Charlie Kirk was murdered on a college campus one year ago today. A fixture of the MAGA Right, one of its most prominent and well-funded operatives and influencers, Kirk’s death was a shocking act of political violence that rattled all Americans to some degree. But Trump World’s grief was raw and vengeful.

I wrote this right after Kirk’s death last year and, forgive me for the self-quote, but I still think it describes MAGA’s response well:

Before we knew anything about Charlie Kirk’s shooter, before Kirk’s body was cold, the Trump Regime went to work canonizing him and turning him into a martyr. As NBC News’ Brandy Zadrozny reports, Kirk devoted his own life to creating and amplifying false conspiracies and alternate narratives. She writes, “It is fitting, maybe, that so many conspiracy theories have engulfed Kirk upon his death.”

I obviously didn’t know Kirk personally, but it does seem that this is precisely what he would have wanted. To become a martyr via viral content. For the people Kirk devoted his life to put into power, using every privilege available to them to exploit his tragic death as a way to crush dissent and punish MAGA’s perceived enemies. An army of online trolls avenging Kirk’s death by doxing and harassing anyone who has negative things to say about him. To cause further harm to already vulnerable communities and individuals. More incitement leading to more violence. All in service of MAGA.

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Of course they were helped along by legacy media and other influentials who either didn’t know what Charlie Kirk’s work actually was or saw themselves in Kirk once he became a casualty of political violence. I won’t relitigate it all here; if you remember the headline “Charlie Kirk was Practicing Politics the Right Way,” you’ve got the gist.

A ridiculous number of people, more than 600 that we know of, lost their jobs or faced retribution for saying negative things about Kirk or simply for pointing out what his beliefs actually were and the harm he’d caused. And of course there was the repeated online harassment and threats of violence that followed. Some of those folks sued their former employers and won, most notably former Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah. But not everyone will be vindicated, and even those who are will still have residual trauma from the experience.

And yet, now, when I look at the result of MAGA’s attempts to canonize Charlie Kirk, it’s hard not to view their efforts as a failure. Kirk was supposed to become a martyr but quickly became a meme. Less than a month after his killing, “Kirkified” memes of his face were swapped onto any and every image. Thanks to AI, meme makers flooded the internet with face-swapped images. Kirk also rapidly became Gen Z slang, as Jada King notes in an opinion column, explaining to us older Americans that “People adding “Kirk” to a sentence is increasingly common among Gen Z, and it’s being used as an intensifier— the same way “ass” can be used to increase the severity of the original sentence.”

Mainstream culture turned on Kirk’s legacy pretty much immediately. The outcry over Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension and Disney’s rapid reversal of it was an early sign that MAGA was failing and flailing. Many of us knew exactly who Charlie Kirk was and weren’t going to let his life and the harm caused be whitewashed. Even the MAGA Right seems to have moved on. Turning Point USA, the organization Kirk founded and now led by his widow, is floundering. Erika Kirk’s Trad Wife CEO routine is falling flat, and Charlie Kirk’s former colleagues are plagued by infighting.

A year later, Kirification is still going strong. And I’d imagine many of those who keep sharing them online have no idea who Charlie Kirk was or how the memes came about. It’s taken on a life of its own. Even this week, as I put together notes for this article, I randomly encountered a few of the memes in the wild.

You could argue that in our culture today, anything and everything can become a meme, but I’m not sure that’s the case. The speed and intensity with which Kirkified memes took over online spaces was unusual. The only thing I can think of that it compares to is Harambe the Gorilla memes, which spread like wildfire after staff at the Cincinnati Zoo killed Harambe when a child got in his enclosure. Kirkified memes are what happens when grief, outrage, and a society in crisis all meet online. It’s a toxic legacy, but in this case it feels earned.

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America’s white supremacist split screen continues. The Trump Regime is deporting Haitian refugees who came here legally, including children, against their will. This week, the Regime turned its racist cruelty into content, with the Department of Homeland Security releasing a horrific video of a deportation flight, with men in chains boarding a plane in the rain. Meanwhile, white South Africans remain the only people who can enter the US as refugees and receive taxpayer-funded aid when they arrive, which the Trump Regime plans to increase.

The video is shot after shot of Black men in chains. The kinds of atrocity that even totalitarian regimes generally don’t want visuals of. But America is a nation run by white supremacists who want us all to know who is in charge, and just how cruel they are. And they want us to fear them.

Covering propaganda from the Trump Regime is always tricky. The content is meant to inflame, and inflaming those of us who don’t support these atrocities is a big part of why they do it. I don’t want to elevate that, and I don’t want to do their dirty work by amplifying it. Still, they’re doing all this in our name. We need to call it out and draw a moral line wherever we can.

ICE continues to operate as Trump’s personal police force, enforcing his whims against Immigrints and those who would stand with their neighbors to oppose the Regime. This week Texas Governor Greg Abbott delayed signing an extradition warrant that would send an agent to Minnesota, where charges have been filed against ICE agent Christian Castro, accused of shooting an innocent man, and a judge refused to intervene. Minnesota is unable to take Castro into custody, despite the concern that Castro is a flight risk.

It sets up an obvious constitutional crisis, one that we’ve been dancing around for a while and will at some point have to come to a head. Pro-Trump states and government agents don’t feel beholden to the law of the land. Only to Donald Trump. Eventually, Democratic governors and the people they represent will get fed up. Because if ICE or the military can come tear apart our communities and harm people at will, and there’s no accountability for abuses of power, what exactly are we paying taxes for or pledging allegiance to?

We’re only as safe as our most vulnerable neighbors. As I’ve covered previously, ICE’s internal watchdog has been repurposed to investigate critics of the agency instead of checking it. ICE is also responsible for fatally shooting at least 10 people during the Trump Administration. ICE has also arrested a record number of people without criminal records this summer. It’s a danger to all of us, and that’s by design.

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Case in point: today ICE detained Milo Yiannopoulos. The British far-right activist, formerly one of MAGA’s most prominent cheerleaders, is now on the outs with the Trump Regime. Apparently Milo’s arrest was at the behest of fellow MAGAlebrity, Laura Loomer, another MAGA-lebrity who is known to have Donald Trump’s ear. ICE doesn’t care that Milo spent years helping build the movement that gave ICE its current mandate. If they’ll detain Milo Yiannopoulos, they’ll detain anyone. Or as Onion CEO Ben Collins put it:

That’s why, as heinous as I find the video, and so much of the social media content that the Trump Regime creates and shares, it’s important not to look away. And to stand up against cruelty any way we can. To understand that while, yes, this is happening to immigrant communities, none of us is safe as long as ICE is allowed to exist and a President is allowed to turn any government agency into his personal Stasi.

You can help protect your community by joining existing community defense and mutual aid efforts, or starting one yourself if it doesn’t already exist. Taking a virtual training with States at the Core or connecting with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network is a great place to start.

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The leopards ate Milo’s face, and had he read CARD he would have known it was coming. Because I’ve been watching those leopards for a decade, and I know who they truly are.

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ICYMI

• Meta Will Pay Up to $16.7 Billion to Settle Its Social Media Harms Case—and That’s Not All (Wired)

• Pete Hegseth Is Building a Pentagon Troll Army (The Bulwark)

• Data Center Discontent Drives State Legislation Surge (Tech Policy Press)

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Coda

I’m off next week for Labor Day weekend. Then I’m not entirely sure of my schedule. My plan is to write two pieces a week between Labor Day and Election Day, but at some point I’ll have surgery and will obviously need some time off. More than likely, the next newsletter will go out on Sunday, September 13.

I’ll see you then!

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Dolly Parton’s music and persona have always been intertwined in my life, and I have countless memories of her music. I could write an entire essay about what Dolly meant to me personally, but as I watched the entire Internet grieve her yesterday, I realized there’s not much original or unique I can say about what she meant to me. So many of us are feeling it, and I loved all the stories and anecdotes I read online.

One of my favorite aspects was all the stories about Parton that circulated and how even her fans learned new things about her. Maybe you learned about a song of hers you didn’t know about or a TV clip you hadn’t seen. But most of what was shared was about who Dolly was as a person, her Imagination Library, and stories about how she showed up for vulnerable people and communities.

Everyone loved Dolly Parton. I was struck by this skeet on Bluesky from Huck Mason, pointing out that both Donald Trump and Democratic Socialists of America had both posted glowing tributes. The first and only time they would ever agree on anything.

Writer Garrett M. Graff’s skeet about Dolly also resonated with me, probably because I’ve been putting together notes for a future piece about Charlie Kirk’s assassination and the Internet’s reaction to it.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to compare Dolly Parton to Charlie Kirk, but I do want to talk about Dolly Parton and politics. Because I’ve always admired how she chose to express her political views and the moments she chose to speak up. Some believe Parton was apolitical, which is something she cultivated. She loved all of her fans, and wanted them to feel loved rather than judged by her. That includes her right-wing fans. But she also stood by people and stood up for vulnerable people repeatedly when it counted. Here’s what you need to know:

Dolly lived her values

“And of course Black lives matter. Do we think our little white asses are the only ones that matter? No!”

Dolly Parton never endorsed a candidate or a political position. She’d never say a bad word about anyone. But she also didn’t stay silent, and she made clear her positions were based on her faith and her values. Parton unequivically stood with Black Lives Matter when asked in an interview and not just in the moment; The Root chronicles her record of supporting the Black community, including in her home state of Tennessee.

And I probably don’t need to tell you about her continued support for the LGBTQ+ community, and unabashed love for her LGBTQ fans. Dolly loved drag performers, and more than once said that were she a man she would surely be a drag queen herself.

My personal favorite Parton song is Travelin’ Thru, which Parton wrote for the movie Trans America. The song is universal in its lyrics and has gotten me through many a tough time in my life (including in recent weeks), but it’s also a metaphor for transitioning as a resurrection. Dolly sings:

God made me for a reason and nothin’ is in vain

Redemption comes in many shapes with many kinds of pain

Oh, sweet Jesus, if you’re listenin’, keep me ever close to you

As I’m stumblin’, tumblin’, wanderin’, as I’m travelin’ through

Dolly spoke out for Trans folks too, as recently as 2023 against anti-Trans legislation in her home state of Tennessee, but Travelin’ Thru was from a movie released in 2006. Her values are rooted in her Christian faith, something the song makes clear. Love everyone, and let them know they belong. Judge no one because that’s God’s job. Political fights come and go, but faith is eternal. And it’s always time to do the right thing.

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Dolly showed us who she was in her deeds and words

Parton was a lyrical genius, and she told us who she was and what she believed countless times in her songs. But she also understood the concept of deeds over words. She’s probably most known for her Imagination Library, which sent a free book a month to kids all over the country, including my own, from birth to age 5.

We have many of those books in our home, and those books are meant to take a beating from children who read them over and over again. Anyone who has small children can tell you that loved books are battered books, but Imagination Library books are sturdy, made of tougher stuff, clearly designed to withstand toddlers for a long period of time. I’ve always assumed that choice was intentional. Dolly could have sent cheaply made books and everyone still would have loved her for it. Those books are made with respect for the children who would read them.

