But they’re speaking to graduates who are entering a shaky job market and are already burdened by tens of thousands of dollars of student debt. However, companies of all stripes are using A.I. as an excuse to slow entry-level hiring and lay off workers. Tech executives have been warning that their technologies will be job destroyers.

In many cases, the students expressed their displeasure at the speakers’ blatant A.I. boosterism the best way they could: with loud boos.

When Eric Schmidt, a former chief executive of Google, told graduates at the University of Arizona about their A.I.-shaped future, the shouting got so intense that he paused and said that graduates feared “that the future has already been written, that the machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating, that the climate is breaking, that politics are fractured, and that you are inheriting a mess that you did not create.”

Mr. Schmidt of Google fame, told graduates to make the best of it. “The question is not whether A.I. will shape the world. It will. The question is whether you will help shape artificial intelligence.”

What? Pull yourself up by your bootstraps? His approach is peak billionaire brain, directed at the young people who have, for the better part of a decade, been treated as woke, and lazy.

The problem isn’t woke; the problem is work. It’s a lack of social mobility. It’s that college may no longer elevate a graduate to the middle class. It’s that nobody even bothers to pretend that a house, a good job and the ability to start a family are at all guaranteed.

Think of this from the graduates’ perspective:

Wealthy old people telling you your future is being pulped by electricity-sucking, water-guzzling data centers. Companies are trying to automate your future away. No wonder you’re furious.

According to a recent working paper from researchers at Harvard, hiring for entry-level roles at companies that have adopted generative A.I. has dropped each quarter since 2023. What is not clear is whether A.I. is taking people’s jobs or if companies are using A.I. as an excuse for not hiring.

Even in the best of times, commencement speeches are uncomfortable: The kids you’re speaking to are basically hostages; they can’t leave without their diplomas.

Tell the graduates getting a degree is a bit of a foundation, but tell the kids the truth of the messiness of one’s 20s!

One is right to be worried. But none of this is as inevitable as it seems. Remember putting everything on the blockchain? Remember NFTs? Hell, some of us are old enough to remember that the world was supposed to end in the year 2000.

Right now, A.I. is in its dark hype period — but who knows how useful any of this actually will be in the end in creating efficiencies (as in, replacing the young with bots).

It’s within young people’s power to stop. Demand regulation of tech companies. Elect people who will legislate that regulation. Organize against data centers in your hometowns.

Don’t just boo A.I. — do something.

Also. trust in government, elections, and national leadership remains strikingly low. Even as young voters lean Democratic, uneven turnout, low enthusiasm, and widespread skepticism about the fairness of elections suggest that participation in the 2026 midterms may be shaped as much by doubt as by political preference.

The most defining shift among young Americans is a loss of perceived agency — a growing belief that what they do no longer shapes what happens next. Half now say people like them have no real say in government. Trust in the federal government has fallen to 15 percent, and confidence in the military has dropped sharply, from 51 percent to 39 percent.

Political engagement is still present, but its meaning is changing. Fewer young Americans believe participation delivers results, and most see elected officials as driven by self-interest.

What once converted concern into action is becoming something more conditional — a generation still paying attention, still showing up, but increasingly unsure that their voice carries weight.

Economic pressure defines this moment for young Americans: Inflation and housing drive both lived experience and urgency, alongside widespread financial strain and a sharp decline in long-term optimism.

Military action in Iran is seen as not in the best interests of Americans: A majority say military action is not in the U.S. interest.

The country feels off track: Only 13% say the U.S. is headed in the right direction, while 59% say it’s on the wrong track, and approval remains low for President Trump (25%) and both parties in Congress (26% Democrats, 25% Republicans).

Young voters favor Democrats: Democrats lead 45% to 26% among young registered voters in the generic ballot. While Democrats say they are more likely than Republicans to vote in November (Democrats 55%, Republicans 35%, Independents 25%), a plurality remain cynical about the system as a whole.

A pervasive sense of threat is defining everyday life for young Americans, and they are increasingly losing faith in fundamental systems of democracy and political participation/

Findings from the 52nd poll in the biannual series are below.

A clear Democratic advantage is offset by weak trust in election fairness and uneven enthusiasm, raising early questions about turnout in 2026.

While Democrats hold an advantage, majorities of young voters believe both parties prioritize elites over people like them, fueling demand for candidates who are younger and more aligned with their values.

While many young Americans recognize the need for government action during emergencies, they express clear limits on how much power leaders should have. There is broad concern that emergency powers could be overused or abused, reflecting deep skepticism about unchecked authority.

For example, A majority of young Americans (53%) say it would be unacceptable for a president to bypass Congress after declaring a national emergency.

President Kennedy once said, “It is a time for a new generation of leadership to cope with new problems and new opportunities.”

Iran has reoccupied center stage and fears of stagflation looms again. In the late 1970s, Americans sensed that their country was growing weaker in the world, (Vietnam, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iranian hostage crisis.

Today there is a war and an economy without a coherent strategy or clear objectives.

The University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment hit its lowest point in more than 70 years, and the International Monetary Fund warned on Tuesday that war in the Middle East could slow growth and fuel inflation, risking a global recession.

Voter discontent is a normal part of a democracy. But what we saw in the 1970s and what we are seeing now is distinctive: a comprehensive loss of faith in the future, a collapse of respect for our governing institutions and alarm that American influence in the world is doomed to diminish.

The Democrats are called upon to make the leap past our problems. Perhaps they need to ask themselves: What would Reagan do? Anyone seeking to change our trajectory can learn a lot from his understanding of the political imperatives and possibilities of his moment.Democrats can’t win by just opposing the president.

Specific proposals grow out of what needs fixing. A place to start: commitments to end corruption of the current administration, its favoritism toward a select group of very wealthy people. The success of the opposition to Viktor Orban in Hungary’s election on Sunday suggests the power of these issues when they’re linked to economic discontent.

Reagan was shrewd about turning a specific problem that was on voters’ minds into a rationale for policies he wanted to pursue anyway. He made the gas lines Americans hated into a case for deregulating the fossil fuel industry. While this may not work now it should be a winning point.

Like now Reagan used stagflation to argue for tax cuts tilted toward the wealthy. Neither policy was necessarily popular then and now , the way inflation was driving people into higher tax brackets and rising property taxes helped make his supply-side approach sound positively populist.

Reagan noted that in a time of crisis, the public is inclined to say: Above all, try something.

In Democratic campaigns last year, they used public concerns about higher prices to make a case for government action in areas such as health care, child care, housing and electricity prices.

Voters don’t usually make foreign policy a priority, but they do sense when the country is in trouble in the world. That’s how they felt in 1980, and it’s how they feel now.

American should vote after asking: Is the United States stronger and more respected now than it was three and a half years ago? Is the world today a safer place in which we live?” Then ask: are you spending more on essentials than before?

With more than 5.5 billion people online – and nearly as many on social media – digital spaces have become central to how we learn and connect. But alongside its benefits, the internet is also being used to spread hate, abuse and misogyny.

The “manosphere:” a loose network of communities that claim to address men’s struggles – dating, fitness or fatherhood, for example – but often promote harmful advice and attitudes. These groups are united by an opposition to feminism and misrepresent men as “victims” of the current social and political climate.

Two-thirds of young men regularly engage with masculinity influencers online. Experts are finding that the popularity of extreme language in the manosphere not only normalizes violence against women and girls, but has growing links to radicalization and extremist ideologies.

These communities promote the idea that emotional control, material wealth, physical appearance and dominance, especially over women, are markers of male worth.

The manosphere targets male audiences on social media, podcasts, gamer communities, dating apps and just about all digital spaces. Many participants engage with it while searching for forums to openly discuss or learn about men’s issues. But while content may appear focused on men’s self-improvement, many of these groups promote unhealthy behaviors, like instructing boys and men to build themselves up by putting others down.

It is normal to seek community in digital spaces. Many of us build a sense of identity, nurture interests and find like-minded people online.

But, the manosphere’s lifestyle coaches have drawn young men in by claiming to teach personal responsibility. But ironically, instead of encouraging the self-exploration that can get to the heart of men’s challenges, they suggest men are victims of society’s prejudice against men.

While groups within the manosphere do not all share the same beliefs, many are united in their misogyny – a prejudice and resentment of women and girls. In many ways, the manosphere is descended from a long line of anti-feminist movements.

Involuntary celibates (incels): believe that men are entitled to sex, and women purposefully deprive them of it. This culture promotes rape and assault and brings together other ideologies, including racism and homophobia.

There is a real-world impact: gender stereotypes harm everyone

In the manosphere, everyone loses. Misogyny and gender inequality are harmful to men, as well as women. Incels are also more prone to depression and suicidal thoughts.

If boys and men aren’t encouraged to speak openly about their emotions or issues, they may gravitate towards these online communities as a place to get advice on topics like relationship struggles, fatherhood, anxiety and sexual health.

Meanwhile, younger men today are more likely to hold regressive ideas about gender roles than older men, representing a backlash that could reverse hard-won gains in gender equality.

Im addition, some of the men and boys who enter manosphere forums feel alienated by mainstream society. Even if relatively few users travel down rabbit holes to more extremist content, research suggests the pathway is there.

Standing up to the manosphere requires we challenge the harmful beliefs and social norms that perpetuate gender inequality. In our social circles and communities, this work often begins and grows with conversation. It’s also helpful to talk to kids about gender equality and stereotypes.

We need to promote healthy masculinity in the digital age and

value empathy and communication, as opposed to stoicism or isolation.

We need to build relationships based on trust, not dominance or status

We need to normalize emotional expression and show that it’s safe to be vulnerable.

Finally let’s model respect and ways to have healthy disagreements and point out and discuss gender stereotypes in the media

Yet, when a war is raging in the Middle East and an affordability crisis is brewing at home, the Senate is poised to begin what could be a marathon debate on the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, a bill that would block millions of eligible American citizens from voting — reversing decades of progress.

And now, Florida passed a bill on Thursday that would require voters to verify their citizenship when registering and limit which forms of identification they can present at the polls.

The new requirements would result in the removal of perhaps thousands of voters from the rolls and in the disenfranchisement of young voters.

The votes in both Florida chambers were along strict partisan lines, with all Democrats against the measure. Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican has supported the legislation.

The bill’s enactment would make Florida the most populous state in the country to impose proof-of-citizenship requirements on voters. But the Florida requirements would take effect next year, not before this year’s midterm elections.

“This is about the integrity of our elections,” one of the bill’s sponsors, State Senator Erin Grall, a Republican from Vero Beach, said on the Senate floor on Wednesday. “It is something that puts greater trust into our system.”

Under the bill, Floridians would have to provide proof of citizenship, such as a birth certificate or passport, when they register to vote. Every existing voters’ citizenship would be verified against government databases, such as Real ID, when the bill goes into effect.

If no citizenship document came up, the local elections supervisor would notify the voter by mail; to stay registered, the voter would have to bring proof of citizenship, such as a passport or a birth certificate, to his or her county elections office.

About 98 percent of Floridians have Real IDs, about 872,000 residents still do not.

Separately, the bill would no longer allow voters to use either college IDs or those provided by retirement homes to identify themselves at polling places. Republicans said those types of ID were too easy to fake.

Banning student IDs drew especially strong opposition from Democrats, who accused Republicans of trying to disenfranchise voters on a partisan basis.

Young voters often lean Democratic. Eight states have banned student IDs for voting, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan organization, but six of them still allow voters to cast provisional ballots.

The Florida bill was modeled in part after the SAVE America Act that would impose strict voter ID and proof-of-citizenship requirements nationally. That legislation has become so important to the president that he has said he will not sign any other bill until it passes.

But studies have shown that requiring proof of citizenship across the country may end up affecting more Republicans states Mr. Trump won handily in 2024 have the largest percentage of citizens without valid passports, according to an analysis last year by the Secure Democracy Foundation, a nonpartisan organization that studies and analyzes voting policy.

This is creating an issue where there are going to be a lot of impacted voters that are going to need to produce a passport or a birth certificate and on the margin, you’re going to have eligible citizens who are not going to be able to vote.

Federal law is clear that only American citizens can vote in federal elections, and evidence suggests that noncitizen voting is exceptionally rare.

Also, in Arizona, voters passed a ballot initiative in 2004 that required proof of citizenship for registering. That law created a bifurcated system, in which any state election required proof of citizenship, but voters without such proof could still participate in federal elections.

In 2024, nearly 100,000 potential voters were at risk of losing their registration because of a glitch in Arizona state data: Voters who were issued driver’s licenses before 1996 might not have proof of citizenship on file. A court granted those voters relief before the 2024 election.

In Kansas, 31,089 potential voters had their registrations rejected or denied because they had failed to produce documents proving their citizenship, according to federal court records.

The court also found that almost all of the affected voters were citizens. The law was ruled unconstitutional and has not been enforced since 2018.

In 2024, New Hampshire passed a law requiring all first-time voters in the state to prove their citizenship in order to vote. The law is being challenged in federal court.

Louisiana also passed a law in 2024 requiring voters to provide proof of citizenship when registering.

This year, legislatures in South Dakota and Utah passed proof-of-citizenship laws that are awaiting signature by each state’s governor.

Don’t forget this reminder that the stakes are immensely high. As the 2026 midterms fast approach, we see renewed efforts to control or undermine our elections on Capitol Hill and in States!

It’s a reminder that war has profound effects on all those who are connected to it. And we are all connected to it, somehow.

The longer the conflict in the Middle East continues the greater the likelihood that people around the globe will pay more for food. And those in the most vulnerable countries could face hunger.

The Persian Gulf is a dominant source of the world’s fertilizers, especially those that deliver nitrogen to soils — a source of nourishment for crops that amount to half the world’s food.

Fertilizer is produced in the region and shipped … everywhere. If the Strait of Hormuz remains strangled, prices for fertilizer will rise. And as a result, farmers may use less on their crops, if they can get any at all. The world will get less food, and it will cost more.

We saw this happen at the start of the Russia-Ukraine war, when the world received a lesson in the geography of agriculture. Both countries provided the world with substantial quantities of wheat and other grains. Without them, bread shortages soon developed in West Africa and South Asia, among other places.

