced it is creating a $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” to compensate what it calls victims of the Department of Justice under former President Joe Biden. Acting attorney general Todd Blanche said the fund was “a lawful process for victims of lawfare and weaponization to be heard and seek redress.”
First of all, the insistence of Trump cronies that the Department of Justice and federal judges “weaponized” the law against them under former president Joe Biden—or under former president Barack Obama—is another example of regime officials blaming others for what they, themselves, are doing as Trump’s appointees try to manufacture criminal cases against those Trump considers his enemies. Trump’s attacks on the justice system are designed to convince his followers that he hasn’t really committed the crimes for which he has been indicted, and sometimes convicted, and they help to undermine faith in the rule of law, weakening our democracy.
Second of all, though, what this agreement is not, is a settlement of Trump’s case against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), although that term is being widely used to describe it. Trump withdrew his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS for damages after a contractor leaked his tax information—along with that of more than 400,000 other taxpayers—during his own first term after it became clear that the judge to whom the case was assigned seemed inclined to say that the case could not move forward because Trump could not be in charge of both sides of the suit.
The recognition that this is not a legal settlement is important. The Trump administration maintains it is doing what the Obama administration did in establishing a compensation fund to settle the case of Keepseagle v. Vilsack, when the Department of Justice established a $760 million fund as a settlement of a long-running class action suit charging that the Department of Agriculture had systematically discriminated against Indigenous farmers and ranchers.
Unlike the Keepseagle settlement, though, Trump’s fund is not part of a legal settlement.
In her order dismissing the suit, Judge Kathleen Williams noted that because Trump’s dropping of the suit “does not reference any settlement or include a stipulation of settlement, there is no settlement of record. Additionally, Defendants—federal agencies represented by the Department of Justice, which has an independent obligation to uphold the ‘public’s strong interest in knowing about the conduct of its Government and expenditure of its resources’ and the ‘fair administration of justice,’ neither submitted any settlement documents nor filed any documents ensuring that settlement was appropriate where there was an outstanding question as to whether an actual case or controversy existed.”
Judge Williams was not alone in her skepticism about the deal. Andrew Duehren of the New York Times reported today that career lawyers at the Internal Revenue Service thought the agency should fight Trump’s suit, noting that the statute of limitations for such a suit had run out, the Justice Department has previously taken the position that people cannot sue the IRS for the actions of a contractor, and the Justice Department settled a similar case from hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin with a public apology rather than a monetary payoff.
The document that purports to be a “settlement” has the words “settlement agreement” written in capital letters across the top of it, but the important word is “agreement.” It is not the settlement of a legal case: Trump dropped the case when it looked like the judge would throw it out.
It is simply an agreement between Trump and his own appointees at the Department of Justice.
And what an agreement it is. It says that Trump and his older sons who also brought (and dropped) the suit “will receive a formal apology from the United States, but will not receive any monetary payment or damages of any kind.” The agreement sets up a fund made up of five people, four of whom Trump’s hand-picked attorney general will choose. The fifth will be chosen “in consultation with congressional leadership,” but Trump can remove any one of them “without cause.”
That group has complete say over how it decides to grant or deny claims, but what it does will be confidential, overseen only by the Department of Justice. The fund ends in December 2028, just after the 2028 presidential election. If all the money isn’t spent by then, Trump gets to decide to which federal account it goes.
In essence then, the agreement gives Trump full control over almost $2 billion of taxpayer money to spend however he wants, without oversight. The Department of Justice document establishing the fund declares that “[o]nce the funds are deposited into the Designated Account, the United States has no liability whatsoever for the protection or safeguarding of those funds, regardless of bank failure, fraudulent transfers, or any other fraud or misuse of the funds.”
On the agreement, the signature of the lawyer representing the United States is not that of acting attorney general Todd Blanche, but rather that of Stanley E. Woodward Jr., who has been a key defense attorney for people in Trump’s orbit accused of committing crimes, including Kash Patel, now FBI director; Trump trade advisor Peter Navarro; and Walt Nauta, the Trump aide indicted for his actions surrounding Trump’s retention of classified documents. Woodward also has represented a number of those charged with crimes relating to the January 6, 2021, storming of the U.S. Capitol.
With the announcement of the agreement, the Treasury Department’s top lawyer, Brian Morrissey, resigned.
The agreement says the amount dedicated to the fund “does not represent the value of any current claim by [Trump], but rather is based on the projected valuation of future claimants’ claims” and thus “is not taxable income” for the Trumps, “who receive no economic benefit” from the agreement. But the number the Justice Department released for the establishment of the fund puts the lie to the idea the number was random. It is $1.776 billion, linking the fund directly to the attempt of Trump and his cronies to destroy American democracy and begin it again, on their terms.
Famously, on January 6, 2021, newly-elected representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) posted, “Today is 1776.” During the attack, the rioters shouted “1776.”
Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) told Greg Sargent of The New Republic that Trump and his loyalists “are figuring out a way to refund the January 6 militia, presumably to get them ready for the next round of battle.”
As political scientist Jonathan Ladd noted, the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution prohibits compensation for those who engaged in insurrection. It says that “neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States…, but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.” In his comments to Sargent, Raskin noted that if the fund pays off the January 6 rioters, the government will be doing precisely that: “using federal taxpayer dollars to compensate people who participated in insurrection.”
Acting attorney general Todd Blanche testified before a subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee today, facing senators for the first time since taking over for fired attorney general Pam Bondi. He refused to rule out paying money to rioters who had attacked police officers.
Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) noted that “an individual who after being pardoned by the president went on to molest two children, and that person actually tried to buy the silence of these children by saying that he would pay them some of the funds that he was hoping to get from your slush fund. Can you commit to making the rule so that that person is not eligible for a payout under this fund?” Blanche accused Van Hollen of “obviously lying” because no such fund existed until yesterday.
But, in fact, administration officials have talked about paying off the January 6 rioters since at least December 2024, and in June 2025 the Justice Department paid close to $5 million to the family of Ashli Babbitt, killed by police as she tried to break into the House of Representatives.
Apparently based on those signals, Florida’s Andrew Paul Johnson, a January 6 rioter pardoned by Trump, was convicted earlier this year of sexually abusing two twelve-year-olds and trying to buy their silence by saying he would share some of the millions of dollars in restitution money he expected the Trump administration would pay him for his January 6 case. Van Hollen went on to read a series of news stories reporting that January 6 rioters expected payments.
Since Trump’s blanket pardon of nearly 1,600 of those convicted of crimes related to the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, many of them have been rearrested for crimes. At the time of Johnson’s sentencing, Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) noted that Trump’s support has made the January 6 rioters “think they’re untouchable.”
Then, today, the plot got even thicker.
A document—this time signed by Blanche himself—amended the previous agreement to add: “The United States RELEASES, WAIVES, ACQUITS, and FOREVER DISCHARGES” Trump, his sons, and the Trump Organization, “and is hereby FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing, any and all claims” that, as of yesterday, “have been or could have been asserted” by the IRS against them or “related or affiliated individuals” or companies. In other words, Blanche is asserting a blanket promise to stop all IRS audits of Trump’s taxes and not to prosecute any crimes Trump, his family, his businesses, or his associates might have committed that crossed the IRS.
In 2024, Russ Buettner and Paul Kiel reported in the New York Times that Trump had been double-dipping his tax breaks for years. In her Civil Discourse, legal analyst Joyce White Vance called the document from the Department of Justice “a pardon on steroids.”
Vance commented that “[t]he optics of this are so bad that it’s hard to believe Trump would expose himself to their consequences unless he really needed this deal.” It’s probably worth remembering that, after years of pursuing the gangster Al Capone, the government finally managed to convict him of tax evasion. It appears Blanche and Trump’s loyalists are trying to make sure that can’t happen again, declaring any such investigations the “weaponization” of the Justice Department.
Holly Baxter of The Independent reported today that in the midst of all the chaos—including his war on Iran and rising fuel and food prices—Trump called a sudden, urgent press conference today as Blanche was testifying. But what was on his mind was not Iran, or prices, or his corrupt agreement with the Department of Justice. He wanted to talk about his ballroom.
Trump’s comments in that press conference have invited commentary suggesting he is turning the White House into a fortress. Describing the ballroom, he said: “Between the drone-proofing, the missile-proofing, we have ah, and the drone capacity upstairs, we can have all sorts of military—I hate to use the word snipers—but we have great sniper capacity. It’s built for our snipers, not enemy’s snipers, our snipers. And because of the height we get a very clear view of everything all over Washington.”
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On May 1, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression published a letter alleging severe restrictions on the freedom of speech of students at Pensacola State College in Pensacola, Florida. The letter alleges that three student-written articles about LGBTQ+ people—a profile of a local drag queen, a piece on a queer bookstore, and a story about a community poetry club—were barred from publication in a student journalism magazine sponsored by the college. According to FIRE, Brenda Kelly, the college's Associate Vice President of Academic Affairs, met with journalism professor Marisa Mills on April 29 and told her the articles could not be published because their LGBTQ+ content could violate Florida's Stop WOKE Act. The fight is now blowing up as the latest example of college students being restricted from even mentioning LGBTQ+ people in academic and journalism contexts—following Texas Tech's ban on student theses about LGBTQ+ topics and the DOJ's investigation of 36 Illinois schools for acknowledging that LGBTQ+ people exist.
"On April 29, 2026, Brenda Kelly, General Studies Associate Vice President of Academic Affairs, held a meeting with Professor Marisa Mills and told her that students could not publish the stories that contained LGBT+ content," reads the letter from FIRE. "Kelly explained that publishing this content could violate the Stop WOKE Act, specifically its prohibitions on funding advocacy 'for diversity, equity, and inclusion' and 'instruction' in a public university or college that 'espouses, promotes, advances, inculcates, or compels' a student 'to believe' any viewpoint contained on an enumerated blacklist. At the meeting, she shared Florida College System guidance on implementing these two provisions of the Stop WOKE Act."
The college has denied the allegations. In a response to FIRE's letter, Kelly said that "Dr. Mills' students completed the collaborative project without any intervention from me or any other PSC administrator" and that she only met with Mills on April 29 "to discuss the optional, not required, printing of the magazine."
But students tell a different story. Casey Hignite, a student in Mills' class who also writes and draws political cartoons for the college's student newspaper, told the Pensacola News Journal that the magazine's content was censored. Only one of the three LGBTQ+ articles would have been allowed to remain only after heavy editing to strip out its central themes—the author chose to pull the piece entirely rather than gut it. Hignite said they also chose not to submit their own story about a local goth shop because the shop's owner "wouldn't want to take part in censorship." The magazine has not been published. "This is just the latest in what PSC has done to censor and intimidate its faculty and students," Hignite said. "There are issues that are not even being reported on because people are afraid to lose their livelihood." Mills, the journalism professor at the center of the dispute, declined to comment after her union representative advised her not to speak publicly.
The move to censor students from writing about LGBTQ+ people breaks with both recent and longstanding precedent, and the cited justification doesn’t even hold up. Florida’s Stop WOKE Act, signed by Governor Ron DeSantis in 2022, prohibits public colleges from funding “advocacy” for diversity, equity, and inclusion and establishes a sort of Don’t Say Gay protocol that applies to colleges. But a federal judge blocked the law’s provisions, calling them “positively dystopian” and finding that the act “officially bans professors from expressing disfavored viewpoints in university classrooms while permitting unfettered expression of the opposite viewpoints.” The 11th Circuit affirmed that injunction in 2024, describing the law as “the latest attempt to control speech by recharacterizing it as conduct” and calling viewpoint-based restrictions “the greatest First Amendment sin.” The law remains enjoined to this day; PSC is censoring students to comply with a law it is not even legally required to follow.
More broadly, student press freedom at public colleges is well established. In Papish v. Board of Curators of the University of Missouri (1973), the Supreme Court held that a public university could not punish a student for distributing a newspaper containing content administrators found offensive, ruling that “the mere dissemination of ideas—no matter how offensive to good taste—on a state university campus may not be shut off in the name alone of ‘conventions of decency.’” In Rosenberger v. Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia (1995), the Court held that a public university cannot withhold funding from a student publication based on its viewpoint. Notably, that is the precise mechanism PSC is using here. Repeatedly, the Supreme Court has acted to protect student publicaitons.
This is not the only case of severe restrictions on speech involving LGBTQ+ people in recent months. Just last month, Texas Tech issued a memorandum that barred graduate students from writing theses or dissertations centered on LGBTQ+ topics, required professors to skip over LGBTQ+ content in textbooks, and used an AI algorithm to scan the entire system's course catalog for references to sexual orientation or gender identity—flagging over 1,400 courses for review. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has launched investigations into 36 Illinois school districts for the apparent offense of teaching students that LGBTQ+ people exist—threatening federal funding losses if schools allow transgender students to use bathrooms or include LGBTQ+ content in their curriculum.
FIRE demanded that PSC reverse course by May 4, warning that administrators who violate "clearly established law" can be stripped of qualified immunity and held personally liable for monetary damages. Meanwhile, the students are taking matters into their own hands. "We're working right now on removing the magazine from under PSC," Hignite told the Pensacola News Journal. The magazine has not been published.
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It’s not a new question. In 2019, The Atlantic ran a Carlson profile titled “What Does Tucker Carlson Believe?” Seven years later, the Times has added a “Really” and a road trip. Otherwise it’s the same swing the Atlantic took, the swings the Atlantic took twice before that, the swing the New Yorker took, and the ones Vox and Playboy each took. I wrote about all of them back in 2021, in a piece about how mainstream journalism keeps trying and failing to pin this guy down.
The interview itself, by Lulu Garcia-Navarro, is better than the 2017-era profiles that just let him talk. She pushes him. She catches him denying things he plainly said. The bracketed fact-checks are real journalism. The framing question, though, is the same question that’s been failing for almost a decade. And there’s a reason for that.
Tucker Carlson has spent his entire career running the same rhetorical move. He identifies a real, legitimate problem. He builds the reader’s trust through the diagnosis. Then he uses that trust to deliver an extremist payload. In the Fox era, the bait was economic populism: the ruling class, the working class, capital taxed at half the rate of labor. The payload was that immigrants and trans people and feminists were why your life was bad. In 2026, the bait is the Iran war and Israel’s influence on American foreign policy. Both are real. Both are held by serious people. The payload is something different. He’s planning something, even if we don’t know what just yet.
The technique hasn’t changed. The audience has. He spent a decade running this on the right. He’s running it on the left now.
I’ve watched an unhealthy amount of Tucker Carlson over the years and I know the moves. I’d rather not be writing this piece. But the people congratulating him this week for getting Trump and Iran “right” are about to learn what the people who congratulated him in 2017 for getting the working class “right” learned later. He’s very good at this. That’s the problem.
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I wrote about this in 2019
The mechanic isn’t subtle once you’ve watched enough of his work. In 2019, while reviewing his book Ship of Fools for Media Matters, I worked through a specific example that’s worth revisiting because Carlson still uses it. In the book, he asks why the United States taxes capital at half the rate of labor. It’s a defensible question. The tax code is unfair. Working people pay more on their paychecks than rich people pay on their stock gains. The left-wing critique here is real.
Tucker Carlson speaks at the 2024 Republican National Convention. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
His answer to that question, in the book, is identity politics. He writes that “elite attacks on working-class whites,” by which he means feminism, anti-racism, and trans visibility, have distracted Americans from noticing how rigged the tax code is. The tax code stays where it is, the corporate interests stay where they are, and the people you should be mad at, in Tucker’s account, turn out to be the same people you were already mad at.
The question is real. The swerve is the whole point.
I’m not the only person who clocked this. Lyz Lenz, in a 2018 CJR profile, quoted the Emerson communications professor Richard West calling Carlson’s approach “change-the-subject conservatism.” Same observation, academic name. Once you see the move, you see it everywhere.
In the Garcia-Navarro interview, the capital gains line shows up again. Nearly verbatim. The question is still useful. He just needs a new thing to swerve toward.
In the Times version, Carlson is theological and measured. He turns Garcia-Navarro’s questions about Trump’s morality into meditations on the universal human capacity for evil. Asked about the antisemitism allegations, he gives the principled answer: he’s against hatred and discrimination based on heritage, no matter who the target is. Nobody, in his telling, should be punished for the circumstances of their birth. It’s a careful performance.
In the Buckley version, days earlier, his brother asked him about Barack Obama. Tucker’s answer: “He really hates white people.”
That’s a… well, it’s a different position.
The pattern holds across the podcast. Carlson tells his brother the COVID vaccine killed enormous numbers of people. He compares the shots to a biological weapon. He tells Buckley the protests after George Floyd’s murder were really a campaign to drive white officers off the force. When Buckley describes the January 6 rioters as representative of the country at its best, Tucker lets it pass. None of this material makes it into the New York Times.
But the most revealing exchange in the whole podcast is the one Garcia-Navarro never got. She asks Carlson, more than once, what his breaking point with Trump actually was. The Times answer is the Easter Truth Social post and the Iran war. Moral, theological, anti-war. Buckley got the real answer. Buckley laid out the brothers’ actual list of grievances, all of which centered on Trump’s failures to punish his political enemies hard enough. The list was long. COVID vaccines. January 6. The George Floyd protests. Biden’s preemptive pardons. The Biden family. The Russia probe. The autopen. Obama, whom Buckley accused of treason. Tucker did not push back. Tucker agreed.
The Times got a man whose breaking point was Easter morning. Buckley got a man whose breaking point was Trump’s failure to put more political enemies in cages. Both versions came from the same Tucker, in the same week. Both are real. Only one was prepared for the audience he’s currently trying to recruit.
About that Fuentes interview
Last October, Carlson sat down for a long, friendly conversation with Nick Fuentes, the white nationalist influencer who has praised Hitler and denied the Holocaust. Carlson treated him like a curiosity. Asked him about his upbringing. Walked him through his views without ever really pressing on what those views actually are. Garcia-Navarro asked Carlson about that interview. He didn’t like the question.
Carlson’s first move was to minimize Fuentes. He’s just a kid, Carlson told her. He’s twenty-seven. He has no power. He just said some “naughty things.” That’s the framing for a man who has built his platform on Holocaust denial and overt white supremacy: a kid who said naughty things.
Garcia-Navarro pressed. Carlson swerved. When she reminded him that Fuentes is a white nationalist who has denied the Holocaust, Carlson asked: “Is that worse than killing kids?”
This is the move.
The “kids” Carlson is referring to are Palestinian children killed in Gaza, and the people he’s accusing of supporting their deaths are Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee. The accusation is not crazy. American political support for the war in Gaza has been disastrous, and U.S. senators and ambassadors who have waved away civilian deaths deserve scrutiny. There is a real, defensible critique buried in there.
That is the bait. Fuentes is the payload. By the time Carlson is done with the answer, the Holocaust denier is unmentioned, Ted Cruz is the bigger threat, and Garcia-Navarro is left trying to reorient the conversation to her original question. He runs the same play several times in the section. When she suggests Fuentes is influential, Carlson demands she name a member of Congress who has cited him. When she keeps pressing, he pivots to the foreign policy views of the people who fund the Republican Party. Capital gains taxes. Donor class. The real problems.
In 2019, when I worked through this technique for the first time, The Daily Stormer was openly delighted that Carlson was running their talking points on Fox. They could see what he was doing because they were the ones whose ideas he was laundering. The audience he is now courting on the left has a harder time clocking the move because his cover story is better: anti-war, anti-corporate, anti-establishment, all of it true on the surface. The mark moved. The con didn’t.
About that headline, again
A word about Garcia-Navarro, because she deserves it. Her interview is genuinely sharper than what the Atlantic and the New Yorker put out in 2017. She presses Carlson on his interview with Fuentes. She presses him on his old comments about Iraqis. When Carlson denies on the record that he ever asked on his show whether Trump might be the Antichrist, Garcia-Navarro inserts a bracketed correction noting that he did. When Carlson’s representatives respond to her follow-up about Cruz and Huckabee with a single word, she prints the single word. None of that is sycophancy. None of it is the 2017 model.
But the headline is the headline. And the headline is the same swing the genre has been taking for nine years.
Tucker Carlson campaigns with Trump in 2024. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
When Garcia-Navarro asks Carlson about his break with Trump, she calls it a “rupture.” Carlson stops her. He doesn’t accept that framing, he tells her. Trump betrayed his promises. The contract was breached by Trump, not by him. He’s the consistent one. Trump is the apostate. Garcia-Navarro doesn’t fight him on it. The conversation continues under his framing.
That’s the structural problem with the genre, and it’s not Garcia-Navarro’s fault. A profile that asks “what does Tucker really believe?” has already accepted the premise that there’s a real Tucker buried somewhere who could be located if only the right questions were asked. The premise is the trap. There is no hidden Tucker. The trick is the belief.