We also have Dolly Parton to thank in part for the Covid vaccine. Thanks to a $1million donation she made proactively at the start of the pandemic. She called up a doctor who was a friend of hers and asked how she could help before anyone had a chance to ask. Then she helped promote the vaccine by changing the lyrics to Jolene and getting her shot on a video for social media.

And Dolly never forgot where she came from. Many of her philanthropic efforts benefited Sevier County, where she came from, and her home state of Tennessee, and her Dollywood Theme Park created jobs and economic opportunity in the region. A Dollywood foundation focused on local aid, and Dollywood paid 100% of college tuition for its employees.

Dolly understood politics was downstream of culture

A lot is being written today about Dolly Parton being apolitical. She worked hard to cultivate that image. But I have a different interpretation of her advocacy. Dolly knew that her power came from the culture, the Appalachian culture that she came from, and the culture that embraced her music and persona wholeheartedly. She intentionally curated her stances and chose her words (and lyrics!) carefully.

​​Tressie McMillan Cottom wrote the definitive essay on Dolly and American culture in 2021, and it’s worth a read in full, but this passage in particular really illustrates the point:

“All of my reading also revealed this: Dolly Parton is one of very few living texts that could survive projections of America’s soul without buckling beneath its contradictions. It is treasonous to do so but if one strips away all the adulation, they are left with an odd totem for our socio-political times. Dolly is a white Southern multi-millionaire boomer who produces self-consciously white music while wearing a stylized drag of a fallen Southern belle. Only a society that willfully believes itself “post-racist” could produce such a queen. Post-racist does not mean there is no more racism. It means that we believe there is an us after we rid ourselves of our errant racist bones, which we are certain will come to pass. We craft Dolly into an unproblematic fave because the most problematic part of The Dolly Parton Moment is us.”

None of this is by accident. Dolly Parton knew who she was, and what she wanted to project out to the world. She knew what her power was and where she could make the most impact. It isn’t politics the way most people think about politics in our hyper-partisan era, but Dolly’s use of music and culture was absolutely a political act.

Dolly never forgot where she came from. And she could still evolve

“As soon as you realize that [something] is a problem, you should fix it. Don’t be a dumbass’.”

I feel a personal kinship with Dolly because we both come from the same overarching Appalachian/Southern culture. She was a country music singer, and I am an unabashed country music fan. Of course, loving country music is complicated, especially right now when the American Right continually attempts to claim ownership. Country music’s history also includes appropriation and wholesale theft. Country music doesn’t exist without Black music, but much of the industry seems determined to exclude Black voices and artists from the genre.

Because of this, loving country music, and really loving anything about Southern culture, is complex and often uneasy. It’s something I feel as a music fan and as a Kentuckian. I’m proud of my working-class roots and how they’ve shaped my politics and values. I’m also well aware of the harm my culture and my ancestors have inflicted. Both things can be true.

After Charlottesville in 2017, Dolly Parton found herself dealing with these issues directly. She was criticized, fairly, for the name of her themed restaurant, Dolly’s Dixie Stampede, and for what both the name and her Civil War-themed dinner theater show evoked. The Slate article from a writer who saw the show twice describes how tone deaf and racist the experience was, and reading it again, it’s hard to reconcile the Dolly Parton who owned that restaurant with the Dolly persona we’re all mourning right now.

But here’s the thing: Dolly Parton evolved. Instead of getting defensive about the essay, she removed Dixie from the name and overhauled the show. She didn’t blame antifa, or claim both sides, or any of the rhetoric that was common at the time. When asked about the change, Dolly said, “When they said ‘Dixie’ was an offensive word, I thought, ‘Well, I don’t want to offend anybody. This is a business. We’ll just call it The Stampede. As soon as you realize that [something] is a problem, you should fix it. Don’t be a dumbass.”

Dolly Parton wasn’t perfect. She made mistakes just like the rest of us, and she probably came up short more often than she wanted to. She didn’t practice politics in the way that I do or the way most of my readers choose to engage. But I admire the way she did. And it’s one of the things I’ll miss most about her.

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When Democratic candidate Angie Nixon won her primary in an upset in Florida this week, I immediately thought about Ms. Rachel. The children’s entertainer and YouTube sensation recently made her first slate of political endorsements, and included Nixon in the list of candidates. In an Instagram post, Ms. Rachel explained her political philosophy and identified her preferred candidates simply as “some folks I believe care about all kids.”

Nixon’s win was quite the upset. She was outspent 13-1 by her opponent, himself a well-known target of Trump, and according to the New York Times, spent only $60,000 on advertising over the course of her campaign. She had some lefty endorsements but not the heaviest hitters: Senator Bernie Sanders or Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez. Realistically, I don’t think we can say that Ms. Rachel’s endorsement won Nixon the election, but when you consider how much earned media had to matter here, I feel comfortable saying that the impact of it was potentially a major factor in Nixon’s favor. I’ll be really interested to see the age breakdown for Nixon’s voters, and how many of those voters are likely to be millennial parents.

Generally, I don’t think political endorsements matter as much as campaigns would like to think they do. But Ms. Rachel is a powerful validator. Parents of small children trust her instinctively, and many of us feel like we know her. I joke that she’s raising the world’s children through her YouTube videos. She’s about as wholesome as they come: a former preschool teacher who decided to create the content she wished existed for her own son. My kids have aged out of Ms. Rachel, but her videos got our family through the toddler years. With educational content, empathy, and music I actually enjoy listening to.

I’ve written previously about the MAGA Right’s continued efforts to cancel Ms. Rachel and why I knew those efforts would fail. Despite the many attempts to paint Ms. Rachel as some sort of radical propagandist for all things woke, her stated political beliefs are actually pretty mainstream:

• There’s too much money in politics, and no one needs a billion dollars.

• Support for kindness and empathy.

• Families should have access to affordable childcare if they want it or have a parent stay home if that’s what they want.

• Everyone should be able to feed and educate their kids without stress.

Nixon was one of several candidates Ms. Rachel has given her stamp of approval to. The list includes some familiar names, including Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota, and Troy Jackson in her home state of Maine. Most of these endorsements came before the candidates’ primaries. I’m genuinely curious to see what, if anything, Ms. Rachel can do to bolster her slate of candidates in the general election. As much as the MAGA Right might hate her, based on the massive numbers she does on Netflix and YouTube, it’s pretty clear their kids are watching Ms. Rachel too.

It’s sad that it takes a beloved figure in children’s entertainment to point this out. But Ms. Rachel feels compelled to do so. And she’s made it clear on multiple occasions that she won’t stop speaking out. She’s a beacon of moral clarity.

It might seem strange for a popular entertainer to wade into politics, but when you consider Ms. Rachel’s overall advocacy, it makes sense. She’s an ambassador for Save the Children and has spoken up repeatedly about children in Gaza and Sudan. She’s called attention to the detention of innocent children detained in ICE prisons. at Ms. Rachel has also stood with the Black community, calling on her followers to listen to Black voices. She advocates for the family of Nolan Wells, saying “Black boys deserve to grow up”, and has encouraged her followers to shop at Black-owned businesses.

Caring about children and families isn’t an especially radical idea, or at least it shouldn’t be. But America is currently being run by a fascist, eugenicist death cult -- which is objectively bad for children. Donald Trump, his cabinet, and the elected officials he controls couldn’t give a shit about children and families, outside of exploiting us and our issues for their own political gain. They don’t care how many babies and children die from diseases that vaccines would have prevented or school shootings, how many women suffer needlessly because they don’t have access to reproductive care, or how many vulnerable communities they harm. That’s before you even get into children outside of America, those who suffered because USAID of Doge’d or because of the genocide in Gaza.

My guess is that the last thing Ms. Rachel wants to do is make political endorsements. Her personal political views aside, it’s clear her passion is children, and any interest in policy stems from that. However, I’m thrilled to see her using this platform in this way. Ms. Rachel is speaking truth to power, and modeling how to do that for children and their parents across the globe. She’s one of the most powerful validators of showing solidarity and living your values out there right now. I don’t care if it’s a cliché to say, America doesn’t deserve Ms. Rachel, but our children certainly do.

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ICYMI

• Natalie Harp Should Concern Everyone—I Should Know, I Once Had Her Job (The New Republic)

• The Architecture of Resistance: America’s Year of Taking On ICE (Mother Jones)

• Liquid Death and Garage Beer Take on AI Data Centers — With Pee (MarketingDive)

• How Much Do You Really Know About Black August? The Legendary Prison Protests That Launched a Legacy of Resistance (The Root)

Coda

To close us out, please enjoy my personal favorite Ms. Rachel song. My kids have aged out of her videos, but they still enjoy some of the songs (So does their Mom!). So this one remains in our family rotation.

Until next week…

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This week, on the anniversary of the Unite the Right Hate Riot in Charlottesville, Virginia, Trump’s Department of Justice announced the arrest of Heidi Beirich — former head of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project. She tracked hate groups and founded the Global Project Against Hate & Extremism. Beirich is accused of defrauding SPLC’s donors to fund white supremacist groups, part of DOJ’s broader effort to destroy and discredit SPLC

If you don’t know Heidi Beirich’s name, you’re certainly familiar with her work and expertise. Beirich’s entire career has been spent investigating and exposing hate groups. Anyone who covers far-right extremism and related topics or works in anti-hate spaces owes Beirich a debt of gratitude. Much of what we know about hate in the US, and the way it’s covered and investigated, comes from Beirich’s work. Here’s what you need to know:

This indictment is designed to isolate and alienate Beirich. There’s a lot to unpack here, but this is the most important thing. The indictment contains some salacious details, which reporter Phil Williams covers in his newsletter if you want to know more. We obviously don’t know the entire story, but I don’t trust the indictment for a minute, and neither should you. The DOJ couldn’t even be bothered to get Beirich’s job title correct, falsely naming her as SPLC’s former CFO. Whether because the DOJ is being strategic, incompetent, or its usual combination of both, there’s no reason to assume that the indictment is correct or even close to the whole story until proven otherwise.

The isolation is the point. A tried and true strategy of the MAGA Right is to make their targets toxic so that allies back off and don’t stand in solidarity with MAGA’s enemy of the moment. Cutting targets off from key emotional, institutional, and financial support and making allies terrified to stand in solidarity, lest they be next. I often refer to this as the ACORN strategy. The MAGA Right keeps doing this because it works -- with help from the institutional left and reactionary centrists.

Too many groups in Civil Society, even so-called allies, are more than happy to play along. Just this week, the centrist think tank Third Way put out a job notice for a Director of Anti-Extremism. Lest you think Third Way is actually doing something useful and researching hate groups, the job is for leading opposition research against members of the Democratic Socialists of America and the candidates they’re running, which apparently Third Way considers a bigger threat than the Trump Regime. Good to know, I guess, but also a perfect illustration of just how much water some are willing to carry for the fascists and why isolation often works.