The Middle East won’t affect the harvesting of grain. But the effects of a fertilizer shortage, or more expensive fertilizer, may be even more intense. ​​The volumes are greater this time around, potentially, than in the Russia-Ukraine conflict

Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain — supply more than a third of the world’s urea, an important nitrogen fertilizer, and nearly a quarter of another one, ammonia.

And they all use the Strait of Hormuz to export their products.

Farmers in the Northern Hemisphere, who will soon need fertilizer to boost their spring crops. Where might they get it? China’s the most obvious alternative. But last year the Chinese government imposed restrictions on the export of fertilizer, in part to shield its farmers from just the sort of geopolitical chaos this war brought on.

Prices are already climbing. Over the past week, the price of urea sold in Egypt, a market that economists track closely, climbed more than 35 percent. If the trend continues, governments across the Global South could need to subsidize the cost of growing crops. And that could add to their debt burdens.

The long-term solution is not to be dependent on fertilizer that has to be trafficked through Strait of Hormuz. We have become hooked on these imports.

Those hooks are everywhere, once you start looking for them. War is hell on us all.

But, have we turned a corner?

The show “Heated Rivalry” is a beautiful, life-giving, hot take. Who wouldn’t wont to watch this? It’s a six-episode show that’s great as romance television.

We have suffered during, say, “Cruising,” in 1980, that remains an index of gay sex clubs in the Meatpacking District. The men in that movie like it hot. A homicidal maniac is on the loose, and he’s killing “homosexuals.” He might, alas, be gay himself, and the heterosexual detective trying to catch him worries he might not be as straight as he thought. Pathos again.

Or how about “The Talented Mr. Ripley” which also produces a body count.

There is a lot of gay media of torment and death, but let’s also never fail to remember that for a long time “Brokeback Mountain” was our “gay love story.” But Jack Twist gets beaten to death and, in the final shot, Ennis Del Mar stands in a trailer all by his lonesome.

Maybe we are accustomed to art that would enrage us as we are fed morsels like “Moonlight.”

During the AIDS crisis, a regime of dehumanization spawned a knowing counterculture of subversion. Being allowed to marry some man always seemed beside the point. Are we going to be allowed to live? We watched movies and still wondered if it did a number on the gay psyche.

During all of these years of gay comedies and weepy ghost stories, of high school comings-of-age and great-man biographies, the gay romance shelf has been barren.

One of the marvels of “Heated Rivalry” is its de-emphasis of tragedy. It hails from the world of the romance novel, where gay plots aren’t novel at all. (Rachel Reid, its author, has written a slew of these books.)

“Heated Rivalry” has no subtext in play, the stars meet during their rookie years and spend years trying not to fall in love. The last shot of the final episode puts the camera in the back seat of a car as these two drive out of the closet.

Source: New York Times

There is disconnect between science and politics in the long war against H.I.V. Forty years ago, the infection was a mystery and a death sentence. Today, thanks to a combination of biomedical breakthroughs and diligent, public health (testing, education, robust social safety nets), it is a chronic but manageable condition that really only flourishes among society’s most marginalized groups.

The first Trump administration vowed to finally end the American H.I.V. epidemic, by 2030, doubling down on prevention efforts in the hardest hit communities. The resulting initiative paid off:

Transmission rates are down in the targeted ZIP codes, according to the National Minority AIDS Council, a nonprofit devoted to stopping the virus’s spread.

Racial health gaps are narrowing as a result, and because prevention is cheaper than treatment, money is being saved.

The second Trump administration seems determined to reverse course anyway.

The future of H.I.V. research became uncertain when it was caught in the cross hairs of the Trump administration.

The Adolescent Trials Network, a massive research apparatus focused on treating and preventing H.I.V. infection in teenagers and young adults, had been abruptly closed.

A 10-year study on H.I.V. and substance use in L.G.B.T.Q. teenagers and young adults was suspended. So was another project on reducing H.I.V. risk in relationships.

Another project, on how to improve the measurement of sexual orientation and gender identity in federal surveys, was also done for. So were at least two fellowship programs for early-career scientists who wanted to specialize in L.G.B.T.Q. health.

Salaries were reliant on N.I.H. funding and a lot of jobs are now gravely imperiled.

Federal grants are the lifeblood of academic research. They support scientists and students, institutes and administrators. They covered overhead costs. It is not uncommon for one person to be funded by several grants.

Likewise, medication that prevents H.I.V. transmission (known as pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP) has became widely available. Within the gay community, middle-aged white professionals had embraced the treatment as an ordinary component of overall health and wellness. But younger adults, immigrants and racial and ethnic minorities still had not.

“It’s not unlike birth control when it was first introduced. It’s pretty straightforward as a treatment, but it’s attached to all of this cultural baggage that makes it challenging to get across.

Nobody outside the scientific community seems to realize what is happening. We have lost years of research in a matter of weeks. Whole labs had been closed and successful, decades-long careers ended — and none of it appeared to have anything to do with the quality or import of the research itself. The decisions were political and ideological. They were also arbitrary and needlessly cruel.

Trust had been broken as a result. Whatever came next, it seems extremely unlikely projects would be able to just pick up where they had left off.

Do you remember scientist having to cull words like “gay” and “sex” back in the early 1990s. But this was different. In the past, even if they had to change a word or two, they still got to do their research.

Seasoned scientists are fleeing the profession, and younger ones are deciding not to pursue it at all. It’s impossible to say what new medicine those minds might have developed or what wicked problems their efforts might have solved.

Source: NYT

But now, after a series of candidate recruitment in red states, Leader Schumer said that Democrats were poised to capitalize on rising anger from voters toward Mr. Trump over a cost-of-living crisis.

Mr. Trump’s approval ratings have slumped, and Democrats have won a series of elections over the last year. The political environment has so brightened for the party that there is an path to victory.

Flipping Alaska, Maine, North Carolina and Ohio, defending defending all of the states Democrats now hold is possible.

Schumer faces attacks frpm many on the left and those who are desperate for younger leadership to take the fight to Mr. Trump. Some progressives are dreaming of a challenge from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

A series of blue-chip Senate recruits include Mary Peltola, a Democratic former congresswoman, who entered Alaska’s race .

She joined former Senator Sherrod Brown in Ohio and former Gov. Roy Cooper in North Carolina, two other top Schumer recruits who are running in states that Mr. Trump has carried all three times he has been on the ballot.

But taking the Senate remains a steep challenge for Democrats. The party would need to not only sweep the four states that Mr. Schumer identified as his top targets, but also hold seats in the battleground states of Michigan, New Hampshire and Georgia.

Democrats also face an unusual number of fractious primaries — most notably in Michigan and Maine — and a Republican president with a super PAC that is flush with cash.

Most Democrats still view the House as the main battleground in 2026, given Republicans’ paper-thin majority in the chamber and its historical tendency to swing against the party in power in midterm elections.

There are parallels to 2006, when Democrats took back power by winning seats even in red states like Montana and Missouri.

That year, voters recoiled from President George W. Bush’s proposals to privatize Social Security as well as the quagmire of the Iraq war. Today Trump is similarly distracted by “military adventurism” and weighed down by an affordability crisis.

The cost issue is much more trenchant than Social Security privatization because that was the future. People are having their health care costs, their electricity costs, their housing costs raised right now.”

On Valentine’s Day we all are talking about LOVE.

In order to feel more loved by others, you must begin by making them feel loved by you. And becoming a better listener is one of the most powerful ways to do that.

Many of us think we’re pretty good listeners, but really, we’re mostly just waiting for our turn to speak. So learned people recommend adopting a “listening to learn” mind set. Basically, shift your focus from responding to understanding.

We all know that feeling, when someone is so curious about you, like they just can’t wait for you to share your story. Their eyes are shining. They’re leaning in.”

That kind of genuine, focused listening is rare, and quite powerful.

When someone feels deeply seen, valued, and understood by you, they become more willing, motivated, and even eager to do the same for you.

But becoming a better listener takes practice. Some simple best practices: Don’t interrupt, and don’t offer advice unless the person you’re talking to asks for it.

And ask follow-up questions like “Tell me more”. Focus on one relationship at a time. It might be someone you’re already close with, like a partner or a parent or it could be a colleague you’d like to get to know better.

Romantic relationships aren’t the only place to get that feeling of being loved, nor is feeling loved confined to just a few close relationships.

Giving and receiving love function together like a seesaw: You lift a person up with the weight of your curiosity and attentiveness — and they do the same in turn so it can really become a two-way street.

But, know when to throw in the towel.

If the other person gives you zilch in return those are signs this isn’t the right relationship to invest a lot of effort and energy in

There are questions like: Does this person seem to “get” me on some level, or at least show an interest in doing so?

When I’ve shared struggles or imperfections, have they been curious and listened enthusiastically?

Feeling loved is not out of your control. Practice all of this on Valentine’s Day.

SENATE

Republicans are entering the 2026 midterms with a 53-47 majority in the Senate (including the two independents who caucus with the Democrats). This cycle, 35 Senate seats are up for election, including special elections to permanently fill the Ohio seat JD Vance vacated to become vice president and the Florida seat Marco Rubio left to be secretary of state.

Nine senators are retiring — five Republicans and four Democrats — creating 11 open seats, as Democrats defend nine incumbent seats and Republicans defend 15. To retake the Senate, Democrats must hold all of their seats and flip four Republican-held ones — a difficult task even given the fact that the party out of power typically gains ground in midterms.

The fight for the Senate would center on four crucial states: Maine, North Carolina, Michigan and Georgia.

THE PRESIDENT

The results from the latest New York Times/Siena University poll show that, one year in, the second Trump coalition has unraveled. The major demographic shifts of the last election have snapped back, and Democrats have regained their usual advantage among young, nonwhite and low-turnout voters in the race for control of Congress. Only 40 percent of registered voters say they approve of Mr. Trump’s performance, the poll found.

THE HOUSE

The battle for control of the House of Representatives this fall will be decided by a small fraction of the chamber’s seats. Republicans are clinging to a five-seat edge, the narrowest margin in modern times.

The nation’s political climate is volatile, and much can change between now and November. But at the start of the year, only a small number of seats are seen as genuinely competitive, magnifying the stakes of individual House races that routinely cost tens of millions of dollars.

The clearest Democratic pathway to a majority — and the power to serve as a check on President Trump and his legislative agenda — is defending the party’s most vulnerable incumbents and flipping a handful of Republican-held seats.

The Cook Political Report rates just 18 seats as tossup races — four held by Democrats and 14 by Republicans. But the map is evolving and Cook recently shifted 18 House races in Democrats’ direction, a sign of the party’s momentum and Mr. Trump’s struggles.

Of the House’s 435 seats, the vast majority, 375, are rated as “solid” for one party or the other — meaning they are essentially noncompetitive. Another two dozen races are seen as likely to favor one party, while 18 are in the more competitive “lean” category.

To get to the House majority, Democrats would need to hold all of their solid and likely seats, sweep the 13 seats that lean toward their party and win at least seven of the 18 tossups, according to The Cook Political Report.

Recent events in Minneapolis led to protests and community responses. Much of what’s been reported involves how residents have used phones and whistles as tools during confrontations with federal immigration enforcement.

The right to assemble, protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, guarantees the right of the people to peaceably gather, protest, and associate for lawful, public, or private purposes without government interference.

It applies to public spaces and protects against actions that violate freedom of speech, though it is subject to reasonable, content-neutral restrictions on time, place, and manner.

In recent weeks, the streets of Minneapolis have echoed with the shrill blasts of whistles, the constant buzz of cellphones recording and communicating, and the honking of car horns — an auditory backdrop to simmering tensions around federal immigration enforcement actions in the city.

Phones as Witness and Network

Cellphones have become indispensable tools for Minneapolis residents mobilizing in response to heightened U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity. Teams of community members actively document enforcement actions with video, sending footage in real time to local and national audiences.

This real-time documentation serves a dual purpose. First, it acts as evidence and oversight, ensuring that interactions between federal agents and civilians are visible beyond the immediate scene. Second, the presence of phones and cameras tends to draw larger crowds of observers — a tactic some see as a deterrent to potential misconduct.

Whistles as Alert Systems

Whistles — simple, loud, and highly portable — have taken on outsized symbolic and practical importance in Minneapolis. Residents have adopted them as alert systems to signal approaching immigration enforcement, with different patterns of whistle blasts conveying different meanings:

Short, sharp blasts indicate that federal agents are approaching or present nearby. Longer, sustained whistles can signal that someone is being detained or that help is needed.

These audible signals spread quickly through neighborhoods, prompting residents to come outside to observe, record, assist, or bear witness. In some cases, the blasts have summoned neighbors within minutes, creating spontaneous gatherings of observers and improvised legal observers.

The Soundscape of Protest

The combination of whistles, phone alerts, and video documentation has reshaped the nature of protest and community defense. Rather than centralized demonstrations, the emphasis has been on decentralized rapid responses: a way of signaling across phone networks that something is happening somewhere in the city. This is a choreography of civic resistance, in which sound — from whistles, shouts, and horns — drives movement and response.

A New Auditory Politics

In Minneapolis today, phones and whistles represent evolving forms of civic engagement, ways for people to support one another, bear witness, and assert community presence in the face of federal enforcement actions that many view as intimidating or destabilizing.

Whether seen as grassroots solidarity tactics or sources of controversy, these sound-based methods have become defining features of the city’s current moment — a reminder that in urban conflict, even the simplest signals can carry profound social meaning.

Here at the NABWMT we have a proud history of peaceful protest and fighting injustice.

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees five essential freedoms: religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition. Adopted in 1791 as part of the Bill of Rights, it prevents the government from restricting expression, establishing a state religion, or interfering with peaceful protest and petitioning for redress of grievances.

Courts have long granted citizens a First Amendment right to film in public. But this right on paper is now being increasingly contested on the streets as federal agents try to stop citizens from recording their activities.

We are seeing a pattern of intimidation of people who are just trying to observe. A federal judge granted a preliminary injunction prohibiting the government from retaliating against peaceful observers and protesters. But that injunction was lifted on Wednesday by an appeals court.

Government officials have said that violence against agents includes “videotaping them where they are at, when they are out on operations.”

