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In November 2024, I wrote in Salon that Donald Trump’s plan to dismantle DEI was a “colorblind path to Jim Crow 2.0.” I take no pleasure in being right. Today, the Supreme Court, by a 6-3 vote in Louisiana v. Callais, rendered Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, in Justice Elena Kagan’s words, “all but a dead letter.” Read alongside what the Trump administration has done to the military and the EEOC in the last ninety days, the picture is not three discrete policy moves. It is one constitutional theory that has walked back into American law: the Plessy theory.

In Plessy v. Ferguson, decided in 1896, the Supreme Court told Black Americans that segregation imposed no harm on them; if they felt it did, that feeling was, in the Court’s words, a “fallacy” the “colored race chooses to put upon it.” Translation: your experience of discrimination isn't real; it’s all in your head. One hundred and twenty-seven years later, in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that universities “have for too long wrongly concluded that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the color of their skin.” There is no daylight between those two sentences. The 1896 Court said Black plaintiffs had wrongly concluded that segregation harmed them. The 2023 Court said American institutions had wrongly concluded that race was operating on the people in front of them. The language is virtually identical. The theory is identical. The condescension is identical.

Today’s majority extends the line. Justice Samuel Alito, striking down Louisiana’s congressional map at the request of plaintiffs who described themselves in their filings as “non-African American” voters, wrote that “we start with the general rule that the Constitution almost never permits the Federal Government or a State to discriminate on the basis of race.” That “general rule” is announced in a country whose founding document counted Black people as three-fifths of a person and whose courts spent the next 180 years building the apparatus that today’s majority claims has magically disappeared.

This is not a technical reinterpretation of Section 2. It is the resurrection of an old idea: that the Constitution knows no race, and therefore, the people who keep insisting race is operating on them are the ones with the problem. Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch, said the quiet part out loud in concurrence — Section 2, he wrote, should never have been understood to regulate districting at all. Kagan, in dissent, dropped the word “respectfully” from her closing line. Lawyers will tell you what that signals.

I am a lawyer by training. I wrote a book called Qualified about the way American institutions disqualify Black professionals while telling them the disqualification is neutral. I recognize the move. The move is to set the standard for proving discrimination so narrow that almost nothing meets it, then declare the remaining gap a problem of perception. Today’s opinion requires plaintiffs to disentangle race from politics and prove intentional discrimination drove a district’s lines. As any practicing civil rights attorney will tell you, intentional discrimination is the hardest thing to prove in American law, because the people who do it stopped writing it down decades ago.

This decision does not arrive in a vacuum. Pete Hegseth has been rolling back integration policies in the United States military, the institution whose mid-century desegregation seeded the integration of the American workplace. Andrea Lucas at the EEOC has spent the last year reorienting the agency around discrimination claims by white workers, treating racially conscious workplace policy as presumptively unlawful. And now the Court has told states they can dilute the political power of voters of color, with what Kagan called effectively no legal consequence, provided they leave no fingerprints. Three branches. One theory.

The theory of colorblindness has a track record. The first colorblind statute in modern American history was the 1944 GI Bill. Nothing in its text excluded Black veterans. In implementation, banks, real estate agents, and segregated universities ensured that of the more than one million Black men who served in World War II, only a tiny fraction received the home loans, mortgages, and educational benefits that built the white middle class. The text was neutral. The country was not. That is what colorblind looks like in operation. It is blindingly white.

Florida is already in special session, redrawing its congressional map. Louisiana’s primary is in weeks. The 2026 midterms are six months out, and the Court has handed legislatures in every state with racially polarized voting a license to draw Black voters out of the political process, so long as they characterize the line-drawing as politics rather than race.

To my Black readers: the civil rights infrastructure that won the original Voting Rights Act in 1965 was in place before Section 2 became law. We had no protection then either. We MUST organize, we are losing ground at an alarming rate, and by the time most of us really feel it, it will be too late!

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To my white readers, especially those of you who are poor, working class, or middle class: the architects of this ruling are counting on you. The whole design depends on it. They are going to redraw these districts, and they need you to vote the way they expect you to vote — against your own economic interest, against the people they have spent forty years telling you are the threat. The threat is not the immigrant. The threat is not LGBTQIA people. The threat is not Black people. The threat is the ruling class that keeps playing you for a fool. They are stripping you, too. They are data-mining you, pricing you out of housing, gutting your healthcare, and selling your children’s futures, and they need you angry at the wrong people to keep doing it.

Prove them wrong. Organize your communities. Turn those red sections blue.

Plessy stood for fifty-eight years. We do not have fifty-eight years.

Then keep it in mind for the midterms.

The EEOC is the federal agency tasked with enforcing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in the workplace. It is the place a Black warehouse worker fired for organizing turns to. It is the place a pregnant nurse, whose hours got cut, turns to. It is the place a deaf software engineer, whose accommodations got denied, turns to. It exists because Congress, sixty-two years ago, decided that no American should have to earn a living while being humiliated for who they are.

According to the Times, that agency is now being run as a political arm of the West Wing.

Its chair, Andrea Lucas, has reportedly been personally scouring case files and providing case updates directly to White House staff — a level of involvement that former agency lawyers describe as unprecedented and a clean break from the long-standing firewall between the EEOC and any sitting president. Field staff describe themselves as “demoralized and fearful.” More than a dozen current and former employees, Republicans and Democrats alike, told the Times they are under pressure to bring cases that fit Trump’s agenda, regardless of the evidence.

District directors have been instructed in writing to assign the agency’s top priority ranking to “all cases claiming discrimination against white people.” Investigators say they are being told to keep weak cases alive — including, in one example described to the Times, a complaint from a white man who didn’t get a job that went to another white man, in a pool of all white male applicants.

Meanwhile, the agency is at its lowest staffing level in decades. Intake interviews — the conversations where workers first describe what’s been done to them — have been cut from 90 minutes to 55. The statutory enforcement priorities — protecting immigrants, transgender workers, pregnant women, people with disabilities — are being quietly shelved.

And then there is this, which deserves its own paragraph: the EEOC, under Lucas, has gone to court trying to force the University of Pennsylvania to hand over a list of its Jewish staff. Read that sentence again. The federal civil rights agency is asking a court to compel a religious roster of American workers. Penn’s lawyers, in a January filing, called the request “premised on the unspecified suspicions of a single commissioner.” That commissioner is Lucas. She filed the original charge herself.

This is not a both-sides story. This is the civil rights enforcement infrastructure of the United States being repurposed to harass universities and manufacture grievance on behalf of the people who already hold the most power in American workplaces.

Andrea Lucas is a woman. She went to law school. She built a career at a major firm. She was confirmed to a federal commission. She now runs the agency that — for sixty years — has been one of the single most important reasons her career was even possible.

Title VII, before the EEOC was given real enforcement teeth in 1972, was a piece of paper. The reason a woman in 2026 can argue a federal case, sit on a commission, or chair an agency is that the women who came before her sued, organized, struck, and, in some cases, lost everything to open those doors. Many of those doors were pried open by EEOC investigators doing exactly the work Lucas’s field staff is now being told to abandon.

The data on this is not subtle: white women have been the single largest beneficiary group of affirmative action and anti-discrimination enforcement in the United States. That is not a slur. It is a finding documented in decades of labor economics research, and it was true before Lucas’s career and will be true after it. What is striking is that she clearly knows it — and has decided that the ladder, having served her, can now be pulled up.

There is a specific kind of insult in that. Not the insult of a stranger taking something from you. The insult of someone who shares your hard-won inheritance, using it to disinherit everyone else.

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This is what midterms are for.

A presidential election is a referendum on a person. A midterm is a referendum on what that person has been allowed to do. And what this administration has been allowed to do, in agency after agency, is take institutions built across decades to serve all Americans and convert them into instruments of one political faction’s grievance.