The attacks against experts in far-right extremism and disinformation is so vast it’s difficult to quantify. I’m living this, and I cover it regularly, but it’s still difficult to describe the scale of what’s happened since 2021 in the anti-hate/anti-disinformation spaces. From Jim Jordan’s witch hunt investigations, to Big Tech rolling back anti-hate and disinformation policies while laying off trust and safety teams, to the #TwitterFiles bullshit from Elon Musk, and the targeting and harassment of researchers like Nina Jankowicz, the list is endless.

As someone who does this work, I can tell you it’s taken a real toll on us all. I don’t know one researcher, journalist, or advocate whose mental health and finances haven’t taken a hit over the past few years. But that doesn’t even begin to cover the impact on American politics and discourse as the MAGA Right has discredited our work and effectively isolated us from institutions and funders. So much of the research, advocacy, and brainpower has been lost—to America’s detriment.

Meanwhile, the Trump Regime’s weaponization efforts have expanded well beyond our space. This week we learned that DHS spent months spying on civil society in Minnesota, including churches, libraries, and union halls, by sending undercover agents to infiltrate local groups. You know, the kind of activity they’re mad at SPLC (which shared intel with law enforcement regularly) over. Eventually they will come for everyone who they consider an enemy.

The Trump Regime is a white supremacist group, and they’re out for revenge. Let’s be real for a minute. Making this arrest on the anniversary of Unite the Right is a choice, intended to send a message. Heidi Beirich and her team at SPLC were instrumental in covering the hate groups that organized the terror in Charlottesville and exposing them. The MAGA Right has never forgiven SPLC for its role in exposing and bringing the organizations and people responsible to justice. This is about revenge and retribution, plain and simple. Which is true of most of what the DOJ seems to do these days: abuse its power to punish political opponents.

Or as neoreactionary blogger Curtis Yarvin put it a few months ago:

“What’s cool is that I don’t really see a strong legal case that the SPLC shouldn’t be able to run these kinds of wacky black ops. That means DOJ is prosecuting the SPLC just because it (kind of) can. If so, this would be an unusual sign of “finally getting it.””

Solidarity is the only way forward. I stand with Heidi Beirich, and I encourage everyone to do the same. She has denied any wrongdoing through her lawyers, and I see no reason to believe the DOJ’s version is true or even grounded in reality. Even if you didn’t know Beirich or her work, you owe her a debt of gratitude. As her friend and colleague Eric K. Ward put it:

“Heidi was taking on organized bigotry long before “multiracial democracy,” “white nationalism,” “political violence” and “authoritarianism” became language people tossed into grant proposals. Long before most of progressive America, the racial justice field and liberal civil society were even willing to admit just how organized the threat had become…

…Her work exposed dangerous organizations, warned communities and protected people.”

The MAGA Right’s power comes from brute force. Ours can and should come from collective force. We can only win when we stand together. When we stop saying Please don’t let me be next and say Alright, try and make us. Heidi Beirich isn’t the Trump Regime’s first target, and she won’t be the last. If you’re as sick of this as I am, the best way to put a stop to it is to fight the urge to hide and instead stand strong and speak out.

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ICYMI

• Does AI Fight or Fuel Election Disinformation? (Brennan Center for Justice)

• One Woman’s Message From the Hell of ICE Detention (The Nation)

• Separating AI’s Technological Problems From its Capitalism Problems (Tech Policy Press)

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Coda

I want to thank everyone, again, for your support and contributions, your love and solidarity, over the last week. Telling the internet you have cancer will trigger the world’s biggest vulnerability hangover, but I’m glad that I did. Y’all are the best people. Truly. My family and I appreciate you so much.

Talk to you again next week!

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Transcript

Hi, it’s Melissa. I’m not really a video person. I’m much more comfortable writing on the internet, but I wanted to say thank you to everyone. I was so overwhelmed to the response to telling the world that I have breast cancer from readers and friends and colleagues just over the course of my life.

It was really overwhelming and humbling. First, just thank you to everyone who donated or contributed. My goal for the newsletter had been to raise $15,000 by year’s end, and we are at $12,000 already, which is just incredible. For me and my family, it’s such relief.

It means that over the next few months when I’m undergoing treatment and surgery and all the emotions that come with that, I’m not going to have to worry about money. And that right now is just, it means so much. You have no idea what a burden it has taken off. It’s really hard for me to be vulnerable.

And I don’t, those of you who know me know, I don’t like asking for help. But I’m so glad I did because this was, I really appreciated it. But I would just say generally, I want to thank you all for three things. First is everyone who shared their stories with me.

I heard from so many of you who have either survived breast cancer or you’re going through breast cancer or you have a dear friend or relative who’s going through it. And all of your stories just, you know, it makes you feel less alone to know that others are going through it. And it just, it makes you hopeful.

So I really appreciate that and I will try to get back to everyone who wrote me. It’s going to take a while. I’ve learned so much about all of your health histories and I’m so honored that you felt comfortable sharing that with me. Thank you. Second is, especially to those of you who donated,

you told me not to feel obligated to keep working. And I really appreciate that. I thought that was so nice that so many of you were worried and like, oh, I love your work. I love what you do. But please don’t take this donation as that you need to push through,

like take care of yourself and come back when you’re ready. And I plan to keep writing because we have this huge election coming up. And also because frankly, writing is what keeps me sane and helps me make sense of a batshit world. But I really appreciated that so many of you We’re like,

please don’t take this as permission to take care of yourself, not as a burden to create more content. And that care and warmth really came through. And then finally, y’all told me how much that my writing and my work has meant to you over the years. So many people, whether you contributed or not,

you just told me that what I do has value and meaning. I’m so fortunate that I get to do everything that I’ve done for a living, whether it’s political activism, whether it’s consulting, whether it’s building a company, whether it’s writing. I don’t take that for granted for a second.

And I know it’s because of the support of so many of you over the years in various ways. And it’s just... It’s so incredible what writing this newsletter in particular has brought to my life from opportunities that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. I mean, we’re featured in a museum now. That is insane. That still blows my mind.

To the Obama Foundation Fellowship, to all the amazing people that I’ve gotten to meet and conferences that I’ve gotten to speak at. I am so grateful every day that I have the privilege of doing this work. The world is terrible in so many ways. But I think one of the things I learned this week is that

the world is also beautiful and wonderful and chaotic. And look, my goal remains. I want to fight mega Nazis with everything that I’ve got. And I know that y’all want to do that too. And I appreciate that you want to continue to support me in that and also that you want to make sure that I’m healthy.

Enough to do that. So again, thank you from the bottom of my heart. I’m not a video person. I’m not a vulnerability person. So this whole thing has been a trip. But I just want to send all the love that has come to me back out into the universe. Thanks.

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I have cancer. Specifically, I have breast cancer. I learned the news last week, and even though I went through multiple rounds of tests, the diagnosis came as a shock.

Get your screenings, folks. I was overdue for a colonoscopy, but since I have no family history of breast or ovarian cancer, I could have waited a few more years to schedule a mammogram. I went ahead and did it because I wanted to get both out of the way, and if I’m being honest, because there was a breast cancer plot on Beyond the Gates that emphasized the importance of screenings. Still, I was a lot more worried about something showing up on the colonoscopy.

Here’s the good news. I have what my nurse navigator described as “fairly boring cancer.” And it seems like we caught it early. The tumors are grade one, and everyone I’ve talked to on my care team and those who’ve been through this tell me that what we know so far is good. But at this point there’s a lot more we don’t know, and the rest of my month is going to be spent in appointments and tests to help my care team determine a treatment.

I’m fortunate in that I have health insurance and a rock-solid network of support. Starting with Micheál and my kids but extending out to an amazing village of family and friends here in Seattle and across the country. When I’m undergoing treatment, I won’t be alone, and I’ll have all the support I need. Something I’m extremely grateful for. The support people have shown me already is incredible, and I love knowing that a village has my back.

But the reality is things aren’t great right now. Without going into details, my family has been through a lot over the past few years with some serious financial and emotional setbacks. Realistically, I don’t know how much I’m going to be able to work as I undergo treatment. And that’s before even thinking about how much insurance will or won’t pay for my treatment.

Writing this newsletter is the work that most fills my cup, and it brings in some income, but it doesn’t pay most of the bills. And since losing my publisher, it provides even less income than it has in the past. Ideally I’d like to bring in more from writing, which is more flexible than consulting, and I think flexibility is going to become supremely important for me and my family in the coming months.

So I’m asking you to consider supporting the newsletter financially. Normally I’d be talking up my plans: migrating off of Substack, adding more video content, and producing two newsletters a week from Labor Day through Election Day. I think my work has value and I much prefer asking people to support that value. But the truth is right now I could really use the help. If you’re in a position to donate, now is a good time to do it.

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Thank you for all your support over the years. I’m an open book, and if you’ve been reading me for a while, you already know a lot about my medical history. That won’t change. I’ll keep you updated on my progress.

In the meantime, we’ll continue to fight the MAGA Right together, week after week. Because I refuse to let these assholes win. Solidarity.

Two details from this week’s news cycle that broke me. Both from Ohio:

• ICE forcing Haitian immigrants to wear ankle monitors.

• Rep. Max Miller refusing to return his child’s bunny, a comfort stuffy.

These two news stories perfectly illustrate the cruelty of MAGA in both the micro and macro sense. Cruelty to an entire community, many of whom came to the US as refugees, and cruelty to your toddler daughter as a way of punishing your ex-wife. I can’t help but think of the same picture meme from The Office. The heinous acts might be different, but the villain is the same.

Let’s start with the ankle monitors, or “a new humiliation” as immigration advocates are calling it. ICE is demanding this of Haitians who came to America legally, under a TPS status that the Trump Regime has now taken away from them. Thanks to JD Vance amplifying disinformation about his then-constituents, you’re probably most familiar with the Haitian community in Springfield, OH. Springfield and surrounding communities are currently preparing for an escalation in ICE abductions and raids.

We’re only as safe as our most vulnerable, and as we’ve seen in Minnesota, LA, Chicago, DC, and smaller communities that haven’t had the national news when ICE targets and terrorizes immigrant communities, it impacts the entire community. No one is safe from ICE violence, and even when ICE kills innocent people, there’s no recourse or accountability. Even if you think you’re safe and protected, you’re potentially impacted when ICE is active in your community.

Still, I suspect many of my readers can more closely relate to Rep. Miller’s ex-wife and toddler, and the alleged violence they endured. The details are horrific, and I won’t present them as trauma porn by listing them here. But anyone who has ever been adjacent to domestic violence will recognize Miller’s behavior. It’s by-the-book abuser shit. Miller’s behavior will also be familiar to any woman who’s divorced or broken up with an abusive partner. Or any child of divorce where the father was an abuser.

But let’s hone in on the bunny. As a parent, a constant source of anxiety is that you’ll somehow lose your kid’s comfort stuffy. It’s why one of my sons has 5 identical stuffies of his beloved fox, Red. Toddlers especially can rely heavily on their comfort stuffy to reduce anxiety and feel safe. Miller refused to give his daughter’s stuffy back as a way of punishing his ex-wife. There’s a well-documented history of him doing it repeatedly. Further traumatizing an already traumatized child because he can. The micro version of The Cruelty is the Point.