Lyz Lenz figured this out in 2018. Her CJR profile spent forty hours of footage and a phone call with Carlson trying to answer a version of the same question, and the most useful thing she got was the moment Carlson insisted he wasn’t shouting while shouting at her. The mystery is the man. The man is the act. The act is what you’re watching. Garcia-Navarro got the same insight in a different form: a Carlson who denies on the record that he said something he plainly said, while the bracketed correction sits next to the denial, both on the page, both true. That isn’t a man who can be pinned down. That’s a man who has chosen the format he can’t be pinned down in.
Years of trying. The interviewers got smarter. He didn’t get harder to read. The genre is just the wrong shape.
The cost of getting Carlson wrong is not theoretical. It is happening right now.
Marjorie Taylor Greene has already endorsed Carlson for a presidential run. Democratic operatives are floating a bipartisan alliance with him. Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks asked what more anyone could possibly want from Carlson after he rejected Trump and joined the anti-war side. The apology video is circulating with applause. Some of it is coming from people whose work I respect.
I want to take that argument seriously, because it deserves to be taken seriously. The case for welcoming Carlson goes like this: the Iran war is a catastrophe. Gaza is a catastrophe. Anyone willing to say so loudly, especially anyone with a large right-coded audience, is doing useful work. Demanding ideological purity from your allies in a coalition is a luxury you cannot afford when people are dying. That argument is not stupid. It is wrong, but it is not stupid.
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The reason it is wrong is the Buckley conversation. The man telling Garcia-Navarro he was radicalized by a Truth Social post on Easter morning is the same man telling his brother that the actual problem is Trump didn’t put more political enemies in cages. That is not anti-war. That is “we wanted a different kind of authoritarian.” There is no coalition there to join. There is an audience he is building, and that audience will follow him to whatever he says next. Based on a decade of evidence, what he says next will sound like what he was saying to his brother last week. White Americans as the real victims. Vaccines as a bioweapon. Civil rights protests as an attack on cops. That’s the album he’s still in the middle of recording.
Nicole Hemmer made this point two weeks ago at MS NOW, more concisely than I’m making it here: shining a sympathetic spotlight on Carlson now does the work of laundering his reputation for the next time he attacks immigrants or trans people or whoever the next target turns out to be. The infighting on the right is genuinely useful. Boosting the people doing it is not.
He is very good at this. The Fox audience that fell for him for ten years was the easy mark. The harder mark is the audience that just spent ten years watching what he did to the easy mark, and is now being told he has changed. He has not. He has just found people who have not been watching as carefully.
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A new memo at Texas Tech University establishes a sweeping and draconian censorship policy toward LGBTQ+ people, creating a campus equivalent of "Don't Say Gay" in one of the most extreme anti-speech policies ever imposed at a public university. The memo bars professors from discussing LGBTQ+ topics in core and lower-level courses and eliminates entire fields of study across the five-university system. It even requires that if an industry-standard textbook includes content on sexual orientation or gender identity, instructors must skip over it and avoid discussion around it. Most troubling, however, is that the censorship regime extends beyond professors to students themselves: the memo states that "no degree-culminating student research within the TTU System will be permitted to center on SOGI topics,” a total ban on LGBTQ+ mentions in dissertations or graduate thesis work.
The memorandum, which was issued by Chancellor Brandon Creighton—a former Republican state senator who authored Texas's ban on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs at public universities and a campus protest restriction law that a federal judge blocked as unconstitutional—went out to the presidents of all five universities in the Texas Tech University System this month. The system serves approximately 64,000 students across Texas Tech University, Angelo State University, Midwestern State University, and two Health Sciences Centers. Under the new policy, all majors, minors, certificates, and graduate degrees "centered on" sexual orientation or gender identity will be eliminated. Provosts at each university must identify every affected program and submit finalized lists to the chancellor's office by June 15, 2026, at which point an immediate admissions freeze will take effect—no new students will be allowed to enroll in or declare any of the targeted programs. Currently enrolled students will be allowed to finish their degrees through a teach-out process, but once the last of them graduates, the fields will cease to exist at Texas Tech entirely.
The censorship policy directly targets all sexual orientation and gender identity content. "The Alternate Materials Rule requires that… in courses where course materials (inclusive of all assigned works, readings, case studies, peer-reviewed research, videos, etc.) are centered on or include sexual orientation or gender identity, alternate materials must be utilized," reads the memo. "If instructors choose permissible works that do not center on or include these topics, instructor-led discussions, class assignments, and instructional materials must not focus on sexual orientation or gender identity." Even passing mentions are policed: the memo instructs that "incidental references should be avoided" when selecting primary materials for core courses, and that if a history book or novel happens to include LGBTQ+ content, professors "must not highlight, assess, or allocate instructional time to it." The memo adds that "there are no exceptions to the Alternate Materials Rule for core, undergraduate courses."
The implications are profound—and at times border on absurd. In core and lower-level courses, there are no exceptions at all. A history professor course could not allocate instructional time to the Stonewall riots or the gay rights movement. If a U.S. history textbook includes a chapter on the AIDS crisis, the professor must skip it. An English professor assigning Oscar Wilde cannot lead a discussion of the trial and imprisonment that defined his later work and legacy. A professor teaching Virginia Woolf's Orlando—a novel whose entire premise is gender fluidity—would appear to be in direct violation of the policy. A core literature class reading Walt Whitman's "Calamus" poems could not explore their homoerotic themes. Sappho—the ancient Greek poet from whom the word "lesbian" derives—could not be taught with any meaningful analysis of her work's content. A professor teaching Shakespeare's Twelfth Night or As You Like It could not discuss the cross-dressing that is central to the plot, nor the long theatrical tradition of male actors performing female roles—because analyzing gender performance in Shakespeare would constitute allocating "instructional time" to gender identity themes. A political science class could not examine the Supreme Court's ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges as anything other than a passing reference. A psychology professor in a core course could not discuss why homosexuality was removed from the DSM. Even a music appreciation course discussing Tchaikovsky or Freddie Mercury would need to avoid any sustained discussion of how their identities shaped their art.
The memo also imposes what it calls a "Two Human Sexes Requirement," stating that "state and federal law and TTU System guidance dictate that only two human sexes, male and female, are recognized." It goes further, declaring that "instructors may not teach that gender identity is a fluid spectrum, endorse the existence of more than two genders, or decouple gender from biological sex as a factual or scientific baseline." There is a narrow carveout for intersex conditions—the memo says instruction on "chromosomal variations, Differences of Sex Development (DSDs), and intersex biological conditions is expressly permitted"—but even here, it adds that "faculty may not use these biological conditions to advocate for or validate sociological frameworks of fluid gender identities." In practice, this means a biology professor could teach students that intersex conditions exist but would be barred from drawing the obvious scientific conclusion that biological sex is more complex than a strict binary. As Inside Higher Ed columnist John K. Wilson observed, the policy "is so extreme that it would seem to prohibit any professor (or any assigned reading) from asserting that trans people even exist, since that would mean recognizing 'fluid gender identities.'"
Perhaps most draconian of all are the policies targeting graduate students. Under the memo, graduate students will be permanently barred from writing theses or dissertations centered on LGBTQ+ topics once current teach-out programs conclude. This is the first policy at any major American university system that extends content censorship to student work itself—not even Florida's "Don't Say Gay" law, which restricted classroom instruction in K-12 schools, attempted to dictate what students could write about in their own research. The memo states that "graduate theses and dissertations may only center on SOGI topics as a strictly temporary teach-out exception, explicitly limited to currently enrolled students completing their degrees within formally identified teach-out programs," and that "upon the conclusive termination of all designated teach-out programs, no degree-culminating student research within the TTU System will be permitted to center on SOGI topics."
Policies barring students from writing on specific topics at public universities have a long and well-established First Amendment history—and they almost always lose. In Keyishian v. Board of Regents (1967), the Supreme Court declared that "the classroom is peculiarly the 'marketplace of ideas'" and that "the Nation's future depends upon leaders trained through wide exposure to that robust exchange of ideas." In Healy v. James (1972), the Court ruled that a public university could not suppress a student organization based on its viewpoint, holding that First Amendment protections apply with no “less force on college campuses than in the community at large." In Rosenberger v. Rector (1995), the Court struck down a public university's refusal to fund a student publication based on its viewpoint, establishing that viewpoint discrimination at a public university is per se unconstitutional.
More recently, a federal court blocked Florida's Stop WOKE Act—which imposed content restrictions on higher education strikingly similar to the Texas Tech memo—calling the law "positively dystopian" and holding that professors' in-class speech is protected by the First Amendment. However, Texas Tech sits in the Fifth Circuit, which has proven to be the most hostile federal appeals court in the country toward LGBTQ+ rights and has consistently upheld restrictions that other circuits have struck down. Whether the Fifth Circuit would extend the same First Amendment protections to students and faculty challenging an anti-LGBTQ+ censorship policy remains an open and deeply uncertain question.
The policies have come under fierce criticism from faculty and academic freedom organizations alike. Jen Shelton, an associate professor of English who has taught at Texas Tech for 25 years, told the Texas Tribune, "I think the whole university has been betrayed. I think even the provost did not expect it to look like this." Kelli Cargile Cook, a professor emeritus who founded Texas Tech's Department of Professional Communication, said the policies at Texas Tech led her to cancel a class and draft a resignation letter. "I can't stomach what's going on at Texas Tech," she said. A statement from the Texas Tech chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) decried the policies in a public letter to Creighton: "We have collectively dedicated many decades of our careers to Texas Tech, proud to be part of an institution where students learn and faculty teach in an environment of rigorous inquiry, open debate, and intellectual freedom. Under this policy, the Constitution of the United States of America is rendered irrelevant, academic freedom and the core mission of our university are sacrificed, and the Texas Tech University we knew no longer exists.”
The policy is already being implemented. Provosts at each of the five universities must submit finalized lists of programs to be eliminated to the chancellor's office by June 15, 2026, after which an immediate admissions freeze will take effect. The memo also directs the TTU System to develop standardized syllabus templates so that "course materials can be efficiently evaluated by both students and component institution leadership and compliance teams"—creating a permanent surveillance apparatus for course content. Artificial intelligence has already been used to target hundreds of course materials, and further crackdowns are expected.
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The Onion is taking over Infowars. Again. The announcement came today, April 20, which is the 27th anniversary of the Columbine shooting. Take that how you want. A licensing deal, for now, pending a Texas judge’s sign-off on April 30 and whatever appeal stunt Alex Jones pulls next. I wrote about the original purchase back in November 2024, then spent the next year and a half watching it get strangled in bankruptcy court and wondering if it was ever going to actually happen. It’s happening. Tim Heidecker is creative director. Perfect casting. Jones has vowed to keep broadcasting from a new site, because of course he has. Nice to have some good news for once.
Congrats to my friends over at The Onion, by the way!
Below is a short reading list. Today’s news, Collins doing the longer version on Pablo Torre, and the people who’ve actually been on this for close to a decade.
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Where to read what happened today
For a clean overview, Benjamin Mullin and Elizabeth Williamson’s NYT piece is the one to read. It’s got the timeline, the deal mechanics, the whole thing, plus the best Heidecker quotes of the day. Heidecker calls the whole thing “a beautiful joke.” He’s right. But he also tells the Times he wants Infowars to eventually become a home for actually weird, actually ambitious comedy. That’s the part I’m paying attention to.
Alex Jones during his 4/20/26 broadcast. Yes, he’s wearing a “Low IQ” hat.
Hadas Gold at CNN is shorter but has Collins quotes with more bite than the press-release stuff everyone else is running. Eight years and three days after the Sandy Hook families first sued Jones, Collins tells CNN, they have not collected a cent.
Where to hear Collins tell it
For Collins telling the story himself, Pablo Torre had him on today. Watch the whole thing. My favorite bit: the part about Trump’s DOJ sending a threatening letter to Chris Mattei (lawyer for the Connecticut Sandy Hook families) last September. At Alex Jones’s request, basically. That didn’t come up in any of today’s wire copy, and I don’t know why not.
For the people who’ve actually lived this
Anna Merlan at Mother Jones did the piece today that nobody else quite did. She got Lenny Pozner, Noah’s father (Noah was the youngest kid murdered at Sandy Hook), who spends his days filing copyright takedowns on images of his dead son because those images keep getting recycled into “crisis actor” content whenever there’s a new mass-casualty event somewhere else. She talks to Chris Mattei about the legal strategy, and to Josh Owens, the former Infowars employee who quit in 2017, about what he calls “false comfort in the deplatforming and the trial judgements.” Owens is right. Today’s news is real progress for the families. The bigger fight, which started in 2018 when they first sued, is nowhere close to over.
Josh Owens wrote The Madness of Believing, a memoir about his years inside Infowars. He’s the ex-employee Merlan quotes. Read it if you want to understand what Infowars actually was as a workplace. The culture, the grift, the whole operation. Merlan blurbed it.
About the hearing
April 30 is when the Texas judge rules. Here’s hoping it’s a yes. The Onion crew has stuck with this for a year and a half through a lot of bullshit. They deserve to see this one land.
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My husband, David, hates Valentine’s Day. He once called it “New Year’s Eve with nuclear weapons.” I pretend not to care. Still, when the day passes entirely unremarked on, a woman can’t help but feel overlooked.
On Valentine’s Day 2024, David found a way out. He booked a speech on February 14 that required traveling from our home in Washington, D.C., to Toronto. I couldn’t object—he was getting paid. Anyway, I had my own plans: an “anti–Valentine’s Day” dinner hosted by one of the foreign embassies.
As I got ready, I called our oldest daughter, Miranda. She answered from her Brooklyn bathroom, getting ready for her own party. She propped her phone up beside her sink and laughed when I told her about her father’s strategic Valentine’s Day escape.
I asked what she planned to wear. She sent a selfie: It showed her looking at her bathroom mirror; her straight rose-gold hair bobbed along her jawline. A strapless black top exposed her pale, delicate shoulders. (Too pale and delicate, I worried reflexively, maternally.)
“Stunning,” I texted back.
It was the last communication I’d ever have with her.
Two days later, I was coming down the stairs when David’s voice shattered the morning. Words tumbled out in fragments: Miranda’s best friend calling from the apartment. Found unconscious. Not breathing. Maybe—
I seized the phone from David’s shaking hand. I could hear a police officer’s radio chatter, the soundtrack to all urban tragedy.
“I’m sorry—” a voice began.
What is the opposite of giving birth?
I hung up and stepped into my bathroom to pack my toiletry case. David was slumped in a chair, face in hands, moaning, “No, no, it can’t be.” I rummaged through my drawers, frantically pulling out pajamas, my medications, a toothbrush. My overwhelming instinct was to get to New York right away, to Miranda right away. I suppose I felt that I’d be able to straighten this all out somehow, as I had straightened things out for her so many times in the past. David was still in the chair: “No, no, no.”
I wrapped my arms around him. “We have to get to Brooklyn.”
We were waiting for our flight at Reagan National when the medical examiner called from Miranda’s apartment. He was matter-of-fact. Miranda had been found face down in her bedroom by her housekeeper around 9 a.m. The cleaner called Miranda’s friend—another client—who called the police. Based on body temperature and other physical evidence, the examiner estimated Miranda’s time of death to be approximately 3 a.m.
The examiner’s first thought was overdose—pills lay everywhere. But they were just her daily medications, scattered when she collapsed. Watching planes take off and land, I numbly shared Miranda’s medical history. Five years earlier, she’d had a nonmalignant brain tumor successfully removed. The tumor had damaged her pituitary gland beyond repair—but this was not a problem. The surgeon had assured us that medication could do everything the gland once did.
Lately, Miranda had been fighting what she assumed was a stubborn cold. When she was ill, she was supposed to take more cortisol, the stress hormone that her body could no longer produce. But cortisol came with a price: It bloated her face, thickened her waist, and made her feel unlike herself. I knew she’d been playing with her dosage to minimize these side effects.
The examiner said that people with compromised immune systems could sometimes present with flu-like symptoms that turned deadly if not treated.
A hundred questions charged through my mind: How could Miranda have been that sick without knowing it? How did we not know it? Had any of her doctors told her she risked dropping dead if she got her cortisol levels wrong?
But these were not the most urgent of my questions at that moment.
“May—may I ask you something … as a mother?”
“Of course.”
“I just need to know—” I had to run at the sentence a few times before I could get it out. “Would my daughter have been in any … pain … when she … ? If this was how she … ?”
“No,” he replied quickly, his voice softening. “She would have fallen unconscious before her heart stopped beating. She wouldn’t have been aware of anything.”
“Thank you.”
The examiner passed the phone to a police officer. “When do you think you’ll get here?” he asked abruptly.
My brain struggled to refocus. Maybe by four?
“I’m not sure if we’ll be here by then.” That afternoon the police would have to seal the apartment, and Miranda would be moved “to the examiner’s office downtown.” The officer gave me a case number and other details we’d need for what I would come to call the Bureaucracy of Death.
There was now no getting around the truth. “The examiner’s office downtown” was not some place where our daughter was going to receive urgent medical care. It was the morgue.
By the time we made it to Brooklyn, the apartment had been sealed. We checked into a hotel and grabbed Ringo, Miranda’s beloved dog, who had been in the care of her friend. We took an Uber to the medical examiner’s building in outer Brooklyn—a fortress of brick and concrete, its grid of windows glowing fluorescent against the dark. The doors were locked. We stood there anyway, as close to Miranda as we could get.
The February night was bleak. David and I sat on the icy curb with Ringo between us, the confused dog seeking warmth from both sides. David opened his phone to search for Psalm 121. We began to recite it together into the darkness. I lift up mine eyes unto the hills …
I lifted my eyes up to the building. Somewhere behind those windows lay our daughter, in a refrigerated drawer.
Years before, on a bitter winter’s day, I’d asked my stepfather if we might get snow. “Too cold to snow,” he replied. It was such a Canadian response, I laughed.
I realized now that “too cold to snow” perfectly described our emotional state. Too shocked to cry: that would be our personal weather report for days to come.
Less than a week after Miranda had sent me that selfie, I sat in front of my computer while a funeral director and I shopped online for coffins. He swiped through about a dozen. Which would suit our daughter best?
I thought back to all of the times Miranda and I had exchanged links for clothing, seeking each other’s advice: “This would look great on you!” We settled on a simple coffin made of pine.
Miranda’s body was transferred to the funeral home, where our surviving children met us. Our son, Nat, and his wife, Isabel, had flown in from Los Angeles. Our younger daughter, Bea, a junior in college, had returned from a semester abroad in France. Now we all gathered wordlessly in a waiting room until we were allowed into the chapel that held Miranda’s body.
Nothing can prepare you for the sight of your dead child. My first view when we entered the room was of the crown of Miranda’s head, the only part of her that wasn’t covered by a blanket. If some piece of me still refused to believe that Miranda was gone—if some corner of my mind clung to a final fantasy of error by the medical authorities—there was no mistaking that swirl of spun-rose-gold hair. I’d smothered that spot in kisses when Miranda was a baby. I’d stroked it through countless illnesses. It was the first part of her I’d seen when she’d emerged from brain surgery—on a gurney being raced to intensive care.
Now she lay before us on a gurney once more. I kissed the crown of her head one last time. Her hair felt dry, the scalp beneath frigid. I remembered how much she hated being cold.
The usher asked if we wanted him to pull the blanket from her face. We nodded. My mind has blocked many details of that moment, but I remember that Miranda was disfigured by her fall, her right cheek bruised and indented. When I rested my hand on her blanketed torso, she felt as stiff and lifeless as a tailor’s dummy.
I stroked her icy brow. I told her how much I loved her. After that, I don’t know what I thought or said. I rested my head on her chest, wrapped my arms around her, and wept.
We are not the first people to have lost a child, obviously. One of the first shocks was discovering how crowded this alternate universe was. We met people living parallel nightmares. The parents of a teenager—an only child—who’d committed suicide. A couple whose daughter died giving birth. A father who’d watched in horror as his 7-year-old boy was struck by a car at the bottom of their driveway.
However unique and precious your own loss feels, you realize that you’ve simply joined the limping thousands—millions—whose lives have been devastated by the routine catastrophes that befall someone, somewhere every second of every day. From them we learned what to expect: There would be no “healing.” No return to who we were. Those people died at the exact moment our child did.
Their wisdom was far more helpful than the advice I got from the happiness hucksters of TED Talks and TikToks who promised us “stages” to climb through, some sort of “acceptance” glimmering at the journey’s end. My social media overflowed with soothing quotes, burbling streams, the idea that grief is a “gift.” Believe it or not, there is no shortage of people who think that the worst thing that can happen to you is actually an opportunity for growth. They kept feeding me a bastardized version of a line from the 13th-century poet Rumi: “Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter.”
To which Miranda would have joined me in saying: “Fuck off.”
Miranda’s death was not my spiritual gain. Nothing better would grow in her place. My “truth” was that my daughter was dead.
In those first days, I had no tolerance for bullshit. We buried Miranda in Canada, near our cottage on Lake Ontario, where our kids had spent every summer of their lives. David and I had discovered the cemetery when we’d shopped for our own burial places. Pity the immigration official who detained me at Dulles airport on my return. My U.S. passport was being renewed when Miranda had died; I’d had to travel on my Canadian one. I hadn’t known the rule: Americans must enter America as Americans, even those of us with dual citizenship.