You cannot fix this with a viral post. You cannot fix it with a clever clip. You fix it by changing the composition of Congress so that oversight hearings happen, subpoenas get issued, budgets get conditioned on lawful conduct, and the agencies in question get reminded that they answer to the American public, not the West Wing.

Between now and November, the work is unglamorous and specific: register voters, fund competitive House and Senate races, show up for the state legislative races nobody covers, and keep telling these stories. Not the abstractions. The specifics. The white-man-versus-white-man job complaint. The 55-minute intake. The demand for a list of Jewish faculty. The 367 federal civil rights workers who have walked away from the agency since this administration took office.

The receipts are already being filed. Our job is to read them out loud, in every room we walk into, until November.

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Sources: Rebecca Davis O’Brien, “Employment Agency Pushes Discrimination Cases That Match Trump’s Agenda,” The New York Times, April 27, 2026.

If you are wondering how to respond to those trying to bully you into silence, ask about Melissa Hortman, her husband, and their sweet dog. Ask why it was okay to mock the deaths of Rob and Michele Reiner and Robert Mueller.

And most importantly, ask about the administration vacating the convictions of Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, whom a federal judge said were threats to our democracy.

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But the question is: how are we actively critiquing the administration? Personally, I think the best way to go about it is to continue to highlight what is happening under this administration.

The Real Horrors

For example, three more women have died in Texas because of their inability to access abortion services after miscarriages and other specific complications. Several women have died in Georgia for the same reason. We seem to have forgotten our messaging. There are real horrors going on under this administration, and there are real economic horrors. People are losing their jobs. Some are losing their homes. People are losing their health insurance. These are real things.

When we look at the military, they are wiping out women and people of color, resegregating the institution, and building what amounts to a Christian army. These are real things we can talk about.

The problem is the instinct to chase this rabbit around the dog track. People have that instinct, but you never catch anything—because it’s not real.

Trying to chase a rabbit that isn’t there, trying to prove or disprove it, trying to lean in or lean out, is a waste. It’s useless.

The Selective Outrage

I cannot forget that when Melissa Hortman, her husband, and their dog were all killed, there was no sympathy from the devil. None. Their names were never mentioned. No flags at half-staff. So the question becomes: where is the outrage? Because it seems like there is a lot of selective outrage—and somehow, at the same time, the validation that we are the ones who should stifle our voices on the left.

People reflexively on the left will say, “Oh, yeah, we have to be bipartisan.” But nobody on the other side is agreeing to that. Nobody is ever agreeing to that.

The answer isn’t to get in the mud with pigs. But the answer isn’t necessarily to go high, either. The answer is to be factual about the situation we find ourselves in—a situation where personal debt is sky high, where we have long-term unemployment, where people are feeling less hopeful than they have since the end of World War II. A situation where tech moguls release 22-point manifestos that sound like the villain monologue from a movie, with points 21 and 22 decrying diverse communities and asserting that certain civilizations—Western civilization—have more value than others.

We have enough factual information to talk about. There is no need to chase the rabbit around the dog track.

For me, it is a losing proposition. I cannot fight a ghost, and there is no win in it.

No Retreat

But I also do not think there should be any retreat. There should be no retreat in the full-throated objection to everything this administration stands for. Look at the way folks have tried to bank-shot this. (And this is why we need the ballroom.) I mean—who does that? People just need to ask themselves: who does that? There is no need to chase it. But: who does that?

This is a tricky moment, only because I think the surveillance state is going to come down even harder on all media creators. And like I said, you get these dummies who are supposedly on the left, or liberal, or progressive, or whatever, who echo these talking points without reflection.

So the answer is to stay the course. To continue to specifically call out what is at stake.

A Lot Is at Stake

And a lot is at stake.

For Black folks, we are in the early stages of the end of the second Reconstruction. Our very livelihoods are at stake. Our ability to sustain ourselves and build future generational wealth is at stake. A lot is at stake.

For the four hundred-some-thousand Black women who lost their jobs, a lot is at stake. Their 401(k)s are almost depleted. Their savings are depleted. A lot is at stake.

For the women dying in hospitals because they cannot get proper medical care after a miscarriage or ectopic pregnancy, a lot is at stake.

For the children learning in schools that being forced to learn that slavery “wasn’t that bad,” a lot is at stake.

For the immigrant children separated from their parents and placed in facilities where they are being sexually assaulted, a lot is at stake.

For the American citizens shot down in the street in Minnesota—we can never forget that—a lot is at stake.

For the other American citizens attacked by off-duty ICE officers, renegade officers, a lot is at stake.

So we just have to keep talking about what is at stake. There is no need to shadow-box shadows.

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Pete Hegseth is systematically dismantling the military to remake it in his own image. Donald Trump's anti-Catholicism is showing, and we're exploring what Norman Vincent Peale's theology has to do with it all. And Palantir just published a 22-point manifesto arguing that some cultures are simply more valuable than others, with leadership willing to say it out loud.

Check it out:

21. Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.

22. We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and, more broadly, the West, have, for the past half-century, resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?

We're diving into all of it tomorrow at noon Pacific on the Click HERE: Friday Roundup Live, and we're having the hard conversations about power, ideology, and what happens when incompetence meets authority without pretense or self-censorship.

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The Atlantic has been tracking this story, and so I am going to turn over today’s newsletter to that reporting with an excerpt and a gift link:

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“The Pentagon told NBC and the Times that promotions under Hegseth are ‘apolitical and unbiased.” Nevertheless, the episode is part of a broader pattern. So far, Trump and Hegseth have dismissed or forced the retirements of several high-ranking Black and/or female officers: General C. Q. Brown as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Admiral Lisa Franchetti as chief of naval operations; Lieutenant General Telita Crosland as head of the Defense Health Agency; and, most recently, Major General William Green as the Army’s chief of chaplains. Hegseth has publicly said that “our diversity is our strength” is the “dumbest phrase in military history.” By erasing Defense Department histories of nonwhite service members and seeking to restore tributes to Confederate soldiers who took up arms against their country in defense of slavery, Hegseth has demonstrated a limited view of whose service is to be honored.”

Continued: GIFT LINK: PETE HEGSETH IS TRYING TO RESEGREGATE THE MILITARY.

Before I get to the alarming thing the Department of Justice is doing with the Southern Poverty Law Center, I want to shout out a good thing: Virginia voters approved the ballot measure that lets the state redistrict its map for the midterms.

Nobody wanted to do this. But Donald Trump told Texas the same thing he told Georgia—“find me some more votes”—except this time it was congressional seats. Democrats had no choice. It is ridiculous to sit on your thumbs while somebody else is running around lighting fires.

It is not a guarantee that Democrats win those seats. But it opens the door. And honestly, there have been a lot of blue wins over the last few months—people saying, enough is enough.

And now, the alarming thing

It is not enough. Because what is going on with the Southern Poverty Law Center is straight out of Nazi Germany. I know we say that a lot. But it is. Let me get into it.

For those who don’t know: the SPLC is a nonprofit law firm started by an Alabama businessman-lawyer right after the civil rights movement and Jim Crow. He saw that, sure, the laws had changed on the books—but they had not changed in reality. So the SPLC was built to enforce civil rights law and to address race-based terrorism, which still exists in this country.

I want to preface this: the SPLC is not perfect. It is not some angelic agency. There were real questions during the George Floyd uprising about race-based tensions inside the organization. And believe me, I have worked in nonprofit spaces. I know there are people with great intentions about working for communities of color who have a hard time working with people from those communities on a peer-to-peer level. So I am not here to say the SPLC is beyond reproach.

