Appeals Court Halts Trump Ballroom Construction

An appeals court has ruled that President Trump must get Congress’s approval to build his White House ballroom and has ordered construction to stop.

After Trump had the East Wing demolished to build the 90,000-square-foot ballroom, the National Trust for Historic Preservation sued in federal district court to stop construction of the ballroom. It argues that the administration began the construction without congressional authorization, without filing construction plans with the National Capital Planning Commission — the agency Congress set up to review federal construction in Washington — and without conducting a required environmental review.

The federal district judge twice blocked above-ground construction while allowing underground work, including a bunker, to continue. The Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit upheld the preliminary injunction in a 2–1 ruling. It also put the ruling on hold for 14 days so the administration could appeal to the Supreme Court. Trump said his administration will do so.

The ballroom’s price tag has climbed from Trump’s original $200 million estimate, which he said would come entirely from private donors, to $600 million. More than half the cost is now expected to come from taxpayers rather than donations.

Meta Ordered to Pay $942M to New Mexico

Yesterday, a New Mexico judge ordered Meta Platforms — which owns Facebook and Instagram — to pay $567 million to the state of New Mexico and limit the time adolescents in the state can spend on its social media apps. The money will be used for mental-health screening, prevention programs, and treatment for minors who have been negatively affected by social media use. That amount is in addition to the $375 million in civil penalties that a New Mexico jury ordered Meta to pay after finding that the company violated state consumer protection laws and misled users about the safety of its platforms, ultimately harming children’s mental health and making them vulnerable to sexual exploitation.

Meta said it will appeal the decision, adding that it has been working to identify and remove harmful content from its platforms.

The case stems from a 2023 lawsuit filed by New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez after an undercover operation using a fake social media profile of a 13-year-old girl. Torrez said the account “was simply inundated with images and targeted solicitations” from child abusers.

Chief District Court Judge Bryan Biedscheid also ordered Meta to implement a number of safety measures, including age verification, deleting the accounts of children under 13, barring messages to minors from adults they aren’t already connected with on the platform (i.e., not mutual friends or followers), prohibiting the exchange of nude images, and continuing to send alerts warning minors about potentially suspicious accounts. The judge is also requiring several changes aimed at protecting mental health for users under 18, including hiding “like” counts by default and capping combined Facebook and Instagram use at 90 hours per month.

Blanche’s Nomination Secure

Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana said today he will vote to confirm Todd Blanche as attorney general, clearing the way for President Trump’s former personal lawyer to lead the Justice Department. Blanche has served as acting attorney general since Pam Bondi’s ouster in April.

The Senate could vote on the nomination as soon as today.

Cassidy, who lost his Senate primary in May after Trump backed a rival candidate, said on the floor that while he’s concerned the Justice Department is targeting Trump’s political enemies, he concluded Blanche is better positioned to push back against Trump’s demands than any alternative. However, shortly after Blanche took over as the acting attorney general, the DOJ indicted former FBI director James Comey, against whom Trump holds a longstanding grudge.

Blanche’s nomination had looked doubtful earlier today after Sen. Lisa Murkowski said she would oppose him, citing his handling of the Epstein files and the tax audit immunity protections given to Trump and his family. She joined fellow Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine in opposing the nomination.

With Sen. Mitch McConnell still recovering from a fall that’s kept him out of the Senate since June, Blanche needed Cassidy’s vote, since all 47 Democrats are opposed.

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US Loses 23,000 Jobs in July

The US economy lost 23,000 jobs in July, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported this morning. Economists had expected a gain of roughly 83,000 to 100,000 jobs. The unemployment rate dropped to 4.1%, down 0.1% from June. Employment continued to trend upward in health care, while local government, education, and retail trade lost jobs.

The Labor Department also revised down its estimates for May and June, finding that 103,000 fewer jobs were created during those months than previously reported.

Labor Union Asks Judge to Scrap Trump Tax Immunity

The labor union representing Treasury Department and IRS workers asked a judge to block a sweeping tax audit immunity agreement for President Trump, his sons, and the Trump Organization, arguing that forcing IRS employees to drop audits of the president and his businesses gives him an unconstitutional financial benefit from the government — an “emolument,” according to the suit — and that applying the law differently to Trump undermines the equal enforcement of tax laws.

The immunity deal is part of the settlement that resolved Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over the disclosure of his tax returns. The other part of that settlement created a $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund to compensate people who say they were targeted for political reasons under the Biden administration.

The National Treasury Employees Union joined a lawsuit that legal advocacy group Democracy Forward filed in May seeking to block the fund, which has since been updated to target the tax audit immunity.

FCC Removes Cap on Media Ownership

The Federal Communications Commission voted 2–1 to eliminate a long-standing limit on how much of the US television audience a single company can reach, a move that could lead to more media consolidation.

Since 2004, companies have generally been barred from owning TV stations reaching more than 39% of US households. The FCC will now replace that rule with a case-by-case review of proposed acquisitions.

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, a Republican appointed by President Trump, called the cap outdated, arguing it prevents local broadcasters from competing with larger media and technology companies.

The decision is likely to face legal challenges. A progressive consumer group, Free Press, plans to sue, arguing that Congress wrote the 39% cap into law in 2004 and only Congress — not the FCC — can change it. Carr has said the FCC has the authority under the Communications Act to adjust ownership limits.

Another Trump-endorsed Candidate Loses Primary

President Trump’s endorsed candidate in Tennessee lost his Republican congressional primary yesterday. Rep. Andy Ogles was defeated by former state agriculture commissioner Charlie Hatcher in the 5th congressional district.

Ogles, a staunch Trump ally, is known for his controversial views. In June, he posted that “homosexuality has no place in America,” though he later blamed the post on his staff after an outcry from Republican colleagues. In March, he wrote that “Muslims don’t belong in American society.” In 2024, the FBI seized Ogles’s phone as part of an investigation of his campaign finance filings, which began after a watchdog group filed an ethics complaint.

Ogles’s defeat was the second primary loss for a Trump-endorsed candidate this week. Two days earlier, his endorsed candidate in a Michigan congressional primary lost to a candidate who had already dropped out of the race.

The timing of their standing up to Trump was anything but coincidental.

Longtime Texas senator John Cornyn had already lost his primary, and North Carolina senator Thom Tillis had announced his retirement rather than face an uphill battle for reelection. Both men will leave the Senate in January, which means neither needs Donald Trump’s endorsement, the Republican base’s affection, or a friendly call from the party’s campaign arm ever again. This gave them the political courage to hold up Blanche’s nomination.

Their objection centered on an extraordinary settlement between Trump (as a personal citizen) and the DOJ, connected to Trump’s lawsuit over the leak of his tax information. The deal included a proposed $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund” that could have been paid to Trump allies who claimed to be victims of politically motivated federal law enforcement — including, potentially, people prosecuted for attacking the Capitol on January 6. The settlement also included language that broadly shields Trump, his sons, and his company from future and past tax audits.

Cornyn and Tillis wanted the fund killed and the audit protection narrowed, if not eliminated. And after several mealy-mouthed statements by Blance and other administration officials about the anti-weaponization fund being dead, the senators demanded that its demise be put in black-and-white writing.

Trump responded by threatening to pull Blanche’s nomination and send it back after the two senators were gone.

Despite Trump’s threats, the two GOP senators held strong. By Monday, the Justice Department had formally rescinded the fund, clarified that the audit agreement applied only retroactively, and won the two senators’ support for Blanche. As a result, the nomination was again moving full steam ahead. (Note: there is debate about how binding the deal is that Blanche and the two senators agreed to.)

For many, the episode makes a seductive argument for congressional term limits. Take away the fear of reelection, and lawmakers may finally remember that they belong to a separate branch of government. They will suddenly find the backbone to tell their president no.

But as enticing as it seems to let term limits help elected lawmakers find their courage, they are the wrong answer to the right question: how to get public officials to do the hard things required of their office in our system of government. In fact, if you can believe it, term limits would make our broken politics even worse.

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Trump Signs New Birthright Citizenship Orders

President Trump signed two executive orders attempting to narrow who qualifies for automatic US citizenship at birth, his second attempt after the Supreme Court struck down his first order on the issue. On his first day in office last year, Trump tried to end birthright citizenship for children born in the US to undocumented and temporary immigrants. But the Supreme Court reaffirmed in June that those children are citizens at birth.

Of the orders signed today, one states that the children of people the administration classifies as “alien enemies,” members of foreign terrorist groups, and people who lobby or act on behalf of foreign governments are ineligible for automatic citizenship. The administration says the order is in accordance with longstanding exceptions to birthright citizenship that the Supreme Court has already recognized. Also ineligible under the first order are the children of mothers who engage in “birth tourism” — paying to travel to the US for the purpose of giving birth here.

The second order focuses specifically on birth tourism and directs the secretary of state and the Department of Homeland Security secretary to set out regulations and guidance to target the birth tourism industry and stop the practice. The administration argues birth tourism is already unlawful under existing fraud rules.

Senate Panel Refers Fauci for Prosecution

Republican senators on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress and referred him to the Justice Department for potential prosecution. Criminal contempt carries a potential prison sentence of up to a year.

The committee voted 8–5 along party lines after Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment right more than 100 times during a hearing last week on his handling of the Covid pandemic. Committee Chairman Rand Paul and Fauci have feuded for years over the pandemic’s origins: Paul believes the virus leaked from a Chinese lab, while Fauci maintains that a natural origin is more likely.

Paul is sending the referral straight to the Justice Department instead of seeking a vote by the full Senate before doing so, a break from precedent that avoids the chamber’s usual 60-vote threshold. Even with a congressional referral, the ultimate decision of whether to prosecute Fauci would lie with the Justice Department, which in turn would still need to convince a grand jury to indict him. Fauci, 85, received a preemptive pardon from President Biden in 2025 to guard against “unjustified and politically motivated prosecutions.”

Fauci’s lawyer, David Schertler, called the contempt referral “a crude political stunt” and urged the Senate to reject what he called Paul’s “meritless and politically motivated contempt resolution.”

FDA Approves mRNA Flu Shot

The FDA has approved Moderna’s new flu vaccine for adults 50 and older, making it the first influenza shot in the US using the same mRNA technology that was used to create the Covid-19 vaccines.

The technology teaches the body’s cells to produce a harmless piece of the flu virus, training the immune system to recognize and fight it. Moderna said that in a study of 40,000 people, those who received the new vaccine, mFlusiva, had 27% fewer cases of flu than those who got a standard flu shot.

Moderna expects doses to be available to select retailers ahead of the fall flu season. The flu still kills tens of thousands of Americans a year, with older adults facing the highest risk of severe illness.

Sen. McConnell Discharged

Sen. Mitch McConnell was discharged from a rehabilitation facility today, nearly two months after a fall at his Washington home left him briefly unconscious and hospitalized.

The 84-year-old Kentucky Republican said in a statement that he’ll continue recovering at home while the Senate takes its scheduled August recess. He said he’ll keep engaging with staff and colleagues “on important Senate business,” though his office gave no timeline for his return to the Capitol. McConnell, who was also treated for pneumonia during his hospitalization, has missed Senate floor votes since his hospitalization. His long absence fueled conspiracy theories online and led to public demands for proof of life.

McConnell’s current term ends in January, and he is not running for reelection.

New CDC Director

The Senate confirmed Dr. Erica Schwartz as CDC director yesterday, giving the agency its first Senate-confirmed leader in nearly a year.

Schwartz was confirmed 51–44, with nearly all Republicans voting in favor and one Democrat joining them. The physician previously served as deputy surgeon general and as the Coast Guard’s chief medical officer. She’s the first Black woman to lead the CDC, and unlike some earlier contenders considered for the job she isn’t a vaccine skeptic. She has testified that mRNA technology is “safe and effective“ and said she’s “been vaccinating people throughout my entire career.”

Her confirmation stalled after senators pressed her on whether she’d stay independent if Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pushed actions unsupported by science. She pledged to “never betray the science” but repeatedly declined to dissent from specific actions Kennedy has taken.

The agency has seen several acting leaders since Trump returned to office.

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Trump Moves to Block BBC Over Records

A federal court has granted President Trump’s request to temporarily block the BBC from obtaining detailed financial records tied to his businesses. The document request is part of Trump’s $10 billion defamation suit against the broadcaster.

Trump sued the BBC in December, claiming a 2024 documentary edited footage of his Jan. 6, 2021, speech to make it look like he told supporters to march on the Capitol, cutting the part where he called for peaceful protest. The BBC has apologized for the edit but says the defamation claim has no merit. Two of its top executives resigned over the episode.

The BBC sought the records through discovery, arguing it needed them to test Trump’s own claim that the documentary damaged his “brand, properties, and businesses.” In response, Trump’s team filed an amended complaint narrowing the case to reputational harm and dropping claims of financial damage, which they argued makes the document request moot.

While a magistrate judge had sided with the BBC and ordered the president to start handing over records from more than 400 companies held by his family trust by today, federal district judge Roy Altman paused the deadline in response to Trump’s request for an emergency stay. Trump’s lawyers argued that the BBC’s demand was “shockingly broad” and driven by “clearly political motivations.”

CIA Forms Task Force on Cuba

The CIA has created a new task force on Cuba,The New York Times reported. The administration has been pressuring Cuba’s communist government to make the economic, political, and leadership changes demanded by President Trump. The aim is reportedly to create fissures within Cuba’s political elite and push out those the US sees as hardline, anti-American leaders in favor of more pragmatic figures willing to negotiate.

The task force will let the CIA direct more money, personnel, and technical resources toward Cuba, and it’s already adding intelligence officers who recruit spies, analysts, cyber specialists, and officers who run covert influence operations.

The CIA ran a similar Cuba task force in 1960; it helped plan the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. Officials said this one has a narrower mission, focused on intelligence and influence rather than military action.

Missouri Redistricting Fight

Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins rejected a petition earlier this week that would have let voters decide whether the state’s new congressional map takes effect, triggering an immediate lawsuit. The GOP is trying to flip the state’s only Democratic-held congressional district by redrawing its boundaries. Republicans currently hold seven of the state’s eight US House seats.