I was ordered to a holding room; David was allowed to accompany me. We waited for more than an hour, exhausted, debilitated by grief. Finally, an officer called me to his desk. After confirming my identity, he asked me why I was traveling on a Canadian passport.
“My U.S. passport is being renewed,” I replied.
“I suppose,” he said sarcastically, “you must have had a very good reason to leave the country on a Canadian passport, right? It was so urgent that you couldn’t wait for your new passport to arrive?”
“Yes.”
“Well, what was the reason? I’d love to hear it.”
“I had to bury my daughter.”
David said afterward that it was as if I’d flung a bomb at the man. His body all but flew back and hit the wall.
Red-faced, he handed me my passport. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
Unfortunately, my no-bullshit period did not last long. It soon yielded to deep and hopeless depression.
Miranda was dead. Miranda no longer existed. Every thought about her had to contend with this untenable fact.
Friends asked if I was able to sleep. Yes, miraculously, I was. I slept the way an exhausted soldier passes out in the trenches while shells whiz overhead. Sleep wasn’t the problem. Waking up was the problem. Every morning, consciousness brought the same first thought: Miranda is still dead.
Sometimes the grief hit me in a general way: My beautiful girl, no, no, no. My beautiful baby girl. Other times, sharp and specific: She would have loved this recipe, but now I can’t share it. Small or large, it didn’t matter. Every thought had the power to punch me to the floor.
The first time I went grocery shopping, I passed Miranda’s favorite items: almond milk, edamame, those awful energy drinks she loved. Suddenly my chest seized. The floor tilted. I raced out of the store. Reminders of Miranda were everywhere. I’d unlock my phone and there, without warning, would be a carousel of AI-curated memories: “Family Fun,” “Furry Friends,” “Portraits”—Miranda’s face glowing from every frame. My car’s Bluetooth kept offering to “connect to Miranda’s iPhone.” The very ordinariness of these shocks underscored the fact that I hadn’t lost just a daughter, but a whole life.
One night, a jagged pain in my chest woke me up. It was just past 3 a.m. I felt the impulse to vomit and stumbled to the toilet. My left arm tingled. I struggled to breathe. I Googled female heart attack symptoms and then called 911.
At the hospital, I was taken to a quiet exam room. Somehow, my blood pressure was fine and my heart was in perfect condition—mechanically speaking. I told the cardiologist that my daughter had just died. Maybe I was having a heart attack, despite having a healthy heart? I had read about broken-heart syndrome, in which the body can mimic cardiac arrest from grief alone. Rarely fatal but terrifyingly real.
After expressing her condolences, the cardiologist explained what was actually happening: a medical-grade panic attack. She instructed a nurse to pump some sedative into my IV.
Back at home, my heart kept on aching. I mean that literally. The pain simmered in my chest like a covered pot. Several times a day, it would boil over. My knees would buckle. The wails would begin in my throat, and gradually descend deeper and deeper into my gut until no noise emerged at all. The weeping would continue even after my voice failed. I’d continue to convulse in terrible silence.
During these eruptions, the same vision always came to me: Miranda’s body in the ground. I imagined myself crawling down to join her, settling into that deep, cool, peaceful earth. How comforting it would be to lie beside her. Please let me go there; please, please let me be with her again. I can’t keep living with this.
In my previous life, suicide had been an abstraction—something I could grasp intellectually when others spoke of depression or terminal illness. Only now, writhing on the floor, did I understand it from the inside: The promise of eternal nothingness seemed preferable to relentless suffering.
I turned to the literature of grief—the scientific self-help manuals by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, the memoirs of Joan Didion and others—to answer one urgent question: When would the pain stop?
Never, was the consensus. Grief must be “gotten through.”
The grief books were not going to tell me what I needed to know. I was simply pawing through them, searching for the spell that would bring Miranda back. But as an acquaintance who’d also lost a daughter warned us, “That’s not on the table.”
So what was on the table?
A tasting menu of pain, madame. Might we suggest the suffering sampler?
Maybe it was time to look into therapy.
Finding help when you’re desperately depressed is harder than you might think. My primary-care doctor sent me a list of grief specialists, but they either weren’t taking on new clients or had endless waiting lists. No one I called could see me for months. I needed help now. I called a local center that offered “crisis response.” A voice recording asked me to leave a message, but warned of a yearlong waiting list for treatment. If this is an emergency, please hang up and dial 911. After the beep, I said, “Hello, I recently lost a daughter. I’m really struggling and need help. I don’t know what to do. Please call me back.” I left similar messages at other practices, my voice cracking through each one.
Then I remembered a psychiatric center not far from our house, one I’d passed countless times while running errands. I drove there straight away. I was hyperventilating by the time I was buzzed into the lobby. A receptionist sat behind a wall of glass. “Can I help you?”
The words tumbled out between sobs: daughter dead, so much pain, was there someone, anyone—?
“Do you have an appointment?”
“No.”
She made a call.
“The person who would handle this isn’t picking up.”
Just over her shoulder was a cheerful poster boasting about the facility’s support for women.
“I’m really in a bad way. Is there no one I could speak to?”
“That would be the person I just tried.”
“Can I make an appointment to come back?”
“You would have to speak to them first.”
I took down the person’s name and number and left. Later attempts reached only the receptionist or rang into nowhere. Finally, someone answered: The person no longer worked there. No, there wasn’t another person. If this is an emergency, you should hang up and dial 911.
Apparently my only option was to walk into an emergency room and say the magic words about self-harm. The idea of being heavily medicated for days sounded like paradise. But sooner or later, they’d discharge me, and my daughter would be no less dead.
Googling treatments for acute grief, I came across eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing, a therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder. I’d associated PTSD with combat veterans, but I learned that it can encompass all trauma, including sudden loss. In EMDR, a patient revisits a trauma while the brain receives bilateral stimulation—their eyes track a dot on a screen, or they hold buzzers that alternate pulses in each hand. The idea behind the treatment is that some events are too awful for our brains to properly categorize as memories, so they float in limbo, omnipresent. Activating both sides of the brain while remembering the trauma seems to help neutralize it, so it no longer feels ever-present. I found a nearby therapist specializing in grief and EMDR who—miraculously—had an opening that week. During our appointments, she had me describe with forensic precision incidents that would usually send me to the floor—the phone call confirming Miranda’s death, that first glimpse of her body. Every session left me emptied, raw, surrounded by sodden tissues. And somehow, also, lighter.
My birthday arrived in April, on the fifth anniversary of Miranda’s tumor surgery. Miranda had been planning to mark this milestone with a characteristically irreverent party, including signature cocktails she called “tumor-tinis.” We’d all blocked off the weekend to celebrate with her. Instead, I wrote to the caterer: Party canceled. The hostess died.
My family took me out to dinner for my birthday. Halfway through the meal, Bea gently led me to the car. I’d broken down sobbing at the table.
I knew that Nat and Bea were suffering too, and at first, I felt useless. How could I do this to them, weeping and wailing in their presence? It felt like abuse. No child should have to witness this. Yet I couldn’t stop.
Mothers are often criticized or belittled for acting selflessly; it’s seen as weak and self-abnegating. But the ability to set aside your own fears and pain to protect those you love? That’s the maternal superpower.
Mine failed me when I lost Miranda, but it slowly flickered back to life. I learned to recognize when Nat or Bea needed me to be their mother, not their fellow mourner. The only energy I still possessed came from that dwindled superpower. Even if I wasn’t interested in living for myself, I knew I must stay alive for my family.
Illustration by Sophia Deng
David and I made a pact not to retreat into what he called “silos of grief.” At first, he’d tried to process his sadness alone, afraid that sharing it might send me spiraling further. But when he spoke about his grief, I didn’t spiral. Instead, I felt the relief of recognition—we were the only two people on Earth who understood exactly what the other had lost. No matter how hard the day was, we made a point of sitting down together at the end of it. David would open a bottle of wine and I would cut flowers for the table. We instituted a “dinner dress code”—abandoning sweats for proper clothes. “Like British colonial administrators donning black tie for dinner in the jungle,” David joked. If not quite black tie, at least we showered, changed, and pretended to be human.
One morning, a friend called. “How are you?” Before I could answer, she caught herself. “Oh my God, I’m so stupid. Sorry. What a dumb question to ask.”
I surprised us both by laughing. “You meant ‘How’s the abyss today?’ ”
“Yes, exactly.” She laughed too. “Any daylight visible yet?”
“Not much,” I replied. “A pinhole in the distance.”
I was still crawling, but crawling upward.
Long ago, my friends nicknamed me “The Minister of Fun”—always orchestrating adventures, karaoke nights, impromptu dancing. After Miranda died, I retired from that position. My calendar opened only to days of blank space.
Many old friends vanished. During a career setback years earlier, David had offered a cheerful thought: “At least we know who our true friends are.” I replied that I’d been happier when I didn’t know. Now the joke turned bitter. The absence of once-close friends hurt and surprised me. Perhaps they had no capacity to let someone else’s suffering into their world. Or possibly our tragedy exceeded their emotional vocabulary. All anyone needed to do was squeeze my hand and ask how I was doing. But rather than risk saying the wrong thing, many people said nothing. They disappeared.
Casual encounters could be awful. You never knew who remembered. I’d see the flash of recognition, then that terrible calculation: Do I acknowledge it? Some asked to be reminded how Miranda had died.
“Consequences of a brain tumor.”
“Oh, of course, how terrible.”
I’d watch the relief pass across their faces: That couldn’t happen to my child. Can tick that box off on my list of worries.
David and I began calling another type of reaction “The Undertaker’s Stare”—that moment when someone spots you across a room, freezes mid-laugh, and rearranges their face into professional sorrow. I’m so sorry for your loss.
Some acquaintances avoided the topic completely, as if tragedy could spread like a virus and they didn’t want to be contaminated. Imagine walking into a crowded room wearing a shirt that has a fresh bloodstain spread over your chest—yet everyone is determined to keep their gaze above your shoulders. You talk about the weather, a sports game. Their gaze might fall for a moment upon the blotch, but they catch themselves and continue: Our son is now studying econ. We just returned from a trip to Spain.
I’d leave these encounters feeling annoyed, and then annoyed by my annoyance. What did I expect? They’d never entered the alternate universe. They didn’t speak its language.
Of all the reactions, the worst was the griefsplaining. Time heals. When I lost my great-aunt …
At a party, a man I barely knew came bounding at me wearing the Undertaker’s Stare. He grabbed my hand. “Danielle,” he implored. “Listen, you must understand, you will get better. It will get better. Please believe that. I know. It will just take time. Trust me on this.”
Some of these encounters turned darkly comic. Weeks after Miranda died, we were finally allowed legal entry into her apartment to pick up important items. Bea and I agreed to go together. The night before, we checked into a hotel. The reception clerk beamed at us, his hospitality smile cranked to the maximum.
“Why, hello, ladies! What brings you here? Business? Pleasure?”
So soon after Miranda’s death, we hadn’t yet developed poker faces for the unwary.
“Personal business,” Bea said quickly.
“Got any great plans while you’re here?”
“It’s not that kind of visit.”
“Not even a show?”
Impatient to end this friendly inquisition, I said: “My daughter died recently.” I explained that we had to deal with some things in her apartment.
The man’s smile remained fixed. “I’m so sorry to hear it!” He handed me back my credit card and ID. “But at least your daughter—what was her name?”
“Miranda.”
“At least Miranda’s in a better place now, right?”
“She was already in a good place,” I replied, so astonished that I now smiled myself. “A one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn Heights near the promenade.”
New Yorker that he was, the man conceded the advantageousness of the real estate.
“Can I send you ladies something up to your room?” he asked. “Some champagne, maybe?”
“We’re not really celebrating.”
“What would you like, then?”
Oh well, I thought, what the heck. “White wine?”
“A bottle’s headed your way. You ladies have a great evening.”
In May, the court probated Miranda’s will. We could now empty out her apartment and prepare it for sale.
The night before the movers came, I invited Miranda’s friends for a final gathering. The same housekeeper who had found Miranda dead returned to clean. I was grateful to her, knowing that she would do the work with sensitivity and care. When we arrived, the apartment looked as if Miranda had just stepped out. The housekeeper apologized for two streaks on the carpet that she’d been unable to remove: the marks from the gurney’s wheels.
I arranged everything the way Miranda would have: olives and almonds in small bowls, flickering votive candles. David fetched her favorite wines. The evening felt ghostly, yet I was comforted to be among Miranda’s friends. Near midnight, they decided to climb to the roof deck one last time, where they’d celebrated New Year’s Eve just months before. Bea went with them. David wanted to return to the hotel. “I’ll tidy up and follow,” I told him.
Alone, I poured myself one last glass and sank back into her sofa. I must have drifted off, because when I checked my phone it was 1 a.m. and I saw worried texts from David. I wrote back that I was fine, and that I wanted to stay the night.
I washed my face with Miranda’s cleanser. The mirror that had framed her last selfie to me threw back a ruined version of my face—sad, swollen eyes; grief etched everywhere. I found pajamas in her dresser and climbed into her bed—the last place her living body had rested. I clutched her pillow and murmured prayers until sleep took me away.
The next morning, efficiency arrived in the form of moving men. They boxed everything and loaded it onto a truck bound for a storage facility in New Jersey. Three hours to dismantle a life.
A small pot of C.O. Bigelow lip balm indented by a finger.
A crumpled boarding pass, LAX to JFK, seat 8A.
A hairbrush clotted with rose-gold hair.
A set of keys.
A black satin evening purse.
What to do with relics for which there is no reliquary?
More than two years have passed, but Miranda’s absence never ceases to shock me. It retains the power to hit me anew each day. Why is she still not here? Haven’t we suffered enough? Don’t we deserve to have her back now?
Part of my recovery, my therapist says, will be to develop a new relationship with her. Little by little, her voice seeps back into my head. I smile at things she’d say: I think you can find that same type of dress in a more flattering shape. I try to summon what it was like to be with her: her impatient tone with naughty Ringo, the reward of her throaty laugh.
It’s common to compare grief to a heavy stone, but that’s exactly what it feels like. I carry it everywhere. Now and then, I’m able to set it down and enjoy a moment of beauty: the sparkle of winter sun on freshly fallen snow; a full moon’s silver path on the lake. Sometimes a joke makes me laugh so hard that I drop the stone. Soon enough, I will stoop to pick it up again. Those who have walked before me assure me that the stone’s weight will lighten. I’m not sure I want it to. Sometimes I miss the intensity of early grief—it meant I was closer to her in time; I could almost touch her still. That intensity has been replaced by something harder to name. Not acceptance, never acceptance. Resignation, maybe. Adjustment—better.
Courtesy of Danielle Crittenden
The author and her daughter Miranda on vacation in 2018
I still face the what-ifs: What if I’d urged Miranda to see the doctor? What if I’d been more insistent about how pale and thin she looked? What if, what if … But I know that these questions run up against the truth of Miranda’s forceful will. She lived her life passionately, bravely, sometimes recklessly. Her regal indifference to authority haunted every report card and drove us half mad. Looking back, I realized there was not a single day of Miranda’s life when I didn’t worry about her.
You might well wonder: Was it worth it? Would I still have chosen to bear and love Miranda, if I’d known I was going to lose her?
A close friend who’d never had children asked me exactly this, a few months after Miranda died. Not callously—he was genuinely trying to understand. I’d just confessed to having suicidal thoughts; here now was this stable, happy woman he’d known for years, utterly destroyed.
“My only regret is that I wasn’t the one who got sick,” I told him. “I would make that trade in a heartbeat if it would bring Miranda back.”
His eyes reddened. “I envy you,” he said.
He explained that he’d known many forms of love, but never one so absolute that he’d choose death over living without it. Yet that’s exactly what a bereaved mother feels.
Maternal grief seizes the body differently from other sorrows. The attachment to our child begins at conception. Fetal cells migrate during pregnancy, taking up residence in the mother’s brain and organs. The child’s cells can remain in the mother for as long as she lives. They can help her fight off illness, recover from surgery. I find this infinitely comforting: Even after death, Miranda remains alive within me, her cells woven through my brain and blood.
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On Saturday, U.S. District Judge Mustafa T. Kasubhai issued a blistering 49-page written opinion vacating the Kennedy Declaration—the December 2025 declaration that threatened to revoke all federal funding, including Medicare and Medicaid, from any hospital or provider that offered gender-affirming care for transgender youth, a virtual death sentence for any hospital system. The vacatur applies nationwide, eliminating the legal basis that roughly 40 hospitals cited when they shuttered their trans youth care programs earlier this year. It also bars the Trump administration from implementing the Declaration or any materially similar policy threatening providers' federal funding for offering gender-affirming care. The ruling could have enormous implications in states like Colorado, where Children's Hospital Colorado is fighting a state Supreme Court case while still citing federal threats as justification for refusing to treat trans youth, and in New York, where hospitals have come under fire under state nondiscrimination law. The ruling goes into effect immediately.
The case centers on the Kennedy Declaration, issued on December 18, 2025, which was widely covered at the time as a "nuclear option" against transgender youth care. The administration's attack came on two tracks. First, CMS released two proposed federal rules barring hospitals providing trans care from Medicare and Medicaid. Because virtually every hospital in America depends on Medicare and Medicaid funding to survive, the rules would have functioned as a de facto nationwide ban. Secretary Kennedy, not content to wait for the long rule-making process, simultaneously issued the Declaration, which invoked an obscure HHS regulation allowing the department to exclude providers from federal health programs if they furnish care that "fails to meet professionally recognized standards of health care." By declaring that gender-affirming care for minors was "neither safe nor effective" and therefore failed to meet those standards, Kennedy effectively short-circuited the rulemaking process—putting a chilling policy into immediate effect without notice, without public comment, and without any of the procedural safeguards required by law. HHS General Counsel Mike Stuart then began publicly referring hospitals to the Office of Inspector General for exclusion.
The opinion was scathing, and called out the Trump administration for flagrant abuse of authority and disdain toward the rule of law. “Unserious leaders are unsafe,” Judge Kasubhai wrote in the opinion’s opening line. “There is nothing more serious than our leaders’ dedication to the rule of law so that we might maintain the integrity of our constitutional democracy. This case highlights a leader’s unserious regard for the rule of law. This case demonstrates how disregard for the rule of law does not merely result in an abstract infraction. Rather, and tragically, this case is one of a long list of examples of how a leader’s wanton disregard for the rule of law causes very real harm to very real people.”
On the government’s core argument—that the Kennedy Declaration was merely Kennedy’s personal, non-binding opinion—the judge was withering: “Defendants’ jurisdictional arguments are based on the bald-faced lie that the Kennedy Declaration amounts to nothing more than one man’s musings on gender-affirming care. This Court is not persuaded by Defendants’ attempts to gaslight it into believing that the Kennedy Declaration does anything other than what it says.” And the judge reserved his harshest words for HHS’s treatment of children’s hospitals: “Despite repeatedly emphasizing their commitment and obligation to protect children, Defendants have sweepingly wielded the Kennedy Declaration to threaten children’s hospitals that provide life-saving care to children. Citing the Kennedy Declaration, Defendants have exploited the threat of exclusion to bully healthcare providers into suspending gender-affirming care they would otherwise provide in compliance with statewide standards of care out of fear they will lose federal healthcare program funding and the attendant ability to provide any life-saving care to all children.”
Specifically, the judge found the Kennedy Declaration violated the law in four ways: it bypassed the Administrative Procedure Act's notice-and-comment requirements, bypassed Medicare's own separate notice-and-comment procedures, violated the terms of federally approved state Medicaid plans that the HHS Secretary is statutorily obligated to pay under, and—most critically—exceeded HHS's statutory authority entirely. On that final point, the judge cited a provision in the Medicare Act that could not be clearer: the statute says that nothing in the law "shall be construed to authorize any Federal officer or employee to exercise any supervision or control over the practice of medicine or the manner in which medical services are provided." The Kennedy Declaration clearly was an attempt to exercise supervision and control over the practice of medicine.
"This Court can scarcely recall an APA action that has come before it in which the agency's action was so clearly unlawful," the judge wrote. Perhaps most absurdly, the government argued that striking down the Kennedy Declaration would violate Secretary Kennedy's First Amendment rights—essentially claiming that the Declaration was not a binding federal action that threatened hospitals' very existence, but rather just one man sharing his personal opinions about medicine, and that the court should treat it as protected speech. The judge was not amused: "Defendants cannot bully or gaslight this Court into ignoring the many procedural and legal flaws of the Kennedy Declaration by invoking one of the most sacred principles of our constitutional democracy—the freedom of speech—when that principle comes nowhere close to being implicated." The court noted that the lawsuit does not challenge Kennedy's right to talk about gender-affirming care—it challenges his authority to "unilaterally, categorically, and without any process, supersede professional standards of care" while 40 hospitals shut down their programs in response.