What I am saying is that what the Department of Justice is doing—with Crazy Eye Cash Patel (who allegedly is drunk all the time) and Todd Blanche, who used to be Donald Trump’s personal attorney—is the legal equivalent of using RICO to take down the mob. Except they are using it to come after nonprofits that support poor people, Black folks, and immigrants, while running cover for the Klan and neo-Nazis.

They told us they were going to do this. This is their first big salvo. Which is why Democrats have to stop saying, let’s not talk about a culture war. Baby, they are in the middle of a war with us, and nobody seems to be noticing.

The legal sleight of hand

Here is what is so wild. A former federal prosecutor told The Guardian it is very odd to charge a corporate entity with these crimes. The DOJ is alleging money laundering, wire fraud, and fraud.

To prove wire fraud, you have to show the defendant intended to defraud. So what is the government’s argument? That the SPLC defrauded its donors because, at one point, the organization paid informants to infiltrate hate groups. And some of those informants used the money to operate inside the hate groups they were infiltrating.

Paying informants to infiltrate violent organizations is not unheard of. In fact, the SPLC had a longstanding relationship with the FBI, sharing intelligence about plans to bomb buildings or attack rallies. The FBI knew about all of this because the SPLC was telling them. That is how the program worked.

But the DOJ’s claim is that the SPLC “defrauded donors” and “gave material funding to a hate group.” On the face of it, that sounds like the Justice Department is on the side of stopping hate groups. It is not. It is playing a too-cute, too-smart-by-half game with the law.

What this really is: a bat signal

A lot of this comes down to the fact that the SPLC included Turning Point USA and Charlie Kirk on its list of right-wing extremists. Which they were. Which they are. And the punishment for that is now: we will sue you.

I do not think they can prove their case at trial. The federal prosecutor doesn’t think so either. But proving it is not the point. The point is the signal. Like a bat signal.

Remember when I said Donald Trump dressed as Jesus was a bat signal? This is the same thing, for the election. They are electioneering. They are telling white nationalists, white supremacists, and the religious-white-nationalist set that the federal government is on their side—and that the federal government will prosecute and persecute the organizations that go after them.

Why the SPLC used informants in the first place

In 1983, the SPLC’s offices were firebombed. They had credible threats against their staff. They have always had credible threats against their staff.

I have talked about this before. When white people do work on the side of Black people—or stand up against the system of white supremacy, like what we saw in Minnesota on behalf of immigrants—people will try to kill them. That is why the SPLC started using informants.

And last year, the FBI announced it was ending its longstanding relationship with the SPLC. You know what that means in plain English? The Bureau does not care if white supremacists threaten to bomb us, blow us up, or shoot us up. They are not interested. They have no intelligence inside those organizations anymore. And the message they are sending to those organizations is: you are okay. You are free to operate. You are free to do whatever you want.

If you do not think that is a message for the midterms, we are talking about the Klan. We are talking about neo-Nazis. We are talking about serious, serious organizations that the DOJ is now running cover for with this convoluted, crazy-ass legal argument.

This is a direct threat to all of us

They are weaponizing the federal government to dismantle funders and legal entities that work on the side of poor people, Black people, immigrants, and—I am sure they will be coming for them next—LGBTQIA+ people. This attack is a direct threat to all of us.

I am excited about Virginia. But we have to rock and roll here. We are racing toward November. And if we cannot pull this off, these people have plans for us. Plans we do not want to know about.

This one, I have some familiarity with. Lori Chavez-DeRemer, from right here in Oregon, who ran twice against my good friend, Congresswoman Janelle Bynum, and lost both times, is out as Secretary of Labor. Donald Trump brought her in after that loss. Lord, that was not a good decision.

(An Oregon aside: I could have sworn she went by Lori DeRemer until she was running against a Black woman, and then the “Chavez” came back into the rotation. But I’ll leave that one alone for today.)

The official line is that she is “departing for the private sector.” The unofficial line—per the Guardian, NPR, the New York Times, and every outlet in between—is that the Labor Department’s own inspector general was days away from interviewing her. And the list of what they’ve been investigating is a menu, not a charge.

The menu

Let me read it back to you.

• An affair with a member of her security detail—a subordinate she was charged with overseeing.

• Drinking on the job, including a reported stash of alcohol in her office and staffers being asked to go buy her wine.

• Taxpayer-funded personal travel—top aides set up “official” events as cover for trips that were really personal. Those aides are already gone.

• Steering grants to people she knows.

• And then the family. Her husband, Dr. Shawn DeRemer—an anesthesiologist based in Portland—was banned from Labor Department headquarters after at least two female staffers said he sexually assaulted them. D.C. police reviewed it and closed the case without charges. The ban stuck.

• Her father, Richard Chavez, was texting young female staffers things like, “Hearing u/r in town. Wishing you would let me know. I could have made some excuses to get out and show u around. Please keep this private.” Her husband was texting the same staffer that he was “feeling forgotten.”

• And per the IG, Chavez-DeRemer and her deputy chief of staff instructed young women on her staff to “pay attention” to her husband and her father. 😐

Read that last one again. The Secretary of Labor—the person whose entire job is protecting workers from exactly this kind of thing—was telling her own young staffers to pay special attention to her husband and her dad.

Portland is a city known for a lot of things. Sexual freedom is on the list. This is not that. This is power being used against people who can’t say no without losing their jobs. Those are two very different things, and nobody in this story is confused about which one is which.

DC is WILD

This is the third Cabinet woman to leave under fire in a matter of weeks.

• Kristi Noem was fired in March after the Homeland Security debacle—up to and including her $220 million ad campaign starring herself on horseback, and the very special airplane bedroom arrangement with her alleged boyfriend Corey Lewandowski.

• Pam Bondi was pushed out earlier this month, having spent part of her tenure yelling at Jeffrey Epstein’s survivors about the stock market. Florida behavior, through and through.

• Lori Chavez-DeRemer resigned today. See above.

Every single one. A woman.

Now look at the men.

Pete Hegseth got caught putting active military plans on a Signal group chat, keeps finding new ways to fold his wife into a department she has no clearance to be in, and is still running what we’re apparently calling the Department of War now. Still has the job.

Kash Patel is also accused of being drunk on the job and wasting taxpayer money flying here and there and running up a tab using the FBI to protect his country-singer girlfriend, which no one has yet been able to explain. Still has the job.

The only Republican congressman in any real trouble lately got there because Eric Swalwell was so outrageous.

Now, don’t get me wrong, these women are not martyrs. They are not being unfairly targeted. Each of them was engaged in misconduct and deserved to lose their job. But the men doing the same things—and in several cases, worse things, things with national-security implications—are still collecting a federal paycheck.

But it’s clear that there is one standard for women and another for men.

But Democrats, let’s go!

The commercial actually writes itself.

You put Noem and the plane.

You put Bondi screaming at Epstein survivors.

You put Chavez-DeRemer—husband banned from the building, father texting staffers to keep it private, deputy telling young women to “pay attention” to both of them.

You put Hegseth and his Signal chat.

You put Kash Patel.

And then you run the tag:

“They told you they were going to drain the swamp. They built Epstein Island in D.C. instead.”

If I had to choose between the swamp and Epstein Island in D.C., I am taking the swamp every single time. At least in the swamp, the predators are the alligators.

Democrats—take this shot. Cut the ad, put it on the socials, take a page from Iran’s Lego PR campaign. Oh, I know you can’t be because of Swalwell, right? Nope, bad behaviors have never stopped them. And Democrats took responsibility and pushed him out.

The road to the midterms runs directly through what voters are already watching in real time: an administration that campaigned on cleaning up Washington and turned it into the very thing they promised to clean up. Only worse. With worse manners.

