In 1962, Fannie Lou Hamer waited at the county courthouse in Indianola to register to vote. Of the 18 people who arrived to register, only Fannie Lou Hamer and Ernest Davis were allowed to take the registration test. The others were ordered out. When it was Fannie’s turn, she held her breath. She was 44 years old and could read and write well enough that the landowner she and her husband sharecropped for had hired her as his bookkeeper.1

But when the registrar looked at her with steely eyes, her heart sank.

He handed her the Mississippi Constitution to copy and then asked her to interpret its meaning. Something about de facto laws, she remembered later. She knew as much about them “as a horse knows about Christmas Day.”

The registrar failed her, as Black applicants were routinely failed under Mississippi’s literacy-test system.

The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified after the Civil War in 1870, prohibited denying the vote because of race, so southern states stopped saying Black people cannot vote. Instead, they created ostensibly race-neutral administrative rules that stopped them cold.

Between roughly 1890 and 1910, Southern states rewrote state constitutions and election laws. These new laws included poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, property requirements, white-only primaries, residency and bureaucratic requirements, as well as intimidation and violence. All designed for maximum deniability.

“We’re not keeping Blacks from voting, they’re just not following the rules.”

It wasn’t until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 passed that these voting barriers to American citizens began to fall.

And now, Trump is rebuilding them.

Jim Crow taught politicians that if the law prevents you from explicitly excluding the voters you don't want, you can simply construct procedural hurdles instead.

Texas: 1.2 million voters put into “suspense” status

As of September 2026, about 1.2 million Texas voters — roughly 6.6% of all registered voters — are on the state’s suspense list.2

A suspense list is where your registration lands if Texas thinks your residential address is incorrect. Texas claims voters are put on suspense status after election mail is returned as undeliverable or other information indicates they may have moved. What that other information could be is unclear. Reports are surfacing of many voters who have not moved, and who have consistently voted in each election, finding themselves on the suspense list.

How do they get off? They’ll have to confirm or update their residential address with the county voter registrar before the election. Hopefully, long before. Texas is supposed to send a Notice of Address Confirmation to suspense voters with a card they can return that confirms or updates the registration.

Many never got that.

Registration requirements really are becoming more onerous

By May 2026, lawmakers in at least 41 states had introduced more than 300 bills restricting voting access.3 The big change is requiring documentary proof of citizenship. As an example, in Arizona, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming new registrants must have a passport, birth certificate, qualifying driver’s license or ID, naturalization records, or certain tribal documents. Utah additionally requires election officials to review existing registrations and gives some voters only 30 days to produce citizenship documents before removal from the rolls.

An estimated 21 million American citizens do not have access to the documents these new laws demand—both Republican and Democratic voters.4

Trump has repeatedly tried to impose documentary proof of citizenship through executive action, while congressional Republicans have pushed versions of the SAVE Act. This shifts the burden onto already eligible citizens to produce additional documentation before the state will register them.

And for women it is even more complicated, because current IDs may have different names from birth certificates—and many women have taken their husbands’ names when they married. They may have to produce additional records, such as a marriage certificate, simply to prove that Jane Smith and Jane Jones are the same American citizen.

Luckily, courts have blocked big parts of Trump's earlier executive order.

And then there is the USPS whistleblower story, where things get even hairier

The U.S. Postal Service built with lightning-fast speed something called the Federal Ballot Mail Portal. The post office—yes, that local building with the long line, crabby workers and ugly stamps—is asking states to submit the names and addresses of voters receiving mail ballots, plus a unique ballot-envelope barcode. These ballots would be checked against federally approved lists before being delivered.5

From Pony Express to Stasi, with the stroke of one pen.

Worse than that, the extreme speed with which the system was built is contributing to the vast technology failure of the portal. According to the whistleblower, a single failed barcode or mismatch could cause an entire batch of ballots to be rejected. Imagine 10,000 voters waiting for ballots that USPS sends back to their election office because one barcode failed.6

Of course, California and a coalition of other states have sued, arguing that USPS is inserting itself into determining who is entitled to receive or send election mail, something election administrators say belongs to the states.

But the bigger issue is that all of these procedures that add taxes in the form of paperwork, extra steps, and failed technology are ways for the Federal government to erode the independence of states to hold their own elections.

OK, but how can I make sure my vote is counted?

Texas

If you’re one of the 1.2 million registered voters in Texas put on the suspension list, here’s what you do:

1. Find out if you’re on the suspend list: Texas Secretary of State

2. Respond to the Notice of Address Confirmation in the mail if you got one. If you didn’t, go to the online portal and confirm your address there.