The anti-gerrymandering group People Not Politicians sued within hours, arguing Hoskins’s move violates Missouri law. Republican lawmakers passed the new map last year, hoping to flip another House seat. Opponents gathered enough signatures to force a November referendum that would delay the map, but Hoskins says Missouri’s constitution doesn’t allow referendums on congressional redistricting at all.

The state already used the new map in Tuesday’s primary. If a court puts the referendum on the ballot, judges may also have to decide whether that primary result stands.

The investigators don’t believe the intrusion was designed to poison anyone or shut off a city’s water supply — the taps kept running because operators caught the anomaly and switched to manual controls before the malfunction could cause real damage. It was something investigators believe was meant to be quieter and more unsettling: a reminder that a foreign government may already be inside the systems Americans rely on every day. A town told to boil its water learns, immediately, that something it took for granted is not guaranteed.

By the time the FBI and the Environmental Protection Agency issued a joint advisory, at least seven states had reported related incidents, and utilities from Michigan to South Dakota were switching to manual operations to keep water flowing.

The statement explained that hackers are remotely accessing internet-connected controls, changing administrator passwords, and “causing operational disruption” like flooding and pressure loss, which “could potentially allow untreated ground water to seep into pipes.”

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) attributed the hack to a group called CyberAv3ngers, which is affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. It said the hackers weren’t picking favorites — they were “targeting water entities of all sizes.” Gus Serino, a veteran water-sector cybersecurity specialist, put it plainly: “The scale and coordination of the recent cyberattacks targeting Minnesota water suppliers is unprecedented.”

For years, Americans pictured cyberwar as hackers stealing credit card numbers or breaking into government servers. That picture is outdated. Today’s targets are the systems that make ordinary life possible — water, electricity, pipelines, hospitals, ports, communications.

Water seems like an unglamorous target, but that’s exactly why it’s attractive. Most municipal utilities are small operations running old control equipment, managed by a handful of staff who also fix water mains and read meters. Of the roughly 151,000 public water systems in the country, only a few hundred participate in the industry’s main cyber-threat-sharing group.

That’s partly because many of these systems were built to run in isolation, decades before anyone thought about hacking, and got connected to the internet only later. Federal inspectors have found that most of the drinking water systems they’ve reviewed fail to meet basic cybersecurity standards — problems as simple as factory-default passwords that were never changed. None of that requires a sophisticated attacker to exploit.

Beyond the tap

Water is the clearest example of this sort of vulnerability, but it isn’t the only one. The electric grid has many of the same problems — aging equipment, thin cybersecurity staffing, and thousands of separate operators with no uniform standard. US officials have believed for years that Chinese state-linked hackers have already installed themselves inside American power systems. The grid has also seen a rise in physical attacks — vandalism and in one case a foiled drone plot against a Tennessee substation — a reminder that the threat to critical infrastructure isn’t purely digital.

Pipelines, hospitals, and ports have similar exposure. The 2021 ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline, blamed on DarkSide, a Russian-speaking criminal group, never touched the pipeline’s operating systems — only its billing software. Yet it was enough to shut down fuel deliveries across the East Coast for days.

Hospitals have become one of the FBI’s most frequently targeted sectors for ransomware. Like water utilities and pipelines, they depend on aging systems, limited cybersecurity resources, and uninterrupted operations — making them attractive targets for criminals and nation-states alike. A hospital that loses water pressure is rendered unable to sterilize medical equipment within hours.

Different actors, and strategies

Iran is one of three countries that dominate the cyber threat to US infrastructure, and experts believe each is playing a different game.

Iran operates like an opportunist. Investigators of the Minnesota attacks believe the hackers weren’t hunting for one high-value target; they were scanning the internet for any water system running an exposed, vulnerable device and hitting whichever ones they found. When the goal is to undermine confidence, the target chosen is not especially important.

One aspect of this strategy’s success is visible in the US political fight over the attacks. President Trump dismissed the theory that Iran was responsible, blaming Minnesota’s Democratic state government instead. “Iran should be so lucky,” he said. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz responded that “this is what modern warfare looks like.”

Iranian-linked hackers have used that same scattershot approach against US water and energy systems since at least 2013, when they accessed the control system of a small dam outside New York City — a low-value target, but one that made the point that they could get in.

Russia, meanwhile, fuses cyber operations into a single, coordinated campaign against one target, timed to work alongside physical strikes. Over more than a decade of conflict with Ukraine, Russian military hackers have treated cyber as a companion to battlefield weapons — knocking out sections of Ukraine’s power grid in the same window as missile attacks, and in 2022 launching wiper (or data-destroying) malware against Ukrainian government systems hours before tanks crossed the border. NotPetya, a form of malware those same Russian hackers built to hit Ukraine in 2017, was aimed narrowly at Ukrainian networks but spread far beyond its intended targets, costing companies worldwide billions of dollars — proof of how easily a state-built cyberweapon can slip its creators’ control.

Russian-affiliated hackers have also opportunistically joined in the Iran war, backing Tehran-aligned targeting of US networks.

China, by contrast, isn’t after disruption today — it’s after position for the long term. The group known as Volt Typhoon has spent years embedded inside US water, energy, and transportation networks, avoiding detection by using legitimate administrative tools rather than malware. The goal, officials believe, is to retain the ability to disrupt American infrastructure during some future crisis, most plausibly one involving Taiwan. CrowdStrike, a leading cybersecurity firm, found that China-linked activity rose 38% in 2025 — evidence of a well-funded, patient operation, not a one-time strike.

The adversary goes quiet

Attackers are also getting harder to spot. CrowdStrike calls 2025 the year of “the evasive adversary” — not because hackers have gotten more sophisticated, but because they’ve largely stopped using malware, the thing security tools are built to catch. CrowdStrike found that 82% of the intrusions it detected in 2025 were malware-free, up from 51% five years earlier, and that the average time an attacker took to move deep into a network was just 29 minutes.

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For a water utility running with a small IT staff that doesn’t work around the clock, that leaves almost no window to catch an intrusion before it’s already inside the systems that matter. Artificial intelligence is accelerating all of this — not replacing hackers, but making each one faster. The result: fewer obvious break-ins, more legitimate-looking log-ins, and far less warning before something goes wrong.

Protecting the grid

The picture isn’t uniformly bleak. Since the Colonial Pipeline attack, Washington has built out real defenses: agency-led coordination, mandatory incident reporting, and stricter rules requiring systems to verify every user and device. The EPA says it has worked directly with hundreds of water systems in the past two years to close known vulnerabilities, and Congress is advancing legislation that would, for the first time, write cybersecurity requirements and funding directly into federal water infrastructure programs.

But the gains are running against a rising tide. The barrier to mounting a serious intrusion keeps falling, blurring the line between state-directed operations and freelance hacktivists — a blur already visible in Iranian-linked activity carried out by proxy groups whose ties to Tehran are deliberately murky. Meanwhile, the agencies charged with coordinating America’s defense have absorbed real cuts to staff and budget, even as officials call infrastructure security a top priority.

The bottom line

Most Americans will never notice the intrusions that are detected and quietly stopped every day. That’s the good news. The harder truth is that deterrence in cyberspace doesn’t look like deterrence during the Cold War. There are no missile silos to photograph, no troop movements to track. Adversaries map networks, test defenses, and wait — sometimes for years — for the moment access becomes leverage.

If the suspected Iranian intrusion into Minnesota’s water systems proves anything, it’s that the front line isn’t somewhere else anymore. It runs beneath American streets, through American substations, into the systems people rely on without a second thought. The next geopolitical crisis may begin thousands of miles away. Its first effects, increasingly, could be felt the moment someone turns on the faucet.

Armed Man Arrested in CA Before Trump’s Visit

A California man was arrested over the weekend at Trump National Golf Club near Los Angeles after authorities found him carrying a loaded handgun and ammunition before President Trump’s planned visit to the property. Trump visited the golf club for a Republican fundraiser two days after the arrest, and the Secret Service is investigating whether the man posed a threat to the president.

The man, Jeanine John Taele, 38, also told federal agents he had a firearm in a vehicle parked in the club’s parking lot, the same pickup truck the security officials searched minutes later. That search turned up a loaded 9mm pistol, binoculars, and a badge labeled “security protection agent.” Deputies also found a 16-round magazine loaded with hollow-point ammunition in Taele’s pants pockets.

At a search of Taele’s home the next day, investigators recovered an unregistered short-barreled rifle — described as an illegally modified AR-platform rifle — along with additional firearms, body armor, and high-capacity magazines.

Taele has been federally charged with possessing an unregistered short-barreled rifle, a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison. He also faces California state charges, including carrying a concealed weapon without permit, possessing that same short-barreled rifle, receiving a large-capacity magazine, and a robbery charge stemming from a November 2025 robbery case. Under California laws, private citizens cannot legally possess a short-barreled rifle or a magazine holding more than 10 rounds.

El-Sayed Beats Stevens in Michigan

Abdul El-Sayed narrowly defeated Rep. Haley Stevens in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary. The race split Democrats over US policy toward Israel. El-Sayed, a former public health official, has criticized Israel’s military campaign in Gaza and supports halting US weapons sales to the country. Stevens, a more moderate Democrat, has been one of Israel’s strongest supporters in Congress.

With 99% of the vote counted, El-Sayed led, 48.5% to 47.5%.

Pro-Israel advocacy group AIPAC’s political arm spent close to $30 million backing Stevens — its largest investment ever in a single race — while tens of millions more came from other outside groups, many of which don’t disclose their donors.

After the AP called the race this morning, Stevens pledged to support El-Sayed in the general election. El-Sayed will face Mike Rogers, who narrowly lost Michigan’s 2024 Senate race and ran unopposed in this year’s Republican primary.

Blanche Says Anti-Abortion SCOTUS Decision Will Be “Permanent”

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told faith leaders on a private call last week that the Justice Department is working to make the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling “permanent in every single state,” and is “putting practices and policies in place” to eliminate mail-order access to abortion pills.

The 2022 Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade and returned abortion policy to the states. When asked about Blanche’s comment on making Dobbs permanent nationwide, a DOJ spokesperson said only that his comments were specifically about stopping mail-order abortion pills, “not a broader expansion of federal control over states.”

Even after Dobbs, medication abortion has stayed widely available in many states since the Biden administration dropped the requirement for mifepristone to be dispensed in person in 2023. Democratic-led states have also passed “shield laws” protecting providers from prosecution when they prescribe or mail abortion pills to patients in states that ban abortion.

Blanche’s remarks were posted on YouTube by a religious group, Intercessors for America, that he addressed. The recording has been removed from the website.

The remarks have complicated Blanche’s nomination to be attorney general. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine said she’ll oppose him, and with Sen. Mitch McConnell absent, Blanche can now afford to lose only one more Republican vote. Two GOP senators — Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana — remain undecided.

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Trump Accounts in Capital One

Capital One has asked a federal court to dismiss a lawsuit where one of President Trump’s financial holding companies sued the bank for closing more than 300 of its accounts in 2021. The accounts covered Trump-branded businesses including a golf course and a winery.

The bank says they closed the accounts because of activity that raised flags about possible money laundering, not because of politics.

Capital One has not disclosed the specific transactions that prompted its review, citing the confidential nature of anti-money-laundering compliance.

The lawsuit alleges the closures caused “considerable financial and reputational harm” to the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust and related entities and seeks damages, though it doesn’t specify an amount. A separate Trump suit against JPMorgan Chase over similar claims seeks $5 billion.

25 States Sue Over Trump Tariffs

Twenty-five states have sued the Trump administration over its latest tariffs, calling them a pretext for reviving import taxes the Supreme Court struck down in February. Last month, Trump imposed double-digit tariffs on 60 trading partners, including the European Union, arguing they haven’t done enough to block goods made with forced labor from their markets. The new tariffs, set at 10% or 12.5% depending on the country, replaced a temporary 10% global tariff that expired on July 24.

The administration is using Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, a law that lets the president impose tariffs in response to unfair foreign trade practices. The states argue the US Trade Representative exceeded his authority under Section 301 the USTR, skipped the required step of consulting with each country about the forced labor issues, and set the tariff rates without any explanation of how they would reduce the use of forced labor.

NC Congressman Drops Reelection Bid

North Carolina Republican Rep. Chuck Edwards suspended his reelection campaign today, two days after the House Ethics Committee recommended he be censured over his conduct toward two female staffers. Earlier this week, the bipartisan committee found a pattern of lavish gifts, personal texts, and invitations to intimate dinners and vacations that it said a “reasonable observer” would interpret as romantic advances. However, the committee found no evidence Edwards engaged in sexual activity with either staffer. Edwards, 65, denied any romantic or sexual intent.

The two-term congressman said he reached the decision to end his campaign after “much prayer and reflection” and will serve out the remainder of his current term. It is unclear whether the full House will still vote on the Ethics Committee’s recommendation to censure him when lawmakers return from the August recess.

Edwards represents the 11th district, a competitive western North Carolina seat.

Cyclosporiasis Outbreak Widens

The CDC has reported that a cyclosporiasis outbreak linked to contaminated lettuce from Taylor Farms has now expanded to 15 states, adding Arkansas, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, and North Carolina.

Federal investigators traced shredded iceberg lettuce served at affected Taco Bell locations to a single supplier in Mexico, Taylor Farms de Mexico, which has recalled bagged iceberg lettuce distributed in 27 states.

Yesterday, Michigan health officials reported the first two deaths attributable to the outbreak. Both individuals had underlying health conditions that may have grown worse from the illness and dehydration.

Cyclosporiasis is caused by a microscopic parasite spread through food or water contaminated with feces. It does not spread person to person. It typically causes weeks of watery diarrhea, along with loss of appetite, bloating, and fatigue.

Federal health officials are also investigating cyclosporiasis cases in more than two dozen other states not connected to the 15-state outbreak. Those illnesses haven’t been linked to Taylor Farms, and investigators haven’t identified their source.