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When CNN recently reported that an online “academy” has been teaching men how to drug and assault their wives and girlfriends, complete with tens of millions of views, a lot of people reacted with shock. My question is, why are you shocked? Having spent years representing victims of domestic violence in divorce and custody cases, none of this is new to me. The technology is new, but what’s behind it is centuries old.

The case that cracked the broader public’s awareness open was Gisèle Pélicot in France, whose husband drugged her for years and invited dozens of men to their home to assault her while she was unconscious. What CNN has now confirmed is that the Pélicot case was not an aberration. There is a whole online ecosystem where men share videos of incapacitated women and teach each other how to do this to the women in their own lives. And I want to sit on that last part for a moment, because as a country, we have always framed sexual violence as stranger danger in a dark alley. We have never been willing to name what actually happens, which is that most of this violence originates, begins, and ends in the home.

His Prerogative

There was a concept in English common law, carried over into early American law, called his prerogative. It is the framework that governed familial abuse for centuries. Under the doctrine of marital unity, a wife’s legal identity was merged into her husband’s. She could not sue, enforce contracts, or seek damages in tort without his participation. She was obliged to obey and serve him, and in exchange, he was entitled to “moderately correct” her, which is the legal euphemism for hitting her. In practice, the qualifier “moderately” did very little work. Men could beat and kill their wives with almost no legal consequence, and plenty of the women who “ran away” in the historical record did not run anywhere. They were buried in the back field.

Strip away the legal language, and what you have left is a mindset: the woman is the man's property. The legal vestiges of that mindset only really began to fall away in this country in the 1960s and 70s, alongside the civil rights movement and the women’s movement that rose with it. That is when women finally won the ability to open bank accounts in their own names, sue on their own behalf, and retain custody of their children. That is not ancient history. That is the lifetime of people still living.

This is also why the trad wife movement is so offensive to me. Not the choice to stay home, there is nothing wrong with that. What is offensive is the implication that a lost golden era exists before the 1960s that women should want to return to. Women in that era were suffering, and many of them had no way out. You baked the bread from scratch because you were told to, or you got hit. You stayed because you had no bank account and nowhere to go. The young women cosplaying that aesthetic online are playing a dangerous game without understanding the rules.

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The Part of the History We Refuse to Discuss

His prerogative was always bigger than the relationship between one man and one woman. It was fundamentally about property. And once you see it that way, you cannot avoid the piece of American history the country refuses to address, which is the role slavery played in shaping our sexual violence.

For hundreds of years, enslaved African women were the outlet for rape, sexual torture, and every form of deviant sexual abuse that men in this country and around the world wanted to inflict. They bore that in their bodies across generations. And when emancipation came, we as a nation said nothing about it. We did not acknowledge it, we did not reckon with what had been normalized, and we did not culturally communicate that any of it was wrong. The idea that those instincts simply evaporated overnight because the law changed is, frankly, absurd. They did not evaporate. They metamorphosed. They found new outlets, new justifications, new technologies. But the underlying entitlement, the sense that the female body is something a man is owed, was never culturally disrupted.

This is why, alongside the persistence of marital and intimate partner violence, you also see the disproportionate rates of violence and murder against Native women. Wherever the dominant culture has historically marked a population as less fully human or less fully protected, the entitlement expresses itself with impunity.

I want to be careful here, because people love to jump in with objections. Yes, same-sex partners can commit intimate partner violence. Yes, women can and do commit sexual abuse, and we see it in schools. None of that is in dispute. But the numbers, in aggregate and by category, point overwhelmingly to male perpetrators, and in some categories, like the production and consumption of child sexual abuse material, overwhelmingly to white male perpetrators. Naming the pattern is not denying the exceptions. Think of it as triage. If three patients arrive at the ER with gunshot wounds and two are immediately life-threatening, you treat the life-threatening ones first. You do not refuse to do the math because the third person is also bleeding.

The Culture That Looks Away

There is a 19th-century North Carolina Supreme Court case in which the court reasoned that in family violence disputes, it was better to “draw the curtain, shut out the public gaze, and leave the parties to forgive and forget.” That’s the problem, right there. We would still rather hide what happens inside American homes than be honest about it.

And when I say “we,” I mean all of us. I want to be direct about something uncomfortable here. I am not blaming victims, and I am not blaming women. I am saying that, as a culture, we do not hold our boys to the same consequences we hold our girls to. Girls are raised with permanent consequences and taught early that stepping out of line carries lasting costs in reputation, opportunity, and autonomy. Boys are raised to understand that almost anything can be forgiven. You can beat your wife and be forgiven. You can assault your girlfriend and be forgiven. You can terrorize your children and be forgiven. The default assumption is that the women in a man’s life, beginning with his mother, will absorb, excuse, and rehabilitate him regardless of what he has done. And because so many men move through the world largely void of consequence, why would their behavior shift?

What we see when the consequence-free environment is finally threatened is annihilation. The Virginia lieutenant governor murdered his wife, Cerina, in front of their children because she was trying to leave him. The man in Louisiana who killed eight children, many of them his own. And we should notice, while we are on the subject, that some of the same voices now expressing horror that this man had eight children he could not support are the same voices that stand on conservative stages and instruct women, specifically white women, to start young and have as many children as possible, regardless of whether they can afford them. The contradiction is not accidental. It tells you whose fertility the ideology is designed to protect and whose it is designed to police.

Where It Leaves Us

We live in a country that elected a man who was found liable in civil court for sexual abuse. Donald Trump was also accused in sworn divorce filings by his first wife of a violent sexual assault, an accusation she later walked back, so I will not speak to what occurred in that room. What I can speak to is the public record we already have, and the pattern it fits into. And I can speak to the fact that everyone in Washington seemed to know about Eric Swalwell’s conduct long before it became public. How does everyone always seem to know? Because that is our culture. The knowing is built in. The obscuring is built in. The man's protection is built in.

As long as men understand that the culture will hide for them, excuse for them, forgive them, and, when pushed hard enough, permit them to annihilate the family rather than lose control of it, nothing fundamentally changes. The online rape academy is not an aberration. It is his prerogative running on new infrastructure. Until we are willing to name honestly what happens inside American homes, and to raise our sons with the same enforcement of consequence we have always imposed on our daughters, we are going to keep having this same conversation, generation after generation.

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I have been saying this over and over: the Trump administration is already politicking for the midterms. But they’re doing it in ways that are non-traditional, and people keep missing the whole picture. The Trump-as-Jesus imagery. The fight with the Pope. These aren’t random. They want daylight there.

And now comes Todd Blanche.

Crazy Town at DOJ

Todd Blanche is the acting Attorney General. He is also the former personal attorney of the president. As a former practicing attorney, let me tell you: that is bananas. That is crazy town. Yes, I know the Kennedys had Bobby as AG under his brother. That wasn’t right either.

But Blanche is auditioning. If you thought Pam Bondi was wild, hold his beer.

The Justice Department is now asking federal courts to vacate the seditious conspiracy convictions of members of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers — two right-wing extremist groups they love to equate with “Antifa.”

Look, because I live in Portland, I can say this: Antifa is not an organization. You don’t pay dues. There is no central authority. It means anti-fascist. It’s a label for people who worked hard to get Nazis out of Portland. The Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, by contrast, are structured, organized, fascist groups built on white supremacy, patriarchy, and misogyny. They are not the same, and the people in power know they are not the same.

The Bat Signal

Here is what Donald Trump is signaling through Todd Blanche: you run this. You can beat police officers. You can threaten to kill members of Congress. You can smear feces on the walls of the Capitol. As long as you do it in the service of white supremacy, it is A- OK.

That is the message. And if you don’t understand that this message matters more to certain voters than the price of gas, you are a fool.