Miller’s ex-wife is the daughter of Ohio MAGA Senator Bernie Moreno, who has called on his ex-son-in-law to resign. MAGA has, for the most part, stood by Miller, though that could change if polls show his reelection effort might be in danger. If Moreno was hoping that the Trump Regime and MAGA would rally behind him and his family, he was sorely mistaken. He belongs to a movement that believes they have the right to terrorize anyone for any reason without consequence, including his daughter and granddaughter.

Senator Moreno is as pro-ICE as they come, even as the Trump Regime deploys ICE repeatedly to terrorize his constituents and the communities he was elected to represent. He’s continually empowered and enabled an America that allows and celebrates acts of violence and terror on a massive scale and in his daughter’s own home. Moreno helped put abusers in power and celebrated their rise. Somehow I doubt he has enough self-awareness to realize this, but I’d love to be wrong.

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I’ve been working behind the scenes to make some big changes. Including a move off of Substack and a plan to do more video livestreams. I plan to be up and running by Labor Day so that we can cover the sprint to the midterm elections with the analysis and attention to detail you rely on.

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ICYMI

• Inside a Mass Shooter’s Harrowing History With ChatGPT (Mother Jones)

• New Poll Finds Black Women Have Lost Faith in Washington But Not in Their Vote (TheRoot)

• How Ariana Grande’s Body Became Political (Salon)

Coda

That’s all for this week, folks. I’ll be back next Sunday before taking the last couple of weeks of August off. Leaving you with Josh Johnson’s set on Andrew Tate in jail that had me rolling this week. Enjoy.

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Anthony Fauci took the 5th because America is dysfunctional and broken.

Fauci is a career-long public servant who has testified before Congress hundreds of times over his decades of service. But American politics and culture are now driven by rage-bait, and Fauci’s continued existence always enrages the MAGA Right base. Senator Rand Paul has found viral (and, I assume, online fundraising) success by harassing Anthony Fauci. Rand Paul has continually said he wants to see Fauci imprisoned, and since the Trump Regime’s DOJ has been weaponized to target political opponents, of course, Fauci would take the 5th. Who wouldn’t?

It’s the same reason outgoing president Joe Biden gave Fauci, along with members of his family and January 6 investigators, preemptive pardons before leaving office. In a functioning America, this would be unthinkable. But there we were, and here we are.

If you want a sense of how normalized this has become, and how desensitized we are, this passage from the AP story about the hearing says it all:

“In response to angry, sometimes mocking questions from Republican senators, Fauci declined to answer more than 100 times, injecting new drama into partisan divides that have festered for years about the origins and handling of the pandemic. Fauci himself has become a polarizing figure, even receiving death threats that prompted him to seek security.”

I’m not sure which phrase annoys me more: “partisan divide” or “polarizing figure.” Or maybe it’s the casual mention of the death threats that Fauci has received. The AP shouldn’t be covering the continued harassment of an octogenarian public servant this way. This isn’t a partisan fight, but unhinged conspiracy-mongers attacking the truth and inciting violence for virality and engagement.

So I was pleasantly surprised when a couple of readers sent me this video of TMZ founder Harvey Levin expressing his disgust over the hearing.

Levin’s outrage is interesting for a couple of reasons. For one thing, he was a Trump ally for some time, even recently calling out so-called elitists who didn’t think the White House should stage a UFC event on its lawn. I don’t think he’d describe himself as a Trump supporter currently, but Levin is certainly more open to MAGA than most of us.

Levin also understands the power of virality more than most. TMZ was a pioneer in taking tabloid journalism online and using video footage to drive engagement and create viral moments. Levin makes it clear that while he thinks it’s fair to be critical of Fauci’s actions during the pandemic, it’s completely out of line to set Fauci up in a public setting, calling him to testify to charge him with perjury.

Earlier this year, TMZ launched a DC bureau, which struck me as a smart move. I hate that politics and celebrity culture have collided, but there’s no denying that it’s happened. We live in a country where People Magazine covers politics and how it impacts readers better than most political news coverage. TMZ DC could play a similar role, especially in covering what drives power, and how elites in government and media interact in our nation’s Capitol.

Public servants like Anthony Fauci are being driven out of government, replaced by Trump cronies and conspiracy-mongering MAHA enthusiasts. HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr’s priority seems to be aiming for his own virality. This week, as Americans are still worried about whether you can eat lettuce without suffering explosive diarrhea, RFK Jr. launched an online cooking show. Admittedly, this is maybe the least offensive thing the man has done since taking office, but it’s still a clear example of his priorities.

Republicans are expected to lose the House, and the Senate is in play this November. The good news is that a Democratic majority can mostly stop this insanity and turn the spotlight back on the people destroying America in order to enrich themselves. Personally, I can’t think of a better reason to vote this year than stripping Rand Paul and his colleagues of their subpoena power.

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ICYMI

• A 23-Year-Old ‘ICE Chaser’ Is Notorious Among Federal Agents. He Has No Plans To Stop. (HuffPost)

• Pro-Data Center Industry Group Behind Ad Campaign in Oregon, Six Other States (News from the States)

• DHS Official Resigns, Citing ‘War on Immigrants’ (WIRED)

• Bluesky Says Kremlin Is Hacking Its Platform to Spread Propaganda (New York Times, gift link)

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Coda

I really enjoyed talking to Ben Wikler about his new book, This is the Plan, on a livestream earlier this week. Be sure to catch our conversation if you haven’t watched yet.

That’s all for now. Talk to you again next Sunday!

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I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Ben Wikler. Learn more about Ben and his new book This is the Plan here. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to fight the Trump Regime, starting in their own backyard. And to everyone already doing that who just needs some hope and inspiration.

I’m determined to keep every aspect of this newsletter, from interviews like this to every article I write, free for anyone who needs the information and analysis. To do that, I need to raise an additional $11,430 between now and the end of the year. You can help me keep CARD free for everyone by making a contribution today.

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Thanks for all that you do!

Mark your calendars! On Tuesday at 11:30 AM ET / 8:30 AM PT, I’m hosting my friend Ben Wikler for a Substack Live. Ben is a longtime political organizer, former chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, and author of the new book This Is the Plan: How to End America’s Meltdown and Save Democracy.

I’m really looking forward to our conversation. Be sure to tune in!

America only accepts white refugees now. That’s not an exaggeration. In 2026, every refugee admitted via the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program was white. And of the 6,668 refugees admitted from October 2025 to today, all but three were White South Africans.

You might read that stat and wonder if you’ve missed something. Was there a coup or a civil war in South Africa? Why are white South Africans (AKA Afrikaners) in need of refugee status?

They aren’t. The South African government has made clear that Afrikaners are in no danger. Alvin Botes, South Africa’s deputy foreign minister, has said publicly that claims of discrimination by some Afrikaners “do not meet the threshold of persecution required under domestic and international refugee law.” An Amnesty International report on South Africa’s human rights record only mentions Afrikaners once, referring to “the US government’s misinformation campaign.”

Misinformation is the wrong word. The so-called plight of Afrikaners is a false conspiracy theory commonly known as White Genocide. It posits that white farmers in South Africa are being persecuted and murdered in an attempt to reclaim land by Black South Africans. Like many other false conspiracy theories, it taps into an ugly history (Apartheid) and relies heavily on racist stereotypes to propagate.

How did a false conspiracy theory from another nation end up driving government policy in the U.S.? Because Donald Trump’s MAGA coalition is built on a foundation of disinformation and false conspiracy theories, and Trump feeds them a constant diet of conspiratorial red meat. And it fuels a dangerous feedback loop.

Trump’s campaigns have always relied heavily on communities such as QAnon and MAHA to win elections and drive media narratives. Now that he’s back in power, the false conspiracy theories MAGA adherents believe, no matter how insane they sound, are increasingly driving policy, legislation, and the White House’s political priorities.

From The Right-Wing Fringe To White House Policy

The White Genocide conspiracy theory and how it traveled across the Globe is the perfect illustration of what I’ve coined the 4chan to Trump Pipeline. Around 2016-2018, the conspiracy theory percolated on far-right forums such as 4chan’s /pol/ board. Leaked logs from a far-right discord server show that many of the trolls spreading white genocide conspiracies knew them to be false but didn’t care. One poster even referred to it as the “white genocide lie in SA.” They understood the power of the lie and how it played into the global right-wing fear that white people would lose status and power on a global scale.

Then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson—who has been open about the importance of 4chan as a source for “salacious” stories—began covering the false white genocide conspiracy theories on his primetime Fox News TV program, exposing a large American audience to them for the first time.

One of Carlson’s viewers, President Donald Trump, took to Twitter and directed his then-secretary of state to look into the matter, tagging Carlson and Fox News to indicate where he’d seen the information.

This episode brings to mind a similar instance from 2020, during the peak of the anti-critical race theory (CRT) fervor that had bubbled up on the right, when right-wing journalist and anti-CRT crusader Christopher Rufo went on Tucker’s show to declare that “critical race theory has become, in essence, the default ideology of the federal bureaucracy and is now being weaponized against the American people.” Avid Fox viewer Donald Trump, then in the final months of his first term, quote tweeted the segment with a short and sweet caption:

As Breitbart reported just two days after Rufo’s appearance on Tucker, “At the direction of President Trump, the White House Office of Management and Budget will move to identify and eliminate any trace of “critical race theory” in the federal government.” And who implemented that order? Then-Trump Office of Managment & Budget Director, Russ Vought—he of Project 2025 fame—proceeded to tweet himself that “The days of taxpayer funded indoctrination trainings that sow division and racism are over.”

Now, Tucker may not be on Fox anymore, but in Trump’s second term, with white supremacists and MAGA loyalists serving at the highest levels of government and with Trump serving without any constraining guardrails within the administration, the pipeline now takes a much more direct route.

“Remigrate”

Take the white supremacist Great Replacement conspiracy theory, whose proponents claim there is a global plot to replace white people in America and European Nations with non-white immigrants. It is racist, xenophobic, and anti-migrant. According to the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, believers of Great Replacement have been responsible for at least 14 mass casualty terrorist attacks across the globe, including three mass shootings here in the U.S.

Hand in hand with the Great Replacement is “remigration,” a concept popularized in far-right communities online and off, starting around 2016. Remigration is the forced removal of non-white people from mostly white countries to their so-called ethnic homelands, a form of ethnic cleansing. As Chris Mathais, a longtime journalist covering the far-right, told The Big Picture during a recent interview, “back in 2017, I could read terms like ‘great replacement’ and ‘remigration’ in the Identity Evropa chat messages stolen away by antifa spies. Now those terms are used by people in the White House.”

And like clockwork, remigration has become core to the Trump administration’s immigration policy. Last May, Axios reported the Trump State Department planned to create an Office of Remigration, backed enthusiastically by White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller. By October, “remigration” was part of the official policy of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS.)