The nation’s founders worried that if the state had a monopoly on weapons, its citizens could be oppressed. Their answer was the Second Amendment. Now that our phones are the primary weapons of today’s information war, we should be as zealous about our right to bear phones as we are about our right to bear arms.

To adopt the language of Second Amendment enthusiasts, perhaps the only thing that can eventually stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a camera.

The difference between oppression and liberation, is, who will ultimately control the cameras.

The smartphone camera is a potent weapon because it offers the promise of future accountability. Even if the person filming is killed, the camera can preserve evidence of a crime that could be prosecuted in the future. A desire to evade such accountability is why governments engaged in violent repression often shut off internet access and thus prevent witnesses from sharing video and photos.

The best defense is to double down on documentation. Those who can afford the personal risk should keep filming. And those who can’t risk being on the front lines can support those doing the documenting in other ways.

We need to question whenever the government asks us to put away our phones — especially when it comes to filming people we pay with our tax dollars.

Source: New York Times

They also promised that the children’s sensitive data would be closely guarded in the decade-long study, which got underway in 2015.

The scientists did not keep it safe.

A group of fringe researchers thwarted safeguards at the National Institutes of Health and gained access to data from thousands of children. The researchers have used it to produce at least 16 papers purporting to find biological evidence for differences in intelligence between races, ranking ethnicities by I.Q. scores and suggesting Black people earn less because they are not very smart.

Mainstream geneticists have rejected their work as biased and unscientific. Yet by relying on genetic and other personal data from the prominent project, known as the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, the researchers gave their theories credence.

Members of the research group were ineligible to obtain data from the ABCD project. But one of them gained access through an American professor who was already being investigated by the N.I.H. over his handling of another child brain study.

Their papers have provided fodder for racist posts on social media and white nationalist message boards that have been viewed millions of times. Some of the papers are cited by A.I. bots like ChatGPT and Grok in response to queries about race and intelligence. On the social media platform X, Grok has referred users to the research more than two dozen times this month alone.

The science is faulty, but it’s being used to advance an unethical agenda.”

The misuse of the children’s data has validated longstanding concerns that hundreds of thousands of Americans’ genetic information held by the N.I.H. could fall into the wrong hands.

Critics say the N.I.H. has failed to address the risks that the data, even with personally identifiable details removed, could be misused in unethical research, for commercial purposes or by foreign adversaries.

In dozens of cases, the N.I.H. suspended researchers’ access and demanded that compromised data be destroyed, but the agency relies heavily on good-faith pledges of compliance.

The misuse of the data for so-called race science is not the only example of a security failure involving the ABCD Study.

There has been no official public accounting of how the N.I.H. lost control of the children’s genetic information.

When Elon Musk invited X users last June to post politically incorrect “divisive facts” on the social network, a so called researcher replied with a criticism of affirmative action and said white people had bigger brains than Black people.

The conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza said on X in 2023 that studies showed that Black people, “who are the rock-solid base of the Democratic Party, have the lowest IQ of any ethnic group.” As evidence, he reposted another chart based on ABCD data about American 10-year-olds.

Scientists said the unauthorized use of the data underscored the need for stronger controls. Several families in the ABCD Study said in interviews that they were not told about the misuse of the information and never would have agreed to participate had they known it could be used to promote racial division.

There needs to be an acknowledgment that there are bad-faith researchers.

But the Government Accountability Office, a federal watchdog, reported last April that the N.I.H. did not have the resources to properly monitor all the downloads of genetic data and “may be missing violations that go unreported by researchers.”

Data from the projects has generated hundreds of papers on, among other things, the effects of social media on mental health, genetic links to addiction and the causes of sleep disorders.

In a 2023 paper, a researcher tried to rank the intelligence of children across ethnic groups. But the sample size for the vast majority of groups was far too small to draw meaningful conclusions.

Mankind Quarterly, a journal known for pushing race science. A researcher studied penis sizes by race and once looked for correlations between intelligence and first names, concluding that people with “non-western Muslim names” had lower I.Q.s.

This runs counter to the scientific consensus that any correlation between a complex trait like intelligence and genes, let alone social constructs like race, is not the same as causation.

Research has found that the environment in which people are raised can affect their cognitive abilities. In the United States, for example, any serious analysis must consider how Black people endured centuries of slavery and racial discrimination and how they today face disproportionately high poverty rates and a lack of quality education and health care.

A Substack article last April asserted that Black people’s supposed lack of intelligence was the source of the racial income gap.

While some scientists have pushed the N.I.H. to limit how sensitive genetic data can be used in research, there is little indication the administration agrees — and there are signs it is moving in the opposite direction.

Americans’ bias against gay people did indeed decline faster than any other bias ever tracked in social surveys. Until 2020.

Research led by Professor Charlesworth published in 2022 detailed a decline. Drawing on 7.1 million responses from Americans collected from 2007 to 2020, the researchers tracked both explicit bias and implicit bias. Forecasting models suggested that, at that pace, anti-gay bias could hit zero as early as 2022.

But at that time, the Charlesworth research team was also analyzing new data showing that anti-gay bias had begun to rise. The analysis of an additional 2.5 million responses from Americans collected from the beginning of 2021 through 2024 revealed that progress had not only stalled; it had reversed. In just four years, anti-gay bias rose by around 10 percent.

Increases also appeared in bias toward Black, darker-skinned, older, disabled and overweight people, but not as starkly. Just as bias against gay people fell especially steeply before 2020, it has surged particularly sharply since.

These trends were distinctly robust among the youngest American adults — those under 25. This group increased its animus against marginalized groups in general and gay people in particular at a faster rate than older Americans did. And although anti-gay bias has risen faster among conservatives, it has also risen among liberals.

What explains this decline in tolerance? Evidence suggests that we can rule out two common hypotheses. The first is that the anti-gay backlash is a side effect, or spillover, of the backlash against the movement for transgender rights. If that were so, you would expect increases in anti-trans bias to be meaningfully correlated with subsequent increases in anti-gay bias — which the research does not show.

The second hypothesis is that the anti-gay backlash reflects the rise in panic about sexual grooming, the notion that gay adults are recruiting or influencing children to become gay. But the research shows no evidence of spikes in grooming discourse (measured through Google searches) that are meaningfully correlated with subsequent spikes in anti-gay bias.

The first idea is social instability. Starting around 2020, the United States experienced a sustained disruption consisting of the Covid pandemic, economic strain and intensifying political conflict — each of which has been linked to heightened intergroup hostility and scapegoating. This would explain the overall rise in bias against marginalized groups.

The second factor, which would explain the rise specifically in anti-gay bias, is anti-establishment sentiment. The sustained social disruption since 2020 has fueled resentment and a loss of confidence in institutions perceived to have failed — governments, corporations, the broader establishment.

By 2020, support for gay and lesbian equality had become an establishment position. Corporate America, for example, demonstrated a concrete commitment to gay rights, with companies donating hundreds of thousands of dollars for Pride celebrations and other efforts at gay and lesbian inclusion.

Gay and lesbian people, newly woven into the fabric of mainstream society, may have been collateral damage in a broader revolt against a system that felt broken, especially among younger generations grappling most intensely with uncertainty about their future.

The recent rise of anti-gay bias suggests that public attitudes and media representation are no longer moving in lock step. (An example is the exuberance surrounding “Heated Rivalry).

By all means, celebrate our media success but stay vigilant against homophobia.

Source: NY Times

In Johnson’s book, he attended a Catholic school initially and history was taught from a revisionist perspective, and Johnson even took part in pageantry glorifying the heroes of the revolution who often were slave owners. As Cross points out, race is an evolving social idea crated to legitimize racial inequality and protect white advantage.

I emigrated to the US in 1971 as a 25 year old and 14 years before Johnson was born, my knowledge of US history was minimal. I was “bathed” in the students of the University of California’s anti war and the peace movement and began my career in science in (partial} understanding of the colorism of US history.

Johnson, years later as he changed to a Black school, undergoes the transformation from this whitewashing to an honest reckoning of his Black History.

The Eurocentric view of white privilege is all pervasive, whether you are white, Black or Brown.

Coming out” is the personal process of a person accepting and openly sharing their sexual orientation, romantic orientation, or gender identity (LGBTQ+) with others, a journey unique to everyone, involving self-discovery and gradual disclosure.

This can be liberating but also challenging, with no single right way to do it, and it’s a continuous process, not a one-time event, requiring self-readiness and consideration for personal safety. We opt in and out of events in our life, sometimes easily as in wearing different fashions, However, choosing to “come out” as a gay person can be easy or most often, a difficult proposition.

In “All Boys Aren’t Blue” by George Mathew Johnson, George opts out of sports and back in again as he chooses track and football. He opts out of a fraternity then opts in to a brotherhood at his college. This is typical of some gay men who follow the path of opting out of sports in rejecting masculinity.

Stereotypes seem to dominate LGBTQ communities but George seems to be able to ease into sports based on a gradual commitment and a determination to succeed and excel.

At my UK high school I felt like I had to play on the soccer team but was told I wasn’t good enough. I opted into the rugby team instead which was considered second rate. For me the team was a collection of misfits that embraced me. Their masculinity was the badge I needed at time.

In the U.S., there is a dominant traditional masculinity ideology rooted in a subjective and dated image of what men should and should not be.

This ideology is dictated by four main rules: men should not be feminine; men must be respected and admired; men should never show fear; and men should seek out risk and adventure.

Traditional gender role socialization leads men to struggle with four main factors of traditional masculinity: men should be successful, achieve power/status, and readily compete against others; men should restrict their emotions; men should restrict their affectionate behavior with other men; and men should be work/career driven.

Many gay men feel compelled to adhere to traditional enactments of masculinity even if it is not who they truly are. In other words, some gay men may feel pressured to behave “super-masculine” or to “butch it up” in order to be accepted. Yet, other gay men suggested that trying to be masculine may be a futile attempt as simply being gay negates one’s masculinity and makes achieving “true” masculinity unattainable.

The choice is yours!

In “All Boys Aren’t Blue” George Johnson is subjected to bullying as a child. His mannerisms were viewed as those of a f**. As a redheaded boy I was bullied for my hair difference in my predominately white school. This small variation in hair color in no way equals the racism endured by Black boys. But if you are “other” you can be targeted.

There was a concept developed after the vicious slaying of. Mathew Shepard, that in the gay experience “It gets better” and a wait and see attitude is a good idea. This is nowadays patently untrue as the two books demonstrate.

George was bullied and was protected by his close Black family and had to learn to for himself later. Cross’s book exhort’s white people to learn the skills to continuously question racism and by inference homophobia.

The current political situation demands our vigilance as things don’t necessarily get better.

While vacationing in Maui, I realized that the area is extremely multiethnic and multicultural so I looked up the history of the state. It was an example of a colonial power grab. Also I reread “White Fragility” by Criss Crass.

“All Boys Aren’t Blue” by George Mathew Johnson. has been frequently challenged and banned in many U.S. schools and libraries, primarily for its LGBTQ+ themes, profanity, and sexually explicit content, making it one of the most challenged books in recent years. The Crass book shows how white people can lead white people to action on racism and try to make the world a better place for those at the margins.

This leads me to this series of short articles/podcasts. This is an homage to both a young and an old queer.

I will try to outline the Johnson book in terms of homophobia and racism and relate my history and coming out as an older gay cis gender white man. I will compare and contrast the two books and my (unpublished) life. The concept is to show that homophobia and racism and response to these two evils are important to us all.

Before I continue, I recognize my white privilege, and cannot fully walk in the shoes of George but have made effort to understand and to inform, particularly white folks on these ideas.

George was brought up in New Jersey with strong family bonds which helped him weather the bullying in school. His first realization of his identity comes when he realizes that the name he was using (Mathew) was a middle name and his first name was known to all his family, but not him. This angered him, but later he adopted George, then turned back to Mathew. He realized his power and identity in his name as a Black boy. This may appear trivial to a white person but Black history tells us that Black names were determined by slave owners!

My birth certificate shows Kenneth as my first name and I shorten it to Ken and my forefathers could change my surname at will as they moved. Our name may or may not denote being wealthy or tell the world where we come from, but a Black name could. Black names are identity and family.

Here in Hawaii names have a rich history deeply connected to nature, spirituality, and ancestry. Traditionally, names held mana (spiritual energy) and were often unisex. A 1860 law later mandated Western naming conventions, which were repealed in 1967.

And so, Black and Indigenous names were forced on enslaved or colonized people but names are identity to be preserved.

I am doing my podcast here in Maui, Hawaii and enjoying my vacation and trying to relax. But I am drifting in my cis gender white privilege and decided to look at the history of this state.

For many Americans, Hawaii lies in a hazy ether between statehood, colony, and exotic getaway. Despite their vacations to here, continental Americans know little about the cultures or histories of its Native people.

The US government brought it into focus when war came over the horizon. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s speech following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor.

At the time, Hawaii was not a US state. It was illegally annexed territory: a military outpost, arms depot, and training site taken from Hawaiian hands in 1898.

This was the culmination of nearly two centuries of foreigners, especially whites interference and meddling, beginning with Captain Cook’s arrival. These developments showered wealth on a small, plantation elite, who required a docile land with docile people for extractive agriculture.

Their wish was granted by the United States military in 1893. In what President Grover Cleveland called “an act of war,” a cadre of businessmen and armed militiamen led an insurrection against Queen Lili‘uokalani, quickly setting up the all-white “Provisional Government of Hawai‘i” and demanding that Washington annex the islands to the United States.

The overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom is unusual in that land theft and dispossession had all been accomplished without the usual bothersome wars and costly colonial administration.

Hawai‘i was a proving ground for American imperialism, a precursor of what would befall other small islands and atolls which stood in the way of American imperial ambition. After World War II, the US turbocharged its military base building project around the world, with a particular eye to the Pacific. In the process, many Indigenous peoples were displaced from their ancestral homelands and prevented from ever returning.

Throughout the Second World War and its aftermath, Hawaii was under martial law for seven years, during which time over 600,000 acres of land was confiscated, civil rights were held in abeyance, and a general atmosphere of military intimidation reigned.

Hawaii is also a tourist colony. Historically, its economy rested on whaling, then sandalwood logging, and later pineapple and sugarcane production. Today, it’s tourism that comprises the largest single source of private capital for Hawai‘i’s economy.