I watched January 6th unfold from beginning to end. I saw members of Congress hiding. I saw rioters break through police lines and shatter windows. I watched them beat officers bloody. They “back the Blue” — until they are beating “the Blue” black and blue.

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What They Actually Believe

Oath Keepers founder Stuart Rhodes was sentenced to 18 years for seditious conspiracy. Prosecutors played a recording in which Rhodes said: “We should have brought rifles. We could have fixed it right then. I’d hang Nancy Pelosi from a light post.”

The judge who sentenced him called Rhodes “an ongoing threat and peril to this country and to the very fabric of our democracy.”

That is who Todd Blanche wants the courts to forgive.

This administration does not believe in democracy, just like they don’t believe in CHRISTianity. What they believe in is something I’ve written about before — a Herrenvolk democracy. A democracy for, by, and prioritizing a particular class of white people. That is why they keep trying to dismantle the machinery of our actual democracy. They don’t believe in it. Not really. Certainly not when it includes people who are not like them.

Donald Trump already commuted or pardoned the January 6th defendants. Now he wants to erase the record itself.

Where Are the Videos?

Here is what Democrats should be doing right now. Some of you are old enough to remember the Willie Horton ad — the attack on Michael Dukakis for a furlough program that ended in murder. Republicans are very good at this. Ruthless.

140 police officers were seriously injured on January 6th. Where are those videos?

After receiving their pardons, dozens of former January 6th defendants have been charged or convicted of new crimes. At the same time DOJ filed to vacate the sedition convictions, they had a January 6 defendant, David Daniel — pardoned after assaulting a police officer — now facing child sex abuse charges.

Where is the ad?

It writes itself:

Freed by Donald Trump. Convicted of child sex assault.

Freed by Donald Trump. Beat his wife.

Freed by Donald Trump. Plotted to hang Nancy Pelosi.

Run it on TV. Run it on social media. Play Stuart Rhodes’s own words: “We should have brought rifles.” Let voters hear him.

Instead, Democrats are locked in a circular firing squad about Eric Swalwell — who, apparently, everyone already knew was a problem. They are not seeing the work the other side is doing. And this is the work. This is how the ground is being prepared.

The Civil War Parallel

A quick aside: this is exactly what happened at the end of the Civil War. They gave the Confederates a pass. Gave them restitution. Never punished them. And that choice — whether it was a mistake or an intentional act — is why we are here today. This intentional act now, this wholesale pardoning of sedition, will lead to even more suffering later.

What We Do

If we get power again, we cannot go back to the politics of the past. F…. the past. We have to go forward. Part of going forward is being willing to shame these people out of polite society. Out of jobs. Out of every institution they touch. They are criminals who committed criminal acts against this country, and they should be treated that way.

The road to the midterms leads straight through the wilderness of white supremacy. I was not kidding. I was not exaggerating.

Tell everyone you know. The information about what these pardoned Jan 6ers have done since is public. Spread it.

We have to fight fire with fire.

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• • •

Qualified at the Intersection — where the personal, political, and intersectional meet.

Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger just signed her state into something called the National Popular Vote Compact. What is that? It’s an agreement among states to award their electoral votes to whoever wins the nationwide popular vote. Virginia is the 18th state to join, bringing the compact to 222 of the 270 electoral votes it needs to actually kick in.

And just as an aside — this goes back to how important elections are, including elections for governor and your state legislators and state senators. All of this matters.

The Pros and Cons

Supporters say the Electoral College is built on a history of exclusion and elitism, and that this compact would let the person with the most votes win. Simple as that — the most people who like you, you win.

Under the current system, that hasn’t always happened. There was 2000 and 2016. And the Electoral College creates a situation in which a handful of swing states get all the attention and input. Voters in the other 40-something states feel ignored — and the Democrats really missed this in the last election. I could see they were treating states as a lock that wasn’t one. And they weren’t. We found that out.

According to Pew Research, a majority of Americans already prefer a popular-vote system. There you go.

Now, the Electoral College does have some benefits. Candidates have to think broadly. They have to build coalitions and figure out how to reach people in different areas. It gives smaller states a louder voice. It produces clear winners without national recounts. But it’s a double-edged sword, because it’s kind of wild that so many more people in California and New York can vote for a candidate, but a handful of small red states with a fraction of those populations can change the election.

And then there’s the constitutional question. But you know what? Do we still have constitutional questions in the age of Donald Trump? He does what he wants. He doesn’t even do it and ask permission later — he does it and never asks permission. But you can bet your bottom dollar that if the compact gets the votes it needs, there will be a constitutional and legal challenge. They’ll say you need a formal amendment. But they haven’t worried about that until now.

You Can’t Separate This From Race

The Electoral College was born from the Three-Fifths Compromise, which gave slaveholding states extra representation in Congress — and extra electoral votes — for people they enslaved but never intended to let vote. We always talk about things like it’s ancient history, but it’s not.

Today, roughly 57 percent of Black eligible voters still live in the South. Black voters in those states overwhelmingly support Democratic candidates by margins of 80 to 90 percent. But Southern states reliably go Republican at the presidential level. Under winner-take-all rules, that means millions of Black votes effectively disappear from the Electoral College math. Five of the six states with populations that are 25 percent or more Black have been solidly red in recent presidential elections. The votes are cast, but they don’t matter. And that could be behind why so many people feel like, “Oh, my vote doesn’t matter. I don’t have to come out.”

A study published in The Conversation found that whiter states consistently have more electoral votes per capita, meaning each voter in those states carries more weight in choosing the president. States with higher levels of racial resentment also tend to have more electoral power per person. So the system doesn’t just passively reflect demographics. It actively advantages whiter, less populated states.

When we look at Latinx and Asian American voters, they face a related challenge. Turnout gaps between white and nonwhite voters have persisted — and in many places grown — since the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County decision, which weakened the Voting Rights Act. In 2020, white voter turnout was around 71 percent, compared to 63 percent for Black voters, 54 percent for Latino voters, and 60 percent for Asian Americans. A popular vote wouldn’t automatically fix that, but it might be something you could use to truly tell people that every vote matters — that their vote counts toward the final outcome. They don’t have to feel like it’s pointless. Sometimes here in Oregon, you hear people say, “Oh, this state is reliably liberal.” We could get caught with our pants down with that one.

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But There’s Another Side

There are times when the Electoral College amplifies Black political power. Black voters in Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania were arguably the most important voters in 2020, precisely because those were tightly contested swing states. That concentration of influence in a close race gives Black voters real leverage — and a popular vote might dilute that.

Now, I would argue that we’ve always taken those voters for granted. This last election, we lost a lot of those voters because we didn’t think we had to be concerned about them. But the point still stands.

So just as always, the racial calculus here isn’t simple. It’s not “popular vote good, Electoral College bad,” although the Electoral College is generally bad. It depends on where you live, whether your state is competitive, all of that. But the thing is, the system we currently have was never designed to empower Black voters. That’s just true.

Time for a New Path

I’ve been talking about the fact that we need to chart a new path forward, no matter what it looks like. And for me, this is one of those things where we have to get serious. We have to come up with something different.

The compact still needs 48 more electoral votes to take effect, and there will be legal challenges. But I feel like we have to push toward something different. This is the same debate we’ve been having since 1787, and it’s time for us to be scrupulous about moving forward.

I know this isn’t sexy, and it isn’t as exciting as other headlines. But it’s important for people to know that this is going on — and to understand how race intersects with all of it.1

When pressed about the Jesus image, Trump denied the comparison, claiming it was supposed to depict him as a doctor or Red Cross worker. He’s either dishonest, delusional, or strategic. I think it’s a strategy, and here’s why.

Two Versions of Christianity

What we’re watching play out is a conflict between two versions of Christianity that have existed for centuries.