3. If you moved within the same county, you can update your residence at the online portal.

Everybody else

1. Check your voter registration now, and check it again closer to Election Day. Make sure your name and address are current on your voter record. If something appears wrong, contact your local election office promptly.

2. Open and respond to election mail from your county or state. Don’t ignore address-confirmation or eligibility notices. They’re important!

3. Keep your identification and supporting documents current, especially if you have changed your name. If you’re going to need a birth certificate or marriage license to prove you are who you say, get those together now.

4. If you vote by mail, return the ballot early rather than waiting until the deadline. Track your ballot: Go to www.eac.gov/, choose your state, and follow the official “Track Your Ballot” link if your state offers one. Save confirmation numbers, screenshots, emails, and notices related to your registration or ballot.

5. If you’re voting in person, know where your official polling place is before Election Day. Locations can change. Bring the identification your state requires when you vote. If you are told you cannot vote, ask what the problem is and what options are available to you. Do not leave a polling place without understanding whether you have cast a regular ballot, a provisional ballot, or no ballot at all.

6. Get election information from official state or county election websites, not social media posts or forwarded messages. There are a lot of alarming rumors circulating and that’s just going to get worse as we get closer to November.

7. After voting, check your ballot status.

Hope that helps!

—Lady Libertie

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Last December, I wrote about the return of caveat emptor—the old American marketplace where the buyer carried all the risk for defective products, while producers and sellers were allowed to give a collective shrug if something went wrong. I pointed out then that the Trump administration has been dismantling the consumer protections we built over a century, especially for food products.

From the first protections imposed to prevent poisoned milk, to those that stopped adulterated food, required ingredient lists and eliminated contaminants and dangerous ingredients, those safeguards were built for a reason. We need them. They save lives.

Nine months later, the results of their deregulation efforts are hitting us in the gut—literally. We are being inundated with recalls and warnings, illness and deaths.

The food-safety system has far less capacity than when I wrote last year

The Food and Drug Administration was already falling behind in inspections even before our government decided that the peons didn’t need safe food as much as corporations needed higher profits. Still, staff has been laid off, funding cut, and regulations nullified. And the impact is being felt now.

One of the biggest problems is that the FDA simply doesn’t have enough staff to do its job. And this isn’t a new development. In 2024, it only had 432 investigators. For perspective, it needs approximately 1,500 inspectors to do their job right. When Trump took office, he fired another 170 support staffers.1

This means the FDA is conducting fewer food-facility inspections and missing statutory inspection deadlines, as well as failing to conduct follow-up inspections after finding serious violations.

And now the outbreaks are piling up

On August 12, 2026 the CDC was investigating 32 active multistate foodborne-illnesses: 22 Salmonella, 7 Listeria and 3 E. coli.2 You may recall the enormous Cyclospora outbreak with iceberg lettuce this year. It caused more than 11,458 infections, 495 hospitalizations and 2 deaths across 20 states, and is the largest U.S. outbreak on record.3

Where else are we seeing the problems? Just about everywhere. In 2026, the FDA has issued public-health advisories involving:

• E. coli and Salmonella in sprouts, frozen blueberries and raw cheddar cheese/raw dairy

• Salmonella in jalapeños, eggs and moringa

• Cyclospora in iceberg lettuce

• Botulism associated with powdered infant formula

• Listeria in soft cheeses

I’m not going to claim this is a comprehensive list, since these outbreaks are happening daily. By the time I post this article tomorrow, there will likely be a new one.

At this point, it’s probably better to be thinking about what is still safe, rather than what is contaminated. (I give you some tips for how to do that, below.)

And then there’s the beef problem.

Where’s the beef (coming from)?

By now, everyone must have heard the outrage coming from our American ranchers. They’re experiencing what the colonial merchants and tea importers were feeling when the British government undercut their trade by importing cheap tea from the East India Company.

Fun fact, when the colonists realized that their government was going to undercut their local merchants, they ended up dumping a lot of tea into the Boston Harbor.

So in 1773, the king discovered that undercutting local merchants for a larger political goal could turn economic grievance into open rebellion.

Here’s what’s going on now: U.S. cattle herds have been severely depleted because of years of drought and high costs. Years of drought and high input costs depleted U.S. cattle herds and pushed beef prices up. Now Trump is increasing cheaper imports and lowering trade barriers, putting downward pressure on the prices ranchers receive.