Sovereign debt makes matters worse. That most of the world’s island nations are both formerly colonized and deeply indebted is no coincidence. As the colonial project took off in the 17th century, imperial powers devoured small archipelagos the world over in the race for global hegemony. Islands were hoarded as both strategic military outposts (bases and depots) and sites for resource extraction (plantations and markets). After years of plunder and repression, a relationship of dependency between colonizer and colonized took hold, however massive a resistance Natives put up.

With 1.7 million tourists visiting the Kuwaii each year, even non-extractive activities like scuba diving and surfing tend to disrupt the local flora and fauna as well as traditional fishing practices.

Tourism dollars tend to not benefit locals, who work at big hotels, attractions, and sites but get paid a pittance. Locals generally get the pocket change spent on souvenirs, locally grown produce, or small-scale guided-tour outfits.

Hawai‘i is a beautiful place—there’s no doubt about it—but when the myths about “paradise” fall away, it’s hard to ignore the horrors that finally shrink-wrapped the islands into a tourist-friendly venue: two centuries of bayonets, bombardments, and subjection; missionaries hacking away at Hawaiian culture and philosophy; sugarcane plantation owners ravaging the soil; and the US military and real estate speculators despoiling the land. Tourism, it appears, is only the latest iteration of the devouring of Hawai‘i.

As I sit here I have to be reminded of my need to return to the mainland an continue to work on making a better world for all and especially for the people at the margins.

The U.S. military killed 11 people last week in a strike against a boat in the Caribbean the Trump administration said was carrying drugs and terrorists.

The U.S. Navy has long intercepted and boarded ships suspected of smuggling drugs in international waters, typically with a Coast Guard officer temporarily in charge to invoke law enforcement authority. Tuesday’s direct attack in the Caribbean was a marked departure from that decades-long approach.

Pentagon officials were still working on what legal authority they would tell the public was used to back up the extraordinary strike in international waters.”

Under the Constitution, only Congress has the power to declare war authorization for use of military force.

The 2001 Congress allowed force “against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons.”

But that law does not authorize war against unrelated groups that the executive branch has chosen to label as “terrorists.”

The specific details of the strike, targeting suspected drug smugglers, are novel, but — in a presidency defined by unprecedented uses of executive power — this is a much more typical type of presidential power grab.

Taking advantage of the fact that Democratic politicians will likely be hesitant to criticize them — lest they be seen as defending drug traffickers — the administration has shrugged off the legal worries.

The White House has suggested that further operations could be coming and “much larger effort to rid the region of narcotics trafficking and potentially dislodge [the country’s leader Nicolas] Maduro from power.”

The lack of information and transparency from the administration is very concerning.

The Pentagon has been amassing a small armada of warships in the southern Caribbean, to include three guided-missile destroyers.

History has taught us many lessons and we should pay attention to its signs because we might be heading towards World War III

What if your skin is light, but your curls reveal your Blackness. It only takes one drop. Being half Black and half white means one cannot easily check off one box or another. The number of people identifying as multiracial in the United States has surged in recent years.

And what if you are too Black to be white and too white to be Black.

And often the term “mulatto,” is used. it is an offensive, archaic term to describe a person with white and Black parents. Derived from the Spanish word for mule, or “mulo,” it was used during slavery to liken biracial people to the hybrid animal and to justify their legal and social oppression. If this is used to describe you, you may feel mocked, sexualized and dehumanized.

For somebody to use it today, it really is an especially derogatory use, because it’s really going back to the era of slavery in the U.S.

Racism has pervaded the United States since before its founding, and this kind of dehumanizing language is not unusual.

In the current political moment, we are really seeing a turning back of the clock, a return to sort of these past, older ideas about race, and especially about racial superiority and inferiority,”

Also, there is a long history of racial fetishization, tracing back to when European colonizers viewed Black people as possessions and Black women were hyper sexualized, in order to justify the violence that the colonizers inflicted upon them. Enslaved women were sexually abused all the time.

“Mulatto” used to be a racial category on the census, along with “octoroon,” meaning one-eighth African blood, and “quadroon,” meaning one-fourth African blood. The 1870 census defined “mulatto” as including “all persons having any perceptible trace of African blood,” according to the Pew Research Center.

Scientists included these categories on the census because they were trying to prove that biracial people were not fertile and a “doomed class of people, which was a pseudoscientific justification to prevent interracial mixing.

Our society’s ideas about race are constantly fluctuating. Racial categories have changed on nearly every census since the first in 1790. The 2030 census will include new “Hispanic or Latino” and “Middle Eastern or North African” boxes to check.

Race is a political and social classification system, which humans invented to divide people into different “categories of worth.”

The deepest divide in this country is not perhaps one between Democrats and Republicans or conservatives and liberals. It is one from which racism takes root: how we choose to treat each other. Do we respond to our differences with hate and a desire to control, or with empathy and love? This is what defines our society.

Racism isn’t always about hate. It can also stem from patterns we inherited or habits we’ve never questioned. That kind of thinking doesn’t just fade with time. Racism is taught and exists in all of us. It is embedded in the systems that structure our lives.

The only way to overcome it is to have a burning passion to disintegrate it, within ourselves and our communities.

But with this, consumers give up data that enables companies to sometimes charge them more for products. I have done this in the past but try to avoid it.

This is a practice in which a company sets a price for particular consumers based on what it gleans from their personal data. New parents, for example, may be shown baby thermometers at the top of their search results that are more expensive than those shown to others.

As digital tracking becomes more sophisticated, more companies began using consumers’ data to set personalized prices. Studies by the Federal Trade Commission found that personal information — including mouse movements and items abandoned in shopping carts — was being used to set prices for individual consumers.

The study is ongoing, and will release the findings of the study to the public once it’s complete.

Surveillance pricing sits at the intersection of two things most people revile: feeling tracked and feeling ripped off.

Lawmakers are working to restrict the practice at the state level, including in California, Georgia and Illinois. A law requiring companies to disclose its use is working its way through the New York Legislature. And New York Attorney General Letitia James issued a consumer alert to warn New Yorkers about the practice, and encouraged them to file complaints if they encountered violations in the wild.

Companies have always been free to set prices based on their own costs, and what they think the market will bear. But with surveillance pricing, prices are not so much about supply and demand as they are about what a particular individual might be willing to pay. Though unappealing to consumers, the practice is, unfortunately, broadly legal.

Zephyr Teachout, a law professor and consumer advocate said in an interview that she could not pinpoint the exact origin of the phrase. But she acknowledged that it may have emerged from conversations she started having with friends in recent years, in a time of “feeling a lot of urgency in finding a way to communicate one of the biggest revolutions in the markets and economy.”

Beyond the name, the practice, she noted, is visceral, and disturbing, to many consumers: “Whenever people really think about prices being set using the same blob of intimate details that decides their TikTok feed, they get freaked out,” and the idea that retailers could use “your keystrokes, your eye movements, your mood, to set the price of diapers and bread hits a deep nerve.”

Racism is not only morally wrong, but it also has massive detriments to our economy. In a recent study by Citigroup, “Closing the Racial Inequality Gaps,” economists state that in the last 20 years, racism has cost the U.S. economy $16 trillion. This is not insignificant as the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) is more than $21 trillion.

These effects are stark in housing, education, and tax policy.

Housing is a major source of intergenerational wealth for many people. However, public, private, and federal discrimination and policies like redlining prevented families of color from owning a home and devalued their homes.

Decades of obstacles to homeownership meant that families of color have missed out on the benefits of rising home values. This is critical, as owning a home is crucial for wealth accumulation.

A study by Princeton University notes “that even among Black families owning homes, properties do not appreciate at the same rate as properties held by other ethnic groups.”

In 2016, the Federal Reserve found that the median amount of housing wealth for a Black family was $124,000; for white families, it was $200,000.

All forms of discrimination are very costly to the economy. Economists estimate that $218 billion was lost in the last two decades due to discrimination in providing credit—lending and receiving loans—to families of color to purchase homes.

In February 2021, the Austin family bought and renovated a house in Marin City, one of the most expensive housing markets in the country. Despite the location and $400,000 in renovations, it appraised for $989,000, or just $100,000 more than its appraisal before the renovations.

The Austin family suspected racism and got a second appraisal. This time the house was staged to make it seem like a white family owned it. The house was appraised for $1,482,000, almost 50% more than its previous appraisal. A family of color in the U.S. cannot use their home to build wealth and contribute to the economy if their homes continue to be devalued.

The adverse effects of racism build upon themselves. Due to housing discrimination, the education of Black people suffered as well. Property taxes fund local schools; schools in wealthier areas receive more funding than those in poorer areas.

Due to years of racial segregation, families of colors’ homes are worth less, which means their schools are not as well funded. The result is that children of color often don’t get a high-quality education.

Education is fundamental to increasing a person’s income and potential. Over 40 years, a person with a college degree and advanced degree will earn $1.3 million to $2 million, respectively, compared with a high school graduate.

Since more Black students fail to access quality education at a younger age, the path towards college and advanced degrees is extremely difficult. The Citigroup study estimates that it costs the economy billions of dollars, as “$90 billion to $113 billion in lifetime income is lost from discrimination in accessing higher education.”

Racism also negatively impacts our tax system, which currently gives more advantages to people with wealth, which is highly concentrated in white families. According to the Brookings Institution, the net worth of a median white household is ten times that of the median Black household.

A lower tax rate on income from wealth versus wages perpetuates the existing racial wealth divide. While tax advantages like the mortgage interest deduction provide additional tax relief for homeowners, there is typically no deduction or credit for renting. All over the tax code, benefits are given to people who have wealth.

It is critical to address racism, as decades of housing discrimination in real estate, homeownership, lending, and federal policies means Black, Latino, and Native American households are more likely than white households to be low-income renters.

Congress needs to enact a tax system that stops advantaging income from wealth over income from wages. We should advocate for Congress to increase taxes on corporations and the capital gains tax.

The current capital gains tax allows families to transfer vast sums of wealth across generations with minimal tax from art, real estate, and stocks. By prioritizing the taxing of wealth, we are working to close the racial wealth divide.

It may seem that racism in our economy only affects people of color, but it costs all of us. It has cost us trillions of dollars and hurt our country’s economic potential, but we can change this.

I am 79 and am lucky to be able to speak my mind, so as eight Democratic-aligned senators with an average age of about 70 voted with Republicans to end the 40-day shutdown without the health care concessions I ask how old is too old to fight Republicans?

Let’s look at how this capitulation and the subsequent anger played out in the arguments. So many members of Congress who are at (and well beyond) retirement age.

Democrats are denouncing Mr. Schumer and this deal to end the government shutdown that their voters hate. But they offer no plausible account of how they would have done better, because maybe there isn’t one.

It’s a lot easier to vote for something your base hates if you’re too old to worry about re-election.

Of the Democratic-aligned senators who voted for the shutdown deal, two are not running again: Dick Durbin of Illinois, 80, and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, 78. Angus King of Maine is 81 and Jacky Rosen of Nevada is 68. Both Tim Kaine of Virginia and Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire are 67.

All would be past 70 years old if they decide to run again when their terms end.

The other “yes” votes were from Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, 61, representing a state where the Las Vegas tourism industry feared taking a major hit from canceled flights, and from John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, who is just 56 but has embraced Trump on a slew of issues.

This is called a gerontocracy. When you have older leaders who are never going to face re-election again, you make decisions that can be disconnected from what their voters believe.

Yet the age issue is likely to keep flaring up. Senator Chuck Schumer’s top three midterm recruits would be in their 80s by the end of a second term.

This is a matter of how much to fight, and who should lead the charge. Remember, Democrats were less than a week removed from sweeping victories in California, New Jersey and Virginia. For many in the party, Tuesday’s elections were the first time in a year that they could feel good about their collective ability to punch back against extremism.

They wanted the Republicans to fund Affordable Care Act subsidies — with polls showing that voters were generally on the Democrats’ side.

Many progressives and younger Democrats have argued increasingly loudly that Schumer, 74, is no longer up to the fight.

Feeding the discontent are memories of the last shutdown fight in March, when Schumer led Senate Democrats to make a deal with Republicans to keep the government open. Then as now, the party’s base and most of its members in Congress wanted the fight against Trump and his allies.

In one sign of how far out on an island the eight senators are, they drew backhanded scorn from the Democratic National Committee, which rarely intervenes in intra party disputes.

This is all taking place as Trump issued preemptive pardons to Rudolph Giuliani and a host of people who tried to overturn the 2020 election results.

In a world without the Democratic senators’ capitulation, the pardons might have been a galvanizing issue for the party’s elected officials to rally around while continuing to press their case that spiraling health insurance costs were too high.

Fortunately for Democrats, they had some wins that should not be discounted. They raised the salience of soaring health insurance premiums and sent the message that Republicans made the policy that caused them. They goaded Trump into making unpopular moves to withhold food stamps that appear to have hurt his poll numbers. It’s possible the shutdown has still been a net political gain for the Democratic Party despite its necessarily ignominious end.

Grocery prices remain high. Energy prices are high. Our values are on the side of people at the margins who are suffering endlessly with the extremists world view.

You might not know it, but an artificial intelligence algorithm used to screen applicants has decided that you are too risky. Maybe it inferred you wouldn’t fit the company culture or you’re likely to behave in some way later on that might cause friction (such as joining a union or starting a family). Its reasoning is impossible to see and even harder to challenge.

It doesn’t matter that you practice safe digital privacy: keeping most personal details to yourself, avoiding sharing opinions online and prohibiting apps and websites from tracking you, A.I. predicts how you’ll behave at work, based on patterns it has learned from countless other people like you and me.

A.I. banks can use algorithms to decide who gets a loan, learning from past borrowers to predict who will default. Some police departments have fed years of criminal activity and arrest records into “predictive policing” algorithms that have sometimes sent officers back to patrol the same neighborhoods.

Social media platforms use our collective clicks to decide what news — or misinformation — each of us will see. In each case, we might hope that keeping our own data private could protect each of us from unwanted outcomes. A.I. only needs to know what people like you have done before.