The first is a Christ-based version. It is rooted in the Beatitudes — in peacemaking, empathy, humility, love for the stranger, and obligation to your neighbor. This is the version Martin Luther King Jr. used to force America to reckon with its contradictions during the civil rights movement. This is the version the Pope is articulating today.

The second is the power-based version. It draws heavily from Old Testament texts — a God of vengeance, a God of anger, a God of war. This version has always been the one that those who seek to dominate are more comfortable with. It is the version that justified the Crusades, enslavement, Jim Crow, and segregation.

An evangelical pastor once wrote about a parishioner who approached him after he taught the Beatitudes — the actual words attributed to the teachings of Jesus Christ — and said they wished he’d stop promoting “all that woke philosophy” and stick to Christ's teachings. The parishioner didn’t even recognize them. That should tell you everything.

The Religion of Empire

We have to talk plainly. Christianity has historically been used to justify colonialism, to endorse slavery, and to rationalize the displacement and dehumanization of native peoples throughout the world because they were not Christian. According to the men interpreting the Bible, you could take their land and destroy their lives, and it was acceptable. This is not ancient history. It is the foundation of this country.

Enslavers in the United States controlled the Bibles. One reason they outlawed literacy among the enslaved was access to the text itself. If enslaved people could read, they might find stories of liberation — the Book of Exodus, people freed from bondage. That was dangerous to the institution of slavery. Literacy would also help with escapes and organization, and it would expose the system's immorality through Christ’s own words. So enslavers controlled the message. They taught enslaved people the white nationalist version of Christianity: obedience to the master, God as punishment. They justified the beatings and torture they inflicted with Scripture. And they withheld the rest.

This pattern goes back to antiquity. Constantine used religion as a tool to manipulate and control the population. The councils of Nicaea decided which books belonged in the Bible and which would be excluded, some for being too radical. The King James Bible was translated into English to reinforce the divine right of the sovereign. At every stage, religion has been stripped of what threatens power and the rest is weaponized.

Drop the Word “Christian”

I’m going to make a turn here. We should drop the word “Christian” from “white Christian nationalism” and just call it what it is: white religious nationalism.

Because what this movement values — if you are honest about it — is not Christ. It is cruelty. Punishment. Violence and war. It abhors peace. It is against empathy. Against humility. It does not stand for decency. It is exclusive only to those within its group. It rejects the stranger. It rejects any obligation to the broader world — to the environment, to your neighbor, to anyone who is not like you. In defining white nationalist religion, they are defining what white supremacy as a system has always been about. It’s telling on yourself.

This is why figures like Elon Musk, J.D. Vance, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen speak so negatively about empathy. They believe the Christ-like emphasis on empathy, humility, and obligation undermines what they see as the power and greatness of whiteness. In their framework, you should not be constrained by those “lesser” than you. And to restore that power, you must be expressly antagonistic to those values.

This is what the Pope is keying in on. This is why Donald Trump attacked him.

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Idolatry Is a Feature, Not a Bug

The other revealing thing about this religion is that idolatry is not accidental — it is central. Trump portraying himself as Jesus is not a mistake. It is an accurate reflection of the theology. In their religion, idolatry is not only tolerated, but it is also encouraged. You bite back against anyone who promotes a Christ-based version of Christianity, because that version has always been in contradiction to the religion of white nationalism. It has always threatened the power structure. The way they’ve tried to minimize it is by claiming only select parts of the faith.

Trump supporters who claim to be religious are not offended by those images of him as Jesus or as the Pope, because their religion is — in some sense — the oldest religion. It is the religion of empire.

It’s Not Dementia — It’s a Message

When Trump releases those images, he’s not confused. It’s not because he has Alzheimer’s or whatever people say. Those images are not mistakes. They are beacons. They are like the bat signal. They are being received — clearly and loudly — even if some people refuse to see it.

Trump is politicking for the midterms. That’s what Democrats, progressives, socialists, and liberals do not understand. While they look at those pictures and joke about dementia, his base is getting the message. And if you think that message isn’t landing, you are the one who is foolish.

A Religion of Money, Power, and Dominance

There is no real pushback from the evangelical community on any of this because they do not believe in the teachings of Christ in the way the Pope is articulating them. They have an entirely different religion — one that draws on the prosperity gospel, the Old Testament, the God of vengeance, and the love of money and power. They blend it all together and paint it white. They say the word “Christ,” but they do not believe in anything Christ taught. They believe in money. They believe in power. They believe in dominance. They believe in whiteness, and that is the religion.

And whiteness — I always have to restate this — is not about any individual who happens to be a white person. It is not an ethnicity. People who are called white are Irish, Polish, Italian, Scottish, and English, and they have rich and distinct cultures. Whiteness was constructed as a set of principles layered on top of those identities to bind them together in a power hierarchy, just like blackness was constructed and imposed in the same way. The white nationalist religion is defining what it believes whiteness to be: cruel, vindictive, warlike, without empathy, without humility, without kindness, without restraint.

The Counter-Message Problem

Yes, there are Black folks, Jewish people, South Asians, LGBTQI people who support this administration. Whether they recognize it or not, they are also worshiping at the altar of a white supremacist religion.

Until we name this plainly — and until politicians on the other side understand what they’re actually up against — they are going to keep losing ground. Trump, Vance, and every figure who claims this mantle understands their congregation. Their church says amen. And that’s how he won.

We have to have a counter-message. If we don’t have an effective one, you can laugh all you want, but the message has already been received. It’s a new religion built on the oldest religion. And every politician running needs to be questioned: How are you going to address its rise?

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— The Guardian, April 10, 2026

That quote is where this newsletter begins because, as I said last week, I want to use this space to push harder towards the midterms. It also shows the playbook that Donald Trump and his Klan are engaged in to win. And, it’s not just Stephen Miller’s playbook from a decade ago; it is the governing strategy of the United States.

Three days ago, the President of the United States posted an unblurred, graphic video of Nilufa Easmin — a 51-year-old Bangladeshi immigrant and mother of two — being beaten to death with a hammer at a Florida gas station. He posted it without obscuring her final moments. He posted it to gin up fear, to stoke rage, and to turn one man’s horrific act of violence into a banner for his mass deportation agenda. As Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council put it, this is “basically Breitbart’s old ‘black crime’ vertical as official government policy. There hasn’t been an administration this openly racist since Wilson invited the KKK to the White House.”

The road to the midterms — and the road to the next presidential election — goes through the wilderness of white supremacy culture. Trump won the last election with a culture war. He got millions of people terrified of trans people — less than one percent of the population. He convinced voters that immigrants are simultaneously stealing their million-dollar homes and their minimum-wage jobs. He persuaded Americans that qualified Black people with advanced degrees aren’t fit for positions of authority, while people with no relevant experience are the most qualified to run the Department of Homeland Security.

And yet — and yet — you still hear Democrats, progressives, and liberals saying we need to “leave the culture wars behind” and “get back to kitchen table issues.” They keep telling us to focus on reaching rural America. But rural America knew what the game was. They voted for their own economic destruction because Trump promised them something else: a mythical restoration of white supremacy. To ignore that as a political strategy is to repeat the same mistake we have made over and over — after the Civil War, after January 6th. The Confederacy never died.

If we do not confront this head-on, every assumption about diversity being dangerous, equity being unfair, inclusion being a weakness, and trans people being threats will be baked into our collective baseline agreements. Once that happens, we’re not going anywhere.

People say, “Get back to the issues.” This is the issue. The cost of white supremacy culture is measured in millions of lives lost to the refusal to provide universal health care — because racism killed it. It’s measured in the gun violence epidemic — fueled by paranoid fantasies of a coming race war. It’s measured in the farmers who vote until their farms are shuttered, because they believed the lie more than they believed their own bank statements.