So what does Trump do? Help the ranchers, right? The base of his MAGA supporters. The guys with the billboards on their land calling Trump their savior and king?

Nope.

Trump has expanded Argentine beef imports. He’s increased Argentina’s quota, which means they can import 80,000 metric tons tariff-free. And he’s allowing 300,000 metric tons from other foreign suppliers.4

Yes—you read that right. The one tariff Trump lowered is the one that actually helped protect his voting base. And now he’s flooding the market with cheap mystery meat.

Also, not lost on those who care about food safety, is that China had previously rejected Argentine beef because their testing detected chloramphenicol, an antibiotic prohibited in food animals.

The U.S. also prohibits that chemical, so we’re rejecting it too, right? Nope.

But at least we’re testing for it…? Alas, 29,628 pounds of Argentine raw beef managed to slip right into this country without the required inspections. It went to Florida and Texas, just in case you’re wondering.

5 Rules to shop like your grandparents

Here’s what you can do to keep yourself as safe as possible during this caveat emptor era.

Rule 1: Less steps means less opportunity for contamination

Favor foods that give you more control over the final safety step—washing, peeling, or cooking—rather than foods you have to trust are already safe when they reach you.

Every extra processing step adds another place where contamination, substitution, handling mistakes or labeling failures can happen. With whole foods there are fewer actors, fewer steps that can go wrong. A carrot is a carrot, a potato is a potato. A sealed bag of chopped salad has been harvested, washed, cut, mixed, processed on equipment, packaged, refrigerated, transported and handled repeatedly before you eat it.

It’s not failure proof, but it does help reduce the number of ways contaminants can get in.

Rule 2: Shop local producers

Avoid foods with long, opaque supply chains when there’s a closer, safer alternative. Farmers markets are an obvious yes (provided your markets are regulated so that only local producers are allowed to sell there).

The fewer trips across the country, continent, world, the less likely the food will come in contact with a contaminant. Want to support local beef producers but not the MAGA kind? Here is a list of blue-dot ranchers who are confirmed liberals that you can support.

https://bluedotfarms.com

Rule 3: Quit the pre-cut, bagged, deli, prepared and other ready-to-eat foods

They’re more expensive and they have more people and machines touching the food. If you can wash it, cut it, peel it and cook it yourself, you’ve eliminated multiple opportunities for contaminants.

It will taste better and cost less.

Rule 4: Buy ultra-pasteurized dairy

Ultra-pasteurized milk is still just milk. It’s heated to a higher temperature for a much shorter time than standard pasteurization, which kills more microorganisms and gives it a much longer refrigerated shelf life. It does not make the milk unsafe, nutritionally worthless, or somehow “fake.”

Raw dairy is the opposite choice here: it skips the pathogen-killing step entirely. Don’t eat that.

Rule 5: Basic food safety, what your grandparents knew

• Don’t buy food in damaged containers. If the can is dented, the box smashed, the seal broken or anything else about the packaging looks odd, don’t buy it or use it. Now is not the time to trust it’s ok.

• If it seems wrong, throw it out. Catch an odd smell when you opened the package? Does it look different when you pulled it out of the fridge? Don’t risk it, throw it away.

• Keep it cold. Check the packaging for refrigeration requirements and follow them. Most perishable food will need cold temps of 40°F or below to keep contaminants from growing. So don’t leave your leftovers sitting on the table or counter for hours before packing them into the refrigerator.

• Wash your produce and your hands. Make sure you’re using a clean knife when you cut food you plan to eat raw (like fruit and vegetables) so you don’t carry germs from the outside to the inside. If you can peel a vegetable or fruit, do that. Then throw the peels away. And keep raw meat away from ready-to-eat foods.

—Lady Libertie

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Dolly Parton died this week. She was the second or third (depending how you count them) of a group of celebrities who passed away recently, giving a collective shock to those of us who were not paying attention.

Social media has been noisy with the lament; “We said Donny, not Dolly! Why does the Grimm Reeper keep getting it wrong?”

This one was a hard loss for many, me included. Not because I was such a Dolly Parton fan—I do not generally listen to country music. I’m more of an Alt Rock type.

But she was part of the fabric of my world.

She was the big-bosomed, high-haired blonde that also somehow managed to be fun, funny and completely authentic. She was a Steel Magnolia, a a whip-cracking madam, and the sexy secretary that kidnaps her misogynistic boss and transforms the workplace into a worker’s paradise.

She was also a philanthropist, in real life.