From the ruling
Now that the Declaration has been vacated, hospitals have lost the primary justification they have cited for ending gender-affirming care for trans youth. The ruling does not merely block the Declaration—it permanently enjoins any “materially similar policy,” meaning the administration cannot simply rename the Declaration and try again. Hospitals that shuttered their programs by citing fear of federal retaliation—from Children’s Hospital Colorado to Children’s Minnesota to NYU Langone and Mount Sinai in New York—must now reckon with the fact that the federal threat they cited has been declared unlawful by a federal court, and the injunction bars it from being reimposed. Children’s Minnesota has already resumed care, citing the earlier oral ruling. California Attorney General Rob Bonta successfully sued Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego, forcing it to continue care under state nondiscrimination law. The Colorado Supreme Court is weighing whether to order Children’s Hospital Colorado to do the same. This ruling strengthens every one of those efforts.
For hospitals that continue to refuse care, the legal calculus has shifted dramatically. Many of the states in this lawsuit—including New York, California, Colorado, and Illinois—have state or local nondiscrimination laws that explicitly protect transgender people. Hospitals that drop gender-affirming care in these states are arguably violating those laws, but state attorneys general, governors, mayors, and city human rights commissions have been slow to act, in part because hospitals could point to a federal declaration threatening their very existence. That excuse is now gone. It remains to be seen if elected officials now push for a return to trans youth care in alignment with those laws.
Jared Kushner is recognized during President Trump's State of the Union address on Tuesday, February 24, 2026. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law, is leading U.S. diplomatic efforts with Iran while engaged in a lucrative, ongoing, multi-billion-dollar business relationship with the Saudi government. This brazenly corrupt arrangement is being completely ignored by most major media outlets.
In 2021, Kushner raised $2 billion from the Saudi government’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) for his private equity fund, Affinity Partners. Since that time, Kushner has collected more than $110 million in management fees from the Saudi government, according to calculations by Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Congressman Robert Garcia (D-CA). Even as he has assumed a central diplomatic role in negotiations with Iran, Kushner has reportedly sought billions more from the Saudis.
Accepting payments from a foreign government while leading diplomacy for the U.S. would be a glaring conflict of interest under any circumstances. But in this case, Kushner was on the Saudi payroll as Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), the de facto ruler of the country, reportedly lobbied Trump both to initiate and continue the war.
Popular Information analyzed coverage of Kushner’s diplomatic role from the outset of the war with Iran on February 28 to April 19. During that period, 202 articles mentioning Kushner’s role representing the U.S. in negotiations with Iran were collectively published by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Associated Press, CNN Wire, The New York Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe, and The Los Angeles Times.
Only six of the 202 articles covering Kushner’s diplomatic role mentioned his financial conflict of interest with the Saudi government. That means more than 97% of the coverage ignored Kushner’s conflict. Of the six articles that covered the conflict, five appeared in the New York Times. The other article originally appeared in Foreign Policy and was republished by the Washington Post.
The Wall Street Journal, The Associated Press, CNN Wire, The New York Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe, and The Los Angeles Times collectively published dozens of articles about Kushner’s diplomatic role in the war with Iran but never mentioned the conflict.
Among the publications analyzed, The New York Times has had the most substantive coverage of Kushner’s conflict. Still, the vast majority of the New York Times coverage of Kushner’s diplomatic role does not even briefly mention his financial conflict.
Notably, some publications that have completely ignored Kushner’s conflict produced the reporting that established the factual predicate. For example, The Wall Street Journal produced the foundational reporting on how Kushner raised billions from foreign governments to fund Affinity Partners, including $2 billion from the Saudis. The Washington Post, meanwhile, broke the story on MBS lobbying Trump to initiate the war in Iran, but did not mention Kushner’s financial relationship with the Saudis — even though MBS controls the Saudi PIF.
Kushner is expected to return to Pakistan today for further talks with the Iranians. Will the news media continue to ignore or downplay his financial conflict?
The Congressional investigation
As the media largely ignores the Kushner corruption scandal, Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, just launched an extensive investigation.
In an April 16 letter to Kushner, Raskin writes, “your decision to act in these two roles—one public for the government and one private for personal profit—creates a glaring and incurable conflict of interest.” Raskin argues that MBS’s “desire to prolong the war imposes obvious financial pressure on you to prolong this war of choice, risking further harm to American servicemembers, deepening the military morass and draining tens of billions from American taxpayer dollars each week on behalf of your investor and benefactor.” Raskin argues that Kushner “cannot faithfully represent the United States with billions of dollars in Saudi and Emirati cash burning a hole in every pocket of every suit you own.”
Raskin informs Kushner that the investigation seeks “information critical to reforming our bribery laws, conflict of interest provisions, other statutes and rules governing the conduct of government and special government employees, and [the Foreign Agents Registration Act].” The letter demands Kushner supply detailed information including, “[a]ll communications between you and any Saudi official, intermediary, or agent— including state-linked investment funds or businesses—between January 2022 and the present day” and “[a]ll communications with the White House and Trump campaign, including your father-in-law, regarding your role within the government from July 1, 2024, to the present day.”
Should Democrats retake control of the House next year, the investigation could gain more teeth, as Raskin would become chairman and have the ability to issue subpoenas.
As of this writing, none of the publications in Popular Information’s analysis has published a story on Raskin’s investigation.
Gas prices over five dollars a gallon are displayed at an Exxon gas station near the U.S. Capitol Building on March 31, 2026, in Washington, DC. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
During the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump promised that if he were elected president again, he would reduce the price of a gallon of gas by 50% within a year of taking office. “12 months from January 20th… your gasoline for your car is going to be 50% cheaper,” Trump declared at a speech to the Detroit Economic Club on October 10, 2024. “That’s a big thing.”
On January 20, 2025, the day Trump took office for a second term, the average price for a gallon of gas was $3.12. Had Trump kept his pledge, gas would now cost about $1.57 per gallon.
On Tuesday, the average price of a gallon of gas was $4.02. Instead of the 50% reduction in gas prices that Trump promised, prices have increased by more than 28%.
Trump also promised to drive down other energy costs, including electricity bills and home heating gas, by 50%. “Energy costs, all of it, air conditioning, heating, all of it, including gasoline, will drop by more than 50% within the first 12 months,” Trump pledged during an August 19, 2024, rally in York, Pennsylvania.
Home heating oil has gone from $3.94 per gallon on the day of Trump’s inauguration to $5.57 per gallon today, a 41% increase. Residential electricity costs averaged 15.92 cents per kilowatt-hour in January 2025. Today, Americans are paying an average of 18.05 cents per kilowatt-hour, an increase of 13%.
The sharp increase in energy prices, particularly oil prices, is not the result of misfortune. Rather, it is a direct and predictable consequence of Trump’s policies. Trump made the decision to start a war against Iran without a plan to secure the Strait of Hormuz, a sea passage used by about 20% of the world’s oil supply. Although most oil that travels through the Strait of Hormuz is not imported to the United States, oil trades in a global market, so cutting off a significant percentage of the supply increases costs for everyone.
Trump has pursued these policies even though his pledge to reduce energy prices was not a flip remark but a central plank of his reelection campaign, one he repeated over and over again.
“Under the Trump economic plan, we will cut your energy prices in half,” Trump said at a September 21, 2024, rally in Wilmington, North Carolina. “Mark it down, and you can get very angry at me if we don’t do it.” Two days later, in Indiana, Pennsylvania, Trump promised, “If you vote for me, I will cut your energy and electricity prices in half within 12 months.”
There are many more examples, all of which are on tape. Popular Information has compiled some highlights. Watch:
Trump has addressed increasing energy prices in a variety of ways. At times, he has sought to spin the increased prices as a positive development. “The United States is the largest Oil Producer in the World, by far, so when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money,” Trump bragged on March 12, 2026.
Alternatively, he has claimed the price spikes would be fleeting. Trump predicted that prices would “go lower than they were before“ as soon as the war ended. This is unlikely because the end of the war would not necessarily mean the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. If the Strait remains closed for an extended period, crude oil prices could reach $200 per barrel, resulting in gas prices of about $7 per gallon.
Finally, after campaigning on lower energy prices, Trump has, at times, dismissed the issue as unimportant.
Idaho Capital Building // Wyatt Perry // Wikimedia Commons
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On Friday, the Idaho Senate passed the most extreme anti-transgender bathroom ban in the United States: a law that applies to both public buildings and private businesses and carries severe criminal penalties. A first offense would be a misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in jail; a second offense within five years would be a felony carrying up to five years in state prison. But the penalties do not stop there. Under Idaho's persistent violator statute, a transgender person convicted of a fourth bathroom offense—their third felony—could face a mandatory minimum of five years and up to life in prison, immediately making Idaho the harshest state in the nation for criminalizing transgender people. Those who find themselves behind bars may then be subjected to additional brutality at the hands of a prison system that has been systematically denying transgender people their medication and placing trans women in male facilities. The bill passed 28-7, with one Republican voting against it, and it now heads to the Governor’s desk.
The bill, HB 752, states that "any person who knowingly and willfully enters a restroom or changing room in a government-owned building or a place of public accommodation designated for use by the opposite biological sex of such person shall be guilty of a misdemeanor" punishable by up to one year in prison. A second offense within five years would be a felony carrying up to five years in state prison, and under Idaho's persistent violator statute, a fourth offense—the third felony—would carry a mandatory minimum of five years and a maximum of life. Notably, these provisions apply to private businesses, and the bill explicitly allows prior convictions under "a similar statute in another state, or any similar local ordinance" to count toward the escalation threshold—meaning a transgender person previously sanctioned under another state's bathroom ban could face felony charges on their first offense in Idaho.
The bill drew sharp criticism from a diverse range of opponents, unifying voices that typically do not share the same stance. ACLU Idaho focused on the extreme privacy violations and excessive penalties the bill would create, as well as the danger to transgender and cisgender people alike from weaponizing law enforcement against anyone who defies gender expectations. The Idaho Fraternal Order of Police also opposed the bill, with President Bryan Lovell warning that "in many circumstances, there is no clear or reasonable way for officers to make that determination without engaging in questioning or investigative actions that could be viewed as invasive and inappropriate." The Idaho Sheriffs' Association joined the opposition as well. Despite pleas from police, Bill sponsor Rep. Cornel Rasor refused to add a duty-to-depart amendment—a provision that exists in Florida's criminal bathroom ban and allows a person to avoid charges by leaving when asked—meaning a transgender person in Idaho could be arrested on the spot simply for being present.
If Governor Brad Little signs the bill into law, Idaho would become the fourth state with a major bathroom ban targeting transgender people through arrest or significant criminal or civil penalties. In Florida, where the offense is a misdemeanor carrying up to 60 days in jail, Marcy Rheintgen was arrested in March 2025 for washing her hands in a women's restroom at the state capitol. In Texas, where the bathroom ban took effect in December, four transgender women were detained at the state capitol and issued criminal trespass warnings banning them from the building for a year. And in Kansas, the state created a bounty hunter system allowing private citizens to sue transgender people encountered in a bathroom for $1,000. Idaho's bill goes further than all of them—the criminal offense is triggered by merely being present in the restroom, it applies to private businesses, and the penalties dwarf those in states that have already earned "do not travel" warnings on the Erin in the Morning trans legal risk assessment map.
Anti-transgender bathroom bans and policies, even informal ones, routinely draw in people they were never meant to target. In Idaho's own Senate hearing on HB 752, Tara Townsell of Nampa testified that she has been repeatedly removed from women's restrooms and forced to show ID because of her short hair—and was once denied entry to a maternity ward at a Boise hospital despite being nine months pregnant. In Congress, Reps. Lauren Boebert and Nancy Mace confronted a cisgender woman in a Capitol restroom, mistakenly believing she was a transgender member of Congress. In Arizona, a Black woman with a “masculine” appearance was confronted by police officers inside a Walmart restroom who tried to remove her; she said she has not used a public restroom since. The laws also create impossible situations for transgender men. In Ohio, Noah Ruiz, a 20-year-old trans man, was beaten by three men after using the women's restroom at a campground—the very bathroom the property owner had told him to use. He was then arrested for disorderly conduct while his attackers initially faced no charges.
On the other hand, anti-transgender bathroom bans in other states have led to remarkably few actual arrests or reports of crimes, suggesting that the general public has little appetite for policing who uses which restroom. Shannon Minter, vice president of legal for the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, told the Texas Tribune that such laws are "largely as a practical matter, unenforceable" and "almost never enforced," adding that they are "simply designed to intimidate and scare transgender people." As a result, many transgender people in those states have vowed to continue using the restroom that matches their identity. "I understand that that is breaking a law, however, I will not bend the knee on that one," Simon Shepherd, a transgender man in North Texas, told the Tribune when the state's ban took effect. But Idaho's extreme penalties may change that calculus. When a second offense carries up to five years in prison, it becomes a concrete threat that many may find too difficult to challenge.
The bill now heads to Governor Brad Little's desk. Little, a Republican, has not indicated whether he will sign or veto the measure, though he has signed every major anti-transgender bill to reach his desk during his tenure. The bill contains an emergency clause and would take effect on July 1, 2026. Advocates have signaled privately they anticipate legal challenges should the law take effect.
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US lawmakers are pressing Tulsi Gabbard to reveal whether using a VPN can strip Americans of their constitutional protections against warrantless surveillance.
I always wondered which of my books would be the first to be banned, and now I know:
Via this post from @thebloggess.bsky.social, I learn that my book Lock In has been banned from schools in New Braunfels, TX. There is irony here in that Lock In won the Alex Award from the ALA, given for "adult books suitable for teens." thebloggess.com/2026/03/25/t…
I'm on a cruise so I'll have more to say about it at a later time, but the short version of this is, of course, fuck censorship, and also, my books will outlast these motherfuckers, we'll see them (politically) dead and in the ground and my books will be there to piss on their (metaphorical) graves.
As noted above, I’ll likely have more to say about this when I get back the JoCo Cruise, but for now, two points, which I may expand upon in a later post:
1. On a personal level, I don’t expect this ban to move the needle much, positively or negatively, for sales of Lock In, which has been out for a dozen years now;
2. Please refrain from exclaiming “Having your book banned just means you’ll sell more!” or something similar in the comments. One, it’s absolutely not true for the vast majority of books that get banned; the usual result is a net loss for authors and publishers. Two, this is sort of comment that, however well-intentioned to be supportive, minimizes the seriousness of book banning as an intentional policy. The busybodies banning books in New Braunfels targeted more than 1,500 books, not just mine. None of that is a thing to be happy about; there is no actual upside to book bans.
A powerful iPhone-hacking technique known as DarkSword has been discovered in use by Russian hackers. It can take over devices running iOS 18 that simply visit infected websites.
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On Tuesday, an all-Republican and mostly Trump-appointed panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that states can exclude gender-affirming surgery from Medicaid coverage, allowing West Virginia's exclusion to return to full effect. In doing so, the panel extended the Supreme Court's decision in Skrmetti—which held that transgender youth care bans were constitutional—to transgender adults, the first federal appeals court in the country to do so, and directly states that adult care bans are legal. Perhaps even more troubling, the judges declared that transgender adult care was "dangerous," and that it is rational for a state to restrict access to such care in order to "encourage citizens to appreciate their sex." The ruling effectively reversed a previous en banc decision by the same circuit and established precedent for a wave of new laws targeting transgender adults—just weeks after Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts declared on a podcast that the solution to transgender adult care was to "outlaw it."
“It is not irrational for a legislature to forgo Medicaid coverage of arguably ineffective and dangerous procedures and allocate its limited resources to covering other treatments. What’s more, States may legitimately recognize and “celebrat[e]” the “inherent differences between men and women.” Virginia, 518 U.S. at 533 (internal quotation marks omitted). And it is not irrational for a legislature to encourage citizens “to appreciate their sex” and not “become disdainful of their sex” by refusing to fund experimental procedures that may have the opposite effect. Skrmetti, 605 U.S. at 516–17,” wrote the justices, endorsing that “encouraging citizens to appreciate their sex” is now a proper and constitutional aim.
4th Circuit Opinion
The court also took a significant step toward ruling that laws targeting transgender adult care would be constitutional. In a footnote, the court states, "While Skrmetti involved sex-change treatments for minors, disagreement among experts about the efficacy and necessity of transgender surgeries extends to treatment of gender dysphoria in adults." This claim is contradicted by the medical literature—multiple studieshaveconfirmed the positive impact of gender-affirming surgeries for transgender people, including a 40-year follow-up study that found high patient satisfaction, improved dysphoria, and reduced mental health comorbidities with no reported patient regret. Nevertheless, a broader issue is at play: the Fourth Circuit appears to be wholeheartedly endorsing the idea that restrictions on transgender adults' access to care are constitutional.
In issuing its ruling, the court cites Skrmetti over 70 times. Skrmetti held that gender-affirming care bans for minors were not discriminatory because they hinged on a diagnosis of gender dysphoria and age, not on transgender status or sex. This reasoning was fiercely contested by the three dissenting justices and by multiple lower courts, which found that discriminating against a condition experienced exclusively by transgender people is inseparable from discriminating against transgender people themselves. But this ruling goes further than Skrmetti ever did. Skrmetti was explicitly about minors. The Fourth Circuit applies the same framework to adult care. The opinion even states outright: “If a State can reasonably ban it, of course a State can reasonably refuse to pay for it“—a sentence that reads less like a Medicaid ruling and more like a roadmap for legislatures to consider outright adult care bans.
4th Circuit Ruling
The court’s reasoning relies on a symmetry that collapses under scrutiny: gender-affirming care for gender dysphoria is banned equally for transgender and cisgender people, the court reasons, so no one is being singled out. But cisgender people do not seek gender-affirming care for gender dysphoria. The “equality” is entirely theoretical. Justice Sotomayor flagged this exact problem in her Skrmetti dissent, drawing a parallel to Loving v. Virginia—the landmark case striking down interracial marriage bans. Virginia had argued its anti-miscegenation law was not racially discriminatory because it banned interracial marriage equally for Black and white citizens alike. The Supreme Court rejected that reasoning in 1967, yet the Fourth Circuit now embraces its mirror image: a ban that targets a medical need unique to transgender people is not discriminatory because it technically applies to everyone. It is the equivalent of taxing yarmulkes and claiming the tax is not antisemitic because anyone, Jewish or not, who wears a yarmulke must pay.
What's worse, the precedent in this decision can be weaponized far beyond Medicaid. If it is not unconstitutional to "encourage citizens to appreciate their sex," the implications extend to virtually every area of transgender life. Are gender marker bans on IDs legal because carrying correct documents could "discourage" transgender people from "appreciating their sex?" Are drag bans and bans on cross-gender clothing legal because the state has an interest in encouraging the appreciation of sex? Could a state compel transgender people into conversion therapy, reasoning that it is not discriminatory because it targets a medical diagnosis rather than transgender status—and that the goal is simply to "encourage them to appreciate their sex?" The implications are terrifying for transgender people, and the court's language provides no limiting principle to prevent any of these outcomes.
The ruling also comes just weeks after Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts declared on the PBD podcast that adult care bans would be the organization's next target. "There does seem to be a mounting body of evidence that suggests a correlation between that surgery at any age, mental health issues, and increasingly, although we're running the numbers on this at Heritage, acts of violence," Roberts said. When host Patrick Bet-David asked how to address it, Roberts responded: "You outlaw it." When pressed on how, Roberts described a strategy of "radical incrementalism"—taking "a quarter of the enchilada" at a time until adult care is eliminated entirely. This court ruling hands Heritage exactly the legal framework it needs to execute that strategy.
The ruling is likely to be cited across the country as states push new anti-transgender legislation. It effectively overturns the Fourth Circuit's own 2024 en banc decision in Kadel v. Folwell, in which the full court ruled 8-6 that excluding gender-affirming care from coverage was unconstitutional. At least seven other states face active lawsuits over similar Medicaid exclusions, and the Ninth Circuit is currently reconsidering M.H. v. Hamso—a parallel Medicaid coverage case also sent back after Skrmetti. If the Ninth Circuit follows the Fourth, the appellate consensus solidifies. If it splits, it could tee up a Supreme Court case on adult care directly.Meanwhile, Puerto Rico banned adult trans healthcare to 21 years old, and Trump has set the age at 19 via executive orders, including some adults. The legal architecture for eliminating transgender adult healthcare is being assembled in plain sight, and this ruling will make it easier for states to do just that.
Florida State Capitol // Michael Rivera // Wikimedia Commons
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On Tuesday, the Florida legislature passed a bill that would ban all local governments from "promoting" or "adopting" activities related to diversity, equity, and inclusion—and bar any recipients of city contracts or grants from doing the same. The bill explicitly includes gender identity and sexual orientation in its definition of DEI, meaning any official activity "with reference to" LGBTQ+ people could trigger a violation. That could include promoting or supporting local Pride events with any city resources or funding LGBTQ+ community health centers. The bill also contains a novel and extreme enforcement mechanism: any elected official the governor deems in violation would be guilty of "misfeasance in office," which under the Florida Constitution gives Governor DeSantis the power to immediately suspend that official by executive order—without a court hearing. It is a power he has already weaponized twice against elected Democratic state attorneys, and which would now expand to every city commissioner and county official in the state.