As we adapt to living with A.I. as a larger part of our lives, we need to exert collective control over all of our data, to determine if it’s used to benefit or harm us

A while ago, protections meant people might be more willing to share their data with third parties, and these differential privacy algorithms are now quite common. Apple iPhones are built with these algorithms to collect information about user behavior and trends, without ever revealing what data came from whose phone. The 2020 U.S. census used differential privacy in its reporting on the American population to protect individuals’ personal information.

Palantir is building an A.I. system to identify and track people for deportation by combining and analyzing many data sources together getting around the obstacle posed by differential privacy.

Even without knowing who any one person is, the algorithm can likely predict the neighborhoods, workplaces and schools where undocumented immigrants are most likely to be found. A.I. algorithms called Lavender and Where’s Daddy? have been reportedly used in a similar way to help the Israeli military determine and locate targets for bombardment in Gaza.

In climate change, one person’s emissions don’t alter the atmosphere, but everyone’s emissions will destroy the planet. Your emissions matter for everyone else. Similarly, sharing one person’s data seems trivial, but sharing everyone’s data — and tasking A.I. to make decisions using it — transforms society.

Everyone sharing his or her data to train A.I. is great if we agree with the goals that were given to the A.I. It’s not so great if we don’t agree with these goals; and if the algorithm’s decisions might cost us our jobs, happiness, liberty or even lives.

We need to build institutions and pass laws that give people affected by A.I. algorithms a voice over how those algorithms are designed, and what they aim to achieve. The first step is transparency.

Use of A.I. should be required to disclose their objectives and what their algorithms are trying to maximize — whether that’s ad clicks on social media, hiring workers who won’t join unions or total deportation counts.

The second step is participation. The people whose data are used to train the algorithms — and whose lives are shaped by them — should help decide their goals. Like a jury of peers who hear a civil or criminal case and render a verdict together, we might create citizens’ assemblies where a representative randomly chosen set of people deliberates and decides on appropriate goals for algorithms.

That could mean workers at a firm deliberating about the use of A.I. at their workplace, or a civic assembly that reviews the objectives of predictive policing tools before government agencies deploy them. These are the kinds of democratic checks that could align A.I. with the public good, not just private power.

The future of A.I. will not be decided by smarter algorithms or faster chips. It will depend on who controls the data — and whose values and interests guide the machines. If we want A.I. that serves the public, the public must decide what it serves.

Senator Schumer publicly rebuked the “fight Trump” wing of the party back in March when he refused to shut down the government.

Democrats need to engage in an all-out fight for the country. And so,House minority leader Jeffries and several other Democratic representatives attended No Kings Day rallies.

Democrats are energized to participate in politics right now. It looks like 5–6 million people turned out nationwide to stand up for democracy and protest Trump on Saturday. That is a big shift in organization and energy to the left from the 2024 Biden and Harris campaigns (and an increase in turnout since the first No Kings Day in June).

Meanwhile Democrats lead by 3 in the House generic ballot, according to the average at FiftyPlusOne.news, and they’ve increased their vote margin in the average special election since January by 15 points.

In the September Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll, voters who were most likely to say they’ll vote next year were 9 points friendlier to Democrats in the House.

Among the most engaged voters (those saying they are definitely or very likely to vote), the margin is still D+5 (50–45). Voters were asked to rate their interest in the election on a scale from 1 to 10: Among the 10-out-of-10 voters, Democrats lead 55–41 (just 4% undecided) in the generic ballot.

But in the sense that No Kings is evidence to party leadership that Democrats want them to publicly fight for democracy and sensible government, I’d say it’s very important. And if you compare how leadership is acting now (holding firm on day 21 of a government shutdown) to where they were six months ago, I’d say we are in a better place.

Also, party identification age distributions have changed over the last 50 years. Gallup just released its quarterly estimate of national party identification on Oct. 20. Now Democrats hold a 7-point lead on party ID now, their highest since before Joe Biden was elected president.

Moreover that 7-point lead is actually larger than the equivalent Democratic Party ID advantage during Trump’s first term:

This quarter’s D+7 reading is close to the lead Democrats had for most of the past decade, including in 2012 during Barack Obama’s re-election:

This is very different from the party registration data of a few months ago when the NYT said it was a “crisis“ for Democrats. Avise back then was to take the catastrophic framing with a grain of salt, since by mid-year, the data was pretty stale (not a lot of people register to vote in the off year), and so was likely hiding the shift toward Democrats we were seeing in polls.

So, don’t clutch the pearls just now, don’t agonize, organize.

The administration’s efforts to reshape the federal government have serious implications for federal workers and their families—especially Black workers.

For decades, the federal government has provided stable employment, excellent benefits, and key protections in hiring and promotions that supported a robust Black middle class.

This time, the administration’s assault on diversity programs and cuts to the federal work force could make it even more difficult for Black workers to recover when conditions improve.

The African American unemployment rate has surged over the past four months, from 6 to 7.5 percent, while the rate for white people ticked down slightly to 3.7 percent. On top of a slowing economy, the White House’s actions have disproportionately harmed Black workers, economists said.

Since the 1970s, the rate for Black people has run about twice the rate for white people. Because of inferior educational opportunities, the legacy of mass incarceration and discrimination over generations, Black people confront greater challenges in the job market.

In 2023, conditions for Black workers looked as healthy as ever. Unemployment reached a low of 4.8 percent. Wages rose at their fastest pace since data collection began in the 1990s, and median Black household wealth reached the highest level on record.

Conditions started to deteriorate in 2024 after pandemic-era subsidies expired. Hiring slowed, and high prices weighed heavily on low-income earners. Black households were the only racial group last year in which median income fell and the poverty rate rose, according to the Census Bureau.

Job losses are concentrated among Black women working in professional services such as human resources, according to Ms. Wilson’s analysis of federal data. A hiring freeze and mass layoffs in the federal work force, which have continued during the government shutdown and now exceed 200,000, have also fallen disproportionately on Black workers.

The hiring freeze is an impediment to young workers trying to get their foot in the door, too.

State and local governments have picked up some of the slack from federal agencies. But competition for those jobs has gotten tougher with more laid-off public-sector workers looking for positions.

The Los Angeles Black Worker Center, has pushed local governments to hire more Black workers because unionized public-sector jobs have historically provided an on-ramp to stable employment.

The federal backlash against diversity, equity and inclusion practices may be making it more difficult for Black workers to get hired in the private sector, too. The administration ordered that group not to pursue racial equity anymore.

Lower interest rates could offer some relief. Representative Ayanna Pressley, Democrat of Massachusetts, wrote to Jerome H. Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, in early September demanding that the central bank take stronger action to support full employment for Black workers. Fed officials lowered rates later in the month for the first time this year and suggested that more cuts were likely.

But the administration’s actions beyond work-force cuts and anti-D.E.I. policies, could create additional hurdles for Black workers. The Department of Labor’s proposed rollback of minimum-wage and overtime protections for domestic workers, for example, would hurt their incomes. Home care aides for the elderly are overwhelmingly Black and Hispanic women.

And despite the claim that immigrants take jobs from Black people, rising joblessness among Black workers suggests that mass deportations of migrants haven’t arrested the trend.

immigrants fill labor shortages, complement the native workforce, and create jobs through entrepreneurship and increased economic demand. Instead of displacing U.S.-born workers, immigrants often take jobs that native-born workers are unwilling or unable to do, or they fill high-skill positions that are in high demand.

Democrats are spending tens of millions of dollars to understand the working class that once defined their party. They face an identity crisis at the very moment they are trying to attract blue-collar voters who no longer think the political left sees them — or cares. Why did the working class switch sides?

To find a way forward, Democrats might want to look back to when they first lost the working class and the New Deal coalition fractured. While some Democratic challenges have changed, too many struggles remain all too familiar.

Remember in 1970, after Nixon expanded the Vietnam War and the National Guard killed four Kent State students, the antiwar movement radicalized like never before.

Workmen watched protesters chanting support for the other side fighting their kin and kind in Vietnam. IIn a clash that engulfed Lower Manhattan and came to be known as the hard hat riot, masses of workmen pummeled student protesters.

The icons of Franklin Roosevelt’s coalition had attacked the left’s future. It shocked power brokers. The New Left was at war with the Old.

Vietnam concerned not only how one lived but also how one might die. It chafed many working families to see student protesters lecture Americans with less status about social justice while their boys went to war in students’ place. For weeks, two breeds of Democrats were now in the streets, clashing over social values and who felt valued.

This was a class war boiling beneath the emerging culture wars.

Many Americans wanted not only respect for soldiers and the flag but also for motherhood, elders, the workingman. Once celebrated, blue-collar workers were now dismissed as reactionary, racist and ignorant suckers.

So, some Republicans saw their chance to win that Democratic base.

By the 1972 campaign, labor sought to salvage blue-collar Democrats. But at the Democratic convention, George McGovern became the standard-bearer. The New Left had won the party.

At the convention, delegates were diverse by race and sex — but not by class. The party establishment shifted Democrats’ emphasis from social class to social identity. Republicans from Ronald Reagan to President Trump framed campaigns as common touch versus out of touch.

Nixon won 49 states with nearly all his electoral gains being with blue-collar voters. The Republican presidential nominee won the labor vote for the first time since tracking began.

Enough of history! Democrats’ question today is: will Hispanic voters, in particular, ultimately drift rightward as so-called ethnic whites once did?

Trump got the white working class and Latino men. Most of Mr. Trump’s increased Latino support was within the working class. Democrats belatedly recognized that demographics — and a multiracial electorate — did not assure a progressive destiny.

In 2020, when protests and riots took place in many American cities, Representative Jim Clyburn of South Carolina warned that the mind-set “burn, baby, burn” had “destroyed our movement back in the ’60s.”

But Democrats are not fated to relive mistakes that confuse some activists’ causes for whom they claim to represent or the views of radical youth for the views of the young or to forget that politicians can win big, boisterous crowds and still lose America.

Blue-collar America has changed. It’s less unionized, less white, less reliant on manufacturing. But most Americans still lack a bachelor’s degree and would find it difficult to pay a $1,000 emergency expense.

American intellectuals have long struggled to fathom the average American. One study showed that Democrats’ ability to accurately comprehend the other side “actually gets worse with every additional degree they earn.”

And it seems, too often, that leading Democrats who seek some populist fire misunderstand how Democrats got burned. More than two-thirds of swing voters who chose Mr. Trump strongly agreed that Democrats held wrongheaded positions on immigration, crime and identity politics.

Economic populism, including Bernie Sanders’s and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Fighting Oligarchy tour, is the easy part. A populism that ignores most Americans’ social outlook has never proved able to win a majority outside dire economic times.

Democrats cannot merely buy back the working class.

There are also progressive headwinds. Democrats who identify as socially liberal rose to 69 percent from 39 percent over the past two decades.And since the 1970s, loud voices from popular culture to politics have encouraged an orthodox social liberalism that has weighed down swing-state Democratic candidates.

Which inspires yet another question: Have Democrats lost enough to win? Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton — led Democrats out of a similar wilderness. For even when Mr. Trump’s presidency ends, the challenges will persist.

Democrats need to stop walking into the same old trap, and supplement defense of democracy with a viable strategy to lure back enough non-college-educated voters to win elections. Both white voters and voters of color without degrees typically care more about the economy than democratic norms.

First, Trump is not focused on the kitchen table issues he ran on. Second, he has cut government programs that provide security for ordinary Americans in order to finance huge tax cuts for big business. Third, he’s making America weak again in the process.

A disclaimer, I am an atheist but do go to church (Unitarian Universalist). I don’t espouse, as Karl Marx did, that "Religion is the opium of the masses". I do think we have to be careful about extreme dogma.

Religious conservatism now is more intentional and mission-driven and a post-secular formation. The Christian right’s bargain with the current administration could look less corrupting and more necessary.

The Kirk service was more religious than political, with a portrait of the slain father and husband emphasizing his faith over his political activism — but his memorial unfortunately was still a fundamentally right-wing and Republican affair. The good is still very good. Erika Kirk’s act of forgiveness should be remembered for a very long time.

It was a statement of evangelical resilience and an indicator of enduring religious influence within the G.O.P.. But controlling a political coalition is not the same thing as converting a culture..

Traditional Christianity in the past was seen as an overly ideological and factional persuasion by many Americans. There was some distance between partisan conservatism and Christian faith.

But if the Republican Party becomes identified with Christian revivalism and vice versa, then any Christian renewal could hit a ceiling outside the distinctive culture of the G.O.P.

Then there’s also the question of how much the ongoing requirements of the administration are still influencing conservative Christianity for the worse. The new religious conservatism as a mind-set that seeks an “assertive common good Christianity” that aspires to “anchor society in the stability and order that flow from Christian ethics.” There are a lot of Christians who think of their faith’s public witness in this way — as a moral and spiritual answer to the dissolving influences of the 21st century

But there are also versions of religious conservatism that cheerfully participate in our era’s very online cycles of scapegoating while forgetting the key moral concerns of religious conservatism from abortion to foreign aid to the public morals of our politicians.

And there is also very clearly the public Christians have to constantly prove that they, too, are tough enough and mean enough, willing to cross the line or play the bully or break the moral norm if that’s what it takes to stand by the boss or stick it to the libs.

And so it is today. We are enduring vengeance. Far too few experience Christian kindness. It is a great tragedy of our time that so many Christians see a divine plan on what’s happening today/

Unitarian Universalism embraces peace, love, and understanding that goes beyond individual belief systems.

Everyone has been trying to figure out what the Trump years mean for America, in particular about civil rights and the criminal justice system.

The world has changed since Jan. 20. In this country we’re in the midst of a critically important narrative struggle about who we are, what our priorities are as a nation and how we get to a better future. Our courts and the larger society are retreating from that commitment to full equality and justice.

History is becoming a real battlefield. In August, the White House announced a sweeping review of Smithsonian exhibitions and collections. What’s going on here? Why is history so important?

When we are honest about history, we learn things, we discover things and we prepare for things differently. In Johannesburg, for example, the apartheid museum is so honest about the legacy of something so devastating.

In Berlin, you can’t go 200 meters without seeing a monument or a memorial dedicated to the victims of the Holocaust. There's this reckoning with history. There are no Adolf Hitler statues in Berlin. There are no monuments to the perpetrators of the Holocaust.