Then, in December, the White House released a National Security Strategy memo that declared without evidence that “Europe will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less” and used Great Replacement-coded language throughout the document. Cut to this past May, when Trump’s State Department formally rejected a United Nations migration declaration by accusing the U.N. of being part of the so-called Great Replacement effort in its formal statement. As Newsweek reported,

“The United States did not participate in the International Migration Review Forum and will not support the May 8 ‘progress’ declaration,” said the statement, adding that the administration objects to U.N. efforts “to advocate and facilitate replacement immigration in the United States and across the broader West.”

How has this led to specific policy? On the campaign trail back in 2024, Donald Trump and his then-VP nominee JD Vance used their campaign platform to spread debunked racist claims about the community of Haitian immigrants living in Springfield, OH. Two years later, President Trump has successfully canceled for hundreds of thousands of Haitians as part of a broader movement that stripped Temporary Protected Status from 1.3 million migrants in the U.S. This meant anyone with TPS could now be deported at any moment, even if they’ve lived in the US legally for decades.

The Great Replacement Theory, along with Trump’s continued insistence that the 2020 election was stolen from him due to election fraud (another false conspiracy theory), also drives policy around elections and voting rights from the Trump White House. Trump has repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that non-citizens voted in the 2020 election, swinging it to Joe Biden in Georgia and other states. In fact, the theory on the MAGA fringe is that Joe Biden purposely let millions of migrants enter the country to create permanent Democratic majorities; to essentially “replace” white American voters. Enter Trump’s latest obsession: the so-called SAVE Act, which ostensibly targets voter fraud, but according to analyis from the Brennan Center for Justice, if passed, millions of American citizens would be blocked from voting. But Trump doesn’t care about that. As political analyst Philip Bump has called the SAVE Act The Great Replacement Theory in legislative form.

As Bump elaborated.

This idea that immigrants are illegally influencing elections, then, is simply too perfect not to embrace.

That’s particularly true because it overlaps with the increasingly normalized claim within America’s political right that there is a deliberate effort underway to flood the country with immigrants who will vote Democratic. This is, in essence, the “great replacement” theory, an idea transmitted from the racist fringe into the mainstream by Tucker Carlson and, later, prominent Republican officials.

And who needs Tucker Carlson when you have Elon Musk mainstreaming this notion, even tactily threatening anyone who would oppose the bill with death.

Of course, no discussion of Trump immigration policy being driven by MAGA fringe conspiracies would be complete without acknowledging the ICE surge in Minneapolis / St. Paul earlier this year. While Trump launched Operation Metro Surge in the Twin Cities in early December, that deployment was on steroids after Nick Shirley’s Dec. 26 video purporting to expose Somali daycare fraud in Minneapolis went viral.

As Vox reported after Nicole Good’s death,

the video, with its 3.4 million views, kicked off a wider national scandal. The federal government promptly froze child care payments to the state. On Monday, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz abruptly dropped his reelection campaign. The Trump administration also surged hundreds of ICE agents to the Minneapolis area as part of a major enforcement action that left one woman dead.

ICE would, of course, go on to murder Alex Pretti in that surge as well, which ultimately led to a so-called “draw down” of ICE agents in the city. But more than six months on, ICE continues its mandate of rounding up and deporting people Trump and his MAGA base simply don’t think belong in the U.S., immigration status (or criminal record) be damned. And as we have seen over the past few days, ICE continues to murder people in the streets.

“Do Your Own Research” is Now Public Health Policy

This tendency of Trump to turn fringe theories into White House policy is not limited to immigration. Trump has long been a believer in anti-vaccine disinformation and false conspiracy theories, claiming in an interview that he believed vaccines caused autism as early as 2007, a claim he continued to repeat on the campaign trail and in the White House.

During his 2024 run, Trump received the endorsement of Robert Kennedy Jr., previously a candidate himself, who harnessed the power of the MAHA Moms, a movement of anti-vaxx activists who switched their allegiance to Trump once the latter promised to put RFK Jr. in charge of reforming America’s public health system.

As Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kennedy has made quick work of turning America’s public health policy into an anti-vaxxer’s fever dream. Kennedy overhauled the recommendations for childhood vaccines and disbanded the board of experts that previously advised the CDC on vaccines. Trump’s FDA changed its recommendation on Tylenol, encouraging pregnant women not to take it because of the debunked claim that acetaminophen causes autism. Research and development funding for mRNA vaccines was slashed.

But it doesn’t stop at just vaccines. The Trump White House has issued multiple executive orders attempting to limit access to gender-affirming health care for the trans community. Kennedy is working to end the sale of fluoride settlements that help protect children’s teeth. Billions of HHS research grants have been delayed or canceled. The White House even launched a website promoting the Covid Lab Leak conspiracy theory.

What Can We Do?

This is no way to run a country. America desperately needs elected officials who don’t believe in false conspiracy theories and aren’t beholden to those who do. This November’s midterm elections are our earliest and best opportunity to course correct. We can vote out the Infowars lab leak crowd in favor of politicians who will support truth and science, and who listen to experts rather than online mobs.

Beyond that, it’s crucial that we rebuild our media ecosystem and disrupt the 4chan-to-Trump pipeline. As academic researchers and experts, Dean Jackson and Jon Bateman state in their 2024 report, Countering Disinformation Effectively, “there is no silver bullet or best policy option,” and democracies need to take a “portfolio approach” which includes experimenting with multiple interventions and strategies.

A healthy policy portfolio would include tactical actions that appear well-researched or effective (like fact-checking and labeling social media content). But it would also involve costlier, longer-term bets on promising structural reforms (like supporting local journalism and media literacy). Each policy should come with a concrete plan for ongoing reassessment.

From a systemic view, this might include bolstering local news as a public good and forcing tech platforms to stop incentivizing the spread of hate and disinformation through robust regulation. But no matter the tactic, each has unique challenges and unique avenues for implementation. As Jackson’s and Bateman’s report lays it out:

As individuals, we perhaps have more power than we realize, especially since Trump’s approval rating is low and continues to sink. There’s never been a better time to have some of those tough conversations with our family and friends who are susceptible to the sort of disinformation that bubbles up into government policy. You can learn to spot disinformation and conspiracies yourself using the SIFT method, and to talk to people in your life effectively using this guide from PEN America.

This piece was originally published in The Big Picture, one of my favorite political newsletters. Thanks so much to Todd and the crew over there for hosting me.

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The Big Picture provides a deep dive into the cultural, political, and societal issues shaping our world today, from a variety of unique perspectives.

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Remember when summers used to be a slow time for news? Me either. People might not be paying as close attention, hopefully while getting some much-needed rest and relaxation, but the Trump Regime continues to terrorize us and enact its agenda.

This week, there’s no one dominant thread, but lots of updates on topics I cover regularly. Here’s what you need to know.

ICE Killing Spree

ICE has killed two more people since my newsletter last week. In addition to Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Texas, ICE in Maine gunned down Johan Sebastián Durán in front of his wife and 3-year-old daughter. Another man in Florida was killed by an oncoming truck while being pursued by ICE agents.

ICE didn’t even bother trying to justify Durán’s killing, claiming only that the officer who pulled the trigger (identified by family as having a history of violent behavior) feared for “public safety” as opposed to his or anyone else’s life. And really, why would they? It’s clear that no ICE agents will be investigated, much less fired or charged with crimes. The agency attempted to diffuse things somewhat by claiming they had put a “pause” on traffic stops, but Trump almost immediately countered by demanding on TruthSocial that ICE keep them going.

It’s all so senseless, and as Lisa Needham pointed out in her own piece at Public Notice, so repetitive. She writes, “The nation is suffering through another spasm of shootings by ICE agents. It feels like we’re right back where we were in January, when federal agents went on a lawless, deadly tear in Minnesota. This time, however, the violence is more diffuse, spread out across multiple states. But the aftermath of all of it remains the same: a sick, lurching knowledge that you are under assault from your own government.”

Election Denial Conspiracies

This week, Trump gave a speech in prime time, once again alleging that there was interference in the 2020 election and that he’d actually won. Considering that Trump is doing everything he can, and his regime using every lever of power to undermine the midterms and other upcoming elections, I was surprised at what a nothingburger his speech was. His promised document release didn’t offer any new information outside of what’s already been reported. Even his accusations and conspiracy-mongering felt low-effort and low-key.

If anything, Trump seemed angrier than some TV networks opted not to carry his speech live, than the election he supposedly had been stolen from him in 2020 and has been on an obsessive tear about ever since.

Still, we can’t take Trump’s poor speech performance as an indicator. The Trump Regime doesn’t want elections to be free or fair, and they have this year’s midterms right in their sights. Including his continued whining about how Congress needs to pass the SAVE Act, and his voter suppression bill. The Brennan Center for Justice has an analysis of everything the regime is to undermine elections in the US, and they’re always a good resource for the latest updates.

As a reminder, for all that MAGA concern-trolling about non-citizens supposedly voting illegally, the biggest target of the American Right has long been Black voters. The Voting Rights Act is now effectively dead, and conversations around election protection and MAGA’s intentions need to center on Black voters and what they’ve lost.

Elections in the US are run locally, and no matter where you live, you have the power to influence and protect the process. This week, States at the Core has a training devoted to election protection and what folks can do in their communities. I highly recommend it to all of my readers. You can learn more and RSVP here.

Antifa

As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, the Trump Regime is coming for Antifa, and if you oppose the Regime in any way, you too are considered Antifa.

Two news stories on the antifa as a terrorist front are worth paying attention to this week. First, the Trump Regime might not be able to define what antifa is, but that didn’t stop Secretary Marco Rubio from hosting a convening of foreign ministers from other countries about how it’s supposedly a global threat.

In announcing the Regime’s effort to fight a so-called “ unprecedented global offensive against the transnational threat of Radical Left terrorism” it’s notable that the release doesn’t include the names of any of these groups, just a promise to investigate and destroy these groups. As soon as they figure out who they are, I suppose.

The other news story is an exclusive from Talking Points Memo: Federal Prosecutor Brian W. Lynch, who marched with the protestors at the Janurary 6 insurrection while employed by the DOJ, is now in charge of a Task Force which according to TPM’s reporting is, “central to its [DOJ’s] effort to prosecute alleged left-wing political violence cases, including last month’s indictment of 15 anti-ICE protesters in Minneapolis.” It doesn’t surprise me that an election denier who marched on January 6 (though he claims he did not enter the Capitol Building) is now leading the charge to hunt down and punish so-called antifa members, but it’s certainly worth keeping an eye on.

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ICE killings. Election subversion. A January 6 marcher is now in charge of prosecuting antifa. Just this week.