The new bill, SB 1134, is sweeping and deliberately vague. It states that any city or county office or official acting in their official capacity cannot "promote or adopt training, programming, or activities designed or implemented with reference to race, color, sex, ethnicity, gender identity, or sexual orientation." It also mandates that local governments not use funds for "contractors, employees, vendors, volunteers, or agents" who will "ascribe to, study, or be instructed" using materials with reference to the same identity categories, which could impact community health centers, hospitals, and nonprofit services in cities across the state.
Importantly, this bill contains an extreme enforcement mechanism. Under Florida's constitution, the governor can suspend elected officials from office for misfeasance—and this does not require a court hearing. The governor can simply issue an executive order, and the official is out. The suspended official's only recourse is an appeal to the Republican-controlled Florida Senate, which holds a 28-12 supermajority. SB 1134 would expand those powers to include declaring support for LGBTQ+ activities or programming in an elected official's official capacity to be an act of misfeasance worthy of removal from office, with DeSantis himself able to use these powers with a stroke of his pen. He has already weaponized this provision twice—suspending Hillsborough County State Attorney Andrew Warren in 2022, in part for pledging not to criminalize gender-affirming healthcare, and suspending Ninth Circuit State Attorney Monique Worrell in 2023. The Florida Supreme Court upheld his authority to do so. This bill would hand him the same power over every city commissioner, county official, and municipal officer in the state.
The bill could have enormous consequences for Pride across the state. While it does not technically ban Pride events, the practical effect on Pride parades may be devastating. Florida's drag ban, which was recently put back into effect by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in December, has already been interpreted to potentially bar parades that include drag performers—which is most Pride parades—from allowing minors to attend. When the drag ban first passed in 2023, Port St. Lucie canceled its Pridefest parade entirely, and Tampa Pride canceled all 2026 events citing the political climate, loss of corporate sponsorships, and the "discontinuation of DEI programs." Now, SB 1134, should it be signed by the governor, would extend the assault even further, barring any city from co-sponsoring, funding, or officially promoting Pride events.
Under broad interpretations of the bill's language, this could prohibit cities from displaying Pride flags on government property, sending official city delegations to march in parades, posting Pride events on city websites or social media, issuing proclamations recognizing Pride Month, or providing city resources like water trucks and staff time to support festivals. These are not hypotheticals—the City of Wilton Manors currently spends $50,000 in direct funding and an additional $48,000 in city services to co-sponsor Stonewall Pride, a large Pride event in the state. The bill arrives in the context of an escalating war on LGBTQ+ visibility in Florida: the state already forced cities across South Florida to remove Pride rainbow crosswalks last summer under a separate law, including the rainbow crosswalk outside the Pulse nightclub memorial in Orlando where 49 people were murdered. City officials in Key West, Fort Lauderdale, and Delray Beach who fought to preserve their crosswalks would, under SB 1134, now risk being removed from elected office for doing so.
"This bill is dangerous, vague by design, and part of a broader political agenda of censorship and government overreach," said Stratton Pollitzer, executive director of Equality Florida, in a statement following the bill's passage. "Once again, Florida lawmakers have manufactured a sweeping anti-LGBTQ law—legislation intended to bully local governments and have a chilling effect on how they celebrate and support the diverse communities they serve. Florida's LGBTQ community knows all too well how to fight back against unjust laws. Just as we did following the passage of Florida's notorious 'Don't Say Gay or Trans' law, we will fight every step of the way to limit the impact of this legislation, including in the courts."
Florida is not the first place to attempt this. Under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán—whose anti-LGBTQ+ policies DeSantis's office has openly acknowledged as a model for Florida's Don't Say Gay law—Hungary banned Pride outright last year, even amending its constitution to block legal challenges. When Budapest Mayor Gergely Karácsony defied the ban by designating Pride as an official city event and leading 200,000 people through the streets, the government filed criminal charges against him. SB 1134 creates a strikingly similar mechanism on American soil: a local official who uses their office to support Pride commits misfeasance, and the governor can suspend them unilaterally. In Hungary, the mayor faces a fine. In Florida, DeSantis wouldn't even need to go to court.
The bill now heads to Governor DeSantis's desk. Given his record on LGBTQ+ issues—including signing Don't Say Gay, a drag ban, and the ban on gender-affirming care for trans youth—a veto is virtually inconceivable. If signed, the bill takes effect January 1, 2027, at which point any existing local ordinances, resolutions, programs, or policies deemed to relate to LGBTQ+ people and other “DEI” activities would be immediately void. The bill is likely to face court challenges, though the 11th Circuit Court and Florida’s Supreme Court have both been among the most hostile courts towards LGBTQ+ people.
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Recently, Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, admitted to a Bloomberg reporter that he uses Microsoft’s AI CoPilot to summarize emails his team sends him, so that he doesn’t have to read the messages or attachments.
Imagine being someone who worked for hours writing something for Nadella, only to find out the CEO outsourced reading it to an algorithm? How would you feel?
People don’t like being on the receiving end of AI usage.
Job applicants hate it when they learn that a company they’ve applied to has used AI to screen their application, especially if it then rejects them.
At the same time, hiring managers don’t like it when they discover a job candidate used AI to embellish their résumé and other application materials.
College professors dislike it when their students use AI to do their assignments, while college students complain when they learn their professors are using AI to create their lectures.
And nobody likes dealing with a customer service chatbot. For many people, their first reaction is to try to convince the chatbot to refer them to a real human. This behavior has become so prevalent that big brands, like United Airlines, have begun advertising human-only customer service chats. Bypassing AI is now a marketing advantage.
All this is to say that if you’re implementing AI functionality, you’ve got a two-party UX problem. While Microsoft’s Nadella is proud of his AI summaries, it’s unlikely the people who work hard on their emails to him are too happy about the fact that he never reads them. If they knew he only wanted a summary, why didn’t they just write him a summary instead of letting the large language model hallucinate their way through summarizing it?
There are two parties in these scenarios: The people using AI to summarize the emails and the people writing them in the first place. The job candidates and the hiring managers. The college students and the professors.
When we’re working on the user experience of AI functionality, we need to think about both parties. This consideration is new to our UX practice.
In the past, if we were working on the UX of an email client or an application management system, we’d focus only on one party. We’d focus on the email recipient or sender, but not both. We’d focus on the job applicant or the application reviewer, not both.
But many AI transactions involve multiple parties, and now we need to think about all of them simultaneously. We want to find a way to make both sides feel that our AI functionality improves their lives, not worsens them.
AI opens us up to social problems, where there are multiple sides to any design. The trick is to identify solutions that improve everyone’s lives, not just a single party’s experience at the expense of everyone else.
When you’re designing AI functionality, how are you focusing on the needs of all the parties involved, not just your primary audience?
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Today, transgender people across Kansas are reporting receiving letters from the Kansas Division of Vehicles stating that they must surrender their driver's licenses and that their current credentials will be considered invalid upon the law's publication in the Kansas Register on Thursday. Should any transgender person be caught driving without a valid license, they could face a class B misdemeanor carrying up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine. Kansas already requires county jails to house inmates according to sex assigned at birth. The letter, obtained by Erin in the Morning, marks one of the most significant erosions of transgender civil rights in the United States to date.
The letter, which has been reported to Erin In The Morning by a Kansas-based activist, states that under House Substitute for Senate Bill 244, Kansas-issued driver's licenses and identification cards must now reflect the credential holder's “sex at birth.” It warns that upon the law's publication in the Kansas Register on Thursday, February 26, current credentials for affected individuals "will no longer be valid." The Legislature, the letter notes, "did not include a grace period for updating credentials," and anyone operating a vehicle without a valid credential "may be subject to additional penalties." Those whose gender marker does not match their sex assigned at birth are directed to surrender their current credential to the Division of Vehicles for reissuance.
You can see the full letter here:
SB 244, also known as the "bathroom bounty" bill, contained heavy identification document bans as well. The bill was rushed through the Kansas Legislature in January using a "gut and go" procedure that bypassed nearly all public input on its key provisions. Governor Laura Kelly vetoed the bill on February 13, calling it "poorly drafted," but the Legislature overrode her veto days later. In addition to the driver's license provisions, the law bans transgender people from using bathrooms matching their gender identity in public buildings and creates a bathroom bounty hunter system allowing citizens to sue transgender people they encounter in restrooms for at least $1,000 in damages, including potentially in private restrooms. The bill takes effect immediately upon publication in the Kansas Register rather than the standard July 1 effective date—giving transgender Kansans just days between the override and the invalidation of their identity documents.
The consequences for noncompliance could escalate quickly. Under Kansas law, driving without a valid license is a class B misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine—though first-time offenders are more likely to face a citation and fine. A conviction, however, triggers an automatic 90-day license suspension. If a person drives during that suspension, they face a charge of driving on a suspended license, which carries a mandatory minimum of five days in jail. Kansas already requires county jails to house inmates by sex assigned at birth.
The Kansas letters arrive amid an accelerating nationwide campaign to strip transgender people of accurate identification documents. The Trump administration has barred transgender Americans from obtaining passports that reflect their gender identity, a policy the Supreme Court allowed to take effect in November. The Social Security Administration has similarly stopped permitting gender marker updates. At the state level, Florida, Texas, Indiana, and other states have moved to block gender marker changes on driver's licenses or birth certificates. But Kansas appears to be the first state to go further than simply blocking future changes—it is actively invalidating previously issued documents and demanding their surrender.
As a result of this extreme anti-transgender law, the state of Kansas has seen its status deteriorate to a "Do Not Travel" warning in the EITM Trans Risk Map. Transgender people should exercise extreme caution when traveling through the state, and those already living there should take immediate steps to legally protect themselves in the face of laws that could strip their driving privileges, expose them to criminal penalties, and subject them to thousand-dollar bounties simply for using a restroom. For most transgender people who do not already live in Kansas, the risk is now too great to travel there at all.
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Good Boy. 1st Place, Invertebrate Portrait. A close view of a moth in Tinamaste, Costa Rica. Hesemans: “A favourite quarry of many macro photographers, it is always a lovely opportunity to spend time with members of the Bombycid family. Incredibly photogenic, the large eyes and antenna positions of these moths, especially the males, always lend their portraits a somewhat melancholy feeling. They are a lesson in beautiful subtlety and a reminder to always give even the simplest arthropods and small creatures a second, closer look.”
Featherhome. 3rd Place, Underwater. A crinoid shrimp, photographed in Tulamben, Bali. Arpa: “I’ve always been fascinated by the smallest creatures of the reef, those that most divers overlook. For a long time, I wanted to photograph these tiny critters from their own perspective, to show what their miniature world might look like if you were right there with them. In Tulamben, Bali, while exploring feather stars, I came across this crinoid shrimp. Perfectly camouflaged in both color and pattern, it clung tightly to its host, spending most of its time motionless, relying on the feather star for protection and food drifting in the current.”
Fatal Jump. Finalist, Animals. A marsh frog leaps into the air just as a barn swallow flies past to drink from a garden pond in Kiskunság National Park, Hungary. Máté: “Human activities have drastically reduced the number of barn swallows. In addition to the creation of chemical-free, arthropod-rich habitats, the installation of artificial nests can play a major role in increasing the population. Thanks to these nests placed on the terraces of my farm, the population has increased from zero to 19 pairs in five years, more than half of which have bred twice. In one small garden pond, I spent a month photographing swallows drinking without landing, their beaks scratching the water. During this time, once, a marsh frog leapt into the air just as the swallow flew past.”
Fractal Forest. Overall Winner and 1st Place, Underwater. The inside of a cauliflower soft coral in Lembeh Strait, Indonesia. Gudgeon: “Named for its characteristic cauliflower-like appearance, this coral has numerous small, rounded, bump-like polyps that give it a puffy texture.”
Weevil. Finalist, Invertebrate Portrait. A weevil with its head tucked in, in the Amazon rainforest at Yarina Eco Lodge, Ecuador. Auer: “While walking behind a small hut in the rainforest at Yarina Eco Lodge, I was searching for subjects when I spotted this remarkable weevil. Its head was tucked in so seamlessly and was fully covered in tiny scales. For the background, I picked a small flower from the surrounding area to add some colour to the composition.”
So What? Finalist, Animals. Alpine choughs in the Bernese Alps, Switzerland. Abbenhaus: “Despite icy winds and swirling snow, Alpine choughs searched for food at 2,268 meters on the Gemmi Pass in the Swiss Alps. They braved the elements with remarkable ease, riding the strong updrafts and returning to the snow-covered rocks between flights. One of them landed right in front of my camera, curious and unfazed by the cold. Snow, wind and sub-zero temperatures made photographing a challenge, yet it was precisely these conditions that gave the image its intensity: a fleeting moment of closeness between human and bird in the heart of a winter mountain storm.”
Blending In. Finalist, Arachnids. A lichen huntsman spider blends perfectly into a tree trunk covered in moss and lichen in Agumbe, India. Annadana: “During a trip to the Western Ghats, one of India’s richest biodiversity hotspots, I came across countless fascinating macro species. Among them was this lichen huntsman spider, perfectly blending into a moss and lichen covered tree trunk. I used a wide-angle lens to reveal its remarkable camouflage and slowed the shutter to capture the soft blue bokeh of light filtering through the forest canopy.”
Kraken. Finalist, Underwater. A juvenile sharpear enope squid photographed in the open ocean off West Palm Beach, Florida. Johnson: “This image was captured during a blackwater night dive, where divers drift in the Gulf Stream to witness the nightly migration of planktonic, larval, and juvenile stage marine life. For this photo, the most challenging part was holding my position in the strong current while keeping the camera steady in complete darkness. The squid’s translucent body shimmered with iridescent speckles as it hovered and posed, just long enough to take the shot, a rather unusual behavior since most dart away quickly.”
Emerald Glow. 3rd Place, Young. A Cuban tree frog in the photographer’s backyard in Florida. Hawkins-Kimmel: “During the heat of the day, I uncovered this Cuban tree frog hiding in the leaf of a banana tree in my backyard. The frog was very calm and allowed me to slip a flashlight under the leaf to create this effect. My 100mm lens ensured that I didn’t need to get too close, so as not to stress out the frog.”
Ghost of the Reef. Finalist, Underwater. A ghost goby on coral in Marsa Alam, Egypt. Biddie: “Small reef fish like this ghost goby are unassuming and often unseen, yet they contribute to 70% of fish biomass, making them critical to reef food chains. These ‘cryptobenthic’ fish evade predators by hiding in crevices or using camouflage. Growing to about 2cm long, ghost gobies are perfectly adapted for concealment amongst coral.”
Parasitic Play. Finalist, Insects. Banana skipper eggs being parasitized by a wasp in Bengaluru, India. Annadana: “While on a macro walk earlier this year, I spotted the familiar sight of banana skipper eggs neatly laid on a banana leaf. But as I peered closer through the lens, the scene turned unexpectedly dramatic. A tiny parasitic wasp was busy at work, slipping its own eggs inside those of the butterfly. Each butterfly egg is only about 1.8mm, and the wasp is even smaller.”
Guardians of the Hive. 1st Place, Young. A stingless-bee nest in Mezhathur, Kerala, India. Girish: “During my summer holiday in Kerala, India, I encountered a nest of stingless bees, likely from the Tetragonula family. Fascinated by the tiny wonders of nature, I make it a point to explore and learn more about the natural world whenever I visit India. These small yet remarkable bees had carefully built their home using wax, resin, and mud, creating a unique tube-shaped entrance to safeguard their colony. The guard bees at the entrance remained alert, ensuring the safety of their hive from potential threats.”
Dragonfly Alphabet Calligraphy. 3rd Place, Butterflies & Dragonflies. A beautiful demoiselle damselfly takes off from a reed in the surroundings of Gatchina, Russia. Melgunov: “Beautiful demoiselles are one of my favorite subjects. In this case, I managed to capture a shot of one taking off from a bent reed against the bright sky reflected in water. This angle allowed me to get a minimal, graphic image that I further enhanced by converting to black & white and increasing the contrast. The composition formed by the reeds resembled the letter ‘A,’ as if drawn by the damselfly in the fine calligraphic stroke of its airy flight.”
Spider Web. 3rd Place, Animals. A Eurasian beaver approaches a spider’s web in Kiskunság National Park, Hungary. Máté: “Years ago, I managed to intervene at the last minute to stop the water department from clear-cutting trees along a 2km stretch of canal. Since then, we’ve worked together. I monitor and notify them of any trees obstructing water traffic, while they avoid unnecessary clear-cutting, preserving a thriving habitat. Beavers returned to this area in 2015, nearly two centuries after they were wiped out across most of Europe. Thanks to conservation efforts, their numbers have surged since the early 2000s, making them one of the few species to successfully reclaim their native range.”
Inside the Pack. 2nd Place, Animals. Arctic wolves on the sea ice in a frozen fjord on Ellesmere Island, Canada. Eshel: “Lying on the sea ice of a frozen fjord, I experienced a moment of pure magic when a pack of Arctic wolves approached me out of sheer curiosity. They came so close I could feel their breath, yet I never sensed aggression, only wonder. These wolves, unlike others, have never been hunted or threatened by humans. In the remote wilderness of northern Ellesmere Island, they have no reason to fear us. I had dreamed of this encounter for years.”
Blooming Butterflies. Finalist, Butterflies & Dragonflies. Eros blue butterflies rest together in Tianjun County, Qinghai province, China. Zhao: “It was a summer morning, and I was planning to photograph other wildlife when I happened to see these Eros blue butterflies. At first, I genuinely thought they were a patch of blue flowers, but as I got closer, I realized they weren’t flowers at all, but butterflies resting. I was stunned by their beauty.”
Bug Invasion on a Sunny Day. Finalist, Insects. Colorado potato beetles ravage a potato field in Afsnee, Belgium. Van Elegem: “I’ve been working for several years on a series about beetles and wanted to illustrate the power of beetle invasion and its devastating effect on crops. I found a field in Afsnee where most of the potatoes had been harvested and numerous adult Colorado potato beetles were still present, feeding on the scarce remains of foliage and unharvested potatoes.”
Frozen. Finalist, Invertebrate Portrait. A globular springtail frozen onto a layer of ice on a small pond in Zurich, Switzerland. Baumgartner: “In January, when temperatures dropped very low, many ponds here in Switzerland froze over. I was hoping to find springtails on the ice as they always look so striking against it. I spotted this globular springtail that wasn’t moving and took a few photos before realising it was actually frozen solid. I completed the stack and then breathed on it gently to free it. After warming up and cleaning itself off, it moved away from the ice.”
In the Crowd. Finalist, Young. A group of flamingos in Camargue, France. Godin: “It was the courtship season for flamingos. They were constantly lowering and raising their heads. I had this photo in mind and wanted one flamingo to be sharp in the middle of other blurred flamingos. So I concentrated on one particular flamingo and followed it with my eyes, only pressing the shutter button when it was surrounded by several other flamingo heads.”
Flying Amongst the Down. Finalist, Insects. A ladybug flies away from hare’s tail grass in a meadow near Valpiana, Grosseto, Italy. Sartori: “I’d been looking for a shot like this for some time, and to get it, I took advantage of a feature on my camera called Pro Capture, which allows you to recover frames from before you fully press the shutter button. Thanks to this feature, I obtained a sequence of shots that included this one.”
Be sure to visit the CUPOTY website to see the full list of honored images.
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It’s Black History Month, and despite what the Trump regime wants you to believe, Black trans and gender nonconforming people have always been at the forefront of change in this country—sometimes waging these battles from the most marginalized of spaces, and other times, doing so in the highest halls of power.
Not all of them may have used the word “transgender” to identify themselves, given that labels and notions about gender are specific to time and place. But today, we can look back at all of these trailblazers and recognize reflections of our own experiences of gender diversity.
To kick off Black History Month, we’ll be honoring the legacies of just a few of these heroes who have shepherded the struggle for the liberation of Black people, trans people, and all Americans.
Perhaps the most underappreciated Black TGNC icon is Pauli Murray. Like many queer people who lived in an earlier era, Pauli did not, as far as public records show, use the word “transgender” to describe themself. Many modern day institutions still reference the civil rights leader using “she/her” pronouns.
While Pauli did indeed use she/her pronouns in public writings, in private, they expressed themself more nebulously. Pauli, who grew up in North Carolina, wrote that they believed themself to be “a girl who should have been a boy.” They sought out testosterone for hormone replacement therapy, and even begged doctors to perform exploratory surgeries with the belief they would find undescended testes.
They were also known to wear a seahorse broach on their lapel—and indeed were “obsessed” with seahorses due to their “genderless” nature. It was a symbol, Murray felt, of their own gender ambiguity.