A master of giving away her millions so that she would never become a billionaire. Proving the point that being rich and successful was never the problem—being a sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot is the problem.

And Dolly was a Christian.

Hers was an expansive, generous version of faith. Not the punitive MAGA version currently strutting around in public. She was a Christian who had actually read the Bible and understood that Christ’s teachings are about loving and caring for other people—not using Christianity as an exclusive country club. Or a cudgel.

And now she’s gone, along with Tim Curry and Bonnie Tyler. People whose music and movies were deeply foundational to my life.

That world they inhabited is rapidly crumbling too, as something new and alien and not very comfortable is taking its place. The cultural and moral world I recognize is disappearing and that’s making me feel old and a bit lost.

I can’t help wondering what this world will look like after those of us now alive are gone. The direction it seems to be going looks…precarious.

If we somehow could return—20, 30, 50 years later—would we find it unrecognizable? Not just the forests that have been cut down, the cities that have sprung up, the vernacular that has raced past all early-21st-century understanding. But will the very topography, climate and constitution of the world have altered beyond our recognition?

This reminds me of a wonderful movie, An American Pickle (2020), about an ancestor who is transported to the present and meets his great-grandson. Much hilarity and poignancy ensue as each tries to understand the worldview of the other. What would my great-great-grandparents who settled the grasslands of Wisconsin think of this world now, if they returned?

Would it seem harsher, softer, fairer—or less so? Would anything in our worldviews overlap? Or would they find this century as alien as I imagine I will find its end?

My grandmother described this inevitability as the march of each generation toward a cliff edge, off which we’re all destined to fall. Knowing what’s ahead and that our turn is coming, sooner than we’d expect.

The end of summer is almost here, that always makes me feel a little sad. As August ends, this year is starting its decline and its own march toward death.

Winter is coming for all of us.

—Lady Libertie

If this piece helped put words to what so many of us are feeling, you can support this work with a coffee or, better yet, an annual subscription. It helps me keep doing this independently, following the thread, and telling the truth as I see it.

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In Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1851, a fire broke out at a mill near the Ohio River in the dead of night. Alarms went off, and two fire companies responded to the blaze. But when they reached the mill, instead of working together to put out the fire, they began fighting each other. As other fire companies responded, they also joined in the fisticuffs.1 And the dispute expanded until members of ten fire companies were all fighting each other but not the fire.

Why?

Because each department wanted the reward and prestige of putting out the fire, which went only to the first company to arrive.

Meanwhile, the mill burned to the ground.2

It wasn’t the first time something like this had happened, but Cincinnati decided it would be the last. Two years later, the city established America’s first fully paid professional municipal fire department—a public service funded by pooling the resources of the entire community.

The city realized that relying entirely on rival volunteer companies not only endangered property like the mill, but threatened the whole city if a fire got out of hand and began to spread.

Some services work better when the public owns them.

NYC was struggling with its own version of Keystone firefighters, but with mobsters.

The infamous Boss Tweed got his political start organizing firemen’s votes and served as foreman of Americus Engine Company No. 6, known as the “Big Six” in NYC.3 Tammany Hall loved them because they were a big block of votes they could always count on.

In return for those votes, the political machine made sure the gangster firefighters kept their status, social clubs and all the perks that came with the job. But few of the responsibilities.

The NYC firefighters also fought over who got to put out the fires, and which fires they were willing to fight at all. This left a densely populated city full of wooden tenement buildings at extreme risk of burning completely down. And after the 1863 Draft Riots, in which members of at least one fire company helped set fires, the state legislature had had enough.

New York’s Republican-controlled state legislature—which was outside Tammany Hall’s control—stepped in and abolish the gangster-led system. It created the paid Metropolitan Fire Department under state supervision, operating under centralized command, standardized training and enforceable discipline to protect everyone in the city.4

And yes, that was Republicans instituting a socialist organization in NYC.

Since then, almost every municipality in the nation has funded a fire department using the pooled resources of the community it protects. And that, my friend, is pure socialism.

There are a few lessons to take away from this history.

The first is that shared services work better when they cover everyone. Just ask Gene and Paulette Cranick, whose home caught fire in rural Obion County, Tennessee, on September 29, 2010.

Their county didn’t fund a fire department, and they didn’t pay the $75 subscription for protection from the neighboring city. So when they called for help, the fire department declined to come, and their house burned to the ground. The fire department did come when their neighbor called, and stood around putting out stray embers threatening the neighbor’s house but not helping the Cranicks at all.