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ICYMI

• Rapinoe: Anti-Trans Legislation Isn’t About “Protecting Girls”—It’s About Distracting Us From What Matters (Marie Claire)

• The Woman in the Photo Wanted to Be Alone. Instead, She Went Viral. (NOTUS)

• Right-Wing and Right-leaning Online Show Hosts, Including Nick Fuentes, Are Getting Millions of Views Pushing Extremely Racist Rhetoric (Media Matters)

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This week, ICE agents gunned down and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican national, in broad daylight. Araujo’s family learned about his death via a video of the shooting posted on social media. They recognized his screams for help. No one from any official agency called them or reached out to them. The other men in the van with Araujo, who witnessed the killing, were detained and are currently being pressured to “self-deport” by the officials holding them.

Araujo had lived in the U.S. for 35 years, raised three children, and built a home for them. As his son Ronaldo said in a press conference, “He did not deserve to die. He did not deserve to be reduced to a headline of Mexican man shot and killed by ICE. He deserved to live a quiet life as Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a husband, a father, and a job creator for dozens of men who also wanted the American dream.”

The family is calling for an independent investigation into the shooting. But since neither Renee Good’s nor Alex Pretti’s deaths by ICE were properly investigated, nor criminal charges ever filed, I don’t hold out hope for Salgado’s family getting any kind of justice or recourse.

ICE continues to be an out-of-control agency, operating at the whims of the Trump Regime and accountable to no one outside of it. ICE agents terrorize communities across the US with abductions and raids. The New York Times recently reported on a surge of 10,000 abductions in five days across the US. Per reporting from Mother Jones, Memphis, Tennessee, is currently “under full-blown” occupation by ICE, and community members who attempt to get that story into the press face swift retaliation.

No one is safe until ICE ceases to exist. Starting with undocumented migrants and immigrant communities, but as we’ve now seen with Good, Pretti, and Salgado, and seven more people shot by federal immigration officers this year. ICE agents are able to kill innocent people without due process. And neither the agency nor individual agents will be held accountable.

But it goes beyond that. As WIRED reports this week, ICE’s internal watchdog is now investigating critics of the agency. The Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) has now opened 131 cases in 2026 and 2026 involving “incidents of doxing and threats directed towards ICE employees nationwide.” You’ll be shocked to learn that OPR has fallen behind on what it’s actually supposed to do—internal investigations.

The results of OPR’s investigations are Americans getting harassed for speaking out. From poll worker Paigelynne Gonyea, who was confronted by ICE agents at a voting location where they demanded she take down a critical social media post to David Streever, whom ICE agents tracked down on vacation because of an angry email he wrote to ICE’s Acting Director Todd Lyons, criticizing the agency’s actions in Minneapolis earlier this year.

At this point, I believe it’s fair to call ICE a secret police force enacting Trump’s whims. The agency is abducting people and terrorizing communities. The agency has a body count and has protected the agents responsible rather than prosecuting or even disciplining them. Now the agency is attempting to crush dissent by intimidating those who speak out against the atrocities it commits.

This is wholly unacceptable, and why Abolish ICE must be a baseline for the Left, especially candidates running for and those holding elected office. There is no reforming or recalibrating this agency. Justice won’t be done for Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and everyone who was abducted until everyone responsible has been held to account and the agency is shut down for good.

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ICE is now investigating its own critics. A poll worker confronted at a voting location. A man tracked down on vacation over an email he sent. 131 cases opened this year against Americans who spoke out.

This is what it looks like when an agency stops answering to anyone but the Trump Regime. CARD exists to document it and ensure you have what you need to fight back.

That only works if it’s free. We’ve now raised $3,490 towards my goal of $15,000 by December. Progress, but still a ways to go. If you can fund the newsletter and help keep it free for everyone, please do.

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ICYMI

• The Administration’s Propaganda Machine is Aimed at the 2026 Election (If You Can Keep It)

• Exclusive: Dr. Bernice King Calls for National Reflection Following Tragic Passing of Nolan Wells (The Root)

• Journalist-Creator Beefs are Bad for Everyone (The Wayfinder)

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Thanks, as always, for reading and supporting the newsletter. I keep going because you keep reading and telling me this work matters to you. We’re in this together. Solidarity, and I’ll talk to you again next Sunday.

Sending this one a bit early, before the holiday weekend kicks off. The headline is the title of a Langston Hughes poem, which you can read here.

America’s 250th birthday has me feeling some kind of way. I’m not alone. For the last month, I’ve been thinking about this year’s 4th of July holiday and trying to name my feelings. The word that comes up most often is grief.

Grief has been a constant emotion in my life this last decade. I lost my Dad, my Papaw, and there were multiple pregnancy losses, including a termination for medical reasons, before I got pregnant with my kids. Just this week, our family said goodbye to our beloved cat, Iowa. Which means I now get to share what I’ve learned about grief with my children, as I teach them how to experience and process loss for the first time.

What I’ve come to realize is that alongside my personal grief, I’ve also been grieving my country. America is currently being run as an authoritarian state, and those in power are doing so much damage that there’s no way an election or two will be enough to restore what we’ve lost. Roe is gone, the Voting Rights Act is gone, there was a violent coup attempt, and four years later, we voted those responsible for it back to power. Migrants and the Trans community are being terrorized, and the MAGA movement continues to destroy all the progress we’ve ever made towards becoming a fully realized multiracial democracy. Dismantling us piece by piece, and enriching Trump and his cronies with the profits. Corruption at a massive scale.

Then there’s Covid. Which took so much from us as Americans (not to mention the world). As a friend of mine put it to me, at one point, we were suffering the equivalent of a 9/11 every day in terms of lives lost, and yet we were just expected to keep going as if things weren’t falling apart all around us.

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In 2024, I wrote about how America was avoiding grieving that loss. Rereading that post, it’s hard not to see that we find ourselves where we are, caused not only by the pandemic but also by our refusal as a nation to grieve an unspeakable systemic catastrophe. We’re a crueler and more isolated society than ever before, both in the micro and macro sense. And became easy prey for Trump and his regime to exploit.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I grieve because I’ve always liked America and being American. We have this incredible culture that, at its best, can change hearts and minds everywhere. I’m always reminded of this when I travel outside the country. People love to tell me about American music and mass media that means something to them. Such as learning English by watching American TV shows or growing up listening to American popular music genres like Hip Hop or Country. Because our popular culture comes from people all over the world who came here, anyone and everyone can see themselves in its pieces. It’s our soft power and America’s true superpower.

I won’t pretend America has ever lived up to its promise or ideals. The men who wrote our founding documents were enslavers and exploiters. Our nation was forged in cruelty and bloodshed as much as or more than the promise of freedom. But I used to believe that most of us were doing our best to live up to those ideas. Trying and failing, and trying again to build a nation where anyone was entitled to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Do I still believe that now? I’m no longer sure, but I want to.

What I know is that America, at least in terms of our system of government, is lost. We can’t go back, and there’s no return to normal. We can only move forward. To do that, we must grieve. We need to name our feelings and move through them rather than avoid them. To understand that our sadness today doesn’t mean things will always be like they are now. I wish I could teach America to grieve the way I’m teaching my kids this week. Because as I’m moving through grief with my family at home, I realize it’s the same lesson.

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One thing that does give me hope is that America is more than our government. Certainly, it’s more than our current regime. An America without our diverse populace, the optimism we bring, and the popular culture we create is joyless and sad, as Donald Trump learned with the debacle that is Freedom 250 and the Great American State Fair. But seeing America through the eyes of World Cup fans who have followed their teams here, I feel more optimistic. Politics is downstream of culture, and MAGA’s continued attempts to dominate popular culture have failed spectacularly. If nothing else, our global cultural impact will outlive the current regime.

We each get to choose how we commemorate America’s 250th anniversary. I choose to grieve what we’ve lost and feel those feelings as much as I need to. I also chose to believe that there’s a better possible future for us as a nation. Which is why this weekend, alongside my grief, I choose to celebrate everything that makes America a nation worth fighting for.

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ICYMI

• They Want Us to Forget How We Saved Democracy the First Two Times. Don’t Let Them (The Root)

• Her Grandparents Fought to Join American Democracy. She’s Fighting to Complete it. (19th News)

• A Reckoning with the Future of Resistance (Political Research Associates)

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This one was hard to write. If it meant something to you to read it, consider supporting my work.

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Since I professed my love for American pop culture, I’m going to close us out with one of my favorites, an NSFW-ish SNL sketch featuring Will Ferrell and his version of patriotism.

Talk to you again next Sunday!

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For years, concerns trolls loved to write me and say something along these lines: I agree with you about white supremacists and neo-nazis, but what about antifa? Aren’t they just as bad?

My response is always the same: Please explain to me what antifa is. You’ll be shocked to learn that, as of yet, no one has given me a good answer. Most of the attempts at an explanation don’t make sense.

As a reminder, antifa isn’t an organization. There’s no headquarters, not even a PO box. Antifa is short for anti-fascist. It’s a global decentralized movement and philosophy. Activists and organizers who identify with Antifa work to stop the spread of fascism and the harm fascists bring to communities. For those sincerely looking to learn about antifa, I highly recommend the book To Catch a Fascist by reporter Christopher Mathias.

Anti-fascists don’t exist without fascists. As Clint Watts, a former US intelligence officer who has trained law enforcement, likes to point out, “I always like to remind people when they hear antifa, that means anti-fascist, which is in response to another. So if you have antifa, then you have ‘fa’ — or as in fascist, which comes down to white supremacy.”

The lack of a central organization and means to defend itself as a movement has made anti-fascist activists an easy target for the Trump Regime and MAGA. The first Trump administration liked to blame everything on antifa. Starting with the hate rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that anti-fascist researchers and activists had repeatedly tried to warn city officials about beforehand. But over the course of Trump’s term antifa would be blamed for everything from Black Lives Matter protests to forest fires. Much like “woke”, it became a catch-all term that didn’t mean much of anything other than something Trump and MAGA wanted to brand as the enemy.

This time around, the Trump Regime has declared that antifa is a domestic terror organization via executive order. (All while pardoning those responsible for January 6, many of whom were actively involved in domestic terror organizations.) The order directs “all relevant executive departments and agencies shall utilize all applicable authorities to investigate, disrupt, and dismantle any illegal operations…including necessary investigatory and prosecutorial actions against those who fund such operations.”

Since, again, there’s no antifa organization, it’s easy to dismiss Trump’s executive order as meaningless. But under his direction, federal agencies are running with it. This week, federal prosecutors in Minnesota charged 15 anti-ICE protestors with having ties to alleged antifa groups. One of those charged is an employee of the state of Minnesota. But as Ken Klipperstein pointed out in his newsletter, at the press conference announcing the indictment, prosecutors couldn’t answer basic questions about what antifa is, who they are, and if they’ve caused any harm.

Meanwhile, anti-ICE protestors in Texas were handed down sentences of more than 50 years, for a slew of criminal charges around a July 4 protest at an ICE detention center. Significantly more than the toughest convictions of the January 6 insurrectionists. Prosecutors alleged (with no real evidence) that those charged were domestic terrorists and part of an antifa cell. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche framed the convictions as a victory against antifa.