So here’s what we need: Every candidate running for office must answer one question — What are you going to do about white supremacy culture and white Christian nationalism in this country? And how are you going to help people — including white people — understand the cost they are paying? Any candidate who can’t answer that is on a fool’s errand. Donald Trump and his allies now know the play. Even if he’s not on the ballot, they will run this table again. And we will be caught flat-footed — again — if we don’t understand that.

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LIVE: https://open.substack.com/live-stream/160209?utm_source=live-stream-scheduled-upsell

The kids call it story time. So here we go.

Around the year 2000 (not sure exact year, but I lived in NYC for 5 years, 2000-2006), a friend of mine — a Singaporean woman I’d met through the wonderfully international social world of Manhattan — and I decided to spend the day on Long Island taking horseback riding lessons. New York, you know. You meet people from everywhere.

By the end of the day, I’ll just say this: she had gotten on my nerves. Badly. I was ready to go.

We’d taken the Long Island Railroad out there, and getting a cab back to the station was proving impossible. This was before Uber, so we were just standing there, waiting, my patience at a boiling point.

That’s when a black (could have been another dark color like green) extended-cab truck slowed down. The driver leaned out and said, Hey, are you guys okay? Do you need a ride?

I want to be clear: I am not someone who takes rides from strangers. I was raised better than that. But my annoyance overrode my survival instinct — and I said yes.

She wasn’t thrilled. I didn’t care. I got in the front seat. She climbed into the extended cab in the back.

And immediately — immediately — you knew it was the wrong decision.

There was an energy in that truck that was absolutely off. The man was wearing wire-rimmed glasses and fixated on my friend. Fixated. She’s Asian, I’m Black, and he could not stop looking at her through the rearview mirror. Barely watching the road. Just these glasses, that mirror, her face.

So I started talking. Just talking — about nothing, about everything. I asked about the birthday balloons in the cab (yes, birthday balloons — which is part of why I’d agreed to get in). I talked about New York. I kept it light, kept it moving. I was trying to talk us to the train station.

He did take us there. But here’s the thing: we weren’t parked out front. We were around the back, away from the platform. People were visible in the distance, but we were not among them.

And the doors were locked.

I didn’t try the handle. Somewhere in my body — not even my mind, my body — I knew not to reach for that door before he unlocked it. Because if I reached for it and it didn’t open, something would shift. I needed him to make the decision. Affirmatively. On his own.

So I kept talking. Thanking him. Mentioning the birthday party he must be heading to. Smiling.

My friend in the back said absolutely nothing. Not a word. We respond to danger differently — she shut down completely, while I went into some kind of negotiation mode I didn’t know I had.

And then, after what felt like a very long moment of him calculating something, I heard the click.

The door unlocked.

I reached for the handle, opened it, got out, she got out, thank you so much, have a great time at the party — and he drove away.

She was furious with me. Rightfully so. I had annoyed her, and then I had nearly gotten us both killed. She said, “The only reason you got in that car was because of those balloons.”

She was right.

That scene never left me. And I don’t have a visual memory — I mean that literally. If you tell me to picture an apple, I don’t see one. But the specifics of that afternoon? The glasses, the truck, the rearview mirror, the locked door, the waiting — that is burned into me. Less as an image and more as a physical thing.

Fast forward many years. The Gilgo Beach Killer story breaks. I see a photo of Rex Heuermann. Current photo — older, no glasses. Doesn’t register.

Then they show a younger photo. Dark hair. Wire-rimmed glasses. That particular look — slightly up, slightly down.

I stopped breathing.

That’s him. The man who leaned out of the truck. The man who watched my friend in the rearview mirror the entire drive. The man who took just a little too long to decide to unlock the door.

I am 99.9% sure.

I can’t confirm it with my friend — she moved back to Singapore, and honestly, she may never want to speak to me again for what I put her through that day. But that face in the younger photo is the exact face that leaned out of that cab and asked if we needed a ride.

Life is a series of choices. Sometimes you make a bad one on a split second of impatience, and you’re lucky enough that it doesn’t become your last one. Some people aren’t that lucky.

And sometimes, years later, you turn on the TV, and you see the man who could have given you your final ride.

That’s story time for today.

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It’s not. The President of the United States threatened to commit genocide against an entire nation unless they complied with his demands — and that threat, in and of itself, is a war crime. There is no negotiation framework that begins with “I will eradicate your people” and gets to be called legitimate.

But turn on the television, and you’ll see something remarkable: the full machinery of normalization at work. Pundits are dissecting the Strait of Hormuz implications. Analysts are debating the two-week timeline. Experts are speculating on whether Iran will come to terms. All of it treating this like a standard geopolitical chess match — as if the opening move wasn’t a threat of civilizational annihilation.

This is what people have rightly called “sane-washing.” Taking something fundamentally unhinged — I will destroy your entire civilization — and packaging it as aggressive-but-savvy dealmaking. Just Trump being Trump. The Art of the Deal on a global stage.

But that’s not what this is; this is a man holding the world hostage. People everywhere were stressed yesterday — not because of some abstract policy debate, but because a person with the most powerful military on earth casually threatened to wipe a nation off the map. And instead of consequences, he got a cooling-off period.

The international community failed here. Rather than scrambling to broker a deal under the terms of a genocidal threat, world leaders should have delivered a unified message: You do this, and you are out. Out of the community of nations. Out of the circle of decency. Out. Because without consequences, Trump learns the lesson every unchecked bully learns — this works. And he’ll do it again. The targets may change, but the playbook won’t.

We know the United States Congress won’t act. The 25th Amendment talk is fantasy. Which means the only remaining check is the international community, and they just validated his approach by treating it as a negotiation rather than what it is.

And by the way, it’s not even clear that this two-week window means anything. Israel appeared to continue strikes after the so-called agreement. So what exactly was agreed to, and who’s actually bound by it?

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Meanwhile, the Vice President of the United States was in Hungary campaigning for Viktor Orbán.

Viktor Orbán, the man famous for his speech railing against race-mixing. A far-right authoritarian who has systematically dismantled democratic institutions in Hungary. And J.D. Vance was there, stumping for him like it was a rally in Ohio.

This is the same J.D. Vance who went to Germany and complained that they weren’t giving the far-right AfD a platform. The same Vance who took backhanded swipes at Germany’s commitment to Holocaust education, as if remembering the worst genocide in modern history were somehow excessive.

So let me get this straight. The Vice President’s international agenda includes: campaigning for a leader known for white nationalist rhetoric, and pressuring Germany to mainstream a party with documented neo-Nazi ties while suggesting they talk about the Holocaust too much.

If the job description is “restore Nazism worldwide,” he’s performing admirably. And the silence around it is deafening.

———

Now, I promised I’d end on a positive note, and I will.

Wisconsin.

The liberal candidate won the state Supreme Court race, securing a ten-year term. I’m from Wisconsin, so let me say it: On, Wisconsin.

For most of my life, Wisconsin was a working-class blue state. Then came Scott Walker, then the gerrymanders, and suddenly it looked like a locked-in Republican stronghold. This result says otherwise.

And it’s not just Wisconsin. In Marjorie Taylor Greene’s district in Georgia — a district Trump won by 37 points — the Democrat lost by only 15. That’s a 22-point swing. In one of the reddest districts in America.

I keep coming back to this: the No Kings marches matter. Not just as a protest, but as an organizing infrastructure and as voter mobilization through collective energy.

I wrote recently that just before a tsunami, the water recedes far out to sea. The shoreline looks strange and empty. And then the wave comes.

I believe that wave is building. They’ll throw everything at it, maybe Trump will threaten to eradicate us as a civilization if we don’t vote for him, who knows, but the signs of a Blue wave are there.

The Wisconsin win is real. That Georgia margin is real. The energy is real.