Regardless of what word Pauli would have used today, they were passionate about the crux of gender liberation and racial justice. They were known as the first African-American “woman” ordained as an Episcopal priest and the first Black person to graduate with a JSD from Yale Law. Alongside Betty Friedan, Pauli also co-founded the National Organization for Women.
But Pauli’s most significant contribution to American life might be their role in ending segregation. They initially pioneered the legal theory that was used by civil rights lawyers in Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed racial segregation in American public schools.
Historian Channing Joseph described Frances as “one of the linchpins” who propelled Reconstruction forward after the Civil War.
Frances was born into slavery on a Southernplantation. It was here that she transitioned—the family that claimed to own her recognized her gender identity and gave her feminine clothes to match.
Frances was liberated during an uprising and began her life as a free woman in Memphis, Tennessee, where she witnessed one of the most consequential post-War atrocities against Black Americans—the Memphis Massacre of May 1866.
Countless Black Tennesseans were murdered, robbed or raped by an angry mob of white men, most of whom were police. Thompson was one such victim.
In the aftermath, Frances was one of five brave Black women who recounted their stories of survival before a congressional committee. Their testimony helped reinvigorate Reconstructionist efforts. Congress adopted the Fourteenth Amendment just a few weeks later, in June of 1866.
“To check the brutal violation of black Memphians’ rights by agents of the state, the federal government would guarantee citizenship, equal protection, and due process,” writes historian Jules Gill-Peterson. “At the heart of this historic transformation of the Constitution lay the testimony of five women who told Congress of being raped by white men, asserting that they must be protected from such violence like any white woman would have been [and...] their claim to equal protection included a woman who had become one through transition.”
“Thompson had once been enslaved, and she knew as well as anyone that her testifying under oath to white congressmen was unprecedented,” Gill-Peterson continued. “In much of the country, black women could not legally be raped because the legal system developed during slavery did not consider them persons.”
The entire Memphis police force was fired in the aftermath, largely in thanks to Frances and the women who testified, Gill-Peterson writes. For a while, she returned to life in Memphis as a renowned spiritualist and fortune teller. But after nearly a decade of police harassment, a neighbor outed her, and law enforcement arrested her for “crossdressing.”
Frances was sentenced to forced labor in a men’s chain gang, and died shortly after her release, likely due to health conditions exacerbated by the brutality of her incarceration.
We would be remiss not to mention that we’re celebrating the first Black History Month since the passing of the magnanimous Miss Major.
Known to many as “Mama,” Major was a dedicated community organizer who refused to abandon the most marginalized among us.
“Major’s fierce commitment and intersectional approach to justice brought her to care directly for people with HIV/AIDS in New York in the early 1980s, and later to drive San Francisco’s first mobile needle exchange,” her obituary via House of gg reads.
“As director of the TGI Justice Project, she’d return to prisons as a mentor to her ‘gurls’ inside. In 2019, she would be powerfully guided by spirit and her vision in search of a family gathering property. House of gg was born out of her dream to build a center that would empower, heal and be a safe haven for Black trans people and movement leaders in the Southern US—a space for our community.”
In Miss Major’s own words:
“We used to accept this crap of: ‘We’re not worthy,’ and ‘We shouldn’t exist,’ like this government is trying to push down our throats,” she told VICE in 2018. “We’ve got to revolt, and we’ve got to reclaim who the fuck we are [...] If this world is going to get its act together, they have to support and put in the front to lead this revolution the people who are the most oppressed, which is my Black transgender community.”
Marsha “Pay It No Mind” Johnson is perhaps the most recognizable figure in Black trans American history. In the early years post-Stonewall, many mainstream gay and lesbian organizations sought to distance themselves from their trans counterparts. Today that inclination is making a nasty comeback as mentions of trans people and trans life are removed from Stonewall Monument materials.
Marsha was a prolific organizer and drag queen whose radiant joy and humor was a fixture of Manhattan’s queer nightlife scene. She mobilized her community in the aftermath of the Stonewall Uprising. Alongside Sylvia Rivera and others, she founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), a group that waged direct actions against anti-trans violence and police brutality.
Most importantly, however, STAR established deep networks of mutual aid and care for the trans street kids and sex workers either abandoned by the state or actively targeted by it.
“We want to see all gay people have a chance, equal rights, as straight people have in America,” Marsha said in an interview from 1970. “Our main goal is to see gay people liberated and free and have equal rights that other people have in America. We’d like to see our gay brothers and sisters out of jail and on the streets again.”
The circumstances around Marsha’s death remain unclear—we only know she was pulled from the Hudson in 1992, off of the historic Christopher Street Piers.
But Marsha’s legacy lives on, and her name has become synonymous with the spark that ignited the LGBTQ liberation movement as it is known today. A floral archway adorns the Marsha P. Johnson State Park in Brooklyn, and every Pride, homages to Marsha are plentiful—indeed, her rallying cry of “For All of Us” is the theme of this year’s Pride Parade in New York City.
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After ICU nurse Alex Pretti was fatally shot by federal officers at point-blank range, legacy media outlets reported that President Trump made significant changes to his immigration crackdown in Minnesota.
The Associated Press reported that Trump “shifted toward a more conciliatory approach,” describing Trump’s new policy as an “about face.” A New York Times headline declared: “Trump Changes Course in Minnesota.” According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump was “convinced“ to “change course” after “Republican lawmakers and other allies raised concerns that he was squandering public support for his signature campaign issue.” Axios took readers “[i]nside Trump’s pivot on Minnesota.”
But what, exactly, has changed about Trump’s policy in Minnesota?
The immigration crackdown in the Minneapolis area will continue indefinitely. Trump has made no announcement to end — or even suspend — the operation.
Nor will any of the leaders who have been overseeing the operation that resulted in the death of Pretti and another U.S. citizen, Renee Good, be held accountable.
Trump confirmed on Tuesday that Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who smeared Pretti after his death, will keep her job. Noem falsely claimed that Pretti “approached U.S. Border Patrol officers with a 9 mm semiautomatic handgun” and falsely accused him of “brandishing” the weapon. According to Noem, Pretti sought “to inflict maximum damage on individuals and kill law enforcement.”
Pretti had a license to carry a gun, but never used it to threaten federal officers. Pretti was unarmed at the time of the shooting because one of the officers had already taken his gun. All of Noem’s claims were directly contradicted by video evidence.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, who publicly called Pretti an “assassin” and “domestic terrorist,” also remains on the job, playing a key role in directing Trump’s immigration policy. The Trump administration has declined to contradict Miller’s false attacks.
Trump himself has refused to concede that the fatal shooting of Pretti was unjustified. “[Y]ou can’t have guns. You can’t walk in with guns. You just can’t. You can’t walk in with guns. You can’t do that,” Trump told reporters on Tuesday. Trump previously referred to Pretti as a “gunman.”
So what is motivating all of the reporting on Trump’s “pivot?” Trump softened his rhetoric, calling Pretti’s death “very unfortunate” and “very sad.” He also replaced Greg Bovino, a Border Patrol commander overseeing the Minneapolis operation, with Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar.
Homan, however, is not a force for moderation. He is one of the chief architects of Trump’s mass deportation campaign and has vocally defended the administration’s tactics in Minnesota and elsewhere.
New Minneapolis boss is an immigration hardliner
Tom Homan has been a staunch defender of the administration’s draconian immigration policies during Trump’s second term. Although Homan has a more bipartisan professional history, this is not reflected in his current views.
In December, Homan expressed complete support for the administration’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota. “I agree with 100 percent [of] what [Trump is] doing,” Homan said. He also defended ICE’s aggressive tactics. “I trust the men and women of ICE and border patrol do the right thing,” he said.
In news coverage, Homan’s role is portrayed as a sign that ICE would refocus its activities on undocumented immigrants with criminal records. But in June, Homan pledged to “massively expand” the Trump administration’s workplace raids. “They’re coming here for a better life and a job, and I get that,” Homan told Semafor. “The more you remove those magnets, the less people are going to come. If they can’t get a job most of them aren’t going to come.”
In June, during ICE’s operation in Los Angeles, Homan said that he would “ask DOJ to prosecute” local officials who “impede law enforcement from doing their job.” Homan also supported the deployment of Marines to facilitate deportation raids.
In April, Homan backed the deportation of two children who were U.S. citizens with their noncitizen mothers. “Having a U.S. citizen child after you enter this country illegally is not a get-out-of-jail-free card,” Homan said. Other policies Homan has backed include the detention of migrants at Guantanamo Bay and the use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport immigrants without court proceedings.
This article was updated on January 27, 2026, at 10:18am ET.
The six-car ICE convoy came to a stop and instantly dozens of people swarmed it, cellphones in hand, while others ran out of nearby houses—I saw a woman in gym shorts in the 20-degree weather—and began surrounding the masked and heavily armed agents who had spilled out of their black SUVs. The fury in the crowd felt almost like a physical force, as real as the cacophony of whistles and honking cars and angry chants: “ICE out! Fuck you! Go home!”
The officers threw a protester to the slushy asphalt and piled on top of them, then cuffed them and dragged them away. The screaming only got louder. With their escape route blocked by protesters and their cars, the agents tossed out tear-gas canisters, the white clouds billowing up into the winter air. An injured man stumbled past me and vomited repeatedly into the snow.
From where I stood, a few yards back from the scrum last Wednesday afternoon, it looked, at best, to be a savage caricature of our national divide: On one side, militarized men demanded respect at the butt of a gun; on the other, angry protesters screamed for justice.
But behind the violence in Minneapolis—captured in so many chilling photographs in recent weeks—is a different reality: a meticulous urban choreography of civic protest. You could see traces of it in the identical whistles the protesters used, in their chants, in their tactics, in the way they followed ICE agents but never actually blocked them from detaining people. Thousands of Minnesotans have been trained over the past year as legal observers and have taken part in lengthy role-playing exercises where they rehearse scenes exactly like the one I witnessed. They patrol neighborhoods day and night on foot and stay connected on encrypted apps such as Signal, in networks that were first formed after the 2020 killing of George Floyd.
Again and again, I heard people say they were not protesters but protectors—of their communities, of their values, of the Constitution. Vice President Vance has decried the protests as “engineered chaos” produced by far-left activists working in tandem with local authorities. But the reality on the ground is both stranger and more interesting. The movement has grown much larger than the core of activists shown on TV newscasts, especially since the killing of Renee Good on January 7. And it lacks the sort of central direction that Vance and other administration officials seem to imagine.
At times, Minneapolis reminded me of what I saw during the Arab Spring in 2011, a series of street clashes between protesters and police that quickly swelled into a much larger struggle against autocracy. As in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, Minneapolis has seen a layered civic uprising where a vanguard of protesters has gained strength as many others who don’t share progressive convictions joined in feeling, if not always in person. I heard the same tones of outrage from parents, ministers, schoolteachers, and elderly residents of an affluent suburb. Some of the quarrels that divided Minneapolis city leaders only a few weeks ago, over policing or Gaza or the budget, have faded as people have come together to oppose ICE.
“Overall, this community has exercised enormous restraint,” Allison Sharkey, the executive director of the Lake Street Council, which represents many minority-owned businesses that have been hit hard by the ICE raids, told me. “But we have been pushed, probably intentionally, towards civil unrest.”
And as with the Arab uprisings, there is profound unease about where it is all leading—especially now that two people have been shot dead in scenes like the one I witnessed—alongside an undertow of hope that Minnesota can provide the rest of the country with a model of democratic resistance.
Jack Califano for The Atlantic
Over the past year, a three-story brick building in south Minneapolis has become a magnet for people who feel they—and their neighbors—need protection from their own government. The nonprofit that runs training sessions there asked me not to identify its location. When I visited, an ebullient labor organizer named Emilia Gonzalez Avalos was standing onstage in front of a packed auditorium, talking about the facial-recognition technology used by ICE agents, who routinely photograph protesters. “Everyone is at risk now,” she said. Behind her, a screen offered bullet points on how to legally observe ICE raids.
Avalos told me that 65,000 people have received the training, most of them since December. “We started in a very different tone; it was preventive,” she said. Now, after Good’s death, “people are understanding the stakes in a different way.”
I went upstairs to see breakout sessions where people were being trained for direct confrontations with ICE. Inside a classroom, several dozen people ranging in age from 14 to about 70 faced off against three trainers playing ICE agents, in a loud fracas that lasted several minutes. Afterward, the trainers offered the volunteers a critique. One gray-haired lady said she had found the exercise difficult, “not being a ‘Fuck you’ person.” Others got tips on how to brace themselves more effectively so that the agents could not easily knock them down.
Before I left, I watched the trainers put the group through two more simulations: an unexpected ICE raid on a neighbor’s home and a planned demonstration at an airport that ICE is using to deport people. The second scenario appeared to come to life a few days later, when about 100 clergy members were arrested for protesting at the Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport.
The participants I spoke with did not seem like typical protest types. One of them, a driver’s ed teacher who asked me to identify him only as Dave, told me, “I do not like confrontation at all, and that’s another reason that it’s weird I went to the training.” But in light of what is happening around him, he felt he needed what the trainers had to offer. His 14-year-old daughter, who attended the training with him, told me, “It was kind of overwhelming. But I don’t think it could be too much, because they’re just being realistic.”
The nonprofit groups that run these training sessions are not organizing or directing the anti-ICE protests taking place in the Twin Cities. No one is. This is a leaderless movement—like the Arab Spring protests—that has emerged in a spontaneous and hyperlocal way. The people who follow ICE convoys (they call themselves “commuters,” a verbal gesture that is part joke and part effort to elude government surveillance) have organized on a neighborhood basis, using Signal groups. The man who drove me to the ICE raids I witnessed—a lawyer, activist, and social-media figure named Will Stancil—had a cellphone fixed above the windshield of his car, and I could hear people tracking the location of the ICE convoy as it passed through their neighborhoods on a Signal audio chat. It was like being inside a police car that is getting updates by radio from a dispatcher.
You do not have to get tear-gassed to observe all of this self-organization; it is visible to anyone walking through Minneapolis. One bitterly cold morning, I approached a man standing across the street from an elementary school, a blue whistle around his neck. He told me his name was Daniel (he asked not to be identified further, because his wife is an immigrant) and that he stood watch every morning for an hour to make sure the kids got into school safely. Other local volunteers come by regularly to bring him coffee and baked goods, or to exchange news. These community watches take place outside schools throughout the Twin Cities, outside restaurants and day-care centers, outside any place where there are immigrants or people who might be mistaken for them.
“It’s kind of unorganized-organized,” Daniel said, when I asked how the school monitoring worked. “George Floyd connected everybody.”
The local networks that formed after Floyd’s killing were not just about fighting racism. During those febrile weeks in May and June of 2020, there were looters and provocateurs of all kinds on the streets, and so much anger had been directed at the police that they pulled back from parts of the city. Many neighborhoods began organizing local watches simply to defend themselves.
Jack Califano for The Atlantic
Jack Califano for The Atlantic
I had been talking with Daniel for only a few minutes when a tall man walked up, said he was a parent observer for the school we stood across from, and asked me to identify myself. When I showed him my press badge, he seemed friendlier, but still wary. He explained that he had heard reports of ICE agents impersonating journalists. I asked about the parent patrol, and he apologized, saying he couldn’t give out any information.
Inside the schools, many administrators have been making their own preparations over the past year. Amanda Bauer, a teacher at a Minneapolis elementary school that has a large portion of immigrant students, told me that administrators informed parents last fall about their emergency plans for ICE raids by phone or in person, because they were already concerned about leaving email chains that could be mined by a hostile government.
Bauer, who is 49, struggled to maintain her composure as she described the day early this month when ICE showed up in force outside her school. Agents had been circling the school since December, seemingly learning its routines, and they arrested some parents just before the winter break. But this time, agents leaped out in riot gear and began entering the apartments just across from the school, where many students live.
“We had to lock down and keep the kids inside, and parents linked arms to block the school entrance,” Bauer said. “We had a student who was looking out the window and saw them break into his apartment and just sobbed, ‘That’s my house. That’s my home.’ And we shut the blinds, but it was too late.”
Bauer has been a teacher for 25 years, a period that has included a rise of school shootings and the drills that have become common to protect against them. “But I never thought it would be our own government we had to protect the kids from,” she told me. “We kept them physically safe, but they saw what happened.”
As she spoke, Bauer’s hands were trembling. She held them up and smiled weakly. “I don’t think I’ve stopped shaking for two weeks,” she said.
Children were a moral fault line for many of the people I met in the Twin Cities—not just the children of immigrants, who are at risk of losing their parents or being deported themselves, but also their white peers in schools and day-care centers.
I met a couple in their 70s who told me they had never considered joining a political protest until ICE came to town, and they realized that their granddaughter was at risk of witnessing a violent immigration raid just by going to school. Dan and Jane (like many others, they asked that I shield their full names) live in a large house in a comfortable suburb, where they welcomed me with tea and cookies.
“When a child witnesses violence or crime, it’s profoundly different from adults,” Dan said. “It leaves scars.”
Dan and Jane resisted the idea that they had become political. A better word, Jane said, was humanist. Their anger was unmistakable as they told me that the Trump administration was violating basic Christian principles. “It became clear very quickly that ICE is the Proud Boys, the Boogaloo boys. They’ve given them uniforms and let them run wild,” Dan said. He attended a legal-observer training—which happened to have been on the day Good was killed—and now the couple delivers groceries regularly to immigrant families in Minneapolis. This past Friday, Dan joined thousands of others at a protest in Minneapolis, where his fingers were frostbitten in the –9 degrees Fahrenheit weather.
Jack Califano for The Atlantic
Jack Califano for The Atlantic
I arrived in Minneapolis 11 days after an ICE agent shot Good in the face. Her picture was hanging like a religious icon on windows and walls all over the city. To many who had not already become involved, her death was a call to action.
One of those latecomers was a 46-year-old documentary filmmaker named Chad Knutson. On the morning after Good was killed, he was at home with his two hound dogs, watching a live feed from the Whipple Building, where ICE is based, a five-minute drive from his house. A protester had laid a rose on a makeshift memorial to Good. As Knutson watched, an ICE agent took the rose, put it in his lapel, and then mockingly gave it to a female ICE agent. They both laughed.
Knutson told me he had never been a protester. It seemed pointless, or just a way for people to expiate their sense of guilt. But when he saw those ICE agents laughing, something broke inside him.
“I grab my keys, I grab a coat, and drive over,” Knutson told me. “I barely park my car and I’m running out screaming and crying, ‘You stole a fucking flower from a dead woman. Like, are any of you human anymore?’”
His voice was so thick with emotion that it felt almost as if he were telling a story of religious conversion. It reminded me again of the Tahrir Square protests in 2011, when so many people seemed to have reached a moral and political turning point.
Knutson now goes to the Whipple Building almost daily, bringing thermoses of hot coffee for the people who hold up signs and bellow at the ICE agents and convoys as they drive in and out. He has been tear-gassed so many times, he said, his voice has gone hoarse. When I met him at his house in St. Paul, a row of megaphones was on the counter. He hands them out along with the coffee. He once brought an ice-fishing clam, a portable shelter, to the Whipple to help the protesters withstand the subzero temperatures.
Knutson mentioned in passing that his neighbor had “an adopted brown kid down there; they hid her in the basement yesterday.” This kind of thing no longer sounds weird in Minneapolis. Many people are hiding indoors—so many that, in a city with a substantial minority population, I hardly saw any Black or Latino faces on the street.
All this sheltering has created an economic crisis that has grown worse by the day. Many immigrant-owned businesses have seen their sales drop by as much as 80 percent, said Allison Sharkey, of the Lake Street Council. Large numbers have shut their doors entirely, fearing for themselves or their employees. Sharkey called it “an assault on our entire Main Street.”
The Karmel Mall, a maze-like shopping hub for tens of thousands of East African immigrants in the Twin Cities, is usually packed with people drawn to the aromas of stewed goat and coffee and sambusa pastries, but when I visited, the place was silent, and most of the stalls were empty. At the far end I found some businesses still open, with a handful of customers. Several people looked frightened when I tried to ask questions, saying they didn’t speak English well or that the owner would be back in an hour.
One man willing to chat, a 42-year-old named Ziad who was sipping coffee by himself, quickly showed me his passport card, saying he had come to the United States from Somalia decades ago. He has a master’s degree in public health and was working in a community center, he said, but now it’s closed. “Nobody’s being paid,” he said. “Everybody is scared.” His children are attending school online, as they did during the coronavirus pandemic, and his wife almost never leaves home. The visits to the mosque and to family members and friends that sustained their emotional lives are on hold.
But Donald Trump “will go and we will stay,” he said. “We Somalis know how to survive. We’ve been through a lot—civil war, refugee camps.”
Jack Califano for The Atlantic
Jack Califano for The Atlantic
The Somali refugees who began coming to the Twin Cities in the early 1990s did so with the help of religious organizations and churches, especially Lutheran and Catholic parishes, that have a history of welcoming people fleeing war and famine. Those groups have been at the forefront of the resistance to ICE, and some of their leaders have been asking difficult questions: When does protest cross the line into violence? When is it morally acceptable to break the law? How do you retain the trust of people who are uncomfortable defying the authorities?