We’re only as safe as our most vulnerable, and since antifa has no meaning, it can be applied to anyone that the Trump Regime deems an enemy. The DOJ’s track record on prosecuting protestors and branding them as antifa terrorists is decidedly mixed, with multiple cases having already fallen apart, but as the convictions in Texas show, not every judge and jury sees through the Regime’s BS.

As this is happening, antifa seems to be having an “I am Spartacus” moment with people showing up to No Kings protests wearing Grantifa t-shirts, holding up anti-fascist signs, and telling media outlets they are proud to be antifa. Antifa has never been more mainstream, which gives me a chuckle but might frustrate actual antifa activists who tend to be anarchists or, at the very least, would consider themselves much further left than your average No Kings Day participant.

Whether you’re an anarchist, a democratic socialist, a normie moderate Democrat, or even a former Republican who is willing to call out fascism for what it is, the Trump Regime considers us all enemies. And when the regime comes for us, we’ll all be antifa. Solidarity with one another and against the regime is the only way forward.

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Antifa doesn't have a PO box. CARD does.

Well, technically, CARD has an ActBlue link, but you get the idea. If the Trump Regime is going to call all of us antifa anyway, we might as well make it worth their while. Ctrl Alt-Right Delete isn’t just commentary, it’s everything you need to help fight the MAGA Right, free every week, because readers like you fund it. Not owned by billionaires. Not behind a paywall. Just the work.

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ICYMI

• YouTube Doesn’t Wanna Be AM Radio Anymore (Garbage Day)

• Mothering as a Judge in an Era of Death Threats (19th News)

• What Online Platforms Can and Must Do to Help Mitigate Escalating Political Violence (Tech Policy Press)

Coda

My World Cup fever continues, and I am not ashamed. By day, I’m Team Fed Up, and by night, I’m at Lee Greenwood levels of sports patriotism for Team USA. It’s a weird time to be an American, but I’m rolling with it. And experiencing it all in Seattle continues to be an absolute blast.

Normally, I’d take next weekend off for the holiday weekend, but I’m working on a special post for America’s 250th birthday. Feel free to read it when you’re back online after some well-deserved rest. Take care until then.

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Zohran Mamdani is a talented politician and a skilled organizer. This week, his slate of endorsed candidates swept New York’s primary. The results caused immediate panic from media elites and establishment Democrats. The socialists are ascendant! Lock up your wives and children. Prepare your bunker because surely the end days are upon us.

I’m a grizzled veteran of these freakouts. The first campaign I was heavily involved in was Ned Lamont’s primary against Joe Lieberman for his Senate seat in 2006. At the time, I naively assumed that since Ned had won the primary, the Democrats would support him. But that’s not what happened. While the DNC under Howard Dean did the right thing, as did then-Senator Hillary Clinton, many Democratic leaders continued to support Lieberman rather than the party’s nominee. Lieberman, of course, won in the general election as an Independent.

It’s funny to think about now. Ned Lamont is a guy wealthy enough to self-fund his campaigns who says things like “golly” in conversation. He’s currently the governor of Connecticut, and these days, most people wouldn’t describe him as a progressive firebrand. But at the time, the chattering class acted like his election to the Senate might mean the end of civilization as we knew it.

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Now we have Zohran Mamdani, and a growing NY coalition that began with Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Elected officials who proudly call themselves socialists or Democratic socialists. Crucially, it’s a coalition led by people with clear organizing chops. Taking on the establishment and racking up wins. Arguably part of a broader movement that includes insurgent candidates like Graham Platner, Katie Wilson, and Nithya Raman, among others.

What’s changed since 2006 is that Democratic voters are pissed and more willing than ever to try something new. They want fighters, people who will work hard for them and actually govern. Twenty years ago, you could scare enough people off of Ned Lamont. In 2026, I don’t think that playbook will work most of the time.

Here’s why. At Netroots Nation, I had the same conversation again and again: Millennial friends explaining that their parents had been radicalized over the past year or so, and how said parents might now be further to the left than they are. Collectively, our parents, at least those of us with parents who were at least mildly Democratic voters previously, are ready to burn it all down. They’ve spent a lifetime dealing with this shit, and they’re fed up.

The thing is, I don’t necessarily think people have moved further to the left. I think they want elected officials who actually do the job they were elected to do. Who fight hard against the Trump Administration’s authoritarian creep, but also fix the roads, expand public services, and build stronger communities.

This week’s primary results in New York have me thinking a lot about how many older Democratic voters, like their children and grandchildren, are more open to candidates like Mamdani and his chosen slate. Obviously, New York is a Democratic stronghold. Theoretically, progressive and socialist candidates should perform better there, but the headwind might just be national.

I think about Charles Booker, who just won the Senate primary in my home state of Kentucky. This week, Booker’s opponent wasted no time calling him the “Mamdani of Kentucky.” Booker responded by saying he was flattered by the comparison. To be clear, Booker is a long-shot candidate, and I’d be surprised if he won in November. But given how mad voters are at Trump and the Democratic party, I also don’t see a downside to leaning in. If a Democrat has a chance in hell of winning Kentucky’s Senate seat, it will be because they bring something new to the table for voters to respond to. Why not go for it?

America is undergoing a seismic political alignment. The left-right binary is broken, and our federal government is being dismantled piece by piece. I don’t consider myself a socialist, but personally, I’m more than happy to be in coalition with them if it helps us win back power and then actually wield it. And like many of you, I’m also more open to new ideas and ways of governing than I’ve ever been in my life. Clearly, a lot of what we’ve been doing, what I’ve been doing, no longer works.

I’m ready to ignore those freaking out and move past them. If they don’t understand that Trump’s MAGA coalition is a bigger danger to us all than Zohran Mamdani and democratic socialists could ever be, I don’t have time to worry about them. Let them keep losing their minds. Most of America seems to be tuning them out anyway.

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This newsletter exists to give you the knowledge and the context to fight the MAGA Right. To help you understand who’s winning, why it matters, and what comes next. If that’s useful to you, keep it going. Make a donation via ActBlue.

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Barack Obama and Donald Trump don’t have much in common, but one thing they do share is an innate understanding of the importance of iconography and brand. Even though their personal brands are as different as night and day, both men are focused on how they’re perceived today, and crucially, how they’ll be remembered by future generations.

We’re seeing this play out in real time as the Obama Presidential Center opens in Chicago this week and the Trump Regime forces Extreme Makeover: Washington, DC Edition on America’s capital city. This is the future that liberals want vs. God Emperor Trump memes, expressed as public art and architecture. And while I hate to compare Trump’s self-aggrandization with Obama’s belief in America’s future, given the timing, it’s impossible for me to separate them in my head.

Let’s start with Trump’s desire to turn DC into a MAGA fever dream. It’s fascinating to me that instead of building his own monuments, structures, or even putting up a bunch of statues, he would rather destroy what already exists. Donald Trump doesn’t want to build; he wants to conquer. To make clear that the White House, Kennedy Center, Reflecting Pool, and all of DC belong to him and should be subject to his whims.

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The visuals from DC, where I lived for many years, range from unsettling to weird. The East Wing torn down, Trump’s name suddenly added to the Kennedy Center, and the most recent images of the White House South Lawn turned into an Ultimate Fighting Championship arena. But Trump’s ambition doesn’t end there. On multiple occasions, he’s suggested that his face be added to Mt. Rushmore.

It mirrors what the Trump Regime has done to our Federal government since coming back into power. Enacting Project 2025, stripping America for parts, and selling it off piece by piece to enrich Trump and his cronies. If Trump’s brand is corruption, hate, and grift, then credit to him: his reconstruction is absolutely on brand. His version of DC leaves no doubt of who this man is and what his MAGA movement stands for.

Last month, when I visited the Obama Presidential Center for a preview tour with my family, I did everything I could to keep Trump out of my head and enjoy the experience without comparison or contrast, but that proved to be impossible. (Full disclosure: this newsletter, and my story of writing it, are featured in the Imagine Your Impact Exhibit. I was also an Obama Foundation USA Leader in 2023, so feel free to take my view of the campus with a grain of salt.)

President Obama has made clear in social media content and multiple interviews that he doesn’t want the Center to be a static monument to his legacy but a living community center for people to gather, and a place to inspire future leaders to become civically engaged and active. That’s a lofty goal, and one could read it as being disingenuous.

But my reaction when I toured the campus was appreciation. I’m not the most hopeful person, especially these days. Yet I couldn’t help but admire the ambition and audacity that it took to create a public space like the Obama Presidential Center. The public art installations blew me away, and I could have spent the entire day looking at nothing else. The exhibits were designed to be accessible to everyone, with Braille labels, audio labels, and objects placed low enough for small children to interact with. Public spaces abound, including a branch of the Chicago library and the most expansive inclusive playground my kids have ever played on.

As much as I enjoyed the visit, it’s hard not to feel cynical at times. The Obama Presidential Center is a monument to hope but also a reminder of where his presidency fell short, not to mention how far America has fallen since. It’s strange to be in a space that celebrates American Democracy, even one that acknowledges the imperfections and incompleteness, when a decade after Obama’s term ended, America is currently a competitive authoritarian state at best. Something I don’t think the museum grapples with enough.

Still, the very existence of the campus, a public space built for everyone-- with the intention of fostering human connection, community, and the message that anyone can become a leader -- is decidedly anti-fascist and pro-multiracial democracy. As Michelle Obama pointed out in her remarks on opening day, “that’s the work of democracy, too, being neighborly, taking care of public spaces, having some fun, enjoying each other, shaking out of the isolation and division that have crept too deeply into our lives.”

Barack Obama isn’t going to be the leader who saves us (something he and his wife Michelle have repeatedly made clear), and I wouldn’t want him to be. We need new leaders to move us forward. But the Obama story is a powerful tale about what America can be and should aspire to.

Longtime readers know I’m fascinated by America’s mythology and the narratives we tell ourselves about who we are. As the Trump Regime attempts to erase so much of our country’s history and rewrite America’s story as a MAGA myth, the Obama Presidential Center is a defiant, rebellious, and joyful rebuke. A testament to the radical notion that America could one day live up to our own ideals.

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The Ask

CARD is once again an independent operation, and I have some big plans ahead, including:

• Moving off of Substack next month

• More livestreams

• A new website

To keep the newsletter going, I need to raise $15,000 between now and December. Can you chip in with a one-time or recurring contribution on ActBlue?

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Seattle, where I live, is one of the World Cup host cities, and this entire week has been delightful. I’ve enjoyed heading downtown to watch games in the fan zones and taking my kids to a watch party in one of our local parks (where they watched Team USA beat Australia). It’s been a lot of fun, and something I think my kids will remember for the rest of their lives.

To experience some of the joy yourself, watch this local news piece of soccer fans from around the world enjoying everything about Seattle.

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“Very poor white people” …[are being convinced that]... “very poor, hard-working brown or Black people” [are responsible for the] “problems caused by billionaire white men”... “I believe that Elon Musk did not just blindly buy Twitter. He did it for a reason. To control a lot of those narratives and what’s put into the domain.”...