Maryland Redistricting Referendum

Maryland’s Democratic-controlled legislature approved a redistricting referendum proposal for the November ballot that would let lawmakers eliminate the state’s lone Republican-held congressional district before 2028 if state voters approve it. Democrats currently hold seven of Maryland’s eight US House seats. The amendment would clarify that the state’s compactness and boundary rules for district maps — cited when a judge struck down an earlier Democratic-drawn map in 2022 — apply only to state legislative districts, not congressional ones. It doesn’t approve any new map and does not apply to this November’s midterm elections.

Senate President Bill Ferguson had blocked redistricting efforts for months, warning that a rushed map could lose in court. He reversed course in May, citing the Supreme Court’s ruling weakening the Voting Rights Act.

We did as we were taught, and that’s exactly why we aren’t in the churches that taught us those things.

Religion News Service reported a couple of weeks ago that half of Gen Z is staying out of church because of their church’s support of Donald Trump. And while some were shocked by this statistic, I categorically was not. I am not Gen Z, but only just — more of a “Zillennial” than millennial; I remember dial-up, but I had a cell phone in middle school.

More to the point, I am a young mother of two little Gen Alpha girls, and an Episcopal priest of a thriving smallish church in Northwest Austin, TX, called Jubilee Episcopal Church. Fifty percent of my congregation are Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Our oldest parishioner is in her 70s. And we are loudly, and proudly, progressive. But the politics are not what keep our belief alive — Christ is. Young Christians want to actually follow Christ, not Christian nationalism. And I see how many more young Christians are leaving churches who have treated the two as synonymous.

What Christian nationalism promised

When Donald Trump was reelected in 2024, data showed that young voters had made a shocking turn to the right. Research pointed to social media as a potential cause, with algorithms feeding young people emotionally driven content targeted to their personal interests, often created by right-wing influencers. Now, I am not a political scientist who can speak to the appeal or power of MAGA Christian nationalism in those terms. What I can speak to is the theological pull of MAGA Christian nationalism, and how the same ideas that initially drew young people in may now be driving them away.

The theology of MAGA Christian nationalism has nuances, but the connective tissue is this: the world is not safe, and God must be defended from many, many enemies — and when God is defended on earth, God will reign over His chosen children with love, while exacting vengeance on everyone else. It is explicitly patriarchal even as it can empower women in positions of prestige and leadership, provided they are still “under” a man in some way. MAGA Christian nationalism creates communal identity based not so much on what Christian nationalists have in common, but on what they are against and, therefore, whom they must defeat.

Just down the road from me in Austin, a Christian Nationalist pastor preaches regularly about how masculine men must force the US away from democracy and toward white Christian authoritarian rule, by forcibly removing power from women, ethnic and religious minorities, and those who are not Christian nationalists. While some clergy were forming human chains to block ICE raids of houses of worship in Minneapolis, others were standing at the pulpit professing support for President Trump’s immigration crackdown, then flying into Washington, DC, for White House photo ops.

Regular sermon topics for high-profile pastors like Mark Driscoll involve filtering biblical texts through a Christian nationalist framework and defining secular American government as something demonic that needs to be brought under the dominion of Christian authority.

But these beliefs are not always coming from the pastors, or the official teachings of the church. Rather, they come from laity (people in the congregation) who consume “Christian” content that proclaims Christian nationalist theologies — theologies their pastor might even find reprehensible. I have too many colleagues who are in anguish as they try to pull parishioners away from purported pastors whose pulpit is social media and whose sermons are fearmongering. Fear can be addictive, and contagious.

Meanwhile, what’s circulating on social media often finds its way right back into church: the same high-octane emotional pull online that has drawn people into voting for Trump permeates church coffee hours and Bible studies. Churches that “pray for Israel,” while explicitly condemning Palestine, or at least stoking a fear of Muslims, are not explicitly calling for a Christian nation — but conflating the biblical people of Israel with today’s nation-state as a prerequisite for God’s providence is a hallmark of beliefs that fall under the broader Christian nationalist agenda. Many churches proclaim “male headship” as the “biblical way,” meaning that women must submit to men most especially in marriage and the household. This theology is certainly not exclusive to Christian nationalism, but it is a cornerstone belief taught by Christian nationalist pastors like Driscoll and Doug Wilson.

And I need to be clear: I denounce Christian nationalist theologies, but I do not think these beliefs entirely define the life of faith of ordinary people in these churches. My parishioners who have left churches that explicitly or implicitly supported Trump rarely describe their departure as an easy break from an exclusively horrible place. These were communities of people who were doing their level best to love, and to follow leaders whom they trusted to bring them closer to God.

But my parishioners saw too many things they couldn’t abide: whether the support for Trump was explicit or implied, they clocked sermons that preached on the evils of trans people but ignored clerical sexual abuse of minors. They saw unwavering support for Benjamin Netanyahu even as Christians descended from the Apostles died at his hands in Gaza. Those threads started to illuminate Christian nationalism’s internal contradictions.

Domination over community

The paradox of the freedom touted by Christian nationalism is that it is not freedom, but domination. Christian nationalism sees any identity or expression besides itself as antithetical to freedom. This is what is so baffling to the outsider; for example, why ban abortion if you, personally, do not want one? Pastors celebrating extremely harsh bans like SB8 in Texas (the so-called “Heartbeat Bill”) are not just caring for the nebulous “unborn.” It comes down to exacting control that fits within their narrow vision of what Christianity is about. It’s about defining the terms of who is free.

And this is where it gets especially tricky: this notion that what a complete stranger can or cannot do affects you is a Christian idea — and not just a MAGA one. In 1 Corinthians 12, St. Paul writes that we are all members of one body, the Body of Christ. That represents a theology of beautiful, inextricable interconnection that rejects the modern notion of “you do you, and I’ll do me” for even the non-nationalist Christian. And while this theology is twisted by Christian nationalist discourse to see every connection as a threat, the theology is still there.

So for a generation of young people feeling starved for real-world connection, this promise of belonging can be intoxicating — whether it arrives while you’re sitting in the pews or while you’re scrolling 30-second clips of Christian nationalist content for hours on end.

But while MAGA Christian nationalism offered a tempting promise, its popularity is actually the self-consuming dragon. The very reasons it appealed are now why it is withering and driving Gen Z out of the churches that embraced it: constantly defining the community by who you are not is not a cure for loneliness. Eventually, it alienates more people than it invites in.

Teachings untethered to Christ

What’s more, many young people are appalled by what Christian nationalism considers Christlike. That same pastor near me in Austin claimed it “makes Jesus smile” when Christians join ICE, but Jesus was not teaching about being connected in one Body so that children could be sent to detention camps.

This is the irony of insisting children read the Bible in public schools: there are a lot of teachings in the Bible that clearly map onto more progressive politics, and young Christians can see that. Before Jesus is even born, his mother, Our Lady Mary, sings a triumphant song called the Magnificat that itself stands in an ancient biblical tradition of women like Judith and Yael and Deborah tearing down oppressive kings from their thrones. What’s more, the lowly, meek, and overlooked are not only seen by God in their misery but lifted up and filled with good things (Luke 1:46–55).

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In his ministry, Jesus heals and dines with tax collectors and sex workers alike, offending everyone with his willingness to see the humanity in people who work for the government and in people whom society has shunned and shamed.

And then there’s all that MAGA Christian nationalism labels anti-Christ: trans people, critique of oligarchy, and immigrants. When Jesus speaks of eunuchs — who lived a somewhat parallel experience to modern-day gender nonconformity — he describes them as people who glorify the very Kingdom of God (Matthew 19:12). The beatitudes proclaim blessing over the poor and woe to the rich (Luke 6:20–26).

In Matthew 25, Jesus paints a parable that makes service to the vulnerable — feeding the hungry, welcoming the stranger, clothing those in need, caring for the sick — central to the faith: “I assure you that when you have done it for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you have done it for me,” he said. Again: one Body. Poor people, immigrants, trans people — every body is part of the Body of Christ.

Jesus is not weaving this story without precedent, either. Repeatedly, throughout the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, God has commanded people to ensure provision and care is provided especially for the orphan, the widow, and the foreigner. God cares about the intimate, material needs of people whom the world is quick to discard, ignore, or exploit.

That is why it is transparently not Christ-like to cut SNAP benefits for 3.5 million people and counting as Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill did, or to frame public assistance as “theft” the way conservative Christian influencer Allie Beth Stuckey has done.

I have helped parishioners try to get SNAP benefits. It is an incredibly complex system that is absolutely not theft. More to the point, God does not add caveats to the commands to feed hungry people — God simply says feed them, whether they “deserve it” or not. In response, churches like mine in the Episcopal Diocese of Texas are stepping into the gap by supporting the interfaith, nonpartisan Call to Feed the Hungry campaign to fight for a fully funded SNAP program. We who have read the Bible and taken it seriously are not willing to commit idolatry by continuing to worship earthly kings whose behavior is anathema to Christ.

A different type of church

For the past decade, I have had innumerable conversations with my clergy colleagues about the impact of Christian nationalism on our churches, in the public discourse, and on our parishioners. We have lamented how much uphill work we have to do to distinguish our ancient, liberatory faith from the machinations of this modern idolatry.

But now, nearly every colleague I know has seen growth in their parishes — as have I. Young people are leaving Christian nationalism because they are seeking the perfect love that casts out fear (1 John 4:18). And to be clear, not all of these churches in my network are wildly liberal — though many are. But they are faithful and earnest, defined by the love of God that is here for all people, and working with our human foibles and hopes to walk alongside all in the great mystery of that love.

Because we, too, feel the instability of the world. But the easy answers Christian nationalism offered have not held up. What drew folks in also disillusions: where is God when nothing feels safe? The theology of MAGA Christian nationalism is sharp-edged fear that claims God must be defended for the world to feel safe; but the theology of true Christian faith knows God does not need defenders, God desires to be with us even in the muck of this volatile and terrifying world.

So we who hunger for the great mystery of God — we who live with the reality of climate disaster as a fact for the rest of our lives, we who face economic upheaval unlike that which our parents and grandparents knew, we who are simply humans enduring the everyday trials of heartbreak and sickness and loneliness — we are already weary of defending ourselves against insurmountable odds. Why then would we want to defend a God who seems unable to protect us unless we do His cruel, dirty work?

Because young Christians want to worship God. Young Christians long for a God who is truly Sovereign, and who mysteriously is deeply with us in our suffering and the ache of the world’s grief, but is not bound by its anger or fear. Christian nationalism ultimately fails to preach a fearless God and a fearless faith because it is knotted around its own fears. And so young people are refusing to stay afraid.

As I wrote in my book, God Didn’t Make Us to Hate Us, life is weird and hard to understand. Love is weird and hard to understand. God, perhaps most of all, is weird and hard to understand — “God’s ways are not our ways,” we hear, over and over. So we crave a faith that makes generous room for this strange and beautiful wrestling.

Christianity is not meant to be a faith of fearmongering. It is about following a God who beholds the worst of humanity and says: but there is so much more to you than this. That is what we hunger for. This is what feeds us.

Named one of Sojourner Magazine’s “12 Women Shaping the Church” in 2025, Rev. Lizzie is known for her passionate, fierce, and colorful reclamation of Christianity as an award-winning writer, Episcopal priest, online creative, and proud mom of two. Her debut book, God Didn’t Make Us to Hate Us: 40 Devotions to Liberate Your Faith from Fear and Reconnect with Joy won the Gold Medal for Best Devotional in the 2025 Illumination Book Awards. She cohosts a weekly podcast, And Also With You, on reclaiming Christian faith, and she honored to serve as the founding pastor and Vicar of Jubilee Episcopal Church in Austin, Texas. Her home is filled with love with her husband, Rev. Jonathan, and their two wild and wily daughters — who are often found underfoot while she preaches!

Spokane County authorities have arrested a man and charged him with arson in connection with one of three wildfires devastating the region. The Spokane County Sheriff’s Office said Aaron F. Farinacci, 37, was arrested yesterday afternoon after witnesses told investigators they saw him kneeling near where the fire started before it broke out on Saturday.

Court records show that Farinacci has a prior manslaughter conviction in Arizona for killing his father. He is being held on a $1 million bond.

The three fires — Old Trails, Autumn Lane, and Fairview — have destroyed more than 700 structures, forced roughly 65,000 people to evacuate, and burned more than 10,000 acres combined. Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown said it could take a week or more before residents can return home.

House Ethics Panel Investigating Rep. Max Miller

The House Ethics Committee announced this afternoon that it is investigating whether Rep. Max Miller (R-OH) engaged in domestic violence or illegal drug use. The inquiry follows accusations by Miller’s ex-wife, Emily Moreno, that he repeatedly abused her during their marriage. In court filings, Moreno alleges Miller threw scalding water on her chest and stomach, held a gun to her head, and hit her head against a wall. She also says she cannot rule out the possibility that he fractured their daughter’s collarbone. Miller, a two-term Republican, has denied the claims and sued Moreno for defamation.

The ethics committee noted that opening an investigation “does not itself indicate that any violation has occurred.”

Miller and Moreno — the daughter of Sen. Bernie Moreno — divorced last year and are now battling over custody of their two-year-old daughter. Earlier this week, Senator Moreno said Miller is unfit to serve in Congress. Miller is currently seeking a third term.

Following the committee’s announcement, Miller said he would cooperate with the investigation.

States Ask SCOTUS to Toss Trump Order

Democratic-led states have urged the Supreme Court to uphold a block on President Trump’s order creating a national list of eligible voters and new mail-in ballot restrictions ahead of November’s midterms. In a brief filed yesterday, officials from 23 states and the District of Columbia argued the plans carry a “high risk of errors” and that there is little time to fix them before the election.

Trump signed the executive order on March 31, directing the Department of Homeland Security to compile voter eligibility lists and the US Postal Service to create new rules for mail ballots. Implementation of the order has been blocked since June, when a Boston-based district court ruled that it violates the separation of powers and exceeds the president’s authority. The First Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, and the Trump administration then appealed to the Supreme Court.