We keep fighting. Every day.

———

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The New Yorker just published a deep dive by Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz about Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI — the company behind the ubiquitous ChatGPT. And basically, based on interviews with many people who’ve worked with him, they’re saying he is a bald-faced liar and a sociopath.

Now look, I’ve worked with people. Sometimes people don’t like you. You can get a whole mass hysteria of people who don’t like you. But there’s something specific they’re saying about him: that he is a relentless liar.

That’s bananas.

One quote from the article I think is particularly sharp: he has two traits that are almost never seen in the same person — a strong desire to please people, to be liked in any given interaction, and an almost sociopathic lack of concern for the consequences of deceiving someone. I’d actually push back on that a little. You see those two things in people all the time. In fact, that’s one of the reasons people lie — because they want to be liked.

But here’s the thing. I have been on this about the whole AI con since the moment I started interacting with ChatGPT, maybe two years ago now. I’ve told this story before, but I had a beta version before it was available to the public. So I’d been using it for quite some time before it hit the mainstream.

Basically, I thought, oh, this could be helpful for editing, helpful for research — until I found out it makes shit up. And then I was like, well, this isn’t helpful for research.

To some extent, it can definitely be an assistive device. I want to be careful about generative AI because there are people like myself whose brain moves faster than their ability to process, and generative AI can help with that — as long as it’s my content, my words, and I’m overseeing it. But what happened was it was sold to people as something they could turn things over to. And that, I knew, was a lie from working with it. I knew it was a lie.

So this article about Sam Altman really gets at the fact that he is not a person you can trust. He’ll say anything. Oh, we’re totally into safety protocols — and they’re not. We’re never going to sell to the government — and they will.

But I think there’s something else that’s only touched on near the end of the article, and it’s the biggest lie of all: the product itself.

I don’t know if anybody’s old enough to remember The Music Man — the musical where this guy comes to River City, tells the people he can teach their kids music, and he can’t. I have always felt that the people in generative AI were lying like the Music Man.

Spend any time with this product. Usually, when people tell me, “Oh no, no, it can do this,” I ask: Did you verify it? Have you looked at it? And one of the former OpenAI board members said something I think is very interesting. She said it wasn’t that he was a Machiavellian villain — though I think he is — but that he’s able to delude himself into believing his ever-shifting sales pitch.

That’s the part I really don’t think is getting enough play. Everybody’s going to talk about the sociopath angle, the accusations from his childhood, the manipulative lying about safety and protocols. But he’s lying about the product. That’s the part I knew. I knew this man was lying about the product because if you use it — I mean, really use it — you can see it’s just not ready for prime time. It can’t do 90% of the things people are saying it does.

And then they’re always on TV saying, “Oh, well, all these jobs...” Look, these corporations are firing people because they want to. Not because they’re necessarily replacing anyone with AI — because they’re cutting costs so they can have more profit and working the shit out of the people who are left. And they’re lying. There is so much lying going on.

Which is not to say they aren’t inserting generative AI into every aspect of our lives in a dangerous way. And that is where the sociopathy comes in. Because I believe Sam Altman and others know for a fact that this is not a product that works the way they’re saying. There are real, dangerous consequences to this — people tend to turn things over to it blindly and don’t stop to ask, Wait, why did it get that wrong? Why didn’t this work?

I have to give myself a shout-out here. On November 18th, 2025, I wrote an article called “The Real AI Threat the Media Isn’t Covering.” What I was talking about was that journalists, when they interview people about AI, just let them make stuff up — talk out of their ass — and never make them answer basic questions. When is that going to happen? Can you show me that working? When did you achieve that? They never ask, and it drives me crazy.

I know a lot of people went over to Anthropic because they rejected the Pentagon. But their CEO was on 60 Minutes when Anderson Cooper was still there, and he said that without guardrails, AI could soon become dangerous, basically implying it could become sentient. Then he proceeds to talk about all this nonsense AI is going to do. Right now, AI cannot do any of those things without assistance. There is a whole unrecognized group of people behind most of the stuff people are claiming AI is doing — people offshore, people working behind the scenes, like puppeting a fake puppet.

What took me aback is that they let tech people get on the air and basically promote their business, and no one asks basic journalist questions. When is it going to be able to do this? Two years? Three years? Nobody does this.

So the fact that Sam Altman is a big liar in general — and he’s lying. Most of the article is really about how he’s lying about the danger. But no. He’s just lying. Period. Point blank. Period. About what it can do. It can do certain parlor tricks. It can be useful for certain things. Generative AI can help people in some limited regard. But we cannot turn over everything to this because it’s just a large language model that’s replicating and repeating. It’s not sentient, and it’s probably never going to be sentient. We still don’t fully understand what it really means to be a human in possession of a human brain.

I’ve been saying for quite some time that these people are lying — that they get on TV and lie and nobody questions them. So check out the New Yorker article: “Sam Altman May Control Our Future, But Can He Be Trusted?”

See, I don’t even like that framing. He doesn’t control the future. To the extent that he’s controlling the future, he’s dangerously lying to us about things that can harm us — not because it’s so smart, but because it’s so dumb.

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1. What It Feels Like Right Now

• Living in the United States right now feels like being trapped in a car with no brakes, headed downhill.

• The chaos is not abstract—it is physical, visceral, and constant.

2. Presidential Rhetoric and the Normalization of Extremes

• Public threats that amount to war crimes are being made openly.

• There are no consequences, and in many cases, there is applause or rationalization.

3. The Double Standard—Who Gets to Behave Badly

• The contrast between what powerful white figures can say and do versus the constraints placed on Black people.

• The emotional toll of constantly navigating that imbalance.

4. Competency Checking Isn’t Just a Workplace Issue

• This same dynamic—who is allowed to fail, who must be perfect—shows up at the highest levels of power.

• The workplace is a microcosm of what we are seeing nationally.

5. The Illusion of Strategy vs. the Reality of Harm

• Media and pundits are framing chaos as an intentional strategy.

• The danger of normalizing instability as leadership.

6. The Child Care Lie—and What History Actually Shows

• The claim that the U.S. “can’t afford” child care is historically false.

• The country had universal child care during World War II under the Lanham Act.

• Patriarchy dismantled it.

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7. The Systems We Never Built—Because of Racism and Patriarchy

• Universal child care and universal health care were both within reach.

• Structural racism and gender hierarchy prevented both.

8. What’s Being Cut—and Who It Hurts

• Targeted cuts to programs tied to education, workforce development, agriculture, and small business.

• Elimination of pathways that allow people—especially marginalized communities—to advance.

9. The Myth That “They Care About the Economy.”

• Policies that actively harm economic growth for certain groups are not accidental.

• Historical parallels show that economic harm is often tolerated—or embraced—when it maintains hierarchy.

10. Who Is Actually Being Impacted

• Many of these cuts disproportionately harm working-class people, including white communities.

• Yet the political messaging continues to redirect attention elsewhere.

11. The Quiet Rollback of Access and Opportunity

• Unpaid internships are returning, closing doors to low-income workers.

• Systematic narrowing of who gets to participate in opportunity pipelines.

12. The Reality of the Job Market

• Long-term unemployment is rising.

• Job creation is weak, and the numbers are misleading.

• Many people are quietly falling out of the system.

13. What’s Coming Next

• Increasing financial instability, housing insecurity, and pressure on public systems.

• A growing class of people with no clear pathway forward.

14. The Bigger Picture—Reclassification of Labor and Worth

• A push toward relegating certain populations to low-wage, limited-mobility labor.

• Echoes of historical systems of economic control.

15. The Emotional Reality—Why This Feels Like Too Much

• The cumulative weight of watching this unfold with little accountability.

• The frustration of speaking into what can feel like indifference.

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