This liberated them, empowered them to create a new democracy that is trusted, respected, vibrant and that’s growing. It doesn’t mean that all the problems have been eliminated, but it does mean that they have recovered something really important, discovered something important.

Slavery, liberation and segregation needs to allow us to liberate us from the burden that that history creates — that burden that still hangs over us, the fog that that history has created that no one is trying to address.

America should celebrate its history. There are lots of things about America that are worth celebrating, but it should also acknowledge the mistakes it’s made. The mistake with trying to whitewash history is that we just continue and sustain the problems that that history has created.

We need to create a world where the children of our children are no longer burdened by this history of racial bias, where there are no more presumptions of dangerousness and guilt that get assigned to people based on their color, where everyone is free to live kind of a life of value and opportunity without restraint because of their color. And we won’t get there if we don’t address some of these harms.

For decades in this country, we had really qualified women and really qualified people of color being denied opportunities for leadership because they were women, because they were Black, because they were brown. That was unfair. It was wrong.

Also, now courts tolerate more racial bias in cases, more extreme misconduct by police and prosecutors, and they look for procedural reasons not to address substantive constitutional violations. That proceduralism became a fence to keep the courts from having to talk about really hard issues.

We are living where the rule of law is not operating in a way to protect people who have been historically vulnerable, historically victimized by power and abuse, and are, in fact, being utilized in a way that will add to that abuse, add to that exclusion.

Judges in state courts who refuse to enforce federal law are no longer fearful that a federal court will overturn them. They’re not worried that the U.S. Supreme Court will intervene.

The composition of the court right now makes it an institution that if you’re trying to advance racial justice, if you’re trying to advance human rights. It is not a very welcoming or hospitable place.

If a court says that states can do whatever they want to do to maintain political power, to disenfranchise Black and brown people, then that will take us back decades. It will fundamentally negate all of that progress.

Should the Court have the authority to undermine the objectives of the president? And that will be a fundamental question this court has to decide — one that will shape the future of this country.

Truth has the power to be resurrected, even in the face of lies and difficult dark days it can triumph!

In March, Democrats shrank from confrontation under the threat of a government shutdown. Now voters’ growing disenchantment with the government and the unpopularity of the megabill gives Democrats a chance to fight and win as another funding deadline looms.

By demanding action on popular policies, Democrats could execute a delicate maneuver where they avoid blame for a shutdown while benefiting from the negotiations to end it.

Backing off to avoid a shutdown would depress the Democratic base and signal capitulation to an increasingly authoritarian regime.

One instructive precedent comes from the 1995-96 shutdown, when right-wing Republicans took control of both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years. A battered Mr. Clinton later pleaded with reporters that he was still “relevant,” which sounds a lot like today’s congressional Democrats.

Yet when the shutdown ended in early 1996, Mr. Clinton had won big. How? Clinton boiled down his dozens of wordy policy positions to what his aides called “M.M.E.E.” — Medicare, Medicaid, education and the environment. Intense focus on those four popular Democratic positions powered Mr. Clinton’s shutdown comeback and his re-election that fall.

Democrats have a big edge on what’s seen as the No. 1 problem in America: affordability. According to a new CBS News poll, a paltry 36 percent of Americans approve of the way the administration is handling inflation.

On health, Democrats should demand an extension of the popular tax credits that make Obamacare more affordable for millions of Americans, which are scheduled to expire next year. They should insist on restoring funding for popular National Institutes of Health grants, particularly for cancer research.

Democrats should insist on the availability of vaccines, a position supported by 78 percent of adults in a recent NBC News poll.

On tariffs, Democrats should demand that almost all tariffs be approved by Congress/

Democrats should demand the restoration of Mr. Trump’s $500 million cuts in aid to local law enforcement and fund thousands of new officers while they’re at it. They could effectively argue that it’s better to spend money preventing crime than having troops pick up cigarette butts on the National Mal

All of this could be pursued while establishing that the president cannot rescind appropriations without congressional approval, including a filibuster-proof Senate vote.

While a CBS News poll shows 47 percent approve of his “goals,” only 37 percent like his “approach.” That doesn’t bode well for his management of a shutdown.

And if Mr. Trump vetoes the appropriations bill, extending the shutdown, he’ll just tick off the millions of Americans who use government services in hundreds of ways, further weakening Republicans heading into the midterms.

Democrats should not deter from at least trying to do their duty. They should heed the advice that the retired Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. offered to Roosevelt when he took office in 1933, amid a crisis of democracy: “Form your battalion and fight!”

Source: New York Times

In 1958, by a bipartisan vote, Congress passed and President Dwight Eisenhower signed the National Defense Education Act, one of the most consequential federal interventions in education in the nation’s history. Together with the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, it made America into the world’s undisputed leader in science and technology.

Nearly 70 years later, that leadership is in peril, the single remaining U.S. institution among the top 10 is Harvard, in second place, far behind the Chinese Academy of Sciences. If this does not constitute a Sputnik moment, it is hard to imagine what would.

Now the leaders of American universities have done little more than duck and cover.

The N.D.E.A. reflected the widespread realization that something had to be done in schools and universities besides teaching students to hide under their desks. The country urgently needed more experts.

The act also played a significant role in diversifying the nation’s campuses by providing low-interest loans to applicants in need, incidentally challenging policies that had restricted admission for disfavored groups, such as Jewish, Asian, Black, Polish and Italian students.

What began as a project of national security blossomed into a generator for limitless curiosity, creativity and critique. The result of the huge influx of tax dollars was institutions that not only trained scientists, medical researchers and weapons engineers but also cultivated sociologists, historians, philosophers and poets.

By the 1990s, American universities had become global cultural icons — envied for their intellectual breadth, celebrated for their academic freedom and eagerly sought after by international students who viewed them as the apex of open inquiry and prestige.

But now, science research has been curtailed; postdoctoral fellowships have been abruptly canceled; laboratories have been shuttered and visas denied. The damage to scientific enterprise extends beyond our borders, whether it’s from the cancellation of nearly $500 of funding for mRNA research under the health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or the purging of data on which climate researchers around the world depend. We will never know what diseases might have been cured or what advances in technology might have been invented had the lights not gone out in the labs.

Should the administration be determined to reshape the intellectual life and values of faculty members and students alike, then recovery will be impossible.

Our situation is not hopeless any more now than it was in 1957. The United States has won so many Nobel Prizes — far more than every other country, including China — not only because of generous funding but also because of an intellectual culture that encourages and rewards innovation and risk-taking, and because we have attracted gifted researchers from all over the world.

In following our values and principles, we must create a community with a culture that welcomes diverse perspectives and supports constructive debate about how values and science are intertwined. Remember the Tuskegee experiment led many African Americans to develop a lingering, deep mistrust of public science officials and vaccines.

Source: Stephen Greenblatt New York Times

It is increasingly clear that the world is no longer persuaded by America’s approach to economic policy. Other nations are not, for the most part, retaliating against the administration’s policies by imposing higher tariffs on American goods. But they also are not imposing higher tariffs on goods imported from countries other than the United States. The rest of the world is rejecting protectionism.

In reality, the United States is walking out of the system it created. While other nations regret its departure, they are not inclined to follow in its self-destructive footsteps. Fears of a global trade war have not materialized because the leaders of other nations have recognized that by raising tariffs, they would be hurting their own countries.

The World Trade Organization reported last month that “a broader cycle of tit-for-tat retaliation that could be very damaging to global trade has so far been avoided.”

Higher tariffs are supposed to protect US manufacturers from unfair foreign competition, leading American consumers to buy more goods produced in American factories, which in turn would expand domestic employment.

But the number of Americans with factory jobs has declined by 28,000. Companies are canceling or delaying their expansion plans. Spending on factory construction has declined.

And a federal appeals court ruled in August that many of the new tariffs are illegal. This will be sent to the Supreme Court.

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Many of the products “Made in America” include a significant share of parts and materials made in other countries.

Tariffs have been applied indiscriminately. The average effective tariff rate for the United States has soared to 18.6 percent from 2.5 percent. The new level is far higher than in any other developed nation.

Countries are not raising tariffs on other trading partners. The European Union, to take just one example, has not only refrained from significant retaliation against the United States. It also has not emulated Mr. Trump by imposing tariffs on low-income Asian nations in an attempt to bolster the prospects of European manufacturers.

Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, said “If the United States doesn’t want to buy, we will find new partners,” he said. “The world is big, and it’s eager to do business with Brazil.”

Other nations continue to pursue trade established by the United States decades ago because they continue to see trade, managed judiciously, as a path to greater prosperity.

Source nytimes.com.

You can pay more for traditional Medicare, or opt for a plan offered by a private insurer and risk drawn-out fights over coverage. Patients are leery andI think it’s the back door into privatizing traditional Medicare.

Private insurers often require a cumbersome review process that frequently results in the denial or delay of essential treatments that are readily covered by traditional Medicare.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services plans to begin a pilot program that would involve a similar review process for traditional Medicare, the federal insurance program for people 65 and older as well as for many younger people with disabilities. The pilot would start in six states next year.

The federal government plans to hire private companies to use artificial intelligence to determine whether patients would be covered for some procedures, like certain spine surgeries or steroid injections.

Similar algorithms used by insurers have been the subject of several high-profile lawsuits, which have asserted that the technology allowed the companies to swiftly deny large batches of claims and cut patients off from care in rehabilitation facilities.

The A.I. companies selected to oversee the program would have a strong financial incentive to deny claims. Medicare plans to pay them a share of the savings generated from rejections.

The government said the A.I. screening tool would focus narrowly on about a dozen procedures, which it has determined to be costly and of little to no benefit to patients.

Abe Sutton, the director of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, said that the government would not review emergency services or hospital stays. Mr. Sutton said the government experiment would examine practices that were particularly expensive or potentially harmful to patients. “This is what prior authorization should be,” he said.

The government may add or subtract to the list of treatments it has slated for review depending on what treatments it finds are being overused, he said.

People enrolled in traditional Medicare who live in Arizona, New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas and Washington State will be included in the experiment, which is expected to start in January and last for six years.

It’s basically the same set of financial incentives that has created issues in Medicare Advantage and drawn so much scrutiny,

Typically, these A.I. models scan a patient’s records to determine if a requested procedure meets an insurer’s criteria. For instance, before authorizing back surgery, the system might search for proof that a patient first tried physical therapy or received an MRI showing a bulging disc.

Insurers defend these tactics as being effective in reducing inappropriate care, such as by preventing someone from getting back surgery at tremendous cost instead of another treatment that would work just as well. Government officials said that any denials would be done by “an appropriately licensed human clinician, not a machine.”

A group of House Democrats, including Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, warned in a letter to government officials in late July that giving for-profit companies a “veto” over care “opens the door to further erosion of our Medicare system.”

Private plans under Medicare Advantage have become increasingly popular, with a little more than half of older Americans and people with disabilities eligible for the program and some 34 million enrolled.

But many are willing to forgo some of the additional benefits the private plans offer, like dental checkups and gym memberships, to avoid having to jump through numerous hoops to get care.

The American Medical Association wrote in a letter that doctors view prior authorization “as one of the most burdensome and disruptive administrative requirements they face in providing quality care to patients.” Most patients who appeal are successful, but a vast majority never appeal.

In announcing the new model, Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administrator of the Medicare agency, said the goal was to root out fraud, waste and abuse.

But if the algorithm used to authorize those procedures proves to save the government money C.M.S. may feel justified in broadening the program to include services that are not such “low-hanging fruit.”

How insurers make their decisions remains opaque. A spokesman for Health and Human Services, which oversees the Medicare agency, declined to identify which companies had submitted applications for the contract.

Contractors hired by the government are supposed to watch over payments to ward against inappropriate or wasteful coverage. Those reviews generally happen after someone has received a treatment.

The new model relies on an additional set of private companies for traditional Medicare that have a very clear incentive to deny care.

The companies represent “a whole new bounty hunter,” said David A. Lipschutz, the co-director for the Center for Medicare Advocacy, one of the groups that has urged government officials to abandon the program.

Source: NYT

Indiana, Missouri, Ohio and perhaps Florida — all Republican-controlled states — seem likely to join Texas and California in attempting to redraw their congressional maps, Republicans could carve out up to seven more House seats where they would be favored to win.

Other states could join; a legal challenge to Utah’s map and a challenge to Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act also loom.

Ultimately, the most important question is whether redistricting prevents the party that wins the national popular vote from winning control of the House. If the popular vote winner wins, then gerrymandering, hasn’t necessarily left one party at an undemocratic disadvantage overall.

The House map was fundamentally fair in 2024: Despite plenty of gerrymandering, the winner of the popular vote was reasonably likely to win the most seats. But if the new maps are enacted in all of these states, Democrats will need to win the national popular vote by two or three percentage points to be favored to retake the House, according to projections based on recent congressional and presidential election results.

A two-to-three-point structural advantage for the G.O.P. is meaningful, but pretty modest. With Democrats leading by four points in the national generic ballot polls today, the party would still be favored to win next year’s midterm election.

The Republicans wouldn’t stand much of any chance at all of surviving a so-called “wave” election, like in 2018, when Democrats won the House popular vote by seven points.

But even if the Democrats won, the likeliest outcome would be a piecemeal seat-by-seat battle in which control of the chamber would come down to a fairly small number of seats. The race might not be called for days. Democrats wouldn’t have much margin for error.

In Missouri, Ohio and Indiana, could draw a total of four new safely Republican districts without endangering any incumbents. Things were messier in Florida.

Republicans want to target two Democratic seats in South Florida, but it could potentially endanger an incumbent. One voted for Joe Biden and could be quite competitive — especially in the Democratic-leaning years that Republicans might hope to survive through new maps.

So it is not a given that Republicans would actually pick up seven seats from their maps when there are so few competitive districts nationwide.

Two potential Democratic-leaning districts in California and at least one of two new Republican districts in Florida seem likely to be at least somewhat competitive. It’s worth noting that most of these potentially competitive districts have relatively large Hispanic populations, and Democrats can plausibly hope that Hispanic voters will collectively snap back to the left next November.