Twelve Republican-led states filed a brief last week urging the justices to let Trump implement the order.

Blanche’s Nomination for AG Advances

The Senate Judiciary Committee voted 12–10 along party lines today to advance to the full Senate Todd Blanche’s nomination to be attorney general. Blanche has served as acting attorney general since April, succeeding Pam Bondi.

Democrats on the panel warned that Blanche would prioritize loyalty to President Trump over the Justice Department’s independence. Two Republicans on the committee, Sens. Thom Tillis of North Carolina and John Cornyn of Texas, had withheld support until Blanche addressed their concerns over a settlement tied to Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS.

Earlier this week, Blanche signed an order formally rescinding a $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization fund” meant to compensate people who say they were targeted for political reasons under the Biden administration. The fund was created as part of a settlement of Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over the disclosure of his tax returns.

A separate part of that settlement — granting Trump, his sons, and the Trump Organization broad immunity from IRS audits — remains in place. Blanche narrowed its scope over the weekend so that it applies only retroactively, but neither the memo rescinding the fund nor the accompanying statement addresses the settlement requirement that any change be agreed upon in writing by both Trump and the IRS.

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Another Detainee Dies in ICE Custody

A Salvadoran immigrant, Edwin Lopez-Cornejo, detained at a New Jersey ICE facility died over the weekend after a “medical emergency,” federal officials disclosed yesterday. ICE said the cause of Lopez-Cornejo’s death at the Newark-based Delaney Hall detention center will be determined after further medical examination. His family, however, says he had diabetes and high blood pressure, and was denied medicine regularly.

Lopez-Cornejo, 41, was arrested June 18 in Plainfield, NJ, after living in the US for about 20 years. ICE said he entered the country illegally in 2006, was removed to El Salvador that October, and later reentered illegally. He was being detained pending removal from the US.

He is the second detainee to die at Delaney Hall since it reopened in May 2025. In December, a detainee died of a “medical emergency.”

The privately run, 1,000-bed ICE facility has faced scrutiny over detainee treatment. In June, protesters clashed with federal immigration officers outside Delaney Hall in support of detainees who were on a hunger strike over poor conditions and inadequate medical care.

According to ICE records, 46 immigrants (including Lopez-Cornejo) have died in ICE custody since the start of Trump’s second term. But outside trackers, including ABC News and Human Rights Watch, have reported higher figures.

Panel Recommends Rebuke for Congressman

The House Ethics Committee found that Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-NC) engaged in “persistent unprofessional and inappropriate conduct towards two young female staffers” and recommended that the full House censure him.The committee said Edwards gave two women lavish gifts, commented on their appearance, and invited them to intimate dinners and on trips — a pattern it said “a reasonable observer” would interpret as romantic advances, though Edwards, 65, denies any such intent.

The investigation began after the committee issued a public call in April for anyone to report sexual misconduct by House members or staff. Shortly after that request, the committee learned of allegations against Edwards and opened a confidential review.

The women joined his staff while he was a state senator. He joined Congress in January 2023. The committee found that the women felt “uncomfortable with his conduct at least as early as May 2025.”

The Ethics Committee cannot punish members on its own, since the full House must vote to approve a censure resolution. The chamber is on recess until August 31.

Two Dead in Cyclosporiasis Outbreak

Two people in Michigan have died after contracting cyclosporiasis, state health officials said yesterday — the first deaths linked to this year’s multistate outbreak. Both had “significant underlying health conditions that may have been worsened by cyclosporiasis and dehydration,” the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services said. The agency did not release further details.

Cyclosporiasis is caused by a microscopic parasite spread through food or water contaminated with feces. It does not spread person to person. It typically causes weeks of watery diarrhea, along with loss of appetite, bloating, and fatigue.

Federal investigators have traced the illness to shredded iceberg lettuce served at Taco Bell locations in nine states. The lettuce came from a single supplier, Taylor Farms de Mexico, which issued a voluntary recall in July. According to the CDC, both Michigan deaths occurred before the recall.

The outbreak has sickened at least 1,947 people across nine states.

SCOTUS Declines to Pause $656M Judgement

The Supreme Court has declined to pause enforcement of a $656 million judgment against Palestinian authorities, which was awarded to victims of attacks in Jerusalem in the early 2000s that killed 33 people and wounded hundreds more. The families sued under the Anti-Terrorism Act, which allows victims of international terrorism to seek damages in US courts.

The case has taken nearly two decades to resolve. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals threw out the original jury verdict in 2016, ruling that US courts lacked jurisdiction over overseas attacks not directed at Americans. Congress responded in 2019 by expanding that jurisdiction, and the jury verdict was later reinstated.

The Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Authority are now appealing that reinstatement and want to hold off on paying the judgment until their case is resolved. The two groups argued that immediately paying the judgment could destabilize public services in the West Bank.

Sonia Sotomayor, the designated justice for the Second Circuit, denied their emergency request.

He refused, but they didn’t stop coming. Caldwell had been assigned to the Panthers for more than a year, covering their outreach work and their message about Black self-determination. He also covered more volatile ground: the party’s insistence that Black Americans arm themselves for self-defense, and its confrontations with law enforcement. The more he reported, the more the bureau asked to meet. The Panthers were dangerous, agents insisted, and law enforcement had a legitimate need for the information he had.

In early 1970, the asking stopped. Caldwell was served with a subpoena ordering him to testify before a federal grand jury and was told to to bring his notes and tape recordings. His testimony would have required him to describe everything he’d seen, and that risked exposing the confidential sources whose trust he’d spent so much time earning.

When the day came to testify, Caldwell refused to appear. A federal judge held him in contempt. But the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit sided with him, ruling that the First Amendment gave reporters a qualified privilege to refuse. The government appealed, and the Supreme Court consolidated it with the appeals of two other journalists who’d also defied grand jury subpoenas to protect confidential sources in their stories.

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The resulting decision, Branzburg v. Hayes, required the Court to balance the same competing interests that still confront journalists and the legal system today: for particularly sensitive reporting, offering sources anonymity can be the only way to get the story. But what happens when that reporting also turns up critical evidence a court wants –– to protect public safety, to solve a crime, or to prove a civil claim like defamation? When — if ever — does a journalist’s need to report freely outweigh the legal system’s need for the information they have?

The importance of confidential sources

Some of the most consequential news stories in American history have depended on sources that were — at least initially — confidential. If reporters hadn’t been able to promise anonymity and keep that promise, President Richard Nixon’s role in the Watergate cover-up might never have come to light, and in 2007 Americans would never have known about the squalid conditions and neglect of wounded veterans at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Anonymity lets sources speak freely and blow the whistle on serious misconduct without fearing retaliation.

Not all anonymous sources are leaking details about government cover-ups — some, like those in Caldwell’s reporting on the Panthers, are instead offering a window into a community that might otherwise go unheard and unseen. There, anonymity protects unpopular people from being investigated for what they think.

But none of that gives journalists a blanket right to refuse. What the law offers is a patchwork of protection — and at the federal level, very little of it.

No First Amendment privilege for journalists

In Branzburg, the Supreme Court ruled against the reporters. Apart from Caldwell, there was Paul Branzburg of The Courier-Journal in Louisville, who drew a Kentucky grand jury’s attention after describing two young men synthesizing hashish from marijuana; and Paul Pappas, a television newsman in New Bedford, Massachusetts, who spent hours inside a Black Panther office waiting for a police raid that never came — and who never wrote a story about it. Together, they argued that the First Amendment protected them from testifying because a reporter who cannot protect sources cannot gather news — which would hollow out the freedom of the press the Constitution guarantees.

By 5 to 4, the Court decided that the need for information to investigate and prosecute crimes outweighed the need to protect sources’ identities. Because grand jury proceedings are secret, the likelihood of sources being exposed was low, the majority reasoned. In federal court, then, journalists have no special privilege that lets them refuse to testify before a grand jury, even when testifying means burning a source.

That is not quite the end of it. Justice Lewis Powell Jr. supplied the fifth vote for the majority, but wrote separately to say that a reporter with a legitimate objection could ask a court to quash a subpoena, and that the balance should be struck case by case. The result is a strange arrangement. The Supreme Court held that reporters have no privilege, except sometimes they do, one that has been assembled by lower courts and weighed on an individual basis. Often, reporters lose.

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Fee for Early Access to Trump Posts

President Trump’s Truth Social is offering a new paid service that will make his posts available to businesses and investors before they become public. The service, called Truth API, will charge subscribers up to $100,000 a month for “a direct, licensed, real-time feed of the platform’s most market-moving Truths,” said Trump Media & Technology Group interim CEO Kevin McGurn.

Trump owns about 52% of Trump Media & Technology Group, which operates Truth Social. Trump has frequently used Truth Social to announce major policy decisions, including tariffs and military action against Iran.

Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Adam Schiff have urged the SEC to investigate whether Trump Media is violating securities laws by selling advance access to the president’s posts. Sen. Chris Murphy called it an “insider trading subscription service.”

Blanche’s Path to AG Cleared

Republican Sens. John Cornyn and Thom Tillis said today they will vote to confirm Todd Blanche as Attorney General. The Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to vote on Blanche’s nomination tomorrow.

Their support comes a day after Blanche rescinded the order that created a controversial $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization fund” meant to compensate people who say they were targeted for political reasons under the Biden administration. The fund was created as part of the settlement that resolved President Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over the disclosure of his tax returns.

Cornyn and Tillis had withheld their support for Blanche’s confirmation until they received written assurances that the fund would not move forward. But questions remain over whether every part of the settlement has been undone, including the part barring the IRS from auditing Trump and his family.

Yesterday, Blanche issued a statement saying he “stands by” his July 15 Senate testimony that indicated the tax audit immunity only applies retroactively and not for future audits. But neither the memo rescinding the fund nor the accompanying statement addresses the settlement requirement that any change be agreed upon in writing by both Trump and the IRS.

Spokane Wildfires

Wildfires in Spokane, Washington, have forced about 60,000 people to evacuate and destroyed at least 600 homes, businesses and other structures. So far, no deaths have been reported. The fires have burned about a dozen square miles in and around the city over the weekend and filled the sky with smoke and haze.

Over the weekend, Gov. Bob Ferguson declared a statewide state of emergency, citing drought conditions and “unusually high temperatures and high winds.” More than 1,000 fires have burned about 425,000 acres across Washington this year, the most since 2021, according to Washington’s Department of Natural Resources.

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Charges Dropped Against Canoeist

The Justice Department has dropped felony charges against three-time Olympian David Hearn, who was arrested for destruction of government property due to damage at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. The charge carried a maximum 10-year prison sentence.

Hearn admitted that he touched the water, but prosecutors had alleged he ripped a piece of sealant from the bottom of the reflecting pool.

In dismissing the case last week, the US Attorney’s Office acknowledged that the damage to the pool resulted from a “botched installation, not vandalism,” and blamed the Interior Department for saying otherwise.

The dismissal came days after Hearn asked a judge to release grand jury testimony. He argued that grand jurors were never properly told that a felony required at least $1,000 in damage, and also weren’t told that a government witness had testified the liner was already damaged and would have required repairs regardless of Hearn’s alleged actions.

Deal Reached to Avoid Govt. Shutdown

Senate leaders from both parties unveiled a short-term spending bill that would keep the government funded through December 11, likely avoiding a shutdown before the November midterm elections.

The House has already passed its own stopgap measure, which funds the government through December 4. But the two versions differ not just in timeline but also in scope.

The House bill includes a White House proposal authorizing Trump’s political appointees at each federal agency to review grant proposals from states to make sure they’re aligned with Trump’s policies. Democrats say that provision could be used to withhold grants — including disaster aid — from Democratic-led states.

The Senate proposal omits that provision in its funding bill. Any differences will need to be rectified before the bill can become law.

Idaho Shooting

Four people were killed and seven more were injured in a shooting at the newly opened In-N-Out Burger in Twin Falls, Idaho, over the weekend. Some of the injured remain in critical condition.

The suspect, identified by police as 24-year-old Chad Williams, died from what authorities said was a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Police said an off-duty officer and an armed bystander fired at Williams. His body was later found near the restaurant.

Authorities are still trying to determine his motive and said his family is cooperating with the investigation.

RFK Jr. Admits Vaccination Works

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told parents to vaccinate their children against measles during a CNN interview yesterday, as a nationwide outbreak of the disease continues. Kennedy Jr., who has long expressed skepticism about vaccines, denied that he has ever questioned the efficacy of the MMR vaccine, but also suggested that vaccine-induced immunity fades over time.

According to the CDC, the US had at least 2,371 confirmed measles cases so far this year, more than the total for all of 2025, which saw 2,289 cases.

Trump “Postpones” Iran Strike

President Trump called off a weekend attack on Iran that he had announced last week, saying the two sides were closer to a deal to end the war. Iran denied that any talks with the US were underway or scheduled.

Instead, Iran said it was negotiating with Oman over temporarily reopening the Strait of Hormuz. The two countries share the waterway, through which about a fifth of the world’s oil supply passes. Trump acknowledged the Iran-Oman talks and said the US naval blockade of Iran would continue unless “a Deal, or Total Surrender, is accomplished.”

Sen. Moreno Asks Rep. Miller to Resign

Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno said his former son-in-law Rep. Max Miller should not serve in Congress after Moreno’s daughter, Emily, accused Miller of domestic abuse. Miller, a two-term Republican, has denied the allegations. He is suing his ex-wife for defamation, and said he will stay in his reelection race. Miller and Emily Moreno divorced last year and are in a custody battle over their 2-year-old daughter.

Sen. Moreno said Miller “needs serious psychological help. He is a danger to my daughter.” The senator said had hoped to keep the matter private, citing concern for his family’s safety, but added that Miller’s “increasingly erratic and dangerous behavior” made it impossible to stay quiet.

Days later, ICE agents killed 25-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero during another vehicle stop in Maine. Once again, they were pursuing someone else. Durán Guerrero, a Colombian immigrant legally authorized to work in the United States, delivered food and cleaned a veterinary clinic at night to support his wife and three-year-old daughter. Neither man was the person ICE claimed to be looking for. Neither was a threat to society. It did not matter. They were immigrants. They were Latinos.