That is what happens when public safety is sold as an individual subscription.5

The second lesson is that sharing the cost of essential services is socialism in practice—and we’ve been doing it all along. It’s not bad or dangerous and doesn’t mean we can’t have capitalism or private property. It simply means that some things belong to all of us and should be shared by all of us.

The third lesson is that it’s time to share the costs and benefits of more essential services rather than leaving them in the hands of gangsters to manipulate, corporations to bleed for as much profit as possible, or volunteers who may or may not have our best interests at heart.

Imagine if phone service, internet service, power and water were all collectively owned and paid for. They’d likely be cheaper, better maintained, and better functioning.6

The myth that private ownership makes business function better or keeps costs down needs to die the same way the political machine of Tammany Hall died. It’s time we pooled our resources to better society as a whole, rather than letting our modern-day Boss Tweeds keep a stranglehold on our essential services, while using them as private tollbooths for accumulating wealth and power.

—Lady Libertie

If this piece helped put words to what so many of us are feeling, you can support this work with a coffee or, better yet, an annual subscription. It helps me keep doing this independently, following the thread, and telling the truth as I see it.

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Question: Are Republican operatives sneaking into your local Democratic headquarters in fake mustaches to fool you into voting for a Republican candidate?

Answer: No, they are not. They’re doing something much more nefarious.

In May, Pennsylvania voters began to see ads from a group called Lead Left PAC. Sounds progressive, right? Its name certainly look…

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This is a thought experiment, so don’t get your panties in a bunch. But explore this scenario with me:

What if President Trump saw the writing on the wall in June, when he publicly broke with Netanyahu over his attempt to end the war in Iran? What if, in that moment, he saw that his smash-and-grab strategy for stripping America for parts and pocketing as…

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In order to explain why the U.S. is still funding Israel’s wars, a nation comitting a genocide against the Palestinians, we start in Chile, in 1973.

Salvador Allende was a democratically elected socialist president who wanted to nationalize major industries, including Chile’s enormously valuable copper mines. But to the Nixon administration, Allende was…

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Things had been pretty bad for a while. Prices were high. Jobs hard to find or non-existant. Almost one in four workers unemployed. Thousands of banks had failed and millions had lost their savings. A fear spread across the country that capitalism itself had failed. People were desperate and helpless, and they went to the polls in November hoping that a…

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Did you buy an iPhone, sunglasses, refrigerator, Xbox or products from Walmart, Amazon, Home Depot or GM while the tariffs were in effect? If you did, you may be eligible for a refund.

But you might have to join a class action lawsuit to get it.

Read more

I recently ran across a TikTok of a woman dissolving into a tearful rant of tech-rage at finding that her 5-year-old HP printer had suddenly demanded to have access to the internet. Once it did, it updated the operating system and told her she wasn’t allowed to print anymore.

The updated firmware had detected that she was using off-brand ink cartridges. …

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It is said that Odysseus came up with the idea of hiding Greek soldiers inside a wooden horse. After ten years of siege of the city of Troy, this was the solution to a standoff that appeared to be never-ending. A way to bring the war to a head, and thus to an end.

The mysterious statue stood outside the impenetrable gates of the city, until the Trojans …

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In the 1930s, electricity was jolting its way through homes, offices, department stores, theaters, restaurants and city streets in urban communities as the idea of an electrified future took hold.

With the magic of electricity, businesses could keep their employees working later, stores could stay open long past sunset, and families could joyfully flip …

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Last week, Donald Trump told Americans that the coming election cannot be trusted.1

He called mail-in voting corrupt. He claimed the election system was vulnerable to being rigged. And he said that anyone opposing his preferred voting restrictions must want to cheat.

That last part is the critical part.

Trump is no longer merely alleging that some people co…

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On June 14, emergency responders rushed to Mitch McConnell’s home after receiving a report of an unconscious 84-year-old man and a possible cardiac arrest. McConnell was removed from the house on a stretcher and taken to the hospital.1

Then the curtain came down.

For nearly a month, McConnell’s office refused to say what had happened, what condition he was in or when anyone outside his tightly controlled circle had last communicated with him directly. The public was told only that he was “receiving excellent care” and later that he was improving.

That was not a medical update. It was a holding statement.