Democrats have a much better chance to overcome a structural disadvantage if they pull off even a few surprising wins. If recent history is any indication, there will be a few surprises, eroding the G.O.P. edge. If not, Republican chances go up.

Source: Nate Cohn NYT

A 2023 survey found that 80 percent of Gen Z adults — that is, those born after 1997 — were worried that their generation was too dependent on technology.

Sixty percent of Gen Z adults said that they wished they could return to a time before everyone was “plugged in.”

That, of course, would involve returning to a time that largely predates their own lives.

The oft-noted increase in sales of vinyl records, CDs, physical books and board games is driven only in part by older adults looking to revisit their youth. Young people who grew up on digital entertainments are also a major force behind this retro resurgence.

Nostalgia helps people thrive in the present and build a better future. Even spending a few minutes reflecting on a fond memory or listening to an old familiar song can improve your mood, increase feelings of belonging and instill a sense of meaning in life.

For most people, most of the time, it is a stabilizing and energizing force.

Members of Gen Z appear to be mining the past to enrich their present lives — especially by fostering a greater appreciation for offline living.

One social media user, for example, described being inspired to buy “a large photo album and high-quality photo printer” because the user was emotionally moved that previous generations created physical photo albums and shared them with visitors to their homes.

In media, styles, hobbies or traditions from bygone eras 78 percent pf Gen Z said they believed that new technologies and products should incorporate ideas and design elements from these periods. Moreover, roughly two-thirds reported that exploring eras that predate their lives helped them when they were stressed out about modern life or anxious about the future.

Also, millennials and Gen X-ers also experienced high levels of historical nostalgia compared with baby boomers and the silent generation.

For example, the practice of listening to an entire vinyl record is a valuable exercise in sustained focus, since you can’t toggle away on Spotify to another album or song or click on a YouTube video halfway through. But the practice may also be teaching young people broader lessons — say, that they can take a long walk in nature without having to check their phones until they return. Even something as simple as a board game night with friends may help them feel more comfortable and confident in professional social settings.

With the rise of artificial intelligence, all eyes are on the future. But it is worth looking to the past, as Gen Z appears to be doing, to reveal the future we actually want.

Source: NYT

Several sources indicate that tariffs disproportionately impact Blacks, the poor and low-income households, both in the United States and globally.

Tariffs are a regressive tax: They apply to imported goods, and lower-income families tend to spend a larger portion of their income on these items, especially necessities like clothing, food, and home goods. Wealthier households can often afford to purchase more expensive domestic alternatives or adjust their spending patterns more easily.

Tariffs increase the cost of imported goods, and businesses often pass these costs on to consumers in the form of higher prices. Also, tariffs can limit the availability of certain imported goods, particularly those that are more affordable,

Tariffs can lead to job losses in industries that rely on imported materials or face retaliatory tariffs from other countries, potentially hitting low-income communities and workers without higher education particularly hard.

A recent analysis found that tariffs implemented in 2025 could result in an average income loss of $2,400 per household, with low-income households facing disproportionately larger losses.

Research from the Cato Institute highlighted how the U.S. tariff code has historically been tougher on lower-end versions of goods compared to their higher-end counterparts, particularly in categories like clothing and food.

The World Trade Organization emphasizes that tariffs can exacerbate economic disparities, especially impacting low-income households, women, and smaller businesses that may struggle with the increased costs and complexities of trade barriers.

Executive actions, meanwhile, are undermining basic governance while hollowing out the federal workforce, a key source of opportunity for Black households since it desegregated in 1948, and vital for building the Black middle class. And, the Trump Administration’s extreme tariff scheme will cost jobs, raise the price of many goods, and create an uncertain environment that is harmful to businesses and particularly Black-owned businesses, which are often relatively small and less well connected to government officials, and thus less likely to obtain exemptions from tariffs.

Opportunity should be available to everyone no matter their race, color, or creed. The Administration’s agenda limits the opportunities for Black and other households to live in healthy and thriving communities, to have the chance to move forward in life, and to be free from worry about “just getting by.

They are looking for art that confronts the pain of family separation and uplifts the everyday acts of love, memory, and solidarity that keep us moving forward.

Color Compton s an arts and history organization grounded on theories and concepts of art making, storytelling, identity, community and history. Through youth internships and community workshops, they highlight the importance of storytelling and narratives throughout history while also introducing visual art techniques and mediums to empower each person to develop their own narratives.

Their mission is to disrupt the single and limited story of marginalized communities such as Compton by serving as a pillar in the community where our Black and Brown histories and art are honored and preserved.

They aim to elevate youths’ artistic skills and education to foster future art abolitionists.

The Museum sets itself apart from all other museums by engaging visitors in a dynamic and interactive experience that combines art, history, and community in a way that amplifies the culture of people from Compton and greater South Los Angeles.

As a community-based and community-centered museum, they are currently located in the heart of Compton, CA—within a shopping center, a place often overlooked or dismissed by society as unworthy of housing art or culture. Yet, they embrace this tension. Their presence there challenges conventional norms, honoring the beauty, creativity, and power of our people, our space, and our stories.

A new expansion will gain access to a stand-alone building featuring a gated parking lot, welcoming foyer, theater, gift shop, permanent history and entertainment exhibition areas, rotating exhibition area, and a dedicated archiving room. This expanded space will allow residents and visitors to be fully immersed in the rich culture, history, and art of our community.

President Trump’s decision to send at least 800 National Guard troops into the streets of Washington to fight crime is the latest example of how the president has used the military to advance domestic policy priorities.

Though crime rates in the capital have been falling, Mr. Trump has said that they are “totally out of control” and has threatened a federal takeover.

Already this year, Mr. Trump has deployed some 10,000 active-duty troops to the southwest U.S. border to choke off the flow of drugs as well as migrants, and 4,700 National Guard troops and Marines to Los Angeles to help quell protests that had erupted over immigration raids and to protect the federal agents conducting them. All but about 250 of those National Guard troops have since been withdrawn.

The National Guard troops who will fan out across Washington starting this week will not perform law enforcement tasks, Pentagon officials said on Monday. Instead, 100 to 200 Guard soldiers at any given time will help with such tasks as logistics and transportation, while providing a “physical presence” in support of federal agents, the Army said in a statement.

But like the Guard in Los Angeles, the soldiers in Washington will probably be able to detain people temporarily in certain circumstances until federal agents arrive, officials said. The soldiers will be armed and authorized to defend themselves, military officials said.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, offered no details on how long the National Guard would be deployed in the capital. But he said they “will be strong, they will be tough and they will stand with their law enforcement partners.”

Unlike a state’s governor, the District of Columbia does not have control over its National Guard, giving the president broad leeway to deploy those troops.

The U.S. military responds quickly to executive directives. For that reason, it is a preferred institution for a president who presents himself as tough on crime, undocumented immigrants, drugs, “woke” culture and other perceived domestic enemies.

But in recent months that has put the military at the center of a series of partisan political issues, traditionally where its leaders in the past have least wanted to be.The military does not train for normal police beat-walking missions,

This is part of a pattern where the administration is using and appropriating military resources for nonmilitary domestic goals. Whether it’s immigration or going against drug cartels or crime in Washington, this administration sees the military as a one-size-fits-all solution to accomplishing its domestic political priorities.

Our military is trained to defend the nation from external threats and assist communities during disasters or emergencies, not to conduct day-to-day domestic policing. This deployment is a serious misuse of the National Guard’s time and talent.” They are being asked to threaten force against the people whose kids may go to school with them.

This is another step to our loss of freedom and we must mobilize against it!

More than two-thirds of Canadians say they plan to buy fewer American grocery products this year. Canadian travel to America continues its steep decline, although that may have less to do with political resistance than with the fact that the United States has made spectacularly clear that foreigners within its borders may be subject to detention, and possibly even violence, without recourse.

The president, has declared repeatedly that he intends to soften up the Canadian economy in preparation for annexation. Americans, from what I can tell, don’t seem to take this possibility seriously, even though he undertook the task in earnest last week by imposing a 35 percent tariff. The American threat to our sovereignty, so sudden, so foolish, is reshaping Canadian life.

All over the world, as the United States retreats from the global order it created, nations are reforming their priorities, changing their institutions and, as a result, changing their identities.

There are drastic changes in how countries exist, in who they are. But perhaps nowhere is the change more profound than in Canada.

In response to America’s threats, Canada is in the middle of the greatest explosion of nationalism in the country’s history.

People on both sides of the border hope that this economic antipathy is temporary. But the second Trump administration has established a more enduring truth about the United States: It is no longer a country that keeps its agreements. One should do business with such people only if you have to. According to a poll from February, 91 percent of Canadians want to rely less on the United States as a trade partner.

The system of open global trade anchored by the United States — a system that Canada has relied on since the Second World War, a system that while not perfect has helped deliver prosperity for a country for decades — is over. Canadians say that they just cannot be in a position in the future where they can be threatened in this way.

I understand that Americans at this point considered the possibility of annexation too outlandish to be taken seriously. But the United States has shown itself capable of the most outlandish possibilities. A year ago, the idea that the U.S. Marines would be deployed to Los Angeles in support of masked agents who don’t always identify themselves would have been seen as dystopian fiction.

When countries backslide out of democracy, invading neighbors is typically the kind of justification autocratic leaders use to suspend their own laws.

The mind-set of Canada is changing, and the shift is cultural as much as economic or political. Since the 1960s, Canadian elites have been rewarded by integration with the United States.

The question is no longer how Canadians should stop comparing themselves with the United States, but how to escape its grasp and its fate. In several surveys, the overwhelming first choice for what Canadians think makes the country unique is multiculturalism. This, in a world collapsing into hatreds, is the distinctly Canadian national project.

Canada still has one of the highest rates of naturalization in the world. This country has always been plural. It has always contained many languages, ethnicities and tribes. The triumph of compromise among difference is the triumph of Canadian history. That seems to be an ideal worth fighting for.

In a recent Pew Research Center survey, 59 percent of Canadians identified the United States as the country’s top threat, and 55 percent of Canadians identified the United States as the country’s most important ally.

That is both an unsustainable contradiction and also a reality that will probably define Canada for the foreseeable future. Canada is divided from America, and America is divided from itself. The relationship between Canada and America rides on that fissure.

Large groups of people in Canada, and one assumes in America, too, hope this new animosity will pass with the passing of the Trump administration.

Canada is far from powerless in this new world; they are educated and resourceful. But they are alone in a way they never have been. Canada serves as a connector between the world’s democracies. We should treat our neighbor with respect and reset our shared values.

Source: Stephen Marche is the host of the “Gloves Off” podcast and the author of “The Next Civil War.”

The administration is trying to impose a new portrait of America that is without flaws at the Liberty Bell, the giant redwoods of Muir Woods, and especially in the Smithsonian Institution.

Last month a label that mentioned that President Trump had been impeached twice disappeared from an exhibit on the presidency while the impeachments of Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton are still included at the Smithsonian.

This is an effort to rewrite history in its official museums and cultural artifacts. In this new narrative, there can be no arguments about oppression by race or gender or ethnicity or sexuality or economic class, the administration implies, because no such oppression will be acknowledged in the official history, which can only be uplifting.

In March Trump signed an executive order accusing the institution of coming under the influence of a “divisive, race-centered ideology” that portrays American values as harmful and oppressive.

The Smithsonian said the references to the Trump impeachments were removed as part of a review of the institution’s content for bias. One prominent artist has refused to exhibit her works at the Portrait Gallery after it balked at showing the widely popular official portrait of Michelle Obama.

Also other targets:

A display about Dorothy’s ruby slippers from “The Wizard of Oz” mentioned the Great Depression and the coming world war;

A label on two “Star Wars” droids noted the nation needed “new hope” after the Vietnam War and Watergate;

Mickey Mouse’s original blackface appearance.

Already, dutiful Park Service employees have flagged signs at the Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia depicting the abuse of fugitive slaves. The Park Service is restoring a statue of a Confederate general in Washington that was torn down and burned during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020.

And unsurprisingly, the administration removed references to transgender people from the Park Service’s website for the Stonewall National Monument in Greenwich Village. It feels like only a matter of time until the government’s Wite-Out is applied nationwide.

These museums finally told the truth about American history — who benefited and who suffered — in an unsparing way. More of it might help new generations confront the reality of their past and prevent further injustices. American shame is precisely what the government is trying to prevent, particularly over racial issues,

For now, the White House has no direct leverage over private museums. Two in New York are presenting exhibitions that repudiate the Trumpian notion that art must uphold an officially approved narrative. “Blacklisted: An American Story” at the New York Historical is a sharp reminder of the cost to society when the government decides to crack down on a disfavored ideology and winds up undermining the freedom to speak, as it did during the Red Scare beginning in 1947.

Remember when most Hollywood studios and television networks, complied with the demands of the Red baiters and refused to push back, just as the Smithsonian appears to be doing now.

Art can only be effective at illuminating and healing if it is unconstrained by authority. Nonconformity is the basic precondition of art, as it is the precondition of good thinking and therefore of growth and greatness in a people.

The degree of nonconformity present — and tolerated — in a society might be looked upon as a symptom of its state of health.

Source: David Firestone NYT

Over the past five decades, the United States Supreme Court has developed an extensive and complex jurisprudence on redistricting. The court said that challengers bear the burden of demonstrating that race, rather than politics, was the predominant factor in the design of a redistricting map. The Court’s future orders could also strike down the Voting Rights Act’s safeguards against gerrymandering altogether.

Texas Democrats fled Austin on Sunday. A new gerrymandered congressional map that will probably flip five blue districts to red. Those extra seats would give the G.O.P. a much more comfortable majority in Washington.

Greg Abbott, the Texas governor, says he’ll oust Democratic lawmakers who don’t return for the vote.

Republican lawmakers hope to pick up five more seats in the U.S. House, five districts now held by Democrats. Three are in urban areas — in Houston and Dallas, and around Austin and San Antonio. The other two are along the Mexican border, where the majority Hispanic population has trended Republican in recent elections.

The map could also force veteran Democratic legislators to fight primary campaigns against young and promising members of the party. The new Austin seat, for instance, might pit Lloyd Doggett, a veteran congressman, against a rising progressive. Al Green.