Their deaths drew national attention because they occurred in public. Their families could speak to reporters. Witnesses could describe what happened. Video recordings could challenge the government’s account.

Far fewer people have heard of Mamuka Artmeladze, Denny Adan Gonzalez, Aled Carbonell Betancourt, Alejandro Cabrera Clemente, Tuan Van Bui, José Guadalupe Ramos Solano, Royer Pérez Jiménez, Mohammad Nazeer Paktiawal, Emmanuel Damas, Pejman Karshenas Najafabadi, Alberto Gutiérrez Reyes, Jairo García Hernández, Lorth Sim, Víctor Manuel Díaz, Heber Sánchez Domínguez, Parady La, Luis Yáñez Cruz, Luis Núñez Cáceres, and Geraldo Lunas Campos.

Harm behind closed doors

They, too, died under ICE’s authority in 2026. But unlike Salgado Araujo and Durán Guerrero, they did not die on streets where witnesses could see them but inside immigration detention centers — institutions hidden from public view.

One of them, Geraldo Lunas Campos, was a fifty-five-year-old Cuban father of four. ICE later said that Lunas Campos had been attempting suicide and that staff intervened to save him. But the agency’s initial account of his death had made no mention of a suicide attempt. Detainees nearby described something very different: they said that guards handcuffed Lunas Campos, held him down, and compressed his neck as he repeatedly cried that he could not breathe. The El Paso County medical examiner found abrasions on his chest and knees and hemorrhaging in his neck and ruled his death a homicide caused by asphyxia from compression of his neck and torso. The autopsy report made no mention of a suicide attempt.

Months before Lunas Campos’s death, Ricardo H., another Cuban man held at the same detention camp, said that guards had denied him food for more than twenty hours. When he demanded a meal, about fifteen officers responded. According to Ricardo, they slammed him to the floor, pinned him facedown, stomped on his neck, and dragged him down a hallway while ICE officers watched and laughed. Ricardo survived to describe what happened. Lunas Campos did not.

During the first 500 days of Trump’s second term, 52 people died in ICE custody. The mortality rate reached its highest level in over a decade. Physicians for Human Rights medical experts reported a high suspicion of inadequate or delayed care in several of the deaths they reviewed, raising serious concerns that some may have been preventable. Yet incomplete government reporting made it impossible for reviewers to determine conclusively what had happened in many cases.

In detention centers, official secrecy and incomplete reporting can obscure both the circumstances of deaths and the abuses and suffering to which migrants are subjected. That invisibility helps sustain the fiction that detention is merely an administrative necessity rather than a form of state violence. The violence of confinement does not take the form of a bullet fired in public but that of a man pinned down until he cannot breathe, another beaten for asking for food, families separated, people subjected to degrading conditions, and treatable illnesses left unattended until they become fatal.

Trump first promoted the idea of detention as a necessity when he launched his 2016 presidential campaign, claiming that immigrants were “bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” His administration has continued to portray immigrants as violent gang members, cartel operatives, and hardened criminals from whom the public must be protected. In Trump’s words, those arrested by ICE are the “worst of the worst.”

But the government’s own detention practices tell a different story. Of the nearly 400,000 immigrants arrested during the administration’s first year, fewer than 14% had been accused or convicted of a violent offense, while almost two in five had no criminal record at all. In fact, some of those portrayed as the “worst of the worst” have been children. In Trump’s second term, over 6,200 people under the age of 18 have been detained. Detention does not merely respond to an actual risk to public safety; by confining people, it helps manufacture the appearance of it.

A history of hysteria and detention

This pattern has deep historical roots. Since the federal government began confining immigrants, detention has been driven less by migrants’ actual conduct than by the particular hysterias of the moment. The feared population has changed — from Chinese migrants to alleged foreign radicals to Cuban refugees to the immigrants targeted today — but the logic has remained the same: first portray a group as a threat, and then use that supposed threat to make its confinement appear necessary.

Federal immigration detention first took shape alongside anti-Chinese exclusion. During the 1870s, white workers in California blamed Chinese immigrants for unemployment, low wages, and declining living standards. These accusations drew power from longstanding portrayals of Chinese people as heathen, immoral, diseased, and incapable of belonging in the United States. In response, Congress passed the Page Act of 1875, which was used especially to exclude Chinese women suspected of prostitution, and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred Chinese laborers from entering the country while permitting only limited exempt classes to enter. Economic resentment had hardened into a racial and moral panic backed by federal law.

Exclusion required confinement. Chinese migrants whose right to enter was questioned were held in county jails, aboard ships, and eventually in dedicated detention quarters. In San Francisco, the Pacific Mail Steamship Company converted the second floor of a wooden warehouse into a locked detention shed. Its few screened windows offered little light or ventilation; hundreds of people were crowded onto grimy floors and four-tier bunks, and detainees ate without tables or chairs.

Angel Island, which opened in 1910, subjected Chinese immigrants to invasive examinations, interrogations, and detentions that could last for months or even years. The confinement itself sometimes proved fatal: some detainees died by suicide rather than face continued imprisonment or deportation. What made these conditions politically acceptable was not evidence that each person posed a threat. Racial panic cast Chinese migrants as a menace before they had even arrived.

A “Red Scare” supplied the next justification for mass confinement. During 1919 and 1920, the Russian Revolution, widespread labor unrest, and a series of bombings attributed to militant anarchists fed government fears that foreign-born radicals planned to overthrow the government. Although the bombings were real, officials used them to cast suspicion on a much broader range of political movements and associations.

Officials, employers, and newspapers blurred together anarchism, communism, union activism, and immigrant identity, often treating political beliefs, organizational membership, or attendance at meetings as evidence that an individual belonged to a revolutionary conspiracy. Palmer’s own language revealed the breadth and prejudice of that campaign: he claimed to be ridding the country of the “moral perverts and hysterical neurasthenic women who abound in communism.” His words cast communists not simply as people suspected of illegal acts but as morally and psychologically defective enemies whose identities and beliefs alone made them inherently suspect.

Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s agents, working with local police, arrested or briefly detained an estimated 10,000 people, often without warrants. The raids concentrated on immigrant political organizations, and during its first eight months the Justice Department’s Radical Division prepared 6,396 deportation cases against noncitizens. Many of those targeted came from Italy and Eastern Europe, including territories of the former Russian Empire, and belonged to Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Jewish communities.

The government confined many noncitizens facing deportation at sites including Ellis Island in New York and Deer Island in Boston. At Deer Island, detainees endured freezing, overcrowded, and unsanitary conditions. One man died after jumping from the prison’s fifth floor, another was committed to an asylum, and others were reportedly driven close to psychological collapse. At Ellis Island, prominent anarchist Emma Goldman described how the “quarters were congested, the food was abominable, and [we] were treated like felons.” Political dissent, organizational affiliation, labor activism, and foreign birth were frequently treated as evidence of individual culpability.

World War II and beyond

Two decades later, during World War II, wartime hysteria showed that foreign birth was not even necessary: Japanese ancestry alone could lead the government to treat American citizens as alien threats and incarcerate them. After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, military officials and politicians claimed, without evidence of widespread espionage or sabotage, that West Coast residents of Japanese descent posed a collective threat to national security, whether they were U.S. citizens or immigrants.

On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which was used to forcibly remove and incarcerate approximately 120,000 people, about two-thirds of whom were American citizens by birth. Indeed, a 1982 congressional committee concluded that incarceration resulted not from military necessity but from “race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership.” Here too, confinement proved deadly: inadequate and delayed medical care contributed to preventable deaths.

The government itself eventually demonstrated that mass immigrant detention was not necessary. In 1954, the Eisenhower administration closed Ellis Island and other seaport detention facilities and began releasing most migrants on parole or bond while their cases proceeded. The average detained population fell sharply, and for more than two decades long-term confinement remained unusual.

As I show in my book, In the Shadow of Liberty, the panic surrounding the Mariel Boatlift helped reverse that approach. Between April and October 1980, nearly 125,000 Cubans traveled from the port of Mariel, Cuba, to Florida. Americans initially celebrated their departure as a rejection of Fidel Castro and communism. The welcome quickly changed after Castro claimed that Cuba had sent criminals and psychiatric patients among the exiles.

News coverage shifted from the “Freedom Flotilla” to warnings of a criminal invasion, focusing especially on the young Black and brown men whose appearance differed from earlier, largely white Cuban migrants. Although some arrivals had been imprisoned in Cuba, most of those had committed only minor offenses or had been confined under vague political categories such as “social dangerousness.” Sensational claims that Mariel had brought an army of violent criminals had little factual basis.

Nevertheless, the government sent thousands of the arrivals to military bases for processing and resettlement. Many remained confined because they lacked sponsors, who became increasingly difficult to find as press coverage portrayed the Mariel Cubans as criminal and undesirable. They lived in barracks under armed supervision. Queer and gender-nonconforming Cubans were placed in segregated dormitories. When some detainees protested or attempted to leave Fort Chaffee, a military base in Arkansas, Frank White, then running for governor, used footage of the unrest to depict Mariel Cubans as a threat to public safety and argue that Governor Bill Clinton had failed to protect the state’s residents.

The vast majority of Mariel arrivals were eventually released to sponsors but approximately 400 men who could not secure sponsors willing to support them financially as they established themselves in the United States were sent to the maximum-security federal penitentiary in Atlanta. They were to remain incarcerated without hope of ever being released or deported, as Cuba would not accept them back, and without having been accused of committing a crime.

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By then, Americans had come to fear the Mariel exiles so deeply that few objected to their prolonged confinement. Even the Cuban American community, which had vigorously supported previous Cuban immigrants, remained for the most part silent about the imprisonment of Mariel Cubans. Indefinite detention had come to seem not exceptional or unjust, but necessary and normal. Just like other sites of detention, the Atlanta penitentiary, as well as other federal prisons that opened up to hold Mariel exiles were sites of preventable death through inadequate medical care, violence by guards, and suicides driven by prolonged confinement and the absence of any clear prospect of release.

As we have seen, the history of detention has never been a straightforward response to the conduct of particular migrants. From the anti-Chinese panic and the Red Scare to wartime anti-Japanese racism and the criminalization of Mariel Cubans, the government has repeatedly used particular events, allegations, or fears to cast entire groups as threats and confine them.

This incarceration, in turn, has made those sweeping characterizations appear justified. Today’s anti-immigrant hysteria takes a different form, but it performs similar work: it casts migrants as criminals and allows the public to turn away from what occurs behind detention walls, where families are separated, people endure brutal conditions and medical neglect, and some die. The walls conceal the suffering, but the rhetoric of criminality has already taught many people not to care. We should not look away. No matter what form it takes, state violence must never be allowed to remain beyond public scrutiny.

Almost everyone expected the same thing: talking to a stranger would make the ride worse, and they’d rather sit alone. But the commuters who were assigned to have conversations with riders next to them ended up enjoying their ride more than those who kept to themselves. The researchers repeated the experiment nine different ways, and the result kept coming back the same: people predicted they’d hate talking to strangers, and then they enjoyed it.

Most of us would have made the same false prediction. (I used to proudly brag about hating small talk, as though it made me deep and intellectual.) Somehow we’ve absorbed the idea that connection counts only when it’s deep. Small talk became the junk food of social life: empty, fake, and a waste of time.

And modern life agrees with us. We are told reducing human interaction will make us more productive, so we use self-checkout lines, order everything online, and set our Uber preference to silent (so we can engage in self-care or work!). We feel good about it because it seems like efficiency: we’re just trimming the filler out of the day, the way we skip ads.

But these small interactions do more for us than we give them credit for. In one study, customers at a coffee shop were told either to smile and chat briefly with the barista or to get through the line as efficiently as possible. The ones who chatted left in a better mood. People also report being happier on days when they have exchanges with acquaintances. None of these exchanges matter much on their own. But having them regularly makes you feel like you belong.

When I first learned about this research a couple of years ago, I started testing it out on myself. Every day while I walked my dog around the block, I started searching for moments of connection. Sometimes I smiled; other times I said hello, shared about my dog, asked about theirs. This habit hasn’t changed my life or made me new best friends, but I’ve started thinking of these interactions as gemstones I collect to decorate my day.

And the days I do it, I feel better. I don’t expect to get to know these people or have real conversations with them, and for a long time I would have counted that as a failed interaction. But a 20-second exchange with a neighbor was never supposed to replace a deep conversation with someone I love. The two meet different needs, and that’s okay.

Your version of this will of course be different. This week, try adding one sentence to an interaction that is normally transactional. Maybe it’s saying, “Man, this heat is intense!” to a parent during drop-off, or complimenting the earrings of someone who is delivering a package. You aren’t aiming to become friends with this person. You’re just collecting a friendly moment during the day.

I still wouldn’t call myself someone who loves small talk. But last week the neighbor who walks his cat and dog on leashes waved at me from across the street before I’d even seen him, and I felt connected to my neighborhood in a way I hadn’t felt before.

We’re back with this week’s weekend open thread, a space to gather, share thoughts, and help each other make sense of the world. What’s on your mind right now, and what questions can you help someone else answer? Come together and talk about it all in the comments.

This community is for paid subscribers, and we’d love to have you join us! The goal is to create a safe and welcoming environment for everyone, which means speaking to and treating each other with respect in the comments.

Thanks for being part of our community!

— The Preamble Editorial Team

Hamas Agrees to Disarm, With Conditions

The Board of Peace, a US-led international body overseeing Gaza’s postwar transition and reconstruction, announced a peace deal yesterday to disarm Hamas and resolve the conflict in Gaza. Hamas agreed to the deal today, but with conditions: Israel must withdraw from Gaza, fund reconstruction, and agree to the establishment of a Palestinian state, among other terms.

Israel has previously rejected the creation of a Palestinian state, and Israeli officials have said that the deal doesn’t meet their demand for Hamas’s full disarmament.