“We’re going to have to live with our discomfort in making other people uncomfortable,” Ingrid Rasmussen, the lead pastor at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church, who has been one of the most outspoken clergy members in the city, told me.
Last June, federal agents raided a taqueria near her church. She ran to the scene, she told me, and found a crowd of protesters facing off against heavily armed agents being protected by local police. Rasmussen was wearing her clerical robes and was thrown to the ground by a sheriff in plainclothes. Some in the crowd threw trash, bottles, and tires at the federal agents, according to a local news report. Video footage spread of Rasmussen shouting at the Minneapolis police chief: “You stand in my church … You promised me a better relationship.”
“It was like nothing I had ever seen before in Minneapolis,” Rasmussen told me.
That was a remarkable thing to hear, because Rasmussen’s church was near the center of the riots that took place after the killing of George Floyd in 2020. “Everything to the west of our building burned,” she told me. During that period, her church became a medical site for injured people. She and her congregation worked for years to help rebuild the neighborhood.
The new round of ICE raids has struck even closer to home for the church, whose congregation includes a large number of immigrants. Rasmussen, who has young children, has continued to put herself in harm’s way. She was among the 120 clergy members who took part in a sit-in at the corporate headquarters of Target on January 15, in an effort to get the company to take a stronger stand against the federal raids. And on January 23, she was among those arrested during the protest at the Minneapolis airport.
On the morning of January 24, Rasmussen got word that a man had been shot by ICE agents. She put on her warmest winter clothes and went to the scene, on Nicollet Avenue and West 26th Street, figuring she might be outside for hours.
By the time she got there, Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse, was dead. The federal agents who had wrestled him to the ground and then shot and killed him were throwing tear gas and flash-bangs at a crowd of furious protesters chanting “Shame!”
Rasmussen attended another protest that afternoon. When we spoke hours later, her voice sounded weary, as if she wasn’t sure what such gestures of defiance would accomplish. She found it “almost unbearable” to witness such brutality from her government day after day, she told me. And it was galling to hear people in power say that they were acting in defense of freedom. The streets still looked like a war zone, with flash-bangs detonating and clouds of tear gas in the air.
An aerial view of the Warner Bros. logo displayed on the water tower at Warner Bros. Studio on December 5, 2025 in Burbank, California. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)
On Monday morning, Paramount announced a $77.9 billion hostile takeover offer of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), an American media conglomerate that owns an iconic movie studio, HBO, and other news and entertainment properties. The offer is meant to upend Netflix’s deal to purchase WBD for $72 billion, which WBD accepted last Friday.
Paramount’s press release announcing the offer says that the $40 billion in equity financing will be “backstopped by Ellison Family and RedBird Capital.” The CEO of Paramount is David Ellison, the son of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, the second-wealthiest person in the world. RedBird Capital is an investment fund based in New York. (The rest of the cash for the purchase will be raised as debt from American banks.)
What is not mentioned in the press release is that while the equity financing is “backstopped” by American individuals and entities, the majority of the equity financing — $24 billion — comes from the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, and Qatar. That fact is buried on page 42 of a separate SEC filing.
$24 billion is a massive investment by foreign governments on Paramount’s behalf. To put it in perspective, the current value of Paramount is just $15 billion.
Also participating in the deal is Affinity Partners, the private equity firm run by President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Nearly all of Affinity Partners’ assets come from the same sovereign wealth funds bankrolling the proposed Paramount takeover of WBD. Kushner collects tens of millions in fees from Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries annually.
Kushner’s involvement in the deal highlights the ongoing legal and ethical problems with his dual role. On the one hand, Kushner is operating as a high-ranking official representing the Trump administration in the most sensitive foreign policy matters. On the other hand, he is being paid by and partnering with Middle Eastern governments as they seek to expand their political, economic, and cultural interests.
Any acquisition of WBD requires the approval of multiple federal agencies. On Sunday, the day before Paramount’s hostile takeover bid was announced, Trump warned that Netflix’s planned acquisition “could be a problem“ because the combined company would have too much market share. It was a somewhat surprising comment from a president who has not made antitrust a central issue of his presidency. Trump also emphasized that while he would consult “some economists” he would also personally “be involved” in the decision.
Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s CEO, reportedly “wooed Trump“ at the White House in advance of the company’s WBD offer. Netflix agreed to pay WBD $5.7 billion if the deal did not receive regulatory approval, one of the largest breakup fees ever. This reflected Netflix’s confidence that the deal would win Trump administration approval — at least before Kushner became involved.
A reporter asked Trump on Monday if Kushner’s involvement with Paramount’s deal could influence his views. “I don’t know,” Trump responded. “I’ve never spoken with him about it.”
Paramount is willing to conform to Trump’s ideological agenda
Trump may be more amenable to Paramount’s bid for WBD, because Paramount has a history of bowing to Trump’s political demands, especially since David Ellison became CEO in August.
In September, CBS News announced that it hired a Trump loyalist, Kenneth R. Weinstein, to “receive and evaluate any complaints of bias or other concerns involving CBS” as the company’s new ombudsman. Paramount had promised to create the job to secure approval for its merger with Skydance. Weinstein had no experience with producing or overseeing news coverage and previously was the president of the Hudson Institute, a right-wing think tank. Weinstein has an extensive record of praising Trump, and in July 2024, Weinstein donated $20,000 to a committee supporting Trump’s campaign.
In October, Paramount announced that it was hiring anti-woke crusader Bari Weiss as the new editor-in-chief of CBS News and purchasing Weiss’ The Free Press for a reported $150 million. Weiss, a former New York Times opinion editor and writer, had no experience in broadcast news. In 2021, Weiss founded The Free Press, a right-leaning publication that often criticizes what it deems the “woke” left and efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). A Popular Information review of The Free Press’ articles found that it repeatedly distorted the truth in order to conform to a right-wing ideological agenda.
Having foreign governments own such a large stake in a company like WBD — which has sensitive financial information about millions of Americans — creates significant regulatory uncertainty. Such transactions frequently require an additional layer of approval by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS).
In the SEC filing regarding the offer, Paramount claims that it has structured the deal to be outside of CFIUS’s jurisdiction:
Our other outside financing partners (the Public Investment Fund (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia), L’imad Holding Company PJSC (Abu Dhabi), Qatar Investment Authority (Qatar) and Affinity Partners (Jared Kushner)) have agreed to forgo any governance rights – including board representation – associated with their non-voting equity investments. Accordingly, the Transaction will not be within CFIUS’s jurisdiction.
It is telling that Affinity Partners, a U.S. company owned by an American, is lumped into this group. Paramount is tacitly acknowledging that Kushner is using Affinity Partners as a vehicle for foreign influence.
But Paramount’s claim that CFIUS no longer has jurisdiction over the deal is false. A company cannot extinguish concerns about foreign ownership simply by nominally giving up governance rights. There are many other ways that entities providing $24 billion in equity investment can influence the operations of a company.
That’s why CFIUS has jurisdiction to investigate the deal between Paramount and WBD to determine what influence the sovereign wealth funds have and whether that influence raises national security concerns.
The creative and economic concerns about Netflix’s takeover bid
Netflix’s bid to buy WBD is also controversial.
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have raised anti-trust concerns about the deal. Senator Mike Lee (R-UT), who leads a Senate subcommittee on antitrust, said on X that the deal raised “a lot of antitrust red flags” and that he would hold “an intense antitrust hearing.” Meanwhile, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) said that the deal “looks like an anti-monopoly nightmare.” If Netflix were to buy WBD, it would own two of the top three largest streaming services, Netflix and HBO Max. This market power could allow Netflix to raise prices for its subscription services, which are already increasing rapidly.
The Writers Guild of America said the Netflix deal would “eliminate jobs, push down wages, worsen conditions for all entertainment workers, raise prices for consumers, and reduce the volume and diversity of content for all viewers.”
Another issue is the impact that the Netflix purchase could have on movie theaters. Netflix typically does not show its movies in theaters. Netflix’s CEO has said that declines in box office sales show that going to the movie theater is “an outmoded idea” and consumers would prefer to watch movies at home. With WBD films making up roughly a quarter of box office sales in North America, a theater-owner trade group said “the negative impact of this acquisition will impact theaters from the biggest circuits to one-screen independents.” Netflix has said that it would continue showing WBD movies in theaters, although this was met with skepticism from many in the industry.
In 1985, the median income was $23,620, and the median price of a home was $84,300. So the typical house was 3.6 times the typical income. By 2023, the median price of a home was $428,600, which was 5.3 times the median income of $80,061.
In some metro areas, median home prices are more than eight times higher than the average income. In Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Honolulu, the price-to-income ratio exceeds 10. Home prices rose dramatically over the last five years, with the median cost of a single-family home increasing 48% between 2019 and 2024.
According to Bankrate’s 2025 Housing Affordability Study, Americans need an income of about $117,000 to afford an average home. In 2020, the income needed to afford an average home was $78,000. Those figures reflect the increasing price of homes and higher interest rates.
Over the weekend, President Trump teased a new policy on social media to address the issue: a 50-year mortgage.
Bill Pulte, Director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), confirmed that this was a real proposal. “Thanks to President Trump, we are indeed working on The 50 year Mortgage — a complete game changer,” Pulte wrote on X.
But while the introduction of a 50-year mortgage would be a windfall to the financial industry, it would do little to make housing more affordable and saddle a generation of Americans with a lifetime of debt.
Similar monthly payments, massive interest
The idea of a 50-year mortgage is that by spreading the cost of a home over 20 more years, you can reduce the monthly mortgage payment. But in practice, those savings are modest.
First, just as a 30-year mortgage has a higher interest rate than a 15-year mortgage, a 50-year mortgage will have a higher interest rate than a 30-year mortgage. Experts estimate that a 50-year mortgage would be about .5 points higher than a 30-year mortgage. Since the current 30-year mortgage rate is about 6.3%, a 50-year mortgage would have an interest rate of 6.8%.
So homebuyers using a 50-year mortgage would pay a higher interest rate over a much longer time period. This limits the reduction in the monthly payment.
HousingWire, using the Fannie Mae mortgage calculator, found that for a typical home costing $400,000, the monthly payment for a 30-year mortgage would be $2,481. The monthly payment for the same home with a 50-year mortgage would be $2,346 — a savings of just $135 per month. (That does not account for sellers potentially raising their prices once a 50-year mortgage becomes available.)
Meanwhile, over the course of the 50-year mortgage, the buyer of a $400,000 home will have paid over $1 million in interest, compared to $493,000 in interest payments for a 30-year mortgage. The big winner here is the lender, not the home buyer.
The equity trap
Many Americans are interested in buying a home because it is seen as an effective way to build wealth. Homeowners grow their wealth through establishing equity over time. But with a 50-year mortgage, the process of building equity is much slower.
Considering the same $400,000 home, with a 30-year mortgage and a 6.3% interest rate, it would take about nine years to pay off the first $50,000 in principal. For the 50-year mortgage with a 6.8% interest rate, paying off the first $50,000 in principal would take about 24 years.
The difficulty in acquiring home equity makes these loans riskier for owners. Since the owner will have little equity in the home for many years, any downturn in the housing market could put the home “underwater.” That means the owner has “negative equity” because the home is worth less than the outstanding mortgage. This makes it virtually impossible for homeowners to relocate or address a financial emergency through a home equity line of credit.
The influencer guiding Trump’s housing policy
The 50-year mortgage proposal was developed by Pulte, who was directed by Trump to use his position to lower housing costs. But Pulte is not an expert in housing policy.
Pulte previously founded an investment firm but is best known for amassing a large following on X as an online philanthropist, giving away money in a series of viral stunts. He is the grandson and heir of William Pulte, who founded home-building giant PulteGroup. After his grandfather died, Pulte’s relationship with the company and many members of his family soured. Pulte sued the family company, accusing his grandfather’s widow of insider trading.
As director of the FHFA, Pulte made the obscure agency a major player in Trump’s political battles. The FHFA’s primary responsibilities are to regulate the mortgage market and oversee Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Pulte, however, has used his position to accuse Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA) and New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) of mortgage fraud.
Pulte has also repeatedly criticized Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell and urged Trump to fire him. This has led to a rift with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who supports Powell. During a private dinner with other administration officials, Bessent reportedly threatened to punch Pulte “in the fucking face.”
In October, Pulte fired dozens of Fannie Mae employees. While he claimed that the firings were to end DEI efforts within the company, the Washington Post reported that Pulte had gutted the company’s internal watchdogs after they began investigating one of his close allies.
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In a ruling issued from the shadow docket, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority sided with the Trump administration on an emergency request on transgender passport restrictions—a process historically reserved for true national crises but increasingly deployed to fast-track administration policies. In the unsigned decision, the majority asserted that banning transgender people’s correct gender markers on passports did not constitute differential treatment, while disregarding clear violations of the Administrative Procedure Act and brushing aside the obvious unconstitutional animus embedded in the executive order that enabled the ban in the first place. The ruling leaves transgender people who obtained updated passports under the prior policy in limbo—and all transgender travelers facing profound uncertainty—as the administration now weighs further actions against their documents under a Court that has signaled it is willing to greenlight those efforts.
The passport gender marker ban, which began early in the Trump administration, was blocked after judges found the executive orders behind it—orders that branded transgender people “wrong,”“dishonorable,” and “socially coercive”—were likely discriminatory on their face and in violation of US law. The passport policy had sown chaos in the transgender community, leaving some passport applications frozen for months. Following lowercourt decisions blocking the passport policy, the Trump administration began allowing transgender people to update their passports if they signed an attestation document, while assuring that those who had their passports updated before the policy was enacted that they would be allowed to use those passports until they expire.
In the prior rulings, judges noted obvious harms: forcing transgender people to travel with documents that out them exposes them to violence and imprisonment in countries hostile to their existence. Judges also noted the daily risks at home—outing in interactions using their passport as identification, harassment, denial of services—as well as the profound mental toll of being forced to carry papers that misstate who you are. The harms, they concluded, are not speculative but immediate and potentially severe for the plaintiffs.
In this new shadow docket ruling, the conservative court has determined with virtually no analysis that the policy did not stem from animus towards transgender people and was not arbitrary and capricious in violation of the APA.
“Displaying passport holders’ sex at birth no more offends equal protection principles than displaying their country of birth—in both cases, the Government is merely attesting to a historical fact without subjecting anyone to differential treatment. And on this record, respondents have failed to establish that the Government’s choice to display biological sex “lack[s] any purpose other than a bare . . . desire to harm a politically unpopular group.” Trump v. Hawaii, 585 U. S. 667, 705 (2018) (internal quotation marks omitted). Nor are respondents likely to prevail in arguing that the State Department acted arbitrarily and capriciously by declining to depart from Presidential rules that Congress expressly required it to follow.” reads the ruling.
Justice Jackson, joined by justices Kagan and Sotomayor, issued a blistering dissent:
“The Court ignores these critical limits on its equitable discretion today. The Government seeks to enforce a questionably legal new policy immediately, but it offers no evidence that it will suffer any harm if it is temporarily enjoined from doing so, while the plaintiffs will be subject to imminent, concrete injury if the policy goes into effect.
The Court nonetheless fails to spill any ink considering the plaintiffs, opting instead to intervene in the Government’s favor without equitable justification, and in a manner that permits harm to be inflicted on the most vulnerable party. Such senseless sidestepping of the obvious equitable outcome has become an unfortunate pattern. So, too, has my own refusal to look the other way when basic principles are selectively discarded.
This Court has once again paved the way for the immediate infliction of injury without adequate (or, really, any) justification. Because I cannot acquiesce to this pointless but painful perversion of our equitable discretion, I respectfully dissent.”
Now, with a Supreme Court signaling its willingness to greenlight nearly any administration policy targeting transgender people, the future of transgender Americans’ passports has become a critical inflection point. Previously, the administration suggested it would allow passports updated under the pre-Trump policy to remain valid. But for passports issued during the injunction, applicants were required to sign an attestation form—and a State Department source tells EITM that the department has been collecting data from those attestations. In earlier court filings, the administration indicated that if it secured a ruling like the one it just received from the Court, it would move to revoke those passports. Whether it will follow through is uncertain.
Legal experts tell EITM that this ruling could open the door to a broader assault on transgender identification policies nationwide. Real ID requirements could be weaponized against transgender people’s gender markers even in blue states. Red states could feel emboldened to enact harsher ID restrictions of their own. And with the Court signaling that transgender people may receive no meaningful equal-protection scrutiny, states may have wide latitude to pass discriminatory laws with little fear of judicial intervention—a shift that could unleash a wave of anti-trans policies backed by the Court’s implicit approval.
The ACLU posted a response to the ruling on Bluesky, stating, “This decision undermines the freedom of transgender, non-binary, and intersex people to have our IDs reflect who we are. This fight isn’t over. Our case challenging President Trump’s executive order will still move forward. In the meantime anyone who applies for a new, corrected, or replacement passport, or for a passport renewal, is at risk of having their passport issued bearing the sex they were assigned at birth.”
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Zohran Mamdani will be New York City’s next mayor. The Queens assembly member has rocketed from local political obscurity to national political celebrity in less than a year, making bumper-stickery campaign promises aimed at alleviating the city’s cost-of-living crisis. Fast, free buses. A freeze on rents. Municipal grocery stores. Universal child care.
That last proposal has gotten little attention—perhaps because a relatively small sliver of New Yorkers would directly benefit, perhaps because the proposal hinges on a tax increase Albany would have to approve, perhaps because early-childhood initiatives are so pervasively underemphasized in American life.
When Mayor Bill de Blasio created a universal prekindergarten program and a near-universal 3-K program in New York a decade ago, it was rightly described as a miracle. But in many ways, that undertaking was far simpler than what Mamdani is promising. He aims to provide high-quality, year-round care to toddlers and infants as young as six weeks old, while setting day-care workers’ earnings “at parity” with those of public-school teachers. It’s a cosmically aspirational set of goals, and it faces a steep set of obstacles. But if he can pull it off, the scheme would transform New York’s demography and economy, constituting one of the most radical examples of policy entrepreneurship in recent memory.
I say this as a parent: Day care is great. Good programs enhance children’s cognitive development and school readiness, increasing educational attainment and improving health outcomes decades later. There’s “a mountain of scientific evidence that the early years are the most important,” Philip Fisher, the director of the Stanford Center on Early Childhood, told me.
But unlike other wealthy countries, the United States forces parents to go it alone for the first three years of their children’s lives, and more often the first five. Though targeted investments in kids have among the highest returns of all public expenditures, Washington devotes just 0.4 percent of its budget to young children. Some cities offer municipal child-care programs, and some low-income families get vouchers. Still, parents shoulder most of the burden of the cost of child care.
As a result, the United States has a severe child-care shortage, and the situation is especially dire in New York. The city has one licensed spot available for every four children under the age of 3. Close to half of neighborhoods have less than 20 percent of the necessary capacity for kids under the age of 2.
Enrolling in a program is like taking on a second mortgage. In the five boroughs, day care costs, on average, $18,200 a year in a home-based setting, or $26,000 in a center. The federal government holds that child-care costs should eat up no more than 7 percent of a family’s income. By that standard, a household in New York has to earn $300,000 or $400,000 a year to have one kid. Wealthy families have the option of hiring au pairs or nannies. Middle-income families commute long distances to drop their kids off before work. Low-income families set up informal arrangements with family members or shift their hours to watch their kids.
In a recent survey of working mothers in New York, 34 percent said that they had declined a promotion or chosen a part-time schedule because of child-care pressures. Nearly as many said they had lost a job. And the cost of child care forces many families out of the city: Households with young kids are twice as likely to leave New York for cheaper pastures as those without.
The lack of affordable child care is a societal and economic catastrophe, not just one afflicting individual households. Parents’ caregiving challenges cause the city to forgo $23 billion in economic activity and $2.2 billion in tax revenue a year. Providing a public option would lift mothers’ earnings by close to $1 billion annually, the city has estimated. Broadly, the paucity of public spending on early-childhood programs is a central driver of the country’s gender wage gap and the low rate of labor-force participation among women.
Even as parents fork over 10, 20, 40 percent of their paychecks to child-care providers, nursery schools and day-care centers cannot afford to pay their workers much. The city’s early-childhood workers earn half what workers in other industries do. A quarter live below the poverty line, many earning less than they would at big-box stores and fast-food chains.
The market is broken and it can’t fix itself. Yet policy makers have historically considered universal-child-care systems too high in cost and too low in political benefit to bother enacting. Day care has a narrow constituency: Perhaps one in 15 American households includes an infant or toddler. Although voters might give their warm approval to early-childhood initiatives, not many of them turn out for day care on Election Day or switch their support to candidates that would fully finance Head Start. (That some voters believe children would be better off if their mother stayed at home figures in too.)