The Texan Democrats struck a defiant tone yesterday in response to Abbott’s threats. Several representatives fled to Albany, where they sat alongside New York’s governor in a press conference. “My grandmother says this: ‘If you allow yourself to be a rug, people will step on you”

This strategy is maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time. Lawmakers in Missouri, Florida, Indiana, New Hampshire and Ohio.

For years, Democrats argued that politics had no place in political mapmaking, and they backed independent, nonpartisan panels to decide the boundaries.

Now they may simply retaliate. In New York yesterday, the governor, Kathy Hochul, said that Texas had left Democrats no choice: “We must do the same.”

California’s governor wants to redraw the state’s political map — and have voters approve it. In Illinois, where Democrats dominate state politics, the process would be simpler, but the boundaries are already quite gerrymandered. Still, the governor says, “all bets are off.”

In Texas, the runaway Democrats can stop Republicans from adopting the new maps for a time. But past walkouts failed after Democrats eventually went home. So the fight is likely to find a more conventional venue: the courthouse.

Source: NYT

When Congress passed President Trump’s signature domestic policy bill last month, they voted to take health care coverage away from about 10 million people. In the past, And they openly boasted about part of it.

About half of the 10 million will lose coverage because of a new requirement that people who enroll in Medicaid prove that they are working, looking for work or unable to work. Funds generated will be used to finance tax cuts for the wealthy.

Republicans have put more stock in an idea that has long been a part of the American conversation about health insurance: that it is a benefit one earns by working. Work requirements have overwhelming support among Republicans, and polls have found that about half of Democrats back the idea, too.

Democrats have warned that some people who do work will lose Medicaid because they can’t file the right paperwork.

The United States’ large uninsured population has forced the creation of a vast, ad hoc safety net that fills the gaps in a patchwork system.

In the years following World War II, most of the United States’ peer countries were creating universal health coverage. Each put its own spin on the idea. Britain made doctors government employees when it built its National Health System in 1948. Canada’s coverage scheme relied on public insurance that paid private doctors for care. Australia came up with a two-tier system: basic public insurance for everybody, with the option to buy a private plan for more generous benefits.

The United States took a completely different path: It tied insurance to employment. American companies facing labor shortages began courting workers by offering them health benefits. Employers were under wartime wage controls but insurance coverage didn’t count, making it an attractive way to provide additional compensation.

In 1954, the Internal Revenue Service gave employer-sponsored insurance an even bigger boost when it made health benefits tax-exempt.

After years of debate, Medicare and Medicaid started in 1966. Medicare was a straightforward program that covered all adults over 65. Medicaid was more complicated. It gave the coverage only to those already receiving cash assistance because they had conditions excluding them from employment. At the time, this included the blind, people with disabilities and single women with children.

Obamacare passed in 2010, expanded Medicaid to anyone who earned less than 133 percent of the federal poverty line. They refashioned Medicaid to look more like Medicare, a program that covers everybody who meets a single condition.

But Medicaid only rarely charges deductibles or co-payments, whereas the average employer plan now has a nearly $2,000 deductible before it kicks in.

A few years after Obamacare passed, several Republican states began proposing adding a work requirement to the program. Somebody who is able-bodied and receiving a public benefit, they ought to have a responsibility, they said.

Their supporters were elevating the idea that people won’t face much harm if they lose medical coverage.

Newer research that uses bigger data sets has started to find that insurance coverage, and Medicaid in particular, does lower death rates. The connection is strongest when researchers look at older, sicker populations.

There is also the financial and mental strain of lacking coverage, which can affect a person’s well-being but wouldn’t turn up in a study that strictly measured physical health outcomes. In my 15 years covering America’s health system, Uninsured patients are too scared to go to the doctor because they fear a large bill on the other end.

Another problem: emergency rooms refusing to see patients who did not have the means to pay. This led to the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, which requires emergency rooms to provide “life-stabilizing” treatment to everyone, even the uninsured.

Uninsured Americans may be scraping together the care they need from free clinics and emergency rooms but they may be doing so at great personal cost, arranging child care for a long wait or having their paycheck garnished when they can’t pay the medical bill.

With some 10 million people expected to lose their access to Medicaid in the decade after the domestic policy bill goes into effect in 2027, more patches may soon be needed in the system.

The Medicaid work requirements in the bill do not take effect until 2027 and, at the last minute, the Senate added a waiver provision that could push the policy back until 2029.

An insidious and enticing form of tech has taken hold: the internet, especially via smartphones. There is evidence that our ability to apply brain power is decreasing.

The idea that technology is altering our capacity not just to concentrate but also to read and to reason is catching on and this may be creating yet another form of inequality.

Long-form literacy is not innate but learned, sometimes laboriously. Acquiring and perfecting a capacity for long-form, “expert reading” is literally mind-altering. It rewires our brains, increasing vocabulary, shifting brain activity toward the analytic left hemisphere and honing our capacity for concentration, linear reasoning and deep thought. The presence of these traits at scale contributed to the emergence of free speech, modern science and liberal democracy, among other things.

The digital environment is optimized for distraction, as various systems compete for our attention with notifications and other demands. Social media platforms are designed to be addictive, and the sheer volume of material incentivizes intense cognitive “bites” of discourse calibrated for maximum compulsiveness over nuance or thoughtful reasoning.

The resulting patterns of content consumption form us neurologically for skimming, pattern recognition and distracted hopping from text to text — if we use our phones to read at all.

Increasingly, the very act of reading scarcely seems necessary. Platforms such as TikTok and YouTube Shorts offer a bottomless supply of enthralling, short-form videos. These combine with visual memes, fake news, real news, clickbait, sometimes hostile misinformation and, increasingly, a torrent of A.I.-generated slop content.

The result is a media environment that seems like the cognitive equivalent of the junk food aisle and is every bit as difficult to resist as those colorful, unhealthy packages.

The harms of digital media will be more pronounced at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale.

Poor kids spend more time on screens each day than rich ones. Research indicates that kids who are exposed to more than two hours a day of recreational screen time have worse working memory, processing speed, attention levels, language skills and executive function than kids who are not.

Many U.S. states, including California, are restricting student smartphone use, which in theory ought to level the playing field. But it is optimistic to assume such rules will be enforced.

New generations reach adulthood having never lived in a world without smartphones, we can expect the culture to stratify ever more starkly. On the one hand, a relatively small group of people will retain, and intentionally develop, the capacity for concentration and long-form reasoning. On the other, a larger general population will be effectively post-literate — with all the consequences this implies for cognitive clarity.

An electorate that has lost the capacity for long-form thought will be more tribal, less rational, largely uninterested in facts or even matters of historical record, moved more by vibes than cogent argument and open to fantastical ideas and bizarre conspiracy theories. If that sounds familiar, it may be a sign of how far down this path the West has already traveled.

Oligarchs attempting to shape policy to their advantage will benefit from the fact that few will have the attention span to track or challenge policies. There is no reason the opportunity to sideline the electorate or to arbitrage the gap between vibes and policy should especially favor either the red team or the blue team.

This post-literate world favors demagogues skilled at code-switching between the elite language of policy and the populist one of meme-slop. It favors oligarchs with good social media skills and those with more self-assurance than integrity. It does not favor those with little money, little political power and no one to speak up for them.

Source Mary Harrington NY

Militarized federal encroachments on public life provoke strong, even violent responses — even among those who agree with their aims.

Trump and Stephen Miller set a goal of deporting 1 million undocumented immigrants each year —ICE will now become the largest law enforcement agency in the country.

Is this a major victory? Maybe not because there's reason to believe it could backfire.

Mass deportations on this scale require brute displays of force that may shock the public conscience, even among people who theoretically support the broader goals.

In Los Angeles the administration deployed guardsmen and active-duty military and ICE arrested over 1,600 persons, including workers at car washes and farms — even people making lawful appearances in immigration court.

The American public, which broadly approved of Trump’s tough stance on immigration during the 2024 election, is shifting the other way. A recent CNN poll shows 55 percent think Trump has gone too far in his pursuit of undocumented immigrants.

We’ve been here before — and there is a warning in it for the president.

Take for example the Fugitive Slave Act (FSA) of 1850.

The act inspired widespread disgust throughout the North. The law stripped accused runaways of their right to trial by jury and allowed individual cases to be bumped up from state courts to special federal courts. Most obnoxious to many Northerners, the law stipulated harsh fines and prison sentences for any citizen who refused to cooperate with or aid federal authorities in the capture of accused fugitives — much in the same way the Trump administration has threatened to jail persons who impede its immigration raids.

The parallels to today are fairly obvious.

Voters who, on paper, support the deportation of undocumented persons are beginning to see just what Trump’s dragnet looks like, in close and intimate terms. Some are recoiling at the idea that law-abiding people with legal or protected status, even citizens, might be detained by masked, unidentified agents and deported or swept away to brutal prisons in South America or Africa, without the benefit of a trial.

Many believe that, like the formerly enslaved who built new lives in free states, immigrants who have established themselves as productive and valued members of their communities, and who have otherwise abided by the laws where they live, have earned the right to a pathway to citizenship.

More ominous, still, is the potential for violent reaction. In a country as heavily armed as the United States, where many states allow gun owners to use lethal force when they believe their property or lives to be at stake. The protests that rocked Los Angeles this year, while largely disciplined and peaceful, devolved into instances of violence as police clashed with protesters, some of whom lit cars afire. As the administration’s raids intensify and spread, particularly to states like Texas, where gun ownership is more prevalent, the potential for violence will only increase.

History suggests the story will not be linear. It could radicalize the broader electorate and make the politics of the 2020s more violent, similar to the 1850s. That outcome would make Americans neither more safe nor more free.

The Republican Party is effective at campaigning and winning elections, but sucks at governing. For all the huffing and puffing on the campaign trail in 2016, the first Trump administration largely amounted to tax cuts for the wealthy, 500 miles of a border wall and a destructive pandemic gone viral. We now have the most incompetent cabinet in modern history: a health and human services secretary who is already targeting federal vaccination efforts; a director of national intelligence who was devoted to an allegedly abusive yoga-centered cult; a former WWE tycoon turned head of Department of Education; and a former cable news talking head as defense secretary. There is nothing the American public despises more than disorder and a broken economy. With no clear leader to voice our opposition and no control in any branch of government, it’s time for Democrats to roll over and play dead. Allow the Republicans to crumble beneath their own weight, and make the American people miss them.

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My skin is light, but my curls reveal my Blackness. It only takes one drop. Being half Black and half white means I cannot easily check off one box or another. And I’m not alone — the number of people identifying as multiracial in the United States has surged in recent years.

I am too Black to be white and too white to be Black..

If you’re unfamiliar with the term “mulatto,” as many of my friends were, it is an offensive, archaic term to describe a person with white and Black parents.

A white guy came up to me in the bar and tapped my shoulder. He didn’t greet me before asking, “Are you half white, half Black?”

Then: “I love mulattos,” he said, before doubling down and going even further, saying in vulgar sexual terms what he’d love to do to “a mulatto.”

I felt like I was being mocked, sexualized and dehumanized.

This was a deliberate act of racism, meant to provoke me and my biracial friend, whom he pointed at while repeating the slur.

I’m aware that racism has pervaded the United States since before its founding. But hearing it from people my age, Gen Z, is disorienting. Knowing they find humor in it is deeply unsettling.

“In the current political moment, I think we’re really seeing a turning back of the clock, a return to sort of these past, older ideas about race, and especially about racial superiority and inferiority,” Morning said.

Whether he knew it or not, that guy’s crude comment echoed a long history of racial fetishization, tracing back to when European colonizers viewed Black people as possessions and Black women were hyper-sexualized, in order to justify the violence that the colonizers inflicted upon them.

“Mulatto” used to be a racial category on the census, along with “octoroon,” meaning one-eighth African blood, and “quadroon,” meaning one-fourth African blood

Scientists included these categories on the census because they were trying to prove that biracial people were not fertile and a “doomed class of people,” a pseudoscientific justification to prevent interracial mixing.

Race is a political and social classification system, she said, which humans invented to divide people into different “categories of worth.”

My white mother is a likely descendant of colonizers, her ancestors being English and Irish. My Black father is a descendant of slaves. I am both.

My relationship with my mom was on the verge of collapse in 2020, shortly after George Floyd was murdered 10 minutes from my high school. We had spent the previous four years failing to understand each other.

But as I was leaving for college, I realized I needed her. The relationship between a mother and daughter is invaluable and irreplaceable.

I now understand that the deepest divide in this country is not one between Democrats and Republicans or conservatives and liberals.

It is one from which racism takes root: how we choose to treat each other.

Do we respond to our differences with hate and a desire to control, or with empathy and love? This is what defines our society.

I know my mom has no hatred for any group of people, and I love her dearly.

But racism isn’t always about hate. It can also stem from patterns we inherited or habits we’ve never questioned.

Racism is taught and exists in all of us. It is embedded in the systems that structure our lives.

The only way to overcome it is to have a burning passion to disintegrate it, within ourselves and our communities.

Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, asked the Justice Department to investigate whether intelligence officials in the Obama administration faked evidence of Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election.

Treason is the only crime defined in the Constitution, and it’s set out there, in relevant part, as giving “aid and comfort” to our enemies. Regurgitating a claim that Mr. Trump and his allies have made for years, Ms. Gabbard said that President Obama, after Hillary Clinton was defeated by President Trump in the 2016 election, “directed the creation of an intelligence community assessment that they knew was false.”

Every investigation of the 2016 campaign, including the one by the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2018, reached the same conclusion. “We found irrefutable evidence of Russian meddling,” said then-Senator Marco Rubio, who is now, of course, Mr. Trump’s secretary of state. In other words, the conclusion of the Obama administration, far from being a crime, much less treason, was a simple statement of fact.

I'm with an NABWMT organization,

and I've been writing and publishing podcasts over the last 10 years directly on

the NABWMT website.

But I've moved to Substack to get a better audience,

a wider audience,

but the topics will still be the same.

It will be basically fighting racism and homophobia.

So the podcasts will also be accompanied by posts to Facebook and other platforms.

So I'm looking forward to being on this new platform and getting to know you more

and allowing you to make more comments and discussions on the type of content I

have.

Thank you for listening.

I appreciate it.