The agreement gives two weeks for Israel and Hamas to determine a schedule for Israel to withdraw from Gaza and for Hamas to surrender “heavy weapons,” a term used by Hamas.

The deal stems from the ceasefire Trump brokered between Israel and Hamas last October.

More than 1,200 people have been killed in Gaza since the October ceasefire, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

Blow to “No Bail” Immigrant Detentions

Two federal appeals courts ruled yesterday that the Trump administration cannot detain immigrants already living in the US without offering them a bond hearing where they have a chance to show they can safely live in their communities while their deportation cases proceed.

The Ninth Circuit and Seventh Circuit each ruled 2–1 that a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act allowing mandatory detention without bond applies only to immigrants encountered at the border seeking to enter the US, not to people arrested after living in the country for years.

Four other circuit courts of appeals have also rejected the administration’s position, while two have sided with the government.

The Justice Department is already appealing a similar Sixth Circuit ruling to the Supreme Court.

Newsbreak

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Water System Hack

The FBI and Environmental Protection Agency warned that water and wastewater utilities in at least seven states have been hit by coordinated cyberattacks this week, with some incidents severe enough to cause water pressure loss and flooding.

In Minnesota, which was hit hardest, more than 30 automated municipal water systems were targeted, forcing some utilities to switch to manual operations.

The attacks targeted the control systems utility companies use to run water towers and treatment plants. In Braham, MN, water treatment plant staff noticed the problem earlier this week and disconnected the hacked system from outside networks to prevent it from being accessed remotely again.

State and federal officials, including the FBI, haven’t formally attributed the hack to Iran, though it has the hallmarks of an Iranian attack. But officials are also weighing whether hackers deliberately made the intrusion look Iranian to inflame tensions during the ongoing US–Iran conflict.

Education Department Breakup Blocked

A Senate committee voted yesterday to advance a bill that would block the Trump administration from further dismantling the Department of Education (ED). Trump has sought to close the ED outright since his 2024 campaign, but only Congress can formally abolish it. Over the past year the administration instead transferred key department functions to other parts of the government.

The bill would prevent the department’s offices that oversee special education, K–12 programs, postsecondary education, and Native American education from being handed off to other agencies. The administration had already signed paperwork to set the transfers in motion during the past year, intending to move special education to Health and Human Services and other programs to the Labor and Interior departments.

The Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee voted 13–9 to move the bill forward, with Republican senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski joining Democrats, including lead sponsor Sen. Tim Kaine.

The bill heads to the full Senate but faces long odds.

Trump Pushes for “Anti-Weaponization” Fund

President Trump defended the proposed $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund today, even though it has held up the confirmation of Todd Blanche as the attorney general. Trump said the fund is meant to compensate the “great American Patriots who were hunted down like dogs” by the Biden DOJ, referring to the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Trump also accused Sen. John Cornyn of reversing his position on the fund only after Trump endorsed Cornyn’s primary opponent, who went on to defeat him.

Cornyn is among the Republicans delaying Blanche’s confirmation until he sees written assurances that the fund will not move forward. Cornyn and Sen. Thom Tillis — another Republican who has withheld his support from Blanche — also want the DOJ to modify the scope of a separate part of the settlement that shields Trump and his family from tax audits. They want to ensure the shield applies only to past returns, not future ones. But Blanche has refused to meet those demands.

Blanche met with the two senators yesterday, and the sides were reportedly making progress toward resolving the confirmation dispute. A confirmation vote seems unlikely to take place before the Senate is set to leave for August recess next week, however.

Migrant Surge

Spain deployed troops and police to its North African territory of Ceuta yesterday after tens of thousands of migrants crossed the border from Morocco.

Fifty thousand to 60,000 people crossed into Ceuta, a small city. At least 34 people died, most by drowning, according to local officials. It is not yet clear what triggered the surge.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez traveled to Ceuta today and called the crossing “a violation of Spain’s territorial integrity,” and officials say roughly half of those who crossed have already been sent back to Morocco.

According to the new deal, Newsmax’s content — including its archives — will be funneled into Meta’s AI tools to help answer questions from users across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and whatever pair of glasses Mark Zuckerberg would like us all to wear next. This means that when a Facebook user asks a question, an AI chatbot will now lean on Newsmax content to provide the answer.

The press release announcing the deal contained a bingo card full of tech buzzwords and phrases, including “reach,” “AI queries,” and “emerging technology.” And Newsmax said the partnership would ensure the millions of folks using Meta’s AI products and apps would receive its “distinctive perspective.”

“Distinctive” is one word for it.

Newsmax’s coverage is unabashedly conservative. In fact, President Trump told his supporters to watch their coverage instead of FoxNews because he grew frustrated by the latter’s coverage of him during his second term. AllSides, a company reporting on media bias, puts the network in its most conservative column, saying its coverage “strongly align[s] with conservative, traditional, or right-wing thought and/or policy agendas.”

And their bias has cost the network tens of millions of dollars in recent years. In 2025, Newsmax agreed to pay a $40 million settlement to voting-machine maker Smartmatic over false claims regarding the 2020 election. Less than six months later, Newsmax paid another $67 million to Dominion Voting Systems for false and defamatory statements about their voting machines.

Now, some of the same content that led to these settlements may help Meta’s AI answer user questions about the news.

When the machine chooses for you

Americans are increasingly using AI, from ChatGPT to Claude to chatbots, as news guides. As a college professor, I see it every day in class. I recently asked students what the national debt is, and instead of googling, more than half of the class typed it into ChatGPT. We had a long discussion about this immediately after.

But my students aren’t the only ones going the AI route. Reuters reports that at least 10% of people use AI chatbots for their primary news source. Among people younger than 35, the share is 16% and growing.

The appeal is tough to deny. AI can summarize a court ruling in understandable language, give quick bullet points about the latest law being considered in Congress, and allow users to have a back-and-forth for information rather than only getting whatever’s put on the news plate in front of them. Plus, there are no paywalls or automatically playing videos, and far fewer pop-up ad boxes where the ‘x’ to close it is annoyingly hard to find.

But lost in all of these advantages are the very real downsides. A chatbot makes loads of editorial choices well before you even see a word of content. Which sources to pull from? How much context to give to a posed question? Should it only use sources with signed deals (like Meta and Newsmax)? Users are involved in none of these decisions. The system decides and then answers with confidence.

Those answers can be dead wrong. A recent Stanford-led study tested six commercial chatbots with 2,100 questions based on BBC stories published that same day. More than 70% of the mistakes happened because the chatbot pulled from an unreliable source, missed the relevant story, or failed to find the best information available. Once it found reliable material, it usually handled the answer well. The hard part was finding the right facts to begin with.

The same researchers asked the AI questions with known false or biased assumptions — which, if you’ve checked Facebook or X recently, is much closer to real political life. Users asked why a senator voted for a bill she really opposed, or whether ballots were really hidden under tables as in the video her cousin shared. Some of the bots corrected the faulty premise while others never missed a beat and responded in seconds.

That same dynamic is now in play with Newsmax’s coverage and all of Meta’s AI-supported products. Meta also has an agreement with Reuters, an outlet with very different editorial standards and, according to AllSides, unbiased coverage. But the AI system can and will draw from both, strip away any identifying features, and merge the material into one answer. Users won’t know whether their source was the respected one or the one that paid more than $100 million to settle election-defamation cases.

To be fair, disagreement and varied sources belong in healthy political and news systems. Outlets have ideological leanings, and different viewpoints can help cancel out some of those biases and keep any one source from defining the story. But disagreement over taxes or immigration is very different from falsely claiming that voting machines secretly flipped ballots. One is a policy argument; the other is a factual claim.

When AI combines the two perspectives — or, worse, leaves the unbiased one out entirely — readers lose the context needed to judge them. When we ask for answers, the first answer automatically becomes the default. Most people aren’t willing to ask four different outlets, compare sourcing, and comb through court filings. That’s why they asked the AI in the first place.

But don’t forget: biased garbage in, biased garbage out.

What happens when good reporting locks the door?

Recognizing these problems, many of the major news corporations are trying to keep AI out of their business. More specifically, they are demanding that web crawlers — automated programs that scan the web, copy news content, and aggregate searchable answers — be blocked from using their material to feed AI systems. And in April the News/Media Alliance, representing outlets including CNN, NBC, and USA Today, demanded that Common Crawl, one of the biggest web crawlers, stop collecting and distributing their journalism for AI companies.

Their argument is reasonable. Reporting isn’t free. It requires journalists, editors, lawyers, and fact checkers. AI companies shouldn’t be able to scrape that human work off the internet, repackage it as their own, and sell it to their own audience.

But blocking AI companies from the content of reputable sources only exacerbates the bias problem. News outlets with stronger records and less biased content blocked AI systems from using their reporting at far higher rates than less reliable outlets. Which means good reporting is harder for AI to provide to their users, while cheaper, more slanted material is readily available. If the machines can’t reach authoritative information, they will grab something else to answer the user’s query.

This reality creates a catch-22 for news orgs. Outlets can either allow crawlers and subject their content to being thrown in the AI machine that makes unseen editorial choices, or they can close the door and risk disappearing from AI answers entirely. Terrific choices.

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All of this is hitting a news industry that is less than healthy in the first place. Nearly 40% of local US newspapers have closed their doors since 2005, and more than 75% of newspaper employees have lost their jobs after Craigslist killed classified ads, tech conglomerates like Google and Facebook took over digital advertising, and local papers started outsourcing their column inches and newsroom jobs to national brands like the Associated Press.

The machine only knows what someone found

This doesn’t mean we should slam the door on AI in journalism entirely. It can be incredibly useful for a variety of tasks, including transcribing interviews, searching and summarizing documents, and even building rough drafts. At Cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer, an AI rewrite desk has been turning reporters’ notes into draft stories, which editors say gives reporters in the field more time to chase down scoops.

But those same tools look very different to a newsroom whose owners are itching to make another round of cuts. Sure, AI can help a reporter and a newsroom, but it can also be the reason for eliminating them.

And newsrooms should never be replaced by AI for a very simple reason: a machine can only summarize what is already known. And in journalism that’s the whole ballgame, because before there can be a summary, someone has to discover something new worth summarizing.

This is often unglamorous, overlooked work that requires a presence and human intuition. It means camping out on the cold tile of Capitol Hill to ask the speaker of the House a follow-up question after they dodged the first one. It means noting how the CEO’s facial expression changed after they were pressed. It means knocking on neighborhood doors to corroborate witness testimony in person.

AI can’t replicate these things. It can’t retrieve a document no one requested, quote a whistleblower who hasn’t been found yet, or compare the witness’s evasive answer with something said three years ago but never entered in the record.

The machines can be incredibly helpful, but only downstream from humans. Take the reporters and newsrooms away and the stream dries up or is filled with questionable information scraped from nonauthoritative sources. The machine does not know what is missing, and it can’t warn you that the most important fact never made it online.

That is far more dangerous than the hallucinated chatbot answers that go viral and make us both laugh and feel a bit anxious about the availability of fake news. The answers we can find online in milliseconds will look polished and even be supported by hyperlinks that we too often take as a sign of fact but all go back to the same unreliable outlet or fake press release.

The Newsmax/Meta deal shows that the source list behind widely used AI systems can and will be shaped by contracts, copyright agreements, ideology, and cash. Yes, excellent reporting will remain available, but it isn’t necessarily contracted to be used for your Instagram AI feeds.

The chatbots will choose an answer from their available sources and become the only version millions of people will ever see — and never question.

Blanche Vote Postponed, Again

President Trump says he may temporarily withdraw Todd Blanche’s attorney general nomination — but keep him on as acting attorney general — until two Republican senators who are blocking his confirmation leave office next year.

Late yesterday, the Senate Judiciary Committee postponed a vote for the second time, due to opposition from Sens. John Cornyn and Thom Tillis.

Before they will agree to move Blanche’s nomination forward, Cornyn and Tillis want written confirmation that the DOJ will permanently kill the $1.776 “anti-weaponization fund” created under a settlement that resolved Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS.

Blanche negotiated the deal as acting attorney general. The fund was designed to pay victims of what the president described as political persecution but ran into bipartisan opposition when it was announced. While the Justice Department said in June the fund is no longer active, the senators want that commitment in writing.

The senators also want the DOJ to modify the scope of a separate part of the settlement that shields Trump and his family from tax audits. They want to ensure the shield applies only to past returns, not future ones. All 10 Democrats on the 22-member committee oppose Blanche, so both Republicans’ votes are needed to advance the nomination.

Cornyn said the Justice Department has not addressed his concerns, adding that the department “stonewalled” his request about the fund.

Courts Differ on Trump’s Order

Two federal appeals courts issued conflicting rulings this week on President Trump’s executive order to create a national voter list and restrict mail ballots.

Trump signed the order March 31, directing the Department of Homeland Security to compile voter eligibility lists and the US Postal Service to create new rules on mail ballots.

Earlier this week, the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit halted a lawsuit by the Democratic National Committee and Democratic congressional leaders that had sought to block the executive order. The court found that the plaintiffs couldn’t show imminent harm because neither the DHS nor the Postal Service had yet acted on the order.

That ruling contrasts with a decision over the weekend from the First Circuit, which upheld an injunction blocking the order in the 23 states that sued to stop it. That panel wrote that the order directs “unprecedented levels of involvement by federal officials in how states administer elections” and warned it could disenfranchise eligible voters before November’s midterms.

The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to lift the First Circuit’s block. The Supreme Court has asked the states to respond by August 3.

Comey Seeks Dismissal of “86 47” Case

Former FBI Director James Comey is asking a federal judge to dismiss the criminal case over his now-deleted Instagram post of seashells spelling “86 47.” He argues he’s being prosecuted because of President Trump’s animus toward him, not because he broke the law.

Prosecutors say the post threatened Trump, the 47th president. To “86” something is restaurant jargon for getting rid of it. Comey’s lawyers argued the term was used as “mere political hyperbole, not a true threat.”