McConnell’s office now says he merely fell, was briefly unconscious and later developed mild pneumonia. A statement attributed to McConnell specifically denied that he had suffered a heart attack or stroke.2 But that explanation did not arrive until July 12—four weeks after the emergency—and only after leaked emergency communications, his prolonged disappearance and the complete absence of direct contact had convinced much of the internet that something far more serious had happened.3

It was entirely reasonable to suspect a cardiac event. McConnell has a history of heart disease and underwent triple-bypass surgery in 2003. He is elderly, medically frail and was reportedly found unconscious under circumstances serious enough for emergency dispatchers to consider cardiac arrest.

Yet for weeks, the people around him behaved as though the most important thing was not explaining what happened, but preventing anyone from independently determining his condition.

The twenty-minute telephone miracle

First came the telephone calls.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune reportedly had a “lengthy and substantive” conversation with McConnell. Then Senator John Barrasso announced that he had spoken with him for approximately twenty minutes.4

On the very same day, Republican strategist Scott Jennings reported that he, too, had spoken with McConnell for twenty minutes.5nEach conversation was presented as evidence that McConnell remained alert, informed and fully engaged.

The repetition became so conspicuous that Joe Scarborough mocked it on television: apparently every Republican permitted to speak with McConnell was granted the same twenty-minute audience.6

But the public did not hear McConnell’s voice.

There was no recording. No live call. No interview. No independent witness. Only Republican officials assuring the country that they had spoken to him and that he sounded wonderful.

That is not proof of life.
It is hearsay from interested parties.

Then came the photograph

After four weeks of mounting pressure, McConnell’s office released a photograph of him sitting beside his wife, Elaine Chao, holding a current newspaper.7

It was the political equivalent of a hostage photograph.

The image was so conspicuously designed as proof of life that it immediately became an object of ridicule. People examined his hands, clothing, skin, the newspaper, the shadows and every blurred detail. The internet produced memes, parodies and its own competing McConnell images faster than his office could answer questions.

Some claimed the photograph had been generated by AI. Digital-forensics experts who examined the file found no evidence that the released photograph was AI-generated, recycled from an earlier hospitalization or materially manipulated—though AI fakes are getting harder and harder to identify even by the experts.8

But that doesn’t make the photograph adequate proof of what Republican leaders claimed it proved.

A still photograph may establish that McConnell was alive when it was taken. It does not demonstrate that he can speak, understand events, make decisions, authorize statements or perform the duties of a United States senator. It doesn’t establish when his medical crisis occurred, why he was unconscious or why his staff concealed the circumstances for nearly a month.

And it certainly doesn’t explain why the public was offered an elaborately staged newspaper photograph instead of a simple live interview. Even Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear said McConnell should record a video or speak directly with a journalist so Kentuckians could assess his ability to continue serving.9

The internet has treated the entire operation like a modern production of Weekend at Bernie’s. It’s frightening because this is a sitting United States senator, not a celebrity protecting the release date of an album.

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I took a vacation for the first two weeks of July and spent 14 day enjoying the small harbor towns around the Puget Sound, dinners with my extended family, the annual 4th of July holiday at the family house where after the sun sets we can watch everyone’s fireworks around the harbor.

It is not wrong to call it magical.

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Donald Trump has spent years telling Americans that elections can’t be trusted.

He claimed fraud when he lost the popular vote in 2016. He claimed fraud before the 2020 election, after the 2020 election and throughout the years that followed. Now, with the 2026 midterms approaching, he is once again preparing his supporters to distrust any result he does…

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As I have watched our freedoms pulled out from under us over the last year and a half, I have found myself thinking about other freedoms we lost long ago—perhaps years ago, perhaps decades.

Not freedoms taken by legislation or force. Not freedoms whose disappearance set off alarms. These were quieter losses: ways of thinking, speaking and living that slo…

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Something happened last week that infuriated me. NGL, I spent more than a few days fuming, ranting and telling the sky that this was wrong, wrong, wrong. I know a lot of my mutuals, my readers and the biggest creators on Substack were also infuriated by events—but most of them for entirely different reasons.

This isn't a defense of Graham Platner. It isn…

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There is a foreign-interest money machine operating inside American politics. Its job is simple. Buy influence. Reward obedience. Punish dissent. Keep American policy tied to Israel, no matter what American voters want, no matter what it costs us and no matter how many times Washington tells us there is no money for our own people.

The name most American…

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A few days ago, I wrote about the World Cup because something lovely was happening in plain sight. People from every corner of the planet were arriving in America wearing their flags, singing their songs, filling restaurants and sidewalks and stadiums and behaving not like rival civilizations, but like people.

Loud people. Hungry people. Proud people. Ov…

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