The political winds are shifting. The country’s affordability crisis has hit apocalypse levels, discouraging couples from having kids and stoking profound disillusionment among young voters. In his campaign, Mamdani spoke directly to that disillusionment; exit polls showed he won a supermajority of ballots cast by New Yorkers under the age of 45. The coronavirus pandemic decimated the child-care system, forcing thousands of day cares to close and requiring millions of parents to watch their kids and do their day jobs simultaneously. The pandemic also spurred many Democrats to recognize child care as social infrastructure, not a niche, nice-to-have benefit.
New Mexico has become the first state to guarantee free child care for all residents, and is in the process of scaling up its system. Connecticut is making it free for families making less than $100,000 a year, and affordable for everyone else. Could New York City be next?
The budget poses the first and central challenge to Mamdani’s plans. His campaign has estimated that universal child care would require roughly $6 billion a year. He wants to increase taxes on millionaires and corporations to cover the cost, bumping the city’s annual budget up by 11 percent. Albany would have to approve the tax increase.
Governor Kathy Hochul has made child care a priority, sharply increasing the state’s spending on grants, paid leave, and tax credits. The issue is personal for her. Decades ago, she quit her job as an attorney for Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan to stay home because the cost of care was so high. “I’ve had conversations with Assembly Member Mamdani about how we can get to universal child care,” she said in a joint appearance with him in Queens last month. “I believe we can.”
But Hochul has repeatedly said that she opposes the tax hike, citing concerns about the 50-plus percent marginal rates already applied to the city’s wealthiest individuals, and about pushing businesses and families to lower-tax jurisdictions. Hochul is up for reelection next year. Would it be more advantageous for her to approve the tax increase and show solidarity with the city that’s home to nearly half of state residents, or to appeal to corporations and moderates by holding tax rates steady? The answer is not clear.
Even if the tax hike passes, the revenue might not be enough to create a truly universal system. The nonprofit Prenatal to Five Fiscal Strategies has estimated that a comprehensive program would cost $6.6 billion a year at prevailing wages, and $9.5 billion if child-care workers made a living wage, as of 2023. (The numbers would be higher now, thanks to wage growth, rent increases, and so on.) Bringing workers’ earnings to “parity” with public-school teachers might require even more money. I asked the Mamdani campaign for details on what it meant by “parity.” Would compensation be based on education levels and tenure? Would it include benefits as well as salaries? I did not hear back.
Nevertheless, if Mamdani got his $6 billion, it would pay for a tremendous expansion of the city’s child-care infrastructure. With the money secured, the real challenge would begin.
Elegant-sounding policy designs for child-care systems exist, experts told me. They just wouldn’t work very well in practice. The city could enroll toddlers and babies in public schools. “I don’t think anybody thinks that’s a great idea,” Emmy Liss, an early-childhood consultant and a former de Blasio staffer, told me. Elementary-school classrooms would have to be retrofitted to accommodate six-month-olds and 2-year-olds. The city would risk putting hundreds of providers out of business as parents switched over to the public option.
Alternatively, New York could give all families vouchers, allowing them to choose their own providers. But if the country’s public schools are any guide, rich families would use the vouchers to offset their costs while poor families would struggle to find quality care and cover their bills. The system would rely on “providers being incentivized in the private market to just go open new sites” in the places where they’re needed, Liss told me, and the city would have little recourse if they did not.
A messy system, combining different models, would actually be a better system.
The obvious first step would be to age the city’s 3-K program down: enrolling 2-year-olds and 1-year-olds in public day-care centers, as well as for-profit, nonprofit, and home-based programs, and paying those programs directly. It works for 3-year-olds. It would work for younger kids, too, experts told me. Still, Mamdani will have to repair the city’s relationships with providers as he expands enrollment. For years, the Department of Education has antagonized care centers by revoking their leases and failing to make payments on time. Some programs have had to take out loans to cover payroll, and some have closed. “I cleaned our accounts” out, Ingrid Matias Chungata, the executive director of Nuestros Niños, in Williamsburg, said at a city-council meeting in February. “Fifty-two years of savings, of having a cushion—it’s all gone.”
Then the Mamdani administration would have to figure out how to turn hundreds of small-scale day cares—many run by women of color in their apartment or house—into municipal contractors. At the moment, the city is not equipped to strike deals with so many vendors, analysts told me. Nor are day-care owner-operators equipped to sign contracts with the city. Mamdani might be able to use New York’s family-child-care networks as intermediaries instead.
Mamdani wants to support informal arrangements too, such as grandparents watching their grandchildren. His administration will need to figure out how to apply health-and-safety regulations and compensate these caregivers. New York City will also likely need to provide vouchers to families with uncommon needs, experts told me, such as parents who work the graveyard shift. (That way, the Mamdani administration would not need to include overnight care and other specialty options in its contracts with day care centers.)
Finally, the city would need to take on all that administrative complexity, and give parents a clear set of choices and an easy path to enrollment.
Of course, setting up a universal-child-care system is not the same thing as delivering universal child care.
New York City has 32,917 early-childhood workers. It probably needs 32,917 more to achieve total coverage. Mamdani’s proposal to raise wages will spur many individuals to apply for child-care jobs and set up home-based day cares. Still, City Hall might need to offer loan forgiveness and cash bonuses to entice enough workers—all without worsening long-standing staffing shortages in other parts of the school system.
City Hall will also have to make sure that child-care providers offer the kind of slots needed, where they are needed—a problem that has bedeviled the 3-K program. Mamdani might have to build and operate public centers in underserved neighborhoods or pay day-care chains to open facilities in child-care micro-deserts. Similarly, he might need to provide bonuses to centers enrolling infants and kids with health issues and disabilities.
Giving parents the opportunity to stay home with their babies, if they wish, might be the best way to cover the youngest kids. “Other countries solve the infant-care issue by providing a year of paid family medical leave or paid parental leave,” Julie Kashen of the Century Foundation told me. Thus far, Mamdani hasn’t included six months or a year of leave in his child-care proposal.
I could write thousands more words on the hurdles the new administration will face and the questions it will need to answer to get to universal child care. Mamdani will have to expand the city’s community-outreach, contracting, site-inspection, and workforce-development infrastructure. He will need to decide how to scale up the system, balancing the political need for immediate results with the technocratic need for a slow rollout. And if tax revenue declines or real-estate prices climb or the White House goes after the city’s budget …
These concerns might sound like an argument that Mamdani shouldn’t create a universal-child-care system, or that he won’t be able to. But they could also be seen as an argument for letting politicians promise the perfect so that their administrations can figure out how to deliver the good. More than 1 million voters propelled Mamdani into office this week, and his victory speech focused on the cost of living and the mayor’s mandate to bring it down.
New York City has double the budget of the state of Massachusetts. It educates as many children in its public-school system as the Pentagon commands adults in the active-duty military. It has a history of delivering inferior programs and failing to solve pressing issues, but it also has a history of getting big, tough things done, including the wildly popular pre-K and 3-K initiatives.
New York could show other governments that creating a universal-child-care system might be expensive and difficult, but it isn’t impossible. If Mamdani falls short, expanding the number of free day-care spots while raising educators’ wages instead—well, it won’t be what he promised. But it still sounds like a miracle to me.
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This morning, news broke that the Trump administration will not use emergency funds to pay out SNAP benefits to the millions of Americans who rely on them starting November 1. The benefits are set to expire as the government shutdown drags on, with Democrats and Republicans at an impasse over a series of funding bills for FY 2026 loaded with conservative policy riders. The main sticking point centers on whether to extend Obamacare subsidies—without which millions could see their health insurance costs skyrocket. In an official notice posted to the USDA website, the administration blamed Democrats for the lapse, accusing them of holding out for “healthcare for illegal aliens and gender mutilation procedures”—a message that scapegoats marginalized groups and, experts warn, may itself violate federal law.
“Senate Democrats have now voted 12 times to not fund the food stamp program, also known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Bottom line, the well has run dry. At this time, there will be no benefits issued November 01. We are approaching an inflection point for Senate Democrats. They can continue to hold out for healthcare for illegal aliens and gender mutilation procedures or reopen the government so mothers, babies, and the most vulnerable among us can receive critical nutrition assistance,” reads the memo posted on top of the USDA website as of Monday morning.
The message accuses Democrats of shutting down the government to protect transgender people and undocumented immigrants. The shutdown followed the Senate’s failure to pass compromise legislation on a series of funding packages for fiscal year 2026. When those measures collapsed, focus shifted to a “continuing resolution” that would have temporarily kept the government open without the controversial policy riders—buying time for further negotiation. But that, too, fell apart when Democrats insisted on preserving Obamacare subsidies to prevent millions of families from facing soaring insurance premiums. With neither a full-year funding bill nor a stopgap resolution in place, the government shut down, leaving federal agencies unfunded and millions at risk.
Trump turning his focus on transgender people raises the temperature that when an eventual deal is brokered, Americans could see the inclusion of some of those anti-trans riders as a major policy priority of the President for compromise legislation. Among the policies that have been suggested: The House appropriations bills for Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education includes a sweeping ban on “any federal funds” supporting gender-affirming care and attacks on health insurance coverage for transgender people. Interpreted broadly, that language could dismantle programs at hospitals nationwide for all transgender people and block Medicare and Medicaid from covering transgender healthcare altogether. The Commerce, Justice, and Science bill, the Financial Services and General Government bill, and even the National Defense Authorization Act on the house side carry provisions ranging from Pride flag bans to bathroom bans on military bases to rules forcing transgender people into prisons aligned with their sex assigned at birth. Taken together, these bills amount to a wholesale rewrite of federal policy on LGBTQ+ rights—one that would instantly transform the legal and medical landscape for transgender people.
The USDA post is part of a broader pattern: a wave of overtly partisan messages that the Trump administration has published across federal websites in recent weeks. Legal experts warn that such posts may violate multiple federal laws prohibiting the use of taxpayer funds for political purposes, including the Anti-Lobbying Act and the Hatch Act. Politico reports that several Hatch Act complaints have already been filed against the administration. Yet few expect meaningful consequences—Trump’s team has repeatedly brushed off legal constraints, asserting near-limitless executive authority to use the machinery of government for partisan ends.
The message comes as experts warn that more than 42 million Americans could lose access to food assistance, with SNAP benefits set to expire as the shutdown drags into November. For many families, opening the USDA website to check on SNAP status now means being met with a partisan message blaming Democrats, immigrants, and transgender people for their hunger. It’s a cynical weaponization of federal platforms—turning what should be a lifeline into propaganda aimed at stoking resentment against marginalized groups. Whether that tactic holds political power remains to be seen. It’s one thing to scapegoat transgender people while out of power; it’s another to keep doing so when your party controls every branch of government, and voters are watching their groceries—and their patience—run out.
This is a lesson some Republicans are already learning in Virginia, where GOP candidate Winsome Earle-Sears has poured millions into anti-transgender ads attacking her opponent, Abigail Spanberger. But this time, the old playbook isn’t landing. Polling shows that the number of voters who list transgender issues as a top concern has actually fallen since the ad blitz began—and Spanberger continues to hold a double-digit lead. The attacks seem increasingly out of touch in a political moment when transgender people, far from being the source of the nation’s problems, have been systematically stripped of power and protections under the Trump administration. Blaming this marginalized group for America’s ills may once have been a reliable wedge—but voters appear to be moving on.
Regardless of where voters stand, many Republicans in power continue to lean hard into anti-transgender politics—and the ongoing negotiations to reopen the federal government will almost certainly make trans people a bargaining chip again. When Congress debates the full fiscal year 2026 funding bills, dozens of anti-trans provisions are expected to resurface. Democrats, for their part, have shown flashes of resistance but also moments of retreat—most notably when they voted for a Senate version of the National Defense Authorization Act that included anti-trans measures. For advocates, the message is clear: don’t wait for politicians to do the right thing, call your elected officials and let them know your stance on federal budget negotiations and transgender rights.
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Over the past several months, the Trump administration has sought to strip federal funding from schools that teach about gender identity or include transgender students in their policies. Many districts have refused to comply with the administration’s directives, issued under an executive order that labeled transgender people “false,” prompting the withholding of tens of millions of dollars in federal education funds. Now, in a major development, a federal judge in Oregon has informed all parties in a lawsuit brought by 16 states that she intends to issue a preliminary injunction blocking the restrictions—marking a significant victory for transgender students and a sharp rebuke to those who see capitulation as the only path forward.
U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken announced during a conference call between state attorneys and federal officials that she intends to issue a preliminary injunction blocking the policy, denouncing what she described as “a sort of separate-but-equal policy” on sex education. The coalition of 16 states argued that the Trump administration’s new directive violated the Administrative Procedure Act, was arbitrary and capricious, and infringed upon the Constitution’s separation of powers. While the specific grounds for Judge Aiken’s forthcoming injunction are not yet known as the order has not been released publicly as of yet, her decision represents a major setback for the administration—one that will, at least for now, halt some of its efforts to weaponize federal funding against schools that teach about gender identity or include transgender students in their curricula.
The ruling follows months of escalation after the Trump administration issued an executive order barring schools nationwide from engaging in what it called the “social transition” of transgender youth—a term encompassing everything from using a student’s chosen name and pronouns to allowing them to use the bathroom or play sports with their peers. When most schools ignored the order, which carries no force of law and mislabels basic affirming practices as “unlawful,” the administration retaliated by threatening to strip funding from schools that included gender identity in their comprehensive sex education programs. Federal letters soon followed, targeting districts from Virginia to Denver, Chicago, and New York City with the loss of tens of millions of dollars in federal grants for maintaining inclusive policies. The administration’s sweeping threats prompted a 16-state coalition to file suit, arguing that the administration’s campaign against transgender inclusion represents an unconstitutional abuse of executive power.
Among the states rejecting the federal government’s demands was California, which saw millions in sex education funding blocked over what the administration called “gender ideology content”—in reality, lessons that simply acknowledged the existence of transgender people. Maine faced similar threats after its curriculum glossary included a definition for “gender identity.” In Massachusetts, funding was targeted because its sex education materials noted that gender norms are culturally relative, stating that gender consists of “the ideas in a culture or society about the appropriate ways for men and women to dress, behave, think, and feel. Ideas about what gender behavior is appropriate change in different cultures and at different times in history.”
Many individual school districts have also defied the administration’s demands. In Virginia, five major districts rejected federal pressure to restrict transgender students’ bathroom access—prompting the administration to attempt to terminate their federal funding. In Denver, the public schools superintendent vowed that the district “will protect all of their students from this hostile administration,” refusing to comply. Chicago and New York followed suit, rejecting similar mandates despite threats to strip sex education and other federal funding. Even under the weight of those financial threats, these districts stood firm, signaling that the moral and legal cost of capitulation outweighed any fiscal consequence.
Meanwhile, many of the nation’s most prestigious institutions have taken the opposite path—choosing compliance over confrontation. This year, several universities including Brown, Columbia, Harvard, and Penn have accepted the Trump administration’s demands to discriminate against transgender students. More than 20 hospitals have ended gender-affirming care for trans youth, even in blue states with protective policies, out of fear of losing federal funding. Even Fenway Health, one of the country’s most well-known LGBTQ+ healthcare providers, recently announced it would comply with Trump’s transgender care ban rather than fight the administration.
Time and again, organizations and states that challenge the administration’s efforts to weaponize federal funding against transgender people—and against state law—have prevailed in court. This latest win delivers another major blow to the administration’s attempts to strong-arm states into adopting discriminatory policies. It comes amid a broader federal budget battle, with over a dozen anti-transgender provisions embedded in the FY2026 appropriations bills that could shape the outcomes of similar lawsuits in the months ahead. For now, though, the schools that refused to throw their transgender students under the bus have a powerful new legal victory on their side.
The states that were a part of this lawsuit include: the State of Colorado, the State of Connecticut, the State of Delaware, the State of Hawai‘i, the State of Illinois, the State of Maine, the State of Maryland, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the State of Michigan, the State of Minnesota, the State of New Jersey, the State of New York, the State of Oregon, the State of Rhode Island, the State of Washington, and the State of Wisconsin, as well as the District of Columbia.
Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, accompanied by President Trump in the White House on January 21, 2025. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
In the near future, Larry Ellison, an 81-year-old tech oligarch, could be in control of one of the world's most powerful media empires.
In August, Skydance Media, a firm funded by Ellison and led by his son David, completed an $8 billion merger with Paramount Global, the parent company of CBS. The Ellisons' media ambitions have only grown since then. Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal reported that the company now known as Paramount Skydance was preparing a bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN, HBO, and a range of other brands.
Apart from traditional media and streaming, the elder Ellison also has eyes set on TikTok, the massive social media app owned by a company based in China. Last week, Donald Trump announced that Ellison would be among the group of American billionaires allowed to acquire TikTok's domestic operations to prevent the app from being banned in the U.S. "You know, they're very well-known people," Trump said in a Fox News interview on Sunday while discussing who would be involved in a TikTok deal. "And Larry Ellison is one of them. He’s involved. He’s a great guy."
Ellison is less known than some of his younger Silicon Valley peers, like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. However, his net worth has skyrocketed amid the artificial intelligence boom. The vast majority of his riches come from his 40% stake in Oracle, the database software and cloud computing firm he cofounded in 1977 and has helped lead since. Earlier this month, a surge in Oracle's stock lifted Ellison's wealth past Musk, temporarily making him the wealthiest person in the world with a net worth of $383.2 billion.
Ellison has spent much of this century indulging in his riches, including spending an estimated $875 million on a sailing match racing team, $200 million on a California estate, and $300 million to acquire 98% of the sixth-largest island in Hawaii.
But Ellison has larger ambitions, among them the belief that humanity would greatly benefit from a surveillance society governed by an all-seeing system of artificial intelligence. "Citizens will be on their best behavior because we're constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on," he said during a question-and-answer session with Oracle investors last year. "It’s unimpeachable."
This article was originally published in Oligarch Watch, Popular Information’s sister publication.
Ellison's enthusiasm for AI is self-serving. A society oriented around centralized databases and immense computing demands would mean more work for Oracle. But Ellison has framed that vision as altruistic. "I think this will make for a happier citizenry," he said in February, referring to the creation of a single massive database that an AI system could easily scan.
Ellison has a lengthy history of advocating for government surveillance. During a 2014 speech, he criticized NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, suggesting that no one had been "wrongly injured" by the agency's domestic spying operations. "By sharing your personal data, there are enormous benefits both to you individually and to the society as a whole," he added at the time. (His interest in databases stems from the early years of his tech career, when he worked on a CIA database project codenamed "Oracle" — which inspired the name of the company Ellison later founded.)
As for Ellison's effort to acquire vast media holdings, his carefully managed relationship with Trump has proven beneficial. Ellison for years has supported Republicans, although he often backed what he described as "centrist" politicians like Mitt Romney in 2012 and Marco Rubio in 2016. He did not hold a fundraiser for Trump until early 2020, which resulted in some Oracle employees staging a walkout. Ellison remained equivocal. "I said President Trump could use the property. I was not here," he said in April 2020, referring to Trump's use of his Rancho Mirage, California, retreat to hold the fundraiser. "We only have one president at a time," he added. "I don't think he's the devil — I support him and want him to do well."
Still, his standing with the then-first-term president was sufficient enough for Trump to greenlight Ellison taking part in a deal to buy TikTok's U.S. operations. That deal, which also involved Walmart, fell through. But ByteDance, TikTok's Chinese owner, attempted to quiet scrutiny in Washington by signing an agreement in the fall of 2020 to host the data of American TikTok users on Oracle servers.
Now, five years later, Ellison has been included in the proposed consortium to purchase 80% of TikTok's U.S. operations, as required by a law passed by Congress and signed by Joe Biden last year. According to Trump, Fox Corp. chief executive Lachlan Murdoch will also be involved in the consortium, along with Michael Dell, the chief executive of Dell Technologies, and the pro-Trump venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
The deal has been months in the making. In January, shortly after Trump began his second term, the president named Ellison as one of his preferred TikTok buyers. "I'd like Larry to buy it," Trump said, nodding at Ellison, who was visiting the White House with OpenAI's Sam Altman to promote a $500 billion project to build AI infrastructure in the U.S. that has yet to materialize.
As part of his role in spinning off TikTok's U.S. operations, Ellison will gain access to a massive trove of data delineating the political views, consumption habits, and social connections of tens of millions of Americans who use the app. "[TikTok's] data and privacy will be led by one of America's greatest tech companies, Oracle," White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fox News over the weekend. "And the algorithm will also be controlled by America as well."
Ellison has already played a role in the conservative overhaul of one social media platform. In 2022, he invested $1 billion in Musk's purchase of Twitter, simply because he thought the takeover "would be lots of fun." Twitter, now X, has since become a sump of right-wing propaganda and Musk's personal megaphone.
There have been snags in Ellison's insatiable quest for data. In 2022, Oracle agreed to settle a class action lawsuit accusing the company of secretly assembling "digital dossiers" on millions of people and selling them to third parties. Oracle denied wrongdoing but agreed to a $115 million negotiated settlement last year.
Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance 