Comey’s lawyers also suggested President Trump was personally involved in the investigation, citing Secret Service records showing Trump asked for a summary of Comey’s interview conducted in May 2025. A Secret Service agent wrote that Trump was “very interested“ in the case.

The filing also says agents obtained Comey’s cell phone location from Verizon under an “emergency“ request without a warrant, tracking him as he drove from North Carolina to his Virginia home.

Comey’s lawyers say investigators repeatedly failed to present evidence — including when seeking warrants to search the digital accounts of Comey and his wife — that he intended to threaten Trump or that he thought “86” meant violence.

Newsbreak

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Medicare Drug Subsidies Ending

The Trump administration plans to end a Biden-era subsidy program that has helped keep premiums for Medicare prescription drug plans low, a move that could leave millions of seniors paying more for coverage next year.

About 25 million people are enrolled in the affected plans. The Biden administration created the subsidies to reduce the impact of premium increases following changes to Medicare’s prescription drug benefit. Those subsidies kept the premiums low; now they are expected to rise, beginning in 2027.

The average monthly premium is $36, according to KFF, a nonprofit health policy research organization.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services said yesterday that it will phase out the subsidies after 2026. It argues that the Biden administration gave billions to big insurance companies. A 2022 law expanded Medicare drug benefits, including capping seniors’ out-of-pocket prescription costs. Because those changes increased the costs of providing coverage, the Biden administration temporarily subsidized Medicare drug plans to keep monthly premiums from rising sharply.

CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz said premiums would rise by less than $10 a month for most affected enrollees, “with many even seeing LOWER premiums.”

US Strikes Iran

The US launched strikes against Iran yesterday evening. US Central Command called the strikes a response to Iran’s firing ballistic missiles at a US base in Jordan on Tuesday.

A previous US–Iran ceasefire, reached in June, collapsed last month after Iran attacked commercial vessels in the strait. The Senate today rejected, 50–49, a resolution that would have directed Trump to end the war under the War Powers Act — the second such vote to fail in two weeks.

Congressman Accused of Violence

Rep. Max Miller (R-OH), a second-term congressman seeking reelection, has been accused by his ex-wife, Emily Moreno, of repeatedly abusing her during their marriage. In court filings, Moreno alleges Miller threw scalding water at her chest and stomach, held a gun to her head, and hit her head against a wall. She also says she couldn’t rule out that Miller fractured their daughter’s collarbone. According to Mother Jones, a child protection specialist characterized the bruising near the fracture as a “handprint.”

Miller has denied all the allegations and sued Moreno, calling her mentally ill, a liar, and a stalker.

Miller and Moreno — daughter of Sen. Bernie Moreno — divorced last year and are currently in a custody battle over their two-year-old daughter.

Miller has also been accused of abuse by his former girlfriend, Stephanie Grisham, who served as White House press secretary during Trump’s first administration. In a 2021 Washington Post op-ed, Grisham wrote about a relationship that “turned abusive“ with a man who had “anger issues and a violent streak.”

Though she did not name him in the op-ed, Miller sued Grisham for defamation, arguing it was widely known they had dated. Grisham later sued back, alleging Miller violated a nondisclosure agreement by publicly calling her a liar. Miller has continued to campaign for his reelection.

The Democratic Women’s Caucus today called for the House Ethics Committee to immediately investigate Miller over allegations of domestic abuse, describing them as “deeply disturbing.”

Trump’s Dulles Redesign Wish

President Trump has announced a $22.5 billion plan to redesign Dulles International Airport, part of what he called an effort to make the Washington, DC, region “safe and beautiful again.”

The plan would add more than 5 million square feet of new or renovated space and replace two of the airport’s concourses, while preserving the original main terminal. It would also retire the airport’s aging shuttle buses for a new train system.

Construction is expected to begin next spring. Trump said the project would take about two years.

Shooter’s Father Gets 15 years

A Georgia man was sentenced to 15 years in prison today for giving his son an assault-style rifle as a Christmas gift, which the teenager later used to fatally shoot two students and two teachers at his high school. Colin Gray, father of Apalachee High School shooter Colt Gray, was convicted of second-degree murder, involuntary manslaughter, and other charges in March.

Before the school shooting, Colin Gray left the gun unsecured despite warnings that his son posed a danger to others. The judge said at his sentencing, “It is clear you failed as a parent…You were convicted because the warning lights were flashing brighter and brighter and you didn’t get him help.”

Colt Gray pleaded guilty last week to all 55 charges stemming from the 2024 shooting at Apalachee High School, including murder.

At 9:37 a.m. on April 9, President Donald Trump posted a message on Truth Social as financial markets reeled from the sweeping new tariffs he had announced a week earlier.

“THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!! DJT,” he wrote.

About four hours later, Trump abruptly reversed course, announcing a 90-day pause on most of those tariffs. The S&P 500 surged nearly 10% by the closing bell, recovering roughly $4 trillion in market value.

The following day, Trump was celebrating the windfall. Speaking in the Oval Office, he pointed to billionaire investor Charles Schwab and businessman Roger Penske, boasting about how much money they had made from the market rally. “He made $2.5 million today, and he made $900 million! That’s not bad,” Trump said.

Let’s start with the obvious: anything a president says can move markets. Investors have long parsed every presidential speech for clues about interest rates, wars, sanctions and trade.

But Trump has taken that relationship to another level, openly encouraging investors to buy while demonstrating just how quickly his own policy announcements can erase or create trillions of dollars in market value. According to CNN, the president posted more than 6,000 times on Truth Social last year, commenting almost daily on companies, industries, and policy. Most presidents make only a handful of market-moving remarks each year.

What’s more, Trump’s words and his wealth often intersect. CNN found a related pattern in Trump’s own trading: his investment accounts, managed on his behalf but reported under his name in his disclosures, made at least 44 stock purchases across 21 companies in the week before he posted something favorable about those companies. Nvidia is the clearest example. His accounts bought between $200,000 and $500,000 of the stock in April 2025, just days before he posted that the government would expedite permits for Nvidia’s AI supercomputer plans.

CNN found no evidence the president used those posts deliberately to lift his own holdings, and most of his more than 20,000 trades last year had no post attached to them at all. Seventeen of his purchases were even followed by posts criticizing the company, not praising it — Comcast and Microsoft among them.

The White House’s answer has been the same one, repeated by spokesperson Anna Kelly: “There are no conflicts of interest.”

An ethical conflict without rules

For the last 50 years, every president who owned individual stocks or businesses handled the conflict the same basic way: they got rid of it. Jimmy Carter put his family’s peanut farm into a blind trust before taking office, meaning that he was not aware of how it was being run. Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush also used blind trusts and did not know what specific investment decisions were made on their behalf while they held office. Barack Obama shifted his money into broad, diversified mutual funds rather than picking individual companies. Joe Biden didn’t trade individual stocks in office at all. Different methods, same goal: make it impossible for the president’s decisions and the president’s money to touch each other, even in theory.

Trump broke that pattern. He did not put his investments in a blind trust, instead outsourcing trading decisions to brokers. His stake in Trump Media sits in a trust managed by his son, Donald Trump Jr. Trump can’t direct trades, but he can see what trades are made and has signed the disclosure forms listing those assets.

Richard Painter, who was the chief White House ethics lawyer under George W. Bush, says that distinction is the whole ballgame. He argues that this isn’t really about who is clicking “buy.” Simply knowing you own stock in an industry you can regulate is itself the conflict, he says, regardless of who executes the trade. “If he were defense secretary,” Painter said, “he would be committing a crime.”

That’s because federal ethics rules prohibit cabinet officials from owning assets affected by their own decisions. But the presidency is exempt. As Gary Kalman of Transparency International US notes, the one official who isn’t legally required to recuse himself from conflicts is also the one the law largely does not cover.

That criticism isn’t coming only from Trump’s usual opponents. Dan Greenberg, a senior legal fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute — a think tank generally skeptical of government regulation and no ally of the Democratic Party — called Trump’s investment arrangement “an ethics disaster.”

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Congress has started to notice the same problem, though not quite the way you’d expect. Trump has said he supports banning members of Congress from trading individual stocks. Lawmakers in both parties have increasingly embraced that idea, and last year Republicans and Democrats introduced bills that would have barred congressional stock trading. Some proposals, including one backed by Republican Senator Josh Hawley, would also have applied to the president. Those provisions didn’t survive. The version that passed the House restricted members of Congress but left the presidency untouched — an odd omission, given that no member of Congress can move markets with a sentence the way a president can.

Stocks are only one channel where the presidency and Trump’s financial interests overlap. Crypto is another, and a bigger one. Trump once called bitcoin “a scam.” He doesn’t anymore. Sometime between 2019 and his second term, crypto became one of the largest sources of his personal income. At the same time, cryptocurrency executives and companies increasingly backed Republicans — including Trump — making the industry one of the 2024 election’s biggest political spenders.

Early in his term, Trump signed an executive order pushing regulators toward a lighter touch on the industry, at the same time his family’s own crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, was still raising money from investors. Trump also launched a personal memecoin, $TRUMP, days before his inauguration; its value spiked, then collapsed, with early insiders profiting most while later buyers were left holding the losses. His 2025 disclosures show that more than half of his reported $2 billion income his first year back in office came from crypto.

Closing the loop between information and profit

For years, Wall Street has paid for speed. Firms pay for Bloomberg terminals and direct data feeds because a few milliseconds of advance notice on market-moving news can be worth millions of dollars in a single trade.

Trump Media is about to sell that same kind of speed, using the president’s own words as the product. Starting August 1, its new offering, called the Truth API, will give paying firms faster access to posts from the ten most-followed accounts on Truth Social. One of those accounts belongs to the president of the United States. The company has pitched pricing as high as $100,000 a month, or a discounted $60,000 a month for firms willing to sign a three-year contract.

Sit with that for a second. Trump’s posts already move markets. He owns assets that respond to those moves. Now his media company wants to sell traders faster access to the posts themselves. The loop has closed.

Donald Sherman, who leads the government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, called the early access “wildly unethical.”

But Sherman stopped short of calling it illegal. Insider trading law is built around information that is non-public. If hundreds of firms are paying a subscription fee for early access to a presidential post, is that post still non-public information, or has it simply become a product anyone can buy? Nobody wrote the laws with that question in mind, presumably because no president has ever tried to sell early access to his own words before.

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Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, called the arrangement “an egregious scheme to profit off the presidency.”

The White House has, so far, referred questions about the Truth API to Trump Media, which hasn’t answered them.

Every president in modern memory has tried to build a real barrier between the office and his own money. Whatever the method, all of them treated that separation as the entire point.

Trump has collapsed that separation. He’s no longer merely participating in the market. He is simultaneously the person whose words move markets, the investor who sees his wealth rise and fall with those movements, and, through his media company, the seller of access to those market-moving words.

Iran Attacks US Base

Iran fired ballistic missiles at US troops earlier today, days after Trump paused US airstrikes to allow ceasefire talks to continue. US Central Command said all the missiles were intercepted.

Iranian forces also struck at least three oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, saying the vessels had violated Iran’s blockade of the waterway.

President Trump vowed a forceful response to the missile attacks, telling Fox News the US would “beat the f---ing s--- out of” Iran.

The US and Saudi Arabia carried out joint strikes on Iranian-backed militia sites in Iraq, saying the groups had launched drone attacks on Saudi Arabia in recent days.

Fauci Invokes Fifth

Dr. Anthony Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination during today’s testimony before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on the origins of Covid-19. Fauci, who led the federal Covid-19 response, accused committee chair Rand Paul (R-KY) of having an “unhinged obsession” with him.

In his opening statement, Fauci said he respects legitimate congressional oversight but that he believes the only reason Paul called the hearing was to get Fauci to incriminate himself under oath.

Republican senators continued questioning Fauci anyway. Paul said Fauci’s refusal to answer would have consequences and that a 2025 preemptive pardon from President Biden to guard against “unjustified and politically motivated prosecutions“ might not protect him. The committee chair has scheduled an August 5 vote by the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on a resolution to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress.

When Fauci’s attorney, David Schertler, tried to speak without being recognized, Paul had him removed from the room.

Paul and Fauci have feuded for years over the pandemic’s origins: Paul believes the virus leaked from a Chinese lab, while Fauci maintains natural spillover is more likely.

Fauci invoked the Fifth despite his 2025 pardon because that pardon only covers any federal offenses committed before it was issued on January 20, 2025. It doesn’t protect him from perjury charges for anything he might have said at this hearing, or from state-level prosecution.

Trump Asks SCOTUS to Toss Judgment

President Trump and the Justice Department are separately asking the Supreme Court to overturn an $83.3 million defamation judgment against Trump in a lawsuit brought by writer E. Jean Carroll. In 2024, a jury found Trump had defamed Carroll during his first term in office when he repeatedly denied sexually assaulting her in the ’90s.

Trump’s attorneys argue he has presidential immunity for those statements — which were made during his first term — and cite a 2024 Supreme Court immunity ruling in his favor.

Separately, the DOJ’s petition argues it should have been allowed to substitute the US government for Trump as the defendant under the Westfall Act, a law shielding federal employees from certain lawsuits tied to their official duties.

Two weeks ago, Carroll collected $5.6 million, including interest, from a separate verdict after the Supreme Court declined to hear Trump’s appeal in that case.

Newsbreak

This book storage basket is a great way to store your “to be read” list. It can hold 10 to 15 books at a time, and comes with sturdy rope handles for easy lifting and transportation, so you can take your stack of books with you anywhere at home.

Georgia Teen Gets Life

A judge sentenced a Georgia teenager to life without parole yesterday for a September 2024 shooting at his high school that killed two students and two teachers. Colt Gray pleaded guilty last week to all 55 counts against him, including murder, at the Apalachee High School. He was 14 years old at the time and was charged as an adult.

Gray’s father, Colin Gray, bought him the assault-style rifle used in the attack as a Christmas gift and left it unsecured despite warnings that his son was a danger to others. A jury convicted the father of murder and manslaughter charges in March. He’s expected to be sentenced tomorrow.