-Allison Morris, Crime Correspondent at the Belfast Telegraph

This week, far-right actors in Northern Ireland exploited the brutal stabbing of a disabled man to fan the flames of hate, and riots have broken out across the city. The videos and images coming out of Belfast are horrific, but what I’m really struck by is how familiar it all is. Violent protests planned online, conspiracy theories and disinformation spreading rapidly over social media, inciting more violence. Far-Right figures in the UK and MAGA influencers and Trump Administration officials in the U.S. are piling on even further.

We’ve seen this all before. The Dublin riots in 2023, multiple incidents in the United Kingdom and other European nations, and of course, what I’ve chronicled in the U.S. over the last decade or so. We all know the role that Big Tech, and the bad actors who exploit the platforms they own, play in making the world less safe for everyone.

Then again, perhaps “exploit” isn’t the right word. You could argue that bad actors are using the platforms as intended. And if the world is burning, that’s because men like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg intentionally set it on fire. Zuckerberg is content to let users on the platforms he owns do the dirty work for him, but per usual, Musk is an active participant. Posting a stream of hateful content about Belfast on a platform juiced to ensure he’s the most influential user. The violence is a feature, not a bug. AI is, of course, making it worse, as content created to feed the algorithms can propagate faster than ever before.

Alison Morris, a reporter for the Belfast Telegraph, put it succinctly on Channel 4 News,placing the blame squarely on Elon Musk for inciting the violence, and stating that his purchase and control of Twitter (now X) were intentional. It’s worth watching.

Since my audience is mostly American, and I’m decidedly not an expert on politics in Ireland or the UK, I don’t want to unpack what’s happening on the ground too much. But I do think it’s worth noting that Belfast is in Northern Ireland, which is governed by the United Kingdom. For all of the “Ireland for the Irish” bullshit I’m seeing online, the UK Parliament sets immigration policies in London, and not locally in Belfast. Historic tensions obviously play a role, and as Al Jazeera points out in its reporting. At the same time, there’s no official connection between riot organizers and existing unionist paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland; “young men who participate in these riots would have been prime recruitment targets of such groups.”

If you want to know more from the ground, I’d suggest Alison Morris’s writing in the Belfast Telegraph, David Gilbert at Wired, and HOPE not Hate, an organization that researches the far-right in the UK.

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What is vital for my readers to understand is that the far-right is a global fascist movement. For all the crowing about America First! (or Britain First, or Ireland for the Irish, etc.) What the far-right wants is a world where they hold all the power and control, and the rest of us are forced to live by their whims. They organize and coordinate online, in plain sight, sharing best practices with one another. As reporter Phil Williams points out in his excellent newsletter, white nationalist groups in the U.S. “are openly celebrating the violent attacks on immigrants in Belfast and suggesting their followers can learn from the rioters’ tactics.”

I don’t know what the answer is. Checking in with colleagues this week, everyone who’s been following Belfast feels pretty defeated by the situation and the similarities to happenings in other parts of the world. Online hate is decidedly getting worse everywhere, and humanity lives with increasing violence as a result. But I think it’s important to be clear-eyed about what’s happening, why it’s happening, and who the villains are.

On a more optimistic note, yesterday in Belfast, thousands of people turned up for the “largest anti-racism rally” in the city’s history. There was a similarly well-attended event in Derry. A reminder that while the fascists want us to believe they are the majority, the reality is that they are not.

ICYMI

• Cops Keep Getting Arrested for Using Flock to Stalk People (404 Media)

• The Anti-Blake Lively to Election Fraud Conspiracy Pipeline (Spitfire News)

• America’s Doctors Just Voted for War With RFK Jr. (Politico)

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On Friday afternoon, I had the privilege of moderating a keynote conversation with Congresswomen Delia Ramirez, Summer Lee, and Ana Lilia Mejia at Netroots Nation. Our discussion centered on what’s possible in America and how grassroots activists can take the lead, pressuring their elected officials to get on board.

What struck me as I was reading bios and preparing for the panel is how all three women have experience as grassroots activists on the outside before being elected to public office. Giving them a unique view into how to move the needle and what works to pressure our elected officials to actually lead. Their counsel on this particular topic was everything I hoped it would be, and you can tell from the audience’s response that it was enthusiastically received. I wanted to make sure you had the opportunity to enjoy it as well.

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Next Sunday, we’re back to regular programming. Talk to you again in one week!

The Ask

CARD is once again an independent operation, and I have some big plans ahead, including:

• Moving off of Substack next month

• More livestreams

• A new website.

To keep the newsletter going, I need to raise $15,000 between now and December. Currently, we’ve raised $2,905.00 towards my goal. A solid start, but we still have a long way to go. Can you chip in with a one-time or recurring contribution on ActBlue?

If you’ve saved your payment information with ActBlue Express, your donation will go through immediately:

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If you’re already subscribed, donated, or you’re a Patron, thank you. Your contributions help keep the newsletter free for everyone. I want to make this content available to as large an audience as possible, and I’m so grateful for your help and support.

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Stop telling me to vote harder is a sentiment I hear from readers and see online fairly often. I understand it, and I feel it too. After Trump’s win in 2016, Democrats won several subsequent elections and special elections. And yet 10 years later, we find ourselves here again. With a Trump 2.0 that’s objectively more destructive than his first term in office, on a scale so vast it’s difficult to quantify.

The majority of Americans don’t want to live in a dystopian hellscape (something I still believe), and yet here we are. A competitive authoritarian system where the worst people you could dream up are tearing our country apart piece by piece, all while enriching themselves at every opportunity.

And still vote harder remains at the center of the conversation. Especially from elected officials and the organizations set up to win campaigns. Even in pro-democracy spaces. I’m guilty of it myself! And yet, as many of you have pointed out to me, that message is going out to an audience who did exactly that. Repeatedly.

I hear you, and I feel your frustration. Which is why I’ve been on a mission to find different ways to fight back and deepen engagement. I’ve worked to find the doers, especially folks doing innovative things that can inspire action in other communities.

Earlier this year I asked readers for examples of how they were organizing in their local communities and y’all came back to me with some incredible stories. Some came from Minnesota, where the state’s twin cities were essentially being occupied by ICE, but I heard from folks all over. Anecdotes included efforts for rapid response, mutual aid, educating one another politically, and working with vulnerable communities to ensure they were protected. Since then, I’ve been on a deep dive to learn more about anything and everything people are doing in their own communities to fight back.

The best definition for this kind of activity I’ve seen is community defense. Local and hyper-local efforts for neighbors to protect and defend one another, outside of the typical organizations we’ve built for advocacy and services. It’s a broad term that includes actions that are more traditionally political, such as pressuring elected officials or election protection, as well as actions that are apolitical, like mutual aid or documenting ICE activity and rights violations in a community. Minnesota is the best-known example of community defense in action, but there are efforts underway everywhere. Since folks are self-organizing and working outside traditional structures, it’s hard to quantify just how much is happening. But my sense, and that of experts I’ve talked to, is that there’s a growing movement of community defense efforts in communities large and small.

This week, I did a livestream with Jill Garvey, a co-founder and co-director of States at the Core. STAC is a newer organization that supports local community defense efforts. They hold frequent public trainings, which I highly recommend if you want to learn more about how to join or start community defense efforts where you live. Our full conversation is worth watching.

A couple of important takeaways: first is that when it comes to elections, the answer isn’t vote harder, but yes and. We already know that the Trump Regime doesn’t want elections to be free and fair, and that the Supreme Court has empowered them to take steps towards that end. But we also know that in the US, elections are run locally, so in addition to voting, it’s on all of us to do everything we can to ensure elections are free and fair in our communities. By protecting not just our vote, but the right of our more vulnerable neighbors to vote and have their voices heard, too.

The other big takeaway is the importance of documentation and storytelling. Minnesota inspired folks all over the country to step up and get involved. Jill told me that more than 50,000 Americans have attended a STAC training, and that she believes potentially millions of Americans are engaged in some kind of community defense activity. There’s a balance of keeping people safe and not exposing vulnerable communities to even more risk, but we also need more people to join the fight. And nothing will inspire others like stories of what ordinary people are doing every day to fight back with their neighbors and friends. We keep us safe, and as Jill points out, the more people join in the fight, the safer we’ll all be.

Thinking about resistance at a large scale, especially the often touted 3.5% rule, community defense is a key piece of that puzzle. Self-organized groups that trust one another and have built trust with a larger network where they live can accomplish a lot. I’ve long thought we don’t have the infrastructure we need to fight the Trump Regime and the MAGA Right, but as I learn more about community defense, I’m realizing that a new infrastructure is being built all around us. A decentralized network of citizens who are fed up with how things are, unhappy with what’s been offered by the opposition, and willing to step up to do things in a new way. The possibilities are limitless.

Next month, STAC is holding a series of four virtual trainings: Smash Authoritarianism Summer Camp. Over the course of a week, the camp will cover everything you need to know about community defense. It’s a crash course in community defense that will include both up-front presentation and breakout ask-me-anything sessions with experienced organizers. I encourage CARD readers to sign up and attend one or more sessions. I’ll certainly be there.

I’m still learning as I go, so if you have a story about community defense that I should know about or someone I should talk to, please hit me up. You can reply directly to this email or leave a comment.

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The Ask

CARD is once again an independent operation, and I have some big plans ahead, including:

• Moving off of Substack next month

• More livestreams

• A new website.

To keep the newsletter going, I need to raise $15,000 between now and December. Currently, we’ve raised $2,805.00 towards my goal. A solid start, but we still have a long way to go. Can you chip in with a one-time or recurring contribution on ActBlue?

If you’ve saved your payment information with ActBlue Express, your donation will go through immediately:

Express Donate: $25

Express Donate: $50

Express Donate: $100

Donate another amount

If you’re already subscribed, donated, or you’re a Patron, thank you. Your contributions help keep the newsletter free for everyone. I want to make this content available to as large an audience as possible, and I’m so grateful for your help and support.

And if you want to sponsor the newsletter, advertise, or partner in some way. Hit me up.

ICYMI

• Your Values Are Nothing If They Aren’t Tested This essay from Ijeoma Oluo -- about where movements fall short and the importance of living your values even when it’s a challenge -- has stayed with me ever since I read it a week ago. A meditation on where we fail and what to do about it.

• White House Seeks Federal Spending Data On Dozens Of Nonprofit Organizations (Federal News Network) Another brazen weaponization of the Federal government to punish Trump’s political enemies.

• NAACP Calls for Black Student-athletes to Boycott Southern Schools Amid Redistricting Backlash (NBC News) I’m following this story closely. Because I hope it has legs, and because I have a lot of faith in young people generally.

Coda

That’s all for now. No newsletter next week as I’ll be in Philadelphia for Netroots Nation. If you’re attending, be sure to catch the keynote panel I’m moderating on Friday evening. Featuring three progressive fighters in Congress: Rep. Delia Ramirez, Rep. Summer Lee, and Ana Lilia Mejia.

There’s still time to join us in Philly and CARD readers get a 15% discount on registration. Use the CTRLALT code.

I’ll be back to it on Sunday, June 14!

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