More than a year before the shooting, Gray wrote on the messaging platform Discord, “I want people to remember the pain I caused and research me for hours.” He had also expressed an obsession with Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz, who killed 17 people in 2018.

Judge Nicholas Primm called Gray’s actions “deliberate, contemplated evil,” telling him, “You seem to relish following in the footsteps of the murderers you idolize.”

New Spy Chief

The Senate confirmed Jay Clayton as director of national intelligence yesterday in a party-line vote, 51–47. Democrats had criticized Clayton for repeatedly failing to directly say Joe Biden won the 2020 election when questioned about it during his confirmation hearing.

Clayton, the US attorney for the Southern District of New York and a former SEC chair under Trump, replaces acting DNI Bill Pulte and takes over with a much smaller workforce than his predecessor, Tulsi Gabbard, had.

Pulte said yesterday that he cut the ODNI workforce by 30% during his tenure of five and a half weeks.

Reflecting Pool

A former Olympic canoeist charged with vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has asked a judge to turn over all grand jury testimony that led to his indictment, citing “irregularities” in the proceedings. David Hearn’s lawyers also want prosecutors to disclose the legal instructions given to grand jurors about the elements of the charge against him.

A government witness testified that the area of the pool liner was already damaged and would have required repairs regardless of Hearn’s alleged actions. To bring a felony charge, prosecutors needed to show that Hearn caused at least $1,000 in damage — the threshold that separates a felony from a misdemeanor under DC law — and Hearn’s lawyer argued that the jury was not properly instructed about that distinction.

Hearn pleaded not guilty earlier this month to one felony count of destruction of property, a charge that carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison. His trial is scheduled to start September 28.

Russia Sanctions

The Senate voted yesterday to advance a sanctions bill targeting Russia and extending sanctions on Iran, clearing the way for a full floor vote. 50 Republicans and 36 Democrats supported ending debate on the measure, now called the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026 in honor of the senator who died July 11. The vote came hours after Graham’s funeral service at Washington National Cathedral.

The bill aims to increase economic pressure on Russia — as Graham sought — by targeting oil revenue that funds its war in Ukraine. It would sanction Russian officials and oligarchs, along with their family members, Russian banks, and the “shadow fleet,” a network of ships Russia uses to sell oil while evading sanctions. It would also let the president impose tariffs on the top buyers of Russian oil to pressure them into cutting ties with Moscow. Some Democrats objected to that tariff provision, saying it hands Trump too much authority.

At Trump’s request, the bill also extends existing sanctions restricting Iran’s oil-linked funding for its weapons programs.

ICE to Deport Haitians

ICE plans to increase operations to arrest and deport Haitian migrants after their deportation protections expired Monday. Roughly 350,000 Haitian immigrants lost their ability to legally live and work in the US when their temporary protected status — a designation Congress created in 1990 for migrants from countries hit by war or disaster — ended.

ICE’s plans include arresting migrants in Ohio cities like Springfield, which has a large Haitian immigrant population and which Trump repeatedly targeted during the 2024 campaign with false claims that Haitian immigrants there were eating residents’ pets.

Last month, the Supreme Court ruled the Trump administration could terminate TPS designations for Haitian and 6,000 Syrian immigrants.

Interest Rate Stays Same

The Federal Reserve left interest rates unchanged today, a fifth straight hold. Three of the 12 members of the policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee wanted a 0.25% hike, believing it was necessary to lower the current inflation rate of 3.5% annually. The Fed’s target is 2% or lower. Last month’s decision was unanimous.

The Fed has held rates steady despite repeated calls from President Trump to lower them.

Crenshaw, the famed law professor, legal scholar, and policy leader who helped create the concept of critical race theory (CRT), has been thrust into the spotlight more than ever during one of the most divisive times in the nation’s history. But she’s refusing to stay silent, no matter what attacks come her way.

While her intent in developing the legal and academic framework of CRT was to illuminate entrenched racial disparities, CRT has become a political flashpoint. The concept has been misrepresented and weaponized as the basis of right-wing and MAGA campaigns such as Ron DeSantis’s Stop WOKE Act, and invoked in political races from the highest office in the land to school boards around the country.

But the backlash hasn’t silenced Crenshaw. Instead, she’s kept talking about racial inequality through her lectures, her teaching at UCLA and Columbia Law School, and her work as co-founder and Executive Director of the African American Policy Forum. But in her newest book, Backtalker: An American Memoir, she approaches the subject through a much more personal lens.

A native of Canton, OH, native born during the Civil Rights Movement, Crenshaw grew up in the heartland of America as the Vietnam War raged, as Black Americans fought against segregation and for voting rights, and as women of all races struggled for access to education and opportunity in the workforce.

The intersectionality of her experience (“intersectionality” being another term Crenshaw coined, to describe how identities overlap and intersect) carried her from her childhood as the daughter of teachers overcoming personal tragedy and loss, to the Ivy League and Harvard Law School, and eventually to a clerkship on the Wisconsin Supreme Court at a time when Black women were a rarity in all of these spaces.

Backtalker is Crenshaw’s ode to the fighter in her, the one who allowed her to pursue her version of the American Dream while never compromising on her determination to speak truth to power.

This is our conversation about what Crenshaw learned in writing Backtalker and touring the world talking about it, and what she hopes America will do in this critical moment.

Natasha S. Alford: Professor, since your book came out in May, you’ve been touring the world to share your ideas about democracy, race, and gender, and the intersectionality of your experiences growing up as a Black woman in America. What has that been like?

Kimberlé Crenshaw: It was really exciting. I was all over the United States, from New York to San Francisco, and then we did the European leg. London, Oxford, Birmingham, Northern Ireland, which was mind-blowing, then Dublin, Paris, Amsterdam, a couple of places in Germany. Everywhere I went, I was lifted by how far these ideas have traveled and how much people want to talk about the things we might assume everyone is putting their head in the sand about, hoping it will pass.

People were drawn to the conversation. For a lot of them it was almost like a revival, reinforcing what kind of world they want to live in and what it takes to make it so. I could have flown home without the plane.

Alford: What were some of the most common questions you got? It sounds like people are trying to navigate the moment as we face growing authoritarianism across the globe.

Crenshaw: The most common question, honestly, was “What is a backtalker?” In my own cultural tradition, a backtalker is someone being transgressive, challenging authority, challenging the rules, challenging the decisions that get made. Usually it’s a child in a situation where the parents dictate the terms of how they exist. And we are in that position now, as adults in the world, with people telling us how to think, what to read, what we are allowed to expect.

So I told our European audiences we need to embrace that backtalking spirit everywhere, because we are facing a rise of authoritarian power almost everywhere. People were inspired by that. I have backtalker caps and backtalker T-shirts, and folks were swooping in and taking them all.

The other big question was, “What is going on in the United States, and what are you doing about it?” And there was actually a greater willingness abroad to talk about race and racism, and about the aftermath of the George Floyd and Breonna Taylor movement. Remember, people around the world were activated by that. There were protests in Paris, in Amsterdam, in London. So everywhere there was this sense of, what happened? And what is being done now?

Alford: As you say “backtalker,” it strikes me that it has always been central to our American identity that we don’t let people tell us what to do — we are the rebels, the revolutionaries. But now, certain ideas are suddenly deemed dangerous and you are punished for expressing them. As a child growing up during the Civil Rights Movement, how did you cultivate the spirit of a backtalker? Especially knowing how, as African Americans, we are taught that “you don’t talk back to your parents.”

Crenshaw: One reason I wanted to write the book was to locate backtalking, and the ideas I’m associated with, right here in the United States, during that period of rising demands and rising expectations.

I was born into a state of unfreedom. I was born before the major Civil Rights acts were even passed. So my inheritance was twofold. On one hand, our status as African-Americans meant we were expected to want less than what other people were born to expect. That was the reality. But it was also the very thing my parents were determined to teach me to question, to challenge, to push back against.

My backtalking was learned at the feet of my parents, at the kitchen table, when they would ask, “What did you learn today? What do you think about what you learned? How did you feel in that moment?” They wanted me to understand that life is not just something done to us. Our role is to engage, to interact, to reshape the trajectory we are born into and create broader opportunities for the next generation.

My parents and their parents were what we called “race men” and “race women.” It meant you understood the structured dimension of racial power, and you understood it in order to change it, to transform it, and to pass down that legacy of backtalking. In many ways, the book is a story about my family, and about how they passed that legacy to me, and what I did with it, becoming a lawyer and a professional backtalker.

Alford: The story you tell about your teacher and the school play when you were six years old moved me. Share with us what happened.

Crenshaw: This is the beginning of my backtalking. I wanted to be the princess in our kindergarten play, Thorn Rosa. We had played it all year, and I was everything but the princess. I was the horse, the pig, the wicked witch. Never the princess.

On the last day of school I’m still saying, “Please, please, I want to play her.” The teacher waits until the last minute, gathers the students to sing the song for the grand entrance, and then the bell rings. My heart just broke, because there was something in me that suspected there was a reason I could never be the princess, and I did not want to sit with that possibility.

When the bell rang and the kids left, I cried all the way home and threw myself on the bed. My parents were both schoolteachers, and this was not how they expected the year to end. My brother couldn’t figure out who had beaten me up or what family had wronged me. So my parents called my teacher, and within a half hour she was at my house. She came into my bedroom, and by then I already knew the princess business was not for me. She made some vague promises I knew would never be realized.

But what I remember most, and what I think is most pivotal, is that my parents did not deny that I had been injured. They did not say, “Stop crying about things you can’t change.” They did not say, “That’s nothing compared to what we have to deal with.” They did not minimize or dismiss my feelings or make me doubt them. They reinforced the idea that if you feel something is amiss, let’s look into it. If you sense there is no legitimate explanation for why you were denied an opportunity, let’s examine it.

There was not a name yet for the way a little Black girl experiences anti-Blackness. But there was a willingness to open up to the possibility that an injury had occurred. And even though the teacher couldn’t put me in the position I should have had, accountability required her to sit with what happened.

That changed everything for me. It made me pay attention the next time I felt that same way. Is this like the time I didn’t get to play Thorn Rosa? Is this the kind of injury little Black girls are supposed to just swallow and sit down somewhere about? My parents made it clear I had a right to fair treatment, a right to be seen.

So I started looking for the patterns, in institutions, in education, in the law. And once you know there is a there there, the question becomes how do we name it, so that all of us who experience it have a common language to identify it and change the context.

Alford: I have to go back to the book, because you tell a powerful story about being at Harvard Law School and going to a final club (an exclusive and then all-male social club with property and history on Harvard’s campus). I went to Harvard for undergrad, so you reminded me of some of the subjugation we swallowed. Women were not allowed in the clubs, and there was no real equivalent for us until much later.

I remember when Black guys would get into the final clubs, we were kind of happy for them, like, well, at least they can get in, it is a win for all of us.

You write about having to go around to the back door, and about a friend, who I believe was Black, and how we so often compromise...

So you compromise, you go in, and you get so sick you are praying to God. Why was that experience formative enough to put at the very top of the book?

Crenshaw: So formative. It was my encounter with what I go on to call asymmetric solidarity. The other Black guy and I had a pact: if we go up in that club and they try to treat us some kind of way, we are not taking it. That was the agreement. So we get there, and our friend comes out, shuts the door behind him, and I’m ready to say, “This is precisely the stuff we said we wouldn’t take.” And he says, “No, no, don’t go there. I forgot to tell you, Kim can’t come in the front door. Women have to go around to the back.”

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And for me, that was exactly the kind of thing we said we were not going to take. It does not matter why we can’t get in. If we are not being treated on an equitable basis, we stand with each other. I had to realize in that moment that there was small print. The small print said: I will stand with you as long as you face the same discrimination I face.

But the moment our reasons differ, the moment we don’t all have access to the same opportunity, I am no longer in solidarity with you. And I thought, “Because the reason is different, you won’t stand for me to be treated as an equal? That is how thin our connection is?” A lot of Black women have that moment, where the look you get is, now don’t act out, don’t embarrass me.

I was so deeply committed to the idea of the “we,” to the idea that our interests are common, that I could not imagine being outside of it. So yes, I went around to the back door. And I got gravely ill from whatever I ingested in that club. And as I lay there negotiating with the universe, “Please take this sickness off me, I swear I will never do what I did to get here again,” I meant the food and the drink, but I also meant accepting those intolerable terms of solidarity. If they are not going to ride or die for me to be treated as an equal, I am not accepting those unequal terms of inclusion.

To this day, when those demands get put on me, I start to feel physically ill. I literally cannot do it. So I wanted to open the book with the very thing I was challenging. How do we think about community? How do we think about solidarity? What is the “we”? Does the “we” include me, or is it just about you? That has been the theme of intersectionality.

Alford: What was it like to become a memoirist at this stage? You are known for your scholarship, your organizing, your teaching. What did it do for you, personally, to see your story on the page, and to see how people have received it?

Crenshaw: In some ways it is the antidote to what the last ten years have been like, watching a caricature of our work, and of me in particular, get created for purposes that were, even at the time, openly admitted. They said, “We don’t care what the work is really about, we don’t care what has actually been written, we don’t care who this person is that we are trying to defame. What we care about is what we can use these ideas and these words to advance.” And it was not to advance greater democratic inclusion. It was to reverse it.

So after watching my work get framed as un-American or divisive, being able to say, “This is as American as apple pie and a lynch rope, and I am going to tell you my story. You do not have to go to Europe or anywhere else to find this life experience, because it happened right here. I know, because it is my life.”

Being able to tell that, and to see it resonate, to see people say, “I recognize that story, I have experienced that, I know what urban renewal is, I know what it is like to be the only Black person in the room, to make a great point that everyone ignores until a white man says the same thing and suddenly it is the smartest thing anyone has ever heard.” Everyone has had those experiences.

So when I lay out how experiences like that give rise to ideas like intersectionality — and people now have a story, one they heard or lived, that helps them understand what that idea is — that means everything. It is reinvigorating. It reminds me that people do still read, that they are interested in ideas that come in longer beats than 20 seconds.